Rowan Clarkson
The genesis of German Romanticism has long stood as one of the most enigmatic chapters in European intellectual history. Occurring at the turn of the nineteenth century, the explosion of literary, philosophical, and artistic activity known as Frühromantik transformed the Western imaginative horizon. For decades, standard historiography framed this period as a dramatic rupture, an abrupt secular rebellion against the mechanistic excesses of Enlightenment rationalism and the cold symmetries of French classicism. In this familiar account, the young intellectuals of Jena, Berlin, and Heidelberg-intoxicated by the French Revolution and the Idealist philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte-invented a new religion of art out of nothing. They elevated the sovereign self, praised infinite longing (Sehnsucht), and sought to re-enchant a world rapidly being flattened by industrialization and empirical science.Yet, beneath the surface of this sudden philosophical revolution lay a deep, subterranean aquifer that had been nourishing German cultural life for more than a century. The passionate interiority, the obsession with unmediated emotional experience, the intense scrutiny of the isolated self, and the conviction that ultimate reality must be felt rather than merely reasoned were not invented ex nihilo in the 1790s. They were the direct, albeit transformed, inheritance of Lutheran Pietism. Pietism was a radical movement of spiritual renewal that had swept through the German-speaking lands during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To understand the genesis of German Romanticism, one must trace the intricate historical and psychological conduits through which a radical Protestant theology of grace mutated into a secularized metaphysics of aesthetic genius.
