Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in GermanyBrandes, Georg
History
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany
Brandes, Georg
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Naturalism in literature; Romanticism
But it is not only the excesses peculiar to the Romanticists
which Arnim reprehends; he also sharply and wittily castigates
the anti-Romanticist, Jens Baggesen. In Heidelberg, where he must
have met Arnim, Baggesen had written a series of satirical sonnets
directed against the Romanticists, "literary sansculottes on the
German Parnassus," as he called them. These he published in the same
year that _Dolores_ appeared, under the title, _Der Karfunkel- oder
Klingklingel-Almanack, ein Taschenbuch für vollendete Romantiker und
angehende Mystiker auf das Jahr der Gnade_ 1810. It was, however,
undoubtedly less Baggesen's verses than his extraordinary instability
of character which provoked Arnim's satire. The life of this enemy
of Romanticism was more planless and capricious than the life of any
one of the Romanticists; and Arnim, for whom everything strange and
improbable had an attraction, could not fail to be interested in such
a singular personality. In _Dolores_ he caricatures him wittily and
mercilessly in the person of the poet "Waller." But though, in this
instance, the weaknesses of a special individual are caricatured,
Arnim's general purpose unmistakably is to throw into salient relief
characteristics which exemplify the lawlessness and levity of the
emotional life of a whole generation.
His unfinished historical novel, _Die Kronenwächter_ ("The Guardians
of the Crown"), published in 1817, presents us, like _Dolores_, with
several well-conceived and ably elaborated characters along with a mass
of undigested mystic and lyric material. In the background of this tale
looms a huge, mysterious, enchanted castle, the seven towers of which
are absolutely transparent; they appear to be built of glass, for each
of them projects a brilliant rainbow upon black rocks and upon distant
water. In this castle the guardians of the crown of the Hohenstaufens
have their lonely retreat, and hence they sally forth into the world,
to act and to avenge. But it is not this mystical background which is
of importance. What one really remembers are one or two characters
portrayed with such virile force as probably no German author has
exhibited since, unless it be Gottfried Keller, in his historical
novels.
We have, for example, the hero's foster-mother, Frau Hildegard,
to whom we are thus amusingly introduced at the beginning of the
book:--"Martin, the new tower watchman, has to-day married his
predecessor's widow, because she has grown too stout to come down the
narrow corkscrew stair. We really could not pull the tower down for her
sake, so she had to make up her mind to this marriage, though she would
have preferred our clerk, Berthold. The priest has had to tie the knot
up there." This story of the widow's corpulence is of course nonsense,
but none the less it makes a very original beginning to the book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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