The Two Captains

Two young captains at Malaga, the German Heimbert and the Spaniard Fadrique, sworn brothers in arms, are drawn into war and into love, and the friendship is the real subject — a short German romance about honor, and about the point at which honor stops being a virtue. Fouqué was a Prussian cavalry officer of Huguenot descent who fought Napoleon and wrote Undine, German Romanticism's most enduring fairy tale. This is the same sensibility, condensed. Fifty-three plates by Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus and others turn the German Romantic landscape of fire, snow and moonlit shore into a visual counterpart to Fouqué's tale of honor tested.