Literary feuds are eternal — Hemingway vs. Faulkner, the sub-tweet as a genre. But in 1797 two giants of German letters, Goethe and Schiller, published what may be the most elaborate work of literary insult ever written: the Xenions, 675 epigrammatic distichs aimed at their critics.
- The title comes from Martial, who ironically named poems against his enemies after the Greek for “host-gift”
- Published in Schiller’s Musen-Almanach with a mission statement: annoy the philistine, ridicule bigots, smite hypocrites
- The 1896 English edition, translated by Paul Carus (Open Court, Chicago), prunes the items “of mere transitory importance”
The favorite targets:
- Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, Enlightenment bookseller who had parodied The Sorrows of Young Werther — mocked as shallow (“Nicola traces thy course till thou art shallow and flat”) and self-certain (“My truth, of course!”)
- Fichte’s idealism sent up as “I am I, and I posit myself” — the gag Goethe used to pitch the whole project to Schiller
The critics roasted back with counter-Xenions, which Carus called “rude, malicious and mean”: one theologian declared that “with unwashed feet” neither Goethe nor Schiller enters “the temple of glory,” while the classicist Voss settled for gently mocking their meter.
Both poets took the fallout seriously — “we must confine our labors strictly to great and worthy works of art,” Goethe wrote — and 1797 became their Balladenjahr, the year of their most famous ballads. Goethe still got the last word: in 1806, Faust parodied Nicolai as the “Proktophantasmist” — the Ass-Phantom Seer.