A little-known poem by Schiller, German Greatness,274 composed in 1801, already announces this idea. ‘What constitutes German grandeur’, says the poet, ‘is precisely the current deprivation of the German people, the fact that their grandeur resides uniquely in its culture and in the moral character of the nation, a thing which does not depend at all on its political destiny. The German spirit is the only one for which “holy things exist”. It alone communicates with the spirit of the universe’ (J. A. Spenlé, ibid.).
In a celebrated passage, Fichte declares: ‘All those who believe in the spiritual reality and in the liberty of this spiritual life, all those who believe in an eternal progress in spirituality by means of liberty, whatever their country of origin may be, and whatever language they speak, they are of our race, they form part of our people, and they will be reconnected sooner or later. By contrast, all those who believe in a fixed State or in regression, or in the circular dance, or even those who place an inanimate Nature at the helm of the world, no matter their country of origin or the language they speak, they are not German, they are foreigners to us, and it is necessary to wish that they will be completely removed from our people ...’
The influence exercised by the Addresses upon Romantic thought is considerable.
Hölderlin sees in the German people the Urvolk, the ‘original people’. He observes that, of all the languages of Europe, the German language remains the closest to primitive Indo-European. Novalis writes: ‘With its slow but steady pace, German precedes the [language of the] other European countries’. He declares: ‘There are Germans everywhere’. In 1848, The Frankfurt Assembly will proclaim: Was deutsch spricht soll deutch werden. That is to say: ‘Whoever speaks German will become German’.
It is the Heidelberg group, under the aegis of Arnim and Brentano, who are the most concerned with defining the new elements constitutive of nationality. ‘These writers’, observes Jacques Droz, ‘have admitted that they could not have reawakened the German people if they did not become conscious of the artistic treasures which it concealed in its breast, if it did not substitute a culture reserved for an elite with a truly popular culture, if the individual did not seek to connect himself spiritually to the entire nation. They have therefore been lead to place the accent on a certain community or ethnic kinship, which has been called Volkstum or Volkheit,275 cemented by the idiom that the population speaks, by cohabitation in a specific region, by common respect for certain customs, beliefs, legal traditions, and morals’.
To the cosmopolitan idea of the nation, the Romantics responded by a theory of the inevitability of national belonging.
Resuming the theses if the publicist Justus Möser (German History, 1773)276 and above all of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), they make the notion of ‘national genius’ rest upon a collective spiritual entity which they call the ‘people’ (das Volk). This term does not designate any social class. It refers to the totality of the national community, finally become conscious of itself, which it represents for all eternity: it is only apprehended in its historical manifestations, but it is anterior to these.
Hence the astonishing admiration of de Staël: ‘Some poems of Goethe and Burger are set to music, and you hear them repeated from the banks of the Rhine to the Baltic! Our French poets are admired by all wherever there are cultivated spirits among us and in the rest of Europe — but they are completely unknown to the common people and to the bourgeois, even in the cities …’ (De l’Allemagne. II, 11).
At the same time that they situate the people in their becoming, the Romantics rehabilitate history. In his dissertation Some Remarks on the Study of the History of the Fatherland (1808),277 Heinrich Luden affirms that ‘even science must have a nationality’, and because they ‘lost the meaning of history’, the Germans experienced disasters. ‘Historicity’, he adds, ‘is the criteria of all humanity’.
Systematically, the Romantics insist on originalities and diversities. To the Aufklärung, which examined the past in the light of universal history and sought to discover the laws of a constant progress of spirit, they oppose research into everything that allows the mentality of man and the genius of the people to be situated in space and time.
Joseph Görres places the accent upon the Stammesgefühl, the popular consciousness of the same ethnic origin, cemented by the use of the same language, attachment to the same countries, respect for the same customs, cohabitation in the same regions.
He writes: ‘For a people, the most deplorable of all self-deception is to let its own originality be forgotten, to ignore its deep nature, to let itself become involved in foreign practices … Everything that is foreign, everything that is introduced without deep reason into the life of a people, becomes the cause of disease for them, and must be eradicated if they want to remain healthy. To the contrary, everything that is essential or specific to them must be cultivated by them and pruned without respite.
It follows that ‘every ethnic group has the right and the duty to jealously conserve its historical denomination, to which the memories of the past are linked’.
Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), whose thought is in part formed by the school of German Romanticism, will have this expression: ‘the earth and the dead’ (The Uprooted).278
The Holy Spirit and ‘Medieval’ Values
‘Authenticity’ for the Romantics is first of all ancient medieval Germany. They turn towards it with a burning nostalgia which goes hand in hand with an admiration for ‘historical’ Catholicism. One of the principal essays of Novalis, Christendom or Europe,279 begins with the words: ‘It was a bright and beautiful epoch, when Europe was a Christian land, when a single and unique Christendom lived upon this so characteristically human continent’.
Hence we find the desire, served by an impassioned nostalgia (Sehnsucht), for that which resembled a rebirth of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire.
The Romantic authors are thus lead to give a preponderant place to ‘medieval’ values: to the ‘feudal exchange’ of service for protection, to the given word, to honour, to courage, to discipline and freely consenting obedience. They aspire to a new nobility. They pronounce themselves for a patriarchal system, to a peasantry connected to the soil, a bourgeoisie limited in its economic ambitions, the inalienability of land ownership (the farm owner is ‘married’ with his land: a divorce is unthinkable).
Joseph Görres distinguishes the teaching profession (Lehrstand), the fighting profession (Wehrstand) and the nourishing profession (Nährstand). This is a return to the traditional division proper to Indo-European societies between those who know and direct (sovereign function), those who fight and defend (warrior function), and those who work and nourish (productive function).
The Organic State
The Romantics, in fact, desire to obtain a synthesis of opposites: the people and the nation, the State and the public spirit, Europe and its regions.
‘There will come a day’, Novalis assures us, ‘where we will be universally convinced that no king can exist without the Republic, and reciprocally, that no Republic is appropriate without a king; and that each are as inseparable as soul and body’.
In the same way that dreams, the unconscious, and fairy tales help them to recover their childhood, the chanson de geste (the Heldenlied),280 the epic, and the literature of the Minnesänger (the troubadours) allows them to place the ‘people’ in their distant origins.
Many of them go to Paris to study the texts of the Middle Ages at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and it is in Paris that Achim von Arnim wrote his epic, Hermann and his Children.281 It is also in Paris that Friedrich von Schlegel, who lived at rue de Clichy, gained awareness of his nationality and his ‘earthly homeland’. In 1803, he writes in the review Europa, which was published at Frankfurt: ‘Perhaps the sleeping lion will awaken once again; and should we not see it ourselves, perhaps the history of the times to come will be filled with the exploits of the Germans’. In 1804, he creates a course on heroic mythology: he is above all
interested in the epic of the Nibelungs, whose spirit and composition he admires. (The adaptation of this epic song by Fredrich de La Motte-Fouqué in 1808, in The Hero of the North,282 will furnish Wagner with one of his sources of inspiration).
The other Schlegel, August-Wilhelm, penned an apology for the Germanic Roman Empire: ‘It is the people of the German race who have recreated and founded Europe, and if it is permitted of me to ask something about the national sentiment of the Germans, it is that they recognise that they are the motherland of Europe’.
He adds: ‘The Eagle, this symbol of royalty, is for Germany a Roman inheritance’.
To the mechanistic attitude of the Aufklärung, which, taking man for a thing, extends the laws of the physical world to organic nature, Romanticism opposes a dynamic conception of life, which no longer only affects morality and religion, as with Lessing or Leibniz, but also nature and history.
Novalis denounces ‘the miserable philistines, devoid of spirit and miserable of heart, the followers of the letter, who seek to hide the dullness of their thought and their inner deprivation under colourful appearances and behind the imposing mask of cosmopolitanism’. ‘Everything that is absolute’, declares Friedrich von Schlegel, ‘is, by its very nature, inorganic, and tends to destroy the constituent elements. We can even say that the absolute is the true enemy of humankind’.
All of this results in an absolutely new conception of the state, which is no longer considered as a static concept (Begriff), but as a dynamic Idea.
The Aufklärung has seen in the state a necessary but transitory evil, a scandal for a reason. Romanticism sees it as a necessity in itself, a natural, organic reality independent of the arbitrary will (the ‘social contract’) of individuals, an entity which remains in service of the people, but which, being endowed with a life of its own, transcends and surpasses them by expressing all potentialities and specific values, and thereby shapes the people.
Adam Müller, in his Elements of Statesmanship,283 writes: ‘The State is not an invention of men destined for the utility or pleasure of the citizens’ life; nothing exists for the citizen besides it. It is indispensable, inevitable, founded upon human nature’. He adds: ‘The State is the fusion of human interests into an organic Whole’.
The same idea according to Novalis: ‘Every citizen is an official of the State. Only in this capacity does he have his income’.
The Romantics noticed that the national community ‘cannot be envisaged as the arithmetic sum of its equal members, but rather that it forms by itself a new, creative synthesis, mystically possessing an existence independent from those who compose it’ (Jacques Droz, Le romantisme allemande et l’Etat. Payot, 1966).
This idea that the State is not a composed whole, but an organic whole, that it is no longer the simple ‘sum’ of its citizens just as an organism is not the simple sum of the organs that compose it, finds its origin in the thought of Schelling.
It is in his Lectures on the Method of Academic Study (1802)284 that Schelling establishes the link between the philosophy of nature and the Romantic doctrine of the State. His interpretation, notes Droz, ‘is accompanied by an aristocratic contempt for all forms of modern egalitarianism, as well as by a pronounced affirmation of the prerogatives of the monarch, without which the State remains “invisible” to its subjects’.
Fichte also wrote on this: ‘In a product of nature, each part is only what it is in connection with the whole, and cannot absolutely be itself outside of this connection (…) In the organised body, each part ceaselessly maintains the whole, and by conserving it conserves itself. The same holds for the citizen in relation to the State’.
What is more, the State is justified by natural inequality, which supports freedom. ‘If freedom is in fact only the general effort of differently endowed natures towards a more perfect development of their faculties’, writes Adam Müller, ‘there is nothing more contradictory than to deny the particularities, the diversities of these natures. Also the concept of freedom that I have defined has never been implemented in France. It is a false concept of freedom which, accompanied by equality, has characterised Revolutionary France (…) If the diverse elements of civil society were not different and unequal, there would be no State. For the State is not born once and for all from some kind of compromise, conciliation, or synthesis between the diverse forces which oppose each other: it is itself the instrument of compromise, of conciliation, of synthesis between these forces’.
Finally, the State, being an end in itself, will not be submitted to international authorities. This is why the Romantics principally combat the doctrine of the ‘equilibrium of forces’, implemented by Metternich. ‘An eternal peace’, affirms Heinrich Luden, ‘will be as pernicious to the human race as if storms disappeared from the atmosphere, leaving behind the swamps’.
Müller writes: ‘If we place ourselves in the vantage of the state, we will see that war is the event in which the greatest momentum of the political life is manifested, where the State becomes conscious of its specific essence and puts the totality of its forces to the test in the presence of an adversary of equal size.
Joseph von Eichendorff, one of the most esteemed poets from the war of liberation, declares, in regards to the texts of the Constitutions: ‘The paper is good for nothing. It is not in the dead letters that the sanctity of the contract resides, but in the loyalty, the unwavering will to uphold it’.
In 1814, the jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny published On the Call of our Time for Legislation and the Science of Jurisprudence,285 a work which would give birth to the historical school of jurisprudence.
Breaking with all juridical internationalism, Savigny affirms that ‘law, like language, grows with the people, develops, and dies with them when the latter loses its profound peculiarities’. From here it follows that to want to interrupt the course of history is to go against life, that it is a ‘crime’ to want to impose institutions on a nation which are foreign to it, that the principle task of the jurist is not to codify and legislate, but to collect and formalise the elements of customary jurisprudence, only in accordance with the popular spirit or genius.
It is in this spirit that Savigny founded in 1815 the Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft,286 which would have considerable impact.
From the years 1812–16, Romanticism was developed above all in the south, notably in Vienna, which since 1809 had become the capital of Napoleon’s adversaries, and also at Munich.
It is in Vienna that the Baron Joseph von Hormayr, born at Innsbruck in 1782, intends to make history serve the resurrection of national values. ‘History’, he writes, ‘is the unique depository of the originality of peoples’. It is also in Vienna that Adam Müller and Beethoven are based. Also at Vienna, August-Wilhelm von Schlegel, travelling in the wake of de Stäel, insists in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature287 upon the necessity of making the poetic élan coincide with the superior interest of the homeland.
In Bavaria, where the Romantics gathered around Joseph Görres and Franz von Baader, the penetration of the movement is linked to the fight for the Church’s independence. It thus assumes an ultra-Catholic and particularistic character which it never had elsewhere. Its centre is found in the new university, which Louis I had transferred from Landshut to Munich.
It is here that von Baader, Professor at the University and collaborator with the review, Eos, rediscovered the works of Meister Eckhart that had been eliminated from the centres of study since the condemnation of the great Rhenan mystic by the tribunals of the Inquisition, first at Cologne, then at Rome in 1328.
In Swabia, the most representative authors are Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862), the novelist Wilhelm Hauff (1802–1850), Gustav Schwab (1792–1850) and the poet Eduard Mörike.
Romanticism and Modern Science
Romanticism concludes, around 1827, in southern Germany, in the draft of a doctrine for Restoration and with an apology for the Christian State. Its last manifestations are stifled b
y the increase of ideas from the left, linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie liberal. (Heinrich Heine, theoretician of the Young Germany movement288 and ‘defrocked’ Romantic, will come to see in Romanticism ‘the most sustained proof of despotism’.)
In the world, however, the grip of Romanticism has only just begun.
In France, the work of Madame de Staël, On Germany (1810),289 vigorously in favour of German Romanticism, has already provoked passionate controversies. From 1829, the Revue de Paris published the texts of E. T. A. Hoffman, Kleist, Jean-Paul, and Novalis. Alfred de Musset, Vigny, Aloysius Bertrand, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, followed by Apollinaire, Barrès, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists, will all draw elements of their own thought from Romanticism.
In Germany, Romantic literature has not contributed solely to national and political renewal. All the philosophers of life, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Klages and Dilthey, have fed on it directly or indirectly. The brothers Grimm laid the foundations for modern philology. Thanks to Brentano, folklore and mythology have been renovated. Indo-European studies and linguistics have taken flight from the works of Schlegel and Franz Bopp, along with archaeology, ethnology, and palaeontology. The development of the German historical school, with Savigny, then Niebuhr and Raumer, of whom Leopold von Ranke was the eminent heir, formed a decisive step for historiography.
Heritage and Foundations Page 21
