Abstract The article examines the constitutive role played by Herder’s theories of tone and aurality, as practiced as in his sermons, for his foundational concepts of universal and culturally particular communities. The author examines Herder’s project as pastor of creating a particular, rarified cultural code separate from the Latinate, Roman Catholic tradition or that of actors, both in his sermons

Abstract This article examines the often neglected ‘reversal side’ of early Romanticism, for which Friedrich Schlegel’s critical philosophy of the infinite, developed in his Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy of 1800/1801, is exemplary. Therein Schlegel aims to synthesize Spinoza’s philosophy of substance with Fichte’s subjective foundationalism. This synthesis finds its particular challenge in

Abstract The essay that follows deals with Novalis’s reception and subsequent engagement with the Western theological concept of anima mundi in “Monolog,” written between 1798 and 1799. The thesis I propose is that the work encapsulates Novalis’s cosmological theology of language. Throughout the course of my interpretation, I ruminate upon Novalis’s conspicuous remark that language engenders a “world

(2021). Kurt W. Forster. Aby Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft: Ein Blick in die Abgründe der Bilder. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 96, No. 1, pp. 87-88.

(2021). Carl Gelderloos. Biological Modernism: The New Human in Weimar Culture. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 96, No. 1, pp. 88-91.

(2021). Sarah M. Pourciau. The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 96, No. 1, pp. 91-93.

(2020). Aesthetics and Politics in the Wake of Enlightenment: Jonathan Hess in Memoriam. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 95, Special Issue: Aesthetics and Politics in the Wake of Enlightenment; Guest Editors: Gabriel Trop and Chunjie Zhang, pp. 237-240.

Abstract This article looks at the “messy side” of Enlightenment, treating periodicals as a major index of this messy side. While periodicals have been relegated to ancillary role in understanding autonomous aesthetics, canonical literature and the public sphere, I examine them from a different angle. By working with the database Zeitschriften der Aufklärung, digital humanities and conventional reading

Abstract This paper argues that Schiller’s theater develops a political semiosis organized around operations of indexicality, understood as the attempt to trace a figure back to its invisible conditions of genesis. This notion of indexicality linking visible form to invisible origin is developed in the Kallias-Briefe in reflections on technical form (technische Form) and acquires a distinctively political

Abstract This article reads Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre from the perspective of affect theory and focuses on the two elements of potentiality and mistake in the novel. In addition to its lexical meaning, the concept of affect emphasizes the transmissions of energy and force from body to body and between body and the world in time and space. Affect is intense and full of potential

Abstract This article explores the way in which two dramatic satires criticized the shortcomings of the Viennese Märzrevolution. As opposed to the typically “partisan” nature of a satire that attacks either revolutionaries or reactionaries, Johann Nestroy’s Freiheit in Krähwinkel (1848) and Eduard von Bauernfeld’s Die Republik der Thiere (1848) both turn their satiric barbs against all political positions

Abstract This essay explores how Berthold Auerbach's 1846 treatise on Volksliteratur functioned as a theory of literature interested in transforming the relationship between the individual and collective within the context of both poetical and social forms. By focusing chiefly on Auerbach's often overlooked Charakteristik of Hebel, I argue Schrift und Volk produces a Romantic-inflected Enlightenment

Katrin Pahl’s recent study offers compelling new readings of Heinrich von Kleist’s dramatic works, in particular The Broken Jug, Penthesilea, The Battle of Herrmann, and Katie from Heilbronn as queer and trans explorations avant la lettre. At a moment in history when the paradigm of sexual binarism was gaining immense purchase, Kleist, it seems, was writing against the grain. But while scholars such

Abstract The essay begins with an examination of Kant's account of wit in the Anthropologie. It argues that Kant's unexpected inclusion of wit in the higher faculty of cognition raises fundamental questions about the subject matter of Kantian anthropology as well as its link to critical philosophy. The essay situates Kant's subsequent exclusion of wit from the understanding proper within the context

In this issue, we present four studies that explore on a micro level several important aspects of a broader argument for a “New Aufkl€arung/New Enlightenment” – a critical reconsideration of the historicity of Enlightenment as well as a resemanticization of the concept of “Aufkl€arung”, in order to explore new systematic approaches and understandings of Enlightenment within the German-speaking context

Abstract This article contextualizes Johann Jakob Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst (1740) within a transdisciplinary discourse on Aufmerksamkeit (attention) in eighteenth-century epistemology and science. I argue that Breitinger’s adaptation of the epistemology of attention defines his most distinctive poetological concepts, including his notion of poetry as a type of painting (poetische Mahlerey)

Abstract This essay examines Hagedorn's early satires and his Rococo songs in order to tease out the enormous shifts in poetic content and in the role of poetic form that occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century. Hagedorn's endeavors are linked to Baumgarten's early investigations into sensate cognition. I argue that both writers discover an indispensable epistemological function of the

Abstract This article considers Friedich Gottlieb Klopstock as an unlikely contributor to a “New Enlightenment.” Using Klopstock's work on declamation, orthography, and meter, it argues that Klopstock foregrounds speaking and especially hearing as central to human subjectivity. It demonstrates the importance of hearing and sound in his poem “Das Gehör.”

Abstract This paper considers the preface to Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers in conjunction with Ritter’s own scientific practice. As in the case of self-experimentation, in the preface Ritter takes on the role of both the narrating subject and the narrated object of his biography. The inward-directed nature of this literary and scientific approach suggests

Abstract To endure and to survive appear as synonyms in dictionaries, but the fates of the two words in the popular imagination have taken opposite tracks. ‘Endurance’ has enjoyed literary cache and wide admiration since the Homeric epics. One of Odysseus’ most common epithets in the Odyssey is polutlās, “much-enduring.” Endurance points to a capacity to suffer hardship, and has been lauded as a heroic

Proletarische Welten is a compelling study that offers important contributions to world literary history and theory. It will push scholars to think about the way internationalist world literature of the Weimar Republic might change our understanding of literary practice during the period–both within Germany and beyond. The monograph will be of interest to advanced students and scholars across a wide

Abstract Hans Blumenberg ends his last book, Höhlenausgänge (Cave Exits) with a coda, entitled “Another Myth,” composed solely of a cave story quoted verbatim from the Babylonian Talmud, to which he adds not a word of his own. This ‘performative act of silence’ raises the general issue of silence in Blumenberg’s thought. Despite the many variants of the cave story recounted in the Höhlenausgänge, I

ingly contemporary significance. With the continuation of their literary renegotiation of utopian and diasporic discourse in the works of authors like Marge Percy, Howard Jacobson, Michael Chabon and Eshkol Nevo, the older generation’s visions and countervisions appear in a new light whose larger comparative context presents their marginalized positions as critically visionary and, as a result, ultimately

Abstract We are obsessed with the specter of disaster and we seem to be living in catastrophic times. Since the events of 9/11, we exist in a state of high alertness and live with the constant awareness of threats of global proportion. Terrorism, war, and forced migration, ecological instabilities and economic uncertainty, all contribute to an atmosphere of heightened anxiety. On the one hand, this

Abstract In his book City of Quartz from 1990, the urban theorist Mike Davis criticized Bertolt Brecht for having failed to explore the “real-life Mahagonny” and “thriving local labor movement” of Los Angeles while he lived there from 1941 to 1947. For someone who considered himself a dialectical thinker, Brecht showed surprisingly little interest in the specific historical dialectic that had shaped

Abstract A closer examination of Adorno’s exile in the US, and particularly in Los Angeles in the 1940s, defies the popular view of him as a cantankerous anti-American Eurocentric snob. Rather, his writings and personal letters show how Adorno saw his time in California, the hothouse of the West’s most advanced culture industry, as an opportunity to scrutinize the modern condition. For Adorno, however

Abstract Christa Wolf’s novel Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud has spawned an impressive amount of scholarly attention in less than a decade. However, two of the major themes of the novel—psychoanalysis and Southern California—remain underexplained. I provide a framework for better understanding both of those themes in the novel by connecting them by way of the role of Richard Neutra

Abstract Friedrich Schiller's long journey to Hollywood began in the late eighteenth-century with the early resonance of his dramas on U.S. stages. After rising to prominence in the nineteenth century, Schiller's dramas all but disappeared from the U.S. repertoire due to anti-German hostility during the First and Second World Wars. In an ironic twist, WWII led to an influx of German-speaking thinkers

The article analyzes the propositional and non-propositional knowledge of globalization in Thomas Meinecke’s novel Hellblau (2001). This literary knowledge has two dimensions. First, Hellblau, formulates a knowledge about non-hegemonic forms of cultural globalization, which understands minorities and their subcultures as agents of globalization processes. Second, Hellblau supplements the predominant

Often categorized as an experimental or case novella, Arthur Schnitzler’s early novella Sterben develops a literary approach that reflects the cultural framework of statistics. At the time, the statistical method aspired to relate individual life to statistical data, a development to which Schnitzler was especially sensitive as a physician. Writing medical texts and editing a medical journal, Schnitzler

Reconstructing the theories of encounter and individuation among Novalis and his contemporaries affiliated with the Freiberg Mining Academy, this article reconsiders German Romanticism through a Spinozan materialist tradition. Countering the reception of Novalis as a poet and an idealist philosopher of subjectivity belonging to Jena Romanticism, I advance an alternative constellation of his interlocutors

Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 Gehen, ging, gegangen has largely been received as a novel meant to educate the German public about the current “refugee crisis” in Europe. This article argues that Erpenbeck’s text has a more complicated relationship to its own didactic potential. By situating Gehen, ging, gegangen within the history of didactic narrative as a genre, the article demonstrates how Erpenbeck’s

Goethes „Mayfest“ gilt als Ursprung und Paradigma für die im 18. Jahrhundert entstehende Naturlyrik und Erlebnislyrik, verstanden als emotionaler Ausdruck eines zumeist männlichen Individuums im Angesicht der Natur, oft auch gegenüber einer mit der Natur identifizierten, als geliebt adressierten Frau. Während das Gedicht in den 1970er Jahren noch als Evokation paradiesischen Lebens betrachtet wird

Wood specimen collections cataloged tree life with actual pieces of wood. Rather than a scientific visual regime that merely stabilized and controlled nature, the serialization of these works transformed how knowledge about the forest was stored and represented by rendering the multiple places of the woods into a collection of reproducible and portable fixed proportionalities. This article suggests

The discovery of the ice age was arguably one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the nineteenth century, resulting in a reconceptualization of the climate as mutable and volatile. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the possibility that there was once a much colder period was a radical idea that diverged from popular scientific belief and biblical thought. The ice age was hypothesized

“Is There a Usable Schmitt?”—the subtitle of Peter Hohendahl’s conclusion encapsulates the thematic thrust of Perilous Futures. It is also one of the most pressing and contentious questions in poli...

This article offers an account of wettern (weathering) in German drama of the 1770s, with focus on works by Goethe, Klinger, Lenz, and Herder. Extant scholarship on this period tends to stress the religious and rhetorical origins, as well as the allegorical function, of meteorological imagery. Against these readings, this article argues that instances of wettern must be read literally, insofar as the

When Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money was published in 1900, intellectual-institutional divisions among the disciplines were still relatively fluid; it is a liminal work, at once philosophy and social science. That it has been canonized as a work of sociology, its title notwithstanding, exemplifies a disciplining of Simmel’s legacy that obscures his wider theoretical significance. This essay examines

This paper poses a simple question that is hard to answer: what does Simmel mean by “form” in Sociology? We pursue this question in three major steps: First we articulate why it is important to understand what Simmel means by form in Sociology; second we explain why it is difficult to understand Simmel’s notion of form; and third we develop what might be considered a pragmatist answer: namely, that

This text elaborates on the idea that Simmel’s relational approach was born within his sociological works, and later on became crucial for his whole oeuvre, thus becoming his worldview, his cosmovision and metaphysical principle. His relational approach structured his three interrelated programmatic texts for the field of sociology: the essay ‘The Problem of Sociology’ ([1894] GSG5,1992:52-61), Sociology’s

This essay argues argues that there is a persistent tension between two visions of the self in Simmel’s work. In one of these, which I call a decentered conception, the self is characterized by complex, socially-constituted multiplicity. In the other, Simmel strove to understand and reconstruct the grounds for an authentically unique individuality, particularly though not exclusively in his late work

The concept of “form,” and the associated problem of the relationship between “forms” and “contents” is a central theme in Simmel’s overall work. This paper shows that recent work in cultural sociology has taken a “Simmelian turn” in conceptualizing how cultural goods can serve as the primary engines of sociation in (post)modern societies. In this, they serve as the most common type of minimal formal

Among Georg Simmel’s many characterizations of modernity is his claim that the current moment might be pictured as a kind of adventure. That is, the modern era seems be a leap out of the everyday customs and habitual patterns of previous periods of history and into a risky world that seems enticing, exciting, unprecedented, and unknown. This essay considers his counter-intuitive illustration of this

2018 marked the centenary of Georg Simmel’s death. In numerous venues this has sparked reflection on the nature and significance of his life and work. To a certain degree, these have reproduced some of the divisions that have continued to characterize Simmel’s reception. Sociologists have gathered to reflect upon Simmel’s legacy in their field (e.g. at the 2018 International Sociological Association

Der Essay besteht aus drei Teilen. Im ersten wird Simmels Schreibszene rekonstruiert. Sie benennt zugleich sein Schreibprojekt: Wiederholung der Relation Wiederholung Innovation. Im zweiten werden sein Schreibfeld markiert, dessen Abgrenzungen benannt, die von Simmel präferierte Textsorte charakterisiert und sein Schreibverfahren spezifiziert. Simmel schreibt Zwischentexte im Spannungsfeld von Monosemie

For Simmel, form is the basic concept that underlies the epistemological process. But he casts form in his sociological and philosophical writings as a function of a relation. Form, for Simmel, is a dynamic principle that can change depending on its function. This makes relation equal with form’s conventionally assigned privileged epistemological status. Reciprocity, according to Simmel, opens form

This essay suggests that Simmel reflects on forms always in conjunction with more general considerations of their presentation. Forms are not only a theoretical concept for him but also a representational, poetological category that he often times associates with literature. His theory of form is bound up with his readings of literature, particularly when he analyzes the works of Goethe in conjunction

While ample attention has been paid to the impact of the Second World War on Sartre’s turn to commitment, the earliest phase of the global conflict in which he was involved, the so-called Phoney War, is seldom mentioned in discussions of his postwar writings. Sartre’s experience of this period, which featured the dread of waiting for a conflict that would not set in, offers additional clues for interpreting

This essay uses Raabe’s novel to explore the relations between the cultural discourses of Altertumskunde and Altertumswissenschaft and the roles they played in the formation of German identity, both national and personal. It focuses on three topics: the katabasis at the novel’s center; the protagonist’s, Buchius’s, archaeological collection; and the fate of his classical studies. It addresses the themes

This essay discusses Rudolf Borchardt's theory of language and translation as it is reflected through his early work, the pseudo-biblical poem Das Buch Joram (1905). It argues that the poem, together with Borchardt's writings on translation and his later polemic with Martin Buber on the translation of the Hebrew Bible, articulates a theoretical conception of language as an inherently written and silent

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus, the form shared by language and the world cannot be said through language, but rather shows itself in language. This statement has posed a major obstacle to interpretations of the book: if the form shared by language and the world cannot be said through language, then how can Wittgenstein say (through language) anything about that form—including

The sound figures were an oscillating metal plate that produced two-dimensional shapes in the sand when musical notes were played through it. Ernst Chladni, the German acoustician who discovered the phenomenon in 1789, exhibited it at public demonstrations around Europe. But despite the support of Napoleon himself, the sound figures could not be explained mathematically. So in these sound figures,

This essay examines the notion of tact at the intersection of technology, music, and literature around 1800. Focusing on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and Die Automate, it situates his texts in the longer history of musical automata in the eighteenth century and alongside the invention of the metronome by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel and Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in the early 19th century. This mechanization

By distancing itself from the current dominance of the ontological interpretation of Stimmung, this article explicates another tradition of understanding Stimmung as a decisively modern category. Two modernities of Stimmung are then offered—a compensational and a confrontational—whereby the article traces the second kind in the writings of Georg Simmel and Emil Staiger. Central is the aesthetic paradigm

The experiment was simple. Ernst Florens Chladni scattered sand on a glass plate and stroked the plate with a bow. The bow caused the plate to resonate, and the vibrations caused the sand to collect in symmetrical figures reflecting the vibrations, thus making sound visible. Chladni named these figures Klangfiguren—“sound figures.” The significance of these experiments from 1787 goes well beyond acoustic

D von Gabriele Schneider und Renate Sternagel in einem editorischen Kraftakt nun zug€angliche gemachte Briefwechsel zwischen Fanny Lewald und Adolf Stahr besticht zun€achst durch seinen Umfang. Drei dicke B€ande mit einem Gesamtvolumen von rund 2.400 Seiten sind es geworden, in denen die Herausgeberinnen 717 Briefe des Schriftstellerliebespaares versammelt, nach biographischen Phasen gegliedert und

Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) connects the idea of genesis with the myth of the poetic origin of language. Scholars have reflected extensively upon Herder’s introduction of anthropological and multi-causal perspectives on language, but largely dismissed the many literary allusions as indicators of its ethical preconditions. Herder substitutes the concept

The essay aims to uncover the somehow overlooked sensorial faculty of tactility in Walter Benjamin’s epistemology of images. Not only is “Das Taktische” transposed into the critical mode of reception characterizing modernity, but the meaning of the tactile, inciting a destructive relation to the integrity of the optical, lies in a certain attention to organic and non-organic decay underlying Benjamin’s

In her well-known review of The Star of Redemption, poet, cultural critic, and philosopher Margarete Susman characterizes Rosenzweig’s project as theology that has “gone beyond the zenith of atheism” and articulates her view of this unique piece of work as the crowning achievement of the philosophical project of that time. But Susman’s assessment also addresses another issue of great significance:

The short, moving song heard from Gretchen at the spinning wheel connects her fate to a series of epic women, The tragic stories of Medea, Ariadne and finally Mary provide illuminating contexts for what Gretchen tells in Faust.