Embodying the Romantic Collector in Post-Romantic Writing

A paradox from Walter Benjamin’s 1937 essay “Eduard Fuchs: Der Sammler und der Historiker” provides the coordinates for this study of the Romantic collector in nineteenth-century literature. Following Benjamin, the paradox turns on the notion that the figure of the Romantic collector is a product not, as might be expected, of Romantic literature but rather of literary realism. Precisely because collecting and museum making were integral to Romantic endeavours and ideas, Benjamin’s assertion begs to be explored on the terrain of Romantic literature and the ways Romantic concerns are imagined and transformed in post-Romantic writing.

Before I analyze pertinent Romantic and post-Romantic literary texts in these terms, I will first discuss Benjamin’s claims against the backdrop of his thinking about collecting and Romanticism. After reading Benjamin’s writing to sharpen the Romantic stakes of his thinking about the collector, I will turn to the trope of the Galeriegespräch in two of its earliest instantiations, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders and August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel’s Die Gemälde. Ein Gespräch. In these key articulations of early Romantic aesthetics, I want to pay particular attention to the Galeriegespräch for the way it figures collecting not as a literal practice of acquisition, preservation, and display of physical artifacts but rather as a notional and literary process. With this approach, I attend to the relationship of collecting to imagination, memory, and dialogic literary form, elements that prove essential to Romantic attempts to grapple with the problems of individual and collective identity, social cohesion, and medial specificity (visual arts, literature, music) in emergent modernity. Beyond suggesting new ways of thinking about early Romantic aesthetics, this analysis also helps to map the transformations in Romantic thinking that take place with the realist invention of the Romantic, i.e. passionate, collector. For as I will show using analyses of Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Pons and Theodor Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm, the figure of the post-Romantic collector works to locate passionate collecting as a key feature of Romantic cultural undertakings, even as that act of representation fundamentally diminishes the collector’s very nature, in no small part by labelling and making him visible as such.

It is easy to overlook that Benjamin’s Fuchs essay offers insight into the life and afterlife of European literary Romanticism. Its stated focus on an understudied collector, publisher, and cultural historian – the Eduard Fuchs of the title – makes the essay less than obvious as a point of reference for literary issues, particularly in light of Benjamin’s inclusion of highly cogent reflections on historical materialism, the history of institutional Marxism, and art and cultural history. And yet, when Benjamin looks to delineate key features of Fuchs’s personality as a collector, rich literary analysis provides a crucial resource not only for clarifying Fuchs’s virtues but also for establishing the collector’s credentials in broader cultural terms. Benjamin’s turn to literature results in part from his perception that cultural material that attests to the collector’s merits, while it exists, is too sparse for the figure of the collector (and this includes Fuchs) to come immediately to the minds of Benjamin’s anticipated readers. As Benjamin writes at the outset of his analysis, “Der Figur des Sammlers, die dem Betrachtenden je länger desto anziehender erscheint, ist bisher das ihre nicht oft geworden” (“Fuchs” 489–90). For Fuchs to receive his due, the figure of the collector must be rescued from obscurity in the margins of culture and placed front and centre long enough for the collector’s attractiveness to be perceived.

Though more could be said about the theoretical and methodological implications of Benjamin’s practice, the crucial point for my purposes is that Benjamin’s project is served by illuminating the paradoxical career of the collector in Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Romantic literature is, for reasons I will examine in a moment, the place Benjamin would most expect to find the collector. Upon closer inspection, however, that expectation fails to hold. As Benjamin...