Very good evening everyone and welcome to another episode of "Paperes of a Reader" I am Cristian Verón and today I wanted to bring you a topic that I was very interested in discussing on this channel, which is German romanticism...And you will say, What is German romanticism? well, well, German romanticism is a movement that was born in Germany, as its name indicates, but that has ramifications throughout the rest of Europe and even Latin America and that is developing in the rest of the countri
es at a time in which which in Germany had already become extinct or the fashion had passed, this fashion, this movement, this impulse is based on two fundamental questions. The first is to take a previous model which is the "sturm und drang" sorry for my German. There is a group, a breed of poets in Germany at the end of the 1700s who made up what was called the sturm und drang or storm and impetus. A poetic movement of humanistic renewal that takes, absorbs, its sources and contents from the E
nlightenment; of the great themes of the age of enlightenment; of that resurrection of the Apollonian forms. That is the first origin or the most distant origin of what would later become German romanticism. Because many of the poets who make up German Romanticism came from that class or were related to the poets who had integrated sturm und drang and we cannot limit this movement only to the literary if it has been a movement of aesthetic origin. It has had repercussions on the philosophical, o
n the musical, and of course also on the literary and, well, I forgot there, but also on painting and the plastic arts. I was interested in treating this movement in broad strokes (I would not like to delve into aspects that do not correspond to me) because it is a movement that from an aesthetic point of view has been very interesting and sheds light on a large number of later literary inspirations. Is it a closed cutting movement? No, in fact it is a movement that has its origin in a series of
poets and is expanding throughout Germany with a speed that Goethe is going to say with horror that it is a disease. In fact, it says that romanticism is a disease of youth, the battle cry of a school of frantic and reactionary Catholic poets and you will say, why was Goethe so against romanticism? well precisely because he saw romanticism as something bad and that he had helped create. In fact, one of his novels is "The Sorrows of Young Werther" or "The Misadventures of Young Werther" and is c
onsidered today one of the main sources of inspiration for romantic writers. Now , is romanticism limited to a time? Well that also depends a lot on the writer on whom we are basing ourselves. There are writers who consider that romanticism is a movement limited to a time and this time is the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. But there are other literary historians, art historians, who consider that romanticism does not have a temporary limitation; a limitation of time; bec
ause I would associate it more with a spiritual predisposition of the writer. That is to say, a writer is romantic because he brings together certain qualities. Under certain lights, for these writers, Elizabethan theater with Shakespeare at the helm could be considered romantic, for example. "Romeo and Juliet", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Tempest" (perhaps if we skip the discussion that The Tempest may be an apocryphal Shakespeare play) could fall into that category and if We come further
back in time and we can talk about the fact that the Gothic scenarios proposed by Washington Irving or Edgar Allan Poe, for example, in North America could be considered romantic. Not to mention if we go to 1850 to Argentina, which at that time were the united provinces of the Río de la Plata, and we read "Amalia" by José Mármol and we also find romantic elements scattered there in the work. So this depends on this consideration; It depends and varies a lot on who the writer is who is precisely
historicizing. Regarding this, there is a very interesting analysis about the differences between parallelisms and similarities... Emm...Parallelisms and differences, sorry, between Elizabethan tragedy and Schiller's tragedies within what is German Romanticism. That analysis belongs to George Steiner and is in a little book called "The Death of Tragedy." If you are interested in the topic, it is absolutely interesting to see how a topic is recycled again under romanticism but with other types o
f connotations or rather with the absence of connotations; and here we are approaching one of the most important points of what the movement itself is ...But before approaching that, I would like to tell you, using my notes; because I always have the dates there that I forget; that one of the best historians on the movement is the German Rudiger Safranski or Rudiger Safranski. Safranski wrote (I'm going to leave it noted at the end, you'll see it on the last slide) a book about romanticism title
d "An Odyssey of the German Spirit" and that odyssey; he says; It has a very precise origin, which is when the philosopher Herder says he goes to sea in the North Sea to try to reach France, and then he goes around France passing through Strasbourg and meets a very young poet who was in Strasbourg (Strasbourg is a very beautiful city that is on the Franco-German border and at that time it was the capital of Alsace-Lorraine, a region historically a point of contact and struggle between Germany an
d France) And there he meets Goethe and they begin an exchange that will take the philosopher Herder to Weimar, the city in central Germany; well south center actually further south than central Germany; We are going to see it on the map where it will provide feedback to a whole generation of poets and also philosophers because there are also some philosophers like Fichte or Schelling who will later take the ideas of Herder and other idealists who were going around. out there like Kant for examp
le and they are going to give it a twist, a more than interesting twist. I began by following, to historicize this period, Isaiah Berlin. Isaiah Berlin is a Soviet historian and writer who wrote several books and several essays on the question of where romanticism begins... What is Romanticism about; how it arises and how it develops. Evidently it was a question that he was passionate about and I like it because between 1966 and 1967 he wrote a series of papers for the BBC in which he made a ser
ies of reflections on everything he knew about Romanticism and among these questions that he illuminates for us is the idea of rebellion. Yes, the idea of rebellion is the basic idea within German romanticism. What is a romantic? He is a young man who rebels. What are you rebelling against? well, the young man who rebels, first rebels against the Enlightenment. Against the classical formation of the Age of Enlightenment and is closely linked to the idea of martyrdom. There are a lot of you
ng German poets, all tragic, all blonde, all thin, who conceive life like this: "live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse." Well, they conceive life that way and have the idea of sacrifice for the cause. . That is to say, putting your youth at the service of a cause without exactly caring about the cause itself. Even if they were fighting with a friend or their parents or whoever for opposite causes. Even themselves at times throughout their short lives; most of them had a fairly short l
ife; They defended one thing and then they defended another and you will say "were they people who changed their ways of thinking very often?" No, not really. What they had in their heads was that the importance of this whole romantic thing was the ability to sacrifice and rebel against everything established, regardless of whether that rebellion was stupid. And this is very important. Why? Because it takes us, says Berlin, to the second type, or the second interesting topic that characterizes w
hat Romanticism is. Berlin gives the example of a romantic of English origin that I am not going to discuss here because it is not important to the question of German romanticism...But it is Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle wrote a series of lectures on the so-called heroes, a cycle of conferences where he plays different Heroes or people who seemed to him to be Heroes: Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, but there is also Dante Alighieri, there is Virgil, and one of the heroes he chooses is Muhammad and
Mohammed. .. he portrays Muhammad, Carlyle portrays Muhammad totally moved by Muhammad's revolutionary...But Islam was not relevant to Carlyle; he did not believe in Islam and was not interested in Islam itself as a religion. What interested him was Muhammad's ability to engender or incarnate himself as a historical force and there that historical force is disconnected from values or parameters such as valid and invalid, even truth or falsehood because Carlyle was not interested either. sourc
es matter . Berlin takes him as a paradigm of what a romantic is: A romantic is a guy who does not care or who will not find relevant the moral background of this whole issue. In other words, it is irrelevant for a romantic to know if the cause is what is being fought is a good cause; whether what he is defending is fair or unjust; that's irrelevant. The important thing is that you put all your passion, all your effort, and all your way of being and the strength of your youth into it. So just by
doing that it is already valid as romantic. This movement is very disconnected from what morality is. because? and because for these people, for the early romantics, morality is something bourgeois...it's something philistine, something they don't have to worry about. They don't care about this question of morality, "whether the cause you are fighting for is right or wrong, I have no idea, I do n't care" in that sense it is interesting, for example, to remember the story of Lord Byron. Lord Byr
on is clearly not a German romantic, he is an English romantic but his life is perfect to portray this. He is going to get married in London and to escape from his marriage that he did not like, he joins a war and that war ends up being the war of Independence of Greece against Turkey. Do you understand what I'm going for? The value of the cause does not matter, what matters is throwing yourself into it with all the strength of your youth. This is what happened to Lord Byron, he died in that war
. What I mean by this is that there are many poets of this time who are going to work with tragedy . They are going to eliminate the moral background from their poems, tragedies, and novels. Why? Because for them, for romantics, tragedy is a simple succession of events without values around it. In ancient times tragedy was a moral error, in the romantic era this is despised as something irrelevant because the moral background shows a hypocritical conscience... For the romantics obviously, not
for those who had written them. So this is how, for example, in the time of Schiller, the German poet, presents a tragedy called "The Bandits" where there are some robbers who steal and commit all kinds of misdeeds. They are arrested, they are brought to justice, they are tried, they are found guilty and finally the worst fate awaits them, which at that time was death. It doesn't matter if they were right or wrong. Why ? Because the author does not make considerations of any kind. For Schiller i
t was totally irrelevant whether the bandit was stealing for a good cause or was stealing just because, because it seemed that way things should be, or because he wanted to escape a boring life, or whatever else you can think of. Schiller doesn't care about any of that. Schiller thinks that what is interesting about tragedy is the tragedy itself. A guy turns to stealing things, gets arrested and then dies. There's no moral background there for Schiller obviously. We always had an image that...we
ll, and the portraits that I am showing here reinforce it, but we had the image of the young man, blonde, disheveled...And there is a very powerful figure that dominates, says Berlin, as an image, during the 19th century to Romanticism that is that of Beethoven disheveled in his attic. Beethoven is a man who executes what is inside him. He is poor, he is ignorant, he is rude, his manners are bad, he knows little, and perhaps he is not a very interesting character if we put aside the inspiration
that drives him forward but he does. What's important about Beethoven is that he doesn't betray himself. He sits in his Attic and creates music and he does so according to the inner light that inspires him. That image of a man who does what he must do, that is, obey the muses, is the image that will govern what we consider as Romanticism. These tragic young people determined to pursue an idea, totally transformed by it and leaving aside all moral considerations, because for them it was being hyp
ocritical. As I said before: for romantics, consciousness moves away from the notion that universal truths exist. This is something that contradicts the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenment was precisely the celebration of the discovery of universal truths. I mean, it was Newton, right? It was the law of gravity, yes? It was Rousseau, it was Voltaire, it was the encyclopedists, yes? It was the idea that reason governed everything; could drive everything and that rationally the world could be
explained. For romantics there is a notion that is very important, which is that conscience no longer believes in universal truths. And you will say how did this happen? Well, it's a little complicated to explain but basically these young people who were in a room... They received Herder. Herder, by the way, is the man with the toupee on the bottom left who looks like a theologian, next to him is Schiller, and next to him is Schelling. There are three philosophers below. Above we have the Schle
gel brothers: On one side the pretty boy who is August or Augusto and on the other side we have the one who was the most rude (Friedrich), these people who meet for the first time in Carolina Michaelis's living room. Carolina Michaelis is going to be very important because in addition to dying of dysentery she is going to marry Wilhelm Schlegel and when she is widowed she is going to marry Schelling. And it is important within the movement because she is going to set up the house for the group t
o meet and have study days, literary gatherings, debates and some even wrote there in Carolina's house. And at a certain moment, we are talking about more or less 1807 or 1808, they are going to think that this group that is getting bigger, because more people are coming to Carolina's room... and needs a broadcasting organ to what they already considered to be a movement and that dissemination organ will be the Athenaum magazine. Athenaum, which, as its name indicates, refers to Athens, will be
the place from which they will attack the Enlightenment, the homogeneous desire for universality that the Enlightenment has. Schlegel points out (When I say Schlegel I am talking about Wilhelm) that romanticism is something that can be understood as a desire to head towards the infinite and escape from materiality. This is also central to understanding romanticism because they will reject the grosser materiality embodied in the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Marxism will also study the ro
mantics with great interest and will see in them an individual attempt... Yes, but an attempt at the end, to escape from those horrors of the industrial revolution, from that materiality, from that instrumentation of the totally destructive technique. And given this, these young poets are going to take refuge in the deep roots of the myths, the popular songs, the legends of their people, and they are going to study again and revive classic themes from another perspective. Not a didactic look as
had been done during the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment you had Voltaire or you had Rousseau or Montesquieu who took themes from the Greeks and Romans and took up some issues that had already been studied in Greece or Rome but always always to explain their system; to explain your personal idea; to explain something. That is to say, it was a return to the classic to explain the world through reason. On the other hand, in romanticism one flees towards the classic as a way of taking refug
e and avoiding everything that was wrong in the modern world. And you will say, then romanticism was a kind of traditionalism? not Romanticism and this is what Stendhal says, it is modern and interesting. The classics that were associated with the rescue that makes the classic of the Enlightenment is the ancient says Stendhal and therefore lacks energy. So they think of the romantic as an avant-garde that rescues or has an affiliation with the past but to transform the entire future. And you wil
l say, why Germany? Why didn't this happen in Poland, in Russia, in France that came with the century of Enlightenment, the century of enlightenment, which had well-known philosophers, truly talented writers? Because they were not the ones who generated the reaction. And there are many reasons but mainly there is one that seems quite important to me and that is that Germany had emerged from the "30 Years War" which was a bloodbath for Germany (If you don't believe me, watch Professor Borda's vid
eos and read Peter Wilson's books) Germany comes out of the 30 Years' War and is a fairly provincial area, and quite backward with respect to the neighboring regions. It is furiously Protestant because Protestantism has triumphed and after the dust settles around everything that was the war, German cultural development and the possibility of achieving national unity are cut off. Then as the political fails, the emphasis begins to fall on the spiritual life. It falls heavily on the spiritual life
. And if you have studied history (and if I don't tell you) you will see that this happens in other historical periods: when the political fails the masses focus on the spiritual life, fall back on the spiritual life and seek individual exit through the spiritual. . Generally these times are also very dark times at the level where sects proliferate, charlatans proliferate, demagogues proliferate, certain people proliferate who lead the people under the promise of messianic redemption and the gre
atest parallel that exists. It can happen to us now without coming to current times, this is what happens in post-Alexander the Great Greece. When Alexander the Great died in Greece, the Stoics and the Epicureans appeared, working on the salvation of individuals in the face of a decadent society. They do not try to save society, they try to save the spiritual aspect of the individual against society. Why is this important? because it is what will allow us to understand the spiritual coordinates
of Germany at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. For these people to emerge I always have to point there but I'm wrong, these people...Okay I have to rehearse it. Paolo D'Angelo is an Italian historian who says that the aesthetics of romanticism...sorry in "aesthetics of romanticism" says that the term romantic is deeply linked to certain states of mind that have a lot to do with the dark, the fantastic, the sentimental. , the passionate and he calls it the epitom
e is wonderful, he calls it "romanticism is the dark side or the irrational side of art" Why? because precisely the topic of romanticism is the opposition to reason, that is why many of the German writers of this period are going to return to the German roots and are going to focus on German legends and are going to recover them even through the poetry, tragedies. For example Hölderlin writing his poems about Germania and the Rhine; Heinrich Heine writing the folk songs of Lorelei, for example t
he singing of Lorelei, or we can also trace it in philosophy: Fichte with his speeches to the German nation calling for national unity, to recover national culture. To create, in reality, a national culture. We cannot talk about national culture when a nation did not exist in the terms in which we usually know them today. For D'Angelo, these people will meet in Weimar and in Jena, especially in Jena because in Jena there was a very important university which had been Goethe's headquarters for a
long time and where the Schlegel brothers are going to work around that group. There are people who are approaching at different times, who participate in the dissemination organ of the movement, who later when the dissemination ends (because it lasts only 2 years or three if I'm not mistaken) they are going to disperse throughout the rest of Germany and they are going to found small romantic subgroups. And there are also those who never end up joining the group but who are invited from time to
time and fall, such as Herder or Hölderlin. The poet Hölderlin...But we also have Schleiermacher who ends up disowning the group. He was a theologian and a student of politics who in his youth was going to spread romantic ideas in what is Berlin and then at a certain moment he was going to forget his past and say "No, I was never with them." " There are fundamental, let's say foundational ones for this movement but the main one is Friedrich Schlegel who in 1797 was going to write his studies on
Greek poetry and the studies on Greek poetry are precisely the beginning of all this. Then we have others like Ludwig Tieck...Novalis, Novalis we have it here so you can see it at the top right. Novalis dies very young and he is a fantastic, wonderful writer, he is a brilliant writer. He is a writer who introduces the fantastic precisely by recovering it in literature in a way that had not been known until now. I highly recommend Novalis's stories, they are wonderful. This group will meet in Jen
a, it will meet in Weimar and in 1798 they meet in Dresden and the philosopher Schelling also joins the gathering . Schelling, in addition to moving to Jena and staying with the wife of one of the Schlegels, will later also be someone who spread precisely the ideas of romanticism. When we talk about romanticism I have mentioned the places, you know that I love maps so what I am going to show you at this moment is where we are located on the map. I move this over here and we have on the one hand
south of Stuttgart to Tübingen. On the other hand we have Vienna, another of the centers, Vienna is a more musical center, that is, romanticism there will be mainly of musical origin. Then we have up here where we have the center of Germany to the left of Leipzig, I don't know if they locate it, we have two little arrows, one lighter red and the other red. The lighter red one is precisely Jena and the one next to it is Weimar. Above we have Dresden and Berlin as we can see now well I run this he
re perfect how I am becoming skilled with this type of things! I already handle it in an incredible way. I would like to point out that the main characteristics are the rejection of the classical conception but the one with which they had recovered, remember well those of the century of enlightenment... not the classical conception of Greece and Rome per se, by itself. The first romantics also found in the French Revolution a point of conflict and at the same time an incentive; they were against
what the French Revolution proposed as the desire for universality. But they ascribed to the revolutionary principles of transformation of the old structures, that is, the world had to be changed as it was. Romanticism is, as I said before, an individual rebellion. There is a failure of the cultural forms that had been submerged in a provincialism full of religion and against that these young boys with long hair rebel who compose songs at night, write about Italian lovers, and go out to search
the roads of Germany for the songs of his people. I think I can go through this calmly because I have already talked about all this. Here we have the main works of the period. I have selected some, this does not mean that they are the ones that you have to read...But if you want to know about Romanticism, I recommend the writings of Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel, the brothers. Here I put some "on the study of Greek poetry", "Alarcos", "characteristics and criticisms", "on dramatic art and liter
ature" and then also some secondary ones or some a little further away from the center of the group like Eichendorf . Eichendorf writes "premonition and present" which is a novel, he writes his "poems" and recovers many of the German folkloric themes in his poems. Also later we have Fichte with his "speeches to the German nation" where he talks about building a culture for the Germans. We also have the "misadventures of young Werther" by Johann Von Goethe, which is the starting point of this who
le story because in fact the romantics look suspiciously like Werther, the character in Goethe's novel, and Goethe is going to think and say that that is a big misunderstanding. Then I recommend Schelling's "philosophical investigations into the essence of human freedom." From Novalis the "hymns to the night" the hymns to the night are exquisite, they are beautiful poetic pieces. If you like poetry, Novalis' hymns to the night are something you have to read to understand this period. I also add
the poet Von Arnim who wrote in three volumes his volkslieder or "popular songs" or "songs of the people" or "songs of the people" which makes a whole compilation of German myths and popular songs that Jacob will also do and Wilhelm Grimm with "stories of childhood and home" that are going to be precisely those that go to the stories of the Grimm brothers. We know them all, the most famous of them I think is "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" but there are others out there floating around. We als
o have "fantasy pieces" by Hoffmann: Hoffmann is an exquisite storyteller as well and is a highly renowned poet. I also included the "book of songs" which does exactly the same thing that the poet Von Arnim had done, which is to recover the German popular songs and the great elegies. From Friedrich Hölderlin...Hölderlin is a poet who was always close to what Romanticism is but never ended up formally integrating it. Why? We do not know. Hölderlin is a pre-romantic and that Eichendorf and Hoffman
n and Heine are the end of the romantic movement, they are its exhaustion because for Safranski; For example; Romanticism is a certain historical era and by 1830 let's say this begins to close, the curtain lowers, the curtain closes. So well, nothing like that. I wanted to bring this to you, it seemed important to me to rescue it. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Hoffmann is, in addition to being a great writer of fantastic stories, someone who did something very interesting, which is to write some
popular stories or rescue some stories, among which is included a very famous one, which is "Puss in Boots" all the time. The world knows Puss in Boots... and after that I put Wallenstein at the end. Wallenstein is a great tragedy in three parts composed over 3 and a half, 4 years, by the great poet Friedrich Schiller and it is like the greatest work of this period. And so we approach minute 45. If you've made it this far and you still feel like it, I ask you to "like" it, subscribe, as that al
ways helps the channel, and here I leave the consulted bibliography. There are other bibliographies, there are other studies on romanticism; obvious; There are other routes that can be taken, yes absolutely... Others can be traced. I used these books "the romantic conscience" by Javier Hernández Pacheco whose edition is from 1995. "the actuality of the first German Romanticism" by Naim Garnica and others because it is a compilation of works that is from the year 2019. Naim Garnica is a Argentine
university professor at the UBA and is a specialist in the first romantic movement. He is also a specialist in the work of the Schlegel brothers... I also have to recommend "the aesthetics of romanticism" by Paolo D'Angelo that I mentioned previously and is from 1997 ... And finally "the roots of romanticism" by Isaiah Berlin from 1967. In reality it was written between 1966 and 67 but it was published as a book in 1967 so well that has been romanticism... Until here. I hope you liked it and se
e you next time. See you later bye!
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