A Breath of Valkyrie on the Baltic Sea. Nationalism and Romanticism in the Literature of East Prussia

Monument engineers, composers and writers were tasked with inventing an honorable tradition for the Empire. The results included the Hermann Monument in the Teutoburg Forest, the Germania statue in Niederwald and Richard Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" – which in reality criticized rule and violence. Romanticism had already rediscovered the Middle Ages and chivalry and painted them in the most beautiful colors.

The new cabinet exhibition of the East Prussian State Museum embarks on an associative search for traces of this era, based on some examples of East Prussian literature, which strongly influenced the zeitgeist. From the poet of the wars of liberation, Max von Schenkendorff, to the romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann and Johann Gottfried Herder, powerful authors were at work – their literature providing later authors with inspiration for a more "national" tone.

Examples of this are writers in  such as Ernst Wichert (1831-1902) or Felix Dahn ("A Struggle for Rome"), who held up the Prussian Order State as the model of martial German unification and praised the millennia-old self-sacrifice of the 'brave Teutons'. When he was appointed to the Albertus University in , Felix Dahn apparently saw himself as a kind of knight of the Teutonic Order. He wanted to teach "German law in the farthest reaches of East Markland" and, as an admirer of Richard Wagner, still sensed a "Walkürenhauch" (a breath of Valkyrie) on the Baltic Sea.

The exhibition shows the context of the founding of the Reich, important sources from Romantic literature, Dahn and Wichert as literary figures in Königsberg and in the Reich, the monumentalizing invention of a supposedly great national past, as well as its reception and consequences.

The accompanying program has been adapted to suit the current pandemic conditions. The plan moving forward includes lectures on the position of East Prussia in the German Reich and guided tours of the exhibition. Please check for announcements on the museum's website.