 Now it's on, right? Yeah, and today, in arts one, you get credit for history and philosophy and also for literature. And what this presentation will do is touch on all of those areas. So in that regard, I think it's OK. We'll be talking about German Romanticism after which I've put a question mark up here because I will try to tease out what's specific, or you might put it this way, what's different about German Romanticism versus what Miguel introduced us to a few weeks ago on Blake when he talked about English Romanticism. So what is it about German Romanticism that's sort of specific, if you like? We'll also do a sort of bit of genre study. We'll be talking about what you've been reading, which are novellas and not short stories. And I'll give you a little bit of theory into the novella, which was a very important genre in the 19th century, prose genre in the 19th century in the German-speaking world. And in fact, remains something that Germans seem to write. Then via a brief engagement with the Snow White story you read, we'll move on to Teaks, Blonde Eckbert, or Fairhaired Eckbert, as you have it, and then spend the last part of the lecture on Kleist, this kind of outlier figure. Is he a romantic? Is he not? He's kind of a unique romantic, if you like. We'll spend a little bit of time on Kleist, and we will examine his earthquake in Chile story, which you read for this week as well. And I had a hard time deciding exactly how to transition into this week, because I could have chosen, there I am, feeling like I need to get up, but I'll try to contain that. I could have sort of jumped off any number of places. I mean, there's sort of Rousseau as this romantic philosopher of sorts, and certainly influences the German romantics. And we will have a chance to talk about Rousseau as the lecture goes on a little later in the lecture. Obviously, I could have started with Freud as these stories are especially open to Freudian interpretations. And one can even say that much of Freud's theory is already there in the romantic writers. I could have started with the English romantics and just done some sort of contrast work. But I settled on, because I think it's important background-wise, actually starting with Hobbes. So this is, of course, the frontispiece from Hobbes Leviathan. You're familiar with it. I'm going to ask you, what does it represent? So when you look at this interesting character up there holding the sword and this religious implement, can you tell me a little bit about what this frontispiece represents? Yeah. Yeah. Centralization of power, I really like that. So this idea also of the right kind of political organization being a state within which an indivisible and all-powerful ruler sort of is at the head of it and shouldn't be challenged unless he cannot uphold peace. That's a sort of thumbnail sketch. Here's Europe in 1789. What's important about this date? We'll get back to the Hobbes in a minute. What's important about this date, 1789, is it an important day? Yeah, it's the date of the French Revolution. This is Europe as it looked in 1789. Obviously, excuse me, what happens in France changes if you like the course of European history, European politics, especially in a very profound way. But that's not really what I want to talk about, although I might have something to say about the way in which the German Romantics responded to the events of the revolutionary events of 1789 and their aftermath a bit later on. But do you notice anything about this map? And remember, we're talking about Germany, right? So it's probably gonna have something to do with Germany. Yeah, I think you're good taking us in the right direction, this idea of separation, right? So, I mean, if we were to take the frontispiece from Hobbes, it's not a, I mean, this is a kind of simplistic picture, but we could put the image of foreign with the people inside him, if you like, over the kingdom of England and Scotland, over the kingdom of France, over the kingdom of Spain, for that matter, there's a kingdom of Poland and there's a kingdom of Hungary, and these are, if you like, states at the head of which is an absolute sovereign, not completely unlike what Hobbes talks about in Leviathan as being the right form of governance, if you like. But Germany's crucially different from that, and that's gonna be important for us as you'll see soon in understanding the German romantics to a certain extent, and this will become clearer soon. Oh, I should also say a little bit about what I have up here, the French. Les tas, c'est moi. So, does that resonate with anybody? Anybody heard that before? Anybody speak French? Yeah, so what does it say? I am the state, right? So if you think about that relative to these images, you think about the sovereign, if you like, as crucial to the state, embodying the state, all powerful in the state. Anybody know who actually uttered these famous words? Yeah. It was Louis XIV, roughly 80 or 90 years, I don't know the exact date, before 1789, Louis XIV said, I am the state. And he think we should understand this in more sort of a fuller understanding of it than just sort of as a political power, because Louis XIV sort of defined everything that happened in the kingdom of France from his court, ruled for a very long time, ultimately was responsible for fashion, style, style in architecture. I mean, he was behind all of these things. Flourishing of literature along sort of classical lines. So in a very meaningful way, Louis XIV was the state of France. This is the picture you get of Germany in 1789. And as you can see, we've got leviathans all over the place. We'll get to that in a minute. First, this great German word to explain it, klein staaterei, it's hard to come up with a good English translation for it. I'll give it a try, little statory. And it captures this idea that whereas France and England, Scotland, if you think, at that time they were one nation state, other states in Europe as well were ruled by one monarch, had centralized government, had a clear capital city. The case in Germany was completely different. This was a loose amalgamation of absolute states, many of them with a duke at the head, many of them with a prince, the largest ones Prussia in blue and Bavaria in orange had a king. And in these states, they all had an absolute ruler who was responsible for government, ultimately had a court, wanted to have a court like Louis the 14th. In some cases, they were more tolerant than others. Some were Protestant, some were Catholic. Total decentralization across the German lands, completely different in each of them, varying in size from 3,000 to 4 million inhabitants. So what would you think then ultimately organize these if it wasn't some form of political organization? By the way, this was called the Holy Roman Empire of Germanic States and it lasts like that until 1806. So if they're not ultimately organized in sort of political terms under one ruler, rather they have all of these different absolute rulers, what is it then that they share or have in common that defines them? Yeah, the back. Language, you would think so. You would think that it would be as simple as that and to a certain extent, Jake is right. However, I've got here, L'État c'est moi, et moi, et moi, et moi, et moi. That not only captures the idea of sort of all of these separate absolute rulers, many of them wanting to have a court like Louis the 14th in their little principality or their little duke, it also captures the idea that the 18th century in Germany, so the 1700s is dominated by French things. It's dominated, especially at the courts. This isn't to say that Fritz Schmidt out there in the village isn't speaking some colloquial form of German, but at court and in terms of what's being sanctioned culturally, the dominance in the 17th century that leased through to about 1750 is do things that are French because that's what Louis the 14th did and he was the kind of ideal absolute ruler. French classicism is what we should do in terms of literature. And so you have a Germany, if you like, this loosely amalgamated Germany, but it's not even really organized or if you like defined by a common language in as much as French style and at court the French language dominates. And this is well into the 1700s. Now Herder, Johann Gottfried Herder, it's not the first to identify this as a problem, but he is probably the most profound influence on what we might call the development of a German cultural nationalism that develops in the latter, so in the last decades of the 18th century and into the early 19th century, Herder is a philosopher, he's interested in linguistics. Just a few quotes here to give you some idea of what he said in response to this domination of these German lands by French ideas, by the French language. After saying, we must stop spewing out this language of the sin, he says, speak German, oh, you're German. Herder was many things, he was also very modern in his ideas about the relationship between language and concepts, language and thought. Are any of you familiar with the Sapir-Worf hypothesis? This is the idea, right, that ultimately it's language that determines concepts and not the other way around. Well, Herder's always already thinking in that direction. If we're gonna start thinking in a German way, in a way that's distinctive from that of the French, if we're gonna develop, if you like, German philosophy and German ways of thinking, then we're gonna have to start to speak German and also in places of power, right, German at court. An example of sort of the domination of French, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia in the late 18th century, great, the definition of an enlightened absolutist, great military leader, great patron of the arts, great artist himself, friend de Voltaire, the philosoph, has him at his court, everything in court in French. Herder has a problem with this. Further, for Herder, the center of this, if you like, German cultural reinvigoration or reawakening starts with culture and specifically the idea that the poet is the creator of the nation around him. The 18th century, I mean really, if you look at the beginning of the 18th century, there's very little literature, culture of any quality coming out of Germany at all. And then in the sort of 1830s, 1840s, Germans start to produce plays along French classicist lines. And what Herder's calling for here is, hey, where are the poets in German? Where are, where's Germanic culture? We need to refine it and develop it. Herder's also sort of starts this trend of looking back in history to try to find times at which Germany was great and to redefine Germany against those cultural traditions. He says, look to the times of the Swabian emperors in the high Middle Ages, the 12th and 13th centuries. And it's true that during this period, this is the kind of first awakening of German literature. This is the culture of the first great German epic poems, the first great German lyric, Minna Zang. These were poems that idealized the relationship between the knight and the queen or the courtly lady. And we see this kind of stuff in Disney movies still that time, jousting and so on. This period's called the Hohenstaufen, H-O-H-E-N-S-T-A-U-F-E-N if you're interested in the German. And Herder says, we need to look back to that time in the Middle Ages, a time when Germany was great if we are going to reinvigorate German culture, move it in a direction away from the French. And Herder also champions a search for Germanic folklore, go out into the country and find out what ultimately German songs, German dance, and music has survived. What are the sort of truly German cultural forms out there? We need to find those, champion those, record those. He's also a big fan of Gothic art, right? Big, huge churches in the Gothic style from the high Middle Ages. He wants to claim that as being something somehow purely German. With Herder, we also get this idea of Das Volk. The idea that the state is not me, as in the sovereign, but rather the people. We have to look to the German people and we have to define nation. We need to unify, if you like. We need to unite around this idea. So this is a kind of cultural nationalism. There's no sort of political talk about unification at this point. It's very much focused on the need to define Germany in cultural terms. This is crucially important to understanding German romanticism. Because German romanticism takes up many of the ideas that Herder asserts and they very much define what the German romantics are up to in a certain way. One thing is this idea of the centrality of the artist and of imagination and creativity. Putting, if you like, the artist at the center of defining what's unique about being German. This is something that Miguel mentioned, the centrality of imagination and creativity of forces when he talked about English romanticism. It's certainly the case also in German romanticism and it very much comes from Herder. They also venerate, worship the Germanic Middle Ages. German romanticism is a very historical movement in the sense that it looks back to the Middle Ages and it sees that as a brighter time. It sees that, in that sense, it's not progressive, but rather, and to a large extent, this is a large extent, this is a construction. It looks back to the Germanic Middle Ages as an ideal time and ultimately in a kind of a longing way. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. The German romantics also take up from Herder, this commitment to reviving folk culture. German folk culture. So if you're thinking, and we'll talk more about this, where is it these fairy tales come from that we see in Disney movies? Ultimately, the impetus for this comes from German romantics listening to Herder and saying it's important that we collect these, in many cases, oral stories that have been told in German folk poetry and folk dances, et cetera. And this is not only in German, this is cultural nationalism in other places too and we could compare it if we wanted to, but it's certainly the case in Germany and it's certainly something the romantics are extremely interested in, going in, out there and saving and using, if you like, these folk culture to reinvigorate Germany. And also as a basis for new literary creation, as a model, if you like, for what German writers should emulate. A crucial difference between the German romantics and Herder though would be, I wouldn't go so far as to say that German romanticism is irrational, although there's certainly elements of it that are. There certainly however is no, it's definitely a reaction against the Enlightenment and that's different from Herder, who is also an Enlightenment figure and is very much trying, if you like, to reconcile German folk traditions with the progress that the Enlightenment shows or. And then we've talked a little bit about cultural nationalism. I need to give you a more nuanced picture of what nationalism meant to the romantics and I can't paint this with a broad stroke and say that the romantics weren't political at all because that would be too sweeping of a statement. We're gonna talk soon about a division between early German romanticism and sort of high German romanticism. And for the early German romantics, I think it would be fair to say that they were romantic nationalists. So when we talk about romantic nationalism, we're talking about, as I say here, the cultural nationalism that we've been chatting about for the last 10 or 15 minutes, but with a very nostalgic political conservatism, which isn't to say what we need is an enlightened, absolute reader, it's even more a kind of longing for the sort of feudal structures that existed in the Middle Ages. It's very nebulous, ultimately, very vague, not particularly clear. But by conservative, I mean a sort of historical conservatism. Times were better when Catholicism ruled, nobody questioned it, and the Lord was kind of a central figure. Increasingly though, the later romantics as we get into the 18th century become more, and again, you have to look at them individually, but these later romantics become more politically nationalist and start really talking about German unity on a political level, that is, a centralized state similar to what France and England have. And also, this is influenced increasingly by liberalism. So the idea of some form of parliamentary democracy, whatever that looks like, that's increasingly the case. So the later romantics, and that's not true of all of them, but certain later German romantics become increasingly active towards political unification, which incidentally doesn't happen until 1871. So that map that I showed you earlier, where you've got this loose amalgamation of principalities sort of not really completely organized or the identity of which is defined in terms of language, well, what happens in the 18th century doesn't reach political unity until the 1871. Now we need to get philosophical a little bit. So we've got some understanding now of the extent to which romanticism is a German cultural sort of a movement that is to which sort of cultural nationalism is important. It's also influenced by contemporary philosophical developments, and specifically by what we call idealism. Anybody familiar with this idea of idealism? Yeah, can you give us a definition of idealism? Well, you're taking us in the right direction by mentioning Plato and Platonic idealism. You're familiar with this. What does Platonic idealism mean? Then we've read the Republic. There's kind of much to be said there about ideas. How does Platonic idealism function then? What is Plato's view on truth and knowledge and our access to it? Forms. Can you refresh our memory as to what these forms are, where they are, and how we gain access to them? Right. So reality we might say, I like the cookie cutter analogy a lot, but I'm going to abandon it and say we might say that the experiences that we have sort of in consciousness or our perceptions of things in the world are more or less on a continuum, embodiments of these ideal forms out there in this realm, and that's where truth is, and we aspire to have sort of get as close to that as we can, and there's this kind of special class of individuals, the philosopher kings, who should be given the task of using logic and reason to try to, if you like, get us as close to those ideal forms as possible. So now to understand sort of German idealism, take away the forms, or argue that they may exist, but we can have no access to them. This is to say there might be some true material realm, if you like, or realm that's kind of objectively true out there, it's which to measure things, and which our perception is a not very good copy of. Now take away the forms altogether, or at least our access to them, which brings us to this chat, Immanuel Kant. I think to go through arts one and not be introduced to Immanuel Kant would be a shame, and so you're getting a brief introduction to him here. And Kant's transcendental idealism is one of the pivotal moments in the history of philosophy. It's a radical rethinking of the way of epistemology, of what we can know, and what knowing means. And so what Kant argues, thinking again, you might vis-a-vis play-doh, there might be material reality, or he calls it the realm of numino or of the thing in itself. Perhaps material is not the right word, but there might be some kind of absolute reality out there. Problem is, we'll never have direct, that is true access or knowledge of it, if you like, as all human experience is mediated through the categories of the mind. So this is to say we only experience the appearance these faculties define. We are only conscious of the phenomena defined in our understanding. There might be something absolute out there, but we have, if you like, you might think of it along a psychological model or in terms of a psychological model. We have these faculties that ultimately, if it's out there, take that stuff and define it in our perception. Things like time, space, causality, right? Those things are not out there in any absolute place. They're here. And ultimately, our experience is defined by those, which is to say we can never have access, if it's even out there, to these things in themselves, to this absolute realm, to some forms, if you like, we can't even really talk about them. Now, you're already probably thinking, well, that's an interesting move. Certainly, it starts as thinking in terms of psychology, right? The extent to which our psychological apparatus is defined what we understand, how we understand the world. But the claim is more radical than that, obviously. Do we all have a sort of idea as to what's going on with Kant's transcendental idealism? I think leading us into it from Plato is a good way to do it. Don't even try to understand it. You're not going to have access to that absolute realm. That form of knowledge is impossible. So Kant shakes a lot of writers, so Kant is writing again around this time, 1770, 1780s. Kant shakes a lot of thinkers, shakes a lot of writers and artists at the time. But the romantics are actually not as strongly influenced by Kant as they are by this chap. His name is Fichte. Fichte responds to Kant's form of idealism. And I'm going to let another idealist philosopher, Schopenhauer, sort of tell you how. Schopenhauer's later, and this is also... Schopenhauer's not a fan of Fichte. This is sort of with derision he's saying these things. But I do think it gives us some idea of what Fichte does. That's radical and is so influential on the German romantics. Schopenhauer writes, Fichte, who, because the thing in itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without anything in itself. So remember, Kant is not saying there isn't something out there. He's saying we can't have access to it. We can't have any knowledge of it. And once prepared, and again back to Schopenhauer on Fichte, once prepared a system without anything in itself. It's not out there at all. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation and therefore let knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. Say bye-bye to objects and objective reality. Fichte's philosophy puts the subject and subjective creation in the center. This is hugely influential on the early German romantics. Among whom is Tiek, we read Farherdeckbert from him, but perhaps most importantly the Schlegel brothers. Now the Schlegel brothers attended lectures by Fichte because they were also in the city of Jena in central Germany in Turingia. And so rather, sort of glibly here, I've said of Fichte, I made the phenomenal that which we experienced no absolute reality, no objective reality, the only game in town and made the individual subject the only force behind its creation. It's a kind of solipsism, a kind of creative solipsism if you like. There's nothing against which to test what we create and it's all subjectively created. This is radical and I don't expect you to buy it. I do want you to try to understand the influence that it has on German Romanticism. We might get at that relationship by looking at probably the most famous theoretical statement of early German Romanticism from the Athenaeum fragment 116 by Friedrich Schlegel. August Schlegel translated Shakespeare by the way. The German classicists in the Romantics, they all loved Shakespeare because he was this genius figure, right? He could break all the rules and every time he did he created something greater than anything we had created in literature before. But back to Friedrich. In this Athenaeum fragment he writes, Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature and make poetry lively and sociable and life and society poetical. The Romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming that in fact is its real essence. It alone is infinite just as it alone is free and recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself. No law above itself. No absolute rules. Nothing against which to try or nothing with which to try to make creativity conform. The breaking down of boundaries. No distinctions between forms, between absolute things, mix and fuse, blend. The German word is great. Verschmelzung. Crazy word. Captures this idea of allowing things to sort of blend into one another. How does this affect the distinction between poetry and life? There's no distinction. Poetically create poetry that is alive. I said earlier that we can divide up German romanticism in a few ways. We can divide it up in three. Some scholars do this. I've sort of gone for the simpler division into two main sort of eras if you like. The first is what we call Romantic. It's really Romanticism. It's focused around Jena 1797 to 1804. And it's very much influenced by the idealism of Fichte that we were just talking about. And it's associated with some guys with really great German names, right? Novales, Friedrich von Hamburg and Ludwig Tieg. These characters, if we look, for example, Novales dies very young. His most famous work, Hymns of the Night, very much play with the idea of sort of losing oneself in the night in death. Again, playing with ideas that have very little to do with objective reality. And then to a lesser extent influenced by Fichte's idealism, what we call Hochrom, or later Romanticism, or high Romanticism, which is centered on two cities, other cities, Heidelberg and Berlin. And we'll be talking about all of these characters, if only in passing. Clemens, Ahem von Ahnen. The Grims responsible for the fairy tales that grew up Joseph von Eichendorf and Hoffmann, who is a kind of singular figure in as much as he's definitely the most... Gothic isn't the right word, but the writer who's sort of most interested in the supernatural edgic. You read Der Zandmann by Hoffmann last week. I would be remiss if I were not to mention the role that women played in Romanticism, and I've given you some names at the bottom. Karolina Schlägel, who married August Schlägel, but wrote poetry, stories. I've been called one of the central figures in the early Romanticism. She was friends with other literate romantics like Goethe and Schlägel. I guess the important point is, though, women wrote, but they weren't published. Women hosted salons where these romantic writers would gather to discuss the theory of Romanticism, to read their stories, but they weren't published until much later. I'll go with a few exceptions. Anem, who married Achim von Anem, similar story. And the Jewish Rahel Levine Warnhagen was one of these central figures in salon culture. This is to say that women of sort of wealthy aristocratic women would open up their homes. Romantic figures would then come and discuss ideas and stories. This was a very important role that women played, and all of them were writing. We just didn't know about a lot of their writing and so much later. It's a similar situation in English Romanticism. I think over the last 40 years there's been a lot more scholarly interest in women writing in the last decades of the 18th and into the early 19th century. One of my colleagues in the Senate's department is sort of one of the preeminent scholars who is looking for women writers from this time, uncovering what they wrote and bringing it to a larger audience. So let's take stock at this point. This is thanks for sending this to me, Miguel. I've taken a photo of it and put it up here. This is what Miguel introduced you to as some of the key ideas related themes, interests, motivations, and by Romanticisms he's referring here not only to English Romanticism but to Romanticisms throughout Europe, I think. And in almost every case, I'd have to say that this is representative of interests of the German Romantics. However, I've had to add a few things, just so we can differentiate them for you. You can get an idea of perhaps what was specific about German Romanticism. So this all stands in the centrality of the genius and of his originality that he should freely prove that emotion over reason, negative reaction to the Enlightenment, the emphasis on childhood, et cetera. But to this we've added, and this is important, the influence of German idealism, of Herdys cultural nationalism, the centrality, this yearning for a Germanic as much of a construct as that is, the Middle Ages, Gothic art, German artists, even the tribal past to a certain extent, the idea of genre hybridity, the German Romantics. Again, this is the idea of breaking down boundaries between particular objects, if you like. What we really want to get at is sort of this total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, total work of art that incorporates many genres. And so Tiek, for example, writes a novel at the heart of which is a novella, so a shorter prose work, is full of poems and songs and remains a fragment, remains unfinished. Not a bad thing, to leave it fragmentary in a sense of becoming, not finished, not fully defined, a good thing for the Romantics. And in general, an open-endedness and ambiguity, especially in prose works created by the German Romantics, and we'll see this, I think, when we get to both fair-haired Eckbert and Kleist's earthquake in Chile. And then there's that word up there in the top right corner, Zeenzucht. Any of you familiar with Ramstein? Yeah. Maybe you're familiar with the word Zeenzucht from the album, I think it's an album by the sort of techno-industrial Ramstein. Ramstein know their tradition, that's for sure. You look at some of their videos, there's one video in particular, I forget the name of it, very much plays with this Romantic, sort of German Romantic notions. Zeenzucht is a very loaded word in German, and it was a very important word to the German Romantics, so I want to maybe finish this first hour by having a look at the word itself. Zeenzucht contains the nouns Zeen to see, and such addiction or craving or like sort of consuming desire almost, is one connotation too. And it gets translated in English as long-full, wistful yearning, which doesn't really do it much justice. If we look at the German definitions, we get a much idea of what it means within the Germanic context and what it means specifically to the German Romantics. Iniges schmetlich nach jemandem etwas in Biatem fianem, an inner, painful desire for something or someone distant lacking. So much more painful, much more, I would dare say also visceral definition, and the example that the German equivalent of the Oxford Dictionary gives, I think is even more telling of how you would use the word Zeenzucht, eine brennende, fiatziellende, ungeschrittene Seenzucht. A burning, insatiable, indeterminate longing cannot be realized. Nothing absolute you can reach out there. Nothing objective. What you have is the burning desire to fiat, and that's ultimately what drives you. This would certainly not be the only German Romantic poem in the book that appears. It is one that has it at its title. It's by Josef von Eichendorf, a later German Romantic. I'm just going to leave you with it and then send you off for a break. Es schienen so golden, am Fenste ich einsam stand, und hörte aus weiter Ferne ein Postholz in Land. Das Herz mir, im Bleib, im Brunter, im Brunter, da hab ich mir heimlich gedacht. There's that word heimlich. Ach, wer da mitleisen könnte in der furchtigen Sommernacht. So golden shone the stars alone at the window I stood solitariness. Again, so important to the Romantics. Frequently characters alone in the woods. Alone at the window I stood and heard out of the distance a post horn across the land. Of course, at this time, post was delivered on horseback. They had horns, you know, sort of coming out of the distance. My heart burned within me as I thought secretly, ah, and this doesn't translate ach very well. There's something in ach that itself communicates a kind of unquenchable longing. Ach. At any rate, ah is the best we can come up with to be able to travel with them in the magnificent summer night, travel without end, but that's impossible to be able to unrealizable this idea of kind of unquenchable longing. So I'm going to leave you after this first idea with this idea of seins, this idea of longing, which is unrealizable. It's kind of a very German Romantic sentiment. And we'll continue in about ten minutes. The Romantics take this seriously. Specifically, Clemens Bentano and Achl von Ahnen, who in 1805 and 1808 published two volumes under the title The Boy's Magic Horn of Alte Deutsche Lieder, old German songs. So, and this would have involved collecting them orally, but also some of them were text. It's wrong to think that the Grims and Ahnen and Bentano somehow went out scouring the land and talking to old ladies about the stories that they've been telling. It's not really the case. You'll be more familiar with the Grim Brothers, so Clemens Bentano and Achl von Ahnen collected songs. And these songs also became, and the rhythms in them also became the basis for the sorts of rhythms that you see in the German poetry that's written by the German Romantics as well. This idea of somehow there are sort of these German rhythms, as if there could be some kind of inherently German rhythms and that we should try to use these folk meter and rhyme and so on in our own new poetry. You'll be more familiar with the Grim Brothers and probably also with their children's and household tales, which were collected, compiled, and published in a number of volumes between 1812 and 1858. These are the stories like Snow White, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, et cetera, that have been co-opted by Disney and that you were likely read as children. But I think it's important to understand that these stories were part of this German national, sort of cultural nationalism. The impetus for collecting them was this idea that these stories out there are a German, sort of specific German national treasure and that we need to make sure that we collect these and use, protect them and that this is part of sort of reawakening German culture and a German national self-understanding. I should probably also, however, dispel a couple of myths. There is this idea out there and maybe you guys have never been privy to it, but I heard it when I was an undergraduate, perhaps the research is relatively new then, that the Grimm's went out there visiting small villages, talking to poor grandmothers and asking them to recite the stories that they'd been telling and inherited from their grandparents. And that wasn't really the case. The Grimm's were pretty well connected. They had a sort of upright bourgeois upbringing, lost their father relatively young and struggled for the rest of their lives, but nevertheless they were connected well. And actually the stories came for the most part from bourgeois women with whom they were collected who would come to their house and tell them the stories that they were told by their nursemaids. And that's where a lot of these stories actually came from. It's also not true that all of these house, all of these mash and these fairy tales as we call them, were oral. They weren't all oral. Some were. Some weren't. Some were written down. Some were taken out of sort of, you know, the Grimm's were librarians and they were brilliant librarians and very devoted and hardworking librarians. And they would have unearthed these things in books, in old books. Also a myth, although this was the plan, was to collect, you know, these tales that were somehow inherently dramatic, not the case at all. Some of these tales ultimately have proved to be European, that is, similar stories being told in different countries throughout Europe. And indeed, many of them were French, which is a bit ironic, if you think about it. Just to back up here, you should also know about the Grimm's that they worked on a dictionary that they only finished, I think they got to the letter D in their lifetime. This was the first great dictionary of the German language, the Grimm's Wurtabu. Their definitions were etymological, think, for example, Freud going back and looking at the history of words. And again, the idea was, let's go back in time and look at our own language, its roots, the way in which it's changed the kind of heritage, if you like. About ten years ago, groups of researchers working in Germany finished the Grimm's Wurtabu and it's now available online, the full language I've chosen the word Heimlich. If you're interested, you can go and read German. I don't know if there's an English version yet, you can go back and look at what the Grimm's were doing. They also wrote very influential grammar. German, German, German, German. German stories, German language, et cetera. German dictionary. All part of this romantic nationalistic, German cultural reawakening. So how many of you were already familiar with Snow White as a story? Perhaps I should ask if anybody wasn't familiar with Snow White as a story. Well now you may have already known this but you know where it came from. It is one of the oral stories. It's one of the most widespread also ultimately we can trace it back to most European countries. One thing to to understand is that the Grimm's collected these but they also edited them and there were many versions as well. The one that you read is only one version of Snow White. How does this version that you read jive with the one you were familiar with? You say anything about anything that surprised you in it or that you found potentially striking? You're good Freudians. No one's going to take that on? Yeah. Can you say anything specifically about what's darker about it? Then for example the Disney Realization? Yeah. What a way to go right? Quite graphic and this is by no means the most graphic of the stories. That's for certain. I chose it because because it's an oral story and also because I think there's a few interesting things we can point out about it vis-a-vis Freud. Jake cannibalism was a little casual. Oh, yes. Cannibalism in what sense? Oh, the commitment to eating the liver and the... Is it cannibalism if it actually isn't the human heart and liver? Or is that just kind of a kind of quasi cannibalism? Yeah. Right. There's just a few things that I wanted to point out about it that are sort of common of the stories, right? That we see across the stories and perhaps also give you some understanding as to why these have become these are sort of tropes across the stories if you like. The evil stepmother, right? Well, part of that is part of that is ultimately rooted in the fact that there just were a lot of stepmothers out there in the early 19th century. You know, I didn't mention when I did this kind of comparative, this little talk comparing German to English romanticism and you might have noticed that I crossed out industrial revolution and Miguel had said something about, you know, this is kind of, there's a reaction and there certainly is in Blake, right, against the industrial revolution. This isn't to say that the German romantics don't react against kind of modern developments for lack of a better way of putting it in weaving, for example, or they do. But it doesn't make sense to talk about industrial revolution in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century end of the 18th century because there wasn't one. Germany doesn't industrialize until much later in the 19th century. So when we're talking about Germany at the beginning of the 19th century this isn't to say that there isn't kind of forestry, etc. But this is a place that in a much more profound way than certainly England is still covered in forests and is relatively speaking, a backwater with lower mortality rates more infant death during childbirth which is to say at the time there were a lot of stepmothers out there. Whether they were evil or not I don't know but that's just to give you sort of some explanation in the reality of another way in which Germany was quite different than say France I don't know not as much but an industrializing England at any rate. And Freud would like this story don't you think? Indeed psychoanalytic interpretations of Grimm's fairy tales are many if not that varied although new interpretations are more so. And certainly there's an argument to be made and this argument has been made that the electro complex is about in the family dynamic in Schnewitzchen. How might that work then? This was briefly introduced to you last week by Professor Hendricks electro complex I think opposite of Oedipus complex if you like God knows I can't give you a particularly nuanced explanation of it Christina do you see it? Electro complex in Snow White? Oh notable too right? Absent father where's the father? Common in these stories is that the father is absent. One interpretation that I've read that's interesting argues that the father is actually in the mirror and that through the mirror the father if you like is kind of encouraging the step mother to get rid of her opponent one interpretation Common also in these stories child abuse what do you think of the representation of women in the fairy tales generally there's a lot of women here maybe you have a reaction I mean what about Snow White I mean when is she going to get it? When is she going to figure out she probably should beware of the old woman probably shouldn't open the window you're going to be reading Angela Carter's bloody chamber and I should probably pitch this one to Miguel because he'll be lecturing on it and knows the text better than me but if I I've read some of it and that's what Carter's up to to a certain extent is trying to offer us different representations of female characters in sort of reworked stories fairy tales, fairy tale settings correct? So you'll be reading that you might want to think about the way in which women are represented in fairy tales Snow White specifically when we get to Angela Carter who says no we need to represent women in a way in which they aren't passive dim-witted housewives who are inevitably rescued by a male hero and there's also in perhaps uses of a reading that you'd like to develop for this week I think we have one question that would allow you to do this there's certainly some room here to develop readings that the return of the repressed in terms of narcissism plays a role and then there's this fetishistic voyeurism right? this idea of Prince Charming showing up talking to the dwarves and saying what do you want for the glass box with the dead chicken I want to take that with me I got to have that at any cost what are you going to do with it right? that's not said but there's something interesting going on there right in terms of owning this female the static female image this beautiful image at which for as long as I want I can simply sit and possess possess I'm going to leave it dangling no pun intended yeah that's right yeah well you're certainly going in the right direction you might want to develop that in an essay it sounds like it would be a really good one yeah in that case you know more than I I mean that may very well be that may very well be the case I don't know I just really wanted to use quite kind of suggestively and give you some of the background and make sure you have a clear understanding of where these fairy tales come from who was responsible for them and the role that they play in this sort of central desire among the romantics to create a sort of german cultural identity that's sort of pure and as you can see is a construct right many of these tales weren't german at all now I want to talk a little bit about blondek bird and give you a little genre lesson specifically on the novella so sorry that was a bit abrupt we're leaving snow white behind because what blondek bird is teaks blondek bird 1797 it's a mashin novella if you like a fairy tale novella now when I the book which has excellent translations in it for the most part by the way it's kind of cool too that you could look at the german maybe it'll encourage you to want to learn the language but to call these short stories is really an inadequate description because all of them are novellas and a novella I think needs to be understood in german in german terms as it is starting in the later part last few years of the 1700s it's a genre that german writers are really interested in indeed it is the narrative the prose narrative that's most popular we think of course when we think of longer prose narratives and the length is kind of not the issue here because these can be short as a few pages and as long as 70 it's not about the length but nevertheless this is the main prose narrative form the novella throughout the 18th century I'm sorry throughout the 19th century sorry throughout the 1800s and not the novel and so we see the novel developing sort of central place in other places prose narrative form for example in England but not in Germany I couldn't I couldn't mention more than six great german novels produced between 1780 and 1900 I couldn't mention more than six I could mention forty novellas part of the explanation for this is has to do with publishing and publishing costs and access to publishing at any rate the novella then within the german literary context has been theorized the question being what is it and sort of what distinguishes it from the short story from the novel what makes it special I'm going to actually skip over Boccaccio's Decameron which is 1353 creation of stories similar in style to what novellas are in the 18th century and get right to what the Germans say when they try to theorize what the novella is and it's more about content sort of topics than it is about length Goethe, he's the german Shakespeare really he's the most important literary figure in the history of the german literary figure he defined it it's characteristic as being the fact that it deals with or is centered on an unexpected and shocking event that's what a novella will have at the heart of it is an unexpected and shocking event Teek theorizes that this unexpected will be a turning point in the story in the narrative Heizer later in 1871 argues that there's a light motif that there's an object or a piece of music that's repeated certain junctures in the story and that understanding the role that that particular light motif plays is the key to unlocking what the novella is ultimately about that turning feature not the length Theodor Sturm also was a great novella writer but much later in sort of a period of german realism in the 1870s 80s and 90s said ultimately all novellas have in common a fact that they're structured or if you like organized like a drama so if you like it's a kind of a narrative that reads like a drama reads like a drama or a theater production unfolding in front of you that's interesting too because the romantics almost without exception wrote no dramas it really turned away from that and so it's interesting to speculate about the way in which sort of dramatic storytelling if you like became part of this prose form and Fritz Martini literary theorist writes in the 1980s that what these novellas almost without exception have in common is a psychologically peculiar character who tends to suffer from isolation and difficulties communicating sounds like someone we know right maybe Eckberg now Eckberg is probably the most famous of these Mearschen novellas that Tiek writes he writes a few others one of them is and I mean if we position it in terms of what we've already learned about German Romanticism it's got many of the sort of tropes that we would expect right you've got a knight, it's an old woman journey it's a child abuse abusive parent fairy tales tend to have that then there's this isolation this word Waldansamkeit not just isolation but the isolation that one experiences when one gets lost in the woods when one gets lost in a space that's indeterminate doesn't know where to go and there's magic and typically there's this abrupt ending especially to the story within the story right did you guys notice this Bert's story all of a sudden and then I married Eckberg and everything was alright and then if we think about it in terms of novellum theory what would the unexpected shocking event be does it fit, is there one what do you think is there one, is there one central sort of shocking event about everything which is pivotal within the story, can you find one what would you call it but you can think about it maybe you'll write on it yeah incest, oh my god is there incest in the story oh it is it is is that the turning point I'm not going to give it to you is there a light motif is there some particular what was that, is that your computer it won't stop laughing I won't take it personally is there a light motif in it what about the song right that's repeated you can argue that that would be it and certain interpreters have does it have a focused dramatic structure there are doubles is the tale uncanny and if so why I read it again for the first time in about 15 years and I had a sort of an uncanny response to it what about you did you say it's an uncanny story you're nodding your head what makes it an uncanny story yeah the reveal right the shocking moment the moment for example when Valter says for example oh yeah and taking care of Stromean and we've not heard the name yet that's that kind of shocking moment I think that still gets me I'm not going to develop these readings for you you're being asked to develop them yourself but I think all of this stuff is in there is it you think to what extent does it embody this kind of novellum theory and how would you develop an interpretation of it as as a novella is it important that it's a hybrid right in what way is it a hybrid of both the fairy tale and the novella just some questions it's been analyzed to death and one of and as Margaret Atkinson has pointed out seems to be a story that is resistant to analysis let's see how you do rush through that I do want to get through the Kleist and Kleist is a bit of a singular figure so again not a very smooth transition he's writing at the time of the German Romantics and there are disabilities in his work certainly outlier in a number of ways first of all I mentioned a couple of minutes ago that reduce almost no drama with one exception Kleist whose broken jug is arguably the greatest comedy in German dramatic tradition a little bit about Kleist he was very his life easily distressed easily disbared character came from Prussian military noble family was in the Prussian military from 1792 until he resigned in 1799 never seemed to be able to settle down I think that this is also communicated to a certain extent in his stories there's a certain restlessness in the prose itself it strikes me moved numerous crisis that Kleist had personally to Kant's philosophy or rather to a misreading of it in a few minutes because I think understanding this moment of crisis philosophically is important to understanding what's special about Kleist he was a fervent German patriot a nationalist but it was ultimately disillusioned by French occupation Napoleon swept through Europe occupied Germany indeed all of it in the early years of the 1800s and at one point he was imprisoned as a spy and his restless often despairing unhappy life ended at all lakes ringing Berlin when he still Henrietta Fogel who wanted to commit suicide and then shot himself there are a couple of other interesting points about Kant as an outlier someone who's unlike any of the other writers at the time certainly his prose style is unique and I think that even shows through in the English translation which is quite good what would you say about the writing of earthquake and chewing is there anything that struck you while reading it about it stylistically so many tears can you explain a little bit more what you mean by tears I don't think you mean what I cry when I realize I have to lecture again this week yeah okay well we're gonna have to talk a little bit about what religious is about it but concentrating on the style the style of the writing yeah your hand is up great really impressionistic can you elaborate on that a little bit the the editor describes it as volcanic volcanic style and content what do you find volcanic style and content of Kleist's earthquake in Chile what does that even mean yeah well I mean this is typical of Kleist these explosive moments of violence things will be ticking along at a certain pace and then all of a sudden boom child gets grabbed and its brains are crushed against the pillar we're told how the blood spurts out everywhere no one else is writing like that that's Kleist so volcanic in that sense it's not volcanic but there's a certain breathlessness breathlessness about the prose I mean if we look at if we look at the very first sentence look at the way the clauses one clause on top of the other we're told so much in so little space all of these facts in Santiago the capital of the kingdom of Chile at the very moment of the great earthquake of the year 1647 in which many thousands of people perished a young Spaniard accused of a crime by name was standing by a pillar in the prison in which he had been confined and was about to hang himself and that's Kleist right I mean Kleist is as if he's in a hurry he's going to tell you everything and he's just going to keep almost as if he wrote it in sort of one sitting in some feverish state it's very distinctive of the way he writes the German is even more breathless in that sense and there's nobody else that writes like him in the entire German tradition so that's also a way in which he's quite a unique writer I also don't think that it doesn't make any sense to try to interpret Christ without understanding this Kant crisis and to get our head around the way in which Kleist responded to reading Kant's critique of pure reason we talked a little bit about transcendental idealism and the way in which this sort of shook thinking in Europe when it was produced this is the way Kleist talks about it in a letter to his sister and her friend if all men had green glasses instead of their eyes they would be led to say that all objects are green almost despairing we cannot determine if what we call truth is really truth or whether it only seems so if the latter is correct then the truth we are able to gather on this earth will no longer be valid after death so how can I ultimately live in such a way as to secure my afterlife to spare and all of our efforts to acquire patrimony accompanying us to the halls of death on null and void in 1801 how can there be any truth what do I ultimately then live my life in accordance with if there are no absolute principles out there against which to to ultimately define my life this kind of despair about an inability the incapacity of human beings you know to find stable meaning in a world in the world it's also important I think to understand that Kleist here is writing about a real event or rather he's engaging in a discussion about that event and that event is the greatest natural disaster of the 1700s this is the point at the bottom here the ongoing intellectual debate in response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 I'm going to skip the stuff about the the novella and also about his Rousseauism because we'll get to that in a minute so earthquake and the tsunami that hit the capital of Portugal Lisbon in 1955 on All Saints Day killed the estimate is between 30,000 and 40,000 people of the population of 200,000 and out of it developed an intellectual discussion about what an earthquake, how an earthquake like that should be understood in terms of theology in terms of God's relationship to man this painting of the event if you look at where the arrow is holds a sword is an event like that divine justice the kinds of discussions that were going on if God is all benevolent if he's a good God and a just God how could he unleash or for that matter allow such events to happen in the world these are the kinds of questions that are being asked in the wake of this cataclysmic event how could a world in which such events occur be the best of all possible worlds this is what the German philosopher Leibniz asserted earlier in the 18th century the world in which we live is the best of all possible worlds God has made it so if it could be better it would be it's the best of all possible worlds a sort of very positive view on the world in which we live probably instructive to look at the way in which Voltaire and Rousseau responded to the events I'll tell you with both of these guys Voltaire one of the French philosophers Rousseau was a friend and at times they entered into what perhaps we could call heated debate on certain subjects and Voltaire in a poem wrote on the Lisbon disaster also called an examination of that axiom all as well referring to Leibniz and Leibniz assertions that were best of all possible worlds Voltaire refers to deluded philosophers who cry all as well when this happens how can we consider this the best of all possible worlds how can we say that all is well in the world later will you say this is a result of eternal laws directing the acts of a free and good God this is the kind of thing people were talking about what do we do in the wake of a tragedy like this Aster that kills this many people wipes out third of the population and then Voltaire says what crime, what error did these children crushed and bloody on their mother's breasts commit what could people how could this be sort of retribution to behalf or how could anybody earn such retribution how could this be somehow deserved Rousseau's response in the following year is interesting too he asks Voltaire to concede for example that it was hardly nature that they are brought together 20,000 houses six or seven stores the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all and then he says I've suffered too much in this life not to look forward to another no metaphysical subtleties caused me to doubt a time of immortality for the soul and the beneficial providence I sense it, I believe it, I wish it and I will uphold it until my last grasp so we see Rousseau again here consistent with what we read in the second discourse arguing hey listen it's ultimately civilization that's responsible or man wasn't civilized and pushing to man didn't live in these states where people were living on top of one another then the losses would have been far fewer this is just to give you some idea of the discussion in the wake the intellectual discussion in the wake of this Lisbon earthquake there's no doubt that as much as this is an earthquake in Chile Christus Lisbon earthquake for example earlier is it Geronimo was in the Carvalite monastery which has been destroyed and this Carvalite monastery was destroyed during the Lisbon earthquake there are other connections it's clear that he's engaging in sort of discussion or entering into this discussion I'll be quite a bit later about this earthquake so how is he ultimately coming out then on what side is Christ coming out is he with Rousseau in the story civilization equals corruption nature or some sort of nascent society is needed how would you respond to that would you say that the earthquake in Chile is a Rousseauian text is that what Christ is advocating and if that's the case is he with Rousseau on this if that's the case what in the text supports that yeah I mean this has certainly been argued right you get this kind of middle section this valley of Eden and that reading was developed in the 1940s you know exactly this is a Rousseauian text I mean ultimately what Christ is advocating is a return to that sort of nascent society that we get in the second discourse where everybody class distinctions have broken down because those are artificial and those are ultimately they come with society, the establishment of society and for that brief moment there in the middle of the story it seems like we get a glimpse of what that nascent society might look like upper class helping lower class what about Voltaire then how can we understand God as omnibenevolent and this world is the best possible when such apparently arbitrary violence explodes without warning because it does right I mean the way in which you've sort of described the Rousseauian reading is right on the money I think we were talking this morning you could sort of almost see it in terms of Rousseau in the middle versus Hobbes at the end there's almost this kind of return to nature at the end right and that comes with civilization and in the center this is ideal for nascent society there's no doubt though there's an arbitrariness about which events transpire and the chance plays a role and nobody's deserved this to happen does anybody deserve to be punished so I'm going to run out of time but I think the class is ultimately up to something else and I think as legitimate as a Rousseauian reading is the best way to get at what he's up to is to actually look at the narrator and that's one and you look at more literature you are going to have to come up to terms with that the narrator is not the author and try to understand how the narrator responds ultimately to the events in the narrative and I would say the point here is not Kleist's opinion on the meaning of the events but rather the characters and narrators unsuccessful attempts to give them consistent meaning ultimately shown here and because I'm running out of time I can't go into much depth are both characters and the narrator reacting through the narrative to what's happening and trying to make sense of it and ultimately being unsuccessful in doing so so if you like the point of the story is interpretation itself and this isn't hard to understand in terms of Kleist who's shaken his Kant crisis who despairs of a lack of firm ground in terms of meaning in the world communicating this through a story in which both characters and narrators try to make sense of an event and ultimately can't this isn't my argument it's an argument that was made in the 1980s a Germanist at the University of Santa Clara by the name of John Ellis and as he puts it throughout a quote, the narrator struggles to understand the story forming one view of it after another and visibly abandoning his character he's not a narrator he's constantly trying out new constants of the events nothing he says at any one moment is conclusive which makes it extremely difficult to come up with a consistent interpretation positive or negative regarding let's say what God might be doing with such events and just a few things that you might want to focus on and if you look at the story closely and that would challenge you to do so see what this interpretation, whether it stands up you'll notice that the narrator is it turns factual and opinionated the opening sentences he seems to be looking around and just communicating what he sees but by the middle section he seems to be coming out very much in favor of what's happening in this valley this kind of nascent society and that something good is coming out of this and that the unjust have been punished and the just have been spared and given a new opportunity develops you might say for the first 13 pages the opinion that God's judgment came down to those deserving it the intolerant viceroy for example and to reconcile the fact that the viceroy survived for example with the facts that looting is rampant and that the innocent are being murdered in the aftermath if we look a little bit later again he seems to be trying to weigh in the moment what's going to happen as he enters the Dominican church his description is first full of foreboding discussion of these mysterious shadows and then he switches very suddenly and he does this throughout the narrative to a description that seems quite positive a flame of ardor leaping up to heaven by the congregation and then of course after that we know what happens this melee ensues that ultimately turns on the fact that the priest engages in this kind of overly committed and loquacious gets too excited about God's judgment which unleashes this rabble again the change hinges on this if you like overzealousness I'll have to let you go I can't keep you any longer I'll leave it at that oh one last thing as you're leaving and that would be please don't understand the German isolation as something that happened between this year and a year 30 or 40 years down the road and so I leave you with this question try to think about the way in which German romanticism might have influenced Nazism and this is something I'll follow up on later in the course