830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur
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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.
Over the past decade, Scandinavian and German scholars have been active in the redefinition of the terms “Vitalism” and “Vitalist” as descriptive categories for analytical purposes in the fields of literary and cultural history. In this context,“Vitalism”has primarily been used to describe an enthusiastic worshipping of life, one that holds youth, health, strength and beauty as its primary attributes, which was prevalent in all aspects of cultural life around 1900. But even the post war founders of the Vitalist re-conceptualisation of this era, Wolfdietrich Rasch and Gunter Martens, warned of taking such a unilateral view ofwhat constituted a Vitalist concept of life. It could lead to a misunderstanding of Vitalist way of thinking, Rasch said, if the focus wasonly set upon the enthusiastic surplus, the worshipping of youth and health. To Vitalists, life is more than that. It is a totality that also encompasses notions of destruction, decay and death. “All life symbols in literature around 1900 are at the same time symbols of death” (Rasch, 1967:24).Through the analyses of three poems, this article aims to show concrete examples of how cyclic Vitalist thinking is embedded in poetry of the era. The analyses include a further sub-categorisation to capture the different types of Life Force dealt with in the texts. By way of an introduction, Vitalism is discussed within the context of the scientific and social developments of the 19th Century.