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Goethe’s Recovery of Hans Sachs and its Afterlife in the German Democratic Republic

Hans Sachs in Weimar: Goethe’s Recovery of Hans Sachs and its Afterlife in the German Democratic Republic (the 2026 English Goethe Society Prawer Lecture) Timothy Powell (University of Oxford); Welcome/Introduction: Professor Jim Reed (President, English Goethe Society) 26 February 2026 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) glowing reappraisal of Hans Sachs (1494–1576) radically reshaped Enlightenment writers’ perceptions of Sachs and his writings. Some viewed him as the best of a barren field of German authors before prescriptive poetics; others mocked him as an unlearned fool whose works were offensive to good taste. Drawing on Book 18 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (1833), Powell shows how Goethe turned the tables on Sachs’ critics, arguing that his ‘didactic realism’ and versification could reinvigorate contemporary German literature. Alongside Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), he celebrated Sachs in the Neuer Teutscher Merkur (April 1776) as a poetic genius – the highest ideal of the Sturm und Drang movement. Surprisingly, Goethe’s engagement with Sachs and his writings provided a crucial interpretative framework for their appropriation for communist cultural ideology in the early German Democratic Republic, where readers in the 1950s channelled the spirit of Goethe’s revival of Sachs to kickstart the revival of his dramas in the GDR. In an astonishing twist on Weimar poetics, Goethe’s observations about Sachs’ ‘didactic realism’ also enabled East German literary historians to appropriate him in the 1960s as a canonical author anticipating Marxist-Leninist literary ideals of 'Socialist Realism' and didactic literature. Timothy Powell is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford.