Online Document Assignment 21

GERMAINE DE STAËL

An Ambassador of Romanticism

In many ways, Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) was the perfect person to introduce German romanticism to a French audience. A veteran of the salons of Enlightenment Paris, she had an intimate knowledge of the currents of Enlightenment thought and of French intellectual circles. Her exile by Napoleon in 1803 forced a return to her native Switzerland and provided the occasion for extensive travels in Germany, which inspired a love of the German landscape and a deeper appreciation of German intellectual and cultural developments.

Given her history, it makes sense that Staël should have chosen to present German culture to the French in the form of a kind of travelogue. In On Germany (1810), she took her readers on a journey, showing them the land, people, and ideas of early-nineteenth-century Germany through the eyes of an admiring outsider who shared her readers’ background and experiences. From the opening passages, Staël established a connection that was crucial to her view of Germany and to her understanding of German romanticism. For Staël, German ideas and Germany itself were intimately related: the land and its history inspire an emotional response, and those emotions are at the heart of German culture. This connection did not imply, as it would for later romantic proponents of German nationalism, that one needed to be German to truly appreciate German culture or to participate in its development. Staël was too much of a cosmopolitan and too committed to the idea of universal human qualities to draw that inference. Nonetheless, she did believe that German romanticism had its roots in German soil.

TO PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THIS DOCUMENT ASSIGNMENT: