It
is, to be sure, a Romantic Waiblingen, and not the real city, as Arnim
himself was afterward forced to admit with some disappointment when he
actually saw it. But as Arnim portrays it, it rises to typical value
without losing any of its poetic individuality. It is the city of the
Hohenstaufens, the last stand of medievalism against the encroachment
of a new civilization. The echoes from Gotz von Berlichingen are at
once apparent to the reader. But Arnim's city of the sixteenth century
does not look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also.
Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall,
thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive
naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on
the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty--a scene which shows Arnim's
power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does
not sit back and wait for the crown to come to him, but with money
mysteriously given him builds a cloth-mill on the site of his
ancestral palace and becomes the mayor of the city. How different a
picture from the hazy cities of Novalis' _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_!
It is a part of the new spirit in Romanticism to point the way for the
people of Germany to go forward--to leave mysticism and dreams, and to
grapple with the life around them.
A similar impulse toward popularization actuated Arnim and Brentano
in their joint work, _The Boy's Magic Horn_ (1806-8).
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