Version classiqueVersion mobile

From Goethe to Gundolf

 | 
Roger Paulin

Romanticism

8. Fairy stories for very sophisticated children

Ludwig Tieck’s Phantasus1

Texte intégral

  • 1  An earlier version of this chapter was published in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Librar (...)

Fig. 11 Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva (1820–84), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

Fig. 11 Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva (1820–84), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

1No movement spoke more of children, their simplicity and innocence, or the symbolic significance of children and youth, than did the German Romantics. Yet by the same token, never was such childlike simple-heartedness expressed with greater sophistication or invested with more subliminal meaning. Romantic iconography, as perhaps the most accessible of the movement’s art forms, bears this out. Philipp Otto Runge’s best-known paintings of children, The Hülsenbeck Children, Rest on the Flight to Egypt and the final version of Morning, place the newborn or the young into a cyclical process of transience and renewal. The symbolic flowers that accompany the images of children are guarantors of the mystical pervasiveness of divine love, seen, at several neo-platonic removes from its ideal source and centre, in the lasting values of marriage and family life. Runge contributed two Low German stories to the most famous of all German collections for children, the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen/Grimms’ Fairy Tales. This is not the place to discuss those two tales, Von den Fischer un siine Fru/The Fisherman and His Wife and Van den Machandel-Boom/The Juniper Tree, or the context in which they stand. Yet no-one today, despite the dedication of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to the real child of real friends (Bettina von Arnim and her son Johannes Freimund) and the later intermarriage of the two families, regards the collection as naive.

  • 2  See Chapter 7 in this volume.
  • 3  Franz and Johannes Riepenhausen, Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (Frankfurt am Main: Varrentra (...)
  • 4  Clemens Brentano, ‘Erklärung der Sinnbilder auf dem Umschlage dieser Zeitschrift’, in Werke, ed. b (...)

2True, the artist member of the Grimm family, Ludwig Emil, did in the frontispiece and vignettes do his best to foster a kind of naivety through a deliberately stylized lack of sophistication. But neither the early editions, nor the revised one of 1840, could be read without their prefaces, with their scholarly credo, and in the case of the later revision, their unrepentant affirmation of academic freedom.2 Ludwig Emil Grimm had also done the frontispiece for an earlier Romantic collection for children: Kinderlieder/Nursery Rhymes (1808), the third part of the famous Des Knaben Wunderhorn/The Boy’s Magic Horn compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Ludwig Emil was at that stage still in his teens and not yet fully in charge of his individual style. Yet students of the Romantic engraving will not fail to notice the connection with those done in 1806 by the Riepenhausen brothers for Ludwig Tieck’s Genoveva3 and the use of the sweetish faux-naif in the service of piety and simplicity of heart. The Kinderlieder themselves were not free of this kind of concession to the religious connotations of folk custom. They were, however, also a record of the local variants of children’s rhymes and of verse enactments by and for children. They had a basis in the wider context of popular oral and written culture that German Romanticism also sought both to compile and foster. Some of these verses came later to be interpolated into a work by another member of this extended clan: Brentano. His Gockel Hinkel Gackeleia of 1838, a re-telling of Italian fairytales, with plates provided by Ludwig Emil Grimm and others, is part of Brentano’s late religious and poetic symbolism, where poetry is the ladder that leads through the sufferings of this world into eternity. And Brentano was, as an earlier essay of his shows, aware even at this level of the complementary functions of icon and extrapolated significance.4

3Tieck, although Runge’s vignettes for his Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter/Love Songs from the Swabian Era (1803) associate him with this thematic complex, was less concerned with the multivalence of symbolic or mythological iconography. Having introduced Runge to Jacob Böhme and the hermetic tradition in which he stands, Tieck withdrew from what seemed too disjunct a view of the world, one too sharply divided into the symbols of light and darkness. Tieck could not embrace Runge’s child-like and implicit faith through which alone these seeming disharmonies might be resolved. But he had stated (or had had a character state) in his most-read and most influential book for the younger generation, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen/Franz Sternbald’s Journeyings (1798):

  • 5  ‘All art is allegorical. […] What can man depict, sufficiently in itself, separate and forever rem (...)

Alle Kunst ist allegorisch. […] Was kann der Mensch darstellen, einzig und für sich bestehend, abgesondert und ewig geschieden von der übrigen Welt, wie wir die Gegenstände vor uns sehn? Die Kunst soll es auch nicht: wir fügen zusammen, wir suchen dem einzelnen einen allgemeinen Sinn aufzuheften, und so entsteht die Allegorie. Das Wort bezeichnet nichts anders als die wahrhafte Poesie, die das Hohe und Edle sucht und es nur auf diesem Wege finden kann.5

  • 6  ‘Deeper significance, free balance and graceful accentuation’. Brentano, ‘Erklärung der Sinnbilder (...)
  • 7  ‘ “Pointing to the higher, never-ending”. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Gespräch über die Poesie’, in Athen (...)
  • 8  ‘The painter is not merely to paint what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees in himself (...)

4Brentano echoed this fourteen years later in stressing ‘Die tiefere Bedeutung, dasfreieGleichgewichtunddiezierlicheZusammenstellung’6 of symbolic icons, free of conventional associations, yet concrete, not ethereal. This is central Romantic doctrine, akin to that ‘Hindeutung auf das Höhere, Unendliche’7 of Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch uber die Poesie/Conversation on Poetry in Athenaeum (1800) or Novalis‘s aphoristic definition of ‘Romantisieren’. True allegorical art will be co-extensive with true Romantic art in that it is the things and objects accessible to the finite mind and senses that will supply the link to a higher perception and will point to the absolute. It is Caspar David Friedrich‘s later quasi-mystical insight, in respect of this higher function of art: ‘Der Maler soll nicht bloß malen, was er vor sich sieht, sondern auch, was er in sich sieht’.8

  • 9  All references to Phantasus are taken from Ludwig Tieck, Schriften in zwölf Bänden, ed. by Manfred (...)
  • 10  Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten/Conversations of German Émigrés of 1795 and Wiela (...)

5Tieck returned to these notions of allegory in a seemingly unexpected place, the discussion of ‘Märchen’ (‘Fairytales’) in the first part of his Phantasus (1812).9 A brief description of this work, published in Berlin in three parts between 1812 and 1816, may be appropriate. Its subtitle, ‘Eine Sammlung von Mährchen, Erzählungen, Schauspielen und Novellen, herausgegeben von Ludwig Tieck’ (‘a collection of fairytales, tales, plays and novellas, edited by Ludwig Tieck’), is not without the agreeable irony of that fictional editorship. For the author of all the works is none other than Tieck himself. The device was not new: in 1798, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen also bore ‘herausgegeben von Ludwig Tieck’ on its title page (a ploy borrowed from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister). But in those days, the imparting of the sacred truths of art demanded self-effacement, like the common venture with Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder of 1796, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders/Heart’s Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, innocent of all authorial attribution. Now, in 1812–16, the irony was one of distance from works, once associated with his name over a period of some fifteen to twenty years, that he was now ‘editing’ with commentary, and subjecting to the scrutiny of a sophisticated country-house gathering. That society, full of literary associations to its very fingertips, is in its turn ironically aware of playing a literary game first invented by Giovanni Boccaccio (sharing their creator’s prejudice for the pre-1789 Goethe, the assembled persons overlook Goethe’s recent revival of the form for Germany, or Christoph Martin Wieland’s).10

  • 11  [Thomas Carlyle], German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London: Ta (...)
  • 12  Der Blaubart is a dramatic adaptation of Bluebeard, in prose. Originally published in 1796, it was (...)
  • 13  These are Die Geschichte von den Heymons Kindern, Denkwürdige Geschichtschronik der Schildbürger, (...)

6It is fair to say that the re-publication of his various earlier works in Phantasus (itself reprinted in 1828) gave them a cohesion that they had lacked before; augmented by three more in a slightly different vein, they establish the essential corpus of the Romantic tale of wonder or terror before it becomes associated with E.T.A. Hoffmann or Arnim, not to speak of less fastidious devotees of the mode. Five of them are the ones chosen by Thomas Carlyle in 182711 to signal the, for him, most significant developments in modern German short prose fiction: Der blonde Eckbert/ Fair-Haired Eckbert, Der getreue Eckart/Faithful Eckart, Der Runenberg/The Rune Mountain, Die Elfen/The Elves and Der Pokal/The Goblet (without, however, the uncanniest of all, Liebeszauber/Love’s Magic). But included in Phantasus would be other, discrete works, some of which specifically bore the subtitle ‘Märchen’, such as the dramatic adaptations of Charles Perrault, Rothkäppchen/Red Riding Hood, Der Blaubart/Bluebeard, Der gestiefelte Kater/Puss in Boots and Däumchen/Hop o’ My Thumb.12 The long (and somewhat tedious) chapbook adaptation, Fortunat, is also subtitled ‘Ein Märchen’. This placed it in a category with Die schöne Magelone/ Fair Magelone, the other ‘Volksbuch’ reworking, given here pride of place over a number of earlier ones now excluded.13 The tone of the collection thus appears to be dominated by a wide and commodious definition of fairytale. The 125 pages of introductory conversation in volume one that precede the reading and discussion of the stories, is not essentially restricted to matters of genre or tone. And it is here that Tieck comes the closest in his middle years to defining what ‘Märchen’ means and what it takes in or excludes.

  • 14  Popular Fairy Tales, ed. by Peter Leberecht, 3 vols (Berlin: Carl August Nicolai, 1797).
  • 15  The title pages read: Der gestiefelte Kater. Kindermärchen in drei Akten, mit Zwischenspielen, ein (...)
  • 16  August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846 (...)
  • 17  Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva. Ein Trauerspiel. In: Romantische Dichtungen von Ludwig Tieck, (...)

7A number of these works, prose or drama, had appeared first in 1796 in a collection called Volksmährchen/Folktales.14 That they manifestly were folktales only in respect of the traditions of other nations, or that they teased and tweaked the reader with fictitious places of publication such as ‘Bergamo’ or ‘Istambul’, need not concern or surprise us unduly.15 Johann Carl August Musäus, whose tone of ironic archness is a source of particular irritation to the Tieck of Phantasus, had called his collection of 1782–86 Volksmärchen der Deutschen/German Folktales, and this they too by no means all were. The early Tieck was scrupulous enough to recall that all adaptations — whether from German sources or others — were in a sense ‘popular’. Only, the ironic, bantering, witty aside-taking of the reader occasionally suggested the sophistication of the Cabinet des fées or even the French rococo, and the introduction of stock figures from the commedia dell’arte was doubtless rooted in Tieck’s precocious reading of Carlo Gozzi as a schoolboy. The circle of young literary men and women in Berlin and Jena, who saw themselves as creating a new awareness of poetry, poetic tradition, and the poetic process, and who were to call themselves ‘Romantic’, saw Tieck’s ‘Märchen’ as a demonstration of what they, too, were striving for. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s review of Ritter Blaubart/Sir Bluebeard (as it was then known) and Der gestiefelte Kater in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in 179716 can with justification be seen as one of the important first links forged between Tieck and the Jena circle. The continuation of the Volksmährchen that came out in 1799–1800, now bore the name of Romantische Dichtungen/Poetic Works in a Romantic Vein. And it would be fair to say that, for Tieck at least, ‘Romantic’ was indeed synonymous with three elements of his early works summed up in these titles: ‘Volksdichtung’, but its adaptation in a succession of sophisticated self-mirrorings (as in his Romantic legend drama Genoveva);17 ‘Märchen’, but in the widest sense, giving fullest rein to the creative imagination; and as the movement’s name of ‘Romantic’ implied, the receptive and eclectic drawing on a wide range of poetic traditions from the Middle Ages to the present.

  • 18  ‘Devout pilgrimage’. Phantasus, 15.

8In that sense, ‘Märchen’, as he was to define it in the exchange of opinions in Phantasus, was part of Tieck’s wider programme of literary renewal and reception. The dedication of Phantasus to August Wilhelm Schlegel, with its reminder of their once close association, reinforces the connection. The themes, the old and new loves, but also the prejudices that are rehearsed in the framework discussion in Phantasus, are a catalogue of his literary interests over more than a generation, often of his unrepentant advocacy, against all the evidence, of the influences he considered to be formative on his youthful poetic development. They need not concern us here, except in the sense that the discussion of ‘Märchen’ is positioned amid a shifting swirl of images, all stations in a pilgrimage (Tieck uses the words ‘andächtige Wallfahrt’)18 to the scenes of old acquaintances and affections. The discussions are ‘framed’, but Tieck initiates inside each frame processes that inform of unfulfilled states, longing, reflections that constantly change perspective and dimension. Of that longing, ‘Sehnsucht’, a discussion partner speaks in these telling words:

  • 19  ‘ […] yes, there is an eternal youth, a longing that lasts forever, because it forever cannot be f (...)

[…] ja, es gibt eine ewige Jugend, eine Sehnsucht, die ewig währt, weil sie ewig nicht erfüllt wird; weder getäuscht noch hintergangen, sondern nur nicht erfüllt, damit sie nicht sterbe, denn sie sehnt sich im innersten Herzen nach sich selbst, sie spiegelt in unendlich wechselnden Gestalten das Bild der nimmer vergänglichen Liebe, das Nahe im Fernen, die himmlische Ferne im Allernächsten.19

9Thus the polyvalency of poetry is but part of this self-reflection, this reaching out in order to turn in on oneself, this self-discovery in all objects ‘out there’. In the same way, no landscape stands still, but shifts and undulates in the movement of the eye, always withholding new perspectives yet to be discovered, as music is lost even as the melodic line takes shape. And these two means of sensory perception join forces with the spoken word to produce, not merely a symposium of opinions and readings, but a synaesthesia.

  • 20  ‘The old romantic land’.

10By the same token, there is no contradiction in a work seemingly so devoted to the celebration of German traditions, for the whole to be ‘framed’, at the beginning and end of the discussion, between Italy and Spain. In the evocation of Lago Maggiore at the beginning (called ‘romantisch’), the Italian landscape seen through German eyes (as Goethe at that very moment was preparing to recall), we are reminded of how the Nazarenes, the school of German Romantic painters, enter into the sensuousness of Italy through a meticulousness that owes much to Dürer; and the ending in a ‘spanische Glosse’, a contrived technical strophic device, can nevertheless conjoin music, love and longing as one aesthetic experience. They remind us that ‘romantisch’ may also mean the lands of romance, ‘das alte romantische Land’20 of the opening to Wieland’s Ariostian verse epic Oberon of 1780. And without that ‘romance’ component, Tieck’s collection would lack its love story, Magelone; even its dramatized tale of human folly, Fortunat, draws on so many themes of common provenance in other literatures. The lowering, threatening and terrifying, as exemplified in the German forest landscape (Der blonde Eckbert, Der Runenberg) or enacted in the narrow lanes of a German town (Liebeszauber) are complemented by the wit, elegance and very sophisticated playfulness of Ludovico Ariosto or Perrault. This, too, is quintessentially Romantic. For the Schlegel brothers, the publication of Old French or Provençal texts was not subordinated to a preoccupation with things Germanic. And for Tieck, the ultimate in poetic incarnation, William Shakespeare, is unthinkable without the widest associations with the literature of the European Renaissance.

  • 21  ‘Mythical regions’. Phantasus, 18.
  • 22  ‘Gentle, flower-like wit’. Phantasus, 108.

11In a similar way, the landscapes invoked in the framework discussion serve a variety of functions. They are in one sense ‘real’, in that beholders stand in front of them and feel drawn to them. They are, however, extended as ‘mythische Gegenden’21 that summon up the widest and most varied sets of associations, human, artistic, musical. They become symbols of other poetic processes; the romantic landscape becomes the Romantic poem; its sinuosities and undulations, its relationship of near and far suggest the Romantic narrative and its constant reference beyond itself to unfulfilled desires and longings. But ruins, waterfalls, formal parks and English gardens all have associations with the widest manifestations of art forms, even when our aesthetic sense may be offended by eccentric invention or excrescence. Thus Ariosto’s ‘zarter, blumenartiger Witz’22 suggests the arabesque, Pedro Calderón the formal garden of French provenance, and Shakespeare, not surprisingly, the English park. Tieck does not exclude even the grotesque, the Bomarzo-style monstrosity, from the range of landscape evocation.

  • 23  ‘Life begins with fairytales’. Phantasus, 98.
  • 24  ‘A fairytale too’. Ibid.

12All this has significant implications both for Tieck’s definition of ‘Märchen’ and for his practice as a narrator. Wieland, in his Hexameron of 1800, for instance, had seen little distinction between short fiction narratives (‘Erzählung’) and ‘Märchen’. The first section of Phantasus (that is, after the introduction) and the one that contains the prose narratives in the collection, is preceded by two attempts to qualify ‘Märchen’, one real and the other allegorical. The group of literary friends and acquaintances wishes, before it hears fairy stories read aloud, to decide among itself what this art form is. But is it merely a phenomenon restricted to aesthetic or poetological criteria? Evidently not; for, a few pages earlier, it having been decided that their story-telling should begin with a ‘Märchen’, it had been variously described as relating to deeper processes of experience. ‘Mit Märchen […] fängt das Leben an’,23 one of the company volunteers; they are the means by which the child’s play and imagination take shape and form. But the spectacle of the sinking sun elicits the response: ‘Auch ein Märchen’.24 The onset of night, the stealing in of shadows, awaken the sense of longing for what is about to be lost forever from our sight. In its main discussion, the company proceeds from concrete examples: the ones some do not like (Hamilton’s in the Cabinet des fées or Musäus), the ones others do (Goethe, Novalis). If the witty rococo-style tale suffers all kinds of interruptions and interpolations, the real ‘Märchen’ calls for consistency of composition, and instead of that knowing cleverness, an innocence that is neither too obtrusive nor too mannered. This is where Goethe and Novalis reap praise, evidence, should any be needed, of Tieck’s manifestly literary preferences. The mention of Ariosto (literature again) elicits a double response: some find him lacking in shape and order, too fragmented, others defend his lightness of touch, his deft moves from one theme or adventure to another. As neither nature nor architecture can abide an excess of unheightened expanse, but require this to be broken and relieved, so Ariosto fulfils this decorative, arabesque-like function to perfection (here follows a disquisition on garden style).

  • 25  ‘Allegorical’. Phantasus, 113.

13The remaining general discussion is brief but crucial. If the ‘Märchen’ could hitherto be informed by the processes of the imagination and longing, its other side now comes to the fore. The ‘Märchen’ also comes about where our premonitions and intimations, our existential angst, take over and populate a landscape, symbolic or real, with the projections of our inner anxieties. The unnerving and ultimately terrifying aspect of such tales is that commonplace or banal objects are invested by the imagination with a significance beyond themselves. It is here that the word ‘allegorisch’25 occurs and the link is forged with central tenets of Romantic poetic theory. It is the awareness that no product of the imagination, no form of poetic expression of whatever kind, has substance without that higher referentiality.

  • 26  ‘Fright’, ‘sweet silliness’, ‘pleasantry’, ‘love’.
  • 27  Cf. modern examples of the anthropomorphic landscape in: Ferdinand Hodler, Landschaften, ed. by Os (...)
  • 28  Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth. Manier und Manie in der europäischen Kunst. Von 1520 bi (...)
  • 29  ‘Contentment’ and ‘revulsion’. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, XI, 136.
  • 30  ‘Spine-tingling horror’ and ‘awfulness’.
  • 31  Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 62, 358.

14Tieck is not Novalis (or Friedrich Schlegel). He is concerned less with the philosophical connotations of allegory than with its actual manifestation. How better to do this than in the allegorical poem, Phantasus, that follows. If the winged boy Phantasus has affinities with Puck or Ariel, it is also he who leads away from brooding introspection, book-learning and speculation, into a symbolic landscape. The plants and metals there, or the sunrise over all of nature, suggest Philipp Otto Runge’s world of higher significance, the glimpse of an ‘ldeenparadies’ in the symbolic progression from earth to heaven, from darkness to light. But Tieck’s imagination never becomes ethereal: we are still in the world of ‘Märchen’. Its allegorical denizens have names: ‘Schreck’, ‘liebe Albernheit’, ‘Scherz’ and ‘Liebe’.26 Only ‘Liebe’ shares affinities with Runge’s cosmic vision, as that force that is felt by all things, animate and inanimate alike. But here Tieck abruptly switches mythologies. True to the awareness that the universal may be hidden in the objects around us, Phantasus brings about the ultimate allegorical transference of meaning. The landscape of mountain, grotto and forest reveals itself as a huge head or face:27 it is the god Pan himself, ‘von allem der Erhalter’, the source and upholder of all things. Perhaps Tieck wishes less to strain the limits of allegory as to remind us — in a reminiscence of allusions that stretch from Hieronymus Bosch and François Rabelais or both Tassos to his contemporary Joseph Görres28 — that well-being and terror are never far from each other. In August Wilhelm Schlegel’s review of 1797, that realm had been characterized by the co-existence of these two, ‘Behagen’ and ‘Entsetzen’.29 But we must not overlook Tieck’s particular emphasis. Pan produces horror, it is true, ‘Graun’ and ‘Schauder’ (strong words)30 but also ‘Schreck’. Earlier in the poem it is ‘Schreck’ and ‘liebe Albernheit’, fright and agreeable silliness, who aid and abet each other in games of terror whose outcome is predictable but deliciously chilling all the same. And no-one is fonder of sheer ‘Albernheit’ than, by his own admission,31 Tieck himself. His Hop o’ My Thumb adaptation, Däumchen, for all its parodistic asides, is ample proof, if any were needed.

15It is true that the stories now read in the society tend towards the uncanny and the horrific. Der blonde Eckbert adds the fantastic for good measure, but fetches it back into our present consciousness in order to blur distinctions between imagination and reality, moral responsibility and malign contingency. Liebeszauber suggests that by looking in on any window in any back alley we may be confronted with visions of terror and obscenity, unmotivated and consuming, that may re-emerge as destructive, if avenging forces. It is thus significant that, of all the stories, Die schöne Magelone is provided with a preface. The garden or landscape symbols there are invoked anew in order to summon up, not terror, but the wondrous world of a past in which this exemplary love-story is situated. The aesthetic justification of renewal or modernization of an old story (with the attendant perils of the falsely archaic) must lie in the revocation of the near-paradisal state of lost innocence where once all things stood in harmony with each other, the world summoned up by Novalis in the Atlantis story in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. To tell of that innocence, unaffected by time or transience, must also be the function of the ‘Märchen’. It is the substance of some of Tieck’s most-quoted lines, from his adaptation of another ‘Volksbuch’, Kaiser Octavianus (1804):

  • 32  ‘Moonbeam-lit magic night,
    That holds the mind in thrall,
    Wondrous magic world,
    Rise up in glory as o (...)

Mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht,
Die den Sinn gefangen hält,
Wundervolle Märchenwelt,
Steig‘ auf in der alten Pracht !32

16These lines become a kind of poetic credo when chosen in 1828 to lead the procession of products of that imagination in volume one of Tieck’s own definitive edition of his works (Schriften) begun in that year. Titles like Romantische Dichtungen are no longer necessary: the symbolic evocation of the past and its wondrous harmony and unity, the celebration of the love and chivalry recorded in romance (of whatever provenance), also constitute ‘Märchen’ and are by definition ‘romantisch’. But we dare not overlook that that world of ‘Märchen’ has to co-exist with the panicked terror produced when the harmonious landscape that we see before us suddenly turns into one of the monsters in the Bomarzo garden.

Notes

1  An earlier version of this chapter was published in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 76 (1994), 59–68. On these aspects of Runge see Werner Hofmann, ‘Antiker und christlicher Mythos — Natursymbolik — Kinder — Familie und Freunde’ in the catalogue Runge in seiner Zeit (Hamburg, Kunsthalle and Munich: Prestel, 1977), 278–79, 288–9.

2  See Chapter 7 in this volume.

3  Franz and Johannes Riepenhausen, Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (Frankfurt am Main: Varrentrapp und Wenner, 1806).

4  Clemens Brentano, ‘Erklärung der Sinnbilder auf dem Umschlage dieser Zeitschrift’, in Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frühwald, Bernhard Gajek and Friedhelm Kemp, 4 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1963–68), II, 1046–54, esp. 1046.

5  ‘All art is allegorical. […] What can man depict, sufficiently in itself, separate and forever remote from the rest of the world, as we see the objects before us? Art also should not attempt it: we put together, we seek to attach a general meaning to the individual, and thus allegory comes into being. The word denotes nothing less than true poetry that seeks the high and noble and can only find it by this route’. Ludwig Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, ed. by Alfred Anger, Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 8715–21 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), 257f.

6  ‘Deeper significance, free balance and graceful accentuation’. Brentano, ‘Erklärung der Sinnbilder’, 1046.

7  ‘ “Pointing to the higher, never-ending”. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Gespräch über die Poesie’, in Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel, 3 vols (Berlin: Vieweg, 1798; Unger, 1799–1800), III, i, 121.

8  ‘The painter is not merely to paint what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees in himself’. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed. by Sigrid Hinz (Berlin: Henschel, 1984), 129.

9  All references to Phantasus are taken from Ludwig Tieck, Schriften in zwölf Bänden, ed. by Manfred Frank et al., 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-) VI.

10  Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten/Conversations of German Émigrés of 1795 and Wieland’s Hexameron von Rosenhain of 1800.

11  [Thomas Carlyle], German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London: Tait, 1827).

12  Der Blaubart is a dramatic adaptation of Bluebeard, in prose. Originally published in 1796, it was Tieck’s attempt at producing a ‘fantastic’ subject for the stage, along the lines of Gozzi. It was never a stage success, being too literary and too self-consciously aware of that literary quality. Der gestiefelte Kater, first published in 1797, is similarly a drama in prose. It is both a satire on the contemporary theatre and its bad taste, and a ‘play within a play’ with audience participation. Many critics have taken it to illustrate the principles of Romantic irony, particularly on account of its deliberate breaking of dramatic illusion. Rothkäppchen appeared in 1800. This time in verse, this little play introduces more direct satire on conventional piety and popular philosophy, with the wolf as ‘sansculotte’ into the bargain. Däumchen was first published in Phantasus in 1812. Here there is much more literary satire, including some unlikely mixtures, such as the classical trimeter and the Arthurian court.

13  These are Die Geschichte von den Heymons Kindern, Denkwürdige Geschichtschronik der Schildbürger, and Sehr wunderbare Historie von der Melusina.

14  Popular Fairy Tales, ed. by Peter Leberecht, 3 vols (Berlin: Carl August Nicolai, 1797).

15  The title pages read: Der gestiefelte Kater. Kindermärchen in drei Akten, mit Zwischenspielen, einem Prologe und Epiloge von Peter Leberecht. Aus dem Italienischen. Erste unverbesserte Auflage. Bergamo 1797. In Commission bei Onario Senzacolpa. Die sieben Weiber des Blaubart. Eine wahre Familiengeschichte herausgegeben von Gottlieb Färber. Istambul, bey Heraklius Murusi Hofbuchhändler der hohen Pforte; im Jahr der Hedschrah 1212.

16  August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846–47), XI, 136–50.

17  Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva. Ein Trauerspiel. In: Romantische Dichtungen von Ludwig Tieck, 2 vols (Jena: Frommann, 1799–1800), II, 1–272.

18  ‘Devout pilgrimage’. Phantasus, 15.

19  ‘ […] yes, there is an eternal youth, a longing that lasts forever, because it forever cannot be fulfilled; neither deceived nor betrayed, but only not fulfilled, so as not to die, for it longs in its innermost heart for itself, it mirrors in an endlessly changing array of figures the image of a love that never passes away, the near in the distant, heavenly distance in that which is the very closest’. Phantasus, 33.

20  ‘The old romantic land’.

21  ‘Mythical regions’. Phantasus, 18.

22  ‘Gentle, flower-like wit’. Phantasus, 108.

23  ‘Life begins with fairytales’. Phantasus, 98.

24  ‘A fairytale too’. Ibid.

25  ‘Allegorical’. Phantasus, 113.

26  ‘Fright’, ‘sweet silliness’, ‘pleasantry’, ‘love’.

27  Cf. modern examples of the anthropomorphic landscape in: Ferdinand Hodler, Landschaften, ed. by Oskar Bätschmann et al., Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft (Zurich: Verlagshaus Zürich, 1987), 42f.; Max Klinger, Wege zum Gesamtkunstwwerk (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1984), 221.

28  Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth. Manier und Manie in der europäischen Kunst. Von 1520 bis 1650 und in der Gegenwart, rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie 50–51, 2 vols (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), I, 86f.; Elisabeth Stopp, ‘Die Kunstform der Tollheit: zu Clemens Brentanos und Joseph Görres‘ “BOGS der Uhrmacher”’, in Clemens Brentano. Beiträge des Kolloquiums im Freien Deutschen Hochstift 1978, ed. by Detlev Lüders (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), 358–76, esp. 375.

29  ‘Contentment’ and ‘revulsion’. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, XI, 136.

30  ‘Spine-tingling horror’ and ‘awfulness’.

31  Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 62, 358.

32  ‘Moonbeam-lit magic night,
That holds the mind in thrall,
Wondrous magic world,
Rise up in glory as of old!’
Kaiser Octavianus. Ein Lustspiel in zwei Theilen von Ludwig Tieck (Jena: Frommann, 1804), 35.

Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 11 Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva (1820–84), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/24335/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 156k

CC-BY-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Acheter

Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search