IN A WELL-KNOWN SCENCE in Goethe's drama Torquato Tasso (act 2, scene 1), Tasso is put in his place by Princess Leonore von Este, the duke's sister. To his impetuous words “Erlaubt ist, was gefällt” (994; Anything is permissible as long as it pleases), she coolly replies, “Erlaubt ist, was sich ziemt” (1006; Anything is permissible as long as it is proper). As one might expect with Goethe, the dilemma is to be seen not only in relation to the “disproportion between talent and life,” as Caroline Herder put it in a letter to her husband in March 1789 (Goethes Werke, 442); it is also an anthropological constant. Goethe has the poet Tasso speak of a golden era (979), a time of universal freedom (981) when nature is unfettered by custom and morality, which he claims is the freedom of poetry and thus of the artist himself. The princess, by contrast, points to rules of social life and of that which is seemly (1017), not only in the sense of courtly “etiquette” but with regard to human sociability, which is fundamental to humanity. To mark this contradistinction, Uwe Japp in 2007 used the terms “reguläre Verfasstheit” (generic constitution) und “Sonderkompetenz” (exceptional competence). We know, of course, how this conflict ends in the play: with the princess's ardent, unseemly embrace by Tasso; with her horror-stricken, ambiguous exclamation “Hinweg!” (3284; Away!); with the fear (expressed by the duke) that Tasso might be “von Sinnen” (3285; out of his mind); and with the poet's subjection to the “tyranny” of convention. In Weimar, Goethe himself smarted under this contradiction and constraint, and no doubt this was one reason for his escape to Italy. His return to Weimar, however, and the fact that he subsequently continued to work there for several decades, were made possible only by keeping the two principles in balance. Henceforth he combined art and administration, imagination and reality—he bore social responsibility and yet remained a free spirit.

Satirists, too, claim exceptional competence, and in the Germanspeaking world Kurt Tucholsky's famous dictum “Was darf die Satire?