No portrait of 19th century Germany can be complete without taking a stroll through the philosophic aura of the times. A lot has happened on the front of Philosophy, from Kant's Metaphysics and onward... As the rigid constraints of Enlightenment's scientific view of Life have been shattered by the new generation of Transcendental Idealists of the Romantic Movement, philosophical discourse was at the forefront of the storm, and laid many crucial foundations for Romanticism and beyond. This I think is the greatest difference between the German Romanticism and the Romanticism in other European countries... In other countries, it was just a movement of literature and art, but in Germany, Romanticism resonated through all cultural manifestations, from literature to art to philosophy. That old national stereotype proved itself true after all: Germans really do love to think. And it was philosophical thought that shaped the cultural outlook of the age of Romanticism, and beyond. The First Wave of Romanticism in Germany started with the "Jena Group" in early 1790s, the city of Jena being an intellectual forum and meeting-place of forward-thinking minds. The group consisted of the two Schlegel brothers, a young genius of a poet who went by the name of Novalis (really he was Friedrich von Hardenberg, and he really deserves a separate page here... German Romanticism's first poetic voice, from whose works comes the concept of "Die Blaue Blume", the ever-haunting, unattainable Ideal that came to symbolize the entire movement as a whole.. He suffered a tragic early death, barely out of his teens. Young as he was, he had already eclipsed many with his poetic gift...), also there were Friedrich Schelling (who wrote the seminal text "The Theory of Transcendental Idealism"), and Ludwig Tieck, a great early Romantic writer who was the first to reach back through the mists of time for Germany's own folk identity, setting his novellas in the distant 'Golden Age' of the middle ages, when master artists and their apprentices and traveling musicians and poets walked from town to town through the great German woods, reveling in the freedom of the wilderness and unrestrained creativity... Eichendorff would later take that further, and imbue this imagery with profound and hauntingly moving emotional tenderness.
The Second Wave of German Romanticism came in the early 1800, in the turbulent climate of the rise of Napoleon and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, when it was a very realistic fear that Germany would be taken over by the French. This Second Wave of creative German minds were avowed patriots and nationalists, and their urgent need to create art that is distinctly German (that would serve as motivation/inspiration for the German people to come together, for Germany was not a unified country yet) was evident in their fervent love of the native folk spirit, and they sought to bring it out in their own works. Lost was the more sophisticated tone of Goethe and Schiller and other 18 century giants; instead it was replaced by folk simplicity, a natural, even naive and open-hearted expression of feelings and thoughts, uninhibited and free. But even as Schiller once said, true Genius ought to be naive and simple. This second wave of writers and philosophers included Johann Gottlieb Fichte (whose philosophical ideas were very laden with patriotic spirit, but he also continued exploring Schelling's theories of Idealism too), Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (both of whom collaborated on collecting and gathering authentic German oral folk poetry and songs, which were then published under the name Des Knabens Wunderhorn), the Grimm brothers (who were also folklorists and scholars, and who did the same gathering for German folk fairy tales), Heinrich von Kleist, Adelbert von Chamisso, and to some extent Joseph von Eichendorff. It's important to remember that there were never official "circles" of activity with "members", people named above came and went as was their wont, but mostly they were familiar with each other's writings and indeed used to meet and share/discuss ideas, some did it more than others, but all were active around the same time. It's also important to keep in mind how crucial German Universities were to the dissemination of these and other ideas, with great impact on culture and politics of the 19th century. Some of these writers, like Schegels and Fichte and Grimm brothers, were also professors, and taught courses and brought these ideas to life in their classrooms... Other people, like Chamisso and Kleist and Eichendorff, were no strangers to military service and were small aristocrats with their own private lives, being less active in the tumultuous wormholes (Kleist was actually kind of active, but then again it's better not to generalize at all).
Romanticism as a movement was coming to an end in the mid-1800s... Eichendorff, who died in 1857, was fondly called even in his lifetime "the Last Knight of Romanticism". The political turbulence of the post-Napoleonic times pierced Germany with a harsh dose of reality. The young revolutionary idealist spirit that seemed so fresh and promising in the 1790s did after all usher in a newer age, but it was far from pretty... More corruption among German authorities, oppressive political regime that was distrustful of individual expression and prone to censuring new writings, and the ideological turmoil boiling in the German universities, as a generation that grew in the Romantic age and was fed Kant and Fichte and now Hegel clamored for some kind of progress or action or change from the status quo.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) enters the scene... Rather, he has already entered it long ago, he has been standing on the side all this while and observing, and getting utterly sick of it. He is credited sometimes with being the founding grandfather of Existentialism - a spirit disillusioned with the times, seeing regression instead of evolution in society all around, and attempting to deconstruct ideas and assumptions that have too long been considered as self-evident. As Romanticism was the voice of optimism in the great tomorrow, Schopenhauer was the voice of pessimism, his realistic reaction coming from watching society all around him not lining up to the ideals that Romanticism strived for. His philosophy bore the brunt of his bitter disillusionment, but at the same time he seemed to transcend it... reaching greater clarity.
Fichte's metaphysical thesis (with which Schopenhauer was familiar) stated basically thus - We know that we exist and that the world and all those things are there because we experience them through our senses. Therefore, our existence is the sum of our perceptions that we get from our five senses. We don't know what's REALLY out there... or if there's even ANYTHING out there at all... because we're trapped within our physical sensual perceptions, so to speak, it is through them that we get information of things around us, and we'll never know the actual TRUTH. - And yes, you guessed it, this metaphysical reasoning by Fichte (he came up with it in 1820s) was used as the premise in the Matrix movies.
And now, Schopenhauer took Fichte's reasoning one step further. He published a monumental work called "The World as Will and Representation", where he explored a theme that would have a profound influence on the lives of both Wagner and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer took Fichte's reasoning further, and said - Yes, in fact there is NOTHING out there, beyond our own perceptions... we live in the utter emptiness, and the only thing that drives us through this emptiness is the WILL... - Schopenhauer saw this Will as a universal life force within every person, it is what drives one onward and ever onward, the sole animator and motivator. But for this very reason, Will is also the cause of suffering in life, because it carries the person ever onward, never allowing him to stop and find peace in one spot, but forcing him to carry on, from one thing to the next - a never satiated thirst for something, a striving for something that never can be seized... the Will for life, in emptiness of life. How, then, can one minimize the suffering of life? Schopenhauer answers - through the power of Music. Of all the different arts, Music is the most direct, Schopenhauer says. Other arts rely more on our physical senses - we look at painting and it takes time to interpret it, we read text and must interpret it, our senses become the mediators through which art travels. But when we hear music, it ENTERS us directly and affects us immediately just the way it IS: our senses do not obscure its essence. It goes directly to our bloodstream, needing no conscious effort to process it at all. According to Schopenhauer, the spirit of Music really DOES exist out there, in that emptiness where nothing else exists... it is Real, it transcends physical limiting perceptions and we have direct access to it. That is why it affects us so... like nothing else does, like nothing else can. Schopenhauer says that Music and the Will are closely related... Music speaks to the Will, soothes it and attaches itself to it, and they are indeed connected and are parts of the one and the same Essence that transcends emptiness... Music gives Will the power to transcend emptiness.

This philosophy of Schopenhauer changed the lives of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom were deeply moved by it and inspired to create their own art that would push those ideas even further, towards a global awareness. Wagner and Nietzsche were friends for many years (they ended up having a falling out later though), and what Wagner did in the realm of musical art, Nietzsche did in the realm of philosophy. Namely, a complete overhaul of pre-established conventions and clearing the centuries' old ideological clutter for a newer, braver truth.
Nietzsche was not satisfied with the dualistic worldview that persisted all the way from Christian times - that everything is either good or evil. Nietzsche saw it as a stale doctrine that has long outstayed its welcome, and wanted to transcend it - overcome it - cross over and leave it behind in favor of something better suited for the time and age he lived in. Nietzsche's ideas speak plainly in the very titles of his works - "Beyond Good and Evil", "On the Genealogy of Morals", and are immortalized in the one single most evocative word of the past two hundred years: Übermensch. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche never does really say HOW the ideological overhaul ought to be achieved... nor does he actually offer his own suggestion of what should replace the stale black-and-white morality that he calls to be torn down. I think the absence of any concrete "recipe" for a new morality/ideology/system is the very testament to Nietzsche's great character. He speaks out vehemently and fervently against "herd mentality", and urges his readers to use their own head instead of simply absorbing other's thoughts and becoming zombies. It would be very hypocritical indeed if he would then actually offer his own opinion on what ought to be done for the philosophy of tomorrow! - he knew only too well that sooner or later, his opinion would be indoctrinated as yet another religion and people would simply read his books instead of thinking for themselves. This was exactly what he wanted to avoid! So instead of shelling out clear-cut means of achieving that which he preaches, Nietzsche instead cloaks his writings into a mantle of mystery. In the true spirit of Self Reliance that Nietzsche values so much, he wants his readers to use their own heads to try to decipher the riddles with which Nietzsche conveys his messages. If someone doesn't get him and throws the book across the room in contempt, all the better! Only a careful reader will truly benefit and be able to unearth the wealth of wisdom from the hidden messages. Because there is no "one" single way of achieving what Nietzsche calls for. Every reader will have to interpret it for himself, and achieve the transcendence in his own way with his own experiences. There is not one "correct" way - leave that kind of dogma to obsolete religions that must be overcome! As Nietzsche said: "You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."


(Below, in the two columns, I posted selections from Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": on the left is a section about Ubermensch, on the right is a section on Friendship and some great Nietzsche quotes that I like. In the bottom column, there is a selection of quotations from Arthur Schopenhauer. I would have loved to post some selections from his works about Music and the Will, but his book is like a thousand pages long and it's hard to choose one passage from the next because they are all so good!)