The romantic idea, to which an entire museum in Frankfurt is dedicated, penetrates into the details of the new building with its protrusions, angles and optical illusions.
On the top floor there is a tiny peephole that reveals a view from the dark of the museum onto the spiers of the Paulskirche, the cathedral and the European Central Bank that sparkle in the sunlight and so, quite typical for romanticism, the heterogeneous, here politics, faith and money, like a Kaleidoscope reassembled from an unimagined perspective.
The Romantic Museum, which will open with a ceremony on Monday after ten years of preparation and construction, gives the multifaceted, often broken and therefore difficult to grasp epoch of dreamy and longing people in the vicinity of the Goethe House a spectacular space for thought.
The course through the exhibition halls quickly makes it clear that movement is much more important than sensitivity, but rather contains reflection, just as the Enlightenment does, to which it is in dialectical tension.
Even the easily ignitable romantic souls knew with Novalis: Too much enthusiasm can be dangerous.
A European affair
The focus of the museum is a collection of unique original manuscripts and letters from Novalis, Schlegel, the Brentanos and Eichendorff, which the Free German Hochstift and sponsors of the museum has been collecting for more than a hundred years. The light-sensitive pieces are complemented by works from the visual arts and music. At 35 stations, the museum questions the essence of the romantic idea: Is it an aesthetic program? Mindset? Intellectual radicalization? Or kitsch?
Up to now there has not been a comparable museum in this country, which is astonishing. This may also have something to do with the fact that the epoch, although it encompassed all of Europe and is also treated as such in the Romantic Museum, for a long time, as an alleged German affair, was treated with reluctance. At times it was taken for granted that it was the prelude to the German catastrophe.
There is a need to talk about the appropriation by National Socialism, which the museum also formulates as a matter of concern. Because the literary scholar and Hochstift director Anne Bohnenkamp falls short of this reading. Sure, the National Socialists misused the ideas of “people” or “nation” for their own purposes, especially those romantics who were shaped by the wars of liberation against Napoleon. This figure of thought, as it is laid out in Thomas Mann's “Doctor Faustus” or in exhibitions such as “De l'Allemagne”, which a few years ago in Paris drew a direct line from Caspar David Friedrich to Leni Riefenstahl, finds an important one in the Romantic Museum A space for reflection that will certainly be deepened in the upcoming temporary exhibitions.
It is amazing how close the museum brings the romantics to us, the way they thought, how they wrote and how much that has to do with ideas about artistic work today. The idea of the autonomy of the artists, who without preconditions recreated the world according to their own ideas and turned to those questions that, according to Kant, are no longer comprehensible, but belong to human existence, was developed at that time. The romantics opposed the transcendental homelessness into which the Enlightenment had fallen, and which they created in the imagination, in the imagination, in art. And this art breaks with all school erudition, throws old rules overboard and leaves genre boundaries aside,by combining natural sciences with speculation and turning to the dark side of the human psyche, the unconscious, the metaphysical, the unreal.
The romantic aura can also be heard
The open form, the playfulness, is reflected in the Museum of Manuscripts and Autographs when it uses other media such as film, sound installations or computer animation.
The effects of alienating installations such as Schubert's “Winterreise” are aimed at a museum visitor who not only sees and reads, but also hears and wants to feel what it is, the romantic aura of the works on display.
Ten years ago, when Anne Bohnenkamp started planning, the idea was for her to use the house to refer to the need for an emotional reference to the world. The reality of 2021 turns out to be changed after Brexit, the outbreak of a pandemic and the upturn in nation-state movements. Now it is in demand as a shelter for reflection and critical pause. How fitting that romanticism cannot be located here or there, is not just passion and emphasis, not just reflection and contemplation, but always works with both. This becomes an experience that, thanks to the exhibition architecture, is conveyed to every visitor who embarks on the adventure of romance.