German Romanticism: Die Romantik from Jena to the Brothers Grimm

German Romanticism did not appear out of nowhere. According to Treccani, it was prepared by Sturm und Drang: in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, that movement had already built, within Germany, a literary consciousness independent of French classicism.

Alongside that break, the 1790s produced a whole generation of philosophers and poets: besides the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, it included the idealists Schelling and Hegel and the poet Hölderlin. Friedrich Schlegel worked to reconcile Fichte’s philosophy of a free subject with Spinoza’s holism, a project that was as much philosophical as literary, one the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reads two ways at once: pushing back against German idealism while also feeding into how it developed.

The Jena circle and the journal Athenäum

The first German Romantic school, Treccani writes, formed in the closing years of the eighteenth century in Jena, before later moving to Berlin. Its outlet was the journal Athenäum, published by the circle between 1798 and 1800. Among its leading figures were the Schlegel brothers: Friedrich, born in 1772, and August Wilhelm, five years his senior, who would later render Shakespeare into German and build a reputation as a leading literary critic of the period. Gathered around them were Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Caroline Schlegel and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel.

For Friedrich Schlegel, the fragment — the short form in which the circle published much of its thinking — had to stand apart from everything around it, complete in itself, “like a hedgehog.”

Practical example: opening an 1798 issue of the Athenäum meant finding one short, dense observation after another, on philosophy, poetry and literary criticism, often without any stated link between them: readers had to piece together the thread themselves, much as they would with a collection of aphorisms.

Novalis was born in 1772 into a pietist family of the lesser Saxon nobility and died of tuberculosis in 1801, at 28. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he was a central figure of the Jena circle, shaped by Fichte, Herder, Goethe and the mystic Jakob Böhme. He wrote philosophical fragments partly published in the Athenäum, poetry, the unfinished novels “The Novices of Sais” and “Henry of Ofterdingen,” and essays such as “Christianity or Europe.” His “Hymns to the Night” earned him a reputation as an otherworldly, at times somber poet. He built on Fichte’s philosophy, but worried that its emphasis on the subject developing through opposition to the object would leave the physical world without a freedom and identity of its own.

The Heidelberg circle: folk songs and fairy tales

After Jena, the movement’s center of gravity shifted. According to the Deutsches Historisches Museum (LeMO), Heidelberg became home to the two Romantics Clemens Brentano (1778-1842) and Achim von Arnim (1781-1831); the same source also names E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) and Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857) among the era’s other important Romantic writers. Brentano and Arnim edited the folk-song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, to which Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm also contributed anonymously, through the mediation of Friedrich Carl von Savigny — it was through Savigny that the two brothers first made contact with the movement’s leading figures.

Wilhelm Grimm was born in 1786 in Hanau, the son of court official Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, and died in 1859 in Berlin of a blood infection; Jacob was born in 1785, also in Hanau, and died in 1863 following a stroke. After five years of work, the brothers published the first volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Children’s and Household Tales, in a print run of 900 copies. In 1837 they were among seven Göttingen professors, the Göttinger Sieben, dismissed for a political protest — for Wilhelm, it remained the only real political act of his life; Jacob, later on, sat as a deputy in the Frankfurt National Assembly after the revolution of March 1848.

Other figures: Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Kleist

The movement also had figures beyond Jena and Heidelberg. Heinrich von Kleist was born in 1777 in Frankfurt an der Oder and died by suicide in 1811, near Berlin at the Wannsee; Deutsche Biographie places him among the writers of the classical-Romantic era, noting his unusual influence, for his time, on twentieth-century literature. Hoffmann and Eichendorff, mentioned above for their dates, broadened the movement beyond its two main circles.

German Romantic painting: Friedrich and Runge

Alongside the writers, the movement also had a pictorial side. Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 and died in 1840; he trained at the University of Greifswald and the Copenhagen Academy, was elected to the Berlin Academy in 1810 and to the Dresden Academy in 1816. The National Gallery in London places him among the defining names of Romantic painting in Germany; a stroke in 1835 limited his output in his final years.

Philipp Otto Runge was born in 1777 in Wolgast and died in 1810 in Hamburg. Deutsche Biographie describes him as one of the founders of Romantic art in Germany: from July 1802 he spent time in Dresden with, among others, Caspar David Friedrich himself. The two painters shared the same circles, not just the same period.

A European movement with a German center

Signs of a break with classicism appeared elsewhere in the same years: Treccani notes that England, France and Italy — where later writers such as Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi would emerge — show early, independent signals, in some cases even predating the German movement. But it was in Germany, Treccani adds, that the formative period of Romanticism went deepest, and from there it spread across the rest of the continent.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reaches a similar conclusion on the philosophical side: while weighing the English and French Romanticisms as well, it places German Romanticism in a position of particular importance because it opened the way for the others, pointing to the aesthetic vision developed in Germany roughly between 1796 and 1801-1802 as the movement’s most philosophical expression.

The legacy: Romantic music and the idea of nation

According to Encyclopedia.com, the idea of nationalism — a people defined by shared culture or ethnicity as the only legitimate basis for a state — spread across Europe in the early nineteenth century as an outgrowth of German Romanticism. The fusion of national feeling and art followed the model set out by the poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schiller, and found one of its most elaborate expressions in Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, from 1821. Later, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and the German unification that followed, the Bayreuth theater built by Richard Wagner became a lasting monument to it.

This part of the story belongs to a later generation than Jena and Heidelberg: the source describes it as an outgrowth of German Romanticism, not as its direct cause.