The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Thursday, 19 December 2024, 11:00
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University
FKH colloquium

Frederike Middelhoff (Goethe University)
»(Re-)Writing Exile: German Romanticism and the History of the French Revolution«

Abstract
The importance of the French Revolution for the German Romanticism can hardly be overestimated. As early as 1798, Friedrich Schlegel announced that »The French Revolution, Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge and Goethe’s Meister are the major trends of the century.« [»Die Französische Revolution, Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre und Goethes Meister sind die größten Tendenzen des Zeitalters«]. Leaving the provocative (and, indeed, Romantic) thrust of this assortment of »revolutionary events« aside, it is clear that Romanticism and the Age of Revolutions (c. 1770–1830) are inextricably linked – politically, programmatically and aesthetically. So far, however, the fact that the Age of Revolutions was also the dawn of a period scholars have come to study as the »Age of Emigrations« or the »Age of Refugees« has not yet been critically investigated in German Romanticism Studies. My talk will give insights into the ways in which the Romantics took part in the controversial debates about how to deal with the émigrés in the aftermath of the French Revolution, how to address the growing numbers of Germans emigrating to America, and how to historicize, remember and make sense of the intricate relationship between revolution, expulsion and exile. In the second part of my talk, my focus lies on the question whether Romantic fiction addressed issues left untouched by contemporary analyses of the French Revolution and migration. Exploring Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s Magie der Natur (1812; republ. 1815), I aim to show how the novel gives attention to female protagonists as a particular group of émigrés whose precarious experiences en route to and during exile were sidelined in discourses grappling with the history of the French Revolution.

The speaker
Frederike Middelhoff has held a professorship for Modern German Literature with a focus on Romanticism at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main since 2020. She has been a Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften since 2022.

Participation
Closed event. Contact: Beate Sutterlüty; email: b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de).