The period between 1832 and 1900 produced some of the most remarkable writers in the history of European literature, and it includes names that nearly everyone would recognize. There is the poet Heinrich Heine, whose poem about the Lorelei on the Rhine inspired stories and songs known around the world. There is the writer and composer Richard Wagner, whose music dramas are still so popular that eager fans are willing to wait years to get tickets to major performances. There is the philosophical writer Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence on European thought and culture extends through the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first. But there were also figures not so well known outside Germany whose work deserves wider recognition. This book aims to introduce many of them, and to reintroduce the names already famous throughout the world. It will also introduce the reader to the most important periods, movements, and genres of nineteenth-century German literature.

Periods, movements, and genres: these are the stock-in-trade categories of all literary histories, including this volume of the Camden House History of German Literature. The topic treated by the book as a whole is itself a period, the nineteenth century, though we have defined that period in a way that pays more attention to literary and cultural events than to the pure chronology of the calendar. For us, the signpost that marks the beginning of the century is not the change from 17— to 18— in the first two digits of the date, but instead the end of the “Age of Goethe” with the death of Germany's foremost man of letters in 1832.