Short answers, pulled from the story.
German Romanticism, or Deutsche Romantik, was the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its early phase, known as Frühromantik or Jena Romanticism, ran roughly from 1797 to 1802. It influenced philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and criticism, and coincided in its opening years with Weimar Classicism (1772-1805).
The central figures of early German Romanticism included Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798). These thinkers gathered around Jena and sought a new synthesis of art, philosophy, and science.
French military occupation of the Germanosphere under the First French Republic and Napoleon spurred the development of Pan-Germanism and romantic nationalism. This political reaction was rooted in the quest for a distinctly German culture and national identity, and was hostile to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It ultimately contributed to the formation of the German Confederation of 1815 and the German Empire of 1871.
In The German Ideology, Marx invoked the Romantic ideal of Bildung to argue that communist society would allow for greater human self-development, free from the forced specialization of the division of labour. In The Communist Manifesto, he and Engels also referenced Romantic critiques of capitalism under the concept of "feudal socialism," calling it "half lamentation, half lampoon."
Key composers include Ludwig van Beethoven, whose Eroica symphony bridged Classical and Romantic music, Carl Maria von Weber (considered perhaps the first wholly Romantic composer), Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, ending with the Ode to Joy, was later adopted as the anthem of the European Union.
Heinrich Heine criticized the tendency of early German Romantics to look to the medieval Holy Roman Empire as a model for unity in the arts, religion, and society. Unlike many of his contemporaries who embraced Counter-Enlightenment politics, Heine supported the German Revolutions of 1848 and stood among the movement's most rigorous internal dissenters.