German romanticism is often seen as a reaction hostile to modernity, a reaction whose cultural influence would explain the “ German route ” of XIXe century, and which would have favored totalitarian drift. Rüdiger Safranski tries to qualify this representation, in particular by considerably widening the chronological framework of his object.
Unlike literary production in French or English language, stylistically brilliant tests, open to a large audience without being superficial, are rather rare in the German -speaking space. The philosopher and essayist Rüdiger Safranski represents a constant exception to this rule. His excellent monographs on Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schiller, ETA Hoffmann or Schopenhauer stood out in Germany and some were translated into French. While mastering with art the tools of cultural and intellectual history, which allows him to contextualize the studied author, Safranski reconstructs the philosophical argument of his subject in a precise and compressed way. In his new book, he undertook the presentation of an entire intellectual and cultural era: German romanticism.
Since the writings of Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant, this era has acquired a major meaning for the French understanding of German culture, insofar as these marked texts made romanticism one of its essential characteristics. The Franco-German relationship also plays a special role in Safranski which begins its history of the romantic era in 1769, with the embarkation for France by Johann Gottfried von Herder. The experience of rupture, of the abandonment of the old convictions, of the meeting with the other leading to the birth of the self in an ocean of uncertainty, was to become a leitmotif of romantic thought, which would still resonate at the end of the century in the programmatic call of Nietzsche: “ Boats ! ». Safranski sees in the 1968 movement the ultimate emergence of romantic motifs and thus completed his story with this motif of the Franco-German meeting which he had used to introduce his subject.
The first part of the book sketches the multiple facets of an era which, towards the end of XVIIIe century, after the rationalist triumph of lights in philosophy, literature, arts, politics and religion, starts exploring the depths of being lost to explore. Novalis thus delivers the definition and program of this current: “ Romanticism is to give the common a high sense, to the usual an air of mystery, to the known the dignity of the unknown, to the finish the appearance of the infinite ».
Starting with the first romanticism, that of Jena, the first part presents the most important authors and ideas, like the literature theorist, Friedrich Schlegel, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte or the writers Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenrod and Novalis. In this context, Safranski offers a precise and clear description of central notions such as irony, infinity, hidden, origin, distant, poetry, which have determined the thought of these authors. Taking up Max Weber, Safranski identifies the romantic project, as a whole, as an attempt to re -enchant a disenchanted world and rediscover the magic. However, around 1800, the romantic motif is also part of other fields: the Protestant theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher thus defines religion as “ meaning and taste for infinity “, And the philological studies of a görres or a schlegel seek the roots of the language and the truth of the origin in the East and ancient India. This desire for lost origins is expressed not only through spiritual journeys in the distance, but also in the reconstruction of an imaginary past. The Greece of Friedrich Hölderlin illustrates this relationship with the poetically condensed past, which confronts a mythologically sublimated antiquity with the profane dimension of its own era.
With its politicization, romantic thought becomes problematic. The philosophical and poetic motive turns into national ideology, at the latest at the time of the Napoleonic occupation: it finds its most accomplished expression in the concept of nation in Fichte, in the idea of a “ Organic state “Developed by Adam Müller, in the artificial populism of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Jahn, or in the hatred of Napoleon and the French transfigured by the literature of Heinrich von Kleist. Also romanticism, considered as a time, has moved away from its philosophically very complex premises. This distance will also characterize the literature of late romanticism: Josef von Eichendorff and ETA Hoffmann alter original ideas by transforming them into a enjoyment of the melancholy of WELTSCHMERZ And a fascination for the dark horrors of the unknown.
The particularity of Safranski’s essay, however, lies in the surpassing of a limited understanding of romanticism, reduced to a philosophical, literary or political moment. Extending his reflections from the first part, he identifies a style of thought which he calls “ The romantic And of which he finds expressions beyond an era circumscribed around the 1800s. This phenomenon of the romantic, conceived as a spirit which is not summed up in an era, is treated in the second part of the book.
It is here that romanticism is analyzed as a interpretation of a disenchanted world operating at different levels. After the first criticisms of romanticism formulated very early by Hegel and Heinrich Heine, the romantic developed, according to Safranski, from the middle of XIXe century in Germany as a recurring leitmotif of mythologization, sacralization and transcendence in the context of a civilization perceived as profane, immanent and dispossessed of its myths. The foundation, by Richard Wagner, of a new mythology in the work of total art of the ring is one of the most powerful expressions of the persistence of the romantic moment. Safranski also finds traces of a romantic thought in Nietzsche, who confronts with the transcendent depths of the creative will and life an age controlled in a superficial manner by civilization, or even in Thomas Mann in his political writings before and during the First World War. Besides these expressions of learned culture, many social movements, in the continuation of youth movements created at the turn of XIXe century, are interpreted as manifestations of the romantic imagination and a flight from the disenchanted world. As for the question of National Socialism interpreted as a romantic phenomenon, Safranski offers a differentiated reading in the wake of Isaiah Berlin and Eric Voegelin. In the very fragmented and contradictory ideological landscape of the regime are elements such as the mythological sublimation of Germans in Alfred Rosenberg, which can be attached to a romantic context. However, these reasons for Nazi ideology had only secondary importance compared to scientifically sublimated racist Darwinism, which quickly imposed itself in the imagination and the practice of the regime.
The last expression of the romantic aspiration to transgress a society deemed too rationalist was, for Safranski, the movement of 1968. In the overcoming of borders and transgression, which permeated most of the guiding ideas of the student revolution (“ Imagination in power “,” Under the paving stones the beach “,” Poetry is on the street », Etc.) also outcrop romantic patterns.
Safranski does not investigate the romantic to find the accuser proof of a betrayal of the Enlightenment. He understands much more the romantic heritage, and especially that of the first romanticism, as a legitimate part of modernity. It is here that he corrects the prospect of Berlin and implicitly of Fritz Stern, even if he shares their analysis on the disastrous consequences of romantic aesthetics in politics. For the author, the meaning of the romantic is precisely due to the creative and imaginary opening of a world which has so far conceived itself as entirely transparent and identical with oneself, and which thus failed to understand each other. In the modern world, the romantic serves as a salutary corrective, insofar as its transgressive aspirations reveal the limits of rationality ; So he contributes to clarifying modern reason for his own absolutist temptations. By working on overcoming the limits of reason, the romantic allows the reason to apprehend them. However, the illumination of the Enlightenment can only lead to the condition that the imaginary extension of reason does not replace it. For this reason, Safranski condemns all alliance of the romantic with politics, since, in history, such a relationship always announced a dangerous ideologization, because it is distant from the world.
We can regret that Safranski has reduced his field of study to the Germanic world, just as it is possible to discuss the selective choice of treated works or the fact that the author largely neglects romanticism in music and painting. In addition, extending the concept to the much broader concept of a “ romantic Transgressing eras do not go without posing certain problems. What do we benefit from identifying the phenomena described by Safranski as “ romantic »» ? Does the romantic resemble the general criticism of modern and rationalized civilization ? His project shows how such attempts at conceptual enlargement contain an almost magical dimension: elements that we thought disparate and autonomous suddenly emerges a similarity. However, the loss of conceptual precision is the price to pay for this widening of knowledge. Despite these critical reflections, Safranski delivers an essay that deserves to be recommended, especially in France, another country of great romantic tradition.