ABSTRACT
In Heinrich Heine’s view the Kunstperiode was the period up to about 1830, dominated above all by the towering figure of Goethe and his works. If one accepts Heine’s view of the special importance of Goethe, the end of the Kunstperiode, which is mentioned among others by Hegel in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, and which runs like a motif through the writings of the Jungdeutschen after 1830, is marked by Goethe’s death in 1832. Heine associates the term Kunstperiode among other things with the idea of an epoch in which art and the creative artist enjoyed a particularly high status, and in which the issue of the relationship between art and life was decided in favour of art. The special role of art between the 1789 and 1830 revolutions has also frequently been stressed by research, leading to formulations such as ‘the age of German classicism and Romanticism’, ‘the age of Goethe and Schiller’, ‘the golden age of German poetry’, etc. Compared with these, the term Kunstperiode seems more neutral and less value-laden. To delineate more precisely than Heine, our Kunstepoche will be taken to be the period between two European revolutions that oscillated between the two poles of revolution and restoration.
