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Welcome

Welcome to the permanent exhibition on German Romanticism!

Spread out over two floors of the museum, the exhibition introduces a major epoch in the history of German culture in 35 installations. They are arranged chronologically, but it is not necessary to view them in any particular order. Each display focusses on selected objects from the collections of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift. For conservational reasons, the objects are presented in display cases designed like writing desks. This ensures that the sensitive originals are exposed to light for only as long as the writing desk is open.

Additional information on the key objects is found near the display cases. Various artists were involved in designing the installations.

The stories told by the installations relate to and complement one another. They show Romanticism in all its facets: as an epoch in the history of culture, an aesthetic programme, a frame of mind, or simply a feeling.

The exhibition begins with a forest of mirrored steles. Here you will find various endeavours to describe the multifarious phenomenon that is Romanticism — some dating from 200 years ago, and some dating from the present.

Welcome

Introduction to the 2nd floor

Romantic awakening

Romantically lonely places

Outpourings of the heart

Waldeinsamkeit

Romanticizing the world

Experimental arrangements

The blue flower

Open all the veins of your wise body

Who? When? Where?

From the water’s coolness I drink embers

Clemens in plaster

No place on earth

The Times of Day

Poetry is the sun

The Boy’s Magic Horn

Enter the sorcerer

Cosmos of colours

Friedrich’s seascape

Physics as art

The purple shimmer

And they lived happily ever after

Germania to Her Children

Introduction to the 3rd floor

The spread of Romanticism

Message to Europe

The man who sold his shadow

Romantic Painting Cabinet

Lukasbrüder

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER

Appreciating what is foreign

CLEMENS BRENTANO

The new gospel

Completed in a picture

E.T.A. HOFFMANN

Looking through the mind microscope

Manuscript Studio

JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF

Out into the wide world

MARY SHELLEY

How the Romantics put fear in our hearts

RAHEL VARNHAGEN

Equality in action

JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF

The magic word

WILHELM MÜLLER

Winter journey

BETTINE VON ARNIM

Chess with the king

Window to St. Paul’s Church

LUDWIG TIECK

Idyll in the garret?

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Here the view is free, the spirit lifted

Epilog

Elliptical stairwell with prism installation