Death Of The War And The Look Of Home

In the context of the German Romanticism in the early 19th Century, this dissertation nainly attemps to analyse and explicate the images of death and the significance of landscape in the works of the German artist Caspar David Friedrich. In terms of the Anspruch(claim) and Abbruch(demolition), two aspects put by Heinrich von Kleist in his Empfindungen vor Friedrich Seelandschaft (sensations of the landscape in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings), this dissertation aims to discuss the viewpoints toward death and nature respectively in his painting. It would explicate these two parts in a corresponding way:death in the context of German Romanticism and the views on the tragedy; nature and its profound meaning which is related with the new mythology argued by supporters and art critics among the early German Romanticisml. After analyzing some of the images in his artworks, it argues that the emphasis on death is not only the reflection of his tragickal life but also the manifestation of the Romantic ideas on expressionism and the Ich und Nicht-ich theory in the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On the other hand, through the research on how the Romantics treated nature, along with the corresponding nature theory of Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, it aims to embody what nature really means to the artist as well as to the Romantics in 19th Century, the menifestation of aspiration toward nostalgia and toward transcendence in a religious way.