Yes, the Shakespeare trash talking was in the same pamphlet, alright. Here's what one of the young Turk Sturm und Drang writers, Herder, replied, according to Katharina Mommsen's essay I have this latest intel from:
"Does one have to step forward and exclaim: great man, be silent! You have no idea what you're talking about; you're making yourself ridiculous in the eyes of your fellow citizens and contemporaries; go and scrub your warrior's armor so it doesn't rust, and continue to leave the dust on the books you should have bothered to read first; shame on you, go away!"
(Btw, today's resarch according to the essay knows that in fact a substantial amount of De La Literature Allemande is based on an unpublished pamphlet Fritz drafted during his time in Rheinsberg...thirty years earlier. And as he confessed to Gottsched when he was in his forties, he hadn't read a German book since he was 18. I doubt he'd read any since meeting Gottsched, though presumably someone told him what Götz von Berlichingen was about and that it was blatantly inspired by Shakespeare. That he dusted off this unpublished thing and added a few more insults, though, really speaks for a need to be controversial again. *g*)
(The essay is mostly about German literary matters and not so much about Fritz, but for the record, it's here.
*"your fellow citizens": truly, the French Revolution is only a mere nine more years away. I doubt anyone in Fritz' youth would have dared to call him a "fellow citizen". ("Mitbürger")
** Also fun is Wieland calling Fritz "den aufgeblasensten aller deutschen Michel" ("the most bloated of German Michaels") in response. "Der deutsche Michel", "German Michael", was a symbolic figure like Uncle Sam later for the US or John Bull for England. He's usually depicted as a sleepyhead with a cap. (Remember, this was before Prussia took over the rest of the German states and we got the collective reputation of being military tough guys; the Michel was the opposite of that.) Is being called bloated or being referred to as the most German of Germans the worse insult for Fritz? Discuss.
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Re: On a lighter note
Date: 2019-10-23 03:41 pm (UTC)Yes, the Shakespeare trash talking was in the same pamphlet, alright. Here's what one of the
young TurkSturm und Drang writers, Herder, replied, according to Katharina Mommsen's essay I have this latest intel from:"Does one have to step forward and exclaim: great man, be silent! You have no idea what you're talking about; you're making yourself ridiculous in the eyes of your fellow citizens and contemporaries; go and scrub your warrior's armor so it doesn't rust, and continue to leave the dust on the books you should have bothered to read first; shame on you, go away!"
(Btw, today's resarch according to the essay knows that in fact a substantial amount of De La Literature Allemande is based on an unpublished pamphlet Fritz drafted during his time in Rheinsberg...thirty years earlier. And as he confessed to Gottsched when he was in his forties, he hadn't read a German book since he was 18. I doubt he'd read any since meeting Gottsched, though presumably someone told him what Götz von Berlichingen was about and that it was blatantly inspired by Shakespeare. That he dusted off this unpublished thing and added a few more insults, though, really speaks for a need to be controversial again. *g*)
(The essay is mostly about German literary matters and not so much about Fritz, but for the record, it's here.
*"your fellow citizens": truly, the French Revolution is only a mere nine more years away. I doubt anyone in Fritz' youth would have dared to call him a "fellow citizen". ("Mitbürger")
** Also fun is Wieland calling Fritz "den aufgeblasensten aller deutschen Michel" ("the most bloated of German Michaels") in response. "Der deutsche Michel", "German Michael", was a symbolic figure like Uncle Sam later for the US or John Bull for England. He's usually depicted as a sleepyhead with a cap. (Remember, this was before Prussia took over the rest of the German states and we got the collective reputation of being military tough guys; the Michel was the opposite of that.) Is being called bloated or being referred to as the most German of Germans the worse insult for Fritz? Discuss.