Achim Von Arnim – författare

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great visionaries of European art, spent all his life in Northern Germany, apart from four years studying in Copenhagen, and his output appears to consist almost entirely of German landscapes. But far from being parochial, he was, in the words of the French sculptor David d’Angers, the artist who ‘discovered the tragic in landscape’. His paintings assemble minutely observed elements of nature into compo­sitions that celebrate the riches and the melancholy of a cosmos fully imbued with the divine, while never losing an almost hallucinatory engagement with reality. For all their clarity, they are the quintessence of Romanticism.Almost too familiar today, to Friedrich’s contemporaries these extraordinary paint­ings were astonishing and challenging. This volume records the reactions of some of the most prominent figures of German Romanticism: Kleist, Brentano and Arnim (in a witty series of dialogues between gallery visitors alternately bewitched and bewildered by Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea), the painter and physiologist Carus, the psychologist Schubert, the Russian poet and translator Zhukovsky. A piece by Goethe and his colleague Heinrich Meyer records the somewhat baffled admiration of the earlier generation; and Friedrich’s own Commandments of Art breathes the almost overwhelming passion with which he approached his vocation. An introduction by the leading scholar Johannes Grave situates Friedrich’s art and its reception in the context of the Romantic movement both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

Mit dem Werkbeitrag aus Kindlers Literatur Lexikon.Mit den Autorenporträts aus dem Metzler Lexikon Weltliteratur.Mit Daten zu Leben und Werk beider Autoren, exklusiv verfasst von der Redaktion der Zeitschrift für Literatur TEXT + KRITIK.Aus dem mit Rubinen, Perlen und feinsten Glocken besetzten »Wunderhorn« dieser bedeutendsten deutschen Liedersammlung ertönen zauberhafte Verse für alle Lebenslagen: Tanz- und Trink-, Soldaten- und Kinderlieder, Trauriges und Triumphierendes, Gedichte zum Abend und Abschied ebenso wie über Frühling, Winter und Weihnacht – und natürlich auch über die Liebe. »Von Rechts wegen sollte dieses Büchlein in jedem Hause, wo frische Menschen wohnen, am Fenster, unterm Spiegel, oder wo sonst Gesang- und Kochbücher zu liegen pflegen, zu finden sein« (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe).