[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: January 25, 2008]
Last November, in an article called A First Map of Bohemia, I made the case that all the American and European artistic/bohemian undergrounds are traceable back to the work and manners of a few penniless friends in 1830s Paris. From la Jeune France to today's remnants of the "hip" is, I claimed, a direct and continuous line.
I don't depart from that, but I've always had a nagging doubt about the Germans.
About a specific circle of German writers in particular. After all, didn't a group of young romantics gather at the feet of Goethe, some thirty or more years before the famous Hernani battle in Paris? Didn't they take his overwrought novella, Young Werther, as a clarion call to a short life of heedless aestheticised passion?
So what about these Frühromantiker, the early German romantics. Were they Bohemians, and if not why not?
In that earlier piece, I gave a provisional sketch of Bohemia: "Artistic aspiration, sufficiently unsuccessful to command outsider status, combined with relative poverty, eccentricity of dress and behavior, drug and alcohol use - not to mention the more complicated subjects of sexual experimentation and "camp" - all experienced as a communal activity, and almost always in a central urban environment."
Community, at least, was central to the concerns of this German group, and a surprising degree of sexual community too. But let's meet them.
The central core, who worked intensely together in Jena for a few years at the end of the eighteenth century: the Schlegel brothers, Wilhelm and Friedrich; Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, the theologian (and, I suppose, critical theorist) Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Ludwig Tieck.
Friedrich Schlegel and Hardenberg, who had met at law-school in Leipzig, were in their mid-twenties, as was Tieck, during this period of aesthetic hyper-activity; the elder Schlegel, Wilhelm, and Schleiermacher were just turned thirty. Even younger, and on the edge of the circle, was the prodigy philosopher Friedrich Schelling.
In this place and time, everybody seemed to know everybody. Schelling had previously studied at Tübingen where he sang the Marseillaise with the young Hegel and Hölderlin, and everyone made the pilgrimage to Weimar to pay homage to Goethe and Schiller, grand statesmen of literature who had passed through their own "romantic" phases.
We perceive these figures, if at all, through a sort of gothic haze of mediaevalism and Grimm-like fairy-tales, and perhaps some hazy notions of Idealist philosophy. In fact, the copious sources of correspondence and journals tell a great deal about their personal lives. Some were dogged, in particular, by sexual controversy.
At Leipzig, Hardenberg and Friedrich Schlegel seduced two daughters of a prominent local family, one married. The young Schlegel also became involved with Caroline Böhmer, by all accounts a formidable and highly intellectual woman who - sign of the times - never became a published writer herself. But she did go on to marry, in turn, the elder Schlegel and the young philosopher Schelling; Schelling himself seems to have been interested too in Caroline's daughter, Auguste, who died of dysentery pretty much under Schelling's philosophical care.
The private lives of the circle attracted scandal somewhat; even more so were they regarded as political radicals and potentially dangerous atheists. In his journal The Athenaeum, published between 1798 and 1800, Friedrich Schlegel published fragmentary essays by himself and Hardenberg, warmly acknowledging the French revolution, setting out philosophical arguments in support of republicanism and democracy, and forcefully promoting female equality (they opposed, in particular, the right of primogeniture).
These early writings are shot through with a mystical religiosity, but of a kind which must have struck many readers as distinctly un-Christian. The philosophical teacher of the group was Johann Fichte, ultimately expelled from his teaching post at Jena for atheism. Fichte's extreme Idealism subsumed the whole of reality into an "other" ultimately posited by the Absolute Ego. The only apparent place for "god" within such a system would seem to be a pantheist omnipresence, and Spinozist pantheism was an even stronger influence on Schleiermacher's theological writings.
Philosophically, the young members of the group were skeptical of Fichte's solipsism; politically they were skeptical of formulaic liberalism. To the extent they had a unified program - and the time working together was really too brief - they promoted individual emancipation within an evolving community held together by poetic-mystical bonds.
Hardenberg himself - dead from tuberculosis at twenty-nine - is best remembered as the author of philosophical-romantic poetry (Die Hymnen an die Nacht) and a poetic novel (Heinrich von Ofterdingen). He also produced a substantial and unpublished critique of Fichtean idealism which is extraordinarily prophetic of later insights into the social/public and even structural basis of language. Some commentators even find a proto-Derridean understanding of all language as essentially unstable - in Hardenberg's terms, poetic.
The rosy dawn passed as the century turned. Hardenberg dead; Hölderlin mad; Wilhelm Schlegel embarked on the vast project of translating Shakespeare; Friedrich Schlegel turning to a career as an increasingly reactionary lecturer and writer in Berlin and Paris; Schelling's attempt at an Idealist philosophy involving nature giving way to the monolithic system of Hegel.
It's an old saying that the two most direct routes out of Bohemia lead to the academy and the grave. The Frühromantiker, in true Bohemian form, either succumbed or became conservatives. But why not Bohemians? For one thing, they weren't economically marginalised. The Schlegels and Schelling readily found work as teachers, writers and editors (Tieck went on to edit hugely popular editions of German fairy tales). Hardenberg was actually a trained scientist, working in the mining industry.
The sexual indiscretions were scandalous for the time, but essentially conventional. There were no diatribes against religion. And, aside from youthful escapades in bierkellers, we don't find the rivers of drink and stashes of drugs associated with Bohemia from Baudelaire on.
Above all, this was not an urban group. They weren't brought together, as later, true Bohemian groups were, by inexpensive housing in deadbeat districts - Montparnasse, London's Soho, the Lower East Side. They were untouched by the urban experience of creating art alongside the working, and indeed idle poor; of meeting in bars and cabarets because they were warm and lit by more than a candle. As far as I can tell from my reading, they didn't pass through criminal or gay milieus.
An attractive grouplet - in its youth at least - they left writings which are fragmentary - deliberately so - dense, often unfinished, difficult. A general history of German romanticism and Idealist philosophy would be wonderful to read - and would take many years to write.
They had Jena - a small university city. What might they have done if, in their twenties, they'd had Paris?
Among many sources: Frederick C. Beiser has translated many of the key early essays and articles in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1996). There are fuller selections of Novalis's theoretical work in Mahony Stoljar's edition of his Philosophical Writings (Albany, 1997). The first two hundred pages of Robert J. Richards' The Romantic Conception of Life (University of Chicago, 2002) tells the Jena story. And for a deep dive into Novalis, Wm. Arctander Brown, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Duke Unversity Press, 1995).
