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German Romanticism: The Theoretical Heartland of the Movement

“Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry.” — Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 116, 1798

German Romanticism was the theoretical heartland of the Romantic movement and the source of many of its most influential ideas. The German Romantics produced the major theoretical statements of the movement, including the concept of Romantic irony, the philosophy of nature associated with Schelling, and the elaborate aesthetics of Jena Romanticism. They also produced some of the strangest, most beautiful literature of the age, from the great novels of Goethe and Novalis to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the plays of Kleist, and the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. German Romanticism extended its influence across Europe and into the Slavic-speaking world, decisively shaping the development of Russian Romanticism and, eventually, Latin American Romanticism.

The Origins of German Romanticism

German Romanticism emerged in the 1790s, in the wake of a remarkable late-eighteenth-century cultural efflorescence that included the great philosophy of Kant, the early plays and poetry of Goethe and Schiller, and the Sturm und Drang movement. Several factors contributed to the rise of the new movement:

The Kantian revolution in philosophy — Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgment (1790) had set the terms in which later German thought would work, and the German Romantics were responding to the new critical philosophy, sometimes by building on it, sometimes by reacting against it.
The legacy of Goethe and Schiller — the great works of Goethe and Schiller in the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s had established a high level of literary ambition that the younger generation both inherited and tried to surpass.
The Jena university — the university of Jena, in the small duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was a remarkable center of philosophical and literary activity in the 1790s, attracting Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and many other leading figures.
The political fragmentation of Germany — the absence of a unified German state, the lingering effects of the Holy Roman Empire, and the pressures of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars all contributed to the German Romantics’ intense interest in questions of national identity, language, and culture.

The Phases of German Romanticism

German Romanticism is usually divided into three main phases:

The Frühromantik (Early Romanticism), centered in Jena in the 1790s, including the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck, and the philosophers Fichte and Schelling. The defining works of this generation are the fragments in the journal Athenäum (1798–1800), Novalis’s Hymns to the Night (1800) and Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), and the Schlegels’ theoretical writings.
The Heidelberger Romantik (Heidelberg Romanticism) of the early 1800s, including Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, the Brothers Grimm, and the legal scholar Friedrich Carl von Savigny. The defining works of this generation are the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08), the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (1812–57), and the historical and legal scholarship of the Heidelberg school.
The Spätromantik (Late Romanticism) of the 1810s and 1820s, including E.T.A. Hoffmann, Adelbert von Chamisso, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Heinrich Heine. The defining works of this generation are the tales of Hoffmann, the lyric poetry of Eichendorff and Heine, and the late novels and stories of the movement.

The Major Writers

The major German Romantic writers include:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) — the towering figure of German literature, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the plays Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787) and Faust (1808/1832), the novels Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (1821–29), and a vast body of lyric poetry. Goethe’s relation to Romanticism is complicated — he outlived and in many ways stood apart from the Jena Romantics, but his influence on the entire tradition is incalculable.
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) — author of the plays Die Räuber (1781), Don Carlos (1787), Wallenstein (1798–99), Mary Stuart (1800), The Maid of Orleans (1801), and William Tell (1804), the philosophical and aesthetic writings of the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) and On the Naive and Sentimental in Poetry (1795–96), and the great lyric poetry, including the “Ode to Joy” later set to music by Beethoven.
Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) — the great theorist of German Romanticism, author of the Critical Fragments and Lyceum Fragments in the Athenäum (1798–1800), the essay On the Study of Greek Poetry (1797), the novel Lucinde (1799), and the Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy (1800–02). The page on Romantic Irony treats Schlegel’s most influential theoretical concept.
August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) — brother of Friedrich, the great translator of Shakespeare into German, the author of the Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809–11) and the Lectures on the History of Literature (1815), and an important critic and editor.
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801) — the great poet and novelist of Jena Romanticism, author of Hymns to the Night (1800), the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), and a vast body of fragments, lyric poetry, and theoretical writing.
Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) — author of the Volksmärchen (1797), the novel William Lovell (1795–96), the dramatic Puss in Boots (1797), and many fairy tales and stories. Tieck was also a major translator and a popular theater director.
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) — the great lyric poet, author of the Hymns and Fragments (written mostly in the 1800s), the odes and elegies, and the translations of Sophocles. Hölderlin’s later work, in particular, has been seen as a high point of the Romantic lyric.
Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) — the great dramatist and novella writer, author of the plays Penthesilea (1808) and The Prince of Homburg (1810) and the novellas Michael Kohlhaas (1810) and The Marquise of O (1808). Kleist is one of the most original and unsettling writers of the period.
E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) — author of the tales collected as Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner (1814–15), The Devil’s Elixirs (1815–16), and The Sandman (1816), the opera Undine (1816), and the stories on which Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty were based. Hoffmann is the great master of the German Romantic uncanny.
The Brothers Grimm (Jacob 1785–1863 and Wilhelm 1786–1859) — the great philologists and folklorists, authors of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–57), the Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37), and the Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854–1961). The Grimm brothers’ fairy tales are among the most influential works in the German Romantic tradition.
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) — the great lyric poet, essayist, and political writer, author of the Buch der Lieder (1827), the prose works of Reisebilder (1826–31), and the late poetry of the Romanzero (1851) and the Lazarus cycle (published posthumously in 1853). Heine is one of the most widely read German poets of the nineteenth century and a major transitional figure between Romanticism and modernism.
Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) — the great lyric poet of the late German Romanticism, author of the Novelle and the verse cycle Das Leben ein Traum. Eichendorff’s poetry, with its romantic images of wandering through forest and night, became a model for late Romantic and post-Romantic German poetry.
Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843), Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter) (1763–1825) — and many other important figures of the German Romantic tradition.

The Central Concepts

The German Romantics developed several central concepts that had a major influence on later thought:

Romantic irony — the self-conscious awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the finite work of art and the infinite ideal it seeks to express. The page on Romantic Irony treats this in more detail.
Universalpoesie — Schlegel’s idea of a “universal poetry” that would unite all the arts and all the human faculties in a single creative act.
Romantic philosophy of nature — Schelling’s idea that the natural world is a living, organic whole, and that the human mind can read in nature the same truths it discovers in itself.
Volksgeist — Herder’s idea of the “spirit of the people” that expresses itself in the language, customs, and historical life of a nation. The page on Romantic Nationalism treats this in more detail.
Romantic hermeneutics — Schleiermacher’s idea that understanding is a creative act, requiring a sympathetic imagination on the part of the interpreter.

The Long Influence of German Romanticism

The influence of German Romanticism on later Western thought is difficult to overstate. The philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the hermeneutic tradition (Gadamer, Ricoeur); the literary theory of the twentieth century, including the Russian Formalists, the New Critics, and the contemporary hermeneutic and reception theorists; the depth psychology of Freud and Jung; the philological tradition of the German university; the modern study of folklore, mythology, and cultural history; and the modern conception of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) — all draw, in different ways, on the German Romantic inheritance.

German Romanticism also extended its influence across the Slavic-speaking world, decisively shaping the development of Russian Romanticism and, eventually, Latin American Romanticism.

In This Section

Latin American Romanticism

An exploration of Latin American Romanticism, the movement that helped give the newly independent nations of Latin America their first major literary …

Russian Romanticism

An exploration of Russian Romanticism, the early-nineteenth-century movement that produced the founding works of modern Russian literature.