Occasional poetry and sociable poetry at the court of Duchess Anna Amalia in Weimar and Tiefurt (1754--1807) (Germany, German text)

At the court of Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach occasional poetry enhances her court's image from 1754 until her death in 1807. This cultural practice provides the background for a poetry of sociability written by Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Gottfried Herder as part of an exclusive sociable circle around the Duchess in the landscape gardens of Ettersburg and Tiefurt. The analysis of everyday aesthetic literary practices illustrates the transformations in ephemeral poetic production.; Idealized images of Duchess Anna Amalia produced for official and personal occasions exemplify the traditional rhetorical role of literature at court. A surprising continuity in forms of representation and underlying mentality characterizes the poetic and prosaic homages by her teacher, her brother, her subjects and the poets at her court. By integrating new topics, like sociability and the landscape garden, Wieland entertains the Duchess while acknowledging her impetus to employ sociability and the garden as spaces to transform the representative role of literature. Her son Prince Constantin and his educator Karl Ludwig von Knebel create a garden in Tiefurt primarily honoring poets, philosophers and their literature. Here Anna Amalia seeks refuge with very few selected companions after his departure. In response to Frederick II.'s thoughts on literature, her circle publishes the exclusive handwritten Journal von Tiefurt in an experimental academy between 1781–1784. The circulation of ideas in the form of French, Italian and English literature translates into a wide variety of genres. The dialogue illustrates a search for philosophical answers to questions concerning both the court and the literary community. The sociability in Tiefurt integrates women, reconfigures the court's orientation in culture and language from French to German and produces a semiotic shift from rhetoric to hermeneutics. While this unique constellation is short-lived for the court, the context of interpretation revealed in the interdisciplinary study—with its analysis of riddles, dramas and all sorts of poetry and prose genres—offers unusual insights into German classicism in Weimar.