Embodying the Romantic Collector in Post-Romantic Writing

Abstract

A paradox from Walter Benjamin’s 1937 essay “Eduard Fuchs: Der Sammler und der Historiker” provides the coordinates for this study of the Romantic collector in nineteenth-century literature. Following Benjamin, the paradox turns on the notion that the figure of the Romantic collector is a product not, as might be expected, of Romantic literature but rather of literary realism. Precisely because collecting and museum making were integral to Romantic endeavours and ideas, Benjamin’s assertion begs to be explored on the terrain of Romantic literature and the ways Romantic concerns are imagined and transformed in post-Romantic writing. Before I analyze pertinent Romantic and post-Romantic literary texts in these terms, I will first discuss Benjamin’s claims against the backdrop of his thinking about collecting and Romanticism. After reading Benjamin’s writing to sharpen the Romantic stakes of his thinking about the collector, I will turn to the trope of the Galeriegesprach in two of its earliest instantiations, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck’s Herzensergiesungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders and August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel’s Die Gemalde. Ein Gesprach. In these key articulations of early Romantic aesthetics, I want to pay particular attention to the Galeriegesprach for the way it figures collecting not as a literal practice of acquisition, preservation, and display of physical artifacts but rather as a notional and literary process. With this approach, I attend to the relationship of collecting to imagination, memory, and dialogic literary form, elements that prove essential to Romantic attempts to grapple with the problems of individual and collective identity, social cohesion, and medial specificity (visual arts, literature, music) in emergent modernity. Beyond suggesting new ways of thinking about early Romantic aesthetics, this analysis also helps to map the transformations in Romantic thinking that take place with the realist invention of the Romantic, i.e. passionate, collector. For as I will show using analyses of Honore de Balzac’s Cousin Pons and Theodor Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm, the figure of the post-Romantic collector works to locate passionate collecting as a key feature of Romantic cultural undertakings, even as that act of representation fundamentally diminishes the collector’s very nature, in no small part by labelling and making him visible as such. It is easy to overlook that Benjamin’s Fuchs essay offers insight into the life and afterlife of European literary Romanticism. Its stated focus on an understudied