Iphigenie auf Tauris: German Theatre and Philhellenism

Abstract

Toward the end of 1778 the small dukedom of Weimar, Saxony, and Eisenach, in the middle of Germany, was faced with the necessity of providing their ally, Frederick II, King of Prussia, with troops for his impending campaign against Austria in the War of the Bavarian succession. One of the duke’s ministers, the young writer and poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, was charged with organizing the recruitment. The young Goethe had arrived at the Weimar court in November 1775 at the behest of the 18-year-old Duke Carl August, who had been deeply impressed by Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, and which was a Europe-wide sensation. He advised the duke that it was better to select and recruit the men themselves than to wait for the Prussians to do it, since they would approach it in a far less delicate fashion and probably take away married men indiscriminately.¹ Goethe also worried about the textile workers of nearby Apolda because the war would interrupt their trade and endanger their livelihood. It was in the midst of his duties overseeing the military recruitment that Goethe wrote the play Iphigenie auf Tauris, adapting the famous play by Euripides. Its ethical pathos and delicate prose rendered it one of the most central statements of Weimar Humanität, that higher and more humane morality, aesthetic, and theology, which German letters have since cherished in the chief authors of those decades.²