Romanticism Exhibition

Open all the veins of your wise body

A letter that Brentano wrote to 19-year-old Johanna Kraus, with whom he had fallen in love in late June, is a further indication of how cleverly he used the medium. To keep others from learning the recipient’s real identity, he pretended to be writing to his poet friend Achim von Arnim and inserted verses from the poem “At the Rhine I Waver Back and Forth”. His confession of love is skilfully hidden on the letter’s last page.