Hölderlin was able to revive with considerable success genres of Greek poetry—the Horatian ode, the elegy, and the Pindaric ode—in German literature and to fuse his love for his native land with the longing for ancient Greece. His epistolary novel Hyperion; oder, der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–99; Hyperion; or, The Hermit in Greece) integrates ideals of Platonic philosophy into a revolutionary concern for the restoration of the ancient poetical and intellectual grandeur of a Greece that had come under Turkish domination.
Kleist pushed beyond the borders of Weimar Classicism with his dramas on Greek subjects (Amphitryon in 1807 and Penthesilea in 1808) and his historical dramas (Die Hermannsschlacht, or “Hermann’s Battle,” dealing with the defeat of the Romans by Germanic tribes under Arminius [Hermann] in ad 9, and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, a play about the conflict of Prussian military law and human compassion; both plays were posthumously published in 1821), while his novellas (Erzählungen, 1810–11; Eng. trans. The Marquise of O– and Other Stories) are remarkable for their classical mastery of form and subject matter. In Kleist’s tale Das Erdbeben in Chili (“The Earthquake in Chile”), from the Erzählungen volume, a nun (who has borne a child) and her lover are saved from execution and suicide, respectively, by an earthquake that destroys all of Santiago and their persecutors. They perceive the cataclysm as an act of redemptive grace sent by God. But their illusions of divine grace are shattered when a churchman incites a frightened mob to slay the two “sinners” (whose misdeed is understood to have caused the earthquake). The Erzählungen story Die Marquise von O– begins when a reputable young woman places an ad in the newspaper asking the father of the child she is bearing to make his identity known to her; she has become pregnant without her own knowledge or conscious participation. The theme of Michael Kohlhaas, also in Erzählungen, is the unbending search for justice of a wronged man who destroys himself seeking redress.
Kleist was more affected by the violence of his period than any other German writer and made the display of violence a central topic of his works. In his drama Die Hermannsschlacht and his Erzählungen novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in Santo Domingo), the concept of violence as a just means in the fight against imperialism takes on strong anti-French overtones, reflecting the emergence of modern German nationalism in the wars against Napoleon. Nationalism links Kleist to the Romantic Movement, which made a fierce and revolutionary patriotism into one of its programmatic features. Ehrhard Bahr The 19th century The Romantic Movement
The early years of German Romanticism have been aptly termed the theoretical phase of a movement whose origin can be traced back to the Sturm und Drang era and, beyond Germany itself, to the French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An interest in individual liberty and in nature as a source of poetic inspiration is a common thread in the sequence of the movements Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Romanticism, which from one perspective can be regarded as separate phases in a single literary development. Within this framework, the German Romantics forged a distinctive new synthesis of poetry, philosophy, and science. Two generations of Romantic writers are usually distinguished: the older group, composed in part of Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel; and the younger group, comprising Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph Eichendorff, Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm, and the painter Philipp Otto Runge.
The French Revolution (1787–99) had had a decisive impact on German Romantic writers and thinkers. The Napoleonic Wars, beginning in 1792 and ending with the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, brought much suffering and ultimately led to a major restructuring of Germany. The upheavals of this period gave rise to a new desire for a uniquely German cultural movement that would explicitly oppose French rationalism.
German Idealist philosophy played an important role in the genesis of Romanticism, which saw itself as grappling with a crisis in human subjectivity and laying the foundation for a new synthesis of mental and physical reality. The first step was taken by Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794; “Science of Knowledge”), which defined the subject (“Ich,” or “I”) in terms of its relation to the object-world (“Nicht-Ich,” or “Not-I”). Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature) posited a reciprocal relationship between nature and mind: his famous formulation “Nature is unconscious mind, mind is unconscious nature” forms the groundwork for a great deal of German Romantic literature. Friedrich von Schlegel’s philosophical writings continued this line of thinking by reevaluating the role of creative imagination in human life. Poetry—the Romantics’ term for all forms of creative writing—was an anticipation of a future harmony in which all forms of conflict would be resolved in a vast productive unity. Adapting Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic (a posited interaction of opposite ideas leading to a synthesis), Schlegel developed his key concept of “irony,” by which he meant a form of thinking or writing that included its own self-reflection and self-critique. Ironic poetry, in Schlegel’s view, was a two-track form of literature in which a naive or immediate perception of reality is accompanied by a more sophisticated critical reflection upon it.
The Romantic writer Novalis (the pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold, Baron von Hardenberg) put Schlegel’s theory of irony into practice in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802; Henry of Ofterdingen), which depicts the development of a naive young man who is destined to become a poet. Heinrich’s untutored responses to experience are juxtaposed with a sequence of inset narratives that culminate in an allegorical “fairy tale” that was to be followed, according to the author’s notes, by the depiction of an “astral” counterreality. Each successive stage of the novel was to move toward a higher and more complex understanding of the world.
Many of the German Romantics drew heavily on contemporary science, notably on Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808; “Views about the Night Side of Science”). In contrast to the Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement reevaluated the power of rational thinking, preferring instead more intuitive modes of thought such as dreams (in Schubert’s terms, the “night side” as opposed to the “day side” of reality). In many ways, the German Romantics can be seen as anticipating Sigmund Freud in their emphasis on the pervasive influence of the unconscious in human motivation. Characteristic Romantic motifs such as night, moonlight, dreams, hallucinations, inchoate longings, and a melancholic sense of lack or loss are direct reflections of this interest in the unconscious.
According to the Romantics, some minds are particularly adapted to discern the hidden workings of nature. Poets, they believed, possess the faculty of hearing the “voice of nature” and transposing it into human language. Lyric poetry was a dominant genre throughout the period, with Ludwig Tieck, Joseph Eichendorff, and Clemens Brentano as its major practitioners. Folk traditions such as the fairy tale, ballad, and folk song were also seen as ways of gaining access to preconscious modes of thought. Fairy tales and folk poetry were the object of quasi-scholarly collections such as the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15; “Children’s and Household Stories,” commonly known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales), assembled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and the poetry anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08; “The Boy’s Magic Horn”), edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. At the same time, these genres were also much imitated, as in Ludwig Tieck’s sophisticated “art fairy tale” Der blonde Eckbert (1797; “Blond Eckbert”). The Romantics were also intensely interested in the Middle Ages, which they saw as a simpler and more integrated time that could become a model for the new political, social, and religious unity they were seeking. Novalis’s essay “Die Christenheit oder Europa” (1799; “Christendom or Europe”) expressed this view.