Arnold Ruge. Histoire et critique littéraires

The Young Hegelian critique, first religious and philosophical, then political and social, also applies, with Ruge and his Hallische, then Deutsche Jahrbücher, to literary history and criticism, but well noticed that literature should never be separated from the religious, philosophical, political, and social life. A legacy of Hegel, the opposition between the serious philosophical and political life and the literary “game”, in particular in its romantic and ironic version, prolonged by Heine, then the Young Germany, constitutes the central element of the literary conceptions of Ruge, gradually building a sort of philosophical and political introduction to German literature. According to Ruge, the danger of German romanticism lies in the camouflage of a reactionary policy behind the charm of an ironic “game”. And the antidotes he opposes to the Heinean Witz and “lie” are the seriousness and sincerity of Börne and of the political poetry of the 1840s. And this at the heart of its own contradiction between democratic universalism and somehow antisemitic nationalism inherited from the backgrounds of the Burschenschaft.