On Germany begins with a sweeping overview of the German landscape. Staël’s description is shot through with romantic themes. Germany’s natural features and medieval past dominate her account. Her goal is to describe not how Germany looks, but what it makes her feel. Thus there are no statistics, no catalogues of principal cities. When Staël does list Germany’s most important rivers, it is not to compare their relative lengths or economic importance, but to identify the Rhine as the river with the best claim to the guardianship of the “genius of Germany.” As you read Staël’s description of Germany, ask yourself how a French audience might have responded to it. How does the description serve as an introduction to romanticism?

The number and extent of forests indicate a civilization yet recent: the ancient soil of the South is almost unfurnished of trees, and the sun darts its perpendicular rays on the earth which has been laid bare by man. Germany still affords some traces of uninhabited nature. From the Alps to the sea, between the Rhine and the Danube, you behold a land covered with oaks and firs, intersected by rivers of an imposing beauty, and by mountains of a most picturesque aspect; but vast heaths and sands, roads often neglected, a severe climate, at first fill the mind with gloom; nor is it until after some time that it discovers what may attach us to such a country.

The south of Germany is highly cultivated; yet in the most delightful districts of this country there is always something of seriousness, which calls the imagination rather to thoughts of labor than of pleasure, rather to the virtues of the inhabitants than to the charms of nature.

The ruins of castles which are seen on the heights of mountains, houses built of mud, narrow windows, the snows which during winter cover the plains as far as the eye can reach, make a painful impression on the mind. An indescribable silence in nature and in the people, at first oppresses the hearts. It seems as if time moved more slowly there than elsewhere, as if vegetation made not a more rapid progress in the earth than ideas in the heads of men, and as if the regular furrows of the laborer were there traced upon a dull soil.

Nevertheless when we have overcome these first unreflecting sensations, the country and its inhabitants offer to the observation something at once interesting and poetical; we feel that gentle souls and tender imaginations have embellished these fields. The high-roads are planted with fruit-trees for the refreshment of the traveller. The landscapes which surround the Rhine are everywhere magnificent: this river may be called the tutelary genius of Germany; his waves are pure, rapid, and majestic, like the hero of antiquity. The Danube is divided into many branches; the streams of the Elbe and Spree are disturbed too easily by the tempest; the Rhine alone is unchangeable. The countries through which it flows appear at once of a character so grave and so diversified, so fruitful and so solitary, that one would be tempted to believe that they owe their cultivation to the genius of the river, and that man is as nothing to them. Its tide, as it flows along, relates the high deeds of the days of old, and the shade of Arminius seems still to wander on its precipitous banks.

The monuments of Gothic antiquity only are remarkable in Germany; these monuments recall the ages of chivalry; in almost every town a public museum preserves the relics of those days. One would say that the inhabitants of the North, conquerors of the world, when they quitted Germany, left behind memorials of themselves under different forms, and that the whole land resembles the residence of some great people long since left vacant by its possessors. In most of the arsenals of German towns, we meet with figures of knights in painted wood, clad in their armor; the helmet, the buckler, the cuisses, the spurs — all is according to ancient custom; and we walk among these standing dead, whose uplifted arms seem ready to strike their adversaries, who also hold their lances in rest. This motionless image of actions, formerly so lively, causes a painful impression. It is thus that, long after earthquakes, the bodies of men have been discovered still fixed in the same attitudes, in the action of the same thoughts that occupied them at the instant when they were swallowed up.

Source: O. W. Wight, ed., Germany by Madame the Baroness de Staël-Holstein, vol. 1 (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875), pp. 27–29.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER