Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
German Romanticism was the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, influencing philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and criticism. Compared to English Romanticism, the German variety developed relatively early, and, in the opening years, coincided with Weimar Classicism (1772–1805).
August WilhelmSchlegel, usually cited as August Schlegel, was a German Indologist, poet, translator and critic, and with his brother Friedrich Schlegel the leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His translations of Shakespeare turned the English dramatist's works into German classics. Schlegel was also the professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe and produced a translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
Karl Wilhelm FriedrichSchlegel was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, pen name Novalis, was a German aristocrat and polymath, who was a poet, novelist, philosopher and mystic. He is regarded as an influential figure of Jena Romanticism.
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer and journalist. His best known works are the theatre plays The Prince of Homburg, Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, The Broken Jug, Amphitryon and Penthesilea, and the novellas Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O. Kleist died by suicide together with a close female friend who was terminally ill.
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850. Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs.
Philipp Otto Runge was a German artist, draftsman, painter, and color theorist. Runge and Caspar David Friedrich are often regarded as the leading painters of the German Romantic movement. He is frequently compared with William Blake by art historians, although Runge's short ten-year career is not easy to equate to Blake's career. By all accounts he had a brilliant mind and was well versed in the literature and philosophy of his time. He was a prolific letter writer and maintained correspondences and friendships with contemporaries such as Carl Ludwig Heinrich Berger, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Henrik Steffens, and Ludwig Tieck. His paintings are often laden symbolism and allegories. For eight years he planned and refined his seminal project, Tageszeiten, four monumental paintings 50 square meters each, which in turn were only part of a larger collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk that was to include poetry, music, and architecture, but remained unrealized at the time of his death. With it he aspired to abandon the traditional iconography of Christianity in European art and find a new expression for spiritual values through symbolism in landscapes. One historian stated "In Runge's painting we are clearly dealing with the attempt to present contemporary philosophy in art." He wrote an influential volume on color theory in 1808, Sphere of Colors, that was published the same year he died.
Austrian literature is mostly written in German, and is closely connected with German literature.
Ricarda Huch was a pioneering German intellectual. Trained as a historian, and the author of many works of European history, she also wrote novels, poems, and a play. Asteroid 879 Ricarda is named in her honour.
Dark Romanticism is a literary sub-genre of Romanticism, reflecting popular fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Often conflated with Gothic fiction, it has shadowed the euphoric Romantic movement ever since its 18th-century beginnings. Edgar Allan Poe is often celebrated as one of the supreme exponents of the tradition. Dark Romanticism focuses on human fallibility, self-destruction, judgement, punishment, as well as the psychological effects of guilt and sin.
Weimar Classicism was a German literary and cultural movement, whose practitioners established a new humanism from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. It was named after the city of Weimar, Germany, because the leading authors of Weimar Classicism lived there.
Sturm und Drang was a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. Within the movement, individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements. The period is named after Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play of the same name, which was first performed by Abel Seyler's famed theatrical company in 1777.
David E. Wellbery is an American professor of German Studies at the University of Chicago. As of 2022 he is the chair of the department of Germanic Studies and holds the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professorship in the department. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German polymath, who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. A poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic, his works include plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
Camden House, Inc. was founded in 1979 by professors James Hardin and Gunther Holst with the purpose of publishing scholarly books in the field of German literature, Austrian Literature, and German language culture. Camden House books were published in Columbia, South Carolina, until 1998. When the company became an imprint in that year, place of publication moved to Rochester, New York.
Hans-Günther Thalheim was a German professor of German language and linguistics and of Literary sciences. He was also a writer and literary editor.
George Guțu is a Romanian philologist, teacher in the Department of German Language and Literature of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest. He is also director of the Paul Celan Center for Research and Excellence and the Master programme "Intercultural Literary and Linguistic Communication Strategies", initiated by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures together with other departments of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. His academic activity is based on the history of German literature ; German and Austrian contemporary literature; German literature from Romania, cultural inter-referentiality in Central and Southeast Europe, particularly in Bukovina, poetics, literary theory, translation, the history of German studies and guidance for PhD students. His research domains are the history of German literature; comparative literature; German literature from Romania; cultural inter-referentiality; imagology; the history and aesthetics of reception; theory and practice of translation.
Martin Sommerfeld was a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany to the U.S. who was a professor at the University of Frankfurt and subsequently at Columbia University, the City College of New York, Smith College, and Middlebury College, where he taught German language and literature. He authored and edited a number of volumes on German literature from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and he wrote numerous contributions to the four-volume Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (1925–31).
