Germans do Romanticism. And by Romanticism, I mean the artistic and intellectual tradition, not so much the PDA thing (which, it appears, Germans do not do--at least not as often as Russians...) This is the venerable Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He was one of the first and most famous Romantics. He was also German, and given the following evidence, I suspect those two facts are closely connected.
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| An older Goethe, who actually was trying to move past Romanticism. Too bad for him everyone else still loved it to pieces. Picture via Wikimedia. |
The little biography of him that I bought tells me that his first great success,
The Sorrows of Young Worther, was inspired by the angsty experiences he suffered as a young man when the pretty wife of his friend wouldn't pay him any attention. Worther killed himself. Goethe didn't. That's good, because he served as the catalyst for a whole generation of poets and artists to find their inspiration beyond Enlightenment rationality--in emotion, in epic heroes, and in landscapes like this one:
