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One of the guiding questions of this study is whether a change took place in the representation of the Greek land with the emergence of the Greek nation state. This chapter looks at the strategies that politicize Greek nature and make it relevant to a German context after the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Greece was declared different from other national movements, and, according to the Romantic correspondence with nature, it was not the Greeks but Greek nature that liberated itself, enhancing its special position. The same imagery allowed for reflection on the German poetic voice and its standpoint in a politically conservative climate. One of the most prominent textual strategies is the use and notion of folk song. The main textual body is the popular poetry of Wilhelm Müller, supplemented with material from political pamphlets and geographical accounts.

This chapter assesses the distinctive features of the exiles' Philhellenism as compared to its British and continental versions. It considers the contrasting in attitudes of Italian exiles and British liberals towards Greek and Mediterranean freedom. It argues that while the Italian exiles considered Greece to be a European country ready for independence and representative institutions, and justified any means which would achieve this goal, the Benthamites orientalized Greece, depicted it as a backward Asian country, and believed that it needed to be ‘educated’ before it could become independent. The greatest contribution of the Italian volunteers to European Philhellenism was the notion of Mediterranean sisterhood between Italy and Greece and the idea that underpinned Italian patriotism until the end of the century. The significance heroic martyrdom of Santorre di Santarosa, who became the most famous European Philhellenic icon after Byron, lay precisely in its capacity to combine the Risorgimento and the Greek struggle for emancipation in a single movement for freedom.

This chapter offers a new reconstruction of Alexander the Great's fragmentary edict to Priene (I. Priene 1; Rhodes–Osborne, GHI 86, probably of 334 bc). Alexander's edict, concerning the status of a number of dependent communities in the vicinity of Priene, such as Naulochon, has played a prominent role in modern scholarship on Alexander's Philhellenism, the nature and extent of ‘royal land’ in the former Achaemenid empire, the civic life of the Greek poleis of western Asia Minor in the early Hellenistic period, and ancient archival practices. Much of this modern scholarship, however, is based on questionable restorations of fragmentary passages in the edict. This chapter offers alternative reconstructions of three critical clauses in the edict, which (if correct) shed a new light on Alexander's policies towards the Greek cities of Asia Minor in the earliest days of his Asiatic campaign.

Chapter 1 examines American reactions to the 1821 Greek War of Independence and the Cretan Insurrection of 1866-1869. Prompted by American philhellenes, politicians, religious organizations, and activists argued vehemently for American intervention to help their “Christian brothers” in Greece and Crete. In their push for intervention, Americans cited the need for humanitarian intervention and based their arguments on developing concepts of international law to counter arguments against non-entanglement, as spelled out in the Monroe Doctrine and advanced most forcefully by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Undeterred by such policies, the American philhellenic movement, led by men such as Edward Everett, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Daniel Webster, helped galvanize the American public to aid the Greeks.

This chapter considers the flourishing of operas on Turkish themes in Restoration France, including Rossini’s Turkish operas in Paris—especially as Rossini became director of the Théâtre-Italien in the 1820s. His most important contribution to Turkishness in Paris was his refashioning of Maometto Secondo as Le Siège de Corinthe for the Paris Opéra in 1826, and this was powerfully shaped by the ongoing Greek War of Independence and the potency of French Philhellenism. The Venetians of Maometto Secondo were now made into Greeks, at war with the Ottomans, and the opera was thus made relevant to contemporary Greece. Public response to Rossinian orchestration suggested that what was once considered “Janissary” percussion was now being generally absorbed into the percussion section of the modern orchestra. In 1824 Beethoven allowed for the brief nostalgic appearance of a Janissary band playing a Turkish march in the score of the Ninth Symphony.

Here the geographical focus shifts to Munich and a discussion of the Bavarian court as a new center for the German revival of Greek tragedy. Like his Prussian counterpart, King Maximilian II of Bavaria turned to the performance of Greek tragedy as part of a larger attempt at cultural reform, including a continuation of the effort begun by his father to transform Munich into an “Athens on the Isar.” The theater reform in Munich initially took place in the shadow of Berlin but ultimately included an original production of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (1852) with music by the court composer Franz Lachner. Lachner also used Mendelssohn’s Greek music as a model, but employed a style marked by a distinctly sacred veneer in what appears to be an effort at suggesting both the religious tone of Sophocles’ drama and the elevated nature of Greek tragedy more generally.

The Prologue proceeds from the common understanding that Philhellenism was constitutive of the cultural identity of the German Bildungsbürgertum since the end of the 18th century until the 1970s or even the 1980s – i.e. between the times of the French Revolution (1789) and the reunification of the two German states in 1989. This common understanding usually is connected to German poets and writers from Winckelmann to Stefan George (Eliza Butler) or explained with regard to the development of Altertumswissenschaften (Martin Bernal and Suzanne Marchand), albeit with different emphases. The link between Philhellenism and theatromania, epitomized in performances of Greek tragedies since 1800 has so far remained absent from this discussion. Therefore, in this study, the focus will shift to the relationship between performances of Greek tragedies and the cultural identity of the German Bildungsbürgertum. It thus attempts to understand tragedy’s endurance on German stages during the last 200 years.

The introduction ‘Philhellenism and Theatromania’ retraces the emergence of these two phenomena in the German middle class. The year 1755 marks a watershed in this regard: it saw the publication of J. J. Winckelmann’s treatise Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks and the premiere of G. E. Lessing’s first domestic tragedy Miß Sara Sampson. Both share the common root and motivation once and for all to banish Frenchified German court culture. While Winckelmann’s treatise praised the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’ of the Greek masterpieces, Lessing’s play advocated new family values and the ideal of ‘naturalness’ as the true virtues of the middle class. The merging of Philhellenism as the cult of beauty with theatromania as the quest for identifying in a social group and as an individual provided the basic condition for staging Greek tragedies.