Nina Svensson/Bernd Krauß Revolver Verlag 2005 Frankfurt am Main
When Markgraf Carl Alexander 1791 handed over Ansbach and Bayreuth to his “Prussian cousins“ the University of Erlangen was part of the deal. King Friedrich Wilhelm the second called up the students of his country to study some semester there, and then to finish their diploma in Halle or Königsberg.
Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798), who went together to the secondary school in Berlin, met in Erlangen again to exercise their studies of law. Next to the lectures they were visiting the surrounding towns as Nürnberg and Bamberg. In 1793 they went out for a twelve days ride through the “Fränkische Alb” and the “Fichtelgebirge” (local mountainous areas). Both were so impressed by nature and landscape that in their descriptions words as madness and weird were used.
Wackenroder, who worked from 1794 on as a juristic assessor in Berlin published 1797 “Herzergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders” (The pouring by heart of an art loving cloister brother), Tieck created 1798 a memorial to his just died friend with “Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen” (Franz Sternbald walks). Both works influenced the romantic perception of the nature and led to a rediscovery of the German middle age.
[...] An sich sehe ich nicht ein, warum es nicht möglich sein sollte, bei allen Dingen unter der Sonne, unter gewissen Umständen, etwas zu empfinden. [...]
[...] I can not look into, why it should not be possible, at all things under the sun, under certain circumstances, to feel something [...] (WACKENRODER/Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Bd. 40. S.445)
