When Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it tapped into a reserve of human emotion not expressed by the rationality of the past century.

But Goethe’s story of a young man’s suicide was only the precursor to a more mature, intellectual movement that would dominate German discourse and change the very nature of modernity.

On this week’s episode of Discuss., Dr. Tom Curran explains the wide-reaching impact of German Romanticism on literature, music, and philosophy over the course of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.