LITERATURE OF PEASANT LIFE IN

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY
The rise of peasant literature as a genre belongs to the nineteenth century, to the
middle years of the so-calied Biedermeierzeit. However, aimost throughout the
eighteenth century iiterary works, usuaiiy lyric or epic poetry, on the subject of the
peasant or peasant life enjoyed wide currency in Germany. Eighteenth-century
German literature of peasant life is remarkable for the uniformly sympathetic view it
offers of its subject. Although a number of works include some degree of empirical
detail of rural life, in general the actual condition of the German peasantry receives
only marginal attention. Nor does such literature offer a programme of social,
political, or economic reform, despite the fact that abuses of the peasantry do figure
in it and that most of it was written during a time of intense interest among public
figures in the problems of the agrarian economy. German literature of peasant iife
owes much to the pastorai poetry of classical antiquity and to its modern European
imitators in Engiand, France, Italy, and Spain. But it has a topicality of its own,
none the less, and a political dimension of a characteristic kind: in the curiously
obiique manner typicai of much poiiticai comment in German iiterature,
eighteenth-century German literature of peasant life offers both a critique of
contemporary society and a vision of an idealized society, a Utopian community such
as the bourgeois inteilectual of limited means, social mobility, and influence might
envisage it.
The central feature of this literature is the raising of the standing of the peasant in
moral, political, and aesthetic terms. While it could include both major works of
hterature and also what were virtually no more than rhymed almanach articies,
literature of peasant life enjoyed considerable popular success and it undoubtedly if
indirectly made an important contribution to informed political discussion on the
subject of the peasant class. The process of restoring the status of the German
peasant, his moral and political rehabilitation as it were, found expression, broadly
speaking, in three ways.
The first concerns his literary status. Traditionally a comic figure, the peasant
became in the eighteenth century the subject of serious literature. In a rejection of
Gottsched's strictures on his suitability in that capacity,' the peasant was shown in
prose idylis and in lyric and epic verse as capable of deep feelings, of sentiments of
love, honour, and generosity, capable of feeling pain, both physical and mental, and,
at a iater date, of patriotism. Secondty, the peasant was represented as the repository
of 'true' or 'natural' human goodness. His mental and morai attitudes and his
manner of iiving were shown to be fundamentaily different from and supierior to
those of 'civilized' society, whether this is understood to signify the court and the
ruling classes, or simply the town-dwellers. (At the end of the century, the
iniiabitants of small towns came to be accepted as part of rurai culture, extending
' In his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkumt (Leipzig, 1751), p. 582. I should point out that I have not
attempted to deal with one central aspect of this problem that has attracted much interest in recent
scholarship, namely, the rhetorical tradition. Friedrich Sengle's pioneering article, 'Wunsehbild Land
und Sehreckbild Stadt', Stadium Generate, 16 (1963), 619-31, stimulated research into the history of the
genre, peasant literature, and a reassessment of the idyll in post-dassical literature. For bibliography and
general discussion see Sengle, .flK&rmnn-inf, 3 vols (Stuttgart, 1971-80), m, 1037.

8o

Literature of Peasant Life

the scope of literature ofpeasant life and, incidentally, providing nineteenth-century

German writers with one of their most popular subjects.) Closely linked with this
aspect of peasant life and an important constituent of its literary presentation was
the rejection of French 'urban' culture and manners as being not merely artificial,
but socially divisive. The association of the rural world with a specifically German
life-style, implicit in much eighteenth-century German iiterature on the peasantry,
was however developed only in the nineteenth century. The 'natural' goodness of the
peasant was presented as expressing itself in a natural piety, which giadly acknowledged divine providence at work in the world, and made him a dutiful subject of his
master, or a loyal member of the village community, according to the jjolitical stance
of the writer. Moreover, the peasant's sense of wonder and his delight in God's
creation were also seen as endowing him with a new aesthetic sensibility, a capacity
for the perception of goodness and beauty not exceeded by any other estate or social
group.
Thirdly, the peasant worid is shown in eighteenth-century German iiterature to
be one of natural social harmony and usefulness. If this is seen not to be the case in
any particuiar region, the fault is cieariy attributed to the irresponsibility of the
authorities rather than to peasant brutishness. Particuiariy in the work oiSturm und
Drang writers, not only are the authorities shown on occasion to harm the peasant
personally if they ill-treat him or restrict his freedom, they also stultify the
development of his naturai talents which, the writers imply, are traditionaliy
empioyed for the good of the community and of society.
To consider each of these points in greater detail: in the process of transforming the
herdsman and the tiller of the soil into a 'human being iike the rest of us', in the
presentation of the peasant as a major literary personage, the Svtass writer, painter,
and publisher Salomon Gessner played a vital part. In his first collection oildyllen
(1756), which were published in his native Ztirich when he was twenty-six and
which founded his extraordinary fame in eighteenth-century Europe, Gessner
presented his sylvan shepherds primarily as people of deep and delicate feeling. It is
of course obvious that his Damons, Chloes, Milons, and Mirtils have no more than a
tenuous relationship with the contemporary Swiss or German peasant in contrast
to the Swiss peasants in Albrecht von Haller's majestic epic poem Die Alpen {1729),
we never see Philiis or Chioe dirtying their pretty hands to make 'aus Miich der
Alpen Meel'.^ But what they did do was to establish in the minds of the sophisticated
European reading public, including Rousseau, Turgot, and Mirabeau, as well as
Swiss and German readers, the notion of an ideal human community set in a local
landscape.* The persuasivenMS of Gessner's 'peasants' lay in the communal
organization of their world. They are not mere love-sick swains and maids, but are
social beings, always mindful of famiiy and communai bonds, affectionate in their
care for their children and aged and in their readiness to aid the poor and the sick,
and they are faithful in love. Phiiiis replaces the iost goats of her poor neighbour,
Idas prays to Pan to increase his flock so that, as he says, 'ich sie mit meinen armen
Nachbam teiien [kann]', and Aschines refuses the offer from Menalkas, a courtier,
^ Haller and Saiis-Seewis, edited by Adolf Frey, Deutsche National Lilieratur (hereafter referred to as
DNL) (Berlin, n.d.), vol. 41/42, p. 24 (1. 232).
' It is perhaps worth reminding oneself that ^ i , ou la rumoelte HeUise (German translation 1762)
appeared four years after Gessner's Idytlen.

EDA SAGARRA

81

whom he has rescued in the mountains, of gorgeously-robed girls, contrasting them

with his 'braunes Madchen . . . [geschmiickt] mit frischen Rosen und einem bunten
Kranz'.* The statistics of Gessner's literary success, with sixty editions and translations into some twenty languages in the eighteenth century, followed by a sudden
and enduring neglect, are indeed extraordinary.^ The reasons cieariy have much to
do with the iyric expressiveness of his prose, and with the critique, perhaps more
evident to Gessner himseif than to most of his readers, of contemporary society.* His
Idytlen estabiished the country-dweiler (as against the Roman topios of the
statestnan-philosopher-turned-countryman)'' as a moral person and an emotional
being, a fit subject for discriminating as well as for didactic pens. His influence is
discernible on those poems where the writer has his peasant swain use Petrarchan
conceits or other traditional conventions of European love poetry in singing praise of
the beloved.* Although in contemporary peasant society economic interest continued to determine the marriage partner, in Gessner, Schubart, Voss, and others
the love relationship of these literary peasants is charged with the kind of feeling
normally reserved in literature for the relationships of tbe upper classes; at the same
time their behaviour is characterized by the kind ofvirtuous restraint and delicacy of
feeling of an idealized society, one which would become widely characteristic of
peasant literature in the Biedermeier era.
The contribution ofJ. H. Voss to peasant love poetry is a significant one, for he
was the first to integrate it into socially critical idylls and odes. The central
importance of his work in the present context lies in his having established the
capacity of the 'authentic' peasant for emotional experience, indeed in his having
helped give expression in his idyils and odes to the peasant's capacity for physical
and emotional suffering, as weii as for human happiness. It is hard for us to realize
how radical this was. The traditional social hierarchy in eighteenth-century Europe
rested on the assumption of a corresponding hierarchy of physical and emotional
sensibility. Just as in earlier times educated people might not (in theory at least) be
tortured, whereas it was thought necessary in the case of the uneducated to do so in
order to 'get through to them', to extract the truth, so too in the eighteenth century
people still believed that peasants actually felt physical pain much less acutely then
their social superiors.' A Pomeranian cleric expressed this view somewhat crudely
in 1684 when he suggested that peasants, like salt cod, were best when beaten soft.''"
Similarly, peasants were believed to be virtually incapable of any but the most
primitive emotions, feeiing iust rather than iove,^^ a primitive hunger and greed for
* Gessner, Idyllen, Kritische Ausgabe, edited by E. T. Voss (Stuttgart, 1973), pp. 23, 25, 48.
' See John Hibberd, Salomon Gessner (Cambridge, 1976), especially pp. 127-43.
* For a critical reassessment of Gessner's work and its modem reception, see E. T. Voss, 'Salomon
Geflner', in Deutsche Dichter des 16. fahrhunderts, edited by Benno von Wiese (Berlin, 1977), pp. 249-75,
especially pp. 264 ff.
^ Illustrated in the case of Germany by the poems of Freiherr von Canitz (165499), highly thought of
by his contemporaries.
* As in H a g e d o m , Der verliebte Bauer, C. F. D. Schubart, Winteriied eines schwabischen Bauemjunge or
Fischerlied (both 1783, when he was a prisoner in the Hohenasperg), or J. H. Voss, Die Wassertragerin
(1793).
See Erich Trunz, 'Der Spathumanismus um 1600 als Standeskultur', in Barockfbrschung, edited by
Richard Alewyn, second edition (Cologne, 1966), p. 150.
' " Quoted in J. G. Gagliardo's important study. From Pariah to Patriot: The Changing Image of the German
Peasant i'j'jf>~i8^ (Kentucky, 1969), p. 29.
" For exampie, the Salzburg peasant, Hans Wurst, as in Stranitzky's Turdiisch-Bestraffier Hochmuth, in
Dichtungaus Osterreich (Drama), edited by Heinz Kindermann (Vienna, 1966), pp. 84 ff.

82

Literature of Peasant Life

food and drink, and imposing harsh discipiine on their children and other dependents. Voss, however, and many ofhis contemporaries, particularly those associated
with the Sturm und Drang, showed the peasant as capable not just of suffering
physically, but also of experiencing the pangs ofiove; moreover he showed him as
being capable of tender emotions towards wife and family, of concern at the
sufferings of others, of gratitude to overlord and to neighbours, and of righteous
anger at injustice, whether inflicted on himself or on others.^^ Voss was primarily
concerned with poiiticai issues in his poetry of peasant life, hut he was also sensible
of the innovatory literary character of his work, and the problems to be overcome. In
a letter to H. Chr. Boie, fi-om whom he had taken over the editorship of the Gottinger
Musenalmanach in 1774, he commented on his poem. Die KirschenpfiUckerin: 'Meine

Idylle... ist fertig und gefallt mir sehr. Es ist ein Versuch, wie weit man die Denkart
der Landmadchen veredeln kann, ohne unnaturlich zu werden.'^^ A few years iater
Matthias Claudias, presenting a GenreitW of contemporary peasant life in Schleswig
in Paul Erdmanns Fest {1782), has the narrator comment: 'Mein Vetter und ich waren
wie vom Himmel gefallen, denn solche Bauern waren uns noch nicht vorgekommen.'^* The irony of the comment is here directed, not at the idealization of peasant
iife, which is undoubtediy there, but rather at the traditionai iiterary stereotype of
the peasant. It was Voss too, in that innovatory decade, the 1770s, which was also a
time of acute rural economic crisis and human suffering in many regions of
Germany, who portrayed the peasant in German iiterature as a tragic figure, the
victim of his social and poiiticai circumstances. In the first of two important idyils.
Die Leibeigenen (1775), the plight of the victims of feudal tyranny (and stupidity, as in
Junker Kord some twenty years iater (1793)) is reveaied. Sensitive to the sufferings of
their companions, to the bitter anguish of iovers forcibiy separated, protest brings
brutal vengeance. None, not the young nor the aged, the sick, the old, nor the
maimed, is spared. The peasants are shown as sensitive to the feelings of one other,
respecting individuality in a way unknown to the ignorant establishment, brutalized
by generations of tnindless power. In Die Freigelassenen (1775), by contrast, Voss
offers a harmonious portrait of peasant life under the guidance of an altruistic and
visionary lord, the peasants no less virtuous or indeed 'authentic' in their prosperity,
based on free endeavour and following the paternal advice of their former master
{Idyllen, pp. 79-83). The theme of the 'good' master is of course a common one in the
1770s and 1780s, reflecting to some extent the preference of proponents of the
ptopular enlightenment for paternalist reform over radical social change.^'
An interesting subsidiary aspect of the literary rehabilitation of the peasant in
eighteenth-century German literature and one, it must be said, on which much
work remains to be done is the portrayal of the peasant woman and giri. At a time
when the so-called popular morai philosophers, such as Camf>e, Ehrenberg, Ewald,
Pockels, and others,^* were demanding feats of submission and moral endurance of
'^J. H. Voss, Idyllen, edited by E. T. Voss (Heidelberg, 1968) (reprint of 1801 Konigsberg edition),
pp. 84, 26 ff., 87 f., 149 f.
' ' Voss, Briefe, 3 vols (Hildesheim, 1971), m, 149.
'* From Der Wandsbecker Bote, in Claudius, Samtliche Werke, edited by Hannsludwig Geiger (Wiesbaden,
n.d.), p. 193.
' ' As, for example, E. von Rochow, Pcstalozzi, or Chr. Salzmann.
^* For example, Fr. Ehrenberg, Reden an GebUdete aus dem weiblichen Geschlechte, second edition (Leipzig,
1808), p. 27, p. 87; Joh. Ludwig Ewald, Die Kunst,eingutes Madchen, eine gate Gattin, Mutter und Hausfrau i-u
z(wriini (1799),fifthedition (Vienna, i827),pp. 5of.;C. F. Pockels, Versuch einer Charakteristik des weibtichen
Geschlechts, ivoh (Hanover, i79&-i8oi),i, 12.

EDA SAGARRA

83

vreimen both in the single and in the married state, deeming these to be preordained
by divine and/or natural law, writers on peasant life offered something very
different. Peasant women, whether farmers, cottagers, or day labourers, were shown
as having a certain authority in their own sphere, based on their useful life and the
self-esteem arising therefrom.^' Some were even shown as exercising a certain
authority over their men-folk, though its nature was not 'mannishness' but rather
what is caiied in Irish the 'sugain sneachta' (= rope of snow), nameiy, the power of
proven affection. The pretty, seif-confident no-nonsense peasant girl is a not
uncommon iiterary type in the poetry of the last decades of the century, pert as in the
poems of the Wiener Almctrmch, triumphant, as she pours a bucket of water out of her
bedroom window over the head ofJunker Wenze! auf Schmuriachsbuttei, coquettish but affectionate in the iove poems of the Kempten collection, Vermischte BauemLieder (1776).^* The anacreontic proets allowed their female peasant protagonists a
certain erotic provocativeness not quite in keeping with the natural virtue now
commoniy attributed to them.'* But the women's capacity for love is seen by
virtuaiiy ail writers on the subject as at least equai to that of their male partners.
Perhaps the most powerful example of this, and a work which had a formative
influence on the Biedermeier peasant heroine, not always fully acknowledged, is
Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea (1797). The endlessly-quoted line, made familiar
from Buchmann's ubiquity in the later nineteenth century, 'Dienen lerne beizeiten
das Weib nach ihrer Bestimmung',^" has led commentators to overlook the independence of spirit, the impressive moral and physical strength of Dorothea, which is
seen to be anchored in her rural background. Reading her iong iast speech, which
begins, 'O nie weiB der verstandige Mann, der im Schmerz uns zu raten / Denkt
. . .',^^ where she confesses her passion for and renunciation of Hermann and the
home offered her, we can perhaps see the prototype of the strong and passionate
heroines of Beidermeier literature of rural life, such as we encounter notably in
Gotthelf, but aiso in Immermann, Stifter, and Auerbach.
The presentation ofiove and marriage in eighteenth-century German literature of
peasant life," schematic though it is, differs substantially from that of hterature of
upper-class or burgher circles, suggesting a freedom of choice governed by inciination, an essentiai equaiity of the sexes, based on their mutually important contribution to the famiiy home and community. The truth or accuracy of this portrait was,
however, hardiy bome out by a comparison with actuai circumstances of rural life.
This is an aspect of the poiiticai function of such literature, namely, an attempt on
the part of its bourgeois authors 0 offer and to win public support for a vision of a
" S e e Uli Braker, Lebensgeschichte and natiirliche Ebenteuer des Armen Mannes in Tockenburg (1789, reprinted
Berlin and Weimar, 1966), p p . 259 If., or Hermann und Dorothea, v m , I. 60: 'Die tatige Mutter belebt im
Ganzen die Wirtschaft' (Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprache, edited by E. Beutler,
24 vols (Zurich, 1948-63), IX, 221).
' " J . A. Blumenauer, Wundersame Klage eines Landmadchens in der Stadt, D N L 135/2, p p . 70-72; Voss, Idyllen,

p. 1.42;
4 see also Leopold
p Schmidt,, 'Lieder far den Landmann: Ein Kapitel
p Aufklarung
uklarung und Volkslied',
Volkslied, in
Die osterreichische
h h d t ( (ly^o-lSjo),
S
)
Die
osterreichischeLiteratur:
Literatur:Ihr
IhrProfit
Profit and derWd
Wende vom818. tum ig.J Jahrhundert

dedited
i d b by H
b
Herbert

Zeman (Graz, 1979), pp. 873-90, especially p. 885.

" M . J . Prandstetter, mn^rr/ierf, DNL 135/2, pp. 113 f.
^ VII, 1. 114, quoted in G. Biichmann,. GeJiHgelte
We 26th edition (Berlin 1918), p. 148. (The first
., o WorU,
edition appeared in 1864.)
" Goethe, Gedenkausgabe, ix, 236 ff. (ix, 11. 134-81).
" Examples include Friedrich (Maler) Muller's idylls, von Leon (DNL 135/2, p. 97), Pestalozzi's
Lienhard und Gertrud, Uli Braker, Lebensgeschichte und naturtiche Ebenteuer des Armen Martnes im Tockenburg,

pp. 212,261 r

84

Literature of Peasant Life

new and just society, as the aiternative to, or perhaps in many cases only as an
escape from, the prevailing system of political, social, and moral constraints.
As part of the generai eievation of the image of the peasant in the eighteenth century,
the notion of him as the embodiment of'natural human goodness' proved persuasive. Almost a generation before Rousseau, the Swiss doctor and polymath Albrecht
von Haller (1708-77) presented the Alpine peasants in his epic poem Die Alpen
(1729) as exemplary for their hard work, thrift, and love of God and their fellow men,
showing them to enjoy a fulfiiied and contented existence. Hailer discovered the
Swiss landscape for eighteenth-century Europe, not least as a resuit of a long trip
undertaken in 1728 in search of botanical and other specimens, though the empirical
awareness of his most famous work also owes much to hterary sources, such as
Brockes's Irdisches VergnHgen in Gott and English pastoral poetry." Yet his praise of
the mountain landscape and its inhabitants was no straightforward Swiss patriotism, but was rather part of a forthright and bitter critique of contemporary Swiss
urban government.^* In that remote landscape he sought and found the original
form of republican Switzerland. While the influence of the Horatian topos is clearly
evident in Die Alpen, a new and significant element has been added to the iiterary
tradition, namely, that the protagonists were now peasants. Moreover, despite the
elevated tone and substance of the poem, there is much reference to the actual tasks
which peasants performed.
In Salomon Gessner's work, on the other hand, the 'authentic' peasant is absent.
The focus of his work is on nature and on nature's power over those who would hear
her voice. Those who live close to nature,figmentsof his poetic imagination, as he
confesses them to be in his Preface, are virtuous and kindly beings: 'Sie sind frei von
alien den Bedtirfnissen, die nur die ungiuckiiche Entfernung von der Natur notwendig machet, sie empfangen bei unverdorbenem Herzen und Verstand ihr Gliick
gerade aus der Hand dieser milden Mutter.'^^
Gessner was, after Hailer, thefirstGerman poet to write a major literary work on
the subject of Nature versus Culture, and the happy accident of his European
success^* greatly encouraged his imitators, as weil as identifying Switzerland in the
public mind as the home ofsimple rurai virtue.^' The narrator in Gessner's Idyllen is
not a countryman; he learns through his encounter with nature and the inhabitants
of his Utopian landscapie to despise what passes for civilized iiving: 'Oft reiB ich mich
aus der Stadt ios und fliehe in einsame Gegenden, dann entreifit die Schonheit der
Natur mein Gemiit allemdem Ekel und aiien widrigen Eindrucken, die mich aus der
"James Thomson, The Seasons (1730) and Bodmer's translation of Milton's Paradise Lost (1732),
admired and influential works in eighteenth-century Germany, were published after Die Alpen was
written.
" Compare his two poems, 'Die Falschhcit menschlicher Tugenden' (1730) and 'Die verdorbenen
Sitten' (1731) with itsjuvenalian superscription, 'Difficile est satiram non scribere'.
" Gepiers Werke, edited by Adoif Frey, DNL 41/1, pp. 63 f.
^' It was the future father-in-law of Therese Forster-Huber, Michael Huber, who translated Gessner
into French. He rightly felt that Gessner's lucid prose was admirably suited for teaching purposes and he
used the idylls to instruct his Parisian pupils, among them Diderot's friend, the physiocrat Tui^ot.
" This view was confirmed and publicized by the 'discovery' of a genuine example of Socrate rustique'
in the person of a Swiss peasant known as Kleinjogg (= Jakob Gujer of Wermatswili). J. C. Hirzel of
Zurich celebrated him in his Wirtschafi eines phitosophischen Bauers (1761), and famous men, including the
margrave of Baden and Goethe, visited him. See G. Franz, Geschichte des Bauerratandes (Stuttgart, 1970),
pp. 237 f.

EDA SAGARRA

85

Stadt verfotgt haben' (Gefiners Werke, p. 63). Piety, the Virgilian pietas, is singled out
by Gessner as the special characteristic of his shepherd figures. This is a recurrent
tlieme in subsequent iiterature of peasant life, where the actual speaker is himself a
peasant, as for exampie in the dawn and evening songs, the seasonai songs and work
songs of the 1770s and 1780s.^*
While the literary influence of the pietas motif, duty towards God, one's master,
community, family, and feliow-men is evident,^' criticism of contemporary poiiticai
and sociai structures is cieariy present in literature of peasant life, not least in
Gessner. The peasants in the work songs and seasonal songs express wonder at
God's creation, they manifest their own readiness to co-operate with the divine plan
or with nature to make the earth fertile. The contrast with the upper classes is ciear
enough even without being made explicit, as Leon makes it in his Morgenlied:
Und nicht wie unsre groBen Herrn
So faul und muBig ruh'n.
*
(DNL 135/2, p. 98)
The inciusion of so many aspects of the peasant's iife in the work songs, the overall
impression of meaningful and productive labour, given in these simple rhythmical
verses, which were published in the various almanachs and therefore achieved wide
geographical distribution and were read by a relatively wide sector of the educated
ranks of society, helped overcome the traditionai literary stereotype of the idle
self-induigent peasant and offered instead a dignified human being with whom the
reader might identify.'" The physiocratic teachings on the prime importance of the
land for the wealth of the nations, and the widespread food shortages in the second
half of the eighteenth century, the actuai experience of hunger by many German
inteilectuals in their childhood and as students,^' helped make the life and work of
the peasantry meaningful and reievant to their own iives.
Individually and collectively the writers of the Sturm und Drang greatly enhanced
the moral stature of the peasant in hterature. Thus in his idiosyncratic but highly
interesting idyll. Die SchafSchur (1775), set in the Palatinate, Maler Muller shows
his genial central figure, the peasant Walter, as possessing an intuitive understanding of central moral issues. A popular theme in Sturm und Drang writing, infanticide,
is discussed by the sheep-shearers after they listen to an old folksong.^^ Waiter, who
is presented as a rough but kindly soul and a loving father, sharply criticizes punitive
justice, showing concern for the ignorant criminal without condoning the crime, and
suggesting instead prevention through adequate social supptort:
^* Many tried their hand at this genre: Matthias Claudius, Schubart, the Austrian von Leon; Voss wrote
many work songs, as did minor poets. A number of Voss's songs were set to music by well-known
composers, such as C. P. E. Bach and J. A. P. Schulz. See H. Voegt in Voss, Werke, second edition (Berlin
and Weimar, 1976), p. 412; also Schmidt, 'Lieder fiir den Landmann'.
" 'And an air of piety to the Gods should shine through the Poem, which so visibly appears in all the
parks of antiquity' Alexander Pope in A Discourse an Pastoral Poetry (1717), quoted in J. Barrell and
J. Bull, English Pastoral Verse (London, 1974), p. 253.
^ For a reassessment of the popular Enlightenment view, see R. Wittmann, 'Der lesende Landmann:
Zur Rezeption aufklarerischer Bemiihungen durch die bauerliche Bevolkerung im 18. Jahrhandert', in
Dan Berendei and others, Der Bauer Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands im so^io-okonomischen Wandel des 18. und ig.

Jahrhunderts (Colc^e and Vienna, 1973), pp. 142-96, with extensive references; but see also L. Schmidt,
'Lieder fur den Landmann', and his 'Vom *'Baucmlied" zum "Volksiied": Aus dem Zeitraum von 1779
bis 1819', in Zeman, pp. 865-71.
^^ Voss, Briefe, i, 39. Hagedom and Jean Paul are other such examples.
^^ The folksong is shown to have the function of awakening compassion and prompting reflection on the
nature of society and justice. See E. Seybold, Das Genrebild in der deutschen Literatur: Vom Sturm urut Drang bis

zmt Reatismus (Stuttgart, 1967), pp. 44 f.

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Literature of Peasant Life

WeiS auch, was das ist, Betriibnis und Pein, und wohin einem [.fie] Traurigkeit bringen kann.
Hab' einmal mussen helfen ein Madel zum Gericht fiihren. Vergess' mein Lebtag nicht, wie's
da ausgeseiien. Das arme Ding! Wie sie da hinging im TodesschweiB, den hitteren Marterweg!
This was in fact a peculiarly relevant issue in contemporary peasant society, where it
was becoming increasingly difficult for economic reasons, and in certain areas
because of rural over-population, for young peasants to set up home and marry.
Waiter's kindness and concem for the young is shown here and in Mulier's iater
work. Das Nufikemen, to be the product of experience and of reflection on his own
social environment, where the interdependence of individuals is seen to be essential
to the prosperity of aii. Another, more overtly political example is the peasant who
challenges the moral authority of his overlord, regardiess of the consequences to
himseif. The naturai courage of the peasant, his inborn sense of iionour, is
contrasted, as in Burger's poem An seinen durchlauchtigen Tyrannen (1776 in the
Lauenburger Musenalmanach) or Voss's satirical idylls, with the alieged Ehre of the
Junker. Since Ehre was traditionaiiy accepted as being the product of nobie biood,
thus determining the immutability of feudal society, it was a particularly sharp
satiric comment on Voss's part when he transferred to the East Elbian Junkers the
stupidity once considered characteristic of the peasant estate: Junker Kord (1793) is
presented as a typicai product of the species; he is so stupid that he cannot even
envisage the possibility of his being cuckolded, that 'des Kutschers Tuck ihm einen
Kuckucksstreich spielen' {Idyllen, p. 142), which by impiication would expose the
aristocratic pretensions to power and privilege based on Ehre for what they are
worth.
The natural sociai harmony of the peasant worid as presented in eighteenth-century
German (and other) literature is both a iiterary topos, derived from the idyils of
Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgii, and aiso implicit in the classical tradition, a
form of social criticism of contemporary life and morals. The history of pastoral
fioetry in westem Europe in the early modern period has demonstrated the genre's
potential for direct poiiticai comment, as weii as emphasizing a fact which escaped
many nineteenth-century commentators, nameiy, the receptivity of audiences for
such criticism.^" Thus it was a centrai feature of what at first reading might seem
innocuous poetry ofGerman rural life in the second half of the eighteenth century, to
draw attention to the destruction or the undermining of that 'natural social
harmony' by an unjust authority or by the abuse of inherited power. Gessner, so long
dismissed as a 'naive' poet, was in fact one of the first to make this point expiicit,
when in the preface to his Idytlen {1756) he referred to the Goiden Age, associating
the heroes and heroines of his work with that period, and explicitly distancing them
from the peasants of his own time, in marked contrast to the view expressed by
Haller in Die Alpen. Peasants today, he writes polemicaiiy, are 'ungesittet und schiau
und niedertrachtig', but they are so because of the economic and political thrali of
their lives; where 'der Landmann mit saurer Arbeit unterthanig seinem Fursten und
den Stadten den UberfluB liefern muB', it is 'Unterdruckung und Armut' that have
made the peasant what he is {Gefiners Werke, p. 64). Such a view, it must be added,
'^ Maler Muller und C. Schubart, edited by August Sauer, DNL 81/3, pp. 231 f.
^ See Helen Cooper, Pastoral (Ipswich 1977), pp. i f., 7, 26.

EDA SAGARRA

87

did not fit in at all with the new reputation of Switzerland as the country of the free.
It was however an accurate comment on certain regions of the country, namely,
those areas where the peasants were under the direct authority of the local Stadtrat or
overlord. Gessner, like Haller before him, and Voss, Muller, and other German
poets of the later eighteenth century, showed awareness of the political aspect of the
'peasant problem', in stressing that the happiness, prosperity, and the 'virtue' of the
rural community depended to a large extent on the degree of freedom, especially the
conditions of tenure. Many writers therefore set their poems of idyilic contentment
in regions where tenure was thought favourable to the peasant, or where a stratum of
small farmers existed, as in the Palatinate or in parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Tyrol,
Swabia, or Baden, where the long-reigning margrave, Friedrich Karl (1738-1811)
was the leading proponent of French physiocratic thinidng and the only prince to
attempt to apply such ideas systematically. Those depicting peasant suffering and
deprivation were set primarily in the regions of manorial tenure in East Elbia,
especially Mecklenburg and Prussia, and in aristocratic estates in Austria.'^
Adelskritik therefore plays a prominent role in the literature of the late eighteenth
century and indeed it remained a characteristic of iiterature oi peasant life,
including the Dorfgeschichte, in the Biedermeier period, despite the radically different
political function of such literature. The criticism was both specific and general. It
was specific in the sense that the demands made by the landowning aristocracy on
the peasants were seen as a prime cause of their wretchedness. Moreover, opposition
by the landowners to the efforts of various territorial rulers, such as those of Prussia
and Austria, to emancipate the peasantry made them, the aristocracy, rather than
the monarch, the object of attack. It was generai in the sense that German iiterature
of peasant iife was in fact a form of bourgeois critique of the whole social, legal,
economic, and poiiticai system which had been designed to exclude the bourgeoisie
from participation, and which by the last decades of the century seemed to so many
educated Germans not merely unjust, but corrupt and antiquated.^*
As has already been mentioned, the naturai sociai harmony of the peasant estate
and the sociai usefuiness of the peasantry are shown in literature to be impaired by
the inefficiency, greed, or even viciousness of their masters. Common grievances
against the nobility, the spoiling of crops through hunting, taxation, forced iabour,
or miiitary service, are featured, mainiy in poetry, between 1770 and 1800.^' Much
play is made, as for example by Claudius in Paul Erdmanns Fest or by Voss in Die
Freigelassenen and Die Erleichteten {1800), of the material effects on peasant work of a
kindly or liberal master. Bourgeois masters too can be the object of resentment or the
butt of satire in the eighteenth century as in the twentieth, the social divide
between nobility and upper bourgeoisie was hardly as great as that between the

^ Eva Konig makes this point in a letter to Lessing (14 October 1770) when she contrasts the apathy of
labourers in an Austrian 'Herrschaftlicher Weinberg' with the peasantry of her native Palatinate (Lessings
Briefifoeduel not Eva Konig tj^o-i^yS (Munich, 1979), p. 31). By contrast the Tyrolean peasant, generally a
figure of fun in eighteenth-century Viennese popular comedy, comes off well in any encounter with city
folk. His self-possession unconsciously reflects the tradition of relative political and social independence
enjoyed by the Tyrolean peasantry since the late Middle Ages.
^ ' F o r a full discussion, see J o h a n n Schulz, Die AuseimndersetzuBg zwischen Adel und Burgertum in den
deutschen Zeitschnften der letiten dreijahnehnte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1925).
" For example, L. v. Goeckingk, Die Parforcejagd (c. 1771), G. Biirger, Der tvilde Jager (written in the
1770S b a t published in I786),J. A. Leisewitz, DiePfandung (1774).

88

Literature of Peasant Life

latter and the Kleinburgertum to which many intellectuals belonged.^* By contrast the
free peasant community, whether of iiberated serfs, or of the indejjendent tenants of
the Paiatinate, Bavaria, or Swabia, are shown to be not just happy and prosperous,
but socially responsible. Peasant society, left to its own devices, is shown to resemble
a family. Love rather than assertive authority educates and acts as a sociaily binding
force in Pestalozzi's Lienhard und Gertrud or J. H. Merck's Geschichte des Herm Oheims

(1778). Herr Oheim, once a state minister and now iiving as a simple farmer, treats
both his children and his servants with affection and trust. The servants sit at the
table with the family^' and are allowed to express their views freely. The Knecht, by
contrast with the visiting merchant, can afford to marry, since a weli-run farm
provides a decent if frugai living for all. Merck's prose tale it is a kind of extended
Genrebild of rural life is a good example of why the rehabilitation of the peasant as
a social and human being should appeal to middle-class authors.
Herr Oheim illustrates the popular notion ofNature versus Civilization in his own
life; more importantly, he demonstrates the roie which the burgher of education
might hope to piay in the actuai rurai scene. Herr Oheim's education and experience
have given him the basis to acquire the necessary technicai skills, which, applied to
the derelict farm he takes over, help to make the whole region prosperous. The
educated man is shown to have an important function in initiating and implementing social reforms, of modernizing society. (In the sequel, Herr Oheim der Jungere, also
published in Wielands Teutscher Merkur {178182), Oheim's son is forced off the land
by taxation and the general chicanery of court officials.) In the writings of a number
of Merck's contemporaries, as in Biedermeier peasant literature, it is the educated
man of humble origin, usually a local clergyman or school teacher, who acts as the
friend and counsellor of the peasant, helping him to use more rational methods of
husbandry, sustaining him in times of trial, whether through bad harvest and
pestilence, or through the malpractices of the powerful.*" Eighteenth-century
literature of peasant life can therefore be seen in the context of contemporary
political and social thinking on agrarian matters. There was however a marked
difference between the judgement of imaginative hterature and the writings of
political philosophers, economic theorists, iawyers, and the authors of the widelyread Hausvaterliteratur, which encompassed in tlie latter decades of the century both
husbandry and domestic morals. Of the latter groups, many of whom were actively
concerned to remedy abuses in the interests of more rational government or
husbandry and some of whom were actually familiar with the conditions of the
peasantry, few showed any tendency to idealize them. The lawyer von Beckendorff
expressed a widely-held belief among his kind when he wrote in his eight-volume
Oeconomiaforensis, published in Berlin the same year as Voss's Die Freigelassenen,

traditional custom and thus exacerbate social divisions within the peasant ranks. See W. von Groote, Die
Entstehmg des NationaHsmus in Nordwestdeutschland 1790-1840 (Gottingen, 1955), p . 105. Kosegarten's

Jucunde (1805) incidentally offers an interesting contrast at a time when the function of literature of
peasant life had begun to change. Jucunde and her friends serve the reapers and later eat with the
peasants during the harvest festival. Their action is presented by the narrator in terms of Christian
condescension (DNL 135/3, PP- 23, 74 f.).
*" Lenz, Der Landprediger (1777); also Pestalozzi's novel, as well as the later novels of Zschokke.

EDA SAGARRA

89

Die Tugend und deren gliickliche Folgen, sind dem Bauemvoike bey ihrer Unwissenheit und
schlechten Erziehung, gemeiniglich eine unbekannte Sache, und es scheinet ihm die Ausubung der Laster . . . weit angenehmer und vortheilhafter zu seyn. . . . Der Bauer hat fast
durchgehends ein fuhflosra Herz, wetches durch vemiinftige Vorsteilungen sehr schwer zu
bewegen und folgsam zu machen ist.**

Even Schlozer, scourge of tyrants, who laid the blame for the poor economic
performance of the pezisantry, and fbr their uncouth habits, on the shoulders of
unjust overlords, while reminding his hearers and readers that 'Apathie ist Wirkung
der Sdaverey, kein Grund fur dieselbe', showed little inclination to idealize.*^ By
contrast, the image of the peasant which emerges from imaginative literature from
the time of Gessner onwards is uniformly sympathetic and positive. A broad
agreement as to the high moral character and sympathetic mien of the peasant exists
across genres and generations. Such differences of emphasis as do exist are concerned with the environment of the peasant. Even in extreme poverty and human
degradation, his humanity remains unaffected, as is epitomized in Holty's poem of
1775, which later acquired the character of a folksong: 'Der alte Landmann an
seinen Sohn' ('Ub immer treu und Redlichkeit') .** Yet although a number of writers
attack specific abuses and one or two build their fiction around contemporary
economic theory (as Merck does in Herr Oheim), eighteenth-century Germ,an
literature of peasant life bears little real relation to contemporary peasant life or
agrarian problems. Nevertheless, to suggest that the literary topwi oi tht frohlicher
Landmann and of Nature versus Civilization determined the idealistic image of the
peasantry would be only partly true. For it is clear that such hterature had the
character of a cypher. In other words it stood for an ideal society, orderly yet free, in
which each socia! element has its meaningful function. In their representation of the
peasant and his world, eighteenth-century German writers, the majority of burgher
or Kleinbiirger origin, present their bourgeois^* readers with a vision of society 'wie
ein Dichter davon traumen mag' (Kleist), in which all talents could be meaningfully
used, and one which was in clear contrast with the system under which they lived.
Belief in the rationality of man and in man's powers to order the universe, a belief
which most of these writers shared, contrasted harshly with tbe actual practices of
society, and their own potential to change it. Here a Lessing could be humiliated by
the whims of a petty princeling or a Voss tricked by a highly-placed cleric who,
promising him a university scholarship, persuaded him to give up his source of
livelihood, and then as casually forgot all about it.*** But the selflessness and indeed
the ingenuity of bourgeois friends (compare Boie's efforts on Voss's behalf or the
support of Claudius's friends after the collapse of the Wandsbecker Bole in 1775) could
achieve what powerful patronage or 'the system' could not be depended on to do.
There is a parallel with the Utopian vision of the caring peasant community, whether
of Swiss shepherds. Palatine nutgatherers, or Bavarian farmers. The ideal society is
based on concern and skills, not on privilege, but needs the discerning vision of the
writer to discover it: such was the collective message of the literature of the peasant
^' Quoted in Wittmann, p. 166.
*^ Quoted in W. Rosenberg, Die Baitembefieiung in Livland und EstUmd und die Unmersitis Gittmgen, in

Berendei, pp. 369 f.

" Der Gittinger Dichterbund, 2. Teil, edited by A, Sauer, DNL 50/1, pp. 104 ff,
" On this, see Wittmann's wide-ranging if occasionaHy polemical article.
** Lessing, Samtliche Schrijlen, edited by Karl Lachmann, tiiird edition, 23 vols (Stuttgart and Leipzig.
:886-r924), xviii, 106 f,; Voss, Briefe, i, 33, 39,42, etc.

go

Literature of Peasant Life

life. That its function was poiiticai throughout is made clear in the correspondence
or prefaces of its authors, a point aptly illustrated by the case of Gessner, who was so
long regarded and in the Democratic Republic is still regarded as an example
of'escapist' literature. It is, however, true that only a minority of writers possessed
the political will or self-confidence to endow their view of the peasant world with a
programmatic political character, of the kind that Schlozer outlined in his Briefe aus
Eichstadt {1785) and that gave him such infiuence over his students:
Ein Schriftsteller ist ein unberufener, unbesoldeter Diener der burgeriichen Geseiischaft, ein
Volontair von Ratgeber der Nation.... So haben die Britten ihre Contracte erhalten, und so
will (auch durch die SchHftsteller) will's Gott, in funfiig Jahren kein Leibeigener mehr in
Deutschland sein. **
But this is not peculiar to the literature of peasant life, but is part of the much more
fundamental problem of the German poet's function in his society, and of his
perception of that function, both in the eighteenth century and later.
TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN

Schlozer;
der Kaiser zugegei
Rosenberg, p. 369),

EDA SAGARRA