German Romanticism Research Articles

Travelling in Romantic Bildungsroman Narratives

The early nineteenth-century bildungsroman is often understood as a coming-of-age story of the protagonist, which implies that temporality is more constitutive for its composition than spatiality. In contrast, my paper focuses on the motif of travelling in German and British bildungsroman narratives. Opposed to the previous allegorical understanding of the Romantic bildungsroman, I suggest that the methods of the spatial humanities open up a new perspective on bildungsroman narratives by showing how their travel itineraries were used in the construction of Europe before and after the Napoleonic Wars. The itineraries annotated from the corpus suggest that the classic Grand Tour to Italy remain important, especially in German Romanticism, whereas northern regions are also popular in British texts. A few narratives emphasise the region of Greece in defining the European frontier in relation to the Ottoman Empire, while Russia and Poland are not popular settings for bildungsroman narratives.

THE VOCAL HERITAGE OF JOHANNES BRAHMS WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE RELIGIOUS AND ETHICAL PRINCIPLES OF 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN CULTURE

The article is devoted to the exploration of spiritual and religious principles in the works of Johannes Brahms and their manifestation in the composer’s vocal and choral opuses. The aim of the study is to reveal the spiritual, ethical, and religious foundations of Brahms’ creative personality and their reflection in the composer’s vocal heritage (using A German Requiem and the vocal cycle Four Serious Songs as examples). The methodology combines intonational, genre-stylistic, etymological, and hermeneutical approaches. The scientific novelty of the study is marked by the introduction into musicology of not only materials concerning the religious worldview of Brahms but also their influence on the formation of the conceptual content inherent in his works, shaped at the intersection of Protestant-Lutheran principles of the German cultural-historical tradition and their metamorphoses during the spiritual quests of the Romantic era. The findings show that the generalization of bibliographic and analytical sources on Brahms’ works, including his vocal heritage, reveals the depth of the spiritual, ethical, and religious principles of his creative personality, which trace back to the German Protestant tradition and the culture formed on its basis. At the same time, these principles were enriched by the spiritual searches of German Romanticism and the Biedermeier period. The appeal to the age-old principles of past national culture and its illustrious representatives, combined with the revival of the “spirit” of the nation and the characteristic Protestant convergence and mutual spiritualization of sacred and secular genres, contributed to the consolidation of German society and its movement towards the unification of Germany. These aspects are also reflected in the poetics of Brahms’ A German Requiem and the vocal cycle Four Serious Songs, which exhibit the tradition’s characteristic focus on eternal themes of life and death in their Protestant interpretation, the use of relevant biblical texts and their authorial re-interpretation, as well as the appeal to the “intonational dictionary” of the Protestant chorale, ranging from direct citation to free compositional realization of broadly interpreted chorality.

The Destruction of the Voice

ABSTRACT The musical orality of the lyric voice constitutes one of the most formidable and persistent facets of the ideology of German Romanticism, one that is further bequeathed to the arts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the musicality of the voice and the ineffability of “absolute” music as its point of departure, this essay investigates a series of primarily German-Jewish figures—Kafka, Schoenberg, Straub-Huillet, and Celan—who stage a radical confrontation with the political aestheticization of the voice. Premonitions and reverberations of these figures’ vocal “destruction” are further traced in Adorno, Kraus, and Maimonides. At stake is not only a comparative study of the voice at the intersection of various media (music, literature, opera, film, and public performance) but also the kind of majoritarian–minoritarian dynamics (between Yiddish and German, German and Hebrew) that arise internal to a single language and its linguistic politics. German-Jewish cultural poetics ultimately develops as a response to the tensions between nation and empire emergent in the dappled political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe—and amends the dominant Romantic paradigm accordingly.

The сoncept of the national culture in German romanticism: Sourсes and historical background

In Novalis’s works, the reaction of German Romanticism to the Enlightenment was civilizational: By the German world, both the French monarchy and Republic were viewed in a negative light. Thus, the Novalis’s philosophy developed the concept of national culture, which the movement “Storm and Onslaught”, led by J. G. Herder, opposed to French classicism of the 17th–18th centuries. According to Herder, the folk’s culture is formed through the psychological exploration of nature in myths and folklore, fixed in language. The “organic nature” of culture links folklore with the Middle Age and Modern poetry as the new forms of the dialogue with nature. This idea was consolidated by the figure of Faust, chosen by the Sturmers and Goethe as the hero of the “masterpiece” summarizing the national poetic path. Novalis elevated Catholicism to the cult of the earth, and the collective mind was connected with it by magic. He saw the institution of this union as an “ideal” Prussia where self-knowledge unites citizens, and the monarch unites the people and nature as an esoteric master. The French monarchy divided the people by cultivating selfishness. The prerequisites of this opinion were indicated by J. Le Goff and L. Karsavin who stated the existence of two types of cultures, which emerged as a result of the Roman conquest of Europe. For the national ones, who retained their languages and with them the connection with pre–Roman mythology and folklore, the introduced ancient norm and Christianity became forms of self-development. For the newly emerged unities west of the Rhine, they became the foundation of the cultural convention.

Allegorie/Symbol (Allegory/Symbol)

For Goethe, allegory and symbol function as poles of the dyad “sinnliche Darstellung” (representation). He introduced the contrasting pair in the second half of the 1790s, in the context of his project for a German classical aesthetics with Friedrich Schiller, his translation of Germaine de Staël’s Essai sur les fictions (Essay on Fiction), his ongoing work on morphology and optics, and his engagement with idealist philosophy. Despite the priority given to the symbol in Goethe’s scientific writings, he applied the term only occasionally to literature; he remained committed to the sophisticated allegorical poetics and imagery of the high baroque drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Calderón) in essentially all his mature work and was sympathetic to its use by the German Romantics. While Goethe’s own terminology often wavered between the poles of symbol and allegory, his distinction became the standard theme in discussions of poetic representation for more than a century, with symbol heavily prioritized over allegory, and it remains a theme in Goethe scholarship. The post-modernist return to allegory in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man is more a skeptical version of the Goethean symbol than earlier definitions of either allegory or symbol.

THE POETRY BY MYKHAILO OREST: IDEAS AND FIGURATIVE STRUCTURE

The paper explores the structure of Mykhailo Orest’s poetry, delving into its main elements such as concepts of time, forest, silence, and word, as well as the motives of eschatologism and reincarnation. It focuses on the ideological and aesthetic originality of Orest’s poetry, examining his views on the nature of language and the essence of art. The distinctive feature of Orest’s poetry is a metaphor of time that comprises various philosophical meanings, including the eschatological understanding of time as “the world of the night,” the era of “the departure of God,” and “the end of things” as opposed to the concept of “the eternal day.” Orest’s eschatological poetics is rooted in medieval imagery and biblical metaphors. His poetic vision of the Apocalypse combines motives and images of diverse meanings and origins. Orest’s pantheism is seen as growing from romantic aesthetics, primarily the works of German romantics. The poet’s pantheistic ideas find expressive reflection through the cult of the forest, the symbolism of trees, particularly the archetype of the world tree. They are also related to the myth of birth and death, interpreted in Orest’s poetry, and the motive of metamorphosis. Medieval mythology takes a special place in Orest’s poetic world. In particular, the poet reinterprets the myths of Grail, Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser. The creative thought of Mykhailo Orest was constantly in search — a romantic inclination towards the irrational to a conscious interest in the world of things and the establishment of a complex system of relationship with it.

Europe in Literature

Abstract This article examines the origin of the idea of Europe and its identity in relation to literature. It attempts to show that, before being a cultural, economic or political reality, Europe was a literary concept, whose origins are closely linked to the literary theories of the Romantics, particularly the German Romantics. The links between the idea of Europe and literature also associate Europe with the birth of comparative literature. But at the same time, the notion of World Literature, even if it has a Eurocentric background in Goethe and his successors, calls for the poet to transcend Europe and become a citizen of the world.

Assembly and Its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought: The Inexhaustible Gathering By Robert E.Mottram and Christopher R.Clason (Eds.), Liverpool University Press. 2022. pp. 240. $130.00 (hardcover)

Assembly and Its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought: The Inexhaustible Gathering By Robert E.Mottram and Christopher R.Clason (Eds.), Liverpool University Press. 2022. pp. 240. $130.00 (hardcover)

Intervention at Home: Representing Migrants in German Romanticism

ABSTRACT This article explores how German Romantic writing reflected on migration and thereby intervened in contemporary discourses about émigrés seeking refuge in German-speaking territories after the French Revolution in 1789. Discussing different representations of French exiles in both fiction and translation, I argue that some Romantics were participating in an “intervention at home:” staying put, observing both the unprecedented overthrow of the French monarchy and, later on, the aggression of French expansionism, Romantic writers contributed to contemporary debates about migration with stories and characters meant to reflect on, evoke empathy with, or create aversion to French migrants. German Romantic writing thus encouraged both emotional responses to and specific ideas about the intricate relationship between migration and nation-building in early nineteenth-century German-speaking countries.

Hypnosis in psychotherapy, psychosomatics and medicine. A brief overview.

Aspects of hypnosis and its application in psychotherapy, psychosomatics and medicine are examined and contextualized in the 250-year history of hypnosis. Imagination as an essential element of hypnotic treatments appeared as early as 1784 as an argument rejecting the theory of animal magnetism of Franz Anton Mesmer. In somnambulism of German romanticism, another proto-form of hypnosis after 1800, concepts of the mind-body problem were dealt with, which still characterize the understanding of unconscious mental processes today. Hypnosis was at the beginning of psychoanalysis, but was not pursued further by Sigmund Freud from 1900 onwards. Nevertheless, there were some hypnoanalytical approaches in the 20th century, as well as attempts to integrate hypnosis into behavior therapy. Techniques of imagination and relaxation combine both; in particular findings from cognitive psychology explain processes of both hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy. The influence of social psychology brought a new perspective to the debate about the nature of hypnosis, which continues to this day: is hypnosis to be understood as a special state of consciousness or is it a completely normal, mundane interaction? The experiments that were carried out to support one side or the other were also dependent on the hypnotizability of the subjects involved, as the more difficult hypnotic phenomena such as paralysis, hallucinations or identity delusions can only be demonstrated by highly hypnotizable subjects. The fact that these are not mere compliance reactions has now been proven by many studies using imaging techniques. But even those who are moderately hypnotizable benefit from hypnosis rituals. Variables postulated by socio-cognitive hypnosis researchers, such as motivation and expectation, are relevant, as is a good "hypnotic rapport." Practical application of hypnotherapy today is characterized by the innovative techniques and strategies developed by Milton H. Erickson. Research into the effectiveness of hypnosis in the field of psychotherapy and psychosomatics still leaves much to be done. The situation is different in the field of medical hypnosis, where there are considerably more studies with a satisfactory design and verifiable effects. However, the impact in practical application in everyday medical practice is still low. Newer developments such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence are being looked at with critical interest.

Empathy and the art of Leonardo da Vinci.

Knowledge about empathy is part of the study of artistic expressions, among which stand out works of personalities such as the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci, who was concerned with the connection between science and art during his creative research full of imagination and sensitivity to nature and human anatomy. The word empathy emerged among critics of German art as the term einfühlung, which was used within the aesthetic bias by philosophers and art historians. It emphasized the idea that a viewer perceiving an object could establish a link between it and themselves, projecting the object 'into themselves'. That is, the artwork could be experienced by the observer as if the viewer belonged predominantly to the object, in such a way that its characteristics could be actually felt through the expression of emotions, feelings and thoughts. This analysis of art appreciation required a great deal of knowledge and contemplation of nature, as understood by the German Romanticists, who had enormous admiration for da Vinci and his universal and systematic mind-a mind which reacted against formalisms, building his intellectual and sensory systems based on both his observation of nature and his own criteria. In particular, the art of painting for Leonardo was a way to demonstrate a mental discourse, just as the most important aspect of human portraits is to represent-in gestures and facial expressions-the states of mind and emotions. These are facts that German Romanticists tried to explain as the relationship between empathy and a work of art. The present manuscript aims to describe empathy from an artistic view, considering the roots of this word in German Romanticism; to comment about Leonardo da Vinci and the expression of art in the Renaissance; and, finally, to discuss the expression of his art in relation to empathy.

The Metaphysics of Meaning: Aquinas and the Meaning of Life

Abstract While ‘the meaning of life’ has grown in prominence as a topic of philosophical inquiry, few Thomists have addressed it. Joshua Hochschild has recently offered a plausible explanation, arguing that ‘the meaning of life’ is a late modern ‘invention’, at home in a conceptual framework both philosophically problematic and incompatible with the principles of St. Thomas’ thought. He, therefore, counsels Catholic intellectuals to avoid the question of life’s meaning. I argue in contrast that St. Thomas offers the kind of metaphysical perspective that originally made ‘the meaning of life’ intelligible. First, I show that closer attention to the context in which the phrase emerges (that of German Romanticism) can clarify why much of the modern discourse on ‘the meaning of life’ succumbs to Hochschild’s critique. I then show that, even in the writings of its earliest modern proponents, we find compelling reasons to hold that ‘the meaning of life’ was always more at home within a Christian conceptual framework. Finally, I argue that St. Thomas’ account of providence and divine art in particular explain the purposefulness and significance of the world, such that Thomists who appeal to these notions are well positioned to address the question of life’s meaning in contemporary philosophical debates.

The Law as Fragment

When Hannah Arendt writes about the law, she does so as a political theorist, genocide survivor and critic of modernity. She also writes as a phenomenologist, which is to say, she is mindful not only that people create the law, but that law constitutes a people. In Origins, she calls attention to the importance of the rule of law in the emergence of totalitarianism. In On Revolution, she seeks a way of grounding political authority in something other than an Absolute. In the process, Arendt looks to another group of intellectuals who grappled with the nature of authority under conditions of modernity—the Early German Romantics. Romantic fragments are philosophical, poetic, even musical. For Arendt, the most highly valued fragments are historical because these fragments provide not only protection against totalitarianism but also a possible solution to the problem of authority. In this article, I explore Arendt’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a historical fragment. She draws on a phenomenological approach to fragments, found primarily in the work of Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, to create a resilient yet malleable basis for authority, thereby grounding political authority in concrete historical events, rather than in human nature.

Die praxis der Übersetzung

Abstract Around 1800, to be more precise, in Early German Romanticism, a decisive leap to an aesthetic imperative of form is being articulated. This new concept of form borrows its template from (empirical) life, where again in the concept of “vital force” (Lebenskraft) the origin for the drive of life is thought? to be found. This paper aims to investigate how this concept, emerging? in the life sciences, not only is being implemented into, but is also declared to be the motor of the life of literature. The initial observation of this investigation is the statement that (the) life (of literature) comes into being because force gives it form. Literature, in turn, can bring this process to view – this is its epistemological merit. Because literature in Early German Romanticism not only elevates itself to a form of life, but also sees the shaping of life as the result of an engagement with literature, the propaedeutic of which is in turn itself, literature – according to the hypothesis – becomes the vital force of life and thus praxis.

Novalis:The Blue Flover of Romanticism

The essay is devoted to the reconstruction of the philosophy of art of Novalis, one of the prominent German Romantics, who presents it in his writings in a fragmentary way. Research of this type appears in scholarly literature for the first time; it utilizes a complex philosophical-aesthetic method of analysis of texts of the German thinker. Novalis appreciates art as one of the highest achievements of humanity, which elevates the human being from ordinary life to spiritual heights. Art is a free expression of the artists' Ego. Art is simultaneously a “self-contemplating and a self-creating nature.” The creative principles of nature are transformed within the spiritual world of the artist and express themselves in art. The secrets of nature are revealed to the artist. The artists sees something great in the least significant things. The beautiful is the object of art and this creates kinship between all types of art. Artists (including painters) do not imitate the external world but they create by means of their internal world. All types of art gravitate towards mutual harmony and foreshadow a synthesis of the arts of sorts. Novalis positions poetry above all other arts. This is because according to him poetry establishes heavenly wisdom on earth, elevates the human being over everyday life, and serves as the foundation for all other arts. Philosophy is internally linked to poetry and serves as its theory. The philosopher must be a poet. The poet lives a special, contemplative life and is a wise and prophetic person. Novalis imagines the future Romantic age as fabulous, magical, poetic, ironic, alogical. “Intelligent chaos” will play a specific role in it. All earthly will be elevated to the heavenly. Novalis considers the novel as one of the principal forms of Romatic poetry and presents its chief characteristics.

Poetic and theatrical occasionalisms: Creation of new morphologically complex words by Joseph von Eichendorff, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Peter Handke and Arno Schmidt

This contribution characterises and differentiates the poetic occasionalisms in the form of new morphologically complex words created by the early romantic German lyrical poet Joseph von Eichendorff, by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner for literature Peter Handke and by the extravagant German prosaic author Arno Schmidt and the occasionalisms created by the most famous Austrian comedy writer Johann Nepomuk Nestroy.The concept and term occasionalism has been founded by the Russian pioneer of stylistics Erik J. Chanpira (1996, see § 2) and defined as a newly created morphologically complex poetic word destined to be used with a literary function only once for a single passage and which is not taken over by anybody else. This definition holds for the authors investigated, except Eichendorff who reuses occasionalisms, which may be also reused by other lyrical poets of the same period or even later.The main part (§ 3) consists of the discussion of 17 criteria for characterising and differentiating the occasionalisms studied. These are productivity of word formation, literary functions, main content, single use vs. reuse of them, consequences of the noun bias of German and of the preference for binary relations, size of the word families of compound constituents (especially of the first constituent), the degree of poetic licence, semantically coherent vs. incoherent combination of words within a compound, embedding into the cotext and into the situational context, gapping constructions and their make-up, preference for compounding vs. derivational morphology.The conclusion and outlook (§ 4) present proposals how literary studies may profit from investigations of poetic and theatrical occasionalisms, which represent the highest degree of language creativity of literary authors. We urge that theatre productions should highlight occasionalisms and report that Nestroy’s German occasionalisms are generally better translated into English by programs of machine translation then by human translators.

Танатологические образы и мотивы в творчестве А. К. Толстого и И. В. Гете (на примере баллад «Слепой» и «Певец»)

The aim of the study is to identify specific typological similarities in the realization of thanatological images and motifs in the ballads by A. K. Tolstoy and J. W. von Goethe (using the example of the ballads “The Blind Man” and “The Singer”). Although literary critics have already analysed similarities between certain aspects of A. K. Tolstoy’s creative work and Western European literature (in particular, German Romanticism), the identification of typological similarities at the level of such poetological categories as the thanatological motif and the thanatological image has not yet been undertaken, which accounts for the scientific novelty of the study. The paper examines in detail the interaction between the two ballads at the levels of the plot and images. Attention is paid to common mythological plots and motifs, similarities and differences in the images of the central characters. The role of thanatological poetics in the creation of world duality, which is typical for the ballad genre, is traced. As a result, the comparative analysis made it possible to shed light on the specifics of thanatological images and motifs in the ballads by A. K. Tolstoy in comparison with German Romanticism (J. W. von Goethe). The revealed connections and similarities indicate literary contact between the authors and the literatures and demonstrate the specifics of contact links and typological similarities in A. K. Tolstoy’s and J. W. von Goethe’s creative work.

Simondon and Novalis: Notes for a Romantic Mechanology

Abstract: German Romanticism plays a central role in Gilbert Simondon's writings. In Mode of Existence , Simondon draws on Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann to illustrate the tragic consequences of failing to attend to the individuated relationship between landscape and tool. While Novalis is only mentioned in passing, his work presents the most radical form of what might be called Romantic mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis's poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new light on several key aspects of romantic poetry and philosophy.

Conspiracy hippies and Holocaust denial

While the artists collective Center for Political Beauty address contemporary politicians’ open or tacit denial of Holocaust and the political betrayals of the 1930s in their social interventions, the artists collective Frankfurter Hauptschule expose the intricate entanglements of fascism with hippie-inspired esotericism and a new interest in German Romanticism and Nordic mysticism among young German artists today. The article will analyze the activist practice of the two collectives and discuss what role artistic interventions into politics may play in the fight against the fascist aestheticization of the political in Benjamin’s sense.

ALCHEMICAL SYMBOLISM OF THE NOVELLA “THE GOLDEN POT: A MODERN FAIRY TALE” BY E. T. A. HOFFMANN

The aim of this study is to analyse the symbolism of E.T.A. Hoffman’s novella “The Golden Pot” within the framework of the alchemical discourse. The researchers employed historical-genetic, structural-semantic methods and the method of motivic analysis to explore the elements of medieval alchemical symbolism in the novella, namely: the motif of the hero’s initiation and his subsequent spiritual transformation, the symbols of snake, elemental spirits (salamander and dragon), manuscripts, blood, apples, garden, four elements, palm and cypress, as well as the symbolism of colour – red, black, white, gold and bronze. Results of the research suggest that the medieval theory of alchemy corresponded to the image of achieving creative harmony and spiritual transformation in German Romanticism.