Requiem für eine romantische Frau (1999)

Requiem for a Romantic Woman, directed, written, and produced by Dagmar Knöpfel, is a film adaptation of the epistolary novel of the same name, edited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who also wrote the film treatment. In her historically grounded film, Dagmar Knöpfel portrays the impossible love story between the German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano and Auguste Bußmann, the 16-year-old daughter of a banker. The film follows the written letters closely and depicts the two lovers’ *amour fou* in a spiraling dramatic structure driven by a continual alternation between attraction and rejection. Auguste Bußmann is unconventional and takes seriously what the Romantic Clemens Brentano writes: she wants to live, in radical sensuality and in reality, the romantic ideal of love that Clemens Brentano celebrates in poetry. But Brentano feels overwhelmed by her and disturbed in his work; he wants to devote himself exclusively to poetry and not be distracted by his wife. For years, the couple wage a battle of love that causes a fierce scandal in early 19th-century intellectual society and would become emblematic of “romantic love,” with all the mutual strain it entails.