BDSL-Klassifikation: 14.00.00 Romantik > 14.11.00 Stoffe. Motive. Themen
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It can hardly be disputed that the theme of popularity is central to the Enlightenment. Popularity is the sociality equivalent to the individual appeal: 'Dare to know.' Parallel to this runs the following imperative: 'Dare to encourage your neighbour and your fellow man and woman to think on their own – even though they do not belong to the erudite elite.' It is also undeniable that Romantic authors and philosophers polemically attempted to tear down the popularity project of the Enlightenment, their main criticism being its tendency towards mediocrity. It is less well known that Romantic authors and philosophers themselves, around the turn of the nineteenth century, made popularity their central concern. To quote Friedrich Schlegel in the journal Athenaeum: 'The time of popularity has come.' This article explores the Romantics' alternative conception of popularity, with especial reference to Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Grimm Brothers. To this end, it is helpful to reconstruct the background of the Romantic attempt to create an independent concept of popularity: the debate between Immanuel Kant and the German popular philosopher Christian Garve on the necessity, possibilities, and limits of popularity.
Research has contended youth is an "invention" of the 18th century. This thesis does not contest the fact that youth was already known and accepted as a stage in life even earlier. Certain basic anthropological patterns of youthfulness, for example nonchalance, instability, recklessness, exaggeration, bashfulness looking forward to the future and the ability to make friends have been rhetorically implied, repeated and cited as a matter of course since the time of Aristoteies. The pointed thesis that the concept of youth only arose in the 18th century accentuates that youth as an autonomous way of life is a characteristic of the Modern Age.
Around 1800, aesthetic debate suddenly places music at the very top in the hierarchy of the arts, even superseding poetry: This has become a commonplace not only in scholarly discourse. The protagonists of this re-arrangement of the artistic disciplines are Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck. In their programmatic texts, they state that music is to be free and absolute and stress its metaphysical quality and its close relation to the supernatural. Furthermore, music is supposed to be no longer dependent on the other arts, and music releases the listener or the musician from prosaic everyday life. As Wackenroder writes in Die Wunder der Tonkunst, […] [a]ll sickening thoughts which, according to Wackenroder, are the illness of mankind vanish with a piece of music, making our mind sane again. Literary romanticism here recurs to a long tradition that reaches back to the classical ages in Greece and Arabia: Music is used as a remedy for curing illnesses of various kinds. In classical antiquity, Apollo is the god of music, poetry and dancing as well as the god of healing. He was also named “Iatros” (physician) or Apollo Medicus. […] Orpheus as a bard and demigod was also said to be capable of curing diseases by means of his music. […] Thus, music in history is part of treating physical illness on the one hand, but on the other hand is more and more considered to provide a remedy especially for mental deficiencies. Music is meant to improve nervous disorders and sometimes it is even prescribed as a regular medicine. As we will see in Hoffmann’s text Die Genesung, there is a connection between the ritual healing processes in the temples of Aesculapius and the setting of the forest in which the old man regains his health.
The animated statues, robots and monsters in German Romantic narratives, as I will argue throughout, tell us something about the Romantic conception of the mutually embedded relationship between art and life. In the works of the German Romantics, the theme of artificial humans thus has an essentially autopoetic, or selfreflexive, function (cf. Schmitz-Emans 1993, 168f). It corresponds in exemplary fashion with Friedrich Schlegel´s idea of transcendental poetry, which should always be “poetry and simultaneously the poetry of poetry” (Schlegel [1985], 50). In the theme of artificial life as well as in transcendental poetry, the observation of the world is integrally bound up with the observation of art and the self (cf. Kremer [1996], 8ff).