Winterabende: A Romantic and Post-Romantic Motif in Friedrich, Büchner and Stifter

This article traces the motif of winter evening in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, in Georg Büchner’s Lenz and in Adalbert Stifter’s Bergkristall, showing how it is used to convey Romantic convictions about death and transcendence, and how it is subsequently a vehicle of post-Romantic explorations of finitude. The article argues that winter ‘Abenddämmerung’ is in Friedrich a central element of the Romantic subject’s relation to landscape and is related to Schleiermacher’s thoughts on religion; that in Lenz it is associated with the subject’s dislocation; and that in Bergkristall it is a moment in which a form of historical life fades and changes.