Citizens' Campus: "The Poetic Heaven" - A History of Romanticism

With the Enlightenment and intellectual freedom from traditional religious teachings came nostalgia: the mourning of the loss of wholeness in thought and life. Romanticism remedied this without going backwards: It created a new heaven that needed no metaphysical safeguarding. It achieved this through a new style: it makes transcendence conscious as a product of the imagination, without thereby devaluing it. In other words: Romanticism is the enlightened insight into the life efficacy of the imagination - and thus the best means against any ideological fundamentalism. After the Enlightenment, it thus became the second decisive impulse of European modernity.

Speaker Stefan Matuschek has been Professor of Modern German Literary Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena since 1996, has been spokesman for the DFG Graduate College "Model Romanticism" since 2018, and has been honorary president of the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar e.V. association since 2019. The title of the lecture is also the title of a book that Prof. Matuschek published in 2021 by C.H. Beck in Munich.