Page 26 - Romanticism: A Weapon of Satan

ROMANTICISM: A WEAPON OF SATAN

allegory. Spiritually they toyed with death, with brooding, with the
somber, opaque recesses of the night. Novalis [a pioneer of the early
German Romantics] said: ''Life is a sickness of the spirit.'' What we
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have here is the beginning of aesthetic pessimism…. Romanticism
uncovered the deeper irrational forces of the human spirit… Novalis
believed that all worlds and ages could be united by the magic of
imagination… Through the patriotic literature of the war of
liberation this ''dance of the soul" reached the broad masses of the
population.
The German Romanticists developed the cult of aestheticism which
was at once a rejection of reason and an attempt to apprehend unity
and immediacy in one instantaneous act. In this theory the poetical
was the absolutely real. 2
The foundation of romantic nationalism was based on "feeling."
This fanciful ideology produced individuals who were cut off from
reality, lost in the confusion of their own minds. Romanticism, by
enslaving people to their feelings, leads them to lose touch with reality,
and in this manner, can be compared to the psychological disease of
schizophrenia. (Those who suffer from schizophrenia are completely

In Nazi
Germany, the
masses were
entranced
under the
influence of
grandiose
emotionalism,
and they were
easily deceived
into
acquiescing to
the inhuman
motivations of
Nazism.