Storm, Stress, and Sexual Revolution: Economies of Desire in the German Literary Avant-Garde of the 1770s

Abstract

This dissertation identifies a queer revolutionary core to the Sturm und Drang movement in German literature that sought to revolutionize the social through the force of the erotic. Drawing on the discourse of queer theory, I claim that these texts question, disrupt, and overthrow contemporary sexual and gender mores. Moreover, I argue, the political economics of the Sturm und Drang are dependent on its queerness: by questioning the structures of social life, authors of the Sturm und Drang sought not mere reform, but the building of a new polity from the ground-up. My first two chapters reveal Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz as the most radical author of Sturm und Drang sexual revolution. In his political-economic writings on military reform, Lenz introduces a radical solution in moderate packaging that utilizes the erotic for social transformation. In his dramas, Lenz demonstrates how thus rethinking sexuality as a means for change opens the way disrupting and making more egalitarian existing structures. The third chapter argues that Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s early Sturm und Drang works Stella and Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers engage in a similar process of sexual revolution. Goethe disrupts the either-or logic of the conventional literary love-triangle and substitutes a polyamorous logic of both-and, where all three partners can define their own relationship against social norms. The fourth chapter explores the theme of infanticide. While Lenz and Gottfried August Bürger seek to liberate desire from what they view as an inherently alien force of destruction, Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich Leopold Wagner see such destruction as an inherent part of desire. Goethe attempts to mediate between these two sides in his own approach. The fifth chapter addresses how Schiller’s Die Räuber and Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften turn definitively away from sexual and social experimentation, ending the movement’s radical potential. I argue that Die Räuber appropriates the aesthetics of the movement against its ideals. Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften utilizes the discourses of botany and chemistry to mobilize the order of nature against his own earlier revolutionary ideas. My project is thus an archaeology of a revolution that never happened and an autopsy of its failure.