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Nation 105for a relatively narrow audience, even a coterie, and likeSchleiermacher, they saw this social fact as a value that improved their“literature” and endowed it with cultural authority. Friedrich Schlegelboasted that “[readers] are forever complaining that German authorswrite for such a small circle, often in fact for themselves as a group. Ifind this a good thing. German literature gains more and more in spiritand character because of it” (Ward 1974:191 n.46).Schlegel’s comment shows that this is not only a bourgeois, but anationalist concept of literature—“German.” And Schleiermacher’stheory of foreignizing translation reveals a similar ideologicalconfiguration: it is also pitched against a German nobility that was notliterary and had long lain under French cultural domination.Aristocratic culture eschewed scholarly research and wide reading inpast and contemporary literature; “the few courts which did take anactive interest in literary affairs,” Ward notes, “were characterized bya predominantly bourgeois atmosphere” (Ward 1974:128). Inaristocratic education, “the accent was on languages, particularlyFrench, and often to such an extent that many noblemen could expressthemselves better in that language than in their mother tongue”(ibid.:123). In a letter from 1757, the aesthetician and dramatist JohannChristoph Gottsched described an audience with Frederick II, duringwhich he informed the Prussian king of the serious threat to literaryculture posed by the Gallicized nobility:When I said that German writers did not receive sufficientencouragement, as the aristocracy and the courts spoke too muchFrench and understood too little German to be able to grasp andappreciate fully anything written in German, he said: that is true, forI haven’t read no German book since my youth, and je parle commeun cocher, but I am an old fellow of forty-six and have no time forsuch things.(ibid.:190n.)Some fifty years later, Schleiermacher’s lecture on translation engagesin the cultural struggle for a German literature with an equally boldcriticism of Frederick II. Schleiermacher represents the king, however,not as Gottsched’s anti-intellectual oaf, but as a German intellectlimited by his utter dependence on French:Our great king received all his finer and higher thoughts in a foreignlanguage, which he had most intimately appropriated for this field.