German Abitur – Poem Analysis: Romantic Period (1795–1835)

Many upper-level students dread this Abitur task—the poem analysis. Yet you don’t have to be an expert in poetry to write a solid analysis. The first step is always to read the poem to be analyzed several times in order to really understand it. You should read it often enough to carefully examine both its content and its linguistic features.

An important aspect of analyzing a poem is identifying its literary period. When was the poem written? Which historical events are relevant? This may not seem important to many students, but the period often reveals a great deal about a poem and its style. Particularly popular literary periods for the German Abitur are Classicism, Romanticism, and the Enlightenment. Each era has its own well-known poets and authors who incorporated specific features into their works.

A very famous poet of Romanticism, often studied in German classes, is Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857). His poems, such as Mondnacht, Nachtlied, or Sehnsucht, are exemplary of the themes and motifs typical of Romanticism.

Romanticism emerged around 1795 as a counter-movement to the Enlightenment, opposing the rationalism and objectivity represented by authors such as Lessing. The era of Romanticism in Europe was shaped by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which finally ended in 1815 with the Congress of Vienna. People longed for an idealized past in which humanity and nature could once again be united. With the onset of industrialization, many workers migrated en masse to the cities. Overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of urban life, many people yearned to return to the countryside.

Feelings and dreams, longing and wanderlust were frequent motifs in Romantic works. Unlike Classicism, Romanticism did not take antiquity as its model, but rather medieval mythology. Imagination was placed above all else, the boundaries of reason were meant to be broken, and a kind of “universal poetry” was sought—a fusion of epic, lyric, and drama.

To “romanticize” something meant breaking down the boundaries between dream and reality and escaping from the real world.