The love of landscape was reflected in the painting of the day. In the landscapes of the old world, from the Dutch masters to Poussin, nature had been portrayed as a mere backdrop to the relationship between God and man and had been executed in a highly stylized, symbolic manner which evoked a sense of harmony and a divine order. Romantic painters changed this view. The old ideas of balance and construction and man’s control over nature were swept aside in favour of unfettered, uncontrollable nature which reduced man to a mere speck in an unfamiliar, frightening, painful and menacing world.
The greatest and most moving of these paintings came to Berlin in 1810, in an exhibition at the Academy of works by Caspar David Friedrich. The artist caused a sensation in the city with his chilling portrayals of destiny and the helplessness of man against the elements. His A Monk on the Seashore reveals a lonely windswept figure standing out against the threatening, turbulent water, an image of infinity with its terrible dark emptiness, the figure with no hope of redemption or eternal life. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has the lone figure again, this time a man dressed in black standing on craggy rocks watching the crashing sea below. In Two Men Contemplating the Moon cloaked figures look out from the edge of the forest at the misty moonlight shining through the gnarled fingers of an ancient tree, and are overpowered by the spectacle before them.36 Like so many of his generation Caspar David Friedrich had been influenced by the Naturphilosophie – the pantheism of men like Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, who taught that the spirit of the world manifested itself in nature. The forest paths which led down rocky cliffs and past shadowy caves were both a source of revelation and a source of fear. The traveller seeking fundamental truths had to make his way through the German forest alone.
This endless journey, the search for meaning and truth, was another essential element of Romantic literature. The artist suffered the Romantic agony because he could never be content with the world as it was. He was driven on by the deep longing, Sehnsucht, to find something which, tragically, could never be achieved in his life. In his Evening Fantasy Hölderlin exclaims: ‘But where am I to go? Mortals live by wages and work; in alternate toil and rest everyone finds satisfaction: why is it always in my breast that the goad is never still?’37 In his poem Sehnsucht Eichendorff describes how a lonely man suddenly hears the sound of a post horn echoing over the distant hills, a call which awakens his lost memories and desire: ‘My heart caught fire within me, and I thought secretly to myself: O, how wonderful to go along too in the glowing summer night.’38 The most famous symbol of Sehnsucht, and indeed of German Romanticism itself, was Novalis’s ‘blue flower’. This remarkable image first appeared in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which was published posthumously in 1802. In it the young poet Heinrich meets a stranger who tells him of treasures in far-off lands and that night he dreams of the mysterious, magical light-blue flower. Heinrich becomes obsessed by this thing of perfection and beauty; the flower has awakened an ‘indescribable longing in me … I cannot get it out of my mind’. He is driven to search for this perfect object, but the blue flower can never be found in this world.
Heinrich’s dream was not unique. If the Philosophes had championed the coming of the light the Romantics preferred the murky world of apparitions and darkness. Hundreds of works were written on the themes of sunset and nightfall. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was the first of many pieces ranging from Robert Schumann’s Nachtstücke (Night Pieces) of 1839 to Brahms’s Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht (Death, that is the Cold Night). Poetry, too, ranged from Hölderlin’s Sunset to Brentano’s Evening Serenade, in which he describes the flute wafting over the dark hills: ‘How sweetly it speaks to the heart! Through the night which holds me embraced.’ Nightfall brought with it the terrible, wonderful world of dreams which gave the human being access to the secret world beyond reason. In Die Symbolik des Traumes (The Symbolism of Dreams) Gotthilf Schubert asserted that dreams gave human beings access to the subconscious, to the soul and to God.39 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s dream sequences are the most disturbing in Romantic literature and range from fairy-tales like The Mouse King to sinister stories like Ignaze Denner and novels like Elixiere des Teufels, which delve into the horror of insanity and which would later inspire the genre of crime fiction. The world of dreams tied into the bizarre and the occult, into a world filled with strange apparitions, ghosts, rotting corpses, and spirits. Mesmer, who gave his name to his own particular brand of hypnotism, created a sensation in Berlin when he preached that all living creatures are linked by a mysterious substance called animal magnetism. He charged substantial sums of money to hypnotize members of the audience and to perform ‘miracles’ and ‘magic cures’ for them. Terrible dreams recurred in Romantic painting, as in the pictures of a goblin lying on a sleeping maiden in Fuseli’s The Nightmare or in Alfred Rethel’s Death as Assassin, complete with its hideous dancing skeleton.
The Romantics were obsessed by themes of fate and death. Popular Schicksalstragödien (tragedies of fate), which were often modelled on Greek plays, had individuals or even whole families fated to die because of a crime committed in the past. In his sensational success Die Schuld (The Guilt) Adam Müller portrays a count who murdered a man in his youth and then married his widow. As the play unfolds he, and the audience, slowly come to realize that the dead man was his own brother. The obsession with death was everywhere. In Hyperion’s Song of Fate Hölderlin described how ‘suffering human beings dwindle and fall headlong from one hour to the next hurled like water from precipice to precipice down through the years into uncertainty’. In Hymns to the Night Novalis cries, ‘Oh draw me, Beloved, powerfully on, so that I can fall into slumber and can love. I feel the rejuvenating stream of death … Eternal life has been revealed in death; you are death and it is only by you that we are made whole.’40 This love of death came through in Achim von Arnim’s phrase ‘We live to die, we die to live.’41 Even in Wilhelm Müller’s cycle of poems Die schöane Müllerin, so beautifully set to music by Schubert, the young miller drowns himself when he learns that the woman he loves desires another. Gradually the fascination with mortality took on a new theme – the idealization of violence and violent death and the creation of apocalyptic visions of warfare and honour in battle. In Fragmente Schlegel writes about giving one’s life for the nation: ‘the noblest and most beautiful must be chosen, above all, the human being, the flower of the earth … only in the midst of death is the lightning of eternal life ignited.’42 Tieck wrote, ‘The desire for death is the warrior-spirit.’43 Joseph von Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart ends with: ‘We were born in struggle and in struggle we will go down conquered or in triumph. For out of the magic incense of our making a ghost of war will materialize, armoured, with the blanched face of death and bloody hair.’44 It was not surprising that this was written in 1815, in the wake of the Wars of Liberation. The idealization of violence and war began to touch for the first time on the world of politics. This new, much more dangerous strain of Romanticism, found a natural home in Berlin.
Berlin’s role was central in the transformation of Romantic ideas into political ideology. Whereas in other parts of Germany it was possible to remain aloof from political life, even the most unworldly philosophers and poets could not shield themselves from the national problems of unity and independence so visible in the occupied city. Suddenly their themes began to take on a new patriotic meaning; characters could still walk through the woods but now they had to be German woods; they could admire buildings, but they had to be ‘German’ Gothic buildings; they could talk of history but it had to be ‘German’ history. Images of national regeneration, of rebirth and greatness, of a lost world of the German Volk, of medieval pageantry and honour, found their way into the works of Novalis and Arndt and Körner and Schenkendorf. Novalis wanted to bring back the glory of the lost Germany and said