a. Brandes’ Organizing Principle and Methodology

Brandes does not arrange his material chronologically, but thematically into areas such as sociality, music, art, description of nature, politics, and central Romantic concepts such as psychology, soul and longing, all of which are categories in which the anthropological-social and poetological-aesthetic are combined. Yet a timeline is established, in that Brandes in the first two of the book’s three sections places the main emphasis on the Early Romantic phase around 1800 and then concludes with the Restoration after 1815. He sees a certain revolutionary potential in Friedrich Schlegel’s novel about free love, Lucinde (1799), but he fundamentally understands Romanticism from its point of conclusion, in that he projects the conservative tendencies of Late Romanticism back onto the early Universal Romanticism, which is also rooted in his biographical approach to the literature. The same early work of Schlegel is negatively evaluated because it is viewed in light of his later conversion to Catholicism and his ultra-conservatism during the Restoration, after the Congress of Vienna. Romanticism in toto thus comes to be portrayed as politically reactionary.

Brandes describes his particular method in the introduction as that of seeking the connection between biography and work. He designates “the anecdote” as his principle (Brandes 1873:4), understood as the illustrative microhistory, which is supplemented by Brandes’ topicalizing commentaries, which at certain points are expanded into programmatic declarations of a modern view of life. “Real life” is the object of investigation (Brandes 1873:5), his interests located in the psychology, palpitations of the soul and feelings (Brandes 1873:5-6) that form the basis of the literature. At the same time he stylizes his own role – in the spirit of Naturalism and Positivism – as that of the natural scientist and physician (Brandes 1873:6). This thus suggests a duality of the scientific and the vitalistic, understood as the non-material forces of life. This interest in the individual aspects results in certain fissures in Brandes’ negatively determined view of Romanticism: he is concerned with that which deviates from normality, with the transgression of boundaries, the mystical, the unexplainable and the ingenious. This ambivalence, between social political condemnation and psychological-aesthetic fascination is an important thread in The Romantic School in Germany.

b. Brandes’ Cultural-Political Employment of German Romanticism

The timely nature of the political and literary criticism is clearly evident in Brandes’ comparison of German and Danish Romanticism in the introductory chapter. Even though the feudal, absolutist, and divided Germany of 1800 precluded political influence, the German authors created no less than a wholly original Romantic literature. The second-hand Romanticism of the Danes, on the contrary, was to a high degree built upon impulses from outside. Brandes surely enough refers to a “Nordic vein” (Brandes 1873:8), but mainly views Danish Romanticism as a German import. The German literature is a genuine expression of life and of life experience, demonstrating a “poetic-philosophical total vision of life” (Brandes 1873:11). The German authors have sophistication, experience and spirit, and are furthermore extreme, consequential and sickly, while the Danes, who have not themselves produced ideas, are on the contrary moderate, even-keeled, harmonious, healthy, and vigorous. These are not only characteristics of the personality, but also formal artistic traits, and the works of the Danish Romantics are said to be more rounded and more elegant than those of the Germans.

Brandes here employs, in a gesture typical of his form of presentation, two metaphors that show that these fundamental difference cannot be valorized purely negatively or positively. On the one hand he deems German Romanticism to be a “hospital” full of “eccentric personalities,” while on the other he describes the Romantics as bold and daring mountaineers. The Danes are neither sick nor mad, yet consequentially lack the courage and desire for conquest: “we have left to others the scaling of Montblanc. We have avoided breaking our necks, but we have left standing the Alpine flowers, which only bloom atop the highest mountain peaks and at the edge of the precipice” (Brandes 1873:15). Thus he makes clear, in his image of the new extreme sport of the era, alpinism, that the literature in this book should be viewed as action, energy and the manifestation of life and not as a museum piece.

In relation to Danish institutionalized literary history writing in the 19th century, Brandes departs from the three-phase model of Romanticism after 1800, which was held to constitute a new period of flourishing and of golden ages. This model is introduced by N.M. Petersen’s Contribution to Danish Literary History (1854-1861], and is consolidated in the decades after Brandes (Conrad 1996:305, 311-19). Brandes does not to any worthwhile extent dwell on the idea that Nordic and popular Romanticism constitutes something especially valuable in Danish literature.

But even though Brandes is frequently critical of the Danish Romantics in the course of his presentation, he should not be understood to be anti-national. On the contrary, he would gladly strengthen the national literature, inaugurating a new period of greatness under the sign of realism together with a new political future for Denmark, yet in so doing he dispenses with the Romantic Golden Age as an ideal. In contemporary German literary historical writing, for example in the prominent figure of Rudolf Haym, Romanticism is reevaluated in attunement to Germany’s political unification, and is read integrally with the Weimar Classicism of Goethe and Schiller as a part of the national canon (Hohendahl 1985:184). In Brandes these German texts collide to a certain extent with his employment of Arnold Ruge’s Young Hegelian, anti-Romantic cultural critique from the 1840s.

These partially conflicting sources also manifest themselves in a contradictory image of Goethe and of German Neoclassicism in The Romantic School in Germany. The negative climax in the introduction is Brandes’ radical rhetoric of contamination: “Romanticism was poisoned by its sources” (Brandes 1873:21). The main sources of Danish Romanticism were those of Henrich Steffens and of his teacher F.W.J. Schelling, the philosophy of nature and of identity that Brandes identifies with opportunistic conservatism and a Christian life view. In later Danish literary history writing, the role of Steffens is otherwise regarded as positive, as the inspiration for Oehlenschläger and thereby for Danish Early Romanticism, the Universal Romanticism of 1800-7. For Brandes the freethinker, the orthodox Christianity (in both Lutheran and Catholic variants) and the orientation toward the past and the middle ages characteristic of Early Romanticism constitutes a point of attack in the following chapters of the book.

c. Brandes’ Conception of Modernity

Brandes’ conception of modernity is complex. In a continuation of Left Hegelianism, he maintains a social-philosophical understanding of the modern as reason, freedom, emancipation, and progress, but at the same times operates with an aesthetic-literary modernity that is less unequivocal. The German critic Karl Heinz Bohrer has analyzed this tension between a social and an aesthetic conception of modernity, identifying it is as distinct thread in the German critique of Romanticism during the 19th century. Bohrer’s thesis is that the dominate Hegelian reception of Romanticism has effectively blockaded the new culturally critical and aesthetically radical concept of the modern that was indeed actually formulated by the Romantics in the form of a new understanding of subjectivity and new literary categories such as the “fantastic” and the “evil” (Bohrer 1999).

This analysis can well be applied to Brandes’ critique, which on the surface condemns the Romantic experience of modernity and its literary expressions, yet at the same time captures it precisely. During the 1870s Brandes maintained an optimistic view of the liberal social-philosophical conception of modernity, yet soon found himself on the threshold of the artistic transitional phase toward the post-Naturalist currents in art and literature. It is typical to place in Danish literature a “breakthrough of the soul” around 1890, characterized by a new understanding of art and an interest in the subject and the psyche, which has affinities with the splintered and fragmented aesthetics of Romanticism. This literary and cultural-critical paradigm shift becomes evident in the reworking of The Romantic School in Germany, and in its impact and reception history.

Another tension in Brandes’ aesthetic conception of modernity is that on the one side he proposes an understanding of literature and art within a frame of a Realist-Naturalist conception of art and literature, while on the other he affirms an aesthetic ideal and conception of form that points back to Weimar Classicism and the time of Goethe. This is however not obvious in The Romantic School in Germany, in so far as Brandes expends much energy in criticizing the Idealism dominate around in 1800 in Classicism as well as in Romanticism. This critique of Idealism shall be explained here.

There are two constants in Hegel-influenced, 19th century literary history writing: the charge that the Romantics were overly subjective and the analysis of their lack of anchoring in reality (Bohrer 1999:142-; Ansel 2003:273-). These are both present in Brandes. Subjectivism, that is to say the philosophical doctrine that our knowledge of the world is conditioned by consciousness, is negatively associated with Romanticism by the Hegelians, and designated as arbitrariness, egomania, self-reflection, solipsism etc. J.G. Fichte’s radicalization of Kant’s theory of perception in his Wissenschaftslehre (1794-5) is viewed as the source of Romantic Subjectivism, and many Hegelian critics do not distinguish between Fichte’s doctrine of the I and Romantic poetry, especially with respect to Romantic irony (see below). In the same manner Brandes conceives of the Romantic period as “what is called Subjectivism and Idealism, the avoidance of historical external reality” (Brandes 1873:43), and like the Hegelians he identifies Fichte as the spokesperson of this tendency:

By the absolute I it was understood, by Fichte himself in a foundational yet varied manner, not the idea of divinity but the human, the thinking being, and the new desire for freedom, the self-willfulness and the self-satisfaction of the I, which with the arbitrariness of the absolute monarch allowed the external world to vanish in relation to the self. This intoxication with freedom comes to a head in a peculiarly arbitrary, ironic and fantastical band of young geniuses. (Brandes 1873:43-4)

In looking closely at Brandes’ utterance, in the first part there is a suggestion of the acknowledgment of the revolt against the metaphysical as a constricting program of interpretation, but in the second part he turns 180 degrees toward a negative analogy between the perceiving subject and political absolutism. In the first edition Brandes identifies two early Romantic Künstlerromane, Ludvig Tieck’s Die Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell (1795-6) and Jean Paul’s Titan (1800-3), as exemplary of Romantic Subjectivism and Idealism.

Properly understood, these novels are not well disposed to serve as ammunition in the war between action and reaction, because both are more differentiated than appreciated and address directly the post-Kantian philosophy and Fichte’s Subjective Idealism. Brandes acknowledges Jean Paul, but does not entirely comprehend that precisely through his figure of Roquairol in Titan he demonstrates both the psychological possibilities and the risks of the autonomy of consciousness, including in varying degrees those of melancholy, self-destruction, the fragmenting of the self, and madness (Schulz 1983:356-7). On the contrary, Brandes sees the novel as a celebration of the Romantic illness of reflection and its lack of capacity to master reality (Brandes 1873:56-7). It is furthermore an historical distortion on the part of Brandes to designate the two works as “pioneers” of Romanticism; Titan was published only after Schlegel’s Lucinde, which for Brandes marks the beginning. In the second edition Brandes demonstrates greater attention to chronology by moving this analysis to later in the book, to a dedicated chapter on Jean Paul, yet the negative evaluation of him remains unchanged.

Not only Fichte’s philosophy and literary Subjective Idealism, but also the Objective Idealism and the imitative Classicism of Goethe and Schiller are included in Brandes’ characterization of the “negative” pioneers of Romanticism. The two German poets flee from a society that has removed the possibility of citizen participation (Brandes 1873:29), and their retreat from reality leads to a polarization of literary life, between an elite poetry of cultivation and a literature of popular entertainment. Here Brandes reasons democratically and sociologically, from the idea that literature constitutes an important element of the new public around 1800.

There is in Brandes a kind of double argumentation that is also typical of contemporary German criticism (Hohendahl 1995:129-31). On the one hand he subscribes to an understanding of literature as autonomous and set apart from societal interests and politics, although it can also however be a countervailing force against these factors, a role which had been adopted in seriousness by Romanticism. And on the other hand he holds that literature should possess a distinct function as a call to action and as a political document. This tension reveals itself in Brandes’ treatment of Goethe, who is described strikingly critically in the introduction (Rømhild 1996:46-7). Here Goethe, in his ideality and his formal interests, is accused of creating an abstract and de-individualized, ahistorical art. Brandes thus takes up the thread from the final part of Emigrant Literature, where he describes German Romanticism as a natural counter reaction to the strictness and universality of Classicism. Brandes acknowledges Goethe’s passionate youthful poetry, especially the novel of Werther (1774), and otherwise praises only his idyllic epic of the revolutionary years, Hermann und Dorothea (1797).

In the second edition, however, the image of Goethe is far more positive, for he is described along with Herder and Lessing as part of a new cultural departure, in which the Sturm und Drang, Classical and Romantic periods are viewed in a dynamic interplay. But already in the unfolding of the first edition, Brandes’ image of Goethe had slowly changed, as across its pages he eventually reconciles with the German “poet prince.” He employs Goethe’s conceptions of form and of Bildung as an antidote to the Romantics, especially how they reveal themselves in the novel of Wilhelm Meister. The main character Wilhelm manages to form his ideal in tune with experiences of the world (Brandes 1873:252-3). Goethe’s conception of Bildung becomes the positive counterpart to that which Tieck, Wackenroder and especially Novalis exhibit in their Künstler- and Bildungsromane (Brandes 1873:253-). According to Brandes, literature should on the one side be in contact with modern life and be realistic, while on the other it should poeticize this reality and impact in an edifying manner, that is to say form positive images of existence. Romantic art, in its interest in the past and the middle ages, its fractured expression “without fixed forms” (Brandes 1873:19), its Romantic irony, its hybrid genres, and its antiheroes, does not achieve this. Strictly speaking Wilhelm Meister is also an antihero, and Brandes must take up its continuation, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, in which Wilhelm becomes a doctor, in order to legitimate Goethe on this point.

d. Brandes’ Concept of Form: Romantic Music and Painting

In his critical praxis Brandes works fundamentally with a view of art that reaches back to a classical and idealistic aesthetics of wholeness. Goethe’s harmonious conception of the work, which is tied to an image of the cultivated and autonomous individual (Sørensen 2017:79-80), is the implicit norm against which Romantic art is measured. It is therefore both the form and the content of Romanticism that is critiqued, and Brandes’ conception of aesthetics and form becomes especially evident in the two chapters on music and painting, chapters VII and VII (Brandes 1873:126-84), in which he demarcates Romantic literature in relation to the non-linguistic art forms.

Brandes’ ideal is the plastic description, and he himself employs a pictorial language that is sensual, concrete and comprehensible. By describing Romantic literature in relation to music and painting, Brande is able to isolate the various forms of representation. In its imitation of instrumental music Romantic literature loses its material reality and becomes “artistic moods” rather than “works of art” (Brandes 1873:136).

Romantics like Schlegel and Novalis valorize the musical principal in their works, that is euphony and beauty, at the expense of meaning. Brandes reveals himself here to be an aesthete of content, yet ultimately demonstrates an understanding of form and of Tieck, who ventures “wholly outward into his madness” (Brandes 1873:144). Illustratively, Brandes thus imitates a Romantic text built upon the movements of a symphony with purely nonsense words devoid of acoustical meaning. He bemoans how Romantic literature lacks ‘tendency,’ that is an orientation toward life and action” (Brandes 1873:149), yet at the same time reveals a sharp sense for the poetics of sound and for language as ornament, as arabesque. In the chapter on the Romantics relation to art and to landscape, by citing Goethe’s writing on Winckelmann, Brandes criticizes the so-called Nazarene painters, who in opposition to the Classicist norms of the academy around 1800 cultivated an inward and pious Romantic-religious art. They took inspiration from medieval Italian and German painters, from contemporary Romantic theories of art, and especially from Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen.

But Brandes primarily employs the Nazarene phenomenon as a launching point for a critique of the later Catholicism of the Romantics and of the older Friedrich Schlegel’s interest in “lox, crayfish and wine” (Brandes 1873:167), as well as the Restoration politician Friedrich von Gentz’s passion for “furniture, perfume and the refinement of the so-called luxurious” (Brandes 1873:167). This section particularly demonstrates Brandes’ particular technique of representation. By going back and forth between Goethe’s Winckelmann book of 1805 and Friedrich Schlegel’s biography after the Congress of Vienna, Brandes manipulates the historical chronology and changes the causal context such that the decadent, the elitist and the reactionary is already witnessed in the point of departure of the young Romantics.

Brandes asserts that the Romantic understanding of nature displaces the emotional in favor of the fantastic. The Romantics favor the solitude of the forest and the moonbeam nighttime, the superstitious, intuitive and mystical, but wholly lack mimetic description. Brandes thus criticizes the Romantic image of Italy for not representing the “real Italy with its powerful colors and lively movement” (Brandes 1873:154), but on the contrary “Italy as ruins” and “Catholicism as a mummy” (Brandes 1873:154). Brandes here tests out the connection between actual geography and the literary space of engagement and between the authors’ place of residence and their literary production, thereby entering into the domain of literary geography. This is doubtless inspired by Taine’s theory of climate, race and milieu, yet ultimately Brandes can be viewed as a pioneer, in that literary geography as an independent genre of criticism is normally placed after 1900 (Piatti 2008:68-70), which is then taken up again later in the 20th century’s “spatial turn” in literary studies. Brandes’ approach is not systematic, but his prioritization of place and space over time is an important supplement to his historical-philosophical optics.

Ludvig Tieck is especially in Brandes’ spotlight. Tieck’s childhood in sandy Brandenburg and the “cold and clear days of Berlin along with his modern north German rationalism” (Brandes 1873:170-1) is viewed as the reason that Tieck longs for nature yet does not manage to recreate an authentic nature in his works, instead portraying artificial landscapes that resemble stage scenery. Brandes puts his own nature program to the test in a travel account from Saxon Switzerland (southeast of Dresden in Saxony), filling many pages with realistic observations of nature. He contrasts his own report with an unnamed Romantic fellow traveler (which could have been H.C. Andersen but in the second edition is identified as M.A. Goldschmidt; see also Brandes 1907:106), which poetically transforms the landscape as it passed into night to a transcendent, ghost ridden, gothic space. Brandes thus blends the fictive and the essayistic into his literary criticism. This spatial-concrete strategy of description, which demonstrates the opposite of the Romantic principle of form, is also employed by Brandes in his analysis of the Romantic mentality.

e. The German Romantic Mentality: Soul [Gemyt], Longing and Reflection

Brandes lays out the Romantic mentality in chapters IX, X and XI (Brandes 1873:184-282), summarizing it as three dispositions: reflection, soul and longing. In each chapter he employs a chief literary example that, in combination with biography and cultural history, describes the peculiarly Romantic anthropology that leads toward the modern, Brandesian ideals of personality and art. There are certain recurrent traits in this part of the book: Brandes addresses the reader almost in the manner of the tour guide, and he concludes each chapter with his own manifesto for the modern human personality. He especially cites Arnold Ruge (Brandes 1873:216,219), one of the severest critics of Romanticism, and employs throughout a vigorous pictorial language that critically mirrors the stylistic traits of the Romantics.

Fruitfully, in the chapter on soul, Brandes zeroes in on the Romantic locus: the mountain and the mine (which in various forms connote mysticism, eroticism and transformation in for example E.T.A. Hoffmann, Joseph Eichendorff and later in Richard Wagner’s Venus Mountain), turning the pragmatic into a concrete locality of the German “soul.” Instead of imparting a spiritual dimension to the typical materials of the Romantic strategy of symbolization, he moves in the opposite direction, interpreting something abstract and psychological wholly materially and physically. The plane of the image becomes the plane of reality when Brandes challenges the reader to go down into the mountain hollow that is the Romantic mind. This is thereby made into an experiential discovery:

Have you ever gone down into a mine? Have you ever been led by a man with a lamp down into a subterranean shaft, and by the uncertain light of that lamp gazed around at the expanse? . . . The shaft I challenge you go down into with me is the German soul, a hollow as deep, as obscure, as extraordinary as any other. (Brandes 1873:213-14)

“Soul” is a specifically German phenomenon that is fundamentally untranslatable, Brandes asserts. He places it between conviction and feeling: he traces a line from Goethe’s warmth of soul toward the extreme, overheated emotionalism of the Romantics, who bottle themselves up in their faith in the right of the “world of inwardness” (Brandes 1873:216,234). Yet whereas the French revolutionaries as well as Brandes understand the right of the world of inwardness as reason that shall be realized, the ideal for the world shy Romantics is equivalent to soul and thus becomes an internal phenomenon. This analogy, between French political revolution and the spiritual German Romantic revolution, is in Brandes thereby purely psychologized, which diminishes German philosophical Idealism.

Not only a German-French antithesis, but also German-English antithesis is employed in a similar manner, by contrasting Novalis’ “inward looking life of soul” with Shelley’s “outward looking desire for freedom” (Brandes 1873:244). Novalis and two of his works are at the center of Brandes’ analysis of soul: first the cycle of poems Hymnen an die Nacht (1800), the six songs of which celebrate the night as a complementary, liberating and redeeming space in a synthesis of Christianity, classical mythology and the poet’s own mystical vision, and second the address Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799). The latter is an oft-discussed vision of Europe’s future after the French Revolution, because it valorizes the middle ages as a time of European unity that shall be recreated as a new golden age. This Romantic philosophy of history, with its three segments of past, present and future, should however be understand to be a fiction and a hypothesis. Both the poems and the speech entail a Romantic project of creating a “new mythology” that could provide a renewed sense of cohesion in a secularized and enlightened age.

Brandes however understands this Early Romantic discourse as anachronistic and alien to reality. He does not at all accept the manner in which the works attempt to overstep genre by blending poem, prayer, sermon, vision, prophecy, and meditation. He reads them referentially and according to content, dismissing the valorization of the night and regarding the sensuality as lascivious illness (Brandes 1873:218) and the mysticism as orthodoxy (Brandes 1873:224), yet nevertheless cites long passages of the hymns in both Danish and German. Likewise, he reproduces long excerpts from Die Christenheit oder Europa, from both the understanding of the past – not least Novalis’ negative view of the Reformation and Protestantism – and the vision of the future. The expansive citations flow into Brandes emphatic demand for “Air! Light!” (Brandes 1873:233) and for emancipation from the German claustrophobia of the mountain hollow of soul toward the political and social realities of the external world.

Brandes introduces the chapter on Romantic reflection and psychology with the same performative zeal, inviting the reader into a mirror cabinet to experience the dizzying effect of seeing oneself infinitely reduplicated. The effect is likened to the manner in which Romantic irony punctures the illusion. Brandes identifies Holberg’s comedy Ulysses on Ithaca (1723) as a forerunner to Tieck’s drama Der gestiefelte Kater (1797), which is speckled with Romantic irony in the form of the characters’ meta-commentaries on the action and in the enframed segments within segments, in which the characters in the one segment act as observers in the next. Brandes illustrates this textual complexity by comparing it to a series of Danish theatrical works from Holberg through Oehlenschläger to Heiberg, before concluding with Shakespeare: “will you imagine such confusion? Think of Jeppe of the Hill written in such a manner, such that “Jeppe” sits and watches Hakon Jarl, while April Fools is performed for Hakon and Thora, while Hamlet is played for Hans and Trine” (Brandes 1873:189). Brandes psychological method of argumentation is on display here. The idea that an individual can transcend his own temporality and thus experience several centuries, as in Novalis’ Bildungsroman Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is rejected by Brandes:

Romanticism thus diffuses the I, spreading it over space, just as it stretches the I over time. It respects neither space nor time. The being of self-consciousness is self- duplication. But this self is sick, in that it does not manage to master this duplication. (Brandes 1873:198)

Brandes briefly identifies doppelgangerism and self-duplication in Jean Paul, Heinrich Kleist and Achim von Arnim, but he dwells on it most in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Late Romantic, fantastical horror novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16), which describes the monk Brother Medardus’ struggle against his doppelgangers. Here he draws on Danish literature, showing how the theme of the fracturing of the personality is an inspiration for B.S. Ingemann. The crowning example of Romantic ironic psychology is however identified as Kierkegaard, in his double communication and his pseudonymous authorship (see below).

Finally there is the third category, Romantic “longing,” which Brandes defines as “lack and desire in unison without the will or the decisiveness to acquire that which is lacking and without the choice of means to bring it under one’s control” (Brandes 1873:247). This is illustrated by employing the central symbol of Romanticism, the blue flower that appears in Novalis’ novel. The blue flower does not manifest itself concretely, but is glimpsed, sensed, intuited. Brandes thus critically attacks a characteristic of Romantic Idealism, namely its accentuation of becoming and process over result. Whereas Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, as noted, shifts his ideal as a result of his encounters with reality, Romantic heroes such as Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Franz Sternbald and William Lovell do the opposite, in that reality dissolves and “the world in the end becomes soul” (Brandes 1873:257). Brandes further discusses Joseph Eichendorff’s novel Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826), which is compared to the heroes in H.C. Andersen’s The Improvisatore (1835) and O.T. (1836). In this chapter the telescope is turned against the Danish Romantics’ variant of this world denying poetry of longing in especially Andersen and Ingemann, but also M.A. Goldschmidt, Poul Møller, Christian Winther, and J.C. Hostrup.

Soul, longing and reflective fragmentation constitute the contrasting pole to Brandes’ own ideal of personality and art in the name of social and philosophical modernity. Yet he neither dismisses the psychological complexity nor defends a trivial and flat understanding of existence, but acknowledges the extreme state of dreaming, hallucination and madness (Brandes 1873:206-7) as well as loss, sorrow and pain (Brandes 1873:207). With reference to Taine he conceives of the personality as an association of ideas that creates cohesion between the experiences of the I and finally is held together by the identity, whose minimal definition is “the name” (Brandes 1873:207). The healthy personality must constantly assert itself against attacks from external conditions, just as with illness, and he summarizes his program in the well-known dictum of the trinity of freedom, will, and decision: “if man is multi-faceted and of necessity divided by nature, then he is made fully human through freedom, will, and decision” (Brandes 1873:213). In a similar manner, Brandes rejects the Romantic faith in pleasure and happiness through his Mill-inspired, utilitarian moral philosophy. Lack is an unavoidable fact of life (Brandes 1873:281), but pain and suffering can be alleviated. Brandes concludes this section with a challenge to emancipate the pent up and suppressed part of humanity from “ignorance, dependency, foolishness, and the chains of slavery” (Brandes 1873:282). The task of the new man and the modern poet is not to long or to dream, but to act:

The child of the new age will not gaze up into the heavens in search of his stars, nor off into the horizon in search of the blue flower. Longing is idleness, but he wants to act. He wants to understand what Goethe meant when he had Wilhelm Meister end up as a doctor. There is nothing else: we must all become doctors, the poets too. (Brandes 1873:282)

This intellectual historical sketch, in its antithetical style and its translation of aesthetic-literary categories into psychological-mental, is of a pace with a broader cultural reception of Romanticism that would produce offshoots in the 20th century. The analysis of the Romantic as an especially German intellectual tradition bounded against those of France and England is later taken up by Thomas Mann (see Reception and Afterlife).

f. Brandes’ Conception of the Individual: Between Goethe and Kierkegaard

Brandes unfolds his conception of the individual in dialogue with Goethe and Kierkegaard (Rømhild 1996:48). Brandes engages with Kierkegaard regularly in the first three volumes of Main Currents, but in The Romantic School in Germany this engagement with and discussion of him is intensified. Only a few years later, in 1877, Brandes would produce the first Kierkegaard biography, which marked the beginning of scholarly investigation of the Christian existentialist philosopher as both literary figure and theologian. As Finn Hauberg Mortensen argues, the biography can be seen as an examination of how Kierkegaard fit into Brandes’ Modern Breakthrough (Mortensen 1993:47). Furthermore, Kierkegaard appears in The Romantic School in Germany as both opponent and ally. He is cited liberally in the first three chapters on Romantic pioneers, in the material on Schlegel’s Lucinde, and in the chapter on Romantic reflection and psychology. Brandes discusses in part Kierkegaard’s treatise On The Concept of Irony (1841) and his Either-Or (1843), especially “The Seducer’s Diary,” which he had read in 1860 during a religious crisis that concluded with his embrace of atheism (Fenger 1980:50-3).

Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony is an investigation of irony in three parts: first as concept and praxis in Socrates, next in German Romanticism and finally in Kierkegaard’s own doctrine of “controlled irony.” On the surface Kierkegaard adopts Hegel’s critique of the Romantics, similarly asserting that Fichte’s subjective philosophy sidelines the objective sphere, e.g. tradition, society and external, historical reality. Fichte’s doctrine in both Hegel and Kierkegaard is placed alongside Schlegel’s irony and is viewed as a destructive power (Stewart 2015), which Kierkegaard designates as “infinite, absolute negativity” (Kierkegaard 1997:309).

Schlegel’s irony was a target of critique throughout 19th century, and thus it is necessary to briefly sketch his conception of it, which is more than a rhetorical figure or literary concept. It encapsulates his philosophy in the form of an “ironic idealism” (Oesterreich 1994:355-6) that is diametrically opposed to that of Hegel. Schlegel’s irony, which is developed on the basis of both Socrates and Fichte, emphasizes that thinking is a never completed process that occurs in the interplay between extremes. It is variously defined as, for example, an enthusiastic “Selbstschöpfung” [self-creation] or as a skeptical “Selbstvernichtung” [self-destruction] (Schlegel 2000:97), the terms revealing that irony is possessed of both artistic and existential implications and is closely bound up with Schlegel’s conception of Bildung (Zovko 2017:310). Whereas Hegel’s idealistic philosophy is teleological and operates with a final aim in sight, no endpoint can be fixed in Schlegel’s thinking. Kierkegaard reads Schlegel’s irony as leading to nihilism, positing in opposition “irony as the controlled moment” (Kierkegaard 1997:352-). This suggests a break with the Hegelian system (Oesterreich 1994:362), and thus in the course of Kierkegaard’s analysis of Schlegel he passes from critique toward positive reception, in that his reading of Lucinde, in the words of Ernst Behler, becomes a singular “literary delirium” that anticipates the modern subjectivity of the aesthete in his later authorship, thereby nearly annulling the moral and ethical condemnation of Schlegel (Behler 2011:27: Bohrer 1999:69-72). Kierkegaard summarizes Schlegel’s doctrine as “living poetically” (Kierkegaard 1997:316) and “poeticizing the self” (Kierkegaard 1997:318), yet on ethical grounds rejects the idea that an aesthetic mode of possibility can support a mode of reality.

Brandes is fundamentally in agreement with Kierkegaard on his critique of irony, which he attacks throughout the book. Yet Brandes does not distinguish between Kierkegaard’s early treatise on irony and “The Seducer’s Diary” in Either-Or (1843). It is difficult to extract a positive or unequivocal result from this text on Bildung and eroticism, which in its complex form and narrative structure consists of a publisher and several narrators, yet Brandes places an equivalence between the whole text and Johannes the Seducer and between it and Schlegel’s Lucinde. Both works are for Brandes examples of the Subjectivism of Romantic irony:

At the deepest level of Lucinde lays the Subjectivism, the self-willfulness that as arbitrariness can become all that is possible, revolution, audacity, dogmatism, reaction, because from the very first it is not bound to any power, since the I does not work in the service of the only idea that provides a striving with foundation and worthiness: that of progress and freedom. (Brandes 1873:74).

Brandes cannot come to terms with the dangerous and indeterminate space of communication that irony opens. For Brandes Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, which expresses itself in paradoxes and asserts a “freedom from prejudices,” opens itself at the same time itself to these same things (Brandes 1873:75-6). Johannes the Seducer thus constitutes the completion of Romantic irony and its conclusion in Danish literature (Brandes 1873:49), and its only reconciliatory component is that it is held in check by the ethical in the novel’s “schema” (Brandes 1873:49). Brandes’ employment of Kierkegaard is dubious, in that through lengthy citations he in part affirms Kierkegaard’s cultural critical characterization of the bourgeoisie, conventions and quotidian morality of the Romantic era (Brandes 1873:68-9,81), and in part rejects Kierkegaard’s Christian understanding of Schlegel’s Lucinde (Brandes 1873:73). This same duality characterizes his Kierkegaard biography, in which he identifies with Kierkegaard’s polemic against society, passionate combativeness and his feud with the national church of his final years, yet criticizes him for remaining within the strictures of religious thought, with which Brandes had previously broken (Mortensen 1993:51).

Another liberation Brandes acknowledges in Kierkegaard is the emancipation of language from tradition and systems of genre, the establishment of a new literary-philosophical discourse (Lundtofte 2003:210). Kierkegaard’s fluid pictorial style constitutes a wholly foundational inspiration for Brandes, which he himself adopts in the biography, which can be viewed as the adoption of the Romantic anti-mimetic aesthetic he otherwise opposes (Mortensen 1993:50; Lundtofte 2003:210).

In The Romantic School in Germany Brandes asserts an understanding of individuality grounded in both his social-philosophical conception of modernity and in Goethe’s concept of Bildung. He demands a concentrated personality of “unity, will and freedom,” but also accepts an openness in the form of idealistic striving and a processual synthesis between the individual and surroundings as in Wilhelm Meister. Kierkegaard’s radical subjectivity and his concept of “that single individual” presents a third model, which in its modern expression is of a pace with Romanticism and points forward to later aesthetic modernism as it was introduced in Symbolism. This modern conception of the individual, marked by loss of identity, fragmentation and conflict oversteps Brandes horizon of understanding in The Romantic School in Germany; Annemette Lundtofte illuminates the paradox that Brandes chooses Kierkegaard, who challenges the idea of a cohesive identity, as the object of his first biography (Lundtofte 2003:190-). Brandes scholars normally date the change in his understanding of the individual to his “aristocratic radical” phase characteristic of his later authorship, which was closely connected to his discovery of Nietzsche at the end of the 1880s (Mortensen 1993:52), yet it is already foregrounded here in his struggle against Romanticism.

Brandes rejects the Kierkegaardian and Romantic conceptions of the individual subject, but is sympathetic to the social project that it is found in Schlegel’s only novel and especially in the women of Romanticism.

g. Schlegel’s Lucinde, Love, Women and Gender

In the chapter “Romanticism’s Social Experiment” Brandes addresses the themes of marriage, eroticism, women, and gender. Equality was an important point in Brandes’ emancipatory program, and The Romantic School in Germany appears between his translation of Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women in 1869 and the “Nordic War over Sexual Morality” that played out in the 1880s. At the center of the chapter is both the Romantic conception of love as found in Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde. Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten (1799) and the Romantic praxis of life with special focus on the biographies of the women authors.

Freidrich Schlegel’s novel awakened great offense, specifically its suggestion that marriage should be grounded in passion. The idea that both man and woman should be active parts in a spiritual and physical love relationship was met with immense moral condemnation by his contemporaries. In addition to its status as a scandalous novel was the fact that it was read biographically, as a portrait of Friedrich Schlegel’s out of wedlock relationship with Dorothea Veit and against the background of her divorce from her husband, and yet it was not just the content, but also its experimental form that earned it condemnation. Nineteenth century criticism of Lucinde is marked by its skepticism, apart from the favorable contemporary reception of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who write a continuation of the story in his 1800 Vertraute Briefe über die Lucinde (which was reissued with an enthusiastic afterword by the Young Germany poet Karl Gutzkow in 1835). In the early 20th century the novel was positively reevaluated, and in the 1960s, in connection with the historical and critical edition of Friedrich Schegel’s works (v. Behler and Eichner), a rising tide of interest in Lucinde was evidenced in German literary studies (Polheim 1999:213-15).

Brandes is located between the Young Germany movement’s celebration of Lucinde as an erotic manifesto and the critical reservations of contemporary German literary historians. Yet he reads Schlegel in his own manner, in a dialogue with both Schleiermacher’s early appraisal and Kierkegaard’s later views in On the Concept of Irony. There are thus three layers of reception and three horizons of understanding that Brandes attempts to weave together. Brandes is sympathetic to Schlegel’s project, but critical of its execution. He affirms the revolt against the bourgeois conception of rational and compulsory marriage, yet criticizes the novel’s presentation and language. It is “pale and doctrinaire” (Brandes 1873:72), artistically impotent, filled with “false starts” and “feeble self-worship” (Brandes 1873:74). Brandes physical and corporeal pictorial language and his suggestion of impotence negatively reflects the erotic theme, yet he does not deliver a substantial analysis of form. The novel is a heterogeneous collection of textual parts in various genres such as letters, diary entries, dialogue, and aphorisms. Today this is viewed as Schlegel’s ambitious attempt to realize his philosophical program for a Universal Romantic poetry of modernity in a new Romantic novel, which also contains its own theory and reflects on its own construction.

Brandes does not however address Schlegel’s fragments, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, Athenäeum (1797) and Lyceum (1798), just as he does not, because of his Hegel-influenced philosophy of history, have a sense for how Schlegel emphasizes the processual as both means and end. Although Schlegel shares the faith in the ideality of art with Weimar Classicism, his concept of form is in contrast open and disharmonious. Since art should point forward to a still not yet realized ideal, which could be called his utopian dimension (Dehrmann 2017:172), its form becomes complex and fragmentary. Kierkegaard had a greater understanding of this than Hegel and Brandes, yet as is apparent Brandes was blind to this connection. He does not continue the discussion taken up by both Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, that of the relation between the aesthetic and the ethical, e.g. whether Lucinde’s hypothetical model of reality can be employed to life (Dierkes 1983:432). Brandes rejects the philosophy of life of the protagonists Julius and Lucinde and thereby “the Romantic doctrine of identity as life and poetry” (Brandes 1873:73), but he addresses only quite selectively the middle section of the novel “Lehrjahre der Männlichkeit.” This section resembles an epically narrated novel and describes Julius’ process of Bildung from being a libertine to finding true love in Lucinde and becoming a father. Brandes does little to document his analysis, only citing single sentences of Julius and Lucinde, which are employed as a launching point of a critique of the regressive Romantic historical vision and the Romantic philosophy of life summarized as “barrenness, arbitrariness, pleasure! . . . and purposelessness (Brandes 1873:79). Yet he also defends Schlegel by way of Kierkegaard, who is drawn in as a critic of the social conditions that have rendered love “as tame, as well-trained, as shambling, as lethargic, and as utilitarian as any domestic animal, in short, as unerotic as possible” (Brandes 1873:80).

Brandes is in agreement in opposing an old-fashioned conception of womanhood, gender and love, yet he is not content with Lucinde’s failure to work out “any social result” (Brandes 1873:83). Whereas Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard both as theologians and philosophers (and Schleiermacher as clergyman) were anchored in a fundamentally ethical and religious, specifically Lutheran, vision of existence, and in their readings of Schlegel proceed to a defense, albeit with quite distinct implications, of the bourgeois institution of marriage (Dierkes 1983:434, 442-3), Brandes maintains his social critique, positing George Sand and Shelley as opposing figures to Schleiermacher. Thus he expands the spectrum of the Romantic discourse on love to France and England. In contrast to Schleiermacher’s idealization of love as a “Bildung force,” George Sand, according to Brandes, sees it as force of nature and as a strong yet mercurial passion that does not correspond to the fantasy of “the one true love.” She would therefore dissolve marriage as an institution (Brandes 1873:119-20). Brandes finds the same program in his hero of freedom Shelley, who would emancipate erotic love from compulsion and ways of life from religion and empty morality (Brandes 1873:121-4).

This section of The Romantic School in Germany, the treatment of Lucinde and the comparative analysis of love, anticipates the Nordic war over the sexual double standard and equality. In opposition to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s call for chastity and restraint, which applied both to women as well as men and both before and during marriage, Brandes’ camp advocated for “free love.” Even though the feud also involved the new political women’s movement, the Nordic war over sexual morality should be viewed, as Annegret Heitmann has critically discerned, as primarily a men’s debate that reflects the insecurity born of maintaining privileges in a time of change (Heitmann 2006:204). A disruption of the male dominance of literature can be witnessed by the numbers: in the years between 1870 and 1890, 70 Danish and 148 Swedish women made their debuts as authors (Heitmann 2006:203).

In this section Brandes is especially interested in the woman as cultural personalities, portraying Dorothea Mendelssohn-Veit-Schlegel (married to Friedrich Schlegel) and Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling (married to A.W. Schlegel and later to F.W.J. Schelling). The series of last names shows the women’s maiden and then married names, and it had long been a convention in German literary history to refer to female authors by their first names. Both women were active as translators and reviewers and as editors and secretaries of their author husbands, as it was difficult at the time to publish as a woman. The publication of their collected letters later in the 19th century led to the beginning of a new literary historical interest in female authorships. Brandes cites liberally from these letters and can be viewed as a pioneer in the discovery of these women, even though he adopts certain characterizations of their personalities from Rudolf Haym (Haym 1870/1961: 663-). Dorothea Schlegel is one of the few who writes and publishes a novel, Florentin (1801), although Friedrich Schlegel is listed as publisher. Brandes is not fond of the novel, yet asserts that it demonstrates greater poetic talent than Friedrich Schlegel (Brandes 1873:94). He empathizes with her plight and presents her as an example of how the women were “manlier and possessed more undivided power” (Brandes 1873:95) than the men and how they were also engaged with social conditions: “they feel more deeply the oppressiveness of the conditions, they are less weakened by bookish over refinement, and they have more practical sense and vision then the men around them” (Brandes 1873:95-6). The women’s critique of Fichte especially demonstrates much clear visions than that of the men, he argues (Brandes 1873:96-7,104). Brandes illuminates Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s role as inspiration for the whole of the Romantic circle with citations from A.W. Schlegel and Schelling and references from her anonymous review of the former’s drama Ion. He dwells especially on her dramatic biography, particularly her sojourn with the Jacobin Georg Foster in Republican Mainz during 1792-3, which upon recapture by German troops resulted in her imprisonment. He is fascinated by the freethinking that marked the Romantic milieu, with its ever-shifting romantic couplings and mutual acceptance of new marriage alliances, and yet despite this “complete spiritual freedom from social bonds” (Brandes 1873:109), he pronounces a harsh judgment on the men, whose women were superior to them and whom they had destroyed: they “have dragged them down, have denied them their full attention and their most tender sympathies, providing only bits and scraps instead” (Brandes 1873:111-12).

Brandes’ feminism can be characterized by contrasting it with that of Friedrich Schlegel. Lucinde – despite its utopia of free and equal love – tends toward essentializing the feminine as the natural, spontaneous, emotional in contrast to masculine rationality, reflection and understanding. Brandes does not dispense with this gender binary, but transfers the masculine positive qualities over to the women. Through long citations he provides for women a voice, making them active discussion partners in his literary history. In this sense Brandes is ahead of Germany literary history writing, which only in the final two decades of the 19th century, commensurate with Germany’s first women’s movement, began to address the women of Romanticism (Becker-Cantarino 2000:262). Yet the liberal Vormärz writers had treated Rahel Varnhagen and Bettina von Arnim as iconic poetesses of freedom (Becker-Cantarino 2000:262-3), and while Brandes discusses the former with enthusiasm (Brandes 1873:90), he does not mention the latter (who is however treated in the volume Young Germany of 1890).

This gender-determined optics changed in the 20th century, as real scholarship on female Romantic authors began. Yet the female authorships are typically not included in the Romantic canon, instead forming a separate canonical body, and they are continuously under-represented in accounts of German Romanticism (Becker-Camarino 2000:260-1). In Danish literary history Lise Busk-Jensen’s vital work is the first account of Danish women authors in European Romanticism it is only with the vital work of Lise Busk-Jensen that an account of women authors is included in Danish and European Romanticism (Busk-Jensen 2009).

h. Romantic Politics

In the final section on Romantic politics, which includes an inset chapter on the drama, Brandes addresses the national phase of Romanticism after 1806. In the second edition the two nearly identically titled chapters are combined into one reduced and rewritten chapter. In both editions Brandes adopts Arnold Ruge’s negative view of Romanticism as anti-Enlightenment and anti-Humanist (Brandes 1873:344). Brandes employs the “fateful year of 1806,” in which Napoleon defeated Prussia and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, as the point of departure for his analysis of German national culture, which is a consequence of the antagonistic Franco-German relations. He goes through the German national ideologues Fichte, Arndt and Körner, but also mentions the liberal reforms of Prussian society instituted by Stein and Hardenberg. Brandes remains critical in principle of the so-called Wars of Liberation in 1813, in that while Germany is no longer occupied by the French archenemy, that enemy had however represented the Revolution of 1789.

Brandes asks what freedoms were in fact brought about by the wars. They only paved the way for a new system of oppression: “they had fought against the revolutionary tyranny on behalf of the reactionary principalities” (Brandes 1873:291). Brandes, perhaps inspired by Ernest Renan, sees clearly that national ideologies and the national cultural interest in language, history, folklore and fatherland emerge against the image of the enemy, and that German national character is cultivated in opposition to France. At the same time he himself engages in cultural stereotyping by contrasting French frivolity and freethinking with German morality and Christianity: “since the religion of the enemy had been humanity, the human spirit in its clarity and freedom, the national religion [of Germany] became Christendom, the Christian spirit in its obscurity and compulsion” (Brandes 1873:294). In this volume Brandes reduces National Romanticism to a feudally oriented “knightly Romanticism” represented by the German writer Friedrich Fouqué and the Dane B.S. Ingemann, whose trivial literary characteristics Brandes satirizes as “the psychology of the nobility or of horses, which in any case come off as one and the same” (Brandes 1873:306). In the second edition Brandes exhibits a greater openness to the national and folkloric stream in Romanticism, for example by identifying Richard Wagner as a part of the revitalization of the middle ages and by writing favorably in the new chapter on Arnim and Brentano of their collection of folk ballads in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806).

That the chapter on Romantic drama in the first edition constitutes an interlude between the political sections can surely enough be attributed to Brandes’ Hegelian understanding of the dramatic genre as the synthesis of epic and lyric and as an expression of freedom and of spirit (Brandes 1873:308). Brandes employs Heinrich von Kleist and Zacharias Werner as examples, and is especially preoccupied with the former. The difficulty of placing dramatists and poets between Classicism and Romanticism is a result of the literary historical canon of the late 19th century, and is defined both negatively and positively by Brandes. Kleist’s formal abilities and character portraits are unlike the Romantics not “spongy” or “blurred,” yet “are penetrated by the Romantic-poetic madness” (Brandes 1873:312). Kleist exhibits Romantic individuality in radical form, in that he sends “his probes deep into the points of illness, where the intellect loses its mastery over itself: somnambulism, animal ecstasy, distraction, cowardice in the face of death” (Brandes 1873:312). Yet at the same time the pathological fascinates Brandes. He goes through all the dramas and some of the short stories, most substantially Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810), in which passion is presented in a compound “that indiscriminately contains much that is laughable, offensive and sublime” (Brandes 1873:314). And he rounds this out with a sympathetic portrayal of Kleist’s malaise and the circumstances of his suicide together with Henriette Vogel.

Brandes chooses to illustrate “Romantic politics” with individual histories, namely in the form of a biography of the German-Austrian writer and politician Friedrich von Gentz (1764-1832), who had also later served as a theme for prominent historians and philosophers such as Golo Mann and Hannah Arendt. As a foundation Brandes cites a total of three sources: Karl Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s biography of Gentz, his correspondence with Adam Müller and two volumes of his posthumous papers. To the Young Hegelians, Gentz, because of his extravagant life and his impact – as Metternich’s close adviser, First Secretary of the Congress of Vienna, and coauthor of the repressive Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, which had limited rights in the German states – was the very incarnation of the restorationist regime (Bohrer 1989:188, 213-). Gentz translated Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to German in 1795, which would exert a strong influence on the skeptical reception of the German Romantics to the Revolution. Brandes does not however discuss this, even though he is as comparative critic and literary mediator cognizant of the intellectual significance of the translation.

In portraying the life of Gentz, Brandes manages to encompass three important phases in Romantic political thought: the reaction to the French Revolution and its after effects (in Early Romanticism), the national mobilization during the Napoleonic wars and the occupation of German territory (in National Romanticism) and finally the circumstances of the Restoration after 1815 (in Late Romanticism). One must distinguish the three phases from one another as well as between Romantic political thought and actual political engagement.

Later scholarship on Romanticism has investigated the contemporary implications of, for example, the German Romantics’ interest in the concepts of republicanism, peace and freedom, which were discussed in both fictive and non-fictive texts such as letters, treatises and essays. It is difficult to maintain a sharp distinction between conservative and liberal positions among the Romantics of the Restoration period (Schwering 1994:494-5), so the image is much more diffuse than that which Brandes portrays. In looking more closely at the actual political action of the Romantics, it must be taken into account that Friedrich Schlegel’s appointment as Austrian counsellor to Prince Metternich lasted only three years (1815-18), because his ultraconservative papal vision of recreating a Catholic empire was out of step with the politics of the allied powers (Schwering 1994:480-1). On the contrary, Adam Müller and Franz Baader alongside Gentz can be counted among active Romantic politicians of the Restoration, and through Gentz as the chief representative of the political dimension of Romanticism, Brandes is able to portray its anti-French, reactionary and monarchical threads without problems.

Brandes conludes this chapter and thereby the volume by illuminating the merger and climax of German and French reaction in Joseph de Maistre, in order to be able to proclaim his critique of the contemporary reaction in Denmark and also the transition to the theme of the third volume of Main Currents, The Reaction in France. In the second edition this last chapter is rewritten. The French ultraconservative thinker is left out, and in his place Brandes provides as a conclusion an overview of the three main groups of European Romantics: the French-German-English, the Scandinavian, and finally the Slavic.