Abstract: Breaking with the traditional view of Sturm und Drang comedy as a radically new beginning in the history of the comic genre, this article highlights important continuities that define German comedy from the Enlightenment through Sturm und Drang. More precisely, this article traces the variations on the central theme of vice that extend from the Enlightenment poetics of Johann Christoph Gottsched to Sturm und Drang plays by Lenz and Wagner. At the center of the analysis are the comedies Das Testament (1745) by Luise Gottsched, Minna von Barnhelm (1767) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Der Hofmeister (1774) by J. M. R. Lenz, as well as the drama Die Reue nach der That (1775) by Heinrich Leopold Wagner. Through these readings, Sturm und Drang's innovations become legible as the continuation of a well-established tradition of variations on a stable theme—a perspective that revises our understanding of the history of German comedy and that bears broader implications for the periodization of eighteenth-century German literature.

Keywords: comedy, Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, German literary history, genre studies, variation, vice

IN HER 2018 STUDY Zeitenwandel als Familiendrama. Genre und Politik im deutschsprachigen Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts (Historical Change as Family Drama: Genre and Politics in Eighteenth-Century German-Language Theater), Romana Weiershausen retraces the remarkably slow and continuous transition from the heroic tragedy to the modern bourgeois tragedy in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Contrary to what older scholarship had suggested, these genres were, for much of that time, experienced as coexisting possibilities of writing, and their respective relevance was based on this simultaneity. The present article presents a similar thesis with respect to eighteenth-century German comedy. Concretely, I shed light on the continuities of German comedy from its Enlightenment origins in the poetics of Johann Christoph Gottsched through Sturm und Drang. This proposed argument significantly revises our view, especially of Sturm und Drang comedy, which, by and large, still tends to be seen as a radical new beginning. Classical (and otherwise still very instructive) studies of Enlightenment comedy—including Horst Steinmetz's Die Komödie der Aufklärung (1966; Enlightenment Comedy), Rüdiger van den Boom's Die Bedienten und das Herr-Diener Verhältnis in der deutschen Komödie der Aufklärung (1979; Domestics and the Lord-Servant Relationship in German Enlightenment Comedy), and Eckehard Catholy's Das deutsche Lustspiel von Aufklärung bis Romantik (1982; German Comedy from Enlightenment to Romanticism)—usually end rather abruptly with Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm (1767).