The attempt to answer this question has a long tradition in Dresden. The character of the works that are today attributed to Romanticism in Dresden differs considerably from one another in literature and poetry, painting and drawing, and music. In all its diversity, the era of Dresden Romanticism ranges from the first stays of the Schlegel brothers in the city in 1792 to the death of the late Romantic Ludwig Richter in 1884. It did not produce a clearly defined school or style, but rather a network of personal connections, artistic design ideals and mutual inspiration. Their common core was the individual search for a new relationship to the world, for the irrational and immeasurable, the wonderful and mysterious, both in history and in the present.
It was the writers and philosophers, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Schelling, who met in Dresden in 1798 and became pioneers of romantic thinking with their "gallery talks". They were followed by the poets Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, who shaped literary romanticism in Dresden for a short or longer period. The young North Germans Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge revolutionized landscape painting fundamentally after their arrival in the city by making nature itself the vehicle for expressing romantic ideas. With the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl, who moved to the Saxon residence in 1818, with Carl Gustav Carus, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme and finally Ludwig Richter, it experienced further development in different forms between transcendent art in the footsteps of Friedrich and reality-based artistic attitudes closer to realism. The old music city of Dresden also offered an excellent breeding ground for romantic music, which inspired composers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Carl Maria von Weber, Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann to create great operas, chamber music and vocal symphonic works.
There were many reasons why Dresden in particular rose to become the centre of romanticism in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century. Working "close to the most excellent art treasures and surrounded by beautiful nature" (Caspar David Friedrich), but also the culturally and geographically favourable location on the Berlin - Dresden - Prague - Vienna - Rome axis and Dresden's situation as a meeting place between Catholic and Protestant spirituality must have been particularly important.
The Dresdner Romantik e. V. association, founded in the run-up to the Caspar David Friedrich anniversary year in 2024, aims to bring the special Dresden expression of this cultural, artistic and intellectual history phenomenon more into the public eye.