Non-fiction: Wilhelm von Schütz und die deutsche Romantik

Overview
Joseph Goebbels’s 1921 study "Wilhelm von Schütz und die deutsche Romantik" is a philological and historical portrait of an overlooked Romantic-era writer set against a broad map of German Romanticism. Written before the author’s later political notoriety, the book follows the conventions of early twentieth-century German literary scholarship: biographical reconstruction, close reading of selected texts, and placement of a lesser-known figure within currents shaped by the better-known Romantics.

Aim and Scope
The study pursues two linked aims. First, it recovers Wilhelm von Schütz as a distinct voice whose dramatic and narrative work illustrates characteristic Romantic tensions, between inwardness and history, fragment and totality, play and faith. Second, it uses Schütz as a lens to clarify the movement’s internal fault lines, tracing the path from the experimental energies of early Romanticism to the more historically inflected and sometimes programmatic forms that followed. Goebbels argues that Schütz’s career, though marginal in the canon, condenses key transformations of the period and therefore rewards renewed attention.

Biographical and Historical Frame
The book sketches Schütz’s formation within the late Enlightenment and his engagement with Romantic circles, periodicals, and theaters. It situates him within a network of critics, editors, and dramatists, noting the institutional settings that shaped literary production: court and municipal stages, salons, and journals. This contextual frame underpins later chapters on genre and reception, as Goebbels links Schütz’s choices of subject and form to the theatrical economies and taste cultures of the time.

Romanticism in Focus
Goebbels outlines a movement defined by characteristic polarities rather than a single doctrine. On one side are irony, fragment, the self-reflexive play of imagination; on the other are the turn to history, the symbolic recuperation of myth and the Middle Ages, and the aspiration to an organic unity of art and life. He reads Schütz as a writer negotiating these pressures: committed to Romantic poetics yet increasingly drawn to historical materials and more coherent dramaturgy. Throughout, the study tracks familiar Romantic themes, nature’s animation, the demonic or uncanny, the pull of destiny, the search for meaning in national and communal pasts, without reducing them to slogans.

Works, Forms, and Techniques
The core chapters conduct close readings of representative dramas and prose works, attending to diction, meter, scenic construction, and the orchestration of motifs. Goebbels highlights Schütz’s preference for charged atmospheres and emblematic situations, his use of symbolic settings, and his tendency to stage moral conflicts as clashes of worldviews. He notes both the strengths and liabilities of this approach: heightened tonal coherence and metaphoric density on one hand; on the other, occasional stiffness of character and uneven plotting. Comparative passages place Schütz alongside more prominent contemporaries, not to claim parity but to clarify his specific choices within shared Romantic problems.

Reception and Evaluation
The study reports a pattern common to several second-tier Romantics: sporadic contemporary attention, partial success on stage or in print, and later eclipse as tastes shifted toward realism and as a narrower Romantic canon solidified. Goebbels diagnoses the eclipse as the product of changing aesthetic priorities and the overshadowing presence of better-known figures, rather than the absence of artistic ambition. He nonetheless stops short of wholesale rehabilitation, proposing instead a calibrated revaluation that recognizes Schütz’s evidentiary value for understanding the movement’s evolution.

Method, Sources, and Significance
Methodologically the book blends archival inquiry, reception history, and formal analysis rooted in German philological practice of its time. It draws on period reviews, correspondence where available, and theater records to supplement textual readings. Its lasting contribution lies less in elevating Schütz into the first rank than in modeling how attention to a peripheral figure can sharpen the contours of a major movement. By mapping Schütz’s trajectory onto Romanticism’s own dynamic, Goebbels offers a study that doubles as a compact anatomy of German Romantic aesthetics and their historical conditions.