A candlelit dinner. A walk. A rendezvous for two. Or, in times of polyamory, also with a larger cast. There are numerous examples of how romanticism is taken for granted as part of everyday life. Much can be called romantic today, everyone can feel romantic. And hopes to do it as often as possible. Whether on the Italian holiday home balcony looking at dusk with an Aperol Spritz in hand, the colors of which compete with those of the setting sun, or looking at the person you hope to spend the rest of your life with.
That's OK. After all, around 1800, when looking for the right word for the new in the thinking of the time, everything was also included, from novels to romance, from art to love. What was called romanticism by more and more poets, writers, painters, musicians and philosophers at the time, echoes up to the present day. If you look pensively in the direction of the moon on a walk in autumn 2021, delighted at how picturesque it stands over the fields and silvered the trees of the forest, you are right in the middle of the paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and the verses of Joseph von Eichendorff. As well as in the mindset of a spiritual movement that encompassed all of Europe and to which a house in Frankfurt is now dedicated. On Monday evening the opening of the city,The German Romantic Museum, which is supported by the state of Hesse and the federal government, is celebrated with a ceremony; it has been open to visitors since Tuesday morning.
“Everyone should be an artist”, Novalis wrote in 1798: “Everything can become fine art.” In a world of influencers and the images they create, this idea is more relevant than ever. In addition to the house where Goethe was born, whose life includes the origins, blossoms and reverberations of Romanticism, all of this can be studied from now on. When looking at one of Friedrich's most amiable paintings, for example, the "Evening Star", or its counterpart, a romantic icon, Füssli's "Nachtmahr", shown in the ice-blue horror version. The museum plays out the overwhelming and decomposing movement of the building and furnishing. At the end of the “Himmelsleiter”, a music machine mimics the song of the nightingale, like the machines at ETA Hoffmann, to which the first special exhibition in 2022 will be dedicated.Elsewhere, an installation shows the refraction of light according to Newton and Goethe. A house to think and empathize with. Very romantic.