While social movements in Europe like the Enlightenment focused on progress and science as new ways of developing culture, other groups were looking to nature and history for answers. The Romantic movement was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it took on a very distinct form in the German-speaking world, both philosophically and artistically.

Around the time of the French Revolution, there was a massive reaction to the principles expressed by the revolutionaries and other Enlightenment thinkers. The Romantics were less focused on science-driven progress and more apt to study nature and medieval lore, looking inward rather than outward. This emphasis on aesthetics and mythology in Germany led to great writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, classic musicians like Beethoven and Mozart, and inspired artists like Adrian Ludwig Richter and Caspar David Friedrich.

German Romantics were attracted to the tension between the everyday world and the imagination of the individual, between the mundane and the spiritual. Unlike their counterparts in England, they emphasized passion and humor, seeking to cultivate new art through unrestrained creativity. Rather than focus on the modern world of science, they drew on the Middle Ages for inspiration, using the simpler times to represent the underlying unity that they felt the Enlightenment had ruined.

As a well-known German Romantic artist, Caspar David Friedrich is perhaps best known for his stark painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. We see a young man in a dark coat standing on a rocky peak with his back to the viewer. Ahead of him lies a landscape shrouded in heavy fog, with trees and mountains barely visible in the distance. The further out you look, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish the low fog from the skies above. In the context of European history in Friedrich's time, the Wanderer shows us where the average Romantic stands. He is an individual, fully realized but facing a vast and uncertain future. The audience stands behind the lone hiker, right in the glorified past where he would rather be. This is the Romantic's dilemma: how to keep moving forward into the fog of the future while still holding onto the beauty and principles of a forgotten era?

To see Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and other works of the German Romantic period, you can visit the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany.

Image by Playing Futures: Applied Nomadology on Flickr