Blog Series on Romanticism #2: Germany

Germany was a place where the cultural movement of Romanticism became entrenched in an especially significant way. This is the second post in a series of essays on Romanticism presented by Ultius, and the focus of this post will be Romanticism within the nation of Germany. The essay will discuss four key figures of German Romanticism: these will be Goethe, Hegel, Herder, and Novalis. Also, the discussion of Goethe will be further divided into two parts: the first part will discuss his highly Romantic work The Sorrows of the Young Werther, and the second part will discuss Goethe's own later turn against Romanticism. The essay as a whole will thus consist of five parts; and by the end of it, the reader should have a good idea of the nature of Romanticism within Germany. 

Goethe's Novel

To start with, then, The Sorrows of the Young Werther, written by Goethe when he was a young man, can be understood as a work that exemplifies the Romantic ethos. In the work, a brilliant and sensitive young man named Werther reflects endlessly on his experience of life and of being unhappily in love with a beautiful woman named Lotte. Werther is passionate in the extreme, and highly subjective in his perceptions of reality: in a way, it is as though the entire external world were little more than a grand mirror for his own moods and thoughts. This can be seen in the fact that the entire second part of the book seems to be set in a different, altogether darker world than the first part. Objectively speaking, the two parts are in fact happening within the same world. What has actually changed is Werther's mental state, which progresses along a downward spiral over the course of the novel and ultimately culminates in his suicide. 

When Werther was first released, it struck a huge chord with the younger generation in Germany, being as it was a paragon of the emerging ethos of Romanticism. Indeed, this was the case even to the point that many young men in Germany began wearing Werther's own signature blue and yellow outfit in their own actual lives. More darkly, a rash of suicides in the style of Werther also emerged after the publication of Goethe's novel; and to this day, a cluster of copycats suicide is still known to psychologists as the Werther effect (see Olson). Naturally, this is not what Goethe could have had in mind when he wrote his novel. Dark as it is, though, this was clearly a testament to the extent to which Werther was the incarnation of an important Romantic archetype, and the extent to which the younger generation in Germany and beyond were ready and willing to receive that archetype and make it their own, even to the point of their own actual deaths.   

Goethe's Turn

Interestingly, Goethe himself turned away from Romanticism after writing Werther; in his mind, that novel was more a description of a serious illness than it was an actual model to be emulated by others. In a way, Goethe was intent on overcoming the Romantic within himself, because he believed that this would be catastrophic to his own actual well-being as a man. The psychologist Rank has put the matter in the following way: "he had to curb the individual Romantic in himself, and this he succeeded in doing, though only at the expense of his productive power, which exhausted itself in the conscious and deliberate transformation of the Romantic type represented by him into a Classical artist-type" (83). Goethe presumably did this because he perceived the dark side of the Romantic mind in a very clear way, and feared that if he did nothing to check the Romantic within himself, then he would be liable to end up with a bullet through his own head, just like Werther. 

If Werther is a great fictional character, then, this is because he embodies the tensions inherent within the project of Romanticism itself; and it is commendable that Goethe caught and represented this tension quite early on. Iyer, for example, has expressed deep admiration for Werther's passion, but then also gone on to state the following: "It's necessary to acknowledge that Werther's lucidity slipped at some point. Romance thus degenerated into solipsism . . . and that was the end of his story. His passion turned in on itself; and what once ignited a drive for intensified life grotesquely inverted into a death sentence instead" (20). On the one hand, there can be no love or passion without a Romantic faith in the inherent value of subjectivity; but on the other, subjectivity completely unchecked by rational or objective considerations becomes a recipe for madness. Werther exemplified the positive pole at first—until he fell into unhappy love, at which point he switched to the negative pole. Goethe saw both of these poles of Romanticism, and it would seem that he turned against Romanticism primarily because of his perception of the real madness contained within this ethos.   

Hegel

Hegel was perhaps one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era; and he has often been associated with the Romantic movement as a result of his radical reformulation of the meaning of History. According to Hegel (as laid out in works such as Phenomenology of the Spirit), the unfolding of History is driven first and foremost by the desire of Spirit to realize itself at higher and higher levels of consciousness. This implies that there is a purpose, or a teleology, built into the very fabric of History itself—that is, into the process of Nature unfolding. The world is thus no longer seen as an objective or inert "thing" that is lacking in all intrinsic meaning. Rather, all of Nature and History become enchanted by the intentionality of Spirit, and every moment of History can be understood as meaningful in light of this broader overarching process of the self-realization of Spirit. 

In a sense, this is clearly a Romantic conception; but at another level, serious questions could be asked about whether it really is appropriate to classify Hegel as a Romantic at all. This is because the nature of his philosophy is such that it shifts attention completely away from the individual human soul and instead makes objective Spirit itself, through the medium of History, the primary agent of reality. Across his works, and especially in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard has repeatedly taken Hegel to task for failing to make any room for the value or metaphysical reality of individual human subjectivity within his grand metaphysical system of the Spirit. Within the present context, this could be understood as a thoroughly Romantic critique of Hegel's philosophical project: from the Romantic perspective, the attempt to shift attention away from the subjective soul and toward the objective world—even if one calls that world Spirit—is essentially a regress to the ethos of the Enlightenment and its belief in the supremacy of reason.  

Herder

Herder was a highly innovative Romantic thinker within eighteenth-century Germany. Berlin has summarized the work and ethos of Herder with these words: "Herder's fame rests on the fact that he is the father of the related notions of nationalism, historicism and the Volkgeist, one of the leaders of the Romantic revolt against classicism, rationalism and faith in the omnipotence of the scientific method" (208). In short, Herder's exemplified many of the non-rational aspects of the Romantic ethos. He sought a more organic and emotive grounding for human social life—a pursuit that can be seen in his preference for the concept of the spirit of the people, rather than the more rational one of the social contract.

Herder's work, though, also points toward the volatility that can emerge when Romanticism becomes entangled with political thought. For example, Herder's political thought, which tends toward finding an organic basis for human social life, inevitably finds itself getting entangled with primal notions such as race and land and blood. This is logical: after all, a "race" of people would be nothing other than a group of human beings who have lived in close proximity and community with each other within a given space over the course of a very long span of time. If one wants to think of political community in terms of natural or age-old categories, then, it becomes difficult to avoid a concept such as race. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, though, one also cannot avoid an awareness of how dangerous this kind of intermingling between Romanticism and politics can actually become when put into practice. In a certain sense, for instance, there are substantial resonances between Romantic political ideals and Nazi political ideals, insofar as both seek an ancient and non-rational foundation for political community. It also does not help that the Nazis were in fact German, and may have more or less unconsciously drawn from at least some aspects of German Romanticism.  

Novalis

Novalis was the pen name of Hardenberg; and although it is difficult to find a cohesive collection of his writings in the English language, he was an influential early Romantic thinker within the nation of Germany. One aphorism of his (which is difficult to locate in an actual source but can be found on countless pages across the Internet) reads: "Philosophy is really homesickness: the urge to be at home everywhere." This is a thoroughly Romantic conception of philosophy, according to which philosophy is not a rational project geared toward the discovery of objective truths, but rather a fundamentally emotional project that is driven toward the resolution of deep-seated spiritual and existential needs. This idea is thoroughly echoed by Iyer in his own work, and it can be understood as one of the fundamental premises of Romanticism as a cultural movement. 

Moreover, Novalis was among the first to begin elevating the fragment or the aphorism to the level of an art form in its own right. This also naturally followed from Romantic ethos regarding the nature of thought itself: the point was less to develop a comprehensive philosophical system than it was to catch thought on the wing, or to express thought in the way that thought naturally occurs within the flow of lived experience. The fragment or aphorism is quite ideally suited for fulfilling the purpose, and Novalis clearly caught onto this. This style was later taken up and perhaps taken to its logical conclusion by Nietzsche, another German who is generally associated with the movement of Existentialism but who clearly owed deep debts to the preceding Romanticism within the German nation. Although Novalis is perhaps not as well-known today as he should be, it is still fair to say that his work stands at an important turning point within German culture as a whole, during the time when Romanticism was first emerging as a major cultural movement. 

Conclusion

In summary, this essay has consisted of a discussion of Romanticism within Germany. The essay has addressed several key figures of German Romanticism, including Goethe, Hegel, Herder, and Novalis. Tensions within the Romantic ethos itself, though, have also pointed out. In particular, it has been suggested that Goethe himself turned against Romanticism after writing one of the most Romantic novels of all time, because he wanted to avoid the fate of his protagonist; that Hegel was not really Romantic at all insofar his philosophy neglects individual subjectivity; and that the thought of Herder presages the dangers of a Romantic politics. In any event, the next blog post in this series will turn to Romanticism in England.

Works Cited

Berlin, Isaiah. Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2013. Print. 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of the Young Werther. New York: Oxford U P, 2012. Print.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of the Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Print. 

Iyer, Sethu A. Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance. Austin: CreateSpace, 2016. Print. 

Kierkegaard, Søren Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1992. Print.  

Olson, Robert. "Suicide Contagion & Suicide Clusters." InfoExchange. Centre for Suicide Prevention, 2013. Web. 17 Jun. 2016. <https://suicideinfo.ca/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=WXg70KbEYsA=>. 

Rank, Otto. Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. Print.