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The zeitgeist is leaning towards romance again.
Even before the forced pandemic rural exodus and world oblivion, the longing destinations of stress-ridden city dwellers could easily be short-circuited with a popular cliché image of romance - admittedly in its Biedermeier variant, as a remote farmhouse with fiber optic connection, in order not to have to do without "romantic comedies" even in the loneliness of the forest.
Heartbreak, idyllic nature, escapism, all of these are stubborn clichés of an art and literature epoch that, especially in Germany, has been criticized from the very beginning for its supposedly reactionary, subjectivist and irrationalist side as sharply as it is glorified and politically specific as a specifically national, primeval German spirit was instrumentalized.
Heinrich Heine's reckoning with the “Romantic School” continued well into the 20th century, while conversely the National Socialist appropriation of the Romantic - as a “Nordic” answer to the soulless rationalism of the West - did little to help its image after 1945.
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An astute mind like Karl Heinz Bohrer tried as early as the 80s (among other things in his book “The Critique of Romanticism”) to straighten out this picture, foreshortened from the right and left, and to detect the particular, forward-looking modernity of Romanticism in its aesthetics.
Stefan Matuschek picks up on this in his new “History of Romanticism”, but directs his gaze even more strongly on the European character of a trend that opposed established art doctrines and world views in several countries around 1800.
Precisely by looking at the transboundary reception of romantic works or manifestos, he can work out the differences and thus clear the confusion of terms that has continued to this day.
Source: CH Beck Verlag
In classicist Italy, for example, the rather staid ballad poet Gottfried August Bürger (whose "Lenore" still tortures eighth graders today) was celebrated as the epitome of German romanticism, because what was popular about it was found to be very "romantico".
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Conversely, an epoch-making poet like Leopardi would have rejected this label, while his poem “Die Infendlichkeit”, as Matuschek shows, ideally fulfills all the characteristics of the romantic in terms of content: “And so my thoughts sink into the immeasurable, and shipwreck is sweet to me this ocean. ”Reality disappears behind a notion of eternity, which of course is no longer religious, but rather immanent in the world, and which is ultimately produced by and in art itself.
Matuschek's book title “The Poetry of Heaven” identifies precisely this inner-worldly transcendence as the spiritual core of German, Italian, French, English or Scottish romanticism and proves this in brilliant short interpretations.
This “tilting figure” between traditional worldviews and ambiguous modernity is also shown in Schiller's “Jungfrau von Orleans” and Goethe's “Faust”, which were received as romantic works par excellence in Europe, just like the so-called “Weimar Classic” for Matuschek a variety of European Romance is.
The other way round, it becomes a shoe: if the “classic” is understood to be something exemplary, then romanticism is our true classic.