Sturm und Drang

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Sturm und Drang (literally: "storm and urge"; sometimes also called "storm and stress" in English-speaking countries) was a German literary movement that developed during the latter half of the 18th century. The period is most commonly characterized as having lasted from 1767–1785 although the dates 1769–1786 and 1765–1795 are also given. It takes its name from a play by Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger. While the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were a major stimulus of the movement, it developed more immediately as a reaction—often inspired by Johann Gottfried von Herder and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—against what was seen as an overly rationalist literary tradition, and its rejection of the rules of 18th-century neoclassical style firmly situate it as part of the wider cultural movement known as romanticism.

Sturm und Drang was revolutionary in its stress on personal subjectivity and on the unease of man in contemporary society, and it firmly established German authors as cultural leaders in Europe at a time when many considered France to be the center of literary development. The movement was also distinguished by the intensity with which it developed the theme of youthful genius in rebellion against accepted standards and by its enthusiasm for nature. The greatest figure of the movement was Goethe, who wrote its first major drama, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and its most sensational and representative novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) which drew on James Macpherson's Ossian cycle. Other writers of importance were Klopstock, J. M. R. Lenz, and Friedrich Müller. The last major artist to work in this movement was Friedrich Schiller. His Die Räuber and a number of early plays were not just Sturm und Drang works, but also preludes to romanticism.

The movement was also paralleled in music of the period, resulting in stormy minor key writing, chromatic harmonies, and a return to some of the contrapuntal writing which had been abandoned at the end of the Baroque era. Sturm und Drang was a part of a preceding, and largely overlapping, movement in music known by its German name, the empfindsamer Stil. Examples of Sturm und Drang composition include the symphonies No. 45 and 49 by Joseph Haydn, as well as his opus 20 set of string quartets; the opera Don Giovanni by Mozart (especially the overture, and the portion including Don Giovanni's descent into hell), as well as his G minor symphony K. 183 and his D minor piano concerto K. 466; also Mozart's early opera "La finta giardiniera" with its heroine abandoned in a desolate place and beset by wild animals as well as numerous compositions by C.P.E. Bach.

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Notable works

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Zum Shakespears-Tag (1771)
- Sesenheimer Lieder (1771)
- Götz von Berlichingen (1773)
- Prometheus (1773; revised 1777)
- Ganymed (1774)

Friedrich Schiller
- Die Räuber (1781)
- Kabale und Liebe (1784)

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

- Der Hofmeister (1774)
- Die Soldaten (1776)

Johann Heinrich Voss
- German verse translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

Christoph Heinrich Hölty

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Pop culture references

The German industrial/techno group KMFDM has a song named Sturm & Drang on their album Attak.
In the Harry Potter book series by J.K. Rowling, the words Sturm und Drang are [spoonerised] into "Durmstrang", the name of an eastern European magic school.
In the title song of the hit musical Little Shop Of Horrors (a Faustus-style tale of a young orphaned genius Seymour Krelborne who accidentally raises a fly-trap type plant that eventually takes over the world), it is sung in the theme song: "...Shang-a-lang-lang feel the Sturm und Drang in the air..."
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, famous smuggler Talon Karrde kept two pet vornskrs named Sturm and Drang (first appeared in Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy).