A German Affair

Germany’s most characteristic contributions to nineteenth-century world culture, music and speculative philosophy, are so thoroughly romantic that they alone would give the whole movement a German flavour. But in Germany romanticism did not stay within the boundaries of art and philosophy, it gave momentum to political nationalism, to an irrational Lebensphilosophie and to a fatal departure from the path of the Enlightenment. In his new book, “Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre” (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2007), Rüdiger Safranski travels into “Germany’s heart of darkness”, but, says reviewer Hans-Dieter Gelfert, is missing out on the social dynamics of the romantic value system, which English writers were the first to respond to in the early eighteenth century.