ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Titanic and Satanic excesses of romanticism after the French Revolution, the two most Titanic figures of this generation being Johannes Paulus Richter, or Jean Paul and Ludwig Tieck. Jean-Paul's work focuses on a Titanic exaltation of the self, fitting into a line to be traced back to Goethe's Prometheus fragment and to Herder's proclamation of Shakespeare as a Titanic genius, a modern Prometheus, starting the German Romantic cult of Shakespeare. The question of the German sources of French Romanticism is both a non-issue and an extremely thorny problem, a perfect illustration of the complexity and complicity of the relations between zero and infinity. The specific, strange characteristics of German romanticism were rooted in an outsider experience of both the Enlightenment and the Revolution. The most striking ambivalence of Baudelaire, directly connected to Goethe's Faust, concerns his explicit references to the Satan and Jesus.
