Memory in German Romanticism treats memory as a core element in the production and reception of German art and literature of the Romantic era. The contributors explore the artistic expression of memory under the categories of imagination, image, and reception. Romantic literary aesthetics raises the subjective imagination to a level of primary importance for the creation of art. It goes beyond challenging reason and objectivity, two leading intellectual faculties of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and instead elevates subjective invention to form and sustain memory and imagination. Indeed, memory and imagination, both cognitive functions, seek to assemble the elements of one’s own experience, either directed toward the past (memory) or toward the future (imagination), coherently into a narrative. And like memories, images hold the potential to elicit charged emotional responses; those responses live on through time, becoming part of the spatial and temporal reception of the artist and their work. While imagination generates and images trigger and capture memories, reception creates a temporal-spatial context for art, organizing it and rendering it "memorable," both for good and for bad. Thus, through the categories of imagination, image, and reception, this volume explores the phenomenon of German Romantic memory from different perspectives and in new contexts.

"Memory in German Romanticism treats memory as a core element in the production and reception of German art and literature of the Romantic era. The contributors explore the artistic expression of memory under the categories of imagination, image, and reception. Romantic literary aesthetics raises the subjective imagination to a level of primary importance for the creation of art. It goes beyond challenging reason and objectivity, two leading intellectual faculties of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and instead elevates subjective invention to form and sustain memory and imagination. Indeed, memory and imagination, both cerebral functions, seek to assemble the elements of one's own experience, either directed toward the past (memory) or toward the future (imagination), coherently into a narrative. And like memories, images hold the potential to elicit charged emotional responses; those responses live on through time, becoming part of the spatial and temporal reception of the artist and their work. While imagination creates and images trigger and capture memories, reception creates a temporal-spatial context for art, organizing it and rendering it "memorable," both for good and for bad. Thus, through the categories of imagination, images, and reception, this volume explores the phenomenon of German Romantic memory from different perspectives and in new contexts"--

Over 130 poems by 23 poets, including Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Tieck, Heine, Nietzsche, many others. New literal English translations on facing pages. Introduction.

The second collection of writings by the German poet, dramatist, and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806), Poetic Fragments was published in 1805 under the pseudonym "Tian." Günderrode's work is an unmined source of insight into German Romanticism and Idealism, as well as into the reception of Indian, Persian, and Islamic thought in Europe. Anna C. Ezekiel's introductions highlight the philosophical significance of the texts, demonstrating their radical and original consideration of the nature of the universe, death, religion, power, and gender roles. The dramas "Hildgund" and "Muhammad, the Prophet of Mecca" are two of Günderrode's most important works for her accounts of agency, recognition, and the status of women. The three poems included in the collection, "Piedro," "The Pilgrims," and "The Kiss in the Dream," represent the wide range of forms in which Günderrode wrote. They reflect themes of erotic longing and union with the divine, and point to her radical reimagining of death. This bilingual English-German edition is the first volume of Günderrode's work to appear in English, and will help unearth this rich, complex, and innovative writer for English readers.

The Romantic era in England and Germany saw a sudden renewal of prophetic modes of writing. Biblical prophecy and, to a lesser extent, classical oracle again became viable models for poetry and even for journalistic prose. Notably, this development arose out of the new-found freedom of biblical interpretation that began in the mid-eighteenth century, as the Bible was increasingly seen to be a literary and mythical text. Taking Walter Benjamin’s thinking about history as a point of departure, the author shows how the model for Romantic prophecy emerges less as a prediction of the future than as a call to change in the present, even as it quotes, at key turns, texts from the past. After surveying developments in eighteenth-century biblical hermeneutics, as well as the numerous instances of prophetic eruption in Romantic poetry, the book culminates in close readings of works by Blake, Hölderlin, and Coleridge. Each of these writers interpreted the Bible in strong, variously radical and conservative ways, and each reworked prophetic texts in often startling fashion. The author’s reading of Blake focuses on the complex temporal and rhetorical dynamics at work in a prophetic tradition, with attention paid to the key mediating figure of Milton. The chapter on Hölderlin investigates the truth-claim of poetry and the consequences of Hölderlin’s insight into the necessarily figural character of poetry. The analysis of Coleridge correlates his theory of allegory and symbol with his theory and practice of political writing, which often relies on mobilizing prophetic authority. Together, the readings force us to reexamine the claims and practices of Romantic poets and thinkers and their ideas and ideologies, not without engendering some allegorical resonance with issues in our own time.

After Nature, W. G. Sebald’s first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind’s place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, “an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance.” The first figure is the great German Re-naissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages. After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.

Traditional criticism on German post-war cinema tends to define rubble films as simplistic texts of low artistic quality which serve to reaffirm the spectator's image of him or herself as »a good German« during »bad times«. Yet this study asserts that some rubble films are actually informed by a type of visual and narrative Romantic discourse which aims at provoking a »critical discussion« on German national identity and its reconstruction in the aftermath of the Third Reich. Considering the lack of previous analyses with regard to the key aspects of Romantic visual style, narration and literary motifs in rubble films, this study points to a major gap in research.

In German Romanticism, the imagination is the site of the encounter between the subject and its environment; this book examines that encounter. Dealing with both literary and philosophical texts, it argues that the Romantic imagination performs a critique of rationalism. In reflecting on the fragmentary, the Romantics require the reader to both imagine and to question this as a hermeneutic process. As such, they understand writing to be an experiment in memory, both individual and cultural. This book is a study of the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Tieck and also of the utopian project of Romanticism itself. Methodologically, it is informed by what Foucault termed the archaeological approach to discourse as well as by psychoanalysis and literary theory. Examining points of contact as well of divergence between Kantian epistemology and Romantic nature philosophy, it also highlights the correspondences between literature, philosophy and science. Above all, it treats Romanticism as an experiment in the portrayal of ambivalent modern identity.

A novel exploring human relations. Its hero is a Hungarian writer who lives through the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and has a homosexual affair with a German poet in East Berlin.

For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people understand themselves? Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly shifted. Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Wolfgang von Geothe, Germany's greatest writer, discovered the distinctiveness of his country's art and history, now lies within the borders of France. For most of the five hundred years covered by this book Germany has been composed of many separate political units, each with a distinct history. And any comfortable national story Germans might have told themselves before 1914 was destroyed by the events of the following thirty years. German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses, and experiences; examining some of these is the purpose of this book. MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places that still resonate in the new Germany—porcelain from Dresden and rubble from its ruins, Bauhaus design and the German sausage, the crown of Charlemagne and the gates of Buchenwald—to show us something of its collective imagination. There has never been a book about Germany quite like it.