With
early Romanticism gradually fading away into the petit -
bourgeois aesthetic cocoon known as Biedermeier (c. 1815 — 1848), German
culture increasingly acquiesces to Romanticism's most worrisome features: its strident nationalist undertow; its messianic aspirations, which mutated into delusions of racial superiority; its Rousseauian attempt at recovering authentic, immediate Life (Leben); the variously violent and sexualized mythology in which its major representatives (Friedrich Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Novalis) ground their longing for human - engineered salvation.