As the Romantic Movement unfolded, its writers became increasingly aware of the tenuous nature of the synthesis they were attempting to establish, and they felt wracked by a sense of irreconcilable dualism. Later Romanticism is perhaps best exemplified by E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose best-known tales, such as Der goldne Topf (1814; The Golden Pot) and Der Sandmann (1816; The Sandman), turn upon a tension between an everyday or philistine world and the seemingly crazed mental projections of creative genius. The poetry of Heinrich Heine, with its simultaneous expression and critique of Romantic sentiment, is also characteristic of this later phase of the movement; indeed, Heine is best seen as a transitional figure who emerged from late Romanticism but had his most decisive influence during the 1830s. His essay “Die Romantische Schule” (1833–35; “The Romantic School”) presented a critique of Romanticism’s tendency to look to the medieval past. Realist modes Bourgeois Realism
The deaths of Hegel in 1831 and of Goethe in 1832 released many German writers from the feeling that they stood in the shadow of great men. A new group of writers, only very loosely connected, began to emerge who felt that the aesthetic models of the age of Goethe could be laid aside in favour of a distinctly political form of literature. Inspired by the July Revolution in France (1830), these young German liberals aimed to have a direct impact on social, political, and moral realities. They opted in the main for literary forms such as pamphlets, essays, journalism, and satire. The agitations of this period gave rise to a tradition of political lyric, exemplified by the work of Heinrich Heine, which continued to provide models for political poetry into the late 20th century. Many of the “Young German” writers were prohibited from publishing their writing in Germany, because of their opposition to feudal absolutism and their promotion of democratic ideals. Some produced their works in exile, as in the case of Heine, whose long poem Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen (1844; Germany, A Winter’s Tale) presented a damning critique of his native land, and Ludwig Börne, whose Briefe aus Paris (1831–34; Letters from Paris) provided an influential record of the political ferment in France. Others were condemned to periods of imprisonment, as were Karl Gutzkow for his novel Wally die Zweiflerin (1835; Wally the Sceptic) and Heinrich Laube for his journalistic activity in support of political liberalism. Georg Büchner narrowly escaped imprisonment following the publication of his radical socialist pamphlet Der hessische Landbote (1834; “Messenger to the Hessian Peasants”), an attack on authoritarian government in his native Hesse. He is best known for his revolutionary drama Dantons Tod (1835; Danton’s Death) and for his remarkable dramatic fragment and critique of the social class system, Woyzeck (1879; Eng. trans. Woyzeck), published posthumously.
German realism, variously termed Bourgeois, or Poetic, Realism, is usually thought to have begun about 1840. In its earliest manifestations German realism is closely linked with the Biedermeier movement in art and interior decoration, a sedate and dignified style that emphasized the value of real things, domestic tranquility, and the social status quo. Writers linked with Biedermeier are Adalbert Stifter, Eduard Friedrich Mörike, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Karl Immermann, and Nikolaus Lenau. Adalbert Stifter paid loving attention to detail, cherishing individual objects, plants, and stones because, large or small, they bore witness to the order of the cosmos as a whole. In the preface to his collection of stories Bunte Steine (1853; “Stones of Many Colours”), Stifter enunciates most movingly his principle of the “sanftes Gesetz” (“gentle law of nature”), according to which the force that causes milk to boil over in the pot is the same as that which causes volcanoes to erupt. By attending to small phenomena that commonly recur, Stifter argues, one can more effectively represent reality than by focusing on more cataclysmic events. His carefully controlled narrative style, with its repeated motifs and structural symmetries, reveals upon closer inspection an awareness of upheaval and disruption.
The Bourgeois Realists refrained from depicting the larger social and political world as exemplified in urban reality and focused instead on village or peasant life and isolated individuals cut off from world events. Swiss writers Gottfried Keller and Jeremias Gotthelf (Albert Bitzius) are representative of this tendency, often known as “provincial realism.” Keller’s representative work is his collection of stories about life in his home country, Die Leute von Seldwyla (1856–74; The People of Seldwyla). Gotthelf is best known for his novella Die schwarze Spinne (1842; The Black Spider). Similarly, in his collection of stories Studien (1844–50; “Studies”), Stifter prefers isolated geographic settings, frequently the heart of the forest, and lonely protagonists whose little worlds are almost entirely of their own making. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s novella Die Judenbuche (1842; The Jew’s Beech), a murder mystery set in a Westphalian village, also belongs to this genre.
The Bourgeois Realists saw themselves as epigones or latecomers who could only inadequately emulate the great works of their predecessor Goethe. The two major novels of Bourgeois Realism, Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (1857; Indian Summer) and Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (first version 1854–55; Green Henry) are suffused with an acute awareness of the fragility of memory, a deep sense of personal loss, and a consciousness that reality cannot live up to the ideal. Nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially that of Eduard Friedrich Mörike and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, is similarly marked by a highly sensitive, elegiac relation to experience.
In contrast to the German Romantics, the German Bourgeois Realists did not attempt to create an all-encompassing philosophy. Instead, they focused on the essential subjectivity of experience. The individual’s angle of vision was fundamentally important to them, and to illustrate that subjectivity they made frequent use of metaphors having to do with sight and the instruments of sight. The novella, originally derived from the technique of embedding individual stories within a large narrative frame, is used by the Bourgeois Realists to draw attention to the limitations of individual subjectivity and to the problems of narration. Thus, despite its focus on the world of “objects,” German realism is anything other than objective. Later realist works, notably those of Wilhelm Raabe, explore the problem of how human beings come to know what they do and draw attention to the troublesome problem of gaps in their knowledge. Perhaps the best example is Raabe’s novel Stopfkuchen (1891; “Plumcake”), a circuitous double-framework narrative about a long-unresolved murder. Similarly, Theodor Woldsen Storm’s doubly framed novella Der Schimmelreiter (1888; The Rider on the White Horse [also published as The Dykemaster]) strikes a precarious balance between rational knowledge and superstition against the backdrop of Frisian village life.