Renaissanceism

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The Renaissancismus is a form of return to the Renaissance , beginning with the reception of Jacob Burckhardt by Friedrich Nietzsche . It is directed against the perceived decline of education and moral values ​​in bourgeois society, accelerated by industrialization . “The reception of Burckhardt's work mediated by Nietzsche prepared the ground for a decidedly anti-bourgeois thrust of that movement. This attitude was the real characteristic of Renaissanceism. ”(Ladwig p. 15)

The reception of Burckhardt's work by Nietzsche

A product of this reception of the Renaissance is the Renaissance man or the universal genius . This, in turn, is by no means conceptually identical with the man of the Renaissance. The term is related to the educational efforts of the educated people in the apprehension of classical antiquity. Burckhardt writes about this in his Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in 1860 : An attempt in the chapter on the development of the individual : “If this drive to the highest development of the personality now coincides with a really powerful and at the same time versatile nature, which at the same time contains all elements mastered the education at that time, then came the 'all-round man', l ' uomo universale , which belongs exclusively to Italy . People of encyclopedic knowledge existed in different countries throughout the Middle Ages because this knowledge was close together; Likewise, all-round artists still occur up to the 12th century, because the problems of architecture were relatively simple and of the same kind and in sculpture and painting the thing to be represented predominated over form . In Renaissance Italy, on the other hand, we meet individual artists who, in all areas, create nothing but new things and that which are perfected in their own way, while still making the greatest impression as people. Others are multifaceted, outside of the practicing art, also in an enormously wide circle of the spiritual. ”Here an ideal idea of ​​the all-round educated person is expressed. Man creates himself and his world. Nietzsche, on the other hand, in his work The Antichrist in 1888 ascribes the blame to Christianity for having "deprived us of the harvest of ancient culture", as it later deprived us of the harvest of Islamic culture. Nietzsche ascribes the guilt to the Germans, especially to the Reformation : “The Germans robbed Europe of the last great cultural harvest that Europe had to bring home - that of the Renaissance.” For him it was the “revaluation of the Christian Werthe ”, which thus failed.

Impact on society

In bourgeois society in the 19th and 20th centuries, due to the development of capitalist conditions, there is also a kind of rediscovery of man through a return to the Renaissance (as well as to antiquity ) and its educational movement from the feeling of a general decline in values ​​of one's own Time. This goes along with ideas of emerging liberalism . Renaissance research and Renaissanceism have in common the experience of an existential crisis to which the bourgeoisie sees itself exposed to the demands of modernity. “German Renaissance research at the beginning of the 20th century could trust that the topic of 'Renaissance' would appeal to a broad audience. Since the early 19th century, more and more examples based on the Renaissance can be found. Not only in architecture, but also in painting and literature , and even in furniture , one looked for the models with preference in the Renaissance. ”(Ladwig p. 14.) With the Art Nouveau , certainly from the time of the Bauhaus , came about an increasing departure from this view.

Renaissanceism in Literature

The height of Renaissanceism in German literature lies in the years 1890 to 1910, when it expanded into a Renaissance cult , which ultimately led to a distortion of the Renaissance image. The Renaissance researchers, however, distance themselves from this because they want to paint an objective picture of the Italian Renaissance.

Among the writers who should be mentioned in connection with Renaissanceism are Conrad Ferdinand Meyer , Isolde Kurz , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann . However, man is the one who overcomes this in turn in literature.

See also

literature

  • Thomas Althaus / Markus Fauser (ed.): The Renaissance discourse around 1900. History and aesthetic practices of a reference. Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2016, ISBN 978-3-8498-1194-5 (= Philology and Cultural History Vol. 5).
  • Helmut Koopmann , Frank Baron (ed.): The return of the renaissance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Münster: mentis 2013.
  • Rolf Füllmann: The novella of the neo-renaissance between “Gründerzeit” and “Untergang” (1870–1945): reflections in the rearview mirror. (565 pp.). Marburg: Tectum-Verlag, 2016.
  • Gerd Uekermann: Renaissanceism and Fin de siècle: The Italian Renaissance in the German Drama of the Last Century. Berlin [West] 1985.
  • August Buck (Hrsg.): Renaissance and Renaissanceism from Jacob Burckhardt to Thomas Mann. Tubingen 1990.
  • Wallace Klippert Ferguson : Renaissance Studies. University of Western Ontario, London (Ontario) 1963 (Reprinted: Harper & Row, New York 1970).
  • Wallace Klippert Ferguson: The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation. Mifflin, Boston 1948 (reprinted by AMS, New York 1981).
  • Lucien Febvre : Michelet and the Renaissance. Stuttgart 1995.
  • Perdita Ladwig: The Renaissance picture of German historians 1898-1933. Frankfurt / M., New York 2004.
  • Walther Rehm : The Renaissance cult around 1900 and its overcoming. In: Walther Rehm: The poet and the new loneliness. Essays on literature around 1900. Göttingen 1969.

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