220 Jahre Heidelberger Romantik – Ein besonderer Romantik-Abend

220 years of Heidelberg Romanticism - A special Romantic evening

Special event on Friday, 10.10., 20:00, Gloria

with Veronika Haas (Literaturherbst Heidelberg), Matthias Paul (Freier Theaterverein Heidelberg), Jutta Wagner (DAI Heidelberg), Brigitte Becker (piano), Barbara R. Grabowski (vocals)

"What are you doing? Nothing. I let life rain down on me."

During the Romantic period, Heidelberg became a place of longing that is still much sung about today, so much so that even Goethe was once refused a room in the hotel of his choice. "Heidelberg is itself a splendid Romanticism", enthused Eichendorff, "as if there were nothing meaner in the world". Fiction or truth? Heidelberg was many things to the poets living here or just passing through. Heidelberg was dolce vita on the Neckar: Hegel raves about Knallwürstchen sausages, Jean Paul praises the beer and wants to ride naked on a horse while intoxicated, Brahms praises twelve-egg pancakes in Ziegelhausen, while Eichendorff promptly prescribed himself a diet when he feared he would not cut a good figure compared to other students while bathing in the Neckar. Meanwhile, traveling to or through the city by carriage was often dangerous, which is why Knigge invented a moose test for carriages in Heidelberg and incidentally became the savior of the first female hitchhiker of the stagecoach era. Some rave about Heidelberg, others complain about the high prices; Lessing - in love with a Heidelberg woman - desperately squandered money playing the lottery. And the women of the Romantic period - such as Bettina von Arnim, Sophie Mereau (married Brentano) and Clara Schumann - dared to take an epoch-making step: they emancipated themselves by writing and composing their own works and began to "let life rain down on them" (Rahel Varnhagen) far away from the domestic hearth. Many a Romantic, such as Karoline von Günderrode, tragically loses her heart to a married professor, of whom Heidelberg residents say nobly that he is only "of dubious beauty", and many a Heidelberg woman is left heartbroken by Romantic poets, such as the cooper's daughter Katharina Förster, whose liaison with Eichendorff led to a famous Romantic poem and song: "In einem kühlen Grunde".

A special evening of Romanticism that brings Heidelberg in the 19th century to life in all its facets, with many unknown, serious and humorous incidents from Heidelberg's poetic-musical city history and with compositions by Bettina von Arnim, Robert and Clara Schumann.

220 years of Heidelberg Romanticism - 220 years of the literary history of the Gloria Cinema

What better place to celebrate 220 years of Heidelberg Romanticism than the place where it was born: today's Gloria-Kino, where the publishing house "Mohr und Zimmer" was located at the beginning of the 19th century. Not only was Brentano and Arnim's famous song collection "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" published here, which continues to inspire composers worldwide to this day, numerous important Romantics published their writings at "Mohr und Zimmer". A bookshop, a literary lunch table and an almost legendary reading society were attached to the same building complex, where Romantics such as Arnim, Brentano and Görres themselves played a lively and friendly game of "potholing" with their actual "arch-enemies", the followers of classicism. In 1817, Karl Baedeker, whose name has long since become a global brand, was apprenticed to Mohr, and the "Baden Baedeker", as the Heidelberg professor and ambitious travel writer Aloys Schreiber was known, was also a frequent guest at 146 Hauptstraße. The literary history of today's Gloria cinema continues until 1935, when Hermann Lenz, as a student, lived in a room above the projection room and wrote about his impressions of Heidelberg in "Other Days".