Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

Kant’s famous comparison of his transcendental critique to a revolution serves as the departure point for Nicolas Halmi’s chapter, which also explores the powerful conjunction between philosophy, criticism, and poetry in early German and British Romanticism, marked by acute self-consciousness. Halmi first discusses changes in the concept of revolution, and how the new meaning lent itself to politics and to philosophy, which both sought to give the subject greater autonomy and self-governance. He then examines different theories developed in response to Kant but also to the Revolution and its perceived failure, many of which call for a moral and intellectual revolution of the self as a preparation for democratic reform. These include Fichte’s theory of scientific knowledge, Schiller’s aesthetic education, Friedrich Schlegel’s transcendental poetry, and Shelley’s defence of the poetic imagination as a source of moral sympathy. Key ideas presented in the chapter include Bildung, the Absolute, Wechselerweis, romantic irony, and allegory. Halmi concludes with a section on Wordsworth’s poetic reform in the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that it emerged as a conservative reaction to revolution.

Chapter Eight revisits several of the same authors and texts as in the previous chapter, but focusses on the complex relation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, looking at how the modern concept of citizenship emerged in this period as a bridge between Enlightenment and Romantic values. The first par discusses the origins and theoretical foundations of cosmopolitanism, including the notions of Humanität, republicanism, and national culture in works by Kant, Schlegel, and Herder. It then turns to two texts on education written in response to the Revolution by Schiller and Fichte. The latter combines Romantic nationalism with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in an effort to first liberate the individual nation, then, through moral education, humanity as a whole. In the last part, the author presents three case studies of lived Romantic cosmopolitanism, in which the above ideals are enacted. These include an abolitionist slave narrative by Olaudah Equiano; the Franco-British poet and writer Helen Maria Williams’s radical repo+L22rting from Revolutionary Paris; and German poet and patriot Karl Follen’s early nationalist and later internationalist writing in exile.

Chapter Three pursues the discussion of aesthetics broached in the previous chapter, focussing on the aesthetic experience most often associated with Romanticism: the Sublime. Contrasting the influential histories of Samuel Holt Monk and Marjorie Nicholson, it argues that no single theory of the sublime dominated the eighteenth century, and that Kant’s influential ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ does not exhaust the term’s many historical meanings, which included the rhetorical sublime, the natural sublime, and the philosophical sublime. The chapter addresses the sublime in a variety of discourses and practices, including landscape gardening, astronomy, gothic fiction, revolutionary politics, language theory and antiquarian texts such as Ossian and the Scandinavian Veddas. It then distinguishes between Burke’s physiological, Kant’s cognitive, Schiller’s moral, and Herder’s more ‘naturalised’ versions of the philosophical sublime, before looking at the rhetorical sublime in Longinus and eighteenth-century language theories, and finally at the natural sublime in landscape aesthetics and in the poetry of Wordsworth, Leopardi, and Mickiewicz. It concludes that academic reconstructions of the Romantic sublime based on Kant have skewed the history of the concept, in particular by legitimating models of Romantic individuality that have excluded women.

This chapter first walks readers through Kant’s critical theory of the sublime before tracing this Kantian sublime in a selection of German Romantic-period cultural texts. One of Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous paintings, The Monk by the Sea, and Heinrich von Kleist’s equally awesome review of it, are read through a (post-)Kantian lens. The chapter then explains how Kant’s model of the sublime was decisively re-interpreted by Friedrich Schiller, whose idea of the ‘pathetic-sublime’ made the concept amenable to poetics, particularly so with respect to tragedy and questions of free will and fate. The chapter closes with a discussion of the sublime in German Romantic-period music, focusing on Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony, with the words of the final chorus from Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

Drawing on literary works from the Revolutionary Wars (Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht), the First World War (Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues and Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern), the Second World War (Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster) and the recent Iraq War (Handke’s Yugoslavia essays and Jelinek’s Bambiland), this chapter argues that the perception of specific historical wars is marked by distinct configurations of time and historicity. Literary representations of the Revolutionary Wars tend to conceive of war within a gradual unfolding of national destiny. Depictions of the First World War chafe against linear concepts of time and against concepts of temporal homogeneity. Representations of the Second World War radically deconstruct concepts of linearity and teleology. Here, time is a web in which the past impinges on the present and the present impacts the future. Both Handke’s and Jelinek’s texts, finally, are characterized by a detachment or even alienation from time and space occasioned by the mediatization of warfare on television and the web.

Kant and Schiller each take up one side of Rousseau so as to heal the rift between nature and freedom: Kant stressing our capacity to repress our natural passions, Schiller stressing Rousseau’s Romanticism and the harmony of freedom and sentiment in aesthetic education. Yet the free self and the natural self remained divided within each individual. Hegel healed this division through a synthesis of Kantian moral rigor and Schillerian love of beauty in which the concept of human nature was jettisoned altogether in favor of a totally historicized understanding of human existence. Hegel also resolved the Rousseauan conflict between our lost natural happiness and the alienating qualities of civilization by relocating Rousseau’s Golden Age of the remote past to the final outcome of civilizational progress, redeeming its alienating aspects as necessary for our fulfillment today. Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit includes his understanding of the ancient Greek polis, his critique of the Rousseau-inspired Jacobin Terror, his defense of passionate political ambition against Kantian moral purity, and his claim to have reconciled reason and revelation as the “self-actualization of God” as history. Hegel’s account of historical progress ignited an intense debate among his successors.

Brecht was exposed to schiller, a formative influence throughout his life, from an early age. While schiller supplied brecht with tragic language (both as langue and parole) and an intellectualist attitude towwards drama, his idealistic conception of theatre, human morality and freedom provoked parodic responses from brecht, especially in his st joan of the stockyards.

The debate in 1792-94 between Wilhelm von Humboldt and Karl von Dalberg focuses on the legitimacy and limits of the state’s promotion of welfare for its subjects. It represents a clash between the Kantian school and advocates of the Leibniz-Wolff philosophy. Dalberg advocates a strongly interventionist state, while Humboldt circumscribes narrowly the scope of rightful political action. Humboldt’s post-Kantian perfectionism aims to maximise freedom and its conditions, rather than to promote happiness, as older perfectionisms had done. Dalberg, in contrast, appeals to Wolff’s defence of enlightened absolutism, viewing the state as the agency for eliminating obstacles to individual and social thriving, or the good life. While illustrating the reception of Kant’s critiques of previous ethical systems, and the persistence of Wolffian themes, the debate is also indicative of the diversity of political positions advocated by Kantians in the aftermath of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). In conceiving the individual as a spontaneous monad with a unique developmental trajectory, Humboldt shares with Dalberg a revised version of Leibniz. The blending of Leibnizian and Kantian concepts constitutes the central theoretical interest of the political thought of this period.

Given Mahler’s Bohemian-Moravian upbringing in a German linguistic enclave by a culturally aspirational bibliophile father, a gymnasium education in Iglau that was almost certainly orientated toward classical literature, and early friendships with a number of cultured figures, many of whom would go on to play distinguished professional roles within the Austrian intelligentsia (Guido Adler, Friedrich Löhr, Emil Freund, Josef Steiner, Anton Krisper, Albert Spiegler, and Siegfried Lipiner), it is unsurprising that Mahler’s life developed strongly intellectual dimensions and that in his early years he even toyed with the idea of pursuing a literary career. Those interests are reviewed here, in sections on texts that he set musically (principally the poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Friedrich Rücket, and Hans Bethge) and personal literary interests (above all, Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky). From this selection certain general features of Mahler’s literary taste can be gleaned, confirming the basic conservatism remarked by Alma.

This chapter provides cultural context for Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, by discussing other pertinent expressions of heroism in Western culture. While these include the deeds of real-life figures such as Napoleon, the primary focus here is on literary heroes found in the epics of Homer ‘as translated in Beethoven’s time by Heinrich Voss’ and in prominent German dramas by Goethe and Schiller that date from their Sturm und Drang and Klassik periods. The underlying nature and overt actions of literary heroes such as Hector, Götz von Berlichingen, Karl Moor, the Marquis von Posa and Egmont influenced Beethoven in the articulation of his own code of values ‘evidenced by quotations in Beethoven’s letters and diary’, while the ways that Goethe and Schiller dramatised their poetic language may well have influenced the formation of the highly dramatic musical language of Beethoven’s heroic style. Varieties of heroism discussed in the chapter include the necessity of rebellion in the face of tyranny, the overriding importance of free thought and freedom in general, the rise of the autonomous individual and the triumph of free will in overcoming adversity and even overcoming one’s own self, culminating in the moral commitment to sacrifice oneself for a higher ideal.

In the period 1770-1830 the progressive dissolution of the antithesis between religious inwardness and Enlightenment critique gave rise to historically unparalleled creativity in German literature and thought. This is also the age in which human subjectivity was decisively redefined by critical and then post-critical Idealism in German philosophy. Between 1770 and 1830 the twin heritages of rationalism in German Idealist philosophy and Pietism in the beginnings of modern biblical criticism came together. In so doing, both decisively affected the vocabulary of German literature and its function as a mode of cultural critique in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Germany. The development in German writing from the literature of Empfindsamkeit (Sentimentality) and Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) to Romanticism reflects the evolution of a specifically literary idea of inwardness which variously expresses and challenges theological and political constructions of the subject.

Brahms was among the many avid consumers of the print culture which burgeoned unprecedentedly during his century. The mid-eighteenth century onwards saw a surge in German-language publishing, following the gradual supplanting of Latin as a scholarly language and Johann Gottfried von Herder’s advocacy of popular literature as the highest expression of the national spirit. During the long nineteenth century, a vast amount of printed matter was devoured by an eager public. Apart from journalism, there were huge numbers of magazines that serialised popular fiction, science, geography, history and suchlike, as well as handsome bound collected editions of classical authors such as Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare in translation, aimed at aspirational middle-class households. Literature was crucial to the wider nation-building agenda to unite the various disparate German-speaking territories and principalities under the umbrella of language. It was inseparable from shifts in religion, philosophy and science, and was shaped and re-shaped by successive waves of political censorship.

We begin our consideration of Brahms’s politics and religion with the great historical turn that occurred in the centre of Europe in the year 1870. With the decisive German military defeat of France and proclamation of King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. Brahms probably would have preferred a Larger German solution that included Austria, Prussia’s traditional rival for leadership in the loosely bound German Confederation that was established by the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. But what mattered most was that Germany had at last emerged from its political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognised achievements in the cultural sphere.