Weimar Classicism and the Image of Historical Time.

Abstract

In this dissertation I argue that the aesthetic theories and practices of Weimar Classicism are deeply informed by a discomfort with history and a desire to reproduce idealized visual images of the passage of time. I draw upon research foregrounding the new perception of a unique temporality of history in the latter half of the 18th century and studies that emphasize breaks in historical consciousness in the early 19th century. Weimar Classicism’s aggressive and preeminently visual aesthetic response to the perceived historical crises of the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars signals a conviction that a new kind of historical experience involves sense perception and requires a sense-oriented representation. Moreover, Weimar Classicism’s recruitment of antique models for the purpose of representing transformative moments as stable images reveals a desire to apply an aesthetic strategy to the understanding of time and even to fix time in an ideal moment. In keeping with recent scholarship challenging traditional understandings of the aesthetic commitments of German Classicism, I regard Weimar Classicism’s rhetoric of beauty and of the remedial power of the aesthetic as symptomatic of an anxiety about change and loss. I focus first on the status of time in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s theoretical and programmatic writings on the visual arts and symbolic representation. Thereafter I explore how Friedrich Schiller’s dramatic trilogy Wallenstein functions as an experimental visual staging of the historical event in the interest of deconstructing and understanding the dynamics of historical time. Finally I turn to Classicist art-historical writing as an acknowledgement of Weimar Classicism’s own imminent passage into history. Throughout the dissertation I consider how Weimar Classicism proposes models for viewing time, either in present experience, in the work of art, or in the past; and how it attempts to overcome its concern about the destructive potential of history in its preference for images of subtle movement and discreet gesture as signs of the passage of time.