SOURCE: "Matthias Claudius's Paul Erdmanns Fest and the Utopian Tradition," in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, February, 1982, pp. 14-26.

In the following essay, Rowland positions Claudius's Paul Erdmanns Fest in the Utopian tradition and interprets it as a critical tool "designed to elucidate society's essential elements and possibilities so that they might better be realized by those with the power to do so and to the extent possible in an imperfect world. "

I

When Matthias Claudius published Paul Erdmanns Fest in Book IV of his Sämtliche Werke in 1783, he entered into a tradition which already had a quite varied, if relatively brief history in modern Europe. The sixteenth century made the first attempts to recover the concept of Utopia, largely lost since classical antiquity.¹ In the seventeenth century there was a veritable eruption of Utopian writing, which produced all the forms which were...