German Philhellenism ― The Pathos of the Historical Imagination from Winckelmann to Goethe

This book is an account of the modern German fascination with the art, politics and religion of ancient Greece from Winckelmann to Nietzsche's generation. Philhellenism was the paradoxical German effort to overcome the ruptures of modern political and social life by means of the appeal to a historical whole rather than a transcendental or universal ideal. Traditionally, the story of German Philhellenism has been told in terms of German admiration for Greek beauty and the political consequences of this aesthetic sensibility. Through the study of two themes this book traces instead the transformation of the German understanding of Greek public life and religion, the forces which underlay and disrupted the admired aesthetic. At the heart of these inquiries was the centrality of the agon, or contest. Competitive institutions were the foundation of Greek politics and artistic achievement, the key to understanding the polis, but also the seeds of Greek self-destruction. For German Philhellenes, the status of women was the best measure of the gulf that separated modernity from Greek antiquity. In the wake of the French Revolution, Philhellenes engaged in attempts to reconcile ancient political freedom, artistic grandeur and a cultivated female citizenry. But in the course of the nineteenth-century, research on the Eleusinian mysteries and the delineation of a distinctly female religiosity increasingly aligned the ancient Greek feminine with the threatening democratic and egalitarian phenomena of modern Europe.

Damian Valdez holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is currently an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.