The Critical Idyll Traditional Values and the French Revolution in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea

The Critical Idyll is a socio-literary re-evaluation of Goethe’s idyllic verse epic, Hermann und Dorothea. The revival of traditional German values as markers of national identity against the approaching revolutionary armies of the French in the early 1790s is analysed in the main figure, the archetypal German youth, Hermann. Confronted by the misery of German refugees from the left-bank territories in 1796, Hermann becomes the spokesman for a new sense of German identity. The refugee Dorothea, and her first finance, the German Jacobin who died in Paris, provide a perspective on the themes of German identity and individual freedom at this time. The national feelings Hermann expresses are based on a language and community in the German small town, rather than on earlier territorial or dynastic concepts of the German nation. The traditional literary form of the idyll is reformed through irony and parody into a modern, critical and self-reflexive work in which central themes of post-revolutionary society are foregrounded.