publications of the english goethe society, Vol. lxxxii No.

3, 2013, 155–58

Introduction
Clare Foster and Helen Roche
University of Cambridge, UK

This volume of PEGS was inspired by the proceedings of a colloquium on ‘German

Philhellenism’, organized by the Cambridge Classical Reception Discussion Group1
and held at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, on 15 December 2012.
One of the CRDG’s main aims is to promote exchange between Classics and other
related disciplines. This event was designed to bring together classicists, Germanists,
and historians and offer a more informed discussion of the kinds of questions about
nationality and culture which this topic necessarily raises. How and why, for exam-
ple, did philhellenism in Germany during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries differ from expressions of the phenomenon in other European nation states?
Might the current ‘transnational turn’ help us better to comprehend and respond
to the ongoing cultural traffic in philhellenism between Germany and France or Eng-
land? Such issues were indeed a focus of discussion, but other, less expected insights
also emerged, about the powerful influence of periodization, pedagogical thought,
and the narrative characteristics of intellectual traditions in general in constructing
philhellenist conceptions during the last two-and-a-half centuries. Perhaps the salient
point to come out of the colloquium as a whole was that we have too often been
seduced into conceptualizing German philhellenism as a single, monolithic entity,
with Winckelmann as its guiding star; and that we should conceive of ‘philhellenisms’
rather than ‘philhellenism’. Indeed, who (or what) is primarily responsible for the
invention of such a ‘philhellenist tradition’, and what its various authorizing
functions have been at different times, emerged as key questions.
The contributions of Simon Goldhill, Katherine Harloe, and Damian Valdez are
summarized here: other papers are reproduced in this volume. We owe a debt of
gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewer who made valuable suggestions for these
articles.
Simon Goldhill introduced the colloquium by suggesting there is, as yet, no estab-
lished doxography for this topic (‘The End of It All: Tragedy and Idealist Criticism’2).

1
The Classical Reception Discussion Group (CRDG) was co-founded in December 2011 by Helen Roche and
Clare Foster, and is now part of the Classical Reception Studies Network (CRSN): see <http://www.classics.
cam.ac.uk/faculty/seminars_conferences/classical_reception_discussion/>; the mailing list can be joined at
<https://lists.cam.ac.uk/ mailman/listinfo/classics-reception>; for the CRSN, visit: <http://www.open.ac.uk/
arts/research/crsn/>.
2
Some of his points can be found in Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy, Oxford, 2012;
others in his Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of
Modernity, Princeton, 2011.

© The English Goethe Society 2013 DOI 10.1179/0959368313Z.0000000022

156 CLARE FOSTER and HELEN ROCHE

Accordingly, he shared some observations from a burgeoning strand of scholarship

in Classics, which focuses on the relationship between German idealism and concep-
tions of tragedy. Classical scholars such as Joshua Billings, Miriam Leonard,
Constanze Güthenke, and others have recently explored how the work of German
philosophers such as Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, and Hegel might be seen as
collectively evolving an idealized concept of ‘the tragic’, as distinct from a historical
understanding of Athenian ‘tragedies’.3 Hegel, for example, sees Sophocles’ Oedipus
at Colonus not as an Athenian play about Athens, but as ‘eternally marvellous’ for
its exemplification of the ‘principle of inner reconciliation’, with the figure of Oedipus
offering a solution to Adam’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden: ‘This transfigu-
ration in death is his own and our reconciliation [. . .]’.4 Goldhill also noted that A.
W. Schlegel’s famous essay on the chorus as idealized spectator ends with an appeal
to the Germanness of his audience, explicitly linking Greece and Germany via their
common search for ideal forms of art. According to Goldhill, this ‘generalizing bent’
had an extraordinary impact; by 1830, he suggested, previous theoretical and practi-
cal engagements with tragedy, from Plato, via the Renaissance, to Italian opera and
the civic neo-classical revivals of revolutionary France, were all but erased by this
‘new theoretical apparatus’. For Goldhill, a tendency to see Greek art in general as
evidence of philosophical and aesthetic universals was continued through the work
of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, who, for all their specificity, nevertheless
also saw Greek tragedies and their choruses as ‘removed from realism’ and not as
‘linked to the nationalism and didacticism of the politicized artist of the state’. Gold-
hill pointed out that this strand of German idealism was itself shaped by historical
conditions: the French Revolution, the failed revolutions of 1848, and the idea of the
German Sonderweg all provided an important context for the various attractions of
universality and abstraction. But its legacy, he concluded, has been enormous: it exists
today not simply as a scholarly topic, but as part of the fabric of English culture. He
offered the example of ‘tragic irony’, a term first coined by Connop Thirlwall (trans-
lator of Niebuhr and Schleiermacher) in 1833, which, deracinated from its Hegelian
origins, has become an accepted term of art in the English-speaking world. ‘The
prevalence and penetration of German idealist thinking in contemporary criticism’,
means, for Goldhill, that ‘we are all Germans now’.5
The suggestion that Greek tragedy and idealism are core elements of German phil-
hellenism was questioned in discussion. It was pointed out that tragedy was not the
only literary genre in which romantic and philosophical idealism had made its mark.
Schelling’s ideas were transmitted to British culture almost immediately through con-
temporary translations, which Coleridge famously plagiarized. Lyric poetry was also
a crucial vehicle for Graecophilia (see Saure’s article in this volume). A rejection of

3
See Miriam Leonard and Joshua Billings (eds), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, Oxford, forthcoming;
Miriam Leonard, Tragedy and Modernity, Cambridge/MA, forthcoming; Joshua Billings A Geneaology of the
Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy Around 1800, forthcoming; and Constanze Güthenke’s Greek
Lives: German Classical Scholarship and the Language of Attachment 1790–1920, forthcoming.
4
For the text in translation, see, for example, Berys Nigel Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds), The Routledge
Companion to Aesthetics, New York and London, 2001, p. 369.
5
This is a twist on Shelley’s famous phrase in his poem ‘Hellas’ (composed in 1821, published in 1822): ‘We are
all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece’.
 INTRODUCTION 157

tragedy as violent or extreme had already begun, even before A. W. Schlegel seized
upon Greek tragedy for its preoccupation with balanced intellectual abstractions (it
was for this reason that he avoided translating Shakespeare’s King Lear and Othello,
for example). Also, however much a philosophic idealism is identified as German,
during the early nineteenth century in Europe, Germans were equally recognized as
pioneers for their textual criticism, archaeology, scientific classification (with the
reciprocal development of museums to house and organize collections), and establish-
ment of systematized public education.6 A growing awareness of ‘art’ as a national
phenomenon is implicated in all these developments. But Goldhill’s polemical
introduction helpfully located this discussion of German Philhellenism in its English
context: taking place (albeit with many Germans involved) in English, at an English
institution. It raised the question of whether our goal was to achieve a better under-
standing of English culture, German culture — or indeed, ancient Greek culture. It
emphasized the importance of taking the nationality — and nationalism — of differ-
ent academic traditions into account; and of paying close attention to dates and
patterns of translation. It is important to identify not only the exact moment at which
translated works become available, but also moments when they, or their ideas,
become naturalized in their ‘translated’ form as an indistinguishable part of the
receiving culture (see Evangelista in this volume). Indeed, each of the papers pre-
sented at the colloquium went on to explore in different ways precisely this issue of
exactly when, and where, a distinct collective notion of philhellenism became current,
and among which constituencies.
Katherine Harloe’s paper, for example, set out to question the most familiar
construction of German philhellenism, which sees it as a movement running from
Weimar classicism to the Weimar Republic, with Winckelmann and Lessing as
illustrious forebears (‘Philhellenism and Enlightenment(s): Thinking about the Early
History of German Philhellenism’). She remarked that this narrative is common to
both insider and outsider accounts of German philhellenism; it links, for example, the
very different discussions by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Eliza May Butler,
and Suzanne Marchand. Harloe invited the colloquium to consider what the stakes
might be of adhering to or modifying this account, as well as asking whether this
narrative does justice to the range of contexts which should be appealed to in a
reconstruction of German philhellenism’s eighteenth-century origins. She problema-
tized hagiographical accounts of Winckelmann’s life and work which present him as
the ultimate and original proponent or ‘starting point’ of German philhellenism,
showing that these interpretations are in fact a retroactive celebration of a phenom-
enon which actually came into being rather later. Additionally, they have frequently
obscured the extent to which Winckelmann’s oeuvre can also be viewed as an

6
Archaeology: Suzanne Marchand, Down From Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellensim in Germany, 1750–
1970, Princeton/NJ, 1996, and Stephen Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New Haven, 2006; classification and museums: Peter Connor,
‘Cast-Collecting in the Nineteenth-Century: scholarship, aesthetics, connoisseurship’, in G. W. Clarke (ed.),
Rediscovering Hellenism, Cambridge, 1989; education (in addition to Marchand, Dyson, and Connor): Saure
(in this volume) and Constanze Güthenke, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism,
1770–1840, Oxford, 2008.
158 CLARE FOSTER and HELEN ROCHE

extension, or translation, of French and English Enlightenment ideas, as unprejudiced

examination of his own handwritten notes and diaries suggests.7
Damian Valdez’s survey of the same-sex problematics of philia and paideia from
the age of Winckelmann to the Weimar Republic, meanwhile, addressed the reciproc-
ity between prevailing intellectual ideas and actual social practices or behaviours
(‘The Ideal and Pathos of Male Friendship in German Philhellenism’).8 He maintained
that the idealization of ancient Greek male friendship is one of the most striking
constants of modern German philhellenism, and one which reveals some of its most
poignant contradictions and struggles. At the heart of this ideal lay the sacralization
of the male form and male bonds. Valdez argued that the conflicts and reconciliations
of this Hellenic ideal with rival ideals such as medieval chivalry, Christianity, and
the modern nation-state, allow us to arrive at a better understanding of German
philhellenism’s self-conception, and of the main themes of its historical development.
His account demonstrated how changing political circumstances affected Germany’s
ability to assimilate the legacy of the unique cluster of Greek institutions that gave
birth to an intense form of male association, and to reconcile it with different modern
sensibilities.
Perhaps the crucial point that the symposium impressed upon on all its participants
was not only that philhellenism should be considered in the plural rather than the
singular, but that the challenge is to understand how these ‘philhellenisms’ interrelate:
both giving rise to, and developing in distinction from, one another. It also became
clear that these processes are still active in the present.
The selectivity of the colloquium was a case in point: as Robin Osborne (Cam-
bridge) and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis (University College London) pointed out, the
predominant focus of papers on literary and intellectual history leaves out the impor-
tant role played by material culture and German engagements with Greece as an
actual place. But the colloquium did not attempt to reflect the overall scope of current
scholarship on the special relationship between Germany and ancient Greece; rather,
an eclectic collection of the specific research interests of individual scholars was
meant to direct attention towards considerations and perspectives not otherwise being
taken into account. Indeed, the discussions sparked by these select views of ‘German
philhellenism’ raised many valuable questions of scope and methodology — hence the
inclusion in this volume of Clare Foster’s summary of the colloquium’s concluding
debate. We hope this brief volume will do the same; and that despite the many aspects
of the topic that have necessarily been omitted, the following essays may at least
provide a stimulating springboard for those who wish to explore such issues further.

7
For more detail, see Harloe’s forthcoming monograph, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History
and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft, Oxford, 2013, which aims to provide a new perspective on
Winckelmann and his reception. We are indebted to her for generously sharing her current research with us,
both at the symposium and for the purposes of this introduction.
8
These ideas are developed at greater length in Valdez’s forthcoming monograph on German philhellenism with
Palgrave Macmillan.