Why did Romanticism as an aesthetic phenomenon evolve into a Heimatkunst movement and the “Wandervogel” youth culture? Literary scholar Raphael Stübe has been awarded this year’s Novalis Prize for his exploration of this question.
Early 19th century Romanticism experienced a vibrant resurgence towards its end. What started around 1800 as an aesthetic project developed about a century later into a Neo-Romanticism with cultural-political significance – and a few decades after that, the Nazis would appropriate Romantic imagery for their own purposes. How can this trajectory be explained? In search of answers, literary scholar Raphael Stübe – who completed his studies at the University of Münster – encountered a striking gap in the research. A simultaneously launched graduate program on the “Romanticism Model” at the University of Jena confirmed his determination to delve deeper. Now, as a research associate at the Institute for German Literature and Its Didactics and at Freies Deutsches Hochstift (German Romanticism Museum), Stübe has been honored for his doctoral dissertation. His thesis, titled “Neo-Romanticism at the Turn of the Century: Transformations of a Romantic Narrative Model around 1900”, was awarded the 2025 Novalis Prize by the International Novalis Society and the Research Center for European Romanticism at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
Stübe’s research traces the rediscovery, appropriation, transformation, and critique of Romanticism around 1900. Looking at texts by authors like Heinrich Mann and Hermann Hesse, Stübe identifies a shift away from early Romantic strategies of irony and multiperspectivity toward monoperspectivity. This development, he says, was already embedded in Romanticism itself. “I believe,” the awardee said in an interview with University of Jena, “you can only fully understand literary Romanticism if you consider both sides: Romantic literature also formulates a critique of modernity from within its own logic. … I illustrate this in my book using an arrow model that gradually drifts apart: from a shared interest in Romantic themes, two distinct forms of appropriation emerge – one that extends into literary modernism, and another that counters modern complexity with buzzwords like ‘health’ and ‘race.’”
With his habilitation project “Either/Or: Crises of Decision in the Vormärz Period”, Stübe continues his engagement with the societal issues he has already touched on in his earlier work. The Novalis Prize, endowed with €2,500, is awarded every two years by the International Novalis Society and the Research Center for European Romanticism at the University of Jena. The prestigious prize honors outstanding and pioneering research in the form of dissertations and habilitation theses.
