- List of Maps, Tables, and Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Origins of Modern Germany
- Senses of Place
- Women and Men: 1760–1960
- States, People, and Nation, 1760–1860
- International Conflict, War, and the Making of Modern Germany, 1740–1815
- Cosmopolitanism and the German Enlightenment
- The Atlantic Revolutions in the German Lands, 1776–1849
- The End of the Economic Old Order: the Great Transition, 1750–1860
- Escaping Malthus: Population Explosion and Human Movement, 1760–1884
- Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, 1760–1871: Enlightenment, Emancipation, New Forms of Piety
- The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850
- German Literature and Thought From 1810 to 1890
- Germany: The Nation State
- Nation State, Conflict Resolution, and Culture War, 1850–1878
- Authoritarian State, Dynamic Society, Failed Imperialist Power, 1878–1914
- The Great Transformation: German Economy and Society, 1850–1914
- Race and World Politics: Germany in the Age of Imperialism, 1878–1914
- Germany 1914–1918. Total War as a Catalyst of Change
- The German National Economy in an Era of Crisis and War, 1917–1945
- Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918–1939
- Piety, Power, and Powerlessness: Religion and Religious Groups in Germany, 1870–1945
- The Place of German Modernism
- Nationalism in the Era of the Nation State, 1870–1945
- Todesraum: War, Peace, and the Experience of Mass Death, 1914–1945
- The Three Horseman of the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism, East European Empire, Aryan Folk Community
- On the Move: Mobility, Migration, and Nation, 1880–1948
- Germany 1945–1989
- Germany is No More: Defeat, Occupation, and the Postwar Order
- Democracy and Dictatorship in the Cold War: the Two Germanies, 1949–1961
- Generations: The ‘Revolutions’ of the 1960s
- Industrialization, Mass Consumption, Post-industrial Society
- Religion and the Search For Meaning, 1945–1990
- Culture in the Shadow of Trauma?
- The Two German States in the International World
- Contemporary Germany
- <i>Annus Mirabilis</i>: 1989 and German Unification
- Germany and European Integration Since 1945
- Toward A Multicultural Society?
Abstract and Keywords
The present article discusses German literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Approaching nineteenth-century German culture, one needs to free oneself from several misconceptions that have proved surprisingly durable. One is that Germans were devoted to cloudy, theoretical idealism that stayed remote from concrete reality. It is commonly asserted that German authors favored the Novelle, rather than the novel; that they practiced a special literary mode called ‘poetic realism’; and that in contrast to the realism of Balzac or Dickens, German novelists specialized in an unworldly, introverted form of fiction, focusing on the inner development of the hero, which was termed the Bildungsroman. Two well-known episodes can serve as emblems of this commitment. One concerns Hegel (1770–1831) whereas the second emblem of German engagement with reality is the programmatic statement by Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). An in-depth analysis of the influence of realism on German literature completes the discussion.
Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Queen's College.
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