In the early 19th century, the Romantic movement was in full swing across Europe. You could probably date its birth from the publication in 1775 of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the gloomy novel of unrequited love that led to a spate of suicides among young men in Germany. Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798, with its Taoist argument for simplicity and the importance of contemplating nature. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams in 1794 and his daughter Mary Shelley’s extravagant Gothic novel Frankenstein in 1816.
The Romantics attacked the new numbers-based utilitarian philosophy which underpinned the Industrial Revolution. Its writers were fascinated by the alienation of spirit they witnessed, the cataclysmic loneliness of the smoky cities, the near impossibility of maintaining one’s inner poet amid the hubbub; in short, the unutterably painful tragedy of life.
A little-known German product of this literary ferment is Nachtwachen, or The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, which was published anonymously in 1804 and which scholars attribute to the writer and theatrical producer August Klingemann, known principally for his production of Goethe’s Faust in the 1830s.
The conceit of this peculiar novel is simple: its hero, Kreuzgang, is a nightwatchman, and the book is divided into 16 chapters or ‘nightwatches’, when our sinister protagonist peers into the darkness and reports back on the strange sights he sees.
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