19/20세기 독일인들의 감정

The Emotions of the German in the 19th and 20th Century

This paper reviews several scholarly works of the German historians about the emotions of the German in the 19th and 20th Century. Above all the studies by U. Frevert, D. Morat, H. Lethen, and F. Biess are closely examined. The review arrives at the following conclusions. First, the theories of emotions which were historically put forward by the German intellectuals, did never completely separate emotions from cognitions, as revealed exemplarily in the case of Wilhelm Wundt. Secondly, emotions were always connected with the questions, what the morality was to be made up of and what roles the emotions were to play. Different answers were given, depending upon the intrinsic meaning systems of each time-spans. Up until the first half of the 19th century emotions had to be in a harmony with the reason, while they were thereafter to be repressed. The repressed emotions led unwittingly to a yearning for ‘Great Emotions’ or the coming of an hero. Thirdly, the German historiography don’t jet bring about historical studies of concrete emotions such as grief, fear and anger, with a exception of Frank Biess, who produced powerful researches of the German fear at the early Federal Republic of Germany. This paper proposes the historians to conduct the study of the ‘economy of emotions’ at each historical constellations.