But to what end has been the bitter opposition of two such great peoples [i.e., the French and the Germans]? Up to the present the German people have been like a bar of gilded silver forced through ever-narrower holes in order to refine it; but just as the broad bar, when drawn out long and thin, still retains its gold content, so have we preserved our gold of cosmopolitanism and loyalty. It seems in order, therefore, that we share for that reason a community of spirit with all nations — and thus, just as the French are the masters of the land and the English those of the larger seas, we are the masters both of those and of the air encompassing everything — so we therefore, in order to be a means of amalgamation of the fragmented nations, have been sown abroad in every country and climate, like the Jews, Jesuits, iron, and that animal, which shares our fidelity. Indeed, haven't all these hostile peoples always, with their wars inside the German realm, been tumbled together as if in a quartz-mill, which separates the metals by amalgamating them, that is, through peace?
— Jean Paul Richter: Peacetime Sermon to Germany : "Preface: Part V: Frenchmen and Germans." (The full form of the page quotation. Note that Jean Paul lived 1763-1825, so he was hardly talking about the Luftwaffe.)
We are left with the conclusion that Goethe never represented the reality of contemporary social life dynamically...Where he deals with the trends of the nineteenth century, he does so in general reflections, and these are almost always value judgments: they are predominantly mistrustful and disapproving. The technical development of machinery, the progressively conscious participation of the masses in public life, were distasteful to him. He foresaw a shallowing of intellectual life; he saw nothing to make up for such a loss. He also, as we know, remained aloof from the political patriotism which, if conditions had been more favorable at the time, might well have led to a unification of the social situation in Germany. If that had happened then, perhaps too the integration of Germany into the emerging new reality of Europe and the world might have been prepared more calmly, have been accomplished with fewer uncertainties and less violence. He deplored the political condition of Germany, but he did so dispassionately and accepted it as a fact...he explains that classical national works can arise only where the author "finds in the history of his nation great events and their consequences in a felicitous and significant union"...But as we look back upon all that has happened since, we are yet tempted to imagine what effect might have been exerted upon German literature and German society, if Goethe, with his vigorous sensuality, his mastery of life, his far-reaching and untrammeled vision, had devoted more interest and constructive effort to the emerging modem structure of life.
The fragmentation and limitation in the realm of realism which we have noted remained the same in Goethe's younger contemporaries and in the following generations. Until toward the end of the nineteenth century the most important works which undertook to treat contemporary social subjects seriously at all remained in the genres of semi-fantasy or of idyll or at least in the narrow realm of the local. They portray the economic, the social, and the political as in a state of quiescence. This applies equally to such different and important writers as Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jeremias Gotthelf, Adalbert Stifter, Hebbel, Storm—the social realism in Fontane still does not go very deep, and the political current in Gottfried Keller is pronouncedly Swiss. Perhaps Kleist, and Buchner later, might have been able to bring about a change in direction, but they had no opportunity to develop freely and they died too young.
The fragmentation and limitation in the realm of realism which we have noted remained the same in Goethe's younger contemporaries and in the following generations. Until toward the end of the nineteenth century the most important works which undertook to treat contemporary social subjects seriously at all remained in the genres of semi-fantasy or of idyll or at least in the narrow realm of the local. They portray the economic, the social, and the political as in a state of quiescence. This applies equally to such different and important writers as Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jeremias Gotthelf, Adalbert Stifter, Hebbel, Storm—the social realism in Fontane still does not go very deep, and the political current in Gottfried Keller is pronouncedly Swiss. Perhaps Kleist, and Buchner later, might have been able to bring about a change in direction, but they had no opportunity to develop freely and they died too young.
— Erich Auerbach: Mimesis : "Chapter 17: Miller the Musician" (translated by Willard R. Trask).
