Portret van Gottfried August Bürger 1810 - 1869

Franz Xaver Eissner created this print of Gottfried August Bürger sometime in the first half of the 19th century. Bürger was an influential poet of the German Sturm und Drang movement, which can be translated as 'Storm and Stress'. It was a proto-Romantic movement that emphasized subjective emotion and individual freedom. This image shows a man who is both an intellectual but also part of the political structure, someone who can move between the private sphere of thought and the public sphere of action. It is interesting to note that Bürger’s actual literary output was relatively small, but he’s been upheld as a figurehead, and that reveals the social function of literary history. Prints like this were important for circulating and fixing particular images of cultural figures and creating national canons of great people. If you want to know more about how the institutions of art and literature work together, I suggest you start with some biographical research and a good critical history of German literature.