Brentano, Klemens Maria

BRENTANO, KLEMENS MARIA. - German writer, b. at Ehrenbreitstein on 8 September 1778, and d. 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 penetrated by the Enlightenment skepticism of his maternal grandmother, Sophie von La Roche. Of a restless and impetuous temperament, fonder of poetry and letters than of his father's business, he had to struggle to follow his vocation, which finally led him, after his father's death (1797), to the University of Jena, where he was on friendly terms with the brothers Schlegel and with Tieck.

Great indeed is the influence of their works on his first novel, Godwi, which also includes many beautiful lyrics in the purest Romantic style. Typically Romantic, too, are his comedy Pouce de Leon (1801) and the Chronika eines fahrenden Schillers (1802). Having moved in 1804 to Heidelberg, he lived there in perfect community of life and work with Achim von Arnim, together with whom he published the successful collection of German folk songs Der Knaben Wunderhorn (1806-1808) and the Zeitung für Einsiedler. There follow years of restless life, also 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 whole life was shaped by his religious conviction: having severed 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 within the setting of medieval Bologna), he lived for six years (1818-24) in Westphalia, far from any intellectual center, at the bedside of the venerable Anna Katharina Emmerich, attentive to recording her visions. After her death, although he resumed a restless and vagabond life, he thought only of publishing the material he had gathered in 24 volumes. Still very widespread 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, as were also, posthumously, through the work of Görres, almost all his fairy tales, a Romantic reworking of motifs from Gozzi and Basile, which almost certainly constitute the best part of his oeuvre, together with some very well-known lyrics.

Alde Manghi