report no.: 038
informant: Richie 1998 (106)
source: Joseph von Eichendorff, Intimationns and the Present (1815), in Craig, The Germans, p. 197
location: Berlin
date: 1815

Joseph von Eichendorff's Ahnung und Gegenwart ends with: 'We were born in struggle and in struggle we will go down conquered or in triumph. For out of the magic incense of our making a ghost of war will materialize, armoured, with the blanched face of death and bloody hair.' It was not surprising that this was written in 1815, in the wake of the Wars of Liberation. The idealization of violence and war began to touch for the first time on the world of politics. This new, much more dangerous strain of Romanticism, found a natural home in Berlin.