'Alles ist eins': Romantische Metaphorologie des Mediums in Bloomington, MN

The "medium," according to Novalis, is the "union" of "body" and "soul" - that is to say: a metaphor. Through this metaphor, the body-spirit problem not yet resolved by the Anthropology of the 1770s is displaced from philosophy onto literature. Romanticism offers media scenes in many different variations. E.T.A. Hoffmann climbs recklessly down Jacob's Ladder in the Silesian Giant Mountains into the glittering spray of the so-called Jagged Waterfall. Through watercolor Schiller lets his friend Korner literally run out of his own body. Eichendorff describes medial ecstasies of rising above the landscape into the cosmos. Today, the Romantics wander over all treetops and hilltops.