10 - Love, death and Liebestod in German Romanticism

Summary

In this essay I shall argue something infrequently heard in modern academic discourse: that we need to turn the clock back a little in the scholarship of German Romanticism (if only to go forward the more progressively). It used to be commonplace to link German Romanticism intrinsically with a suspect ideology of love and death, and in especial with the erotic death cult most prominently exemplified by the Liebestod of Richard Wagner's doomed Tristan and Isolde. But scholarship in recent decades has turned away from that preoccupation. With some justification, it is true, other themes have come to the fore. Romanticism is (for example) now no longer thought of as an aggressively irrationalist and obscurantist phenomenon. Instead, its anti-Enlightenment polemic is understood as the expression of a pioneering critique of abstract rationalism very much within the utopian tradition of the project of Enlightenment. Similarly, the engagement of Romantic thinkers with the political sphere is now recognised to be much more complex than the received scheme of conservatism and reaction used to suggest. And analogous corrections of our historical understanding have been made across virtually the entire spectrum of Romanticism's thematic preoccupations. This is true in some sense of the traditional identification of Romanticism with morbidity and perverse love. Thomas Mann's early novella Tristan (1902) well represents what we used to think. This bleak allegorical analysis of the sickness afflicting art, life and modern culture certainly foregrounds and criticises a pessimistic ideology of love and death. In a sanatorium around 1900 the beautiful, yet mortally ill Gabriele Klöterjahn encounters a minor aestheticist poet, Detlef Spinell. In the absence of her merchant husband, they recognise an aestheticist affinity and fall in love.