On Germany

[1] It surveys modern German literature and philosophy, praising writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jean Paul and Friedrich Schiller.

Like Friedrich Schlegel, Staël views Romantic literature as modern, because its roots are in the chivalric culture of the Middle Ages, and not in the classical models of ancient Greece and Rome.

Staël writes in favour of literature rooted in Christian culture, which is defined by its preference for the internal life, as practised in the confession.

Segments have been translated by Vivian Folkenflik and published by Columbia University Press in An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (1987), where the English title is On Germany.

The scholar John Claiborne Isbell compares its impact to that of Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830), which was seen as a "triumph of Romantic art",[2] writing: "Romanticism outside Germany dates its conscious existence from De l'Allemagne: recognising its pivotal role will give France back twenty stolen years of literary history, and restore the missing origin of this Europe-wide transformation of art and society.