Stefan Matuschek, Der gedichtete Himmel. Eine Geschichte der Romantik. Beck, München 2021. 400 S., € 28,–.

Stefan Matuschek, Der gedichtete Himmel. Eine Geschichte der Romantik. Beck, München 2021. 400 S., € 28,–.

To write a coherent account of literary Romanticism, taking in not only German but also French, Italian and English literature, and to make it accessible both to the general reader and to academics, is a major challenge. Stefan Matuschek has achieved it with remarkable success, producing a highly informative and insightful book which this reviewer read with continued pleasure and fascination. It is no mere description, but contains a challenging argument, and I will respond to some of Matuschek's provocations later in this review.

First, though, let me try to summarize Matuschek's take on Romanticism. Romanticism can be seen as a discourse or a phenomenon. As a discourse, it was elaborated by the Jena circle surrounding the brothers Schlegel. As a phenomenon, it was far more extensive. We are accustomed to speaking of the English Romantic poets from Wordsworth to Keats, though neither they nor their English-speaking contemporaries applied the term ‚Romantic' to them, and it makes sense to call Leopardi a Romantic, despite his adherence to classicism. Romantic content is compatible with classical form, as in Foscolo's poem Dei sepolcri (1807) and much of Hölderlin's poetry (another example would have been Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality [1807]).

Romanticism is therefore a suitable term to denote a literary period stretching over four decades, from Blake's America: A Prophecy (1793) to Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831). As an international literary and cultural phenomenon, Romantic represents less a rejection of the Enlightenment than its continuation by other means. The conflict between the Berlin Enlightenment and the Jena Romantics, epitomized by Tieck's break with Nicolai, was not a reversal but an example of the familiar process whereby a younger generation impatiently, and sometimes rightly, rejects an older generation's values as ossified.

One hallmark of Romanticism was the transfer of cultural authority. In the Enlightenment, the authority of the Church and the aristocracy was already yielding to that of the rapidly expanding reading public. A new authority-figure appeared, typified by the Schlegel brothers: the literary critic, who evaluates literature by appealing not to the impersonal rules of art but to his own literary sensibility. Elsewhere, too, external criteria were displaced by subjective ones. Schleiermacher in Über die Religion (1799), accepting implicitly that the Enlightenment has undermined the theological and historical bases of Christianity, undertakes not a reaction but a flight forward by redefining religion as a subjective ‚Sinn und Geschmack fürs Unendliche' (quoted, p. 20). The new subjectivity of religion is illustrated here by a beguilingly perceptive reading of Eichendorff's Mondnacht. Matuschek's sensibility as a reader of literature exemplifies and confirms the very process he is describing.

The quality of the writer's imagination is now the guarantor of truth. Matuschek might have found further support in Keats's famous declaration: „What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth". This creates an ambiguity. For the Romantics, the imagination is powerful, compelling, deeply founded in human nature – Romanticism also inherits the Enlightenment's interest in anthropology – but without ultimate external support.

Hence Matuschek's key idea is that many typically Romantic works exhibit what he calls a ‚Kippfigur', referring to those ambiguous drawings in which, for example, a duck can also be seen as a rabbit. In the Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) Wackenroder and Tieck, inspired by Dürer and Raphael, treat art with religious devotion, thereby also treating religion with aesthetic appreciation: „Man kann darin die religiöse Überhöhung der Kunst sehen oder eine ins Künstlerische gewendete Frömmigkeit" (p. 115). Matuschek finds another ‚Kippfigur' in the passsionate devotion of Johanna in Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801): in this ‚romantische Tragödie', the vision of the Virgin Mary welcoming her to heaven is seen only by the dying Johanna (though the stage direction does specify a rosy glow in the sky, and earlier the apparition of the Black Knight, and Johanna's Samson-like breaking of her chains, are not easy to rationalize away). The cosmic apparatus of Faust, from the benign Jehovah of the „Prolog im Himmel" to the virgin mother-goddess of „Bergschluchten", is itself a ‚Kippfigur', poetically magnificent but clearly tongue-in-cheek. Such ambiguity is characteristic of an epoch which, unlike the Enlightenment, understands religion as the expression of a distinctively human faculty, but is too enlightened to claim that religion can be the cognition of an external reality. Romantic visions result in varying degrees from deliberate ‚Romantisieren', and when the visionary power fails, the result is depression and ‚Weltschmerz' (illustrated here from Jean Paul's Rede des toten Christus [1797] and the Nachtwachen von Bonaventura [1805]). Late in our period, one might add, the mechanism of the ‚Kippfigur' is revealed by Heine in Gespräch auf der Paderborner Heide (1821).

While the ‚Kippfigur' is a powerful and sensitive instrument for reading Romantic texts, this book offers much more. There are thumbnail sketches of many works, some of which, such as Senancour's Obermann (1804), may be known to relatively few readers, and illuminating comparisons: the aestheticization of Christianity by Novalis and Chateaubriand, for example, and the adaptation of vampire stories by Goethe in Die Braut von Corinth (1798) and Keats in Lamia (1820). The changing tastes of the reading public require extensive discussion of Gothic and ‚Schauerromantik' (where Hoffmann's irreducibly ambiguous Der Sandmann [1816] provides another ‚Kippfigur') and of the taste for ‚Märchen', fostered especially by Tieck and the brothers Grimm, whose dubious methods as folklorists are exposed. Matuschek reminds us that in the Enlightenment (and earlier) fairy-tales were written for adults (Perrault, Wieland, Voltaire); only in Romanticism were they considered primarily sources of entertainment and instruction for children.

Any book on Romanticism, especially one written in German, must deal with German nationalism. Matuschek gives an admirable account of how Scandinavian mythology was appropriated on behalf of the ancient Germans; how it was developed in Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835) and Fouqué's popular dramas; and how the discipline of ‚Germanistik' originated as a „Mischung aus Wissenschaft und Idealisierung" (p. 298). He reminds us that an interest in Germanic mythology did not necessarily commit one to reactionary conservatism by telling us about Uhland, a champion of democracy who in his Der Mythus von Thor nach nordischen Quellen (1836) represented Thor as a friend of the common people. Here, as throughout, Matuschek's judgements are trenchant, well-founded, and mostly persuasive.

Particularly welcome is the comparison between German and Italian nationalism. Fichte and Foscolo (the latter in his novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis [1802]) both idealize national character, but for Fichte the unique profundity of the German character is a brute fact, whereas for Foscolo the Italian character is present in the will of Italians, but possibly illusory – hence another ‚Kippfigur'. There are some illuminating pages on Goethe and Manzoni, noting the oddity whereby Goethe, in his enthusiasm for Manzoni's works, ignores their patriotic and religious content.

A stumbling-block for some readers will be Matuschek's treatment of Weimar Classicism. He brusquely dismisses it as an invention by nineteenth-century Germanists who wanted an epoch of national achievement between the Enlightenment (which they belittled) and Romanticism (which they thought truly German). He argues that ‚Klassik' will not serve as a period term because there are no contemporary counterparts in other literatures, and he suggests instead „dass Goethe und Schiller epochal der Übergangszeit von der Aufklärung zur Romantik zugehören und dass ihr Werk gleichermaßen von beiden Tendenzen geprägt ist" (p. 107). There is some danger here of elevating the ‚Übergangszeit' into a period in its own right and thus reviving unhelpful period designations such as ‚pré-romantisme' (still current in France) or the ‚Age of Sensibility' advocated by Northrop Frye. It might be better to see the Enlightenment as penetrating far into Romanticism (and beyond, if one thinks of Heine). Recently, stronger claims have been made. Terence James Reed has argued that the work of Goethe and Schiller, along with that of Kant and Herder, belongs essentially to the Enlightenment. His case strikes me as broadly convincing, though one cannot ignore substantial Romantic elements in Goethe's work, especially after 1800. Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), written during Goethe's close acquaintance with the Romantic playwright Zacharias Werner, would surely qualify as a ‚Kippfigur', in which fate and occult natural forces play an undecidable role. Again speaking for myself, I would happily follow Matuschek in discarding ‚Weimarer Klassik' and other terms for mini-periods (such as ‚Sturm und Drang') and instead placing Enlightenment and Romanticism on a spectrum, like that of the rainbow, whose members are necessarily coloured by their neighbours.

And yet judgements like that made by René Wellek in 1949 – „Goethe perfectly fits into the European romantic movement which he, as much as any single writer, helped to create" – sound somehow wrong. Do they require us to think of Goethe as a kindred spirit of Novalis and Brentano? The problem perhaps lies less in the judgement itself than in the practice of literary periodization on which it is based. Obviously literary historians cannot do without period concepts. Such concepts may be broad or narrow. Broad concepts, such as ‚Baroque', ‚Enlightenment', ‚Romanticism', give literary history a basic structure but may not offer a helpful approach to particular works. Matuschek assigns French classicism to the Baroque era, along with Shakespeare (p. 107); but what is gained by placing such antithetical dramatists as Racine and Shakespeare under the same umbrella? Yet the alternative – the construction of mini-periods such as Weimar Classicism – risks turning literary history into a confusing mosaic.

The test of theory is practice. Taken pragmatically, Matuschek's construction of Romanticism is enormously rewarding, clarifies the subject, and produces innumerable insights. As he notes: „Epochen sind keine objektiven Eigenschaften der Geschichte, sondern Deutung und Lernhilfe derer, die Geschichte studieren" (p. 351). Period concepts are not objective, but neither are they arbitrary. Like genre concepts, they are never instantiated in a homogeneous way. Just as there is no pure tragedy or satire, there are no pure Romantic texts. Yet period and genre concepts remain indispensable.

The reader may wonder: if Romanticism succeeded the Enlightenment, what came after Romanticism? The entirely predictable answer must be Realism, and I wish that the author, instead of offering some rather random examples of the afterlife of Romanticism, had at least briefly indicated how Romanticism is inflected by Realism. As early as 1800, Wordsworth offers rural realism in Michael and The Old Cumberland Beggar. Hoffmann's late stories, notably Meister Floh (1822), end by renouncing the supernatural world in favour of one-dimensional domesticity. In Des Vetters Eckfenster (1822), the imagination is directed towards the real world of the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Scott's historical novels, which strangely go unmentioned here, satisfied the taste for the ancient, the exotic, and the remote, but also provided much domestic realism, for serious purposes as well as for comic relief. It goes without saying that Realism in turn is inflected by Romanticism, often, as in Keller's Der grüne Heinrich (1854–1855, 1879–1880), by revealing the dangers of the Romantic imagination.

Finally, an unusual feature of this book is that the many end-notes refer only to primary texts, never to works of scholarship. This is a bold and refreshing move which avoids confronting readers with an apparatus which many might find off-putting. Besides giving the book a less academic appearance (though with no loss of rigour in the text), the author has thus renounced the rhetorical support provided by scholarly references. Part of the purpose of references is to impress the reader by intimating how much the author knows and how many people agree with him. Without their support, the author must rely on his own powers of argument, his style, and his demonstrable ability as a reader of literature, to convince his audience. By all these criteria, Matuschek scores highly. His book is a major achievement and deserves a wide audience.