BRENTANO, KLEMENS MARIA. – German writer, born at Ehrenbreitstein on 8 September 1778 and died at Aschaffenburg on 28 July 1842. He is one of the principal representatives of the so-called second Romanticism. The son of an Italian father and a Rhenish mother, he was raised in the Catholic faith, albeit one permeated by the Enlightenment scepticism of his maternal grandmother, Sophie von La Roche. Of a restless and impetuous temperament, and more fond of poetry and letters than of his father’s commercial business, he had to struggle to follow his vocation, which ultimately led him, after his father’s death (1797), to the University of Jena, where he was on friendly terms with the Schlegel brothers and with Tieck.
The influence of their works on his first novel, Godwi, is indeed considerable; the novel also contains many fine lyrics in the purest Romantic style. Typically Romantic are also his comedy Pouce de Leon (1801) and the Chronika eines fahrenden Schillers (1802). Having moved to Heidelberg in 1804, he lived there in perfect community of life and work with Achim von Arnim, with whom he published the successful collection of German folk songs Der Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–1808) and the Zeitung für Einsiedler. Years of restless living followed, including from the sentimental point of view, until in 1817 he definitively returned to the Catholic faith under the influence of the poet Luise Hensel. From then on, his entire life was marked by his religious conviction: having broken off relations with all his Romantic friends (except the Catholic Görres) and renounced an exclusively literary activity (he would continue only the Romanzen vom Rosenkranz, a glorification of the Catholic practice of the Rosary set against the backdrop of medieval Bologna), he lived for six years (1818–24) in Westphalia, far from any intellectual centre, at the bedside of the venerable Anna Katharina Emmerich, carefully recording her visions. After her death, although he resumed a restless and wandering life, he thought of nothing but publishing the material he had collected in 24 volumes. Still very widely read in Catholic Germany as a work of edification is his Bitteres Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi nach den Betrachtungen der gottseligen Anna Katharina Emmerich (1833). The work Leben der heiligen Jungfrau Maria, on the other hand, was published posthumously, in 1852; likewise, almost all his tales were published posthumously through the efforts of Görres. These are Romantic reworkings of motifs from Gozzi and Basile and almost certainly constitute the finest part of his oeuvre, together with several very well-known lyrics.