Romance in Western Pomerania

Frenssen is probably the most knowledgeable person you can meet in Western Pomerania on the subject of Romanticism and Caspar David Friedrich. The Pomeranian State Museum is located on the grounds of a former Franciscan monastery. The painting gallery with many works by Friedrich is one of the museum's highlights. A new Romanticism gallery is currently being planned.

„Many people consider the sunset to be romantic. That used to be the case, and it is today. But for the Romantics, the artists of the Romantic period, the sunset had a meaning that went beyond the natural event. For them, human life was reflected in the times of day. ‚In the morning think‘ of your destiny, in the evening think‘ of your death‘ – that expresses the romantic understanding very well“. According to Frenssen, Romanticism is actually an art movement that is easy to understand. There is no abstraction whatsoever. If you look at a picture, you can experience exactly that outside in nature for yourself. Caspar David Friedrich invented expansive nature paintings in which he depicted the future and the mystery of the grave in a way that was easy to understand but full of symbolism.

Friedrich's most famous paintings include the ruins of the Eldena monastery near Greifswald. Still a – yes, exactly! – romantic place. Plants entwine themselves along the old brick pillars - green moss, red climbing plants, yellow flowers. When the sun goes down, its rays work their way up the walls from the bottom of the ruins to the top of the archway. A bit as if it is saying goodbye.

„The west window of the Eldena ruins was half walled up in Frederick's time,„ Frenssen knows. „But in his painting ‚Ruine Eldena im Riesengebirge‘ he depicted it as an open keyhole. And his drawings show a man sitting with one leg in the grave. You can still understand that today.“

The young Philipp Otto Runge was also a Romantic. But he was someone who always went his own way. That is why I am so enthusiastic about him“, enthuses Dr. Barbara Roggow, museum director of the Runge House in Wolgast, about Philipp Otto Runge, the contemporary of Caspar David Friedrich. „He created paintings and prints full of allegories, whose true beauty only reveals itself with the right interpretation.“

The painting „The Lesson of the Nightingale” is the best example of this, says Roggow. Most viewers only see a picture frame decorated with birds, flowers and angels, in the middle of which sits a winged woman with two cherubs in a tree. You would have to have studied Runge's life to realize that it contains a declaration of love to Runge's later wife Pauline von Dresden, with whom he was unhappily in love for a long time. And why is the picture round, not square? Because his love is boundless, without beginning, without end.“

Runge did not only show his skills in pictures. He also painted canvas, designed theater curtains and a card game, and was active in the fields of literature, singing and dance. „True to the motto ‚I express my feelings because I am a human being‘.“

A school of thought, says Roggow, that was later taken up again by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

Both Runge and Friedrich had to leave their homeland in order to further their education and sell their art. But they carried the light, the colors of the region in their hearts. Even today, Western Pomerania still attracts many artists. „Romanticism is an art movement in history that keeps coming back in waves,“ says Roggow. „Whenever people felt a lack of emotion, of humanity, they returned to romanticism. Romance helps us to come to ourselves, to regenerate.“ Western Pomerania offers the ideal backdrop for this: „There is an incredible light here and you have the flat landscape with the high sky, the ‚Friedrich sky ‘ – wide, violet or red“, enthuses Frärmt Frenssen. „We also have places here that have hardly changed over the centuries. The view of Stralsund's tarns when you come from Hiddensee, or the feeling of stepping out of the beech forests onto the chalk cliffs“. Scenes that Friedrich captured in his famous paintings can still be experienced today. Sailing across the Bodden, walking along the River Ryck in Greifswald or enjoying one of these magical sunsets.