Chapter Fourteen explores the relation between poetics and Restoration politics in Germany, France, and Italy. It argues that, similar to earlier aesthetic responses to the failure of the French Revolution, writers sought alternatives to the political and geographic order established at Vienna, imagining works that synthesise the past and the present in order to inspire change. After explaining why the Restoration left Britain largely unscathed, the author looks at examples of literary and political restoration in Novalis, Chateaubriand, Lamenais, and Metternich to show how restoration did not mean a nostalgic return into the past but rather the creation of something new. The chapter then compares the Restoration poetics of Quinet, Hugo and Gautier, suggesting that they advocate the ‘grotesque’ through the recovery of Shakespeare, to imagine a more comprehensive and liberal vision of society than that set forth by Metternich. Balzac’s La comédie humaine serves as a counter-example, ending in a cynicism at odds with the idealism of George Sand. The chapter’s last section compares the political uses of loss, exile, and restoration in two great Italian poets, Foscolo and Leopardi, concluding with a close reading ‘La Sera del dì di festa’ to show how political hope was kept alive.

Jacobi played a determinative role in shaping the landscape from which German Romanticism would emerge. His critique of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte, and his advocacy of transcendent realism, would deeply influence Early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin and would go on to shape the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This chapter deals with the ‘flip side‘ of Krautrock, exploring which political, social, and cultural developments in West Germany in the 1970s were clearly not reflected in Krautrock. The aim is to show that German pop music in the Krautrock era – contrary to its glorification as progressive, avant-garde, and internationalist – was actually conservative, if not restorative, in essential aspects. The chapter demonstrates that, firstly, feminist tendencies are discernible outside Krautrock (e.g. Inga Rumpf or Claudia Skoda). Secondly, the chapter deals with the vibrant music scene of Turkish migrants, which was ignored by German majority society. Thirdly, the chapter focuses on aspects of the appropriation of national traditions in German pop music of the 1970s. It discusses bands like Novalis and Hölderlin, who took up the tradition of German Romanticism, or Achim Reichel, who used the marginalised language form of Low German for his pop music. The chapter establishes a counter-narrative that challenges the prevailing view of the modernising power of Krautrock. Rather, it suggests that Krautrock was decoupled from the actual modernising trends in 1970s West Germany, such as the women‘s movement and the multicultural diversification of society.

This chapter examines the nature and the origins of what it identifies as a distinctively Romantic view of music. According to this, the purpose of music is to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, most usually into one’s inner self or, especially, into the fundamental nature of reality. The chapter starts by charting some key moments in the philosophical background of the 1780s and ’90s. Building on this, it traces the emergence of the Romantic view of music in the works of the two philosophers most closely involved in its earliest formulations: Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). It concludes with brief examinations of the ways in which this view was elaborated by two now-canonical philosophers of this era, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, and with a reflection on the subsequent influence of this view.