Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Rediscovering the “Volk”

Abstract

JEAN PAUL WAS NOT EXACTLY FORGOTTEN around 1900, but his texts, while of interest to some, were clearly not part of the German literary canon. This was not the case, however, for the poems collected by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn). Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano were prolific German authors, belonging to the second Romantic school affiliated with the city of Heidelberg. While the first generation of Romantic authors (Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Tieck, and Wackenroder) was primarily a protest generation, the second generation, partially influenced by the French occupation of large sections of the German states, was characterized by a nationalistic, conservative, and religious turn; many of these Romantics converted to Catholicism. Des Knaben Wunderhorn is the most comprehensive and best-known collection of German folk songs and was first published in 1806 (volume 1) and 1808 (volumes 2 and 3). The songs experienced a renaissance much earlier than Jean Paul's works, around 1870; interestingly, this coincided with Germany's national unification. And yet one should not exaggerate their popularity; first-edition copies of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for instance, were still available from the publisher in 1900.