Utopia and Dystopia in German Literature and Film

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DOI :10.26650/B/AH09SSc16.2024.034.003   IUP :10.26650/B/AH09SSc16.2024.034.003    Full Text (PDF)

Romantic Figurations: Legacies of the Reformation in Novalis and Kleist

Matthew Thomas Stoltz

On the eve of the nineteenth century Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) wrote one of his most controversial texts entitled Christenheit oder Europa (1799). In it, he re-imagines the history of Europe prior to the Reformation as utopia. Emerging at the center of this text are not “facts,” but rather figurations of history that promise a revolutionary break with the divisiveness of Europe’s past. In what follows, I explore how this approach to historiography developed out of the Fragmentenstreit (1774-1780), wherein Lessing encouraged readers to engage with the spirit of (biblical) history rather than its letter. Eight years after the publication of Christenheit oder Europa, Heinrich von Kleist wrote Michael Kohlhaas (1808), a story that also uses the Reformation as its primary historical backdrop. But Kleist’s approach to historical representation deviates significantly from Novalis. In it, we find no grand narrative for a universal history but instead a tragically local tale full of sound and fury that throws the reader back into a vicious circle of state sponsored injustice. Unlike Novalis, who took inspiration from the fairy tale genre to present his account of the Reformation, Kleist draws on the form of the chronicle to structure his fictional account of the Reformation. In Novalis, the past serves to point towards a better future, yet Kleist remains skeptical of any urge to predict the future by means of the past insofar as such predictions generate violence and dystopia.


Keywords: German Reformation, Romanticism, Utopia, Dystopia, Philosophy of History

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