Goethe and Schiller spent 1797 publishing hundreds of verses insulting their critics

arts, ideas & societyThe Public Domain Review1797 · Weimar, Germany

Goethe and Schiller spent 1797 publishing hundreds of verses insulting their critics

the gist

In 1797 the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller teamed up to publish the Xenions, a series of short verses in Schiller's Musen-Almanach aimed squarely at their critics. Inspired by the Roman epigrammatist Martial, they wrote in the classical distich form, two lines per verse, to mock philistines, bigots and hypocrites. Targets included the bookseller Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, who had satirised Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose philosophy of the self was parodied as I am I. The insults provoked a flurry of counter-attacks, and Goethe soon urged the pair to turn to nobler forms. Goethe later took another dig at Nicolai in Faust, through a character called the Proktophantasmist. The English selection was translated by Paul Carus in 1896.

so what

The Xenions show that the Romantic era's famous writers were as combative as modern online critics, and that their feuds produced serious literature. They also reveal how much German literary culture of the period was shaped by public quarrels in periodicals.

fun fact

1797 is known in German literary history as the Balladenjahr, the year Goethe and Schiller produced many of their most famous ballads.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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