Performing Knowledge, 1750-1850 9783110421064, 9783110412062

Citation preview

Performing Knowledge, 1750–1850

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Irene Kacandes

Volume 18

Performing Knowledge, 1750–1850

Edited by Mary Helen Dupree and Sean B. Franzel

ISBN 978-3-11-041206-2 e-ISBN [PDF] 978-3-11-042106-4 e-ISBN [EPUB] 978-3-11-042112-5 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Anatomisches Theater der Tierärztlichen Hochschule Berlin/ Urheber: Preußische Meßbildanstalt Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

1

Part One: Sounds and Stages Viktoria Tkaczyk The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with 27 Words Dietmar Till The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

57

Ellwood Wiggins Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments 85 Rebecca Wolf The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

113

Mary Helen Dupree Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808) and the Performance of Literary 137 Knowledge Hans-Georg von Arburg Modern Architecture Takes the Stage: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles 165

Part Two: Pedagogies and Publics Claire Baldwin Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics 193

VI

Table of Contents

Chad Wellmon Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

221

Michael Bies Staging the Knowledge of Plants: Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants” 247 Edgar Landgraf Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

269

Sean Franzel Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form 295 Adrian Daub Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Forms of Musical Knowledge: The Case 323 of the Piano Angela Esterhammer Afterword: The Audience, the Public, and the Improvisator Maximilian 341 Langenschwarz Bibliography Index

377

347

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850 1 The production and circulation of knowledge The period between 1750 and 1850 was a time when knowledge and its modes of transmission were reconsidered and reworked in fundamental ways. This was an era that witnessed momentous political and social transformations that have been routinely described as catalysts of global modernity, as events such as colonial expansion and the French and Industrial Revolutions went hand in hand with new ways of viewing, sensing, and experiencing a rapidly changing world. Exploratory attempts to shape these new experiences abounded across a wide range of institutional and cultural settings, including public experiments and scientific spectacles, theatrical and scholarly presentations, and the founding and reform of a variety of cultural and educational institutions. The public status and pedagogical function of scholarship, science, and the arts became pressing issues in this era, not least because growing sectors of society were gaining access to newly discovered knowledge and becoming familiar with the idea that this knowledge had the potential to transform both the self and the world. One especially intriguing commentary on the production and diffusion of knowledge from this era is the 1789 Fragments on the Circulation of Ideas [Fragmente über den Ideenumlauf] by the relatively obscure figure Josias Ludwig Gosch (1765 – 1811), a young independent scholar (Privatgelehrter).¹ Published in Copenhagen on the eve of the French Revolution, this rather curious text has recently been heralded by scholars as a work of media theory avant la lettre, for Gosch’s Fragments raises fundamental questions about knowledge production, circulation, and the role of public performance in both. Gosch’s “media theory of the Enlightenment”² is grounded in his firm adherence to the project of Enlightenment popular philosophy, or Popularphilosophie; in this vein, he calls for the dissemination of knowledge among broader publics, beyond traditional institutional gatekeepers, to the young and the old, and to both men and women. As Gosch argues, “the Enlightenment of the female sex [die Aufklärung

 Josias Ludwig Gosch, Fragmente über den Ideenumlauf (Berlin: Kadmos, 2006).  Georg Stanitzek and Hartmut Winkler, “Eine Medientheorie der Aufklärung,” foreword to Gosch, Fragmente, 7– 34.

2

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

des weiblichen Geschlechts]” gives rise to “many advantages for the processing of the sciences in general and indeed for entire human happiness [viele Vortheile für die Bearbeitung der Wissenschaften überhaupt und für die ganze menschliche Glückseligkeit überhaupt].”³ In this context, Gosch theorizes the situations in which the transmission of new knowledge takes place, drawing on influential models of the circulatory system of the human body pioneered by William Harvey and others.⁴ Gosch focuses on several main modes of the “circulation [Umlauf]” of ideas – reading in books, oral instruction, and technical as well as entertaining conversations in social situations⁵ – and thereby outlines something like a typology of different forms of communication. Aspects of Gosch’s discussion of the spread of ideas through print clearly rely on a model of dissemination, leading recent scholars to situate Gosch as part of a nascent modern discourse on mass media.⁶ However, Gosch also privileges communal sites of rhetorical performance and sociable entertainment, describing them as central nodes in the system of circulating ideas. Like many of his contemporaries, Gosch is thereby involved in reimagining the spaces and scenes where knowledge production and transmission takes place. In light of the twenty- and twenty-first-century theories of performance and performativity that the present volume of essays draws upon, we might think of this as the realm of performance, rather generally understood. For example, Gosch expounds upon the “many advantages of the public speaker [der Redner].”⁷ Not only does the orator or lecturer have better access to visual aids, which allow the listener to visualize (anschauen) the content of what is being said more clearly;⁸ he also possesses a greater capacity than print authors for producing emotional reactions in the audience, due to the collective scene of presentation and the audience’s spontaneous, interactive reactions: He does not present his ideas through stiff figures […], but rather through tones that are capable of so many modulations; he affirms the meaning of his words through his movements […]; and even if he does not develop all the ideas that lie in his soul […], the listeners still will easily guess these, they will come to the aid of the speaker, there might even be certain dark ideas that are awakened in [the listeners] that the speaker himself did not

 Gosch, Fragmente, 173.  On such notions of circulation see Albrecht Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1999).  Gosch, Fragmente, 157.  On “Verbreitungsmedien,” as Stanitzek and Winker put it, see the foreword to Gosch, Fragmente, 16.  Gosch, Fragmente, 160.  Gosch, Fragmente, 160.

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

3

have […]; … feelings fly during the speech like lightning, penetrating the minds [die Geister], they seem to flow from one soul to another […], sympathy evidences its highest power.⁹

This imagined scene of oratory glosses and refashions the rhetorical model of communication prevalent throughout preceding centuries, including notions of tailoring public speech to specific audiences, the invention of speech and elaboration of topics, and the importance of gesture and affective modulation (this rhetorical model and its eighteenth-century fate is the topic of Dietmar Till’s essay in this volume).¹⁰ While extolling the virtues of oratory, Gosch also introduces an emphatic anthropology of sympathy that suggests how the scene of performance generates new knowledge, as the audience becomes involved in helping the speaker formulate his thoughts, even in generating new ideas “that the orator himself did not have.” This mode of “fabricating thoughts while speaking,” to quote a contemporary of Gosch’s, Heinrich von Kleist (another important theorist of the performativity of language and the subject of Edgar Landgraf’s essay in this volume), is connected to sound, to emotion, and to the presence of audience members. All of these features of the performance situation are enabling conditions for the circulation of “sympathy,” and all of these features – the importance of acoustics, affect, and audience co-presence – have been foregrounded by twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars in their own theories of performance. Despite continuing to draw on certain aspects of the traditional model of rhetorical production, Gosch’s model of circulation should also be seen as part of a broader transition towards a model of communication that imagines social settings as an affect-and-idea-saturated network, a model that lends itself to rethinking and reworking existing cultural and educational institutions. Corresponding to Gosch’s suggestion that such public, “popular” scholarly oratory should go beyond its usual institutional frameworks, the project of “moving” audiences is envisioned as an integral part of a more diffuse system of social communication. Indeed, Gosch calls for a much wider repertoire of public lectures  “Er zeigt seine Vorstellungen nicht durch steife Figuren an […], sondern durch Töne, die so vieler Modulazionen fähig sind; er bestätigt den Sinn seiner Worte noch durch seine Bewegungen […]; entwickelt er nun auch nicht alle in seiner Seel liegende Ideen […], so werden die Zuhörer jene doch leicht errathen, sie werden dem Redner zu Hülfe kommen, es werden vielleicht in ihnen dunkle Vorstellungen erweckt, die der Redner selbst nicht hatte […]; … die Gefühle fliegen bei der Rede, wie ein Blitz, durch die Geister hindurch, sie scheinen grade zu von einer Seele zu der andern überzuströmen, […], die Sympathie beweißt ihre höchste Macht.” Gosch, Fragmente, 162.  See also John Bender and David Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. David Wellbery and John Bender (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3 – 39.

4

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

than what currently exists, lectures “on the history of the earth and its peoples, on psychology [Seelenlehre], on aesthetics.” Furthermore, he envisions a network of peripatetic scholars repeating their presentations multiple times across different locations: “every traveling scholar could then publicly appear on stage [öffentlich auftreten] and hold a speech on a specific object of these sciences and would be welcomed into the city on the basis of how much talent he showed.”¹¹ To wit, this model entails the enhanced circulation of individual, itinerant lecturers, along with their ideas. Gosch’s vision of a thriving culture of scholarly and popular presentations was realized to varying degrees by a range of figures across the arts and sciences who feature in many of the stories told by essays in this volume, figures such as Karl Philipp Moritz and Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Gustav Anton von Seckendorff, and Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. These and other scholars gave extensive lectures on historical, scientific, or literary topics for “popular” audiences that included laypersons and women, and they used theatrical strategies to energize their lecture performances and engage the audience with the topic at hand. Like Gosch’s orator, these lecturers were able to promote the Enlightenment project of visual accessibility and immediacy, or Anschaulichkeit, by introducing non-textual strategies for making knowledge more immediately and viscerally present to the audience’s imagination. Moreover, they capitalized on the potential of such performances to reinforce knowledge through an experience of shared emotion, wonder, and sympathy. One obvious example of this is the public experiment, which communicated recent scientific developments through the controlled application of specific empirical conditions. Equipped with a flair for the theatrical as well as with a set of rudimentary instruments and apparatuses, experimental physicists, chemists, and other scholarly figures educated and entertained audiences throughout Europe, creating in the process new styles of scholarly and “disciplinary” presentation, a topic that several contributors to this volume explore in greater detail in their essays. Not least due to the use of specific theatrical strategies, the form of the lecture itself sometimes shaded into popular forms of theatrical performance like the tableau vivant and the declamatory concert, which also targeted educated, mixed audiences. For example, in 1813, Gustav Anton von Seckendorff, alias “Patrik Peale,” who had previously made a name for himself as an actor and touring performer of tableaux vivants and declamatory concerts, developed a series of lectures “on the beautiful and characteristic” in ancient and modern art,

 Gosch, Fragmente, 164.

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

5

in which he combined spoken text with his own repertoire of tableaux vivants. ¹² These tableaux used poses and costumes to create various images from art and mythology, and served to demonstrate Seckendorff’s own ideas about the ideal and the natural in art. Accounts of Seckendorff’s lectures and his other performances in the fashionable Journal of Luxury and Fashions (Journal des Luxus und der Moden) offer a fascinating glimpse of a cultural moment in which performative approaches to the production and dissemination of knowledge flourished in spaces of sociability such as salons and spa resorts. Regularly appearing reports about such performances in fashionable journals helped to extend the audience of these performances far beyond the physical walls of the salons, universities, and theaters where they were staged, and lent additional legitimacy to the unique aesthetic of these performances. Although lectures and public demonstrations were ephemeral, localized events, the concepts of the arts and sciences that they disseminated were also deeply dependent on print circulation. A feedback loop thus emerged, linking literary production, stage performance, fashionable periodicals, and the founding of a literary, artistic, and stylistic canon. Thus, as traveling lecturers, scientists, and performers made their way throughout German-speaking lands, rehearsing the same “scripts” for audiences in different cities and towns, and as reports of their performances were disseminated in journals, something not unlike the new and enhanced communicative network of ideas envisioned by Gosch began to be realized.

2 Theoretical contexts This volume brings together a range of essays that explore the performance of knowledge in the period from 1750 to 1850 in the broadest sense of the term. The term “performance” as we use it can denote not only theatrical performances, but also other types of physical performance such as lectures, scientific experiments, tableaux vivants, musical and declamatory concerts, and other spectacles; in addition, it can also refer to performance in a literary or philosophical sense, for example a literary author’s performance of self. Topics explored by our contributors include scientific and philosophical lectures, theater performances and stage design, botany primers, musical publications, staged Schiller memorials, acoustic presentations, and literary declamations, to name a few. These essays address historical moments in which the uniqueness of the performance situation produced knowledge that would have been inaccessible or unattainable

 “Miscellen aus Cassel,” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 28, no. 6 (June 1813): 350 – 351.

6

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

otherwise, e. g., through print alone. Such performances produced knowledge not only about the stated object(s) of inquiry, but also about their institutional context, the social groups and individuals that were involved in them (their instigators, performers, and audiences), and the nature of knowledge itself. It is our conviction that these literary, theatrical, and scientific events are not mere epiphenomena of an intellectual-historical tradition or of abstract scientific propositions, but rather that they serve as vital conduits in the larger process of generating, differentiating, and circulating knowledge in this period. Our impetus to organize a volume around this topic arises not least from the fact that many scholars working in interdisciplinary cultural studies and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have recently turned to examine the history of science, scholarship, pedagogy, and performance more closely. Of course, this is partially in response to the absolute centrality of theories and practices of knowledge and knowledge circulation in the period between 1750 and 1850. For example, literary and intellectual historians have often traced the coalescence of ideas of education in this period around the concept of Bildung, a term that connotes individual (self)-formation or (self)-development for its own sake and thereby breaks with earlier models of utilitarian education (Erziehung) to the end of fulfilling particular functions in the traditional society of orders (Ständegesellschaft).¹³ Though much has been written about Bildung, pedagogy, and knowledge production during this period, recent developments in performance theory, philosophy, science studies, and media theory have further expanded our methodological toolkit and facilitated new approaches to the question of how knowledge is produced and disseminated. Such developments include the flourishing in Germany and North America of new approaches to concepts of performance inspired by the work of Erika Fischer-Lichte, Judith Butler, and others; new approaches to the aesthetics of the theater and other performance situations in previous centuries; work by historians of science on experimental practices, intellectual networks, and the rise of modern academic disciplinarity; historical approaches that explore the resonance of aesthetics with other forms of knowledge production, including the “poetology” and history of knowledge (Wissensgeschichte); and new work in media studies that accounts for the involvement of various media in the performance situation, including attempts to describe the unique status of acoustic experience.

 See Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” in Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 170 – 207.

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

7

All of the contributions to this volume show how knowledge production is tied to specific “scenes” that are situated within various temporal, spatial, social, medial, and institutional contexts. They also engage closely with questions of the audience, of disciplinarity, and of the ever-changing distinction between “popular” knowledge and “scientific” expertise. In this regard, our volume builds on the work of sociologists and historians of science such as Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer, who have helped to shift the focus from the propositional content of scientific experimentation to its status as contested ground within specific sociological, political, and economic context(s).¹⁴ At the same time, our focus on knowledge production owes something to more recent work in science studies by Bruno Latour, Rudolph Stichweh, Donna Haraway, and, perhaps most important of all, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, whose work considers experimentation as a “practical process” by which “experimental systems” generate “epistemic things” and reproduce themselves through “the production of differences.”¹⁵ Taking a cue from Rheinberger, we can speculate that the “differences” thus produced impact not only scientific concepts, entities, and frameworks, but also social and disciplinary distinctions amongt “experts” and audiences, which in turn inform the way that scientific information is transmitted and circulated in these same “experimental systems.” By considering the way in which performance and performativity are implicated in the production of such identities and differences, the essays in this volume highlight the analogous relationship between theatrical and scientific performances. Both involve actors and audiences; both are generative of knowledge, not only about an object but also about the respective identities of actor and audience(s); and both are the focus of seemingly endless commentaries and debates, as contemporary observers and audiences seek to come to grips with the social, cultural, and historical significance of such events. At the same time, the essays in this volume bear witness to the way in which performativity and performance have, in recent years, become “traveling concepts” (Bal)¹⁶ that enable new and innovative work across various disciplines. Over the last two decades, extensive conceptual work in the field of performance studies has energized scholarship in a variety of other fields, such as literature, art history, and science studies. This process of catalyzation can be seen to fol-

 See Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 20.  Rheinberger, quoted in Mitchell 22; see also for example Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, and Writing: I. Tracing Protein Synthesis,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 23 A, no. 2 (1992): 305 – 331.  See Mieke Bal, “Performance and Performativity,” in Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 174– 212.

8

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

low two different, equally important strands. On the one hand, German scholars, many of them working at the Free University of Berlin, have led the way in the search for new strategies for defining and analyzing specific scenes of performance; this group includes Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch, Günter Gebauer, Christoph Wulf, and Helmar Schramm. Fischer-Lichte’s much-cited work The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics [Ästhetik des Performativen] has been particularly instrumental in helping to broaden the scope of international performance studies.¹⁷ In part as a response to the diversity of twentieth-century performance art (and also in dialogue with the work of American anthropologists of theater such as Richard Schechner), these scholars have extended the area of inquiry far beyond the borders of traditional theater studies to encompass a wide range of performance situations, from political theater to sporting events.¹⁸ This kind of scholarship engages extensively with questions of the co-presence between actors and audiences, temporality and spatiality, “liveness,” representations of gender and race, and, most recently, the particular function of the voice in performance.¹⁹ Meanwhile, a second, related, but not identical strand has sought to grasp and apply the notion of “performativity” as it has been developed by John Langshaw Austin and Judith Butler.²⁰ This approach is concerned with how certain kinds of speech acts “do” rather than “say” things, seeking less to assess propositional statements about certain states of affairs and more to describe how certain “performative” utterances or actions create new states of affairs in the first place. Working with this distinction, Butler has shown how fixed concepts such as gender can be destabilized even as they are foregrounded in the act of performance, both in the context of live performances, such as drag performances, and in the act of writing itself. Not only has Butler’s work been productive for scholars working on feminist and queer approaches to performance, it also provides a useful alternative to traditional ways of thinking about how identities and knowledge about those identities are produced.²¹  See Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen; also Uwe Wirth, ed., Performanz, Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002).  See for example Günter Gebauer, Poetik des Fußballs (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2006).  See Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer, eds., Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006).  See John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. James Opie Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).  See Butler, Bodies That Matter; also Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

9

All of the essays in this volume draw on recent theoretical achievements of performance studies in accounting for the specific physicality, materiality, and temporality of the performance situation, and they likewise profit from philosophical and historical approaches to non-propositional, “performative” sites of knowledge production. The work of Helmar Schramm has been influential in interweaving these distinct strands of performance studies. His extensive interdisciplinary research group Theatrum Scientiarum addresses resonances between the scientific cultures of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the avant-gardes of the twentieth centuries, thereby working with an emphatic concept of the “performance of knowledge.”²² Foregrounding the analogous role of the theater and the sciences, Schramm stresses the connection of knowledge to space and place and its relationship to various institutions and publics or audiences; in this context, he and his collaborators discuss a number of key “scenes of knowledge” such as the collection, the laboratory, and the theater. Similarly, Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick have theorized “spheres of action” in the later Romantic period, exploring filiations of the performative in a Romantic context and considering the diversity of textual and speech practices during this era.²³ Like Schramm and Esterhammer, we and many of our contributors repeatedly refer to the specific situation or “scenario” of performance (to borrow a term from Viktoria Tkaczyk’s essay in this volume). However, along with the spatial connotations of “scenes,” “scenarios,” and “spheres,” it is also important to consider expressly temporal features of the performance situation: the fact, for example, that lecture series were often repeated, that theater productions were often restaged, and that these performances were reviewed, redescribed, and remediated across a variety of print media. These events not only had meaning as singular, individual occurences; rather, their social, cultural, and discursive significance was determined in large measure with reference to prior as well as future performances and representations in books, journals, etchings, etc. To paraphrase Derrida’s theory of performativity, which is discussed in Tkaczyk’s essay in more detail, it is not only the “presentness” of the actor/audience interaction that is significant, but also the traces of the ab-

 See Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte and Jan Lazardzig, eds., Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century, vol. 1 of Theatrum Scientiarum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005).  See Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhamer, eds., “Introduction: Romantic Spheres of Action,” in Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 3 – 18; and Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750 – 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

10

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

sent to which the performance refers, and which make the performance intelligible to audiences as it is reiterated and disseminated in various medial contexts. With his concept of “poetologies of knowledge” (Poetologien des Wissens), Joseph Vogl poses a complementary set of research questions that address the reliance of a variety of sites and scenes of knowledge production upon aesthetic operations. Like theorists of performativity, Vogl does not define knowledge primarily in terms of the propositional content of given scientific discourses; instead he views knowledge production as something guided by a variety of creative, transformative, or “poetic” logics. This is the basis of his contention that all forms of knowledge generate their own performative character and are correlated with unique forms of representation (Darstellung) and staging or performance (Inszenierung).²⁴ Broadening the scope of established approaches to social and cultural history in the wake of Foucault’s project of the “archaeology of knowledge,” Vogl and others thereby speak of the history of knowledge (Wissensgeschichte) rather than the “history of science” (Wissenschaftsgeschichte).²⁵ Vogl’s concept of the “poetology” of knowledge is just one way in which recent scholars have tried to think through the question of how knowledge is organized in science, in literature, and in the arts in specific historical contexts. In the context of North American German Studies, scholars such as Stefani Engelstein and Michel Chaouli have studied specific discursive sites where literary and scientific logics inform each other, for example in late eighteenth-century discussions of human anatomy and chemistry.²⁶ Similar approaches have been productive for Romantic Studies more generally; for example, Robert Mitchell, building on the work of Georges Canguilhem, uses examples from both science and English literature to show how Romantic literature and experimental sciences around 1800 adopted a common stance towards new experiences, concepts, and knowl-

 “Eine Poetologie des Wissens [orientiert sich] nicht am Gesagten, sondern am Sagen und folgt damit der These, daß jede Wissensform einen eigenen performativen Charakter, eigene Formen der Darstellung und der Inszenierung entwickelt.” Joseph Vogl, “Für eine Poetologie des Wissens,” in Die Literatur und die Wissenschaften 1770 – 1930, ed. Karl Richter, Jörg Schönert, and Michael Titzmann (Stuttgart: M & P Verlag, 1997), 107– 130, 121.  See Joseph Vogl, “Poetologie des Wissens,” in Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft, ed. Harun Maye and Leander Scholz (Munich: Fink and UTB, 2011), 49 – 72, 54. See also the recently founded interdisciplinary “Center for the History of Knowledge” [Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens] at the University of Zürich (www.zgw.ethz.ch).  See Stefani Engelstein, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); and Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), among many others.

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

11

edge, which he terms “experimental vitalism.”²⁷ A critical approach to the history of knowledge (Wissensgeschichte) enriches several of the contributions to this volume, including Michael Bies’s essay, which explores the interweaving of literary and scientific approaches to “plant knowledge” in Goethe’s elegy “On the Metamorphosis of Plants.” An emphasis on “scenes of knowledge” (Schramm) also lends itself to discussion of the mediality of performance situations. The accelerated development of new medial techniques in the eighteenth century led to the rapid emergence of a number of new types of performance, which in turn led to a heightened awareness of the physicality and materiality of the communicative process and of the variety of cultural technologies involved in it. Contemporary theories of the mediality of performance offer complementary insights and points of comparison with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates. Parallel with J.L. Gosch’s privileging of oral communication, for example, recent media theorists have addressed ways in which the body and sense experience are uniquely implicated in the performance situation; in particular, Sibylle Krämer has argued that the specific medial constellations of the performance situation encourage a critical reconsideration of and return to an emphatic concept of aesthetics as sense experience, or “aisthesis.”²⁸ It is likewise useful to juxtapose debates about the medial reproducibility or ephemerality of performances with eighteenth-century performance situations that resonated across a variety of media, including visual and printed reproduction. Is the performance situation unrepeatable, ephemeral, uniquely bound to a particular space and time, as Fischer-Lichte and others have argued? Or is performance always already “mediatized,” is it from the start reliant upon a variety of media ensembles that are directed both backwards and forwards in time to medial operations of recording, storing, and retransmitting certain media effects, as Philip Auslander and others have argued?²⁹ Applying these debates to historical cultures of performance sheds new light on social and cultural history. Finally, several of the essays have profited from new developments in the field of “sound studies,” which is concerned with (among other things) how knowledge is produced and disseminated acoustically, and how discourses and technologies of hearing and listening have shaped each other recip-

 See Mitchell, 9 – 10.  Sybille Krämer, “Was haben ‘Performativität’ und ‘Medialität’ miteinander zu tun? Plädoyer für eine in der ‘Aisthetisierung’ gründende Konzeption des Performativen,” in Performativität und Medialität, ed. Sybille Krämer (Munich: Fink 2004), 13 – 32.  See the essay by Franzel in this volume for a longer discussion of these debates.

12

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

rocally over time.³⁰ This approach offers a fascinating counter-narrative to histories of knowledge in the eighteenth century that stress the visual dimension to the exclusion of all else, and it challenges us to rethink the eighteenth century’s supposed videocentrism in light of larger intermedial developments taking place in the realm of aesthetics, philosophy, and technology during this period. Taken as a whole, this volume seeks to enrich our understanding of what “performance” and “performing knowledge” mean in the period between 1750 and 1850 by considering a variety of practices, texts, and cultural technologies to which these terms pertain. The essays collected here cast a wide net, linking together and recombining a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to situations, metaphors, and theories of performance. At the same time, they all reflect their authors’ specific grounding in literary studies, the history of science, theater and performance studies, visual culture, musicology, book history, and media studies.

3 Thematic overview The following essays are organized under two basic headings that reference the basic features of the performative situation they describe; in each case, the essays are ordered roughly chronologically. The heading “Sounds and Stages” corresponds to issues pertaining to sound, music, and the voice, as well as to theater and theatrical models of performativity, while the heading “Publics and Pedagogies” brings together essays on publicity and the public sphere and on scholarly cultures of instruction and presentation. In addition, we have found that a range of substantial thematic concerns resonates across the essays as a whole, and that these essays cut across the chronological order of the subject matter. These include, first of all: the historical axes of continuity and change against the backdrop of which innovations in performance, theater, and scholarship occurred between 1750 and 1850. How did the scene of performance – whether in university classrooms or in theater auditoriums, in visions of the actors’ craft or in stage design, in understandings of acoustics or of the effects of musical instruments – shift in this period? How do performance scenarios in this period differ from previous models and how, in turn, do they anticipate later features of performativity? As a second focus, many of our contributors approach the performance situation as an essentially  See for example Kolesch and Krämer’s volume, Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen, as well as Nora Alter and Lutz Koepenick, eds., Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn, 2004); also Petra Maria Meyer, ed., Acoustic Turn (Munich: Fink, 2008).

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

13

intermedial process that combines, juxtaposes, and interrelates different media. What kinds of intermedial constellations emerge through performance situations and how does this shape our understanding of performativity more generally? How do these situations shed new light on the interrelated media, forms, and genres of cultural communication, including musical performance, the spoken word, architecture, printed books, visual imagery, and more? Third, many of our contributors explore how the performance situation becomes a place to experiment with new modes of public knowledge. What new ways of imagining “publics” and their relationships to political and social institutions were tied to the performance situation? How did changing models of the spectatorial imagination and emotional response relate to new forms of popular entertainment? In what ways are pedagogical methods, by their very nature, deeply performative? And how might we understand the rise of new academic disciplines as something deeply imbricated with the performance situation? Fourth, several of the contributors are interested in the specific temporality of the performance situation, and ways in which ephemerality and repetition are characteristic of encounters with performance in this period, as well as more generally. In order to elaborate upon these common threads and thereby also introduce the individual essays, we would like to conclude this introduction to the volume with a more in-depth consideration of these four thematic concerns.

3.1 Historical axes Many of the authors in this volume differentiate cultures of performance around 1800 from previous and subsequent eras and styles of performance practice (e. g., styles of acting, stage design, and ways of “staging” scientific experiments) and notions of spectatorship. By giving specific attention to the scene of performance, they engage with and rework cultural-historical, literary-historical, and scientific-historical narratives. For example, in her essay “The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words,” Viktoria Tkaczyk historicizes the performance of scientific knowledge in the early nineteenth century, making the history of “cultures of knowledge” the subject of her inquiry. Her study focuses on the scientific and experimental performances of Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, the so-called “father” of modern acoustics. By identifying Chladni’s experiments as “performatives,” Tkaczyk is able to show how Chladni carefully calibrated his image as a scientist and cemented his reputation and influence. Whereas the Enlightenment favored the image of the scientist as a dispassionate researcher, Tkaczyk argues that Chladni’s self-performance evoked the early modern culture of scientific performance as entertainment. At the

14

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

same time, in their embrace of a broad audience and in their enthusiastic tenor, Chladni’s scientific demonstrations in many ways resembled the performances of virtuoso musicians and instrument makers of his era. Tcakzyk thus reveals scientific knowledge to be not simply the content of an utterance, but rather something that emerges through a dynamic interplay of historic performance styles and registers. Tcakzyk’s essay combines a compelling early nineteenth-century case study with an incisive discussion of the methodological presuppositions of performance studies, thereby serving as a useful point of entry into the volume as a whole. Dietmar Till’s essay “The Fate of Rhetoric in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” likewise plays an important introductory role for the volume, for this essay offers an account of the eighteenth-century decline of earlier models of rhetorical eloquence and the concomitant reconceptualization of the production of public speech. Till surveys the complex cluster of issues surrounding the dissolution of rhetoric as a school subject and discipline, including the transition from Latin rhetorical training to the vernacular and the fundamental late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shift from rhetoric, which focuses on authors and text production, to hermeneutics, which focuses on reading and text reception. Till traces a range of complementary as well as contradictory tendencies, including the Kantian critique of rhetoric, the pragmatization of rhetoric by Popularphilosophen who sought to disseminate philosophical rationality to unequipped readers and listeners, the transformation of rhetoric into a theory of prose, and more. As Till shows, the critique and eventual abandonment of systematic, rule-based rhetorical training went hand in hand with concepts of genius, of inimitable style, of natural vividness (Natürlichkeit and Anschaulichkeit), of a conversational, dialogical model of social speech, and of an anthropology of emotion. We can see a glimpse of most of these concepts in Gosch’s Fragmente above, and they are at the heart of many of the essays in this edited volume. Till closes by suggesting that what cultural historians have normally conceived of as the ever-increasing encroachment of new models of disciplinary knowledge production (such as philosophy, pedagogy, aesthetics, and anthropology) upon the traditional purview of rhetoric might also be understood as a kind of diffusion of rhetoric as a form of anthropological knowledge. From this angle, we can see how aspects of earlier historical models of the scene of public oratory infuse the later cultures of performance investigated throughout this volume. Turning to the realms of dramatic literature and moral philosophy, Elwood Wiggins’s essay “Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments” is similarly attuned to transformations in performance styles and theories of spectatorship in the eighteenth century. Like Tkaczyk, Wiggins assumes the historicity of models of per-

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

15

formativity, with special emphasis on the transition from the Baroque discourse of affects (Affektenlehre) to the Enlightenment aesthetics of sympathy (Mitleidsästhetik). Wiggins dissects how Lessing brilliantly exploits the tension between Baroque and Enlightenment modes of self-performance in the figure of Lady Marwood in his drama Miss Sara Sampson; the play reveals how the scheming Marwood stages a “pity play” within a play in hopes of winning back the sympathy of her former lover, Mellefont. In order to have an effect on him, Marwood is forced to employ not only Baroque theatrical tactics (as other authors have argued), but also the tactics of the new drama of sympathy. Through the failure of Marwood’s performance, which ends in a display of madness, Lessing performs a critique of the genre of bourgeois tragedy even as he helps to establish the genre in the German-speaking world. Lessing’s drama thus reveals some of the moral dilemmas and emotional dangers involved in the new theater of sympathy that replaced the Baroque discourse of affects in the eighteenth century. It implicitly challenges both the moral implications of the aesthetics of sympathy and the unreflected evocation of “pity plays” or theatrical scenarios in the arguments of moral philosophers such as Adam Smith. In turn, Hans-Georg von Arburg’s essay “Modern Architecture Takes the Stage: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles” explores the dialogue between Schinkel’s neoclassicist stage designs, his canonical architectural works such as the Berlin Nationaltheater, and the Idealist philosophy and popular culture of Schinkel’s era. On the one hand, von Arburg argues that Schinkel’s conception of the spectator’s view of his canonical architectural structures depends much on his early work in the theater, where Schinkel incorporated images of architectural structures into the two-dimensional space of the stage backdrop. Von Arburg likewise situates Schinkel’s theatrical aesthetics within the transition from the Baroque stage to the modern, Idealist vision of the theater propagated by the likes of Schiller and Goethe. Eschewing the clutter and multidimensional stage design of the Baroque theater, Schinkel instead preferred to set the action on stage against a flat backdrop, turning the spectator’s attention as much to his own processes of aesthetic reflection as to the action unfolding on stage. In marking this transition to the privileging of aesthetic reflection along the lines of German idealism and early Romanticism, von Arburg likewise shows how this vision of the space of performance lends itself to historicist styles at the crossroads of architectural design and stage design.

16

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

3.2 Performance and intermediality Another key concern of many of the essays in this volume is the reliance of knowledge production upon a differentiated media ensemble. Performance situations are often dependent upon a variety of media, including music, the spoken word, and theatrical staging, as well as upon the resonances of these media in print. Conceiving of performance as a social practice that in its very nature moves across, between, and through different media, many of these essays explore concrete medial contexts that gave rise to new forms of knowledge; new public careers; and new visions of the stage, page, and human sensorium. Along with exploring the emergence of the Idealist theater via Schinkel, Hans Georg von Arburg’s essay is likewise a compelling study of intermediality, as he examines the dialogue of architecture – a paradigmatically three-dimensional medium – with two-dimensional stage backdrops. In his genealogy of Schinkel’s deeply theatrical architectural spaces, von Arburg also reveals the Prussian architect’s indebtedness to popular forms of panoramic performance and display of the period, which, much like the theater hall, adeptly presented spectators with a rich mixture of visual and auditory media. Similarly, several essays in the volume focus on the acoustic or aural components of performance situations, drawing on recent developments in media history and sound studies and thereby complicating previous accounts of what David Michael Levin has termed the “hegemony of vision” in the Enlightenment.³¹ Similarly to Victoria Tkaczyk, Rebecca Wolf’s essay “The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger” approaches performance as a specifically acoustic phenomenon, tracing the immense popular fascination in the eighteenth century with the newly invented glass harmonica. As Wolf shows, the harmonica was an instrument around which a range of related and at times competing discourses coalesced; these included the discourse of sensibility, the popularization of science as spectacle, a concern with the relationship of music to literature, and the special status and function accorded to female performers in the eighteenth century. Many of the most influential figures of the time across Europe and North America were fascinated with the harmonica and instruments made from glass, as Wolf recounts: Benjamin Franklin was one of the inventors of the instrument, and Chladni used it frequently in his acoustic presentations; Beethoven and Mozart incorporated it into orchestral works; and the well-known performer Marianne Davies made her career with the instrument. The example of the glass harmonica aptly demonstrates the intermediality of the

 See David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

17

performance situation and the implication of performance practices in knowledge production in the eighteenth century. To wit, the harmonica was used as a tool for scientific demonstrations to accompany and exhibit scholarly discourse, and it was also sometimes used as a musical accompaniment for poetry that was declaimed or sung. At the same time, the example of the glass harmonica reveals both the gendering of musical performance in the eighteenth century and the risks and dangers inherent in such performances: for example, the sound of the glass harmonica, which was thought to be close to that of the human voice, was considered potentially harmful to delicate female constitutions. Wolf’s essay thus addresses the volume’s fundamental questions about intermediality and the audience, while foregrounding the significant and often overlooked role of acoustic knowledge production in the eighteenth century. Additional essays in this volume thematize the symbiosis between print and performance. A good case in point here is Adrian Daub’s piece on “Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Forms of Musical Knowledge: The Case of the Piano,” which gives an account of the passage from the musical world of the eighteenth century to that of the nineteenth, namely by tracking the rise of musical knowledge that relies on the selective and juxtapositional achievements of print periodicals and printed music for its emergence. Though the piano comes to prominence in the nineteenth-century middle-class parlor and becomes a cultural fad like no other, Daub compellingly argues that the prominence of the piano depended as much on a larger print discourse about musical figures and their canonization as on the actual scene of performance. In contrast to the model of the music connoisseur (Musikkenner) of the eighteenth century, who was thought to access the music via the expression of authentic emotion in and through the keyboard (think here of C.P.E. Bach’s expressive“free fantasias”), the knowledgeable “friend of music” of the nineteenth century is able to order and historically situate the works of great composers via familiarity with the landscape of printed music and music criticism. Daub thus tells a narrative of romanticization, historicization, and canonization, but also a story about how historical discourse about music arises at the intermedial meeting point of piano and print publication. Evoking a common theme of this volume, Daub reminds us that attention to sites of performance likewise requires us to consider the multi- or intermedial features of the stage, the lecture hall, and the printed page.

3.3 Public and popular knowledge Shifting conceptions of audiences or publics went hand-in-hand with the medial constellations and forms of performance emergent in the period from 1750 to

18

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

1850. Multiple essays in this volume show how scenes and concepts of performance aimed to reach new audiences, develop novel models of spectatorship, and promote new modes of medial consumption, a point that Daub’s essay makes in detail. Here the pedagogical ideal of being both “edifying and entertaining” corresponded to the growing self-consciousness of educated classes that defined themselves through specific cultural and aesthetic practices. Relatedly, this was also a time when scientists, scholars, and artists of the time found themselves straddling goals of disseminating “popular” knowledge for lay audiences and engaging in more disciplinary-specific modes of inquiry, as fields such as botany, anthropology, chemistry, historical philology, and philosophy began understanding themselves as semi-autonomous disciplines. Several contributors to this volume explore the role of the performance situation in spreading scholarly knowledge to general audiences, in “disciplining” new scholarly personalities, and in reflecting more generally on the status and function of “publics” as the proper spectators for performed actions. Edgar Landgraf’s essay “Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist” does the latter, suggesting that the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concept and semantics of the “public” and the “public sphere” rely inherently on a notion of the public as the audience of a performance. In particular, Landgraf argues that Kleist’s works repeatedly put the public (as depicted in his novellas, essays, and plays) in the position of an audience to various forms of performed speech: “in Kleist, it seems, whenever a speaker speaks, she is performing.” Landgraf offers an extended reading of representations of the public in Michael Kohlhaas and this text’s central question as to whether a political action can represent the interests of the public. As Landgraf shows, Kleist repeatedly puts the audience in the curious position of a passive observer who, without providing any substantive input, nevertheless comes to play an important role in defining the contentious actions in front of him/her. By playing competing accounts of the emergence of eighteenth-century public institutions (Habermas, Luhmann, Agamben) off of one another, Landgraf reconsiders the range of interpretations of Kleist’s politics, which situates Kleist across the entire political spectrum, from revolutionary liberal to proto-fascist conservative. Rather than understanding Kleist’s calibration of the public and the political as a normative position to be rejected or embraced, Landgraf suggests that Kleist’s representations of the public are of analytic value, for they explore political challenges that are indicative of comprehensive social changes. Landgraf thus offers something of a Luhmannian reading of idea of the modern notion of the “public” at time of its emergence: the public serves as an environment for the political and legal institutions of its time, in which (intentionally or not), actors

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

19

or performers attribute expectations and opinions to it in pursuit of particular political interests and agendas. The notion of the public as spectator leads us directly to models of vision and the imagination, a topic that several essays in the volume, including Tkaczyk’s and von Arburg’s, explore in their studies of new modes of popular presentation and performance. In his essay “Staging the Knowledge of Plants: Goethe’s Elegy ‘The Metamorphosis of Plants,’” Michael Bies likewise focuses on the realm of vision via the all-important concept of poetic rendition or visualization (Darstellung) in his account of Goethe’s attempts to disseminate his botanical research. Along with writing an influential scholarly treatise on the topic, Goethe also attempted to popularize his botanical research through verse; Bies argues that Goethe’s elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants” implements this research in a performative manner. Bies situates the elegy in relation to the rise of popular forms of knowledge about plants since 1770 – a primarily literary development aiming at non-professional, mixed-gender audiences – and he connects Goethe’s poem with poetological discussions of the concept of Darstellung likewise in emergence around 1770. As Bies argues, Goethe uses the poetic mode to stage the visualization of an understanding of plant metamorphosis instead of simply explaining it in abstract scientific terms. Similarly to von Arburg’s argument about Schinkel, Bies shows how Goethe brings together an Idealist philosophical and aesthetic framework with experiments in popular presentation and discourse, and how, in the process, Goethe implements a vision of the interpersonal constellation that arises through the transmission of knowledge. Chad Wellmon’s essay “Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity” likewise intervenes at the fault line of scientific and popular presentation, asking as to the status of Kant’s longstanding lecture series on pragmatic anthropology and their status as both “systematic” and “popular.” Wellmon situates the discourse of anthropology against the backdrop of the pervasive eighteenth-century perception that knowledge was being organized into narrower and thus more manageable spheres or fields, but that this process threatened the Enlightenment imperative to make knowledge more useful and accessible. Anthropology is especially interesting in this regard because it was commonly understood to encompass all forms of inquiry into the human and did not yet refer to an autonomous discipline. Wellmon takes a closer look at Kant’s desire that his anthropology become a “proper academic discipline,” showing how Kant’s notion of discipline brings together an idea of behavior modification with an idea of a scholarly field of study. Here, Wellmon reads Kant’s anthropology not as a static, timeless category of knowledge, but rather “a contingent and dynamic staging of knowledge,” “an activity or process whose effectiveness depended on its repetition,” and thus as “a form of behav-

20

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

ioral modification that constantly rearticulated the limits of the possible.” The need for repeating this discourse on anthropology (Kant gave lecture series on the topic over twenty times throughout his career) and its ethical status as behavior modification likewise pertains to Kant’s hope that this material be “popular,” i. e., that it will reach audiences beyond the confines of the university classroom. It is part of the ethical reach of the discourse of anthropology that it straddles the classroom and the broader “world,” operating as both systematic science and knowledge in the service of the common ends and destiny (Bestimmung) of all people. This seemingly paradoxical element of Kant’s anthropology is what leads Wellmon to conclude that Kant’s anthropology is an ethical solution to the problem of the proliferation of knowledge, and thus a critique of modern disciplinarity before it had even emerged. Like Kant, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an accomplished and innovative lecturer who used the scene of the lecture to rethink the status and function of scholarly pedagogy. This aspect of Lichtenberg’s self-performance is the topic of Claire Baldwin’s essay entitled “Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics.” Baldwin argues that Lichtenberg’s practices as a professor of physics strongly shaped late eighteenth-century cultures of public and professional science, as anthropology, botany, chemistry, and physics were emerging as self-standing disciplines. Engaging with historians of eighteenthcentury “public science” as well as with contemporary theories of performance, Baldwin explores the social space and pedagogical situation of Lichtenberg’s lecturing, describing how Lichtenberg’s experimental demonstrations modelled the intellectual excitement of the study of nature. Baldwin focuses both on the embodied aspect of the lecture performance – its appeal to the senses and its construction of a notion of “embodied mind” – and to the status of the concept of “play” in Lichtenberg’s pedagogical self-understanding. As Baldwin shows, a positive concept of play and its epistemological value proves useful in considering questions of performance and the history of scientific practice in conjunction with each other. In Lichtenberg’s view, scientific pedagogy as “play” guides students to self-conscious methodological reflections that incorporate the recognition of the inseparable link between mind and body and that bring students to conceive of themselves as informed members of a scientific public.

3.4 Temporality and repetition The fact that Lichtenberg’s experimental physics presentations and Kant’s anthropology lectures were such a persistent feature on the lecture catalogues in Göttingen and Königsberg over so many years makes clear that, as a scene of

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

21

scholarly performance, the lecture is not simply characterized by its collective, communal setting, but also by its repetition and serialization across time. In contemporary theories of performativity, it has become widely accepted that embodied participation is one of the foundational characteristics of the performance situation, a conclusion that Fischer-Lichte and Lehmann have foregrounded with their theorizing of the embodied co-presence of spectator and performer, as well as Krämer with her notion of aisthesis as embodied aesthetic experience. Though these thinkers do also address the temporality of performance situations, there still remains fruitful work to be done on the importance of temporal components of the performance situation, including the status of performances as singular, ephemeral occasions as well as their potential for (perhaps even dependence on) repetition and reiteration. The essays in this volume by Sean Franzel and Mary Helen Dupree discuss how the performance situation helps to temporalize processes of understanding and knowledge production both in the academic lecture hall and on the stage. Sean Franzel’s essay “Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form” addresses issues of temporality and repetition in the lecture form as well as visions of the lecture as quasi-theatrical event, though, in contrast to Claire Baldwin, he takes as his topic lectures on the philosophy of history and culture rather than on natural science. Franzel suggests that a variety of scholars around 1800 emphasize the performance situation of the lecture and thereby construct emphatic notions of the present as a standpoint from which to view the past, present and future. Put differently, the lecture focalizes the time and place of articulation of philosophical discourse by encouraging listeners (and later readers) to view the past through the lens of the particular present moment in which the lecture takes place. Engaging with recent theories of performance that address the concept of presence and its temporal filiations, Franzel considers a variety of constructions of the present. This includes Karl Philipp Moritz’s 1790 antiquarian lectures on ancient Rome, which map the temporal unfolding of the lecture series onto the calendar year of ancient Rome; August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lectures on literary history, which were pioneering in organizing literary history around an idea of distinct national traditions during a time of crisis in German-speaking lands; and finally, Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, which also present a historical narrative that foregrounds the reflective work of the audience. In Franzel’s reading, the lecture emerges not just as a single, one-time ephemeral event, but as a performance situation that depends on repetition, and sequential, serialized presentations for its full effectivity: lectures are often meant to be given as part of a larger series and, in the university context, to be repeated multiple times, year-in, year-out.

22

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

Mary Helen Dupree’s essay, entitled “Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808) and the Performance of Literary Knowledge,” also engages issues of repetition and temporality at the intersection of literary history and performance history. The essay is concentrated on the performance of literary knowledge in the staged Schiller memorials (Schiller-Feiern) that were performed in the years following Schiller’s death in various locations, including Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Bad Lauchstädt, Dresden, and Vienna. In these memorial performances, declamation, tableaux vivants, and other types of performance were combined in innovative ways, in order to promote a specific image of Schiller and create a shared sense of mourning amongt the attendees and the performers. Moreover, repetition was a key element of such performances; not only were similar tropes, language, and theatrical gestures repeated across multiple stagings of SchillerFeiern, but the staged memorials themselves engaged the audience’s own memories of seeing and hearing Schiller’s works performed repeatedly in plays and declamatory concerts. These Schiller-Feiern were also conducted with a keen awareness of the local and temporal specificity of their respective audiences, and framed an image of Schiller’s literary immortality in the context of an asyet-unrealized German “nation.” Through analyses of Schiller memorials performed between 1805 and 1808, Dupree shows how knowledge about Schiller and the German literary canon was negotiated not only through print, but also through locally specific, experimentally innovative performances, which in turn reached a broader audience through print media. In repeated exchanges between performance and print culture, specific tropes and practices were established as normative for the memorialization of Schiller; some of these practices, such as the tradition of reading Schiller’s “The Song of the Bell” [“Das Lied von der Glocke”] aloud, have survived until the present day. By showing how the circulation of ideas in both performance and print depends on repetition over time, Franzel and Dupree’s essays highlight various temporal dimensions of the circulation of ideas (Ideenumlauf) imagined by Gosch. The deep affinity of the performance situation to temporal cycles of almost ritualized reiteration is apparent in many of the examples discussed in this volume, from Lichtenberg and Kant’s lectures to Seckendorff’s tableaux vivants and the phenomenon of the Schiller-Feier, which as a commemorative event was intended from the beginning to be repeated multiple times. Both in the experiment and in the staged memorial service for a beloved poet, patterns of memorialization create knowledge through repetition. Attention to a variety of temporal structures thus is crucial for this volume as we consider the period from 1750 to 1850 as one in which performance inscribes knowledge about literature, history, science, aesthetics, acoustics, rhetoric, and disciplinarity into the cultural memory of the German-speaking world. All of the essays in this volume exhib-

Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850

23

it in more and less explicit ways how our perception of this era is structured by knowledge that was produced in this era through repeated, reiterated, and remediated “performances.”

Works Cited Alter, Nora, and Lutz Koepenick, eds. Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2004. Anonymous. “Miscellen aus Cassel.” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 28, no. 6 (June 1813): 350 – 351. Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by James Opie Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bal, Mieke. “Performance and Performativity.” In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, 174 – 212. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Bender, John and David Wellbery. “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” In The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, edited by David Wellbery and John Bender, 3 – 39. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chaouli, Michel. The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Dick, Alexander, and Angela Esterhammer, eds. Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750 – 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Gebauer, Günter. Poetik des Fußballs. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2006. Gosch, Josias Ludwig. Fragmente über den Ideenumlauf. Edited by Georg Stanitzek and Hartmut Winkler. Berlin: Kadmos, 2006. Kolesch, Doris, and Sibylle Krämer, eds. Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006. Koschorke, Albrecht. Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 1999. Koselleck, Reinhart. “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung.” In Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner et al., 170 – 207. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Krämer, Sybille. “Was haben ‘Performativität’ und ‘Medialität’ miteinander zu tun? Plädoyer für eine in der ‘Aisthetisierung’ gründende Konzeption des Performativen.” In Performativität und Medialität, edited by Sybille Krämer, 13 – 32. Munich: Fink 2004.

24

Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel

Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Meyer, Petra Maria, ed. Acoustic Turn. Munich: Fink, 2008. Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Peters, Sibylle. Der Vortrag als Performance. Bielefeld: Transkript, 2011. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “Experiment, difference, and writing: I. Tracing protein synthesis.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23 A, no. 2 (1992): 305 – 331. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century. Vol. 1 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. Stanitzek, Georg, and Hartmut Winkler. “Eine Medientheorie der Aufklärung.” Foreword to Josia Ludwig Gosch, Fragmente über den Ideenumlauf, 7 – 34. Berlin: Kadmos, 2006. Vogl, Joseph. “Für eine Poetologie des Wissens.” In Die Literatur und die Wissenschaften 1770 – 1930, edited by Karl Richter, Jörg Schönert, and Michael Titzmann, 107 – 130. Stuttgart: M & P Verlag, 1997. Vogl, Joseph. “Poetologie des Wissens.” In Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft, edited by Harun Maye and Leander Scholz, 49 – 72. Munich: Fink and UTB, 2011. Wirth, Uwe, ed. Performanz, Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002.

Part One: Sounds and Stages

Viktoria Tkaczyk

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words The German physicist and musician Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756 – 1827) is widely held to be the inventor of experimental acoustics. Numerous scientists before him had explored acoustic phenomena; see, for instance, the work of Joseph Sauveur, a renowned mathematician at the Académie des Sciences in Paris, who, in 1701, advocated establishing a systematic science of sound under the title “acoustics.”¹ But it was Chladni who published the first textbook of acoustics in 1802, aggregating the insights circulating in the fields of music, physics (of sound), and (hearing) physiology and arranging them in a new order. Moreover, Chladni gave experimental proof that sound travels not only in gases and liquids, but also in solid bodies (wood, glass, metal, etc.). Acoustics, then, could no longer be subsumed under the “science of air” and came to be recognized as a branch of physics in its own right.² But the real question is whether it was Chladni’s accomplishments of scientific synthesis and research alone that, around 1800, allowed experimental acoustics to rise to the status of an academic discipline. Why does a new science emerge at a specific time and in a specific place? How does an actor become the founding figure of a science? Which scientific discourses, which inventions in the realm of media, and which material circumstances are responsible for this emergence?

 Sauveur speaks of the “superior science of music, which I have called acoustics, which has as its object sound in general, whereas music has as its object sound insofar as it is agreeable to the ear” [science supérieure à la musique, que j’ai appelé acoustique, qui a pour objet le son en général, au lieu que la musique a pour objet le son en tant qu’il est agréable à l’ouïe].” Joseph Sauveur, “Système géneral des Intervalles des Sons, & son Application à tous les Systèmes & à tous les instrumens de Musique,” in Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris: Gabriel Martin, Jean-Baptiste Coignard & Hippolyte-Louis Guérin, 1701 [2nd edition, 1743]), 299. On the early history of acoustics, see Dayton Clarence Miller, Anecdotal History of the Science of Sound: To the Beginning of the 20th Century (New York: Macmillan, 1935); Robert Bruce Lindsay, “The Story of Acoustics,” in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 23, no. 4 (1966); Frederick Vinton Hunt, Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Robert Thomas Beyer, Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics (New York: Springer, 1999).  On Chladni’s contribution to the history of acoustics, see also Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 13 – 44; Dieter Ullmann, Chladni und die Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750 – 1850 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996).

28

Viktoria Tkaczyk

Studies in the histories of knowledge and science have repeatedly asked these and related questions, and offered a variety of answers. The performative processes that become operative in the production of knowledge, by contrast, continue to draw little attention. In the following, I will accordingly offer a brief discussion of various theories of the performative and their relevance to the histories of knowledge and science.³ I will then move on to an analysis of a lecture Ernst F. F. Chladni delivered in Paris in 1808, and conclude by sketching the challenges and questions a historiography of science inspired by theories of performativity continues to face.

1.1 Towards a history of performative utterances in science Theories of the performative allow us to examine processes in the histories of knowledge and science that other approaches, such as discourse analysis or laboratory studies, consider in passing but do not subject to explicit analysis. Discourse analysis in the Foucauldian sense is conceived as an archaeology of the exemplary instance. Any action or utterance (énoncé) is regarded as exemplary of a discursive regime, and so said to be capable of representing and informing the discourse – but not of effecting a paradigm shift, as postulated by Thomas Kuhn in his theory of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). In other words, Kuhn locates the paradigm shift on the epistemic level (in the form of factual propositions), whereas Michel Foucault places it on the level of the discursive regime as a whole.⁴  This essay is a revised version of Tkaczyk, “Performativität und Wissen(schaft)sgeschichte,” in Theorien des Performativen: Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Klaus W. Hempfer (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011). I especially thank Karine Chemla, Agathe Keller, and Koen Vermeir for giving me the opportunity to revisit my ideas about performativity in the Seminar “Histoire des Sciences/Histoire du Textes” at the Laboratoire SPHERE (Paris) in 2011. The concept of the “performance of knowledge” was coined by the research project “Theatrum Scientiarum” (at the Free University of Berlin), which is dedicated to the comparative historical study of cultures of knowledge in the early modern era and the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, and I especially thank the director of this project Helmar Schramm and my colleagues Jan Lazardzig and Michael Lorber for fruitful discussions on theories of the performative. For a more detailed discussion of recent studies on the performance of knowledge, see the introduction to this volume.  On Foucault’s displacement of the Kuhnian concept of the paradigm from epistemology (or more precisely, from a model of scientific revolution largely framed in the terms of the history of ideas) into politics (i. e., into a historical model of discursive continuities and disruptions), see Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone, 2009), 9 – 32.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

29

Theories of the performative allow us to reconcile these two positions in a model that does not locate all articulations of knowledge on the level of the exemplary, as is the practice of discourse analysis, but also does not attribute revolutionary power in the Kuhnian sense to individual propositions. Instead, it shifts our attention to selected units of action and their efficacy within a clearly defined discursive field.⁵ In other words, it places the focus on those actions that contribute to the production or transformation of knowledge content as such, to the very establishment of scientific disciplines or cultures of knowledge. This also means that this approach presupposes a broadly inclusive concept of knowledge that encompasses scientific insights as well as explicit and implicit familiarity and skills.⁶

1.2 The performative and the scenario When John Langshaw Austin delivered his high-profile William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1955, he introduced a neologism: the “performative utterance.” Austin pointed out that it was not the sole purpose of the linguistic utterance to “‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact,’ which it must do either truly or falsely.”⁷ There were also utterances, he argued, that create the facts in the first place to which they refer (self-reference). In such cases, “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action.”⁸ One of Austin’s favorite examples of such “performative utterances” is “I do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife).”⁹ In the context of a wedding ceremony, this utterance does not merely describe a state of affairs; rather, the state of affairs is produced in the first place by the action of uttering it. The success of such “performatives” accordingly also depends on their particular context, on the specific

 On the relationship between discourse analysis and performance analysis, see also Robert Felfe and Ludger Schwarte, “‘Performative Prozesse’ und ‘epistemische Konfigurationen,’” in “Praktiken des Performativen,” ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Christoph Wulf, special issue, Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 1 (2004), 100 – 111.  For a reflection on Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between two types of knowledge – “knowing that” (cognition) and “knowing how” (familiarity) – in the perspective of a theory of performance, see Klaus W. Hempfer and Anita Traninger, eds., Dynamiken des Wissens (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2007).  John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. James Opie Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1.  Austin, 5.  Austin, 5.

30

Viktoria Tkaczyk

speech situation (in this instance, an official marriage ceremony). According to Austin, the utterances he calls “explicit performatives” form a small group, but virtually all speech acts (illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary speech acts) can in principle function as “primary performatives.”¹⁰ Austin, a philosopher, thus charted a different theoretical path than the linguist Noam Chomsky. In keeping with the Saussurian opposition of langue (the language system that enables a speaker to use this language) and parole (the concrete language use), Chomsky later distinguished between “competence” and “performance,” classifying any concrete linguistic utterance as a “performance.”¹¹ By contrast, Austin and, subsequently, his student John Searle situated their theory of the speech act not on the level of parole but, primarily, on that of langue. They were interested in defining a very special type of speech act they labeled “performatives,” and only in a second step did they, too, admit that these “performatives” ultimately become effective only in their concrete employment or performance (in the simultaneity of the utterance and an action grounded in it).¹² Austin focused exclusively on speech acts; Judith Butler, however, attributes a similar constitutive character also to other symbolic acts (gestures, bodily practices, or rituals). When such symbolic acts are repeated several times, Butler argues, they become sources of identity. Rehearsing new symbolic acts, moreover, facilitates the constitution of new identities – as Butler demonstrated with a particular view to gender identities.¹³ What is interesting about Butler’s theory for our context is that the meanings of the terms “performative” (in the linguistic sense of: constitutive of reality) and “performance” (in the sense of a ritual action) blend, once again, into each other.¹⁴

 Austin, 149.  Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); see also Klaus W. Hempfer, “Performance, Performanz, Performativität. Einige Unterscheidungen zur Ausdifferenzierung eines Theoriefeldes,” in Theorien des Performativen: Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Klaus W. Hempfer and Jörg Volbers (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), especially 14– 18.  See also Searle’s observation that, “though every utterance is indeed a performance, only a very restricted class are performatives,” John Searle “How Performatives Work,” Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989): 535 – 558. See also Hempfer, “Performance, Performanz, Performativität,” 23.  See most importantly Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).  Butler, Bodies, 169. Bodies That Matter is the first book in which Butler draws on Austin’s speech act theory and Derrida’s theory of the iterative (on Derrida, see below). In her earlier contributions to the field, she had relied on the concepts of “social drama” and “performance” developed in the theory of ritual (Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, et al.).

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

31

The discipline of performance studies responded to this challenge by revising its concept of “performance,” which had been derived from theories of ritual and theater studies.¹⁵ The observation, then, that any “cultural performance,” and theatrical performance in particular, is performative is far from tautological – what this now means is that such performances are potentially constitutive of reality in the Butlerian or Austinian sense of the performative. It is also in light of this consideration that Erika Fischer-Lichte emphasizes the contribution linguistic and extralinguistic utterances during a theater performance make to the constitution of the planes of both the (fictional) action and the real experience. Such involvement, moreover, is not the exclusive privilege of the stage action; spectatorship, she writes, must likewise be seen as a form of “co-action” and the “co-constitution” of spaces of experience. In fact, she argues, this co-presence or co-performance of actors and spectators is the fundamental characteristic of theatrical performances.¹⁶ The theories of the performative I have sketched allow us to consider the histories of knowledge and science as an ensemble of cultural performances, each of them facilitating individual utterances (be they of verbal or physical nature) that make a particularly strong contribution to the constitution of scientific reality or knowledge (i. e., evince an eminently performative character). The term

 The concept of the “cultural performance” was coined in the 1970s and adopted by sociology and the theory of ritual (Milton Singer, Victor Turner, et al.), where it drew the interest of scholars in American performance studies (Richard Schechner et al.), who sought to extend the purview of classical theater studies to include everyday and festive situations that evince ritual qualities. In this regard, American performance studies show a certain theoretical kinship with early theatricality research: the concept of theatricality coined by the Russian theater theorist Nikolai Evreinov had been applied by extension to selected cultural phenomena as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. When the discussion of theatricality resumed in the 1980s in the German-speaking world (Rudolf Münz, Joachim Fiebach, et al.), the aspiration was sometimes to use the concept of theatricality to expose social and historical processes. Today, the primary difference between theatricality and performativity studies concerns their different approaches to conceptual history. Theatricality is sometimes understood as a modern phenomenon (see, e. g., Christopher Balme, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Stephan Grätzel, eds., Theater als Paradigma der Moderne [Tübingen: Francke, 2003]), while other scholars also examine premodern discursive fields to see what was meant by “theater” in a given place and time and in which way the “theater” informed its cultural and epistemic context, see, e. g., Helmar Schramm, “Theatralität,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), 6: 48 – 73.  Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Grenzgänge und Tauschhandel: Auf dem Weg zu einer performativen Kultur,” in Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Uwe Wirth (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 277– 300, and Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), especially 40 – 41.

32

Viktoria Tkaczyk

“cultural performance” primarily refers to culturally well-established rituals, and so I will instead use the term “scenario” in order to describe a pre-arranged nexus of actions on the structural level that fit historically specific cultures of knowledge and stand out from other occurrences. The “scenario of knowledge” should thus be understood as the general structure of a possible moment in which knowledge could, in a certain time and place, be performed. The concept of the “scenario” also indicates the interdependency and interaction between acts of speaking and hearing, writing and reading, presenting and spectating/listening in each particular situation.¹⁷ The question of the audience’s involvement (or co-performance) becomes crucial especially when the analysis of scientific communities inquires into the ways in which insights are transformed into scientific facts in a field, how knowledge is passed on and comes to define a style of thinking and representing, how actors are inducted into the community and legitimized as experts, or how institutions, disciplines, and research fields are established.

1.3 The historicity of the performative Austin already emphasized on several occasions that the degree of performativity (“primary performatives,” “explicit performatives”) depends not only on the type of an utterance, but also on the context in which it is made.¹⁸ One important prerequisite and/or effect of the performative, then, is its indexicality.¹⁹ In studies in the histories of knowledge and science, too, the question concerning the  On the performative power of scenarios, see also Andreas Wolfsteiner and Markus Rautzenberg, “Trial-and-Error-Szenarien. Zum Umgang mit Zukünften,” in Trial and Error. Szenarien medialen Handelns, ed. Andreas Wolfsteiner and Markus Rautzenberg (Munich: Fink, 2014), 7– 29.  See also Manfred Pfister, “Appendix: Skalierung von Performativität,” in “Theorien des Performativen,” Fischer-Lichte and Wulf, 302; in the same issue, see also Sybille Krämer and Marco Stahlhut, “Das ‘Performative’ als Thema der Sprach- und Kulturphilosophie,” especially 55 – 56.  I base my argument on Yehoshua Bar-Hillel’s suggestion that we should expand the linguistic concept of indexicality to include not only “indexical expressions,” but also “indexical discourses.” See also Klaus W. Hempfer, Bernd Häsner, and Irina Rajewsky, “Indexikalität, Performativität und Stil im Diskurs der Wissenschaften,” in “Praktiken des Performativen,” ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Christoph Wulf, special issue, Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 1 (2004). In the same issue, see also Martin Baisch, Roger Friedlein, and Angelika Lozar, “Historizität und Performativität von Wissen und Wissenschaften in der Frühen Neuzeit,” and Häsner, “Indexikalität und Indexikalisierung: Überlegungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Relevanz eines sprachwissenschaftlichen Konzepts,” in Im Zeichen der Fiktion: Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht, ed. Irina Rajewsky and Ulrike Schneider (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 2008).

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

33

conditions that make the performative possible and allow it to succeed brings us to the historicity of any articulation of knowledge, i. e., to its involvement in the concrete historical context to whose constitution, modification, or destruction it contributed. Our analysis thus inevitably operates on the level of microhistory; it examines “cultures of knowledge” in the narrower sense defined by the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina: “practices, mechanisms, and principles that, bound by kinship, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine in a domain of knowledge how we know what we know.”²⁰ The concept of the culture of knowledge raises a familiar question afresh: to what extent can we understand culture in its entirety as a praxis? Or must we attribute performative potential also to the material component of a culture, which exists side by side with the nexuses of human action? The latter view has been insistently expressed by representatives of laboratory studies; as early as the 1990s, the historian of science Andrew Pickering, responding to the rise of actor-network theory (Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law, et al.) identified the “performance” as an interface between human and material actants. The concepts of the performance and the performative, however, are fairly undefined in Pickering’s use.²¹ Instead, he frames a general theory of the structure of real-time scientific practice by focusing on how “human and material agency are constitutively enmeshed in practice by means of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation.”²²

 Karin Knorr Cetina, Wissenskulturen: Ein Vergleich naturwissenschaftlicher Wissensformen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 11. Knorr Cetina’s concept of the “fabrication of knowledge” bears considerable resemblance to the concept of the performative relevant to the analysis of performance in the history of knowledge; see Knorr Cetina, Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Zur Anthropologie der Naturwissenschaften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991).  Latour uses the concept of “performance” only in the Chomskyan sense, to describe a mode of action that is (ultimately still) based on competencies tied to a subject; see Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 89. Pickering sees this choice as an occasion to distinguish his own views from actor-network theory by pointing to his interest in the “performative idiom,” but in defining that idiom, he does not explicitly draw on theories of the performative – except for a reference to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s concept of “doing without meaning”; Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7.  Pickering, “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (1993): 559 – 589, here 562. Pickering’s later concept of the “dance of agency,” which is explicitly meant to counter an overly rigid focus on the actor, no longer has any basis in the theory of performance at all. Pickering instead identifies it as an “ontology of becoming”; see Pickering, “New Ontologies,” in The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, ed. Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1– 14.

34

Viktoria Tkaczyk

Yet it may also be fruitful to consider the performative potential of individual human actions and material objects in isolation: to what extent do visual media and media of writing contribute, each in their own specific way, to the production and transmission of knowledge – can we speak of “image acts” or “writing acts” of knowledge?²³ How do architectural circumstances (of cabinets of curiosities, libraries, lecture halls, observatories, or laboratories) influence the order and distribution of knowledge?²⁴ Can instruments or machines involved in research processes develop a “life of their own” that substantially affects the outcomes?²⁵ From this perspective, we may also discern epistemic fault lines and barriers on the level of representation and handling – for example, when an insight can be visualized but not verbalized, or when a knowledge transfer between different cultures of knowledge entails modifications on the level of

 On the performativity of strategies of visualization, see Robert Felfe, “Sehen am Faden der Linie. Spiele des Bildermachens bei Abraham Bosse,” in Spektakuläre Experimente: Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludgar Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 78 – 113; and Felfe, “Die Erziehung des Auges. Wissen und visuelle Praxis (Einführung Sektion X),” in Kulturen des Wissens im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 451– 454. For a theory of the image act, see Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts: Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010). On the materiality and performativity of written sources, see Timothy Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Bernd Häsner, Henning S. Hufnagel, Irmgard Maassen, and Anita Traninger, “Text und Performativität,” in Hempfer and Volbers, Theorien des Performativen, 11– 41.  On the performativity of architecture, see Robert Felfe and Kirsten Wagner, eds., Museum, Bibliothek, Stadtraum: Räumliche Wissensordnungen 1600 – 1900 (Berlin: Lit, 2010); Jan Lazardzig and Kirsten Wagner, “Raumwahrnehmung und Wissensproduktion: Erkundungen im Interferenzbereich von Theorie und Praxis,” in Möglichkeitsräume: Zur Performativität von sensorischer Wahrnehmung, ed. Christina Lechtermann, Kirsten Wagner, and Horst Wenzel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2007).  On the life of their own that technical components develop in experimental systems as described by the modern life sciences, see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, and Writing: I. Tracing Protein Synthesis,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23 A, no. 2 (1992), 309 – 310; Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 24. The concept of this “life of its own” of an object goes back to Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On the performativity of instruments and machines, see also Schramm, Schwarte, and Lazardzig, eds., Collection, Laboratory, Theater; Schramm, Schwarte, and Lazardzig, eds., Spektakuläre Experimente: Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006). Schramm, Schwarte, and Lazardzig, eds., Spuren der Avantgarde: Theatrum machinarum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008). Schramm, Schwarte, and Lazardzig, eds., Instruments in Art and Science, vol. 2 of Theatrum Scientiarum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008); see also Lazardzig, Theatermaschine und Festungsbau (Berlin: Akademie, 2007).

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

35

representation. The concept of material culture, then, need not be understood solely as describing a discursive unit: it may also designate an ensemble of tensions generated by intermedial and inter-material forces within a discourse.

1.4 The cultural memory of knowledge Processes of the constitution of knowledge are bound up not only with human and material actants, but also with “immaterial culture,” i. e., with the cultural memory of knowledge and modes of imagination of the past. To get a theoretical handle on this nexus, we cannot rely solely on Austin’s observation that the success of performative acts depends on their institutional or social circumstances. A much more crucial question concerns the different traces of historic knowledge that become “visible” in the singular act of knowledge production. Austin neglected this question concerning the performance of cultural memory; Jacques Derrida insistently raised it. Austin’s theory of the speech act, Derrida charges, limits the question of the constitution of reality to an irreducible presentness, or more specifically, to the co-presence of speaker and listener: The conscious presence of speakers or receivers participating in the accomplishment of a performative, their conscious and intentional presence in the totality of the operation, implies teleologically that no residue [reste] escapes the present totalization. No residue, either in the definition of the requisite conventions, or in the internal and linguistic context, or in the grammatical form, or in the semantic determination of the words employed; no irreducible polysemy, that is, no “dissemination” escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning.²⁶

This observation leads Derrida to introduce iterability and citationality as further criteria of the performative. Since these are the two qualities Derrida attributes fundamentally to any speech act, it necessarily follows that he regards every speech act as performative as well – something that, to a certain degree, Austin also observes. But in contrast to Austin, the performative in Derrida’s work serves a double function. On the one hand, it constitutes a present; on the other hand, it contributes to the dissemination of that present because, Derrida argues, any speech act also lets traces of the non-present articulate themselves – traces that suggest that a speech act, as a component of a linguistic system, may in other spaces and at other times generate a variety of other presentnesses. Conceived

 See Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” [1971] in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 14.

36

Viktoria Tkaczyk

in these terms, the performative thus reveals the speech act to be a dynamic force of producing presence and referring to the absent. Derrida’s philosophy of language has already been a source of inspiration to a variety of approaches in the history of science, including Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s theory of experimental systems, to which we will return below. Of more immediate concern to these present reflections is the work of the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who sought to limn the concrete historical contours of the Derridean concept of the “trace,” developing a theory of collective literary memory. Greenblatt replaces Derrida’s notion of the abstract non-presentness of the sign with the much more concrete presence/absence of the process of a literary text’s genesis. This process, he argues, though it is in the past, has left “traces” in the text: as we read the latter, we usually intuit not just a single historical meaning but the trace of an entire spectrum of possible present and absent meanings. Individual literary motifs, figures, and metaphors, Greenblatt writes, are frequently vehicles of a “social energy” that in turn gestures back to a historical multiplicity of meanings and to concrete cultural negotiations between different cultures of knowledge (such as the religious, political, and economic cultures of knowledge that intersected at the time of a text’s genesis).²⁷ Greenblatt’s concept of “social energy,” then, may be translated back into a theory of the performative, which would have to be read as a momentum of historic sources charged with the “energetic” traces of historic circulations, appropriations, and the shifting meanings of vehicles of signification. To sum up what has been said so far, we should note, first, that a historiography of knowledge inspired by theories of the performative takes an interest in concrete historical moments of the utterance of knowledge. It assumes that such moments are embedded in a “culture of knowledge,” i. e., a complex interplay of human, material, and immaterial actants in a specific time and location. This culture of knowledge facilitates certain “scenarios of knowledge,” i. e., well-defined structures, rules and practices of knowledge production that are supposed to be successful within single disciplines or smaller units of research or teaching. The performance of knowledge could succeed only within this historical scenario – and its success meant turning the scenario into an event, effecting a lasting modification of the historical context (by implementing, refuting or destroying knowledge). In this connection, we must consider not only the particular historical scenario and the appropriate culture of knowledge, but also the cultural

 Stephen Greenblatt, “The Circulation of Social Energy,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1– 20.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

37

memory of a variegated knowledge of the past that an articulation was able to recall at the time or is capable of recalling even now.

2 The expert’s performance Napoléon-Le-Grand has deigned to accept the dedication of this work after having witnessed the fundamental experiments.²⁸

This dedication awaits the reader opening the first page of Ernst F. F. Chladni’s Traité d’acoustique (Treatise on Acoustics, 1809). It guides the reader’s attention to a performance that came about as follows: Chladni, a doctor of law from Wittenberg, lived as a private scholar conducting research in the natural sciences. To support himself, he gave presentations of his knowledge enlivened by spectacular experiments before academic as well as non-academic audiences throughout Europe. In 1808, Chladni’s travels brought him to Paris, where he intended to advertise the textbook Die Akustik (the German original of the Treatise on Acoustics, 1802). For this purpose, he asked the Institut de France to assemble a mixed committee of experts, including natural scientists and musicians. His unusual request was complied with, and the committee received his presentation with great enthusiasm and asked him to translate his book into French.²⁹ To secure the necessary funding support, he was recommended to the Emperor. According to Chladni’s own highly detailed report, the audience took place in the small apartments (petits appartements) of the Tuileries on 7 February 1809, between 7 and 9 p.m. On this occasion, the story goes – and note the allusion to the incident in the dedication quoted above – Napoleon promptly declared Chladni’s innovative research a matter of personal concern and thus made the scientific breakthrough of experimental acoustics possible.³⁰ For Chladni to be able to establish a new discipline by means of a lecture, the lecture as such had to be a legitimate medium for the production, distribution, and consolidation of knowledge at the time. Yet as I will show in the follow-

 “Napoléon-Le-Grand / A daigné Agréer / la dédicace de cet ouvrage / après en avoir vu / les expériences fondamentales.” Ernst F. F. Chladni, Traité d’acoustique (Paris: Courcier, 1809).  See the reports by the representatives of both classes in the Mémoires de la classe des sciences mathématiques et physiques de l’Institut de France.  Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” Caecilia 5 (1826): 137– 144.

38

Viktoria Tkaczyk

ing, Chladni’s “lecture scenario” involved a number of further potentially performative components, namely: (1) the (oral) presentation of knowledge in person, (2) the materials and media of presentation, (3) the validation conferred by the audience, and (4) the retelling of the lecture in written reports. The term “lecture scenario” is meant to capture the fact that Chladni, though drawing on historically specific cultures of lecture performance for his lectures, designed his own presentations in an individual and very systematic fashion and continually tweaked the details over the course of four decades as a traveling lecturer. The hypothesis I want to test is that the components I have mentioned generated an internal dynamic within Chladni’s presentations and helped him succeed in establishing acoustics as a scientific discipline. If that is so, what role in the process of knowledge production should we ascribe to Chladni himself?

2.1 Presenting knowledge in person Over the past several decades, historians of science have variously pointed out that researchers are not neutral producers of knowledge; they have personalities and bodies that lend a particular weight to their knowledge.³¹ If we consider Chladni in this perspective, it is striking how deliberately he employed strategies of the indexicalization and de-indexicalization of his own person to ensure that he would always appear in the proper light. In his New Contributions to Acoustics [Neue Beyträge zur Akustik, 1817], for example, Chladni claims that he rarely ever spoke about his private affairs during his travels, instead discussing at length his professional acquaintances, such as his encounters with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.³² The researcher, that is to say, made careful strategic choices as to the context in which he set his person. But the manner in which Chladni presented himself on the scientific stage did not at all conform to the type of the polite and modest scholar familiar to the eighteenth century. “I felt,” Chladni notes in his report of the audience Napoleon granted him, “not the slightest trace of timidity […]. The emperor seemed to be pleased by my ingenuousness.”³³

 See Robert Matthias Erdbeer and Christina Wessely, “Kosmische Resonanzen. Theorie und Körper in der Esoterischen Moderne,” in Resonanz: Potentiale einer akustischen Figur, ed. Karsten Lichau, Viktoria Tkaczyk, and Rebecca Wolf (Munich: Fink, 2009), especially 165.  Chladni, “Vorrede, zur Fortsetzung der Geschichte meiner akustischen Entdeckungen,” in Neue Beyträge zur Akustik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1817), xii.  Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” 139.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

39

This remark not only illustrates Chladni’s virtuous and self-confident appearance. It shows that the type of the timid and dispassionate scholar, too, was present at Chladni’s presentation through the awareness and trace of his absence. That is all the more interesting if we consider that, by the early nineteenth century, the art of delivering spectacular discourses was already a holdover from a distant past. In order to understand this shift, we must go back to the European experimental sciences of the seventeenth century, when the entertaining presentation was still associated with a new type of pragmatic scholar who would oust the learned man of the scholastic tradition, a figure generally regarded as pedantic and unworldly. Many experimental scientists at the time took their cues from the mechanical arts (artes mechanicae) (i. e., virtuoso craftsmanship) and artistic performances (traveling artistes, theatrical actors).³⁴ Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the lecture enlivened by curious experiments began to draw accusations of charlatanism. The establishment of the experimental sciences as academic disciplines (i. e., the creation of professorships and positions for librarians, curators, etc.) meant that even most scholars who came from less than wealthy backgrounds no longer depended on the constant marketing of their knowledge. In this period, the lecture appealing to larger audiences also came in for criticism in the classical disciplines (such as jurisprudence), where it was described as “mountebankery.”³⁵ Audiences demanded a more restrained scholarly habitus to match the requirements of an objective style of specialist lecture.³⁶ The result was the emergence, by the mid-eighteenth century, of a new type of scholar, the dispassionate researcher – yet Chladni precisely failed to embody this type, uniting (or reviving) in his person the mountebank lawyer and the impassioned experimental scientist. Chladni staked out his own position between experimental physics and the virtuoso culture of musicians and instrument makers; note the composition of the

 This development was in turn rooted in the entry of members of the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie into the university system and their call for a pragmatic science that would emphasize application to social, political, and economic realities; see Steven Shapin, “A Scholar and a Gentleman: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England,” History of Science 26 (1991), especially 293 – 295.  Viktoria Tkaczyk, “Der Marktschrei und sein Echo,” in Spuren der Avantgarde: Theatrum oeconomicum, ed. Helmar Schramm, Jan Lazardzig, and Viktoria Tkaczyk, vol. 7 of Theatrum Scientiarum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015 [forthcoming]).  On the history of the art of the scientific lecture, see also Charles Taylor, The Art and Science of Lecture Demonstration (Philadelphia: Hilger, 1988); Françoise Waquet, Parler comme un livre: L’oralité et le savoir XVIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003); William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Sibylle Peters, Der Vortrag als Performance (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).

40

Viktoria Tkaczyk

committee the Institut de France assembled for him in 1808, which featured experts from the two classes of “physics and mathematics” and “literature and the fine arts.” Chladni also found a place for himself between the worlds of scholarly learning and popular science, lecturing before bourgeois public audiences interested in the arts and sciences as well as academic circles and transplanting elements from each culture of knowledge into the other (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Chladni giving a public lecture. Pencil drawing. Deutsches Museum, Munich.

With his extensive lecture tours, Chladni quite literally crossed the boundaries that separated the distinctive national traditions in some disciplines, such as the divide between the French- and German-speaking versions of physics.³⁷ He was very conscious of the mediator’s role that thus accrued to him and the ways he benefited from it; as he emphasized, the French language prompted  In Chladni’s time, the divergence is especially evident between the speculative philosophy of nature of the Germans and the exact (physical-mathematical) natural science of the French, which was already well established in the academic institutions; see Andreas Kleinert, “Wechselbeziehungen zwischen deutschen und französischen Naturwissenschaften im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIII et XIXe siècle), ed. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988), 371– 380.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

41

him to not merely translate but “revise” his textbook,³⁸ rethinking his experiments and theoretical convictions and putting them in more precise terms, adding new elements and removing others that proved inexpedient. For instance, he wrote, there was only one French word for “sound,” son, to translate the three German terms Schall, Klang, and Ton, compelling him to offer a clearer explanation in the French version of the distinction he had made between these three in the original Acoustics (1802).³⁹ Processes of transfer between different nations, between unequal scientific disciplines, between academic and non-academic audiences, between diachronic styles of lecturing, and between instrument making, music, and science thus laid the foundation for the success of Chladni’s lectures. The traveling researcher embodied in his person the traces of what we may call negotiations over presentation practices between highly disparate cultures of knowledge. Chladni was thus always also a member of other cultures of knowledge and kept the cultural memory of already obsolete or non-standard arts of presentation and scientific personalities alive. We might even say that these other cultures of knowledge appeared in Chladni’s performances as traces of the non-present (to speak in Derridean terms). And it might have been these traces that fueled the exceptionally compelling effect, the high degree of performativity, in Chladni’s lectures.

2.2 Materials and media of presentation According to his autobiography of 1818, Chladni quickly realized that his audience was much less liable to be impressed by scientific competence than by the presentation of novel musical instruments and scientific experiments.⁴⁰ In an experiment that rose to particular prominence, Chladni covered a wooden board with a thin layer of sand and then excited it with a violin bow to create so-called “sound figures” (fig. 2). One is tempted to argue that these sound figures, even more than their inventor himself, became the “founding figures” of acoustics, as they not only impressed audiences with their beauty, but also visualized a crucial insight of the new discipline: the vibration potential and natural oscillation of solid bodies. Two musical instruments that are virtually forgotten today, the euphon and the clavicylinder, were likewise among the inventions Chladni frequently displayed.  Chladni, “Vorrede,” vii.  Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Die Akustik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1802).  This autobiography was published as an obituary: Chladni, “Chladnis Selbstbiographie,” (Nekrolog) Caecilia 6 (1827), here especially 304.

42

Viktoria Tkaczyk

Fig. 2: Vibrating plates, in, Ernst F. F. Chladni, Die Akustik (Acoustics), Leipzig, 1802.

Their function is based on the difference between the transverse and longitudinal waves that appear in different materials.⁴¹ Chladni himself reports that his work

 See the description of the instruments in Ullmann, Chladni und die Entwicklung, 41– 45 and 83 – 86.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

43

as a traveling lecturer compelled him to continually reconfigure and refine his instruments, a process that time and again led him to new insights, and “the new results of these investigations obliged me to take up what I had written down about the various designs of such instruments so that nothing would be lost, as well as the associated drawings, and revise these documents once more.”⁴² We may at first glance read this as a clear indication that technical objects came to lead a “life of their own” within the ensemble of Chladni’s lecture series, prompting the emergence of new knowledge.⁴³ However, Chladni’s insights and inventions were already a few years old at the time and did not help him win renown as a scientist until later. Chladni accordingly ascribes only a minor role in making his presentations so successful to his instrumental inventions; much more important, he believes, is the manner of their presentation: It seems to me […] that playing and listening to the Clavicylinder more closely resembles a healthy nutritious meal one may enjoy often and in large quantities; whereas playing and listening to the Euphon more closely resembles a delicacy one must enjoy less frequently and in smaller amounts, for example, for dessert. Experience has taught me that such persons as possess knowledge of the art of music and a keen feeling for nobler harmonic compositions have generally preferred the Clavicylinder, while others, who do not possess such knowledge and feeling and judge everything by the momentary impression alone, have generally preferred the Euphon; and that, when both instruments are to be heard and the judgment or comparison is not to do injustice to either one of them, it is advisable to play several pieces first on the Clavicylinder and then on the Euphon, and not in the inverse order.⁴⁴

So Chladni did not allow his instruments to lead entirely independent lives. On the contrary, the traveling scholar made a close study of the economy of his audiences’ attention. Historians of science have demonstrated in a variety of examples how forms of scientific attention have changed over the course of history and came to be trained on widely different objects.⁴⁵ From the perspective of performativity studies, we may add that modes of scientific attention were quite often deliberately aroused and guided by using and staging objects in specific ways.

 Chladni, “Vorrede,” x.  On theories of the “life of their own” technical objects develop in research contexts, see above.  Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik und zur Lehre vom Instrumentenbau, enthaltend die Theorie und Anleitung zum Bau des Clavicylinders und damit verwandter Instrumente (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1821; repr., Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1980), 12.  See, e. g., Lorraine Daston, Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2001).

44

Viktoria Tkaczyk

For example, Chladni, also emphasizes in retrospect that he always refrained from revealing how the instruments worked and laying out the underlying physical knowledge in its entirety. This strategy, he writes, was what allowed him to heighten listeners’ curiosity. Even Napoleon, he recalls, turned to the physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace during the audience, asking him, “sotto voce, so that I wouldn’t hear him (although I did), whether he might not also see the instrument’s interior (which I was then still keeping a secret because it wasn’t ready for publication and I wanted to prevent others from pilfering my ideas), whereupon [Laplace] replied, equally sotto voce, that I was still keeping it a secret; and so he suppressed the desire.”⁴⁶ This remark shows, once more, that Chladni’s lectures were built upon the attraction of newly invented instruments and the material and media used in experimental settings. But instead of turning these inventions completely loose, Chladni knew the ropes of his lecture scenarios and how to seize the moment of knowledge performance.

2.3 Validation (the audience) From the perspective of a theory of performance, the production of knowledge is inseparably bound up with its reception. Chladni seems to have been aware of this nexus: he frequently gave detailed accounts of his audiences, discussing the qualifications his listeners brought to his lectures and how they behaved. Recounting his audience with Napoleon, for example, Chladni lets the reader know that the emperor initially sat at a table. Napoleon’s wife sat by his side and between them, but set back by roughly one pace, sat his mother, while other people in the room stood. Chladni’s account subsequently also notes in great detail how Napoleon and almost all others in attendance changed their positions in the room to be better able to follow the presentation (fig. 3).⁴⁷ One reason Chladni gives for traveling to Paris in the first place is that, as he puts it, I felt I would rather not see what I had done for the theory and its application judged by laypeople of a certain sort who dismiss everything; but I was certainly willing to submit [my work] to the judgment of estimable persons who could be trusted to possess both a love of justice and some expertise.⁴⁸

 Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” 140.  Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” 139.  Chladni, “Vorrede,” vi.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

Fig. 3: Chladni’s audience with Napoleon (anonymous), Deutsches Museum, Munich.

45

46

Viktoria Tkaczyk

As it happened, Napoleon himself had considerable expertise; the emperor, “knowledgeable in mathematical matters,”⁴⁹ did not make things easy for him but, Chladni writes, recognized that “the experiments would be a means of comparing many a result drawn from theory with results of experience.”⁵⁰ Napoleon also promptly had a prize offered to solicit a mathematical explanation of the capacity of solid bodies to vibrate that Chladni had demonstrated with his experiments. This allowed the latter to draw on the image of the French emperor not only as an authority that bolstered his own personal reputation and expertise, but also as an advocate of the new discipline to be established, which he called “practical acoustics.” While Chladni praised (or hyped) his audience and thus ultimately his own accomplishments, his own person came to serve similar purposes in later years. Around 1800, for example, Chladni became an authority in the field of architectural acoustics. This was the time when architects engaged in a vigorous debate over the needs and possibilities of optimizing the acoustic properties of theatrical auditoriums. Many architects started conducting their own experiments in architectural acoustics and discussed the relevant publications of physicists. In so doing, the architect Carl Gotthard Langhans explicitly relied on Chladni’s authority after getting his advice before building the Royal National Theater at Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt square (completed in 1802). Langhans proposed to design a number of sound tubes that led from the stage to the auditorium, and claimed that his ideas were approved by Chladni, who, in a correspondence, had stated that “this technology will be of more help than any architectural design.”⁵¹ Using Chladni as a reference may indeed have helped Langhans to see his designs realized, but it did not prevent him from creating a theater that went down in history as an acoustic disaster.

2.4 Retelling To describe the performance of knowledge, we must inevitably rely on the traces it has left in the sources that have survived. Yet written and visual sources should not primarily be read as neutral witnesses to historical events; rather, they are media of retelling that can develop their own kind of performance of knowledge

 Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” 141.  Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” 141.  Carl Gotthard Langhans, Vergleichung des Neuen Schauspielhauses zu Berlin mit verschiedenen ältern und neuern Schauspielhäusern in Rücksicht auf akustische und optische Grundsätze (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1800), 6.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

47

and science. In this regard, too, Chladni’s own writings may serve as an example. “Soon after my book had been released,” he writes, “I handed a copy to Napoléon during a Sunday morning court [cour] to which Count de la Place had taken me along; in addition to the entire court, various foreign rulers were also present. He immediately recognized me, and after I had given him the book, he said, c’est bon, c’est bon, and kept it under his arm for the entire time he walked the round and exchanged a few words with everyone in attendance, as was the usual custom.”⁵² Thus was the positive evaluation of Chladni’s knowledge handed down by Napoleon, into whose hands Chladni placed – or inscribed, as it were – the career of the new discipline; though it seems the German scholar did not quite grasp that the French c’est bon may also mean “that’s enough,” which would make Napoleon’s response evasive rather than enthusiastic. The passage nonetheless illustrates that the founding act of acoustics took place not only during the imperial audience, but equally in Chladni’s writing and retelling. In retrospect, Chladni emphasized that the designation “Napoléon-le-Grand” in the dedication of the Treatise on Acoustics was imperative in France at the time, and that it was by no means an indication of unreserved admiration on his part for the French ruler, to whom he merely sought to express his gratitude for the financial support he had received. Closer examination, however, shows that the frequent mentions of Napoleon in the scholar’s writings serve a vital function, generating legitimacy and validation. Chladni was perfectly aware of the narrative strategies he employed and so quite pointedly staged their precarious truth value. In his account of his “Reception by Napoléon and in Paris More Generally”, for example, he writes: “If, incidentally, this narrative should otherwise be lacking in good qualities, one quality it does possess is that it is thoroughly faithful, without adding or subtracting anything for poetic effect.”⁵³ And yet Chladni also left blanks and elisions in his writings. For instance, after his sojourn in France, he kept the design of his instruments a secret until 1821. As early as 1790, he had published a brief report about the euphon that included a copperplate illustration,⁵⁴ but he did not reveal its construction and functional principle until thirty years later.⁵⁵ This strat-

 Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” 143.  Chladni, “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris,” 143 – 144.  Chladni, “Von dem Euphon, einem neuerfundenen musikalischen Instrumente,” Journal von und für Deutschland 7, no. 3 (1790): 201– 202.  Chladni, Beyträge; Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, “Fortsetzung der Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik, enthaltend manche Verbesserungen und Zusätze, wie auch Nachrichten von einem vor kurzem auf eine ganz neue Art gebauten Euphon,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 24 (1822): 789 – 792, 805 – 814, 821– 826.

48

Viktoria Tkaczyk

egy of hinting at knowledge through a careful blend of revelation and veiling is familiar from technical treatises of the early modern period: the artist-engineers of the Renaissance had used it in machine-books to solicit commissions or vie for steady employment at a court without enabling their colleagues to actually reproduce their inventions.⁵⁶ Experimental scientists in the early modern period had subsequently adopted the same strategy to bolster their standing in academic societies – Robert Hooke, for example, promised to reveal his discoveries in many different fields, a promise he never made good on, in order to secure his position as curator of experiments at the Royal Society of London.⁵⁷ In this respect, Chladni chose yet another path: he presented his inventions in public and gave partial explanations of their mechanisms, but (not unlike the early modern engineers) withheld a full and precise description, hoping to capitalize on his knowledge. He would not reveal “the least part” of his inventions, he proclaimed, “under any circumstances, unless I receive sufficient compensation for the effort, time, and money expended both on the invention and on my other acoustical experiments.”⁵⁸ His goal, in other words, was a professorship or at least some form of state allowance. This wish, however, remained unfulfilled, and so Chladni produced a growing number of publications in which he offered outlines but no exact descriptions of the instruments. In his later years in particular, the researcher took up writing as his primary tool – a tendency that culminated in the years after 1818, when he revised and amended his autobiography on an annual basis and deposited a copy with a publisher with instructions to bring out the most recent version as an obituary after his death, which came in 1827.⁵⁹ One might say that Chladni thus extended his lecture scenarios into the future, paving the way for performances in the field of acoustics to come and for the biographers who would posthumously identify him as the founding father of acoustics.

3 Scenarios for the making of science Chladni’s writings were designed to pursue aims beyond the production of scientific facts, as he already forthrightly acknowledged in the preface to his

 See Marcus Popplow, Neu, nützlich und erfindungsreich: Die Idealisierung von Technik in der Frühen Neuzeit (Münster: Waxmann, 1998).  See Viktoria Tkaczyk, “Ready for Take-off,” Cabinet: Quarterly Magazine of Arts & Culture 27, no. 3 (2007): 44– 49.  Chladni, “Von dem Euphon,” 202.  Chladni, “Selbstbiographie.”

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

49

1802 Acoustics: “I do not hesitate to narrate some of the history of my discoveries, mainly in order to show that everything, far from being a result of happenstance, has been the fruit of sustained effort.”⁶⁰ This remark raises the question of the place that the “sustained effort” Chladni attributes to himself has in a history of acoustics. From a contemporary perspective, presumably no one would go so far today as to identify Chladni as the true founding father of acoustics, let alone as the sole author of his writings and lectures. Many recent approaches in the histories of media, knowledge, and science have drawn our attention to the complex historical discursive ensembles that allowed scientific texts or research findings to come into being. In the life sciences, for instance, experimental systems have also been described as “machines for making the future.”⁶¹ This angle emphasizes the largely depersonalized processes of research, discovery, invention, and insight – processes conditioned by material objects and technology. The “machines” are described as involving a high degree of contingency: their function is bound up with the unpredictability of the outcomes. Individual elements of the machinery are said to develop a life of their own that proves to be incalculable and arbitrary due to complex contexts and dynamics. In other words, the actors involved in experimental systems proceed without a clear vision of the goal of their activities, and this openness is in fact what allows them to arrive at unforeseeable new results. A similar impulse has emerged in art history and performance studies, where scholars have written about the “aesthetics of the performative”; again, discussions of the performative highlight the contingency and emergence,⁶² which is to say, the open future and unforeseeable effects, of works of (performance) art. In this connection, studies have outlined a pathic concept of action and shed light on the paradoxical productivity of hesitation, procrastination, and failure to act.⁶³

 Chladni, Die Akustik, 1.  François Jacob speaks of “une machine à fabriquer de l’avenir” (François Jacob, La statue intérieure [Paris: Jacob, 1987], 13). Rheinberger translates this as “machines for making the future” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 28).  The concept of emergence, which has its roots in the natural sciences, is used here in the very specific sense of appearance/operativeness; see Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, 240 – 280. On the discursive history of the concept of emergence, see Anita Traninger, “Emergence as a Model for the Study of Culture,” in Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, ed. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 67– 83.  See, e. g., Barbara Gronau and Alice Lagaay, eds., Performanzen des Nichttuns (Vienna: Passagen, 2008) and Barbara Gronau and Alice Lagaay, eds., Ökonomien der Zurückhaltung: Kulturelles Handeln zwischen Askese und Restriktion (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010).

50

Viktoria Tkaczyk

In contemporary history of science as well as in art, media, and cultural studies, then, the performative is a useful concept especially in describing dynamics that unfold beyond human agency and the bounds of the intentional. The associated postulate of limited free agency in a sense arguably applies to Chladni’s activities as a researcher and lecturer as well. As sketched above, the four decades of his lectures likewise attest to a certain degree of contingency: the instruments and material components of his lecture scenarios engender an intrinsic dynamic that has left traces in the extant documents. His deliberate efforts to embody a certain type of scholarly persona, his deliberate echoing of historical knowledge and different cultural modes of the presentation of knowledge, his interaction with his audiences, his ongoing revisions and demonstrations of experimental settings, and last but not least, his retelling of his activities in writings and visual media did their part to promote Chladni’s research and generate the necessary attention. In this respect it makes sense to describe Chladni’s entire scenarios and the marketing of his lectures as “performatives.” The question remains, however, as to whether we can wholeheartedly agree that scientists have only a limited understanding of what they do because the performance of their knowledge is incalculable and unplanned, a series of events subject to a considerable extent to the power of complex networks, experimental arrangements, or semiotic systems. To hold this position is to absolve scientists of some of the responsibility for their actions. The question is of particular urgency, needless to say, in fields where research processes sometimes generate a potential for destruction and violence or lead to results that draw controversy and are seen as ethically contentious.⁶⁴ Chladni’s own research hardly meets these criteria. Yet the “case of Chladni” is especially apt to inspire a reflection on the spaces of agency and latitudes a researcher can stake out for his activities. My point is certainly not to advocate a return to a subject-centered historiography of science. In Chladni’s case, however, it appears that the results of his experiments were at least in part the products of deliberate evocation; his performative acts seem to have involved a certain degree of strategic control and targeted delivery. However skeptical we feel about Chladni’s claim to the title of the inventor of acoustics, then, we do have reason to admire him as the coauthor of an art of highly effective lecturing that contained the seeds of the future evolution of his science. In other words, his example suggests that research in the history of the sciences may sometimes benefit from a slight shift of perspective; as we observe uncontrollable processes, we

 On the destructive dynamics of the performative, see Alice Lagaay and Michael Lorber, eds., Destruction in the Performative (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012).

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

51

should also take another closer look at the internal structure of these processes – the scenarios of discovery, invention, and presentation – asking who generated and operated them under which conditions in order to establish new knowledge or even a new discipline. Translated by Gerrit Jackson

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell. New York: Zone, 2009. Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by James Opie Urmson and Marina Sbisà. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Baisch, Martin, Roger Friedlein, and Angelika Lozar. “Historizität und Performativität von Wissen und Wissenschaften in der Frühen Neuzeit.” Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 1 (2004): 92 – 100. Balme, Christopher, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Stephan Grätzel, eds. Theater als Paradigma der Moderne. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. Beyer, Robert Thomas. Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. New York: Springer, 1999. Bredekamp, Horst. Theorie des Bildakts: Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Die Akustik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1802. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik und zur Lehre vom Instrumentenbau, enthaltend die Theorie und Anleitung zum Bau des Clavicylinders und damit verwandter Instrumente. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1821. Reprint Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1980. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Chladnis Selbstbiographie.” (Nekrolog) Caecilia 6 (1827): 297 – 308. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Fortsetzung der Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik, enthaltend manche Verbesserungen und Zusätze, wie auch Nachrichten von einem vor kurzem auf eine ganz neue Art gebauten Euphon.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 24 (1822): 789 – 792; 805 – 814; 821 – 826. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Kurze Uebersicht der Schall- und Klanglehre, nebst einem Anhange, die Entwicklung und Anordnung der Tonverhältnisse betreffend. Mainz: Schott’s Söhne, 1827. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Traité d’acoustique. Paris: Courcier, 1809. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2009.

52

Viktoria Tkaczyk

Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris.” Caecilia 5 (1826): 137 – 144. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Von dem Euphon, einem neuerfundenen musikalischen Instrumente.” Journal von und für Deutschland 7, no. 3 (1790): 201 – 202. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Vorrede, zur Fortsetzung der Geschichte meiner akustischen Entdeckungen.” In Neue Beyträge zur Akustik, v–xii. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1817. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Daston, Lorraine. Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit. Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context” [1971]. In Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Diebner, Hans H. Performative Science and Beyond: Involving the Body in Research. London: Springer, 2006. Erdbeer, Robert Matthias, and Christina Wessely. “Kosmische Resonanzen. Theorie und Körper in der Esoterischen Moderne.” In Resonanz: Potentiale einer akustischen Figur, edited by Karsten Lichau, Viktoria Tkaczyk, and Rebecca Wolf, 144– 176. Munich: Fink, 2009. Felfe, Robert. “Die Erziehung des Auges. Wissen und visuelle Praxis (Einführung Sektion X).” In Kulturen des Wissens im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Ulrich Johannes Schneider, 451 – 454. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Felfe, Robert. “Sehen am Faden der Linie. Spiele des Bildermachens bei Abraham Bosse.” In Spektakuläre Experimente: Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Helmar Schramm, Ludgar Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, 78 – 113. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. Felfe, Robert, and Ludger Schwarte. “‘Performative Prozesse’ und ‘epistemische Konfigurationen.’” Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 1 (2004): 100 – 111. Felfe, Robert, and Kirsten Wagner, eds. Museum, Bibliothek, Stadtraum: Räumliche Wissensordnungen 1600 – 1900. Berlin: Lit, 2010. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Grenzgänge und Tauschhandel: Auf dem Weg zu einer performativen Kultur.” In Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Uwe Wirth, 277 – 300. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, and Christoph Wulf, eds. “Praktiken des Performativen.” Special issue, Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 1 (2004). Fischer-Lichte, Erika, and Christoph Wulf, eds. “Theorien des Performativen.” Special issue, Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 10, no. 1 (2001). Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Circulation of Social Energy.” In Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, 1 – 20. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Gronau, Barbara, and Alice Lagaay, eds. Ökonomien der Zurückhaltung: Kulturelles Handeln zwischen Askese und Restriktion. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Gronau, Barbara, and Alice Lagaay, eds. Performanzen des Nichttuns. Vienna: Passagen, 2008. Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

53

Häsner, Bernd. “Indexikalität und Indexikalisierung: Überlegungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Relevanz eines sprachwissenschaftlichen Konzepts.” In Im Zeichen der Fiktion: Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht. Festschrift für Klaus W. Hempfer zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Irina Rajewsky and Ulrike Schneider, 67 – 84. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 2008. Häsner, Bernd, Henning S. Hufnagel, Irmgard Maassen, and Anita Traninger. “Text und Performativität.” In Hempfer and Volbers, Theorien des Performativen, 69 – 96. Hempfer, Klaus W. “Performance, Performanz, Performativität. Einige Unterscheidungen zur Ausdifferenzierung eines Theoriefeldes.” In Hempfer and Volbers, Theorien des Performativen, 11 – 41. Hempfer, Klaus W., Bernd Häsner, and Irina Rajewsky. “Indexikalität, Performativität und Stil im Diskurs der Wissenschaften.” Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 1 (2004): 83 – 92. Hempfer, Klaus W., and Anita Traninger, eds. Dynamiken des Wissens. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2007. Hempfer, Klaus W., and Jörg Volbers, eds. Theorien des Performativen: Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Hunt, Frederick Vinton. Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Institut de France. Classe des sciences mathématiques et physiques, ed. Mémoires de la classe des sciences mathématiques et physiques de l’Institut de France. Paris: Baudouin, 1808. Reprint in Chladni, Traité d’acoustique, 358 – 375. Jackson, Myles W. Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Jacob, François. La statue intérieure. Paris: Jacob, 1987. Kleinert, Andreas. “Wechselbeziehungen zwischen deutschen und französischen Naturwissenschaften im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIII et XIXe siècle), edited by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, 371 – 380. Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988. Knorr Cetina, Karin. Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Zur Anthropologie der Naturwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Knorr Cetina, Karin. Wissenskulturen: Ein Vergleich naturwissenschaftlicher Wissensformen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. Krämer, Sybille, and Marco Stahlhut. “Das ‘Performative’ als Thema der Sprach- und Kulturphilosophie.” Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 10, no. 1 (2001): 35 – 64. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Lagaay, Alice, and Michael Lorber, eds. Destruction in the Performative. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Langhans, Carl Gotthard. Vergleichung des Neuen Schauspielhauses zu Berlin mit verschiedenen ältern und neuern Schauspielhäusern in Rücksicht auf akustische und optische Grundsätze. Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1800. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lazardzig, Jan. Theatermaschine und Festungsbau: Paradoxien der Wissensproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie, 2007.

54

Viktoria Tkaczyk

Lazardzig, Jan, and Kirsten Wagner. “Raumwahrnehmung und Wissensproduktion: Erkundungen im Interferenzbereich von Theorie und Praxis.” In Möglichkeitsräume: Zur Performativität von sensorischer Wahrnehmung, edited by Christina Lechtermann, Kirsten Wagner, and Horst Wenzel, 124 – 140. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2007. Lenoir, Timothy, ed. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Lindsay, Robert Bruce. “The Story of Acoustics.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 23, no. 4 (1966): 629 – 644. Miller, Dayton Clarence. Anecdotal History of the Science of Sound: To the Beginning of the 20th Century. New York: Macmillan, 1935. Peters, Sibylle. Der Vortrag als Performance. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pickering, Andrew. “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (1993): 559 – 589. Pickering, Andrew. “New Ontologies.” In The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, edited by Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik, 1 – 14. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Pfister, Manfred. “Appendix: Skalierung von Performativität.” Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 10, no. 1 (2001): 302. Popplow, Marcus. Neu, nützlich und erfindungsreich: Die Idealisierung von Technik in der Frühen Neuzeit. Münster: Waxmann, 1998. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “Experiment, Difference, and Writing: I. Tracing Protein Synthesis.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23 A, no. 2 (1992): 305 – 331. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Sauveur, Joseph. “Système géneral des Intervalles des Sons, & son Application à tous les Systèmes & à tous les instrumens de Musique.” In Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 299 – 366. Paris: Gabriel Martin, Jean-Baptiste Coignard & Hippolyte-Louis Guérin, 1701. 2nd ed. 1743. Schramm, Helmar. “Theatralität.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, edited by Karlheinz Barck, vol. 6, 48 – 73. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Collection—Laboratory—Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century. Vol. 1 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Instruments in Art and Science: On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century. Vol. 2 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Spektakuläre Experimente. Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert. Vol. 3 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Spuren der Avantgarde: Theatrum machinarum. Vol. 4 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Searle, John. “How Performatives Work.” Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989): 535 – 558. Shapin, Steven. “A Scholar and a Gentleman: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England.” History of Science 26 (1991): 279 – 327. Taylor, Charles. The Art and Science of Lecture Demonstration. Philadelphia: Hilger, 1988.

The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words

55

Tkaczyk, Viktoria. Himmels-Falten: Zur Theatralität des Fliegens in der Frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Fink, 2011. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. “Der Marktschrei und sein Echo.” In Spuren der Avantgarde: Theatrum oeconomicum, edited by Helmar Schramm, Jan Lazardzig, and Viktoria Tkaczyk. Vol. 7 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015 [forthcoming]. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. “Ready for Take-off.” Translated by Mary Helen Dupree. Cabinet: Quarterly Magazine of Arts & Culture 27, no. 3 (2007): 44 – 49. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. “Performativität und Wissen(schaft)sgeschichte.” In Hempfer and Volbers, Theorien des Performativen, 115 – 139. Traninger, Anita. “Emergence as a Model for the Study of Culture.” In Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, edited by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, 67 – 83. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Ullmann, Dieter. Chladni und die Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750 – 1850. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996. Waquet, Françoise. Parler comme un livre: L’oralité et le savoir XVIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. Wolfsteiner, Andreas, and Markus Rautzenberg. “Trial-and-Error-Szenarien. Zum Umgang mit Zukünften.” In Trial and Error. Szenarien medialen Handelns, edited by Andreas Wolfsteiner and Markus Rautzenberg, 7–29. Munich: Fink, 2014.

Dietmar Till

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century¹ 1 Rhetoric in the age of Enlightenment The term Enlightenment refers to a pan-European “intellectual and social reform movement,”² which aims for an overall improvement of mankind through the use of reason. As a period construct, Enlightenment is identical to the eighteenth century only in outline: recent research marks the beginning of the epoch in the 1680s with philosophical rationalism (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Thomasius, Christian Wolff, et al.) and sees it spanning the French Revolution (1789 and beyond). The “long” eighteenth century refers to the persistence of key concepts of the Enlightenment into the 1830s and 1840s. Politically, the German Enlightenment is marked by both the prevalence of territorial absolutism and the simultaneous questioning of it; this context forms the backdrop for shifts both in practical eloquence and the educational system. In the eighteenth century, just as in the early modern period in general, public, political deliberative oratory (genus deliberativum) and judicial oration (genus iudiciale) are lacking: both represent nineteenth-century rhetorical novelties. In theory, they are criticized in more or less unchanging ways. This leads to tension between the norms postulated by ancient and early modern rhetoricians and actual needs: the “social isolation” of the classical humanist doctrine in Baroque rhetoric theory (as noted by literary critic Wilfried Barner)³ and the resulting tension between the bonds of tradition and ordinary life (vita communis) is characteristic of the age of Enlightenment as well. It is further exacerbated by the fact that, during the eighteenth century, more and more room for political and social discussion emerges through the “structural transformation of the public sphere” described

 This paper is an edited translation and expansion of Rhetorik und Stilistik der deutschsprachigen Länder in der Zeit der Aufklärung, published in Rhetorik und Stilistik: Ein internationales Handbuch historischer und systematischer Forschung, ed. Ulla Fix, Andreas Gardt, and Joachim Knape (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 112– 130.  Werner Schneiders, Das Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Munich: Beck, 1997), 11. Unless otherwise indicated, the translation of quotes is by Viktorija Romascenko.  Wilfried Barner, Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970), 150.

58

Dietmar Till

by Jürgen Habermas.⁴ In the wake of the French Revolution, a public, political rhetoric of debate emerged for the first time in Germany in tandem with the founding of the Republic of Mainz (1792/93). However, this rhetoric is only partially based on acquaintance with the classical tradition: in the eighteenth century, there is an ever-widening gap between the growing relevance of rhetorical praxis and rhetorical theory. A focus on the ratio, which is so characteristic of Enlightenment thinking, necessarily implies “breaking with tradition.”⁵ It is this very aspect that is central for describing the relationship between the philosophers of the Enlightenment and rhetorical tradition. But whither tradition? A glance at the book market of the eighteenth century and at the range of actually published rhetorics provides insight. In 1996, Joachim Dyck and Jutta Sandstede published a comprehensive bibliography of eighteenth-century theoretical works on rhetoric, which can serve as a basis of such a quantitative analysis. It is striking that compared to the seventeenth century, classical books on rhetoric (Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s Treatise on Rhetorical Invention [De inventione] and On the Ideal Orator [De oratore] as well as Quintilian’s Training of an Orator [Institutio oratoria]) did not decline in popularity in the eighteenth century. On the contrary: while in the seventeenth century the Treatise on Rhetorical Invention and Training of an Orator have one edition each, two or three eighteenthcentury editions were published, along with an abridged German translation of Quintilian’s work (1775). What is particularly surprising about this period is the low overall number of editions of classical rhetorics – in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, for example, the Rhetoric: For Herennius [Rhetorica ad Herennium] was not printed at all – which were apparently only desired by a small group of learned philologists and had a limited impact in both the Baroque and Enlightenment eras. This is surprising only at first glance, for classical rhetoric was distributed primarily through Latin textbooks at this time. Such textbooks processed the classical system in a compilatory manner and homogenized heterogeneous discourses. During the first half of the eighteenth century this tradition subsided considerably, a development that affected Protestant as well as Catholic areas. As Manfred Fuhrmann postulates, this is the reason why the dissolution of Latin rhetoric cannot be interpreted as a simple process of vernacu-

 Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Nachdruck und um ein Vorwort ergänzt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990); see Peter Uwe Hohendahl et al., Öffentlichkeit. Geschichte eines kritischen Begriffs (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 12– 14. See also Ursula Goldenbaum’s critical Appell an das Publikum. Die öffentliche Debatte in der deutschen Aufklärung (Berlin: Akademie, 2004), 3 – 5.  Schneiders, Das Zeitalter der Aufklärung, 11.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

59

larization, with German replacing Latin as the language of science and instruction.⁶ In addition, deeper epistemological causes must be considered, as must their effects on the education system through the dissolution of rhetoric as a subject in schools and universities (see below). All in all, it is striking that the works of the three key textbook authors of the seventeenth century⁷ – Konrad Dietrich, Gerhard Johannes Vossius, and Cyprianus Soarez – disappear from the book market after the mid eighteenth century (in Protestant areas completely, in Catholic areas with characteristic persistence, surely due to the different objectives of their respective education systems). Some concrete numbers support these general statements: Soarez’s Jesuit rhetoric The Rhetoric of the Book [De arte rhetorica libri], which had appeared in about 100 editions since the end of the sixteenth century, only appears in a few scattered editions after 1740; Vossius’s Concise Rhetoric [Rhetorica contracta], a popular schoolbook for rhetorical education in Protestant grammar schools, is last published in Leipzig in 1742,⁸ and an edited version by Johann Sebastian Mitternacht (with seventeen editions in total)⁹ last appears in 1740 in Merseburg. Meanwhile, Conrad Dieterich’s Institutions of Oratory [Institutiones oratoriae] finally appear in 1722 for the last time, his Institutions of Rhetoric [Institutiones rhetoricae] in 1752. Afterwards, these Protestant rhetoric textbooks went out of print and the Jesuit ones were published only sporadically, even more so after the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773. So what kinds of changes drew the rug out from under rhetoric as a discipline? A key factor here is the anchoring of rhetorical instruction in grammar schools and universities.

2 The history of education as a foundation of Enlightenment rhetorical theory What Barner¹⁰ calls rhetoric’s “key role” in the early modern education system – educating students in spoken and written skills, primarily in Latin, the language of res

 Manfred Fuhrmann, Rhetorik und öffentliche Rede. Über die Ursachen des Verfalls der Rhetorik im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert (Universitätsverlag Konstanz: Konstanz, 1983).  Joachim Knape, “Barock (1. Deutschland),” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 1: 1287– 1288.  Joachim Dyck and Jutta Sandstede, Quellenbibliographie zur Rhetorik, Homiletik und Epistolographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum, 3 vols. (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996), 1742, 1733.  See Barner, Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen, 266.  Barner, 242.

60

Dietmar Till

publica litteraria – still applied at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Initially, the transition to the “Enlightenment” – a periodizing construct retrospectively ascribed to this time – did nothing to change this situation. The objectives of teaching would be revised only over the course of the eighteenth century, though with considerable differences across specific regions or states. In some territories the curriculum remained more or less unchanged until the 1830s and 1840s. There are two fundamental tendencies within eighteenth-century rhetorical theory that led to the dissolution of rhetoric as a school subject and discipline: (1) the transition from the dominance of the Latin rhetoric to the vernacular, even in the field of scholarly culture, and (2) the fundamental shift from rhetoric (focusing on authors and issues of text production) to hermeneutics (focusing on reading and text reception) in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are precursors for both of these tendencies that go back well into the early modern period, including the justification of hermeneutics in Philipp Melanchthon’s rhetoric and repeated attempts by Johann Matthäus Meyfart or Christian Weise to establish vernacular rhetoric in the seventeenth century.¹¹ Prior to the eighteenth century, German was not dominant as a language of instruction. The orientation towards the transfer of skills through the student’s own text production is theoretically enveloped in the imitatio-aesthetic of the early modern period. Although their Latin models change (in the context of disputes over Ciceronianism and anti-Ciceronianism), the principle of imitation (imitatio auctorum) as such was not affected. In the educational canon of the early modern period, rhetoric is primarily an institution of linguistic and cultural habitualization. This was particularly evident at Jesuit grammar schools, whose fixation on Latinity was historically very stable up into the nineteenth century.¹² To be able to speak and write in Latin was a key competence that students needed in order to be successful in university theology studies. There was a consequent absence of separate classes of rhetoric in the universities of the Jesuit education system. The same went for the Protestant educational institutions after the institution of humanist reforms by Johannes Sturm et al.: rhetorical training at grammar schools and universities served almost exclusively as preparation for studies at one of the upper faculties. This indicates a close bond between rhetoric and eruditio (erudition or Gelehrsamkeit), which also manifested itself in the ideal of “classicality” (Klassizität)¹³ that views rhetoric as a communication theory transmitted from antiquity in an essentially unaltered way. Throughout the seven-

 With different intentions and programs each; see Barner, 159 – 161.  Barner, 248.  Barner, 249.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

61

teenth century, attempts to resolve the tension between the norms postulated by the ancient rhetoricians and the demands of ordinary life (vita communis) continued to face problems: this can be seen in the vernacular rhetoric of Wolfgang Ratke (Ratichianism); in the practically-oriented training programs of knight academies and other institutions of nobility education; and, finally, in the reform program of Christian Weise, which already indicates the transition to the Enlightenment. Yet these endeavours were singular and they did not have a cohesive program; judging from the school regulations of Catholic and Protestant provenances, they only had a limited impact. The decisive shift would only come with the eighteenth century, yet the modernization of rhetoric, as will be shown, would no longer succeed. In the Protestant areas of Germany, the grammar schools of BrandenburgPrussia played a pioneering role, especially the Halle Pädagogium founded in 1696 by the Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke. Ultimately remaining completely within Sturm’s program, with its pairing of eloquentia and pietas, these schools combined upbringing to “godliness” with “skillful eloquence.”¹⁴ Traditionally, verbal instruction and imitation of ancient authors was emphasized; the “realities” (i. e., the early modern social and political contexts of speeches) played only a minor role. Of crucial importance here is the turn to the mother tongue: the German language (including orthography) and German rhetoric were taught in specially devised lessons. The spectrum of genres ranged from speeches and poems to letters, with an emphasis on exercises in practical textual genres. A similar development occurred at the neighboring university of Halle, where the professor of law Christian Thomasius began to offer classes in German style (Collegia stili) as early as the 1680s. These lectures must be seen as a part of a reform program that proclaimed a departure from scholarship, which it denigrated as “pedantic,” and privileged instead practical educational content. Central to this is Thomasius’s Discourse on the Manner for Imitating the French in Everyday Life [Discours welcher Gestalt man denen Frantzosen in gemeinem Leben und Wandel nachahmen solle], held in 1697. In this speech, Thomasius ostentatiously breaks with the humanistic Latin scholarly style and advocates an ideal of conduct based on the current French model of courtly integrity (honnêteté).¹⁵ Al-

 Friedrich Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitäten vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zur Gegenwart. Bd. 1. Unveränd. photomechan. Nachdr. d. Ausg. Leipzig 1919 (Berlin, De Gruyter 1965), 1: 568.  Gunter E. Grimm, Literatur und Gelehrtentum in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zum Wandel ihres Verhältnisses vom Humanismus bis zur Frühaufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983), 349;

62

Dietmar Till

though Thomasius did not write his own book of rhetoric, he is an important transitional figure for the history of rhetoric. The philosophical doctrine of emotions and the theory of appropriateness (aptum) or decorum played important roles in his extensive work, and he generally valued the content (res) higher than the linguistic form (verba), as is evidenced not least by the fact that Thomasius devoted no special attention to the theory of style.¹⁶ The Halle professor of law turned away from the traditional system of rhetoric (the five canons), which he considered to be too pedantic and – due to its systematic character with a tendency towards hypertrophy – too inflexible. Be it in dealing with court officials or in a variety of communicative situations within the scholarly world, dialogic discursive interaction occurs ubiquitously. For him the rules of rhetoric, which always sought to perfect extended, monological speech (as is manifest in the doctrine of the three rhetorical genres), seemed to be hardly useful. Discussions about the relationship between the verbalia and realia (i. e., textual imitation of ancient authors versus real-life subjects like geography and contemporary history) also shaped debates at the intersection of pedagogy and rhetoric around 1700. For example, Johann Jakob Schatz and Friedrich Andreas Hallbauer, both important figures in the reformation of rhetoric in the early Enlightenment, criticized modes of rhetorical instruction that aimed at the transfer of linguistic and communicative competence. In his Preamble on the Shortcomings of School Oratory [Vorrede von den Mängeln der Schul-Oratorie], which was preceded by his Guide to Improved German Oratory [Anweisung zu verbesserten deutschen Oratorie], Hallbauer finds objectionable not only the blind application of Latin rhetoric to instruction in the German language and the mindless memorization of rhetorical schemas, but also, encouraged by Weise, the collection of model tropes and figures and the compilation of one’s own writings from such oratorical collectanea. It is not acceptable to practice modes of expression detached from their respective contents and to encourage students to argue about subjects that they are not intellectually capable of handling.¹⁷

Behind these disputes lay the core pedagogical question of whether it makes sense to drum the rules of rhetoric into the students’ heads, even if their youth limits their knowledge of the matter. The transmission of the system of rhetoric was thus criticized as being remote from real life. Instead, it was argued

Dietmar Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik. Untersuchungen zum Wandel der Rhetoriktheorie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 279.  Grimm, Literatur und Gelehrtentum in Deutschland, 391.  Horst Joachim Frank, Dichtung, Sprache, Menschenbild. Geschichte des Deutschunterrichts von den Anfängen bis 1945, 2 vols. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1973), 88 – 89.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

63

by Schatz, students should practice elementary textual exercises in the tradition of the preliminary exercises (progymnasmata). Finally, the literature and theater reformer Johann Christoph Gottsched drew certain important conclusions from these debates, banishing rhetoric from schools because, as he argued, only university students are capable of following a certain level of rhetorical theory. In turn, Gottsched wrote a special textbook, Preliminary Exercises in Eloquence [Vorübungen der Beredsamkeit, 1754] specifically for schoolchildren, which provides exercise texts in the tradition of the preliminary exercises of Aphthonios. Subsequently, public speech exercises (speech-actus), which were held by students in Latin at graduations, birthdays of the ruling family or other festive occasions in the seventeenth century, also began to slowly disappear from daily school life.¹⁸ These public rhetorical performances were held increasingly in German already at the end of the seventeenth century – a development that continues into the eighteenth century, occasionally involving foreign languages such as French.¹⁹ In the 1730s, rhetorical education in Protestant grammar schools was submitted to sharp criticism that widened into a broader crisis in rhetorical theory. Owing to a profound transformation of the educational system, rhetoric as a school subject was deprived of its social and historical role. In addition, the institutionalization of “German rhetoric” proved unsuccessful in the long run. Independent professorships were rarely designated for classes in German language style, such as the 1731 extraordinary professorship (Extraordinariat) held by Johann Ernst Philippi.²⁰ Professorships for German rhetoric were established in the 1730s in Kiel, Göttingen, and Königsberg, but all were discontinued mid century after the resignation of the original holders and replaced by professorships in aesthetics (or belles lettres), which were institutionally connected almost exclusively to philosophy. This suggests that the disciplinary contours of rhetoric dissolve around 1750. One example of this transformation of rhetorical theory²¹ is the appearance of pedagogy as an independent curriculum subject at the universities of the late Enlightenment, first seen in Halle around 1779 onwards with Ernst Christian Trapp. This development must be observed against the background of an extensive reorganization of the education system around practical, pragmatic de-

 Barner, 243.  Barner, 295; Adolf Matthias, Geschichte des deutschen Unterrichts (Munich: Beck, 1907), 183 – 185.  Klaus Weimar, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1989), 42.  Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik.

64

Dietmar Till

mands, with new kinds of schools such as the Realschule appearing where rhetoric is no longer taught. An expression of this movement is the Elementary Work [Elementarwerk, 1768 – 1774] by Johann Bernhard Basedow, the founder of the Dessau reformist school (Philanthropinum) and a central reform pedagogue of the late Enlightenment. It is significant that rhetoric comes up in his voluminous work only in a marginalized and reduced form. In particular, his educational program does not contain room for monological speech: only letters and entirely “pragmatic” genres such as bills and invoices are treated as independent genres. At the same time, the Elementary Work is limited to progymnasmatic text exercises such as description or narration.²² The dissonance in rhetorical training between the norms of antiquity and the pragmatic requirements of common/ordinary life (a dissonance characteristic of the history of reception of the classical ars rhetorica during the early modern period) leads to a turn against the tradition and finally to an almost complete dismissal of rhetoric. Even within pedagogy, the distancing from classical rhetoric cannot be overlooked. This is already evident in critical attitudes towards rhetorical theory (doctrina) in John Locke’s treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762). Both are important foundations for the pedagogy of the Enlightenment,²³ and both criticize Latin rhetoric classes focused on linguistic form (verba) as well as unworldly themes from antiquity. Instead, Locke and Rousseau both see the pedagogical task as providing students with knowledge and skills in their own language beyond the traditional rhetorical standards.²⁴ Trapp argues in his Attempt at a Pedagogy [Versuch einer Pädagogik, 1780] that the transmission of rhetorical theory is completely unnecessary, and he hardly treats monological speech, suggesting that such oratory would be taught through the practical imitation of the teacher rather than through theory, which is dispensable. In any case, Trapp argues, it would make more sense if a student learned how to make an index or create dispositions from a finished text. If this radically utilitarian pedagogical orientation is one tendency of Enlightenment pedagogy, then ethical improvement through aesthetic education is the other. Both are in tension, yet for rhetoric as a systematic complex of production and aesthetical norms of the principle of imitation (imitatio auctorum), both tendencies are equally fatal. In the view of contemporary thinkers, one becomes a better person not through writing and speaking, but by reading: as a theory of production, rhetoric is replaced by a reception-oriented hermeneutic

 Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik, 274– 275.  Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik, 261– 263.  Christian Weise voiced similar criticism in Germany; see Barner, 211– 213.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

65

and textual analysis, a theoretical and practical model that continues to dominate literary studies to this day.²⁵ Reading model texts (including contemporary literature of the era, which at this point becomes significantly more important) should develop good taste in students,²⁶ a practice that incorporates aesthetic as well as ethical aspects. This is done, as Friedrich Schiller writes, for example, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man [Briefen über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795], by developing “man’s capacity for feeling […] since the way to the head must be opened through the heart.”²⁷ On the production side, rhetorical ideas survived in classroom instruction in German-language classes that newly emerge in the eighteenth century. Repeatedly noted in research on the history of rhetoric’s disintegration is the milestone of the introduction of a written final school exam in Brandenburg, Prussia in 1788.²⁸ Viewed through the lens of media history, this development has been interpreted as a transition from orality to written language.²⁹ However, this oversimplified explanation fails to recognize that the model of rhetorical textual production always faces the tension between written language (the process of developing arguments [inventio], the organization of arguments [dispositio], and the mastery of stylistic elements [elocutio] aim at text production) and oral speech (the delivery and discipline of giving speeches [actio/pronuntiatio] as the performance of the text; impromptu speech as both borderline case and crowning achievement of rhetorical art).

3 Philosophical reorientations and critique of the topics model Explanatory models that assume the disintegration of rhetoric in the eighteenth century often fail to recognize that early modern rhetoric was a very heterogeneous phe-

 See Joachim Knape, Poetik und Rhetorik in Deutschland 1300 – 1700 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 172– 173.  Georg Jäger, Sozialgeschichte des deutschen Unterrichts an höheren Schulen von der Spätaufklärung bis zum Vormärz (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), 13 – 15.  Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard Ashley Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 53.  Heinrich Bosse, “Dichter kann man nicht bilden. Zur Geschichte der Schulrhetorik nach 1770,” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 10, no. 1 (1978): 84– 86.  See Bosse, “Dichter kann man nicht bilden”; Otto Ludwig, Der Schulaufsatz. Seine Geschichte in Deutschland (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), 132; Albrecht Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1999), 171.

66

Dietmar Till

nomenon. Even systematic books of rhetoric that followed the “five canons” model (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery) took up different theoretical positions at odds with each other. Considered in this context, a historiographical model seems to be more promising, for such a model can account for the plurality of theoretical designs in rhetoric and does not macroscopically examine the disintegration of a single rhetoric understood monolithically. Such a model instead settles for the observation of singular system parts on the micro-level. Here, one central factor is the theory of topics (τά τοπικά), which during the early modern period was expanded to a basic discipline of structuring and locating knowledge and disclosing the structure of the world.³⁰ Although this theory also encompasses elements of the doctrine of rhetorical topoi, it raises a broader philosophical claim beyond immediate pragmatic contexts. As part of Petrus Ramus’s reorganization of the trivium in the sixteenth century, the process of developing and the organization of arguments (inventio and disposition) (under the heading of judgment [iudicium]) were added to dialectic; only the mastery of stylistic elements (elocutio) and delivery and discipline of giving speeches (actio/ pronuntiatio) remained for rhetoric. This restriction leads to the predominance of the verbal eloquence (eloquentia) – or elegance (elegantia) – ideal³¹ and to the extensive identification of rhetoric with poetics. The responsibility for all matters of invention are withdrawn from rhetoric and assigned to philosophy. While the status of rhetoric was already precarious as early as the sixteenth century, it was further weakened in the seventeenth century by what Michel Foucault has postulated as an epistemological break. The philosophy of René Descartes and Cartesianism are central for this development, because they made it problematic to consider rhetoric as a means of discovering the truth: here, the argument is that rhetoric is only concerned with probabilities and thus not suited for philosophy, which is fixated on irrefutable truths.³² Antoine Arnauld’s and Pierre Nicole’s so-called Port-Royal Logic was highly influential throughout Europe (first in 1662; with over 30 editions towards 1800); this text was quite rightly called “anti-rhetorical” in approach, in light of the level of renunciation

 Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft, Paradeigmata 1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983).  Zierlichkeit, which could be translated as “daintiness”; Grimm, Literatur und Gelehrtentum in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zum Wandel ihres Verhältnisses vom Humanismus bis zur Frühaufklärung, 576 – 577.  Rudolf Behrens, Problematische Rhetorik. Studien zur französischen Theoriebildung der Affektrhetorik zwischen Cartesianismus und Frühaufklärung (Munich: Fink, 1982); Peter France, Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to Diderot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 20 – 21.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

67

with which the topic is considered in this work.³³ In the third part of the Logic, Arnauld and Nicole radically criticize the enthymeme (the rhetorical form of a syllogism) as the central rhetorical mode of inference and thereby critique the entire rhetorical tradition from Aristotle to Quintilian. For these authors, the rhetorical art of invention is no longer appropriate as a means of finding truth. This criticism also takes issue with mnemonics (memoria), which is closely linked to the theory of topics. Although mnemonics would continue to be treated in books of rhetoric, it would now be subject to an obligation towards “naturalness.”³⁴ This is the case in Hallbauer’s Guide to Improved German Oratory [Anweisung zur Teutschen Oratorie, 1725], which builds on corresponding remarks by Quintilian that a well-functioning memory is essential,³⁵ but which no longer has any use for the artificial means of the ars memorativa tradition. For Hallbauer, the foundation of a good mnemonics lies solely in the physiology of the brain, not in the skilful handling of mnemonic devices and schemata for memorizing texts. Epistemologically, this means replacing basic constitutive parts of the rhetorical tradition with a medical physiology that comes from Cartesianism. This is the background for the German early Enlightenment, whose theoreticians consistently referred to the discussion of this topic in the Port-Royal Logic. Their second main reference is the German philosopher Christian Wolff, who at the beginning of the eighteenth century proposed that philosophy should be based on the rational model of mathematics (more geometrico). Wolff’s followers tried to extend this stringent methodological ideal to rhetoric, poetics, and the emerging aesthetics, suggesting that their theories should be equally rationally grounded. This led to a partially concealed, partially open conflict between the norms postulated by the ancient rhetoricians and the elevated standards of rationality. On the whole, this did not lead to a single clear position and was regularly dealt with within the normative framework of the textbooks. Outstanding representatives of this rationalistic rhetoric were Johann Andreas Fabricius, Friedrich Andreas Hallbauer, and Johann Christoph Gottsched; also important were authors like Gottfried Polykarp Müller, Johann Jakob Schatz, and Daniel Peucer.³⁶ Their opponent was Christian Weise and above all the compositional model of chreia (consisting of four more-or-less fixed parts: introduction, proof, explanation, and conclusion), which became dominant around 1700 in the wake of Weise’s interventions.

 Behrens, Problematische Rhetorik, 2, 33.  Wolfgang Neuber, “Memoria,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 5: 1065 – 1066.  Friedrich Andreas Hallbauer, Anweisungen zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie (Jena 1725; repr. Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974), 545 – 546.  Grimm, Literatur und Gelehrtentum in Deutschland, 576 – 578.

68

Dietmar Till

Weise is also associated with the harsh critique of the material concept of “topic” from the Baroque rhetoric textbooks (similarly to the Port-Royal Logic), a central target of early-Enlightenment thinkers. Hallbauer’s general objection is that excerpting from books and categorizing material under existing organizational categories hinders unbiased thinking about an issue. Commonly referred to by contemporaries as “meditation,” this kind of thinking gains significantly in importance with the orientation towards rationalism as methodological ideal; it becomes the center of the process of developing arguments (inventio) and it ostentatiously breaks with the dominant material concept of “topic.” One important result of this is the distinct subjectivization and individualization of invention – a development that clearly points to the emergence of the modern concept of genius, starting in the 1770s with the advent of the Sturm und Drang movement. The focus on logic inevitably leads to distancing from the authority of rhetoric, and, relatedly, to a shift in the ars/natura relationship as a prerequisite for rhetorical text production. The result is a significant depreciation of ars and thus of rhetoric’s norms and rules for production. Hallbauer’s aggressive argumentation is paradigmatic for this process of distancing (which itself is rhetorically quite skillful), for it also shows how the rejection of rhetorical concepts of one’s own time can be legitimized by reference to ancient rhetoric.³⁷ According to Hallbauer, it is necessary to rely on reason, like Cicero, rather than to inflexibly follow traditional rules, rules that were created in a very different cultural context and could hardly be applied to the present: Aristotle and Cicero would not laugh at us, but rather scorn us for still licking their saliva. They acted reasonably, as they offered rules leading to the eloquence that was common in the Republic: we act ever more unreasonably, when we nonetheless retain their rules even though our Republic requires a very different kind of eloquence.³⁸

The tension between the tradition and contemporary demands was already a latent problem in the seventeenth century, yet only with the beginning of the early Enlightenment would it be linked with the harsh rejection of the theoretical approach of school rhetoric. The keyword with which the rhetoric of the seventeenth century is criticized is that of pedantry, as a mode of following the rules in an excessively scholastic way that leads to errors of affectation (affectatio) and to the ostentation of the artificiality of speech. As Hallbauer expresses it: “One makes eloquence into an art: but why not make it instead a craft [Handwerck]? For most people the hand

 See Johann Christoph Gottsched, Ausführliche Redekunst (Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1973), 43.  Hallbauer, Anweisungen zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie, Preface, fol. a7r.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

69

has more to do than the head. One treats everything as if it were an art and they were part of a guild [Man tractiret alles Kunst und Zunftmäßig]. Each and every one is tied to the rules, and he would not be considered a worthy speaker if he did not follow them closely. Even if one succumbs to pedantic compulsion and to disgusting affectation, it nonetheless suffices that the letter or the speech is created according to the rules of art.”³⁹ In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the critique of pedantry became a catchphrase.⁴⁰ Although this critique of a scholarly type was not limited to rhetorical theory, it is there where the effects are perhaps most visible. In particular this involved devaluing the norms and rules of the art of rhetoric (ars) for the production of discourse and the critique of monological speech forms, which, as was commonly held until the late Enlightenment, per se always tend to pedantry.⁴¹ Indeed, monological speech was no longer the privileged model of interpersonal communication in the eighteenth century. Instead it was dialogical conversation, a realm of discourse that had always eluded rhetorical theory, and that played a key role in the communicative sides of sociability and politics. This critique of monologic modes originated in Cicero’s On Duties [De officiis] and reaches through Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier [Cortegiano, 1528] into the eighteenth century. It forms a parallel line of theoretical reflections on communication alongside classical rhetorical theory and becomes dominant in the eighteenth century. Such theoretical models distance themselves from the art of rhetoric (in the sense of ars-concept) by appealing to grace (Anmut) as a key element in eloquent conversation. This critique of rhetoric has been underthematized at times in recent research when scholars have spoken of a homogenized rhetoric of conversation.⁴²

4 Between poetic sensibility and philosophical reason: rhetoric as prose theory A further locus of dissociation from early modern (as well as classical) rhetorical theory is the redefinition of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric.  Hallbauer, Anweisungen zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie, Preface, Bl. a8r.  Wilhelm Kühlmann, Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat. Entwicklung und Kritik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des Barockzeitalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982), 285– 287.  Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik, 147.  Markus Fauser, Das Gespräch im 18. Jahrhundert. Rhetorik und Geselligkeit in Deutschland (Stuttgart: M&P Verlag, 1991); Eugen Bader, Rede-Rhetorik, Schreib-Rhetorik, Konversationsrhetorik. Eine historisch-systematische Analyse, ScriptOralia 69 (Tübingen: Narr, 1994).

70

Dietmar Till

Unlike in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France or England, where rhetoric was seen as detrimental to the pursuit of truth (as by Descartes and Locke), a generally more positive view persisted in Germany. Yet even in Germany, theorists continuously warned of appeals to affect that conceal the truth.⁴³ Since the early Enlightenment, philosophy and rhetoric had been closely related: in the view of early-Enlightenment thinkers, philosophy deals with the conceptual cognition (Erkenntnis) of irrefutable truths obtained by using logical syllogisms (demonstrative method of proof). Communicatively, it aims at the process of persuasion (the convictio), which means insight into the binding nature of the syllogism, independently of the use of rhetorical methods of persuasion (which aim at persuasio). This requires the logical expertise of the recipient, so that he can follow the inference, and most importantly, appropriate rational skills. Rhetoric, in turn, is only preoccupied with the acts of persuasion that are based on uncertainty and therefore epistemologically inferior; seen in the context of the Enlightenment aim of implementing rationality, however, these acts of persuasion take on an even more important status.⁴⁴ The envisioned audience of this kind of rhetorical communication is the “common man,” who possesses sufficient rationality but a low level of education. In this case, the speaker/author must necessarily operate with rhetorical means (that range from enthymematic techniques of argumentation to stylistic means), if he wants to help implement his position. This position, however – and this is the philosophical stand on which the early Enlighteners (e. g. Andreas Rüdiger) insist – must in turn be necessarily recognized as true. Rhetorical communication serves merely the implementation and transmission of truths, not their discovery: “true eloquence,” as Gottsched writes in the Complete Rhetoric [Ausführliche Redekunst, 1736], “is the only [form of eloquence] to possess the truth and to have as its goal its diffusion and reproduction.”⁴⁵ It is precisely judicial oration (the genus iudiciale) that becomes the target of criticism, since the speaker in this case must “defend the bad no less than the good things,”⁴⁶ and that is what makes them morally questionable. Rhetoric thus becomes a subordinate supplement of philosophy and logic and receives an epistemologically inferior status. Unlike the logician who obtains conviction through “a series of irrefutable syllogisms,”

 Klaus Petrus, “Convictio oder persuasio? Etappen einer Debatte in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Rüdiger – Fabricius – Gottsched)” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 113 (1994): 484.  Dietmar Till, “Kommunikation der Aufklärung. Über Popularphilosophie und Rhetorik,” in Die Sachen der Aufklärung: Beiträge zur DGEJ-Jahrestagung 2010 in Halle a. d. Saale, ed. Frauke Berndt, Studien zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert 34 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012), 97– 111.  Gottsched, Ausführliche Redekunst, 38.  Gottsched, Ausführliche Redekunst, 39.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

71

the speaker can only settle for probable proofs that are perceivable for a “listener of mediocre intellect”⁴⁷. Based on this constellation, we should emphasize two contrasting developments that lead us into the late Enlightenment: on the one hand, Enlightenment popular philosophy (Georg Friedrich Meier, Christian Garve, Johann August Eberhard, Johann Jakob Engel, et al.), which grants rhetoric the supplementary function of being a mediating discipline; and, on the other hand, the harsh critique of rhetoric in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790], which forms a counter-program to the contemporaneous tradition of Popularphilosophie by rejecting the art of public speaking (ars oratoria) as an “art […] of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion,”⁴⁸ thereby also returning to the antirhetorical positions of the early Enlightenment. Precisely because of its communicative orientation, Popularphilosophie is treated with fierce hostility in postKantian history of philosophy.⁴⁹ In more general terms, rhetoric is transformed into a theory of prose, which lies somewhere between poetry and the prose of philosophy. Theorists define the function of poetry via the concept of vivid representation (Darstellung), i. e., generating vividness by rhetorical means. In the view of late Enlightenment aestheticians, poetry acts on the human imagination and sensibility, while the ideal form of philosophical prose acts only on the understanding by means of argumentation and logic. It is not hard to recognize how this continues the rhetorical theory and disciplinary hierarchies of the early Enlightenment. Rhetorical prose settles in the middle between the two extremes of vivid poetry and ideal philosophical prose. It is also the appropriate style of popular philosophy, which links the claim of reasonableness with the pursuit of vividness, and employs literary writing styles such as dialogue, the letter, and narration. In the significant General Theory of the Fine Arts [Allgemeiner Theorie der schönen Künste, 1771/74], Johann Georg Sulzer comments on this division of the functions of knowledge acquisition and transmission: “The philosopher may only give the artist the practical truth discovered by him.”⁵⁰ This question of legitimacy becomes paradigmatic at the end of the century.⁵¹

 Gottsched, Ausführliche Redekunst, 40.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 204.  See Till, “Kommunikation der Aufklärung. Über Popularphilosophie und Rhetorik.”  Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Künste. In einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1774), 2: 613.  It is negotiated, for example, in the argument between Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schiller about Fichte’s Die Horen journal manuscript Concerning the Difference Between the Spirit

72

Dietmar Till

Since Condillac and Rousseau, the distinction between poetry and prose is explained via a historical model of the origin of language: in the beginning, there was an original and poetic language (Ursprache), rich in metaphors and figures, while today we use abstract and prose language (Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder).⁵² This story is generally told as one of decline: philosophical abstraction is considered to be deficient, which is the reason for speculations in poetics and history of philosophy about the possibilities of returning to this original language. The status quo thus is a paradoxical one: while the eighteenth century is generally seen as an age of the flourishing of prose (driven by rhetorical concerns), language is at the same time seen as having lost its archaic richness in metaphors and rhetorical figures (its original rhetoricality).

5 Aesthetics Aesthetics developed into a distinct discipline in the eighteenth century. The first use of the term “aesthetics” is attributable to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and appears in his Philosophical Meditations on Some Matters Pertaining to Poetry [Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, 1735], then as the title of his major work Aesthetics [Aesthetica, 1750/58]. The publication of this work can be interpreted as a sign of the dissociation of the theory of art from the requirements of rhetoric, not least because Baumgarten no longer focuses exclusively on texts. Nevertheless, his examples come predominantly from literature and oratory. The external structure of the Aesthetics follows the model of the five duties of the orator (officia oratoris; i.e., it adapts the rhetorical system to aesthetics), yet fills this model with different content, at least to some extent.⁵³ A discussion of the differences and similarities of individual arts arose concurrently with this development of aesthetics as a self-standing discourse, leading to systematic theories of art, often in the form of comprehensive compen-

and the Letter Within Philosophy [Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie, 1795]. See Peter Phillipp Riedl, Öffentliche Rede in der Zeitenwende. Deutsche Literatur und Geschichte um 1800 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 284– 286.  Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik, 453 – 455.  The extent to which Baumgarten’s theory is superimposed upon rhetorical norms is still heatedly discussed in the secondary literature; see Ursula Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis. Die Rolle der Sinnlichkeit in der Ästhetik des Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972); Marie-Luise Linn, “A.G. Baumgartens Aesthetica und die antike Rhetorik,” in Rhetorik. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom 16.–20. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmut Schanze (Frankfurt: Athanäum, 1974), 105 – 205.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

73

dia.⁵⁴ By far the most influential among them is Charles Batteux’s The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle [Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe, 1746]. The book was translated several times and was important for all discussions on poetics and aesthetics through to Kant. Historically considered, two criteria are important here for a closer definition of oratory’s position in the system of arts.⁵⁵ (1) Batteux defines pleasure (le plaisir) as the ultimate purpose of the fine arts. Their function distinguishes them from the applied arts. Rhetoric, together with architecture, assumes an intermediate position: it shares with the fine arts the focus on pleasure, though this pleasure is embedded in a pragmatic context and hence not purposeless. It is this distinction between “purposeful” and “purposeless” that is responsible for the exclusion of rhetoric from the system of the arts since the end of the eighteenth century. Especially in German Idealism (from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Theodor Vischer in the nineteenth century), this distinction fuels a veritable hostility towards rhetoric. In the background is the postulate of aesthetic autonomy that frees art from any non-aesthetic purposes. (2) Initially, Moses Mendelssohn follows Baumgarten in his influential treatise On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences [Über die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften, 1757], but then differentiates between the “fine sciences [schöne Wissenschaften]” and “fine arts [schöne Künste]”: the former include poetry and oratory as they use “arbitrary signs [willkürliche Zeichen]” based on the principle of convention; while the latter (i. e., painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance) use natural signs [natürliche Zeichen] that are based on the principle of similarity.⁵⁶ Mendelssohn’s theory became fundamental for the numerous theories of fine arts or sciences that appeared in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Kant contests the possibility of any science of the beautiful (schöne Wissenschaft). His main argument was that the beautiful, which pleases without a concept, could not deliver any science. In the decades following the

 Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Das moderne System der Künste,” in Humanismus und Renaissance, ed. Eckhard Keßler, Humanistische Bibliothek. Abhandlungen. Texte. Scripte. Reihe I: Abhandlungen (Munich: Fink, 1976), 164– 313; Werner Strube, “Die Geschichte des Begriffs ‘Schöne Wissenschaften,’” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 33 (1990) 2: 136 – 216.  Wolfgang Ullrich, “Kunst/Künste/System der Künste,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in 7 Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2001), 578.  Moses Mendelssohn, Ästhetische Schriften in Auswahl (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), 182– 184.

74

Dietmar Till

publication of Kant’s work, that the concept of “schöne Wissenschaften” entered a severe crisis. Johann Joachim Eschenburg, who had submitted the most successful work of this kind with his Preliminaries of a Theory and Literature of Fine Sciences [Entwurf einer Theorie und Literatur der schönen Wissenschaften, 1783], changes the title of his book in the fourth edition to Preliminaries of a Theory and Literature of Fine Oratory [Entwurf einer Theorie und Literatur der schönen Redekünste, 1812] under the pressure of the Kantian argument.

6 Stylistics, style theories, and the individualization of style In classical rhetoric, the theory of effective and aesthetically pleasing style had its place within the theory of the mastery of stylistic elements (elocutio). This included the study of the virtues of style (virtutes dicendi) and thus also included the doctrine of tropes and figures. Because of the proximity to poetry, this field of rhetorical theory takes up considerable space in textbooks since antiquity and was the subject matter of multiple separate treatises. Examining the history of rhetoric since the early modern period, Gérard Genette has even spoken of the restriction of rhetoric to the doctrine of tropes and figures, out of which our current tendency to equate rhetoric with stylistics originated. Initially, in the eighteenth century, this status quo of rhetorical theory was largely unchanged: discussions of appropriate style were ongoing within the systematic framework of rhetoric and poetics. Examples of this are the extensive chapters on figures in the rhetorics of Hallbauer, Fabricius or Gottsched; among these, the latter stands out, as his treatment of the doctrine of figures is considerably more substantial in the Attempt at a Critical Poetics [Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, 1729/30] and in his Complete Rhetoric [Ausführliche Redekunst, 1736]. Already in the rhetorics of the early Enlightenment, however, a tendency began to emerge that would shape later developments, namely the tendency towards the personalization of style, such that style is to be an authentic expression of the orator’s or the writer’s personality. The dictum of Buffon, “style is the man himself [Le style c’est l’homme même],” becomes virtually proverbial.⁵⁷ The turn to individuality and naturalness of style marks a departure from the stylistic principles of rhetoric. Within rhetoric, there exists the measure of the right style, which was primarily evaluated according to the principles of the inner and exter-

 Bernhard Sowinski, Stilistik. Stiltheorien und Stilanalysen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 20.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

75

nal aptum, i. e., the appropriateness for the topic and audience, respectively.⁵⁸ These standards were based on normatively understood models such as Cicero’s style of artistic prose and speeches (Ciceronianism) amongst others, and here, the individuality of the speaker was viewed only as a topos (ut vir, sic oratio). This changed in the early Enlightenment, in which naturalness became the ideal of style par excellence, in a deliberate rejection of early modern scholarly culture (e.g., as later manifested in the Sturm und Drang). At the same time, the aesthetics of expression (Ausdrucksästhetik) took the place of the model of rhetorical production.⁵⁹ That said, this process should not be viewed as a radical break; instead, it managed to update elements of the rhetorical system, and thus remained within the framework of the classical rhetorical tradition. The self-affection of the orator, as is required by Quintilian and Horace in his The Art of Poetry [Ars poetica], is crucial here: only if the orator (or poet) is emotionally taken with his topic can he plausibly convey these affects to the audience. In classical theory, this self-affection is understood as a technique, available for the use of an orator; nonetheless, it would always presuppose mastery of rhetorical theory.⁶⁰ This mutual interdependency of the nature/art (natura/ars) dialectic shifts in the course of the century towards the dominance of nature. One indicator in the field of poetic theory is the emergence of the concept of genius that rejects all of the rhetorical norms: for genius is seen, as Kant postulates in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, as “the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art.”⁶¹ For eighteenth-century theories of style, in addition to self-affection, another point of reference was of considerable importance, namely the theory of figurative speech, as put forward in Bernard Lamy’s On the Art of Speaking [De l’art de parler, 1675] based on a Cartesian theory of language.⁶² Unlike systematic rhetoric, Lamy is not interested in how figures and tropes are deliberatively used to achieve a certain effect in the process of textual production. Instead, Lamy discusses how the natural affective condition of a man, the psycho-physiological constitution of his brain, is impressed into his speech in a relief-like way. In  Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric. A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 1998), 460 – 461.  Dietmar Till, “Ausdruck – rhetorisch/ästhetisch. Zur Etablierung einer Ausdrucksästhetik zwischen Aufklärung und Sturm und Drang,” in Figuren des Ausdrucks. Formation einer Wissenskategorie zwischen 1700 und 1850, ed. Tobias Robert Klein and Erik Porath (Munich: Fink, 2011), 49 – 68.  Dietmar Till, “Affekt contra ars. Wege der Rhetorikgeschichte um 1700,” Rhetorica. A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 24 (2006): 337– 369.  Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 46, 186.  Behrens, Problematische Rhetorik, 2; Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik, 319 – 321.

76

Dietmar Till

the chapters on the mastery of stylistic elements (elocutio), the rhetorics of the early Enlightenment consistently refer to Lamy’s postulate of figural expression. The “stirring of the will,” as Fabricius calls it, expresses nature “by itself, without compulsion in speech”; the figures and tropes thus produced could therefore be called “the language of affects.”⁶³ Hallbauer refers back to the postulate of self-affection; the affect generates figures automatically: “One must have the affect that one wants to arouse in others in one’s own heart, [since] this way it will manifest itself in the matter, in the expression of it, and in the entire outward demonstration; in a word, it will speak for itself and thus infect [anstecken] the audience too.”⁶⁴ Knowledge of rhetorical theory is no longer necessary to be able to speak successfully; indeed, “a poor and afflicted man can move one to pity, even if he did not learn from the oratory how he should excite the same.”⁶⁵ The ars-based rhetoric of the early modern period is transformed into a rhetoric of affect, which makes rhetorical skills redundant. Such “progressive” theories, however, became widespread only towards the end of the century. At first there were only theoretical treatises on style, like Johann Christoph Adelung’s extensive three-part textbook On German Style [Ueber den deutschen Styl, 1785]. This work marks a break with rhetorical tradition not because it abandons the unity of the five duties of the orator (officia oratoris)⁶⁶ – these kinds of specialized rhetorical works had existed since late antiquity – but rather because a clear boundary is drawn between genius and a mere exercise in craft: according to Adelung,⁶⁷ the the process of developing arguments (inventio) is the “work of a true genius,” but for mastery of style (elocutio) it is sufficient to learn and practice the rhetorical craft. New to Adelung’s extensive classification of linguistic expressions was the consequent consistent focus on the contemporary faculty psychology (Vermögenspsychologie). It would prevail in the late Enlightenment and would become the classification principle of the doctrines of tropes and figures by J. G. Sulzer, J. J. Eschenburg, and others. Already in Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts, there was a tendency that would eventually lead to a dismissal of rhetoric, namely the individualization of style that opposes any normalization and pulls the rug out from under rhetorical

 Johann Andreas Fabricius, Philosophische Oratorie, Das ist: Vernünftige Anleitung zur gelehrten und galanten Beredsamkeit (Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974), 189.  Hallbauer, Anweisungen zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie, 323.  Halbauer, Anweisungen zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie, 323.  Marie-Luise Linn, Studien zur deutschen Rhetorik und Stilistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Elwert, 1963), 9.  Johann Christoph Adelung, Ueber den Deutschen Styl (Berlin 1785; repr. Hildesheim and New York: Olms 1974), 1: 1726.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

77

art (technê). Since the end of the eighteenth century, this received the proper disciplinary name of stylistics. ⁶⁸ For Sulzer, style is not only a characteristic of the linguistic surface (the verba), but even more so of the underlying thought (the res), insofar as the distinctive character of the speaker expresses itself in style:⁶⁹ “The special imprint that the work receives from the artist’s character and his, transient at best, state of mind, seems to be what one credits to the art of writing or to style.”⁷⁰ The art of rhetoric can do nothing about the state of the speaker’s mind, which is based on the natural assets of the speaker. It is therefore logical that Sulzer rejects typological models of style, such as the system of three styles (Dreistillehre).⁷¹ In his Lectures on Style [Vorlesungen über den Styl, 1793/94], Karl Philipp Moritz radicalizes individual stylistics, again turning against rhetorical theory in arguing that it tries “to teach what cannot be taught”⁷². Here, he targets the rhetorical efforts that try to classify the linguistic means of expression and normalize style by resorting to authoritative models. Yet style exists – and this is Moritz’s central argument – not in model-generalities, but rather in “peculiars,” for which no rules can be formulated.⁷³ This special feature of style, which he elsewhere calls “characteristic [eigenthümlich],”⁷⁴ cannot be taught but rather only observed. Indeed, we can draw a line from Moritz onward to the organic theories of language in Romanticism, through Gustav Gerber up to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Basel lectures on rhetoric (1872/73).

7 Declamation, the art of elocution, and drama theory Rhetorical systems typically concluded with the discussion of how the actio (bodily eloquence) or pronuntiatio (vocal delivery) form the presentation of the speech. In classical rhetoric, this topic is covered at length by Quintilian, to whom later authors frequently refer.⁷⁵ The Roman rhetorician holds the perform-

 Sowinski, Stilistik. Stiltheorien und Stilanalysen, 22.  Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Künste, 1049.  Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Künste, 1047.  Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Künste, 1051.  Karl Philipp Moritz, Vorlesungen über den Styl oder praktische Anweisung zu einer guten Schreibart mit Beispielen aus den vorzüglichsten Schriftstellern (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1808), 1.  Moritz, Vorlesungen über den Styl, 4.  Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik, 371.  See Quintillian, Inst. or. XI,3.

78

Dietmar Till

ance to be the decisive achievement of the orator, but at the same time he is sceptical as to whether this can be learned. Correspondingly, bodily eloquence and vocal delivery (actio/pronuntiatio) are usually treated merely as appendages of the classical canons of rhetoric related to textual production in the rhetorical tradition. Nevertheless, there are works devoted exclusively to rhetorical performance beginning in the sixteenth century.⁷⁶ These works in German became increasingly popular in the mid-eighteenth century, starting with Johann Friedrich Löwen’s Compact Principles of Bodily Eloquence [Kurtzgefaßte Grundsätze von der Beredsamkeit des Leibes, 1755]. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a separate art of declamation forms on the basis of the theory of bodily eloquence, which first draws on rhetorical principles, but then quickly differentiates itself as a discipline beyond rhetoric.⁷⁷ It focuses primarily on the artistic presentation of lyrical and dramatic texts. The art of elocution adapts theoretical elements from metrics and rhythmics and develops differentiated notation systems for vocal presentation and thereby for the textualization of oral speech.⁷⁸ Key works in this regard are Karl Philipp Moritz’s Attempt at a German Prosody [Versuch einer deutschen Prosodie, 1786] and Christian Gotthold Schocher’s Should Speech Remain a Dark Singing, or Could its Ways, Cues and Motions be Drawn Vividly in the Manner of Music [Soll die Rede auf immer ein dunkler Gesang bleiben, oder können ihre Arten, Gänge und Bewegungen nicht anschaulich, nach Art der Tonkunst gezeichnet werden, 1791]. The other branch of rhetorical theory that inherently deals with presentation is the theory of drama.⁷⁹ Classical rhetoricians had already emphasized the proximity of bodily eloquence to theatrical performance.⁸⁰ Training in acting, which has its social and historical place in the scholastic theater that was used as a rhetorical training ground during the early modern period, was based at first en-

 Dietmar Till, “Rhetorik und Schauspieltheorie,” in Körpertechniken in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ausstellungskatalog, ed. Rebekka von Mallinckrodt (Wolfenbüttel: Harrassowitz, 2008), 61– 84 and 270 – 283.  Irmgard Weithase, Anschauungen über das Wesen der Sprechkunst von 1775 – 1825 (Berlin: Germanische Studien, 1930); Christian Winkler, Elemente der Rede. Die Geschichte ihrer Theorie in Deutschland von 1750 bis 1850 (Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer, 1931); Mary Helen Dupree, “From ‘Dark Singing’ to a Science of the Voice: Gustav Anton von Seckendorff, the Declamatory Concert and the Acoustic Turn Around 1800,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 3 (2012): 365 – 396.  For an overview, see Johann Nikolaus Schneider, Ins Ohr geschrieben. Lyrik als akustische Kunst zwischen 1750 und 1800 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 175 – 177.  Dene Barnett, The Art of Gesture. The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg: Winter, 1987).  Till, “Rhetorik und Schauspieltheorie.”

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

79

tirely on rhetorical theory. This is the reason why separate works on theories of acting only appear in the eighteenth century, beginning with the Dissertation on Stage Acting [Dissertatio de actione scenica, 1727] by the Jesuit Franciscus Lang, who brings together the main ideas of classical rhetoric (especially Quintilian’s Training of an Orator [Institutio oratoria]) and Baroque rhetoric, and sums up the practices of the previous centuries. In the following years, pioneering (also for drama theory and dramatic practice) is above all François Riccoboni’s treatise Theatrical Art [L’art du théâtre, 1750] (which Lessing translated and critically edited)⁸¹ and also Johann Joachim Engel’s Sketches for a Manual of Gesture [Ideen zu einer Mimik, 1785/86]. These and other authors no longer sought to establish a connection to rhetorical theory (although one can find borrowings from individual theoretical elements and intertextual references, mostly from Quintilian’s Training of an Orator); they increasingly relied on references to contemporary anthropology and empirical psychology, which replace rhetoric as a leading discipline.⁸² School rhetoric was deemed to be too regulated and standardized (and, in fact, boring); in its place, one was to search for an authentic expression of affects through corresponding natural gestures and vocal control.⁸³ This suggests that these authors did not utterly reject rhetoric (Quintilian expressed similar ideas on effective bodily eloquence), but rather that they transformed it into a solidified contemporary form of school rhetoric. The essential tool for natural presentation is self-affection, by means of which an actor projects himself or herself into the character he or she is supposed to embody. The postulate that the actor identify with the character remained a constant in representational theory, all the way through to Brecht’s theater aesthetics of the early twentieth century.

 Wolfgang F. Bender, “Vom ‘tollen Handwerk’ zur Kunstübung. Zur ‘Grammatik’ der Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert. Grundlagen, Praxis, Autoren, ed. Wolfgang F. Bender (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), 24– 26.  See Johann Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik (Berlin: Mylius, 1785), 1: 106 – 107; also Bender, “Vom ‘tollen Handwerk’ zur Kunstübung. Zur ‘Grammatik’ der Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert,” 40 – 41.  Bender, “Vom ‘tollen Handwerk’ zur Kunstübung. Zur ‘Grammatik’ der Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert,” 25.

80

Dietmar Till

8 Classical rhetoric and rhetorical anthropology in transition Shifting theories of acting, as well as of the process of developing arguments and mastery of stylistic elements (inventio and elocutio), show that one cannot simply assume a model of disintegration when looking at eighteenth-century rhetorical theory. That said, the counter-thesis of the persistent continuity of the rhetorical tradition is also not convincing, given the disciplinary breakdown of rhetoric. Without a doubt, like school rhetoric, rhetorical theory lost its social and historical foundation in the course of the eighteenth century, yet individual elements of the rhetorical system were theoretically revised in the context of newly formed disciplines such as psychology, pedagogy, and aesthetics. It is therefore advisable to recognize the crucial difference between rhetoric as a discipline or system and rhetoric as a form of anthropological knowledge. ⁸⁴ While the discipline of rhetoric ceased to exist after 1800 (depending on the territory within the “Reich,” this process takes place between 1750 and 1850), elements and concepts of rhetorical theory were assimilated by other disciplines. Some examples: the doctrine of chreia developed by Weise around 1700 formed the basis of the method of essay writing (Aufsatzlehre) developed in nineteenth-century German philology; Baumgarten’s aesthetics relies heavily on categories derived from classical rhetoric; and modern hermeneutics (up to Gadamer) is often explained as the counterpart of rhetoric (understood as the reversal of speaking and writing).⁸⁵ Translated by Viktorija Romascenko

 See Rüdiger Campe, Affekt und Ausdruck. Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990); Dietmar Till, “Zwischen Ubiquität und Tod – Neuere Forschungen zur Rhetorik im 18. Jahrhundert,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 28 (2004); Carsten Zelle, “Fall und Aufstieg der Rhetorik in der Moderne,” in Die Sieben Freien Künste in Antike und Gegenwart, ed. Reinhold F. Glei (Trier: WVT, 2006); Dietmar Till, “Anthropologie oder System? Ein Plädoyer für Entscheidungen,” Rhetorik. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 23 (2004): 11– 25.  See Glenn Most, “Rhetorik und Hermeneutik. Zur Konstitution der Neuzeitlichkeit,” Antike und Abendland 30 (1984): 62– 79.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

81

Works Cited Adelung, Johann Christoph. Ueber den Deutschen Styl. 3 vols. Berlin 1785. Reprint, Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1974. Bader, Eugen. Rede-Rhetorik, Schreib-Rhetorik, Konversationsrhetorik. Eine historisch-systematische Analyse. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. Barner, Wilfried. Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970. Barnett, Dene. The Art of Gesture. The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting. Heidelberg: Winter, 1987. Behrens, Rudolf. Problematische Rhetorik. Studien zur französischen Theoriebildung der Affektrhetorik zwischen Cartesianismus und Frühaufklärung. Munich: Fink, 1982. Bender, Wolfgang F. “Vom ‘tollen Handwerk’ zur Kunstübung. Zur ‘Grammatik’ der Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert. Grundlagen, Praxis, Autoren, edited by Wolfgang F. Bender, 11 – 50. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992. Bosse, Heinrich. “Dichter kann man nicht bilden. Zur Geschichte der Schulrhetorik nach 1770.” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 10, no. 1 (1978): 80 – 125. Campe, Rüdiger. Affekt und Ausdruck. Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. Dupree, Mary Helen. “From ‘Dark Singing’ to a Science of the Voice: Gustav Anton von Seckendorff, the Declamatory Concert and the Acoustic Turn Around 1800.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 3 (2012): 365 – 396. Dyck, Joachim, and Jutta Sandstede. Quellenbibliographie zur Rhetorik, Homiletik und Epistolographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum. 3 vols. Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996. Engel, Johann Jakob. Ideen zu einer Mimik. 2 vols. Berlin: Mylius, 1785. Fabricius, Johann Andreas. Philosophische Oratorie, Das ist: Vernünftige Anleitung zur gelehrten und galanten Beredsamkeit. Leipzig 1724. Reprint, Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974. First published 1724. Fauser, Markus. Das Gespräch im 18. Jahrhundert. Rhetorik und Geselligkeit in Deutschland. Stuttgart: M&P Verlag, 1991. Fauser, Markus. Rede-Rhetorik, Schreib-Rhetorik, Konversationsrhetorik. Eine historisch-systematische Analyse. ScriptOralia 69. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. France, Peter. Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to Diderot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Frank, Horst Joachim. Dichtung, Sprache, Menschenbild. Geschichte des Deutschunterrichts von den Anfängen bis 1945. 2 vols. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1973. Franke, Ursula. Kunst als Erkenntnis. Die Rolle der Sinnlichkeit in der Ästhetik des Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972. Fuhrmann, Manfred. Rhetorik und öffentliche Rede. Über die Ursachen des Verfalls der Rhetorik im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1983. Goldenbaum, Ursula. Appell an das Publikum. Die öffentliche Debatte in der deutschen Aufklärung. Berlin: Akademie, 2004.

82

Dietmar Till

Gottsched, Johann Christoph. Ausführliche Redekunst. 1736. Reprint, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973. Grimm, Gunter E. Literatur und Gelehrtentum in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zum Wandel ihres Verhältnisses vom Humanismus bis zur Frühaufklärung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Nachdruck und um ein Vorwort ergänzt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. Hallbauer, Friedrich Andreas. Anweisungen zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie. Jena 1725. Reprint, Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, Russell A. Berman, Karen Kenkel, and Arthur Strum. Öffentlichkeit. Geschichte eines kritischen Begriffs. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000. Jäger, Georg. Sozialgeschichte des deutschen Unterrichts an höheren Schulen von der Spätaufklärung bis zum Vormärz. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Knape, Joachim. “Barock (1. Deutschland).” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, vol. 1, 1285 – 1332. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. Knape, Joachim. Poetik und Rhetorik in Deutschland 1300 – 1700. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. Koschorke, Albrecht. Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts Munich: Fink, 1999. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “Das moderne System der Künste.” In Humanismus und Renaissance, edited by Eckhard Keßler, translated by Renate Schweyen-Ott, vol. 2 164 – 313. Munich: Fink, 1976. Kühlmann, Wilhelm. Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat. Entwicklung und Kritik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des Barockzeitalters. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric. A Foundation for Literary Study. Edited by David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson. Translated by Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton. Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 1998. Linn, Marie-Luise. “A.G. Baumgartens Aesthetica und die antike Rhetorik.” In Rhetorik. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom 16.–20. Jahrhundert, edited by Helmut Schanze, 105 – 125. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1974. Linn, Marie-Luise. Studien zur deutschen Rhetorik und Stilistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Marburg: Elwert, 1963. Ludwig, Otto. Der Schulaufsatz. Seine Geschichte in Deutschland. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988. Matthias, Adolf. Geschichte des deutschen Unterrichts. Munich: Beck, 1907. Mendelssohn, Moses. Ästhetische Schriften in Auswahl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Vorlesungen über den Styl oder praktische Anweisung zu einer guten Schreibart mit Beispielen aus den vorzüglichsten Schriftstellern. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1808. Most, Glenn. “Rhetorik und Hermeneutik. Zur Konstitution der Neuzeitlichkeit.” Antike und Abendland 30 (1984): 62 – 79. Neuber, Wolfgang. “Memoria.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, vol. 5, 1037 – 1078. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001.

The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century

83

Paulsen, Friedrich. Der Gelehrte Unterricht im Zeichen des alten Humanismus 1450 – 1740. Vol. 1 of Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitäten vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965. Petrus, Klaus. “Convictio oder persuasio? Etappen einer Debatte in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Rüdiger – Fabricius – Gottsched).” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 113 (1994): 481 – 495. Riedl, Peter Phillipp. Öffentliche Rede in der Zeitenwende. Deutsche Literatur und Geschichte um 1800. Studien zur deutschen Literatur 142. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In a Series of Letters. Translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard Ashley Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm. Topica universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft. Paradeigmata 1. Hamburg: Meiner 1983. Schneider, Johann Nikolaus. Ins Ohr geschrieben. Lyrik als akustische Kunst zwischen 1750 und 1800. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. Schneiders, Werner. Das Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Munich: Beck, 1997. Sowinski, Bernhard. Stilistik. Stiltheorien und Stilanalysen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. Strube, Werner. “Die Geschichte des Begriffs ‘Schöne Wissenschaften.’” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 33 (1990): 136 – 216. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der Künste. In einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1774. Till, Dietmar. “Affekt contra ars. Wege der Rhetorikgeschichte um 1700.” Rhetorica. A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 24 (2006): 337 – 369. Till, Dietmar. “Anthropologie oder System? Ein Plädoyer für Entscheidungen.” Rhetorik. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 23 (2004): 11 – 25. Till, Dietmar. “Ausdruck – rhetorisch/ästhetisch. Zur Etablierung einer Ausdrucksästhetik zwischen Aufklärung und Sturm und Drang.” In Figuren des Ausdrucks: Formation einer Wissenskategorie zwischen 1700 und 1850, edited by Tobias Robert Klein and Erik Porath, 49 – 68. Munich: Fink, 2011. Till, Dietmar. “Kommunikation der Aufklärung. Über Popularphilosophie und Rhetorik.” In Die Sachen der Aufklärung: Beiträge zur DGEJ-Jahrestagung 2010 in Halle a. d. Saale, edited by Frauke Berndt, 97 – 111. Hamburg: Meiner, 2012. Till, Dietmar. “Rhetorik und Schauspieltheorie.” In Körpertechniken in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ausstellungskatalog, edited by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, 61 – 84; 270 – 283. Wolfenbüttel: Harrassowitz, 2008. Till, Dietmar. Transformationen der Rhetorik. Untersuchungen zum Wandel der Rhetoriktheorie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. Till, Dietmar. “Zwischen Ubiquität und Tod – Neuere Forschungen zur Rhetorik im 18. Jahrhundert.” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 28 (2004): 83 – 95. Ullrich, Wolfgang. “Kunst/Künste/System der Künste.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in 7 Bänden, edited by Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, vol. 3, 556 – 616. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2001. Weimar, Klaus. Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 1989. Weithase, Irmgard. Anschauungen über das Wesen der Sprechkunst von 1775 – 1825. Berlin: Germanische Studien, 1930.

84

Dietmar Till

Winkler, Christian. Elemente der Rede. Die Geschichte ihrer Theorie in Deutschland von 1750 bis 1850. Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer, 1931. Zelle, Carsten. “Fall und Aufstieg der Rhetorik in der Moderne.” In Die Sieben Freien Künste in Antike und Gegenwart, edited by Reinhold F. Glei, 237 – 263. Trier: WVT, 2006.

Ellwood Wiggins

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments “Sympathy” was a key term in two of the liveliest discourses of the eighteenth century.¹ On the one hand it provided the underlying foundation of influential moral philosophies from Rousseau to leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which has received a renaissance of attention from economists and political scientists over the past decade, is in many ways the culmination of this trend in the moral sense tradition.² On the other hand it was a principle term of contention in the battleground of theatrical practice and theory. From Lillo and Steele in England to Diderot and Beaumarchais in France, the heralded bourgeois drama was meant to elicit sympathy with the internal feelings of its protagonists as a principal distinguishing characteristic over and against the older Baroque tragedies of external affect. The clearest enunciation of this new theatrical ideal comes from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose famous maxim, “the most compassionate person is the best person,”³ serves as his defense of sympathy as the chief edifying aim of all tragedy. While sympathy provided the first keystone of human epistemology for sentimentalist philosophy,⁴ it represented the final telos for sentimentalist theater.

 There is no space in this essay to dwell on the thorny issues of Smith and Lessing’s terminology. Briefly, “sympathy” in Smith usually refers to what psychologists today call “empathy” (the capacity to feel emotions that others feel), though sometimes it must be understood in the more limited sense of feeling pity for another’s misfortunes. Lessing’s use of Mitleid is precisely the opposite: usually it refers to pity; occasionally it should be understood as empathy. For English usage, see Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Emotion: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 301– 304. For Lessing’s Mitleid, see Thomas Martinec, Lessings Theorie der Tragödienwirkung. Humanistische Tradition und aufklärerische Erkenntniskritik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), especially 164– 181.  See especially the enthusiastic reception of Smith’s TMS as a tool for grounding international justice by Amartya Sen, “Open and Closed Impartiality,” Journal of Philosophy 99, no. 9 (2002): 445 – 69.  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Nicolai, and Moses Mendelssohn, Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1972), 55. All translations from German are by the author.  David Hume, Moral Philosophy (Hackett: Indianapolis, 2006), 31.

86

Ellwood Wiggins

Any investigation of the performance of knowledge in the eighteenth century cannot do without an inquiry into sympathy’s interpersonal operation. If one begins to look at the rhetoric of sympathy in these two discourses side by side, however, one notices that the philosophers constantly borrow the language and imagery of theatricality while the dramatists repeatedly make assumptions about ethical distinctions. This essay will show that despite this affinity, each of the two discourses seems to have precisely the other’s focus on compassion as its own blind spot.⁵ We can see evidence for this mutual neglect best in two of the most developed thinkers who championed compassion in their respective fields, Smith and Lessing.⁶ Smith’s understanding of the mechanics of sympathy is profoundly theatrical, but he never engages seriously with the theater or the actor’s craft. Lessing’s hope for the playhouse as a place of moral improvement, meanwhile, never openly addresses the ethically questionable structure of voyeuristic and self-interested theatrical compassion. The concrete language of both writers, however, forces a reckoning with the very issues that they seem to ignore. This essay does not argue for a reductionist deconstruction of the respective discourses, but rather points to a productive paradox inherent in the theatrical structure of sympathy. It turns out that the birth of a new theatrical genre, the bourgeois tragedy, provides the stage for sympathy to act out its paradoxes. In addition to showcasing heroes from the emerging middle class, as the name of this eighteenth-century innovation implies, the bourgeois drama also distinguishes itself from earlier theatrical

 This mutual neglect and its implications have gone largely unremarked in scholarship despite many excellent studies on the discourses of both theater and moral philosophy in the eighteenth century. David Marshall has written two insightful book-length investigations of sympathy and the theatrical: The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). The first has a helpful chapter on Adam Smith, which rightly demonstrates that the discussion of sympathy in TMS is suffused with the theatrical. He does not, however, remark on the strange absence of the stage and acting from Smith’s thoroughly performative analysis.  It is surprising that there has not been more comparative scholarship on Smith and Lessing. For Smith’s influence on Lessing’s later thought, see Arnold Heidsieck, “Adam Smith’s Influence on Lessing’s View of Man and Society,” Lessing Yearbook 15 (1983): 125 – 143; and Helga Slessarev, “Nathan der Weise und Adam Smith,” in “Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang,” ed. Wilfried Barner and Alfred M. Reh, special issue, Lessing Yearbook (1984): 248 – 256. For an insightful reflection on sympathy and rhetoric in Lessing and Smith, see Zachary Sng, “Parenthyrsos: On the Medium which is not One,” Modern Language Notes 125, no. 5 (2010): 1029 – 1049.

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

87

modes by aiming to communicate interior states of feeling to audiences.⁷ It is a theater of sentiment rather than of affect, and sympathy is one of the principle modes of its operation, both technically and morally. After making a brief show of the performative structure of sympathy in Smith, this essay turns to the close reading of a single act in the first famous German bourgeois tragedy, Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755). The play famously demands spectators’ sympathy for a fallen woman, Sara, and can be seen as a social plea for expanded tolerance and understanding. The act in question, however, features the play’s villain, Marwood, rather than its titular heroine. In it, a jilted woman tries to win back her lover by putting on a show of pity (Lessing 1755, II.1– 6, 448– 462).⁸ This scene provides evidence for three arguments this essay will lay out. First, the very theatricality of sympathy so devastatingly demonstrated here points surprisingly away from the vaunted moral efficacy of compassion and towards some later critics of this elusive sentiment, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Brecht. Second, by casting an experiment in new sentimental drama within a seeming throwback to older dramatic conventions, the act challenges prevailing generic understandings of the play. Finally, the essay shows how these two seemingly unrelated arguments – one concerning moral philosophy and the other concerning genre and literary history – are in fact inextricably linked. Just as Lessing cannot eschew Baroque gestures in inaugurating the bourgeois drama, Smith’s encomium to sympathy ignores the more natural, sentimental drama that would best fit its analysis in favor of stagey stoicism and tragedies of affect. These apparent contradictions do not negate the arguments in which they occur, but rather highlight the tensions at work in the dynamics of sympathy.

1 Adam Smith’s performative sympathy For Adam Smith, sympathy is central and fundamental to human morality, but in a way very different from Hume and other moral sense philosophers. Instead of being a mere mechanism whereby passions are communicated between people, it takes on a more normative character of judgment. When we see another person in joy or pain, our imagination calls forth similar sensations from our own memory, as in Hume, yet Smith immediately goes on to allow sympathy a greater power: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive our-

 Despite many excellent recent studies of the bourgeois drama, the best analysis of its paradoxes remains Peter Szondi, Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973).  Lessing, Werke und Briefe, ed. Conrad Wiedemann, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2003). Further citations are indicated parenthetically by act, scene, and page number.

88

Ellwood Wiggins

selves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him […]” (Smith 1759, TMS 9, emphasis added).⁹ This unifying function of fellow feeling provides the basis for all personal and civic virtue and perfectibility. Sympathy is therefore not only a faculty or mechanism with which we are all equipped, it is also a skill that we ought to practice and improve. The language Smith uses to describe how sympathy operates is surprisingly resonant with the work of many performance theorists, both in its insistence on an awareness of performance in every aspect of human behavior, and in its tendency to universalize this awareness as a key to explain every human action to an extent that can become vague and unhelpful.¹⁰ This performative nature becomes apparent in the verbs and images to which Smith repeatedly turns in order to describe sympathy’s working, as he constantly dips into the metaphorical well of both theatrical and musical performance for his vocabulary of fellowfeeling. From the stage: spectate; view; observe; wonder; change places in fancy; picture out in our imagination; from the concert hall: harmony of sentiment; concord; reecho; keep time with.¹¹ The two registers of visual and audible performance even inspire mixed metaphors: “to see the emotions of their hearts beat time to his own” (TMS 22, emphasis added). Let us look more closely at this passage, which vividly demonstrates the double nature of sympathy that is so crucial to Smith’s system. [Concerning the person who is the object of sympathy:] To see the emotions of their hearts [i.e., those of the sympathetic spectators], in every respect, beat time to his own, in the violent and disagreeable passions, constitutes his sole consolation. But he can only hope to obtain this by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him. He must flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him. In order to produce this concord, as nature teaches the spectators to assume the circumstances of the person principally concerned, so she teaches this last in some measure to assume those of the spectators. […] As their sympathy makes them look at it [the sufferer’s passion], in some measure, with his eyes, so his sympathy makes him look at it, in some measure, with theirs, especially when in their presence and acting under their observation. (TMS 22)

 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 22. Further citations are indicated parenthetically with TMS and page number.  See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskia Jain. (London: Routledge, 2008), 24– 37.  All taken from the first few chapters of TMS.

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

89

The anthropologist Erving Goffman could not have made his principle contention of mutual performativity more expressly than with Smith’s language describing “the habit which a man, who lives in the world, has acquired of considering how everything that concerns himself will appear to others” (TMS 43).¹² Despite this clear reliance on an awareness of performance as a fundamental category of Smith’s system, however – despite this insistence that we are always acting, whether we are the receivers or the givers of sympathy – he never speaks directly about the art of acting or the practices of the stage. The examples he takes from dramatic works are few and paltry compared with the use he makes of figures from the pages of Greek and especially Roman history. The narrative accounts of Livy and Plutarch are clearly much more alive and vivid to him than the plays of Shakespeare and Racine. But the way Smith describes his sympathetic judgment of their actions is again incredibly theatrical: In imagination we become the very person whose actions are represented to us: we transport ourselves in fancy to the scenes of those distant and forgotten adventures, and imagine ourselves acting the part of a Scipio or a Camillus. (TMS 75, emphasis added)

One is reminded of the young Wilhelm Meister, who cannot help but act out every narrative he reads on the inner stage of his mind. The activity of sympathy turns even the driest chronicles of history into a virtual theater. Smith, in one of his few explicit forays to the theater, even anticipates Schechner’s insistence that every aspect of an audience’s experience before, after and during a theatrical production is an integral part of the performance event:¹³ When we attend to the representation of a tragedy, we struggle against that sympathetic sorrow which the entertainment inspires as long as we can, and we give way to it at last only when we can no longer avoid it: we even then endeavor to cover our concern from the company. If we shed any tears, we carefully conceal them, and are afraid lest the spectators, not entering into this excessive tenderness, should regard it as effeminacy and weakness. (TMS 46)¹⁴

This is the only explicit acknowledgement of theatergoing in a book replete with performative imagery, and it calls attention to the performance of the spectators

 See Goffman on teams, 47– 65. Compare also Fischer-Lichte on co-presence, 38 – 74.  Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), esp. 70 – 71.  This passage also gives an anticipatory nod to Judith Butler’s claims about the cognizance with which we enact gender roles as we imagine them to be expected of us in society. See her “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519 – 31.

90

Ellwood Wiggins

rather than that of the actors. For a thinker whose language is so thoroughly theatrical, Smith is remarkably silent about the stage.¹⁵ Finally, and most interestingly, this reflecting action of sympathy (between the consciousness of the spectator and the spectated) is only one of the doubling splits that occur in Smith’s construction of self and other in the social system. He also makes it clear that a kind of second-order observation of sympathy is taking place in the sympathizer that is universally positive, regardless of the first-order passion being compassionated with. In the sentiment of approbation there are two things to be taken notice of; first, the sympathetic passion of the spectator; and, secondly, the emotion which arises from his observing the perfect coincidence between this sympathetic passion in himself, and the original passion in the person principally concerned. This last emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is always agreeable and delightful. The other may be agreeable or disagreeable, according to the nature of the original passion, whose features it must always, in some measure, retain. (TMS 46n)

Hume perceptively noted this feature as “the Hinge of [Smith’s] System.”¹⁶ He is very right to put his finger on this doubling, second-order sympathy as the key point of theoretical innovation in Smith’s moral theory. It is a powerful new explanatory model for human behavior, perfectability, and social harmony. At the same time, however, a closer inspection of the language used to describe sympathy reveals a serious and perhaps insurmountable paradox at the heart of Smith’s system. We saw above how the power of sympathy lets the spectator “become one” with the suffering person. Smith later describes how the same sympathy splits that very spectator as she regards herself. “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons […] spectator and actor […] judge and judged” (TMS 113). Sympathy both unites disparate persons into one and divides single individuals into two. This contradictory movement to simultaneously achieve unity and duality is not meant by Smith as some irony-laden Romantic maxim of productive paradox. The impartial spectator becomes: the man within the breast. […] With the eyes of this great inmate he has always been accustomed to regard whatever relates to himself. […] He does not merely affect the sentiments of the impartial spectator. He really adopts them. He almost identifies himself

 Space considerations prevent a thorough analysis of Smith’s mention of the theater here, but suffice it to say that the few appearances of theatrical performances in TMS concentrate on the audience (e. g., the nervous spectators of the tightrope walker, TMS 10) rather than the performers.  David Hume, Letter 36 to Adam Smith dated 28 July 1759, quoted in TMS 46n.

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

91

with, he almost becomes himself that impartial spectator, and scarce even feels but as that great arbiter of his conduct directs him to feel. (TMS 147)

Smith never confronts or reflects upon this apparent inconsistency, and the effect it might have on the practice or recipient of sympathy is left unclear. Instead, a play written in German some four years before Smith’s book was published stages this very problem with tellingly insightful results.

2 Lessing’s performance of sympathy It should not come as a complete surprise that Lessing, steeped as he was in the arguments of the moral sense philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, should hit upon this central point of Smith’s system. During the same years he was writing Miss Sara Sampson, Lessing was working on a translation of Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson had been a teacher and mentor to Smith, and the valorization of sympathy in his moral system founded on benevolence no doubt sent both men thinking along similar paths, as evidenced in Lessing’s famous correspondence on the nature of tragedy with Nicolai and Mendelssohn (1756 – 1757). Miss Sara Sampson, the first performance of which in Berlin helped instigate this flurry of letters between the three friends, represented a revolutionary moment in German theatrical history. Heralded as the first native “bourgeois tragedy,” it remained a huge success on German stages for the next twenty years. Just as enthusiastically as Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson was long hailed by literary historians as the first German bourgeois tragedy (bürgerliches Trauerspiel), critics lately have begun to revel in revealing the extent to which it still depends on rhetorical strategies and formal elements of the Baroque tragedy it is meant to replace. To do so, they have largely concentrated on the figure of Marwood, whose declamatory rage at the end of act two has been touted as the epitome of everything the bourgeois tragedy was intended to correct and supplant in earlier dramatic practice.¹⁷ Marwood personifies the “remainder”

 Anja Lemke nicely summarizes this tendency in criticism: “Marwoods sprachliche Inszenierung des Pathos gilt […] als Zeichen der unvollkommenen Umsetzung des ästhetischen Projekts einer auf Unmittelbarkeit und Natürlichkeit zielenden Darstellung von Leidenschaften. […] Bis in die kleinsten Details ihrer Rede und ihrer Körpersprache zeigt die Marwood in ihrem kontrollierten Spiel der simulatio die rhetorische Kunst der Verstellung und den bewussten kalkulierten Einsatz des Gefühls.” Lemke, “‘Medea fiam’– Affekterzeugung zwischen Rhetorik und Ästhetik in

92

Ellwood Wiggins

of Baroque rhetoric in the new, naturalistic drama. A glance at the scene (II.7) in which Marwood ‘becomes’ Medea makes it is easy to see why readers and watchers of the play as early as Lessing’s own friend Mendelssohn were left uneasy by the scene. If the chief programmatic goals of the bourgeois tragedy were (a) to produce characters closer in social position and feeling to average audience members instead of grand royalty or mythic heroes, (b) to replace a language of rhetorical affect with a more natural idiom, and (c) to exchange the pointed stimulation of passion for the realistic representation of sentiment,¹⁸ then Marwood here clearly violates every single one of these principles, almost as if she had a checklist of rules she intended to transgress one by one. Marwood herself, even within the short space of the scene in question, makes us unfailingly cognizant of her inconsistency with the new aesthetic when, at the opening of the scene, in full conformity to the sentimentalist program, she berates Mellefont for alluding to the ancient gods: MARWOOD mockingly: Express yourself without such learned allusions. (II.7.462)

Marwood thus anticipates the criticisms that Mendelssohn, Staiger, and a host of others would level at her character.¹⁹ Barely a page and a half later, however, she is dropping her own learned allusions [gelehrte Anspielungen], when she makes it clear she has transcended the representation of any “average” character who might be taken from the ranks of the audience: “Behold in me a new Medea!” (II.7.464). Marwood has thus clearly reverted back to the heroic grandiosity, the rhetorical flourishes, and the raging passions of an earlier dramatic idiom. This essay will do nothing to challenge this understanding of Marwood’s function as a vestige of Baroque Trauerspiel in the midst of Lessing’s new bourgeois tragedy.²⁰ Instead, it will uncover the surprising source of her reactionary

Lessings Miss Sara Sampson,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 2 (2012): 207.  These three programmatic “aims” are largely gleaned from Diderot’s preface and afterward to Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le père de famille (1758) respectively (Lessing translated both). The aims can also be sighted as early as George Lillo’s 1731 preface to The London Merchant, which Diderot and Lessing admired. The name of Marwood herself is a tribute to Lillo’s evil seductress, Millwood.  Emil Staiger, for instance, wryly claimed “Niemals sind einer verlassenen Geliebten, auch nicht der kältesten Intrigantin, solche Satzgefüge und Konjunktionen über die Lippen gekommen,” in “Rasende Weiber in der deutschen Tragödie des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 80 (1961): 377.  Lemke convincingly demonstrates connections between the ancient or humanistic rhetorical traditions and the aspirations of eighteenth-century aesthetic representation. See also Marti-

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

93

character. In turning to observe the events of act two leading up to Marwood’s assumption of the Medean mantle, this essay will show that it is, in fact, a failed test-run of the new type of bourgeois drama that necessitates her resorting to older models of affectation (II. 7– 8). Of the eight scenes in act two, only these last two exhibit the Baroque paroxysms that have garnered all the critical attention. In scenes 1– 5, in contrast, Marwood prepares and executes a seemingly successful sentimental drama for Mellefont. Scene 6, however, reveals the ephemerality of the play’s desired effect in its spectator. As we shall see, Mellefont’s progress as effected audience complements and shapes Marwood’s evolution as affected actor. Moreover, because Marwood’s resolution to kill Sara results from Mellefont’s refusal to heed her appeal, the origin of the tragic plot of the play as a whole has its seed in this first failed prototype of the sentimental drama. It is Marwood’s Baroque reaction to the failure of her aesthetics of sympathy that ultimately turns a potential tearful comedy (comédie larmoyante) into a bourgeois tragedy (tragédie bourgeoise).

3 Marwood as actress Let us turn back to the opening of the second act. In a play where the unity of place is conspicuously maintained by its setting in the quintessential space of transience – of changing between places – in an inn, only one act ever violates the original announcement of the setting in the very first scene of the first act: The setting [Schauplatz] is a hall in an inn Sir William Sampson and Waitwell enter in traveling clothes (I.1.433)

Act two alone is separated in space from this first specific inn, but the act’s locale is also a guesthouse: the type of space is identical. The second act thus simultaneously brackets itself off from the rest of the play by the change of setting while also precariously preserving the play’s unity of place by virtue of the interchangeability of roadway inns. The stage directions for act two echo those of act one:

nec’s Tragödienwirkung, which traces Lessing’s debt to pre-Enlightenment modes of thought in his reception of his contemporaries.

94

Ellwood Wiggins

The setting [Schauplatz] represents Marwood’s room in another inn Marwood in a negligé; Hannah (II.1.448)

As before the opening of act one, these lines of orientation before act two are the only indications of any characters’ dress – the introductions of all other figures throughout the first two acts are absent any sartorial directives. Sir William and his servant, meanwhile, appear in travel clothing [in Reisekleidern], surely the most appropriate dress for a place that is only useful for a pause before resuming travel. Marwood, in contrast (and the difference is stressed by the strange singularity of parallelism in costume notes), though she is also introduced in an inn (in another inn), appears in a negligée: she makes herself at home in the place of transience. The echoes in the introductory remarks to the two first acts serve to show off their disparities quite nicely. The contrasts thus highlighted, however, appear more cosmetic than substantial upon a closer look at the opening scene. Marwood is speaking to her servant, Hannah, in preparation for Mellefont’s arrival. She freely admits the just wrath she feels towards him, but then immediately reins in her anger: “Don’t I seem a little uneasy to you, Hannah? The traitor! But still! Enraged [zornig] is the last thing I should become” (II.1.449). She realizes from the beginning that an unbridled display of emotions will not achieve the desired effect on her former lover: she knows that the time of showcasing passions in the grandiloquent and lyrical mode of a Racine or Corneille has passed, and that a new type of theatricality is at hand. “Leniency, love, and entreaty [Nachsicht, Liebe, Bitten] are the only weapons I may use against him, if I rightly know his weak side” (II.1.449). She is listing out the techniques of the new sentimental drama: though Lessing and Diderot might shy away from terming them “weapons,” forbearance, love, and solicitation are indeed the stylistic and moralistic innovations they propose. Hannah immediately brings up the possibility of these tactics not working: “But what if he should be hardened against them?” (II.1.449). Marwood has two successive answers. First she foreshadows her eventual reaction when she learns that her play has indeed failed: “Then I won’t just be angry [zürnen] – I shall rage [rasen]! I can feel it, Hannah; and I’d rather be doing it now” (II.1.449). This quip makes it clear that if Marwood is anything “by nature,” then it is the excessively unnatural rhetorician she will later become. Her second response reveals the trump card with which she will eventually bring her upcoming sentimental theater-piece to a resounding climax: her daughter. Another great shift in the latter half of the eighteenth century, alongside and related to the rise of the domestic drama, has been touted as the inven-

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

95

tion of childhood and the growing idealized centrality of children in the family.²¹ It is no coincidence that the star sympathy-catcher in the play Marwood is staging should be the young Arabella, sole rival to Sara in innocence and authenticity.²² The mother has few illusions that the language of old love is much weaker than the language of blood, as she calls it, and has no qualms about using both to whatever effect they may achieve. Marwood thus gives her stage-manager, Hannah, a quick synopsis of the drama to come. In it, she will employ all the techniques the promoters of sentimentalist theater will aspire to in their programmatic writings.²³ In the domestic drama she puts on for Mellefont, Marwood successively tests out six strategies of the new theater: everything from the actor’s craft to moralistic ideals of tolerance, admiration, compassion, reason, and even a proto-Diderotian familial tableau. Let us examine these six policies in turn.

3.1 Technique of the actor Diderot and Lessing both had rather controversial notions about the technical aspects of acting – the Frenchman went so far as withholding publication of Paradox of the Actor [Paradoxe sur le comédien] until after his death (which means Lessing would not have had the pleasure of reading this delightfully slippery dialogue). Both men, however, would have agreed that to achieve a histrionic natural lifelikeness, which they championed over the bombastic posturing of the traditional French stage, a great deal of artifice would be necessary. Marwood displays the complexities involved in this artificial naturalness as she gives us a glance at how “an actress prepares” in the second scene of act two. MARWOOD: Oh, Hannah, he’s here now! How should I receive him? What should I say? What face should I wear […]? Is this one calm enough? Look at me! HANNAH: Anything but calm. MARWOOD: What about this one? HANNAH: Try a little more grace [Anmut – also: sweetness, charm].

 See Friedrich Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Göttingen, 1978), 14– 43. Although Kittler directs his claims to the time between Goethe’s composition of the Sendung and the Lehrjahre (1770s–1790s), it is important to remember that Goethe’s novels were set mid-century, and many of Kittler’s observations about the construction of ideas of childhood and family are already emerging in Sara.  In fact, it is remarkable how alike Sara and Bella are – they are the only two characters able to move Mellefont to pretend to commit to anything, and Mellefont’s interest in Sara seems more ruled by a suspiciously parental joy in her childlikeness than any more sexually mature motives.  See Lessing’s 1760 translation of Diderot’s prefaces (Werke und Briefe, Vol. 5.1, 15).

96

Ellwood Wiggins

MARWOOD: HANNAH: MARWOOD: HANNAH:

How about this? Too sad! Would this smile suit me? Perfect! But just more free – he’s coming. (II.2.450 – 51)

This exchange, in which Marwood tries on expressions as she might dresses before a ball, reveals the value of composure and grace as well as the importance of avoiding histrionic scenes of melodrama: “Too sad! [Zu traurig!].”²⁴ Hannah coaches her mistress in the natural ways of the new heroine of the stage – there is no more room for Phèdres full of fire and ice, but only for Saras steeped in sweetness and light. The crowning commentary on all this effort to achieve effortlessness arrives with Hannah’s final judgment: “Perfect!” she praises, “but just more free.” Naturalness and freedom can only be achieved by studiedly practiced craft. This is an exact staging of the way Smith argues the prospective recipient of sympathy should try to pitch her performance to the expectations of an audience. Expressions either too stoical or too passionate would turn off the spectator rather than draw him in to sweet sympathy. Hannah here is an embodiment of the division of Marwood’s self into a creature who feels and an “impartial spectator” who must moderate the outward appearance of those feelings. Marwood’s strained efforts to affect the naturalism of new sentimental heroines can thus be read as emblematic of the double bind placed on actresses in the second half of the eighteenth century in both their social situation and their acting craft. On the one hand, by being an actress, women were always already transgressing against traditional expectations of gender propriety. On the other hand, although the acting profession demands ostentation and flagrant affectation, actresses were suddenly expected to restrain this element of their artistic identity in order to play the self-effacing, demure roles (like Sara) that had come into fashion. Meanwhile, it is equally suggestive to think about how the character Sara is ultimately successful in winning Mellefont’s devoted spectatorship away from Marwood simply because she proves to be better at acting like the natural, unaffected object of sympathy that had come into vogue. Sara’s acting is more effective because it masks its theatricality. The play’s female rivalry thus dramatizes tensions inherent in the position of actresses in eighteenth-cen-

 Marwood: “Welche Miene soll ich annehmen? […] Ist diese ruhig genug?” Hannah: “Geben Sie noch mehr Anmut.” II.2.450 – 451.

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

97

tury Germany as documented in Mary Helen Dupree’s excellent study, The Mask and the Quill. ²⁵

3.2 Tolerance and forgiveness The appeal to tolerance was not only a programmatic ideal of the Enlightenment in general, but was a pet objective of Lessing’s dramatic efforts in particular. Miss Sara Sampson is no exception: the play takes a young woman who has run away from home in order to live in sin with a man and shows her not as a figure of horror and ridicule, an admonishing example of what to avoid, but rather as a picture of virtue and innocence, an object of sympathy and even admiration. Marwood’s first tactic in her performance for Mellefont is equally magnanimous in its espousal of toleration and forgiveness. Instead of appearing as the wronged, vengeful lover, as Mellefont expects, she approaches him with smiles. Mellefont would rather hear “reproaches,” as he quickly reminds her. She responds: You dear, funny soul, why would you forcibly compel me to remember a trifle that I forgave the very moment I found out about it? Does a brief infidelity that your gallantry, but not your heart, played on me really deserve reproach? Come, let’s laugh about it together! (II.3.452)

Thus does Marwood introduce her first strategy of programmatic tolerance and forgiveness for Mellefont’s transgressions. The eighteenth-century discourse of toleration and acceptance is based in right knowledge of the relation of the other to oneself, and thus it makes sense that Marwood should attempt to stage a scene of anagnorisis-like revelation here. Two successive but opposed discoveries in fact take place, both grounded in a claim to know Mellefont better than he can know himself.²⁶ The first of these asserted recognitions contends to espy the central goodness at Mellefont’s core; the second will descry his human weakness and evil. Thus we watch within the space of a few short minutes of stage business the two poles of contention about human nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – from Hobbesian insight into man’s depravity to Rousseauian sentimentalist testimonies to human goodness. Marwood first tries out the latter:

 Many thanks to Mary Helen Dupree for suggesting these lines of thought, which deserve to be pursued much further than space allows here. See her The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011).  Mellefont, “Ich kenne [Ihr Herz] besser als Sie” (II.3.452).

98

Ellwood Wiggins

MARWOOD: Your heart, Mellefont, is a good little fool. It lets itself get talked into whatever your imagination fancies. But believe me: I know it better than you do. If it weren’t the best, the most faithful of hearts, then I wouldn’t make such an effort to keep it. (II.3.452)

She immediately must confront the results of her misstep in claiming such a relation to the good heart she discerns in Mellefont, however, as he reacts with a fit of (proto‐) Marwoodian rhetorical hyperbole: “Marwood, if I thought that you possessed even a single fiber of my heart, then I would rip it out of my chest here before your eyes” (II.3.452). After this rebuff, she tries another tack with a second kind of recognition. MARWOOD confidentially: Just listen, my dear Mellefont; I know well what your situation is. (II.3.452)

This second strategy of tolerance is marked by two gestures that may seem to counter but in fact support her diagnosis of his character flaws. The stage direction makes explicit that she is to deliver the speech “confidentially [vertraulich],” and this sudden intimacy is even more emphasized by her move to the familiar form of the second person singular. In fact, these two speeches, in which Marwood is professing a forgiving recognition of Mellefont’s darker nature, are the only passages but one in the entire play where Marwood addresses Mellefont as du (the other occurs in Marwood’s rage at the end of the act). Appropriately, after sharing this intimate psychological study with its subject fails to effect change in him, she will return to Sie when she moves on to her next tactic (admiration). The content of Marwood’s diagnosis begins with a stoical (or Cartesian) assessment of human passions: “Your desires and your taste are now your tyrants” (II.3.452). But the treatment she prescribes for Mellefont is much more in line with the wryly knowing wink-wink-nudge-nudges of British moralists like Hume or Laurence Sterne: “But that’s okay: you have to get them out of your system [man muß sie austoben lassen]. It is foolhardy to resist them.” (II.3.452). She proposes instead to give his desires and passions “free range” (freies Feld) so that when they have eventually exhausted themselves in each novel object, he will return to her forgiving arms with fresh ardor. This brand of tolerance is one that recognizes the unavoidability of a man’s falling under the sway of his passions; one that simply forgives and forgets. Marwood’s second speech addressing Mellefont as du makes the character sketch even more pointed. “You men must not even know yourselves what you want” (II.3.453), she opines, and then proceeds to make a prophecy about the lifespan of Mellefont’s infatuation with Sara. She traces the development of his attachment from devotion to indifference week by week and gives the affair a month’s life expectancy. Sara’s

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

99

death at the end of the play prevents us from testing the accuracy of this prediction, but the wavering distaste at a prospective loss of freedom Mellefont expresses in his soliloquy after discovering that every hindrance to a hasty marriage with Sara has been removed (IV.2) gives no uncertain hint that Marwood indeed knows her patient very well.

3.3 Admiration (Bewunderung) Immediately after demonstrating that she knows the shabby side of Mellefont’s character, Marwood manages an adroit segue to prove that she is much nobler than he gives her credit for. She quotes from a letter Mellefont had sent her and turns his concern about “sums of money” into a subtle indictment of his petty (and in the England in which the play is set, utterly ungentlemanly) over-concern with money. She feigns doubt as to his authorship of the letter, which “an innkeeper must have written” (II.3.454) (which would render Mellefont as grubbily at home in the transience of hostelry as Marwood’s negligee seemed to do). Then, with hurt pride, she announces not only her willingness, but indeed her insistent desire that he should take back any valuable gifts she has received at his hand. In the same breath in which she continues her diagnostic of Mellefont’s forgiven imperfections, she engineers a moment of admiration for her own virtue and honor. But just as Lessing knew that admiration (Bewunderung) of stoical forbearance could never be a lasting effect of drama,²⁷ Marwood does not rest with this achievement: she immediately uses the potential state of penury to which this admirable act of self-denial would lead to provoke the next stage of her sentimental drama: pity.

3.4 Compassion, sentiment Not too long after Miss Sara Sampson was first performed in Frankfurt (Oder), Lessing engaged in a correspondence about the purpose and function of tragedy in which he claimed, “These are the steps: fear; pity; wonder [Schrecken, Mitleid, Bewunderung]. The name of the ladder, though, is pity; fear and wonder are nothing but the first buds, the beginning and the end of pity.”²⁸ Marwood  See Lessing’s respectful arguments with Mendelssohn, who held Bewunderung to be the chief end of tragedy (Lessing, Briefwechsel, 80). As we shall see, Adam Smith would surprisingly side with Mendelssohn in this debate.  Lessing, Briefwechsel, 54.

100

Ellwood Wiggins

seems to get the order of the steps a bit out of kilter, as she will move from this momentary ploy for admiration directly to a plea for compassion, and will invoke fear (in the guise of a Baroque Medea) only after her sentimental drama has run its course and proven a failure. Perhaps we can say that she descends the ladder rather than climbs it: admiration is a first step and fear the result of its end. But the ladder’s central coherence in compassion is certainly at work throughout Marwood’s production in scenes 1– 4 of act two. The centrality of sympathy is evident from her very first words to Mellefont at the beginning of their interview: “Share my joy! [Teilen Sie doch meine Freude!]” (II.3.451). Marwood’s conception of Mitleid in this opening salvo is clearly more akin to that of the British moral-sense philosophers (something like the later “empathy”) than that of Aristotle (a more discriminating “pity”). Lessing himself seems to vacillate between the two in the Correspondence [Briefwechsel] no less than in the Hamburg Dramaturgy [Hamburgische Dramaturgie] and Laocoon [Laokoon]: He is definitely aware of the distinction, and at several points addresses it explicitly, but it is also undeniable that when he himself uses the word “Mitleid,” it is often unclear if he means one, the other, or both at once.²⁹ As we shall see below, Marwood’s subsequent pleas for mercy (Erbarmen) (and her incisive critique of self-serving vs. true compassion) will, in contrast to this first exclamation, also switch over to a more Aristotelian notion of (and then Kantian critique of) pity. A following exclamation of Marwood’s, “Oh, how unfortunate I am, that I can express far less than I feel!” (II.3.451) is a perfect expression of the shift from affect to sentiment (it will be echoed as a central motif of Goethe’s Werther, for instance), and it is immediately followed with repeated references to tears, the yardstick by which the success of all eighteenth-century drama was measured. Now however, in the wake of his admiration for her imagined selfless, penniless state, Marwood moves directly to a plea for pity: MARWOOD: Then run away; but be sure to take everything with you that might remind me of you. Poor, despised, without honor or friends, I will dare once more to awaken your pity [Ihr Erbarmen rege zu machen]. I will show in Marwood nothing but a miserable wretch who has sacrificed her family [Geschlecht], respectability [Ansehen], virtue and conscience all for you. (II.3.455)

Marwood’s language unabashedly stresses the theatrical nature of pity in this speech: she will dare to activate his mercy (“rege machen”– rather like a theat Martinec makes a valiant and erudite attempt to determine when precisely Mitleid means empathy and when it means pity in Lessing’s work (Martinec, “Boundaries”), but I find his distinctions a bit too neat and rigid for Lessing’s actual usage, even in the examples Martinec cites (see especially 746 – 747).

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

101

rical effect [Wirkung]); and she will display herself as a miserable wretch [als eine Elende zeigen]. Indeed, the presentation Marwood wants to make of herself here is precisely what the play as a whole intends for Sara. Marwood is providing exactly the kind of technical analysis of the acting involved in the performance of pity that Smith’s account falls short of. As we shall see below, she furthermore offers the kind of cogent moral critique of pity that Lessing’s theoretical works lack. She thus is illuminating the blind spots of both.

3.5 Familial duty Despite the clever dramaturgy of Marwood’s staging, none of the rapid succession of sentimentalist ploys to gain Mellefont’s sympathies achieves its end: tolerance, admiration, and pity all fall on ultimately deaf ears. But so far Marwood’s theater has employed only one actress; just as Aeschylus added a second actor to create classical tragedy (or if we consider Mellefont as a Boalian “spect-Actor” in her piece, then she plays Sophocles adding the third), Marwood calls in her advocate (Vorsprecher) to add another voice to the stage. It is appropriate, for the age that saw the “invention of childhood” and the idealization of domesticity,³⁰ that their young daughter should play the starring and most stirring role in Marwood’s little drama. It is also telling, however, for the age that was supposedly bent on replacing rhetorical models of dramatic convention with more natural and immediate ones, that her mother refers to the little girl with the ultra-rhetorical term, Vorsprecher. Contrary to the fantasies of interiority feeding the new sentimental aesthetic, no emotion, however genuine, can speak itself: nature requires a declaiming advocate. Considering Lessing’s preoccupation with the Poetics, it is useful to consider this scene in Aristotelian terms. After the one-sided and partial recognitions Marwood attempts to impose in the previous scene, Arabella’s entrance provides the setting for and culmination of a classic anagnorisis scene, and makes up the true peripeteia for her mother’s play. Her opening lines frame their encounter explicitly in terms of recognition. Upon her appearance, Mellefont turns his face away [mit abgewandtem Gesichte], and she approaches him hesitantly: ARABELLA approaching him fearfully: Oh, Sir! Is it you? Are you our Mellefont? – No, Madam, it’s not he. – Wouldn’t he look at me, if he were really Mellefont? Wouldn’t he take me in his arms? He always used to do so. Oh, I’m such an unfortunate child! What

 See Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel, 14– 43.

102

Ellwood Wiggins

did I do to make him angry, this man, this most dear man, who once allowed me to call myself his daughter? (II.4.457)

She opens with the piercing question, “Is it you?” and closes with the reminder that he had allowed her to call herself his daughter. That is, Mellefont’s acknowledged paternity had provided her own identity. She is basically asking, then, “Are you still my father?” Will he recognize her as his daughter? In the developing image of domestic bliss unfolding in the eighteenth century, it would be increasingly difficult to acknowledge the paternal relationship and not feel obligations that would play into Marwood’s hand. Now it is Arabella’s turn to try out the techniques of sentimental drama on her audience (though in her case, we cannot know whether she is “acting” as consciously as her practiced mother – indeed the success of the play’s effectiveness relies on the mother’s guile and the daughter’s complete lack thereof). Mellefont still will not turn to face her: ARABELLA: He’s sighing, Madam. What’s wrong with him? Can’t we help him? Can’t I? Nor you? So let us sigh along with him.³¹– (II.4.457)

Mitleid at its most literal: to sigh along with (mit-seufzen). And Arabella’s sympathy is effective: “Oh, now he’s looking at me!” she next exclaims, and then: “No, he’s looking away again! He’s looking up to heaven!” For the first time, Mellefont is indecisive. He has been brought to complete aporeia, as his scattered glances indicate. Shortly thereafter, Marwood’s production reaches its climax in a passage of simultaneous peripeteia and anagnorisis: MARWOOD: What have you decided, Mellefont? MELLEFONT: What I shouldn’t, Marwood; what I shouldn’t. MARWOOD who embraces him: Oh, I know that the honesty of your heart has always won out over the obstinacy of your desires. MELLEFONT: Don’t assail me any further. I am already what you want to make me: a perjurer; a seducer; a thief; a murderer. MARWOOD: Well, you’ll be those things for a few days in your imagination, and later you will realize that I have prevented you from becoming them in reality. (II.4.458)

Here the dramatic reversal, Mellefont’s decision to leave Sara and return to Marwood, is accompanied not, as we might expect, with an explicit acknowledgment of Arabella as his daughter or of Marwood as a woman for whom he bears responsibility – indeed at no point in the scene does he address his daugh-

 Arabella, “So lassen Sie uns doch mit ihm seufzen” (II.4.457).

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

103

ter as such or admit any obligation to her mother – but rather with an almost Oedipal³² moment of self-recognition: “I am already what you want to make me: a perjurer, a seducer, a thief, a murderer.” This effect may be less surprising if we recall what a self-centered cad Mellefont is (his servant Norton would have been unfazed to learn of this reaction on his master’s part). However suspect its expression, however, it is undoubtedly Marwood’s ability to stage this triadic domestic tableau – mother and daughter imploring on their knees before a man with averted face – that engineers the intended effect in the audience.

3.6 Voice of reason Marwood is a good enough playwright to know that the sensual effect alone of any piece is not sufficient for a lasting conversion, so she immediately begins to buttress the transformative impact of her play with a host of explanatory interpretations. In other words, she follows up the sentimental drama with a good dose of that other Enlightenment panacea: reason. Marwood’s acute analysis of Mellefont’s actions amounts to a critique of sympathy that foreshadows many of its later philosophical opponents. Surprisingly, it is precisely this criticism of compassion, the principal means of her drama, that leads to the climax of her play and its desired end: Mellefont’s acquiescence. When Mellefont wonders what he is going to do with poor Sara, and chastises Marwood’s heartlessness towards his young lover, she retorts: MARWOOD: If you could have seen to the bottom of my heart, then you would have discovered that it feels more true pity for your little Miss than you do yourself. I say true pity, for yours is a self-serving, soft-hearted pity.³³ (II.4.458)

Thus she corrects both his wayward recognition of his old lover as well as any still remaining illusions about his own virtue. The linguistic move that Marwood makes here mirrors the lexical spread of sympathy: the protasis of her conditional sentence sets up the possibility of empathy while the apodosis reveals the pitfalls of pity. The wording of the former suggests an epistemological paradox; the  Oedipal in the Sophoclean (and Aristotelian), not the Freudian, sense – though Mellefont’s passion for the utterly sexless Sara, who so resembles his daughter Arabella in her childlike innocence, may point to some other kind of disturbing complex.  The close reading that follows warrants quoting the German: “Wenn Sie bis auf den Grund meines Herzens gesehen hätten, so würden Sie entdeckt haben, daß es mehr wahres Erbarmen gegen Ihre Miss fühlt als Sie selbst. Ich sage wahres Erbarmen; denn das Ihre ist ein eigennütziges, weichherziges Erbarmen.”

104

Ellwood Wiggins

latter points to a moral failing. Together, they provide a cogent commentary on the (unavoidable) ambiguity in Lessing’s own usage of Mitleid between these two meanings. First, empathy: “If you had seen to the bottom of my heart,” Marwood begins; that is, “If you could feel what I am feeling…” The precondition for empathetic sympathy in this formulation is to see one’s heart. Sight, associated since antiquity with epistemological paradigms, is the sense Marwood invokes for others to know her innermost feelings. The paradox is clear: no eye can penetrate to the interior of another’s breast to see the heart; if knowledge of what another person feels functions in a way analogous to this optical operation, then true empathy is impossible. We have already observed how Adam Smith echoes this very dissonance in his own mixed metaphor of seeing the emotions of the heart beat time (TMS 22). Despite the entire push of literary production in the eighteenth century away from affect and towards an intimation of interiority, the only access anyone can have to another’s feelings – the only way empathy can be constructed – is via inferences based on the outward signs available through verbal and gestural performance. Marwood’s language sets up the new poets’ and philosophers’ desideratum for immediate knowledge of others’ feelings as always already impossible: as a metaphor that leaps from one incompatible transference to another. Just as Marwood’s protasis unveils the paradox of empathy, her apodosis – even beyond the logical trap of its dependence on an impossible precondition – suggests several problems inherent in pity that will later be amplified by the opponents of Mitleid: Kant, Nietzsche, and Brecht. The ostensible thrust of Marwood’s critique is clear. The mercy and compassion Mellefont purports to have for Sara’s fate are belied by the situation into which he has placed her: unmarried and dishonored, cut off from her friends and family. She reproaches Mellefont for his role in seducing and corrupting the innocent young Sara for the gratification of his own desires, with no thought to what is best for the girl. His brand of pity resembles the useless kind that a play or sermon might engender for the poor in a wealthy audience: even if it leads them to give an extra farthing to the beggar on the way out of the theater or church, they will never be induced to change the social inequality that produces their own comfort and the mendicant’s poverty in the first place. This insightful critique of self-serving compassion will be repeated in Brecht’s denouncement of the bankrupt moral efficacy of Mitleid – and of the dramas that engender its warm and fuzzy sensibility. Notice, too, in Marwood’s speech the transformation of Mitleid into mercy (Erbarmen) – from a category of secular moral philosophy to one of religious virtue – which is indicative of a further moral hazard of pity. As Nietzsche will emphatically point out in his linking of compassion with Christian mercy, both at-

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

105

titudes emanate from a position of superiority. The object of pity is necessarily an object of contempt, and hence the supposedly ennobling power of compassion is undermined. Kant also shows how both parties in the relationship of pity end up demeaned: the pitied is taken for too weak to know true virtue and worth, independent of mere worldly deprivations and sufferings; the pitier foolishly fancies that she is bestowing something of value on the sufferer with her commiseration.³⁴ As if to augment this Kantian critique of pity with Nietzschean flair, Marwood’s speech and the following exchange are suffused with the language of shame. Marwood reinforces her earlier appeal to family ties by accusing Mellefont of breaking, merely for the sake of his lust, “the strongest bonds of nature” by enticing Sara away from her loving father (II.4.459). Marwood’s own machinations to reunite Sara with Sir William are then paraded before him as truly considerate and compassionate solicitation in her rival’s best interest. The supposedly noble motivations of domestic virtue that bring about Mellefont’s conversion are necessarily comprised of guilt. None of the other tricks from the bag of bourgeois drama Marwood has hauled out make a dent in his determination; only when she couples “true mercy” with shame does she effect a softening in his resolve. This fact suggests that the compassion Marwood’s play inspires in Mellefont – and by extension the pity Lessing’s play conjures in its audience – is never far from (and perhaps even dependent on) the attendant feelings of guilt.³⁵ The play within a play that seems so successful at the end of scene four is a lachrymose comedy (comédie lachrymose) in the vein of Richard Steele or C. F. Gellert. The entire exchange after Mellefont’s reversal works as a kind of denouement – explaining how everyone comes to be reunited with their appropriate partners and families after the painful confusions and mistakes of the tearful plot. “Make amends for your mistakes, as far as it is possible to amend them.” (II.4.459), Marwood commands: Go and sin no more. And the sentimental drama she staged in all its elements has gone over with resounding success: “Oh Marwood, with what feelings did I come to you, and with what feelings must I leave you now!” (II.4.459). We are even treated to a tableau of father and daughter tenderly exchanging kisses before his exit from the stage, a changed man.

 See Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 6 (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1914), 456.  For Nietzsche’s critique of Mitleid, see Morgenröte II, §132– 146.

106

Ellwood Wiggins

4 Mellefont as spectator Any time the theater presents us with a play within a play, we are invited to speculate on the self-referential implications of the mise en abyme, and Marwood’s sentimental drama is no exception. The most remarkable thing about it, of course, is its awful failure. Mellefont’s dramatically induced conversion turns out to be ridiculously short-lived. Lessing’s play very carefully orchestrates the aftermath of Marwood’s production. The theatrical audience is treated to an eye-opening scene after Mellefont’s exit, which meticulously reveals all of Marwood’s pretensions to Enlightenment and sentimental ideals in the preceding scenes to have been feigned (II.5). One after another, her discussion with Hannah shows that her previous airs of tolerance, forgiveness, admirable carelessness for material possessions, and expansive compassion were calculated shams put on with shrewd psychological insight into Mellefont’s value system. Least forgivable for audiences surely is the selfish cruelty with which she now addresses her daughter. All this serves to cancel out any positive impressions the role she played for her lover might have inspired in spectators outside the play. The cognitive judgment of “undeservedness” that Aristotle makes a necessary component of pity is thereby fully undermined. The entire scene makes it difficult for spectators to feel any compassion for this unhappy, forsaken woman, and ensures the negation of any effects from the mise en scène she staged for Mellefont that might have spilled over into the ranks of the audience. None of this scene, however, is witnessed by Mellefont. So when he returns a few seconds later, full of all the righteous indignation and invective that the theatrical audience has been encouraged to feel, it is perhaps easy to overlook the fact that he has not been privy to the intervening scene’s revelation of character that justifies the spectators’ withdrawal of compassion. It is all the more pressing, therefore, to inquire into the source of his offstage change of heart. As far as Mellefont can know, all of the compassion for Arabella and Marwood he has been made to feel, together with all of the rational, moralistic arguments condemning the selfish, destructive results of his desire for Sara that he has been made to acknowledge, are still entirely justified and valid. Observe his explanation to Marwood’s surprised query as to why he is returning so quickly: MELLEFONT heatedly: Because I didn’t need more than a few moments to regain my senses [wieder zu mir selbst zu kommen]. MARWOOD: Well? MELLEFONT: I was stunned [betäubt], Marwood, but not moved [bewegt]. (II.6.461)

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

107

Two things are very revealing in this exchange. First, Mellefont explains his change of mind as a return to himself [wieder zu mir selbst zu kommen]. This means either that he now perceives the self-recognition (as “perjurer, seducer, robber, murderer”) to which he has just been led in watching Marwood’s play as false, or that he accepts the condemnation of his selfish concupiscence and embraces it, abandoning any briefly held hopes of reform. Second, he describes the effect of Marwood’s drama as a matter of being numbed or stupefied rather than being moved. One is reminded of Meno’s accusation that Socrates is like a torpedo fish that numbs whomever it encounters. Indeed, paralysis (Betäubung) is a perfect description of the state of aporeia to which Socrates endeavors to bring his interlocutors as the first step towards potential philosophizing. Being moved (bewegt sein) corresponds more with what Plato’s Socrates disparages as the effect of rhetoric, which aims at moving people with persuasion, rather than of dialectic, which aspires to knowledge and truth. Yet Plato’s dialogues often reveal the ephemerality and disingenuousness of aporetic admissions, and the rhetorical tricks that underlie Socrates’ dialectical methods. Just as Plato’s dialogues display the paradoxes and compromises inherent in the selfsame model of dialectic they espouse, Lessing’s play-within-a-play here interrogates the very genre it inaugurates. Marwood’s staging (Inszenierung) counts as a bourgeois drama point by point, but not only is the achieved effect of inspiring sympathy and moral action almost immediately annulled as soon as its spectator leaves the scene, it is also revealed to have been carefully crafted through and through with rhetorical self-consciousness. Marwood says as much to Hannah in the intermediary sixth scene: “it’s all a matter of knowing who you’re facing” (II.5.460).³⁶ This is the central tenet of all rhetoric: to know the assumptions and opinions of one’s audience. Rhetoric, thus defined, is decried by Socrates and Lessing alike, but just as Socrates must equally know the character of his interlocutors in order to tailor his elenchus to their personal needs, Marwood uses her intimate knowledge of Mellefont to create the drama which will have an effect on him. Plato’s dialectic no less than Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy thus are shown to be doubly suspect (in terms of their end no less than their means) in the very works meant to showcase their merits.

 “[…] man muß wissen, wen man vor sich hat.”

108

Ellwood Wiggins

5 Conclusions Marwood’s pity-play – though it adhered to all the prescriptions for sympathy of which both Adam Smith and the dramatic theorists would approve – was ultimately a failure. There are several important lessons that we can draw about eighteenth-century doctrines of sympathy from this failure. First of all, Marwood’s strategy shows the trouble with using sympathy to further the social advancement of minorities or disadvantaged portions of society, such as Jews or women. On the one hand, to encourage pity with herself, she must make her behavior conform to preconceived social norms of feminine weakness, victimhood, and dependency. On the other hand, if she refuses to play the weak woman and makes a show of strength and righteous outrage (if she becomes the new Medea), the rejection of her appeals is automatic. Pity can be a self-fulfilling trap into which the downtrodden might fall. This problem is ultimately linked to the paradox of unity and disjuncture hidden in the structure of sympathy, as we observed in Smith’s conflicting metaphors. Marwood demonstrates the instability of identification and self-knowledge – the splitting of her self in the performance of sympathy in order to seduce Mellefont’s sympathetic union with her leads directly to her madness and violent catastrophe. The blind spot of the two discourses of ethics and theater is mirrored in Marwood’s experiment: the failure of the bourgeois play within a play leads to her Baroque paroxysms and ultimately the tragedy of the whole. The scene shows how precarious it is to rely on the virtue of sympathy per se or through the edifying function of the theater. This volatile instability inherent in the structure of sympathy (unity with other/splitting of self) as described by its greatest champions calls into question the very laudable projects of economists and philosophers today who would like to replace a contract theory of justice with one that relies on notions of fairness and compassion.³⁷ Hence Marwood’s tragedy could serve as a complicating gesture not only for eighteenth-century historiographers, but for the rehabilitation of moral sense ethics in contemporary political discourse. Both theater and sympathy can be powerful agents, but often have more insidious effects than one might wish. Finally, we return to the question of genre: the dynamics of both Lessing’s play and Smith’s ethics can be traced by the way they depict the fate of the new bourgeois tragedy. Scholars have shown how the inaugural specimen of German bourgeois tragedy is set in motion by the Baroque remainder of Marwood’s excessive affectation. Now we can see that this leftover older rhetoric in turn is  E.g., Nussbaum and Sen.

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

109

motivated by a failure of Marwood’s attempt at new sentimental drama. Hence the play dramatizes not merely how that against which sentimental dramatists were reacting is present in the current dramas, but moreover that the catalyzing trace of the old itself is a product of the failure of the new. Smith’s dynamics of inter-personal performance as a calculus of the greatest accrual of sympathy from an audience of one’s peers, meanwhile, clearly echo the controlled naturalism of the new school of acting associated with the sentimental drama. One would expect, from a book of performative theory written in this vein in the 1750s (during the height of Diderot’s and Garrick’s fame), an appreciation for the new drama and actor’s craft. Instead, the remarkably few times Smith mentions any actual play, he lauds Racine’s Phèdre and Voltaire’s The Orphan of Zhao [L’Orphelin de la Chine] – precisely the kind of affected fare the new naturalism was inveighing against. In fact, Smith goes out of his way to discredit one of the central tenets of bourgeois drama, the depiction of ordinary citizens: “It is the misfortune of Kings only which affords the proper subjects for tragedy” (TMS 52).³⁸ In addition to this reactionary dictum for the appropriate class of characters, Smith also wants to admire heroes who suffer stoically rather than weep with people who express their pain. His depredation of the bodily sufferings of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (TMS 30) later leads to Lessing’s long defense of that play in the Laokoon, and his claim that all stoicism is un-theatrical.³⁹ Despite advocating sympathy as the grounding of all morality, Smith would appear to be in Mendelssohn’s camp rather than Lessing’s in their debate about admiration versus sympathy as the goal of tragedy.⁴⁰ Far from advancing an aesthetics of sympathy in the book that proposes an ethics of compassion, Smith would reject many of the key innovations of Lessing’s dramaturgy of sympathy (Mitleidsdramaturgie). What Lessing fails to offer in systematic analysis for his claims about pity, Smith’s book on Moral Sentiments provides exactly. Similarly, what Smith’s account lacks in an awareness of the performer’s craft inherent in his system, this scene in Lessing’s play demonstrates with aplomb. Their complementary relation is comprised of two seeming contradictions. Lessing is the great champion of sympathy in tragedy, but has Marwood stage a prototype sentimental drama that reveals compassion as both morally suspect and dramatically ineffective. Adam Smith is the great champion of sympathy as the theatrical underpinning

 Smith repeats in his second (and last) foray into tragedy: “The most interesting subjects of tragedies and romances are the misfortunes of virtuous and magnanimous kings and princes” (TMS 226).  See chapter four of the Laokoon, in which Lessing’s one concrete reference to Smith’s TMS appears (Lessing, Werke und Briefe, 5: 2, 35 – 48, especially 43).  For a helpful assessment of Smith’s debt to the stoics, see Nussbaum, 369.

110

Ellwood Wiggins

of social virtue, but has a reactionary view of theater that upholds Baroque neoclassicism and the aesthetics of admiration over and against the new bourgeois drama and aesthetics of sympathy. These two double binds are emblematic not only of the double blindness of the eighteenth-century discourses of theater and moral philosophy for one another in the matter of sympathy, but also of the structural enigma at the heart of compassion in any age. Sympathy is always already a performative scene: any ethics based on fellow feeling cannot escape – but must shut an eye to – its inherent theatricality.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519 – 531. Dupree, Mary Helen. The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskia Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Haig, David. “Sympathy with Adam Smith and Reflections on Self.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 77 (2011): 4 – 13. Heidsieck, Arnold. “Adam Smith’s Influence on Lessing’s View of Man and Society.” Lessing Yearbook 15 (1983): 125 – 143. Hume, David. Moral Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by the Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 29 vols. to date. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Kiesling, L. Lynne. “Mirror Neuron Research and Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy: Three Points of Correspondence.” Review of Austrian Economics 25 (2012): 299 – 313. Kittler, Friedrich, and Gerhard Kaiser. Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Lemke, Anja. “‘Medea fiam’ – Affekterzeugung zwischen Rhetorik und Ästhetik in Lessings Miβ Sara Sampson.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 2 (2012): 206 – 223. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Edited by Wilfried Barner and Conrad Wiedemann. 12 vols. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985 – 2003. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Friedrich Nicolai, and Moses Mendelssohn. Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel. Edited by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1972. Marshall, David. The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Martinec, Thomas. “The Boundaries of Mitleidsdramaturgie: Some Clarifications Concerning Lessing’s Concept of ‘Mitleid.’” The Modern Language Review 101, no. 3 (2009): 743 – 758.

Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship

111

Martinec, Thomas. Lessings Theorie der Tragödienwirkung. Humanistische Tradition und aufklärerische Erkenntniskritik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Morgenröte. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1983. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Emotion: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Routledge: London, 1988. Sen, Amartya. “Open and Closed Impartiality.” Journal of Philosophy 99, no. 9 (2002): 445 – 469. Slessarev, Helga. “Nathan der Weise und Adam Smith.” In “Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang,” edited by Wilfried Barner and Alfred M. Reh, special issue, Lessing Yearbook (1984): 248 – 256. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982. Sng, Zachary. “Parenthyrsos: On the Medium which is not One.” Modern Language Notes 125, no. 5 (2010): 1029 – 1049. Staiger, Emil. “Rasende Weiber in der deutschen Tragödie des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 80 (1961): 377. Szondi, Peter. Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.

Rebecca Wolf

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger¹ Europe in the decades around 1800 witnessed a variety of experiments with musical and acoustic instruments. Craftsmen, musicians, and scientists sought to improve traditional instruments and invented a variety of new ones. These improvements took place in both traditional workshops and in laboratory-like settings. Some of these instruments found their way into regular orchestras, but others remained at various stages of experimentation. Others did not survive, but detailed descriptions of their construction have been preserved in magazine articles, letters, and advertisements. The contexts in which new or improved musical and acoustic instruments were presented to the public often shifted between musical concerts, salon entertainments, and the performance of natural science. Mechanical theaters, magic lantern shows, electrostatic generators, sounding pictures, and dioramas were presented and combined with performances of newly invented musical instruments. A unique example of this period’s fascination with musical experiments is the glass harmonica, invented in 1761 by Benjamin Franklin (1706– 1790). Although there is a long history of making sounds with glass, Franklin invented a new design, which had a significant influence on the way people played music. The instrument became more and more popular with musicians and composers in the decades following its invention. We know of other scientists and inventors who worked with glass in both musical and acoustic contexts. Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756– 1827), for example, was famous for his scientific presentations of musical instruments and acoustic apparatuses made with glass parts. Glass attracted composers seeking a new and unmistakable sound, as well as scientists attempting to unearth the characteristics of sound. The following article will address questions pertaining to the use of glass in acoustic research and music making. Why do we find such an interest in glass at this important juncture of European acoustic science in the long eighteenth century, and why does it become such a fashionable material for the construction of instruments? The interweaving of music and experimental science emerged in the relationships, friendships, and common interests of several

 The work on this article was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Department of Music at Harvard University, and the Deutsches Museum in Munich. For the very helpful comments to the article in general and to the translation of the historic quotations the author wishes to thank Mary Helen Dupree and Sean B. Franzel.

114

Rebecca Wolf

known personalities from a range of different backgrounds. One way to understand these various interactions is to analyze certain instruments, such as the ones built by Franklin, Chladni, and others, with a view to their use in performance situations. Additionally, we can also examine personal letters, which reveal the inventors’ original conceptions of their instruments, as well as other publications related to these instruments and their uses, which constitute a special form of presentation, a sort of performance in itself. The context of the performances and the form and language of these different texts indicate how the budding field of acoustics was developed in connection with music theory. Furthermore, it is necessary to explore the way in which new instruments influenced musical compositions. We shall see that for glass instruments, there is a very close connection to the human voice, whether sung or spoken. For example, Ludwig van Beethoven composed a “Melodrama” for glass harmonica and spoken words as one movement of the incidental music he composed for Johann Friedrich Leopold Duncker’s play Leonore Prohaska.² The combination of vocal recitation with accompaniment by a musical instrument played in a chordal style may seem extraordinary for us, but some characteristics of the glass harmonica were said to amalgamate with the human voice in a remarkable way. Therefore it is worth exploring the particular combination of glass and voice in the long eighteenth century. It is also important to take a closer look at the role of gender in this constellation: for several reasons, the glass harmonica was very often played by women. However, because the sound was produced directly with one’s finger, many believed that the sound waves could cause health problems for the female performer and therefore discouraged the instrument’s extensive use. On the one hand, the merging of the sound of glass and the human body of the player evoked the fear of physical danger. On the other hand, the transparency of glass offered researchers, musicians, and audience members access to new scientific knowledge insofar as it offered them the possibility of observing the effects of the sound waves. In this article, I seek to uncover some of the connections formed among different characteristics of the material glass in the context of sounding instruments. The history of performances of instruments built with glass in both music and acoustics may help to reveal the variety of these connections.

 Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonore Prohaska, Werke ohne Opuszahl 96, 1815.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

115

1 The glass harmonica from Europe to North America and back We find ancestors of the glass harmonica in different areas of the world. According to a publication of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1908,³ people in China and Japan were already aware of the sound of glass vessels in the Middle Ages. There is evidence, for example, to show that Chinese performers began using such instruments in the fourteenth century. In addition, musical cups were known in Asia in the following centuries. In Europe, meanwhile, we find late fifteenth-century reports of glasses being filled with various amounts of water to achieve different pitches. Experiments from this period were used to show the relations of Pythagorean intervals and their effects on temperament.⁴ Similarly, some 150 years later, Athanasius Kircher (1602 – 1680) describes experiments using sounding glass in his Musurgia universalis (1650). For Kircher as well, these instruments demonstrated Pythagorean intervals and were used to present the principles of music theory rather than to make music itself. Moreover, this example is included under the heading “experimentum,” suggesting a link to other modes of natural science and experimental research. Kircher describes these experiments as art works, but not specifically as musical instruments.⁵ The instruments were considered as percussion or friction instruments. By adding water, Kircher tunes his glass instrument in such a way that the level of the filled glasses correlates with the intervals. In 1684, Kircher explains in more detail how sounding glasses resonated in sympathy with strings tuned to the same pitches.⁶ He later demonstrates that the character of the “tone” (today we would say “timbre”) varies according to the liquid – aquavit, wine, water, seawater, and oil – with which the glasses are filled.⁷ Comparing the varying densities of these liquids with the density of human blood, Kircher develops a doctrine of affections. But in general, he uses the sound of glass to explore the science of sound in all its variety  A.C. Moule, “A List of Musical and other Sound-Producing Instruments of the Chinese,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 39 (1908): 148.  See Peter Sterki, Klingende Gläser. Die Bedeutung idiophoner Friktionsinstrumente mit axial rotierenden Gläsern, dargestellt an der Glas- und Tastenharmonika (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 16; Sterki writes specifically about Franchinius Gafurius’ Theorica musicae from 1492.  Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni (Rome: Corbelletti, 1650), 9: 212.  Athanasius Kircher, Neue Hall- und Thon-Kunst oder Mechanische Gehaim-Verbindung der Kunst und Natur durch Stimme und Hall-Wissenschafft gestifftet (Nördlingen: Arnold Heylen, 1684), 112.  Kircher, Neue Hall- und Thon-Kunst, 135 – 136.

116

Rebecca Wolf

and detail. Furthermore, he adds, the transparent glass will be helpful for observing the different waves generated by the liquids. Along with these uses of glass instruments for scientific research, there are examples of musical instruments made of glass that date back to the end of the sixteenth century (Austria, Ambros Castle).⁸ The long eighteenth century became an especially significant era in the history of musical glass, with the Irishman Richard Pockrich (ca. 1690 – 1759) becoming famous for his playing of glasses beginning in the 1740s. Pockrich gave concerts in his home country and in England until his death in 1759, playing glasses both by striking them as percussion instruments and by rubbing them with wetted fingers.⁹ Pockrich started a vogue for musical glasses in England that also inspired German composers like Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714– 1787), who played an instrument with twenty-six glasses accompanied by an ensemble in London in 1746. The music Gluck interpreted was originally composed for violin or harpsichord.¹⁰ In 1761, a famous player of the viola da gamba and musical glasses, Anne Ford (1737– 1824), published a guide that explained how to learn to play the glasses in a few days. The only pre-condition she required was the knowledge of music in general and a good ear. The whole title of her textbook is: Instructions For Playing on the Musical Glasses: so that Any Person, who has the least Knowledge of Music, or a good Ear, may be able to perform in a few Days, if not in a few Hours. The work was published in The Public Advertiser on 2 November 1761. In contrast to other instruments that required virtuosity and practiced technique, the musical glasses were presented as an instrument for everyone, easy to learn and enjoy. In contrast to other exercises for musical instruments, these instructions were published in a journal and not as a book. Access to them was thus made open to a more general public. Towards the end of the same year, Benjamin Franklin perfected a completely new form of glass instrument, and his protégée, Marianne Davies (c. 1743–c. 1818), presented the instrument to the public soon thereafter. Franklin also later published a detailed letter he had written in the summer of 1762 to Giambatista Beccaria (1716 – 1781), a professor of experimental physics in Turin, Italy.¹¹ After the usual cordialities and remarks on Beccaria’s new book on electricity, Franklin turns to music, more precisely to Italian music. Presumably, he

 Sterki, Klingende Gläser, 16.  See Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), 10: 117.  General Advertiser, 31 March 1746. Printed in Sterki, Klingende Gläser, 24. For further information on Gluck and the musical glasses see Hyatt King, “The Musical Glasses and Glass Harmonica,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 72nd Session (1945 – 1946): 110.  See Labaree et al., eds. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 10: 116 – 130.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

117

did this to make a connection with his correspondent in Italy and to segue into a discussion of his own invention. Rather than sending him the harmonica itself, Franklin made his friend a very unusual gift. He sent him detailed instructions for reconstructing his invention. Beccaria was meant to be able to make a copy by himself, without, as Franklin notes, having to struggle with its initial design: As it is an instrument that seems peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind, I will endeavour to give you such a description of it, and of the manner of constructing it, that you, or any of your friends may be enabled to imitate it, if you incline so to do, without being at the expence and trouble of the many experiments I have made in endeavouring to bring it to its present perfection.¹²

The instrument was invented and described as an instrument for everyone. The instrument’s construction and the method of playing it appear to be easy and not intended only for specialists. In this regard, the glass harmonica can be thought of as a “democratic” instrument. Franklin begins his explanation of the history of glass instruments by describing several performances of drinking glasses tuned by water and played by the finger. Although he was impressed by the instrument’s sweet tone, perceived deficiencies in the conventional manner of playing seem to have been the inspiration for Franklin’s improvement. He thus writes further: Being charmed with the sweetness of its tones, and the music […] produced from it, I wished only to see the glasses disposed in a more convenient form, and brought together in a narrower compass, so as to admit of a greater number of tones, and all within reach of hand to a person sitting before the instrument, which I accomplished, after various intermediate trials, and less commodious forms, both of glasses and construction […].¹³

The new form he describes is that of the hemisphere. Both the form and the arrangement of the glasses were new in Franklin’s design. It was no longer necessary to fill glasses each time with a different quantity of water before playing. Now, the glasses had a different size and were ordered in relation to each other, with the largest glasses on the left (which produced the lowest tones) and the smallest on the right end of the board. The glasses were fixed on a spindle with a cork and the whole construction could be turned by a foot treadle. The player sat in front of the turning glasses and touched them with wet fingers in order to produce the sounds. Furthermore, Franklin gave detailed instructions  Benjamin Franklin from London to Giambatista Beccaria in Turin, 13 July 1762. See Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 10: 127.  Benjamin Franklin from London to Giambatista Beccaria in Turin, 13 July 1762. See Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 10: 127.

118

Rebecca Wolf

to his friend Beccaria for tuning the instrument with great precision. The new position of the player sitting in front of the instrument was similar to that used with the very popular keyboard instruments of the day. Also, the tight position of the fingers on the glass vessels allowed for a performance of virtuosity, because the changes from one note to the next went faster. Also, an instrument for a wide range of musicians, from professionals to laymen, had to offer good and fast responsiveness, so that current compositions could be played in a professional manner. Virtuosity was further encouraged by the possibility of sustaining tones, which could be modified constantly. Franklin brought his letter to a close with a description of the instrument’s sound that anticipated typical descriptions of the instrument in the following decades: “The advantages of this instrument are, that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued to any length; and that the instrument, being once well tuned, never again wants tuning.”¹⁴ The letter ends as it begins, by memorializing Italy and its music. By giving the new instrument the Italian name “Armonica,” Franklin situates it as part of a long European musical tradition, thus paying his Italian correspondent a special compliment. However, the name became “Harmonica” with an “H” very soon thereafter.¹⁵ In the winter of 1762, Franklin sailed back to the U.S. and took a glass harmonica along, which he performed in Philadelphia.¹⁶ The performance was seen as a great success, as evidenced in 1763, when Nathaniel Evans (1742– 1767), son of a merchant in Philadelphia and later an Anglican missionary, published a poem inspired by the new instrument. Here Evans describes the instrument’s sound in a way that may function as a prototype for later descriptions and critiques: […] Th’ Armonica shall join the sacred choir, Fresh transports kindle, and new joys inspire.

 Benjamin Franklin from London to Giambatista Beccaria in Turin, 13 July 1762. See Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 10: 130.  Benjamin Franklin from London to Giambatista Beccaria in Turin, 13 July 1762. See Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 10: 425, which mentions a poem inspired by Franklin’s musical play in Philadelphia. The poem’s version from 1772 spells “Harmonica.”  B. Franklin from London to Giambatista Beccaria in Turin, 13 July 1762. See Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 10: 119, 383, 384. For further information, pictures, and musical examples see, e. g., the homepage of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where Franklin’s early instrument from London is housed today: See “Franklin’s Glass Armonica,” The Franklin Institute, accessed 24 October 2014, http://learn.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/armonica/armonica. php.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

119

Hark! the soft warblings, rolling smooth and clear, Strike with celestial ravishment the ear, Conveying inward, as they sweetly roll, A tide of melting music to the soul. And sure if aught of mortal-moving strain, Can touch with joy the high angelic train, ‘Tis such a pure transcendent sound divine As breathes this heart-enchanting frame of thine.¹⁷

The comparisons with celestial, ethereal, or angelic music and its strong influence on the souls of the listeners are described here and later on by several other commentators. But above all, Evans begins and ends his poem with reference to the specifically national context of the instrument’s reception: “Our little State resounds thy just applause.” And the sweetness of the harmonica’s sound let the country respond to the sound. Here we find the connection of a single affected soul with a whole group of people who are in a changing political situation between England and the colonies. In the poem, the fledgling American state resonates metaphorically with the music. In his poem, Evans thus used the new instrument to build a symbol for the new country. Interestingly, it would be a sounding symbol. One could argue that the specific sound of this newly invented instrument helped to mark the development of the colonies as an independent country. Instead of visual signs like flags or armorial bearings, which usually symbolize a country or a state, here, a musical timbre may have helped to start a new tradition, in contrast to the long European tradition with its history of musical styles and sounds cultivated over centuries. With a less strongly national connotation, but as the instrument of sentiment, the harmonica came into vogue in Europe as well. With famous performers such as Marianne Davies, its popularity in England and Germany grew very quickly. For example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed one of the most famous pieces for this instrument, the Adagio in C major for Glasharmonika (KV 617 a), in 1791. It is dedicated to Marianne Kirchgessner (1769 – 1808), who, like Davies in England, was responsible for the high degree of popularity of the instrument in the Germanspeaking lands. These parallel examples underscore both the international reach and connection of glass instruments and their special association with female performers, which I will discuss later in this essay.

 Nathaniel Evans: To Benjamin Franklin, ESQ; LL.D. F.R.S. “Occasioned by hearing him play on the Armonica.” Written in Philadelphia, 1763. See Labaree et al., eds., vol. 10: 425 – 426.

120

Rebecca Wolf

2 Texts and experiments as staging As mentioned previously, throughout Germany and much of Europe, the decades leading up to and immediately following 1800 were a time of improvement and innovation in musical instrument construction. Many different instruments were built with ever greater mechanical sophistication, with the capacity for higher volume, and with a chromatic scale instead of a natural one. The aim of creating a particular type of sound was described in many ways. Although the pianoforte, which could produce a variety of dynamics, was one of the most popular instruments of the day, other instruments produced sustained tones with the possibility of dynamic variation after triggering. Several of the glass harmonica models invented during this time displayed similar characteristics; all of them met the requirement of producing long tones with the ability to vary dynamics. Perhaps on the basis of Franklin’s invention, which requires the direct contact of the player’s finger with the glass, certain new mechanisms of generating sound with glass were developed. These used mechanical devices between the player’s hand and the sounding part of the instrument. Traces of performances of these instruments can be found both in the concert situation and in the acoustic laboratory. For example, Friedrich von Dalberg (1760 – 1812), who published extensively on music, experimented with so-called glass rods (Glasstäbe). In an 1811 article in the era’s most prominent German musical journal, the General Musical Journal [Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung], Dalberg refers to Chladni as the founder of the principle of sound production through friction by rods.¹⁸ Chladni uses this new construction in his instruments, the “euphon” and “clavicylinder,” which he invented in the 1790s and which he played and presented more as acoustic experiments than as conventional musical instruments. Instead of using strings as the initial producers of sound, as with the cembalo and pianoforte, Chladni used rods. To play the euphon, it was necessary to use wet fingers to play the friction rods (Streichstäbe), which transferred the vibrations along to the sounding rods (Klangstäbe) made of glass. For the clavicylinder, on the other hand, Chladni built a keyboard in front of the instrument; this made the musician’s direct contact with the rods unnecessary. In this construction, the musician’s foot moves with a pedal a wet barrel with glass cylinders, similar to the glass harmonica. The action of pressing a key of the keyboard by hand causes the corresponding rod to be pressed by the barrel and played. Here too, it was possible to sustain the sound and modify its dynamics. Chladni himself descri-

 Freiherr Johann Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg, “Aschaffenburg (Nachrichten),”Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 13, no. 15 (April 1811): 254– 257.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

121

bed “slow and expressive pieces” as the best kinds of musical pieces for his invention.¹⁹ In contrast to Franklin’s comment on the glass harmonica’s use for Italian music, Chladni does not attribute the sound to a national music. Dalberg’s article presents Chladni as a scientific inventor. As Dalberg recounts, Chladni had initiated a tradition of producing sound with glass rods and the mechanism of friction, which was developed by a variety of further instrument makers. Dalberg explicitly compliments Chladni for his invention for the science of acoustics. Within this framework, he describes Chladni’s instruments more as scientific than as instruments for making music in general. On this basis, Dalberg himself explores similar instruments with diverse materials. The resonance of several overtones would depend on the material of the friction rods, according to his thesis. Dalberg experimented with glass rods that played metal strings. The result he describes in his article as a sound different from the usual sound of metal strings, which he calls sharp; in this case the sound is described as very similar to the French horn, but much more tender and affecting, and with a variety of shading.²⁰ Furthermore, Dalberg makes several claims about the potential usefulness of these experiments for research on acoustic experience in general. And with his focus on the sound of strings, Dalberg comes to the material of sound production: the string, as the “bodily cover of sound [körperliche Hülle des Klangs],”²¹ makes him think about the sounding body, which includes the invisible tone. Therefore, according to Dalberg, research on the material of sound production would help to uncover the secrets of the tone. Dalberg thus taps into an idea of “the secret of sound” that was very common in the decades around 1800. The notion of invisible sound was fascinating to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century commentators, and it was not unusual to presume that sound possessed its own mysterious vitality. Experiments with acoustic phenomena such as resonance and sympathy (for example the activating of a string by the sound on another string playing on a similar frequency) were very popular in part because they claimed to elucidate the effects of sound on the human body, especially on the physiology of listening. The acoustic

 Ernst F. F. Chladni, Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik und Lehre vom Instrumentenbau, enthaltend die Theorie und Anleitung zum Bau des Clavicylinders und damit verwandter Instrumente (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1821; repr. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat, 1980), 175.  “Selbst dieses scheint eine nicht unwichtige, folgenreiche Bemerkung: dass Metall-Saiten, die ihrer Natur nach einen scharfen Klang vernehmen lassen, wenn sie durch Glasstäbe berührt werden, einen Ton geben, der vollkommen die Natur des Waldhorns annimmt, nur noch zarter, noch rührender und der mannichfachsten Nüancirung vom leisesten Anklang bis zur erschütternden Stärke empfänglich.” Dalberg, “Aschaffenburg,” 256.  Dalberg, “Aschaffenburg,” 256.

122

Rebecca Wolf

phenomenon was transferred metaphorically onto the listening body. Dalberg suggests this notion again in referring to Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s 1810 “Fragments from the Estate of a Young Physicist,” published just one year before Dalberg’s article, in which Ritter describes the tone as the life of the sounding body. In addition to evoking the fascination for instrumental mechanisms and their development, Dalberg interrogates the vital and organic dimensions of sound in this context. One could conclude that one of his goals in explaining the details of the mechanics of the new instruments (as well as their relation to acoustics) was to learn more about the spirit of sound. For a historical perspective on presentations of glass instruments in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we must rely on contemporary sources, such as letters and critiques in magazines and journals. Thanks to the popularity of the glass harmonica and similar instruments, we have access to a variety of texts and articles. Also, thanks to a widespread interest in the mechanics and acoustics involved in the invention and improvement of instruments like those built by Chladni and others, we find many articles in music journals that attempt to explain these technological aspects in detail. Furthermore, the presentation of mechanical constructions was bound up with current ideas about the nature of music, as indicated both in texts like Dalberg’s article and in performances by Chladni and others. In addition to his books and writings about the acoustic, Chladni was famous for his presentations in several European countries. As a travelling scientist, he gave lectures for a diverse audience. He presented the euphon and clavicylinder to a select audience in a few European capitals and royal residences. Much more famous, however, was his experiment on the visualization of sound, the so-called vibrating plates or patterns (Klangfiguren). For these presentations, he typically used a sand-covered glass plate, which he presented horizontally. The friction of a violin bow causes the plate to vibrate as well. The sand moves outside of the nodal points, so that a pattern can be seen. Chladni changed both the pitches and the patterns by changing the point where he touched the glass plate with forefinger and thumb. The different frequency creates a different pattern of nodal points, such that each tone produces a different sounding pattern. Chladni presented this visualization of sound for an educated audience who was interested in science; his most famous spectators included Napoleon and Goethe.²² The performances took place in scientific academies and universities all over Europe, thus allowing for encounters with other researchers and savants like Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whom Chladni met in Göttingen in  See Hermann R. Busch, “Chladni,” in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume et al., Personenteil 4, 2nd ed. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000), 956– 958; Dieter Ullmann, Chladni und die Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750 – 1860 (Basel, Boston, and Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1996).

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

123

1792. During some of these meetings, new inventions were developed. For example, to cite the above example, Chladni’s vibrating patterns were based upon Lichtenberg’s experiments on electricity.²³ Furthermore, the public around 1800 was widely interested in scientific exhibitions and presentations. Announcements in magazines and newspapers informed people about new inventions and their presentations, so that a wide swath of society, from the bourgeoisie to the nobility, from musicians to scientists, was interested in such performances. The popularization of acoustic experiments thus took place to a large extent in performance. Taking Chladni as an example of this wider phenomenon, it is significant that on the one hand, he was looking for a vital and organic sound produced by variable musical dynamics with the euphon and clavicylinder; and on the other hand, he found in his vibrating pattern a way of presenting sound in a visible fashion. Moreover, Chladni published numerous works over several decades on acoustics, instruments, and the physiology of listening. In his effort to create a more or less independent science of acoustics, he produced several books and articles that developed a strictly scientific language, provided detailed explications, and emphasized the connection of acoustics with music theory, obviously in a strategic manner. His performances on various physical “stages”, such as concert halls, academic sessions, and exhibitions, dovetailed with his texts in which he expounded on the scientific background of his inventions. For example, Chladni’s preface to his monograph on Acoustics (1802) shows us the close connection between his inventions, performances, and scientific writings.²⁴

3 Singing glass and voice Turning once more to the sound of glass made by musical instruments, we find ourselves back at the end of the year 1761. Benjamin Franklin’s musical glasses had been completed; besides “armonica,” they were also called “Glassy-chord.” From the beginning, the sound of this instrument was performed together with the human voice. Regarding his impression of one of the first such concerts, an observer wrote: “London, Jan. 12, 1762. In the Bristol Journal we find advertised, The celebrated Glassy-Chord invented by Mr. Franklin, of Philadelphia; who has greatly improved the Musical Glasses, and formed them into a compleat Instru-

 See Dieter Ullmann, Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (Leipzig: Teubner, 1983), 29.  Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, “Vorrede,” in Die Akustik (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1802), iii–xii.

124

Rebecca Wolf

ment to accompany the Voice; capable of a thorough Bass, and never out of Tune.”²⁵ The first musician who was involved with the glass harmonica craze was Marianne Davies, who is mentioned earlier in this essay. She was a singer, flutist, and harpsichord player before she came to the harmonica; moreover, she called Franklin her benefactor and made his invention famous. Together with her sister Cecilia, she toured Europe, especially France, Germany, and Austria. Marianne played the harmonica, while Cecilia sang. Based on the performances of the sisters, we find early reports about the outstanding correlation of the human voice and the new musical instrument. Pietro Metastasio wrote a letter to this effect in 1772 about the sisters, in which he praised the voice of Cecilia and the soft and lovely music of Marianne. Moreover, the sound of the two was said to amalgamate, which gives us an impression of the outstanding character of the glass harmonica.²⁶ The similarity of this friction instrument with the singing human voice must have been surprising. Only a touch by a finger produces the sound, while the human voice needs the whole body, including the breath, to produce a similar sound. Throughout the history of music, many instruments have been said to sound similar to the human voice: particularly the violin, cello, and flute, as well as the trumpet and the organ. Musical glasses, however, retained this image for a considerable length of time in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during which an abundance of commentaries comparing the glasses to the voice were published. This may be due to the special character of the sound they produced. The possibilities of a sustained tone similar to that of the organ, in combination with flexibility regarding the change of dynamics, were fascinating to contemporary critics. Furthermore, with the glass harmonica, there is less distance between the player and the instrument, because the fingers are directly involved in the production of sound. The player’s body seems to be amalgamated with the sounding part. Only the singing voice is closer to the body and transports the personal expression more directly. Although Chladni had experimented with a keyboard on a friction instrument, he characterizes the difference between friction instruments like the harmonica and general keyboard instruments as follows in an 1821 volume: “Those common instruments that are played by

 See Labaree et. al., eds., 10: 119. The source is Mrs. Martha J. Lamb, ed., Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 19 (1888): 83.  See the letter of P. Metastasio dated 16 January 1772, cited in Sven H. Hansell, The Solo Cantatas, Motets, and Antiphones of Johann Adolf Hasse. PhD. diss., University of Illinois 1966, 129; see also Heather Hadlock, “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 3 (2000): 507– 542, 513; C. Ferdinand Pohl, Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung. Zur Geschichte der Glas-Harmonica (Vienna: Carl Gerald’s Sohn, 1862), 6.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

125

keys are imperfect because they do not sing, which means that they are not sustained with increasing, sustained, or decreasing volume as long as they should be.”²⁷ The mechanical construction of a keyboard interrupts the connection of sound with the musician’s hand. Or perhaps conversely: the closer the production of sound is to the body, the more similarities can be found between the music thus produced and the characteristics of the human voice. Both the sound of glass and the sound of the voice have an extraordinary status in the field of music and compositions. Producing a variety of dynamics, they offer possibilities similar to those associated with the popular pianoforte, but they surpass the latter in terms of duration. Neither the glass harmonica nor the voice can be completely integrated into an orchestral sound. Rather, they assert themselves as soloist instruments. However, unlike the voice, the glass harmonica was generally not used in virtuoso musical pieces with fast melodies. This disadvantage gave the instrument a special character with respect to its usage for playing longer notes and chords, often with an ethereal character. Moreover, due to the glass harmonica’s “singing” character, the possibility of continuing dynamical variations engenders contact with the body in two ways. On the one hand, such contact between the hand and the sound produced is made during the production of music itself. On the other hand, the sound seemed to contemporary listeners to be in direct contact with the ear and the organ of perception. In general, the tone of the glass harmonica complied with the ideals of the age of sensibility. Accordingly, the sound was described as ethereal, sometimes uncanny in a manner similar to the very popular experiments with electricity and the context of mesmerism. The invisible power of electricity became famous as a power that moves things, that produces lights, and that touches the body. As Hyatt King, one of the most influential twentieth-century authorities on the glass harmonica, has summarized, the tones of this instrument were said to “make women faint; send a dog into convulsions; make a sleeping girl wake screaming through a chord of the diminished seventh; and even cause the death of one very young.”²⁸ Such an instrument must have been interesting for Franz Anton Mesmer (1734– 1815), who worked as a doctor and a so-called magnetizer in Vienna, Austria and who tried to heal sickness with magnetic forces and the use of natural powers. Mesmer’s séances and hypnotic sessions became famous and very popular in the late eighteenth century. Mesmer himself played the glass harmonica in a unique

 “Die gewöhnlichen Instrumente, welche mit Tasten gespielt werden, haben die Unvollkommenheit, daß sie nicht singen, d.i. daß man die Töne nicht, so lange sie eigentlich dauern sollten, mit anwachsender, gleichbleibender, oder abnehmender Stärke fortdauern lassen kann.” Chladni, Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik, 33.  King, “The Musical Glasses and Glass Harmonica,” 114.

126

Rebecca Wolf

way: he used the highly emotional tone of the instrument for his therapeutic sessions. Furthermore, contemporaries observed that sometimes Mesmer’s playing of the harmonica inspired him to sing.²⁹ The sound of the glass harmonica was described in a similar way in the literature of the late Enlightenment and Romanticism, for example in works by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul. The sound of the harmonica was figured “as the sublime voice of ethereal, superhuman realms,”³⁰ where the sound of the glass harmonica opens the way to nature, the heart, and heaven. It is often described as having a direct connection to the nerves and soul of the listener.³¹ The glass harmonica was also involved in a variety of musical compositions. Here as well, it achieved an extraordinary status. For example, as mentioned previously, in 1815, Ludwig van Beethoven composed a “Melodrama for harmonica and spoken words” as the third movement of his incidental music for the play Leonore Prohaska. This piece, whose full title is “Musik zu Friedrich Dunckers Drama Leonore Prohaska,” is categorized as incidental music for a tragedy that is no longer extant. The novel is based on the true story of Eleonore Prochaska (1785 – 1813), an unusual young woman who fought in 1813 for several months in the Lützow’schen Freicorps against Napoleon’s troops. During her last battle, she abandoned combat for service as a military musician. Eleonore had learned the military signals from her father, a Prussian corporal. In the battle, she replaced the drummer and led a group of fifty to seventy soldiers in an attack that was important for the further development of the war. She was wounded in the battle and died soon thereafter. Several artists during the time of the Wars of Liberation dedicated pieces to her, in which she was often stylized as a German Jeanne d’Arc.³² Beethoven’s composition for Duncker’s play starts and ends with military music. The music begins with a choir of soldiers singing on the topics of freedom and love. A funeral march finishes the first movement. The second movement is a romance for singing voice and harp, in the form of a sparely written song. That which concerns us here, namely the piece featuring a glass harmonica, constitutes the third movement. This musical “melodrama” – a genre that is similar to the German Lied, but instead of a singing voice, spoken

 King, “The Musical Glasses and Glass Harmonica,” 110.  Hadlock, “Sonorous Bodies,” 508. See for example E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kreisleriana 1,1: “Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler’s Musical Sufferings,” in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 86; Jean Paul, Hesperus, oder 45 Hundsposttage (Berlin: Karl Matzdorff, 1795), 1: 82, 321, 327.  See for example Pohl, Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung, 8.  See Freia Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper. Die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt: Insel, 1991), 380 – 392.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

127

words are accompanied by an instrument – describes the moment of death of the female heroine: For you, to whom they were entwined, there were two flowers for love and faithfulness. Now I can only pledge to you the flowers of the dead, yet on my tombstone grow the lily and rose anew.³³

This text is meant to be declaimed. The tempo is declared as “solemn, but not slow [Feierlich doch nicht schleppend].” And, as for the accompanying instrument, we read “Harmonika,” the contemporaneous German term for the glass harmonica. The harmonica part is unostentatious and light. Mostly, the harmony stays in a clear D major with some changes to the dominant A, or the neighboring minor-parallel and the double dominant. But in the moment of death, as is to be expected, something unusual happens. After the word “flowers of the dead,” the phrase changes from D major to D minor with a passage through G minor, until it comes back to major A for the hopeful phrase “yet on my tombstone grow / the lily and the rose anew.” The “doch [yet/however]” as the short form of “jedoch [nonetheless]” emphasizes a change. First, the flowers of death and the grave belong to the context of the past, then the change brings the present: new flowers grow, and life returns. Beethoven uses simple musical strategies for a simple text, but this combination allows for a focus on the sound of glass. The ethereal character of the glass harmonica’s sound and its discursive association with a direct path to heaven seems to be ideal for the embodiment of the dying heroine. The glass harmonica thus seems to be an extraordinary instrument intended for extraordinary use. It “sings” when the human voice speaks, as in Beethoven’s piece. Here, it is used in the most dramatic part of the composition, namely, in the moment of the heroic death of Leonore Prohaska and in the moment of returning to the image of growing nature and life represented by the lily and the rose. Moreover, the lily as a symbol of light, pureness, and innocence might represent the dying maiden heroine. The rose signifies her beauty, but symbolizes also paradise and early death. Leonore’s attributes seem to signal the metamorphosis of the female hero into nature. The ideal musical instrument

 “Du, dem sie gewunden, / es waren dein zwei Blumen für Liebe und Treue. / Jetzt kann ich nur Todtenblumen dir weih’n, / doch wachsen an meinem Leichenstein / die Lilie und Rose auf’s neue.” Helmut Hell, Beethoven. Musik zu Egmont und andere Schauspielmusiken (Munich: Henle, 1998), 159. See also Brian Kane, “Melodrama, nach Beethoven,” accessed 18 October 2014, http://www.browsebriankane.com/My_Homepage_Files/melodrama.html.

128

Rebecca Wolf

accompanies this transformation, namely the glass instrument with a close connection to heaven, to transparent light and clarity.

4 The shapes of glass: an extraordinary material The unusual sound and utilization of the glass harmonica may inspire us to ask questions about the physical characteristics of glass in general as well as its connotations. Glass is an extraordinary material. It was and is used for a variety of products, from jewelry to fiber-optic cables. In terms of its properties, glass seems to be an exception to all rules. It is both non-metallic and inorganic; furthermore, when it cools after melting, it does not change to a crystalline state as expected, but rather stays in a liquid structure if it becomes solid.³⁴ It seems to withdraw itself from the common categories with which materials are classified. In the craft of musical instruments as well, glass remains outstanding. In the history of the trade in musical instruments in general, we find a long tradition regarding the development of different branches of the trades. Very often, this tradition went beyond the narrow barriers of the guilds, but in the case of glass instruments, this took place in a special manner. The production of the material glass itself has its own tradition and its use for musical instruments is very rare. Glass blowing is a craft in and of itself. Therefore, the inventors of musical instruments worked closely together with glass blowers, as Benjamin Franklin did in London. The glass harmonica was not an artisanal product of his own making, but rather reflected Franklin’s conception of and idea for a new mechanism and form. As a man of multiple professions and also as a diplomat, Franklin had the opportunity to make the instrument famous on two continents, in Europe and in the “new world.” Today, it gives us pause to think that a man of politics and natural science like Franklin constructed a musical instrument. Moreover, he was not alone among his contemporaries in his interest in improving mechanisms for sound. For example, his friend and colleague Francis Hopkinson experimented in the 1780s with a keyboard for the glass harmonica. Hopkinson wrote music and poetry as well, so this instrument was not alien to his interests. But for a layman to provide a blueprint for the construction of a musical instrument that requires special knowledge in mechanics and craftsmanship seems extraordinary to us today. Nonetheless, it shows us the wide range of activity reached by a few people in the late eighteenth century, in the recently established tradition

 Helmut A. Schaeffer, Roland Langfeld, and Margareta Benz-Zauner, ed., Glass Technology, vol. 1: Glass: The Material (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2012), 13, 21, 22.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

129

of the polymath. In addition to the two intercontinental diplomats, Franklin and Hopkinson, a third man of the political sphere was enthusiastic about the invention: Thomas Jefferson. Hopkinson corresponded with Jefferson about the development of his experiments with the keyboard and received a more than positive answer. Jefferson was full of hope for this groundbreaking invention.³⁵ But this hope remained unfulfilled, because no completed instrument by Hopkinson survived. For us, the question is obvious as to why some revolutionary American politicians were so enthusiastic about this particular musical instrument. One might argue more associatively that the form of the glass vessels as a hemisphere held special inspiration for politicians and fighters for a free continent. And a musical invention that might be, according to Jefferson, the greatest of the eighteenth century, could offer the hope of an American counterpart to the European pianoforte.³⁶ A new instrument, easy to copy and to play by everyone, would have been ideal for this plan. On a more pragmatic level, we can interpret the glass harmonica as a good opportunity for Hopkinson, Franklin, and Jefferson to expand their professional work as politicians and researchers in natural science. They combined their interest in music with research in sound, acoustics, and glass, an unusual material for the production of sound. Qualities of sound and music were often described in a theoretical way. For example, Emily Dolan discusses the historical use of “timbre,” a word used with increasing frequency since the eighteenth century, in connection with the article on the French son by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. In addition to dynamic and pitch level, Rousseau writes about timbre as a third quality of music. According to Rousseau, the quality of tone has several ranges, from soft to bright. This description of instrumental sonority enjoyed a rich tradition in the following era.³⁷ Timbre became more and more important for the development of a unique sound of the works of a special composer or of an orchestra and with this, for the sound of an era, if we think, for example, about the orchestration of Hector Berlioz or the tradition of grand opera. Not only is the sound of an instrument as a whole important; moreover, the shape and the connotation of the material are also equally responsible for producing certain associations with the sound. Glass, for example, was used in several contexts and for different fields of application, such as art and sculpture, as well as objects of everyday life and commodity items, such as tumblers or windows. Perhaps here we find a reason for the enthusiasm around 1800 for using an unusual material for a  See Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 10: 124.  Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 10: 124.  See Emily Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 54, 57; on the harmonica, 61– 65.

130

Rebecca Wolf

musical instrument. The search for a characteristic sound of the era arrived at this material in order to produce a unique sound and timbre, which was interwoven with the metaphors that the material gave the object. Besides a distinctive sound, Franklin’s harmonica brought with it a different position for the player’s body. As with most keyboard instruments, the player sat behind the instrument and the movement of the arms and hands was clear and manageable, which means that the arms could stay close to the body. No broad movements of the arms were necessary. Following the argumentation of Freia Hoffmann, we can conclude that this instrument was one of the best suited to women at this time. Associations with the female body could thus develop.³⁸ Particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, German descriptions of women’s music playing were edited with a view to the posture of the female body. The first aim was so-called Schicklichkeit, which translates as “respectability” or “propriety.” The composer, musician, and author Carl Ludwig Junker was one of the dominant voices in this field. His primary focus was the potential of such performances to produce an impression of Schicklichkeit. The combination of the bodily movements involved in the musical performance, the sight of a female body clothed in a fashionable dress, the “nature of the instrument,” and the general female disposition would result in so called “ideas,” presumably sensual imaginings in the audience members, which he tried to describe.³⁹ More specifically, Junker defined which instruments could be played by women. The female body should stay without too much movement during making music, also because of the voluminous dresses. Women should play the instrument effortlessly. The sound of the instrument, as Junker explained, had to harmonize with an imagined ideal of femininity as soft and angelic. As Hoffmann and Hadlock have shown, this ideal of femininity must harmonize with the conditions offered by the glass harmonica in order to produce an ideal moment of female performance: in this scenario, less movement is necessary to play and the sound produced is soft and ethereal.⁴⁰ In contrast to this ideal amalgamation of sound and the female body, questions and speculations about the dangerous side effects of playing the glass harmonica circulated. According to several reports, the harmonica acquired the

 Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper, 114– 115.  “Dies Gefühl des Unschicklichen entspringt aus Verbindung der Ideen, zwischen körperlicher Bewegung, und Kleidermode; – zwischen der Natur des Instruments, und der allgemein anerkannten weiblichen Stimmung, – zwischen körperlicher Positur, und sittlichem Anstand.” Carl Ludwig Junker, “Vom Kostüm des Frauenzimmers Spielens,” Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783 (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1783), 85 – 99, 90.  See Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper; also Hadlock, “Sonorous Bodies.”

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

131

image of a pathogenic instrument, particularly for women.⁴¹ During the decades around 1800, when the glass harmonica was at the height of its popularity, numerous negative critiques of its use were published. The general idea was that playing the glass would cause maladies of the nerves. The myth was circulated that musicians, mostly female musicians, could become depressive. The ethereal sound of the glass harmonica, as an affecting power which impacts the body of the player directly, was thought to be the guilty party. Furthermore, the close connection of the player’s finger to the sounding part of the instrument suggested a close connection between the sound and the player’s nerves and emotions. On the other hand, there were more serious voices who tried to discuss the topic of “dangerous” glass sounds in more moderate language. For example, in 1798, Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, the founder and editor of the General Music Journal [Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung] in Leipzig, relativized and qualified the physical danger of the glass harmonica. He too calls it an ethereal instrument about which rumors and preconceptions circulated. He evokes both the fear of danger to the nerves of the musician and the accusation that the glass harmonica fostered melancholy. Rochlitz’ first conclusion ends with a positive statement, namely that the harmonica is no more dangerous for the player than any other musical instrument.⁴² Nonetheless, after a long passage in which he defends the effects of the harmonica, Rochlitz turns to a contrary warning. He cannot find any dangerous aspects, but one should be careful nevertheless.⁴³ This implies that people with maladies of the nerves should not play the instrument. Even healthy people should play only for a short time. Moreover, he advis-

 Hoffman, Instrument und Körper, 122.  “Es ist befremdend, wie selten in Deutschland das ätherische Instrument, die Harmonika, ist. […] Es mag mancherley Ursachen von der Seltenheit der Harmonikaspieler geben. […] das so ganz falsche und dennoch weit verbreitete Vorurtheil der grossen Schwierigkeit sie zu erlernen; und endlich vornehmlich die fast allgemeine Meynung, ihr Spiel sey der Gesundheit schädlich, reize die Nerven zu sehr, versenke in nagende Schwermuth, mache deshalb düster, melancholisch, und sey ein treffliches Hülfsmittel zur langsamen Abzehrung zu gedeihen […] Ich spreche hierüber nicht ohne Erfahrung. […] das Spiel der Harmonika schadet der Gesundheit eben so wenig, als das Spiel irgend eines andern ausdrucksvollen Instruments.” Johann F. Rochlitz, “Über die vermeynte Schädlichkeit des Harmonikaspiels,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1, no. 7 (November 1798): 97– 98.  “So wenig Schädliches ich nun auch am Harmonikaspiel finden kann: so bin ich doch keineswegs in Abrede, dass es einige Vorsichtigkeit verlange.” Rochlitz, “Über die vermeynte Schädlichkeit des Harmonikaspiels,” 100.

132

Rebecca Wolf

es that people not play at night.⁴⁴ Although Rochlitz tries to defend the instrument, he accepts some of the prejudices against it. Around 1800, the fascination with the harmonica seems to allow for a deep respect for the power of the sound of glass. This has its reasons in the material’s ethereal sound, in the extraordinary use of the material, and in the direct physical contact necessary to play the instrument. In general, the power of music was said to have strong effects on the emotions. Clearly, the harmonica, as a young and fashionable instrument with a catchy sound, offered a great deal of metaphorical potential. A completely different context guides us to invisibility and the unseen, namely the performances of a travelling Belgian scientist, which were also accompanied by glass music. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson (1763 – 1837) settled in Paris in 1791. Before coming to Paris, he had studied physics in Leuven; he came to France to pursue his interest in both experimental physics and electroplating with Jacques Charles and Alessandro Volta.⁴⁵ Soon thereafter, Robertson became famous for several spectacles that evoke similarities with Chladni’s popular performances. The combination of scientific presentations and experiments with “wonders” was widespread at this time. Robertson was known as a popular balloonist, whose self-presentation was situated between science and spectacle. On the one hand, Robertson operated with the latest scientific instruments in order to make measurements in the air, which he then published in magazines; on the other hand, he also took out advertisements in local newspapers to announce his entertainments. The sensation lay in the prodigious height the balloon could achieve. Furthermore, Robertson scattered flyers inscribed with poems from the balloon.⁴⁶ From today’s standpoint, we would argue that the focus seems to be on the entertainment value of the performance, with a scien-

 “[…] weil der Körper durch seine Ermattung, die Nerven schon durch den Einfluss der Atmosphäre, der Geist durch die Stille und Düsterheit der Nacht – mehr, als zu anderer Zeit, zur Wehmuth geneigt machen oder geneigt sind.” Rochlitz, “Über die vermeynte Schädlichkeit des Harmonikaspiels,” 101.  Julien Fraipont, “Robertson,” in Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, ed., Biographie nationale (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe & Cie, 1907), 19: 496 – 507; “Robertson,” in Camille Pavard, Biographie des Liégeois illustres (Brussels: Alfred Castaigne, 1905), 120; Françoise Levie, Etienne-Gaspard Robertson. La vie d’un fantasmagore (Brussels: Le Préambule, 1990).  See for example the poems in French and German in Journal des Luxus und der Moden 25, no. 4 (April 1810): 255 – 257. Typically, he addressed the public and the emperor in the poems, and described his journey to the sky, which gave him the ability to communicate between earth and the heavenly power. See Rebecca Wolf, Friedrich Kaufmanns Trompeterautomat. Ein musikalisches Experiment um 1810 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2011), 174.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

133

tific “touch”, namely that of presenting the instruments and their measurement results. But in an era of public science, when traveling scientists were financed by their performances of knowledge, the necessity of a strict division between science and spectacle must be called into question. To illustrate this point, Robertson was a traveling natural scientist who routinely performed his so-called “Phantasmagoria” before an audience. In this more or less scientific performance, the glass harmonica was played. At night and very often in parks, Robertson projected pictures in the mist using a magic lantern. The projections showed heads of famous people, nuns, or skeletons. Starting around 1799, the Phantasmagoria was accompanied by the “Harmonica de Franklin,” the glass harmonica. Robertson himself was not the musician, but, according to an advertisement, it was played “by the premier virtuoso of Paris [par le premier virtuose de Paris].”⁴⁷ Perhaps similarly to Mesmer, Robertson used the harmonica to produce a supernatural atmosphere and to reinforce the imagination of the listeners. Both Robertson and Mesmer used this instrument to support an imaginative journey into an unknown sphere. An instrument with a sound as if from heaven should be helpful for finding spirits, both in the sense of one’s own subconscious mind and in the sense of supernatural ghosts. The way to the invisible seems here to be made apparent by an ethereal sound.

Conclusion The performances of the glass harmonica during the decades around 1800 offered a variety of associations and fields of application. Besides its use as a regular musical instrument presented in concerts and for music-making in the home, the harmonica was played for the purpose of the investigation of psychology. Mesmer engaged in this type of investigation of the subconscious mind and used the instrument to access both the medical and the spiritualistic realm, while Robertson used similar techniques to produce the atmosphere and aura of the spirit world. In contrast to both of these figures, Chladni was looking for a scientific way to study acoustic and mechanical principles. Besides its use in the fields of spiritualism and science, the harmonica was originally invented by a politician. Franklin and his colleagues were fascinated about the new possibilities of sound and developed associations with national musical styles. A newly invented musical instrument without any tradition of use offers fresh

 Levie, Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, La vie d’un fantasmagore, 92.

134

Rebecca Wolf

possibilities of metaphoric analogies, for example for the emancipating British colonies of America. For the research of timbre, the harmonica seems to have been a happy accident as well. Its unique sound in general and the special demands it made of the player helped to establish its exceptional status. This is illustrated by the very beginning of sound production in the glass harmonica: the starting point of the sound is not audible. In contrast to numerous musical instruments, no mechanical action is noticed, and the sound starts immediately. This aids in the impression of a transcendental sound, because the origin of the sound cannot be recognized. As a material, glass is responsible for several attributes of the instrument as well. Its transparency allowed for a good view of its experimental applications, making it an ideal material for scientific research. At the same time, its near-invisibility and other related properties quickly evoked an uncanny atmosphere. Together with a sound that is said to come from heaven and an ethereal atmosphere, the instrument was described as dangerous for the (largely female) player. The special concern around 1800 with the physiology of listening and sound effects thus provided an ideal cultural medium for speculating on the heavenly, virtuosic, corporeal, and sensual music of glass. Nevertheless, the uses of the glass harmonica offered an even wider range of performance practice. Robertson’s poems and Beethoven’s melodrama show us how the combination of the human voice and spoken word was joined in new ways with the new instrument, which was taught in different exhibitions and displayed aspects of the science of the sound wave to an interested and informed public – both in Europe and in the “new world.”

Works Cited Beethoven, Ludwig van. Leonore Prohaska. Werke ohne Opuszahl 96. 1815. Busch, Hermann R. “Chladni.” In Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Friedrich Blume et al., Personenteil 4, 2nd ed., 956 – 958. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000. Chladni, Ernst F. F. Die Akustik. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1802. Chladni, Ernst F. F. Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik und zur Lehre vom Instrumentenbau, enthaltend die Theorie und Anleitung zum Bau des Clavicylinders und damit verwandter Instrumente. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1821. Reprint, Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1980. Dalberg, Freiherr Johann Friedrich Hugo von. “Aschaffenburg.” Nachrichten. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 13, no. 15 (1811): 254 – 257. Dolan, Emily. The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger

135

Fraipont, Julien. “Robertson.” In Biographie nationale, edited by Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, vol. 19, 496 – 507. Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe & Cie, 1907. “Franklin’s Glass Armonica.” The Franklin Institute. Accessed 24 October 2014. http://learn.fi. edu/learn/sci-tech/armonica/armonica.php. Hadlock, Heather. “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 3 (2000): 507 – 542. Hansell, Sven H. The Solo Cantatas, Motets, and Antiphones of Johann Adolf Hasse. PhD. diss., University of Illinois, 1966. Hell, Helmut. Beethoven. Musik zu Egmont und andere Schauspielmusiken. Munich: Henle, 1998. Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler’s Musical Sufferings.” In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, edited by David Charlton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hoffmann, Freia. Instrument und Körper. Die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur. Frankfurt: Insel, 1991. Jean Paul. Hesperus, oder 45 Hundsposttage. Berlin: Karl Matzdorff, 1795. Junker, Carl Ludwig. “Vom Kostüm des Frauenzimmers Spielens.” Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783. Leipzig: Schwickert, 85 – 99. Kane, Brian. “Melodrama, nach Beethoven.” Accessed 18 October 2014. http://www.browse briankane.com/My_Homepage_Files/melodrama.html. King, Hyatt. “The Musical Glasses and Glass Harmonica.” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 72nd Sess. (1945 – 1946): 97 – 122. Kircher, Athanasius. Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni. Rome: Corbelletti, 1650. Kircher, Athanasius. Neue Hall- und Thon-Kunst oder Mechanische Gehaim-Verbindung der Kunst und Natur durch Stimme und Hall-Wissenschafft gestifftet. Nördlingen: Arnold Heylen, 1684. Labaree, Leonard W., and Whitfield J. Bell, eds. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 40 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966. Lamb, Martha Joanna. “Notes.” In The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries, edited by Martha Joanna Lamb, vol. 19, 81 – 83. J.J. Little & Co.: New York, 1888. Levie, Françoise. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson. La vie d’un fantasmagore. Brussels: Le Préambule, 1990. Moule, A.C. “A List of Musical and other Sound-Producing Instruments of the Chinese.” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 39, no. 1 (1908): 1 – 162. Pavard, Camille. Biographie des Liégeois illustres. Brussels: Maison D’Edition Alfred Castaigne, 1905. Pohl, C. Ferdinand. Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung. Zur Geschichte der Glas-Harmonica. Vienna: Carl Gerald’s Sohn, 1862. Rochlitz, Johann F. “Über die vermeynte Schädlichkeit des Harmonikaspiels.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1, no. 7 (1798): 97 – 102. Schaeffer, Helmut A., Roland Langfeld, and Margareta Benz-Zauner, eds. Glass Technology. Vol. 1 of Glass: The Material. Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2012. Sterki, Peter. Klingende Gläser. Die Bedeutung idiophoner Friktionsinstrumente mit axial rotierenden Gläsern, dargestellt an der Glas- und Tastenharmonika. Bern: Peter Lang, 2000.

136

Rebecca Wolf

Ullmann, Dieter. Chladni und die Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750 – 1860. Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1996. Ullmann, Dieter. Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni. Vol. 65 of Biographien hervorragender Naturwissenschaftler, Techniker und Mediziner. Leipzig: Teubner, 1983. Wolf, Rebecca. Friedrich Kaufmanns Trompeterautomat. Ein musikalisches Experiment um 1810. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2011.

Mary Helen Dupree

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808) and the Performance of Literary Knowledge

On 9 May 1805, Friedrich Schiller died in Weimar after a relapse of tuberculosis. The deceased poet was not given a spectacular funeral in Weimar; workmen interred his body in a crypt on the night of Saturday, 11 May, and a relatively modest church funeral was held the following day.¹ Within a month, however, mourners in cities throughout the German-speaking lands had begun to stage more elaborate memorial performances in Schiller’s honor. These early Schiller memorials were by and large secular events and took place mostly in urban theaters. Five such memorials were staged in June of that year, in Königsberg, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Breslau, and Magdeburg; and over the next four years, at least twenty-three additional memorials were performed in at least eighteen different German-speaking cities.² Goethe himself made sketches for a rather elaborate Schiller memorial, but this was never carried out; instead, a staged reading of Schiller’s “The Song of The Bell” was performed in Bad Lauchstädt in August 1805, followed by a reading of Goethe’s epilogue to Schiller’s poem.³ The primary purpose of these memorials was to foreground the audience’s appreciation for his literary works and to mourn the untimely loss of his genius. They combined elements of two significant performance genres around 1800: the tableau vivant, in which live performers were used to represent scenes from art or mythology, and the “declamatory concert,” in which popular literary works were read by one or more performers, often with musical accompaniment.⁴ In staged Schiller memorials, tableaux and declamation were used in  Grit Dommes et al., “Lebens- und Werkchronik,” in Schiller-Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung, ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2005), 621. See also Norbert Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung bis zu Goethes Tod. 1805 – 1832 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1967), 28 – 29.  Norbert Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 74– 78.  See the editor’s commentary on “Schillers Todtenfeyer (Mit einem Facsimile der Handschrift),” in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke. Weimarer Ausgabe. Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Herzogin Sophie von Sachsen, ed. Erich Schmidt et al., vol. 1.16 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887– 1919), 561. See also Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 46 – 47.  At least one of the early Schiller memorials, performed in Heidelberg on 9 May 1807, was advertised as a “Declamatorium” (Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 77). On the declamatory concert, see Mary Helen Dupree, “From ‘Dark Singing’ to a Science of the Voice: Gustav Anton von Seckendorff and the Declamatory Concert Around 1800,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 365– 396; see also Karin A. Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1870–

138

Mary Helen Dupree

various combinations and were often enhanced by invisible choirs, instrumental music, and elaborate set designs. Such performances could be large-scale affairs, involving numerous performers and attracting large audiences, or they could be intimate concerts in which one or two performers declaimed verses and monologues by Schiller, with or without musical accompaniment. These early memorials were dynamic, relatively intimate, but nonetheless widely publicized performances that had an immediate impact on the reception of Schiller. In this regard, they were distinguished both from the highly politicized (and massive) Schiller memorials that were staged in 1859, Schiller’s centenary year, and from the more staid form of the Schiller memorial that subsequently developed, which often centered on the reading of a speech or Festrede and served the self-legitimation of the middle classes.⁵ Rather than simply reinforcing an established image of Schiller’s genius, the earlier Schiller memorials used theatrical and performative strategies to reinforce and create knowledge about Schiller, his literary works, and his place in the German-language literary canon. The staged Schiller memorial (Schiller-Feier) is by no means an unexplored phenomenon in German literary history. The literary historian Norbert Oellers has written extensively about the tradition of staging Schiller memorials from 1805 to the present,⁶ and has also published a two-volume anthology on Schiller’s reception that includes numerous documents from Schiller memorials performed from 1805 until the mid-1960s.⁷ However, apart from Oellers’ important work, there has been very little specific scholarly engagement with the earliest Schiller memorials that were performed in the few years immediately following his death in 1805. Nonetheless, these early performances and the texts associated with them can offer valuable insights into literary and theatrical culture around 1800, particularly when viewed through the dual lens of cultural studies and performance studies. Not only do the 1805 – 1808 Schiller memorials affirm the significance of tableaux vivants and declamation practices in German culture during this period; they also highlight the way in which knowledge about literature can be mediated through performance. In the following, I will explore the

1830 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 295 –301. On the “Sprechkunstbewegung” in eighteenth-century Germany more generally, see Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2001), 213–250; and Irmgard Weithase, Zur Geschichte der gesprochenen deutschen Sprache, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961), 333– 415.  On the Schiller celebrations of 1859 and their political meaning, see Bruce Duncan, “Remembering Schiller: The Centenary of 1859,” Seminar 35 (1999): 1– 22.  See Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 73 – 82.  See Norbert Oellers, Schiller – Zeitgenosse aller Epochen. Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Schillers in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Athenäum-Verlag, 1970) and vol. 2 (Munich: Beck, 1976).

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

139

specific performative situation(s) created by these Schiller memorials, which used a variety of dramaturgical techniques not only to create different moods and emotions in succession, but also to foster a sense of unity and commonality among actors and audience members. My exploration of these early SchillerFeiern begins with an analysis of the Schiller memorial staged in the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus on 9 June 1805, which in turn inspired many subsequent performances, from the enhanced performance of “The Song of the Bell” staged by Goethe in Bad Lauchstädt in 1805 to the elaborate Schiller memorial performed at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1808.⁸ My aim is to show how Schiller memorials used theatrical strategies to facilitate the transfer of knowledge about Schiller and his oeuvre, knowledge that was then circulated via reports and transcripts of Schiller memorials in popular journals, such as the Journal of Luxury and Fashions [Journal des Luxus und der Moden], The New German Mercury [Der neue teutsche Merkur], and the Morning Paper for the Educated Classes [Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände]. What did early nineteenth-century audiences learn about Schiller from performed Schiller memorials (and from accounts of such performances in fashionable journals), and how was this knowledge shaped by the theatrical strategies (both visual and acoustic) used in such performances? Who was the Schiller they “knew?” – and what knowledge about aesthetics, canonicity, community, and nation did these performances help to transmit? Finally, what were the consequences of the knowledge thus generated for the literary and cultural history of the German-speaking world?

1 The first Schiller memorial: Frankfurt, 9 June 1805 The timing and geographic locations of the various Schiller memorials performed from 1805 to 1808 are critical, as they reflect the efforts of specific, local communities to reflect on Schiller’s death and its meaning both for their own local/regional context and for the idea of a German “nation” as a whole. As Bruce Duncan acknowledges, “regional attitudes” were more clearly on display in early Schiller memorials than in later ones performed after the 1848 revolution, which tended to foreground nationalistic or partisan motifs.⁹ This sense of local and regional specificity would have been compounded by the fact that many of those attending these early Schiller memorials had had personal contact with Schiller, or at the very least, had

 Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 73 – 74.  Duncan, “Remembering Schiller,” 8.

140

Mary Helen Dupree

had the experience of seeing his plays performed during his lifetime, in the same theaters where the Schiller memorials were now being staged. This meant that the earliest Schiller memorials were much closer in atmosphere and mood to an actual funeral than the later celebrations would have been. At the same time, while they incorporated some religious imagery, the early Schiller memorials were by and large secular events and were performed in theaters rather than in churches or at Schiller’s grave. They were not concerned with Schiller’s spiritual afterlife, but with the long afterlife of his literary oeuvre. As secular funerals, the early Schiller memorials enacted Schiller’s vision of the theater as an institution for the expression of this-worldly values and morals, while offering a rare experience of community that was defined by common aesthetic and literary interests, rather than religious or political affiliations. A case in point is the very first staged Schiller memorial, which was held in the Frankfurt theater (Schauspielhaus) on 9 June 1805 and attracted hundreds of attendees. The Frankfurt Schiller memorial is described extensively in an anonymous letter to the editor of the Journal of Luxury and Fashions, dated 11 June 1805.¹⁰ Although mostly secular in nature, it drew on the iconography of religious funerals, using a combination of visual and acoustic media to dramatize the contrast between the poet’s death and the immortal life of his art. The performance was open to the public; however, attendees had to acquire a free ticket in order to be guaranteed a seat. Four hundred tickets were distributed on the day of the Schiller memorial, and a line began to form three hours before the performance, which was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock that evening. The memorial evoked an intimate atmosphere and feelings of deep personal sadness, even though most of its attendees had never known Schiller personally. Noting that most of those present were dressed in black, the author of the description in the Journal also stages himself as a personal friend and mourner of Schiller; he mentions that he had met Schiller in Weimar and Jena several times prior to his death.¹¹ It is significant that an account of the Frankfurt memorial appeared in the Weimar-based Journal of Luxury and Fashions; like many other theatrical events during this era, the Schiller memorial reached a large portion of its “audience” through print. By publishing this description of the Frankfurt Schiller memorial, the editors of the Journal acknowledged the significance of Schiller memorials held outside Weimar. The article in the Journal thus lent the Frankfurt memorial a certain pan-German relevance, leading to expectations that other German cit-

 Anonymous, “Schillers Todtenfeyer auf dem Theater in Frankfurt. Brief an den Herausgeber,” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 453 – 454.  Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 454.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

141

ies would, in turn, stage similar performances. According to the Journal, the solemnities in Frankfurt began with music, followed by an actor’s reading of Schiller’s “Nänie,” with its famous opening line: “Even the beautiful must die.”¹² This reading was followed by the opening monologue from the fourth act of Schiller’s play The Maid of Orleans, in which Joan of Arc confesses her love for her enemy, Lionel; this was read by an actress named Bohs and accompanied by music by Weber, played behind the scenes. The first, declamatory half of the performance was rounded out by a reading of “The Song of the Bell” by an actor named Werdy, followed by additional solemn music. Alternating musical interludes with readings of texts that were apparently unconnected to each other, the Frankfurt Schiller memorial resembled the format of the “declamatory concert,” which had been introduced in the 1780s and was on its way to becoming extremely popular around the time of Schiller’s death.¹³ The performers of declamatory concerts were often touring professional actors, such as August Wilhelm Iffland, Christian Friedrich Solbrig, and Gustav Anton von Seckendorff; the genre was especially favored by actresses, such as Henriette Hendel-Schütz, Elise Bürger, and Friederike Brun, who found in it an outlet for their creativity and a source of added income when roles were scarce.¹⁴ The declamatory concert typically featured an assortment of literary selections, such as lyric poems, ballads, and monologues, which were often (but not always) performed with musical accompaniment. While declamatory concerts were generally not limited to works by one author, Schiller’s monologues and ballads, such as “The Song of the Bell,” “The Diver,” and “The Cranes of Ibykus,” were mainstays of the declamatory repertoire favored by Hendel-Schütz, Bürger, Seckendorff, and others. Such pieces were attractive to male and female declamators for their dramatic content as well as their pulsing rhythms and musicality; just as readings of Klopstock’s Christian epic poem, “The Messiah” [Der Messias] had captivated an earlier generation of educated German speakers,¹⁵ readings of Schiller’s poetry enthralled many early nineteenth-century audiences. The repeated experience of hearing Schiller’s works performed in a communal setting – performances that were subsequently remediated in newspapers and journals – cemented their popularity and staying power in a way that print alone could not.

 Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 454.  See Dupree, “Dark Singing,” 374– 375.  Dupree, “Dark Singing,” 368.  On cultures of reading around Klopstock, see Johannes Birgfeld, “Klopstock, the Art of Declamation and the Reading Revolution: An Inquiry into One Author’s Remarkable Impact on the Changes and Counter-Changes in Reading Habits Between 1750 and 1800,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 101– 117.

142

Mary Helen Dupree

The theatrical strategies used in the Frankfurt Schiller memorial were thus partly innovative and partly derived from existing models of performance. The first half of the Frankfurt memorial was not only structured very similarly to the declamatory concerts that were staged from the late 1790s to the 1830s, but also may have also evoked the form of popular melodramas such as Georg Anton Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea, which also combined music with literary performance.¹⁶ As in the declamatory concert, the Schiller memorial used an overture to focus the audience’s attention and create a solemn mood, then presented several successive readings of short texts that were thematically unrelated to each other. In at least one of the readings (the monologue from The Maid of Orleans), music was overlaid with declamation. While the text of “Nänie” seems to have been meant to evoke sadness and loss at Schiller’s passing (“Even the beautiful must die”), the other two texts seem to have been chosen less for their thematic content than for their recognizability as exemplary works from Schiller’s oeuvre. With Joan of Arc’s monologue, for example, the performance evoked Schiller’s renown as a dramatic author and in particular the spectacular success of The Maid of Orleans; the play’s Leipzig premiere in 1801 had ended with a brass fanfare and cries of “Vivat!”¹⁷ One can see here how the predilection of early nineteenth-century declamators for stirring, eminently listenable texts helped to enhance the staying power of certain of Schiller’s works; most notably, Schiller’s highly rhythmic, epic “The Song of the Bell,” which was used in the Frankfurt, Bad Lauchstädt, Dresden, and Vienna memorials, continues to be read aloud (and parodied) frequently in Germanspeaking countries to this day.¹⁸ The Frankfurt memorial also made extensive use of tableaux vivants, which had become extremely popular around 1800, in part due to the Europe-wide success of the so-called “attitudes” performed by Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, in the late eighteenth century.¹⁹ Performers of declamatory concerts and tableaux were

 On the combination of music and text in melodrama, see Juliane Vogel, “Zurüstungen für den Medienverbund. Zur Selbstaufgabe der Dichtung im Melodram um 1800,” in Bettine Menke, Armin Schäfer, and Daniel Eschkötter, eds., Das Melodram. Ein Medienbastard, Theater der Zeit Recherchen 98 (Berlin: Theater der Zeit: 2013), 36 – 50.  Journal des Luxus und der Moden 16, no. 12 (December 1801): 669.  See for example August Klingemann’s 1812 comedy Schill, oder das Declamatorium in Krähwinkel (Helmstädt: Fleckeisen, 1812), which lampoons contemporary declamators’ predilection for readings of “Das Lied von der Glocke”; see also Wulf Segebrecht, Was Schillers Glocke geschlagen hat. Vom Nachklang und Widerhall des meistparodierten Gedichts (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2005).  On the tableau vivant in Germany around 1800, see August Langen, “Attitüde und Tableau in der Goethezeit,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 12 (1968): 194– 258; see also Birgit

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

143

often one and the same; for example, Hendel-Schütz, von Seckendorff, Brun, and Bürger all performed so-called “living pictures” or “pantomimic-plastic shows,” sometimes in combination with declamatory readings. Generally speaking, these tableaux were highly theatrical, but did not always represent scenes from the theater. Hendel-Schütz’s repertoire, for example, featured an assortment of Greek mythological motifs and also included two cycles depicting the life of Mary of Nazareth in a manner meant to imitate the “Old German” and “Italian” styles of painting, respectively.²⁰ The Frankfurt Schiller memorial, on the other hand, presented a kind of mega-tableau that brought together both mythological figures, such as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, and fictional characters from Schiller’s plays. Whereas most tableau performances had one actor performing a series of different poses and scenes in succession, the Frankfurt Schiller memorial had multiple actors posing simultaneously, in a massive, panoramic display that seemed to stage Schiller’s oeuvre all at once, in its entirety.²¹ Following the declamatory readings, the curtain was raised slowly to reveal, behind a gauze scrim, a backdrop depicting a mountainous setting, with Schiller’s bust set on a pedestal atop a craggy peak (Fels). A staircase was placed at center stage, leading up to the pedestal’s base; on its steps were placed various allegorical symbols pertaining to theater and drama, including a mask, a lyre, a crown and scepter, and a dagger. (The writer does not make it clear whether the scrim at stage front was ever raised during the performance.) Positioned at stage right and stage left were two allegorical figures: Melpomene, who held a laurel wreath over Schiller’s bust, and a “genius” or mythical spirit holding an upside-down torch, a classical symbol of death typically associated with funerary monuments. Actors in costume, portraying various scenes from Schiller’s plays, were placed “between the cliffs, from the peak on down”; in order to pull this off, it was necessary to take advantage of all the vertical and horizontal space available onstage. The entire spectacle lasted only a few minutes. During this brief span of time, however, the writer of the Journal report was able to note all of the plays and characters represented. These included: Don Carlos and his friend the Marquis Posa, looking soulfully into the distance; Wallenstein in a commanding pose; Isabella from The Bride of Messina, seated and looking pensive; Wilhelm Tell receiving the infamous apple; Luise from Intrigue and Love, already dead from poison at the

Jooss, Lebende Bilder. Körperliche Nachahmung von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit (Berlin: Reimer, 1999); and Ulrike Ittershagen, Lady Hamiltons Attitüden (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998).  Hendel-Schütz’s Marian cycles are reproduced in a series of etchings by Joseph Nicolaus Peroux, Pantomimische Stellungen von Henriette Hendel, nach der Natur gezeichnet und in 26 Blättern herausgegeben (Frankfurt, n.p., 1809).  Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 455.

144

Mary Helen Dupree

hands of her lover; Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, in a prayerful pose, with sword and banner; Fiesko, “free and proud”; Mary Stuart with a crucifix in her hand; Turandot; and finally, the conscience-racked, hell-fearing villain, Franz von Moor, as he appears in the fifth act of The Robbers.²² Whereas the first half of the performance had evoked the totality of Schiller’s oeuvre synecdochically, by alluding to individual texts by Schiller, this panoramic tableau made the entirety of Schiller’s dramatic oeuvre present to the audience for a brief moment. Moreover, it simultaneously staged a wide range of extreme emotions, from Fiesko’s pride to Franz von Moor’s guilt-induced madness, in an easily recognizable way, at least for those audience members who were already familiar with Schiller’s plays. The writer at least seems to have had no trouble discerning the different emotions and motivations of each character; clearly, the performance was intended for an audience that knew Schiller’s plays well and would have been able to parse the characters’ motivations based solely on visual cues. Not only the absent poet himself, but also his plays (and previous performances of them) were thus made present again through the memorial performance. The Frankfurt Schiller memorial thus responded to Schiller’s death through a complex interweaving of tropes of life, death, immortality, theatricality, monumentality, and memory. It was an emotionally charged event that drew on the audience’s sense of emotional connection with Schiller and his works and that was perceived as deeply moving in much the same way as a funeral might have been. Indeed, as Oellers notes, staged Schiller memorials of this era incorporated a number of visual tropes associated with religous funerals and funerary art, such as candelabras, temples, and extinguished torches; in some of them, an empty coffin was even displayed.²³ While the trappings of conventional funerals helped to establish a somber mood, the deployment of other media such as tableaux and declamation rendered the performative situation more complex and enabled the representation of other, potentially more complex ideas and emotions. For example, in the tableau vivant, which freezes a dramatic narrative at a key moment in its unfolding, the medium of theater comes to resemble something frozen and static, like sculpture. Using this technique, the tableaux in the Frankfurt Schiller-Feier created an impression of stillness and monumentality, anticipating the many stone and marble statues and monuments to Schiller that would appear in public squares throughout Germany in the course of the nineteenth century, beginning with Thorvaldsen’s Stuttgart memo-

 Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 456.  Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 74– 75, 78 – 79.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

145

rial, which was erected in Stuttgart in 1839.²⁴ At the same time, by using live actors, the Frankfurt Schiller memorial dramatized the tension between the “aliveness” and ephemerality of theater on the one hand, and a static, monumental image of Schiller’s genius on the other. The massive hyper-tableau prompted the audience members, many of whom would presumably have been regular theatergoers, to draw on their own familiar experience of identifying emotionally with Schiller’s characters, and to project those emotions onto an all-encompassing image of Schiller’s oeuvre. This idea is affirmed by the anonymous letter writer in the Journal, who states that the Frankfurt tableau reminded everyone of the immortal poet’s creations in a particularly “lively [lebhaft]” manner. ²⁵ The “liveliness” of the tableau and of the memories it evoked served as a way of accessing Schiller’s literary immortality, which was seen as having special meaning for both the specific Frankfurt theater audience and the German “nation” as a whole. As all lamented the poet’s absence, the audience members were invited to revisit their fondest memories of witnessing Schiller’s plays, and thus to experience a sense of community linking them with the performers onstage and the departed author, whose works, it was maintained, would continue to be read and performed far into the future. In addition to using declamation and tableaux, the Frankfurt Schiller memorial also introduced the practice of using slightly altered versions of Schiller’s own poetry to eulogize Schiller and to evoke the immortality of his works. After the curtain had gone down on the multi-actor tableau, “tones of mourning” were heard from an invisible choir accompanied by instruments, and an altered excerpt from Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece” [“Die Götter Griechenlands”] was recited.²⁶ The original poem, which appeared in two different versions from 1788 to 1793, contrasts the aestheticized world of Greek art and mythology with the mundanity and sterile rationalism of modern life. (The first version of the poem had included some verses critical of Christianity and monotheism, which Schiller removed in response to criticism by his friends Christian Gottfried Körner and Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg.)²⁷ The verse used in the Frankfurt Schiller memorial is taken from the final strophe of the 1793 version of the poem, which depicts the gods returning to their home on Mount Parnassus (referred to in the poem as “Pindus”):

 Duncan, “Remembering Schiller,” 3.  Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 456.  Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 456.  Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen et al., vol. 2.1b (Weimar: Böhlau, 1947– 2000), 231– 232.

146

Mary Helen Dupree

Yes, they returned home, and everything beautiful, Everything exalted, they took with them, All the colors, all the tones of life, And to us remained only the lifeless word. Snatched from the deluge of time, they hover, Rescued, on the heights of Pindus, That which shall live immortally in song Must perish in [mortal] life.²⁸

Schiller’s 1793 text juxtaposes the music and color of antiquity with “the lifeless word,” which is all that is left to the monotheistic world after the gods have forsaken it and returned to “Pindus.” Removed from the flow of time, the gods live on only in the form of poetry and “song.” In the altered version used in the Frankfurt Schiller memorial, by contrast, it is Schiller himself, not the Greek gods, who returns home to Pindus/Parnassus (the alterations are highlighted here in italics): Yes, he returned home, and every beautiful Great hope he took with him, Early ceased the tones of his life And for us remain only his thought[s] and word[s]. Snatched from the deluge of time, he hovers Perfected, on the heights of Pindus. That which lives immortally in song Must perish in [mortal] life.²⁹

The Frankfurt adaptation thus replaces some of the more provocative cultural, historical, and theological implications of Schiller’s poem with a poignant

 The original reads: “Ja sie kehrten heim und alles Schöne / Alles Hohe nahmen sie mit fort, / Alle Farben, alle Lebenstöne, / Und uns blieb nur das entseelte Wort. / Aus der Zeitfluth weggerissen schweben / Sie gerettet auf des Pindus Höhn, / Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben / Muß im Leben untergehn” (Schiller, Nationalausgabe 2.1: 367). Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s nineteenth-century translation captures the rhythm and basic sense, if not the literal meaning, of Schiller’s poem: “Home! And with them are gone / The hues they gazed on and the tones they heard; / Life’s Beauty and life’s Melody–: alone / Broods o’er the desolate void the lifeless Word; / Yet rescued from Time’s deluge, still they throng / Unseen the Pindus they were wont to cherish: / Ah, that which gains immortal life in Song, / To mortal life must perish!” (Friedrich Schiller, “The Gods of Greece,” trans. by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in Schiller’s Poems and Plays, ed. Henry Morley (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1889), 158 – 161, here 161).  “Ja, er kehrte heim, und jede schöne / Große Hoffnung nahm er mit sich fort, / Früh verklangen seines Lebens Töne / Und uns bleibt nur sein Gedank und Wort. /Aus der Zeitfluth weggerissen, schwebet / Er vollendet auf des Pindus Höh’n / Was unsterblich im Gesange lebet / Muß im Leben untergehen.” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 456 – 457.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

147

image of the author’s own literary apotheosis. At the same time, the poem and the memorial performance reference each other: for example, the cliff or mountaintop depicted in the background of the tableau corresponds to the mythical “Pindus” where Schiller lives on immortally in song, as depicted in the poem. The altered poem thus merges an image of ancient Greece as the ultimate source of beauty and art with an image of Schiller as an immortal genius, and uses the image of the mountaintop as a visual shorthand for the lofty heights to which Schiller has ascended through poetry. Only a month after Schiller’s death, then, the Frankfurt Schiller memorial generated a monumental image of him as an almost godlike figure, whose works could lay claim to almost instant canonicity. The Frankfurt Schiller memorial set a precedent for the use of tableaux, declamation, invisible choirs, and altered texts to evoke an image of Schiller’s authorship and his oeuvre in its totality. At the same time, it helped legitimize the canonicity of Schiller’s works by suggesting that they occupied the same figurative space as the cultural production of the ancients. The lofty peak to which Schiller’s greatness had attained in death replaced both the Christian heaven and the Greek Parnassus. As Oellers notes, this type of “idolatry [Götzendienst]” was at work in virtually all of the early Schiller memorials, in which mythical and religious imagery was used lavishly and the poet was praised universally as a “favorite of the gods” who had gone home to the Elysian fields.³⁰ Moreover, the “cliff [Felsen]” depicted in the Frankfurt memorial was a particularly “German” space, in which the spirit of German poetry was brought to life through live performance and declamation. If the claims of the reporter in the Journal are to be believed, the combination of various multimedia interventions in the Frankfurt Schiller memorial produced a collective moment of self-awareness and unity between actors and audience, approaching a state of what Erika Fischer-Lichte and Hans-Thies Lehmann have termed “co-presence.”³¹ Through the declamatory performances and the massive tableau depicting Schiller’s oeuvre, the individual audience members and perhaps also the performers themselves were reminded of their own memories of viewing Schiller’s plays and reading (or hearing) his poems. At the same time, the tropes of mourning that proliferated in the performance (e. g.,

 Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 74, 78.  Lehmann uses the term “co-presence” to describe the performative situation typical of “postdramatic theater” in his groundbreaking work on this topic; see Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater, trans. and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 18. Focusing on twentieth-century performance art, Fischer-Lichte also uses the term “co-presence” to discuss how community is created between actors and audiences (“der leibliche Ko-Präsenz von Akteuren und Zuschauern”); see Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 58 – 128.

148

Mary Helen Dupree

the inverted torch and the black clothing of the performers) would have reminded them that a shared, personal experience of mourning connected them with the other audience members and the performers on stage – as well as to all of Schiller’s other mourners in Weimar and throughout the German-speaking world. The Frankfurt Schiller memorial can thus can be said to have produced the kind of humanizing experience of collective emotion that Schiller describes as the highest achievement of theater in his essay “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution”: “Each enjoys the raptures of all, which are reflected on him from a hundred eyes in heightened beauty and intensity, and in his breast there is room for only one sensation: the awareness that he is a human being.”³²

2 Reiterations: Bad Lauchstädt, Dresden, and Der Neue teutsche Merkur, 1805 – 1806 While the Frankfurt Schiller memorial was lauded rhapsodically by the anonymous author writing in the Journal of Luxury and Fashions, other contemporaries of Schiller were less enthusiastic about the prospect of a public funeral in Frankfurt for the departed poet. On 19 June 1805, Goethe sent a copy of Schiller’s death announcement in the Frankfurt Journal to his friend, the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, with the following commentary: The Frankfurt Absurdum is enclosed. The newspaper announces: he did not die a rich man, he left behind four children, and the esteemed public is offered free entry to his funeral! Priests and monks know better how to use the funerals of their saints to the advantage of the living. The deep emotion of loss belongs to [the deceased’s] friends as their privilege. The Frankfurters, who otherwise don’t know how to value anything but money, would have done better to express their condolences realiter, since they – let it be said between us – never paid the worthy man (who had a hard enough time of it as it was) full price for a manuscript while he was alive, but rather always waited until they could have the printed text for 12 groschen. Pardon me for speaking so freely. I could go even further, if I wanted to say everything that could be said about this subject.³³

 Friedrich Schiller, “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” in Essays on German Theater, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sander, trans. Jane Barnard Greene (New York: Continuum, 1985), 24– 33, here 33. Schiller’s original reads: “Jeder einzelne genießt die Entzückungen aller, die verstärkt und verschönert aus hundert Augen auf ihn zurück fallen, und seine Brust giebt jetzt nur Einer Empfindung Raum – es ist diese: ein Mensch zu seyn.” Schiller, Nationalausgabe 20: 100.  “Das Frankfurter Absurdum lege ich bey. Man setzt in die Zeitung: er sey nicht reich gestorben, habe vier Kinder hinterlassen, und gewährt dem lieben Publicum einen freyen Eintritt zu einer Todtenfeyer! Pfaffen und Mönche wissen die Todtenfeyer ihrer Heiligen besser zum Vortheil der Lebenden zu benutzen. Das tiefe Gefühl des Verlustes gehört den Freunden als ein Vor-

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

149

With the derisive reference to “priests and monks,” Goethe simultaneously alludes to the fact that Schiller has already achieved virtual sainthood in certain circles and laments that Frankfurt seems ready to treat Schiller in death with a level of admiration and respect that he was never accorded in life. Goethe’s vehement rejection of the Frankfurt Schiller memorial is grounded not only in his abhorrence of the commercial exploitation of writers for profit, but also in a categorical rejection of “public” funerals for Schiller outside Weimar; he argues that feelings of deep loss at the poet’s passing belong only to his friends and family, as their “privilege.” Goethe’s comments thus reveal his sense of the importance of the social and geographic context of Schiller’s memorialization. It is clear from his remarks that the right to memorialize Schiller was a contested one, and that the geographical space where such memorials took place was a crucial factor in their reception. Perhaps in order to compensate for his outrage and disappointment at the Frankfurt memorial, Goethe spent a good deal of time in the months following Schiller’s death trying to stage his own memorial in Bad Lauchstädt, where the Weimar court ensemble performed during the summer months. The first of these attempts was the staged reading of “The Song of the Bell” and Goethe’s “Epilogue” performed at Bad Lauchstädt on 10 August 1805, following a performance of Mary Stuart. The performance began and ended with solemn music by Zelter, and was set in the “foundryman’s workshop”; the poem was recited by costumed actors, while other actors dressed as workmen and apprentices went about casting the bell.³⁴ As per Goethe’s instructions to Zelter, the performance combined music and recitation: for example, in the verse in which the bell is cast, following a spoken exhortation to “say a pious prayer,” a choir responded, “in all that we undertake/ be Thy mercy near us, Lord.”³⁵ The performance closed with a sung fugue that was meant to imitate the sound of bells; the text of the fugue was the poem’s Latin epigram, “Vivos voco, mortuos plango, ful-

recht. Die Herren Frankfurter, die sonst nichts als das Geld zu schätzen wissen, hätten besser gethan, ihren Antheil realiter auszudrucken, da sie, unter uns gesagt, dem lebenden Trefflichen, der es sich sauer genug werden ließ, niemals ein Manuscript honorirt haben, sondern immer warteten, bis sie das gedruckte Stück für 12 gr. haben konnten. Verzeihen Sie mir, daß ich so weitläuftig bin. Ich könnte es noch mehr seyn, wenn ich sagen wollte, was über diesen Gegenstand alles zu sagen ist.” Goethe, Weimarer Ausgabe 4.19:20.  Anonymous, “Schillers Denkfeier auf dem Weimarischen Hoftheater in Lauchstädt. (Nebst einer Nachschrift.) Lauchstädt den 10. Aug. 1805,” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 9 (September 1805), 620 – 623.  Goethe, Weimarer Ausgabe 4.19: 30. See also Bernhard Suphan, “Zum zehnten November: ‘Schiller’s Todtenfeyer’: ein dramatischer Entwurf Goethe’s,” Deutsche Rundschau 21, no. 2 (November 1894): 274– 275.

150

Mary Helen Dupree

gura frango” (I call the living; I lament the dead; I repel lightning). Following the reading of “The Song of the Bell,” the actress Amalie Becker, wearing a Grecian costume, recited Goethe’s epilogue.³⁶ Like the Frankfurt Schiller memorial, the Bad Lauchstädt performance evoked powerful emotions; in particular, the repeated phrase “for he was ours!” helped to cement the melancholy atmosphere³⁷ and reminded the audience members of Schiller’s contributions to theatrical and literary life in Weimar and Germany more generally. Although Goethe himself would not have liked to admit it, there were a number of key similarities between the Frankfurt Schiller memorial and his own tribute in Bad Lauchstädt. Like the Frankfurt performance, the Bad Lauchstädt memorial used “The Song of the Bell” as a lapidary example of Schiller’s literary production and capitalized on the popularity of spoken performances of the poem. Both performances also made the appealing and economical gesture of allowing Schiller’s oeuvre to speak for itself through declamation and recitation of his original works. Moreover, both the Frankfurt and Bad Lauchstädt memorials drew on the late eighteenth-century practice of memorializing actors, writers, and directors inside the physical space of the theater, in a way that appealed to the Enlightenment notion of theater as a secular “temple” and affirmed the self-image of both the audience and the theater personnel. Finally, both performances affirmed a sense among the audience members that they belonged to Schiller’s innermost circle of friends – “for he was ours!” – and were therefore entitled to participate in a public display of mourning for him. As Bernhard Suphan remarks, the phrase “for he was ours! [Denn er war unser]” from Goethe’s epilogue was used in the late nineteenth century to evoke Schiller’s significance for the German nation as a whole; in the Bad Lauchstädt memorial, however, it would have evoked the more intimate, local context of the Weimar theater community.³⁸ Goethe planned to have a more grandiose memorial for Schiller performed on 10 November 1805, which would have been Schiller’s forty-sixth birthday; however, these plans were never carried out.³⁹ A few handwritten fragments and sketches, which were rediscovered by Bernhard Suphan in the late nineteenth century and included in the Weimarer Ausgabe, offer an idea of what form this memorial might have taken had it been performed.⁴⁰ Like the enhanced version of “The Song of

 See Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 47; see also Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 9 (September 1805): 621.  Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 9 (September 1805): 621. Duncan writes that the phrase was also used extensively in Schiller memorials performed in 1859 and thereafter.  Suphan, “Zum zehnten November,” 274.  Goethe, Weimarer Ausgabe 4.19: 30.  Goethe, Weimarer Ausgabe 1.16: 561– 569.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

151

the Bell,” this Schiller memorial involved a combination of declamation and music and was structured more like a musical composition than a play. Opening with an overture (“Symphonie”), it featured a combination of instrumental music, singing, and declamation by soloists and choirs representing various allegorical figures as well as fictional characters from Schiller’s works, such as the workmen from “The Song of the Bell” and the soldiers from the Wallenstein trilogy. Though this performance did not center on “The Song of the Bell,” the influence of Schiller’s poem was still felt; for example, the cycle of generations depicted in Schiller’s poem was to be represented by a series of choirs composed of “maidens,” “youths,” and “old men who look joyfully to the coming century.”⁴¹ This was followed by a series of “mimic entrances,” in which “Death,” “Wisdom,” “Poetry,” and “Fatherland” engaged in conversation with each other. Schiller’s widow, Charlotte, was even meant to make a brief appearance in the performance, thus cementing its personal and local-specific orientation. Prior to writing his sketches for the Schiller memorial, Goethe had witnessed several declamatory concerts, and while he was sometimes critical of the genre, he nonetheless understood the effectiveness of combining declamation with music in order to create a brief and poignant emotional impression.⁴² At the same time, Goethe’s Schiller memorial went a step further than most declamatory concerts in its embrace of complex musical forms, such as the choral fugue. The memorial thus bears witness to Goethe’s own commitment to theatrical and musical experimentation as well as his and Zelter’s awareness of how choral music could evoke a sense of harmony and community – an awareness that Zelter would later bring to bear on his work as director of the Berlin mixed choral society (Singakademie).⁴³ Despite Goethe’s avowed disdain for the Frankfurt Schiller memorial, his own Schiller memorials use many of the same motifs, tropes, and medial components. Goethe may have been disgusted by what he saw as the crass exploitation of Schiller’s image in Frankfurt, but that did not stop him from attempting to  Goethe, Weimarer Ausgabe 1.16: 564.  In April 1813, for example, Goethe witnessed a “declamatorium” by the actor Christian Friedrich Solbrig, which he described as “vacuous” and “tasteless” in a letter to Christiane Goethe (Goethe, Weimarer Ausgabe 23: 321). He also mentions attending declamatoria by Wilhelm Ehlers and Elise Bürger in his letters dating from 1801 to 1817. See also Mary Helen Dupree, “Elise in Weimar: ‘Actress-Writers’ and the Resistance to Classicism,” in Patricia A. Simpson and Evelyn K. Moore, eds., The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 111– 125, here 118 – 120.  See the chapter “Singing Savants: Music for the Volk,” in Myles Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth–Century Germany, Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 45 – 74.

152

Mary Helen Dupree

use some of the same strategies to his own ends. Indeed, one could read Goethe’s Schiller memorials as performative in the Butlerian sense, as a reiteration of previous memorials that used some of the same strategies, but also introduced some new elements and alternative readings of Schiller’s legacy, such as an increased focus on the local/regional context of Weimar.⁴⁴ Like the Frankfurt “Absurdum,” Goethe’s memorials used readings of Schiller’s own literary texts to memorialize the deceased; however, they also struck a somewhat more personal note by showcasing the physical presence of members of Schiller’s inner circle. At the same time, they offered a new perspective on Schiller’s works not only as models of literary production but also as guides for living for present, past, and future generations. The text of “The Song of the Bell” is particularly important here: both in Frankfurt and in the Bad Lauchstädt performance, the drama of Schiller’s death is played out against the backdrop of the larger cycle of collective life depicted in the poem. The individual audience members are invited to find themselves in this larger matrix of life and to identify with the generic characters (husband, wife, children, and workmen) who populate it. This can, of course, be a nationalistic exercise as well: as the poem states, “the impulse towards the fatherland [der Trieb zum Vaterland]” is among the strongest civilizing influences that bind together the idyllic collective – and indeed, the declamatory concert and the staged Schiller memorial, with their use of exclusively German-language texts, were in many ways more “national” than the so-called German “national theaters” of the era, whose repertoire frequently included translations of English- and French-language dramas and comedies. The use of “The Song of the Bell” in the Frankfurt and Bad Lauchstädt Schiller memorials thus reveals much of what is at stake in the practice of staging secular, theatrical funerals for Schiller; such performances not only frame an image of Schiller as a poet for the ages, but also link him to an idealized vision of communal and national life, filtered through “The Song of the Bell,” in which the values of work, family, closeness to nature, and harmony are strongly emphasized. This vision of a linguistic, cultural, and political community extending from the past into the present and future was subsequently reiterated (and adjusted to suit various political and social agendas) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both through the Schiller-Feier and through repeated performances of Schiller’s poem.

 I am thinking here specifically of Butler’s investigation of drag performance as a potentially subversive reiteration of gender norms in “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropration and Subversion,” in Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 81– 98.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

153

The Frankfurt and Bad Lauchstädt memorials thus established a number of tropes and (inter)medial gestures that were replicated in the many Schiller memorials which were planned and performed throughout the German-speaking world in the several years following Schiller’s death. Some of these projects were actually performed, while others were only committed to paper. Many of the people who spearheaded such projects were seasoned actors or performers of declamatory concerts and tableaux vivants. For example, on 30 November 1805, the actress-writer Elise Bürger, who had been performing tableaux and declaiming publicly since the 1790s, staged a “musical-declamatory memorial celebration” in honor of Schiller at the Dresden concert hall (Gewandhaus), for which she charged one thaler admission at the door. As she had done in her declamatory concerts, Bürger read poems by Schiller aloud while the musician Therese aus dem Winckel (1779 – 1867), who was also known as a painter, accompanied her on the harp; the two women also declaimed some poems together.⁴⁵ In the second volume of her collected poems, Lily Petals and Cypress Branches, Bürger noted that eight hundred people had been present at the audience at her Dresden Schiller memorial.⁴⁶ Since the program of the Dresden performance is no longer extant, it is difficult to speculate about its content, but it appears to have resembled the Frankfurt Schiller memorial at least insofar as it used readings of Schiller’s poetry to memorialize the late author, and drew broadly on techniques borrowed from the declamatory concert in order to create specific emotional effects. The Dresden Schiller memorial also foregrounded the role of women as readers, actresses, declamators, and musicians in promoting Schiller’s literary legacy and cementing his place in the German canon, an aspect that is often overlooked by literary historians. Declamatory concerts were, above all, social events that created a pleasant sense of harmony amongst performers and audience members, and the combination of women’s voices and soft harp music may have had a more soothing impact on the audience than the more expansive orchestration used in the Frankfurt memorial. More generally speaking, women – and actresses in particular – were highly visible in many of the early Schiller memorials, in some extent due to the significance of women’s roles in Schiller’s most popular plays, such as Mary Stuart and The Maid of Orleans. This was emphatically not the case in later Schiller memorials; Duncan comments that at the unveiling of the Schiller monument in Stuttgart in 1839, for example, “women were

 Dresdner Anzeigen, Dritter Jahrgang, Erster Band, 101. Stück (19 December 1805), n.p.  Elise Bürger (“Theodora”), Lilien-Blätter und Zypressenzweige (Frankfurt: Heller und Rohm, 1826), 197.

154

Mary Helen Dupree

included only to the extent that they could help collect donations.”⁴⁷ Elise Bürger’s Schiller memorial also provides an example of how individual performers (actors and musicians) integrated an image of Schiller into their performance of self. The occasion of Schiller’s death provided Bürger with an opportunity to present herself as an enthusiastic high priestess and mediator of knowledge about the German literary canon, a role that she had long embraced, not least because it helped her to counteract the negative rumors about her that circulated in the wake of her divorce from the popular poet Gottfried August Bürger. Indeed, both Bürger and von Winckel embraced a vision of women’s cultural participation as secondary and ancillary to men’s: while Bürger styled herself as a vehicle for the works of famous male authors such as Goethe and Schiller,⁴⁸ von Winckel made a name for herself as a painter by copying the works of male Renaissance artists.⁴⁹ The image of Schiller’s genius was thus refracted in Bürger’s Schiller memorial through the image of his devoted “handmaidens.” This gendered logic would have helped to quell any lingering anxieties that the audience may have had about Bürger and von Winckel’s boldness in staging a Schiller memorial without male assistance. In 1806, Bürger’s fellow declamator, Gustav Anton von Seckendorff, also penned the script for a Schiller memorial (Schillers Todtenfeier) which he published in the New German Mercury. ⁵⁰ This long poem, which includes stage directions but appears never to have been performed, once again affirms the connection between the early Schiller memorial and the declamatory concert. Seckendorff was an enterprising character who pursued simultaneous careers as an actor, writer, declamator, performer of tableaux vivants, and sometime academic; having spent some time in Philadelphia in the 1790s, where he gave lectures in declamation and gesture, he returned to Germany and began to perform

 Duncan, “Remembering Schiller,” 4.  See for example Bürger’s poem “To Madame Hendel, when she left Karlsruhe” (“An Madam Hendel, als sie Carlsruhe verlassen hatte”), in which she describes the tableau vivant performer Henriette Hendel-Schütz as “servants of Thalia,” who breathe life into classic works of art by male artists and authors, respectively, by recreating their works in live performances (Elise Bürger, Gedichte von Elise Bürger, geb. Hahn. Als erster Band ihrer Gedichte, Reise-Blätter, Kunst- und Lebens-Ansichten (Hamburg: Conrad Müller, 1812), 163).  See Carl Wilhelm Otto August von Schindel, Die deutschen Schriftstellerinnen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1825): 431– 435.  Gustav Anton [Freiherr] von Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier. Theatralisch für einige Freunde bearbeitet,” Der neue teutsche Merkur 1 (1806): 38 – 43.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

155

declamatory concerts and tableaux under the stage name “Patrik Peale.”⁵¹ In 1815 and 1816, Seckendorff published two of his lectures, in which he expounded on his ideas about gesture and declamation.⁵² Like Elise Bürger, Seckendorff was interested in using the techniques of the declamatory concert to promote the virtues of great writers like Goethe and Schiller. His long-standing interest in declamation and tableaux would presumably have made the intermedial genre of the Schiller memorial especially attractive to him. Seckendorff’s “Schillers Todtenfeier” is essentially a long poem intended to be recited by an actress dressed as Melpomene; like the Frankfurt Schiller memorial, it includes directions for musical accompaniment by an invisible choir and an embedded tableau. The poem’s subtitle, “theatrically adapted for several friends [theatralisch für einige Freunde bearbeitet]”, suggests that the work might have been performed in a small, intimate theater with amateur actors, although no record of such a performance exists. Set in a forest at nighttime, the poem opens with the words “Gone! Gone! [Dahin! dahin!]”⁵³ – evoking the dual sense of the word as it is used in both Karl von Moor’s lament for his innocence in The Robbers and in the song “Knowest Thou the Land” [“Kennst Du das Land”], sung by Mignon in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (in which the German word dahin takes on a different meaning, as “thither!” rather than “gone!”). As in the other Schiller memorials of the era, grief and mourning are also foregrounded in Seckendorff’s poem, as Melpomene rages at fate and the stars for having taken away the lamented “singer” too early. The poem oscillates between inconsolable grief and exalted bliss (the latter evoked by references to Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”)⁵⁴ in a manner similar to that of declamations and tableaux, in which performers shifted rapidly from one emotional register to another. Dispersed throughout the poem are lines taken more or less verbatim from other poems by Schiller. These include, for example, the line “My heart is dead, the world is empty [das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer]” from “The Maiden’s Complaint” [“Des Mädchens Klage”], a poem that Seckendorff later set to music for use in declamatory concerts.⁵⁵ The image of the cliff from the Frankfurt Schiller memorial is evoked here again with a quotation (“A stormy flood from rocky crags [Ein Regenstrom aus Felsenrissen…]”) from the poem

 See the entry “Seckendorff, Gustav Anton Freiherr von,” in Robert E. Ward, A Bio-Bibliography of German-American Writers 1690 – 1970 (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publishers, 1985), 276.  Gustav Anton Freiherr von Seckendorff, Vorlesungen über Deklamation und Mimik, 2 vols. (Braunschweig 1815/1816).  Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier,” 38.  Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier,” 41.  Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier,” 42.

156

Mary Helen Dupree

“The Power of Song” [“Die Macht des Gesanges”].⁵⁶ In a gesture reminiscent of the Frankfurt Schiller memorial, Seckendorff alters a passage from Schiller’s poem “To My Friends” [“An die Freunde”] to commemorate Schiller’s death and suit the overall mood of the text. The original passage had praised the immortality of the imagination: Everything only repeats itself in life, Eternally young is imagination alone; That which never took place, That alone never ages!⁵⁷

Seckendorff’s revised text, by contrast, focuses on the immortality of Schiller’s imagination: Ah! everything only repeats itself in life But eternally young was his imagination That which he, inspired, once gave [us] It thrives eternally; ages never.⁵⁸

Seckendorff thus transforms a meditation by Schiller on the gulf between life and art into a tribute to Schiller’s immortality as a poet. This intervention causes some semantic shifts to occur. For example, Schiller’s emphasis on the unreality of the imagination (“that which never took place”) is replaced by a focus on Schiller’s literary works, the products of his creative genius. These tangible products of Schiller’s imagination provide the audience with a path to immortality; as books to be read and declaimed, they can be passed on to future generations and thus can continue to “thrive” for years to come. Again, the poem modifies Schiller’s own texts to highlight an image of Schiller’s past, present, and future canonicity, which is closely bound up with the idea of the German “nation” as a community of readers, bound by language and culture and extending far into the future. Seckendorff’s poem also recalls the Frankfurt Schiller memorial insofar as it ends with a tableau; however, rather than attempting to bring all of Schiller’s characters to life at once, Seckendorff makes Schiller’s grave the focus of a visual

 Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier,” 40.  Schiller’s original text reads: “Alles wiederholt sich nur im Leben, / Ewig jung ist nur die Phantasie; / Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben, / Das allein veraltet nie!” Schiller, Nationalausgabe 2.1: 226.  “Ach! alles wiederholt sich nur im Leben / Doch ewig jung war seine Phantasie / Was er begeistert einst gegeben / Es grünet ewig; altert nie” (Italics mine). Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier,” 41.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

157

allegory. The scene makes good use of lighting techniques: as the stage directions indicate, the grotto in which the mourning Melpomene stands is to be illuminated by the rising sun, revealing a “genius of fame” suspended over Schiller’s grave (here described as a “hill”) and holding a laurel wreath.⁵⁹ At the foot of the grave, we see (again!) the “genius of life” with an extinguished torch. The allegory thus returns the audience to an awareness of death while also foregrounding the immortality that fame has granted Schiller. As Melpomene weeps, the invisible choir sings a final lament: Do you see the morning light that encircles him? Fame and glory shine down, cover the grave of the great singer. What is great does not die. The soul lives on, even when its shell breaks. Eternally does fame Surround all great ones In the form of light. The afterworld’s blessing never fades away.⁶⁰

Although the poem refers briefly to the immortality of the soul, the overall emphasis is on the immortality that literary fame has granted Schiller. As in the Frankfurt Schiller memorial and Goethe’s unrealized memorial for Schiller, the chorus is used in conjunction with the tableau to juxtapose the immortality of the imagination with the transitoriness of earthly life. With Seckendorff’s “Schillers Todtenfeier,” one can see how the memorialization of Schiller through performance came to be associated with a readily identifiable set of tropes and gestures, which could be repeated in different times and settings to evoke a similar sense of solemnity and monumentality.

 Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier,” 41– 42.  “Siehst du das Morgenlicht, / das ihn umfließet? / Ruhm und Verklärung / leuchten herab, / decken das Grab / des hohen Sängers. / Es stirbt das Große nicht. / Die Seele lebet, / wenn auch die Hülle bricht. / Ewig umschwebet / Ruhm jedes Große in Lichtgestalt. / Nimmer verhallt / Der Nachwelt Segen.” Seckendorff, “Schillers Todtenfeier,” 42– 43.

158

Mary Helen Dupree

3 A “monument of national gratitude”: Vienna, 1808 In the several years following Schiller’s death, among educated circles and in the pages of popular journals, it was often argued that staging a Schiller memorial was an important way for a German city to demonstrate that its citizens were educated and had a healthy appreciation for the literature and the arts. This argument quickly took on a “national” character, despite the local/regional focus of the early Schiller memorials. Already in the summer of 1805, a Gotha-based newspaper publisher, Rudolf Zacharias Becker, had decried the lack of pomp that Schiller with which Schiller’s funeral was celebrated, and called for all theater directors in the German-speaking world to stage a “monument of national gratitude” on 10 November 1805.⁶¹ As Oellers suggests, most of the Schiller memorials that followed this date were probably inspired by Becker’s initiative, even if they did not take place on the specified date. In Vienna, a grandiose memorial was staged at the Burgtheater on the rather late date of 17 December 1808. In an essay in the Morning Paper for the Educated Classes, an anonymous author defends the relatively late date of the Vienna memorial on the grounds of censorship: It is true, Vienna only followed the example of other cities and was even rather late in this, but a lack of warmth and respect for Schiller were not to blame here […] The censors became more liberal and ever since then, more of Schiller’s plays have been performed; and because of this, even the more vulgar mob learned to love and honor the poet more and more, and so we must thank the directorship for the delay, rather than making it into an accusation against them.⁶²

The author echoes the assumption of Becker and others that a staged Schiller memorial was a proper way for a city to show respect and “warmth” for the deceased luminary (while implicitly affirming its connection to the other cities in the imaginary German “nation” by imitating Schiller memorials that had been performed elsewhere). Like many other Schiller memorials, the Vienna Schiller memorial followed a play; it began immediately after a performance of Racine’s Phaedra [Phèdre], starring Johanna von Weißenthurn. It followed a somewhat altered script of a work entitled “Schiller’s Memorial” [“Schillers Todtenfeyer”], which was written in Bavaria by the writer and politician Christian Bentzel-Sternau, included music

 Oellers, Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung, 75.  Morgenblatt für Gebildete Stände 312 (29 December 1808): 1245.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

159

by Friedrich Adam Hiller, and was published by the Gotha-based press owned by Becker in 1806.⁶³ Like other Schiller memorials, it involved declamation, choral music, and tableaux; the spectacle was centered on two “priests” worshipping at an altar, and the whole performance was accompanied by music in a way that would have evoked comparisons with melodrama and the declamatory concert.⁶⁴ The backdrop depicted a cloud that had descended behind the altar, and in front of it appeared allegorical figures representing poetry, music, and theater. Then, the cloud parted to reveal yet another “genius” with a lyre and a laurel wreath in his hand; some audience members thought that this was meant to represent Apollo with his lyre. As in the Frankfurt Schiller memorial, scenes from Schiller’s plays were performed in succession, together with declamations of Schiller’s literary works. The genius then disappeared into the clouds, and various characters from Schiller’s plays gathered in a tableau around his bust to offer flower wreaths. The actress playing Joan of Arc from The Maid of Orleans occupied a central role in this tableau: the commentator claims that “it was she whom Schiller considered his dearest gift, so she rightly stood so close to him, protected by him, and rewarding him.”⁶⁵ The characters then separated into a half-circle, with Wallenstein, Beatrice, Don Carlos, Karl Moor, Maria Stuart, Macbeth, and Wilhelm Tell all standing together at center stage. Finally, the veteran actor Brockmann appeared in the guise of a priest, and Johanna’s flower crown was replaced with a laurel wreath. Like the authors of the descriptions of the Frankfurt and Bad Lauchstädt memorials in the Journal of Luxury and Fashions, the author describing the Vienna memorial in the Morning Paper repeatedly emphasizes how much the audience and the performers themselves were moved by the spectacle. He closes with an image of Schiller’s immortality and his importance to the German nation: “in every breast awoke the proud, free feeling that Schiller would live on immortally among the Germans, and loud applause rewarded the initiative of the directors and the artists […].”⁶⁶ In the Vienna Schiller memorial, many components of the theatrical performance – such as the use of allegorical figures such as Melpomene and the “genius,”

 Christian Bentzel-Sternau, Schillers Feier. Seinen Manen durch seinen Geist, with music by Friedrich Adam Hiller (Gotha: Becker, 1806).  Morgenblatt für Gebildete Stände 312 (29 December 1808): 1246.  “Sie war es, die Schiller für seine liebste Gabe hielte, also stand sie ihm mit Recht so nahe, von ihm selbst beschützt, und ihn lohnend.” Morgenblatt für Gebildete Stände 312 (29 December 1808): 1246.  “[…] in jeder Brust erwachte das stolze, frohe Gefühl, daß Schiller unsterblich unter den Deutschen fortleben werde, und lauter Beyfall belohnte das Unternehmen der Direktion und der Künstler […].” Morgenblatt für Gebildete Stände 312 (29 December 1808): 1246.

160

Mary Helen Dupree

the multi-character tableau, and the declaimed speech by a leading actor of the troupe – seem to have acquired a citational character. These tropes, images, and gestures were clearly not original to Vienna; they had been developed in the course of the numerous Schiller memorials that were held between 1805 and 1808, and had been further disseminated in the German-speaking world via fashionable journals. By restaging these tropes, the makers of the Vienna Schiller memorial communicated not only knowledge about Schiller and his oeuvre (e.g., by including a selection of figures from his plays and foregrounding the importance of Joan of Arc as Schiller’s “favorite” character) but also about the proper way to observe Schiller’s death and to acknowledge his significance for a German “nation” that was cohesive culturally and linguistically, if not politically. Thus, through a survey of various Schiller memorials performed in the years from 1805 to 1808, including Goethe’s contributions to the genre, it is possible to trace the development of a very specific visual, acoustic, and verbal vocabulary for honoring Schiller and conveying his importance to audiences. These early Schiller memorials liberally combined allegorical motifs with figures and metaphors from Schiller’s literary works. They expressed a deep and apparently genuine sense of sadness at Schiller’s passing and sought to make his literary works come to life again through acoustic and visual performances. The organizers of these Schiller memorials relied on the audience’s knowledge of Schiller’s literary works and catered to the audience members’ sense of themselves as insiders who were entitled to take part in Schiller’s memorialization as members of his inner circle of friends and family. Using performative techniques, they framed an image of Schiller’s literary legacy and his significance for German cultural identity, which was then again refracted through print in the form of reports in literary and theatrical journals. The Schiller they depicted had little in common with the historical Schiller who had lived and died in Weimar, but was rather an absent resident of a mythical “Pindus,” the Promethean creator of a host of fictional characters, and the source of countless dramatic high points that could be counted upon to mobilize the emotions of an entire audience. The Schiller memorials thus created a unified image not only of Schiller, but also of the local and trans-regional, German-speaking audience, whose successive playgoing and reading experiences were condensed into one moment, i. e., in the final tableau of Schiller’s characters. Much more than a single play performance could have done, then, the Schiller memorial thus provided audiences with a poignant moment of self-recognition, which fed into their sense of themselves not only as members of a local community, but also, finally, as participants in a larger German “nation” with a stake in the preservation of Schiller’s literary greatness for future generations. It is this awareness of Schiller’s significance for the Germans that would carry

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

161

over into the later decades of the nineteenth century, leading to the staging of ever more complex spectacles by multiple communities, parties, and groups, all of them equally eager to prove that “he was ours.” The history of the Schiller-Feier is thus an essential component of Schiller’s reception in the nineteenth century and an important reminder that the process by which Schiller entered the German canon not only involved individual readers and authors, but also networks of women and men who connected with Schiller and with each other in large part through live performances of his theatrical works and readings of his lyric ones. In the memorial performances staged from 1805 to 1808, these men and women both commemorated the experience of seeing those early performances and created new experiences for both actors and audiences, which were in turn commemorated through print. These Schiller memorials thus bore the traces of those performances of Schiller’s works that were staged during his lifetime, offering a sense of permanence to counteract the obvious ephemerality of live performance, and using performance itself to make real the fantasy of the poet’s eternal life in poetry and song, where the afterworld’s blessing would never cease.

Works Cited Anonymous. “Schillers Todtenfeyer auf dem Theater in Frankfurt am Main. Brief an den Herausgeber.” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 453 – 454. Bentzel-Sternau, Christian. Schillers Feier. Seinen Manen durch seinen Geist. Gotha: Becker, 1806. Bertuch, Carl, ed. Journal des Luxus und der Moden. Weimar: Industrie-Comptoir, 1787 – 1812. Birgfeld, Johannes. “Klopstock, the Art of Declamation and the Reading Revolution: An Inquiry into One Author’s Remarkable Impact on the Changes and Counter-Changes in Reading Habits Between 1750 and 1800.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 101 – 117. Bürger, Elise. Gedichte von Elise Bürger, geb. Hahn. Als erster Band ihrer Gedichte, Reise-Blätter, Kunst- und Lebens-Ansichten. Hamburg: Conrad Müller, 1812. Bürger, Elise. Lilien-Blätter und Zypressenzweige. Frankfurt am Main: Heller und Rohm, 1826. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Dresdner Anzeigen. Dresden: Adreßcomptoir, 1795 – 1826. Duncan, Bruce. “Remembering Schiller: The Centenary of 1859.” Seminar 35 (1999): 1 – 22. Dupree, Mary Helen. “Elise in Weimar: ‘Actress-Writers’ and the Resistance to Classicism.” In The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, edited by Patricia A. Simpson and Evelyn K. Moore, 111 – 125. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Dupree, Mary Helen. “From ‘Dark Singing’ to a Science of the Voice: Gustav Anton von Seckendorff and the Declamatory Concert Around 1800.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 365 – 396.

162

Mary Helen Dupree

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Werke. Weimarer Ausgabe. Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Herzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Edited by Erich Schmidt et al. 136 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1887 – 1919. Ittershagen, Ulrike. Lady Hamiltons Attitüden. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998. Jackson, Myles W. Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. Jooss, Birgit. Lebende Bilder. Körperliche Nachahmung von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit. Berlin: Reimer, 1999. Klingemann, August. Schill, oder das Declamatorium in Krähwinkel. Helmstädt: Fleckeisen, 1812. Langen, August. “Attitüde und Tableau in der Goethezeit.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 12 (1968): 194 – 258. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Luserke-Jaqui, Matthias, ed. Schiller-Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2005. Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart. Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2001. Morgenblatt für Gebildete Stände. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1807 – 1837. Oellers, Norbert. Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung bis zu Goethes Tod. 1805 – 1832. Bonn: Bouvier, 1967. Oellers, Norbert. Schiller – Zeitgenosse aller Epochen. Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Schillers in Deutschland. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Athenäum-Verlag, 1970 and Munich: Beck, 1976. Peroux, Joseph Nicolaus. Pantomimische Stellungen von Henriette Hendel, nach der Natur gezeichnet und in 26 Blättern herausgegeben. Frankfurt: Peroux, 1809. Schiller, Friedrich. Schiller’s Poems and Plays. Edited by Henry Morley. Translated by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1889. Schiller, Friedrich. “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution.” In Essays on German Theater, edited by Margaret Herzfeld-Sander, translated by Jane Barnard Greene, 24 – 33. New York: Continuum, 1985. Schiller, Friedrich. Werke. Nationalausgabe. Edited by Julius Petersen et al. 43 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1947 – 2000. Schindel, Carl Wilhelm Otto August von. Die deutschen Schriftstellerinnen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1825. Seckendorff, Gustav Anton [Freiherr] von. “Schillers Todtenfeier. Theatralisch für einige Freunde bearbeitet.” Der neue teutsche Merkur 1 (1806): 38 – 43. Seckendorff, Gustav Anton [Freiherr] von. Vorlesungen über Deklamation und Mimik. 2 vols. Braunschweig 1815/1816. Segebrecht, Wulf. Was Schillers Glocke geschlagen hat. Vom Nachklang und Widerhall des meistparodierten Gedichts. Munich: Hanser, 2005. Suphan, Bernhard. “Zum zehnten November: ‘Schiller’s Todtenfeyer’: ein dramatischer Entwurf Goethe’s.” Deutsche Rundschau 21, no. 2 (November 1894): 274 – 275.

Early Schiller Memorials (1805 – 1808)

163

Vogel, Juliane. “Zurüstungen für den Medienverbund. Zur Selbstaufgabe der Dichtung im Melodram um 1800.” In Das Melodram. Ein Medienbastard, edited by Bettine Menke, Armin Schäfer, and Daniel Eschkötter, 36 – 50. Berlin: Theater der Zeit: 2013. Ward, Robert E. A Bio-Bibliography of German-American Writers 1690 – 1970. White Plains, New York: Kraus International Publishers, 1985. Weithase, Irmgard. Zur Geschichte der gesprochenen deutschen Sprache. 2 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961. Wieland, Christoph Martin, ed. Der neue teutsche Merkur. Weimar: Industrie-Comptoir, 1790 – 1810. Wurst, Karin A. Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1870 – 1830. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.

Hans-Georg von Arburg*

Modern Architecture Takes the Stage: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles This paper discusses German neoclassical architecture of the early nineteenth century within the context of contemporaneous stage theory and design, examining how certain foundational architectural principles and practices arose in dialogue with new aesthetic standards established by Idealist philosophy and archaeology on the one hand and with popular culture and spectacular science on the other. In this context, the case of the Prussian state architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781– 1841) is particularly relevant, not only due to Schinkel’s eminent influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. Indeed, Schinkel’s interest in contemporary philosophy – and in Kant’s transcendental Idealism in particular – and his preoccupation with archaeology (including both its official and more popular, fashionable versions) converge in what I want to call a transcendental archaeology of theater and of the theatrical, which reinterprets ancient Greek théatron as modern theoría at the intersection of performance (Schauspiel), representation (Darstellung), and (philosophical) intuition (Anschauung). In both open and covert exchange with contemporary literature (Goethe, Tieck), Schinkel thus conceives of modern architecture as an art of architectural spectacle destined for an ideal spectator who should be brought to self-conscious reflection by visual means. In the history of modern architecture, Schinkel’s neoclassical designs are generally understood as forerunners of the functional modernism (Neue Sachlichkeit) of the twentieth century. This opinion usually focuses on the architect’s mature œuvre, which is commonly considered in complete isolation from his earlier, allegedly prearchitectural production. Only in recent years has increasing attention been given to Schinkel’s early work, which draws heavily on visual and conceptual registers firmly imbedded in the Classical and Romantic aesthetics of the Goethezeit. Here, however, the comparison of Schinkel’s early and late work is not simply a matter of identifying a youthful poetic foil for a later, more technical rationalism. Instead, Schinkel’s well-known “official” buildings self-reflexively extend and expand upon his “unofficial” early work. The media of these self-reflexive extensions are none other than

* I am indebted to Sean Franzel for his work on this paper, which went far beyond the job of a translator.

166

Hans-Georg von Arburg

the popular visual spectacles of the day: landscape paintings on transparent paper in dioramas, round panorama paintings, and, especially, stage design for the theater. More specifically, this early theatricalization of architectural forms functions both as a conceptual matrix and as an aesthetic mold for architectural practices developed by Schinkel in his later work, which undoubtedly unfolded after 1820 but did not fundamentally change. Seen in this way, Schinkel’s legacy is much more than a classicist’s success story: it is exemplary more broadly for how, in the profuse atmosphere of late eighteenth-century idealism and early nineteenth-century historicism, popular media and other cultural technologies interacted with modes of performance and led to new forms of aesthetic representation.

1 Schinkel as a scenographer The birthplace of Schinkel’s architectural aesthetics can be found in the young artist’s work as a painter and designer for the Berlin Theater. Summarizing the accounts of Schinkel’s Neuruppin contemporaries, Theodor Fontane noted that “theater was his entire passion.”¹ Schinkel himself speaks of his “inclination since youth for the painterly handling of the set.”² He realized this passion for theater in no small part through his experience as the designer of stage sets for operas and theater from the early 1810s until the late 1820s. The aesthetic impact of this experience on the architect’s body of work cannot be overestimated and Schinkel should undoubtedly be understood as a great scenographer.³ After his first unsuccessful efforts to modernize contemporary theatrical architecture in theoretical writings such as his 1813 Memorandum to the then-director of the Berlin Nationaltheater, August Wilhelm Iffland (1759 – 1814),⁴ Schinkel began his practical career under Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von Brühl (1772– 1837), who succeeded Iffland as the general artistic director of royal productions for the National Theater and Opera in 1815. Between 1815 and 1828, Schinkel created a total of 128 sets for eighteen plays and twenty operas, musicals, and vau-

 Theodor Fontane, “Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walter Keitel, vol. 1: sect. 2 (Munich: Hanser, 1966), 109.  Cited in Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, ed. Ulrike Harten, Helmut BörschSupan, and Gottfried Riemann (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000), 34.  See Art Institute of Chicago, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781 – 1841: The Drama of Architecture, exhibit catalogue, text by John Zukowsky et al. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994).  See Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, ed. Ulrike Harten, Helmut Börsch-Supan, and Gottfried Riemann (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000), 36 – 40.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

167

devilles for Brühl.⁵ The pieces outfitted by Schinkel include the works of Schiller, Goethe, Kleist, Kotzebue, de la Motte Fouqué, Grillparzer, and Calderón de la Barca, as well as compositions by Gluck, Mozart, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Carl Maria von Weber, Salieri, Rossini, Cherubini, and Verdi. In addition to Schinkel’s early enthusiasm for the reformist operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck, his sets for Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s The Magic Flute (1791) stand out qualitatively, as does his collaboration with Berlin musical director Gasparo Spontini quantitatively. Spontini’s resplendent operas (Prunkopern) all premiered in Berlin with set designs by Schinkel. Early in his theater work, Schinkel created all of the main designs for individual works, but the soon overworked building officer (Geheimer Oberbaurat) and later planning director (Oberbaudirektor) was later only called upon to design sets for major scenes. Between 1819 and 1824, Schinkel published a representative selection of these theater designs in the form of thirty-two large aquatint etchings.⁶ This so-called On Theater Design [Dekorationswerk] served as an important public relations vehicle for Brühl’s stage reform. Brühl’s ideas of reform were widely congruent with Schinkel’s own; this was evident not only in the preface of the Dekorationswerk but also in Brühl’s so-called “costume work,” the New Costumes of Both Royal Theaters in Berlin [Neue Kostüme auf den beiden königlichen Theatern in Berlin, 1819] which advocated, like Schinkel, for “the characteristic [das Characteristische]” and “the adequate costume [das richtige Costüme],” i. e., the scientifically correct embedding of a staged action in its proper historical and geographical context.⁷ Before taking a closer look at the theoretical content of Schinkel’s proposed reform of the theater, I would like to consider several of its practical preconditions.

 See Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 102– 462.  Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von Brühl and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Decorationen auf den beiden Königlichen Theatern in Berlin, unter der General-Intendantur des Herrn Grafen von Brühl. Nach Zeichnungen des Herrn Geheimen Ober-Baurath Schinkel, 5 vols. (Berlin: Wittich, 1819 – 1924). The plates are published in Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Bühnenentwürfe/Stage Designs, ed. Helmut Börsch-Supan, vol. 2 (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1990); on the publication of the Dekorationswerk, see vol. 1, 44– 68; also see Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 60 – 65.  Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von Brühl, Neue Kostüme auf den beiden königlichen Theatern in Berlin unter der General-Intendantur des Herrn Grafen von Brühl, 3 vols. (Berlin: Wittich, 1819 – 1824) [1831]. Excerpts of the preface are published in Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 65 – 67.

168

Hans-Georg von Arburg

2 Prelude: landscapes, panoramas, and dioramas The ideas of Schinkel and Brühl’s stage reform are fundamentally based in (as Brühl put it) the “great skill” of the architect as a “practicing landscape painter [ausübender Landschaftsmaler].”⁸ More specifically, certain calculations about the lines of sight of the moving subject-observer adapted from the theory of the landscape garden are reflected in Schinkel’s images of natural and cultural landscapes. This is evident both in how these images direct the audience’s gaze and in how they are based on a two-dimensional, pictorial conception of architectural form.⁹ Both of these strategies lead to a despatialization of architecture; this is a characteristic feature of Schinkel’s stage backdrops and also of many of his later publicational projects. The optical surfaces of the buildings advance out in front of their own three-dimensional reality, a reality that Schinkel conceptualizes as the material precondition of pictorial effects distributed along various visual axes. Schinkel developed his plans for the reform of the theater even more concretely through his activity over multiple years as a painter of popular display pictures (Schaubilder).¹⁰ From 1807 to 1815, he produced one panorama [Panorama von Palermo, 1808] and forty-eight dioramas, which were displayed in Berlin, first in the former royal stable building and later in the mechanical puppet theater of the Berlin industrialist Wilhelm Gropius (1752 – 1852). These “perspectival-optical” paintings (perspektivisch-optische Gemälde), as Schinkel called them, depicted exotic sights, picturesque landscapes, spectacular historical events, political topographies, architectonic interiors, entire architectural en-

 Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 64.  On visuality in the theory of the garden around 1800 more generally, see Michael Gamper, Die Natur ist republikanisch: Zu den ästhetischen, anthropologischen und politischen Konzepten der deutschen Gartenliteratur im 18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), 114– 174; on this theory’s particular relevance for Schinkel, see Chris Vogtherr, “Views and Approaches: Schinkel and Landscape Gardening,” in Art Institute of Chicago, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781 – 1841: The Drama of Architecture, 68 – 83.  On the following material, see Mario Alexander Zadow, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1980), 51– 56, and Birgit Verwiebe, “Schinkel’s Perspective Optical Views: Art between Painting and Theater,” in Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781 – 1841: The Drama of Architecture, 36 – 53. Schinkel’s first biographers Franz Kugler and Gustav Friedrich Waagen already ascribed special importance to Schinkel’s early production of display pictures. See Franz Theodor Kugler, Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Eine Charakteristik seiner künstlerischen Wirksamkeit (Berlin: G. Gropius, 1842), 137– 152, and Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Mensch und als Künstler, ed. Werner Gabler (Düsseldorf: Werner Verlag, 1980), 338 and 343 – 352.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

169

sembles, and, above all, archaeological reconstructions. Most of these display pictures were created under contract with Gropius, and some were also done at Schinkel’s own cost. Additionally, the Berlin Diorama established in 1827 after the model of Daguerre’s Paris Diorama by Carl Wilhelm Gropius, Wilhelm’s son and Schinkel’s lifelong partner, bore unmistakable evidence of Schinkel’s influence, both in its aesthetic imagination and in its popular effectivity.¹¹ Indeed, the awareness of how to produce effects on a large audience remained at the center of Schinkel’s work through to the end of his career: Schinkel’s last and final project of his life was to have been an enormous panorama – 30 meters (nearly 100 feet) in diameter – that would have brought together “the main monuments of the most diverse countries, from Asia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Germany in the Middle Ages, each with corresponding natural surroundings.”¹² Apart from professional and economic motivations,¹³ Schinkel’s production of these display pictures was driven from the beginning by an experimental interest in theatrical effects. Here the dioramas were more indicative of his future work with the stage than the panorama, both in terms of technique and their approach to the mise-en-scène. ¹⁴ Describing Schinkel’s dioramas, the architect and art critic Louis (Ludwig) Catel (who had published his own Suggestions for the Improvement of Theaters [Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Schauspielhäuser] in 1802) shows that these visual spectacles were indeed conceived as quasi-theatrical performances: These pictures are shown on a flat area about twenty feet long and thirteen feet high. The spectator looks at the picture from about thirty feet away, and views it through a long colonnade which, because of its false perspective construction, seems elongated far beyond reality […]. Powerful illumination, with lamps both in front of the picture and behind it

 This cooperation between Schinkel and the younger Gropius lasted until the very end of Schinkel’s lifetime; Gropius helped with including the entirety of the preserved documents pertaining to Schinkel’s work on dioramas into the Schinkel Museum founded in 1844 (see Verwiebe, “Schinkel’s Perspective Optical Views,” 49 – 52). On Schinkel’s part in the construction of the Berlin panorama, see Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin I. Bauten für die Kunst – Kirchen – Denkmalpflege, ed. Paul Ortwin Rave (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1941), 163.  Waagen, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 420.  Schinkel personally led the king and queen through the exhibition of display pictures in the royal stables, which likely helped him secure the commission he received in early 1810 to decorate the interiors of several royal chambers, and then gain his first position as assessor for the Oberbaudeputation of the Prussian state (Verwiebe, “Schinkel’s Perspective Optical Views,” 39).  On the competing models of the diorama and panorama, see Heinz Buddemeier, Panorama, Diorama, Photographie: Entstehung und Wirkung neuer Medien im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 1970), 32– 37.

170

Hans-Georg von Arburg

for the transparencies, increases the illusion of the whole thing, which for the following reasons seems to be greater than that produced by usual panoramas: in the panorama, the spectator’s viewpoint is inside the picture, and so he has to use his imagination to weave his own ego into the illusion [um sein eigenes Ich in die Täuschung zu verweben]. On the other hand, in the presentations under discussion, the spectator, as in a normal theater, is in a special space, in front of which the magic mirror [Zauber-Spiegel] is unveiled, upon which the magical illusion [das magische Blendwerk] is painted […].¹⁵

An explanatory text accompanying Schinkel’s dioramas specifies that the eye is to glide “out of the magical darkness” of the auditorium “through a well-ordered colonnade [and view] scenes” that are “purposefully illuminated from a particular point of view and that arrest the probing gaze of the understanding, without wanting to place limits on the free flight of fantasy.”¹⁶ The illusionary effect of this spectacle and its sequences of short actions are accentuated through dramatic light design and musical accompaniment – via organ, fortepiano, or song with operatic sound effects – in addition to the use of mechanical stage figures.¹⁷ With respect to Schinkel’s stage reform, three aspects of his dioramas are preliminarily of note: first, the stage-like tripartite structure of the diorama, with the auditorium divided from the transparent stage scenery by a middle zone that is artificially arranged so as to deliberately manipulate the spectator’s perspective; second, the dynamization and dramatization of the visual experience through lighting and musical effects, which turn the visual spectacles into actual performances;¹⁸ and third, the choreography of rationality and imagination, in which images on the projection surface are to have an effect on the spectator’s capability for imaginary projection. Here I want to suggest that Schinkel’s strategy of distancing the spectator from what is happening optically deliberately seeks to set in motion the processes of sublimation inherent to the aesthetics of German Idealism. As Kant put it in his Critique of the Power of Judgment in 1790, the aesthetic subject is to remain at

 Schinkel, Bühnenentwürfe/Stage Design, 1: 29; quoted in Berlinische Nachrichten (29 December 1808).  Quoted in Kugler, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 140.  See the 24 December report in the Berlinische Nachrichten on the presentation of the diorama The Fire of Moscow on 19 December 1812: “The effect of the fire is magnificent and perhaps even more beautiful are the masses of clouds of smoke! […] On the bridge, throngs of people surge back and forth [these are mechanical decorative figures (Staffagefiguren); HGvA], and in order to capture the imagination even more, throughout the music one hears […] the sound of intermittent cannon fire being played on the fortepiano, which turns and rolls like the flames.” Quoted in Zadow, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 51.  The element of movement was central in the aesthetics of the diorama. See Buddemeier, Panorama, Diorama, Photographie, 25 and 37– 41.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

171

both an inner and outer distance to his object in order to exclude every interest in the pleasant and stimulating existence of it and to free him for the productive interplay of the imagination and reason. And likewise, Schiller was haunted by the idea of man rising through free play above his animal condition (Sein) into a higher ideal existence (Schein), thus sublimating human society into an aesthetic state. It is no doubt that Schinkel sympathized with this Idealist tendency towards distantiation. At the same time, however, a large number of enthusiastic reviews compared Schinkel’s and Gropius’s dioramas with the notorious phantasmagorias of the Belgian physicist and aeronaut, Etienne Gaspard Robertson, which staged specters of mythical and historical celebrities in an uncanny atmosphere. This raises the question whether the reflective capabilities of the viewing subject presupposed by Idealist aesthetics and targeted by Schinkel were truly up to the task of processing the overwhelming illusionary potential of such spectacles.¹⁹ Brentano’s later critique of Schinkel is likewise grounded in this problematic when he suggests that Schinkel’s stage designs aspired to be “nature” itself, rather than artifice or ideal aesthetic “Schein.”²⁰

3 Schinkel’s vision for stage reform The staging practices of the diorama led directly into Schinkel’s efforts to reform the German stage. Schinkel articulated his most important ideas for reform in the 1813 Memorandum to Iffland, in which he addressed the spatial organization of the stage.²¹ In accord with other contemporary proposals for reform, Schinkel advocated for doing away with the moveable scenery flats (Kulissen) of the Baroque stage, which were oriented towards creating a sense of depth on stage, in favor of an empty stage that is contained by a flat, large-scale backdrop (Prospekt). On this model, the flats and drapery suspended by rigging and enclosing the stage from above would be replaced by a stationary, framed background surface,  Robertson’s “phantasmagories,” a kind of optical-acoustic incantation of spirits in a former Capuchin monastary, were all the rage in Paris beginning in 1798. See Max Milner, La fantasmagorie: essai sur l’optique fantastique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982) and Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26 – 61. Gropius’s “Mechanisches Theater,” which opened in 1812 in the Französische Straße, was linked to these in an article in the Berlinische Nachrichten on 21 December 1809.  See Michael Grus, Brentanos Gedichte “An Görres” und “An Schinkel”: Historisch-kritische Edition der bislang ungedruckten Entwürfe mit Erläuterung (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), 206 – 214.  Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 36 – 40.

172

Hans-Georg von Arburg

which would focus the spectator’s gaze on the dramatic plot being performed on stage in front of this backdrop. This radical flattening of the stage area corresponded to an equally radical change to the auditorium space: in order to optimize the sight lines of as many audience members as possible, Schinkel likewise proposed a flattening of the auditorium into segments (in the manner of a fan). For Schinkel, the main advantages of a set reduced down to a framed backdrop were the following: 1) securing material and financial savings; 2) expanding the width and breadth of the functional space on stage; 3) optimizing the light design: instead of being lit from the flats or from a platform of lights on the floor, actors would be illuminated from above, thus appearing “considerably more natural”²² and less like dark figures in a shadow play; 4) democratizing the optics of the theater: Schinkel’s proposal would do away with the previous custom of limiting the optimum visual effect to a specific vantage point in the theater (i. e., the royal box) and instead give the “Volk” an adequate, perspectival view of the stage, no longer forcing it to be satisfied with glimpsing little more than a “collection of junk [Trödelbude];”²³ and 5) freeing up and aesthetically intensifying the work of the stage decorator, thus placing the painter of backdrops on equal footing with the more prestigious panel artist. Comparing his vision of a reformed theater with the exemplary model of the theater of antiquity, Schinkel expands on the advantages of using a single pictorial backdrop as the primary feature of the stage design, arguing that the central aim of the theater should be to create an illusion that is aesthetically, philosophically, and ethically “correct”: If in most cases we could decorate our stage with a single large screen [Bildwand], we would infinitely surpass the ancients, for it is much easier to create a complete physical illusion of a change in location with the artistic means of such a screen. [This is] much better and easier with a screen backdrop than with flats and drapery [Kulissen und Soffitten], which are always falling apart and are never able form a single coherent context, even with the best organization. The largest advantage from such a set design would be that the image of the stage could be handled in an artistic manner in all aspects. While remaining an important, yet auxiliary component of the action on stage, the visual effect of the stage as a whole would not be disruptive, for it would not ostentatiously stand out and would instead remain a symbolic background that is situated at a distance that is always beneficial for the fantasy. If the scene is to achieve a higher character, this proscenium must take on more of the essence of the stable and solid stage of the ancients and it must powerfully frame and close off the total image of the theatrical appearance [Theatererscheinung]. The moving ac-

 Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 38.  Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 37.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

173

tion should be like a spot projected from outside the scene, which enters this framed enclosure and thus forms the most luminescent point of the entire appearance.²⁴

Phrased in negative terms, shifting the emphasis away from the depth of the stage towards its background surface prevents “vulgar physical deception [gemein physische Täuschung].”²⁵ Phrased in positive terms, this shift enables the “formation [Bildung]” and purification of the “unimpeded, emancipated spirit [Geist]” when confronted with “the pure visage of art.”²⁶ Here the physical flattening of the stage area is to lead, via psychological distancing, to ethical perfection [Vervollkommnung] through effects of projection. Characterizing this kind of set as “symbolic,” Schinkel intends the backdrop to serve as a projection surface for the “productive fantasy of the spectator.”²⁷ This is the decisive “stimulus [Anregung]” for the audience member, such that the “enchanting art of the representation” enables the spectator “to complete the action and its implied location on an ideal level, for himself, such that the true and ideal illusion” should emerge in and from the spectator. Schinkel thus conceives of the actual stage as the mirror image of an imaginary stage in the spectator’s mind.²⁸ The flat backdrop framing the (philosophical and ethical) action on stage has its equivalent on the level of the imagination of the theatergoer. As a spatial location of imagination and fantasy, the theater coalesces first and foremost into a surface composed of light and color. Indeed, it is precisely upon this surface that the theater becomes the prominent medium for the program of individual and social Bildung forged by Schiller and popularized in late-Enlightenment Berlin by Moritz, Iffland, and other thinkers, a program that joined philosophical, pedagogical and aesthetic issues in an amalgam very characteristic of the intellectual culture in the rising Prussian capital of this time.²⁹

 Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 39.  See Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 36. This shift in emphasis is only interrupted in one aspect, namely acoustics. As Schinkel explains in his plan for the reorganization of the auditorium, “For good acoustics, […] the best means is to break up the smooth walls even more, so as to avoid any echoing.” In the model structure of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, the lodges are “piled so closely onto each other and separated so much by dividing walls, that one [can] no longer speak of any kind of flat surface.” See Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 39.  Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 36.  Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 36.  Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 36.  On the “Berlin scene” and its specific fusion of theoretical claims and pragmatic impetus, see the publications of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften project “Berliner Klassik. Eine Großstadtkultur um 1800,” especially vol. 13: Eine Experimentalpoetik. Texte zum Berliner Nationaltheater, ed. Klaus Gerlach (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007), and vol. 15: Der

174

Hans-Georg von Arburg

4 The stage direction for The Magic Flute I would now like to turn to Schinkel’s stage designs for Mozart and Schikaneder’s opera The Magic Flute, which consolidate his theatrical aesthetics of the surface in an exemplary manner. On 18 January 1816, on the occasion of the coronation and peace feast (Krönungs- und Friedensfest), an entirely new performance of this epochal “magic opera” (Zauberoper), directed by Brühl, premiered at the Royal Opera House at Berlin. Schinkel, at that time already a building officer (Geheimer Ober-Baurath) of the Prussian construction commission (Ober-Baudeputation), designed twelve backdrops for this occasion, of which ten still exist (held by the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, formerly the Schinkel-Museum). Brühl’s production was an immense success: the Berlin Opera House was crowded for at least a dozen performances, and even Friedrich Wilhelm III was pleased by this fact, despite having earlier criticized Brühl rather harshly for his expensive extravaganzas. The success of this production was due not least to Schinkel’s work, and his backdrops remained milestones in the history of modern opera. In a genetic perspective of Schinkel’s œuvre, they represent the high point of his early “symbolic” conception of the stage.³⁰ Here I will focus on two designs that are closely related to the issues under discussion in the previous section, i. e., the Idealist and archaeological orientation of Schinkel’s staging work.³¹ In fact, the sophisticatedly illuminated archaeological settings of Schinkel’s staging of The Magic Flute serve to reinflect Mozart and Schikaneder’s drama about bright male reason and dark motherly instincts, transforming the opera into an inner drama of self-reflexive subjectivity in the very tradition of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Schikaneder’s stage direction for the opening scene reads as follows: “The theater is a rocky area that is overgrown in certain sections by trees; accessible mountains on either side flank a circular temple.”³² Schinkel interprets this di-

gesellschaftliche Wandel um 1800 und das Berliner Nationaltheater, ed. Klaus Gerlach and René Sternke (Hannover: Wehrhahn 2009).  Ten of these backdrops have been preserved in their original designs, and eight of these are published in the Dekorationswerk. See Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 117– 177, and Schinkel, Bühnenentwürfe/Stage Designs, vol. 2, plates 13 to 20.  On the dramatic “architecture,” “tectonics” or “constructedness [Gebautheit]” of the Magic Flute, see Stefan Kunze, Mozarts Opern (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 607– 629, and Georg Friedrich Koch, “Schinkels architektonische Entwürfe im gotischen Stil 1810 – 1815,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 32 (1969): 262– 316, 118.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder, Die Zauberflöte: eine grosse Oper in zwei Aufzügen, KV 620, ed. Hans-Albrecht Koch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), 7. Subsequent citation

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

175

Fig. 1: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “Entryway with Rocky Gate [Eingang mit Felsentor],” Cardboard for the first Decoration for Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s “Zauberflöte” (Act I, Scene 1), 1815, Gouache, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

rection quite freely (see fig. 1). Expanding on the most current archaelogical knowledge of his time, Schinkel transposes Schikaneder’s idea into the “style of ancient Egyptian architecture,” depicting a version of the kind of cave architecture that had captivated him his entire life and that he viewed as a privileged catalyst of the play of “free fantasy,” as E. T. A. Hoffmann noticed in his discussion of the Berlin Magic Flute premiere.³³ Departing from the published libretto of the opera in characteristic fashion, Schinkel’s design features a three-winged columnal structure that juts out of an immense semi-circular opening in a rock face, which is sparsely covered with ancient plants. This scene is reminescent of the frontal view of Schinkel’s “Residence of a Prince” [“Residenz eines Fürsten”] in his later Architectural Textbook [Architektonisches Lehrbuch] from 1835 (fig. 2). However, the entryway in the Magic Flute decoration is not a Corinthian propy-

follows the act (Roman numeral) and scene (Arabic numeral) numbers added by the editor of this Edition.  E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Über Dekorationen der Bühne überhaupt und über die neuen Dekorationen zur Oper Die Zauberflöte auf dem Königl. Opern-Theater insbesondere,” Dramaturgisches Wochenblatt (17 February 1816): 122 – 130, 127. On Schinkel’s archaeological templates, see Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 131.

176

Hans-Georg von Arburg

Fig. 2: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “Residence of a Prince (Entryway),” from the materials for the Architektonisches Lehrbuch, Pen and Watercolor in Blue, 1835, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

laeum but instead an architectural structure based part in fantasy and part in archaeologically reconstructed information about ancient Egypt. Also in contrast to the “Residence,” a Greek temple on the surface of the rockface does not cap and sublimate this mystical, primeval building; instead it is encompassed by the backdrop of the azure blue hall of stars, which the audience later learns is part of

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

177

the palace of the Queen of the Night, with the quasi-Egyptian structure serving as its entrance. One might well read this opening scenery in line with the apparent Enlightenment and Masonic themes of the opera’s libretto, such that the dark, chthonic world of the Queen of the Night stands in fundamental opposition to Sarastro’s realm of light, which triumphs at the opera’s end via the formula “the rays of the sun dispel the night [Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht].”³⁴ On this reading, Schinkel’s decorative program would serve as little more than a reiteration of the duality that nearly all contemporary reviewers found at work in the opera, namely between “good and bad principles, [between] sun and moon,” “represented by the priest Sarastro and the Queen of the Night.”³⁵ But Schinkel does not seem to have intended such a crude polarization, and nor did Schikaneder, whose libretto undermines a oversimplified, dichotomous logic of Enlightenment: hardly a foe of humanity, the Queen of the Night kills the “cunning snake” that threatens the life of the “human being” Tamino (one might think here of the Biblical scene of Genesis 3,1); the Queen is repeatedly described as a tender mother by her daughter Pamina (I, 11; I, 24; I, 34) before she despairingly resorts to revenge after her daughter has been abducted (II, 8); Sarastro interprets his calling as a defender of reason entirely in authoritarian terms and does not shy away from inhuman means such as kidnapping and enslavement; Sarastro’s dark-skinned henchman Monostatos is just as much a “Mensch” (I, 14) as the noble Tamino (II, 1) and he is likewise just as much a perpetrator in a disastrous situation as a victim of racist stereotypes ascribed to his character by other figures in the opera.³⁶ Schinkel would therefore seem to adopt this (self‐)critique articulated in the libretto as a productive motor for his decorative agenda. One case in point here is the subtle light design in Schinkel’s plan for the opening scene, which spreads light and shadow equally across the rockface. Additionally, the Queen’s hall of stars initially glimpsed behind the Egyptian structure in the first backdrop and totally visible only later in the second backdrop (according to the sixth scene of act one) is by no means shrouded in complete darkness (see fig. 3). Schinkel’s cupola is marked by finely delineated paths of stars and a brightly shining crescent moon, and all threatening clouds are kept at bay; this design clearly draws on the domes of the neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, which depict

 Mozart and Schikaneder, Die Zauberflöte, 72 (II, 30).  Anonymous, without title, in Münchner Theaterjournal 3, no. 3 (1816): 152; in Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 118. Louis Catel also expresses himself in very similar ways: see Louis Catel, “Über die Dekorationen der Zauberflöte,” Vossische Zeitung (10 February 1816): 118 and 121.  On the consistent ambivalence of figures in the Magic Flute, see Kunze, Mozarts Opern, 586.

178

Hans-Georg von Arburg

Fig. 3: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “The Hall of Stars of the Queen of the Night [Die Sternenhalle der Königin der Nacht],” Cardboard for the second Decoration for Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s “Zauberflöte” (Act I, Scene 6), around 1816, Gouache, 61.4 x 46.3 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

nocturnal scenes of the heavens (especially his Cenotaph for Newton [1784] und his Temple of Reason [1793/94]).³⁷ The placid immateriality of Schinkel’s dome suggests a virtual space that is no longer weighed down by anything chthonic. Furthermore, it stands out that the highest point of Schinkel’s dome is not visible; in contrast to the domes of Boullée and his followers, which placed circular openings or images at their zeniths that represented the all-seeing eye of God, Schinkel’s dome effaces any reference to absolutist command or mastery.³⁸ The scenery for the closing scene of The Magic Flute reverses the complex dynamic of light and dark established by the opening scene in an equally ex-

 See Haus, Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Künstler, 142, and Adolf Max Vogt, Boullées NewtonDenkmal. Sakralbau und Kugelidee (Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1969), 291 and 365.  On the touchy political situation of the Berlin staging of The Magic Flute, see Haus, Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Künstler, 139. The premiere occurred on the same day as the coronation of Friedrich Wilhelm III (18 January 1816), just as the first signs of the political Restoration were coming into view.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

179

Fig. 4: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “The Inside of the Sun Temple [Inneres des Sonnentempels],” Cardboard for the twelfth Decoration for Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s “Zauberflöte” (Act II, Final Image), 1815, Pen and Ink, Watercolor and coating paint, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

treme and pronounced manner (see fig. 4). The sun – whose light is supposed to “transform” “the entire theater,” according to the stage direction – shines out from the center of an oversized pyramid in the image’s background, and floods the entire background and center stage with blazing light. This light divests the landscape and the imposing temple architecture of any contour. Indeed, Schinkel’s aim was not “not simply to illuminate […] external objects but rather to penetrate them and thus form them into a pure shape of light [sie dadurch selbst zu einer reinen Lichtgestalt zu bilden],” as Louis Catel put it in his extensive discussion of the Berlin premiere of The Magic Flute. ³⁹ At first glance, this lighting control might seem to absolve those figures in the opera who have been struck by the sun of reason. But, in the line with Catel’s very precise description, this transformation into a lighted figure [Lichtgestalt] finally applies only to the pyr-

 See Catel, “Über die Dekorationen der Zauberflöte,” 121.

180

Hans-Georg von Arburg

amid, the “rear mountains,” and the “air” in the image’s background, which melt together into a “white glow” and create a monochromatic surface in the form of a “golden vaporous circle [goldene[r] Dunstkreis].” In contrast, the giant Osiris statue at the center of the temple courtyard and the figure of Sarastro standing “elevated” (Catel) on a pedestal below the statue are both severely backlit by the glaring surface of light and thus come to be disfigured as ominous spectres. As central Enlightenment principle and thus as metaphor for the central problematic of the opera, the sun bathes its self-appointed representatives in shadow, thereby questioning their authoritarian self-understanding.⁴⁰ The fact that the light design simulates the very lighting practices that Schinkel had criticized as “unnatural” in his Memorandum to Iffland speaks more for this critical reading than against it. The gaze of the spectator is thus directed to two distinct visual surfaces; these surfaces are illuminated in dissimilar ways and both delineate the main figures on stage with sharply varying levels of contrast. But unlike Schinkel’s earlier experiments with “perspectival-optical” images, the mode of directing the spectator’s gaze in these designs consciously brackets out any kind of “attempt to grab [the audience’s attention] through perspectival illusion and thus to create a kind of proscenium effect [Guckkasten Effekt] through long colonnades.”⁴¹ Instead, Schinkel’s backdrops operate much more as projection screens intended to activate the intellectual capacities of the spectator. Taking Schinkel’s transcendental understanding of art into account in this way makes it plausible to suppose that the hall of stars of the Queen of the Night might well be citing the conclusion of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which was published in 1791, the same year as the Vienna premiere of The Magic Flute: for Kant just as much as for Schinkel, the “starry heaven above me and the moral law within me” is not something that is “veiled in obscurity.”⁴² And Schinkel could likewise have said with Kant: “I see both before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”⁴³ This transcendental structure of self-reflexive subjectivity – not the situation in which the magical tricks of an evil woman are heroically overcome by the reason of a few good men – is the key message that Schinkel takes away from The Magic Flute. The

 On the critical valence of shadow in eighteenth-century painting, see Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 119 – 145.  See Catel, “Über die Dekorationen der Zauberflöte,” 121.  Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 133 – 272, 269. See also Haus, Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Künstler, 138 and 141.  Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” 269.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

181

optical “depth” that according to Catel is “lost” with “decorative painting in general” and in Schinkel’s stage decorations in particular is recaptured by the screen-like handling of the physical space of the stage. This is because the “complete effect” of the pictorial stage’s surface should help the spectator access a reflexive depth.⁴⁴ The “Romantic ideal” that E. T. A. Hoffmann saw realized in Schinkel’s stage decorations did not consist – as Hoffmann thought – in the subordination of the decoration in favor of the dramatic action. Instead, this ideal was to be found in an opposite tendency, namely in the accentuation of moments of pause and contemplation that retard the dramatic action, moments that are characteristic of both the opera’s text and music.⁴⁵ The most important action for Schinkel is that which takes place in the reflexive dissolution of the representation on the stage in the mind of the spectator.

5 The Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt Schinkel attempted again and again to integrate the practical experiences and theoretical convictions he developed as stage designer into his architectural praxis. At the heart of his efforts was an all-encompassing preoccupation with contemporary archaeology, including the early national campaigns of largescale archaeology in Italy and Greece as well as the increasing popular interest in the daily life of antiquity and its applications for modern costume design and interior decoration.⁴⁶ The archaeological principles he developed were usually antiquarian, additive, and decorative, and thus corresponded more to the later “characteristic” stage designs. Striking evidence of this can be seen in the decorations for academic memorial ceremonies and the arrangements for royal celebrations, for which Schinkel contributed a series of tableaux vivants. ⁴⁷ Nevertheless, Schinkel continued to pursue his project of archaeologically reconstructing modern architecture in the Idealist tradition later in his career.  Catel, “Über die Dekorationen der Zauberflöte,” 120.  Hoffmann, “Über Dekorationen der Bühne überhaupt,” 126. Catel also describes Mozart’s Singspiel as a “Romantic Opera” (Catel, “Über die Dekorationen der Zauberflöte,” 119). On the moments of reflexive retardation in The Magic Flute, see Kunze, Mozarts Opern, 562.  On “official archaeology,” see Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus. Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750 – 1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); on “everyday archaeology” see Peter Werner, Pompeji und die Wanddekoration der Goethezeit (Munich: Fink, 1970).  See Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin III. Bauten für Wissenschaft, Verwaltung, Heer, Wohnbau und Denkmäler, ed. Paul Ortwin Rave (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1962), 359 – 364; Zadow, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 85 – 92; and Schinkel, Die Bühnenentwürfe, 75 – 84.

182

Hans-Georg von Arburg

A significant example for this is the Neues Schauspielhaus (New Theater House) on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, which was completed in 1821 at the site of Carl Gotthard Langhans’s Nationaltheater, destroyed by fire in 1817. Following Andreas Haus’s excellent study Karl Friedrich Schinkel as Artist [Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Künstler], I want to suggest here that the Schauspielhaus is an attempt by Schinkel to give architectural form to his “symbolic” conception of the stage as the fundamental principle of the theater. Here, I would like to explore the exact preconditions according to which Schinkel intended the theater to really function as a political and pedagogical institution or Bildungsanstalt, to echo Schiller’s Idealist theory of theater work and its popular variations by Moritz, Iffland, and others. Haus has accurately described Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus as a form of stage architecture (Kulissenarchitektur).⁴⁸ It is not an understatement to say that this building lies at the center of an entirely unique urban ensemble, with the German Cathedral at its right and the French Cathedral at its left, which were expanded by domed towers by Carl Philipp Christian von Gontard in the early 1780s. The Schauspielhaus’s stately Ionic gable portico takes up the ornate Corinthian order of Gontard’s two sacred buildings and encloses the oversized space of the Gendarmenmarkt like a stage background. However, the building only appears at first glance to be “Greek,” a designation that Schinkel used to describe both his design’s form and construction.⁴⁹ Rather than calling to mind neoclassical temple structures, the construction of the arches and above all the single-story pillars integrated into each of the building’s facades are reminiscent of certain Egyptian elements from the architecture of the French Revolution (and likewise familar from Schinkel’s designs for The Magic Flute), thus creating a hybrid stylistic effect.⁵⁰ In addition, Schinkel deliberately placed the pictorially composed structure of the building’s exterior in the foreground of

 See Haus, Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Künstler, 185 – 207.  Through “the style of architecture” of the Schauspielhaus, Schinkel attempted to “connect with and continue Greek forms and modes of construction.” See Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe, enthaltend theils Werke, welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegenstände, deren Ausführung beabsichtigt wurde (Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1819 – 1840), 2: unpaginated introduction.  Schinkel’s Berlin architect colleagues “felt that a pure style was lacking.” They found the “excessive corners and crotchet work [Kropfwerk]” and especially “the excessive, small windows” to be “off-putting.” See the corresponding remarks in the letter by Karl Friedrich Zelter of 14 October 1821 to Goethe, in Schinkel, Berlin I, 123.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

183

his construction, relegating the building’s highly complex interior⁵¹ to a secondary status less constitutive of its initial visual impression.⁵² Four further elements add to the ways that this building functions like a stage set, with all of the set’s deliberate artificiality and intent to make a primarily visual impression. First of all, a grid system generated by small pilasters distributed lattice-like over the facade’s window and wall surfaces suggests a boardlike impermanent construction and contributes significantly to the de-corporealization of the building. Second, segments of the building that initially appear to be dazzlingly white blocks of stone or even marble are in reality made of brick and were originally covered with golden yellow plaster, in imitation of the contemporary trend of decorating the stage with seemingly weighty, monumental objects.⁵³ Third, the monumental steps in front of the main facade lead only to a viewing platform (as the stage direction might often require) and not, as one might expect, to the entrance of the theater, which is placed underneath the steps. And last of all, Schinkel explicitly desired that the decoration of the interior of the building was to extend and continue the grid-like fassade structure, even including the wall frescoes, which were each designed individually in a Pompeian style. This is yet another example of Schinkel bringing the contemporary fad for archaeology into the theater.⁵⁴ Furthermore, the overarching pictorial idea of the building was underlined by the sophisticated light design and the placement of carefully chosen accessories, something that is clear from illustrations of the building. This can be seen nicely in a sepia drawing by Schinkel from 1818 (see fig. 5), depicting the theater building in an almost unnatural overexposure that transforms the building into a surface with vertical and horizontal hairlines spread over it. The dark pile of ruins in the drawing’s left foreground not only references tropes familiar from neoclassical vedute painting, but also serves as a calculated rejection of the

 Which, in accordance with the wishes of the king, contained a large hall for concerts and balls as well as a connected service structure with buffet, kitchen, and servants’ rooms.  The accompanying text to the Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe explicitly emphasizes this: “The judgment about an architectural work of importance is first grounded when one has an overview of the conditions out of which the inner and outer forms emerged. In regards to the plans for the new Schauspielhaus, I consider the enumeration of these conditions all the more necessary, since there is rarely such a diverse and complex confluence of these conditions as in the present case. The easier it is to solve the task of initially making sense of the outer forms with a very complex work, the less likely it is that the artistic value of this work is recognized by the masses.” Schinkel, Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe 2: n.p.  This plaster proved to be too costly to maintain and was replaced by a sandstone veneer in 1881.  See Schinkel’s letter from 29 March 1819 to Caroline von Humboldt: Schinkel, Berlin I, 108.

184

Hans-Georg von Arburg

Fig. 5: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “View of the New Schauspielhaus at the Gendarmenmarkt [Ansicht des Neuen Schauspielhauses auf dem Berliner Gendarmenmarkt],” (Second Version), 1818, Sepia Drawing, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

sculptural architectural ideal of earlier classicism epitomized by Langhans’s theater building to be replaced by the Schauspielhaus. All in all, the theater (Schauspielhaus) was intended by his creator to present itself as a bright and serene (heiter) architectonic “fiction” and inspire a higher life in a imaginative space of ideal contemplation, thus translating the ancient Greek “theater” into modern (Idealist) German (philosophical) intuition (Anschauung).⁵⁵ But Schinkel did not stop at this blueprint suggestion. In his set design for Goethe’s Prologue, which was written for and performed at the building’s dedication on 26 May 1821, the Schauspielhaus is presented very concretely as a theatrical backdrop (see fig. 6).⁵⁶ This design situates the audience at an idealized, “elevated posi Schinkel repeatedly emphasizes this moment of “brightness” or “serenity [des Heiteren],” as, for example, in the introductory text to the Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe or in a letter from 1 November 1819 to the Kabinettsrat Albrecht, who was a member of the commission for building the theater (Theaterbaukommission); see Schinkel, Berlin I, 110. This “bright” element should be seen as being intertwined on the most essential level with the illuminated de-corporealization that Schinkel was aiming for.  This image was carried out under Schinkel’s direction by his co-worker, Carl Wilhelm Gropius. See Schinkel, Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe 2: plate 14 and unpaginated page opposite. The following quotes are from this source. On the circumstances of the premiere, see material documenting it in Schinkel, Berlin I, 119 – 124.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

185

Fig. 6: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “Perspectival View from the Auditorium onto the Stage, with the Presentation of the Decorations Exhibited at the Dedicational Prologue in the Royal Schauspielhaus in Berlin [Perspectivische Ansicht aus dem Zuschauerraum auf die Scene, mit der Vorstellung der beim Einweihungsprolog ausgestellten Decorationen, in dem königl. Schauspielhaus zu Berlin],” in: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Berlin: Wittich, 1831), Blatt 1, Werkverzeichnis Nr. 103

tion [hochliegenden Platz]” – the proscenium – and presents the spectators with a “scene decoration [Szenen-Verzierung]” that grants them a “free view of Berlin.” Two Corinthian collonades frame this view and the theater building is placed “in the middle,” flanked by Gontard’s two domed towers and encompassed by a fictive forest.⁵⁷ It is striking how this stage decoration corresponds point by point with Schinkel’s reform ideas from 1813, ideas that Schinkel once more publicly embraced by republishing them in 1821 in his Collection of Architectonic Designs [Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe]. The “total effect” of the arrangement should “make present” for the spectators “the external form of the building just inaugurated.”⁵⁸

 Schinkel, Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe 2: plate 14 and unpaginated page opposite.  Schinkel, Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe 2: plate 14 and unpaginated page opposite.

186

Hans-Georg von Arburg

This mise en abîme of the real building depicted on its own inauguration backdrop directs the spectators to the particular function of the building as a theatrical institution. However, Schinkel’s whole intention has not yet been captured by these evident observations. Indeed, it could hardly have been the aim of the non-fictional Prologue to remind the audience that they were sitting in a theater. Instead, Schinkel uses the motive of mirroring metaphorically, refering to the spectators’ capacity for self-reflection and its essential role in completing the artistic work, a foundational presupposition of the aesthetics of German Classicism and Idealism. It is hardly surprising that Goethe’s Prologue points in a similar direction.⁵⁹ In fact, Goethe’s discussion of a form of theater that “surpasses the starry heaven” and is capable of bringing us closer to the “God within us” (as stated in a central passage of his 1821 Berlin Prologue), can be directly linked to the hall of stars from Schinkel’s Magic Flute decoration and its affinity with Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The “space” of the theater created by the architect with “high spirit,” as Goethe argues, should lead those spectators, “whose heart beats more freely in higher spheres,” to an intensified, elevated feeling of self.⁶⁰ However, the decisive place where Schinkel departs from Goethe is in Schinkel’s view that it is not the dramatic action on stage but rather the surface of the stage backdrop which produces this elevation of the spectator to a state of reflexive selfconsciousness. Taken as a whole, the multimedial effects at work in the dedication of Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus thus integrate in an altogether unique way certain literary, theater-technical, and architectonic methods in the service of realizing a neoclassical aesthetics of the surface.

6 The transcendental archaeology of the theater Schinkel’s set design for Goethe’s Prologue challenges the audience to intensify and elevate the “free view” out upon the city and theater to the level of intellectual intuition. The fact that this design condensed the three different scenes originally intended by Goethe down to one single architectonic backdrop resulted more from Schinkel’s deliberate focus on the theater’s transcendental dimension than from any lack of time or good will on the part of the stage tech-

 Goethe, Prolog zur Eröffnung des Berliner Theaters im Mai 1821, quoted in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Friedmar Apel et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987– 2013), I.6: 907– 916, here 908 (verses 24 und 62).  Goethe, Prolog zur Eröffnung des Berliner Theaters im Mai 1821, 913 (verses 187– 196 und 237).

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

187

nicians and decorative painters.⁶¹ By transforming the stage view into a projection screen and placing the theater building – similarly conceived of as a twodimensional image – at its center, Schinkel hoped to prevent the immersion in the action represented on stage. This put Schinkel at odds with Goethe, who suggested in an early schematic plan for the Prologue that the immersive experience that led to the “forgetting of oneself and all relationships” was the “highest aim of art.”⁶² For Schinkel, the spectator can only experience the true, transcendental depth of the theater under the condition that his or her gaze remain spellbound by the pictorial surface of the stage background, which, in turn, is to serve as a projection screen that stimulates self-reflective transformation. That said, this aesthetics of the surface is by no means exclusively classical or neoclassical. It corresponds just as much to the Early Romantic/Idealist conceptual operation that Ludwig Tieck details in his novel Franz Sternbald’s Travels [Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 1798]. In a key passage of this novel – which tells the story of a young Renaissance painter on his way to the perfection of life and art in Italy – the city of Leyden, the initial goal of Sternbald’s pilgrimage, appears unexpectedly before the young artist’s eyes “like an image.”⁶³ The titular hero then goes on to imaginatively transpose himself into this image as a decorative figure: It was around midday when Franz Sternbald sat on the open field under a tree and gazed upon the large city of Leyden, which lay before him. He had set out early that day so as to reach the city in good time; now he was resting, and it was wonderful to him that this world-famous city was now before him as an image, the city with its high towers that he had already seen depicted many times before. He now had the feeling that he was one of the figures that were always placed in the foreground against such a backdrop [Prospekt], and he now saw himself drawn or painted, lying there under his tree and turning his eyes to the city in front of him. Indeed his entire life often appeared to him as a dreamlike vision [Traumgesicht]; in these moments, it was not easy for him to convince himself [of the existence] of the objects that surrounded him. Franz Sternbald had preserved entire images, entire ensembles [Versammlungen] with all of the people therein accurately and vividly in his fantasy; because he was capable of placing these images in front of himself anew, he was uncertain at certain moments as to whether everything that surrounded him was not also in fact a creation of his imagination.⁶⁴

 Brühl expressed his apologies in these terms to Goethe, who was visibly irritated that the three scenes had been condensed down into one; Goethe, Prolog zur Eröffnung des Berliner Theaters im Mai 1821, 1489.  Goethe, Prolog zur Eröffnung des Berliner Theaters im Mai 1821, 1497.  Ludwig Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Studienausgabe, ed. Alfred Anger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), 87.  Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 87.

188

Hans-Georg von Arburg

The doubling and displacement of the self within an image, completed with an object in the foreground (repoussoir), decorative figures (staffage), and backdrop, is entirely identical to the stage production at work in Schinkel’s dioramas. For Sternbald, this imaginative operation triggers reflections about the dreamlike character of his perception of reality and about the manipulative potential of fantasy. This experience causes him first to forget his pragmatic circumstances, and then the experience is once more mirrored in a dream where the hero finds his future symbolically prophesized. However, the Leyden image in which the spectator sees himself as an observing figure does not lead the young artist to art’s highest aim of self-forgetting or self-abandon in the immersive logic of Goethe’s Prologue sketch. Instead, what occurs in Tieck’s novel is an extended reflection on this process in the medium of poetic representation. Taking this foundational literary scene of intellectual intuition and self-reflection into consideration, it becomes possible to get to the heart of Schinkel’s passion for the theater and his related approach to architecture. Schinkel’s theatrical buildings, such as his stage sets, function as theater architectural structures (Theaterarchitekturen) which adapt the logic of the Sternbald scene in two ways, pertaining both to the aesthetics of audience reception and artistic production. On the one hand, Schinkel’s structures take over this scene as an architectonic model of audience reception that postulates that the spectator supplements and even completes architectural form on the level of transcendental reflection. On the other hand, Schinkel’s structures also use this scene of reflection as a fruitful motor for new modes of artistic production, giving rise to new, programmatically “symbolic” decorations (like the one for Goethe’s Prologue, for example). In this way a transcendental archaeology of theater and of the theatrical emerges from the scene of a spectator who is brought to self-conscious reflection. Both as artist and architect, Schinkel is seeking nothing less in his work than the origin (arché) of the Greek conception (logos) of “theater” as such. Related concepts of theatrical performance (Schauspiel), representation (Darstellung), and intuition (Anschauung) all intersect in this origin, doing so in a strikingly similar way to the related concept of “theory” (theoría).⁶⁵ At the heart of this origin, however, one unmistakably finds clear traces of how popular practices of performance and stagecraft prepare the way for modern architecture. It is this very concept of “théatron” and its dual sense of being originary – as theater’s highest and most elemental form of existence – that remained the quintessence of architecture for Schinkel throughout his entire career. And this is also the reason why the archaeological “reconstructions” of Schinkel’s activities both as stage de-

 See Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987), 33 – 41.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles

189

signer and as architect that I have pursued in this essay are doubly legitimate, both in terms of their philosophical horizon and their popular relevance. Translated by Sean B. Franzel

Works Cited Art Institute of Chicago, The. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781 – 1841: The Drama of Architecture. Text by John Zukowsky et al. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. Exhibit catalog. Baxandall, Michael. Shadows and Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Blumenberg, Hans. Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987. Brühl, Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von. Neue Kostüme auf den beiden königlichen Theatern in Berlin unter der General-Intendantur des Herrn Grafen von Brühl. 3 vols. Berlin: Wittich, 1819 – 1823. Brühl, Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Decorationen auf den beiden Königlichen Theatern in Berlin, unter der General–Intendantur des Herrn Grafen von Brühl. Nach Zeichnungen des Herrn Geheimen Ober-Baurath Schinkel. 5 vols. Berlin: Wittich, 1819 – 1824. Buddemeier, Heinz. Panorama, Diorama, Photographie: Entstehung und Wirkung neuer Medien im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Fink, 1970. Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26 – 61. Catel, Louis. “Über die Dekorationen der Zauberflöte.” Vossische Zeitung (10 February 1816): 118 – 121. Fontane, Theodor. “Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg.” In Die Grafschaft Ruppin, in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Walter Keitel, vol. 1, sect. 2, 107 – 129. Munich: Hanser, 1966. Gamper, Michael. Die Natur ist republikanisch: Zu den ästhetischen, anthropologischen und politischen Konzepten der deutschen Gartenliteratur im 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998. Gerlach, Klaus, ed. Eine Experimentalpoetik. Texte zum Berliner Nationaltheater. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007. Gerlach, Klaus, and René Sternke, eds. Der gesellschaftliche Wandel um 1800 und das Berliner Nationaltheater. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2009. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Edited by Friedmar Apel et al. 40 vols. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987 – 2013. Grus, Michael. Brentanos Gedichte “An Görres” und “An Schinkel”: Historisch-kritische Edition der bislang ungedruckten Entwürfe mit Erläuterungen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993. Haus, Andreas. Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Künstler: Annäherung und Kommentar. München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2001. Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Über Dekorationen der Bühne überhaupt und über die neuen Dekorationen zur Oper Die Zauberflöte auf dem Königl. Opern-Theater insbesondere.” Dramaturgisches Wochenblatt (17 February 1816): 122 – 130.

190

Hans-Georg von Arburg

Kant, Immanuel. “Critique of Practical Reason.” In Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor, 133 – 272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Koch, Georg Friedrich. “Schinkels architektonische Entwürfe im gotischen Stil 1810 – 1815.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 32 (1969): 262 – 316. Kugler, Franz Theodor. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Eine Charakteristik seiner künstlerischen Wirksamkeit. Berlin: Gropius, 1842. Kunze, Stefan. Mozarts Opern. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Marchand, Suzanne L. Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750 – 1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Milner, Max. La fantasmagorie: essai sur l’optique fantastique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Emanuel Schikaneder. Die Zauberflöte: Eine grosse Oper in zwei Aufzügen, KV 620. Edited by Hans-Albrecht Koch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Berlin I. Bauten für die Kunst – Kirchen – Denkmalpflege. Edited by Paul Ortwin Rave. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1941. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Berlin III. Bauten für Wissenschaft, Verwaltung, Heer, Wohnbau und Denkmäler. Edited by Paul Ortwin Rave. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1962. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Bühnenentwürfe/Stage Designs. Edited by Helmut Börsch-Supan. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1990. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Die Bühnenentwürfe. Edited by Ulrike Harten, Helmut Börsch-Supan, and Gottfried Riemann. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe enthaltend theils Werke, welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegenstände, deren Ausführung beabsichtigt wurde. 28 vols. Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1819 – 1840. Tieck, Ludwig. Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Studienausgabe. Edited by Alfred Anger. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966. Verwiebe, Birgit. Lichtspiele: Vom Mondscheintransparent zum Diorama. Stuttgart: Füsslin, 1997. Verwiebe, Birgit. “Schinkel’s Perspective Optical Views: Art between Painting and Theater.” In Karl Friedrich Schinkel, exhibit catalog, 36 – 53. Vogt, Adolf Max. Boulle´es Newton-Denkmal: Sakralbau und Kugelidee. Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1969. Vogtherr, Christoph M. “Views and Approaches: Schinkel and Landscape Gardening.” In Karl Friedrich Schinkel, exhibit catalog, 68 – 83. Waagen, Gustav Friedrich. Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Mensch und als Künstler. Edited by Werner Gabler. Düsseldorf: Werner, 1980. Werner, Peter. Pompeji und die Wanddekoration der Goethezeit. Munich: Fink, 1970. Zadow, Mario Alexander. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Berlin: Rembrandt, 1980.

Part Two: Pedagogies and Publics

Claire Baldwin

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics Introduction He still hung at the local university like a beautiful chandelier, from which, however, no light had shone for the last twenty years.¹

Lichtenberg’s satiric comment from his so-called Waste Books [Sudelbücher] certainly does not apply to his own extended academic career in the fields of mathematics, astronomy and physics; his light shone brightly throughout his professional life at the University of Göttingen and his lectures in experimental physics in particular made him a celebrity throughout Europe. The leading German physicist of his day,² as a teacher he was reputed to be shy and engaged before his student audiences in equal measure, self-conscious about his crippled body and his initially nervous manner, while generous with his expertise and enthusiasms.³ “I lecture with the greatest pleasure, but it is hard for me and takes effort,” he writes in a letter from  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher 2, vol. 2 of Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies (Munich: Hanser, 1967), H1 113, 193. All translations are mine.  Friedrich Hund and Gustav Beuermann each name Lichtenberg as the leading German experimental physicist of his time. Friedrich Hund, Die Geschichte der Göttinger Physik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 29; Gustav Beuermann, “‘Sie schwäntzen aber jezt schon, bis es blitzt und donnert.’ Physikprofessor – Lichtenbergs Beruf,” in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 1742 – 1799: Wagnis der Aufklärung. Ausstellung Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt; Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, ed. Ulrich Joost, Stephan Oettermann, and Sibylle Spiegel (Munich: Hanser, 1992), 350. Rudolf Stichweh makes an equally strong claim that Lichtenberg’s discovery in 1777 of the figures named after him established his reputation for the next two decades as the primary German researcher in the field of electricity. Rudolph Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland, 1740 – 1890 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 297.  See the recollections of his students compiled and ed. Ulrich Joost, “Zeugnisse über Lichtenberg als akademischen Lehrer,” in Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 2, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften: historisch-kritische und kommentierte Ausgabe, herausgegeben von der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen und der Technischen Universität Darmstadt (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005 – 2010), XLIX–LXXXII. Lichtenberg himself often notes both his pleasure in lecturing and his shyness before his students, for example in a letter to J.A. Schernhagen of May 11, 1780, in Lichtenberg, Briefwechsel, ed. Ulrich Joost and Albrecht Schöne, im Auftrag der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 5 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1983 – 2004), here vol. 2, Nr. 692, 55.

194

Claire Baldwin

1782.⁴ Student reminiscences reveal that Lichtenberg frequently collapsed from physical overexertion after his lectures.⁵ In addition to lecturing up to six hours a day, he displayed and demonstrated his instrumentation and led extra teaching sessions (“Sunday services,” Sonntagsandachten) on the weekends in order to make ends meet and to generate income for purchasing the precious instruments for his experimental apparatus.⁶ His laconic Waste Books note, “chained to the university galley,” reflects these strenuous aspects of his university life and still quickly conjures a variety of images for his contemporary academic audience.⁷ Lichtenberg’s lectures in experimental physics at the University of Göttingen (held in various forms from 1778 until his death in 1799) were famous as scientific spectacle. They captivated his audiences and attracted visitors from all over Europe. From the summer semester 1780 on they were announced as lectures in “Experimental Physics.”⁸ He was renowned for incorporating demonstration experiments into each lecture and for conducting more elaborate or potentially dangerous experiments outside the lecture hall, students in tow. Rather than recite the utility of physics, he wanted to demonstrate its principles. Rather than reviewing the history of the discipline, he wanted to point students towards new horizons of knowledge. Rather than first trudging through theory, he wanted to display the intellectual excitement of physics through the active demonstration of experiments. Lichtenberg’s practices as professor of physics strongly shaped the culture of public and professional science in late eighteenth-century Göttingen and Germa-

 7 November 1782 to Schernhagen, in Briefwechsel vol. 2, Nr. 987, 463.  A.F.W. Crome writes: “As the audience left through another door, Lichtenberg came down from his cathedra five steps up and fell unconscious into the arms of his servant, who quickly lay him on the sofa […] the servant assured me, however, that this condition always set in after the lectures and always passed quickly.” Crome, Selbstbiographie, 1833, cited in “Zeugnisse über Lichtenberg,” LVI–LVII. Gravenkamp’s medical study of Lichtenberg’s scoliosis makes vivid the constant physical toll of this condition and its related illnesses for Lichtenberg. Horst Gravenkamp, Geschichte eines elenden Körpers. Lichtenberg als Patient, Lichtenberg-Studien 2 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992).  See Ulrich Joost, “Vorlesungsmanuskript und Vorlesungsnachschrift als editorisches Problem, und etwas von Lichtenbergs Vorlesungen,” Cardanus. Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 1 (2000): 33 – 70, here 41; Joost, “Einleitung,” Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 2, VII-XL. In a letter to Heyne from November 1781, Lichtenberg writes, “I have so overburdened myself with courses that I am holding lectures for 7 hours on Tuesdays and 6 hours on all other days. Those who want to become rich, or in this case, those who wish to purchase instruments, fall into temptation and the traps of many foolish desires” (Briefwechsel 2, Nr. 877, 284).  Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher 2, H1 119, 193.  Joost excerpts the relevant catalogue announcements of the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen in “Vorlesungsmanuskript,” 58 – 66.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

195

ny.⁹ For his colleagues and students, many of whom became illustrious scientists in their own right, he modeled what it meant to be an accomplished physicist and teacher. His pedagogy and scholarship also influenced developing ideas about the university as an institution. He encouraged the transition towards the rise of the research university in the nineteenth century, while embracing the scholarly values associated with the end of the eighteenth century, such as breadth of knowledge and teaching, as documented in his textbook editions and extensive popular as well as specialized scientific publications.¹⁰ Contemporary historians of science emphasize that scientific inquiry takes place in particular social spaces, and that attention to the local sites and forms of scientific practice provides a fuller understanding of its development and processes. The “historical geography of science” foregrounds the situated and communally constructed nature of scientific knowledge as a practical activity.¹¹ Scholarship on public science also highlights the variety of scientific cultures of the eighteenth century, and the ways in which the scientific establishment came to define itself as authoritative through engagement with and in contrast to the spectacle of popular scientific shows.¹² The role of the university

 “Lichtenberg’s contributions to the teaching of physics cannot be overstated” (Beuermann, “Physikprofessor, 361). Stichweh explores the interwoven facets of public, social, and academic concerns with electricity, a major focus for Lichtenberg, in its relevance for the developing discipline of physics (Physik in Deutschland, 252– 317). Oliver Hochadel, Öffentliche Wissenschaft. Elektrizität in der deutschen Aufklärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), also considers the relationships of these spheres and Lichtenberg’s assertion of a professional persona; see especially 249 – 309.  Steven R. Turner presents the late eighteenth-century German conceptions of professorial creativity and publication, including the centrality of textbook publication in “University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany 1760 – 1806,” in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), especially 522– 526.  Charles Withers, “The Geography of Scientific Knowledge,” in Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, ed. Nicholaas Rupke (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 9 – 18. See also Lorraine Daston, ed., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York; Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books, 2007); Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).  See for example the path-breaking work of Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760 – 1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660 – 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Hochadel, in Öffentliche Wissenschaft, studies these issues in

196

Claire Baldwin

in these developments was very much in question, given both the financial and other pressures faced by universities at this time and their ossified institutional structures that could discourage intellectual advances, while new scientific academies were established and the public journals devoted to scientific topics in the republic of letters proliferated. Lichtenberg’s scientific lectures negotiated these challenges and shaped new forms of scientific community by bringing the kind of experimental demonstration he first encountered in public lectures by James Ferguson in England in 1775 into the curriculum of the university in Göttingen. He thereby follows and furthers the performative turn in experimental physics from text and description to the event and spectacle of the lecture-demonstration as performance, in which forces of nature are staged for an audience.¹³ A consideration of Lichtenberg’s lectures through the lens of performance theory allows us to specify how he claims scientific legitimacy and helps shape new disciplinary contours and frameworks of institutional practice for experimental physics. Performance theorists direct us to take seriously the primary character of performance as unique event which is created as it unfolds in time. Its constitutive features include the corporeal co-presence of audience and actors and intentionality in staging practices. Together these aspects of performance bring forth a particular shared experience that structures the relationship between audience, directors, and actors. Professorial performance is influenced by normative expectations or “historically specific personas,” as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write. Attention to the material practices and influential individuals shaping scientific education at particular historical moments of transition can help illuminate

German contexts with one focus on Lichtenberg; Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel offer an excellent introduction to their edited volume Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 1– 10.  J.S.T. Gehler dates the first examples of such pedagogy in Germany to the late seventeenth century in lectures by J.C. Sturm in Altdorf; see head word “Experimentalphysik,” in J. S. T. Gehler, Physicalisches Wörterbuch, Leipzig 1798, http://archimedes.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/cgi-bin/ar chim/dict/hw?lemma=Ver%C5 %BFuch&step=entry&id=d008; Stichweh traces this development and the shifting meanings of “experimental lecture” to mark the mid-eighteenth century as the definitive transition to the demonstration-experiment in the classroom, citing Göttingen as an important institutional basis (Physik in Deutschland, 334– 44). Lichtenberg himself parses two current understandings of “experimental physics” for his students – experimental physics “without experiments” and experimental physics shown through the most important experiments – and he follows the second model in which demonstration experiments are actually done in class. See Gottlieb Gamauf, Erinnerungen aus Lichtenbergs Vorlesungen, vol. 2 of Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 18.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

197

the processes that “transmute quirky individuals into exempla” of scientific authority.¹⁴ An examination of Lichtenberg’s pedagogical practice as professor of physics, drawing on insights from performance studies to identify what it is that his lecture performance brings forth, can illuminate public science and academic institutional history at the end of eighteenth century in Germany. Both the institutional context in Göttingen as a self-consciously modern university and Lichtenberg’s own particular performative culture shape his Collegium. His performative practices make manifest both nature’s forces and, centrally, the quality of embodied mind as the foundational tool of the scientist. Finally, I argue that the concept of play and of its epistemological value proves useful in considering in conjunction these questions of performance and the history of scientific practice, and Lichtenberg’s own self-presentation and self-positioning of his lectures on experimental physics within this framework.

1 The university and Lichtenberg’s Collegium Experimental-Physik The University of Göttingen, where Lichtenberg was first a student and then a professor, was pre-eminent among German universities of the late eighteenth century. While most institutions were in decline and in crisis, Göttingen – the “classic university of the German Enlightenment”¹⁵ – stood out for the quality of its professors, its appeal to students that ensured steady enrollments, and its progressive institutional structures.¹⁶ The relative status of the traditional faculties was shifted, such that the legal faculty became dominant and theology  Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 44. William Clark emphasizes the importance of investigating pedagogy’s “material practices” as they contribute to the emergence of the research university and the ideas of academic charisma in Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). This approach is also championed by Marian Füssel, “Akademische Aufklärung. Die Universitäten des 18. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld von funktionaler Differenzierung, Ökonomie und Habitus,” in “Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung,” ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig, special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2010): 54.  Notker Hammerstein, “Universitäten,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, ed. Notker Hammerstein and Ulrich Herrmann, vol. 2: 18. Jahrhundert. Vom späten 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuordnung Deutschlands um 1800 (Munich: Beck, 2005), 369.  Turner emphasizes that Göttingen professors “such as J.G. Schlözer, C.G. Heyne, and G. C. Lichtenberg pioneered the scholarly methods and approaches to be applied later with great success by scholars of the early nineteenth century” (“University Reformers,” 504– 05).

198

Claire Baldwin

was less powerful. Concurrently, the faculty of philosophy was championed through funds and institutional respect, promoting the development of new disciplinary strengths represented by professors such as C.G. Heyne and F.A. Wolf in Classical Philology, J.C. Gatterer in History, and Lichtenberg in Physics.¹⁷ Professorial appointments were made on the basis of public reputation and publications, a new academic value.¹⁸ The curriculum was designed to appeal to and support students in their personal development, not merely to impart received knowledge. An unusual atmosphere of intellectual liberty was a hallmark of the institution.¹⁹ Göttingen’s success as a new university, established in 1737 with such modern curricular goals, crucially paved the way for the second wave of German university reform associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt and institutionalized through the founding of the new university in Berlin in 1810 under the ideal of Bildung. ²⁰ Many of the theorists and instigators of the Berlin university reform “had been strongly impressed with the viability of modernized universities during student years in Göttingen,” as McClelland writes.²¹ Indeed, some of the most prominent among them, for example Wilhelm von Humboldt and Christian Hufeland, studied directly with Lichtenberg and credited their experiences in his lecture hall as an important influence on their thought and understanding of academic values.²²

 Charles Edgar McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700 – 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 41– 45; Turner, “University Reformers,” 510; on Gatterer, see Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang, Fundamenta Historica, ed. Georg G. Iggers et al., vol. 4 (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012).  Turner writes that sustained scholarship through publications was the progressive university norm in Göttingen (“University Reformers,” 522). McClelland emphasizes Göttingen’s leading role and its “preference for publishing scholars” that appears to correlate with the “beginning of the research and publishing ethic so apparent in nineteenth-century Germany” (University in Germany, 39 – 43 and passim, here 41); Clark states that Göttingen’s policies “transformed publication into the essential modern academic capital” (Academic Charisma, 247).  Hammerstein emphasizes the exceptional conditions of academic freedom in teaching and research in Göttingen (“Universitäten,” 373).  McClelland, University in Germany 58 – 63, 95; Turner, “University Reformers,” 504– 5.  McClelland, University in Germany, 79.  Hans-Joachim Heerde catalogues information about Lichtenberg’s students in Das Publikum der Physik. Lichtenbergs Hörer (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006). Joost compiles student testimonies of Lichtenberg’s teaching in “Zeugnisse.” Hufeland, later director of the Charité, dedicated the first edition of his best-selling Makrobiotik [Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern. Jena: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1797] to Lichtenberg.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

199

Lichtenberg is an excellent representative of the new kind of professoriate and pedagogy championed at the University of Göttingen.²³ As a member in the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, as well as an author and editor for multiple important journals including the Göttingen Learned Announcements [Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen], the Göttingen Magazine of Sciences and Literature [Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur], and the Göttingen Pocket Calendar [Göttinger Taschen-Calender],²⁴ Lichtenberg’s professional activity mirrored the desired synergy between the institutions of the academy, the university, and the journal as a vehicle for public scholarship in Göttingen. His international scholarly connections furthered Göttingen’s institutional renown and drew visitors to the university. And Lichtenberg’s famed lectures modeled precisely the kind of pedagogical mediation of values and habits of mind that later reformers praised and enjoined teachers to represent: the creative effort to expand the borders of knowledge rather than impart a fixed set of truths; the concomitant emphasis on cultivating independent thought; the attention to methodological principles as a prime measure of scientific probity; and the ideal of a kind of holistic knowledge within which particular fields (new delineation of subjects) can best be understood. In the introductory lectures of his course on experimental physics, Lichtenberg self-consciously articulates the principles that shape his performance in the lecture hall and justifies them with reference to the state of contemporary physics and contemporary philosophy. Asserting his allegiances to a progressive model of teaching and research, Lichtenberg aims in his lectures to shift the emphasis in the study of physics from theory to practice, book learning to experiential learning, historical study to a contemporary focus at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Lichtenberg’s metaphors reflect his temporalized view of the development of knowledge, itself a modern stance: he tells students that,

 McClelland summarizes these new values and locates their origin in the late eighteenth century (University in Germany, 123 – 25); “Göttingen’s ‘more rigorous and systematic’ concept of university instruction also left more room for professorial scholarship, a theoretical view supported by Göttingen’s preeminence in German learning” (Turner, “University Reformers,” 517); see also Sibylle Peters, “Figuren des wissenschaftlichen Vortrags um 1800: Actio, Affekt, Anschauung – Die Performance ‘Denken,’” KulturPoetik: Zeitschrift für kulturgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaft/Journal of Cultural Poetics 5, no. 1: 31– 50.  McClelland portrays the importance of the contributions of university academics to the changing profile of periodical literature that cultivated an audience interested in scholarship and prepared the ground for more professionalized academic journals (University in Germany, 85 – 86). Füssel emphasizes the close connections of the university and the Enlightenment in German lands, seen for example in new practices of communication and of learnedness, such as those found in these journals (“Akademische Aufklärung,” 53 – 54 and passim).

200

Claire Baldwin

given the rapid developments in the field, “this raging progress of physics,”²⁵ he is especially concerned with having time to attend to what is most relevant and to share the newest developments of the discipline. Lichtenberg took pains to describe for students the relationship between his performative classroom pedagogy and the textbook accompanying his lectures, J.C.P. Erxleben’s Foundations of Natural Science [Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre],²⁶ which Lichtenberg himself edited and revised in multiple editions during his career. These revised editions became immensely influential, as they contributed to and circulated contemporary knowledge and provided a common touchstone for generations of future scientists and a scientific public. In William Clark’s words, “virtually everyone who taught physics at a German-language university used the work.”²⁷ Kant lectured from Lichtenberg’s third edition of Erxleben, as did Johann Carl Fischer at the beginning of his career. Fischer, championed by Lichtenberg, was author of the eight volume History of Physics (1801– 1808) commissioned for Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s historical series on the history of the arts and sciences in Europe and the Dictionary of Physics (1798– 1827), and as such he helped codify the understanding of the “history and present state of physics” in the late eighteenth century.²⁸ Lichtenberg is likewise concerned with the past development of the field primarily insofar as it helps to situate contemporary physics in order to better advance its knowledge. He ridicules what he calls the German tendency to exhaustive historical scholarship for its own sake, all too often a substitute for independent thought and research, and he rejects the tradition of reciting the history and usefulness of the discipline in the lectures. He nonetheless admonishes his students: “Yet one must know the books, not for the sake of the titles, but in order to move forward.”²⁹ He expects his students to acquire the textbook, use it as reference, bring it to lecture and make appropriate emendations and notes in class, as he directs. The book is a crucial tool and complement to the lecture, but the pedagogical emphasis and, ultimately, the grounds of all learning and knowledge and thus the priority in the

 Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 12.  Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre, by J.C.P. Erxleben, first published in 1772 and reissued in multiple editions until 1794, the last four of which were edited and revised by Lichtenberg himself during the time of his physics courses. The fourth edition with Lichtenberg’s notations appears as volume 1 of Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre (2005).  William Clark, “From Enlightenment to Romanticism. Lichtenberg and Göttingen Physics,” in Rupke, ed., Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, 72– 85, here 74. See also William Clark, “German Physics Textbooks in the Goethezeit,” History of Science 35, no. 2/3 (1997): 219 – 239 and 295 – 363.  J. L. Heilbron, “Physics and its History at Göttingen around 1800,” in Rupke, ed., Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, 50 – 71.  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 7.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

201

lecture hall is the immediate experience of natural phenomena and of the use of scientific instrumentation to be gained through experiments staged in the auditorium. In the lecture hall he intends “to simply stick to the things themselves and not lose more time with scholarly history, especially in a course like this one that is primarily dedicated to experiments.”³⁰ Experimental demonstration and detailed explanation of the relevant instruments are the crucial elements in the performances and research methods Lichtenberg offers as lecturer and are to be the pedagogical focus of his Collegium, “where we ought to be fundamentally more concerned with the discoveries themselves than with their circuitous history.”³¹ Lichtenberg legitimizes this practice on several counts. He claims the practical benefit of capturing students’ attention through the appeal to the senses: “A good lecture necessarily demands something completely different and better than dry postulates. One must at least attempt to make whatever one postulates as sensory as possible, one must represent it in order to better remember it and we will proceed in this way.”³² And on theoretical grounds, following both Bacon and the “new philosophy” of Kant, while differentiating his practice from Kant’s interest in transcendental and systematic “pure science,” Lichtenberg’s pedagogy places priority on sensory experience as most adequate to the fundamental structures of human cognition.³³ Sensory input received by our sensibility and processed by our understanding and reason is our only source of data about the objects that natural science studies: If I am not mistaken, I already said in the first hour that our mind is equipped with the capacity to receive impressions, that is with sensibility. With understanding to connect these impressions, form concepts, and with reason to draw conclusions. Nature dictates to us and we dictate to Nature. Both have equal rights. Here Liberté and Egalité are truly at home.³⁴

He demands awareness of these epistemological conditions and respect for experience as the grounds of knowledge. “In this sense all true physics is absolutely experimental. For, my God! What can we know of the world without exper Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 7.  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 14. He records 600 such demonstrations for the winter of 1791 (Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 12).  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 27– 28; also 34– 35.  Gunhild Berg, in her essay “Probieren und Experimentieren, Auflösen und Zusammensetzen im Sudelbuch. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg als experimental philosopher” (Lichtenberg-Jahrbuch 2010: 7– 25), describes Lichtenberg’s embrace of the eighteenth-century ideals of “natural philosophy” and emphasizes observation and experimentation as the fundamental practices of thought in all Lichtenberg’s intellectual endeavors.  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 17– 18.

202

Claire Baldwin

iences and experiments? Everything that is not grounded on this basis is but a dream and not natural science.”³⁵ Experience and experimentation are two forms of empirical evidence that enable and further scientific knowledge. For future physicists as well as for future members of the educated scientific public, it is furthermore imperative to gain familiarity with the experimental apparatus which allows for such new knowledge in the field: “You will also learn here about many instruments that one needs to be familiar with, if one is not to be considered an ignoramus in good society, and also about instruments whose setup and use everyone who wants to move forward with the matters at hand must know.”³⁶ This last aim to advance knowledge in the discipline reveals the professional pride and ambition that shapes Lichtenberg’s pedagogy. If the principles legitimating the course in experimental physics hold true for the development of knowledge of each individual student, it is also evident that he likewise propounds them as the path to developing collective knowledge in the discipline of physics as a whole. Lichtenberg’s own research on electricity and the rapid developments in this field at the time of his lectures accounted for his significant expansions on Erxleben and for memorable demonstration experiments in his lectures.³⁷ Gamauf’s transcriptions of the lectures detail the explanations and instruction of how to prepare and use the newest instruments such as Volta’s electrophore and condenser or Lichtenberg’s own double electrophore, an electrostatic generator by which he experimented with positive and negative electric charges and discovered how to fix the Lichtenberg Figures, “his most spectacular contribution to the science of electricity.”³⁸ The demonstration of his Figures that he repeated each semester showed the use of the electrophore to instigate electric events and the art of capturing the results in a blueprint to make such phenomena visible and communicable. In his lectures, Lichtenberg includes discussion of new international work in physics as it is happening, such as the experiments of Alessandro Volta (who visited Lichtenberg in Göttingen in October 1784) or Martinus van Marum’s work with John Cuthbertson to build the largest glass plate electrostatic generator to date in 1784, discussed in print in 1785. He points his students to his own forthcoming review of Marum’s work with this generator, as he demonstrates electric machines with cylinders and glass plates and lauds the relative

 Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 29.  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 47.  See Albert Krayer, “Vorbemerkung” in Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 4, 235 – 244, here especially 236 – 237.  Krayer, “Vorbemerkung,” 239; Gamauf, Erinnerungen, 513– 525; Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 4, 270 – 277.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

203

advantages of the plates, but emphasizing for students: “And so now experience will decide for you.”³⁹ Experiments, Lichtenberg explains, are “experiences that one coaxes from Nature through augmentation and art.”⁴⁰ They are events intentionally orchestrated for an observing audience. He describes particular experiments with Brand’s phosphorus through metaphors of theater: “They are the best shows [Schauspiele] one can see. I have never demonstrated them for anyone, connoisseur or not, who was not fully captivated by them.”⁴¹ The image of theater underscores both the dynamism of nature and way experiments are temporally and spatially staged and set in motion by the scientist as director, whose skills and performance script impose the strictures of art onto the forces of nature.⁴² Dynamic natural forces are thereby momentarily stabilized in the form of a reproducible, if fleeting, synaesthetic event and thus made perceptible to the senses and available as an object of shared study.⁴³ The event that is thus intentionally and artificially brought forth can be described, following Martin Seel’s definition of staging (Inszenierung) as “allowing something to appear” (Erscheinenlassen) in a particular time and space, such that it is both immediately perceptible to an audience and emphatically directs awareness to its presence and the present moment.⁴⁴ Erika Fischer-Lichte holds that such production of a heightened present is rather properly a feature of performance (Aufführung). Her insistence on the distinction between staging and performance focuses attention particularly on the co-production of the live performance between audience and actor and on the role of contingency in its creation, and is thus also useful for considering the place of experiment in the context of Lichtenberg’s lectures. Despite careful planning, practice and repetition, it is always possible for experiments to go awry. Sometimes there are difficulties with how the instrumen-

 Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 4, 254.  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 55.  Letter to Reimarus, June 1782, in Briefwechsel II, Nr. 925, 358.  On theater as image of scientific display, see Lissa Roberts, “Chemistry on stage: G.F. Rouelle and the theatricality of eighteenth-century chemistry,” in Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 129 – 139; also Jessica Riskin, “Amusing Physics” in the same volume, 43 – 64.  Berg enumerates important functions of the demonstration experiment in the eighteenthcentury physics classroom, as attractive spectacle, as pedagogical tool, and as methodological confirmation or proof of scientific claims witnessed by multiple people (“Probieren und Experimentieren,” 12– 13).  Martin Seel, Die Macht des Erscheinens: Texte Zur Ästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007), 71– 73.

204

Claire Baldwin

tation functions. Also, mishaps occur in the process of the demonstrations: “Once again I have burned myself miserably during an experiment in my lecture and can barely hold my pen,” Lichtenberg writes in 1783.⁴⁵ Such difficulties underscore the event character of the demonstration-experiment, but successes, too, influence the atmosphere in the auditorium. For example, Lichtenberg relays the response of his audience to a particularly impressive presentation: “In my lecture it elicited such general joy that [the audience] nearly began to clap.”⁴⁶ Lichtenberg’s lectures as performances, and thus his auditorium as a happening place, are characterized by this kind of intentional staging in its contingent iterations of his own self-presentation as teacher and lecturer. Important components include the use of his impressive instrumental apparatus to perform his demonstration experiments; his scientific explanations of these presentations, including the visual explanations on the board, such as his drawings and mathematical equations; and his famed anecdotes, philosophical insights, and wit that enlivened his lectures, noted by many of his students and visitors.⁴⁷ The elements of co-presence, of liveness, and embodiment (of professor, technical assistants, audience, Nature) are central, not only in the sensory impact of the experiments that are the heart of the lecture, but also in Lichtenberg’s own awkward efforts to hide his hunched back, for example, writing on the board over his shoulder while still facing the audience.⁴⁸ The student roles in the performance experience are shaped by such factors as the setup (of benches, board, experiments) in the lecture space; the tickets Lichtenberg distributed to paying students to regulate viewing position; the extra shows he offered – the repetition of his lectures, the excursions to do experiments with kites or explosives⁴⁹– and his backstage viewings, for example the open invitation to his audience to come study and admire his experimental instruments.⁵⁰

 Letter of 24 February 1783 to Schernhagen, Briefwechsel II, Nr. 1036, 530.  Letter of 12 August 1782 to Schernhagen, Briefwechsel II, Nr. 951, 402.  Joost, ed., “Zeugnisse”; see also Gamauf, Erinnerungen.  This awkward effort is documented by numerous student recollections; see Joost, ed., “Zeugnisse” and “Einleitung.”  “Lichtenberg’s students will remember that this experiment was carried out each half year on the Göttingen Schützenhofe,” Gamauf, Erinnerungen, 60.  “If you would like to come after the lecturers and on Saturdays to see my instruments, the way one considers anatomical preparations, then you are warmly invited.” Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 9.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

205

2 Erscheinenlassen These “material practices” of Lichtenberg’s Collegium define the performative nature of the lectures as staged, unique and contingent, embodied, and non-quotidian events taking place in a public space for and with an audience that is actively engaged in its particular production. As the centerpiece of the lecture performance, the demonstration-experiments bring forth Nature’s dynamic forces in a spectacular theatrical display. It is a Schauspiel elicited through art and artifice that achieves the aesthetic effect of a heightened present through sensory impressions that also provide the data foundation for developing scientific knowledge. But what, then, is similarly brought into presence, and into appearance (Erscheinung), by the performances as a whole, of which the experiments are but a part, albeit a crucial one? How do the nested performances, the sum of the performance components, work jointly to render something else apparent? I would like to offer and then elaborate several interrelated answers to this question. First, in the process of being enacted, Lichtenberg’s performances both create and make apparent his own scientific authority. This Erscheinenlassen of his knowledge is intimately connected to his Erscheinenlassen of the drama of Nature, as we have seen. It is also closely linked to a further productive result of the performances that are his lectures, namely their creation of a new scientific community. The pedagogical relationship between actor and audience reinforces the community-building moment that always already inheres in performance practice and it shapes the result in particular ways. The performance of Lichtenberg’s authority models intellectual and moral values that he holds dear and that he strives to mediate to students and future scientists as well; the most important performative achievement in this context is, I propose, the way the performance showcases the “embodied mind.” Finally, through the community he thus helps shape and through the practices of his Collegium, Lichtenberg’s lectures contribute to the emergence of the discipline of physics as a modern science. The practices that characterize Lichtenberg’s performance style manifest his authority as professor and scientist and dynamically model the scientific values he aims to impress upon his students. The values of efficiency of class time, relevance, cutting edge knowledge, and modern scientific practice shape his decisions on how to present material to his students. Although his lectures take as their foundation Erxleben’s Foundations of Natural Science, Lichtenberg departs from this script in his lectures: “I will teach many things about which there is not a word in the whole book. I take this to mean not merely the detailed explanation of all important propositions, but rather I will also teach all important new material that I have in part not included in the book and in part was not yet able to include, that is

206

Claire Baldwin

very necessary given the raging progress of physics.”⁵¹ He thereby shows his independence of thought, his knowledge of the newest, most exciting developments in physics, and his quest to put this research to the test himself, engaging his students in this process.⁵² As he corrects and elaborates on the textbook script in class, drawing on his own research and that of other contemporary scientists, he underscores the difference between the compendium as text and the lecture as performative event, in which the live co-presence of students and professor provides occasion for a creative mediation and production of knowledge. By making the demonstration-experiment central to his lectures and by explaining this choice to his students through references to modern epistemological theories and his own experiences, Lichtenberg defends the scientific legitimacy of the performance culture of his Collegium. By investing greatly in acquiring and maintaining stellar experimental instruments, by using them to stage his experiments in the lecture hall, and by teaching his students about their use and qualities, he exhibits his authority as a skilled practitioner and connoisseur of mechanical equipment, as well as a man of ingenuity in experimental design, that is, as an effective producer of Nature’s shows. By guiding his audience through explanations for these shows, interpreting and further pursuing what Nature brings to the stage, he begins to bring his listeners into the community of knowledgeable witnesses and competent technicians so crucial for scientific credibility. By reflecting on his method of inquiry, defending his methodological principles, and modeling them in his words and actions, he directs the attention of his audience to similar self-reflection and marks the scientific values of precision, independence, self-scrutiny, skepticism, cognitive flexibility, curiosity, modesty, and honesty, among others, that he holds in esteem. And by producing and sharing his experimental successes and failures in the lecture hall in all these ways, and by presenting his personal shyness and his wit, his awkward body, and his brilliant intellect, what is emphatically manifested in his performances is, indeed, to use the terms noted above, the quality of embodied mind. The idea of embodied mind is embedded as a key to Erika Fischer-Lichte’s “radical concept of presence” through which she defines performance art.

 Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 12.  See Stichweh, Physik in Deutschland, 103. Lichtenberg’s editorial decisions and his emendations of Erxleben’s influential textbook – for example, Lichtenberg’s increasing inclusion of chemical topics and his own research focus on electricity – both reflect and influence the disputes about the changing disciplinary borders of physics in the dialectical development with chemistry and mathematics that Stichweh describes as functional horizontal differentiation of the fields. Clark underscores the influence of textbook publication for scholarly authority: “Textbooks and journals emerged as a Göttingen eighteenth-century speciality and helped establish its professors as enlightened judges over all European scholarship” (Academic Charisma, 247).

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

207

Such presence is a performative quality generated by the actor’s physical self that exemplifies the inseparability of body and mind and sets in motion potentially transformative energies within the performative space. “Through the performers’s presence, the spectator experiences the performer and himself as embodied mind in a constant process of becoming—he perceives this circulating energy as a transformative and vital energy. I would like to call this the radical concept of presence.”⁵³ The live performance that unleashes a dynamic exchange between all those present focuses the audience on the character and potentiality of the fleeting moment and on the generative power of the self in its inextricable physical and cognitive dimensions. Fisher-Lichte’s concept thus marks a particular kind of awareness of the embodied creative self that is elicited through the corporeal experience of live performance. The philosopher of art Noël Carroll offers a complementary way of conceiving the relationship between performance and the embodied mind.⁵⁴ He notes that performing arts are constitutively dualistic: they appear both as a performance plan and as a performance event which offers an interpretation (“a token”) of the performance plan. He insists that a performance event, as an immediate and unique product of the intentions, beliefs, desires, and mindfulness of the performers, is “ineliminably an artifact of mind”⁵⁵ and as such is itself an artwork (and not a “template” like film) that depends on “liveness.” The liveness of the performance event reflects its status as “mind-mediated through and through”⁵⁶ and this is an important ontological distinction to, say, mediatized art.⁵⁷ Thus the performance event necessarily presents itself as a specific artifact of mind through the corporeal immediacy of the performers. The immediacy of the performance event reflects and gives evidence of the embodied mind which produces it. Both Fischer-Lichte’s “radical concept of presence” (experienced presentness) and Carroll’s focus on performance as an “artifact of mind” (experienced mental causation) underscore how live performance directs audience attention to the qualities of embodied mind enacted and made apparent by the performer and experienced by receptive spectators as their own condition of being and perceiving. This consciousness of the self and others as embodied minds and this engagement with the performance as a manifestation of the workings of such

 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, translated by Saskia Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), 99.  Noel Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).  Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions, 453.  Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions, 455.  Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions, 452.

208

Claire Baldwin

embodied minds can serve central pedagogical ends, and certainly do so for Lichtenberg. By force of his professional passions and the various enactments of his knowledge that together shape the performance of his lectures, Lichtenberg creates the conditions of rapt attentiveness in the moment that is a crucial basis for good pedagogy and good science both. His performances can be read as an Erscheinenlassen of the embodied mind in this sense and as a conscious act which the audience is to recognize and perceive in its methodological implications for scientific productivity. That is, his lecture performances engage his students experientially to heighten their awareness of a particularly meaningful present moment, and they also enact for the students the workings of an attentive mind in creating that particular experience as a scientific demonstration. Furthermore, and most fundamentally, they guide the students to self-conscious methodological reflections that incorporate the recognition of the inseparable link between mind and body. This crucial element in Lichtenberg’s pedagogical mission correlates with his scientific goals and his presentation of Kantian epistemology. It is imperative that scientists recognize their physical self as the primary tool of scientific investigation and learn to parse the limitations and possibilities of the senses and their relation to complex cognition.⁵⁸ “We only have 5 senses and these are very limited, animals greatly surpass us in many of them,”⁵⁹ Lichtenberg impresses upon his students; “Were God to give us a new sense, we would no longer know the world.”⁶⁰ Lichtenberg often remarks on the ways that knowledge is conditioned by subjective, embodied standpoints. “The whole man must move together” he quotes from Addison’s Spectator (1711) as epigraph to his Waste Book C (1773). The inescapability of our innate human faculties as the primary instrument that determines and limits how we can experience the world and pursue knowledge demands reflection: Since our mind, by which I understand the whole sum of our capacities (better) without perceiving a difference between body and soul (our cognitive faculty), is actually the tool on the knowledge of which everything that we will consider here depends: thus it cannot hurt to say a few words here about this tool […] Here the person with his capacities is the tool and this is not described in the standard physics texts.⁶¹

In Lichtenberg’s lectures, he strives to engage students through the appeal to their sensory experience and their intellectual curiosity and ambition, and to di   

See Berg, “Probieren und Experimentieren” 9; 21 and passim. Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 184. Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 186. Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher 2, L799, 449.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

209

rect their methodological attention to both, as well as to their interwoven nature: he asks students always to consider phenomena and scientific problems selfconsciously with both the “eyes of the body” and the “eyes of the mind” as grounds of knowledge.⁶² If the audience experience of performance already generates an inclination to corporeal imitation, as Fischer-Lichte has theorized,⁶³ this expectation of imitation is even stronger when the audience itself enters the performance space in the collective role of students aspiring to learn from an instructor. The professor embodies and enacts one version of “being a scientist” on stage and invites the audience to witness nature’s laws and to learn to respond in a participatory fashion, to enter the dialogue as it were, which is cast as an active, unfolding exchange. Lichtenberg is an impressive model to emulate, and yet he frequently exhorts his students to engage independently and actively in the scientific enterprise, in words such as these: “Nothing in the world can be done without independent thought. One reads forever and ever and nothing is achieved. Take hold on your own; that is the rule and the motto of philosophy.”⁶⁴ His students do seem to have taken to heart such injunctions for independence of thought and hands-on learning and to have identified them as some of their most valuable academic lessons. Alexander von Humboldt, for example, formulates this appreciation in a letter to Lichtenberg from 1790: If one could give thanks for friendship and benevolence, then I would need to thank you for much. I regard not simply the sum of positive knowledge that I gained from your lectures – but still more the general direction that my course of thought took under your guidance. Truth is valuable in itself, but more valuable still is the skill to find it.⁶⁵

Others express similar sentiments in their reports and reminiscences of their time in Göttingen. Lichtenberg taught “a need to pursue the foundations of things and the dominant opinions about them rather than a blind acceptance of authority. I did not find the same philosophical treatment from any other professor in Göttingen.”⁶⁶ The success in mediating his values and his methods to his students, and in cultivating their self-reflection about these aspects of scientific practice, is as im-

 Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 77; 102.  Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, 45 – 60.  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 133.  Alexander von Humboldt, letter of 3 October 1790 to Lichtenberg, Briefwechsel III, Nr. 1747, 779 – 780.  Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth, in Joost, “Zeugnisse,” LV.

210

Claire Baldwin

portant to the way these lectures bring forth and nurture a fledgling scientific community in Göttingen as the insights about natural laws. On the shared methodological and experiential basis, the students and the other people in the audience (e. g., dignitaries and scientists) together with Lichtenberg and his assistants establish a local, specific scholarly community and determine the parameters within which knowledge will be acknowledged, accepted, and thus created. The contours of the discourse they shape together determine who gains the ability to warrant scientific truths and to vouch for its practitioners, and lays down ground rules for scientific practice. “One should always proceed with the investigation of truth such that even more enlightened ages sometime in the future can take, if not our belief itself, then still our method as a model. Nota Bene. Nota Bene. For not the claim but the behavior defines the philosopher,” Lichtenberg asserts in his lectures.⁶⁷ The need for “public warranting of knowledge” entailed a spatial move into a public space where experiments that had been “tried” in private could be “shown” and credited in public, as Steven Shapin and other historians of science illuminate.⁶⁸ The audience needed to be recognized as one with “cognitive authority,”⁶⁹ and this is the kind of audience Lichtenberg helps develop and shape as an educator. He transmits skills, knowledge, and values that delineate what counts as good science, while his audience practices the role of public warrantor in spe. As Lichtenberg’s lectures take place under the aegis of the University of Göttingen and become grounds for its institutional fame, they in turn further the institutionalization of his practice of physics and physics pedagogy, both literally, that is, locally, and in the broader sense of the academy at large. Although, as he tells his students, “before God and in Nature there are no chapters,”⁷⁰ Lichtenberg devotes considerable effort to defining the borders of the discipline clearly and legitimizing his lecture practices.⁷¹ While he himself began his work at the university teaching mathematics and astronomy, over time Lichtenberg’s success teaching experimental physics led him to become the first Göttingen professor to focus solely on this field and it gave rise institutionally to a dedicated physics  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 16. See also Sudelbücher 1, K 360.  David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 24; Shapin, “The House of Experiment in SeventeenthCentury England,” in Never Pure, 59 – 88.  Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place, 40.  Gamauf, Erinnerungen, 17.  Gehler describes the transformation and institutionalization of the teaching of modern experimental physics in the entries “Versuch” and “Experimental Physik” of his Physicalisches Wörterbuch. See also Stichweh, Physik in Deutschland, who traces the development of the modern field of physics in Germany at this time.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

211

professorship, as Friedrich Hund emphasizes in his history of physics in Göttingen.⁷² His impressive collection of instruments, for which he initially received university loans and which he sold to the university in 1789, is also an important aspect of such institutionalization. The incorporation of these important and valuable tools of scientific inquiry into the body of the university marks acceptance of the research methodology they represent and commitment to the performative pedagogy of experimental physics, and makes possible a continuity of these practices beyond Lichtenberg’s own academic career.⁷³ The institutionalization of the discipline of physics in the contours that Lichtenberg strives to establish takes place just prior to the second wave of German efforts at fundamental university reform commonly associated with the name Wilhelm von Humboldt. As noted earlier, the group of reformers includes many who studied in Göttingen and with Lichtenberg, and his pedagogical practice correlates directly with many of their ideals. A key element of that reform is the reconceptualization of the academic lecture, as Sibylle Peters has shown. Theories of the lecture and its purpose within the institutional setting of the university around 1800 emphasize the difference between preparation of a class and the performative character of the lecture that is conducive to the production of new knowledge in both lecturer and audience. Peters explains: “They all place particular value on the process of bringing forth thoughts that must become evident while lecturing” and “While lecturing, the principal concern is to share and to communicate the process of independent thought.”⁷⁴ Lichtenberg’s performative lectures model and engage his students in this activity of independent thought. They delineate the criteria of scientific inquiry and justified knowledge and the qualities demanded of the serious scientist to present the modern discipline of experimental physics as one that requires exactitude and daring, deep knowledge and creative leaps of ingenuity, humility and intellectual ambition, individual effort and a collective pursuit of ever-expanding scientific knowledge.

 Hund, Göttinger Physik, 31.  The cost of acquiring and maintaining the experimental apparatus was a burden to the individual professors such as Lichtenberg. The move towards institutional support was thus significant. Hammerstein writes that the University of Göttingen was the most successful in this kind of development of institutional resources (“Universitäten,” 374). Beuermann cites the letter of the Hannover government to the English king promoting the purchase of Lichtenberg’s collection for the university that makes its institutional planning for the future explicit (“Physikprofessor,” 347– 350). The Institute for Advanced Study at Göttingen, established in 2009 under the name “Lichtenberg-Kolleg,” is a more recent expression of Lichtenberg’s institutional legacy. As explained on its website: “His name stands for innovative ideas and independent, unconventional thinking.” http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/lichtenberg-kolleg/90756.html.  Peters, “Figuren,” 40.

212

Claire Baldwin

3 Spiel In his presentation of the emergent discipline of experimental physics in the selfconsciously modern University of Göttingen, Lichtenberg did not only differentiate its style, purpose and intellectual purview from the academic tradition of natural philosophy. He was also at pains to distinguish his practice from the popular spectacular shows of the itinerant scientific stage. The great variety of venues for displaying and producing scientific knowledge and the widespread cultural interest in such events was a prime achievement of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science. Historians of science have emphasized this pluralist character of eighteenth-century science with the term “scientific cultures” and have turned their attention to the market forces at play in the rise of “civil science.”⁷⁵ Within this context, natural philosophers sought to define boundaries and to establish what would be credited as modern scientific discourse and knowledge.⁷⁶ Yet the forces that created the new category of “philosophical consumer” influenced the development of experimental physics in the academy as well, where the students were the consumers who paid the professors’ lecture fees and bestowed the necessary recognition of “applause” and scientific warranting.⁷⁷ While the need to cater to students’ desires and expectation for entertainment and spectacle in order to attract them to the lecture hall was a thorn in the side of some of Lichtenberg’s colleagues, Lichtenberg embraced the pedagogical value of playful performance as an enticement to knowledge: “In lectures on experimental physics one needs to play […] a beautiful and edifying experiment will certainly please the fellows better if a few window panes are destroyed in the process.”⁷⁸ Nonetheless, Lichtenberg is adamant in his insistence on the dignity of serious scholarship and he distances himself and the collective scientific enterprise from the showmen; it is important to distinguish, as he quips, the “Physiker” (physicists) from the deceptive, wandering “Physikanten” (itinerant peddlers of physics).⁷⁹

 Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, introduction to Science and Spectacle, 2; 10.  Hochadel traces the “boundary work” of distinguishing reputable science from entertaining spectacle, insight into the workings of nature from simply sensual impressions (Öffentliche Wissenschaft, 273 – 308). See also Roberts, “Chemistry on Stage”; Riskin, “Amusing Physics.”  Joost, “Einleitung”; Larry Stewart, “The Laboratory, the Workshop, and the Theater of Experiment,” in Science and Spectacle, 11– 24; Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, introduction to Fyfe and Lightman, eds., Science and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1– 13.  Letter of 10 June 1782 to Franz Ferdinand Wolff, Briefwechsel II, Nr. 922, 344.  Gamauf, Erinnerungen, 25.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

213

It is typical of Lichtenberg to focus on and finesse a conceptual difference through such linguistic play, and he is always conscious of how language shapes understanding. One must be aware of how the effort to define precise scientific terms is not neutral but already solidifies particular conceptions. Lichtenberg notes “the manifest quality in nomenclature [das Manifestmäßige in der Nomenklatur].”⁸⁰ Such neologisms and lexical variation can comprise a powerful heuristic tool, as he suggests in a Waste Book entry: “One should try out further words following the paradigm Erkältung [common cold] and Erkaltung [cooling down]. The distinction is fine, but lovely. Entfaltung [unfolding] and Entfältung [‘unfoldening’ or ‘uncreasing’], etc.”⁸¹ Following this lead, I propose that Lichtenberg’s strategies of differentiation between proper physics and the bluster of the tricksters can be explored through the semantic field of terms relating to “play,” in particular through Lichtenberg’s understanding of Spiel – play – and Spielerey – playing games. Other scholars, notably Oliver Hochadel in his substantial work on Lichtenberg and the field of electricity, have presented the ambivalent discourse on the value and limitations of Spielwerke (mechanical toys) in physics in the late eighteenth century. Hochadel considers the efforts to distinguish establishment science from itinerant producers of scientific shows through the changing use of the terms “play” and “work,” which is also developing at this time, yet himself underscores the apparently contradictory assessments of play in the discourse of the time that resist the clarity of a contrast between work and play as the mark of the professional scientist.⁸² Lichtenberg’s fine linguistic distinctions in the use of Spielerey to mark a frivolous practice that may at times be re-directed to positive ends allow him, I argue, to maintain a claim on the positive practice of Spiel, one that accords importantly with his methodological and philosophical positions. A survey of important terms related to play includes Spielwerk, which refers to experimental apparatus and games; Schauspiel der Natur [theater of nature], as we have seen; spielen [to play], which is sometimes used to refer to the activity in the lectures; Spiel [play; game] as a designation for experiment; and finally, vorspielen [to perform] and Spielerei [playing games], which Lichtenberg often uses in a pejorative sense, as do others. He reflects on this difference in a Waste Book entry as follows: “To play [spielen] is a highly undetermined word. Often something becomes a frivolous game [Spielerei] through the poor use that one makes of a thing. There are people who play with the most holy  Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher 2, J II 1714, 312.  “Nach dem Paradigma Erkältung und Erkaltung müßte man mehrere Worte durchprobieren. Die Distinktion ist fein, aber schön. Entfaltung und Entfältung. usw.” Sudelbücher 1, J I, 112, 669.  Hochadel, Öffentliche Wissenschaft, especially 280 – 289.

214

Claire Baldwin

things.”⁸³ In his lecture notes, Spielerei is usually employed dismissively to indicate experimentation or demonstration that is a frivolous waste of time, something that is either commonplace or else something insufficiently substantiated and does not help further understanding – for example, “The books of the French physicists are full of such useless games [Spielereyen].”⁸⁴ Gehler, too, employs the term Spielerey in his discussion of the necessary balance between experimental and experiential learning and historical-theoretical or “dogmatic” teaching in the physics classroom, reflecting its broader use to designate a lack of scientific seriousness. Under the headword “experimental physics” Gehler emphasizes, as does Lichtenberg, that experimentation is the foundation of true natural science, but that there is a pedagogical need to include “dogmatic physics,” that is, explanatory and historical study, along with the immediacy of demonstration experiments in the academy. Without the experiential data gained through experimentation, any calculation and theory would have no foundation and results could not be verified – they would be, he writes, “nothing but empty dreams.” Conversely, “an experimental physics without any conclusions would comprise nothing but unproductive games [Spielereyen].”⁸⁵ The term Spiel, however, can indicate engaging experimental play, as in this letter from Lichtenberg to Blumenbach: “I wanted to first see the lovely game [das schöne Spiel] in the cup”⁸⁶ and the dramatic play [Schauspiel] of nature is fascinating and awesome, the object of his intensive pursuit of understanding and a cause for pleasure and delight. The play of nature in turn encourages the kind of active intellectual play in the service of serious science that accords with Lichtenberg’s methodological tenets. Playful work and serious play optimally condition each other and spur scientific inquiry. Helmar Schramm has even suggested that the history of experimentation can be read as a history of play.⁸⁷ Contemporary work on neuroscience stresses the expansive effect of play on cognitive facility and observes the effects of play on brain chemistry: the increased focus and better mood that accompany creative play lead to increased cognitive capacity.⁸⁸ Play provides for imaginative freedoms within established parameters, rules of play that temporarily trump everyday rules. Play encourages mental

 Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher 2, undated comments 76, 564.  Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 11– 12.  Gehler, Physicalisches Wörterbuch, head word “Experimentalphysik.”  Letter to Blumenbach from 1780 or 1781, Briefwechsel II, Nr. 764, 144.  Helmar Schramm, “Einleitung. Ort und Spur im Theatrum scientiarum,” in Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne: Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, vol. 1 of Theatrum Scientiarum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), XVI.  As described by Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance (New York: Vintage, 2004), 40 – 65.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

215

flexibility, the performance of and movement between disparate roles, and the adoption of multiple points of view and hypothetical scenarios while maintaining awareness of its temporary suspension of “reality”; it is crucial for the fundamental habitus of Lichtenberg’s thought and practice that Albrecht Schöne so eloquently and influentially termed “Lichtenbergian subjunctives.”⁸⁹ Such playful subjunctive structures support Lichtenberg’s position of “skeptical enlightenment” and “pragmatic understanding of truth” elaborated by Smail Rapic:⁹⁰ they can frame skeptical doubt about metaphysical truth claims in science (and in general) as a positive and creative force and as a self-conscious method that leads to new insights. Play allows for expansiveness of thought and an adventurous attitude as well as openness to spontaneity and serendipity, to which Lichtenberg attributes much scientific advancement. Play is a form of experimentation, a way to posit and test hypotheses. Lichtenberg indeed defends the use of bold hypotheses in the service of scientific advancement through metaphors that combine images of various forms of play and daring: Without hypotheses of this type nothing can be done. The question of whether they are useful has something incongruous about it: for one certainly wants to explain phenomena in Nature, and such a hypothesis is indeed nothing more than such a daring explanation that will collapse on its own as soon as the phenomena contradict it. Likewise, the question of whether false hypotheses can be of use also answers itself immediately. It is not everyone’s talent to hit on the best one first. They are not only present in natural science. Turenne and Frederick II followed them in their enterprises as much as Newton. L’hombre cannot be played without hypotheses, and the finest players make the most, and when a false one is refuted, another one is there right away that is seldom worse.⁹¹

The capacity for active play in this broad sense is not the only necessary trait of the successful scientist, but the qualities that such play cultivates are indispensable ones in Lichtenberg’s view. Play is one form of experience of the self as embodied mind.⁹²

 Albrecht Schöne, Aufklärung aus dem Geist der Experimentalphysik. Lichtenbergische Konjunktive (Munich: Beck, 1982).  Smail Rapic, “‘Die Philosophie, deren Professor zu seyn ich die Ehre habe.’ Zwischen Leibniz, Kant und Popper: Lichtenbergs philosophiegeschichtlicher Ort,” in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 1742 – 1799. Wagnis der Aufklärung, 148 – 166.  Sudelbücher 2, J II 1321.  In a distinct fashion, this also holds true for Schiller’s concept of play posited in his aesthetic writings of the 1790s, in which the instinct for play mediates between and engages both the senses and rationality. In Schiller’s aesthetic ideal, play can give rise to human freedom through the creative engagement of the imagination and human faculties beyond the rigid strictures of reason.

216

Claire Baldwin

The distinction between the nouns Spielerei and Spiel correlates to that between the verbs vorspielen [perform; deceive] and spielen [perform; play], terms which suggest two different performative modes. Lichtenberg insists to his students that “it is not at all my intention to deceive you” [es meine Absicht gar nicht ist, Ihnen etwas vorzuspielen], and therefore encourages students to come to the extra demonstrations on Sundays so they can all have a chance for an adequate viewing position, ensuring that they will be more active observers.⁹³ Vorspielen neutrally suggests an active performer and a receptive audience. It can also, as here, carry the connotation of a manipulative stance towards the audience on the part of the performer, and the suggestion of show, pretense or deception, which Lichtenberg abhors. Lichtenberg interprets play, in contrast to vorspielen, as something that engages his audience in mental activity that can lead to new insights, as another look at his letter cited above reveals. With the right kind of active attention, games can offer an opportunity for a productive kind of play: “In lectures on experimental physics one needs to play [etwas spielen]; the sleepyhead will be woken up thereby and the one who is awake and reasonable will see games [Spielereyen] as an opportunity to consider the issue from a new perspective.”⁹⁴ Play is, then, not just a way to pander to student demand for amusement, or simply a didactic mask, sugar-coating a lesson. Rather, it has epistemological value. Lichtenberg’s student Pieter Poel remembers, “in his lectures he was far too serious about science than to attempt to amuse his audience with games [Späße].”⁹⁵ Yet Lichtenberg concludes his lectures on electricity, as Gamauf recalls, with the pleasing spectacle of various experiments in the dark, “beautiful light in the airless glass cylinders.”⁹⁶ Lichtenberg also divides the list of demonstration experiments useful for teaching about electricity into the categories “experiments [Versuche]” and “artful experiments or mechanical games [gekünstelte Versuche oder elektrische Spielwerke],” which include “the dance of the paper dolls with the help of electricity,” and an electric Glockenspiel chiming “God Save the King.”⁹⁷ Gamauf cites Lichtenberg’s own commentary of 1784 on the latter device. In the Göttingen Pocket Calendar he writes that although “it is true, they are only mechanical games [Spielwerke],” they still demand more perspicacity and talent than other instruments such as

 Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 3, 12.  Lichtenberg, Letter of 10 June 1782 to Franz Ferdinand Wolff, Briefwechsel II, Nr. 922, 344.  Pieter Poel, in Joost, “Zeugnisse,” LI.  Gamauf, Erinnerungen, 544.  Lichtenberg, Lichtenbergs annotiertes Handexemplar der vierten Auflage von Johann Christian Polykarp Erxleben: “Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre,” Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 1, 538. See also Gamauf, Erinnerungen, 498.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

217

the Orrery, “today one of the most useless machines in the world from which no person can learn anything.”⁹⁸ Characteristically, Lichtenberg connects the aspects of serious scientific study and the theatrical staging of the lecture-demonstration. He does so through an emphasis on intellectual play that fosters cognitive flexibility and prompts students to adopt new vantage points in the pursuit of conceptual clarity and scientific precision. Lichtenberg’s performance in the Collegium of experimental physics aims to define the rules of the game of the new discipline, and to turn the philosophical consumer in the auditorium into an active player: an independent, skeptical, imaginative thinker; an interlocutor with nature; a legitimate judge of scientific credibility; an informed member of the scientific public; and a true co-producer and colleague in the modern performance of knowledge.

Works Cited Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette and Christine Blondel. “Introduction: A Science Full of Shocks, Sparks and Smells.” In Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment, edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincente and Christine Blondel, 1 – 10. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette and Christine Blondel, eds. Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Berg, Gunhild. “Probieren und Experimentieren, Auflösen und Zusammensetzen im Sudelbuch. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg als experimental philosopher.” Lichtenberg-Jahrbuch 2010: 7 – 25. Beuermann, Gustav. “‘Sie schwäntzen aber jezt schon, bis es blitzt und donnert.’ Physikprofessor – Lichtenbergs Beruf.” In Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 1742 – 1799: Wagnis der Aufklärung, edited by Ulrich Joost, Stephan Oettermann, and Sibylle Spiegel, 346 – 364. Munich: Hanser, 1992. Carroll, Noel. Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Clark, William. “From Enlightenment to Romanticism. Lichtenberg and Göttingen Physics.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nikolaas Rupke, 72 – 85. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Clark, William. “German Physics Textbooks in the Goethezeit.” History of Science 35, no. 2/3 (1997): 219 – 239 and 295 – 363. Daston, Lorraine, ed. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

 Lichtenberg, “Neue Entdeckungen, physikalische und andere Merkwürdigkeiten,” in Göttinger Taschen Calendar für das Jahr 1784. Taschenbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnügen (Göttingen: Dieterich 1784), 50 – 63, here 52– 53.

218

Claire Baldwin

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York and Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007. Erxleben, Johann Christian Polykarp. Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre. Göttingen and Gotha: J.C. Dieterich, 1772. Erxleben, Johann Christian Polykarp. Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre. Lichtenbergs annotiertes Handexemplar der vierten Auflage. Vol. 1 of Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre. Edited by Wiard Hinrichs, Albert Krayer, and Horst Zehe. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, translated by Saskia Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Füssel, Marian. “Akademische Aufklärung. Die Universitäten des 18. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld von funktionaler Differenzierung, Ökonomie und Habitus.” In “Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung.” special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2010): 47 – 73. Fyfe, Aileen, and Bernard Lightman. Introduction to Science and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, edited by Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, 1 – 13. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gamauf, Gottlieb. Erinnerungen aus Lichtenbergs Vorlesungen. Vol. 2 of Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre. Edited by Alfred Krayer and Klaus-Peter Lieb. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. Gehler, J. S. T. Physicalisches Wörterbuch. Leipzig 1798. The Archimedes Project, Archimedes Repository Dictionary Access. Accessed 10 November 2014. http://archimedes.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/cgi-bin/archim/dict/hw? step=list&id=d008&max=50. Gierl, Martin. Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang. Stuttgart and Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012. Golinski, Jan. Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760 – 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Gravenkamp, Horst. Geschichte eines elenden Körpers. Lichtenberg als Patient. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992. Hammerstein, Notker. “Universitäten.” In Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte. Edited by Notker Hammerstein and Ulrich Herrmann. Vol. 2: 18. Jahrhundert. Vom späten 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuordnung Deutschlands um 1800, 369 – 400. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005. Heerde, Hans-Joachim. Das Publikum der Physik. Lichtenbergs Hörer. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006. Heilbron, J. L. “Physics and its History at Göttingen around 1800.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nikolaas Rupke, 50 – 71. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Hochadel, Oliver. Öffentliche Wissenschaft. Elektrizität in der deutschen Aufklärung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003. Hufeland, Christian Wilhelm. Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern. Jena: Akademie Buchhandlung, 1797. Hund, Friedrich. Die Geschichte der Göttinger Physik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Exuberance. New York: Vintage, 2004. Joost, Ulrich. “Einleitung.” In Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 2: vii –xl. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008.

Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics

219

Joost, Ulrich. “Vorlesungsmanuskript und Vorlesungsnachschrift als editorisches Problem, und etwas von Lichtenbergs Vorlesungen.” Cardanus. Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 1 (2000): 33 – 70. Joost, Ulrich, ed. “Zeugnisse über Lichtenberg als akademischen Lehrer.” Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 2: xlix–lxxxii. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. Krayer, Albert. “X. Von der Elektrizität. Vorbemerkung.” In Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 4: 235 – 244. Lawrence, Christopher and Steven Shapin. Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Briefwechsel. Edited by Ulrich Joost and Albrecht Schöne, Im Auftrag der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 5 vols. Munich: Beck, 1983 – 2004. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. “Neue Entdeckungen, physikalische und andere Merkwürdigkeiten.” In Göttinger Taschen-Calendar für das Jahr 1774; Taschenbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, 50 – 63. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1784. Digitale Sammlungen der Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld. Accessed 10 November 2014. http://ds.ub.unibielefeld.de/viewer/image/2235093_009/1/LOG_0003/. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Sudelbücher. Vols. 1 and 2 of Schriften und Briefe. Edited by Wolfgang Promies. 6 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1967 – 1992. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre. Vols. 1 – 4 of Gesammelte Schriften: historisch-kritische und kommentierte Ausgabe. Edited by the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen and the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005 – 2010. Lichtenberg-Kolleg. The Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study. “Institute.” Accessed 10 November 2014. http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/lichtenberg-kolleg/90756.html. Livingstone, David N. Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. McClelland, Charles Edgar. State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700 – 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Peters, Sibylle. “Figuren des wissenschaftlichen Vortrags um 1800: Actio, Affekt, Anschauung – Die Performance ‘Denken.’” KulturPoetik: Zeitschrift für kulturgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaft/Journal of Cultural Poetics 5, no. 1 (2005): 31 – 50. Rapic, Smail. “Die Philosophie, deren Professor zu seyn ich die Ehre habe” Zwischen Leibniz, Kant und Popper: Lichtenbergs philosophiegeschichtlicher Ort.” In Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 1742 – 1799: Wagnis der Aufklärung, edited by Ulrich Joost, Stephan Oettermann, and Sibylle Spiegel, 148 – 166. Munich: Hanser, 1992. Riskin, Jessica. “Amusing Physics.” In Bensaude-Vincente and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 43 – 64. Riskin, Jessica. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Roberts, Lissa. “Chemistry on Stage: G.F. Rouelle and the Theatricality of Eighteenth-Century Chemistry.” In Bensaude-Vincente and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 43 – 64. Rupke, Nikolaas, ed. Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Schöne, Albrecht. Aufklärung aus dem Geist der Experimentalphysik. Lichtenbergische Konjunktive. Munich: Beck, 1982.

220

Claire Baldwin

Schramm, Helmar. “Einleitung. Ort und Spur im Theatrum scientiarum.” In Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne: Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, vol. 1 of Theatrum Scientiarum, xi – xxx. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003. Seel, Martin. Die Macht des Erscheinens: Texte zur Ästhetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007. Shapin, Steven. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Stewart, Larry. “The Laboratory, the Workshop, and the Theater of Experiment.” In Bensaude-Vincente and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 11 – 24. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Stewart, Larry. The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660 – 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Stichweh, Rudolph. Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland, 1740 – 1890. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Turner, Steven R. “University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany 1760 – 1806.” In The University in Society, edited by Lawrence Stone, 2: 495 – 531. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Withers, Charles. “The Geography of Scientific Knowledge.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nikolaas Rupke, 9 – 18. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002.

Chad Wellmon

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity In 1773, Immanuel Kant wrote to his friend the Berlin physician Marcus Herz that he planned to teach a course that winter on anthropology, which he hoped to make into a “proper academic discipline.”¹ Kant went on to lecture on anthropology almost annually for over twenty years, but it is only in the last two decades that Kant scholars have given significant attention to the lectures and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Much of this scholarship has attempted to reconcile Kant’s account of a pure reason, as exemplified in the critical canon, with what has been called the “impure” reason of his anthropology. In their efforts to determine whether Kant’s anthropology is properly philosophical, however, scholars have overlooked a different set of questions: what did Kant mean by a “proper academic discipline” and why would he want to make anthropology into one? Such questions do not fall within the traditional purview of Kant scholarship. They extend to related but broader fields like the history of knowledge and science and situate Kant’s attempts to make anthropology into a “proper academic discipline” within a basic Enlightenment tension. As Robin Valenza puts it, on the one hand, Enlightenment figures saw themselves as carrying out Francis Bacon’s imperative to expand knowledge across all the sciences. On the other hand, however, they increasingly saw this as conflicting with another Enlightenment imperative to disseminate knowledge to an ever-broader readership.² The logic of specialization – the organization of knowledge into narrower and thus more manageable spheres or fields – served as an efficient filtering mechanism, as Kant put it, for the “growth” of knowledge and the unrelenting “curiosity” of humans, but it also threatened the Enlightenment imperative to make knowledge both more useful and accessible.³

 Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. The Königlich-preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols. to date (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–) here: vol. 13, 60. Henceforth, all citations to Kant will be to volume and page number. Citations to the Critique of Pure Reason will follow the standard A/B citation practice. Unless noted otherwise, all translations are my own.  See Robin Valenza, Literature, Language, and the Rise of Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680 – 1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1.  Critique of Pure Reason, A708/B736. With slight emendations, translations of the Critique follow Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

222

Chad Wellmon

Kant’s efforts to make anthropology into a “proper academic discipline” were, in part, a response to broader cultural anxieties about the proliferation and specialization of knowledge. They were part of his broader effort to develop a concept of science (Wissenschaft) capable of balancing the dual imperative of Enlightenment and the questions they posed about the future of knowledge: What constituted scientific knowledge and distinguished it from other forms of knowledge? Could science, as Kant put it, be “systematic yet popular”?⁴ And, ultimately, was science “our true destiny,” that towards which all humans should strive and aspire? According to the more historical and institutional concerns of this essay, Kant’s pragmatic anthropology exemplified the logic of an emergent disciplinarity, but it also anticipated some of its limitations and was itself a limit case. As an emergent, underdeveloped science, anthropology was a test case for the limits and possibilities of scientific knowledge.

1 Eighteenth-century anthropology as proto-discipline Anthropology in late eighteenth-century Germany was notoriously undisciplined. There was no agreement as to what a so-called science of the human might entail. Its proper methods, limits, audience, and sources were all disputed. Consequently, commentators from J.G. Herder to Ernst Cassirer have observed that Enlightenment anthropology tended to subsume all forms of inquiry.⁵ The reformulation of all philosophical, moral, and theological questions as anthropological rendered anthropology less a discipline or science and more a general anti-metaphysical orientation.⁶ From this perspective, anthropology can seem to contemporary readers, as it did to its eighteenth-century critics and supporters as well, eclectic. In his lectures on logic, Kant gathered up the three guiding questions of his philosophical project – what can I know? what should I do? what can I be allowed to hope for? – into a fourth question: what is the human? This capacious forth question, he suggested, was the concern of anthro-

 Kant, Anthropology, 7: 124.  See, for example, Wolfgang Proß, afterword to vol. 2 of Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufklärung, Philosophie der Aufklärung, by Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Wolfgang Proß (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987); Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932).  See Panajotis Kondylis, Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 119 – 169.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

223

pology.⁷ Formulated in this manner, anthropology was akin less to a particular, specialized science and more to a mode of inquiry, a manner of treating knowledge. There was no monolithic discipline known as anthropology. In An Essay on Anthropology, or a Philosophy of the Human According to His Physical Dispositions (1794), Johann Ith repeatedly worried that his own efforts to contribute to this proto-discipline might have been in vain since, as he wrote, a science of the human “is still so new and even still emerging! […] We are just now beginning to collect and form its dispersed fragments into a scientific system. There is still no consensus about the actual concept of this science, its domain, its element, its methods.”⁸ Anthropology was an emergent field with unclear boundaries, no basic concept, and a range of methodologies. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the proponents of various types of anthropology advocated for their particular vision. Ernst Platner, a professor of medicine in Göttingen, outlined a physiological-philosophical anthropology that sought to study the mind and body in harmony. Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, in contrast, proposed a medical one based solely on experience and the study of the body. For Jakob and other physiologically oriented proto-anthropologists, a science of the human had to avoid any questions that did not deal directly with the human body so that it would not “spring out of the field of experience and into the regions of metaphysics;” “[a]ll metaphysical hypotheses are empty and irrelevant in anthropology.”⁹ G.S.A. Mellin, author of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Critical Philosophy (1797– 1804), advocated a practical or pragmatic anthropology that would consider “the unique nature and condition of the human faculty of desire, the drives, inclinations, and passions of the human being and the hindrances of exercising the moral law.”¹⁰ Such an anthropology would apply its knowledge of the human being to the “realization of particular ends.”¹¹ Carl Christian Erhard Schmid (1762– 1812) proposed a teleological anthropology that considered the human as a natural being in relation to a “natural purpose that is thought through the reflection of the power of judgment.”¹² For  Kant, Logic, 9: 25.  Johann Ith, Versuch einer Anthropologie oder Philosophie des Menschen nach seinen körperlichen Anlagen (Bern: Emanuel Haller, 1794), 76.  Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, Grundriß einer Erfahrungs-Seelenlehre (Grätz: Hemmerde und Schwetschke, 1795), 279.  G.S.A. Mellin, Encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der kritischen Philosophie (Züllichan and Leipzig: Friedrich Frommann, 1797), 279.  Michael Wagner, ed., Beyträge zur philosophischen Anthropologie (Wien: Joseph Stahel, 1794), xi.  Schmid, xvii.

224

Chad Wellmon

Schmid, only a teleological anthropology could fulfill the promises of physical and pragmatic anthropologies, because it was the only one that would be able to integrate the “powers and highest abilities” of individual human beings with the entire human species. More than twenty years after Kant’s letter to Herz, then, there was still no consensus about what constituted a “proper academic discipline” of anthropology. Expressing frustration in 1800 with anthropology’s fragmented state, Karl H.L. Pölitz complained that it was impossible to appeal to a “single science or discipline of anthropology” because everybody meant something different by the term. Anthropology “now finds itself in a state of crisis,” he wrote.¹³ By 1800, there were at least four distinct and completing anthropologies: a physiological-philosophical anthropology that conceived of the unity of the human in terms of the harmony of the mind and body; a physiological anthropology that conceived of the unity of the human in strictly the physiological terms of the human body as a mechanism; a pragmatic anthropology that conceived of the unity of the human according to its freedom; and finally a teleological anthropology that considered the human being according to the “the purposes of human predispositions.”¹⁴ One day, proclaimed Pölitz, the real anthropology would “emerge and win out in the end”; it would unify an anthropology beset by fragmentation and confusion about it real ends. For Pölitz, sciences were organized around a core. There was a “true” anthropology that pre-existed or underlay its differentiation into various anthropologies, and the most basic task of anthropology was to discern this inner core. As evidenced by the confusion surrounding anthropology, however, a common object of study, the human, was not enough to unify the various forms of inquiry that operated under the heading of anthropology into a clear and distinct science called anthropology. What could constitute the unity of a science like anthropology? And, inversely, how could anthropology as a possible discipline sustain such a variety of methods and objects of study? By the time Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798, then, anthropology referred to multiple, oftentimes contradictory forms of inquiry that were competing to become the authoritative “science of the human.” Given the variety of anthropologies in Germany around 1800, was anthropology a “proper academic discipline”? It lacked a unity of method, concepts, and boundaries. It was never self-identical. It was constantly cleaving into

 Karl H. L. Pölitz, xxxvii–xxxviii.  Christian Schmid, “Einleitung,” Anleitungen zur Menschenkenntniß, Cureau de la Chambre, trans. Carl Christian Schmid (Jena: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1794), xviii; Pölitz, 9.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

225

related but distinct fields of inquiry. The only thing that unified the various forms of anthropology was the very question of anthropology: What was it? What was its proper method? What was its proper object of study? All of this raised a more basic question: what was a discipline? What was a science? What would it have meant, then, for Kant to have turned anthropology into a “proper academic discipline”?

2 Discipline as behavior modification In eighteenth-century Germany, disciplines in the contemporary sense of the term did not exist. The terms “discipline” (Disziplin) and “science” were highly underdetermined. “Discipline,” for example, was used to refer both to a field of study and a form of behavior. The internal differentiation of anthropology into competing anthropologies organized inquiry into the human by establishing ever-finer distinctions. In this sense, the emergent discipline of anthropology was not a static, timeless category of knowledge, but rather a contingent and dynamic staging or production of knowledge. It framed and filtered an apparent excess of knowledge into a coherent and manageable discourse. When confronted with new and more information, Kant, like his proto-anthropology contemporaries, repeatedly redrew boundaries and made new distinctions. Kant’s use of “discipline” exemplified the double meaning and complexities of the term. In his 1773 letter to Herz, he used “discipline” to refer to a particular category of knowledge. Elsewhere, however, he almost always used the term to refer not to an academic discipline, but rather to a particular activity that was repeated over time. It signified a form of constraint in the face of an unremitting human “curiosity.”¹⁵ Discipline did not refer to a set of propositions or objects of study. It was an activity or process whose effectiveness depended on its repetition. It was a form of behavioral modification that constantly rearticulated the limits of the possible. Discipline, wrote Kant, referred to the “compulsion through which the constant propensity to stray from certain rules is limited and finally eradicated.”¹⁶ It was, thus, related to the negative work of critique, which outlined the boundaries of knowledge through the repeated re-actualization of the limits of reason itself. Critique, as Kant put it, was a negative teaching that functioned not as an “orga-

 A708/BB736.  A709/B737.

226

Chad Wellmon

non for the extension but as a discipline for the limitation of pure reason.”¹⁷ It contributes to culture and Bildung, wrote Kant, through a “negative lawgiving.” As discipline it works back on the subject of reason by establishing a system of, as Kant put it, “self-testing.”¹⁸ It acts on the subjects, not the objects, of knowledge. Although Kant never explicitly related his two uses of discipline – as a category of knowledge and a negative subset of culture – the two uses functioned analogously. Like the constraining effect of critique, a discipline of knowledge produces knowledge by filtering what one can know. It does so primarily by constraining and checking the curiosity of the subjects of knowledge. It guides its practitioners to the “proper” ends of their science by focusing their attention. It also produces certain kinds of knowledge through its negative effects. It focuses questions, filters excess, and restricts inquiry. In this sense, a properly disciplined anthropology would have been less a taxonomic category than a formative agent of knowledge. It would have provided a general concept of knowledge, a generally coherent account of what counted as anthropological knowledge, not through its appeal to a distinct object in the world, but rather through the forma-

 A795/B823.  Kant similarly describes the constraining effect of discipline in his posthumous handbook Über Pädagogik, which outlines two aspects of education (Erziehung), discipline and cultivation. Discipline changes animal nature into human nature. “Discipline prevents the human being from deviating by means of his animal impulse from its destiny: humanity. Discipline, for example, must restrain the human so that it does not wildly and thoughtlessly put himself in danger” (9: 442; Louden 2008, 438). In this sense, discipline has a strictly propaedeutic function relative to the other elements of education like cultivation and moralization, which contribute positively to human development. Discipline itself does not establish moral principles; instead, it constrains, restricts and limits the effects of our animal nature. Similarly, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant defines discipline as the second and primary aspect of culture: “the emancipation of the will from the despotism of desires” (5: 431). Through its negation of the domination of sensuous desires, discipline transforms the inner will and makes it receptive to purposes higher than “nature itself can provide,” – that is, discipline prepares the human being for the recognition of the ends of reason (5: 433). In order to redress the non-coincidence of our status as moral subjects and our status as empirical, finite beings with sensuous inclinations, Kant prescribes a discipline of reason. The culture of discipline induces the human being to keep its sensuous desires in order to set itself higher purposes and thus make possible the self-legislation of reason. The disciplinary aspect of culture reworks the sensuous part of our being by disciplining our desires so that the gap between it and our reason might be closed. As the Sittenähnliche or simulacrum of freedom, culture prepares the human being to be an end-in-itself. It is the ultimate end of nature. In all these instances, then, Kant ascribes to discipline a primarily negative function. Its task is to prevent error (A709/B737), be it epistemological in the case of the errors of reason or moral in the case of the errors of our animal nature.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

227

tion of the subject of knowledge. To make anthropology into a “proper academic discipline,” then, Kant would have had to form the person of the anthropologist. In Kant’s use of “discipline,” the two meanings converged and anticipated more contemporary uses of discipline as a category of knowledge that is reproduced through its formation of disciplinary subjects. And one of the key features of such a discipline was its performative character. For Kant, anthropology could only succeed if it “erased” its theoretical underpinnings and focused less on its propositional content and more on its effect on what Kant termed the “theater” of life. Kant wanted anthropology not just to inform, but to transform.

3 The distinctions of Kant’s anthropology Kant attempted to form such a subjective intellectual identity, in part, by making a consistent series of distinctions. Kant’s original announcement to Herz that he planned to make anthropology into a “proper academic discipline” was prompted by Herz’s positive review of Platner’s Anthropology for Physicians and Philosophers (1772). From the beginning of his own anthropology lectures, Kant organized his conception of a properly disciplined anthropology around a general distinction between Platner’s “physiological” anthropology and what he termed his own “pragmatic” anthropology. This juxtaposition differentiated Kant’s anthropology from other contemporary forms of anthropology and emphasized its particularity and originality. “All anthropologies, which currently exist,” as it is put in the Friedländer lecture notes, “do not belong to anthropology.”¹⁹ The pragmatic-physiological distinction anticipated other core distinctions that would come to organize his critical philosophy such as reason/nature and pure/impure. Kant repeated the basic distinction of anthropology between physiological and pragmatic throughout his lectures but at ever finer levels of analysis. But the terms were always relative to one another. The limits of a particular “pragmatic” anthropology were only evident when juxtaposed with a specific notion of physiological anthropology. Each term in the distinction was indexical. Its stability, meaning, and function only made sense in the context of its opposing term. Platner wrote what Kant considered the consummate “physiological” anthropology text, Anthropology for Physicians and Philosophers, out of a dissatisfaction with the available solutions to the Cartesian dualism problem concerning how the two domains – mental substance whose essence is thought and material substance whose essence is extension – could be related. Like so many physi-

 Kant, 25:1: 472.

228

Chad Wellmon

cians of his time, he considered occasionalism, harmonism (e. g. Leibnizian preestablished harmony), physical influx, and psycho-physical parallelism to be insufficient explanations of the mind-body problem. He envisioned anthropology as a new science that would finally prove and demonstrate that the human was “neither body nor soul alone; he is the harmony of both.”²⁰ He speculated that this “harmony” was made possible by a mediating material, the “nerve fluid.” Platner had conceived of a physiological mechanism for a psychological process and “nerve fluid” was the mediating material. Despite the fact that Platner never articulated the precise mechanisms for the interactions between the fluid and organs – what were the material means for the impressions on organs? What was it exactly that the nerve fluid transmitted to the mind? – his work was hailed by many of his contemporaries as the “real anthropology.”²¹ Beginning in his first lecture courses on anthropology, Kant dismissed Platner’s work as mere conjecture. Although Kant did not doubt that there was in principle a harmony or relationship between body and soul, he insisted that anthropology should not deal with the question of how his harmony operated. “The transition from bodily to mental movement,” he wrote, “cannot be further explained.” All those scientists who claimed that they could “connect the mind to the soul” were mistaken; they merely “grop[e] for the causes of nature.”²² Physiological explanations that sought to explain the mechanics of the mindbody relationship should be excluded from anthropological inquiry. At times Kant seemed to deny the existence of Platner’s anthropology all together. According to lecture notes from 1781, anthropology lectures were necessary “because no other book on anthropology exists,” despite the fact that Platner’s Anthropology had been regarded in Germany since its publication ten years earlier as “the anthropology of the human being in general.”²³ More often, however, Kant simply dismissed Platner’s physiological anthropology as a false anthropology and juxtaposed it with a pragmatic anthropology concerned with how the “phenomena and the laws” of human behavior can be used. The latter was not concerned with the “conditions of possibility of the modification of human nature as such.”²⁴ In contrast to physiological anthropology’s “eternally futile investigation” into the ultimate relationship between organs and thoughts,

 Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (Leipzig: Dyck, 1772), xvii.  Mareta Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bern: Peter Lang, 1976), 53. See, for example, Marcus Herz, “Rez. von Platners Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise,” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 20, no. 1 (1773): 25 – 51.  Kant, Anthropology, 7: 119.  Kant, 25:2: 859; Linden, 53.  Kant, 10: 145.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

229

pragmatic anthropology considered how reason could use observations for purposive action. For Kant, this distinction was not just a philosophical claim; it was also an intellectual filter. Like the circumscription of reason through critique, Kant’s pragmatic anthropology identified the limits of anthropological inquiry through delimitation, which alleviated the subjective burden to know by clarifying beforehand what can and cannot be known about the mind-body relationship. It also delegitimized other, non-Kantian versions of anthropology. Platner’s physiological anthropology was not anthropology but Kant’s pragmatic anthropology was.²⁵ The pragmatic-physiological distinction limited not just the possible content of anthropology but also the kinds of questions a properly disciplined anthropology – that is, one organized around clear and repeated distinctions – might legitimately pose. It restrained the scope of anthropological inquiry by identifying certain questions and even texts as illegitimate. Kant eliminated an entire discourse – medical anthropology, for example – from consideration. By declaring such texts as Platner’s a “pure waste of time,” Kant granted his readers license to ignore forms of inquiry that tried to explain the relationship between mind and body. It also excused ignorance. These negative effects, however, also had a positive intention. The distinction worked back on the subject of knowledge to shape and form him.

4 Anthropology as system Kant’s lectures were filled not only with warnings about what not to read, but suggestions and examples about what an aspiring anthropologist should read: from ethnographies and novels to Hume’s History of England and Montaigne’s Essays. For Kant, anthropology consisted of a “stockpile of observations.” In order for these particular observations to provide a coherent account of the human and for anthropology to have an intellectual identity, however, they  Kant occasionally drew a more complex distinction between pragmatic and practical anthropology or between pragmatic anthropology and a never fully-articulated moral on anthropology. See, for example, 4: 389. Contemporary Kant scholars have yet to reach consensus on this possible relationship. Reinhard Brandt argues that Kant’s “pragmatic anthropology is not identical in any of its phases of development with the anthropology that he repeatedly designates as the complementary part of his moral theory after 1770,” whereas Werner Stark argues that “an internal, positive relationship” does exist between the lectures on anthropology and his moral philosophy. According to Stark, “Kant considered anthropology to be an integral part of his philosophy (including his critical philosophy).” Robert B. Louden makes perhaps the most forceful and detailed argument for this relationship.

230

Chad Wellmon

had to be organized as a whole and brought under the control of a system.²⁶ From the first lecture courses to Anthropology, Kant sought to provide students not only with empirical observations but a framework through which they could filter and properly organize anthropological knowledge. Anthropology had to be made into a “coherent science.” Anthropology, as the Friedländer notes put it, “deserves” to be lectured on “in the academy as a science” and not simply alongside other sciences.²⁷ According to Kant, anthropology had yet to become a science because its status had been undermined by those who claimed to practice and study it. Contemporary scholars purportedly interested in anthropology, he complained, treated knowledge of the human as though it could be accumulated through daily haphazard “interaction” with people. They reduced it to an aggregate lacking any organizing idea. It was just a supplemental knowledge that was generally “shoved into metaphysics, namely, psychology […] where it does not belong.”²⁸ It was a fund of ready-made empirical observations from which other sciences could draw in order to validate their own claims. These failures of form, suggested Kant, were functions of an underlying assumption that human action was not governed by discernable principles. What anthropology needed was an organizational framework. “One retains nothing,” as the Collins notes put it, “from books for which he doesn’t already have categories in his understanding. The disposition is thus in science the most excellent thing; if one has this form the natural cognition of the human then one could collect invaluable reflections and observations from novels and periodicals, from all writings and interactions.”²⁹ Kant uses “disposition” here in its more Latinate sense of management or arrangement. The growth of anthropology depends on the addition and organization of observations into a distinct organization structure. In order to become a science, anthropology required an underlying logic for scattered observations about the human. Both the empirical observations and the underlying principles of human action, as Friedrich Schleiermacher put it in his review of Kant’s Anthropology, needed to be treated “according to a certain method, or in a word, systematically.”³⁰ To become a science, anthropology would have to become a system.

 Kant, 25:1: 7.  Kant, 25:1: 473; Kant, 25:1: 7– 8. See also the Collins notes, where anthropology is described as the “science of the human being,” “a coherent science,” “a unique science” (25:1: 7– 8).  Kant, 25:1: 473.  Kant, 25:1: 8.  Kant, 25:2: 1435.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

231

For Kant, science and system were nearly synonymous. “Common knowledge,” he wrote in the Critique of Pure Reason, is rendered scientific through systematic unity. A science as a system is the “unity of the manifold of cognitions under one idea.”³¹ It makes a whole out of a “mere aggregate” by organizing particulars according to a unifying idea. The ever-expanding collection of anthropological observations had to be organized under one idea in order to become a science. For Kant, however, such a unity could only be thought. The unity of a science, in which all the parts are related to the whole, was an a priori idea, a timeless product of reason. And just for this reason the unity of a science is oftentimes difficult to discern. As a science develops as a series of insights and discoveries in time, the actual correspondence between the rational idea of the whole and the manifold acts of cognition and observations that constitute the particulars of a science can often be challenging to recognize. Even a science’s “founder,” claimed Kant, “often fumble[s] around with an idea that they have not even made distinct to themselves.” He has difficulty discerning the science’s “special content” or its “articulation (systematic unity) and boundaries.”³² He can rarely give a clear account of its unity, much less its progress. “It is too bad,” laments Kant, that the underlying unity of a science can only be glimpsed after the fact, after various ideas and materials have been collected “rhapsodically like building materials and worked through […] technically.” At best, a science’s earliest participants work according to a vague idea “hidden,” like some rational hint, within themselves. When one of these first participants or founders does attempt to give an account of such an emergent science, it seems to him to emerge “like maggots, by spontaneous generation [generatio aequivoca].” It appears to arise from the “mere confluence of aggregated concepts,” without any rational developmental history. In time, no total, universal account of the unity of a science can be given. Outside of time – rationally – however, Kant insisted that what appears to be a natural spontaneous scientific order is actually a product of reason itself. The idea of the emergent science “lies in reason like a seed, all of whose parts still lie very involuted and are hardly recognizable even under microscopic observation.” The unity of any science, and ultimately of all sciences, lies in the “self-development of reason.”³³ Reason’s self-disclosure guarantees the ultimate unity of the sciences. This gradual unfolding of reason was, for Kant, the real source of the “hints” of order that a science’s founder might discern.

 Kant, A832/B860.  Kant, A834/B862.  Kant, A834– 35/B862– 63; Guyer 1998, 692.

232

Chad Wellmon

With these metaphors (spontaneous generation, seeds), Kant invited readers to conceive of the development of the sciences, and ultimately reason itself, in organic terms. But he did so not to suggest that a science refers back to an already existent natural order. The unity of the system is not, ontologically speaking, undergirded by nature itself. Kant used these organic metaphors as way to conceptualize science’s internal teleology. The organism, in this case the “seed” of reason, is goal-directed. Its purpose is internal, and it is therefore autonomous. Such a model of unity within diversity was, for Kant, a way of holding together a rational account of unity (or totality) with a multitude of particulars – observations, facts, individual cognitions, the constitutive elements of a science. For Kant, the unity of a science could only be thought; it could not be found in mere experience. In order for anthropology to become a science on Kant’s own account, then, it needed a guiding idea, but the initial lecture courses did not have a clear guiding idea. In fact, according to the earliest lecture notes, anthropology was not, according to Kant’s later definition at least, a science at all. It was only concerned with the “appearances” or “perceptions” of the human being.³⁴ Although Kant always used the empirical psychology sections from Baumgarten’s Metaphysics [Metaphysica] as the basis for his lectures, the initial lectures (1772/73, 1773/74) more closely follow Baumgarten’s text, especially in their explicit appeal to the mental faculties as organizational principles.³⁵ In contrast to the earliest lectures, the lectures from the mid-1770s and Anthropology concluded with a discussion of the “destiny of the human being” and the character of the species. The earlier lecture notes from Collins and Parow discussed this character in terms of temperaments, physiognomy, sex and nationality. By the Friedländer notes of 1775, however, the sections on character concluded with an argument that the true character of the species lay in the fact that the human being has a “destiny” (Bestimmung) to achieve his moral perfection through cultural and moral devel-

 25:1: 243. Contemporary Kant scholars have been engaged in a debate about the scientific, philosophical, and systemic character of Kant’s anthropology for a few years now. Some, such as Reinhardt Brandt, argue that pragmatic anthropology “although conceived systematically and as a science, is not a philosophical system – it neither belongs to philosophy in a strict sense, nor is it articulated as a system based upon an idea of reason” (Brandt, “The Guiding Idea of Kant’s Anthropology and the Vocation of the Human Being,” in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Klein [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 85). Similarly, Brian Jacobs and Patrick Klein argue that “philosophical anthropology” is a contradiction for Kant, because philosophy is pure, while anthropology is empirical and thus impure. Jacobs, 3.  On the shift from an empirical psychology to a pragmatic anthropology, see Reinhard Brandt, “Ausgewählte Probleme der Kantischen Anthropologie,” in Der ganze Mensch, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 14– 32; See Brandt, “The Guiding Idea.”

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

233

opment.³⁶ Unlike empirical psychology, contended Kant, pragmatic anthropology’s observations were oriented toward the guiding purpose and final ends of the human – the actualization of the human as self-legislating and an end in itself. A pragmatic anthropology was concerned not simply with the more static, a temporal question “what is the human?” but rather with the historically-inflected question of “what is the destiny of the human?” – what might the human become?³⁷ And this was the guiding idea of Kant’s pragmatic anthropology.³⁸ Like one of those early “founders” of a science, Kant organized his empirical observations according to an idea that he only gradually and in retrospect discerned. In Anthropology he gave a clear account of anthropology’s guiding idea: “The sum total of pragmatic anthropology, in respect to the destiny of the human being and the characteristic of its formation,” he wrote, “is the following”: The human being is destined by its reason to live in a society with human beings and to cultivate itself, to civilize itself, and to moralize itself by means of arts and sciences. No matter how great his animal tendency may be to give itself over passively to the impulses of ease and good living, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacles that cling to him because of the crudity of its nature.³⁹

The guiding idea of a pragmatic anthropology – the destiny of the human – cannot be observed; it is not a product of empirical observation. Like any science, anthropology’s organizing idea can only be given by reason itself.⁴⁰ For Kant, the idea of a human destiny should ultimately determine the organization and use of empirical observations and, thus, make possible a “science” of anthropology.”⁴¹

5 Anthropology as popular science Kant envisioned not just a scientific and systematic anthropology, but a popular one as well. And this popular element is what made Kant’s anthropology necessarily

 See for example Kant 25:1: 682.  See introduction to Kant 25:1: L–LI.  Holy Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 110.  Kant 7: 324– 325; Louden, 420.  A detailed discussion of this issue exceeds the concerns of this essay. For a more extensive account, see Wilson Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology. Wilson makes the point that this guiding idea is grounded in a teleological form of judgment.  For more on the concept of Bestimmung and its relationship to pragmatic anthropology, see Brandt, “The Guiding Idea.”

234

Chad Wellmon

performative. As a popular form of knowledge, anthropology was a situated knowledge that could never be detached from situations of use and activity. It was a knowledge that had to be performed within, as Kant put it, the “theater” of life. Kant described his pragmatic anthropology as “systematically constructed and yet popular.”⁴² As the qualifying “yet” suggests, the two distinctions were presumed to be mutually exclusive. Systematic and scientific implied not-popular. Kant repeatedly acknowledged that pragmatic anthropology needed to “condescend” to a more common “power of comprehension.”⁴³ In order to be popular, it had to employ “common expressions,” forgo scholastic jargon, and make frequent use of examples familiar to every reader.⁴⁴ It had to be made accessible to “the reading public.”⁴⁵ Kant’s insistent that pragmatic anthropology can and should be popular echoed a common refrain among so-called “popular philosophers” of the 1770s such as Christian Garve. Guided by a certain eudemonism, “popular philosophers” claimed that true knowledge should be both useful and widely accessible.⁴⁶ Such a conception of philosophy represented a shift away from traditional concerns with epistemology and metaphysics (theoretical knowledge) toward ethical and political philosophy (practical knowledge) and its popular effects. Garve’s appeal to “popularity” stressed less the content of particular philosophical arguments than it did their form.⁴⁷ Popularity, he wrote, concerned the “manner in which one dealt” with the objects of philosophical inquiry.⁴⁸ Kant placed anthropology under a dual imperative: it had to be a science and had to be popular. The process of internal differentiation and systematization that made anthropology a proper science, however, also made it less accessible to a broader public more difficult. Every new internal distinction presumed a set of prior distinctions produced an increasingly specialized form of knowledge. For anthropology’s first advocates, who in the 1770s and 1780s had consistently touted its accessibility, relevance, and popularity, this was a problem. Thus, when Kant claimed that his pragmatic anthropology was systematic and “still popular,” he was responding to anxieties about the specialization of an-

 Kant, 7: 121.  Kant, 7: 121.  Kant, 16:3: 862; 7: 119.  Kant, 7: 121.  Klaus Petrus, “Beschrieene Dunkelheit und Seichtigkeit: Historisch-systematische Voraussetzungen zwischen Kant und Garve im Umfeld der Göttinger Rezension,” Kant-Studien 85, no. 3 (1994): 280 – 302.  See Friederich Beiser, Fate of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 165 – 166.  Christian Garve, Popularität, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Kurt Wölfel (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985), 1: 4; 1: 353.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

235

thropology. Pragmatic anthropology, he insisted, could “advance and hasten […] the growth” of science and “contribute to the broader good.”⁴⁹ Some of Kant’s contemporaries, however, doubted that a science could ever be popular. And Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, as Friedrich Schleiermacher suggested, demonstrated why. In his review of Kant’s 1798 textbook, Schleiermacher argued that “in pursuit of the popular” Kant had sacrificed the systematic and, thus, undermined the scientific character of anthropology.⁵⁰ Schleiermacher criticized in particular Kant’s claim that Anthropology was a “draft” designed to facilitate participation from readers. The “completeness of the titles,” the various themes according to which the text was organized, claimed Kant, would encourage readers to contribute to the project by inserting their own observations under his pre-set headings under which “this or that observed human quality can be subsumed.”⁵¹ Kant considered this a crucial part of his pragmatic anthropology and a way to make anthropology more broadly accessible, but Schleiermacher dismissed Kant’s popular headings as “empty space” that would simply confuse readers. These attempts to popularize anthropology could not compensate for the fact that it lacked a clear plan and unifying idea. Furthermore, claimed Schleiermacher, Kant’s claim to systematicity and popularity contradicted his so-called critical philosophy. It illegitimately mixed pure and impure. Kant claimed that pragmatic anthropology considered what the human “as a free acting being makes of himself,” whereas physiological anthropology considered what “nature makes of the human.”⁵² How, then, reasoned Schleiermacher, could the observations about digestion routines, table manners, and human races, which filled Kant’s anthropology, contribute to an account of the human as “free acting being”? Had Kant, however inadvertently, raised the specter of the body’s power over the mind, which his own critical philosophy deemed illegitimate? This philosophical contradiction, suggested Schleiermacher, manifested itself on the level of form as well, and this was the source of Kant’s paradoxical claim that his anthropology was both systematic and popular. Anthropology’s philosophical and formal contradictions converged in what Schleiermacher termed Kant’s concealment of anthropology’s organizing idea. Kant not only con-

 Kant, 7: 122.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hans-Joachim Birkner et al., 11 vols. to date (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979–), 1.4: 386.  Kant, 7: 21– 122; see Susan Meld Shell, “Kant’s Concept of the Human Race,” in The German Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).  Schleiermacher, 365; see Kant, Anthropology, 7: 117.

236

Chad Wellmon

tradicted his critical philosophy, but he also “deprives us” of the inner, guiding principle that supposedly organizes his sundry observations about the human.⁵³ Without this original idea, the Anthropology was little more than an assortment of “trivialities.”⁵⁴ Although Kant promised in his introduction an organized, scientific account of what the human can make of himself, he delivered an amalgamation of particulars that left the reader struggling to orient himself.

6 Kant’s solution to science and popularity Even after teaching his anthropology course for decades, Kant only hinted at the organizing idea at the center of his anthropology. As noted above, he placed ideas about the “destiny” of the human at the end of Anthropology and the lecture courses, but he never even alluded to such a possible guiding idea in his introductions or elsewhere in the various anthropology texts. He made little ostensible effort to connect his manifold empirical observations to an explicit, organizing idea of a species character. These connections are more evident in Kant’s essays on history and race, but why, as Schleiermacher asked, did Kant conceal the underlying idea of anthropology, which, if anything, would have clarified its status as a system and science? On the one hand, Kant’s seeming reluctance to highlight anthropology’s guiding idea could have been a function of the gradual, sometimes indiscernible development of anthropology into a science. As Kant described it in more theoretical terms in his “Architectonic of Reason,” the organizing idea of a science lay hidden, like some rational “hint,” even to its originators. Kant may well have only gradually discerned the organizing idea of anthropology. On the other hand, Kant’s apparent reluctance to clarify anthropology’s organizing idea may have been more intentional and a direct effort to balance the demands of popularity and systematicity. For Schleiermacher, the concealment of anthropology’s underlying idea was an intolerable contradiction, but, for Kant, it was a crucial, if seemingly paradoxical, and performative element that enabled it to be both scientific and popular. It was performative because it was concerned less with the particular content of his so-called anthropology and more with how it was presented both to a lecture audience and a reading public. For Kant, pragmatic anthropology was a form of knowledge that was addressed to a specific audience for particular ends. Unlike

 Schleiermacher, 368.  Schleiermacher, 365.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

237

theoretical knowledge, it had a particular time and place. It was intended not just to inform but to transform. In this sense, the distinction between the systematic and the popular was a matter of staging, of creating the appropriate conditions such that such a pragmatic knowledge could be taken up and change lives. For Kant, however, science could fulfill the dual imperative of Enlightenment only by obscuring its underlying theoretical system. The proper response to specialization and the gap it established between reading publics was intentional, but not necessarily malicious, obfuscation. The scientific character of anthropology had to be concealed as a matter of time and form. Before a science could be more broadly disseminated, it had to become a science within the university. Over the course of his writing career, Kant consistently distinguished between different forms of knowledge and their distinct ends. Throughout his lectures – not just on anthropology but on logic, geography, the philosophical encyclopedia, and metaphysics – and in the Critique of Pure Reason, he differentiated between a cosmopolitan knowledge and a scholastic knowledge. He related these two forms to a cosmopolitan and scholastic concept of philosophy as well. According to its scholastic concept, philosophy was a system of philosophical cognitions derived from concepts, whereas according to its cosmopolitan concept philosophy is the “science of the ultimate ends of human reason.”⁵⁵ Scholastic knowledge concerned “the skill” of thinking theoretically; it was a technical knowledge practiced for the specific and limited ends of a particular system of thought. Cosmopolitan knowledge, or what Kant sometimes referred to as popular knowledge, in contrast, concerned usefulness by which Kant means the “application of skill to oneself and to other people.”⁵⁶ Whereas scholastic knowledge always adheres to the ends of “a certain system,” cosmopolitan knowledge strives for what is more common and consciously excludes “the less interesting,” or things that pertain only to a particular system.⁵⁷ It is concerned with the ends and purposes to which particular skills are put. It asks about the universal, human ends of knowledge. For Kant, the distinction between scholastic and cosmopolitan knowledge was not simply theoretical; it was social, as well. And he tied these distinctions to particular social institutions. In the school or university, one learns “scholastic knowledge that belongs to the learned by profession,” whereas outside the university, “in the world,” one engages in “intercourse with the world and not just a group of scholars.⁵⁸ The university was the institution of scholastic knowl   

Kant, Logic, 9: 23. Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 113. Kant, 25:2: 1435. See also, Menschenkunde 25:2: 853; Mongrovius, 25:2: 1209. Kant, 25:2: 1209.

238

Chad Wellmon

edge, and the “world,” primarily the world as embodied by “the reading public,” was the institution of cosmopolitan knowledge. Kant also associated these two forms of knowledge with particular types of people. He oftentimes associated scholastic knowledge with the more specific figure of the pedant (Pedant), but he tended to use the term to refer not to anyone who pursued scholastic knowledge but rather those scholars who were incapable of considering whether such knowledge was “interesting or not.” The failure of a pedant is not his interest in scholastic knowledge but his disinterest in communicating its value to anyone outside his self-continued group of specialized scholars. He may be very knowledgeable, but he only knows how to communicate that knowledge in a form that is “appropriate only for the school.” The pedant does not lack knowledge or skill; he lacks, as Kant puts it, “a world” – a broader context in which to put his skills and knowledge to use.⁵⁹ “There are minute speculative sciences,” wrote Kant, “that are useless to humans. In the past there were philosophers, whose entire science consisted in exceeding each other in acuity. These were called Scholastici, and their art was science for the university, but no enlightenment for everyday life could be acquired through this. Such a man could be great, but only for the university. And the world did not necessarily have any use for his knowledge.”⁶⁰ Ultimately, the difference between a pedant and a cosmopolitan, for Kant, lay in the ends to which they directed their knowledge and actions. A pedant directs his knowledge “toward things,” whereas the cosmopolitan directs his knowledge toward the broader ends of the human. Scholastic knowledge is a knowledge of things, be they natural objects or systems.⁶¹ Cosmopolitan knowledge is a knowledge of how to put such knowledge to use to achieve the ends of the human – ultimately to realize his own freedom as an autonomous, self-legislating rational being. It was a knowledge of the human not only as an object or observer but as an actor in the world; the subject of anthropology was the “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitan knowledge entailed, for Kant, then, a certain facility in communicating with the world and addressing the interests, theoretically at least, of all humans. Kant’s argument for a “public use of reason” in his 1784 essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” should be understood in terms of a cosmopolitan form of knowledge. “By the public use of reason,” he writes, the scholar “addresses the public.” A scholar has a world to the extent that he

 Kant, 15:1: 376.  Kant, 25:2: 853.  The pedant has an “aptitude in the use of the means of nature” (25:2: 1210).

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

239

participates in the world and does not observe it only as a distinct, separate object. He exercises his full capacities of reason – its potential to consider and set rational ends – when he considers the interests and final ends of all humans in “his writings” through which he “speak[s] to his public, the world.” The world of which Kant writes consists not only, as Jürgen Habermas suggests, of the exchange of reason among a “critically debating reading public” but also of a world in which the knowledge of the university is put to work for the common ends of all people.⁶² According to the Mongrovius lecture notes, Kant tied these distinctions directly to anthropology. Distinguishing between a pragmatic anthropology and a scholastic one,⁶³ Kant made clear that the real difference between a scholastic and a cosmopolitan concerned not their content but their ends, their very purpose. A scholastic anthropology reduced the human to a detached observer of himself and the world: He who ponders natural phenomena, for example, what the causes of the faculty of memory may rest on, can speculate back and forth (like Descartes) over the traces of impressions remaining in the brain, but in doing so he must admit that in this play of his representations he is a mere observer and must let nature run its course, for he does not understand how to put them to use for his purposes.⁶⁴

The constraints of scholastic anthropology are not simply epistemological; they are ethical. Simply observing the mind-body relationship detaches humans from themselves and leaves them with an impoverished account of what it is to be human. Pragmatic anthropology aims to form its readers (and listeners) into effective actors and not passive observers in the “theater” of life, whereas a theoretical anthropology merely poses questions as though an observer could be distinguished from what is observed.⁶⁵ Pragmatic anthropology acknowledges this reduplication and studies and observes the “nature of human beings” so that this investigation might be used “for our ends.”⁶⁶ Kant uses “theater” to figure the relationship between knowledge and action. Pragmatic anthropology is an embodied form of knowledge, one that cannot be detached from situations of use and activity. It is a thoroughly situated

 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 106.  Kant, 25:2: 1211.  Kant, Anthropology, 7: 119. Translation taken from Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller, Anthropology, History and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 231.  Kant, Anthropology, 7: 120.  Kant, 25:2: 1436.

240

Chad Wellmon

form of knowledge; and, thus, it is a knowledge that is performed. Pragmatic anthropology always implies a self acting in the world according to purposes, both settled and dynamic, and ongoing projects. And the “theater” of life is just this world of persons acting within their particular contexts of space and time. When Schleiermacher claimed that Kant’s pragmatic anthropology could not be systematic and popular, he was making a distinction based on the conflicting grounds of a purportedly pure, rational philosophy and an empirical anthropology. And Kant would have agreed with these distinctions. Kant framed the differences between different forms of knowledge, however, not as one of epistemological grounds or sources but as one of distinct interests or ethical ends. Different forms of knowledge have different ends. As Holly Wilson has argued, Kant distinguished between cosmopolitan and scholastic forms of knowledge not according to their grounds (empirical or rational) but according to their interests.⁶⁷ For Kant, they referred to different ways one could relate to different types of knowledge. They “treat” knowledge differently. A pedant, for example, knows his science only in the “technical terms” of the university. “He speaks merely in scholastic expressions and idioms,” whereas a “cosmopolitan” can speak so that “not only professional scholars” but citizens beyond the university can understand him.”⁶⁸ In the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant described the interests of a cosmopolitan concept of knowledge as one that “concerns that which necessarily interests everyone,” whereas a scholastic concept of knowledge concerns only the ends of the science: “I determine the aim of a science in accordance with scholastic concepts if it is regarded only as one of the skills for certain arbitrary ends.”⁶⁹ The interests of particular sciences are articulated in accord with scholastic concepts, whose only end is the “systematic unity” of a particular body of knowledge, the internal coherence of a system. In this sense, the ends of science are, as Kant puts it, “indiscriminately chosen,” because they are determined only in accord with that particular science. The limited ends of a science are meaningful and of interest only to those who are already enmeshed within in, who already know it. A science limits not only the types of questions that might be posed from within it but also the interests and ends that can be pursued. This was part of the intellectual identity of a specialized scholar, of a Wissenschaftler. And yet, Kant insisted that these distinctions were not absolute. A science could be both systematic, and thus scientific, and popular; it could pursue  See Holly Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology: Its Origin, Meaning and Critical Significance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 109 – 122.  Kant, 25:2: 853.  Kant, A839/B867 fn.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

241

both scholastic and cosmopolitan ends. It could address different audiences and pursue different ends in different contexts. And herein lies Kant’s solution to the problem of pragmatic anthropology’s claim to be systematic and popular. Although Kant never directly addresses this question – hence Schleiermacher’s critique – he did offer an implicit response if we think in terms of the distinctions outlined above. An anthropology that is simply pragmatic – that is, one that considers knowledge only in terms of the final ends of the human – would have no content without scholastic anthropology or scholastic knowledge more generally. “Wisdom without science,” wrote Kant in the Logic, is a mere “shadow of perfection.”⁷⁰ This was an important qualification to Kant’s argument about the primacy of a pragmatic anthropology or even a cosmopolitan concept of knowledge, and it helps clarify the relationship between cosmopolitan and scholastic forms of knowledge. Pragmatic anthropology is grounded qua science in the prior scholastic delimitation of a legitimate anthropology. As a popular science, pragmatic anthropology assumed a prior process of systematization. A science that is fit for the university, argued Kant, had to be carried out according to the demands of the university and “profession.” Before it could be disseminated more broadly, it had to attain scholastic “perfection”: “Before science can be brought into order and a regularity of character, it must be carried out solely in academies. This is the only means to bring a science to a certain level.”⁷¹ “All sciences must first be appropriate to the school.” Only then can they “also become popular, in order to be taken up by mere lovers and put to use. First, a science should satisfy those who study it professionally and then we will see how it can best be understood by a broader public.”⁷² Kant conceived of popularity in temporal terms. Both scholastic and popular sciences have as sciences underlying ideas. Before a science could be communicated beyond the university, it had to be fully articulated and systematized in scholastic terms, otherwise it there would be no science and no real knowledge to be disseminated. In order for pragmatic anthropology as science to become popular and be disseminated beyond the university, however, it could not be presented as a system. Its scientific character had to be concealed; otherwise it could not be distributed more broadly and communicated to “the reading public.” As Kant put it, Popularity does not consist in doing away with scholastic standards of perfection; instead, it consists in not letting the outfit [of scholastic philosophy] be seen as the framework (just as one draws a line with a pencil, on which one writes and later erases it). Everything sci-

 Kant, Logic, 9: 26.  Kant, 25:1: 8.  Kant, 25:2: 853.

242

Chad Wellmon

entific must be done according to scholastic standards, but the technical elements must not be seen, rather [the cosmopolitan philosopher] must condescend to the power of comprehension and the common expressions [of the reading public].⁷³

“Popularity,” wrote Kant, “cannot be the beginning point [of a science].”⁷⁴ It must be preceded by a proper scholastic grounding. Any truly “popular” treatment of science entailed an elaborate staging, in which its scholastic, systematic substrate was actively hidden from view. In order for anthropology to be made popular, its scientific structure had to be erased. In the case of Kant’s anthropology, this erasure involved the concealment of its guiding teleological principles – the final ends of the human species that should organize anthropology’s observations. Only through this act of concealment could anthropology be “systematically constructed and yet popular.”⁷⁵ Such an act of concealing technical elements of a particular science for a popular audience was the inverse of “disciplining” a science for an increasingly specialized and limited audience. The former entailed a movement beyond the community of scholars, the university, and the latter a movement toward the university and its own internal differentiation into distinct sciences. This process of concealment was the consummate performative act of Kant’s pragmatic anthropology. It was a necessary act that concerned not the propositional content or truth of anthropology, but rather its performative potential, its capacity to address a particular audience at a particular time and for particular reasons. Without such a performance, anthropology would have been mere theory, that is, knowledge unmoored from the specific “theaters” of human action. By erasing its own theoretical and conceptual underpinnings, pragmatic anthropology, or rather Kant as its proponent, attempts to create the conditions under which its insights, observations, and purported wisdom can be taken up and lived out.

7 Conclusion Kant’s efforts to sketch a pragmatic anthropology that was both systematic and popular was not just about the future of anthropology. It was also about the future of knowledge more generally. The “great growth and expansion” of knowledge, as Kant put it, had led to their fragmentation and lack of coherence. Kant

 My  

Kant, 16:3: 862. On this passage, see Holy Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 113 – 115. argument follows hers. For similar passages in Kant, see also Kant, 25:2: 853. Kant, letter to Christian Garve, August 1783, 10: 338. Kant, 7: 119.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

243

lamented the fact that the sciences were increasingly taught at universities separately and without any concern for their basic unity.⁷⁶ Such fragmentation created a feedback loop. As sciences expanded, they were organized and managed through ever-finer distinction through specialization. Kant’s own anthropology exemplified this pattern as it layered distinction upon distinction. In light of this expansion and fragmentation, Kant proposed not another technological solution – a new taxonomy or encyclopedia – but an ethical one. The claim of his pragmatic anthropology concerned the end of knowledge: “Every science refers to the human being and when one takes together all of our purposes, they boil down to the human.”⁷⁷ For Kant, pragmatic anthropology would manage the fragmentation of knowledge by asking about the final ends of knowledge – that is, by referring all knowledge to the final ethical ends of the human. The ambiguous place of pragmatic anthropology within Kant’s broader philosophical system lent it what some scholars have called a bridging or transitional character within Kant’s broader system. As we have seen, however, it bridged not only perceived gaps in Kant’s own system but also various sciences and different forms of knowledge.⁷⁸ Kant imagined a form of disciplined anthropological inquiry that crossed over between the school and the world by referring all knowledge back to the human. In this sense, pragmatic anthropology, even though Kant presented it systematically, entailed an implicit critique of modern science and its relation to system. Although sciences may humanize us by, as Kant put it, disciplining our animal natures,⁷⁹ they also isolated their practitioners from the broader world.⁸⁰ According to their scholastic concept, sciences advanced knowledge by filtering excess information and knowledge, by limiting scholars’ points of view and circumscribing their interests. They were technologies for dealing with experiences of excess and fragmentation. And yet the more adept, or disciplined, individual scholars became

 Kant, 25:1: 243.  Kant, 25:2: 1210.  Brandt and Stark use these terms but in the context of pragmatic anthropology’s relation to the so-called critical system. Brandt and Stark call Kant’s pragmatic anthropology a “bridging discipline” that connects different spheres of inquiry (Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark, “Einleitung,” in Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 25: Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, 2 vols, ed. Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–], xix). In this sense, it can and should “peacefully” supplement metaphysics and critical philosophy, but it will not carry out Kant’s socalled “Copernican Revolution” (xiii).  As Kant argues in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, “sciences” prepare the human being for a “dominion” in which only reason rules and allows it to “feel a suitability for higher purposes” (5: 433).  See Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 116 – 122.

244

Chad Wellmon

within a particular science, the more they risked seeing the world, as Kant put it, like a Cyclops, through the single eye of a particular science. As sciences expanded and specialized, they became increasingly self-referential and inaccessible to nonspecialists “outside the school.” Although Kant embraced the rigor and coherence he thought systematic sciences offered, he also warned that they produced fragmentation and specialization. In the face of this, Kant insisted that science “is not our destiny.”⁸¹ The final end of knowledge was not the systematic integrity of a science but the ethical integrity of the human. Kant’s hope was that pragmatic anthropology could attenuate the dangers of scholastic, disciplined sciences not by transcending them, but by presenting their more local interests in terms of the final ends of all humans – the realization of our capacity for self-legislation, or freedom. A systematically constructed yet popular pragmatic anthropology would frame the limited interests of a particular science in the broader terms of our common “destiny” to cultivate, civilize, and moralize themselves “by means of arts and sciences.”⁸² Kant’s anthropology was a critique of modern disciplinarity before it had even emerged.

Works Cited Beiser, Friederick. Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Brandt, Reinhard and Werner Stark. “Einleitung.” In Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 25: Vorlesungen über Anthropologie. Edited by Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark, vii-cli. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Brandt, Reinhard. “Ausgewählte Probleme der Kantischen Anthropologie.” In Der ganze Mensch, edited by Hans-Jürgen Schings, 14 – 32. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994. Brandt, Reinhard. “The Guiding Idea of Kant’s Anthropology and the Vocation of the Human Being.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, edited by Brian Jacobs and Patrick Klein, 85 – 104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cassirer, Ernst. Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. Tübingen: Mohr, 1932. Garve, Christian. “Über die Popularität des Vortrages.” In Gesammelte Werke: Vermischte Aufsätze. Edited by Kurt Wölfel, vol. 2, 331 – 358. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Herz, Marcus. “Rez. Von Platners Anthropologie von Aerzte und Weltweise.” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 20, no. 1 (1773): 25 – 51.

 Kant, 29: 8.  Kant, Anthropology, 7: 324.

Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity

245

Ith, Johann. Versuch einer Anthropologie oder Philosophie des Menschen nach seinen körperlichen Anlagen. Bern: Emanuel Haller, 1794. Jacobs, Brian, and Patrick Klein. Introduction to Essays on Kant’s Anthropology. Edited by Brian Jacobs and Patrick Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich. Grundriß einer Erfahrungs-Seelenlehre. Halle: Hemmerde & Schwetschke, 1795. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology, History and Education. Translated by Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by the Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols. to date. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Kondylis, Panajotis. Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. Linden, Mareta. Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts. Bern: Peter Lang, 1976. Meld Schell, Susan. “Kant’s Concept of the Human Race.” In The German Invention of Race, edited by Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore, 55 – 72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Mellin, G.S.A. Encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der kritischen Philosophie. Züllichan and Leipzig: Frommann, 1797. Petrus, Klaus. “Beschrieene Dunkelheit und Seichtigkeit: Historisch-systematische Voraussetzungen zwischen Kant und Garve im Umfeld der Göttinger Rezension.” Kant-Studien 85, no. 3 (1994): 280 – 302. Platner, Ernst. Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise. Leipzig: Dyck, 1772. Pölitz, Karl H. L. Populäre Anthropologie, oder Kunde von dem Menschen nach seinen sinnlichen und geistigen Anlagen. Leipzig: Kramer, 1800. Proß, Wolfgang. Afterword to Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufklärung, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, edited by Wolfgang Proß, vol. 2, 1128 – 1216. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Hans-Joachim Birkner et al. 11 vols. to date. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979 –. Schmid, Christian. “Einleitung.” In Anleitungen zur Menschenkenntniß, Cureau de la Chambre, translated by Carl Christian Schmid. Jena: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1794. Valenza, Robin. Literature, Language, and the Rise of Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680 – 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wagner, Michael, ed. Beyträge zur philosophischen Anthropologie. Wien: Joseph Stahel, 1794. Wilson, Holly. Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology: Its Origin, Meaning and Critical Significance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Michael Bies

Staging the Knowledge of Plants: Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants” By 1800, it had long become customary to incorporate botanical knowledge into lyric poetry as well as to make programmatic allusions to botany in theoretical texts on poetics.¹ Jean Paul clearly does the latter in his 1804 treatise School for Aesthetics, lamenting that: “All Parnassus is full of poems which are only bright prose spread out upon verse as if on Leyden jars, or poetic petals which like botanic petals come into being only through the contraction of the stem leaves.”² Here, Jean Paul may simply be criticizing the tradition of poetry that does little more than render scholarly, scientific, or philosophical prose into verse; indeed, his discussion of “The Scale of Poetic Faculties” (where this statement is located) ranks this tradition between “imagination” and “passive genius,” namely as products of mere “talent.” Yet, it would also seem that Jean Paul takes aim at a distinct poetic example, specifically Goethe’s recently published elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and its aspirations to classical, Parnassian heights. This assumption is not so far-fetched, as “The Metamorphosis of Plants” poem, which was first published in Schiller’s Muses’ Almanac in 1798, does in fact refer back to a prose text, Goethe’s seminal 1790 essay An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants. Indeed, the elegy engages with and unfolds anew this treatise’s central claims that all plant organs can be understood as formations of a single organ – to wit, the leaf – and that the transformations of the leaf during the plant’s growth must be described both as a reciprocal process of “extension” and “contraction” and as a gradual “intensification.” Jean Paul seems to allude to this reciprocal process when describing the genesis of “poetic petals” by comparing the composition of verses with the “contraction of the stem leaves,” the process by which the sepals of the flower emerge according to Goethe’s theory. Jean Paul’s reference to “The Metamorphosis of Plants” would be provocative merely on the basis of its implication that Goethe is at times a mere “talent” rather than a “genius,” as was commonly held at the time (Jean Paul does in fact

 See, for instance, Günter Peters, Die Kunst der Natur: Ästhetische Reflexion in Blumengedichten von Brockes, Goethe und Gautier (Munich: Fink, 1993).  Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics, trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 31 (translation modified).

248

Michael Bies

come around to the latter position a few pages down).³ His observation is more revealing, however, for the way that it addresses the interrelationship of poetry and knowledge production more generally. On the one hand, Jean Paul suggests that poetry may well intensify the effects of knowledge with the metaphor of preserving poetic “verses” in “Leyden jars,” apparatuses used to intensify and store electrical charge.⁴ On the other hand, Jean Paul also would seem to use the double meaning of “Blatt” as “leaf” and “page” to call into question the aesthetic autonomy of certain kinds of poetry. By comparing “poetic petals” to “botanic petals” and by suggesting that certain poetic forms arise through improper “contraction” with prose genres (in analogy with Goethe’s theory of the “contraction” between stem leaves and sepals), Jean Paul suggests that this kind of poetry does little more than present prosaic knowledge in a condensed, but not qualitatively different way, thus limiting the aesthetic autonomy of the poetic form in question. Again, it seems plausible that Jean Paul implies as much on the basis of his readers’ familiarity with Goethe’s botanical theory. The relationship between lyric poetry and prosaic scientific knowledge that is staked out in this Jean Paul quote forms a central concern of this essay. Expanding on previous scholarship by Karl Richter, Ulrich Kinzel, and Gideon Stiening,⁵ my aim is to show that, in “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” Goethe may indeed have intended to pursue “the thought of further disseminating the idea of the metamorphosis of plants through poetic presentation” as he wrote in a 1798 letter.⁶ However, the knowledge Goethe wanted to “further disseminate” did not remain unaffected by his wish to popularize it through verse. Along with presenting a form of popular knowledge of plants that is constitutively  See Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon, 34.  On the relation of literature and electricity, see most recently Michael Gamper, Elektropoetologie: Fiktionen der Elektrizität 1740 – 1870 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009).  See Karl Richter, “Wissenschaft und Poesie ‘auf höherer Stelle’ vereint: Goethes Elegie Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” in Gedichte und Interpretationen: Klassik und Romantik, ed. Wulf Segebrecht, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 156 – 168; Ulrich Kinzel, “Von der Naturbeschreibung zur ‘literarischen Biologie:’ Transformationen im literarischen Diskurs an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 20, no. 2 (1995): 75 – 115, especially 87– 102; Gideon Stiening, “‘Und das Ganze belebt, so wie das Einzelne, sei’: Zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Literatur am Beispiel von Goethes Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” in Literatur und Wissen: Theoretisch-methodische Zugänge, ed. Tilmann Köppe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 192– 213. Here I also continue considerations explored in my recent monograph, Im Grunde ein Bild. Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe und Alexander von Humboldt (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012), 182– 193.  Letter to Carl Christian Adolph Neuenhahn on 14 September 1798. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Briefe: Hamburger Ausgabe in sechs Bänden, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow, vol. 2 (Munich: Beck, 1988), 359. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

249

tied to the aesthetic and rhetorical possibilities of poetic representation, Goethe’s elegy also discusses the conditions according to which this knowledge can be presented in discursive form. After a brief overview of “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and the way that it presents or stages knowledge, I want to consider the elegy’s place in the development of popular forms of knowledge about plants on the rise since 1770 – a development which specifically took place in literary genres aiming at non-professional, female, and mixed-gender audiences. I will then turn to poetological discussions of the concept of representation or Darstellung which were likewise in ascendancy beginning in 1770. In his elegy, Goethe takes up these discussions by presenting and visualizing an understanding of plant metamorphosis, instead of simply explaining it in abstract scientific terms. I would like to suggest that this poetics of Darstellung is closely related to a pedagogy of Darstellung as part of the classical project of “aesthetic education.” Following this pedagogy, “The Metamorphosis of Plants” investigates how knowledge can be transmitted through poetic imagination and shows that this transmission is embedded in a network of social relations and thus has consequences not only for the person gaining the knowledge but also for the interpersonal constellation that arises through this transmission.

1 The Anschauung of plant metamorphosis Before Goethe’s poem goes into the specific theoretical achievements of An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, “The Metamorphosis of Plants” distinguishes Goethe’s own botanical discoveries from those of classical botany. In the process, the poem thematizes the problem of transmitting this new form of knowledge of plants. The elegy opens with the scene of a male lyric “I” and his lover together in a garden. The female lover is “confounded” by the “rich profusion” of the plants, and she is unable to alleviate her sensual confusion with standard eighteenth-century botanical methods established by Carl Linnaeus – that is, by calling the plants by their proper names and thus situating them within a systematic, scientific order. The lyric “I” therefore comments: “Name upon name assails thy ears, and each / More barbarous-sounding than the one before.”⁷

 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” The Metamorphosis of Plants, ed. Gordon L. Miller (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 1– 3, here 1; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” in Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Gedichte 1756 – 1799, ed. Karl Eibl, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 639 –

250

Michael Bies

In order to dispel this optical and acoustic confusion of the plants and their labels, the lyric “I” then introduces his lover to a new method of giving order to nature. Reacting to the sensory overload of his lover, the “I” does not direct her view to the large variety of vegetation and teach her a terminology capable of representing and ordering it, but instead introduces her to the doctrine of plant metamorphosis, which seeks to describe what the plants have in common despite their large formal and structural variety.⁸ However, because this “secret law” (Goethe 2009, MP 6) cannot be conveyed terminologically, through a formulaic word or “simple answer” (MP 8), the lyric “I” helps the lover to conceive an intuitive idea of a complete plant metamorphosis, from the emergence from the seed to the creation of new seeds. This new approach to the order of nature and to the representation of knowledge staged in the middle part of the elegy proves to be successful. In the final part of the poem, the lover is not only able to discern the order hidden amidst the chaos of “flowers, spread athwart the garden” (MP 2). In addition, she also successfully grasps the doctrine of plant metamorphosis as a doctrine of love that connects all living creatures and thus also the lover and the lyrical “I.” We read in the final part of the elegy: Turn now thine eyes again, love, to the teeming Profusion. See its bafflement dispelled. Each plant thee heralds now the iron laws. In rising voices hear the flowers declaim. […] Rejoice the light of day! Love, sanctified, Strives for the highest fruit – to look at life In the same light, that lovers may together In harmony seek out the higher world!

(MP 63 – 66, 77– 80)

The opening and closing of the elegy thus distinguishes the doctrine of plant metamorphosis from classical botany, stages the problem of transmitting this doctrine, and expands this doctrine into a general doctrine of love. It is the main task of the middle part of the poem, however, to go through the theoretical achievements of An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, and it stands out that this middle section (the largest of the elegy) stays rather close to the in-

641, here 639, v. 1– 4. In the following, quotations from this poem are cited with the abbreviation MP and the number of the respective line.  Kinzel in particular stresses that Goethe precisely grasps the epistemic upheaval that Foucault described as characteristic of the eighteenth century. Kinzel, “Von der Naturbeschreibung zur ‘literarischen Biologie,’” 87– 102.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

251

dividual sections of Goethe’s theoretical essay.⁹ The poem deviates from the essay, however, by dispensing with its more explanatory sections, instead situating the essay’s conclusions as part of a more philosophical “universal theory of nature,” as Gideon Stiening has recently shown.¹⁰ Yet, this middle part of “The Metamorphosis of Plants” is interesting not only because of the knowledge discussed there, but also, as I hinted at above, because of how this knowledge is performed, an issue that previous scholarship on the poem has not sufficiently addressed. Even though literary critics have rightly pointed out that the idea of plant metamorphosis is conveyed to the lover through Anschauung, i. e., through the intuition or visualization of the object – a process that directly corresponds to Goethe’s later notions of “intuitive judgment” and “objective thinking”¹¹ – literary criticism has not adequately defined the status and function of this intuitive access to knowledge. To be sure, the elegy initially creates the impression that the lyric “I” introduces the lover to plant metamorphosis by directing her gaze to a single plant in the garden and explaining the details of its growth. This would seem to be the case when the lyric “I” uses phrases like “Gaze on them as they grow” (MP 9) and “‘tis plain / To see” (MP 25 – 26), or when the “I” documents the responses of the lover, as in this case of her reaction to the sepal: “Oft the beholder marvels at the wealth / Of shape and structure shown in succulent surface” (MP 30 – 31). Still, it can be shown that such a reading (pursued by Heide Crawford,¹² for example) will eventually fall short. In contrast with these earlier readings, I want to contend that the middle part of the elegy is not about the observation of a concrete plant, but rather about the

 For a slightly different allocation of the lines of the elegy to the sections of the metamorphosis essay, see Günther Müller, “Goethes Elegie ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen:’ Versuch einer morphologischen Interpretation,”Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 21 (1943): 67– 98, especially 88 – 91; and the commentary in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Schriften zur Morphologie, ed. Dorothea Kuhn, vol. 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 1061.  Stiening, “‘Und das Ganze belebt, so wie das Einzelne, sei,’” 211.  See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Anschauende Urteilskraft,” in Schriften zur Morphologie, 447– 448; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort,” in Schriften zur Morphologie, 595 – 599. On this relation of knowledge and Anschauung in “The Metamorphosis of Plants” see for example Stiening, “‘Und das Ganze belebt, so wie das Einzelne, sei,’” 193.  See Heide Crawford, “Poetically Visualizing Urgestalten: The Union of Nature, Art, and the Love of a Woman in Goethe’s ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,’” in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, ed. Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 279 – 288, here 286.

252

Michael Bies

lyric “I” conveying the idea of a symbolic plant that contains within it all of the formal possibilities realized by the entirety of all plants. This idea is distinguished by the fact that it must be created by rhetorical and poetic means and that it cannot be visualized by the “outer eye,” but rather only by the “inner eye,” that is to say by the productive power of the imagination. This becomes apparent as early as the beginning of the first part of “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” when the lyric “I” announces to the lover the vision of the successive growth of a plant over an entire year: “Gaze on them as they grow, see how the plant / Burgeons by stages into flower and fruit” (MP 9 – 10). This presentation of an intuition or vision to the “inner eye” of the imagination (a rhetorical device commonly referred to as hypotyposis, designating “a representation of things so fully expressed in words that it seems to be seen rather than heard”¹³) becomes even more evident at the beginning of the final part of the elegy, where the lyric “I” turns the (inner) gaze of the lover away from the gradual “growing” or “becoming” of the symbolic plant and leads it back to the concrete observation of the plants present in the garden: “Turn now thine eyes again, love, to the teeming / Profusion. See its bafflement dispelled” (MP 63 – 64). At this point, the ways in which Goethe’s poem stages knowledge of plant metamorphosis have hopefully come into a bit clearer focus. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of this poem might be characterized as an “epistemopractical” approach (a term that Rainer Godel has used to describe the anthropological and communicative conditions of the production and presentation of knowledge),¹⁴ such that the transfer of knowledge is at the narrative core of the poem and as such is embedded in an interpersonal constellation that leads to the recognition of mutual love. Here Goethe takes recourse to a stylistic device already deployed in An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, where the frequent use of the personal pronoun “we”¹⁵ served to establish a bond between the subject of the text and its readers. However, Goethe’s elegy now uses this interpersonal constellation to address the “prerequisites and consequences”¹⁶ of the transfer of knowledge within the world of the poetic imagination. The fiction-

 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory: or, Education of an Orator, trans. John Selby Watson, vol. 2 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), 164 (IX, 2, 40).  See Rainer Godel, “Literatur und Nicht-Wissen im Umbruch, 1730 – 1810,” in Literatur und Nicht-Wissen: Historische Konstellationen 1730 – 1930, ed. Michael Bies and Michael Gamper (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), 39 – 57.  On An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants see my remarks in Bies, Im Grunde ein Bild, 162– 182, and in Bies, “Der Goethe des Grashalms: Zur ‘Darstellung’ der Naturforschung um 1800,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 131, no. 4 (2012), 513 – 535.  Stiening, “‘Und das Ganze belebt, so wie das Einzelne, sei,’” 195.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

253

al interpersonal interaction staged by the poem also allows Goethe to appeal to hypothetical female readers: the poem’s linkage of knowledge production and love, its generic status as elegy, and its first publication in Schiller’s popular periodical, the Muses’ Almanac, all supported this goal of addressing a broader, female and mixed-gender readership.¹⁷ On the other hand, it is characteristic of “The Metamorphosis of Plants” that it engages the imagination as a productive rather than a reproductive faculty.¹⁸ In this way, Goethe aims to make a certain form of knowledge visible (both to the lover figure and to the readers of the elegy) that could never be obtained by the observation of a single plant alone. To be sure, Goethe had already tried to persuade readers of An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants by placing the progress of plant development before their “inner eye.” However, this earlier essay did not yet stage the way in which knowledge generated through the imagination would in turn affect the perception of reality, how it would render visible the “iron laws” (MP 65) of living nature in a garden that at first only confused the senses.

2 Popularizing the knowledge of plants Goethe’s work on the metamorphosis of plants dovetailed both in form and content with several key developments of the late eighteenth century. From the perspective of the history of science, perhaps the central event in the expansion of knowledge about plants at this time was the establishment of botany as a scientific discipline. Botany had long been considered the most useful and (as the numerous botanical gardens bear witness to) the most prestigious discipline of natural history,¹⁹ but it would increasingly take center stage as a science that could

 On the Muses’ Almanac and related publication forms, see most recently Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books. The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 121– 152.  The difference between reproductive and productive imagination played a key role in the development of aesthetics as an independent discipline; see especially the influential discussion of Immanuel Kant, “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” in Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 2 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 148 – 149 (B 151– 152).  On the emphasis of the “usefulness” of botany, see also Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, “Premier discours: De la manière d’étudier & de traiter l’Histoire Naturelle,” Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière: avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749), 1– 62, here 13; Franz von Paula Schrank, Allgemeine Anleitung, die Naturgeschichte zu studiren (Munich: Johann Baptist Strobl, 1783), 11. Generally, however, it can be observed that the “usefulness” of botany was more and more neglected over the course of the differentiation of this discipline and that by 1800 it was mainly expected from “amateurs.” Carl Ludwig Willde-

254

Michael Bies

organize and manage far larger and more complex bodies of knowledge than, for example, mineralogy or zoology. This “epistemological precedence enjoyed by botany,”²⁰ as Michel Foucault has described it, was manifested in heated debates about Linnaeus’s systematic botany and in the proliferation of alternative, allegedly “natural” methods of plant classification.²¹ Additionally, the development of botany as a scientific discipline corresponded to a differentiation of various forms of knowledge, an ever more prominent trend at the end of the eighteenth century. This process of differentiation found partial expression in the epistemological distinction between scientific knowledge and a popular, “applied” knowledge deemed non-scientific. This scientific and popular divide could be found in a variety of social, medial, and gender-specific contexts, for example in the rise of works on plants aimed at different segments of the population. Whereas works aimed at experts presented botanical information via strictly organized definitions and descriptions, works aimed at amateurs, dilettantes, women, and children often employed more accessible textual forms that imitated popular literary genres, such as the epistolary novel or didactic poem, and also contained multiple images, something that Linnaeus and others rejected.²² Although natural historians like Linnaeus had initially attempted to exclude forms of popular knowledge from scientific botany, these more popular forms increasingly came to be decoupled from the epistemological frameworks and institutional contexts of scientific botany, especially in the 1770s and onward. This dynamic experienced a crucial impetus from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Elementary Letters on Botany [Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique], which he addressed

now, “Preface to Johann Heinrich Sack’s Deutschlands wilde Gewächse,” Botanische Zeitung 3, no. 13 (1804): 193 – 198, here 196. On the history of botany, see in particular Alan G. Morton, History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day (London: Academic Press, 1981).  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002), 149.  On two different examples of these “natural methods” see Michael Bies, “Naturwissen, natürlich: Die ‘Méthode naturelle’ bei Buffon und Adanson,” in Methoden der Aufklärung: Ordnungen der Wissensvermittlung und Erkenntnisgenerierung im langen 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Silke Förschler and Nina Hahne (Munich: Fink, 2013), 209 – 221.  Linnaeus rejected the use of pictures in botany in § 13 in the preface to his Genera plantarum (1737) as non-scientific: “I do not recommend drawings for determining genera – in fact, I absolutely reject them, although I confess that […] they convey something to the unlearned.” Staffan Müller-Wille and Karen Reeds, “A translation of Carl Linnaeus’s introduction to Genera plantarum (1737),” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 563 – 572, here 568.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

255

to Madeleine-Catherine Delessert beginning in 1771, and which were available in a German edition entitled Botanik für Frauenzimmer in Briefen an die Frau von L** in 1781 and in Thomas Martyn’s famous edition of the Letters on the Elements of Botany: Addressed to a Lady in 1785.²³ Rousseau’s Elementary Letters stand out above all for the way they engage with Linnaean botany without, however, presenting botany as a form of knowledge based only on abstract designations, descriptions, and “labor of the memory,” but instead solely on “observations and facts truly worthy of a naturalist.”²⁴ Furthermore, these letters stage the occupation with plants not merely as an exploration of “outer” nature, but also as a condition of possibility for accessing the “inner” nature of the self, that is to say as an occupation, as Jörg Dünne explains it, that establishes “a distance to oneself” and serves as a “ethopoetical practice of the self.”²⁵ Rousseau’s epistemopractical, “individualistic” approach is also enhanced by the way that the Elementary Letters render the knowledge of botany in the popular literary form of the sentimental letter, which lends itself to the staging of immediacy and the creation of intimate, erotically charged moments. We might say, with Pierre Bourdieu, that the Elementary Letters employ botanical knowledge as a form of cultural capital that the addressee has, in turn, to pay back with social capital in the form of attention, friendship, or love. These features of the Elementary Letters are particularly apparent when, in the third letter, Rousseau warns Madeleine-Catherine Delessert against taking up botanical textbooks and “pursuing common nomenclature, with abundance of names” – this would only make her “confused” and at best help her gain “a mere knowledge of words” – before concluding: “I am jealous, dear cousin, of being your only guide in this part of Botany.”²⁶ Goethe himself bears witness to the speed with which Rousseau’s popularization of botanical knowledge became established as a positive model. After the Elementary Letters were published in German translation in 1781, he wrote to Duke Karl August on 17 June 1782: “In Rousseau’s works you find the most  For an introduction to the publication and reception history of the Elementary Letters, see Alexandra Cook, “Propagating Botany: The Case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” in The Transmission of Culture in Western Europe, 1750 – 1850: Papers Celebrating the Bicentenary of the Foundation of the ‘Bibliothèque britannique’ (1796 – 1814) in Geneva, ed. David Bickerton and Judith Proud (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), 69 – 94.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letters on the Elements of Botany: Addressed to a Lady, trans. Thomas Martyn, sixth edition (London: J. White, 1802), 26.  Jörg Dünne, Asketisches Schreiben: Rousseau und Flaubert als Paradigmen literarischer Selbstpraxis in der Moderne (Tübingen: Narr, 2003), 199. Here Dünne refers to the discussion of botany in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker.  Rousseau, Letters on the Elements of Botany, 33 – 34.

256

Michael Bies

charming letters about botany, where he presents this science to a lady in the most easily understandable and delicate way. They are a model of how one should teach.”²⁷ Indeed, the effectiveness of this “model” was confirmed by the subsequent appearance of a large number of writings by male and female authors that took their cue from Rousseau and presented botanical knowledge for women. Along with Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany; in a Series of Familiar Letters, first published in 1796,²⁸ these works include lesser-known publications such as Botany for Women and Botanical Amateurs Who Are Not Scholars published in 1795 in Weimar by the botanist and friend of Goethe, August Johann Georg Carl Batsch.²⁹ However, this Botany for Women and Botanical Amateurs is also a good example of the rather vague and imprecise way that many authors availed themselves of the “model” of the Elementary Letters. For even though Batsch reminds his readers that “the unforgettable citizen of Geneva” was the first to show how botany could be taught to the “friendly and helpful sex” with the necessary “grace and regard,”³⁰ his text took on a rather conventional prose form, with no traces of the interpersonal, epistolary frame. In this way, Batsch hardly takes up Rousseau’s pedagogical program of encouraging (albeit with the firm guidance of the author) the pupil’s own observation and selfobservation. Instead he takes recourse to a physico-theological concept of nature typical of the eighteenth century (and propagated by Linneaus), which viewed natural phenomena as legible text,³¹ describing the different parts of the plant as “letters with which the history of plants is written or every plant is rendered in written form.”³² This conventional method is also evident in the form of the

 Goethe, Briefe, 1: 398. On Goethe’s interest in Rousseau as botanist (which he also explains by stating that “the dilettante likes to learn from the dilettante”), see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Der Verfasser teilt die Geschichte seiner botanischen Studien mit,” in Schriften zur Morphologie, 732– 752, here 743.  See Sam George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760 – 1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), especially 43 – 80.  On Goethe and Batsch, see the comprehensive work of Igor J. Polianski, Die Kunst, die Natur vorzustellen: Die Ästhetisierung der Pflanzenkunde um 1800 (Köln: König, 2004).  August Johann Georg Carl Batsch, Botanik für Frauenzimmer und Pflanzenliebhaber welche keine Gelehrten sind (Weimar: Industrie Comptoir, 1795), 176.  Linnaeus named and described the various plant organs in this way as early as in § 11 of the Genera plantarum “letters of plants”: “These were inscribed by the Creator. It will be our duty to read them.” Müller-Wille and Reeds, “A translation of Carl Linnaeus’s introduction to Genera plantarum (1737),” 568. On the attempt to found botany as a “science de la parole” and as a “dictionnaire” which was based on this “appréciation floro-alphabétique,” see François Dagognet, Le catalogue de la vie. Étude méthodologique sur la taxonomie (Paris: puf, 2004), 55 – 62, here 55 and 61.  Batsch, Botanik für Frauenzimmer und Pflanzenliebhaber, 137.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

257

Botany for Women and Botanical Amateurs, which was organized in paragraphs in a way common for botanical textbooks. In contrast, Goethe knew how to employ Rousseau’s “model of how one should teach” in a much more specific manner. As we have seen, “The Metamorphosis of Plants” presents a discursive scenario closely related to that of the Elementary Letters, with the lyric “I” teaching his lover about plant metamorphosis by helping her envision a symbolic plant. Just as in Rousseau’s text, the female pupil remains mute and achieves physical presence only through reactions that the “teacher” perceives and describes. Furthermore, it seems clear that Goethe lets the female figure “repay” her instructor by acting out the same discursive economy that characterizes the Elementary Letters, namely the conversion of the cultural capital of botanical knowledge into the social capital of friendship and love; indeed, this occurs in “The Metamorphosis of Plants” in a more pronounced and deliberate way, with the poem’s culminating doctrine of the universality and naturalness of love. This discursive economy must be distinguished from the anthropomorphic imagery used to represent plant “sexuality” and “love” ubiquitous throughout the eighteenth century (particularly in the works of Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin), though this imagery is also at work in “The Metamorphosis of Plants.”³³ To be sure, this imagery was also present in the textual and publishing contexts in which Goethe embedded his elegy in its initial and subsequent publications. After first being published in Schiller’s Muses’ Almanac, Goethe published it again in 1800 as part of his New Writings. As in all subsequent complete editions (including the Final Authorized Edition [Ausgabe letzter Hand]), Goethe situated “The Metamorphosis of Plants” amongst other elegies such as “The New Pausias and His Flower Girl” and “Euphrosyne,” among others.³⁴ However, because Goethe was not happy with initial reactions to the poem, in 1817 he included the elegy in the first issue On Morphology, which was mainly dedicated to the reworking of his plant studies with a strong autobiographical component. He now presented “The Metamorphosis of Plants” as part of the essay History of the Printed Brochure, in which he discussed several reactions and responses to the 1790 metamorphosis essay, hoping that the elegy “might be more easily understand-

 See especially the fundamental article by Londa Schiebinger, “The Private Life of Plants: Sexual Politics in Carl Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin,” in Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Inquiry 1780 – 1945, ed. Marina Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 121– 143.  See Peters, Die Kunst der Natur, 177– 190. It should be added that “The Metamorphosis of Plants” was published in the Ausgabe letzter Hand twice: as part of the elegies and with other poems on natural philosophy in the rubric “God and World.”

258

Michael Bies

able in the context of a scientific treatise [wissenschaftliche Darstellung] rather than amidst a series of tender and impassioned poems.”³⁵ In the History of the Printed Brochure, Goethe sought to improve the poem’s understandability mainly through recourse to autobiographical explanations. It is striking, furthermore, that he takes up the discursive economy described above, now completely spelling out the mutual interrelation of knowledge and love. After declaring how an interest in plants – and in his theory of plant metamorphosis in particular – is actually the prerequisite for requited love, Goethe then goes on to give concrete proof of how botanical knowledge might be transformed into an intensified form of mutual love. Superimposing his earlier mineralogical studies onto his former friendship to Charlotte von Stein in the 1780s and his botanical studies onto love affairs, he comments on his relationship to his later love interest. Relating how his “female friends […] would have loved to pull me away from the lonely mountains, from the contemplation of stark rocks,” and were “not at all content” with his “abstract gardening” (i. e., with his study of plant metamorphosis), Goethe describes his attempts to “lure” these “female friends” “into participation with an elegy.”³⁶ We need not dwell on the fact that Goethe succeeded at least with the amorous part of this strategem. Replacing the plural “female friends” with a singular person, the “one I actually loved,” he remarks later in the essay that “the poem was highly welcome to the one I actually loved, who was justified in applying the lovely images to herself; and I too felt very happy, as the living metaphor intensified and completed our beautiful and perfect affection for each other.”³⁷ This quote is quite revealing. For unlike the elegy, which presented the doctrine of plant metamorphosis as a doctrine of love, but also staged the way in which knowledge generated through the imagination would in turn affect the perception of reality, the essay on the History of the Printed Brochure focuses almost exclusively on the interrelation of knowledge and love. By doing so, however, the essay also tends to ignore the specific knowledge that “The Metamorphosis of Plants” stages. In other words, instead of treating the elegy as a performance of knowledge and as a scene of “aesthetic education,” the History of the Printed Brochure simply explains it as a performance of gallantry.

 Goethe, “Schicksal der Druckschrift,” in Schriften zur Morphologie, 418 – 425, here 420.  Goethe, “Schicksal der Druckschrift,” 420.  Goethe, “Schicksal der Druckschrift,” 423.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

259

3 A pedagogy of Darstellung In this essay I want to do more than simply describe “The Metamorphosis of Plants” from an epistemological perspective and give an account of it as yet another example of late eighteenth-century attempts to popularize botany for nonprofessional, female, and mixed-gender audiences. From a poetological perspective, the elegy can also be understood as an attempt to give scientific knowledge an enduring and classical aesthetic form. However, this form-giving effort stands in constant interdependency with the knowledge to be presented and must, for this reason, remain precarious from an epistemological perspective. After all, this poem is nothing less than the attempt to give scientific knowledge permanence through poetic treatment without limiting the validity of said knowledge, a validity that in modernity can only be claimed with the caveat of its provisional nature, i. e., by keeping in mind the possibility that all scientific knowledge may be superseded by newer and more convincing knowledge and thus be relegated to the cultural archive of non-knowledge. Moreover, Goethe’s poem is also potentially problematic from an aesthetic perspective, as a poem should not, in principle, restrict the validity of poetry understood as an autonomous realm and endanger this autonomy through the wrong kind of interaction with scientific knowledge. Schiller’s comprehensive treatise On Naive and Sentimental Poetry had already pointed out this problem, stating that “didactic poetry” only operates “without internal contradiction” if it treats the knowledge it deals with in a genuinely poetic way, namely by concretizing it and raising it “to an object of intellectual intuition.”³⁸ Yet Schiller adds that he himself had not yet come across any such poem: “The didactic poem has yet to be written where the thought itself is poetic and remains thus.”³⁹ It is thus useful to consider “The Metamorphosis of Plants” as the result of the attempt to realize such a poem “yet to be written,” a poem that unites scientific knowledge and poetic rendition via recourse to the poetic models of antiquity. Along with the poem’s elegiac genre and its versification (distiches consisting of hexameter and pentameter) certain key poetological reflections in Goethe’s diaries and letters also suggest that such an approach to the poem is apt. On 18 June 1798, for instance, he notes that he had contemplated with Schil-

 Friedrich Schiller, “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Peter-André Alt, Albert Meier, and Wolfgang Riedel, vol. 5 (Munich: Hanser, 2004), 694– 780, here 732.  Schiller, “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,” 732.

260

Michael Bies

ler “the possibility of presenting a natural science through a poet.”⁴⁰ Goethe discussed this “possibility” even more intensively with Karl Ludwig Knebel, who had been working on a translation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. Upon sending Knebel the recently finished poem in June 1798, he characterizes it as an “attempt to present the intuition of nature [das Anschauen der Natur], if not poetically, then at least rhythmically,” adding: “Who can take more interest in this than you, by comparing it to the manner of Lucretius.”⁴¹ In a later letter, Goethe then explains his striving for a new “Lucretian manner” in more detail: Since last summer I have often thought about the possibility of a nature poem written in the present day, and after [my] little attempt on the metamorphosis of plants I have become encouraged on various occasions. It would be all the more interesting, also for me, if your Lucretius could emerge quite perfectly in our language, so that the old would stand as the cousin of the new.⁴²

Viewed against the backdrop of eighteenth-century debates on theories of art and poetry, Goethe’s attempt at renewing a mode of natural poetry understood in classical terms should be taken as a clear departure from other descriptive natural poems such as Barthold Hinrich Brockes’s Earthly Pleasure in God or Albrecht von Haller’s The Alps. ⁴³ Goethe’s dissatisfaction with descriptive natural poetry is quite clear in his reaction to Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, a widely read and much discussed poem that took its cue from Linnaeus. As Igor Polianski has stressed, it is obvious that “The Metamorphosis of Plants” corresponds to Darwin’s poetry in several aspects: “The time of its genesis, the thematic frame, the typological reference of its genre, and the entire topical program” indicate that the elegy draws most notably on The Loves of the Plants, the second part of Darwin’s poem, which was published first.⁴⁴ Still, one must not forget the extent to which Goethe distanced himself from The Botanic Garden, explaining his reaction to Darwin extensively in a letter to Schiller from 26 and 27 January 1798. Interestingly though, Goethe does not take issue with the suggestively anthropomorphic depiction of plant sexuality, something for

 “Die Möglichkeit einer Darstellung der Naturlehre durch einen Poeten.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, vol. 31, Mit Schiller: Teil I, 1794 – 1799, ed. Volker C. Dörr and Norbert Oellers (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 560.  Goethe, Gedichte 1756 – 1799, 1208.  Goethe, Briefe, vol. 2, 365.  For a comparison of “The Metamorphosis of Plants” with Brockes’s didactic poetry, see Peters, Die Kunst der Natur, and Kinzel, “Von der Naturbeschreibung zur ‘literarischen Biologie.’”  Polianski, Die Kunst, die Natur vorzustellen, 214.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

261

which he had criticized Linnaeus (who is much more prudish in this regard than Darwin).⁴⁵ Instead he admonishes the lavish layout, the overabundant paratexts, and especially the allegorical design and proliferating contents of this “fashionable English book” – in short, the fact that “this botanical work is found to speak of everything but vegetation.”⁴⁶ Even more significant than this criticism of the book’s numerous “oddities,” however, is Goethe’s reproach that Darwin had “bound together the entire material without even a trace of poetic feeling” (this even though he had succeeded “not half badly” with his “verses”).⁴⁷ Goethe thus concludes that it may just be that “the distracted English world” was so enthusiastic about Darwin’s poem because “such an amount of theoretical stuff that [the readers] had been hearing for so long was now sung to them in the familiar meter.”⁴⁸ For Goethe, however (and likely also for Schiller, who was equally struggling to emulate classical forms) this would not suffice; he ends by saying: “I have only had the book in my house since last night, and I really find it below my expectations.”⁴⁹ With his reproach of Darwin for failing to render his wide-ranging material in poetic form, Goethe alludes to a problem that would continue to worry him in his correspondence with Schiller. In particular, Goethe’s critique draws on and extends the demand common in German theories of poetry since the 1770s, namely that the poet ought not to “describe” and “imitate” the objects of his poems, but instead “present” them. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s influential theory of Darstellung ⁵⁰ in particular defines poetic presentation in contrast to

 Goethe particularly objects to the trope of the plant marriage, which he nonetheless uses himself in “The Metamorphosis of Plants” (MP 53 – 56), stating that this “artful parable would be a be a honor to the poet” but that it would “completely prevent the discovery of the true physiological relations” of the plant organs (Goethe, “Metamorphose der Pflanzen: Zweiter Versuch,” in Schriften zur Morphologie, 152– 156, here 154). On the other hand, Goethe criticizes that “innocent souls” – “young persons and ladies” that is – would be “offended in their moral feelings” by such metaphors: “The incessant marriages you cannot rid yourself of, when monogamy, on which moral, law, and religion are based, dissolves into a vague lasciviousness, these marriages will remain completely intolerable to the pure human mind.” Goethe, “Verstäubung, Verdunstung, Vertropfung,” in Schriften zur Morphologie, 509 – 521, here 514.  Goethe, Mit Schiller: Teil I, 1794 – 1799, 487.  Goethe, Mit Schiller: Teil I, 1794 – 1799, 488.  Goethe, Mit Schiller: Teil I, 1794 – 1799, 488.  Goethe, Mit Schiller: Teil I, 1794 – 1799, 488.  On the theory of Darstellung see especially Winfried Menninghaus, “‘Darstellung:’ Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstocks Eröffnung eines neuen Paradigmas,” in Was heißt “Darstellen”?, ed. Christiaan L. Hart-Nibbrig (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 205 – 226; Martha B. Helfer, The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of ‘Darstellung’ in German Critical Discourse (Albany: State

262

Michael Bies

the scientific “treatise.” Crucial for this distinction was the relation of poetic and scientific works to knowledge, or – as Klopstock put it – to “theory.” In The German Republic of Letters of 1774, he explained that any scientific treatise “is commonly only theory,” and as such would become uninteresting as soon as a better work was published on the same topic; poetic rendition or Darstellung, however, is not theory, but it “has theory” and deals with this theory in its own way.⁵¹ True, poetic Darstellung also concerns itself with scientific knowledge, but it always translates it into the realm of poetry and can thus claim “permanence” in the sense of a continuous validity established by poetic means, regardless of the validity of the knowledge in question: “Any work of Darstellung (if it otherwise deserves to survive) will remain even after another is published that is better in regard to the content.”⁵² However, Klopstock developed this theory of Darstellung not only to distinguish between poetic and scientific works. He also intended to stake out the parameters of a new form of poetry that departed from early Enlightenment poetics, which misguidedly aimed for imitation in the sense of extensive description. Here Klopstock positioned himself in particular against “common poets” such as Brockes or Haller, “who want us to lead a plant life along with them,”⁵³ instead of aspiring to liberate readers from passively vegetating and, in short, to animate and enliven them through Darstellung. Yet, such Darstellung could only succeed, as Klopstock explained in his 1779 essay On Representation [Von der Darstellung], if the poet dealt with living objects in a way that did not aim for as transparent a representation as possible (an aim that Foucault famously described as one key characteristic of the Classical Age).⁵⁴ Instead, the goal of the poet should be to find a formal equivalence to what he presents, to emulate the signified in the form of the signifier, in the form of the poetic medium, and thus to produce a “presentation [Zeigung] of the life that the object has.”⁵⁵ For the creation of

University of New York Press, 1996); Inka Mülder-Bach, Im Zeichen Pygmalions: Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der ‘Darstellung’ im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 1998).  Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “Darstellung und Abhandlung,” in Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie: Dichtungstheoretische Schriften, ed. Winfried Menninghaus (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989), 157– 160, here 157. I have tried elsewhere to demonstrate that around 1800 there were also scientific treatises that followed the poetics of Darstellung – including Goethe’s An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants. See Bies, Im Grunde ein Bild and Bies, “Der Goethe des Grashalms.”  Klopstock, “Darstellung und Abhandlung,” 157.  Klopstock, “Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie,” in Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie, 180 – 186, here 181.  Foucault, The Order of Things, especially 51– 85.  Klopstock, “Von der Darstellung,” in Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie, 166 – 173, here 168.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

263

such Darstellung, it is crucial that the poet makes full use of the rhythmic possibilities of verse and deploys “meaningful meter”⁵⁶ in such a way that directly corresponds to what he presents. The poem would thus generate “motion” that relieves the reader of the burden of having first to transform “the sign” into “the signified”; instead, the rhythmical organization would already contain and convey “that which is expressed through it” to the reader.⁵⁷ Against the backdrop of this theory of Darstellung, Goethe’s critique of The Botanic Garden and its alleged lack of poetic coherence should be more plausible now, and it becomes obvious how much the poetics of “The Metamorphosis of Plants” differs from Darwin’s approach. In programmatic statements, Darwin proved to be committed to as transparent a representation of nature as possible, for instance when the proem to The Botanic Garden explains poetry via the model of a camera obscura, “in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas,”⁵⁸ or when the interludes of the poem define the poet as “a flower-painter”⁵⁹ who mainly addresses “the ideas or sensations belonging to the sense of vision.”⁶⁰ Goethe, in stark contrast, understands his elegy as an “attempt to present the intuition of nature, if not poetically, then at least rhythmically,” as we saw above. This attempt at rhythmical Darstellung becomes palpable mainly in the poem’s temporal organization established through the ancient hexameters and pentameters. This temporal organization can be considered both as a counterpart to the temporal structure described by the theory of plant metamorphosis as the alternation between extension and contraction,⁶¹ and as the equivalent to the “constant exceeding of the self into the external,” which Hegel would later define as the “character” of plant life.⁶² It thus seems plausible to read the elegy as an attempt at poetic Darstellung because it translates the knowledge of plant metamorphosis into the realm of poetry and thus invests it with aesthetic, poetic permanence, and because it stages the power of the imagination (and thus of poetry) to create knowledge and insight: after all, rather than copying the

 Klopstock, “Von der Darstellung,” 171.  Klopstock, “Vom deutschen Hexameter: Fragment,” in Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie, 60 – 156, here 148.  Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II: Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem, with Philosophical Notes, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by J. Nichols, for J. Johnson, 1790), ix.  Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, 48.  Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, 133.  See Gertrud Overbeck, “Goethes Lehre von der Metamorphose der Pflanzen und ihre Widerspiegelung in der Dichtung,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 31 (1961): 38 – 59, especially 55 – 59; and Crawford, “Poetically Visualizing Urgestalten,” 286 – 287.  G.W.F. Hegel, “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik,” in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 13, 183.

264

Michael Bies

“rich profusion” (MP 1) of the flowers in the garden, the poem stages the scene of the lyric “I” presenting his lover with a symbolic plant, a process that enables her insight into the invisible “iron laws” (MP 65) that organize this “profusion.”

4 Conclusion I hope that I have been successful in showing that Goethe productively engages in at least two key ways with the intersections of lyric poetry and knowledge characteristic of this historical moment, despite the skepticism of the likes of Jean Paul. From an epistemological perspective, I have emphasized that Goethe’s elegy does not simply paraphrase the knowledge laid out earlier in An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, but instead profiles it in a genuinely poetic manner, rendering in popular form the doctrine of plant metamorphosis and investing it with sensual presence. This Darstellung of knowledge is also remarkable from a poetological perspective because Goethe’s elegy would seem to provide an answer to the question of whether poetry can in fact deal with knowledge without jeopardizing its aesthetic autonomy (even though this answer, as we have seen, seems to imply an aesthetization of knowledge and its possible instrumentalization for the purposes of love and poetry). This is not to say though, that this kind of poetic staging of knowledge found overwhelmingly positive reception – indeed, the opposite was the case. After his elegy “The Metamorphosis of the Animals,” in which he continued his project of the Darstellung of knowledge was, according to Goethe’s own report, also not well-received by “charming society,” he turned to other projects not directly related to this poetological – and pedagogical – problem.⁶³ However, his experiments with the Darstellung of knowledge were not without at least some positive resonance. For instance, in a letter to Caroline Schlegel from September 1798, Friedrich von Hardenberg commended Goethe’s “pure gift of reproduction,” and explained how this gift of re-forming and representing nature (and thus of staging knowledge, as I have been discussing it) made the Weimar poet and naturalist “the most remarkable physicist of our times.”⁶⁴

 Goethe, “Schicksal der Druckschrift,” in Schriften zur Morphologie, 418 – 425, here 423.  Novalis, Schriften: Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1978), vol. 1, 671.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

265

Works Cited Batsch, August Johann Georg Carl. Botanik für Frauenzimmer und Pflanzenliebhaber welche keine Gelehrten sind. Weimar: Industrie Comptoir, 1795. Bies, Michael. “Der Goethe des Grashalms: Zur ‘Darstellung’ der Naturforschung um 1800.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 131, no. 4 (2012): 513 – 535. Bies, Michael. Im Grunde ein Bild. Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe und Alexander von Humboldt. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Bies, Michael. “Naturwissen, natürlich: Die ‘Méthode naturelle’ bei Buffon und Adanson.” In Methoden der Aufklärung: Ordnungen der Wissensvermittlung und Erkenntnisgenerierung im langen 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Silke Förschler and Nina Hahne, 209 – 221. Munich: Fink, 2012. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc. “Premier discours: De la manière d’étudier & de traiter l’Histoire Naturelle.” In Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière: avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, vol. 1, 1 – 62. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749. Cook, Alexandra. “Propagating Botany: The Case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In The Transmission of Culture in Western Europe, 1750 – 1850: Papers Celebrating the Bicentenary of the Foundation of the ‘Bibliothèque britannique’ (1796 – 1814) in Geneva, edited by David Bickerton and Judith Proud, 69 – 94. Bern: Peter Lang, 1999. Crawford, Heide. “Poetically Visualizing Urgestalten: The Union of Nature, Art, and the Love of a Woman in Goethe’s ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen.’” In The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, edited by Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson, 279 – 288. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Dagognet, François. Le catalogue de la vie. Étude méthodologique sur la taxonomie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004. Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden, Part II: Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem, with Philosophical Notes, 2nd ed. London: Nichols, 1790. Dünne, Jörg. Asketisches Schreiben: Rousseau und Flaubert als Paradigmen literarischer Selbstpraxis in der Moderne. Tübingen: Narr, 2003. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2002. Gamper, Michael. Elektropoetologie: Fiktionen der Elektrizität 1740 – 1870. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009. George, Sam. Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760 – 1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Godel, Rainer. “Literatur und Nicht-Wissen im Umbruch, 1730 – 1810.” In Literatur und Nicht-Wissen: Historische Konstellationen 1730 – 1930, edited by Michael Bies and Michael Gamper, 39 – 57. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Briefe: Hamburger Ausgabe in sechs Bänden. Edited by Karl Robert Mandelkow. 6 vols. Munich: Beck, 1988. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. “The Metamorphosis of Plants.” In The Metamorphosis of Plants, edited by Gordon L. Miller, 1 – 3. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Edited by Friedrich Apel et al. 40 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987 – 2013. Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. In Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 13. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986.

266

Michael Bies

Helfer, Martha B. The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of ‘Darstellung’ in German Critical Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In Werke, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 2. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. Kinzel, Ulrich. “Von der Naturbeschreibung zur ‘literarischen Biologie:’ Transformationen im literarischen Diskurs an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert.” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 20, no. 2 (1995): 75 – 115. Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb. Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie: Dichtungstheoretische Schriften. Edited by Winfried Menninghaus. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989. Menninghaus, Winfried. “‘Darstellung:’ Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstocks Eröffnung eines neuen Paradigmas.” In Was heißt “Darstellen”?, edited by Christiaan L. Hart-Nibbrig, 205 – 226. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Morton, Alan G. History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day. London: Academic Press, 1981. Mülder-Bach, Inka. Im Zeichen Pygmalions: Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der ‘Darstellung’ im 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: Fink, 1998. Müller, Günther. “Goethes Elegie ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen:’ Versuch einer morphologischen Interpretation.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 21 (1943): 67 – 98. Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Karen Reeds. “A Translation of Carl Linnaeus’s Introduction to Genera plantarum (1737).” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 563 – 572. Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis). Schriften: Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, edited by Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel, 3 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1978. Overbeck, Gertrud. “Goethes Lehre von der Metamorphose der Pflanzen und ihre Widerspiegelung in der Dichtung.” Publications of the English Goethe Society 31 (1961): 38 – 59. Jean Paul. Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics. Translated by Margaret R. Hale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. Peters, Günter. Die Kunst der Natur: Ästhetische Reflexion in Blumengedichten von Brockes, Goethe und Gautier. Munich: Fink, 1993. Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books. The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Polianski, Igor J. Die Kunst, die Natur vorzustellen: Die Ästhetisierung der Pflanzenkunde um 1800. Köln: König, 2004. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory: or, Education of an Orator. Trans. John Selby Watson. 2 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856. Richter, Karl. “Wissenschaft und Poesie ‘auf höherer Stelle’ vereint: Goethes Elegie Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen.” In Gedichte und Interpretationen: Klassik und Romantik, edited by Wulf Segebrecht, vol. 3, 156 – 168. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Letters on the Elements of Botany: Addressed to a Lady. Translated by Thomas Martyn. 6th ed. London: J. White, 1802. Schiebinger, Londa. “The Private Life of Plants: Sexual Politics in Carl Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin.” In Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Inquiry 1780 – 1945, edited by Marina Benjamin, 121 – 143. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”

267

Schiller, Friedrich. “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.” In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Peter-André Alt, Albert Meier, and Wolfgang Riedel, vol. 5, 694 – 780. Munich: Hanser, 2004. Schrank, Franz von Paula. Allgemeine Anleitung, die Naturgeschichte zu studiren. Munich: Johann Baptist Strobl, 1783. Stiening, Gideon. “‘Und das Ganze belebt, so wie das Einzelne, sei:’ Zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Literatur am Beispiel von Goethes Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen.” In Literatur und Wissen: Theoretisch-methodische Zugänge, edited by Tilmann Köppe, 192 – 213. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Willdenow, Carl Ludwig. “Preface to Johann Heinrich Sack’s Deutschlands wilde Gewächse.” Botanische Zeitung 3, no. 13 (1804): 193 – 198.

Edgar Landgraf

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist In the sixth and last episode of Heinrich von Kleist’s famous essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts While Speaking,” the narrator conjures up the scene of a public exam to argue that preparation and premeditation hinder rather than promote the completion of thought. During the exam, the student fails to answer such seemingly simple (yet potent) questions as “what is the state” or “what is property.” While a student underperforming during an exam is a common event, which in itself provides limited evidence in support of the essay’s main thesis, the explanation given for the student nevertheless passing the exam is highly revealing. The student is said to pass the exam despite his failure to answer these simple questions because the tester must fear, we learn, that an overly aggressive posture might make the public recognize his own ineptness.¹ The presence of the public makes the examiner recognize that he is being observed; that he, too, is being tested. The examiner responds by assuming the position of a performer who is no longer bound by the standards of his profession, but by what he believes are the expectations of a public that observes him. Playing to the public, he safeguards his reputation and presumably the integrity of the institution he represents. The presence of the public allows pragmatic, even political concerns to permeate a supposedly disinterested discipline such as education. The episode thus reveals how the exam is neither about the knowledge the student accumulated nor his ability to produce or reproduce thoughts, but instead constitutes a performance whose primary function is to maintain a particular institution, preserve its authority, and establish its membership. In this paper, I will examine more closely representations of the public in Heinrich von Kleist’s writing. As in the exam, Kleist puts the public regularly into the position of an audience, which frames various kinds of speech deliveries as performances that are driven by more or less overt political concerns. While the secondary literature has long recognized the emphasis on performance in Kleist,²

 See Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Hanser, 1965), 2. 234. All citations from Kleist’s work will be taken from the Sembdner edition and cited parenthetically in the text. All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.  Most recently, Sean Allan and Elystan Griffiths edited a special issue of German Life and Letters (64, no. 3) dedicated to questions of performance and performativity in Kleist. The volume focuses

270

Edgar Landgraf

and explored in depth his political trepidations, little attention has been given to the “audience” of the performances we witness in his texts. It goes without saying that there is no performance without an audience. The audience turns subjects into actors and their doings into performances. Furthermore, Kleist puts the audience in the curious position of a passive observer who, without providing any substantive input, nevertheless comes to play an important role in defining the contentious actions in front of it. This duplicity defines all six of the episodes that make up the essay on the gradual production of thoughts. Each drafts a highly asymmetrical speech situation where the production of thought while speaking derives not from conversations between people where ideas would be shared or where competitive exchanges would prod reflection and innovation (as in many Romantic figurations of irony); rather, in each episode, a single individual faces interlocutors who remain essentially mute. Yet, this audience puts the speakers on the spot, forces them to perform. The author of the letter speaks to his sister who lacks the legal expertise that would allow her to contribute to the conversation; Molière converses with his maid who we must presume to be illiterate; Mir-

on scenes of role-play in relation to authenticity concerns – how Kleist’s “texts explore questions of identity and expose the social and cultural forces that lie concealed behind essentialist concepts of identity” (“Introduction. Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 [2011]: 328) – as well as on the performative dimension of Kleist’s work that can be noted on the discursive and intertextual level, how Kleist’s texts constantly quote, display, exhibit other texts, discourses, genres, and so on, introducing what Bernd Fischer suggests is a sincere mode of irony that invites critical reflection of what is put on display without offering resolution or the clarity one might find in idealistic and Romantic forms of irony (see Bernd Fischer, “Heinrich von Kleists vorgeführtes Erzählen,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 [2011]: 352). My essay hopes to add to the discussion of performativity in Kleist in two ways. First, I do not approach performances and role-play as raising problems of authenticity, identity, or even subjectivity. Doing so – even if only for the purpose of its deconstruction – continues to presuppose the notion of an authentic self, certainly a highly problematic assumption for Kleist’s literary work. The tester in the episode above as much as Mirabeau and later Michael Kohlhaas, to mention three examples central to this essay, all are quite authentic in their doings (if we define authenticity along Hegelian lines, as an identification with one’s actions). In fact, their very identity is defined through their performances – an identity, of course, that is not “fixed” but is always open to challenge, redefinition, reconfirmation, and alteration in ever new performative acts that take place within a “scene of constraint” (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender [New York: Routledge, 2004], 1). Kohlhaas exhibits this often-noted instability in paradigmatic fashion. His “self” is constantly reconstituted and reconstituted differently in his interactions with his social environment. Second, then, my analysis locates performativity not on the level of language, but in the social medium of communication. Simply put, and in line with J.L. Austin, it is not language that acts, but speech, i.e., utterances made in particular social settings and in exchange with others. Language acquires its binding force only in its communicative use, that is, in the context of social exchanges that, in a strict sense, cannot be reduced to the intentions of an individual, character, narrator, or even the author of a text.

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

271

abeau addresses an assembly that yielded to him; the sheep in the fable remain mute; so does the social gathering as the enthusiast tries to make his point; and finally, the public is merely mentioned, but does not intervene in the proceedings that make up the exam. It is as mere spectators, listeners, and implicit judges that the audience advances the “midwifery of thought” by placing the speaker in the position of a performer. One of the more surprising features of Kleist’s short essay is how it finds the structural properties of the performative not only in public speeches or artistic presentations, but instead permeating such intimate settings as the conversation between siblings or Molière’s intercourse with his maid. In Kleist, it seems, whenever a speaker speaks, she is performing. That is, Kleist’s model of communication is inherently performative. Each utterance draws a distinction between speaker/performer on the one hand and what for the duration of the utterance assumes the role of an audience on the other. For the duration of the utterance, the speaker slips into the role of an actor who needs to deliver in the hope of impressing, entertaining, educating, persuading, or manipulating the audience – or else face embarrassment and humiliation.³ This emphasis on the performative structure of speech explains why language in Kleist finds its end or telos not in the realm of signification or meaning, but instead in its effectiveness, in the expression of what Andreas Gailus has recently termed its “assertoric force.”⁴ This force of speech expands in two directions. It affects the social space of its articulation (e. g., it threatens or fortifies the authority of the educational institution); and the performance comes to define the identity of the speaker. The revolutionary claim of the essay is that the latter happens not only in the social realm (where the student, presumably, is inducted into the

 As highlighted in the fifth episode where an over-excited person suffers embarrassment as he fails to articulate his premeditated thoughts during a social gathering (Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 323). Even in such a communal setting, the utterance creates a performance space, separating the actor from his audience.  Andreas Gailus examines how in Kleist, the propositional content of language, which is tied to institutionalized truths and existing power structures, consistently clashes with the “assertoric force” of language, its creative, transformative, and inventive power. Gailus finds the tension between those two uses of language not only expressing political concerns of Kleist’s writings, but also serve as a poetic structuring principle, motivating, for example, the contradictory double endings that hold Kleist’s works in suspension between happiness and violence, redemption and condemnation, resolution and revenge (see Andreas Gailus, “Breaking Skulls. Kleist, Hegel, and the Force of Assertion,” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan [Rochester: Camden House, 2011], 243 – 244). My reading of the exam episode (and below, my readings of the fable and Michael Kohlhaas) suggests that the assertoric force of language not only challenges, but often is also used to maintain existing power structures.

272

Edgar Landgraf

class of the learned; or where the reputation of the examiner might be tarnished); rather, conceived as a performance, the delivery of speech comes to affect the production of thought itself.⁵ Dominik Paß has aligned Kleist’s description of the completion of thought with contemporary theories that link thinking to communication and argued that the stuttering, erring, and other contingencies Kleist mentions indeed serve a constructive function in everyday speech: they allow for the recursive operations and “repairs” that enable the composition of supposedly antecedent intentions during the completion of speech. Paß argues that “as a medium, language depends on performance, on its actual application and realization.”⁶ The argument finds its perhaps most pointed support in Kleist’s short text “The Very Last Word in Modern Educational Theory” [“Allerneuster Erziehungsplan”], a fictitious letter addressed to a “Hochgeehrtes Publikum!,” or highly honored audience (Kleist 1965, 2: 239). The letter gathers anecdotal evidence to substantiate the thesis (also found in “On the Gradual Production”) that the laws of repulsion found in nature (electro-magnetism) apply to the social world, too. The author of the letter devises a series of examples designed to show how individual intentions, no matter how heartfelt they are, may completely reverse direction once they enter the realm of social interaction.⁷ Kleist thus ties the formation of thoughts and intentions to the dynamics and fleetingness of the realm of social communication. They are up for constant renegotiation. They are defined not by an inner drive or will, but by tensions and contentions that form during the interaction between speakers/performers on the one side

 The difference between the speech’s effects on the speaker and how it defines the social space of its articulation might be drawn along the lines of J.L. Austin’s distinction between the illocutionary force of a speech act, and its perlocutionary effects. Austin defines the former as what one does in saying something, the latter as the effects of said action. Focusing on the audience is to highlight how speech acts are social events. The audience provides the context in which “illocutionary acts are conventional acts” (J.L Austin, How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], 121), and it is the site where the illocutionary act – “a certain force in saying something” (121) – is recorded, has its perlocutionary effects.  See Dominik Paß, “Die Beobachtung der allmählichen Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden. Eine systemtheoretische Lektüre,” Kleist-Jahrbuch 2003: 107– 136, 126.  The most pointed example in the essay concerns a husband who after losing too much money the previous evening, decides to stay home rather than meet his friends and gamble again, but takes his hat once his wife suggests they spend some quality time together. Rather than substantiating the natural law of contradiction, the episode suggests that intentions form in socially contentious settings. On the contentious theatricality of Kleist’s writing, see also Günther Blamberger, “Agonalität und Theatralität. Kleists Gedankenfigur des Duells im Kontext der europäischen Moralistik,” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1999: 25 – 40.

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

273

and the audience (or what are assumed to be audience expectations) on the other side. The fact that Kleist links the production of thought to the contentious social dynamics of communication informs what recent scholarship identified as the pragmatic concerns of his writing, including the “strategic rationality” Kleist develops in response to the challenges his characters face in their social interactions.⁸ These dynamics are also on display in the more overtly political episodes at the center of the essay “On the Gradual Production,” in particular in the one that describes Mirabeau challenging the sovereignty of the king and in the counterrevolutionary fable that follows. In both episodes, a conversation takes place in front of an audience that, like the public in the exam, remains mute, yet is of central concern for the speaker. At first glance, Mirabeau seems to alter this structure. In fact, his stroke of genius, which comes to change the order of things in France and beyond, lies in the way in which he usurps the space of the audience, when he claims to speak on its behalf. His speech stages “a historic shift in political semantics, the moment at which the people cease to be the passive subject of the law and instead become, under the rubric of ‘the nation,’ its source and foundation.”⁹ Considering the emphasis the essay puts on performance, it is hard to avoid the question, however, as to whether Mirabeau’s claim is authentic, or whether he is not merely another actor who, like the tester in the last episode, plays to the audience in an effort to defend his reputation and the integrity of the institution he represents (the rights of the Diet over the rights of the king). In short, isn’t Mirabeau merely putting on an act when he claims to represent the

 Challenging dominant critical opinion that reads Kleist as a “metaphysical ironist” (Bernd Fischer) who recognized, but saw no escape from the philosophical and political aporias of his time, Tim Mehigan identifies a second philosophical turning point in Kleist’s life around 1805/6, after which Kleist develops a more constructive (compared to the famous Kant crisis of 1801) relationship to Kant and begins to progress toward what Mehigan calls an “inter-subjective outlook” (see Tim Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist. Writing after Kant [Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2011], 179). Expanding on recent works by Günther Blamberger, Bernhard Greiner, and Dominik Paß, Mehigan draws on game and systems theory to account for the strategic rationality Kleist develops. Accordingly, Mehigan present us a Kleist “who was less haunted by life’s inherently tragic nature than by its enigmatic openness, whose thinking was troubled but constructive, and who indeed prefigured the modernity that was rapidly taking on ever more defined a form from the early nineteenth century on” (Writing after Kant, 170). See also chapter 4 of my Improvisation as Art which links Kleist’s fondness of improvisation to his recognition of the uncertainties and rational demands created under the conditions of modernity (Edgar Landgraf, Improvisation as Art. Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives [New York and London: Continuum, 2011]).  See Andreas Gailus, Passions of the Sign. Revolution and Language in Kant, Goethe, and Kleist (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 6.

274

Edgar Landgraf

nation? Such a reading is supported by the episode that immediately follows Mirabeau’s speech, namely in the aforementioned fable in which the fox identifies the ass (Esel) as the most “bloodthirsty” of all animals (presumably for eating all the herbs). If read as a reference to the very king that was overthrown by Mirabeau’s speech – the German word “Esel” also means blockhead – the fable notes the failure of the Revolution to get rid of the causes of the disease (the brutal rule of the lions). In this account, the Revolution merely sacrificed the ass/king to maintain the political status quo when circumstances inherently challenged the legitimacy of the existing order of things.¹⁰ At stake are not only Mirabeau’s or Kleist’s intentions, but the legitimacy of the modern, political order for which Mirabeau stands. Does his “thunder bolt” (Donnerkeil) “We are the representatives of the nation” (2: 321) indeed institute a representational order where those who govern are bound by those they govern? Or is the claim to represent the nation merely a smokescreen, a lightning rod that blinds the public from recognizing the continued rule of the lions? Is the “nation” indeed providing substantive input, or is its role merely structural, enabling a performance that supports rather than challenges institutional autonomy and political sovereignty? To corroborate the latter reading and the fundamental critique of modern politics it implies, I will turn to other instances in Kleist’s work that feature the public prominently. In particular, my analysis will focus on Kleist’s politically most contentious novella, Michael Kohlhaas, in which the public plays a crucial role in the negotiation of questions of political legitimacy and efficacy. Examining more closely the role of the public in Kleist will allow us to substantiate the suggestion that Kleist is skeptical about the representational claims that underlie modern, republican politics (as represented by Mirabeau); and inquire how Kleist understands modern politics as a performance in which actors are playing to their audience, the public. *** In the eighteenth century, “Publikum,” the modern German word for audience, had become the common term to reference the public (or what in German today is called Öffentlichkeit, usually translated as public sphere). Immanuel Kant conceives the public along this line, most prominently, perhaps, when he locates the

 Joachim Theisen points out how Kleist’s rewriting of Lafontaine’s fable suggests that the fox’s speech is able to maintain and cement the existing order of things (Joachim Theisen, “‘Es ist ein Wurf, wie mit dem Würfel; aber es gibt nichts anderes:’ Kleists Aufsatz Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” DVjs 68, no. 4 [1994]: 731). Gailus reads the fable as being “about the intertwining of law and violence, and thus about the plague of sovereignty” (Gailus, Passion, 9).

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

275

value of the French revolution not in the political changes it instituted, but in its effects on the “Publikum” that witnessed the event (and its bloody aftermath).¹¹ In Kleist we find the term “Publikum” (and “Publici”) in various essays, in his police reports, and his journalistic writings;¹² and he situates the public in the position of an audience at crucial points throughout his plays and novellas. To mention only a few examples: Walter’s mild treatment of Adam at the end of The Broken Jug is motivated by his concern about the public image of the court;¹³ in Prince of Homburg, the public is a central factor in the contemplation of the Prince’s punishment;¹⁴ the marriage of Käthchen of Heilbronn is staged prominently, seemingly to distract the public from the failings of the king; a public audience also enhances the dilemma the Marquise of O. confronts when she has to announce her unwanted pregnancy in a newspaper ad; and the public in-

 See Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, ed. Horst D. Brandt and Piero Giordanetti (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2005), 97. In his seminal study Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit from 1962, Jürgen Habermas specifies that the audience the authorities (“Obrigkeit”) addressed in the eighteenth century was the newly formed bourgeoisie, an educated, reading public that formed the basis for the emergence of “ein kritisches Publikum” (Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990], 82). For Kant, though, the “Publikum” includes the people, see, for example, when he discusses the restriction the authorities need to put on “Literaten” or bureaucrats “who have legal influence on the public … because they address the people directly, which consists of people without professional skills (as when the clergy turns to the laity)” (“[die] aufs Publikum gesetzlichen Einfluss haben […] weil sie sich unmittelbar ans Volk wenden, welches aus Idioten besteht (wie etwa der Klerus an die Laien)” [Kant, Streit der Fakultäten, 16]).  See Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 426 – 431. Kleist reflects critically the role of the (French) media when he characterizes it as the art of making the people believe what the government considers to be good (“die Kunst, dem Volk glauben zu machen, was die Regierung für gut hält” [2: 361]).  Dorothea von Mücke relates Kant’s use of the public as audience to Kleist’s The Broken Jug, arguing convincingly that the comedy exposes the aestheticization strategies that underlie modern politics and thereby recasts the programmatic relationship between art and history, poetics and politics in ways that allow for “a freedom that makes history in the emphatic sense – as the passionate partisanship within an (imaginative) performance – possible” (Dorothea von Mücke, “The Fragmented Picture and Kleist’s ‘Zerbrochner Krug,’” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan [Rochester: Camden House, 2011], 51). I will return to the question of political aestheticization below.  See Helmut Schneider’s subtle analysis of Kleist’s merging of two political orders (familialhorizontal on one side, stately-military and therefore hierarchical on the other side) in Prince of Homburg which, Schneider argues, receives its political significance only through its dramatic staging, which puts the prince in the center of a public (dis)play (“in den Mittelpunkt eines öffentlichen Schauspiels [stellt]”) (Helmut J. Schneider, “Herrschaftsgenealogie und Staatsgemeinschaft: Zu Kleists Dramaturgie der Moderne im ‘Prinzen von Homburg,’” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan [Rochester: Camden House, 2011], 123).

276

Edgar Landgraf

creases the shame Alkmene faces at the end of Amphitryon as her involuntary affair with Jupiter is revealed. Other examples could be named, but it is Michael Kohlhaas where the political concerns raised by the Mirabeau episode find their most extensive treatment. Kleist’s longest and most intricate narrative text revolves around the question about the legitimacy of the state and the rights of the people whose interest the state is supposed to represent. The novella unfolds the story of a sixteenth-century horse dealer whose sense of justice, as we learn in the first paragraph, turned him into “a robber and murderer.” Wronged by the corrupt Junker Wenzel von Tronka, Kohlhaas’s attempts to find justice through legal means fail as he encounters widespread nepotism, abuses of power, and various political interests interfering with his case. Kohlhaas decides to take justice in his own hands and starts waging a private war against the authorities. An extensive body of secondary literature has looked at the legal and political implications of Kleist’s novella, its discussion of medieval resistance laws, absolutism, social contract theory, and the underlying philosophical questions the text raises concerning the legitimacy of the modern state. More recently, scholars such as Christiane Frey, Andreas Gailus, and Christian Moser have shown how Kleist anticipates political and legal paradoxes that are at the center of Jacques Derrida’s and Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the challenges presented by the declaration of a “state of exception” (that has to suspend the very law on which it is based).¹⁵ Gailus argues that Kleist exposes a foundational problem of the modern judicial system, namely that “the legal apparatus as a whole does not rest on some substantive metanorm but is grounded ultimately in the force of its tautological self-assertion.”¹⁶ He holds with Agamben that paradox – ultimately, the need to suspend the law on which authority is based – and tautology (self-assertion) not only question the legitimacy of the modern social order, but are also at the heart of the “intertwining of law and violence” that Kleist’s novella stages. By putting himself outside the law, Kohlhaas demonstrates the vulnerability of the state as well as the violence that under-

 See Christiane Frey, “The Excess of Law and Rhetoric in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas,” Phrasis: Studies in Language and Literature 47, no. 1 (2006): 10 – 12; Gailus, Passion, 116 – 122; and Moser who finds at the center of Kleist’s attention “the fundamental paradox that the law has to be suspended to be applied. Kleist thus exposes a problem that is also and specifically discussed in contemporary theories of sovereignty – as, for example, by Georgio Agamben in connection with Carl Schmitt or by Jacques Derrida in connection with Walter Benjamin” (Christian Moser, “Recht als Krieg. Moderne Staatlichkeit und die Aporien legalistischer Herrschaft bei Heinrich von Kleist,” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan [Rochester: New York, 2011], 84).  Gailus, Passion, 116.

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

277

writes eighteenth-century social contract theories: that the rule of law is founded not on the consent of the governed, but on the threat of violence.¹⁷ As productive and convincing as these interpretations are, they tend to read Kleist in the vein of the theorists they cite as a liberal idealist whose texts lament the contradictions, hidden violence, and abuses of power they portray. Subsequently, they ignore (or view as criticized) the conservative, nationalistic, and autocratic stances we find throughout Kleist’s writing. While Kleist’s writings contain revolutionary desires as well as utopian hopes, neither in Michael Kohlhaas nor in the Betrothal in St. Domingo do revolutions provide resolutions. Likewise, moments of utopian fulfillment (most famously in the aftermath of the Earthquake in Chile) are short-lived, as Kleist dashes the reader’s hopes for the sustainability of a state of non-violence. A closer examination of Kohlhaas’s behavior surely disappoints any political idealism, too. While at first, he seeks legitimacy for his action by invoking public interests, claiming that he is defending the rights of traders to do business under the protection of the law,¹⁸ such claims of legitimacy seem completely forgotten when he takes up the business of revenge and burns down Wittenberg repeatedly. While the story raises fundamental questions concerning the legitimacy of the state, the critique of its shortcomings are undermined by the brutality of Kohlhaas’s campaign, the violence of his

 For a more detailed analysis of the paradoxes involved in Kohlhaas’s fight for “justice,” see especially Monika Frommel, “Die Paradoxie vertraglicher Sicherung bürgerlicher Rechte. Kampf ums Recht und sinnlose Aktion,” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1988/89: 357– 374. Horst Lange explores in detail how Goethe’s drama Götz von Berlichingen (of which Kleist’s Kohlhaas is a hypertext of sorts) “is to a large extent a reflection upon the difficulties Enlightenment social contract theory faced in accounting for the legitimacy of the modern state” (Horst Lange, “Wolves, Sheep, and the Shepherd: Legality, Legitimacy, and Hobbesian Political Theory in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen,” Goethe Yearbook 10 [2001]: 5). He concludes, and I believe this finding in particular can be applied to Kohlhaas too, that Goethe’s play analyzes the paradox and necessary violence of Hobbes’ contract theory: “Whoever puts himself outside of the law, Hobbes argues, does not have grounds to complain that certain actions taken against him are violations of it. This position is quite radical, for it implies among other things that the sovereign establishes the universality of the rule of law not, as the conception of the social contract seems to suggest, through the free assent of the governed, but rather through the raw exercise of superior power” (Lange, “Wolves,” 22).  “that, if the whole incident proved to have been premeditated, as seemed probable, it was his duty to the world to do everything in his power to get satisfaction for himself for the wrong done him, and a guarantee against future ones for his fellow citizens” (The Marquise of O—. And Other Stories, trans. Martin Greenberg [New York: Criterion Books, 1960], 95). For German, see Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 16.

278

Edgar Landgraf

extra-institutional pursuit of justice.¹⁹ When Martin Luther involves himself in the case and, with the help of the Elector of Brandenburg, parameters are set to provide Kohlhaas with a fair trial, we again find the state not holding up its end of the bargain, deflating any hope that the interests of Kohlhaas could find legitimate representation; and yet again, Kohlhaas undermines any claims of legitimacy to his case as it becomes more and more apparent that he is not interested in defending any rights, but is merely seeking personal revenge (2: 86), reducing his pursuit of justice to the desire to inflict pain. From Kleist’s early nineteenth-century perspective (as much as from today’s vantage point), the question about the legitimacy of Kohlhaas’s actions hinges on the question how a political action represents or fails to represent the interests of the public. Understood in terms of a geographically defined population or segments of the population, the public appears in various forms in the novella. Kohlhaas invokes it to motivate his pursuit of justice, it gathers as an audience in public squares, it is victimized by Kleist’s rage, its interests and opinions are discussed, and we even encounter what seems to be a literate public in the Habermasian sense, a public that reasons about Kohlhaas’s case and to which the authorities feel obliged to respond. While Kleist does not use the noun “Öffentlichkeit,” the adjective “öffentlich” appears a total of eight times in the text. It makes its first appearance when Kohlhaas explains to his wife Lisbeth his plan to seek public justice (“die öffentliche Gerechtigkeit für sich aufzufordern” [II, 20]). “Öffentlich” retains two meanings here, namely the traditional sense of “accessible to everyone,” what defines public offices, or Ämter; and the historically newer (eighteenth century) meaning of “having an audience,” in the sense of the German word “Publikum.” In the course of the novella, Kohlhaas is being denied the former, access, while he finds plenty of the latter, a Publikum, namely in the horde he amasses to follow him, in the public postings of decrees addressed to the authorities as much as to the general public, and in a couple of public squares where people assemble to see the now famous rebel (in the end, to see him being executed). Throughout the novella, Kohlhaas’s case against the authorities hinges on his ability to attract and be seen as addressing an audience. Another use of the adjective references an important historical law. Kohlhaas’s death sentence is based on his breaking of what Kleist calls the “öffentlicher Landfriede,” or public peace, an allusion to the perpetual public peace (ewiger Landfriede), the imperial law that was implemented in 1495 and made feuds

 For a recent discussion of Kohlhaas’s action constantly undermining the legitimacy of his quest, see Elisabeth Krimmer, “Between Terror and Transcendence: A Reading of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 405 – 420. Krimmer also notes the ambivalence of Kleist’s political stance as Michael Kohlhaas “contains elements that appeal to readers at both ends of the political spectrum” (415).

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

279

within the Holy Roman Empire illegal – a milestone in the consolidation of power in central Europe as it allowed for the formation of modern, territorial states.²⁰ Incidentally, the last three uses of the adjective “öffentlich” are in reference to this law – a law where the adjective “public” is not yet conceived in opposition to the private, but rather references the type of representative publicness typical for the meaning of the term in feudal societies.²¹ Kleist gives the public a more contemporary treatment in the other four places where the adjective appears referencing the voice of the people and public opinion. Three of those instances are associated with Luther and are part of Luther’s attempt to help Kohlhaas acquire the “public justice” he seeks. At this point of the narrative, the public justice under discussion no longer merely pertains to finding a court that would uphold the laws of trade and thus promote the public good; rather, Kohlhaas and Luther – anachronistically – discuss social contract theory and the reciprocal relationships of responsibility and legitimization between the private citizen and the sovereign. With a public letter Luther wants to force Kohlhaas “to return within the confines of the social order” (122), yet the argument Luther makes in his letter and later in his conversation with Kohlhaas seems less than convincing when measured against the social theories invoked to make the case in the first place.²² In his letter, Luther likens Kohlhaas to the wolf who attacks the peaceful community protected by the “Landesherr,” or territorial lord, and declares Kohlhaas’s actions as unjust based on the ignorance of the Elector: And need I tell you, impious man, that your sovereign knows nothing about your case: what am I saying? – the sovereign you are rebelling does not even know your name, so that one day when you come before the throne of God thinking to accuse him, he will be able to say with a serene face, “I have done this man no wrong, Lord, for my soul is a stranger to his existence.” (Other Stories, 122 – 123; German, see 2: 43)²³

 See Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978).  Habermas points out that the Latin word “publicare” means to claim for the ruler (“für den Herrn in Beschlag nehmen” [Strukturwandel, 60]).  “in den Damm der menschlichen Ordnung” (Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 42).  Hans-Jörg Knobloch notes that Luther’s argument is less than convincing, subsequently, however, does not reflect on the implications of Kleist using this anachronistic argument. Instead, he speculates that Kohlhaas’s change of heart takes place not because of Luther’s argument, but despite of it, showing Kohlhaas to be an overly emotional character who is overwhelmed by his adoration for Luther (see Hans-Jörg Knobloch, “Die Auflösung des Gesellschaftsvertrags in Kleists ‘Michael Kohlhaas,’” in Recht und Gerechtigkeit bei Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Peter Ensberg and Hans-Jochen Marquardt [Stuttgart: Heinz, 2002], 75).

280

Edgar Landgraf

While Luther’s argument references the social-contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau,²⁴ it completely ignores one of their main consequences: the necessary separation of the private from the public. To put it bluntly, what distinguishes the feudal system from the modern notion of the state is that for the latter political authority, legitimacy, and responsibility are no longer tied to the person (or family) who God anointed as ruler; instead the state is thought to exist independent and “above” the particular individuals who are in power. Clearly, from Kleist’s early nineteenth-century perspective, the Elector’s claim of innocence must have seemed highly problematic. In a modern state, personal ignorance does not suspend public responsibility nor can it excuse the failings of the state. The problem is not just one of denied access or nepotism; nor are we merely dealing with a critique of the feudal system; at stake is a distinction that is central for the evolution of the modern state and modern laws whose integrity relies on the separation of public responsibility and private authority. To understand better the relevance of the distinction between public and private in modern society, we can look at older feudal societies where the mingling of private with public interests was the prerogative of the aristocracy and could be seen as an expression of the will of God. While a ruler would be bound by honor codes and reputation, transgressions were not seen as challenging the legitimacy of the ruler. It was merely seen as a matter of time until the bad –and with it God – would in hindsight reveal itself as good and meaningful.²⁵ Kleist’s Luther mirrors this argument only on the surface, as it is incompatible with the

 Tim Mehigan shows how Kleist’s Kohlhaas novella moves beyond Hobbes and closer to Rousseau and Kant “to a type of contractualism that is built on the equality of the contracting parties, in which governors themselves are included, and to new juridical conceptions of judgemade law that rationalist contractualism anticipates” (Writing after Kant, 80). On the importance of Rousseau for Kleist, see also Moser, “Angewandte Kontingenz. Fallgeschichten bei Kleist und Montaigne,” Kleist-Jahrbuch 2000: 3 – 32.  For historical examples, see Niklas Luhmann, “Staat und Staatsräson im Übergang von traditionaler Herrschaft zu moderner Politik,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 3: 91– 100. Luhmann points out that these historical justifications of injustice relied on a religious notion of time where time holds the promise of getting closer to perfection and the true essence of the world (see 99). Clearly, such a notion of time is obsolete in Kleist’s time and does not reflect the rationality of his Luther figure. Günther Blamberger found as a possible source for Kleist’s novella a letter from Freiherr von Stein who decides to leave a country that refuses to offer him protection under the law and independence. While Stein leaves Prussia in the hands of a divine jurisdiction, Blamberger suggests that unlike Stein, Kleist does not console himself with the idea of a punitive God, but assumes the role of the archangel Michael, who wants to put back together “eine aus den Fugen geratene Welt” (Günther Blamberger, Heinrich von Kleist. Die Biographie [Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011], 417).

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

281

social contract theory he cites. For one, this feudal mindset reflects not at all the world in which Kohlhaas lives. His whole crusade is based on the perception of an illegitimate mingling of public authority with private interests, which he encounters first at the border crossing where he loses his horses, and subsequently at the various courts where family ties are cited as the reason for why his case is never heard. Kleist’s recognition of the performance aspect of politics must itself be tied to this larger historical development. Only as the distinction between public and private becomes prevalent, that is, only as a person’s public doings are no longer identified with his or her private persona or interests, do political doings become recognizable as performances and role-play.²⁶ Furthermore, when Luther in his meeting with Kohlhaas invokes God as his only relevant judge, he raises (rather than diffuses) the question of the sovereign’s legitimacy. He asks rhetorically who else than God should punish the “Landesherr” had he indeed “hired people that behind his back suppressed his case.”²⁷ Following social contract theory, the answer to this loaded question should be the public. Despite his (for Kleist’s time) politically antiquated trust in God, Kleist’s Luther indeed invokes the public prominently in defense of Kohlhaas’s case. He does, so, however, less to hold the sovereign (die Obrigkeit) accountable, than to influence the sovereign. That is, Luther does not remind the sovereign of his responsibility toward the public, nor is Luther driven by a desire to rectify an injustice in the name of the public or even to protect the public from Kohlhaas’s rage; rather, he intervenes to preserve the power of the public authorities. The letter Luther writes to the Elector of Saxony urges him to reopen Kohlhaas’s case, because the “highly dangerous way” in which public opinion is on Kohlhaas’s side threatens the state’s authority (die Staatsgewalt):

 In his classic study Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung und die Inszenierung der Wirklichkeit from 1977, Dietrich Schwanitz, drawing on Norbert Elias’s work, links the emergence of the modern sense of self to the increased role-play at the courts and on stage that resulted from the consolidation of power in Central Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Life at the courts led to changes in the sense of self as only now could the role be recognized as something autonomous, as something that is replaceable and can be experienced independent of the “I” (see Dietrich Schwanitz, Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung und die Inszenierung der Wirklichkeit. Untersuchungen zur Dramaturgie der Lebenswelt und zur Tiefenstruktur des Dramas [Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1977], 105 – 106). As suggested earlier, Kleist’s literary texts show selves that, even in their most intimate interactions, do not escape the performance aspects introduced by their participation in communicative exchanges.  “wer anders als Gott darf ihn wegen der Wahl solcher Diener zur Rechenschaft ziehen?” (Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 46).

282

Edgar Landgraf

Public opinion, Luther remarked, was on his side to a very dangerous extent, so much so that even in Wittenberg, which had been set on fire three times by him, it was still possible to hear voices raised in his favor; and since Kohlhaas would undoubtedly let the people know about it if his proposal were refused, as well as make his own malicious commentary on the matter, the populace might easily be misled so far that the state would find itself powerless to act against him. (Other Stories, 129; German, see 2: 49)

The circumstance alone, the repeated burning of Wittenberg, make Luther’s claim that public opinion would be on Kohlhaas’s side, seem suspicious to begin with. The suspicion is supported further by Kleist’s syntax. The clause immediately following Luther’s invocation of public opinion specifies public opinion as something Luther noted. This is echoed by the subsequent reduction of public opinion to “one voice” (eine Stimme), which makes us wonder if any one else but Luther indeed holds this opinion. Behind such speculations, Kleist’s wording points toward a more fundamental problem. How can a mass of people speak with one voice? How can what must be presumed to be a multiplicity of opinions – opinions we might suspect are as diverse as they are ever changing – be forged into one? And who, then, is the one that should have the authority to articulate the multiplicity of opinions as one voice? In Kleist’s novella, this is precisely what is at stake: who voices public opinion when and how? The public comes to prejudice Kohlhaas’s case differently as different people come to articulate “its” voice. As Luther demonstrates, the public and its opinion are invoked by those in positions of authority (by Luther, by Kohlhaas, and by the courts) to reflect and influence political decisions. To put it bluntly, Kleist shows how public opinion is not articulated by the governed, but by those who govern. It is not even that the public would be manipulated; the public merely (yet importantly) serves as an audience whose opinion is invoked by Luther to manipulate Kohlhaas and the Prince Elect of Saxony. By presenting the public as a threat to state authority, Luther gets the Prince Elect to reopen Kohlhaas’s case. My reading is premised on associating Luther with the state, rather than seeing him as the legitimate voice of the people. As indicated, he seems to care little about the people, but a lot about the stability of the political system and the reaffirmation of political authority. The novella’s overall concern with abuses of power might well be read in this context, too. The abuses by public officers we witness in Kohlhaas raise questions of political legitimacy from a broader, socio-historical perspective. The question of political legitimacy itself, however, must be tied to the separation of public from private interests which, socio-historically, is primarily about the stabilization and expansion of political authority. Niklas Luhmann reads the institution of public offices in particular as an important evolutionary accomplishment in the differentiation of political power. They made it possible to differentiate the political use of power from other forms of exerting social pressure or extending secret favor-

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

283

ites. Luhmann correlates the formation of public offices historically with the end of periods of increased conflict and shows that they had stabilizing effects by responding to the desire for protection and peace.²⁸ While the invention of “öffentliche Ämter,” or public office, goes back to antiquity, it is only in the Middle Ages that the judicial structure of the public office is defined more closely, allowing for the separation between public office and the person that holds the office. In this regard, public offices also establish spaces where the distinction between public and private can take hold. It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that public offices were fully conceived as positions [Stellen] existing independent of the individuals who filled them.²⁹ Only then did the older distinction public/secret merge with the distinction public/private, as the new meaning of public in the sense of “Publikum” took hold.³⁰ Kohlhaas’s reaction to the political abuses he encounters show ex negativo how public offices allow the reduction of overt violence. Violence does not disappear with the institution of public offices, but it is bound as threat and consolidated through the differentiation of the political system, for the sake, not of more or less appropriate political representation, but for the stabilization and expansion of power.³¹

 Public offices support the “stable, recursively usable and reusable codification of power” (see Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, ed. André Kieserling [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000], 91). They provide spaces that make political power visible without it constantly having to risk the instruments of power. In this context, see also Luhmann’s explanation for the emergence of political power: “Erst wenn wir zur Einflußform übergehen, die sich auf negative Sanktionen stützt, kommen wir zum spezifisch politischen (oder besser: politisierbaren, politikbedürftigen) Medium Macht” (Luhmann, Politik, 45).  While positions [Stellen] are invented to protect their public function from private abuses, the separation between private and public refers to expectations for such offices and does not preclude corruption or continued identification of the office with the person (a thematic discussed prominently, for example, in Kleist’s The Broken Jug). Put differently, the question is not if this separation is observed in every case, but how much public expectation and institutional parameters have developed in a society that register and sanction the conflation of the public with the private as corruption or otherwise as illegitimate.  I am drawing on Lucian Hölscher’s classic study Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Öffentlichkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), which is also one of Luhmann’s main sources for the changes in historical semantics he reads as indicative of the differentiation of an autonomous politial system.  Luhmann compares the “threat of violence” to the function money plays in the economic system: it is a precondition for the differentiation of the separate political system. (“Wie Geld für die Wirtschaft muss Drohmacht (nicht Konsens!) als Bedingung für die Ausdifferenzierung eines besonderen politischen Systems verstanden werden” [Politik, 52]). Luhmann argues that “every political communication involves the application of power, that is, the willingness if necessary to utter threats and coerce; otherwise it is not a political act, but an academic discussion,

284

Edgar Landgraf

We noted how Kleist’s syntax raises doubts about the representational qualities of the public opinion Luther cites. We can also define the problem more abstractly. The term “public” reduces a multiplicity of referents to a single referent, one that has no equivalent in the empirical world. There are only individual persons with a multiplicity of individual and ever changing thoughts, opinions, and interests.³² Kleist is certainly highly aware of this. As indicated earlier, his short treatise “The Very Last Word in Modern Educational Theory” suggests, albeit tongue-in-cheek, how fickle opinion and even the most heartfelt intentions are.³³ Kleist recognizes that such opinions and interests arise situationally and are produced by their articulation rather than preceding it. Both, the quantity and fickleness of public interests and opinions create a fundamental problem for a society that has grown too large (and too complex) to address every one of its acknowledged members (something perhaps still conceivable for the small demos that defined the political sphere in ancient Greece). Yet, the eighteenth-century political discourse demands that politics do just that, represent the interest of all the people. Under such conditions – that is, under the conditions of modernity – the public and its opinions become themselves a matter of opinion. More precisely, they become a matter of debate, something whose content is determined not by someone’s ability to represent more or less accurately actual, individual opinions, but by the particular interests, desires, or political agendas of those articulating those opinions. Considering these circumstances, it is unavoidable that those making political decisions assume the role of actors and performers who are playing to the public. To use a more contemporary vocabulary, we can observe an epistemic shift in Kleist’s writing. It recognizes how the public serves as an environment for the political and legal institutions of its time where (intentionally or not), actors/performers attribute expectations and opinions to it in pursuit of particular

a lecture, a beauty contest among the applicants that might at best have indirect political consequences” (see Politik, 54).  Luhmann also points toward a temporal problem, the impossibility to imagine “that a particular opinion is actualized by a large number of people at a particular point of time” (Niklas Luhmann, “Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System: Zur Theorie der öffentlichen Meinung,” in Öffentliche Meinung – Theorie, Methoden, Befunde: Beiträge zu Ehren von Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, ed. Jürgen Wilke [Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich: Alber, 1992], 78), and notes the chaos that would result if public opinion referred to what actual people actually thought, perceived, considered, or remembered.  There is a more serious problem at the center of the suggested Erziehungsplan, namely the observation that educational procedures that expect imitation fail to entice a student’s “eigentümliche Kraft des Herzens” (II, 332), something that is more likely to happen if a student finds herself in a socially contentious situation (e. g., exposed to bad mores).

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

285

political interests and agendas. Even where such opinions appear to be taken from (members of) the public itself, it remains in the hands of those in power to decide which opinions to adopt and how to react to them. In a diverse public, topics, themes, and interests vary as widely as the decisions or political programs one devises in response to them. Even where politics in turn solicits affirmation or rejection for its decisions and programs from the public/audience (in democracies, for example, through elections), it again is confronted with the problem that it itself has to decide what responses (didn’t vote for x, but for y) mean, which ones should count, how they are best addressed, and so on.³⁴ If we want to conceive of modern politics nevertheless as a feedback process, we have to stipulate that the feedback happens within the political discourse itself, rather than along the lines public interest –> politics –> public interest –> politics as liberal models from Rousseau to Habermas tend to suggest. The point is not to deny that the public would play a role in the political process, but to suggest that its role is comparable to that of an audience to a public performance. Such an audience has limited input options on the performance it witnesses on stage; yet, its presence nevertheless matters, namely in as much as those on stage (in power) include it into their strategic considerations. This implies that the actors on stage perceive a certain threat emanating from those that witness its doings – they might stay away, start throwing produce, or possibly even burn down the house – but even in the worst-case scenario, even facing an immediate threat of violence, the actors will be limited in their response by the rules of the “game” they are performing. ***

 Along these lines, Luhmann compares the use of the concept of public opinion to that of a mirror in which pubic communication can observe itself and, as in the older use of the metaphor, can idealize and moralize its own productions (“Man kann sie als einen durch die öffentliche Kommunikation selbsterzeugten Schein ansehen, als eine Art Spiegel, in dem die Kommunikation sich selber spiegelt. Das schließt, wie im alten Gebrauch der Metapher des Spiegels, Idealisierung und Moralisierung ein” [Luhmann, Politik, 286]). Similarly, Dirk Baecker argues that the public serves as a mirror, not only for politics, but also for other social subsystems, allowing them simultaneously to be indifferent and sensitive toward activities within the public sphere (see Dirk Baecker, “Oszillierende Öffentlichkeit,” in Wozu Gesellschaft? [Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007], 89). The idea of the people governing themselves, Luhmann understands as a myth that does not correspond to the structure and place of the political system in modern society. Yet, as Edwin Czerwick notes, such a myth nevertheless is important in sustaining democratic political systems (see Edwin Czerwick, Systemtheorie und Demokratie. Begriffe und Strukturen im Werk Luhmanns [Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008], 46).

286

Edgar Landgraf

In Michael Kohlhaas, this indirect (non-causal) relationship between the public and those in power comes to the fore most starkly in the fifth and perhaps most interesting instance where Kleist uses the term “öffentlich,” namely when a member of the lowest social strata, the skinner (Abdecker) comes to threaten the life of the treasurer (Kämmerer), the representative of the power structure which subjugates Kohlhaas. On the surface, the scene appears to contradict the claim that the public has no immediate effect on those in power. The skinner appears to mount a direct challenge to authority. The event unfolds in a public square where, “as bad luck would have it,” (2: 58) the skinner from Döbbeln comes to challenge the authority of treasurer Kunz von Tronka. The skinner’s challenge is represented most starkly when he does his private business, peeing, right in front of the treasurer on the market square. What the narrator calls “bad luck,” marks an important feature and consequence of the public space’s open accessibility, namely its unpredictability. In a public space, one does not know who will show up, what behavior one might encounter (it could be public urination), or what might happen. Such unpredictability harbors the potential of minor incidences having major consequences. In the case of the skinner, the whole spectacle attracts an ever-increasing mass of people and tensions unravel to the point where the treasurer almost loses his life.³⁵ The incident mirrors Kohlhaas’s own uprising against the authorities and seems to confirm Luther’s warning about the danger of the public taking Kohlhaas’s side. Yet, the argument this time around has the opposite effect, reversing the trajectory of Kohlhaas’s case: The riot in the palace square, as little as Kohlhaas was to blame for it, nevertheless aroused a feeling throughout the land, even among the more moderate and better class of people, that was highly dangerous to the success of his suit. It was felt the state had got itself into an intolerable position vis-à-vis the horse dealer, and in private houses and public places alike the opinion grew that it would be better to do the man an open wrong and quash the whole proceedings again, than to see that justice, extorted by violence, was done him in so trivial a matter, just to justify his crazy obstinacy. (Other Stories, 144; German, see 2: 63 – 4)

Kleist comes closest here to suggesting a notion of the public in the sense made famous by Habermas, a literate public that represents a voice of reason that would form in private homes, clubs, societies, and other public spaces – presumably through open discussion and a sense of solidarity. In his seminal Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas sees the role of such an enlight-

 “von Augenblick zu Augenblick sich vergrößernden Haufen von Menschen, den das Schauspiel herbeigezogen” (Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 58).

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

287

ened public to communicate “through public opinion the needs of society to the state.”³⁶ In Kleist, however, the enlightened public, this (in his words) “more moderate and better class of people” seems not to defend the interests of the people, nor is it a reliable source of reasonability. In an inversion quite typical for Kleist, these better people turn against the pursuit of justice. Rather than vouching for a state that is based on the rule of law, they come to support the state’s arbitrary rule. What makes matters worse (from the Habermasian perspective) is that their argument is per se not unreasonable, and yet, it fails to function as guarantor for justice or to legitimize a state based on the rule of law.³⁷ Despite the threat to the treasurer those in power subsequently do not come to adhere to the will voiced by the skinner or the people that gathered on the public square. The unpredictable incident served as an irritant, without determining, however, the direction Kleist’s case would take. Put differently, the incident presented both a risk and an opportunity for those in power. As the subsequent development of Kohlhaas’s case makes clear (soon thereafter, the amnesty that Luther had brokered is rescinded), the event allows the political authority (Obrigkeit) to reflect on its decision and adjust it to its advantage. Reflecting Kohlhaas’s overall case, rather than affecting a particular course of action, the incident instead is used to give legitimacy to the political authority’s breaking

 “Die politische Öffentlichkeit geht aus der literarischen hervor; sie vermittelt durch öffentliche Meinung den Staat mit Bedürfnissen der Gesellschaft” (Habermas, Strukturwandel, 90). Still in the second preface from 1990, where Habermas concedes that functional differentation makes it impossible to develop a holistic social theory (see Strukturwandel, 27), and he recognizes “dass sich die Staatsgewalt zum Medium einer Selbstorganisation der Gesellschaft verflüssigt,” (Strukturwandel, 22) he continues to define public opinion as such an exterior meta-normative “measuring stick” for the legitimacy (note the use of the modal verb “dürfen”) of the state and for the articulation of common interests in a pluralistic society (“Die sozialstaatlichen Massendemokratien dürfen sich, ihrem normativen Selbstverständnis zufolge, nur solange in einer Kontinuität mit den Grundsätzen des liberalen Rechtsstaates sehen, wie sie das Gebot einer politisch fungierenden Öffentlichkeit ernst nehmen” [Strukturwandel, 33]). Habermas subsequently points out, quoting the first edition of his book, that a shadow will be cast on his book’s contribution toward a contemporary theory of democracy “wenn es der ‘unaufgehobene Pluralismus der konkurrierenden Interessen […] zweifelhaft macht, ob aus ihm je ein allgemeines Interesse derart hervorgehen kann, daß daran eine öffentliche Meinung ihren Maßstab fände’” (Habermas, Strukturwandel, 33 and 339).  The episode lends support to Ogorek’s assessment that the novella is not about the question whether Kohlhaas’s action are legal or not, but rather about making visible poetically the limits of the law and it indebteness to political, religious, psychological, and mystical contexts (“die Begrenztheit der Rechtsdimension und ihre Eingebundenheit in politische, religiöse, psychologische und mystische Kontexte”); Regina Ogorek, “Adam Müllers Gegensatzphilosophie und die Rechtsausschweifungen des Michael Kohlhaas,” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1988/89: 98.

288

Edgar Landgraf

of the law – presumably to represent the interest of the public. As with the examiner in “On the Gradual Production” and with Luther earlier in the novella, at the center of the political system we find neither justice nor public interest, but the survival of political authority. Whether he was skeptical about the legitimacy of the modern political institutions or not, Kleist’s recognizes how politics is foremost about maintaining political authority, if necessary, even from the law. To that end, the public is but a means for the political system to maintain its autonomy – including its autonomy from the public. *** The suggestion that Kleist recognizes how politics constitutes a performance, a show that conceives of the public as an audience to which it caters primarily with the aim of sustaining its own, political interests raises broader questions about the aestheticization of modern politics as well as the overall function of politics within modern society. As Juliane Rebentisch in her recent study demonstrated, from Plato to Rousseau and beyond, the aestheticization of politics has been a perennial point of criticism, a supposed sign of the disintegration of politics, of its illegitimate splitting into “spectacle and audience,”³⁸ and perhaps even a sign, as Walter Benjamin famously concluded, of fascism. Yet, Rebentisch argues convincingly that aestheticization strategies are indispensable for any democratically conceived form of politics.³⁹ The ambivalence of Kleist’s texts vis-à-vis this question is reflected in the history of their reception. Their popularity with reactionary, nationalistic, and even fascist members of society in the first half of the twentieth century stands in stark contrast to the interest they garnered over the last few decades when, for the most part, they found adoration for their powerful subversive and deconstructive tendencies. The debate about Kleist’s political allegiance continues to this day. Earlier, I referenced Christiane Frey, Andreas Gailus, and Christian Moser who draw on Jacques Derrida and Georgio Agamben and read Kleist as exposing the “plague of sovereignty.”⁴⁰  Juliane Rebentisch, Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2012), 18.  In as much as we can assume, Rebentisch argues, that the “self of a collective self-government can never be presupposed as a simple unit, but must be produced in the act of political representation, […] the demos of democracy can never exist beyond the simultaneously enacted separation between representatives and represented, producers and receivers, those governing and those governed” (see Rebentisch, Die Kunst der Freiheit, 22– 23). While for Plato, the observation of this polarity forms the basis for his critique of democracy, Rousseau understands aestheticization as a perversion of democracy (see Rebentisch, Die Kunst der Freiheit, 23 and 271– 340).  Gailus, Passion, 9.

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

289

Read against the backdrop of such theories, Kleist appears as a (more or less disappointed) liberal idealist whose writings mark the contradictions, paradoxes, and hidden violence in the existing political order.⁴¹ Such readings on their flipside imply hopes for a form of “true” self-governance, without violence, and without self-indulging performances, where the interests of the public could find appropriate representation. In contemporary theory, Giorgio Agamben marks perhaps the most consequential attempt to think such an idealized form of governance to its end. Agamben theorizes the “intertwining of law and violence” as the “political space of modernity itself”⁴² where “all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception.”⁴³ Agamben’s understanding of modernity is based on the radicalization of a distinction that is central for the liberalization of politics, namely the distinction between private and public. Sacred life, for Agamben, is life that is without protection, life that is under the constant threat of violence, while politics, which Agamben equates with polis or the social life itself, is defined from its margins, as caught in a constant state of exception, and hence is conceived as always already operating above the law. In this tradition, the exposure of violence feeds revolutionary desires as well as utopian hopes for redemption, the creation of a society without violence, one that has overcome the tension between life and politics, the governed and the governing, the private and the public.⁴⁴

 Ricarda Schmidt points out how the reception of Kleist tends to reflect the preferences and historical concerns of the reception’s time more than that of Kleist’s texts. Examining the reception of Penthesilea in the early twentieth century, she finds, for example, that classic modernism did not identify Kleist with the “failure of all metarécits,” but rather saw in Kleist someone who articulated what were seen as fundamental truths about gender, German identity, or about (un)healthy and (un)natural behavior (see Richarda Schmidt, “Weiblicher Sadismus, Wutwelt des Liebes-Urwalds, Geschlechtskampf, absolutes Gefühl: Die Penthesilea-Rezeption in der Moderne,” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan [Rochester: Camden House, 2011], 162). Schmidt retains that Kleist conceptualizes gender both as performance and as natural essence and argues, I believe convincingly, that there is no clear political bias to the performance of traditional or non-traditional gender roles in Kleist: either can have or can fail to have emancipatory effects (see Richarda Schmidt, “Performanz und Essentialismus von Geschlecht bei Kleist: Eine doppelte Dialektik zwischen Subordination und Handlungsfähigkeit,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 [2011]: 380).  Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 174.  Agamben, Homo Sacer, 148.  Agamben draws on the “classic distinction between zoe and bios, between private life and political existence, between the simple human life, that has its place in the home, and the human as political subject that has its place in the state,” only to deny the efficacy of this distinction today (i. e., after Auschwitz) (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 197). A mediation of this opposite, a

290

Edgar Landgraf

Placing Kleist within such a narrative is problematic, as we saw, because he subscribes to a different, essentially contentious model of communication, because his texts constantly smash idealistic hopes, and because this narrative runs counter to the aestheticization strategies Kleist’s text themselves exhibit, strategies that in recent years received increased attention in the secondary literature.⁴⁵ Following Wolf Kittler’s seminal study, Kleist has been recognized as an author whose writing suggests means and strategies of aestheticization that help create nationalistic sentiments and the willingness for sacrifice that often call for (rather than help overcome) violence.⁴⁶ In David Pan’s assessment, these strategies anticipate, if not feed into the political abuses of the Nazis.⁴⁷ If we bring

return to what he calls “classical politics” is no longer possible as the private has been subsumed fully under the political. But neither is the return to a purely natural life (oikos) an option. Instead, Agamben projects as the “telos and enigma of occidental metaphysics” (Homo Sacer, 198) a “forma-di-vita” where the “bios,” one’s political existence, is fully subsumed under the “private,” where the “bios is only its zoe” (Homo Sacer, 198). Along this distinction, Agamben can make Auschwitz the “nomos of modernity” and read the camp’s equation of home and state as preventing us to distinguish between “what cannot be communicated and remains mute, and that, which can be communicated and spoken” (Homo Sacer, 197). Agamben thus presents us with a radicalized version of the eighteenth-century distinction between public and private and proposes with the forma-di-vita concept a sublation of the former under the latter that, I would suspect, suggests a form of private and universal consensus that has overcome the necessarily contentious nature of communication (which is necessarily social and therefore also political) by muting communication. Paradoxical or not, such a metaphysical ideal seems utterly incompatible with Kleist’s understanding of the contentious structure of communication and its assertoric force. It is also an ideal that has the potential to stifle the very (democratic) mechanisms (contradiction rather than consensus) that allow for the continued adjustment of political decision to changing public (and cultural) needs, interests, and opinions, that is, to the multi-cultural reality of modernity. For a more comprehensive critique of Agamben and related liberal ideologies, see esp. chapter 5 of William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents. On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London, Portland, and Coogee [Australia]: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004).  For a recent example, see Steven Howe’s analysis of The Battle of Herrmann which focuses on Kleist’s use of aestheticization techniques to point “people towards a communal ideal they cannot perceive unaided […] imposing, from a position outside any institutional framework, a patriotic spirit of “Brüderlichkeit” on a disoriented multitude” (Steven Howe, “‘Des Vaterlandes Grauses Sinnbild’: Legitimacy, Performance and Terror in Kleist’s Die Hermmannsschlacht,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 [2011]: 397).  Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie. Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1987).  Whereas von Mücke defends Kleist’s aestheticization strategies as exposing how the artifacts that produce history in an emphatic sense are “complex, heterogeneous, willfully appropriated” and “hence irreducible to a propagandistic paraphrase” (“The Fragmented Picture,” 51), David Pan argues that Kleist’s Prince of Homburg indeed provides “a template for the development of Ger-

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

291

to bear a broader, socio-historical account of the evolution of the political system of the West, a third option emerges, one that neither reads Kleist as a liberal idealist nor as a proto-fascist, but instead suggests that Kleist’s representations of the public are of analytic value, that they explore political challenges that are indicative of comprehensive social changes that affected Kleist’s time. From such a sociological viewpoint, we will find Kleist’s texts to be less about questions of legitimacy – which would require an outside perspective from where to assess the success or failure of politics to adhere to an ideal of representation – but about the recognition that such expectations themselves and the narratives that support them are motivated by power-interests, and often help sustain and consolidate those interests. From this vantage point, Kleist – perhaps closer to Nietzsche – appears as someone who recognizes the impossibility to subtract the assertion of power and (the threat of) violence from the social realm. Kleist texts present the Enlightenment’s hopes for an appeasement of Western society and its civilization history not as the result of reason or increased human sensibilities or as expressive of a stronger desire for justice emerging in the eighteenth century; nor as a consequence of expressions of solidarity and community. His writings acknowledge instead how power and political decisions only function if there is a credible threat of violence. In Kleist, this threat, as we saw earlier with regard to the essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts While Speaking,” permeates communication and therefore all forms of social interaction; yet, this contentious structure of communication also forms the basis for language’s productivity. As we saw, it is only when facing an audience that thoughts may form that have the potential to be inventive and (politically) effective. Conceiving the public as a mere audience, then, is not to ignore its role for modern politics, but to come to a more refined understanding of the complex (eluding linear causalities) relationship between the political system and what it choses to perceive (and react to) as its public. For Kleist – and this certainly can be read as a critique of the inactivity of Prussia’s political leadership in the early nineteenth century – the regard for the public underlines the need for those in power to prove themselves as performers who know how to play to their audience – to fortify their authority.

man culture” that culminated in the politics of personality as practiced by the Nazis (see David Pan, “Representing the Nation in Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan [Rochester: Camden House, 2011], 108).

292

Edgar Landgraf

Works Cited Agamben, Georgio. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Allan, Sean, and Elystan Griffiths. “Introduction. Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 327 – 336. Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by James Opie Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Second Edition. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Baecker, Dirk. “Oszillierende Öffentlichkeit.” In Wozu Gesellschaft?, 80 – 101. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007. Blamberger, Günther. Heinrich von Kleist. Die Biographie. Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2011. Blamberger, Günther. “Agonalität und Theatralität. Kleists Gedankenfigur des Duells im Kontext der europäischen Moralistik.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1999: 25 – 40. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Czerwick, Edwin. Systemtheorie und Demokratie. Begriffe und Strukturen im Werk Luhmanns. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008. Elias, Norbert. Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. 2 vols. 6th ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978. Fischer, Bernd. “Heinrich von Kleists vorgeführtes Erzählen.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 337 – 353. Fischer, Bernd. Ironische Metaphysik. Die Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists. Munich: Fink, 1988. Fischer, Bernd, and Tim Mehigan, eds. Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Frey, Christiane. “The Excess of Law and Rhetoric in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas.” Phrasis: Studies in Language and Literature 47, no. 1 (2006): 9 – 18. Frommel, Monika. “Die Paradoxie vertraglicher Sicherung bürgerlicher Rechte. Kampf ums Recht und sinnlose Aktion.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1988/89: 357 – 374. Gailus, Andreas. “Breaking Skulls. Kleist, Hegel, and the Force of Assertion.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 243 – 256. Gailus, Andreas. Passions of the Sign. Revolution and Language in Kant, Goethe, and Kleist. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. Hölscher, Lucian. Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Öffentlichkeit in der frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. Howe, Steven. “‘Des Vaterlandes Grauses Sinnbild’: Legitimacy, Performance and Terror in Kleist’s Die Hermmannsschlacht.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 389 – 404. Kant, Immanuel. Der Streit der Fakultäten. Edited by Horst D. Brandt and Piero Giordanetti. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2005. Kittler, Wolf. Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie. Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1987. Kleist, Heinrich von. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Edited by Helmut Sembdner. Munich: Hanser, 1965.

Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist

293

Kleist, Heinrich von. The Marquise of O—. And Other Stories. Translated by Martin Greenberg. New York: Criterion Books, 1960. Knobloch, Hans-Jörg. “Die Auflösung des Gesellschaftsvertrags in Kleists ‘Michael Kohlhaas.’” In Recht und Gerechtigkeit bei Heinrich von Kleist, edited by Peter Ensberg and Hans-Jochen Marquardt, 69 – 77. Stuttgart: Heinz, 2002. Krimmer, Elisabeth. “Between Terror and Transcendence: A Reading of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 405 – 420. Landgraf, Edgar. Improvisation as Art. Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives. New York and London: Continuum, 2011. Lange, Horst. “Wolves, Sheep, and the Shepherd: Legality, Legitimacy, and Hobbesian Political Theory in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen.” Goethe Yearbook 10 (2001): 1 – 30. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Edited by André Kieserling. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000. Luhmann, Niklas. “Staat und Staatsräson im Übergang von traditionaler Herrschaft zu moderner Politik.” In Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft 3: 65 – 148. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993. Luhmann, Niklas. “Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System: Zur Theorie der öffentlichen Meinung.” In Öffentliche Meinung – Theorie, Methoden, Befunde: Beiträge zu Ehren von Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, edited by Jürgen Wilke, 77 – 86. Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich: Alber, 1992. Mehigan, Tim. Heinrich von Kleist. Writing after Kant. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. Moser, Christian. “Angewandte Kontingenz. Fallgeschichten bei Kleist und Montaigne.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 2000: 3 – 32. Moser, Christian. “Recht als Krieg. Moderne Staatlichkeit und die Aporien legalistischer Herrschaft bei Heinrich von Kleist.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 71 – 92. Mücke, Dorothea von. “The Fragmented Picture and Kleist’s ‘Zerbrochner Krug.’” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 41 – 53. Ogorek, Regina. “Adam Müllers Gegensatzphilosophie und die Rechtsausschweifungen des Michael Kohlhaas.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1988/89: 96 – 125. Pan, David. “Representing the Nation in Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 93 – 111. Paß, Dominik. “Die Beobachtung der allmählichen Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden. Eine systemtheoretische Lektüre.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 2003: 107 – 136. Rasch, William. Sovereignty and Its Discontents. On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political. London, Portland, and Coogee (Australia): Birkbeck Law Press, 2004. Rebentisch, Juliane. Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2012. Schmidt, Ricarda. “Weiblicher Sadismus, Wutwelt des Liebes-Urwalds, Geschlechtskampf, absolutes Gefühl: Die Penthesilea-Rezeption in der Moderne.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 145 – 166. Schmidt, Ricarda. “Performanz und Essentialismus von Geschlecht bei Kleist: Eine doppelte Dialektik zwischen Subordination und Handlungsfähigkeit.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 374 – 388. Schneider, Helmut J. “Herrschaftsgenealogie und Staatsgemeinschaft: Zu Kleists Dramaturgie der Moderne im ‘Prinzen von Homburg.’” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 113 – 130.

294

Edgar Landgraf

Schwanitz, Dietrich. Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung und die Inszenierung der Wirklichkeit. Untersuchungen zur Dramaturgie der Lebenswelt und zur Tiefenstruktur des Dramas. Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1977. Theisen, Joachim. “‘Es ist ein Wurf, wie mit dem Würfel; aber es gibt nichts anderes:’ Kleists Aufsatz über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 68, no. 4 (1994): 717 – 44.

Sean Franzel

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form This essay explores the influence of the lecture form on discourses of the philosophy of history and cultural and literary history emergent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a period that witnessed considerable experimentation with the lecture in Germany and around Europe: even while remaining the primary mode of instruction in the German-speaking university, the lecture came to be reimagined amidst the rise of new ideas about education and knowledge production, as well as amidst the increased popularity of various sites of scholarly, literary, scientific, and theatrical performance outside the university. It is only recently, though, that the lecture has come to be considered as a mode of public presentation, as a central site for the production and transmission of knowledge in its own right. Scholars such as William Clark and Theodore Ziolkowski have considered the lecture as part of the changing university landscape of the period,¹ while others such as Jürgen Fohrmann have directed renewed attention to scholarly communication and knowledge production (gelehrte Kommunikation) in particular.² Ulrich Johannes Schneider has examined the crucial shifts in philosophical instruction in the nineteenth-century university, treating the lecture as an essential site of public discourse in the German and European contexts,³ and a recent monograph by Sibylle Peters provides an important genealogy of the lecture’s theatricality and performative nature from its historical roots up to the present.⁴ My own recent monograph expands on this scholarship, examining the theory and practice of lecturing around 1800 at a time when basic premises about its status and function were shifting considerably and new sites and styles of public presentation were emerging.⁵

 See William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).  See Jürgen Fohrmann, ed., Gelehrte Kommunikation: Wissenschaft und Medium zwischen dem 16. und 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Boehlau, 2005).  Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Philosophie und Universität: Historisierung der Vernunft im 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999).  See Sibylle Peters, Der Vortrag als Performance (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2011).  See Sean Franzel, Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013).

296

Sean Franzel

In this essay I want to examine the construction of notions of the present day and contemporary time in the scholarly consciousness of the period, for innovations in the lecture form across different institutional situations went hand in hand with a newfound awareness of the present as a transformative period in human history.⁶ Indeed, it was quite common for lecture series to fuse expansive historical narratives with diagnoses of present-day culture and politics, from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation to August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lectures on the history of literature and drama, from Friedrich Schlegel’s lectures on world history, to G.W.F. Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history and on the history of philosophy and art. It is thus useful to inquire as to the effects of the lecture as medium, social occurrence, and public presentation upon the historical consciousness of this era. My working hypothesis is that the very form of the lecture helped organize philosophies of history and the structure of historical address at work therein; in particular, I want to propose that the situation of oral presentation contributes to a sense of the present moment, such that the lecture helps lecturers and audiences to conceive of themselves as living at a distinct historical time and as members of recognizably modern cultures. Put differently, the lecture focalizes the time and place of articulation of philosophical discourse by encouraging listeners (and later readers) to view the past through the lens of the particular present moment in which the lecture takes place. Notions of presentism have long had pejorative overtones in historiographical debates, connoting a lack of historical objectivity and an inability to transcend the narrow concerns of one’s own particular situation. I want to use the notion of presentism less in this negative sense and more as a heuristic tool that helps to account for various social and cultural situations of scholarly speech as well of constructs of the present day encouraged by the scene of presentation or performance.⁷ Here I also engage with recent theories of performance that address the concept of presence and its temporal filiations.

 Koselleck speaks of the temporalization (Verzeitlichung) of human consciousness in this period; see “‘Neuzeit’: Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 300 – 348. See also Bianca Theissen, “Memories of the Future: The Temporalization of History in Romantic Narrative,” in The Poetics of Memory, ed. Thomas Wägenbaur (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1998).  On recent debates about presentism and literary historiography, see the recent issue of Romantic Circles on “Romanticism and Contemporary Culture,” especially David Simpson’s republished essay “Is Literary History the History of Everything?” and Jon Klancher’s essay “Presentism and the Archives,” accessed 14 June 2013, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/contemporary/ klancher/klancher.html.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

297

In what follows, I consider the examples of three lecturers and I sketch a partial, though altogether incomplete typology of constructions of the present at work in the lecture around 1800. I begin with Karl Philipp Moritz’s 1790 antiquarian lectures on the religious life of ancient Rome; as I show, Moritz maps the temporal unfolding of the lecture series onto the calendar year of ancient Rome and he deploys a quasi-theatrical model of antiquarian discourse. I then consider the lectures of A. W. Schlegel on literary history; his 1801– 1804 lectures on literature and the arts and his 1808 lectures on drama represent a pioneering moment in organizing literary history around an idea of distinct national traditions during a time of crisis in German-speaking lands. Schlegel’s lectures, like Moritz’s, profit from the analogy between scholarly presentation and theatrical performance. I then close with Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, which also present a historical narrative that covers different eras and cultures and foreground the reflective work of the audience. In each case, I am interested in the interrelation between the lecture form and these thinkers’ historiographical assumptions as well as in the ways they deploy the lecture form to the pedagogical end of generating a distinct sense of modernity.

1 The performance situation of the lecture: historical and theoretical presuppositions I would like to preface my discussion of these figures with a brief elaboration of some of this essay’s historical and theoretical presuppositions. It is worthwhile to draw on conceptual and methodological tools of historical performance studies when considering scholarly lecturing, not least because the lecture bears striking similarities to other kinds of performance such as theater, declamation, and improvisation, as well as visual and auditory spectacles of both secular and religious varieties.⁸ Certain features of the performance situation of the lecture stand out, including its status as an occasional presentation; its periodicity; its similarities to the theater in spatial layout and mobilization of the imagination; and its roots in cultures of textual commentary.⁹ On the one hand, the lecture is like other theatrical modes in that it is an occasional performance bound to a specific place and time. This occasionality

 See Sibylle Peters’s important account of the lecture form from the eighteenth century to the present in the context of performance studies (Der Vortrag als Performance).  Here I leave aside the use of scientific apparatuses, an important feature of scholarly lecturing that Claire Baldwin touches on in her contribution to this volume.

298

Sean Franzel

helps create an awareness of the uniqueness of the presentation and of time as something that is punctuated by eventful cultural occasions. One can often witness lecturers engaging with the scene of the lecture hall in highly self-reflective ways; in a preface to his 1808 lectures on the history of drama, for example, A.W. Schlegel construes the immediate emotional connection between speaker and audience as an event of almost historical importance, describing the scene of the lecture hall as an “unforgettable moment” where the entire audience was connected through “a relation founded by collective love for a more edifying formation of spirit.”¹⁰ Undoubtedly, the materiality of the performance situation – its physical setting, the embodied presence of the lecturer and audience, and other auditory and visual elements – leads to a sense of the “presentness” of the lecture, a sense that it is happening in the here and now. Recent scholars such as Peggy Phelan and Erika Fischer-Lichte work with a concept of presence to describe this setting, such that the performance situation is an embodied, ephemeral occurrence where actual physical presence is manifested that cannot be recreated or preserved.¹¹ Though in this essay I consider the construction of the lecture’s “presentness” more as a discursive effect that differentiates historical moments from each other than as an irreducibly essential feature of the performance situation, it does seem clear that the discourse presented in the lecture can be and often was influenced by its physical setting and occasional status. That said, the lecture’s temporality also diverges from that of the theater, insofar as lectures were frequently given as series; rather than being a single oneoff experience, an individual lecture was often one in a sequence of events. This serialization contributed to a sense of linear progression – of surveying distinct historical epochs in sequence –, but it is also arguably capable of producing an experience of time as cyclical. Much like liturgical service, lectures often occurred on a weekly basis, and those that lasted multiple years were often calibrated with certain yearly cycles such as seasonal breaks or semesters. Furthermore, lecture series were often repeated from one academic year to the next, a key feature of the form’s institutional situation. The lecture thus characteristically inter-

 A.W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner, vols. 5 and 6 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), 5: 15.  Peggy Phelan and Erika Fischer-Lichte grant concepts of presence and material immediacy privileged place in their theories of performance; see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London and New York: 1993) and Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). See also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

299

twines linear and cyclical temporal frames, and these frames map well onto depictions of historical time across a variety of discourses. It thus becomes pertinent to explore how the periodicities particular to the lecture are insinuated into the organization and modes of presentation of philosophical-historical discourse. Of course, other media certainly share attributes with the lecture: print publications emphatically mark their own historical eventfulness, they appear in serialized forms and are disseminated in a way not entirely dissimilar to the lecture’s one-speaker, multiple-listener model.¹² That said, features of the lecture do stand out as different from print. Institutional context is important here: in certain circumstances, the university setting lends credence to the discourse in question that it would not have in an extra-university setting (and the opposite is also certainly true, with extra-university lecturing on the rise in the Romantic era). In addition, one cannot go at one’s own pace with a lecture series (although one might argue that waiting for the next installment of a serialized print periodical is akin to waiting for the next lecture). Features that distinguish different media from each other are always under negotiation, as print and oral forms of speech metaphorize each other and incorporate features of each other into their self-presentation; print publication’s avid use of the rhetoric of oral address is an excellent example of this. For this reason it can be easy to overstate the case for the unique importance of the lecture as medium, especially when the only traces of many lectures are their printed versions. Despite this methodological complication and without wanting to reify too quickly the unique mediality of the performance situation, I would nonetheless argue that it remains worthwhile to look for traces of the performance situation in certain historical projects, especially those closely tied to cultures of scholarly presentation above and beyond the printed page. The proximity of lectures on historical topics in particular to other performance situations is also underscored by the analogy between historical discourse and theatrical stage. Indeed, all of the lecturers considered in this essay likened their activity to historical dramas. To be sure, it was all too common throughout the early modern period and the eighteenth century to suggest that listeners and readers are to imagine the events of the past as a grand “Schauspiel,” or spectacle, going back to the Baroque notion of the theatrum mundi. ¹³ This analogy

 On communicative models of dialogue and dissemination, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).  On earlier iterations of this commonplace, see Helmar Schramm, Karneval des Denkens: Theatralität im Spiegel philosophischer Texte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1996).

300

Sean Franzel

made immediate sense in the context of lectures not least because of the physical organization of the auditorium (with the scientific lecture hall being called an “anatomical theater” since the beginnings of university anatomical instruction). Another way that lecturers compared their own presentations to the theater was in terms of mobilizing the imagination of audience members. Historical narratives were cast as projects of imaginary recreation that call upon the outer sense of sight as well as upon the individual spectator’s inner vision or intuition (Michael Bies and Hans-Georg von Arburg discuss aspects of this conceptual landscape in their essays for this volume). In this context of this essay, I am interested in how this mobilization of the imagination across different media and performance situations was metaphorized in the service of constructing concepts of the present day or present historical period. The lecture also characteristically negotiates artifacts from the past, especially textual material – indeed, the lecture has always been a site where scholars comment on other texts. Writing about the lecture’s role in university education, Ulrich Johannes Schneider observes that “not only is the philosophicalhistorical lecture an expression of scholarly activity (as the articulation of different academic disciplines such as philosophy, literary history, or history) and an act of interpretation (of texts and of texts about texts), but the lecture also is speech, address, the making present of that which is spoken in the lecture in relation to the past.”¹⁴ Schneider’s concept of making the past present or “presentification [Vergegenwärtigung]” is useful here, for he describes another form of presentism at work in the lecture. As an inherently pedagogical form, the lecture entails reflection on the transmission of knowledge of the past; it is therefore hardly an accident that the lecture became a privileged site for experimenting with models of historical knowledge production around 1800, a time when the status and function of university instruction and public oratory were under renegotiation, with the early modern humanist rhetorical tradition coming to an end.¹⁵ The rhetorical tradition privileged the emulation of models of scholarly eloquence from the past; in the post-rhetorical paradigm, different strategies for interpreting and appropriating the past coalesced around emergent concepts of imagination, internalizing memory (Erinnerung), and historical Bildung, all of which attempted to theorize the operations of subjectivity as something that un-

 Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Philosophie und Universität. Historisierung der Vernunft im 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1999), 157.  See Dietmar Till’s essay on the end of the rhetorical paradigm in this volume; see also David Wellbery and John Bender, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. David Wellbery and John Bender (Stanford University Press, 1990), 3 – 39.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

301

folds through time.¹⁶ However, rhetorical and post-rhetorical models alike of making the past present involve the intermedial process of accessing historical texts via oral presentation. The making present of the past has therefore always been a medial occurrence; scholarly speech is always predicated on negotiating temporal and spatial distance by manipulating media. The “present” is therefore a concept that is in part constructed in relation to the past as manifested in printed and written texts.¹⁷ In turn, notions of the present, making present, or presentism play a central role in philosophies of history and in cultural histories more generally. It is typical for most philosophies of history to differentiate between historical eras by comparing various expressions of human culture, including religion, philosophy, art, social organization, etc. The project of creating a systematic overview of different historical periods is thus intertwined with this differentiation between past and present. Indeed, the claim to narrate the story of historical becoming from a proper (and properly modern) philosophical point of view is a defining feature of Romantic and Idealist philosophies of history. Phrased in the terminology of systems theory, at stake here is negotiating the difference between difference and unity: if historical judgment involves isolating different historical moments and placing these moments in relationship to each other, at stake in each case is the difference between the specific moment and its position in the larger whole of history, the difference between distinct elements and history as totality.¹⁸ Being able to negotiate this interrelation between part and whole is an essential task of the philosophy of history and it informs various constructions of the present as a point from which to gain a unified picture of the past. This differentiational structure (a structure that nonetheless strives to create a unified conceptual whole) likewise has a quasi-anthropological component: ascertain-

 See Peter Gilgen, Lektüren der Erinnerung: Lessing, Kant, Hegel (Munich: Fink, 2012); and Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).  This is another reason that I am less inclined to approach this notion of “making the past present” through an ontologically privileged notion of presence, and more interested in looking at specific descriptions of the historical and imaginative work involved in viewing the past. Here I side more with Auslander and his claim that the performance situation is always already “medialized,” as he puts it; see Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).  Here I draw on Gerhart von Graevenitz’s wide-reaching discussion of this differentational structure as the very structure of the nineteenth-century concept of Bildung. Gerhart von Graevenitz, “Memoria und Realismus: Erzählende Literatur in der deutschen ‘Bildungspresse’ des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Memoria: Vergessen und Erinnern, ed. Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann (Munich: Fink, 1993), 282– 304.

302

Sean Franzel

ing the particularity of the present involves differentiating between “this” or “our” culture and other cultures.¹⁹ The proliferation of philosophies of history in the eighteenth century always entailed reflections upon cultural difference as well as the construction of narratives that situated these differences in the context of a totality called the human. The presentism of the philosophy of history thus pertains to the quasi-anthropological question of what the culture of the present day is and what differentiates this culture from other past and present ones.

2 Moritz: the mirror of antiquity The lectures of Karl Philipp Moritz on Roman religion and ritual are an excellent site to test out some of the more general methodological reflections that have preceded. Along with being an accomplished literary author, Moritz served as professor of fine arts, mathematics, and perspective at the Prussian Academy of Arts and Mechanical Sciences in 1789, where he lectured on aesthetics, art history, ancient religion and mythology, perspective, and style. His lectures in Berlin between 1784 and 1792 filled a niche market for cultural awareness among lay audiences, attracting auditors from the entire city, not only students at the Academy of Arts. After traveling to Rome in the late 1780s, Moritz packaged his studies and experiences there in an Italian travelogue, a book on Greek and Roman mythology, and in his 1791 book entitled Anthusa, or Rome’s Antiquities, which details the festivals and rituals of ancient Rome. It is striking that Moritz first presented the Anthusa material as public lectures in 1790 at the Academy of Arts. In considering the influence of the performance situation upon this material, the following issues are of particular relevance: Moritz’s tendency to liken the operations of philosophical and historical observation to the theater; the temporal structures at work in these lectures’ subject matter as well as those structures manifested by the lectures’ periodic repetition; and Moritz’s account of similarities and differences between the ancient past and the modern present. Scholars have repeatedly noted that a quasi-theatrical structure pervades Moritz’s writings; Christopher Wild, for example, has described Moritz’s literary and scholarly oeuvre in terms of a “theater of observation,” such that the Morit-

 Though I do not thematize it in this essay, this structure of “us”/“them” obviously brings with it plenty of problems, including most importantly the often problematic terms of inclusion/exclusion into given cultures. For a discussion of constructions of race and ethnicity in late eighteenth-century Germany, see Birgit Tautz, Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2007).

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

303

zian observer “occupies the position of the spectator and his objects of inquiry that of the actors. The theatricalization of social and psychological events thus establishes the distinction between a subject and an object of observation. Only when the self begins to regard the events in which it takes part ‘like a drama’ [wie ein Schauspiel] can it detach itself and situate itself vis-à-vis as an observer.”²⁰ This observational structure creates a certain distance from that which is being observed (as if these events were “on stage”), and elicits emotional involvement vis-à-vis self and other akin to the structure of empathy in the theater. This “theater of observation” is at work in his groundbreaking proto-psychological journal project, the Magazine for Empirical Psychology [Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde], which presents readers with individual case studies from real life as well as from fictional narratives. Moritz intends for this logic of observation and spectatorship to facilitate increased symbiosis between scholarship and literary work and thus result in more authentic and accurate representations of human psychology and pathology.²¹ Key here is a structure of scholarly discourse that communicates the analysis of human experience via an empathetic pathos of quasi-theatrical observation, putting self and other onto a figural stage that is “a universal mirror [allgemeiner Spiegel] in which the human race can view itself [sich beschauen].”²² This construct of the observer plays an important role in other projects of Moritz, including his private lectures on art history, which included a series on the contents of the royal art museum (Gemäldegalerie). And Moritz’s writings about other cultures unmistakably invoke metaphors of dramatic performance and spectator-actor relations. In contrast to his earlier travelogue through England, though, which adopts the model of the Sternian sentimental journey and describes present-day cultures in quasi-anthropological fashion, the Anthusa project is a decidedly historical endeavor. The quasi-theatrical relationship of self and other takes on a different hue when transposed into an antiquarian discourse negotiating differences between past and present. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the basic postulates of Moritz’s lectures is that of historical distance: his presentations represent the “customs and practices of a people [Volk] no longer present.”²³ That said, he describes the task of the lectures in expressly visual,

 Christopher J. Wild, “Theorizing Theater Antitheatrically: Karl Philipp Moritz’s Theatromania,” MLN 120 (2005): 507– 558, 531.  See Moritz’s “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungs-Seelenkunde,” in Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 1: 793 – 809, 798.  Moritz “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin,” 797.  Karl Philipp Moritz, “Anthusa oder Roms Alterthümer,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Yvonne Pauly (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), 4.1: 17. This preface is an edited version of Moritz’s separately pub-

304

Sean Franzel

if not theatrical terms, claiming to depict “scenes from the past”²⁴ to the present age and thus create a sense of participation [Theilnehmung], a term that resonates with the semantic field of empathy (Mitleid, Theilnahme) so central to the theatrical aesthetics of the late eighteenth century (see also Wiggins’s essay in this volume on this topic). Rejecting simple antiquarian documentation, Moritz aims at a plastic, engaging representation: “we” are to “see” this “this people before us, acting and living in its homes and on its streets and public places of gathering.”²⁵ Traces of the performance situation of the lecture are evident here: as if placing the audience in the position of theatergoing spectators, Moritz hopes that audience empathy for the Roman people will help enhance and authenticate his historical portrayal. Bridging the gap between audience participation and historical observation depends on observing the everyday actions of the Roman people: “to be able to participate in festivals, the celebration of which has long since faded away, it is necessary to observe them in their continuous relation to actual, everyday life [das wirkliche Leben], as a genuine consecration of actual life and as moments of an elevated enjoyment of life.”²⁶ There is a certain realistic element to these accounts of concrete rituals and festivals, which parallel empirical impulses in Moritz’s experiments with the psychological case study. But the Anthusa material also contains a considerable dose of aestheticization, such that “observing” antiquity entails viewing Roman culture as a work of art, a unified totality that exists “for the sake of its own self.”²⁷ This notion of culture as artwork is at the heart of Moritz’s theatricalization of cultural-historical discourse in the lecture hall. This pathos of observation helps Moritz present the relevance of ancient Rome for the present day, obviating historical distance at the same time as underlining it. In this context Moritz calls the imaginative contemplation of the ancients a mode of self-reflection, a “mirror that casts our own image back to us [entgegenwirft] much more completely and truly than our own contemporaries do.”²⁸ This mirror metaphor places “spectators” and “actors” into a quasi-dramatic frame as

lished 1789 “Über die Würde des Studiums der Altertümer,” which was published separately in 1789 in anticipation of attaining his appointment at the Academy of Arts. The text is reprinted in Anthusa, 3 – 6. The language and rhetoric of this programmatic piece recurs throughout the Anthusa material.  Moritz, “Anthusa,” 28.  Moritz, “Anthusa,” 17.  Moritz, “Anthusa,” 28.  Moritz, “Anthusa,” 3.  Moritz, “Anthusa,” 18.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

305

in the Empirical Psychology project discussed above, though here Moritz invites comparison between modern and ancient forms of community and sociability. In this way, the Anthusa lectures invite reflection on their own “public” or “popular” status as communal events by comparing modern and ancient scenes of communal life. When coupled with the metaphor of the theatrical stage, the mirror metaphor carries much of the philosophical-historical weight of the Anthusa lectures, setting up a reflexive structure that establishes both the difference and the unity of the past and present. The present day achieves a proper self-understanding by finding itself reflected in antiquity. Though tropes of the past as mirror have always been quite common, Moritz feeds this metaphor through the particular performance situation of late eighteenth-century scholarly culture, presenting his audience with an argument for the normativity of the ancients filtered through the scene of scholarly performance and the privileging of the individual recipients’ imaginative capabilities. A further feature of the Anthusa lectures’ construction of a sense of the modern-day present involves Moritz’s organization of the material according to the calendar year. As we have seen, Moritz’s lectures are predicated on an emphatic sense of temporal progression and historical difference. However, unlike chronologies that track historical time through different historical peoples (from Egypt to Greece to Rome, etc., as in later historicist lectures) or narratives of Rome’s “decline and fall,”²⁹ Moritz’s account of Roman festivals establishes a cyclical movement tied to seasonal rhythms. “We will let the description of the festivals follow upon each other according to the order of the days and months, wandering through the most remarkable scenes of antiquity with the calendar that has been preserved for us.”³⁰ In this way, the Anthusa material aligns the periodicity of the Roman religious calendar with the sequential temporality of the lecture form, as different scenes from Roman life unfold on a weekly basis in the Academy of Arts auditorium. Furthermore, by not marking Rome’s inevitable decline, Moritz’s historical narrative lends Roman antiquity an aura of eternal repetition, and thus aids in the project of making the past present to Moritz’s contemporaries. Moritz’s account of the Saturnalia festivals underscores this sense of cyclical return, the sense that modernity continues or preserves certain features of the ancient past. For Moritz, the Saturnalia is one of the central, crowning examples of Roman public life, and he ends the Anthusa material by invoking the Saturna-

 Famously told by Edward Gibbon in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 – 1789), a contemporaneous project to Moritz’s research for Anthusa.  Moritz, “Anthusa,” 29.

306

Sean Franzel

lia as the quintessence of a society that weaves together religion and everyday life into a beautiful whole.³¹ In typical classicist fashion, Moritz views the persistence of traces of the Saturnalia up to the present day as proof that there is a universal human need to momentarily inhabit a state of freedom and equality.³² Reiterating one of the central paradoxes of carnival, namely that the event is viewed both as ephemeral and as persisting long past its momentary eventfulness, Moritz suggests that carnival manifests the continuity between past and present and preserves ideals of beauty and freedom. It is striking, though that Moritz uses a description of modern carnival to make this point, with the Anthusa material quoting extensively from Goethe’s The Roman Carnival [Das römische Carneval], a text that was originally published on its own in 1789 and later incorporated into Goethe’s Italian Journey. Here Moritz speaks of his choice to use Goethe’s text: If the carnival ever brings the old Saturnalia vividly into view, as if in a new costume, this occurs in Rome itself, where considerably more of the old customs shimmer through in the new ceremonies than one might believe at first glance. Let us hear of the carnival, or the new Saturnalia of the Romans, from a narrator whose description is so complete and masterful that the spectator can take only it as his most authorative source.³³

He then quotes selected passages from Goethe’s travelogue, moving between Goethe’s account of specific scenes and his more general reflections. Moritz continues to use theatrical metaphors to compare past and present (also a key feature of Goethe’s text): contemporary Rome manifests ancient festivals in a new “costume” and its historical core is discernable by attentive “spectators” or “eyewitnesses” who place Roman popular collectivity before their mind’s eye.³⁴ Taking a step back then, Moritz’s lectures experiment with forms of popular, public performance by self-reflectively depicting popular life in the lecture. Moritz asks his audiences both to “participate” in narrative or imagistic fictions and to observe them at a distance, a structure that is similar to the logic of theater and its dialectics of sympathy and distance. Moritz offers his audience not just the terms  See Moritz, “Anthusa,” 257.  See Moritz, “Anthusa,” 160.  “Wenn nun dieß Karneval irgendwo die alten Saturnalien, gleichsam in einer neuen Kostume, lebhaft wieder vors Auge bringt, so ist es in Rom selbst, wo noch weit mehr von den alten Gebräuchen, bei den neuen Ceremonien durchschimmert, als man beim ersten Anblick glauben soll. Von dem Karneval, oder den neuen Saturnalien der Römer, wollen wir einen Erzähler hören, dessen Beschreibung hievon so vollkommen und meisterhaft ist, daß auch der Augenzeuge sich nur auf dieselbe beziehen kann” (161).  On the status of Moritz’s discourse as popular and on his accounts of popular collectivities across his oeuvre, see Sean Franzel, Connected by the Ear.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

307

according to which scenes of foreign popular life might be observed, but also a certain set of conceptual tools drawn from the language of theatrical aesthetics with which to reflect in fresh ways on historical forms of social and political life. Stated differently, Moritz develops a conceptual and rhetorical framework for individuals to experience their own reflection on social belonging as itself a mode of specifically modern communal life. Listeners and readers are encouraged to turn themselves into their own spectacle, to use different performance situations and media such as the lecture, the theater, and the printed page as metaphorical “mirrors,” and thereby to become both spectator and actor on the level of the imagination.

3 A.W. Schlegel: the nation on stage Like Moritz, A.W. Schlegel was a prominent and successful lecturer outside of the university, though Schlegel’s most influential presentations occurred in a rather different political context. Schlegel’s 1808 lectures on the history of drama in particular are set against the backdrop of the military defeats of Prussia and Austria at the hands of Napoleonic France. Echoing other contemporary calls for national resistance to Napoleon from a variety of political positions, Schlegel’s lectures present the notion of a unified German national community as a necessary, yet vexed project that can only take place by cultural rather than political means at the present historical moment. Schlegel’s lectures are a key site where the discourse of early German nationalism emerges amidst the “culture of defeat”³⁵ in Prussia, Austria, and the rest of the German-speaking lands in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Schlegel’s account of the relation of past and present in his 1801– 1804 Berlin Lectures on Literature and the Fine Arts and his 1808 Vienna Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature is based upon a concept of distinct cultural nationalities and of the privileged role of the German people, as well as upon the conceit that his own lectures enact popular cultural life in a time of fragmentation and disunity. For Schlegel, a collective interest in literature converges in the lecture, and literary history is an integrative force and a “reservoir for the self-consciousness of the nation.”³⁶ Here Schlegel offers one of the first narratives of the historical and philosophical interrelation of all art forms, anticipating Hegel’s achieve-

 See Wolfgang Schievelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery (Picador, 2004).  Jürgen Fohrmann, “Literaturgeschichte als Stiftung von Ordnung. Das Konzept der Literaturgeschichte bei Herder, August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel,” in Kontroversen, alte und neue, ed. Eberhard Lämmert and Wilhelm Vosskamp (Göttingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 75 – 84, 84.

308

Sean Franzel

ments in this field and laying the groundwork for nineteenth-century historicism more generally. Like Herder, Schlegel and his brother were pioneers in infusing literary criticism with a philosophical-historical narrative. As Schlegel recognized, it is the challenge of art history to explain how and why different paradigms of cultural production follow upon each other while at the same time treating particular cultures as independent and self-sufficient ends in themselves.³⁷ The concept of the nation serves as both the “axis for succession and the center”³⁸ of the moments punctuating Schlegel’s literary-historical narrative; according to Schlegel, artworks are “always tied to a national and local element” and fixed in “a particular nationality.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, both lecture series reserve a particular role for German-speaking lands. Of all modern European “nations,” the Germans are best able to combine nationality and “universality,” that is to say the ability to understand and appreciate all cultural forms. Citing recent German advances in translation, literary history, and art history, Schlegel claims that German thought and art is defined by its ability to transcend its limitations, to “externalize” itself and appropriate other cultural forms. This path to cultural achievement lies in attaining a position of “universality of education [Universalität der Bildung],”³⁹ a standpoint that his lectures purport to enact.⁴⁰ This specifically German philosophical and cultural universality successfully overcomes the challenge of distinguishing between national differences and the unity of historical development in the face of the inherent limitations and blindspots of all cultures (which tend to prefer their own styles over others). This is a critical and translational project, to be sure – Schlegel was himself an accomplished translator – and it is in this philological work that we see traces of the historical role of the lecture in commenting on and elaborating historical texts. Schlegel thus presents his lectures as a vehicle for defining “Germanness” as well as for theorizing cultural history more generally. Schlegel’s construction of the present moment as a time of universalist Bildung is complicated, however, by his account of the fragmentation and alienation of the present day. For Schlegel, the political ills of German-speaking

 August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Vorlesungen über die romantische Literatur,” in Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, ed. Ernst Behler, Frank Jolles, and Claudia Becker, 3 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989), 2.1: 1– 194, 191.  Fohrmann, 81.  Schlegel, “Vorlesungen über die romantische Literatur,” 65.  Schlegel goes so far as to conjecture that recent scholarly achievements could well lead to the German language becoming the “universal organ of communication [allgemeines Organ der Mitteilung] for the educated nations,” a scholarly lingua franca akin to the Latin of centuries past.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

309

lands under Napoleonic occupation go hand in hand with the ills of the literary and scholarly world. Critiquing the anti-social pedantry of recent decades and the deleterious effects of a fractious and ineffective print public sphere, Schlegel stylizes the literary-critical lecture as a vehicle for regenerating contemporary public life, for the lecture is a communal and sociable event that directly intervenes in the literary culture of the nation. Not dissimilarly to Moritz, Schlegel suggests a holistic notion of cultural nationality, but he is more emphatic in conceptualizing Germany in this light and in casting his own lectures as an event of national importance. In the preface, he recalls the collective scene of the lecture hall and the shared emotion that was supposedly felt by all: “In the spiritual realm of thought and poetry, inaccessible by worldly power, the Germans – many times over divided – feel their unity; in the midst of confusing future prospects, we can gain an elevating sense of the great, eternal calling of the German people – which has remained unmoved in its dwelling place since the beginning of time – in this feeling, of which writers and orators should be the mouthpiece.”⁴¹ Listeners are unified by contemplating the German nation as a unified cultural force, a force that writers and orators such as him are capable of imagining. Here we can see the quasi-anthropological underpinnings of Schlegel’s literary-historical discourse, as he construes the contemplation of a cultural whole as the formation of that whole. In turn, the organization of the Berlin and Vienna lectures’ subject matter might seem to support Schlegel’s claim that German Bildung is capable of surveying the whole of (European) cultural history, to present a “universal overview [allgemeiner Überblick].” The lectures move through different national traditions one by one, suggesting that each is a self-contained whole. Of course, any discursive presentation can construct the unity (or disunity) of its object through formal and rhetorical manoeuvers, but it seems worthwhile considering the extent to which natural breaks in lecture presentations generate an especially stark sense of boundary and delimitation. The periodicity of the lecture and its constraints of time and place might well be viewed as medial features that enable a sense of self-contained national wholes and their sequential relationship to each other. Though there are obviously more factors contributing to the early nineteenth-century notion of cultural nationality than the formal and medial features of the lecture, it does seem plausible that overlapping forward movement of the lectures as well as their subject matter (from antique theater to the Italians, from the French to Shakespeare to German theater) helps to create

 A.W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner, vols. 5 and 6 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), 5: 15.

310

Sean Franzel

a cumulative effect of overview and a sense of having reached the present day at the end of the series. Indeed, Schlegel’s 1808 lectures on drama reflect quite explicitly on the lecture as a site that manifests unified national collectivity, concluding with a discussion of the contemporary German stage and its future prospects. One the one hand, theater is a privileged site where national community is formed: “nationality can and must emerge most decisively in the drama.”⁴² But for Schlegel, the dramatist and the popular orator (Volksredner) are both equally able to incorporate the audience into a national, political body: “The task is to have an effect on a gathered crowd, to capture their attention, to awaken their participation [Theilnahme]. In this way, the poet shares a certain part of his duties with the popular orator.”⁴³ Both engage a collected group of people, and both elicit the “participation” of their audiences by manipulating their bodily reactions. Schlegel’s notion of participation shares much with Moritz, though Schlegel understands audience participation less in terms of “viewing” scenes of public life and more in terms of bodily control: “The dramatic poet as well as the public speaker [Volksredner] must transport his listeners […] through strong impressions, he must control their attention corporeally.”⁴⁴ Nationality emerges when the Volksredner or dramatic poet is able to unify the emotional response of the audience: “By being placed in such lively emotional transports […], each person perceives the others having the identical sentiment [Rührung], and thus, former strangers come to be intimates suddenly, in an instant.”⁴⁵ This places unique importance upon on the bodily co-presence (to use a preferred term of performance studies) of spectators and orator or actors in the moment of performance. Schlegel’s notion of empathy emphasizes the emotion’s embodied aspects more than Moritz, who describes the scene of theatrical viewing almost more as a metaphor for the workings of the individual imagination than as a concrete collective scene. In contrast, Schlegel imagines that the distance between stage and audience disappears, as the entire performance becomes a single cultural event instantiated by the circulation of moving sentiment. In such passages, the task of philosophical and historical reflection recedes into the background, pointing to a clear tension in Schlegel’s concept of the nation, for he must alternate between privileging philosophical-historical reflection (Bildung) and privileging embodied sentiment as that which generates a sense of cultural unity in the current context of Ger-

   

Schlegel, Schlegel, Schlegel, Schlegel,

Vorlesungen Vorlesungen Vorlesungen Vorlesungen

über über über über

dramatische dramatische dramatische dramatische

Kunst Kunst Kunst Kunst

und und und und

Literatur, Literatur, Literatur, Literatur,

5:34. 5:35. 5:35. 5:36.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

311

man-speaking Europe in which he so clearly situates his own critical intervention. But Schlegel does privilege a particular variety of drama in closing the lecture series with prescriptions for the present German stage. His discussion of German theater comes at the very end of the lectures, after surveying the works of Shakespeare (the adoptive German par excellence of the Storm and Stress and the Early Romantics), and the English and Spanish theaters. Asking as to the future direction of the German stage at a time when it is still in need of development and lacking a clear, centralized representative location, Schlegel rejects both the classicist model of the French theater and the chaos of the entertaining comedies and melodramas that were so popular at the time, advocating instead a form that would “develop the serious, higher forms of the German character with dignity.”⁴⁶ Historical dramas in particular are capable of depicting previous eras of German glory, “transport[ing] us entirely into the great pre-history [versetze uns ganz in die grosse Vorzeit].”⁴⁷ Schlegel has in mind the historical dramas of Schiller and Goethe, but he also calls for the glorification of the Holy Roman Empire (which had just collapsed under Napoleon) and the Hapsburgs, the Austrian Empire’s ruling family (he is lecturing in Vienna, after all). Schlegel explicitly conceptualizes these kinds of historical dramas as “mirrors” that reflect the German nation back to itself: “Let the poet look for us into this mirror, even if it causes us to blush with shame to see what the Germans have been in the past and what they should become again.”⁴⁸ Such plays should both inspire and shame contemporary Germans, encouraging self-reflection by depicting both the strengths and the limitations of past and present Germans – in a sense, Schlegel conditions the structure of wholescale empathetic/sympathetic association explored by Moritz. Seen against the backdrop of the subsequent boom in German historical drama in the early and mid-nineteenth century, Schlegel’s embrace of this form appears quite prescient.⁴⁹ The literary-historical lecture and the historical drama thus play similar roles in representing, mirroring, and manifesting the German nation back to itself. On the terms of the Vienna lecture series, transporting the audience back to its “prehistory” functions as a way to take control or possession of the present moment, an empowering act that brings the German nation into being through self-memorialization. By closing the lecture with the gesture of leading the audience up to

 Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 6:289.  Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 6:286, 291.  Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 6:290.  On the rise of the historical drama in the early nineteenth century, see Wolfgang Struck, Konfigurationen der Vergangenheit: Deutsche Geschichtsdramen im Zeitalter der Restauration (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997).

312

Sean Franzel

the present day, Schlegel performs the cumulative effects of Bildung, but he also underscores his vision that the performance situation contributes to the formation of national community. This emphasis on the present manifestation of discursive community through historical reflection is a key feature of what I want to call the presentism at work in Schlegel’s thought; in both cases, a sense of contemporary cultural lack under Napoleonic occupation is compensated for by aesthetic and scholarly means. But even though Schlegel does present the scholarly lecture and the theater as analogous, it would seem that the project of nationalist historical drama – which creates and responds to the need for the repeated rememorialization of the nation – and the cumulative project of literary history also diverge in certain key ways. The more chauvinistic and limitedly “German” the historical drama becomes, the less capable it is of appreciating foreign forms. Of course, Schlegel’s rather inflated concept of the universality of the German critical spirit is supposed to be able to manage the paradox between being self- and other-directed (between seeing only the German nation in the mirror and seeing a rich multiplicity of cultural nationalities), but one can witness in Schlegel some of the central tensions between cosmopolitan and more rigidly nationalist visions of transnational literary history (as well as of contemporary “world” literature) under development in the nineteenth century.⁵⁰

4 Hegel: the Bildung of modernity Hegel is not usually put in the same category as other prominent Romantic-era public speakers, not least because he had “an (apparently well-deserved) reputation for being a bad lecturer.”⁵¹ Hegel came to maturity as a university instructor later than the likes of Fichte and Schleiermacher, after the nationalistic rhetorics of scholarly vocation of the Napoleonic era had subsided to a certain extent under the censorship of the Restoration. But there remain compelling reasons for considering Hegel as part of a line of thinkers who actively rework the pedagogy of the lecture in the wake of the Idealist and Romantic reconceptualization of

 On tensions between cosmopolitan and nationalistic conceptions of Weltliteratur, see John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisana State University Press, 2006), 18 – 46.  “Hegel almost certainly had a very common type of speech impediment; when he had to speak formally before groups, he was led either to stutter or to lecture in slow, groping monotones.” Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 282.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

313

scholarship.⁵² As an orator, Hegel was not as accomplished or ostentatious as Fichte or A.W. Schlegel, but he nonetheless placed particular importance on the university lecture as a site that exemplarily manifests modern Bildung. Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Hegel lectured repeatedly and continuously throughout his life; this was a key constant in his professional life as scholar in Tübingen, Jena, Nüremberg, Heidelberg, and Berlin. In this final section I suggest ways in which the scene of the lecture insinuated its way into the very historical structure of Hegel’s thought. By comparing Moritz, Schlegel, and Hegel, we can see how notions of historical Bildung are inflected by the performance situation; here I use Bildung to mean both the institutionally grounded education of the individual and a principle of world-historical development or formation (a sense that Herder popularized in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind). The performance situation bears on both of these senses of Bildung, for Bildung is, on the one hand, something to be occasioned in the individual recipients and, on the other, the proper subject matter of historical discourse, namely the development and formation of human culture. Additionally, like Moritz and Schlegel, Hegel’s philosophical project as a whole might well be read as a form of philosophical anthropology, for he attempts to describe the collective meaning-making of distinct cultures throughout history, including that of present-day German-speaking lands.⁵³ For Hegel, philosophical knowledge is the highest level of human selfknowledge. Hence, imparting to his audience a philosophical approach to history instantiates the coming to self-knowledge that is itself historical development: instruction and the articulation of philosophy qua science (Wissenschaft) are thus one and the same task.⁵⁴ It is in this convergence of pedagogy and philosophical systematicity where the presentism of Hegel’s influential lectures be-

 Indeed, Pinkard views Hegel exactly in this new paradigm of Romantic-Idealist lecturing: “The ideal of the Berlin lecturer found one form of its realization in Hegel: that ideal held that the professor would in his monologue actually create a dialogue – that instead of simply handing over facts to the students in the lecture hall, he would somehow embody in himself and bear witness in his lectures to the way in which one explores thinking as an ongoing process rather than something already over and done with and whose finished results were only to be communicated. […] The students felt that they were witnessing the actual working out of a thought, not just being handed something that had already been decided” (612).  Again, here, I use anthropological in a rather general sense, as a (philosophical) science of the human. Gillian Rose’s excellent book Hegel Contra Sociology supports reading Hegel in the broader context of competing anthropological and sociological theories of modernity, and she calls Hegel’s aesthetic lectures the “most ‘sociological’” of his works. See Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009), 129.  See Schneider, 125.

314

Sean Franzel

comes especially apparent, for the process of historical self-reflection is for Hegel simultaneously a process of transformative self-reflection on the present day. Hegel gave his lectures on the philosophy of history five times. Most of his lecture series present the historical scope of his philosophical system, including his lectures on the history of philosophy, aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of right. This repetition of the narrative of the becoming of modern, historical consciousness is thus one of the central elements of Hegel’s pedagogy as university lecturer. The key agent in Hegel’s narrative in his lectures on the philosophy of history is World-Spirit (Weltgeist) which can be roughly defined as the cultural self-knowledge of humankind as collective whole. Like Schlegel and Moritz, Hegel invokes metaphors of vision and theatrical spectatorship in his account of the process of the World-Spirit coming to know itself, calling history both a theater and a painting⁵⁵: “on the stage on which we are observing it – world history – spirit displays itself in is most concrete reality.”⁵⁶ These metaphors draw attention to the act of historical imagination and reflection in which Hegel and his audiences are engaged, much in the same way as Schlegel and Moritz. Hegel also similarly describes world history as a dynamic process in which specific cultures or peoples are the main actors. World-Spirit is a culminating aggregate of the experiences of specific national spirits (what he calls the “spiritual totality, the spirit of a people [geistige Gesamtheit, der Geist eines Volkes]”⁵⁷), and the philosophy of history describes the organizing principles of these distinct “spirits of a people [Volksgeister]” – their religion, art, form of political organization, and technical achievements. For Hegel, a proper philosophy of world history shows how self-conscious rationality comes to know itself in and through the cumulative achievements of specific peoples – as he describes it, concrete moments of human self-apprehension⁵⁸ are the “material” of reason, the historical events through which reason manifests itself. Hegel defines the self-knowledge of specific historical peoples via a key concept of his entire thought, namely Sittlichkeit, often translated as “ethical life.” Sittlichkeit is the ethical and political system of a given people insofar as it is constituted both by objective laws and by a people’s acceptance and implementation thereof; as Hegel puts it, Sittlichkeit is “the vitality of the state in the in-

 In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel calls history a “gallery of images;” see Gilgen, 179.  I will cite from both the German and English versions. G.W.E. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 29; Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 16.  Hegel, 72, 52.  Hegel, 55, 38.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

315

dividuals who compose it [die Lebendigkeit des Staates in den Individuen].”⁵⁹ It is important to take both these objective and subjective sides of ethical life into account, because for Hegel, simply having formal, abstract laws is not enough to sustain a political or legal system. Instead we must also be attentive to how individual actors affirm that system of laws and work through them themselves, thus helping to produce a larger set of collective assumptions and beliefs. In effect, Hegel’s philosophical anthropology is concerned with how politics, science, art, and religion bring individuals into resonance with the larger general will of a given historical culture. It is in this context that Hegel’s lectures appear as a kind of presentist pedagogy, for Hegel’s account of Sittlichkeit as the individual’s selfknowledge as part of a cultural whole can be seen as a model for what he wants his lectures to achieve. As Hegel argues, “man must also attain a conscious realization of this his spirit and essential nature, and of his original identity with it”;⁶⁰ here, unified Sittlichkeit is the conditioning factor for historical peoples to produce themselves and act as historical agents. Insofar as spirit is always historical in nature, the apprehension of historical permutations of Weltgeist through philosophical-historical reflection in institutions of German higher learning is not simply a historical project, but rather a form of cultural selfawareness based in a sense of the present as the cumulation of historical processes. Contemporary German listeners and readers are to see their own consciousness as the result of world historical developments, and it is the particular challenge and opportunity of modern life to attain this level of self-reflection. In this context it is necessary, according to Hegel, for modern students to work through the deficiencies of the past so as to better compensate for them in the present. In contrast to Schlegel, however, for whom the self-knowledge of German national belonging had a more urgent end in resisting Napoleon, the political stakes are more subdued for Hegel in Restoration-era Prussia. There is much less pathos of fragmentation and alienation, much less “culture of defeat” (Schievelbusch) in Hegel’s work, and this has been read by some later commentators as a sign of conservatism. Though I will not go into Hegel’s politics and his defense of constitutional monarchy as the form of modern statehood that best corresponds to the Volksgeist, or spirit of the people, of Germany (a topic much discussed in the secondary literature), I do want to reiterate that Hegel articulates an emphatic vision of the overlap and even unity of scholarly pedagogy and historical-systematic philosophical science (Wissenschaft), something that

 Hegel, 72, 52.  Hegel, 69, 50.

316

Sean Franzel

remains a remarkable achievement in the history of philosophy. It is the German university of Bildung and Wissenschaft where modern individuals realize their world-historical destiny, where the German Volksgeist produces itself.⁶¹ Hegel positions his lectures on the philosophy of history (which he read on five different occasions) quite decidedly in the academic setting, as a form of Bildung that helps students to orient themselves and organize other modes of knowledge. The stakes of Hegel’s philosophical pedagogy become especially clear in his discussion of the “presentness” of historical reflection, its “Gegenwärtigkeit.” He describes the study of the idea of spirit as it manifests itself through history in the following manner: “we have, in traversing the past – however extensive its periods – only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has to do with the eternally present.”⁶² This is the case because World-Spirit is the cumulative result of all preceding moments of spirit: “the present form of spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps.”⁶³ The task of philosophical pedagogy is to make present these different stages, to present them so that students can take these stages as the content of their own thought processes and thus internalize them. Put differently, Hegel offers his students an abstract language through which to conceptualize different moments in history and their relation to the whole from the vantage point of the present. Much like a model of historical presentation that moves from one distinct historical people to the next, this architectonic metaphor of steps or levels corresponds well to the sequential periodicity of the lecture form, to the “making present” of unified past modes of life.⁶⁴ Insofar as the progression of spirit is the unfolding of reason, it is eternal for Hegel – it is part of the past, present, future, persisting both in time and eternally. This how Hegel solves what I have been calling the problem of differentiating between difference and unity: Geist is the very name of that process of differentiation, raised to the level of self-conscious cultural self-reflection. As Hegel writes, “The life of the ever present Spirit is a circle of progressive stages, which looked at in one aspect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past.”⁶⁵ Put differently, the object and subject of  Robert Pippin discusses Hegel’s philosophical project in terms of the philosophical attempt to come to terms with modernity, and casts Hegel as the thinker who best and most systematically articulates the stakes for a philosophy of human autonomy in the culture and society of modernity. See Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: on the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999).  Hegel, 105, 79.  Hegel, 105, 79.  On architectural metaphors in German thought, see Daniel Purdy, On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).  Hegel, 105, 79.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

317

philosophy converge in Hegel’s discourse – to quote Ulrich Johannes Schneider, “presenting and presented consciousness [vortragendes und vorgetragenes Bewusstsein]”⁶⁶– lecturing and lectured consciousness, if you will – are one and the same. The lecture presents history as something that the student can create in and out of himself, and as something that is more generally representative of the progression of world-spirit. Like Schlegel, Hegel deliberately brings his listeners up to and closes with the present day, “the last stage in History, our world, our own present days [unsere Welt,[…] unsere Tage].”⁶⁷ In a way, it would not be a Hegelian presentation without the construction of the properly philosophical, properly holistic vantage point of the speculative system, but again it is striking that the present day is construed as the final level of history. Understanding modernity as the vantage point from which to properly understand human history is the challenge that Hegel presents to his listeners and to his later readers, and this is a challenge that is both compelling and frustrating, for it seems simultaneously deeply convincing and rather naïve. But like Schlegel and Moritz, it is in the realm of philosophical reflection filtered through the theatrical metaphor of the stage that this self-understanding of the present day qua modernity is to occur, with an emphatic notion of Bildung operating as the self-description or the self-performance of the contemporary age. This is less a self-memorializing project than with Schlegel, for Hegel does not call for the glorification of past achievements, which in Hegel’s model are inherently lacking and deficient. Schlegel concedes as much at certain times (as he puts it above, sometimes the messy history of the Germans makes us blush with shame), but Hegel is not as interested in memorializing or monumentalizing the past. Hegel also stands out from Moritz in that the mirroring effects that arise from juxtaposing past and present occur more through philosophical self-reflection than through aesthetic judgment. For Hegel, the task is not to aestheticize one’s present life-world through recourse to an imaginary task, but to console oneself with the greater levels of human self-knowledge (qua freedom) in the modern age through comparison to earlier stages of the world spirit (this is also the conclusion of Hegel’s aesthetics lectures, which privilege the harmony and unity of the aesthetic forms of antiquity, but stipulate that modernity can never recreate these forms). Each of these thinkers is likewise concerned with constructing the universalism of the human, another key feature of the early nineteenth-century idea of Bildung. Whether through a notion of classical normativity, cultural difference, or the achieve-

 Schneider, 228.  Hegel, 524, 442.

318

Sean Franzel

ments of humanity qua World-Spirit, each of the philosophical projects entail the construction of a whole through the differentiation of its parts. Again I want to stress the roots of the pedagogical impulse of Hegel’s thought in the scene of the lecture. The pedagogy of going back through history, surveying historical ideas, artifacts, and texts, and repeating this historical retrospective across multiple semesters are all important sides to Hegel’s systematic thought that bear traces of its institutional articulation.⁶⁸ Of course, Hegel’s great early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, has been likened not to the lecture, but to the Bildungsroman, a deeply pedagogical form that traverses distinct stages, passing through deficient or vexed forms of consciousness to reach more complete knowledge. The likeness to a literary rather than orational form would seem to condition my claims about the effects of the lecture on the structure of Hegel’s thought. But it does stand out that even though some of Hegel’s mature, systematic works were published as standalone works (such as the Logic), others (such the Philosophy of Right and the Aesthetics) were only ever given as lectures and published posthumously on the basis of Hegel’s notes and those of his students, while other works, including the Encyclopedia, were published as handbooks for the lecture hall. Examining the fact that professors repeated specific lecture series multiple times also helps us get a better sense of the institutional situation in which they unfolded. Hegel lectured on the philosophy of history on five different occasions (though this pales in comparison to Immanuel Kant, who gave his well-attended anthropology lectures twenty-four times over the course of his career). Noting this repetition helps us get a sense of these scholars as pedagogues, but it also arguably helps us see the contents of the lectures in new light. The lecture form is a site of performance that is both occasional and periodical, and the repetition of entire lecture series taps into this mixture of occasional and sequential periodicities. We can extrapolate structures of repetition quite clearly from Moritz, who calls upon his listeners and readers to constantly expose themselves to the mirror of antiquity so as to witness their better selves, and we saw how Moritz adeptly mapped this onto a vision both of the Roman calendar year and of carnival as a yearly festival infused with the idea of cyclical becoming. Likewise with Schlegel, we can clearly extrapolate structures of periodic repetition: the critical work of the lecture can be repeated and recreated through subsequent performance situations that place the German nation on  In a related context, Tilottama Rajan argues that Hegel places an encyclopedic totality into an emphatically temporal frame, that he “[temporalizes] the circle of learning.” See Tilottama Rajan, “Philosophy as Encyclopedia: Hegel, Schelling, and the Organization of Knowledge,” Wordsworth Circle 35, no. 1 (2004): 6 – 11, 7.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

319

stage, that mirror audiences back to themselves as imagined communities. This is the structure of modern self-memorialization and self-monumentalization emergent in the nineteenth century, with yearly festivals, commemorations, and the like taking on ever more importance. Here the periodical unfolding of the lecture maps in similar ways onto other performance situations as both a progressive and repetitive discursive form. And with Hegel, we might also extrapolate related structures of sequentiality and repetition: Hegel clearly feels the need to make the past present repeatedly, for new generations of students. This is not a practice of presenting the world with a single work and moving on; instead, Hegel repeats the pedagogy of the collective by continuously reengaging new members, retelling his historical narrative, and marking the turning points in human culture and cognition that are at the same time turning points in the self-conception of the individual. This is, at heart, the pedagogical project of modernity, where each new generation of students needs to be made aware of their place in history, their cultural inheritance, and their freedom as modern individuals.

Works Cited Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Bender, John, and Wellbery, David. “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” In The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, edited by David Wellbery and John Bender, 3 – 39. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990. Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Fohrmann, Jürgen, ed. Gelehrte Kommunikation: Wissenschaft und Medium zwischen dem 16. und 20. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Boehlau, 2005. Fohrmann, Jürgen. “Literaturgeschichte als Stiftung von Ordnung. Das Konzept der Literaturgeschichte bei Herder, August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel.” In Kontroversen, alte und neue, edited by Eberhard Lämmert and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 75 – 84. Göttingen: Niemeyer, 1986. Franzel, Sean. Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Gilgen, Peter. Lektüren der Erinnerung: Lessing, Kant, Hegel. Munich: Fink, 2012. Graevenitz, Gerhart von. “Memoria und Realismus: Erzählende Literatur in der deutschen ‘Bildungspresse’ des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Memoria: Vergessen und Erinnern. Edited by Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann, 282 – 304. Munich: Fink, 1993. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004.

320

Sean Franzel

Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956. Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Klancher, Jon. “Presentism and the Archives.” Accessed 14 June 2013. http://www.rc.umd. edu/praxis/contemporary/klancher/klancher.html. Koselleck, Reinhart. “‘Neuzeit’: Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe.” In Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 300 – 348. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Anthusa oder Roms Alterthümer.” In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Yvonne Pauly, vol. 4.1. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungs-Seelenkunde.” In Werke, vol. 1, 793 – 809. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Peters, Sibylle. Der Vortrag als Performance. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pippin, Robert. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999. Pizer, John. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge: Louisana State University Press, 2006. Purdy, Daniel. On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Rajan, Tilottama. “Philosophy as Encyclopedia: Hegel, Schelling, and the Organization of Knowledge.” Wordsworth Circle 35, no. 1 (2004): 6 – 11. Rose, Gillian. Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Verso, 2009. Schievelbusch, Wolfgang. The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery. London: Picador, 2004. Schlegel, A.W. Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. In Kritische Schriften und Briefe, edited by Edgar Lohner, vols. 5 and 6. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966. Schlegel, A.W. “Vorlesungen über die romantische Literatur.” In Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen. Edited by Ernst Behler, Frank Jolles, and Claudia Becker, vol. 2.1, 1 – 194. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989. Schramm, Helmar. Karneval des Denkens: Theatralität im Spiegel philosophischer Texte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1996. Schneider, Ulrich Johannes. Philosophie und Universität. Historisierung der Vernunft im 19. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1999. Simpson, David. “Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for ‘Antiquarian’ History.” SubStance 88 (1999): 5 – 16. Struck, Wolfgang. Konfigurationen der Vergangenheit: Deutsche Geschichtsdramen im Zeitalter der Restauration. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Tautz, Birgit. Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Theissen, Bianca. “Memories of the Future: The Temporalization of History in Romantic Narrative.” In The Poetics of Memory, edited by Thomas Wägenbaur, 61 – 67. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1998.

Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form

321

Wild, Christopher J. “Theorizing Theater Antitheatrically: Karl Philipp Moritz’s Theatromania.” MLN 120 (2005): 507 – 58. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and Its Institutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Adrian Daub

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Forms of Musical Knowledge: The Case of the Piano In Goldelse, a novel by E. Marlitt (pseudonym for Eugenie John (1825 – 1887)) that was first serialized in 1866 in the journal The Arbour [Die Gartenlaube], the bourgeois Ferbers move into an ancient castle called Gnadeck, an estate where Elisabeth’s uncle works as a forest warden. The old edifice is described as profoundly uncanny (unheimlich), in the double sense of that word, but right away the family begins to make the eerie old edifice bourgeois – to transform it from a castle into a home. “The sinister door that led to the larger wing had been walled up; the lofty oak doors with brass locks and bolts covered the masonry and hid the fact that, beyond it, there was nothing but wilderness.”¹ The Ferbers suffuse this stark and forbidding structure with warmth, modernity and humanist charm. The “festive atmosphere,” we are told, “harmonized with that of the forest.”² The cherry on top of the domestication of the old rulers’ residence is represented by the acquisition of a piano: “a beautiful, table-shaped instrument that was carried without further ceremony into the foyer and placed, in the tapestry room above, beneath the bust of Beethoven.”³ Marlitt’s novel seems far removed from the eighteenth century, however long one wants to stretch that designation. But the way it portrays the bourgeois family encroaching upon and restructuring aristocratic space registers the final tremors in a revolution in what counted as music and as musical knowledge in the German-speaking world and beyond, one that decisively distinguished eighteenth-century musical culture from the nineteenth-century world that frequently drew on it. Domesticating the forbidding geography of Castle Gnadeck requires a sealing off and replacement of one kind of Flügel (the several wings the edifice has acquired over the centuries) with another kind – the grand piano – that completes the family’s conquest of this alien space. The far-flung wings of the castle, decentered and uncontrollable, have given way to a Flügel that concentrates, organizes and centers domestic space. Between the two Flügel, Marlitt presents an

 Eugenie Marlitt, Goldelse (Leipzig: Ernst Keil, 1875), 64.  Marlitt, Goldelse, 50.  Marlitt, Goldelse, 65.

324

Adrian Daub

allegory of the passage from the musical world of the eighteenth century to that of the nineteenth. The piano not only transforms the forbidding aristocratic space into an inviting bourgeois one; it also transforms the castle’s dwellers into a family. Almost as soon as it is brought in the family gathers around the instrument. The daughter of the household pays musical homage to the bust of Beethoven, and they enthusiastically watch “as the wondrous melodies rush forth from under the fingers of the young girl.” The classics function as a hearth around which the family assembles: “the little family took seats in the niche of the broad arching window and fell into the master’s [i. e., Beethoven’s] ocean of thoughts, whose portrait looked down from the wall at the enthusiastic player.”⁴ Note what happens in this scene of quasi-religious devotion: it is not Beethoven’s music that brings the family together, but his face, or even his gaze. What the young girl’s hands produce is not as important as who wrote it, the man in the portrait and who is positioned like a crucifix over the organ of the domestic congregation. Beethoven is the “master,” and the “mastery” of his “ocean of thoughts” unfurls its command through more than his music. The “master” is a member of the family, a full person, visually and intellectually present. It is as if Marlitt stages the reformation of the cosmos of the eighteenth-century music (courtly, disaggregated, decentralized) world by the values and maxims of the nineteenth. It may seem strange that in the nineteenth century, the number of composers, of musicians, of music lovers expanded explosively, but that what counted as knowing music at the same time became increasingly centralized. But this is what figures like Beethoven, and families that venerated at his altar like Marlitt’s Ferbers, made possible: the family piano and the Beethoven portrait above it collectively became the central point de capiton of musical ideology in the nineteenth century, that “point of convergence,” as Lacan defined his term, “that enables everything that happens in a discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.”⁵ Once the piano and the master’s bust above it had become the centerpiece of domestic music making, what counted as music changed, and what had once counted as knowing music was fundamentally transformed. When Arthur Elson wrote The Book of Musical Knowledge in 1915, he took that knowledge to comprise, as per his book’s subtitle, “the history, technique, and ap-

 Marlitt, Goldelse, 66.  Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III (New York: Norton, 1993), 268.

The Case of the Piano

325

preciation of music, together with the lives of great composers.”⁶ The book’s frontispiece had Beethoven on it, followed a few pages on by Wagner. This was not what the eighteenth century would have understood by that label. In the mid-eighteenth century, the novelist Johann Timotheus Hermes (1738– 1821) had written a small ode “To the Piano” [“Ans Clavier”], which he included in his novel Sophie’s Trip from Memel to Saxony [Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen, 1769 – 1773]. The poem addresses the instrument as a conduit for a kind of communion with a kindred spirit – a topos that would become lemmatic in the nineteenth century. But when Hermes praises the piano for bringing him and another person together, he isn’t thinking of a composer – he is thinking of the inventor of the instrument: You, Piano, were invented by a friend to humanity, A man sad like me. He cried like me! He created you full of sorrow For you and for me.⁷

There are many encomia to the instrument in the eighteenth century, much fewer in the nineteenth. And almost all of them, for instance Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariae’s “To the Piano,” linger over the material instrument and the act of playing it, while leaving aside the music one plays on the instrument. It took barely fifty years to reverse this prioritization. By the nineteenth century, the piano’s inventor (Erfinder) was beside the point. The instrument was a natural and inalterable fixture in the bourgeois home. It was produced in large quantities in large workshops. And the pianist no longer communed with the craftsman who had created or invented the particular instrument – the pianist sought instead communion with the bust of Beethoven above the piano, sought it through scores and arrangements, through careful study of technique and by passing on this knowledge to the family at large. *** Erika Fischer-Lichte has famously spoken of a performative turn or a push towards performance (Performativierungsschub) in postwar art, an historically specific transformation that pushed the different arts beyond the categories and organizing dichotomies relied on by traditional aesthetics. Where performance had frequently been understood as a system of signs waiting patiently to be deci Arthur Elson, The Book of Musical Knowledge (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1927).  “Dich, o Clavier / erfand ein Menschenfreund, / Ein Mann, der traurig war, wie ich. / Er hat, wie ich, geweint! / Voll Kummer schuf er Dich / Für sich und mich.” Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Musicalisch kritische Bibliotek I (Gotha: Ettiger, 1778), 318.

326

Adrian Daub

phered, Fischer-Lichte’s conception of the performative emphasized the eventcharacter of art. The emergence of a new type of musical knowledge around the piano and music for the home (Hausmusik) around 1800 can be understood as a process unfolding in essence in reverse: it harnessed phenomena that had previously had event-character and sought to turn them precisely into systems of signs – or at least heightened those aspects that could safely be harnessed in such a way. It is a process analogous to the performative turn described by Fischer-Lichte, but in the opposite direction. Celia Applegate and others have pointed to the early nineteenth century as a moment in which the masterpiece-aesthetic and its imbrication with discourses of national identity emerged (Applegate points to the Bach revival of 1829 as a particularly cogent example⁸). The process described in this article formed in many respects the condition of the possibility of both masterpiece-aesthetic, musical nationalism, and the public discourse through which they were constituted. Only once certain types of musical knowledge (that went beyond just knowing music) became established, expected, only once they could be relied upon by writers and pedagogues, did the salient links of nineteenth-century musical culture become possible in the first place. A weekly from the 1770s entitled “The Musical Dilettante” [“Der musikalische Dillettante”], published in Vienna, gathered basic reflections on the history and the aesthetics of music, and otherwise featured mostly scores: little sonatas for the cembalo, song settings, and the like. The editors explain their aim in terms of knowledge: the weekly is targeted at “beginning music lovers [angehende Musikliebhaber],” and its goal is to give them eine Wissenschaft“⁹ which in the late eighteenth century could mean “science,” “knowledge,” or “expertise” – but whatever kind of knowledge the editors wish to impute to their “music lovers” is about technique. The music lovers are supposed to get to know how to play certain pieces, and it is the role of the print media to gather appropriate pieces to that end. Contrast that with Schubart’s Ideas towards an Aesthetics of Musical Arts [Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 1806], which relies almost entirely on “characteristics [Charakteristiken]” of prominent music makers: Their sounds, which have long since rung out, live again in words, and one recognizes the possibility that the oft-lamented fugitiveness of performed music might be battened down by

 Celia Applegate, “Bach Revival, Public Culture, and National Identity: The St. Matthew Passion in 1829,” in A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 142– 145.  Der musikalische Dillettant: Eine Wochenschrift (Vienna: Kurzböcken, 1770), 2.

The Case of the Piano

327

means of the word in much the same way as one has determined enduring works of the visual arts.¹⁰

Schubart wants to “batten down [fixieren]” a canon of “enduring artworks [bleibenden Kunstwerke]” against the ever-beating winds that render music fugitive and momentary – performative. Like ekphrasis of works of visual art (to which Schubert alludes towards the end of the quotation), the verbal description of music was mostly concerned with bridging the inherent physical unsteadiness of performed works. For Schubart, this battening down was the task of the musical press, and assimilating the canon is what makes someone a music lover. Goethe, in his Second Italian Journey [Zweiter Italienischer Aufenthalt], still operates with a separate category called the “connoisseur of musical history [musikalische Geschichtskenner]”¹¹ – there is an expertise with regards to making music, and another expertise with regards to its canon. Schubart already no longer makes that distinction. This transformation concerned what Hegel around the same time termed a “subject-object.” The transformation in musical knowledge had to do not just with what music was known, but rather what counted as knowing music. At the same time, this change in what counted as knowing was predicated on who was expected to know music in these new ways. For just as the object “music” was subject to multiple shifts around the turn of the nineteenth century, so too were those parts of the public that were the ostensible subjects of such knowledge. The piano crystallized the peculiar technologies and institutions that sprang up around the turn of the nineteenth century, and that allowed both a canon of knowable music and a public that expected itself to know music in this way to solidify. The transformations on both the subject-side and the object-side of musical knowledge were owed to socioeconomic factors. Thanks to the proliferation of the pianoforte and the emergence of a viable music publishing industry, the gravitational center of music making migrated from the court into the bourgeois parlor. That is not to say that the aristocracy stopped making music, or stopped employing musicians or music teachers; but a composer or musician looking to make a living in the nineteenth century increasingly looked to the bourgeoisie

 “Ihre verhallten Töne leben in den Worten wieder auf, und man erkennt die Möglichkeit, dass die oft beklägte Flüchtigkeit der executiven Musik eben so durch das Wort fixieren ließe, wie man die bleibenden Kunstwerke bestimmt hat.” Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, C.F.D. Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Stuttgart: Scheible, 1839), 7.  J.W. von Goethe, “Zweiter Italienischer Aufenthalt,” in Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe), vol. 11 (Hamburg: Wegner, 1948), 436.

328

Adrian Daub

and its institutions for support – to municipal orchestras, to music schools, and to the great music publishers. In the course of the nineteenth century, the pianoforte became mass-produced and widely available, and wider and wider strata of society felt they needed one. Piano builders helped things along with marketing strategies intended to proliferate the instrument. At the same time, the shape of the piano was standardized along the dimensions familiar to us today. Eighteenth-century keyboard music had been written for any number of keyboard instruments, all of them of different dimensions, lengths, and registers, and often with entirely different sounds. Christian Friedrich Schubart’s Ideas on the Aesthetic of Music [Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 1806], for example, distinguished between the following kinds: grand, pianoforte, clavichord, pygmy piano (Pantalon), harmonica, melodica, and a portable clavier.¹² There were also smaller kinds of piano (for example, the boudoir-piano, which also could be used as a Toilette).¹³ Of course, the instrument kept evolving throughout the nineteenth century, and the sorts of pianos we can buy today did not emerge until fairly late in the century. The iron frame, for instance, was an innovation of the 1860s, and it entailed a wholesale shift in the instrument’s sound. In terms of range, however, the instrument attained the shape we are familiar with today much earlier. In the 1820s, Goethe still made music on a grand that had a five-octave range (something that would not have been unusual in a harpsichord), but by mid-century, eighty-eight keys had become standard. In the music that was composed specifically for the piano, the fortepiano quickly gained ascendancy. Charles Sealsfield (the pseudonym of Karl Postl) described a typical Sunday in Vienna at mid-century: “From three o’clock in the afternoon until eleven at night, the whole city is in a regular uproar of music and amusement. Up and down the street, all one hears is music. In every burgher’s house the piano is the first thing one sees. The guest has scarcely sat down and refreshed himself with the watery wine and Pressburg Zwieback before Miss Caroline, or whatever her name is, has followed her parents’ enjoinder to play something for the group.”¹⁴ Eduard Hanslick called this profusion of pianos the “piano plague [Clavierseuche],” and worried that “the amount of time people sacrifice to piano-playing stands in no relation [to its benefits], and comes at the expense

 C.F.D. Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Vienna: Degen, 1806), 287.  Richard Leppert, “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano,” Nineteenth Century Music, 16, no. 2 (1992): 105 – 28.  Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl), Österreich, wie es ist, oder, Skizzen von den Fürstenhöfen des Kontinents (Vienna: Schroll, 1919), 189.

The Case of the Piano

329

of more serious scientific education.”¹⁵ As bourgeois rituals and institutions attained ever-greater dominance, the piano emerged as the triumphal chariot leading the procession. The piano proved not only a potent symbol for the ascendant Third Estate, especially in Germany and Austria where that ascendancy and its symbols had to content themselves largely within the confines of the aesthetic – the bourgeoisie had little political or symbolic power, so it ruled all the more powerfully in the aesthetic realm. The piano was also a very dynamic conduit, a mode of induction and exclusion – a central engine in what Pierre Bourdieu has called the process of “distinction.”¹⁶ No sooner was the piano finding widespread acceptance than musical professionals of all stripes began to worry that perhaps it was spreading too far, into reaches of society that, for reasons of money, culture or temperament, could not use it properly. In the process, the proper use of the instrument became fraught with moral import. The piano-manuals of the eighteenth century were by and large rather pragmatic affairs aimed at enhancing pleasure and elegance of play. Since it apotheosized and relentlessly overdetermined the role of the piano in domestic culture, the nineteenth century was a great deal more anxious about what an incorrect relationship to the instrument might mean. It was commented on not just by composers and teachers – journalists and essayists, philosophers and novelists all felt compelled to diagnose cultural trends using the piano as their Geiger counter. Piano pedagogy became a deeply problematic and fraught terrain, and the stakes were far higher than a few inelegant or joyless players. Marlitt’s novel shows clearly how differentiated writers could be in their use of piano by mid-century, and how well conditioned their audience was to pick up on these subtle nuances. Marlitt’s heroine works as a piano instructor, and we first meet her leaving her classroom, dismayed at her charges’ progress. Whoever has once heard how a child’s hands, or even hands belonging to a full-grown body and head, launch confidently into a well-known melody on the piano, but then tear the musical thread with some dissonance or the other, grasp with incorrect fingering for all kinds of keys, just not the key indicated, while the teacher lets sink in despair her tapping foot, until suddenly the melody starts again, only to race through some easier measures like through level terrain. Anyone whose ear nerves have ever been subjected to this torture will understand why the young girl, who had just finished giving lessons at an institute for two hours, gladly

 “Der unverhältnißmäßige Zeitaufwand, den unsere Jugend dem Clavierspiele opfert, wird zum Raube an der ernsteren wissenschaftlichen Ausbildung.” Eduard Hanslick, “Ein Brief über die Clavierseuche,” in Suite (Vienna: Keil, 1884), 163 – 178.  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction – A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 2013).

330

Adrian Daub

held her flushed face against the cold wind, that reliable companion who howled with system and consistency, and whose powerful sound becomes melodious in organ and Aeolian Harp.¹⁷

Later, after relocating to Gnadeck, the family’s Beethoven-inspired idyll is disturbed by a messenger from Castle Lindhof, the foreign building in the valley – “a monstrous structure in the Italian style that pushed up fairly close to the foot of the mountain where Gnadeck lay.”¹⁸ The messenger brings Elisabeth a letter from the Baroness Lessen. “She began by telling the young girl many flattering things about her magnificent piano-playing, which she claimed to have heard on walks through the forest for the last few evenings, and she added the question whether Miss Ferber was inclined – naturally, under conditions to be determined beforehand – to play four hands a few times every week with Miss vom Walde.”¹⁹ The family reacts to this invitation with fury – treating it, as does the narrator, as a naked attempt at seduction. The piano helps the Ferber family carve out a new space within the inhospitable spaces of the old aristocracy; the novel chronicles their ascent to quasi-aristocratic status, but makes very clear that their new status is marked by a different relationship to domestic space and to the Flügel. The same space, between the petit bourgeois and the aristocratic, is mapped out with respect to piano pedagogy: the Ferbers navigate a space of domesticity that is threatened on the one side from those who should not by rights be playing the instrument (Else’s charges in the classroom), on the other by those who would use the instrument for their own immoral purposes (Miss vom Walde and her request to play four-hands). What sets apart proper (that is to say bourgeois) music-making from their exertions is that it is pure, autonomous and natural. In the opening scene, a distressed Else finds her nerves calmed by the “organ and Aeolian Harp” of the wind; the bourgeoisie makes music because it comes naturally to them, but everyone else has ulterior motives. The instrument’s spread coincided with a revolution in pedagogy: penniless musicians increasingly took to teaching the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie how to properly play the new instrument. As Oscar Bie noted in 1920, the nineteenth century produced a veritable inundation (Überschwemmung) of graduates of prestigious music academies or private teachers: “The largest music school in England,” Bie calculates, “the Guildhall School of Music had, when these lines were written, 140 professors, 42 music rooms, 2700 pupils and will

 Marlitt, Goldelse, 1.  Marlitt, Goldelse, 52.  Marlitt, Goldelse, 67.

The Case of the Piano

331

soon be expanded to 69 rooms and 5000 students.”²⁰ Few graduates of the music schools were able to make a living actually playing their instrument – the vast majority wound up teaching it, often for a pittance. At the same time, a small army of Wunderkinder and sundry virtuosi toured the continent, thereby conveniently reshaping the goal of piano instruction in a way that kept the penniless graduates of the music academies at least somewhat gainfully employed. François Couperin’s The Art of Playing the Harpsichord [Art de toucher le clavécin, 1716] had still set out to instill in its readers virtues like basic accuracy and competence. By the time Carl Czerny (1791– 1857) and his generation started dominating piano instruction, the key term was technical brilliance (Brillianz) – the piano student was to settle for nothing less than virtuosic play – Mozart and Thalberg and later Liszt were the acknowledged models. Whereas eighteenth-century piano pedagogy had sought to establish a solid basis, a minimum standard, nineteenth-century piano instruction aimed for the loftiest heights of perfection. As Oscar Bie noted in retrospect in 1920, most of the collections of études that appeared in Germany were called “schools” (Schulen), and that designation was barely metaphorical: “The printed schools have such elaborate systems that they resemble the organization of actual schools. There are higher schools, elementary schools, universities and private tutorials, and within each institution a set sequence of grades.”²¹ Johanna Kinkel’s Eight Letters to a Female Friend about Piano Instruction [Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über den Clavier-Unterricht, 1852] make clear that the printed “schools” were in fact meant as substitutes for actual music schools with buildings and classrooms: “This book,” she writes in her introduction, “is mostly intended for musically educated mothers who either live in the countryside, or in a small town, and are therefore compelled by the dearth of capable piano teachers, to lead or at least supervise their children’s piano studies themselves.”²² Once again, then, print culture became an analogue of state institutions. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach explicitly addresses his An Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments [Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 1762] to “my supporters and friends [meinen Gönnern und Freunden].”²³ His “school,” just like Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg’s The Art of Playing the Piano [Die Kunst das Clavier zu spielen, 1751], did not lay claim to an openness and translatability that would sus-

 Bie, Das Klavier (Berlin: Cassirer, 1921), 288.  Bie, Das Klavier, 290.  Johanna Kinkel, Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über den Clavier-Unterricht (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1852), 1.  Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1787), i.

332

Adrian Daub

tain the “school” metaphor. The piano instruction manuals (Klavierschulen) of the nineteenth century, by contrast, did not just describe a range of finger exercises and were not content to simply indicate how often the pupil was supposed to repeat each exercise – many of them insisted on providing detailed prescriptions for posture, playing style, even physical exercise. In other words, these printed “schools” strove to act very much like the real thing. The first “school” of the eighteenth century, François Couperin’s The Art of Playing the Harpsichord [L’Art de toucher le clavecin, 1717] had insisted that “it is better to tell children to study only when their instructor is present,”²⁴ while the nineteenth century was intent on individual study at home. A profoundly social arrangement was transformed into homework. Anton Diabelli (1781– 1858) exemplifies many of the forces that decisively reshaped the musical world around 1800. This Salzburg native wore many hats during a sixty-year career in music – teacher, composer, arranger, publisher. All of these roles would have looked very different a mere fifty years prior: many of them would not have been viable; others would not have existed at all. Diabelli came to Vienna around the turn of the century, where he first established himself as a piano and guitar teacher. He soon began publishing etudes and other educational pieces, which proved quite influential. What proved even more successful were transcriptions and arrangements of famous works for piano, both for two and four hands – among others, Diabelli was the first to transcribe for piano the symphonies of his friend Beethoven. In the late 1810s, Diabelli started his own successful publishing house, which was notable, for instance, for publishing the works of Franz Schubert. Like many of the men who followed similar trajectories during this time, men like Frédéric Kalkbrenner and Carl Czerny, Diabelli is not much remembered today. That his name is still familiar at all is owed to the famous variations on a little waltz he coaxed out of Beethoven, the Diabelli Variations [Diabelli Variationen], which turned out to be Beethoven’s last major piano work. In 1819, Diabelli wrote to a large number of Austrian composers and solicited variations on a small dance theme in C Major. Beethoven’s thirty-three variations are still remembered today, but in a separate volume, Diabelli published variations from the many others who responded – the list of contributors is a veritable who’s who of the Austrian musical landscape around 1820. Mozart’s son Franz Xaver, Franz Schubert, Carl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Liszt, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and even Archduke Rudolf of Austria dutifully sent along one or several pieces.

 François Couperin, L’Art de Toucher le clavecin (Paris: Couperin, 1717), 7.

The Case of the Piano

333

Diabelli’s variations are thus paradigmatic for his project as a whole: His concern was to unify and to integrate the musical world, to establish a “classical” age through a set of canonical works. In his prefatory note to the collection, Diabelli encapsulates his mission as follows: How interesting must it thus be, when all the other composers who presently flower from Austria’s classical soil, apply their talent to the same motif, and thereby turn this important work not just into a competition-entry, but rather into an alphabetical lexicon of all the names of our age […].²⁵

Diabelli’s remarks make explicit that his project is not to be understood as a continuation of courtly practice (music prizes) under the auspices of a bourgeois and mercantile outfit; instead, he wants his gathering of composers to be an “alphabetical lexicon” of contemporary composition. The composers gathered in his volume are supposed to exhaust and delimit the set of contemporary composers. It is a gathering of all the data that qualifies, and Diabelli pointedly refuses to rank or qualify the contributions (although he naturally places Beethoven in a category of his own). Conversely, the implicit promise Diabelli’s volume of variations makes to its audience is the following: everyone worth knowing in Austrian musical production is gathered here; these masters (Meister) you must know, but you are safe not knowing composers beyond their circle. His variations brought together under the title Patriotic Artists’ Association [Vaterländischer Künstlerverein] a musical equivalent to the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The published volume’s subtitle was “Variations for PianoForte on a Predetermined Theme Composed by the Most Eminent Composers and Virtuosos from Vienna and the Imperial and Royal Austrian States” [“Veränderungen für das Piano-Forte über ein vorgelegtes Thema componirt von den vorzüglichsten Tonsetzern und Virtuosen Wien’s und der k.k. oesterreichischen Staaten”]. And indeed, the composers Diabelli gathered all hailed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even though he sold and advertised his Artists’ Association throughout the German-speaking world and even beyond, Diabelli’s concern was to establish a national conversation. Music publishing established not only what music the consumer needed to know, it also established that one needed to

 “Wie interessant muss es daher seyn, wenn alle andern Tonkünstler, die gegenwärtig auf Oesterreichs classischem Boden blühen, über dassselbe Motiv ihr Talent entwickeln, und somit dieses bedeutende Werk nicht nur zu einer Preis-Aufgabe, sondern zu einem alphabetischen Lexicon aller […] Nahmen unsers in der Kunstgeschichte so glänzenden Zeitalters durch ihre Beytäge zu machen sich bemühen.” Anton Diabelli, quoted in Heinrich Rietsch, “Fünfundachtzig Variationen über Diabellis Wälzer,” Beethovenjahrbuch, 1 (1908): 29.

334

Adrian Daub

pay special attention to special kinds of music – for instance to music from one’s own country. Music publishing did not just establish canons, then; it established national canons. The fact that Diabelli chose a waltz (or rather a Deutscher, an embryonic form of the waltz) as his guiding theme, is telling in this regard. Although mediated through print culture, Diabelli’s collection lived in a kind of second-order “liveness,”²⁶ analogous to the one Philip Auslander has suggested in rock music: the conversation occurred through print, but it was an organic, authentic conversation. At the piano, their conversation came alive; it could be recreated in salons and drawing rooms across Austria-Hungary. When Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart published his Ideas on the Aesthetic of Music [Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst] in 1806, he presented an exhaustive list of composers working in his day and before, but he did so in geographic groupings –these referred to schools of composers, associated with one court or the other (Salzburg, Mainz, Mannheim, Taxis). But while a project like Diabelli’s or Schubart’s was fairly impressionistic in trying to encompass the totality of the musical world, others were far more systematic in these endeavors. Breitkopf & Härtel was the world’s first music publisher. Founded by Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf in the early eighteenth century, it initially found success publishing traditional books, but by mid-century had published several songbooks that sold quite well. But it was Bernhard’s son Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf who innovated techniques for printing scores with moveable type that allowed Breitkopf (Härtel did not join until 1795) to publish music in unprecedented volumes and at much lower cost. Johann Gottlob Immanuel was also the first to compile catalogues of scores that were for sale, and to systematize those catalogues. The most famous (and most thorough) of these catalogues were Adolph Hofmeister’s annual Catalogues [Verzeichnisse]. Their full title was Catalogue of Musical Scores, Musical Writings, and Illustrations of the Year [Verzeichnis der im Jahre erschienenen Musikalien, auch musikalischen Schriften und Abbildungen], although the abbreviated title was something of a byword in musical circles. They attempted to present every work published in a particular year, “in alphabetical order as well as in a systematic order,” as the subtitle states. The catalogue was presented without any commentary. The word “systematic” turns up everywhere in the musical literature of the early nineteenth century – the piano and musical publishing made it possible to systematize not just current publications, but to impose an order on past music. Carl Ferdinand Becker’s Musical Works of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century [Die Tonwerke des XVI. und

 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 2012).

The Case of the Piano

335

XVII. Jahrhunderts, 1855], for instance, present a “systematic-chronological compilation of music printed in those two centuries” (as the subtitle states).²⁷ Franz Ludwig Schubert’s Travelers’ Guide through the Musical Literature for Piano Players [Wegweiser in der Musikliteratur für Pianofortespieler, 1861] even compiled a list of historical music schools “in order of difficulty level.”²⁸ This emphasis on systematicity transmitted itself to the consumer, who increasingly came to appreciate music as part of a canon. Schubert’s Travelers’ Guide takes as its epigraph a quote from Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians [musicalische Haus- und Lebensregeln]: “You must bit by bit get to know all more or less important works of the important masters.”²⁹ In his memoirs, Eduard Hanslick points not just to the voraciousness with which a musically interested young man circa 1840 could (and was even expected to) acquire musical knowledge – he also makes clear that this knowledge was supposed to be systematic rather than piecemeal. The sheer volume of new music being written, performed and published necessitated that consumers develop a coherent canon of categories. In this they were helped by institutions like music libraries, subscription services, and the music press. I was constantly at the piano in order to get to know new music, which endeavor was much helped by the fantastic musical library of J. Hoffmann. This lending library was not just characterized by its richness, but also by the fact that it had a full printed catalogue. I have never found such a catalogue in any musical lending library in Vienna, even though such a catalogue is the only way of orienting oneself systematically in terrains that one wants to know for more than mere entertainment. Every newly published composition was immediately incorporated into the lending library. As a subscriber of this excellent lending institution I refreshed my musical fodder almost daily, and endured many a joke about the fact that I was rarely seen without a musical binder under my arm in the streets.³⁰

 “Systematisch-chronologische Zusammenstellung der in diesen zwei Jahrhunderten gedruckten Musikalien.” Carl Ferdinand Becker, Die Tonwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, Fleischer, 1855).  Franz Ludwig Schubert, Wegweiser in der Musikliteratur für Pianofortespieler (Leipzig: Wengler, 1861).  “Du musst nach und nach alle bedeutendere Werke aller bedeutender Meister kennen lernen.” Schubert, unpaginated epigraph.  “Am Klavier war ich unermüdlich, neue Musik kennen zu lernen, was mir durch die vortreffliche Musikalien-Anstalt von J. Hoffmann sehr erleichtert wurde. Diese Anstalt zeichnete sich nicht nur durch ihren Reichtum, sondern auch hauptsächlich dadurch aus, daß sie einen vollständigen gedruckten Katalog ausgab. Einen solchen Katalog habe ich bei keiner Wiener Musikleihanstalt gefunden, und doch ist er das einzige Mittel, sich über die Gebiete systematisch zu orientieren, die man, nicht bloß der Unterhaltung wegen, kennenlernen will. Jede neu erschienene Komposition wurde sofort der Leihbibliothek einverleibt. Als Abonnent dieser Leihanstalt erneuerte ich beinahe täglich mein musikalisches Futter und erduldete manchen Scherz darüb-

336

Adrian Daub

Hanslick is not alone in turning to a digestion-metaphor to describe his musical intake – depending on how they viewed the phenomenon, nineteenth-century writers likened the rapidity with which music lovers tore through new publications either to daily sustenance, to rejuvenating exercise, or else to a drug addiction. But given that their intake was so rapid, so seemingly unstoppable, the insistence that this intake was guided by a quest for knowledge (and specifically systematic knowledge) became all the more important. Note that Hanslick is at pains to emphasize that his purpose in tearing through Hoffmann’s music lending library (Musikleihanstalt) was “systematic orientation” rather than “mere entertainment.” Music consumption has to be an effort of “orientation,” and the mass of musical production has to be brought under the control of the individual and his aesthetic categories and knowledge (Kenntnisse); otherwise the individual risks being under the control of the never-ending torrent of entertaining publications. The burgeoning music press, meanwhile, did its part to further both parts of this strange dialectic: As exhaustively as it catalogued and presented new musical publications, new arrangements and pedagogic trends, the press just as doggedly shamed music lovers for acquiring musical knowledge somehow incorrectly – too quickly, too dumbed-down, too unsystematically. There was a constant crush of pieces to be known, and just as constant was the threat that one didn’t “really” know them right, wasn’t quite the right recipient for these new pieces. This new music-knowing subject was in the first place a reader of music, and a collector of musical publications. He was part of a reading public for music, and that meant for scores. As a member of the public, the music lover was supposed to behave in certain ways that resembled those that had determined the “public sphere” of the eighteenth century. One was expected to keep current, to know certain composers and works. As a result, knowing music around 1800 increasingly started looking like being a consumer of literature: one awaited publications from certain authors, ordered new releases from catalogs or bought subscriptions: one sought to establish complete collections. The idea that music was collectible cut to the very core of what constituted music, and what constituted “knowing” it. It would go too far to completely dichotomize eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical knowledge and to suggest that one was about knowing how to do certain things, while the other was about knowing a bounded set of objects. Still, as the audience for classical music expanded, and as the publishing industry and instrument builders incen-

er, daß ich nie anders als mit der Musikmappe unter dem Arm auf der Straße zu sehen war.” Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987), 29.

The Case of the Piano

337

tivized the streamlining of musical practice, musical knowledge acquired a more pronounced aspect of connoisseurship. Nineteenth-century music, by contrast, presented itself as a vast universe of discrete objects, objects that required filing, assessment, and control. Just as figurines and lithographs cluttered the domestic sphere and yet gave a sense that a rapidly growing universe could yet be brought to order, so arrangements for piano or quartet, whether they were slim volumes or encyclopedic tomes, bespoke both a dizzying range of musical production and the impulse to harness it. On first glance it might seem paradoxical, but the same period that created the means for proliferating musical works beyond the salons where it could be performed also arrived at the modern notion of what constituted a “work.” In the eighteenth century, music had circulated just as vigorously as it would in the nineteenth, but the nineteenth century began recognizing this circulation as a problem. In the early 1800s, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote an angry letter to the editor of one of Germany’s major music journals: “I take it as my duty to alert the musical public to a four-hand piano transcription of my recent overture, which misses the mark entirely and departs completely from the original score.” Instead, Beethoven recommends the “absolutely faithful” transcription which “will soon appear in a legitimate edition with B. Schott’s Sons in Mainz,” which, as it happened, had been arranged by Carl Czerny.³¹ Beethoven’s pique set the tone for how the circulation of music was discussed throughout the nineteenth century: there was an abiding concern with the danger that transmission might lack in “faith” and thus damage the “spirit” of the work, a “spirit” that was immediately accessible only in the original score or, better yet, the original performance. Robert Schumann similarly exhorted the piano student as follows: “Regard it as an abomination to change things, to leave them out or to update them in modish ways in the pieces of great composers. It is the greatest violation you can commit in art.”³² It was particularly German critics who were leery of the way transcriptions and arrangements might abstract away from the “color” of a work, or might distort its “spirit.” Starting in the late eighteenth century (probably with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famed essay on the Laocoon [Laoköon]), German philosophy had become convinced that different artistic contents demanded different forms, that each art had its own logic, and that transitioning from one form to the other was often a

 Quoted in Albert Dreetz, Czerny und Beethoven (Leipzig: Kirstner, 1932), 24.  “Betrachte es als etwas Abscheuliches, in Stücken guter Tonsetzer etwas zu ändern, wegzulassen oder gar neumodische Verzierungen anzubringen. Dies ist die größte Schmach, die du der Kunst anthust.” Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, Zweiter Band (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1891), 476.

338

Adrian Daub

fraught proposition. Other thinkers, like Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, understood the relationship between the arts to one another as part of an organic and historical process – contents transitioned from, say, Greek statuary to renaissance painting with some sort of logic. Skipping steps in this transition by necessity produced bad art. That meant that nineteenth-century Germans were if anything less than willing to countenance the idea that an original piece and its transcription for piano, for piano duet, for quartet, or for the organ were somehow just different pieces, although they shared melodies and harmonies. Organicist notions of the arts and their relationship predominated, and transcription was usually seen as a disruption of that relationship, rather than as a continuation of it. That the very idea of a “work” whose “spirit” ought to be inviolate actually depended on the very circulation of arrangements, transcriptions, potpourris, and variations was largely repressed. While again not a complete novelty, the nineteenth century’s approach to staging musical knowledge was once again clearly distinct from that of the eighteenth: how one came to know a certain piece came to matter; not only did the compass of knowable entities expand immensely, the way in which one came to know those entities was itself problematized. The simple devotion Hermes professes before the piano, a kind of naïve immersion that really lacked any epistemic dimension, had been replaced with devotional scenes like the Ferbers before their Goldelse and their bust of Beethoven: scenes in which how an individual knew music marked that individual politically, socially, and morally.

Works Cited Applegate, Celia. “Bach Revival, Public Culture, and National Identity: The St. Matthew Passion in 1829.” In A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, edited by Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, 139 – 162. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 2012. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. Leipzig: Schwickert, 1787. Becker, Carl Ferdinand. Die Tonwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig, Fleischer, 1855. Bie, Otto. Das Klavier. Berlin: Cassirer, 1921. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction – A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 2013. Couperin, François. L’Art de Toucher le clavecin. Paris: Couperin, 1717. Dreetz, Albert. Czerny und Beethoven. Leipzig: Kirstner, 1932. Elson, Arthur. The Book of Musical Knowledge. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek I. Gotha: Ettinger, 1778.

The Case of the Piano

339

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Zweiter Italienischer Aufenthalt.” In Werke, vol. 11. Hamburg: Wegner, 1948. Hanslick, Eduard. Aus meinem Leben. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987. Hanslick, Eduard. “Ein Brief über die Clavierseuche.” In Suite, 163 – 178. Vienna: Keil, 1884. Kinkel, Johanna. Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über den Clavier-Unterricht. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1852. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III. New York: Norton, 1993. Leppert, Richard. “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano.” Nineteenth Century Music 16, no. 2 (1992): 105 – 128. Marlitt, Eugenie. Goldelse. Leipzig: Ernst Keil, 1875. Der musikalische Dillettant: Eine Wochenschrift. Vienna: Kurzböcken, 1770. Rietsch, Heinrich. “Fünfundachtzig Variationen über Diabellis Wälzer.” Beethovenjahrbuch 1 (1908): 28 – 50. Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel. C.F.D. Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Stuttgart: Scheible, 1839. Schubert, Franz Ludwig. Wegweiser in der Musikliteratur für Pianofortespieler. Leipzig: Wengler, 1861. Schumann, Robert. Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1891. Sealsfield, Charles (Karl Postl). Österreich, wie es ist, oder, Skizzen von den Fürstenhöfen des Kontinents. Vienna: Schroll, 1919.

Angela Esterhammer

Afterword: The Audience, the Public, and the Improvisator Maximilian Langenschwarz The study of European literature and culture around 1800 has been transformed in recent years by an awareness of performativity and by new research into numerous modes of performance. Qualities long associated with the Romantic era, such as sensibility, inwardness, and authenticity, are now being contextualized within the era’s orientation toward audience, appearance, and embodiment. The essays in Performing Knowledge, 1750 – 1850 expand that awareness of performativity into new genres and across several decades of German culture. They show how philosophy and science as well as art and poetry are publicly performed in visual and aural media, how knowledge is instrumentalized in the interests of different socioeconomic classes, age groups, genders, and national markets. Most importantly, these essays reveal how deeply knowledge is conditioned by being represented in public contexts and by being communicated to often unpredictable audiences. Performance affects not only the way knowledge is transmitted, but even the way it is produced. Whenever knowledge is being performed it is also, to some extent, being formed. The prominence of universities and public education in German-speaking states between the Enlightenment and the mid-nineteenth century provides an especially rich context for performing knowledge, and several of the contributors to this volume explore that potential. Their reflections on student experience and professorial life around 1800 generate insights into the way socioeconomic realities augment the performative aspects of education. A large cadre of Privatgelehrte or Privatdozenten, for example – private or independent scholars without university chairs – are obliged to support themselves by offering lecture courses to paying auditors. These knowledge-producers, who at one time included Kant as well as lesser-known figures such as Josias Ludwig Gosch and Ernst F. F. Chladni, are highly motivated to develop ways of performing scholarship that will appeal to a target public. The evolution of disciplines in German universities provides another indication that the transmission of knowledge is increasingly taking pragmatic and embodied forms. Dietmar Till shows that the curricula of German schools and universities shift away from classical rhetoric in the mid-eighteenth century in favour of a “radically utilitarian pedagogical orientation” (64) and that rhetoric evolves from being primarily a system to being a “form of anthropological knowledge” (80). This shift complements Kant’s attempt

342

Angela Esterhammer

to make anthropology into what he called a “proper academic discipline” (221), and in his essay Chad Wellmon reveals the importance Kant accorded to popular science, cosmopolitan knowledge, and the “public use of reason” (238). The link between education and performance is clearly evident in a medium to which this volume devotes special attention: the lecture, lecture-demonstration, or what Viktoria Tkaczyk calls the “lecture scenario” (32). In the lecture scenario knowledge is embodied and conditioned by the materiality of the physical world, the contingency of transmission in real time, and the visual and physical presence of the knowledge-producer to the listener, spectator, and consumer. Texts that are usually encountered on the printed page, such as Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History [Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte], gain new resonances when the full implications of the original lecture context are attended to, including the importance of presence and presentness as well as the characteristics of a lecture course that is offered repeatedly. Sean Franzel discusses these aspects of temporality and periodicity in relation to the disciplines of history and literary-cultural history, where the mode of transmission injects a distinctive temporal consciousness that influences the subject matter of the discourse. The lecture scenario is an equally important factor in the shaping of scientific and philosophical knowledge, as Claire Baldwin shows by analyzing the impact of Lichtenberg’s work as a physics lecturer and performer of experiments whose lecture-demonstrations manifest the material culture of science and the “embodied mind” (205). While this perspective sheds new light on an established eighteenth-century figure like Lichtenberg, it makes other Romantic-era scientists visible in the first place, including Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, the travelling physicist, musician, and lecturer whom Viktoria Tkaczyk presents as the founder of modern acoustics. These approaches reveal the extent to which scientific and philosophical disciplines incorporate practice alongside system, belief, and claim. Philosophy and other forms of knowledge, when represented before an audience, demand public credibility or what performativity theory calls “uptake.” This key insight, which several of these essays arrive at through analysis of lecture scenarios and other real-life and real-time performance contexts around 1800, is also fundamental to Edgar Landgraf’s textual study of Kleist. Landgraf shows how often in Kleist the public – even and especially when it is composed of silent bystanders – becomes an audience whose presence “turns subjects into actors and their doings into performances” (270). “In Kleist, it seems, whenever a speaker speaks, she is performing,” Landgraf writes (271), showing with the help of eighteenthand nineteenth-century political theory as well as discourse analysis that the role of the public in establishing political legitimacy is that of a (mostly passive)

The Audience, the Public, and the Improvisator Maximilian Langenschwarz

343

audience. An embodied form of public opinion, it is a presence that needs to be taken account of by political agents. Landgraf’s essay – like this volume as a whole – reads the concept of aestheticcultural audience and that of political-economic public together in important new ways. Other contributors address the elision of audience with public by examining cases in which pedagogical, poetic, or political scenarios take the form of theater or spectacle per se. Such a conflation happens in the public commemorations of the death of Schiller studied by Mary Helen Dupree, with their reliance on ritual and repetition, declamation, and drama. Theater also comes together with broader public experience in Hans-Georg von Arburg’s study of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s early career as a theatrical set designer, through which he developed a sense of architecture as spectacle designed to awaken philosophical reflection in the spectator. A recognition of the performative dimension of architectural forms or lecture scenarios is thus complemented by a new awareness of the knowledge-transmitting function of musical recitals, popular theater, and public ritual. These approaches to the performance of knowledge in German culture open up the potential for comparative or intercultural studies that might, for instance, engage with recent research on the institution of public lecturing in early nineteenth-century Britain. The comparative dimension comes to the fore in a different way in essays that show how knowledge was communicated internationally by travelling scientists, musicians, lecturers, and other performers. E.F.F. Chladni stands out as an example of a literal border-crosser during his extensive European lecture tours, as well as a figure who crossed boundaries between scientific experiment and aesthetic performance and between German and French languages and knowledge cultures. Crucially, this volume also helps bridge contemporary international cultures of knowledge by bringing Anglo-American research into contact with German and European scholarship, for instance with the extensive work on performativity and performance produced by the research group “Cultures of the Performative [Kulturen des Performativen]” at the Free University of Berlin (1999 – 2010). Last but certainly not least, Performing Knowledge 1750 – 1850 introduces a fascinating cast of characters into Enlightenment and Romantic studies, including the scientist and musician Chladni, the actor and lecturer Gustav Anton von Seckendorff, and Josias Ludwig Gosch, whom the editors’ introduction presents as a media theorist of the Enlightenment. The series might be extended to take in another shadowy performer of knowledge, Maximilian Langenschwarz – a midnineteenth-century figure who offers himself as a kind of counterpart to the late eighteenth-century Gosch as well as an intriguing realization of Gosch’s ideas about the performative circulation of knowledge. A brief look at Langenschwarz, by way of a coda, makes Gosch appear quite prescient about the production and

344

Angela Esterhammer

transmission of knowledge by peripatetic speakers within an “anthropology of sympathy” and an “affect- and idea-saturated network” (3). Equally marginal to traditional literary-cultural history, equally ephemeral in their activities and reception, both Gosch and Langenschwarz provide fascinating examples of embodied, multi-media communication in the period between 1750 and 1850. Born into an impoverished Jewish merchant family in the town of Rödesheim near Frankfurt shortly after 1800, Maximilian Langenschwarz seized an auspicious moment in which to go public with his talent for spontaneously improvising poetry when he debuted as an improviser (improvvisatore) in Munich’s Hoftheater in the summer of 1830. Gaining a reputation in that medium at that time was possible thanks to the popularity of poetic improvisation throughout Europe during the 1820s (although it still caused a sensation when attempted in any language other than the traditional Italian), and to the existence of an international network of journalists who were eager to report on innovative performances such as these in newspapers and magazines. Following his initial success in Munich, Langenschwarz went on tour in Bavaria and then more widely throughout German states to Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin, further to England and Russia and then to the cultural center of Paris, where he settled for some years with his wife, a German mezzo-soprano who gained celebrity in her own right as Madame Langenschwarz-Rutini. Langenschwarz and his wife typically performed together with other musicians in vaudeville shows that alternated vocal and instrumental numbers with his improvisations in various genres including lyric and epic poetry, comic verses, or entire dramas. Like other nineteenth-century improvvisatori, Langenschwarz performed his (and the audience’s) fund of historical, cultural, and literary knowledge. Improvisers were usually assigned topics from history or legend such as “William Tell” or “Napoleon crossing the Alps” although, judging by the titles of his extant improvisations that were printed in periodicals, Langenschwarz and his German audiences also showed a tendency toward more contemplative and philosophical themes such as impatience (Ungeduld), satisfaction (Zufriedenheit), or the immortality of man (Der Mensch ist unsterblich). “Langenschwarz is a phenomenon in his time in Germany,” wrote one reviewer in 1839.¹ More than particular genres or topics, his improvisations were above all designed to showcase the capabilities of the human mind. What fascinated audiences who had been influenced by the Romantic ideology of poetic genius was the opportunity to see inspired creation taking place, as it were, before their eyes. Langenschwarz took the display of mental capabilities to an ex-

 “Langenschwarz der Improvisator,” Zeitung für die elegante Welt 103 (30 May 1839): 412.

The Audience, the Public, and the Improvisator Maximilian Langenschwarz

345

treme in the vaudeville scenarios that he devised. He specialized in writing multiple poems at once, on different topics chosen by audience members of which he could not have known in advance; he expressly asked audience members to make as much distracting noise as possible and to remove and return the papers on which he was writing at random so that he could demonstrate his extraordinary focus, invention, and multi-tasking ability. Reviewers, in addition to evaluating the quality and entertainment value of his poetic improvisations, were often led to comment on the mental faculties they revealed – genius and quickness, but also inner calm. An especially astute review by Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy in the Damen-Zeitung uses the occasion of Langenschwarz’s debut performance in Munich to contextualize improvisation from the time of Homer to the present day, making distinctions between oral and written poetry, folksong and theatrical convention, German and Italian language and national character, aesthetics and “Romantic freedom.”² Langenschwarz’s novelty performance thus leads a journalist like Chézy to reflect explicitly on aesthetic creation and representation and the medial contexts in which these processes occur. Langenschwarz himself, who later set up as a physician in Paris, maintained an interest in psychological processes as well as the sociopolitical applications of improvisation. Like other performers of knowledge who figure in the present volume, he brings together theatrical performance with philosophy and science. His lengthy list of publications includes a pedagogical text entitled The Arithmetic of Language, or the Orator through Himself [Die Arithmetik der Sprache, oder der Redner durch sich selbst, 1834], in which he sets out to teach a form of philosophical rhetoric that will help readers discover their inner selves and develop their speaking abilities for public service. Langenschwarz claims to be motivated by Germany’s special need for effective public speakers, although his book is still more ambitiously dedicated not just to his countrymen but “to humanity.” By teaching the appropriate ordering of thoughts and their effective, spontaneous expression with the help of rhetoric and imagination, Langenschwarz aims at the establishment of a rhetorical system, through the precise following of which it would gradually be possible for even the most unpracticed speaker to become master of his feelings and ideas, completely and to such a degree that, undeterred by anything going on around him, and at any given time, he would be capable of expressing what has awakened inside him clearly and in an ordered and coherent manner.³

 Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy [Julius Aquila, pseud.], “Ein Deutscher Improvisator,” DamenZeitung: Ein Morgenblatt für die elegante Welt 179 (29 July 1830): 714.  Maximilian Langenschwarz, Die Arithmetik der Sprache, oder der Redner durch sich selbst: Psychologisch-rhetorisches Lehrgebäude (Leipzig, 1834), x–xi.

346

Angela Esterhammer

Langenschwarz’s system re-assimilates theatrical performance to a psychologically grounded form of rhetoric that will lead to self-knowledge, self-fulfillment, and effective sociopolitical engagement. His Arithmetik der Sprache was not the only textbook that sought to invest poetic improvisation with public usefulness. In fact, similar handbooks appeared across Europe in the mid-nineteenth century,⁴ suggesting a widespread acceptance of the continuity between performance, professional education, and the transmission of knowledge via the pulpit, the bar, the political podium, and the university professor’s chair. Langenschwarz stands out, however, as a performer who conveyed this conviction with equal avidity in printed textbooks and in sensational vaudevillian soirées, achieving a broad geographical reach with both these media. Langenschwarz disappears from European literary and theatrical history in the mid-1850s, leading some nineteenth-century German biographers to infer that he died during that decade. But a prolific “Max Langenschwarz” or “Max Langenschwartz,” sometimes styled “Dr.” or “Colonel,” author of a multitude of broadsides, scientific articles, and political diatribes in English, turns up in the United States at that very moment. Apparently this extraordinary improviser had a later career of intervention in American Civil War politics that remains to be explored. As we become attentive to what a writer like Privatgelehrter Gosch has to say about the media theory of the Enlightenment, and as we learn more about the performative dimensions of German culture in the ensuing decades, we will also be in a position to appreciate how Improvisator Langenschwarz enacts a distinctive nineteenth-century convergence of theatrical performance, knowledge production, professional practice, and political action.

Works cited Anonymous. “Langenschwarz, der Improvisator.” Zeitung für die elegante Welt 103 (30 May 1839): 411 – 412. Chézy, Wilhelm Theodor von [Julius Aquila, pseud.]. “Ein Deutscher Improvisator.” In Damen-Zeitung: Ein Morgenblatt für die elegante Welt 178 (28 July 1830): 709 – 712; 179 (29 July 1830): 713 – 716; 180 (30 July 1830): 717 – 719. Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750 – 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Langenschwarz, Maximilian. Die Arithmetik der Sprache, oder der Redner durch sich selbst: Psychologisch-rhetorisches Lehrgebäude. Leipzig: Georg Joaquim Göschen, 1834.

 See Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750 – 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 205 – 6.

Bibliography Adelung, Johann Christoph. Ueber den Deutschen Styl. 3 vols. Berlin 1785. Reprint, Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1974. Agamben, Georgio. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell. New York: Zone, 2009. Allan, Sean, and Elystan Griffiths. “Introduction. Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 327 – 336. Alter, Nora, and Lutz Koepenick, eds. Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2004. Anonymous. “Langenschwarz, der Improvisator.” Zeitung für die elegante Welt 103 (30 May 1839): 411 – 412. Anonymous. “Miscellen aus Cassel.” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 28, no. 6 (June 1813): 350 – 351. Anonymous. “Schillers Todtenfeyer auf dem Theater in Frankfurt am Main. Brief an den Herausgeber.” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20, no. 7 (July 1805): 453 – 454. Applegate, Celia. “Bach Revival, Public Culture, and National Identity: The St. Matthew Passion in 1829.” In A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, edited by Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, 139 – 162. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Art Institute of Chicago, The. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781 – 1841: The Drama of Architecture. Text by John Zukowsky et al. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. Exhibit catalog. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by James Opie Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. Leipzig: Schwickert, 1787. Bader, Eugen. Rede-Rhetorik, Schreib-Rhetorik, Konversationsrhetorik. Eine historisch-systematische Analyse. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. Baecker, Dirk. “Oszillierende Öffentlichkeit.” In Wozu Gesellschaft?, 80 – 101. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007. Baisch, Martin, Roger Friedlein, and Angelika Lozar. “Historizität und Performativität von Wissen und Wissenschaften in der Frühen Neuzeit.” Paragrana 13, no. 1 (2004): 92 – 100. Bal, Mieke. “Performance and Performativity.” In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, A Rough Guide, 174 – 212. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Balme, Christopher, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Stephan Grätzel, eds. Theater als Paradigma der Moderne. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. Barner, Wilfried. Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970.

348

Bibliography

Barnett, Dene. The Art of Gesture. The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting. Heidelberg: Winter, 1987. Batsch, August Johann Georg Carl. Botanik für Frauenzimmer und Pflanzenliebhaber welche keine Gelehrten sind. Weimar: Industrie Comptoir, 1795. Baxandall, Michael. Shadows and Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Becker, Carl Ferdinand. Die Tonwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig: Fleischer, 1855. Beethoven, Ludwig van. Leonore Prohaska. Werke ohne Opuszahl 96. 1815. Behrens, Rudolf. Problematische Rhetorik. Studien zur französischen Theoriebildung der Affektrhetorik zwischen Cartesianismus und Frühaufklärung. Munich: Fink, 1982. Beiser, Friederick. Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Bender, Wolfgang F. “Vom ‘tollen Handwerk’ zur Kunstübung. Zur ‘Grammatik’ der Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Schauspielkunst im 18. Jahrhundert. Grundlagen, Praxis, Autoren, edited by Wolfgang F. Bender 11 – 50. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992. Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, and Christine Blondel. “Introduction: A Science Full of Shocks, Sparks and Smells.” In Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment, edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincente and Christine Blondel, 1 – 10. Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, and Christine Blondel, eds. Science and Spectacle, in the European Enlightenment. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Bentzel-Sternau, Christian. Schillers Feier. Seinen Manen durch seinen Geist. Gotha: Becker, 1806. Berg, Gunhild. “Probieren und Experimentieren, Auflösen und Zusammensetzen im Sudelbuch. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg als experimental philosopher.” Lichtenberg-Jahrbuch 2010: 7 – 25. Bertuch, Carl, ed. Journal des Luxus und der Moden. Weimar: Industrie-Comptoir, 1787 – 1812. Beuermann, Gustav. “‘Sie schwäntzen aber jezt schon, bis es blitzt und donnert.’ Physikprofessor – Lichtenbergs Beruf.” In Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 1742 – 1799: Wagnis der Aufklärung, edited by Ulrich Joost, Stephan Oettermann, and Sibylle Spiegel, 346 – 364. Munich: Hanser, 1992. Beyer, Robert Thomas. Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. New York: Springer, 1999. Bie, Otto. Das Klavier. Berlin: Cassirer, 1921. Bies, Michael. “Der Goethe des Grashalms: Zur ‘Darstellung’ der Naturforschung um 1800.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 131, no. 4 (2012): 513 – 535. Bies, Michael. Im Grunde ein Bild. Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe und Alexander von Humboldt. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Bies, Michael. “Naturwissen, natürlich: Die ‘Méthode naturelle’ bei Buffon und Adanson.” In Methoden der Aufklärung: Ordnungen der Wissensvermittlung und Erkenntnisgenerierung im langen 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Silke Förschler and Nina Hahne, 209 – 221. Munich: Fink, 2012. Birgfeld, Johannes. “Klopstock, the Art of Declamation and the Reading Revolution: An Inquiry into One Author’s Remarkable Impact on the Changes and Counter-Changes in Reading Habits Between 1750 and 1800.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 101 – 117.

Bibliography

349

Blamberger, Günther. “Agonalität und Theatralität. Kleists Gedankenfigur des Duells im Kontext der europäischen Moralistik.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1999: 25 – 40. Blamberger, Günther. Heinrich von Kleist. Die Biographie. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011. Blumenberg, Hans. Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987. Bosse, Heinrich. “Dichter kann man nicht bilden. Zur Geschichte der Schulrhetorik nach 1770.” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 10, no. 1 (1978): 80 – 125. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction – A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 2013. Brandt, Reinhard. “Ausgewählte Probleme der Kantischen Anthropologie.” In Der ganze Mensch, edited by Hans-Jürgen Schings, 14 – 32. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994. Brandt, Reinhard. “The Guiding Idea of Kant’s Anthropology and the Vocation of the Human Being.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology. Edited by Brian Jacobs and Patrick Klein, 85 – 104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Brandt, Reinhard and Werner Stark. “Einleitung.” In Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, vol. 25: Vorlesungen über Anthropologie. Edited by Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark, vii – cli. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Bredekamp, Horst. Theorie des Bildakts: Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Brühl, Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von. Neue Kostüme auf den beiden königlichen Theatern in Berlin unter der General-Intendantur des Herrn Grafen von Brühl. 3 vols. Berlin: Wittich, 1819 – 1823. Brühl, Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Decorationen auf den beiden Königlichen Theatern in Berlin, unter der General-Intendantur des Herrn Grafen von Brühl. Nach Zeichnungen des Herrn Geheimen Ober-Baurath Schinkel. 5 vols. Berlin: Wittich, 1819 – 1824. Buddemeier, Heinz. Panorama, Diorama, Photographie: Entstehung und Wirkung neuer Medien im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Fink, 1970. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc. “Premier discours: De la manière d’étudier & de traiter l’Histoire Naturelle.” In Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière: avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, vol. 1, 1 – 62. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749. Bürger, Elise. Gedichte von Elise Bürger, geb. Hahn. Als erster Band ihrer Gedichte, Reise-Blätter, Kunst- und Lebens-Ansichten. Hamburg: Conrad Müller, 1812. Bürger, Elise. Lilien-Blätter und Zypressenzweige. Frankfurt am Main: Heller und Rohm, 1826. Busch, Hermann R. “Chladni.” In Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Friedrich Blume et al., Personenteil 4, 2nd ed., 956 – 958. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York and London: Routledge, 1993, 2011. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990, 2006. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519 – 31. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Campe, Rüdiger. Affekt und Ausdruck. Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. Carroll, Noel. Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

350

Bibliography

Cassirer, Ernst. Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. Tübingen: Mohr, 1932. Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26 – 61. Catel, Louis. “Über die Dekorationen der Zauberflöte.” Vossische Zeitung (10 February 1816): 118 – 121. Chaouli, Michel. The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Chézy, Wilhelm Theodor von [Julius Aquila, pseud.]. “Ein Deutscher Improvisator.” Damen-Zeitung: Ein Morgenblatt für die elegante Welt 178 (28 July 1830): 709 – 712; 179 (29 July 1830): 713 – 716; 180 (30 July 1830): 717 – 719. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Die Akustik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1802. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik und zur Lehre vom Instrumentenbau, enthaltend die Theorie und Anleitung zum Bau des Clavicylinders und damit verwandter Instrumente. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1821. Reprint, Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1980. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Chladnis Selbstbiographie.” (Nekrolog) Caecilia 6 (1827): 297 – 308. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Fortsetzung der Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik, enthaltend manche Verbesserungen und Zusätze, wie auch Nachrichten von einem vor kurzem auf eine ganz neue Art gebauten Euphon.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 24 (1822): 789 – 792; 805 – 814; 821 – 826. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Kurze Uebersicht der Schall- und Klanglehre, nebst einem Anhange, die Entwicklung und Anordnung der Tonverhältnisse betreffend. Mainz: Schott’s Söhne, 1827. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. Traité d’acoustique. Paris: Courcier, 1809. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2009. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Über seine Aufnahme bei Napoléon und sonst in Paris.” Caecilia 5 (1826): 137 – 144. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Von dem Euphon, einem neuerfundenen musikalischen Instrumente.” Journal von und für Deutschland 7, no. 3 (1790): 201 – 202. Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. “Vorrede, zur Fortsetzung der Geschichte meiner akustischen Entdeckungen.” In Neue Beyträge zur Akustik, v–xii. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1817. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Clark, William. “From Enlightenment to Romanticism. Lichtenberg and Göttingen Physics.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nikolaas Rupke, 72 – 85. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Clark, William. “German Physics Textbooks in the Goethezeit.” History of Science 35, no. 2/3 (1997): 219 – 239 and 295 – 363. Cook, Alexandra. “Propagating Botany: The Case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In The Transmission of Culture in Western Europe, 1750 – 1850: Papers Celebrating the Bicentenary of the Foundation of the ‘Bibliothèque britannique’ (1796 – 1814) in Geneva, edited by David Bickerton and Judith Proud, 69 – 94. Bern: Peter Lang, 1999. Couperin, François. L’Art de Toucher le clavecin. Paris: Couperin, 1717. Crawford, Heide. “Poetically Visualizing Urgestalten: The Union of Nature, Art, and the Love of a Woman in Goethe’s ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen.’” In The Enlightened Eye:

Bibliography

351

Goethe and Visual Culture, edited by Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson, 279 – 288. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Czerwick, Edwin. Systemtheorie und Demokratie. Begriffe und Strukturen im Werk Luhmanns. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008. Dagognet, François. Le catalogue de la vie. Étude méthodologique sur la taxonomie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004. Dalberg, Freiherr Johann Friedrich Hugo von. “Aschaffenburg (Nachrichten).” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 13, no. 15 (1811): 254 – 257. Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden, Part II: Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem, with Philosophical Notes, 2nd ed. London: Nichols, 1790. Daston, Lorraine. Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit. Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2001. Daston, Lorraine, ed. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York and Cambridge, MA: Zone, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context” [1971]. In Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Dick, Alexander, and Angela Esterhammer, eds. Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Diebner, Hans H. Performative Science and Beyond: Involving the Body in Research. London: Springer, 2006. Dolan, Emily. The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Dreetz, Albert. Czerny und Beethoven. Leipzig: Kirstner, 1932. Dresdner Anzeigen. Dresden: Adreßcomptoir, 1795 – 1826. Duncan, Bruce. “Remembering Schiller: The Centenary of 1859.” Seminar 35 (1999): 1 – 22. Dünne, Jörg. Asketisches Schreiben: Rousseau und Flaubert als Paradigmen literarischer Selbstpraxis in der Moderne. Tübingen: Narr, 2003. Dupree, Mary Helen. “Elise in Weimar: ‘Actress-Writers’ and the Resistance to Classicism.” In The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, edited by Patricia A. Simpson and Evelyn K. Moore, 111 – 125. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Dupree, Mary Helen. “From ‘Dark Singing’ to a Science of the Voice: Gustav Anton von Seckendorff, the Declamatory Concert and the Acoustic Turn Around 1800.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 3 (2012): 365 – 396. Dupree, Mary Helen. The Mask and the Quill: Actress-writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Dyck, Joachim, and Jutta Sandstede. Quellenbibliographie zur Rhetorik, Homiletik und Epistolographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum. 3 vols. Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996. Elias, Norbert. Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. 2 vols. 6th ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978. Elson, Arthur. The Book of Musical Knowledge. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915. Engel, Johann Jakob. Ideen zu einer Mimik. 2 vols. Berlin: Mylius, 1785. Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.

352

Bibliography

Erdbeer, Robert Matthias, and Christina Wessely. “Kosmische Resonanzen. Theorie und Körper in der Esoterischen Moderne.” In Resonanz: Potentiale einer akustischen Figur, edited by Karsten Lichau, Viktoria Tkaczyk, and Rebecca Wolf, 144 – 76. Munich: Fink, 2009. Erxleben, Johann Christian Polykarp. Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre. Göttingen and Gotha: J.C. Dieterich, 1772. Erxleben, Johann Christian Polykarp. Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre. Lichtenbergs annotiertes Handexemplar der vierten Auflage. Vol. 1 of Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre. Edited by Wiard Hinrichs, Albert Krayer, and Horst Zehe. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750 – 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Fabricius, Johann Andreas. Philosophische Oratorie, Das ist: Vernünftige Anleitung zur gelehrten und galanten Beredsamkeit. Leipzig 1724. Reprint, Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974. Fauser, Markus. Das Gespräch im 18. Jahrhundert. Rhetorik und Geselligkeit in Deutschland. Stuttgart: M&P Verlag, 1991. Fauser, Markus. Rede-Rhetorik, Schreib-Rhetorik, Konversationsrhetorik. Eine historisch-systematische Analyse. ScriptOralia 69. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. Felfe, Robert. “Die Erziehung des Auges. Wissen und visuelle Praxis (Einführung Sektion X).” In Kulturen des Wissens im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Ulrich Johannes Schneider, 451 – 454. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Felfe, Robert. “Sehen am Faden der Linie. Spiele des Bildermachens bei Abraham Bosse.” In Spektakuläre Experimente: Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Helmar Schramm, Ludgar Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, 78 – 113. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. Felfe, Robert, and Kirsten Wagner, eds. Museum, Bibliothek, Stadtraum: Räumliche Wissensordnungen 1600 – 1900. Berlin: Lit, 2010. Felfe, Robert, and Ludger Schwarte. “‘Performative Prozesse’ und ‘epistemische Konfigurationen.’” Paragrana 13, no. 1 (2004): 100 – 112. Fischer, Bernd. “Heinrich von Kleists vorgeführtes Erzählen.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 337 – 353. Fischer, Bernd. Ironische Metaphysik. Die Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists. Munich: Fink, 1988. Fischer, Bernd, and Tim Mehigan, eds. Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Grenzgänge und Tauschhandel: Auf dem Weg zu einer performativen Kultur.” In Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Uwe Wirth, 277 – 300. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, translated by Saskia Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, and Christoph Wulf, eds. “Theorien des Performativen.” Special issue, Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 10, no. 1 (2001). Fischer-Lichte, Erika, and Christoph Wulf, eds. “Praktiken des Performativen.” Special issue, Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 1 (2004). Fohrmann, Jürgen, ed. Gelehrte Kommunikation: Wissenschaft und Medium zwischen dem 16. und 20. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Boehlau, 2005.

Bibliography

353

Fohrmann, Jürgen. “Literaturgeschichte als Stiftung von Ordnung. Das Konzept der Literaturgeschichte bei Herder, August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel.” In Kontroversen, alte und neue, edited by Eberhard Lämmert and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 75 – 84. Göttingen: Niemeyer, 1986. Fontane, Theodor. “Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg.” In Die Grafschaft Ruppin, in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Walter Keitel, vol. 1, sect. 2, 107 – 129. Munich: Hanser, 1966. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek I. Gotha: Ettinger, 1778. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2002. Fraipont, Julien. “Robertson.” In Biographie nationale, edited by Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, vol. 19, 496 – 507. Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe & Cie, 1907. France, Peter. Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to Diderot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Frank, Horst Joachim. Dichtung, Sprache, Menschenbild. Geschichte des Deutschunterrichts von den Anfängen bis 1945. 2 vols. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1973. Franke, Ursula. Kunst als Erkenntnis. Die Rolle der Sinnlichkeit in der Ästhetik des Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972. “Franklin’s Glass Armonica.” The Franklin Institute. Accessed 24 October 2014. http://learn.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/armonica/armonica.php. Franzel, Sean. Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Frey, Christiane. “The Excess of Law and Rhetoric in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas.” Phrasis: Studies in Language and Literature 47, no. 1 (2006): 9 – 18. Frommel, Monika. “Die Paradoxie vertraglicher Sicherung bürgerlicher Rechte. Kampf ums Recht und sinnlose Aktion.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1988/89: 357 – 374. Fuhrmann, Manfred. Rhetorik und öffentliche Rede. Über die Ursachen des Verfalls der Rhetorik im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1983. Füssel, Marian. “Akademische Aufklärung. Die Universitäten des 18. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld von funktionaler Differenzierung, Ökonomie und Habitus.” In “Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung,” special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2010): 47 – 73. Fyfe, Aileen, and Bernard Lightman. Introduction to Science and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, edited by Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, 1 – 13. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gailus, Andreas. “Breaking Skulls. Kleist, Hegel, and the Force of Assertion.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 243 – 256. Gailus, Andreas. Passions of the Sign. Revolution and Language in Kant, Goethe, and Kleist. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Gamper, Michael. Die Natur ist republikanisch: Zu den ästhetischen, anthropologischen und politischen Konzepten der deutschen Gartenliteratur im 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998. Gamper, Michael. Elektropoetologie: Fiktionen der Elektrizität 1740 – 1870. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009.

354

Bibliography

Gamauf, Gottlieb. Erinnerungen aus Lichtenbergs Vorlesungen. Edited by Alfred Krayer and Klaus-Peter Lieb. Vol. 2 of Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. Garve, Christian. “Über die Popularität des Vortrages.” In Gesammelte Werke: Vermischte Aufsätze. Edited by Kurt Wölfel, vol. 2, 331 – 358. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985. Gebauer, Günter. Poetik des Fußballs. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2006. Gehler, J.S.T. Physicalisches Wörterbuch. Leipzig 1798. The Archimedes Project, Archimedes Repository Dictionary Access. Accessed 10 November 2014. http://archimedes.mpiwg-ber lin.mpg.de/cgi-bin/archim/dict/hw?step=list&id=d008&max=50. George, Sam. Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760 – 1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Gerlach, Klaus, ed. Eine Experimentalpoetik. Texte zum Berliner Nationaltheater. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007. Gerlach, Klaus, and René Sternke, eds. Der gesellschaftliche Wandel um 1800 und das Berliner Nationaltheater. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2009. Gierl, Martin. Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang. Stuttgart and Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012. Gilgen, Peter. Lektüren der Erinnerung: Lessing, Kant, Hegel. Munich: Fink, 2012. Godel, Rainer. “Literatur und Nicht-Wissen im Umbruch, 1730 – 1810.” In Literatur und Nicht-Wissen: Historische Konstellationen 1730 – 1930, edited by Michael Bies and Michael Gamper, 39 – 57. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Briefe: Hamburger Ausgabe in sechs Bänden. Edited by Karl Robert Mandelkow. 6 vols. Munich: Beck, 1988. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Werke. Weimarer Ausgabe. Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Herzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Edited by Erich Schmidt et al. 136 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1887 – 1919. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “The Metamorphosis of Plants.” In The Metamorphosis of Plants, edited by Gordon L. Miller, 1 – 3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Edited by Friedmar Apel et al. 40 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987 – 2013. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Zweiter Italienischer Aufenthalt.” In Werke, vol. 11. Hamburg: Wegner, 1948. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Goldenbaum, Ursula. Appell an das Publikum. Die öffentliche Debatte in der deutschen Aufklärung. Berlin: Akademie, 2004. Golinski, Jan. Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760 – 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Gosch, Josias Ludwig. Fragmente über den Ideenumlauf. Edited by Georg Stanitzek and Hartmut Winkler. Berlin: Kadmos, 2006. Gottsched, Johann Christoph. Ausführliche Redekunst. 1736. Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973. Graevenitz, Gerhart von. “Memoria und Realismus: Erzählende Literatur in der deutschen ‘Bildungspresse’ des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Memoria: Vergessen und Erinnern. Edited by Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann, 282 – 304. Munich: Fink, 1993. Gravenkamp, Horst. Geschichte eines elenden Körpers. Lichtenberg als Patient. Göttingen: Wallstein 1992.

Bibliography

355

Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Circulation of Social Energy.” In Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, 1 – 20. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Grimm, Gunter E. Literatur und Gelehrtentum in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zum Wandel ihres Verhältnisses vom Humanismus bis zur Frühaufklärung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983. Gronau, Barbara, and Alice Lagaay, eds. Performanzen des Nichttuns. Vienna: Passagen, 2008. Gronau, Barbara, and Alice Lagaay, eds. Ökonomien der Zurückhaltung: Kulturelles Handeln zwischen Askese und Restriktion. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Grus, Michael. Brentanos Gedichte “An Görres” und “An Schinkel”: Historisch-kritische Edition der bislang ungedruckten Entwürfe mit Erläuterungen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Nachdruck und um ein Vorwort ergänzt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990. Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hadlock, Heather. “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 3 (2000): 507 – 542. Haig, David. “Sympathy with Adam Smith and Reflections on Self.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 77 (2011): 4 – 13. Hallbauer, Friedrich Andreas. Anweisungen zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie. Jena 1725. Reprint, Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974. Hammerstein, Notker. “Universitäten.” In Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte. Edited by Notker Hammerstein and Ulrich Herrmann. Vol. 2: 18. Jahrhundert. Vom späten 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuordnung Deutschlands um 1800, 369 – 400. Munich: Beck, 2005. Hansell, Sven H. The Solo Cantatas, Motets, and Antiphones of Johann Adolf Hasse. PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1966. Hanslick, Eduard. Aus meinem Leben. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987. Hanslick, Eduard. “Ein Brief über die Clavierseuche.” In Suite, 163 – 178. Vienna: Keil, 1884. Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis). Schriften: Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, edited by Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel, 3 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1978. Häsner, Bernd. “Indexikalität und Indexikalisierung: Überlegungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Relevanz eines sprachwissenschaftlichen Konzepts.” In Im Zeichen der Fiktion: Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht. Festschrift für Klaus W. Hempfer zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Irina Rajewsky and Ulrike Schneider, 67 – 84. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 2008. Häsner, Bernd, Henning S. Hufnagel, Irmgard Maassen, and Anita Traninger. “Text und Performativität.” In Theorien des Performativen: Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine

356

Bibliography

kritische Bestandsaufnahme, edited by Klaus W. Hempfer and Jörg Volbers, 69 – 96. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Haus, Andreas. Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Künstler: Annäherung und Kommentar. München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2001. Heerde, Hans-Joachim. Das Publikum der Physik. Lichtenbergs Hörer. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956. Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. In Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 13. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Heidsieck, Arnold. “Adam Smith’s Influence on Lessing’s View of Man and Society.” Lessing Yearbook 15 (1983): 125 – 143. Heilbron, J.L. “Physics and its History at Göttingen around 1800.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nikolaas Rupke, 50 – 71. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Helfer, Martha B. The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of ‘Darstellung’ in German Critical Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Hell, Helmut. Beethoven. Musik zu Egmont und andere Schauspielmusiken. Munich: Henle, 1998. Hempfer, Klaus W. “Performance, Performanz, Performativität. Einige Unterscheidungen zur Ausdifferenzierung eines Theoriefeldes.” In Theorien des Performativen: Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme, edited by Klaus W. Hempfer and Jörg Volbers, 11 – 41. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Hempfer, Klaus W., Bernd Häsner, and Irina Rajewsky. “Indexikalität, Performativität und Stil im Diskurs der Wissenschaften.” Paragrana 13, no. 1 (2004): 83 – 92. Hempfer, Klaus W., and Anita Traninger, eds. Dynamiken des Wissens. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2007. Hempfer, Klaus W., and Jörg Volbers, eds. Theorien des Performativen: Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Herz, Marcus. “Rez. Von Platners Anthropologie von Aerzte und Weltweise.” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 20, no. 1 (1773): 25 – 51. Hochadel, Oliver. Öffentliche Wissenschaft. Elektrizität in der deutschen Aufklärung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003. Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler’s Musical Sufferings.” In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, edited by David Charlton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Über Dekorationen der Bühne überhaupt und über die neuen Dekorationen zur Oper Die Zauberflöte auf dem Königl. Opern-Theater insbesondere.” Dramaturgisches Wochenblatt (17 February 1816): 122 – 130. Hoffmann, Freia. Instrument und Körper. Die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1991. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, Russell A. Berman, Karen Kenkel, and Arthur Strum, Öffentlichkeit. Geschichte eines kritischen Begriffs. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000. Hölscher, Lucian. Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Öffentlichkeit in der frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979.

Bibliography

357

Howe, Steven. “‘Des Vaterlandes Grauses Sinnbild’: Legitimacy, Performance and Terror in Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 389 – 404. Hufeland, Christian Wilhelm. Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern. Jena: Akademie Buchhandlung, 1797. Hume, David. Moral Philosophy. Hackett: Indianapolis, 2006. Hund, Friedrich. Die Geschichte der Göttinger Physik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987. Hunt, Frederick Vinton. Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Institut de France. Classe des sciences mathématiques et physiques, ed. Mémoires de la classe des sciences mathématiques et physiques de l’Institut de France. Paris: Baudouin, 1808. Reprint in Chladni, Traité d’acoustique, 358 – 375. Ith, Johann. Versuch einer Anthropologie oder Philosophie des Menschen nach seinen körperlichen Anlagen. Berne: Emanuel Haller, 1794. Ittershagen, Ulrike. Lady Hamiltons Attitüden. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998. Jackson, Myles W. Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Jacob, François. La statue intérieure. Paris: Jacob, 1987. Jacobs, Brian, and Patrick Klein. Introduction to Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, edited by Brian Jacobs and Patrick Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich. Grundriß einer Erfahrungs-Seelenlehre. Halle: Hemmerde & Schwetschke, 1795. Jäger, Georg. Sozialgeschichte des deutschen Unterrichts an höheren Schulen von der Spätaufklärung bis zum Vormärz. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Exuberance. New York: Vintage, 2004. Jean Paul. Hesperus, oder 45 Hundsposttage. Berlin: Karl Matzdorff, 1795. Jean Paul. Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics. Translated by Margaret R. Hale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. Jooss, Birgit. Lebende Bilder. Körperliche Nachahmung von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit. Berlin: Reimer, 1999. Joost, Ulrich. “Einleitung.” In Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre. Vol 2. of Gesammelte Schriften: historisch-kritische und kommentierte Ausgabe. vii–xl. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. Joost, Ulrich. “Vorlesungsmanuskript und Vorlesungsnachschrift als editorisches Problem, und etwas von Lichtenbergs Vorlesungen.” Cardanus. Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 1 (2000): 33 – 70. Joost, Ulrich, ed. “Zeugnisse über Lichtenberg als akademischen Lehrer.” Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre 2, xlix–lxxxii. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. Junker, Carl Ludwig. “Vom Kostüm des Frauenzimmers Spielens.” Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783. Leipzig: Schwickert, 1783, 85 – 99. Kane, Brian. “Melodrama, nach Beethoven.” Accessed 18 October 2014. http://www.browse briankane.com/My_Homepage_Files/melodrama.html. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology, History and Education. Translated by Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

358

Bibliography

Kant, Immanuel. “Critique of Practical Reason.” In Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor, 133 – 272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by the Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols. to date. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In Werke, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 2. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Der Streit der Fakultäten. Edited by Horst D. Brandt and Piero Giordanetti. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2005. Kiesling, L. Lynne. “Mirror Neuron Research and Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy: Three Points of Correspondence.” Review of Austrian Economics 25 (2012): 299 – 313. King, Hyatt. “The Musical Glasses and Glass Harmonica.” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 72nd Sess. (1945 – 1946): 97 – 122. Kinkel, Johanna. Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über den Clavier-Unterricht. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1852. Kinzel, Ulrich. “Von der Naturbeschreibung zur ‘literarischen Biologie:’ Transformationen im literarischen Diskurs an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert.” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 20, no. 2 (1995): 75 – 115. Kircher, Athanasius. Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni. Rome: Corbelletti, 1650. Kircher, Athanasius. Neue Hall- und Thon-Kunst oder Mechanische Gehaim-Verbindung der Kunst und Natur durch Stimme und Hall-Wissenschafft gestifftet. Nördlingen: Arnold Heylen, 1684. Kittler, Friedrich, and Gerhard Kaiser. Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Göttingen, 1978. Kittler, Wolf. Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie. Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1987. Klancher, Jon. “Presentism and the Archives.” Accessed 14 June 2013. http://www.rc.umd. edu/praxis/contemporary/klancher/klancher.html. Kleinert, Andreas. “Wechselbeziehungen zwischen deutschen und französischen Naturwissenschaften im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIII et XIXe siècle), edited by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, 371 – 380. Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988. Kleist, Heinrich von. The Marquise of O—. And Other Stories. Translated by Martin Greenberg. New York: Criterion Books, 1960. Kleist, Heinrich von. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Edited by Helmut Sembdner. Munich: Hanser, 1965. Klingemann, August. Schill, oder das Declamatorium in Krähwinkel. Helmstädt: Fleckeisen, 1812. Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb. Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie: Dichtungstheoretische Schriften. Edited by Winfried Menninghaus. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989. Knape, Joachim. “Barock (1. Deutschland).” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, vol. 1, 1285 – 1332. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. Knape, Joachim. Poetik und Rhetorik in Deutschland 1300 – 1700. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006.

Bibliography

359

Knobloch, Hans-Jörg. “Die Auflösung des Gesellschaftsvertrags in Kleists ‘Michael Kohlhaas.’” In Recht und Gerechtigkeit bei Heinrich von Kleist, edited by Peter Ensberg and Hans-Jochen Marquardt, 69 – 77. Stuttgart: Heinz, 2002. Knorr Cetina, Karin. Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Zur Anthropologie der Naturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Knorr Cetina, Karin. Wissenskulturen: Ein Vergleich naturwissenschaftlicher Wissensformen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Koch, Georg Friedrich. “Schinkels architektonische Entwürfe im gotischen Stil 1810 – 1815.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 32 (1969): 262 – 316. Kolesch, Doris, and Sibylle Krämer, eds. Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006. Kondylis, Panajotis. Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. Koschorke, Albrecht. Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 1999. Koselleck, Reinhart. “‘Neuzeit’: Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe.” In Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 300 – 348. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Koselleck, Reinhart. “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung.” In Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner et al., 170 – 207. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Krämer, Sybille. “Was haben ‘Performativität’ und ‘Medialität’ miteinander zu tun? Plädoyer für eine in der ‘Aisthetisierung’ gründende Konzeption des Performativen.” In Performativität und Medialität, edited by Sybille Krämer, 13 – 32. Munich: Fink 2004. Krämer, Sybille, and Marco Stahlhut. “Das ‘Performative’ als Thema der Sprach- und Kulturphilosophie.” Paragrana 10, no. 1 (2001): 35 – 64. Krayer, Albert. “X. Von der Elektrizität. Vorbemerkung.” In Lichtenberg, Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre, Gesammelte Schriften: historisch-kritische und kommentierte Ausgabe, 4: 235 – 244. Krimmer, Elisabeth. “Between Terror and Transcendence: A Reading of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 405 – 420. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “Das moderne System der Künste.” In Humanismus und Renaissance, edited by Eckhard Keßler, translated by Renate Schweyen-Ott, 2: 164 – 313. Munich: Fink, 1976. Kugler, Franz Theodor. Karl Friedrich Schinkel; eine Charakteristik seiner künstlerischen Wirksamkeit. Berlin: Gropius, 1842. Kühlmann, Wilhelm. Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat. Entwicklung und Kritik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des Barockzeitalters. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Kunze, Stefan. Mozarts Opern. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Labaree, Leonard W., and Whitfield J. Bell, eds. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 40 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III. New York: Norton, 1993.

360

Bibliography

Lagaay, Alice, and Michael Lorber, eds. Destruction in the Performative. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Lamb, Martha Joanna. “Notes.” The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries, edited by Martha Joanna Lamb, vol. 19, 81 – 83. J.J. Little & Co.: New York, 1888. Landgraf, Edgar. Improvisation as Art. Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives. New York and London: Continuum, 2011. Lange, Horst. “Wolves, Sheep, and the Shepherd: Legality, Legitimacy, and Hobbesian Political Theory in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen.” Goethe Yearbook 10 (2001): 1 – 30. Langen, August. “Attitüde und Tableau in der Goethezeit.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 12 (1968): 194 – 258. Langenschwarz, Maximilian. Die Arithmetik der Sprache, oder der Redner durch sich selbst: Psychologisch-rhetorisches Lehrgebäude. Leipzig: Georg Joaquim Göschen, 1834. Langhans, Carl Gotthard. Vergleichung des Neuen Schauspielhauses zu Berlin mit verschiedenen ältern und neuern Schauspielhäusern in Rücksicht auf akustische und optische Grundsätze. Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1800. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric. A Foundation for Literary Study. Translated by Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton. Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 1998. Lawrence, Christopher, and Steven Shapin. Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Lazardzig, Jan, and Kirsten Wagner. “Raumwahrnehmung und Wissensproduktion: Erkundungen im Interferenzbereich von Theorie und Praxis.” In Möglichkeitsräume: Zur Performativität von sensorischer Wahrnehmung, edited by Christina Lechtermann, Kirsten Wagner, and Horst Wenzel, 124 – 140. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2007. Lazardzig, Jan. Theatermaschine und Festungsbau: Paradoxien der Wissensproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie, 2007. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Lemke, Anja. “‘Medea fiam’— Affekterzeugung zwischen Rhetorik und Ästhetik in Lessings Miβ Sara Sampson.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86, no. 2 (2012): 206 – 223. Lenoir, Timothy, ed. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Leppert, Richard. “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano.” Nineteenth Century Music 16. no. 2 (1992): 105 – 128. Lessing, G. E. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Edited by Wilfried Barner and Conrad Wiedemann. 12 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985 – 2003. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Friedrich Nicolai, and Moses Mendelssohn. Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel. Edited by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1972. Levie, Françoise. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson. La vie d’un fantasmagore. Brussels: Le Préambule, 1990. Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Briefwechsel. Edited by Ulrich Joost and Albrecht Schöne, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 5 vols. Munich: Beck, 1983 – 2004.

Bibliography

361

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. “Neue Entdeckungen, physikalische und andere Merkwürdigkeiten.” In Göttinger Taschen-Calendar für das Jahr 1774; Taschenbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, 50 – 63. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1784. Digitale Sammlungen der Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld. Accessed 10 November 2014. http://ds.ub.unibielefeld. de/viewer/image/2235093_009/1/LOG_0003/. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Sudelbücher. Vols. 1 and 2 of Schriften und Briefe. Edited by Wolfgang Promies. 6 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1967 – 1992. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Vorlesungen zur Naturlehre. Vols. 1 – 4 of Gesammelte Schriften: Historisch-Kritische und Kommentierte Ausgabe. Edited by the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen and the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005 – 2010. Lichtenberg-Kolleg. The Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study. “Institute.” Accessed 10 November 2014. http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/lichtenberg-kolleg/90756.html. Linden, Mareta. Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts. Bern: Peter Lang, 1976. Lindsay, Robert Bruce. “The Story of Acoustics.” The Journal of Acoustical Society of America 23, no. 4 (1966): 629 – 644. Linn, Marie-Luise. “A.G. Baumgartens Aesthetica und die antike Rhetorik.” In Rhetorik. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom 16.–20. Jahrhundert, edited by Helmut Schanze, 105 – 125. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1974. Linn, Marie-Luise. Studien zur deutschen Rhetorik und Stilistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Marburg: Elwert, 1963. Livingstone, David N. Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Ludwig, Otto. Der Schulaufsatz. Seine Geschichte in Deutschland. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988. Luhmann, Niklas. “Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System: Zur Theorie der öffentlichen Meinung.” In Öffentliche Meinung – Theorie, Methoden, Befunde: Beiträge zu Ehren von Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, edited by Jürgen Wilke, 77 – 86. Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich: Alber, 1992. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Edited by André Kieserling. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Luhmann, Niklas. “Staat und Staatsräson im Übergang von traditionaler Herrschaft zu moderner Politik.” In Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft 3: 65 – 148. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. Luserke-Jaqui, Matthias, ed. Schiller-Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Marchand, Suzanne L. Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750 – 1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Marlitt, Eugenie. Goldelse. Leipzig: Ernst Keil, 1875. Marshall, David. The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Martinec, Thomas. “The Boundaries of Mitleidsdramaturgie: Some Clarifications Concerning Lessing’s Concept of ‘Mitleid.’” The Modern Language Review 101, no. 3 (2009): 743 – 758.

362

Bibliography

Martinec, Thomas. Lessings Theorie der Tragödienwirkung. Humanistische Tradition und aufklärerische Erkenntniskritik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003. Matthias, Adolf. Geschichte des deutschen Unterrichts. Munich: Beck, 1907. McClelland, Charles Edgar. State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700 – 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Mehigan, Tim. Heinrich von Kleist. Writing after Kant. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. Meld Schell, Susan. “Kant’s Concept of the Human Race.” In The German Invention of Race, edited by Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore, 55 – 72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Mellin, G.S.A. Encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der kritischen Philosophie. Züllichan and Leipzig: Frommann, 1797. Mendelssohn, Moses. Ästhetische Schriften in Auswahl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974. Menninghaus, Winfried. “‘Darstellung:’ Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstocks Eröffnung eines neuen Paradigmas.” In Was heißt “Darstellen”?, edited by Christiaan L. Hart-Nibbrig, 205 – 226. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Meyer, Petra Maria, ed. Acoustic Turn. Munich: Fink, 2008. Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart. Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2001. Miller, Dayton Clarence. Anecdotal History of the Science of Sound: To the Beginning of the 20th Century. New York: Macmillan, 1935. Milner, Max. La fantasmagorie: essai sur l’optique fantastique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982. Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Morgenblatt für Gebildete Stände. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1807 – 1837. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Anthusa oder Roms Alterthümer.” In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Yvonne Pauly, vol. 4.1. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Vorlesungen über den Styl oder praktische Anweisung zu einer guten Schreibart mit Beispielen aus den vorzüglichsten Schriftstellern. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1808. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungs-Seelenkunde.” In Werke, vol. 1, 793 – 809. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997. Morton, Alan G. History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day. London: Academic Press, 1981. Moser, Christian. “Angewandte Kontingenz. Fallgeschichten bei Kleist und Montaigne.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 2000: 3 – 32. Moser, Christian. “Recht als Krieg. Moderne Staatlichkeit und die Aporien legalistischer Herrschaft bei Heinrich von Kleist.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 71 – 92. Most, Glenn. “Rhetorik und Hermeneutik. Zur Konstitution der Neuzeitlichkeit.” Antike und Abendland 30 (1984): 62 – 79. Moule, A.C. “A List of Musical and other Sound-Producing Instruments of the Chinese.” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 39, no. 1 (1908): 1 – 162. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Emanuel Schikaneder. Die Zauberflöte: Eine grosse Oper in zwei Aufzügen, KV 620. Edited by Hans-Albrecht Koch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991.

Bibliography

363

Mücke, Dorothea von. “The Fragmented Picture and Kleist’s ‘Zerbrochner Krug.’” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 41 – 53. Mülder-Bach, Inka. Im Zeichen Pygmalions: Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der ‘Darstellung’ im 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: Fink, 1998. Müller, Günther. “Goethes Elegie ‘Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen:’ Versuch einer morphologischen Interpretation.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 21 (1943): 67 – 98. Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Karen Reeds. “A Translation of Carl Linnaeus’s Introduction to Genera plantarum (1737).” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 563 – 572. Der musikalische Dillettant: Eine Wochenschrift. Vienna: Kurzböcken, 1770. Neuber, Wolfgang. “Memoria.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, vol. 5, 1037 – 1078. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Morgenröte. Insel Verlag: Frankfurt, 1983. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Emotion: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oellers, Norbert. Schiller. Geschichte seiner Wirkung bis zu Goethes Tod. 1805 – 1832. Bonn: Bouvier, 1967. Oellers, Norbert. Schiller – Zeitgenosse aller Epochen. Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Schillers in Deutschland. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum-Verlag, 1970 and Munich: Beck, 1976. Ogorek, Regina. “Adam Müllers Gegensatzphilosophie und die Rechtsausschweifungen des Michael Kohlhaas.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1988/89: 96 – 125. Overbeck, Gertrud. “Goethes Lehre von der Metamorphose der Pflanzen und ihre Widerspiegelung in der Dichtung.” Publications of the English Goethe Society 31 (1961): 38 – 59. Pan, David. “Representing the Nation in Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 93 – 111. Paß, Dominik. “Die Beobachtung der allmählichen Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden. Eine systemtheoretische Lektüre.” Kleist-Jahrbuch 2003: 107 – 136. Paulsen, Friedrich. Der Gelehrte Unterricht im Zeichen des alten Humanismus 1450 – 1740. Vol. 1 of Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitäten vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965. Pavard, Camille. Biographie des Liégeois illustres. Brussels: Maison D’Edition Alfred Castaigne, 1905. Peroux, Joseph Nicolaus. Pantomimische Stellungen von Henriette Hendel, nach der Natur gezeichnet und in 26 Blättern herausgegeben. Frankfurt am Main: Peroux, 1809. Peters, Günter. Die Kunst der Natur: Ästhetische Reflexion in Blumengedichten von Brockes, Goethe und Gautier. Munich: Fink, 1993. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Peters, Sibylle. “Figuren des wissenschaftlichen Vortrags um 1800: Actio, Affekt, Anschauung –Die Performance ‘Denken.’” KulturPoetik: Zeitschrift für kulturgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaft/Journal of Cultural Poetics 5, no. 1 (2005): 31 – 50. Peters, Sibylle. Der Vortrag als Performance. Bielefeld: Transkript, 2011.

364

Bibliography

Petrus, Klaus. “Beschrieene Dunkelheit und Seichtigkeit: Historisch-systematische Voraussetzungen zwischen Kant und Garve im Umfeld der Göttinger Rezension.” Kant-Studien 85, no. 3 (1994): 280 – 302. Petrus, Klaus. “Convictio oder persuasio? Etappen einer Debatte in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Rüdiger – Fabricius – Gottsched).” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 113 (1994): 481 – 495. Pfister, Manfred. “Appendix: Skalierung von Performativität.” Paragrana 10, no. 1 (2001): 302. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Pickering, Andrew. “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (1993): 559 – 589. Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pickering, Andrew. “New Ontologies.” In The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, edited by Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik, 1 – 14. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books. The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pippin, Robert. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999. Pizer, John. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge: Louisana State University Press, 2006. Platner, Ernst. Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise. Leipzig: Dyck, 1772. Pohl, C. Ferdinand. Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung. Zur Geschichte der Glas-Harmonica. Vienna: Carl Gerald’s Sohn, 1862. Polianski, Igor J. Die Kunst, die Natur vorzustellen: Die Ästhetisierung der Pflanzenkunde um 1800. Köln: König, 2004. Pölitz, Karl H. L. Populäre Anthropologie, oder Kunde von dem Menschen nach seinen sinnlichen und geistigen Anlagen. Leipzig: Kramer, 1800. Popplow, Marcus. Neu, nützlich und erfindungsreich: Die Idealisierung von Technik in der Frühen Neuzeit. Münster: Waxmann, 1998. Proß, Wolfgang. “Afterword.” In Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufklärung, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, edited by Wolfgang Proß, vol. 2, 1128 – 1216. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. Purdy, Daniel. On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory: or, Education of an Orator. Trans. John Selby Watson. 2 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856. Rajan, Tilottama. “Philosophy as Encyclopedia: Hegel, Schelling, and the Organization of Knowledge.” Wordsworth Circle 35, no. 1 (2004): 6 – 11. Rapic, Smail. “‘Die Philosophie, deren Professor zu seyn ich die Ehre habe’: Zwischen Leibniz, Kant und Popper: Lichtenbergs philosophiegeschichtlicher Ort.” In Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 1742 – 1799: Wagnis der Aufklärung, edited by Ulrich Joost, Stephan Oettermann, and Sibylle Spiegel, 148 – 166. Munich: Hanser, 1992.

Bibliography

365

Rasch, William. Sovereignty and Its Discontents. On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political. London, Portland, and Coogee (Australia): Birkbeck Law Press, 2004. Rebentisch, Juliane. Die Kunst der Freiheit. Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “Experiment, difference, and writing: I. Tracing protein synthesis.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23 A, no. 2 (1992): 305 – 331. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. California: Stanford University Press, 1997. Richter, Karl. “Wissenschaft und Poesie ‘auf höherer Stelle’ vereint: Goethes Elegie Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen.” In Gedichte und Interpretationen. Klassik und Romantik, edited by Wulf Segebrecht, vol. 3, 156 – 168. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987. Riedl, Peter Phillipp. Öffentliche Rede in der Zeitenwende. Deutsche Literatur und Geschichte um 1800. Studien zur deutschen Literatur 142. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Rietsch, Heinrich. “Fünfundachtzig Variationen über Diabellis Wälzer.” Beethovenjahrbuch 1 (1908): 28 – 50. Riskin, Jessica. “Amusing Physics.” In Bensaude-Vincente and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 43 – 64. Riskin, Jessica. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Roberts, Lissa. “Chemistry on Stage: G.F. Rouelle and the Theatricality of Eighteenth-Century Chemistry.” In Bensaude-Vincente and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 129 – 139. Rochlitz, Johann F. “Über die vermeynte Schädlichkeit des Harmonikaspiels.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1, no. 7 (1798): 97 – 102. Rose, Gillian. Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Verso, 2009. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Letters on the Elements of Botany: Addressed to a Lady, translated by Thomas Martyn, 6th ed. London: J. White, 1802. Rupke, Nikolaas, ed. Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Sauveur, Joseph. “Système géneral des Intervalles des Sons, & son Application à tous les Systèmes & à tous les instrumens de Musique.” In Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 299 – 366. Paris: Gabriel Martin, Jèan-Baptiste Coignard & Hippolyte-Louis Guerin, 1701. 2nd ed. 1743. Schaeffer, Helmut A., Roland Langfeld, and Margareta Benz-Zauner, eds. Glass Technology. Vol. 1 of Glass: The Material. Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2012. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Routledge: London, 1988. Schiebinger, Londa. “The Private Life of Plants: Sexual Politics in Carl Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin.” In Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Inquiry 1780 – 1945, edited by Marina Benjamin, 121 – 143. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Schievelbusch, Wolfgang. The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery. London: Picador, 2004. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In a Series of Letters. Translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard Ashley Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Schiller, Friedrich. Schiller’s Poems and Plays. Edited by Henry Morley. Translated by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1889. Schiller, Friedrich. “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution.” In Essays on German Theater, edited by Margaret Herzfeld-Sander, translated by Jane Barnard Greene, 24 – 33. New York: Continuum, 1985.

366

Bibliography

Schiller, Friedrich. “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.” In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Peter-André Alt, Albert Meier, and Wolfgang Riedel, vol. 5, 694 – 780. Munich: Hanser, 2004. Schiller, Friedrich. Werke. Nationalausgabe. Edited by Julius Petersen et al. 43 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1947 – 2000. Schindel, Carl Wilhelm Otto August von. Die deutschen Schriftstellerinnen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1825. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Berlin I. Bauten für die Kunst – Kirchen – Denkmalpflege. Edited by Paul Ortwin Rave. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1941. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Berlin III. Bauten für Wissenschaft, Verwaltung, Heer, Wohnbau und Denkmäler. Edited by Paul Ortwin Rave. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1962. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Bühnenentwürfe/Stage Designs. Edited by Helmut Börsch-Supan. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1990. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Die Bühnenentwürfe. Edited by Ulrike Harten, Helmut Börsch-Supan, and Gottfried Riemann. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe enthaltend theils Werke, welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegenstände, deren Ausführung beabsichtigt wurde. 28 vols. Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1819 – 1840. Schlegel, A.W. Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. In Kritische Schriften und Briefe, edited by Edgar Lohner, vols. 5 and 6. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966. Schlegel, A.W. “Vorlesungen über die romantische Literatur.” In Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen. Edited by Ernst Behler, Frank Jolles, and Claudia Becker, vol. 2.1, 1 – 194. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Hans-Joachim Birkner et al. 11 vols. to date. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979–. Schmid, Christian. “Einleitung.” In Cureau de la Chambre, Anleitungen zur Menschenkenntniß, translated by Carl Christian Schmid. Jena: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1794. Schmidt, Ricarda. “Weiblicher Sadismus, Wutwelt des Liebes-Urwalds, Geschlechtskampf, absolutes Gefühl: Die Penthesilea-Rezeption in der Moderne.” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 145 – 166. Schmidt, Ricarda. “Performanz und Essentialismus von Geschlecht bei Kleist: Eine doppelte Dialektik zwischen Subordination und Handlungsfähigkeit.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 3 (2011): 374 – 388. Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm. Topica universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft. Paradeigmata 1. Hamburg: Meiner 1983. Schneider, Helmut J. “Herrschaftsgenealogie und Staatsgemeinschaft: Zu Kleists Dramaturgie der Moderne im ‘Prinzen von Homburg.’” In Fischer and Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, 113 – 130. Schneider, Johann Nikolaus. Ins Ohr geschrieben. Lyrik als akustische Kunst zwischen 1750 und 1800. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. Schneider, Ulrich Johannes. Philosophie und Universität. Historisierung der Vernunft im 19. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1999. Schneiders, Werner. Das Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Munich: Beck, 1997. Schöne, Albrecht. Aufklärung aus dem Geist der Experimentalphysik. Lichtenbergische Konjunktive. Munich: Beck, 1982.

Bibliography

367

Schramm, Helmar. “Einleitung. Ort und Spur im Theatrum scientiarum.” In Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne: Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, vol. 1 of Theatrum Scientiarum, xi–xxx. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003. Schramm, Helmar. Karneval des Denkens: Theatralität im Spiegel philosophischer Texte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1996. Schramm, Helmar. “Theatralität.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, edited by Karlheinz Barck, vol. 6, 48 – 73. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century. Vol. 1 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Instruments in Art and Science: On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century. Vol. 2 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Spektakuläre Experimente. Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert. Vol. 3 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. Schramm, Helmar, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds. Spuren der Avantgarde: Theatrum machinarum. Vol. 4 of Theatrum Scientiarum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Schrank, Franz von Paula. Allgemeine Anleitung, die Naturgeschichte zu studiren. Munich: Johann Baptist Strobl, 1783. Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel. C.F.D. Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Stuttgart: Scheible, 1839. Schubert, Franz Ludwig. Wegweiser in der Musikliteratur für Pianofortespieler. Leipzig: Wengler, 1861. Schumann, Robert. Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1891. Schwanitz, Dietrich. Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung und die Inszenierung der Wirklichkeit. Untersuchungen zur Dramaturgie der Lebenswelt und zur Tiefenstruktur des Dramas. Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1977. Sealsfield, Charles (Karl Postl). Österreich, wie es ist, oder, Skizzen von den Fürstenhöfen des Kontinents. Vienna: Schroll, 1919. Searle, John. “How Performatives Work.” Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989): 535 – 58. Seckendorff, Gustav Anton [Freiherr] von. “Schillers Todtenfeier. Theatralisch für einige Freunde bearbeitet.” Der neue teutsche Merkur 1 (1806): 38 – 43. Seckendorff, Gustav Anton [Freiherr] von. Vorlesungen über Deklamation und Mimik. 2 vols. Braunschweig 1815/1816. Seel, Martin. Die Macht des Erscheinens: Texte zur Ästhetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. Segebrecht, Wulf. Was Schillers Glocke geschlagen hat. Vom Nachklang und Widerhall des meistparodierten Gedichts. Munich: Hanser, 2005. Sen, Amartya. “Open and Closed Impartiality.” Journal of Philosophy 99, no. 9 (2002): 445 – 469. Shapin, Steven. “A Scholar and a Gentleman: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England.” History of Science 26 (1991): 279 – 327.

368

Bibliography

Shapin, Steven. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Simpson, David. “Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for ‘Antiquarian’ History.” SubStance 88 (1999): 5 – 16. Slessarev, Helga. “Nathan der Weise und Adam Smith.” In “Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang,” edited by Wilfried Barner and Alfred M. Reh, special issue, Lessing Yearbook (1984): 248 – 256. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982. Sng, Zachary. “Parenthyrsos: On the Medium which is not One.” Modern Language Notes 125, no. 5 (2010): 1029 – 1049. Sowinski, Bernhard. Stilistik. Stiltheorien und Stilanalysen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. Stanitzek, Georg, and Hartmut Winkler. “Eine Medientheorie der Aufklärung.” Foreword to Josias Ludwig Gosch, Fragmente über den Ideenumlauf, 7 – 34. Berlin: Kadmos, 2006. Staiger, Emil. “Rasende Weiber in der deutschen Tragödie des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 80 (1961): 377. Sterki, Peter. Klingende Gläser. Die Bedeutung idiophoner Friktionsinstrumente mit axial rotierenden Gläsern, dargestellt an der Glas- und Tastenharmonika. Bern: Peter Lang, 2000. Stewart, Larry. “The Laboratory, the Workshop, and the Theater of Experiment.” In Bensaude-Vincente and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 11 – 24. Stewart, Larry. The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660 – 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Stichweh, Rudolph. Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland, 1740 – 1890. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Stiening, Gideon. “‘Und das Ganze belebt, so wie das Einzelne, sei:’ Zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Literatur am Beispiel von Goethes Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen.” In Literatur und Wissen: Theoretisch-methodische Zugänge, edited by Tilmann Köppe, 192 – 213. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Strube, Werner. “Die Geschichte des Begriffs ‘Schöne Wissenschaften.’” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 33 (1990): 136 – 216. Struck, Wolfgang. Konfigurationen der Vergangenheit: Deutsche Geschichtsdramen im Zeitalter der Restauration. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der Künste. In einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1774. Suphan, Bernhard. “Zum zehnten November: ‘Schiller’s Todtenfeyer’: ein dramatischer Entwurf Goethe’s.” Deutsche Rundschau, 21, no. 2 (November 1894): 274 – 275. Szondi, Peter. Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. Tautz, Birgit. Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Taylor, Charles. The Art and Science of Lecture Demonstration. Philadelphia: Hilger, 1988. Theisen, Joachim. “‘Es ist ein Wurf, wie mit dem Würfel; aber es gibt nichts anderes:’ Kleists Aufsatz über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 68, no. 4 (1994): 717 – 744.

Bibliography

369

Theissen, Bianca. “Memories of the Future: The Temporalization of History in Romantic Narrative.” In The Poetics of Memory, edited by Thomas Wägenbaur, 61 – 67. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1998. Tieck, Ludwig. Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Studienausgabe. Edited by Alfred Anger. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966. Till, Dietmar. “Affekt contra ars. Wege der Rhetorikgeschichte um 1700.” Rhetorica. A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 24 (2006): 337 – 369. Till, Dietmar. “Anthropologie oder System? Ein Plädoyer für Entscheidungen.” Rhetorik. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 23 (2004): 11 – 25. Till, Dietmar. “Ausdruck – rhetorisch/ästhetisch. Zur Etablierung einer Ausdrucksästhetik zwischen Aufklärung und Sturm und Drang.” In Figuren des Ausdrucks: Formation einer Wissenskategorie zwischen 1700 und 1850, edited by Tobias Robert Klein and Erik Porath, 49 – 68. Munich: Fink, 2011. Till, Dietmar. “Kommunikation der Aufklärung. Über Popularphilosophie und Rhetorik.” In Die Sachen der Aufklärung: Beiträge zur DGEJ-Jahrestagung 2010 in Halle a. d. Saale, edited by Frauke Berndt, 97 – 111. Hamburg: Meiner, 2012. Till, Dietmar. “Rhetorik und Schauspieltheorie.” In Körpertechniken in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ausstellungskatalog, edited by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, 61 – 84; 270 – 283. Wolfenbüttel: Harrassowitz, 2008. Till, Dietmar. Transformationen der Rhetorik. Untersuchungen zum Wandel der Rhetoriktheorie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. Till, Dietmar. “Zwischen Ubiquität und Tod – Neuere Forschungen zur Rhetorik im 18. Jahrhundert.” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 28 (2004): 83 – 95. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. “Der Marktschrei und sein Echo.” In Spuren der Avantgarde: Theatrum oeconomicum. Vol. 7 of Theatrum Scientiarum, edited by Helmar Schramm, Jan Lazardzig, and Viktoria Tkaczyk. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015 [forthcoming]. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. Himmels-Falten: Zur Theatralität des Fliegens in der Frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Fink, 2011. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. “Performativität und Wissen(schaft)sgeschichte.” In Theorien des Performativen: Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme edited by Klaus W. Hempfer and Jörg Volbers, 115 – 139. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. “Ready for Take-off.” Translated by Mary Helen Dupree. Cabinet: Quarterly Magazine of Arts & Culture 27, no. 3 (2007): 44 – 49. Traninger, Anita. “Emergence as a Model for the Study of Culture.” In Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, edited by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, 67 – 83. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Turner, Steven R. “University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany 1760 – 1806.” In The University in Society, edited by Lawrence Stone, 2: 495 – 531. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Ullmann, Dieter. Chladni und die Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750 – 1850. Basel, Boston, and Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1996. Ullmann, Dieter. Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni. Vol. 65 of Biographien hervorragender Naturwissenschaftler, Techniker und Mediziner. Leipzig: Teubner, 1983. Ullrich, Wolfgang. “Kunst/Künste/System der Künste.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in 7 Bänden, edited by Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, vol. 3, 556 – 616. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001.

370

Bibliography

Valenza, Robin. Literature, Language, and the Rise of Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680 – 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Verwiebe, Birgit. Lichtspiele: Vom Mondscheintransparent zum Diorama. Stuttgart: Füsslin, 1997. Verwiebe, Birgit. “Schinkel’s Perspective Optical Views: Art between Painting and Theater.” In Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781 – 1841: The Drama of Architecture, text by John Zukowsky et al., 36 – 53. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. Vogel, Juliane. “Zurüstungen für den Medienverbund. Zur Selbstaufgabe der Dichtung im Melodram um 1800.” In Das Melodram. Ein Medienbastard, edited by Bettine Menke, Armin Schäfer, and Daniel Eschkötter, 36 – 50. Berlin: Theater der Zeit: 2013. Vogl, Joseph. “Für eine Poetologie des Wissens.” In Die Literatur und die Wissenschaften 1770 – 1930, edited by Karl Richter, Jörg Schönert, and Michael Titzmann, 107 – 130. Stuttgart: M & P Verlag, 1997. Vogl, Joseph. “Poetologie des Wissens.” In Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft, edited by Harun Maye and Leander Scholz, 49 – 72. Munich: Fink and UTB, 2011. Vogt, Adolf Max. Boulle´es Newton-Denkmal: Sakralbau und Kugelidee. Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1969. Vogtherr, Christoph M. “Views and Approaches: Schinkel and Landscape Gardening.” In Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781 – 1841: The Drama of Architecture. Text by John Zukowsky et al., 68 – 83. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. Waagen, Gustav Friedrich. Karl Friedrich Schinkel als Mensch und als Künstler. Edited by Werner Gabler. Düsseldorf: Werner, 1980. Wagner, Michael, ed. Beyträge zur philosophischen Anthropologie. Vienna: Joseph Stahel, 1794. Waquet, Françoise. Parler comme un livre: L’oralité et le savoir XVIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. Ward, Robert E. A Bio-Bibliography of German-American Writers 1690 – 1970. White Plains, New York: Kraus International Publishers, 1985. Wellbery, David, and John Bender. “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” In The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, edited by David Wellbery and John Bender, 3 – 39. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990. Weimar, Klaus. Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 1989. Weithase, Irmgard. Anschauungen über das Wesen der Sprechkunst von 1775 – 1825. Berlin: Germanische Studien, 1930. Weithase, Irmgard. Zur Geschichte der gesprochenen deutschen Sprache. 2 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961. Werner, Peter. Pompeji und die Wanddekoration der Goethezeit. Munich: Fink, 1970. Wieland, Christoph Martin, ed. Der neue teutsche Merkur. Weimar: Industrie-Comptoir, 1790 – 1810. Wild, Christopher J. “Theorizing Theater Antitheatrically: Karl Philipp Moritz’s Theatromania.” MLN 120 (2005): 507 – 558. Willdenow, Carl Ludwig. “Preface to Johann Heinrich Sack’s Deutschlands wilde Gewächse.” Botanische Zeitung 3, no. 13 (1804): 193 – 198. Wilson, Holly. Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology: Its Origin, Meaning and Critical Significance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Bibliography

371

Winkler, Christian. Elemente der Rede. Die Geschichte ihrer Theorie in Deutschland von 1750 bis 1850. Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer, 1931. Wirth, Uwe, ed. Performanz, Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Withers, Charles. “The Geography of Scientific Knowledge.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nikolaas Rupke, 9 – 18. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Wolf, Rebecca. Friedrich Kaufmanns Trompeterautomat. Ein musikalisches Experiment um 1810. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2011. Wurst, Karin A. Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1870 – 1830. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Zadow, Mario Alexander. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Berlin: Rembrandt, 1980. Zelle, Carsten. “Fall und Aufstieg der Rhetorik in der Moderne.” In Die Sieben Freien Künste in Antike und Gegenwart, edited by Reinhold F. Glei, 237 – 263. Trier: WVT, 2006. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and Its Institutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

About the Contributors Hans-Georg von Arburg is Professor of German at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). His working fields and publications deal with the history of German literature from the mideighteenth to early twentieth century, the relationship of literature to other arts, and the history and theory of architecture and music. His most recent monograph Alles Fassade (Munich: Fink 2008) analyzes the problem of “surface” in eighteenth-century literary and architectural aesthetics. A current project is devoted to the early twentieth-century discussion on housing in German literature from an intermedial perspective. Claire Baldwin is Associate Professor of German at Colgate University. Her specialties include eighteenth-century literature and culture; Goethe; Lichtenberg; contemporary literature and culture; Jewish German literature; inter-arts; gender studies; narrative theory. Her book The Emergence of the Modern German Novel: Wieland, La Roche, and Sagar was published in 2002. Michael Bies teaches at the German Department of Leibniz University Hannover. His research interests include questions of representation in the sciences around 1800, the relation between literature and anthropology, and theories and literary representations of work. Recent publications include: Im Grunde ein Bild. Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe und Alexander von Humboldt (Wallstein, 2012); Literatur und Nicht-Wissen. Historische Konstellationen 1730 – 1930 (Diaphanes 2012) (co-edited with Michael Gamper); and Gattungs-Wissen. Wissenspoetologie und literarische Form (Wallstein 2013) (co-edited with Michael Gamper and Ingrid Kleeberg). Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes on literature, philosophy and music in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Tristan’s Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently writing a study of the ballad in the nineteenth century and a monograph on the extended family in literature and philosophy after Romanticism. Mary Helen Dupree is Associate Professor of German at Georgetown University. Her teaching and research interests are concentrated on eighteenth and early-

374

About the Contributors

nineteenth-century German literature and culture, with emphasis on gender, performance studies, and theories of the acoustic and the voice. She is the author of The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Bucknell University Press, 2011). Her current project focuses on the theory and practice of literary declamation in Germany from the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of recording technology. Angela Esterhammer is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her publications include The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2000), Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750 – 1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the edited volumes Romantic Poetry (De Gruyter, 2002) and Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto University Press, 2009), as well as articles on British, German, and European literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her current research project “Speculation, Improvisation, Mediality: The Late-Romantic Information Age” examines interrelations among improvisational performance, print culture, periodicals, and fiction in the early nineteenth century. Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri. His first book is an interdisciplinary study of the Romantic and Idealist lecture entitled Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture (Northwestern UP, 2013), and he has co-edited with Matt Erlin a special issue of the journal Seminar on the eighteenth-century novel. Future projects include a book project on ephemerality as aesthetic and media-theoretical concept and a monograph on cultures of performance in the writings of Theodor Fontane. Edgar Landgraf is Professor of German at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). Recent publications include articles on Karl Philipp Moritz, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Immanuel Kant, German Romanticism, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Don DeLillo and Niklas Luhmann. His book Improvisation as Art. Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives was published in 2011 with Continuum (reissued as paperback by Bloomsbury in 2014). His current book project examines nineteenth-century physiological writings as the basis for Friedrich Nietzsche’s “posthumanism.” Dietmar Till is Professor of Rhetoric at Tübingen University. His research areas include the history of rhetoric since antiquity, aesthetics (including the sublime) and poetics, early modern literature and culture. Important publications include: Transformationen der Rhetorik. Untersuchungen zum Wandel der Rhetorik um 17.

About the Contributors

375

und 18. Jahrhundert (2004); Das doppelte Erhabene. Geschichte einer Argumentationsfigur von der Antike bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (2006). Viktoria Tkaczyk is Assistant Professor of Arts and New Media at the University of Amsterdam, and the director of the research group “The Making of Acoustics in Sixteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Europe” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Dilthey Fellow, Volkswagen Foundation). She is a member of the Junge Akademie (Berlin Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), the network “Hör-Wissen im Wandel” (DFG), and the research project ECHO (Ecrire l’Histoire de l’Orale, Paris, CNRS). Ellwood Wiggins is an Assistant Professor of Germanics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has published on Goethe, Lessing, and Kalidasa. He is currently finishing up a book on the performance of recognition from Homer to Kleist. His most recent project traces a history of the rhetoric of compassion by exploring the metamorphoses of Philoctetes from antiquity onwards. Chad Wellmon is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Virginia. His teaching and research interests include European intellectual history, Romanticism, and media and social theory. His published work includes Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom (2010) and Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Research University (2015). He has also written for the Institute’s journal, The Hedgehog Review: “Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid … or Smart” and “Knowledge, Virtue, and the Research University.” Wellmon is also editor of the blog, The Infernal Machine. Rebecca Wolf is postdoctoral researcher in musicology at the Deutsches Museum in Munich where she is working on the catalogue and digitization of the collection of paper rolls for player pianos. Furthermore, she teaches musicology at the University of Munich. In 2012 she spent a year as fellow of the Humboldt Foundation at the Department of Music at Harvard University. Her recent publications include books and articles on musical automata, music in peace and war, organology, and acoustics.

Index Addison, Joseph 208 Adelung, Johann Christoph 76 Agamben, Giorgio 276, 289 Applegate, Celia 326 Auslander, Philip 11, 301, 334 Austin, John Langshaw 8, 29, 35 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel 331 Basedow, Johann Bernhard 64 Batsch, August Johann Georg Carl 256 Batteux, Charles 73 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 72, 232 Beccaria, Giambatista 116 Becker, Rudolf Zacharias 158 Beethoven, Ludwig van 114, 126, 324, 332, 337 Bie, Oscar 331 Breitkopf, Johann Gottlob Immanuel 334 Brühl, Karl Friedrich Moritz Graf von 166, 168 Brun, Friederike 141 Bürger, Elise 141, 153 Butler, Judith 8, 30 Carroll, Noël 207 Catel, Louis (Ludwig) 169 Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich 113, 120, 123 f., 343 Chomsky, Noam 30 Couperin, Francis 332 Cuthbertson, John 202

13, 28,

Dalberg, Friedrich von 120 f. Darwin, Erasmus 260 Daston, Lorraine 196 Davies, Marianne 116, 124 Derrida, Jacques 9, 41 Diabelli, Anton 332 Diderot, Jacques 95 Duncker, Johann Friedrich 114, 126 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried Elson, Arthur 324

200

Erxleben, J.C.P. 200 Evans, Nathaniel 118 Fischer, Johann Carl 200 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 8, 11, 21, 31, 203, 206, 209, 325 Ford, Anne 116 Franklin, Benjamin 113, 116, 123, 128 Fuhrmann, Manfred 58 Gailus, Andreas 276 Galison, Peter 196 Garve, Christian 234 Gehler, J.S.T. 214 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 116 Goethe, J.W. 19, 100, 137, 152, 186, 247, 306 Gosch, Josias Ludwig 4 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 63, 70, 74 Greenblatt, Stephen 36 Gropius, Wilhelm 168 Hallbauer, Friedrich Andreas 62, 67 f., 76 Hanslick, Eduard 328, 335 Hardenberg, Friedrich von 264 Hegel, G.W. 297, 312 Hendel-Schütz, Henriette 141 Hermes, Johann Timotheus 325 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 181 Hooke, Robert 48 Hopkinson, Francis 128 Horace 75 Humboldt, Alexander von 209 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 198, 211 Hume, David 90 Hutcheson, Francis 91 Iffland, August Wilhelm Ith, Johann 223

141, 166, 171

Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich 223 Jefferson, Thomas 129 John, Eugenie 323, 329 Junker, Carl Friedrich 130

378

Index

Kant, Immanuel 19, 71, 73, 105, 170, 200 f., 221, 274, 341 Kinkel, Johanna 331 Kircher, Athanasius 115 Kleist, Heinrich von 3, 18, 269, 342 Klopstock, Friedrich Gotthold 261 Knebel, Karl Ludwig 260 Knorr Cetina, Karin 33 Krämer, Sibylle 11, 21 Kuhn, Thomas 28

Pockrich, Richard 116 Pölitz, Karl H.L. 224 Postl, Karl 328 Prohaska, Eleonore 126 Quintilian

Lamy, Bernard 75 Langenschwartz, Maximilian 343 Langhans, Carl Gotthard 46 Lessing, G.E. 14, 87, 91 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 20, 122, 193, 342 Linnaeus, Carl 254 Locke, John 64 Luhmann, Niklas 282 Marlitt, E See John, Eugenie 323 Marum, Martinus van 202 Mellin, G.S.A. 223 Mendelssohn, Moses 73, 92 Mesmer, Franz Anton 125, 133 Mitchell, Robert 10 Moritz, Karl Philipp 77, 297, 302 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 119, 181 Napoleon 37, 44, 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich 104 Novalis See Hardenberg, Friedrich von Oellers, Norbert

138

Paß, Dominik 272 Peters, Sibylle 211 Phelan, Peggy 298 Pickering, Andrew 33 Platner, Ernst 223, 227 Plato 107

264

58, 67, 75, 77

Rebentisch, Juliane 288 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 7 Richter, Jean Paul 247 Robertson, Etienne-Gaspard 132 Rochlitz, Johann Friedrich 131 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 64, 72, 129, 254 Schickaneder, Emanuel 181 Schiller, Friedrich 22, 65, 161, 259 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 15, 188, 343 Schlegel, A.W. 297, 298, 307 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 235 Schmidt, Carl Christian Erhard 223 Schneider, Ulrich Johannes 300 Schramm, Helmar 9 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel 326, 328, 334 Schumann, Robert 335 Seckendorff, Gustav Anton von 4, 141, 157 Seel, Martin 203 Smith, Adam 91, 108 Sophocles 109 Sulzer, Johann Georg 71, 76 Thomasius, Christian Tieck, Ludwig 187 Vogl, Joseph 10 Volta, Alessandro

61

202

Weise, Christian 67 Wild, Christopher 302 Wolff, Christian 67 Zelter, Carl Friedrich

148