Schriften der Internationalen Arnim-Gesellschaft
Loneliness, a concept already discussed before 1800, is adapted as a cultural technique in the Romantic understanding of art, as Arnim’s draft titles for what became the Newspaper for Hermits show: World Loneliness, The Hermit in Society, The Hermit on a Journey. Loners and strangers, hermits and pilgrims are favored literary and pictorial figures in the works of Arnim, Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and many others.
After interest grew in legal cases and the criminal mind during the Enlightenment era, the understanding of law underwent a fundamental transformation in the romantic period. As Savigny put it, “The true site of law is the collective consciousness of the people.” This collection of essays by legal historians and literary scholars examines questions of crime and punishment in legal histories, legal practice, and literature.
Examining the role of everyday life for art and in art opens a new perspective on the Romantic era’s supposed struggle against the banalization of art. According to Pierre Bourdieu, everyday life and art face each other like the sacred and the profane. This volume examines the “lifeworld” and art, craft and conviviality, letters and the experiences of war, illness and food, as literary and artistic themes as realities of everyday life.
This volume addresses the scientific, physiological, aesthetic, and symbolic function and meaning of colors in the art and literature of the Romantic era by examining the discourse on subjective and objective perception that took place around 1800. It reveals how colors in the “real world” and in the visual arts contrasted with the typically metaphoric colors in language and literature.
The Romantic mode and representations of emotion would seem to be a perfect fit. By focusing on the esthetics of emotions, their genre-typical enactments and representation in the works of Arnim, Günderrode, Goethe, Heine, Hoffmann, Schiller, Tieck and others, the book presents a broad-based examination of this interaction. The articles in this volume examine how the literature of the Romantic ‘deals with’ or represents emotions.
After a decade of editorial work on the new historical-critical edition of the works of Ludwig Achim von Arnim (Weimar Arnim Edition, WAA), this volume collects the philological, literary, philosophical and comparative constellations gained so far. A new picture is developing of one of the “most original minds of the Romantic School” (Heinrich Heine) illustrating his influence on his contemporaries and following generations, which was much more lasting than hitherto believed.
Around 1800 there is a new symbolisation and narration of ‘internal spaces’, spiritual and psychic processes, states or relationships which do not lend themselves to direct observation. This volume focuses on the narrated ‘real’ spaces of Romanticism; it deals with the cultural encoding of houses and rooms, castles and towers, but also of open spaces – the vastness of the sea, riverscapes and distant lands. The analyses are to be understood as a contribution within the currently proclaimed spatial or topographical turn to a new dimensioning of a complex of central importance for both narrative and representational techniques and for cultural anthropology.
River and stream as images of time and fate are as ancient as spring and stream as metaphors of inspiration and song. Processes of crossing and dissolving boundaries, of transmission and exchange are visualised in different images of fluidity. At the sixth Colloquium of the International Arnim Society held in Burg Schönburg (Oberwesel), the participants discussed this complex of images and metaphors, from the flowing Rhine via cash flows to the flow of a text and energy flows in the body – using too the context of “Romantic Science”. Novalis’ conception of poetry as “by its nature fluid” is opposed by Goethe’s lines “Water drawn by bards whose
fame /Pure is, may be rounded”.
The fifth colloquium of the International Arnim Society in Heidelberg (2004) revolved around the imminent 200th anniversary of the publication of »Des Knaben Wunderhorn« in 2006. For Heidelberg romanticism and for Volkspoesie in general, issues concerned with performance, the relationship between the oral and the written, citation, and intertextuality have always been central concerns. Alongside other works by Arnim and the Heidelberg romantics discussed here, Arnim and Brentano's »Des Knaben Wunderhorn« is an especially grateful subject for the discussion of these issues. Goethe himself stressed the performative aspect: »By right, this little book should be found in every house where fresh-minded people live, on the window-sill, under the mirror, or wherever hymn-books and cook-books normally lie, to be opened whenever the mood (good or bad) should take us, and we are in search of something like-minded or stimulating.«
At the fourth colloquium of the international Arnim Society in Glasgow, the central issues were biographical and national identity, culture- and socio-political codification, and marginalization and communality. Alongside comparative studies concentrating on intertextuality, there were also a number of interdisciplinary contributions largely concerned with the historical, political, social, and cultural contexts. Among the Romantics, the crisis occasioned by the Napoleonic wars strengthened the recourse to their own literary traditions and the highly problematic (from a 20th century viewpoint) reception accorded to those traditions. Experience of other cultures (Arnim's image of England, Jews and gypsies in Arnim's works) differentiated the formation of identity on the national, communitarian, and individual plane. There is also discussion of the reasons for a shift to aesthetic identifications (as opposed to philosophical and/or political alternatives). Other case studies are devoted to the narrative construction of artistic, social, amicable, and gender-based identity.
The third colloquium of the International Arnim Society situates Achim von Arnim in the political, culture-political, and literary context of Prussia in the 1810-1820 period. The profusion of literary and journalistic production justifies regarding Arnim's Berlin years (1809-1814) as the zenith of his career. Political and educational issues are addressed alongside the specifically 'Romantic' context of Arnim's Berlin period (Berlin art, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Kleist, Eichendorff, Tieck). The volume closes with three emphatically text-analytic studies on Arnim and Brentano and the discussion of a surprising reading of Arnim's 'Wunderhorn' by Rahel Levin.
The topics of the colloquium of the International Arnim Society in the summer of 1998 were Arnim's biography, his literary and scientific writings from his childhood and student years up to the time of his travels abroad. The complexity of his intellectual life, his extensive literary production, and the breadth of his education were examined, and interconnections among various aspects of his career were revealed, especially through previously unpublished manuscripts documenting the intersection of biographical, literary, philosophical and scientific concerns.
Achim von Arnim's stay in Königsberg (1806/07) during the Napoleonic wars was shaped by his contacts to the Prussian reformers around Stein, his crucial love for Auguste Schwinck, and his edition of the »Einsiedlerzeitung« in Heidelberg in 1808. After his return he spent five years in Berlin where he attempted to integrate himself into Berlin society, wrote his most important works (Wintergarten, Gräfin Dolores, Halle und Jerusalem, The Novellas of 1812, Päpstin Johanna, the plays in Die Schaubühne), founded the Christlich-Teutsche Tischgesellschaft, and edited the »Preussische Correspondent« (1813/14). 1810 marks the founding of the Berlin University. Arnim attempted to shape the political, literary, scientific and artistic endeavours during the years of occupation, reforms, and wars against Napoleon. In 1811, he married Bettina Brentano, in 1814 he moved to his country estate Wiepersdorf where he devoted his life to his estate and writing. The lectures of the first meeting of the Internationale Arnim-Gesellschaft at Wiepersdorf palace 1997 discuss these years at the zenith of Arnim's career and analyse his concepts, intentions, successes and disappointments. J. Barth (Wuppertal) compiled the Arnim-Bibliography of the years 1925-1995 which is the continuation of the 1925 Arnim-Bibliography by Otto Mallon.
