2 - Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Rediscovering the “Volk”

Summary

JEAN PAUL WAS NOT EXACTLY FORGOTTEN around 1900, but his texts, while of interest to some, were clearly not part of the German literary canon. This was not the case, however, for the poems collected by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn). Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano were prolific German authors, belonging to the second Romantic school affiliated with the city of Heidelberg. While the first generation of Romantic authors (Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Tieck, and Wackenroder) was primarily a protest generation, the second generation, partially influenced by the French occupation of large sections of the German states, was characterized by a nationalistic, conservative, and religious turn; many of these Romantics converted to Catholicism. Des Knaben Wunderhorn is the most comprehensive and best-known collection of German folk songs and was first published in 1806 (volume 1) and 1808 (volumes 2 and 3). The songs experienced a renaissance much earlier than Jean Paul's works, around 1870; interestingly, this coincided with Germany's national unification. And yet one should not exaggerate their popularity; first-edition copies of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for instance, were still available from the publisher in 1900.

While the subtitle of the collection is “Alte deutsche Lieder” (Old German Songs), Achim von Arnim refers to the songs in an essay accompanying the first volume as “Volkslieder.” It was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) who had invented the term “Volkslied”; in fact, Volkslieder was the title of a collection of songs that he edited almost three decades before von Arnim and Brentano published their collection. Herder's introduction of the “Volkslied” concept into cultural history is significant for two reasons. By using this term, Herder initiated the study of what today is called “world music” or ethnomusicology, a discipline guided by the idea that music should be studied in its global diversity and local contexts. Simultaneously, however, the early-nineteenth-century interest in “Volkslieder” is undeniably linked to a surge of nationalism in Germany. Des Knaben Wundernhorn is one of the first texts documenting this turn toward the national that typified second-generation Romantics.