Nicholas Saul

Romanticism and Classicism

Broadly conceived, European Romanticism designates a period of 100 years extending from Rousseau to Baudelaire, and in painting and music it follows Classicism. German literary history not only uses the term more narrowly, as this volume demonstrates, but it also distinguishes between contemporaneous movements called Romanticism and Classicism. In the context of European comparative scholarship Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) are Germanys greatest Romantics, but for German scholars they embody the movement called German or Weimar Classicism, which is cast variably as the enemy, diametric opposite, or complement of Romanticism. Scholars today no longer universally accept the distinction between Romanticism and Classicism, nor do they even argue much whether it should be drawn, since proponents of both sides consider the question settled. A frequent compromise has been to speak of a Goethezeit (Age of Goethe), which can then be divided into Classicism and Romanticism or not as one chooses. This essay describes the historical details of the connections between the groups, their intellectual commonalities and differences and what might properly be called Goethes role in German Romanticism; then it considers briefly the history and function of the distinction. As the canon of German literary history crystallised in the late nineteenth century, Classicism often included in addition to Goethe, Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) the older dramatist and theorist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) and the poet Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), tutor to the Duke of Weimar and Goethes respected associate.

The Cambridge companion to German romanticism

Preface Chronology 1. What is Romanticism, and where did it come from? Azade Seyhan 2. From early to late Romanticism Ricarda Schmidt 3. Prose fiction of the German Romantics Anthony Phelan 4. The Romantic lyric Charlie Louth 5. The Romantic drama Roger Paulin 6. Forms and objectives of Romantic criticism John A. McCarthy 7. Romanticism and Classicism Jane K. Brown 8. Women writers and Romanticism Gesa Dane 9. The Romantics and other cultures Carl Niekerk 10. Love, death and Liebestod in German Romanticism Nicholas Saul 11. Romantic philosophy and religion Andrew Bowie 12. Romantic politics and society Ethel Matala de Mazza 13. Romantic science and psychology Jurgen Barkhoff 14. German Romantic painters Richard Littlejohns 15. Romanticism and music Andrew Bowie 16. Transformations of German Romanticism 1830-2000 Margarete Kohlenbach Key authors and their works Guide to further reading Index.

Love, death and Liebestod in German Romanticism

In this essay I shall argue something infrequently heard in modern academic discourse: that we need to turn the clock back a little in the scholarship of German Romanticism (if only to go forward the more progressively). It used to be commonplace to link German Romanticism intrinsically with a suspect ideology of love and death, and in especial with the erotic death cult most prominently exemplified by the Liebestod of Richard Wagners doomed Tristan and Isolde. But scholarship in recent decades has turned away from that preoccupation. With some justification, it is true, other themes have come to the fore. Romanticism is (for example) now no longer thought of as an aggressively irrationalist and obscurantist phenomenon. Instead, its anti-Enlightenment polemic is understood as the expression of a pioneering critique of abstract rationalism very much within the utopian tradition of the project of Enlightenment. Similarly, the engagement of Romantic thinkers with the political sphere is now recognised to be much more complex than the received scheme of conservatism and reaction used to suggest. And analogous corrections of our historical understanding have been made across virtually the entire spectrum of Romanticisms thematic preoccupations. This is true in some sense of the traditional identification of Romanticism with morbidity and perverse love. Thomas Manns early novella Tristan (1902) well represents what we used to think. This bleak allegorical analysis of the sickness afflicting art, life and modern culture certainly foregrounds and criticises a pessimistic ideology of love and death. In a sanatorium around 1900 the beautiful, yet mortally ill Gabriele Kloterjahn encounters a minor aestheticist poet, Detlef Spinell. In the absence of her merchant husband, they recognise an aestheticist affinity and fall in love.

The Romantic lyric

Most of the poetry written by the German Romantics is remote from what we tend nowadays to appreciate in a poem. It lacks the concreteness, the precision, the dense texture and above all the love of the particular that we have largely come to associate with the modern lyric, and beyond that, in its reliance on a limited stock of themes and motifs (nightingales, the heart, stars, moonlight, gardens, spring, childhood, the soul ...), it seems to stand for what much modern poetry has worked against. More so than in the writings of the English Romantics its world can seem to join up with our own experience and our articulation of it only by stark contrast. At the same time, thanks in part to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and other composers of the Lied , if we are familiar with any German Romantic work it is likely to be a poem; and to some extent modern poetry still depends on an implicit knowledge of the once-dominant forms of the Romantic lyric to point and nuance its workings. Who, though, wrote the Romantic lyric? Conventionally German literary history, because of the virtual simultaneity of Classicism and Romanticism in the German tradition, excludes several writers who from a European perspective are clearly Romantic poets, chief among them Goethe and Holderlin. Romantic poetry in the narrow sense is as unthinkable without the example of Goethes early poetry as is the Romantic novel without his Wilhelm Meister , though the debt was much less fully acknowledged at the time.

»Vom alten Proteus«/»Der gute Tag«

Die Erzahlungen Vom alten Proteus. Eine Hochsommergeschichte und Der gute Tag oder die Geschichte eines ersten Aprils (beide 1875) gehoren entstehungsgeschichtlich wie thematisch zusammen. Beide thematisieren – fast als einzige in Raabes literarischem Werk – das in den 1870er Jahren neue, aus den USA und Grosbritannien eingefuhrte, in Berlin und Leipzig stark vertretene soziokulturelle Phanomen des Spiritismus (vgl. Linse 1998; Pytlik 2005; Saul 2013).

‘Vorgänger Darwins’ or ‘Nachfolger Goethes’? Wilhelm Bölsche on Evolutionism in Goethe and Novalis or, Literature and the Two Cultures Then and Now

Abstract This essay is the first to consider Wilhelm Bölsche’s activity as editor of, and commentator on, Novalis’s work. It does so on the one hand by contrasting Bölsche’s image of Novalis with his image of Goethe, and on the other by setting that in the context of Bölsche’s evolutionist theory of culture. Both are said to represent evolutionism in an early and vigorous form, and so to ‘precede’ Darwin. Finally, Bölsche’s evolutionist characterization of Novalis as a sympathetically Faustian conqueror of other cultures is critically evaluated against his own, later essay on Columbus and the Conquistadors. Bölsche’s attempt to propagate an evolutionary critique of culture is in conclusion argued to prefigure key tendencies of today’s cognitive humanities and evolutionary poetics.

Raabes Geschichte(n): Realismus, Erzählen, Historie, Prähistorie

Hier soll nicht nur von der Geschichte, sondern auch von den Geschichten bei Raabe gesprochen werden, und zwar soll in diesem Zusammenhang insbesondere die Funktion jener ältesten aller Geschichten im Realismus kommentiert, also etwas über Raabe als Darwin-Kritiker gesagt werden. Deswegen die im Titel graphemisch festgehaltene, irreduzible Form der Alternativität, welche statt der Singularität von ‚Geschichte‘ ein nichtaufgelöstes Nebeneinander von Mehrdimensionalität oder Komplexität suggeriert. Die Geschichte bzw. die Geschichten, so soll argumentiert werden, sind für Raabe mehr als nur irgendein herkömmliches Thema wie etwa die Sexualität, der Kolonialismus, die Eisenbahn, der Tod – wichtig, wie solche Themen zweifellos bei Raabe sind. Geschichte(n) in der hier suggerierten Vielfalt sind für Raabe vielmehr so etwas wie eine Denkkategorie, ein fundamentales Denkmedium, stellen seine persönliche geistige Signatur unter den deutschsprachigen Romanciers des 19. Jahrhunderts dar.1 Worin besteht also diese Mehrdimensionalität? Zunächst ist ‚Geschichte‘ im Singular konventionell genug als die Geschichte zu verstehen, als jene Disziplin, welche trotz ihrer vielfachen Binnendifferenzierungen schlichtweg der Erkenntnis des Vergangenen dient. Raabe kannte sich in den offi ziellen und nichtoffi ziellen Geschichtswissenschaften des historistisch denkenden 19. Jahrhunderts – von Ranke bis Schliemann und Hegel bis Hartmann – erwiesenermaßen exzellent aus.2 Vor allem ist ‚Geschichte‘ in dieser ersten Bestimmung natürlich in Raabes historischer Dichtung präsent, in seinen zahlreichen historischen Novellen und Romanen. Raabe hat nach der herkömmlichen Defi nition der Gattung mindestens 24 Werke dieser Sorte geschrieben, von Lorenz Scheibenhardt (1858) bis Hastenbeck (1899).3

Philosophy and German literature, 1700-1990

Acknowledgments Introduction: German literature and philosophy Nicholas Saul 1. Critique and experience: philosophy and literature in the German Enlightenment John A. McCarthy 2. The pursuit of the subject: Literature as critic and perfecter of philosophy 1790-1830 Nicholas Saul 3. Two realisms: German literature and philosophy 1830-90 John Walker 4. Modernism and the self 1890-1924 Ritchie Robertson 5. The subjects of community: aspiration, memory resistance 1918-45 Russell A. Berman 6. Coming to terms with the past in postwar literature and philosophy Robert C. Holub Bibliography.

The Body, Death, Mutilation, And Decay In Zacharias Werner

Here the attitude of the Romantic dramatist Zacharias Werner to death and the body is analysed for the first time. His model, Goethe, stands in the classicist tradition, whereby art celebrates life and the encounter with death and bodily destruction is consciously marginalised. Werner is shown to present versions of an ambiguous critique of this aspect of Goethean classicism in an early lyric from Die Sohne des Thals, his Roman journal, and the last act of Die Mutter der Makkabaer.In the early lyric the marginalisation of death is opposed by a deliberate eroticisation which ends in necrophilia. In the journal and Werner’s last play the eroticisation is renounced, but the tendency to celebrate physical destruction as self-fulfilment still subverts his attempt to follow classical norms for the portrayal of violence and death. His poetic discourse is thus a hybrid of Classicism and black Romanticism. Finally, Foucault’s reconstruction of the history of corporeal discipline and Arie’s history of death are applied to evaluate these aspects. Werner’s texts are attempts to solve the modern problem of death, but they do so by means of regression to pre-modern attitudes and betray an affinity to sadism.