Famously, the sociologist Max Weber described the rational, enlightened age as "disenchanted": Unlike "the savage," he claimed, who uses "magical means" for manipulating "mysterious incalculable powers," the denizens of capitalist modernity use "technical means and calculation" to master "all things." At the same time, Weber indicated that the "process of disenchantment, which has been under way for millennia in Western culture," birthed abstract new enchantments: "Having lost their magic, the multiple gods of the past rise up from their graves in the form of impersonal forces, fighting for power over our lives and thus beginning anew their eternal struggle against one another." Against the backdrop of Weber's dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment, this course offers a representative overview of some of the key ideas, works, and authors of German Romanticism, a term that designates both a period that extends from about 1795 to 1848 and a style of creative and intellectual production that encompasses a remarkable diversity of phenomena, including the proto-avant-garde experiments with communal "sympoetry" and "symphilosophy" in the Early Romantic circles and the rise of "Dark Romanticism" that fuses a fascination with science and new technologies with a turn to the occult and demonic. In tracing the tensions between disenchantment and re-enchantment, we will consider works of literature, criticism, art, and music, including works by some of the key figures in the German intellectual and artistic tradition, such as Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Schlegel and the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Caspar David Friedrich, Robert and Clara Schumann, Franz Schubert, Karoline von Günderrode, Bettina von Arnim, Novalis, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and the young Karl Marx. |