What literary epoch is considered the most crucial to your culture and why particularly this one?

5 comments

1. In Germany, I think it’s “Weimarer Klassik” in the late 18th and early 19th century when Weimar hosted the most important German authors like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Freidrich Schiller, Johann Gottfried Herder and Christoph Martin Wieland.

2. Two possible candidates:

   1. Max Havelaar (1860) by Multatuli, pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker. “The book that killed colonialism”. It follows a Dutch coffee trader and his experiences in Java, a colony at the time. It made clear to a whole generation that the coffee they were drinking was payed for with the starvation of people on the other side of the world.
   2. The Discovery of Heaven (1992) by Harry Mülisch. Voted the best book in the Dutch language by readers of the NRC newspaper. It’s a mulitgenerational epic about how two angels are charged by God to create the perfect child, in order to retrieve the Covenant. We follow an astronomer, a politician and a cellist, while the second half of the 20th century develops around them. Themes are the Cold War, the impact of science on society, secularisation and the changing relationship between politicians and civilians.

   Edit: I notice now you asked for an era and I answered with books.

3. I would say that two eras deserve this description. The first in the 14th century, with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, who contributed to the development of the literary vernacular, from which modern Italian derives, not to mention the great literary influence the Divine Comedy had in the following centuries. The second, in the first half of the 19th century with Leopardi’s poetry and Manzoni’s ‘I promessi sposi’, the main works of Italian romanticism; Manzoni’s work is also significant at the linguistic level in the standardisation of language, while Leopardi, through all his phases (historical pessimism, cosmic pessimism and heroic pessimism; Leopardi, in terms of themes, is very close to Schopenauer’s thought) builds a milestone in Italian literature, I think it can be divided into pre-Leopardi and post-Leopardi.

4. I’m gonna go with the mid-19th century and Realismus, maybe even a bit earlier, from 1815 onwards. The old political structures were abolished, replaced, and reinvented again, all in short order. The writers like Jeremias Gotthelf, Gottfried Keller, and curiously enough the German Friedrich Schiller with his drama *Wilhelm Tell* cemented the tropes and topoi about the Swiss rural population as independent and hard-working, but did not shy away from depicting their misery. Some authors were actively engaged in the political movements that led to the founding of the modern federation in 1848.

5. In Germany aside from the “Weimarer Klassik” probably Nachkriegsliteratur (after war literature) 1945 – 1950 and something just known as “new literature” 1950 – 1990.

   After war was a weird mix of very emotional, often depressing and dark texts or the opposite where people tried to eradicate all emotion in their writing and went for pure descriptive.

   New Literature is fascinating because we had two Germany’s (east and west) with different developing storytelling styles and authors dealing with growing up with After War literature.

   The most common trait is probably that literature stopped being pure entertainment or an expression of emotions but tried to teach people some form of morale or deeper meaning. Books like “Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum” by Heinrich Böll, “Der Besuch der Alten Dame” by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and “Das Parfum” by Patrick Süskind represent it well.

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   The “New Literature” is pretty influential because all other forms of media adapted this approach. We see it in German movies or video games – things that were produced with entertainment in mind only will most likely not get funding or win any prizes because the majority of the population misses a teaching moment. It’s still shaping the modern media landscape here but a lot of people are unaware where that’s coming from.