Romanticism And Irony In Ludwig Tieck's Der Blonde Eckbert

The movement of German literature dominant the late 18th and early 19th centuries is romanticism. This movement follows the philosophical developments that influenced the Weimar Classic period, and is an attempt to fuse the philosophy and intellect of the earlier period with the emotions and wit of the idealized Romantic era. Much of the literature in the romantic era looks fondly at the Middle Ages as a simpler lifestyle, yet has to deal with the intellectual and scientific accomplishments that took place during the classical Weimar period. I seek to try and understand the concepts of romanticism and irony separately by analyzing Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert. This stems from a commitment to try and understand the concept of romantic irony,
“Irony is a figure of speech in which words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words. It may also be a situation that may end up in quite a different way than what is generally anticipated. In simple words, it is a difference between the appearance and the reality” (Literary Devices). Interpreting this book’s definition literally offers different ways of understanding irony. One example of this is interpreting verbal irony (often considered sarcasm); verbal irony is generally understood as the opposite of what the author or speaker says. For example, if an author making use of irony says ‘I enjoyed the movie as much as getting a root canal’, the audience is to assume that the movie was dreadful, just like getting a root canal. Verbal irony can also be found in literature, for example, in many works of Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet. These are examples of verbal irony because it is irony that is vocally expressed by a character towards another character within the context of a text. This is not difficult to understand, but applying this to romantic texts and calling them romantic ironies becomes
The motifs of isolation, nature, love, and mental turmoil, to name only a few, are given such emphasis here as would nearly be considered the epitome of a romantic text. Significant, however, is that none of these themes is presented in a straight-forward manner. Each one is first portrayed as a normal occurrence or concept, but takes a turn for the worse as the story progresses. For Tieck, the monotony of daily life and the supernatural have become one; any attempt to live one without the other is destine to fail. Eckbert seeks to end his "entsetzliche Einsamkeit" but finds only confusion and anxiety; in doing so, he destroys his previous lifestyle but is incapable of creating a new one. The subject in Tieck’s narrative seeks to overcome his isolation through the poetic dream, and this in turn results in the unraveling of his entire existence. This has serious consequences for the understanding of Tieck's world view: his romantic vision is not always productive; instead, his creation has the power to destroy, to negate even its own reality, as Eckbert indeed