Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 369 Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz East Tennessee State University Abstract: The short, enigmatic aphorism “Keine Poesie, keine Wirklichkeit” (Schleiermacher) best describes the romantic idea of poetic realism. Rather than approaching the problem of realism as a matter of representation of an objectively given world, the Romantics focused on the inextricable link between subject and world that are both in a mutually constitutive relationship� Realism, thus, describes an epistemological perspective in poetry rather than a particular style of mimetic representation. By taking a close look at theoretical writings by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel as well as Novalis, and poetic texts by Tieck and Arnim, this article explores romantic notions of poetic realism, without pitting the subjectivist tendency of Romanticism against what in the later nineteenth century came to be called ‘Realism.’ I demonstrate that romantic realism is based on a rejection of both the strict distinction between subject and object in German idealism on the one hand, and the teleological aspect in Schiller’s project of aesthetic education on the other� Romanticism insists on the decisive function of imagination for the constitution of reality and simultaneously recognizes the existence of a resistive and irreducible outside world. Thus, romantic realism embraces the ‘characteristic’ as an index of reality’s manifoldness. Keywords: Romanticism, realism, Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim ‘Realism’ is not what first comes to mind when reading both romantic literature and aesthetic self-reflections of romantic authors. Achim von Arnim for instance invokes in Die Majorats-Herren a higher form of reality (4: 142), which can only be revealed by transgressing the limits of our everyday world. As he explains in “Dichtung und Geschichte,” reality is accessible only by separating 370 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz the “Tau des Paradieses” from the deceiving “ausgespritzten Gifte der Schlange” (2: 12). Drawing on mystical and pietist practices of inwardness, Novalis finds the entire universe within the subject (2: 417—18), and - at least at first look - grants in good Platonic tradition the ‘real’ world only the status of a “Schattenwelt” (2: 232). Finally, in the Athenäum Friedrich Schleiermacher posits: “Keine Poesie, keine Wirklichkeit” ( Fragmente 1: 64)� This romantic subjectivism seems to indicate a disinterest in any form of realism - if ‘realism’ is defined as a mode of mimetic representation. As I argue in the following article, however, such a definition is insufficient to capture the particular romantic take on reality and thus the constitution of romantic realism� For the Romantics, realism only made sense, as we will see, as an appropriation of a meaningful reality, a reality that cannot be disclosed by mere sense perception or an act of positing, but a reality that is saturated with cultural and social traditions, norms, values, as well as the subject’s own agency and history. The examples quoted above appeared to indicate a clear deviation from more practical or pragmatic understandings of reality and were certainly one of the reasons for later rejections of Romanticism� Julian Schmidt, for instance, repudiates the romantic concept of poetry at large, claiming that the “Zeitalter [der Romantik] war das der Tendenzen, d. h. zunächst der mangelnden Befriedigung” which resulted merely in a never-ending self-mirroring of poetry, a “phantastischen Hohlspiegel” (“Charaktere” 361—62). Novalis’s declaration that the world needs to be romanticized is indeed an expression based in a perceived deficit, and a ‘higher’ form of reality seems to be the way out of common everyday life that was met with “Ungenügen” (Pikulik), as ever more insufficient for individual aspirations in, and appropriations of, the world. Schmidt, by contrast, decried imagination, irony, and the primacy of poetry - all of which was part of the romantic answer to Enlightenment thinking. For the later critic, these tenets of romantic thought and writing were nothing more than mere self-contained and inconsequential “buchhändlerische Speculation[en]”: “man sagte so ernsthaft als möglich, daß man überall nur spiele und ironisire” (“Charaktere” 358). Yet, taken at face value, the Romantics conceived of poetry not simply as expressions of a playful imagination in order to compensate for a disenchanted normalcy, but rather as a privileged access to reality, one that is inextricably intertwined with the constitution of meaning. Reality is not reality as something simply being given to the senses and thus a mere object of perception� As expression of life itself it is reality for a community of human beings and as such of a distinctly communicative nature. This allows Tieck for instance to claim that all reality is unconsciously underpinned by an “Allegorie” ( Schriften 4: 129), that is, by the fact that both the most ordinary and the most marvelous appearances address some form of human understanding and thus constitute a shared Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 371 experience� This experience provides evidence and realization of an inherently harmonic reality, as one type of realism has been defined by Hans Blumenberg. 1 Romantic realism, it seems, is best understood if simultaneously the romantic concept of reality is brought into sharp relief� In this article, I propose that romantic realism is a specific disposition towards a world that is no longer experienced in its unity as divine creation, but as both an ever-evolving manifold of indiscernible data and as an accelerating succession of events that do not allow for a simple act of mimetic representation. Instead, romantic realism emphasized the significance of imagination as the faculty to individuate objects and events in the first place, as the faculty that is best suited to make visible the progression of time as the organizing principle� After tracing this notion of realism in Novalis’s and the Schlegels’ conceptual writings, I will demonstrate how the discussion around the categories of the ‘interesting’ and ‘characteristic’ provided the tools to implement this realism in poetic texts and will test the thesis with a brief look at two poems from Ludwig Tieck’s lyric double cycle Reisegedichte eines Kranken and Rückkehr des Genesenden � I argue that in order to satisfy the demand for the ‘characteristic’ romantic writers had to turn to another category - history - to fully embrace this realism of the ‘characteristic.’ I will close with some remarks on the romantic conceptualization of history in writings by Achim von Arnim, particularly in his novella Die Majorats-Herren � Arnim elaborated explicitly (if enigmatically) on the issue of poetry, history, and reality. He conceives of poetry as a mediator between past realities that no longer allow for an “Übersicht eines ganzen Horizonts” and the present reality of a life characterized by experiences and anticipations (2: 13). I do not claim that there is a single notion of reality and realism in romantic thought� What the writers considered here share as their common ground, however, is their belief in a primacy of imagination, and it is this primacy, as I will demonstrate, that is intrinsic to the romantic conceptualization of reality in the first place. This seems to me to be independent from the differentiation between earlier and later stages of Romanticism. Instead, as I will demonstrate, this is a central concern of romantic writing and artistic appropriations of the world. It is because Romanticism favored the imagination as the central faculty with which to access meaningful reality that it would be later (mis-)understood as a merely subjective and irrational movement that eventually ended in the bondage of Catholicism (Schmidt, “Charaktere” 490). Whereas what becomes later known as ‘Realism’ in aesthetics draws heavily on Hegel’s definition of poetic imagination as a synthesis of subjective content and the ontological status of the concrete intuition (Hegel 388), early romantic theory of imagination and reality posited a more dynamic relationship between world and subject and 372 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz stressed that imagination is a distinctly epistemological faculty: “die re[elle] [Kraft des Menschen] ist d[ie] Fantasie, die schaffende Einbildungskraft, die produktive Anschauung,” as Friedrich Schlegel muses (KFSA 18: 159). Reality is not anything that is simply given to perception or the cause of intuition but rather something that is constituted only through simultaneously activating perception and comprehension, as Schlegel suggests with his emphasis on the notion of divination (155). From a romantic perspective, thus, a clear distinction between world and cognition is a misleading epistemological move, good only for constructing a philosophical system, but not for embracing the fullness and manifoldness of life and the world (12: 361). Early on, Schlegel couches this idea in a rejection of any form of strong distinction between realism and idealism; in the Athenäum , he famously claims that poetry is realized irony ( Fragmente 1: 33)� Schlegel is not alone in this reframing of the ancient philosophical question whether world or I can claim primacy in cognition; along similar lines, Novalis explains: “Aller reeller Streit ist ein Schein - daher die Frage über Idealismus und Realismus so thöricht, so scheinbar, aber eben deswegen so Johannisch [i.e., previsional]” (2: 232). Divination is here the cognitive disposition that reality is meaningful� Schmidt’s polemic was motivated partly by his staunch anti-Catholicism, and partly by the later generation’s perceived need to distinguish themselves from the previous generation� Current research, in any case, seems to stress continuities more than discontinuities between what later literary historiography came to sharply distinguish as Poetic Realism and Romanticism. As Dirk Göttsche and Nicholas Saul point out, the relationship between Romanticism and Realism is characterized by “intertextual references and continuities in genre histories,” and thus share essential features of poetic practice (Göttsche and Saul 11)� Whereas the self-assessment of realist theory departed from Romanticism notably due to the politics of aesthetical distinction between two generations, contemporary criticism of Romanticism lacks a clear framework to make such a claim. According to Göttsche and Saul, it is a “desideratum in scholarship of Romanticism” to establish clear benchmarks to compare the two epochs and their respective styles rather than a deficit in the historiographic definition of Realism (14). The following considerations will not fill this gap in research; however, a focus on epistemology, imagination, and history in romantic theory and poetry will illuminate the nature of Romanticism’s distinctive realism, a step that in future explorations will help in defining clear points of comparison between the two literary epochs. Schleiermacher’s aphorism “Keine Poesie, keine Wirklichkeit” sums up the romantic nexus of poetry and reality, a formulation, however, that requires some Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 373 explanation despite - or rather because of - its assumed simplicity. Poetry is not a representation of any form of given reality, based in any form of imitative activity. For him there is no reality without poetry in the first place: Keine Poesie, keine Wirklichkeit. So wie es trotz aller Sinne ohne Fantasie keine Außenwelt gibt, so auch mit allem Sinn ohne Gemüt keine Geisterwelt. Wer nur Sinn hat, sieht keinen Menschen, sondern bloß Menschliches: dem Zauberstabe des Gemüts allein tut sich alles auf. Es setzt Menschen und ergreift sie; es schaut an wie das Auge ohne sich seiner mathematischen Operation bewußt zu sein. ( Fragmente 1: 64) Perception provides the subject with a flurry of data that at best solidifies into general concepts (“Menschliches”) but that is not automatically transformed into true cognition. Individuation of general concepts into the concrete (“Mensch”) is only possible through the simultaneous act of poetic imagination; imagination, as Schlegel puts it, is for the soul as necessary as breathing for the body (KFSA 12: 361)� This has crucial consequences for imitation, the critical concept that generally governs the discussion of any reference to extraliterary reality in poetry� For a long time, scholarship has seen a primacy of poiesis over mimesis in romantic poetry (Petersen 232). Nonetheless, for the romantic authors this primacy was not as self-evident as their rhetorical emphasis on the potency of imagination might suggest� August Wilhelm Schlegel points out that imagination of extranatural realities is impossible and that, thus, all imagination is rooted in reality. Compared with the discussion on imitation in the earlier eighteenth century, he shifts the attention from a discussion of the probable and the marvelous. He stresses that poetry’s mimetic efforts need to address the idea rather than the appearance of nature, in order to prevent a mechanical copying: “[D]ie Kunst soll die Natur nachahmen. Das heißt nämlich, sie soll wie die Natur selbständig schaffend, organisirt und organisirend, lebendige Werke bilden” ( Kritische Schriften 2: 322). “Mimesis,” as Mattias Pirholt summarizes, “represents poiesis” in romantic thought (23). That the term “Nachahmung” in romantic writing is not particularly prominent (Petersen 237) does not mean that the concept itself is absent� Mimesis, or the aesthetic problems that arise attendant on this concept, resurface in many disguises in the romantic reflection on the relationship between art and world, as we shall see. Against Kant and Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel insists that cognition is not based in an original act or premise, from which a system can be determined, but that every cognitive act is in itself an act within a larger temporal continuum: “[D]er Kern liegt bei uns in der Mitte ” (KFSA 12: 328). In a move away from the earlier idealist framework, Schlegel takes a distinctively historical turn; the material world and cognitive experience are self-representations of an organic 374 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz whole, an “interconnectedness that joins all individuals in the infinite chain of being” (Millan 145). For Schlegel, the purpose of philosophy is to disprove the misbelief of the finiteness of things, that he rejects by embracing the “Ansicht der unendlichen Fülle und Mannigfaltigkeit” (KFSA 12: 335). The iteration of the word “Fülle” here reveals a proximity to the realm of aesthetics, where this word served a central function in regulating the process of creative inspiration during the eighteenth century (Niehle 47). In his Ideen , Schlegel uses “Fülle” to directly refute a central tenet of Schiller’s concept of poetry: Das Moralische einer Schrift liegt nicht im Gegenstande, oder im Verhältnis des Redenden zu den Angeredeten, sondern im Geist der Behandlung� Atmet dieser die ganze Fülle der Menschheit, so ist sie moralisch. Ist sie nur das Werk einer abgesonderten Kraft und Kunst, so ist sie es nicht. ( Fragmente 1: 86) The whole fullness of humanity determines the morality of poetry; if poetry becomes detached from the manifold appearances of life, poetry ceases to have a moral purpose� This idea of progressive poetry, as it had been promoted during the Athenäum years, is based in the dialectic of ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ - the two extreme positions that frame all thinking about poetry. However, the remark that romantic poetry is not yet finished but itself the realization of an infinite becoming does not lend itself to a poetic program of realism. Yet, Schlegel echoes Schleiermacher elsewhere noting that true realism is only possible in poetry (KFSA 2: 265), since only here the workings of imagination become transparent for the subject� More in practical rather than theoretical terms, Ludwig Tieck has something similar in mind when he defines the novella as a “sonderbare Casuistik”: Und wie der Dichter hier das Geheimnisvolle zwar klar, menschlich und göttlich zugleich, aber doch wieder durch ein Geheimnis ausgleichen will: so ist in allen Richtungen des Lebens und Gefühls ein Unauflösbares, dessen sich immer wieder die Dichtkunst, wie sie sich auch in Nachahmung und Darstellung zu ersättigen scheint, bemächtigt, um den todten Buchstaben der gewöhnlichen Wahrheit neu zu beleben und zu erklären. ( Schriften 11: lxxxviii—lxxxix) At first glance, ‘enlivening’ and ‘explaining’ are rather modest purposes for poetic imagination, if compared to the enthusiasm expressed in early romantic thought at large. However, this passage leads to the core of the romantic conceptualization of poetic realism, which is deeply rooted in early romantic thinking. The tension between transparency and opacity of life itself, Tieck continues to explain, is not relieved in sublime enthusiasm as the ancient tragedy aimed for, but in the emotional and stylistic compounding of potentially infinite perspectives on one and the same fact of life. Only a diversity of “Farben und Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 375 Charaktere läßt die ächte Novelle zu,” as Tieck continues in his poetics of the genre ( Schriften 11: lxxxvii)� Compared to the 1790s - when romantic though had gathered pace - the historical situation in the late 1820s - when this programmatic text had been written - had completely changed. Yet, Tieck’s emphasis on contingencies, the ostensibly significant or insignificant occurrences of events ( Schriften 11: lxxxvii), echoes early romantic thought that proves to be more persistent and relevant in the conceptualization of early nineteenth-century realism than has been generally acknowledged. The point of departure for romantic theories of poetry and imagination was not only the rapid philosophical development in the 1790s, but also Schiller’s subsequent appropriation of these philosophical innovations in poetological theory and practice as well as aesthetics. As Frederik Beiser argued recently, Schiller’s aesthetic theories, too, have a realistic bend� Schiller defined beauty as autonomy in appearance (8: 285). Although beauty is an appearance for or within reason, Schiller claims that beauty must be a quality that is objectively inherent in the thing in question: “Es gibt also eine solche Ansicht der Natur oder der Erscheinungen, wo wir von ihnen nichts weiter als Freiheit verlangen, wo wir bloß darauf sehen, ob sie das, was sie sind, durch sich selbst sind” (288). What Schiller does not claim in this context is the actual existence independently of cognition; “in other words,” as Beiser summarizes, “it does not identify appearance with things-in-themselves.” What allows Schiller to see beauty as an objective property of a thing is that the property must be identifiable in an “intersubjective spatial world” (Beiser, Schiller 71)� In his Matthisson review, a year after the Kallias letter from 1793, Schiller asserts the value of visual evidence in descriptive poetry as a legitimate poetic device� Nevertheless, the idealist frame of Schiller’s realism is obvious� Schiller insists on eliminating all historical contingencies from poetry, since poetry aims at the “allgemeine[.] Naturwahrheit” rather than individual and accidental occurrences. Poetry should present “wahre Natur” since only “in Wegwerfung des Zufälligen und in dem reinen Ausdruck des Notwendigen liegt der große Styl” (8: 1020—21). This last remark is clearly directed against the rustic and folkloric realism of Bürger’s poetry that Schiller devoted his infamous and damning review to three years earlier, and to which the Matthisson review is obviously the positive coda. But on a general level, Schiller unveils in practical terms his own concept of idealized reality that he develops in his larger essays on aesthetics around the same time� In his letters on ästhetische Erziehung , Schiller demands that art shall leave reality behind, “und sich mit anständiger Kühnheit über das Bedürfnis erheben,” whereas realism is being located in art’s purpose of advancing “wahre[.] politische[.] Freyheit” (8: 559). In this trajectory, poetry is not the representation of the individual and thus contingent object or event 376 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz of empirical nature� Poetry rather captures essence, not appearance� As mentioned above, the romantic idea that art imitates not nature itself but her ‘idea,’ her creative potential, seems to agree with Schiller. Indeed, romantic authors are deeply indebted to Schiller’s theory; below the surface, however, it is obvious that the romantic concept of reality differs from Schiller’s fundamentally. The romantic authors clearly saw that this program offers only a quite limited approach to reality and poetic realism. Novalis, for instance, remarked: “Das Allgemeine kann man nur mit dem Besondern überhaupt ausdrücken und das Besondre überhaupt nur mit dem Einzelnen” (2: 188), thus leaving no doubt that the accidental is intrinsically constitutive of poetry - and not something to be eliminated� Novalis indeed points exactly to what he perceived as the blind spot in Schiller’s idealized nature, the fact that the imagination is activated only through the individual stimulus, not the abstract idea that - eventually - may be contained in the poetic text� For Schiller, the absence of contingencies had a certain necessity, since he conceptualized poetry as an act of freedom that cannot account for resistive phenomena of the empirical world. He takes up Kant’s distinction between reality as modality (in the sense of actuality) and reality as correspondence between perception and cognition and synthesizes both in the “Spieltrieb.” Novalis does not exactly favor empiricism in his fragment, but feels uneasy with eliminating all accidental events, since they are at the center of every perception of the world’s fullness. He maintains that poetry begins with a fact, with a perception of something actual that then sparks a cognitive process; 2 each contingency may become a representation of the whole, every “Willkürliche, Zufällige, Individuelle kann unser Weltorgan werden” (3: 684). Against this backdrop, Tieck’s “Allegorie” becomes more concrete. 3 Novalis went on to posit an inextricable link between world and meaning as the origin of cognition: “Die Welt ist ein Universaltropus des Geistes, ein symbolisches Bild desselben” (2: 600). Novalis’s epistemological monism guarantees a coherence between mind and world that will be constitutive for reality; only against the world as horizon - taken here in a first, not differentiated meaning as reality - the mind is self-transparent� Whether this is being thought of as an act of positing or perception is a secondary question. The arbitrariness of the empirical world as a fact seems to be a sufficient condition for a representation of reality within cognition. Similar to Tieck’s “Unauflösbares,” Novalis’s transparency, the “symbolisches Bild,” intrinsically has an enigmatic spot, a moment that is perceivable only as wonder, not as distinct cognition: Alle unsre Erinnerungen und Begebenheiten reihen sich an eine mystische Einheit, die wir Ich nennen. Indem wir uns in der Welt umsehen, finden wir eine Menge Sen- Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 377 sationen aller Art wunderbar gewählt, gemischt[,] geordnet und zusammenhängend. Wir fühlen uns wundersam von diesen Phaenomenen angezogen - das Phaenomenon scheint uns einzuziehen - die Welt ist verschwunden - wir sehn nichts, als das Phaenomenon an der Stelle der Welt - und jetzt entsteht der Begriff des emp[irischen] Ich. (3: 431—32) The last clause makes clear that the disappearance of the world is not an endorsement of idealism but rather the precondition for the constitution of realism in the first place; the empirical subject itself is the result of a process of individuation of the particular from the manifold, a process that in turn is rooted in the inaccessible, ‘mystical’ subject. Where Schiller thought of the empirical fact as an impediment to the free activity of imagination that allows only for self-imposed limitations, Novalis by contrast sees no limitation in the contingent fact but describes contingency as a first stimulus in a cognitive process. Without taking into consideration these epistemological underpinnings, any explanation of romantic aesthetics would miss the difference to Schiller’s concept of modern aesthetics, which in many ways was similar. Romantic epistemology no longer allowed for a normative take on accidental events that characterizes Schiller’s primacy of true over historical nature. Neither was it the Romantics’ question whether ‘realism’ is permissible in poetry, since ‘realism’ was conceived of as an intrinsic part of cognition, as the defining moment of the empirical subject� The decisive factor here, however, is that this problem is not solved in romantic thought in the first place. The introduction of reality’s own historicity into the discussion shifts the attention towards a concept that eventually transcends Schiller’s teleological idea of education as a governing framework of poetical and intellectual activity� Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, does not even try to reconcile the tension between the deeply entangled concepts of idealism, realism, truth, and reality� In his Gespräch über Poesie , he denies the possibility of realism in poetry, only to give reality a few lines later a significant reentry. In a passage which he later added to the Werke edition of this text, Schlegel speaks of the interrelation of nature and poetry and points out that representation in poetry is always underpinned by meaning: “Welch’ unermeßlich reiche Natur-Symbolik liegt nicht in jenen Schilderungen und Gleichnissen verhüllt, welche die Dichter aus der sichtbaren Fülle der Natur so wie sie dem sinnlichen Auge erscheint, entlehnen” (KFSA 2: 320). 4 Since poetry is a product of human activity, there is no true mimetic relationship between art and nature, but art is always an act of symbolizing, and thus relies on superimposing nature with meaning. However, only a few pages later, Schlegel refers to the major tendency of German Idealism, the anti-subjectivist “growing realism and naturalism” 378 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz (Beiser, Idealism 3), by invoking the “Naturbegriff des Realismus” and locates the origin of poetry in the same reality that he initially had dismissed (KFSA 2: 325)� 5 The language with which he explains his take on poetry here is revealing. Poets produce both “Schilderungen” and “Gleichnisse,” descriptive evocations of things, and figurative images that refer to ideas. “Schilderungen” (descriptions) in eighteenth-century usage of the word carries the connotation of pictorial representation, and with this the idea of verisimilitude. 6 He also posits a strong connection between the symbolism in poetic nature and the “sinnlichen Auge,” as if sense perception were able to immediately intuit symbolic meaning. Finally, the verb “entlehnen” which describes the act of poetic creation suggests that the symbolic meaning is connected to an intrinsic quality of objects in nature that can be directly accessed and transferred into poetry. The two concepts, poetry as cognitive activity of symbolizing and poetry as direct access to nature’s meaning by way of sense perception, can hardly be reconciled. On principle, Schlegel denies a synthesis of these opposing positions, pointing towards the fact that for him the truth lies not in a Hegelian sublation but the infinite negotiating dynamic between two opposing forces - the intake of sense data and the symbolizing activity of the human mind, two cognitive activities that are less distinct than a first glance suggests. Both are framed by the concept of progressive poetry and its distinctly modern trajectory� Schlegel’s monistic premise that allows this evolving dynamic is that poetry (as poesy) is already an intrinsic quality of reality, of the infinite becoming that is inherent in both the great works of art and in the allegedly most insignificant appearances in nature (KFSA 2: 285). Significant here is the fact that intrinsic poesy is unconscious of itself. If attended by consciousness too early, any occurrence would lose its quality as “Charakteristische[s], Interessante[s],” as Schlegel demonstrates in his earlier Studium essay (KFSA 1: 241). In this essay he repeatedly operates with these two terms that around the same time emerged as central concepts in Classicist aesthetics (Dönike 18—29). Originally, Schlegel had supported Schiller’s idea of the objectivity of poetry, which is achieved only by stripping reality from all historical contingencies for the sake of symbolizing her truth. In the Studium essay, he still rejected the trajectory of modern poetry, insofar as the focus on the interesting and characteristic lacks any harmonizing force. But with these two terms, he had found that which would become a central idea in the constitution of romantic realism only a few years later. In the earlier essay, however, the characteristic is thought of as a distraction from the essential in a way that the autonomous potential of poetry, for which Schlegel still takes ancient poetry as the model, is not yet realized� The consequential demand for autonomy that Schlegel adapts from both Kant and Schiller, however, is simultaneously Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 379 contrasted by his insistence on “ästhetische Heteronomie” (KFSA 1: 270). On the other hand, the fact that the forces of life are not harmonized as in ancient poetry is the prerequisite for the emergence of progressive poetry� Thus, although Schlegel only occasionally rather than frequently used the term of the ‘characteristical’ after the Studium essay, the concept resurfaces in a much more positive light as “progressive Universalpoesie” only a few years after the Studium essay. By now, Schlegel embraced the premise of the ‘moderns’ as an essential component of his progressive ideas on poetry ( Fragmente 1: 16)� Whereas ancient poetry still provides the ultimate normative background against which the moderns are being judged, Schlegel historicized the very concept of ancient poetry as a merely “relatives Maximum” (KFSA 1: 634). Accordingly, aesthetic judgement is not based on measuring modern against ancient poetry, but on bringing both together in a critical framework that takes the respective historical situations of each into account and into a dialogue. “Poesie kann nur durch Poesie kritisiert werden,” as he writes in the Lyceums fragments ( Fragmente 1: 20). Yet, even in the Studium essay, Schlegel was careful not to let the genuine value of the moderns go unnoticed. For example, he praises Shakespeare in particular, which suggests that the concept of poetry he laid out in this early essay is not completely divested of reality as a system of reference� Schlegel appreciates the “unerschöpfliche Fülle des Interessanten, […] unnachahmliche Wahrheit des Charakteristischen” (KFSA 1: 249) in Shakespeare’s plays, explicitly using the categories that he had rejected earlier in favor of aesthetic autonomy. By the time then that the romantic movement was in full bloom, Schlegel merged the ‘characteristical’ with his earlier insistence on objectivity in poetry. A little later, in the Athenäum , he simply and apodictically posits: “Shakespeares Universalität ist wie der Mittelpunkt der romantischen Kunst” ( Fragmente 1: 49)� Schlegel emphasizes, however, that this is not merely a continuation of the querelle ; modern poetry doesn’t put the ancients behind itself, but has a distinctive quality only in progressive, infinite becoming ( Jauss 75). Through critique, poetry needs to explore its own potential, rather than assess what it is, as the Lyceum fragment posits; many of the extensive reviews in the Athenäum follow this trajectory. The review of August Lafontaine’s novels that Caroline and August Wilhelm Schlegel present in the journal’s first volume are an example that leads directly to the problem of realism. The reviewers take particular issue with those characteristics of Lafontaine’s prose that they deem to be idealized to a degree that defies all plausibility: “Ein Mahler wirft leicht eine schwebende Stellung hin, aber laßt es jemand versuchen, sie in Wirklichkeit nachzuahmen, so wird er bald das Gleichgewicht verlieren” (“Beyträge zur Kritik” 156). It is significant that the passage goes beyond a mere reflection on what the earlier eighteenth century negotiated as probability, but that this question directly 380 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz leads into the idea of morality that is the background of Lafontaine’s novels; Lafontaine’s characters, who are too virtuous to be true, undermine the moral purpose of the novels in the first place, and the reader is left with nothing more than the “trockene Moral der Fabel” (159). As Tieck phrases his critique of Lafontaine around the same time, the prolific author of popular novels presents the reader with characters “die gar nichts Charakteristisches haben” (KS 1: 101—02). What appears as a lack of probability is in actuality a lack of vitality of the characters, a claim that shifts the perspective from normative questions to the relationship between intraand extratextual reality. This distinction, in turn, becomes the center of the emergence of literary realism in the nineteenth century on a more general level (Plumpe 256). Lafontaine’s characters remain within a completely intratextual system of reference, a source that cannot provide them with the vitality that Schlegel called for� His characters are made up from patterns and clichés from other texts and not from observation. In Tieck’s words, Lafontaine knows “Natur [nur] aus einigen und nicht den besten Büchern” (KS 1: 102). Whether or not this assessment is entirely true, Tieck as well as August Wilhelm Schlegel see a lack of vitality, which for them equals a lack of realism; this is the core of the critique of their contemporary popular literature� Crucial here is that the Romantics attest this kind of literature not simply a lack of realism in representation, but that this lack causes a failure of popular literature in serving a function in the increasingly autonomous and differentiated system of literature. Thus, romantic realism detaches the discussion from its close association with problems of representation and turns ‘realism’ into a category in both aesthetics of production and reception� Caroline and August Wilhelm Schlegel explicitly maintain that it is not Lafontaine’s subject matters per se that demonstrate the lack of aesthetic value, which again points to the significance of the ‘characteristic’ as an implicit element of real poetry: “Es kann ein Gegenstand der reifsten Poesie seyn, auch eine sehr gewöhnliche Natur in ihrer vollen Wahrheit und Beschränkung darzustellen” (“Beyträge zur Kritik” 164). The insistence on the aesthetic value of the “Beschränkung” seems to point to Schiller who repeatedly speaks of “Einschränkungen” that result not from the idea of the basic concept of human life, but the accidental and concrete exercise of freedom. This creates the “Schauplatz der Wirklichkeit” (FA 8: 619) in the first place, the ‘historical’ nature that must be overcome in poetry. In other words, neither Schiller’s nor Lafontaine’s idealism may be taken as the origin of poetry - at least not of a poetry that meets the challenge of infinite becoming. Yet, despite the indispensability of reality for poetry, romantic realism is not a realism that switches from intraliterary references to reality proper as dominant system of reference� As it is obvious in Schlegel’s theory, both the ‘characteristic’ as an index of reality and poietic Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 381 faculty of imagination together are preconditions for poetic realism in Romanticism� A paradigmatic shift from intrato extraliterary reference (“Systemreferenz” and “Umweltreferenz,” to use Plumpe’s terms) has been called on to differentiate periods in the periodization within Romanticism itself. Ludwig Tieck’s lyric double cycle Reisegedichte eines Kranken and Rückkehr des Genesenden has been used to demonstrate this turn� Stefan Scherer for instance claims that these poems mark Tieck’s departure from early romantic premises. Dieter Breuer points to the political and historical realities of the early nineteenth century that determine both descriptive elements and figurative speech as well as the textual organization of the cycle. Tieck himself emphasizes that the poems are based on “kleine Begebenheiten,” i.e., characteristic and interesting events that often in themselves don’t appear as being significant at first glance; claims of Tieck’s turn to a more realistic style are certainly not without merit, particularly not from a more historiographic perspective that emphasizes biographical constellations. However, the realism of the cycle is simultaneously deeply rooted in early romantic thought, which cannot be sufficiently explained by the fact that even realist literature must inevitably include intraliterary references in order to be distinguishable from other social systems (Plumpe 256). Rather than understanding the cycle on a general level as a turn towards realism, I see the poems as attempts to salvage tenets of early romantic aesthetics after the break-up of the Jena constellation. This allows, I argue, for a concept of poetic realism that retains the epistemological framework described above in poetic practice and simultaneously to acknowledge the fact that poetry needs what Schiller describes as “Schauplatz der Wirklichkeit.” The poems were written during Tieck’s journey through Italy in 1805 and 1806 and were published in 1823. Most of the poems are written in a free, rhapsodic form and in poetic prose rather than a particularly lyric style� This already indicates a turn towards a very tangible reality when we compare it to Tieck’s earlier poetry, which often is centered around a Stimmung , a mood or atmosphere (Böckmann). The poems describe Tieck’s experiences during his sojourn in Italy; the ‘realism’ of the text, however, would be misunderstood if the poems are taken in the sense of ‘Erlebnisdichtung.’ Like Schlegel’s contrasting of idealism as a subjective and realism as an objective mode of epistemic attitude, Tieck contrasts the personal experiences of a poet in crisis with the more ‘real’ experiences of the northern tourist in Italy� On several occasions, however, Tieck reverts to earlier modes of writing. He again returns to the hallmark of his pre-Italian poetry, namely playing with sounds and rhythms - and it is exactly in these instances when the realism of 382 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz the cycle is associated with early romantic modes of poetic self-reflection. A striking resonance of this conceptual background can be found in “Koboldchen,” the next to last poem of the cycle� Formally, the poem resembles the majority of the preceding poems; the text is written in irregular lines and strophes that clearly follow the train of thought rather than a formally determined lyric style or genre; its subject matter and tone as well as its rhymed nature, however, seem to return to Tieck’s earlier lyric style: a fleeting, floating agility that not only characterizes the succession of images but also the central subject, a little goblin that could almost be seen as symbolizing Tieck’s early poetry. The folkloristic fairy-tale reality of the goblin, but also the reference to Goethe’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” - “das Mädchen / Das still dort am Rädchen / […] / Nicht weiß, daß sie schön und gut.” ( Gedichte 7: 260) - effectively embraces the lyrical subject in intrapoetic security. However, a closer look at the goblin reveals that Tieck uses this image for a negotiation of romantic notions of reality and realism� “Koboldchen” addresses the goblin in the second person, immediately raising the question whether the poem takes the reality of the folkloristic creature for granted, or if some figurative meaning is alluded to. Either way the irreal creature ironically represents a particular take on reality, whereas the figurative meaning is correlated with an idealism that seems to deny reality external to the subject. In both cases, though, the relationship between a tactile, cognitive, or emotional reality and poetic language rather than the beginning of a tale is in the limelight of the text� Immer neckend, Scherze weckend, Bald sich zeigend, Bald versteckend Bist du drollig Gleich drauf tollig, Nie ermüdet, Nie befriedet, In Unruh Ruhe suchend, die dir fehlt, Selbst gequält; (258—59) The restless, whimsical “Koboldchen” doesn’t seem to have a corporeal nature, yet his appearance has a strong and immediate effect; the goblin’s teasing challenges the subject’s wit (“Scherze”). Moreover, he has the power to hide and to show itself, and thus operates by its own intrinsic nature which also seems to determine the inability to ever relax, rendering him simultaneously powerful and powerless. In folklore, a ‘Kobold’ is a household spirit that has no permanent physiognomy but that can take on various imaginative appearances. Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 383 Thus, the spirit may have an appearance that is simultaneously familiar and entirely foreign� The spirit’s nature is neither good nor evil, rather his nature is the infinite, perpetuated transformation that is not bound to any normative framework. Against the backdrop of Tieck’s earlier poem “Sehnen nach Italien,” it is not without irony that the journey which he commenced in a hopeful mood, ends with an address to a disillusioning, northern, Germanic spirit in a historical environment that is characterized by the unravelling of the old political order� The sojourn under the Mediterranean sun and being surrounded by the artefacts of ancient culture did not lead to a renewal, neither spiritual nor physical, as it was the case with Goethe during his Italian journey. It is obvious, thus, that Tieck does not end his Italian double cycle with a reminiscence to a fairytale reality as a culmination of his Italian experience� Early on, the traveler is disillusioned by his experiences as is made clear by the departure from Schiller’s ideas of aesthetic education in the first few poems of the cycle ( Jost-Fritz 170—71). Now, upon return the subject realizes that Schiller’s “Sonne Homers” (“Spaziergang”; FA 1: 42) is indeed not shining for him, but that he, by contrast, not only failed with transferring southern art and inspiration to the North, but that the return means a return into an ever more disruptive history� In the end, it remains ambiguous whether Tieck replaces Schiller’s teleological structure of history with a cyclical structure. However, the “unglückseliges Dunkel” in the very end of the cycle (“Dresden”; Gedichte 7: 262) is not a matter of the continued personal crisis, but the expectation that historical disruption is the nature of history, rather than the development to any certain end� In the end, it is less important that Schiller’s late-Enlightenment optimism is replaced by resignation, but that the awareness of the fact that all poetry is dependent on different - and from generation to generation differing - experiences of the political, cultural, and social dynamic of history� It might be up to poetry to conceive of a meaning in the ever-changing world. Consequently, Tieck’s cycle is not an embrace of representational realism as realism came to be understood in the course of the nineteenth century, but closely follows many of the themes that were addressed in the romantic reflection on the relationship between reality, realism and poetry. In the end, Tieck’s lyrical subject turns to poetry again to find consolation; his choice, however, just adds another layer of ironic commentary to the poem and cycle: He reads Goethe’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” - not only a reference to a particularly ‘northern’ myth 7 but also a poem marked by a distinctive unrest, text-internally confirming the earlier line “in Unruh Ruhe suchend.” Beginning and end are neither connected through teleological direction, nor does a circle close� Instead, beginning and end are merely contingent points in time, much the same as Schlegel claims that all thought begins in the middle. The ‘realist’ 384 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz and the ‘romantic’ elements in Tieck’s double cycle are not reconciled into a unified concept of poetic reality; Tieck’s poems closely echo Schlegel’s epistemic realism that he extensively reflects upon particularly in his philosophical lectures between 1800 and 1807. Schlegel’s insistence on the ultimate lack of transparency of Being’s origin is not an endorsement of irrationalism, but the result of the inherent condition of things and their cognition; this idea is echoed in Tieck’s insistence on something “Unauflösbares,” as demonstrated above. In the center of all knowledge is its own opacity - without discrediting the value of this knowledge, as Schlegel emphatically underscores: “Erkennen bezeichnet schon ein bedingtes Wissen. Die Nichterkennbarkeit des Absoluten ist also eine identische Trivialität” (KFSA 18: 512). To take Tieck’s goblin as a metaphor for the Absolute certainly would stretch Tieck’s philosophical earnestness too far. What Schlegel’s Absolute and Tieck’s “Koboldchen” have in common, however, is their simultaneous ideal and real nature, its infinite state of change and transformation. Much the same way, Schlegel redefined Kant’s Thing-in-itself as a dialectic relationship between persistence and “wechselnden Erscheinungen” (KFSA 12: 306). The changing appearance is the result of the cognitive fact that reality never can be entirely fixated, but that it is an ever-evolving manifold (KFSA 12: 110). Tieck applies this epistemological premise to his poetic practice and posits the utter impossibility of a clear and distinct representational relationship between world and poem: So umgetrieben In rastlosem Wildern? Wenn die Modelle Nie bleiben auf selbiger Stelle, Wer kann in Qualen Denn zeichnen und schildern, Mit Farben gar malen ( Gedichte 7: 259) Schlegel conceives of things not as fixed and finite entities; their only persistent quality is that they are “beschränkt und abgesondert,” limited and isolated, from any perceiving subject� Things rather are circumstantial manifestations of something that is determined only by the fact that everything is in a state of continuing transformation� Things become things by spontaneous individuation in concrete environments� Cognition of things, accordingly, is not dependent on the Thing-in-itself as defined above but determined by historical contexts that are themselves accidental in relation to the thing (and the subject), essential for their constitution as objects and for communicating about them� In Tieck’s poem, the appearance does not allow for a depiction in “[s]tillstehenden Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 385 Bildern,” but it entices to a flurry of cognitive activity of the “Witzfunken,” an activity that is distinctly linguistic: So laß uns denn flattern, Mit Witzfunken knattern, Und plaudern und schnattern, Jetzt wundersam dichtend ( Gedichte 7: 259) Thus, whereas things as such are not accessible to cognition, they are to language and, accordingly, they are a matter of discursive knowledge (KFSA 12: 345). Communication replaces the quest for the ultimate origin of knowledge; and Tieck here demonstrates that the point is not whether the spirit appearance of the goblin is truth or fiction; instead, the point is that it becomes the origin of a communicative event, no matter what character or moral value this event may have: Doch das ist nicht fraglich So interessant unbehaglich, So ernst und so komisch, So kindisch, dämonisch, Einfältig und witzig, So stumpf und so spitzig ( Gedichte 7: 260) It is clear that the appearance prompts the urge to communicate distinct properties; questions about the ‘true’ reality by contrast remain unanswerable (“Unwissend”) because they are not based in distinct knowledge, a clear rejection of both the Idealist attempt to locate the origin of reality in self-consciousness, and of the mentalist theories that fail to take the communicative nature of human beings into account� As Schlegel claimed, romantic anti-foundationalism does not depart analytically from a determined and determining foundation; 8 rather, cognition emerges within the historical succession of things. But what then is romantic realism against the backdrop of this historical turn? The very last poem of the cycle, “Dresden,” indeed shifts the perspective from the “kleine Begebenheiten” that Tieck mentioned as his source of inspiration to the theater of war that Thuringia would become just weeks after he had written this last poem. On the way back to Ziebingen via Dresden, Tieck pays a visit to Goethe in September 1806� The hopeful longing for Italy in the beginning of the cycle was associated with physical illness and mental exhaustion of the biographical subject of the poems, hence the reference to Schiller’s elegy� In the very end of the cycle, the physical and mental well-being - “gesund und kräftig” ( Gedichte 7: 261) - is correlated with a gloomy anticipation of a catastrophe 386 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz to come that tinges the atmosphere of the visit in Weimar. Tieck is met with kind reception in Goethe’s house and finds an exquisite group of fellow artists and poets, yet the entire account of his visit is dominated by the sight of the Prussian troops, whom Tieck observed already on his way to the city “auf allen Straßen,” and that are now deployed on the Frauenplan (260—61). These troops were devastatingly defeated at Jena and Auerstedt just a few weeks after Tieck left Weimar� Tieck’s double cycle, thus, ends on a resigned note. Nonetheless, the progressive nature of romantic poetry does not allow a mere acceptance of unfolding historical situations but pushes the subject to make conjectures - as Schlegel used the hermeneutical concept of divination - for the future. The current situation leaves the subject with a “unglückselige[s] Dunkel,” but from a biographical perspective, the title of the poem - “Dresden” (the city is otherwise absent from the poem) - hints at a future reality that is at this point certainly not yet realized. In the end, Tieck’s cycle poses the question of romantic realism, but leaves it open for speculation about how the “Koboldchen” on the one hand and history on the other jointly constitute reality� As Schlegel’s emphasis on the historical embeddedness of characteristic perceptions already suggests, history in the sense of progression, and not only the individual event, is a driving force of human experience that mediates between the situatedness and the epistemological foundation of reality. It is noteworthy that this driving force is less oriented towards a certain point in history, despite the frequent use of tropes such as the ‘golden age’ or ‘childhood’ as symbols for an unalienated state of being in romantic writing might suggest. 9 After all, Schlegel posits that cognition begins “in der Mitte,” and the only teleological vantage point is a state of a “höchster Punkt menschlicher Erkenntnis” when “Umfang so wie die Grenzen alles Wissens” will be fully realized ( Gedichte 12: 328). In an age of rapid scientific progression, Schlegel was probably aware that this “höchster Punkt” is itself only temporary and transgressed by the following generation� Hegelian absolutism of a self-conscious and in the end self-transparent process of history seems to be absent� Nonetheless, tropes of an idealist view of reality remain part of romantic writing, even if those do usually not remain uncontradicted� A revealing example for this is Achim von Arnim’s novella Die Majorats-Herren � Shortly before his premature death, the protagonist of this novella, the Majoratsherr, learns about his true identity, and that not he but the beautiful Jewess Esther, with whom he was exchanged as a baby, is the legitimate heir of a stately mansion, the Majoratshaus. He fell in love with Esther, who in the course of the narration is murdered by her neighbor Vasthi, a crime that he decided to reveal� 10 When the Majoratsherr himself dies shortly Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 387 thereafter, the narrator explains “ erschien überall durch den Bau dieser Welt eine höhere, welche den Sinnen nur in der Phantasie erkenntlich wird, die zwischen beiden Welten als Vermittlerin steht ” ( Werke 4: 142; italics in the original text). However, this preliminary end of the novella is juxtaposed by a grotesquely open series of successive endings, in which first a court lady takes revenge on her husband by allowing countless dogs to sit at the luxurious dinner table, then a revolutionary commander, who restores the old order in the mansion that seems to be the true and quite versatile metaphorical center of the text, and finally by an anti-Semitically painted old woman who buys up the mansion to install an ammoniac plant� Structurally, this series of endings could be extended into our own present time. 11 This points to the tendency of Romantics to distinguish between reality at large, and meaningful reality� Accordingly, Novalis’s operation of romanticizing the world does not result in a reality accessible only to an exclusive group of the initiated, a lingua latina or sacra , but in a “ lingua romana ,” a universal and inclusive language (2: 545). This allusion to the shift from Latin to the vernacular languages during the Reformation is certainly no coincidence; just as the Reformation set out to change the experience of reality, romantic realism attests to the fact that this experience is no longer bound to a unifying principle around 1800, in contrast to the Enlightenment that still trusted to attribute reality to such a principle, be it in the form of Christian Wolff’s ens realissimum (Holz 210) or Fichte’s original conjunction of act and fact� The higher form of reality, addressed in Arnim’s novella, is not the romanticized reality, since, as Novalis claims, romanticization is a “Wechselerhöhung und Erniedrigung,” and simultaneously embraces the mysterious and the “geläufigen Ausdruck” (2: 545). Neither is the higher form of reality a unifying principle. The resigned character of Tieck’s lyric cycle and Arnim’s novella, thus, only seemingly suggest an apotheosis as a precondition to access a ‘true’ reality. What both point to, however, is the fact that reality increasingly evades disclosure; whereas Tieck can witness the deployment of troops and follow the news, he nevertheless feels his own loss of agency. The protagonist in Arnim’s novella stumbles into the historical shift brought forth by the French Revolution and eventually perishes trying to solve a mystery literally next door to his house� In the end, the higher form of reality becomes an immanent force in the world. ‘Higher’ realities seem to have their very function in pointing to a “realen Zusammenwirken mit der übrigen Welt,” rather than being realities with a different ontology, as Arnim writes in his review of Jung-Stilling’s Theorie der Geister-Kunde , one of the sources for the novella ( Werke 6: 543). In this review, he discusses the problem of imagination and truth; spirit appearances, the phenomenon both Jung-Stilling’s book and Arnim’s review focus on, become part 388 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz of the empirical world (the “übrige Welt”) that to some extent governs both imitative and poietic acts of the poet. As spiritual phenomena, however, they remain inaccessible to direct perception. Arnim is not concerned with imagination as a subjective end in itself but as a function in a differentiated literary system; the purpose of literature for him is to be in a “sichern Verkehr mit der Welt,” as he explains in “Dichtung und Geschichte,” the first preface to his Kronenwächter novel, around the same time ( Werke 2: 17)� Whether ghostly apparitions are real or not is not the question for him, as long as appearances set forth a creative process and a product in this world. A closer look at how Arnim conceptualizes this preconscious realm of imagination reveals that the higher form of reality resembles what Tieck alluded to with the manifold of life’s events (and eventually the “Allegorie”). “Alle Poesie,” Arnim writes in another book review, “ruht auf einer derben, eckigen Realität, und ohne diese menschlichen Züge ist alles Übermenschliche ein Licht ohne Gestalt” ( Werke 6: 271)� The point here is that Arnim does not pit the realism of a “eckige[.] Realität” against an idealist “Übermenschliche[s]”; rather, he reconciles both in a realism that originates in a mimetic act that is then superimposed by imagination� He explains this idea in an earlier letter to Friedrich von Raumer� While visiting the art gallery in Dresden, Arnim immerses himself in Dutch paintings and criticizes the alleged realism of this school: Die niederländische Schule hat die Wahrheit des Ganzen der Wahrheit im Einzelnen gewöhnlich aufgeopfert, wäre alles so […] ich würde nie dabey verweilen, wie ich bey einem Gemälde verweilen, nicht diesen Ausdruck der gewöhnlichsten Natur zu befestigen und gleichsam als Gemälde zu erstarren würde mein Wunsch seyn, wenn mich etwas reitzte so wäre es der Wechsel die Veränderung dieser Scene, wie alles zusammenstimmt darin zu einer gewissen Freude zu einem gewissen Zwecke. (WAA 30: 191) Arnim appreciates the verisimilitude of the Dutch School’s realism, but he misses reality as an open horizon that allows the imagination to situate seemingly closed scenes in a succession of events in time, i�e�, history� The aspiration of pictorial realism and exhaustive representation of all visual perceptions for him leads into a failure to reconcile imitation, imagination, and contingency, the very moment of “Wechsel” that Arnim calls for. As Schlegel claimed, poetry (referring to art in general) can make the real essence of things visible. He is, however, simultaneously aware that mimetic representation fails due to the elusive nature of reality itself. Romantic aesthetics seem not yet to draw the connection between this essence of reality and the symbolic meaning of objects that in turn become representations for the driving forces in the social and historical dynamics in the later decades of the nineteenth century. But as we have seen, romantic aesthetic puts an emphasis on the problem that realism is Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 389 dependent on imagination, and that imagination is a precondition to perceive reality in the first place. Beyond its progressive trajectory, however, romantic realism remains, at least with one foot, in pre-modern conceptualizations of reality, a fact that is comprehensible only when simultaneously the romantic concept of history is considered. In July 1802, just a few months after he gave up his career as a scientist in favor of becoming a poet, Arnim writes to Louise von Schlitz that eine gewaltige Dichtung durch die ganze Natur weht, bald als Geschichte bald als Naturereigniß hervortrit, die der Dichter nur in einzelnen schwachen Wiederklängen aufzufassen braucht um ins tiefste Gemüth mit unendliger Klarheit zu dringen. (WAA 31: 54) The romantic understanding of history here is modelled after the concept of natura naturans , along the same lines as August Wilhelm Schlegel favored to imitate not the appearance of nature but the productive potency (“das Hervorbringende selbst”; 2: 322). History is in itself a creating reality, a progressive force that becomes graspable only in its ever-changing manifoldness, but that is in itself not yet understood as the result of competing social processes� Romantic history is the recognition of the significance of contingency, as contingency is a precondition for imagination’s open horizon� By way of conclusion, romantic thought emphasizes the function of both imagination and history for accessing reality, and thus romantic conceptions of realism are always epistemological rather than ontological. Arnim puts the contingencies on center stage, in order to realize the moment of change (“Wechsel”). Tieck focuses entirely on the contingencies to point to the fact that reality emerges not only where individuals find a common ground in communication, but also where the individual encounters resistance. His “Koboldchen” in this sense is a symbol for the subject’s loss of agency in a reality that becomes more and more dependent on a dynamic that has its center beyond the individual subject. This points to what Blumenberg explains as “ Realität als das dem Subjekt nicht Gefügige ” (Blumenberg 53; italics in original text); history no longer allows a vantage point to gain a complete view of its own course. The Romantic authors did not look for the absolutism of a self-conscious spirit, as Hegel did, to solve this loss of preconceived comprehension of history. However, they also did not yet focus on the social dynamics as the driving force of history, as the later nineteenth-century Realism did. For the Romantics the actual (and actualized) reality is ultimately a contingent fact; as meaningful reality, however, it is a fact that is simultaneously based in the subject’s own agency and in something to which the subject has no access. Schleiermacher’s aphorism “Keine Poesie, 390 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz keine Wirklichkeit” has its explanation in the romantic attempt to actualize the contingent reality as meaningful, an attempt that is possible only through imagination� Romantic realism, thus, needs mimetic activity just as much as poietic faculties� Notes 1 In “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” Blumenberg differentiates four types of realism that he sees not in a strict historical succession of each other; a particular type of realism, however, may come to dominate a particular period in history. Here, Blumenberg defines realism as “Realisierung eines in sich einstimmigen Kontextes,” which was a dominant type of realism of the Age of Enlightenment (Blumenberg 51). 2 Arnim takes this in a literal sense when he advises young poets not to dwell on every “kleine[s] Gefühl[.]” in their poetry, but to look at the “Stadtgeschichten und Zeitungsnachrichten” as the origin for poetry (6: 264). 3 Tieck indeed included this fragment in his 1802 edition of Novalis’s works and was certainly familiar with his deceased friend’s thought. 4 In several instances, Schlegel replaced the word “Mythologie” in the later edition of the text with his concept of “Symbolik” that draws heavily on his reimagining of Friedrich Creuzer’s allegorical interpretation of myth� 5 For “Naturbegriff” in the edition of 1823, Schlegel uses “Mysterien des Realismus” in the Athenäum edition of the Gespräch (KFSA 2: 325). 6 Deutsches Wörterbuch , lemma “Schilderung” (http: / / www.woerterbuchnetz. de/ DWB? lemma=schilderung; accessed 20 May 2020). 7 At this point, Tieck certainly couldn’t know yet Goethe’s attempt to reconcile northern and southern poetry in Faust II� 8 On Romantic anti-foundationalism see Millan 159—74� 9 This is not to deny the significance of such tropes; Novalis, however, does not see these tropes as conceptually descriptive elements in his views on history, but rather as regulative ideas (Mähl 294—95). 10 The complicated backstory of the novella cannot be discussed here in its entirety� Essentially, Esther is the biological daughter of the old Majoratsherr, who gave her to a Jewish merchant and took the illegitimate child of a court lady in her place in order to secure the lineage of inheritance, from which female children are excluded. The young Majoratsherr observes Esther being murdered, jumps over the street into her room, and drinks water to proof the crime. According to a rabbinic myth, the water that is next to a dead body brings death to whomever drinks it, and consequently the Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism 391 Majoratsherr dies, merging the reality of the historic event (the crime) and the reality of the myth into an inseparable unity� 11 The anti-Semitic tendency of the novella cannot be further discussed here; for an analysis of this issue see Garloff (437—44). It is noteworthy that the text certainly reflects a despicable value system that characterized parts of the Prussian society in the early 1800s, a value system that is also reflected in the extensive and partly open anti-Semitic writings of the “Deutsche Tischgesellschaft” (see WAA 11: 263—65 for this context). 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