Weimar Classicism

Weimar Classicism (Weimarer Klassik) was a German literary and cultural movement centered on the collaboration between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in Weimar from roughly 1786 to Schiller's death in 1805, seeking to fuse the emotional intensity of the preceding Sturm und Drang movement with the balance, order and idealized humanism the two writers associated with classical Greek and Roman art. Reacting against both Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic excess, the movement produced major works including Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels and the completed Faust Part One, and Schiller's mature dramas and aesthetic essays, and it treated art as a vehicle for the harmonious moral and aesthetic education of the individual. Weimar Classicism's ideals of Bildung, or self-cultivation, and classical balance profoundly shaped later German culture and education, and the movement is generally understood as the mature culmination of German Enlightenment-era letters, positioned between Sturm und Drang and the German Romantic movement that followed.