The adversaries of Romanticism have not failed to exploit this imprecision. In a still-famous study (Politische Romantik, 1925),253 Carl Schmitt reproached the Romantics for substituting God as the absolute instance (or supreme third-party) for any other concept: whether the State, the people, the individual. (We know the formula: ‘Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism’).254
In English, the word Romantic initially had the same meaning as French romanesque, by which it was customarily translated at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is with Rousseau’s Rêveries255 that the adjective romantique made its appearance. It therefore distinguishes itself from romanesque by the fact that it is applied less to events that are engaged by action than to characters and environments that are evoked to memory. Elsewhere, in the same period, the sentimental novel or roman256 begins to overtake the swashbuckling roman. It would be necessary, however, to wait until the nineteenth century to see the substantive, romantisme, enter into current usage. De Staël currently employs it. It is opposed to the classical tradition in the same way as culture is opposed to civilisation: romanticism is the adversary of classicism.
But this definition is no more satisfying than the others. Especially if one relates it to German Romanticism, of which the character and evolution is completely different to that which one has called, perhaps wrongfully, French Romanticism and English Romanticism.
Far removed from the classics, the German Romantics begin by laying high claim to Kant in philosophy and to Goethe in literature. Better, they have the sense to perpetuate a tradition which, through the Sturm und Drang, the Baroque, the works of Lessing, Herder, early Goethe, and young Schiller, has never ceased to proclaim the sovereignty of passion, the cult of life, the adoration of creative genius. Since 1770, it is true, the classics in Germany have ‘provided the theory and example of a spontaneous and direct lyric poetry, of a drama free from barriers, varied and picturesque, of a critical and non-dogmatic historicism open to the most varied forms of art; in short, a literature of dissent for the regard of the traditional French Graeco-Latin ideal’ (Paul Van Tieghem, op. cit.).
The great German mystics (Paracelsus, Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme), as well as Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, the theoretician of Pietism, also count among the ‘ancestors’ of Romantic speculation.
‘The principle antagonist of Romanticism’, remarks Erika Tunner, ‘is not classicism, but the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment’ (Aufklärung).
Just as the Lutheran Reformation was a reaction against the Thomist rationalism linked to the rise of Scholasticism, so too does Romanticism appear as a ‘response’ to the rationalism, this time profane, stemming from the Aufklärung.
‘Ineffable, Sacred, Mysterious Night’
We generally distinguish a first generation of Romanticism (Frühromantik), above all literary, with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, the brothers Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist, Jean-Paul, E. T. A Hoffman, Hölderlin; and a second generation (jüngere Romantik), more political, with Adam Müller and Görres, J. von Eichendorff, the brothers Grimm, Bettina and Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, von Chamisso, Bonaventura, Mörike, Büchner, etc.
In total, the movement would last scarcely more than a quarter of a century: from 1795 until around 1825.
The first Romantic circles were formed in Berlin (1795–96) and Jena (1798–99), where the brothers Schlegel published the magazine Athenaeum. They try next Heidelberg and Dresden.
Novalis (by his true name Friedrich von Hardenberg) is the first to introduce into his poetry the theories of monarchic traditionalism and the admiration for the medieval conception of the State. He is influenced by Pietism, and above all by Jakob Boehme, who his friend Ludwig Tieck had introduced him to, and of whom Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué, descendant of Norman Huguenots who had emigrated to Prussia after the revoking of the Edict of Nantes, had prepared a biography.
Novalis writes: ‘The world must be romanticised. By giving an elevated meaning to what is common, a mysterious aspect to what is banal, the dignity of the unknown to what is known, an infinite halo to what is finite, I romanticise’.
In the eyes of their contemporaries, the Romantic authors often seemed to be frail imaginative poets of a sickly sensibility, almost always inadequate, cultivating impossible loves, prone to suicide and unfortunate by vocation. This cliché (the ‘blue flower’) only gives a very poor idea of the nature of the movement.
In reality, the first Romantics conceived the world as a ‘dynamic infinity’: an inexhaustible plenitude of ever-renewed forms.
To the Graeco-Latin ideal of finite perfection and of the completed form, they substitute the Faustian ideal of hyperbole and form in a state of becoming (the cult of the incomplete, of the infinite); to the social relationship, in which men associate with each other, they substitute the cosmic relationship, which connects man to the universe. Likewise in literature, to the systematic œuvre constructed without spontaneity, they prefer the ‘fragment’, the incomplete but authentic text, where the heart expresses itself in an original and creative form.
In the aesthetic domain they proclaim that the work of art is not the creation of a conscious intelligence, but that it is born in the manner of a living being by virtue of a quasi-organic process.
In the cult of the theory of I, they draw from the certitude that destiny belongs to some exceptional individualities powerful enough to liberate themselves from much-too-human realities by creating a new world, all the while remaining capable of surpassing it. Schlegel and Novalis speak of ‘divine egoism’. ‘An exceptional man’, they say, ‘can be humanity in its entirety. The man who participates in the œuvre of the universe becomes in some way a god. We discover here the idea of the ‘spark in the soul’ (scintilla in anima) presented in Meister Eckhart, and also of the genius, which in the Sturm und Drang movement, is already snatched from its Christian context.
The taste for nature, which they proclaim to be as primordial as the spirit, leads the Romantics to celebrate childhood, the ‘blessed time’ during which man is in immediate sympathy with the world.
‘The ingenuity of the child is necessary to study nature’, says Novalis. ‘Childlike nature, more receptive, remains more intimately linked to action from above’, observes Heinrich Schubert.
Another magic door leads to the state of childhood: the fairy tale (Märchen), which translates a whole universe of beliefs and popular sentiments into illustrated stories. In the fairy tale, everything is possible. Opposites no longer contradict each other: they meld together to give birth to new concepts. The creative imagination, at last liberated, takes precedence over the reason of the period.
The group from Heidelberg, with Görres, Brentano, the brothers Grimm, and Achim von Arnim, devote themselves more specifically to the discovery of forgotten songs and ancestral poetry.
In 1805, The Boy’s Magic Horn,257 a collection the popular songs compiled by Arnim and Brentano, enjoyed a staggering success. The Children’s and Household Tales258 by the brothers Grimm would go around the world.
At the same time, the Romantics discovered the virtues of darkness. Turning their backs on the day which betrays them, they threw themselves with abandon into the silence of the night. Only the moon, eternal and icy, illuminated their work. Love itself belonged to the kingdom of the night (cf. the Second Act of Wagner’s Tristan). ‘I turned myself towards the ineffable, holy, mysterious night’, says Novalis in his Hymns to the Night (1800).259
The desire for nature and childhood, this nostalgia for a lost paradise, does not turn at any moment towards the egalitarian utopianism of a Rousseau. Once seduced by Les confessions,260 the Romantics quickly turn away. They do not want to return to nature to discover a ‘good’ or ‘better’ man, but to be suffused by what makes them authentic.
The unconscious into which they plunge themselves is not, as per Freud, that ‘backstage’261 where the individual ‘represses’ the depravities of their nature, but rather the ‘source of the soul’, t
he intimate domain in which the personality discovers and enriches itself. ‘Man must dive back into his unconscious’, writes Goethe, ‘for there lives the root of his being’.
Far from confining itself to a simple literary exercise, the dream is a means of communicating with the invisible universe of a forgotten past. ‘Thanks to the dream’, observes Jean-Paul, ‘the past is conjoined with the future in an eternal present’.
A particular place is reserves for music, hailed from the beginning as ‘the most Romantic of the arts’: Keine Farbe ist so romantisch als ein Ton! (‘No colour is as Romantic as a note!’). This is because music opens a gate to the collective unconscious like a dream opens one up upon the individual unconscious. During the centuries of ‘false clarity’, it was the ultimate refuge for ancient feelings and rhythms.
After Beethoven, there is the blossoming of the Lied with Schubert, the flourishing of opera with Weber, then Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, and finally Wagner and Richard Strauss.
E. T. A. Hoffmann is at once poet and musician. Tieck places music above everything. Others attempt to write ‘poetic symphonies’, or seek ‘musical effects’ in their writings.
A New Religion
All of this is enveloped by a religiosity which is far from orthodox. Novalis, in his Hymnes, develops a kind of nocturnal pantheism. He proposes the founding of a church which would borrow at once from the secret societies, the mystics of the Middle Ages, the Jesuit Order, and pagan cults. He asserts that a ‘new Catholicism’ gain momentum in Germany and evoke the hour in which ‘a Saviour like a pure genius will have his home among men’. On 2 December 1798, Friedrich von Schlegel writes: ‘I intend to create a new religion; for it will come and will triumph also without me’.
This is also the opinion of Schleiermacher, for whom ‘true Christianity’ must reunite the richness of Protestantism and that of Catholicism. A formula summarises this acute sense of the sacred: ‘Do everything with religion, do nothing by religion’.
Quite different from the first, which it nevertheless perpetuates, the second Romanticism is felt most deeply in the spirit of the times.
The work of Rousseau, then the Revolution, first raised the hopes of the Romantics. They are disenchanted when they discover in the ideas of 1789 the logical outcome of the ‘enlightened’ philosophies which they stood against. The movement then looks on with horror at the execution of Louis XVI, the assassination of suspects, and the Terror. It gains the greatest publicity from the Reflections on the Revolution in France262 which the Englishman Edmund Burke published in 1790, and who had considerable influence upon Novalis and Adam Müller. In the eyes of the Romantics, France is now the mother of democratic egalitarian ideas.
Ten years later, an immense shadow spreads across Europe. That of Napoleon. In reaction, German Romanticism will contribute to the formation of a nationalism that is still trying to find itself. (This right-handed outcome of a phenomenon that would have the exact inverse result in other countries, appears characteristic of the German temperament. We could evoke in this regard the fate of the Wandervögel movement and of the Jugendbewegung at the beginning of this century — and even wonder today about the specific future, in Germany, of a certain ‘dispute’).
‘Imagine for a moment’, notes Erika Tunner, ‘what the Napoleonic invasion meant on the simple, material plane: dislocated families, separated friends, broken correspondences. The former centres of Romanticism find themselves neglected; at the head, Berlin: the Court resides from 1806 to 1809 at Königsberg — and the literary salons, generally of a free spirit and largely open to the great artistic problems of Romanticism, are closed’.
The Romantics are thus forced to put an end to their self-fulfilment.
In the first case, they no longer exclusively insist upon love or individual friendship (‘Love’, writes Schleiermacher, ‘consists in making two people one, but friendship makes each of us two people’), but upon other privileged forms of ‘sociability’, such as ‘symphilosophy’ (or common philosophy) and ‘reciprocal meditation’, etc. Schlegel dreams of an international elite, of a ‘hanse’ or ‘guild’ of superior spirits. Schleimacher declares the desire to make university life a ‘common scientific existence’. In the second case, ‘sociability’, emotionally speaking, becomes political. Most of the Romantics recognise that beings of quality have a need to form bonds with those similar to themselves and, following from this, that the development of the personality flows from the ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) where social contacts occur.
Individualism is increasingly repudiated: the individual cannot be subtracted from his cultural environment nor from his heredity.
Pure sensibility is no longer found at the centre of the preoccupations of the second Romanticism, nor are the states of the soul or the restless humours; instead what is found is everything related to the popular soul: the history and science of language, the origin of beliefs, ancestral traditions and legends, the chivalric Middle Ages, ancient law, Germanic antiquities, folklore, script, etc.
Literature is therefore related to the arousal of enthusiasm and the galvanisation of energies. Erika Tunner notes: ‘German Romanticism takes a distinctly political turn; the patriotic inspiration of the Heidelberg years emerges into a nationalist inspiration’.
A Call to Arms
The two centres of anti-Napoleonic resistance are Prussia and Austria.
In 1808, the year that Napoleon achieved his greatest triumphs, Goethe wrote the first Faust and Heinrich von Kleist published The Battle of Hermann,263 a homage to Hermann (Arminius) the Cherusker, who defeated the legions of Varus in the Teutoburger Wald in the ninth year of our era. In the context of the contemporary period, the piece is a veritable call to arms. Censorship prohibits the portrayal.
Von Kleist also wrote his famous Catechism of the Germans,264 in which a father questions his son upon the duties of patriotism in occupied Germany: ‘Why do you love your homeland? — Because it is my homeland.’
This same year, 1808, Adam Müller, the most profound of the political theoreticians of Romanticism, published his Elements of Statesmanship,265 while Schleiermacher conducted his celebrated sermons in which he made it a religious duty for his audience to become aware of their civic responsibilities.
Schlegel writes: ‘Why so small as a nation, while we are so grand as individuals? The reason is simple and clear. We are a divided people’. And whereas Arnim places his pen at the service of his Prussian homeland, Hölderlin published a Hymne à Allemagne266 which expresses a painful love:
O Sacred Heart of the People, O Fatherland!
All-enduring like the silent Mother Earth,
Utterly misjudged by all, even though strangers
have taken the best from your depths!
They harvest your thoughts and spirit,
They gladly pluck your grapes, but scorn you
malformed vine! You, erratic,
wild and rambling on the ground.
Land of high and solemn genius!
Land of love, I am already yours,
Often I raged in tears because you
Witlessly rejected your own soul.267
On 29 April 1809, Kleist quit Dresden for Prague, where he hoped to publish a journal called Germania. But his project failed. In January 1810 he returned to Berlin where he launched his Evening Paper,268 a daily newspaper closely monitored by the censors and which, on 30 March 1811, had to stop publication.
In despair, Kleist kills himself on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee at the gates of Berlin in November 1811. He was 34 years old.
This is the epoch where Clausewitz teaches at the Higher School of War,269 where Ernst Moritz Arndt must flee because of his patriotic poems, where Ludwig ‘Turnvater’ Jahn rekindles popular enthusiasm thanks to the collective physical culture.
On 3 February 1813, King Frédéric-Guillaume III launches a ‘call to the people’ in Breslau. Numerous Romantics are engaged as volunteers for the war of liberation, notably Joseph v
on Eichendorff and the painter Philipp Veit. The young poet Theodor Körner, twenty-two years of age, falls in Mecklenburg. His songs are brought together under the title Lyre and Sword,270 and set to music by Carl Maria von Weber.
At Koblenz, Joseph Görres, eminent Catholic theologian, created The Rhenish Mercury,271 which Napoleon will qualify as ‘the fifth great power’. The journal will be banned on 3 January 1816.
The pioneer of this new attitude had been J. G. Fichte, whose fourteen Addresses to the German Nation272 laid the foundations for what will later be called ‘the German idea’.
The Era of the Fichte’s Addresses
Fichte, whose idealist doctrine effected the transition between the rationalist reclamation of the eighteenth century and German nationalism, is not a Romantic. But he made large borrowings from Romantic thought. In his work we find the theme of the exclusivity of the National Self, conceived as an enclosed whole, the theme of the originality of national character, linked to the ‘primitiveness’ of the German language, the exaltation of history as a factor of regeneration, etc.
The Addresses to the German Nation are delivered in the aftermath of the Battle of Jena, during the winter of 1806–07, in the halls of the Berlin Academy. Napoleon, whose troops occupied the city, pays no attention, judging this literature ‘insignificant’. (On 26 August 1806, however, he executed the 39-year-old librarian, Johann Philipp Palm, who was responsible for distributing patriotic pamphlets).
Fichte, who links his predication to that of Luther, reveals the theme of ‘German predestination’. He asserts that the Germans have the privilege of speaking an ‘original’ language (Ursprache), which makes them a ‘chosen people’ called to dominate the world by virtue of an inherent historical necessity. The Spirit, in his eyes, being absolute, an absolute Self, is opposed not to another Self but to a not-Self; in the same way, the absolute People are not opposed to another group of people, but to a non-People: the Foreigner. ‘For Fichte’, remarks Jean-Edouard Spenlé, ‘the Germans are the absolute people, those who exist “in and of themselves”, that is to say, “the People pure and simple” (das Volk schlechtweg), those who do not draw their reality from history, but who, conversely, engender their being, their history, by their thought, by the consciousness which they have of themselves’ (La pensée allemande, 1934).273
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