ABSTRACT
THE Christlich-Deutsche Tischgeselkchaft, to which Kleist belonged, and which was a link between him and some of the romantic writers, was a club founded in 1811 by Arnim and by Adam Müller, the spokesman of ‘political romanticism’, now that the original vague benevolence towards the French Revolution of the Athenäum romantics had given place to blind adulation of the Junker-state of Prussia (later this adulation was to cede to the cult of the Catholic authoritarianism of the Metternich ‘System’ in Austria); Kleist had already collaborated with Adam Müller in editorial work (Phöbus and the Berliner Abendblätter). Members of the club had to be born into the Christian religion (in keeping with pronounced antisemitic views and the general Junker-atmosphere) and must be ‘anti-philistine ’ : and they included Brentano, his brother-in-law Savigny (who translated romanticism into terms of jurisprudence) and the philosopher Fichte, whose tenets had been the first canon of the law for the Athenäum group. The patriotic spirit of the club was of the authoritarian Prussian variety, expressed in the words of the festive song written specially by Arnim : 1 Freedom in devoted loyalty ’ : ‘and it was loyalty to the Hohen-zollern state, which took the particular form of an extravagant cult of Queen Luise, the wife of Frederick William III: she had died in 1810, at the climax of her country’s humiliation at the hands of Napoleon, and now she became the saint, Madonna, and royal martyr of a romantic myth, a heavenly intercessor for her ‘orphaned’ people.
