Love
Love (and friendship) as an indispensable elixir and prerequisite for the (contractual) bond between a man and a woman only came to the fore in the course of the eighteenth century. Over a century ago this interpersonal relationship – the only legitimate one being marriage – was largely sanctioned by economic needs. Marriages of convenience were the norm. In 1761, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse fundamentally questioned this “normality”. The concept that love should be the binding element in a relationship eventually became the romantic ideal and found its voice in Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinda. Sensuality, wild devotion, but also wonderful fantasies should overcome pragmatic utilitarianism, and passion and marital security should be compatible. Loving the entire world through the other person was the goal, and this ability promised a harmonious existence. But the dominance of the emotions brought danger with it and unrequited love could be the source of unbearable suffering. The romantic ideal of love can be seen as a utopia, which may have lost its shine as a result of its idealism, in its belief that love will last a lifetime.
The focus on an ideal, the attempt to escape everyday banality and achieve a rapturously adored, positively excessive existence, will always be faced with the possibility of failure, which is fatal. Without the ability to relate to a concrete experience, life may be accompanied by a contemplative state of mind, melancholy and an undefined sadness.
Double suicide
From a historical perspective, suicide had been a sin since the time of Saint Augustine. Suicide victims were refused burial in church graveyards – they were buried in what was known as a “burial of a donkey” in accordance with the Old Testament (Jeremiah). This attitude adopted by the Catholic church was also taken on by the Protestants, and was still practised in the 19th century. Suicide had become popular with Goethe’s “Werther” (Sturm und Drang movement), but this Werther-mania was no longer around in the early 19th century. Committing suicide, or even double suicide, was scandalous from a societal perspective. Despite this, “Werther” was the starting point for suicide. Suicidal thoughts also have a place in Romantic thinking. Suicidal thoughts now appear to be an option not as a result of existential and tragic desperation, but rather they express an attitude which is a type of secular martyrdom. Comfort is sought in an existence in heaven. So suicide, and especially double suicide, were not fashionable.
In literature, there are the deaths from love of Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet and Luisa and Ferdinand in Schiller’s “Intrigue and Love” because their love is prevented by societal circumstances and remains unfulfilled. However, these are emotional acts (in some cases accompanied by misunderstandings).
Death
Amour fou not only ends with the instantaneous death by shooting, the “biological” death of the characters. Amour fou also shows the insidious death by suffocation through everyday earthly life and its lack of emotion. The everyday bourgeois life shown in the movie represents a limitation, and is therefore in conflict with the romantic desire for the dissolution of boundaries. This dissolution of boundaries, the achievement of which seems to be problematic in earthly existence, can be shifted into a kingdom, a better world to which only death grants access.
At that time, death was considerably more present than it is today. There was a high death rate, and many children didn’t survive into adulthood. Most people died at home, not in hospitals or old people’s homes like they do today. In addition to this there was the long period of war with its large number of deaths and injuries, including in the civilian population. The young men had the recent experience of the war (and many of them actively participated in it.) In general, human lives were not worth as much as they are in the modern, western world.
People were religious; they believed in divine power and divine predetermination (and in life after death). Death was not the end of all things.
Kleist
Kleist had rapturous tendencies, he may even have been bipolar, but his suicide was a rational decision and was planned for a long time. All of his projects and life plans had failed. He must have seen death as a release from the hopelessness of existence, as the only conceivable escape for him.
But we wouldn’t describe Kleist as a Romantic poet. He is impossible to categorise. His novels, dramas and newspaper projects are not what we would call Romantic poetry. In German literature, names such as Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim come to mind more in this context.
Henriette
Henriette’s everyday married life was reflective of the typical behavioural role of a bourgeois woman around 1800. But at this time there were also entirely different, self-determined “wild lives” being lived out by bourgeois and aristocratic women, and Jewish women in particular (for example in Berlin). Women got divorced, lived (sometimes in sin) with other men, they gave up their previous, safe environments and their children. Some funded themselves through writing or as artists. Henriette is far removed from all of that. She barely gets involved in conversations with her guests and doesn’t bring her own thoughts to the table.
Only when she is diagnosed with a terminal illness does she start thinking about death and questioning her previous life.