Intermediality in New/Romanticism: “Sonnabend abend Gegen sieben, hellster Mondschein in meine Stube hinein” — Rahel Levin Varnhagen Speaks Caspar David Friedrich

Central to the development of modernity, salons shaped the reception of new cultural movements. Good company, lively talk, and a chance to reflect on new thinking in the arts, music, science, and social change, in other words, the salon atmosphere can be only fully evoked through text, sound, and image. This article reflects on the features of text and image (intertextuality) in the context of dialogue and letters of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771—1833), who hosted the most prominent salon, a magnet for Romanticism in Berlin, where intellectuals met and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774—1840) were exhibited in the Academy of Arts. I position Levin Varnhagen’s salon as conceptual art where ideas and impact are more important than the quality of a finished work of art. Her letters—as an extension to salon conversations—are reflections on Romantic philosophy of sociability and symphilosophy and its emphasis on poeticizing and potentializing so that life becomes art and art life. Levin Varnhagen’s weather vignettes placed within letter header visualize a portrayal of landscape in a manner of Friedrich as they examine an instant of sublimity and constitute self-contained emotive subjects.

Thus, this article contributes to the critical interest of intermediality from the perspective of Bakhtin’s dialogism and Kristeva’s intertextuality, as it centers on flow and passage rather than on the traditional text-to-text relationship of intertextuality. It also sheds light on artistic movements in the early nineteenth century and contemporary trends in art and art criticism. In German Romanticism, the interchange of medium among art, myth, mythology, and poetry stems from the concept of museum (exhibition), a medium of reflection and memory device useful for the future. Romantic intermediality includes a principle of art criticism that involves the change between the media of pictures and writing. Friedrich experimented with the mediation between literature, art, and religion, in short with intermediality—an alternative term for intertextuality. Since the concept evolved from the new digital technologies, it is then fitting to reflect on Levin Varnhagen’s vignettes evoking Friedrich’s work as GIF’s from around 1800.