The Literature of German Romanticism, Vol. 8 (Camden House History of German Literature)

The Camden House History of German Literature Volume 8 The Literature of German Romanticism

The Camden House History of German Literature Volume 8

The Camden House History of German Literature Edited by James Hardin Vol. 1: Early Germanic Literature and Culture Edited by Brian Murdoch and Malcolm Read, University of Stirling, UK Vol. 2: German Literature of the Early Middle Ages Edited by Brian Murdoch, University of Stirling, UK Vol. 3: German Literature of the High Middle Ages Edited by Will Hasty, University of Florida Vol. 4: Early Modern German Literature Edited by Max Reinhart, University of Georgia Vol. 5: Literature of the German Enlightenment and Sentimentality Edited by Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Ohio State University Vol. 6: Literature of the Sturm und Drang Edited by David Hill, University of Birmingham, UK Vol. 7: The Literature of Weimar Classicism Edited by Simon Richter, University of Pennsylvania Vol. 8: The Literature of German Romanticism Edited by Dennis F. Mahoney, University of Vermont Vol. 9: German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1830–1899 Edited by Clayton Koelb and Eric Downing, University of North Carolina Vol. 10: German Literature of the Twentieth Century: From Aestheticism to Postmodernism Ingo R. Stoehr, Kilgore College, Texas

The Literature of German Romanticism

Edited by

Dennis F. Mahoney

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2004 by the Editor and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2004 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Ave., Rochester, NY 14620 USA and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ISBN: 1–57113–236–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Literature of German Romanticism / edited by Dennis Mahoney p. cm. — (Camden House history of German literature; v. 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–236–8 (Hardcover: alk. paper) 1. German literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. German literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Romanticism— Germany. I. Mahoney, Dennis F., 1950– II. Title. III. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) PT361.L55 2003 830.9'145—dc22 2003017146 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Abbreviations

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Introduction Dennis F. Mahoney

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From “Romantick” To “Romantic”: The Genesis of German Romanticism in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe Gerhard Schulz

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Goethe and the Romantics Arnd Bohm

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Early Romanticism Richard Littlejohns

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From Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to anti-Meister Novels: The Romantic Novel between Tieck’s William Lovell and Hoffmann’s Kater Murr Gerhart Hoffmeister

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Tales of Wonder and Terror: Short Prose of the German Romantics Ulrich Scheck

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The Romantic Drama: Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, Fouqué, and Eichendorff Claudia Stockinger

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German Romantic Poetry in Theory and Practice: The Schlegel Brothers, Schelling, Tieck, Novalis, Eichendorff, Brentano, and Heine Bernadette Malinowski

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The Turn to History and the Volk: Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimm Brothers Fabian Lampart

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History and Moral Imperatives: The Contradictions of Political Romanticism Klaus Peter

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Romanticism and Natural Science Gabriele Rommel

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Gender Studies and Romanticism Martha B. Helfer

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The Romantic Preoccupation with Musical Meaning Kristina Muxfeldt

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Romanticism and the Visual Arts Beate Allert

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Goethe’s Late Verse Paul Bishop & R. H. Stephenson

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The Reception of German Romanticism in the Twentieth Century Nicholas Saul

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Works Cited

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Notes on the Contributors

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Index

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Illustrations Drawing of “Der Sandmann,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Pen and ink, dated November 1815. Courtesy of Bailey-Howe Library, University of Vermont

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Title page of the first volume of Arnim and Brentano’s edition of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1805. Courtesy of Bailey-Howe Library, University of Vermont

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“Der Morgen” (Morning), by Philipp Otto Runge, 1808. Courtesy of Hamburger Kunsthalle

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“Das Kreuz im Gebirge” (The Cross on the Mountain), by Caspar David Friedrich, 1808. Courtesy of the Kunstsammlungen Dresden

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“Der Mönch am Meer” (The Monk by the Sea), by Caspar David Friedrich, 1810. Courtesy of the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

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“Abtei im Eichwald” (Abbey in the Oak Wood), by Caspar David Friedrich, 1810. Courtesy of the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

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Acknowledgments

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ANY THANKS to the following institutions for permission to reproduce illustrations: the Forschungsstätte für Frühromantik und NovalisMuseum; the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz; the Kunstsammlungen Dresden; and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Quotations from the German are provided in the original; unless otherwise indicated, the accompanying English translations are by the respective contributors or by their own translator. I am most grateful to Dorothee Racette, Bernadette Malinowski, and David Wood for the help they provided me in translating chapters 6, 7, and 10 of this volume, and to Sean Callagy for the assistance rendered to Fabian Lampart on stylistic matters in chapter 8. Thanks also to the Dean’s Fund of the College of Arts and Sciences and to the University Committee on Research and Scholarship of the University of Vermont for the funds made available for this translation help. To the distinguished contributors to this volume I owe a sincere debt of thanks for their commitment to this project and for their willingness to undertake editorial revisions — particularly when these had to do with the task of situating our volume within the overall design of the Camden House History of German Literature. Thanks also to Jim Hardin and Jim Walker at Camden House for their unfailingly prompt and helpful answers to my many questions, as well as to my beloved wife, Angelika Mahoney, for all the moral support she has provided me. Within my own department, Wolfgang Mieder has been a source of much encouragement and good advice; our departmental administrative assistant, Janet Sobieski, has been of great help in formatting matters. I also owe many thanks to my graduate assistant, Courtney Magwire, for her proofreading skills and her assistance in preparing the bibliography of primary and secondary literature. Above all, I would like to thank Klaus Peter, my dissertation advisor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for the insights, inspiration, and encouragement he has provided me over the years. It is to him that I dedicate this volume. D. F. M. June 2003 Burlington, Vermont

Abbreviations KFSA

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 28 vols. to date, eds. Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958-).

NS

Friedrich von Hardenberg, Novalis Schriften: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe in vier Bänden, einem Materialienband und einem Ergänzungsband in vier Teilbänden. 6.2 vols. to date, eds. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Gerhard Schulz, et al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960-).

Apart from these two historical-critical editions, which are used throughout the volume, the individual contributors have selected whatever other editions they found most helpful. Frequently quoted sources, whether primary or secondary literature, are given their full bibliographical information in an endnote, along with the abbreviation that thereafter will be used as a parenthetical reference within the main text itself.

Introduction Dennis F. Mahoney

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T THE END OF the eighteenth century, there occurred an outburst of intellectual, literary, and artistic creativity within German-speaking lands that signaled the start of the Age of Romanticism throughout Europe and even the Americas. While many literary historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarded German Romanticism as the polar opposite to Enlightenment rationalism — with the evaluation of such a purported opposition depending on the ideological orientation of the critic — it might be more productive to view the Romantic era in Germany as a time when discordances latent in eighteenth-century society and thought became manifest. In this way, Enlightenment and Romanticism become part of a continuum of development in European intellectual history that also includes more narrowly confined literary movements in Germany such as the 1 Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism. Within German Romanticism itself it is customary to distinguish at least two and perhaps even three phases in the years between 1795 and 1830 — Früh-, Hoch-, and Spätromantik (Early, High, Late Romanticism) — whereby the middle attribute then suggests a high point to the movement in the years between 1805 and 1815 before it either lapsed into repetitive self-parody or was superseded by other groups and directions in nineteenthcentury literature. Regardless of whether one chooses to accept this tripartite division or else simply speaks of Early and Late Romanticism, there is no doubt that the first phase of this movement overlaps with the literary partnership of Goethe and Schiller between 1794 and 1805 known as Weimar Classicism. The Early Romantics, in fact, were the first to direct critical attention away from Goethe’s literary productions of the 1770s like Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) and praise his most recent novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96). Instrumental in this regard was the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the journal founded and edited by the brothers August Wilhelm (1767–1845) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), which included the latter’s essay “Über Goethes Meister” (1798) as well as collections of aphorisms on topics relating to literature, philosophy, religion, art, and politics by Friedrich Schlegel and his friend Friedrich von Hardenberg

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(1772–1801), who first published under the pen name of Novalis (that is, 2 the clearer of new ground) in the Athenaeum. When one considers that 1798 was also the year that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of their Lyrical Ballads, which contained such masterpieces as Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” it becomes apparent that new directions in literature were beginning in other European countries as well. It would not be until 1800 that a poem of comparable literary quality appeared in the Athenaeum, namely Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to Night), whose mixture of rhythmic prose and ecstatic lyrics proved particularly influential in French poetry of the later nineteenth century. The principal strength of the Schlegel brothers was their critical acumen, which they later were to display in public lectures in Berlin and Vienna that were then translated and distributed throughout the Western world, aiding in the development of other national schools of Romanticism after 1815. Besides Hardenberg, the only Early Romantic who excelled as a poet as well as a theoretician, the other two principal literary talents of the first phase of German Romanticism were Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), who published in 1796 their collection of essays on art and music entitled Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk). As was true for Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg, Tieck and Wackenroder became friends during their student days, when excursions from the Prussian university of Erlangen into the southern German countryside around Bamberg and Nuremberg gave these native Berliners a newfound enthusiasm for the art of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque that in turn had an impact on the development of German Romantic art and music until at least as far as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) by Richard Wagner (1813– 3 83). Throughout the Romantic era, Tieck’s experiments in the novel, shorter prose narratives, drama, and lyric poetry likewise were to prove influential models for other writers, as the corresponding chapters within the present volume will make evident. Collaborative work was to become characteristic of the Romantic generation, although the personal configurations shifted from year to year and place to place. The Early Romantics, for example, are often known as the Jena Romantics, as this small university town near Weimar is where August Wilhelm Schlegel was appointed professor in 1796, his brother Friedrich immersed himself in the study of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and Tieck became friends with Hardenberg in the summer and fall of 1799. But Berlin, a city hitherto regarded as a citadel of the Enlightenment, has equal claims to be regarded as a center of Romanticism — from the work of Tieck and Wackenroder through that of Late Romantics like E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), Adelbert von Chamisso

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(1781–1838), and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843). It was in Berlin, after all, that the Athenaeum was published and where Friedrich Schlegel first met his future wife Dorothea Veit-Schlegel (1763–1829), the daughter of the Jewish Enlightenment leader Moses Mendelssohn (1729– 86), and also brought the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) into the orbit of the Early Romantic movement. In Berlin as well as in Dresden and Jena, ideas were discussed at formal and informal gatherings that embodied the Early Romantic ideal of “Symphilosophieren,” or philosophizing together, in preference to the closed philosophical systems of contemporary German Idealism. At the beginning of his Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation on Poesy, 1800), one of the key documents of German Romantic theory and practice, Friedrich Schlegel argues that individual thoughts about life and art are necessarily limited and require their complement in the views of others (KFSA, 2: 285–86). Consequently, Schlegel strives in this work to recreate the lively discussions among the Early Romantics. For our twenty-first century Gespräch on Romanticism, an international team of scholars from a variety of disciplines and critical perspectives will attempt to come to grips with one of the most fruitful and complex, but also most controversial periods in German literature. The editor’s introduction and the following three chapters establish an overall framework for the essays to follow. In the course of his exploration of the genesis of German Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century and the discussion of its place in literary history, Gerhard Schulz differentiates the concept “Romantic,” as applied to literary and artistic history, from its more typological usage as synonymous with “imaginative,” “fantastic,” and “unreal.” In an oft-quoted remark to Eckermann on 4 April 1829, Goethe even went so far as to distinguish between “classic” and “romantic” by labeling the former as healthy and the latter as sick. Had he only known that Anglo-American critics would come to regard 4 him as a key figure in European Romanticism! Goethe and his younger contemporary Schiller are too protean in their development to be confined to any single literary movement — within the Camden House History of German Literature they also are treated in the volumes on the Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism; but in this volume Arnd Bohm helps us to consider their significance for the English and German Romantics as well as the ways in which Goethe in particular strove to distinguish himself from tendencies in Romanticism that he regarded with deep reserve. By way of counterpoint to Goethe’s conception, Richard Littlejohns provides an overview of Early Romanticism that stresses not only the value ascribed to rationality in the circle around Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, but also their attempt to respond to the political and philosophical revolutions of the 1790s in a whole gamut of forms and modes of writing.

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By this point in the volume, it will have become evident that the German Romantics were anything but dreamy, moonstruck poets who relied on their emotions to create their art. Even with later Romantics such as Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) and Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), the apparent simplicity of their tales and poems is the product of conscious artifice, as the ensuing discussion of these works will show. This next set of four chapters on the novels, short prose works, dramas, and poetry of German Romanticism uses as a starting point the traditional distinctions between epic, dramatic, and lyric genres, all the while realizing that, particularly in the Romantic novel, there was a conscious, programmatic attempt to intermingle these three modes of writing. Although also written with an audience of fellow Romanticists in mind, these chapters by Gerhart Hoffmeister, Ulrich Scheck, Claudia Stockinger, and Bernadette Malinowski should be of particular value for graduate student and generalist readers looking for a reliable guide to the literature of and scholarship on German Romanticism. It has been maintained that — for better or worse — Romanticism had a deeper and more wide-ranging impact on German society and culture than it did in other European countries. In the second half of this volume, therefore, Fabian Lampart, Klaus Peter, Gabriele Rommel, Martha B. Helfer, Kristina Muxfeldt, and Beate Allert focus on the most significant aspects of German Romanticism and their interplay with folklore, politics, natural science, gender presentation and representation, music, and the visual arts. The penultimate chapter by Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson explores facets of Goethe’s late verse that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of Weimar Classicism; we will leave it up to the reader to decide whether Goethe was more “Romantic” than he might have suspected. The concluding chapter by Nicholas Saul, though, should leave no doubt as to the extent that the writings of the German Romantics have stimulated literary production throughout the twentieth century. If, as we hope, this volume is read from cover to cover, its organization is such that the argument of each chapter should flow seamlessly into the succeeding piece. Such a “classical” order may seem out of place for a study on German Romanticism, whose writings often have been decried as formless and artless outpourings. Goethe, for example, once compared Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) to a cooper who forgets to put rings around his 5 barrel, thus causing the contents to spill all over the place. Ironically, this remark in a letter to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858) of 8 July 1825 resembles contemporary complaints about the seeming formlessness of Goethe’s final novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, 1829), which Goethe countered with reference to the organizational principle of multiple mirroring that he had long incorpo6 rated into his writings. For individuals who may be consulting this volume

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for purposes of learning about a particular German Romantic author, work, genre, or theme, such a Goethean, “classic-romantic” method of reading will enable them to benefit from sections that complement the one with which they begin. The opening and concluding chapters by Gerhard Schulz and Nicholas Saul on the genesis and twentieth-century reception of German Romanticism provide a chronological and thematic frame for the volume as a whole. The two chapters on Goethe at either end of the volume also relate to each other as a matter of course. Chapters 3–7 and 9–13, meanwhile, provide opportunities for multiple reflections on a single work or author from different perspectives. For example: chapter 3 on Early Romanticism by Richard Littlejohns draws attention to Friedrich Schlegel’s deliberate flouting of conventional structure in his novel Lucinde (1799); in his account of the German Romantic novel (chapter 4), Gerhart Hoffmeister discusses how this seeming chaos actually is organized into two groupings of six literary arabesques around a central, more chronologically narrated chapter entitled “Lehrjahre der Männlichkeit” (Years of Apprenticeship in Masculinity); and chapter 10 by Martha B. Helfer investigates the Romantics’ experiments with gender roles in their writings, with special attention to Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s novel Florentin (1801). Where, then, does that leave Fabian Lampart’s discussion of “The Turn to History and the Volk: Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimm Brothers” in chapter 8? In analogy to the structure of Lucinde: this central chapter deals with topics around which the entire volume revolves, namely, the radical restructuring of European society in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period, and the efforts of writers such as Arnim, Brentano, and Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) Grimm to come to terms with this phenomenon by constructing an alternative model of reality in their writings. These authors, along with Joseph von Eichendorff, belong to the so-called Heidelberg group of Romantics, who congregated intermittently in this southern German university town in the years between 1805 and 1808 and attempted to preserve and renew the German cultural heritage through collections of folk songs and fairy tales, as well as their own 7 literary production. So successful were they in their creation of an imagined “Germany” that Heidelberg, the Rhine River, and its seductive temptress the Lorelei — first evoked in a ballad by Brentano within his novel Godwi (1801) and later immortalized in the poem by Heinrich Heine (1797– 1856) — have become mainstays of the tourist industry ever since. After all, the fairy-tale palace in the Walt Disney movie Cinderella (1950) that now serves as the emblem for the “Magic Kingdom” throughout the world is itself modeled on Neuschwanstein Castle, which King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–86) built as his “romantic” refuge from unpleasant reality and decorated with scenes from the music dramas of Wagner.

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There is an earlier film, however, that also makes use of the trappings of Romanticism, namely Der Triumph des Willens (1935) directed by Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003); while Riefenstahl to her death claimed that she was merely making a documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, her film’s cinematic message clearly suggests that Adolf Hitler embodies the German people just as surely as Nuremberg represents its glorious past and promising future under National Socialism. Although Romanticism was not the only era of German culture that the Nazis exploited for their own sinister 8 purposes, one cannot overlook this area of its reception history. The remainder of this introduction, therefore, will provide a review of the sweeping intellectual and societal changes in the decades before and after 1800 before proceeding to a writer who often has fallen into the literary-historical crack “between Classicism and Romanticism,” namely Heinrich von Kleist (1777– 1811), and regarding his life, works, and problematic reception as illustrative of the difficulties that Kleist and his Romantic contemporaries faced when 9 attempting to come to terms with a world in flux.

German Romanticism, the French Revolution, and Napoleon When writing his monumental history of German literature between 1770 and 1832, Hermann August Korff took as his organizing principle a quasiHegelian Geist der Goethezeit (Spirit of the Age of Goethe) that made itself manifest in the various literary movements of the Sturm und Drang, Classi10 cism, and Romanticism. For his magisterial account of German literature of the Classic and Romantic period, Gerhard Schulz chose a more material framework than did Korff, his professor in Leipzig: the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris that signaled the precarious nature of the Restoration imposed upon Europe after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) at the Battle of Waterloo 11 in 1815. In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel already had drawn connections between social upheaval and intellectual innovations when he termed the French Revolution, the Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Knowledge, 1794–95) of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre the three main tendencies of the age (KFSA, 2: 198, no. 216). Schlegel envisioned as the common thread linking changes in the worlds of politics, philosophy, and literature the willingness to break away from traditional methods of organization; the novel, in particular, offered the greatest possibilities of artistic and intellectual freedom. In a Europe shaken by revolutionary developments in politics, science, and philosophy, young writers like Schlegel saw literature as the medium for joining seemingly disparate cultural spheres through the “progressive Universalpoesie”

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of Romanticism (KFSA, 2: 182, no. 116). By the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, it had become clear that German Romanticism itself was less a solution than it was a manifestation of the seismic shocks 12 striking a civilization on the fracture line between tradition and modernity. The first ten years of the French Revolution provided a common background for the development both of Weimar Classicism, treated in a separate volume of this literary history, and of Early Romanticism. Goethe, after all, had accompanied Duke Carl August of Saxony-Eisenach-Weimar on the disastrous Austrian and Prussian military campaign of the summer and fall of 1792 that resulted in the French occupation of the Rhineland and precipitated the overthrow of the new constitutional monarchy in France and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793. Schiller, who had been named a honorary citizen of France in the fall of 1792, was so disgusted by the excesses of the Reign of Terror of 1793–94 as to compose his letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795) in an attempt to diagnose and prescribe a cure for the ills of modern society. The peace treaty of Basel that Prussia signed with revolutionary France in April of 1795, the withdrawal of the various Saxon principalities from the imperial war against France in the fall of 1796, and Austria’s own treaty at Campo Formio in October of 1797, meanwhile, provide the background for the hope for peace expressed at the end of Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea (1797), in which the Rhine River is ac13 cepted as the border between German and French territory. One essential difference between Goethe, Schiller, and the Early Romantics, however, is that the former writers were willing to accept modifications, but not major alterations to the social structure of pre-Revolutionary Europe under which they had spent their formative years, while the Romantic generation experienced the cataclysmic changes in the political and social fabric of Europe wrought by the French Revolutionary wars as teenagers or young adults. Even if, in their later years, many Romantics opposed the Napoleonic reorganization of Europe — which Goethe understood as the restoration of order after the chaos of the French Revolution — they were acutely conscious that such radical transformations of the world were part of the stuff of daily life. Writing to his friend Friedrich Schlegel on 1 August 1794, at the climax of the Reign of Terror in France, Friedrich von Hardenberg observed that in their time one did not have to be too reserved with the word “Dream”; things were being realized that ten years earlier would have been consigned to the philosophical madhouse (NS, 4: 140). Not surprisingly, his own experimental novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) later would open with a dream of the blue flower that inspires the protagonist to undertake a search destined to transform the entire world into a realm ruled by love, peace, and poetry.

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If such an envisioned ending to this novel sounds more like a fairy tale than the realistic depiction of contemporary life promoted by most eighteenth-century novelists, Goethe included, it is — but it was also intended to be so. Writing to Friedrich Schlegel after the completion of part one of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which remained incomplete due to its author’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 28, Hardenberg hoped that his friend would notice a fortuitous mixture of novel and fairy tale that would become even more pronounced in the second part (NS, 4: 330). In effect, Hardenberg was attempting to take two admired works by Goethe, the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and the cryptic tale Märchen (Fairy Tale) published in Schiller’s journal Die Horen in 1795, and transform them into a fairy-tale novel. Indeed, the question-and-answer pattern encountered at crucial moments within Goethe’s Märchen provides the stylistic model for the most famous statement in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, namely the answer Heinrich receives to the question as to where he is going: “Immer nach Hause” (Home. All the time; NS, 1: 325). Hardenberg’s choice of the term “Mischung” (mixture) to describe his artistic procedure in Heinrich von Ofterdingen indicates another contemporary source for Romantic poetic theory — advances in chemistry. Although the effects of the Industrial Revolution that had already begun in England and France did not make themselves felt appreciably in Germany until later in the nineteenth century, the scientific discoveries fueling technological change were well known by the Romantics. Due to his profession as saltmining official in Saxony, Hardenberg had studied at the Mining Academy in Freiberg, which was one of the leading schools of its kind in the world, and had received a thorough training in subjects such as chemistry, geology, and mathematics. Following Joseph Priestley’s (1733–1804) discovery that water was actually a combination of the elements hydrogen and oxygen, other elements were identified at a rapid pace. More important, scientists realized that the seemingly stable natural world was capable of modification and manipulation, if one understood the rules. Alluding to the prominent role played by French chemists such as Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94) and Antoine de Fourcroy (1755–1809), Friedrich Schlegel noted that it was natural that the French were also playing a dominant role in the “moral chemistry” of an Age of Revolution (KFSA 2: 248, no. 426). By way of analogy, for Romantic poets and critics the model for poetic production no longer was the imitation of existing nature (mimesis), as it had been since the time of Aristotle, but the creation of new worlds through poetic experi14 ment and imagination. In his Fichte-Studien (1795–96), Friedrich von Hardenberg made an observation on the nature of Fichte’s philosophy of human freedom that was soon to characterize his own poetic output:

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Das oberste Princip muß schlechterdings Nichts Gegebenes, sondern ein Frey Gemachtes, ein Erdichtetes, Erdachtes seyn, um ein allgemeines metaphysisches System zu begründen, das von Freyheit anfängt und zu Freiheit geht. / Alles Filosofiren zweck auf Emancipation ab. / (NS, 15 2: 273, no. 568).

The Early Romantics extended such poetic experimentation into the realms of politics and religion as well. Hardenberg’s collection of aphorisms Glauben und Liebe (Faith and Love), published in 1798 under his poetic pseudonym, develops the vision of a Prussia combining monarchical and republican principles in which the new king Friedrich Wilhelm III (1770– 1840) and his spouse, Queen Luise (1776–1810), serve less as rulers and more as representatives of ideal humanity. True to his poetic principles, Novalis was, in effect, inventing a Prussian monarchy that has been created by poetic fiat. As Ingo R. Stoehr observes, it is this concern with innovation that characterizes literature written after 1800; in that regard Romanticism is “the first truly modern literary period.” However, Stoehr sees an additional trend developing in this period, namely “a world that is defined by autonomy of individual spheres or, put in negative terms, lack of cohesion in the society as a whole,” and it is the consciousness of the disparity 16 between “art” and “life” that also is characteristic of German Romanticism. One real difference between the aesthetic ideal of Weimar Classicism and that developed by the Early Romantics is that Goethe and Schiller insisted on the autonomy of art, whereas Novalis and other Romantic authors made a conscious attempt to effect political changes through works like Glauben und Liebe and thereby to narrow the gap between ideal and reality. The piece met with the disfavor of the king, however, at least in part because Friedrich Wilhelm III resented such an intrusion into his sphere of activity, and the Prussian censor forbade the publication of its concluding political aphorisms. Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom or Europe, written 1799, published 1826) was even more ambitious in scope, calling for a Christianity freed of dogmatic divisions and capable of bringing peace to a war-torn Europe. Given the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition against France earlier in 1799, it is not surprising that its closing words, which Hardenberg delivered as a speech to the members of the Early Romantic circle, evade any answer to the question as to when such utopian dreams will occur. Instead the narrator reassures his audience with allusions to paragraph 86 of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–81) Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of Mankind, 1780) and the title of Immanuel Kant’s 1795 treatise on perpetual peace: Nur Geduld, sie wird, sie muß kommen die heilige Zeit des ewigen Friedens, wo das neue Jerusalem die Hauptstadt der Welt seyn wird; und bis dahin seyd heiter und muthig in den Gefahren der Zeit, Genos-

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sen meines Glaubens, verkündigt mit Wort und That das göttliche Evangelium, und bleibt dem wahrhaften, unendlichen Glauben treu bis 17 in den Tod. (NS, 3: 524)

Despite such rhetorical flourishes, even Hardenberg’s most immediate associates were not convinced, and Die Christenheit oder Europa was not published until 1826, when it was understood as a reactionary defense of the so-called Holy Alliance propagated by the monarchs of Europe after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. But even in the years between 1799 and Hardenberg’s death in March of 1801, political realities had outstripped poetic articulation. On 9–10 November 1799, several days before Hardenberg, the Schlegels, and other members of their circle gathered in Jena, Napoleon Bonaparte had organized the coup d’état that catapulted him from the rank of revolutionary general to that of First Consul of France. By 9 February 1801, a succession of military defeats in Germany and Italy induced Austria to sign the peace treaty at Lunéville that recognized as sovereign states the puppet governments the French had established in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and northern Italy on the fringes of the crumbling Holy Roman Empire. On 25 March 1802, France and Great Britain signed a treaty at Amiens that gave Europe its first respite from war in ten years — a chief reason why Romantic writers like Friedrich Schlegel, Arnim, and Kleist were able to undertake extensive European travels, including sojourns in Paris, in the years prior to the resumption of hostilities between France 18 and Austria in the fall of 1805. In these years between 1801 and 1805, Napoleon consolidated his rule in France, crowning himself as Emperor of the French in Notre Dame Cathedral on 2 December 1804, and built the Grande Armée that was to be employed with such devastating effects in the years thereafter. On the east side of the Rhine, the Holy Roman Empire was not formally dissolved until 6 August 1806, but as early as 1805 the southern German states of Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria had become allies of Napoleon, gaining territory and increased prestige in the process; the protected status of Heidelberg in the new arch-duchy of Baden was one reason why it became a meeting place for Romantics like Arnim, Brentano, and Eichendorff in the years after 1805. In the meantime, the fruitful partnership between Goethe and Schiller was brought to a close by Schiller’s death in May of 1805. As for the Early Romantics, the death of Friedrich von Hardenberg in March of 1801 had served to accelerate the process of dissolution of this literary group, and centers of Romantic literary activity shifted from Jena to cities like Heidelberg, Berlin, Dresden, and even Vienna, following Friedrich Schlegel’s conversion to Catholicism in 1808 and energetic defense of the Austrian emperor as the true representative of imperial legitimacy. In these years of historical and literary flux, the life and works of Heinrich von Kleist epito-

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mize the forces that impinged on the new generation of Romantics and that in turn were treated in their writings.

“Immer nach Hause?” Heinrich von Kleist Born into an aristocratic family that numbered eighteen generals among its ancestors, Heinrich von Kleist served in the Prussian army from 1792 to 1799, where he took part in the siege of republican Mainz in the spring and summer of 1793, and eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant. Kleist, however, chafed under Prussian military discipline, regarding it as demeaning for officers and enlisted men alike; in a letter of 19 March 1799 to his former tutor Ernst Christian Martini, he described regiment drill as a living monument to tyranny. After he was given royal permission to leave the military, Kleist studied law and economics for three semesters at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, his hometown, before assuming a position in the Prussian Ministry of Economics in November of 1800. Already in that same month, though, Kleist confided his dissatisfaction with his new situation in a letter to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge, whom he had met while studying in Frankfurt: “Ich soll tun was der Staat von mir verlangt, und doch soll ich nicht untersuchen, ob das, was er von mir verlangt, gut ist. Zu seinem unbekannten Zwecken soll ich ein bloßes Werkzeug sein — ich kann Es nicht” (I am supposed to do what the state demands of me, and yet I should not investigate whether that which it asks of me is good. For its unknown purposes I am supposed to be a mere instrument — I cannot do this). Later that winter, Kleist’s despondency further intensified when his readings in Kantian philosophy led him to the conclusion that humans can never know whether that which seems to them to be true actually is truth. In the same letter to Wilhelmine of 22 March 1801 that contains the description of this so-called “Kant crisis,” Kleist revealed his plans to leave on 19 a journey to France with his half-sister Ulrike. Heinrich and Ulrike arrived in Paris in time for Bastille Day, which was particularly elaborate that year in honor of the Treaty of Lunéville. Yet the uncaring anonymity of the metropolis repelled him, and the Bastille Day celebrations seemed only a means of entertaining and distracting the populace, rather than the celebration of republican virtue that Kleist had expected in his Rousseauistic idealism. In Paris for the official purpose of pursuing chemical and mathematical studies, Kleist furthermore expressed his disgust 20 at what he termed the cyclopean one-sidedness of scientists. In the ensuing months and years of restless travel throughout Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy, and France — in the course of which his engagement with Wilhelmine dissolved, his health deteriorated, and thoughts of suicide occurred at regular intervals — Kleist’s energies turned ever more to literature. Between the fall of 1804 and the summer of 1806, Kleist made one more

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attempt to assume a position within the Prussian civil service, but even during this time he was occupied with what were to become some of his most celebrated works: the plays Amphitryon (1807), Penthesilea (1808), and Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Pitcher, performed in 1808, published 1811) as well as the novellas Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile, 1807), Die Marquise von O. (1808), and Michael Kohlhaas (1810) 21 that were later published in his first collection of stories in 1810. In August of 1806, Kleist wrote from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) to his superior, the Finance Minister Baron vom Stein zum Altenstein, requesting a six-month leave of absence due to reasons of ill health. By October of that year, the much-vaunted Prussian army met the same fate as Austria and Russia in December of 1805 at Austerlitz: it was decisively defeated by Napoleon’s forces at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt. Upon returning to Berlin, now occupied by French troops, Kleist was taken for a spy and imprisoned in France from February to July of 1807 until after the Peace Treaty of Tilsit, which stripped Prussia of all its territories west of the Elbe and the bulk of its acquisitions in Poland. One of these prisons was Fort de Joux near Besançon, in which the Haitian rebel leader Toussaint l’Ouverture had died in 1803. Kleist’s novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in Santo Domingo, 1811), whose setting is a successful slave rebellion against French forces, is an indication of his growing interest 22 in using literature as a weapon against Napoleonic hegemony in Europe. In a letter to Ulrike from 24 October 1806 warning against the baleful effects of a Napoleonic occupation of Europe, he had described the Germans as the subjugated peoples of the Romans (7: 26). This metaphor finds its full application in Die Hermannsschlacht (Arminius’s Battle, published 1821), the play that Kleist completed in Dresden in the second half of the year 1808, at a point when guerilla war had broken out in Spain against French occupying forces and Austria was readying itself for renewed struggle against France. In the first three acts of this play, the German tribal leader Hermann (Latin form Arminius) acts in a way consonant with the submissive behavior of Prussian leadership since their military defeat in 1806 — but for the purposes of lulling Roman suspicions and luring their forces into the impenetrable morasses of the Teutoburg Forest, where in A.D. 9 three Roman legions under the command of Quintilius Varus were annihilated. Richard Samuel has made a convincing case that the Machiavellian tactics displayed by Kleist’s Hermann bear considerable resemblance to those advocated by his former superior and leader of the Prussian Reform Movement, Baron vom Stein, particularly with regard to reconciliation between Prussian and 23 Austria for purposes of a general German uprising against Napoleon. Kleist’s correspondence in the winter and spring of 1809 documents unmistakably his interest in a speedy performance and publication of this drama, preferably in the prestigious Burgtheater in Vienna. When war broke

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out in April of 1809, he left Dresden for Austria, visiting the battlefield at Aspern where Archduke Karl’s forces had won a victory over Napoleon’s army and offering his services as a propagandist. The ensuing defeat of Austria, however, eliminated the likelihood of any performance of a work that could be construed as a call for uprising against Napoleon and the German states allied with him since 1806 in the Confederation of the Rhine. Even after Ludwig Tieck’s publication of Die Hermannsschlacht in 1821, the drama met with relative inattention, only gradually becoming more popular in the latter course of the nineteenth century as nationalist sentiments arose in Germany and new applications of its political message could be construed, such as seeing Hermann as a predecessor of Prussia’s “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck (1815–98). The high or, rather, low point in the reception history of this drama occurred during the period of National Socialism, when Die Hermannsschlacht became the most frequently staged of all of Kleist’s dramas in Germany, lauded for its depiction of the molding of disparate tribes into one, uncompromising fighting body at the bidding of a truly German leader. A main dilemma of Kleist scholarship and dramaturgy ever since has been to determine whether such tendentious interpretations are consonant with Kleist’s play, or whether its structure and message offer alternative opportunities that undercut the seeming glorification of hatred 24 and deceit in the service of national liberation. One point speaking against the reduction of Die Hermannsschlacht to a mere propagandistic piece is the transparency with which Kleist outlines the willingness of his main character to employ every wile for the purpose of accomplishing his goal. Whereas earlier Arminius dramas, such as Johann Elias Schlegel’s Hermann (1743), had outdone themselves in depicting the moral integrity of their protagonist, a more apposite object of comparison with Kleist’s Hermann would be the figure of Wallenstein in Schiller’s great trilogy (1798–99), who likewise not only readily manipulates his officers but 25 also makes use of his own family within his political intrigues. Indeed, Kleist’s Hermann distinguishes himself chiefly from Schiller’s field marshal in that he has mastered the skills of dissimulation more completely and hence succeeds in convincing the Romans that he is the simple-minded German that they can direct for their own purposes, thereby causing them to fall into the trap he has prepared for them. But if victory is only possible when one becomes “more Roman than the Romans,” what has been accomplished? By the end of act 5, the Teutoburg has been reduced to a smoldering ruin, and Hermann’s chief remaining goal, as expressed in the closing lines of the play, is to ensure that the same eventually occurs to Rome: Denn eh doch, seh ich ein, erschwingt der Kreis der Welt Vor dieser Mordbrut keine Ruhe, Als bis das Raubnest ganz zerstört,

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Und nichts als eine schwarze Fahne, 26 Von seinem öden Trümmerhaufen weht! (3: 211) As Bernd Fischer has observed, not only has the putative struggle for liberation become a war of annihilation, it also has turned into a war of conquest, as aggressors and victims switch their roles and the hunters become the hunted. In that respect, it can serve, doubtless against Kleist’s original intention, as a quasi-Brechtian parable of the dangers of an unmitigated national27 ism at that very point when this ideology was beginning to be developed. A chilling illustration of this point is the passionate hatred that Hermann nourishes in Thusnelda, his wife. Throughout the course of the play Thusnelda is the one character besides Aristan, the unrepentant Ubian ally of the Romans whom Hermann ultimately orders beheaded, who dares to oppose Hermann’s will. In act 2, scenes 3 and 8, she tells her husband to keep her out of his game with Ventidius, the Roman legate who imagines he has saved her life in the aurochs-hunt and who now proclaims his devotion to her in fulsome fashion — while surreptitiously cutting a lock of her hair as a token for the empress Livia. In act 3, scene 3, she initially refuses to believe Hermann’s assertion that the Romans plan to shear the golden hair of Cheruskan women as booty for their wives just as they already have done in Ubia on the Rhine, although a seed of doubt is sown. In the final scene of act 4, Thusnelda is horrified to learn that all Romans, the good with the bad, are to be slaughtered in the planned uprising, and pleads in particular for the life of Ventidius. Hermann accedes to this request, but only while simultaneously returning the lock of Thusnelda’s hair with the letter that Ventidius (allegedly) has sent to the empress together with the promise that the rest of her tresses will be cut off once Hermann has fallen (3: 181). As Hermann already has demonstrated no compunction about exaggerating or even inventing misdeeds by the Romans for purposes of inflaming his people, commentators such as Gerhard Schulz and Bernhard Greiner are justified in calling into question the genuineness of this letter. Given the prevalence of falsified letters in the dramas of Schiller and his predecessors, one can not rule out this possibility here as well, although Kleist does include a conversation between Varus and Ventidius in act 3, scene 6, which makes it clear that Romans intend to treat the Cheruskans not as allies, but 28 rather as a conquered people. Unprecedented even in the most outrageous scenes of Sturm und Drang drama, however, is the revenge on Ventidius that Thusnelda devises, who promises her departing husband that he will be pleased with her: in the expectation of a nocturnal tryst with Thusnelda, Ventidius enters an enclosure where he is attacked and torn to pieces by an enraged she-bear. More horrifying still is Thusnelda’s sadistic taunting of Ventidius, even as Gertrud, her maid, and Childerich the bear keeper do their best to wrest the key to

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the enclosure from her and to rescue the anguished Roman: “Sag ihr, daß du sie liebst, Ventidius, / So hält sie still und schenkt die Locken dir! / Sie 29 wirft den Schlüssel weg und fällt in Ohnmacht” (3: 203). Beginning with Kleist’s first play Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803) there is no lack of scenes where characters fall unconscious at crucial moments. Perhaps Thusnelda faints here because she does not want to witness the culmination of her revenge; when Thusnelda later embraces Hermann upon his return from battle and he asks how splendidly she has kept her word (of revenge), she replies distractedly: “Das ist geschehen. Laß sein” (It took place. Let it be; 3: 208). But given the sexually charged language of the scenes leading up to the laceration of Ventidius, it is more likely that Thusnelda, like the Amazon queen Penthesilea in the drama that Kleist had completed prior to Die Hermannsschlacht, is experiencing what Friedrich von Hardenberg had observed in one of his notebook entries: “Sonderbar, daß der eigentliche Grund der Grausamkeit Wollust ist” (Strange, that the actual basis for cruelty is pleasure; NS, 3: 655, no. 581). If one relates the orgy of violence unleashed by the end of this drama — and Hermann explicitly calls the conversion of Thusnelda to his way of seeing and acting “der erste Sieg” (the first victory; 3: 183) — to Kleist’s earlier scruples about the uncertainty of truth and the misuse of individuals as mere instruments by the state, then “Hermann’s Slaughter” is an evil omen for the war-torn Europe of the Napoleonic period. In this light, Anthony Stephens understands Kleist’s drama, as “a helpless act of provocation, addressed to whatever forces might — despite all appearances — be active in history, as a corrective to facile optimism. But it was a provocation that failed to impinge upon either its immediate or 30 more distant interlocutors.” In act 3, scene 1 of Kleist’s final drama, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (published 1821), the title figure reacts with horror and indignation at the news that the Kurfürst (Elector) of Brandenburg actually intends to sign the sentence of death his military tribunal has invoked because of the prince’s failure to follow orders at the Battle of Fehrbellin in 1675 — the very battle won by his actions. What makes this act more monstrous in Homburg’s eyes is that hitherto he has regarded the Kurfürst as a father figure to whom he hopes to become even more closely bound by marriage with his niece, Princess Natalie. When he learns that the Swedish emissary has offered a peace treaty with Brandenburg upon the condition of Natalie’s marriage to the Swedish king, the explanation for his execution is all too clear to him: he is to be sacrificed for reasons of state (3: 253–54). Homburg’s despair, which leads him to beg for his life before the Prince Elector’s wife on bent knee and to renounce any claim to Natalie, is all the more extreme because of the pageant enacted before the somnambulant 31 prince in the first scene of the play. Here the Kurfürst, observing Homburg winding for himself a crown of laurel leaves, wraps this insignia in his chain

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of office and hands it to Natalie, who holds it upraised as a virtual incarnation of the goddess of victory. Although Homburg fails to secure the crown of laurel before the Kurfürst and his party retreat from the scene, he does wrest from Natalie one of her gloves, which he later understands as confirmation that his dream was no mere chimera, but rather a prophecy of his success in love and war. For Kleist’s literary generation, the dream of the blue flower in the opening chapter of Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) already had provided a model of fantastic expectations destined to be realized. In Kleist’s play, the opening tableau repeats itself in the final scene of the play, but with one significant difference: Homburg, awaiting his execution, instead receives the laurel crown and chain of office from Natalie, who 32 places his hand on her heart. This happy ending is, in effect, also a rewriting of Schiller’s Wallenstein: rather than being sacrificed on the altar of power politics, as was the love between Max Piccolomini and Wallenstein’s daughter Thekla, the Prince and Natalie may marry; the Kurfürst proves himself to be a loving father and not an unfeeling despot. All figures on stage depart for battle against the Swedish forces with the resounding words: “In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs” (Into the dust with all enemies 33 of Brandenburg; 3: 289). Not coincidentally, the Sweden of both 1675 and 1810–11 was allied with France. But Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, while containing numerous plot details that link it, like Die Hermannsschlacht, to Kleist’s ongoing anti-Napoleonic animus, has more to do with inner reform of the Prussian state. Unlike the concrete reforms undertaken during the years 1808–11 — such as emancipation of the serfs, civil rights for the Jewish population, or the founding of the University of Berlin — the changes advocated by Kleist’s play involve the attitudes of individuals toward each other and to the state that incorporates them. Whereas in the first two acts the prince seems to be impelled chiefly by dreams of private glory and the main concern of the Kurfürst is that his commands be carried out to the letter, both characters seem to have learned from each other by the end of the play. Given the opportunity to gain his freedom if he disagrees with the justice of the death sentence, the prince refuses to do so. Through the petition on behalf of Homburg that the officers of his army bring him, meanwhile, the Kurfürst comes to realize that Homburg represents the living spirit of his army. Anticipating their answer, he asks his officers whether they are willing to risk yet another battle with the Prince and then leads them, as his “Freunde” (friends), into the garden for the final scene (6: 286). This resolution of extremes is characteristic of the philosophy developed by Adam Müller (1779–1829), Kleist’s friend and co-editor of the journal Phöbus from their days in Dresden, who in the spirit of Novalis’s Glauben und Liebe also advocated that citizens should be bound by feelings of love and devo34 tion to their country, not by contracts motivated by mutual self-interest.

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Having returned to Berlin in December of 1809, Kleist hoped to lend a hand in the renewal of his homeland. In a letter to Ulrike von Kleist of 19 March 1810, he reported about a planned private and public performance of his drama, which was then to be given to Queen Luise of Prussia, whom Kleist idolized and who is generally regarded as the model for Natalie. But the queen died in July of 1810, and no performance of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg took place during Kleist’s lifetime. Nor did Kleist succeed in securing court patronage through Prince Wilhelm, the younger brother of the Prussian king, and his wife, Marie Anne of Hessen-Homburg, to whom he dedicated the play. Of all the many deviations from historical fact that Kleist undertook in this play, none proved more harmful to his cause than Homburg’s fear of death in act 3, which the princess reputedly described as being unworthy not only of the memory of her ancestor, but also of any Prussian officer. On 21 November 1811, less than three months after this final attempt to secure material and moral support from the Prussian state, Heinrich von Kleist committed suicide. The reception history of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg shares many features with Die Hermannsschlacht; likewise published by Ludwig Tieck in 1821, it initially enjoyed limited recognition until the 1870s but eventually developed a reputation as the play par excellence that glorified Prussian patriotic fervor; the Kurfürst becomes a figure of adulation on Kleist’s stage. In 1938, the Nazis underscored this play’s importance for Germans everywhere by having Prinz Friedrich von Homburg staged in Hitler’s presence in the Burgtheater, the site of its original performance in 1821, in celebration of the annexation of Austria to the German Reich. Two postwar productions deserve particular credit for freeing Kleist’s play from the odium of such associations and directing attention back to the figure of the prince himself. Jean Vilar’s stagings in Avignon and Paris in 1951 and 1952, with Gérard Philipe in the title role, unleashed the existentialist wave of Kleist interpretations. In Germany, Peter Stein’s 1972 rendition of “Kleists Traum vom Prinzen von Homburg” quickly attained the status of a modern classic. As its title indicates, Stein and his company — including the renowned actor Bruno Ganz in the role of Homburg and the novelist and playwright Botho Strauß as dramaturgist — emphasize that Kleist’s depiction of a humane Prussia that has a place for the prince (and himself) was not only a dream, but also an unfulfilled one. In the final tableau, as the overwhelmed prince falls to the ground in a faint, the elector and his party leave him lying on the ground and depart instead with a waxen image that seemingly suffices for them and their marching chorus of “Heil! Heil! Heil!” (3: 288). As these militaristic nationalists depart, the figure of the prince rises, as lonely on stage as he was in the beginning, while the voice of Jutta Lampe, the actress who plays Natalie, recounts Kleist’s suicide and his words to Ulrike von Kleist in the letter he wrote on the morning of his death: “die Wahrheit ist,

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daß mir auf Erden nicht zu helfen war” (the truth is that there was no help for me on earth). Last but by no means least, the set back-drop by KarlErnst Herrmann — modeled after the painting “Der Mönch am Meer” by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) that Kleist and his friends Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano had analyzed so memorably in his Berliner Abendblätter (1810–11; 5: 61) — in effect turns the solitary prince into 35 Kleist as well. As early as 1935, Anna Seghers had responded to National Socialist attempts to claim Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), and Georg Büchner (1813–37) as forerunners of their movement by emphasizing that the true patriotism of these and other writers from the time of the Sturm und Drang through the 1830s consisted in their vain attempts to prevail against the repressive society surrounding them, which led to suicide, madness, or death at an early age. At the end of the 1970s, the East German writer Christa Wolf followed the example of her teacher Anna Seghers by exploring the psyche of not only Kleist, but also Karoline von Günderrode (1780– 1806), another Romantic author who committed suicide, in Kein Ort: Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1979). That Wolf should turn her attention to Kleist and Günderrode at a point when she was undergoing surveillance from East German state security suggests the degree to which writers, stage directors, and filmmakers have come to perceive German Romantic authors as kindred spirits — not so much for their proffered solutions to personal and societal problems as for their embodiment of the problems themselves 36 and the willingness to struggle for their resolution. In this regard, the jacket illustration for this volume is a fitting representation of the place for German Romanticism in our times. That the blue flower should be depicted in connection with the birthplace of the Friedrich von Hardenberg seems appropriate; but it is situated at the spot reached by the demolition of Schloss Oberwiederstedt in 1987 before a local citizens’ initiative prevented any further destruction of what East German authorities regarded as a decaying building of little value. By the time Kerstin Hendrich (b. 1978) rendered her artwork in 1992 as a project at the newly renamed Novalis-Gymnasium in nearby Hettstedt, an international Novalis Society had been founded, with Schloss Oberwiederstedt as its headquarters, but a restoration of the demolished west wing of the building was still a vision. In the meantime, that “dream” has been fulfilled. Other dreams, such as work and prosperity for one of the most economically depressed areas of Germany, remain to be accomplished; but stories with open endings are a common feature of Romanticism — with Heinrich von Ofterdingen being a key example. Let us hope that the fairy-tale ending for this real-life story will be a happy one. And may the following chapters help stimulate readers to explore the terrain of German Romanticism and rediscover some dreams of their own in the process!

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Notes 1

The following single-authored studies will be of use to those interested in further readings on German and European Romanticism: Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Haessel 1899–1902); Paul Kluckhohn, Das Ideengut der deutschen Romantik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1942); M[eyer] H[oward] Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971); Gerhart Hoffmeister, Deutsche und europäische Romantik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976; 2nd. ed. 1990); Glyn Tegai Hughes, Romantic German Literature (London: Arnold, 1979); Lothar Pikulik, Romantik als Ungenügen an der Normalität: Am Beispiel Tiecks, Hoffmanns, Eichendorffs, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); Klaus Peter, Stadien der Aufklärung: Moral und Politik bei Lessing, Novalis und Friedrich Schlegel (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1980); Alan Menhennet, The Romantic Movement (London: Croom Helm, and Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1981); Claus Sommerhage, Deutsche Romantik: Literatur und Malerei 1796–1830 (Cologne: Taschen, 1988); Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990); Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995); Gerhard Schulz, Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff (Munich: Beck, 1996); Detlef Kremer, Romantik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001). Essay collections that have been of particular value in the conception and development of this volume include: Das Nachleben der Romantik in der modernen deutschen Literatur, edited by Wolfgang Paulsen (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1969); The Romantic Period in Germany: Essays by Members of the London University Institute of Germanic Studies, edited by Siegbert Prawer (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, and New York: Schocken Books, 1970); Romantikforschung seit 1945, edited by Klaus Peter (Königstein: Hain, 1980); European Romanticism: Literary CrossCurrents, Modes, and Models, edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990); Romantik-Handbuch, edited by Helmut Schanze (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1994). 2 See the essay by Gerhart Hoffmeister in this volume for a discussion of how the Romantics viewed their own novels as a response to, and advance upon Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. For studies on the relationship between Goethe, Schiller, and the Schlegel brothers, see Josef Körner, Romantiker und Klassiker: Die Brüder Schlegel in ihren Beziehungen zu Schiller und Goethe (Berlin: Askanischer Verlag 1924; reprint Bern: Lang, 1974); Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism,” in Essays on the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1948), 207–27; Ernst Behler, “Die Wirkung Goethes und Schillers auf die Brüder Schlegel,” in Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, edited by Wilfried Barner et al. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1984), 559–83. For discussions of Friedrich von Hardenberg, who had been a student of Schiller’s at the University of Jena in 1790– 91, and his literary response to Weimar Classicism see Herbert Uerlings, “Novalis und die Weimarer Klassik,” Aurora 50 (1990): 27–46, and Ulrich Stadler, “Novalis — Ein Lehrling Friedrich Schillers?” Aurora 50 (1990): 47–62. See also the essays in the catalog to the exhibit “Ein Dichter hat uns alle geweckt”: Goethe und die literarische Romantik, edited by Christoph Perels, (Frankfurt am Main: Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe Museum, 1999).

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3

See Klaus Peter, “Nürnbergs krumme Gassen: Zum Deutschlandbild bei Wackenroder, Tieck und Richard Wagner,” Aurora 57 (1997): 129–47. 4

Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, edited by Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis, 1948), 332. See Ernst Jenisch, “‘Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke’: Goethes Kritik der Romantik,” Goethe: Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der Goethe-Gesellschaft 19 (1957): 50–79, as well as the essays by Arnd Bohm, Beate Allert, and Nicholas Saul in this volume. For a discussion of Goethe as “Romantic,” see Robert C. Holub, “The Romanticizing of Goethe: A Study in the Acquisition of a Label,” in English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, edited by James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Winter, 1985), 349–61. For a stimulating treatment of Goethe’s poetry between 1770 and 1785 in its relationship to the theory and practice of German and European Romanticism, see David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996).

5

Quoted in the opening sentence of the recent study by Nicola Kaminski, KreuzGänge: Romanexperimente der deutschen Romantik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001), 15. Kaminski’s close readings of not only Arnim’s Gräfin Dolores, but also the anonymous Nachtwachen: Von Bonaventura, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, Joseph von Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels are an excellent complement to Gerhart Hoffmeister’s survey of the German Romantic novel in this volume.

6

See the chapter on Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre in Dennis F. Mahoney, Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774–1829) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 155–62, and Jürgen H. Petersen, “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre — ein ‘romantisches Buch,’” in Rereading Romanticism, edited by Martha B. Helfer (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 389–406. For further readings on the topic of Goethe and German Romanticism see Hartmut Fröschle, Goethes Verhältnis zur Romantik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), and Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, edited by Walter Hinderer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002). 7

For further information on this phase of German Romanticism, see Lothar Pikulik, “Die sogenannte Heidelberger Romantik: Tendenzen, Grenzen, Widersprüche. Mit einem Epilog über das Nachleben der Romantik heute,” in Heidelberg im säkularen Umbruch: Traditionsbewußtsein und Kulturpolitik um 1800, edited by Friedrich Strack (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), 190–215, and Friedrich Strack, “Heidelberg als Stadt der Romantik,” in Stätten deutscher Literatur: Studien zur literarischen Zentrenbildung 1750–1815, ed. by Wolfgang Stellmacher (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1998), 455–74. 8

On the development of the conception of Nuremberg as a German and Romantic city from Wackenroder and Tieck through Wagner’s Meistersinger until the beginnings of National Socialism, see Klaus Peter, “Nürnbergs krumme Gassen” (note 3). On the phenomenon of anti-Semitism during the Napoleonic era, as propagated by Romantic authors like Arnim and Brentano, see Charlene Lea, “The ‘ChristlichDeutsche Tischgesellschaft’: Napoleonic Hegemony Engenders Political AntiSemitism,” in Crisis and Culture in Post-Enlightenment Germany: Essays in Honour of Peter Heller, edited by Hans Schulte and David Richards (Lanham, MD: U P of America, 1993), 89–111, and the essay by Fabian Lampart in this volume.

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9

For concise bio-bibliographic introductions to other authors and works treated in this volume, see German Writers in the Age of Goethe: Sturm und Drang to Classicism, edited by James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer (Detroit: Gale, 1990); German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789–1832, edited by James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer (Detroit: Gale, 1989); Deutsche Dichter der Romantik: Ihr Leben und Werk, edited by Benno von Wiese (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1971); and relevant entries in the Encyclopedia of German Literature, edited by Matthias Konzett. 2 vols. (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000). 10

Hermann August Korff, Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer ideellen Entwicklung der klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte. 5 vols. (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1923–57). 11 Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration: Erster Teil: Das Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789–1806 (Munich: Beck, 1983; 2nd ed. 2001); Zweiter Teil: Das Zeitalter der Napoleonischen Kriege und der Restauration 1806–1830 (Munich: Beck, 1989). 12 For an interpretation of German literature written between 1790 and 1830 as a response to the political and cultural crises of the times, particularly revolution and secularization, see Nicholas Saul, “Aesthetic Humanism (1790–1830),” in The Cambridge History of German Literature, edited by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 202–71. In “The Pursuit of the Subject: Literature as Critic and Perfecter of Philosophy 1790–1830,” Saul explores the interplay between philosophy and literature during the period covered in this volume: Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990, edited by Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 57–101. 13 For more information on the historical background, with particular attention to German intellectual and social history, see Thomas P. Saine, Black Bread, White Bread: German Intellectuals and the French Revolution (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1988) and Horst Möller, Fürstenstaat oder Bürgernation: Deutschland 1763– 1815 (Berlin: Siedler, 1998). For a general overview of the military conflicts of this period, see Michael Glover, The Napoleonic Wars: an Illustrated History 1792–1815 (New York: Hippocrene, 1978). 14

For the impact of Friedrich von Hardenberg’s studies in mathematics and natural science on the development of his poetics, see Dennis F. Mahoney, Die Poetisierung der Natur bei Novalis: Beweggründe, Gestaltung, Folgen (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980); for the importance of chemistry for the poetic theory of the Early Romantics, see Peter Kapitza, Die frühromantische Theorie der Mischung: Über den Zusammenhang von romantischer Dichtungstheorie und zeitgenössischer Chemie (Munich: Hueber, 1968). For a stimulating discussion of the increasing importance of the concept of imagination throughout the eighteenth century, see James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981). 15

“The foremost principle must be absolutely nothing given, but rather something freely made, fabricated, invented, in order to found a general metaphysical system that begins with freedom and goes to freedom. / All philosophizing has emancipation as its goal.”

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16

Ingo R. Stoehr, German Literature of the Twentieth Century: From Aestheticism to Postmodernism. Camden House History of German Literature; volume 10 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), xii. 17 “Only [have] patience, it will, it must come the holy age of eternal peace, where the new Jerusalem will be the capital of the world; and until then be cheerful and courageous in the dangers of the age, comrades of my faith, proclaim with word and deed the divine gospel and remain loyal to the true, unending faith until death.” For further discussion of Glauben und Liebe and Die Christenheit oder Europa, see the essays by Richard Littlejohns and Klaus Peter in this volume. 18

For information on Napoleon and his empire, see Felix Markham, Napoleon (New York, Mentor, 1963); Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815 (London: Arnold, 1996).

19

For the corresponding sections in the letters see Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, edited by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: dtv, 1964), 6: 19–20, 117– 18, 163–64. Any further parenthetical citations of Kleist’s letters and writings refer to this edition. 20 Letter of 29 July 1801 to Adolfine von Werdeck (6: 205); for a further discussion of the ambivalent reaction of writers like Kleist to the natural science of their day, as well as the importance of natural science and philosophy for their writings, see the essay by Gabriele Rommel in this volume. 21

The former three plays will be discussed in more detail in the volume on Weimar Classicism edited by Simon Richter; for a discussion of Kleist’s tales see the essays by Ulrich Scheck and Gabriele Rommel in this volume. 22

See Ruth K. Angress, “Kleist’s Treatment of Imperialism: Die Hermannsschlacht and “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,” Monatshefte 69 (1977): 17–33; Paul Michael Lützeler, “Napoleons Kolonialtraum und Kleists Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,” Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vorträge G 372 (= Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000): 1–32. 23 Richard Samuel, “Kleists Hermannsschlacht und der Freiherr von Stein,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 5 (1961): 64–101; see also the chapter “Partisanenkrieg” in Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1989), 218–55. As a complement to these elucidations of the immediate military and political background to Kleist’s play undertaken by Samuel and Kittler see the close reading of Hermann’s machinations in William C. Reeve, In Pursuit of Power: Heinrich von Kleist’s Machiavellian Protagonists (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 1987), 23–111. For a survey of the employment of literature in the construction of a new image of German national identity, see Otto W. Johnston, The Myth of a Nation — Literature and Politics in Prussia under Napoleon (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1989). 24

For a survey of the reception history of Die Hermannsschlacht and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg see Rolf Busch, Imperialistische und faschistische Kleist-Rezeption 1890– 1945: Eine ideologie-kritische Untersuchung (Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1974); William C. Reeve, Kleist on Stage: 1804–1987 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s U P, 1993).

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25

See Gesa von Essen, Hermannsschlachten: Germanen- und Römerbilder in der Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), 146. 26

“For I see that the sphere of the world will not / Attain any rest from this brood of murderers / Until the nest of robbers is completely destroyed / And nothing, but a black flag, / Waves from its desolate heap of ruins.” 27

Bernd Fischer, Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herder, Fichte, Kleist: Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995), 300–21, here 318. Klaus Peter likewise employs Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht to warn against an uncritical acceptance of the Romantic call for a New Mythology: “Sehnsucht nach dem Gott: Kleist, der Mythos und eine Tendenz der Forschung,” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts 1993: 183–257, here 243– 57. 28

Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration, vol. 2 (Munich: Beck, 1989): 655–56; Bernhard Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum “Fall” der Kunst (Tübingen and Basel: UTB, 2000), 118. 29 “Tell her that you love her, Ventidius, / Then she will hold still and give you her locks. / She throws away the key and falls into a faint.” 30

Anthony Stephens, Heinrich von Kleist: The Dramas and Stories (Oxford and Providence, USA: Berg, 1994), 170. 31

For the contemporary understanding of the notions of “animal magnetism” that permeate Kleist’s depiction of somnambulism in dramas such as Penthesilea, Das Käthchen von Heillbronn (1810) and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, see Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), esp. 82–120. 32

See in this regard Roland Heine, “‘Ein Traum, was sonst?’ Zum Verhältnis von Traum und Wirklichkeit in Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,” in Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte: Festschrift für Richard Brinkmann, edited by Jürgen Brummack et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1981), 283–313. Gabriele M. Wickert has drawn attention to the flower imagery that Natalie and the prince himself use to describe him: Das verlorene heroische Zeitalter: Held und Volk in Heinrich von Kleists Dramen (New York: Lang, 1983), 130–32. 33

Kleist’s letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 16 August 1800 makes clear that the figures of Max and Thekla in Wallenstein had a particular value for him as a means of indirect conversation with her: “Alles, was Max Piccolomini sagt, möge, wenn es einige Ähnlichkeit hat, für mich gelten, alles was Thekla sagt, soll, wenn es einige Ähnlichkeit hat, für Dich gelten” (Everything that Max Piccolomini says may apply to me, if it has some similarity; the same applies to you with regard to Thekla; 6: 55). For a further discussion of intertextual references within Kleist’s play to Wallenstein and other works by Schiller, see Gisela Berns, “‘Mit dem Rücken’ gegen Schiller: Zur Funktion der Schillertexte in Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,” in Ethik und Ästhetik: Werke und Werte in der Literatur vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wolfgang Wittkowski zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Richard Fisher (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995), 329–348; Johannes Endres, Das “depotenzierte”

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Subjekt: Zu Geschichte und Funktion des Komischen bei Heinrich von Kleist (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996), esp. 131–45. 34

For an explication of the political theories of writers like Müller and Novalis, see Klaus Peter’s essay in this volume. For specific connections between Kleists’s drama and political Romanticism, see Klaus Peter, “Romantik und Politik in Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts 1992: 95–125. 35

Many thanks to Courtney Magwire for pointing out Stein’s adaptation of this painting by Friedrich for his stage production. For a discussion of “Der Mönch am Meer” and Kleist’s interpretation of it, see the essay by Beate Allert in this volume. For further information on the Peter Stein production of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, see Hans Mayer, “Denkspiel oder Traumspiel? Kleists Prinz vom Homburg im Schillertheater und bei der Schaubühne,” Theater Heute (1972, no. 12): 9–14; Hajo Kurzenberger, “Kleists Traum vom Prinzen von Homburg: Zu Peter Steins Inszenierung an der Berliner Schaubühne,” in Geist und Zeichen: Festschrift für Arthur Henkel, edited by Herbert Anton, Bernhard Gajek, and Peter Pfaff (Heidelberg: Winter, 1977), 235–40; Michael Patterson, Peter Stein: Germany’s Leading Theatre Director (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 90–97. 36

Anna Seghers, Glauben an Irdisches: Essays, edited by Christa Wolf (Leipzig: Reclam, 1969), 12–13; many thanks to Gabriele Rommel for this reference. For a study of the twentieth-century reception of German Romanticism, including Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf, see the essay by Nicholas Saul in this volume. Ulrich Scheck likewise concludes his essay on the short prose of the German Romantics, including Kleist, with a review of recent works inspired by some of the works he has discussed.

From “Romantick” To “Romantic”: The Genesis of German Romanticism in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe Gerhard Schulz E ’ (1788–1857) novel Dichter und ihre Gesellen J(Poets and their Companions) appeared in 1834, when Europe was alOSEPH VON

ICHENDORFF S

ready in the grip of the Industrial Revolution, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) had settled in Paris, and Georg Büchner (1813–37) was writing the revolutionary pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote (The Hessian Messenger). More placid concerns, however, occupy the characters in Eichendorff’s book; in chapter 24, for example, a young lawyer elopes with an equally young lady. A group of friends, among them a poet, hears about these events, and it is the poet to whom everybody turns for an opinion because he is regarded as an expert “in solchen romantischen Fällen” (in such romantic cases), to which Fortunat, the poet, responds: “Ach teurer Freund, [. . .] ich wollte, die Romantik wäre lieber gar nicht erfunden worden!” (Dear friend, [. . .] 1 I wish Romanticism had never been invented). It is a comment which ever since has elicited sympathy from literary historians. Eichendorff knew what he was talking about. In German literary history he is commonly known as one of the most distinguished, as well as popular, exponents of Romanticism in its most general terms. His poetry conjures up starry moonlit nights, and rustling treetops in the unfathomable depth of forests where Lorelei, the seductive witch, lures the homeless wanderer to death and destruction. A wedding procession moves through a valley, the pretty bride weeps silently and mysteriously, musicians compete with the birds, a roe jumps over rustling brooks, and an aged knight rests fast asleep atop an ancient tower. It is images of this kind that have established Eichendorff’s reputation as a Romantic poet, and composers such as Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wolf, Reger, Pfitzner, and, above all, Robert Schumann have made his name known worldwide through musical settings, their “Lieder,” as in 2 Schumann’s Liederkreis (Song Cycle, op. 39, 1840). Eichendorff, however, was also one of the first historiographers of German Romantic literature; his Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutschlands was published in 1857, shortly before his death in the same year. By then

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Büchner had been dead for twenty years, Heine for one, and railways connected some of the major German cities, in short: little was left of the romantic ambience of stage coaches and singing wanderers, if it ever existed. The second part of Eichendorff’s history is a sober and critical account of the “neuere Romantik” (more recent Romantic literature) in Germany from which Eichendorff modestly excludes himself. “More recent” suggests the existence of an earlier Romantic literature, and with this we enter the entangled field of terminology and definitions. As is commonly known, the application of the word “romantic” to literature has English origins — literature here to be understood as belleslettres, that is, a product of the imagination transmitted by words. In 1650 Thomas Bayly used the word “romantick” as “fictional” or even “fictitious” in the subtitle of a story, and in 1659 Henry More wrote in his book The Immortality of the Soul: “As for ‘Imagination,’ there is no question but that Function is mainly exercised in the chief seat of the Soul, those purer Animal Spirits in the fourth Ventricle of the Brain. I speak especially of that Imagination which is most free, such as we use in Romantick Inventions, or such 3 as accompany the more severe Meditations and Disquisitions in Philosophy.’” The further history of the word “romantic” then amply demonstrates how, from such origins, two different families of usage developed: that of “Romantic” as an aesthetic quality within the confines of literary or, more generally, artistic history, encompassing literature, fine arts and music, and that of a typological usage in the sense of imaginative, emotional, remote from experience, visionary, passionate, dreamy, fantastic and unpractical — the Oxford Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus provide a whole range of synonyms and variants. For purposes of clarity: in this volume, we use the uppercase spelling in variants of “Romantic” referring to the artistic movement, with “romantic” taking on the typological usage. But the tendency to confuse the two meanings, or at least not differentiate between them clearly, has persisted in scholarship as well as in general usage. Even the early history of the concept is confusing. Its godfather is none other than the eternal city of Rome, and the path from here to Romanticism has been well documented and carefully researched. The etymology of “romantic” can be traced back to an old French word “romanz,” which meant the popular Romanic language in contrast to the Latin of scholarship and the Church. Here for the first time in history the word appeared in contrast to the culture of antiquity, though in a quite unpolemic manner. But such opposition to classical antiquity later became its actual content in a historical perspective. In the course of time, Provençal verse and prose tales, mostly about knights and their chivalrous exploits, assumed the name “romance.” The German word “Roman” (novel) was subsequently derived from this linguistic kernel, and when Thomas Bayly first employed the adjective “romantick” in the sense of “like in a novel,” it referred to tales that

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were steeped in imagination and adventure, fictitious and therefore also untrue, for the qualification “romantic” was not intended as praise but as criticism. Even as late as 1806 — that is to say at a time when the concept had already assumed both a broad cultural-historical and subtle aesthetic significance — Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) in his German dictionary spoke of romantic landscapes as of “vorzüglich angenehmen und gleichsam bezaubernden Gegenden [. . .], so wie sie in den Romanen und Ritterbüchern beschrieben werden” (especially pleasing and enchanting 4 regions [. . .] as they are depicted in novels and knightly tales). Adelung did not recognize that by this time the novel had taken on many diverse shapes, and had continued to gain in popularity with an ever-increasingly enlightened reading-public. The old-style chivalric novel had long since merged with Gothic horror stories, while the novel as a sentimental love story from the new reality of middle-class life had gradually matured into a fully-fledged serious and sophisticated form of literature. Thus, “romantic” came to be used more and more as an umbrella term, embracing the eccentric and extravagant, the weird and wonderful, the ghastly and gruesome, not to mention the emotional and sensitive, and to call something “romantic” was no longer a matter of simply passing critical judgment on such qualities, for what caused one person to hold their nose in disgust provided others with immense pleasure — in other words, “romantic” attained as much seriousness and respectability as the novel. Adelung spoke of “Gegenden.” It must be remembered that “romantic” was not just a characterization of certain literary features, but also developed into a descriptive term for landscapes in art, denoting in particular the paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600–82), Nicolas Poussin (1593–1665) and Salvator Rosa (1615–73). It referred to emotional qualities of these pictures, which were engendered by nature in its sublimity or silent seclusion, as an antithesis to the hectic and busy everyday world. Hence, “romantic” and picturesque became synonyms, and from there arose an intimate pact between “romantic” on the one hand, and nature as a world lying outside society on the other. The cultivation of the inherently “natural” or “wildly romantic” parks and landscapes of the “English garden” in the eighteenth century was one of the consequences of this relationship. In addition to these critical or culturally affirmative usages of the concept “romantic” there finally emerged in the course of the eighteenth century a third, specifically historical meaning. It was this meaning that decisively separated the concept from the abundant and wide-ranging meanings of the word, a concept, which has since become indispensable to literary and cultural history. When in 1780 at the beginning of his epic poem Oberon, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) implores the muses to saddle-up the winged poetic steed Hippogryph for a ride “ins alte romantische Land” (into the ancient romantic land) of medieval chivalry, he forges

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a bond between the original age of “romances,” the Romanic chivalric chronicles of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, and the 5 subsequent European culture. Looked at in a historical sense, the concept “romantic” had thus become the antithesis of “classical,” which denoted the art and culture of antiquity, that culture which had most of all impressed itself upon the dominant education and erudition of Wieland’s age. In contrast to it, there now arose the idea of a modern Christian culture independent from pagan antiquity, a culture embracing within it all EuropeanChristian languages and nations. This allowed the concept to acquire a breadth and depth over and beyond its specific historical sense, rendering it a vessel for fresh conceptions, artistic forms and perspectives, into a “Romantic” art that was seen in turn as modern art. There was no unanimous agreement concerning such a change in and variety of meaning, nor were the changes even widely noticed and registered. When, for example, the word “Romantik” (Romanticism) appeared for the first time in the German language in 1790, in a novel by Johann Gottwerth Müller (1745–1828), it solely referred to the novelistic works — “Romane” in German — of the novel’s literary hero; when at the beginning of 1799 Novalis (nom de plume of Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801), for the first time, used the word “Romantiker” (Romanticist; NS, 3: 466), he too meant nothing else but a writer of novels. Likewise, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), one of the first and most brilliant theoreticians of Romanticism, variously understood Romantic culture around 1800 simply as literary culture dominated by the form of the novel, whose prose had eclipsed the ancient epic and played a genuine role in the etymology of the concept. Nevertheless, Schlegel’s definition of the novel as “ein romantisches Buch” in his Gespräch über die Poesie (Discourse on Poetry, 1800; KFSA, 2: 335), only served to add to the confusion surrounding this form, for he chose as its masters not merely epic writers such as Dante or Cervantes, but also the lyric poet Petrarch and the dramatists Shakespeare and Calderón. Moreover, when some ten years later Schlegel himself and a number of his colleagues were branded “Romantics,” this was said by the opponents of their ambitions and, more generally, of the latest literary production in Germany. It was clearly uttered in a derogatory, often hostile tone, and came from a conservative position. Actually, around 1800 it was indeed these young German writers such as Friedrich Schlegel or Novalis who took the concept beyond its cultural-historical import, relating it now to their own efforts and aims to create an art form for the future, thereby exercising a significant influence not only upon its usage within its own linguistic domain, but 6 furthermore within the whole of Europe. It is impossible to protect the study of Romanticism from misunderstandings and deliberate or accidental misinterpretations deriving from the confusion of the two family trees which have grown from the one root,

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unless we execute the wish of Eichendorff’s poet Fortunat and abolish the term altogether in the histories of art, music, and literature. Whether this will happen one day, is impossible to predict. Until then usage of the words “romantic” and “Romanticism” must be accompanied in each case by clear definitions, however widely views on the value and truthfulness of historical assessments may differ. In German literary historiography the term “Romanticism” has been commonly used as an umbrella word for a substantial part of the literary production between 1789 and 1830, but there have always been significant exclusions. Whether Goethe is to be regarded as “Romanticist” or “Classicist,” has sparked much — and mostly unproductive — discussion; especially among German scholars outside the German-speaking area Goethe usually is regarded as a Romantic par excellence. The position of Schiller (1759– 1805), Jean Paul (1763–1825), and Kleist (1777–1811) — writers of the highest distinction — has remained uncertain in respect of these categories. Once again it has to be remembered that around 1800 “Romantic literature” was generally given that wider meaning which Wieland’s Oberon had already reflected: it signified the tradition of Christian culture from the Middle Ages to the present day. It was in this sense that the word was used predominantly in the early writings of Friedrich Schlegel, while his brother August Wilhelm (1767–1845) provided the first comprehensive survey of this tradition in his Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst (Lectures on Belles-lettres and Art) held in Berlin between 1803 and 1804. The lectures had a profound impact on the younger generation of German intellectuals, as they represented an attempt to break away from rigid adherence to and admiration of the art of ancient Greece and Rome as the sole worthwhile model for any present and future artistic efforts. Literary studies at schools and universities in those days usually meant the study of antiquity, of the Greek and Latin classics, and nothing else. In August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lectures Romantic literature began with the epic poems of the Middle Ages and continued then with Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Calderón to the literature of his own time. Schlegel’s masterly translation of Shakespeare opened the German stage to him. Goethe, though in those days in matters of art no doubt a classicist, was for the Schlegels the fulfillment of all Romantic aspirations, and they revered him and tried to emulate him in some of their own literary works. The tendency to historicize ancient art and deny it an exemplary role in the present was, of course, not new. In France the Querelle des anciens et des modernes (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns) toward the end of the seventeenth century had already moved in that direction. Now, toward the end of the eighteenth century, fundamental changes in the social foundations of life in Germany had developed. The philosophical interpretation of history reflected these changes, and a review of the aims, motivations, and

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practices of all artistic and literary efforts was indicated in response to such changes and interpretations. Romantic literature became, as indicated, gradually identical with “modern” literature. Especially in Friedrich Schlegel’s writings the word even related to the future, as, for instance, in his well-known “Fragment” No. 116 published in 1798 in his journal Athenaeum: Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will und soll auch Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig und das Leben und die Ge7 sellschaft poetisch machen (KFSA, 2: 182).

In this passage awareness of the indigenous traditions of the European nations at the onset of industrial and technological revolution blends here with rather activist expectations of the humanizing power of literature, of “Poesie,” as Schlegel writes. Here the aesthetic and historical use of the word “romantisch” seems to merge again with the typological usage and indicates an attitude which appears to be nothing but the fulfillment of all the qualities which the Oxford Dictionary identifies with it. Chiliastic tendencies with strong religious overtones prevailed in German literature around 1800. The lack of a national identity at a time of an extreme political and military crisis, that is, the French occupation of a large part of the German-speaking territories in Central Europe, were the main causes for this prevalence. In literature, political aims merged with religious faith and with the interpretation of world history as the history of the advent and rise of Christianity, especially in the work of Novalis. In his vision, laid down in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa that he read to his friends in November 1799, but which was not published until 1826, twenty-five years after his death, a peaceful united Europe was to develop under the spiritual guidance of a new, united Christian church. Friedrich Schlegel, on the other hand, believed instead in literature as the decisive instrument for the pacification of mankind, and the novel — “der Roman” — a form for which no models existed in ancient poetics, was to become, as already mentioned, “the romantic book,” combining and merging prose and poetry, drama and theoretical reflection. Later, however, Friedrich Schlegel, the son of a Lutheran pastor, had his doubts about the validity of his dreams, joined the existing Roman Catholic Church, and became a militant defender of his new faith. As always, differences between persons and their views, aims, ambitions, talents, or literary techniques inevitably developed, even between those who worked in close collaboration. Often such differences were anything but fundamental. Literary history, however, has later drawn rigid dividing lines

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between them, between Goethe and Schlegel or Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). But was “Romanticism” really the antithesis of “Classicism?” Hölderlin, for instance, expressed his poetic visions of a new era in an imagery that subtly blends Christianity with the ideal life in an ancient Greek republic. Moreover, his novel Hyperion (1797–99) combines such visions with references to the then-topical struggle of late eighteenthcentury Greeks from Turkish occupation. It was a struggle that enthused and inspired successive generations of European intellectuals from 1770 onward. The daring combination and amalgamation of past and present, antiquity and modernity produced unconventional perspectives within the confines of what is regarded as “Romantic” literature, that is as modern literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century and as literature influencing the future, a literature distinct from that promoted by the traditional eighteenth-century schools of aesthetics for which antiquity alone was the sole yardstick in all artistic achievement. Younger German writers, quite unlike their English contemporaries such as John Keats (1795–1821) or Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), mostly rejected classical imagery. Hölderlin, who masterfully adapted Greek lyrical forms and greatly admired republican life in ancient Greece, was ignored by most of his contemporaries, who did not discover the thoughts of tomorrow in what appeared to be the language of yesterday. Equally underestimated or ignored was the work of Heinrich von Kleist, who even more audaciously than Hölderlin blended Christian imagery with that of antiquity. Virgin birth for example is fused with the erotic escapades of Zeus-Jupiter in Amphitryon (1807), a daring adaptation of Molière’s comedy, and Kleist’s story Die Marquise von O . . . (1808) oscillates between myth and reality through allusions to the Immaculate Conception, so that, as one critic wrote at the time, the very summary of the contents of this story would preclude its being mentioned in refined and cultivated circles. Kleist’s works, just like the works of Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis, contain bold excursions into the modern secular mind, explorations of the tensions between the sexes, between love and sexuality, or, on the political level, between the urge for power and the desire for justice — images and thoughts which transcended the comprehension of most of their contemporaries. Kleist’s, Hölderlin’s, Schlegel’s, and Novalis’s works were properly edited and critically examined only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and their place in world literature has been established only recently. In any case, German Romanticism would be considerably narrower and poorer, if a terminological wall were built between Schlegel and Novalis on the one side and Hölderlin and Kleist on the other. What complicates a clear definition of German Romanticism, in particular, is the fact that there were common issues for many German intellectuals beyond their philosophical or artistic creeds and convictions. In a country

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without political centralism and unity the quest for a national identity, corresponding to the cultural identity achieved in its literature and based on a common national language, was such an issue. This problem intensified, when after 1806 Napoleon and his armies invaded most of the Germanspeaking territories. But while Romanticism in literature generally coincides with the rise of a national consciousness in many European nations and with the gradual diminution or abrupt, revolutionary destruction of feudal power there, nationalism is not an essential symptom or ingredient of Romantic literature nor can it solely be found there. Nationalism has little importance for the visions of Novalis, Hölderlin, and Friedrich Schlegel, although it is not entirely absent there. Kleist’s fierce anti-French chauvinism, on the other hand, is that of a Prussian patriot struggling for social acceptance and public recognition of his work. It may seem to dominate such plays as Die Hermannsschlacht (Arminius’s Battle, 1808, publ. 1821) or Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1811, publ. 1821), but only on the surface, while on a deeper level these works share concerns that are typical of other exploratory excursions in modern thought. Patriotism and Romanticism do not essentially belong together, and even though Joseph von Eichendorff enlisted as a volunteer in the battles against the French occupants, he despised all “Vaterländerei,” all patriotic fervor. Similar considerations apply to the connection between Romanticism and Catholicism. Religious values had declined under the impact of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the growing importance of the natural sciences, and of course the French Revolution. Private mythologies developed, and so did private religious constructs. Nihilism was one of the consequences, most significantly in the Nachtwachen (Night Watches, 1804) by Bonaventura, a pseudonym for Ernst August Klingemann (1777–1831). Novalis, on the other hand, dreamed of a new, united Christian church beyond the contemporary split into confessions hostile to or competing with each other. Eichendorff, for his part, was a devout Catholic, but unlike Friedrich Schlegel, a Lutheran who had converted to the Catholic Church, he never questioned his faith nor fought for it, but did regard his religion as the best way to check, restrain, and, perhaps, tame “das wilde Tier” (the wild 8 beast) in the human breast of which he was very much aware and which he had portrayed in his poetic work in more than one dangerous situation. Such language is, of course, metaphorical and thus in itself an expression of the “Romantic” imagination and its deep concern with the motivations of human beings who possessed within themselves both a divine creativity and animal-like desires. So, to sum up, the use of the word “romantic” (“romantisch”) and its derivatives in German remain problematic. The noun “Romantik,” usually regarded as the equivalent for “Romanticism,” was around 1800, that is, at the time when it was first introduced as a term in literary history, mainly

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used in the sense of the aesthetics of the novel — in German “der Roman” — or as a summary term for “romantic” qualities in the more general typological sense. Its use as a denotation of a “school” or literary movement, which now seems to prevail, first developed among the conservative enemies of all “romantic” tendencies, people like Johann Heinrich Voss (1751– 1826), the famed translator of Homer, who tried to retain the exemplary character of classical poetics for all literature, and who led a fierce attack against the introduction of poetic forms from the Christian — “Romantic” — tradition into German poetry, above all the sonnet, which had become a literary fashion around 1800. He was, indeed, the first to speak of a “Romantic school” in German literature and condemn it. While no such school ever existed, the terms “Romantische Schule” or later “Romantik” nevertheless made history, not least through works such as Heinrich Heine’s brilliant survey of German literature of this time in his book Die romantische Schule (1833). With the concept of a “Romantic school” its presumed members also became “Romantiker” in the eyes of their critics. A satirical sonnet by the Danish writer Jens Baggesen (1764–1826) in the “anti-romantic” anthology Der Karfunkel oder Klingklingel-Almanach (1809), written in German, lists no fewer than twenty-seven “Romanticists” (“Die siebenundzwanzig Romantiker”). Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), Joseph Görres (1776– 1848), Kleist, Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), Eichendorff, Adam Müller (1779–1829), and a few minor writers belong to this versified catalogue, thereby establishing connections and a unity of interests, aims, and concepts that in reality did not tie them together. The English term “Romanticist” is of a later origin and dates back to about 1850. However, words such as “Romantiker” or “Romanticist” remain of dubious value, as they tend to simplify the complexity of literary relationships and artistic as well as intellectual interaction over a period of more than half a century. The essence of what may rightly be called, in historical terms, “Romantic” in German literature refers then to the literary attempts toward the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century that try to invoke a Christian-European consciousness and depart from the traditions of forms and the mainly mythological imagery of classical antiquity. But “Romantic” has also developed into the denomination for those literary concepts around 1800 that attempt to give art and literature a decisive role and function in the process of human history. The names of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hardenberg-Novalis, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98), Tieck, Arnim, Brentano, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843) and Eichendorff have been closely linked with those concepts. Whether Goethe and Schiller, Hölderlin, Jean Paul, Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) or Heine should be included in or excluded from this

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categorization, will remain a matter of what is understood by “romantic” and “Romanticism” in scholarly usage from case to case. Would it have been better, had Romanticism never been invented, as Eichendorff’s Fortunat suggested? “We do not mean quite the same thing when we speak of a writer as romantic, as we do when we speak of a literary period as romantic,” T. S. Eliot wrote in 1934, and he came to the conclusion that “the opportunities for systematic misunderstanding, and for futile 9 controversy, are accordingly almost ideal.” Regardless of such observations, however, the term seems to have become indispensable in the nomenclature of cultural history, pointing to certain features of intellectual life, literature and the arts at the threshold of the industrial age in Europe. As such it can offer a wide variety of challenges for historical understanding and interpretation, and is well worth the difficulties that the term has continued to produce in the jungles of literary taxonomy.

Notes 1

Joseph von Eichendorff, Werke, edited by Jost Perfahl (Munich: Winkler, 1970), 2: 487. 2

For a discussion of the German art song see Steven Paul Scher, “The German Lied: A Genre and its European Reception,” in European Romanticism: Literary CrossCurrents, Modes, and Models, edited by Gerhard Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990), 127–41. 3 Quotation from: Raymond Immerwahr, Romantisch: Genese und Tradition einer Denkform (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. 1972), 14. 4

J. C. Adelung, Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart. (Leipzig 1811), 3: 1155.

5

Christoph Martin Wieland, Oberon: Ein romantisches Heldengedicht in zwölf Gesängen, edited by Sven-Aage Jørgensen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), 7. 6

The previous four paragraphs are based on my book Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff (Munich: Beck, 1996, 2nd ed. 2002). I would like to thank David Wood (Adelaide/Dublin) for providing me with a translation of pp. 10–12. See also my history of German literature 1789–1830: Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1983–89; vol. 1, 2nd ed. 2002). 7 “Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. It is destined not merely to reunite the separate genres of poetry and to link poetry to philosophy and rhetoric. It would and should also mingle and fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, artistic poetry and natural poetry, make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetic.” 8

Eichendorff, Werke, 3: 874. “‘Romantic’ and ‘Classic,’” in T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 31. 9

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or correlate the histories of German and English literature in the period between 1750 and 1850 can quickly become frustrated by the incommensurable categories deployed in the respective camps. Students of German literature who are used to thinking in terms of the succession Aufklärung (Enlightenment), Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), Klassik, Romantik, and Vormärz (Literature up to March 1848) encounter an entirely different sequence in English. There one finds categories such as the age of Johnson, the age of Sensibility, Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian. The one term that might seem familiar is Romantic. But even there difficulties immediately arise, not least because the English 1 participants did not use the term Romantic of themselves. Complicating matters more is the fact that many critics schooled in the English tradition disregard their German colleagues’ distinctions and consider Goethe to be 2 a Romantic writer. Dismaying though this may be to Germans who are used to thinking of Goethe and Schiller as the pillars of a period of such stellar achievement that it has earned the accolade German Classicism, the view from a more distant 3 outlook is not without merit. The first significant impact of German literature upon English audiences came from the Storm and Stress works, especially Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), and Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781). It is more than coincidence that the wretch in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) 4 schools himself by reading, among other things, Werther. As elsewhere in Europe, a generation of English readers had been profoundly moved by the experience of delving into a troubled individual psychology and getting to know extreme emotions. A plausible case can be made that the Storm and Stress works were so powerful and innovative that they became paradigmatic for the English reception of German writing until Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold introduced a revised image of Goethe in the mid-nineteenth century, presenting him to the Victorian audience as a sage rather than as a rebel. The emergence of Gothic in English culture filtered the subsequent reception of German literary works, as well as the perceptions of English tourists who NYONE ATTEMPTING TO COMPARE

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travelled the Rhineland in search of ruined castles. This reception leveled out all the differences that matter to German literary history. Texts that would eventually be excluded from the German canon on the basis that they were second-rate (Trivialliteratur) were elevated, appropriated, and assimilated by English audiences. Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94) with his poem 5 “Lenore” (1773) and the dramatic works of August von Kotzebue (1761– 6 1819) had strikingly higher reputations in England, flowing from Gothic into the mentality of English Romanticism. The levelling worked diachronically as well. The subtleties of internal development and change were largely lost in transmission. The distinction between the aesthetics of the Storm and Stress generation and those of the German Romantics was too fine for outsiders to grasp. And in the case of Goethe himself, English readers tended to see continuity rather than evolution in his writing. The most fateful consequence of this would be the interpretation of Faust through lenses colored by Werther, as well as by Schiller’s and Kotzebue’s plays. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was not alone 7 in rejecting Goethe’s Faust on the grounds of immorality. In the Monthly Review in 1810, William Taylor, an influential channel in Anglo-German cultural relations, wrote the following of Faust: On the whole the absurdities of this piece are so numerous, the obscenities are so frequent, the profaneness is so gross, and the beauties are so exclusively adapted for German relish, that we cannot conscientiously recommend its importation, and still less the translation of it, to 8 our English students of German literature.

Most English writers during the Romantic period were indifferent to their German counterparts at the time; cultural mediators such as Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), who had lived and studied in Germany and had first-hand knowledge of the literary scene, were the exception rather than the 9 rule. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) had at best an ambivalent attitude to Goethe, while John Keats (1795–1821) apparently had no interest in 10 German literature. Two major exceptions in the generally negative view of Goethe and of Faust on the part of English Romantic writers were Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). Although much more research needs to be done before the intricacies of their relationships to Goethe are fully mapped, complicated by their intellectual and personal interactions with each other, it is increasingly evident how early and how deeply Faust I affected them. Documented evidence of Shelley’s efforts 11 to translate Faust falls into two periods. The earliest, as Leland Phelps has shown on the basis of a careful study of the manuscript in the Bodleian Library, was made between 1810 and 1811, when Shelley was eighteen or 12 nineteen. As Phelps observes, the translation was not very good, since

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Shelley’s command of German was weak at the time. Nevertheless, this early dating is important, especially since Faust I had only been published in 1808. Shelley had also been reading Werther by 1811 and had sketched his 13 own continuation of the novel. The trail of evidence picks up again in 1821, when Shelley took German lessons from John Gisborne. According to a letter of 22 October 1821, Shelley had begun to “read Goethe’s Faust 14 with Mr. G[isborne],” a project that continued for some months. On 10 April 1822, he wrote to Gisborne describing his responses in vivid terms: I have been reading over & over again Faust, & always with some sensations which no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom and augments the rapidity of the ideas, & would therefore seem to be an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, & the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained. — And yet the pleasure of sympathizing with emotions known to only few, although they derive their sole charm from despair & a scorn of the narrow good we can attain in our present state, seems more than to cure the pain which belongs to them.

At the end of his observations, Shelley admits that he does not have the words to convey “how Göthe would have written in English” and suggests 15 that “No one but Coleridge is capable of this work.” Despite this gesture of self-doubt, Shelley did undertake translations of the “Prologue in 16 Heaven” and of the “Walpurgisnacht.” Even with their occasional linguistic lapses, both texts are interesting in their own right as interpretations by the English poet of a work for whose themes he had an obvious affinity. Shelley’s interest in Faust is also significant because of his close ties with Byron. One of the intractable and perhaps unsolvable puzzles deals with 17 Byron’s knowledge of German and hence his proximity to German sources. On the one hand, we have Byron’s repeated demurrals suggesting that he did not know the language very well and had little familiarity with German 18 texts. On the other, we know that he did take German lessons as a child — he admitted having read Der Tod Abels (The Death of Abel, 1758) by Salomon Gessner (1730–88) with his German tutor — and that he had a remarkable facility with other languages. Thus, the evident traces of Faust in Byron’s drama Manfred (1817) raise the immediate question of the channels of influence and transmission. Byron insisted that he had not read the original, but that M[atthew] G[regory] Lewis (1775–1818), author of one of the most successful Gothic novels, The Monk (1796), had done an oral translation for him between 14 and 19 August 1816: I never read, and do not know that I ever saw, the Faustus of Marlowe [. . .] but I heard mr lewis translate verbally some scenes of Goethe’s Faust (which were some good, and some bad) last summer; — which 19 is all I know of the history of that magical personage [. . .].

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It has also been pointed out that Byron would have known at least the general contours of Faust from Madame de Staël’s (1766–1817) account in De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1815 Paris), published in English in 1813. What has gone unremarked is the probability of another, more immediate, source Byron could have drawn upon for knowledge of Faust, namely Percy Shelley. Since the spring of 1816, the Shelleys were living beside Villa Diodati on the shores of Lac Léman in Switzerland, where Byron had set up house. The expatriates met frequently (one of the gatherings resulted in the informal competition that led to Mary’s writing of Frankenstein), and it is 20 likely that Percy would have shared his interest in Faust with Byron. Thus the context was more complicated than Byron’s report would suggest: All I know of that drama [Faust] is from a sorry French translation, from an occasional reading or two into English of parts of it by Monk Lewis when at Diodati, and from the Hartz mountain scene that Shelley versified the other day. Nothing I envy him so much as to be able 21 to read that astonishing production in the original.

It is difficult to imagine that the two poets would not have discussed their common fascination with Goethe’s play, just as Byron’s insistent dissembling 22 cannot conceal the extent to which Manfred is indebted to Faust. Indeed, from its first appearance, informed readers were sensitive to the similarities between Byron’s and Goethe’s dramas. One harsh critic declared in The Critical Review (1817) that the opening scene was “a gross plagiary from a great poet whom Lord Byron has imitated on former occasions [. . .] 23 Goethe’s Faust begins in the same way.” Considerably more sympathetic, and understandably so, was the assessment by Goethe, who received a copy of the play shortly after it was published. On 13 October 1817 he wrote to his friend Karl Ludwig von Knebel (1744–1834) about his subtle and complex reaction. The passage remains one of the most insightful comments on Byron’s play: Die wunderbarste Erscheinung war mir diese Tage das Trauerspiel Manfred von Byron [. . .] Dieser seltsame geistreiche Dichter hat meinen Faust in sich aufgenommen und für seine Hypochondrie die seltsamste Nahrung daraus gesogen. Er hat alle Motive auf seine Weise benutzt, so daß keins mehr dasselbige ist, und gerade deshalb kann ich seinen Geist nicht genug bewundern. Diese Umbildung ist so aus dem Ganzen, daß man darüber und über die Ähnlichkeit und Unähnlichkeit mit dem Original höchst interessante Vorlesungen halten könnte; wobey ich freylich nicht läugne, daß einem die düstre Gluth einer grenzenlosen reichen Verzweiflung doch am Ende lästig wird. Doch ist der Verdruß, den man empfindet, immer mit Bewunderung und Ho24 chachtung verknüpft.

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This reception is clearly more than a simple instance of narcissism in which the older German poet was flattered to see his work reflected in the younger Englishman’s imitation, although some hints of Goethe’s vanity do shimmer through. But far more than personal ego was at stake; the issues that would culminate in the memorializing of Byron in act 3 of Faust II went to the core of Goethe’s concerns with literature and history, with Classicism and Romanticism. In order to appreciate the impact of this extraordinary conjunction, it is necessary to step back and consider the larger contexts within which Goethe was discovering and celebrating Byron. One of the most baffling aspects of the German discussions, at least for those coming from English and other non-German literary histories, are the references to “Klassik, klassisch” within an era that is also known as Romantic. Any inclination to tidy matters up by discarding the apparently anomalous term is blocked by several factors. First, Germans have considerable justification in using the term “classical” in the sense of “canonical” as a label for the totality of literary production of Goethe and Schiller during their Weimar years, much as one might speak of the “Golden Age” of Spanish or of Russian literature. Every national literary system establishes such 25 periods for the purposes of ordering and selecting. It is this sense of the word that was meant by Goethe in his essay “Literarischer Sansculottismus” (“Literary Radicalism,” 1795) when he asserted “daß kein deutscher Autor sich selbst für klassisch hält” (no German author considers himself to be 26 classic). Lacking both a national capital and a national audience, German writers were further hampered by the absence of noteworthy national achievements, all of which together were preconditions for the production of enduring classical works: Wann und wo entsteht ein klasisscher Nationalautor? Wenn er in der Geschichte seiner Nation große Begebenheiten und ihre Folgen in einer glücklichen und bedeutenden Einheit vorfindet; wenn er in den Gesinnungen seiner Landsleute Größe, in ihren Empfindung Tiefe und in ihren Handlungen Stärke und Konsequenz nicht vermißt; wenn er selbst, vom Nationalgeiste durchdrungen, durch ein einwohnendes Genie sich fähig fühlt, mit dem Vergangnen wie mit dem Gegenwärtigen zu sympathisieren; wenn er seine Nation auf einem hohen Grade der 27 Kultur findet, so daß ihm seine Bildung leicht wird [. . .].

Measured by these criteria, Goethe would certainly have declined any suggestion that he himself had earned the distinction of being a classic German writer. Neither he nor any of his contemporaries could lay claim to such a status because the external preconditions did not exist. The touchstone for determining whether a national literature had succeeded in earning the right to claim a classical achievement had always been whether or not the literature had produced a masterly epic. As Goethe knew only too well from

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observation and from personal effort, there was no German epic that could bear comparison with Homer, Virgil, or Dante. The term classic also was and is used to refer to those works by Goethe and Schiller in which they consciously attempted to imitate the style of ancient Greek and Latin, that is, classical, writers. Examples would be 28 Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1787) and Schiller’s 29 elegy “Der Spaziergang” (The Walk, 1795). Such efforts were characterized by the emphasis on strict adherence to the normative poetics of Greek and Latin literature, insofar as they could be translated or rendered into German, including rhythm, plot structure, and themes. These efforts were supported by an extensive cultural program that included an intensified study of Greek, in addition to the Latin that was still fairly routine; the translation of classical texts, as with the successful translation of Homer by Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826); an increased tolerance for allusions to non-Christian mythology; and attempts to imitate classical theater in performance. Centered as it was in the relatively small space of Weimar, this cultural program gave rise to self-perceptions of the duchy as a sort of Ath30 ens on the Ilm, Classical Weimar. These two uses of classical do obviously identify differences in style and intention with the Storm and Stress, particularly when contrasted with the latter’s agenda of disrupting all forms, negating the unities of time, place, and action in drama, rebelling against normative aesthetics, and stressing 31 immediate affects over enduring values. However, there are considerable difficulties once one attempts to classify individual authors as to whether or not they should be considered as part of German Classicism. For example, based on reasons that are ultimately not defensible, neither Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), nor Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), nor Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), are traditionally grouped with German Classicism. And whatever coherence the organization might have is seriously challenged by the presence of Goethe’s own works, including Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96) and Faust, in the middle of everything. When one looks at the divergent histories of Goethe’s reputation in English and in German letters, it is striking that whereas the English Romantics were keen on the influence of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, their German counterparts honed in on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, a Bildungsroman that is far removed from the Gothic genre. To some extent, this difference resulted from the delays in translation and transmission and the filtering of German literature through the grid of the popular Gothic novel. Werther had been translated in 1779 from the French and was then translated again from German in 1786 and 1789; dramatized versions were 32 presented on the stage in 1785 including Covent Garden. Tellingly, when Coleridge was in Germany in 1798, Goethe for him was still “the author of

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the Sorrows of Werter.” “Wertherism” became synonymous in English 34 with morbid, melancholic Romanticism, an identification that still prevailed in 1833 when Thomas Carlyle linked Byron and Werther in his satirical work 35 Sartor Resartus. For the German Romantics, however, Werther belonged to the literature of their parents’ generation. The wave of shock and controversy that had marked the novel’s first appearance in 1774 had subsided by the mid 1780s. Goethe, dismayed by the misreadings of a text he had intended as a warning against excessive emotionalism, carefully revised the text, so that the 1786 version was less volatile as well as more sympathetic to the figure of Albert, Werther’s rival in love who marries Lotte and begins 36 a career as a dutiful civil servant. Not to be overlooked is also the simple fact that by 1790 Goethe was over forty, no longer a young rebel who could be readily, if wrongly, identified with the fictional character of Werther. In his dealings with poets and writers of the next generation, Goethe appeared to be an established author, one who actively counteracted what he saw as the excesses of religious en37 thusiasm. Goethe’s adamant rejection of enthusiastic tendencies (“Schwär38 merei”) was a fundamental component of his Enlightenment worldview. Any mysticism, especially when associated with Catholicism, could draw his most intense ire. One victim was the hapless Zacharias Werner (1768–1823), who committed the faux pas of reciting a sonnet at a gathering in Goethe’s home on New Year’s Eve in 1808 in which he compared a partial moon with a consecrated wafer. Goethe exploded in rage, Werner had to leave, and all 39 of Weimar was aghast. The intensity of Goethe’s antipathy to all varieties of irrational thought was matched by his watchfulness in detecting its influence, whether in behavior, philosophical theories, literary texts, or politics. This helps to explain Goethe’s negative reaction to those trends of German Romanticism, such as conversion to Catholicism and an overly strong reliance on the imagination, which he saw as anti-rational, self-destructive and 40 a threat to social order. Goethe’s ideological position, rather than personal animosity, underlies his critique of Heinrich von Kleist’s play Amphitryon (1807): “Das Stück enthält nichts Geringeres als eine Deutung der Fabel ins Christliche, in die Überschattung der Maria vom heiligen Geiste” (The piece contains nothing less than an interpreting of the story into a Christian con41 text, in the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Ghost.) A diary entry for the next day makes it clear that this was not a compliment: “über den neuen mystischen Amphitryon und dergleichen der Zeit” (on the new mystical 42 Amphitryon and similar stuff of the present times). Goethe was utterly opposed to what he called “die neukatholische Sentimentalität [. . .] das klosterbrudrisirende, sternbaldisirende Unwesen” (the neo-Catholic senti43 mentality [. . .] the monasticizing, Sternbalding mess) — in other words, to the aesthetic of what in English literature became known as Gothic and 44 that looked to German literature for inspiration.

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The discrepancy between German and English receptions of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is even more pronounced, with reversed polarities of appreciation. The novel was virtually unknown in England before Thomas 45 Carlyle’s translation in 1824. In his introduction, Carlyle stressed the edifying and philosophical qualities of the text, which tactic did not prevent 46 many English critics from deploring the novel’s immorality. For the history of German Romanticism, however, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre became an 47 apotheosis of a new Romantic genre. Friedrich Schlegel famously declared the novel to be one of the three greatest moments of the age, together with the French Revolution and Fichte’s epistemology (KFSA, 2: 198, no. 216). The sentiment was elaborated in Schlegel’s essay “Über Goethes Meister” (1798), an unexcelled rhapsody of misreading. Driven by the punning conviction that the novel, for which German uses the word “Roman,” is paradigmatic for a romantic era, Schlegel sees Wilhelm’s essence in “Streben, Wollen und Empfinden” (striving, wanting and sensing) and the world of the novel as a fantastic realm: “Alles ist hier seltsam, bedeutend, wundervoll und von geheimem Zauber umwebt.” (Everything here is rare, meaningful, wonderful and woven about with secret magic; KFSA, 2: 129–30). He stresses that the ultimate organic unity of both the main character and of the succeeding sections of the book override any awareness of incompleteness or gaps. Overwhelmed by the desire to make of Wilhelm Meister the work of art whose completion would attest to the triumph of a new poetic sensibility, of Romanticism, Schlegel missed the basic arguments Goethe was making. Not freedom but necessity, not imagination but educated reason, not accident but the occluded plan of hidden managers shape the world of the 48 novel. As Joachim Storck has noted, Novalis saw the case more clearly in charging: “Das Romantische geht darinn zu Grunde — auch die Naturpoësie, das Wunderbare.” (There the Romantic founders — as well as the 49 poetry of nature, that which is wonderful; NS, 3: 638, no. 505) Indeed, Goethe’s novel was not sympathetic to the free rein of imagination, least of 50 all to the unbridled fantasy of dreamy poets. The misreading of Goethe’s intentions by Friedrich Schlegel as well as by his brother August Wilhelm would have fateful consequences for the interpretation of the character of Faust as well as that of Wilhelm Meister. Stung by Goethe’s notorious statement, “Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke” (“That which is Classic I call healthy and the Romantic that which is sick”), later defenders of Romanti51 cism took refuge behind Faust. More precisely, they took the figure of Faust hostage: if he were the prototypical Romantic hero, striving endlessly to transcend the limits of body and society, then echoing Goethe’s comment would be tantamount to attacking German literature’s greatest character. Faust had to be a positive figure. How could anyone then take Goethe’s

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sentence at face value? However, there are several flaws in the defensive strategy. For one thing, it is impossible to overlook other occasions upon 52 which Goethe levelled the same critique against Romanticism. Second, recent research has shown with increasing certainty that Faust, as Goethe 53 had conceived the character, was literally ill, suffering from melancholy. Finally, the mere coincidences of publishing history, whereby Faust appeared in 1790 and then again in 1808, when German Romanticism was flourishing, should not blind us to the fact that Goethe had begun work on the project in the early 1770s, long before the aesthetics and poetics of Romanticism had become influential. What a consideration of Goethe’s original intentions entails is that for him Romantic was defined in opposition to classical antiquity, that it began in what we now call the medieval period and extended through the Renaissance into the late eighteenth century. Thus Faust was a representative of Romantic, but so were Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, and Shakespeare. The opening lines to Christoph Martin Wieland’s poem Oberon (1780) illustrate this terminological problem: Noch einmal sattelt mir den Hippogryphen, ihr Musen, Zum Ritt ins alte romantische Land! Wie lieblich um meinen entfesselten Busen 54 Der holde Wahnsinn spielt! The “old romantic land” was the realm depicted in Ludovico Ariosto’s (1474–1533) Orlando Furioso (1516–32), filled with errant knights, damsels in distress, sorcery and magic, and the other features associated by many people to this day with the Middle Ages. For Wieland, the word romantic was still inseparable from the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish) in which the relevant literary works — the romances — were written. However, romantic had also already become a label for a specific anti-classical poetics. Those who admired the witty combinatoric narratives of Ariosto and Cervantes welcomed the open-ended plots, the flexibility which permitted the insertion of digressions and subplots, the hybrid mingling of classical mythology with remnants of the Arthurian legends and with popular Christianity. Others were critical, faulting the vernacular literatures because they did not achieve the rigorous forms and narrative coherence associated with 55 the classical epic. One commonplace of the debate was the critique of Torquato Tasso (1544–95), whose difficulties in organizing and completing his epic Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581) were frequently 56 attributed to his own melancholic disposition. Wieland’s reference to the madness of the land of romance was ambivalent, since it referred both to the furor of Roland that initiated the story of Orlando Furioso and the mental instability of the poet Tasso. The degree to which Goethe was aware of all

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these issues and fascinated by them can be read in his own dramatization, Torquato Tasso, begun in 1780 and finally published in 1790. The dilemma of Tasso was not only the result of inner conflicts; it was also caused by systemic pressures exerted by the logic of the European epic 57 system. Nowhere else was the anxiety of influence expressed in the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, the sometimes heated debate about whether the classical or the modern writers should have primacy, more evident than in the question of whether the moderns could produce a great epic poem. Ever since Dante had declared the independence of Italian from Latin in his De 58 vulgari eloquentia (1303–5), the key measure by which national literatures and the qualities of national languages were judged was by the production of epics. As Goethe related in Dichtung und Wahrheit (Fiction and Truth, 1811–14, 1833), his autobiographical sketch of German literature, German writers were also troubled by the absence of a national epic that could com59 pete with Homer and Virgil. The deficiency was not due to lack of effort, 60 as Dieter Martin has shown in a definitive study. And at some point in the early 1770s, Goethe decided to use the legend of Faust as the basis for an epic that could withstand the competition. What made the Faust material particularly useful were a number of considerations: it had not been appropriated by anyone else, it was “German,” and it dealt with a fascinating, central dimension of Christian faith. The question of whether one could sell one’s soul, whether salvation was alienable, struck at the very core of the modern crisis of faith. Moreover, the legend as it had been transmitted provided an important opening for the reconciliation of the conflict between the classical and the romantic epic, for it told of an encounter between Faust and Helen of Troy. As Goethe would admit years later, this element was crucial for the conception of Faust. On 22 October 1826 he wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt: Erinnern Sie sich wohl noch mein Teuerster, einer dramatischen Helena, die im zweiten Teil von Faust erscheinen sollte? [. . .] Es ist eine meiner ältesten Konzeptionen, sie ruht auf der PuppenspielÜberlieferung, daß Faust den Mephistopheles genötigt, ihm die Helena zum Beilager heranzuschaffen. Ich habe von Zeit zu Zeit daran fortgearbeitet, aber abgeschlossen konnte das Stück nicht werden als in der Fülle der Zeiten, da es denn jetzt seine volle 3000 Jahre spielt, von 61 Trojas Untergang bis zur Einnahme von Missolunghi.

The embedding of the classical material inside the post-classical story of Faust provided Goethe with an opportunity to synthesize all components of the epic system, even if it meant that Helen could only appear as an artificial construct. However, the actual writing proved much more difficult than Goethe could have foreseen. Many external factors were quite mundane, such as the

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increasingly onerous administrative and social responsibilities in Weimar. Others were grander, such as the American Revolution, which drastically altered the historical context within which the European epic was con62 structed. Intellectually, Goethe had to absorb the explosion in scientific knowledge and to grapple with how to integrate the history of the scientific 63 revolution into an epic. By the 1780s Goethe felt stymied and resigned himself to publishing an uncompleted version as Faust: Ein Fragment in 1790. The involvement with the project might have ended there had it not been for the friendship with Schiller in the 1790s. Schiller encouraged Goethe to return to the Faust project and, more importantly, engaged Goethe in an extended discussion about the possibilities for writing a suc64 cessful epic in contemporary, modern times. After experimenting with the blatantly classical story of Achilles in his unfinished epic Achilleis (1798–99), which he quickly discovered could not be completed due to the paucity of the story, and with the moderately successful historical epic Hermann und Dorothea (1797), Goethe gradually became convinced that Faust could be completed. Decisive was the insight that the work had to be more than the biography of a hero, told through his adventures and experiences. Rather, what had to shape the epic was nothing less than the confrontation between the ancient and the modern, between the Classical and the Romantic, be65 tween Helena and Faust. Awareness of the theoretical and practical discussions that flourished at the end of the eighteenth century about the possibility of still writing a national epic is of help in deciding the question of whether Faust should be considered a Romantic work or not. Neil Flax has suggested, following Cyrus Hamlin, that a work written during the Romantic era might as well be considered to display typical Romantic characteristics, such as irony and 66 a concern with language. Stuart Atkins provided a more nuanced assessment, pointing out that it is important to distinguish what is depicted in the play from Goethe’s own position. According to Atkins, Faust might be read as a critique of key Romantic attitudes on subjectivism, primitivism, parochialism, utopianism, and supernaturalism and he concluded that “Faust is a 67 drama of anti-romanticism in a romantic form.” Making the issue even more complex is that Goethe did incorporate themes and images from the contemporary worldview of Romanticism into Faust II, but with the notable exception of a tribute to Byron in act 3, such allusions served to parody and undermine the Romantics rather than to support them. Goethe’s program becomes apparent when translated into a familiar cultural calculus. In this formulaic reduction of European history, the combination of the Classical plus the Medieval era should yield the Renaissance. Substituting terms from the system of epic, one could say that Homer and Virgil plus Dante should, as they did, lead to Ariosto and Tasso. The formula also corresponds to the structure of the first three acts of Faust II. The

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confrontation and intermingling between classical antiquity and medieval mysticism leads to a remarkable conjunction — literally and symbolically — 68 in act 3. Helena appears first, staged and speaking as though in a classical Greek tragedy. Then the scene shifts to a medieval castle, Faust’s abode, where Helena encounters Christianity and rhymed verse. Finally, in an Arcadian setting, a landscape which historically arose from the imposition of the pastoral landscapes from the Old Testament upon the idyllic landscapes derived from Theocritus and Virgil, the union of Helena and Faust brings forth their son Euphorion, who has elements of both the Classical and the Medieval, but goes beyond them both. However, Euphorion does not survive long, signalling that the synthesis is not viable. The resemblance of the scene’s triadic structure to Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic has 69 led some critics to discern a similar dialectic synthesis in this scene, but that was foreign to Goethe’s thinking, which operated with morphological models. Goethe continually sought and presented the constant underlying structure, even when it was actualized in different versions. Thus, Helena is subtly different in each of the scenes, but is still recognizable as one identity. Faust remains Faust, but when joined with Helena is also a replication of other husbands, including Theseus, Menelaus, and Achilles, attributed to her by various versions of the myths. This game of resemblances and differences enabled Goethe to incorporate an extraordinary tribute to Byron in act 3 by connecting him with the figure of Euphorion. Lest anyone miss the allusion, Goethe made it explicit to Eckermann: ‘Ich konnte als Repräsentanten der neuesten poetischen Zeit,’ sagte Goethe, ‘niemanden gebrauchen als ihn, der ohne Frage als das größte Talent des Jahrhunderts anzusehen ist. Und dann, Byron ist nicht antik und ist nicht romantisch, sondern er ist wie der gegenwärtige Tag selbst. Einen solchen mußte ich haben. Auch paßte er übrigens ganz wegen seines unbefriedigten Naturells und seiner kriegerischen Ten70 denz, woran er in Missolunghi zugrunde ging.’

Goethe’s inscribing of Byron into Faust was more than just a noble gesture to a poet he admired greatly, whose career he had followed closely, and whose works he knew intimately. Byron could, had to be, represented because he alone had succeeded where all the modern writers, including Goethe, had failed. It was Byron who had met the challenge and produced a successful epic in Don Juan (1819–24). When Goethe received the first two cantos on 6 December 1819, he read them immediately. And in 1821 he published an attempt at translating some stanzas, with an accompanying commentary:

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Don Juan ist ein gränzenlos-geniales Werk, menschenfeindlich bis zur herbsten Grausamkeit, menschenfreundlich in die Tiefen süßester Neigung sich versenkend; und da wir den Verfasser nun einmal kennen und schätzen, ihn auch nicht anders wollen als er ist, so genießen wir dankbar, was er uns mit übermäßiger Freiheit, ja mit Frechheit vorzuführen wagt. Dem wunderlichen, wilden schonungslosen Inhalt ist auch die technische Behandlung der Verse ganz gemäß, der Dichter schont die Sprache so wenig als die Menschen, und wie wir näher hinzutreten, so sehen wir freilich, daß die englische Poesie schon eine gebildete 71 komische Sprache hat, welcher wir Deutschen ganz ermangeln.

Except for the final bit about language, the passage as a whole could be read as though it were Goethe reviewing Faust, and there is little doubt that he saw his ideal image of himself in Byron. To be neither classic nor romantic, to be the representative poet of the age who was able to expand the boundaries of the European epic system had been Goethe’s aspiration, and it must have taken considerable humility to award the laurels to someone else. However, there was a bizarre consolation in the fact that Byron’s wildness had contributed to his early death. Not content with salvaging the classical heritage of Greece in his poetry, Byron had undertaken to struggle for contemporary Greek independence, losing his life at age thirty-six. Goethe could not forbear a criticism, hinting that in this respect Byron too was susceptible to the unbalanced attitude of moderns. The tragedy at Missolonghi was a death for poetry, and the occasion for another indictment by Goethe of Romanticism. After the symbolic death of Euphorion, and the actual death of Byron on his ill-fated bid to liberate Greece and thus restore a semblance of her past glory, history takes an ominous course. In poetic terms, Byron’s resurrection of Renaissance epic was both anomalous and anachronistic. His contemporaries would not be able to continue developing the epic as a genre, but would instead retreat into pseudo-medieval epics such as Corona (1814) by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843). When Fouqué sent 72 him a copy, Goethe did not even acknowledge having received it. The regression to an imagined medieval world is reflected in act 4 of Faust II, which does not move forward chronologically as the audience might expect but shifts back in time. As Jane Brown has observed, the astonishing signal of the shift to the realm of German fairy tales is the stage direction requiring two seven-league boots which bring Mephistopheles and then are supposed 73 to march off on their own. Faust and the audience have entered the unreal world of German Romanticism, one that will be controlled by irrationalism, excesses of the imagination, and limitless striving for unattainable goals, all represented by senseless civil war. With the last act Goethe brought to a close the campaign against the aesthetics of German Romanticism that he had waged with ever more determination. The opening leaves no doubt as to Goethe’s conviction that

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Romanticism posed a mortal danger to the ideals of German Classicism. Faust, obsessed with stargazing and indifferent to the real world around him, causes the destruction of a remaining fragment of the classical world, the idyllic space of Philemon and Baucis. Seizing upon a lapse in Faust’s instructions, Mephistopheles sets fire to the grove; the elderly couple also perishes. Those with keener vision, the watchman Lynkeus and the play’s audience, look on in vain as the heritage of millennia is engulfed in flames. The irony is that, even as the past is being destroyed, Faust, now a full-fledged embodiment of what has come to be known as the “Byronic hero,” does not grasp the direction of his own destiny. Consistent with the Romantic historical philosophy, which envisaged unlimited evolution that would release human potential, Faust has embarked on a vast project to reclaim land from the sea. Only those with a memory of history strong enough to be able to span the arch from Troy to Missolonghi will detect that Faust’s project has an antecedent in the construction of Troy’s walls. Faust believes he is building for the future, but actually he has only come full circle to the beginning of European history, to a moment before the Trojan War, before the events that would become the stuff of Homer’s epic. Without a grasp of the underlying forms of life and of history such as those transmitted by the Classical world, the Romantic consciousness does not see the universe clearly. Such, at least, is one lesson to be drawn from Faust. Those wanting to claim Faust as a masterpiece of Romanticism have generally built their strongest case around the closing scenes and their apparent 74 celebration of the qualities associated with the Byronic hero. It is easier to say what happens than why. Faust’s life comes to an end, but rather than losing his wager and thus his soul to Mephistopheles, he is saved by an intervention from above. Faust’s last words could possibly be heard as a ringing triumph: Ja, diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluß: Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, Der täglich sie erobern muß. Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr, Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr. Solch ein Gewimmel möcht ich sehn, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn. Zum Augenblicke dürft’ ich sagen: Verweile doch, Du bist so schön! Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen Nicht in Äonen untergehn. — Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück Genieß’ ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick. 75 (HA, 3: 348; 11, 573–11, 586)

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The rhetoric is as grand and defiant as that of Byron’s Manfred. However, Goethe does not let the action end here. Mephistopheles immediately deflates the mood with one of his usual sardonic observations. Nor can the words paper over some hard facts. Faust has died without seeing his project completed. As Konrad Burdach pointed out many years ago, the conclusion of Faust is rife with allusions to Moses, who also glimpsed but was not to 76 enter the Promised Land. Even before he dies, Faust in his blindness does not know that the lemurs are digging his grave rather than concentrating on the reclamation project. This dramatic irony highlights the limitations of Faust’s knowledge. The gap between what he wanted to know and what he should have wanted to know is what makes Faust a tragedy. He is a man who dies without ever understanding the full meaning of his life. The theater audience sees from the outset that all of Faust’s adventures and misfortunes come about as a result of the contest between God and Mephistopheles. Any devout Christian should be able to remember that every single soul is the field for such a trial between good and evil. But Faust, still afflicted with the defective memory symptomatic of the melancholic, forgets his place in the divine 77 order and in the history of salvation. At the very moment of his death he persists in believing that life must be earned, when in truth it has already 78 been given through grace. The debates about whether or not Goethe was a Romantic, about Faust’s position in the canon of European Romanticism, will no doubt continue. Nor could Goethe have prevented future generations from appropriating him to their own views according to their own perspectives, as he fully realized and accepted. At some level Goethe had to be as much a part of the historical era in which he lived as any of his contemporaries. The two great political revolutions, the American in 1776 and the French in 1789, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, accelerating progress in discovering the laws of nature, the terrifying spread of secularization: these forces and others inexorably shaped Goethe’s aspirations and accomplishments. But unlike Faust, Goethe had the wit to realize and the wisdom to accept what was inevitable.

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Notes 1

Excellent surveys of the ways in which Romantic was used in the respective national literary systems are the contributions by Raymond Immerwahr, “‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates in England, Germany, and France before 1790,” 17–97; Hans Eichner, “Germany / Romantisch — Romantik — Romantiker,” 98–156; and George Whalley, “England / Romantic — Romanticism,” 157–262, all in ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto & Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1972. See also the succinct discussions by René Wellek, “German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation,” in his Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965), 3–33; and Wilfried Malsch, “Klassizismus, Klassik und Romantik der Goethezeit,” Deutsche Literatur zur Zeit der Klassik, ed. Karl Otto Conrady (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1977), 381–408. On the difficulties of determining where English Romanticism begins and ends, see Susan J. Wolfson, “Our Puny Boundaries: Why the Craving for Carving Up the Nineteenth Century?” PMLA 116.5 (2001): 1432–41. 2

See Robert C. Holub, “The Romanticizing of Goethe: A Study in the Acquisition of a Label,” English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, ed. James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985), 349–361. A brief overview of the positions is provided by Kathleen Harris, “Goethe and Classicism,” Approaches to Teaching Goethe’s Faust, ed. Douglas J. McMillan, with Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1987), 33–39. Goethe as a Romantic is an established commonplace in Anglo-American criticism. Thus M. H. Abrams discusses Schiller, Hölderlin, Goethe, and Novalis in a chapter of his influential Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Richard Garber has a chapter that brings together Hyperion, Götz, Moor, Werther, and Manfred in The Anatomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 150–173; Ian Watt deals with Faust under “Romantic Apotheosis of Renaissance Myths” in Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 193–207, to cite just three examples. 3

For overviews on the values of and controversies surrounding this term in German literary history, see Malsch, “Klassizismus, Klassik und Romantik der Goethezeit”; Max L. Baeumer, “Der Begriff ‘klassisch’ bei Goethe und Schiller,” Die KlassikLegende: Second Wisconsin Workshop, 1970, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1971), 17–49; Wilhelm Voßkamp, “Klassik als Epoche: Model und Funktion der Weimarer Klassik,” Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 134–51; and Hans-Georg Werner, Literarische Strategien: Studien zur deutschen Literatur 1760 bis 1840 (Stuttgart & Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1993), 115–28. 4

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1994), 155– 56 (Book I, Chapter 7). The editors note that Werther “had a special resonance for Shelley: her father had described her mother as ‘a female Werter’ [sic] because of her

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sensibility, her letters to her first lover, and her suicide attempts after he abandoned her” (26). See also Roswitha Burwick, “Goethe’s Werther and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” The Wordsworth Circle 24.1 (1993): 47–52; and Syndy McMillen Conger, “The Sorrows of Young Charlotte: Werther’s English Sisters 1785–1805,” Goethe Yearbook 3 (1986): 21–56. 5 Evelyn B. Jolles, G. A. Bürgers Ballade Lenore in England (Regensburg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1974). 6

On Kotzebue’s reception on the English stage, see L. F. Thompson, Kotzebue: A Survey of his Progress in France and England, Preceded by a Consideration of the Critical Attitude to him in Germany (Paris: Champion, 1928); and Douglas Milburn, Jr., “The Popular Reaction to German Drama in England at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Rice University Studies 55.3 (Summer 1969): 149–62. Another oddity of his reputation is due to the fact that Elizabeth Inchbald’s translation of Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe as Lovers’ Vows (1798) plays an important role in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. See Elaine Jordan, “Pulpit, Stage, and Novel: Mansfield Park and Mrs. Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction (1986–87): 138– 47; and Syndy McMillen Conger, “Reading Lovers’ Vows: Jane Austen’s Reflections on English Sense and German Sensibility,” Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 92–113. 7 On Coleridge’s reception of Goethe, see F. W. Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period 1788–1818: With Special Reference to Scott, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron (1926; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 89–143; Rosemary Ashton, “Coleridge and Faust,” Review of English Studies NS 28 (1977): 156–67, and her The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 56–66. 8 Quoted by Roxana M. Klapper, The German Literary Influence on Byron (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974), 59, from Monthly Review 62 (1810): 492. 9

On Robinson, see the two studies by Diana J. Behler, “Henry Crabb Robinson as a Mediator of Early German Romanticism in England,” Arcadia 12 (1977): 117–55; and “Henry Crabb Robinson and Weimar,” A Reassessment of Weimar Classicism, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 157–80; as well as Gregory Maertz, “Henry Crabb Robinson’s 1802–1803 Translations of Goethe’s Lyric Poems and Epigrams,” Michigan Germanic Studies 19.1 (1993): 18–45. The role of M. G. Lewis as an intermediary is the subject of Karl S. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik und deutscher Sturm und Drang: M. G. Lewis’ Stellung in der Geschichte der deutschenglischen Literaturbeziehungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958). 10 Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 114–16. Matthew Arnold observed scathingly in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” that “surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is [. . .] was that he should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.” Arnold, The Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1966–77), 3: 262. Geoffrey H. Hartman’s “Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History,” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 393–413, reprinted in his The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 58–74, 229–230, offers illuminating insights into parallels between the two, without claiming any direct influences. There is room for more

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research, for example into Wordsworth’s “Strange fits of passion have I known” as a rewriting of Goethe’s “Willkommen und Abschied.” 11

On Shelley and Goethe, see Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 144–58; Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 142–203. 12 Leland R. Phelps, “Goethe’s Faust and the Young Shelley,” Wege der Worte: Festschrift für Wolfgang Fleischhauer, ed. Donald C. Riechel (Cologne & Vienna: Böhlau, 1978), 304–312, here 311. 13 14 15

Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 151–53. Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, 152–13. Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, 152.

16

The “Walpurgisnacht’ was published in 1822 in Leigh Hunt’s The Liberal 1 (1822): 121–38; the “Prologue in Heaven” appeared in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems (1824). On Shelley’s translations, in addition to Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, 174–203, and Phelps, “Goethe’s Faust and the Young Shelley,” see Robert C. Casto, “Shelley as Translator of Faust: The ‘Prologue,’” Review of English Studies NS 26 (1975): 407–24. 17

On Byron’s relationship to German literature, which is primarily a question of his relationship to Goethe, see Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 159–74; A. Brandl, “Goethes Verhältnis zu Byron,” Goethe-Jahrbuch 20 (1899): 3– 37; J. G. Robertson, “Goethe and Byron,” Publications of the English Goethe Society NS 2 (1925): 1–132; E. M. Butler, Byron and Goethe: Analysis of a Passion (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1956); Klapper, The German Literary Influence on Byron; and the editorial commentaries to the individual works in Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–93). 18 19

Butler, Byron and Goethe, 19–20. Cited by Butler, Byron and Goethe, 35.

20

Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 163–64; Ulrich Wesche, “Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred: The Curious Transformation of a Motif,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 50.3 (1976): 286–90, here 289.

21

Quoted by Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 164. On the divergent opinions about the degree of similarity and for a detailed comparison, see Klapper, The German Literary Influence on Byron 63–86. Alan Richardson’s chapter on Manfred in A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park, PA & London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1988), 43–58, operates with generalized notions of the Faust theme. 22

23

Quoted by Klapper, The German Literary Influence on Byron 63. Letter to Knebel on 13 October 1817. “The most amazing event for me was the appearance a day or two ago of Byron’s Manfred [. . .]. This strange and gifted poet has completely assimilated my Faust and derived the strangest nourishment from it for his hypochondria. He has used all the motifs in his own way, so that none remains quite the same, and for that reason alone I cannot sufficiently admire his mind. The remodeling is so complete that very interesting lectures could be given about it, as well as about the similarity with the original and the dissimilarity from it; although 24

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I certainly do not deny that the somber glow of an unlimited, abounding despair becomes tedious in the end. Yet the displeasure felt on this account is always mixed with admiration.” Translated by Butler, Byron and Goethe 33. 25

On the functions of canonical works in literary systems, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1993). 26

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), 12: 240. “Hamburger Ausgabe”; cited as HA, with volume and page numbers. 27

HA, 12: 240–241. “When and how does a classical national author come into being? When he finds in the history of his country great events and their consequences in a fortuitous and significant unity; when he does not look in vain in the attitudes of his countrymen for greatness, in their sensibility for depth and in their actions for strength and consistency; when he himself, with national spirit, enabled by an inner genius, feels able to sympathize with the past as with the present; when he finds his country on a high level of culture, so that his self-cultivation comes easily to him [. . .].” The requirements listed by Goethe are typical in the discussion on what makes for a successful national epic poet. 28 The designation of “classic” was of course open to the sort of debate surveyed by Irmgard Wagner, Critical Approaches to Goethe’s Classical Dramas: Iphigenie, Torquato Tasso, and Die natürliche Tochter (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995). For a radical critique of the politics involved, see Klaus L. Berghahn, Schiller: Ansichten eines Idealisten (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1986), “Von Weimar nach Versailles: Zur Entstehung der Klassiklegende,” 201–22. 29 On the classical form and content of the elegy, see Theodore Ziolkowski, The Classical German Elegy 1795–1950 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980). 30

Entry points into the extensive literature are Ilse-Marie Barth, Literarisches Weimar: Kultur / Literatur / Sozialstruktur im 16.-20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1971); Gert Ueding, Klassik und Romantik: Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789–1815. Erster bis Vierter Teil (Munich / Vienna: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 65–97, 820–23; and Dieter Borchmeyer, Weimarer Klassik: Portrait einer Epoche (Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1994). Still readable and reliable is W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775–1806 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962), translated into German as Kultur und Gesellschaft im klassischen Weimar 1775–1806 (Göttingen, 1966). 31

See Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1953). 32 Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 20; Catherine Waltraud Proescholdt-Obermann, Goethe and his British Critics: The Reception of Goethe’s Works in British Periodicals, 1779 to 1855 (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1992), 62–67, 83–88. 33

Quoted by Ashton, The German Idea, 32 from Coleridge’s letter of 26 October 1798 letter to Poole. 34 See Steven P. Sondrup, “Wertherism and Die Leiden des jungen Werther,” European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990), 163–79. Jane K. Brown analyzes Werther

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as a prototype for later Romantic narratives in “‘Es singen wohl die Nixen’: Werther and the Romantic Tale,” Rereading Romanticism, ed. Martha B. Helfer (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 11–25. 35

Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1971), 251–252. 36 On the impact of the novel and on Goethe’s remedies, see Georg Jäger, “Die Wertherwirkung: Ein rezeptions-ästhetischer Modelfall,” Historizität in Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft: Vorträge und Berichte der Stuttgarter Germanistentagung, 1972, ed. Walter Müller-Seidel, with H. Fromm and K. Richter (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1974), 389–409; and Wolfgang Bunzel, “Rück-Wirkung: Goethes literarische Reaktionen auf die Rezeption seines Romans Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,” Spuren, Signaturen, Spiegelungen: Zur Goethe-Rezeption in Europa, ed. Bernhard Beutler and Anke Bosse (Cologne & Weimar: Böhlau, 2000), 129–67. 37

Still useful as overviews of Goethe’s relationships with the younger generation are the introductions by Carl Schüddekopf and Oskar Walzel to Goethe und die Romantik: Briefe mit Erläuterungen. 1. Theil (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1898), v–xciii; and Goethe und die Romantik: Briefe mit Erläuterungen. 2. Theil (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1899), v–li; and Hans Röhl, Die ältere Romantik und die Kunst des jungen Goethe (1909; rpt. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1978). Also informative on the generational conflicts is Johannes Weber, Goethe und die Jungen: Über die Grenzen der Poesie und vom Vorrang des wirklichen Lebens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989). From the other perspective, on the Romantics’ response to Weimar, see Dennis F. Mahoney, “The Channeling of a Literary Revolution: Goethe, Schiller, and the Genesis of German Romanticism,” A Reassessment of Weimar Classicism, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 117– 31; and Herbert Uerlings, “Novalis und die Weimarer Klassik,” Aurora 50 (1990): 27–46. 38

On the connotations and implications of “enthusiasm” in the eighteenth century, see Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1998; also published as Huntington Library Quarterly 60.1–2). Particularly informative for the German context is Anthony J. La Vopa’s contribution, “The Philosopher and the Schwärmer: On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant,” 85–116. 39

Weber, Goethe und die Jungen, 66–67.

40

Weber, Goethe und die Jungen, 48–75. From a conversation on 14 July 1807 as recorded by Riemer; quoted by Katharina Mommsen, Kleists Kampf mit Goethe (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 24. 41

42

Entry of 15 July 1807, quoted by Mommsen, Kleists Kampf mit Goethe 24. Similar undertones can be heard in the remarks about Novalis reported by Johannes Falk: “Ja, wovon sprachen wir doch gleich? Ha, von Imperatoren! Gut! Novalis war noch keiner; aber mit der Zeit hätte er auch einer werden können. Schade nur, daß er jung gestorben ist, da er noch außerdem seiner Zeit den Gefallen gethan und katholisch geworden ist.” (Yes, what were we talking about? Ha, about imperators! Good! Novalis was not one yet, but in time he could have become one. Too bad, that he

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died young, especially since he did his era the favor of becoming a Catholic.) Quoted by Wm. Arctander O’Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham, NC / London: Duke UP, 1995) 319–320. One zenith of Goethe’s aversion to such conversions came in the case of Friedrich Schlegel; see Josef Körner, Romantiker und Klassiker: Die Brüder Schlegel in ihren Beziehunen zu Schiller und Goethe (1924; rpt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 166–221. 43 Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1897), 1.48: 122. The phrase is difficult to render into English because of the satirical neologisms. “Klosterbrudrisirend,” something like “monasticizing,” alludes to Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Gushings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk, 1796). “Sterbaldisirend,” i.e. “Sternbalding,” refers to Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald, 1798). Goethe blamed the two novels for contributing to the vogue for Romantic mysticism. For a reconsideration of the details of the case, see Dirk Kemper, “Goethe, Wackenroder und das ‘klosterbrudrisirende, sternbaldisirende Unwesen,’” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1993): 148–68; see also the essay by Richard Littlejohns in this volume. 44

A detailed account of Goethe’s increasingly scathing campaign is provided by Frank Büttner, “Der Streit um die ‘neudeutsche religios-patriotische Kunst,’” Aurora 43 (1983): 55–76. 45

On Carlyle’s reception of German literature and of Goethe, see Charles Frederick Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 (1934; rpt. Hamden, CT & London: Archon Books, 1963); and Elizabeth M. Vida, Romantic Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle (Toronto & Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1993). 46

Proescholdt-Obermann, Goethe and His British Critics 168–73; Harold Jantz, “Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister: Image, Configuration, and Meaning,” Studien zur Goethezeit: Erich Trunz zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl and Eberhard Mannack (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981), 105. 47

See Clemens Heselhaus, “Die Wilhelm-Meister-Kritik der Romantiker und die romantische Romantheorie,” Nachahmung und Illusion: Kolloquium Giessen Juni 1963: Vorlagen und Verhandlungen, ed. Hans Robert Jauss (Munich: Fink, 1969), 113–27; Ernst Behler, “Die Wirkung Goethes und Schillers auf die Brüder Schlegel,” Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Wilfried Barner, Eberhard Lämmert and Norbert Oellers (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1984), 559–83; Eric A Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1983), 21–37; and Jürgen H. Petersen, “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre — ein ‘romantisches Buch,’” Rereading Romanticism, ed. Martha B. Helfer (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 389–406. For the complementary case of the German Romantics’ reception of Egmont, see Hartmut Reinhardt, “‘. . . jene tiefere, echt romantische Tendenz’: Goethes Egmont und seine Rezeption bei den Romantikern,” Schnittpunkt Romantik: Text- und Quellenstudien zur Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts: Festschrift für Sibylle von Steinsdorff, ed. Wolfgang Bunzel, Konrad Feilchenfeldt, and Walter Schmitz (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997), 1–22. 48

On the inherent conservative logic of the Bildungsroman and of Wilhelm Meister, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

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(London: Verso, 1987), 15–73. The extensive intertextual network behind the novel has finally been revealed by Rainer Kawa, Wilhelm Meister und die Seinigen: Studien zu Metamorphose und Spiegelung beim Figurenensemble der ‘Lehrjahre’ von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Bucha bei Jena: quartus-Verlag, 2000). 49 Joachim W. Storck, “Das Ideal der klassischen Gesellschaft in ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,’” Versuche zu Goethe: Festschrift für Erich Heller zum 65. Geburtstag am 27.3.1976, ed. Volker Dürr and Géza von Molnár (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1976), 212–34, here 227. Goethe’s attitudes to Novalis were presented exhaustively by Hans-Joachim Mähl, “Goethes Urteil über Novalis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Kritik an der deutschen Romantik,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1967): 130–270. 50 Friedrich Strack has argued that in the novel Goethe was parodying and attacking the more extreme sentimentality of Pietism, which would be consistent with his overall objections to religious enthusiasm. See “Selbst-Erfahrung oder SelbstEntsagung? Goethes Deutung und Kritik des Pietismus in ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,’” Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 52–73. 51 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1948), on 4 April 1829 (332). Goethe continued, making clear what he meant: “Und da sind die Nibelungen klassisch wie der Homer, denn beide sind gesund und tüchtig. Das meiste Neuere ist nicht romantisch, weil es neu, sondern weil es schwach, kränklich und krank ist, und das Alte ist nicht klassisch, weil es alt, sondern weil es stark, frisch, froh und gesund ist. Wenn wir nach solchen Qualitäten Klassisches und Romantisches unterscheiden, so werden wir bald im reinen sein.” (“And hence the Nibelungen are classical as Homer, for both are sound and virtuous. Most of what is new is not romantic because it is new, but rather because it is weak, ill and sick, and that which is old is not classical, because it is old, but rather because it is strong, fresh, joyful and healthy. If we distinguish Classic and Romantic according to such qualities, then we will soon have things sorted out.”) 52

Erich Jenisch, “‘Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke’: Goethes Kritik der Romantik,” Goethe: Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der GoetheGesellschaft 19 (1957): 50–79. Jenisch’s discussion is important because he takes the medical metaphors seriously and situates the analogies in Goethe’s scientific worldview. Worth noting is that the translation of “gesund” as “healthy” loses the connotation of “sound, hale” still heard in the German and necessary for the overlap between the medical and the aesthetic discourses. 53

The breakthrough to the diagnosis came with Leonard Forster’s “Faust and the Sin of Sloth, Mephistopheles and the Sin of Pride,” The Discontinuous Tradition: Studies in German Literature of Ernest Ludwig Stahl, ed. P. F. Ganz (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 54–66, also in German as “Faust und die acedia: Mephisto und die superbia,” Dichtung, Sprache, Gesellschaft: Akten des IV. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses 1970 in Princeton, ed. Victor Lange and Hans-Gert Roloff (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1971), 307–19. It has been extended by Ferdinand van Ingen, “Faust — homo melancholicus,” Wissen aus Erfahrungen: Werkbegriff und Interpretation heute: Festschrift für Herman Meyer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Alexander von Bormann

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(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976), 256–281; and Jochen Schmidt, “Faust als Melancholiker und Melancholie als strukturbildendes Element bis zum Teufelspakt,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 41 (1997): 125–39. Important complements are Bernhard Buschendorf, Goethes mythische Denkform: Zur Ikonokgraphie der ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’ (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 127–67; and K. F. Hilliard, “Goethe and the Cure for Melancholy: ‘Mahomets Gesang,’ Orientalism and the Medical Psychology of the 18th Century,” Oxford German Studies 23 (1994): 71–103. 54

Christoph Martin Wieland, Werke, ed. Fritz Martini and Hans Werner Seiffert (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1968), 5: 165. “Once again saddle my Hippogryph, you Muses, / For a ride into the old romantic realm! / How delightfully around my unshackled breast / Disports enchanting madness!” The Hippogryph was a winged steed with griffin’s head, chest and feathers, invented by Ariosto in Orlando Furioso. As a fantasy creature, the Hippogryph became a touchstone in the debates on whether or not the marvellous had a place in epic. For a further discussion of the connections between “romantic” and medieval romances, see the essay by Gerhard Schulz in this volume. 55

Recent innovative scholarship has confirmed earlier perceptions of the poetics of romance epics. The secondary literature is too extensive to be reviewed here, but entry points are Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 16–53; and Patrick J. Cook, “The Epic Chronotope from Ariosto to Spenser,” Annali d’italianistica 12 (1994): 115–41. For the earlier German reception, see Horst Rüdiger, “Ariost in der deutschen Literatur,” Studien über Petrarca, Boccaccio und Ariost in der deutschen Literatur, Horst Rüdiger and Willi Hirdt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1976), 56–84. 56

The blending of Tasso’s biography — the struggle with melancholy — with his poetic theories — the struggle for an adequate epic form — made him a strong candidate for the role of the modern, the Romantic poet: Maria Moog-Grünewald, “Tassos Leid: Zum Ursprung moderner Dichtung,” Arcadia 21 (1986): 113–32; Klaus Ley, “‘sii grand’uomo e sii infelice’: Zur Umwertung des Tasso-Bildes am Beginn des ottocento: Vorraussetzungen und Hintergründe im europäischen Rahmen (La Harpe / Gilbert — Goethe — Foscolo),” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift NS 46.2 (1996): 131–73; Albert Meier, “‘Und so ward sein Leben selbst Roman und Poesie’: Tasso-Biographien in Deutschland,” Torquato Tasso in Deutschland: Seine Wirkung in Literatur, Kunst und Musik seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Achim Aurnhammer (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 11–32. 57

Out of the vast secondary literature, the following are useful introductions to the network of European epic: A. J. Boyle, ed., Roman Epic (London & New York: Routledge, 1993); Robert M. Durling, “The Epic Ideal,” Literature and Western Civilization, vol. 3: The Old World: Discovery and Rebirth, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus Books, 1974), 105–46; David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993); Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1992); and E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and its Background (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954).

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58

Marianne Shapiro, De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P, 1990). 59

HA, 9: 262–265; 272; 279–282. Dieter Martin, Das deutsche Versepos im 18. Jahrhundert: Studien und kommentierte Gattungsbibliographie (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 1993). 60

61

Letter of 22 October 1826 to Humboldt. Goethes Briefe: Hamburger Ausgabe in 4 Bänden, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow (Hamburg: Wegner, 1967), 4: 207. “Do you still recall, dearest friend, a dramatic Helena, who is supposed to appear in the second part of Faust? [. . .] It is one of my oldest concepts, based upon the tradition of the puppet play that Faust requires Mephistopheles to fetch Helena for his wedding. I continued working on it now and then, but the piece could only be completed in the fullness of time, since it now plays its entire three thousand years, from the fall of Troy to the capture of Missolonghi.” 62

The trajectory of epic had been mapped on to European colonial expansion; cf. Quint, Epic and Empire. Logically, Faust should have gone to America, following the direction indicated by the numerous Columbiads. Only traces remain that Goethe had realized this, notably the poem “Amerika, du hast es besser,” which suggests that the New World was not a realm for either classical or romantic narratives. 63

On the development of the encyclopedic imperative for the epic, see Eberhard Müller-Bochat, “Die Einheit des Wissens und das Epos: Zur Geschichte eines utopischen Gattungsbegriffs,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 17 (1966): 58–81. A vivid reminder that the imperative was on the minds of eighteenth-century poets is found in a letter from Coleridge to Joseph Cottle, April 1797: “I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine — then the mind of man — then the minds of men — in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories.” Quoted by Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1975), 3. 64 See E. L. Stahl, “Schiller and the Composition of Goethe’s Faust,” Germanic Review 34 (1959): 185–99; Wolfgang Schadewaldt, “Fausts Ende und die Achilleis,” Weltbewohner und Weimaraner: Ernst Beutler zugedacht 1960, ed. Benno Reifenberg and Emil Staiger (Zurich & Stuttgart: Artemis, 1960); Richard Littlejohns, “The Discussion between Goethe and Schiller on the Epic and Dramatic and its Relevance to Faust,” Neophilologus 71 (1987): 388–401; and Elke Dreisbach, Goethes “Achilleis” (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994), 10–38. 65 The genesis of the text indicates that Goethe had made substantial progress on the Helena scene by 1800, before working on the other scenes of Faust II. On the textual history, see Ernst Grumach, “Aus den Vorarbeiten zu den Helenaszenen,” Goethe: Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der Goethe-Gesellschaft 20 (1958): 45–71. See also Werner Keller, “Der klassische Goethe und sein nicht-klassischer Faust,” Goethe Jahrbuch 95 (1978): 9–28.

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66

Neil M. Flax, “Goethe and Romanticism,” Approaches to Teaching Goethe’s Faust, ed. Douglas J. McMillan, with Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1987), 40–47. 67 Stuart Atkins, “The Evaluation of Romanticism in Goethe’s Faust,” in Atkins, Essays on Goethe, ed. Jane K. Brown and Thomas P. Saine (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), 293–321, here 321. The essay first appeared in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 54 (1955): 9–38. A balanced assessment is that of Benjamin Bennett, “The Classical, the Romantic, and the Tragic in Part Two of Goethe’s Faust,” Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980): 529–50. 68

Act 3 has received considerable attention. Basic information and interpretations are provided in the annotations to recent editions, among which Ulrich Gaier’s FaustDichtungen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1999) and Albrecht Schöne’s Faust: Texte and Faust: Kommentare (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) are especially thorough. Also important are Horst Rüdiger, “Weltliteratur in Goethes ‘Helena,’” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 8 (1964): 172–98; John R. Williams, “Faust’s Classical Education: Goethe’s Allegorical Treatment of Faust and Helen of Troy,” Journal of European Studies 13 (1983): 27–41; Joachim Müller, “Faust und Helena: Der arkadische Traum. Genese und dramatisches Medium,” Jahrbuch des Wiener Goethe-Vereins 86–88 (1982–84): 199–227; Thomas Gelzer, “Helena im Faust: Ein Beispiel für Goethes Umgang mit der antiken Mythologie,” Mythographie der frühen Neuzeit: Ihre Anwendung in den Künsten, ed. Walther Killy (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, for the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, 1984), 223–253; Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Faust: The German Tragedy (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1986), 198–215; Benjamin Bennett, Goethe’s Theory of Poetry: Faust and the Regeneration of Language (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1986), 136–61; John Gearey, Goethe’s Other Faust: The Drama, Part II (Toronto & Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1992), 105–39; Thomas Zabka, Faust II — Das Klassische und das Romantische: Goethes ‘Eingriff in die neueste Literatur,’ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 89–139; Fritz Breithaupt, “Dies- und Jenseits des Endes der Geschichte, Helena,” Modern Language Notes 114 (1999): 528–50; and Anthony Phelan, “The Classical and the Medieval in Faust II,” A Companion to Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and II, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester: Camden House (Boydell & Brewer), 2001), 144–68. 69

For example, Zabka, Faust II — Das Klassische und das Romantische, 135. Eckermann, Gespräche, 5 July 1827 (256). “‘I could use no one,’ said Goethe, ‘as the representative of the most modern poetic era but him, who is, without question, to be regarded as the greatest talent of the century. And then Byron is not antique, and not romantic; but he is as the present day itself. Such a man I had to have. He suited me exactly, moreover, by reason of his dissatisfied temperament, and his warlike tendencies, by which he perished at Missolonghi.’” Translated by Robertson, “Goethe and Byron,” 106–7. 71 Weimarer Ausgabe, 41.1: 247. “Don Juan is a work of boundless genius, plunging misanthropically into the bitterest savagery, and again philanthropically into the deepest and tenderest affection; and as we already know and esteem the author and will not have him any other than he is, we gratefully enjoy what he dares with excessive licence, nay, with audacity, to set before us. The technical handling of the verse is quite in accordance with the strange, wild, ruthless matter of the poem; the poet 70

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spares his language as little as he spares his people; and as we examine the work more closely, we see that English poetry is in possession of what we Germans have never yet attained, a cultured comic language.” Translated by Robertson, “Goethe and Byron,” 63. 72

Heinrich Maiworm, “Epos der Neuzeit,” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, ed. Wolfgang Stammler (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1960), 2: cols. 685–748, here 720. On the production of similar works during the Romantic period, see also H. Maiworm, Neue deutsche Epik (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1968), 120–30. 73

Brown, Goethe’s Faust 220.

74

For an overview, see Ingeborg Weber, “‘Gothic villain’ and ‘Byronic hero,’” English Romanticism: The Paderborn Symposium (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1985), 153–79. Valuable insights into the difference between the characters of Manfred and Faust are those of Martin Procházka, “‘The Strongest Nourishment for His Hypochondriac Humour’: The Expression of the Subject in Byron’s Manfred and Goethe’s Faust,” Philologica Pragensia 25.3 (1982): 97–109. 75

“Yes — this I hold to with devout insistence, / Wisdom’s last verdict goes to say: / He only earns both freedom and existence / Who must reconquer them each day. / And so, ringed all about by perils, here / Youth, manhood, age will spend their strenuous year. / Such teeming would I see upon this land, / On acres free among free people stand. / I might entreat the fleeting minute: / Oh tarry yet, thou art so fair! / My path on earth, the trace I leave within it / Eons untold cannot impair. / Foretasting such high happiness to come, / I savor now my striving’s crown and sum.” Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt and ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1976), 294. 76 Konrad Burdach, “Faust und Moses. I. II. III.” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 23, 35, 38 (1912): 358–403; 627–789. 77

Without reference to the medical causes, Harald Weinrich, “Faust’s Forgetting,” Modern Language Quarterly 55.3 (1994): 211–95, identifies the persistence of Faust’s selective amnesia. 78 A succinct survey on the debates about Faust’s salvation, with bibliography, is Alfred Hoelzel’s “The Conclusion of Goethe’s Faust: Ambivalence and Ambiguity,” The German Quarterly 55.1 (1982): 1–12. On the most recent controversy about the theological interpretation of Faust’s salvation, see the arguments by Rolf Christian Zimmermann in “Goethes ‘Faust’ und die ‘Wiederbringung aller Dinge,’” GoetheJahrbuch 111 (1994): 171–85; and “Klarheit, Streben, Wiederbringung: Drei Beiträge zum Verständnis von Goethes Faust,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturund Geistesgeschichte 74.3 (2000): 413–64.

Early Romanticism Richard Littlejohns

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N HIS Kritische Fragmente (1797) Friedrich Schlegel asserts: “So lange der Künstler erfindet und begeistert ist, befindet er sich für die Mitteilung wenigstens in einem illiberalen Zustande” (So long as the artist is inventing and is inspired, he finds himself at least for the purposes of communication in an illiberal state; KFSA, 2: 151). Such mental indiscipline, he argues, blinds those who indulge in it to the value of self-limitation, the ultimate ideal not only for the artist, but also for all human beings. A similar line of argument occurs in Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). Klingsohr, the benevolent father of Heinrich’s beloved and his mentor in the craft of poetry, advises his pupil that “Begeisterung ohne Verstand ist unnütz und gefährlich” (Inspiration without intellect is useless and dangerous); and he adds emphatically that “Der junge Dichter kann nicht kühl, nicht besonnen genug sein [. . .] Es wird ein verworrnes Geschwätz, wenn ein reißender Sturm in der Brust tobt, und die Aufmerksamkeit in eine zitternde Gedankenlosigkeit auflöst” (The young poet cannot be cool and circumspect enough [. . .] Confused chatter ensues when a violent storm is raging in the breast and dissolves attentiveness into quivering lack of thought; NS, 1: 1 281). Thus, both Schlegel and Novalis suggest that inspiration, if not checked and balanced, results only in distraction and frustrates properly thoughtful communication. Inspiration has to be contained and even negated by the contrary impulse of rationality, by self-awareness and selfregulation. Hardly what is conventionally associated with Romanticism! There is a long tradition of misrepresenting Early Romanticism by interpreting it as a revolt against the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) and as a plunge into irrationalism. It was the second generation of Romantics in Germany who, for their own ideological motives, began this distortion. The Catholic Eichendorff maintained in his Geschichte der neuern romantischen Poesie in Deutschland (History of Recent Romantic Poetry in Germany, 1846) that the Early Romantics had declared themselves “in jugendlicher, feuriger Begeisterung zu Rittern des Christenthums wider den herrschenden Rationalismus” (knights of Christendom waging war against prevalent ra2 tionalism in youthful, fiery inspiration); and later critics, from nineteenthcentury liberals to the conservative literary historians of the 1950s, continued

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to interpret Romanticism as a reaction against rationalism. Yet, as we have seen, for Schlegel and Novalis at least the emphasis in self-expression is on the importance of reason, on — to use one of their favorite terms — circumspection (“Besonnenheit”), the detached self-criticism that serves to prevent thought from petrifying into one-dimensional certitude and complacency. Indeed it is the essence of Romantic poetry, so Friedrich Schlegel writes in a celebrated definition, that it can transcend all preconceptions on the wings of poetic reflection and “diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen” (raise this reflection again and again to a higher power and multiply it as if in an endless series of mirrors) (KFSA, 2: 182–83). Early Romantic authors, seen in this light, not only reflect on their own insights, but also reflect on the reflections, and so ad infinitum in an incessant process of critical re-thinking. The Early Romantics — Friedrich Schlegel, his later wife Dorothea née Mendelssohn, his older brother August Wilhelm and his wife Caroline née Michaelis, Novalis (that is, Friedrich von Hardenberg), Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder — were all born between 1763 and 1773 and educated in the best traditions of the Aufklä3 rung, although they were also to encounter its worst aberrations. In their formative years, most of them were influenced by Kant’s epistemology, which had reinforced eighteenth-century rationalism despite pointing out its limitations. They embraced the Enlightenment’s emphasis on critical enquiry, on skeptical examination of established wisdom — hence the admiration that Friedrich Schlegel in particular lavished on Lessing. However, precisely because they valued rationality, they insisted on using it to question rationalism itself. In recent years scholars have found a variety of phrases to describe this characteristic of Early Romanticism: “Aufklärung der Aufklärung” (enlightening the Enlightenment), “Aufklärung der Aufklärung über 4 sich selbst,” “Selbstkritik der neuzeitlichen Aufklärung.” What the Early Romantics rejected was not reason but what might be termed “pseudorationalism,” that naïve empiricism practiced by the dictatorial critic and publisher Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) and fellow epigones of the Aufklärung in Berlin, who had debased rational debate into risible pedantry and utilitarianism. The “harmonisch Platten” (harmonious dullards), as both Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis call them (see for example KFSA, 2: 160), are a major target for the Early Romantics: those sober positivists who in their obsession with common sense and moderation “level out” and “harmonize” everything original, unconventional or paradoxical. The Early Romantics do not reject knowledge, just the opposite: extending the Aufklärung belief in human perfectibility, they insist that reasoned thought cannot stand still, but in an everlasting state of flux must question its own assumptions and build on them dialectically. Against this background they tend in their own work to the cerebral and the theoretical.

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All the same, there were irrational forces at work in the last quarter of the eighteenth century that did influence the Early Romantics. Both Novalis and Schleiermacher came from Pietist family backgrounds. Pietism, a variety of Protestantism that had developed in the seventeenth century and found a particular focus in Halle, placed spiritual experience, the cultivation of personal faith, above religious orthodoxy and dogma. It thus stressed the importance of “inwardness,” of intensity of feeling and imagination. Moreover, in rejecting institutionalized ecclesiastical worship Pietists turned instead to forms of free congregational interaction, such as that practiced by the community that had been established in Herrnhut by Count Zinzendorf and of which Novalis’s father was an adherent. Another movement in the late eighteenth century that rejected rational regulation in favor of emotional experience, in this case influential in France and Britain as well as Germany, was Sensibility. Termed Empfindsamkeit in Germany, it represented a cult of sentimentality that owed much to Rousseau’s argument in the 1750s that human beings were innately motivated only by compassion, reason being an accretion arising from degenerate modern civilization. The hallmarks of uncorrupted nobility were thus exquisite sensitivity, an uninhibited and lachrymose display of feeling, and a devotion to others that found expression in intense romantic love and equally passionate friendship. The best-known document of Sensibility in Germany is Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), despite its implied disapproval of Werther’s descent from feeling into neurosis and eventual suicide. In this novel, alongside its disdain for staid utilitarianism, its pantheistic veneration for nature, and its portrayal of a love that defies social barriers, the adolescent Romantic generation could encounter Werther’s outburst about the river of feeling and genius whose flow and even overflow only frigid pedants would seek to contain or divert (letter of 26 May 1771). Such attitudes recur in the correspondence in 1792–93 between Tieck and Wackenroder, who not only conceive of their own friendship with an amorous intensity borrowed from Empfindsamkeit but also quote from 5 Werther and reproduce Werther’s view of rural existence as a pastoral idyll (see for example Wackenroder, 2: 21, 28 and 34). This admiration for Werther is shared by Friedrich Schlegel, who writes of the grandeur of the view of nature in the novel (KFSA, 2: 342), and by Novalis, for whom Werther resembles Homer and the poems of Ossian in its evocation of pristine mankind living in harmony with nature (NS, 4: 100). “Ossian” himself, an ostensible Celtic bard invented by the Scotsman James Macpherson (1736–96), was an important influence on German Romanticism: his impassioned songs of bereavement and despair, which Werther translates and recites to Lotte in the famous “Ossian” scene of the novel, offered an alternative to the bland optimism and genteel morality of the eighteenth century and accorded with the cult of melancholic sublimity common to Pre-

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Romanticism throughout Europe. In general the Sturm und Drang, with its emphasis on spontaneity and imagination, its adulation of the dissident genius, and its iconoclasm, served as a model for the Early Romantic generation in their rejection of fixed orders and structures, of what Friedrich Schlegel calls “mindless regularity” (KFSA, 2: 210). The young Goethe in his essay “Von deutscher Baukunst” (Of German Architecture, 1773) anticipates the liberal aesthetic doctrines that Wackenroder and the Schlegels were to proclaim: he idealizes the Strasbourg cathedral and its Gothic architecture as a paradigm of the work of art growing organically from its own inherent necessity and not governed by the prescriptive doctrines of neo-classicism. Two developments, one political and one philosophical, served to convert this mounting but inchoate disquiet with the reductivist and constricting aspects of establishment Aufklärung into the principled Romanticism expounded by the Early Romantics after 1795: the challenge of the French Revolution and the demolition of empiricism by Kant (together with the more extreme conclusions drawn by Fichte). In this sense Friedrich Schlegel was justified in claiming that the French Revolution, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Knowledge, 1794–95) and Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96) were potentially the most influential events of the 1790s, at least for intellectuals of the Early Romantic generation, even if they were only what he called suggestive “tendencies” (KFSA, 2: 198). The Early Romantics unanimously welcomed the French Revolution in its initial stages. It seemed to embody the natural justice, the egalitarian principles, and the hostility to privilege that were implicit in the rationalism with which they had grown up. Thus Tieck wrote to his sister in 1793: “auch in diesen Gegenden werden endlich die Ideen von Freiheit und Gleichheit herrschen, die Ketten der Despoten müssen endlich reissen” (in these territories too the ideas of freedom and equality will eventually prevail, the chains of the despots must eventually break; Wackenroder, 2: 247). If at first the French Revolution seemed to promise political and constitutional change, it also aroused a sense of millennial regeneration, of an ideal new age. Hölderlin spoke for a generation when he wrote in his early poem “Hymne an die Menschheit” (Hymn to Mankind, 1791) that young men strode like gods beside the banners of freedom, and “zur Vollendung geht 6 die Menschheit ein” (and mankind enters into perfection). Within a few years however, in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror, the Revolution came to be seen by the Romantics less as the advent of a humanist utopia and more as the indirect catalyst of a religious revival, of the realization of the kingdom of God on earth (KFSA, 2: 201), of a “heiligen Revolution” (sacred revolution; NS, 3: 493). Revolution as a concept, as an attitude or procedure, profoundly influenced Early Romantic thought. It is difficult in a modern democratic age to reconstruct the shock occasioned by the events

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in France after 1789: the first European monarchy, the established form of government for centuries, to be overthrown by its own subjects in a mass uprising, the divinely ordained ruler unceremoniously deposed. If entrenched power structures could thus be smashed by revolution and the moribund ancien régime demolished at a stroke, could not the revolutionary principle also overturn established ideas, attitudes, morals, and cultures? Hence the rejection by the Early Romantics of all closed, monolithic systems and static conceptions, their insistence on rebellious questioning of all assumptions. It was entirely logical that Friedrich Schlegel’s aphorisms — the genre itself challenges conformity and finality — should be characterized by Novalis as “ächte, revolutionaire Affichen” (authentic revolutionary posters), his own fragments too being in no small measure revolutionary in content (NS, 4: 241–42). In their determination to undermine assertion by simultaneous self-criticism, the Early Romantics sought to make the revolutionary principle perpetually operative in intellectual processes. In his essay answering the question “Was ist Aufklärung?” (What is Enlightenment?, 1784) Kant had produced a eulogy of rationality, maintaining that the assertive use of reason was the characteristic expression of the independence of the mature individual. Such a challenge to intellectual and by implication political authority was bound to appeal to the iconoclastic generation of the Early Romantics in a Germany still dominated by absolutist monarchies. Yet they were equally persuaded by the epistemology set out by Kant in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) and propagated enthusiastically at German universities in the 1790s, nowhere more so than in Jena where the Early Romantics were to congregate. Kant’s achievement was to show that rationality could not produce absolute knowledge, functioning as it does through the limiting medium of subjective perception, so that it could serve only to analyze empirical phenomena. Such phenomenalism, the conviction that empirical reality offered nothing more than data and could not reveal ultimate truths (“Dinge an sich” — things per se — in Kant’s terminology) led directly to Romantic dualism, the belief in a frustrating dichotomy between infinite totality and the real but limited historical world. Novalis wrote programmatically at the start of his collection of aphorisms Blüthenstaub (Pollen, 1798): “Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge” (Everywhere we seek the absolute and find always only things — the German text exploits the contrast between “Unbeding t” and “Dinge,” NS, 2: 413). Fichte radicalized Kant’s insight. If all perceptions of reality are conditioned by our consciousness, he concluded in his Wissenschaftslehre, then in a sense we determine that reality; everything outside the ego is only the postulate of the ego, it is “Nicht-Ich,” non-ego. “Das Gehirn gleicht den Hoden” (the brain resembles the testicles), Novalis jotted in his Allgemeines Brouillon (General Draft, 1798–99; NS, 3: 444): both organs generate existence. Hence the importance for the

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Early Romantics of the subjective imagination, the faculty by which the phenomenal world is postulated or created — and potentially transfigured and transformed. The project for the Romantics was to explore the imagination — as well as other non-rational methods of perception such as dream, intoxication, and vision — without abandoning reason itself as a tool to evaluate and relativize these experiences. For this reason too a dialectic was essential between creativity and critique, the “wunderbare ewige Wechsel von Enthusiasmus und Ironie” (miraculous eternal alternation of enthusiasm and irony), as Friedrich Schlegel called it (KFSA, 1: 318). Such subversive, indeed explicitly revolutionary ideas could not be accommodated in any existing literary outlet, and in any case the Schlegel brothers were by 1797 in dispute with the editors of the principal journals 7 in which they had previously published. Accordingly, they decided to launch their own jointly edited periodical, which would be characterized by uncompromising and even polemical independence. The result was Das Athenaeum, the journal of the Early Romantics, a manifesto in installments, appearing in six issues from 1798 to 1800. The Athenaeum has two characteristic formal features, both with ideological implications: the attempt to cultivate an interchange of ideas, to practice so-called “Geselligkeit” (literally, sociability), and the emphasis placed on collections of aphorisms. The journal was intended to reflect the intimate debates among the Early Romantic “Geisterfamilie” (family of minds), as Novalis characterized their literary circle in a letter to Caroline Schlegel (NS, 4: 276). The notion of intellectual exchange is embodied in Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation on Poetry) in the Athenaeum: in dramatized format a group of friends, thinly disguised representations of the Early Romantics themselves, discuss literary issues and recite essays, an address, and a discursive letter. The preamble to this Gespräch argues that such “sociable” forms encourage individuals to amplify their own innermost being through the personalities of others (KFSA, 2: 286). Other terms used by Friedrich Schlegel to express the concept of collaborative thought and writing are “sympoetry,” “symphilosophy,” and “symcriticism,” all communal activities and thus open-ended rather than potentially apodictic in the manner of a disquisition composed by an individual. One method for putting “sociability” into practice in the Athenaeum is the insertion into groups of aphorisms by one writer of others by one of his collaborators. Thus, Novalis’s Blüthenstaub collection includes four aphorisms by Friedrich Schlegel, while Schlegel’s own laconically titled Fragmente include individual aphorisms not only by his brother and co-editor August 8 Wilhelm, but also by Novalis and by Schleiermacher. Friedrich Schlegel derived his concept of the aphoristic form from the Maximes et pensées (1795) of the French writer Nicolas de Chamfort and published his own first collection (the Kritische Fragmente) in the journal Lyceum der schönen Kün-

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ste (Lyceum of the Fine Arts). The Athenaeum contained not only the Fragmente (sometimes referred to as the “Athenaeumsfragmente”) but also Schlegel’s later and less polemical Ideen. Initially he had regarded aphorisms as hedgehogs, each self-contained and compact (KFSA, 2: 197), and each, so we deduce, prickly and provocative in its stance toward the world at large. Novalis saw them as “Texte zum Denken” (texts to be thought about; NS, 4: 270) or as “litterarische Sämereyen” (literary seed-beds; NS, 2: 463). Common to all these and other definitions is the sense that the aphorism remains a hint and a stimulus and never attains the fallacious definitiveness of a systematically elaborated argument. The same agenda underlies the concept of Romantic Irony, which is one of the most memorable features of the Athenaeum. Irony in this context is the answer to the epistemological problem stated with telegrammatic conciseness in one of Schlegel’s Kritische Fragmente: “Unmöglichkeit und Notwendigkeit einer vollständigen Mitteilung” (impossibility and necessity of a complete statement; KFSA, 2: 160). Given human limitations, it is impossible for us to articulate absolute knowledge, as Kant had shown; yet it remains imperative, necessary for our intellectual self-respect, for us to keep trying to do so. Faced with this dilemma, we can only ensure that every thought contains the potential for development, for self-transcendence, even self-contradiction, or at least contains a built-in awareness of its own incompleteness, in other words that it is capable of self-ironizing. Elsewhere in the Kritische Fragmente Schlegel defines such irony as “transcendental buffoonery” (KFSA, 2: 152): on the surface it will appear as an act of clowning, but its underlying intellectual purpose is to reflect “die Stimmung, welche alles übersieht, und sich über alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt” (the mood which takes an overview of everything and rises infinitely above all that is relative). It may thus be defined as “permanent parabasis” (KFSA, 18: 85), a state in which we stand outside our own mental processes and comment on them as they occur, like a Greek chorus, but as a constant accompaniment and not merely at set intervals. It is difficult to cite concrete examples of thoughts imbued with Romantic Irony, and perhaps it appears more in attitudes than in particular pronouncements, although it does often take the form of the paradoxical, as Schlegel himself points out (KFSA, 2: 153). The pithiest of his aphorisms go some way to illustrating the concept, using provocation, hyperbole, startling analogy, and wit to shock the reader out of conventional assumptions. Thus: “man muß das Brett bohren, wo es am dicksten ist” (the best way to bore through a plank is at its thickest point; KFSA, 2: 148), that is, you should attack obtuseness where it is most impenetrable, and not where it is superficial, as might be expected. Or: “Verbindet die Extreme, so habt ihr die wahre Mitte” (connect the extremes, then you will have the true middle; KFSA, 2: 263), that is, the center of things is not to be found in the “happy

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medium,” but in a dialectical synthesis of the most contradictory positions. Schlegel’s assertion that in its external appearance Romantic Irony will resemble the comic antics of a clown is borne out by three plays by Tieck: Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots, 1797), Die verkehrte Welt (The Topsy9 Turvy World, 1797), and Prinz Zerbino (1799). All three of these comedies juxtapose fairy tale or myth and historical reality with surrealistic abandon. They employ the technique of the play-within-the-play and willfully disrupt theatrical illusion, teasingly manipulating it at multiple levels, in order not only to satirize the social and cultural scene in Berlin in the 1790s but also to demonstrate the absurd and precarious nature of empirical existence altogether. In fact, Romantic Irony extends to almost any kind of selfreferentiality in literature. In one of the lapidary aphorisms in the Kritische Fragmente Schlegel describes the modern novel, more exactly the ideal novel as he imagines it, as the haven for true sagacity escaping from pedantic scholasticism (KFSA, 2: 149). The novel, both in theory and in practice, was an enthusiastic preoccupation for both Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. For Schlegel all expressions of Romantic Poetry were necessarily novels, as he defined them, drawing on the verbal relationship in German between “Roman” (novel) and “romantisch.” The only qualification he admitted was that some “novels” were written for reading, while others, namely dramas, were “applied novels” for performance. These radical opinions were expressed in the “Brief über den Roman” (Letter on the Novel) in his Gespräch über die Poesie (KFSA, 2: 329–39). The enthusiasm for the novel as a genre among the early Romantics derives in part from the profound but ambivalent impact of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. As a Bildungsroman, a novel of itinerant personal development, the Lehrjahre influenced Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings, 1798), Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin (1801), and the novels of the 10 Late Romantics. Friedrich Schlegel’s essay “Über Goethes Meister” in the Athenaeum extols the ironical distance in Goethe’s novel, arguing that it is not a narrative “wo Personen und Begebenheiten der letzte Endzweck sind” (where persons and events are the be-all and end-all) and that its unity is located instead in its “geistigen Zusammenhang” (intellectual coherence; KFSA, 2: 133–34). Such conceptions feed into Schlegel’s definition of the novel form in the 11 “Brief über den Roman.” He rejects the mimetic realism and linear narration of contemporary chroniclers of fashionable society. Instead, he advocates a digressive and heterogeneous novel expressing the whimsical individuality of the author, for which he names Diderot and Sterne as models. True realism resides in such confessional literature. In these circumstances the unity of the novel will not lie in the plot, but in the set of interrelated themes and ideas that the author seeks to convey implicitly and

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cumulatively. The novel may, indeed should, be episodic in structure, encompassing a variety of literary forms — song, dialogue, anecdote, and fairy tale — in its comprehensive framework. Cervantes and the European romance are its antecedents. Similar conceptions of the novel can be found in Novalis’s aphorisms and jottings, again exemplifying the “sympoetry” which these two writers cultivated through both correspondence and personal contact. The novel should not be mimetic, Novalis writes in his notebooks, except in relation to the subjectivity of its author. Its task is to body forth an idea, but an idea encompasses an infinite series of statements (NS, 2: 570), so that a novel cannot be structured as a continuum but must consist of selfcontained episodes (NS, 3: 562). It will incorporate a wide range of styles and genres “in einer durch den gemeinsamen Geist verschiedentlich gebundnen Folge” (in a sequence linked in various ways by a common spirit; NS, 3: 271). Novalis sought to apply these precepts in his Heinrich von Ofterdingen, written as a reaction to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, partly imitation and 12 partly counterblast. The outline of a plot is apparent in Heinrich’s journey from Eisenach to Augsburg in an idealized medieval setting, but the narrative is structured more around a series of recollections and premonitions. Each chapter represents a separate experience in Heinrich’s quest to realize the vocation as a poet that had been announced to him in a dream; but collectively these episodes do convey an idea or ideas: the ubiquitous presence of poetry on earth for those attuned to it, and the ability of the inspired artist to transcend and even (in Fichte’s sense) to transform imperfect historical reality. Narration is interrupted by dream, anecdote, song, dialogue in dramatic form, above all by Märchen. Each succeeding fairy tale is more extensive and more mythological in scope — a novel should proceed by “geometrical progression,” Novalis maintained (NS, 2: 534) — until in the fragmentary Second Part of Heinrich von Ofterdingen empirical reality is totally supplanted and Heinrich moves only in a supernatural world where the restrictions of time and space have disappeared. Friedrich Schlegel’s reflections on the form of the novel seem to have been based in part on his own Lucinde (1799), theory and practice thus 13 interacting symbiotically. Lucinde abandons chronological narration altogether, except in one section which by way of background recounts the various amours of Julius, the main figure in the novel, before Lucinde brings light into his discontented existence. The novel argues that, emotionally and intellectually, women should be equal partners in relationships, but ultimately it is another Bildungsroman centered on a male protagonist. Lucinde contains thirteen independent sections — letters, allegory, idyll, pen-portrait, dialogue — that represent variations on a set of themes relating above all to sexuality and marriage. In form it offers, and boasts about, decorative profusion or confusion (“reizende Verwirrung”; KFSA, 5: 9 and passim); and it

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rejoices in flouting pedantic order, both in the structure of the novel and in the permissive social and sexual relations which it advocates. Whimsical subjectivity and digression are the principle of Lucinde, as in Schlegel’s theory, held together by the “intellectual coherence” that he had first identified in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. A deliberately provocative aphorism in Schlegel’s “Atheneumsfragmente” begins with the claim that most marriages are equivalent to concubinage (KFSA, 2: 170); and one feature of Lucinde is the rejection of conventional marriage held together by contract and routine. The ideal relationship, so Julius proclaims, is not constituted by legal ties but by “ewige Einheit und Verbindung unsrer Geister” (eternal unity and union of our spirits: KFSA, 5: 11). It will be a union of minds, bodies, and lives, permanent and exclusive. In such an ideal relationship infidelity will be unknown, not because it is prohibited but because it is pointless. A similar concept of Romantic love is expressed in Novalis’s formally very different Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800), a cycle of six ecstatic poems published in the Athenaeum. In dense imagery of great erotic and religious intensity, borrowed in part from Pietism, the poet rejoices in a relationship that transcends the grave. Spiritual contact with a dead beloved opens up the prospect of escape from the restrictions of mortality, and in this sense the lost lover is equated with Christ, since both represent an intermediary with the deity, a means of experiencing the infinite and ultimately passing through into it. Death is the route to eternal life, and those who have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the everlasting will lead contented lives in present reality precisely because they are confident of ultimate transcendence. Christian doctrine is confirmed, however unorthodox and mystical its presentation in the Hymnen. Here the influence on Novalis is apparent of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion (Addresses on Religion, 1799). Schleiermacher was a theologian based in Berlin, with whom Friedrich Schlegel shared lodgings from 1797 to 1799. His Reden were designed to rehabilitate religion in an age when it had been discredited by rationalism, hence their subtitle Für die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (For the cultivated among those who despise it — that is, religion). Schleiermacher’s approach is to detach religion from morals, from scripture, and from institutionalized creeds. The essence of religion, he argues instead, lies simply in faith in a transcendent realm, however defined, and in relating all empirical experience to this realm. In the second address he offers the following definition: “alles Einzelne als einen Teil des Ganzen, alles Beschränkte als eine Darstellung des Unendlichen hinnehmen, das ist Religion” (Accepting everything individual as a part of the whole, everything restricted as a representation of the absolute, that is 14 religion): no more and no less. Such a definition, devoid of dogma, doubtless made religion less rebarbative to rationalist freethinkers, but its impact on the Early Romantic generation was far more dramatic. Having themselves

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been educated in a tradition of skepticism toward established religion, they nevertheless aspired compulsively to some kind of spiritual experience, some belief in a transcendent totality, an urge stimulated in part by Kant’s demonstration of the limitations of the empirical. Schleiermacher’s arguments allowed them to identify such impulses as fundamentally religious in character and so opened the way for the Romantics to turn back toward orthodox Christianity. Thus Novalis, in the final version of his Hymnen, was able now to support his personal notions of death and the transcendent with an account of the redemptive power of Christ’s resurrection. Friedrich Schlegel’s work entitled Ideen, also published in 1800 in the Athenaeum, is inconceivable without the influence of Schleiermacher, indeed this collection of Romantic fragments specifically refers to his doctrines. Schlegel here links religion to the vocation of the artist. We conceive God through the operation of the imagination, and creative artists are those who have “eine eigne Religion, eine originelle Ansicht des Unendlichen” (a religion of their own, an original view of the infinite; KFSA, 2: 257). In March of 1799 Fichte had been dismissed from his academic post in Jena on charges of atheism, but on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definitions Schlegel now argues that Fichte’s whole teaching is religion in the form of philosophy, given that the essence of religion is “Interesse am Übersinnlichen” (interest in the supersensory; KFSA, 2: 266). In Lucinde and in his notebook jottings around 1799 Schlegel had inclined toward the Naturphilosophie espoused by several of the Early Romantic circle such as the physicist Johann Ritter and propounded by Friedrich Schelling and by Henrik Steffens, most notably in the latter’s Beiträge zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde (Contributions to the Inner Natural History of the Earth, 1801). Speculative nature philosophy conceived of the physical world not as dead matter, as had been suggested by empiricist natural science, but as a constantly mutating chaos of energies and forces that were miraculous and divine. Schelling asserted in his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) that physical objects should be regarded as the product of forces (his emphasis), while Schleiermacher declared in the Reden that “das Universum ist in einer ununterbrochenen Tätigkeit und offenbart sich uns jeden Augenblick” (the universe is ceaselessly active and reveals itself to us in every moment; Schleiermacher, 243). In his Ideen Schlegel retained such quasi-pantheistic conceptions, as for example in the assertion “Schön ist was uns an die Natur erinnert, und also das Gefühl der unendlichen Lebensfülle anregt” (Beauty is that which reminds us of nature and thus arouses the feeling of the infinite abundance of life; KFSA, 2: 264), but Schleiermacher’s Reden clearly caused him also to sense that such longings for the infinite and the spiritual were inherently compatible with Christianity. He thus took the first steps on his path to conversion to Catholicism in 1808; and other Romantics, for instance Clemens Brentano, were to follow suit.

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The Early Romantic drift toward religion interacted with changing attitudes toward the French Revolution to produce significant — and fateful — new political beliefs. The French descent into internecine violence after 1793 led Romantic writers to question whether constitutional changes or even a social revolution were alone sufficient to create a just and humane society. Like Schiller at the same time, they concluded that the first priority should be a regeneration of the human personality, after which philanthropic political change would inevitably ensue. Seen in this light, the French Revolution is merely an interim stage in a far-reaching process. Thus Novalis in Blüthenstaub, employing a typically daring medical analogy, declares that the Revolution is not a passing malaise but rather a pubertal crisis in the adolescence of the human race (NS, 2: 459). Unlike Schiller, who remained resolutely humanist in his vision of mankind in its maturity, the Romantics came to believe that the aims of the Revolution, individual and societal regeneration, could only come about through a revival of religious faith. In 1796 Friedrich Schlegel had published an essay in praise of republicanism; but by 1800, reflecting Schleiermacher’s influence, he writes in the Ideen that future historians will consider that the true significance of the French Revolution is not that it instituted a republic but that it served to stir religion from its slumber (KFSA, 2: 265). The millennial golden age that the Romantics had always sought was thus envisaged as specifically religious; this entailed new conceptions of the state and of history that, unlike those of Romantic writers elsewhere in Europe, were markedly conservative in implication. Novalis’s first reaction to the disappointing course of the French Revolution and the European wars that it triggered was to propose a form of state 15 combining the best of monarchy with the best of republicanism. In Glauben und Liebe (Faith and Love, 1798), another cycle of aphorisms, he argued that the state should resemble a family, with an enlightened and virtuous royal pair of rulers presiding benevolently over their subjects. In doing so he expressly rejected cosmopolitanism and denounced formal constitutions as putty sticking society together (NS, 2: 488): true political cohesion could only be achieved in a national community based on shared spiritual and moral convictions rather than material goals. In his controversial essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom, or Europe) — delivered orally in November of 1799 to his friends in Jena, but not published until 1826 — Novalis went beyond such utopian conceptions and envisaged a regenerate future only in a harmonious community of nations united in religious fervor. The attempts of politicians to reform society through political and constitutional change were doomed to failure like the labors of Sisyphus, ceaselessly rolling the boulder to the top of the mountain only to see it roll down the other side. Only an “Anziehung gegen den Himmel” (attraction — magnetic? — toward heaven) could keep it at the apex, that is, only religion could sustain a community in an ideal form (NS, 3: 517). For Novalis hu-

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man history is the history of our “heiliges Organ” (organ for the holy) or “Sinn für das Unsichtbare” (sense of the invisible). In the Middle Ages this sense prevailed communally throughout Europe and allowed the Papacy to preserve unity and peace; but with the division of Christendom at the Reformation a fatal loss of spiritual unity began, which by the eighteenth century led to godless rationalism and materialism. However, the French Revolution had undermined all modern institutions, creating a social and ideological vacuum in which our sense of the holy could be restored and a new, permanent religious community could be established and celebrated eucharistically. This hymnic vision owes its inspiration, Novalis proclaims, to a prophet who “hat einen neuen Schleier für die Heilige gemacht” (has made a new veil for our holy age; NS, 3: 521) — he means, if we decode the 16 pun, Schleiermacher and his Reden. It was Friedrich Schlegel, residing in Berlin, who had brought the Reden to Novalis’s attention. From 1797 to 1799 Schlegel communicated mainly by letter with the rest of the Romantic circle in Jena and with Novalis in Freiberg or Weissenfels. In Berlin he moved in the salons presided over by the Jewish intellectuals Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin, such gatherings providing a further model — as well as Pietist communal worship — for the Romantic ideal of sociability transcending class, gender, and ethnicity. Here 17 he met Ludwig Tieck and through him Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, the two other representatives of Early Romanticism in Berlin. Having been at school and university together and reacted against the strictly rationalist environment in which they had been brought up, they had by 1797 published the Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Effusions of an Art-Loving Friar), the earliest programmatic document of Romantic 18 aesthetics in Germany. The Herzensergiessungen are a series of anecdotal biographies of Renaissance artists, most notably Dürer and Raphael, and generalized reflections on art, together with one novel in miniature, an account of the life and death of a modern musician, Joseph Berglinger. They are supposedly related by a friar acquainted with Berglinger, a narrative device by which the authors give expression to their reverence for art and its divine provenance, though without themselves professing Christian faith. Wackenroder and Tieck reject neo-classical notions of art produced according to taught rules, and of eclectic gathering of ideals from classical models, claiming instead that true creativity operates only on the basis of sublime but unpredictable inspiration. Art, the arts, cannot be taught or learned. The inspired Renaissance painters, the recipients of insights into the mysteries of the infinite, deserve hagiographic adulation, as do their works. The friar is made to remark: “ich vergleiche den Genuß der edleren Kunstwerke dem Gebet” (I compare the appreciation of the nobler works of art to prayer; Wackenroder, 1: 106). Berglinger, however, living in philistine modern society and thus lacking an

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untroubled sense of vocation, is alienated from his contemporaries and destroyed by his music. The same problem is presented in the Phantasien über die Kunst (Fantasies on the Arts, 1799), a further collection of short pieces by the two authors, but published by Tieck after Wackenroder’s death; here music is shown to generate inspired euphoria in its participants 19 but also to threaten cataclysmic destabilization of the emotions. In the novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, however, which was in part planned by Wackenroder but written only by Tieck, a medieval journeyman painter educated in Dürer’s pious devotion to art eventually finds contentment, 20 despite picaresque escapades on journeys through Europe. Wackenroder, the principal author of the ideas in the Herzensergiessungen, remained like other early Romantics indebted to the Aufklärung. Not only are his biographies of painters based on close study of Vasari and other antiquarian sources, but his approach to the history of art also rests upon principles of historical relativism derived from eighteenth-century humanism. He and Tieck argue that both classical Greek temples and medieval Gothic churches, or both European sacred music and the primitive chants of savages, are equally valid expressions of the human creative impulse. What is new in their approach and runs counter to the neo-classical canon is the emphasis on the religious art of the Renaissance, giving further impetus to the Romantic reversion to religion. In the work of Wackenroder and Tieck we note again the tendency to apply Aufklärung values in order to outflank 21 the Aufklärung itself. In the section of the Herzensergiessungen entitled “Von zwey wunderbaren Sprachen, und deren geheimnißvoller Kraft” (Of Two Wondrous Languages and their Mysterious Power) Wackenroder tackles the Kantian problem of the impossibility of grasping and articulating transcendent or divine truths, pointing out that by definition they cannot be conveyed by human speech, “die Sprache der Worte” (Wackenroder, 1: 97). Nature and art, however, are two languages granted to mortals by means of which we indirectly gain insight into the infinite. Art is therefore a kind of coded language, a “Hieroglyphenschrift” (hieroglyphic script), from which we can partly infer transcendent truth without ever fully comprehending it. Such views, mediated here through the naïvely pious persona of the friar, equate with the aesthetics expressed in philosophical terminology in the Athenaeum and elsewhere by the Schlegel brothers. Friedrich Schlegel writes in the “Brief über den Roman” that all true literature, that is all Romantic literature as he defines it, embodies a “Hindeutung auf das Höhere, Unendliche, Hieroglyphe der Einen ewigen Liebe und der heiligen Lebensfülle der bildenden Natur” (intimation of higher things, of the infinite, hieroglyph of the one and only eternal love and of the sacred abundance of life in generative nature; KFSA, 1: 334). The divine, he argues, cannot be grasped me-

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chanically and tangibly in the earthly sphere, but through the medium of art or literature it can be manifested in a veiled manner as mortal beauty. Both Wackenroder and Schlegel are in fact talking about symbolism. August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his Vienna lectures on dramatic art (1808), argues that Classical literature had essentially celebrated the immanent, while Romantic literature seeks symbolically to express a transcendent or spiritual vision. The poetry of the ancients had been one of “possession,” while 22 Romantic poetry — in Christian modernity — is one of “longing.” This view of the Romantic accords with Novalis’s much-quoted definition. In his notes Novalis states: “Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnißvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es” (by giving the everyday a high meaning, the usual a mysterious status, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite the appearance of the infinite, I romanticize it; NS, 2: 545). Romanticism is, according to the Early Romantics, a mode of describing reality as a symbolic experience, reconfiguring or transfiguring it so that it intimates underlying spiritual or transcendent truths. Friedrich Schlegel defines the Romantic in the “Brief über den Roman” as that which offers “einen sentimentalen Stoff in einer fantastischen Form” (sentimental subject matter in a fantastic form; KFSA, 2: 333). By “sentimental” he means “that which embodies divine spirit,” and by “fantastic” he means “governed by the imagination.” In other words: the characteristic of Romantic literature is that it conveys the spiritual, but of necessity does so symbolically, through the dynamic (that is, open-ended 23 and self-transcending) creations of the imagination. By 1802, Novalis and Wackenroder were dead, Friedrich Schlegel was living in Paris, and August Wilhelm Schlegel was in Berlin, while Tieck had settled in rural Prussia. The Early Romantic circle with its main focus in Jena broke up, although Tieck and the Schlegels remained in contact. Its legacy to Romanticism, both German and European, was the conception of a duality in existence, a dichotomy between the empirical (the importance and validity of which they never denied) and the spiritual, and of the necessity of remaining aware of this dichotomy, whether through a dialectic between its two poles or by transfiguring the empirical in order symbolically to convey the spiritual. The work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, for instance, of Eichendorff or of Heine, notwithstanding marked shifts of emphasis from Early Romanticism, would be unthinkable without this philosophical and poetological basis.

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Notes 1

With reference to this quotation, NS has “ein reißender Strom,” but the reading “Sturm” (as found in other modern editions) accords better with the sentence as a whole. 2

Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Wolfram Mauser (Regensburg: Habbel, 1962), 8.1: 22. 3 The best introduction to Early Romanticism is Lothar Pikulik’s Frühromantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 1992). There is also a volume of essays edited by Silvio Vietta: Die literarische Frühromantik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983). No study in English exists that is devoted specifically to Early Romanticism in Germany, but reference may be made to chapters 2 to 4 in Glyn Tegai Hughes, Romantic German Literature (London: Arnold, 1979). 4 Respectively: Wolfgang Mederer, Romantik als Aufklärung der Aufklärung? (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1987); Frank Wilkening, “Progression und Regression: Die Geschichtsauffassung Friedrich von Hardenbergs,” in: Romantische Utopie — Utopische Romantik, edited by Gisela Dischner and Richard Faber (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1979), 251–69, here 255; Silvio Vietta, passim in his own contributions to Die literarische Frühromantik. 5 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Silvio Vietta and Richard Littlejohns, (Heidelberg: Winter, 1991), 2: 28 and 34. This edition is henceforth cited as “Wackenroder” plus volume number. 6

Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1946), 1.1: 148. 7

For a good general study of Friedrich Schlegel, see Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Twayne, 1970). 8

See Eudo C. Mason, “The Aphorism,” in: The Romantic Period in Germany, edited by Siegbert Prawer (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970), 204–34. 9

See Raymond Immerwahr, The Esthetic Intent of Tieck’s Fantastic Comedy (St. Louis: Washington UP, 1953). 10 See the essay by Gerhart Hoffmeister in this volume. 11

See Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1983), 21–38; Diana Behler, The Theory of the Novel in Early German Romanticism (Berne: Lang, 1978). 12 On Novalis in general see John Neubauer, Novalis (Boston: Twayne, 1980); Wm. Arctander O’Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham: Duke UP, 1995). On Heinrich von Ofterdingen, see Blackall, 107–30. 13

See Blackall, 38–43, and Richard Littlejohns, “The ‘Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten’: a Re-Examination of Emancipatory Ideas in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde,” Modern Language Review 77 (1977): 605–14. For further discussion of the structure of Schlegel’s novel within the context of German Romantic literary theory and practice, see the essay by Gerhart Hoffmeister in this volume.

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14

Schleiermachers Werke, edited by August Dorner (Aalen: Scientia, 1981), 4: 244. This volume is henceforth cited as “Schleiermacher” plus page number. 15

On Novalis’s political opinions see Nicholas Saul, History and Poetry in Novalis and in the Tradition of the German Enlightenment (London: U of London, 1984). 16

For further information on these and other political writings of the Romantics, see the essay by Klaus Peter in this volume. 17

See Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). See Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Confessions and Phantasies, translated and annotated with a critical introduction by Mary Hurst Schubert (University Park & London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1971). 18

19

For a further discussion of the importance of music for the German Romantics, see the essay in this volume by Kristina Muxfeldt. 20

See J. L. Sammons, “Tieck’s Franz Sternbald: the Loss of Thematic Control,” Studies in Romanticism, 5 (1965): 30–43; William J. Lillyman, Reality’s Dark Dream: The Narrative Fiction of Ludwig Tieck (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 61–76; Blackall, 160–66. 21

For a further discussion of the importance of Wackenroder and Tieck for the development of German Romantic art, see the essay in this volume by Beate Allert. 22 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, edited by Edgar Lohner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), 5: 25. 23

On Early Romantic literary theory see Hans Eichner, “Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of Romantic Poetry,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 71 (1956): 1018–41, and Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).

From Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to anti-Meister Novels: The Romantic Novel between Tieck’s William Lovell and Hoffmann’s Kater Murr Gerhart Hoffmeister The Revolution in Romantic Genre Theory

F

OR STUDENTS OF LITERARY HISTORY one

of the most fascinating chapters in the development of modern genres constitutes the rapid rise of the German novel from its status as the least appreciated genre in the preRomantic period to its commanding position as the most innovative and comprehensive manifestation of high literature in the age of Romanticism. One may in fact argue that the novel became the primary battleground for the Romantic revolution in literature that took shape after the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96), a work whose significance Friedrich Schlegel compared to the French Revolution on the political stage (KFSA, 2: 198: Athenaeum no. 216). According to Schlegel, all novels are revolutionary in the sense that 1 only a genius is able to write in this genre. This programmatic statement reveals Schlegel’s belief in the challenging possibilities of novel writing if undertaken by a gifted author. However, until the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Schlegel had encountered only rare examples of ingenious novelists able to rise above the conventional chivalric, courtly, or pedestrian sentimental stories. Not surprisingly, Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg (1744–96), in his groundbreaking study Versuch über den Roman (Essay on the Novel, 1774) starts out with the observation that novels heretofore had generally been written for the entertainment of the masses and idle women. Two decades later in his essay Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795–96) Schiller corroborated this opinion by referring to the novelist as the half-brother of poets because he considered their genre an impure medium lacking a sense of poetry and ruled by 2 arbitrary imaginings. In fact, Schiller never completed his own novel Der Geisterseher (The Ghost Seer, 1789), although it proved to be one of his

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most popular works and influenced the development of the Gothic romances 3 in England and Germany. Yet this very feature of “arbitrary imaginings” alerted Schlegel to some historical paradigms for contemporary novel writing. By expanding his horizon to world literature, he could point to Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Sterne before turning his attention to his contemporaries Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) and Goethe. What seems to be an incongruous list of masters, however, indicates the two directions Schlegel’s theory of the novel took: his theory breaks away from a normative and restrictive understanding of specific genres so as to include lyrical, epic, and dramatic elements; and this theory selects the anti-classicist tradition of writing in a witty, fantastic, and even bizarre fashion. The literary revolution that set out to romanticize the world in fiction and through fiction aimed at the reversal of poetic tradition; it embarked on experimental prose works in keeping with ideas expressed in the young Romantics’ essays, aphorisms, and programmatic statements within their novels. The most concise formulation of Friedrich Schlegel’s theory is contained in his Athenaeum fragment no. 116 (2: 182–83). In this manifesto Romantic poetry is not only described as synonymous with novel-writing, but is also characterized as “progressive,” that is continuously developing and universal, always on the threshold between the real world and infinity, and thus of necessity never finished. Since this type of writing synthesizes all genres of poetry in a total work of art and includes philosophy, rhetoric, poetry of nature, reflections of the author’s spiritual life as well as representations of the world, it may not imitate reality. On the contrary, the poet’s “Willkür” (caprice) has to focus on the process of inventing an “absolute” novel that embraces everything. The author constructs a world of fiction with his narrator hovering between the subject matter and himself, reflecting in a mode of “Romantic Irony” on the creative process and the poet’s ultimate goal, namely to poeticize life, nature, and society. No theory can exhaust the essence of Romantic poetry, Schlegel maintains, as it is constantly evolving, no typology can do justice to its rich world of possibilities. In his “Brief über den Roman” (Letter on the Novel, 1800) Schlegel adds this to his earlier pronouncements: Romantic works feature a sentimental subject matter in a fantastic form (2: 333); the word “sentimental” refers to a higher spirit of love that opens the reader’s mind to infinity. Here he also postulates a novel as “romantic,” that is a highly poetic book (335). Novalis likewise rightly derives “Romantik” from “Roman” (NS, 3: 271). He too rejects the traditional sentimental novel by postulating that “a novel is a life, as a book” (2: 599), implying the life of the spirit and the symbolic construction of the transcendental world (2: 536) within the novel as well as outside of it by its readers, who are challenged to change their lives into Romantic novels in order to help “redeem” the world. Similarly revolu-

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tionary was the conception of the novel not only as a literary form but also as a national task with social implications. The Romantic idea of novel writing first became an example and then the dominant factor in an entire system of revolutionary concepts in fragmentary form. Its ultimate purpose was the transformation of the dismal German reality into a poetic “golden” state. 4 The transfer of the principle of freedom from politics to the aesthetic sphere guides Romantic authors away from the thralls of classical compositions, away from emotional identification with their subject matter in order to maintain control over their art. Liberty pervades all German Romantic literature in form as well as in content, because that was the theory of the Romantic writers. The French Revolution created a state of continual fever (see NS, 2: 490) among German intellectuals with striking results for poetic theory and practice, because the Romantic poets realized that they had to 5 come to terms with the Revolution. In fact, most Romantic novels depict the constant struggle between freedom and constraint, specifically the struggle of the emerging artist versus social conventions that suffocate his desire 6 for freedom. At close inspection, even the so-called German Bildungsroman, with its traditional focus on individual character formation reveals much about the upheaval of the times: its protagonist generally serves as a 7 pathfinder and role model for a society that is looking for direction. The best example is Goethe’s novel.

Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96) This novel grew out of the earlier Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung (Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, manuscript 1777–85, published in 1911) and precedes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 1821 and 1829), thus forming part of a trilogy that leads the protagonist from his love of the theater to a new goal, his own education and, in the sequel to his apprenticeship years, to his service of the community as a surgeon. In the Lehrjahre Wilhelm struggles to realize his artistic ambitions in order to establish a free space for himself between the traditional barriers of a preordained class system. But after playing the role of Hamlet he discovers that he was not cut out to be an actor. Instead he finds love (Natalie), becomes a father, and takes his place in the secret Tower Society that has guided his life. Although in the end Wilhelm has apparently mastered his life, he remains dependent upon others and without a specific orientation. Thus Wilhelm’s formative years show a process of disillusionment; for that very reason, the reader’s perspective should go beyond a limited focus on the protagonist. What turns the Lehrjahre from a “Bildungsroman” into a “Bildungsgeschichte” (history of education) of an entire century is the fact that Wilhelm, the son of merchant parents, as an itinerant actor is free to experience broad cross-sections of eighteenth-century life in

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Germany, coming into contact with the bohemian world of art, with the landed nobility, a secret society, with Pietism as a religious renewal movement and with men, children, and especially women who reflect various phases in his development. From this perspective it may be more rewarding to read the novel as a “Zeitroman” (a period novel). Even the novel’s episodic structure along the lines of a picaresque tale appears to support this view, with the depiction of cross-sections of society gaining in importance over Wilhelm’s life story. Interestingly, the inner chronology of the novel is such that one can see the main action for the Lehrjahre as occurring between 1787 — the eve of the French Revolution — and the spring of 1793, a time sequence that underlines the fact that Goethe revised the Theatralische Sendung in response to 8 the Revolution and its ensuing war. Using Wilhelm as his vehicle, Goethe wanted to probe the reactions and goals of various segments of German society vis-a-vis the perceived threat from the outside. He rejects the hedonistic, irresponsible behavior of the old nobility of birth (book 3 of the novel); he reveals his skepticism regarding the itinerant acting troupe as a model for responsible social action (book 4), but seems to favor the joining of the educated middle class and the reform-minded nobility in the Tower Society for the purpose of securing property rights and stimulating the productivity of individuals. What undermines this solution, however, is the exclusion of poetic figures such as Mignon and her father, the harpist, from this supposedly humane and enlightened group. With Mignon, Goethe introduced an exotic and tragic figure because this boyish girl who grows into a loving young woman does not accept any conventional constraints. For her, love and death are one; her longing for Italy and for Wilhelm merge in songs of pure poetry, an expression of her desire to live unconditionally and open to infinitude. She wastes away, but her poems form an important ingredient both for the interpretation of the novel and for its composition as a generically indeterminate, open structure. That Wilhelm does not take on any 9 specific tasks underlines this open end. Thus, Goethe himself had paved the way for a reading of his novel beyond the question of education. In fact, by shifting the focus to the poetic elements of the work, members of the Romantic generation read it as a model on how to lead an aesthetic life and how to compose an artist’s novel. They only needed to invert the priorities. Friedrich Schlegel’s touchstones for evaluating novels were above all Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–15) and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. For Schlegel, Goethe seemed to have fulfilled some essential requirements of “progressive Universalpoesie,” since in his famous review “Über Goethes Meister” (1798) he points out a sense of the universe, a musical structure, and a narrative technique that combines various literary genres and employs anticipations, mirror effects, and symbolic presentations of the world. At the same time, the novel’s self-

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reflectivity reveals the author’s ironic self-representation (KFSA, 2: 133–34). Moreover, Schlegel and Novalis also recognized Wilhelm’s Romantic desire to live an aesthetic existence away from bourgeois constraint; they praised the inclusion of poetic figures such as Mignon and the harpist with their songs. Nonetheless, a critical undertone came to the fore: this novel was not sufficiently Romantic; it had to be surpassed (NS, 2: 642 and 3: 638–39). Among the most important reasons for this claim was Novalis’s recognition of Wilhelm’s educational progress from a middle-class background and a short sojourn in the world of an itinerant troupe toward his final destination close to the ruling nobility. With Mignon’s and the Harper’s demise, communion with nature and the glories of poetry lost out. For both Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis it was paramount to break away from any harmonization of the conflict between art and life, between the poet and the philistine. Instead, these two authors focused on the process of transforming their protagonists through the experiences of love, poetry, and even death, because they believed that transitions are the most important aspect of a life story free from the chains of conventional morals, of work, trade, capital, and 10 marriage. To “improve” on Goethe’s Meister, they set up new goals in their theoretical deliberations that both would try to realize in their own novels: first, to romanticize the protagonist and his world to the extent that they would become part and parcel of the metaphysical real; second, to depict the surrounding environment not in a mimetic fashion but as already transposed by the spiritual life of an ingenious author; third, the author’s caprice plays with the given world and constructs a new one as an antidote to bourgeois society.

Anti-Meister Novels As Friedrich Schlegel saw it, the “Romantic novel” had always been characterized by its approximation to an absolute ideal. Therefore, neither a defi11 nite model nor a firm typology could be established, although Schlegel attempted to distinguish among fantastic, sentimental, and mimetic varia12 tions. To be sure, he had recognized the paradigmatic significance of Jean Paul’s grotesque narrative achievements as “the only romantic products in our unromantic age” (KFSA, 2: 330), but it was above all Goethe’s Meister that was going to serve him and the younger generation as a starting point for their novelistic experiments. Even before Schlegel’s pronouncements of 1798–99, the revolution in novel writing was already well underway, with a noticeable shift away from Meister’s adaptation to social demands toward an emphasis on the interior development of musicians, painters, or poets, and their special status and aspirations as geniuses. I am referring to Jean Paul, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. Jean Paul, pseudonym of Johann Paul

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Friedrich Richter, was one of the most popular novelists in the early 1800s, especially among female readers. His popularity was largely due to his sentimentality, his humor, and the eccentricities of the narrator who frequently addresses his readership. Although Jean Paul’s title-hero Siebenkäs (novel, 1796) is not a creative artist, he leads the charge against middle-class institutions by exchanging his name with his doppelgänger Leibgeber and by instigating a faked death in order to gain freedom from his unhappy marriage bonds so as to be able to marry his Romantic ideal Natalie. Moreover, he rises above provincial stuffiness by employing his humorous imagination to transform his surroundings as well as by his double vision of being an actor and spectator at the same time. Inspired by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Jean Paul’s narrator adds another layer of emancipation by way of his witty combinations, puns, and grotesque reflections that together form a more important unifying thread than the meager plot. It is indicative, however, of Jean Paul’s position on the threshold of Classicism and Romanticism that Leibgeber — a cosmopolitan free spirit who plays with everything he touches — falls victim to Romantic Irony as “Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung” (self-creation and self-destruction; KFSA, 2: 172: Athenaeum no. 51) at the risk of his going mad. In Jean Paul’s subsequent novel Titan (1800–1803) Leibgeber reappears as the librarian Schoppe who, encountering his look-alike Siebenkäs, believes he has seen himself and actually goes crazy. In a similar position between Greece-inspired Classicism and Romanticism was Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) with his epistolary novel of a nostalgic retrospective to the golden age, Hyperion oder der Eremit aus Griechenland (Hyperion or the Hermit from Greece, 1797–99). Yet, despite its complex circular structure, where the incipient lamentations about the dissonances in man and society point toward their eventual reconciliation by the end of Hyperion’s career, analogies to the subsequent Romantic novels abound. Hyperion appears as a stranger among men, destined to become a poet inspired by Diotima, his beloved muse who sacrifices her life so that he can clearly see his mission: to become a priest of nature with a magic wand of poetic skills, i.e., to restore the lost harmony of the golden age, to spiritualize nature and thereby to poeticize and redeem the world. As a result, 13 Hölderlin advanced considerably toward the ideal of “the novel as poetry.” Thus, in intent and poetization Hyperion approaches Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, but differs from it in its epistolary design, its metaphoric use of Greece instead of the Middle Ages, and its depiction of the unsuccessful political struggle for liberation from the Turks in 1770 — the year of Höl– derlin’s birth. Closer to the Romantic artist novel comes Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s brief tale “Das merkwürdige musikalische Leben des Tonkünstlers Joseph Berglinger” (The Remarkable Musical Life of the Composer Joseph

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Berglinger, 1797), in Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Effusions of an Art-Loving Friar). This story forms the final section of a collection of essays co-authored with Ludwig Tieck after their discovery of Renaissance fine art in Southern Germany. In these essays, old masters such as Dürer, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo are presented as saints whose works ought to be approached not with critical analysis, but with deliberately unsystematic reverence, since their art serves as a substitute for religion. As the most important piece in this work, the life story of Joseph Berglinger differs from the previous portraits because it presents the story of a contemporary musician whose existential predicament heightens the dilemma of Wilhelm Meister: Berglinger is torn between the demands of a society that wants to use his music for courtly entertainment and his own understanding of his exceptional ingeniousness. Under the pressure of having to produce music for the court as well as for a philistine audience essentially not interested in the arts, he admits the great power music has over him. It causes him a lot of joy, but also enormous suffering, because he tends to neglect his social and family obligations and is not even quite sure whether his divine music does not also reveal some demonic qualities. These conflicts tear him apart, only to lead him to nervous paroxysm and early death. Berglinger had rejected the more useful job training as a male nurse his father had suggested. The narrator adds his own critical endnote to explain Berglinger’s failure: “Und muß der Immerbegeisterte seine hohen Phantasien doch auch vielleicht als einen festen Einschlag kühn und stark in 14 dieses irdische Leben einweben, wenn er ein echter Künstler sein will?” In the portrayal of his conflict with the court and in his artistic aspirations, Berglinger is a paradigmatic figure not only for Romantic authors, but also 15 for the novelists and novella writers throughout the nineteenth century all the way to the early work of Thomas Mann, who continued the analysis of the jarring antagonism between artistic aspirations and the strict demands of a profit-oriented society in protagonists such as Hanno Buddenbrook (Buddenbrooks, 1897) and Tonio Kröger (1903). Among the radical anti-Meister novels inspired by Friedrich Schlegel’s “progressive Universalpoesie” are Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799), Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), Brentano’s Godwi (1800–1801) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr (1819–21). In content, form, and intent Lucinde is as much a counterthrust to Wilhelm Meister as it is a poetic manifesto of the Schlegelian program, but in the nineteenth century it was rejected by most readers as a scandalous book reflecting the author’s affair with his wife-to-be Dorothea Veit, the eldest daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, an author and translator herself. In form and content a revolutionary book, it was the product of the emancipated intellectual circle of the Romantics in Berlin that tried to counter the rigid moral conventions of established society. The circle was also reacting against the Enlightenment dissociation of mind and matter, body

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and soul. The caprice of the author (“Verwirrungsrecht,” KFSA, 5: 9) seems to rule everywhere, creating an apparently chaotic book whose underlying formal principles only careful scrutiny reveals: two groups of literary arabesques frame the central “Lehrjahre der Männlichkeit” (5: 35), which focuses on Julius’s narration of his past loves until he finds Lucinde. The beginning six chapters deal with his happiness in the present, the final half dozen with his 16 future. All the traditional practices of composing works that form a complete whole, that create an illusion of reality as a mirror of life, with the observance of separations between classes and genres are thrown overboard and replaced by discursive reflections and allegorical scenes. Having led a dissolute life looking for love where there was none, Julius meets Lucinde and gradually changes from a torn individual into a complete person who feels called upon to show conventional society what he thinks love is all about. Living together on an emancipated level serves as a model for a utopian society not ruled by rigid conventions but held together by love, equality of the partners, and a new concept of marriage. The traditional middle-class marriage as a “concubinage of mutual contempt” (5: 33) is replaced by Romantic love characterized by the principles of an integration of all individual faculties and love as an androgynous experience that aims for a process of “completing” the personality. To reach this perfect harmony between the genders, it is essential to turn women into self-reliant equal partners. Only then can they turn into muses and mediators between man and the universe. Schlegel’s aim to connect his protagonists’ Romantic love with the surrounding world becomes clear when Lucinde expects a child and Julius turns into a responsible father who wants to create a new earth and a new mankind. Their love has become socially significant and provides an example of Schlegel’s programmatic claim that life in society needs to be poeticized (Athenaeum no. 116). Whether Schlegel succeeded, or whether he in the end succumbed to traditional gender roles, has been much debated 17 in recent scholarship. When Novalis embarked on his Heinrich von Ofterdingen, he set himself a twofold task: to surpass Meister as well as Lucinde. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister had been too empirical and rational for his taste, as Wilhelm reaches a level of maturity that does not include poetry. On the other hand, Schlegel’s attempt at creating paradise on earth through love seemed to him too forced and immature. Novalis tried a different approach. Instead of an 18 empirical or allegorical novel, he wrote a “mythological” one that gave him sufficient latitude to break new ground in form and content. It was a radical solution, because what he aimed at was the transformation of reality into the fairy-tale land of a former (imagined) golden age. This entailed a major shift from the usual novelistic focus on categories such as time, space, linear plot, and psychological characterization toward “der Weg der inneren Betrachtung” (the way of inner contemplation; NS, 1: 208) for the title figure, who

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keeps expanding his consciousness — mostly through encounters with important people and their representative stories, but also through his dreams and introspection. An equivalent for “mythological” novel is “magic” novel; because it is the poet who uses his “magic wand of analogy” (NS, 3: 518) to symbolically construct a transcendental world (2: 536). As a consequence Novalis treats his figures as variations of the Absolute that he wants to bring about, making them exchangeable among themselves because they all participate in the same idea (see for example the metamorphosis of the “Blaue Blume,” the blue flower, into the figures of Zulima, Mathilde, Zyane, and back to the “Blaue Blume”; or see the variation of the King of Atlantis, the miner, the hermit, the poet Klingsohr, and the physician Sylvester). Thus, when readers look at any one figure, they already are within the inner circle of the final message. The same applies to dreams, tales, landscapes etc., all of them open to infinitude and in correspondence with previous or subsequent variations of themes and figures. The reader is always within reach of the final goal. This is what Heinrich von Ofterdingen is about: how a young man is initiated into poetry and how as a poet he is to bring about the redemption of the world. The stages of Heinrich’s development comprise the incipient dream of the blue flower that encapsulates his future; an encounter with merchants who recognize his inclination for poetry; a meeting with the crusaders and their oriental prisoner Zulima; an expedition with the Bohemian miner, who introduces Heinrich to nature and history; a conversation with the hermit and the viewing of a book that seems to contain his own history; a stay with Klingsohr, the Goethe-like poet who teaches Heinrich about technical aspects of writing, and his daughter Mathilde, who finally crowns him poet. In a dream Heinrich anticipates Mathilde’s death, because, as Klingsohr explains in his fairy tale, only a love that has gone through death and rebirth can spiritualize nature and bring down the barriers between this world and eternity. Ironically enough, on the threshold between “Erwartung” (expectation; part I) and “Erfüllung” (fulfillment; part II) the novel breaks off; as Novalis died so young, this becomes a point of interpretation. Certainly, Ofterdingen had the potential to become a mega-novel along the lines of Wordsworth’s Excursion (of which only The Prelude was ever completed). It remains for the reader to fill in the blanks of the fragmentary novel. However, Novalis has left copious notes, poems and also various clues within the first part to indicate the shape of utopia in the making. Clemens von Brentano’s Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter, ein verwilderter Roman (Godwi or the Mother’s Statue, a Novel Run Wild, 1800–1801) is perhaps the most “Romantic” of these early novels, signaling the pinnacle as well as an early breakdown of the arabesque mode that Friedrich Schlegel had championed. Both in form and content, all the novelistic motifs and narrative principles introduced by Goethe, Ludwig Tieck

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(William Lovell, treated in the next section of this chapter), Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel are joined together to create a seemingly chaotic work with a correspondingly bleak outlook for its protagonists. To mention Goethe as a model for a novel run amuck appears farfetched, but Godwi does provide sufficient evidence of his influence. Not only was Goethe the intellectual center of the young Jena Romantics, as acknowledged in the postscript to Godwi itself, but his Wilhelm Meister also furnished the inspiration for specific motifs, inlaid songs, apprenticeship years, and configuration (Werdo points to the Harper, Eusebio to Mignon, Godwi to Wilhelm, Römer to Werner, Violette to Philine etc.). In several respects, Friedrich Schlegel seems to have inspired Brentano the most, considering that his novel expresses “den Geist des Autors vollständig” (the author’s mind completely) who hovers over his creation “auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion” (on the wings of poetic reflection) multiplying it “wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln” (as if in an endless sequence of mirrors; KFSA, 2: 182–83: Athenaeum no. 116). The organization of Brentano’s novel exemplifies Schlegel’s contention that the author’s caprice rules supreme even to the point of the complete de-composition of the novel. Part one is an epistolary novel with multiple correspondents and perspectives, telling the story of Karl Godwi, who is seeking redemption through various forms of love (his encounter with Molly and Joduno, for example) and finding only a temporary refuge as well as poetic inspiration in Otilie, because the search for his mother and his own identity prods him on to look further. The second volume purports to be edited by the friends of Maria, the fictitious but recently deceased author of the first volume. Before his death, however, Maria had visited Godwi in his castle to find out from his own hero what really went on in the first part. Godwi and Maria decided to work as a team to complete the novel, starting their joint effort with material from which Godwi reads and which Maria forms into elements of the continuing plot, until this line merges into the “Fragmentarische Fortsetzung” (fragmentary continuation) by both of them. Although he sent some of his heroes on a wedding trip to Italy, hoping to get rid of them forever, Maria was unable to control his wayward characters and to finish his story before he dies of exhaustion, which leaves Godwi up in the air struggling to make sense of an open-ended novel. As an ironic obituary, “Nachrichten von den Lebensumständen des verstorbenen Maria” (news about the life circumstances of the deceased Maria) are presented by one of Brentano’s friends, since Brentano (= Maria) claimed to be dead. Godwi’s form is certainly in compliance with Schlegel’s program that Romantic poetry is still in the making, it is its actual essence that it exists only in its eternal progress and can never be completed (KFSA, 2: 183: Athenaeum no. 116). Yet what appears “formless [. . .] was in reality form19 ful” and purposeful. This bizarre form is an ingenious vehicle for presenting

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the futile search of a poet for himself, for love, for his mother. However, what succeeded in Lucinde and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the utopian transformation of the world through Romantic love, comes to naught in this novel: Godwi the poet remains the outsider, suffering from the ongoing conflict between life and art, isolated, misunderstood, and left alone by his women (Otilie disappoints him; Violette, the incarnation of free love, goes mad). The retelling of the same story elements from various perspectives — first in letter form (part I), then in the teamwork of Godwi, Maria, his editors, and friends — mirrors the search for the elusive self that is reinforced by the fragmentation of the novel itself. Not only its grotesque title — Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (Life-Opinions of Tomcat Murr Together with the Fragmentary Biography of Johannes Kreisler in Coincidental Galley Proof Sheets, 1819–21) — places E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr squarely in the same eccentric tradition as Lucinde and Godwi. By using the back of the Kreisler galley proofs as paper for his autobiography, the tomcat obliges his reader to shift his attention between two narrative perspectives on two completely different levels, which frequently conflict with one another but are subtly linked through parody. The parodistic inversion of Wilhelm Meister remains a constant element throughout the Murr biography, including the cat’s “Lehrmonate” (apprenticeship months) and its desire to become educated at all costs. Murr reads the classics from Cervantes to Goethe and Tieck for self-presentation and gainful living, and ends as a self-satisfied intellectual philistine who adapts to social conventions: “Mit der Sicherheit und Ruhe, die dem wahren Genie angeboren, übergebe ich der Welt meine 20 Biographie, damit sie lerne, wie man sich zum großen Kater bildet.” Thus Murr satirizes not only Wilhelm Meister, but also the “Bildungsphilister” (intellectual philistines) of the Age, as well as Kreisler, the Romantic artist par excellence, who in his own right forms a counterpoint to Wilhelm. Whereas Murr matures and finally finds his place in society, Kreisler remains unchanged, a strange exotic principle that like a fiery volcano destroys all social conventions around him. Between him and society, communication breaks down. Kreisler is forced to stave off the intruding world by hiding behind his melancholy and irony, even playing a madman; yet by almost always encountering only himself (with the exceptions of Julia, his muse, and Meister Abraham, his satiric mentor), he is on the verge of going insane for real. The monastery where he composes church music offers but a temporary refuge from the irreconcilable conflict between the Romantic genius, driven by his art and representative of a higher humanity, and the philistine society that considers him a destructive fool. But how was it possible for Hoffmann to create a masterful total unity out of a grotesque subject matter presented on two levels that parody one

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another and remain unfinished? Blackall calls this mode of writing “the unity 21 of ironic reflection.” It is a constant narrative principle, from the title page via the tensions between cats and dogs (reflected in Kreisler’s struggle at the court) to the postscript about Murr’s death. In addition, Hoffmann is skilled in arranging, juxtaposing, and telescoping his chapters. Despite the apparent chaos, he eventually manages to achieve a circular structure. In fact, the first Kreisler fragment tells us how Meister Abraham found Murr during a stormswept courtly birthday party and gave him to Johannes Kreisler, who becomes his new master. But time-wise, the party actually follows the last Kreisler section of the novel, where the previous festivity is announced. Thus Murr’s retrospective ends where Kreisler’s story begins, and Murr’s life 22 begins when Kreisler’s biography is headed for tragedy. In this way, Kreisler is not only caught within himself, but also symbolically within the overall 23 fractured structure of this unfinished work. What remain to be unraveled are the mysterious relationships among the characters as well as the outcome of the curse that is haunting the people at court; in this Gothic environment of rampant murder, incest, and adultery, it is unclear who really belongs to the nobility or to the bourgeoisie. In this way, the choppy composition appears to reinforce the instability of the social order in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Hoffmann intended Kater Murr to settle 24 accounts with the literature and society in the Age of Goethe. With its deceit, its repression, and its general hollowness of values, society appears to make it impossible for a genuine artist to maintain his dignity and to develop his genius unless he compromises it and adapts like Murr. Romantic authors either responded to Wilhelm Meister by composing arabesque counterpoints, as illustrated above, or they adapted Goethe’s straightforward narrative style and structure to their intention of creating novels in which their protagonists’ open-ended traveling determines the plotline. Two examples stand out, Ludwig Tieck’s Sternbald and Joseph von Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart. Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Eine altdeutsche Geschichte (Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings: An Old German Story, 1798) was the first Romantic novel that Friedrich Schlegel praised unconditionally as a divine book: “Es ist der erste Roman seit Cervantes der romantisch ist, und darüber weit über Meister” (It is the first novel since Cervantes that is Romantic and for that reason far above Meister; KFSA, 24: 260). Yet, without Meister’s inspiration, Sternbald would not have been written. Like Goethe, Tieck combined all three genres to compose the story of his itinerant protagonist, but he transfers him from the contemporary scene to Dürer’s time, shifting his focus from theater to painting and from Wilhelm who, after a linear development to maturity, limits himself, to Sternbald, who undergoes a cyclical progression on his way to becoming a full-fledged artist. Not surprisingly, Goethe noted the empti25 ness of it all, the sentimentality, and the wrong tendency of the novel.

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This circular structure is important in that it shows how Sternbald the enthusiast sets out from the bourgeois town of Nuremberg leaving his childhood, his sentimental friend Sebastian, and eventually his religiously inspired art behind (part I); how he discovers the bohemian world of artistic and erotic experiments represented by Florestan on his way to Italy (part II); and how he is to synthesize his artistic experiences upon his return to Nuremberg in the unfinished continuation. In part I, Sternbald appears as an enhanced “Klosterbruder” (see Wackenroder’s book) who enjoys religious paintings of saints and medieval heroes that open up vistas to infinitude and invite the recipient to prayer. This so-called “Sternbaldisieren” (to act like Sternbald) became even the hallmark of the German Nazarene painters’ community in Rome after 1810! In part II, however, painting is conceived more as a musical journey in colors, tones, and moods with an emphasis on impressionistic landscapes and their allegorical significance — a style that influenced Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810). Sternbald himself does not mature; he repeatedly rejects the temptation to settle down as a philistine. Instead, he continually broadens his artistic horizon, always in search of an ideal that remains beyond reach. The plot moves on two levels: the hero’s passage through trivial adventures (he is looking for his beloved’s portrait, for example), and his inward journey fed by premonitions that turn into reality because apparent coincidences correspond with the subconscious. Setting out into the world leads into his own past, to his beloved lady, to his mother, his brother, to himself. People who seemed to be lost or wandering aimlessly through the woods turn out to be mysteriously related. The fairy tale suspends the flow of time, but cannot entirely wipe away the shadows that fall across this landscape from Sternbald’s doubts about the social function of art in a materialistic world. Written in 1811–12, Eichendorff’s novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (Presentiment and Present, 1815) was not published until after the fall of Napoleon. The turmoil of the period has left its mark on this work, a blend of confession and self-realization, of Wilhelm Meister imitation, of social criticism, and of the work of providence. The hero, Count Friedrich, leaves his university friends behind when he sets out for his native Austria. Like Wilhelm Meister he encounters many random adventures; for example, he wakes up wounded in the lap of a girl who follows him disguised as Erwin, a boy, and who dies of unrequited love, like Mignon in Goethe’s novel. Both Wilhelm and Friedrich realize how little the arts can do to further a life of substance. But what distinguishes Friedrich from Meister is his journey without psychological maturation, since he sallies forth into the world under the sign of the cross, goes through life as a miles christianus, and ends as a monk. Since his way of looking at the world was predetermined from the outset, he only needs to make sure that he lives up to his creed that the world beyond is more relevant than the ephemeral sphere. The lack of indi-

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vidual features in his and other characters supports the basic design of the plot according to a religious plan of salvation that starts out with harmony with God (amor dei), progresses through the temptations of the world 26 (amor mundi) and concludes with the return to God (amor dei). What is more important than realistic details is Eichendorff’s use of characters and landscapes for allegorical purposes in the service of a higher religious goal; this feature distinguishes his novel from all other Romantic works, especially those that aim at the redemption of the ills of society through the sacred mission of the poet, for example, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Under the impact of the Napoleonic occupation of Germany (1806–13) when the survival and reform of the nation was at stake, Eichendorff decided to throw mere aestheticism over board and replace it with religious renewal. Accordingly, he stages landscapes as moral spaces, where good and evil clash. The flatlands with city and court are breeding grounds of corruption, whereas the mountains remain bastions of the ancient freedoms of the landed nobility. Significantly, two storms collide above the German Empire and produce the thunder of war over the country before the sun of regeneration and salvation 27 in the sign of Jesus rises again. Defeated in his patriotic struggle, Friedrich retreats from the contemporary scene to find a religious solution for the future. In this sense, Ahnung und Gegenwart diverges from previous Romantic adaptations of Wilhelm Meister, although its plot invites comparison 28 with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Gothic novel Die Elixiere des Teufels. The anti-Meister novels discussed parody their model either by filling its “progressive” form with a Romantic content (Sternbald, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Ahnung und Gegenwart) or essentially breaking up its travelstructure in favor of an apparent “chaotic” design (Lucinde, Godwi, Kater Murr). With the exception of Ahnung und Gegenwart, these novels remain unfinished, although sometimes nothing seems to be missing (Lucinde). Their fragmentary form seems to reflect their authors’ conviction that the world is out of joint and their task to repair it has proven to be difficult. Proceeding from the dichotomy between materialism and idealism, between life and art, the Romantic author and protagonist take different routes to deal with this clash: first, there is the mission-driven poet who, with the help of love, redeems the world and transforms reality into a fairy tale (Julius and 29 Lucinde, for example, and Heinrich and Mathilde, also Godwi ); second, suffering the consequences of alienation on the periphery of society, some protagonists are in danger of madness and death (Berglinger, Kreisler, Maria in Godwi); third, the artist distances himself from society and escapes into religion (Friedrich in Ahnung und Gegenwart). Accordingly, the prevailing circular structure of these novels either mirrors the hero’s inward journey in search of his roots, trying to find his identity by returning to his origins; or the protagonist, a destructive element in society, cannot break out of his imprisoning self (Kreisler), as this name implies.

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Diversification of the Romantic Novel Did the historical novel arise in the Age of Romanticism? There exist real doubts about it, since Walter Scott did not publish his Waverley until 1814. Although authors such as Novalis and Tieck had shifted the setting of their stories from contemporary Germany to medieval times as the newly discovered realm of the “golden age” of total harmony, they did not develop 30 specific historical details. The first Romantic novelist whose work may be compared with Scott was Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) with Die Kronenwächter (The Crown Guards, 1817), a sprawling and unfinished novel that blends Gothic elements such as murder, arson, blood drinking, and blood transfusion with colorful historical figures (Emperor Maximilian, Luther, Faust). As a historical novel, it is a failure, not only because Arnim’s protagonist Berthold dies without restoring the Hohenstaufen dynasty to its former glory, but also because Arnim was, unlike Scott, unable to transform 31 regional Swabian history into national history. Arnim did his best to study relevant historical sources in order to provide sufficient sixteenth-century local color, but essentially he saw his purpose in distilling history into poetic 32 truth. The result is a Romantic “Sagen-Roman.” Wilhelm Hauff’s (1802– 27) popular novel Lichtenstein (1826) follows in Scott’s and Arnim’s wake as “Eine romantische Sage aus der württembergischen Geschichte” (a romantic legend from Württemberg history), as indicated by its subtitle, but here serious Romantic aesthetic issues have deteriorated into faint echoes. Parallel to the Romantic novel of redemption from Heinrich von Ofterdingen to Ahnung und Gegenwart developed its counterpart, the novel with Gothic horror features stretching from Tieck’s Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell (The Story of William Lovell, 1795–96) via Ernst August Klingemann’s Nachtwachen (Night Watches, 1804), to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815–16). Following literary models such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), with its multi-perspective epistolary form and its libertine Robert Lovelace as hero, as well as Rétif de la Bretonne’s Le Paysan perverti (The Peasant Perverted, 1776), with its depiction of corrupting town life, Tieck’s early work has sometimes been relegated to the end of the Enlightenment. Yet in form as well as content, it is also a forerunner of Romanticism proper in that it poses the core question of the age: how far to trust the capricious rule of imagination in running one’s life. According to Hermann A. Korff, this novel is one of the most important documents for the genesis of Romanticism arising from a psychic 33 condition. Lovell plays with people as if they were marionettes on stage; he is faced with the dissolution of his irony-driven personality, but is killed in a duel after learning that he himself has been manipulated throughout the course of his life. What happens when a desire for the “uneingeschränkten 34 Willkür eines Gottes” (unlimited caprice of a God) takes over? Judiciously,

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Korff sees William Lovell with his ruthless hedonism and godlike arbitrari35 ness as threatened by the specter of self-destruction; he ends as a nihilist. In anticipation of subsequent Romantic novels, the completely emancipated individual is faced with the recurrent question: “Wer ist jenes Ich?” (Who is that I?, 613); finding no immediate answer, he then either slides off toward madness (see Balder in this novel, but also Jean Paul’s Schoppe in Titan, 1800–1803) or looks to religion for salvation from a total breakdown (similarly Medardus in Die Elixiere des Teufels). Interestingly, the young Friedrich Schlegel, the promoter of poetic omnipotence as the author’s supreme right, viewed William Lovell rather critically, in that poesy is breaking its own neck (KFSA, 2: 44). It is ironic that Schlegel also later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1808. Novalis’s statement “Wo keine Götter sind, walten Gespenster” (where there are no Gods, specters rule; NS, 3: 520) applies to both of the subsequent novels, Nachtwachen and Die Elixiere des Teufels. Once the latter have been chased away, there is a chance for the gods to return. Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen could very well be labeled “ein verwilderter Roman” in the wake of Lucinde and Godwi. But it is also an anti-novel that blends the tradition of Juvenal’s (A.D. 60–140?) biting satires with the German “Narrenliteratur” (fool’s literature, see Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, 1494), the commedia dell’arte, and Hogarth’s or Brueghel’s “Schwanzstücke” (tail 36 pieces) in order to achieve a grotesque effect in keeping with the intended inversion of the contemporary value-system. In an anti-chronological procedure, this book presents sixteen nightly vigils containing the observations of Kreuzgang, the narrator, regarding life around him as well as disorganized sections of his life story, starting with the end of his career as a town watchman via his days as poet, fool, minstrel, and inmate in a madhouse, where he falls in love as Hamlet did with Ophelia, and ending with finding his father’s grave. Klingemann went a step beyond Tieck’s William Lovell by letting his protagonist look into the abyss without flinching, keep up his negative perspective, and laugh the hollow laughter of despair: “it is the triumphant subject that plays the world judge and proves its inner superiority over the 37 world by way of his laughter.” Yet behind the Mephistophelean laughter of Kreuzgang, the “advocatus diaboli,” hides the explicit desire to turn things around for the better after all the sham masks and facades have been torn down. With their programmatic nihilism the Nachtwachen are the end products of the Early Romantic period that they parody in form, in ideals, and in social conventions. To what extent parodistic inversions are involved becomes readily apparent in the contrast between Novalis’s “Nachtbegeisterung” (night enthusiasm; in Heinrich von Ofterdingen as well as in his Hymnen an die Nacht, 1800) and Kreuzgang’s disillusioning night vigils. Moreover, in his fourth vigil, he finds his “Lebensbuch” (the book of his life; 25) that anticipates his

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future as did Heinrich’s book-find (Heinrich von Ofterdingen, chapter 5). Whereas Heinrich grows into his sacred mission as poet and redeemer, Kreuzgang becomes the accuser of a frivolous age that either forces ingenious minds to adapt or to be ostracized: “wer jetzt leben will, der darf nicht dichten!” (he who wants to live now must not write poetry; 6). His composition is marked by a curse (115). No wonder, the Fichtean “I” (referring to the idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814), in its divine omnipotence (see 69, 83), is contradicted by the dissolution of the self that longs to get away from itself (93). In sum, it is no more use for people to try to lead an aesthetic existence like Brentano or to follow the example of Wackenroder’s “junger Kunstbruder” (young art-loving monk; 108). For Klingemann and his protagonist Kreuzgang, as well as the suicidal town poet, times have changed: “Ich denke es ist mit dem Besänftigen jetzt nicht an der Zeit und man soll vielmehr heftig erzürnen und aufwiegeln” (I think the time for 38 appeasement is over, rather it is time for wrath and rebellion; 72). Nachgelassene Papiere des Bruders Medardus (1815–16, Posthumous Papers of the Monk Medardus; subtitle of Die Elixiere des Teufels) were written as a retrospective on the protagonist’s sinful life. Medardus tells the story of how he entered a convent and became a powerful preacher until his breakdown that tempted him to drink the Devil’s elixirs, urging him to lead a worldly life of lust and crime at a prince’s court. He later rejoined a monastery near Rome where he discovered ancestral documents informing him that he is descended from Francesko, the Renaissance painter who had sinned against Saint Rosalia and thereby brought a curse on his progeny. The end of Medardus’s life’s story marks the end of his search for an understanding of his own past with its many mysterious encounters with his halfbrother Viktorin and his love for Aurelie, his half-sister, a love that is torn between illicit passion and divine longing. “The act of recapitulation is [. . .] 39 therapeutic” and an act of penance, because eventually the monk finds his way out of a maze of crimes — among them murder, rape, and incest — that are reinforced by the Gothic structure of a generational curse and a fall from grace in accordance with Hoffmann’s model, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1795). In the end, Medardus redeems his family as well as himself. Paradise lost has been regained. According to Eric Blackall, this novel can be read in three ways that complement each other: as “the best thriller in German literature” (232), as a “morality play” of crime and redemption, and as a psychological novel (231). Since his birth, antagonistic forces, devilish and divine ones, have been striving for dominance in Medardus’s soul, a stage where uncanny forces rise up from the un- and subconscious, causing his self to shatter and to be jeopardized by specters of madness. Whether in the shape of Francesko, Viktorin, or other mysterious figures, these specters appear as

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doubles that keep haunting him; they seem to be real-life characters, but essentially are splintered off his own self. Since Schiller’s critical remark about the novelist as “Halbbruder des Dichters,” a complete turn-around in the production and evaluation of novels had taken place that allowed Romantic authors to integrate traditional elements — such as trivial love plots, the search for lost relatives and sweethearts, as well as Gothic crimes and punishment — with the greatest heights of poetry. Psychological depth, the repair of the old or the construction of a new world, and paradise regained are the marks of the Romantic novel. Novels became so popular that women, who had encountered difficulties in gaining access to the erudite poetic canon of rhymed plays and verse, turned toward novel writing as a way of self-expression and self-assertion. Even Schiller was impressed with a flood of works coming from female authors: “Ich muß mich doch wirklich darüber wundern, wie unsere Weiber jetzt, auf bloß dilettantischem Wege, eine gewisse Schreibgeschicklichkeit sich zu verschaffen wissen, die der Kunst nahe kommt” (I am really surprised how our women folk are able, in their own dilettantish way, to achieve a certain 40 versatility of the pen that approaches art ), indicating that with their natural talent they did not quite match their male counterparts. The problem for women was a pervasive gender bias that forced them either to publish their novels under their husband’s name (Therese Huber under L. F. Huber; Dorothea Veit, Florentin, 1801, “herausgegeben von [edited by] Friedrich Schlegel”), to publish under a pseudonym (e.g. Caroline de la Motte Fouqué as Serena) or to merely claim the role of editorship (Sophie Mereau as editor of her own novels). Accustomed to writing letters, some women favored the epistolary novel (see Mereau’s epistolary Amanda und Eduard, 1803, with excerpts published in Schiller’s Die Horen); others combined in their many works — for example, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué published 20 novels! — echoes of their Goethe studies with Gothic elements. A case in point is Fouqué’s Magie der Natur (Magic of Nature, 1812), a novel set at the outbreak of the French Revolution, which compels a marquis and his 41 twin daughters to flee from Burgundy to Switzerland. What is intriguing to the modern reader, with a view to literary history, is how Fouqué manages to link individual characters with a major historical event, the French Revolution — a burning topic of the age, yet mostly avoided by male authors, who failed to address the turmoil and its effects in a direct mimetic fashion. They did, however, treat the Revolution in a general, roundabout, and symbolic way, such as Goethe in his collection of stories titled Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Emigrants, 1795) and Hölderlin in Hyperion. Most Romantic novels as manifestations of an ongoing literary revolution would not even have been written without the emancipatory ideas of the French Revolution. Yet Fouqué shows how her protagonists become incarnations of ideological forces and how they can

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be linked with major revolutionary events, thereby contributing either directly or indirectly to the foundations of the historical novel in Germany. But she also confirms her view that women will be destroyed if they overstep the pre-ordained gender boundaries, therein reflecting her own predicament 42 in the male domain of public limelight.

Notes 1

Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, edited by Hans Eichner (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1957), 71. 2 Friedrich Schiller, Werke: Nationalausgabe, edited by Benno von Wiese (Weimar, Böhlau, 1962), 20: 462. 3

See Anna M. Wittmann, “Gothic Trivialliteratur: From Popular Gothicism to Romanticism,” in European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models, edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990), 59–75. 4 Friedrich Schlegel refers to “logical insurrection” (KFSA, 2: 179, Athenaeum no. 97). 5

Novalis refers to the poet as “transcendental physician” (NS, 2: 531).

6

Almost all novels between Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), Jean Paul Richter’s Siebenkäs (1796–7), Wackenroder’s “Joseph Berglinger” (in Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 1797, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Lebensansichten des Kater Murr (1819–21) prove this point.

7

See Dennis F. Mahoney, “The French Revolution and the Bildungsroman,” in The French Revolution and the Age of Goethe, edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister (Hildesheim: Olms, 1989), 127–43. 8 Mahoney, 129–31. 9

See Goethes Mignon und ihre Schwestern: Interpretationen und Rezeption, edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister (New York: Peter Lang, 1993).

10

For this reason Novalis in a letter to Caroline Schlegel differentiates between the Lehrjahre and the ÜbergangsJahre, specifying thus: “Das Wort Lehrjahre ist falsch — es drückt ein bestimmtes Wohin aus. Bey mir soll es aber nichts, als — ÜbergangsJahre vom Unendlichen zum Endlichen bedeuten” (The word apprenticeship is false — it expresses a definite goal. For me it should mean nothing but — years of transition from the Infinite to the Finite; NS, 4: 281). 11

See also Jean Paul Richter, whose Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool of Aesthetics, 1804) classifies both his own novels and those of his contemporaries according to their thematic levels as Italian, Dutch, and German ones; in Jean Paul, Werke, edited by Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 5: 253–54. 12

Literary Notebooks, 49; see Gerhart Hoffmeister, “Der romantische Roman,” in Romantik-Handbuch, edited by Helmut Schanze (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1994), 218. 13

See Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1983), 233.

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14

Wackenroder, Herzensergießungen, edited by Richard Benz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969), 125–26. “And shouldn’t the eternal enthusiast also boldly integrate his lofty fantasies, as a firm woof, into this life on earth, if he wants to be a genuine artist?” 15 See the contributions to Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, edited by James N. Hardin (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1991). 16

See Ernst Behler, Frühromantik (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 1992), 227–28.

17

See Dennis F. Mahoney, Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774–1829) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 88; Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Schlegels Lucinde: Zum Frauenbild der Frühromantik,” Colloquia Germanica 10 (1976–77): 128–39; Richard Littlejohns, “The ‘Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten’: A Reexamination of Emancipatory Ideas in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde,” Modern Language Review 72 (1977): 605–14; and the essay by Martha B. Helfer in this volume. 18

See Behler, Frühromantik, 233.

19

Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics, 176. Murr’s “Vorwort” in Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr, edited by Hartmut Steinecke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972), 11. “With the assurance and tranquility inborn to the true genius, I am publishing my biography, so that the world learns how to educate oneself into a great tomcat.” Steinecke provides an excellent analysis of the novel in his “Nachwort,” 486–511; see also Herbert Singer, “Hoffmanns Kater Murr” in Der deutsche Roman vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Benno von Wiese (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1963), 1: 301–29. 21 Blackall, 237. 20

22

This bizarre practice recalls Jean Paul’s advice in the Vorschule der Ästhetik: “Zwei Kapitel müssen für einander und zuerst gemacht werden, erstlich das letzte und dann das erste” (From the beginning two chapters must be written for one another, first the last and then the first; Werke, 5: 263). 23 See Howard Gaskill, “Open Circles: Hoffmann’s Kater Murr and Hölderlin’s Hyperion,” Colloquia Germanica 19 (1986): 21–46. 24

See Horst Daemmrich, “E. T. A. Hoffmann: Kater Murr” in Romane und Erzählungen zwischen Romantik und Realismus, edited by Paul Michael Lützeler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), 72–93, esp. 76 and 87–89. 25 Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, edited by Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis, 1950), 14: 186–87. 26

See Gerhart Hoffmeister, “Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart as a Novel of Religious Development” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, edited by James N. Hardin (U of South Carolina P, 1991), 300. 27 See the Reclam-edition by Gerhart Hoffmeister (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 248– 49. 28

Both Hoffmann’s and Eichendorff’s works have been compared by Horst Meixner in Romantischer Figuralismus: Kritische Studien zu Romanen von Arnim, Eichendorff und Hoffmann (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1971) and by Wolfgang Nehring in Spätromantiker: Eichendorff und E. T. A. Hoffmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997). Nehring refers to an “antagonistische Bruderschaft” (antagonistic brotherhood) between these two Late Romantics, 9.

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29

On the typology of love relationships in Godwi see Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration. Vol 1: 1789–1806 (Munich: Beck, 1983), 434–36. 30 On Novalis’s view of the Middle Ages see Nicholas Saul, History and Poetry in Novalis and the Tradition of the German Enlightenment (London: University of London, 1984) and Ira Kasperowski, Mittelalterrezeption im Werk des Novalis (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994). 31

Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration. Vol 2: 1806–1830 (Munich: Beck, 1989), 403. For an alternative reading of Arnim’s Die Kronenwächter in the development of the historical novel, see Fabian Lampart, Zeit und Geschichte: Die mehrfachen Anfänge des historischen Romans bei Scott, Arnim, Vigny und Manzoni. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 167–244. Also see Hans Vilmar Geppert, Achim von Arnims Romanfragment ‘Die Kronenwächter’ (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979), 82–87, for an interesting chapter on Arnim and Novalis. 32 Paul Michael Lützeler, “Nachwort,” Die Kronenwächter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), 381. 33

Hermann A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit: Teil III: Frühromantik (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1949), 51. 34

Ludwig Tieck, William Lovell, edited by Walter Münz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986), 166. 35 Korff, 3: 55. 36

Bonaventura. Nachtwachen, edited by Wolfgang Paulsen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964), 31, 70. 37

Korff, 3: 228. For a recent analysis of Nachtwachen see Ina Braeuer-Ewers, Züge des Grotesken in den Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1995).

38

39

Blackall, 231.

40

Letter to Goethe, 30 June, 1797; Gedenkausgabe, 20: 369. See Gerhart Hoffmeister, “The French Revolution in the German Novel around 1800,” European Romantic Review 2 (1992): 165. 41

42

For more detail see Gerhart Hoffmeister’s edition of Fouqué’s novel, Magie der Natur (Berne: Lang, 1989) and for comparison’s sake, see also his discussion of Therese Huber, Die Familie Seldorf (1796), in “The French Revolution in the German Novel around 1800,” European Romantic Review 2 (1992): 163–72. More recently, both Todd Kontje and Barbara Becker-Cantarino treat Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf; Kontje in Women, the Novel, and the German Nation 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 60–73, and Becker-Cantarino in Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2000), 86–112.

Tales of Wonder and Terror: Short Prose of the German Romantics Ulrich Scheck

N

OVELLAS AND TALES — like the novels and lyrical poetry of German Romanticism — are an essential part of the Romantic legacy and can claim their well-deserved place in the pantheon of German literature. They have never fallen out of favor with the reading public and even today capture our imagination. Undoubtedly this ongoing fascination is in no small part due to the depiction of strange and terrifying events in Romantic novellas and artistic fairy tales that unearth the darker side of the human soul. Indeed, for today’s readers who receive an almost daily dose of the supernatural via television and motion pictures, the wondrous occurrences in these texts could have come straight from the twilight zone of the X-Files: a knight loses his sanity and life when he finds out that his marriage is based on an incestuous relationship; young men succumb to the seductive powers of marble statues and female automatons; protagonists make deals with evil forces and trade their shadows and hearts for material wealth; a woman seemingly experiences immaculate conception; and a mentally disturbed soldier single-handedly terrorizes a whole city. Yet in the Romantic imagination, these extraordinary events not only satisfy the curiosity of readers who desire to transcend the experiences of everyday life, but also represent narrative points of departure for the creative fusion of the rational with the irrational, the outer with the inner world, and the profane with the sublime. Thus, it hardly comes as a surprise that the Romantic writers strove to overcome the traditional separation of genres in their short prose works, albeit not to the same degree as they did in their novels. Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) dictum that all Romantic writing amounts to “progressive Universalpoesie” (KFSA, 2: 182), to be sure, calls for transcending the narrow boundaries of genre-specific writing and frames Romantic literature in paradoxical terms as being universal and, at the same time, forever without closure. While Romantic tales are not open ended or fragmentary in the programmatic Schlegelian sense, they often successfully fuse fairy-tale elements with formal features of novellas, combine prose with poetry, blend the depiction of natural, seemingly realistic states of affairs with the presence of

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supernatural forces, and construct a multi-layered magical narrative space that defies easy interpretation. In their quest for less restrictive narrative forms, some Romantic writers explored ways of combining such established genres as the fairy tale with the novella, and all of the writers under discussion in this essay turned ordinary tales into captivating pieces of prose by injecting elements of wonder and terror into the textual reality. Following the lead of Goethe, who won the admiration of young writers with his collection of novellas entitled Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Emigrants, 1795), Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) began to reflect on essential features of short prose forms. Schlegel conceptualizes the novella as “eine Anekdote, eine noch unbekannte Geschichte, so erzählt, wie man sie in Gesellschaft erzählen würde” (an anecdote, a still unknown story, told as one would tell it at a social gathering), thereby closely echoing Goethe’s views as expressed in the Unterhaltungen (KFSA, 2: 394). For Tieck, every novella, regardless of its other features, needs “jenen sonderbaren auffallenden Wendepunkt” (that peculiar striking turning point), a central event in the story that one can perceive as being both plausible, as a possible occur1 rence in real life, and supernatural in its magical uniqueness. The conflation of everyday life and the supernatural is also at the heart of Tieck’s insistence on using the fairy tale next to the novella as the short prose form of choice in his earlier works. It is thus not surprising that texts such as Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Fair, 1797), Der Runenberg (The Rune Mountain, 1804) and Die Elfen (The Elves, 1811) have been classified as “Märchennovellen” (fairy-tale novellas), “Kunstmärchen” (artistic fairy tales), or “märchenhafte Erzählungen” (fairy tale-like stories). Ludwig Tieck, the son of a wealthy and educated rope maker in Berlin, was the most prolific and multi-talented author of the early Romantic pe2 riod. His very productive literary career now and again aroused suspicion among critics, who claimed that his writing lacked focus and an identifiable artistic style. Reservations of this kind are not justified, however, since tales such as Der Blonde Eckbert and Der Runenberg inspired many of his contemporaries to explore the hidden depths of the human psyche, particularly in regard to the fragile nature of personal and social identity, and because a number of his works shaped the literary trends of the period rather than followed established formulas. Novellas and fairy tales represented for Tieck the ideal forms of narrative discourse within the context of social gatherings that celebrated friendship and dialogue between individuals of equal standing in society. His collection Phantasus, published in three volumes between 1812 and 1816, embeds all of Tieck’s most important short prose and dramatic works in a frame narrative based on the discussions within a circle of friends. Of central importance in this amicable exchange of opinions is the question of how true under-

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standing is possible in light of the fact that no individual can occupy the mind of another. The Phantasus frame narrative establishes a parallelism between internal, mental states of affairs and an external nature that can appear domesticated and accessible, like well-structured gardens, or else wild and mysterious, like mountain ranges or waterfalls. Successful relationships and understanding of oneself and others are based on the same duality of the known and unknown. Friendship requires the ability to recognize that the mental landscapes of others are similarly constructed yet discrete, which means that one must accept and tolerate the possibility, even necessity of misunderstanding. Thus, the frame narrative establishes a community of interdependent individuals and provides the positive counterpart to the often disturbing and terrifying tales embedded in its rational, enlightened discourse. In Der Blonde Eckbert, originally written in 1796 and published in the following year, Tieck first introduces the reader to the seemingly peaceful and harmonious relationship between Eckbert and his wife Bertha, who live in seclusion in a small castle where they occasionally entertain their friend Walther. During one of Walther’s visits, Eckbert asks Bertha to tell their guest the story of her childhood that, until now, she has shared only with her husband. The narrator explains Eckbert’s motivation to allow Walther to learn about Bertha’s hidden past by pointing out that there are moments in life where one has a strong desire to divulge even one’s innermost secrets in order to strengthen the bonds of friendship. But the warning that complete disclosure of one’s inner self sometimes has the opposite effect and destroys a friendship immediately follows this statement. Bertha’s narration describes two escapes: one from home, when she is still a little girl, the other from her subsequent life in the seclusion of “Waldeinsamkeit” (solitude of the forest) as the housekeeper of an old woman. The latter constitutes a serious breach of trust as Bertha, then fourteen years old, leaves behind a little dog that the old woman had given into her care and takes with her both a magical bird and a pot of gemstones. On her journey back into society she strangles the bird, whose melancholy lament about the lost “Waldeinsamkeit” she can no longer endure. Bertha’s tale ends with her marriage to Eckbert, then a young knight without any financial means. What thus emerges from the story is that the gemstones Bertha stole from the old woman have secured a comfortable life for the couple. Before Walther retires for the night, he casually mentions to Bertha the name of the little dog she had left behind: Strohmian. This revelation is the turning point of the narrative: it triggers Bertha’s subsequent illness and eventual death, since she had never been able to remember the dog’s name and is now overcome by fear and longsuppressed guilt. The remainder of the story depicts Eckbert’s decline into insanity as the old woman whom Bertha had betrayed pursues him in differ-

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ent disguises and finally reveals to him that he has committed the ultimate sin of the blood, incest, by marrying his stepsister. During the last moments of his life, Eckbert hears a confusing chorus consisting of the old woman’s voice, the dog’s barking, and the bird’s repetitive singing of the “Waldeinsamkeit” song, but in a new variation: Waldeinsamkeit Mich wieder freut, Mir geschieht kein Leid, Hier wohnt kein Neid, Von neuem mich freut 3 Waldeinsamkeit. Der blonde Eckbert is a treasure trove of Romantic literature, filled with fairy-tale images, allegory, symbolism, and the confluence of realistic elements and supernatural forces. Tieck weaves together inner and outer reality through the moods of landscapes and spaces that reflect the mental states of the protagonists. At one moment, nature appears calm, serene, comforting, and joyful; in the next, it becomes threatening, terrifying, and violent. Mental states are just as volatile: neither Eckbert nor Bertha can sustain the veneer of a seemingly placid and comfortable life, as their personal and social identities are challenged by feelings of fear, guilt, and shame. Violations of trust trigger these emotions: Eckbert has no confidence that his friendship with Walther can endure without unveiling his wife’s hitherto secret past, and Bertha betrays the old woman and the two animals in her care. It comes as no surprise that the dog’s name plays such a central role in the story, as trust and loyalty have long been considered the most remarkable characteristics of canine behavior. However, the narrated events always remain ambiguous in regard to their ontological status, since it is never clear whether they belong to the external reality of the protagonists or are the product of the fictional characters’ mental collapse. The terrifying loss of personal identity results from Eckbert and Bertha’s inability to become part of a larger family and to establish interdependent relationships with others; even their largely identical names are indicative of the solipsistic loneliness (“Einsamkeit”) that entraps them. Redemption is not in sight in Der blonde Eckbert — no fairy-tale ending resolves the web of betrayal, guilt, and fear that leads those caught in it to murder, insanity, and death. The expression “Waldeinsamkeit” eventually became almost synonymous with the Romantic experience of nature and remained a constant and important motif in Tieck’s works, for example in Der Runenberg, a story he claimed to have written in 1802 in only one night. This tale of Christian, a young hunter who is seduced by subterranean forces into sacrificing his life as father and respected community member for the false glimmer of gold

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and precious stones, begins at the precise moment when the protagonist finds himself in an isolated spot deep in the recesses of a mountain range. While Der Runenberg contains allusions to mysticism and to the philosophy of nature espoused by the Danish mineralogist Henrik Steffens (1773– 1845), who was well known among the Romantics, it is nevertheless again predominantly a narrative of disengagement from society. During his journey through the mountain range, Christian meets a stranger in whom he confides that his desire to escape the confined space of his father’s garden and the narrow boundaries of family life has driven him to leave home forever and to learn the art of hunting. After Christian has completed his story, the stranger points him to the Runenberg, a magic mountain of runes where those whose hearts truly long for it can find ancient friends and great wonders, and vanishes as suddenly as he had appeared. In the central narrative segment of the tale Tieck masterfully blends the temptation of the mysterious mineral world with sexual imagery. In the twilight of the moon, Christian finds his way to the Runenberg where he watches through a window in a stone wall as a beautiful, majestic woman slowly undresses in a crystalline hall. To the captivated young hunter, the naked, pure form of her body gleams like polished marble. The temptress then hands Christian a magic stone tablet lined with precious gems that seem to be arranged in a wondrous shape. As soon as he touches the tablet, this incomprehensible formation of jewels penetrates him while simultaneously the whole apparition disappears, leaving Christian stumbling down the mountain in a state of mental and physical exhaustion. The remainder of Der Runenberg depicts Christian’s unsuccessful attempts to live a socially responsible life. The overpowering temptation of the mineral world with its promises of unheard of treasures eventually renders him a social outcast and drives him insane. After a final encounter with his wife Elisabeth and his daughter Leonore, during which he presents them with a pile of pebbles that he mistakes for precious stones, Christian vanishes forever. Throughout the narrative we can detect a consistent leitmotif, the juxtaposition of the warm, transitory, yet vital world of plants with the cold and seemingly eternal world of stone. Christian’s father, the avid gardener, and Elisabeth, who possesses a flower-like beauty, are representatives of the former while the stranger and the Runenberg temptress with her cold eroticism embody the latter. This juxtaposition also contains an economic subcurrent. Christian’s desire to possess the sparkling gems of the earth points to the emerging bourgeois accumulation of material wealth that becomes the driving force of social change during the early industrial period. The patriarchal voice of Christian’s father is the echo of the idealized old order of an organic community of individuals whose hearts are not yet bewitched by the lure of the cold metal.

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The same ambiguity that characterizes Der blonde Eckbert can be found in Der Runenberg: it is never clear where reality and imagination intersect in the protagonists’ minds. Both tales can be read as narratives about individuals in a state of transcendental homelessness trapped between the tedious routine of daily life and their higher aspirations. Bertha and Christian embark on journeys into the inner world of their dreams; Eckbert gets lost in delusions created by feelings of guilt suppressed in his subconscious. None of them can reconcile the tension between imagination and reality, individual desire and social integration. Die Elfen is the third part of what can be fittingly called Tieck’s trilogy of timeless “Kunstmärchen.” Written in 1811 and first published in Phantasus in 1812, this text resembles the traditional, folkloristic fairy tale more closely than the other two. It tells the story of the girl Marie who accidentally enters a magical realm of elves, a world hidden from everyone else in her community. The centerpiece of Die Elfen is an elaborate description of a wondrous world of colors and sounds representing the four elements that are the essence of all life. The elves ensure the prosperity of the area surrounding their territory since they are the ones who keep the ground fertile, grow the forests, and supply the wells with an abundance of water. At the end of her journey through this enchanted kingdom, Marie has to promise not to reveal the existence of the elf world to anyone. For a number of years, Marie safeguards the secret entrusted to her, and she, her family, and the whole community surrounding these invisible benefactors thrive. When Marie in a fit of rage tells her husband about her childhood visit to the elf world, disaster strikes. The elves leave the enchanted area and, because of their departure, Marie’s daughter Elfriede perishes, crops fail to grow, the forests die, and the springs dry up. Marie herself never recovers from the loss of her daughter and eventually follows her into death. For all its fairy-tale elements and supernatural ambience, Die Elfen is not a simple tale of paradise lost. Rather, it is a subtle premonition of things to come: the disintegration of long-established political and social structures in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the accelerating exploitation of natural resources for economic gain. As in Der blonde Eckbert, trust violated leads to the destabilization of a fragile equilibrium; as in Der Runenberg, the possibility of a harmonious relationship between humans and their natural environment is called into question. Only in the poetic realm of Romantic imagination are brief moments of unity still possible. However, for the protagonists in Tieck’s artistic fairy tales mutually beneficial interdependence with either nature or society is not sustainable. More than a quarter century after he published Die Elfen, Tieck penned his most intricate and subtle novella, a work that again focuses on the tension between individualism and social integration. Although it initially seems that Heinrich and Clara in Des Lebens Überfluß (The Over-Abundance of

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Life, 1839) also cannot establish their rightful place within the social fabric of family and community, they eventually manage to leave their splendid isolation behind, albeit only with the assistance of a deus ex machina in the form of an old friend who comes to the rescue at just the right moment. Des Lebens Überfluß is saturated with the wisdom and delightful sense of irony of the mature Ludwig Tieck. Of all his novellas, this is undoubtedly his most elegant work — beautifully crafted, serene, and humorous in tone, filled with reflections on love, life, and the essence of Romantic writing. The structure of the text is reminiscent of Uroboros, the snake that bites its tail, reproducing itself and thus forming a circle, the symbol of the eternal cycle of life. The beginning of the novella is also its conclusion, as the reader is confronted with rumors of a strange occurrence in a suburb involving possibly revolutionary elements, atheists, or rebels. In the course of the novella we learn that the truth is much less sensational and that the real culprits are a young couple living in utter isolation from society on the second floor of a small house. In order to survive the harsh winter, Heinrich (whose last name is Brand — the German word for blaze or fire) is forced to use the staircase leading to the couple’s domicile step by step as firewood. In a figurative sense, this destruction of the staircase burns the last bridge to society and brings to a logical conclusion the creeping isolation that started with their escape from the wrath of Clara’s father. When the owner of the house returns in early spring, the ensuing turmoil is resolved only by the appearance of Heinrich’s old friend Andreas. Andreas has made a fortune from a small investment that Heinrich had entrusted to him years ago, and with the unexpected wealth the two lovers can embark on a new life. Clara and her husband are reunited with her now forgiving father, and they henceforth live a comfortable and happy life. Des Lebens Überfluß is a poetic experiment that puts the concept of Romantic love to the ultimate test. Tieck places his protagonists in a situation of abject poverty and almost complete isolation from all human interaction — Heinrich’s servant Christine is the one and only source of outside support — and thus leaves them with only their love for each other. Stripped of life’s superfluous commodities and provided with only the bare necessities, the two lovers focus on their dreams, memories, and vivid imagination. The experiment both succeeds and fails: for a while, love does indeed conquer all, but ultimately lasting happiness can only be achieved within the social context of family, friends, and society. The key concept in Des Lebens Überfluß is “Schonung,” best translated as consideration and respect for the spiritual character and mystery of life. This respectful appreciation must be extended to all facets of human experience, be it nature, faith, or social structures. Most importantly, “Schonung” is the conditio sine qua non for the most intimate forms of interaction, friendship, and love; in Heinrich’s words: “Selbst der vertraute Freund, der Liebende, muß den geliebten

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Freund schonend lieben, schonend das Geheimnis des Lebens mit ihm träumen” (even the intimate friend, the lover, must love the beloved friend in a considerate manner, and in a considerate manner dream with him the 4 secret of life). This, of course, implies loyalty to and trust in others, tolerance of their weaknesses, and respect for their innermost secrets. While the protagonists of Tieck’s earlier tales end in despair and death precisely because they violate the principle of “Schonung,” Heinrich and Clara succeed because they act in the considerate and respectful manner necessary to sustain a civil society. Tieck’s masterful novella also contains subtle criticisms of Romantic subjectivity and the increasing commercial exploitation of art. Regarding the former, Tieck’s position is that Romantic imagination and creativity must always be based on reason and literary craftsmanship. The latter phenomenon becomes apparent in Heinrich’s dream of an auction where he himself, i.e., the artist, turns into an object available to the highest bidder. Much of the sophistication and subtlety of Des Lebens Überfluß is due to its ironic and humorous stance that allows the reader to recognize the self-reflective nature of the text and to maintain a critical distance to the narrated events. It is therefore not surprising that Des Lebens Überfluß today is still the most famous of Tieck’s later novellas despite the fact that most contemporary 5 critics failed to see its merits. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s (1777–1843) tale of the water-nymph Undine, who longs for human companionship and love, leads the reader to the same melancholy conclusion as Der Runenberg and Die Elfen: nature and society are incompatible. Fouqué, the descendant of an aristocratic Huguenot family, was a hugely popular writer during the first half of the nineteenth century. However, of the numerous knightly novels and tales he 6 wrote, only Undine (1811) achieved lasting fame and admiration. Although the bittersweet love story of the young knight Huldbrand and Undine exudes the ambience of a folkloristic fairy tale set in medieval times, it is a very contemporary narrative about the failure to endure the tension between the freedom and chaos of nature and the narrow confines of societal order. This fact becomes particularly evident in the distinct topography of the textual landscape, which is divided into the idyllic peninsula, the wild forest, and the structured world of urban society, as well as in the juxtaposition of the two female protagonists, the free-spirited nymph Undine and the materialistic Bertalda who plays her part in society to perfection. Huldbrand is the male torn between the two female protagonists, and his melancholic soul mirrors the futility of his struggle to reconcile his feelings for these very different women. When Huldbrand first meets the eighteen-year-old Undine on the peaceful, paradisiacal peninsula where she lives with her adopted parents, he is enchanted by her beauty, laughter, and capricious behavior. Undine also

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falls deeply in love with the happy young knight and is willing to sacrifice her immortality for a life with Huldbrand. The transformation of Undine from free spirit to devoted, even submissive, wife occurs during the wedding night, and because of her union with Huldbrand she develops into a moral being with a soul. The young couple moves to Huldbrand’s castle but the knight, who is never completely free of doubt about his wife’s elemental origins and her association with the untamed forces of nature, is drawn to the socially adept and scheming Bertalda. Eventually, Huldbrand commits the one act against Undine that forces her to return to her former state of being: during a journey on the Danube river he gets angry with her, and since they are on a body of water, Undine must rejoin the world whence she came. After Undine is betrayed a second time, this time by Bertalda after she becomes Huldbrand’s second wife, the knight dies from the water nymph’s kiss while she holds him in her arms. Undine has its place in the long tradition of artistic representations of the female as the temptress closely connected to or emanating from water — the ambiguous element associated with life, death, erotic desire, and sexuality. Fouqué himself identified Paracelsus’s (1493–1541) Liber de Nymphis, Sylphis, Pygmaeis et Salamandris as the main source and inspiration for his 7 tale. Undine, whose name is derived from unda, the Latin word for wave, embodies the mythical unity of all life; in her role as Huldbrand’s wife she personifies the temporary symbiosis of natural emotion and instinct with human reason and morality. As a fictional character, she typifies the early Romantic male vision of the female who can enrich the rational, antimetaphysical worldview of the Enlightenment with its counterpart, the realm of spirituality, desire, and wonder. However, the text’s melancholic tone accords with its premise that the marriage of nature with our social existence can only succeed for brief moments in the minds of author and reader. In Joseph von Eichendorff’s (1788–1857) famous novella Das Marmorbild (The Marble Image, 1818) we also encounter the figure of the beautiful seductress, in this case in the form of Venus, whose captivating sensuality puts a spell on Florio, a young nobleman and aspiring poet. Eichendorff, himself a member of an old aristocratic family from Silesia, is best known as a lyricist and the author of the novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing, 1826). The Taugenichts is the tale of a miller’s son who wanders into the world with nothing but his violin and a few pennies, thus personifying the prototype of the Romantic free spirit. While this later work contains some of the most charming and positive Romantic images of nature ever written, the earlier Marmorbild still shows signs of the existential uncertainty Eichendorff had to face in 1816 when he was struggling with his family’s desolate financial situation. He eventually decided to join the Prussian civil service and for a while he was unsure 8 whether or not this decision would jeopardize his aspirations as a writer. In

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Das Marmorbild, this crisis is reflected in the topos of the lost paradise and the transformation from adolescence to adulthood experienced by the novella’s protagonist. Like Huldbrand, Florio is caught between two opposing forces represented by female figures, the sensual, seductive Venus and the fair maiden Bianka. In his youthful desire to get to know the wondrous places he has fantasized about since his childhood, Florio has set out on a journey that has no identifiable goal. Just before he reaches the town of Lucca in northern Italy, he makes the acquaintance of the poet Fortunato who symbolizes the liberating and redemptive nature of poetic imagination, and the knight Donati who stands for the demonic force of creativity. Throughout most of his sojourn in Lucca, Florio is in a dream-like state as he is drawn to both Bianka and Venus, often confusing the two, and he is unable to decide whether he should follow the guidance of Fortunato or Donati. During a walk in the twilight of the moon he encounters Venus for the first time. She materializes in the form of a marble statue near a pond, and it seems to Florio as if she has just emerged from the waves and is now admiring the reflection of her own beauty in the water. This perfect poetic rendering of narcissism and death is completed by swans that circle around the image created on the surface of the pond. Florio first reacts with enthusiasm since the image seems to come alive and appears to be the lover he has been seeking for a long time; however, he is soon overcome by feelings of terror as the statue assumes a death-like pose. All subsequent encounters with Venus arouse the same ambiguous feelings in Florio, and during the final confrontation with her, just as he is about to succumb to her advances, he asks God for help. His plea does not go unheard and Venus loses her power over him. The novella ends with Florio’s departure from Lucca, accompanied by Fortunato and his newfound love Bianka. Das Marmorbild is a meticulously crafted tale reminiscent of a five-act drama. It is a tightly constructed web of textual elements ranging from colors to characters, from symbols to allegorical passages, all of which serve the central purpose of illuminating Florio’s predicament and eventual salvation. Aside from the autobiographical undercurrents alluded to above, at least two further layers of meaning are evident. It has been pointed out many times that Das Marmorbild can be read not only as a story of individual redemption, but also as a history of collective salvation, the transformation of mankind from adolescence to adulthood through Christianity’s conquest of ancient heathenism. More recently, critics have emphasized the importance of the poetological discourse implicit in the text. The image of the narcissistic Venus, for example, is clearly a critique of the excessive subjectivism that for Eichendorff was an inherent danger in Romantic writing. In his view, the true poet must balance the forces of chaos and order that exist

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within himself, and in Eichendorff’s case, that meant including the stabiliz9 ing power of one’s religious beliefs in the act of writing. Ernst Theodor Amadeus (E. T. A.) Hoffmann’s (1776–1822) tales and novellas are also self-reflexive texts that both tell a story and also reveal their fictional essence and poetic nature to the reader through distancing effects such as irony and commentaries by the narrator. A lawyer by profession, Hoffmann was a multi-talented artist. His literary oeuvre includes such famous tales as Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814) and Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scudéry, 1819). He was also an accomplished painter, who illustrated many of his own texts, as well as a successful composer and conductor whose opera Undine — completed in 1814 to a libretto by his friend Fouqué — was performed in 1816–17 to great acclaim 10 in Berlin. Of all his literary works it is the tale Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817) that has received the most attention from critics over the years despite the overwhelmingly negative, even derogatory, comments made by contemporary reviewers. Especially psychoanalytic literature has used this story of a young man susceptible to bouts of madness as a case study, mostly inspired by Sigmund Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” (The ‘Uncanny,’ 1919) in which he interprets the protagonist’s behavior as being rooted in 11 castration anxiety and narcissism. Der Sandmann is a particularly unsettling, sometimes gruesome, narrative representative of the darker side of Romanticism. Nathanael, a student and would-be poet, has been traumatized during childhood by his nanny’s story about the cruel sandman: “Das ist ein böser Mann, der kommt zu den Kindern, wenn sie nicht ins Bett gehen wollen und wirft ihnen Händevoll Sand in die Augen, daß sie blutig aus dem Kopf herausspringen, die wirft er dann in den Sack und trägt sie in den Halbmond zur Atzung für seine Kinderchen” (That is an evil man, who visits children when they refuse to go to bed, and he throws handfuls of sand into their eyes so that they pop out of their heads all bloody, and he then throws the eyes into his bag and takes 12 them to the half-moon to feed his children with them). From the time he hears this story, Nathanael is possessed by these horrifying images. As a tenyear old he mistakes the lawyer Coppelius for the sandman and blames him for his father’s death, and later on as a student he identifies Coppelius with the barometer dealer Coppola. From the latter he buys a small telescope with which he watches Olimpia, a female automaton built by one of Na13 thanael’s professors. For Nathanael, Olimpia is the most desirable woman on earth and he comes to the conclusion that he must marry her. Only after a violent confrontation with Coppola and the professor does Nathanael realize that Olimpia is not alive but merely a puppet. Just when it seems that Nathanael is recovering from the threat of going insane, tragedy unfolds. In a final moment of utter madness he mistakes his fiancée Clara for a wooden doll while looking at her through Coppola’s telescope — in a complete

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reversal of Nathanael’s perception of Olimpia, the animate becomes the inanimate —, and tries to kill her by throwing her off the town’s observation tower. While Clara is saved by her brother, Nathanael hurls himself over the railing and dies from the fall, his head shattered on the pavement. Distorted vision and the fear of losing one’s eyesight, or, metaphorically speaking, the fear of losing the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is the product of a tormented mind, are the major themes of Der Sandmann. In a narrative tour de force, Hoffmann employs the immediacy of personal letters and direct comments to the reader as devices to bring Nathanael’s mental breakdown sharply into focus. Hoffmann was very familiar with the medical discourse of his time that described insanity in terms of nervous disorders. But he goes far beyond the purely clinical explanation by reframing Nathanael’s decline into madness in poetic images and by including the inner perspective of the person suffering from debilitating delusions. Thus Hoffmann creates tension between the voices of reason (Clara) and unrestrained imagination (Nathanael), with the narrator providing guidance to the reader on how one can better appreciate the complex 14 relationship between illness and health. Like Das Marmorbild, The Sandmann criticizes the narcissistic subjectivism especially evident in Nathanael’s voyeurism and his total devotion to Olimpia, whom he adores for her ability to listen for hours to his monologues. However, Hoffmann extends the poetological discourse beyond this critical assessment to the question that is at the heart of Romantic writing: how do reality and the wondrous world of Romantic fiction relate to each other? In keeping with the visual theme of Der Sandmann, the narrator’s answer, given in a direct address to the reader, mirrors the condition of his own creative efforts: “Vielleicht wirst du, o mein Leser! dann glauben, daß nichts wunderlicher und toller sei, als das wirkliche Leben und daß dieses der Dichter doch nur, wie in eines matt geschliffnen Spiegels dunklem Widerschein, auffassen könne” (Maybe then you will believe, dear reader, that nothing is more fantastic and outrageous than real life and that the 15 poet can capture it only as if it were a dark reflection in a dull mirror). Of course, the use of the subjunctive in the German original suggests that we should read this statement with a healthy dose of skepticism. For Hoffmann, the nexus between life and art was as complex as the relationship between madness and sanity. While many of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novels and tales are still widely read today, Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838) is now mostly known for only one work. Just as Undine shaped Fouqué’s reception over the last two centuries, Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (The Wondrous History of Peter Schlemihl, 1814) is largely responsible for our current appreciation of Chamisso’s considerable talents as a writer of poetry and prose. A Frenchman by birth and a member of an old noble family from the Lorraine region,

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he was forced to emigrate during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution. Together with his family Chamisso moved to Berlin and became an 16 officer in the Prussian military. When he wrote Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte in the fall of 1813 at the height of the wars against Napoleon, he was still concerned about his divided loyalty, and many critics have maintained that the central motif in the text, the lost shadow, is a barely disguised reference to Chamisso’s loss of national identity. However, reading this tale solely as a veiled autobiography would not do justice to its sophisticated structure and subtle criticism of the emerging world of bourgeois capitalism. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte follows the pattern established by Tieck’s Runenberg, where we have seen that the lure of riches leads to the protagonist’s downfall. Young Peter sells his shadow to a man in a grey suit in exchange for a purse that contains an inexhaustible supply of gold. With this deal Peter Schlemihl hopes to attain the admiration of others and to achieve integration into a bourgeois society that is preoccupied with the accumulation of material goods. His newfound wealth, however, does not bring him the social status he seeks so desperately. Schlemihl’s efforts to fit in are constantly thwarted by the fact that people notice his lack of a shadow. He truly becomes an outsider with no hope for personal happiness and bourgeois respectability. When everybody but his servant Bendel has abandoned Schlemihl, he is tempted for a second time by the devil-like figure of the grey man who offers to give him his shadow back in return for his soul. Peter refuses and, horrified by the prospect of eternal damnation, throws away the magical purse. Now without a shadow and gold, but equipped with a pair of seven-league boots that he buys at a country fair, unaware of their mysterious powers, Schlemihl decides to turn his attention to nature. Aided by the boots that can transport him in a fraction of a second to any part of the globe, he becomes an explorer and scientist, leading a life that is solitary yet compatible with his true self. While on the surface Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte may appear to have all the characteristics of a fairy tale, it is in fact the story of an alienated individual trying to establish his identity beyond societal expectations. The melancholic tone of Peter’s self-reflections suggests that the exclusion from communal life is a high price, indeed, to be paid for such independence. Thus, this wondrous tale serves as a reminder that the cost associated with the shift toward more individual freedom in a market-driven society is the ever-increasing isolation of its members. This is also reflected in the playful narrative frame, typical of Romantic author-reader gamesmanship: according to the fictional letter preceding the text, Chamisso receives the manuscript of Peter’s first-person account of his life from Schlemihl himself who delivers it to the writer’s home while the latter is asleep. No direct communication between author and protagonist occurs, which foreshadows Schlemihl’s ultimate withdrawal from society and brings into focus the

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dreamlike, poetic nature of the text. It is, after all, only in Chamisso’s Romantic imagination where alienation can be fused with the supernatural in 17 both its magical and terrifying manifestations. Peter Munk, the simple-minded hero of Wilhelm Hauff’s (1802–27) Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart, 1828), also has to learn the lesson that money alone cannot buy him happiness and the acceptance of others. He takes the step from which Schlemihl still shied away: he exchanges his heart for a large sum of money. Before this ominous trade takes place, Peter Munk is a carefree young man whose aspirations do not reach beyond having enough money in his pocket for his frequent visits to the local pub and being the best dancer in town. For a while, he achieves these foolish goals with the help of the Glassmännlein, a benevolent spirit whom he meets in the dark recesses of the Black Forest. When Peter’s luck runs out, he falls prey to the evil Holländer-Michel and relinquishes his heart for material wealth. Instead of earning a living through hard work and by honest means, he becomes a ruthless loan shark. Peter now literally and figuratively possesses a heart of stone and can experience neither joy nor sorrow. Despite all his riches he remains at the margins of society, a bored and unaffected observer. One day Peter viciously attacks his wife because she shows kindness toward a poor old man who turns out to be none other than the Glassmännlein. Unable to feel remorse but tired of his indifference and disengagement, Peter sets out to reverse the fateful deal he made with the Holländer-Michel. All ends well: with the assistance of the Glassmännlein Peter manages to regain his warm, pulsating heart and he henceforth leads the life of an honorable, hardworking, and compassionate man. The obvious moral message of Das kalte Herz is that material wealth must be earned through one’s labor and craft, and that the affluent members of society have the responsibility to share their prosperity with those less fortunate. Both this Protestant work ethic and the commitment to act in a kind and charitable manner have their roots in the values instilled in Wilhelm Hauff by his upbringing in a middle-class Swabian family. What makes Hauff’s artistic fairy tale more than just a moralistic fable aimed at a bourgeois readership is its implicit discourse on cultural and economic issues prevalent in the Black Forest area during the first two decades of the nine18 teenth century. In this respect, the evil Holländer-Michel is the most intriguing character in Das kalte Herz. He turns honorable citizens into gamblers and drunks, establishes exploitative business practices in the lumber trade, and generally embodies the destructive outside influence on the traditional ways of life in this southern German region. Thus, Hauff’s seemingly unsophisticated narrative is not that simplistic after all. It provides us with a fascinating glimpse of how contemporary attitudes toward foreigners were inextricably linked with the depletion of natural resources and the undermining of the bourgeois value system. What Peter Munk receives in return

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for his heart is not just a stone, but a completely new set of moral parameters associated with fast and radically changing social norms. Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau (The Mad Invalid at Fort Ratonneau, 1818) also has a distinct subtext, albeit more of a political and historical nature. Its author Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) is well known for his close friendship and collaboration with Clemens Brentano (1778– 1842) with whom he published the most significant collection of German folk songs entitled Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn, 19 1805 and 1808). In Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau, Arnim utilizes a story set in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) to remind his contemporaries that peaceful coexistence between nations is an ever-present possibility even during long periods of military conflict. On the surface, the plot appears to be just another poetic manifestation of the age-old adage that love conquers all. A young German woman named Rosalie is drawn to an injured French soldier who has been captured by the Prussians. It is love at first sight: from the moment she encounters Francœur, who is mentally disturbed as a result of a head wound, Rosalie knows that her heart belongs to the young Frenchman. Despite her mother’s strong disapproval and without concern for her own social marginalization, she marries him and looks after his every need. When Francœur’s condition worsens Rosalie manages to find him a post at Fort Ratonneau near Marseille where, so she hopes, the mild Mediterranean climate will have a calming influence on her husband during his frequent bouts of madness. For a while it seems as if Rosalie’s wishes come true but when Francœur is manipulated into thinking that his wife has betrayed him, he locks himself in the Fort’s tower with its huge supply of gunpowder. Francœur threatens to blow up himself and anybody who tries to take the tower by storm. For three days he holds Marseille hostage by cutting off any traffic to and from the city with a remarkable display of his shooting skills. In the end, it is only because of Rosalie’s courage and willingness to sacrifice her life for him that Francœur is saved from being totally consumed by madness. She forces him to confront his demons, and during a last emotional eruption he opens up his head wound, thus exposing the bone splinter responsible for his physical and mental injury. Uncovering the source of his irrational behavior paves the way for the fairy-tale ending: Francœur comes to his senses again and the people of Marseille celebrate Rosalie as their savior. Arnim makes extensive use of color symbolism in order to bring the political and historical subtext sharply into focus. Rosalie’s character, for example, implies a combination of red (rose) contained in her first name and white (lily) found in her maiden name, Lilie. Red stands for Rosalie’s unwavering love and white refers to both her innocence and the French royalist color. Furthermore, after 1814 the lily was reintroduced into the French flag as an emblematic component, and thus the connection between the German

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Rosalie and the Frenchman Francœur is established not only on the personal but also the political level. Ultimately, Rosalie’s and Francœur’s love for each other proves to be strong enough to rise above all physical, mental, and social challenges, which in political terms suggests that the historical differences between Germany and France can be overcome as well. Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau symbolically articulates Achim von Arnim’s belief that the poetic imagination can decipher a higher truth in history. In Arnim’s Romantic vision, the power of love experienced by Rosalie and Francœur signals to the reader that mutual tolerance and lasting peace between deeply divided nations are indeed possible. We can hardly blame the author for not anticipating that the French and German people would have to face the madness of war three more times before his Romantic vision 20 finally could become a reality. Heinrich von Kleist’s (1777–1811) narrative texts do not guide the reader to such a harmonious conclusion. His protagonists suffer because they perceive the world as a place without metaphysical certainty in which acts of violence ranging from rape to murder predominate. Kleist himself never succeeded in his attempts to find a path to personal happiness and for most of his life experienced strong feelings of alienation and depression. At the age of thirty-four he shot Henriette Vogel, a terminally ill woman who had agreed to join him in death, and then committed suicide. Although Kleist himself regarded his dramas to be superior to his prose works, the latter are equally powerful and arguably paint an even darker picture of the inability of human beings to control their own destiny. The unexpected and terrifying events in Kleist’s novellas and tales are no longer attributable to supernatural forces, be they malevolent or benign, real or imagined, but are set in motion 21 by selfish, spiteful, or cruel human behavior. Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile, 1807) is a particularly disturbing example of individual suffering in a destabilized society that no longer provides physical and metaphysical protection. This chilling tale, set in 1647, opens just after Josephe, who has given birth to an illegitimate child, has been sentenced to death by the archbishop of St. Jago. While Josephe and her lover Jeronimo are held in different prisons where they await her public execution, a powerful earthquake destroys most of the city including the royal palace and the cathedral, the symbols of political and religious authority. The young couple and their child, a little boy named Philipp, escape from the ruins and are blissfully reunited in an Eden-like valley. Here they meet Don Fernando, who is the son of the city commandant, his family, and many other survivors willing to share whatever possessions they managed to carry with them. For a brief moment it seems as if the earthquake has created a utopia in which social status and material wealth have become meaningless. However, Kleist’s use of the verb “schien” in the passage that describes this idyllic scenario points toward its illusory character:

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“Und in der Tat schien, mitten in diesen gräßlichen Augenblicken, in welchen alle irdischen Güter der Menschen zugrunde gingen, und die ganze Natur verschüttet zu werden drohte, der menschliche Geist selbst, wie eine 22 schöne Blume, aufzugehn.” Soon it becomes evident that the evolution of an enlightened society based on equality and goodwill is a short-lived dream, as Josephe’s enthusiastic belief that the new social order brought about by the earthquake is the result of God’s inexplicable power is quickly and brutally shattered. When the couple attends mass in the only still existing church, the canon giving the sermon incites the congregation to turn against them. He accuses Josephe and Jeronimo of having caused the natural disaster with their sinful behavior, and in an eruption of rage equally as destructive as the violent earthquake, the mob kills both of them. Don Fernando’s efforts to defend Philipp and his own son Juan are only partially successful. The shoemaker Pedrillo, who is the most ferocious and bloodthirsty of all the attackers, mistakes Juan for Philipp and mercilessly kills the little boy: “Meister Pedrillo ruhte nicht eher, als bis er der Kinder eines bei den Beinen von seiner Brust gerissen, und, hochher im Kreise geschwungen, an eines Kirchenpfeilers Ecke zerschmettert hatte. [. . .] Don Fernando, als er seinen kleinen Juan vor sich liegen sah, mit aus dem Hirne vorquellenden Mark, hob, voll namenlosen Schmer23 zes, seine Augen gen Himmel.” Kleist’s realistic, sometimes even detached, style makes the violent outburst in the church one of the most gruesome and terrifying passages in Romantic literature. The sadistic images in this scene stand in stark contrast to the pastoral ambience of the fleeting social utopia and emphasize how vulnerable individuals are in a world that has lost its metaphysical foundation and where political and religious authority is exercised in an oppressive rather than caring manner. Das Erdbeben in Chili concludes on a seemingly positive note with Don Fernando and his wife eventually adopting and raising Philipp as their own son. However, the very last sentence suspends closure indefinitely: “wenn Don Fernando Philippen mit Juan verglich, und wie er beide erworben hatte, so war es ihm fast, als 24 müßt er sich freuen.” Die Marquise von O . . . (The Marquise of O . . . , 1808) is a much more subtle text lacking the explicit, random violence found in Das Erdbeben in Chili. Nevertheless, the conflict between individual perception of reality and the contingent, deceptive nature of human existence is equally evident in this expertly crafted novella. In the opening sentence, Kleist sets up an impossible scenario: a marquise who enjoys an impeccable reputation advertises in the newspapers that she has become pregnant without her knowledge. As we learn later on, she has been raped by the very same Russian officer who rescued her from a group of soldiers intent on assaulting her. She has no recollection of her sexual violation since it occurred while she was unconscious, and the marquise eventually has to resolve two complex inner strug-

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gles. She has to accept the fact that she is pregnant without losing faith in her innocence, and she must come to terms with her love for the young officer, her “angel” as she calls him, once his repulsive behavior has been revealed. Since the marquise succeeds on both counts, the novella ends in a happy marriage blessed with many more children. Despite this fortunate conclusion, the essential problem remains unsolved. Even absolute trust in one’s own feelings and beliefs does not provide shelter from the ever-present danger that one’s physical, emotional, and spiritual integrity will be violated by acts of sudden terror. The profound loss of trust in the protection offered by a civil society is also at the heart of Kleist’s longest and arguably greatest tale, Michael Kohlhaas (1810), in which a respected horse dealer turns into a ruthless “avenging angel” because his sense of natural justice has been undermined by the arbitrary confiscation of two of his animals. The disturbing and often brutal realism in the depiction of the extremely fragile link between individual and society is the trademark of Kleist’s narratives. They share with all the texts discussed above the notion that personal and social identities can no longer be taken for granted. As we have seen, the Romantics articulate this existential insecurity with varying emphases in psychological, religious, economic, environmental, and sexual terms. Summary statements about genres and periods are more often than not simplistic and tend to obscure the unique nature of every literary text. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that all Romantic novellas and tales place the protagonists in situations where they have to face their darkest desires and most secret fears, and where their physical and spiritual integrity is at stake. These twilight zones of the Romantic literary imagination easily surpass in depth and complexity any of the modern-day sci-fi visualizations of wonder and terror produced solely for quick consumption and commercial profit. It is not surprising, therefore, that contemporary novelists, composers, and filmmakers have drawn inspiration from tales by writers like Tieck, Hoffmann, Arnim, and Kleist. In the American edition to her seminal study of Weimar cinema, Lotte Eisner drew attention to the first feature film by Werner Herzog (b. 1942), Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1968), as a promising indication of the rebirth of the German cinema and identified its literary 25 source as a story by Achim von Arnim. In 1975, E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931) built into his novel Ragtime the tale of the African-American musician Coalhouse Walker, who undertakes an armed rebellion and appoints himself the head of the Provisional American Government after his Model T Ford is vandalized by envious racists and his fiancée dies in the vain attempt to secure justice for him by peaceful means; it was not long before literary critics recognized that Doctorow had transposed Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas 26 from the time of Martin Luther to twentieth-century America.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Drawing of “Der Sandmann,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Pen and ink, dated November 1815. Courtesy of Bailey-Howe Library, University of Vermont. Like Doctorow, the filmmaker David Lynch (b. 1946) begins his 1986 film Blue Velvet in an apparently idyllic white suburban community. But just as Younger Brother voluntarily employs his knowledge of firework technology in the service of Coalhouse Walker’s rebellion — an allusion both to American fears about “Anarchists” around 1900 and the specters unleashed in the late 1960s by groups like the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army — Lynch’s hero Jeffrey soon discovers the seamy side to his hometown and himself. One of the key insights in Freud’s essay on “Das Unheimliche” is that its root word contains within it both positive and negative connotations: “home-like” and “secretive.” In this connection, Freud refers to an observation by Schelling that the uncanny is everything that should have remained secret or hidden but has come to light; hence, the most terrifying aspect of young Nathanael’s identification of the lawyer Coppelius with the evil Sandman is that he sees Coppelius dominating his good, but weak father — the scene that Hoffmann sketched in a drawing before actually undertaking the writing of his tale — and so comes to regard 27 the former figure as the disturber and destroyer of love throughout his life. In her study of figure doublings and of oral and aural hallucinations within Blue Velvet, Alice Kuzniar has established that not only Freud’s essay, but

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also Hoffmann’s tale provide the backdrop to this cult film of the 1980s. Already in the nineteenth century, of course, Hoffmann’s tale had inspired composers like Leo Delibes (1836–91) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80) to put to music the subplot of the singing and dancing puppet Olimpia in the ballet Coppelia (1870) and, in Offenbach’s case, the tragicomic opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (1881); to this list can be added Heaven Ablaze in His Breast (1989), a dance-opera by the Scottish composer Judith Weir (b. 29 1954) whose later works include the opera Blond Eckbert (1994). One additional cinematic adaptation deserves mention: The Sandman (2001) by David Teague (b. 1976). Common to both Hoffmann’s tale and Teague’s film is the conscious evocation of eye imagery, as in the shot of Nathanael peering in through the portal to Professor Spalanzani’s home where he is to realize his dream of meeting with Olimpia. Appearances are deceiving, of course, as both reader and viewer already have learned. While the film’s opening caption may have led the viewer to expect a movie set in 1815 Berlin, its “reel” locale unfolds in the urban wasteland of Brooklyn, New York; by the time Nathanael ventures into the park with Olimpia, his movements are becoming as mechanical as hers. A black-and-white, largely silent film with intertitles and original score, The Sandman also includes a voice-over narration of Nathanael’s initial revelations about Coppelius and Coppola, as well as the ironic commentary of a Hoffmannesque narrator who undercuts the increasingly hysterical reporting and behavior of Nathanael. A similarly postmodern collage of filmic styles prevails. Certain shots may remind the viewer of scenes from silent-screen classics like Robert Wiene’s (1881–1938) Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1919) or F. W. Mur30 nau’s (1888–1931) Nosferatu (1922). But Teague also replaces Coppola’s telescope with a Super-8 camera that first brings Olimpia to life for Nathanael and later transforms the vision of his fiancée into the lifeless, eyeless puppet that precipitates his final, fatal outburst of madness. Instead of the tower of Hoffmann’s tale, though, we find ourselves on the roof of a highrise building with a view of the New York City harbor around us, including a fleeting glimpse of the World Trade Center. Who could have suspected that events were soon to give sad proof of the observation by Hoffmann’s narrator that nothing is more fantastic and outrageous than real life?

Notes 1 2

Ludwig Tiecks Schriften, vol. 11 (Berlin: Reimer, 1828–54), 87.

See Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). 3 Ludwig Tieck, Der blonde Eckbert, Schriften in 12 Bänden, vol. 6: Phantasus, edited by Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 145. “Lone woodland still, / Again my thrill, / No envy stirs, / No hate can kill, / Again

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my thrill, / Lone woodland still.” The translation is from the volume Goethe, Tieck, Fouqué, Brentano: Romantic Fairy Tales. Translated and edited by Carol Tully (London & New York: Penguin, 2000), 51. 4

Ludwig Tieck, Des Lebens Überfluß, Schriften in 12 Bänden, vol. 12: Schriften 1836– 1852, edited by Uwe Schweikert (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 228.

5

For a detailed discussion of Tieck’s short prose see William J. Lillyman, Reality’s Dark Dream: The Narrative Fiction of Ludwig Tieck (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), especially chapters 5 and 6. See also Gordon Birrell, The Boundless Present: Space and Time in the Literary Fairy Tales of Novalis and Tieck (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979). 6 For a comprehensive survey of Fouqué’s literary production see Frank Rainer Max, Der “Wald der Welt”: Das Werk Fouqués (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980). 7

In his response to an inquiry about the sources of Undine, Fouqué wrote in the journal edited by himself and Wilhelm Neumann that he found the concept of marriage between “Wasserfrauen” (water women) and humans in Paracelsus’s Liber de Nymphis but maintained that everything else in Undine was his own invention; see Die Musen 4 (1812): 198. 8

See Günther Schiwy, Eichendorff: Der Dichter in seiner Zeit: Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2000).

9

See Winfried Woesler, “Frau Venus und das schöne Mädchen mit dem Blumenkranze: Zu Eichendorffs Marmorbild,” Aurora 45 (1985): 33–48, for a discussion of the competing female figures. For an alternative reading of the temptations contained in Eichendorff’s tale, see the conclusion to the essay by Martha B. Helfer in this volume. 10

See Rüdiger Safranski, E. T. A. Hoffmann: Das Leben eines skeptischen Phantasten (Munich: Hanser, 1984). 11 For two stimulating readings of Hoffmann’s tale that also address a number of Freud’s significant misreadings, see S. S. Prawer, “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of Der Sandmann,” German Life and Letters 18 (1965): 297–308 and Lee B. Jennings, “Blood of the Android: A Post-Freudian Perspective on Hoffmann’s Sandmann,” Seminar 22 (1986): 95–111. 12

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann, Sämtliche Werke in 6 Bänden, vol. 3, edited by Hartmut Steinecke in cooperation with Gerhard Allroggen (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 13. 13

For a detailed discussion of the automaton motif see Lienhard Wawrzyn, Der Automaten-Mensch: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung vom “Sandmann” (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976). 14

See John M. Ellis, “Clara, Nathanael, and the Narrator: Interpreting Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann,” German Quarterly 54 (1981): 1–18. 15 Der Sandmann, 27. 16

See Peter Lahnstein, Adelbert von Chamisso: Der Preuße aus Frankreich (Munich: List, 1984).

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17

For further readings see Adelbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemihl: Geld und Geist: Ein bürgerlicher Bewußtseinsspiegel, edited by Winfried Freund (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980), and Alice Kuzniar, “‘Spurlos. . . . Verschwunden’: Peter Schlemihl und sein Schatten als der verschobene Signifikant,” Aurora 45 (1985): 189–204. 18 For information on Hauff see Friedrich Pfäfflin, Wilhelm Hauff: Der Verfasser des “Lichtenstein.” Chronik seines Lebens und Werkes (Stuttgart: Fleischhauer & Spohn, 1981). For an analysis of the economic subtext in Hauff’s tale see Ulrich Scheck, “Wald und Wucher in Wilhelm Hauffs Das kalte Herz,” Natur, Räume, Landschaften: 2. Internationales Kingstoner Symposium, edited by Burkhardt Krause and Ulrich Scheck (Munich: Iudicium, 1996), 157–68. 19 See Helene M. Kastinger Riley, Achim von Arnim (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979). For further information on Des Knaben Wunderhorn see the essay by Fabian Lampart in this volume. 20

For a discussion of Arnim’s ironic deconstruction of symbols of masculine identity that gives special attention to Der tolle Invalide see Thomas Paul Bonfiglio, “Ironie und Modernität bei Arnim,” Grenzgänge: Studien zu L. Achim von Arnim, edited by Michael Andermatt (Bonn: Bouvier, 1994), 35–56. 21 For an introduction to scholarship on Kleist’s life and literary output see Thomas Wichmann, Heinrich von Kleist (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). For detailed discussions of Kleist’s prose works see Denys Dyer, The Stories of Kleist: A Critical Study (London: Duckworth, 1977); Beatrice Martina Guenther, The Poetics of Death: The Short Prose of Kleist and Balzac (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); and most recently Séan Allan, The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Rochester: Camden House, 2001). 22

Heinrich von Kleist, Das Erdbeben in Chili, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, edited by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: dtv, 1987), 2: 152. “And indeed it seemed that in the midst of these horrible moments, when all of people’s earthly goods were destroyed and when all of nature appeared to become engulfed, the human spirit itself would rise like a beautiful flower.” 23 Das Erdbeben in Chili, 158. “Master Pedrillo did not stop until he had grabbed one of the children by the legs and had ripped it from his [Don Fernando’s] chest, and, swinging it round and round high in the air had smashed it into the edge of a church pillar [. . .] When Don Fernando saw his little Juan lying there before him, brain jutting from the forehead, he raised, filled with unspeakable grief, his eyes to the sky.” 24

Das Erdbeben in Chili, 159. “Whenever Don Fernando compared Philipp to Juan and how he had acquired both of them, it almost seemed to him as if he should be happy.” 25

Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969), 341. For a more extended study of similarities and divergences between Arnim’s Der tolle Invalide and Herzog’s film, which is set on an island in Greece during World War Two, see Brigitte Peucker, “The Invalidation of Arnim: Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968),” in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, edited by Eric Rentschler (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), 217–30.

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26

Lieselotte E. Kurth-Voigt, “Kleistian Overtones in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime,” Monatshefte 69 (1977): 404–14. For an overview of the reception of Kleist’s tale by writers, filmmakers, and literary scholars see Paul Michael Lützeler, “Heinrich von Kleist: Michael Kohlhaas (1810),” Romane und Erzählungen der deutschen Romantik: Neue Interpretationen, edited by Paul Michael Lützeler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 213–39; here 213–17. For a discussion of Kleist’s use of Michael Kohlhaas as a critique of the Prussia of his own day see Wolfgang Wittkowski, “Is Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas a Terrorist? Luther, Prussian Law Reforms and the Accountability of Government,” Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques 26 (2000): 471–86. 27

Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche,” Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1978), 12: 236, 244. 28 Alice Kuzniar, “’Ears Looking at You: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet,” South Atlantic Review 54, no. 2 (1989): 7–21. 29

See Steven Paul Scher, “Judith Weirs Heaven Ablaze in His Breast: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Der Sandmann als postmoderne Tanzoper,” Literatur und Demokratie: Festschrift für Hartmut Steinecke zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Alo Allkemper and Norbert Otto Eke (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2000), 49–60. 30 In the chapter “Symphonies of Horror” Lotte Eisner notes the affinities of German silent films, with their motifs of the “demoniac bourgeois” and “the sway of the Doppelgänger,” to the tales by Romantic authors such as Hoffmann and Jean Paul; The Haunted Screen, 95–113.

The Romantic Drama: Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, Fouqué, and Eichendorff Claudia Stockinger

I

N 1802,

AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL had little positive to report about the repertoire and the condition of the contemporary German stage. In his view, it consisted mainly of poor translations or revisions of Italian, 1 French, and English material. The audience preferred so-called “Familien2 gemälde” (family tableaux), which combined the action, characters, and problem areas of the bourgeois tragedy and sentimental comedy, and trivialized them in a moralizing stereotypical manner. Also popular was the “Ritterdramatik” (knightly drama), which also adapted the pattern of the bourgeois melodrama and embellished it with pseudo-historical details, 3 mostly of medieval character. While the entertainment drama, with its emphasis on illusion, dealt with current topics taken from the contemporary bourgeois environment, new tendencies to rehabilitate historic and mythological materials, which had been among the preferred subject areas in the neo-classicist theater of the early Enlightenment (especially Johann Christoph Gottsched, 1700–1766), can be observed in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Even though this choice had been explained with normative reasons around 1700, as the genus sublime (elevated genre) of tragedy required contents related to the state, new poetological principles come to bear around 1800 that allow us to roughly divide the dramaturgical and dramatic development emerging at that time into two directions. On one hand, the Weimar classics (Schiller, Goethe) claim a “modern drama,” which adapts the traditions of antiquity and transforms them, thereby turning the dramatized individual case into a symbol for all humankind. On the other hand, the Early Romantic School (including Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck) shifts the roots of “modern” drama from ancient times to medieval or early modern times (historical drama), into “Nordic” mythology (mythical drama), and into recent history (patriotic drama), a shift in content that is mainly due to national impulses. In addition, this young generation was confronting, in particular, the traditions of the Enlightenment from which they had derived their literary socialization and from whose overpowering authority they now sought to

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distance themselves. The result was an intertextual meta-drama (parodies, literary satires, play with forms of popular theater) full of allusions to the great works and authors, topics and dramatic styles of the European cultural realm such as Molière, Shakespeare, Goldoni, Gozzi, Ludvig Holberg, Lope de Vega, and Calderón. It is quite telling that this is precisely the time when the great verse translations of Shakespeare, still performed to this day, were initiated by August Wilhelm Schlegel and brought to their conclusion under the editorship of Ludwig Tieck; in addition, Schlegel and Joseph von Eichendorff produced powerful translations of Spanish works. With such examples available to them, the Romantics preferred the verse drama. Romantic production abounds with metrical variety, and is characterized by blending prose with verse and stanza forms of the most varied sources: sonnets, ottava rima, romances, Italianate song forms, and terza rima, to mention only the most important examples. 4 Regardless of Romantic elements in the drama of Schiller, Goethe (such 5 as Faust II), and Heinrich von Kleist, this account will not treat these authors, who so decisively shaped the literary history of German drama, because they are not part of the Romantic School in the narrower sense of the term. While an author such as Kleist, who is now accepted as part of the canon, struggled for recognition around 1810, the now forgotten Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843) was considered one of the best dramatists 6 of the day, even though the Romantic drama subsequently has not enjoyed 7 an especially good reputation. Consequently, the following overview considers the dramatic works of only those authors who clearly are characterized as Romantics in the canonized division of German literary history: Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, 8 and Joseph von Eichendorff. From a structural point of view, Romantic drama primarily shares a dissolution of the classic final structure, which makes it a precursor of modern drama. Due to its episodic character and the increasing independence of its parts, it approaches the epic as well as painting, in that the causally connected action of the classical drama is replaced by a mosaic of different text elements organized in scenes. Within this mosaic, the introduction of mediating instances (auctorial, internal, or external drama narrative configura9 tions) provides coherence. This drama intends to represent totality. Its 10 “arabesque structure” does not have additive serializing as its goal; rather, the aesthetic integration of all genres (epic, lyric, dramatic) is intended to produce a new entity. What, then, can be said about the ability to perform the Romantic drama on stage, which theater practitioners such as Goethe have so vehemently 11 questioned? In fact, it virtually has never been performed on stage, as a consequence of the poetological conditions of its genre. To put it concisely, Romantic drama was written for an “imaginary stage,” even if Tieck or

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12

Fouqué never lost touch of theatrical effect. According to A. W. Schlegel, a dramatic text can only inspire a “lebendigen Eindruck” (lively impression) 13 when the reading is based on experience with theater. This requires a wellversed audience that is able to dispense with a performance because it can imagine the theatrical implementation. The “imaginary stage,” therefore, is an elitist model, which can be suitably enacted not only through reading, but also by listening to public readings that combine the act of reading and theatrical performance. Tieck’s art of reading aloud was particularly legendary, and not 14 just because of its, at times, tiresome length. After all, Goethe’s enthusiasm 15 for Tieck’s Genoveva was based on listening to a reading.

Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) The prolific dramatic oeuvre of Tieck was written between 1789 and 1816. It consists, in the beginning, of student works written during the author’s years at the Friedrichswerder Gymnasium in Berlin, and ends with the second part of the treatment of the Renaissance Volksbuch (chapbook) Fortunat, which at the same time signifies the final conclusion of the Romantic phase in Tieck’s works. No dramatic works by Tieck are known after that time. Instead, he published tales and novels that contained dialogue and theatrical elements, proof that the Romantic principle of genre mixing was still present, even if just in rudimentary traces. Two facts are important about this: on one hand, the dramatic texts of the work period up to 1816 integrate epic and lyrical material and complicate a clear genre allocation. On the other hand, Tieck’s oeuvre always keeps present precisely this reflection of poetological genre context and literary processes: Tieck’s works are less concerned with content; rather, they focus on questioning the conditions of the feasibility of literary production. This transcendental-poetic dimension 16 can be observed in both the narrative texts and the dramatic works. In the early years of his dramatic production (1789–92), the young Tieck experimented with a great variety of genre traditions, ranging from Sturm und Drang, the “Bürgerliches Trauerspiel” (bourgeois tragedy), comedy and “Singspiel” (musical play) types of the Enlightenment, and 17 returning to William Shakespeare. One of his earliest literary texts is the dramatic fragment Die Sommernacht (The Summer Night, 1789), in which parts of the mature Romantic production after 1796 are already anticipated. The topic is the poetic initiation of Shakespeare, who gets lost in the woods as a boy and receives the most important poetic insignia from Oberon, Titania, and Puck in his sleep: “Phantasie” (imagination), “Begeist’rung” 18 (enthusiasm), “heit’re Laune” (cheerfulness). By entering the sphere of the miraculous, Shakespeare turns into a genuine Romantic poet, whose poetic talent guarantees a close connection with reality in the form of production

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and reception of poetry. Thus, the fictitious and real worlds blend with one 19 another. In addition, Tieck, until 1796, experimented with dramatic contents emulating the closed nature of Schiller’s classical dramatic works. This dramatic approach, as in the case of the tragedy Karl von Berneck (1793–1795– 96) will have genre-forming qualities for the fashionable form of the knightly play. At the same time Tieck was writing mostly satirical comedies as a collaborator of Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) in the book series Straußfedern (Ostrich Feathers). These comedies perfectly reflect the generic patterns of the early and high Enlightenment, for example, in Die Theegesellschaft (The Tea Party, 1796). This is a case of reproducing — in part strictly, and in part 20 as an expansion — a forgotten literary genre, the “Sächsische Typenkomödie” (Saxon character comedy) that had dominated German comedy pro21 duction until 1750. This comedy form focuses on the faulty behavior of an individual or a group that is ridiculed for therapeutic reasons. Thus, Tieck’s Theegesellschaft confronts the superstitions as well as the pretense of erudi22 tion in a society that considers itself enlightened. Accordingly, the criticism is not aimed at the idea of Enlightenment, but at the limitation of its current social application. The texts that continued to characterize the canonized image of the playwright Tieck in literary history were written between 1795 and 1798. They are literary texts on the topic of literary texts (literature about literature). More precisely, the intertextually structured literary satires Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots, 1797), its “sequel” Prinz Zerbino (1799), and Die verkehrte Welt (The Upside-down World, 1798) have been a paradigm for the development of what Uwe Japp has called the “parabatic type” of the Romantic comedy, meaning a comedy containing numerous satiric digressions. In addition to a content focused on ridiculing contemporary cultural practices and their most prominent representatives, the structure of this comedy is characterized by the fact that the figures on stage constantly are leaving their roles by bringing their real existence as actors into the play. Stage workers, the audience, or the authors are also integrated into the dramatic action. However, since audience, actors, or theater directors are still nothing but literary fiction, the dramatic illusion is not destroyed, but rather 23 increases. Thus, Der gestiefelte Kater mocks the enlightened demand for poetic plausibility by introducing a heatedly debating audience, which examines the children’s fairy tale of “Puss in Boots” for its reality content and rejects it: DER KUNSTRICHTER : (IM PARTERRE) FISCHER:

— Der Kater spricht? — Was ist denn das? Unmöglich kann ich da in eine vernünftige 24 Illusion hineinkommen.

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The “play within the play” thus is constantly interrupted and can be concluded only with difficulty; among other incidents, one stage figure, the socalled “Besänftiger,” has the task of calming the upset audience. As Tieck says, “die Bühne treibt mit sich selbst Scherz” (the stage is joking with 25 itself). The years from 1798 to 1804 were dominated by large, universal dramatic works that feature specific individual text references, mostly from the 26 areas of the chapbooks or fairy tales (literature from literature). In addition, the works attempt the largest possible synthesis of genres in dramatic form, that is, they integrate epic, lyric, and dramatic elements into a type of “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art). Thus, the “tragedy” Leben und Tod des kleinen Rotkäppchens (Life and Death of Little Red Riding Hood, 1800) is an adaptation of the well-known fairy-tale motif, while large-scale chapbook adaptations are represented by the “tragedy” Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (Life and Death of Saint Genevieve, 1799), which Gerhard Kluge 27 has called “the prototype of the Romantic drama,” as well as Kaiser Octavianus (1804), a “comedy in two parts.” The subtitle “Lustspiel” does not make a comedy out of Octavianus; rather, it exemplifies Tieck’s unique 28 poetics of the genre, in which all forms of drama are integrated. This 29 melding of dramatic forms results in a dramatized “Weltpanorama” that, as Tieck says, reflects “den ganzen Umkreis des Lebens und die mannichfaltigsten Gesinnungen” (the entire surroundings of life, and the most varied 30 attitudes). In terms of content, this dispersion is achieved by dissipating the action into individual episodes, while the same effect is achieved linguistically through a metrical experiment with a comprehensive repertoire of Romance 31 and German verse and stanza types. The Romantic reader himself is charged with making sense of this chaotic text conglomerate, whose initial variety of characters and episodes gradually leads to a comprehension of the 32 text as a whole. All text components are connected with one another, until the final tableau leads the families together, representing the resurrection of 33 paradisiacal conditions in a final apotheosis of poetry. In his last dramatic works (until 1816), Tieck returns to the most important forms and methods of Romantic drama, which he himself had initiated: The “fairy tale” Leben und Taten des kleinen Thomas, genannt Däumchen (Life and Deeds of Little Thomas, called Tom Thumb), in the style of the parabatic comedies of the 1790s, as well as the two-part universal play Fortunat in the tradition of Kaiser Octavianus. Both were specifically written for the collection Phantasus, published in three volumes between 1812 and 1816.

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Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) Only very few of the approximately 20 dramas and dramatic fragments by 34 Brentano were published at all. This has a number of reasons: on the one hand, many of the pieces were written for private occasions and for private showings, such as a shadow play planned for the birthday of a friend (W, 890), or the “Scherzspiel” (jocular play) Juanna of 1809. This play utilized a Spanish model and turned it into a satire of the literary and cultural society in Berlin. However, the firework of puns is so grotesque that the text becomes virtually unintelligible for outsiders, rendering the work unfit for performance (W, 894–96). Other texts may have been ignored for political reasons, including the “allegorisches Festspiel” (allegorical festival production) Österreichs Mut, Sieg und Hoffnung (Austria’s Courage, Victory, and Hope, 1813; W, 899), while yet another group of texts was never finalized, including the notes on Kirschfest zu Naumburg, (The Cherry Festival at Naumburg, 1802; W, 890), or the plans for the “tragedy” Klinge und Heft (Blade and Hilt; W, 893). Brentano himself only rarely pursued the publication of his manuscripts. This is primarily attributable to the fact that there was no general market for Romantic drama productions. Neither theaters nor publishers were interested in them. The general principles of the Romantic drama are especially applicable to Brentano’s case. His true talent lay in the lyrical realm, and his enjoyment 35 of word play repeatedly surfaces in dramatic works as well. However, when the poetic tone dominates, and semantic references are continually established and dissolved in seemingly uncontrolled lyrical speech, the dramatic action itself is only of minor importance. It is replaced by a formal principle that can be referred to as the basic principle of lyrical-Romantic speech: the parallelism that connects “gleichartig tönende Sprachsphären, gleich oder ähnlich tönende Wörter, mit einander” (word spheres of similar sound, 36 words of similar or equal sound, to one another), thus contributing to the musical character of the performance. A special musical effect results from the minimal exchange of letters, or word beginnings and ends, in a constant syntactic structure. The resulting sentence or verse sequences no longer are intended to transfer meaning, but are dedicated to the joy of playing with words. This is illustrated by an example from Die Gründung Prags (The Foundation of Prague, 1814): “Tschart behaart mich / Sei artig Tschartig, schartig, Tschart bewahrt dich” (W, 638). (Tschart covers me with hair / Be 37 good, good as Tschart, jagged, Tschart looks out for you). Under these conditions, Brentano’s early dramatic work is dominated 38 by comedy. His first work, Gustav Wasa (1800) perfects Ludwig Tieck’s 39 concept of the literary satire (see section 2). With this text, Brentano took sides in an argument between August Wilhelm Schlegel and the popular contemporary dramatist August von Kotzebue (1761–1819). He not only

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parodies the play of the same name by Kotzebue, but also transfers any serious intertextual reference into the utter nonsense of completely separated 40 action components, destroying them at the same time. In addition, he produces a genuinely new form of the Romantic comedy: the intrigue comedy Ponce de Leon, which I will discuss in more detail below. Nonetheless, Brentano’s lyrical linguistic power is not limited to comical subjects and forms. In his later years, he worked primarily with large historical Romantic formats, including the “tragedy” Aloys und Imelde (published for the first time in 1912), and the “play” Die Gründung Prags, which also will be discussed in more detail. The fact that, in 1813, Brentano intended to make use of national-patriotic sentiments in the fight against the foreign domination by Napoleon to further his own success as an author belongs in this context. However, the 1813 “festival plays” Victoria und ihre Geschwister mit fliegenden Fahnen und brennender Lunte (Victoria and Her Siblings with Flying Banners and Burning Fuse) and Am Rhein, am Rhein! were unsuccessful and were not published until 1817. The comedy Ponce de Leon is one of the most important comedies in the German language. It is based on the plot of Dom Gabriel Ponce de Léon from the Cabinet des Fées by Madame d’Aulnoy (1650–1705). It also borrows content and structure from the intrigue plays of Spanish authors, especially Pedro Calderón de la Barca. “Intrigue” in the contemporary definition means a “künstliche Verknüpfung” (artificial connection) of characters and 41 actions, which reflects the endless variety of life. At the same time, the seemingly random connections are always based on a higher order. However, this order can only be perceived by the author as the initiator of the complications, and from the “ruhigen festen Standpunkt” (calm solid point 42 of view) of an external observer, that is, the reader. In the play, the figure of Don Sarmiento, who has returned incognito to Spain after many years of living abroad to see his children married, plays both of these roles. The positive ending is repeatedly delayed by misunderstandings and confusions. As postulated in Schiller’s “Dramatischer Preisaufgabe” (Dramatic Prize Competition), for which Brentano had written the play in 1801 under the 43 title Laßt es euch gefallen (As You Like It), the characters of the action 44 recede behind the circumstances. Only Sarmiento himself is fully in charge of the situation at all times. An overview of the chaotic complications is made more difficult by the fact that word jokes and play with language increasingly overlap with the intrigue. Even though this “liberation” of language corresponds with Brentano’s intent, “das Komische und Edlere hauptsächlich in dem Mutwill unabhängiger, fröhlicher Menschen zu vereinigen” (to combine comical and noble elements mainly in the random acts of independent and cheerful people; W, 131), the play was neither successful on stage nor in literary history. Still, it exerted considerable influence on the play Leonce und Lena by Georg Büchner (1813–37).

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The large-scale drama Die Gründung Prags, written in several versions 45 after 1812 and published in 1814, pursued completely different intentions. On the one hand, it represents a type of poetic-patriotic history in dramatic form; on the other hand, it can be understood as a mythological project that expands narrow regional, national, or historical limits toward a more cosmopolitan outlook. While the former goal anticipates the historical drama of early Realism (Grabbe, Büchner), the latter reactivates genuine Romantic interests. At first glance, the subject is a detail of Bohemian history that begins with the selection of Libussa as duchess, relates her connection with Przemisl, and closes with her vision of the city of Prague (W, 533–34). The foundation of Prague simultaneously represents the foundation of a state, but is not included in the subject matter of the drama. Even though Brentano conducts comprehensive source studies (W, 528–33) that reveal the 46 historian in the poet, he perceives his higher task as creating paradisiacal conditions through the poetic reading of the legend. Brentano as a dramatist wishes to reconstruct the “überzeitliche, ewige poetische Wahrheit” (timeless, eternal poetic truth) of the legend, which in his opinion remains inaccessible to historical writing (W, 528). As is so often the case with Brentano, the most important instrument to achieve this goal is language. Repeatedly, the calm narrative of the blank verse lapses into the lyrical, while metrical changes create a diversion from the action, and clear semantic references are eliminated (e.g., W, 765–73, 777–82). The intent of this is a delirious euphoria, which recreates the poetic condition and, therefore, a renewal of the ancient paradisiacal unity. This play, even though it inspired Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) for his own Libussa plans (after 1819), also provided no success for Brentano on the literary market.

Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) It is difficult to classify the dramatic works of Achim von Arnim. The early Romantic demand for a “progressive Universalpoesie” whose task it was to reunite all separate genres of poetry (KFSA, 2: 182, no. 116), whenever carried out with radical zeal, makes any genre distinction impossible. This is already elevated to the status of a program in Arnim’s dialogue-structured Erzählungen von Schauspielen (Tales of Plays, 1803). Novels such as Brentano’s Godwi (1801), Fouqué’s Alwin (1808) or Arnim’s Gräfin Dolores (Countess Dolores, 1810) contain interspersed dramatic scenes, some of which even turned into dramas in their own right, such as Arnim’s Päpstin Johanna (Pope Joan, 1812–13). As late as 1826, we find a dramatic text, Marino Caboga, integrated into Arnim’s story collection entitled Landhaus47 leben (Country Living). One of the most conclusive formal experiments in this regard is the Shakespeare adaptation Ariel’s Offenbarungen (Ariel’s Revelations), written in 1802 and published in 1804. The main section

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focuses on poetological reflection (the poetry collection Heymar’s Dichterschule and the letter by the painter Kryoline to the musician Kyane), and is embedded in a framework of dramatic forms: the mythological historical “tragedy” Das Heldenlied von Herrmann und seinen Kindern (Heroic Ballad of Herman and His Children), followed by a comedy in the early Romantic tradition, Das Sängerfest auf der Wartburg (The Singers’ Contest on the 48 Wartburg). The figure of Ariel, taking over mediating functions as a pseu49 donym of the author, integration figure, and leitmotif, connects the heterogeneous parts of the work with one another. This early text example already shows a literary technique that is paradigmatic for all of Arnim’s poetic production: the process of literary quotation and montage that Detlef Kremer has called “intertextual patchwork.” Arnim’s syncretistic approach differs from other traditional approaches in two aspects: His texts abound with quotations and intertextual allusions, and he is not trying to conceal that fact, but even repeatedly points it out. According to Kremer, Arnim has made few efforts to smooth over the breaks 50 between the source materials or to hide them. This technique has its origins in the insight that one text is always based on another text and that every 51 author is working with used materials. This unmasks the then-current ideal of the autonomous poet-genius (the Prometheus model) as a phantasm. At the same time, Arnim’s texts are proof that completely new works can be created from such intertextual arrangement. One of the best examples for this is the first major drama by Arnim, Halle und Jerusalem, which was published in 1811 after the publication of 52 a few unfinished dramatic fragments. In his dedication, Arnim refers to the double drama as a “Trauerspiel in zwei Lustspielen” (tragedy in two come53 dies), whose first part, the “Studentenspiel” (student play) Halle, was initially based on an editing project of the tragedy Cardenio und Celinde by Andreas Gryphius (1616–64). This project had been intended as a contribution to the contemporary restoration of old German literary icons, as moti54 vated by nationalism. Instead, the piece turned into an autobiographically colored social play that combines the confusion around the daredevil Cardenio with the legend of Ahasverus, the Jew who is condemned to perpetually wander the earth. “Die bösen Folgen wilder Leidenschaft” (The evil consequences of wild passion) (PK, 127) turn Cardenio into a multiple murderer and send him into the world like a second “wandering Jew” (PK, 162). The journey to the Holy Land, planned as a sign of remorse for the evil deeds committed (PK, 185–86), provides the transition into the second part of the double drama. This is the “Pilgerabenteuer” (pilgrim adventure) Jerusalem that consists of loosely connected individual episodes with their own chapter headings. The chaotic action is untangled in a final utopia: all characters discover they are partially related and either die in peace or retreat into a monastery; Christian teachings prevail (PK, 291–92, 298).

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This strongly Christian belief in the poetic salvation of man dominates the entire dramatic oeuvre of Arnim as a guiding principle. In transcending their apparent lack of form, the works always express some specific positive message. The dramatic works published in 1813 as part of the collection Schaubühne, for example, are not just part of the patriotic drama that experiences its peak at the time of the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. Rather, the proceeds from sales were designated directly for military pur55 poses. The generic formats employed in these works are as varied as the source material. This variety is already indicated by the subtitles of the mainly historical (or historicizing) dramatic works, such as “Puppenspiel” (puppet play), “Schattenspiel” (shadow play), “Hanswurstspiel” (harlequinade) or “Posse” (farce). Thus, the “heroic comedy” Die Capitulation von Oggersheim (The Capitulation of Oggersheim) refers to an episode of the Bohemian-Palatine War (1618–23), although Arnim was not particularly interested in historical accuracy. The shepherd Hans Warsch becomes a hero when he negotiates favorable capitulation conditions for his town with the Spanish occupants. An updated application of this topic to German-French 56 relations in 1813 is obvious. With his “shadow play” Das Loch (The Hole) Arnim reactivated a form that had been part of social culture at courts in the eighteenth century, but only advanced to independent literary status with Reiseschatten (Travel Shadows, 1811) by Justinus Kerner (1786–1862). Das Loch combines Arnim’s criticism of the management at the Frankfurt Theater with criticism of political events in Prussia, and specifically the tax legislation by the Prussian chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg (1750–1822). This legislation 57 had a negative impact on the nobility that Arnim had always defended. In this context, fantastical and absurd text components such as the “Regierungsmaschine” (government machine) — the most important governing instrument of the established political system that ultimately becomes its own downfall (L, 31) — clearly are allegories of contemporary politics. The utopian final scene reestablishes paradisiacal conditions (L, 34). At the same time (1812–13) Arnim was working to turn one of the sce58 nic interludes of his novel Gräfin Dolores into an independent large-scale project: Die Päpstin Johanna. In Arnim’s version, this papal legend based on chronicle tradition of the thirteenth century is joined with the motif of a pact with the devil. Lucifer wishes to gain access to the papal throne and, consequently, dominance over the church and the world by using Johanna, daughter of Melancholy and the satanic servant Oferus. For this purpose, he orders to have Johanna raised as the boy Johannes by the teacher Spiegelglanz, with whom he has negotiated a pact. Johanna’s extremely complicated life leads from lies and guilt to truth and forgiveness. Ultimately, “good” (clearly defined in Arnim’s restorative-Christian worldview) triumphs over “evil.” The play is remarkable above all for its method of representation, as

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the text portions containing dialogue and dramatic scenes are connected to one another with long epic passages. In so doing, Arnim followed a suggestion by his publisher that texts ex59 clusively in verse are difficult to sell. On the other hand, this is the only way to give some coherence to the meandering text composition. The narrator acts as a mediator between the reader and the plot by connecting the episodes and shortening and explaining the action. In this manner, the universal drama stays reasonably intelligible, and the basic questions of “good” and “evil,” “right” and “wrong,” “dream” and “reality” are clearly answered. Nevertheless, the drama was not published in 1813, but only posthumously in 1846, and was utterly unfit for the stage. Die Päpstin Johanna has never been produced on stage to this day, as is the case with Arnim’s last largescale universal drama Die Gleichen (The Equals), the dramatized version of a saga in six acts, published in 1819. When he sent the play to Goethe for his comments, the hapless poet remarked perceptively in a letter of 12 July 1819 that he was writing for a “Theater, das nirgend vorhanden ist” (a theater 60 that does not exist).

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843) Nearly seventy dramas of varying length and quality by Friedrich Fouqué have been preserved, even though the author is better known today as a Romantic storywriter and novelist. Hardly any of these texts saw a second 61 edition, which is typical for the Romantic drama in general. The author’s oeuvre is of great interest, however, as it covers the entire first half of the nineteenth century (Fouqué published his first dramas in 1804 and the last one in 1842), and therefore reflects the full range of contemporary dramatic production. The early works are written in the tradition of the Early Romantic literary theory and follow the dramatic concepts of Tieck. Fouqué reacted to the theater of Weimar Classicism and became the model for the political theater of the Napoleonic Wars, as well as for the dramatic produc62 tion of the so-called “pseudo-Romantics,” and the historical drama of early Realism of the 1830s (Georg Büchner, Christian Dietrich Grabbe). Contemporary reception to Fouqué’s dramatic works was strongly divided: The unalloyed admiration displayed by Jean Paul, in whose estimation Fouqué 63 ranked even above Schiller, stands in stark contrast to the merciless spite of Tieck, which at the same time represents a judgment of his own dramatic work. In a letter to Friedrich Schlegel from 26 August 1813, Tieck calls the works of Fouqué “krankhaft und manierirt” (sick and affected) and distances himself: “Ich habe überhaupt keine Freude an allen den Sachen, die wir 64 veranlaßt haben” (I feel no joy about the things that we initiated). To give an overview, the early works by Fouqué, published under the pen name “Pellegrin,” are dominated by his adaptation of Early Romantic

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poetic theory, and attempt an allegorical dramatic style of World Theater, as in his Historie vom edlen Ritter Galmy (History of the Noble Knight Galmy, 1806). This style is strongly influenced by Ludwig Tieck’s concept of comedy (see section 2) as well as by the Spanish comedy tradition. In contrast, the main dramatic works pursue a nationalistic political program. The works can be structured by topic into mythical dramas such as Der Held des Nordens (Hero of the North, 1810), that meet the contemporary demands for a “new mythology,” historical dramas reacting to current political events or central historical incidents, for example, Die Invaliden (The Invalids, 1813–18) and Herrmann (1818) — as well as medieval dramas presenting a new form of important literary traditions (for example, Eginhard und Emma, 1811). In addition, Fouqué does intensive study of Schiller’s dramatic works, which also results in new dramatic forms such as Don Carlos (1823) and Der Pappenheimer Kürassier (The Cuirassier of Pappenheim, 1842). In comparison with Tieck’s Octavianus (see section 2), the plot of Fouqué’s adaptation of a chapbook, Historie vom Ritter Galmy, is far more accessible. The greater accessibility can be attributed to the fact that the text accurately copies large parts of its model: Eine schoene und liebliche History / Von dem edlen und theüren Ritter Galmien (A beautiful and enjoyable history / of the noble and good Knight Galmy, 1539) by Georg Wickram. It is the story of a knight who so loves the duchess of Brittany that he saves her from dying in a fire and becomes duke himself. According to Fouqué’s version, this material is well suited for a universal drama, because the book “reflects the world in old writing”; and “life” in general can be compared to 66 a “play.” Variety as a characterizing property of the world is also a characteristic of World Theater. The breadth of the presentation, which is specifically designed to delay the plot rather than to support it, in an attempt to show different perspectives, indicates this facet of Fouqué’s play. Further characteristics include the continuous change of places and scenes, which are ever so barely connected by epic interludes, and the combination of serious and comical elements. The demand for consistent and “probable” characters has 67 become irrelevant for this type of dramatics, whose “lack of definition” even forms part of the dramatic program: thus, the figure of the Marshall ranges from a positive to a negative character. In spite of all the focus on variety, it is eminently clear, even beyond the model of the popular tale, that Galmy and the duchess will find one another eventually. Fouqué’s historical dramas follow August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures about Dramatic Art and Literature, 1809–11), which had added a nationalistic political mandate to 68 the contemporary drama. In this regard, Fouqué creates two different genres: the “vaterländisches Schauspiel” (patriotic play), which deals with

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current events, and the “historisches Drama” (historical drama), which combines historiographic and historical-philosophical questions. Both forms represent an attempt at dramatizing history. The historic drama Herrmann, for example, is part of a plan to combine an Altsächsischer Bildersaal (Ancient Saxon Picture Gallery), in which different episodes of Germanic history were to be placed in a panoramic series of individual sketches. The Herrmann drama is the introductory play, even though the military successes of Arminius, especially the victory over the Roman legions under the command of Varus (A.D. 9) is of little interest to Fouqué. Instead, the drama deals with the time after the battle of the Teutoburg Forest and the fight against Germanicus and Caecina, which turns into a backdrop of internal fighting that ultimately leads to Arminius’s downfall. This failure, therefore, is not based on superior Roman war tactics, but on bickering over responsibilities with the other Germanic tribal chiefs. To put it pointedly, the topic of Fouqué’s Herrmann is the loss of its hero. The destruction of the hero is also perceptible in the structure of the drama. The continuous overlapping of the hero’s story by a number of other principal and less important scenes, which are intended to put the historical significance of a powerful historic individual into perspective, thus represents the dissolution of the heroic. The end anticipates a vision of Christian Europe. It is intended to confirm the model function of Germany for the future development of European statehood after the Congress of Vienna (1814–15). The ongoing concern with Schiller has a special place in the dramatic work of Fouqué. Even though Schiller is a model, Fouqué does not intend to imitate him. He understands Schiller’s Don Carlos as an independent version of the historical material. The case of Der Pappenheimer Kürassier is different, because it is a poetic continuation of an existing text (Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy, 1798–99) by giving one figure of the model a story of his own. The “first cuirassier,” who is mentioned in Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein’s Camp, 1798), gets a name (Trovato, Enandro) and an origin (son of the Duke of Sora) in Fouqué’s drama. The plot is guided by the biography of the cuirassier from his early childhood to his death, when he is killed in Max Piccolomini’s last battle. Over all, the plot of the drama covers twenty-five years. The dramatic action is a loose sequence of images with two plots that are only tenuously connected: the Enandro plot is guided to a certain extent by Schiller’s Wallenstein, and makes use of the seeming independence of the soldiers in order to illustrate human homelessness as such. A second parallel plot shows scenes from the life of the Duke of Sora, who is following his son’s trail and at the same time searching for the right religion. Fouqué’s version follows the tradition of the criticism of Wallenstein by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819), who demanded a contextual69 ized and historicizing representation. The drama presents a history not

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found in history books, but one that is yet sufficiently plausible to have occurred. By turning history into literature, and literature into history, Fouqué concludes the early Romantic project of a “progressive universal poetry,” which Friedrich Schlegel (see quotation in section 4) had called for almost half a century earlier.

Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) The last great representative of the Romantic School was also one of its first literary historians and critics. In his late essays Über die ethische und religiöse Bedeutung der neueren romantischen Poesie in Deutschland (On the Ethical and Religious Significance of Modern Romantic Poetry in Germany, 1847) or Zur Geschichte des Dramas (On the History of Drama, 1854), Eichendorff debates with his own teachers and ideals who had dominated his literary 70 socialization and had accepted the young unknown author as a protégé. In this context, Eichendorff focused on the expectations of the Romantic Movement and their poetic implementation. According to Eichendorff, the works of Romanticism had failed to impart poetry and life through religion, which he considered the essential calling of Romanticism, because they had emphasized form over content. He charged that the works were “verhüllt” (hidden) in “die künstlich drapierten Schleier der Ironie” (the artificial veils 71 of irony) instead of focusing on truly Romantic, deeply religious issues: “ihre Aufgabe war halb eine ethische; die romantischen Poeten aber nahmen sie nur ästhetisch” (Half their task was an ethical one, but the Romantic poets accepted only the aesthetic challenge; EG, 47). Eichendorff’s criticism, therefore, is not geared toward the goals of Romanticism; in his opinion, however, Romantic poetry has failed to attain these goals (EG, 54). Eichendorff’s literary oeuvre also shows skepticism about the very poetry that forms its base. This is especially true for his dramatic works, which can be called the summary of dramatic Romanticism. Eichendorff both adapts and renews the genre definition provided by Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, and Fouqué. Within the medium of the Romantic drama, it becomes the subject of literary-historical reflection. In addition to fragments that were not published during the poet’s lifetime such as Herrmann und Thusnelda or Eginhard und Emma (see also ED), the works include literary satires in the immediate tradition of Tieck and Brentano, such as Krieg den Philistern! (War on the Philistines!, 1824) and Meierbeth’s Glück und Ende (Meierbeth’s Happiness and End, 1828), which deals with contemporary literary fashions, more precisely, the production of historical novels in the manner of Walter Scott. The puppet play Das Incognito (The Incognito, written after 1839 to 1843) was orientated on Arnim’s Das Loch, while the intrigue play Die Freier (The Suitors, 1833) follows the tradition of Brentano’s Ponce de Leon, and the national historic tragedies Ezelin von Romano (Ezelin of Romano, 1828)

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and Der letzte Held von Marienburg (The Last Hero of Marienburg, 1830) emulate Fouqué’s historical dramas. Although Eichendorff, according to his own statements, was not planning to enter into any competition with Tieck (ED, 799), the play Krieg den Philistern! may be read as a battle call against the Early Romantic literary satire. Nevertheless, the (illusion-increasing) disillusion, role departures of actors and stage hands, and audience participation in the plot are adopted from Tieck as much as the focus of the presentation on current social, politi72 cal, and cultural conditions. Two parties are facing one another in Eichendorff’s play: poets and philistines. Brentano had already initiated the fight against philistines in his essay Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte (The Philistine Before, In, and After History, 1811), in which he turned against the petty bourgeoisie and patriarchs, bureaucrats and careerists, with the polemical attributes of nightcap, house robe, and pipe (ED, 61). The new aspect of Eichendorff’s satire is that it does not present the poetic party as a positive counter model. On the contrary: the work ultimately perceives no difference between the parties: while the philistines are stupid, poets are shown as “fatal” (disagreeable; ED, 126) and the figure of “Kritikus” is a parody of the proven anti-philistine Brentano (ED, 98, 110). Still, the play does not expand into a fundamental criticism of all realms of life. Only in the satirical play does the criticism of current conditions have the last word. Eichendorff’s proposed solution, his ideal of a simple, original, Christian life precedes the play as a title: “Und doch — den Morgen seh’ ich scheinen, / Viel’ Ströme gehn im grünen Grund. / Frisch auf denn! und 73 die’s ehrlich meinen, / Die grüß’ ich all’ aus Herzensgrund” (ED, 28). The hopefulness of the motto invalidates the irreconcilable bitterness of the satire. The text itself points at this solution in the timeless idyll without history in the fourth act (ED, 92–114). In contrast, the posthumously published puppet play Das Incognito, which uncovers the seemingly progressive 74 liberalism as a new edition of the old Enlightenment and re-activates central motives of Arnim’s Loch to this end (such as the “government machine,” 75 ED 600; see also section 4), only shows this positive model from a negative perspective. The ideal of the “good old times” has always been contained in the criticism of the “new bad times.” The comedy Die Freier, published in 1833, was written over a long period. The comparison of editing stages has shown that only the final version represents a consistent comedy of intrigues, while satirical elements have been further suppressed (ED, 855–58). As in Brentano’s concept of Ponce de Leon, the play is the ideal of the presentation, and becomes, in Eichendorff’s own words, a comedy essentially without comical elements aimed at the momentous liberation of all petty bourgeois worries and limitations of daily life, meaning the sheer fun of it (EG, 796). Compared to Ponce, the always threatening chaos of complexities and confusion is increased by the

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fact that there is no figure like Sarmiento to pull the strings of the puppets. Finally, all complications and masquerades are explained and the play ends with a double wedding (Adele and Leonard at the master level, Flora and Victor at the servant level; ED, 572f.) With Ezelin von Romano, a tragedy in five acts, Eichendorff moves into the realm of the historical genre, which in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s estimation is the most important genre of the Romantic play. The historical 76 material does not pursue any historiographic objectives. Rather, the story of the tyrannical Ezzelino III da Romano (1194–1259), who had played a decisive role in the fight of the Ghibellines against the Lombard League, portrays the tragedy of a powerful individual whose initially altruistic revo77 lutionary actions fail due to his own hybrid hunger for power. This topic has important models in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (Fiesco, 1783), Heinrich von Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht (Arminius’s Battle, 1808/1821), and Fouqué’s Herrmann (1818; see also section 5). In addition, the format is influenced by the closeness to Fouqué: The Shakespearean universal drama of Fouqué, with its programmatic mix of verse and prose, tragic and comic elements, popular scenes and state spectacles, is renewed in this treatment of historic materials, and attempts a syn78 thesis of all literary genres. The universal poetic project of the Romantic drama with all its facets is therefore preserved one last time in the dramatic works of Eichendorff. Translated by Dorothee Racette

Notes 1

Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration 1789–1830. Erster Teil: Das Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution. 1789–1806 (Munich: Beck, 1983), 452. 2 For example O. H. v. Gemmingen: Der deutsche Hausvater, 1780; the most successful authors are August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814), and August von Kotzebue (1761–1819). 3

Markus Krause, Das Trivialdrama der Goethezeit 1780–1805: Produktion und Rezeption (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982). 4 Claudia Stockinger, “Dramaturgie der Zerstreuung: Schiller und das romantische Drama,” in Das romantische Drama: Produktive Synthese zwischen Tradition und Innovation, edited by Uwe Japp, Stefan Scherer, and Claudia Stockinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 199–225. 5

With references to medieval drama: Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (written 1807– 08), to patriotic drama: Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (written 1809–11), to the historical drama: Die Hermannsschlacht (written 1808); on Kleist’s comedies see also Uwe Japp, “Kleist und die Komödie seiner Zeit,” in Kleist Jahrbuch 1996: 108–22.

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6

Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration 1789–1830. Zweiter Teil: Das Zeitalter der napoleonischen Kriege und der Restauration. 1806–1830 (Munich: Beck, 1889), 563. 7 John Fetzer, “Das Drama der Romantik,” in Romantik-Handbuch, edited by Helmut Schanze (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1994), 289. 8

See also the corresponding section in Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration 2 (see endnote 6), 596–628. 9 Manfred Pfister, Das Drama: Theorie und Analyse, revised and updated edition (Munich: Fink, 1988), 103–22. 10

Gerhard Kluge, Spiel und Witz im romantischen Lustspiel: Zur Struktur der Komödiendichtung der deutschen Romantik, Diss. Cologne 1963, 43–48, 87. 11

Goethe, Werke, edited on behalf of the Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony. Section I. Vol 36 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1893/ repr. Munich: dtv, 1987): 88. 12 Claudia Stockinger, Das dramatische Werk Friedrich de la Motte Fouqués: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des romantischen Dramas (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 21– 22. 13

August Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, edited by Edgar Lohner. Vol. 6: “Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Erster Teil” (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1966), 30.

14

Dichter lesen: Von Gellert bis Liliencron (Marbach/ N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1984), 154–55, 159.

15

Goethe to Tieck, September 9th, 1829; Goethe, Werke, Vol 46 (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1908/ repr. Munich: dtv, 1987): 80. 16 See also Christoph Brecht, Die gefährliche Rede: Sprachreflexion und Erzählstruktur in der Prosa Ludwig Tiecks (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); Stefan Scherer, “Witzige Sprachgemälde: Dramen der deutschen Romantik,” manuscript Karlsruhe 2001, 141–78. 17

My chronological and topical order follows that of Scherer, “Witzige Sprachgemälde,” 192–98; ibid. also the comprehensive discussion of Tieck’s dramatic works, 141–418. 18

Ludwig Tieck, “Die Sommernacht. Ein dramatisches Fragment,” in Schriften. 1789–1794, edited by Achim Hölter (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 11–25, here 21, 24. 19

Paul Gerhard Klussmann, “Die Zweideutigkeit des Wirklichen in Ludwig Tiecks Märchennovellen,” in Ludwig Tieck, edited by Wulf Segebrecht (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 352–85, here 355. 20

On the category of “regenerating” see Gérard Genette, Palimpseste: Die Literatur auf zweiter Stufe (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 44. 21

On the comedy of the Enlightenment in general, see Walter Hinck, “Das deutsche Lustspiel im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Das deutsche Lustspiel: Erster Teil, edited by Hans Steffen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 7–26. 22

Other standard topics in the repertoire of the Saxon character comedy were class hybris and class prejudice. In the play, this is represented by Ahlfeld’s attempt to rise

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into the refined world of nobility through marriage, an attempt that fails because of the protagonist’s stupidity. See Ludwig Tieck, “Die Theegesellschaft: Lustspiel in Einem Aufzuge. 1796,” in Schriften: Zwölfter Band (Berlin: Reimer, 1829/ reprint Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), 355–420. 23

Uwe Japp, Die Komödie der Romantik: Typologie und Überblick (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 21.

24

“The art critic [in the audience]: — The cat talks? — What is that? Fischer: It is impossible to get into a reasonable illusion this way.” Ludwig Tieck, Der gestiefelte Kater: Kindermärchen in drei Akten: Mit Zwischenspielen, einem Prologe und Epiloge, edited by Helmut Kreuzer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 11. 25 Ludwig Tieck, “Vorbericht,” in Schriften: Erster Band (Berlin: Reimer, 1828 / reprinted Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), [v]-xliv, here vii. 26

See also Heinz Hillmann, “Ludwig Tieck,” in Deutsche Dichter der Romantik: Ihr Leben und Werk, edited by Benno von Wiese (Berlin: Schmidt, 1971), 111–34, here 114. 27 Gerhard Kluge, “Das romantische Drama,” in Handbuch des deutschen Dramas, edited by Walter Hinck (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1980), 186–99, here 192. 28

It was an “eigene Gattung von Stück” (unique genre of a play), which contained “Intrigenstück, Charakterstück, Tragödie, Lustspiel, Pastorale” (intrigue play, character play, tragedy, comedy, and shepherds play) in equal parts, according to Tieck’s words in Das Buch über Shakespeare: Handschriftliche Aufzeichnungen, edited from the author’s unpublished works by Henry Lüdecke (Halle/ Saale: Niemeyer, 1920), 394; see also Manfred Frank, Das Problem ‘Zeit’ in der deutschen Romantik: Zeitbewußtsein und Bewußtsein von Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung, 2nd revised edition (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 1990), 300. 29 Gerhard Storz, Klassik und Romantik: Eine stilgeschichtliche Darstellung (Mannheim, Vienna, Zurich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1972), 224. 30

Ludwig Tieck, “Vorbericht” (see endnote 25), XXXIXf.

31

As Tieck notes: “Es schien mir gut, fast alle Versmaaße, die ich kannte, ertönen zu lassen, bis zu der Mundart und dem Humor des Hans Sachs hinab” (I liked the idea of letting resound almost all verse types I knew, including idiomatic ones, and the humor of Hans Sachs); Tieck, “Vorbericht” (see endnote 25), XXXXIX) 32

On the means of creating coherence in Tieck’s Octavianus, see Stockinger, Das dramatische Werk Fouqués (see endnote 12), 59–77.

33

Ludwig Tieck, “Kaiser Octavianus: Ein Lustpiel in zwei Theilen,” in Schriften: Erster Band (see endnote 25), 415. 34 See the chapter “Brentanos dramatische Arbeiten und Entwürfe” in Clemens Brentano, Werke: Vierter Band, edited by Wolfgang Frühwald und Friedhelm Kemp. 2nd revised edition 1978 (Munich, Vienna: Hanser, 1966), 887–902. This edition will subsequently be cited in the text with the abbreviation W and the page number. 35

On Brentano’s “Dramaturgie der Sprachlichkeit,” see Scherer, “Witzige Sprachgemälde,” (see endnote 16), 491–504. 36 A.[ugust] F.[erdinand] Bernhardi, Sprachlehre (Berlin: Frölich, 1801), 395.

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37

Some lyrical sections of this drama have been published separately in poetry editions of Brentano’s works; see O.[tto] Brechler, “Einleitung,” in Clemens Brentano, Sämtliche Werke: Bd. 10: Die Gründung Prags, edited by Otto Brechler and August Sauer (Munich, Leipzig: Müller, 1910), VII–LXVIII, here XVI. 38 For general information, see Japp, Die Komödie der Romantik (see endnote 23). 39

Dorothea Veit consequently calls Brentano a “Tieck of Tieck” in a letter to Schleiermacher on June 16th, 1800; Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Briefwechsel 1800, edited by Andreas Arndt and Wolfgang Virmond (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1994), 87–95, here 95. 40 Marianne Thalmann, Provokation und Demonstration in der Komödie der Romantik (Berlin: Schmidt, 1974), 70–77. 41

[Adam Müller], “Vom Character der spanischen Poesie. Aus Adam Müllers Vorlesungen über dramatische Poesie,” in Phöbus: Ein Journal für die Kunst, edited by Heinrich von Kleist and A. M. First year. Seventh edition. July 1808 (Dresden: Walther, 1808), 3–12, here 10. 42 [Adam Müller], “Noch etwas über den Unterschied des antiken und modernen Theaters,” in Phöbus: Ein Journal für die Kunst, edited by Heinrich von Kleist and A. M. First year. Eighth edition. August 1808 (Dresden: Walther, 1808), 45–47, here 46. 43

This competition was announced in 1800 in Goethe’s journal Propyläen. After applying unsuccessfully, Brentano published his play in 1803 (pre-dated to 1804) under the title of Ponce de Leon (W, 920–922).

44

Kluge, Spiel und Witz im romantischen Lustspiel (see endnote 10), 29.

45

See also John Fetzer, “Clemens Brentano. Die Schwelle als Schwäche oder Stärke des romantischen Dramas?” In Das romantische Drama (see endnote 4), 119–36. 46 The most important sources are Wenzeslaus Hajek z Libocan’s Böhmische Chronik (1541) and Johann Karl August Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1782–1786). 47

See also Scherer, “Witzige Sprachgemälde,” (see endnote 16), 485–89.

48

Ludwig Achim von Arnim, Ariels Offenbarungen, edited by Jacob Minor (Weimar: Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen, 1912). 49 See Ulfert Ricklefs, Kunstthematik und Diskurskritik: Das poetische Werk des jungen Arnim und die eschatologische Wirklichkeit der ‘Kronenwächter’ (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 59, 64. 50

Detlef Kremer, “Durch die Wüste: Achim von Arnims uferloses Drama Halle und Jerusalem,” in Das romantische Drama (see endnote 4), 137–57, here 139–40. 51 See also Detlef Kremer, Prosa der Romantik (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1996), 30–31, 66. 52

See the compilation found in Lothar Ehrlich, “Ludwig Achim von Arnim als Dramatiker: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des romantischen Dramas” (Diss. Halle/ Saale, 1970), 86–87. 53 Dramen von Clemens Brentano und Ludwig Achim von Arnim, edited by Paul Kluckhohn (Leipzig: Reclam, 1938), 48. This edition will subsequently be cited in the text with the abbreviation PK and the page number.

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54

Roger Paulin, Gryphius’ “Cardenio und Celinde” und Arnims “Halle und Jerusalem”: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), 5–12. 55

More precisely for the purchase of cannons for the Seventh Berlin Militia Batallion; see Achim von Arnim und die ihm nahe standen, edited by Reinhold Steig und Hermann Grimm. Bd 1: Achim von Arnim und Clemens Brentano, revised by R. S. (Bern: Lang, 1970/ reprinted from the edition Stuttgart-Berlin: Cotta, 1894), 312. 56

See Japp, Die Komödie der Romantik (see endnote 23), 63–66.

57

See Gerhard Kluge, “Materialien zum Verständnis des Textes Das Loch,” in Ludwig Achim von Arnim, Das Loch oder Das wiedergefundene Paradies: Ein Schattenspiel / Joseph von Eichendorff, Das Incognito oder Die mehreren Könige oder Alt und Neu: Ein Puppenspiel, edited by G. K. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 69–105. This edition will subsequently be cited in the text with the abbreviation L and the page number.

58

Achim von Arnim, Hollin’s Liebeleben; Gräfin Dolores, edited by Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 491–503. 59 This was why he turned a part of the drama, which was originally written entirely in verse, into prose. See Ulfert Ricklefs, Magie und Grenze: Arnims ‘Päpstin Johanna’-Dichtung: Mit einer Untersuchung zur poetologischen Theorie Arnims und einem Anhang unveröffentlicher Texte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 61– 69; Uwe Japp, “Dramaturgie der Vertauschung. Achim von Arnims Die Päpstin Johanna,” in Das romantische Drama (see endnote 4), 159–73, here 163–64. 60 Goethe und die Romantik: Briefe mit Erläuterungen. 2. Theil, edited by Carl Schüddekopf and Oskar Walzel (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1899), 157. 61

Some of the dramatic works were used a second time; for example, the collection Schauspiele für Preussen reprinted part of the plays that had previously been published as Dramatische Dichtungen für Deutsche (in 1813), see also Stockinger, Das dramatische Werk Fouqués (see endnote 12), 330–33. 62 The “Afterromantiker” Eichendorff had scorned so much (see section 6 of this chapter); see also Herrn. Anders Krüger, Pseudoromantik: Friedrich Kind und der Dresdner Liederkreis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Romantik (Leipzig: Hässel, 1904). 63

Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke: Abteilung II: Jugendwerke und vermischte Schriften. Vol. 3, edited by Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1978), 714–15. Friedrich Schlegel calls Fouqué a “German skald” (KFSA, 3: 241). 64

Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel: Briefe. Newly edited and commented by Edgar Lohner, based on the edition of Henry Lüdecke (Munich: Winkler, 1972), 175.

65

August Wilhelm Schlegel is Tieck’s most important teacher; see Fouqué, Lebengeschichte: Aufgezeichnet durch ihn selbst (Halle/ Saale: Schwetschke, 1840), 227–28, 246–50.

66

Fouqué, Historie vom edlen Ritter Galmy und einer schönen Herzogin aus Bretagne von Pellegrin, I. und II. Theil (Berlin: Himburg, 1806), 5, 51. 67

Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 386. 68

August Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe 6 (see endnote 13), 290.

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69

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Nachgelassene Schriften und Briefwechsel II, edited by Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich von Raumer (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1973, facsimile print of the 1826 edition, edited and with an epilogue by Herbert Anton), 619. 70 The lectures and writing of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel are of particular importance, see Joseph von Eichendorff, Dramen, edited by Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt/ Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988), 751. This edition will subsequently be cited in the text with the abbreviation ED and the page number. The publication of Eichendorff’s first novel (Ahnung und Gegenwart, 1815) was due to Fouqué. 71

Joseph von Eichendorff, Geschichte der Poesie: Schriften zur Literaturgeschichte, edited by Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 777, 766. This edition will subsequently be cited in the text with the abbreviation EG and the page number. 72

This form of Romantic metacriticism is a significant characteristic of Late Romantic poetry in general; another example can be found in August von Platen’s Der romantische Oedipus (1829). 73 “And yet — I see the morning rise, / Brooks abound in the fields / Ho then! Those with honest goals / I greet you all from the heart.” 74

Gerhard Kluge “Materialien zum Verständnis des Textes Das Incognito,” in Arnim, Das Loch / Eichendorff, Das Incognito (see endnote 57), 118–29. 75

See also Japp, Die Komödie der Romantik (see endnote 23), 85–86. This is where Eichendorff’s Ezelin is different from the historic drama of early Realism (Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s Napoleon, 1831, or Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod, 1835), even though it prepares the path with regard to topic choice, dramatic technique, and structure. On this issue, and on Ezelin in general, see Stefan Scherer, “Verworrne Doppelschrift. Christlich nationale Erneuerung und poetische Ambivalenz in Eichendorffs Ezelin von Romano,” in Das romantische Drama (see endnote 4), 175–98. 76

77

The topic of the tragedy is the psychography of a violent man in a higher conflict over power and divine law, updated by the contemporary reception to fit the personality and actions of Napoleon; see Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration 2 (see endnote 6), 627. 78

See also Eichendorff’s own statement about the dramatic genre, EG, 870–71.

German Romantic Poetry in Theory and Practice: The Schlegel Brothers, Schelling, Tieck, Novalis, Eichendorff, Brentano, and Heine Bernadette Malinowski Historical and Philosophical Prerequisites

W

German Romantic poetry and poetic theory, it is important to keep in mind the turbulence of the era during which these innovations in poetic theory and practice took place. While many thinkers throughout Europe initially greeted the storming of the Bastille and the proclamation of the Rights of Man in the summer of 1789 as the culmination of an age of Enlightenment, it quickly became apparent that the French Revolution did not signal the establishment of humane, enlightened, and autonomous reason as the guiding force in politics. On the contrary: France, and soon the rest of Europe, was plunged into over two decades of war and a succession of governments, culminating in Napoleon’s effort to extend French hegemony across the continent. Within the perspective of German territory, the so-called Wars of Liberation of 1813–15 ended in the final defeat of Napoleon, the stabilization of the European peace at the Congress of Vienna, and the establishment of the German Confederation. At the same time, the Austrian chancellor Metternich’s (1773–1859) policies led to a restorative phase of anti-liberalism and conservatism that in turn inspired further social unrest across Europe, culminating in the Revolution of 1830 in Paris. Meanwhile, the effects of the Industrial Revolution were becoming evident; technological and industrial progress not only sped up the pace of life, but also intensified social stratification and alienation. The much-quoted threefold estrangement of people from society, nature, and one another — preceded by a fourth, namely the estrangement of the individual from established religion — was an outgrowth of this critical period of revolution and restoration, of progress and stagnation, of bourgeois aspiration to freedom and anti-liberal power politics. HEN DISCUSSING

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Only against this background does it become clear why idealistic — classical and Romantic — philosophy and aesthetics strove for the reconciliation of 1 spirit and nature, reason and sentiment, individual and society. For all their individual differences, the manifold models of philosophical aesthetics and theories of art share two fundamental, albeit paradoxical characteristics: a historical reorientation toward classical, medieval, and early modern ideals of art and life, on the one hand, and an eschatological projection of political, philosophical, and aesthetic ideals into the future, on the other. Accordingly, the utopian concepts of an aesthetic state (Schiller), a new mythology (Hölderlin and Novalis, among others), an aesthetic reconciliation (Hölderlin), a progressive universal poesy (Friedrich Schlegel), and a “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or total work of art (Schelling), all respond to an empirical reality that denies coherence, continuity, totality, and significance to life. Against this historical-cultural backdrop, the poetological and lyrical products of the Romantics have an ambivalent character from the very beginning: they are manifestations of an empirical-artistic crisis as well as attempts at its aesthetic resolution. The Romantic principle of the mixture of literary genres, which superseded the classical principle of a strict hierarchy of genres, helps explain why no independent theory of lyric poetry developed. Instead, genre theory merges into a general philosophy of art (Schelling). The following aesthetic concepts consequently possess a significance that is valid across genres. Friedrich Schlegel developed his programmatic concept of a “Transzendentalpoesie” in analogy to the language of philosophy. The term “transcendental” designates the conditions of the possibility of an a priori cognition within the idealistic philosophy of Kant and Fichte. Schlegel transfers this approach from the theory of cognition to an aesthetic level and specifies as the task and function of transcendental poetry that it should reflect on the conditions of the possibility of all poetry. Thus, Schlegel does not demand a theory of poetry that develops parallel to poetry. Instead, poetry itself should be theoretical and provide insight into the conditions for its genesis, function, and self-understanding (KFSA, 2: 204, no. 238). With this program, Schlegel initiates the self-referentiality and self-reflectivity of poetry characteristic of the Romantic period. Poetry becomes metapoetic; it no longer aims to imitate, but becomes the imitation of itself. Novalis takes Schlegel’s idea of transcendental poetry as the unification of poetics and poetry, of philosophy and literature, of the ideal and the real, one step further. He understands transcendental poetry as the relation of consciousness to the mysterious existence of being in the world, out of which a process of literary tropes can be expected, “die die Gesetze der symbolischen Construction der transzendentalen Welt begreift” (that recognizes the laws of the symbolic construction of the transcendental world; NS, 2: 536, no. 48, and 268, no. 556). Correspondingly, the transcendental poet

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has to change the world magically — a postulate with a pragmatic and social2 ethical component. The two thinkers share the view that these transcendental-poetic tasks will be ongoing and never ending. It is for this reason that Friedrich Schlegel remarks in his famous Athenaeum Fragment of 1798 (no. 116): “Die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden; ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig nur werden, nie vollendet seyn kann” (The Romantic type of poetry is still developing; yes, its true nature is that it is eternally developing and never can be completed; KFSA, 2: 182–83). This programmatic statement, however, contains within itself a moment of crisis. The individual work of art is no longer, as for instance with Schel3 ling, seen as a perfect reflection of the whole. Instead, Friedrich Schlegel regards lyrical poems as “romantische Fragmente” (KFSA, 14: 128, no. 524) that obtain their aesthetic justification from participation in the historical4 progressive generation of the universal work of art. Moreover, Schlegel contends that poems should not form a separate genre but rather should always be woven into novels. This aesthetic deficit can therefore only be compensated by a historical-philosophical determination of the function of 5 art. A consciousness of historical crisis here is linked with the historical 6 ability of the individual to create the future actively and autonomously. Thus, for Schelling, as later for Hegel as well, poetry is that literary genre in which human subjectivity, freedom, and inwardness find most immediate 7 expression. What manifests itself negatively as estrangement from nature and society is recognized, in terms of philosophical aesthetics, as inner freedom and independence, which enables the expansion of art with respect to its objects and procedures. The opening of art for the realms of the infinite, unconscious, and fantastic, the transgression of limited poetic strategies in favor of an artistic play with images, words, and forms find their realization in the medium of “produktive Einbildungskraft” (productive imagination), which advances to a central place in Romantic poetological and philosophical theory. In the wake of Fichte, Schelling describes imagination as a productive, free-acting capability; by permanently exceeding limits, it conveys and synthesizes seemingly 8 incompatible opposites pictorially. In his Philosophie der Kunst (1802–3), Schelling turns this definition into a theological statement by interpreting artistic fantasy as a power analogous to divine imagination, which alone is 9 capable of presenting the divine-universal in the individual work of art. Thus, for him the world of imagination represents a higher and truer reality than the merely empirical world. By way of contrast, Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of the power of imagination has a philosophic-historical orientation and fulfills a bridging function: In the permanent “Überspringen in das Gegenteil,” (jump into the opposite), that is, in the continuous alternation between past and future, expansion and contraction, not-I and I, real and

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ideal world, the fragmentary reality of the present is to be transcended pro10 gressively into a new totality.

“Mystifizieren” and “Befremden”: Poetic Strategies In his call in 1798 for the romanticizing of the world, which was of crucial importance for the entire Romantic period, Novalis illustrates the poetic procedure of estrangement by which the highest postulate of poetry — the representation of the inner soul, the inner world in its totality (NS, 3: 650, no. 553) — is to be achieved: Romantisiren ist nichts, als eine qualit[ative] Potenzirung. [. . .] Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnißvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es — Umgekehrt ist die Operation für das Höhere, Unbekannte, Mystische, Unendliche — dies wird durch diese Verknüpfung logarythmisirt — Es 11 bekommt einen geläufigen Ausdruck. (NS, 2: 545, no. 105)

In his poetic program Novalis criticizes a conventionalized mode of perception and a traditional view of the world and of reality. Thus, the linking operations to be performed by the poet consciously connect heterogeneous contrasts, whereby the known is pleasantly estranged (“angenehm befremdet”) and the supposedly strange brought to a familiar level. In poetry what matters is not the generation of a sensible and comprehensible link to a particular life situation; rather, the medium of art transforms the disparately experienced world into an imaginary cosmos of infinite varieties or into an artificial chaos, conceived as the vision of totality. In like manner, Clemens Brentano includes in his novel Godwi (1800–1801) a poetics of new vision when he has his first-person narrator say: “Alles, was zwischen unserem Auge und einem entfernten zu Sehenden als Mittler steht, uns den entfernten Gegenstand nähert, ihm aber zugleich etwas von dem Seinigen mitgiebt, ist 12 romantisch.” Linked to this process is a linguistic-philosophical conception that is not directed at the mimetic simulation of the poetic object; rather, the poet aims to overcome conventional paradigms of meaning and thus to dissolve semantically standardized relations of signs and designations. As long as language is reduced to its function of mere information and definition, it is, according to Novalis, “enttönter Gesang” (a song without sound; 3: 283, no. 84), artificial poetry that has become separated from its original unity with natural poetry (2: 572, no. 214). In the interchange of reason and imagination, in experimenting with images and terms, language should be returned to its original form and function. It should become again a song and expression of the spirit.

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In these poetic strategies, an aesthetics of boundlessness becomes apparent that at the same time reflects the crises in the production and reception of Romantic poetry. Bourgeois identity problems, religious and social estrangement, and a consciousness of contingency and crisis are directed in this way toward an aesthetic solution: The disparity of I and not-I, individual and society, outside world and inner world, and so on, is suspended by the artistic production of a transitory synaesthetic synthesis. The receptiveaesthetic (wirkungsästhetisch) result of such productive procedures is, according to this theory, the rediscovery of original significance, the revelation of the unrepresentable spirit, in the form of a harmonious spiritual mood, or “Stimmung.” In the non-mimetic, non-intentional language of music, the Romantics recognize the only medium capable of evoking the inner, prelogical harmony of individual soul and world soul that neither discursive 13 concepts nor the structures of an experience ever can capture. The receptive-aesthetic concept of Romantic mood correlates, on the one hand, with the ideal striving of the Romantic-lyric subject for the absolute; on the other, it contrasts with the intellectuality of the productiveaesthetic process, with the autonomous, poetic creation of utopian worlds, and with the conscious design of a musical language corresponding to the desired sentimental mood. Consequently, poetic contents no longer stand in the forefront of poetological considerations. The new focal points are the categories of lyrical form that further the goal of a musical and semantically flowing poetry. Included in these categories are, for instance, Romantic Irony, the arabesque, wit, fairy tales, the grotesque, and rhetorical devices such as oxymoron, onomatopoeia, parallelism, and allegory: in short, all forms of composition that might serve to destroy traditional paradigms for the perception, experience, designation, and cognition of reality. In the final instance, Romantic poetic theory aims to transform language into the unending flow of inconsistent signifiers that Ludwig Tieck refers to as “eine 14 abgesonderte Welt für sich selbst” (a separate world of its own).

Romantic Poetry as Progressive/Regressive Universal Melancholy After this discussion of Romantic poetic theory, it is now time to examine how these theories correspond to poetry actually composed in the decades between 1789 and 1830. The theme of melancholia offers the opportunity of presenting several fundamental features of Romantic poetry: poetological questions (lyrical subjectivity, functions of poetry, the role of imagination), relevant poetic themes and motifs (nature, longing, the infinite), and histori15 cal and social interconnections. The binary coding of melancholy — sadness, loneliness, introversion, inhibitions regarding actions and decisions, on

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the one hand, and excessive sensitivity, intellectual sharpness, exuberant fantasy, genius, and obsession, on the other — also describes the Romantic experience of life, whose deep ambivalence the infinite striving for universality and identity is meant to overcome. While the Early Romantics use the symptoms of these experiences of difference and ambivalence productively, this bifurcation becomes codified irrevocably for the later Romantics. One need only think of the isolation of the aesthetic cosmos of an Eichendorff, the artistic pessimism of a Brentano, the politically engaged poetry of a Heine, and the attempt undertaken by practically all Late Romantic poets to regain, via folkloric forms and national-political contents, an affiliation with 16 the reality of life. It is revealing that Kant, whose philosophical reflections on melancholy are representative also for the Romantic period, allocates melancholy, due to this structural ambivalence, to the aesthetic category of the sublime. In the perception of a sublime object, the imagination is driven to the edge of the chasm wherein it might well lose itself if autonomous reason did not intervene; it is reason to which the idea of infinity appears in the threatening dimensions of the sublime that otherwise evoke feelings of anxiety and listlessness. Within the Kantian aesthetics of the sublime, such a failure of the imagination is the prelude to the linking of reason and soul to a superior world. In similar fashion, Schiller interprets the experience of the sublime as the victory of the moral and rational human being over the physical and sensual side of human existence. Nonetheless, the melancholic character is at risk of becoming a dreamy visionary or of lapsing into depression — a risk that is already evident in the character of Goethe’s Werther, but which becomes amplified within German Romantic literature in the strict sense of the term. An early testimonial of such arrested melancholy is Ludwig Tieck’s poem “Melankolie,” first published in his novel Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell (1795–96). The first stanza gives a reminder of the pre-birth moment in which the gods determine the fate of the lyrical persona: Schwarz war die Nacht und dunkle Sterne brannten Durch Wolkenschleier matt und bleich, Die Flur durchstrich das Geisterreich, Als feindlich sich die Parzen abwärts wandten 17 Und zorn’ge Götter mich ins Leben sandten. The second strophe reports in a narrative gesture of the hour of birth, in which pale grief and misery stand alongside the lyrical subject as “längst gekannte Brüder” (long-known brothers). The first line of the third stanza delegates the lyrical speech to brother “Gram” (grief) and his prophecies concerning the pending life on earth of the lyrical subject until that posthu-

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mous moment in which the individual’s fate finally changes for the better: “im ausgelöschten Todesblick / Begrüßt voll Mitleid dich das erste Glück” (in the extinguished look of death / Full of pity first happiness is greeting you). The prophecies of “Gram” announce a life that could be described with Walter Benjamin’s translation of Baudelaire’s “ennui” as “Katastrophe in Permanenz” (permanent catastrophe). It is characterized by pain, gloom, joylessness, desperation, and lovelessness. It is conspicuous that the poem picks up topoi such as nature, friendship, longing, and love that are “romantic” in the conventional sense; here, however, Tieck turns them into the negative and mirror-like image of subjective misery. Nature appears — as for Novalis — as a script of ciphers which however — and this in contrast to Novalis — is not to be read as sensuous sign of a higher unfading ideal of meaning, but functions rather as an outer illustration of existential absurdity and inner hopelessness: “Das Tor ist hinter dir verschlossen” (The gate is locked behind you). The idiosyncratic time structure of the poem — looking back in the mode of remembrance and looking forward in the prophetic mode — annihilates, as it were, the present of the lyrical speaker; to employ a later term of Nietzsche, the present has become frozen in an eternal return of the same. The individual lifetime is not — as in the “Erlebnislyrik” (experiential lyric poetry) of Goethe — the medium of a dynamic sequence of personal experiences and events; rather it melts topographically into the “wüsten Felsenbahn” (wild rocky path) of a ghostly desert landscape “[w]o Klippen drohn, wo keine Blumen blühen, / Der Sonne Strahlen heiß und heißer glühen” (where cliffs lurk, where no flowers flourish, / The sun’s rays hot and hotter glow) that becomes the arena for a desperate chase through the wastelands of life. This continuous absence of differences manifests itself also in the situation of lyrical speech: both the fates and gods who throw the individual into life as well as brother “Gram,” who addresses the lyrical persona in the familiar form and prophesizes him Hell on Earth, are ghostly projections of a depressively melancholic subject standing on the verge of the cliff of madness. Even the metaphysical comfort promised the lyrical subject after his death is incapable of breaking through the nihilistic-melancholic discourse of the poem. Too heavy weighs the burden of eternal night (“ew’ge Nacht”) — the black color of melancholy — on this final sequence for it to evoke a credible change of mood into hope, release, and the metaphysical. If the epic context is considered, the observations made by William Lovell — the chief figure in the novel and the author of this poem — on his own melancholic state could be read as a general diagnosis of the pathologically endangered Romantic individual. The unbridled and enraptured game of the imagination leads to a state of spiritual paralysis that only a “gewisse Häus18 lichkeit” (certain domesticity) can permanently prevent. This demand for the limitation of imagination by philosophical reason and poetic calculation

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is fulfilled twofold in the poem “Melankolie.” On the one hand it is the 19 strict form in which lyrical subjectivity, torn down into the chasm, provides for itself a last handhold and preserves its autonomy; on the other hand it is the epic foundation of lyric poetry that lends this endangered genre its place in a homeless, secularized, and devalued world. As a result of this contextualization of poetry, it loses its status as an autonomous genre; on the other hand, its tendency toward self-referentiality, de-realization, distance from the world of experience, and withdrawal into the subjectivist, incommunicable inner world is similarly qualified and cushioned. Thus, the William Lovell context transcends the poem by repeatedly referring to such positive qualities of melancholy; conversely, however, the poem also can be 20 regarded as a “Keimzelle des Romans” (germ-cell of the novel): the final failure of the hero in the search for love and happiness has been anticipated poetically by positioning these nihilistic verses immediately at the beginning of the novel. Similarly, Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night) can be read both as poetic testimonials of Romantic melancholy and as poetic 21 realization of its author’s postulate to romanticize the world. The first publication took place in 1800 in the magazine Athenaeum edited by the Schlegel brothers. The cyclic composition consists of six hymns, whereby the linguistic movement begins in rhythmic prose (hymns one to three), then goes over to a mixed form of prose and verse (hymns four and five) and finally flows into the pure verse form of the last hymn. The first hymn begins with a praise of earthly light before turning to the “heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht” (holy, unspeakable, mysterious night). The initial lamentation over the loss of light and the “tiefe Wehmut” (deep melancholy) of the speaker veer into the feeling of the sublime; darkness becomes the place of actual perception and knowledge, a sphere in which the painfully experienced disparity of the day-world is reversed. In the second hymn day and light are connected to the temporality and transience of earthly life and at the same time contrasted with the timeless, spaceless night and the holy sleep that provides creative-unconscious power to the “Nacht Geweihte” (devoted initiates of the Night; 1: 133). The third hymn — with reference to Novalis’s diary entry of 13 May 1797 22 also described as the “Urhymne” — commemorates in the form of a religious awakening a vision bestowed on the lyrical narrator at the grave of his beloved. The fourth hymn unfurls this initiation in a new perspective. Just as external emptiness becomes the site of an internal event, so the hitherto central object of the dead beloved is now related to Christ, who becomes in the purely lyrical final part the actual goal of individual and general human striving:

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Hinüber wall ich, Und jede Pein Wird einst ein Stachel 23 Der Wollust seyn.[. . .] (1: 139) The fifth and longest hymn — a Romantic counterpoint to Schiller’s praise of the joys of life when mankind believed in “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The gods of Greece, 1788) — commemorates the myth of human history from the creation of the world via the fall of man under the rule of death to the salvation history of Christ; it concludes with an account of the ongoing redemption of the world, as a result of the secret of the resurrection, and its propagation through poetry. This apocalyptic vision is continued in the sixth and final hymn, whose last lines celebrate the return from the sphere of light, temporality, and individuality into “ew’ge Nacht” (eternal night), “ew’gen Schlummer” (endless slumber), “heil’ge Zeit” (holy time; 1: 153), erotic and fraternal community: Hinunter zu der süßen Braut, Zu Jesus, dem Geliebten — Getrost, die Abenddämmrung graut Den Liebenden, Betrübten. Ein Traum bricht unsre Banden los 24 Und senkt uns in des Vaters Schoß. (1: 157) The romanticizing operation of “qualitative Potenzierung” (see note 11) in the hymns comes to fruition at all levels. In the thematic field it manifests itself in the syncretistic fusion of Greek cosmogony and Christian apocalypse, in the interweaving of the erotic and the mystic (the unification of the beloved and Jesus), in the transformation of death to life (of Thanatos to Christ), in the synthesis of poetry and religion (Orpheus and Jesus) and in the transition from the personal to the general human fate. Similarly, the lyrical melancholic discourse set out in the hymns follows the principle of “qualitative Potenzierung.” Secular “Wehmuth” (melancholy; 1: 131) is transformed in the meeting with the nightly sphere into a feeling of the sublime, as expressed by the oxymoron “froh erschrocken” (joyful-startled; 1: 133); here, too, the descent turns out to be an ascent: “[d]ie schweren Flügel des Gemüths hebst du empor,” (you uplift the heavy wings of the soul; 1: 131). This earthly melancholy differs qualitatively from that longing which stirs the poetic persona in the fourth hymn in which Eros and Thanatos coincide — the desire for the departed beloved and the longing for death. If the first form of melancholy is marked by attributes of loneliness, anxiety, and mental paralysis, the second appears as a dynamic force in the sense of the platonic Eros. This reversal of melancholy into “Nachtbegeisterung” (Night Enthusiasm; 1: 135) is moreover distinguished by a change of direction: the “unendliche Sehnsucht”

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(endless longing) no longer seeks to return to the “Treiben der Welt” (tumult of the world; 1: 137), but to find the “neue Land” (new land). These configurations of melancholy related to the lyrical subject are repeated in the fifth hymn on the level of human history: the “alte Welt” (old world; 1: 145) is described in images of a collective melancholy, which is healed by the emergence of the new Christian-poetical world: Was uns gesenkt in tiefe Traurigkeit Zieht uns mit süßer Sehnsucht nun von hinnen. Im Tode ward das ew’ge Leben kund, 25 Du bist der Tod und machst uns erst gesund. (1: 147) With these verses attributed to the Greek singer-poet who becomes a disciple of Christ even prior to the latter’s death and resurrection, not only is earthly life declared pathological and Christ extolled as the conqueror of death, but similarly the poetological program of the poet as a “transcendentaler Arzt” (transcendental physician) is accomplished, who masters the “große Kunst der Construction der transcendentalen Gesundheit” (great art of constructing transcendental health; 2: 535), namely poetry. Illness is here not only given aesthetic appeal, but also recognized as a symptom of theoretical value and thus integrated systematically into the conceptions of transcendental philosophy and poetics. On the one hand a stigma of the present time that has to be healed and vanquished; on the other hand a conditio sine qua non of a higher form of existence, illness consequently becomes a means of attaining a higher synthesis. In particular, hypochondria — discussed in the eighteenth century 26 as a typical special instance of melancholy — paves the way to physical selfknowledge (cf. 2: 607) and must therefore become art (2: 614). The pathological symptom of the hypochondriac, namely to interpret and to produce physical signs and symptoms in a never-ending interplay, is here completely reinterpreted in the sense of the aesthetics of progressive universal poetry. The Hymnen an die Nacht present the successive apotheosis of the dead beloved into a godlike intermediary who initiates the hymnal singer — via the transcendental descent into the pre-conscious self — into the world of divine night. This canonization of the beloved is at the same time a canonization of the lyrical subject into an idealized self. Art thus becomes the real place of spiritual resurrection, the place of Romantic suicide where the persona of the poet achieves idealistic-sentimental enhancement by the 27 “Annihilation” of his earthly, biographic self. Turning now to a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), we shall see how the Early Romantic concepts of longing and striving, of chaos and “Indifferenz,” of “Potenzierung” and the dissolution of order prove to be increasingly problematic and become significant factors of an increased historical and aesthetic crisis of consciousness. “Die zwei Gesellen” (The

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Two Journeymen, 1818), a balladesque poem that at the end changes abruptly into sacral recitation, narrates two life stories in which paradigmatically extreme forms and dangers of human existence are reflected. The poem, which could be read as a lyrical miniature of a Bildungsroman, links the traditional allegory of world and sea voyage as life journey with the theme of melancholy. Let us consider the first two stanzas: Es zogen zwei rüst’ge Gesellen Zum erstenmal von Haus, So jubelnd recht in die hellen, Klingenden, singenden Wellen Des vollen Frühlings hinaus. Die strebten nach hohen Dingen, Die wollten, trotz Lust und Schmerz, Was Rechts in der Welt vollbringen, Und wem sie vorüber gingen, 29 Dem lachten Sinnen und Herz. — The joint departure into the big wide world takes place under promising omens: despite the ambivalent experiences of “Lust und Schmerz” the two young journeymen are determined to realize their common aims. This unified striving toward higher aims and morality characterizes the two of them, if the poem is regarded under poetological aspects, as typical representatives of Early Romantic philosophy and aesthetics. The following verses recount how the respective fates of the two journeymen have been fulfilled: Der Erste, der fand ein Liebchen, Der Schwieger kauft’ Hof und Haus; Der wiegte gar bald ein Bübchen, Und sah aus heimlichem Stübchen Behaglich in’s Feld hinaus. Dem Zweiten sangen und logen Die tausend Stimmen im Grund, Verlockend’ Sirenen, und zogen Ihn in der buhlenden Wogen Farbig klingenden Schlund. Und wie er auftaucht’ vom Schlunde, Da war er müde und alt, Sein Schifflein das lag im Grunde, So still war’s rings in die Runde, 30 Und über die Wasser weht’s kalt.

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What is conspicuous is that between the two complexes of stanzas a narrative caesura has been set: If the first complex (stanzas one and two) describes the joint route of the two companions, the second complex (stanzas three to five) begins directly with the description of their diametrically opposed individual fates. The rupture in the poem establishes a chasm that cannot be overcome anymore. Both fates end in catastrophe: the fate of the first companion in bourgeois society is marked by homey comforts, prosperity, and familiar order but also by narrow-mindedness, rigidity, restrictions, confinement, and stagnation; the second companion succumbs to the whirlwind of Romantic striving for ideals, to Eros, to poetry. Particularly the fate of the second journeyman reveals the risks to which the poetic existence is subjected, as well as the radical changes in poetic theory and practice since the heyday of Early Romantic aesthetics. Like the lyrical subject in the Hymnen an die Nacht, the second companion plunges into a sphere of night; here again the route goes inward and downward. But while in the texts by Novalis the lyrical persona moves along this path of transformation, at the end of which a kind of higher subjectivity is found, the Eichendorff journeyman is not the poetic subject but rather the poetic object. It is true for both journeymen in Eichendorff’s poem that they are narrated figures, that is, objects of a narrative subject. The first journeyman, however, maintains within his biography a (bourgeois) subjectivity (er “fand,” er “wiegte,” er “sah”), whereas the second is not only the object of the narrator but also the object and victim of the “tausend Stimmen” and the “verlockend’ Sirenen”; his subjectivity is dissolved and destroyed. He is a failed Odysseus, who is at the mercy of the figments of his imagination and the desires of his erotic drive. The dark realm of the unconscious, of the imaginary, of the sexual, and of death is for him not a passage to a higher reality (Novalis), but rather the plunge into an inextricable labyrinth and finally into death. The goal of his journey is neither philistine comfort (first journeyman) nor a metaphysical order representing itself atmospherically (Novalis), but rather a loss of self and identity, a loss of creative power and language. When in the last stanza the narrative “I” explicitly appears for the first time as the observer and narrator of the preceding catastrophic events, the attempt is made to turn the complete failure of both companions’ existences — stranding on the bourgeois shore and (literally) being shipwrecked — into the positive: Es singen und klingen die Wellen Des Frühlings wohl über mir; Und seh’ ich so kecke Gesellen, Die Thränen im Auge mir schwellen — 31 Ach Gott, führ’ uns liebreich zu Dir!

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In the narrator’s melancholy review, the two journeymen are proved to be the two irreconcilable opposites of one and the same lyrical existence: This “I” is with itself (“bei sich”) and simultaneously outside itself (cf. the waves of spring, which are beyond him). It contains those contrary poles of melancholy that unfolded as external events in the story about the two journeymen. The complex artistic character of this seemingly simple narrative thus makes manifest the melancholic aspects of fixation and movement as an aesthetic principle. Fixation is conveyed by harmonic onomatopoeia (“hellen, klingenden, singenden Wellen”), internal rhymes (“klingenden — singenden”) and by means of iambic rhythms and syntactically rounded verse units (cf. the stanza of the first journeyman). Expansion, on the other hand, 32 is achieved by vowel displacements, dactylic rhythms, enjambments, and syntactic limits (cf. the stanza of the second journeyman). When, however, the poem about the two journeymen turns into a prayer, then the last stanza transcends the lives and fates about which the preceding ones narrate and also the balladesque lyrical form in which they are narrated. The last line, which in its reference to a new departure returns thematically to the beginning of the poem, is addressed directly to God. All the same, while this prayer expresses the hope of a radically different type of existence, an existence far beyond the respective fates of the journeymen, such a hope is not realized in the poem. If in the case of Novalis the erotically colored turn toward religiosity is an integrative component of the aesthetic text and if art, thus, is distinguished as the appropriate medium for the realization of such an eroticreligious unio mystica, in the case of Eichendorff this turning toward the religious is excluded from the realm of art. In the Late Romantic transition from the lyrical to the sacral, one notes skepticism toward the Early Romantic conviction that the differences in the world of experience can be annihilated by the aesthetic strategies of absolute self-reflection or “qualitative Potenzierung.” When Clemens Brentano in 1817 writes to E. T. A. Hoffmann: “Seit längerer Zeit habe ich ein gewißes Grauen vor aller Poesie, die sich selbst spiegelt, und nicht Gott” (For a long time I have felt a certain 33 horror of all poetry that reflects itself, and not God), then this could be precisely a paraphrasing of the fate of Eichendorff’s second journeyman. That Brentano’s statement provides first and foremost a selfcharacterization of his lyrical works could be shown in a variety of his poems; they serve as documents of an increasingly problematic dissociation of both the biographical and the poetical subject from the areas of nature, society, love, religion, and art. This process of dissociation reaches a climax in his justly famous weaver song (1835–37). Here Brentano programmatically follows once more the Early Romantic concepts of irrationalism and magic idealism, only to denounce the higher world of poetry as a world of lies and pretence:

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Wenn der lahme Weber träumt, er webe, Träumt die kranke Lerche auch, sie schwebe, Träumt die stumme Nachtigall, sie singe, Daß das Herz des Widerhalls zerspringe, Träumt das blinde Huhn, es zähl’ die Kerne, Und der drei je zählte kaum, die Sterne, Träumt das starre Erz, gar linde tau’ es, Und das Eisenherz, ein Kind vertrau’ es, Träumt die taube Nüchternheit, sie lausche, Wie der Traube Schüchternheit berausche; Kömmt dann Wahrheit mutternackt gelaufen, Führt der hellen Töne Glanzgefunkel Und der grellen Lichter Tanz durchs Dunkel, Rennt den Traum sie schmerzlich übern Haufen, Horch! die Fackel lacht, horch! Schmerz-Schalmeien Der erwachten Nacht ins Herz all schreien; Weh, ohn’ Opfer gehn die süßen Wunder, 34 Gehn die armen Herzen einsam unter!

With its triadic structure (the dream in which the impossible is realized; the irruption of truth which destroys the dream; the aphorism-like warning at the end of the poem) and self-referential picture of the weaving poet, the poem structurally and thematically refers to Romantic ideas and modes of composition. But by renouncing an explicit division into strophes, by reducing the articulating “I” into an abstract principle of textual organization, and by bizarrely joining together images, the poem also leaves the Romantic lyrical discourse behind, or at least gives it a new quality. Within this poem, Brentano places prosaic, everyday images in direct proximity to poetic metaphors and accentuates their homogeneity via alliteration and internal rhymes (e.g. Herz — Huhn, Kerne — Sterne, taube Nüchternheit — der Traube Schüchternheit); when colloquial and artistic expressions follow one another directly, as they do in verses fourteen to fifteen, then the poem realizes the strategies of abstraction and irony as established in theory by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. At the same time, however, these strategies are taken ad absurdum, precisely because here the play with contrasts does not lead — as intended by the Early Romantics — to the momentary unification of the divided at a higher level, but rather to the disillusioning lowlands of an overpowering empirical reality. The method of “Logarythmisierung,” with which Novalis describes the transformation of the higher into the lower and more common, is here applied to Early Romantic poetics and poetry itself. This moment of disillusionment is revealed also in the antagonistic interplay between form and content. In the first ten lines of the poem, the sequential order of the dreamers goes from the concrete (“Weber”) increas-

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ingly into the abstract (“Nüchternheit”), and from the possible increasingly into the impossible. The dream contents all have to do with wholeness and salvation. This dream hope is, at first, expressed at the formal level: by internal rhymes, alliteration, and assonance; by the suggestive reiteration of words (“träumt”); by the ponderous trochaic pentameter that imitates the lame gait of the weaver; by the monotonous rhyme pairs with their constant feminine rhymes. Last but not least: the elliptical syntax turns the text into a woven fabric of sounds that conceals the tensions within the content (the question as to whether we are supposed to understand the initial “Wenn,” to which the whole sentence structure is attached, conditionally or temporally is left open by the omission of the consecutive “dann”). In the second part of the poem, form and content are simultaneously brought into correspondence and contrarily related. Truth — enlightened rationality but also social reality — breaks in; regardless of whether this break-in of truth is part of the dream or the end of the dream, the reference framework of dream and reality dominating the poem is brought to consciousness. This dualism between dream and reality is reflected formally in the abrupt change in rhythm (line eleven) and in the evoked pairs of opposites (helle Töne — grelle Lichter, Glanzgefunkel — Dunkel, Schmerz-Schalmeien) that are linked to one another via internal rhymes and alliteration. The resulting synaesthetic effects and ironic punch lines generate a labyrinth in which a semantic and also a sensual orientation is no longer possible. This collapse of logical and perceptual-aesthetic contiguities performed at the formal level, moreover, runs diametrically counter to the sudden appearance of truth, with its connotations of rationality, logical discourse and enlightenment. The bi-polar structure of the text also becomes clear when individual verses are compared. The weaving weaver and the singing nightingale are traditional metaphors for the poet and the creative process; here their real powerlessness (lameness and muteness) can be overcome only in a dream. Only in the sphere of night, sleep, and dream does the poetic song achieve 35 an impact: its echo (“Widerhall”) lets the heart burst. This poetics of echo — implicit in the intertextual reference to the poem “Trutz-Nachtigal” of the Baroque poet Friedrich von Spee — also conceals risks: if the echo returns to the heart of its sender, it has a fatal effect; thus Brentano reinforces his rejection of an exclusively self-referential, autonomous poetry and his plea for a poetry aimed at the hearts of other people. The ambivalence of these verses returns in lines fifteen and sixteen, which at the same time contrarily refer to verses three and four, as the poetics of song now changes into a poetics of screaming: it is not the song of the nightingale that opens the heart of another person, but rather the “Schmerz-Schalmeien” that shout to the awakened night’s heart. The double imperative “Horch!,” that represents the direct address of a ‘thou’ (also the reader’s thou) and perhaps even a form of self-address to the lyrical subject, shakes the dreamers out of

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their sleep in order to shout out a warning in the last two verses. The lonely ruin of the hearts is sealed if poetry only speaks in monologues of itself and thus forfeits its communicative and social function. Yet, the poem does not end with this warning cried out but rather ends in resignation, given that the utopia of a dialogic poetry (as stated in the first part of the poem) remains woven into the nocturnal dream. Different from its function in Novalis’s hymns, the dream here is the manufacturing plant of a labyrinthine texture, in whose inextricable corridors of language the lyrical subject already has lost itself. The “Bewusstsein der inneren Entzweiung” (consciousness of inner division) which, according to August Wilhelm Schlegel, distinguishes the Romantic poet from the classical, is at the same time a Christian consciousness of the difference between the finite and the infinite, the present life and 36 the hereafter. From this consciousness of difference, which the Romantics 37 also paraphrase with the term melancholy, results that longing and striving which is aimed at reconciliation, a reconciliation that can only be realized in the medium of art for moments at a time and in an infinite process. Brentano shares this melancholy consciousness with his Early Romantic contemporaries. What separates him from them is the loss of their belief that art can achieve the postulated reconciliation. Not only is his secular, in particular his love poetry marked by a deep inner conflict; in the final instance, his turning to religious devotional poetry also is a symptom of his consciousness of the end of Romantic poetry and its aesthetic concepts. Even more radical than Brentano in his ambivalence and skepticism concerning Romantic art and aesthetics is Heinrich Heine. The roots for this attitude go back to 1819–20, when Heine lived as a student in Bonn. The lectures of his professor and mentor, August Wilhelm Schlegel, conveyed to him the most important principles of Romantic aesthetics and poetry, whereas the cultural-historical lectures of the anti-Romantic Karl Dietrich Hüllmann acquainted him with the ideas and thoughts of the Enlightenment. The most important self-portrayal from this period is the essay “Die Romantik” (1820), in which the young Heine attempts to rescue what he regards as truly modern in Romanticism by releasing Romanticism from its historical foundation in Christianity and the Middle 38 Ages. In his polemic treatment of what he calls Die romantische Schule (1833 and 1836) Heine criticizes — thereby including his own early poetry — the cleft between the claim for truth in Romantic poetry and its actual estrangement from the empirical world. While on the one hand he adheres to the Early Romantic concepts of genre mixture and the playful freedom of imagination, on the other hand he denounces Romanticism’s restorative tendencies, in particular the escape into idealistic subjectivism, aestheticism, Catholicism, and nationalism.

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A quotation by Eichendorff paraphrases the originality of Heine very precisely and may serve at the same time as a document for Eichendorff’s own ambivalent relationship to his literary epoch: Heinrich Heine, ursprünglich selbst noch Romantiker, macht hierbei die Honneurs, indem er aller Poesie das Teufelchen frivoler Ironie anhängt, das jubelnd ausruft: Seht da, wie hübsch, ihr guten Leute! Aber glaubt ja nicht etwa, daß ich selber an das Zeug glaube! Fast jedes seiner schönen Lieder schließt mit einem solchem Selbstmorde. Die Zeit hat allgemach den Romantikern hinter die Karte geguckt und insgeheim Ekel und Langeweile vor dem hohlen Spiel überkommen. Das sprach Heine frech und witzig aus, und der alte Zauber39 bann war gelöst.

The “Teufelchen frivoler Ironie” indeed is that hallmark of Heine’s Romantic poetry by which he ultimately leads ad absurdum the Romantic dreams of a “Weg nach innen,” of a progressive transcendental poetry, and of the romanticization of the world. His employment of Romantic imagery and poetical methods thereby becomes an artistic game with which he hopes to regain contact to the historical world of life and experience. His poetry does not build on spiritualism and Catholicism, but on the release of eroticism and the turn toward the secular; it does not seek to reconcile the contrasts given in reality by projecting seamless Romantic moods of totality; rather his poetry shows the antagonisms and conflicts of reality explicitly by means of fractures and ironic punch lines. The aim of Heine’s poetry is not to raise the finite, imperfect world to an assumed higher world of poetry or religion, but rather to expose the aesthetic, Romantic world as an illusory, dreamlike one. In the process, Heine does not at all intend to abandon poetry itself; what matters to him is to reassign to poetry a socio-political and social-critical function. The deeply ambivalent character of most of Heine’s poetry — continuing Romantic traditions on the one hand and destroying them in favor of radical aesthetic innovations on the other — can be demonstrated exemplarily in the following poem from the cycle Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming), itself part of the Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs, 1827) that made Heine’s reputation throughout Europe: Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig, Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai; Ich stehe, gelehnt an der Linde, Hoch auf der alten Bastei. Da drunten fließt der blaue Stadtgraben in stiller Ruh’; Ein Knabe fährt im Kahne, Und angelt und pfeift dazu.

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Jenseits erheben sich freundlich, In winziger, bunter Gestalt, Lusthäuser, und Gärten, und Menschen, Und Ochsen, und Wiesen, und Wald. Die Mägde bleichen Wäsche, Und springen im Gras herum; Das Mühlrad stäubt Diamanten, Ich höre sein fernes Gesumm’. Am alten grauen Turme Ein Schilderhäuschen steht; Ein rotgeröckter Bursche Dort auf und nieder geht. Er spielt mit seiner Flinte, Die funkelt im Sonnenrot, Er präsentiert und schultert 40 Ich wollt’, er schösse mich tot. The initially intoned theme of melancholy and weltschmerz, the conventional topoi of nature and landscape, the particular perspective of visual perception (looking from above down on the valley), the traditional song verses and the phrases aimed at achieving dynamic and synaesthetic effects (“springen,” “stäubt,” “auf und nieder,” “funkelt” etc.) all affiliate the poem in form and content with the repertoire of stereotyped modes of Romantic lyrical speech and design. The lamentation about the isolated and exiled 41 situation of the poetic subject and, linked with it, the longing for “Heimkehr” (above all expressed by the spatial dualism of proximity and distance), create a mood-image of intact nature and playful sociability — the illusionary character of which, however, is radically destroyed by the final punch line. In its last verse the poem does indeed resume the theme of melancholy and thus returns to its very beginning, but the initial theme of Romantic heartache now turns round into naked reality. The lyrical speaker’s desire to die is no longer associated with departure and return to an erotic-spiritual homeland, but rather expresses the existential homelessness and hopelessness of the poetic subject. Interpreted from a literary-historical point of view, this anti-poetically articulated desire for a violent death relentlessly uncovers the superficial idealism of Romanticism; the artistically constructed poetic mood collapses and gives way to a consciousness of reality that necessarily transgresses the limits of the poetic. This break-in of the reality principle is prepared on a broad front. The free artistic play with poetic-Romantic settings generates the exaggeratedly naïve and trivial picture of a ‘Wald- und Wiesenromantik’

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(woods and meadows Romanticism), whose hollowness is heightened by additional ironic and parodistic alienation effects. Thus the Romantic color “blue” is not linked to the conventional Rhine myth or the flower metaphor but to the prosaic word “Stadtgraben.” The double semantics of the verb “sich erheben” in the sense of “aufstehen” (to rise; to raise) and / or “sichtbar werden” (to appear; to come to the fore) is fully exhausted by the verb’s references to many different objects, which thus creates an animated landscape painting that borders on the ridiculous. This grotesque inconsistency is further promoted by the arbitrary sequencing of things and living beings; last but not least the Romantic harmony is disturbed by concrete images that refer to an identifiable historical-biographical reality. Thus, the “alte Bastei” can be easily identified as the bulwark of Lüneburg and the “rotgeröckte Bursche” as a red-coated soldier of Hanover, whereas the whole scenery of the poem is biographically rooted in Heine’s visit to his parents in Lüneburg in 1823, the year when the poem was written. Thus develops Heine’s characteristic combination of elegy and irony, seriousness and humor, illusion and disillusion, which in the final punch line tumbles into a tragic sobriety. The consciousness of himself being at risk and the melancholic suffering from social reality that Heine shares with his Romantic contemporaries lead him neither to the Early Romantic methods of resolution — such as visionary-mystic immersion or the construction of synthesizing moods, landscapes of the soul, and subjective-autonomous worlds of imagination — nor to the Late Romantic, pragmatically intended solutions of a folksong-like or religious poetry. Instead, Heine opts for a secular and realistically oriented, socially committed poetry. This poetic commitment, which comes to the fore in Heine’s political poetry of the 1830s and 1840s as explicit criticism of existing conditions, is demonstrated in this poem in a much more subtle way. By treating the Romantic method of irony itself in an ironically estranging manner, Heine’s poem gains an aesthetic function that differs diametrically from the one intended by the Romantics. In Romantic Irony, particularly as conceived by Friedrich Schlegel, the synthesizing imagination brings contrastive aspects into an indefinite and undefined “Schwebezustand” (state of suspense). Thus, the ironic method occupies a central function within the concept of progressive universal poetry: by refusing to dissolve antithetical tensions, it mediates a sense of the indissoluble contradiction between the unconditional and the conditional in an infinite poetic-ironic chain of reflection (KFSA, 2: 160). Heine, on the other hand, returns this existential-ontological concept of irony to its rhetorical-tropological function; he restores the difference between the actually intended and the not properly stated and thus also restores the dialogic relationship to the recipient that is constitutive for any ironic speech. In the poem at hand, the Romantic world is unmasked as

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illusion by aligning irony with the aesthetic perception of the recipient: the poetic world is fractured in the confrontation with reality. Translated by Bernadette Malinowski and Dennis F. Mahoney

Notes 1

See Hiltrud Gnüg, Entstehung und Krise lyrischer Subjektivität: Vom klassischen lyrischen Ich zur modernen Erfahrungswirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 13. 2

NS, 2: 536, no. 47. See Karl Heinz Volkmann-Schluck, “Novalis’ magischer Idealismus,” in Die deutsche Romantik: Poetik, Formen und Motive, edited by Hans Steffen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ²1970), 45–53. 3 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst (1802–1803), in F. W. J. S., Ausgewählte Schriften. Vol. 2 Schriften 1801–1803, edited by Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 181–567, here 195. Henceforth Schelling’s work is cited as AS. 4

See Michael Feldt, Lyrik als Erlebnislyrik: Zur Geschichte eines Literatur- und Mentalitätstypus zwischen 1600 und 1900 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), 384. The recognition of the insurmountable difference between the ideal and the real, which marks the singular work as well as human existence, leads to the Romantic conception of irony that F. Schlegel and Solger developed as a program of life and art (see John F. Fetzer, “Romantic Irony,” in European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models, edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister [Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990] 19–36; Ernst Behler, Ironie und die literarische Moderne, [Paderborn, Munich et. al.: Schöningh, 1997]). 5 The paradigm of the arts as fine arts shifts to an aesthetics of the no-longerbeautiful. On this subject see Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, edited by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Fink, 1968) (= Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 3), especially the essays by Karl Maurer and Odo Marquard. 6

On the Romantic philosophy of subjectivity and identity see Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). 7 See Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in AS, 2: 468 as well as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 2: 129, 223, 222. 8

See Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus (1800), in AS, 1: 395–702, particularly 626, 694. 9 Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in AS, 2: 221. 10

Friedrich Schlegel, “Propädeutik und Logik,” in KFSA, 13: 293. See also KFSA, 12: 361; 421.

11

“Romanticizing is nothing but raising the quality of things to a higher power. [. . .] By giving a high meaning to the common, an arcane appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unfamiliar to the familiar, an infinite appearance to the finite, thus I am romanticizing it — Vice versa functions the operation for the higher, unfamiliar,

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mystic, infinite — which by that relationship is logarithmicized — It receives a familiar formulation.” 12

Clemens Brentano, Werke, edited by Friedhelm Kemp and Wolfgang Frühwald (Munich: Hanser, ²1973), 2: 258. “[I call] everything Romantic which is posed as an intermediary between our eye and something to be seen from afar, which brings us closer to the remote object, but at the same time bestows something of itself on it.”

13

For further details on the Romantic preoccupation with musical meaning, see the contribution by Kristina Muxfeldt in this volume. 14

See Ludwig Tieck, Werke und Briefe, edited by Lambert Schneider (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1967; reprint of the edition of 1938), 245; see also 223. 15 On melancholia as a psychic disposition characteristic of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, see Wolf Lepenies, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). On the history of melancholia, see Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Die Melancholie der Literatur: Diskursgeschichte und Textfiguration (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997). 16 For a discussion of the importance of history, the Volk, and folk narratives for the later Romantics, see the contribution by Fabian Lampart in this volume. 17

“Black was the night and dark stars burnt / Through veils of clouds dull and pale, / The lea roamed through the spirit-world, / When hostile the Fates turned downward / And wrathful gods sent me into life.” The original poem is quoted from the first edition of William Lovell, edited by Walter Münz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 17–18. For further references to the novel, see the essay by Gerhart Hoffmeister in this volume. 18

Tieck, William Lovell, 125.

19

See the continuous rhyme scheme (abbaa), the strictly applied trochaic meter, the sound pattern alternating between dark and clear tones, as well as the interlacing of isolated elements by alliterations, internal rhymes, and assonances. 20 Thus remarks Walter Münz in a footnote to this poem; see Tieck, William Lovell, 658. 21

On the life and work of Friedrich von Hardenberg see Dennis F. Mahoney, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001). 22 “Abends gieng ich zu Sophieen. Dort war ich unbeschreiblich freudig — aufblitzende Enthusiasmus Momente — Das Grab blies ich wie Staub, vor mir hin — Jahrhunderte waren wie Momente — ihre Nähe war fühlbar — ich glaubte sie solle immer vortreten” (In the evening I went to Sophie. There I was indescribably happy — flashing moments of enthusiasm — The grave I blew before me like dust — centuries were like moments — her closeness was perceptible — I believed she always should step forward.; NS, 1: 158). 23 “Across I journey, / And each torment / Will one day be a thorn / Of voluptuousness.” 24

“Down to the sweet bride, / To Jesus, the beloved — / Confidently, evening twilight grows gray / To those who love and grieve. / A dream dashes our chains apart / And lays us in the Father’s lap.”

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25

“What dropped us all into abyssal sadness / Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now. / In death the everlasting life was announced, / You are Death and at last make us whole.” 26 See Wagner-Egelhaaf, Die Melancholie der Literatur, 144–58. 27

On this context also see the interpretation by William Stephen Davis, “‘Menschwerdung der Menschen’: Poetry and Truth in Hardenberg’s Hymnen an die Nacht and the ‘Journal’ of 1797,” in Athenäum: Jahrbuch der Romantik 4 (1994): 239–59. 28

Joseph von Eichendorff, “Die zwei Gesellen,” in Sämtliche Werke des Freiherrn Joseph von Eichendorff: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, founded by Wilhelm Koch and August Sauer, continued and edited by Hermann Kunisch and Helmut Koopmann, vol. 1.1 Gedichte: Erster Teil, edited by Harry Fröhlich and Ursula Regener (Stuttgart, Berlin et. al.: Kohlhammer, 1993), 1.1: 66–67. The work of Eichendorff is subsequently cited as SW. 29

“Two spry journeymen left / Home for the first time, / And set sail with jubilation in the bright, / Sounding, singing waves / During the fullness of Spring. // They aspired after high things, / They desired, despite pleasure and pain, / To bring what is right into the world, / And whomsoever they went past, / Their minds and heart laughed.” 30

“The first one found a sweetheart, / Whose mother bought him a farm and a house; / Soon he was cradling a little boy / And looking out from a secret [homely] little parlor / Cosily into the field. // The second one was sung to and lied to / By a thousand voices in the earthly ground: / Tantalizing siren-song pulled / Him down into the wooing waves’ / Colorfully sounding abyss. // And when he surfaced from the abyss, / He was exhausted and old, / His small ship lay grounded, / It was so quiet around, / And across the waters cold winds blew.” 31

“The waves of Spring are singing and sounding / Well beyond me; / And when I see such bold journeymen, / Tears swell in my eyes — / Oh, God, guide us lovingly to You!” 32 Thus the shifting of vowels from e and i (“hellen, klingenden, singenden Wellen”) to o, u and a (“sangen und logen,” “Grund,” “zogen,” “Wogen,” “Schlund”) imitates the sinking and drowning of the second journeyman. For a detailed analysis of the poet’s form, see Oskar Seidlin, “Die zwei Gesellen,” in Versuche über Eichendorff (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ²1978), 161–92. 33

Clemens Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Wolfgang Frühwald et. al. (Stuttgart, Berlin et al.: Kohlhammer, 2000), 33: 285. 34

Clemens Brentano, “Wenn der arme Weber träumt,” in Werke, vol. 1 Gedichte: Romanzen vom Rosenkreuz, edited by Wolfgang Frühwald, Bernhard Gajek et. al. (Munich: Hanser, 1968), 611. “When the lame weaver dreams of weaving, / The sick lark, too, dreams of soaring, / The dumb nightingale dreams of singing, / That the heart of the echo may burst, / The blind chicken dreams of counting the grain, / And the one just able to count to three of counting the stars, / The rigid ore dreams of melting softly, / And the iron heart of being trusted by a child, / The deaf sobriety dreams of listening, / As the grape intoxicates shyness; / Then truth stark-naked comes running along, / Guides the lustrous sparkling of bright sounds / And the

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dance of the glaring lights through the dark, / And painfully runs over the dream; / Listen! The torch laughs, listen! Pain-shawms / Are shouted into the awakend night’s heart; / Woe, without sacrifice the sweet miracles, / The poor hearts lonely drown.” 35

This instrumental interpretation of the genitive (“des Widerhalls”) is supported by documentary evidence in Peter Utz, “Singen oder schreien? Eine poetologische und sozialgeschichtliche Lektüre von Brentanos ‘Weberlied,’” in Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 1987: 228–52, see 232. 36

See August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Eduard Böcking, vol. 5 Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur: Erster Teil (Hildesheim & New York: Olms, 1971) 17. 37 Due to this Christian characterized consciousness of difference A. W. Schlegel maintains that the “Wesen der nordischen Poesie in die Melancholie gesetzt [ist]” (substance of the nordic [i.e. the Romantic] poetry is set into melancholy); ibid., 15. 38

See Heinrich Heine, “Die Romantik,” in Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen und Kleinere literaturkritische Schriften, edited by Jan-Christoph Hauschild (Düsseldorf: Hoffmann und Campe: 1993), 194–97 (= Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, edited by Manfred Windfuhr, vol. 10).

39

Joseph von Eichendorff, SW, 4 Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutschlands, edited by Wolfram Mauser (Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1970), 471. “Heinrich Heine, originally a Romantic himself, contributes to that by attaching to all poetry the imp of frivolous irony, which loudly exclaims: Just look, how nice, good folks! But for all that don’t believe that I myself believe in that stuff! Almost each of his beautiful songs winds up with committing such a suicide. Time has always seen through the Romantics’ game and was overcome by disgust and tedium in the face of that hollow play. Heine expressed that fact impudently and wittily, and the old spell was broken.” 40

Heinrich Heine, “Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig,” in Buch der Lieder, edited by Pierre Grappin (Düsseldorf: Hoffmann und Campe, 1975), 20–210 (= Historischkritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 1/1). “My heart, my heart is sad, / But merrily gleams the May; / I stand leaning against a lime-tree / High upon the old bastion. // Down there, the blue town-moat / Flows in tranquil silence; / A boy goes boating / Thereby fishing and whistling. // Beyond friendly raise / In a tiny, colorful shape, / Brothels, and gardens, and men, / And oxes, and meadows, and forest. // The maidservants bleach the linen, / And hop around in the grass; / The mill-wheel disperses diamonds, / I can hear its remote buzzing. // At the old gray tower / There stands a sentry-box; / A fellow wearing a red coat / Walks there up and down. // He plays with his rifle, / Which twinkles in the blazing sun, / He presents and shoulders / I wish he’d shoot me dead.”

41

In the process, Heine’s biographical situation is incorporated into the poem’s structure: his Jewishness, his profound aversion to capitalism and bourgeois utilitarianism, and last but not least the ongoing conflicts with his family distinguish Heine as a literary and social outsider and border crosser. In May 1831 these circumstances finally led to Heine’s voluntary retreat into French exile.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Title page of the first volume of Arnim and Brentano’s edition of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1805. Courtesy of the Bailey-Howe Library, University of Vermont.

The Turn to History and the Volk: Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimm Brothers Fabian Lampart Folk Songs and Fairy Tales: Examples of Folk Literature

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of German Romanticism is the importance of “Volksdichtung” or “Volksliteratur” (folk literature). By this term the Romantics understood literature that has its origins in the collective memory of the people or even of one specific nation. “Volksliteratur” is part of a national or international cultural tradition, though it can be collected or 1 even written down in a specific historical version by one single author. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is a key figure in the process of propagating and diffusing the concept of Volksliteratur in Germany. In the 1760s, his function was restricted to a process of cultural transfer. Among German poets and intellectuals, Herder was the first to give an enthusiastic reception to James Macpherson’s (1736–96) Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), which were said to have been created by the blind Gaelic bard Ossian. Later on, Herder was also the first to undertake an individual collection of folk songs in German. The Volkslieder (Folk Songs, 1778–79) are based on a multi-national idea of folk literature. It is characteristic of his understanding of folk literature that Herder includes not only Nordic and Native American folk songs but also poems by Shakespeare and songs by Goethe. Some of the texts are written by contemporary authors, others are derived from the oral traditions of highly heterogeneous ethnic groups. Herder justifies such diversity by emphasizing their common origins in a living and vivid culture. In Herder’s view, literature — folk poetry in particular — is created inside a collective tradition that is open to stimulation 2 from different cultures. The Romantics based their ideas of Volksliteratur on Herder’s concepts, but they modified it in two important ways. First, the term Volk no longer refers to an international collective as its foundation: folk poetry tends to be national and is limited to German traditions. Second, this collective foundaNE SALIENT FEATURE

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tion is no longer within reach but has become historicized: it belongs to a past age. Therefore, Volksliteratur is a part of history, and history has to be discovered by means of historical research. Accordingly, the Romantics began to collect the two folk genres, folk songs (Volkslieder) and fairy tales, 3 with the aim of regaining and reconstructing lost national traditions. These ideas constitute the background for the origin of the two most famous and to this day immensely popular collections of Romantic Volksdichtung. Achim von Arnim’s (1781–1831) and Clemens Brentano’s (1778– 1842) Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (The Youth’s Magic Horn: Old German Songs) was published in three volumes between 1805 and 1808; Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786– 1859) published their collection of Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children’s 4 and Household Tales) in two volumes between 1812 and 1815. Both books were neither the only nor the first collections. Arnim and Brentano as well as the Brothers Grimm began their work on the basis of prior collections, prior experiences, and thus prior ways of theorizing and systematizing the material. When Arnim and Brentano first made their still vague plans of a Romantic song book between 1801 and 1804, they faced the same problems Herder had encountered more than twenty years before their attempts, but at least Herder’s (and others’) solutions could serve them as a sort of com5 pass. Similarly, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were not the first to edit a collection of fairy tales. In the years before 1812, when the first volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen appeared, there had been several collections of fairy tales and legends. Not before the third edition in 1837 did their edition become the book it has remained ever since: the most famous collection of fairy tales in world literature. With their two collections, Arnim, Brentano, and the Brothers Grimm shaped the image of Romantic Volksliteratur. The ideal of Romantic folk song in German literary or musical history is associated with the songs collected in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, while the term fairy tale all over the world is connected to the Brothers Grimm. Considering the prominent role played by the two collections in later definitions of Volksliteratur, it is even more remarkable that neither Arnim and Brentano nor Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had a clearly defined concept of folk literature nor of how and where to discover and collect it. Thus, their books were works in progress in a practical and in a theoretical sense. Arnim’s and Brentano’s first vague plan to collect folk songs dates back to the time of their voyage along the Rhine river valley in 1802, but not until 1805 did Brentano suggest to Arnim that they make a book of folk songs together. It was to replace and to succeed the older and, according to Arnim and Brentano, more commonplace collections — such as Herder’s Volkslieder or the Mildheimische Liederbuch (Mildheim Song Book, 1799) by Rudolph Zacharias Becker — by means of the specific character of the songs.

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Soon Arnim and Brentano edited the first volume of their collection and found diligent collaborators in their research for folk songs all over Ger6 many. Two of the most zealous contributors were the Brothers Grimm. In October 1807, Arnim and Brentano were preparing the second volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Brentano met Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm for the first time in Kassel and expressed his enthusiasm about their collections of folk poetry. As will be discussed later, the Brothers Grimm did not agree with Arnim’s and Brentano’s liberal view of what constituted Volkslieder, but collaborating in Des Knaben Wunderhorn was decisive for the development of their own interests in Volksliteratur. In 1807, the Brothers Grimm not only began to compile their own collection of folk songs, but also started to make excerpts from fairy tales and thus laid the foundations for the Kinder7 und Hausmärchen. Contrary to Arnim and Brentano, the Brothers Grimm emphasized the authenticity and closeness of their collection to folk traditions. Whereas Arnim and Brentano revised and recomposed folk songs they found included in collections and books of the previous 300 years, the Brothers Grimm stuck to the importance of oral tradition. For Arnim and Brentano, it was natural to modify folk literature, but the Brothers Grimm criticized the procedure and claimed to keep strictly to the versions they collected from storytellers who had received the tales orally. The problems and implications of the debate centered upon the contradictory but at the same time correlative concepts of Naturpoesie and Kunstpoesie (natural and artistic poetry). Both terms are not merely aesthetic concepts. At the very least, they form essential ideas in the complex designs of the philosophy of history upon which Romantic thinking is based. Naturpoesie as well as Kunstpoesie represent different stages in the historical development of poetry with specific aesthetic and historical implications. Both of these collections are projected and realized in a period in which the concept of history as a complex context of political, philosophical, and cultural ideas — at least in intellectual discourse — turns out to be more and more problematic. The view of history as a process, as a growing consciousness of change, became a basic tendency of the age. The problem of history around 1800 will be treated in the ensuing section; the importance of Kunstpoesie and Naturpoesie in Romantic aesthetics and the philosophy of history will be discussed in the section dealing with Volk and Poesie. After the consideration of these premises, we can proceed with a general interpretation of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

The Problem of History Around 1800, the term history changed its meaning. Previously, history in intellectual discourse was an abstract concept, something far removed from

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concrete experience. Yet, at the beginning of the new century, it became more and more evident that there had been important transformations during the last decades all over Europe. Differing from earlier revolutionary situations, these transformations were not limited just to abstract discussion, but were also closely connected with political and economic revolution. The new experience of history was a major turning point in European thinking. Reality itself, prior to this time a rather stable space of perceptions and experiences, became more and more insecure and unpredictable. These signs 8 are indicative of an intellectual and cognitive crisis. As for Germany, the decisive event in this process of transformation can be reduced to one name: Napoleon. The German reaction to the French Revolution had been vivid and intense, particularly in the years between its outbreak in 1789 and the radical phase of the revolution in 1793–94, but it was to be Napoleon’s role to spread the ideas of the Revolution all over Europe. Still more important than the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity was the radical revolution of the political order in the countries of Western Europe. The Napoleonic Wars destroyed the system on which European politics had been based since the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 48). Territories like Italy or Germany, traditionally divided into a multitude of bigger and smaller states, were particularly affected by these changes. Centuries-old traditions and continuities were interrupted and brought to an end. It is symptomatic that Thomas Nipperdey opens his influential study of German history between 1800 and 1866 with the simple statement, “Am 9 Anfang war Napoleon” (In the beginning, there was Napoleon). Nipperdey thus underlines the absolutely fundamental role of Napoleon in the process of reshaping Germany between 1800 and 1815. But the revolutionary changes were not limited to politics and the economy; these were just one half of the phenomenon. The deep political changes and severe effects of the economic crisis had a direct impact on the everyday life of people, too. It was this experience of a profound crisis caused by the wars that finally rendered possible the feeling of history as a visible force even on the level of common life. Thus, history appeared as an irregular movement that was able to cancel all secure traditions and presumptions upon which life had been based in previous periods. History became a synonym for insecurity and contingency. The new significance of history is symptomatic for the loss of metaphysical security that had already been described theoretically by thinkers of the Enlightenment period. The Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1670–1744) in his Scienza Nuova (New Science, 1725–44) was one of the first philosophers to offer a definition of history that underlined its wholly secular character. According to Vico, there are different parts of creation. Whereas nature is made by God, civilization, politics, and culture are formed by human activity. Vico separates the secular world from Divine Creation, and, moreover, he entrusts the organization of this secular and historical world to human

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responsibility. The insecurity and contingency of history, according to Vico, 10 is a problem to be resolved by mankind. Accordingly, the problem of how to cope with the new incalculability of the historical world also dominates philosophical thinking around 1800 in Germany. Johann Gottfried Herder made an important contribution to this discussion. In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of Human History, 1784–91), he states a concept of history as progress toward the perfection of mankind. In Herder’s view, history is a teleological process. It is directed toward human perfection, and its final scopes are ideals such as humanity, freedom, and universal happi11 ness. Immanuel Kant expressed similar ideas in his various essays on the 12 philosophy of history. Those concepts form important steps in resolving the problem of historical contingency and insecurity. By transforming history into a process that is clearly directed toward an ideal of humanity, it is possible to justify even contradictions and “dark ages” in the course of this development. In the end, humanity will reach providentially an ideal state of enlightened perfection. Providence in this post-Enlightenment view is no longer a religious category, but a wholly secular process; it is an historical law 13 that leads mankind toward an age of perfect harmony. This utopian state of perfection is one of the basic concepts of historical thinking around 1800. If there is an end goal of history, then there is also a direct way to resolve the problems brought about by political, economic, or intellectual modernization. The question is how to find the right way to this ideal age. The answer is to look back to the ages before the present, ages in which man was not yet alienated from nature. Evidently, the philosophical theories of history develop in accordance with Jean Jacques Rousseau’s 14 (1712–78) thoughts about the evolution of man. Starting from a state of natural harmony, with the development of notions of social propriety mankind enters an age of sociological and historical deformation. Furthermore, history as a modern state is characterized by the problematic contingency of human-made reality. But, contrary to Vico, Rousseau strongly emphasized the necessity to refer back to the ideal state of natural harmony prior to 15 history in order to create the fundaments of a new utopian age. The result is a triadic scheme of history. In Romantic thought this triadic scheme became the basic mode of resolving and explaining the contradictions and problems of the discontinuous present. By looking back to the lost age of harmony, man could learn how to shape the future Golden Age. The triadic scheme is a recurrent structure in the different designs of philosophical descriptions of history from Herder and Kant through Schelling, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Novalis up to Hegel. There are vastly different ideological implications in these thinkers’ conceptions of a secularized salvation history, but present in them all is the basic structure of an idealized prehistoric age, a present with clearly negative qualities, and an ideal future;

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there is always the final aim to discover paths to that ideal future by a round16 about route via the harmonious past.

The Relationship of People and Poesie The question of how to reconstruct the ideal and harmonious past is the focus of Romantic discussions on history. One of the most important answers is the concept of Volk. In one respect, the Volk (people or nation) is a reaction to the political ideas of the French Revolution. Romantic writers tried to answer the revolutionary ideas of a radical reorganization of society with alternative projects. In contrast to rapid political change, they emphasized the organic and natural evolution of social structures. The Volk was the focus of these conservative versions of a political and social revolution. In accordance with Rousseau’s and Herder’s ideas, the Volk represents a collective individual. Comparable to a human being, it develops in several phases; it can and should be educated carefully in order to give shape to its specific abilities and to become, finally, a harmonious personality. Another analogy is more important: Romantic thinkers draw a comparison between the development of the individual Volk and the three ages of history. Therefore, childhood is more than the starting point of the collective social development that should be controlled and regulated carefully in order to prevent revolutionary convulsions. Both in the individual’s life and in the evolution of the Volk, childhood is the anthropological state nearest to natural harmony, the first epoch in the triadic scheme. In childhood, man is not yet alienated from himself by education, and similarly, the childhood of a specific people or nation corresponds to a state not yet contaminated by civilization and historical development. Going back to the childhood of the Volk, man can rediscover some of the lost qualities of the ideal state 17 before history. But how could it be possible to go back to an epoch removed from the present to such a degree that it lies literally beyond history? The Romantics give different answers, and in all of them Poesie plays a central part. In Romantic aesthetics, poesy is not merely poetry in the narrow sense of the word; rather, it represents a general force, a creative entity that synthesizes subjective and objective as well as individual and collective parts of reality. In the famous definition of Romantic poesy in Athenaeum-Fragment no. 116, Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of “Universalpoesie” is characterized by a universal claim to unify the heterogeneous and contradictory aspects of reality (KFSA, 2: 182–83). Poesie is an archetypal and anthropological force that can help to overcome the problematic fragmentation of the modern 18 world. The central significance of Poesie is transformed in the different approaches of the Romantics. Whereas the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and

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Novalis underline its general philosophic value as an absolute and unifying force, the second generation of Romantics tends to interpret the concept of Poesie in relation to history. For their part, Arnim and Brentano on the one hand, and the Brothers Grimm on the other, arrived at interpretations of poesy that differ in important respects. Consequently, one of the most important disputes of Romanticism arose from their rather opposite interpretations of Poesie. In 1802, Arnim writes in a letter to Brentano the sentence which is to become the programmatic center of his poetic theory: “Alles geschieht in der Welt der Poesie wegen, die Geschichte ist der allgemeinste Ausdruck dafür” (Everything in the world happens due to poesy; history is the most common 19 expression for that.). The important point about the dichotomy concentrated in this program is the relation between poesy and history. Whereas poesy is a basic ontological force, history is a general term that refers to the temporality of human action. Everything that can be realized in a temporal reality is historical — forms of political and social organization as well as works of art. Thus, history is the most general visible expression of the creative force of poesy. Poesy is the moving element, and history is its manifestation in reality. Since the original forms of poesy are in the course of the centuries more and more covered by the sediments of history and thus, as it were, obscured, the Romantics seek ways to rediscover the invisible or almost lost poesy. Most evidently, it can be found in the living collective traditions of the people, as for example in legends or myths. Arnim and Brentano are convinced that the basic force of poesy can be found particu20 larly well in the literature of the Volk, or as they define it, in the Volkspoesie. There is another aspect that needs to be considered. According to Arnim and Brentano, poetry (also in the narrower sense of the term) stands outside history and can realize itself in any historical epoch; thus, poetry is not restricted to prior ages and can be created as well in the present. Poetry recreated in the present is no longer a result of the collective and unconscious creativity of the people, but an individual creative act, yet it is still poetry. For Arnim and Brentano, there is no difference in the collectively created Naturpoesie and the individual creative act of Kunstpoesie. Both are just different ways of rediscovering the lost Poesie. Accordingly, in editing the folk songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn it was not only natural but even necessary for Arnim and Brentano to revise and change profoundly the songs 21 collected. Therefore, Arnim’s — and to a lesser extent, Brentano’s — ideological and political attempt to discover a common ground for a future national identity in the legendary and mythical Naturpoesie cannot be a 22 purely historical enterprise but has to be creative as well. By changing, revising, and modifying ancient songs, legends, and myths — in short, by creating Kunstpoesie — it is no less possible to arrive at common national

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ground than through a strictly philological process as presumably practiced by the Grimm brothers. Around 1806, the Brothers Grimm raised their protest. In several essays, they argued against Arnim and Brentano’s liberal ideas about transforming 23 older texts. According to the Grimms, history and poetry have common origins in the collectivity of the nation, but these origins belong to a remote past. The exemplary form of Volkspoesie or Naturpoesie is a medieval epic such as the Nibelungenlied; like legends and myth it is created by the people. In the course of the centuries, historical thinking and poetry have been alienated from each other. Therefore, it is no longer possible to discover the foundations of a nation in collective creative acts. Individual creativity — Kunstpoesie — and collective poetry — Volkspoesie — at present are two highly different things. According to the Grimms, there is no way to create something like Volkspoesie individually under the conditions of modern life of around 1800. The only way to discover the original force of an intersubjectively created poetry is to go back to the origins and to collect carefully and correct philologically the remains of ancient Volkspoesie. Under such conditions, it is obvious that the Grimm Brothers would oppose the “creative” editorial policies of Arnim and Brentano. In their view, there was no way to discover Naturpoesie if the original — and that meant orally transmitted — texts were manipulated. To the Grimms, Arnim and Brentano’s revisions of the Wunderhorn songs were not acceptable. At least theoretically, Volkspoesie and Kunstpoesie were two different things for them, things that could by no means be united. To them, any arrangement 24 of Volkspoesie was a destruction of its original qualities. The surprising practical consequences of these theoretical convictions will be discussed in the section about the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. The idea of the Volk as a common ground for national identity in times of general historical crisis had a defensive character. The Romantics tried to develop literary concepts against what they regarded as politically wrong — the French occupation of Germany or at least of large parts thereof and the 25 enactment of political reform in some German states, particularly in Prussia. The Romantic ideal of reconstructing the foundations of a national identity in the collective memory of national literature had negative aspects, too. Even if the search for national traditions was no more than a starting point for the nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, problematic aspects of Romantic ideas are already visible. Politically, the Romantics of Arnim and Brentano’s generation tend to be rather conservative. Even if a close look at Arnim’s political writings reveals rather refined concepts of reform politics attempting to integrate traditions, their basic tendency re26 mains anti-revolutionary. Another negative aspect of the return to the Volk 27 is Romantic anti-Semitism. In 1811, Arnim and Brentano were among the founders of the “Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft” (Christian-German

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Dinner Society) — a gathering of aristocratic and bourgeois intellectuals in Berlin with the aim of cultivating patriotic thought. Among the members of the “Tischgesellschaft” were famous names of Prussian political and cultural 28 life of the first decades of the nineteenth century. Jews were not admitted, not even if they had converted to Christianity. This fact is all the more astonishing since the same members of the “Tischgesellschaft” were frequent visitors in the Berlin salon of the Jewish intellectual Rahel Levin (1771– 1833). These contacts apparently couldn’t prevent the members of the society from displaying their political and ideological convictions when they 29 held their meetings. In March 1811, Brentano read to the society a satire in which basic views of the Berlin Romantics — such as the superiority of 30 Christianity, nationalistic feelings, and anti-Semitism — were united. The reception was enthusiastic. Nationalist anti-Semitism at this early stage was not yet a violent political ideology, but the Romantics’ connection between a presumed intellectual and artistic superiority and feelings of a conservative and elitist nationalism is problematic and sheds light on the explosive force 31 inherent in a combination of aesthetics and politics. The dichotomy of Volk and Poesie is full of tensions. In a political context, the idea of a nation elevated by universal feelings of Poesie became one of the starting points for nationalist radicalism. In a literary perspective, the same idea is a basis for the poetic search or even philological research for collective national traditions. That brings us to the two most famous results of this creative research — Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

Arnim and Brentano’s Folk Songs: Tradition Recreated In 1805 Clemens Brentano suggested to Arnim that they edit a collection of Romantic folk songs together. Brentano wanted to edit a book that would replace former and, in his opinion, less satisfying collections of folk songs. In the letter to Arnim on 15 February 1805, he criticizes in particular the Mildheimische Liederbuch (1799), which in his view was superficial. In the same letter, Brentano defines the qualities he intends to realize in his and Arnim’s song book: “[. . .] man könnte es abteilen in einen Band für Süddeutschland und einen für Norddeutschland, weil beide sich in ihren Gesängen notwendig trennen, es muß sehr zwischen den romantischen und alltäglichen [Gesängen] schweben, es muß geistliche, Handwerks-, Tagewerks-, Tageszeits-, Jahrzeits- und Scherzlieder ohne Zote enthalten, die 32 Klage über das Mildheimische ist allgemein.” Brentano further provides philological and poetic guidelines for Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Neverthe-

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less, his suggestions were to undergo significant transformations in the process of collating and editing the book. This applies especially to his first point. Brentano held that the differences between song traditions in northern and southern Germany should remain visible in the division of the book into two separate volumes. Arnim was against this systematically justifiable division. He desired to emphasize the entire German tradition; for him, the collection was an element of cultural politics and should constitute an indirect contribution to national unification. In Arnim’s view, the songs from all over Germany were a means to display common national traditions. The present state of political division and French occupation had to be overcome by referring back to a common national foundation that could be found in songs from all German regions. Thus, in the end, the collection replaced Herder’s cosmopolitan approach 33 to folk literature with a visibly national form. Second, in his letter to Arnim, Brentano alludes to the general poetic character of the collection, saying that the book should hover between Romantic songs and songs treating everyday life and common experiences. With this expression, Brentano describes the singular poetic character of the Wunderhorn songs that often has been defined as their specific musicality. The program of a mixture between the Romantic and the commonplace may seem simple at first view, yet it leads to the key problem of the book. Arnim and Brentano intended to collate folk songs, but the question was how to edit them. They faced several problems. It was not so difficult to find songs and to discover older collections they could use; here they could base their proceedings on Herder’s and on other predecessors’ works. It was more problematic to find an agreement about the general aims of the collection. In an earlier project, Arnim and Brentano had interpreted the term Volkslieder as “songs for the people” — yet written by poets. Their idea was to produce Kunstpoesie in a folklore-like mode. When they began preparing the Wunderhorn, the former idea merged with the concept of collecting original folk songs. In 1805, they worked on at least three different levels. First, Arnim and Brentano began collecting songs from prior collections and older books. Second, they continued what they had already started during the voyage along the valley of the Rhine in 1802 and looked for original folk songs orally recorded among the people. With this field research at the basis of the Volk, they had helpers and contributors from all over Germany, among them the Brothers Grimm. Finally, Brentano and Arnim examined and revised the collected songs extensively and thus in many cases adjusted the material according to their specific idea 34 of folk songs. Considering these different procedures it is possible to describe the particular character or “Volkston” of the Wunderhorn songs. On the one hand, Arnim and Brentano claimed that the oral origins of the songs were an important criterion for the collection. On the other, more than half of the

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songs are based on written sources. This contradiction between theory and practice is the point at which the aesthetics of Des Knaben Wunderhorn is concentrated. The dichotomy of orality and literality became for Arnim and Brentano the central poetic means in the process of adapting single songs to the whole collection. They created a sort of artistic orality. Since the publi35 cation of Heinz Röllecke’s critical edition of the Wunderhorn, in which he provided the exact source of each song, it has been possible to examine precisely the editors’ poetical treatment. The results are remarkable. Arnim’s method of changing the original texts was quite different from Brentano’s: whereas Brentano tried in many cases to stay as close as possible to the original texts, Arnim apparently was less careful and more individualistic in his approach. Songs that Brentano changed carefully and almost invisibly, Arnim edited by using less philologically exacting criteria — making songs more coherent, for example, and toning down colloquial and crude expressions. It is still remarkable that the book that, throughout the entire nineteenth century and perhaps to the present day, represents the quintessence of folk song is based upon the aesthetic reinvention of a tradition. There is a third key question to which Brentano alludes in his letter: What kind of world is portrayed in the Wunderhorn songs? Like any work of art, Des Knaben Wunderhorn represents a single aesthetic reality. In the folk songs created by modern revisions, Arnim and Brentano give a fictional version of a factual world — a world that, according to the reality they found in the songs, should approximate the authentic past of the Volk. By listing the genres of the songs that should be integrated in the collection, Brentano also outlines structures of the Wunderhorn world. By defining the songs as “geistliche, Handwerks-, Tagewerks-, Tageszeits-, Jahrzeits- und Scherzlieder ohne Zote” (spirituals, songs of crafts and the day’s work, the times of the day and year, and funny songs without obscenity; KW, 3: 563), he describes more than literary genres; he names the whole range of themes treated in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The subjects of the songs refer to situations and emotions in the life of the Volk. On this basis, it is possible to attempt a general description of the collection. The Wunderhorn songs treat archetypal structures of life in pre-modern society — that could be one approach of summing up the contents of the 723 Volkslieder of the collection. Gerhard Schulz names as recurrent motives birth, childhood, love, marriage, matrimony, and death, but there are also scenes from pre-industrial working life, historical ballads, and songs with a religious background about death and redemption. If there is something of a leitmotif behind the hundreds of songs of the Wunderhorn, it can be described, in the words of Schulz, as the cycle of being within a small fam36 ily. There is no logical structure in the succession of the songs, but behind the heterogeneity of the individual pieces, the reader can discover fragments of a universal narration in the lives of the people. By describing and varying

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the basic stages in the life of the small family, the collection comprises a mosaic image of the life of the Volk. This simple life of the people shows some qualities important to the Romantics, who lived in a time of insecurity and historical contingency, were in search of stable values, and preferred long-term gradual development to revolution. The life represented in Des Knaben Wunderhorn is regular and constant, and moves in the cyclical 37 rhythms of nature. This implies that there are still traces of a utopian and original life not yet contaminated by the degenerating impulses of political movements and modernization. There are several songs of the Wunderhorn that allude to the ideal of the Volk still far from the destructive influence of historical processes. Marriages or other celebrations are opportunities for discovering the original and natural humanity still vivid among the people. This can be seen in some songs that celebrate the biblical holiness of marriage, such as the first stanza of “Hochzeitmorgen” (Wedding-Day Morning): Weil ich nun seh die goldnen Wangen Der Himmelsmorgenröthe prangen, So will auch ich dem Himmel zu, Ich will der Leibsruh Abschied geben, Und mich zu meinem Gott erheben, 38 Zu Gott, der meiner Seele Ruh. At the same time, the Wunderhorn by no means idealizes a past not yet destroyed by the problems of the modern present. The reality shown in the songs is imperfect and problematic, and the individuals do not live in a paradise. Yet, they try to resolve their problems and defend their way of life as free individuals comprising a part of a natural community. They face the problems of history, but at the same time they still have access to the utopian 39 past. This can be seen especially in the songs that deal with workers or craftsmen, that is, with the forms of work corresponding to the pre-industrial society that constitutes the socio-historical background of the songs. Miners, as in all Romantic poetry, play an important role. They are not yet alienated from the earth, but retain an intimate relation to stones and precious metals. Moreover, their profession is highly symbolic, representing one of the central motives of German Romanticism. Miners are nearer to center of the earth 40 and thus to the essence of life. In the song “Bergreihen,” the miners are described as the men who have direct access to divine creation because, “Sie hauen das Silber aus der alten Wand, / Die Gott der Herr selbst gebauet hat, / Mit seiner selbst Gewalt” (They chip the silver from the old wall / That God himself hath made / With His own might; KW, 2: 409.). Other symbolically important professions are the millers and hunters; they represent the settled and the unsettled ways of life, respectively. Therefore, the

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songs reflect actual social problems. Whereas the miller signifies the life of the regular workingman, the hunter is associated with irresponsibility, lawlessness, and aristocratic privileges — and he is, last but not least, the seducer of girls. One concrete motif thus can allude to many different problems. Des Knaben Wunderhorn is not just a collection of different songs, but also a mirror of a past society in which the problems of the insecure reality around 1800 are reflected in the form of historical songs adjusted to contemporary experiences.

The Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Oral Narration in Written Form The Grimms’ problems at the beginning of their work were similar to those faced by Arnim and Brentano while editing the Wunderhorn songs. But whereas Arnim and Brentano had emphasized the importance of their own creative part in the process of collating and editing folk songs from the very beginning, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm considered themselves mainly collectors and philologists. Theoretically, they were strictly against Arnim and Brentano’s technique of collecting and then remodeling the collected material. Such a conviction was based upon their theoretical concepts, in which they strictly underline the difference between Kunstpoesie and Volkspoesie. The Brothers Grimm were serious in their aim to recover and reconstruct Naturpoesie in the collective memory of the people. For them, there was no creative way to get there; Naturpoesie could only be found by means of positivistic reconstruction. To the Grimms, that meant collecting and recording the fairy tales in exactly the same versions in which the people had 41 told them. The crucial point about the Grimms’ theory about collecting fairy tales is how significantly it differs from the practice thereof. Their own description of their procedure and the way in which it actually evolved in their revisions of the earlier editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen con42 stitute two contradictory aesthetic approaches. The Grimms claimed to work strictly philologically, that is, without altering the original texts and recording the song with all its warts. Compared to Arnim and Brentano, they paid much more attention to the written records of literary texts. The activities of the Grimms were among the first important steps toward the development of a serious textual philology in German literary history. But in the particular case of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, there were few written texts actually used as a basis. Therefore, the Grimms had to concentrate on oral tradition, on fairy tales told by people who — according to the idealized supposition — still lived and worked in the country, far from the modern life of the cities and thus nearer to the prior state of mythical har-

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mony. Precision and accuracy of the sources were the main techniques employed in this task of collecting. That implied that the Grimms had to write down the fairy tales as they were told, changing as little as possible. Oral tradition was central in their concept. It was a measure of the archaic originality of the tales and thus a sign for their belonging to the Volkspoesie. According to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Arnim and Brentano’s editorial methodology was not only problematic but also fundamentally wrong. For them, the leading 43 principle of any edition of folk poetry had to be fidelity to the oral traditions. Surprisingly, the claim for philological accuracy of oral sources in the Grimms’ case is by no means less questionable than with Arnim and Brentano. Observing closely the different editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen that appear between 1819 and 1837, it becomes clear how important the literary arrangement of the single tales was even for Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Equally, examining the way the fairy tales actually were collected casts light on the alleged simplicity and originality of the first contributors from among the people. First of all, the group of contributors did not consist of illiterate peasantry, country folk, or craftsmen, but for the most part of educated bourgeois ladies. Accordingly, the material of the fairy tales was by no means an immediate expression of the spirit of the Volk born from the depth of the past, but rather more a result of cultivated narration in society. The celebrated farmer’s wife Dorothea Viehmann, mentioned in the preface of the second volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, was in reality a tailor’s wife and lived in Kassel. Furthermore, Dorothea Viehmann, as well as the Hassenpflug sisters who contributed to the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, were of Huguenot origin and knew well the French fairy-tale tradition, particularly the Fables of Charles Perrault (1628–1703). Naturally, that does not mean that the fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were derived from French fairy tales exclusively. Nevertheless, it shows that nearly all the contributors had a literary education and were quite capable of telling stories in a specific literary manner. In their first version, the tales collected in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen were less original expressions of a collective German Volksgeist than individual versions of tales belonging to the broader European fairy-tale tradition. (KHM, 3: 600–605) In the second place, the fragile illusion of an oral tradition was modified again in the process of publishing the collection. In 1812 the first volume of the first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen was published. This edition was still far from the version that currently offers the most extensive examples of classic fairy tales. In the course of the publication, Wilhelm, the younger of the two brothers, assumed full responsibility for the editing process. He is the one who brought about the stylistic changes that created the tone characteristic of fairy tales by today. Thus, he invented the classic introductory words, “Es war einmal . . .” (Once upon a time . . .), and

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similarly, he crafted the conclusion, since then classical: “. . . und sie lebten vergnügt bis an ihr Ende” (. . . and they lived happily ever after). The typical style of the fairy tales evolved between 1812 and 1837. Wilhelm Grimm produced metaphorical expressions that kept the balance between an assumed oral narration based on common speech and an archaic or epic tone. He thus created the characteristic narrative means for telling fairy tales. In the end, he had managed to connect the most contradictory elements in his narrative repertoire. Mythical origins and motifs of magical powers, atavistic and sometimes even cruel episodes were blended with folklore elements in a Romantic and Biedermeier atmosphere. Like Arnim and Brentano, Wilhelm Grimm tended at times to gloss over sexual allusions, but in other respects he rendered more visible the archaic elements. He managed to find stylistic and narrative approaches capable of creating entire texts out of different historical strata within fairy tales. The clearness and succinctness of his narrative style, the concentration on a single action, and his preference for extremes and contrasts were perhaps already traditional qualities of fairy tales. But it was the merit of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to develop a style that was able to transport all these features successfully to a vast reading public. The world represented in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen is the tradi44 tional world of the fairy tales. They recount a conflict and its resolution. A problematic state at the beginning of the fairy tale is to be transformed into a harmonious or even utopian order at the end. Usually, that happens by means of a hero or heroine who has to accomplish a task. The hero moves through a reality in which natural laws are — or at least can be — suspended temporarily. Inside the world of the fairy tale, the miraculous and supernatural are normal and regular. Within that fictional frame, the hero can resolve his task. One decisive element of fairy-tale reality is the concise dualistic division between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, big and small, and aristocratic and common. Max Lüthi explains the importance of these fundamental structural dichotomies by pointing out the tendency of the fairy tale 45 toward universality. By displaying the most evident moral contrasts and values, the narrated world can claim to be a metaphorical equivalent to reality. The world of fairy tales — and that applies particularly to the Kinderund Hausmärchen — may be limited to the sphere of the real and visible, but that limitation merely underlines the universal claim of the genre. In the narrative program of the fairy tale, a complicated, threatening, and dangerous reality becomes structured and rationalized through reduction to generic antagonisms. If reality is imperfect and fragile, then the fairy tale attempts to bring it to order, to make it conform to a utopian perspective. Therefore, it seems logical that the fairy tale’s protagonists move in a straightforward, comprehensible world. In fairy-tale narration, experiences of the supernatural as well as existential problems are transformed into metaphorical figurations.

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In the fairy tale, dangerous changes — whether initially interior processes such as maturation or external changes like revolutions and historical progress — all are manageable. How strongly the literary means of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen react to the discontinuous and problematic reality of the period around 1800 can be seen in the tale of “Dornröschen” (“Briar Rose,” better known as “Sleeping Beauty”). It deals with the problem of time as a basic parameter of human life, as an anthropological condition that cannot be escaped. When the hundred-year sleep of Sleeping Beauty and the rest of the castle is ended, the characters proceed with a life that doesn’t seem to have changed. In the tale, time as evolution, as a dangerous and progressive element of reality, is not accepted. When the population of the castle awakens, it achieves a state beyond the problems of history: Da gingen sie zusammen herab, und der König erwachte und die Königin und der ganze Hofstaat und sahen einander mit großen Augen an. Und die Pferde im Hof standen auf und rüttelten sich; die Jagdhunde sprangen und wedelten; die Tauben auf dem Dache zogen das Köpfchen unterm Flügel hervor, sahen umher und flogen ins Feld; die Fliegen an den Wänden krochen weiter; das Feuer in der Küche erhob sich, flackerte und kochte das Essen; der Braten fing wieder an zu brutzeln; und der Koch gab dem Jungen eine Ohrfeige, daß er schrie; und die Magd rupfte das Huhn fertig. Und da wurde die Hochzeit des Königssohns mit dem Dornröschen in aller Pracht gefeiert, und sie lebten 46 vergnügt bis an ihr Ende.

In “Sleeping Beauty,” the insecurity of human existence is suspended. The tale results in a tableau of timeless reality, and for a short, fictive moment, the problem of history is brought to a solution in the final utopian words (Schulz 2: 321). The last example again renders evident what Jacob and especially Wilhelm achieved in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen. By means of the fiction of orality, they managed to create a coherent narrative mode in which fairy tales originating from different traditions could be told to a contemporary public. In re-narrating and remodeling the ancient tales, the Brothers Grimm created a fictional reality that in itself reflected contemporary problems. Neither for Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm nor for Brentano and Arnim was the “turn to history and the Volk” an escape from their own contemporary problems. Nevertheless, it was a convincing literary reaction to their own modern experience of a fragile and shifting historical reality.

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Notes 1

See “Volksdichtung,” in Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur (Stuttgart: 8 Kröner, 2001), 886–7. 2

See Stefan Greif, “Märchen / Volksdichtung,” in Romantik-Handbuch, edited by Helmut Schanze, (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1994), 257–67. 3 Detlef Kremer describes the aesthetic strategy to read German literature as “‘altdeutschen’ Traditionsraum” (“ancient-German” place of tradition), in Detlef Kremer, Romantik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 276–78. 4

Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte Deutsche Lieder, edited by by Heinz Röllecke, 3 volumes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), henceforth this work is cited as KW; Brüder Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, ed. by Heinz Röllecke (Stuttgart: Reclam., 1980), henceforth this work is cited as KHM. 5

See Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration. Vol 2: 1806–1830, (Munich: Beck, 1989), 696–708. (Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, ed. by Helmut de Boor and Richard Newald, vol. 7/2) Henceforth this work is cited as Schulz 2. 6 7

Heinz Röllecke, “Nachwort,” in KW, 3: 557–81; here 564–65. Röllecke, “Nachwort,” in KHM, 3: 593–621; here 596–98.

8

See “Geschichte, Historie,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), 593–717, here 547– 53; see also: Reinhart Koselleck, “Geschichte, Geschichten und formale Zeitstrukturen,” in R. K., Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt: 1 Suhrkamp, 1989 [ 1979]), 130–43. 9

Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: Beck, 1983), 11. 10

4

1

Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993 [ 1977]), 231–32. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Stuttgart: Syndikat, 1985); J. G. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Bildung der Menschheit (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990). 11

12

Immanuel Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, in I. K., Schriften zur Geschichtsphilosophie, (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992), 21–39. 13 “Die Geschichtsphilosophie [. . .] des späten 18. und des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts [. . .] hatte die Machbarkeit der Geschichte nicht vorausgesetzt. Sie suchte das die Aufklärer schockierende Phänomen zu verarbeiten, daß nun zwar die Menschen zunehmend besser die Natur beherrschen, daß sie immer mehr ‘machen’ können, daß sie mit all ihrem Können aber in einen sich beschleunigenden Prozeß hineingeraten sind, der sich jenseits ihrer Verfügung vollzieht” (The philosophy of history [. . .] of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries [. . .] had not presupposed the makeability of history. It attempted to deal with the phenomenon that had so shocked Enlightenment thinkers: namely that people could now control nature increasingly better and “make” more and more, but that with all their abilities they

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had slipped into a self-accelerating process that was out of their control). Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, Listen der Vernunft: Motive geschichtsphilosophischen Denkens (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1998), 8. 14

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes [1755]; Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique [1762], in J.-J. Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, Du contrat social: Écrits politiques, vol. 3, edited by Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 109–223; 347–470. 15

See Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration. Vol 1: 1789–1806 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), 181–89. (=Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, edited by Helmut de Boor and Richard Newald, vol. 7/1) Henceforth this work is cited as Schulz 1. 16 See Kremer, 74–78. 17

Gert Ueding, Klassik und Romantik: Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789–1815 (Munich & Vienna: Hanser, 1987), 117–20. (=Hansers Sozialgeschichte der Deutschen Literatur, edited by Rolf Grimminger, vol. 4) 18 Kremer, 90–92. 19

Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Freundschaftsbriefe, 2 volumes, edited by Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1998), 1: 21.

20

Achim von Arnim, “Von Volksliedern,” in KW, 1: 379–414, here 403–4. Paul Michael Lützeler, “Die Geburt der Kunstsage aus dem Geist der MittelalterRomantik: Zur Gattungsbestimmung von Achim von Arnims Die Kronenwächter” in Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 46 (1986): 147–57, here 150–54. 21

22

Ueding, 758–59.

23

Jacob Grimm, Gedanken, wie sich die Sagen zur Poesie und Geschichte verhalten (1808), in J. G., Kleinere Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dümmler, 1879), 400–4. Jacob Grimm, Von Übereinstimmung der alten Sagen (1807); Gedanken über Mythos, Epos und Geschichte (1813), in J. G., Kleinere Schriften IV, Recensionen und vermischte Aufsätze, part 1 (Berlin: Dümmler, 1869), 9–12; 74–85. Wilhelm Grimm, Über die Entstehung der altdeutschen Poesie und ihr Verhältnis zu der nordischen (1808), in W. G., Kleinere Schriften, edited by Gustav Hinrichs (Berlin: Dümmler, 1881), 92– 150. 24 Schulz 2: 263–68. 25

Ueding, 117–20; Kremer, 8–11.

26

See Jürgen Knaack, Achim von Arnim — nicht nur Poet: Die politischen Anschauungen Arnims in ihrer Entwicklung (Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1976). 27

See Schulz 2: 146–56; Kremer, 14–15. Also among the members of the “Tischgesellschaft” were Fichte, Savigny, Adam Müller, Kleist, Clausewitz, and the Brothers Grimm. 28

29

Clemens Brentano, Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte (1811), in Clemens Brentano, Werke, vol. 2 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 959– 1016. 30 See Schulz 2: 88–90; Kremer, 19.

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31

See also Wolfgang Frühwald, “Antijudaismus in der Zeit der deutschen Romantik,” in Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum ersten Weltkrieg, second part, edited by Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 72–91. 32 “[. . .] one could divide it into one volume for southern Germany and one for northern Germany, for both are divided by their songs. It must certainly alternate between the Romantic and every-day [songs; F. L.]; it must contain spirituals, songs of crafts and the day’s work, the times of the day and year, and funny songs without obscenity; complaint about the Mildheim Song Book is common.” Quotation according to Heinz Röllecke, “Nachwort,” in KW, 3: 557–81, here 563. 33 KW, 3: 565–67; Ueding, 756. 34

KW, 3: 567–71; Schulz 2: 699–700.

35

Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, gesammelt von L. A. v. Arnim und Clemens Brentano, edited by Heinz Röllecke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1975). (=Clemens Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, edited by Jürgen Behrens, Wolfgang Frühwald, and Detlev Lüders, volumes 6–9, 1– 3.) 36

Schulz 2: 701.

37

Schulz 2: 704. KW, 3: 209. “Because I now see the golden cheeks / Of heavenly dawn shine in splendor, / thus I too wish to rise heavenwards, / I want to take leave of bodily rest, / And lift myself to my God, / to God, who gives rest to my soul.” 38

39

Schulz 2: 703.

40

See Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 18–57. 41 Schulz 2: 266–67. 42

Schulz 2: 318–20.

43

For a general introduction see Heinz Röllecke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm (Munich: Artemis, 1985). 44 See “Märchen,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 2, H-O, edited by Harald Fricke (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter: 2000), 513–17. 45

See Max Lüthi, Das Märchen, edited by Heinz Röllecke (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996), 29. 46 KHM, 1: 260. “Then they descended together, and the King awoke and so did the Queen and the entire kingdom, and all gazed at one another with great wonder. The horses in the stables stood up and shook themselves; the hunting dogs leapt and wagged their tails; the doves in the eaves lifted their gentle heads from under their wings, looked about and flew afield; and the flies on the walls crawled once more. The fire in the kitchen grew, flickered, and cooked the feast; the meat began to sizzle once again; and the cook boxed the boy’s ears so that the boy shouted; and the maidservant plucked and prepared the chicken. And then the wedding of the King’s son and Briar Rose was celebrated in utmost splendor, and they all lived happily ever after.” 9

History and Moral Imperatives: The Contradictions of Political Romanticism Klaus Peter

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N SEPTEMBER 30, 1819 Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Prussian king, signed a decree stating that Professor Joseph Görres in Coblenz should be immediately arrested for insulting his own king and foreign rulers with the most disrespectful comments and for attempting to rouse citizens through the most impertinent criticism of government regulations. The decree went to Rhineland officials in Coblenz, which had become part of Prussia in 1815. Before the decree arrived, Görres was able to flee to Frankfurt, and when friends warned him that the decree had also arrived in 1 Frankfurt, he fled to Strasbourg, France, on October 10. It was Joseph Görres’s (1776–1848) work Teutschland und die Revolution (1819) that provoked the king’s decree. Görres, who first made a name for himself in a number of radical publications in the 1790s as a Rhenish Jacobin supporting the French Revolution, later became an emphatic opponent of France as a result of his bitter disappointment with the course the Revolution had taken. He then established a reputation throughout Europe as the publisher of the newspaper Der Rheinische Merkur (1814–16), which he used brilliantly to attack Napoleon and to fight for the reinstitution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which Napoleon had dissolved in 1806. However, the Congress of Vienna, which in 1814–15 decided the fate of post-Napoleonic Europe and, especially, the future of Germany, did not fulfill his hopes. After Napoleon’s defeat, Görres increasingly criticized the restoration of absolutism in all of Europe and of German “Vielstaaterei” (particularism) as pursued by the European powers under the leadership of the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (1773–1859). He particularly attacked the reactionary government in Berlin, which led to Der Rheinische Merkur being banned in 1816. Görres was not to be silenced. In March 1819 when a radical student, Karl Ludwig Sand, murdered the dramatist August von Kotzebue (1761–1819), a symbolic figure of the Restoration era after 1815, Görres reacted promptly. He condemned the murder in the work Kotzebue und was ihn gemordet (1819), but praised the motives that had led to it. His new work, Teutschland und die Revolution, addressed the same issue.

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In 1819, four years after the Congress of Vienna, Görres declared that Metternich’s system, which — after the uproar and the disorder caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars — was supposed to reestablish peace and order in all of Europe, especially in Germany, had had the opposite effect. New catastrophes threatened the continent: “Nach vier Jahren eines heftigen Parteikampfes, eines unsinnigen Widerstandes gegen die Ansprüche der Zeit [. . .] ist es endlich dahin gediehen, daß eine allgemeine Gärung aller Gemüter durch ganz Teutschland sich bemeistert, und eine Stimmung eingetreten, wie sie wohl großen Katastrophen in der Ge2 schichte voranzugehen pflegt.” Even those in power seemed to share those fears. In August 1819, while Görres was writing Teutschland und die Revolution, Metternich called the German states to Carlsbad for a ministerial conference where the so-called Carlsbad Decrees were formulated. In order to avoid further problems in Germany, the assembled ministers decided to form a Central Investigating Committee in Mainz to help suppress revolutionary activities across state borders, and they banned the “Burschenschaften” (fraternities) — the feared radical student movement. This meant, in particular, persecution of so-called “demagogues,” censorship of the press, and supervision of the universities. Through such measures they hoped to keep danger at bay. Görres, on the other hand, predicted that these reactionary measures would be counter-productive in the extreme. Their repressive 3 nature almost had to provoke a revolution. Was Görres therefore a revolutionary? This question not only points to the importance and problematic nature of Görres, it leads to the heart of the problematic nature of Romanticism in general. Germany and the Revolution — this title, formulated by Görres, could be used of the entire Romantic movement, especially political Romanticism. For the generation of writers who began writing in the 1790s, the French Revolution was the crucial experience of their youth. Romanticism, from the outset, had essentially been a political movement encompassing all social spheres, not merely aesthetics, and this explains, in part, the great fascination with Romanticism far into the twentieth century. The experience of the Revolution, the radical disruption of traditional life, connected Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, Joseph Görres, Adam Müller, and Franz Baader with the philosophers Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, and also with the poet Hölderlin, but it differentiated them from the poets of Weimar Classicism, from Goethe and Schiller. Goethe’s and Schiller’s experiences were, for the most part, prerevolutionary; from the beginning they approached the Revolution with much more skepticism. Was Görres a revolutionary? Yes and no. Political Romanticism was both revolutionary and anti-revolutionary, progressive and regressive — and not only in view of its own historical development, in which the progressive Early Romantic movement prior to 1800 was followed by the regressive Late

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Romantic movement after 1800. More importantly, the regressive post-1800 turn in Romanticism was foreshadowed previous to 1800, and conversely, even after 1800, there remained older revolutionary thoughts. The political scientist Carl Schmitt, who first attempted to define the problematic nature of political Romanticism in his book Politische Romantik (1919), used such contradictions as his starting point. To him, they characterized not only German Romanticism, but English and French Romanticism as well. In English Romanticism, for instance, he viewed politically conservative writers such as Wordsworth and Walter Scott standing cheek to jowl with the revolutionaries Byron and Shelley; just as in Germany the celebration of the Middle Ages, knighthood, the feudal aristocracy, and old castles figured prominently in Romantic literature, and yet the political polemics contained revolutionary demands. Schmitt’s overview of the various Romantic possibilities leads to an odd list: Romantic conservatives, Romantic papists, Romantic socialists, ultra-nationalists, and communists all stand next to each other; Marie Antoinette, Queen Luise of Prussia, Danton, and Napoleon Bonaparte appear as Romantics. Schmitt claimed that it is just as Romantic to praise a state, because it has a beautiful queen, as it is to admire the heroes 4 of the Revolution as “kolossalische Menschen” (colossal people). Schmitt found the explanation of these contradictions in the concept of Romanticism itself, in its all-pervasive aestheticism. The Romantics saw reality, according to Schmitt, even political reality, merely as an occasion and as an opportunity for aesthetic effect. Schmitt introduced the concept of “Occasionalismus” (occasionalism) in defining this aestheticism: Chance decided whether a writer and his work were progressive or regressive. The importance always lay solely in the aesthetic effect (Schmitt 19–23). To explain Romanticism in this manner was to condemn it. In the 1920s and 1930s, Jakob Baxa and then Paul Kluckhohn came to the defense of Romanticism, especially political Romanticism. They attempted to resolve the contradictions of Romanticism, at least those within German Romanticism, by disputing their relevancy. The result was a one-sided and conservative image of Romanticism in which revolutionary characteristics were 5 portrayed, but trivialized as the youthful sins of the respective authors. Not until the 1960s, when scholarship addressed Early Romanticism and its connections to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution anew, did the revolutionary aspects return to view. But this, of course, once again raised 6 the old questions about the Janus face that Romanticism seems to present. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was one of the first in Germany to profess bravely his faith in the French Revolution. With his revolutionary philosophy, as he understood his own writings, he strongly influenced not only Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling, but also Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. In 1793, Fichte heralded the French Revolution with two works that made him famous: Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den

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Fürsten Europens, die sie bisher unterdrückten (A Demand for the Restitution of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe who have suppressed it until now) and Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (A Contribution toward Correcting the Misunderstandings of the Public regarding the French Revolution). Fichte himself often stressed the connections between these two works and the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the Complete Science of Knowledge), his main philosophical work published in 1794. Kant had viewed man’s freedom as limited by what he had called the “Dinge an sich” (things in themselves); these limits, according to Kant, restrict our knowledge as well as our actions. Departing from Kant, Fichte claimed absolute freedom for man and, therefore, placed the “Absolutheit des Ich” (the total independence of the self) in the center of his philosophy. His philosophy was, as he saw it, a philosophy of liberation, according to which the laws of the state possess legitimacy only if the self acknowledges them voluntarily and provided that they do not conflict with moral law. When and if there is a conflict, man has the right, even the obligation, to revolt. At the end of the eighteenth century, Fichte’s philosophy was the most radical formulation of the moral demands that had placed the Enlightenment in opposition to absolutism, that is, existing politics or, more specifically, the existing laws of the state. As in England and France, the importance of the middle class within eighteenth-century society was constantly growing within Germany, and the economic advancement championed by the middle class was impossible to stop. Nevertheless, at the end of the century, the German middle class was still denied the right to participate in the political decisions of the state. Why was there no revolution in Germany? There are many answers, but mainly it has always been blamed on the fact that Germany consisted of so many different states, which prevented the establishment of a political center and did not allow a national market, while in England and France the middle classes profited from the already existing national state. Because in Germany the national framework was missing, the traditional power structures were not questioned. Reinhart Koselleck has shown how the middle-class intelligentsia in Germany traded political power for the right to judge over virtue and vice. Thus, moral law competed with secular law. Philosophy and literature educated the middle class about this new law and thus helped to create what Jürgen Habermas has called “bür7 gerliche Öffentlichkeit” (the middle-class public sphere). This context also determined the important political influence of Fichte’s philosophy. But philosophical development did not cease with Fichte. Fichte’s students, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, in connection with political Romanticism, as well as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, all criticized Fichte’s philosophy, which they thought was incapable of adequately describing the self in relation to society and state, and they were right. In fact,

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Fichte himself tried in later works, such as the Grundlage des Naturrechts (Foundation of Natural Law, 1796), to correct his one-sided emphasis on the self. But in his revolutionary works of 1793, he went so far as to declare the state totally superfluous. In this respect, Fichte’s philosophy proved to be pre-revolutionary. Its anarchist traits allowed Fichte to confront the state only with absolute demands. Fichte’s students rejected this stance of extreme moral subjectivity. Under the influence of the Revolution in France they were searching for a post-revolutionary state that would combine freedom and obligation in such a way that state law and moral law would be one and the same. In political Romanticism, this meant a synthesis of freedom and society, that is, the state; more precisely, it meant the moralization of politics. These ideas motivated Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) socio-political works from the beginning. Schlegel, known primarily as a literary critic, especially through his contributions to the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the journal he and his brother August Wilhelm published, was also central to political Romanticism. In his early years, he was won over to the French Revolution by his future sister-in-law Caroline Böhmer (1763–1809), who, while living in Mainz in the house of the writer and revolutionary politician Georg Forster (1754–94), had experienced the founding of the first German republic in this city in 1792–93. But Schlegel’s interest in politics inspired also his later works, long after he had turned away from the French Revolution. After a short and disappointing stay in Paris (1802–4), he moved to Cologne, where he converted to Catholicism in 1808 and from where he moved on to Vienna that same year. In Vienna he supported the war against Napoleon and after 1814–15 he became a vocal representative of Metternich’s Restoration; he even worked for three years (1815–18) as an Austrian diplomat at the Bundestag (Diet) in Frankfurt am Main, the central organ of the newly established Deutscher Bund (German Confederation). In striking contrast to this career, he still championed the idea of an imminent revolution in his long essay Signatur des Zeitalters (Character of the Epoch) in 1820. Five years after the Congress of Vienna, he, like Görres, warned of the many signs pointing toward major historical changes and catastrophes. “Jener eine Hauptirrtum des Zeitalters, daß die Revolution schon abgeschlossen und beendet sei, wird [. . .] kaum noch jemanden zu täuschen vermögen, oder irgendwo Glauben finden können; da die Tat und die Zeit 8 selbst hier den Gegenbeweis geführt haben” (KFSA, 7: 488). Schlegel made it clear, however, that the revolution he referred to was now a moral revolution and a revolution of world historical significance, of which the political revolution could only be a symptom. The crisis that occupied Schlegel went back to the time of the Reformation and had engulfed the foundation of all the states of Europe; in other words, it was limited neither to France nor Germany (KFSA, 7: 488–89). But even in his very early writings the idea of

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the revolution and his enthusiasm for the events in France had been morally rather than politically motivated, for instance in his 1796 essay “Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus” (Essay on the Concept of Republicanism). Closely following the principles of the French Revolution, Schlegel pleaded in this early essay for democracy. He proclaimed that the greatest political freedom would be equal to moral freedom, that is, the absence of 9 all laws except for the moral one. Was Schlegel a revolutionary? The contradictions between the young Schlegel who was reputed to be a Jacobin and the later Schlegel who championed Metternich’s politics apparently did not affect Schlegel’s moral commitment, which was the same in 1820 as it had been in 1796. In this respect, Schlegel was a revolutionary. The moralization of politics, the goal of the revolution as he saw it, was still not achieved in 1820. Nevertheless, how can these opposite political positions be explained? Was Schlegel indifferent toward political reality, as Carl Schmitt assumed? The reason for the contradictions was, first, the exclusively moral definition of all political commitment. Romanticism wanted to have a political effect; yet, at the same time, it rejected politics. As long as politics and morality in regard to the French Revolution could be thought of as one and the same, that is, as long as it was possible to believe that the moralization of politics had become revolutionary reality in France, Schlegel, Görres, and others identified themselves with political events. Their commitment in itself was political. When, toward the end of the 1790s, it became apparent that the unity of morality and politics was an illusion, the Romantics maintained their moral demands but turned away from politics. At the same time they renounced the optimism of the Enlightenment: the future now seemed to them to be blocked off. Disappointed by the course of history, they no longer searched for positive alternatives to the present in the future, but rather in the past. History now appeared as a history of decay, the result of original sin. In the end the idealized past was the past before man had fallen from grace. But the revolution, which now was expected to change the course of history, was beyond the means of man. Only God, so it seemed, could bring back what was lost: paradise. The revolution became a matter 10 of religion. After the turn of the century, Friedrich Schlegel was not alone in locating this paradise in the Middle Ages. Schlegel’s friend and literary partner Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), under the pseudonym Novalis, not only wrote the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) and the poems Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800), but also was an important philosopher. Historically, of course, the turn to the Middle Ages must also be explained by the Napoleonic wars: the German national past was to be 11 mobilized against the French. But Novalis’s depiction of the Middle Ages in Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom or Europe, 1799) proved that

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the turn to the Middle Ages had begun already before 1800 and before Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799. Novalis’s essay does not yet exhibit any nationalistic traits; rather, Die Christenheit oder Europa was inspired by Friedrich Schlegel’s early treatise Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (Concerning the Study of Greek Poetry), published in 1797 but written two years earlier in 1795. In this essay, classical antiquity appears as an “objective” world, in which poetry joined in a “natural” union with society and all of social life. According to Schlegel, the development of subjectivity, of the “interesting” individual, destroyed this unity in the modern world. Schlegel hoped to overcome the crisis of both poetry and society, brought about by the separation of the two, through creating a new “objectivity” initiated by the study of the Greeks. What was once unconsciously, “naturally,” bestowed, must be produced consciously in the modern world, that is, now. Schlegel saw hopeful signs for such a process in contemporary philosophy, meaning German Idealism, and in the works of Goethe. Novalis adopted this idea, but with an important change: he replaced classical antiquity with the Middle Ages. The “objectivity” of the medieval world, its unity, thus had fallen victim to Martin Luther’s Reformation as well as to the industrial and scientific advancements of modern times. Novalis, too, saw indications of a recovery from the present crisis in contemporary philosophy and literature. When he replaced the antiquity of Schlegel’s essay with the Middle Ages, Novalis made a crucial step from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. Since the Renaissance, the European norms of harmony and order in society, as well as in the arts, including poetry, had taken their inspiration from classical antiquity; Novalis looked for such an inspiration in the Middle Ages. The classical norms — classical proportions, genres, poetics, subject matter — as they were understood in the eighteenth century, reflected the rational order of nature and had to be studied. They were accessible only to the educated. Novalis broke with this long tradition. The norms he was looking for should no longer be based on classical ideas about art, and on reason, but on something else. What? The presentation of the Middle Ages in Die Christenheit oder Europa was meant to answer this question. This is how the essay starts: “Es waren schöne glänzende Zeiten, wo Europa ein christliches Land war, wo Eine Christenheit diesen menschlich gestalteten Welttheil bewohnte; Ein großes gemeinschaftliches Interesse verband die entlegensten Provinzen dieses weiten geistlichen Reichs. — Ohne große weltliche Besitzthümer lenkte und vereinigte Ein Oberhaupt die großen 12 politischen Kräfte” (NS, 3: 507). Thus, according to Novalis, the medieval world was dominated by Christianity and ruled by one ruler, the pope. He was aided in this rule by the Church, that is, the priests who united all political powers under the pope’s leadership. The pope, however, did not rule this world by force, but by spiritual means, such as Christian beliefs and love.

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Everybody, rich and poor, honored the Church and trusted its leader as children trust their father. The result was a harmonious world joined by everybody’s commitment to the same common good (NS, 3: 507–9). Obviously, Novalis paid little attention to historical facts. Only the idea of the Middle Ages, suitable for the philosophical depiction of an ideal representation of a future society, was important to him. Novalis’s central concepts were faith, peace, and love. They described the powers that would produce harmony and order and would not require academic studies; every child comprehends them. Of the greatest importance for Novalis was the complete absence of force. The bond that was supposed to bind and connect everyone and that exerts pressure, but is not perceived as pressure, is love. Novalis had already contemplated love in his Fichte-Studien (1795–96), an extensive collection of notes documenting his emancipation from Fichte’s philosophy. There he noted: “Liebe — als synthetische Kraft” (love — as synthetic force; NS, 2: 292). Novalis criticized Fichte’s philosophy as egocentric and employed love as the opposing power to egotism. While egotism enthralls and isolates the individual, love frees it for all that is universal. Because force is only necessary when egotistic interests are to be restrained, love would enable a society to be free of force. Voluntarily and without coercion, yet not arbitrarily, the necessary good would prevail. Clearly, Novalis’s image of the Middle Ages still continued the tradition of the Enlightenment. As a social-political ideal, constructed and derived from philosophy, the past was the model of a possible future, and obviously contained utopian characteristics. Novalis, similar to Schlegel in his essay Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, emphasized that he did not merely advocate imitation of the past. He made it clear that Christianity, in its specific medieval form, was passé and could not and should not be preserved: “Seine [des Christentums] zufällige Form ist so gut wie vernichtet, das alte Papstthum liegt im Grabe, und Rom ist zum zweytenmal eine Ruine 13 geworden” (NS, 3: 524). Novalis referred here to the imprisonment of Pope Pius VI by the French and the transformation of the papal state into a republic in February 1798; by the time he wrote his essay, the Pope had died in exile in Valence in August 1799 and the French prohibited the election of a successor. Not surprisingly, this passage was expunged from the first edition of the essay in 1826, which also had the effect of making Novalis 14 appear more in line with Restoration policies of the time. The transference of ideals from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages by Novalis prepared for the historicizing of the ideal after 1800. For the later Romantics, what Novalis had clearly differentiated from real history through his own poeticized representation now was seen as having actually occurred in the historical past. The projected future was supposed to repeat the Middle Ages, turning backward the factual course of history. Paradoxically, one might say that the philosophical turn to real history after 1800 negated

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history by depriving it of its forward motion. Because Novalis viewed the French Revolution as helping to fulfill the promise of the unity of morality and politics — the goal of eighteenth-century Enlightenment — his poetic image of the Middle Ages served the future. Once it became obvious that the French Revolution did not fulfill this promise, the optimism regarding the future disappeared and the ideal got fixed in the past. Morality thus not only negated politics; it also denied the connection between cause and effect in history. After 1800 this problematic development, which bound morality to the past, became nowhere more apparent than in the question of a constitution. The absolutist monarchies ruled without a constitution; the call for a constitution, therefore, was a battle cry not only of revolutionaries, but of liberals as well. The Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Görres, however, demanded the restoration of the medieval social structures, the feudal state. In 1820, in his essay Signatur des Zeitalters, Schlegel turned, most prominently, against what he called the “Konstitutionswesen” (the infatuation with the constitution) of the liberals. The idea of a modern constitution — as imposed in England for instance — was, according to Schlegel, an unstable mixture of monarchical and republican elements. In his opinion, only the idea of the feudal state, amended perhaps by some more modern features, could guarantee the desired stability of the monarchy in the present as well 15 as in the future (KFSA, 7: 535). As early as 1814, at the time of the Vienna Congress, Görres had presented in his Rheinischer Merkur a plan for a social structure fashioned after the medieval state. As later in Teutschland und die Revolution, he called for a society divided into three classes: priesthood, nobility, and middle class. All three would be represented in a national Diet, in his eyes the only realistic alternative to absolutist rule, which he rejected (Görres, 1: 421–23). But Schlegel and Görres were by no means the only heralds of the past. The main theorist of the Romantic state and its medieval structures was Adam Müller (1779–1829). Müller, a writer and idealistic philosopher, who published his Lehre vom Gegensatz (Theory of Oppositions) in 1804, was proficient in many areas. In Dresden, the native Prussian made a name for himself between 1806 and 1809 by giving a number of public lecture series on aesthetic topics and he won the friendship of Heinrich von Kleist. But early on he also felt himself drawn to politics. In this connection, his lifelong friendship with Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), a political writer and journalist, played a major role. When Gentz, in 1812, became one of Metternich’s most important advisors, he helped Müller, who had moved to Vienna in 1811, to acquire the position of the Austrian consul general in Leipzig (1815–27). During 1808–09, while still in Dresden, Müller held a series of public lectures on the philosophy of the state, which appeared as a book in

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1809 under the title Elemente der Staatskunst (Elements of Statecraft). This work remained his most important work on political theory. Although Müller ultimately aimed at a more systematic foundation of the state and, in this respect, remained true to the tradition of the Enlightenment, nevertheless he also argued in favor of history, just as Schlegel and Görres did. In Elemente der Staatskunst, he left no doubt that the state was, wherever it existed, not a product of reason, as the theorists of the Enlightenment had insisted, but a product of historical development. The state was the result of collaboration between the past and the present. Here the English philosopher and politician Edmund Burke (1729–97), the author of the famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which Gentz had translated into German in 1793, was an important influence. Along with Burke, Müller argued against the French Revolution and the erroneous conception with which Burke had also reproached the revolutionaries, namely, that one could provide history with a new beginning starting at zero. Against the prevailing rationalistic theory of the state, the so-called theory of natural law, Müller argued emphatically: “Der Staat ist nicht eine bloße Manufaktur, Meierei, Assekuranz-Anstalt, oder merkantilische Sozietät; er ist die innige Verbindung der gesamten physischen und geistigen Bedürfnisse, des gesamten physischen und geistigen Reichtums, des gesamten inneren und äußeren Lebens einer Nation zu einem großen energischen, 16 unendlich bewegten und lebendigen Ganzen.” The state, therefore, could not be summed up in a single term; only an “idea” that does justice to its constant growth in history and its infinite diversity could capture its essence. In this respect, Müller claimed the state would resemble nature, and thus the state appeared completely independent from human arbitrariness and inven17 tion. In the end it was, as man himself, created by God. With this idea of the state as a living entity, Müller was considerably more ambitious than his teacher Burke. Unlike Burke, who had replied to the enormous theoretical ambitions of the revolutionaries in France with the weight of actual history, expressing a conservative skepticism toward political theory in general, Müller proclaimed a demanding theory of his own. Müller’s state was a moral postulate. Müller wanted it both ways: he opposed the French Revolution in the name of history; at the same time, he claimed that the state he postulated was based on unchangeable “law.” In doing so, he called upon Schelling and the idealistic philosophy of nature in general. It is clear, therefore, that his “nature” was motivated by morality and that he also advocated the moralization of politics. He called the state “organic,” joining all parts of society into one harmonious whole. As a result, Müller proclaimed that man’s existence is impossible without the state and he explained quite pointedly that man cannot hear, see, think, feel, or love with18 out it.

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With this radical theory of the ideal state Müller also showed his indebtedness to Novalis. Let us turn our attention one more time, therefore, to this influential Romantic poet and thinker. As with his turn to the Middle Ages in his essay on Europe, Novalis also had anticipated important aspects of political Romanticism after 1800 in his collection of fragments Glauben und Liebe oder Der König und die Königin (Faith and Love or The King and the Queen, 1798) in which he formulated his philosophy of the state. Like his image of the Middle Ages, his portrayal of the state also reveals obvious utopian characteristics. It did not derive from historical experience, but aimed at fundamentally changing it. The ascent to the throne of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III (1770–1840) in November 1797 no doubt motivated Novalis to write the fragments; the new Prussia, however, that Novalis celebrated in these fragments resembles historical Prussia as little as the Middle Ages in the Europa essay resembled historical Europe. Novalis’s state was a philosophical-poetic state, as the poetic language of the fragments already demonstrates. He himself proclaimed: “Wer hier mit seinen historischen Erfahrungen angezogen kömmt, weiß gar nicht, wovon ich rede, und auf welchem Standpunkt ich rede; dem sprech ich arabisch, und er thut am besten, seines Wegs zu gehn und sich nicht unter Zuhörer zu mischen, 19 deren Idiom und Landesart ihm durchaus fremd ist” (NS, 2: 488). Novalis first developed the logic of this state in a fragment in the collection Vermischte Bemerkungen (Assorted Comments), written shortly before or at the same time as Glauben und Liebe. In the typical fashion of the philosophy of German Idealism, Novalis searched for a synthesis, the unity of opposites. In this case, the synthesis sought for was the unity of monarchy and democracy in a “Universal-Staat” (universal state). In the Vermischte Bemerkungen, Novalis described the opposite poles as “plus state” (monarchy) and as “minus state” (democracy). These extremes imply, on the one hand, the total state, that is, absolute power, and, on the other, no state at all, that is, anarchy or pure nature. The ideal, then, appears as the speculative combination or synthesis of both extremes, but not in the form of a constitutional monarchy in the manner of England, which Novalis already called the “hobby horse of our time.” What he had in mind instead was the merging of both extremes into what he saw as “the poetic state”: “Der poetische Staat — ist der wahrhafte vollkommene Staat” (The poetic state is the true and perfect state; NS, II: 468). In his fragments Glauben und Liebe, Novalis heralded Prussia under the newly established rule of Friedrich Wilhelm III as such a poetic state. Put differently: in these fragments, Novalis formulated the hope that Prussia, under this king, would break radically from the past and follow the path to utopia. What above all qualified this king for this 20 journey was his marriage of love to Queen Luise (1776–1810). Novalis considered the spirit of love to be the spirit that could and should produce the poetic state. As he envisioned the bond of love joining the people of the

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Middle Ages in the Europa essay, so should love determine the common existence of citizens in the ideal state. Family and marriage became models for this ideal. The love marriage of the King and the Queen of Prussia at the head of the state, therefore, acquired symbolic meaning. From here this love should spread throughout the entire state and begin a new golden age. Traces of Novalis’s philosophy can be found in Friedrich Schlegel’s work, but above all, in Adam Müller’s. One constantly encounters Novalis in Müller’s Elemente der Staatskunst. Its utopian aspects, in particular, derive from here. But contrary to Novalis and in spite of these utopian aspects and even in obvious contradiction to them, Müller loaded his philosophy with the weight of actual history. He historicized the ideal. Instead of a poetic state of the future, he alluded to the historical states of the past and the present. Side by side with the utopian characteristics in Müller’s work, there appear the characteristics of the medieval class system. While the Prussian King, with good reason and hardly surprisingly, had rejected Novalis’s demands as impertinent (and the Prussian censorship had forbidden the publication of the conclusion to Glauben und Liebe, another series of fragments under the title Politische Aphorismen), with just as good reason princes and nobility in general embraced Müller’s defense of their historical privileges. Whereas Novalis had negated the traditional class system, Müller explicitly confirmed the privileged position of the nobility in society and even defended the serfdom of the peasants. While Novalis had shunned conventional politics, Müller pursued political action and became a renowned representative of the Vienna Restoration; in 1819 he became one of the authors of the Carlsbad Decrees mentioned earlier in connection 21 with Görres. In this way, political Romanticism also demonstrated its two-sided face in Müller. In the name of morality, it continued the Enlightenment, promoted a better world, and designed daring utopias. Because of the stubborn resistance of reality to change, however, the Romantics were forced more and more into adventurous speculation. It thus became inevitable — in contradiction to their moral agenda, which lay in the future — that they should become ever more fixated on the past and aligned with the reactionary powers of their time. This had nothing to do with Carl Schmitt’s “Occasionalism.” On the contrary, this development revealed the logic underlying their moral stance. Their moral commitment, with its roots in the Enlightenment, stood in radical opposition to politics. It could be politically implemented, therefore, only against its own intentions. This contradiction had remained undetected in the Enlightenment itself, because there morality had worked only indirectly in politics. Only later, in Romanticism, after the experience of the French Revolution, when morality sought a direct political role, was it doomed to failure. In this connection, political Romanticism

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possesses a tragic dimension, to which neither its critic Carl Schmitt nor its apologists Baxa and Kluckhohn did justice. This tragic dimension — the fact that the moral imperatives of Romanticism already contained in their definition the impossibility of their historical realization — revealed itself most dramatically when it came to social questions. One of the merits of Romanticism was its awareness of the problems of industrialization. In the early nineteenth century, these problems became more and more apparent, even in Germany. Romanticism, guided by its specific interest, the criticism of modern times, reacted much more strongly to these problems than did the liberal bourgeoisie, which tended to dismiss them. Later it was easy for Marx and Engels to expose the illusionary character of the Romantics’ anti-capitalism and the abstract nature of their social commitment. It is nevertheless undeniable that in this pre-socialist period, insights of striking far-sightedness had already been gained. Ever since his studies in Göttingen, for example, Adam Müller had occupied himself with economic theory, especially with that of Adam Smith, which he rejected early on. Müller’s characteristic way of responding to economic problems may be seen in an article he published in 1820 in Friedrich Schlegel’s last journal, Concordia. His incisive description of the hostile confrontation of capitalists and workers in England, for instance, clearly points in the direc22 tion of socialism. At the same time, his stubbornly religious interpretations of economic processes, especially of the nature of class struggle, met with immediate criticism even from conservatives, which indicates how unrealistic 23 and merely speculative it was. The author who most vehemently advocated the social commitment of political Romanticism in Germany, however, was Franz Baader (1765– 1841). This Bavarian mining official and philosopher, who was later ennobled, had been a professor at the University of Munich since 1826; together with Görres, who began teaching in Munich in 1827, he belonged to the leading representatives of Catholic conservatism there. From 1792 until 1796, Baader had lived in England and Scotland, where he completed his training in mining. His observations of industrialization in England and the problems of the working class there affected him for the rest of his life. Through the works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) and William Godwin (1756–1836), he became acquainted with early English socialism. Baader’s early experience in England inspired his late essay, with the lengthy title Über das dermalige Mißverhältnis der Vermögenslosen oder Proletairs zu den Vermögen besitzenden Klassen der Sozietät in betreff ihres Auskommens, sowohl in materieller als in intellektueller Hinsicht, aus dem Standpunkte des Rechts betrachtet (Concerning the present disparity between the non-property owners or proletarians and the property-owning classes of society with respect to their livelihood, in a material, as well as in an intellectual sense, considered from the standpoint of the law, 1835). This work is undeniably

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the most radical anti-capitalistic document of political Romanticism and at the same time the most radical critique of capitalism prior to Marx and Engels. All the same, not even in this essay did Baader pursue revolutionary goals; on the contrary, he advocated the prevention of revolution through efforts to educate the current rulers, and pleaded for an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process for overcoming existing problems. The greatest theme of Baader’s life was the restoration of morality, which, in his opinion, was alone capable of preventing the decay of society and its revolutionary destruction. In particular, he felt it was necessary to restore religion. His advocacy of love as a bonding agent in society as well as among individuals was reminiscent of Novalis, although unlike Novalis he drew his concept of love from the Bible, not philosophy. In addition to the Bible, Christian mystics — especially Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) and the Frenchman Louis Claude de St. Martin (1743–1803) — were influential and, together with Baader’s readings in Wollstonecraft and Godwin, inspired, in 1835, his radical critique. In the strongest possible terms he condemned the physical and moral misery of the working classes in England and France. He claimed that even the fate of the serfs in the Middle Ages, which he called barbaric, was less inhuman than that of large segments of the population in the most educated and cultured nations in so-called Christian Europe. Most pointedly, he deplored the prosperity of a privileged few in 24 the face of the suffering of the majority. However, these insights, as mentioned, did not lead Baader to support the revolution. He demanded instead the representation of the working class within the state, which, however, should not be taken over by the proletariat itself, but by the Church (Baader, 241). In this way, Baader hoped to incorporate the working class into the organism of the state, from which it had been excluded. At the same time, he hoped to save the workers from the destructive influences of “demagogues.” Baader demonstrates especially well how deep insights into the problems of modern society coexisted with the inability of Romanticism to address them effectively. Baader’s approach could never overcome class struggle, as he himself described it. Taking these notions into consideration, one might say that political Romanticism stood in the way of its own goals. It was tragic that morality, in whose name Romanticism had fought, was not defined in connection with politics, but rather in opposition to it. Neither the medieval empire nor the medieval class system were useful alternatives to the existing social and political realities at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The sovereignty of the individual German states and the reality of advancing industrialization made the restoration of the past impossible. In the second half of the century, Bismarck’s empire had nothing in common with the notions of Romanticism, and Marxism reacted to the social questions of the time in a more radical and much more persistent manner than Romanticism did.

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Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant Churches of the nineteenth century were capable of the socio-political decisions that Baader’s philosophy implied. The bond between throne and altar was still much too strong. Romanticism as a political force thus ended powerless, as a protest movement that, in the end, no one took seriously. Not the conservatives, because it was too utopian, and certainly not the liberals. And Marxism, which Romanticism had to some extent anticipated, began completely 25 anew.

Notes 1

Karl Alexander von Müller, Görres in Straßburg 1819–20: Eine Episode aus dem Beginn der Demagogenverfolgungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1926). For more information on Friedrich Wilhelm III see note 20. 2 Joseph Görres, Ausgewählte Werke, edited by Wolfgang Frühwald, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1978), 1: 294. “After four years of a vehement party struggle, of a senseless opposition to the demands of the time [. . .] it has come to the point where a general unrest has gripped everyone throughout Germany and created a mood that tends to precede great catastrophes in history.” 3

For studies on Görres see László Tarnói, Joseph Görres zwischen Revolution und Romantik (Budapest: Loránd-Eötvös-Universität, 1970); Heribert Raab, “Görres und die Revolution,” in Deutscher Katholizismus und Revolution im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Anton Rauscher, (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1975), 51–80. 4

Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1919, third edition 1968), 13–14. 5

Jakob Baxa, Einführung in die romantische Staatswissenschaft (Jena: G. Fischer, 1923); Gesellschaft und Staat im Spiegel deutscher Romantik: Die staats- und gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Schriften deutscher Romantiker: Auswahl mit erklärender Einleitung und Anmerkungen, edited by Jakob Baxa (Jena: G. Fischer, 1924); Paul Kluckhohn, Persönlichkeit und Gemeinschaft: Studien zur Staatsauffassung der deutschen Romantik (Halle: Niemeyer, 1925); Deutsche Vergangenheit und deutscher Staat, edited by Paul Kluckhohn (Leipzig: Reclam, 1935. Reprint Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964). 6

See Klaus Peter, Die politische Romantik in Deutschland: Eine Textsammlung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985), Introduction: 9–73. Other portrayals of political Romanticism, in addition to Schmitt, Baxa, and Kluckhohn, are: Hans Reiss, The Political Thought of the German Romantics (1793–1815) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955); Jacques Droz, Le romantisme allemand et l’état: Résistance et collaboration dans l’Allemagne napoléonienne (Paris: Payot, 1966); Ernst Behler, “Die Auffassung der Revolution in der Frühromantik,” in Essays in European Literature: In Honour of Lieselotte Dieckmann (St. Louis: Washington UP, 1972), 191–215; Richard Brinkmann, “Frühromantik und Französische Revolution,” in Richard Brinkmann et al., Deutsche Literatur und Französische Revolution: Sieben Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), 172–91; Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought 1790–1800 (Cam-

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bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992); Ethel Matala de Mazza, Der verfaßte Körper: Zum Projekt einer organischen Gemeinschaft in der Politischen Romantik (Freiburg: Rombach, 1999). For the historical context also see Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966); Volk — Nation — Vaterland, edited by Ulrich Herrmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996). 7 Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Freiburg: Alber, 1959. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973); Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962.): English Translation as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1989). 8

“This main error of our age, that the revolution has already been completed and ended, will no longer be able to deceive anyone or be believed anywhere; politics and the time itself have proven the opposite.” 9

For treatments of Schlegel’s politics see Gert Peter Hendrix, Das politische Weltbild Friedrich Schlegels (Bonn: Bouvier, 1962); Ernst Behler, “Einleitung,” in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 7 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1966): XV–CLII; Werner Weiland, Der junge Friedrich Schlegel oder Die Revolution in der Frühromantik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968); Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, “Revolution und Kirche im Denken Friedrich Schlegels,” in Deutscher Katholizismus und Revolution im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Anton Rauscher (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1975), 11–32; Klaus Peter, Stadien der Aufklärung: Moral und Politik bei Lessing, Novalis und Friedrich Schlegel (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1980), 139–83. 10 In this context see also Jean-Jacques Anstett, La pensée religieuse de Friedrich Schlegel (Paris: Société d’Edition Les Belles Lettres, 1941). 11

See the essay by Fabian Lampart in this volume.

12

“Those were beautiful and splendid times when Europe was a Christian land where one Christianity occupied this humanely formed continent; one common interest held together even the most remote provinces of this huge spiritual empire. — One sovereign who was without large worldly possessions, directed and united the great political powers.” 13

“Its (Christianity’s) accidental form is as good as destroyed, the old papacy is buried and Rome has become a ruin a second time.” 14 For more information about Novalis’s essay see Hans-Joachim Mähl, Die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis: Studien zur Wesensbestimmung der frühromantischen Utopie und ihren ideengeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1965), especially 372–85; Wilfried Malsch, “Europa” Poetische Rede des Novalis: Deutung der französischen Revolution und Reflexion auf die Poesie in der Geschichte, (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965). 15 16

See Behler (note 9), CXLIX–CLII and Peter (note 9), 173.

Adam H. Müller, Die Elemente der Staatskunst: Öffentliche Vorlesungen (Meersburg: Hendel, reprint of the original edition, 1936; revised edition Berlin: Haude and Spener, 1968), 27. “The state is not just a manufacturing machine, a producer of agricultural products, an insurance institute, or a trade association; it is the most

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intimate connection of all the physical and spiritual needs, of the entire physical and spiritual wealth, and of the total interior and exterior life of a nation, creating a huge energetic, endlessly dynamic and living entity.” 17

Müller, 31. Müller, 24. For more information on the philosophy of nature developed by Schelling and the Romantics, see the essay by Gabriele Rommel in this volume. 18

19

“Whoever comes along here with his historical experiences does not know what I am talking about and from which platform I speak; I [seem to] speak Arabic to him, and it is best for this person to move on and not to mingle with listeners whose language and customs are foreign to him.” 20 Friedrich Wilhelm III, the same Prussian king who in 1819 signed the degree that drove Görres out of Germany into France, promised much-needed reforms when he succeeded his father Friedrich Wilhelm II to the throne in 1797. He had married Princess Luise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz for love and not — as was customary among princes in the eighteenth century — for political reasons, which alone suggested to many that he would break with other customs as well and establish a more modern regime. Novalis used these expectations in his fragments. It soon became clear, however, that the new king — although well meaning — was too weak to confront the severe problems of the changing times. After the devastating defeat of the outdated Prussian armies by Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, he supported some important reforms, but after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814 he sided with Metternich’s Restoration politics. Queen Luise was extremely popular in Prussia and a great help to her husband. She was credited with saving Prussia when Napoleon wanted to abolish this state but, unfortunately, she died prematurely in 1810. 21 For studies of Novalis’s and Adam Müller’s political philosophies see Hans Wolfgang Kuhn, Der Apokalyptiker und die Politik: Studien zur Staatsphilosophie des Novalis (Freiburg: Rombach, 1961); Hans-Joachim Mähl, Die Idee des goldnen Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis, 330–40; Klaus Peter, Stadien der Aufklärung, 85–138. Hermann Kurzke, Romantik und Konservatismus: Das “politische” Werk Friedrich von Hardenbergs (Novalis) im Horizont seiner Wirkungsgeschichte (Munich: Fink, 1983); Wm. Arctander O’Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham: Duke UP, 1995), 161–93; Klaus Peter, “Novalis, Fichte, Adam Müller. Zur Staatsphilosophie in Aufklärung und Romantik,” in Novalis und die Wissenschaften, edited by Herbert Uerlings, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 239–67; Reinhold Aris, Die Staatslehre Adam Müllers in ihrem Verhältnis zur deutschen Romantik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1929); Jakob Baxa, Adam Müller: Ein Lebensbild aus den Befreiungskriegen und aus der deutschen Restoration (Jena: G. Fischer, 1930), especially 100–9; Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, “Adam Müller: Ein Konservativer zwischen Preußen und Österreich,” in Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Der schwierige Konservatismus: Definitionen, Theorien, Porträts (Herford & Berlin: Nicolai, 1975), 201–21; Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, “Romantik als Restoration bei Adam H. Müller,” in Katholizismus, konservative Kapitalismuskritik und Frühsozialismus bis 1850, edited by Albrecht Langner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1975), 75–97; Benedikt Köhler, Ästhetik der Politik: Adam Müller und die politische Romantik (Stuttgart: Klett, 1980).

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22

See Ernst Hanisch, “Der ‘vormoderne’ Antikapitalismus der Politischen Romantik: Das Beispiel Adam Müller,” in Romantik in Deutschland: Ein interdisziplinäres Symposion, edited by Richard Brinkmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), 132–46. 23 See especially Adam Müllers Lebenszeugnisse, 2 vols, edited by Jakob Baxa (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1966), 2: 390–93. 24

Franz von Baader, Gesellschaftslehre, edited by Hans Grassl (Munich: Kösel, 1957), 237–38. For scholarly literature on Baader see Ernst Benz, “Franz von Baaders Gedanken über den ‘Proletair’: Zur Geschichte des vor-marxistischen Sozialismus,” in Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 1 (1948): 97–123; Gert-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, “Franz von Baader: Der Konservative zwischen Mystik und Politik,” in Gert-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Der schwierige Konservativismus (note 19), 181–99; Arno Baruzzi, “Franz von Baaders Verhältnis zur Idee der Revolution,” in Deutscher Katholizismus und Revolution im frühen 19. Jahrhundert (note 9), 33–49; Klaus Peter, “Franz Baader und William Godwin: Zum Einfluß des englischen Sozialismus in der deutschen Romantik,” in Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 3 (1993): 151– 72. 25

It should perhaps be noted that political Romanticism enjoyed a kind of Renaissance in the twentieth century in Austria. In 1934 the government of Engelbert Dollfuss installed a constitution that was fashioned after the medieval class system — the so-called “Ständestaat” (Corporate State). Among the spiritual fathers of this state was Othmar Spann (1878–1950), a professor of political economy at the University of Vienna. His ideas were based largely on Adam Müller’s work, which Spann publicized in the 1920s in new editions. Jakob Baxa was one of Spann’s students. About Austria at that time see Aufbruch und Untergang: Österreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938, edited by Franz Kadrnoska (Vienna: Europa, 1981), especially 499–592. About Spann in particular see William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972), 311–15. For a general discussion of the reception of German Romanticism in the twentieth century, see the essay by Nicholas Saul in this volume.

Romanticism and Natural Science Gabriele Rommel “Wem die Natur vergönnte in sich ihre Harmonie zu finden, — der trägt eine ganze, unendliche Welt in seinem Innern — er ist die individuellste Schöpfung — 1 und der geheiligste Priester der Natur.” Henrik Steffens

T

the eighteenth century, more than the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests were shaking Europe. German and European Romantics also found themselves caught up in fundamental cognitive changes brought about by new and increasingly specialized sciences, particularly in the fields of natural science, medicine, and technology. New conceptions often revolutionize traditional forms of knowledge and require a presentation that influences the development of the language of science as well as our everyday communication. Such proved to be the case of Romanticism, a literary epoch situated on the threshold of the era of 2 machines. This charged and tumultuous atmosphere reflected the élan of the Age of Enlightenment, which critically investigated medieval-scholastic worldviews and scientific conceptions, linked with ideas of the Renaissance and Humanism, and made it possible to approach the ideal of the liberated human self. This process continued to influence the generation of Romantics born around 1770 until the start of the nineteenth century. In their educational development, they came into contact with some of the best scholars of the time. Esteemed and reputable historians, philosophers, natural scientists, and physicians disseminated European knowledge at German universities and academies. Heinrich von Kleist called them “die Lehrer der Menschheit” (the educators of humanity). Like Kleist, other Romantics such as Achim von Arnim, Adelbert von Chamisso, and E. T. A. Hoffmann were all initially engaged in intensive scientific, medical, and natural-philosophic studies alongside their planned working careers. Hence, as Kleist wrote, one sought out “in jeder Stadt immer die Würdigsten” (the most worthy people 3 in every town). At the University of Jena one could encounter, among others, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), the founder of comOWARD THE END OF

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parative anatomy and medical anthropology. Eminent scholars at the University of Halle included the chemist Alexander Nicolaus Scherer (1771–1824), the physicist Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert (1769–1824), and the physician Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813). The fame of the University of Leipzig was largely based on the presence of such scholars as the physicist and mathematician Carl Friedrich Hindenburg (1741–1808), who further developed the elaborate procedure of combinatorial analysis of his celebrated predecessor Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716); finally, the physician and philosopher Ernst Platner (1744–1818) lectured there on physiology 4 and anthropology. Important scholars in Berlin were the physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762–1836), and the mathematician, natural scientist, and philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77), renowned for his writings on astronomy and cosmology. Thomas Theodor Sömmering (1755–1830), a physician, anthropologist, paleontologist, and physicist who was a friend of Georg Forster (1754–94) — himself renowned throughout Europe for his account of Captain Cook’s second voyage around the world — practiced and taught in Mainz, while the physician Andreas Röschlaub (1768–1835) helped make Bamberg a center of Romantic natural philosophy. Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817), a geologist and mineralogist whose “Neptunist” theory of the sedimentary evolution of the earth influenced Goethe’s thinking, taught in Freiberg (in Saxony) at Europe’s most modern mining academy. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) — natural scientist, mathematician, and philosopher and writer — and the anatomist and psychologist Heinrich August Wrisberg (1744–1828) were both active in Göttingen. Christian Ernst Wünsch (1744–1828), of importance not only to Kleist, lectured at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder and gave courses on experimental physics to interested local citizens. Romantic reflections on nature by poets, natural scientists, and natural philosophers around 1800 were primarily based on the ideas of these and other scholars. As the young jurist Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801) wrote in the summer of 1794 to his friend Friedrich Schlegel in Dresden, whom he had met during their studies together in Leipzig, one need not be overly lavish with the term “dream”: “Es realisieren sich Dinge, die vor zehn Jahren noch ins philosophische Narrenhaus verwiesen wurden” (Things are now being realized which ten years ago were consigned to the philosophical madhouse; NS, 4: 140). When this same Hardenberg decided in February 1798 — barely three months after beginning his studies at the Mining Academy in Freiberg — to publish under the pseudonym Novalis a collection of fragments from his philosophical notebooks in the journal Athenaeum (1798–1800), a crucial change had occurred. Novalis means “the tiller of new land.” Yet this new land that was now becoming the focus of his enthusiasm was clearly the field

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of poetry, cultivated with the physical and social worlds in mind, so as to unearth new possibilities and methods, and to provide them with a genuinely humane foundation and fresh significance. However much the Romantic generation welcomed the progress in scientific knowledge — which would prove an inspiration for wholly new aesthetic ideas — there nevertheless spread a skeptical attitude toward the practice of dissecting nature and the use of technological instruments in natural research. In his 1789 essay “Ein Blick in das Ganze der Natur” (A Look into the Whole of Nature), Georg Forster still saw the human being as nature’s greatest wonder, impelled by an inner impulse to know himself and to explore the connection between 5 himself and his surroundings. The evident loss of a unified view of nature altered human self-understanding as well as human perspective on nature. As a result of this shift in viewing nature, primeval nature came to be viewed as both alien to humanity and also the subject for analysis and research. However, the uncertainty of ever attaining final insights into the whole course of nature increased, and it became questionable whether all the accumulated data served any useful purpose. The critical question of humanity’s responsibility to nature as a responsibility to itself was already in the air around 1800; and while the development of the natural sciences further cemented the existence of modern industrial societies, it finally led to the loss of the idea of a creative nexus between God, nature, and humanity (creation, perception, new creation). As the philosopher Jürgen Mittelstrass has observed: nature vanished from modern conceptions of the world not 6 only as an active, creative force, but also as an intuitive vision. Nonetheless, natural scientists such as Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, Henrik Steffens (1773–1845), and Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) continually emphasized that knowledge of nature was an indispensable part of our knowledge, on which not only the preservation and cultivation of life depended, but also to a large 7 degree the cultivation of our minds and hearts. It is in this context that the Romantics attempted to develop a philosophy of nature that was both in accord with the most recent scientific developments and yet also attuned to the bonds linking humans with the world.

Physics — The Science of Nature, or: “Natural Philosophy and Fatalism” 8 “Kann die Chemie Kunst werden? Hauptfrage. 9 Sie solls durch Moralitaet werden.” Novalis

The rapid broadening of the material basis of the natural sciences in the second half of the eighteenth century provoked a discussion of fundamental concepts mirrored in specialized scientific investigations and European

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journals, compendia, and lexicons. The historian of science Michel Chaouli sees in the experiments by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94) involving the newly discovered element of oxygen not only the founding of modern chemistry, but also a factual, linguistic, and hermeneutic paradigm shift in chemistry and modern natural science alike — the initial spark for the revolutionizing of European scientific thought by means of a second “French 11 Revolution.” This new conception, which dispensed with the purported existence of “phlogiston” in combustion processes, made it possible to investigate the nature of water, which in turn created the requirements for the establishment of the disciplines of electrochemistry and meteorology. This achievement re-invigorated the debate concerning the concept of elements or principles; the processes of chemical associations or disassociations were brought under the concept of “relationship” or “affinity.” Experiments and hypotheses about the theories of electricity and galvanism opened up new fields of research, corresponding to the development of 12 physiology. Differing theories arose about the “life-force” and the related question of the organization and function of the organism, as well as the difference between living and dead matter, which may be traced back to Luigi Galvani (1737–98) and his observations on animal electricity in muscles and nerve fibers. On the other hand, between 1795 and 1811 the excitation theory of the Scottish physician John Brown (1735–88), whose Elementa medicinae sought to explain states of illness as a result of the deficiencies or excesses in an organism’s irritability and sensibility (irritabiltas; excitability), attracted enthusiastic supporters in Röschlaub, Melchior Adam Weikard (1742–1803), and Christoph Heinrich Pfaff (1773–1852) — both of whom translated Brown’s book — as well as natural philosophers and writers like Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), Kleist, 13 and Novalis. In addition to the concept of a life-force in physiology and biology, a notion also employed by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) in his Zoonomia (1794), one finds the idea of development: that is, deliberations as to whether the evolution of an organism is already completely predetermined in its earliest form (pre-existence), for example, in the egg, or whether in the course of various stages it emerges out of different elements to finally 14 constitute the organism (epigenesis). Behind all these attempts to fathom the individual phenomenon of nature from observations lay a concern of philosophers and scientists ever since antiquity: the idea and essence of nature as a totality created by God. An allied concern was the debate on the criteria for a science of nature that had been put forward by contemporary philosophers, particularly by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Ordering principles were required to uncover a true picture of nature from all the partial knowledge. In regard to this search for the principles ordering nature, Novalis mentions in his notebook entries written during his years of study

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at the Mining Academy in Freiberg his own system of science, one founded on mathematics as the science of all the sciences. In similar fashion, Oken commences his Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (Textbook of Natural Philosophy, 1809), which he dedicated to his friends Schelling and Steffens with mathesis, i.e. with a section of that science concerned with the measure and 15 order of things. The one element common to all these efforts is the acknowledged goal of the natural scientist to rediscover and establish once again the unity of nature in the knowledge of nature; in the words of 16 Steffens, the primary point of interest was the dignity of knowledge. Nevertheless, to attain such an order and its basic principles it became necessary to develop an appropriate epistemological method, based either on a collection of empirical data or on the speculative theses of natural philosophy. Hence, the fundamental debate between empiricism and idealism has accompanied the evolution of modern natural science: on the one side “the individual fact is what is certain,” while on the other, it is “the whole that 17 is true.” The understanding of “knowledge” and “science” underwent a corresponding change. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that experimental research and speculative natural philosophy became strictly differentiated, for until this point they had been closely intertwined in their attempts to determine the relationship between nature and spirit. The mathematical foundation of natural science in Kant’s philosophy formed the focus of modern debates, and quickly provided the methodological basis of natural scientific papers and articles. In his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 1786) Kant wrote that every theory of nature must lead to natural science in the end; the theory of nature itself, however, will only contain as 18 much science as there is mathematics in it. Thus, just as with Kant’s dynamic explanation of the concept of matter — which portrays matter as determined by the two fundamental polar forces of attraction and repulsion — it is possible to reconstruct the history of nature within the separate disciplines into a procedural model that functions similarly to mathematics. Chemistry is missing from this Kantian scheme, since it is unable to erect (or construct) laws for combining the elements in line with mathematical ideas. By contrast, Kant observed, physics is based not only on the data and knowledge garnered from experiments but also on empirical principles. In the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, physics was still mathematical experimental philosophy, counting among its most notable achievements the founding of electrostatics, the discovery of the physical nature of heat, and the development of optics by convincing explanations of the polarity and wave character of light. Kant’s focus on modes of knowledge provided a standard for the evaluation of knowledge and the degree of scientific character. It was reserved for metaphysics to supply the concepts

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allowing the scientist to mathematically construct and experimentally examine phenomena. It is precisely here that Schelling established modern, Romantic natural philosophy, by both critically rejecting Kant’s reduction of scientific criteria to mathematics, and by granting an equal status to chemistry as a “dynamic” 19 science that had the quality of matter as its subject. Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) was not only closely perused by Goethe and Schiller, but also critically reviewed by philosophers, natural scientists, students, scholars, and the Jena circle of Early Romanticism. In addition to his Ideen, Schelling’s subsequent writings, Von der Weltseele — Eine Hypothese der höhern Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus (On the World Soul — A Hypothesis of Higher Physics for Explaining the General Organism, 1798), the Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (First Outline of a System of Natural Philosophy, 1799), and the presentation of his System der Philosophie (1801), all greatly influenced scientific discussion in physics, chemistry, and medicine on the methodological demarcations between the cognitive approaches of the single disciplines, between (handicraft) art and science. To determine the relationship between the individual parts and the organism itself in physical and physiological (chemical) laws, Schelling constructed a unified natural whole by employing the idea of an infinite organism. As Schelling wrote: “Geist als Princip des Lebens gedacht, ist Seele” (Spirit conceived as the principle of life is soul), which bridges the dualism between the materiality of life and the over-arching spiritual princi20 ple. His philosophy of nature therefore tends toward the idea of nature, in which nature is seen as visible spirit, and spirit as invisible nature. If in his Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Scientific Knowledge) of 1794 Fichte had placed the philosophical foundation of the absolute and autonomous “Tathandlung” (creative act) of reason in the self-activity of the ego, and rendered nature one of its mere products, then Schelling reintroduced nature into philosophy and elevated it again to one of the tasks of natural philosophy. For Schelling, the constant self-experimenting of nature according to its inherent natural laws yields yet another perspective on chemistry; seen in this light, chemistry became an example of a useful scientific fiction, enabling an otherwise merely experimental art to be raised to the level of a science (SW, I.5: 243). Moreover, just like the related image of a “free interplay of forces” from Kant’s Kritik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft (Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, 21 1790), this scientific fiction also has an aesthetic dimension. Basing his theory on Kant’s treatment of the human faculties (imagination, understanding, and judgment as a synthesis of the two), Schelling transfers a basic cognitive approach into the realm of nature: the imagination — conceived as a creative, unbounded, unformed activity — and understanding, or “Verstand” (as the faculty of limiting, of separating, giving shape and structure).

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The two forces interact in free regularity to generate the activity of aesthetic judgment, which for Kant is characteristic of the synthesis of generality and 22 particularity, of freedom and necessity. Thus, in the forms of nature one can see an analogy to the artist, who forges a second, alternative nature in accordance with what is originally produced in nature. In the moments of “Begrenzung,” or limitation, an image is fixed whose boundaries the imagination transcends, granting a brief, ideal glimpse into the hidden being of nature. Chemistry around 1800 seems to symbolize exactly this reciprocal interplay of contrary forces, and therefore represents for Friedrich Schlegel the most precise allegory for what he calls “romantische Poesie” and what 23 we are accustomed to term literature. According to Schelling, if natural philosophy is to be a true philosophy of nature it must pass beyond experimental, empirical natural science and marshal its knowledge under the higher viewpoint of a unified nature, which 24 alone can supply genuine results in the search for knowledge. By viewing nature as something active, as subject, instead of as a mere object of infinite dismemberment — an approach also criticized by Novalis, Steffens, Oken, 25 and August Wilhelm Schlegel — Schelling is able to speak of a “grosse Synthesis” in his Ideen, since he views the system of nature and the system 26 of our spirit as a unity (SW, I.5: 93). In his philosophy of nature, Schelling not only postulates the end of the separation between nature and spirit, but also considers this a significant task in the actions of the free, self-conscious human being. Man first gains his freedom in the process of engaging with 27 nature. Schelling formulates this creative striving for freedom as a twofold productive striving between nature and art in his idea of a “werktätige Wissenschaft” (workaday science), treated in the lectures Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (On the Relation of the Fine Arts to Nature, 28 1807). In all her diversity and stages of development nature beholds in man her most lofty and supreme product, and recapitulates her path once again in him, freely bestowing her creative force upon this creature. In his works, the artist — who unlike any other individual is attuned to the very origin and mystery of nature — lifts individual moments of the infinite process out of their temporality, granting them a new, visible infiniteness or eternity. In this natural process, Schelling pictures man — and above all the artist — as 29 ultimately nature’s redeemer. In conjunction with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History, 1784), the representation of nature as a unity gleaned from the chaos of isolated knowledge has history as a touchstone, and is 30 essentially bound up with the developmental stages of humanity. As a rule, the scientific journals and compendia of the period especially proclaim the importance of natural history, advocating its educational worth for the 31 nation. One can see this emphasis in the parenthetical subtitle of Isis, an

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encyclopedic periodical edited by Lorenz Oken between 1816 and 1848. Isis embraced in its program all four kingdoms of nature (elemental, mineral, plant, and animal), including the kingdom of the human spirit. The various branches of natural science and humanities were reflected in the interlacing of contributions on the fields of natural science, natural history, art, mythology, archaeology, and literature. According to Oken, the express purpose of this eclectic approach was to prevent a dangerous cultural one-sidedness brought about by the inappropriate separation of the different fields of knowledge. As a counterbalance, Oken evoked the notion of the scholar as the embodiment of man’s moral nature, who was to raise natural history and natural philosophy into an indispensable basis of his cultural mission to an entire people. Yet another aspect of the dialogue among these various scientific domains was the emergence of the scientific travel report as a new type of literary genre, among whose best practitioners were Alexander von Hum33 boldt, Forster, and Adelbert von Chamisso. In their content and style they strove to portray natural phenomena, and their own experiences in particular, with less than absolute exactitude, choosing rather to affect the imagination and emotions of the reader by means of their manner of presentation, 34 in the hope of inspiring a natural impulse to occupy oneself with nature. The natural philosophical efforts of the Romantics did not exert any lasting influence on the further development of the natural sciences and 35 medicine. But the discussions of that time on nature and spirit, nature and humanity, life and death, historical temporality, and the infinitude of nature and the universe did generate critical contributions in Romantic fragments and studies, essays and poetical works, which to a certain degree treated approaches to epistemology, natural science, and natural philosophy. Particularly in the years around 1800, the Romantic concepts of art and poetry built upon a radicalized principle of history from the perspective of nature. By linking man’s reintegration as a “natural being” with the idea of an infinitely positive creative force, the Romantics rejected the dominant position of man with respect to nature preached by the Enlightenment. This new stance implied a radicalization of Enlightenment ideas, against whose reductionist elements Schelling directed his philosophy of identity. Achim von Arnim beheld in poetry that other cognitive path traced by Schelling, which made possible the “endliche Darstellung einer unendlichen Aufgabe” (the finite depiction of an infinite task), namely the construction of a whole out of the creative spirit of fantasy; for him poesy was the necessary prerequisite 36 that made possible what had been termed the theory of nature.

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Poesy as “Symbolic Physics” “[. . .] In meiner Philosophie des täglichen Lebens bin ich auf die Idee einer moralischen / im Hemsterhuisischen Sinn / Astronomie gekommen und habe die interessante Entdeckung der Religion des sichtbaren Weltalls gemacht. Du glaubst nicht, wie weit das greift. Ich denke hier, Schelling weit zu überfliegen. Was denkst Du, ob das nicht der rechte Weg ist, die Physik im allgemeinsten Sinn, schlechterdings Symbolisch zu behandeln? [. . .]” 37 Novalis

In the epistemological sense, the development of modern natural science is itself part of a decided change in the orientation of thought that forms the heuristic core, so to speak, of the Early Romantic poetic program. Following the lead of Michel Foucault, Ernst Behler situates all the vastly different attempts to establish the possibility of modern poesy and the reflections on the nature of poesy within the context of the entire development of contemporary cognition and thought, in which everything leads to the more fundamental phenomenon of human language. This is due, Behler notes, to the discontinuity of the process of cognition itself, which at the end of the eighteenth century could no longer rely on the old schemata and tableaux. Modes of perception altered; words and concepts were superimposed on things, precluding the manifestation of their inner nature. Consequently, the loss of the representation between sign and signified became the impulse for an entirely fresh linguistic theory and poetical language, whose goal was the reclamation of identity and representation through the agency of the human 38 subject. It is at this juncture of late-eighteenth-century thought that Novalis, in the midst of his studies at the Mining Academy at Freiberg, advocates the poeticization of the sciences, where cognition is conceived as a historic-genetic process and becomes freed of all systematic constraints (whether through philosophy or natural science) to thus offer a glimpse of the essence of things. The poetic view alone leads out of the chaos by estranging the familiar and by presenting the uncommon in a familiar way, that is, by romanticizing the world: Die Welt muß romantisirt werden. So findet man den ursprünglichen Sinn wieder. Romantisiren ist nichts, als eine qualitative Potenzierung. Das niedre Selbst wird mit einem bessern Selbst in dieser Operation identificirt. So wie wir selbst eine solche qualitative Potenzenreihe sind. Diese Operation ist noch ganz unbekannt. Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnisvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen 39 unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es [. . .].

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As one may gather from this central, oft-quoted Romantic manifesto, Novalis favored mathematics as the basic science in all cognitive processes, heuristically building upon his intensive studies in natural science and tran40 scendental philosophy, particularly those of Fichte and Kant. His intent was not to derive the concept of poesy from the sciences, nor to loot the sciences for purposes of building up an arsenal of images, but rather to apply scien41 tific cognitive methods and concepts to the sphere of poesy. Resolving the dual deficit of insufficient scientific language and inadequate aesthetic concepts is a difficulty compounded by the perception of a historical and social deficit. Novalis clearly comprehended the task at hand in an entry from the Allgemeines Brouillon (General Draft, 1798–99) — his collection of material for a planned encyclopedia of all the arts and sciences — in which he observes that the “I” is not a product of nature, not nature, not a historical 42 being, but rather something artistic, an art, a work of art. Art in the broadest sense, and a poesy operating with language in the narrower sense, constitute the experimental planes upon which the productive imagination tests itself in the attempt to restore the ontological connection between humanity with nature that natural science can only suggest. In this process one can examine the quality of knowledge in all its forms, insofar as it participates in an act of producing and making; as Novalis observes in his Kant studies, we 43 only know something insofar as we realize it. The traditional thought experiment taken from the history of physics (Galileo, Kepler, Newton), serves in the sense of Francis Bacon as an extension of our cognitive powers, and leads for Novalis into the primeval nature that is hidden within its sys44 tem of signs and ciphers. The approach in which one derives the whole (of nature, the universe) from an overall idea is also methodologically decisive for Novalis, which is why in his Teplitzer Fragmente (1798) he enthusiastically embraces Kepler’s attempt to deduce the laws of celestial mechanics from the idea of creation, and to ultimately and dynamically explain the heavenly bodies (NS, 2: 619, no. 433). This conception of an active and productive nature can be traced back to Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum, where nature is determined by the human architect, instead of, as had 45 been believed hitherto, by the heavenly architect. With regard to the history of the sciences and the pre-scientific stages of scientific development such as alchemy, mysticism, and magic, Novalis argued for a symbolic treatment of physics as a poetic treatment of nature, in accordance with ancient Egyptian and Paracelsian medical practices that he found depicted in Kurt Sprengel’s Versuch einer pragmatischen Geschichte der Arzneikunde (Attempt at a Pragmatic History of Medicine, 1794). The symbolic level of presentation fulfils something of which neither natural science nor natural philosophy are capable, and that is: arraying all the isolated phenomena in a higher relationship that was represented in earlier times by the sympathy of each part of the universe with every other part,

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with constellations, people, animals, and plants. This theory of the reciprocal representation of the universe, Novalis notes, is founded upon the sympathy of the sign with the signified; it proclaims the universe in countless languages and has a grammatical mysticism as its basis, which only a look inside nature 46 can reveal. From Novalis’s perspective, such a symbolic view of nature might result in the “moral astronomy” to which he refers in his letter to Friedrich Schlegel in the summer of 1798 (NS, 4: 255). Or the physical phenomenon of light, as treated in his Teplitzer Fragmente or his Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800), now emerges from the terminological confinement and temporally bounded cognitive status it held in modern physics, to function as an (actually experienced!) symbol of the cosmic link between all beings and times. A similar point is made by Arnim in the opening of his 1812 collection of novellas when he talks of that “Urquell des höheren Lichtes, das ebenso die Theorie einer andern Welt ist, wie unser Licht, ohne von einer Theorie erfaßt zu werden, die Theorie aller unsrer Naturerscheinungen aufschließt” (primeval source of the higher light, that is just as much the theory of another world as our light, without being 47 grasped by a theory, unlocks the theory of all our natural phenomena). In this process of transition, works of art are temporary fixed points of life, and hence the novel itself is life. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1802; translated as The Novices of Sais, 1949), begun during Novalis’s studies in Freiberg and left as a fragmentary novel at his early death in 1801, reflects in a quasi-experimental manner the problem of representing nature adequately. In the temple of Isis at Sais in Egypt, the disciples, their teacher, foreign travelers, and the “tausendfältige Naturen” (thousand-fold natures) all gather together to discuss the true way to the secret of the goddess (nature); in the end, only he proves himself to be a true teacher and herald of nature who has traversed nature’s inner path, so as to comprehend and interpret the signs of the outer world: Um die Natur zu begreifen, muß man die Natur innerlich in ihrer ganzen Folge entstehen lassen. Bey dieser Unternehmung muß man sich bloß von der göttlichen Sehnsucht nach Wesen, die uns gleich sind, und den nothwendigen Bedingungen, diese zu vernehmen, bestimmen lassen, denn wahrhaftig die ganze Natur ist nur als Werkzeug und Medium des Einverständnisses vernünftiger Wesen begreiflich. Der denkende Mensch kehrt zur ursprünglichen Function seines Daseyns, zur schaffenden Betrachtung, zu jenem Punkte zurück, wo Hervorbringen 48 und Wissen in der wundervollsten Wechselverbindung standen [. . .].

Here Novalis describes the individual course of remembrance as a part of a world-historical movement that re-establishes the lost “poetic” nature; yet, most important, the art of tranquil contemplation and reflection on nature engenders an inherent harmony with the universe. The portrayal of

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this inner world history at last leads to “die wahre Theorie der Natur” (the true theory of nature), which the poet is capable of uncovering in a much more unprejudiced manner than the scientist. In 1798 Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis exchanged papers containing their speculations on physics, as did Novalis and the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810), as well as Steffens and Schelling. According to Schlegel, Novalis was to play the role of “Socrates in physics.” Following the lead of Schelling and Novalis, Steffens characteristically called his 1801 work Beiträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde (Contributions to the Inner Natural History of the Earth), and methodologically proceeded as Novalis had prescribed. Novalis’s experimental Encyclopedia — whose materials were collected directly parallel to his study of natural science, training as a mining engineer, and first poetic “experiments” — gathered cognitive building blocks from all disciplines, in order to relate them infinitely and reciprocally to one another following the procedure of combinatorics. It was conceived as an infinite dialogue, as a process permanently overstepping all factual, temporal, and spatial boundaries. The twentieth-century theory of information perceives in this Romantic variant of eighteenth-century encyclopedic knowledge an anticipation of the modern system of experts. Still, its intrinsically mathematical and systematic procedure is always directed toward the functionality of knowledge, never toward a completed system, but rather toward a system that guarantees the infinitude of ongoing 49 thought. Thus Novalis’s symbolic treatment of physics (as theory of nature) approaches what Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel understood as the new mythology: the possibility of historically situating human existence between past, present, and future, which in turn is capable of generating a new, infinite, progressive poesy — Romantic universal poesy. Such a grand experiment is meant to bestow on the individual human subject, threatened and left bereft by natural science, the freedom to engage in absolute, albeit 50 purely speculative control over all its determinations. Therefore poesy is no longer a mere generic concept, but rather, as Käte Hamburger has observed, 51 a new form of ordering and connecting. For the Schlegel brothers, the concept of a new mythology is based upon a mythological natural history. And like Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel is of the opinion that in the end 52 nature only reveals herself to prophetic eyes. In the sense of Schelling, the artist here advances to be a seer and redeemer of nature. The association with natural science had conceptual consequences only for Early Romantics like Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Steffens, and Ritter. The views and aesthetic variations on individual phenomena by later writers such as Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860), Achim von Arnim, and Heinrich von Kleist, are no longer anchored in a genuine, overriding concept, despite the fact that their natural philosophic,

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natural scientific, and medical studies now and again intertwined with their 53 professional activities. For the most part, their presentations focus on medicinal problems like health and illness, on conceptions of the art of living, and on illnesses of the soul as indications of the increasing peril for the human subject, the seemingly eternal disassociation of inner and outer nature. Characteristic of the Romantic artist after 1806 is an awareness of being cast to and fro between elation and depression, leading to the painful consciousness that the only quantifiable thing in the world is one’s own limited span of life, in which it will be impossible to fathom the course of 54 history and the cosmos. In this hovering between microcosm and macrocosm, the later Romantic unceasingly seeks his self and his place in the universe. In his Allgemeines Brouillon from 1798–99 Novalis was able to formulate this search optimistically: “Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh — Trieb überall zu Hause zu seyn” (Philosophy is really homesickness — the desire to be everywhere at home; NS, 3: 434, no. 857) But whereas Novalis conceived of poesy as the catalyst in the process of human cognition and culture, Kleist, Hoffmann, Arnim, and Chamisso developed conceptions that likewise were inspired by developments in natural science, but in a disenchanted way. In 1800 Kleist still shared the optimistic Enlightenment belief that one could enrich the intellect through observation, and “tausendfältig durch aufmerksame Wahrnehmung aller Erscheinungen üben” (test it a thousand-fold by careful perception of all phenomena). In this same letter to his fiancée he enthusiastically avows that there is one excellent teacher if we understand 55 her: nature. But the unheard-of events of his novellas and dramas are constructed according to the principle of polarity and the law of antithesis that permeate life; the people are either subject to the laws of society, as in Michael Kohlhaas (1810), or to those of Nature, as in Das Erdbeben in Chili, (1807), and hence to their destiny. Or as a result of unforeseen circumstances they are cast beyond the pale of every law, even beyond the seemingly unalterable laws of Nature, as in the Marquise von O . . . (1808), and must defend their existence and regain their individuality, if given the chance. It is a play of figures that unfolds in an unending process, which is only temporarily interrupted by the cessation of communication in the play, or at the end of the novella. Kleist’s lack of fixed solutions provides a focus for the modern problem of a lack of commitment as compensation for increasing isolation, for values and words that have become lost or questionable. The scientific ciphers in the tales of Kleist already symbolize the crisis of cognition. For example, the law of electricity functions as an instrument of this kind of Kleistian experiment, suggesting the world of 56 contingency and violent polarity. Similarly doubting the possibility and preconditions for cognition of nature, Achim von Arnim decided against the vocation of a natural scientist,

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choosing instead that of the poet. Arnim, who undertook studies in physics and meteorology and published a Theorie der elektrischen Erscheinungen (Theory of Electrical Phenomena) in 1799, saw in the concepts of energy and force the symbolization of nature and spirit. The warmth enveloping all livings beings was for him a sign of the presence of God, just as force was for Johann Wilhelm Ritter; in this respect his conceptual ideas resemble those of Novalis. Arnim strove to experience how poesy and history, the earthly and heavenly interpenetrate one another. In the first of his fragmentary novels, Hollins Liebeleben (Hollin’s Love-Life, 1802), he consciously crafted 57 the transition from science to poetry. On the other hand, the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, including Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces, 1814–15) and Nachtstücke (Night Pieces, 1816–17), reflect his intensive medical studies, especially the magnetic curative method of Mesmer, Reil’s theory on the curing of psychic illnesses, and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s (1780–1860) Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Natur58 wissenschaft (Views from the Nocturnal Side of Natural Science, 1808). These studies form the basis for Hoffmann’s depiction of all that is unknown, menacing and terrifying in the individual self, whose psychic ruptures and confusions become a literary theme. Even the figure of the physician is veiled in a shadowy light: he is no longer primarily the healer and evangelist of life, but rather embodies the demonic element, performing 59 fatal and risky experiments on the patient. The novella Der Magnetiseur (1813), originally begun as an essay, stands wholly under the influence of a recent reading of Schelling’s Von der Weltseele (1798), Novalis’s Lehrlinge zu Sais, and Schubert’s lectures. Hoffmann tracks down the secret of the dream and of the magnetic-hypnotic ability of the psyche to react violently to outer stimuli. The world of the unconscious and the soul’s nocturnal side manifest themselves not just to the poet as a counter-world to apparent normality, which harbors that which is truly ill. The recesses of the soul first see the light of day in the distortions of human nature; the absolute external and internal isolation of the individual reveals in a frightening way those originally close physical and psychological ties to nature that cannot be put into any system. Translated by David Wood and Dennis F. Mahoney

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Notes 1

Henrik Steffens, Beyträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde (Part one. Freyberg: Verlag der Crazischen Buchhandlung, 1801), 317. “Whomever nature allows to discover her harmony within himself — bears a whole, infinite world in his inner being — he is the most individual creation — and the most sacred priest of nature.”

2

Gerhard Schulz, Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff (Munich: Beck, 1996), 29. Heinrich von Kleist to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge, 3 June 1801, in Werke und Briefe, edited by Siegfried Streller in collaboration with Peter Goldammer and Wolfgang Barthel, Anita Golz, Rudolf Loch (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1978), vol. 4, 225. Henceforth cited as Kleist Werke 4, page no. 3

4

Cf. Manfred Durner, editorial report, in: F. W. J. Schelling, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Hans Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs and Hermann Krings. Reihe I: Werke, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994), 17–24. 5

Georg Forster, Kleine Schriften und Briefe, ed. Claus Träger (Leipzig: Reclam, 1964), 36. 6

Jürgen Mittelstrass, “Leben mit der Natur: Über die Geschichte der Natur in der Geschichte der Philosophie und über die Verantwortung des Menschen gegenüber der Nature,” in: Über Natur: Philosophische Beiträge zum Naturverständnis, edited 2 by Oswald Schwemmer (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991), 48. 7

Cf. Georg Forster, 35.

8

August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst (1801– 1802). “Über Mythologie,” in Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen über Ästhetik. I, edited by Ernst Behler together with Frank Jolles (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 1989), 461. Henceforth cited as AWS, page no. 9

NS, 3: 253, no. 77. “Can chemistry become art? Principal question. It shall become so through morality.” (Allgemeines Brouillon: Materialien zu einer Enzyklopaedistik 1798/99.) 10 Among the most important contemporary reference works are: J. S. T. Gehler, Physikalisches Wörterbuch oder Versuch einer Erklärung der vornehmsten Begriffe und Kunstwörter der Naturlehre: mit kurzen Nachrichten von der Geschichte der Erfindungen und Beschreibungen der Werkzeuge begleitet in alphabetischer Ordnung. (Leipzig 1781–96); J. K. Yelin, Lehrbuch der Experimental-Naturlehre (1796); F. A. C. Gren, Neues Journal der Physik (1794–98), continued by L. W. Gilbert, Annalen der Physik (1799–1824); F. A. C. Gren, Systematisches Handbuch der gesamten Chemie (1st ed. 3 parts. Halle 1787–90; 2nd entirely revised ed., 4 parts. Halle 1794–96); F. A. C. Gren, Grundriß der Naturlehre in seinem mathematischen und chemischen Theile (revised, Halle 1793); Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent / Berthollet, Claude Louis / Fourcroy, Antoine François de: Methode der chemischen Nomenklatur für das antiphlogistische System, [. . .]. Nebst einem neuen Systeme der dieser Nomenklatur angemessenen chemischen Zeichen, von Herrn Hassenfratz und Adet. Aus dem Französischen zum Gebrauche hoher Schulen bey deutschen Vorlesungen über die antiphlogistische Chemie, von Karl Freyherrn von Meidinger (Vienna 1793). See further the sections on chemistry (Manfred Durner), magnetism, electricity and galvanism (Francesco

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Moiso), and physiological theories (Jörg Jantzen) in: F. W. J. Schelling, Ergänzungsband zu Werke Band 5 bis 9: Wissenschaftshistorischer Bericht zu Schellings Naturphilosophischen Schriften 1797–1800. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994). Cf. also Dietrich von Engelhardt, Historisches Bewußtsein in der Naturwissenschaft. (Freiburg, Munich: Alber, 1979). 11 Michel Chaouli, “Friedrich Schlegels Labor der Poesie” in Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 2001: 59–70. Henceforth cited as Athenäum 2001; see also Manfred Durner, “Die Anfänge der Chemie als Wissenschaft,” in Schelling, Ergänzungsband 1994, 3–15. 12

Francesco Moiso, “Magnetismus, Elektizität, Galvanismus” in Schelling, Ergänzungsband 1994, 165–374.

13

Jörg Jantzen, “Theorien der Irritabilität und Sensibilität” in Schelling, Ergänzungsband 1994, 466–70; Günter B. Risse, “John Brown” in Klassiker der Medizin II, eds. Dietrich v. Engelhardt and Fritz Hartmann (Munich: Beck, 1991), 24–36; HansGeorg von Arburg, “Gotthilf Heinrich Schuberts ‘Die Kirche und die Götter (1804)’ — ein frühromantischer Roman in literatur- und medizinhistorischer Sicht,” in Athenäum 2001: 110. 14 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomie oder Gesetze des organischen Lebens von Erasmus Darwin. M. D. F. R. S. Verfasser des Gedichts Botanic Garden. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt und mit einigen Anmerkungen begleitet von J. D. Brandis (Arzt in Druiburg) (Hannover: Gebrüder Hahn, 1795); and cf. Jantzen 1994, 469. 15 Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. Erster und zweiter Theil (Jena: Frommann, 1809), 2. Cf. also Klaus Stein, “‘Die Natur, welche sich in Mischungen gefällt.’ Philosophie der Chemie: Arnim, Schelling, Ritter,” in “Fessellos durch die Systeme”: Frühromantisches Naturdenken im Umfeld von Arnim, Ritter und Schelling, edited by Walther Ch. Zimmerli, Klaus Stein, and Michael Gerten. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1997), 143–202. Henceforth cited as Zimmerli 1997. 16 Henrik (also Henrich) Steffens, Grundzüge der philosophischen Naturwissenschaften von Henrich Steffens. Zum Behufe seiner Vorlesungen. (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1806), IX. Henceforth cited as Steffens 1806. 17

See Uwe Japp, “Aufgeklärtes Europa und natürliche Südsee: Georg Forsters Reise um die Welt,” in Reise und Utopie: Zur Literatur der Spätaufklärung, edited by Hans Joachim Piechotta (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 10–56; 28. 18

Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Riga: Hartknoch, 1786), IX.

19

For further information on the beginnings of chemistry as a science at the end of the eighteenth century see the account by Manfred Durner in Schelling, Ergänzungsband 1994, 7–8. 20

F. W. J. Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Introduction. In Werke, 5: 103. Henceforth cited as SW, vol.: page no. 21

See Manfred Durner, “‘Freies Spiel der Kräfte’: Bestimmung und Bedeutung der Chemie in Schellings ersten Schriften zur Naturphilosophie,” in Zimmerli 1997, 363–65. 22 Durner 1997, 360.

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Michel Chaouli, Athenäum 2001: 60.

24

F. W. J. Schelling, Foreword to Nachgelassene Schriften von H.[enrich] Steffens. (Berlin: Verlag von E. H. Schröder, Unter den Linden No. 23, 1846), VII–IX. 25 See August Wilhelm Schlegel’s extensive critique of the brilliant achievements and necessary limits of the empirical sciences, with their stress on machines and physical instruments, as compared with the speculative efforts of the ancient Greek natural philosophers who sought to comprehend nothing less than creation itself. Our current natural researchers, Schlegel concludes, have for the most part delved into the decomposition of natural products, and as a consequence, have entirely lost nature: “Allgemeine Übersicht des gegenwärtigen Zustandes der deutschen Literatur,” in Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst: Berlin 1801–1804: Zweiter Teil [1802– 1803], AWS, 515–16. 26

In this regard, see Novalis, who likewise conceives nature as a plan or systematic index of our spirit. (NS, 2: 583, no. 248). 27 Durner 1997, 367. 28

F. W. J. Schelling, Schriften 1804–1812. Edited and introduced by Steffen Dietzsch (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1982). Texte zur Philosophie und Religionsgeschichte. Henceforth cited as Schelling, 1982. 29

“Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände” (1809), in Schelling, 1982, 203. 30 Cf. Alexander von Humboldt, “Einleitende Betrachtungen über die Verschiedenartigkeit des Naturgenusses und eine wissenschaftliche Ergründung der Weltgesetze” in Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Stuttgart: Verlag der J. G. Cottaschen Buchhandlung, 1845), 1: 3–48. As a further example of Humboldt’s conviction of the eternal influence which physical Nature exercises upon the moral determination of humanity and on its destiny, see Ansichten der Natur. (1st edition, 1808) in Alexander von Humboldt Studienausgabe. Seven vols., edited by Hanno Beck (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 5: IX–X. 31

Lorenz Oken, Ueber den Werth der Naturgeschichte besonders für die Bildung der Deutschen. (On the Value of Natural History, especially for the Education of the German People) Von Lorenz Oken, bey Eröffnung der Vorlesungen über Zoologie: VI. Für die Herbstferien 1809. (Jena, Friedrich Frommann 1809). 32 Lorenz Oken, Isis oder Enzyklopädische Zeitung (vorzüglich für Naturgeschichte, vergleichende Anatomie und Physiologie) von Oken. 31 vols (Jena, 1817–48). 33

See Thomas E. Bourke, “Der Wissenschaftler als Dichter: Betrachtungen zur Ästhetik der Expeditionsberichte Georg Forsters und Alexander von Humboldts,” in Die deutsche literarische Romantik und die Wissenschaften, edited by Nicholas Saul (Munich: Iudicium, 1991), 103–24. 34 On the useful connection between natural history and the study of world history, philology and ancient and modern art, as well as the expected effects of art on the explanation of nature, cf. A. v. Humboldt, Aphorismen aus der chemischen Physiologie der Pflanzen. Preface. (Leipzig: Voß und Compagnie, 1794), III–XX.

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35

Cf. Dietrich von Engelhardt, “Romantische Mediziner.” In: Klassiker der Medizin II (1991); “Naturforschung im Zeitalter der Romantik,” in Zimmerli 1997, 19–48; and: Medizin in der Literatur der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Verlag Guido Pressler 1991). 36 Zimmerli 1997, 159. 37

NS, 4: 255. “[. . .] In my philosophy of everyday life I’ve happened upon the idea of a moral / in the Hemsterhuisian sense / astronomy, and have made the interesting discovery of the religion of the visible universe. You cannot imagine how farreaching it is. I think I will go far beyond Schelling in this regard. What do you think: might not the correct path be to treat physics in the most general sense thoroughly symbolically? [. . .]” 38 Ernst Behler, “Die frühromantische Sprachtheorie und ihre Auswirkung auf Nietzsche und Foucault,” in Athenäum 2001: 195. 39

NS, 2: 545, no. 105. “The world must be romanticized. This yields again its original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing else than a qualitative potentization. In this operation the lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we ourselves are a potential series of this kind. This operation is still entirely unknown. By giving the higher a common meaning, the everyday, a mysterious semblance, the known, the dignity of the unknown, the finite, the appearance of the infinite, I romanticize it [. . .].” Concerning the role of chaos in Novalis’s writings, see Dennis F. Mahoney, “Hardenbergs Naturbegriff und -darstellung im Lichte moderner Chaostheorien,” in Novalis und die Wissenschaften, edited by Herbert Uerlings (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 107–20. 40 Cf. the large “Mathematische Heft” of 23 June 1798 in NS, 3: 50–53. Also see “Novalis: Kant-Studies (1797).” Translated by David Wood in: The Philosophical Forum, A Quarterly. 32, No. 4, (Winter 2001): 323–38. 41

Chaouli, Athenäum 2001: 68.

42

NS, 3: 253, no.76. NS 2: 386.

43 44

See also Jürgen Daiber, Experimentalphysik des Geistes: Novalis und das romantische Experiment (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001). 45

Jürgen Mittelstrass, Leben mit der Natur, 1991, 43. NS, 3: 266–67; see in this context Gabriele Rommel, “Magie der Zeichen. Novalis Idee einer ‘Zeichenflächenform(figuren)bedeutungskunst’ im Kontext der Freiberger naturwissenschaftlichen Studien” in Alchemie, Magie, Mystik und Natur bei Novalis (Berlin: Edition Leipzig, 1998): 7–16.

46

47

Achim von Arnim, “Anrede an meine Zuhörer,” in Die Erzählungen und Romane, edited by Hans-Georg Werner (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1981), 1: 506–510, here 507. 48 NS, 1: 101–2. “In order to comprehend nature, one must allow her to develop inwardly in her entire sequence. In this undertaking, one must merely let oneself be guided by the divine longing for those beings who are similar to us and by the conditions necessary for perceiving them; for nature can only be truly understood as the instrument and medium of agreement among rational beings. The reflective human being returns to the original function of his existence, to creative contemplation, to that very point where production and knowledge are reciprocally joined in

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the most miraculous fashion, to that creative moment of actual enjoyment, of inner self-conception [. . .]” 49

Käte Hamburger, “Novalis und die Mathematik,” in Philosophie der Dichter: Novalis-Schiller-Rilke. (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1966), 63. 50 Davies 1991, 29. 51

Hamburger 1966, 26.

52

August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Von der Mythologie” in Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst: Berlin 1801–1804. Erster Teil: Die Kunstlehre, AWS, 459–60. Cf. also F. Schlegel. “Rede über die Mythologie” in Gespräch über die Poesie, KFSA, 2: 311– 28.

53

See Dietrich von Engelhardt, Medizin in der Literatur der Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1991).

54

Davies 1991, 26. See the letter from Heinrich von Kleist to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 16 November 1800, in Kleist Werke 4, 153. 55

56

See in this regard Otto Lorenz “Experimentalphysik und Dichtungspraxis: Das ‘geheime Gesetz des Widerspruchs’ im Werk Heinrich von Kleists,” in Die deutsche literarische Romantik und die Wissenschaften 1991: 71–90. For a further discussion of Kleist’s tales, see the essay by Ulrich Scheck in this volume. 57 Roswitha Burwick, “‘Sein Leben ist groß weil es ein Ganzes war’: Arnims Erstlingsroman Hollins Liebeleben als Übergangsversuch von der Wissenschaft zur Dichtung,” in Zimmerli 1997, 50–51. 58

Cf. Johann Christian Reil Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Halle 1803), Reprographischer Nachdruck (Amsterdam: Bonset, 1968); Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert: Gedenkschrift zum 200. Geburtstag des romantischen Naturforschers, Erlanger Forschungen Reihe A Band 25 (Erlangen: 1980). 59

Concerning the role of the physician in Romanticism, see Dietrich von Engelhardt “Klassik und Romantik,” in Medizin in der Literatur der Neuzeit: Schriften zur Psychopathologie, Kunst und Literatur II (Stuttgart: Guido Pressler, 1991), 185.

Gender Studies and Romanticism Martha B. Helfer

H

ISTORICALLY, A PRONOUNCED GENDER BIAS

toward male authors has skewed our critical understanding of German Romanticism. Standard workhorses like Frenzel’s Daten deutscher Dichtung identify the “most important” Romantic writers as Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Eichendorff, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, 1 and Ludwig Tieck. Influential theoretical studies like Jochen Hörisch’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft der Poesie, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute, Manfred Frank’s Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, Winfried Menninghaus’s Unendliche Verdopplung, Azade Seyhan’s Representation and Its Discontents, and Ernst Behler’s German 2 Romantic Literary Theory likewise focus almost exclusively on male authors. As incisive as these analyses are in their articulations of Romantic theory, the theory they articulate clearly is androcentric. In these studies the female Romantics largely play the role of helpmeet to their male companions. For the most part, they are not treated as authors in their own right. And they often are referred to much too familiarly by their first names, an unreflected rhetorical gesture that implicitly suggests these women are not to be taken as seriously as their surnamed male counterparts. Read from a gender perspective, most scholarship on Romantic literary theory tacitly skips over Friedrich Schlegel’s earliest prefigurations and formulations of Romantic criticism in terms of a theory of the feminine — his progressive essays “Ueber die weiblichen Charaktere in den griechischen Dichtern” (On the Feminine Characters in the Greek Poets, 1794), “Über die Diotima” (On Diotima, 1795), and “Über die Philosophie: An Dorothea” (On Philosophy: To Dorothea, 1799) — and reflects instead his markedly more conservative treatment of the feminine in the Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation on Poesy, 1800). In this thinly veiled, fictionalized mise-en-scène of the Jena Romantic Circle men write literary criticism and theory; women write nothing at all; and with the little voice women do have, they actively resist theory and play at best a regulative role in its production. Happily, in the last twenty years or so a rapidly growing body of work in gender studies has begun to reshape this one-sided conceptualization of

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the Romantic era. Important studies like Silvia Bovenschen’s Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit, Christa Bürger’s Leben Schreiben, Katherine Goodman and Edith Waldstein’s In the Shadow of Olympus, and Barbara Becker-Cantarino’s Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, to cite only a few diverse examples, have made substantial inroads into the study of an-“other” Romanticism — the 3 Romanticism of women authors. Freeing Romantic women from the stricture of being regarded solely as wives or companions of famous men, this new research has transformed the study of female authorship in the Romantic era. Scholars have examined the sociohistorical conditions of possibility for large numbers of women to emerge as writers at the end of the eighteenth century. They have investigated the diverse genres, modes of writing, and authorship strategies employed by women who published anonymously, pseudonymously, or under male names. And they have analyzed the significant contributions to Romantic literature, criticism, and culture made by women like Therese Huber (1764–1829), Dorothea Veit-Schlegel (1763– 1839), Caroline Schlegel-Schelling (1763–1809), Sophie Mereau (1770– 1806), Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771–1833), Henriette Herz (1764–1807), Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806), Bettine von Arnim (1785–1859), Friederike Helene Unger (1751–1813), Johanna Schopenhauer (1766– 1838), and Benedikte Naubert (1756–1819): demonstrably gifted and influential letter-writers, diarists, salonnières, political activists, novelists, 4 playwrights, poets, essayists, translators, and writers of fairy tales. This cogent new research analyzing women’s writing tends to approach its subject matter with a theoretical framework derived either implicitly or explicitly from contemporary feminist theory — and rightly so. Yet in this respect one might argue that it faces the same critical limitations as does much of the androcentric scholarship, in that the male Romantics generally are relegated to the sidelines or play fairly minimal roles in studies of the women authors. As a result of this disciplinary gender divide, one avenue of research has yet to be explored fully. The Early Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis is primarily philosophical in its inception and praxis, and most major critics today read the literary works of these male authors and their male contemporaries as instantiations of Romantic theory. Women like Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, and Karoline von Günderrode were conversant with philosophy to a considerable degree, and certainly participated in discussions with Romantic male authors about the nature of Romantic Poesie (poesy). Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel also were active, albeit anonymous, collaborators in the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the short-lived journal project founded by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel in which many of the most famous and far-reaching theoretical writings of Early Romanticism were published. Sara Friedrichsmeyer has argued with good justification that the Jena Romantic Circle owes its very existence to Caroline Schlegel-Schelling,

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who had a fundamental impact on Romantic aesthetics and ethics. With no elaboration Ernst Behler likewise notes Schlegel-Schelling’s decisive influ6 ence on the formulation of Early Romantic theory. Strikingly, although Schlegel-Schelling’s and Veit-Schlegel’s substantial roles in the Jena Romantic Circle are thus highlighted in the scholarship, relatively little attempt has been made to understand their writings or those of their female contemporaries in the same theoretical mode used to analyze the literary production of Romantic male authors. Conversely, there also has been little attempt to explain why these women’s writings should not be understood in the same theoretical mode, a mode that maintains that theory and praxis are one and the same. For the most part, women’s writing remains compartmentalized from this “male” theory. Ironically, the gender schism in Romantic studies even extends to recent discussions of discourses that destabilize or subvert binary gender categories in the Romantic era. Alice Kuzniar’s groundbreaking Outing Goethe and His Age, Robert Tobin’s Warm Brothers: Queer Theory in the Age of Goethe, Sara Friedrichsmeyer’s The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism, and Catriona MacLeod’s Embodying Ambiguity offer astute, synthetic analyses of discourses that break down conventional binary gender categories. Yet these studies all adhere to binary gender categories to some degree in that they 7 concentrate primarily on male-authored texts. At the risk of generalizing too simplistically, one might well assert that in comprehensive analyses of Romantic theory most mainstream scholarship to date has segregated the works of its male and female authors and created a de facto institutional gender 8 dichotomy in Romantic studies. The heuristic bifurcation of the Romantic era along gender lines is methodologically problematic, and two fundamental questions need to be broached in studies of gender and German Romanticism at this critical juncture. First, following the line of analysis introduced by Anne Mellor in her study of gender and British Romanticism, we must ask whether “a paradigm shift in our conceptual understanding of [. . .] Romanticism occurs when we give equal weight to the thought and writing of the women of the 9 period.” More research on women’s authorship is needed on both archival and interpretative levels to establish a comprehensive corpus of German Romantic writing in its entirety, and to re-evaluate the status of women writers vis-à-vis “male” Romantic theory and the male Romantic canon. Are there specifically male and female modes of poetic production in German Romanticism? In Mellor’s terms, is there a “masculine” Romanticism and a “feminine” Romanticism, where “masculine” Romanticism generally corresponds to the works of male authors and “feminine” Romanticism to the works of female authors, although female authors may participate in the 10 “masculine” model, and vice versa? Or have we essentialized Romantic discourse incorrectly or incompletely by studying its male and female writers

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in relative isolation from each another? Ultimately, this integrative line of research may lead to a reconceptualization of Romantic theory as a whole. The second question that must be addressed in studies of Romanticism and gender is related to this global reconceptualization of the Romantic era. We need to re-read individual texts by both male and female authors, and consider whether our methodological approaches to these texts have occluded important dimensions of the discourse on gender formulated by the Romantics themselves, to examine whether new interpretative paradigms are possible, indeed necessary. The following essay does not attempt to answer either of these questions — how contemporary gender studies conceptualizes Romanticism, and how this critical framework shapes our understanding of the Romantics’ conception of gender — completely. Instead, it sets two more modest goals that address these issues peripherally. First, it aims to show how gender studies is essential to the theory and praxis of Early Romanticism, and in so doing sketches out one possible method for moving toward the construction of an integrative reading of German Romanticism. Second, it aims to open up a new dimension of the Romantic discourse on gender by calling into question our current critical understanding of a central Romantic topos: the female as the inspiration, source, and ground of true Poesie. Motivating this essay is the following working thesis: if mainstream scholarship overemphasizes the works of male Romantic authors at the expense of female Romantic authors in constructing Romantic theory, it conversely overemphasizes the feminine at the expense of the masculine in interpreting Romantic discourse. The essay’s three sections explicate this thesis from different perspectives. The first examines contemporary research that highlights the feminine in Early Romanticism. The second considers the complex gender flux that grounds models of subjectivity in the Romantic aesthetic program, focusing on Karoline von Günderrode’s suicide, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799), and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s Florentin (1801) as diverse gendered attempts to define the subject aesthetically. The final section questions the conventional valorization of the feminine in our conception of Romantic poetic production by briefly examining the figure of the male muse in three mainstream Romantic texts: Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814), and Joseph von Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1819).

Feminisms In its inception, Early German Romanticism calls into question the conditions of possibility, the contents, and the limits of established disciplines like philosophy, mathematics, the natural sciences, and art, thereby effecting a

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transgressive critique of traditional modes of discourse. In this respect one might argue that the Romantic program as a whole is fundamentally feminist in import. This reading is bolstered in no small part by Friedrich Schlegel’s grounding of the Romantic project in a “Theorie der Weiblichkeit” (theory of the feminine), Novalis’s equating of his beloved, Sophie von Kühn, with his philosophical program of self-definition (NS, 4: 188), and the thoroughgoing gender play that informs Romantic writing. Yet such an argument for a fundamental feminist impulse in Romanticism perforce would be ironic (and irony, of course, is an essential component of Romantic discourse). First, because Romanticism, even in its most transgressive literary moment — Friedrich Schlegel’s wayward novel Lucinde — reinscribes traditional gender categories while simultaneously calling these categories into question. Moreover, one would be hard-pressed to find a feminist component in Romanticism’s most transgressive philosophical moment — Novalis’s shockingly unabashed celebration of rape as the highest pleasure (NS, 3: 262, no. 17) — subsumed under the heading “natural science” in his encyclopedia project, Das Allgemeine Brouillon (General Draft, 1798–99). Finally, female Romantic authors would seem — on the surface, at least — to cling to conventional gender roles even more tenaciously than do their male counterparts. But irony notwithstanding, texts by women Romantic authors like Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Sophie Mereau, and Karoline von Günderrode programmatically construct a feminist Romantic aesthetic that demands a different mode of reading than does the discourse on gender articulated in the theoretical and literary works of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. And the discourse on gender set forth by these male authors, while perhaps not truly feminist, programmatically and progressively challenges the status quo. Writing against the backdrop of the increasingly conservative polarization of binary gender categories in the economic and social spheres that occurred 11 at the end of the eighteenth century, both male and female Romantic authors experiment with a fluidity of gender categories in their writing. Indeed, a critique of gender is essential to the Romantic project. Recent studies have analyzed this gender critique by highlighting the primacy of the feminine in the critical discourse of Early German Romanticism. Reading Friedrich Schlegel’s early philological essays “Ueber die weiblichen Charaktere in den griechischen Dichtern” and “Über die Diotima” in conjunction with “Über die Philosophie: An Dorothea,” Lucinde, and selected notes and fragments, Winfried Menninghaus has argued convincingly that the “theory of the feminine” expressed in these works forms an 12 integral part of Schlegel’s poetic, scientific, and philosophical thought. Menninghaus’s cogent analysis provides an excellent overview of a core group of texts central to the Romantics’ discourse on gender, and also serves as an illustration of how mainstream scholarship has approached this polyvalent discourse from a single perspective. The following discussion reviews

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Menninghaus’s interpretation of Schlegel’s “theory of the feminine,” augmenting his analysis with background information on these core texts and casting an inquiring eye on his emphasis of the feminine. In Menninghaus’s reading, the first of Schlegel’s essays on the feminine, “Ueber die weiblichen Charaktere in den griechischen Dichtern,” which was published for a female readership in the Leipziger Monatsschrift für Frauen, details how the systematic oppression of women, the lack of respect accorded them in Greek society, was not only reflected, but also overcome in Greek literature. “Über die Diotima” traces the same themes in Greek society and in philological reconstructions of Greek society historically. Both thus con13 stitute landmarks in the history of women’s emancipation. Their greatest innovation, however, lies not in what they say, but in what they do not say. Menninghaus interprets the dearth of positive, defining statements about the nature of the feminine in these early essays not as a symptom of an incompletely conceived theory — surely a possible diagnosis, but one that Menninghaus side-steps — but as Schlegel’s critique of formulaic anthropological models of masculinity and femininity. The gender theory of the philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) offers a prime example of this type of anthropological model. In his contemporaneous essays “Über den Geschlechtsunterschied und dessen Einfluss auf die organische Natur” (On the Difference between the Sexes and its Influence on Organic Nature, 1794) and “Über die männliche und weibliche Form” (On Masculine and Feminine Forms, 1795), Humboldt defines man’s and woman’s mental characters according to the physical roles they play in sexual intercourse. Men are active, energetic, and have greater faculties of reason than do women; women are receptive, passive, and less capable of abstract and analytic thought than are men. Schlegel, in contrast, breaks down strict gender dualisms and instead merges the masculine and feminine in his theoretical 14 construction of an ideal, complete humanity. Menninghaus notes that Schlegel also was critical of the repressive conceptions of the feminine propagated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schiller, and the philosopher and novelist Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743– 1819). Rousseau’s tremendously influential Émile (1762) prescribes a pedagogical program in which woman is educated to be man’s helpmeet; in Schlegel’s acute assessment Rousseau had assembled an assortment of common platitudes in his doctrine of femininity, presenting nonsense so systematically that it met with general approval. Schiller’s “Würde der Frauen” (Women’s Dignity, 1795), a pedestrian poem that attempts to characterize men’s and women’s differing natures by praising women for weaving heavenly roses into earthly life and calming men’s impulsive behavior, was the object of parody and ridicule among the Jena Romantics. Jacobi’s Woldemar (1794) promotes absolute submissiveness as the highest feminine virtue, and

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Schlegel criticized the novel’s title figure for being an egotistical, spiritual 15 sensualist who uses women for his own pleasure without loving them. However, Schlegel was notably noncommittal about the sharply regressive statements about women made by his friend and philosophical mentor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). In a 38-paragraph discussion of family law appended to his Grundlage des Naturrechts (Foundation of Natural Law, 1796), Fichte, like Humboldt, defines men’s and women’s characters according to their “active” and “receptive” sex roles. Fichte argues that the unmarried woman must submit to her parents’ violence, the married woman to her husband’s; and that the woman must subjugate herself completely to 16 the man’s will in marriage. Schlegel does not criticize the core of Fichte’s “doctrine of femininity,” noting in response only that women are not “passive” but “antithetical, physical, and moral” (KFSA, 18: 34, no. 164). Fichte’s acerbic pronouncements and Schlegel’s reticent reaction to them must be interpreted in their historical context. As Theresa Kelley has argued, the fact that women did not gain constitutional citizenship rights in the French Revolution constitutes a major turning point in the European debate 17 about women and gender. In stark contrast to Fichte, writers across Europe eloquently and forcefully fought for women’s rights in the wake of the Revolution. In France the political activist and pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges (1748–93) circulated Les Droits de la Femme et la Citoyenne (1791). In Britain the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). And in Germany the jurist Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–96) penned an anonymous treatise Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On the Civic Advancement of 18 Women, 1792). In Menninghaus’s view, Schlegel presents his own theory of independent femininity in Lucinde, a text that proposes that men and women switch sexual roles in a sensual allegory of the completion of male and female in full, complete humanity (KFSA, 5: 13). Menninghaus does not draw attention to the fact that in Lucinde Schlegel subsequently singles out the male only as embodying this androgynous ideal (KFSA, 5: 21–22). In the letter “Über die Philosophie,” addressed to his lover Dorothea Veit but intended for all women, Schlegel identifies philosophy, precisely because it moves from concrete to abstract thought, as the best means for women to expand their socially determined narrow thought processes and to work out of their 19 restrictive social spheres. It should be noted that these statements arguably constitute a remarkable volte-face for Schlegel. In 1791 and 1792 the young Schlegel had asserted that while he liked to think about women, he did not hold them or their mental faculties in high esteem, and that he wanted to see whether one could use male love to forget female love. Menninghaus maintains the “male love” at issue here is solely spiritual, an assessment Lucinde 20 would seem to belie. Menninghaus reads Schlegel’s fragments and notes on

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the feminine on a continuum with his early essays, highlighting Schlegel’s discussion of his theory of the feminine in terms of plants and flowers, and drawing important correlations to his aesthetic theory. In coding the novel feminine, for example, Schlegel identifies the genre as a progressive discourse that breaks out of conventional, normative restrictions. Menninghaus regards Novalis’s statements about the feminine to be largely derivative of Schlegel’s. Included in his discussion is a consideration of the natural philosophy of the feminine developed by the Romantic scientist Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810). In Ritter’s posthumously published Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch für Freunde der Natur (Fragments from the Unpublished Papers of a Young Physicist: A Handbook for Friends of Nature, 1810), interrelated natural phenomena are gendered “male” and “female.” Building on Menninghaus’s synthetic and far-reaching analysis, Lisa Roetzel likewise stresses the centrality of the feminine to Romantic criticism, 21 but does so with an innovative shift of emphasis to Novalis. She takes as her starting point Novalis’s famous equation of his passion for knowledge, philosophy (etymologically, philo, love of sophia, wisdom), with his eponymous “love of Sophie,” his real-life love of the barely pubescent Sophie von 22 Kühn (1782–97). Extrapolating, Roetzel maintains that the female body and the body of philosophy become one and the same, that philosophy is feminine for the Romantics. In her reading, the members of the Jena Romantic Circle feminize philosophy to challenge the entire Western philo23 sophical tradition, which was coded as masculine and addressed to men. Thus, for example, Schlegel and Novalis call into question the primacy of the male subject in the Western philosophical tradition when they define the 24 subject as “feminine” and the object as “masculine” in their own works. But this gender critique cannot be entirely successful, Roetzel argues with reference to Novalis’s “love of Sophie,” because Romanticism simultaneously repeats traditional philosophy’s inscription of the male as the desiring subject and the female as the object of desire. Consequently, she notes a tension inherent in Romantic writing between revolutionary approaches to 25 the feminine and conventional gender politics. Roetzel moves beyond Menninghaus in allotting Dorothea VeitSchlegel and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling muted voices in her discussion. Veit-Schlegel’s incisive critique of philosophical discourse — that words like 26 “sublime” are shifting signifiers whose meaning is unstable — and the satire, irony, and wit that animate Schlegel-Schelling’s letters and essays clearly constitute important moments in Romantic criticism. Roetzel also considers the descriptions of daily life in these women’s letters and diaries — genres that are, in her view, traditionally coded as “female” — as comprising another dimension of the Jena Circle’s program. In Roetzel’s provocative assessment, the women Romantics were not particularly concerned with

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“theorizing Romanticism” but with practicing it, not so much through their writings, but through their lives: “for Schlegel-Schelling and Veit-Schlegel 27 Romantic critique meant living as Romantics.” Menninghaus and Roetzel are correct to emphasize the centrality of the feminine in Romantic discourse, and they are correct to emphasize the fact that both Schlegel and Novalis propound a “theory of the feminine” as an integral component of the Jena Romantic program. However, one might question their claims that the women Romantic authors themselves did not construct a “theory of the feminine” in their writings — an argument Menninghaus makes by omission and Roetzel makes by a qualified denial. One also might question whether the male Romantics’ wide-ranging and diffuse statements about the feminine should be read synthetically or programmatically only under the rubric “theory of the feminine,” whether they should be privileged over the concomitant critique of the masculine formulated in many of the same writings. As a case in point, if Novalis, echoing Schlegel, defines the subject as feminine and the object as masculine, he, like Schlegel, does so singularly, fragmentarily, and without elaboration. Novalis also states that men are to a certain extent women, just as women are to a certain extent men (NS, 3: 262, no. 117), suggesting a melding, rather than a prioritization of gender categories. In the poem “Astralis,” which inaugurates the transition in Heinrich von Ofterdingen from Part I’s “Erwartung” (Expectation) to Part II’s “Erfüllung” (Fulfillment), Novalis likewise emphasizes the merger of gender categories in the production of the subject in his description of the genesis of the poetic figure Astralis from the fusion of Heinrich’s and Mathilde’s separate bodies “in einem Bilde” (in a single image, NS, I: 318). Similarly, Lucinde should not be read solely in terms of Schlegel’s “theory of the feminine.” Thematically, the text focuses not on its female title figure but on its male protagonist; structurally, it revolves around a central and lengthy “Lehrjahre der Männlichkeit” (Apprenticeship of Masculinity). Furthermore, Schlegel actually had plans to complement the masculine bias in the extant text with a corresponding analysis of the feminine (KFSA, 24: 252–53), but this sequel never appeared. Indeed, it bears mention that the phrase “theory of the feminine” has been extracted peremptorily from one of Schlegel’s fragments, where it does not have a primary, but a tertiary ranking: “Die Theorie des Sterbens gehört zum Roman wie die Theorie der Wollust und der Weiblichkeit” (The theory of dying is a component of the novel, as are the theory of lust and the theory 28 of the feminine). Although it is true that Schlegel identifies the novel as feminine in three fragments — to be sure, in one of these fragments his 29 wording is provisional — it is equally true that he calls this identification into question in his own literary praxis. In the prologue to Lucinde he pronounces his femininely-named novel, with characteristic wit, “his son” (KFSA, 5: 3). In an ensuing section of the text, “Charakteristik der kleinen

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Wilhelmine” (Character Sketch of Little Wilhelmine), he compares his novel to a little girl with a masculine name (KFSA, 5: 15). And in the novel’s “Allegorie von der Frechheit” (Allegory of Impudence), he assigns four young men to represent a typology of the novel. These examples suggest we should re-examine our understanding of the function of the feminine in Romantic discourse in light of the programmatic polyvalence of Romantic discourse and the pronounced gender play that informs it. The feminine clearly plays an important — but not an exclusive — role in the theory and praxis of Romanticism. Other facets of the Romantic discourse on gender emerge when we deflate the feminine, as it were, and consider the complex gender flux that animates the core of the Jena Romantic aesthetic program — the poetic definition of the subject or “I” — from a different vantage.

Engendering the Subject Early German Romanticism developed its theoretical framework from the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his Idealist successor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Addressing shortcomings in Kant’s and Fichte’s models of self-definition, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, the leading theoreticians of Early Romanticism, extend philosophical discourse into the poetic realm, arguing that the “I” must define itself in a self-reflexive act of autopoiesis or self-creation. (Auto means “self”; poiesis, the etymological root of the words “Poesie” and “poetry,” is derived from the Greek verb meaning “to make” 30 or “to create”). The derivation of this theory of autopoiesis is laid out in Novalis’s Fichte-Studien (1795–96). In an incisive critique of Fichte’s model of the self-positing subject, Novalis identifies a vicious circle in the one seemingly incontrovertible principle that grounds Fichte’s entire philosophical system, the statement “I=I.” Novalis argues that the fact of selfconsciousness cannot be derived from the reflexive act of self-positing, since reflection, by definition a mirroring, always results in a reversal or inversion in the subject’s self-representation: “Das Bild ist immer das Verkehrte vom Seyn” (The image is always the inverse of Being, NS, 2: 142, no. 63). Novalis proposes to correct this unavoidable inversion in the subject’s selfpositing poetically, maintaining that poetry is capable of representing the unrepresentable, the pure ego. In one of the final fragments of the FichteStudien Novalis concludes: “Vollständiges Ich zu seyn, ist eine Kunst” (Being a complete subject is an art, NS, 2: 294, no. 659). In the praxis of the Early Romantics this artistic self-definition or autopoeisis takes place in the literary text: poetic language — in its multiple, mutable, metaphoric 31 transformations — is the means by which the subject makes or creates itself. Hence, Early Romanticism experiments with discursive strategies for creating the “complete” subject poetically; and gender, sexuality, and repro-

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ductive metaphors figure prominently in these (pro-)creative efforts. For the male poet, producing Poesie becomes a paternal affair. As Novalis asserts in one of his fragments: “Dichten ist zeugen. Alles Gedichtete muß ein lebendiges Individuum seyn” (To produce poetry is to beget. All poetic production must be a living individual, NS, 2: 534, no. 36). Ironically invoking an organic maternal metaphor to describe his poetic production, Friedrich 32 Schlegel likewise calls Lucinde his “son.” Similarly, Johann Wilhelm Ritter states: “Die Kunst scheint das Gebähren des Mannes zu seyn [. . .]. Das Weib gebiert Menschen, der Mann das Kunstwerck. [. . .] Der Mann geht aus der Liebe schwanger mit dem Kunstwerck, das Weib schwanger mit dem Kind hervor. Menschheit und Kunst sind zwei Gechlechter” (Art appears to be man’s way of giving birth [. . .]. Woman bears humans; man, the work of art. Man emerges from love pregnant with the work of art; woman, preg33 nant with child. Humanity and art are two sexes). Ritter’s formulation underscores one of the central components of the Romantics’ discourse on gender: the male poet’s desire to give birth to living art, to engender himself in a self-reflexive act of self-positing, requires him to take on feminine characteristics, to appropriate woman’s child-bearing capabilities for himself. From this perspective, Romanticism propounds a theory of the feminine for men. Accordingly, a critique of gender not only informs Romantic discourse, it constitutes its very condition of possibility. In a nuanced analysis of the Romantics’ use of parturition and conception images to describe poetic creativity Alice Kuzniar has interpreted the fluid inflection of gender categories in Romantic writing similarly, proposing that “the Romantic poetic and philosophical project may be grounded in 34 terms of reversible gender positions.” Kuzniar delineates an important distinction between male and female Romantic writers. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis appropriate the birth topos to make poetic writing seem natural and spontaneous. But for Karoline von Günderrode, a female author aware of the risks of crossing into the male poetic realm around 1800, writing and birth lead — figuratively and literally — to death. “Was mich tödtet zu gebähren” (how it kills me to give birth), the childless Günderrode exclaims in verse, referring to her poetic production, which appears stillborn (“Ist für 35 mich wie nicht gebohren” [Is for me as if not born]). She then writes with her body, writes her non-procreating body to death. She has her doctor mark the location of her heart on her chest, nicks her bosom, and sends a blood-stained handkerchief to her long-time lover, the philologist Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), a married man who eventually jilts her. Günderrode then stabs herself in the heart three times. Thus, Kuzniar concludes that Günderrode, like her male contemporaries, resisted strict gender affiliation and coding — in her case, as a woman who refused to give birth to a “living” poem. But, unlike Schlegel and Novalis, Günderrode did not feel free to switch genders creatively: “Although the male romantic crosses over into

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the female domain to give birth to verse, this female romantic faces death 36 when she enters the male sphere of the poetic.” Alternately, one might read Günderrode’s suicide as the highest expression of Romantic theory. Writing on her breast — writing with her 37 breast — the poetess kills herself in a self-reflexive act of aesthetic selfdefinition, incising her wretched roman — the failed love affair or roman in the true sense of the word — into her female body. In so doing, she critically enacts Friedrich Schlegel’s “theory of the feminine” to the letter: “Die Theorie des Sterbens gehört zum Roman wie die Theorie der Wollust und der Weiblichkeit” (The theory of dying is a component of the novel, as are the theory of lust and the theory of the feminine). For the Romantics, theory is praxis: “Absolute Vollendung ist nur im Tode” (Absolute completion exists only in death, KFSA, 2: 286), Friedrich Schlegel writes in Gespräch über die Poesie. If Günderrode’s suicide tragically enacts a feminist critique of Schlegel’s theory of the feminine for women, Schlegel’s Lucinde ironically enacts a critique of the feminine — more precisely, a critique of gender per se — for men. On the surface a thinly disguised fictionalization of Schlegel’s scandalous affair with Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, this “mad little book” addressed to “happy young men” (KFSA, 5: 32) was castigated by Schlegel’s contemporaries for its obscene celebration of erotic love. More recently critics have downplayed the novel’s overt sexuality, interpreting the densely argued, programmatically opaque text from numerous, at times conflicting, gender perspectives. In these various readings Lucinde promotes a feminist theory of woman and women’s emancipation; a progressive theory of the truly androgynous subject; a male-centered theory of androgyny in which the male projects himself onto the female; or an incisive critique of gender as a 38 performative. These interpretations all are valid to varying degrees. As Kuzniar has observed, irony conceivably infuses the presentation of gender in the text, such that “contradictory sexual, gender, and authorial positions 39 are either simultaneously or sequentially operative in Lucinde.” Similarly, Marc Redfield has maintained that gender must be thought of in terms of irony, that gender identity itself is ironic in that it constantly undermines 40 itself in Schlegel’s novel. A homoerotic subtext subtends Lucinde, a thesis in keeping with Kuzniar’s and Redfield’s arguments about the shifting, polyvalent gender 41 positions in the text. Paradoxical though it may seem in a text that takes a heterosexual couple as its focus, the novel propounds an aesthetic theory of a male sexuality infused with homoeroticism. This same-sex desire, an expression of Romantic reflexivity, plays an integral role in the male subject’s autopoiesis, the self-reflexive self-construction of the male subject as art. In Lucinde the artist Julius takes on the role of woman in a series of homosexual liaisons and homoerotic fantasies that are depicted using a complex

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system of code words and floral metaphors. His seemingly heterosexual, androgynous relationship with Lucinde, permeated with narcissism, homoeroticism, and a love of Lucinde as his “mother,” allows him to appropriate her pregnancy to create himself vicariously as a “Kunstwerk” (work of art, KFSA, 5: 57). The narrator takes this procreative gesture one step further in the novel’s prologue when he deploys a maternal metaphor to describe his poetic production, and then calls Lucinde his “son.” But the novel itself undercuts this male autocreative effort in a self-reflexive act of Romantic criticism: at the end of the text Julius strews flowers on the grave of his toosoon-departed son, presumably the novel itself, suggesting that in the poetic sphere male birthing produces unviable offspring. In the novel Lucinde recognizes the true nature of Julius’s attraction to her, and overtly criticizes her lover for his homoerotic aesthetic. This raises the question whether Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, the model for Lucinde, recognized the true import of Lucinde and responded in kind with an intertextual critique: the title of her own novel, Florentin, may well refer to an eighteenth-century code word 42 for homosexuality, “Florenzen” (to “Florence”). Indeed, Florentin stages a feminist Romantic aesthetic that can be read as a direct response to the homoerotic aesthetic underlying Schlegel’s Lucin43 de. On the surface an insipid novel about a young nobleman in search of his origins who enters into an upright German family, disrupts its orderly ethos, and then disappears without learning anything about himself, the text is, in effect, an anti-Bildungsroman. The novel’s contrary stance to conventional aesthetic forms is reflected in a series of statements Veit-Schlegel made explaining why her novel is not a novel; the novel itself is structured around a series of metonymic displacements and absences that resist closure. Significantly, Veit-Schlegel borrowed liberally from male-authored novels in con44 structing this retrograde aesthetic. As a result, Florentin was criticized for its lack of originality and dullness when it first appeared in print. However, this mimicry masks an incisive feminist critique that is expressed both in the novel’s female characters, who are one-dimensional foolish figures, and in the male title character. The outsider Florentin with the feminine floral name enters into a conventional German family, ethic, and aesthetic as a welcome disruptive force; more precisely, he functions as a figure of subversion in a parodic masculinist discourse patterned on Schlegel’s Lucinde. Like Schlegel’s Julius, Florentin undergoes an “apprenticeship of masculinity” infused with homoeroticism; like Julius, his interpersonal relationships are primarily narcissistic; like Julius, he is an artist who aestheticizes the events of his life; and like Julius, he tries to commandeer his lover’s pregnancy to project himself into a position of autoengenderment. Unlike Julius, however, Florentin’s aesthetic program of self-definition is abruptly terminated when his lover decides to have an abortion, thereby “murdering” Florentin (his own words) and effecting a stunning feminist critique of androcentric theo-

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ries of autopoiesis. Tellingly, the feminist Romantic aesthetic staged in Florentin does not contain a positive depiction of the feminine subject. Precisely this absence of the feminine in a masculinist discourse constitutes Veit-Schlegel’s “theory of the feminine,” a thesis entirely in accord with Friedrich Schlegel’s assertion that the essence of feminine writing lies not in what is said, but in what is not said by women (KFSA, 16: 217, no. 167). Other Romantic women authors experimented with a wide variety of theoretical modes for constructing the female subject poetically. Like VeitSchlegel’s, their writings can — and should — be read both with and against “male” Romantic theory, and our critical understanding of Romantic theory must be adjusted accordingly. Three examples that invite further research are 45 cited here. Sara Friedrichsmeyer has argued persuasively that Caroline Schlegel-Schelling used the genre of letter-writing to explore avenues for 46 constructing various versions of the female self. This self-reflexive creation of the female subject in epistolary form, of woman inscribing her multiplicity, clearly is an expression of autopoiesis that resonates with contemporary 47 gender theory, in particular the feminist theory of Luce Irigaray. Similarly, in an intricate analysis of an excerpt Günderrode made of Novalis’s posthumously published “Das Lied der Toten” (The Song of the Dead, 1802), Sabine Gölz interprets the poetess’s female authorial stance as a response to male theories of subjectivity. Gölz maintains that in redacting Novalis’s poem Günderrode delineates two mutually incompatible economies of reading: “one centered around the construction of a (male-) gendered author, the other centered around an ungendered, self-reflexive readerly 48 subject.” Finally, Bettine von Arnim’s epistolary novel Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, 1835) presents a model of female autopoiesis in the form of a largely fictional exchange between von Arnim as a poetically constructed subject and the literary luminary 49 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the quintessential male muse. In drawing on such highly statured, authoritative masculine inspiration as the ground of autopoiesis, the self-styled “child” von Arnim ironically, critically, and selfconsciously aligns the theory of female self-definition effected in her text with a male-authored Romantic paradigm.

Male Muses Three mainstream Romantic narratives that likewise invoke male muses suggest that male inspiration plays a more important role in Romantic poetic production than has been recognized in previous scholarship. Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf, and Joseph von Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild — representative of Early Romanticism, High Romanticism, and Late Romanticism — present models of autopoiesis in which the male subject defines himself or is defined as an

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artist. According to the surface storylines of these narratives, female inspi51 ration is a formative component of the male artist’s self-definition. The “blue flower” Mathilde teaches Heinrich von Ofterdingen to sing. The snake Serpentina guides Anselmus into the poetic realm of Atlantis, where he will be rewarded with her “golden pot.” And the productive tension between the marble statue Venus and her chaste Christian counterpart Bianka is essential to the aspiring poet Florio’s self-definition. There can be no doubt that the female does function as the avatar of Poesie in these texts. But given the ironic, self-reflexive, self-critical nature of Romantic discourse and the fluid gender categories that animate it, it is entirely conceivable that the texts simultaneously inscribe alternate gendered models of selfdefinition, and that other interpretative methods for analyzing the function of gender in these texts are both valid and necessary. The following analysis calls into question the conventional, exclusive emphasis on the feminine in the male artist’s self-definition by drawing attention to a competing discourse in each text in which a male muse functions as the inspiration, source, and ground of autopoiesis. Perhaps the most graphic example of woman troped as the true source of Romantic Poesie occurs in “Klingsohrs Märchen,” the celebrated fairy tale from Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The fairy tale culminates with the female character Fabel (Fable) — the tale’s self-reflexive representation of Poesie — defeating the evil male Writer and singing and spinning the text of the future from her own breast. And in the novel itself the budding minstrel Heinrich famously sees a blue flower in a highly erotic dream and then finds creative inspiration in the master poet Klingsohr’s daughter Mathilde, whose face he had seen in the blue flower of his dream. But even this brief explication of Novalis’s novel points to a significant oversight in standard interpretations. While it is true that Romanticism casts the definition of the male artist in terms of woman, the true source of Poesie, it is equally true that this female figure is subordinate to and dependent on an exoteric male figure. In this case: the master poet Klingsohr himself, the progenitor of both Fabel and Mathilde. Significantly, Heinrich is immediately attracted to Klingsohr, but has to be guided by his grandfather to even notice Mathilde in the first place. Heinrich himself acknowledges Klingsohr’s essential role in his own self-definition when he characterizes Mathilde as “die sichtbare Geist des Gesanges, eine würdige Tochter ihres Vaters” (the visible spirit of song, a worthy daughter of her father, NS, I: 277). Importantly, the text repeatedly defines Mathilde as the projection of her father. The primacy of male poetic inspiration in Heinrich’s autopoiesis is underscored on the structural level of the text: the novel consists primarily of a series of stories about male poets narrated by men; the subject Heinrich both constructs himself and is constructed poetically in the interweaving of these male discourses. Moreover, this male poetic ground apparently is metaphysical in nature: in notes for the

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continuation of his fragmentary novel Novalis identifies Klingsohr as the “eternal poet” who does not die, but stays on earth forever (NS, I: 348). Similarly, in Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf the bumbling “poetic spirit” Anselmus would seem to gain entrance into the fluid poetic realm of Atlantis by learning to listen to — and transcribe — the sibilant, melodious voice of the Archivist Lindhorst’s daughter Serpentina. This ideal woman — who, ironically, is a snake — narrates her father’s manuscripts and her father’s genealogy to Anselmus as he copies these male urtexts. But from the start of the narrative Serpentina’s voice is conspicuously controlled by her father, who first sends Serpentina and her sisters to flirt with Anselmus, abruptly silences these female poetic voices and calls his daughters home again, and then provides the texts Serpentina vocalizes for Anselmus. Moreover, it is not the successful translation or transcription of the female poetic voice that enables Anselmus to become a poet; Anselmus in fact fails this test when Lindhorst’s control over his poetic initiation is challenged by a powerful female figure, the “Äpfelweib” (Apple Woman). Anselmus’s entrance into Atlantis actually is predicated on a central battle between the archivist Lindhorst and his archnemesis the Äpfelweib, in which this Eve figure strips naked and armors her wizened female body with parchment from Lindhorst’s library to no avail. The defeat of this female poetic figure by the patriarch Lindhorst — by profession a guardian of texts — paves the way for Anselmus’s transcendence into the fluid poetic realm of Atlantis. Indeed, the history of Lindhorst’s own expulsion from Atlantis — which programmatically reverses the gendering of the biblical Fall story — constitutes the precondition for Anselmus’s transition into the poetic realm. The salamander Lindhorst, who had insisted on throwing his spark, “der Gedanke” (knowledge), into his love the lily and destroying her, has been banished from the Edenic Atlantis because of his audacious behavior. Lindhorst has been sentenced to life on earth until he finds three poetic spirits who will marry his snaky daughters. Lindhorst’s mythic autobiography provides the condition of possibility for the surface storyline narrating Anselmus’s transition into the liquid poetic realm of Atlantis. Likewise, at the conclusion of Hoffmann’s “modern fairy tale,” Lindhorst’s raspy, discordant voice, emanating from a golden chalice of flaming liquid arrack, both grounds and enables the male narrator’s production of the text itself: Lindhorst provides the poetic inspiration necessary for the narrator to complete his story. Finally, in Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild the aspiring poet Florio seems to find his voice by learning to choose the chaste Christian woman Bianka over the seductive heathen Venus image, the embodiment of a dangerous female sexuality and a dangerous female art. But it is the male minstrel Fortunato who provides true artistic inspiration for Florio. Significantly, Florio is attracted to Fortunato’s body, his very being, and his voice from the start of the text: “Dem jungen Florio dünkte die schlanke Gestalt des Frem-

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den, sein frisches keckes Wesen, ja selbst seine fröhliche Stimme so überaus anmutig, daß er gar nicht von demselben wegsehen konnte” (the stranger’s slender figure, his fresh, bold being, indeed even his joyful voice struck the youth Florio as so exceedingly attractive that he could not look away from 52 him). In the course of the narrative, the minstrel’s songs save Florio from the wiles of the Venus image and help him translate his desire for Fortunato and for the seductive marble statue into a conventional, chaste, heterosexual paradigm. Bianka — who is compared to the Virgin Mary in Fortunato’s final song — appears as a boy but is then revealed to be a girl at the end of the narrative. Florio’s homoerotic desire is thereby normalized metonymically. However, in an autocritical gesture the text suggests that the male artistic inspiration Fortunato gives voice to can be as dangerously alluring as the seductive heathen art of the marble statue. On meeting Florio for the first time Fortunato cautions him to guard against the “Spielmann” (male minstrel) who lures youths into a magic mountain from which they cannot escape. This warning would seem to apply not to the marble statue and her “Venusberg,” or to her servant Donati, who never sings or plays music in the narrative, but to Fortunato himself, the only male minstrel identified in the text. Obviously an analysis of the function of the male muse in these texts demands far greater finesse than has been attempted here due to space considerations. The aim here is to delineate a new dimension of the Romantics’ discourse on gender by suggesting that male muses play an essential role in the Romantics’ conception of Poesie. In the concluding conversation of the Gespräch über die Poesie Schlegel’s self-styled Romantics turn to classical mythology and find three gendered models of autopoiesis to inspire their own writing. First, the weeping Niobe, whose many children were murdered by Artemis and Apollo because she boasted her procreative abilities were superior to those of their mother, Leto. Second, the artist Prometheus, who fashioned humans from clay and was bound by the gods as punishment for his audacity. Finally, the flute player Marsyas, who successfully challenged Apollo’s music-playing abilities by equaling him in a flute-playing contest. This was no small feat, given that Apollo, god of music and poetry, presides over the Muses on Mount Parnassus. But Marsyas then lost in a rematch and was flayed. Of these three myths, the tale of Marsyas and Apollo holds sway as a model of artistic inspiration. Very occasionally, Schlegel comments in the second edition of the Gespräch über die Poesie (1823), the sounds of Apollo’s lyre reach our mortal ears, while the weeping mother Niobe, who was turned to stone, threatens to petrify Romantic poetic production (KFSA, 2: 362).

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Notes 1

Herbert A. Frenzel, Daten deutscher Dichtung (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1953), 305–7. Many later editions, coedited with Elisabeth Frenzel. 2

Jochen Hörisch, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft der Poesie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988); Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdopplung: Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: U of California P, 1992); Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1993). 3 Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); Christa Bürger, Leben Schreiben: Die Klassik, Die Romantik und der Ort der Frauen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990); Katherine R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein, eds., In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers around 1800 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992); Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2000). 4 For excellent introductory overviews of many of these women writers see the essays in Goodman and Waldstein, as well as Becker-Cantarino. 5

Sara Friedrichsmeyer, “Caroline Schlegel-Schelling: ‘A Good Woman, and No Heroine,’” in Goodman and Waldstein, 115–36, here p. 132. 6

Behler, 40. Alice Kuzniar, ed., Outing Goethe and His Age (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996); Robert Tobin, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory in the Age of Goethe (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000); Sara Friedrichsmeyer, The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, and New York: Peter Lang, 1983); Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998). 8 One notable study that does work across gender lines is Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der romantische Brief: Die Entstehung ästhetischer Subjektivität (Vienna and Munich: Hanser, 1987). 7

9

Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 1. 10 Mellor, 11. 11

See Karin Hausen, “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharaktere’: Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit: Neue Forschung, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 363–93. 12

Winfried Menninghaus, “Nachwort” to Friedrich Schlegel, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, ed. Menninghaus (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1982), 185–223. The following discus-

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sion of Menninghaus’s essay attempts to follow the tenor and wording of his analysis closely. Ironically, despite the emphasis Menninghaus places on Schlegel’s “theory of the feminine” in this volume, this “theory of the feminine” plays no role in his discussion of Romantic theory in Unendliche Verdopplung. 13

Menninghaus, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, 195. Menninghaus notes he is following Ernst Behler’s formulation here. 14

Menninghaus, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, 192. As I will suggest below, I believe Schlegel’s theory is more androcentric than Menninghaus indicates. 15

Menninghaus, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, 196–8. Menninghaus interprets Schlegel’s reticence on this point dismissively: Fichte’s theory of the feminine, for Schlegel, “scheint nicht mehr kritikwürdig zu sein” (appears no longer to be worthy of a critique; Theorie der Weiblichkeit, 198). 16

17

Theresa M. Kelley, “Women, Gender and Literary Criticism,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Romantic Era, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 321–37, here p. 321. 18 For brief discussions of these texts see Becker-Cantarino, 23–26. 19

Menninghaus, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, 199–203.

20

Menninghaus, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, 187. Menninghaus does not see a break between these comments and Schlegel’s later essays, arguing that Schlegel comes to realize that he does not disdain women, but their lack of education and lack of independence (188). Against Menninghaus, I would maintain that the “male love” at issue in Lucinde includes a physical component, a thesis I will explicate below.

21

Lisa C. Roetzel, “Feminizing Philosophy,” in Theory as Practice, ed. and trans. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 361–81. 22 “Mein Lieblingsstudium heißt im Grunde wie meine Braut. Sophie heißt sie — Filosophie ist die Seele meines Leben und der Schlüssel zu meinem eigenen Selbst” (My favorite topic of study has in essence the same name as my bride. Her name is Sophie — philosophy [love of Sophie] is the soul of my life and the key to my very being; NS, 4: 188). 23 24 25

Roetzel, 361–2. KFSA, 18: 334, no. 137; NS, 2: 261, no. 519. Roetzel, 362–3.

26

Roetzel, 378. Veit-Schlegel’s comments resonate further when read in conjunction with Schlegel’s essay “Über die Unverständlichkeit” (On Incomprehensibility, 1800) and Novalis’s cryptic “Monolog” (Monologue, 1798). 27 Roetzel, 364–5. 28

Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1957), 148: no. 1434. 29

The other two fragments are quoted in Menninghaus, Theorie der Weiblichkeit (152): “Der ganze Roman weiblich, dithyrambische Fantasie männlich” (The whole novel feminine, dithyrambic fantasy masculine); “Vielleicht ist der Roman eine weibliche Dichtart, wenn man die Poesie als animalisches Universum betrachtet”

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(Perhaps the novel is a feminine poetic form, if one regards poesy as an animal universal). 30

My reading of early German Romanticism, in terms of autopoiesis, is based on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute (note 2). 31 For an expanded interpretation of the Fichte-Studien see my discussion in The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of “Darstellung” in German Critical Discourse (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 77–89. 32

For a discussion of this maternal metaphor see Alice Kuzniar, “Labor Pains: Romantic Theories of Creativity and Gender,” in “The Spirit of Poesy”: Essays on Jewish and German Literature and Thought in Honor of Géza von Molnár, ed. Richard Block and Peter Fenves (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2000), 74–88, here p. 77. 33

Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1969), 2: 108.

34 35 36

Kuzniar, “Labor Pains,” 75. Quoted in Kuzniar, “Labor Pains,” 85. Kuzniar, “Labor Pains,” 85.

37

Kuzniar, “Labor Pains,” 85. For interpretations that emphasize the feminist aspects of the text see Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Priesterin und Lichtbringerin: Zur Ideologie des weiblichen Charakters in der Frühromantik,” in Die Frau als Heldin und Autorin: Neue kritische Ansätze zur deutschen Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1979), 111–24, and Becker-Cantarino, “Schlegels Lucinde: Zur Frauenbild der Frühromantik,” Colloquia Germanica 10 (1976–77): 128–39. For discussions of the text’s treatment of androgyny, see Friedrichsmeyer, Androgyne (note 7); Inge Stephan, “‘Daß ich Eins und doppelt bin . . .’: Geschlechtertausch als literarisches Thema,” in Stephan und Sigrid Weigel, Die verborgene Frau: Sechs Beiträge zu einer feministischen Literaturwissenschaft (Berlin: Argument, 1982), 153–75; and Sigrid Weigel, “Wider die romantische Mode: Zur ästhetischen Funktion des Weiblichen in Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde,” in Stephan and Weigel, Die verborgene Frau, 67–82. For a discussion of gender as a performative in Lucinde see Marc Redfield, “Lucinde’s Obscenity,” in Martha B. Helfer (ed.), Rereading Romanticism (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 102–30. 39 Kuzniar, “Labor Pains,” 78. 38

40

Redfield, 102 and 113.

41

Helfer, “‘Confessions of an Improper Man’: Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde,” in Kuzniar, Outing Goethe (note 7), 174–93. 42 Many code words for homosexuality were derived from geographic locations. See Paul Derks, Die Schande der heiligen Päderastie: Homosexualität und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschen Literatur, 1750–1850 (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1990), 87. The name likely is also a gloss on the character Florestan in Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings, 1798). 43

Helfer, “Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s Florentin: Constructing a Feminist Romantic Aesthetic,” German Quarterly 69 (1996): 144–60.

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44

Jacobi’s Woldemar, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96), Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, and Schlegel’s Lucinde are much in evidence in Veit-Schlegel’s text. 45 In addition, I would like to draw attention to three recent dissertations that have proposed innovative approaches to re-thinking gender in Romantic discourse. In “Visuelle Gewalt und Selbstverlust bei Günderrode, Hölderlin, und Fichte” (Diss., U of N. Carolina, 2000), Olaf Berwald has analyzed links between visual violence and loss of self in Günderrode’s writing, contrasting Günderrode’s model of subjectivity with those of Friedrich Hölderlin and Fichte. In “Unveiling the Feminine Self: Reading Narrative Relief in Novels by Sophie Mereau, Friederike Unger, and Johnna Schopenhauer” (Diss., U of Utah, 1998), Cindy Patey Brewer has argued that “flaws” in the novels of three women Romantic writers — Sophie Mereau’s Amanda und Eduard (Amanda and Edward, 1803), Friederike Helene Unger’s, Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele, von ihr selbst geschrieben (Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, Written by Herself, 1806), and Johanna Schopenhauer’s Gabriele (1830) — announce a narrative subtext in which the feminine subject defines herself by enacting a selfreflexive critique of her construction in the surface narrative. In “Kleist’s Female Title Characters as Aesthetic Disruption of Idealist Discourse” (Diss. U of Utah, 2001), Grant P. McAllister interprets Heinrich von Kleist’s female title characters as selfreflexive figures of resistance and alterity in a masculine signifying economy. 46

Friedrichsmeyer, “Caroline Schlegel-Schelling” (note 5), 124.

47

Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985). 48 Sabine I. Gölz, “Günderrode Mines Novalis,” in Block and Fenves (note 32), 89– 130, here p. 91. 49

Cf. Edith Waldstein, who argues that in the novel von Arnim “comes to terms with her own self through the relationship with Goethe, which, while it had its origins in a real friendship, is ultimately fictitious.” Waldstein, “Goethe and Beyond: Bettine von Arnim’s Correspondence with a Child and Günderrode,” in Goodman and Waldstein (note 3), 95–113, here p. 99. 50 I have presented preliminary results of this research on male muses at the 2001 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference in Seattle and the 2001 German Studies Association conference in Washington D.C. A larger study is forthcoming. 51

Recent theoretical articulations of this theme include Kuzniar’s analysis of woman’s originary poetic voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen and David Wellbery’s metacritical synopsis of Friedrich Kittler’s figuration of Romanticism as “the discursive production of the Mother as the source of discursive production.” Alice Kuzniar, “Hearing Woman’s Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” PMLA 107.5 (1992): 1196–1207; David E. Wellbery, “Foreword” to Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), vii– xxxiii, here p. xxiii. 52 Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Erzählungen, ed. Hartwig Schulz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), 25.

The Romantic Preoccupation with Musical Meaning Kristina Muxfeldt

M

who understand each other just as we do them: Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810), a young physicist in the orbit of the Jena circle of Romantics, made this rather eccentric proposition in a volume of literary fragments published posthumously in 1810. Arguing that no human relationship or story exists that could not be represented in music, Ritter suggests — even more provocatively — that, because of an inherent likeness of musical notes to human relationships, we can interact with tones (and they with us) just as we do with other people. Music can provide us with an idealized form of the relations we are missing in life — just as it can also become our seductress, leading us astray. Composers command an entire world analogous to the human, and the social orders 1 they construct in music both reflect and influence life. In these remarks, Ritter pushed to extremes a new conception of the power of instrumental music that had begun to hold sway in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The new appreciation was notably first expressed by critics who, like Ritter, were not themselves professional musicians. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98), Ludwig Tieck (1773– 1853), Novalis (1772–1801), Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), even Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) — writers and thinkers occupied with what came to be known as the Geisteswissenschaften (“sciences of the spirit,” or Humanities) — all set down reflections on the subject. This newfound attention was stimulating to musicians, many of whom responded with critical writings about music (not just technical accounts) of their own in the following decades. What was most radically new was the conception that music, even without the addition of words, had grown capable of representing ideas and sentiments — not merely the broad, largely static affects recognized in earlier eighteenth-century music. A Baroque orchestral suite, for example, was made up of contrasting movements, each of which was understood to convey a distinct character or sentiment (“affect” was the term Baroque theorists preferred) that normally was sustained for the duration of the movement. By the last decades of the eighteenth century — in the music of Wolfgang USICAL TONES ARE BEINGS

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Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and their contemporaries — instrumental music had developed in a different direction, striving to simulate the form and movement of thought and feeling even as its precise content remained indefinite. This combination of mimesis and abstraction was much admired. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, praised music as “die allgemeinste Kunst” (the most general of the arts; KFSA, 1: 213, no. 120) and recommended it as a model for philosophy and poetry. It was above all purely instrumental music that captured the imagination of the German Romantic theorists. In 1799, the year he moved from Berlin to Jena, Ludwig Tieck commemorated the recent death of his friend Wackenroder with a joint publication of their essays entitled Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (Fantasies on Art for Friends of Art). In “Symphonien,” one of the four essays (all on music) he contributed to the volume himself, Tieck argues that vocal music is a contingent art form that is and must forever remain a heightened form of declamation and speech. Instrumental music, on the other hand, is independent and free, subject only to the laws it invents for itself: In der Instrumentalmusik aber ist die Kunst unabhängig und frei, sie schreibt sich nur selbst ihre Gesetze vor, sie phantasiert spielend und ohne Zweck, und doch erfüllt und erreicht sie den höchsten, sie folgt ganz ihren dunkeln Trieben, und drückt das Wunderbarste mit ihren 2 Tändeleien aus.

In Tieck’s estimation the highest form of instrumental music was the symphony — for which sonatas, trios, and quartets were only preparatory studies. (Mozart would have begged to differ: many musicians understood chamber music, especially the string quartet, as a vehicle for their most advanced and concentrated ideas.) Music as we now know it, Tieck hazarded, is the youngest and the least practiced of the arts; it has not yet experienced a true classical age (351). Surprisingly, this comes at the same time as the terms “classic” or “classical” were first being associated with the music of Haydn and Mozart. Writing in 1798, for example, Mozart’s first biographer Franz Xavier Niemetschek compared Mozart’s string quartets and quintets to the masterworks of the Greeks and Romans: they were classical works in the sense that there was always something more to be learned from 3 each new encounter with them. This comes quite close to Friedrich Schlegel’s observation “Eine klassische Schrift muß nie ganz verstanden werden können. Aber die, welche gebildet sind und sich bilden, müssen immer mehr daraus lernen wollen” (A classical text must never be fully comprehensible; but those who are cultivated and who cultivate themselves, must always seek to learn more from it; KA, 2: 149, no. 20). In neither case is “the classical” construed in opposition to a romantic aesthetic.

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The striking formulation of Ritter with which we opened this brief history fuses two currents of thought on the significance of the new power of instrumental music. One tendency finds succinct expression in Schelling’s declaration that music is pure form and movement freed from all material 4 content. This view celebrates the independence of music from the conditions of worldly existence. Things are possible in music that may not be possible in the world. Novalis had something similar in mind when he called for the invention of a poetry that would emphasize the musical qualities of speech, emancipating language from the need to communicate things. Like mathematical formulas, he proposed, language should become a world unto 5 itself. Schiller, on the other hand, emphasized music’s grounding in human experience. In a 1794 essay on Matthisson’s landscape poetry he explained that music translates into tones insights that are gained from acts of introspection: having studied the behavior of human thought and feeling, the composer creates an analogue in sound for its process and mechanisms. In 6 this way music can become a symbol of the human. For Schiller as for Novalis, however, the great strength of instrumental music stemmed from its lack of a fixed content. Composers could guide the direction of the listener’s imagination, but should avoid anything that might block its free reign. Music was advanced as a model for the other arts precisely because its potential meanings were unlimited — and yet not arbitrary. We do not know exactly which works of music Schiller or Ritter had in mind. But Ritter’s insistence on the specificity of musical meaning — he claimed that there was no human relationship, no human story that could not be represented in music (233) — shows a greater willingness, compared with his elder colleagues, to decipher music’s content and suggests that his field of musical reference may have shifted too. Among the fragments of Blüthenstaub, contained in the first volume of the Athenaeum (1798), is Novalis’s assertion that only the individual interests us; hence all that is classical is not individual (NS, 2: 435, no. 55). Here “classical” is indeed cast negatively to make a sharp contrast with newer tendencies. Such a judgment, which incorporates Friedrich Schlegel’s celebration of the supremely individual, of the “characteristic” over the conventional, would in musical circles come to be associated with one figure in particular, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). His music, more than that of any other composer, prompted listeners to grapple with the mechanisms by which music communicated, and with the relations between the creative personality and the ideas relayed by instrumental music. Beethoven’s works remained a constant point of reference in treatments of these subjects even for such “late Romantic” composers as Richard Wagner (1813–83) and Franz Liszt (1811–86). Among the earliest and most influential discussions — and one of the first efforts to define musical Romanticism — is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music. Here we encounter a view from a writer

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who himself was an occasional composer and who holds music at maximal remove not only from the representational methods of the other arts but from the everyday experiences of life: “Die Musik schließt dem Menschen ein unbekanntes Reich auf; eine Welt, die nichts gemein hat mit der äußern Sinnenwelt, die ihn umgibt, und in der er alle bestimmten Gefühle zurück7 läßt, um sich einer unaussprechlichen Sehnsucht hinzugeben.” This is the text of the passage as it appeared in the Kreisleriana of 1814, within the Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier that made Hoffmann’s reputation as a writer: Robert Schumann (1810–56) would be sufficiently impressed by Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana to borrow its title for a collection of his own character pieces for piano in 1838. Four years earlier, in a version of the essay published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (as a review of Beethoven’s fifth symphony), Hoffmann had not yet arrived at quite so radical a conception. There the final clause read: “und in der er alle durch Begriffe bestimm8 baren Gefühle zurückläßt, um sich dem unaussprechlichen hinzugeben.” The earlier text grapples with the untranslatability of that which is expressed in music; the later one emphasizes even more forcefully the complete otherness of musical experience from anything that could be given spoken expression. In nearly direct opposition to Ritter — whose ideas on music and 9 language he invokes admiringly elsewhere in the Kreisleriana — Hoffmann warns against all efforts to represent specific occurrences in sound: these deny music’s singular nature, treating it instead as plastic art; like the symphonies of Dittersdorf (the Austrian composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf [1739–99]) composed in this manner, such works will be justly forgotten. Declaring music to be the most Romantic of the arts, whose sole subject matter is the infinite (like Romanticism itself), Hoffmann was nevertheless intent on laying out the individual character of different composers’ music. Haydn, he stated, grasps romantically what is human in life; Mozart calls rather upon the superhuman, the wondrous element that resides in inner being. Only Beethoven was for him a thoroughly Romantic composer, for his music alone “bewegt die Hebel der Furcht, des Schauers, des Entsetzens, des Schmerzes und erweckt eben jene unendliche Sehnsucht, welche das Wesen der Romantik ist” (engages the levers of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and wakens just that infinite longing which is the 10 essence of Romanticism). It must be pointed out that Beethoven himself was not entirely averse to composing music in the manner of plastic art as Hoffmann describes it. Clemens Brentano’s 1814 cycle of five poems Nachklänge Beethovenscher Musik were inspired by a performance of Beethoven’s “Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria,” op. 91, a work that was all the rage in Vienna for a brief period after it premiered in December, 1813, but which, as Hoffmann rightly predicted, has had no lasting fame. Joseph Kerman has written of this period in Beethoven’s output: “Luckily for him the Congress

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of Vienna convened in 1814–15, making him the musician of the hour. He went into a whirlwind of composition, producing quantities of mindless and distasteful patriotic music which was played repeatedly (it is never played 11 today) and brought him more fame and money than ever before.” The literal imitations of cannonball fire shooting through the orchestral tumult in Wellington’s Victory, the bugle calls of the opposing armies, the military wind band piping “Rule Britannia” all have little to do with the terror of the sublime or the endless longing of Hoffmann’s Romanticism, which were inspired rather by such works as the op. 70 piano trios and the Fifth Symphony. Nevertheless, a Romantic poet could be swept away by even this music (which is a masterpiece of its genre) and by the aura of Beethoven — with whom Clemens’s sister Bettine corresponded. The opening lines of Brentano’s cycle do not in fact betray the particular musical source of their inspiration and resonate well with Hoffmann’s idea that music opens up entirely new inner worlds: Einsamkeit, du Geisterbronnen, Mutter aller heil’gen Quellen, Zauberspiegel innrer Sonnen, Die berauschet überschwellen, Seit ich durft’ in deine Wonnen Das betrübte Leben stellen, Seit du ganz mich überronnen Mit den dunklen Wunderwellen, Hab’ zu tönen ich begonnen. . . . [Solitude, you source of spirits, Mother of all sacred fountains, Magic mirror of inner suns, Which well over with intoxication, Since I have been permitted to place My gloomy life in your glories, Since you have inundated me completely With your dark waves of wonder, I have begun to emit tones . . .] Likewise, we may hear echoes of Ritter and Novalis in Brentano’s characterization of the godlike composer in the third poem: “Selbst sich nur wissend und dichtend schafft er die Welt, die er selbst ist” (Knowing and composing only himself, he creates the world, which he himself is). But there is no possibility of denying what motivated the close — the compressed rhythm of the final lines and the rolled “r’s” of “Viktoria” and “Gloria” even conjure the sound of Beethoven’s precise military drumrolls:

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Er spannt dir das Roß aus dem Wagen, Und zieht dich mit Wunderakkorden Durch ewig tönende Pforten. Triumph, auf Klängen getragen! Wellington, Viktoria! Beethoven, Gloria! [He unhitches the steed from your chariot, And takes you with wondrous chords Through eternally resounding portals. Triumph, borne on tones! Wellington, Victoria! 12 Beethoven, Gloria!] The tensions in Hoffmann’s essay between specificity of expression, individuality of character, and untranslatability would be immensely influential in the writings of later music critics (as would his clear recognition that Beethoven’s Romanticism was of a different order than Haydn’s or Mozart’s). Eighteenth-century writers had tended to view music as a more generalized form of communication than language. Theorizing primarily from the experience of vocal music (chiefly opera), many had sought to locate the origins of music’s communicative power in its imitation of the accents of speech. This critical direction continued to exert some influence even into the nineteenth century: just a few years before Hoffmann’s essay appeared, instrumental works of Mozart had been published with verbal glosses that sought to tease out — to translate — the verbal impetus behind 13 the music’s melodic contours and cadences. By the same token, not everyone in the eighteenth century had been persuaded by appeals to language as the source of music’s expressive capacity. In an invented dialogue between Rousseau, a chief proponent of these ideas (in the Essai sur l’origine des langues, où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale [Paris, 1753] for example) and the Italian opera composer Niccolo Jomelli (1714–74), the Sturm und Drang writer Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1805) reasoned that if melody were based on language then a Frenchman, Turk, Russian, or German would be unable to understand the music of an Italian. Because music acts directly on the nerves, it speaks to all more or less equally. Differences in the depth of comprehension have nothing to do with the listener’s linguistic orientation, only with the sensitivity of his nerves. (German music, Heinse’s Jomelli complains, likes to conceal its melodies in a dense chaos as 14 if our ears were magnets, and the melodies iron filings!) This clearly anticipated the Romantic celebration of music’s emancipation from language — but, like most of his contemporaries, Heinse continued to emphasize the universality and generality of the experiences that music is able to relate.

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Hoffmann’s concept of an overpowering and entirely other realm of experience, stimulated by the music of Beethoven, was still beyond reach. The perception that music had become sharply individualized in the hands of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven grew into an important critical trope in discussions of music after Hoffmann, as did his alignment of Beethoven with Romanticism. It is a pervasive theme in Amadeus Wendt’s 1831 study of the major epochs of art where we find the proposal that Haydn invites comparison with Goethe because of his predilection for epic representation; Mozart’s lyrical, melancholy-infused pathos is more like Schiller; Beethoven, finally, may be compared to Jean Paul because of his all-encompassing humor — and still better, in view of his dramatic nature, 15 he might be compared to Shakespeare. For the generation of critics writing after Beethoven’s death the singularity and specificity of this music — its unprecedented violence, its unfathomed states of interior calm, and, indeed, the humor with which the composer’s presence can suddenly assert itself (like a puppeteer emerging briefly from the shadows) — frequently also invited a blurring of the boundary between the mind that commands the notes and the work. Adolph Bernhard Marx (?1795–1866), the prolific nineteenth-century music theorist and Beethoven scholar, wrote that in Beethoven’s Eroica symphony (1804) we have before our eyes an ideal image, not of a general state of being common to many, but rather of an 16 exalted, rare, and extremely specific life experience. Marx went on to explicate the content of this “specific life experience” in a narrative gloss — a program. The essay on the Eroica, published in 1859, contains not only Marx’s own appreciation of the symphony’s poetic content, but an analysis of the programs of several other writers, including one by Richard Wagner. Marx was impressed by the relative agreement among nearly all the narratives he examined, interpreting this consistency in reception history as evidence that with the Eroica symphony Beethoven had taken a decisive step in the direction of giving a work of purely instrumental music a precise content. Marx was attempting to demonstrate through close analysis — not of Beethoven’s score directly but of verbal approximations of its poetic content — what Ritter, in 1810, had so provocatively heralded: that every imaginable human relationship or story could be conveyed through music. But can music ever truly be capable of revealing this kind of objective content, Marx asked? Does not the specificity reside in the title? He dismissed this thought almost as abruptly as he raised it. No one would believe us if we simply changed the title: the music would not fit. Granting that a title is an important indicator of the underlying assumptions (“Voraussetzungen”) of content, Marx insisted, however, that the rest must follow from nothing more than close attention to the harmonies, rhythms, and tone of the work, and a consideration of these against psychological analogies and symbols (M, 1: 282).

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Efforts to explicate the content of earlier instrumental music — chiefly Beethoven’s who came to be understood as the progenitor of nearly every direction of musical Romanticism — had become increasingly fashionable by the 1850s. This change in interpretive fashion arose in conjunction with a general increase in composition of music openly based on or issued with a program, such as the “tone poems” of Franz Liszt from the late forties and fifties, which follow a French tradition famously launched with Hector Berlioz’s (1803–69) Symphonie Fantastique (1830). Berlioz’s subtitle “Episode from the life of an artist” (and later also his memoirs) deliberately invited an identification of the fictional protagonist of the program with the composer himself, smudging the boundary between the work and the world outside. Even more revolutionary, and extremely controversial, was Berlioz’s claim (retracted for the second edition) that his program was necessary for a complete understanding of the symphony’s dramatic outline. Similar fusions between the arts had in fact been championed by the theorists of the Athenaeum. August Wilhelm Schlegel, for example, envisioned the possibility of an entirely new genre, the pictorial accompaniment of poetry (modeled, he suggested, on music). This new art form would grant the visual artist the freedom to throw himself wholeheartedly into just those domains in which his art is most powerful, leaving the resulting gaps to be fleshed out by the poet’s art: the visual artist would give us a new organ with which to comprehend poetry, while the poet would translate into his elevated speech the charming cipher-language of line and form. August Wilhelm conceded that traditional — classical — standards of autonomy and completion would have to be relaxed whenever one art draws on only a part 17 of its means in order to bond with another. Literary accompaniments to symphonic music — programs, epigrams; all manner of verbal material not incorporated into the musical work as sung text — began to be championed by many Romantic composers and critics of the generation born around 1810 (the year of Hoffmann’s essay); but for others, notably Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47) and even Schumann, such an interdependence was uncomfortably at odds with the idea that music could speak directly and immediately to the listener’s imagination. The more concrete the program, the worse. Schumann thought that the personal revelations in Berlioz’s program for the Symphonie Fantastique (he admired the symphony) not only interfered with the listener’s imagination but of18 fended a German’s sensibility. Liszt sought a middle ground in an 1855 essay on Berlioz’s “Harold” Symphony — itself an evocation of scenes from Lord Byron’s (1788–1824) autobiographical poem Childe Harold — where he cautioned against the production of explanatory programs for works composed by those he termed “specifische Symphoniker,” that is, musically specific symphonists who take their listeners into ideal realms, leaving the particulars to be fleshed out by each individual’s imagination. He only

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championed the production of programs by composers who were intent on communicating definite ideas through music: Der malende Symphoniker aber, der sich die Aufgabe stellt, ein in seinem Geist deutlich vorhandenes Bild eben so klar wiederzugeben, eine Folge von Seelenzuständen zu entwickeln, die ihm unzweideutig, bestimmt im Bewußtsein liegen, wie sollte er nicht vermittelst eines Pro19 gramms nach vollem Verständniß streben?

Another passage from the same essay suggests that it is in any case the composer, not a later critic, who is best positioned to issue such programs: Das Programm will nur die Möglichkeit anerkannt wissen einer genauen Bestimmung des Seelenmomentes, der den Componisten zum Schaffen seines Werkes trieb, des Gedankens, den er zur körperlichen 20 Erscheinung brachte (52).

Since one cannot assume that a musical creation will necessarily reflect the impetus that gave rise to it, capturing (or inventing after the fact) the elusive moment of inspiration for the work can be undertaken with authority by the composer alone. The preface to Liszt’s symphonic poem Orpheus is a perfect example of such a fictionalized account of a work’s origin: the composer confides that it was a representation of Orpheus on an Etruscan vase in the Louvre that inspired his piece: the long hands of the figure on the curved body of the vase are poised over the strings of his lyre, his mouth ajar as if he were about to sing. The frozen scene is brought to life with the opening of Liszt’s Orpheus. A single note, G, is intoned softly by the horns. Emerging from silence, their initial attack resembles the sound of the vowel “O.” When the note is re-stated, it is surrounded by a wash of harp and woodwind harmony. Meter and melody emerge only gradually, as the opening G is intoned repeatedly, each time enveloped in richly contrasting harmonies. It is as if we were witnessing the birth of music. Liszt’s symphonic poem was written to introduce an 1854 performance (conducted by Liszt) of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s (1714–87) opera Orfeo ed Euridice, an eighteenthcentury work much on the mind of A. B. Marx as well. The spectacle of the composer himself conducting the moment of music’s origin, standing in the footprints of Orpheus as it were, enacted a favorite Romantic myth: music was the newest art, still close to its origins, and only just now in the act of becoming. The legendary power of Orpheus’s music — its ability to move the hearts and minds of wild beasts, stones, and even the furies of the underworld — held a special fascination for Romantic composers and critics. Marx’s sensitive account of the slow movement of Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto, op. 58, begins with a close description of the interaction between the pianist’s lyrical phrases and the foreboding body of strings. He is re-

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minded of a similar scene in which a lyrical voice gradually subdues a strongwilled resistant force in Gluck’s Orfeo: “Kaum können zwei Gedichte der Grundlage nach nähere Verwandschaft mit einander haben, als jener 21 Gluck’sche Chor und das Beethovensche Andante” (M, 2: 92–93). He hastens to point out, however, that there are many differences between the two “poems” in their elaboration. As late as 1870 Richard Wagner was still inventing programs for works of Beethoven and grappling with the function of such verbal glosses. It is important to recognize that programmatic criticism was not an amateur’s genre: professional musicians who could have given detailed technical analyses of musical works were choosing instead to respond with poetic descriptions. In Wagner’s program for the C-sharp minor String Quartet, op. 131, he proposed to create an image of a genuine day in the life of Beethoven by following “the master’s” innermost thoughts as they are manifested in this intimate work. Wagner stressed that the result can be nothing more than a verbal analogy — one that is impossible to maintain in the act of listening. While listening we are able only to take in music through the senses as an unmediated revelation from another world — there is Hoffmann’s language again — but rehearsing the work in memory, we can more easily hold such 22 analogies in mind. Wagner does not repeat the objection that the specificity of verbal images interferes with our freedom of imagination but, rather, asserts that verbal and musical modes of apprehending the musical work are incommensurate; they cannot both be engaged at the same time. The application of programmatic criticism to works of Beethoven was undeniably an anachronistic exercise even if the genre was a direct outgrowth of the Early Romantic theorists’ claims for instrumental music. In some ways, however, it was merely a delayed reaction. For despite the cautions against overt interpretation by Beethoven’s own contemporaries there were plenty of hints that listeners felt a strong link between what unfolded in the music and the mind and personality of the composer behind the work. Accounts of his music’s eccentricity, unruliness, and even incomprehensibility, are legion. Lingering behind a number of these assessments was the suspicion that Beethoven’s music engaged socially disruptive, even forbidden ideas. When the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) visited the composer on several occasions in the mid-1820s, Beethoven’s deafness had already progressed to the point that visitors were compelled to communicate with him by writing into bound “conversation books.” The exchanges between the two men frequently turned to Grillparzer’s never-ending difficulties with the censors. On one such occasion, in May of 1823, we find back to back these tantalizing reactions of Grillparzer to Beethoven’s — alas, unrecorded — remarks: “Den Musikern kann doch die Zensur nichts anhaben.” — “Wenn man wüßte was Sie bei Ihrer Musik denken!” (But the censors cannot touch music . . . If they only knew what was on your mind

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when you compose!) Grillparzer delighted in the thought that music had the power to summon restricted ideas yet could escape censorial control. The idea that there was something dangerous in Beethoven’s music, and that this danger had its roots in the unbridled imagination of the composer found its most surprising expression in a letter dated 14 September 1812 from the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832) to Goethe. An influential composer of Lieder and a respected teacher of composition (he taught Felix Mendelssohn), Zelter was frequently Goethe’s advisor on musical matters. The letter is a response to an earlier one of Goethe relating his impressions of Beethoven’s difficult personality, whom he had just met in Töplitz. It gives a vivid picture of the mixture of fascination and fear with which Beethoven’s new manner was met by those accustomed to the balance, restraint, and greater conventionality of musical classicism. Zelter’s remarks are worth citing at some length: . . . Was Sie von Bethofen sagen ist ganz natürlich. Auch ich bewundere ihn mit Schrecken. Seine eigenen Werke scheinen ihm heimliches Grauen zu verursachen. Eine Empfindung die in der neuen Kultur viel zu leichtsinnig beseitigt wird. Mir scheinen seine Werke wie Kinder deren Vater ein Weib oder deren Mutter ein Mann wäre. Das letzte mir bekannt gewordene Werk (Christus am Ölberge) kommt mir vor wie eine Unkeuschheit, deren Grund und Ziel ein ewiger Tod ist. Die musikal. Kritiker, welche sich auf alles besser zu verstehen scheinen als auf Naturell und Eigentümlichkeit, haben sich auf die seltsamste Weise in Lob und Tadel über diesen Komponisten ergossen. Ich kenne musikal. Personen, die sich sonst bei Anhörung seiner Werke alarmiert ja indigniert fanden und nun von einer Leidenschaft dafür ergriffen sind, wie die Anhänger der griechischen Liebe. Wie wohl man sich dabei befinden kann, lässt sich begreifen, und was daraus entstehen kann, haben Sie in den Wahlverwandtschaften deutlich genug gezeigt . . . [. . . What you say about Beethoven is certainly true. I, too, admire him with terror. His own works seem to cause him secret horror — a perception which is dismissed all too lightly in our contemporary culture. His works seem to me like children whose father is a woman or whose mother is a man. The most recent work of his I have come to know (Christ on the Mount of Olives) seems to me like an indecency whose very foundation and goal are eternal death. Music critics, who seem to understand everything better than the natural and the unique, have gushed over this composer in the most curious manner, in both praise and reproach. I know musical persons who used to find themselves alarmed, even indignant, upon hearing his works, but who are now gripped with an enthusiasm for them like the partisans of Greek love. How one might be drawn into this is not difficult to understand, and

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yet what can come of it you have demonstrated clearly enough in your 24 Elective Affinities . . .]

To place this in context: in Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809) the birth of a child to parents whose passion for each other has been supplanted by new objects of desire marks the beginning of a rapid downward spiral in the fortunes of every one of the characters. The child, a boy, was conceived under the cloak of an emotional falsehood, which nature faithfully registers. Late one night, Eduard and Charlotte, husband and wife, having each just left in frustration the company of the ones they secretly love, fall into each other’s arms. The features of the child born of this displaced passion betray the adulterous fantasies in the minds of his parents. Eduard cannot bear to be present at the birth of his only son, and neither of the parents is able to bond with the child, who later drowns in an accident caused by Ottilie, the object of Eduard’s erotic fascination. Zelter thus adjudges Beethoven’s creations to be the consequence of a similarly shocking psychological displacement. The implication — not far from the surface — that Beethoven’s music is against nature (or, truer to Goethe’s portrayal in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, that nature is permitted to run rampant in it) is reinforced with a psychological analogy: like the adherents of Greek Love (an eighteenth-century euphemism for homosexuality), Beethoven’s listeners also find their initial indignation transformed into passionate enthusiasm. If it was the similarly shocked reaction of readers to Die Wahlverwandtschaften that motivated Zelter’s analogy, he masked this with the shrewd suggestion that Goethe’s treatment of his dangerous subject ultimately reinforces social order, whereas Beethoven’s music disrupts it. (Alluding to an 1827 letter of Goethe to Zelter, Walter Benjamin remarks that Goethe sensed the reaction of his audience even through the respectful posturing with which his works were customarily met: readers had reacted to Die Wahlverwandschaften, Goethe reminded Zelter “as if to the Robe of 25 Nessus.” ) We should be grateful, I suppose, that the censors’ office did not regularly engage music consultants to decode the meaning of instrumental works! Not surprisingly, Zelter’s letter gained a certain notoriety after the publication in 1833 of the Goethe-Zelter correspondence. It makes an appearance in A. B. Marx’s essay on the Eroica, where Zelter’s response is mistakenly attributed to Goethe — its words spectacularly misinterpreted to serve an entirely new argument about Beethoven’s transformation of music’s feminine nature into a masculine art. After quoting Goethe’s famous lines on the eternal Feminine from the conclusion to Faust, Marx stands [Zelter’s] genealogical postulate on its head:

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Das ewig Weibliche, das ist die Musik, die das Leben, den Geist, geheimnißvoll in ihrem Mutterschooße birgt. Wenn es wahr ist, daß Goethe von Beethoven gesagt: es komme ihm beim Anhören Beethovenscher Musik vor, als ob dieses Menschen Vater ein Weib, seine Mutter ein Mann gewesen sein müsse: so hat der sonnaugige Dichter wieder einmal klar und tief geblickt. Der Vater, der Geist, hat ihn in die Musik gewiesen, bis sie in ihm Mann — Geist — geworden (M, 1: 26 287).

Acknowledging only obliquely the evident gulf between this “normalizing” interpretation (normalizing, that is, in the sense that it harmonizes with the most commonplace gender ideology of its age) and whatever its author may have meant, Marx adds that it is of course possible for interpreters to go astray in the endless depths of such music. Even Beethoven himself once “lost himself” in fanciful interpretation: when news of Napoleon’s death reached him, he is said to have remarked that, without this having been his intention at the time, he had already composed the music forecasting this event seventeen years earlier (M, 1: 287–88). Marx, for whom programmatic interpretation was a serious critical endeavor, was clearly irked by Beethoven’s reported effort, even in jest, to affix to the Eroica’s funeral march so particular, anachronistic, and mundane a meaning. Some of the most penetrating programmatic criticism produced by Romantic musicians comes from composers who used language with great inventiveness as a critical tool — not to disclose a work’s content, but to guide the imagination and focus the attention of their listeners on the music. It was applied not only to symphonic music but to the short character pieces — dances and other forms of piano miniatures — that composers in the 1830s embraced. It will be useful to examine one example of the genre in detail; but let us first consider a famous instance in which the application of language to music was judged to have fallen short of its mark. On 12 October 1842, an admirer of Felix Mendelssohn, Marc-André Souchay, Jr., wrote to the composer with a sincere query. Ever since his childhood he had loved Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words, 1830), in which he found such distinctive feeling and penetrating emotion that they became his favorite piano pieces. Now as an adult, he felt a need to try to put this distinctiveness into words and he requested the composer’s reaction to his efforts. The characterizations he provides (their Bedeutung [meaning] is the word he uses) are for the most part extremely brief: vol. 1, no. 1 suggests “Resignation”; vol. 3, no. 3 is a “Liebeslied,” or love song. Vol. 3, no. 1 is given a slightly more elaborate characterization: “Unbegrenzte aber unglückliche Liebe, die daher oft in Sehnsucht, Schmerz, Wehmuth u. Verzweiflung beigeht, aber immer wieder ruhig wird” (boundless but unhappy love, which therefore often moves into long-

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ing, pain, sadness, and despair, but always becomes peaceful again). Mendelssohn’s response to these suggestions is an earnest consideration of the problem. Recent research by John Michael Cooper has shown that Souchay’s letter can only have been the proximate cause prompting Mendelssohn to formulate his careful position on these matters. The composer had for years received similar inquiries and a recent edition of the Lieder ohne Worte had been issued with accompanying poems professing to have solved the music’s “riddle” (C, 343–44). Mendelssohn begins with an observation: people usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But it is words that are too indefinite, calling up different associations in everyone who uses them, he asserts (in language that seems a refinement of Hoffmann’s claims): “Das was mir eine Musik ausspricht, die ich liebe, sind mir [nicht] zu unbe28 stimmte Gedanken, um sie in Worte zu fassen, sondern zu bestimmte.” While Mendelssohn acknowledges that many such accounts may have something true about them, he finds that none is ever adequate (C, 344). To fully situate his position, it is important to recognize that the characterizations he is reacting to are remarkable above all for their generality. Many of them could fit equally well dozens, if not hundreds, of other pieces. Souchay has not actually addressed the specificity of Mendelssohn’s pieces. Let us turn to a contrasting example from the music criticism of Robert Schumann — who may have unintentionally stimulated efforts such as Souchay’s when, in an 1835 review of the Lieder ohne Worte, he wrote that Mendelssohn could well have had specific poems in mind when composing them (C, 341). Reflecting on these circumstances in 1855, Franz Liszt thought that Mendelssohn — whom he warily called “der moderne Classiker” — had his own generic designation to blame for the rash of instrumental works that soon appeared with titles, accompanying poems, epigrams, and the like. (When Mendelssohn introduced an epigram it was more likely to be a phrase of music, like the brief song that precedes the score of the A minor string quartet, op. 12.) Liszt championed Robert Schumann as the master of the genre, praising him for displaying the most delicate tact in his choice of programmatic material, and for producing the most intimate 29 fusions of the verbal and the musical. A bit of background is necessary. Schumann famously cultivated two critical personas, Eusebius and Florestan, to whom he attributed specific portions of his music and his critical writings for nearly a decade. Schumann was also a great admirer of E. T. A. Hoffmann and of Jean Paul, from whose novels he once claimed to have learned more about counterpoint (the technical craft of combining musical voices) than from any of his composition teachers. (Elsewhere, he claimed that his greatest influences were Jean Paul and J. S. Bach, the supreme master of counterpoint.) Music historians have

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frequently proposed a connection between Schumann’s critical alter egos, the introverted poetic Eusebius and the brilliant and impassioned Florestan, and the figures of Walt and Vult, twin brothers with similarly opposed personalities in Jean Paul’s novel Flegeljahre (1804–5), which Schumann 30 adored. Both brothers are in love with the same woman, Wina. In the masked ball scene near the end of the novel one twin disguises his voice to sound like the other, creating a marvelously convoluted play of identities. (Schumann certainly imitated this: after his engagement to the virtuoso pianist Clara Wieck, he wrote to ask her which of the two, Eusebius or Florestan, she had agreed to marry — and would she come to resent the presence of the other, he wondered?) Equally influential was Jean Paul’s delight in having characters from one novel suddenly reappear in another, suggesting that their personalities persist outside their fictional context. Schumann’s set of piano miniatures, Carnaval, op. 9, (completed in 1835, published in 1837) contains musical portraits of both Eusebius and Florestan together with characterizations — or impersonations — of several friends (including Wieck and the composers Chopin and Paganini). Similarly, all but one of the dances of the Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6, (completed in 1837, published the same year) was originally signed with the initials of Florestan, Eusebius, or both. Revising the work for a second edition in 1850–51 Schumann stripped away the initials and additional verbal directions, such as the one that had introduced the final piece: “Ganz zum Überfluss meinte Eusebius noch Folgendes; dabei sprach aber viel Seligkeit aus seinen Augen” (Superfluously, Eusebius added the following, and much happiness shone from his eyes). This last example is essentially a personalized form of performance indication — like the directions “langsam” or “einfach.” Had these literary intrusions perhaps come to seem redundant over time? Or had Schumann grown embarrassed in later years to make public the centrality of these assumed masks in every aspect of his life? In an 1836 review of dance music published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the journal founded by Schumann in 1834, we come upon characterizations of a collection of dances by Schubert whose form is outwardly similar to the glosses Souchay sent to Mendelssohn. Yet their content is far more definite and picturesque, and the distancing devices by which they are staged in the review paradoxically serve to bring us much closer to the effect of the music. A narrator conjures a convivial past occasion on which Eusebius, Florestan and a host of others (including Serpentin — Serpentina is the name of a character in Hoffmann’s story “Der goldne Topf” — and Walt) listened to Zilia, a female pianist, playing Schubert’s Deutsche Tänze (1825) by heart. Clara Wieck was famous for her performances from memory, a rare occurrence at that time. It does not in fact matter whether we catch all the references: Schumann’s mixing of familiar fictional names and characteristics of famed personalities creates the aura of a situation invested with personal

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meaning. The narrator, himself present in the scene, remarks that an entire carnival takes part in Schubert’s dances, and he encourages a deaf painter to use his magic lantern to translate the musical masquerade into shadows cast upon the wall. Florestan is moved to speak. As if to apologize for the inevitable loss of meaning in any act of recounting, the storyteller warns us that the characterizations that follow, like the painter’s shadows, are merely approximations, partially remembered fragments from an unforgettable evening: “Zilia fing an und Florestan mochte ungefähr so sprechen, obgleich alles viel ausgearbeiteter” (Zilia began and Florestan may have spoken sub31 stantially to this effect, though at much greater length). A few brief excerpts from Florestan’s remarks should suffice to show how different their function is from Souchay’s efforts: — Nr. 2. Komische figur sich hinter den Ohren kratzend und immer “pst, pst” rufend. Verschwindet . . . — Nr. 4. Zwei steife vornehme Masken; tanzend, wenig miteinander redend. — 5. Schlanker Ritter, eine Maske verfolgend: habe ich dich endlich schöne Zitherspielerin. — 32 “Laßt mich los.” — Entflieht. . . . (RS, 13).

These vivid descriptive glosses attributed to Florestan, and carefully staged within an account of a memorable past performance, serve only partly to translate the distinctive affect of the dances into language. More importantly: the specificity of Schumann’s evocative images provides an analogue in language for the specificity of the musical meaning. There are even bits of dialogue within the rehearsal of Florestan’s words. Furthermore, the fact that the descriptions are introduced as fragments of a spontaneous effusion fostered by the convivial surroundings serves to recommend a mode of reception for these works — they are best heard in an intimate setting performed by friends for friends, just as they might have been played by Schubert himself one equally memorable evening. At the end of his review Schumann reports that Florestan suddenly broke off in the middle of the waltz: “Florestan pflegt nämlich oft mitten im Augenblick des Vollgenusses abzubrechen, vielleicht um dessen ganze Fri33 sche und Fülle mit in die Erinnerung zu bringen” (RS, 13). Recalling Schumann’s musical portrait of Florestan in Carnaval, we will be struck by the fact that he does just that. Both the review and the musical portrait break off at the height of a scene of passionate intensity; both are left as dynamic 34 fragments (like the literary fragments of the Athenaeum). Only the essay is able directly to draw our attention to this fact, but the stray cadence with which the following piece in Carnaval opens is in its own way a coy reply to Florestan’s abrupt departure. A generation of German Romantic literary theorists embraced music for its capacity to open up entirely new worlds, free of the constraints imposed by language. Poetry should become more like this most Romantic of the

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arts, they urged, striving for a mode of expression at once definite and abstract. As if in distant reply, Schumann’s review demonstrates how the most specific and singular verbal images can become the means to something like the abstraction of music: the flood of names laden with personal significance in his sketch, the mix of intimate detail (“pst, pst!”) and sweeping gesture (the shadows of the tones projected onto the wall; Florestan’s energetic miming) awaken numerous senses, leaving a composite impression as difficult to paraphrase as any piece of music. In affirming again and again the loss of meaning inherent in all forms of translation, Schumann also reaffirms that the fullness of musical meaning can be taken in only through the ear, stressing that musical perception is colored by the distinctiveness of the acoustical space and the atmosphere in which it is heard. Better than any of his contemporaries he understood how to use language to put the listener in a receptive state, to create the conditions that will induce us to focus intently upon the music. Schumann’s masterful review serves to summon Schubert’s Deutsche Tänze to the minds of those who know them already; and — to all who have not yet had the pleasure — it provides an impetus for rushing to make their acquaintance.

Notes 1

Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch für Freunde der Natur (Facsimile reprint edited by Heinrich Schipperges, Heidelberg: Schneider, 1969), 232–42. Walter Benjamin thought the preface to this esoteric volume “the most important sample of personal prose of German Romanticism.” Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken, 1969), 65–66. 2

Ludwig Tieck, “Symphonien,” in part 2 of the Tieck/ Wackenroder Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (1799). Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe (Munich: Hanser, 1984), 353. “In instrumental music, however, art is independent and free. Subject only to laws of its own invention, it fantasizes playfully and without purpose, and yet it attains the highest purpose: pursuing its most mysterious inclinations, it expresses the greatest marvels through its meanderings.” A similar conception is recorded in a notebook entry of Novalis from 1800: “Lieder, Epigramme etc. sind für die Poësie, was Arien, Angloisen etc. für die Musik sind. Sonaten und Symphonieen etc. — das ist wahre Musik. So muß auch die Poësie schlechtin bloß verständig — künstlich — erdichtet — Fantastisch! Etc. seyn” (Songs, epigrams etc. are for poetry what arias and the angloise [a country dance] are for music. Sonatas, symphonies etc.: that is true music. Poetry per se also must be merely comprehensible — artful — contrived — fantastic! etc.; NS, 3: 691). 3

Franz Xavier Niemetschek, W. A. Mozarts Leben nach Originalquellen beschrieben (1798), facsimile reprint (Prag: Taussig, 1905), 47.

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4

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften: Schriften 1801–1803 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 2: 330. For a discussion of the influence of idealist philosophy on the new aesthetic see Mark Evan Bonds, “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 387–420. 5 Novalis, “Monolog” (1798; NS, 2: 672). 6

Friedrich Schiller, “Über Matthissons Gedichte,” in Werke und Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 8: 1016–37 (1023–26, remarks on music). There is an excellent discussion of Schiller’s ideas on music (with translations of the relevant passages) in Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), 126–31. 7

E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik” (1814–15), in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 2.1: 52. The essay is a conflation and revision of two essays, an 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony written for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, and an 1812–13 essay on the Piano Trios, op. 70. English translations from Ruth A. Solie (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, revised edition, volume 6, The Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1998), 151–55. “Music discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.” 8

“[A world] in which he leaves behind all feelings definable by concepts in order to surrender himself to the inexpressible.” The original version of the essay is reprinted in E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schriften zur Musik: Singspiele, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. 9 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1988), 22–42 (23). The variants and broader context of the essay are considered in detail in Christine Lubkoll, Mythos Musik: Poetische Entwürfe des Musikalischen in der Literatur um 1800 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1995), 234–46. 9

Charles Rosen identifies Ritter as the writer whose idea of music as the Ur-language from which all others are derived Hoffmann paraphrases in the Kreisleriana. He continues with a brilliant discussion of the affinity of these ideas to an aspect of Robert Schumann’s songwriting technique. The Romantic Generation, 60–61. 10

Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, 2.1:54. As Scott Burnham has observed, Hoffmann understood Romanticism “more as a synchronic mode of all art than as a historical development peculiar to his own age.” See his probing review essay of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton and trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) in 19th Century Music, 14.3 (1991): 287. 11

Joseph Kerman, “Beethoven the Unruly,” New York Review of Books, 27 February 2003: 37.

12

Clemens Brentano, Werke in Zwei Bänden (Munich: Hanser, 1972), 1: 113–15. Translations from John F. Fetzer, Romantic Orpheus: Profiles of Clemens Brentano (Berkeley: University of California, 1974), 251–55. Fetzer’s book contains a detailed discussion of the Beethoven cycle.

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13

This practice is carefully contextualized in Lisa Fishman, “‘To Tear the Fetter of Every Other Art’: Early Romantic Criticism and the Fantasy of Emancipation,” 19thCentury Music (Summer, 2001): 75–86. 14 Wilhelm Heinse, Musikalische Dialogen (1769, first published in 1805), in Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig: Insel, 1913), 1: 221–47; for the Rousseau-Jomelli Dialogue, see esp. 232, 239. A new edition of Heinse’s musical writings has just been announced by Olms (Hildesheim, 2002). 15

Amadeus Wendt, Ueber die Hauptperioden der Schönen Kunst, oder die Kunst im Laufe der Weltgeschichte dargestellt (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1831), 308. “Haydn könnte man, insofern bei ihm die epische Darstellung vorherrschend ist, mit Göthe; Mozart wegen seines lyrischen, durch Melancholie versezten Pathos, mit Schiller; Beethoven endlich, wie auch früher von mir geschehen ist, wegen seines allumfassenden Humors, mit Jean Paul, in Hinsicht seiner dramatischen Natur aber mit dem Briten Shakspeare vergleichen.” Wendt alludes to his earlier association of Beethoven with Jean Paul in an 1815 essay in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. 16

Adolf Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen, (2 vols. Berlin: Otto Janke, 1859; facsimile reprint, Hildesheim & New York: Olms, 1979, as 2 vols. in 1), 1: 280. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation M and page number.

17

August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Ueber Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxman’s Umrisse,” Athenaeum (Berlin: Heinrich Fröhlich, 1799; facsimile reprint Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 2.2: 202–3. The immediate stimulus for these reflections were the outline drawings of John Flaxman — rather stiff sketches (some designed as bas reliefs for pottery) — illustrating scenes from Dante, Aeschylus and Homer. 18

Schumann’s essay on Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is the longest and most detailed review of his career. It is translated in the Norton Critical Scores edition of Berlioz’s symphony edited by Edward T. Cone (New York: Norton, 1971). 19

Franz Liszt, “Berlioz und seine Haroldsinfonie,” 52. The essay was published in five installments in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 43 (1855): volumes 3 (25–32) 13 July; 4 (37–46) 20 July; 5 (49–55) 27 July; 8 (77–84) 17 August; 9 (89–97) 24 August. Its text is a translation of the French original by Liszt and the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. A partial translation of the essay into English by Oliver Strunk is contained in Solie (ed.), “Strunk’s Source Readings,” 116–32. (The page numbers for the NZfM are incorrectly stated in this volume.) Here is Strunk’s translation of the passage cited: “The painter-symphonist, however, setting himself the task of reproducing with equal clarity a picture clearly present in his mind, of developing a series of emotional states which are unequivocally and definitely latent in his consciousness — why may he not, through a program, strive to make himself fully intelligible?” (Strunk). 20

“The program asks only acknowledgement for the possibility of precise definition of the psychological moment that prompts the composer to create his work and of the thought to which he gives outward form.” 21 “Hardly could two poems at their foundation show a closer kinship than that chorus of Gluck and this Andante by Beethoven.”

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22

Richard Wagner, “Beethoven” (1870), Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel’s Musikalienhandlung, 1904), 96. The essay is available in English in Wagner: Actors and Singers, translated by W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln and London: Uof Nebraska P, 1995). 23 Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte. Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek Berlin, ed. Karl-Heinz Köhler and Dagmar Beck, with Günter Brosche, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1983), 288. 24

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter in den Jahren 1799 bis 1832, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, vol. 20.1 (Munich: Hanser, 1991), 285–86. 25 “Dieser hat nichtsdestoweniger die Gesinnung seines Publikums gefühlt und aus bittrer, unverfälschter Rückerinnerung gemahnt er 1827 Zeltern, daß es, wie er sich wohl erinnern werde, gegen seine Wahlverwandschaften sich ‘wie gegen das Kleid des Nessus gebärdet’ habe.” Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften” in Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 78. The essay is translated in Selected Writings, 2 vols., ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1996), 1: 297–360. 26 “The eternal Feminine — that is what music is, mysteriously harboring life and spirit in her womb. If it is true that Goethe said of Beethoven that ‘while listening to Beethoven’s works it appeared to him as if this man’s father had been a woman, his mother a man’: then the clear-eyed poet has once again gazed penetratingly and deeply. The father, the spirit, directed him to music and in him music [a feminine noun in German: die Musik] became Man, became Spirit.” 27 We have no critical edition of Souchay’s letter, which is held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, or of Mendelssohn’s response. A copy of Mendelssohn’s letter (the original is in private hands) is also housed in the Bodleian Library. A transcription of these two texts, and several others that bear on Mendelssohn’s response, have recently been made available by John Michael Cooper. See his, “Words Without Songs? Of Texts, Titles, and Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte” in Musik als Text: Bericht über den Internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung: Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ed. Hermann Danuser and Tobias Plebuch, 2 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), 2: 341–45. References to Cooper’s work are cited in the text using the abbreviation C and page number. English translations from Solie (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings, 156–59. 28

“What the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not too indefinite for words, but rather too definite.” 29 Liszt, 39. 30

The most comprehensive investigation of Schumann’s engagement with Jean Paul and its effect on his music is Eric Frederick Jensen’s “Explicating Jean Paul: Robert Schumann’s Program for Papillons, Op. 2,” 19th Century Music, 22.2 (1998): 127– 43. 31 Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1854; reprint edited by Gerd Nauhaus and Ingeborg Singer, Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1985, as 2 vols. in 1), 2: 9–13. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation RS and page number. English

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translation in Solie (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings, 112–15. Some of the translations have been emended for this essay. 32

“Nr. 2. Comic character, scratching himself behind the ears, and continually calling out, ‘Pst, pst!’ He exits . . . Nr. 4. Two stiff and elegant masks, dancing, conversing little. 5. Slim cavalier, chasing a mask: ‘Have I caught you at last, lovely zitherplayer!’ ‘Let me go!’ She escapes.” 33

“Florestan, you know, has a habit of breaking off in the very moment when his enjoyment is at its height, perhaps in order to impress it in all its freshness and fullness on the memory.” 34

For a superb discussion of the fragment as a Romantic form see Rosen, The Romantic Generation, chapter two (“Fragments”), 41–115.

Romanticism and the Visual Arts Beate Allert

I

T WAS IN GERMANY

where Romantic visual art first emerged in the years 1 between 1796 and 1830. This time span can be conventionally structured into three distinct currents: Frühromantik (Early Romanticism, 1796– 1806), Hochromantik (High Romanticism, 1806–15), and Spätromantik 2 (Late Romanticism, 1815–30). While the boundaries between each are frequently indistinct and the currents themselves are sometimes hard to distinguish, the periodization applied to German Romantic art coincides for the most part with that accorded German Romantic literature, although their centers of activity do not specifically coincide. 3 German Romanticism is often contrasted to Weimar Classicism. Goethe had serious objections to Romanticism and categorically rejected significant works of art, even by the painters since recognized as major figures, includ4 ing Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774– 5 1840). Romanticism was opposed by the Propyläen (1798–1800) venture, a learned periodical published by Goethe, Johann Heinrich Meyer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Karoline von Humboldt, and Schiller. They also organized many art competitions to promote classical ideals and to denigrate Romanticism, a movement that was nevertheless rising and eventually could not be 6 stopped. In this chapter it will be argued that German Romanticism has suffered a double stigmatism in its reception history, due first to the dominant Goethe reception, which associated Romanticism with self-indulgence, extreme subjectivity, neglect of the objective, and ultimately madness. This strand of reception history was also strengthened by the Hegelian criticism of Romanticism in the name of so-called realism. Second, the reception of German Romantic art has suffered because it was valorized by National Socialist aesthetics in opposition to what was denigrated as “degenerate art,” thus linking German Romantic art with features of fascist ideology, an unfortunate historical connection that continues to have consequences to the 7 present. In contrast to this, it is Walter Benjamin in his writings on Romantic art and on the associated arabesque and grotesque who has offered a way out of this dilemma. Via his corrective readings, progressive elements in Early Romanticism can be traced in the digressive writings of Jean Paul or in the fluency of the paintings by Runge. For example, Benjamin argues the

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apparent loss of objectivity claimed by Goethe has been much misunderstood and must be instead conceptualized in terms of what he calls “disfig8 uration.” Benjamin argues that the “figures” or “Gestalten” of fantasy do not have a single accurate word to describe them in the German language and that this has led to much misunderstanding of the specific processes in the imaginary. He contrasts the Romantic process of “Entstaltung der Gebilde” (disfiguration of forms) with any destructive process of decay or disintegration as it occurs naturally in the empirical world. He emphasizes that the aesthetic process of Romantic disfiguration is at the core of fantasy and that it is free and therefore painless, adding that it comes with enjoyment and bliss and does not lead to dissolution or death. Instead, it celebrates life in an infinite succession of transitions (“Übergänge”) and must be distinguished from any sort of “Untergang” or complete loss (6: 115). Benjamin thus counters the Goethean and Hegelian critique of German Romanticism and argues against the notion of a loss of objectivity or overabundant subjectivity for the sake of an open-minded receptivity. It was not until the famous Berlin “Jahrhundert-Ausstellung” of German art from 1775–1875 held in the Königliche Nationalgalerie in 1906 9 that German Romantic paintings were rediscovered and appreciated. And in much critical literature on German Romanticism, the culmination of this movement has been identified with the conservative, bourgeois Biedermeier 10 school (1815–48). Whereas Biedermeier — influenced by High and Late Romanticism — makes Romanticism appear primarily associated with conservatism, retreat, and the return to interior space, one can instead argue with Benjamin that Early Romanticism was a progressive movement, thus emphasizing alternative aspects of Romanticism. Benjamin accentuates the arabesque and the allegorical mode as the most relevant matters for the reception of Romanticism in Modernity. The arabesque draws from the more forward minded approaches in Early Romanticism and questions all framing and centering devices, being related rather to the ideas of liberation, 11 invention, and unpredictable progress. Movements that came after Romanticism, such as Junges Deutschland and naturalism, rejected Romanticism altogether and attacked and weakened belief in the power of imagination for the sake of the “real” and a return to mimetic reproduction. German Romanticism continues to be associated with folk legends such as the Lorelei and Undine, myths such as Isis, Midas, and Pygmalion. The fairy-tale material often includes notions of the sublime and the grotesque, as well as the representations of humans, animals, plants, dwarfs, giants, or other-worldly creatures in paintings and literature. German Romantic aesthetics, however, continues to live on in the arabesque and in many diverse forms, genres, and styles, as well as in the contexts of multiple adaptations and themes in art, such as sunsets, landscapes, shipwrecks, ruins, and travel scenes. It is also implicit in the philosophical, psychological, and theoretical discourses of

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writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, among others, and it is prevalent in countless modern and postmodern images and metaphors, including those of the uncanny and the grotesque. Moreover, German Romanticism influenced later movements in art such as impressionism, cubism, and futurism, yet these were the movements that came to be labeled as “degenerate” and were forbidden and pitched against the idealized notion of “pure” and “simple” German Romantic art. In Munich in 1937, the National Socialists held two concurrent exhibitions of contemporary art, one showcasing “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) in the Hofgartenarkaden and the other entitled the “Great Exhibition of Ger12 man Art” in the just completed “Haus der Deutschen Kunst.” Adolph Hitler opened it with a major speech on art. Due to that speech paintings in any style of German Romantic art were then falsely idealized, individual 13 painters appropriated and misrepresented, and used for propaganda. Hitler emphasized that art is timeless and associated with “race” and that artists do 14 not create for themselves but for their nation. He said that National Socialism made it the explicit goal to rid the German people and its art from all impurities, which he then identified with elements of the avant-garde, with 15 corruption, madness, and cultural bolshevism. Referring to the loss of art works that had occurred in 1931 when the previous art gallery on the spot had burnt down, he singled out one particular group for praise as expressing the values of “wahrhaft[en] deutsche[n] Kunst” (true German art): Romantiker heißen sie und waren dabei doch nur die schönsten Vertreter jenes deutschen Suchens nach der wirklichen und wahrhaften Art unseres Volkes und nach einem aufrichtigen und anständigen Ausdruck 16 dieses innerlich geahnten Lebengesetzes. (246–47)

What Hitler emphasized in Romanticism was what he saw as its simplicity, accessibility, its “völkisch” sentiment and “morality,” aspects that the 17 Biedermeier school had tried to develop and perpetuate. Friedrich in particular was terribly misrepresented, stylized as a “prototypical German,” 18 manly and brave, in terms of self-denial, stoicism and ignoring the abyss. What Hitler and the National Socialists repressed in their interpretation of Romantic art was the innovative, the transgressive, and those departures from earlier modes of visual representation that attempted in theory and practice to leave mimetic representation behind. These elements provided vital inspiration for the important modernist movements that helped contribute to our contemporary understanding of the processes of simulation. The debate that was initiated by an exhibition in Great Britain and Germany in 1994–95 entitled “The Spirit of Romanticism in German Art” has done much to clarify the situation and allow German Romantic art to be under19 stood in its own right. Romantic art is not an anticipation of fascist ideol20 ogy, and Novalis’s blue flower cannot be an icon for death, elitist

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“Innerlichkeit” (inwardness), and political escapism. Early German Romantics offered more fragments, open-ended sketches, messages that indicate an affinity to the democratic. They turned the table from the previously omnipotent creator of the artwork or text to its reader or recipient, who is invited to actively participate in the construction of meaning. This shifting of emphases is one of the most basic assumptions of Romantic philosophy and art aesthetics and represents an area in which German Romantic paintings differ significantly from those by other great European Romantic painters, for example the Swiss Johann Heinrich Füsseli [Henry Fuseli] (1741– 1824), the Spaniard Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), and the Englishmen, William Blake (1757–1827) and Joseph William Mallord 21 Turner (1775–1851). These European contemporaries ventured into dream worlds, the fantastic, and the unconscious in perhaps even more directly explicit and strikingly innovative ways than did their German counterparts, while consciously parting from the ordinary in every day life. German Romantics in contrast had an outspoken desire to “romanticize” life in general, to give everything the glow of uniqueness, to find the unusual in the usual, the sacred and mysterious everywhere. A conventional beginning for German Romanticism in literature is the year 1796, during which Wackenroder and Tieck’s collection of essays Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk) first appeared anonymously. This work prepared the ground for Runge, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), and numerous other contemporary artists and was followed by Tieck’s Franz Sternbald’s Wanderungen (The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald, 1798) and Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (Fantasies on Art for Friends of Art, 1799). These narratives offered fictionalized celebrations of great artists such as Dürer, Michelangelo, Cranach, and Raphael — painters who dedicated their lives to the pursuit of art with religious devotion. These artists provided examples for the German Romantics, not in terms of any pre-given model or uniform style, but rather in terms of something imaginative and metaphoric, indirect and incomplete. Raphael in particular provided the inspira22 tions for artists as diverse as Runge and the Nazarenes. German Romanticism is often characterized in distinction to Classicism not in terms of a different style and form but in terms of another “Geisteshaltung,” an attitude, or vision of the mind. It comes from a quest for hidden meanings in the all-embracing universe. Nature has become the sacred itself. Early Romantic philosophers, painters, and poets wanted to turn life into art. For them art is a natural human language of the divine that expresses itself in the cosmos, anywhere without any discrimination. It was a shared assumption among a wide and diverse spectrum of German Romantic painters to consider the paintings by Raphael, Dürer, and Michelangelo as great or “vorbildlich” (ideal). But in contrast to the ideals of “edle Einfalt” and “stille

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Größe” as advocated by Winckelmann, a spokesman for Weimar Classicism, Early Romanticism returned to the simple, the child as hero, sense perception itself, nowhere perhaps better exemplified than in the work of Runge. Accompanying these efforts by writers like Tieck and Wackenroder and artists like Runge was an attempt in philosophy, literature, and visual art to bridge spatial and temporal aspects while aiming at interdisciplinarity and multisensory perception. This was conceptualized in Novalis’s Blüthenstaub (Pollen, 1798) fragments and in other contributions to the Athenaeum journal such as Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of “progressive Universalpoesie,” which stipulated that the poetic should integrate the visual with the acoustic 24 and that the various disciplines should merge. Language should gain new meanings based on the collective experiencing of concrete sensory data, and paintings should reflect things in new constellations as never seen before. Things should not be described or painted as representing finished products. A shift toward the recipient and observer characterizes much of Early Romanticism, in the context of both texts and images. Friedrich Schlegel states in the Athenaeum Fragment 116 that everything must be reborn in the spirit of the poetic for a new age to come. All the various disciplines should unite for the sake of a “Gesamtkunstwerk” combining all genres and sense perceptions into one work of total art. It aims at recognition of shared existences in a newly romanticized, poetic world. As Novalis wrote in his sixteenth Blütenstaub Fragment: Die Fantasie setzt die künftige Welt entweder in die Höhe, oder in die Tiefe, oder in der Metempsychose zu uns. Wir träumen von Reisen durch das Weltall: ist denn das Weltall nicht in uns? Die Tiefen unseres Geistes kennen wir nicht. — Nach Innen geht der geheimnißvolle Weg. In uns, oder nirgends ist die Ewigkeit mit ihren Welten, die Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Die Außenwelt ist die Schattenwelt, sie wirft ihren Schatten in das Lichtreich. Jetzt scheint es uns freylich innerlich so dunkel, einsam, gestaltlos, aber wie ganz anders wird es uns dünken, wenn diese Verfinsterung vorbei, und der Schattenkörper hinweggerückt ist. Wir werden mehr genießen als je, denn unser Geist hat ent25 behrt. (NS, 2: 417)

As the title of Novalis’s collection of literary fragments already suggests, we have here a new genre and an alternative to the earlier model conceptualizing the author-text relation. It is now dependent on the reader-text relation in such a way that information is not simply given by the author to the reader via the text, it must be understood in terms of inter-subjectivity. The text or the visual message is incomplete and meaningless unless the reader or viewer actively participates in its construction as well. Texts according to this model by Novalis, Jean Paul, and others can be properly received and disseminated only if the persons reading them have already previously made

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similar discoveries within themselves. This way they trust that the incomplete messages will find a “fertile” ground in order to be processed creatively. Thus, the creative process has its sources inside rather than outside. Novalis suggests a quasi anti-didactic move away from any language with exclamation marks, any interposing speech that would tell the recipients what to do. He insists: Wie kann ein Mensch Sinn für etwas haben, wenn er nicht den Keim davon in sich hat? Was ich verstehen soll, muß sich in mir organisch entwickeln; und was ich zu lernen scheine ist nur Nahrung, Inzitament 26 des Organismus. (Blütenstaub no. 18, NS, 2: 418)

Early Romantic poets and painters continue the heritage of the Enlightenment by turning toward their own senses rather than by accepting any given belief system. At the same time, the search for change relies on a notion of 27 an “organic” similarity, shared among all living persons and creatures alike. Based on this notion, the Early Romantics allowed imagination to be liberated from a culturally long-engrained iconophobia, a fear of images, as well as from certain assumptions on linear time, as it had been previously assumed in strictly rationalist discourses. The concept of organic growth and images of birth, initiation, and departure are shared among many Early Romantic 28 painters and poets and also connected with the popular Romantic motif of “Wanderung.” The motif of unveiling, as it is referred to more specifically in Novalis’s fragmentary novel Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1802; translated as The Novices of Sais, 1949), is associated with the ongoing search for a hidden self. The development of an artist is identified with finding oneself in harmony with loving nature. Lifting the veil of Isis is not described as fatal, as in “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais” (The Veiled Image at Sais, 1795), Friedrich Schiller’s poem on the same motif. In Novalis it reveals an ongoing process of disillusionment toward finding one’s higher or — more accurately said — deeper self within the sacred universe where everything, subjects and animated objects alike, reflect each other in an endless process of interconnectivity, contiguity, and metaphoric relations. Hyazinth, the main character in the fairy tale within Novalis’s Lehrlinge zu Sais, a narrative consisting of series of interconnected fragments, searches for the goddess Isis and asks all humans, animals, plants, rocks, trees, even clouds he meets on the way where to find her. After many years travelling, he falls asleep and has a marvelous dream. Suddenly he stands in front of the goddess, raises her glowing veil, and Rosenblütchen, his earlier love, falls into his arms. Just like the blue flower in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the object of desire undergoes metamorphoses and changes meanings in various contexts. But the meanings always depend on the individual seer, not on any given myth or prescribed legend.

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This notion of change has consequences for the use of language that welcomes metaphors and allegories in ways that Goethe had rejected. Jean Paul in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool of Aesthetics, 1804) writes that the so-called language of images (“Bilderschrift”) can express more life than 29 the dead language of letters (“tote Buchstabenschrift”). Images had gained a new currency even within texts or as metaphors in relation to the fixed terms of language. Jean Paul celebrated metaphor as a way to expand one’s 30 horizon, to invent new colors and to explore all the senses. In his approach, the language of poetic images is conceptualized as a “Findkunst” or “Heuristik” in Vorschule (§54, 202), which further illustrates the link between 31 painters and poets of Early Romanticism. And this link did not go unnoticed by their contemporaries. An anonymous reviewer of an exhibition of paintings in Dresden in 1807 called Friedrich the Jean Paul among the painters, since he similarly took the most abstract ideas and presented them with such vitality and accurateness that they irresistibly take hold of one’s 32 mind and have, even at first sight, a fascinating attraction. Whereas the origins of German Romantic visual art are hard to trace and may go back to Medieval mysticism and other sources, one may want to accept the notion that the first Romantic artist was Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the 33 younger (1781–1855). While in Berlin, Kolbe, who had exhibited his first work in 1797 and who would later in 1830 become a professor of the Berlin Academy, participated in the Propyläen competitions but was in fact already more interested in the revival of a medieval approach to art. He experimented with earlier techniques of mixing colors with wax and additional materials in order to gain various effects of opaqueness and transparency. These experiments later became important for Runge and Friedrich, who are known for their “Lasurtechnik,” a water coloring and varnishing technique that has the effect of veiling or only partial uncovering. But perhaps the title of father of German Romantic art should belong to his father, Carl Wilhelm 34 Kolbe the elder (1759–1835). He entered the Berlin Academy under the sponsorship of the artist Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki (1726–1801) and was taught by the eminent classical painter Asmus Jakob Carstens (1759–98), soon becoming a full member of the Academy. An artist whose work refuses categorization, Kolbe restricted himself to drawings and engravings that reflect an interest in organic growth, a subject that was also important for Herder and the early Goethe during the Storm and Stress period. Kolbe was later given the nicknames “Eichen-” (oak-) and “Kraut-” (cabbage or plant) Kolbe because of the detailed etchings of very meticulous craftsmanship he produced based on minute observations of nature and patterns of growth. His engraving “Phantastische tote Eiche” (Fantastic Dead Oak, 1830) portrays a bent oak whose branches look like roots above the ground, a tree uprooted, not dead but animated with many faces and imaginary eyes that 35 reflect the eyes of the observers. Kolbe’s influence on other painters was far

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reaching. In 1797, after seeing some of Kolbe’s etchings done the year before, young Runge became aware of his own determination to become a painter himself. In 1795 Leopold Friedrich Franz (1740–1817), the ruler of Dessau, established a School for Drawing and Design and that year Kolbe became a teacher there. In the first decade of the nineteenth century he was subsequently to teach the Olivier brothers Ferdinand (1785–1841) and Friedrich (1791–1856), both of whom became associated with a very different kind of Romanticism, the mainly Catholic revivalist movement known as the “Nazarener” (Nazarene School). The immediate period after 1796 was also a time of increased tensions between the proponents of Weimar Classicism and a newly constituted group in Jena associated with August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, the editors of the periodical Athenaeum (1798–1800), whose dates coincide 36 with those of the Propyläen. This group was the nexus of a series of close partnerships and friendships: Friedrich Schlegel with Novalis, Schleiermacher, and his wife Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn; August Wilhelm and wife Caroline Schlegel-Schelling with 37 Schelling; Wackenroder and Tieck; Tieck with Novalis and Runge. Members of this Jena circle gathered in Dresden in 1798 (Tieck was to live there from 1801–5 and then again after 1819). August Wilhelm and his wife 38 Caroline Schlegel edited the “Die Gemälde. Gespräch. In Dresden 1798” (The Painters. Discussions. In Dresden 1798) and the former published the 39 poem “Der Bund der Kirche mit den Künsten” (The Alliance of the Church with the Arts), two texts that later became programmatic for the Nazarenes. While this period of intense literary ferment was in progress, parallel 40 changes were underway in the world of art, especially painting. These changes affected a large number of artists, but are particularly associated with Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich. Runge was born in the port city of Wolgast in Swedish Pomerania. With the support of his brother Daniel, Runge took drawing lessons in Hamburg and entertained the idea to become a decorative designer later in life. However, he soon acquired an expertise that went far beyond his initial goal and in 1799 he left for Copenhagen to study at the Academy there. His illustrations to Ossian, for example, still reflect the influence of Classicism; but in them Runge mixed elements of sculpture and painting, the disciplines of plastic art and drawing, 41 thus challenging the usual borders between them. For Runge, Friedrich, and the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) the Early Romantic concept of “Transzendentalpoesie” was important, as it supported the individualistic exploring with border crossings and the marginal. The work of Kolbe also suggested to Runge that there is more to a picture than what is actually presented within its own media and its obvious meaning and that there is much more space for imagination available than has ever been al-

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lowed to enter the domains of visual art. Runge decided to turn his attention to painting rather than plastic art and he also shifted more attention to the media and their specific effects. One of the basic features characterizing Early Romantic aesthetics is the self-empowering move of a viewer wanting to become an artist and creator in the face of an artwork by someone else and to participate in its open-ended construction of meaning. This was too radical for the Copenhagen Academy, and Runge left it in 1801, less than two years after he had begun his studies. On his way to Dresden he made a stop at Greifswald, where he met with Friedrich. Caspar David Friedrich was also born in Swedish Pomerania in the town of Greifswald not far from Wolgast. He is less well known than Runge for his innovations in the use of color but more renowned for the precision of his landscapes, which are almost frozen stills that in a different way highlight the importance of time and the inescapability of the moment. Both were of Protestant upbringing and influenced by Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten (1758–1818), a pastor and poet. Kosegarten’s works are suffused with Christian pantheism and a Neo-Platonic interpretation of beauty that may have disposed both to be influenced by the work of the early seven42 teenth-century Protestant mystic, Jacob Böhme (1575–1624). In Dresden, Runge enjoyed the friendship of Friedrich, who had his studio in the city. He also expected to be closer to Weimar and Goethe, with whom he had corresponded and whom he very much admired at that time. There he also made the acquaintance of Kleist and took advantage of the vibrant artistic life of the city and its famous art collections before returning to Hamburg in 1803. Goethe, however, rejected Runge’s composition “Achilles and Skammandros,” which the young Pomeranian had submitted 43 to the Weimarische Kunstausstellung in 1801. Runge was disillusioned with Goethe but soon found inspiration elsewhere. When Runge first saw Raphael’s famous “Sistine Madonna” at the Dresden Gallery in 1801, he was filled with awe. But his awe before the painting of Raphael did not lead Runge to follow a path soon to be marked out by the Nazarenes. This group of artists eventually formed something of a religious cult, following Raphael even to the extent of moving to his homeland, Italy. Instead, earlier that same year Runge wrote that he had for the first time realized that it was not important to try to reach the same level as any admired artist before him, but 44 rather to find how originality could be tapped for oneself. Runge became an avid reader of Novalis, whose protagonist in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) is inspired not only by high art but also by legends, dreams, and the ordinary world. On his journeys Heinrich meets people who help him to see things with an appreciation for nature and to perceive the sacred everywhere, including in a cave where he finds for a moment his own figure among the sketches in a book. When Heinrich perceives what appears to him to be a blue flower his desires seem almost in that instant fulfilled,

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but the flower remains ultimately out of reach and a matter of projection, transformation, and apparent illusion. Like the protagonist in Novalis’s fragmentary Lehrlinge zu Sais, Runge began to take a special interest in the imaginary, in stone formations, clouds, rocks, plants, and indeed any sense perceptions. He became attuned to communication and love among the diverse creatures in the universe, humans, animals, and plants. Like Novalis too, Runge read around in the works of the mystic Böhme and was fascinated with transubstantiation and incarnation. Runge developed a friendship with Ludwig Tieck and shared with Novalis, Tieck, Jean Paul, and Herder the idea that everything is contained in everything else throughout the 45 cosmos (“das All-Eine” or “the Universal Spirit”). This Pantheistic idea is connected with the notion that everything undergoes change and transcends one manifestation and appearance to another continuously, ad infinitum. Despite the possibility of continued connection with the Weimar circle around Goethe, whose Faust I (1808) similarly celebrates ongoing creation and evolution, Runge distanced himself from the great master after Goethe’s rude rejection of Runge’s “Achilles and Skammandros” in 1801 and remained disenchanted with all aspects of Weimar Classicism. Runge especially dismissed the notion of timeless art and personally realized that all art is caught up with time. For him art has its truth precisely in its temporal and fleeting specificity and its metaphoric nature. Runge’s first major work was the sequence of four engravings, “Die 46 Zeiten” (The Four Times of the Day) which was published in 1805. The borders of each painting transcend the main panel and continue throughout the framing margins or ornamental borders that add more of a dimension to 47 the image. These border elements deserve to be included in the actual painting, thus transgressing an expected boundary. Runge’s painting “Der Morgen” of 1808 (or more precisely “Der Kleine Morgen” in distinction to a later larger unfinished version) on the same motif involves more than one light source, rhythmic qualities, various points of reference, a radiant collage of elements for harmony consisting of various dimensions and multiple frames that are intimately connected with the recurrent motifs of the central 48 image and no longer to be ignored or considered superfluous. The picture is simple and harmonious despite its fragmentation and it offers glimpses into ongoing processes of reflection and progression, shifting motions between insides and outsides and connecting links and mirror effects between them. As observed by the early twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the introduction to his volume on the painters at Worpswede (1902), the great miracle of a sunset has never been painted again as it was in Runge’s 49 “Der Morgen.” It is a painting that has something fresh and exciting. The light radiates from the child up and from behind, not as perhaps expected down from above. This implies an anti-hierarchical move. The center does not present a hero as is normal in classical paintings, but has two focal points

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that seem equally important: a child and a female figure. She seems to be standing or lifted by a wave on top of the ocean with an effortless motion as if gliding and weightless, uplifting one arm. Runge’s figure transcends limited interpretations, and meanings are suggested on various levels of metaphor. Nevertheless, some critics argue that the female figure reflects Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna,” others, more prosaically, that she is Pauline Bassege, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Dresden shoemaker, whom Runge would later marry. This figure has also been interpreted as an allegory of Aurora, “the Morning,” as nature personified, revitalizing a figure from classical mythology in a way comparable to what Novalis does to Isis or 50 Herder to Pygmalion. Many other related figures populate the image and are interacting in motion. Nature is animated with kindred spirits or genii, and allegories combine the immediate with the most distant. Whatever the picture suggests goes beyond the encoded messages and the use of traditional techniques and their calculated effects. The viewers’ attention may not remain with the most familiar motifs that are of a commonplace in art history and well familiar since medieval iconography: the Madonna, the child, and the putti. It is more likely to extend to the delicate translucent effects in the background that make the foreground appear less interesting than the distant and unseen, resulting in curiosity and excitement. It was this notion of the intangible and sacred that startled the critics when the painting was first exhibited. What may be the figure of Christ may equally be that of any blessed genius being born in a flower or just waking up to a new insight in the morning. Fragments of the familiar iconography are recombined into something entirely new. The picture has been studied in terms of hieroglyphs of a secret language and in trying to link the intricate details with Runge’s personal experience as traced in his biographical writings and letters and also in connection with his vast and non-dogmatic belief in the sacred and pantheistic. Flowers and panels structure the image into various levels of consciousness and multiple perspectives at once. Many features are symmetrical and structured in detail, yet the use of light and hues tends to indicate additional effects and nuances of the temporal that may signal specific moments of awakening and delight. Two caring children, a bit older, on each side at the center bottom, admire the little child or baby Jesus. The sacred is located on the grass, naked and surrounded by plants and flowers. Direct contact is also given to the side panels of the outer frame that show genii, or angels, evolving from the plants playfully connected with all life in the universe. There are multiple higher levels, including that of Aurora or the female figure, but there is no central perspective. Runge’s antiperspectivalism in this work is from a contemporary point of view extraordinarily avant-garde. The sun signals the lily’s reign or the life force that comes from behind or rather from below from an eclipsed sun. The child radiates yet another glow of light and is a light force equally strong to that of Aurora

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or the morning sun. Runge experimented with various colors and hues, contrasts and effects to dissolve and to enhance them mutually. The notion of “Entstaltung,” or disfiguration has for Runge, however, none of the negative connotations it had for Goethe and Hegel. Runge died when he was only thirty-three years old, and other talents had to continue to explore the insights of his vision. His “Morgen” and the related images are in tune with the philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel’s “progressive Universalpoesie” and Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800). Among the features and techniques of Runge’s work are the layering of structural panels, the unveiling and superimposing of images, the reflection of recurrent motifs, the dynamics of colors interacting, the illusion of unrestricted space, and the freedom from any one dominant linear univocal plane for the sake of polyperspectivism. His work is musical and airy, highlighting the temporal and the simultaneous. Reminiscent of Runge’s incomplete painting of the cycle of times of the day is the fantastic stage decoration by Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) who is otherwise better known as one of the leading architects of the period. It is one of twelve designs he prepared for a performance by the Berlin Opera of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) on 18 January 1816, entitled “Der ägyptische Sternenhimmel der Königin der Nacht” (The Starry Egyptian 51 Heaven of the Queen of the Night). The multi-dimensional plane of this cosmic image lets the dancers and musicians step out of the picture, a technique already initiated by Runge when he integrated the frame into the painting. The illusionist makes the queen not only float in the air but also stand in clouds and on top of a new crescent moon or, rather, inside of it since it is turned into the shape of a canoe. The sun comes from underneath and stars are arranged in the uniform symmetrical rows that reveal the unreality of the vision. Runge seems to be the initiator for Pleinairism, a new style of the future that did away with shadows yet was also criticized for being more traditional than Turner’s effects with light and colors. In any case, Runge left ideas for Schinkel to complete. Moreover, Runge’s delicate flowers, shells, and miniature details of nature with mystical metamorphoses and multiple levels of reflection can similarly be detected in paintings by Paul 52 Klee, Henry Moore, and Joseph Beuys. The stage offers one perfect setting for the partial application of Schlegel’s idea of a “Gesamtkunstwerk” to which such a painting should, according to Early Romantic aesthetics, belong. Friedrich too had experimented with illustrating temporal cycles, first in 1803 with a set of four drawings on the seasons and then in 1826 when he returned to the subject in a series of seven sepia drawings in which the times of the day, the times of the seasons, and the times of life cycles inter53 act. But it was in 1808 that a painting of a sunset provided the setting for another key work of Early Romantic Art, Friedrich’s “Das Kreuz im Gebir54 ge” (The Cross on the Mountain), also known as the “Tetschener Altar.”

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When this picture was shown in Dresden during Christmas of 1808, it 55 gave rise to a public debate, the famous Ramdohr controversy. Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr (1752–1822), a councilor in the Court of Friedrich Augustus, king of Saxony, not only charged Friedrich with mounting a threat to good taste, but also associated him with an (imagined) slide into an age of barbarism. The crux of the matter was that in a picture, clearly intended as an altarpiece, Friedrich had essentially painted a landscape and infused it with symbols of mysticism. The artwork had been ordered by the Count Franz Anton von Thun-Hohenstein at the urging of his wife, Maria Theresa, after she had seen an earlier sepia version in Friedrich’s Dres56 den studio, intending for it to be installed in a private chapel. However, the painting hung in the count’s bedroom in his castle at Tetschen in northern Bohemia, as the chapel was never built. As a consequence of these attacks by Ramdohr, Friedrich published a response in which he defended the mixture 57 of the sacred with the private and argued that nature is itself the sacred. A crucifix stands in the context of a landscape that seems just as important as the Christian symbol itself. The picture was therefore seen as a blasphemy, as a displacement. The mixture of the sacred with landscape was, however, what Friedrich insisted on. The cross is entwined with ivy, a plant associated with death but symbolizing fidelity and immortality. It is placed not in the center of the picture, where it would be expected, and the rock on which it is mounted presents a steep cliff, which makes the cross appear inaccessible to the spectator. The effect of being shielded from the gaze of the spectator is also noticeable in the position of Christ on the cross, seen from behind, and neither hanging nor rising but suspended between heaven and earth, gravity and levitation. Although the cross is on the rock, it is not at its highest pinnacle either, and the sun shines not from above, but is setting from behind or slightly below. The sky looks as if on fire, it could be morning or evening, but the picture does not evoke any image seen like this in nature before, giving no consolation or joy, as in the case of Runge’s “Morning.” In contrast, it almost presents a threat, something ominous or gloomy. The painting of the dark reddish rock in the foreground looks unfinished and rough, thus apparently rejecting the spectator also. There are fir trees, traditionally symbols of the elect and those who excel in patience, painted with needles projecting in exquisite detail, almost overdone to an extreme of clarity. The trees around the crucifix are randomly positioned, each one separate from the others on the rocks, not grouped together into an obvious sort of pattern. Their color is dark green, almost black. They simply point toward the sky that is structured in various panels of shades of color in diverse directions. There are five rays of light, themselves possibly symbolic of the five wounds of Christ that come from behind and underneath the rock. Three main beams move diagonally into the upper part of the picture. They act as a nimbus, but the head whose glory they are sup-

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posed to emphasize is absent. Dark and red irregular bold stripes in horizontal direction dynamically counteract the diagonal upward rays. This adds a sense of melancholy. The effect is also one of disorientation, as various planes cross. Since linearity had historically been associated with a world in order, this indicates a disorder, not as in Runge’s challenge to perspectivalism, with the effect of enchantment, but here associating it with a postLaokoonian scream. The famous statue had been a matter of debate in terms of different reasons for its subdued expression by Winckelmann, Goethe, and 58 Lessing. In this painting by Friedrich, there may be a pre-Expressionist crying out in pain and — as the image suggests via its symbolism — in sympathy with the crucified Christ. The picture is surrounded by a thick golden frame, specially designed by Friedrich and made by his friend the sculptor Gottlob Christian Kühn (1780–1828), which itself contains sculptured images of on-looking figures. A star, done in silver, is in the center of the upper frame over the five angels who peer down over the painting. The sides of the frame are embellished with palm fronds; at the center of the lower frame, a sunburst nimbus surrounds “the eye of God,” or the eternal eye, in the golden trigon of the 59 trinity. This is flanked with ears of grain and bunches of grapes that symbolize bread and wine of the Eucharist. The trigon itself echoes the composition of the picture as a whole with the rocky mount itself roughly triangular, surrounded by a nimbus and a low bush in its center in the place of the pupil and again adding another dimension of conflicting beams in diverse directions. The mixture of the multiple senses and the conflation of nature with the sacred were unexpected in this form. Nature is represented, as critics noticed, not as it “is” but behind the matrix of art and individualized sense perception. Friedrich makes us aware of nature’s polyvalence with differences hard to gauge. His picture does not rely on the traditional illusion of three-dimensionality and the application of any central perspective; for this reason Ramdohr insisted that Friedrich in this painting had abandoned the true paths and scholarly principles of pictorial painting. Friedrich, on the other hand, draws attention to the fact that truth and artistic skills are neither the same nor opposed to each other. And it is clear that Friedrich did not lack awareness for the criteria that were demanded from him but had his own good reasons not to be influenced by Ramdohr, nor by Goethe, who also tried to change Friedrich without success, as Ernst Osterkamp has 60 documented. Friedrich’s reversal of the expected norms does not contradict his search for meaning. He searched inside himself rather than outside and made nature an altar, something private but sacred that deserves respect, 61 reflection, and compassion. Two years later, in 1810, Friedrich submitted two paintings to the annual exhibition of the Prussian Royal Academy which were listed in an understatement as “Zwei Landschaften in Öl” (Two Landscapes in Oil) but

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which really mark his breakthrough as artist. These paintings were “Der Mönch am Meer” (The Monk by the Sea) and “Abtei im Eichwald” (Abbey in the Oak Wood) and they were received with both applause and astonish62 ment. As Werner Hofmann points out, the political circumstances may have had an impact on the Crown Prince, who persuaded his father, Friedrich Wilhelm III, to buy both paintings even at a time when Prussia had to find money in order to pay the reparations for the Napoleonic wars. After the devastating defeats of Prussia’s army at Jena and Auerstedt in October 1806, the prince was apparently drawn to the somber atmosphere of the paintings that offered neither comfort nor patriotic uplift. Friedrich gained even more attention thanks to some major literary illustrations and important theoretical commentaries on art written by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Kleist. As the editor of the Berliner Abendblätter, Kleist commissioned an article from his friends, and then rewrote it, publishing it in the twelfth 63 issue of the paper on 13 October 1810 under the initials “CB.” As Kleist published it, the piece lacks the original conversations of a variety of individuals at the exhibition when they come face to face with “Der Mönch am 64 Meer.” Brentano and Arnim were quite annoyed at the published result and Kleist had to publish a “clarification” in a later issue. As Jörg Traeger argues, Kleist’s comment on the “Mönch am Meer” can be understood as the articulation of a basic paradigm shift in art theory at that time, away from pictorial thinking toward the increasing abolition of aesthetic frontiers as expressed not only by Friedrich but also, for example, by William Turner, who achieves a related effect via condensation and evaporation of clouds and 65 intensified coloring. Attention is drawn to the media, to language and the way this is painted. For example, the color Friedrich used in painting the sand may itself contain sand. The observer may in fact be reflected or become the monk in the picture and then see what is seen in the panorama referred to. How did Kleist come to make his famous, provocative statement on this painting by Friedrich, saying it was “als ob Einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären” (543, as if one’s eyelids had been cut off)? Certain expectations by the audience of the time remained unfulfilled by Friedrich’s 66 painting. The notion of “Anspruch” — the claim that is made by looking out into the ocean — contrasts with the “Abbruch,” or gap, that results from what is seen instead. Wishful desire as often projected unto nature needs the illusion of goals, parameters, or guidelines that would lead toward fulfillment. This picture, however, does not offer any vertical or diagonal lines that would feed into the illusion of three-dimensionality. Desire bounces back. The picture remains flat, based on horizontal lines only, and dismisses such a claim or “Anspruch.” There are three fuzzy, non-linear stripes of varied shades of muddy color, but only in a horizontal direction. Except for the small figure of the monk in the lower left side on the sand

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and bending slightly to the left there is no vertical or diagonal line that could serve as a guideline or as a counter-post to the horizontal stretching of the entire image. The universe is seen through the mind of this one observer. We are drawn into the simulated image, as Kleist remarks, and are forced to identify with the monk. Considering the diminutive human figure standing in the left bottom of this vast landscape by the ocean, the effect is a sense of empty space, loneliness, and the loss of the self. The figure of the monk is abstract and differs from the other “Rückenfiguren” in Friedrich’s paintings that are often seen from behind but standing on firmer ground with respect to the scenario of the landscape. This monk almost disappears in the sand 67 and the incumbent darkness that veils the shore. The “Abtei im Eichwald” offers a more varied design, a combination of different directions, zones, and spatial relations. It has sharp contrasts, and a center is marked by a leftover window, framed by the remnants of a ruin, just a piece of wall with the open gate and the window that once may have belonged to the front wall of an abbey. Not even the façade is left. The building as announced in the title is actually missing. The gothic shape of the window and its height are superseded by the bare and almost crippled oak trees that stretch their branches into the pale yellow sky and bend on both sides of the ruin’s window. The foreground is rough and unframed, as in the “Mönch am Meer.” There seems to be a graveyard with bent stones, neglected, positioned in no clear order in lines that seem to be from the lower left slightly up to the right. One crucifix without a stone can be seen on the right bending over to the left. Some dark figures, monks or nuns, walk to or from the gate of the ruin. No narrative would do justice to the bare and solemn picture of this burial scene that is nothing but a fragment, full of symbols of frailness. As the fragment became an acceptable genre in literature and philosophy of Early Romanticism, Friedrich ventured into the allegorical and offered more questions than answers, experimented with empty landscapes, and unsettled parts without counterparts or wholes. At the thresholds between truth and illusion, he used clear varnish and dark outlines in stark contrast. The year 1806 marked the beginning of High Romanticism in literature; Heidelberg was the new center. Its writers include Joseph von Eichendorff, Joseph Görres, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Otto Heinrich Loeben (alias Isodorius Orientalis), Achim von Arnim, and Clemens Brentano, the latter of whom published the folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805 and 1808). Folk songs, legends, and travel motifs seem to dominate the literature and art of that period, mostly as antidotes against the gloom of everyday life as experienced at that time of political instability. With the defeat of the Prussian army in Auerstedt and Jena, a sense of loss and lethargy marks various texts and paintings. High Romanticism shifted the intellectual centers from Jena and Dresden and the Protestant North more to the

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South. Numerous writers gathered in Heidelberg and Stuttgart, which also had become important centers for architecture and the visual arts. Important circles gathered in Berlin, where the concept of the salon gained life and women a new prominence. It was a productive period for book illustrations, fairy tales, folk legends, and the so-called “Beschreibungskunst” (art of visual description), or the “tableaux vivants,” experimenting with live images and performing statues that illustrate the myth of Pygmalion. More contributions aimed at the achievement of a “Gesamtkunstwerk,” the fusion of art and life and of all sense perceptions and disciplines combined. Topics in art shifted to the sublime in nature as it turns dangerous, such as shipwrecks or labyrinthine caves and rocks, and in contrast the discovery of the comfortable home, surfaces, and the interior space. Architecture was experiencing a boom. In the art world another shift was also discernable. In 1804 Friedrich Schlegel encountered the first practicing disciples of a movement that later became known as the Nazarenes: the teenage Riepenhausen brothers from Göttingen, who had come to Dresden in spectacular appearance with long hair and gowns of a style that was popularly associated with paintings of 68 Christ’s disciples. They opposed Weimar Classicism and admired instead the Romantics and the principles laid out in Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders of 1796. Moreover, in the summer of 1804 they converted to Catholicism, after which the older, Fritz or Friedrich (1786–1831), became “Franz” and the younger brother Christian (1789–1860) became “Johannes.” The “Weimarer Kunstfreunde” who continued the principles of the Propyläen venture held Tieck responsible for the “Abfall der Riepenhausen Brüder” (the apostasy of the Riepenhausen Brothers), which indeed had major consequences for art history. In July 1805, The Riepenhausens traveled together with Tieck to Rome in order to live there in what they found as an ideal setting for their religious devotion, art, and communal living. In 1802, the Stuttgart artist Gottlieb Schick (1776–1812) who painted the “Opfer des Noah” (Sacrifice of Noah) arrived in Rome. Schick became involved with the medievalism of the Schlegels and the Riepenhausen brothers as soon as they arrived in Rome. They attracted several more artists. This group was later accompanied by the “Lukasbrüder” (Lukas Brothers), a related movement of religious artists whose initial center was constituted in 1809 in Vienna by the founding members Franz Pforr (1788–1812) and Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869), and who two years later had another center in Italy. The circle was joined by Joseph Sutter (1781–1866), Josef Wintergerst (1783–1867), Ludwig Vogel (1788–1879), and Johann Konrad Hottinger (1788–1828). On July 10, 1809, they celebrated the founding of the Lukas Brotherhood with the patron of painters, Saint Luke, as their spiritual emblem. The early writings of Wackenroder and Tieck gave the

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accent once again. In 1810 Pforr wrote a short prose work entitled “Das 69 Buch Sulamith und Maria” paraphrasing Tieck’s Sternbald. For the Lukas Brothers, the Middle Ages were not only a golden age but also the model of the artists’ profession, offering a collective and a community, an alternative to the life in contemporary academia and to bourgeois expectations. They sensed increasing isolation among the artists of their time and held the view that all artists should be equal and should wear uniforms. They cultivated friendships and hoped to find autonomy via spiritual devotion. Goethe commented in a letter to Christian Friedrich Schlosser of 21 September 1813: “Jene Künstler sind wirklich anzusehen als die, in den Mutterleib zurückgekehrt noch einmal geboren zu werden hoffen.” (These artists are really to be regarded as those who, having returned into their mothers’ 70 womb, hope to be born once again). In May 1810, Pforr and Overbeck left Vienna and traveled to Rome with Ludwig Vogel and Johann K. Hottinger. Joseph Sutter stayed in Vienna for lack of money and Josef Wintergerst followed in 1811. They went via Urbino, the birthplace of Raphael, and stayed in the secularized abandoned Irish Franciscan cloister San Isidoro on the Monte Pincio until 1812 when the church claimed the cloister. The most interesting works of this movement are the allegorical paintings by Pforr and Overbeck that reflect each other and are in a way collective art products: “Sulamith and Maria” and “Italia and Germania.” On 16 June 1812 Pforr died, Hottinger left and Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867) joined the group, becoming its leader in the same year. He is an artist who shared much with Classicism and Romanticism and is therefore hard to categorize. In 1811 he had prepared a number of illustrations to Goethe’s Faust, some of which Sulpiz Boisserée sent 71 to Goethe that year and which pleased the latter to no end. One should point out that the group of the Nazarenes includes a variety of subgroups. Some of them were in Rome because of their personal relations and because they were connected with strict neo-classicism and the Italian High Renaissance, such as Gottlieb Schick, the landscape artist Joseph Anton Koch (1768–1839), and others. In the beginning the Nazarenes had at times more similarities to Classicism than to Romanticism, but then the borders became increasingly fluid. Friedrich Schlegel thought especially highly of Gottlieb Schick despite the latter’s classicistic orientation. Pforr and Overbeck, whose mentor was the Classicist Eberhard Wächter (1762–1852), had adopted some aspects of Classicism despite their own sentiment against Greek paganism, but it was their admiration for Raphael and the old masters that finally won out. They emphasized Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s version of Romanticism and interpreted it in the most literal way possible. Like the shrill grotesque works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, the harmonizing paintings by the Nazarenes express in another way a fear in face of the new industrial age, the rise of mass production, and the commodification of art.

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Late Romanticism (Spätromantik, 1815–30) is an era marked by disillusionment, irony, melancholy, conservatism, retrospection, longing for the past, and a return to forms of representation that earlier were considered outdated. Centers shifted and dispersed. Whereas before 1815 the most influential academies of visual art for German-speaking artists in Europe were located in Copenhagen, Dresden, and Vienna with additional academies in Berlin, Kassel, Stuttgart, and Düsseldorf; after 1815 Austria and Denmark were insignificant centers. Prussia, with both Berlin and Düsseldorf, and Bavaria with Munich became the leading art centers. Medieval revivalism was still en vogue and the return to the past still programmatic, although the initial creative impulse was becoming attenuated, recycling itself in popular 72 and trivialized manifestations. Caspar David Friedrich became more isolated and poor before he died in 1840. As the novel Der Komet (1820–22) by Jean Paul illustrates, painters and even the Lukas Guild had made their way into literature and fiction. Nikolaus, the protagonist of this novel who thinks of himself as the Graf von Hacencoppen, enters Lukas-Stadt after a long journey, making himself believe that he is being celebrated as the new heir when in fact the public and its celebration has nothing at all to do with 73 him. Among the apparent welcomers is “Raphael (Renovanzens Bruder),” who sings “in seinem Himmel oben ein dünnes, weiches Grasmückenliedchen herab und der Graf von Hacencoppen war besonders gut gelaunt 74 und gekleidet: als plötzlich ein entsetzlicher Nebel einfiel.” Lukas-Stadt has become a fictionalized place of disillusionment, a city in the fog where everything appears pale and colorless. What is being satirized is the false identification of the self with an idolized figure from the past and projections of places as the historic sites for a returning golden age. Much of Romantic parody is devoted to magical fantasy and blind deception such as the naïve notion that one could turn anything into gold. Eichendorff’s novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (The Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing, 1826) parodies not the notion of the artist as member of a guild or brotherhood but rather the artist as a bohemian wanderer, at one with nature, scorning formal education and employment. But the freedom that the wandering life once seemed to promise proves to be illusionary — even the city of Rome, idealized as a center of spiritual significance, turns out to be marred by immorality. By the end of the novella, the protagonist is on his way back to Austria, where he marries Aurelia, the woman of his dreams who turns out to be not a countess, as he had thought before setting out for Italy, but rather her maid. The protagonist has learned to feel content with his nationality, his own life, and his given status in society. Eichendorff privileges marriage, the bourgeois life style, and craftsmanship rather than the hopes of the artist and the dreams of the idealist. In contrast to Eichendorff, E. T. A. Hoffmann juxtaposes the fantasy world irreconcilably with that of bourgeois life and ridicules both, as can be seen, for example in his fairy tale

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novella, Der Goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814). Much of literature and painting invokes parody; the idea of art in terms of universal poesy with all senses combined in a “Gesamtkunstwerk” becomes questionable and utopian, while academic institutionalization leads instead to an increased differentiation among the disciplines. Late Romanticism is characterized finally by having institutionalized architecture, landscaping, and gardening as formal disciplines and by having established in all major cities of Germany societies, clubs, and an industry for art and nature in ways that leave many of the 75 dreams and visions of the Early Romantics unfulfilled. Obviously, the conventional triad of Early, High, and Late Romanticism as outlined here cannot suggest any linear progression or continuity from one of these types of Romanticism to the other. It indicates rather that the visual art of German Romanticism consists of superimposed images and styles that differ yet do not absorb or erase each other. According to its own theoretical underpinnings, production and reception cannot be separated; together they determine the meanings of each painting or literary text. This makes it difficult to discuss the visual art of German Romanticism in any 76 generalizing form. Numerous poets and painters of Late Romanticism shunned the aesthetics of the liberated Early Romantics. They turned instead toward institutionalized religion, as the earlier Nazarenes had already done, to firmly established structures, and to what in retrospect seem to be outmoded forms of mimetic representation. This regressive development in going back to the dominance of the scriptural over the visual within Late German Romanticism has puzzled many art critics, some of whom reject all of German Ro77 manticism as “reactionary,” as Willi Geismeier put it. Other critics have interpreted German Romanticism in terms of an “internalized revolution” and emphasized that whereas the French turned to politics and society, the 78 Germans turned to art and poetics at that time. The aesthetics of Early Romanticism can never be entirely reversed or forgotten. It is its plea for imagination, open-ended processes of fantasy, and devoted disfiguration that made visual art of that period of lasting interest internationally, not only for such great theorists as Walter Benjamin, but also for painters such as Paul Klee and Marc Chagall. Goethe (and Hegel to an even greater extent) did not care for the Romantics’ flight to the past from the immediate present. What they negatively labeled as subjectivity and a loss of objectivity resulted from a disagreement with the Romantics’ new sensibility. Hegel found it “tiring” as he put it, to try to understand Jean Paul’s fleeting images or what he thought to be self79 destructive metaphors. However, it was Jean Paul’s conscious effort to make his readers think productively about culturally imposed limits in the habitual use of language. Jean Paul insists and agrees with Friedrich that “das Abbild mehr als das Urbild enthält, ja sogar das Widerspiel gewährt”

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(§4, 43, that the image in art contains more than the image in nature, indeed it even provides its reflection). Whereas Jean Paul’s verbal images lack contour and clarity, as Goethe claimed, they are experimental applications of the innovative techniques that instrumental optics had introduced to seeing and transposed into the realm of poetic writing. His language is metaphoric, allegorical, and arabesque. Jean Paul and other Romantics were characterized by an aesthetics of distance, a longing for something that is not tangible in nature, text, or image. What Goethe disliked about the paintings of the Romantics is that they were not self-contained and immanently understandable, often being full of allusions to other texts or images going beyond what is actually presented. Jean Paul made it clear that he did not want to be misunderstood as a “poetic nihilist” who would have no interest in nature (§3, 31–34), but he insisted on the important difference between nature and art: Ungleich der Wirklichkeit, die ihre prosaische Gerechtigkeit und ihre Blumen in unendlichen Räumen und Zeiten austeilet, muß die Poesie in geschlossenen beglücken; die ist die einzige Friedensgöttin der Erde und der Engel, der uns, und wär es nur auf Stunden, aus Kerkern auf 80 Sterne führt.

Future scholarship will have to pursue the close links but also investigate some of the interesting gaps between certain painters and writers of German Romanticism. Much will depend on the extent to which both viewers and readers of German Romanticism will be able to disfigure, as Benjamin proposed it in his approach to “Entstaltung,” certain appearances of the imaginary. The process of disfiguration in fantasy and visual art should then no longer be feared but understood as a vital part of human expression.

Notes 1

There is a considerable disagreement over the periodization of German Romanticism, especially in determining its beginning, a problem avoided by Lothar Pikulik, who chooses instead various starting points in the early 1790s in his “Die Geburt der Romantik,” Frühromantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 1992), 15– 65. Despite these problems, a periodization will be assumed as a structuring device for this essay. 2 For this tripartite structure, see Claus Sommerhage, Deutsche Romantik: Literatur und Malerei 1796–1830 (Cologne: Taschen, 1988), 11–32, 50–62, 107–16. On German Romantic art in general see Willi Geismeier, Die Malerei der deutschen Romantiker (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1984); William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994). 3

On distinctions and overlaps between Classicism and Romanticism in visual art, see the following essays in Rolf Tomann, ed., Klassizismus und Romantik: Architektur —

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Skulptur — Malerei — Zeichnung 1750–1848. (Cologne: Könnemann, 2000): Klaus Jan Philipp, “Architektur des Klassizimus und der Romantik” (152–93); Alexander Rauch, “Klassizismus und Romantik: Europas Malerei zwischen zwei Revolutionen” (318–479); Angela Resemann, “Zeichnungen des Klassizismus und der Romantik” (480–500). See also Helmut Rehder, Die Philosophie der unendlichen Landschaft: Ihr Ursprung und ihre Vollendung (Wertheim a. M.: Bechstein, 1929), esp. 38–130. 4 On Runge, see Jörg Traeger, Philipp Otto Runge und sein Werk: Monographie und kritischer Katalog (Munich: Prestel 1975); Andreas Blühm, ed., Philipp Otto Runge, Kaspar David Friedrich: The Passage of Time, trans. Rachel Esner (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1996); Peter Betthausen, ed., Philipp Otto Runge: Briefe und Schriften (Munich: Beck, 1982); Rudolph M. Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp Otto Runge: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Art Theory and Iconography (De Kalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1970). 5

On Friedrich, see Werner Sumowski, Caspar David Friedrich — Studien (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970); Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig, Caspar David Friedrich: Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildhafte Zeichnungen (Munich: Prestel, 1974); Helmut Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, trans. Alain Boyer (Paris: Adam Biro, 1989); Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990); Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska, Caspar David Friedrich aux sources de l’imaginaire romantique (Paris: L’age d’homme, 1992); Charles Sala, Caspar David Friedrich and Romantic Painting (Paris: Terrail, 1994); Wieland Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, rev. ed., trans. Russell Stockman (New York: Abrams, 1995); Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000); Werner Busch, Das Rätsel Caspar David Friedrich (Munich: Beck, 2003). 6 For more information on Goethe’s lifelong interest in art, of which his response to Romanticism represents only one part, see Beate Allert, “Goethe and the Visual Arts,” The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, ed. Leslie Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 193–206, 265–66. 7

See, for example, Jay Julian Rosellini, Literary Skinheads? Writing from the Right in Reunified Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2000), especially in the preface and chapter one, where Novalis is associated with “a wave of irrationalism that swept Europe” (7) culminating in fascist ideology. 8

Walter Benjamin, “Zur Ästhetik,” Fragmente vermischten Inhalts, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Gesammelte Schriften ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 2nd–4th eds., 7 vols. in 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–96), vol. 6, 3rd ed, (1996): 109–29 at 114–15. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 9 For the exhibition catalog, see Hugo von Tschudi, ed., Ausstellung deutscher Kunst aus der Zeit 1773–1875 in Der Königlichen Nationalgalerie Berlin 1906, 2 vols. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1906). 10

See Willi Geismeier, Biedermeier: Das Bild vom Biedermeier, Zeit und Kultur des Biedermeier: Kunst und Kunstleben des Biedermeier, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: VEB Seeman, 1986).

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11

See Traeger 114–16; Hilmar Frank, “Arabesque, Cipher, Hieroglyph: Between Unending Interpretation and Loss of Meaning,” Keith Hartley, ed., The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790–1990 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 147–54; Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske: Wirklichkeitsaneig-nung und Stilisierung in der deutschen Kunst des 19. Jh. (Berlin: Mann, 1985). 12 For the exhibition catalog, see Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937 im Haus der Deutschen Kunst zu München 18. Juli bis 31. Oktober 1937 (Munich: Knorr & Hirth, 1937). For documents involving both exhibitions, including exhibition catalogues, see Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed., Die “Kunststadt” München 1937: Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst” (Munich: Prestel, 1987). See also Franz Roh, “Entartete” Kunst: Kunstbarbarei im Dritten Reich (Hanover: Fackelträger, 1962); Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996) and Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford UP, 2000). 13

This speech from 18 July was printed in the Völkischer Beobachter, 200 (19 July 1937) (“Der Führer zeigt den deutschen Künstlern ihren Weg” [“The Führer Shows German Painters the Way”]) and reprinted in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich 1.7–8 (July-August, 1937): 47–61. Quoted from Schuster 242–52. There is a partial translation by Ilse Falk in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968), 474–83. Similar attacks on avant-garde art are unfortunately still encountered.

14

See Schuster 245, 251; Falk 476, 482.

15

“Denn die Kunst ist nun einmal keine Mode. So wenig wie sich das Wesen und das Blut unseres Volkes ändert, muß auch die Kunst den Charakter des Vergänglichen verlieren, um statt dessen in ihren sich fortgesetzt steigernden Schöpfungen ein bildhaft würdiger Ausdruck des Lebensverlaufs unseres Volkes zu sein. Kubismus, Dadaismus, Futurismus, Impressionismus usw. haben mit unserem deutschen Volk nichts zu tun” (Schuster, 245). (Art can in no way be a fashion. As little as the character and the blood of our people will change, so much will art have to lose its mortal character and replace it with worthy images expressing the life course of our people in the steady unfolding growth of its creations. Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism etc., have nothing to do with our German people [Falk, 479]). 16

“They were called the Romantics, but in essence they were the most glorious representatives of those noble Germans in search of the true intrinsic virtue of our people and the honest and respectable expression of those only inwardly experienced laws of life” (Falk, 478). Ralf Klausnitzer in his Blaue Blume unterm Hakenkreuz: Die Rezeption der deutschen literarischen Romantik im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999) reflects at length on the connecting links between the ideas of German Romanticism and those of Nationalist Socialist ideology. The reception history from German Romanticism to the Third Reich poses many challenging questions and more scholarship will be necessary to better understand how the National Socialists appropriated certain features of German Romanticism while entirely repressing and overriding others. 17

“Ein Gang durch diese Ausstelllung wird Sie vieles finden lassen, was Sie wieder als schön und vor allem als anständig anspricht und was Sie als gut empfinden werden” (Schuster 252). (A walk through this exhibition will allow you to find quite a few

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things that will impress you as beautiful and, above all, as decent, and which you will sense to be good [Falk, 482]). 18

Hofmann 13. For the exhibition catalogs see Hartley, The Romantic Spirit in German Art; Christoph Vitali, ed., Ernste Spiele: Der Geist der Romantik in der deutschen Kunst, 1790–1990 (Stuttgart: Oktagon, 1995). 19

20

See Rosellini (note 7) and Robert C. Holub, “Coming to terms with the past in postwar literature,” in Nicholas Saul, ed., Philosophy and German Literature 1700– 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 245–290, especially the section “The Troubled Legacy” (245–48). 21 On comparisons of German Romantic artists with those from elsewhere in Europe, see Rauch, “Klassizismus und Romantik.” 22

On the Nazarenes see Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964; New York: Hacker Art Books, 1988); Die Nazarener. [Ausstellung] Städel. Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut Frankfurt am Main 28. April bis 28. August 1977, ed. Klaus Gallwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Städel, 1977); Herbert Schindler, Nazarener: Romantischer Geist und Christliche Kunst (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982). See also Mitchell Benjamin Frank, German Romantic Painting Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Frank investigates from a philosophical point of view the reception history of German Romantic painting, which now favors the work of Friedrich and Runge at the expense of the Nazarenes.

23

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken ueber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst 2nd Enlarg. ed. (1756), reprinted in Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, Complete German text with trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 32. 24 KFSA, 2: 182–83. 25

“Imagination places the future world either high up or down deep, or in metempsychosis in relation to us. We dream of travels across the universe. Isn’t the universe within us? We do not know the depth of our spirit. The mysterious path goes to our inner being. In us, or nowhere, is eternity with its worlds, the past and the future. The external world is only a world of shadows. It casts its shadows in the realm of light. Now of course it appears to us from the inside so dark, lonely, and shapeless. But how different will it appear, when this darkness will have dissipated, and the shadow bodies will have been removed. We shall enjoy more than ever since our spirit has been deprived.” 26

“How can human beings have a sense for something, if they do not have the seed of it already within themselves? What I am supposed to understand I must develop for myself in an organic way — and what I seem to learn is only nourishment, stimulus of the organism.” 27

See [Gabriele Rommel, ed.,] Geheimnisvolle Zeichen: Alchemie, Magie, Mystik und Natur bei Novalis (Berlin: Edition Leipzig, 1998), 10–15. 28

This change was so radical that it has even been claimed that the painting by Christoph Nathe (1753–1806), “Dorfstraße mit hochgelegten Häusern” (Village

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Street with High-lying Houses, 1791), marks the “Geburtsstunde des Impressionismus” (moment of birth of Impressionism) (Resemann 493–94). 29

Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller et al., 10 vols., 1st–3rd ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1960–1985), vol. 5, 3rd ed. (1973), 7–456 at §50. 184. See Beate Allert, “Theorizing Visual Language in George Berkeley and Jean Paul,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 27 (1998): 307–42 at 313, 321–22.

30

Jean Paul, Vorschule, §82, 296, See Allert, “Theorizing,” 326.

31

See Benjamin 6: 116. Benjamin is indeed someone who understood Jean Paul and Runge not in terms of Goethe’s verdict against the allegorical, nor in terms of Hegel’s critique of what he claimed to be self-destructive images in language for their apparent lack of contour and frame. Benjamin understood these Romantics rather in terms of color, texture, motion, and related fluid imagination processes that open up new types of visuality for the poetic and for perception, in writing, and in art. 32

“Gemälde-Ausstellung in Dresden,” Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1807): 248, quoted in Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, 67. The sepia drawing referred to is the lost sketch for the “Tetschen Altar” (Börsch-Supan and Jähnig, no. 146, 291). 33 Athanase Raczynski, Histoire de l’art moderne en Allemagne, 3 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1836–1841), 3: 58. 34

See Ulf Martens, Der Zeichner und Radierer Carl Wilhelm Kolbe d. Ä.: (1759– 1835) (Berlin: Mann, 1976). 35

Martens no. 269, 115–16; Vaughan 34. August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum, 3 vols. 1798–1800. Reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960. 36

37

On Tieck and Runge, see: Siegfried Krebs, Philipp Otto Runges Entwicklung unter dem Einfluss Ludwig Tiecks (Heidelberg: Winter, 1909 [= Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte 1.4 (1909): 357–528]). 38 August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 1st–3rd ed., 16 vols. (1846–1848, Reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1971), vol. IX, Vermischte und Kritische Schriften, 3, 3–101 [= Athenaeum II. i (1799): 39–151]. 39

Sämmtliche Werke vol. I, Poetische Werke: Erster Theil, 3rd ed. (1846): 87–96. The other arts lie outside the scope of this paper, but for architecture see Philipp, “Architektur des Klassizismus und der Romantik” and Geese, “Skulptur des Klassizismus” in the volume edited by Tomann. 40

41

See Traeger no. 326–44, 388–89.

42

Kosegarten has been incorrectly credited with introducing Runge to Böhme, an interpretation going back to 1857 (see Traeger 204, footnotes 40–41), whereas the credit belongs to Tieck (Krebs, 69–103). 43 44

See Traeger no. 205, 314–15.

Traeger, 38, quotes a statement by Runge from May 1801: “. . . es ist mir vorgekommen, ob es nicht heutiges Tages wohl das nöthigste wäre, daß ein Mahler nicht sowohl sich bestrebte, selbst die Stufe der Alten zu erreichen, als vielmehr nur zu ergründen, wie sie erreicht werden könne” (It appeared to me as if today it would not be the most important thing that a painter would attempt to reach the same level as the Ancients but rather to fathom how it could be reached). On Runge’s theoreti-

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cal approach to his craft see Elisabeth Décultot, Peindre le paysage: discours théorique et renouveau pictural dans de romantisme allemand (Tusson, Charente: Du Lerot, 1996), 159–213. 45

On the relation between Romantic painters and poets see Konrad Feilchenfeldt, “Novalis und die bildende Kunst,” “Blüthenstaub”: Rezeption und Wirkung des Werkes von Novalis, ed. Herbert Uerlings, Schriften der Internationalen NovalisGesellschaft 3 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 65–98. Whereas arguments have been directed against positivistic scholarship and reductive influence studies connecting poets and painters, what is needed, as Feilchenfeldt puts it, is “wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste” (mutual illumination of the arts, 78). On this see: Ulrich Stadler, “‘Wahre Leser’ von ‘Wahren Lesern’?: Über den Dokumentationsband der zweiten Fachtagung der Internationalen Novalis-Gesellschaft.” IASLOnline, 22 May, 2001: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/rezensio/liste/stadler.html 46 See Traeger no. 265–83, 343–62. 47

Goethe was ambivalent toward Runge’s achievements. The Cologne connoisseur and art collector, Sulpiz Boisserée (1783–1854), reported in a letter on 6 May 1811 a conversation he had with him on viewing Runge’s “Die Zeiten”: “. . . da sehen Sie nur, was für Teufelszeug, und hier wieder, was da der Kerl für Anmuth und Herrlichkeit hervorgebracht, aber der arme Teufel hat’s auch nicht ausgehalten, er ist schon hin, es ist nicht anders möglich, was so auf der Kippe steht, muß sterben oder verrückt werden, da ist keine Gnade.” (. . . here take a look, what for devil’s stuff and here again what this guy produced for grace and beauty, but the poor devil couldn’t stand it, he’s already vanished, and it’s not possible otherwise, what stands on the cliff like this must die or go mad, there is no help for it.) Sulpiz Boisserée, Briefwechsel / Tagebücher, ed. Mathilde Boisserée, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1862, reprint with afterword by Heinrich Klotz [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970]), 1, 113–15 at 114. 48 See Traeger no. 414, 432–33 and Traeger no. 497, 466–68. On multiple frames in Runge and the “progressive Potenzierung” (“progressive raising the ante”) as a method of painting “Der kleine Morgen,” see Sommerhage 9. 49

Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. Manfred Engel et al., 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996), vol. 4, Schriften, ed. Horst Nalewski, 307–25 at 317. 50

On the myth of Isis compare Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais with Schiller’s poem “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais.” On the myth of Pygmalion, see Johann Gottfried Herder, Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume, Werke, ed. Günther Arnold et al., 10 vols. in 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), vol. 4, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (1994), 243–326, 997–1075, and Goethe’s poem “Amor als Landschaftsmaler,” Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hendrik Birus, et al., 40 volumes in 45 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–), vol. 1, Gedichte 1756–1799, ed. Karl Ebel (1987), 351–53 (see also Allert, “Goethe and the Visual Arts,” 205). 51

This design in the form it is reproduced is a later print by Karl Friedrich Thiele (c. 1780-c. 1836) based on a gouache by Schinkel done in 1815. Mozart’s Zauberflöte was first performed on 30 September 1791.

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52

See Christa Lichtenstern, Die Wirkungsgeschichte der Metamorphosenlehre Goethes: Von Philipp Otto Runge bis Joseph Beuys, Metamorphose in der Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts 1 (Weinheim: VCH, 1990), 45–52, 80–104, 120–27, 143–53; PeterKlaus Schuster, “In Search of Paradise Lost: Runge, Marc, Beuys,” Hartley, 62–81. 53 See Börsch-Supan and Jähnig no. 103–6, 275–76; Börsch-Supan and Jähnig no. 338–40, 402–03; no. 431–34, 449–51. 54

See Börsch-Supan and Jähnig no. 167, 300–02.

55

“Über ein zum Altarblatte bestimmtes Landschaftgemälde von Herrn Friedrich in Dresden und über Landschaftmalerei, Allegorie und Mystizismus überhaupt,” Zeitung für die elegante Welt, 12 (1809): 89–95; 13 (1809): 97–104; 14 (1809): 105– 11; 15 (1809): 113–19. Quoted from Sigrid Hinz, ed. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1984), 138–57. There is a partial translation in Hofmann 276–80. On the controversy see Décultot, 393– 406. 56

There is now evidence that Friedrich had originally intended the work in honor of Gustavus IV Adolphus (1778–1837), king of Sweden (Koerner 50). 57

See his letter of 8 February 1809, Hinz 157–59. There is a partial translation in Hofmann 280–81. 58

Beate Allert, “Lessing im Kontext kunsttheoretischer Debatten,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 371–87. 59 This symbol can be found on the title page of the Jacob Böhme’s Des Gottseligen Hocherleuchteten Iacob Bohmen Teutonici Philosophi Alle Theosophische Schrifften (Amsterdam: n.p., 1682). 60

See Goethe, “Ruysdael als Dichter,” Sämtliche Werke, vol. 19, Ästhetische Schriften, ed. Friedmar Apel (1998), 632–36. This text from 1816 is directed at Romantic landscape painters such as Friedrich in an attempt to teach them to learn from Ruysdael for the better; see Ernst Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde: Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibungen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 321–55 at 330–31. Even though Friedrich had shared a first prize at the Weimarische Kunstausstellung in 1805 for two pictures (Börsch-Supan and Jähnig no. 125–26, 282–83), and while at least one of his paintings, “Der Winter” from c. 1808 (Börsch-Supan and Jähnig no. 165, 299–301), apparently shows an influence of Ruysdael, relations between him and Goethe had cooled considerably. The latter is reported to have said to the art collector Sulpiz Boisserée in September, 1815: “Im jetzigen Zustand der Kunst sey bei vielem Verdienst und Vorzügen große Verkehrtheit; die Bilder von Maler Friedrich können eben so gut auf den Kopf gesehen werden. Goethe’s Wuth gegen dergleichen; wie er sich ehemals ausgelassen, mit Zerschlagen der Bilder an der Tischecke; Zerschießen der Bücher u. s. w. er habe sich da nicht erwehren können, mit einem Ingrimm zu rufen: das soll nicht aufkommen; und so habe er irgend eine Handlung daran üben müssen, um seinen Muth zu kühlen” (In the current state of art, despite much of merit and excellence, there is great wrongheadedness; the pictures by the painter Friedrich might just as well be seen upside down; Goethe’s anger about such stuff; as he had previously vented it, with the smashing of the pictures on the edge of the table; the riddling the books with bullets etc.; then he said he was not able to prevent himself from shouting with rage; this ought not come

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into being; and so he had to do something about it in order to cool off his temper), Boisserée, 1, 276. 61

In 1818 the Nazarene painter, Joseph von Führich (1800–76), did a gouache, “Das Kreuz im Gebirge,” which “domesticated” Friedrich’s painting, omitting the frame, turning the mountain crucifix into a pilgrim site with a pilgrim approaching on the left across a bridge now half way up the central mountain peak. See Deutscher Romantiker: Bildthemen der Zeit von 1800 bis 1850, ed. Christoph Heilmann (Munich: Hirmir, 1985), 206–08. 62

See Börsch-Supan and Jähnig no. 168, 302–4; Börsch-Supan and Jähnig no. 169, 304–05. 63 Heinrich von Kleist, “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth et al., 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–1997), vol. 3, ed. Klaus Müller-Salget (1990), 543–44, 1126–30. There is a translation in Hofmann 283–85. On the “invention of a new discourse on landscape painting,” see Elisabeth Décultot, 406–18, and E. Décultot “Genèse d’un discours nouveau sur la peinture de paysage: La réception du Moine au bord de la mer de Caspar David Friedrich (1808–1810),” Revue Germanique International 7 (1997): 143–53. 64 Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, “Verschiedene Empfindungen vor einer Seelandschaft von Friedrich, worauf ein Kapuziner,” Iris: Unterhaltungsblatt für Freunde des Schönen und Nützlichen, 20 (28 January, 1826), 77f. First collected, Clemens Brentano, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Christian Brentano, 9 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Sauerländer, 1852–55), vol. 4 (1852), 424–29. Quoted from Brentano, Werke, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald et al., 4 vols. 2nd–3rd ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1978– 1980), vol. 2, 3rd ed. (1980), 1034–38. 65 Jörg Traeger, “‘. . . als ob einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären,’” KleistJahrbuch (1980); 86–106. The secondary literature on the “Empfindungen” is enormous. Important recent contributions include: Andreas Ammer, “Betrachtung der Betrachtung in einem Zeitungsartikel über die Betrachter eines Bildes, worauf der Betrachter einer Landschaft (‘Mönch am Meer’ — Friedrich, Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, Ernst usw.),” Athenäum — Jahrbuch für Romantik, 1 (1991): 135–62; Christian Begemann “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer: Aspekte eines Umbruchs in der Geschichte der Wahrnehmung,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 64 (1990): 54–96; Roswitha Burwick, “Verschiedene Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft; Arnim, Brentano, Kleist,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 107 [Sonderheft] (1988): 33–44; Bernhard Greiner, “Bildbeschreibung und Seelsorge’ — zwei Grenzfälle: Kleists Essay ‘Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft’ und das Kunstgespräch in Büchners Lenz,” Behext von Bildern? Ursachen, Funktionen und Perspektiven der textuellen Faszination durch Bilder, ed. Heinz J. Drügh and Maria Moog-Grünewald (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001), 87–100; Gerhard Kurz, “Vor einem Bild — Zu Clemens Brentanos ‘Verschiedene Empfindungen vor einer Seelandschaft vor Friedrich, worauf ein Kapuziner,’” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (1988): 128–40; Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Kleists Rede über Bilder und in Bildern: Briefe, Bildkommentare, erste literarische Werke,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1997): 126–48; Rüdiger von Tiedemann, “Bild und Text. Caspar David Friedrich, Heinrich von Kleist und Anselm Kiefer,” Dialog der Künste: Intermediale Fallstudien zur Literatur

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des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Festschrift für Erwin Koppen, ed. Maria MoogGrünewald and Christoph Rodiek (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1989), 379–93; Ekkehard Zeeb, “Kleist, Kant, und/mit Paul de Man — ‘Rahmen’ der Kunst, Verschiedene Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” Heinrich von Kleist: Kriegsfall — Rechtsfall — Sündenfall, ed. Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg: Rombach, 1994), 299–36. 66 Brentano’s version is more pointedly a satire, as the piece purportedly records personal ideas and responses to the painting among various observers and their comments are ironic reflexes of each other and dynamically interrelated. The dialogic open-ended format of such fictionalized written conversations invites additional personal interaction by the readers and viewers of Friedrich’s art. It suggests that anything can be expressed in response, even platitudes or misunderstandings, such as for example the hint of a mix-up of the word “Ossian” with “Ozean” (1034). 67 See the previously cited scholarship on Kleist and Brentano’s reaction to Friedrich’s “Mönch am Meer” for a further discussion of the disquieting effect of this painting. For the citation of Kleist’s interpretation of Friedrich’s painting in Peter Stein’s 1972 staging of Kleist’s drama Prinz Friedrich von Homburg see the introduction to this volume. 68 The following discussion of the Nazarenes is particularly indebted to the work of Andrews, Schindler and the essays in Die Nazarener. 69

See Geismeier, Malerei, 105, 117–18. “Das Buch Sulamith und Maria” is published in Der Wagen: Ein Lübeckisches Jahrbuch (1927): 51–58. 70

Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 34, Napoleonische Zeit: Briefe, Tagebücher, Gespräche, ed. Rose Unterberger (1994), 257–59 at 258. See also Johann Heinrich Meyer (1760–1832), as revised by Goethe, writing as “W.[eimarische] K.[unst] F.[reunde],” “Neu-deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst,” Sämtliche Werke, vol. 20, Ästhetische Schriften 1816–1820, ed. Hendrik Birus (1999), 105–29, 818–76, and the “Anmerkungen und Belege,” 159–69, 901–15. See further Christian Lenz, “Goethe und die Nazarener,” Die Nazarener, 295–321.

71

Lenz, 296–97. These illustrations were engraved by Ferdinand Ruscheweyh (1785– 1846) and published as Bilder zu Goethes Faust (Frankfurt am Main: Friedrich Wenner, 1816). For some of them see Die Nazarener 208–9, E84–90 (250–52), and Martin Sonnabend, ed., Peter Cornelius: Zeichnungen zu Goethes Faust: Aus der Graphischen Sammlung im Städel (Frankfurt am Main: Städtische Galerie im Städel, 1991). For Goethe’s praise of Cornelius see “Neu-deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst,” 120, 865–68 and Bosserée, 1: 111–13 at 113. 72

Sigrid Metkin, “Nazarener und ‘nazarenisch’ — Popularisierung und Trivialisierung eines Kunstideals,” Die Nazarener, 365–88; Schindler, “Popularisierung und Trivialisierung des Nazarenerstils,” 177–93. 73

Beate Allert, Die Metapher und ihre Krise: Zur Dynamik der “Bilderschrift” Jean Pauls (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 96–134. See also Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Sankt Lukas als Statist: Malerfiguren und Malergeschichten bei Jean Paul,” Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft 37 (2002): 53–85. 74 Jean Paul, Der Komet, Werke 6 (1963), 563–1036 at 905: Raphael [Renovanzen’s brother] sang in his sky above the delicate and soft air of a warbler and Duke Hacen-

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coppen was in a particularly good mood and dressed well: when all of a sudden a horrible fog fell. 75

Notably absent in the above discussion is any mention of women painters. Those that there were appear to have restricted themselves to purely classical models with the possible exception of Louise von Panhuys (née Freiin von BarckhauseWiesenhütten, 1763–1844) and her paintings done in connection with her trips to Surinam in South America. See Bärbel Kovalevski, Zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit: Künstlerinnen der Goethe-Zeit zwischen 1750–1850 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Gert H. Hadje, 1999), H7–H11, 221–23, 231. 76

Rauch, “Klassizismus und Romantik,” argues that Classicism and Romanticism in Germany are interconnected and he sums up the political circumstances from which these movements are derived (318–19). 77

Geismeier argues that German Romanticism expresses the transition from a feudal to a bourgeois order and, although it is still deeply indebted to the ideals of the Enlightenment, it is driven by a longing for the past more than for the future, and contains within it politically and philosophically “reaktionäre Elemente” which finally gain the upper hand (Malerei 7). 78 See Ehrhard Bahr, “Introduction” (3–10) and Jens Kruse, “The French Revolution and the German Romantics” (149–62) in The Internalized Revolution: German Reactions to the French Revolution, 1789–1989, ed. Ehrhard Bahr and Thomas Saine (New York: Garland, 1993), as well as the other essays in the volume. 79

“Solch eine Reihe von Einfällen ermüdet aber bald, besonders wenn es uns zugemutet wird, uns mit unserer Vorstellung in die oft kaum erratbaren Kombinationen einzuleben, welche dem Dichter zufällig vorgeschwebt haben. Besonders bei Jean Paul tötet eine Metapher, ein Witz, ein Spaß, ein Vergleich den anderen, man sieht nichts werden, alles nur verpuffen” (Such a sequence of ideas is soon tiring, especially when we are expected to immerse ourselves with our imagination in the scarcely guessable combinations the poet may by chance have floating about. Especially in Jean-Paul, each metaphor, witticism, joke, comparison annihilates the other, one sees nothing develop, everything just fizzles out). G. W. F. Hegel, “Der subjektive Humor,” Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 3 vols. (=Theorie-Werkausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970], 13– 15), II.iii.3.3b, vol. 2, 229–31 at 230. 80

Jean Paul, Vorschule §3, 35. “Unlike reality, which distributes its prosaic justice and its flowers in infinite space and time, the poetic must make us happy in the limited; it is the only goddess of peace and the only angel on earth capable of leading us from dungeons to stars, even if only for hours.”

Goethe’s Late Verse Paul Bishop & R. H. Stephenson

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N A TYPICALLY SELF-IRONIC POEM

in the West-östlicher Divan (WestEastern Divan, 1819) Goethe lists the losses old age brings to everyone before defiantly asserting that two things remain to him, making life worth1 while: “Mir bleibt genug! Es bleibt Idee und Liebe!” This binary pairing of intellect and feeling lies at the heart of Goethe’s “symbolic” outlook on old age. As Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) authoritatively demonstrated, Goethe’s theory of symbolism covers both those “symbolic forms” on which a poet draws — as raw material, from traditional poetic meters through genres to concepts (in its broadest sense, “ideas”) — and what he makes of them to create a new, aesthetic structure of renewed significance, of “symbolic pregnance,” as Cassirer calls it (in other words, “felt experience,” at its most 2 intense in “love”). And, as Rudolf Arnheim has argued in respect of Goethe, as well as Titian, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Cézanne, and Rodin, such a synthetic blending of mind and emotion is the defining characteristic of the 3 “late style” found “in the end products of artists’ long careers.” The notion of “lateness” in the work of an artist now occupies an important position in the history of criticism, and given the length of his life, and the historical and cultural periods it covers, it is not surprising that the category has been 4 applied to Goethe’s works. Erich Trunz’s assessment that Goethe’s Alterswerk began in 1809 when he started to write his autobiography has gained 5 widespread support. What applies to Goethe’s autobiographical writings, beginning with Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811–33), also pertains to verse produced after the death of his friend Schiller and the reconfiguration of the map of Europe in the years after 1805: Goethe is writing “from the vantage point of a sixty-year old [and more] interested in 6 imbuing individual stages of his life with historical significance.” In this context, otherwise helpful rubrics like “Sturm und Drang,” “Weimar Classicism,” and “Romanticism” become place markers of value only when seen as part of the pattern already addressed in the final stanza of the poem “Dauer im Wechsel” (Permanence in Change, 1803): Laß den Anfang mit dem Ende Sich in eins zusammenziehn!

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Schneller als die Gegenstände Selber dich vorüberfliehn. Danke, daß die Gunst der Musen Unvergängliches verheißt, Den Gehalt in deinem Busen Und die Form in deinem Geist. 7 (HA, 1: 248)

In his 1949 study of the late Goethe, Paul Stöcklein divided Goethe’s 8 works into two groups. Stöcklein draws on the notions of sich verselbsten (creating the self, “en-selfment”) and sich entselbstigen (renouncing the self, “de-selfment”) as found in the end of Part II, Book 8 of Dichtung und 9 10 Wahrheit, which derive ultimately from the hermetic tradition. He places the novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809) and the novella “Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder” (The Wondrous Neighbors’ Children) found in Part Two of that novel, as well as act 5 of Faust II (where Faust confronts the figure of “Sorge,” Care), into the category of verselbsten; he places the poem “Der Bräutigam” (The Groom, ca. 1824) and poems from the West-östlicher Divan, together with some of Goethe’s aphorisms, into the category of entselbstigen. Ultimately, however, both moments — of the concentration and the expansion of the self — are necessary, and underpin, as we shall see, the Goethean notion of “die and become!” Furthermore, the presencing of the self through language is a major concern of Goethe’s late verse, and represents a point of continuity with his earlier work.

Late Verse Those who have written on Goethe’s late poetry agree on one thing: they 11 are extremely difficult poems. Two tools of interpretation can, however, assist the reader in an appreciation of these complex texts. To begin with, there is a consensus that an intimate knowledge of Goethe’s thought, par12 ticularly his scientific thought, is indispensable. For the difficulties of Goethe’s late poetry arise, at least in part, from the failure to identify the common intellectual property (Gemeingut) of the eighteenth century as the discursive content of the poems in question, which can, in turn, lead to the 13 mystification of Goethe’s thought as communicated by his late poems. An awareness of the world of discourse inhabited by Goethe is the first interpretive tool to use in understanding these poems. Consider, for example, the poem “Urworte. Orphisch” (Primal Words. Orphic, 1817), and let us begin with its perhaps most accessible stanza, the third, which is entitled “Eros, Liebe” (Love):

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Die bleibt nicht aus! — Er stürzt vom Himmel nieder, Wohin er sich aus alter Öde schwang, Er schwebt heran auf luftigem Gefieder Um Stirn und Brust den Frühlingstag entlang, Scheint jetzt zu fliehn, vom Fliehen kehrt er wieder, Da wird ein Wohl im Weh, so süß und bang. Gar manches Herz verschwebt im Allgemeinen, Doch widmet sich das edelste dem Einen. 14 (HA, 1: 360)

By seeing this text in the context of eighteenth-century debates on topics of mutual interest to writers of the time, the familiarity of its ostensible content, its Stoff, becomes evident. For the poem is constructed around a basic antithesis: Goethe exploits the double title, emphasizing the distinction between (Christian) love and (Greek) eros by means of the inherent opposition between the feminine and masculine pronouns in the first line of the stanza, placed as they are in stressed position at the beginning of the first two sentences. After the dash — which signals a break with “love” — all the action, down to the period in line 22, is initiated by eros until, in lines 23 and 24, love is again introduced, by contextual implication, in being characterized (in contrast to eros) by commitment. Thus there is a contrast between, on the one hand, a steady devotion to a particular and, on the other, feeling as a violent and unstable swinging from one pole to another (cf. l.17, “stürzt”; l.21), induced by and itself inducing inner turmoil (l.22) which, being so unstable, can only express itself in generalities. This is precisely the contrast drawn by writer after writer in the Age of Goethe when discussing Schwärmerei, or “enthusiasm.” The Schwärmer, at odds with himself , is a prey to sudden passions, forever moving to and fro, hither and thither. “Schwärmerei comes 15 from ‘swarm,’” said Lessing, “in the precise sense in which it is used of bees”; and contrasted to the Schwärmer is, according to context, the true enthusiast, 16 or lover, or the true artist as opposed to the dilettante. In each case, as in Goethe’s poem, commitment is contrasted with vacuous fervor. Thus the relevant aspects of Goethe’s, as of any writer’s, world of discourse are those “unit ideas,” both traditional and contemporary, which, like the Schwärmerei complex, Goethe could rely upon his audience already knowing. Similarly, we can perceive in “Daimon, Dämon” (Daemon), the title to the first stanza of Urworte, the pre-Socratic concept of the human being as a fixed quantity; and in the fourth stanza, even if in highly ironic formulation, the Stoic notion that freedom lies in the acceptance of our ultimate dependence on Nature’s laws. Yet these references represent not so much borrowings as an expression of property common to writer and reader alike. Likewise, the final stanza, “Elpis, Hoffnung” (Hope), becomes much less obscure when we read it in terms of the fundamental conception of the Cynics: that spiritual freedom is only to be

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found under the most restrictive circumstances, for the latter are the means to achieving the former:

35

40

Doch solcher Grenze, solcher eh’ren Mauer Höchst widerwärt’ge Pforte wird entriegelt, Sie stehe nur mit alter Felsendauer! Ein Wesen regt sich leicht und ungezügelt: Aus Wolkendecke, Nebel, Regenschauer Erhebt sie uns, mit ihr, durch sie beflügelt; Ihr kennt sie wohl, sie schwärmt durch alle Zonen; Ein Flügelschlag—und hinter uns Äonen. 17 (HA, 1: 360)

This approach helps us open up Goethe’s other “philosophical” poems. For example, the idea that informs “Eins und Alles” (One and All, 1823), that all existent things must return to the flux from which they came, can be traced as far back as the pre-Socratic thinker Anaximander. (The validity in viewing it as a historical commonplace of his age seems to be confirmed by Goethe’s uncompromising description elsewhere of the idea in lines 23–24 18 as “dumm”; surely something he would only do if he were secure in the knowledge that the thought would not be identified as his own.) Then again, in the opening stanza of the poem “Vermächtnis” (Legacy, 1829) — “Kein Wesen kann zu Nichts zerfallen! / Das Ew’ge regt sich fort in allen, 19 [. . .]” — we find the same thought that we find in Anton Friedrich Büsching’s Vergleichung der griechischen Philosophie mit der neuern (1785): 20 “was ist, kann nicht vernichtet werden” (what is, cannot be annihilated). Büsching cites this idea as one of the age-old propositions common to ancient and modern philosophy. Similarly, it seems more appropriate, and more enlightening, to regard the thought expressed in the third stanza not so much in terms of Kant, as an expression of the age-old Christian concept of the conscience, as an orderly and rule-bound faculty (a thought which, in his own way, Kant reformulated). Equally, the discursive content of the fifth stanza — that human reason enables us to transcend the immediate moment of perception — could be traced to Aristotle, but it seems more plausible to assume that, although perhaps not a commonplace for us, it was precisely that for Goethe’s contemporary reader: 25

30

Genieße mäßig Füll’ und Segen, Vernunft sei überall zugegen, Wo Leben sich des Lebens freut. Dann ist Vergangenheit beständig, Das Künftige voraus lebendig, Der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit. (HA, 1: 370)

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But if the recognition of the conceptual Gemeingut Goethe is employing obviates the problems raised by treating these poems as if they were original philosophical reflections (which they are plainly not), it raises another, and in some ways more interesting, problem — a specifically literary problem, which greatly exercised minds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the solution to which offers us a second interpretive tool. Why, people asked at that time, should the reformulation of such commonplace truths, however important, interest anyone? The answers, however different in other respects, all laid the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the writer: it was his or her task, it was argued, to reformulate them so that the reader would give the thoughts his or her serious consideration. And a quite distinct solution, which was particularly influential in Germany, was that received material could be brought to life by being recast in a manner somehow characteristic of the author, by being impressed by writers with what Johann Heinrich Merck (1741–91) called “ein ihnen so eigenes Ge21 präge” (a stamp of their own). As a result, light can be shed on Goethe’s idiom in his late philosophical poems by approaching them from another part of his canon that is often adduced, although usually in respect of their content only: his Maximen und Reflexionen (1833 / 1907). An awareness of the techniques employed by Goethe in his maxims leads to a better understanding of his similar practice in his late verse as a whole. Goethe employs a wide variety of “morphological” devices (that is, devices that draw on the “sound” and “look” of language to raise his inherited material to a higher, aesthetic level) which, when embedded in the prose of an aphorism, are perhaps easier to detect than when they appear in verse, with its conventional and, often, peripheral sound effects. A second tool of interpretation is to pay close attention to the use of these techniques.For example, in this apparently simple aphorism Goethe manages to lay bare, in a way paradigmatic of his later style, the felt dynamics of growth: “Unser ganzes Kunststück besteht darin, dass wir unsere Existenz 22 aufgeben, um zu existieren” (HA, 12: 381). The seemingly paradoxical, and age-old, idea that “we must die in order to live” — central to the theme of “renunciation” (Entsagung) that runs through all of Goethe’s later works 23 — is expressed in a short sententia, where the polyptoton of Existenz/ existieren functions as a rhetorical distinctio, forcing the reader to give a different meaning to each term if he or she is to make sense of the apparent paradox. Yet what the reader perceives here is not a relation of intellectual distinction, but rather a felt relation of development, of becoming: within the polyptoton, the substantival ending (-enz), is dropped in favor of the more dynamic, because verbal, ending (-ieren). Thus we move from stasis to movement, a process which, since something is retained (the element exist-), we can speak of as “becoming” rather than as mere change. By bearing this

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intertextual perspective in mind, it becomes possible to discern what is essential about the aesthetic structure Goethe has created in his later verse. If we turn our attention to the opening stanza of “Eins und Alles,” we see Goethe exploiting the simple device of rhyme, not just to give cohesion and shape to his piece, but to create an expressive structure:

5

Im Grenzenlosen sich zu finden, Wird gern der Einzelne verschwinden, Da lost sich aller Überdruß; Statt heißem Wünschen, wildem Wollen, Statt läst’gem Fordern, strengem Sollen Sich aufzugeben ist Genuß. 24 (HA, 1: 368)

By coordinating words of opposite meaning (sich finden-verschwinden, Überdruss-Genuss, wollen-sollen) in terms of their perceived likeness (rhyme), he expresses for us that basic human feeling underlying the Neo-Platonic mystical veneer of the poem. We are made to feel an indifference to distinction, a sense that “it’s all the same.” At other times, however, phonetic likeness is exploited to quite different effect. For example, in the fourth stanza of “Urworte. Orphisch,” entitled “Ananke, Nötigung” (Necessity), the persona of the poem employs the rhetorical device of polyptoton to indicate the subtlety of the distinction being drawn: 25

30

Da ist’s denn wieder, wie die Sterne wollten: Bedingung und Gesetz; und aller Wille Ist nur ein Wollen, weil wir eben sollten, Und vor dem Willen schweigt die Willkür stille; Das Liebste wird vom Herzen weggescholten, Dem harten Muß bequemt sich Will’ und Grille. So sind wir scheinfrei denn nach manchen Jahren Nur enger dran, als wir am Anfang waren. 25 (HA, 1: 360)

In line 26 the “wollten” of the preceding line becomes “Wille,” which is connected with the “wollen” of line 27, which, in turn, is connected with both “Willen” and “Willkür” in line 28, and these with “Will’” in line 30. “True will” is said to be an accommodation to duty (26–27), compared with which any other kind of will is mere caprice (28, 30). Within this rhetorical structure there is a felt relation of tension and resolution. By placing the morphemes woll- (25, 27) and will- (26 and 28) in exactly parallel spots in the metric pattern of the first four lines of the stanza (on the penultimate stress of lines 25 and 26; and on the second stress of lines 27 and 28), Goethe emphasizes the palpable tension between them: the shared conso-

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nants draw them together, while the different vowels hold them apart, thus expressing a relation of mutual attraction and repulsion. Now, this felt tension is overcome and resolved through the double appearance of the willmorpheme, again in emphatic parallel position, in lines 28 and 30. This aesthetic play expresses for the reader a feeling of discrepancy, of a lack of “fit,” between our innermost desires and those desires that are sanctioned by ethical norms and, furthermore, are adapted to sheer physical necessity. The entirely a-logical, but nonetheless real, sentiment so articulated is something of this kind: moral freedom feels, at one and the same time, like an overcoming of one’s inclination (wanting becomes ethical willing) and a free indulgence of one’s inclination (ethical willing becomes wanting, indeed, caprice) — and each of these feelings is accompanied by a paradoxical feeling of “angry renunciation” (“weggescholten” of line 29 rhymes on “wollten” and “sollten”) and “peace” (“stille” of line 28 rhymes on “Wille” and “Grille”). Finally, one should note that Goethe simultaneously invokes and resolves a cultural dichotomy of his day by embedding his interpretation of these “Orphic” words in the eminently “Romantic” ottava rima stanzas that he employs, among other places with his ouevre, in the dedicatory poem to Faust I. The same technique of simply reduplicating one whole chiming syllable is also playfully at work in the second stanza of “Vermächtnis”:

10

Das Wahre war schon längst gefunden, Hat edle Geisterschaft verbunden, Das alte Wahre, faß es an! Verdank es, Erdensohn, dem Weisen, Der ihr die Sonne zu umkreisen Und dem Geschwister wies die Bahn. 26 (HA, 1: 369)

In the first line of the stanza (l.7 of the poem) the iteration of the same sound, Wahr/war, which may appear a careless jingle, has a point. Through both its oral and its visual impact, it establishes a palpable link between what is past and what is true — a perceptible relation, which is also linked by this same repeated sound in “bewahren” in stanza 1 (l. 5):

5

Kein Wesen kann zu Nichts zerfallen! Das Ew’ge regt sich fort in allen, Am Sein erhalte dich beglückt! Das Sein ist ewig: denn Gesetze Bewahren die lebend’gen Schätze, Aus welchen sich das All geschmückt. 27 (HA, 1: 369)

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Thus what is exhibited to our senses as well as to our mind is an intimate connection between “the past,” “conservation,” and “truth.” Likewise, earlier in this opening stanza (1–2), we are made to feel an equally close bond between the notion of “being” and that of “eternity,” when, by means of a kind of phonetic chiasmus — W-e:e-W — “Wesen” and “Ewige” are tied together. By means of such devices, conceptual elements of a poem are related not simply by identity (or antithesis) of meaning, but also by virtue of a perceived similarity of form.

West-östlicher Divan The same preoccupation with the reformulation of inherited thought is central to a major portion of Goethe’s output in old age, his “Spruchdichtung.” The term covers those short, rhyming maxims — for the most part, couched in regular tetrameters — written between 1814 and his death in 1832, published in various collections: in Cotta’s edition of the works of 1815; in the Zahme Xenien (Tame Epigrams) of the Ausgabe letzter Hand; and in the West-östlicher Divan. Goethe’s interest in the East did not begin with the West-östlicher Divan; much earlier, in 1772–73, he had begun work on a drama based on Voltaire’s play Mahomet (1742), from which the text “Mahomets-Gesang” (Song for Mohammed) survives as a fragment; this poem, with its mixture of free rhythms and trochees, is one of the hymnic 28 examples of Goethe’s early Sturm und Drang lyrics. For David Wellbery, this text is “often considered emblematic for what is referred to as the Genie29 zeit (period of genius),” but the text also serves to illustrate the continuity 30 of Goethe’s interest in Islam, as well as the continuity within his work of the theme of the Poet. In “Mahomets-Gesang,” two of his followers praise the Prophet, who unifies his disciples as a river unites many tributaries and carries them all to the ocean. As Wellbery argues, “Mahomets-Gesang” is ultimately concerned with the position (both cultural and psychological) of 31 the genius in general, and with genius as a figure of desire in particular; a similar concern informs the notes that Goethe provided to accompany the West-östlicher Divan, where he discusses the distinction between the task of the poet and the task of the prophet (HA, 2: 143). By contrast with the prophet, the work of the poet places an emphasis on form (HA, 2: 185). To put it another way, the prophet is concerned with divine revelation; the poet 32 is concerned with revealing the self through language. In Islam, someone who could recite the whole text of the Qu’ran was known as a hafiz, and this name, by which he is now known in the West, was also applied to Shams alsDin Muhammad Shirazi (1326–89), whose ghazals, or odes, “are the most celebrated in all Persian literature, blending human and mystical love with balance and proportion in some of the world’s most sublime and technically 33 exquisite poetry.” Having read, in German translation by the Austrian

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orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), the verse of Hafiz in June 1814, Goethe set about producing a series of poems that imitated as closely as possible the imagery and style of the work of the fourteenth-century Persian poet. That concern with the present, with the everyday, yet with the sense of what is beyond the individual and the merely contingent, is reflected in the short poem that concludes the Fourth Book, which is spoken by Suleika, the female companion of Hafiz as imagined by Goethe: Der Spiegel sagt mir, ich bin schön! Ihr sagt: zu altern sei auch mein Geschick. Vor Gott muß alles ewig stehn, In mir liebt Ihn, für diesen Augenblick. 34 (HA, 2: 41) In (biographical) reality, “Suleika” was, in fact, Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860), the wife of a Frankfurt banker with whom Goethe became acquainted in the summer of 1814. She contributed poems that Goethe incorporated into his cycle, including the great texts “Hochbeglückt in deiner Liebe,” “Was bedeutet die Bewegung,” and “Ach, um deine feuchten 35 Schwingen.” (The figure of Suleika is a good example of the poetic anima figures that feature in Goethe’s late works, such as Makarie in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, of whom the prototype is Helena in Faust II.) In some of the rhyming maxims in the Divan, we find the older Goethe “playing” with language, exploiting the sound-look relations of its “bodiliness.” Take, for example, Goethe’s reformulation of the proverb “two of one trade never agree” in the “Buch der Sprüche” (Book of Proverbs) from the Divan, “Ein Herre mit zwei Gesind” (A master with two servants): Ein Herre mit zwei Gesind, Er wird nicht wohl gepflegt. Ein Haus, worin zwei Weiber sind, Es wird nicht rein gefegt. 36 (HA, 2: 56) The notion that an individual’s efforts, unlike those of a twosome, are “whole-some” and of a piece, is given felt articulation in the rhyme of “rein” in the final line with “ein” at the beginning of lines 1 and 3. Likewise, in the maxim “Freigebiger wird betrogen” (The generous are cheated) from the Divan’s “Buch der Betrachtungen” (Book of Observations), the familiar thought that the appropriate response to being deceived is to deceive in turn (“fallite fallentes,” as the Latin goes) is, by means of polyptoton in its concluding exhortation, transformed into a sensuous structure: “Betrogener 37 betrüge!” (HA, 2: 40). Here the reader feels not simply an emphasis on

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intellectual relation but, rather, a felt connection of intrinsicality, as if “betrüge” had grown out of “betrogen.” Nowhere, however, is the mixture of the spiritual and the physical that characterized the work of Hafiz and, by the same token, of Goethe in the Divan, more clearly evident than in the famous poem from the “Buch des Sängers” (Book of the Singer) “Selige Sehnsucht” (Sacred Yearning, 1814): Sagt es niemand, nur den Weisen, Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet, Das Lebend’ge will ich preisen, Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet. In der Liebesnächte Kühlung, Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest, Überfällt dich fremde Fühlung, Wenn die stillte Kerze leuchtet. Nicht mehr bleibst du umfangen In der Finsternis Beschattung, Und dich reißet neu Verlangen Auf zu höherer Begattung. Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig, Kommst geflogen und gebannt, Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig, Bist du, Schmetterling, verbrannt. Und so lang du das nicht hast, Dieses: Stirb und werde! Bist du nur ein trüber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde. 38 (HA, 2: 18–19) 39

On the one hand, the images of “Flammentod,” “umfangen / In der Finsternis Beschattung,” and “des Lichts begierig” recalls the imagery of light and dark found, for example, in a section of the Qu’ran known to 40 Goethe; on the other, there is clearly an erotic subtext, recalling the frank enjoyment of sexuality in a religion whose Prophet had many wives and who taught that heaven is a garden of delights full of beautiful women. In turn, this subtext stands in the tradition of reading such descriptions of Paradise, or such texts as the biblical “Song of Songs,” as allegory; and, indeed, such Western works as Dante’s Divine Comedy (in which Beatrice’s earthly love paves the way to divine love) are indebted to the mystical vision of Moham41 med as experienced in his Night Journey. Not that the “message,” the import, of Goethe’s poem is mystical; for while “Selige Sehnsucht” is per-

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haps Goethe’s most profound, it is also his most potentially playful treatment of the “die-and-become” theme. It is characteristic of the temper of the late Goethe that the human psyche is set free in this poem only after the human body’s needs are fulfilled. Moreover, the process is a reiterative one; note the plural, “Liebesnächte” (“love-nights”). The flight of the psyche ends, in dying, in the body; the light-dark metaphors, like the series of antitheses (“feeling” — “cooling,” “embracing” — “longing,” “remaining” — “tearing [away]”), are resolved as mutual co-implicates of each other. The “secret” that cannot be spoken, for fear of misunderstanding, turns out, on attentive reading of the aesthetic form, to be not a mystical formula, but a down-to-earth truth that the intellect nevertheless finds hard to grasp: namely, that the self-development so dear to human aspiration demands the (temporary) renunciation not just of the flesh (once enjoyed!) but also of the spirit, when it threatens irretrievable damage by undue prolongation. So much is clear from the final stanza, which, at the same time as it didactically insists on the age-old call to self-transcendence, also slyly, with the cunning of poetry’s playfulness, insinuates the indispensable part that earthiness plays in self-refinement: the untranslatable intensification of the outward form of German — the rhyme of “werde” (“become”) with “Erde” (“earth”) — makes the point here that the cultural life of symbolism is, in this world at least, wholly dependent on the meaningful manipulation of some sort of 42 physical medium. In the case of Goethe’s later verse, that medium is the masterly, “intensified,” aesthetic deployment of the corporality of the German language.

Faust If Goethe was fascinated by the Orient, he was also deeply interested in the roots of Western culture. Faust II, the composition of which occupied Goethe for over thirty years, displays both the fruits of his view, as expressed to Eckermann, that we should “always study the Greeks,” and his reflection 43 on the forms and function of meter. It would be foolish to try and summa44 rize the significance of Faust II in a few words, but a glance at the work shows the wide range of mythological reference sustaining the work: the conjuring of Paris and Helena in act 1, not to mention the influence of Plutarch as a source of the idea of the Mothers; the sphinxes, sirens, griffins, lamias, nereids, and tritons of the “Classical Walpurgisnacht” in act 2, together with Chiron the centaur, Manto the sorceress, and the philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras; the setting of the palace of Menelaus in Sparta and the background of the Trojan War in act 3; and the reinterpretation of the 45 story of Philemon and Baucis in act 5. Equally wide-ranging are the forms of rhyme and meter deployed by Goethe throughout Faust II, of which act 3 may serve as an example.

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This act opens with an imitation of classical Greek tragedy, as Helena, standing in front of the chorus of captive Trojan women, declaims her identity in iambic trimeters — “Bewundert viel und viel gescholten, Helena, / Vom Strande komm ich, wo wir erst gelandet sind” (HA, 3: 257, lines 46 8488–89) — which also reflect the parataxis of Homeric language. In other lines, the verse shifts to trochaic tetrameter (8909–29). Yet if this metrical “order” (8541, 8555, 8569), as well as many of the cultural references, are Greek, some of the allusions are Roman, such as the echoes of Ovid and Juvenal in the lines “Daß Scham und Schönheit nie zusammen, Hand in 47 Hand, / Den Weg verfolgen über der Erde grünen Pfad” (8755–56). Following the Greek practice of alternating single or half lines (“stichomythia”), Phorkyas and the Chorus, and then Faust and Helena, enter into a series of exchanges; with the shift of scene to “The Inner Courtyard of a Castle,” more modern verse forms, such as blank verse used by Faust (9192– 9212) and the trochees and iambs in the strophes of Lynkeus, embody in verse this chronological change. As if to show the persistence of the old in the new, however, Helena and Faust return to the ancient stichomythia and enrich their end-rhymes with internal rhyme in lines, as Faust, wooing He48 lena, teaches her how to speak in modern, rhyming verse. Once again, language appears as a medium for the erotic (as it had done in Part One when Faust was seducing Gretchen). Moreover, not only does the old persist in the new; the new seems to form the meaningful context for understanding the old. For all its exploration of ancient culture, the emphasis of Faust II is equally modern, and nowhere is this clearer than in the allegories of modern economics (act 1) and of the abuse of modern technology (act 5). And because the culture of the Western mind is saturated with Christian notions, the allusions to Protestantism in Faust I, when Faust, in an imitation of Luther, translates the Bible — “Das heilige Original / In mein geliebtes Deutsch zu übertragen” (1222–23; To translate the sacred original / Into my beloved German) — find their counterpart in the Baroque Catholicism of the final scene of act 5 of Part Two, as Faust’s “immortal part” ascends, amid the choirs of angels, patristic figures, sacred youths, and penitent women, to the Mater gloriosa, in an apotheosis that draws as much on Dante as it does on Neo-Platonism. Nor are the final lines of the Chorus mysticus free from erotic overtones as it intones: “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan” (121110–11; The Eternal Feminine / Draws us onward). In Goethe’s poetry, as well as his prose (whether in drama, short story, novel, or scientific and scholarly treatise), the very texture of the German language is exploited to its fullest extent, and always with the same purpose: to match, to some extent at least, the subtle delicacy of connectedness — of what seem, to the human mind, to be opposites — that characterizes the process and products of art and nature. (Seeing the world as an aesthetic

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phenomenon, as “cosmos” — a view later made his own by Nietzsche — is, in fact, the essential insight Goethe shared with Schiller in their joint classical enterprise of reconciling the One and the Many.) In one of his later essays, entitled “Probleme” (Problems, 1823; HA, 13: 35–37), Goethe insists that, while it is impossible to represent in expositional language the ubiquitous simultaneity of oppositional forces at work, it is possible to envisage an artificial discursive practice that could intimate something of it: “It would be necessary to introduce a method of discoursing by artifice. A symbolism would have to be established! But who is to do this? And who is to recog49 nize it, once accomplished?” Goethe had a similar effort in mind when, in connection with Faust, he told Schiller in his letter of 5 May 1798 that he was revisiting many scenes that were in prose in order to put them into verse. His intention was to force the reader to construe the material deployed “through a veil,” what he (and Schiller) were to call “der Dichtung 50 Schleier” (the veil of poetry). This aesthetic veil, so vital to Goethe’s quintessential meaning in his later verse, is at work almost everywhere in Faust; in fact, it is what lends this gigantic work its enormous power to move. According to L. A. Willoughby, at whatever significant point we strike the verbal surface of Goethe’s Faust, we are able to follow up a pattern of 51 meaning running through the whole play. This cohesion is achieved through his poetical technique, one example of which is given here. The word that Faust uses when, defying Anxiety (“Sorge”), he articulates his belief in the human capacity to understand the world, is “ergreifen,” which (cf. “grasp” in English) means both “to take hold of, to seize” and “to understand”: “Was er erkennt, läßt sich ergreifen” (What his mind grasps, he may possess; l.11448). This word, like its cognates such as “fassen” and many others, acts as a leitmotif that links and binds across this vast texture what may seem to be unrelated episodes. In the opening Prologue in Heaven in Faust I, we are told, for example, by the angelic host that God’s works are fundamentally “incomprehensible” (“unbegreiflich”). Hence the irony of the Lord’s words to Mephisto: You can have Faust, “kannst du ihn erfassen” (l.325) — “if you can understand/get hold of him”! Precisely Mephisto’s inability to “grasp” and his unwillingness to be “gripped” (i.e., moved emotionally) make him, for all his intelligence, incapable of ever fully understanding human life — and of “catching” Faust. In this work, human understanding involves, as the ambiguity of the vocabulary makes clear, feeling — something that cannot be grasped in a purely intellectual way. This theme of the contrast of mere intellect with true (because felt) understanding is echoed throughout the length of the text. The terrible isolation implicit in Gretchen’s rejection, in the final scene of Part One, of human contact, of “fassen” — “Fasse mich nicht so [. . .] an” (Don’t touch me so), she twice tells her former lover — reveals her total alienation from the world as we know it, just as when Faust, preparing in Part Two to descend to the

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fundamental form of forms, the Mothers, speaks of the essential quality of human being, evoking the whole complex of meaning Goethe has built into the word “ergreifen” (6272–74). These interweavings, taking in on the way the conceptual opposite of “grasping” (“erkennen”: mental perception), grow in density and complexity throughout Part Two. The result is an intensely pregnant, poetic web of meaning. In act 1, the Chorus opens Part Two with the assurance: “Alles kann der Edle leisten, / Der versteht und rasch ergreift” (“The noble man can do everything, / Who understands and quickly grasps”) (4664–65); and in act 2, we have surely what is the most spectacular play on the metaphors of “greifen” — by the “Greifen”: “Man greife nun nach Mädchen, Kronen, Geld, / Dem Greifenden ist meist Fortuna hold” (“A griffin grips or grabs; girls, crowns, or gold — / Good fortune 52 favors those who take good hold”) (7102–3). The central metaphor of “erkennen” / “ergreifen” is found in act 3, when Phorkyas tells Helena to “grasp” power (8805–6), a point with which Helena is in total agreement (8915–16). Faust tells Helena that such will-to-power is a cosmological principle, “Denn wo Natur im reinen Kreise waltet, / Ergreifen alle Welten sich” (“For where the laws of purest nature rule, / All separate worlds unite at last”) (9560–61), just as Euphorion is “gripped” by a desire to soar aloft: “Hinaufzudringen / Ist mir Begierde, / sie faßt mich schon” (“To soar / Is my desire, / It grips me now”) (9714–16). In act 4, when Mephisto dismisses the incapacity of the educated to understand intellectually the nature of volcanic eruption, he praises, by contrast, the common individual’s “grasp” of its essentials (10113–17). And in the Midnight scene in act 5, the “fassen” / “begreifen” complex is sustained when Faust admits: “Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt; / Ein jed Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren” (“I merely raced across the earth, / Seized by the hair each passing joy”) 53 (11433–34). The result is that, by the time we reach those final, summative lines of the “Chorus mysticus,” the nature of “the Eternal Feminine” which draws us on, like that of the (literally) “ungraspable” (“das Unbegreifliche”) of which the Chorus speaks, has been prepared for by being embedded in the very body of the language, the “veil of poetry,” spread across the surface of this vast text.

Trilogie der Leidenschaft In a sense, one could say with some justification that the mystical idea contained in the famous lines of the “Chorus mysticus” recurs as the central motif of all of Goethe’s later verse: the somber, and yet joyful, message of all tragedy — “Die and become!” That, after all, is the core of the highly allusive symbolism of “Trilogie der Leidenschaft” (Trilogy of Passion, 1823– 24), the title given to three poems, “An Werther,” “Elegie,” and “Aussöhnung” (To Werther, Elegy, and Reconciliation) written between August

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1823 and March 1824. In biographical terms, these texts emerged from the Marienbad affair, Goethe’s love for the eighteen-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow, who rejected a proposal for marriage from the seventy-four-yearold poet. But the “Marienbad Elegy,” as the second text is sometimes known, goes beyond mere biography: In unsers Busens Reine wogt ein Streben, Sich einem Höhern, Reinern, Unbekannten Aus Dankbarkeit freiwillig hinzugeben, Enträtselnd sich den ewig Ungenannten: Wir heißen’s: fromm sein! [. . .] 54 (HA, 1: 384) “Piety” consists in devotedly striving ever higher; and, as the tripartite structure at which Goethe eventually arrived shows, the exordium-play-coda structure of Greek tragedy is involved. This structure is used in part to make the point that, as Goethe put it in his 1827 essay on Aristotle’s concept of “catharsis,” true reconciliation of feeling is to be found only in an intensification of external forms — in precisely the kind of aesthetic form that his own poetic veil (as in Werther and Tasso, both evoked in this work) offers 55 and which, in the poem itself, is apostrophized in music. Indeed, the ambiguity of the line “enträtselnd sich den ewig Ungenannten” — we may take both “sich” or “Ungenannten” as either direct or indirect object — perfectly articulates Goethe’s conviction that subject and object are inextricably linked in a pattern of reciprocal interaction, in which “death” of one or the other, seen from the perspective of one of the poles, is not just a (temporary) loss but a (temporary) gain. “An Werther” asserts, in an obvious allusion to Tasso: “Verstrickt in solche Qualen, halbverschuldet, / Geb’ ihn ein Gott zu 56 sagen, was er duldet” (HA, 1: 381). The suffering of loss — for writer and reader alike — is, like all feeling, a necessary condition of the heightened enjoyment of art’s symbolism of experience. This commitment to the ancient wisdom of “dying into life” has been seen by many commentators to be the central import of that joyous affirmation of the new life — what 57 Goethe called “repeated puberty” — celebrated in manifold modes: in his late philosophical poems (weltanschauliche Gedichte); in the “poetry-inprose” of his maxims and reflections; in the assimilation of Persian verseforms in the West-östlicher Divan; and in the great architecture of Faust — the fruit, according to Rudolf Arnheim, of the truly new holistic vision vouchsafed by creative old age, which “transcends outer appearances to search out essentials.”

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Notes 1

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg: C. Wegner, 1948–65), 2: 39. All references to Goethe’s works are to this edition, cited as HA, with volume and page numbers. “I’m left enough! Idea and love are lasting!” Goethe, Poems of the West and East: West-Eastern Divan — West-Östlicher Divan: Bi-Lingual Edition of the Complete Poems, trans. by John Whaley (Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 143. English translations from the Divan refer to this edition and will be cited as Whaley with page numbers.

2

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. by Ralph Manheim, 3 vols (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1955–1957), vol. 1, Language, 42, 105–07; The Myth of the State (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1946), 47. 3

Rudolf Arnheim, “On the Late Style,” in Late Life Potential (Washington, DC: Gerontological Society of America, 1990), 110–36 (113 and 116).

4

See R. T. Llewellyn, “Parallel Attitudes to Form in Late Beethoven and Late Goethe: Throwing Aside the Appearance of Art,” The Modern Language Review 63 (1968): 407–16. 5

See his commentary in HA, 1: 639. Dennis F. Mahoney, “Autobiographical Writings,” in Lesley Sharpe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 147.

6

7

“See in each beginning, ending, / Double aspects of the One; / Here, amidst stampeding objects, / Be among the first to run, / Thankful to a muse whose favor / Grants you one unchanging thing: / What the heart can hold to ponder; / What the spirit shape to sing.” Goethe, Selected Poems [Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 1], ed. Christopher Middleton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994) (translated by John Frederick Nims), 169. Subsequent translations by Christopher Middleton from this edition will be cited as SP and page numbers. 8

Paul Stöcklein, Wege zum späten Goethe: Dichtung, Gedanke; Zeichnung; Interpretationen (Hamburg: M. v. Schröder, 1949; reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984). 9 “[D]ie Absichten der Gottheit dadurch zu erfüllen, daß wir, indem wir von einer Seite uns zu verselbsten genötiget sind, von der andern in regelmäßigen Pulsen uns zu entselbstigen nicht versäumen” (“Fulfilling the plans of the deity when, while compelled on the one hand to concentrate into ourselves, we do not neglect, on the other hand, to expand, in regular pulsations, away from ourselves”) (HA, 9: 353; Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth: Parts One to Three [Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 4], ed. by Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. by Robert R. Heitner [New York: Suhrkamp, 1987], 263). 10

See Rolf Christian Zimmermann, Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe: Studien zur hermetischen Tradition des deutschen 18. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969), I, 188 and 227.

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11

See, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm Wentzlaff-Eggebert, “Zu Goethes Gedicht ‘Vermächtnis,’” in Albert Fuchs and Helmut Motekat (eds), Stoffe Formen Strukturen: Hans Heinrich Borcherdt zum 75. Geburtstag (Munich: H. Hueber, 1962), 151– 59 (152); and Jeremy Adler, “Goethe’s Gedankenlyrik: From ‘Mailied’ and ‘Ein Gleiches’ to ‘Vermächtnis,’ in the light of Goethe’s principle of ‘Synthese,’” in T. J. Reed, Martin Swales, and Jeremy Adler (eds), Goethe at 250: London Symposium (Munich: iudicium, 2000), 247–64. 12

Johannes A. E. Leue, “Goethes ‘Urworte. Orphisch,’” Acta Germanica 2 (1967): 1–10 (2–3). 13

Compare with Friedrich Sengle’s comments on the reluctance of Goethe scholarship to note Goethe’s indebtedness to tradition (“Konvention und Ursprünglichkeit in Goethes dichterischem Werk,” in Arbeiten zur deutschen Literatur 1750–1850 [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965], 9–23 [10]). 14

“Love is not absent! Down from heaven swooping / Whither from ancient emptiness he flew, / This way he flutters, borne by airy feathers, / Round heart and head the day of Springtime through, / Apparently escapes, returns anon, / So sweet and nervous, pain to pleasure gone. / Some hearts away in general loving float, / The noblest, yet, their all to one devote” (SP, 231). 15

G. E. Lessing, Über eine zeitige Aufgabe (1776), in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Stammler, 2 vols (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1959), 1: 953–60.

16

See Letter 9 §5 and §6, in Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 56–59. 17

“Yet the repulsive gate can be unbolted / Within such bounds, their adamantine wall, / Though it may stand, that gate, like rock for ever; / One being moves, unchecked, ethereal: / From heavy cloud, from fog, from squall of rain / She lifts us to herself, we’re winged again, / You know her well, to nowhere she’s confined— / A wingbeat—aeons vanish far behind” (SP, 233). 18 “Denn alles muß in Nichts zerfallen, / Wenn es im Sein beharren will” (And into nothing everything must fall, / If it in being would persist; HA, 1: 369; SP, 243). See Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann of 12 February 1829. 19

HA, 1: 369. “No thing on earth to nought can fall, / The Eternal onward moves in all” (SP, 267). 20 Anton Friedrich Büsching, Vergleichung der griechischen Philosophie mit der neuern: Ein Versuch und eine Probe (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1785), p. v. 21

See J. H. Merck, Fragment einer Beantwortung der . . . Frage: Welches sind die Kennzeichen des geraden Menschenverstandes (1776), cited in Vicky Rippere, Schiller and “Alienation” (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1981), 80. 22 “Our whole achievement is to give up existence in order to exist.” Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, ed. by Peter Hutchinson, trans. by Elisabeth Stopp (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 36. 23

The repetition of the same word in various declensions or conjugations provides the rhetorician with the possibility of varying the basic technique of synonymy.

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“In boundlessness, itself discovering there, / The singular would gladly disappear, / Satiety is then absolved quite; / Ardent wishing, savage will abate, / Strict obligation, coping, ah, with Fate: / In self-abandon is delight” (SP, 241).

24

25

“Then back it comes, what in the stars was written: / Law and circumstances; each will is tried, / All willing simply forced, by obligation: / In face of it, the free will’s tongue is tied. / Man’s heart forswears what most was loved by him, / To iron ‘Must’ comply both will and whim. / It only seems we’re free, years hem us in, / Constraining more than at our origin” (SP, 232–33). 26 “Long since, the true was found and could / Spirits join in brotherhood; / The ancient truth set hand upon. / Thank now the sage, O child of earth, / Who showed her and her kin the path / For circuiting about the sun” (SP, 267). 27

“No thing on earth to nought can fall, / The Eternal onward moves in all; / Rejoice, by being be sustained. / Being is deathless: living wealth, / With which the All adorns itself, / By laws abides and is maintained” (SP, 267). 28 See K. F. Hilliard, “Goethe and the cure for melancholy: ‘Mahomets Gesang,’ orientalism and the medical psychology of the 18th century,” Oxford German Studies 23 (1994): 71–103. 29

David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996), 131 (for further commentary, see 131–50). 30

See Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und der Islam (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 2001), especially 47–67.

31

See Wellbery, 142, 146–47. For further discussion, see Benjamin Bennett, “Language, Tradition, and Blissful Yearning,” in Goethe’s Theory of Poetry: Faust and the Regeneration of Language (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1986), 261. 32

33

Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power (New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene, 2002), 166. 34 “The mirror tells me I am fair! / You say: me too did fate with age endow. / In God all lasts for evermore: / In me love Him, this moment here and now” (Whaley, 159). 35

See Astrid Seele, Frauen um Goethe (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997), 110– 20. For these texts and their corresponding translations as “By your love I am elated,” “How interpret this emotion?” and “Ah, West Wind, your moist wings gliding” see Whaley, 250–53; 314–17; and 324–25. 36 “A master is not served well / When servants two are kept. / A house wherein two women dwell / Is never cleanly swept” (Whaley, 221). 37 38

“Deceived, deceive in turn!” (Whaley, 147).

“Tell it no one, only sages, / For the crowd derides such learning, / Life I seek through all the ages / Which for death in flames is yearning. // Cooled in lovenights’ animation, / Which begat you, where you mated, / You are seized by strange sensation, / By still candlelight elated. // No more are you held in capture / Darkly over-shadowed waiting, / You anew are torn by rapture / Upwards to a higher

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mating. // From no weight of distance tiring / You’re in spellbound flight held fast, / And you are, the light desiring, / Moth, in fire consumed at last. // And till you can meet this test: / Die, renew your being! / You are just a dismal guest / In earth’s dark unseeing” (Whaley, 47). For further discussion, see Robert Ellis Dye, “‘Selige Sehnsucht’ and Goethean Enlightenment,” PMLA 104 (1989): 190–200. 39 In Mysterium coniunctionis (1955–1956), the analyst C. G. Jung glossed lines 3–4 of the poem as follows: “This means burning in your own fire and not being like a comet or a flashing beacon, showing others the right way but not knowing it yourself. The unconscious demands your interest for its own sake and wants to be accepted for what it is” (trans. R. F. C. Hull [Collected Works, 14] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1963), §192 (162)). 40 See Surah 24, Al-Nur (“The Light”), verse 35 (cf. Surah 25, Al Furqan [“The Criterion”], verse 61–62 and the allegory of the shadow in verse 45); compare, too, with the image of the cloud and the pillar of fire as a sign of the presence of God in the Hebrew Bible. 41

See Surah 17, verse 1; Surah 53, verses 13–18.

42

See “Nachlese zu Aristoteles’ Poetik” (1827; HA, 12: 342–45); “On Interpreting Aristotle’s Poetics,” in Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. by John Gearey, trans. by Ellen von Nardoff and Ernest H. von Nardoff [Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 3] (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986), 197–99. Here Goethe defines catharsis as an “aussöhnende Abrundung” (“reconciliating rounding-off”). 43

See Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann of 1 April 1827. For further discussion of metrical considerations, see Anthony Phelan, “Deconstructing Classicism: Goethe’s Helena and the Need to Rhyme,” in Richard Sheppard (ed.), New Ways in Germanistik (Oxford: Berg, 1991), 192–210. 44

As Goethe remarked to Eckermann on 6 May 1827, “it would have been a fine thing indeed if I had strung so rich, varied, and highly diversified a life as I have brought to view in Faust upon the slender string of one pervading idea” (trans. John Oxenford). 45 See Paul Bishop, “Introduction: Reading Faust Today,” in Paul Bishop (ed.), A Companion to Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and II (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), xiii–xliv. See also the essay by Arnd Bohm in this volume. 46

“So much admired and so much censured, Helena, / Now from the sea I come; we are not long ashore.” Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. by David Luke (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1994), 124. 47 “That modesty and beauty never hand in hand / Pursue their way together along the earth’s green path” (trans. Luke, 131); cf. Ovid, Letters, 16 (l.288): Lis est cum forma magna pudicitiae (“There is a struggle between the noble figure and modesty”); Juvenal, Satires, 10 (l.297): Rara est adeo concordia formae atque pudicitiae (“Rarely do beauty and modesty go together”). 48

See Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, “Goethe’s Faust: Tragedy in the Diachronic Mode,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, NS 42 (1973): 116–74 (127–28); and R. H. Stephenson, “The Diachronic Solidity of Goethe’s Faust,” in Bishop (ed.), 243–70.

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49

Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. by Douglas Miller [Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 12] (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 43; and see R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995). 50 See Goethe’s “Zueignung” (Dedication, 1784; HA, 1: 149–52, here 152) as well as the letter to Schiller of 5 May 1798. 51

See L. A. Willoughby, “Goethe’s Faust: A Morphological Approach,” in Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Goethe: Poet and Thinker (London: Edward Arnold, 1962; second ed., 1970), 95–117. 52 53

Trans. Luke, 81. Trans. Luke, 157, 219.

54

“In the clear depths of our soul there springs an impulse to give ourselves freely, in gratitude, to something higher, purer, and unknown, and thus to unriddle the eternal Unnamed; this we call piety”; Goethe, Selected Verse, ed. and trans. by David Luke (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 313. 55 HA, 12: 342–45; Essays on Art and Literature, pp.197–99. For further discussion, see Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, “Goethes Trilogie der Leidenschaft als Beitrag zur Frage der Katharsis,” Freies Deutsches Hochstift 3 (1957): 69–88. 56

“Entangled in such torments, and themselves half to blame, may some god grant them the voice to tell of what they must endure.” Cf. the epigraph to the “Elegie”: “Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt, / Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, was ich leide” (HA, 1: 381; “And if tormented humanity is dumb, / some god has given me the voice to tell of what I suffer” [English translations by David Luke from Goethe, Selected Verse, 308–9]) For further discussion of the relationship between Werther and Tasso, see Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, “‘Tasso — ein gesteigerter Werther’ in the Light of Goethe’s Principle of ‘Steigerung’” [1949], in Wilkinson and Willoughby, Goethe: Poet and Thinker, 185–213; and, from a different perspective, Sylvia P. Jenkins, “The Depiction of Mental Disorder in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Torquato Tasso and its Place in the Thematic Structure of the Works,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, NS 62 (1991–92): 96–118. 57

See his conversation with Eckermann of 11 March 1828.

The Reception of German Romanticism in the Twentieth Century Nicholas Saul

A

S AN ORIGINAL,

unique and undiluted, literary and cultural movement, German Romanticism did not last long: perhaps thirty years or so after its rise around 1795. Moreover, most of its creative, signature ideas had already been realized by the Early Romantics (Wackenroder and Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, Hardenberg-Novalis, Schelling, and Schleiermacher), and little of import emerged after the traumatic shock to the German collective 1 mind occasioned by the battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806. That Romanticism should have earned one of the longest and weightiest reception histories of any such movement — until the present day — is thus eloquent testimony to its significance. In what follows, the enormously widespread reception of German Romanticism in the last century will not be measured against any definition of today. What counts is not the current state of scholarship, which is well documented in the preceding pages, but the state of knowledge then: What the word Romanticism connoted within the contemporary horizon, which writers concerned themselves with Romanticism, which aspects they selected, how these were interpreted, what cumulative story about Romanticism all 2 these episodes build up into. Romanticism (unlike, say, the Sturm und Drang) is not a purely literary phenomenon. It speaks in every medium of 3 expression then available. Here however the literary reception is unashamedly the main object of interest. It will be explored in three sections: the literary image of Romanticism in high modernism around 1900, the Weimar Republic, and German literature after 1945 in both East Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany. In this context, the focus is strictly on the reception of Romantic prose works (rather than drama or poetry) as characteristic of the movement’s self-understanding, and, moreover, mainly on their reception in representative works — any striving for exhaustive documentation is impossible here. As a foil, the image of Romanticism in official scholarship and in major thinkers linked to literary movements such as Benjamin and Adorno will also be reconstructed. From this will emerge that the writers, the scholars, and the thinkers tend to exploit German Romanticism according to selective and partial understandings of the movement in the

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service of contemporary agendas, which relate to crises of some kind for which an answer is sought in the Romantic heritage. Often the writers — guided perhaps by the inner instinct of their transhistorical community — are ahead of the rest in the adequacy of their image. These successive appropriations of Romanticism are not always parasitic. Frequently, they reveal a genuine affinity of then and now, and lead both to a more adequate understanding of Romanticism and a better self-understanding of modernity in a given phase. In particular, the twentieth century is fascinated by certain dominants of Romanticism: the characteristically Romantic consciousness of alienation and fragmentation, its concomitant utopian vision and celebration of that vision’s experimental aesthetic mode, its intrinsically linked exploration of the self. The charisma of these ideas will draw moderns to them repeatedly in our story. Above all, however, the reception of Romanticism is rarely an “innocent” (unmediated) reception of Romanticism. Rather, it is a response to a received image of Romanticism, a powerful and pervasive image of the movement generated long before the twentieth century, yet through which the modern reception even today needs to be filtered: Goethe’s final, withering verdict. Goethe, in truth, had profound sympathies with the Romantics’ project, 4 and, according to his lights, had tried hard to cooperate with them. But when at last the rupture came, it seemed uncompromising: his own intel5 lectual orientation, Classicism, was healthy, Romanticism was sick. As any balanced account of this relationship reveals today, Goethe of course intended here only to attack those aspects of Romanticism that had caused problems in his life: its reflexive abstraction and introspection, indulgence in taedium vitae, contamination of the aesthetic with the religious, mysticism, and one-dimensional nationalism. Now even if one wanted to share Goethe’s normative view, not many of these reproaches could be justified wholesale today, and indeed Goethe’s true opinion was far more differentiated. But the damage was done. Ever since, Romanticism has struggled to overcome this, its first, nearly decisive public relations disaster. In the nineteenth century, the two most influential commentators after Goethe, Heine and Hegel, relentlessly reinforced Goethe’s anathema in their own style. For Heine, in Die romantische Schule (The Romantic School, 1833 and 1836), Romanticism, while not all of one color, was by and large a bizarre and eccentric escapist movement, orientated around a chronically unfulfilled yearning for the renewal of medieval culture and Christian religiosity in the philistine present. He encapsulates this memorably in his comparison of HardenbergNovalis (always the paradigm case of the Romantic poet) with the mythical giant Antæus, whose strength disappears as soon as his feet lose contact with 6 solid ground. For Hegel, in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on 7 Aesthetics, 1820–29), Romanticism is the art of division, the monument of a pusillanimous failure to mediate objective, absolute spirit adequately with

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empirical reality through self-transparent thought. Hence, it culminates in an aesthetic of frivolous compensatory irony and play, which in truth merely betrays the sad entrapment of the Romantic artist in his subjectivist consciousness. The very ferocity of these attacks, of course, almost inevitably creates a counter-current, a sneaking sympathy with their object, to which there may adhere the glamorous aura of the excluded and perhaps dangerous or unjustly persecuted outsider (itself a major Romantic category of thought). Unable to escape the authority of a careless Goethean judgment, the reception of Romanticism in the twentieth century takes place within this field of tension. Among scholars of the movement in the nineteenth century, the credit for turning back the tide of invective goes to Rudolf Haym. His Die roman8 tische Schule: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (1870), is so titled as to echo and yet re-modulate Heine’s interpretation. Arguing from the standpoint of the newly self-confident Protestant German identity following nationhood attained, he solemnly records Romanticism’s universal lack of favor in contemporary German consciousness (3), recalls the past decades when the representative majority of the people made (metaphorical) war with passion and hatred on reactionary and regressive Romanticism (3), and dutifully echoes the leitmotif of German Romanticism’s lack of roots in the solid ground of everyday reality (7). Thanks to victory in the national struggle, however, the vantage point has now been reached whence a sober, historical overview of Romanticism’s intellectual achievement may be conducted (4–5). Romanticism for Haym aimed at nothing less than a quite new Bildung (7) that unified the poetic, the scientific, and the practical. But his chief concern is its intellectual expression, a revolutionary idealism (8) that, uniquely, synthesizes philosophy, poetry, and religion. Far from opposing Hegel, this synthesis is the ground from which his philosophy triumphantly emerges (864). Haym’s achievement, then, was to re-establish the intellectual dignity of Romanticism. The movement began, however slowly, to emerge from the shadow created by Goethe’s one-sided judgment and those who continually rewrote it. Its positive reception around 1900 owes much to Haym’s ground-clearing operation. By 1906, books were already being written about the phenomenon of “Neuromantik” (Neo-Romanticism). Haym’s book had been republished, and Ricarda Huch’s Die Romantik (1899–1902), a brilliantly multifaceted portrait of Romantic life and thought that stressed the Romantic utopia of androgyny, was entering its third edition. But, to take Ludwig Coellen’s 9 Neuromantik (1906) as an example, they do not trace the genealogy of the new movement back to Haym. Neo-Romanticism, says Coellen, is the response to a crisis of values at the end of the nineteenth century. Europe, following the rise to cultural dominance after 1850 of critically- and empirically-grounded natural scientific thought (positivism) and its literary cog-

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nate, the reductive, prosaic world of Ibsen’s early naturalism, was experienc10 ing a crisis of meaning. A cure was sought, first in Ibsen’s later, semimystical dramas, then in the work of the Belgian modern mystic Maurice Maeterlinck. The latter, especially, satisfies the yearning of the desiccated nineteenth-century mentality for compensatory intuitions of unity, wholeness, and totality. For in all of us, concealed behind the veil of everyday reason or the banal moment, lies a transcendental awareness of primal unity. It is up to us to break through this husk and mystically to intuit the ultimate source of life (Coellen, 4–6). Thus a new, undogmatic mysticism, an immediate revelation of being, will underpin the logical cognitions of natural science with new meaning (8–11). Cultural development, indeed, is a series of immanent revelations mediating the two domains (12–14), primarily through art (20–21). So at last Coellen points out the affinity of modernity with early nineteenth-century Romanticism (26) and develops a cyclical theory of Romanticisms. In cultural development every major change in the relation of absolute and phenomenon is marked by typological shifts in aesthetic style: from a naturalism, in which immediate experience and criticism dominate, through phases of decadence and agonistic style formation to a classical stage, in which a mythical world-view and a new meaning are achieved (26–30). Romanticisms are typically the third stage in this cycle, which is repeated throughout cultural history, and the new Romantic age 11 around 1900 is progressing toward a new Classicism (39). Romanticism, then, has been rescued from obscurity in a time of cultural need. But only under classical (Goethean) sanction. Against this contemporary theoretical background, the major contours of Romanticism’s reception by three representative modernist writers around 1900 will now be traced: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Musil. They certainly recognize an affinity with Romanticism at a critical point in cultural history, but they also differentiate and distance themselves. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) is one of the major examples of Coellen’s and Samuel Lublinksi’s neo-Romantic analyses. Like Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal thought 12 of Novalis, the paradigm Romantic, as a mystic, and there is no doubt that 13 the visionary or epiphanic dimension of Novalis’s poetics, their healing compensatory intuition of lost and regained plenitude, is one source of his 14 self-proclaimed lifelong affinity with the Romantic writer. But Hofmannsthal’s view of Novalis around 1900 is also mediated through another strand of the literary tradition, which, like that of Maeterlinck, bypasses the German reception: the French Symbolist poets Baudelaire, Verlaine, and 15 Mallarmé, with whom he first classes Novalis. For as Werner Vordtriede 16 showed, Novalis’s poetics and his accompanying cult of poetry were highly influential in nineteenth-century France, but understood in abstraction from their idealist ethical and metaphysical foundation: as the model of a protomodernist, self-referential, absolutely autonomous lyricism. It was this Ro-

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mantic aesthetic transformed which French Symbolism imprinted on the 17 aestheticist generation of Stefan George and Hofmannsthal. But for the young Hofmannsthal such a “Romantic” celebration of the poetic construct’s radical autonomy concealed an existential and ethical problem typical of modernity. Nietzsche had already defined one basic problem of the mod18 ern condition in Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888) as decadence, a cultural state in which the force of authentic vitality, the will to power, has withered. Modernity is thus characterized by a life-denying slave ethos and a corresponding aesthetic, in which the literary word no longer serves, but supervenes on life (Fall Wagner, 917, 936). Classicism is of course the life-affirming aesthetic. Thus, the Nietzschean category combines with the traditional Goethean denunciation, and the young Hofmannsthal sees Novalis, and Romanticism, as manifesting aestheticism’s dark side. 19 Romanticism is a sickness of art and a turning away from life, a dreamy 20 desire to transform life into fairy tale. Das Märchen der 672. Nacht (The Tale of the 672nd Night, 1895), his adaptation of a tale from The Arabian 21 Nights, which Hofmannsthal explicitly interprets in Romantic terms, exemplifies this. Here the wealthy son of a merchant withdraws from the world into an exotic, aesthetic paradise of his own making, of which he is an absolute sovereign ruler, and which gradually, despite his almost unconscious sense of threat, replaces the world for him. The threat is realized when a letter arrives, accusing one of the precious servants on whom he depends. Thus enticed from his artificial paradise into the real world, he strays into the equal and opposite realm of squalor, ugliness, and decay. The negative mirroring of his earlier situation pitilessly reveals the truth: that the aesthetic paradise merely concealed an unconscious denial of life. A brutal accident, the powerful kick from a daemonic-looking horse, executes his aesthetic nemesis. However, Hofmannsthal’s relation to Novalis and Romanticism became increasingly sophisticated, and turned to constructive rather than destructive ends. In particular he used the poetic language which Romanticism had forged to explore subjectivity — that imposing inventory of metaphors involving obscure desires, journeys, dreams, descents into mineshafts, concealed doors, and the raising of veils — as a means beyond the problem of decadence to counter another great symptom of the modern condition, the widespread modern sense of a crisis of the self. Around 1900, for example, both the Impressionist philosophy of Ernst Mach and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud threatened the received integrity and autonomy of the modern subject. Mach had skeptically asserted in his Analyse der Empfin22 dungen (1885) that our self was only a fiction, an illusion reinforced by habit. Real and substantial are only punctual sensations, blossoming and fading as the body encounters objects, and psychical or physical only from one or other perspective. These ultimate elements of reality attach to a self

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that is merely a pragmatic thought construction, a vessel for containing sensations, otherwise difficult to circumscribe, and in truth dies and is reborn in the sensation from instant to instant. Freud’s psychoanalysis, most clearly 23 outlined in Die Traumdeutung (1900) and itself in many ways a transmogrification of the Romantic concept of the unknown world latent in the 24 psyche, suggested that our supposedly autonomous consciousness merely conceals a stratum of unconscious thought, an inner dark continent structured by repressed childhood desires, which irrupt uncontrollably into consciousness in the form of dreams, fantasies, and deformed behavior. From his early dramolet Gestern (Yesterday, 1891), with its adventurer hero Andrea, who sees no link between his once and present moment, to his late historical drama Der Turm (The Tower, 1924–26), with its visionary hero Sigismund, whose oceanic consciousness transcends the compass of the imprisoning tower, Hofmannsthal repeatedly treats the problem of the recuperation of an authentic, ethically and ontologically founded modern self against this canvas. The prime example is however his modern, unfinished Bildungsroman Andreas, oder die Vereinigten (Andreas or the United Ones, 1912–29). Here the central figure takes a journey from Vienna to Venice, but the journey in the present becomes an inner journey, into the past and into the self, and slowly reveals itself as the psychogram of a typical modern. Freudianism clearly motivates the flood of compulsive memories, dreams, and fantasies, which abruptly colonize the external narrative of the novel and expose young Andreas’s psyche as a disintegrating tissue of sexual and moral guilt. As a proper Bildungsroman hero, he has to learn that everything in the 25 world is based upon an integrated sense of self, and the unfinished novel would have shown him undergoing psychosocial therapy in a Venetian dream theatre, prior to returning home. But if the sickness is expressed in Freudian terms, the cure is in unmistakably Romantic language. Her name (tellingly) is Romana, he has encountered her at the start of the journey, she is his muse, and her love mediates to him a mode of consciousness in which all oppositions are reunited. The story of her loss and recuperation which frames the central, therapeutic section of the tale of course closely shadows the Romantic plot familiar from Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1802; translated as The Novices of Sais, 1949), in which the obscure yearnings of the hero for the beloved lead him on an inner journey, via fragmentation of the self, to reunion with the beloved and a visionary reintegration of self and world. For the later Hofmannsthal, then, Romanticism is less a threat than a vehicle through which reconstruction of the threatened self of modernity can be enabled, a new balance of personality achieved, a new (if resolutely unmetaphysical) commitment to life can emerge. But the novel remained a fragment. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) did not, unlike Hofmannsthal, study 26 Romanticism systematically over many years. But he too was deeply influ-

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enced by French Symbolism, and resorted to Romantic models of language and consciousness at the time of modernist crisis. Again the redemptive experience of epiphany amid banality is central. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) is Rilke’s only novel. But it eschews conventional narrative form in favor of the generic mixing pioneered by the Romantics, and consists in a consciously fragmented montage of autobiographical reflections, lyrics, unsent letters, inserted marginalia, anecdotes, and other short forms. Embodied in this formal kaleidoscope is the story of a self on the way to itself through the process of writing, as a healed cripple must learn how to walk. Launched by the twenty-eight-year-old Malte’s repulsion at his first encounter with the oppressive, decaying reality of modern Paris, this process moves via successive attempts to recuperate his authentic self from memory shards of his Danish youth to a recounting of his inner biography in the form of the parable of the prodigal son. But the major articulations of the search for the recuperated self are those moments at which intensive sensual experience of concrete things disgorges the unexpected opulence, authenticity, and transformative power of the Romantic intuition. “I am learning to see,” Malte famously says in the opening pages, and it is these privileged, existentially 28 charged visions that change what he is. He thus opens all of his senses in a bid to penetrate surface. As he passes the wall of a ruined house, noted momentarily, he is suddenly overwhelmed by the flood of associations the sight calls forth before the inner eye (45–47). A main motif of the search for authentic life is the encounter with death. Disgusted by the meaningless “factory” style of modern-day mass dying in the hospital, Malte learns to understand what the sternly individualistic dying of his Danish grandfather means. The concluding parable of the prodigal son at last treats the theme of love, as Malte learns the modality of “intransitive” love — beyond the object, an epiphany of the human and the divine. This index of closure, recuperated wholeness, may or may not open up a future of coherent and connected experience. But here again Romantic means — the fragment, generic mixing, the need to confront death, the epiphanic redemption — offer a language with which to confront the modern problem. Robert Musil (1880–1942) too exploits the Romantic inheritance in 29 search of authentic modalities of consciousness around 1900. Like Hof30 mannsthal he was influenced by an encounter with Ricarda Huch’s book, and his long novella, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions 31 of Pupil Törless, 1906), which also features a motto by Maeterlinck, clearly emerges from a dialogue with Novalis in particular. Again, the traditional Bildungsroman form is used to analyze the crisis of modern consciousness, this time through the mind of a schoolboy at a remote boarding school in the far Slavic reaches of the Austrian Empire. Törleß suggests the German 32 “Tor-los” (without a gate), and this is precisely the pupil’s problem. His

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self has no fixed boundary, is radically open within and without, and he must find orientation in body and mind through clumsy and painful experiment. This leads Törleß with his associates Reiting and Beineberg and their victim, the apathetic Basini, through wild borderlands of nascent sexuality: incest, homoeroticism, and sadomasochism. But key moments on his journey are informed by intellectual experiences derived from Musil’s reading of Romantic theory. They all relate to dualism and the intellectual failure to reconcile. In his search for self-understanding the foil to Törleß, Beineberg, has subscribed to an “Indian” philosophy (19). It suggests to him that he has a destiny prescribed by the world soul (“Weltseele,” 56–57): to rule. When Basini foolishly places himself in his power, Beineberg determines to conduct a naïve but dangerous experiment: to demonstrate the existence of the soul. For our conscious knowledge, Beineberg Romantically argues (116–18) is fundamentally dualistic, offers only a fragmentary image of the metaphysical living self, which in truth rests on inarticulate feeling, a feeling the existence of which we have forgotten. He will therefore hypnotize Basini and force him into a state of intellectual intuition (“Versenkung in sich selbst,” 118), thus gradually dissociating the conscious mind from the body, reducing Basini to body, and freeing the immortal soul (121). Beineberg’s philosophy may be “Indian,” but his terminology echoes Novalis’s most famous fragment: “Konzentriere alle Aufmerksamkeit nach innen,” “Wende den Blick 33 nicht von innen weg!” (121). Of course the result is a grotesque farce. The mesmerism fails completely, humiliating Beineberg. But a profounder exploration of the same problem is made with Törleß. His experience too is undermined by dualism, as his first stirrings of sexuality become misdirected, at both his mother and the whore Bozena, and later at Basini. But this is a mere symptom of the deeper problem. For Beineberg’s pretentious talk succeeds in opening a new, authentically meta-reflexive Romantic sense in the disorientated Törleß. As he lies on his back in a field, staring at the sky, pondering, he experiences a dislocating — epiphanic — sense of infinity when the moving clouds reveal the (Romantic) blue merely veiling an ungraspable infinity beyond. He is from now on a stranger to the common reality around him (62–64), which henceforth appears under two aspects. He grasps, for example, that mathematics — one of the authoritative languages in which human intellect claims to master totality — is curiously defective: it stands on shaky foundations, mere fictions such as the impossible square root of minus 1 (73–78). But paradoxically this neo-Romantic discovery of the limitations of our knowledge of self and world is precisely that which stabilizes Törleß’s personality. For he can now relativize, distance himself from the floundering deviant experiments in self-orientation, grasp their merely passing value on his journey to self-knowledge. He can thus finally commit himself to life, assuming the arch-Romantic stance of ironic 34 correctness, knowing the provisionality of the symbolic order, yet con-

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forming. Ulrich and Agatha adopt a similar stance in Musil’s later unfinished novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities, 1930–36). Romanticism, then, again offers the framework in which characteristically modern problems are explored and solutions formulated. But it is no coincidence that Musil’s omniscient narrator also, subtly, motivates Törleß’s Romantic flounderings in the unread, or undigested German classics in his bookcase (13, 78–79). The First World War and its aftermath in the tragic Weimar Republic 1919–33 only intensified the German cultural crisis of 1900. If modernism, in response to the crisis of the self provoked by mass industrialized society, had had recourse to Romanticism for new models of individuality, then the war and the tragic struggle of the Republic only prompted further searching for redemption in the Romantic canon. But the crisis now was less of singular than collective identity. Writers — and, this time, theoreticians — engaged primarily with the political dimensions of Romanticism. The conventional left and right shared the common, received view of Romantic politics as both nationalistic and reactionary, but drew opposite conclusions. On the left, the young Bertolt Brecht’s Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night, 1918) used a parody of the Romantic ghost ballad as a form of attack. The Romantic nationalism of the so-called Wars of Liberation against Napoleon was the chief source of the illusory patriotism, which 35 led young Germans to their absurd death in the Great War. Brecht (1898– 1956) occasionally toyed with other Romantic forms (such as the Kalendergeschichte) in this epoch, but mainly in order to exploit their popular communicative potential with the mass in the cause he thought of as diametrically opposed to Romantic beliefs. On the right, Jakob Baxa (1895– 1979), a Viennese professor of political philosophy, can serve as our model. His Einführung in die romantische Staatswissenschaft (1923) identifies Novalis as the source of almost all the great conservative ideas of the nineteenth century (Baxa, 98). He is fundamentally undemocratic, opposed to the French Revolution, rejects natural law and human rights, advocates an organic vision of the state, and sees the revived feudal order as his ideal (81– 83). Romantic political theory as a whole, says Baxa, overcame the errors of individualism and human rights and recognized society and Volk as the foundation of German cultural being (277). What this means for the Weimar Republic is clear from his ominous conclusion. Romanticism may have been overwhelmed by liberalism and socialism in the nineteenth century. But now 36 its time has come (279). However the most significant encounter with political Romanticism at this time, that of Thomas Mann (1875–1955), was far more devious and ambiguous than the easily received schema of the conventional left and right, and eventually led to a re-evaluation of Romantic politics. Mann claimed a near-mystical affinity with Goethe as Germany’s representative writer.

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Hence, his earlier work, also under Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s influence, frequently associated death and decay with a Romantically tinged aestheticism. Thus in Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912) the representative, classical artist Gustav von Aschenbach finds his stable, Apolline personality disintegrating under the influence of a homoerotic infatuation with the beautiful Tadzio. But if Romanticism is for Mann aesthetically and ethically suspect, the same does not apply in politics, especially after 1918. In his first response to the War, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflec37 tions of an Unpolitical Man, 1918), Mann had vehemently, if naïvely and ambiguously, attempted to divorce the aesthetic from the political, and defended traditional German forms of the polis against alien Western forms. These, he claimed (Betrachtungen, 424–26), even Romantic artists sympathizing with death would defend. However in his address Von deutscher 38 Republik (On the German Republic, 1922), Mann, horrified by the assassination of Walter Rathenau and the incipient disintegration of the body politic in that year, performed a dramatic political turn. Having opposed the transplantation of non-Germanic political forms, he now accepts the republic. Even more surprising, he now uses Romanticism (Novalis) to support it. But his version of Romantic politics is very different from the prevailing orthodoxy. The received image of political Romanticism has already been seen to be that of reactionary legitimism. But in Novalis there is counterevidence. Mann seizes on Novalis’s irenic will, evidenced in Glauben und Liebe (Faith and Love, 1798), to synthesize old and new, monarchic and republican political systems in the wake of the French Revolution. He skillfully concedes to prevailing opinion how far Novalis sympathizes with monarchic forms of government, how skeptical he is of the integrational power of written constitutions (Von deutscher Republik, 818, 825), and how well he represents what is truly universal in the German national mind (815). But having made these strategic concessions, Mann then triumphantly emphasizes the extent to which this impeccably German, Romantic, national figure in fact — from the higher standpoint of humanity — supports the hated republic. His utopian ideal is republican to the extent that it aims at “politische Humanität” (833), demands that the state promote the harmony of individual and collective (834–35), and rejects any one-sided Nietzschean ethic of the “Herrenmensch” (836). Novalis thus synthesizes in an aptly German form the universalizing tendencies of the West with the particularistic German mentality, and the despised republic can on this — frankly aesthetic — basis be ennobled (823). Like Mann, then, Novalis is a conservative in the service of the future (829–30), his political thought a kind of Romantic Jacobinism (833), he himself a representative of political Enlightenment (838, 840). Against a background in which neither left nor right were capable of identifying with the republic, Mann makes an effective rhetorical case for solidarity with the new body politic by anchoring it within an authenti-

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cally German tradition — even if his object is less to republicanize the German mind than to fill the notion of the republic (if not the constitution) 39 with German, and Romantic, values. This, as it were, neo-neo-Romantic move also marks a major turn, not only in his own thought, from the separation of art and politics to their union. Mann now recognizes, as he says in his essay on Freud (again referring to Novalis), that the political lies hidden in every intellectual attitude (10: 267). The import of this for his literary writing can be gauged from the 40 Bildungsroman Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924). Originally conceived as a pendant to Tod in Venedig in which the encounter with death leaves the protagonist relatively unscathed, Der Zauberberg grew into a novel, of time and of the time. The young Hans Castorp visits a mountaintop sanatorium, only to discover that he too is ill with tuberculosis. In this rarified atmosphere, hovering between life and death, he is exposed for seven years to an emotional, existential, and political education. Above all, he is subjected to the unending dialectic of the two great political tendencies of the age, represented by the Italian liberal humanist Settembrini and the Jewish-Jesuitical totalitarian-cum-communist Naphta, and the novel ends on an unresolved note, exactly where Mann in Von deutscher Republik had claimed the German republic started, with Castorp going to war in 1914 (Republik, 811). However the key episode is the visionary chapter “Schnee” (Snow). Risking death in a snowstorm, Castorp has a symbolic dream, as a result of which he decides to favor life even while recognizing the unchallengeable power of death. The dream is existential and ethical in character, and it embodies the attitude Castorp takes with him into battle. But it also political. For Castorp’s words in the dream extensively cite that passage at the conclusion of Von deutscher Republik in which Mann triumphantly glosses Novalis’s political commitment to life as emerging from his seemingly unpolitical “sympathy with death” (Republik, 850; Zauberberg, 684) The republicanism of that stance is thus transplanted into Castorp’s representative German mind — with what sterile consequences for the development of German political life history has made plain. Alongside this widespread politically colored reception there also blossomed a less wholesome variety of neo-Romanticism. Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) always saw himself as a neo-Romantic. But by that he meant less what has so far been seen — one who critically exploits the conceptual and formal heritage of the past in the cause of commitment to the present — than an epigonal latecomer who doggedly clings to a sympathetic creed despite its pastness. Two lyric novels, Demian (1919) and Der Steppenwolf (1927), typify this problematic stance. Both are typologically Romantic tales of self-discovery in a more-or-less autobiographical mode, and both wear their epigonal Romanticism (judiciously leavened with Jung and Nietzsche) as a badge of honor. The shadow of a ruthlessly popularized and simplified

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Novalis hangs heavy over the tale of Emil Sinclair’s search for selfknowledge. His preface, with its coyly intriguing rhetoric (“Wenige wissen [. . .]”), its insistence that only the self can understand the self, that the act of writing is the apt mode of self-insight, and that each must go his own way 41 to the rebirth which is self-understanding, obviously pastiches the tour de 42 force which is the preface of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais. It is no coincidence that this new apprentice must travel the inner way (Demian, 8), or that one of his most significant encounters on the path to self-knowledge is with Novalis’s writings, in particular a decidedly inward-looking statement by Heinrich von Ofterdingen proclaiming the identity of fate and soul (84). Into this form a more-or-less Jungian tale is poured, of a young man who must learn to accept his dark side and gain admission to the select band of initiates, which he achieves thanks to mentors including Max Demian and his mother Eva. At last, all external tensions are reduced to inner solutions. Eva, like many of Novalis’s heroines, becomes a kind of mother-lover and emblem of authentic union with origin. Most worryingly, even the First World War is briskly reduced to a large-scale, merely outward expression of the inner, psycho-spiritual conflict which all are experiencing, and is itself only the sign of an imminent, collective rebirth. With the internalized image of the dead Max as his “Freund und Führer” (963) and contemplating the dark well of his ego, Sinclair returns in 1915 to the front. This astonishingly naïve celebration of aesthetic inwardness contrasts tellingly with the achievement of Der Zauberberg, ending as it does at the same point in historical time, but after an outwardly- and politically-orientated journey. Harry Haller, the autobiographical hero of Der Steppenwolf, is another 43 great reader of Novalis and Nietzsche, who admires the notions that one must be proud of one’s existential pain and bravely leap into the inner uncharted waters of the self. Like Sinclair, and as his pseudonym suggests, he is the victim of a divided psyche, who must resolve the tension between his authentic sense of self and the false consciousness of the city-world he inhabits. This text too exploits the received canon of Romantic experimental forms, in that the underlying confessional monologue of the torn outsider hero is contrasted with the preface of an uncomprehending bourgeois editor and a mysterious, yet authoritative “Tract of the Steppenwolf” sub specie aeternitatis. But the chief feature is the “magic theatre,” an inner domain, modeled in part on the metamorphoses undergone by Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which Haller imaginatively encounters the personified Jungian forces peopling his unconscious. He thus learns to read the archetypal structures underlying his experience of the world, his ego is dissolved and partly reconstituted. He has to learn the Romantic virtue of humor, that which ironically reconciles the world of (allegedly) banal bourgeois-mass culture (symbolized by jazz music) with that of eternal values (Mozart). But

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again, one notes how far this analysis reduces the objective tensions of the age to a received, and perverted, Romantic thought-figure of inwardness. Something analogous can be observed in Gerhart Hauptmann (1862– 1946). In his later phase, the major innovator of German naturalism followed the trend of the epoch toward re-mythification. The verse epic Die 44 blaue Blume (The Blue Flower, 1924) is one of a group of related writings which in typical neo-Romantic fashion tells the story of an inner journey in dream mode, and of course recycles the famous symbol from Heinrich von Ofterdingen as an object which inspires the birth of poetry. As in Hesse, the autobiographical writer encounters a syncretic virgin-bride-mother figure, Mary (also Isis), who initiates him into the highest mysteries of a poetic religion involving the identity of Dionysus and Christ on the dream island Leuke-Capri. But Romanticism, perhaps because of its celebration of existence as fragment, generated ideas as much as texts, and possesses a correspondingly weighty inheritance among the theoreticians. Leaving the literary reception briefly on one side, a highly significant reception of Romantic thought at this time in the theoretical discussion of the left should also be noted. This too mirrors the received dichotomy of the Classic-Romantic tradition. Straddling the historical divide of the Second World War, it had lasting consequences for writers’ self-understanding in both East and West Germany. Georg Lukács (1885–1971), the dominant thinker in the Marxist aesthetic tradition, reproduces the mistrust of Romanticism inherited from 45 Goethe and Hegel. His still Hegelian Theorie des Romans (1920) affirms a socialist and progressive concept of realism. Modern literature must follow authentically in the tradition of the classical epic and encompass reality: expose the concealed totality of the objective world in the cause of emancipatory insight. The fragmented, lyric and reflective, subjective literature of Romanticism, with its recognition that this innocent reconciliation of individual and totality is impossible in modernity, is to this negative extent legitimate. But as Lukács’s later Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (1923) argued, the socialist work of art must nonetheless strive to capture and dialectically reflect that totality. In a controversy conducted in the journal Das Wort (1937–38) with Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), Lukács also polemicized against the perspectivism and subjectivism realized in the montage technique of modernist and expressionist texts (itself an adaptation of Romantic textual play), insisting that this restricted the ordinary reader’s access 46 to the desired coherent narrative of totality. The realism of the nineteenthcentury novel, which for him includes Goethean Classicism, is thus on both accounts preferable as a model to the modernist trend, and Lukács prescribes an anti-Romantic, neo-Classical commitment to unity and totality of form and authorial narrative which runs deeply counter to modernism.

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Yet Lukács’s arguments influenced the shape of German literature in the official socialist tradition for the next forty years. By contrast, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), while equally committed to the socialist tradition, affirmed progressive elements in Romantic aesthetics. His doctoral dissertation, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen 47 Romantik (1920), positively sanctioned the affinity of Romanticism and modernism. Freeing himself from pejorative Hegelian categories, Benjamin clarifies the Romantic concept of text in its own terms. All Romantic art, as an attempt to know the absolute, must remain a fragment from a particular subjective standpoint. Criticism’s purpose is reflectively to complement the fragment, extrapolate its immanent tendencies, and partner the work of art in the (unending) process of self-transcendence toward the absolute and the objective (Kunstkritik, 62–64). The Romantic commitment to fragment and subjectivist perspectivism is thus (by contrast to Lukács) validated as a fact of cognitive (and historical) life. Just as significant: the concept of authorship is decentered. Readers are recognized as being involved in the co-creation of aesthetic truth over history in works of art no longer understood as autonomous. With this, Benjamin opens up the whole field of reader re48 sponse criticism, which in the scholarly world blossomed only in the 1970s. Developed to its fullest extent, this led him in the essay “Das Kunstwerk im 49 Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (1936), to posit the gradual erosion of the traditional ‘aura’ (cult value) of the work of art. Mechanical reproduction (photography, film) discloses the non-uniqueness of aesthetic artifacts and places them increasingly at the disposal of the masses, with a resultant increase in emancipatory critical and political potential (“Kunstwerk,” 145–48, 159) — even if this too is susceptible to fascistic perversion (168–69) and demands, as Brecht and Thomas Mann had insisted, the politicization of all art. Finally Benjamin’s “Über den Begriff der 50 Geschichte” (1940) exploits the Romantic critique of linear historical time and conventional historiography to posit an emancipatory and materialist, yet also messianic, historiography. Conventional historiography (including social-democratic historiography) is conformist. It legitimizes the status quo as the inevitable result of a linear progression to abstract perfection through empty and homogeneous time. It thereby suppresses the redemptive moment in which the fullness of history’s human significance might be recuperated. The task of the materialist historian is to disrupt the illusory construct of immanent, seamless progression by appealing to an epiphanic moment of past fulfillment which, like the leap of a tiger into the political arena of the present (“Begriff der Geschichte,” 259), shatters the superficial illusion of normal temporal contiguity and unfolds the full significance of the present in a transcendent and truly transformatory “Jetztzeit.” Benjamin’s concrete example is the “citation” of the Roman republic by French Revolutionary culture and its concomitant inauguration of a new epoch of world history.

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But the idea’s descent in both the epiphany of classical modernist poetics around 1900 and that of Romantic poetic historiography around 1800 is clear. Benjamin’s oeuvre, long neglected, is a glittering example of modernism’s debt to Romanticism, and a nodal point from which the modernist dynamics of Romantic thought became disseminated by Theodor Adorno 51 (1903–69) in West German literary theory of the late 1960s. Back in the world of literary reception, Hans Grimm (1875–1959) pro52 duced in his epic novel Volk ohne Raum (Nation without Space, 1926) the literary analogue of Jakob Baxa’s version of neo-Romantic political theory, which became a bestseller under the National Socialist régime and some53 thing of a bible of Nazi ideology. This is primarily and self-consciously set in the Lower Saxon Weserbergland, where the author’s better-known Romantic namesakes collected their Volksmärchen (popular fairy tales). The modern Grimm’s text is however an aggressive work of expansionist Heimatliteratur, which argues against the familiar background of outrage at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that the German Volk must now return to its authentic self-identity. That identity is modeled in the Lower Saxon Heimat and a pre-modern, agrarian-feudal-patriarchal mode of life. This, ultimately characterized by the fundamental, supra-individual sense of being a genetically pure German over generations, has, Grimm argues, been corrupted by German acquiescence in political domination by third nations and the modern trend to mass urban industrial life. Thus, the peasants, as their families thrive and multiply, are faced with the necessity of emigration: to factories in Kassel or Bochum, or to the colonies. Only in the mind of the hero, Cornelius Friebott, does the “authentic,” and frankly missionary, German consciousness mature, as Grimm sends him on the eccentric Romantic journey, from impoverished farm to British South Africa and German South-West Africa, and back home. Friebott learns that the socialdemocratic creed of class-conflict can and must be overcome by adopting the higher, socialist but also nationalist consciousness of being German, and returning to agrarian life in lands beyond German borders. Hence, there is a strong attack on Thomas Mann’s ruthless analysis of the sacred generational bond’s decay in Buddenbrooks (Volk ohne Raum, 920–21). At last Friebott understands his vocation as a wandering political preacher, voice of the historical mission of his Volk. Killed by a stone from the crowd in 1923, he dies a martyr’s death, and the novel is presented as Grimm’s inspiring monument to the prophet without honor. If much of this crazed and evil, racist ideology can be traced to Romantic roots (Theodor Körner and the Wars of Liberation in a more innocent age), it should also be noted that allusions to Goethe and Luther or the widespread tradition of Heimatliteratur are as frequent as those to Romanticism. But perhaps the most prominent appropriation of Romantic intellectual property lies in the author’s obvious and predictable use of the Grimm brothers’ Volksmärchen. Friebott

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meets his devoted, blonde and blue-eyed, predestined future wife Melsene on a walk through the German ‘Urwald’ (primeval forest) in the vicinity of the legendary Sababurg, where Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty) is said to have lived, and she appears, like the Grimms’ Allerleihrauh (The Patchwork Coat), in the hollow bole of a German oak tree (975–86). This suggests, then, both the continuity of “authentic” German life with “authentic” German literature from the Heimat, and the place of Hans Grimm’s novel in the (now appropriated) tradition of his somewhat more democratic forebears. It is a commonplace of literary historiography in both East and West Germany following the Second World War to set Romanticism prominently 54 in the genealogy of National Socialism — a view, motivated by loyalty to familiar Goethean and Hegelian arguments, which is so undifferentiated as inevitably to be both right and wrong. But it is hardly surprising to record a dramatic etiolation of Romanticism’s creative reception in the decade after this catastrophe. The literary history of the German Democratic Republic (1945–90) still awaits a final verdict. But it is characterized by a repeated cycle of repression and relaxation of orthodox aesthetico-political imperatives, from the relative liberalism of the earliest years, to the Cold War repression following the establishment of the East German state in 1949 and the intensified demand for conformism after 1956 (the Hungarian uprising), to the renewal and relaxation following the Bitterfeld conference in 1959 and (paradoxically) the erection of the Wall in 1961, and finally the dismay following 1968 (the Prague Spring) and 1976 (the expatriation of the poet Wolf Biermann [b. 1936]). In East Germany, despite his effacement from official records after the crisis of 1956, Lukács’s concept of a classical realism serving the cause of socialist progress continued to represent the onedimensional anti-Fascist orthodoxy required of writers. Accordingly, Goethe and Schiller were appropriated as the authentic, humanistic heritage of the renewed socialist German state — with obvious consequences for Romanticism. However, a leftist tradition had of course always existed within modernism, represented most notably by Lukács’s opponent Brecht. In East Germany, engagement with the Romantic tradition thus emerged during periods of ideological relaxation (mainly after the mid-1960s) as a codified expression of protest against official doctrine, and this tendency in literature is mirrored by the slow recognition of “progressive” elements in bourgeois 55 Romantic thought by official critics like Werner Krauss and Claus Träger. The most prominent woman writer of early East Germany, Anna Seghers (1900–1983), had herself conducted an open controversy with Lukács in 1938, in which she emphasized the fragmentary character of modern experience and aesthetic creativity. It was Seghers, in her address to the inaugural international writers’ congress at Paris in 1935, who had first advocated the suitability of Romantic models for an authentically socialist

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literature. Perhaps the best example of this is the novella Das wirkliche Blau 56 (The Real Blue, 1967), which is based on her exile experiences in Mexico in the 1940s. Typical of her later work, it is formally “realistic,” but with an unmistakably Romantic orientation. The village potter Benito has a successful market niche for his products, which is not only well made, but also decorated with a distinctive pattern in a uniquely resonant blue on a white background. Unfortunately, his supply of blue color has dried up, for Mexico (it is 1942) has been drawn into the Second World War, and trade with fascist Germany, home of the chemical concern that is his supplier, is officially discontinued. This triggers Benito’s search for a new supplier, which is, of course, modeled on the yearning of Heinrich von Ofterdingen for the particular blue he glimpsed in his famous dream. As with Heinrich, Benito’s search follows an eccentric path, which leads him astray but also, eventually, back home, and this path also figures an interior journey. Benito, as his trade suggests, is a symbolic artist-figure of a particular kind — the kind favored by Seghers herself — whose talents are placed at the service of the ordinary people of his own community to enrich their lives. On a personal level, Benito’s loss is eventually gain, for he slowly comes to understand the inner necessity and meaning of his vocation and, despite the endless obstacles he encounters, assents to the process of self-transformation imposed on him. The tale is archly decorated with other Romantic motifs, from the wise woman with stars in her eyes who first directs Benito to the new source of supply, to the location of that source in a silver mine. But the final message lies in the political, social, and economic context of the Romantic figure. It is no coincidence that Benito’s productivity is compromised and threatened by his unwitting dependence on a chain of supply that originates in a capitalist enterprise in Nazi Germany, and Seghers devotes much space to exposing the hidden complicity of the local entrepreneurs with the global evil. But this leads to the utopian solution. The new source of supply is a mineral found in the waste left by the capitalist silver mine, and the discoverer (and owner) of the process by which the wondrous blue is made is a distant cousin of Benito, Rubén. Thus independent local structures and a new system of cooperative ownership by the basis overcome the suspect model of international capitalism. The texture of this tale is unrelentingly socialist, with its constant emphasis on economic need and unceasing labor of mind and body. But it is also a model example of how Romanticism continued to be harnessed to the needs of the moment, even in so unlikely a context as the anti-Fascist struggle of the anti-Romantic German Democratic Republic. If Seghers exemplifies the channeling of Romantic energies into a conventionally ‘realist’ form, then the next generation of (overwhelmingly women) writers abandons the Lukácsian tradition entirely, and adopts the Romantic mode of formal innovation. For Irmtraud Morgner (1933–90) Romantic formal experimentation is a language to explore the hitherto silent

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continent of women’s history. Her Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura (Life and Adventures of the 57 Troubadour Beatriz in the Chronicles of her Minstrel Laura, 1974), the second of a planned trilogy of novels, skillfully opposes utopia and reality through the explicitly Romantic montage technique. History is a sea of male egoism, says the contemporary East German scholar Laura Salman in an interpolated interview with “Irmtraud Morgner.” It divides the past from the future with an impenetrable barrier in the present (26). But the present is not to be neglected. The novel therefore creates an alternative, feminized present in the service of the future, a narrative space in which the female voice, once silenced, can be heard. Its major vehicle is the troubadour Beatriz, who sings for free love and sexuality and a third, humane order of affairs beyond patriarchy and matriarchy (20). But it is an appropriation of a Romantic text, a fairy tale of the Grimm Brothers, which sets her tale in perspective. For this pioneering woman writer reacts to the patriarchy of the high Middle Ages by contracting with Persephone to sleep for 810 years, although she is in fact woken by accident two years early — in April 1968, dawn of the great protest movement in France (and Prague). However, this Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty) is disappointed to discover the continued rule of patriarchy. The rest of the tale measures the revolutionary aspirations of the West against Beatriz’s feminist expectations and experience, and includes her crossing into East Germany, which is presented as a womanfriendly culture. But Beatriz dies before the French elections of March 1973 (403–4), and the novel, despite utopian visions of Orlando-style gender metamorphosis, at last travels full circle, as first Laura’s mother and then Laura herself choose to sleep out the next several hundred years. The greatest exponent of the Romantic heritage in the cause of the present in the GDR was Christa Wolf (b. 1929), whose affiliation with the Romantic movement extends back through the modernist utopianism of her teacher Ernst Bloch. Wolf shifted from an official career path through the writers’ organizations to an uneasy stance of critical solidarity with the project of the GDR. By 1968 she could no longer write in the approved antimodernist idiom, and — like Morgner — was using perspectivist techniques to retrieve officially unrecognized areas of subjective experience. Her Romantic reception, following this, becomes explicit in two major works, the short story Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers (The New Life and Opinions 58 of a Tomcat, 1974) and the novella Kein Ort: Nirgends (No Place: Not 59 Anywhere, 1979). In both it is noticeable that Wolf favors the later Romantic generation, which was greatly distanced from the Early Romantic mentality of achieved reconciliation. The story adopts the ancient device of the animal view as a satirical perspective on human affairs, but foregrounds its Romantic actualization in Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, 1820–22). Hoffmann used vio-

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lence done to the autobiographical text to figure the tragicomic inadequacy of life lived idealistically under oppressive circumstances, and Wolf exploits this resource to the full for an account of GDR culture. The tomcat Max is however primarily a means to defend literary autonomy. The pet of a Professor of Applied Psychology, Max discovers that his owner and various assistants are compiling a vast corpus of psychological data, which will be used by the state to impose total health and happiness on all its citizens. The more problematic the interface of human subjectivity and objective knowledge becomes, the greater the influence of a giant computer and the more the definition of humanity is reduced to fit its matrix. Max plays his full part in subverting the Professor’s referencing system, but the major symbol is the cat’s literary text. After his death it stands as a lonely, if ironic monument to the traditional, psychotherapeutic role of literature in a dystopian society. Kein Ort: Nirgends, written in 1977, reflects the writers’ crisis in the GDR following Biermann’s enforced departure in 1976. As Wolf herself revealed, it projects the contemporary conflict onto Romantic material to 60 illuminate the otherwise banal present. Skillfully shifting between authorial perspective, indirect free style and direct speech, Wolf depicts a fictional meeting between two figures on the margins of Romanticism, Günderrode and Kleist, which lovingly explores their subjective consciousness in selected memories, inner monologues, and fragments of conversation, accompanied by the slow march of the salon clock and the viscous surge of the Rhine. Negativity dominates, for these Romantics, unlike Seghers’s Benito, have no home in Germany. Kleist and Günderrode are of their time in two senses. Both writers, they are highly sympathetic examples of the culture of “Humanität.” This draws the womanish man Kleist and the mannish woman Günderrode together in what would be a perfect image of androgynous Romantic fulfillment and does culminate in the intimate “Du” of recognition and the “wir” of belonging (Kein Ort, 136). It is of course precisely this which destroys them, for the attempt to live — and write — “Humanität” condemns them in the new age of science and commerce to division, absurdity, and despair. Yet Wolf’s message is one of hope. For Kleist and Günderrode, suicides both, nevertheless emerge with a feeling of relief and strength from their encounter (97–98). They know that they have no place in the present, but they have created a world of words outside the world, and this monument to themselves is the present — open-ended (105) — text. It may perhaps be understood by future generations, and that is the beautiful, if negative utopia foreshadowed by the title. Kein Ort: Nirgends is thus finally Wolf’s monument to the subjective authenticity of the writer under the censorious régime that disowned that value. In Wolf, who fully recognizes her debt to the Lukács-Seghers debate (“Projektionsraum,” 239–40), Romanticism has moved from the anti-tradition of East Germany

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to its utopian mirror image, and the GDR has metamorphosed from utopia to its opposite. Wolf had already written pioneering literary biographies of both Günderrode and Bettine Brentano-von Arnim, and in this she follows a distinguished new trend of GDR literature. Günter de Bruyn’s (b. 1926) Das Leben des Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (The Life of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 1975) had painted a highly sympathetic and relevant portrait of the lifelong (if bourgeois) supporter of the French Revolution. But one of the most striking examples of a GDR writer’s use of literary biography to analyze the present is John Erpenbeck’s (b. 1942) documentary novella Heillose Flucht: Szenen einer Biographie (Flight without Salvation: Scenes from a 61 Biography, 1984). This reconstruction of the bizarre relationship between Clemens Brentano and the stigmatized nun Anna Katharina Emmerick between 1818–24 presents itself as an episode from the past. But it of course mirrors present concerns. Erpenbeck, both natural scientist and writer, forensically reconstructs the motivation for Brentano’s astonishing move from cosmopolitan salon Berlin to garret bedside in remote Westphalia. It is no coincidence that Erpenbeck cites the same critical bon mot of Brentano as Wolf: that today one cannot write, one can only do something for poetry (Heillose Flucht, 32; Kein Ort, 60), for this text exposes how Brentano’s parasitic consumption of Emmerick’s religious visions not only compensates his erotic frustration after the failed affair with Luise Hensel but also his dwindling literary creativity. But there is more to it than that. The age around 1818 should be progressive. It is the time, as Erpenbeck says in his explanatory foreword, of great technological progress, with its immanent tendency to democracy (Heillose Flucht, 8–9). However reaction has driven the bourgeois inward, and Brentano’s driven search for divine truth — which culminates in cynical, pseudo-scientific experimentation on a fellow human being — compensates precisely that lost freedom. If there is a typological similarity between then and now, Erpenbeck seems to be saying, it lies in the destructive consequences of political stagnation for poetry and people in a 62 transitional age. Sarah Kirsch (b. 1935), unlike Wolf, left East Germany in 1977, but it lives in her writings as a bittersweet memory. Her Allerlei-Rauh: Eine Chro63 nik (The Patchwork Coat: A Chronicle, 1988), a meditation in lyrical prose on the passing of an epoch, recalls an idyllic summer spent in rural Mecklenburg with Christa Wolf (and other writers) when Wolf worked (among other texts) at Kein Ort: Nirgends. Here the recording of everyday existence in the GDR is reduced to a ruralized minimum with distant echoes of the dystopian capital infiltrating the subjective consciousness of the narrator only as occasions for self-exploration. The tiny, isolated farming community is presented as a kind of paradise, although death and change are never far away. All this continually prompts an associative slide into fantasies, dreams,

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and memories of the near and distant past, which, like the descent into a mineshaft (Allerlei-Rauh, 36), constitute a reflection on the constancy of her identity. The text, then, far from following the line of chronicle form, has the consistency of the patchwork coat in the title. But so does the subject at its center. “Sarah Kirsch” understands herself as having led several successive lives, personal revolutions which entail the shedding of a skin. The new skin has heightened sensitivity, which gives the exploration of her new self its kaleidoscopic texture. The tale is thus shot through with figurations of subjective transformation under the sign of skin or fur, from the black lamb and the viper in the rural paradise, to the bearskin she receives from a man in a sexual fantasy, the mole being consumed alive by maggots in its pelt, and the playful tabby cat Allerlei-Rauh she meets on the farm. But the chief metaphor for the process of self-recomposing is of course the Grimm fairy tale from which both the cat and the text take their name, a retelling of which is embedded in the patchwork of self-construction. The Grimm tale is deeply ambiguous. A king insists on marrying his daughter, since she is the only one as beautiful as his dead wife. Unfortunately, he manages to fulfill the seemingly impossible conditions she had set in order to prevent the forbidden union, including the making of a patchwork coat from the fur of all the animals in the realm. Escaping in the coat, she sleeps in a hollow tree, but is found by chance, returned unrecognized to court as “Allerleirauh,” and put to work as a cook. Revealing herself by tokens to the king, she does however finally marry him, and live happily ever after. This changes dramatically in Kirsch’s contemporized retelling. For here Allerlei-Rauh, who originates in proletarian postwar Leipzig, escapes the incestuous union with her father and marries an American officer in Wiesbaden. The Romantic tale thus mirrors her own, darkly, and the narrator concludes by learning to forget the paradise once enjoyed, to accept as the natural mode of existence the archaic rhythm of loss and change. A Romantic text is thus again used as the distorting mirror to capture the reality of the present. But Kirsch’s text celebrates in its central metaphor the contingent, changing unity of a self and a state, and to both former identities it says an unnostalgic farewell. German writing in the West follows a parallel path in its reception of Romanticism. Here too one finds a gradual process of rediscovery following the postwar years of ethical reconstruction and Gruppe 47, in which German literature self-consciously sought to abandon a heritage which seemed tainted at the source, and to purify its received language, often with highly experimental, but more usually with pathetically tinged realistic forms. Only rarely does for example even a consciously traditionalist writer such as Wilhelm Lehmann (1882–1968), in work such as “Deutsche Zeit: 1947,” refer to a tradition that might be identified as Romantic (that of nature lyricism), with painfully inverted forms of received images. Thus only slowly, after the late 1960s, could Romanticism be reclaimed to a significant extent

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from the shadow of National Socialism. One factor in this was the rise of Frankfurt School cultural and aesthetic theory, as exemplified by Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) and Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie (1970). The Dialektik der Aufklärung paradoxically sees not Romanticism, but Enlightenment as the cultural tradition which ended in National Socialism. Reason applied systematically and uncritically brings not emancipation, but rather totalitarian control of nature and society: from fascism, to the comprehensively administered world, to the culture industry. In fascism, the need for totality leads to a conformist mentality that readily accepts victimization of marginal groups as “rational.” Thus Enlightenment is a key factor in the Holocaust. Building on this implicit revision of Romanticism’s image, the Ästhetische Theorie condemned traditional (Hegelian) philosophical discourse (the “concept”), as itself merely a product of the dialectic, hence conformist and incapable of bringing the truth to critical consciousness. Only in the alternative discourse of rebarbative modern art is authentically critical consciousness achievable. Modern art reassembles the received elements of experience into a hermetic construct that resists minddeadening appropriation by the culture industry and discloses a truly emancipatory utopian other that is latent in the world. When Adorno describes this experience of privileged, meta-conceptual disclosure as a secularized “Augenblick” (Ästhetische Theorie, 17) of insight “outside” the historical process, its genealogy in the categories of Benjamin and Romantic theory 64 becomes plain. Another major part in the reassessment of the Romantic heritage in the West was played by official scholarship. As part of a very widespread move to reassess the new nation’s cultural heritage, the writings of Early Romantics such as Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Wackenroder were comprehensively re-edited after the late 1950s by reference to relocated original manuscripts. For Novalis in particular, this led to a fundamental revision of his position in the history of ideas. The death-obsessed, reactionary apostle of anti-Enlightenment was discovered, on a closer look at his philosophical studies, to have stood all along in the broad tradition of Enlightenment emancipatory thought. When he criticized the Enlightenment faith in the synthetic cognitive power of philosophical reflection and validated intuitive and fragmentary, aesthetic forms of cognition, insisting that only poesy could express the otherwise inexpressible, he was not opposing the Enlightenment tradition so much as prefiguring the attacks of Benjamin, Adorno, and the wider modernist tradition on Hegelian abstract rationalism. Consequently, official Western scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a mirror image of the process evident in East Germany, finally caught up with tendencies already recognized by Thomas Mann, and began to emphasize 65 the “other,” liberal, and emancipatory Romanticism. Today, scholarly opinion regards Romanticism as indeed possessing a deep-structural affinity

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with the cultural mentality of our own postmodern age. If modernity begins with Enlightenment rationalism, then Romantic aesthetic discourse represents a legitimate, critical response in an alternative medium to the inhumane tendencies of that rationalism, and is the direct genealogical ancestor of all 66 aesthetic modernisms since. West German literature from the 1970s on is rich in work that recognizes this. An early indicator of the revival of interest in Romanticism in the West is fictive biographies, which — where that is promising — initially tend to politicize their subject. Peter Weiss (1916–82) links an aesthetic of documentary literature ultimately related to the moral reconstruction of Gruppe 47 with the revision of Romantic image in his play Hölderlin (1971, second version 1973). He sees Hölderlin, the most politically committed of the Romantic generation, as an anti-bourgeois precursor of Marx. Less onedimensional are the biographical novels. These of course, with their license to fill in the gaps left by even the most thorough scholarship, can create a vivid picture of the inner life unattainable even in the literary biography. The biographical novels of Peter Härtling (b. 1933) stand comparison with the achievement of Günter de Bruyn across the border. Härtling’s Hölderlin: Ein Roman (1976) is rightly esteemed for the sensitively invented scenes and dialogues — all declared as fictive — which nevertheless give remarkable insight into the decay of Hölderlin’s emotional world following the failure of his poetic and political hopes, and contain most moving inner landscapes of his disorientated consciousness. Härtling had already in 1964 performed the same service for Nikolaus Lenau, and is still pursuing the possibilities of the form with his elegant Hoffmann oder die vielfältige Liebe (Hoffmann, or Love in Many Forms, 2001), which strives to reconcile the love of the artist for Julie Marc with his genuine affection for his wife Mischa. But it is with Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73), a highly self-conscious modernist writer, that the main reception begins. She appropriates the utopian language of Romanticism, and especially Novalis, in the feminist cause. Having studied philosophy, she concluded in parallel to Adorno if by a different path (Heidegger and Wittgenstein) that only literature could overcome the limits set to meaningful philosophical sentences. Long associated with the Gruppe 47, she gradually overcame its stubbornly onedimensional recourse to postwar ethical reconstruction, although this reappears modulated in her later conviction that peace is merely the continuation of war by means of structural social violence: to women, and through language. To this, for Bachmann as for Wolf (who greatly admired her), literature is the utopian counter-image. The reception of Fouqué in her short story “Undine geht” (Undine Departs, 1961) and Novalis in the novel 67 Malina (Malina, 1971) typify this writing strategy. Fouqué’s “Undine” (1811) is steeped in late Romantic mystery and tragedy. This water spirit seems human but can gain a soul only through the love of a man. Tragically

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betrayed by her husband Huldbrand, who must pay the price of death, she too dissolves into the elements. Fittingly, Huldbrand thinks of himself in relation to Undine as a Pygmalion figure, a man who breathes the life of full humanity into a female figure previously relegated to the animalistic level of 68 nature. Fouqué’s realization of the motif exemplifies the patriarchal tradition, which associates masculinity with culture and spirit and femininity with nature and matter. Precisely this is Bachmann’s target. Her Undine tale is an autobiographical speech act of dramatic defeat and farewell. It ends on a conciliatory note, praising the male mastery of matter and accepting even in downfall the fatal attraction of the sexes. But the abiding impression is of fierce polemic against the symbolic order of tyrannical male power, an affirmation of female identity as other, and the choice of loneliness. Malina is equally tragic, but offers by contrast a positive exploitation of a Romantic model. In this montage novel of inner landscape a woman writer, never named, stands between two men: dying in the marriage-like relationship with Malina, living — for a time — in the love-affair with Ivan. The act of writing is once more a desperate attempt to recuperate authentic female identity from the negation she encounters in seeking love and affirmation from men. For Malina she is a spare rib, an appendage in his image (23). Thus, she can only write hopeless variations on the theme of death, as suggested by the overall title of the trilogy to which Malina belongs: Todesarten (53–54). It is Ivan who she hopes will make it possible for her to write as she wishes: beautiful, celebratory books affirming a Platonic astonishment at life (Malina, 54–55, 230). Elements taken from Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen signal Ivan’s function as a utopian figure. He is linked associatively with the red Turk’s cap lily (a symbol that combines the blue of the blue flower with the red of the carbuncle). In a dreamlike inset fairy tale that pastiches the dream of the blue flower, he figures as a mysterious stranger who, just as Heinrich envisions Mathilde, rescues the narrator from a watery death in human-flower metamorphosis (Malina, 64, 68). As the writer oscillates in her process of anamnesic narrative self-reconstruction between the two men (and her murderous father), so she wavers between writing the beautiful utopia of life or the books of death. But when the relationship with Ivan decays, she grasps that her utopian-Romantic “poesy will never be” (303). Immured in the acommunicative dystopia that is life with Malina she dies — murdered, it would seem (337), in the higher metaphorical sense. Malina, then, like Morgner’s Trobadora Beatriz, revalidates the Romantic utopia in the feminist context. Peter Handke (b. 1942) not only rejected the value system of Gruppe 47 but also, along with a generation of writers around 1970, protested hypertrophically against the contamination of literary art with any ideological, ethical, or political purpose. His works thus emphasize the redemptive or transformative qualities of pure aesthetic experience, and frequently proclaim

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themselves Romantic. Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (The Moment of 69 True Feeling, 1975) begins, at any rate, like Heinrich von Ofterdingen, with a dream that may puzzle the dreamer, but leaves him certain that his life will never be the same again, and whose significance slowly translates into reality. But Gregor Keuschnig’s is a violent dream of apparently unmotivated murder. The sublimated violence is of course the indicator of existential crisis, for his life has lost the sense of fresh feeling that is the hallmark of authentic experience. In a world governed by the culture industry all forms of experience, from work to lovemaking to the inner economy of self-consciousness, seem regulated by preordained scripts. Thus, like a latter-day Malte overcome by a Sartrean nausea of superfluity, Keuschnig traverses Paris in search of something truly new that will liberate him from dead habituality. Haunted like the apprentice at Sais by a presentiment that one mere detail will create a new, meaningful order of things and self, he finds it at last in a chance configuration of objets trouvés on the sand of the boulevard: a chestnut leaf, a mirror shard, a child’s hairclip (Stunde, 81). This mysterious pattern, in true Romantic fashion, is never explained. Yet slowly Keuschnig learns to reenchant the world, and finally attains an epiphanic moment when (again like Novalis’s apprentice) disparate objects (a plastic spoon with egg remains, a swallow) suggest the inner correspondences of a higher coherence, from which every point in the universe leads home (152). Abandoned by his wife, his beloved daughter in another’s care, the ending finds Keuschnig striding confidently into the future in a dashing new set of clothes. Unlike Adorno, who never abandoned the (admittedly deeply buried) link between autonomous aesthetic construction and social reference, Handke seems provocatively to glory in the ivory tower aestheticism of his work. With Botho Strauß (b. 1944), another renegade from the Adornian inheritance, the postmodern celebration of neo-Romantic expressive possibili70 ties reaches its virtuosic zenith. Der junge Mann (The Young Man, 1984), one of the most ambitious postwar West German novels, stands selfconsciously in the tradition of the great Bildungsromane, seeking answers on behalf of the maturing Federal Republic to the perennial problems of the modern condition — the crisis of meaning, of singular and collective identity — in innovative, experimental play with received language and form. For such a writer, the ancient opposition of Classicism and Romanticism has lost its venom. The novel opens with a skilled pastiche of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as young Cologne theatre director Leon Pracht wrestles with a misunderstood artistic vocation; and Goethe’s symbol of the tower, with its familiar connotations of achieved self-identity, recurs again and again as an aspiration in the novel’s imaginative landscape. But Goethe’s linear model alone is no longer adequate. For Der junge Mann, despite its title, has abandoned the tradition of the singular hero and the convention of singular identity, and its narrative focus shifts with little thought for one-dimensional

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coherence in five sections from Leon, to a young businesswoman, the scientific observer of an experimental utopian colony (the Syks), a group of friends, and finally back to Leon and his partner Yossica. Ostensibly the timeline moves from 1969 to around 1980, but, as the editorial preface points out, the age of narrative is past. Given the total captivation of perception by rapid-fire TV, no one has time for narrative. To this the novel opposes a spatialized, honeycomb time form of layered, cross-referenced episodes, a form that will release consciousness from the rule of time’s arrow, and create a privileged aesthetic space — in time but outside of time — for experimental attempts to regain authentic self-sovereignty. Of course Strauß uses Romantic forms, like an open arabesque, to achieve this. Each section unfolds the tale of individuals undergoing identity-changing threshold experiences, sometimes in conventional realistic mode, more often as fantastic dream or fairy tale, and it is up to the reader in this explicitly Romantic, self-reflexive aesthetic domain to combine and create significance. If the novel’s form is self-evidently neo-Romantic, then so too is much of its content. The solutions all seek to reach “behind things” (55, 59), to unveil a utopian, mythical, higher mode of consciousness that will re-establish coherent experience of the decentered and inscrutable, technologized modern world. But Strauß’s solutions are not anachronistically neo-Romantic. His investigation of the Syk colony is, rather, a punishing review of the redemptive claims of neo-Romanticism for postmoderns. This multicultural utopian colony in the forest outside Cologne is a willed laboratory experiment to create a new consciousness (117) overcoming all conflict. Forms of contradiction are replaced by ambivalence, goal-oriented thought by holistically oriented dream and fantasy, writing by speech and image, political structures by collective spontaneity, gender polarity by androgynity. The Syks thus dwell in a totally alternative mental world which is neither dream nor reflection, but both (or neither), the mode of a feminized “other knowledge” (115), in which any thinkable opposition from nature and spirit to time and eternity or God and world is harmonized. A Romantic golden age, certainly, but harshly dealt with by Strauß’s commentator. For the colony of the Syks, he notes, is entirely parasitic on the economic resources of the nearby city. The apparently idyllic society in fact conceals a still unreconciled other of violence, an invisible beast kept in a cage. Worse, the syncretic mentality of the community is unmasked as culturally parasitic, merely an empty postmodern montage of received flotsam and jetsam (118) that is in truth indistinguishable from the patent recipes (Strauß has the New Age in mind) launched on the commercial market by the culture industry (139). Thus, they do not so much live their life, as die it (138). Hence for Strauß the appeal of Romanticism is not lost. It is certainly emancipated from Goethe’s anathema, and its received inventory of formal experimentation is still the

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key to redemptive explorations of modern consciousness. But Romanticism, like Goethe, is at best a resource, not a solution. But even this weighty and even-handed contribution to cultural debate is not the last word in what is evidently an unending dialogue of postmodern present and Romantic past. Helmut Krausser’s (b. 1964) Thanatos: Das 71 schwarze Buch (Thanatos: The Black Book, 1996), our last example, is still another postmodernist variation on a Romantic theme. Here the perennially modern search for authentic self-identity is once more dressed in Romantic clothes. But, in a regressive step, it is again accused of sympathy with death. Krausser’s protagonist, the archivist Konrad Johanser, has become a specialist in German Romanticism as an alternative to his empty life and a modern world seen as ephemeral and banal. But his Romanticism is decidedly premodern: not a visionary utopia, but an asylum from reality. Closeted in the Institute for German Romanticism, he indulges in compensatory fantasies of sharing in the authentic creativity he associates uniquely with the Romantics and to which he feels himself too late called (43). This soon results in a travesty of Romantic creativity so understood. A brilliant paleographer and calligrapher (Johanser holds a doctorate in the history of Wackenroder editions), he creates fake, sensationally important manuscripts — partly in order to rescue his Institute in the days of budget cuts by the senate of newly-united Berlin (Romanticism has gone out of fashion, 36), partly in order to experience a compensatory feeling of power by changing the reality of history. He succeeds in recruiting a new sponsor (a tobacco magnate). But, alas, his brilliantly faked fragments for the continuation of Heinrich von Ofterdingen Part II begin to arouse suspicion, and he is asked to leave. At this point literature and life become still more postmodernistically confused, and the imitation of art by life has fatal consequences. Incapable of reconciling himself with reality, he repeats the figure of escapist flight, and returns “home,” that is, flees to another Romantic idyll — the Swabia of his unhappy youth as depicted by Ludwig Uhland — and aesthetic nemesis, personified by the figure of Thanatos and his black book. Torn by yearnings and sexual fantasies between the pure Anna and the lascivious Berit, he undergoes a slow symbiosis with his young cousin Beni, who acquires his taste for Wackenroder as he acquires Beni’s taste for Gothic rock. At last he gruesomely murders Beni, conceals the fact with still more faked letters, and enters into a kind of living death, a dream-like, perhaps insane, existence as Beni, yet at home in the city of the dead. A testament despite everything to the continued appeal of Romanticism, this text alas revives many myths, notably the easy — and perhaps immortal — cliché of sympathy with death, and the uncontradicted assertion that Romanticism leads to Auschwitz. It also contains errors and implausibilities. Of course the Romantics did not, as Johanser thinks (50), understand art as a falsification of the world, for the anti-mimetic turn is perhaps Romanticism’s most important trait. And the

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very existence of the novel disproves its own contentions that Romanticism is opposed to modernity and out of fashion. Finally, none with any knowledge of literary scholarship (such as Johanser) could seriously entertain the possibility that fake manuscripts might evade detection by today’s technological and theoretical instruments. It is a pity to end on a sour note. But it should be clear from the preceding pages that this is only a break between the chapters of an ongoing narrative. The fate of Romanticism in the twentieth century is really an object lesson in reception-aesthetic theory. In this narrow compass this essay has not attempted a comprehensive treatment, either of Romantics or moderns (although it has focused on perhaps the most important Romantic, Novalis, and tried to include figures and texts representative of every significant station on his journey of reception through the last century). Twentieth-century writers turn to Romanticism partly because they are selfconsciously modernist writers, and the modernist’s first move is creatively to 72 experiment with received literary forms, to re- and deconstruct. But this move is always guided by a regulative principle of one kind or another. In a sense, every modernist who rewrites a Romantic text is merely making of it what he wishes, and it has been seen that Romantic texts have been appropriated for very different purposes, sometimes by the same writer: to justify political action of the left and right (Brecht and the later Mann), to justify political inaction (Hesse and the earlier Mann); to reinforce National Socialist totalitarianism (Hans Grimm), to subvert Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism (Kirsch); to attack misogyny (the earlier Bachmann), to support a feminist utopia (the later Bachmann); to figure the recuperation of the existentially threatened self (Handke, Strauß), to figure its loss (Krausser). Of course there is no unchanging definition of Romanticism from 1895 to 1996, and all of these strangely varied creative receptions are only performances within the hermeneutic circle: they take out of the text what the author puts in, in terms of his own knowledge and the knowledge of his epoch. But this repeated turn to Romanticism does suggest more: that the modern recourse to Romanticism is not haphazard or tautological. With the notable exception of the years immediately after 1945, it consistently presupposes a typological similarity between present and past, and the term of that similarity between present and past is crisis (whatever that crisis happens to be). Equally, it always seeks in the mirror of the past a means of transition from the crisis, by which a better future might be constructed or a worse destroyed. (Perhaps this is why the Romantic utopia of the fragment — the uncompleted transition — is so often deployed only under the sanction of Goethean wholeness — the attained goal.) Whether that repeated turn to the past verifiably demonstrates a fundamental relationship between modernism and Romanticism is hard to prove, although cultural historians from Ludwig Coellen to Silvio Vietta have argued that case. To do that one would have

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to compare with the twentieth-century reception of Classicism, Enlightenment, and so forth. But here at least a case is made that there is such a deeper affinity, which lies in the fact that the Romantic crisis is merely the beginning of the still unresolved modern crisis.

Notes 1

See Lothar Pikulik, Frühromantik: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung (Munich: Beck 1992), 9. 2

For this essay the following works have been used with gratitude: Wolfgang Paulsen, ed., Das Nachleben der Romantik in der modernen deutschen Literatur (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm 1969); Dieter Bänsch, ed., Zur Modernität der Romantik (Stuttgart: Metzler 1977); Richard Faber, Die Phantasie an die Macht (Stuttgart: Metzler 1970); Alexander von Bormann, “Wie aktuell ist die deutsche Romantik? Ein Umblick in der Forschung,” Euphorion 78 (1984): 401–14; Hanne Castein, Alexander Stillmark, eds., Deutsche Romantik und das 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Heinz 1986); Ernst Behler, Jochen Hörisch, eds., Die Aktualität der deutschen Romantik (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh 1987); Michael S. Batts, Anthony W. Riley, Hans Wetzel, eds., Echoes and Influences of German Romanticism: Essays in Honour of Hans Eichner (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Paris: Lang, 1987); Uwe Japp, Literatur und Modernität (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1987), esp. 185–224; Erika Tunner, ed., Romantik — eine lebenskräftige Krankheit: Ihre literarischen Nachwirkungen in der Moderne (Amsterdam — Atlanta, GA: Rodopi 1991); Silvio Vietta, Die literarische Moderne: Eine problemgeschichtliche Darstellung der deutschsprachigen Literatur von Hölderlin bis Thomas Bernhard (Stuttgart: Metzler 1992); Silvio Vietta, Dirk Kemper, eds., Ästhetische Moderne in Europa: Grundzüge und Problemzusammenhänge seit der Romantik. (Munich: Fink 1998); Aktualität der Romantik, Text + Kritik, 149 (1999). 3

Still the most impressive renditions of the rich panoply of Romantic culture are Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik, 2 vols (Leipzig: Haessel 1899–1902), and Paul Kluckhohn, Das Ideengut der deutschen Romantik (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1942; numerous later editions). 4

Compare the essays by Beate Allert and Arnd Bohm in this volume with the discussion of Goethe’s late verse by Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson. 5

See Goethe’s well-known remark to Johann Peter Eckermann on 2 April 1829. See H. H., Die romantische Schule (Munich: Goldmann 1964), 9–138, esp. 11, 82– 83. 6

7

G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, eds. Eva Moldenhauer, Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970), vols 13–15. Here 13: 131–37. 8 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1906; first edition 1870). 9

Ludwig Coellen, Neuromantik (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1906). See too Samuel Lublinski, Die Bilanz der Moderne (Berlin: Cronbach 1904) and S. L., Der Ausgang der Moderne: Ein Buch der Opposition (Dresden: Reissner 1909). 10

Coellen, 3–4.

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11

For a similarly Hegelian interpretation of Romanticism as transitional epoch of failed synthesis see the marvelously bilious Samuel Lublinski, Ausgang der Moderne, 48–50, who however opposes this variant of modernism as a dead end: a chaos of styleless mood images, incapable of generating the new myths modern humanity needs (64–65). 12 On Hofmannsthal and Novalis see Nicholas Saul, “Hofmannsthal and Novalis,” in Gilbert J. Carr, Eda Sagarra, eds., Fin de siècle Vienna (Dublin: Institute of Germanic Studies 1985), 26–62, and Johannes Endres, “Hofmannsthal und Novalis: Zur Ambivalenz des Erbes,” in Herbert Uerlings, ed., “Blüthenstaub”: Rezeption und Wirkung des Werkes von Novalis (Tübingen: Niemeyer 2000), 311–38. 13 See on the modernist epiphany what is still the standard essay, Theodore Ziolkowski, “James Joyces Epiphanie und die Überwindung der empirischen Welt in der modernen deutschen Prosa,” DVjs 35 (1961): 594–616. 14

See Carl Burckhardt, “Begegnungen mit Hugo von Hofmannsthal,” Neue Rundschau 65 (1954): 341–54, esp. 354. 15 See Hofmannsthal’s “Ad me ipsum.” Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, eds. Bernd Schoeller, Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1979–80), Reden und Aufsätze, 3: 620. 16

Werner Vordtriede, Novalis und die französischen Symbolisten: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des dichterischen Symbols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1963). Compare Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik: Von Baudelaire bis zur Gegenwart (Reinbek: Rowohlt 1956), 19–21. 17 See Wolfgang Braungart: Ritual und Literatur (1996–7), vol. 2: Ästhetischer Katholizismus: Stefan Georges Rituale der Literatur (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1997), 17, 90, 176ff., who emphasizes how little George was specifically concerned with or influenced by Romanticism in the strict sense. 18

Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner: Ein Musikanten-Problem, in F. N., Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, 6 vols (Munich-Vienna: Insel 1980), 4: 901–38. 19

Reden und Aufsätze, 1: 102–3.

20

Reden und Aufsätze, 1: 151.

21

See Hofmannsthal’s comments linking this tale with Romanticism to Richard BeerHofmann, 15 May 1895, in H. v. H., Briefe 1890–1901 (Berlin: Fischer 1935), 130– 31. 22

Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen (Jena: G. Fischer, 1886). 23

Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in S. F., Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al., 11 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1972), vol. 2. 24 See Thomas Mann, “Die Stellung Freuds in der modernen Geistesgeschichte,” in T. M., Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1974), 10:256–80, esp. 278–80. 25

H. v. H., Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Ausgabe, eds. Rudolf Hirsch, Clemens Köttelwesch, Heinz Rölleke, Ernst Zinn et al. 37 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Kohlhammer 1975–), 30: 129.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RECEPTION OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

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357

26

See H. R. Klieneberger, “Romanticism and Modernism in Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” MLR 74 (1979): 161–67.

27

See Lawrence Ryan, “Die Krise des Romantischen bei Rainer Maria Rilke,” in Nachleben der Romantik (Note 2): 130–51, esp. 130ff. 28

R. M. R.: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1978), 9.

29

See E. C. Stopp, “Musil’s Törleß: Content and Form,” MLR 63 (1968): 94–118; Anthony Phelan, “Romantic Affinities of ‘der andere Zustand’ in Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,” in Castein, Stillmark, eds., Deutsche Romantik (Note 2), 141– 56; Tim Mehigan, Robert Musil (Stuttgart: Reclam 2001), esp. 28, 111–2. 30

See R. M., Tagebücher, ed. Adolf Frisé, 2 vols (Reinbek: Rowohlt 1976), 138 (3 April 1905). 31

In R. M., Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frisé, 9 vols (Reinbek: Rowohlt 1978), 7: 7–140. 32 See Mehigan (Note 29), 21. 33

Novalis, Blüthenstaub (NS, 2: 412–70, esp. 417–18).

34

See Novalis, Glauben und Liebe oder der König und die Königin (NS, 2: 483–503, esp. 499–500). 35 See Ronald Speirs, Brecht’s Early Plays (London, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1982), 22–24. 36

Compare Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Munich, Leipzig 1925), 85, 120–21. For a discussion of the views of Baxa and Schmitt in the context of political Romanticism see the essay by Klaus Peter in this volume. 37 In Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke (Note 24), 12: 9–589. 38

Gesammelte Werke, 12: 809–52.

39

Compare Hermann Kurzke, Romantik und Konservatismus: Das “politische” Werk Friedrich von Hardenbergs (Novalis) im Horizont seiner Wirkungsgeschichte (Munich: Fink 1983), 36.

40

Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 3.

41

Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1978), 8. 42 NS, 1: 91–3. 43

Der Steppenwolf: Erzählung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1974), 17, 20–21, 45.

44

In G. H., Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hans-Egon Hass et al., 11 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1964–74), 4: 571–96. 45

Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik (Berlin: Cassirer 1920). 46

See Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 14–15, 182–87. 47

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1973). See Hans-Robert Jauß, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970). 48

358 ❦ 49

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

In W. B., Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970), 136–69.

50

Illuminationen, 251–61. For a further discussion of affinities between German Romanticism and Benjamin’s modernist poetics see the essay by Beate Allert in this volume. 51

52

Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (Munich: Albert Langen/Georg Müller 1934; first edition, 1926). 53

See Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit, 143rd-146th edition (Munich: Hoheneichen 1939; first edition, 1930), esp. 439–40. 54

See Victor Klemperer, LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Leipzig: Reclam 1999; first edition, 1975), 180–82. 55

Werner Krauss, Studien zur deutschen und französischen Aufklärung (Berlin: Aufbau 1963), Claus Träger, “Ursprung und Stellung der Romantik,” Weimarer Beiträge 21 (1975): 37–73. On the general phenomenon see Patricia Herminghouse, “The Rediscovery of Romanticism: Revisions and Revolutions,” in Studies in GDR Culture and Society 2 (1982): 1–18, esp. 2, 4, 6–7; also Sara Lennox, “Christa Wolf and the Women Romantics,” Studies (1982) 31–43, and Christiane Zahl Romero, “The Rediscovery of Romanticism in the GDR: A Note on Anna Seghers’ Role,” Studies (1982) 19–30. 56 There is a useful edition including extracts from the Seghers-Lukács controversy: A. S., Das wirkliche Blau. Mit Materialien zusammengestellt von Juliane Eckhardt (Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Leipzig: Klett 2001). 57

(Darmstadt: Neuwied 1977; first edition Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau 1974).

58

In C. W., Werke, ed. Sonja Hilzinger, 12 vols (Munich: Luchterhand 1999–2000), 3: 435–67. 59 Werke, 6: 7–105. 60

See C. W., “Projektionsraum Romantik: Ein Gespräch mit Frauke Meyer-Gosau” (1982), Werke, 8: 236–55, esp. 236. 61

(Halle, Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag 1984). See John Fetzer, “Mediation as Medication for the Romantic Malady? John Erpenbeck’s Heillose Flucht,” in Tunner, Lebenskräftige Krankheit (Note 2), 63–85, esp. 84–85. 62

63

(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1988). Intellectual historians who have made this connection include Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1989) and Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London, New York: Routledge 1997). 64

65

See Helmut Schanze, ed., Die andere Romantik: Eine Dokumentation (Insel: Frankfurt am Main 1967); also, for a discussion of the theme that the blue flower was always red, Faber (Note 2). The pioneer was Ludwig Marcuse, “Reaktionäre und progressive Romantik,” Monatshefte 44 (1952): 195–201.

66

See especially Silvio Vietta, Die literarische Moderne (Note 2).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RECEPTION OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

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359

67

In Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke, eds. Christa Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, Clemens Münster, 4 vols (Munich, Zurich: Piper 1978), 2: 253–63; 3: 9–337.

68

See Undine: Eine Erzählung, in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Romantische Erzählungen, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1985), 39–115, 75–76, and the discussion of Fouqué’s tale in the essay by Ulrich Scheck in this volume. 69

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1975).

70

(Munich: dtv 1984). (Neuwied: Luchterhand 1996).

71 72

See Uwe Japp, Literatur und Modernität (Note 2), 294–349.

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———, ed. Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 3 volumes, 1805 [dated 1806]-1808. Selections translated by Margarete Münsterberg as “The Boy’s Magic Horn.” In The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, vol. 5. Eds. Kuno Francke and W. G. Howard. New York: German Publishing Society, 1913, 163–69. Chamisso, Adelbert von. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 1814. Translated by Harry Steinhauer as “The Strange Story of Peter Schlemihl.” In German Romantic Stories. Ed. Frank G. Ryder. New York: Continuum, 1988, 91–137. Eichendorff, Joseph von. Ahnung und Gegenwart, 1815. ———. Das Marmorbild, 1818. Translated by Frank G. Ryder as “The Marble Statue.” In German Literary Fairy Tales. Ed. Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning. New York: Continuum, 1983, 133–71. ———. “Die zwei Gesellen,” 1818. ———. Krieg den Philistern!, 1824. ———. Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, 1826. Translated by Ronald Taylor as “Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing.” In German Romantic Stories. Ed. Frank G. Ryder. New York: Continuum, 1988, 189–267. ———. Ezelin von Romano, 1828. ———. Die Freier, 1833. ———. Dichter und ihre Gesellen, 1834. ———. Über die ethische und religiöse Bedeutung der neueren romantischen Poesie in Deutschland, 1847. ———. Zur Geschichte des Dramas, 1854. ———. Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutschlands, 1857. ———. Das Incognito, 1901. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europens, die sie bisher unterdrückten, 1793. ———. Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution, 1793. ———. Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 1794–95. Translated and ed. by Peter Heath and John Lachs as Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), with the First and Second Introductions. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. ———. Grundlage des Naturrechts, 1796–97. Forster, Georg. “Ein Blick in das Ganze der Natur,” 1789. Fouqué, Caroline de la Motte. Magie der Natur, 1812. Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte. Historie vom edlen Ritter Galmy, 1806.

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———. Undine, 1811. Translated and ed. by Carol Tully. In Romantic Fairy Tales: Goethe, Tieck, Fouqué, Brentano. London: Penguin, 2000, 53–125. ———. Herrmann, 1818. ———. Der Pappenheimer Kürassier, 1842. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Mahomets-Gesang,” 1772–73. Translated by Christopher Middleton as “A Song to Mahomet.” In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Vol. 1. Selected Poems. Ed. Christopher Middleton. Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1983, 23–27. ———. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774. Translated by Michael Hulse as The Sorrows of Young Werther. London: Penguin, 1989. ———. Torquato Tasso, 1790. Translated by Michael Hamburger in Goethe’s Collected Works, Vol. 8. Verse Plays and Epic. Eds. Cyrus Hamlin and Frank Ryder. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987, 55–139. ———. Faust: Ein Fragment, 1790. ———. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–96. Translated and ed. by Eric A. Blackall and Victor Lange as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 9. New York: Suhrkamp, 1989. ———. Faust I, 1808. Translated by David Luke. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1987. ———. Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809. Translated by Judith Ryan as Elective Affinities. In Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 11. Ed. David E. Wellberry. New York: Suhrkamp, 1988, 89–262. ———. “Urworte. Orphisch,” 1817. Translated by Christopher Middleton as “Primal Words. Orphic.” In Goethe’s Collected Works. Vol. 1. Selected Poems. Ed. Christopher Middleton. Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1983, 231–33. ———. West-östlicher Divan, 1819. Translated by John Whaley as Poems of the West and East: West-Eastern Divan — West-Östlicher Divan: Bi-Lingual Edition of the Complete Poems. Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998. ———. “Eins und Alles,” 1823. Translated by Christopher Middleton as “One and All.” In Goethe’s Collected Works. Vol. 1. Ed. Christopher Middleton. Selected Poems. Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1983, 241–43. ———. “Probleme,” 1823. ———. “Trilogie der Leidenschaft,” 1823–24. Translated by John Frederick Nims as “Trilogy of Passion.” In Goethe’s Collected Works. Vol. 1. Selected Poems. Ed. Christopher Middleton. Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1983, 243–55. ———. “Vermächtnis,” 1829. Translated by Christopher Middleton as “Testament.” In Goethe’s Collected Works. Vol. 1. Ed. Christopher Middleton. Selected Poems. Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1983, 266–68.

364 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

———. Faust II, 1832. Translated by David Luke. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1994. ———. Maximen und Reflexionen, 1907. Translated by Elisabeth Stopp as Maxims and Reflections. Ed. Peter Hutchinson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Gordon, George (Lord Byron). Manfred, 1817. ———. Don Juan, 1819–24. Görres, Joseph. Teutschland und die Revolution, 1819. ———. Kotzebue und was ihn gemordet, 1819. ———, ed. Der Rheinische Merkur, 1814–16. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Kinder und Hausmärchen, 1812–15. Translated by Jack Zipes as The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Hauff, Wilhelm. Das kalte Herz, 1828. Translated by Robert M. Browning as “The Cold Heart.” In German Literary Fairy Tales. Ed. Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning. New York: Continuum, 1983, 184–220. Hegel, G. W. F. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 1820–29. Translated by T. M. Knox as Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. Heine, Heinrich. “Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig,” 1824 and 1827. ———. Die romantische Schule, 1833 and 1836. Translated by Helen Mustard. In The Romantic School and Other Essays. Eds. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub. New York: Continuum, 1985, 1–127. Heinse, Wilhelm. Musikalische Dialogen, 1805. Hoffmann, E. T. A. Der Magnetiseur, 1814–15. ———. Der goldne Topf, 1814–15. Translated and ed. by Ritchie Robertson as “The Golden Pot.” In The Golden Pot and Other Tales. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1992, 1–83. ———. Kreisleriana, 1814, including “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik,” 1814– 15. Translated by Martyn Clarke and edited, annotated, and introduced by David Charlton. In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: “Kreisleriana,” “The Poet and the Composer,” Music Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989, 79–165. ———. Die Elixiere des Teufels, 1815–16. Translated by Ronald Taylor as The Devil’s Elixirs. London: Calder, 1963. ———. Der Sandmann, 1817. Translated and ed. by Ritchie Robertson as “The Sandman.” In The Golden Pot and Other Tales. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1992, 85–118.

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———. Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern, 1820–22. Translated by Anthea Bell as The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. London: Penguin, 1999. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hyperion oder der Eremit aus Griechenland, 1797–99. Translated by Willard R. Trask as Hyperion; or, the Hermit in Greece. New York: Ungar, 1965. Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter). Siebenkäs, 1796–97. Translated by Edward Henry Noel as Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, The Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the Advocate of the Poor, Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs 2 volumes. London: Smith, 1845; Boston: Monroe, 1845. ———. Vorschule der Ästhetik, 1804. Translated by Margaret R. Hale as Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1973. ———. Der Komet, 1820–22. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790. Translated by James Creed Meredith as The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon, 1957. Kleist, Heinrich von. Amphitryon, 1807. Translated by Charles E. Passage. In Heinrich von Kleist: Plays. Ed. Walter Hinderer. New York: Continuum, 1982, 91–164. ———. Das Erdbeben in Chili, 1810–11. Translated by Michael Hamburger as “The Earthquake in Chile.” In German Romantic Novellas. Eds. Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning. New York: Continuum, 1985, 122–35. ———. Die Marquise von O., 1810–11. Translated by David Luke as “The Marquise of O.” In German Romantic Novellas. Eds. Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning. New York: Continuum, 1985, 1–38. ———. Michael Kohlhaas, 1810–11. Translated by Martin Greenberg. In German Romantic Novellas. Eds. Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning. New York: Continuum, 1985, 39–121. ———. Die Hermannsschlacht, 1821. ———. Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 1821. Translated by Peggy Meyer Sherry. In Heinrich von Kleist: Plays. Ed. Walter Hinderer. New York: Continuum, 1982, 269–341. ———, ed. Phöbus: Ein Journal für die Kunst, 1808. ———, ed. Berliner Abendblätter, 1810–11. Klingemann, Ernst August. Nachtwachen, 1804. Translated and ed. by Gerald Gillespie as Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura — The Night Watches of Bonaventura. Austin: U of Texas P, 1971. Müller, Adam. Lehre vom Gegensatz, 1804.

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———. Elemente der Staatskunst, 1809. ———, ed. Phöbus: Ein Journal für die Kunst, 1808. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). Fichte-Studien, 1795–96. ———. Vermischte Bemerkungen/Blüthenstaub, 1798. Translated and ed. by Margaret Mahony Stoljar as “Miscellaneous Observations.” In Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1997, 23–46. ———. Glauben und Liebe oder Der König und die Königin, 1798. Translated and ed. by Margaret Mahony Stoljar as “Faith and Love or The King and Queen.” In Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1997, 85–100. ———. Allgemeines Brouillon, 1798–99. Selections translated and ed. by Margaret Mahony Stoljar as “General Draft.” In Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1997, 121–36. ———. Hymnen an die Nacht, 1800. Translated by Dick Higgins, revised edition. New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1984. ———. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1802. Translated by Palmer Hilty as Henry von Ofterdingen. New York: Ungar, 1964; reprint Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1990. ———. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 1802. Translated by Ralph Manheim as The Novices of Sais. New York: Valentin, 1949. ———. Die Christenheit oder Europa, 1826. Translated and ed. by Margaret Mahony Stoljar as “Christendom or Europe.” In Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1997, 137–52. Oken, Lorenz. Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 1809. ———, ed. Isis, 1816–48. Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich. See Jean Paul. Schelling, F. W. J. Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797. Translated by Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath as Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to that Study of Science. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1988. ———. Von der Weltseele — Eine Hypothese der höhern Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus, 1798. ———. Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799. ———. System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 1800. Translated by Peter Heath as System of Transcendental Idealism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1978. ———. Philosophie der Kunst, 1802–3. Translated and ed. by Douglas W. Scott as The Philosophy of Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

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———. Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur, 1807. Translated by A. Johnson as The Philosophy of Art: An Oration on the Relation between the Plastic Arts and Nature. London: Chapman, 1845. Schiller, Friedrich. Die Räuber, 1781. Translated by F. J. Lamport as The Robbers. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1979, 21–160. ———. “Die Götter Griechenlandes,” 1788 and 1800. ———. “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais,” 1795. ———. “Über Matthissons Gedichte,” 1794. ———. Wallenstein trilogy, 1798–99. Translated by F. J. Lamport. In The Robbers &Wallenstein. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin 1979, 161– 472. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst, 1801– 4. ———. Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 1809–11. Translated by John Black as A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 2 volumes. London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1815; revised by A. J. W. Morrison. London: Bohn, 1846; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1973. Schlegel, August Wilhelm, and Caroline Schlegel. “Die Gemälde: Gespräch,” 1799. Schlegel, Friedrich. Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus, 1796. ———. Kritische Fragmente, 1797. Translated by Peter Firchow as “Critical Fragments.” In Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, and London: Oxford UP, 1971, 143–59. ———. Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, 1797. ———. Über Goethes Meister, 1798. ———. Lucinde, 1799. Translated by Peter Firchow in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, and London: Oxford UP, 1971, 41–140. ———. Ideen, 1800. Translated by Peter Firchow as “Ideas.” In Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, and London: Oxford UP, 1971, 241–56. ———. Gespräch über die Poesie, 1800. Translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc as Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1968. ———. Signatur des Zeitalters, 1820. ———, ed. Athenaeum, 1798–1800 (with August Wilhelm Schlegel). ———, ed. Concordia, 1820.

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Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Reden über die Religion, 1799. Introduction, translation, and notes by Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 1808. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, 1818. Tieck, Ludwig. Die Sommernacht, 1789. Translated by Mary C. Rumsey as The Midsummer Night; or, Shakespeare and the Fairies. London: Whittingham, 1854. ———. Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell, 1795–96, including the poem: “Melankolie.” ———. Die Theegesellschaft, 1796. ———. Der blonde Eckbert, 1797. Translated and ed. by Carol Tully as “Eckbert the Fair.” In Romantic Fairy Tales. London: Penguin Books, 2000, 33–51. ———. Der gestiefelte Kater, 1797. Translated and ed. by Gerald Gillespie as Puss in Boots. Austin: U of Texas P, 1974. ———. Die verkehrte Welt, 1797. Translated by Oscar Mandel Mandel and Maria K. Feder as The Land of Upside Down. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1978. ———. Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Eine altdeutsche Geschichte, 1798. ———. Prinz Zerbino, 1799. ———, and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst, 1799. Translated by Mary Hurst Shubert as “Fantasies on Art for Friends of Art.” In Confessions and Fantasies. University Park & London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1971, 161–97. ———. Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva, 1799. ———. Leben und Tod des kleinen Rotkäppchens, 1800. ———. Der Runenberg, 1804. Translated by Robert M. Browning as “The Runenberg.” In German Literary Fairy Tales. Ed. Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning. New York: Continuum, 1983, 81–101. ———. Kaiser Octavianus, 1804. ———. Die Elfen, 1811. ———. Phantasus, including: Leben und Taten des kleinen Thomas, genannt Däumchen and Fortunat, 1812–16. Translated by Julius Hare et al. as Tales from the Phantasus. London: Burns, 1845. ———. Des Lebens Überfluß, 1839. Veit-Schlegel, Dorothea. Florentin, 1801. Translated by Edwina Lawler and Ruth Richardson. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1988.

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Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, and Ludwig Tieck. Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, including “Das merkwürdige musikalische Leben des Tonkünstlers Joseph Berglinger,” 1796 [dated 1797]. Translated and ed. by Mary Hurst Schubert as “Confessions from the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar.” In Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Confessions and Phantasies. University Park & London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1971, 79–160. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Oberon, 1780. Translated by William Sotheby (in 1798) as Oberon: a Poem from the German of Wieland, with an introduction by Donald H. Reiman. New York: Garland, 1978.

Secondary Literature General Abrams, M[eyer] H[oward]. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. Bänsch, Dieter, ed. Zur Modernität der Romantik. Stuttgart: Metzler 1977. Batts, Michael S., Anthony W. Riley, and Hans Wetzel, eds. Echoes and Influences of German Romanticism: Essays in Honour of Hans Eichner. New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Paris: Lang, 1987. Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung. Munich: Beck, 2000. Behler, Ernst and Jochen Hörisch, eds. Die Aktualität der deutschen Romantik. Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 1987. Beiser, Frederick C. Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought 1790–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Borchmeyer, Dieter. Weimarer Klassik: Portrait einer Epoche. Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1994. Bormann, Alexander von. “Wie aktuell ist die deutsche Romantik? Ein Umblick in der Forschung.” Euphorion 78 (1984): 401–14. Bovenschen, Silvia. Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Broers, Michael. Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815. London: Arnold, 1996. Brose, Eric Dorn. German History, 1789–1871: From the Holy Roman Empire to the Bismarckian Reich. Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1997. Brown, Marshall. The Shape of German Romanticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979. Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. 8 vols. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–97. Bürger, Christa. Leben Schreiben: Die Klassik, Die Romantik und der Ort der Frauen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. Butler, E. M. Byron and Goethe: Analysis of a Passion. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1956. Castein, Hanne and Alexander Stillmark, eds. Deutsche Romantik und das 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Heinz, 1986.

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Derks, Paul. Die Schande der heiligen Päderastie: Homosexualität und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschen Literatur, 1750–1850. Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1990. Eichner, Hans, ed. “Romantic” and its Cognates: The European History of a Word. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1972. Engelhardt, Dietrich von. Historisches Bewußtsein in der Naturwissenschaft. Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich: Alber, 1979. Engell, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. Epstein, Klaus. The Genesis of German Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. Fischer, Bernd. Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herder, Fichte, Kleist: Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. Frank, Manfred. Das Problem “Zeit” in der deutschen Romantik: Zeitbewußtsein und Bewußtsein von Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung, 2nd revised edition. Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich: Schöningh, 1990. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara. The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism. Bern, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1983. Fröschle, Hartmut. Goethes Verhältnis zur Romantik. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Frühwald, Wolfgang. “Antijudaismus in der Zeit der deutschen Romantik.” In Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum ersten Weltkrieg, second part. Eds. Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989, 72–91. Glover, Michael. The Napoleonic Wars: An Illustrated History 1792–1815. New York: Hippocrene, 1978. Goodman, Katherine R., and Edith Waldstein, eds. In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers around 1800. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. Gray, Richard T. “Economic Romanticism: Monetary Nationalism in Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Adam Müller.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 (2003): 537–57. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962. Translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hardin, James, and Christoph E. Schweitzer, eds. German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789–1832. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 90. Detroit: Gale, 1989.

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Hardin, James, and Christoph E. Schweitzer, eds. German Writers in the Age of Goethe: Sturm und Drang to Classicism. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 89. Detroit: Gale, 1990. Helfer, Martha B. The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of “Darstellung” in German Critical Discourse. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Helfer, Martha B., ed. Rereading Romanticism. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Herminghouse, Patricia. “The Rediscovery of Romanticism: Revisions and Revolutions.” Studies in GDR Culture and Society 2 (1982): 1–17. Hinderer, Walter, ed. Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Hoffmeister, Gerhart. Deutsche und europäische Romantik. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976; 2nd. ed. 1990. ———. Goethe und die europäische Romantik. Munich: UTB für Wissenschaft, 1984. ———, ed. The French Revolution and the Age of Goethe. Hildesheim: Olms, 1989. ———, ed. European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990. Holub, Robert C. “The Romanticizing of Goethe: A Study in the Acquisition of a Label.” In English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies. Ed. James Pipkin. Heidelberg: Winter, 1985, 349–61. Huch, Ricarda. Die Romantik, 2 vols. Leipzig: Haessel 1899–1902. Hughes, Glyn Tegai. Romantic German Literature. London: Arnold, 1979. Japp, Uwe. Literatur und Modernität. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987. Jauß, Hans Robert, ed. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen. Munich: Fink, 1968. Jenisch, Erich. “‘Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke’: Goethes Kritik der Romantik.” Goethe: Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der Goethe-Gesellschaft 19 (1957): 50–79. Johnston, Otto W. The Myth of a Nation — Literature and Politics in Prussia under Napoleon. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1989. Kapitza, Peter. Die frühromantische Theorie der Mischung: Über den Zusammenhang von romantischer Dichtungstheorie und zeitgenössischer Chemie. Munich: Hueber, 1968. Klapper, M. Roxana. The German Literary Influence on Byron. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974. Klausnitzer, Ralf. Blaue Blume unterm Hakenkreuz: Die Rezeption der deutschen literarischen Romantik im Dritten Reich. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999.

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Kluckhohn, Paul. Persönlichkeit und Gemeinschaft: Studien zur Staatsauffassung der deutschen Romantik. Halle: Niemeyer, 1925. ———. Das Ideengut der deutschen Romantik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1942. Kontje, Todd. Women, the Novel, and the German Nation 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Konzett, Matthias, ed. Encyclopedia of German Literature. 2 vols. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. Korff, Hermann A. Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer ideellen Entwicklung der klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte. 5 vols. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1954–57. Koselleck, Reinhart. Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt. Freiburg im Breisgau: Alber, 1959; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. ———. Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am 1 Main: Suhrkamp, 1989 [ 1979]. Kremer, Detlef. Romantik. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. Kuzniar, Alice, ed. Outing Goethe and His Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. L’Absolu littéraire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester as The Literary Absolute. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. Lea, Charlene. “The ‘Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft’: Napoleonic Hegemony Engenders Political Anti-Semitism.” In Crisis and Culture in PostEnlightenment Germany: Essays in Honour of Peter Heller. Eds. Hans Schulte and David Richards. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1993, 89–111. Lepenies, Wolf. Melancholie und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Lützeler, Paul Michael. “The Image of Napoleon in European Romanticism.” In European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models. Ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State UP, 1990, 211–28. MacLeod, Catriona. Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. Mahoney, Dennis F. “The Channeling of a Literary Revolution: Goethe, Schiller, and the Genesis of German Romanticism.” In A Reassessment of Weimar Classicism. Ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1996, 117–31. Malsch, Wilfried. “Klassizismus, Klassik und Romantik der Goethezeit.” In Deutsche Literatur zur Zeit der Klassik. Ed. Karl Otto Conrady. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977, 381–408. Markham, Felix. Napoleon. New York: Mentor, 1963.

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Mazza, Ethel Matala de. Der verfaßte Körper: Zum Projekt einer organischen Gemeinschaft in der Politischen Romantik. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1999. McCort, Dennis. Going beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen, and Deconstruction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Mederer, Wolfgang. Romantik als Aufklärung der Aufklärung? Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1987. Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Menhennet, Alan. The Romantic Movement. London: Croom Helm, and Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1981. Möller, Horst. Fürstenstaat oder Bürgernation: Deutschland 1763–1815. Berlin: Siedler, 1998. Müller-Funk, Wolfgang. Die Farbe Blau: Epistemologie des Romantischen. Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2000. ———, and Franz Schuh, eds. Nationalismus und Romantik. Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1999. Nipperdey, Thomas. Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat. Munich: Beck, 1983. Translated by Daniel Nolan as Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck 1800–1866. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Paulsen, Wolfgang, ed. Das Nachleben der Romantik in der modernen deutschen Literatur. Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1969. Perels, Christoph, ed. “Ein Dichter hat uns alle geweckt”: Goethe und die literarische Romantik. Frankfurt am Main: Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe Museum, 1999. Peter, Klaus. Stadien der Aufklärung: Moral und Politik bei Lessing, Novalis und Friedrich Schlegel. Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1980. ———. “Nürnbergs krumme Gassen: Zum Deutschlandbild bei Wackenroder, Tieck und Richard Wagner.” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 57 (1997): 129–47. ———, ed. Romantikforschung seit 1945. Königstein: Hain, 1980. ———, ed. Die politische Romantik in Deutschland: Eine Textsammlung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985. Pikulik, Lothar. Romantik als Ungenügen an der Normalität: Am Beispiel Tiecks, Hoffmanns, Eichendorffs. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Prang, Helmut, ed. Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968.

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Prawer, Siegbert, ed. The Romantic Period in Germany: Essays by Members of the London University Institute of Germanic Studies. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, and New York: Schocken Books, 1970. Rehder, Helmut. Die Philosophie der unendlichen Landschaft: Ihr Ursprung und ihre Vollendung. Wertheim a. M.: Bechstein, 1929. Reiss, Hans. The Political Thought of the German Romantics (1793–1815). Oxford: Blackwell, 1955. Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Saine, Thomas P. Black Bread, White Bread: German Intellectuals and the French Revolution. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1988. Saul, Nicholas. “Aesthetic Humanism (1790–1830).” In The Cambridge History of German Literature. Ed. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, 202–71. ———. “The Pursuit of the Subject: Literature as Critic and Perfecter of Philosophy 1790–1830.” In Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990. Ed. Nicholas Saul. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 57–101. ———, ed. Die deutsche literarische Romantik und die Wissenschaften. Munich: Iudicium, 1991. Schanze, Helmut, ed. Romantik-Handbuch. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1994. Schmitt, Carl. Politische Romantik. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1919, third edition 1968. Schulz, Gerhard. Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration. Erster Teil: Das Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789– 1806. Munich: Beck, 1983; 2nd ed. 2000. Zweiter Teil: Das Zeitalter der Napoleonischen Kriege und der Restauration 1806–1830. Munich: Beck, 1989. ———. Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff. Munich: Beck, 1996. ———, and Sabine Doering. Klassik: Geschichte und Begriff. Munich: Beck, 2003. Seyhan, Azade. Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: U of California P, 1992. Storz, Gerhard. Klassik und Romantik: Eine stilgeschichtliche Darstellung. Mannheim, Vienna, and Zurich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1972. Tatar, Maria M. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Tobin, Robert. Warm Brothers: Queer Theory in the Age of Goethe. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Träger, Claus. “Ursprung und Stellung der Romantik.” Weimarer Beiträge 21 (1975): 37–73.

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Tunner, Erika, ed. Romantik — eine lebenskräftige Krankheit: Ihre literarischen Nachwirkungen in der Moderne. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1991. Ueding, Gert. Klassik und Romantik: Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789–1815. Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1987. Vietta, Silvio. Die literarische Moderne: Eine problemgeschichtliche Darstellung der deutschsprachigen Literatur von Hölderlin bis Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart: Metzler 1992. ———, and Dirk Kemper, eds. Ästhetische Moderne in Europa: Grundzüge und Problemzusammenhänge seit der Romantik. Munich: Fink 1998. Wellek, René. “German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation.” In his Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century. Ed. René Wellek. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965, 3–33. Wiese, Benno von, ed. Deutsche Dichter der Romantik: Ihr Leben und Werk. Berlin: Schmidt, 1971. 8

Wilpert, Gero von. Sachwörterbuch der Literatur. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2001. Zimmerli, Walther Ch., Klaus Stein and Michael Gerten, eds. “Fessellos durch die Systeme”: Frühromantisches Naturdenken im Umfeld von Arnim, Ritter und Schelling. Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1997. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

Genres, Schools, Periods, Music, and the Visual Arts Allert, Beate. “Goethe and the Visual Arts.” In The Cambridge Companion to Goethe. Ed. Leslie Sharpe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 193–206 and 265–66. ———, ed. Languages of Visuality: Crossings Between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. Andrews, Keith. The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964; New York: Hacker Art Books, 1988. Behler, Diana. The Theory of the Novel in Early German Romanticism. Bern: Lang, 1978. Behler, Ernst. Frühromantik. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1992. ———. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. ———. Ironie und die literarische Moderne. Paderborn, Munich et. al.: Schöningh, 1997.

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Benjamin, Walter. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik. Bern: Francke, 1920. Translated as “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism.” In his Selected Writings, vol. 1, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1996. Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Ed. Henry Hardy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, and London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Bisanz, Rudolph M. German Romanticism and Philipp Otto Runge: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Art Theory and Iconography. De Kalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1970. Blackall, Eric A. The Novels of the German Romantics. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1983. Blühm, Andreas, ed., Philipp Otto Runge, Kaspar David Friedrich: The Passage of Time. Translated by Rachel Esner. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1996. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Der romantische Brief: Die Entstehung ästhetischer Subjektivität. Vienna and Munich: Hanser, 1987. Bonds, Mark Evan. “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 387–420. Börsch-Supan, Helmut and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig. Caspar David Friedrich: Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildhafte Zeichnungen. Munich: Prestel, 1974. Bowie, Andrew. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Busch, Werner. Die notwendige Arabeske: Wirklichkeitsaneignung und Stilisierung in der deutschen Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Mann, 1985. Büttner, Frank. “Der Streit um die ‘neudeutsche religios-patriotische Kunst.’” Aurora 43 (1983): 55–76. Décultot, Elisabeth. Peindre le paysage: discours théorique et renouveau pictural dans de romantisme allemand. Tusson, Charente: Du Lerot, 1996. Feldt, Michael. Lyrik als Erlebnislyrik: Zur Geschichte eines Literatur- und Mentalitätstypus zwischen 1600 und 1900. Heidelberg: Winter, 1990. Fishman, Lisa. “‘To Tear the Fetter of Every Other Art’: Early Romantic Criticism and the Fantasy of Emancipation.” 19th-Century Music (Summer, 2001): 75–86. Frank, Manfred. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik: Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Frank, Mitchell Benjamin. German Romantic Painting Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

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Geismeier, Willi. Die Malerei der deutschen Romantiker. Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1984. ———. Biedermeier: Das Bild vom Biedermeier, Zeit und Kultur des Biedermeier: Kunst und Kunstleben des Biedermeier, 3rd ed. Leipzig: VEB Seeman, 1986. Gnüg, Hiltrud. Entstehung und Krise lyrischer Subjektivität: Vom klassischen lyrischen Ich zur modernen Erfahrungswirklichkeit. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983. Hardin, James N., ed. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1991. Heselhaus, Clemens. “Die Wilhelm-Meister-Kritik der Romantiker und die romantische Romantheorie.” In Nachahmung und Illusion: Kolloquium Giessen Juni 1963. Ed. Hans Robert Jauß. Munich: Fink, 1969, 113–27. Hofmann, Werner. Caspar David Friedrich. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Japp, Uwe. Die Komödie der Romantik: Typologie und Überblick. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. ———, Stefan Scherer, and Claudia Stockinger, eds. Das romantische Drama: Produktive Synthese zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Kaminski, Nicola. Kreuz-Gänge: Romanexperimente der deutschen Romantik. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001. Kluge, Gerhard. “Das romantische Drama.” In Handbuch des deutschen Dramas. Ed. Walter Hinck. Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1980, 186–99. Koerner, Joseph Leo. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Kovalevski. Bärbel. Zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit: Künstlerinnen der GoetheZeit zwischen 1750–1850. Ostfildern-Ruit: Gert H. Hadje, 1999. Krause, Markus. Das Trivialdrama der Goethezeit 1780–1805: Produktion und Rezeption. Bonn: Bouvier, 1982. Kremer, Detlef. Prosa der Romantik. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1996. Lampart, Fabian. Zeit und Geschichte: Die Anfänge des historischen Romans bei Scott, Arnim, Vigny und Manzoni. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Littlejohns, Richard. “Philipp Otto Runge’s Tageszeiten and their Relationship to Romantic Nature Philosophy.” Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 55–74. Llewellyn, R. T. “Parallel Attitudes to Form in Late Beethoven and Late Goethe: Throwing Aside the Appearance of Art.” The Modern Language Review 63 (1968): 407–16. Lubkoll, Christine. Mythos Musik: Poetische Entwürfe des Musikalischen in der Literatur um 1800. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1995. 9

Lüthi, Max. Das Märchen. Ed. Heinz Röllecke. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996.

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Lützeler, Paul Michael, ed. Romane und Erzählungen der deutschen Romantik: Neue Interpretationen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. ———, ed. Romane und Erzählungen zwischen Romantik und Realismus: Neue Interpretationen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983. Mahoney, Dennis F.. Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774–1829). Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988. Malinowski, Bernadette. “Das Heilige sei mein Wort”: Paradigmen prophetischer Dichtung von Klopstock bis Whitman. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Menninghaus, Winfried. Unendliche Verdopplung: Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987. Meixner, Horst. Romantischer Figuralismus: Kritische Studien zu Romanen von Arnim, Eichendorff und Hoffmann. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1971. Pikulik, Lothar. Frühromantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung. Munich: Beck, 1992. ———. “Die sogenannte Heidelberger Romantik: Tendenzen, Grenzen, Widersprüche. Mit einem Epilog über das Nachleben der Romantik heute.” In Heidelberg im säkularen Umbruch: Traditionsbewußtsein und Kulturpolitik um 1800. Ed. Friedrich Strack. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987, 190–215. Pross, Caroline. Kunstfeste: Drama, Politik und Öffentlichkeit in der Romantik. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2001. Richardson, Alan. A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age. University Park, PA and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1988. Saul, Nicholas. “Prediger aus der neuen romantischen Clique”: Zur Interaktion von Romantik und Homiletik um 1800. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999. Schindler, Hubert. Nazarener: Romantischer Geist und Christliche Kunst. Regensburg: Pustet, 1982. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, ed. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Sommerhage, Claus. Deutsche Romantik: Literatur und Malerei 1796–1830. Cologne: Taschen, 1988. Steffen, Hans, ed. Das deutsche Lustspiel: Erster Teil. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968. Strack, Friedrich. “Heidelberg als Stadt der Romantik.” In Stätten deutscher Literatur: Studien zur literarischen Zentrenbildung 1750–1815. Ed. Wolfgang Stellmacher. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1998, 455–74.

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Thalmann, Marianne. Provokation und Demonstration in der Komödie der Romantik. Berlin: Schmidt, 1974. Tomann, Rolf, ed. Klassizismus und Romantik: Architektur — Skulptur — Malerei — Zeichnung. 1750–1848. Cologne: Könnemann, 2000. Traeger, Jörg. Philipp Otto Runge und sein Werk: Monographie und kritischer Katalog. Munich: Prestel 1975. Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Vietta, Silvio, ed. Die literarische Frühromantik, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983.

Individual Writers and Poets Achim von Arnim Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul. Achim von Arnim’s Novellensammlung 1812: Balance and Meditation. New York: Lang, 1987. ———. “Ironie und Modernitat bei Arnim.” In Grenzgänge: Studien zu L. Achim von Arnim. Ed. Michael Andermatt. Bonn: Bouvier, 1994, 35–56. Fischer, Bernd. “Achim von Arnim (1781–1831).” In German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789–1832. Ed. James Hardin and Christoph Schweitzer. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 90. Detroit: Gale, 1989, 12–18. Geppert, Hans Vilmar. Achim von Arnims Romanfragment “Die Kronenwächter.” Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979. Hoermann, Roland. Achim von Arnim. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Kastinger Riley, Helene M. Achim von Arnim in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979. Knaack, Jürgen. Achim von Arnim — nicht nur Poet: Die politischen Anschauungen Arnims in ihrer Entwicklung. Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1976. Lützeler, Paul Michael. “Die Geburt der Kunstsage aus dem Geist der Mittelalter-Romantik: Zur Gattungsbestimmung von Achim von Arnims Die Kronenwächter.” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 46 (1986): 147–57. Ricklefs, Ulfert. Kunstthematik und Diskurskritik: Das poetische Werk des jungen Arnim und die eschatologische Wirklichkeit der Kronenwächter. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. ———. Magie und Grenze: Arnims “Päpstin Johanna”-Dichtung: Mit einer Untersuchung zur poetologischen Theorie Arnims und einem Anhang unveröffentlicher Texte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990.

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Franz von Baader Baruzzi, Arno. “Franz von Baaders Verhältnis zur Idee der Revolution.” In Deutscher Katholizismus und Revolution im frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Anton Rauscher. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1975, 33–49. Benz, Ernst. “Franz von Baaders Gedanken über den ‘Proletair’: Zur Geschichte des vor-marxistischen Sozialismus.” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 1 (1948): 97–123. Kaltenbrunner, Gert-Klaus. “Franz von Baader: Der Konservative zwischen Mystik und Politik.” In his Der schwierige Konservativismus: Definitionen, Theorien, Porträts. Herford and Berlin: Nicolai, 1975, 181–99. Peter, Klaus. “Franz Baader und William Godwin: Zum Einfluß des englischen Sozialismus in der deutschen Romantik.” Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 3 (1993): 151–72.

Clemens Brentano Böckmann, Paul. “Die romantische Poesie Brentanos und ihre Grundlagen bei Friedrich Schlegel und Tieck: Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung der Formensprache der deutschen Romantik.” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochschrifts (1934– 35): 56–176. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Brentanos Poetik. Munich: Hanser, 1961. Fetzer, John F. Romantic Orpheus: Profiles of Clemens Brentano. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974. ———. Clemens Brentano. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Frühwald, Wolfgang. “Clemens Brentano.” In Deutsche Dichter der Romantik. Ed. Benno von Wiese. Berlin: Schmidt, 1971, 280–309. Frye, Lawrence. “The Art of Narrating a Rooster Hero in Brentano’s Das Märchen von Gockel und Hinkel.” Euphorion 72 (1978): 400–420. Gajek. Homo poeta: Zur Kontinuität der Problematik bei Clemens Brentano. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1971. Riley, Helene M. Kastinger. Clemens Brentano. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985. Regener, Ursula. “Arabesker Godwi: Immanente Kunsttheorie und Gestaltreflexion in Brentanos Roman.” Modern Language Notes 103 (1988): 588–607. Stopp, Elisabeth. “Brentano’s ‘O Stern und Blume’: Its Poetic and Emblematic Context.” Modern Language Review 67 (1972): 95–117. Utz, Peter. “Singen oder schreien? Eine poetologische und sozialgeschichtliche Lektüre von Brentanos ‘Weberlied.’” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1987): 228–52.

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Adelbert von Chamisso Freund, Winfried, ed. Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl: Geld und Geist, Ein bürgerlicherBewußtseinsspiegel. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980. Gille, Klaus F. “Der Schatten des Peter Schlemihl.” Deutschunterricht 39, no. 1 (1987): 74–83. Kuzniar, Alice. “‘Spurlos. . . . Verschwunden’: Peter Schlemihl und sein Schatten als der verschobene Signifikant.” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 45 (1985): 189–204. Lahnstein, Peter. Adelbert von Chamisso: Der Preuße aus Frankreich. Munich: List, 1984. Miller, Norbert. “Chamissos Schweigen und die Krise der Berliner Romantik.” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 39 (1979): 101–19.

Joseph von Eichendorff Bohm, Arnd. “Competing Economies in Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts.” German Quarterly 58 (1985): 540–53. Nehring, Wolfgang. Spätromantiker: Eichendorff und E. T. A. Hoffmann. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997. Schiwy, Günther. Eichendorff: Der Dichter in seiner Zeit: Eine Biographie. Munich: Beck, 2000. Seidlin, Oskar. Versuche über Eichendorff. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 3rd edition, 1985. Woesler, Winfried. “Frau Venus und das schöne Mädchen mit dem Blumenkranze: Zu Eichendorffs Marmorbild.” Aurora: Jahrbuch der EichendorffGesellschaft 45 (1985): 33–48.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Engelbrecht, H. C. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: A Study of His Political Writings, with Special Reference to His Nationalism. New York: Columbia UP, 1933. Jacobs, Wilhelm G. Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984. Kroner, Richard. Von Kant bis Hegel, vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr, 1921, 303–612. Rockmore, Tom. Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980.

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Summerer, Stefan. Wirkliche Sittlichkeit und ästhetische Illusion: Die Fichterezeption in den Fragmenten und Aufzeichnungen Friedrich Schlegels und Hardenbergs. Bonn: Bouvier, 1974. Widman, Joachim. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Einführung in seine Philosophie. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1982.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué Max, Frank Rainer. Der “Wald der Welt”: Das Werk Fouqués. Bonn: Bouvier, 1980. Stockinger, Claudia. Das dramatische Werk Friedrich de la Motte Fouqués: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des romantischen Dramas. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Adler, Jeremy. “Goethe’s Gedankenlyrik: From ‘Mailied’ and ‘Ein Gleiches’ to ‘Vermächtnis,’ in the light of Goethe’s principle of ‘Synthese.’” In Goethe at 250: London Symposium. Eds. T. J. Reed, Martin Swales, and Jeremy Adler. Munich: Iudicium, 2000, 247–64. Bishop, Paul, ed. A Companion to Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and II. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001. Blackall, Eric A. Goethe and the Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1976. Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire (1749– 1790). Oxford: Clarendon, and New York: Oxford UP, 1991; vol. 2, Revolution and Renunciation (1790–1803), 2000. Brown, Jane K., Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine, eds. Interpreting Goethe’s “Faust” Today. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. Dye, Robert Ellis. “‘Selige Sehnsucht’ and Goethean Enlightenment.” PMLA 104 (1989): 190–200. Keller, Werner. “Der klassische Goethe und sein nicht-klassischer Faust.” Goethe Jahrbuch 95 (1978): 9–28. Leue, Johannes A. E. “Goethes ‘Urworte. Orphisch.’” Acta Germanica 2 (1967): 1–10. Mommsen, Katharina. Goethe und der Islam. Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 2001. Muenzer, Clark S. Figures of Identity: Goethe’s Novels and the Enigmatic Self. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1984. Phelan, Anthony. “Deconstructing Classicism: Goethe’s Helena and the Need to Rhyme.” In New Ways in Germanistik. Ed. Richard Sheppard. Oxford: Berg, 1991, 192–210.

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Stephenson, R. H. Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. Stöcklein, Paul. Wege zum späten Goethe: Dichtung, Gedanke; Zeichnung; Interpretationen. Hamburg: M. v. Schröder, 1949; reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984. Wellbery, David E. The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996. Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. and L. A. Willoughby. Goethe: Poet and Thinker. London: Edward Arnold, 1962; second ed., 1970. Wilpert, Gero von. Goethe-Lexicon. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998. Zabka, Thomas. Faust II — Das Klassische und das Romantische: Goethes “Eingriff in die neueste Literatur.” Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Zimmermann, Rolf Christian. Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe: Studien zur hermetischen Tradition des deutschen 18. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. Munich: Fink, 1969.

Joseph Görres Berger, Martin. Görres als politischer Publizist. Bonn and Leipzig: Schroeder, 1921. Raab, Heribert. “Görres und die Revolution.” In Deutscher Katholizismus und Revolution im frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Anton Rauscher. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1975, 51–80. Tarnói, László. Joseph Görres zwischen Revolution und Romantik. Budapest: Loránd-Eötvös-Universität, 1970.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Antonsen, Elmer H., et al., eds. The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: J. Benjamins, 1990. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1987. Gerstner, Hermann. Brüder Grimm. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973. Haase, Donald, ed. The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993. McGlathery, James M., ed. The Brothers Grimm and the Folktale. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Peppard, Murray B. Paths through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971.

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Röllecke, Heinz. Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Munich: Artemis, 1985. Tatar, Maria M. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forest to the Modern World. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

Karoline von Günderrode Arnim, Bettina von. Die Günderode: Den Studenten. Grünberg & Leipzig: Levysohn, 1840. Translated by Margaret Fuller as Günderode. Boston: Peabody, 1842; translation completed by Minna Wesselhoeft as Correspondence of Fräulein Günderode and Bettina von Arnim. Boston: Burnham, 1861. Burwick, Roswitha. “Liebe und Tod in Leben und Werk der Günderode.” German Studies Review 3 (1980): 207–23. Riley, Helene M. Kastinger. “Zwischen den Welten: Ambivalenz und Existentialproblematik im Werk Caroline von Günderrodes.” In her Die weibliche Muse. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1986, 90–119. Wolf, Christa. Kein Ort: Nirgends. Darmstadt: Lutchterhand, 1979. Translated by Jan Van Heurck as No Place on Earth. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982; London: Virago, 1983.

Wilhelm Hauff Hinz, Otto. Wilhelm Hauff: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989. Hollstein, Dorothea. “Dreimal Jud Süss: Zeugnisse ‘schmählichster Barbarei.’ Hauffs Novelle, Feuchtwangers Roman und Harlans Film in vergleichender Betrachtung.” Der Deutschunterricht. Stuttgart, 37, no. 3 (1985): 42–54. Pfäfflin, Friedrich. Wilhelm Hauff: Der Verfasser des “Lichtenstein.” Chronik seines Lebens und Werkes. Stuttgart: Fleischhauer & Spohn, 1981. Scheck, Ulrich. “Wald und Wucher in Wilhelm Hauffs Das kalte Herz.” In Natur, Räume, Landschaften: 2. Internationales Kingstoner Symposium. Ed. Burkhardt Krause and Ulrich Scheck. Munich: Iudicium, 1996, 157–68.

Heinrich Heine Hermand, Jost. Der frühe Heine: Ein Kommentar zu den “Reisebildern.” Munich: Winkler, 1976. Höhn, Gerhard. Heine-Handbuch: Zeit, Person, Werk. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987.

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Kruse, Joseph A., et al., eds. “Ich Narr des Glücks”: Heinrich Heine 1797–1856. Bilder einer Ausstellung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997. Oesterle, Günter. Integration und Konflikt: Die Prosa Heinrich Heines im Kontext oppositioneller Literatur der Restaurationsepoche. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972. Prawer, S. S. Heine the Tragic Satirist: A Study of the Later Poetry 1827–1856. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961. ———. Heine’s Jewish Comedy: A Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. Reeves, Nigel. Heinrich Heine: Poetry and Politics. London: Libris, 1974; revised edition, 1997. Robertson, Ritchie. Heine. London: Holban, 1988. Sammons, Jeffrey L. Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet. New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale UP, 1969. ———. Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979. Spencer, Hanna. Heinrich Heine. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Windfuhr, Manfred. Heinrich Heine: Revolution und Reflexion. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969. Winkler, Markus, ed. Heinrich Heine und die Romantik / Heinrich Heine and Romanticism: Erträge eines Symposiums an der Pennsylvania State University (21.-23. September 1995). Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997.

E. T. A. Hoffmann Ellis, John M. “Clara, Nathanael, and the Narrator: Interpreting Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann.” German Quarterly 54 (1981): 1–18. Feldges, Brigitte, and Ulrich Stadler. E. T. A. Hoffmann: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung. Munich: Beck, 1986. Gaskill, Howard. “Open Circles: Hoffmann’s Kater Murr and Hölderlin’s Hyperion.” Colloquia Germanica 19 (1986): 21–46. Jennings, Lee B. “Blood of the Android: A Post-Freudian Perspective on Hoffmann’s Sandmann.” Seminar 22 (1986): 95–111. Kremer, Detlef. Romantische Metamorphosen: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählungen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993. McGlathery, James M. E. T. A. Hoffmann. London: Prentice Hall, and New York: Twayne, 1997. Prawer, S. S. “Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest: A Reading of Der Sandmann.” German Life and Letters 18 (1965): 297–308.

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Safranski, Rüdiger. E. T. A. Hoffmann: Das Leben eines skeptischen Phantasten. Munich: Hanser, 1984. Segebrecht, Wulf. Autobiographie und Dichtung: Eine Studie zum Werk E. T. A. Hoffmanns. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967. Singer, Herbert. “Hoffmann: Kater Murr.” In Der deutsche Roman vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Benno von Wiese. Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1963, 1: 301–29. Wawrzyn, Lienhard. Der Automaten-Mensch: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung vom “Sandmann.” Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976. Wright, Elizabeth. E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Rhetoric of Terror: Aspects of Language Used for the Evocation of Fear. London: U of London, Institute of Germanic Studies, 1978.

Friedrich Hölderlin Gaskill, Howard. Hölderlin’s “Hyperion.” Durham: U of Durham, 1984. Roberg, Thomas, ed. Friedrich Hölderlin: Neue Wege der Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003. Ryan, Lawrence. Hölderlins “Hyperion”: Exzentrische Bahn und Dichterberuf. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965.

Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) Götz, Müller. Jean Pauls Ästhetik und Naturphilosophie. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983. Koepke, Wulf. “Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics: Humor and the Sublime.” In Eighteenth-Century German Authors and Their Aesthetic Theories: Literature and the Other Arts. Ed. Richard Critchfield and Wulf Koepke. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1988, 185–202. Ortheil, Hanns-Josef. Jean Paul: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984. Schweikert, Uwe, ed. Jean Paul. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974.

Heinrich von Kleist Allan, Sean. The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Angress, Ruth K. “Kleist’s Treatment of Imperialism: Die Hermannsschlacht and Die Verlobung in St. Domingo.” Monatshefte 69 (1977): 17–33.

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Berns, Gisela. “‘Mit dem Rücken’ gegen Schiller: Zur Funktion der Schillertexte in Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.” In Ethik und Ästhetik: Werke und Werte in der Literatur vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert; Festschrift für Wolfgang Wittkowski zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. Richard Fisher. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995, 329–48. Busch, Rolf. Imperialistische und faschistische Kleist-Rezeption 1890–1945: Eine ideologie-kritische Untersuchung. Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1974. Ellis, John M. Heinrich von Kleist: Studies in the Character and Meaning of His Writings. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979. Endres, Johannes. Das “depotenzierte” Subjekt: Zu Geschichte und Funktion des Komischen bei Heinrich von Kleist. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996. Essen, Gesa von. Hermannsschlachten: Germanen- und Römerbilder in der Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998. Greiner, Bernhard. Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum “Fall” der Kunst. Tübingen and Basel: UTB, 2000. Heine, Roland. “‘Ein Traum, was sonst?’ Zum Verhältnis von Traum und Wirklichkeit in Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.” In Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte: Festschrift für Richard Brinkmann. Eds. Jürgen Brummack et al. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1981, 283–313. Hinderer, Walter, ed. Kleists Dramen: Neue Interpretationen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. Japp, Uwe. “Kleist und die Komödie seiner Zeit.” Kleist Jahrbuch 1996: 108– 22. Kittler, Wolf. “Partisanenkrieg.” In his Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1989, 218–55. Kording, Inka and Anton Philipp Knittel, eds. Heinrich von Kleist: Neue Wege der Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003. Lützeler, Paul Michael. “Napoleons Kolonialtraum und Kleists Die Verlobung in St. Domingo.” Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vorträge G 372 (= Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000): 1–32. ———, and David Pan, eds. Kleists Erzählungen und Dramen. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001. Mommsen, Katharina. Kleists Kampf mit Goethe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Müller-Seidel, Walter, ed. Heinrich von Kleist: Aufsätze und Essays. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967; 3rd ed., 1980.

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Peter, Klaus. “Romantik und Politik in Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts 1992: 95–125. ———. “Sehnsucht nach dem Gott: Kleist, der Mythos und eine Tendenz der Forschung,” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts 1993: 183–257. Reeve, William C. In Pursuit of Power: Heinrich von Kleist’s Machiavellian Protagonists. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 1987. ———. Kleist on Stage: 1804–1987. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993. Samuel, Richard. “Kleists Hermannsschlacht und der Freiherr von Stein.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 5 (1961): 64–101. Stephens, Anthony R. Heinrich von Kleist: The Dramas and Stories. Oxford and Providence, Rhode Island: Berg, 1994. Wichmann, Thomas. Heinrich von Kleist. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988. Wickert, Gabriele M. Das verlorene heroische Zeitalter: Held und Volk in Heinrich von Kleists Dramen. New York: Lang, 1983.

Adam Müller Aris, Reinhold. Die Staatslehre Adam Müllers in ihrem Verhältnis zur deutschen Romantik. Tübingen: Mohr, 1929. Baxa, Jakob. Adam Müller: Ein Lebensbild aus den Befreiungskriegen und aus der deutschen Restoration. Jena: G. Fischer, 1930. Hanisch, Ernst. “Der ‘vormoderne’ Antikapitalismus der Politischen Romantik: Das Beispiel Adam Müller.” In Romantik in Deutschland: Ein interdisziplinäres Symposion. Ed. Richard Brinkmann. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978, 132–46. Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus. “Adam Müller: Ein Konservativer zwischen Preußen und Österreich.” In his Der schwierige Konservatismus: Definitionen, Theorien, Porträts. Herford and Berlin: Nicolai, 1975, 201–21. Köhler, Benedikt. Ästhetik der Politik: Adam Müller und die politische Romantik. Stuttgart: Klett, 1980. Peter, Klaus. “Novalis, Fichte, Adam Müller: Zur Staatsphilosophie in Aufklärung und Romantik.” In Novalis und die Wissenschaften. Ed. Herbert Uerlings. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997, 239–67.

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) Daiber, Jürgen. Experimentalphysik des Geistes: Novalis und das romantische Experiment. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001.

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Davis, William Stephen. “‘Menschwerdung der Menschen’: Poetry and Truth in Hardenberg’s Hymnen an die Nacht and the ‘Journal’ of 1797.” Athenäum: Jahrbuch der Romantik 4 (1994): 239–59. Liedtke, Ralf. Das romantische Paradigma der Chemie: Friedrich von Hardenbergs Naturphilosophie zwischen Empirie und alchemistischer Spekulation. Paderborn: mentis, 2003. Kasperowski, Ira. Mittelalterrezeption im Werk des Novalis. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. Kurzke, Hermann. Romantik und Konservatismus: Das “politische” Werk Friedrich von Hardenbergs (Novalis) im Horizont seiner Wirkungsgeschichte. Munich: Fink, 1983. Kuzniar, Alice. “Hearing Woman’s Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” PMLA 107 (1992): 1196–1207. Mähl, Hans-Joachim. Die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis: Studien zur Wesensbestimmung der frühromantischen Utopie und ihren ideengeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen. Heidelberg: Winter, 1965. Mahoney, Dennis F. Die Poetisierung der Natur bei Novalis: Beweggründe, Gestaltung, Folgen. Bonn: Bouvier, 1980. ———. Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. Neubauer, John. Novalis. Boston: Twayne, 1980. O’Brien, Wm. Artander. Novalis: Signs of Revolution. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Rommel, Gabriele, ed. Geheimnisvolle Zeichen: Alchemie, Magie, Mystik und Natur bei Novalis. Berlin: Edition Leipzig, 1998. Saul, Nicholas. History and Poetry in Novalis and in the Tradition of the German Enlightenment. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1984. Schulz, Gerhard. Novalis in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969; 15th ed. 2001. Stadler, Ulrich. “Novalis — Ein Lehrling Friedrich Schillers?” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 50 (1990): 47–62. Uerlings, Herbert. “Novalis und die Weimarer Klassik.” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 50 (1990): 27–46. ———. Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis: Werk und Forschung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. ———, ed. Novalis und die Wissenschaften. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. ———, ed., “Blüthenstaub”: Rezeption und Wirkung des Werkes von Novalis. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Volkmann-Schluck, Karl Heinz. “Novalis’ magischer Idealismus.” In Die deutsche Romantik: Poetik, Formen und Motive. Ed. Hans Steffen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ²1970, 45–53.

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Wilkening, Frank. “Progression und Regression: Die Geschichtsauffassung Friedrich von Hardenbergs.” In: Romantische Utopie — Utopische Romantik. Ed. Gisela Dischner and Richard Faber. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1979, 251– 69.

F. W. J. Schelling Jähnig, Dieter. Schelling: Die Kunst in der Philosophie. 2 vols. Pfullingen: Neske, 1966–69. Marx, Werner. The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling: History, System, and Freedom. Translated by Thomas Nenon. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Sandkühler, Hans Jörg. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970. Schueller, H. M., “Schelling’s Theory of the Metaphysics of Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (1956–57): 461–76. Szondi, Peter, “Schellings Gattungspoetik.” In his Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974, 185–307.

Friedrich Schiller Behler, Ernst. “Die Wirkung Goethes und Schillers auf die Brüder Schlegel.” In Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik. Eds. Wilfried Barner, Eberhard Lämmert, and Norbert Oellers. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1984, 559–83. Hinderer, Walter. Der Mensch in der Geschichte: Ein Versuch über Schillers Wallenstein. Königstein: Athenäum, 1980. ———, ed. Schillers Dramen: Neue Interpretationen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979. Janz, Rolf-Peter. Autonomie und soziale Funktion der Kunst: Studien zur Ästhetik von Schiller und Novalis. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973. Koopman, Helmut. Friedrich Schiller. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966; revised, 1977. Lovejoy, Arthur O. “Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism.” In his Essays on the History of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1948, 207–27. Sharpe, Lesley. Schiller and the Historical Character: Presentation and Interpretation in the Historiographical Works and in the Historical Dramas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Simons, John D. Friedrich Schiller. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

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Stockinger, Claudia. “Dramaturgie der Zerstreuung. Schiller und das romantische Drama.” In Das romantische Drama: Produktive Synthese zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Eds. Uwe Japp, Stefan Scherer, and Claudia Stockinger. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000, 199–225. Wessell, Leonard P. The Philosophical Background to Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetics of Living Form. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1982. Wiese, Benno von. Friedrich Schiller, 4th edition. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978.

August Wilhelm Schlegel Atkinson, Margaret Edith. August Wilhelm Schlegel as a Translator of Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell, and Brooklyn, New York: Haskell House, 1958. Behler, Ernst. Die Zeitschriften der Brüder Schlegel: Ein Beitrag Zur Geschichte der deutschen Romantik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. Ewton, Ralph. The Literary Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. Guthke, Karl S. “Benares am Rhein — Rom am Ganges: Orient und Okzident im Denken August Wilhelm Schlegels.” In his Das Abenteuer der Literatur. Bern: Francke, 1981, 242–58. Körner. Romantiker und Klassiker: Die Brüder Schlegel in ihren Beziehungen zu Goethe und Schiller. Berlin: Askanischer Verlag, 1924; reprint Bern: Lang, 1974. Sauer, Thomas G. A. W. Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism in England, 1811– 1846. Bonn: Bouvier, 1981. Schenk-Lenzen, Ulrike. Das ungleiche Verhältnis von Kunst und Kritik: Zur Literaturkritik August Wilhelm Schlegels. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1991. Wellek, Rene. “August Wilhelm Schlegel.” In his A History of Modern Criticism. Volume 2. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955, 36–73, 354–66.

Friedrich Schlegel Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. “Schlegels Lucinde: Zum Frauenbild der Frühromantik.” Colloquia Germanica 10 (1976–77): 128–39. Behler, Ernst. Friedrich Schlegel in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966. Chaouli, Michel. “Friedrich Schlegels Labor der Poesie.” Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 2001, 59–70. Eichner, Hans. “Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of Romantic Poetry.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 71 (1956): 1018–41.

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———. Friedrich Schlegel. New York: Twayne, 1970. Helfer, Martha B. “‘Confessions of an Improper Man’: Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde.” In Outing Goethe and His Age. Ed. Alice Kuzniar. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 174–93. Immerwahr, Raymond. “Friedrich Schlegel’s Essay ‘On Goethe’s Meister.’” Monatshefte 49 (1957): 1–21. Littlejohns, Richard. “The ‘Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten’: a Re-Examination of Emancipatory Ideas in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde.” Modern Language Review 77 (1977): 605–14. Peter, Klaus. Friedrich Schlegel. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978.

Ludwig Tieck Birrell, Gordon. The Boundless Present: Space and Time in the Literary Fairy Tales of Novalis and Tieck. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979. Brecht, Christoph. Die gefährliche Rede: Sprachreflexion und Erzählstruktur in der Prosa Ludwig Tiecks. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Immerwahr, Raymond. The Esthetic Intent of Tieck’s Fantastic Comedy. St. Louis: Washington UP, 1953. Lillyman, William J. Reality’s Dark Dream: The Narrative Fiction of Ludwig Tieck. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979. Paulin, Roger. Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Trainer, James. Ludwig Tieck: From Gothic to Romantic. The Hague: Mouton, 1964. Wulf Segebrecht, ed. Ludwig Tieck. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976. Zybura, Marek. Ludwig Tieck als Übersetzer und Herausgeber: Zur frühromantischen Idee einer deutschen Weltliteratur. Heidelberg: Winter, 1994.

Dorothea Veit-Schlegel Helfer, Martha B. “Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s Florentin: Constructing a Feminist Romantic Aesthetic.” German Quarterly 69 (1996): 144–60. Hibbert, J. “Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin and the Precarious Idyll.” German Life and Letters 30 (1977): 198–207. Roberts, F. Corey. “The Perennial Search for Paradise: Garden Design and Political Critique in Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin.” German Quarterly 75 (2002): 247–64.

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Stern, Carola. “Ich möchte mir Flügel wünschen”: Das Leben der Dorothea Schlegel. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990.

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder Bollacher, Martin. “Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder: Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1796–97).” In Romane und Erzählungen der deutschen Romantik: Neue Interpretationen. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981, 34–57. Ellis, John. Joseph Berglinger in Perspective. Bern: Lang, 1985. Kemper, Dirk. “Goethe, Wackenroder und das ‘klosterbrudrisirende, sternbaldisirende Unwesen.’” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 1993: 148–68. ———. Sprache der Dictung: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder im Kontext der Spätaufklärung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993. Littlejohns, Richard. Wackenroder-Studien: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Biographie und Rezeption des Romantikers. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Lang, 1987.

Notes on the Contributors BEATE ALLERT is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Chair of the German Section in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Purdue University in Indiana. Her most recent book is the edited volume Languages of Visuality: Crossings Between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature (1996). She is the author of numerous studies on eighteenth and early nineteenth century authors including Jean-Paul, Lessing, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Goethe. Her research is particularly concerned with visualverbal dynamics, ekphrasis, and metaphor. PAUL BISHOP is Professor of German and Head of the Department of German at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of various books and articles on Goethe, Nietzsche, and C. G. Jung, and the editor of Jung in Contexts: A Reader (1999), (with R. H. Stephenson) of Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work (2000), and editor of A Companion to Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and II (2001). ARND BOHM is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University. His research interests are German literary history from 1700 to the present; English Romanticism; Anglo-German literary relations; and modern poetry. Recent publications include articles on Goethe (Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift; Modern Language Studies); Wordsworth (The Wordsworth Circle; Romanticism); Celan (Germanic Review); and Tournier (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature). MARTHA B. HELFER is Associate Professor of German at the University of Utah. Her publications include The Retreat of Representation (1996), Rereading Romanticism (ed., 2000), and numerous articles on gender and Romanticism. She also has published on the rhetoric of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century literature. Her article on Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche was awarded the Max Kade Prize for Best Article in the German Quarterly in 1998. GERHART HOFFMEISTER is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature in the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Languages at the University of California–Santa Barbara. He is the author of many articles and reviews as well as the editor of various collections of essays, among them European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models (1990) and A Reassessment of Weimar Classicism (1996). His monographs include:

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Deutsche und europäische Romantik (1976; 2nd. ed. 1990); Goethe und die europäische Romantik (1984); Heine in der Romania (2002). FABIAN LAMPART is Wissenschaftlicher Assistent in the Seminar for German Philology at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen, where he has been involved in the founding and development of the Center for Comparative Studies and the program of studies in Comparative Literature. His publications include Zeit und Geschichte: Die Anfänge des historischen Romans bei Scott, Arnim, Vigny und Manzoni (2002) as well as essays, lexicon articles, and reviews on the literature and aesthetics of Romanticism, the history and theory of Realism, and contemporary German lyric poetry. RICHARD LITTLEJOHNS is Professor of Modern Languages and Director of Studies in German at the University of Leicester. He edited volume 2 of the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe of Wackenroder’s Sämtliche Werke (1991) and has published a volume of Wackenroder-Studien (1987), as well as articles on Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Görres, Eichendorff, and Remarque. He is currently completing a monograph on Philipp Otto Runge’s Tageszeiten cycle of drawings. In 1988 he was awarded the Oskar Seidlin prize of the Eichendorff-Gesellschaft for his published work on Romanticism DENNIS F. MAHONEY is Professor of German and Director of the European Studies Program at the University of Vermont.He is the author of Die Poetisierung der Natur bei Novalis: Beweggründe, Gestaltung, Folgen (1980), Der Roman der Goethezeit (1987), The Critical Fortunes of a Romantic Novel: Novalis’s “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” (1994) and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) (2001). In addition to his articles and book chapters on German literature from Lessing to Büchner, he also has published on the German film and been guest editor of the journal Historical Reflections for special issues on the topics “The Eighteenth Century and Uses of the Past” (Fall 1992) and “The End of the Enlightenment” (Fall 2000). BERNADETTE MALINOWSKI is Wissenschaftliche Assistentin at the University of Augsburg, where she teaches German and Comparative Literature. She has written a monograph titled “Das Heilige sei mein Wort”: Paradigmen prophetischer Dichtung von Klopstock bis Whitman (2002) and published several articles on realism, contemporary German literature, and literary theory. KRISTINA MUXFELDT is Associate Professor of Music History at Yale University. She is currently completing a book of essays probing matters of cultural and reception history in and around works of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. Previously published essays in this area include “Political Crimes and Liberty, or Why Would Schubert Eat a Peacock?” (1993), “Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of Narcissus” (1996), and “Frauenliebe und Leben Now and Then” (2001). On her desk currently is “The Fairy Tale and the

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

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Censor,” a study of Schubert’s last (unfinished) opera on the Graf von Gleichen legend. KLAUS PETER is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the author of Idealismus als Kritik: Friedrich Schlegels Philosophie der unvollendeten Welt (1972), Friedrich Schlegel (1978), and Stadien der Aufklärung: Moral und Politik bei Lessing, Novalis und Friedrich Schlegel (1980), as well as the editor of Romantikforschung seit 1945 (1980) and Die politische Romantik in Deutschland: eine Textsammlung (1985). In addition, he has published major articles on authors of the Romantic period such as Arnim, Baader, Fichte, Kleist, Adam Müller, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. GABRIELE ROMMEL has been the Director of the Forschungsstätte für Frühromantik und Novalis-Museum Schloß Oberwiederstedt since their founding in 1992. In that time she has organized numerous exhibits and edited the accompanying catalogues, including Geheimnisvolle Zeichen: Alchemie, Magie, Mystik und Natur bei Novalis (1998) and Novalis: Das Werk und seine Editoren (2001). She also is involved in editing the concluding volumes of the historical-critical edition of the works of Novalis. NICHOLAS SAUL is Chair of German at the University of Durham. He is the author of monographs on Poetry and History in Novalis and the German Enlightenment (1984) and “Prediger aus der neuen romantischen Clique”: Zur Interaktion von Romantik und Homiletik um 1800 (1999). He has edited volumes on literature and science, threshold metaphors, the body in German literature, German literature and philosophy, and “Gypsies” in European cultures, and also published essays and articles on authors from Frederick the Great of Prussia to Wilkie Collins, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Botho Strauß. ULRICH SCHECK is Professor of German and Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. He is the author of monographs and articles on Nestroy, Robert Neumann, Tieck, Schlegel, Ludwig Börne and Christoph Ransmayr. Together with Burkhardt Krause he has co-edited the volumes Verleiblichungen: Literatur- und kulturgeschichtliche Studien über Strategien, Formen und Funktionen der Verleiblichung in Texten von der Frühzeit bis zum ‘Cyberspace’ (1996) and Natur, Räume, Landschaften (1996). He has also co-edited and co-authored volumes on intercultural Germanistik and the didactics of teaching Business German. GERHARD SCHULZ is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he has held the Chair of German from 1969 to 1992. He is the author of the two-volume literary history Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration (1983/89, 2nd ed. vol. 1 2000).

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In addition to his numerous articles and essays on German literature in the era of Classicism and Romanticism he has published monographs on Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff (1996, 2nd ed. 2002), Exotik der Gefühle: Goethe und seine Deutschen (1998), and Novalis in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (1969, 15th ed. 2001), the latter of whose works he also has edited. R. H. STEPHENSON is William Jacks Professor of German at the University of Glasgow, Director of its Center for Intercultural Germanistics, and Head of its School of Modern Languages. He has published widely on various aspects of German literature and thought, including numerous articles, monographs on Goethe’s Wisdom Literature: A Study in Aesthetic Transmutation (1983) and Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (1995). He is co-editor (with Paul Bishop) of Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work (2000). CLAUDIA STOCKINGER is Junior Professor in the German Department at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen. She is the author of Das dramatische Werk Friedrich de la Motte Fouqués: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des romantischen Dramas (2000), has published various articles on German literary history from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century (Kasuallyrik, Lessing, Schiller, Moritz, Brentano, Hauff, Immermann), and is co-editor (with Uwe Japp and Stefan Scherer) of Das romantische Drama: Produktive Synthese zwischen Tradition und Innovation (2000).

Index Adelung, Johann Christoph, 27 Adorno, Theodor, 328, 341, 348–49, 351 Adorno, Theodor, works by: Ästhetische Theorie, 348; Dialektik der Aufklärung, 348 aesthetic, the, 7, 9, 21 n. 12, 26– 27, 30, 41, 56 n. 52, 64, 81– 83, 93, 95, 126, 138, 148–49, 151–52, 156–59, 162–63, 165–66, 173, 181, 183, 187 n. 3, 193, 199, 211, 214–15, 218, 220, 232–33, 236, 238, 240– 42, 248 n. 43, 249 n. 45, 252, 268 n. 4, 273–74, 291, 307, 311–13, 317–19, 321, 328–31, 336, 338–40, 342, 348–54 aestheticism, 92, 162, 193, 331– 32, 336, 351 aesthetics, 31, 33, 36, 40, 43, 47, 73–74, 148–49, 151–52, 156– 58, 162, 166 n. 5, 173, 176, 179, 181, 192, 231, 246 n. 7, 268 n. 4, 273–74, 276, 283, 288, 296–97, 328, 340 Age of Goethe, 6, 21 n. 9, 90, 97 n. 7, 231, 309 alienation, 92, 114, 116, 147, 319, 328 allegory, 69, 92, 104, 151, 157, 215, 235, 238, 287, 289–90, 292, 316, 318 Allert, Beate, 4, 20 n. 4, 24 n. 35, 77 n. 21, 273–306, 355 n. 4, 358 n. 51 American Revolution, 45, 49 Amiens, Treaty of, 10 Anaxagoras, 317

Anaximander, 310 antiquity, 26, 28–29, 31, 33, 43, 46, 125, 197–98, 212 anti-Semitism, 20 n. 8, 178–79 aphorism, 2, 9, 65–70, 72, 76 n. 8, 80, 160, 202, 308, 311 arabesque, 5, 86–87, 90, 126, 151, 273–74, 297, 299 n. 11, 352 Ariosto, Ludovico, 43, 45–46, 57 Aristotle, 8, 310–11, 321, 325 n. 42 Arminius, 12–13, 32, 137, 140 Arnheim, Rudolf, 307, 321, 322 n. 3 Arnim, Achim von, 4–5, 10, 18, 20, 33, 93, 98–99, 115–16, 118, 132–35, 138–39, 143–45, 172–73, 177–81, 183–89, 209, 216, 219–22, 224, 226–27, 229, 291–92, 304 Arnim, Achim von, works by: Ariel’s Offenbarungen, 132–33; Armut, Reichtum, Schuld und Buße der Gräfin Dolores, 20 n. 20, 132, 134; Die Capitulation von Oggersheim, 134; Erzählungen von Schauspielen, 132; Die Gleichen, 135; Halle und Jerusalem, 133; Hollins Liebeleben, 222; Des Knaben Wunderhorn (with Brentano), 115, 122 n. 19, 170, 172–73, 177–83, 292; Die Kronenwächter, 93, 99 n. 31; Landhausleben, 132; Das Loch, 134, 138; Die Päpstin Johanna, 132, 134–35; Schaubühne, 134; Theorie der elektrischen

400 ❦

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Erscheinungen, 222; Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau, 115–16, 122 n. 20, 122 n. 25 Arnim, Bettine von, 230, 242, 255, 346 Arnim, Bettine von, works by: Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, 242, 249 n. 49 Arnold, Matthew, 35, 51 n. 61 Atkins, Stuart, 45 Auerstedt, Battle of, 12, 207 n. 20, 291–92, 327 Aufklärung (Enlightenment), 1– 3, 21 n. 14, 32, 35, 41, 54 n. 38, 61–63, 65, 74, 76 n. 4, 77 n. 15, 85, 93, 109, 125, 127–28, 139, 141 n. 21, 147, 162, 174–75, 187 n. 13, 193– 94, 196–200, 202, 205 n. 6, 207 n. 21, 209, 216, 221, 224 n. 17, 278, 306 n. 77, 346, 348–49, 355, 358 n. 5 Augsburg, 69 Aurora, 287–88 Auschwitz, 353 Austria, 7, 10, 12–13, 17, 91, 130, 147, 191, 195, 199, 208 n. 25, 260, 295, 333 autonomy of art, 9, 154, 258, 330–31, 345, 350–51 Baader, Franz, 192, 203–5, 208 Baader, Franz, works by: Über das dermalige Mißverhältnis der Vermögenslosen oder Proletairs zu den Vermögen besitzenden Klassen der Sozietät, 203–4 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 264 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 349–50, 354, 359 Bachmann, Ingeborg, works by: Undine geht, 349–50; Malina, 349–50 Bacon, Francis, 218

Baden, 10 Baggesen, Jens, 33 ballad, 5, 133, 335 Bamberg, 2, 210 Baroque, 2, 161, 251, 318 Basel, Treaty of, 7 Bassege, Pauline, 287 Bastille, 11, 147 Baudelaire, Charles, 153, 330 Bavaria, 6, 10, 295 Bayly, Thomas, 26 Baxa, Jakob, 193, 203, 208 n. 25, 335, 341, 357 n. 36 Becker-Cantarino, Barbara, 109 n. 42, 230, 248 n. 38 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 253–63, 268–70, 307, 322 n. 7 Beethoven, Ludwig van, works by: Christus am Ölberge (op. 85), 261; C-sharp minor String Quartet (op. 131), 260; Fifth Symphony (op. 67), 254; Fourth Piano Concerto (op. 58), 259–60; Piano trios (op. 70), 255; Third Symphony (Eroica, op. 55), 257, 262–63; Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria (op. 91), 254–55 Behler, Ernst, 217, 229, 231, 246–47 Benjamin, Walter, 153, 262, 267 n. 1, 270 n. 25, 273–75, 296–97, 301 n. 31, 328, 337, 340–41, 348, 358 n. 51 Benjamin, Walter, works by: Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 340; Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 340; Über den Begriff der Geschichte, 340 Berlin, 2–3, 10, 12, 16–17, 39, 62, 68, 70, 73, 75, 85, 102, 111, 113, 120, 127, 130,

INDEX

144 n. 55, 179, 191, 210, 252, 274, 283, 288, 291, 293, 295, 346, 353 Berlioz, Hector, works by: “Harold” Symphony, 258; Symphonie Fantastique, 258, 269 n. 18 Beuys, Joseph, 288 Bible, 46, 204, 318, 325 n. 40 Biedermeier, 185, 274–75 Biermann, Wolf, 342, 345 Bildungsroman, 40, 55 n. 48, 68– 69, 81, 97–98, 157, 241, 332– 33, 337, 351 biology, 212 Bishop, Paul, 4, 307–26, 355 n. 4 Bismarck, Otto von, 13, 204 Blackall, Eric A., 76 n. 11, 90, 95 Blake, William, 276 Blanckenburg, Christian Friedrich von, 79 Bloch, Ernst, 339, 344 blue flower, 7, 16, 18, 87, 243, 275, 278, 285–86, 339, 350, 358 n. 65 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 209 Bohm, Arnd, 3, 20 n. 4, 35–60, 325 n. 45, 355 n. 4 Böhme, Jakob, 204, 285–86, 301 n. 42, 303 n. 59 Böhmer, Caroline, 195. See also Schlegel-Schelling, Caroline Boisserée, Sulpiz, 294, 302 n. 47 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 6–7, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 20 n. 8, 22, 32, 90–92, 145, 147, 174, 193, 195, 197, 207 n. 20, 263, 335 Bonaventura. See Klingemann, Ernst August Bovenschen, Silvia, 230 Brahms, Johannes, 25 Brandenburg, 15–16 Brant, Sebastian, 94

❦ 401

Brecht, Bertolt, 335, 340, 342, 354 Brentano, Clemens, 4–5, 10, 18, 20 n. 8, 33, 71, 87–89, 115, 130–32, 138–39, 142–43, 152, 159–62, 167–69, 172–73, 177–81, 183–89, 229, 254–56, 268 n. 12, 291–92, 304–5, 346 Brentano, Clemens, works by: Aloys und Imelde, 131; Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter, ein verwilderter Roman, 5, 20 n. 5, 85, 87–89, 92, 94, 99 n. 9, 132, 150; Die Gründung Prags, 130–32, 143 n. 37; Gustav Wasa, 130– 31; Juanna, 130; Des Knaben Wunderhorn (with Achim von Arnim), 115, 122 n. 19, 170, 172–73, 177–83, 292; Nachklänge Beethovenscher Musik, 254–56, 268 n. 12; Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte, 139, 179, 188 n. 29; Ponce de Leon, 131, 138–40, 143 n. 43; “Verschiedene Empfindungen vor einer Seelandschaft von Friedrich,” 18, 291, 304–5; “Wenn der arme Weber träumt,” 159–62, 168–69 Brown, John, works by: Elementa medicinae, 212 Brueghel, Pieter, 94 Bruyn, Günter de, works by: Das Leben des Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 346, 349 Büchner, Georg, 18, 25, 131–32, 135, 145 n. 76, 304 n. 65 Burdach, Konrad, 49 Bürger, Christa, 230 Bürger, Gottfried August, 36 Burgtheater, 12, 17

402 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Burke, Edmund, works by: Reflections on the Revolution in France, 200 Büsching, Anton Friedrich, 310 Byron. See Gordon, George (Lord Byron) Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 28– 29, 126, 131 Campo Formio, Treaty of, 9 caprice, 80, 83, 86, 88, 93, 312– 13 Carl August, Duke of Weimar, 7 Carlsbad Decrees, 192, 202 Carlyle, Thomas, 35, 41–42, 55 n. 45 Carstens, Asmus Jakob, 283 Carus, Carl Gustav, 220 Cassirer, Ernst, 307, 322 n. 2 Catholicism, conversion to, 10, 32, 41, 54 n. 42, 72, 94, 195, 293 censorship, 9, 192, 202, 260–62 Cervantes, Miguel de, 28–29, 43, 69, 80, 82, 89–90 Cézanne, Paul, 307 Chagall, Marc, 296 Chamfort, Nicolas de, 66 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 2, 33, 112–14, 209, 216, 221 Chamisso, Adelbert von, works by: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 112–14, 122 n. 17 chaos, 71, 108, 110, 139, 150, 156, 215, 217, 226 n. 39, 256 Chaouli, Michel, 212 chemistry, 8, 21 n. 14, 212–15, 223–24 childhood, 91, 103, 106, 110–11, 137, 176, 181, 263, 332 Chodowiecki, Daniel-Nicolas, 283 Christ, Jesus, 70–71, 92, 154–56, 161, 287, 289–90, 293, 339 Christendom, 9, 61, 72–73 Christian, 28–33, 40–41, 44, 49, 70, 73, 75, 133–34, 137, 139,

155–56, 162, 169 n. 37, 197, 204, 243–44, 285, 289, 309– 10, 318, 328 Christianity, 9, 30–32, 43, 46, 71, 110, 162, 179, 197–98, 206 “Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft,” 20 n. 8, 178–79 classicism. See Weimar Classicism Coblenz, 191 Coellen, Ludwig, 329–30, 354 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 36– 37, 40–41, 51 n. 7, 58 n. 63 Cologne, 195, 351–52 Congress of Vienna, 10, 137, 147, 191–92, 195, 199, 254–55 Cooper, John Michael, 264, 270 n. 27 Copenhagen, 284–85, 295 Cornelius, Peter von, 294 Cranach, Lukas, 276 Creuzer, Friedrich, 239, 292 Dante (Dante Alighieri), 28–29, 40, 43–44, 58 n. 58, 80, 269 n. 17, 316, 318 Danton, Georges Jacques, 193 Darwin, Erasmus, works by: Zoonomia, 212 Delibes, Leo, works by: Coppelia, 120 democracy, 196, 201, 345 dialogue, 69, 102, 127, 132, 135, 256, 266 Diderot, Denis, 68 Disney, Walt, works by: Cinderella, 5 Dittersdorf, Carl Ditters von, 254 Doctorow, E. L., works by: Ragtime, 118–19, 123 n. 26 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 208 n. 25 drama, 2, 12–17, 30, 36–39, 41, 44–49, 59, 68, 125–45, 305 n. 67, 314, 317–20, 332, 349 dream, 7, 16–18, 66, 69, 87, 108, 110, 117, 120, 135, 160–62,

INDEX

210, 222, 243, 276–78, 332, 337, 339, 343, 350–52 Dresden, 3, 10, 12–13, 16, 199, 210, 283–85, 287, 289, 292– 93, 295 dualism, 65, 161, 164, 214, 334, 338 Dürer, Albrecht, 73–74, 85, 90, 276 Early Romanticism, 1–3, 5–10, 61–77, 84–91, 101–6, 127–31, 148–56, 193–98, 201–2, 214– 15, 217–20, 230–44, 251–53, 273–74, 276–90, 292, 296–97 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic Eckermann, Johann Peter, 3, 20 n. 4, 46, 56 n. 51, 317, 323 n. 18, 325–26 economics, 11, 203, 318 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 4–5, 10, 19–20, 25, 29, 32–34, 61, 75, 90–92, 98, 109–11, 121, 126, 138–40, 144–45, 152, 156, 159, 163, 168–69, 229, 292, 295 Eichendorff, Joseph von, works by: Ahnung und Gegenwart, 20 n. 5, 90–93, 98, 145 n. 70; Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, 109, 295; Dichter und ihre Gesellen, 25; Ezelin von Romano, 138, 140; Die Freier, 138–40; Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutschlands, 25–26, 163, 169 n. 39; Das Incognito, 138– 39, 145 n. 74; Krieg den Philistern!, 138–39; Der letzte Held von Marienburg, 139; Das Marmorbild, 109–12, 121 n. 9, 242–45; Meierbeth’s Glück und Ende, 138; Über die ethische und religiöse Bedeutung der neueren romantischen Poesie in

❦ 403

Deutschland, 138; Zur Geschichte des Dramas, 138; “Die zwei Gesellen,” 156–59 Eisner, Lotte, 118, 123 n. 30 Eliot, T. S., 34 Emmerick, Anna Katharina, 346 Empfindsamkeit (Sensibility), 35, 51 n. 6, 63 empiricism, 62, 64, 213 England, 8, 36, 42, 50–51, 80, 194, 199, 201, 203–4 English Romanticism, 2–3, 20 n. 4, 31, 35–39, 46–47, 50–52, 59–60, 193 “Entstaltung” (disfiguration), 274, 288, 297 epic, the, 27–29, 39–40, 43–48, 53 n. 27, 57–58, 126, 135–36, 178, 339 epistemology, 42, 62, 65, 216 Erlangen, 2 “Erlebnislyrik” (experiential lyric poetry), 153 Eros (the erotic), 31, 70, 91, 109, 155, 158, 164, 240, 243, 262, 308–9, 316, 318, 346 Erpenbeck, John, works by: Heillose Flucht: Szenen einer Biographie, 346 Europe, 1, 6–7, 9–10, 12, 15, 25, 28, 30, 34–35, 64, 72–73, 106, 137, 147, 163, 174, 191–92, 194–96, 201, 204, 209–10, 235, 295, 300 n. 21, 307, 329 fairy tale, the, 5, 8, 18, 47, 68–69, 86–87, 91–92, 101–2, 104, 106, 108, 113–15, 121, 128–29, 151, 171–73, 183–86, 230, 243–44, 274, 278–79, 295–96, 331, 341–42, 344, 347, 350, 352 Federal Republic of Germany, 327, 339, 341–42, 347–49, 351–54

404 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 2, 6, 8, 23 n. 27, 42, 64–65, 69, 71, 95, 148–49, 188 n. 78, 191– 95, 198, 207 n. 21, 212, 214, 218, 235, 238, 247 n. 16, 249 n. 45, 284 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, works by: Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution, 194; Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 6, 64–65, 194, 214; Grundlage des Naturrechts, 195, 235; Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europens, die sie bisher unterdrückten, 193–94 Fischer, Bernd, 14 Flax, Neil, 45 folk song, 5, 115, 171–73, 177, 179–83, 292 Forster, Georg, 195, 210–11, 216, 223–25 Forster, Georg, works by: “Ein Blick in das Ganze der Natur,” 211 Foucault, Michel, 217 Fouqué, Caroline de la Motte, works by: Magie der Natur, 96– 97, 99 n. 42 Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte, 3, 33, 47, 108–9, 111–12, 121, 126–27, 132, 135–42, 144–45 Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte, works by: Don Carlos, 136–37; Eginhard und Emma, 136; Der Held des Nordens, 136; Herrmann, 136–37, 140; Historie vom edlen Ritter Galmy, 136; Die Invaliden, 136; Der Pappenheimer Kürassier, 136–38; Undine, 108–9, 111–12, 349–50 Fourcroy, Antoine de, 8, 223 n. 10

fragment, 30, 45, 80, 90, 127, 149, 186, 201, 271 n. 34, 277, 291– 92, 314, 332–34, 339–40, 354 France, 7–12, 16, 29, 50–51, 63, 65, 116, 147, 191, 194–96, 200, 204, 235, 330, 344 Frank, Manfred, 229, 358 n. 64 Frankfurt am Main, 191, 195 Frankfurt an der Oder, 11, 210 Freiberg, 8, 73, 210, 213, 217, 219 French Revolution, 5–8, 21 n. 13, 32, 42, 49, 64–65, 72–73, 79, 81–82, 90, 96, 97 n. 7, 99, 106, 113, 147, 174, 176, 191–96, 199–202, 209, 235, 306 n. 78, 335–36, 340, 346 French Revolutionary wars, 7, 9–11, 72, 82. See also Napoleonic Wars Frenzel, Herbert, 229 Freud, Sigmund, 111, 119, 275, 331–32, 337, 356 Freud, Sigmund, works by: Die Traumdeutung, 332; “Das Unheimliche,” 111, 119, 121 n. 11, 123 n. 27 Friedrich, Caspar David, 18, 280– 82, 275, 283–85, 288–92, 295–96, 298 n. 5, 303–5 Friedrich, Caspar David, works by: “Abtei im Eichwald,” 282, 291–92; “Das Kreuz im Gebirge” (“Tetschener Altar”), 280, 288–90, 303–4; “Der Mönch am Meer,” 281, 291– 92, 304–5 Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, 9, 191, 201, 207 n. 20, 291 Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, 230–31, 242 Füsseli, Johann Heinrich, 276 Galileo, 218

INDEX

Galvani, Luigi, 212 Ganz, Bruno, 17 Geismeier, Willi, 296, 297 n. 2, 298 n. 10, 308 n. 77 gender discourse, 4–5, 69–70, 73, 85–86, 96–97, 99 n. 42, 108– 10, 185–86, 229–49, 261–63, 342, 344–47, 349–50, 352, 354 genius, 34 n. 7, 39, 53 n. 7, 59 n. 71, 63–64, 79, 83, 89–90, 133, 152, 287, 314 Gentz, Friedrich, 199–200 geology, 8 George, Stefan, 331, 356 n. 17 German Confederation, 147, 195 German Democratic Republic, 18, 327, 339, 342–48 Gesamtkunstwerk, 129, 148, 277, 288, 293, 296 Gessner, Salomon, works by: Der Tod Abels, 37 Gilbert, Ludwig Wilhelm, 210 Gisbourne, John, 37 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, works by: Orfeo ed Euridice, 259–60 God, 49, 64, 71, 92–93, 110, 117, 159, 174, 182, 196, 200, 211–12, 222 Godwin, William, 203–4, 208 n. 24 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 3–8, 10, 19–21, 29, 31, 33, 35–60, 63–64, 68, 79–83, 86– 91, 96–97, 99, 102, 125–27, 135, 141, 143 n. 43, 152–53, 171, 192, 197, 210, 214, 231, 242, 246 n. 7, 249 n. 49, 257, 261–63, 270, 273–74, 283, 285–86, 288, 290, 294, 296– 98, 301–5, 307–26, 328–29, 335, 339, 341–42, 351–52, 355 n. 4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works by: Achilleis, 45, 58 n. 64; Dichtung und Wahrheit, 44,

❦ 405

307–8; “Eins und Alles,” 310, 312; Faust: Ein Fragment, 43, 45; Faust I, 36–38, 40, 42–43, 45, 50–52, 56–58, 286, 294, 305 n. 71, 313, 318–19; Faust II, 39, 44–49, 58–60, 126, 262, 308, 315, 317–21, 325; Hermann und Dorothea, 7, 45; Iphigenie auf Tauris, 40, 53 n. 28; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1, 35–37, 40–41, 50– 51, 53–54, 63, 162, 320–21, 326 n. 56; “Literarischer Sansculottismus,” 39; Märchen, 8; “Mahomets-Gesang,” 314; Maximen und Reflexionen, 311–12; “Probleme,” 319; Propyläen (co-editor), 143 n. 43, 273, 283–84, 293; “Selige Sehnsucht,” 316–17; Torquato Tasso, 44, 53 n. 28, 321, 326 n. 56; “Trilogie der Leidenschaft,” 320–21; Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, 96, 102; “Urworte. Orphisch,” 308–10, 312–13, 323 n. 12; “Vermächtnis,” 310, 313–14; “Von deutscher Baukunst,” 64; Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 261–62, 270 n. 25, 308; West-östlicher Divan, 308, 314–17, 321; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1, 6, 8, 19 n. 2, 40, 42, 55–56, 64, 68–70, 79, 81– 83, 85–86, 88–92, 97, 249 n. 44, 351; Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung, 81–82; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 4, 20 n. 6, 81, 315 golden age, 39, 72, 84, 86, 93, 175, 202, 294–95, 352 Goldoni, Carlo, 126 Gölz, Sabine, 242 Goodman, Katherine, 230

406 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Gordon, George (Lord Byron), 36–39, 41, 45–49, 51–52, 59– 60, 193, 258 Gordon, George (Lord Byron), works by: Childe Harold, 258; Don Juan, 46–47, 50 n. 2; Manfred, 37–38, 49, 50 n. 2, 52, 60 n. 74 Görres, Joseph, 33, 191–92, 195– 96, 199–200, 202–3, 205, 207 n. 20, 292 Görres, Joseph, works by: Kotzebue und was ihn gemordet, 191; Der Rheinische Merkur (editor), 191, 199; Teutschland und die Revolution, 191–92, 199 Gothic architecture, 64, 74, 292 Gothic literature, 27, 35–37, 40– 41, 60 n. 74, 80, 90, 92–97 Göttingen, 203, 210, 293 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 125 Gouges, Olympe de, works by: Les Droits de la Femme et la Citoyenne, 235 Goya, Francisco de, 276 Gozzi, Carlo, 126 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 132, 135, 145 n. 76 Great Britain, 10, 63, 235, 275 Greece, 29, 31, 47, 84, 122 n. 25, 155 Greiner, Bernhard, 14, 23 n. 28, 304 n. 65 Grillparzer, Franz, 260–61 Grimm, Hans, 341–42, 354 Grimm, Hans, works by: Volk ohne Raum, 341–42 Grimm, Jacob, 172–73, 178, 180, 183–84, 186, 188 Grimm, Wilhelm, 172–73, 178, 180, 183–86, 188 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, works by: Kinder und Hausmärchen, 172–73, 178– 79, 183–87, 341–42, 344, 347

grotesque, 83–84, 89, 94, 130, 151, 165, 273–75, 294 Gruppe 47, 347, 349–50 Gryphius, Andreas, works by: Cardenio und Celinde, 133, 144 n. 54 Günderrode, Karoline von, 18, 230, 232–33, 239–40, 242, 249, 345–46 Habermas, Jürgen, 194, 206 n. 7 Hafiz (Shams als-Din Muhammad Shirazi), 314–16 Halle, 63, 133, 210 Hamlin, Cyrus, 45 n. 66 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph Freiherr von, 315 Handke, Peter, 350–51, 354 Handke, Peter, works by: Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung, 351 Hanover, 165 Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Hardenberg, Karl August von, 134 Härtling, Peter, works by: Hoffmann oder die vielfältige Liebe, 349; Hölderlin: Ein Roman, 349 Hauff, Wilhelm, works by: Das kalte Herz, 114, 112 n. 18; Lichtenstein, 93 Hauptmann, Gerhart, works by: Die blaue Blume, 339 Haydn, Joseph, 252, 254, 256– 57, 269 n. 15 Haym, Rudolf, works by: Die romantische Schule: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes, 329 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 46, 149, 175, 192–94, 288, 296, 301 n. 31, 306 n. 79, 328–29

INDEX

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, works by: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 166 n. 7, 306 n. 79, 328–29 Hegelianism, 6, 273–74, 339–40, 342, 348, 356 n. 11 Heidegger, Martin, 349 Heidelberg, 5, 10, 20 n. 7, 292–93 Heine, Heinrich, 5, 25–26, 33, 75, 152, 162–63, 165, 169 Heine, Heinrich, works by: Buch der Lieder, 163; Heimkehr, 163; “Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig,” 163–65; “Die Romantik,” 162; Die romantische Schule, 33, 162, 328–29 Heinse, Wilhelm, 256, 269 n. 14 Heinse, Wilhelm, works by: Musikalische Dialogen, 256 Helen of Troy (Helena), 44–46, 57–59, 315, 317–18, 320, 325 Helfer, Martha B., 4–5, 20 n. 6, 98 n. 17, 121 n. 9, 229–49 Hendrich, Kerstin, 18 Hensel, Luise, 346 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 171– 72, 175–76, 180, 215, 283, 286–87, 302 n. 50 Herder, Johann Gottfried, works by: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 175, 215; Volkslieder, 171–72 Herz, Henriette, 73, 230 Herzog, Werner, works by: Lebenszeichen, 118, 122 n. 25 Hesse, Hermann, 337–39, 354 Hesse, Hermann, works by: Demian, 337–38; Der Steppenwolf, 337–39 Hettstedt, 18 hieroglyphs, 74, 287, 299 n. 11 High Romanticism, 1, 5, 10–17, 31–33, 116–18, 132–37, 171– 89, 242, 244, 273–74, 292–94, 296

❦ 407

Hindenburg, Carl Friedrich, 210 Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von, works by: Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber, 235 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 17, 275, 299–300 Hörisch, Jochen, 229 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 2, 20 n. 5, 33, 75, 85, 89–95, 97–98, 111–12, 118–21, 123, 159, 209, 220–22, 232, 242–44, 253–58, 260, 264–65, 268, 294–96, 344 Hoffmann, E. T. A., works by: “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik,” 253–58, 260, 268; Die Elixiere des Teufels, 20 n. 5, 92–95; Das Fräulein von Scuderi, 111; Der goldne Topf, 111, 232, 242–44, 265, 295– 96; Kreisleriana, 254, 268; Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr, 85, 89–90, 92, 97–98, 344–45; Der Magnetiseur, 222; Der Sandmann, 111–12, 119, 119–21, 123; Undine: Zauberoper in drei Akten, 111 Hoffmeister, Gerhart, 19, 20 n. 5, 34 n. 2, 51 n. 9, 76 n. 10, 79– 99, 166 Hofmann, Werner, 291 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 330– 32, 356 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, works by: Andreas, oder die Vereinigten, 332; Gestern, 332; Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, 331; Der Turm, 332 Hogarth, William, 94 Holberg, Ludwig, 126 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 18, 31–33, 40, 50 n. 2, 64, 83–84, 96, 148, 175, 192–94, 249 n. 45, 349 Hölderlin, Friedrich, works by: “Hymne an die Menschheit,” 64; Hyperion oder der Eremit

408 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

aus Griechenland, 31, 84, 96, 98 n. 23 Holy Alliance, 10 Holy Roman Empire, 10, 49, 191 Homer, 33, 40, 44–45, 48, 56 n. 51, 63, 269 n. 17, 318 Horkheimer, Max, 348 Hottinger, Johann Konrad, 293– 94 Huber, Therese, 96, 99 n. 42, 230 Huch, Ricarda, 19 n. 1, 329, 333 Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm, 210 Hüllmann, Karl Dietrich, 162 Humboldt, Alexander von, 211, 216, 225 Humboldt, Karoline von, 273 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 44, 234–35, 273 Ibsen, Henrik, 330 Idealism, German, 3, 197, 201, 268 n. 4 imagination, 5, 8, 21 n. 14, 26– 27, 32, 37, 41–42, 47, 63–64, 66, 71, 75, 84, 93, 101, 106–8, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 127, 149–53, 158, 162, 165, 214– 16, 218, 252–53, 258, 260–61, 263, 274, 277–78, 284, 286, 301 n. 31, 306 n. 79 Industrial Revolution, the, 8, 25, 30, 147 irrationalism, 47, 61, 159, 298 n. 7 Isis, 215–16, 219, 274, 278, 287, 302 n. 50, 339 Islam, 314–16, 324–25 Italy, 10–11, 82, 88, 91, 110, 174, 285, 293, 295 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, works by: Woldemar, 234–35, 249 n. 44

Jean Paul, 29, 33, 80, 83–84, 97– 98, 123 n. 30, 135, 257, 264– 65, 269 n. 15, 270 n. 30, 273, 278, 283, 286, 295–97, 301, 305 n. 73, 346 Jean Paul, works by: Flegeljahre, 265; Der Komet, 295, 305; Siebenkäs, 84; Titan, 84, 94; Vorschule der Ästhetik, 97–98, 283, 296–97, 301, 306 Jena, 2–3, 10, 19 n. 2, 65, 71–73, 75, 88, 209, 214, 229–31, 234, 236–38, 251–52, 284, 292 Jena, Battle of, 12, 207 n. 20, 291–92, 327 Jewishness, 3, 16, 73, 169 n. 41, 179, 337 Johnson, Samuel, 35 Jomelli, Niccolo, 256 Jung, Carl, 337–38 Junges Deutschland, 274 Juvenal, 94, 318 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 11, 62, 64– 65, 67, 71, 148, 152, 175, 194, 212–15, 218, 238, 310 Kant, Immanuel, works by: “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung,” 65; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 65, 194; Kritik der Urteilskraft, 152, 214–15; Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, 213–14; Zum ewigen Frieden, 9 Kassel, 173, 184, 295, 341 Keats, John, 31, 36 Kelley, Theresa, 235 Kepler, Johannes, works by: Mysterium Cosmographicum, 218 Kerman, Joseph, 254–55 Kerner, Justinus, 134 Kirsch, Sarah, works by: Allerlei-Rauh. Eine Chronik, 346–47, 354

INDEX

Klee, Paul, 288, 296 Kleist, Heinrich von, 6, 10–18, 22–24, 29, 31–33, 40–41, 116– 18, 122–23, 126, 140, 188 n. 28, 199, 209–10, 212, 220–21, 223 n. 3, 227, 229, 249 n. 45, 285, 291–92, 304–5, 345 Kleist, Heinrich von, works by: Amphitryon, 12, 31, 41; Berliner Abendblätter (editor), 18, 291; “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” 18, 291–92, 304–5; Das Erdbeben in Chili, 12, 116–17, 221; Die Hermannsschlacht, 12–17, 22– 23, 32, 140 n. 5; Die Marquise von O. . ., 12, 31, 117–18, 221; Michael Kohlhaas, 12, 118, 123 n. 26, 221; Penthesilea, 12, 15, 23 n. 31; Phöbus: Ein Journal für die Kunst (co-editor with Adam Müller), 16; Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 15–17, 22–24, 32, 140 n. 5, 305 n. 66; Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, 12, 22 n. 22; Der zerbrochene Krug, 12 Kleist, Ulrike von, 11–12, 17 Klingemann, Ernst August, works by: Nachtwachen, 20 n. 5, 32, 93–94, 99 Kluckhohn, Paul, 193, 203 Knebel, Karl Ludwig von, 38 Koch, Joseph Anton, 294 Kolbe, Carl Wilhelm the elder, 283–84 Kolbe, Carl Wilhelm the younger, 283 Königsberg, 12 Körner, Theodor, 341 Korff, Hermann August, 6, 93–94 Kosegarten, Gotthard Ludwig Theobul, 285, 301 n. 42 Koselleck, Reinhart, 187 n. 8, 194, 206 n. 7

❦ 409

Kotzebue, August von, 36, 51 n. 6, 130–31, 140 n. 2, 191 Krauss, Werner, 342 Krausser, Helmut, works by: Thanatos: Das schwarze Buch, 353–54 Kühn, Gottlob Christian, 290 Kühn, Sophie von, 167 n. 22, 233, 236, 247 n. 22 Kuzniar, Alice, 119, 122 n. 17, 123 n. 28, 231, 239–40, 246 n. 7, 248 n. 32, 249 n. 51 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 229 Lampart, Fabian, 4–5, 20 n. 8, 99 n. 3, 122 n. 19, 167 n. 16, 171–89, 206 n. 11 Lampe, Jutta, 17 Late Romanticism, 1–3, 68, 89– 93, 95–96, 98 n. 28, 106–16, 138–40, 145 n. 72, 152, 156– 66, 191–93, 199–200, 202–5, 220–22, 242, 244–45, 273–74, 295–96 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 8, 212 Lehmann, Wilhelm, 347 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 210 Leipzig, 6, 199, 210, 347 Lenau, Nikolaus, 349 Leonardo da Vinci, 85 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 9, 19 n. 1, 62, 290, 303 n. 58, 309 Levetzow, Ulrike von, 321 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 37–38, 51 n. 9 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, works by: The Monk, 37, 95 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 210 Liszt, Franz, 253, 258–59, 264, 269 Liszt, Franz, works by: “Berlioz und seine Haroldsinfonie,” 258–59; Orpheus, 259

410 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

literary history, 3, 6–7, 25–34, 35– 36, 39–40, 42, 50 n. 3, 51 n. 10, 61–62, 79, 96, 126, 128, 131, 138, 163–64, 172, 183, 342 Littlejohns, Richard, 3, 5, 22 n. 17, 55 n. 43, 58 n. 64, 61–77, 98 n. 17 Loeben, Otto Heinrich von, 292 longing, 75, 82, 151, 153, 155– 56, 162, 164, 226 n. 48, 254– 55, 268 n. 7, 295, 297, 306 n. 77, 317 Lorelei, 5, 25, 274 Lorrain, Claude, 27 Louis XVI, King of France, 7 Lublinski, Samuel, 330, 356 n. 11 Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, 5 Luise, Queen of Prussia, 9, 17, 193, 201, 207 n. 20 Lukács, Georg, 339–40, 342, 345, 358 n. 56 Lüneburg, 165 Lunéville, Treaty of, 10–11 Luther, Martin, 318 Lutheran, 30, 32 Lüthi, Max, 185 Lynch, David, works by: Blue Velvet, 119 Mach, Ernst, works by: Analyse der Empfindungen, 331–32 MacLeod, Catriona, 231 Macpherson, James, 63, 171 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 330 Mainz, 11, 192, 210 Malinowski, Bernadette, 4, 147– 69 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 330 Mann, Thomas, 85, 335–37, 340–41, 348, 354 Mann, Thomas, works by: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 336; Buddenbrooks, 85, 341; Der Tod in Venedig, 336–37; Tonio Kröger, 85; Von

deutscher Republik, 336–37; Der Zauberberg, 337 Marc, Julie, 349 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 7, 193 Marlowe, Christopher, 37 Martin, Dieter, 44 Martini, Ernst Christian, 11 Marx, Adolph Bernhard, 257, 259–60, 262–63 Marx, Karl, 203–4, 349 mathematics, 8, 21 n. 14, 213–14, 218, 232, 334 medicine, 209–10, 214, 216, 218, 222 melancholy, 41, 43, 49, 56–57, 63, 89, 103, 108–9, 113, 134, 151–69, 257, 290, 295, 324 n. 28, 328 Mellor, Anne, 231 Mendelssohn, Felix, 25, 258, 261, 263–65, 270 n. 27 Mendelssohn, Felix, works by: Lieder ohne Worte, 263–64 Mendelssohn, Moses, 3, 85, 284 Menninghaus, Winfried, 229, 233–37, 246–47 Merck, Johann Heinrich, 311 Mereau, Sophie, 96, 230, 233, 249 n. 45 Mesmer, Franz, 222 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel, Prince von, 147, 191–92, 195– 96, 207 n. 20 Meyer, Johann Heinrich, 273, 305 n. 70 Michelangelo, 85, 276 Middle Ages, 2, 29, 43, 73, 84, 99 n. 30, 162, 193, 196–99, 201–2, 204, 294, 344 mimetic representation, 8, 68–69, 83, 96, 150–51, 274–75, 296, 339, 353 mining, 8, 203, 210, 213, 217, 220, 343

INDEX

Missolonghi, 46–48 Mittelstrass, Jürgen, 211 modernism, 275, 330–35, 339– 42, 349, 356–57 Mohammed, 314, 316 Molière, 31, 126 Moore, Henry, 288 More, Henry, 26 Morgner, Irmtraud, 343–44 Morgner, Irmtraud, works by: Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura, 344, 350 Moses, 49 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 252, 254, 256–57, 268 n. 15, 288, 338 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, works by: Die Zauberflöte, 288, 302 n. 51 Müller, Adam, 16, 24 n. 34, 33, 143, 188 n. 28, 192, 199–203, 207–8 Müller, Adam, works by: Elemente der Staatskunst, 200, 202; Lehre vom Gegensatz, 199; Phöbus: Ein Journal für die Kunst (co-editor with Heinrich von Kleist), 16, 143 Müller, Johann Gottwerth, 28 Murnau, Friedrich, works by: Nosferatu, 120 muse (female and male), 84, 89, 232, 242–45, 332 music, 2, 4–5, 25–26, 29, 74, 77 n. 19, 84–85, 89, 120, 130, 151, 167 n. 13, 172, 245, 251– 71, 321, 328 Musil, Robert, 330, 333–35 Musil, Robert, works by: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 335; Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, 333–35

❦ 411

Muxfeldt, Kristina, 77 n. 19, 167 n. 13, 251–71 mysticism, 41, 46, 55 n. 43, 105, 218–19, 283, 289, 328, 330 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 229 Napoleonic wars, 6, 10, 12–13, 15, 92, 174, 205. See also French Revolutionary wars narcissism, 39, 110–11, 241 national identity, 22 n. 23, 30, 32, 72, 113, 177–78, 329, 335, 341 National Socialism, 6, 13, 17, 20 n. 8, 275, 299, 341–43, 348 nationalism, 13–14, 17, 32, 133, 136, 162, 178–79, 328, 335 natural philosophy. See Naturphilosophie natural science. See science naturalism, 274, 330, 339 nature, 8, 27, 42, 49, 63, 71, 74, 80, 83–84, 87, 103–9, 113, 147–49, 151, 153, 159, 164, 174–75, 182, 187 n. 13, 201, 210–27, 236, 262, 276, 278– 79, 285–93, 295–97, 309, 318, 320, 347–48, 350, 352 Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature), 71, 105, 200, 210–27, 236. See also science Naubert, Benedikte, 230 Nazarenes, 276, 284–85, 293–94, 296, 300 n. 22 neo-classicism, 64, 284, 294. See also Weimar Classicism Neo-Platonism, 285, 312, 318 neo-Romanticism, 329–30, 334, 337, 339, 341, 351–52 Netherlands, the, 10 Neuschwanstein, 6 New Mythology, 23 n. 27, 136, 148, 220 Newton, Isaac, 218 Nicolai, Friedrich, 62, 128 Niemetschek, Franz Xavier, 252

412 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 153, 226 n. 38, 275, 319, 331, 336–38 nihilism, 32, 94 Nipperdey, Thomas, 174 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 1–2, 7–10, 15– 16, 18–19, 21 n. 14, 24 n. 34, 28, 30–33, 42, 50 n. 2, 54–56, 61–63, 65–73, 75–77, 80, 83– 88, 93–94, 97, 99, 121 n. 5, 148–50, 153–56, 158–60, 162, 166–68, 175–77, 192–94, 196–99, 201–2, 204, 206–7, 210–13, 215, 217–22, 225–27, 229–30, 232–33, 236–39, 242–44, 247 n. 26, 249 n. 48, 251, 253, 255, 267 n. 2, 275– 78, 284–88, 298 n. 7, 300 n. 27, 302, 327–28, 330–39, 343, 348–51, 353–54, 356–57 Novalis, works by: Allgemeines Brouillon, 65, 218, 220–21, 233; “Astralis,” 237; Die Christenheit oder Europa, 9–10, 22 n. 17, 30, 72–73, 196–98; Fichte-Studien, 8–9, 198, 238, 248 n. 31; Glauben und Liebe oder Der König und die Königin, 9, 16, 22 n. 17, 72, 201–2, 336; Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 7–8, 16, 18, 61, 68–69, 84–87, 89, 92–95, 196, 232, 237, 242–43, 249 n. 51, 278, 285, 338–39, 343, 350– 51, 353; Hymnen an die Nacht, 2, 70–71, 94, 154–56, 158, 168 n. 27, 196, 219, 288; Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 219–20, 222, 278, 286, 302 n. 50, 332, 338, 351; “Das Lied der Toten,” 242; Teplitzer Fragmente, 218–19; Vermischte Bemerkungen/Blüthenstaub, 65–66, 72, 201, 253, 277 Novalis Society, 18

novel, the, 1–2, 4–8, 20 n. 5, 25– 28, 30–31, 37, 40–42, 54 n. 36, 56, 63–64, 68–70, 73–74, 76, 79–99, 118, 134, 145 n. 70, 150, 152–54, 196, 219, 233, 235–37, 240–44, 249, 262, 265, 278, 295, 308, 332– 33, 335, 337, 339, 341–42, 344, 349–54 novella, the, 12, 85, 101–2, 106– 11, 115–18, 219, 221–22, 295–96, 308, 333–34, 343–46. See also fairy tale Oberwiederstedt, 18 Offenbach, Jacques, works by: Les contes d’Hoffmann, 120 Oken, Lorenz, 211, 213, 215–16 Oken, Lorenz, works by: Isis (editor), 215–16; Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 213 Olivier, Ferdinand, 284 Olivier, Friedrich, 284 Ossian, 63, 171, 284, 305 n. 68 Osterkamp, Ernst, 290, 303 n. 60 Overbeck, Friedrich, 293–94 Ovid, 318 painting, 2, 18, 24 n. 35, 73, 85, 90–91, 136, 273–306 Paris, 6, 10–11, 17, 25, 38, 75, 147, 195, 333, 342, 351 parody, 1, 45, 89, 92, 94, 139, 163–66, 234, 295–96, 335 Perrault, Charles, 184 Peter, Klaus, ix, 4, 19 n. 1, 20, 22 n. 17, 23 n. 27, 24 n. 34, 191–208 Petrarch, 28 Pfaff, Christoph Heinrich, 212 Pfitzner, Hans, 25 Pforr, Franz, 293–94 Phelps, Leland, 36, 52 philistinism, 73, 83, 85, 89, 91, 139, 158, 328

INDEX

philosophy, 1, 6, 8–9, 11, 16, 21 n. 12, 22 n. 20, 26, 32, 48, 62, 64, 71, 105, 148–49, 152, 156–57, 166, 173, 175, 187 n. 13, 193–205, 209, 212–15, 221–22, 229–30, 234–36, 238, 247, 252, 268 n. 4, 276–77, 288, 292, 309–10, 329–31, 334–35, 349 physics, 210–14, 217–22 Pietism, 56 n. 50, 63, 70, 73, 82 Platner, Ernst, 210 Plutarch, 317 poesy, 3, 94, 148, 176–79, 216– 22, 229–30, 248, 296, 348, 350 poetry, verse, 2, 4, 20 n. 4, 25, 30, 33, 47, 61, 82, 101, 104, 130, 143 n. 37, 147–69, 171– 73, 179–83, 254–56, 307–26 Poland, 12 political Romanticism, 6–7, 9–18, 24 n. 34, 32, 64–65, 72–73, 191–208, 335–37, 357 n. 36 postmodernism, 22 n. 16, 119–20, 123 n. 29, 275, 349, 351–53 Poussin, Nicolas, 27 Priestley, Joseph, 8 progressive Universalpoesie, 6, 30, 80, 82, 85, 101, 132, 138, 148, 156, 165, 220, 277, 288 Protestantism, 63, 318, 329 Prussia, 7, 9, 12–17, 22 n. 23, 32, 75, 113, 123 n. 26, 134, 178– 79, 191, 193, 201–2, 207 n. 20, 291–92, 295 Pygmalion, 274, 287, 293, 302 n. 50, 350 Querelle des anciens et des modernes, 29, 44 Ramdohr, Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von, 289–90 Raphael, 73, 85, 276, 285, 287, 294–95

❦ 413

Raphael, works by: “Sistine Madonna,” 285, 287 Rathenau, Walter, 336 rationalism, 1, 61–62, 64, 70, 73, 348–49 rationality, 3, 61–62, 65, 161 reason, 42, 62–63, 65–66, 108–9, 112, 147–48, 150, 152–53, 197, 200, 212, 234, 310, 330, 348 reception history, 2–6, 13, 17–18, 22 n. 24, 33, 61–62, 118–20, 126, 273–76, 296–97, 327–59 Redfield, Marc, 240 Reformation, the, 73, 195, 197 Reger, Max, 25 Reign of Terror, 7, 64 Reil, Johann Christian, 210, 222 religion, 1, 9, 32, 70–72, 74, 85, 92, 94, 137–38, 147, 155, 159, 163, 196, 204, 216, 316, 329, 339 Rembrandt, 307 Renaissance, 2, 43, 45, 47, 73–74, 85, 95, 127, 197, 209, 294 Restoration, 6, 147, 181, 195, 198–99, 202, 207 Rétif de la Bretonne, works by: Le Paysan perverti, 93 Revolution of 1830, 6, 147 Rhine, 5, 7, 10, 13–14, 165, 172, 180, 345 Rhineland, 7, 36, 191 Richardson, Samuel, works by: Clarissa, 93 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich. See Jean Paul Riefenstahl, Leni, works by: Der Triumph des Willens, 6 Riepenhausen brothers (“Franz” and “Johannes”), 293 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 286, 330, 332–33 Rilke, Rainer Maria, works by: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 333, 351

414 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 71, 220, 222, 224 n. 15, 236, 239, 251, 253–55, 268 n. 9 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, works by: Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers, 236, 251, 267 n. 1 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 36 Rodin, Auguste, 307 Roetzel, Lisa, 236–37 Röllecke, Heinz, 181 romance, 26, 28, 43, 57, 69, 80 Romantic Irony, 67–68, 80, 84, 151, 165, 166 n. 4 Romantic love, 70, 86, 89, 107 Romantisiren (to romanticize), 75, 80, 83, 150, 154–55, 163, 217, 276–77 Rome, 13, 26, 29, 91, 95, 293–95 Rommel, Gabriele, 4, 22 n. 21, 24 n. 36, 207 n. 18, 209–27, 300 n. 27 Rosa, Salvator, 27 Röschlaub, Andreas, 210, 212 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11, 63, 175–76, 234, 256 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, works by: Émile, 234 Runge, Philipp Otto, 91, 273, 276–77, 283–90, 298 n. 4, 300 n. 22, 301–2, 303 n. 52 Runge, Philipp Otto, works by: “Achilles and Skammandros,” 285–86; “Der Morgen” (“Der Kleine Morgen”), 279, 286–87, 289; “Die Zeiten,” 286 Russia, 12 Samuel, Richard, 12, 22 n. 23 Sand, Karl Ludwig, 191 Saul, Nicholas, 4–5, 20 n. 4, 21 n. 12, 24 n. 36, 77 n. 15, 208 n. 25, 327–59 Saxony, 7, 8, 210, 289

Scheck, Ulrich, 4, 22 n. 21, 24 n. 36, 101–23, 227 n. 56, 359 n. 68 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 71, 119, 148–49, 166, 175–76, 192–94, 200, 207 n. 18, 212–17, 220, 222–26, 251, 253, 268 n. 4, 284, 327 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, works by: Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 214; Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 71, 214–15; Philosophie der Kunst, 149; System der Philosophie, 214; Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur, 215; Von der Weltseele — Eine Hypothese der höhern Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus, 214, 222 Scherer, Alexander Nicolaus, 210 Schick, Gottlieb, 293–94 Schiller, Friedrich, 1, 3, 7, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 19 n. 2, 29, 33, 35– 36, 39–40, 45, 50, 54 n. 37, 58 n. 64, 72, 79, 96, 125–26, 128, 131, 135–37, 140, 148, 152, 155, 175, 192, 214, 234, 251, 253, 257, 269 n. 15, 273, 278, 307, 319, 342 Schiller, Friedrich, works by: Don Carlos, 137; Der Geisterseher, 79–80; “Die Götter Griechenlandes,” 155; Die Horen (editor), 8, 96; Die Räuber, 35–36; “Der Spaziergang,” 40; Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 7; “Über Matthissons Gedichte,” 253, 268 n. 6; Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 79; “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais,” 278, 302 n. 50; Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, 140; Wallenstein, 13,

INDEX

16, 23 n. 33, 137; “Würde der Frauen,” 234 Schinkel, Friedrich, works by: “Der ägyptische Sternenhimmel der Königin der Nacht,” 288, 302 n. 51 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 1–3, 29, 33, 42, 62, 66, 75, 125–26, 130, 136, 140, 144 n. 65, 145 n. 70, 162, 195, 215, 220, 225 n. 25, 229–30, 258, 284 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, works by: Athenaeum (co-editor with Friedrich Schlegel), 1–3, 30, 66–68, 70–71, 74, 79–80, 84, 86, 88, 149, 154, 176, 195, 210, 230, 253, 258, 266, 269 n. 17, 277, 284; “Der Bund der Kirche mit den Künsten,” 284; “Die Gemälde. Gespräch. In Dresden 1798” (with Caroline Schlegel), 284; “Ueber Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxman’s Umrisse,” 258, 269 n. 17; Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 75, 136, 162, 169; Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst, 29, 223 n. 8, 225 n. 25, 227 n. 52 Schlegel, Caroline. See Schlegel-Schelling, Caroline Schlegel, Caroline, works by: “Die Gemälde. Gespräch. In Dresden 1798” (with August Wilhelm Schlegel), 284 Schlegel, Friedrich, 1–3, 5–8, 10, 19, 28–33, 42, 61–75, 79–80, 82–83, 85–88, 90, 94, 96, 101– 2, 135, 138, 144 n. 63, 148–49, 160, 165–66, 192–200, 202–3, 206 n. 9, 210, 215, 219–20, 229–30, 233–42, 245, 247–48, 252–53, 277, 284, 288, 293– 94, 327, 348

❦ 415

Schlegel, Friedrich, works by: Athenaeum (co-editor with August Wilhelm Schlegel), 1–3, 30, 66–68, 70–71, 74, 79–80, 84, 86, 88, 149, 154, 176, 195, 210, 230, 253, 258, 266, 269 n. 17, 277, 284; AthenaeumFragmente, 6–8, 30, 62–64, 66–67, 70, 79–80, 82–83, 86, 88, 101, 138, 148–49, 165, 176, 252, 277, 288; “Brief über den Roman,” 68, 74–75, 80; Concordia (editor), 203; Gespräch über die Poesie, 3, 28, 66, 68, 227 n. 52, 229, 240, 245; Ideen, 67, 71–72; Kritische Fragmente, 61, 67–68, 252; Lucinde, 5, 20 n. 5, 69–71, 76 n. 13, 85–86, 89, 92, 94, 98 n. 17, 232–33, 235, 237–41; Signatur des Zeitalters, 195, 199; “Über die Diotima,” 229, 233–34; “Über Goethes Meister,” 1, 42, 68, 82–83; “Über die Philosophie: An Dorothea,” 229, 233, 235; Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, 197–98; “Ueber die weiblichen Charaktere in den griechischen Dichtern,” 229, 233–34; “Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus,” 196 Schlegel, Johann Elias, works by: Hermann, 13 Schlegel-Schelling, Caroline, 66, 97 n. 10, 230, 236–37, 242, 246 n. 5, 284 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 3, 62– 63, 66, 70–73, 143 n. 39, 284, 327 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, works by: Reden über die Religion, 70–71, 73 Schlosser, Christian Friedrich, 294

416 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Schmitt, Carl, 193, 196, 202–3, 357 n. 36 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 336 Schopenhauer, Johanna, 230, 249 n. 45 Schubert, Franz, works by: Deutsche Tänze, 265–66 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich, 220, 222 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich, works by: Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 222 Schulz, Gerhard, 3, 5–6, 14, 19 n. 1, 21 n. 11, 25–34, 57 n. 54, 99, 181, 186–89 Schumann, Robert, 25, 254, 258, 264–67, 268 n. 9, 269 n. 18, 270 Schumann, Robert, works by: Carnaval (op. 9), 265–66; Davidsbündlertänze (op. 6), 265; Kreisleriana (op. 16), 254; Liederkreis (op. 39), 25; Review of German Dance Music, including Schubert’s Deutsche Tänze, 265–67 Schwärmerei (enthusiasm), 41, 54 n. 41, 56 n. 50, 309 science, 4, 6, 21 n. 14, 22 n. 20, 32, 58, 71, 209–27, 232–33, 326 n. 49, 330, 345 Scott, Walter, 93, 99 n. 31, 138, 193 Seghers, Anna, 18, 24 n. 36, 342– 43, 345, 358 Seghers, Anna, works by: Das wirkliche Blau, 343, 345 Seyhan, Azade, 229 Shakespeare, William, 28–29, 43, 80, 126–27, 132, 140, 142 n. 28, 171, 257 Shelley, Mary, works by: Frankenstein, 35, 50 n. 4

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 31, 36–38, 51–52, 193 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, 138, 166 n. 4 Sömmering, Thomas Theodor, 210 Souchay, Marc-André, 263–65 Spain, 12, 131 Spanish, 39, 43, 126, 130–31, 134, 136 Spann, Othmar, 208 n. 25 Spee, Friedrich von, 161 Sprengel, Kurt, works by: Versuch einer pragmatischen Geschichte der Arzneykunde, 218 Staël, Madame de, works by: De l’Allemagne, 38 Steffens, Henrik, 71, 105, 209, 211, 213, 215, 220 Steffens, Henrik, works by: Beiträge zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde, 71, 220, 223 n. 1 Stein, Friedrich Karl, Baron vom und zum, 12, 22 n. 23 Stein, Peter, 17, 24 n. 35, 305 n. 67 Stephens, Anthony, 15 Stephenson, R. H., 4, 307–26, 355 n. 4 Sterne, Laurence, 68, 80 Sterne, Laurence, works by: Tristram Shandy, 84 Stockinger, Claudia, 4, 125–45 Stöcklein, Paul, 308, 322 n. 8 Stoehr, Ingo R., 9 Storck, Joachim, 42 Strasbourg, 64, 191 Strauß, Botho, 17, 351–52, 354 Strauß, Botho, works by: Der junge Mann, 351–53 Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), 1, 3, 6, 14, 18, 35–36, 40, 64, 127, 256, 283, 307, 314, 327

INDEX

Stuttgart, 293, 295 subjectivism, 45, 110, 112, 154, 162, 329, 339–40 subjectivity, 69–70, 108, 149, 151, 154, 158, 166 n. 6, 195, 197, 232, 242, 249 n. 45, 273– 74, 296, 331, 345 sublime, the, 73, 101, 125, 152, 154–55, 236, 255, 274, 293 Sutter, Joseph, 293–94 Swabia, 93, 114, 353 Sweden, 15–16 Switzerland, 10–11, 38, 96 Tasso, Torquato, 43, 45, 57 n. 56 Taylor, William, 36 Teague, David, works by: The Sandman, 120 Teutoburg Forest, Battle of, 12– 13, 32, 137 Thales, 317 Theocritus, 46 Thun-Hohenstein, Count Franz Anton von, 289 Tieck, Ludwig, 2, 13, 17, 19–20, 33, 55 n. 43, 62–64, 68, 73–77, 85, 87, 89–90, 93–94, 102–8, 118, 120–21, 125–30, 135–36, 138–39, 141–44, 151–53, 167, 220, 229, 251–52, 276–77, 284, 286, 293–94, 301, 327 Tieck, Ludwig, works by: Der blonde Eckbert, 101–4, 106; Die Elfen, 102, 106; Fortunat, 127, 129; Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Eine altdeutsche Geschichte, 41, 55 n. 43, 68, 74, 77 n. 20, 90–92, 248 n. 42, 249 n. 44, 276, 294; Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell, 88, 93–94, 152–54, 167; Der gestiefelte Kater, 68, 128–29; Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (with Wackenroder), 2, 55 n.

❦ 417

43, 73–74, 84–85, 91, 95, 97 n. 16, 276, 283; Kaiser Octavianus, 129, 136, 142; Karl von Berneck, 128; Leben und Taten des kleinen Thomas, genannt Däumchen, 129; Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva, 127, 129; Leben und Tod des kleinen Rotkäppchens, 129; Des Lebens Überfluß, 106–8; “Melankolie,” 152–54; Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (with Wackenroder), 74, 252, 267 n. 2, 276; Phantasus, 102–3, 106, 129; Prinz Zerbino, 68, 128; Der Runenberg, 102, 104–6, 113; Die Sommernacht, 127– 28; Die Theegesellschaft, 128, 141 n. 22; Die verkehrte Welt, 68, 128 Titian, 307 Toussaint l’Overture, 12 Traeger, Jörg, 291, 298 n. 4, 304 n. 65 Träger, Claus, 342 transcendental poetry, 77, 80, 87, 148–49, 156, 163, 218, 284 Trunz, Erich, 307, 322 Turner, William, 276, 291 Uhland, Ludwig, 353 uncanny, the, 95, 119, 275 Unger, Friederike Helene, 230, 249 n. 45 utopianism, 9, 64, 72–73, 86–87, 89, 116–17, 133–34, 148, 151, 162, 175, 182, 185–86, 198, 201–2, 205, 296, 328–29, 336, 343–46, 348–50, 352–54 Varnhagen, Rahel Levin, 70, 230 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 4 Vasari, 74

418 ❦

THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Vega, Lope de, 126 Veit-Schlegel, Dorothea, 3, 62, 85, 96, 143 n. 39, 230–33, 235–37, 240–42, 247 n. 26 Veit-Schlegel, Dorothea, works by: Florentin, 5, 68, 96, 232, 241–42, 248 n. 43, 249 n. 44 Verlaine, Paul, 330 Vico, Giambattista, works by: Scienza Nuova, 174–75 Viehmann, Dorothea, 184 Vienna, 2, 10, 12, 17, 75, 195, 199, 202, 208, 254–55, 293– 95, 332 Vietta, Silvio, 354–55 Vilar, Jean, 17 Virgil, 40, 44–46, 66 n. 57 Vogel, Ludwig, 293–94 Voltaire, works by: Mahomet, 314 Vordtriede, Werner, 330 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 33, 40 Wächter, Eberhard, 294 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 2, 20, 55 n. 43, 62–64, 73–75, 77, 83–84, 251–52, 276–77, 284, 293–94, 327, 348, 353 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, works by: Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (with Tieck), 2, 55 n. 43, 73–74, 84–85, 91, 95, 97 n. 16, 276, 283; Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (with Tieck), 74, 252, 267 n. 2, 276 Wagner, Richard, 2, 6, 20, 253, 257, 260, 331 Wagner, Richard, works by: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 2, 20 n. 8 “Waldeinsamkeit,” 103–4 Waldstein, Edith, 230, 249 n. 49 Wars of Liberation, 134, 147, 335, 341

Waterloo, Battle of, 6 Weikard, Melchior Adam, 212 Weimar, 2, 39–41, 45 Weimar cinema, 118, 120, 122 n. 25 Weimar Classicism, 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 19 n. 2, 22 n. 21, 31, 35, 39– 42, 48, 50 n. 3, 51 n. 9, 53, 54 n. 37, 84, 125, 135, 192, 273, 276–77, 284–86, 293–94, 297 n. 3, 303 n. 60, 306 n. 76, 307, 328, 339, 351, 355 Weimar Republic, 327, 335–37 Weir, Judith, works by: Blond Eckbert, 120; Heaven Ablaze in His Breast, 120, 123 n. 29 Weiss, Peter, works by: Hölderlin, 349 Weissenfels, 73 Wellbery, David, 20 n. 4, 249 n. 51, 314, 324 Wendt, Amadeus, 257, 269 n. 15 Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 210 Werner, Zacharias, 41 West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany Wickram, Georg, 136 Wieck, Clara, 265 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 27– 28, 40, 43 Wieland, Christoph Martin, works by: Oberon, 27, 29, 43, 57 n. 54 Wiene, Robert, works by: Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, 120 Willemer, Marianne von, 315 Willoughby, Leonard A., 319, 326 n. 51 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 277, 290 Wintergast, Josef, 293–94 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 349 Wolf, Christa, 18, 24 n. 36, 344– 46, 349 Wolf, Christa, works by: Kein Ort: Nirgends, 18, 344–46; Neue

INDEX

Lebensansichten eines Katers, 344–45 Wolf, Hugo, 25 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 50 n. 4, 203–4, 235 Wordsworth, William, 2, 36, 51– 52, 97, 193 World Trade Center, 120 Wrisberg, Heinrich August, 210 Wünsch, Christian Ernst, 210 Württemberg, 10, 93 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 261–62 Zenge, Wilhelmine von, 11, 23 n. 33, 223 n. 3, 227 n. 55 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig Count of, 63

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