Europäische Romantik: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Forschung ed. by Helmut Hühn and Joachim Schiedermair (review)

Europäische Romantik, a collected volume of twenty articles based on a 2011 conference held in Greifswald, does an excellent job of presenting the current state of research on Romanticism. The wide range of contributions shows how Romantic art, music, philosophy, and literature unfolded across multiple European languages and cultures. The robust multiculturalism of the objects of study and the interdisciplinarity of the field make a strong case for preserving and even expanding Romanticism's role as a central node of inquiry within the humanities. In addition, this volume repeatedly demonstrates how central features of modern consciousness such as our ambivalent relationship to Enlightenment, our self-placement within a historical development, and our excitement for the avant-garde, first emerged as part of the pan-European movement we call Romanticism.

A particular strength of this volume lies in the multiple links it draws between the Romanticism of the German-speaking world and movements in Scandinavia, particularly Denmark but also Norway and Sweden. Four of the twenty articles are devoted to addressing these connections. Michelle Facos's "Scandinavian Landscape Painting," for example, introduces the reader to several rather unknown Scandinavian painters and discusses the network of relationships they had with the art scenes of Paris and Dresden. In Joachim Schiedermair's "Medien des Ewigen" we learn of the Danish phrenologist Carl Otto and the influence that he, together with Hegel, had on the Danish writer Meïr Aron Goldschmidt.

This volume also reflects fruitfully on the methodological issues that arise with the attempt to subsume such a diversity of artistic and intellectual output under the single heading of "Romanticism." Helmut Hühn's introductory chapter, "Deutungskonflikt 'Romantik': Problemgeschichtliche Überlegungen," is extremely helpful in this respect, offering the reader multiple tools for negotiating the tension between synthesis and attention to detail. To give an example: rather than identifying universal criteria for what qualifies as Romanticism, Hühn suggests that we think of Romanticism in terms of Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblances," according to which a network of shared characteristics groups objects into various clusters even if all objects do not exhibit all these characteristics (20). Another useful suggestion is that we think of Romanticism in terms of the problems, conflicts, and controversies in which it is implicated, particularly in regard to emerging conceptions of modernity, as in the case of the conflict between Friedrich Schlegel's Romanticism and the classicism or idealism of Hegel. Yet another, related suggestion is that we maintain "die Verbindung einer … übergreifenden makrohistorischen Perspektive mit mikrologischen Untersuchungen der einzelnen Werke und Konstellationen" (33).

The suggestions of Hühn's introduction often correspond nicely to specific types of investigation pursued by the subsequent contributions. The notion of family resemblances, for example, seems most useful in tracking Romanticism across nations and cultures, where differences in language, culture, and history make the shared characteristics between, say, German, English, and French Romanticism quite tenuous. Meanwhile, thinking of Romanticism in terms of its relation to competing conceptions of art and/or modernity appears most suited to philosophy, where positions and arguments arise in relation and response to other positions. The contributions of Paul Ziche, Andreas Arndt, and Walter Jaeschke can all be understood in this light, for they focus on the philosophy of Romanticism and its emergence from the opposition between idealism and realism or, in the case of Jaeschke's article on Hegel, between subjectivity and objectivity. Finally, the suggestion to combine larger "macrohistorical perspectives" with intense focus on individual works appears to be most naturally suited to literary studies, where the close reading of a single literary work is situated against the backdrop of broader intellectual currents, as in Schiedermair's article on Otto, Hegel, and Goldschmidt.

The benefit of having a volume of collected essays dealing with European Romanticism is obvious: the field is too large for any one person to manage, and bringing together multiple scholars allows for...