The period known as Sturm und Drang embraced the works of Johann Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Jakob Lenz.

Sturm und Drang means  Storm and Stress. It was a  movement in German literature that flourished from c.1770 to c.1784. It takes its name from a play by F. M. von Klinger, Wirrwarr; oder, Sturm und Drang (1776).

The ideas of Rousseau were a major stimulus of the movement, but it evolved more immediately from the influence of

  Gotthold Lessing 1729–81, and others notably Hamann.

Johann Georg Hamann,

 1730–88, German Protestant theologian, b. Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). Although opposed to the rationalism of Kant and the German Enlightenment of Herder and Lessing, he was highly esteemed by the leading thinkers of his day.

He was an advocate of religious immediacy, stressing the rights of the individual personality and the importance of inner religious experience. For Hamann, faith was the faculty of perceiving God’s acts in history and His works in nature.

Because of the aphoristic and occasional nature of his writings, he was called “The Magus of the North.”

His works, chief of which are Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten (1759), Aesthetica in nuce (1761), and Golgatha und Scheblimini (1784), greatly influenced Søren Kierkegaard.

With the Sturm und Drang, German authors became cultural leaders of Europe, writing literature that was revolutionary in its stress on subjectivity and on the unease of of the individual in contemporary society.

The movement was distinguished also by the intensity with which it developed the theme of youthful genius in rebellion against accepted standards, by its enthusiasm for nature, and by its rejection of the rules of 18th-century neoclassical style.

The great figure of the movement was Goethe, who wrote its first major drama, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and its most sensational and representative novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Other writers of importance were Klopstock, J. M. R. Lenz, and Friedrich Müller. The last major figure was Schiller, whose Die Räuber and other early plays were also a prelude to romanticism.

The period also encompassed the early works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Goethe and Schiller were widely considered the greatest figures in the subsequent classical period, when artistic forms in general were characterized by restraint, lucidity, and balance (see classicism). Their cultural ideals, expressed in the novel of self-formation or Bildungsroman, were also spread by C. M. Wieland and Friedrich Hölderlin, the age’s greatest German poet.

Romanticism

At the end of the 18th cent. literary romanticism, initiated in Germany by the brothers Friedrich and H. W. von Schlegel and by Novalis, brought greater emphasis on subjective emotion. A new literary form appeared in the novelle, a prose tale often dealing with supernatural elements. Typical early romantic poets were Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and Joachim von Arnim, who were also collectors and editors of folktales and folk songs, sometimes set to music by Robert Schumann and other composers. Freiherr von Eichendorff, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Ludwig Uhland were other notable German romantics.

The movement’s historical tendencies were supplemented by the philological and folkloristic researches of the brothers Grimm. The writer E. T. A. Hoffmann was romanticism’s greatest psychologist of the unconscious. Hovering between classicism and romanticism, Heinrich von Kleist’s stories and plays were masterpieces of dramatic economy, other important playwrights were Franz Grillparzer and C. F. Hebbel.