Berlin is rarely thought of as a centre of Romanticism; rather, the label is usually applied to regions like Bavaria with its Ludwig II fairy-tale architecture, or to the Rhine with its great ruins towering above the water and its legends of river gods or magic rings. The image is wrong. Despite Berlin’s post-war attempts to distance itself from a movement now associated with everything from nationalism to Nazism it was in fact the most important centre of German Romanticism in the Napoleonic period.23 It was Berlin which became the focal point of the diverse artistic, literary and intellectual output of that troubled age, and it was in Berlin that the sentimentality and Schwärmerei was channelled into a fledgling political movement. It was there that the resentment against France and against political impotence began to be mixed with its notions of the German Volk and Vaterland, with calls for German unity and, more ominously, with increasing claims to German cultural superiority and, later, racial purity as well. Berlin became important in an age in which middle-class Germans, barred from political life, began to be passionate about their own culture and their own past. They were permitted to pursue their cultural revolution under the noses of the French only because Napoleon refused to believe that such scribblers and artists threatened his rule. He was only half right.
The sheer number of artists and writers attracted to Berlin was staggering. When Kleist returned from Paris to carry on the struggle against Napoleon he chose Berlin as his base; in 1815 the world traveller Adelbert von Chamisso called it the ‘Father City’.24 A number of Romantics, from Hitzig and Tieck to Eichendorff and Varnhagen, were Berliners but many more were drawn to the city to meet and to argue and to hear the latest works at the salons of Bettina von Arnim, Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, Karoline Schlegel and Henriette Sontag. Achim von Arnim settled in Berlin in 1809, where he married Bettina Brentano; the great Berlin critic Wilhelm Wackenroder, who stressed the importance of feelings over analysis, remained there for most of his life; Karl Philipp Moritz taught at the Academy of Arts and published the Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde between 1783 and 1793, the first ever periodical of psychology produced in Germany. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the grandson of Frederick the Great’s famous general, married Karoline von Briest there and retired to her home near Berlin, where he wrote myriad Romantic tales, plays and novels, including Der Held des Nordens and his masterpiece Undine. E. T. A. Hoffmann moved to Berlin in 1798, where he wrote his evocative and fantastic stories and drank with friends like Ludwig Devrient at ‘Lutter und Wegner’; he died in Berlin in 1822, aged forty-six. Clemens Brentano, a friend of Arndt with whom he had written Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), moved to Berlin from Heidelberg in 1810; here he met Müller and Eichendorff and the Schlegel brothers. Zacharias Werner, the most important dramatist of the Romantic movement, wrote poetry and songs while working in the Prussian civil service during the Napoleonic occupation; Adelbert von Chamisso, whose family had fled the revolution in France when he was a boy of nine, wrote many of his poems and stories in Berlin, including Der Soldat about a man ordered to execute his closest friend. Heinrich Heine studied in Berlin for two years and spent much of his time at Rahel Varnhagen von Ense’s salon. Kleist, who had spent most of his extraordinary life travelling, returned to Berlin in 1807, was arrested and spent time in a French prison but returned in 1810 to continue the fight against Napoleon and to complete his most famous work Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. He killed himself at Wannsee in Berlin on 21 November 1811 after shooting a terminally ill friend. Friedrich Schleiermacher helped to found Berlin University and emphasized the religious dimension of Romanticism; his lectures and sermons as a professor of theology filled young Berliners with patriotic fervour.
Romanticism in Berlin was born out of the indignity, the shame, the degradation felt by those living in the humiliated and occupied capital. German Romanticism was a reaction against France – against French manners, French ideas, the French Philosophes and finally against French aggression. Young Germans now saw Enlightenment rationality, classicism and utilitarianism as the culture of the enemy, a culture which lacked something fundamental, something spiritual, and above all something German. Romanticism started as a literary movement and can be traced to the short-lived whirlwind aptly named Sturm und Drang.
Sturm und Drang ran its feverish course between the years 1765 and 1785. Frederickan Berlin was still very much an Enlightenment city, and it was left to Weimar to lead the headlong charge into the new age. Wieland arrived in 1772. Three years later Karl August became duke and invited Goethe to stay. He would remain for the rest of his life. Herder moved to Weimar in 1776 and Schiller thirteen years later. The concentration of talent in the small town would later give rise to the inane notion that Germany was somehow divided into two mutually exclusive groups, the Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) represented by Weimar, and the arrogant Prussian militarists of Berlin; in fact the two strands in German life have always been linked. Nevertheless in the late eighteenth century Weimar was experiencing its golden age and was receptive to the ideas introduced to Germany by that Citoyen de Genève: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau was the ‘wild man’ of Europe, the uncouth genius with a deep love of nature who travelled on foot preaching a new ‘natural religion’ and leaving a string of mistresses and abandoned children behind him. For him the Enlightenment man was a fallacy for underneath all the trappings of civilized life lurked an earthy, spiritual, natural human being. Being free meant breaking the restrictive chains imposed by society and allowing the natural man to shine. ‘I would rather be dead than be taken for an ordinary man,’ he exclaimed. The longing to break with the refined views of the Enlightenment was one of the key undercurrents of Sturm und Drang.
The name itself was derived from the title of a play written in 1777 by Friedrich Klinger.25 In contrast to the characters in the typical bedroom farces of the day Klinger’s characters seethed with unbridled emotion; the hatred between the two families on stage raged so intensely that it could only be countered by passionate love. The very style, the tone, the wild abandon of the characters marked this out as quintessential Sturm und Drang. The new movement challenged conventional morality; the rule of law was scorned while anything which allowed man to follow his true nature was praised. Jakob Lenz actually lived the new carefree life, which included well-publicized attempts to bed married women; many of his works from Die Engländer to Der Waldbruder revolve around the idea of unrequited love. In Wilhelm Heinse’s 1780 novel Ardinghello the hero, a Florentine painter, commits two murders in the name of love but this was acceptable because the artist had thrown away stifling convention and had abandoned himself to his emotions. Schiller, too, foreshadowed the Romantics with his belief in the primacy of art and in the idea that beauty could restore to man all that he had lost through the Enlightenment. His heroes were to be respected not because of their deeds but because of their inner responses to life. In The Robbers of 1781 the wrenching conflicts suffered by his main character, Karl, glorify the anarchic liberty of the individual; Karl becomes a tragic hero despite the crimes he has committed as the head of a robber band.26 These ideas were echoed by Hamann, the ‘Magus of the North’, in his anti-rationalism and his belief in instinct and in the primacy of poetry and imagination. But above all, Sturm und Drang found its leading spirit in Goethe. Later in his life this many-faceted character would mock his youthful outbursts, but in the late eighteenth century he was the undisputed master of the new movement.
Goethe enjoyed the kind of adulation in his youth now typically reserved for pop stars, and his works, especially his Bildungsroman or novel of experience, caused a hitherto unheard of sensation. The young Goethe appealed to his generation precisely because he rejected conventional rules and codes; for him a genius did not follow a path laid down by others: instead such talent revealed itself by rejecting convention, by ‘overstepping existing law, breaking established rules and declaring itself above all restraint’. The early novels always featured