German Romanticism

Compared to English Romanticism, the German variety developed relatively early, and, in the opening years, coincided with Weimar Classicism (1772–1805).

[3] Late-stage German Romanticism emphasized the tension between the daily world and the irrational and supernatural projections of creative genius.

[3] A major product of the invasion and military occupation, beginning under the First French Republic and continuing under Napoleon, of the traditionally politically and religiously balkanized Germanosphere was the development of Pan-Germanism and romantic nationalism, which eventually created the German Confederation of 1815 and the German Empire of 1871.

German Romanticism was accordingly rooted in both the quest, epitomized by Baron Joseph von Laßberg, Johann Martin Lappenberg, and the Brothers Grimm, for decolonisation, a distinctly German culture, and national identity, and hostility to certain ideas of The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the First French Empire.

Several major Romantic thinkers, especially Ernst Moritz Arndt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, embraced many elements of Counter-Enlightenment political philosophy and were hostile to Classical liberalism, rationalism, neoclassicism, and cosmopolitanism,[4] Other Romantics, like Heine, were fully in support of the German Revolutions of 1848.