One morning in 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe climbed the stairs to a modest apartment at no. 27 An Der Elbe in Dresden. Continental Europe’s greatest poet was returning from taking a cure in the spa town of Teplice, so probably needed cheering up. His diary entry is brief: “Went to Friedrich’s. His wondrous landscapes. A foggy churchyard; an open sea.”

The paintings were Monk By the Sea and Abbey Among Oak Trees, both by Caspar David Friedrich, who died in 1840 aged 65. The former, a kind of existentially deranging prefiguring of Munch’s The Scream , is 98% ominous cloudscape, beach and sky – plus a tiny brush stroke of monk with his back to us. It’s been called the big bang of Romantic art and also, tiny human figure notwithstanding, the birth of abstraction a century before Wassily Kandinsky ostensibly showed that art needn’t be representational.

Regular visitors to Friedrich’s Dresden studio saw how he had repeatedly reworked Monk By the Sea: once, sailing ships bobbed on the waves; first it was day, then night. Clearly the painter wasn’t aiming to faithfully depict nature. The compositional spareness and darkling tones of the completed picture may be related to the fact that, as he painted and painted it, Friedrich’s sister and father died in quick succession.

The other picture that Goethe saw that day, painted on the same bolt of canvas, may show the burial of the same monk. One theory is that the monk is Friedrich’s self-portrait. As Florian Illies puts it in his new book The Magic of Silence, the figure we see in the Monk By the Sea is both tempter and tempted. “God has lured him to the edge of this beach and left him alone; now the monk tempts us, would make him fall into his abyss, his maelstrom, with him.”

If so, this is possibly not as much a landscape as a picture that sucks victims into its oblivion. The poet-journalist Heinrich von Kleist, reviewing the painting when it was shown in Berlin that same year, wrote: “It is as if one’s eyelids are cut away … Nothing can be sadder and more comfortless than this position in the world: the only spark of life in the vast realm of death. The picture is … like the Apocalypse.”

A few months later, Kleist shot himself on a beach at Wannsee near Berlin. “Today,” writes Illies, “I cannot look at the Monk by the Seashore without thinking the figure has a pistol in his cassock.”

Now 250 years after his birth, what does Friedrich’s art have to say to us? He’s been appropriated by Nazis, denounced as petit bourgeois by Marxist theorists, and variously seen as the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Bambi and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

For much of the 19th century he was taken as passé and erased from Germany’s art historical record. Even when rehabilitated in the 20th century, he became yoked into kitsch romanticism that made him about as threatening as the lid of a box of chocolates.

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How many times have we seen reproductions of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) – a lone frock-coated male, standing with a foot on a crag, imperious and butch like a macho avatar? But that is to misunderstand Friedrich’s art: what we could see instead is something miraculous.

Wordsworth’s The Prelude includes an epiphany when, after climbing through Snowdon’s night-time fog, the poet emerges above the murk to see “a hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved” over an ocean of hoary mist. Before commercial flights, to surmount the clouds was incredible. Friedrich, perhaps, depicts a profane miracle: as if man had replaced god and was looking down from the heavens.

Yes, but what about Bambi? On a European trip in 1935, Walt Disney bought hundreds of German art books and took them back to Hollywood to inspire his animators. As Bambi gambols through misty meadows and spruce forests, Illies suggests that the setting is Freidrich’s Morning Fog in the Mountains. When deer flee hunters, the backdrop is Friedrich’s Rocky Ravine. And when, at the film’s bitter end, the forest is aflame and Bambi looks up to a glowing red heavens, that is a Friedrich sky.

As for Godot, the link is even clearer. In 1937, Beckett visited the Sekundogenitur building in Dresden which housed a room full of Friedrichs. “Pleasant predilection for two tiny languid men in his landscapes,” Beckett wrote in his diary. Years later, he told a journalist this was the source for Waiting for Godot: Friedrich’s two little men were, quite possibly, inspirations for Vladimir and Estragon. The play’s first stage direction – “A country road. A tree. Evening.” – sounds like a Friedrich. Moreover, in the play, as in the paintings, we don’t know if God(ot) is coming, has died or ever existed.

It’s surprising that there any Friedrichs remaining. Illies’s book is, among other things, the tragicomic chronicle of how many paintings were destroyed in fires, ridiculously misattributed, looted by the Red Army, stowed in lock-ups on the wrong side of Frankfurt or ignored by aristocrats in their castles for centuries. Like Sophocles (only seven of whose 120 plays survived) this great artist comes to us with what may have been his best work lost for ever.

One morning in 1931 for instance, Adolf Hitler and Thomas Mann awoke in different parts of Munich to the smell of smoke and sound of sirens. The mighty Glaspalast was ablaze and around 100 paintings by Runge, Schinkel and others were doomed. Among them were Friedrich’s homesick painting Baltic Sea Strand; The Port of Greifswald depicting his beloved birthplace; August Bridge in Dresden, depicting a view from his apartment window; and Evening, showing his wife Caroline and daughter Emma looking out of a window one summer’s evening. v

Hitler was livid at this destruction of German art. He vowed to build a temple to German art in Munich and laid the foundation stone for the bombastically neoclassical Haus der Kunst in 1933. It opened four years later with a Nazis’ Great German Art Show, devoted to patriotic “Aryan” art.

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Today, there are no Friedrichs in the Haus der Kuust, though there come lovely Friedrichs across town at the Neue Pinakothek. To see his best work, though, go elsewhere – to London’s National Gallery, Winterthur’s Kunst Museum, Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, or to New York’s Met which from February marks his anniversary with an exhibition of around 75 of his works.

The artist now celebrated as a genius is one fellow art school students laughed at for his attempts at depicting human bodies and faces. But that inability does not solely explain why in his best works, figures turn their backs on us.

Yes, there are many great Rückenfigur (paintings of figures seen from behind), many of them erotic pictures of women such as Constable’s Portrait of a Woman, or Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (1647-51). Friedrich’s Rückenfigur are nothing like these. He incessantly strives to get us to see what his figures are seeing. When viewing his most celebrated painting Chalk Cliffs on Rügen look not at the woman in red on the left nor the man in the hat on the right, still less at the guy kneeling at the bottom of the frame who appears to be searching for a missing contact lens. Rather, share in their wonder, their mystical communion before nature.

There’s a particularly wonderful picture of his wife Caroline, with her back to us blocking our view. This is Woman at the Window. We can just glimpse a sailboat’s mast and from that detail construct a watery world of what she can see better than us. One can impute so many things to this superb picture – Caroline’s yearning, her enchantment, even perhaps her sense of confinement. We might even wish the she would step aside so we can see what she’s looking at.

The early 20th century Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi practically made a whole oeuvre after being inspired by this painting. The Dane, as Illies puts it: “Painted the energy in the space created by the obstructed view and by the woman who fills it”. What Hammershøi recapitulated is what Friedrich invented, and what makes his paintings today so particularly enchanting and contrary to the zeitgeist.

The blurb for the Met’s Friedrich show puts it this way: “The vision of the landscape that unfolds in his art – meditative, mysterious, and full of wonder – is still vital today.” That’s true, but we shouldn’t forget that his paintings are also dangerous to look at.

Very nearly all of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings express silence, still air, stopped time. For those of us deprived of all three in our hurtling, distracted lives, his pictures are more vital than ever. By depicting meditation, they invite us to meditate. Caroline Friedrich is not in the way: she is showing us the way.

• The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time by Florian Illies is published by Polity, £20. Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is at the Met, New York, 8 February to 11 May.