Re-Entry.mp3
Sturm und Drang
'Storm and Stress’
‘Sturm und Drang’ German for ‘storm and stress’ was a movement by German playwrights in the late eighteenth century who rebelled against neoclassical ideas. It was a forerunner to the Romantic Movement that would happen shortly after. ‘Sturm und Drang’ sought to break the bonds of rationalism imposed with the Enlightenment Era and go against the dramatic rules of neoclassicism. Instead it portrayed extremes of human emotion and the idea of individual impurity while utilizing episodic structure, mixed genres and extreme violence. Also there was a very pantheistic belief that God was found everywhere, especially in nature as seen from the quote from Goethe’s The Sorrows of a Young Werther.
“I had heard that the river had burst its banks, all the streams were swollen, and all the way from Wahlheim my beloved valley was flooded! It was after eleven, and I ran out into the night. It was a fearful spectacle: the raging torrents were crashing down from the crags in the moonlight, flooding the fields and meadows and hedges, and the broad valley, upstream and down, was a turbulent lake whipped by a roaring wind! And when the moon appeared once more, peaceful above a sombre cloud, and the flood before me rolled and thundered and gleamed with awesome majesty, a shudder of horror shook me—and then longing seized me again! Ah, there I stood, arms outstretched, above the abyss, breathing: plunge! plunge!--and was lost in the joyful prospect of ending my sufferings and sorrows by plunging, passing on with a crash like the waves! […] How gladly I should have surrendered my human existence in order to be that stormy wind, scattering the clouds, snatching at the floods! Ha!—May that rapture not still lie ahead for this imprisoned soul?”
Another convention of ‘Sturm und Drang’ was portraying its protagonists in a not so great light. They’re often driven to violent action, not by noble means, but rather in pursuit of revenge or for greed. They tended to have an anti-aristocratic reflection to them while trying to elevate such concepts as humility, nature and reality.
Because of their nature and tendency to be extremely radical to their time period not many of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ plays were staged, yet the movement still proved to help romanticism come into light.
