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dark romanticism

Die Schwarze Romantik war eine literarische Strömung innerhalb der Romantik, die deren irrationale, melancholische Züge betonte und sich auch von der Gestaltung menschlichen Wahnsinns fasziniert zeigte. Bekannte Vertreter waren E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, H. P. Lovecraft und Lord Byron.

Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts bildete sich in England eine eigene Stilrichtung aus, die Gothic-Novel, die sich mit Schauerromanen beschäftigte. Ein besonderes Werk dieser Strömung stellt der stark von der englischen Dichtung beeinflusste romantische Roman „Nachtwachen“ dar, den Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann unter dem Pseudonym „Bonaventura“ veröffentlichte.

In Anlehnung an die Schwarze Romantik bezeichnet man auch eine Splitterkultur der Gothic- und Dark-Wave-Szene als Schwarzromantiker.

Vertreter der Schwarzen Romantik

Autoren

• Marquis de Sade (1740–1814)
• Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)
• E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822)
• Jacob Grimm (1785–1863)
• Lord Byron (1788–1824)
• Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
• Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855)
• Gustave Flaubert (1821–1867)
• Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

Künstler

• Caspar David Friedrich (z. B. „Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer“)
• Johann Heinrich Füssli (z. B. „Der Nachtmahr“)

Notes

"I found the article above on Schwarze Romantik (Eng: black or dark romanticism) at Wikipedia. I was working on my giallo fiction page and thinking about the roots of European exploitation culture. In English, these can easily be traced to the gothic novel (although it is still unclear to me when the term gothic novel was coined). My thesis is that the gothic sensibility can be traced in most European literatures. Every European country also had its own terminology to denote the sensibility of the gothic novel. In France it was called the roman noir ("black novel", now primarily used to denote the hardboiled detective genre) and in Germany it was called the Schauerroman ("shudder novel"). Italy and Spain must have had their own, but I am unaware of their names as of yet. In nineteenth century France there also flourished a literature of horror on a par with the English Gothic novel or the German Schauerroman. It was christened 'le roman frénétique'.

Back to Schwarze Romantik. The term can probably be traced to the 1963 German translation of Mario Praz's La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. The German title of this translation is Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik.

While I would like to believe that the roots of the gothic novel are rooted in the darker strains of German Romanticism, this cannot be substantiated as of yet. Granted, the term gothic in the 17th and 18th centuries refers to Germany, and writers such as Schiller, Hoffmann and Klingemann seem to predate much of the gothic fiction of the UK, but there is of course a whole range of gothic novels that predate these three German authors, most notably: The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) - Horace Walpole, Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786) by William Beckford, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1796) - Matthew Lewis. Most probably there was a substantial cross-fertilization between German, French, English and other continental strains of dark romanticism that is dealt with as fantastic literature.

P. S. In France, the Romantic Agony was published in 1966 as La Chair, la mort et le diable, le Romantisme noir.

Literatur

• Mario Praz: Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik. München, 1963. ISBN 342304375X. Die bis heute umfangreichste Monographie zum Thema.