“German writers […] were fascinated by the Eastern world […] reflect the Morgenland (morning-land) […] a paradisiacal realm of spiritual wholeness, wisdom, mystery, and exoticism. […] the East […] thus constitutes the answer to the Romantic Sehnsucht (longing) […] The designation derives from the Latin word oriens (east, morning, sunrise) […] [Martin] Luther's ‘land of the sunrise’ evokes the Latin phrase Ex oriente lux (from the East [comes] light) originally referring to the sunrise but later associated with Christianity.
The Morgenland […] a utopian state of perfection […] a Golden Age. […] The era of Enlightenment had not only separated nature from superstitious beliefs but also […] eliminated the connection to the divine creation and thus, robbed nature of its soul. The Romantics diagnosed the world of their century to be ill and in need of healing. […] [they] felt a sense of infinite Sehnsucht (longing) for a different world […] a painful feeling of sadness and melancholy. […] The solution for the Romantics lay in the ages before the present time […] past ages in which man was not yet alienated from nature. […] Only there […] could man find and reconnect with the ideal state of natural unity and wholeness. […] a return to the Morgenland would bring about a spiritual transformation and the rebirth of a new mythology. Symbolically, the [East] was a key to recover ancient and lost knowledge of the past […] awaking to a new dawn of mankind, a Golden Age founded on the pillars of love and poetry.”
— Claudia Mareike Katrin Schwabe; “Romanticism, Orientalism, and National Identity: German Literary Fairy Tales” (2012)
“Her dark bound with the beast shall redeem us all! For when the sun’s pure light shall break upon the dawn, redemption! The plague shall be lifted! Redemption!”
