Family-order at the end of Weimar classic -: On the understanding of genealogy, politics and poetics in Schiller's Die 'Braut von Messina' and Goethe's Die 'natfurliche Tochter'

The article examines the correlation between genealogic and political constellations with the poetics of tragedy. Written almost contemporaneously Goethe's and Schiller's plays connect different tragic traditions with a political reflection on the revolutions around 1800, which are interpreted as the failure of the genealogical legitimation of power. In formal terms both tragedies still fulfill the rules of classicism. Read as political plays and compared to Goethe's Iphigenie, however, an aesthetical-ethical disillusion becomes manifest that can be read as a revocation of the programmatic aims of the Weimarian form of Classicism.