Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800 9780271080512

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Tr an sl atin g the Wo rld

The Max Kade Research Institute Series: Germans Beyond Europe Series Editors A. Gregg Roeber and Daniel Purdy The Max Kade Research Institute Series is an outlet for scholarship that examines the history and culture of German-speaking communities in America and across the globe, from the early modern period to the start of the First World War. Books in this series examine the movements of the German-speaking diaspora as influenced by forces such as migration, colonization, war, research, religious missions, or trade. This series explores the historical and cultural depictions of the international networks that connect these communities, as well as linguistic relations between German and other languages within European global networks. This series is a project of the Max Kade German-American Research Institute located on Penn State’s campus. This Institute, co-directed by A. Gregg Roeber and Daniel Purdy, was founded in 1993 thanks to a grant from the Max Kade Foundation, New York.

TRANSL ATING THE WORLD Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800

BIRGIT TAUTZ

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tautz, Birgit, author. Title: Translating the world : toward a new history of German literature around 1800 / Birgit Tautz. Other titles: The Max Kade Research Institute series: Germans beyond Europe Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Series: The Max Kade Research Institute series: Germans beyond Europe | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Examines the intersection of literary and national imagination through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030921 | ISBN 9780271079103 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: German literature—Germany—Hamburg—18th century—History and criticism. | German literature— Germany—Hamburg—19th century—History and criticism. | German literature—Germany—Weimar (Thuringia)—18th century—History and criticism. | German literature—Germany—Weimar (Thuringia)—19th century—History and criticism. | Translating and interpreting—Germany—History—18th century. | Translating and interpreting—Germany—History—19th century. Classification: LCC PT3803.H3 T38 2018 | DDC 830.9/006—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030921 Copyright © 2018 Birgit Tautz All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

contents

Preface and Acknowledgments  vii Introduction: The City and the Globe: On Remaking German Literature  1 1

Theater Channels: Translating the British Atlantic World for the Hamburg Stage  30

2

Lessing Dethroned: The Hamburg Dramaturgy and the Eighteenth-Century World  68

3

Leaving the City: Conversion to Community, Redemption, and Literary Sociability  104

4

Classical Weimar Reconsidered: Friendship Redeemed, Foundations Laid, and Monuments Made 145 Epilogue: In the Translation Zone or (German) Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century  191 Notes 205 Bibliography 230 Index 247

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book is a trade (not to say a trade-off). It is an attempt to comprehend and represent an alternate German literary history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (ca. 1760–1830) by letting go of its well-established, gravitational center: the imaginary nation. As Translating the World turns to the city and the globe as anchors of the literary imagination, it also moves away from temporality and teleology—that is, the imagined future—as primary organizational principles of literary history. Instead this book speaks to what must have been an overwhelming, diffuse present around 1800—a chaos of impressions, contested knowledge, and languages—as the world knocked on the proverbial city gate, and urban experience became multilayered with tinges of both excitement and danger. By trying to gauge the dazzling, mutual impact of globe and city on eighteenth-century literary life, this book turns to a large city (Hamburg) as well as a small town (Weimar) in an overparceled, German-speaking territory. In the process, it trades well-established truths of literary historiography for alternative, small or seemingly marginal stories that reflect the reverberations of global processes in urban settings. These stories involve tales in representative buildings and semiprivate spaces. They take a fresh look at urban institutions, or simply narrow streets, chronicling how emergent global awareness penetrated the urban horizon and how the confinement of cities, but also of mansions in country estates, yielded global returns. These stories involve a rich reservoir of texts:

literary and nonliterary, translations and “originals”; they revolve around elusive performances as well as what would later become hallmark genres of the literary tradition. And telling these stories means to translate and transpose, assuring that this book returns multiple perspectives and alternate versions of literary historiography that have been eclipsed. As the alternate story lines point to a network that has globe and city enmeshed in unexpected, surprising ways, their relations upend established images of political power, trading routes, or conquest—all that we might call original maps. Instead, they draw attention to hitherto unknown or forgotten cultural and literary centers and to institutions, genres, and cognitive figures that shape these alternative stories. This version of literary history comes, of course, with a trade-off in yet another sense, not just the usurpation of a familiar story for a new version or multiple tales. Narrating this story involves embracing alternate modes of literary production, which I have chosen to understand as acts of translation, all under the guise of striving for equivalence and adequacy in order to highlight rather than eradicate cultural and interpretive difference. Translating the World thus reveals that which seemingly existed, was perceived and calculated before it was narrated and fully understood as history. This story bears traces of the many transpositions—material and linguistic, across disciplines and genres—that took place in the late eighteenth century and that are folded in the figural expressions of cultural exchange (but also of conquest and domination) that are of interest to us today. Consequently, trade-off also points to what was missed and replaced, cast aside, verdrängt. And yet, in the net of trade-offs and exchange, the figuration of fiction accomplishes more than to indicate, preserve, or anticipate the life outside of fiction. Rather, fiction intersects and shapes this life. While Hamburg’s literary and cultural importance has been confined to niche explorations in academia, the literary output of late eighteenth-century Weimar has become “Classical” and truly transnational. Today, the literary period of Weimar Classicism forms a central, even foundational part of modern German national literature; on a global scale, it represents a metaphor for what German literature contributed to world literature’s conceptual foundation. Thus, Translating the World also tells the story of how Classical Weimar’s domination arose—but it does so precisely by trading places of importance. Finally, this book represents trade in yet another way, namely, as the result of material, digital, and intellectual exchanges today. I readily acknowledge the enormous impact that digitization projects on either side of the Atlantic have had on this book. By delocalizing texts from remote archives and libraries, these projects have animated a mode of thinking in bold metaphors of viii

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a network, including a web of texts and approaches that would have been impossible to conceive not too long ago. Translating the World surely benefits from this infrastructure. Most importantly, though, this book draws on intellectual exchanges and debates that happened in silent contemplation—usually beginning with reading and scribbled notes—as well as in spirited conversations in person and on the phone, over coffee and wine, and at conferences. Translating the World considers itself part of a global/local network in which other scholars’ voices have become inspirational sources, pesky interlocutors, and types of translation. As alternate stories, these voices and arguments have formed an intrinsic part of my claims. They influenced my thinking and thus entered, in remediated ways, the pages of this book, often upholding a proverbial screen onto which the present story is projected. On occasion, the proponents of these stories have acted, sometimes unbeknownst to them, as adversaries and intellectual sparring partners, but they were always enriching the company of supportive institutions, colleagues, friends, and family. They have been present throughout the many years in which I have thought about and, eventually, written this book, and I thank each and all of them: you know who you are, even if you do not find your name on these pages. This book would not be what it is today were it not for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers allowed me to spend the academic year 2011–2012, as well as the summer of 2013, at the Deutsches Seminar of the Leibniz University of Hanover. Alexander Košenina was an inspiring, fun, and generous host, a true Humboldt-Gastgeber. He not only showed great interest in my work, but he also arranged for research assistants, office space, housing, and a great work environment in Hanover. Alexander, along with Ulrike Gleixner, David Wellbery, and Dan Wilson were most enthusiastic in their support of my project from the very beginning, as was the late Jochen Schulte-Sasse. I thank them all, and I am looking forward to our continued exchange and collaboration. This project began in spring 2008 when I came across an obscure reference to the Schimmelmann family in one of my favorite research libraries in Germany; I have forgotten whether it was in Marbach, Wolfenbüttel, or Weimar. Not coincidentally, libraries in somewhat remote locations became harbors for this project, and I thank all MitarbeiterInnen for their interest in and support of my work over the years, most notably Jill Bepler, Ulrike Gleixner, and Gerlinde Strauß in Wolfenbüttel. Bowdoin College’s Phocas Award for Coastal Studies Research (2010) enabled me to delineate Hamburg’s importance for Translating the World while working in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky and the Staatsarchiv Hamburg. Michaela Giesing, who then Preface and Acknowledgments

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directed the Theatersammlung Hamburg, deserves special thanks for steering me toward the work of Bärbel Rudin, who has long written against the monopoly of literary scholarship and its distorting impact on our understanding of eighteenth-century theater, performance practice, and history. Claudia Nitschke and Sigrid Nieberle invited me to present first insights into this project at a conference in Erlangen, Germany (2010). In the years since then, I had numerous opportunities to engage with many colleagues on eighteenth-century networks and intercultural exchange, and eighteenth-century religion, sentimentalism, and architecture, as well as on the eighteenth-century literary world “beyond English.” The annual conventions of the German Studies Association were invigorating and provocative sites of scholarly exchange, while smaller symposia at Penn State (2012), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2013), the Atkins Goethe Conference in Pittsburgh (2014), and the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Roundtable at MLA (2016) proved to be essential in suturing the disparate ends and many layers of this project into a hopefully compelling story. For seemingly small, provocative suggestions that turned out to be crucial contributions to my thoughts on city, globe, and translation, I thank Anja Bandau, Karin Baumgartner, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Dieter Burdorf, Mark-Georg Dehrmann, Mary Helen Dupree, Matt Erlin, Monika Fick, Sean Franzel, Daniel Fulda, Liz Goodstein, Kevin Hillard, Peter Höyng, Catriona MacLeod, Venkat Mani, Tracie Matysik, Monika Nenon, Carl Niekerk, John Noyes, Maike Oergel, David Porter, Daniel Purdy, Hanna Schissler, Karin Schutjer, Ludwig Stockinger, Jonathan Strom, Astrida Orle Tantillo, Dirk Werle, Christopher Wild, Sabine Wilke, Chi-Ming Yang, Chunjie Zhang, and Rachel Zuckert. All of them have been terrific colleagues, and quite a few are dear friends. My colleagues in the Goethe Society of North America have challenged my thoughts in new and productive ways, constituting a thriving network of inspiration, mentorship, and collaboration. I consider myself most fortunate to be part of this group. I could not have thrived in the process of writing and researching this book without the assistance of creative and resourceful librarians at Bowdoin: the staff in the Interlibrary Loan department, my friend and colleague Carmen Greenlee, who helped me navigate thorny reference and copyright questions, and Judy Montgomery, who always found quiet writing spaces for me. Richard Lindemann, Daniel Hope, and Marieke van der Steenhoven shared their expertise in Bowdoin’s Special Collections: their help led to rare and unexpected finds that opened up new venues for exploration. Julian Ingelmann,

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Lea Käßmann, and Charlotte Milsch in Hanover and Johanna Clarke and Arhea Marshall at Bowdoin were excellent research assistants. Several of my honors students, as well as students who would never expect to see themselves referenced here, have challenged me and my lines of thinking in multiple ways. They continue to add refreshing and important perspectives to my work. Dharni Vasudevan is not only a best friend and regular in our carpool reality show; she coaxed me into participating in a three-day local writing retreat in spring 2015. I thank all fellow participants for somehow making me want to come back each day, despite my aversion to writing groups. In the end, those days were instrumental to the completion of the manuscript, because from then on, it was smooth and easy writing. Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s no-nonsense advice has become a steady voice in my head; she and “Ms. Mentor” made me develop excellent research and writing habits. Monica Birth Hoesch, one of my favorite editors, was a fabulous resource during the writing process: she helped me to polish my writing and translations of obscure eighteenth-century text. She inspired me to strive for rhetorical eloquence, and she patiently and competently navigated what strikes me as the chaos of documentation. Thus I felt much more confident in handing over my ideas to the acquisition staff at university presses. I thank the editors who welcomed and encouraged the project, but especially the editors at Penn State University Press, where Translating the World found its ultimate home. A. Gregg Roeber and Daniel Purdy were the most welcoming series editors of the Max Kade Institute Series: Germans Beyond Europe. Two anonymous readers provided invaluable feedback. Kathryn Yahner has steered the project with competence and enthusiasm, patience and editorial wisdom, through all its early phases. Marian Rogers was a fabulous copyeditor; Laura Reed-Morrison managed the editing; Patty Mitchell coordinated the production, and Jennifer Norton oversaw the entire process, including design. I cannot thank all of them enough. I wrote this book in Hanover, Berlin, and Portland, Maine, and thank old and new friends, as well as VermieterInnen, in Germany for their warm welcome, whenever and wherever I showed up. I thank my friends in the United States simply for being friends, neighbors, and in many cases colleagues. They have shaped aspects of this book or contributed, unbeknownst to them, to its completion: Jeanie Barnard, Joanna Bosse, Barbara Weiden Boyd, Aviva Briefel, Rick Broene, Jim Brokaw, Elena Cueto-Asin, Otto Emersleben, Pamela Fletcher, Paul Franco, David George, Crystal Hall, Mary Hunter, Charlene Jenness, Ann Kibbie, Matt Klingle, Scott MacEachern, Craig McEwen, Kavi Montanaro, Jill Pearlman, Ari Saiber, Doris Santoro,

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Chris Scales, Dharni Vasudevan, Allen Wells, everybody at The Yoga Center and nearly everybody on Arlington Street. Jen Scanlon restored belief in my work at a crucial moment, and Barbara and Paul “joined” my department pro tempore in 2016; I am proud to be their colleague. I would not pursue the research I do, were it not for my current and former departmental colleagues; I thank Helen Cafferty, Steve Cerf, Jens Klenner, and Jill Smith. Helen and Jens deserve special mention: Helen for always saying the right things at the right time, and Jens for saving me from oversights in the manuscript. Last but not least, I thank my small, close-knit family for their support and enthusiasm. My parents continue to be my biggest cheerleaders, and my cousins have become fun fellow flâneurs in Berlin while persistently shying away from crossing the Atlantic—of course, none of this deters me from looking forward to meeting them in their locales, wherever they are. Finally, like most scholarly endeavors, this book is part of a process; at crucial junctures it builds on and revises earlier work. My initial work on the presence of world in Hamburg and the role of the global/local in shaping translations of Cumberland’s West Indian is documented, respectively, in “Die Welt als Intertext: Das Britische Kolonialreich und Hamburg im späten 18. Jahrhundert,” in Gastlichkeit und Ökonomie: Wirtschaften im deutschen und englischen Drama des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Sigrid Nieberle und Claudia Nitschke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 264–289, and in “Travelling Ideas of (the British) Empire: Translating the Caribbean World for the Eighteenth-Century German Stage,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 79.2 (2010): 95–111, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/095936810X12735767339907. An earlier version of a portion of chapter 2 first appeared, in German, in Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch 40 (2012/2013): 53–72, edited for the Lessing Society by Monika Fick and Carl Niekerk, with book reviews edited by Monika Nenon. I first came across the Kirstein/Schimmelmann symbiosis when researching revolutionary news from France and England; my initial findings are documented in a small section of “Revolution, Abolition, Aesthetic Sublimation: German Responses to News from France in the 1790s,” in (Re-)Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain, and France, ed. Maike Oergel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 72–87. Finally, the fourth chapter of Translating the World grew out, in part, of “Stadtgeschichten: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of Classical Weimar,” German Studies Review 3 (2013): 497–514, © 2013 The German Studies Association. I thank all editors and presses for the permission to use these materials here in much revised form.

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INTRODUCTION:THE CITY AND THE GLOBE On Remaking German Literature

The year 1775 saw the publication of Johann Peter Willebrand’s legendary Grundriß einer schönen Stadt (Outline of a Beautiful City), one of the first manuals of urban planning.1 Yet neither the book’s prescriptiveness nor its later impact is what captures my attention here. I am transfixed by a casual, even flippant comment by which the author invokes China. Talking about urban infrastructure, he recommends that Hamburg, as well as other cities (e.g., Amsterdam), should take a lesson from Peking’s streets. In his view, the latter’s tamped-sand and clay streets represent an alternative to the washed-out cobblestone of the affluent northern German port city. Tamped sand also offered a viable solution for resource-strapped towns that could neither pay for nor easily procure stone. Willebrand furthermore supplements his specific suggestions for construction with administrative recommendations for urban management, including a central registry and reliance on denizens when it came to enforcing rules and regulations. Here, too, he compares and contrasts his experiences to Chinese and, to a lesser extent, British models. Thus, what seems like a passing reference turns out to be a marker of a beautiful city’s worldliness. Placing it in a network of world cities confirms the German city’s global existence. The recourse to Peking is unique in its manner of folding the global into the urban text. Willebrand relies on the Chinese city’s image as if it were a well-known fact, without any need to

be authenticated by an anecdote, a travelogue, or a translated text. Making do without fiction is different from many other late eighteenth-century accounts that appear in this book. As we shall see throughout, nonfiction texts rely to varying degrees on incorporating alternate genres when introducing new information. Literary forms, styles, and corpora are thus born. Certain genres begin to dominate, while others are relegated to the margins, each circulating ideas of locality and worldliness in unexpected ways and rearranging relations between fiction and nonfiction. But Willebrand effectively conceals whether he invents the image of Peking or assumes that it is part of public knowledge about China and thus a solid point of reference for his readers. It hardly matters whether he succeeds as a writer; in fact, his goal lies elsewhere. He aspires to design a beautiful city, which exists, I suggest, in a global network and exchange with other cities. He invokes and coproduces their distinguishing features through comparison and contrast as well as the transposition of ideas. In the process, he creates a specialized book devoted to nascent urban modernity, setting it apart from city chronicles or representations of budding eighteenth-century urbanity in fiction. And just as the fleeting passage in Outline of a Beautiful City turns the reader’s attention toward the translation of world in local texts, it reminds us that literary historiography has told a different story of cities.

Of Turns and Translations “Traditionally, the city has been the place of citizens.” Thus begins a chapter in a tome of German literary historiography, Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Hanser’s Social History of German Literature).2 Claiming to be about a distinct space—the city—and its influence on literature, the chapter turns away from the broader urban context and zeroes in on what its author perceives as “the makers” of culture and literature, namely, the citizens. It then leaps, somewhat predictably, to what literary historians consider the ultimate goal of citizens’ communication in late eighteenth-century German lands: projecting an absent nation through public and—by extension—literary reasoning. This project, the story goes, unfolds in time, enacting a self-perfecting and reasonable public sphere that will culminate, eventually, in that most German of all imaginations, the Kulturnation (Culture Nation). Written in 1980 by Rainer Wild, the chapter’s first sentence is as beautifully minimalistic as it seems obsolete today, in the second decade of the

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twenty-first century. Untranslatable as it is in all the nuance of the original German (“der geographische Ort des Bürgers”), Wild’s assertion makes for an appropriate beginning of my study. The multiple meanings of Bürger still resonate, including that of a dominant, idealized citizen fully engaged in public life as well as the pre-eighteenth-century burgher displaying his property, occupational pride, and allegiances. While the former bears complex facets and simultaneously evokes and traverses, via translations, multiple cultural contexts (e.g., citoyen, Staatsbürger, the middle class), location and its nonportable elements define the latter understanding of Bürger. Accordingly, he remains, first and foremost, a (male) denizen, that is, the citizen of the town (Stadtbürger).3 Moreover, the statement suggests a place of belonging that is almost akin to a natural habitat, shoring up an ever more complex, anthropological picture of what urban space actually is, while further obscuring relations among inhabitants, literary life, and urban space.4 As Translating the World departs from existing research, it rethinks direction and also turns away from the nation: in emphasizing the nitty-gritty, often mundane places and spaces of the city rather than the role played by idealized citizens in forming an imagined, protonational community, my book proposes an alternative history of late eighteenth-century German literature. What would such a history look like if we considered it in the context of world? What if we examined the local ramifications of global engagements and their manifestations in literature and culture? Even posing the question shifts attention toward aspects of the literary city that may not equate easily with citizens’ intention: literary life, as much as any other aspect of urban existence, happened in the then present moment and often reflected rather diffuse intentions, developments, and contexts. It produced and circulated genres that spoke to intersecting intellectual and artistic, even leisurely, interests. Rather than casting a particular class’s or social stratum’s vision of itself into the future, it often remained on the verge of a mundane banality. As its poetic potential lent itself to mediating and transcending life’s eventualities, literary production played out against the horizons of urban perception, envisioning an attitude toward and relations with the wider, indeed global, world. In the process, literary life engaged with persons and objects, institutions and genres, the obscure use texts, new and old modes of thought, creating not only epistemological arrangements that took “the shape of a net”5 but also reflecting and constantly rearranging this network. Though I understand these arrangements as a global network, it builds on—and at the same time—transcends descriptors of the Atlantic world:

Introduction

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slave-carrying ships and Caribbean plantations, revolutions in the New World, spiritual and cultural communities in the young United States. Africa, though ever present in this configuration, often remains a blind spot for scholars—just as the move across the Atlantic is mostly envisioned as a westward movement. What I hope to accomplish in this book is different: my move away from the national story of literature, and toward the globe and the city, amplifies the entangled, networked relations along the Atlantic rim and across the ocean: I observe patterns of resonance, rather than causal impacts, and chronicle obscure and often diffuse traces of the global that somehow surface locally. As I seek to tell a story that challenges predominant modes of transnational inquiries (e.g., bilateral German-British relations; the travel of a genre), something else comes into sharp focus between the city and the globe. Folded in the pages of this book is yet another story: that of the rise of modern academic disciplines, infringing upon and simultaneously highlighting the work of literature. Bringing these worlds into a text required then, as it does now, acts of reflection, mediation, and translation. Consequently, network and translation evolve as conceptual anchors in the following chapters; I understand both terms pragmatically—as functions of my reading this book’s materials—rather than dogmatically, that is, as applied theories or strict methodology shaping my text. Together, these considerations guide my argument: by telling literature’s story from the perspective of a city defined by global exchange with the eighteenth-century transatlantic world (Hamburg), and by contrasting it with that of a small place that, despite being far from any global network, would rise to international fame (Weimar), I challenge the category of the nation as the conceptual foundation of writing literary history. This turn leaves us with a few perplexing observations. For example, upon reexamining Hamburg’s buzzing and globally engaged—some might say cosmopolitan—literary and cultural scene of the late eighteenth century, an inevitable question arises: What happened? How did the city find itself so thoroughly relegated to the margins of German literary historiography? In contrast, sleepy, provincial Weimar—a town really, much more so than an urban center—emerged as the symbol of the German national literary tradition. Why? “Because of Goethe” is the short, predictable answer, but it is also, I am afraid, a shortsighted one. Similarly, a fresh look at Weimar—and the globe—at the end of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth centuries (ca. 1770–1810) presents us with a more complicated picture. It consists not merely in challenging the claim that Weimar was a secluded, sleepy town. Nor does it simply affirm the

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image of a cosmopolitan Weimar bustling with literary and cultural energy. Instead, I propose to tell a story that reveals how the town’s self-fashioned place and aspiration in the world prove to be a clever strategy of containment as well. Despite its alleged interest in global connections,6 Weimar very much embraced its place away from the (trade and transportation) networks of the eighteenth century. How these two vastly different legacies came about and how Weimar’s literature and culture came to eclipse Hamburg’s is the story I tell in this book. Rhetorically, my argument exploits what sums up the fate of the city in modern cultural history and in literary history in particular: its symbolic transformation from an actual place into a figure of perception and representation. Rather than exploring architecture and urban planning, or the more elusive urban fabric—that is, the symptoms of the spatial, communicative, and social relations that make up the city—the cultural history of the past two hundred years has witnessed the city dissolve into snapshots of individual perception. It has henceforth existed as a mental image, morphing from an idealized space of bourgeois action—reinforced by Jürgen Habermas’s seminal Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—to expressing the modern subject’s feeling of alienation. In studies of literary representation, the city has been refracted through an occasionally simplifying understanding of modernist discourse, with effects of industrialization and technological modernity dominating the study of urban environments, including those of the eighteenth century. In recent years, however, scholars have challenged this trend, and telling the city’s story in the history of literature and culture has become a fraught, fragmenting, and altogether contested enterprise in which the city represents more than one diffuse image: discussions of the city often conjure up images of the ephemeral, the underworld, and various twilight zones of human existence, often in palimpsest fashion. But they also extol miniature representations of suggestive, comprehensive clarity, evoking equations between snapshot-like, metonymic images and the city as a whole. At times, they even conjure up a photographic image, likening the city to a postcard, an object, or a thing.7 Like so much else in cultural history, the city turns into a commodity, a place whose characteristics can be transported elsewhere—whether to actual lands or within the imagination.8 Going back and beyond any modernist narratives that engage an individual subject’s response to and/or the movement of the city, eighteenthcentury accounts display different textual dynamics. As they precede the

Introduction

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city’s transformation into representation, they complicate its role in literary historiography. As a distinct space, the late eighteenth-century city emerged and developed in relation to literary genres and the cultural fabric they form. Literary genres interact with each other, intersecting in ways that shape the city and urban discourse; conversely, they depend for their genesis on urban spaces. At the same time, genres act globally: traveling across multiple languages and morphing into local and regional variants in different literary markets, they also move their readers in a more figurative sense across the globe, stirring captive audiences’ global imagination and expanding their cognitive horizons.9 All the while, genres remain confined by the limits of individual readers who, after all, engage with texts, no matter how community-forming literature professes to be. How literature fashions its appeal matters, as do its modes of circulation, but they are not the only parameters that create its success and impact. What I want to suggest is that it may well be the city’s imaginary horizon that coshapes these confinements. For as the world intervenes in daily lives, it gets translated into an urban context, utilized for local projects that are often reframed in terms of national (and later, nationalist) ideologies (which almost always pose as universal claims). Often, such acts of cultural transposition intersect with actual, linguistic translation. They require acts of localization—the linguistic and cultural rendering to fit the purpose and idiom of a place—as Willebrand’s passing references to China show. In this sense, Outline of a Beautiful City delineates both the limits of the new, specialized type of city writing and the boundary-pushing possibilities of urban literature. But the author’s pivoting to Peking also exemplifies how I tell literature’s story. Despite Translating the World’s challenge to central concepts of literary historiography, by chronicling the inflections of the global in the urban text, I interrogate first and foremost the nature of literature and the literary figuration of texts—while not losing sight of nonfictional genres that coemerge. Linking the city and the globe has become commonplace in colonial and postcolonial studies, where the metropolis functions as the imaginary, political, and often economic center within the empire; (post-)colonial relationships have also received proper attention in urban studies of recent decades.10 Already in the eighteenth century, though, contemporaries were conscious of imperial inflections of city life: as Zedler’s Universallexikon (Zedler’s Universal Encyclopedia) documents the multifaceted meaning of “Haupt-Stadt” (capital), for example, it distinguishes not only between the city proper and a larger urban area comprising a center and adjacent parts separated by the

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city wall; the encyclopedia also chronicles the distinctions made between the capital of an actual, territorially unified country and the more elusive notion of a capital that unifies imaginary constructs or a sprawling, though porous empire.11 Thus, the city is projected not only temporally toward the future (as Weimar will prove to be), but also spatially to its contemporary, global environs. Hamburg and Bordeaux, Göttingen and Bristol all demonstrated that a capital was more than a political hub of a centralized state. A capital was part of a far-reaching network that constantly regenerated and often rearranged itself, incorporating an ever changing array of trade-, knowledge-, and—as I will show here—literary- and art-centers. Indeed, eighteenth-century literary tableaux (panoramas) of major cities—as well as beautification treatises such as Willebrand’s—show familiarity with the worldwide, colonial enterprising of prominent citizens and the influence these activities had upon city architecture. These texts draw on the rhetorical prowess of cultural comparisons and fill in the contours that global awareness impressed upon social and political institutions as well as on urban design. The eighteenth-century city was one on the verge of becoming a metropolis. As such, it existed in relation to the world amid a global network defined by a multidirectionality of transculturation and exchange. Yet imagining a revitalizing impact of empire on cities at home proved to be fraught from the very beginning. In fact, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, the grand elder of French city writing (Le tableau de Paris, 1781), resorted to architectural rhetoric when exposing the tensions of empire, forging the associative link between the globe and the city: “For France the colonies represented something akin to a house in the country for the private citizen: it was because of the house in the country that the city mansion fell apart over time.”12 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe seemed at least suspicious: Johann Peter Eckermann’s recollection depicts the elder, sage writer distinguishing between a Weltstadt, which was full of allure but estranged from the organism of a nation, and the often pitiful, provincial towns, which could easily become part of enmeshing carriage roads and thus, eventually, sustain a nation—by offering pathways and crossroads within a vast rural landscape.13 Nevertheless, more than two hundred years later, Leonardo Benevelo revived as a fable the historical hope that Mercier had already debunked. Benevelo recasts colonial expansion as a process that turned urban fantasies into reality. Pondering the limitations that Europe’s medieval cities imposed on art, imagination, and urban revival in the eighteenth century, he suggests that conquered territories in the New World provided spaces where Europeans could implement innovative urban planning.14 Anthony King

Introduction

7

builds on this claim and inverses it, observing, for example, that cities capture imperial projections of the world by segregating inhabitants according to a colonial mind map.15 Whereas nations appeared as agents in the colonial enterprise, visions of cities took on object-like qualities. Exchangeable and easily transplanted elsewhere, cities met the same fate as commodities of trade: their reputation crumbled. Just as commodities and trade stood for obsession with material property and in antithesis to an intellectual life of contemplation, cities impaired, destroyed, and obscured any attempts at leading the good, honorable life. Benevelo argues that city space squarely appears to restrict a truly “human” existence and concludes that the city exiles art, banishing its production to rural settings for inspiration and sustenance.16 But literary production goes further than reclaiming the countryside as the true place of art. Craving an expansive horizon, it engages the world in fascinating and truly unexpected ways, all of which amount to more than merely duplicating global reflections in urban space. In the process, literature speaks to the varied ways in which cities and the globe interact because, despite their differences in scale and geographical reach, both the world and the city provided more than a stage for colonial casts. Intersecting global and urban forces shaped the imagination of eighteenth-century individuals and communities alike, producing literature that eventually aided the rise of the city as a “conceived space,” and—in tandem with the nascent imaginary nation— contributed to the demise of cities actually existing as a “lived space.”17

A Network of Genres, Concepts, and Disciplines How does one begin to tell the story of a literary network that fuses and jolts, amalgamates and traverses, the global and the local, and that rethinks the Atlantic world in terms of translation? In The Creation of the British Atlantic World, editors Elizabeth Mancke and Carol Shammas proceed from a simple question, namely, “what does the Atlantic history approach offer . . . that traditional imperial history does not?”18 Historically, “transatlantic activities” have been “studied as a contest among western European nations in which the most enterprising wins.”19 Thus, despite its title, the book seeks to unearth the forces that led to Europe’s worldwide dominance, co-opting and working against the different national interests at play. Seasoned scholarship assumed that power constellations, economic interests, and religious and philosophical ideas originated in Europe and were exported across the Atlantic, subsequently

8

Translating the World

enwrapping the Americas in a cultural imagery that divided the globe into the Western and Eastern Hemispheres; Mancke and Shammas sum this up as “competition” and “striving for empire.” More recently, scholars have challenged the narrative resulting from this dominant image of the Atlantic world, asking for new stories to be told that involve the multiple people, conflicts, and interests that contributed to the making of the Atlantic imagination and that often are positioned outside the domineering colonial realm that spread around the Atlantic rim and defined Atlantic relations; here, the authors observe “serendipitous workings of a variety of subnational groups.”20 As a result, Atlantic studies has accrued a plethora of approaches, archives, and competing histories, all of which draw attention to the discontinuities inherent in stories and histories.21 The interplay of both trends—the transnational, one-directional export vis-à-vis the networked “returns,” that is, diffuse reverberations of local actions elsewhere—often manifests itself as a tension. This is where Translating the World intervenes. By focusing on what historians call the Atlantic triangle and rereading literary reflections of this space, my argument brings out new layers of meaning in texts: manifestations of sentimental communities arise, presenting as a globally inflected style (rather than an indicator of a literary period, Empfindsamkeit). We see patterns of using theater pragmatically, as an effective strategy to disguise urban greed (rather than supporting national ambitions); along the way, reflections on literature arise that seem much closer to our, early twenty-first-century ideas about comparative and world literatures than to eighteenth-century beginnings of the national literary paradigm. We encounter the insurmountable, indeed constitutive, presence of religion in a century that promised to promote the secular. We encounter texts that capture seemingly bygone moments of literary life—orality, reading aloud, performance—and resort to old signs in order to sustain new, unfettered subjectivities. In unveiling these layers, I also chronicle the beginnings of self-monumentalizing: latently, in the diaries of want-to-be cosmopolitans like Caspar Voght as well as in the modest, understated anonymity of Ernst von Schimmelmann. Friedrich von Schiller’s self-depreciating proclamations of friendship and Friederike Brun’s adaptation of conversational and family roles stand for more relational efforts, while Johann Wolfgang von Goethe literally resorts to the heights of the city. Collectively, these layers of meaning trace the influx or absence of the world. In laying bare these hidden aspects, Translating the World locates literary production in languages that encompass all registers, are full of stylistic

Introduction

9

inflections, of translations (e.g., from other languages) as well as transpositions (e.g., of oral discourse); these languages carry literal (i.e., factual) information and seemingly infinite metaphoric potential. Literary life evolves as a cultural phenomenon that is carried by more than authorial intent. Thus, by wrestling literature away from the narrative of the nation, and by repositioning literary life vis-à-vis city and world, my book tells the story of literature in the making. In the process, a subplot emerges as well: a version of literary history that has a plurality of genres arrange and rearrange themselves beyond the literary historical conventions of the Bildungsroman, which took shape toward the end of the eighteenth century, and that casts a new light on earlier, normative genre in(ter)ventions: Johann Christoph Gottsched’s prescriptions for German drama is but one example. Though I do not revisit Gottsched’s work here and did not limit my choice of materials to dramatic texts, I chart a domination of dramatic genres and performance in negotiating the global presence in urban spaces. Despite two decades of heightened sensitivity to the colonial, postcolonial, and Orientalist inflections in German literature,22 turning “global” or “Atlantic” into a central vector of German—and for that matter, any national—literary historiography has not been without its challenges. On the one hand, the delineation of self-identities in the Western world is hardly conceivable without reflecting upon the process in literary, and—more broadly—cultural writing; both espouse imagination and figuration. On the other hand, national literatures were implicated in the colonial enterprise, thus rendering them (trans-)continental or global per se. Nevertheless, is it useful to question or even abandon “the national” as shorthand for what literature and cultural identity engender in the first place? How does my pragmatic usage of network and translation fit within the large and ever growing body of scholarship, especially within a debate that seeks to go beyond established modes of thinking about the (trans-)national as an effect of political, territorial, and economic thought? Recent studies on eighteenth-century literature and culture—focusing on German as well as European and world literature—assist in pondering these questions. They reframe the challenge to the national. They reconceive literary production along the lines of geography and history. But rather than proposing spatial and teleological images for thinking about the nation, they emphasize the early nineteenth-century rise of geography and history as modern academic disciplines and chronicle the impact of these disciplinary modes of thinking in delineating the nature of literary and philosophical thought.

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Translating the World

In The Geographic Imagination of Modernity, Chenxi Tang suggests a threshold moment in human imagination. By working through the coemergence of geographic sciences and “the making of the modern semantics of geographic space,”23 Tang describes this moment as one that usurps temporality by overinvesting in images of spatiality, and pinpoints it chronologically around 1800. Interested in the epistemological exploration and description of space, Tang delineates how the emerging field of natural history and a burgeoning geographical knowledge modulated concepts of individuality and subjectivity that, ultimately, shaped aesthetics, philosophy, and literature. Several aspects of Tang’s book prove useful to my present argument. As Tang chronicles the historical coemergence (or even equation) of the individual and collective experience of environments, he underscores, on the one hand, the catalyst role that individual subjectivity played in the imagination of modern geographic disciplines. However, by acknowledging “the homogenization” of the multifaceted spatial experience, he inadvertently exposes the blind spot in the replication of “geography” as a “European science.” Tang here reveals modernity’s more or less open disregard for the world and the oceans. By unmasking a fractured (rather than a sovereign) subject, he explains—not intentionally, for sure—how concepts such as the Culture Nation, with its homogenizing underpinnings, became palpable and necessary. By projecting literary imagination into the future, literature and philosophy, history and narration, became conflated. (Here, we only have to remember Schiller’s philosophy of history and its centrality in national literary historiography of the nineteenth century.) In effect, a huge conglomerate tale is spun, narrating the story of an impending, future nation and superimposing a new temporal order onto the barely gained spatial understanding.24 Similarly, as the spatiality of the German nation’s territory gets suspended or transposed in time, another spatial imagination—that of the world—penetrates one of the smallest reservoirs of public space, namely, the city. In exploring the urban scale, I seek to reintegrate human experience in a distinct, rather than ominously conflated, imaginary space, allowing literature to soak up the material conditions of its existence. I take the spatial imagination to be a substrate that allows for particular literary figurations to emerge, while showing that the life of the city began to be translated as well. The urban story was told in terms other than that of a political geography supported by statistics and void of imagination and fantasy.25 The city began to coproduce an alternate literary history that reached beyond the philosophical dominance accorded to Romantic geography and its nationalizing effects, resonating instead with

Introduction

11

literary and cultural currents circulating across the Atlantic and indeed globally. Such a history thrives on a multitude of literary genres. Srinivas Aravamudan’s book Enlightenment Orientalism assists in reading this alternate literary history. It also allows me to return to the second conceptual pillar of my book, translation. Aravamudan approaches the relationship between geography, history, and literature from the perspective of literary genre and world by juxtaposing literary modes that accrue in geographically and historically organized models of literary historiography, reframing the story of the novel through the vanishing influence of other tales, genres, and non-Western literary traditions. Thus, the nexus of genre and geography forms both a point of departure and a formidable challenge for Enlightenment Orientalism. The author revisits the coemergence of the novel and Europe’s obsession with Oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, and satires and examines them through individual, textual aspects that became instances of an emerging Enlightenment Orientalism; they include travelers acting as external critics of Enlightenment, claims of scientific universalism, and figurations of gender and sex.26 He provides us with a succinct account of methodologies involved in the production of world, national, and comparative literature, while generating a productive methodological openness, or “open-ended thought-experiment.”27 I heed this call for open-endedness for two reasons. The first is because it challenges the well-worn assumption that certain, dominant genres engineered the story of national literatures in the eighteenth century. Accordingly, the novel shaped the English- and French-speaking nations, and if we take Bethany Wiggin’s Novel Translations at face value, also the German-speaking lands (and any nascent, modern notion of German literature). Even before the recent turn toward comparative perspectives in genre studies, scholars considered the formative impact that the German bourgeois tragedy (Trauerspiel) had on the emergence of eighteenth-century German national consciousness. While I will scrutinize the role that dramatic text, theater, and performance played in the late eighteenth century, Aravamudan’s argument casts wide open the question of dominance. It inspires me to revisit, among others, the battle for “the original play,” which, by allegedly moving against translation, shaped the national image of eighteenth-century theater in German lands. This example brings me to the second reason why the call for open-endedness is important here. Which role does translation play in negotiating genre, particularly the zone between the literary and nonliterary, between fiction and simple descriptive texts (Gebrauchstexte)? How are the relationships among the modes of use and imagination projected, described, and interpreted? In

12

Translating the World

short, how are they translated on par with dominant literary paradigms? In pondering these questions, I elucidate my multidimensional understanding of translation in this book. Translation refers to linguistic translation between languages, transference between cultures, and even acts of transposing text, performance situation, or genre between geographical locales. I also engage metaphors of translation to delineate disciplinary distinctions, just as I speak of acts of translation when detailing transformations of orality into literacy and vice versa. One might say that this multitude runs the risk of obscuring the mediation of the global in urban experience, when it is, in fact, a wellcalculated, deliberate risk: as my argument progresses, and translation becomes ever more amorphous and multifaceted, it points to its own conceptual eclipse and eventual transformation, resembling but not fully coinciding with the relegation of local experience to the margins of literary historiography. In the process, a refined understanding of translation zone emerges as well. Anticipating aspects of what Emily Apter describes as the all-encompassing, mobile spaces that, by being “in-translation,” form the foundation of the new comparative literature (of the future), translation zones resist the reflexive turn toward becoming both a mirror and an instrument of nation. Instead they capture moments of eighteenth-century literary life that produced spaces full of “epistemological interstices” in which modes, registers, and styles of language production, generic innovation, and adaptation coexisted and that were much more in flux than literary historiography would have it.28 The translation zone I traverse in this book thus captures the messy, spectral radiance of translation that also marked late eighteenth-century literary life—before it was “tamed” by the original, the rules and languages of academic disciplines, and its demotion to the inferior derivative in the creative process. This late eighteenth-century translation zone truly encapsulates the manifestations of the global on the local scale. Clearly my line of thinking is indebted to Apter for providing a term that translates (!) the complex workings of eighteenth-century literary life; it also resonates, as we shall see in the epilogue, with her formulation of a programmatic goal for the future of literary studies. But others observed a decade earlier a historical phenomenon along the murky fault lines in the making of national literatures around 1800, which, I believe, reveals a multitude of literary modes while bringing to the fore questions of dominance and marginality in writing literary history. Not surprisingly then, Translating the World seeks dialogue with Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism,29 paying close attention to the argument she threads through the tensions between culture and

Introduction

13

literature, orality and literacy, as well as with Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s thought-experiments about domineering narratives, separation, and the foreclosure of marginal stories they see at work in emergent, national narratives. The “provocation” they unleashed proves useful here, as I seek to tell an alternate story of German national literature, reading—in no small part—through marginal genres.30 In the process, I suggest how we may want to think about the emergence of literature and literary studies as a modern disciplinary paradigm and thus a mode of thought, style, and figuration that reaches beyond the geopolitical reflection of identities. But I am jumping ahead. By working through genre—and by acknowledging the productive interplay between Enlightenment and Orientalism, two concepts that, after all, have long been considered mutually exclusive or whose linkage seems caught in a paradox—Aravamudan not only bypasses the use of concepts such as “global” and “globalization,” which are routinely linked to modes of scholarship that reflect a neoliberal mind-set and its critique. Elsewhere he furthers his reconsideration of world literature and its beginnings in the early modern world by linking them, however obliquely, to a mode of heuristic translation, namely, “the linguistic and cultural decoding of multiple languages thrown together by exploration.”31 While this theoretical intervention explicitly resists any joining together with translation zone—be it as its flip side, complement, or parallel, or even as its eighteenth-century historical equivalent in translatio—Aravamudan delineates an early modern and Enlightenment notion of “worlding.” This concept proves useful in my efforts at repositioning German-language texts and literature vis-à-vis the globe and the city, because it allows me to engage with the conundrum posed by the eighteenth-century notion of Welt—translating both “the globe” and, partially, “the world”—while guarding against the overuse and jargon-like depletion of the term. For “worlding . . . is a product of multiple acts that give form in many contexts, an endless conversation around multiple acts of reception,” states Aravamudan, as he pleads for reclaiming pure text(s) in resurrecting world literature before the time that national languages and academic institutions enshrined its separation into national traditions (and which were subsequently compared and “worlded”—that is translated—again).32 There is of course no literary (and scholarly) life without the historical institutions and contexts that create it. As “global” and “globalization” entered the critical vocabulary of eighteenth-century studies, they bore the risk of eliding historical precision. Historians, first and foremost Jürgen Osterhammel,

14

Translating the World

have claimed for some time that the eighteenth century actually was a period of early globalization,33 while others—for example, Jonathan Israel—escape what they call “neoliberal language” altogether. In the process, Israel proposes what amounts to an idea of benevolent colonialism when he argues for a “playing field of the universal” that was produced through colonial expansions.34 Literary scholars have intervened in and brought more nuance to this debate. More than a decade ago, Felicity Nussbaum reminded us in her introduction to The Global Eighteenth Century that “global” is neither the same as “globalization” nor is it a new, politically correct term for “the universal.” Conceptually and institutionally, Nussbaum claims to engage in “critical global studies,”35 making a theoretical move that is suitable to account for historical nuance and, at the same time, defines an effect of modernity and thus becomes part of an eighteenth-century legacy: “Critical global studies seeks globalization’s investment in the past to isolate antecedents of contemporary globalization, but it also recognizes the discontinuity from that past in its virtual nature, its radical augmentation of the speed of connection, and its particular form of late capital . . . an uneven genealogy.”36 She goes on to introduce “alternate modernities” in order to account for unevenness and noncongruity (Ungleichzeitigkeit), and supplements these temporally defined terms with the concept of “the glocal,” which she understands as a relation between two geographical coordinates.37 Nussbaum’s line of thinking therefore informs my use of glocalization, which I propose to define as a manifestation of the global relations, awareness, or repercussions in a particular locale. It is, some might say, just another term for the late eighteenth-century translation zone, and it is definitely a cognitive figure allowing me to fuse, once more rhetorically, translation and network. More recently, Nussbaum has reengaged with thinking eighteenth-century literature beyond well-worn categories, including the linguistic dominance of English, all in what she calls an effort at “worlding the eighteenth century.”38 In some ways, she puts forth what Aravamudan might criticize as a quest for an unassailable, theoretical metalanguage. But the concept takes on a dual role, casting in sharp relief the difficulty of finding the best, most suitable language in my readings of German-language literature between the city and the globe: on the one hand, Nussbaum’s use of worlding circumscribes the vexing status of temporal and spatial relation in literary studies of the eighteenth century, which I describe in Translating the World as the tension between history and geography, and on the other, her use explicitly pulls away from thinking in terms of nation. Worlding seemingly elevates the debate beyond ideological trappings, by shifting it away from Eurocentric or transatlantic perspectives

Introduction

15

and the pervasive west-east dichotomy. In a more generalized use, worlding draws on field imagery—for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s—which utilizes the simultaneous noncongruity of geographic as well as temporal, generic, and conceptual components.39 It thus generally resonates with the late twentiethand twenty-first-century search for a distinct role that literature, fiction, and (more broadly) art might play, while providing a counterconcept to any allusion to markets and exchange that are involved in globalization. Most importantly for German studies and this book, worlding allows me to transcend transnational (or comparative) vocabulary and approaches through its deliberate attempts to get beyond the confines of nation. All too often, transnational studies not only preclude closer attention to multiple points on “spatial and temporal scales” but also run the risk of getting stuck in thematic similarities or bilateral, transnational connections (e.g., German-British or German-French relations). I seek to move beyond these risks, precisely by pursuing my readings between the city and the globe. This arrangement also captures the material and formal conditions that surface through and in translation. These conditions, comprising objects (things) and texts (as well as their exchange), produce a network-like arrangement; they sustain worlding as a paradigm by engaging translation as a mode of moving objects and texts across borders and insisting on specific, often localized modes of language usage.40 Conversely, I see translation emerge as the prime indicator of a network that allows for worlding to emerge, precisely by mitigating the determination accrued by spatial and temporal difference. As worlding becomes a conceptual correlate to network and translation, it acts as another language that can foster the dialogue of German studies with other disciplines. It also acknowledges dominant teleological underpinnings of scholarly narratives, while allowing divergence, unevenness, and fractures to persist. Worlding thus picks up on—and simultaneously expands upon—the critical tools of both Atlantic studies and approaches focused on the historiography of national literatures, traditions, and canons. Yet whereas Nussbaum’s marshaling of worlding seeks to correct the imperial overreach of the “national literature paradigm”—but is only conceivable in dialogue with the national— Aravamudan’s notion of world literature seeks to chart literary life before the advent of the idea and institution of national literature.41 The plural, at times contested, uses of worlding assent to a linguistic and cultural specificity, while constructing pathways into rethinking the long-asserted belatedness of German literature (and nation) in relation to the formation of national literary traditions as well as to the emergence of imperial mind-sets, awareness,

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Translating the World

and critical inflections of world. Worlding serves as shorthand for a nuanced debate in (comparative) literary studies, against which (and in dialogue with) my retelling of German literature’s story unfolds.

Return to the German City—Its History and (Missed) Story Aside from its imperial entanglements, the story most commonly told about the eighteenth-century European and early American city is one of industrialization, with narrative excess addressing demographic explosions, outrageous consumption, and burgeoning vice. Depictions of city life are frequently marked by symptoms of “boundary confusion,” exhibition of trivialities, and by reporting the “migration” of people and things.42 From their midst, the idea of the modern city arises: one defined by government and public institutions, design, and topography rather than being strictly confined to architecture, economics, and demography.43 Socially, the literary and cultural life of urban spaces involves more than the bourgeois class in the making; geographically, it exceeds the confines of the city. Nascent urban modernity brings about ethnic and often linguistic plurality, amplified social stratification (and often segregation), tolerance and infighting, democratization and lingering political hierarchies; in short, early modern cities display all the hallmarks of civil society. Their cultural and literary life becomes all about watershed moments in which aesthetics parts with the mundane and where the quest for a higher, ethical purpose collides with mere entertainment. Around 1800, in cities all over Europe, intersecting urban, global, and literary life exposes a struggle for cultural relevance, authority, and community amid the tides of economic crises, wars, and future aspirations. The story of the German city, even outside of the aspiring metropolis Berlin, is only partially different. Certainly, eighteenth-century Berlin forecasted its own imperial future by drawing people in, in part because of its inviting, open architecture and its turn toward modern institutions, which took on deictic, forward-directed qualities.44 Suggesting a transcendence of urban confines and international, though not global, aspirations, these patterns anticipated, through material manifestation, the coming late nineteenth-century empire. Overall, a city’s projecting power seems to hinge upon its material reflection of time and space. For example, concerning literary studies, Matt Erlin has established a powerful matrix against which to read the rhetoric of the German city around 1800, viewed through the example of

Introduction

17

Berlin. Not only did the rapid temporal change around 1750 find its reflection in a proliferation of city writing. Literary and historical narratives increasingly converged,45 and the city became the space and metaphor of modernity per se; it mirrored the bifurcation of organic, historical growth and ahistorical planning, symmetry, and containment. Erlin convincingly links these patterns to the Enlightenment preferences for order and transparency. Nevertheless, his narrative seems to identify material conditions without producing the texts and figurations that are shaped by these material circumstances. In other words, texts and circumstance appear disjoined. Turning away from the textual markers of urbanization and toward its material remnants, Yair Mintzker puts forth an alternative tale, when insisting that the story of eighteenth-century German cities is better told in a language other than that of modernity with its exteriorized order and interiorizing temporality of life. The language of preindustrial urbanity, Mintzker claims, does not suffice either.46 His argument focuses the city as a prime space for imagination by drawing attention to an aspect of city life that escaped the mind and experience of most city dwellers and the budding urban consciousness. The eighteenth-century German city existed, after all, within the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation—however, this loosely defined, largely imaginary or contractual empire remained invisible to citizens, dignitaries, and foreigners. This empire could not be known; its absence defined the horizon of citizens’ imagination. They could only experience their local environment. Therefore, the city gained an enormous, projectional power when it came to identity. Nation-tasks, such as the defense or other tasks of utilitarian might, including the upkeep of fortifications as a defense structure, were within the responsibilities of the city. Thus, by recasting defortification—and ultimately the city itself—as a vector in shaping national identities (rather than relegating it to an act necessitated by expansion and industrialization), Mintzker ascribes important imaginative power to urban space development. By embracing city walls as an imaginary border, he refutes, on the one hand, a one-dimensional growth metaphor that had trading places morph into national towns, and, on the other hand, tacitly confirms an observation that Mack Walker made nearly half a century ago: namely, that narrative history, not to say storytelling, takes over whenever the town fails as a metaphor for German affairs.47 Mintzker’s argument is, in some ways, a fold if not the inverse of mine, perhaps best expressed in the language of neither historiography nor literary studies. Where he treats the city as a seed from which national imagination may grow, I perceive it as a looking glass or a lens that refracts the world outside its walls.

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Translating the World

In contrast, Spiro Kostof urges us to be more critical and doubtful when it comes to historical facts about city growth: not every trade center and fair turned into a major city; not every exemplary defensive structure had lasting urban impact. In fact, trade may have flourished in places because they were important urban locales, and a large concentration of people may have necessitated a beefed-up defense.48 Similarly, a city’s literary and cultural output may have influenced its urban design and material face. But we will never know in a comprehensive way, at least not without reducing literature to a reflex of material circumstance. Therefore, mine is not a study in architecture and not even in urban historiography. Instead, it is and will remain a study in metaphor: of the city and of urban life. But what happened when such a refracted and mediated urbanity confronted alterity, a broader world beyond the city wall and the traces of a national fantasy? Translating the World attempts to respond to this question, because as the eighteenth century unfolded and turned, the urban imaginary was altered and upset through an inflection of colonialism and the advent of imperial thought.

Why Hamburg? Why Weimar? The eighteenth-century German cities revisited in Translating the World certainly engaged modernity. They were confronted with it and turned to embracing or contesting the traits of modern urban life. Cities housed elites and nonelites, who inhabited buildings that befitted their social and cultural standing and defined the urban landscape. Important differences arose among cities, not just from their varying municipal size and natural topography, but also pointing to different manifestations of latent modernity. For example, eighteenth-century Hamburg and Weimar, the central proponents of the story I tell in this book, produced distinct, urban spaces—and did so in marked, albeit unintended difference from eighteenth-century Berlin (as well as from London or Paris): the northern German port city possessed all the flair of a mercantile hub, donning warehouses, a stock exchange, banks, and luxury trade, along with numerous public spaces defined by trade, politics, and the accompanying moral underbelly. Without the conventional spatial arrangements, which in preindustrial times combined residence and workplace in one place while strictly separating them in the industrial age, Hamburg saw growth typical of early industrialization. Its population had increased to 100,000 in 1787. Population growth came with transformations in urban institutions;

Introduction

19

economic boom-and-bust cycles reflected a larger, transatlantic dynamic of war and peace, slave trade, and colonialism; foreigners not only visited but also lived in the city (as well as in neighboring Altona, then part of the Danish Gesamtstaat (Danish Unitary State). In short, thoroughly modern, eighteenth-century Hamburg was what passed then for a global city, that is, a Weltstadt; its citizens considered it a “cosmopolis.”49 Not so Weimar. Preindustrial and courtly, it displayed very few signs of the future culture capital. Architectural, courtly tradition dominated the urban space through the castle and aristocratic residences, but perhaps most strikingly through the city wall whose demolition was never quite completed. Even more significantly, demographic patterns were nothing but rigid, appearing less penetrable than in Hamburg, which certainly championed its established elites. By 1799, Weimar had 6,041 inhabitants living in cramped quarters in a few hundred houses of different sizes, often with low ceilings, and stretched along torn-up streets with poor lighting.50 Fields spilled into town, as did sewage, dirt, water, and crime. Visitors and recent arrivals “from abroad”51 told stories that competed with what would soon become the dominant narrative of “a literary capital.”52 Weimar was, to put it mildly, far from being a welcoming town. Cultivating instead what I call a distinctly “nonurban city” with a self-secluding life, Weimar nevertheless accelerated the commodification of space, that is, an understanding that space could be traded, compartmentalized, and leveraged for profit. Such commodification is commonly considered a sign of the ways in which modernization impacts city life. In Weimar, commodification had the opposite effects, fossilizing in some ways the narrowness of Weimar around 1800 and turning it into a museum avant la lettre. Though Weimar would go on to occupy an exalted position in the German cultural imagination, some aspects of its small-town nature resembled the eighteenth-century norm rather than the exception. Even late eighteenthcentury Leipzig, Vienna, and Munich—which recently entered the debate surrounding the German national theater—shared some of the traits that came with latent provinciality and delayed industrialization. Berlin narrowly escaped provinciality only through the grand architectural gestures of Prussian rulers. Alan Balfour shows how Prussian kings used geometrical shapes to allude to their sense of power—for example, the octagonal city shape, which was supposed to express a desire for a ruler free from the restraints of history. These architectural details stood for the aristocratic quest to situate itself in the system of order that urban topography provided, adopting it as a vehicle of self-modernization.53 Along with the suspension of fortification, of districting,

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Translating the World

and the opening of city gates, these measures (and their symbolic impact) are distinct outward signs of embracing modernity. Therefore, stories about other cities also resonate with this book, presenting models of alternative literary and cultural histories. At times, cities are reduced to prominent urban institutions, a representative building or an element of infrastructure; likewise a segment of its population may stand in for a city. For example, though not projecting aristocratic power or a distinctly modern layout, Hamburg’s architecture reflected global aspirations. But the port city displayed its global position in different ways than Berlin. Containing huge storage houses for the export of grain and imported luxury goods in its cityscape, Hamburg also embraced the dubious establishments of a “worldly” port city (pubs, bordellos); they all were detailed in tales about the city. Its theater existed, and was resurrected, for the purpose of entertaining foreigners (diplomats). At the same time, church towers (and ecclesial power) served as reminders of more modest times. They were not eradicated from city chronicles and more modern, urban tales (Stadtgeschichten). In other words, in the late eighteenth century, Hamburg’s identity was always already in flux, suspended between city and world. And yet, the story Erlin tells about Berlin complicates claims about global Hamburg, explaining perhaps how it ended up on the margins of a national imagination that was established post-1800. Erlin draws in the global, albeit in limited ways—the global is reflected in philosophical and historical writing, either as a vector of history or as a domestic reflection (that is, the absence of such a vector).54 Domestic urbanity, Erlin suggests, throws a wrench in Enlightenment’s self-proclaimed universalism, as it draws attention to disenfranchised people and communities. They were spatially segregated, and in texts, appear translated into temporal nonsimultaneity.55 Here, on a miniscule scale, I see Berlin’s story tying in with transatlantic stories, lending itself to becoming part of the narratives of worlding, while exposing the tale of German belatedness that worlding seeks to overcome. Despite the projections of nonsimultaneity onto the local level, a different story holds true as well. The case of Hamburg tells this story. Erlin pinpoints growth as a decisive factor in cities becoming metropolitan entities and centers of an empire. Accordingly, Berlin perpetuated the tale of accelerated temporalization and functional differentiation while being unable to escape the tale of lagging behind on the world stage and thus enshrining belated modernity. In Hamburg, in contrast, the world existed within the city limits, thus distorting and undermining the temporal dissolution and transcendence of difference. Despite being the

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second largest German-speaking city (after Vienna) for much of the eighteenth century, it soon stagnated, eclipsing its power of projection, which from now on could be directed nowhere but inward.

Reading in Four Chapters and an Epilogue: What This Book Is (Not) Where does this leave the story I tell in Translating the World? Is it about to become one of stagnation, in which one proponent (Hamburg) dynamically engages with the world but cannot transcend its mercantile limitations that thwart growth, while the other (Weimar) stands still but casts an embellished, illusionary tale into the future? The following four chapters engage these alternatives. Before previewing them, however, I want to conclude my situating of this book’s argument vis-à-vis urban history, New Historicism’s method of literary criticism, and architectural studies. In other words, by fine-tuning the impulses for my study and connecting a few of the proverbial dots, I acknowledge what this book is not and does not want to be. The tale of another eighteenth-century city, Leipzig, suggests pathways beyond the seemingly inevitable tale of stagnation. Leipzig was a major literary center: since late medieval times, it had grown into a trading spot, before being designated as location for a major trade fair toward the end of the fifteenth century; in the eighteenth century, two fairs took place a year. Leipzig had become a musical mecca and home to a prominent university, which was among the oldest in German lands. Gottsched was among its influential professors and set out to reform German literature by prescribing the exemplary drama. The city was a major literary and cultural center, and to this day the Meßkataloge (the book fair’s catalogues of newly published titles) are testament to Leipzig’s role in literary trade. In The Soul of Commerce, Robert Beachy scrutinizes this role further. He corrects the long-held assumption that the rise of the literary market was a material but not a monetary prerequisite for the emergence of national literature in German lands. One aspect of this economic and cultural history proves particularly relevant for my present purpose, Beachy’s foray into the impact of a small journalistic genre. He considers Pasquillen (lampoons) as a genre of critique, paving the way for reading Leipzig’s literary life in a much more multifaceted way than German literary historiography suggests. He shows that the town’s lively eighteenth-century culture of criticism defined literary life as much as Gottsched’s activist enterprise of normative poetics. Beachy

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thus makes a case for engaging with fictional texts, literary institutions, and imaginary life when chronicling urban history. His account reaches beyond the well-worn stories of material conditions, flying in the face of idealist goals for protonational communities.56 In laying bare the ways in which Leipzig’s urban institutions empowered merchant patrons and by emphasizing the role of a marginal literary genre, Beachy’s tale resembles the story I am about to tell of Hamburg. In the eighteenth century, Leipzig’s merchant patrons played roles similar to those fulfilled by investors in theater, libraries, and salons in Hamburg. The case of Leipzig illustrates that small and now-marginal genres must play a bigger role in current discussions of national canon formation—as does translation, a domineering mode of literary production today and, as it turns out, in and prior to the eighteenth century. Beachy’s account of Leipzig resonates not only with my claims about Hamburg. The desire to make property ownership a showcase of political representation (and vice versa) emerged as key to “Leipzig’s urban reform movement.”57 It obstructed the ways in which denizens and strangers perceived the city, resembling the manner in which property possession, maintenance, and tales told about the town became a vehicle for manipulating the image of Weimar.58 But unlike the good citizens of Weimar, who turned inward, Leipzig’s population exhibited their interrelation with the world, arriving—in the nineteenth century—at a pattern of political representation unimaginable without a self-identity aware of the Atlantic world. Thus, through critical engagement with urban history, and especially with cultural and literary studies about eighteenth-century German city life, I derive my method for reading across the crevices, folds, and hidden subtexts of texts from and about Hamburg and Weimar. Rather than amassing stories of historical imperiousness and “thick description” à la Clifford Geertz, I am interested in the ways the texts speak with each other, to and about each other. In reading slowly, pointedly, and between surface and depth, I tell stories about the imprints and inflection of world in the urban landscape. It is a world, I suggest, that unfolds multiple genres against imaginary (and real) urban horizons. As sketched above, the historical processes that translated and condensed the world for the German city in its actual habitat—as well as in literary and cultural life—depended on streets and city buildings, urban institutions and landmarks, structures like city walls demarcating its borders. First and foremost, they relied on images of all of the above as well as on spatial preconcepts and “re-concepts” that aided processes of imagination. In a recent essay collection, Transnationalism and the German City, Jeffry Diefendorf and Janet

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Ward assemble a number of case studies that situate the German city in the transnational network emerging from the hybrid existence of the modern city as a place marked by both confinement and porous, urban boundaries (which had already structured eighteenth-century accounts) while mirroring national characteristics and thus “reinscribing” the local in a national space.59 In each of the essays, the materiality of the built environment becomes meaningful through its intersection with images of space that arise in the interplay of denoting, reading historically, and reconceptualizing. While this essay collection reinforces claims of the concurrent existence of local, regional, and national patterns of belonging and identification in urban spaces, its lead essay, Daniel Purdy’s “Enlightenment in the European City: Rethinking German Urbanism and the Public Sphere,”60 draws attention to an inward-directed human existence. Arguing, among other things, that the public, often transregional (or even transoceanic) reach of the late eighteenth-century German city and its institutions was highly dependent on the incubation of its values in the bourgeois home (Bürgerhaus), Purdy reminds us of the material and psychological conditions housing the texts that I discuss in this book. The bourgeois home’s semipublic atmosphere, an occasionally private, yet always domesticated consumption of Enlightenment ideas, enabled these very ideas to go public. They then could travel across city lines. The homes housed salons and social teas (Tischgesellschaften)— both of which figure prominently in chapters 3 and 4 of Translating the World—and fostered forms of creativity that, despite involving performance, conversation, and other vanishing presences, resonated beyond the local confines. Ideas disseminated in bourgeois homes thus expressed an “inverse relationship between the increasing compartmentalization of private space into ever more exclusive chambers and the expansion of global networks.”61 The ideas read structures of community that cast the eighteenth-century German city in a new light, bringing into focus a subtle interplay that pits two notions of the city against each other. On the one hand, cities were perceived as an exclusively intellectual or economic space that had, however, naturally grown. On the other hand, cities were considered as an architecturally constructed, not to say invented, space that sought to balance public and private institutions.62 Architectural features thus folded public, even global, life into private space. They did so in a manner that resonates, of course, with Erlin’s claim that urban life around 1800 embodied the drive toward historical thinking, temporal acceleration, and aspiration for intellectual growth, while remaining

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entrapped in a geography that betrayed the Enlightenment obsession with order and transparency mapped onto living quarters. Yet there seems to be little room for truly global remnants in this story. If the world could not be subsumed in teleology, it could not be segregated or compartmentalized. It could thus not be integrated into the various emergent narratives that all appealed, more or less, to community, identity, or modernity. These remnants nevertheless retained their place in literary life, pervading and altering genres, creating new ones, and connecting faraway places to the German city. Unearthing these remnants is my goal in this book. Hamburg and Weimar turn out to be particularly fruitful grounds in this story of exploration. Though both fall outside the neat categories of imperial cities or capitals and do not display any patterns of urban growth or acceleration as outward signs of urban modernity, they lend themselves as stark examples in other respects. Both cities intersect German literary historiography in crucial albeit different ways. Hamburg lived exchange with the world. While the traces of this exchange still subsist in libraries and the occasional plate on Hamburg’s city houses, the historiography of its literary life represents aborted paths and failures, whereas Weimar’s came to symbolize, even mythologize, more than literary history. Today, it stands for the German (Culture) nation, reaching well into the twentieth century as Weimarer Klassik (Weimar Classicism) and Mythos Weimar (the myth of Weimar) appear to be interchangeable.63 This book’s story is thus also one of Weimar’s rise and Hamburg’s fall, of domination and eclipse. It is a story of the gradual disappearance of world—of the world’s relegation from German literary life and historiography. Translating the World’s chapters reflect the story’s often-meandering episodes and unfold a multitude of translations: literal translations and conceptual wrangling; geographical and psychological transpositions; communal transformations and discursive shifts. This book’s story begins, literally, with translations and adaptations from English to German. It wrestles, against the urban horizon with the burgeoning presence of a contested, late eighteenthcentury world—the context—in the small, confined spaces of texts (chapter 1). But this is also a story that recaps the very early beginnings of a general, comparative or world literature and its suppression in favor of a national literary historiography (chapter 2), exhibiting, for the first time in this book, the various modes of translation as a sine qua non of literary life. It is a story that hears the voices that left the city behind. They traveled across the Atlantic and back, mediating the boundaries between orality and literacy—or performance

Introduction

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culture and literary tradition—as well as the relationship between geographical expansion and the psychological and spiritual turns inward (chapter 3). Finally, it is a story that culminates in moves toward the monumental, installing the foundations of the Culture Nation (chapter 4) and by moving translation toward self-understanding, a move that helps delineate the nature of literature vis-à-vis other disciplinary modes of thinking. By elevating people and places, the monumentalizing part of an otherwise fragile and tentative tale produces, perhaps necessarily so, the most remnants. Recast in the epilogue, these remnants become seeds—new beginnings, really—of German literature circulating globally in the early nineteenth-century world. This process involves, again, translation—this time from German into English and the cultural idiom of the New World. Looking ahead at the twenty-first century, the epilogue wrestles with literary history’s tendency to fizzle in cultural studies—attempting to plead for the relevance of literature, linguistic creativity, and, more broadly, humanities today. Chapter 1, “Theater Channels: Translating the British Atlantic World for the Hamburg Stage,” takes us back to the city’s flourishing publishing and translation scene around 1770. The scene radiated well into the next decades and developed a lively journal, theater, and performance culture combining institutions of higher learning, playhouses, the opera, and visiting acting troupes in a truly international setting and, of course, in a well-defined urban space. The chapter centers on three of these venues or institutions. As Hamburg pulled the world inside its walls, it shaped its unique, urban spirit, capitalizing an institution that channeled global exchange: the Trade Academy and its publication, Trade Library. This duo staged a model for the transmission of a distinctly cosmopolitan spirit, soon connecting to the young United States, while remaining entrapped in its urban confines. Along with the Hamburg theater, the Trade Academy and Trade Library stood for institutions that served the engaged and educated public in which the city prided itself and whose worldliness expressed itself in translation: in literal translations from French and especially, and in contrast to many other German cities, from English. Hamburg was also a hub of cultural transfer—by translating colonialism, colonial trade, and community for the public, enmeshing audiences in the multilayered workings of an empire. Both literal and cultural figures of translation rely on and accommodate the influence of other languages as well as of texts of different genres. (Examples of the latter include, aside from many anonymous texts in journals and travel books, Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko and Richard Cumberland’s play The West Indian.) By reading—in detail—two

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dramatic texts, Ernst Lorenz Michael Rathlef ’s Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg (The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg, 1775) and Johann Christoph Bode’s Der Westindier (The West Indian, 1772), I explore the translation and transposition, mediation and transformation, of world in the northern German city (and vice versa), suggesting conditions for the (non-)portability of Hamburg’s literary and cultural institutions beyond Hamburg. Chief among Hamburg’s urban projects stands what literary history has described as the birthplace of modern German consciousness, Hamburg’s national theater (Nationaltheaterprojekt). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767–69) carried the legacy of this project into the world. Chapter 2, “Lessing Dethroned: The Hamburg Dramaturgy and the Eighteenth-Century World” rereads the Dramaturgy by reflecting the rich incursions of world in this text. I show that Lessing’s pointed criticism of other authors’ translations, as well as his commentaries and embedded, innovative theories of translation, connect the Dramaturgy to the world—much more so than to the nonexisting German nation. Considered in those terms, a different facet of the Hamburg Dramaturgy moves to the fore: Lessing’s notion of a general literature sprouting, perhaps inadvertently, an early concept of “comparative literature.” This chapter too underscores, in turn, that Hamburg occupied a global position in the late eighteenth century, foregrounding once more an international taste for entertainment, But unlike chapter 1, this chapter sheds light on how the city’s international flair fared subsequently. Conversely, it also explains how the Dramaturgy could prove foundational to both the national history of German literature, which it domesticated, and a “worlded” understanding of theater, manifesting the disciplinary divide between literary and theater studies. Part of Hamburg’s fate as a cultural center involved literary life fleeing the city. The city spurred exalted salons, which spread into the countryside; in chapter 3, “Leaving the City: Conversion to Community, Redemption, and Literary Sociability,” I tell their story. The salons never quite lost their ties to an older, aristocratic culture as well as their resonance with, if not deep roots in, religion and religious sentimentalism. They also reflected global events and developments, becoming a space that cultivated what we call, sometimes flippantly, cosmopolitanism. It is this particular sentimental community that envelops, and is shaped by, the Atlantic rim. Reverberations of global networks (especially the Moravians’) lead me to suggest a rethinking of orality, literacy, and literary genres. I highlight the contexts of abolition and Caribbean slavery, Moravian memoir culture, and the occasional, declamatory poetry

Introduction

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performed in salons, which also unfold in a reconfigured understanding of the city. As literary life fled the urban space, individual buildings and their interior represent urbanity pars pro toto. Little known voices join merchants with poetic aspirations (e.g., Caspar Voght), their slave-owning friends in government with a penchant for secrecy, communal service, and abolition (e.g., the Schimmelmann family), and poets of northern German sentimentalism aspiring to literary greatness (e.g., Friederike Brun). The literary life of these almost forgotten figures intersects with Friedrich Schiller’s, whose work Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Aesthetic Letters, 1794) was influenced by and, in an early version, sustained through an act of northern patronage. Befittingly, a discussion of the precursor correspondence to Aesthetic Letters, directed at the modern rather than the classical world, opens the fourth and final chapter, “Classical Weimar Reconsidered: Friendship Redeemed, Foundations Laid, and Monuments Made.” The chapter’s interrelated acts of geographical and discursive transposition move the book’s argument to Weimar. In contrast to Hamburg, Weimar proved to be provincial. Classical Weimar sought to keep people out, whereas other German cities, most notably eighteenth-century Berlin, drew people in. While Hamburg’s city architecture reflected a buzzing, global trade, Weimar’s was largely one of improvisation, patch-up, and compromise reflecting the delicate power structures between varying constituents and paralleling a vivid culture of conversation. As I have shown elsewhere, these interrelated aspects of Weimar around 1800 supported its selfelevation; all of these aspects aided in making the myth of Classical Weimar. Chapter 4 takes this argumentation further and explores how the different facets of Classical Weimar were aligned in keeping the world out, namely, in guarding against global ideas, in particular those that sprung from the American, Caribbean, and—to a lesser extent in this book—French revolutions. Ultimately, these moves contributed to establishing the city as a museum avant la lettre, allowing the town to become a monument and emerge in a new kind of currency, namely, as cultural capital and culture capital, which then could be exported—as an idea—around the world. My readings of primarily two journals (Englische Miszellen; Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden) as well as of letters and other autobiographical documents—all emanating from Goethe’s and Schiller’s circles—and Goethe’s engagement with towers in essays on architecture illustrate how the imaginary realm of the city transcended into that of the nation and how Classical Weimar became the culture capital, even in the absence of a nation.

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Nevertheless, literary life and especially the translations among genres, the written and the spoken word, and its transposition of other languages and cultures also demonstrate what was forgotten, fell by the wayside, and was kept at bay: global connections and the wider world. The epilogue recalls these connections while probing the status of literary studies today. Taking up Emily Apter’s challenge to rethink comparative literature in the translation zone, this final part of the book sets up, in partial opposition to Goethe’s notion of world literature, August von Kotzebue’s transatlantic legacies: by teasing out the lasting impact of translating his plays into English, the book makes an argument for alternate literary histories, namely, those moving beyond the nation and involving style and genre. In highlighting the translation zones, such histories connect, forcefully, with the existence of literature and fiction in today’s interconnected world; at the same time, they hint at profound splits between literary and cultural studies. Our literature—and the forgotten German literature of the late eighteenth century—is one that connects the local and the global and that marks its presence and relevance by intersecting the two. Conversely, it is also in the translation zone that Goethe’s lasting impact reemerges and reasserts itself: not in the notion of a sovereign, autonomous subject but in one that struggles, questions, and is challenged in perpetuity and thus reorients aesthetically.

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1

THEATER CHANNELS Translating the British Atlantic World for the Hamburg Stage

Befördrer vieler Lustbarkeiten, du angenehmer Alsterfluß! Du mehrest Hamburgs Seltenheiten Und ihren fröhlichen Genuß. Supporter of much entertainment, you pleasant Alster river! You increase Hamburg’s rarities and her joyful pleasures too. —Friedrich von Hagedorn, “Die Alster” (The Alster River), 1757

Late Eighteenth-Century Hamburg, or the City as a Glocal Stage In German literary historiography, Hamburg barely conveys an image of worldliness and rarely appears to be a player in the production of Germany’s literary legacy around the world. In the course of the last two hundred plus years, provincial Weimar has thoroughly dwarfed cosmopolitan Hamburg. That northern German cultures of sensibility (which straddled the city’s borders but did not make their primary home in Hamburg) retain importance in German-English literary

relations seems more the exception than the norm.1 Most scholars read eighteenth-century Hamburg’s cosmopolitan standing as a curious fact, attributing it all too quickly to the Hanoverian reign over the British Empire and the ensuing ties of the northern regions to Britain. It turns out that this, too, is a misreading at best: while the reign impacted Hamburg, it did not define it. More obscure, century-old relations did. Yet in several other respects the city’s impact comes with a whiff of inward-directedness and singularity, even— and perplexingly so—with the air of a recluse. The city appeared thoroughly secluded, if not from the world, then from the narratives that sought to situate Germany in the world. Given Hamburg’s particular political infrastructure, with its mixed form of government,2 and location by the sea, the city was unique by many standards of the imagination. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Hamburg was a Weltstadt—that is, an urban center with cosmopolitan flair— and it was more. To add to my descriptions in the introductory chapter, the city truly represented the eighteenth-century equivalent of what Saskia Sassen has described as a “global city.” As a decentralized hub for banking, trade, and trading seats, Hamburg fulfilled many of the criteria that we classify as “global” today.3 The city boasted an independent credit and financial system, stimulating enormous financial stability through opulent coins and notes of credit that had recourse to Hanseatic traditions and currencies (Mark banco) and leading to other early forms of dispersal and centralization of economic forces.4 Around 1800 (and ahead of its time), Hamburg gave rise and meaning to the concept of Zwischenhandel (intermediary trade), defining the local not only geographically but also monetarily.5 Emerging as the dominant force in importing and exporting goods for many of the landlocked German regions, Hamburg kept the global import and export lines for European colonial powers alive, especially when they were at war with each other. During and after the Seven Years’ War, for example, the city established a reputation as a safe port, where the business of slavery could continue to flourish: sugar, cotton, coffee—grown by African slaves in Africa and on the Caribbean islands—reached the city, and the profit was invested in rifles, liquor, and fabric, which were exported across the ocean. While the prominent Hamburg merchant Caspar Voght bragged about his benevolent importation of coffee, tobacco, and rubber from three continents,6 he and his contemporaries knew about the slave trade’s essential role in transatlantic business relations and were active participants. Slave trade—as well as an insurance system paying out ransom if merchants’ ships were captured—had a long tradition, with

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a pronounced uptick in documentation, commentary, and record keeping during times of global war, rebellion, and revolution.7 Participation in the trade meant navigating perpetual crises,8 involving economic boom-and-bust cycles as well as deep crises of personal purpose. We will get a sense of the multiple entanglements between business, private lives, and ethical claims in chapter 3, as we read along the fractured lines and within the splintered texts that the slave-trading patronage of the arts produced. Areas around the northern German port city showed other signs of global enterprise as well. Losing their local and provincial feeling, they were populated by people of many ethnicities, chief among them the neighboring Dutch and Danish. Many inhabitants were sailors; others refined sugar. In the late eighteenth century, Hamburg was close to Denmark—neighboring Altona was in fact Danish—with its colonial corporations (e.g., the Danish East-India Company); the proximity brought as many benefits as it steered competition.9 For brief periods in the second half of the eighteenth century, Hamburg was the leading European port;10 from 1789 on, the region was home to many French emigrants or refugees. For centuries, English merchants—aptly named London Merchants in the German port city and Hamburg Merchants in London—had traded in the port, contributing to the rise of English as the most prominent foreign language in Hamburg and helping to establish the city and vicinity as a center of sugar production, especially after England emerged as the dominant manufacturer after the Seven Years’ War.11 Add to that a steady presence of transiting seafarers and numerous families displaying their worldliness not only through the consumption of luxury goods originating overseas (e.g., coffee, tea, cocoa, and rum), but also through the possessions of so-called Haussklaven (domestic slaves) or Hausmohren (domestic Moors). To see people of other races was more common in the Hamburg vicinity than in any other part of the German territories.12 Well-known merchant families opened branch offices in Hamburg and dispatched capital and knowhow to branch offices all over Europe, but especially in France, Portugal, and England.13 Thus, although Hamburg was not a colonial center or metropolis by today’s understanding (nor “a capital” in Zedler’s parlance), its existence was intricately interwoven with empire.14 Boundaries between city and world were fluid, and late eighteenth-century Hamburg was by no means as distant from the Caribbean world as one might expect today. And yet, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the city remained conspicuously absent from the stories and narratives seeking to situate Germany in the world, especially those emerging in Germany’s national era

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and those that used literature and culture as driving forces. It mattered little that eighteenth-century contemporaries sang of Hamburg’s reputation and uniqueness—like Friedrich von Hagedorn, whose poem lends this chapter its epigraph—and readily acknowledged Hamburg’s wealth and privilege, along with its penchant for at times frivolous entertainment. The city harbored, as Hagedorn’s poem suggests, “rarities” proliferated by its location. Indeed, with its easy access to the northern Atlantic and several “institutions” germane to a port city (e.g., seafarer missions, bordellos, pubs), Hamburg was unique. The most glorious in a chain of erstwhile wealthy towns along the Elbe estuary, Hamburg struck eighteenth-century travelers with its indulgence as well as its vulgarity, displaying the “magnificence of a mercantile republic, [that required] no great penetration to see the seeds of its decline.”15 While it afforded rare, even strange experiences setting it apart from other German cities around 1800, Hamburg soon was at risk of becoming closed-off, stagnant, and well past its prime. The second-largest German-speaking city with a nearly constant population for much of the eighteenth century, Hamburg experienced rapid growth in the last two decades of the century (from 100,000 to roughly 130,000 people). Afterward, its growth slowed significantly; eventually Hamburg was a distant third behind Berlin and Vienna.16 These were facets of the backdrop of Hamburg’s complex cultural and literary legacy: much like the developed form of trade that Hamburg championed, its urban environment created a cultural threshold. Well capitalized economically, yet soon baring the ugly underbelly of urban poverty,17 Hamburg also created, and traded in, a particular kind of capital, namely, world knowledge: it easily rendered foreign cultures and products, imparted its own values to others, and adapted knowledge of other parts of the globe to varied audiences, discourses, and disciplines. The city readily spent and dispersed this knowledge, sending and flushing it down Hagedorn’s proverbial Alster River. While insisting on (and indeed intersecting with) rich entertainment, leisurely diversions, and educational context, Hamburg’s literary life lacked any investment in its own legacy. Its supporters appeared disinterested in claiming any particular role or cultural significance beyond their immediate circumstance. Reflecting on their own poetic efforts, contemporaries write in a rather mundane and casual fashion about what strikes us today as a rich cultural life. Young sons of globally enterprising merchants established a lending library. They were acquaintances with the likes of famed actor David Garrick and had customary speech lessons in order to perform in Vorlesestunden (reading circles). They recollect the barely imaginable splash that Friedrich Gottlieb

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Klopstock (1724–1803) made with his Messias (1749–73). Caspar Voght, who documented these observations in his autobiography in 1811, blames the cold, Enlightenment spirit of the times for having all but forgotten Klopstock’s effect (and the affect created among contemporaries).18 But even mid-nineteenth-century literary historiography suggests that today’s impression of Hamburg’s relative irrelevance was formed fairly recently. As late as 1856, Feodor von Wehl cast a different story in Hamburgs Literaturleben im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg’s Literary Life in the Eighteenth Century). Detailing the cultural effects of disputes involving the theater—there was more than one Theaterstreit—and of religious influences upon the literary life of Hamburg, he also saw a wealthy, reflective public. Acquisitive in its daily activities, the city nevertheless possessed a cosmopolitan outlook and took pleasure in the arts and intellectual development. “It is this moment and only this moment that elevates the eighteenth century in Hamburg or rather, it elevates Hamburg in the eighteenth century,” sums up Wehl.19 Full of aspirations and proud of their formative impact, Hamburg’s citizens participated in everyday culture, wrote essays, debated, and consumed literature for other than strictly utilitarian purposes. Roughly 120 years later, the poetic output of the eighteenth century retains its prominence in stories of English-German cross-cultural exchange—if they are told from a British or Anglo-American perspective.20 While English-German political and diplomatic history has been extensively researched, often with an eye toward political symbiosis, literary historians have focused on education, travel, and book history. Nevertheless, studies such as Bernhard Fabian’s now-classic essay on English books and German readers and Michael Maurer’s Aufklärung und Anglophilie in Deutschland are few and far between, waiting to be reread in a broader context of world.21 Moreover, in the canon of German national literature, sentimentality—especially its northern permutation—hibernates in the margins. Not surprisingly, then, Franklin Kopitzsch, the intellectual stalwart with regard to writing Hamburg’s urban history, has called for a modern, scholarly account of eighteenth-century literary life in Hamburg.22 With this chapter I wish to contribute to such an account by examining, first, an alternate venue for producing world knowledge, the Hamburg Trade Academy (Hamburgische Handlungsakademie), before turning to one of the city’s big assets, the theater. Both venues display stage-like qualities as places where one could observe global engagement: they emphasize, at times unintentionally, foreign languages and small, epistemic genres as conduits of exchange, creating images of the larger world in the process. These images

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emerge from local, indeed small institutions (e.g., a school and a journal) as much as from space that has been linked, in literary historiography, to the emergence of the national (the theater and the dramatic text). Therefore, as this chapter turns to theater, plays, and performance, it unites the multilayered facets of “staging” under a widespread phenomenon of the late eighteenth century, namely, translation. Including linguistic translation as well as cultural transposition of motifs, values, and urban spaces, translation becomes a vehicle for bringing plays to the theater that reframe the global in urban settings. But translation also acts as a mode for intellectual exchange, including import as well as export. It thus becomes both a lubricant and a guarantor of (male) style, expressing a free-flowing cosmopolitan worldliness that was the hallmark and aspiration of the eighteenth-century form of a public intellectual. In exploring translation, I also reread the rich metaphor of literary channels by transposing it onto the stage. (This constitutes, of course, another act of translation.) While alluding to paths of transmission, origin, and destination of literary texts, it also stands for translation practice and adaptation as well as the emergence of literariness from more than an author’s pen and/or the printer’s workshop. Most immediately, the metaphor pays homage to an essay collection entitled The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel. Edited by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, the book offers an alternate history of the novel, one that does not consider it solely the result and assertion of modern autonomous subjectivity and nationality. Rather, it takes into account formal aspects of the genre, portability issues across languages, and transformative impacts on languages, most notably on English and French. As these acts of invention relate to, and at times produce, translation, they resonate with the literary and cultural effects we see in Hamburg’s urban environment around 1800, especially since these textual dynamics hold true for drama as well. Here, too, the English Channel, the body of water between Continental Europe and Britain, connects Hamburg’s literary legacy to the globe, in particular to the Atlantic world, while separating the city from most of the surrounding German-speaking territories and carving out its place in subsequent literary historiographies. Moreover, the Channel lends metaphor to the differences that define the status of eighteenth-century tragedy in British and German literary historiography as well as to the uniqueness of the Hamburg stage. As the city becomes a local stage for the world, global phenomena are perceptively filtered through the lens of Hamburg’s urban environment and, at least in some cases, deliberately selected to become a conduit of world

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knowledge. Literary institutions—and the theater in particular—play a crucial role in this selection as well as in the transformation and localization of knowledge. They enact strategies of mediation, transmission, and articulation that focus the literary and cultural realm of the city as much as they capture the world, all before exporting the city’s life globally and, in particular, across the Atlantic into the New World of the colonial period and early United States. Indeed, Hamburg’s literary and theatrical practice was to a large extent defined by its relation to the world, especially its entanglements in the Atlantic triangle.23 As the microcosm of the colonial world intervened in the German text, the stage became an institution of glocalization: on stage—particularly in theater, its discourse, and criticism—local cultural ramifications of global developments could be observed.24 At the same time, the translation and adaptation of drama gained currency, making for the distinguishing feature of Hamburg’s theater in the second half of the eighteenth century. The city exported its cultural products as much as it invited the world into its spaces, all the while beginning to tell a story that is also a story about the struggle among disciplines, epistemologies, and institutional legitimacy. And at its literary core, it is a story about the circulation of genres: the latency of small, almost journalistic genres and the dominance of drama.

The Hamburg Trade Academy and Trade Library: Exports of World Knowledge, Working Against the Nation Among all the international representatives in Hamburg, the London Merchants were the most legendary; moreover, the British Empire could be felt everywhere. Anglophiles made the city their home, providing a readymade explanation for a public fascination with all things English: material goods, manners, and news—and not to be forgotten—a particular notion of global and cosmopolitan knowledge. The ideals of trade, mercantilism, and transoceanic business ventures were palpable throughout the urban environment. Considered “English,” a correlate value system dominated in daily life: the use and usability of “things.” Everything was deemed visible, could be traded, and was negotiable, penetrating an exchange of goods that had ideals intersect with materiality: texts, journals, maps, and philosophical pamphlets were lent and borrowed, acquired and wagered away. By 1789, following announcements in Hamburg’s English-language journal the British Mercury, the city had become a booming center for trading in English books, in no

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small part because William Remnant, an importer, had challenged the competition to supply English books faster (and presumably cheaper).25 Around 1800, visitors to the northern German port city and prominent booksellers in Berlin agreed: Hamburg was the only German-speaking city where English was not only translated into German, but where it was spoken and understood in the streets, and not just by its native speakers.26 Life in Hamburg thus mimicked, with some twists, turns, and translations, the pivotal role that Britain played in the transfer of cultural ideas, texts, and knowledge among European powers in the late eighteenth century.27 But the city’s textual legacy allows us a glimpse into the manner in which British colonialism organized itself aesthetically and became part of the fabric enabling the cultural transfer of presumably “English ideas.” Nevertheless, an important manifestation of eighteenth-century global Hamburg remained hidden in plain sight, namely, in the role it played in capitalizing new epistemological paradigms, that is, in moving from a holistic or encyclopedic ideal of knowing toward more specialized disciplines. Institutionally, universities espoused these paradigms. Yet Hamburg, which lacked a university until the early twentieth century, was nevertheless instrumental. The city’s harboring of the world directly relates to the emergence of such paradigms and appears in the institutionalization of knowledge in academic disciplines, epistemic genres, and a unique, urban institution. Hamburg’s Trade Academy performed crucial tasks related to situating the city in the world.28 Established in the 1760s as an institution of higher learning, the academy was more than a trade school. Most importantly it also engendered a text: both the founding idea and sustaining principle of the institution were propagated by the journal Handlungsbibliothek (Trade Library), first published in 1764 and seeing two further installments, each covering several years. As a pair, the Trade Academy and Trade Library provide a window into the dissemination of late eighteenth-century knowledge, situating an epistemic mode and genres that inevitably responded to, but at the same time altered, the zeitgeist. By prioritizing exchange, pragmatics, and debate, and small genres such as reports, translations, and even advertisements, the academy and Trade Library straddle the line between the oral and literary—or communal and personal—dissemination of knowledge. In their focus on the present, they do so much differently than, for example, the lecture, which, in abandoning both its traditional roots in scholastic erudition and fairly small student audience, segued into becoming a national-historical document to be published, proliferated in books, and archived as part of the literary canon.29 At the same time,

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while playing along with the idea that “print created a world of its own” (as Chad Wellmon aptly describes a collective anxiety impeding late eighteenthcentury German readers), the Trade Academy and Trade Library tell the story of capitalizing on epistemic fragments, proliferating texts that remained as the empire of erudition—the Republic of Letters with its treatises—fractured (if it indeed ever existed).30 This capitalization happened in a pragmatic, global way, while tracing the contours of the city. The academy’s intent effectively rivaled that of a university and its correlate academic disciplines—which took their modern forms around 1800 and soon were exported as German goods. In contrast to the university, which projects disciplinary histories, this unique Hamburg institution aimed at the world—as well as the city, the ocean, and the Eurasian continent—but not at the nation, producing forms and a style that tell us much about cultural dominance but also about forgetfulness in literary historiography. In this quest for epistemological repositioning, an early version of the public intellectual arises. Incidentally, the director of the academy, copublisher of Trade Library and its frequent author, Johan Georg Büsch (1728–1800), was also a member of the theater’s board of directors. Büsch—often in tandem with the academy’s codirector Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741–1817)—regularly engaged in publicity campaigns when reporting on the academy’s success in the German-language press.31 He praised the international character of the academy as well as its private sponsorship. Established in 1768 as a private venture (Privatunternehmung), the academy taught about sixty Hamburg denizens and three hundred pupils from all over Europe in its first twenty years of its existence.32 In his texts (reviews, reports, theoretical and legal treatises), Büsch emphasized transatlantic networks, connecting especially with the English-speaking world, as well as trade and cultural exchange with eastern Europe and Russia, Italy and northern Europe. For Ebeling, work in the academy and on Trade Library became the launching pad for his sustained engagement with the New World, especially regarding the United States’ independence and culminating in the incomplete Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika: Die vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Geography and History of America: The United States of North America). Büsch and Ebeling enacted—via the journal and the promotion of Trade Library and the academy in other news media—Hamburg’s position as an intermediary trade center that oriented itself globally. In contrast, there is only one review of a book on the history of German trade included in volume 1 of the journal, and

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no discussion of literature, arts, or the theater. Even more so, in subsequent volumes Trade Library’s world appears to be shrinking, centering instead on its urban, Hamburg origins. Volume 2, published in 1789, revolves around relations with the Anglo-American world, whereas the third volume (1797) moves the Danish colonial empire to center stage and therefore resonates with Hamburg’s experience of an urban duality with neighboring Altona. As the written accounts mirror Hamburg’s spheres of interest and influence as well as the specific nature of the city’s global network in the respective decade, the symbiosis of the Trade Academy and Trade Library illustrates how cultural capitalization may have worked. Although, at first glance, both institutions appear to be geared toward the English-speaking world (and thus toward the British Empire and the newly independent United States), they aspire to exude truly global influence and thus exemplify how the city refracted a global network of trade and cultural relations. Trade Academy and Trade Library show how bilinguality and translation penetrate local institutions of learning. In his texts, Büsch underscores the importance of the English language, insisting that the academy introduce an innovative model of modern foreign language teaching. English and German were taught as foreign languages, in addition to the then-customary French. Ahead of its time, the academy brought in a native speaker to teach French who would also take a seat as one of the school’s board members.33 Well versed in the living, spoken language, this teacher thus pioneered new methods of language instruction, with the teaching of other languages following suit. The Hamburg Trade Academy thus demonstrated a global attitude and linguistic diversity that was not only unparalleled—for example, in comparison to the trade academies in Vienna and Manchester described in Trade Library—but that also stood in stark contrast to the philological turn that would establish itself only a few decades later at German universities, becoming the foundation of national language studies, and that had already seen a precursor, namely, early modern translation theory, flourish at the university of Göttingen in the last third of the eighteenth century.34 But rather than investing language study with written recapitulation, through excerpting, for example, or installing a scholar-orator, the academy remained devoted to face-to-face interaction, thus acknowledging a focus on the pragmatics of the moment rather than on authoritative, canonical knowledge. Similarly, while Büsch and Ebeling signed their writings about the academy—thus transposing its institutional values into print—Trade Library includes anonymous texts (as well as authors reduced to initials). Not hiding the fact that the

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included writings are epistemic genres, that is, texts that do more than share facts or create imaginary worlds, the journal morphs into a teaching manual or tutorial. In terms of its global legacy, the Hamburg Trade Academy therefore resonates more with the United States’ ideals of a liberal arts education than it does with the idea of the discipline-driven research university, which evolved as one of the core values of nineteenth-century Germany, and was the educational model exported across the Atlantic. The Trade Academy, in contrast, vanished from German national consciousness, despite the global orientation it exhibited not only in the format of the tutorial but also in the legacy of the academy’s clientele. The institution bears the marks of its urban context as well as of an older social stratification when addressing its ideal pupil and reader. By displaying both of these traits simultaneously, the Trade Academy exposes an alternate dynamic of public life. It proposes a correlate model of a public sphere that does not differentiate between what Immanuel Kant, and almost two hundred years later, Jürgen Habermas, might call, respectively, the public (leisurely) and private (occupational) existence of any given individual or Bürger. Considered by its founders the first educational institution that prioritized civic education (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) over schooling (Schulerziehung), the academy initially limited itself to the training of merchants. But it soon reinvented itself, aspiring to become a transcending force not only of content but also of clientele. It morphed into an institution stressing comprehensive education, which was thought to be useful for all fields that required expertise in money matters.35 Cognizant of class differences, the academy reached out to aristocrats interested in such education. Büsch specifically proposed that all those who turned out not to be talented enough to be merchants could “read mathematics, philosophy, and old languages” and acquire qualifications for public administration, government, academia, and international diplomacy.36 At first glance, this reads like a belittling of everything outside economics or Kameralwissenschaften (as it was called in the eighteenth century) while fully endorsing, and indeed prioritizing, an unfettered, mercantile existence. In reality, though, it propagated an ideal of a human being’s holistic existence, rather than a pragmatism that distinguished between and acted according to the rules of functionally differentiated society. The academy prohibited activities that were at the core of mercantile societies and were especially rampant among the most prominent families in the transatlantic trade, such as speculation with credit and material goods. Pupils were not allowed to obtain credit for their “amusement,” of which “any urban setting” offered plenty; the academy

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insisted that credit would only “seduce them” and feed their addiction to profiteering.37 Overall, despite supplying students with occupational skills—and the authors frequently pride themselves on “lessons in warehouses”—the school’s basic approach centered on practical reasoning and etiquette. It produced a scheme of rewards that appears only consequential: the authors’ writings in Trade Library praise only graduates who supplemented (and at times even supplanted) ambition and work ethic with a morally upright character and a pleasant personality.38 Similarly, in each of its journalistic texts, the academy emphasizes its global reach and deep transformative impact on personalities and communities. Promoting the enterprise and taking the institution beyond the confines of Hamburg—and onto the road and across the oceans—the academy professes to train international pupils in the art of negotiating the world.39 The phrase is as loaded as it is at least two-dimensional, implying both economic and cultural cosmopolitanism. It combines a sense of trading and negotiating contracts on a global scale with displaying the traits of worldliness, an awareness of multiple global value systems.40 At the same time, while listing the students’ national origins, detailing their success upon graduation, and being published in German, the Trade Academy and Trade Library seek to present, whenever appropriate, an alternative to national, state-sponsored institutions, most notably to other trade companies.41 As the Hamburg institutions allude to men of the world and “the whole man,” they aspire to an ideal of humanist cosmopolitanism, rather than furthering colonialist projects for the public’s sake. Büsch emphasizes the latter in his criticism of the Manchester Trade Academy. He bemoans that Manchester, albeit established as a public venture by men involved “in letters,” does not educate “the whole man.” Trade companies in Britain and elsewhere, Büsch dryly states, were marred by a general imbalance in the types of capital, sprouting too much money and too little knowledge.42 The Hamburg Trade Academy, he insists, is different, priding itself on producing comprehensive knowledge. We know, of course, that this alternative, despite its praise of the well-rounded personality and communal interest, was rooted in private enterprise, priding itself on its independence from the Senate. Indeed, Hamburg’s alternative involves an ambiguous public figure. In fact, the spirit of both the Trade Academy and the city create it: a shrewd, culturally articulate merchant with a social conscience. This idealized figure became a reality in early nineteenth-century Hamburg (and it is revived in chapter 3 below). More importantly, it forms a core concept of German liberalism manifesting itself by the mid-nineteenth century. The aforementioned Caspar Voght began to develop it around 1800.

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He not only considered it his merchant’s ethos to experience “the greatest feeling of personal liberty”; he also aspired to cultivate the imagination as the highest good. Once trade ceased to inspire, he felt only disgust. But in trade’s place, the common good and philanthropy arose as Voght’s new, allconsuming interest.43 Not surprisingly, then, the specter of a merchant with a social conscience lurks in many of the well-known literary works of German Biedermeier and realism. In different permutations, it has shaped German society well into the twentieth century. Its birth, however, the Hamburg Trade Academy insinuates, marked a moment in which knowledge and capital became joined, bound together through the circulation of either, and they both fed off of any surplus of the other. To know meant to possess and invest; in return, investing allowed for an ever more expansive field of inquiry, knowledge acquisition, and production. World knowledge thus took on yet another meaning: it circulated globally, and indeed, knowledge became a currency to be traded, a thing one could own, waiting to be invested for further growth, and expressed, some two hundred years later, in the unwieldy composite noun of knowledge-capital. The culturally well-versed merchant also marked a particular moment in time and history: Hamburg was a capital city where economic and cultural wealth intersected and from which both spread across the world. The academy’s impact was continuously amplified by its dual existence as local educational space and as a journal, that is, as an institution able to reach beyond Hamburg’s borders. Through its self-proliferation and remediation across institutions and disciplines, as well as through different venues of publicity, the Trade Academy ultimately reached a point of saturation. For, despite exceeding the spatial and temporal limits of Hamburg’s urbanity in its written record, the academy’s translocal impact was ultimately curtailed. Its epistemological impact was one of knowledge mobility—and mediation—rather than a paradigmatic stability, and eventually tradition, which university disciplines entail. The academy and Trade Library’s knowledge circulated freely, not hamstrung by any institution or oversight, while promoting the institutional power of trade (and financial capital). Nevertheless, in most regions, universities soon outranked any alternative institution administering and generating knowledge. The universities sustained epistemological paradigms. But why? The reflexive answer is to point to “tradition”: medieval universities had grown with and absorbed the times. But it is equally common—at least among scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture—to invoke the “aesthetic grounding” of the modern world, meaning that knowledge soon became

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aestheticized, formal, and ultimately “disinterested.” Knowledge and capital separated, and while the merchant devolved into a much-maligned figure, knowledge retained—or conjured up—its purity. Though in a strict sense only accounting for one disciplinary narrative, that of philosophy and metaphysics, the early aesthetic turn explains how the Hamburg Trade Academy’s profile—international, multilingual, pragmatic, and meandering through small, journalistic genres—precipitated the institution’s demise. Yes, it was portable as an idea and in the press, but it was also a distinctly local institution that depended on its urban context. Its profile lent itself to being tuned out by a unifying force, a discourse that established itself as an authoritarian narrative (through philosophical treatise and university lecture) and, ultimately, with a national (in this case, German) inflection.

Multiple Translations, or Localizing the Empire of Sentiments in Hamburg In representing the Trade Academy, its directors emphasize educational ambitions and legacies across the world, reverberations whose impact is palpable without having necessarily causal effects. Similarly to a network, they seed and yield results in related, and occasionally in disparate, locations, without geographical conquest of land or sea territory. Simultaneously, by highlighting the academy’s emphasis on English, they redirect us to the imperial force the British Empire yielded in formulating mercantile ideals and shaping public discourse, also and especially in Hamburg. Books, journals, and lending libraries played a decisive, much-discussed role in the process of implementing these ideas. Coffeehouses and pubs did so as well—even more so, in fact—and, as we will see, (semi-)private settings (e.g., salons) and media (e.g., journals) connected the disparate spheres of influence and communication with one another before fiction took over the role of organizing social reality, in order to imagine its future or even supplant it.44 Less readily acknowledged is the empire of feeling that emerged as the unifying force of the British colonial project, permeating British culture on many levels, including literature, and extending well beyond novels, which in crossing the Channel became domineering cultural forces and erected an empire of their own. Lynn Festa demonstrates how economic and territorial expansion worked in tandem with, and indeed relied on, affective structures in order to become a powerful, imperial force. For in the last third of the eighteenth century,

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Britain not only had considerable material impact upon the globe, but its national consciousness and imagination were also saturated with imperial affection. A country that imported commodities and stories from the colonies and that oversaw the export of manufactured products, political ideals, and slaves—more than 3.4 million between 1662 and 1807—Britain had become the dominant global force of the period. It further solidified its position by 1815, when “the British empire embraced one-fifth of the earth’s inhabitants.”45 In British seaports, important commercial chains intersected and formed a network of transcontinental reach; all the while, the nation developed a unique set of ideas shaping middle-class understanding of prosperity, culture, and values of modernity that in turn were discussed on the Continent.46 British national consciousness around 1800 transcended social difference and embraced imperial pride, which initiated globally oriented patterns of identification and aesthetic compensation. This imperial consciousness influenced the manner in which Britain was perceived all over Europe, including German lands. The British Empire and its intellectual, economic, and emotional horizon had profound effects on bilateral British-German relations. The empire also shaped a monopoly of text and information, permeating texts, written by influential cultural figures and anonymous newspaper writers alike, and promising to deliver crucial, fact-based information on discovery and trade. English texts bestowed knowledge all over Continental Europe. Frequently such knowledge was formed in a manner that equated experience with fact and from which German seemed empirically excluded. Examples include knowledge about slavery and colonial history, for which English texts set up a competition for the truth—at least with the onset of the American, Caribbean, and French revolutions. “Accuracy” was then frequently mediated through an alternate channel, namely, Paris and the French language. The effects on fiction mirror those of news accounts; indeed the two realms permeate each other with few boundaries whatsoever. A case in point is the circulation of multidimensional texts devoted to the West Indies and, more broadly speaking, the two pillars of the Caribbean conquest: the imaginative embellishment of Europeans taking over the Americas and the slave trade. A rich reservoir of texts was, parallel to its appearance, “stolen”: these texts and the information they contained were readily adapted, translated, and reissued, all without an attribution of source and mostly claiming to be original. Other texts, “based on originals,” were newly composed. At once obliterated and distorted, these versions were also translated and retranslated, as Mary Helen McMurran and Cohen and Devers have shown for the

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genre of the European novel. More often than not, the versions were truncated and/or enlarged in the process. While the beginnings are hard to determine, this phenomenon became all encompassing, affecting many genres. Important historical and political events—such as the Somerset case (1772), bestowing freedom on an erstwhile slave in London, and the slave rebellions in Haiti (1791–1804)—triggered floods of texts and information; the publication of important source texts led to numerous, barely traceable adaptations, excerpts, and translations. As Susanne Zantop has shown, this avalanche was embraced for its proliferation of travel genres; the public’s desire to travel imaginatively was simply insatiable, akin to a “travel mania.”47 Readers preferred to survey and cross vast territory from the comfort of their homes. But there was one topic whose textual circulation punctuated this preference. Journal articles frequently engaged, from the 1760s on, questions of slavery and rebellion; the social hierarchies and intellectual and material power created by colonialism suited the German public’s increasingly altered self-understanding. I have shown elsewhere in detail how the specter of these global events influenced the mediation of news from revolutionary France and the Caribbean colonies, saturating, for example, the reporting in Hamburg’s Minerva.48 As we shall see in chapter 3, this saturation triggered new rhetorical figures and stylistic patterns for engaging the world. Imperial consciousness extended beyond bourgeois aspirations, thus transcending any particular class or rank. It manifested itself aesthetically by translating, for example, colonial constellations to the domestic London stage and by anchoring models of personal and communal identification. These models in turn allowed for, or at the very least attempted to provide, aesthetic and ethical compensation for material debt and exploitation. Medial, communal, and personal traces of imperial consciousness became omnipresent, fierce, and—at least in hindsight—desperate for transcendence. Begging to be elevated—ethically and aesthetically—imperial consciousness presented as something more human, better, or more acceptable. It called for and enacted translations and transpositions on either side of the Channel. Aesthetically, British culture gave rise to sentimentalism, a practice of engagement with self and others that at first glance, because of its pronounced emphasis on domesticity, could only collide with the domain of empire. Exploring the inner life, sentimentalism promoted individuality, but simultaneously—not unlike empire—it undermined individuality’s qualities as a basis of thought. It nevertheless prevailed, succeeding, according to Festa, by creating models for consuming the world from the safe distance of the

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British Isles, while bringing the victims of colonial conquest into the web of emotional entanglements and identification. By enabling people to engage with the world through differing genres, through forms of aesthetic and public practice, and across a diverse social spectrum, sentimental tropes played an important role in the imperial conquest. Rather than undermining the new middle-class ideology, they solidified it and aided its claim to universality. Put differently, as individuality took center stage, Enlightenment restated its universal claims via sentimental rhetoric, producing “a shared tabula on which figures separated by space and time can communicate, as the seemingly spontaneous outpourings of sentimental emotion reaffirm the existence of a common humanity.”49 The empire of feeling was born. The sentimental style proved simultaneously more pervasive and subtle than the contents the texts exchanged, promoted, and at times fabricated. In German lands seemingly all genres except the novel had morphed into vehicles for engaging with the complexities of transnational cultural transfer (and exceeding Europe as frame of reference and content or representation): travel books, plays staging intercultural conflicts, and pseudoscientific, philosophical, and economic treatises shared knowledge of the world. Texts disseminating knowledge about the oceans and natural history, trade routes and merchants, foreign fashions, and distant lands—featuring both paradisiacal and hostile environs—were especially popular. They were published either as a Germanlanguage original or translated and appeared in weeklies, monthly journals, and early serialized novels. Often taking a stance for or against sentimentalism by involving their readers in text and plot through particular narrative techniques,50 these accounts were deemed useful. Almost always they claimed disinterestedness, allegedly serving no other purposes than the acquisition of facts, the import of new information, and knowledge production. In the process, eyewitnesses and other individuals, who could authenticate actual sources for the newly acquired information, who spoke to observation or the truthful relaying of facts, gained prominence. With Germans rarely represented among experts and world travelers, the translator emerged as a preeminent if amorphous figure. She or he took on a decisive role in relating as well as fabricating knowledge for a new communal purpose.51 The translated texts position readers in the world, while domesticating them. They document images of intercultural contact and transfer, at times chronicling reciprocal exchange. Some propose the coemergence of similar ideas and images about non-European people in the country where the text originated as well as in German lands, while still others—many, if not most of them—stress the

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differences between the text’s original context and its German horizon.52 With eyewitnesses and translators vouching for the accuracy of fact and information, while duplicating this accuracy respectively in a German text, the empire of feeling seems to be kept at bay. Or is it? Texts did in fact render an affective pattern that remained hidden behind seemingly neutral words and factual information. However, it did not relate political sentiment to revolution at home, thus creating an expression of community (Gemeinsinn), as Barbara Riesche claims in her study of colonial themes in German popular theater around 1800.53 Instead, affect partook in exchange and redistribution, that is, in a circulation of text and dramatic form across borderlines. Sentimental rhetoric and its adaptation acted as potent lubricants in transposing the world onto the city, be it on the public, urban stage of the theater or, as we will see in chapter 3, in the semiprivate setting of the northern German salon. The proverbial presence of the British Empire on Hamburg’s stage demonstrates how the sentimental, dramatic mode localizes global relations. In Hamburg, British colonialism circulated theatrically in multifaceted ways, mediated, on the one hand, by British colonial presence—merchants, sailors, and imported luxury goods—in the city and, on the other hand, through linguistic transposition: by importing stories, fables, and plays and adapting them to the Hamburg stage. The British Empire also appears in adaptations of British plays, promoted by a vital translation practice from English that rendered not only speech or words but also concepts. Finally, the theater localizes empire aesthetically through an adaptation of aesthetic practice and theatrical device that transported colonial identification into Hamburg’s domestic sphere. Like colonial exchange, theatrical practice faced—and indulged— periods of economic as well as aesthetic boom and bust. And nowhere were the latter more evident than in Hamburg, where merchants endured crises of their businesses, including bankruptcies, while simultaneously financing theaters, libraries, and other forms of entertainment. The turbulent history of the Hamburg theater was much more afflicted by mercantile business cycles than by financial incompetence. And like the theater’s financial footing, plays failed, no matter how much resonance they promised.

The World on Stage in Hamburg: Dramatic Bust Ernst Lorenz Michael Rathlef ’s Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg (The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg, 1775) fits on any eighteenth-century stage, and yet it is

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a quintessential Hamburg play. Staging a dramatic text that relates Hamburg’s urban life and institutions while engaging the world, the play delivers on its title. It shows the presence of blacks in the city; its title alludes, albeit obliquely, to the social, ethnic, and ultimately racial stratification of Hamburg’s society. Several characters appear to be English, with several others conveying an aura of Britishness through their Anglicized names of African-French origin. Still others allude to exotic overtures, sound, and adventures. Yet all of these characters are embroiled in colonial activities, especially in the slave trade, steering it, registering it, or benefiting from the trade, however passive. Two main black characters, Cadige and Zaduc, have been its victims: enslaved in Africa, they ended up in Hamburg. Cadige lives at the home of Wallmer, an influential and well-established merchant. Gordon, his nephew, falls for her. Though the uncle kicks Gordon out, when learning of his infatuation, he does not give up on Cadige. Physically separated and unable to see each other, not even through a window, the couple engages in avid letter writing and exchange. In the process, we learn in piecemeal fashion about their backgrounds, Cadige’s illustrious life experiences as well as Gordon’s complicated family affairs. Born in Guinea, Cadige stays at Wallmer’s as a companion to his foster child, Emilie. The merchant considers her property, willing to pimp her out as Gordon’s lover—as long as his nephew marries Emilie and cements the nuclear family’s bonds and wealth. Reminding his uncle of Cadige’s status (“of being neither slave nor servant”), Gordon emphatically rejects Wallmer’s proposal and reveals, in passing, how Cadige came to Europe as a slave and eventually ended up in Hamburg. A late aunt from Amsterdam—in fact Wallmer’s sister—freed Cadige by willing her a small allowance. Obliquely referencing the employment of (former) slaves as servants, a practice common among Hamburg’s merchants, while alluding to the Enlightenment project of universal education, the play links city and globe in a generic motif. Gordon weaves the Amsterdam episode into a larger tale about Cadige, praising her European-style education and pure soul. Insisting that her inner beauty constitutes an ideal that Emilie, whom he considers cold and soulless, could never reach, he defends his relationship with Cadige. Wallmer, on the other hand, rejects it because of race, which he circumscribes with “temperament and feelings,” thus detaching the race debate completely from aesthetic discussions of beauty and alluding to alternate, eighteenth-century theories that had environment and climate alter skin color. Nevertheless, what Wallmer considers the repulsiveness of black skin structures his exchange with Gordon.

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The latter punctuates his uncle’s logic by rejecting the perfect body and insisting instead on choosing the perfect soul. Yet Gordon is not entitled to free decision making, because, in the realm of the play, he relates the city in much stronger terms than an ideal of individual personhood. The city engulfs him with its diffuse expectations, clichés, and complicated social relations. Indeed, the city coproduces the conceptual rationale for his decision making. He relents, succumbing to his uncle’s wishes when the latter reminds him of potential public ridicule. He agrees to marry Emilie and have Cadige sent to Guinea with part of her pension. But throughout he waffles, weighing his uncle’s sinister motives with his own fear of becoming the talk of the town: “One has to comply with habits, even be mindful of prejudice. Should I really make a fool of myself in my hometown? This would be—What would people think of me? Say about me? He who is indifferent to his fellow citizens’ opinion, is not worth the honor of being called a citizen. I’m not the first and won’t be the last to sacrifice out of necessity.”54 That Gordon hesitates can easily pass for Rathlef ’s “scripting,” that is, his efforts to create a character according to social norms. Yet such a reading proves more complicated if we consider audiences’ expectations— including their quest for “unaccountable pleasure” in the performance55—and Hamburg’s unique urban context. While Gordon’s pensiveness allows spectators to suture the rift between stage and themselves, creating an allusion to community, their knowledge of the plot pulls them deep into play, “hovering at a . . . emotional threshold between the special and the common place.”56 For, once he decided to leave Cadige, Gordon asks a messenger—“a gypsy boy”—to hand-deliver a letter to her. Meeting him, Cadige notices his earring. In an earlier scene, the boy had found the piece of jewelry under a tree—and spectators were left wondering about its significance. Now, they are pulled into a different plot space, because the earring instigates dramatic conflict in a play that hitherto was full of bourgeois pettiness and stale mores (and fleeting contemplation of a denizen’s reputation and duty to his community). But suddenly the audience is thrown into a world of luxury items, sparkle, and “foreign characters,” further amplified by Cadige’s next move. She confronts her past when recognizing the earring as Zaduc’s, to whom she was betrothed in Guinea. Hoping to find him alive—perhaps even in Hamburg—she finally speaks, acts, and performs a character, only to be foretold, “You will marry two men.”57 Resisting this dire prediction, Cadige opens the letter and is promptly thrown back into dramatic passivity. Her reading scene is telling, though, speaking louder than

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her words ever could. In utter disbelief, Cadige mingles reading Gordon’s words with visual memories of Zaduc, conjuring up a hallucinatory image that blends and eradicates distance and boundaries for her. She, too, becomes immersed in an emotional gamble, just as the audience moves between simple enjoyment and testing their moral resolve. As Gordon appears, unable to let go of Cadige, she promises to love him if only she can see Zaduc one more time, simultaneously heightening spectators’ dramatic thrill and the chance of moral transgressions. But yet again, the city—present in the play’s setting in distinctly urban spaces—inserts itself, creating dramatic obstacles. These must be overcome for the meeting to happen and before Zaduc’s past reveals itself to both Gordon and the spectator. The latter twist draws in audiences, far beyond Hamburg though not necessarily in German lands: Zaduc and Cadige’s story resembles another one. The erstwhile betrothed African couple—separated by slavery but eventually reunited—reminds us of Aphra Behn’s short novel, Oroonoko (1688), which had infiltrated European literary consciousness by 1800 and provided an example for unifying the world despite, or even along, the fractured lines of slave trade, sentimental love stories, and—at least latently—abolitionist thought. But Oroonoko resonated for reasons beyond its theme. In the eighteenth century, Behn’s story had turned the dramatic corner, so to speak; adaptations and translations were everywhere. Laura Stevens considers the prime structure of the tale to be a major aspect in the proliferation of the literary subject matter, taking the symbiosis of an “exotic” American destination and a European heroic story as a major element in producing a master plot of cultural exchange.58 Nevertheless, the story’s appeal arose from the original quality of the material: providing a self-proclaimed opening into the distant lands of Surinam, the text affirms the authenticating role of the eyewitness. Only the eyewitness could be a reliable source, constituting the order in this story, after she or he had seen and heard, directly, from “the chief actor in this history.”59 Furthermore, a tale that amplifies the motif of trading with natives structures the unifying patterns of identification. In Oroonoko, the European indulgence—that is, the Continent’s luxury trade with colonies—parallels, and at times opposes, Caribbean natural indulgence and its predilection for the best food. Europe and Caribbean nations, the text insinuates, should come to arrangements of mutual benefit in order to exploit slaves. Rhetorically, visuality—or simply the ability to see—creates legitimacy by entwining witnessing and the exhibition of objects, making the latter “exotic” in the process and turning them into remnants of distant lands that could be domestically

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owned. In addition, the text preserves traces of orality, not only by claiming that Oroonoko himself told part of the story, but also by creating a competing figure of authenticity—one that can insist, ultimately, on more gravitas in the novel. This figure is one of the characters: the governor. A mediator who embodies and levels colonialism,60 he also elides the distinction between omniscient narrator and eyewitness participant. The following statement cannot be clearly attributed: “They have a native justice, which knows no fraud; and they understand no vice, or cunning, but when they are taught by the white men.”61 Conversation—or mediation between forms of perception—evolves as the manner of guaranteeing authenticity, while producing genres of complicity.62 Thus, just as in Oroonoko, eyewitness, trade, and geographical transposition work together to move the narrative forward; translating these aspects onto the Hamburg stage generated a unique dramatic text.

Global Story, Local Pubs Aside from loosely absorbing the widely, even globally circulating story of Oroonoko, Rathlef ’s play possesses deictic qualities, interweaving Hamburg’s conditions of life, amusement venues, and references to world in the dramatic plot. Foreigners had a legendary presence in the city; they were as much partners in negotiations as they were objects of negotiations; to enter Hamburg meant to speculate, trade, and gamble (in every sense of the word). “It’s not hard to imagine that Hamburg was tough for foreigners. Everything is translated into money,”63 writes an aspiring economist in 1760, when plotting his modern history of Hamburg. Thomas Nugent notes the quasi isolation of foreigners in Hamburg’s pubs, all of which were concentrated near the port, while observing the denizens secretly flocking to these establishments. He is at once attracted and repulsed by Hamburg’s greed, luxurious splendor and urban decay, and poverty—all of which were displayed in daily life. The foreign—in the gestalt of people and goods—entices and deters Hamburg’s population, but it represents nothing extraordinary. Mundane as they are, Hamburg’s pubs become a microcosm of the city’s problems. As both the entertainment establishment (Lokal) and the city as a whole constantly exhibit their intermediary or mediating position, the pub arises as a paradigmatic space transposing the world onto the local scale. The play picks up on this fact of late eighteenth-century life: Zaduc and his slave owner lodge in a Hamburg pub, where Gordon finds them after

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searching in vain in a number of coffeehouses, pubs, and stock and commodity exchanges. Here Gordon enters upon a scene that in and of itself presents a comical setting with a witty riposte. Anecdote-like, the scene appears like a chiseled depiction of the world descending upon the microcosm of a buzzing town. Van der Twylen, the pub’s proprietor, has a coffin carried onto the stage, because his daughter, Amanda, died of a heavy heart after falling hard for Zaduc. Now, her grief-stricken father threatens to sue Zaduc for not reciprocating Amanda’s love, especially after he—Van der Twylen—offered to purchase him as a gift for his daughter. Zaduc refused such freedom in name only, because it would have merely meant domesticating his dependency. The attempt to lock him in a marriage and a patriarchal family reflects local manifestations of colonial greed. Staged anecdote morphs into ethical claim, culminating in a declamatory exchange, with Gordon challenging the pseudoabolitionist Van der Twylen to hurry up and travel to Guinea, Madagascar, and Barbados, and fight for abolition there. This point of culmination is remarkable not just for its dramatic riposte, but for what it implies. The statement insinuates that the fate of abolition will not be decided in the colonial centers, where policy is made, but in the colonies themselves, where the slaves are brought and where they keep the colonial economy alive. At first, Gordon’s rhetorical gesture reads like transference, seeking to dispose of guilt by simply exporting it. The domestic realm—understood here as the local, regional, and even national space of action—is not to be implicated in abolition and slavery, allowing it instead to accommodate colonial bystanders. But the overall textual dynamic is far more complex, pointing to the imperial structures of trade, exchange, and “value fusion” at work in the sentimental discourses of empire. The play exposes them as more than mere indicators of the universal order, which theorists, historians, and philosophers of Radical Enlightenment, most notably Jonathan Israel, have proclaimed as the tabula rasa of the eighteenth century. Instead, mercantile values anchor emotional investment in the play, enabling entertainment, an urban mind-set, and enjoyment of world rather than simply unifying disparate interests along the lines of aesthetic identification. Gordon purchases Zaduc from his owner, who claims a high price for the young man, basing his value on three criteria: Zaduc’s beauty, the purchase of his labor, and his loyalty during a mutiny. The multifaceted view of personhood, no matter how much it falls short of our ethical standards today, condenses the various, competing discourses in the eighteenth-century value systems. It also alludes to the narrative trajectories these discourses create:

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aesthetics, market economics, and communal ethics. For Gordon bargains as well, promising Zaduc’s true—that is, to his mind, individual—freedom. Zaduc, in turn, wants to return to Guinea immediately, despite the risk of renewed slavery, thus setting into motion the spiraling effects of enslavement and rebellion that structure so many eighteenth-century plots and that (re-) distribute dramatic agency in the process. However, before embarking on his future, Zaduc gets together with Cadige. With both men wooing her, Cadige, truly torn and unable to decide, stabs herself; she resolves the dramatic triangular structure. Unlike Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler’s Die Mohrin (The Blackamoor Woman, 1803), which ends happily with a black woman marrying a white man, Rathlef ’s play rejects what scholars of British and comparative literature have called “tragedy’s death.” While adhering to bourgeois tragedy’s virtuous sacrifice of woman, the play rejects a complete retreat into the domestic sphere, which at the time arose as the genre’s distinct model for ending dramatic conflict. Cadige’s becoming a tragic heroine means her passing: before she dies a virtuous woman, she asks Gordon and Zaduc to retreat as friends. Gordon and Zaduc heed Cadige’s request. They act in accordance with sentimental patterns by resolving conflict through an unlikely happy end; they act imperially by fusing global and domestic sentiment. And yet, the play’s effectiveness derives neither from its conforming to gender expectations nor from the capacity of the family drama to resolve larger, ethical questions such as slavery, as Wendy Sutherland and Susanne Zantop have suggested, respectively. The dramatic triangle involving two men and a woman transposes the Atlantic trade onto the local stage, by translating the trade’s reciprocal dependencies into the fiction of play. The equal disposition of men emerges as a foundation for friendship on stage and for the audience’s coming together as a community of spectators. While the conflicts appear harmonized in the rhetoric of friendship on stage and the friendly coexistence of people with differing origins and life stories in the world, the play’s true impact—or lack thereof—results from the location of its urban setting and performance. Gordon’s aforementioned monologue, in which he contemplates his city’s reaction, along with the exposition (act 1), adds a meta-aesthetical dimension to The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg, probing and simultaneously defining the limits of representation. The spectrum of aesthetic identification departs considerably from the monologue’s pondering of marriage to a black woman. Construing such a plan as improper was in keeping with the social norms and was therefore most restrictive (and strangely realist) in the play’s universe. In fact, early nineteenth-century reviews of other plays featuring a black heroine

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suggest as much, when insisting on the impossibility of unifying virtue and blackness on stage.64 Of course, when Gordon speaks of Cadige’s inner beauty, he means perception through others. Yet aesthetic identification also revolves around other dramatic characters. Wallmer, for example, possesses a string of negative characteristics deemed typical of a merchant: in addition to unrestricted mercantile ambition and greed, which are on full display to spectators and fellow dramatic characters, he is considered stingy. Representing, on the one hand, Hamburg’s mercantile culture, which embraced a burgeoning credit system, public display of wealth, and the natural crises of the business cycle, there is a nuance to the character that Daniel Fulda describes as a national feature. Thrift, in essence a mercantile asset, is taken to the extreme. Accordingly, by being stingy, Wallmer exhibits a core motif of German comedy, created for “comical excess.”65 Suitable to sustain the critique of money, which Fulda defines as a central ethical intention of German comedies, miserliness evolves as dramatic counterweight to virtue. Opposite Wallmer is Gordon, who guarantees virtue and thus becomes the moral corrective of comedy, acting in line with mercantile pragmatism that posits feeling as radical alterity. He acts by stigmatizing feeling and yet in excess of any constraint that pragmatism dictates. He emulates the Hamburg merchant that the Trade Academy envisions. As he leaves Cadige but finds himself unable to forget her, Gordon appears entrapped in irreconcilable contradictions; he, too, acts as an emotional gambler caught between the merchant’s ambition, a citizen’s ethics, and personal virtue. (This sets him apart from other characters in other plays, who, caught in similar circumstances, decide against the “crowd’s opinion” and establish their dramatic heroism.) He appreciates Cadige’s virtuous heart mirrored in her soul, which could make for a play that realizes its sentimental potential by fusing colony and motherland, Guinea and the Hamburg merchants, in a sentimental community based on empathy and love. Bringing together two dramatic conventions—comedy and feeling—the play unduly complicates both, shutting out the spectator in the end. Despite its inflection of Hamburg’s society, the play’s dramatic set-up turns out to be improbable. Rather than creating “the unaccountable pleasure” for spectators that comes from becoming part of the play—indeed emotionally gambling with/on the outcome of the plot—The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg refuses such identification. Though at times ahead of the dramatic plot, the spectator cannot use the excess of knowledge; she or he can imagine neither a coherent story nor a good dramatic conflict. Nor can the spectator be casually entertained. Meanwhile, other elements, which are key to understanding and

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emotional involvement in the plot (e.g., Cadige and Zaduc’s engagement), seem neglected. Competing love, anticolonial, and protonational interests, all embodied by Zaduc, drown in sentimentality. Along with other, noble ideas of Enlightenment discourse (e.g., virtue), these interests ultimately collapse. Overburdened sentimentality is a result of an allusion to the spectators’ vague familiarity with stories: Oroonoko circulated in German lands in various dramatized versions.66 The play’s explicit reflection on medial and perceptive insecurity further intensifies the reliance on emotional hooks, because the characters can trust neither what they see nor what they read in the letters they receive. All they have to rely on are clearly articulated intentions and actions. Thus, Gordon considers suspect and untrustworthy what he sees: he dismisses Emilie’s conventional beauty, while looking beyond the color of Cadige’s skin. Other characters consider visual impressions reflections of inner nature (Natur), leading to alternate interpretations of Cadige that very much reveal how contemporaries “read” black skin at the time. The play introduces exemplarity—for example, through “the ideal women”—only to denounce it as the result of excessive reading of books. In a similar vein, Wallmer accuses Gordon “of speaking the language of [his] girl,” while underscoring the threats that letters, their exchange, and reading impose upon the order of individuals and communities. His bleak prophecy comes true: Cadige gets lost in chaotic perceptions that superimpose Africa and Hamburg, Zaduc and Gordon. In addition, while individual characters’ perceptions are frequently marred by skepticism, they do not present a uniform or reliable profile when acting as a pair or in groups. Together with the heightened sense of mediated theatricality—expressed through the competing presence of various media (e.g., dramatic texts, letters) and modes (the erudition emanating from silent reading)—characters frequently undermine, rather than enable, any aesthetic identification that spectators might develop with the action on stage. On the other hand, by alluding so strongly in its settings to the spaces and conversations, visual impressions, and overwhelming effects of Hamburg’s urban environment—by becoming so relatable—the play undercuts its theatrical fiction and risks conflation with mundane experience. Like the city, the text proves to be chaotic. Because of its simultaneous appealing to and weakening of spectators’ emotional involvement, the play’s multidimensional model of identification can result in success as well as in failure. And indeed, in The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg, aesthetic identification fails upon arrival on stage outside Hamburg. According to available records, the play was not performed in Hamburg,67 while audiences in Berlin and Nuremberg must have considered it pure

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invention, foreign, and exotic beyond belief. After all, the text was strongly tied to Hamburg’s context; its setting creates a realist dimension with all its mundane (rather than dramatic) characters. Not only was Rathlef, the author, utterly familiar with the city’s intricate theater and cultural scene; he also predicated the play’s dramatic effects—and we must assume, its success—upon the lived urban experience of the Hamburg spectator. But he overwhelmed audiences outside the port city by not transposing the plot into a non-German environment—as Ziegler did in his hugely popular The Blackamoor Woman—and thus prevented audiences from being either innocent bystanders or simply entertained. The play would have affected audiences in Hamburg in similar ways, except that it involved them in a prosaic tableau. The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg pulls spectators emotionally and spatially into the city, while forcing them out in the world and having them constantly run up against communal beliefs and world knowledge, lived experience and superficial impressions. Maybe it hit too close to home and thus was not performed in Hamburg. While we will never know for sure, the inference is amusing, to say the least; regardless of the historical details of its (non-) performance, the play proved a dramatic bust. Befittingly for Hamburg, the boom was never far, and thus the play takes us back to the peculiar state of the city’s theater and its relationship to the world. For Hamburg not only alluded to the world through proprietary markers in texts, it also harbored translations—from English—that enabled transpositions of the world in yet other ways and shed light upon the urban theater community.

Dramatic Import, Localization, and Export Delayed Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, a comedy, premiered in London in 1771. Featuring Garrick in the part of Belcour, a young West Indian from Jamaica, the play was specifically written for the great actor and theater director. Both playwright and actor-director felt strongly that the stage had a moral purpose.68 The plot was familiar at the time: Stockwell, a wealthy and influential London merchant, eagerly expects the arrival of young Belcour, who is in London for business, having inherited all of the possessions of a plantation owner in Jamaica. What Belcour does not know is that he is Stockwell’s son and that his father will “make some experiment of [his] disposition” before revealing the truth to him.69 Among the gaudy cast of characters, complicated relations arise. In addition to Belcour, Stockwell,

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and members of his household, there are the ambitious but shady Fulmer and his wife, the impoverished captain Dudley with his son and daughter, Dudley’s miserly sister-in-law and her generous stepdaughter Charlotte, as well as Major O’Flaherty, who often orchestrates the dramatic action. In the end, after a clever exchange of money and jewels, attempted fraud, and a near duel between Carl Dudley and Belcour—in short, after scheming behavior everywhere—love and justice prevail. Belcour marries Louisa Dudley; the Fulmers are arrested; Charles Dudley turns out to be the rightful heir to his grandfather’s estate and marries his cousin Charlotte; and Stockwell reveals his true identity. The West Indian was translated and appeared in at least two variations on the German-language stage: the versions by Johann Christoph Bode (1772) and August von Kotzebue (1815).70 While the broad plotlines remain intact, the modes and patterns of localization in the English original and in Bode’s and Kotzebue’s translations are different. While both German-language versions of The West Indian use modes of localizing the global that, at first glance, draw on a heightened sense of geographical, psychosocial, and/or historical distance from the British Empire, stylistic differences pinpoint their respective locales by reimagining the affective potential of the play. Bode’s Westindier demonstrates the localization of empire in Hamburg; Kotzebue’s play projects globally. Whereas Bode adapts his translation to Hamburg’s society and stresses affective bonds between family and friends, Kotzebue historicizes sentimental identification and creates a melodrama that, in its own right, can circulate globally. Thus, these translations are, in fact, Bearbeitungen (adaptations) and differ with respect to literary historiography. They participate in the making and unmaking of national traditions as well as the eclipse and resurrection of nascent world or global literature around 1800. Accordingly, Bode’s play features prominently in this chapter, while Kotzebue’s text reappears in my final contemplation on alternative literary paradigms—my musings about the eighteenth-century translation zone—and at the end of this book. The localization of Bode’s dramatic text—that is, not only its transposition into German but also the interlacing with particular local or regional markers of its performative context—occurs at the beginning. It shares this feature with Cumberland’s play. It, too, opens with a prologue, to be “spoken by Mr. Reddish.” This assignment of lines to a living actor places the comedy firmly on the London stage, whereas the prologue’s text inscribes the manner in which race structures the colonial situation. Putting “a fine West Indian . . . full in view,” the words evoke images and ideas that contemporaries across

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Europe associated with black skin and the tropics.71 (The play later repeatedly casts doubt on Belcour’s race.72) Aside from the sheer visibility of physical difference that blackness marked, tropical heat was said to determine not only the climate and the soil, that is, the physical nature of the place, but also the personalities of the people. More importantly, the prologue positions Britain vis-à-vis the Caribbean world, implying that commercial success and fame are solely the result of imperial efforts and owe nothing to the inhabitants of the islands, and even less to slave labor. Nevertheless, the speech also implores the spectators to recognize, behind the exotic spectacle, a common humanity that it endorses: “Laugh, but despise him not, for on his lip / His errors lie; his heart can never trip.” The plea to distinguish between appearance and essence extends to aesthetics, as the prologue insinuates that spectators might find “a noble mind” and “touches, which, though void of art / May find perhaps their way into the heart.” Spectators “may condemn the bard—but spare the Man” and are called upon to appreciate the play not only in terms of personal taste, but also in relation to the efforts of the playwright, the tradition of humor and comedy, and—most noble of all—the “honour of your isle.”73 Suggesting an emotional engagement with the action on the stage, the prologue mobilizes knowledge of the world while appealing to a shared sense of humor, all of which contribute to building a tacit national pride. As befits the genre, the prologue introduces the tropes of the play and the time, but more importantly, it delineates the play’s affective reach. It sketches the intricacies of surface and depth, understood here primarily as the relationship between representation and true value—rather than the spectators’ dithering between emotional identification and abjection. But it alludes to the latter by pointing to difficulties in discerning the true nature of the play’s facets. The play hints at the discrepancy between promised comic relief and the human condition, while reiterating the play’s goal of mapping universal patterns of human relations through sentimental identification. Characters and actions further localize the play in colonial Britain at the height of its global influence; the exposition of social advancement and status is particularly evident in the figure of Stockwell. Years ago, he married a planter’s daughter in secrecy, because his “condition made it hopeless to expect her father’s consent.” Since then, his fortunes have changed: with ships in every major European port, the merchant is involved in speculation, commodities trading, and the loan business. As “a member of the British Parliament” he occupies a position still rare among urbanites at the time, for merchants and city folk remained in large part underrepresented throughout the eighteenth century

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and reached only greater influence once the commercial lobby emerged.74 Now the social positions of plantation owner and erstwhile assistant are equalized, if not reversed in favor of the merchant in the colonial metropolis. Stockwell’s housekeeper certainly thinks so when describing Belcour, in a somewhat derogatory manner, as a “Creolian,” who—in Stockwell’s words—“must be a singular spectacle,”75 yet whose “reports . . . give . . . favourable impressions of his character, wild perhaps, as the manner of his country is.”76 Stockwell strikes a delicate balance between a father’s (emotional) expectations, racial preconceptions that are applied to all inhabitants of the colony, irrespective of skin color and social class, and his own, allegedly objectifying interpretation of speech that can be trusted for its reasonable content. He initiates the sentimental reading of mercantile exchange by portraying Belcour as a hybrid figure who, in keeping with the theatrical conventions of the time, inserts unruliness onto the stage, colliding—in his perceived role as the savage body—with the rules and expectations of British colonialism. He visibly embodies (and thus has interiorized) what Nussbaum calls the spectator’s “unaccountable pleasure in tragedy” by turning it, de facto, into an unaccountable pleasure in suturing the empire of feelings. For Belcour is also a merchant, an heir to a plantation owner—and a London son, “a suitor of the old world,”77 who signals that the imperial quest is a shared enterprise of the nation that, on the more personal level of Cumberland’s play, leads to family reconciliation. In this respect, any allusion to the prodigal son appears less biblical than topical for the post-Restoration stage. With a nod to the emergent type of the “English international personality,”78 Belcour mirrors Stockwell’s arrival in London society: his legitimate rise within the merchant class after being rejected by his beloved’s father, and his eventual ascendancy over those trading in material objects. The potential disturbance—signified by the savage body of the visitor—does not destabilize London’s mercantile society but merely exposes its inherent instabilities. The city not only affords social mobility but also harbors chaos; it is full of spaces where fraud and gambling, prostitution and idle vanity flourish. All of them are paraded in the course of the play, letting Belcour, on the one hand, indulge—in a self-deprecating, ironic manner—the prejudice that the colony is the place of loose morals, while seeking to disprove this cliché by acting like an imperial subject.79 On the other hand, he keenly registers the chaos of the city and concludes that London is full of rampant consumption, hollow wealth, and deteriorating ethical values80—a judgment that is reiterated (and gendered) in the epilogue of the play, written by Garrick and spoken by an actress.

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In the epilogue, two female voices chronicle the transition from a time when work and virtue defined people’s identity toward a time when indulgence and idleness entice people to gamble their lives away. The play echoes this valorization of “true life,” which warrants the audience’s “praise”81 and constitutes the true fusion of comedy and national identity. Overall, though, a bifurcated model of identification emerges: subverting the negative images of the colony, the play locates the presumably distant vices at home. It conveys a sense of a shared world in which people are bound together through exchange and commerce, by suggesting to the audience a path for sentimental identification. Belcour, whose “heart is softened for the affecting discovery”82 yet who also publicly invites a critique of his follies and promises to be reasonable,83 carries and promotes the recognition of what Festa calls “a common humanity.” Through sentimental identification, the spectators can relocate themselves in the British imperial world and recognize the “West Indian [as] British, after all.”84 While partaking in purely pleasurable entertainment, they unite as an audience of morally conscientious, imperial subjects.85 This particular mode of glocalization is missing in Bode’s translation. Its striking feature is the anchoring of the German text in Hamburg, despite the geographical distance from the play’s settings: neither Jamaica nor London is easily exchangeable for Hamburg, though, as we have seen in the earlier part of this chapter, the Caribbean world, especially its dual specter of sugar production and slavery, is much closer than the geographical distance suggests. Both translation and performance spoke to the northern German port city, allowing Karl August Böttiger to praise effusively performance, translator, and translation: “In 1772, [Bode] adapted two of the best more recent English comedies, Cumberland’s West Indian and Withaed’s Fashionable Lover. Both were printed in Hamburg the same year and performed several times to much acclaim, especially The West Indian, in which Hamburg’s citizen mirrored himself.”86 This last, almost flippant comment should give us pause, despite its author’s reputation as the gossipmonger of the late eighteenth century. For Böttiger’s role extends beyond sharing juicy details of other people’s lives. To be sure, he introduces semijournalistic writing for dramatic effect and in efforts to shore up his social position. But his also represents a voice that helps to reconstruct literary life around 1800 by unearthing what has been suppressed in literary historiography. Irrespective of Böttiger’s comment, the prologue acts as an additional marker of localization: rather than translating the original, Bode creates his own prologue on the analogy of a prose genre, the translator’s preface. Commonly used to integrate and abridge, and to legitimize and falsify, eighteenth-century

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German translations of English and French travel texts, the typical translator’s preface not only advocated a latently national spirit by prescribing a communal discourse. The preface also elevated the status of the translator to an arbiter of taste, in anticipation of and in unison with the emerging notion of an autonomous author. By adapting the translator preface’s basic principles to a dramatic text, Bode enhanced Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s notion of the prologue as a supplementary exposition of dramatic theory.87 Altering it by bringing it back to performance context, he suggested that translation principles, specifically localization, should become an integral part of the play (which in turn would position each play vis-à-vis the original play). Bode’s introductory address is both more modest and bolder than a translator’s preface: it refrains—perhaps surprisingly to anybody familiar with the historiography of German national literature that has Lessing’s Hamburg years at its center—from nationalizing efforts, while describing Hamburg and its cultural elites. To me, it anchors my claim of an alternate literary history that oscillates between the globe and the city. By pandering to the “parterre,” the space of the theater that was populated by a diverse, colorful, and often rowdy group of spectators, Bode recognizes the real limitations of eighteenth-century German national theater. As we will see in chapter 2, he shared this insight not only with his erstwhile collaborator Lessing but also with the Hamburg director Abel Seyler, who openly mocked requests for national plays and engineered edification as suggestions that were not sustainable in practice.88 At the same time, Bode’s prologue shows awareness of the great differences among the audience, who included Hamburg’s educated and cosmopolitan elites (the connoisseurs), in addition to minor artists, lawyers, gilded men, traveling but otherwise uneducated merchants, and Ungelehrten (dilettantes).89 He praises the parterre for admirable qualities—especially the capacity to empathize—even though he insinuates that the theatergoers were not necessarily a respected part of Hamburg’s commercial elite.90 This version of the history of Hamburg’s theater continues to fester in German literary history, which to this day rehashes misfortunes or overt risk-taking in business as causes for the failure of cultural enterprises in the late eighteenth-century city. Indeed, many in the parterre chose patronage of the arts as a way of integrating themselves into Hamburg society. Bode reveals the prominent role and mixed motives of the patrons when he addresses the prologue “To the Wandsbeck Messenger” (An den Wandsbecker Bothen), Matthias Claudius’s persona as editor of the journal by the same name, published by Bode and financed by the Schimmelmann family. The Schimmelmanns were among

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the most influential players in the global economy, ascending to prominence in Danish politics, German-language literature, German culture, and Pietist missions, and acting discreetly but well known to their contemporaries as slave and plantation owners in the Danish West Indies. While German-born Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–1782) was the biggest slave owner in the Danish Unitary State, his son Ernst Heinrich (1747–1831) rose to become the Danish secretary of the treasury and a closeted abolitionist. “Not exactly beloved,” they turned their trading partners into influential forces in the Hamburg business community.91 While supporting more obscure entertainment venues (Lustbarkeiten), they championed the arts and displayed their fortune in mansions (e.g., the Schimmelmannsche Palais) along the boulevards connecting Hamburg and Altona—as well as along the road connecting Hamburg and Copenhagen—and in salons in the countryside;92 we will visit one of them in chapter 3. Ultimately, by alluding to the complexities of Hamburg’s role in the process of eighteenth-century globalization, while pointing out the citizenry’s lack of interest in the sentimental layers of The West Indian’s story, Bode openly articulates what Cumberland sought to redress aesthetically: the underside of the emergent middle-class identity, especially the shortcomings of utilitarian thought and the ethical pitfalls of crude mercantilism and empire. Bode’s mode of localization explains the pointed portrayal of Mr. and Mrs. Fulmer, which the Hamburg theater director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder read as a sign that Bode wanted to comment on Hamburg society.93 Cumberland introduced the couple as unfortunate, petit bourgeois characters who had tried to succeed in London, seeking any “livelihood to be picked up in this country.” Fulmer had “offered to serve [his] country” and eventually “set up as a bookseller.”94 None of these enterprises succeeds; Mrs. Fulmer is relentless in blaming her husband for their misfortune and is tempted to find a way to prostitute Louisa Dudley, a girl of uncommon beauty.95 The Fulmers are murky characters whose behavior precipitates the decline of the inn and tavern. The inn played an important role in eighteenth-century communication, transportation, and socialization, a role that set it apart from the tavern. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, gambling and prostitution encroached on the formerly reputable space, damaging the reputation of the inn.96 This history is evoked when the Fulmers’ home is portrayed as being at risk of becoming a questionable place. In contrast, Bode’s German text immediately recalls the negative stereotypes associated with pubs, rendering moot the distinction between the two

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settings, “Fulmer’s house” (act 2) and “the tavern of London” (act 5), which he retained from Cumberland’s version. There “the tavern of London” signifies the tavern’s original role as part of the emergent public sphere; it is there that the Fulmers are eventually arrested and judged. In Der Westindier, however, the Fulmers own a tavern-like establishment in their house that is quite different. They occupy a sinister space from the moment they enter the stage; unlike in Cumberland’s play, their circumstances are not the result of bad luck but of hubris and greed. Mrs. Fulmer regrets giving up her modest existence as a shopkeeper. She blames her husband for his lofty aspirations and incompetence, as well as for his moral transgressions: “First, he wants to establish a factory, fails and it’s in shambles . . . because he does not understand how to properly declare bankruptcy. The pub may have worked had he not turned it into a whorehouse.”97 Their house has become a place for drinking, gambling, and moral transgression. Mrs. Fulmer predicts that far from finding paradise in London, as her husband had promised, they would eventually be forced to emigrate (or end up in prison). Fulmer, in turn, accuses her of taking in strangers; unlike Van der Twylen in Rathlef ’s play, he expresses suspicion of travelers and casts the inn in a problematic light. She concedes that Louisa Dudley’s beauty influenced her reasoning and that she hopes to attract more business with Louisa living in their house. The detailed exposition sets them up, not surprisingly, as the scheming, defrauding pair that they become in the course of the play, before they are arrested—just as in Cumberland’s version— for fraud and stealing diamonds. Yet whereas Fulmer begs for mercy as “a man of letters” in Cumberland’s version, and is dismissed because Stockwell neither wants to “disgrace [the bookseller’s] profession . . . nor betray the interests of mankind,”98 any references to honorable enterprises promoting public debate are gone in the German version. Stockwell responds only with mockery to Fulmer’s claim of innocence.99 That Bode added so many characteristics and painted an elaborate, cynical picture of the couple was widely read as an indictment of Hamburg. Ruthless competition and risky business practices had yielded modest luxuries but triggered more widespread poverty (as a direct result of the dependency on business cycles), and ultimately fostered private vices, public corruption, and a decline of civic virtues.100 The Fulmers of Hamburg were to represent more than the counterweight to the morally upright Stockwell and Belcour, exposing the city’s perceived reality and the inner, rotten fabric of its community rather than merely its common human foibles. At the same time, the pub morphs from a space that put global relations under a magnifying glass—for

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example, in The Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg—to a space that exhibited moral deformation as a result of acting in the world, that is, of engaging in global colonialism and profiteering from empire. Such involvement, Bode’s play suggests, necessarily led to the moral and economic bust of the city. Aside from the prologue and the depiction of the Fulmer couple, Bode’s translation remains close to the original text, making mostly dramaturgical changes. Der Westindier contains more scenes and thus appears more tightly structured than The West Indian, indicating perhaps how Bode adapted Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s discussion of German (as opposed to English) plots and the preference for simplicity and clarity of structure, an aspect to which we return in the next chapter. Yet a few small but important details further adapt the text to the Hamburg—and ultimately German—stage; many of them pertain to the characterization of Stockwell’s relationship to Belcour or involve the latter’s self-image. In general, Bode depicts the West Indian world as more seductive and dangerous than Cumberland does, and he genders these markers through the characters’ speech. When Stockwell tells the story of meeting Belcour’s mother, he makes her the seductress (rather than confessing his own sexual weakness). When the housekeeper comments on the arrival of young Belcour, she boldly announces that she will leave if Stockwell keeps the visitor around. She mocks his exotic belongings and pets—she adds the latter in order to amplify her rejection of the “colorful man”—and in so doing reveals her own penchant for exotic goods. The butler tantalizes her with the expectation of “Chinese fur, and who knows, maybe even a dress and lace.”101 The descriptions, which associate the Caribbean world with temptation and luxury, extend to Belcour, whom the German text portrays not only as chasing Louise Dudley but whose determination to pursue her stems from his homeland, where the tropical climate had influenced his personality. When Belcour believes that Louisa Dudley will not reciprocate his feelings, he curses his decision to travel to London but believes it would be inappropriate for a person of his nature to give up the chase: “That’s not what an honest West Indian does. The more bitter the chase, the sweeter the rewards.”102 In Cumberland’s version, he complains about his “tropical constitution”103 and attributes it to his geographical origin. The German wording exaggerates this assessment, though conveying the same affective meaning: “Oh my blood, my blood! Why did the sun make you so hot.”104 This formulation combines the dialogic form of addressing his inner self with a depiction of his temperament. Signified by a single metaphor (blood), Belcour’s nature is the product of the direct, material influence of his

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environment. In both texts, Belcour ironically parallels his personality, which contemporaries would describe as wild, exaggerated, and hot-tempered, with the chaos, turmoil, and danger of the European city. He thus exposes both the hypocrisy of colonial attitudes and the anxieties about miscegenation that became evident once larger numbers of freed slaves lived in London.105 At the same time, Bode eliminates digressive inner monologues that suggested, in the English original, that Belcour actually thinks about the diversions, women, and activities in which Stockwell urges him to engage. By cutting out these allusions, Bode instills a heightened sense of morality in the West Indian character. At the same time, he keeps the chaos of the city at a distance. The end of Der Westindier is substantially different as well: Bode does not translate the whole text, eliminating the last exchange between Stockwell and Belcour and concluding instead with O’Flaherty’s reaction to Stockwell’s revelation of fatherhood: “As this unfolds, we all will be family. You see how closely related a friend can be!”106 Whereas Bode expands this line—the original speaks merely of a vague relationship and invokes neither family nor friendship—he skips the dialogic commentary on the effectiveness of the moral test: in Cumberland’s text, Stockwell observes his son and judges his nature, character, and ability to reason, while Belcour promises to keep reason and emotion in balance. The upright behavior of both protagonists produced results: by working both rationally and through affect, Stockwell and Belcour demonstrate that sentimental identification can succeed, just as it did for them. That Bode deemphasizes the affective component at the end of the play suggests that he wishes to locate affect elsewhere, not in the recognition of the global relations entwining Stockwell and Belcour—or the audience and the colonizer—which were all too tangible in London but complicated, to say the least, in Hamburg. By opting, in the end, for distance between world and city, he resorts to familial and friendship relations as accepted models of domestication. Bode duplicates the distancing move by omitting the epilogue, which in Cumberland’s version contains a staged admonishment to read sentimentally while recognizing human follies and the dangers of overabundant consumption. By attaching these negative character traits to Mr. and Mrs. Fulmer’s behavior, Bode incorporates the moral and aesthetic judgment into the play rather than emphasizing it (through reiteration) at the end. Here he separates the theory and criticism of drama from the dramatic text and performance; however, he also undercuts—obliquely and ironically—the localizing aspects of the prologue. Contemporary critics, authors, and cultural elites publicly

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recognized the references to Hamburg in the “Germanifying” of the Fulmers,107 but in the absence of the epilogue’s explicit directive, Hamburg’s real-life citizens were able to ignore any similarities if they chose to do so. They could preserve their distance from a British couple in a British play that had merely been translated for the German stage. They could be entertained. Ultimately, in remaking The West Indian, Bode introduces a different affective agenda. His prologue-preface had already signaled that he was aware of the impossibility of a translation, or simple passage of the text across the Channel, which is why he speaks of Verteutschung, while simultaneously stating the impossibility of translation (Übersetzung) at the present time and the hope for its future realization. In localizing the play, Bode forgoes a national agenda but creates divergent ways of reading Der Westindier. All of them go beyond a mere juxtaposition of the German community to the British. He emphasizes the critique of unfettered utilitarian thought. He explores the communal traction that a narrative of empire might have, simply by alluding to it, however tacitly, in the prologue and in character development. But such a narrative, we sense, may very well prove a distraction. Instead, Bode produces sentimental affect by invoking “family” and “friendship” in the final scene. The ideas are not merely domesticating substitutes in the absence of empire, nor are they meant to put aside the sentimentalism of Cumberland’s play. They do not simply clear the way for more enlightened and rational ideas that would place communal values above middle-class individuality. I propose to read them, instead, as trademarks of a uniquely northern German culture of sentimentality, where emotions, communities built on affection, and salons promoted middle-class identity. Entertainment and leisure were an integral component of this communal identity. In the communities, art at times served as a compensatory mechanism for commercial enterprise, but it always fostered an engagement with global processes outside of empire and nation. At the same time, these trademarks foreclose a radical bifurcation of the stage, which—by introducing prescriptive dramatic theory—gave cover to the rhetoric of an allegedly national project, devoid of pleasure and entertainment, and steeped in rational antitheatrical discourse of literariness, while relegating worldliness to the vocal pleasures of music theater, declamatory salons, and poetry. Hamburg has of course been claimed by the project of German national literature, for housing the Nationaltheater (national theater) and installing the founding father of modern German literature, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781),108 while other voices have mostly disappeared.

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But as this chapter has shown, this story (and history) is somewhat incongruous, eclipsing a richer literary life. Hamburg presented, indeed, a different stage. Its multilingual existence explains and results from the city’s global perspective, creating a need for institutions that reflected worldwide exchange and eighteenth-century transatlantic networks, including their ethically and economically complicated entanglements. Within the urban context that simultaneously magnified and condensed the world, the culturally attuned merchant became a central figure around whom public life revolved in a much more nuanced, varied, and innovative way than has been suggested. As early as the 1760s, both Thomas Nugent and Christian Ludwig von Griesheim reduced the Hamburg coffeehouses to spaces resembling trading floors; both observers were confined by the city’s horizon, as they merely judged the quality of Enlightened debate and conversation. The latter cried foul, alleging hypocrisy, while the former was simply fascinated. To us, their juxtaposition resembles a window into late eighteenth-century Hamburg: open to the world, it closed off what critics for the next 250 years would describe as both the fantasy and the foundation of nation. At the same time, images of the world were clearly refracted through the urban institutions producing them. Thus, in focusing the world in the city, Hamburg became an early example of a thoroughly glocalized space: resisting the absorption in its geoterritorial surroundings, it also thwarted assimilation into cognitive figures of national identity.109 Like its inhabitants, the city’s cultural institutions gravitated toward the world, as their forgotten, hidden, and eclipsed textual legacy demonstrates; this legacy also reflects the limits of the city. And, of course, one literary work seems to contradict my claim. In the eyes of literary historiography, Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy) is plain and simple a, perhaps even the, founding text of modern German literature. Or is it? The next chapter tells an alternate story, one in which Lessing and his text speak to the world.

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2

LESSING DETHRONED The Hamburg Dramaturgy and the EighteenthCentury World

Vielleicht zwar ist auch der Patriot in mir nicht ganz erstickt, obgleich das Lob eines eifrigen Patrioten, nach meiner Denkungsart, das allerletzte ist wonach ich geizen würde; des Patrioten nemlich, der mich vergessen lehrt, daß ich ein Weltbürger sein sollte. Maybe the patriot in me is still alive, though to be praised as an eager patriot I do not crave, because in my mind the patriot teaches me to forget that I ought to be a citizen of the world. —Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Letter to Gleim,” December 16, 1758

Responding to Lessing—Responding to German Literary History Without any doubt, Rathlef ’s and Bode’s plays enforced the image of Hamburg as a Weltstadt, alluding to its population density, its multiethnic life translating into language plurality, and its role in directing, mediating, and maintaining major international trade networks. Accordingly, the authors’ plays—and consequently, their views of both city and world— focus on recasting the global in local environs: in pubs and

merchants’ offices as well as in the busy streets of the city. At the same time, these plays conjure up a global urbanity: the city fashioned itself as an intrinsic part of a global network rather than a microcosm of an elusive nation. As the plays translate the world for the Hamburg stage, they reflect a local, imaginary dimension that captures a cosmopolitan habitus and produces an empire of sentiment around 1800. Denizens feel a connection to faraway places, share in disparate, “foreign” values and communities, and experience diffuse pleasures on stage while indulging other peoples’ stories. Hamburg certainly emerged as a capital of this empire of feeling. Rathlef ’s play offers local scenes: the textual miniatures of Hamburg’s daily life situate spectators epistemologically and experientially, while hooking the scenes’ latent realism emotionally to imperial desires and comic entertainment. The scenes reconcile spectators with aspects of their existence that played out far away and were mediated by ships, contracts, trades, and credit, limiting the play’s transferability outside port cities. Bode’s play illustrates how emotive structures of imperial feeling were transposed onto the German city, offering a structure for empathy that allowed for simultaneous engagement and distance, not least by underscoring that the play was translated from a source. Both dramatic texts also embrace—in fictional and translated form—the modes of cultural exchange that another Hamburg institution, the Trade Academy, set out to enshrine in the worldviews of its pupils. But as works of fiction, they not only reflect daily life but engineer alternate experiences, creating ideas of other, future worlds while transposing audiences into alternate spaces that, though very real in the eighteenth-century world, may or may not have related to their daily lives. For example, people coming to see The West Indian were able to watch fellow citizens’ (as well as their own) trade entanglements, while imagining and/or retaining personal moral innocence: after all, it was the British Empire and London that provided the setting for the dramatic text whose characters resonated with but did not necessarily resemble Hamburg’s denizens. And, they could fantasize about their own importance in global networks. By simultaneously authenticating the knowledge of world and alienating it as foreign, such multifaceted translation matched the local conditions perfectly. The result were plays that fulfilled their important task of enacting as well as disguising the split between everyday experiences and fiction. Nevertheless, fiction fed on emulating the everyday while surpassing it. References to the global reach of Hamburg’s localized trade activities abound. Though overtly confined to the prologue of Bode’s text, they project—aesthetically—across both plays. Their dramatic constellations create an aesthetic

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intersection of the global and the local, marking once more the glocal space that defines the city. The plays replicate this space in fiction by simultaneously condensing and amplifying it. (Nowhere is this latter gesture more obvious than in Bode’s prologue, where global trade activities infiltrate the theater’s space by taking on a name that stands for both, a part of the theater’s architecture and a social group, the parterre.) Thus, play—understood as dramatic text, theater performance, and audience’s engagement with performance— contains any expansiveness or emotional overflow of identification. Only an urban location can frame this excess. In importing the English-speaking Atlantic triangle via trade in goods, people, and texts, Hamburg both fragments and opens the window to the world. Inadvertently, though, Rathlef ’s and Bode’s plays respond to a failure, an economic and artistic bust. Their dramatic texts mask what we believe was the dire prospect of Hamburg’s theater around 1770. In the mind of today’s readers, back then Hamburg was reeling from the financial and moral collapse of an ambitious national theater project, the Hamburger Nationaltheater (Hamburg National Theater, 1767–69).1 To us, the theater’s demise is an indication of both the shortcomings of eighteenth-century theater audiences and the premature invoking of (a nonexisting) nation. Today, we easily yoke these aspects together when holding on to the belief that aesthetic and political communities ought to coincide, somehow, eventually coming together for a unifying purpose. Contributing to this line of thought are a number of firsts attributed to the Hamburg National Theater: Die Entreprise, as it was initially called, was the first theater to tie an ensemble of actors to a particular local institution, including a building where they had exclusive rights (stehende Bühne). In pioneering a civic culture institution, the Hamburg Theater was the first theater to attempt to turn a theory of national theater into praxis: its board of directors represented an innovative organizational and management structure, replacing the principal in charge of erstwhile touring theater companies. Last but not least, the Hamburg National Theater was also the place where an iconic text of modern German literature was written: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767– 69). In fact, its textual legacy influenced not only how later eighteenth-century literature depicted the status of theater—Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795/96) comes to mind as well as his prologue to Faust I (1808)—but also the role that was bestowed upon theater in national approaches to German literary historiography.

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The Dramaturgy—and the nearly three years Lessing (1729–1781) spent in Hamburg—have long been considered foundational moments in modern German national literature. Accordingly, the text equates city and nation, suggesting an idealized view of Hamburg and the conditions it bestowed upon theater. Almost always, this argumentation is threaded through the city’s republican government and its citizens, misreading—or rather simplifying—not only Hamburg’s urban situation but also the interrelation between cities, nation, and globe. Nevertheless, the Dramaturgy recorded the failure of the National Theater project and inaugurated its textual legacy, fusing the demise of a local institution, the interpretation of its historical and national relevance, and a text that brought lasting recognition to its author. Here, I propose an alternate view. Taking Rathlef ’s and Bode’s transposition of the world onto the local stage as a point of departure, I reconsider the 1760s in light of the city’s unique position and conclude that the particular urban setting proved crucial for writing the Hamburg Dramaturgy. The text was shaped by both the long history of the city’s theater culture and its entanglements in Atlantic trade networks. This reconsideration exposes the Dramaturgy’s shortsighted reading not only as foundation of nation, but also as the incipient text of modern German literary history. It also engenders new readings. Jointly, rereadings and new readings reveal that the Hamburg Dramaturgy emulates a tension between literary and theatrical culture, instigating a rupture between text and performance and explaining why scholarship on the Dramaturgy so often despairs in light of the text’s perceived incoherence. My reading moves toward unearthing a broader, more global legacy of the text by accepting the splitting of its unity into disciplinary discourses that further evolve in modern humanities disciplines, namely, literary and theater studies. In the end, the Dramaturgy displays an early instance of what Apter has called the “new comparative literature,” making acts of translation its mode of representation. The latter affects our understanding of the original and the national, refracting them, however, not through transnational movements, language plurality, or the English language’s predominance in the world, but through the literary life of an eighteenth-century city and its engagement with the world.

A Local Institution Construed as a failure even by its contemporaries, the Entreprise makes a case for thinking locally.2 Symptomatic of a threshold moment in the history of

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theater, when touring companies settled down and became institutionalized in an urban environment, the National Theater also reflected something unique about Hamburg. This uniqueness arises, first and foremost, from cultural continuity and tradition rather than from the city’s politics. The theater represented an all-important, continuous Hamburg institution—before, during, and after the National Theater’s short life. (In fact, any comprehensive cultural history of performances reduces the period 1767–69 to not much more than a dot.) The city’s opera house, established in 1677 at the Gänsemarkt (Goosemarket), had long appealed to Hamburg’s denizens, including and especially the foreign envoys living in the city. Seating up to two thousand people, the structure was considered a landmark of Baroque excess; until 1738, it hosted only musical theater. Afterward, visiting theater companies rented the space, before the building was deemed unusable because of its dilapidated state.3 In 1765, the old opera building was finally torn down after a fire. In its place, theater principal Konrad Ackermann erected an architecturally modest structure, the National Theater. Measuring 59 feet long and 100 feet wide, the building resembled, on the outside, a Halle (hall) with its basic rectangular, two-story layout, unadorned facade, and side loggias that harmonized with the streets leading to the Gänsemarkt and that featured amusement stands. Inside, spatial arrangements were less open, separating the parterre from a two-story balcony and gallery (Logen). Twentieth-century theater history suggests that this division segregated aristocracy—presumably minor figures coming to Hamburg from their country estates in the vicinity—and city folks.4 Late eighteenth-century theater histories, notably Schröder’s directives on theater, paint a slightly different, more nuanced picture, stating that the second balcony seated women (and accommodated male actors, who were banned from the parterre). Lacking any decor, the building was intended to project to the world the shared values of those attending the performances; its clear lines simulated openness, but also revealed a basic recourse to northern German tradition. The building was unassuming, stripped of any individual extravagance.5 It integrated into the cityscape, rather than imposing on it (as did Hamburg’s churches) and thus complied with contemporary calls for an urban aesthetics that conveyed modesty and comparability—in short, community. The stage sets, of great interest to Hamburg audiences, were horrible, to say the least.6 In any case, the theater building stood in contrast to Hamburg’s cityscape with its five churches as well as to its urban commercial infrastructure full of warehouses. The theater also formed a contrast to the private residences owned by its economic sponsors: Hamburg’s leading families, either full of intellectual

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might or of solid mercantile reputation, inhabited opulent Bürgerhäuser and merchants’ mansions that lined boulevards “fleeing” the city.7 The National Theater building was not the only theater venue. On the contrary, in the decades prior to the reopening of the theater at Gänsemarkt, a robust theatrical infrastructure had emerged. This spatial diffusion of theatrical life had a profound impact on the mission of the theater project. The various houses were united in their competition for ensembles, their rants against visiting theater troupes, and their battle for audiences. The capacity of the combined venues was too large for the city, and perhaps there were also too many venues per capita. Furthermore, audiences were of differing minds. Hamburg’s citizens frequented the theaters, but with varying and unequal interest.8 They cherished visiting theater companies performing in rudimentary, improvised structures (Bretterbuden). Later, in the 1790s, they flocked to the French immigrant theater, which had a newly built stage in a hotel garden, adjacent to culinary and social pleasantries. In the 1760s, a church had been refurbished as a theater, accommodating opera, musical numbers, and plays; its director, opera impresario Pietro Mingotti, catered to the city’s love for musical theater. Finally, for more than thirty years (1760s–90s) a concert hall complemented the performance spaces, which were centered in the areas of Großneumarkt (Great New Market) and Gänsemarkt.9 All venues were privately developed, financed, and maintained, leading to a debate among today’s scholars about how to judge the Hamburg Senate’s attitude toward art. (Collectively, cultural historians observe either tolerance or hostility, and quite often both.) We do know for certain that the city taxed theatrical performances heavily. Though not as high as the rate for touring musical theater and opera, the acting companies’ performance tax exceeded fees and taxation of other, extremely popular attractions (e.g., acrobats, circus artists, and sugar bakers). Acting companies creatively subverted such impediments, issuing, for example, sublicenses in order to integrate musicians or to avail themselves of the lower rates for ballet and acrobats; in each case, they benefited financially from the reselling of these permits.10 Like many citizens, Hamburg’s performance venues nurtured an entrepreneurial spirit. In this context, the Entreprise struggled from the beginning, despite the widely cast, translocal ambitions with which it had started in 1767. For the project hardly matched its ambitious goals. German plays accounted for only about 30 percent of its productions, with translations, ballets, pantomine, and Singspiele making up the majority of performances; after the demise of the Entreprise, the latters’ unabashed success continued and grew.11 Never

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quite ridding itself of the flair of the ordinary and mundane theater chaos, the National Theater became symptomatic of Hamburg and, in some ways, of other urban centers, rather than paradigmatic of an aspiring nation. The National Theater was a distinctly local institution, yet it dismissed the interests of its local audiences—which sought above all entertainment. Edification, bourgeois companionship, and intellectual engagement were certainly not their primary concerns.12 But could their loyalty to the former opera be harnessed? Would audiences keep coming, even if just in small numbers? Despite its rocky start and ultimate failure, the theater dragged itself into the future, operating under its original name for decades to come, before morphing into Hamburgisches Stadttheater (City Theater of Hamburg). The illustrious history of the theater space reflects phases in the life of an institution whose boom-and-bust cycles resembled the economic fortunes of its prominent, urban contributors. The theater’s board of directors (Direktorium) assembled men who were among the makers of the city’s cosmopolitan culture; they were members of Hamburg’s globally acting merchant class, belonged to educational elites, or literally carried the theater’s mission outside: Caspar Voght was one of the directors. A few years after the founding of the theater, he and his son, Caspar von Voght, joined with merchant friends to bail out the Entreprise through a generous subscription; decades later, the younger Voght, a member of the board since 1780, mortgaged his house to keep the theater afloat.13 Other directors included Büsch (of the Trade Academy); Senator Adolph Bubbers, the owner of a tapestry factory; Albrecht Ochs and Franz Peter Hiß, erstwhile French immigrants and merchants with branch offices near the Mediterranean Sea and the French Atlantic coast; and Hans Andreas (?) Dreyer, whom contemporaries merely called a Schöngeist (aesthete).14 Abel Seyler embodied the symbiosis of merchant and theater practitioner. His extravagant lifestyle, mingling with the wrong people—among them the much-maligned Heinrich von Schimmelmann—and lack of business savvy have come to explain, pars pro toto, the reasons for the theater’s failure. But many of his ideas were truly entrepreneurial. For example, Seyler’s efforts to turn the theater space into a reception hall for the Danish royal couple, which received the enthusiastic blessing of the Senate, finally put the lid on the losses incurred by the theater.15 Seyler’s troupe was also instrumental in taking the Hamburg National Theater on the road, touring the German provinces as early as 1768 and inevitably promoting the idea that nonurban, even aristocratic institutions could promote the national. But this direction was more of a by-product than an intended plan.

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Far from being an early, idealized example of an Enlightened citizen, Seyler did not consider the theater as the institution lifting audiences above the distractions of daily, urban life. Nor did his fellow directors. For the fate of the theater, it mattered little that few members of the board were citizens.16 Nor did it matter that economic busts occurred that pulled the rug from underneath the theater’s foundation. A cyclical life was part of mercantile Hamburg. More importantly, though, the very structure of the board enabled greater flexibility with respect to the theater’s day-to-day directorship. For the first time, nonpractitioners (i.e., nonprincipals) could assume the position; thus, the theater saw a quick succession of principals, theorists, and, especially in subsequent decades, figures of public life. By moving into a dedicated performance space, the theater was stabilized. At the same time, new organizational structures put it into flux, calling for alternative directions. Theater theorists provided the latter. Among the theorists, Johann Friedrich Löwen stands out, having usurped Konrad Ackermann even before the official opening of the theater and installing himself as director. Löwen had been the leading proponent of the national theater project since publishing a book on the subject in 1766.17 He oversaw the National Theater, including its quick demise and return of the business to the erstwhile powerful principal Ackermann. Löwen also invited Lessing. Evidently, Lessing’s legacy and his “Hamburg texts” (with several completed years later) resonated with the entrepreneurial spirit of the urban environment and reflected the challenges facing the National Theater. His dispute with Christian Adolph Klotz led to Antiquarian Letters (1768/69) and How the Ancients Portrayed Death (1769);18 the theater dispute of 1769—which involved Lessing only as a distant observer and commentator—allows for conclusions about Lessing’s belief (or disbelief ) in the actual power of theater. Frank about being hired because of his availability rather than suitability,19 he quickly caved to the city stage: infighting among actors and actresses, the lack of any plan, and religious strife stifled any vision that Lessing may have had. He understood the urban realities of Hamburg. His stint was, first and foremost, a job carried out for people who craved entertainment amid open religious hostility toward theatrical illusion. The Fragmentenstreit (fragment controversy, 1776–79)—with the famous quarrel with Melchior Goeze at its core—points to these shadows of urban religious life, in particular the power the Orthodox Lutheran Church exerted over Hamburg, which often produced a tug of spiritual war between Orthodoxy and Pietism. This theological dispute over Spinozism, Deism, and Orthodoxy—in which Lessing acted as a proxy for a famous, by then deceased Hamburg citizen, Hermann Samuel

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Reimarus, and which played out long after Lessing had left Hamburg—is widely considered Lessing’s most frank critique of religious orthodoxy and a prime example of his polemical style. These intricacies of the urban context, especially global mercantile interests, international clientele, and religious life, are hardly discussed in relation to the text that most overtly ties him to the city, the Hamburg Dramaturgy. The work is treated as Lessing’s deliberate programmatic effort on behalf of the national idea. It forms part of his legacy as an author, though he started out as an embedded critic, writing daily reviews that were published twice weekly in journal form.20 But the text was much more local, and thus inevitable, than national and intentional: “Only Hamburg could produce the Dramaturgy.”21 The text therefore begins to tell a story that can project beyond the failure of the national.

The Journey to Hamburg, Taking Along Minna von Barnhelm The story of the Hamburg Dramaturgy begins in another city—Berlin. When Lessing decided to move to Hamburg in 1767, accepting Löwen’s invitation, he was far less enthusiastic—and less altruistic and nationally oriented or patriotic—than is widely assumed.22 As the epigraph opening this chapter indicates, Lessing himself was emphatic about the pitfalls of patriotism, because a poet’s patriotism obscured the poetic work and impulse. This is what the entire letter to the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803) suggests. And yet Lessing’s move to Hamburg was not so much an expression of rejection—of being a Prussian subject—or an embrace of “serving humanity.”23 Rather, at this point in his life, Lessing had few choices left. Though literary history has credited him with professional ambition and the single-minded intent to revive German culture,24 not least by producing and critiquing proper national plays for the Hamburg stage, his actual reasons for leaving Berlin were more mundane and indeed pressing: upon returning from Breslau in 1765, he found his finances and Berlin surroundings—confidants, accommodations, and property—in shambles. His hopes of obtaining a civil servant position in Dresden, or, later, at the Prussian court in Berlin, had dwindled.25 Moving to the wealthy port city seemed like an ideal escape from courtly institutions and messy taxation. At the very least, it was surely a worthwhile adventure, for which he would be well compensated.26 Despite the mounting disappointments in Berlin, Lessing remained devoted to the city, promising his brother, Karl, that he would not leave for more than five or six

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months.27 Overall, his letters to Karl, as well as the correspondence with Gleim during 1766–67, cast the Hamburg episode as a pragmatic choice. Indeed, though Lessing certainly wishes for economic stability, he also reveals personal shrewdness and ambition when interacting with Gleim: he speaks of his hopes for staging his dramatic texts, most notably his comedy Minna von Barnhelm, and envisions continued work on Laokoon (1766)—including the publication and dissemination of a popular version of the text. He anticipates a completely different entrepreneurial project than the Dramaturgy, namely, in publishing and through a business venture with Johann Christoph Bode; in order to line up financing, he embarks upon selling his library.28 From the outset, personal aspirations, pragmatism, and economic necessity dictated Lessing’s decision to move to Hamburg, more so than aesthetic visions or communal goals of the National Theater. However, his contemporaries enlisted Lessing for their own national claims, as Gleim’s tirade suggests: “I blame not those who’ve become indifferent because of their French education, but rather those who claim to be a German patriot while failing to keep Lessing around; I blame them for losing him.”29 Speaking of Berlin as the nonhospitable environment, Gleim constructs patriotism as the effect of a capital, if not of urbanity; its only manifestation, at this time in German history, is local. And Lessing? Surely, he was bitter, and, most certainly, he was interested in the aesthetics of both stage and play. Performance and dramatic writing presented him with alternate spaces amid the all-consuming quest for the security of bourgeois existence in the service of the court. They preserved his chance of being the poet whom a patriot would suppress. This ambiguous ideal of confinement and transcendence was shaped by a city, Berlin, no matter how disillusioned Lessing had become with its surroundings. In championing Minna von Barnhelm, he investigated the portability of urban conditions, probing the imaginary horizons of a clearly defined and limited space. And yet, he did not abandon these limitations. In his correspondence, Lessing inevitably revealed that he only projected to the city, which he saw as a center exuding a gravitational pull: connecting roads or figures traversing the landscape or territory are mostly absent from his vocabulary. Appropriately, Minna’s carriage roads lead to Berlin. Set in “the first among all cities,”30 the play refracted the world in many allusions to the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, capturing other German regions, foreign languages (French and Dutch), and exotic, globally traded products. Yet in spite of it all, the play put Lessing, ostensibly, en route to the nation.

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When he arrived in Hamburg, he brought the play. Lessing had worked on Minna von Barnhelm off and on for a number of years. Dated to the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763), the play is set in Berlin and revolves around the virtue and honor of a Prussian officer, Major Tellheim, and his betrothed, Minna, as well as their seemingly lost love, fidelity, and virtue. It thrives on its urban context, amplifying “specific elements of the big city environment.” As Matt Erlin has pointed out, scholars have paid little attention to Minna’s nature as an urban play, reducing this aspect to the embedded criticism of Prussian military culture.31 Instead, scholars focus on social aspects and gender roles, questions of happiness, or the comedic genre.32 Nevertheless, references to Berlin were front and center, leading, among others things, to the play’s delayed premiere at the National Theater in Hamburg, because the local Prussian diplomat interceded, seeking to suppress it for its outrageous and critical commentary on the alliance of the military and government. Yet despite the localizing elements, Minna von Barnhelm was not a local play. It ranked among the most successful, most frequently performed plays, once it became part of the National Theater’s repertoire. From Hamburg, it traveled on, crisscrossing German lands. It earned Goethe’s iconic praise; late in life, he likened it to “a glittering meteor.”33 This metaphor sums up the fate of the play: Minna von Barnhelm’s reception involved a wonderful resonance as well as a fast fall, and not only in German lands.34 Contemporaries noted Hamburg’s pleasure in seeing Prussian uniforms on stage, while Berliners mentally transposed the inn to Hamburg (or imported the cliché of Hamburg’s innkeepers to Berlin). The play partakes in an urban social space through its references to coffeehouses and inns, to leisurely entertainment, including sightseeing and strolling, and also to boredom. By alluding to the trans-European dimension of the Seven Years’ War (e.g., scenes 1:12, 4:6, and 5:9), the play anticipates a verdict, which, though arrived at some two hundred years later, considers the mid-eighteenthcentury conflict the first global war of the modern period. Thus, while many contextual references and allusions ground the play in Berlin, Minna von Barnhelm enacts a dynamic, through more global and experiential references, that foreshadows the problematic, and indeed anonymous, modernity of city life: an increasingly mediated experience, marked by perceptive overload and disorientation and amplified in spatial references that elude imagination and experience. The noise of the city obscures the experience of time (e.g., scene 2:1). Objects and relations that had anchored experience in the past, such as a ring or a title, vanish; circular mediators such as money, gambling, and

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credit take their place. Together, these references indicate a lingering sense of disorientation, amplified by increasingly abstract concepts (e.g., happiness, love, and virtue). Overall, the city breeds confusion, a feeling that affects the play’s characters and intensifies in the course of the play. Perception of the play’s internal context and its characters’ identities collide, making for a successful drama. Like The Blackamoor of Hamburg a few years later, Minna von Barnhelm pulls audiences emotionally and spatially into the city. Unlike Rathlef ’s play, it grounds itself in the gravitational pull of the present. While at the Berlin inn, Minna aggressively seeks to project to the here and now, that is, the local. Where Rathlef allows his characters to read letters about their mutual affection, and to situate themselves, via globally circulating stories, in the literary past and future, Lessing’s Minna insists on Tellheim’s speaking (e.g., act 3), thus claiming—and discursively reflecting upon—the authenticity of the moment. By being tied to spoken dialogue and performance, the thoroughly modern strategy risks of course the vanishing moment, obscuring not only the city’s image but leaving characters intoxicated with erratic feelings. The “non-regulated space of the city is thus [indeed] characterized by multiple ambiguities,” as Erlin suggests,35 producing at once a tantalizing and disorienting experience in the theater. With the conditions for the audience’s possible emotional identification thus complicated, the play relies on the limits of the city in delineating its horizon. As Minna von Barnhelm gets stuck within the city limits, its translation and portability into the language of nation are hampered.

The Double Quest: The Nation and the Original Play Although Minna von Barnhelm was performed to great success at the National Theater, it does not rise to exemplary prominence in the Hamburg Dramaturgy. Instead, literary scholarship frequently reduces the Hamburg Dramaturgy to one quotation, from the last chapter, in which Lessing mocks the “naive idea” at the heart of the Hamburg theater project “to give a national theater to the Germans who, after all, are not a nation.”36 The misreading lies in something I have already alluded to, namely, in construing the statement as Lessing’s call for a Nationalstaat (nation-state)—despite the fact that, in the immediately following sentence, he claims to be speaking not about politics but “a community.” While the latter idea permeated many mid-eighteenth-century texts, it has been read, in reference to Lessing, as a sign of advocacy for an ideal

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nationhood, rooted in its culture and/or language and rejecting other nations’ taste. In addition, several scholars underscore the latter by pointing to Lessing’s practice of creating language, asserting, by extension, that he was interested in a unified normative language derived from a model literary text.37 Jan Philipp Reemtsma was the first to differentiate between national intention (in the modern, political sense of the word) and Lessing’s aspiring to creative impact, writing, “Lessing . . . was not invested in the national but in literature.” Consequently, Reemtsma suggests, the Hamburg Dramaturgy is an “experiment” in creativity, “a lesson in independent thinking in matters of poetry.”38 Nevertheless, based on the above and other passages of the Dramaturgy, critics have made a reciprocal claim: that a national theater, according to Lessing, will create a national community. Marshaling the text to draw inferences about its resonance, Barbara Fischer and Tom Fox observe that premiering Minna to great success in Hamburg was surely a sign of “Lessing clearly envision[ing] it as a play of national reconciliation.”39 Peter Höyng concludes, in writing about Lessing’s dramatic theory: “Thus, the theater was conceived by Lessing and similar-minded intellectuals as a cultural and public domain that tied aesthetics and politics together . . . : the theater as a public institution that should enable the bourgeoisie to experience and participate in the discourse of a national identity.”40 Evidently, at least according to literary historians, the Hamburg Dramaturgy and Lessing’s work at the theater marked the incipience of a Culture Nation; moreover, institution and author deliberately worked toward their historization and historical relevance. German literary history has further embraced this logic, extending it to the overall harsh verdict on the short life of the Hamburg National Theater. To this day, scholars consider the lack of finances, the lack of an educated, proper audience—ideally consisting of the bourgeois middle class and the cultural elite—and the shortage of suitable plays as the main reasons for its failure.41 These claims of insufficient rootedness in Hamburg’s ideals of civic society appear shortsighted, not least because they rest on pitting influential, even respected merchants (such as a few members of the theater board), the Senate, and intellectuals—the latter frequenting the same social circles as Lessing— against each other. Influenced by the nineteenth century’s appropriations of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, these views must be reassessed in light of Wolfgang Lukas’s work on theatrical taste across German lands and his general call for differentiating among literary texts, the contemporaneous resonances of an eighteenth-century performance, and the subsequent historization of a play in literary form and edition.42 In his study of the text and context of the

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Dramaturgy, Lukas notes the plethora of themes and references, including the variously pursued and eventually abandoned dramatic traditions that Lessing invokes in his text. He thus reaffirms scholars’ repeated criticism of Lessing’s style while directing attention to the local nature of the text: “In the end, only fixed, contextual elements define the Dramaturgy’s structure, namely the Hamburg Theater project and its repertoire.”43 But Lukas concedes that Lessing’s “discursive style”44 reflected the critic’s attempt to create new norms for theater practice by deriving them from texts. Reading bygone, historical phenomena and texts, interpreting them, and “turning them inward,” Lessing tried arranging his observations according to the dual anthropological premise that yokes together individual subjectivity and individual texts.45 As we shall see later, in the process he delineated comparative ways of reading, while wrestling the text away from its urban context. Similarly, theater treatises began to invent the ideal spectator in order to make her or him suit evolving theories of genre and acting.46 Although made in relation to French theater, Paul Friedland’s suggestion resonates with Hamburg’s stage, in particular if viewed not only through the prism of the nineteenth-century’s use of the Dramaturgy (and Lessing) for German national literature, but also in the context of recent, often biographically inflected, studies on the theater, its audience, and the financial circumstances of both stage and city.47 As Hamburg’s mercantile elites became instrumental patrons of Enlightenment culture and its institutions, they viewed the urban space through a broader, global perspective and projected it as a realm invested in present action rather than in a future or a programmatic legacy sustained by texts and historiography. The reasons behind the National Theater’s failure include more than local, intellectual, and financial shortcomings. They appear multiplied through the city’s global entanglements. At the same time, the symbiosis of entertainment and situatedness in the world reveals how the literary text arose as an autonomous work, as a counterpoint to or compensation for the everyday present that projected into the future. Detaching the ideal of the spectator from audiences was part of the process; in turn, the parterre served—and theater studies scholars would agree—as a metaphor for eighteenth-century audiences. Simultaneously, though, the parterre evolved as a unique rhetorical space. I suggest that it marked, indeed, a translation zone, representing a force or medium that both condensed and reflected the nexus of the local and the global, where cultures mingled (and clashed).

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In order to explore this translation zone, I once more turn to Friedland’s argument. If, as was the case in France—and French theater, after all, allegedly maintained its grip on German theatrical taste—the playwright resembled either a despot or a rebel extraordinaire, then the audience or the parterre was thought to possess a common instinct, a feeling for community. Its modesty, at least according to Marmontel’s entry in the Encyclopédie, was legendary, bribery-proof, beyond reproach.48 Where the playwright stood for the extraordinary, the parterre had to provide correction, delineating an ethical claim. Thus, a major, all-encompassing text transformed a social or situational group by bestowing upon it the exalted role of a human being, leading to conceptual shifts with far-reaching repercussions for European theater and dramatic literature of the eighteenth century. Lessing, for example, contemplates Marmontel’s turn to friends and family members in the fourteenth essay of the Dramaturgy, in order to explicate the French theorist’s concept of human nature and natural relations, which are at the core of the parterre’s corrective role. In the end, the parterre’s audiences morphed into the ideal spectator. Despite being a French import, a thus-translated understanding hibernates in German theater theories at the time, even those that are critical of the French; some bury the import in dramatic genres (e.g., Bode’s prologue) or relegate the transposition to metadramatic texts (e.g., Hamburg Dramaturgy). Fully translated, the parterre often reappears as Publikum (audience or spectators) and paves the way for the theatricality of politics, explaining the instrumental role that theater played in the formulation of national communities. Eventually, though, in late eighteenth-century Hamburg as well as in theater history and literary history, references to the parterre have implied a rebellious bunch,49 while spectators came to embody the virtuous nation. Not surprisingly, then, Lessing seems torn about the parterre, at least at first glance. He deeply mistrusts their judgment, accusing audiences of feeding—and later abusing—the playwright’s vanity.50 Stylistically, this hypocrisy-exposing anecdote, detailing audiences’ response to Voltaire, posits not only knowledge about another theater tradition, but also folds back onto another account of the parterre: in chapter 2 of the Dramaturgy, Lessing resorts to a tale of alleged whispering and sarcasm among audience members in order to legitimize what he perceived as the dramatic shortcomings of a play; in both instances, he tantalizes readers with the specter of theatrical experience. However, he also relates his experience, noting attentiveness among Hamburg’s parterre: “Wonderful! These people love morality; this audience has a taste for maxims; a Euripides could earn fame on this stage, and Socrates would happily visit

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it.”51 Already in the second part of the sentence, text absorbs Lessing’s observations on performance, reestablishing ancient dramatists as the criterion for theater’s success. Conversely, shortcomings of any dramatic text under his review affect the language Lessing chooses to describe the audience, ultimately making him speak of “rabble” (Pöbel). To be sure, in the reality of the German city the parterre was rowdy, untamed, vulgar, and prone to business transactions; late arrivals, eating, and the throwing of objects (including food) were daily occurrences. Sunday audiences constituted an extra challenge: more diverse and fewer repeat attendees, they had no patience for moralizing overtones, demanding instead unfettered entertainment. Bad behavior got worse as soon as opera singers or actors mingled with the parterre; furthermore, members of the parterre at times sought to shape the repertoire. Nevertheless, representations of urbanity, though not the setting of one’s own city, were hugely popular, explaining not only Minna’s success in Hamburg but also Karl Lessing’s verdict on Berlin’s theater. Writing to his brother in an ongoing, comparative exchange about Hamburg’s and Berlin’s audiences, he notes: “The entire parterre ignores bad acting as soon as the shady innkeeper and Hamburg boor are on stage.”52 That these observations were the norm, rather than exception, underscore numerous testimonies and documentations, preserved well into the nineteenth century.53 The parterre was more than a space where social and artistic expectations clashed; it was also a zone where translations from theory into practice—or text into performance—were tested. Even more so, the parterre became a space where urban identities materialized and where members read culturally and discursively (rather than literally and historically), investing in their own presence rather than communal projections into history. In this sense, the parterre acted as a global space or medium, connecting—via their habits, social interaction, and present experiences—theatergoers in distant locations: in London and Hamburg, but also, as we shall see at the end of this book, in the New World, in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The living, social presence of parterre worked of course against its transposition into a text, where it almost immediately took on a different role. Idealized and abstracted, the spectators’ parterre became charged with projecting aesthetic and political ideas into the future, making it a preferred idea of modern national historiography of literature. But the parterre also retained a more nebulous conceptual understanding, as it designated a translation zone for transposing dramatic, performance, and literary theories onto one another. We shall see later that the parterre also acts as a metaphorical space that

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helps to gauge the fault lines between modern humanities disciplines and their appropriation of spatial and temporal thinking. To recognize that the understanding—and thus the overburdening—of the text-based aesthetics of the parterre was imported from France paradoxically steers us toward another, frequent misreading of Lessing’s text: the alleged obsession with German plays, culminating in the demand for an original play, that is, a dramatic text conceived and written in the German language. Much repeated and clearly extracted from the Dramaturgy, this claim sustained the symptomatic criticism of the Hamburg National Theater, shaping not only literary history’s view of this particular stage but the historical assessment of a broader phenomenon in eighteenth-century German-language culture. The obsession over originality extended to the dramatic literature available to theaters and for performance, enabling and eventually recapitulating the long-standing claim that eighteenth-century German theater suffered from a general lack of original plays (that is, plays written in German and not based—linguistically or thematically—on a foreign source).54 In his theory of the National Theater, Löwen had bitterly complained about missing Nationalstücke (national plays), planting the idea that financial motives prevented the rise of the German play, while recommending plays whose dramatic text expressed a taste mediating between the French and the English.55 Thus, in retrospect, the National Theater appears as a prolonged, ultimately unsuccessful struggle for one thing only, the original play (Originalstück). Nevertheless, from the beginning—indeed, coinciding with the National Theater’s opening—a circular logic began to fester, suggesting early on that had original plays existed, a nation might have formed in and through theater. Lessing seemingly concurred when praising the theater’s first play (Croneck’s Olindo and Sophornia) for its original quality: “It was clearly important to begin with a German original, which in this case would also have the attraction of novelty.”56 Subsequent discussants of Hamburg’s National Theater zero in on Lessing’s quest for the original play, which they see articulated in the Dramaturgy’s first installment as well as in the harsh verdict concerning the failure of the National Theater in the final essay. As scholarly readings of the entire text have been slanted in one direction—suggesting that the Dramaturgy constitutes a manual on how to achieve a German national theater—interpreters discern an appearance of coherence and programmatic intention that the work in fact lacks. Therefore, by approaching the work through Lessing’s notions and practice of translation—in its contemporaneous, urban context—I take several steps back from the presumption that the

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Hamburg Dramaturgy grounds, first and foremost, the German nation, as well as the idea of the national more broadly conceived.

Born out of the Translation: Original Play, Language, or How to Manage Too Much Material Reinhart Meyer’s extensive bibliographic research on eighteenth-century German drama seemingly confirms the shortage of German plays, as it points to the abundance of commentaries on and critiques of translations, which dwarf any discussion of nation. A look at the two most important journals devoted to theater performances, Theaterkalender (Calendar of Theater) and Theaterjournal (Journal of Theater), confirms that translations (and the nuances entailed in different approaches to translating a text) and translation criticism were everywhere, to the end of the century.57 However, an obsessive focus on translations in German lands does not necessarily suggest a shortage or lack of originals; it merely identifies a dominant theme in the public discourse about theater as manifested in journals, reviews, short theoretical pamphlets, and performances. Accordingly, Thorsten Unger deconstructs the rhetoric surrounding originals, exposing their alleged lack as a cliché derived from the subsequent instrumental use of theater for national purposes in the nineteenth century.58 The latter, in conjunction with a focus on the individual author (as well as on the textual afterlives of dramatic texts in books), becomes indicative of efforts to homogenize a diversity of debates, or rather a discursive chaos, which Andrew Piper has described as a bibliographic diversity and abundance—an existence of perhaps too many books that required ordering— and which was symptomatic of the late eighteenth century.59 Juxtaposing the original and translation proved to be the end point of this ordering impulse. But at the advent of a lively bibliographic imagination, translation played a constructive (rather than derivative) role, especially when it came to transposing the world into cities—and the various stages of learning and entertainment—in German lands. Translating was widely considered a necessary and valuable conduit for expanding knowledge; it even promoted the novel organization of knowledge in modern university cities by connecting emergent academic disciplines to publishers and wider dissemination networks.60 Thus, as sentimental, aesthetic discourse flourished (in part through the acts of translation and tie-ins in other peoples’ stories), another sophisticated debate on “epistemic translation” evolved. Surely, compared to the translation of ancient

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Greek and Latin literary texts, these translations retained marginal status. Yet the intervention, which epistemic translations make, strikes an incredibly modern tone, even today. The anonymous author of “Vom Übersetzen” (On Translation), published in Hannoverisches Magazin (Hannover Magazine) appreciates translation as a science, which assures its readers of truth and authenticity while never losing sight of the necessary naturalness, innocence, and imagination that it can bring to the process of learning; in short, translation engenders innovation through knowledge.61 In eighteenth-century German-language journals, a broad discourse on translation emerges that transposes and parallels—and thus previews—the impending rise of modern academic disciplines as well as the divisions among literary and epistemic genres, the history of knowledge and contemporary use. Ultimately, while journals classify translations from classical languages—as well as from English or French works of literature—by outing their translated nature in their titles and thus emphasize the equivalency of original and translation, other genres employ translation in order to assert their own epistemic legitimacy. Usually in subtitles or in the body of text, they direct readers to their cultural authenticity or legitimacy by invoking British or French sources that they adapt, pilfer, or render selectively and always in combination with invention, interpretation, or explanation. Translations in journals come from three broad language areas: English and French (with rare, occasional venturing into other modern Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian), biblical languages, and classical Latin and Greek. Thematically, there is a clear division among the three. Whereas the latter two groups stand for translations of foundational church texts and in classical literary genre theory, respectively, translations from English and French fulfill a pragmatic purpose. Constituting the bulk of translated, epistemic genres, they convey geographical facts and observation, natural history, politics and science—in short, the whole gamut of encyclopedic knowledge. Translation therefore illustrates, through its dual strategy of amplification and condensation in knowledge exchange, the embrace of the global, its mediation through other European languages, and subsequent local sustenance—whether in particular urban contexts or in the proliferation of local genres and their tie-ins with academic disciplines. The latter move curiously detaches the modern disciplinary discourse from its presumed center, the university. Translation proliferated an overabundance of texts, their versions, and even knowledge, while growing the quest for the original, which would arise as a counterpoint to oversupply and, ultimately, ascended to become the

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ordering authority. At the same time, translation impaired the national text, obscuring the latter’s centrality before it was born. Just as the late eighteenth century grappled with an information overload, which led, for example, to an oversupply of and market saturation with travel texts, the plethora of translations signaled insecurity and instability; it intensified the fragmentation of genres, which had become obvious, often accompanied by expressions of anxiety. In bridging various registers—the literary and the epistemic, the written and the oral—translation relied on and replicated the broader contours of culture. With these contours encompassing the world, and culture projecting to a global horizon, another late eighteenth-century use of translating arose: learning a modern language. Journals spurred numerous reviews of didactic books, which published materials for translation (e.g., letters) in order to perfect one’s communicative, pragmatic language skills. These contours codevelop and grow with the literary scene, though the two do not mirror or duplicate each other, and occasionally even appear at odds. For example, in discussing the nexus between translation and literature, journals produced a wide variety of genres that never made it into the realm of literary history. Small, often fractured or abridged genres—Probe (the sample) and Probestücke (exemplary plays or samples), Anmerkungen der Herausgeber (editorial remarks or notes), and literarische Notizen (literary notes), in addition to reviews—played a curious role, hindering the authority of the original to emerge. Relegated to the margins—even of literary journalism—and at times decried as excessive, these genres remained a by-product of a culture as it engaged in the making of literary history. Their fate in the nonliterary realm was quite different, as translating a foreign source provided access to authoritative knowledge of the global world. To translate meant to participate in a trade of erudition. The use and abuse of translations in the eighteenth century not only marked practices of location and relevance in the urban context, as we saw in chapter 1, but also contributed to understanding texts within a wider network of exchange. They also situated the emergence of modern disciplines—and disciplinary hierarchies—at the beginning of modernity. Lessing’s alleged interest in the conceptual rise of the nation thus unfolds against the myriad of translations, not as a manifestation of creative impulse or the writer’s individuality. He embraced translation, rather than ignoring it or guarding against translated texts, and became an engaged, prolific, and enthusiastic translator. Like his contemporaries, Lessing translated for financial reasons and to showcase his linguistic skills and world knowledge, but also

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in order to understand his subject matter better. More polemical than others, he frequently complained about unskilled translators, rebuking their abuse of translation for unfettered proliferation of bad language abilities and of too many texts. Unlike his contemporaries, Lessing mastered several languages, and translating did not affect his emergent fame as an author and critic.62 Indeed, Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend (Letters on Literature, (1758–60), which are commonly read as Lessing’s embrace of national, not to say nationalist, sentiment, revolve around translation and its criticism, as much as if not more than they discuss the status of original German literature.63 In this iconic Berlin journal, Lessing puts forth a multifaceted concept of translation, which has become the subject of two recent essays.64 John Hamilton and Katherine Arens untangle the discussion of German language and writing from the subsequent, nationalist use of the Letters on Literature by literary historiography. Both locate Lessing’s modernity in his notion of translation, albeit in different ways and conceptual frameworks. Hamilton extends the constituting role of translation to both the translator and the reader, culminating in a notion of translation that equates with both, the imaginary (or fictional) and the original. The original thus arises from translation. Furthermore, the linguistically creative act—and ultimately, the shared common language as well as the aesthetic construct—provides the foundation for community. Accordingly, German cultural identity emerges from translating. While Hamilton shows how translation’s aesthetic innovation mutated to ethical intervention (or rather was misconstrued and abused in favor of the latter), Arens turns to translation’s mimesis. Arguing that Lessing enlists translation’s mimetic potential for a particular purpose, namely, to create greater linguistic and epistemological clarity, she considers translations as practical applications of Lessing’s linguistic theory. At the same time, she paves the way for a modern understanding of translation that places it “in service” to discovering the original and therefore operates as its imperfect, derivative, or secondary form. Arens herself considers another aspect of Lessing’s philosophy of translation modern, namely, the transposition of past epistemological constellations into the present moment. Most importantly, perhaps, Hamilton’s and Arens’s invocations of modernity vis-à-vis Lessing’s translation theory tease out the divergence of literary and cultural studies at the end of the twentieth century: whereas the former privileges creativity and aesthetic invention (i.e., the subject of literature), the latter is interested in contexts and knowledge configurations (i.e., the subject of culture). We shall see in the final part

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of this chapter that both have significant implications for reading Lessing as an early proponent of translation as the living condition of literature. Overall, literary historians have commented on Lessing’s translations passim, praising the deliberate acts of translating that promoted other aspects of his oeuvre: dramatic theory, aesthetic debates or polemics, and the desire to contribute to knowledge transfer. Helmut Berthold, for example, notes that Lessing was, first and foremost, a pragmatic translator, driven by a purpose and thus not strictly adhering to the semantic or structural fidelity of the original.65 And yet, Lessing does not fully depart from semantic and structural equivalencies, attempting instead to render the style of the original text in an adequate manner. To Lessing, a translator must be able to emulate the original [ihm] nachzudenken—that is, to think like the original and imagine the constellation in which it was conceived, but also to follow its form, while stepping back from any perceived rigidity of the original text.66 Susan Bernofsky concludes that Lessing’s translation of Diderot was one of the first to serve the original text, being much more loyal to the original work than indebted to the author’s motivation. At the same time, she points out the arbitrariness of the subsequent value difference between translation and original, pointing to both the popularity and the linguistic innovation of Lessing’s product.67 Like Bernofsky and Hamilton, Dirk Oschmann emphasizes the aspect of innovation, claiming that Literaturfähigkeit (the potential to serve as a medium for fiction) constitutes Lessing’s authentic and permanent contribution to German literary history.68 Together these multifaceted claims allow us to situate Lessing—via his approach to translation—not just in relation to German literary history, but also in relation to comparative or world literature and German cultural studies. In the end, his work situates, perhaps, less a beginning of a temporal, national trajectory (namely, a founding text of modern German literature) than a spatial fracturing and loose linkage of alternate beginnings, stages, and manifestations of literature—explicated through alternate approaches to texts—and a nascent discourse on the beginnings of humanities and cultural studies. To be sure, Lessing works through examples of European literature and culture. These “constraints” arise, I believe, from his familiarity with “only” western European languages, yet they allow him to be perceived, ultimately, on a wider global scale.69 Perhaps surprising (or indeed compelling), this “worlding” happens through a text that enshrines the city in its title: Hamburg Dramaturgy. A thoroughly urban text, the Dramaturgy is neither one of order and transparency, nor of growth, but one of collapse:

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through translation, it lays out material, linguistic, and performance remnants. Together, they are indicative of the city but project to the world. In Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing claims to create an original out of translation. Despite beginning and ending the text with allusions to the German play, he actually exposes the fragility and artificiality of any opposition between original and translation, a distinction that, in its then-present form, was merely nascent (angedacht). In the process, Lessing ends up constantly revising and surpassing his own theoretical precepts of translation, including his thoughts on translation laid out in the Letters of Literature. He produces a text that generates a more global but definitely a very portable notion of literature, casting doubt on the predominant reading of the Dramaturgy as a foundational moment of modern German national literature. Indeed, the Hamburg Dramaturgy is marked by transpositions, contradictions, and transferences when it comes to the use of translation and its many synonyms. Like the different words used for “translator,” these synonyms are, in the end, not completely exchangeable. Through the multifaceted idea of translator/translation, Lessing connects the Hamburg Dramaturgy to the criticism he had launched in Letters on Literature. In the 332nd letter, for example, Lessing introduced at least three different notions of translator, in order to offset his rant about bad translators that had marked his active, initial involvement in the journal. Unlike those disgracing translation, its ideal practitioners are simultaneously Verfasser (author), Übersetzer (translator), and Schriftsteller (writer), leading to the claim that “the beautiful spirit [must] unite with the philosopher in the translator.”70 By articulating an increasingly clear intention, artistic maturity, and impact, the translator becomes original, on equal footing with the author.71 This line of Lessing’s argumentation also unhinges the initial understanding of the original in the process of translation: “original” stands no longer for the source text that ought to be translated into a target language but for the novelty of the target text, the product of translation, perfected through the translator’s “small improvements and corrections.”72 This turn comes with a general preference for prose genres, as Hamilton has observed, because they allow “the reader . . . to experience the flow of the piece, to find his or her own way into and through continuous print, without the restrictive or misleading directions of verse-lines.”73 Overall, the seventeenth letter encapsulates interpretive enigmas, sprouting the seeds of several approaches to translations and figurations of literary studies, including the thinking along the lines of national literatures. Lessing indulges these enigmas by further

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eliding clear distinctions between source and target text, or between translator and author. Whereas the broader eighteenth-century practice of translation, and the fierce debate over translations’ role and value, establishes these distinctions, Lessing juggles (and conflates!) original and translation. Expanding his notion of translation beyond transpositions among individual languages and extending it to the transfer of cultural and historical constellations, he inevitably raises the status of translation rather than diminishing it. Thus enmeshed in a culture of translation, he embarks upon explicating it while writing the Hamburg Dramaturgy.

Exhibiting Translation in the Hamburg Dramaturgy Lessing’s use of translation in the Dramaturgy resembles his reflections on the subject in Letters on Literature. Overall, Lessing’s engagement with translation in Hamburg oscillates between criticizing the translation of plays performed at Gänsemarkt and excursions into model-like ethics and practice of translation (and the chastising of any habits opposed to Lessing’s suggestions), corrections of translated passages, more general thoughts on translations, and even nascent translation theories. Often, Lessing develops all of these facets by using comparative translations. Consistent with the Dramaturgy’s meandering, “nonsystematic” style, which scholars criticize widely,74 the subtext on translation is full of semantic ambiguity, the only clear elements being translations of certain concepts (e.g., pity and fear in the discussion of Aristotle). Thus, while some of the translation principles resemble those employed in Letters, others open up new perspectives on Dramaturgy, especially in relation to Hamburg, the concept of literature, and dramatic theory. Despite criticizing translated plays, Lessing himself does not translate a complete play in the Hamburg Dramaturgy. But he supplies translated text passages of varying lengths. Just as the Dramaturgy morphs into something other than originally intended, Lessing’s concept of translation evolves. In the first dozen installments, or so, he concludes reviews of performances and actors with short, noneffusive commentary: “The translation is in verses and possibly one of the best at our disposal; at least, it is fluent with many comical lines.”75 But gradually, criticism becomes theory, just as the Dramaturgy takes on more and more prescribing features, focusing on the analysis of dramatic text and a new interpretation of Aristotle’s poetics and anticipating literary criticism’s turn toward hermeneutics. In essays 89–91, Lessing contrasts

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translations of Aristotle into several languages by evaluating the quality of target texts through the interpretation of the source text. These multilayered comparisons and contrasts supplement the translation and interpretation of pity and fear (essays 74–83). In turning to translation as an instrument, Lessing modifies the notion of translation considerably, extricating it from a simple, qualitative relation between source and target text. Instead, he uses translation to understand how tragedy and comedy work, eventually explicating the genres’ workings in a better way. Through and in translation, Lessing uncovers the dramatic essence that exists irrespective of a text’s individual language. Before embracing this notion, Lessing undertakes piecemeal transitions into theory, albeit in abruptly changing, meandering style. One technique is commenting on the talent of the translator, as is the case in the critique of Corneille’s Rodogune: “And finally, a word about the translation . . . a completely new, local one, not yet printed; in rhymed Alexandrine verse. It is not one to be ashamed of; indeed, it is full of strong, successful passages. The author, however, I know possesses too much sense and taste to embark once more on such a thankless task. In order to translate Corneille well, one must be a better poet than he is.”76 This paragraph, the last of the Dramaturgy’s thirtysecond essay, reveals the historical status of the translation. Tied to location and performance, new translations compete with established (i.e., authoritative) and published versions, while remaining unprinted. They trace the formal characteristics of the source text, while not erasing its shortcomings. In order to eradicate any limitations of the source, the translator must display talents that have him become a poet—an originator—or an author-translator. Elsewhere in the Hamburg Dramaturgy—when introducing criteria for good translations—Lessing departs from the short passages, in which he criticizes local translations that resemble an afterthought or inconsequential addition. Paying attention to equivalencies of form and syntax, of semantic content and (nongrammatical) mood, Lessing evaluates translation through comparison with the source text. He demands unambiguous translations. Marked by high degrees of efficiency, clarity, and reversibility in form, content, and connotation, they resemble his ideal of a transparent language and elude existing translations. As Lessing adapts a principle of instrumentalism in his criticism, he erects a notion of a successful translation that remains valid, even today.77 Rhetorically, he shores up this theorizing through examples, implementing a technique for involving readers and interpreters that is similar to the one Hamilton discerns in Lessing’s favoring of prose as the target text’s genre. For example, in the twentieth essay, Lessing begins by translating a passage from Françoise de Gaffigny’s Cenie,

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which he ties to the source text by excerpting French words and locating the passage in the play’s plot. He moves on to interpreting the scene, disguising whether he speaks of the original drama, a competing translation, or his own translated version. Though he observes a unity of “heart” and “mouth” in the character’s lines, he misses this symbiosis in the translation: “He speaks as if he said the same thing twice, as if both statements were true tautological statements, perfectly identical statements, without the least little conjunction.” Here and elsewhere, he follows up with the performed translation, usually adding harsh criticism, in this case against “die Gottschedin” (Luise Gottsched): “Unbearable! The sense is perfectly translated, but the spirit is gone: a deluge of words has suffocated it.”78 The reader must then choose. She or he proceeds by either deducing the ideal translation from the failed version after correcting the flaw or by accepting Lessing’s version as the new, correct translation. The latter often requires the courage to add or eliminate clauses or words, all in order to produce harmony and formal symmetry (e.g., eighth essay), and almost always a prose translation (e.g., nineteenth essay).

Localizing Translation Through Performance / Performing the Original The characteristics of “the comprehensible and beautiful,”79 which evolved as desiderata in eighteenth-century translation discourse, permeate Lessing’s quest for harmonizing prose. To be compatible with everyday language— indeed, to be capable of resonating with the mundane—emerges as a condition of originality. A play and, ultimately, any work of literature had to possess these qualities in order to engender a textual tradition. For, no matter what ideal fiction was performed, it only produced a translocal community if it were recorded as a text. But not just any text suffices: it must preserve the emotional circulation of theatricality, that is, the sensual or emotional connection between audience and stage. Once published, a play can leave its local context behind, becoming a publicly accepted, established, and indeed traditional genre: namely, a dramatic text. Transposed elsewhere, the dramatic text can be revived again: indeed, its resonance with the living, mundane language acts as part and parcel of its suitability for successful performance. Only lines that can be spoken with ease can resurrect the ideal fiction of the original performance. Thus, the recording practice has implications for reading the concepts of originality and the original play. The latter bundles and condenses theatricality, arresting and thus archiving the circulation of emotions at work

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in a particular performance. Encoding this process roughly corresponds with and creates the substrate of what scholars describe as identification or empathy. But actually, this quality of the text is a retroactive projection of feeling and emotion, a by-product of literary historiography. Christopher Wild has described this paradoxical effect of recording a historical performance in writing (Literarisierung) by demonstrating that any historiography of theater ends up with a text and thus with a highly antitheatrical product. The text—a record or a medium—is the only way to access the theater of bygone times.80 Arguably, Lessing was one of the early proponents, practitioners, and historians of the interdependence of play and dramatic text. However, this turn toward recognizing the mediated existence of theater is not imaginable without an early modern tradition that is all too often suppressed in considerations of eighteenth-century German drama, especially in studies of the original German play or the bürgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy). In emphasizing what is at the core of “antitheatrical theatricality,” namely, the nexus between theater’s content and form and a reciprocally working modesty, Wild’s book resurrects this tradition. It alludes to a religious belief, pervasive in the northern Protestant areas in German lands, and which created (and fiercely defended) various shades of hostility toward the theater. An early modern attitude, antitheatricality became a characteristic feature of the dramatic text in which the historical stage of performance has been handed down. Most immediately, this insight brings us back to the disputes on the theater unfolding during Lessing’s time in Hamburg. While one, launched by Albrecht Wittenberg around 1769 and attacking the very idea of municipal oversight of actors and principals, did not touch upon theater’s role as a mediator, the other hit at the core of religious doctrine on theater. Revolving around the semipublic dispute among pastors Johann Ludwig Schlosser and Johann Melchior Goeze in 1768, it culminated in Goeze’s emphatic rejection of theater because of its moral indifference.81 While in the early installments of the Dramaturgy, Lessing appears at risk of being pulled into the debate, he manages to stay above the fray, because he turns to translation. The stylistic freedom of translation has immediate effects on dramatic text as well as the understanding of theater. It not only impacts local performances, but it also affects the notion of the original play by, ultimately, shifting focus from the “what” to the “how” of representation. In recommending translation principles, Lessing departs from both “taste,” which critics had introduced as the central criterion for evaluating drama, and the “courage” to be creative, which Lessing had made a centerpiece of good translations. In fact, he does

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not oscillate between aesthetic norm and creative freedom. Instead, he interrogates the aesthetic effect of a specific, local performance and its relationship to everyday language and its urban context. Although he pretends to plea for prose, he refers to the situation in which an audience perceives the performance: “But would you not rather hear nervous prose than vapid and forced verse? Among all our rhymed translations there will be scarcely a dozen that are tolerable.”82 Appealing to the audience, Lessing lists two reasons for favoring prose: first, the shortcomings of the source text featuring bad verse in French which resist translation into German for both formal and “natural” reasons. In Lessing’s view, the German language lacks structure and vocabulary to render these aspects of French adequately. Second, verse engenders a play to be performed, not a text to be published, read, and translated in silence. Accordingly, the original is always tied to a local and performance situation—and therein lies the crux of the Hamburg Dramaturgy. Facing the problem of the importability of this theory and in an effort to have an impact beyond Hamburg, Lessing resorts to the transposition of his own criticism of performance—of the Hamburg plays—to the theory of drama. Literary historians have interpreted this move as a prescriptive intervention, a turn toward explicating effective and good drama and toward examining its potential effect. In the reception of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing’s gesture involves much more: it gives birth to the original idea of the Dramaturg (dramaturge), who transposes, adapts, and develops written texts for stage performance, while strangely eclipsing for a long time the role that Lessing had in Hamburg: to mediate between the work of art, administration, and actors, and to produce a public debate about theater. Straddling a fine line between keeping apart and conflating the differences between theater and literature, Lessing’s text also historicizes dramatic genres and dramatic literature, thus leading to the incipience of a facet of modernity. Read as a document of literary theory and history, Hamburg Dramaturgy lays the foundations of national literature. But Lessing’s text also overcomes the national, by instituting comparative literature. It does so in a strikingly advanced, indeed twenty-first-century way. The Hamburg Dramaturgy’s particular suggestions for recording and publishing prologue and epilogue—making them literary genres rather than localizing performance pieces—represent a first step toward bypassing the national, working instead through the local and in a latently comparative manner. This aspect constitutes another facet of the translation discourse, illustrating particularly well that Lessing remains torn between the national

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and its rejection (by circling back to the local or embracing the world.) In the sixth essay of Dramaturgy Lessing publishes, in their entirety, both prologue and epilogue of the National Theater’s opening night. He wants to preserve the monologues as texts, so that they may speak for themselves and without any commentary. However, prologue and epilogue localize the theater, in this case in Hamburg. They indicate context and conditions of performance, trace the actual performance situation in the theater space, including the emotional bind or rift between stage and audience. In tying the performance to Hamburg, the pieces challenge, at least implicitly, any transferability across German-language lands. Localization not only guarantees that translations are understood in the target context or city—Hamburg—but also creates a problem for translation and communication across city lines. Nevertheless, the texts published in Dramaturgy suggest a parallelism or even identity between the performed, local play and its relevance for national literature, that is, its existence in a different time and space. The prologue unifies Hamburg, stage tradition, and intended effects in the German-language area: “And remember, oh remember, all Germany looks to you!” Lessing underscores the impression of turning to the national, as he develops a theory of affect for prologue and epilogue in the seventh essay, detaching both parts rhetorically from the location Hamburg and equating play and dramatic text. However, if we consider this in relation to English theater, the frequent translations from English in Hamburg, and the general internationality of the city, about which we read in chapter 1, a more nuanced picture emerges. Lessing defines prologue and epilogue in reference to the English tradition and its frequent use of the genres for localization, making the subject relevant to the place and time of performance (“kind of usage”).83 Here Lessing not only reminds us that the performed plays were indeed mostly translated, but he also recaptures the aesthetics, which I have circumscribed as creating a sentimental empire binding colony and metropolitan area—or a capital of a different kind—in a community. By translating the local markers, which affixed the play to London, and replacing them with allusions to Hamburg, prologue and epilogue can dissolve the English context; instead they create an urban play. In the Dramaturgy, Lessing attempts to loosen these strategies of localization by exploring the plays’ portability. The results are mixed. Surely, through prologues and epilogues, dramatic texts become original plays. “Therefore, if I wish that we would not bring original plays before our public without introduction and recommendation, it is with the understanding that, in the case of tragedies, the tone of the epilogue ought to be more suited to our

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German seriousness,”84 writes Lessing, alluding, formally, to the national. But this ideal image exists only locally, in Hamburg. The city’s urban, aesthetic context accommodated global sentimentality. The ideal’s roots in another tradition of national literature needed to be translated in order to resonate; the same applies to Hamburg’s performance context if it were to be transplanted elsewhere. Therefore, the translator’s role is to account for both, the local context and the translocal task. But does the translator have any options for creating the national, and can the translator do it in such a way that she or he surpasses the author? If we consider the Hamburg Dramaturgy as a whole, Lessing increasingly doubts the national, translocal impact of the National Theater. Lessing struggles to formulate observations that can easily be transposed to any stage outside Hamburg: while he recognizes and underscores that imported plays become original plays through acts of localization in prologue and epilogue, he wonders whether these parts of a play—often created specifically for the Hamburg audience—are too strongly tied to the international character of the port city and do not translate easily to other, provincial stages within the German-language areas. In the end, he abruptly abandons the question of whether a translator can serve the national cause. One might even argue that Lessing gets lost in translation. The more Lessing loses sight of the initial, uncomplicated notion of what an original play is—namely, a play written by a German-language author in German—the more he defines literature. As translation becomes the form of literature’s existence, it defies temporality—that is, an investment with an ideal imagination—but proliferates the experience of the present. Accordingly, any programmatic unity of the Dramaturgy, if it ever existed, slips further and further away, as the later installments of the project replicate, transpose, and reinvent its original purpose.

Toward a New Comparative Literature, or How Emergent Humanities Disciplines Force a Temporal Trajectory In the end, Lessing introduces a multidisciplinary view of drama. Reflecting a plurality of approaches to the dramatic subject, the Dramaturgy makes a case for drama that exists in translation. It is here that Hamburg Dramaturgy’s modernity—propelling itself forward temporally, with ever greater disciplinary nuance and distinction—comes to the fore, while giving impulse to a new comparative or world literature. Indeed, the Dramaturgy encapsulates a foundational moment at which literature and culture separate. But how does

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the text arrive at this point? In addition to comparisons of translations and translator motifs across several languages, Lessing explicates the idea of an ideal translation. By imploring us repeatedly to construct the ideal through examples, he creates a constellation that encapsulates the founding moment of modern dramatic theory and national literary history. In translating sections of John Banks’s The Unhappy Favorites or, The Earl of Essex: A Tragedy (1682), Lessing pulls in the discussion of the play’s currency and resonance all over Europe. The Earl’s interpretation and translation choices take up large portions of essays 56–68 in Hamburg Dramaturgy. Lessing begins by stripping the play to its core: the historical subject matter. Consulting and translating from competing English, Spanish, and French versions, he uses comparative variations on a motif as a foundation for extricating the particularities of national drama. The play’s historical subject had gained dramatic persistence all over seventeenth-century Europe, thus seeding a dramatic tradition that did not quite compare to the legacy of the novel Oronooko or the philosophical treatise Histoire des deux Indes (1777) but was nevertheless substantial. Lessing pursues an interest that builds on particularities of genre, while capturing the initial formation of a national tradition. To him, The Earl of Essex usefully illustrates two directions of dramatic literature in German lands. One connects to the French tradition, via Peter Stueven’s 1753 Vienna translation of Corneille’s play (1678). The other relates the mid-eighteenth-century English variations—remakes of Banks’s play—which began to conquer the European stage: Heinrich Jones, Heinrich Brook, and James Ralph compiled versions. All of them appeared at roughly the same time (ca. 1753), and their coexistence unleashed a debate on plagiarism and adaptation. Lessing, who claims to work with Banks’s text and thus English literary history, admits to not having read the recent three plays, although the inventory of plays performed at the National Theater alludes to Jones’s version. In any case, Lessing’s commentary dispels the idea of an authoritative or original version among the different language adaptations; instead, it seeks a repurposing of translation. Though overtly interested in evaluating different versions in one language, Lessing delineates the highly contested discourse on translations, adaptations, and originality and, in doing so, reveals a discourse on the emergence of national drama traditions and their distinction from other modes of thinking. He glimpses into—and cowrites—the beginnings of modern comparative literature and its historiography; by writing through translation he leaps into a mode of understanding literary production that anticipates our time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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At the same time, Lessing fleshes out the idea of an individual language literature. His translation glosses over details and nuances in the structure and diction of Banks’s play, as he levels the register of language to an “everyday tone,” suggesting a version of resonant German, a linguistic idiom on which a diverse audience could agree. Lessing introduces this revised notion of translation in the fifty-ninth essay. Asking the reader not to judge Banks’s play by the translation that he, Lessing, offers, he proceeds to discuss the challenges a translator faces when negotiating a language that oscillates between the stilted and the overtly popular. This rhetorical move indicates a pattern of language use in the mid-eighteenth century as the style of popular texts reflected a late stage of verbalization and codification of linguistic patterns, pointing to a process that eventually would have a translocal and transregional impact.85 Similarly, plays—especially the techniques of translation used to make them German—tapped into a reservoir of motifs, language, and topics (i.e., the popular discourse) in order to connect the textual foundation of performance with genre requirements for drama and the normative expectations of theater audiences. Performances drew on the mundane and reinforced it. Against this backdrop, Lessing’s discussion of long passages in John Banks’s The Earl of Essex underscores the role of the living language in the production of literature. He often uses his own translations, corrections, and interpretations as a tertium compartiones in developing a notion of an efficient, fluent, and readable German translation. But rather than working across different versions of written language, in order to achieve flexibility and facility, Lessing transfers—back and forth—between performance and published text.86 While he relies on the reader to deduce the notion of an ideal translation, he advocates for a dramatic version that plays well as opposed to one that reads well. Of course, the dynamic circulation of language—despite the ensuing chaos or even noise—resembles the urban discourse in Minna von Barnhelm. In emphasizing the present moment—performance, everyday language, and discursive writing—Lessing circumvents the question of the national altogether, recognizing merely that the concept entails more than a unity of language or a single language. The national resonates with the historical process. But such a process fails, at least in the discussion of The Earl of Essex. Lessing cannot define his ideal Essex outside the play’s dramaturgy, that is, beyond a local staging. Urbanity as a local condition for literary and cultural life arises, as it traverses and ultimately challenges the ideal of the nation. What we are left with is a text that remains outside of literary history or theory. However, though working “merely” as a translation example, this text also

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anticipates the modus operandi of literature, as it will exist some two hundred years later: outside the confines of national paradigms, in the translation zone. Simultaneously, Lessing’s translation work offers glimpses into a disciplinary multitude. Amid performance criticism and a prescriptive dramatic theory, Lessing develops an understanding of culture studies, characterized by different approaches to the literary subject matter and especially the text. The contours of these disciplinary distinctions arise in and through translation, which, in turn, reinforces the new, parallel understanding of comparative literature. Rather than relying on several national traditions, that is, a body of work, this novel version emphasizes the space between these traditions. This space, and the new comparative literature, are shaped by the abilities of translators rather than their works in individual languages or within national traditions, opening the view for translation as the raison d’être of this new concept, on the one hand, and its immediate collision with the emergent author concept, on the other. In this space, translators’ abilities become aligned with disciplinary expertise. The forty-second essay of the Dramaturgy, in which Lessing compares the Italian Merope-drama by Maffei with Voltaire’s, underscores this turn. Lessing uses the concept of work, understood here as professional craft, to develop a profile of the translating, self-professed dramatist. By talking about skilled “versifiers” (Versifikateure), he elevates craft as the main characteristic of a new, specialized translator who sets himself or herself apart from the author. More importantly, he considers Maffei’s notions of poetry, translation, and adaptations a result of training in classical languages. Shaping his method, such training combines philological precision, erudite intuition, and facility or effortlessness; it places solid craft above Maffei’s potential as an artist: “that however which a scholar of good Classical taste, who looks upon the matter rather more as a recreation than a labor worthy of him, could produce, is what he did produce.” Lessing further concludes that Maffei’s work is shaped by linguistic precision—which he achieves through a high degree of structural equivalency—and a resonance with the context of the play’s original conception. In attaining to form as well as the space and time of the source text, he created history based on his expertise. Or so Lessing says, judging Maffei’s translation as that of a particular guild: “His treatment is more mannered and artificial than felicitous, his characters are more in accordance with the analysis of moralists, or with well-known types in books, than drawn from life; his expressions evince more imagination than feeling; the littérateur and versifier are everywhere discernible, but rarely the poet and the genius.”87 Unable to

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produce an effective play, Maffei fails as a dramatist, while establishing himself as a historian. He fails to introduce a living, emphatic language, but in his text he transports past constellations into the present. Maffei is not a creative author, but a scholar who tells the (his)story of literature. The larger context of the passage, including the comparison to Voltaire, reveals not only Lessing’s lack of enthusiasm for French writing but also another understanding of translation. Here, translation indicates differences in style that circulate among and rearrange text-based humanities disciplines. While literature insinuates simultaneity, history creates linearity, memory, and teleology. Is this a retreat on Lessing’s part, reducing his poetic vision to mere communicability of literary production? Indeed, he seems to rescind the demand for the original play. But Lessing reneges in this respect, proposing instead two functions of translation: on the one hand, he emphasizes the aforementioned transposition of the spoken language of performance into the dramatic, printed text and vice versa. On the other hand, he uses translation to develop a general theory of tragedy centering on the conceptual essence of pity and fear. Together, the conceptual nuances of translation work against a political usage of theater and drama (such as the insinuation that an original German play and the National Theater compellingly promote a national community). Translation is tied and remains confined to the text, despite Lessing’s occasional drifting into performance theory. (For example, when describing the relationship between rules and improvisation, he explores a rhetorical use of translation as a metaphor for original performance.) But by using translation as an ancillary tool for interpretation, Lessing leaves behind the translation principles of the Letters on Literature, where translation had aided the quest for clear language, and moves toward hermeneutics. Here, in the work of translating, the understanding of a text-based theory of tragedy appears, establishing not only a theory of literature but also a nascent notion of comparative literature. The latter affects the cultural appropriation of drama: while translation promotes a more limited, contemporaneous understanding of nation, that is, a linguistic community sharing vocabulary and grammatical and stylistic patterns as well as a register of language, which in turn grounds a local, theatergoing public, the Hamburg Dramaturgy resists any recording of national and political affect and taste in the dramatic performance or text. In the nineteenth essay, Lessing writes: “The purpose of tragedy is far more philosophical than the purpose of history, and we diminish its true value when we make it into a mere panegyric for famous men or misuse it to feed our national pride.”88

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Similarly, no theory of dramatic genre can regulate actual theater. Nor can it be transposed into praxis, because one part of local theater discourse will always escape theater norms: the audience. In this respect, “not only the Germans . . . but even the French have as yet no theater.”89 In other words, Lessing notes a profound difference, if not a rift, between a written text and a national community. Lessing finds national literature elsewhere, namely, in the comparison of literatures via translation and, as we have seen in Lessing’s discussion of Merope, in a historically specific state of a general literary and cultural history and the manner in which different disciplinary “bents” describe the historical state. This concept of literary history does not depend on an individual language. Translators’ expertise and intention permeate the style of national literature, but they reflect more than the unique characteristics of language. As they point to historical contexts and interdisciplinary constellations, they focus literature vis-à-vis other cultural phenomena, establishing it as a global phenomenon that can transcend the national in translation. As Lessing substantiates the differences in purpose among what we have come to describe as disciplinary modes of thinking and writing, he also concedes—unintentionally—the inevitability of local, that is, spatial and geographical thinking. Its legacy, which he does not address, clearly consists in a global, not a temporal or historical, reach. (The idea of the dramaturge, exported from the Hamburg Dramaturgy across the (Western) world, exemplifies the latter, as does the text’s relevance in theater studies.) Instead, Lessing observes that the very condition of theater—namely, its being tied to the presence inherent in performance—consists in generating a new language, circulating and in constant motion. This language defines an in-between state, resembling the nature of translation. In contrast, any (dramatic) text, and perhaps most literary texts at the cusp of modernity, are merely an illusion of originality, promising to encapsulate a moment of presence but delivering their own histories instead. When Lessing departed Hamburg, he had finished writing a book that soon would assume a translocal legacy. By then, the Hamburg Dramaturgy had appeared not only in Hamburg but also in Berlin, in both authorized and pirated copies. The book had become a trade object that drew the rhetorical ire and frustration of its author, who desperately tried to intervene in pricing, printing, and distribution beyond Hamburg’s city limits. Lessing had not only turned exterior, globally inflected circumstances and sources inward, that is,

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translated them locally, for the stage. He had also tried to safely contain them in a new medium, the book, while dabbling in the market with altered forms of distribution and subscription. Concluding the Dramaturgy with a disparaging postscript on its printing and publication, he critically accompanied but nevertheless endorsed its new medial life. In letters, he had authorized the Berlin publisher Friedrich Nicolai to set the price for printing the Hamburg Dramaturgy’s first run, emphasizing his marked indifference about whether each installment or the subscription would determine the price. Literary historians have described this intervention as “an early reprinting of the Dramaturgy that forced Lessing to interrupt the writing,”90 the latter presumably in order to generate new interest. But it was, perhaps, Hamburg’s glocal circumstances that proved disruptive and disorienting. Consequently, the book was still a few decades away from being read as a treatise of national literature or prescriptive theory of playwriting. And yet, the book also appeared to have left behind its local roots. Ultimately, however, while radiating beyond the city borders, the Dramaturgy contained the traces of Hamburg’s particular place in the world. By projecting to the world, the Hamburg Dramaturgy’s inherent tension between presence and history—or between local literary life and a nascent national literary canon—comes into sharp focus as we reconsider its oscillation between city and world in a broader cultural context. Indeed, as literary life—encompassing a multitude of genres—leaves the city behind, travels, and absorbs the impact of global networks, it manifests in instances of cultural production that are simultaneously more localized and affected by the world. It is this constellation that will ultimately carry the local and the global into the twenty-first century, while pushing them to the margins of national thinking (if not into oblivion) for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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3

LEAVING THE CITY Conversion to Community, Redemption, and Literary Sociability

Ueberhaupt bin ich der ewige Vorleser, ein herumwandernder Lector, der seine Collegien überall hält, wo Damen sind. In any case, I am the everlasting reader, a meandering tutor, who lectures wherever there are ladies. —Jens Baggesen, on his role in Danish-German salons, ca. 1790

The Country Estate and the New World The outcome of preserving the eighteenth-century world in urban texts was, ironically, to seed modern German literary history with one text: Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy. Nevertheless, the world retained its presence, in Lessing’s text as well as in the formation of literary tradition. Though appeals to the imaginary nation eventually bypassed the global city, the immediate effects of the early form of literary glocalization were both subtle and severe. Literary and performance life left the city behind, retreating instead to the salons in the northern German country estates or accompanying settlers, slave traders, and ultimately slaves across the Atlantic. Unlike Oroonoko, this literary life left no traceable motifs, instead infusing the

written record of performances with the style of speech, declamation, and recitation. In the process, alternate patterns manifested themselves in the disparate network of cultural production along the Atlantic rim: contrary to the quest for book publications, which Lessing experienced as a personal failure and a stifling of creativity, orality was preserved (or perhaps resurrected). Rather than establishing new authorities of literary production, porous groups of oftenanonymous writers persevered in salons; they were joined by readers—like Baggesen—who brought other people’s texts to life. Alternate forms of community emerged, rendering less relevant the debates on the national. Overall, a network of people and genres and a robust exchange of texts, rather than individual books, acted as the media for capturing and translating the world. With such diffuse imagery, the point of departure changes as well. Where do we begin to tell this transatlantic episode in a German literary and cultural history? How was this web of connections spun, seemingly without a center and an organizing, dominant figure? This chapter begins outside Hamburg, in the German-speaking salons of Danish political elites,1 as well as on Caribbean islands and in New World Pennsylvania, where Moravian communities instantiated the memoir as a new genre, laying one foundation—with the Pietist conversion narrative being another—for the vast and sprawling corpus of modern autobiography. Alternatively, this chapter may also start in an inbetween realm, not in a translation zone but in transfer, aboard a ship that brought thousands of slaves from the African continent to the New World, transmitting an oral culture that shaped slave poetry and community and that intersected salon and church communities through religious belief. Finally, this chapter also bridges the two locales of this book, Hamburg and Weimar: Friedrich Schiller (1759–1804), resident of Weimar, inhabited the minds of at least one northern German salon during the early 1790s. He knew nothing of his northern friends celebrating him, his ideas, and poetic production in a memorial service, believing a rumor that he had died. The illustrious cast in Danish Hellebek included several members of the slavetrading Schimmelmann family, first and foremost Ernst von Schimmelmann, his second wife, Charlotte, and her brother. The Danish poet Jens Baggesen (1764–1826), who became a prime mediator in the German-Danish cultural exchange and whose words precede this chapter, took part in the celebration, as did, in all likelihood, several members of the Reventlow family who were related by marriage to the Schimmelmann clan. They all had connections to other salons: in Copenhagen, Sophienholm, and Emkendorf, Augustenburg, Hellebek, and Seelust, Lübeck, Ahrensburg, and Wandsbek, forming a cultural

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network that, hitherto forgotten, illuminates, on the one hand, the processes of literary life fleeing the city, and illustrates, on the other, the symbiosis of religious thinking and cultural, especially poetic, practice.2 The nature of these cultural relations is the subject of this chapter. It demonstrates how around 1800 structures of sociability and redemption evolved as staples of the thinking community, connecting global enterprise and local artistic production. Where literary historiography would later notice the absence of “nation,” an investment in culture prevailed, producing in turn a literary mode that resembled the conceptual openness, blurred boundaries, and overall expansiveness of literary life. In these networks, the idea of friendship promotes imagination. As they unfold—or are arranged in a transatlantic mode—the networks utilize elements and media of religious communities (e.g., pastoral work, journals), which become a primary means of relating information about the New World and erecting communities that connect various centers of dominance and bridge spatial distances. In its final part, the chapter therefore suggests how alternative notions of community migrated and, in condensing the spatial extension that had spanned half the globe, became domesticated, initially in the northern salon. Reflecting social and gender dependencies, these spaces also showcased performances. Here, the inflections of a revolutionary world—indeed the revolutions in the New World, not just the French Revolution—were sublimated in an aesthetic community and, in recalling oral traditions against the exemplariness of Greek poetry, emphasized the presence of artistic experience through improvisation. National literary historiography began, charting the path toward eclipsing the nexus of city and world as a force for telling the story of literature as that of printed texts and editions.

Nevermann Is Everyman Before we reach this juncture, we return, once more, to Hamburg. In 1793, Friedrich Theodor Nevermann, an otherwise unspectacular, even obscure denizen of Hamburg, published Neuer Almanach aller um Hamburg liegenden Gärten, nebst Zugabe einiger Gedichte (New Almanac of Hamburg’s Gardens, including a Few Poems).3 The title is telling: not only was Nevermann exclusively known for garden books, before being recently rediscovered as the author of a likely source text of Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili,4 but Nevermann’s interest in the edge of the city, his turn to alley and promenade,

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and his contemplation of world represent the inclinations of many members of Hamburg’s society, if not those of everyman. To start this chapter with the few poems included in the almanac is therefore fitting, because their content— and, as we shall see, their form—reflects a caesura in the relationship between literary life and the city. In the late eighteenth century, poets and writers left cities and towns en masse, lamenting the bad air and, metaphorically speaking, the suffocating climate of urbanity. The vicinity of courts proved as repulsive as hierarchical etiquette and cramped living quarters.5 Whereas in Weimar, writers treated the town’s confines as a theme worthy of literary self-reflection, poets escaped (without many words) Hamburg as well. But Nevermann’s turn to the garden is real and local for yet another reason. The small book resonates with a trajectory of erstwhile global activity in the port city: merchants Caspar Voght and Georg Heinrich Sieveking, for example, despite being major players in transatlantic shipping and trade, turned inward. They not only organized a private reading circle as youths; they also began tending to the city’s business. Voght established services for the poor, combining housing, health and monetary care (Armenanstalt and Armenkasse), and an orphanage; the second of Nevermann’s poems, “Das Waisengrün” (Orphan’s Green), alludes to the latter. At the same time, he also became a proponent of modern agricultural methods, creating an impressive estate just outside Hamburg (Gut Flottbeck) that implemented modern principles of urban, rural, and garden design. The first poem, “Aufmunterung zum Spatziergang an einem angenehmen Sommertage [sic]” (Encouragement to Stroll on a Pleasant Summer Day), installs occasional poetry’s formal elements and its thematic focus: the casual turn away from the city, underscored through a celebration of nature’s harmonious life cycle in popular form: ode-like, sixteen four-line stanzas are held together by simple, paired rhymes. They progress in tone and theme from the observation of natural beauty and toward recognition of perfect creation. Culminating in a declamatory celebration of divine appreciation and humanity, the poem cannot guard against looming war, despite Hamburg’s quest for unity and harmony. The next two poems, “Waisengrün” and “An den Frieden” (To Peace), pick the influx of reality and experience of war as their central theme, respectively directing the readers’ attention to the bliss that childhood innocence promises in contrast to the misery of orphans, and an idealized, holy “golden” peace that desperately conjures up ecstasy while being unable to disguise the carnage and mourning (“tears”) of war. A pronounced oscillation between extremes characterizes all three poems: whereas the dynamic movement in the first poem hovers between joy and friendship,

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all the while intersecting with allusions to war and refuge and being offset by idyllic agriculture, the second poem oscillates between religious ritual and the social discrepancy that has patrician, wealthy Hamburg create a modern social welfare structure. The poetic pendulum swings in a drastic, seemingly violent mode in the third poem: its rhythm renders palpable the virulence of fear and chaos. Imaginatively folding back onto the urban center, the first three poems resonate with local Hamburg, while the fourth casts a global line: “Der dankbare Afrikaner, an Lord Wilberforce” (The Grateful African, to Lord Wilberforce) references a global problem and context, namely, the slave trade, thus radically changing the identity of the alleged lyrical subject and the frame of reference. The poem’s form is also different: longer than the first three poems, it neatly transitions into a fifth, “Gedanken der Zukunft” (Future Thought), which reads like a second part of the fourth poem. A note accompanies the dedication-like title of the fourth poem, acknowledging the historical significance of William Wilberforce’s speech to the British Parliament in 1792, in which he advocated for an end to the slave trade, and expressing the hope that a poetic voice “greater than the author’s” will celebrate the politician.6 The dual inscription of global occasion and local, individual moderation underscores more than Hamburg’s affinity for the British Empire or the city’s intermediary role in times of war as well as continental trade. And while it reiterates the role of the British Empire as an important lens through which scholarship on the Atlantic world is refracted, it emphasizes Hamburg’s role as a nodal point in focusing and redistributing anti-imperial as well as colonial forces. The inscription alludes to the city’s entanglements in slavery and the slave trade’s omniscient presence in the urban mind-set. The pairing of global role and local impact resonates with the self-understanding of some of the city’s most famous inhabitants. Voght, for example, put himself in line with contemporaries whose world-historical significance was evident. He writes, “Howard and Wilberforce’s and Penn’s images hovered above my desk,”7 underscoring his stationary presence in Hamburg while simultaneously orienting himself globally and especially toward the New World. The abolitionists were at once example and inspiration, not least by spurring him to become a writer. They impart historical directive and obligation to the citizen and cosmopolitan Voght, while illustrating the cultural processes of making an icon: the Hamburg citizen as an exemplary patrician. At the same time, in Nevermann’s poem, the concession of poetic modesty unifies the speaking voice with the image of the African man referenced in the poem’s title.8 It is an image that the voice created in the first place. Alleging that

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the African is rather nonerudite (ungelehrt), the lyrical self claims ownership of place, certainty of knowledge, and self-confidence (An unsrer Küst hab ichs vernommen), while conflating his identity with the African’s identity and desiring sentimental affection, loyalty, and love. Simultaneously, the voice expresses disappointment and desperation when acknowledging that Wilberforce failed. As the declaration of emphatic friendship alternates with the invocation of brotherhood—the latter irrespective of the color of skin—the lyrical self concedes power to history, as the larger historical process interferes with the declarative statement and the declamatory, albeit momentary and fleeting, power of speech. Though mercantile greed outpaced humanism in the end, Wilberforce, the lyrical self, and “the grateful African”—and by extension all enslaved African people—are united in a sentimental community of mutual affection. This part of the poem culminates in “a narrative hymn,” combining praise, prayer, and prophecy in a declaration of joy and leading to a glimpse of the future. However, the optimistic forecast remains at best momentary, as the lyrical self reminds us of slavery, underscoring the validity of its claim by summing up the history of the slave trade. Relating humans’ innate love of freedom, the poem tells stories of erstwhile slaves’ flight into the interior of the African continent, only to be captured—at times betrayed by their “own brothers”—and sold, and often resold, into slavery.9 Once abducted and deported from their homes and families, slaves were deprived of their humanity. But all human beings were robbed of their dignity. Either oppressors or oppressed, they were now incapable of mutual affection or friendship. These outward signs of common humanity seem lost. As they vanish, a community characterized by lament and mourning replaces that of human action, deferring hope into a future marked by salvation and redemption. Rendering Caribbean slavery synonymous with death, the poem turns to celebrating Wilberforce once again—this time as a redeemer and an angel. Here, the elevation of a historical figure takes on ecstatic form. Promising to worship him like he would Christ, the lyrical self recognizes that meeting Wilberforce during this lifetime is out of the question. The voice defers hope for equality and mutual recognition to heaven, because death will also render personal inequality mute. Accordingly, the dynamic of speaking—and thus, the poem’s dynamic—reverses itself: in death, the lyrical self will be erudite (gelehrt); all differences, hierarchies, and incompatibilities will vanish. Not surprisingly then, the last lines of the fourth poem seamlessly transition into the fifth, celebrating death. Becoming one with a spiritual force, the lyrical self rejoices in his enlightenment, which compares to an experience of

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personal fulfillment in connecting (self-)recognition and public redemption. The poems resonate with, and perhaps attest to, “the subjective, mystical, [and] emotional religiosity” pervading northern Germany at this time.10 The emphatic structures of these poems not only appeal to Hamburg’s position in the world and to its pronounced local identity, but also contribute to what I have called, in chapter 1, the empire of sentiment. Imaginatively encompassing the Atlantic rim, these structures resemble, at first glance, the affective mold that linked the British metropolis and colonies. They clearly transgress and transcend thinking along the lines of nation, territory, and a geographically based, political empire and enable communal, emotional investment—a feeling—in the global enterprise. But unlike the empire of sentiment that transposed affective identification onto the theater, enwrapping stage and audiences, the poems conjure up a different imagery and style that together suggest flight: the transcendence of space and time, often with an emphasis on the individual reader. Tapping into a documented reservoir of religiously grounded feelings of ecstasy, the poems simulate a situation of emotive affection that must have reminded contemporaries of the pathos in Pietist hymns rendering the poems at once familiar and popular.11 At the same time, the poems allude to the “news bits” that reports on Wilberforce’s efforts had become. But rather than engineering the reader’s forceful, coerced identification with the lyrics’ rhythmic pattern or the world the lines portray, the poems participate in the circulation of texts that affects the tone of religiously inspired abolitionist writing (e.g., from the British Committee for Effecting the Abolition of Slave Trade) as well as the Pietist and Moravian Lebenslauf (memoir). This network of texts allows us to imagine how patterns of oral and literate, and ultimately literary, cultures intersected and how the world encroached upon the city, fragmented and diffused its unity, and ultimately was localized in restricted, often semiprivate spaces such as mansions, country houses, or the northern German salon.

Abolition, Religion, Translation Reverberations of this network can be found in unlikely places. In 1792, Ernst Philipp Kirstein (1773–1864), a longtime private secretary to Ernst von Schimmelmann, by then the secretary of the Danish treasury, published a treatise in the periodical Deutsches Magazin (German Magazine). Kirstein, like most administrators in the Danish Unitary State, was German-born; his

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written and spoken language was German. The publication venue exuded a binational, even global context (albeit without any bilingual traits): German Magazine had previously appeared in Hamburg. From 1792, it was published in neighboring Danish Altona, before moving, eventually, to Copenhagen. Exemplifying the German-Danish symbiosis of the times, this particular journal provided the perfect venue for the intervention Kirstein was about to make, while further underscoring the role of periodicals in creating a global— or at the very least, transatlantic—network of interrelated locales. Laying out the rationale for abolishing the slave trade in the Danish West Indies and entitled “Auszug aus der Vorstellung an den König wegen Abschaffung des Negerhandels für die Dänischen Staaten” (Excerpt from the Presentation to the King, Concerning the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the Danish Estates), the text appears—at first glance—trivial. It was just one among several, not to say many, that surfaced in Europe and that dealt with the abolition of the slave trade and slavery.12 Inevitably tied to the larger question of peace (or war) between the newly independent United States and Britain, the slave trade had picked up with vigor around 1780, especially in North America, while being confronted by its critics, who stressed the inhuman qualities of the enterprise. This context created the foundation for abolitionist discourse. As Hugh Thomas claims, “In England, after the loss of the American colonies, antislavery became ‘a means to redeem the nation, a patriotic act.’”13 Influenced by firsthand experiences of the conditions on slave ships during the Atlantic passage as well as stays in the West Indies, abolitionists often interacted with religious movements, such as the Quakers,14 while affecting a rhetoric that resembled that of Histoire des deux Indes. Following the publication of this work in 1770, abolitionist thought had begun bubbling up all over Europe, insisting on basic human rights that treated all human beings equally and resorting to an often sharp, not to say violent, rhetoric. The Histoire, a massive book attributed to Thomas Guillaume François Raynal (1713–1796), engendered waves of excerpting, translating, rewriting, and selective appropriation of sources—and ultimately, of writers’ authority—across Europe, including in German-speaking lands. In addition, many German-language journals published news about the West Indies, detailing social dynamics among the islands’ inhabitants, including the rising tide of slave rebellions. The journals printed reviews of and commentary on English or French texts critical of Caribbean slavery. Shortly before publishing Kirstein’s piece, German Magazine accounted for the shifting attitude toward the slave trade in a lengthy article entitled “Über

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die Vorbereitungen zur Aufhebung des Negerhandels und Abschaffung der Sklaverei auf den Englischen Westindischen Inseln” (On the Preparations for the Abolition of the Trade in Negroes and of the Slave Trade in the British West Indies).15 The article sums up a debate in which more and more writers, though not always outright abolitionists, engaged. Leading to the conviction that slavery was a disgrace to humanity and that abolishing the slave trade was a first step in ending enslavement, their public discourse resonated across a broad spectrum of mercantile and political interests, as Caspar Voght’s diaries and the nascent political and literary discourse of the newly independent United States show. That the debate was conducted in a particularly intense way in journals such as German Magazine, Minerva, and Politisch-historisches Magazin (Historical Political Magazine) surprises little, because they all were published in Hamburg. The journals thus join other instances that mediated slavery: sugar refineries in Hamburg’s vicinity, accumulated mercantile wealth within the city walls, and most importantly, its status as a safe port. Hamburg kept the slave trade afloat in unsafe times, allowing merchants to circumvent blockades under the guise of political neutrality. The overabundance of similar publications notwithstanding, Kirstein’s treatise remains remarkable. It is widely believed that Kirstein acted on Schimmelmann’s order when thrusting into the public eye what is best described as a policy paper, summarizing deliberations by a royal Danish commission on the future of the transatlantic slave trade. Schimmelmann not only took part in these discussions; he assumed an active, if secret role in the abolitionist debate. Soon after his father’s death in 1782, he began pondering changes to the economic and legal status of the slaves working on the family’s sugar plantations in the Danish West Indies, proposing reform to the numerous heirs of the estate. Needless to say, the family turned him down. As large private shipping magnates, and by far the biggest sugar producers and slave owners in the Danish territories, the entire Schimmelmann family—with Ernst as its most prominent heir—had a lot to lose. Once he was in office, a public venue of working toward changes in governmental policy became available to Schimmelmann, although it clearly conflicted with his private business interests as well as with his longer-term political ambition. Advocating for abolition betrayed the geopolitical interests of the Danish Crown, in addition to endangering the Danish monopoly over sugar refineries in the Hamburg vicinity. Thus he turned to Kirstein. But by all accounts, it is his thoughts that are rendered—that is, translated or transposed—in Kirstein’s text. It is based on Schimmelmann’s handwritten “Denkschrift” (Thoughts, 1791) to a

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fellow cabinet secretary and, as Christian Degn has shown, corroborated by a later revision published under the short title “Alleruntertänigste Vorstellung” (Subserviant Presentation) in Minerva (1792).16 Finally, Schimmelmann is identified as one of the committee members and signatories who prepared the recommendations laid out in “Excerpt.”17 Framing the sixty pages is an appeal to well-versed, exacting journal readers, because this local text—first distributed at Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen, for an obviously limited and secret purpose—styles itself as an intervention in the public debate on the slave trade and slavery in a global context. Incidentally, not only does the text deal with a theme of global significance, but its initial circulation underscores, paradoxically, the global ramifications of the local. The Copenhagen castle, with its locally defined space, alludes to a global reach, because the port in the West Indies where slave ships—among them The Christiansborg—landed was called Christiansford (and alternately, Fort Christiansborg), while the port of departure in Guinea was Christiansborg.18 Names indicate the nodal points within the transatlantic network, suggesting a mode of global thinking that relied on early modern forms of honoring patrons. At the same time, the global “outposts,” especially Christiansborg in Guinea, displayed features of the Danish colonial center: an impressive, ornamental facade—with a particularly striking, open second-floor porch—directed the view to the colonial center of power, the Copenhagen castle, while harboring a slave dungeon on the back of the ground floor; it clearly identified the purpose of the outpost. The port mansion’s cramped, not to say modest, interior spaces situated nonaristocratic life.19 They transposed the northern German spaces in which conversational culture flourished, underlining the enmeshing of privacy with community and, eventually, publicity. Their intersection was, as we shall see shortly, central to the global engagement of local forces. As befits its publication venue, Kirstein’s piece stands out for an unusual mix of genres, combining meeting minutes with a summary of news reports, lengthy balance sheets, and trade accounts. The “Excerpt” not only details the living conditions of slaves in the Danish West Indies and the situation on “Guinea’s coasts,” where the Crown procured slaves, but also compares—in its opening section—Danish to English and French colonialism. The piece concludes with recommendations for ending slavery that clearly surpass the Danish situation, framing abolition as a global challenge to humankind. Like Nevermann’s poem and Voght’s diary, “Excerpt” invokes Wilberforce: “The name Wilberforce will never be forgotten throughout history as long as it

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preserves the names of people who did extraordinarily great things for humankind. Future generations will possibly remember him with utmost gratefulness as they realize, in a number of years, the full impact of his actions.”20 The text thus resonates globally by proposing multiple communities that rely upon sentiment—and, even more so, on the rejection of sentiment—for their creation, sustenance, and operation. “Excerpt” conjures up images of mercantile communities, political ideals, and actually existing forms of state, as well as images of racial communities and (an however abstractly invoked) humankind. By never picking as a central theme the fact of Wilberforce’s evangelical conversion in 1784–85,21 the invocation of his name ends up concealing, and nevertheless thriving on, religious discourses of sentimentality. Overall, the various, communal images act as translations of abolitionist discourse. As the trade in ideas uses a seemingly incompatible conduit, religion, it transposes values across a broad social spectrum, ultimately secularizing a religious impetus by adapting it to the public sphere. These values shape the broader social and ethical debates of the time by interacting with the domineering political discourse of Enlightenment thought—not least of all, the discourse of the French Revolution—while exposing its shortfalls and ultimate reliance on quasi-religious rhetoric in order to cement its influence. Elsewhere I elaborate on the arbitrating effects of this rhetoric, introducing Kirstein’s argument as one among several examples of mediating radical political and epistemological influxes that pervaded Europe with the publication of the Histoire des deux Indes. Indeed, epitomizing latent abolitionist thought amid news of violent slave rebellions, “Excerpt” wrestles with the emergent human rights discourse à la Histoire. I describe the essay’s argument as driven, alternately, by shrewd economic calculations or by a larger effort to moderate Enlightenment in the face of an increasingly radical impetus, especially when it came to the slave trade and slavery.22 For, after all, as Hugh Thomas has pointed out, revolutionary events and rebellions emboldened both abolitionists and proponents of slavery.23 However, the harmonizing intention of Kirstein’s piece led to a rhetorical implosion, rupturing the unity of the text and producing a sentimental void, which foreclosed the possibility of aesthetic identification that, for example, theater afforded. Instead, the text’s coherence and effectiveness of argumentation broke apart, forcing a new narrative logic that resorted to economic calculus and the language of trade. Metaphorically speaking, in this alternate account, slavery’s global reverberations destroy the text—and its aim for harmony and nonviolence—and, at the same time, perpetuate trade as the primary mode for depicting global relations. On this

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reading, images of mercantile, global interests—what Pauline Kleingeld sums up as economic cosmopolitanism—rise to the surface of texts, threatening to eclipse the translations of abolition into sentimentality.24 Here, I want to take several steps back, paying attention to selected images of community that, while producing a dominance of their own, simultaneously counteract empire and coproduce it. By all accounts, religious practice influenced Kirstein’s “source,” Ernst von Schimmelmann; furthermore, religiously inspired communities constitute both a point of departure and the narrative aim of “Excerpt.” In addition, the text engages the legacy of another text, the writings of Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp (1721–1787). Based on a three-year journey (1767–69) to the Danish West Indies and Bethlehem and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Oldendorp had assembled notes, maps, and sketches—not only of missionary infrastructure but also of vegetation and animals—as well as reports, accounts of what we would call “oral histories,” letters, and memoirs. More than half a decade later, the material finally appeared in two volumes, edited by Johann Jacob Bossart of the Brethren’s seminary in Barby.25 Indicative of the emergence of geographical imagination in the eighteenth century and specifically in keeping with contemporary conventions of establishing authority in travel texts, the first part relates geographical knowledge.26 Its final part provides a history of slavery that has Guinea, the Atlantic passage, and the West Indies as its central locales and features the Portuguese, British, and Dutch, along with African traders, as the major purveyors of slaves; conveniently, Oldendorp casts the Danes in a minor role. Only the second part of Geschichte der Mission der evangelischen Brüder auf den caraibischen Inseln S. Thomas, S. Croix und S. Jan (A Caribbean Mission, 1777), which is divided into five books, describes the missionary efforts from 1734 to 1768. Missionary intention thus appears as an afterthought to territorial exploration. Yet the “hidden presence” of Oldendorp’s text, its barely recognizable traces, shape Kirstein’s narrative nevertheless, ultimately invoking an ideal community of readers. The traces of A Caribbean Mission both upend and amplify the news that Kirstein’s text seeks to stir, impart, and shape. The article by Kirstein begins by challenging the veracity of news genres that claim to pinpoint the causes of recent Caribbean slave revolts. Kirstein analyzes journalistic discourse, suggesting that many texts use black upheaval as a mechanism of deflection from other political and social problems and mainly in an effort to conceal the disharmony within another group, the white settlers. In employing racial imagery relying on opposition and contrast, while exposing its rhetorical value and social symbolism, Kirstein obliquely addresses

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the violence of slave trade and its impact on public debate and, ultimately, the shape of the news. He emphasizes the rhetorical pattern by relating explicit facts about the economics of trade, the low profit margins of plantations, and the high mortality rate during the transatlantic passage, ultimately producing a subtext that paves the way for his argument’s eventual translation into the language of trade. But overtly, he writes about white moral flaws and communal betterment, effectively turning the tables on what he had previously identified as a strategy of rhetorical concealment. The whites’ hypocrisy in depicting violent slaves gets exposed. Consequently, rather than dwelling on slave revolts as a central theme, Kirstein seeks to avert any risks of white rebellion. This rhetorical move in particular has textual recourse to accounts of the Caribbean mission in the 1730s. They not only detail, as Jon Sensbach meticulously reconstructs in Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World, the decade’s slave rebellions in the New World and during the Atlantic passage, but also a struggle over slaves’ religion, which was fought vigorously among various Evangelist sects. In addition, these accounts point to white revolts. Contrary to the later conflicts in the French Caribbean colonies, which in the 1790s pitted whites against blacks, the 1730s had planters agitate against the Brethren, declaring point-blank that missionaries should leave and planters, if they desired, should hire preachers to introduce slaves to Christianity.27 Unlike other contemporary treatises modeling paths toward educating, liberating, and “morally improving” blacks, casting them as noble savage, Kirstein hopes to educate whites by reminding them of the power of religion. Thus his intervention reads like a bifurcating attempt at conversion: by converting whites to the acceptance of the Savior, abolition arises as an option on the horizon, without being contingent on the conversion of slaves. The somewhat shrewd move, in reversal of Schimmelmann’s plea for black education in “Thoughts,” ultimately drives the text. Unlike Kirstein, his boss had insisted on slaves’ education, stating emphatically: “Education must precede their liberation, or otherwise they will jeopardize their own well-being as much as their masters.”28 Raising a larger question and probing the limits of morality, Kirstein suggests that by advocating for abolition, whites can reclaim their inherent goodness as human beings, thus forming a transatlantic community. Surely, his proposal is racially based. But first and foremost, Kirstein argues for embracing a religion that is inevitably tied to the Caribbean legacy of missions undertaken by the “Evangelical Brethren” (Moravians; Herrnhuter). To him, advancing policies of the Danish Unitary State involves acceptance of

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a religious transatlantic community. First and foremost, Kirstein cares about nation and statehood, not about empire. At the same time, because of its religious substrate, such an idealized (white) community appears not only transnational but also subnational, transcending or undoing imperial (that is, nationalist) power. By forfeiting an imperial longing for common identity between Denmark and the islands, the Brethren community stands in contrast to the sentimental communities that were forged, for example, in eighteenthcentury British theater and localized in Hamburg’s urban environment, where they flourished without losing their global flair. This tension, I believe, complicates any deliberate efforts to relocate or to translate the religious empire back into the German city. But the Moravian community implies more than what Kirstein’s rhetoric originally suggests, namely, a legacy of early modern Christianity that aligned whiteness with morality and justified slavery. Nicholas von Zinzendorf, the eccentric count and erstwhile Pietist who revived the Moravian sect on his Herrnhut estate and turned it into a movement proselytizing across the world, delivered strong proslavery comments while visiting the island of St. Thomas in 1738, arguing not only that every human being’s position in life was predetermined by “the Lord . . . Himself [and that] everyone must gladly endure the state into which God has placed him and be content with God’s wise counsel.” He continued, “God has punished the first Negroes with slavery,” only to suggest, obliquely, that the slaves of St. Thomas may occupy a modestly privileged position among “Negroes or Savages called to the Lord in many places by the Brethren.”29 The Danish West Indies were the first islands in the Caribbean where the Moravians established themselves, along with settlements along the shores of the newly independent United States, in particular in Pennsylvania and Georgia. In turn, fueled by their information network, the Moravian community inspired continuous migration from Europe to the Americas. These early eighteenth-century developments profoundly influenced the thought and action at the Danish court, and among the German-speaking politicians, businessmen, writers, and church personnel in its orbit. Key to the Moravian impact on both sides of the Atlantic was the manner in which the religious community accounted for individuality within, as well as the constant self-presentation as a community of outreach—through teaching, mission, and worship but also a worldwide publication network. In Kirstein’s argument, two elements of Moravian religious life are important. In keeping with the ultimate goal of his article, Kirstein underscores that thriving communities can be forged and aided by legislation, cloaking in tradition and

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legitimacy the other piece of legislation that “Excerpt” champions: the abolition of the slave trade. Moreover (and more importantly), in his view, religious communities exist as pragmatic, ritualized forms of enacting sociability and, ultimately, of stabilizing the social fabric: “What should primarily be achieved through this, is order.”30 In this respect, Kirstein’s argumentation resonates with early Moravian doctrine and Zinzendorf ’s endorsement of slavery: they came with hierarchies and dependencies, which in turn involved structure. But in working toward a stable social fabric, religion also intersects with the conjugal family. Kirstein envisions the two realms working in synergy toward a natural abolition of the slave trade, simply because there was no longer any need for importing slaves once they procreated. He firmly believed that once slaves lived as families and worshipped in local communities, “the West Indian culture” (that is, the colonial plantation economy) would be preserved. As the economic necessity for trade disappeared, slavery became “naturally” sustainable. Procreation, growth, and development became cognitive figures replacing exchange.31 In conjuring this model, Kirstein adapted, on the one hand, Schimmelmann’s idea of reforming and liberating slaves through family life, a project the politician had tried to implement on his own plantations. Strangely, the idea of conventional, Christian marriage ceremonies, and a slave community consisting of smaller family units, appealed even to adversaries within the Schimmelmann-Reventlow family. On the other hand, Kirstein avoided any recourse to education and thus concealed what Schimmelmann had championed not only in “Thoughts,” but also—and much more vigorously—in the family dispute that pitted Ernst against Fritz von Reventlow (1755–1828), his brother-in-law. From the time of Heinrich von Schimmelmann’s death, Ernst, in probating the estate, had launched efforts to reform the social life and management of the family’s West Indian plantations. Despite being rebuked, he continued his reform efforts. By the mid-1780s, he had altered his approach, appointing new inspectors who traveled to the islands with catalogues of questions. They were charged with testing alternatives for improving the plantations and were asked to observe life in the colonies and make recommendations for change upon their return. One of the inspectors, Johannes Heitmann, turned to the Moravian missionaries, asking for supplementary reports in order to contextualize his observations in local knowledge and channel all materials back to Copenhagen. The result was an accumulation of epistemic authority, in addition to economic power. Suddenly, Schimmelmann possessed not only actual, albeit mediated knowledge about the Danish West Indies; he also

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underscored his newfound authority by anchoring it in two textual traditions: first, through travel documents that combined the scientific expertise of observation with assurances of usefulness—the latter being achieved by responding to specific questions; second, turning to supplements provided by a religious group who in this case fulfilled, most likely reluctantly, an anthropological task, while surely lodging the report in the tradition of missionary records. Although he was never its pupil, Schimmelmann embodied the ideal product of the Hamburg Trade Academy, exhibiting in ideal manner how trade expertise and exchange were sustained by world knowledge. Schimmelmann not only wanted to improve slaves’ material conditions through modest profit sharing for all laborers on his plantations; he also wanted to grant the slaves rights and make them fully subject to the legal code. Most striking, however, is the envisioned technique of implementing the suggestions. Christian Degn has described the author’s intervention “as translation of the Ten Commandments into a rationalist language.”32 Indeed, Schimmelmann proclaims basic human rights by resorting to descriptors of a divine, natural law of human fraternity, involving social structures of mutual respect, labor, and individual worship as well as setting aside time for contemplation and rest. Arguably, this strategy resembles more a translation of human rights into the language of the Ten Commandments than the other way round. Ultimately, it is the style—including the author’s insistence on humans’ innate feelings for society—and his recommendation to teach children how to read and write in Danish that create the seed of a religious community of compassion, affection, and sympathy. He speaks of religion’s “comforting solace and insatiable hope,”33 appealing to unity and mutual patience as well as planters’ and owners’ care and sympathy for slaves—all the while acknowledging that slavery itself creates the material conditions for fulfilling the task of material (and ethical) compensation. Making this argument involves religious laboring on the part of Schimmelmann, who promptly juxtaposes the ideal of the Caribbean islands to the illness-infected, cramped conditions in the centers of European cities, where people subsist like animals or things, stripped of any chance at moral existence.34 But he goes beyond his personal reckoning, returning this time to an idea of community created by legislation. Schimmelmann’s proposal concludes that the essential elements of economic, spiritual, and intellectual “liberation” may lead to slaves’ conversion to Christianity and the salvation it entails. While embracing Christianity wins Reventlow’s endorsement, he takes issue with Schimmelmann’s central idea: to bestow upon all human beings

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membership in civil society. In a forty-two-page paper, he emphatically underscores the necessity of maintaining power over a social constellation that was originally created through violence, namely, the original acts of capture and enslavement. Anything short of insisting on this dynamic will lead to revenge: “It is a matter of fate!” They [slaves] must rule or remain servants,” writes Reventlow.35 His alternative insists on viewing slaves as “members of our household, as servants, who, although they must work for their master, will work under just labor conditions.”36 Human nature, he claims, is respected by affording acts of human kindness and welfare. Consequently, as he proposes structures that may facilitate these acts, he turns to spaces and institutions that accommodate European families: slaves are to be married in church ceremonies, even if they are heathens; they are to live in houses surrounded by gardens for cultivation of fruit, vegetables, and a few small farm animals; their affairs are to be regulated by family laws, including those that set forth stipulations for obtaining their freedom. Though smaller in scale, the plantation’s medical facilities and care for invalids and elders are supposed to resemble the poverty management in colonial centers, for example, in Hamburg. However, all the proposed measures apply only to slaves working the fields; in Reventlow’s “vision,” they no longer have access to the households of planters and white families. In contrast, Schimmelmann does not separate the different spheres of indentured labor. Furthermore, whereas Schimmelmann had emphasized personal unity and reckoning with God as foundations for the slaves’ salvation, Reventlow calls for open government support of the Brethren, praising the Moravian brand of Christianity. Strangely enough, though, he does not discuss their role in the lives of slaves; only the textual context in which he writes implies their relevance in the overall project of improving the living conditions on the Schimmelmann family’s plantations. The differences between Schimmelmann’s and Reventlow’s proposals had historical consequences, influencing steps taken toward abolition in the Danish Unitary State.37 More subtly, though, these nuances also produced textual effects. Whereas Reventlow considers the prime value of the Moravian mission in its conquering and thus culturally captivating impact, Schimmelmann is interested in the Brethren’s educational institutions, which are suitable for furthering his individual human rights campaign; he willingly veils his quest in religious disguise. Unlike in Reventlow’s proposal, where religion is part of ritual (i.e., the discussion of slave weddings) but not entwined with any, however latent abolitionism, Schimmelmann considers religious conversion a pleasant, though not inevitable by-product of recognizing natural

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law. If human rights further the religious project of the Brethren, both end up stronger. Thus, despite its sophisticated rhetorical concealment of interventionist strategies, Schimmelmann’s text advances the century’s ideas, whereas Reventlow’s essentially endorses the status quo. By transcending his intervention into the realm of rhetoric, Schimmelmann cements the far-reaching, often ambiguous legacy of Enlightenment. Against this backdrop of an intellectual family feud, Kirstein’s “Excerpt” unfolds. It turns out to be indebted to Reventlow’s text as well. Kirstein claims, for example, that the oversupply of domestic slaves hinders the formation of communal structures among slaves, not least because it distorts the distribution of resources and wealth in the West Indies. In colonial societies organized around slavery, wealth was measured in cash, credit, social position, or trade and possession of luxury goods, but also in human capital. Appraising the possession of domestic and plantation slaves became a negotiating tool, not to say a battleground, for establishing social hierarchies and influence among colonialists on the islands.38 Kirstein suggests that by slapping a luxury tax on the possession of domestic slaves and redistributing the tax earnings to the plantations, living conditions can be improved, allowing in turn for increased procreation. Thus, by appeasing Reventlow, Kirstein’s text accomplishes more than absorbing Schimmelmann’s religiosity or accommodating his desire for anonymity amid a campaign for human rights. “Excerpt” also goes beyond merely archiving Oldendorp’s account. Surely, A Caribbean Mission’s life stories—including excerpts from letters allegedly written by slaves, addressed to the Danish king, and describing slaves’ work for moral betterment—must have read like their embrace of empire via religion; Oldendorp effectively interlaced tales of missionary efforts and of slaves’ willing embrace of the Savior (including those by heathens as well as those baptized in other churches).39 Though none of the three writers explicitly addresses the latter aspect, to Kirstein, the Brethren clearly provided a recipe for enlisting religious community for political purposes. Adhering to A Caribbean Mission’s emphasis on religious labor, he advocates for Moravian form or style rather than for an imposition of political ideas or content in the disguise of belief. That Moravian missionaries lobbied for Danish language in their efforts neither strengthened nor undermined the imperial component vis-à-vis the Danish-German symbiosis; indeed, the contemporary accounts relate the multitude of languages—German and Dutch played a strong role in the first missionary efforts. Taking the route from Herrnhut via Copenhagen, the Brethren—in particular their town structures, latently urban life, crafts and

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entertainment in settlements such as Danish Christiansfeld—cemented the connections.40 At the same time, their performance of community in these spaces—the declamation of a written text that then would enter worldwide circulation in published and redacted form—allowed cultural practitioners in the northern German salons (e.g., poets, artists, and philosophers) an alternative to the individual creation of political ideas or literary life. Metaphorically speaking, Kirstein’s text brings the Evangelical mission back to the Danish Unitary State. In both stabilizing and mobilizing white identity, the idealized community situated itself in a global and translingual manner and with a global task: to end the slave trade, while enforcing white superiority. And yet, the actual values of Moravian communal structures (and their legacy in salon culture) are buried in the emotive layers of the text. For in the “narrative stutter” of the sentimental void, Kirstein’s text expresses the desire for immediacy, or an unfiltered sentiment, which allowed for the communal feeling and engagement of the present. Drawing on the impact of performance situations that enwrapped the global Moravian community, the article thus exposes another one of its structural tensions. Not only the line between national politics and imperial religion proves difficult to straddle; Kirstein also encounters the stylistic limits of bundling together published news accounts, political treatises, and religious doctrine and fashioning the product as a journal article. But underneath the subtle intertexts imparting Moravian doctrine, Kirstein’s article retranslates cultural patterns to German-speaking Europe that, thus invigorated, proved vital to the development of modern German literature in the context of the world—precisely by defining what would be excluded from national literary historiography. The article gains its importance by exhibiting the thresholds between orality and literacy, individual and community, but first and foremost, between the local and the global. Though it is certainly not a literary text, it projects images of community pervading religious life. These images, in turn, connect to literary life—via the genre of memoir that bundles individual authorship, (didactic) recording for communal purpose, and transposition into other communal settings. The genre of the Moravian memoir directly influenced literary production by tracing modes of individuation akin to the self-assured, individual subjectivity at the core of modern fiction. Moravian memoir influenced modern autobiography, and in the late eighteenth century acted as a conduit to translate the religious empire for the German city. A through-and-through “global” genre, it also exemplifies how the world was eventually expelled from German literary life.

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Conversion/World, or the Persistence of Orality Conversion narratives are at the heart of the Moravian memoir; they are also, as we shall see, mediation per se, despite their claims to narrating an experience of immediacy. For, as Christopher Wild demonstrates, the turn toward the divine cannot be represented without turning to linguistic figuration.41 The memoirs encapsulate stories of emigration as well, because, throughout the eighteenth century, Germans’ departure for the New World returned seemingly excessive and detailed accounts revolving around religion. On the one hand, Germans’ arrival in the New World invoked tales of religious exile; on the other hand, the emigrants’ reports detailed religious conversion: among indigenous people and the migrants themselves, in newly founded communities and amid pastoral care of varying denominations. The tales of conversion not only relied on an elaborate network of translation but also proliferated it: often, migrants, missionaries, and pastors did not travel directly to America (like Oldendorp)42 but passed through London or Copenhagen (like the German protagonists of Oldendorp’s story). Travel memoirs describing passage and arrival in the New World were often retranslations from English. In turn, upon arrival, immigrants gave credence to an epistolary culture that narrated their lives in idealized ways, seeking to inspire more emigration through (often fabricated) enthusiastic letters sent to their German family and friends.43 Rhetorically, the accounts borrowed from abolitionist discourse as well as from the economics of the Atlantic passage: Rebekah Starnes demonstrates how Muhlenberg’s circle in Pennsylvania told stories about Germans arriving on North American shores by adapting them to the gut-wrenching tales about the plight of slaves dying on ships during the transatlantic passage.44 The combination of deeply personal experience and outreach to the world produces a tension that mediates, and is indicative of, the birth of modern literature. The Moravian memoir stands out among conversion accounts. First, it documents the conversion and life of (former) slaves, which is of particular interest in Translating the World’s consideration of the Caribbean world, in particular the Danish West Indies. The life stories of erstwhile slave Rebecca Freundlich Protten, who played a crucial role in proselytizing and converting slaves during the Caribbean missions, her second husband, Christian Protten, a native of Guinea, and “Magdalena, the Moor” and “Andrew, the Moor,” who made it to Pennsylvania, are well known, along with snippets about Anton and Anna, Gerd and Abraham, all of whom Oldendorp only identifies by first name and “Negro.”45 Telling the story of individual lives, these memoirs

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reveal, as Katherine Faull argues, their firm self-understanding as “slaves” or “former slaves”—through names, acts of deliberate self-representation, and rhetorical liberation, for example. (Jon Sensbach casts a wider net. Going beyond the official memoir in his discussion of the Prottens, he points out that both of their lives’ journeys, but particularly Christian’s, mark a deep uprootedness and feeling of nonbelonging.) Regardless, these memoirs do negotiate, circumvent, and traverse the positioning of the “I,” because, rather than simply representing a self-certainty by detailing the experience of both slavery and liberty,46 the accounts have recourse to the oral and aural patterns of slave poetry. While oral performance—and reception—of slave poetry marked defiance of slavery, committing orality to script did not.47 Thus, slave poetry, which was usually recorded many decades after its creation, inhabited a zone between orality, traditional and easily replicable song, and the biblical text. At the same time, its call-response structure provided an oral-aural complement to the dialogic visions that frequently structure the Moravian memoir.48 Together, these aspects not only characterize the Moravian memoir’s passage into written literature but amplify a crucial element of the genre: its communicative, even communal, style. This structural element is of course shared by all memoirs, not just slaves’. The awareness and conscious embrace of sinfulness shape the substrate of each, and the truthful relating of events and life experiences grounds each text in a social network. The product, in turn, is verifiably relatable to a person.49 Each memoir served at least a dual function, namely, accounting for one’s own life and circulating as a report to be disseminated to others: as a factoid, an example, and a record. Each memoir had the potential to intersect, produce, and rearrange communities along the way. The Moravians’ “own words”—which were dictated (or written) by the authors themselves—often end with speaking about an event that formed some sort of culmination: two of the better-known Pennsylvania Moravians—with the first being an erstwhile participant in Caribbean missionary efforts—Johann Böhner and Georg Nixdorf, respectively, relate the reception of God’s blessing and the anticipation of the author’s own death in salvation.50 They strike an overall sober (rather than ecstatic) tone when speaking of their communion with the congregation, with the former arranging the entire memoir along the lines of seafaring, beginning with the passage from Altona to Savannah.51 Women’s memoirs display a greater visual expressiveness, mostly ending in what appears to be a culminating religious experience. The experiences include moments of regeneration, considered key to conversion, or the first communion within

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a particular congregation. Still others emphasize the rhetorical or narrative closure in a culminating experience, constituting usually a simile of sacrifice or surrender,52 or depict, rather colorfully, unity with Christ (“the Bridegroom of my Soul”).53 Each account arranges patterns along a person’s natural life cycle (alluding to, nevertheless, an underlying, ever present dialogic communion with Him), thus turning life events into a forceful rhetoric and marking them as conversion to different choirs.54 In departing from images imparting visual immediacy,55 the products—often entwining confession and conversion—serve as powerful tools in proselytizing. Usually, the memoir contains an, at times euphemistically, interpretive passage. Added before the text was read aloud at the author’s funeral, the supplement completed the facts of a life story, especially if years had passed between the original recording and the author’s death. Sometimes, the text was further augmented with poems, resulting in the two- or three-part structure of many memoirs. The recitation at funerals was then edited, shortened, and transcribed into a new genre—a printed report—and circulated among Moravians worldwide in the Gemein Nachrichten (newsletter). In sum, the genre of the Moravian memoir stores a life’s story, preserving not only the life cycle of an individual journey but also the mode of telling this story. Sometimes these stories were submitted as oral history and recorded by a scribe. Their narrative leads always up to and includes conversion, often relating the author’s later experiences as a member of the church. Thus written down, indeed documented for subsequent communal use, the memoir’s traces of oral history are resurrected in the funeral performance—before being edited, collected, and disseminated, and eventually, archived. An individual’s life story therefore exists as a multilayered text containing multiple voices, narrative modes, and authorities, and—on occasion—divergent temporalities that distinguish introverted self-representation from the image represented to the worldwide community. As a genre, the Moravian memoir thus preserves tension, expressed by the slash (/) in the section head, “Conversion/World”: it is the tension among the individual experience of spiritual conversion, the translation—or conversion—of this experience into text, and its worldwide dissemination as and in a medium. The textual constructions of a person at times affected her perception through others, even during her lifetime, as Rebecca Protten’s fate shows. After being widowed twice, in 1773 she became the subject of a fierce exchange of news and directives among the Brethren in Herrnhut and the West Indies, allowing her to return to St. Thomas from Guinea. She responded only two

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years later, and was supposed to appear on a ship for passage in 1776, before being reported dead in 1781: “From Guinea by way of Copenhagen we have received the report that the well-known Christian Protten’s widow Rebecca has herself gone to the Savior a year ago.”56 Her own voice turned silent halfway through this textual construction. But even in the next layer of the Moravian network, as memoirs and Gemein Nachrichten reports circulate, they enact an equally fractured discourse, blurring the lines between individual self-representation and communal purposes. The act of narrating conversion to oneself, which according to Günter Niggl began to dominate around 1750,57 is transformed into a version of memoir in order to authenticate one’s life in the eyes of others. While in twentieth-century scholarship, the act of authentication appears tied to silent reading, I want to emphasize the importance of having the memoir read aloud in the eighteenth century. If, as Bruce Hindmarsh, and before him George Gusdorf, observe, “autobiography is a second reading of experience, and it is truer than the first because it adds to experience itself consciousness of it,”58 then reading aloud adds the feeling for and experience of community. Its ritualistic performance enacts the constant element, which amounts to the possibility of repetition and affirmation.59 The declamatory, oral-aural element disrupts the mediation that the text imposes, simulating immediacy, before returning the account to mediation for community: after all, the memoir becomes an essential component in discourses as diverse as missionary work, historical bio-bibliography, and journalism. By conflating, upon circulation in the Gemein Nachrichten, religious ritual, global reach, and cultural conquest, the text morphs from a script at the declamatory event (e.g., the individual’s funeral) into a community-sustaining factoid and eventually into its afterlife as a journalistic text and archival document. It appears translated for consumption by other communities in the world, while trying to capture the initial—emotive—relation of worshippers with community and individuality. The genre’s oscillation between oral and literal cultures relates to its impact upon literary historiography. It also anticipates its fate of being relegated to the margins of literary history. The Moravian memoir’s inscription of and circulation within a network preclude it from being a precursor of the Bildungsroman, unlike a classical Pietist conversion or confession.60 Instead, it resonates with epistolary and epistemic genres as well as with travelogues—in short, with genres that emphasize an outward-directedness and exploration of world and have subsequently been relegated to the margins of German literary historiography. At the same time, the memoir instantiates individuation,

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relating not only the author’s embrace of the divine—her or his experience of wholeness—but also its representation. The latter constitutes, of course, the individual’s self-relation to the Moravian community and is thus set apart from the inward-directed autonomous self, which, as scholars have observed, was aided by and eventually emerged alongside the Pietist engagement with texts. Moravian conversion is, first and foremost, conversion to community. In its communal acts, the Moravian memoir reproduces a culture that resembles the declamations, performance practices, and Vorlesekultur (culture of reading aloud) of eighteenth-century literary life.61 In turn, the reverberations of Moravian culture, especially its anchorage in the world, enliven the salon.

Between the World and the City: The Northern Salon Reading aloud to a group of devotees: this cultural practice united the Moravian funeral service, the reenactment of missionary success (both in the New World and in German lands),62 and activities in the northern German salon. Both religious communion (e.g., at Moravian funeral services and in the Moravian global press) and the sociability of the salon promised to suture the unity of the world in the singular event, revolving around the performance of texts. Jens Baggesen, whose annoyance is expressed in this chapter’s epigraph, was not the only “everlasting reader.” In fact, Johann Wolfgang Goethe created the memorable image of the salon’s eighteenth-century reader. In his novel Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1819), the main character, Eduard, has a favorite pastime, namely, “reading aloud to others.” Eduard sees his performance as an act of unmediated creativity and subjectivity, intended to produce pure aesthetic effects—“emotional excitement, . . . imaginative surprise”—in short, an action that may entice the imagination but most certainly will stimulate perception while producing a communal feeling. This ideal of aesthetic performance is contingent upon removing the printed text as mediator. In fact, in order to hold on to his illusion, Eduard “could not bear to have anyone look over his shoulder at the book he was reading.”63 When he notices that his wife, Charlotte, begins to read along, he acts annoyed: “When I read aloud to someone, is it not as though I were speaking directly to them? . . . If someone glances into the book I’m reading, it always feels as if I were being ripped into two pieces.”64 The immediacy of experiencing art is destroyed in this moment. Not only is Eduard’s subjectivity as performer shattered, but the correspondence between enunciated word and imagination is also disturbed,

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signaling to Eduard’s partners in conversation, as well as to the reader, that the characters will encounter, at the very least, a crisis. However, Eduard’s “peculiarity,” that is, his penchant for reading aloud without the interference of silent reading, is not unusual; “he very likely shared [it] with many others.”65 Thus, the passage points to a competing, “vocal” paradigm of literary life and production,66 rather than a crisis of literature. At most, it indicates a crisis of sociability. Literary history has of course resolved this clash of paradigms by siding with Charlotte and embracing the medium, the book. But Jens Baggesen’s comment takes us also back into the settings of the northern German salon. These salons existed in Hamburg and on country estates in the immediately surrounding areas and were spread across the northern German and Danish countryside. Topographically, their locations represented perfectly well both cultural symbiosis and the proverbial escape from the city. Many salons were hosted by aristocrats, or assembled in the houses of prominent intellectuals and merchants such as the famous Reimarus-Sieveking tea table in Hamburg (1770s–1811), which Lessing had frequented during his Hamburg years. They provided a stage for people like Caspar Voght, who, as we saw in chapter 1, aspired to be a reader with the declamatory acumen of a Garrick and a public intellectual in the mold of Hamburg’s Trade Academy. The salons espoused a lively German-Danish culture that reached beyond Klopstock’s presence and the chatter of (Danish) national theater, which, coming out of Copenhagen, had become so pervasive in Hamburg’s theater circles between 1760 and 1770. German power over Danish affairs of course predates this time (and was not primarily literary!), culminating in Count J. H. E. Bernstorff’s rise to power in 1751 and leading to an influx of “scientists, literary men and men of learning, doctors, soldiers, secretaries and tutors”67 over the next twenty years. Not just Kirstein and Schimmelmann but most administrators at the Danish court had German roots. Danish and German aristocrats intermarried and created a sprawling net of social circles and salons: Emilie von Schimmelmann, Ernst’s first wife, hosted her own salon, as did his sister Julia von Reventlow, and their friend, the author, German pastor’s daughter, and diplomat’s wife, Friederike Brun (1765–1835). Brun, who owned a mansion in Copenhagen as well as a country estate (Sophienholm), took the salon into the world, spending winters in Rome where she mingled with the painter Angelica Kauffman and Germaine de Staël (a.k.a. Madame de Staël), the superb chronicler of European cultural and literary life. She befriended the aristocratic brothers Friedrich and Christian Stolberg, poets and translators in their own right, as well as the

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aforementioned prominent intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and writers (or, in some cases, their wives); overall, she had a keen sense of the quest for power and authority involved in literary gatherings.68 Brun attracted Goethe and Schiller’s attention, though the two writers paid tribute rather mockingly. Devoting one of their infamous Xenien to her, they were more than eager to define her limits as a writer.69 Celebrated in the nineteenth century, Brun’s work is nearly forgotten today. Why? Simply because of Goethe’s and Schiller’s harsh but veiled verdict? I suggest otherwise. Turning to her salon as a glocal space—rather than pushing her into the “women’s corner,” as most recent scholarship does—begins to explain the strange phenomenon that replaces late eighteenth-century cosmopolitan prominence with national forgetting in literary history. Indeed, the dividing line between the beginnings of a literary tradition, cultural legacy, and history and the remnants of an oral, performance-driven culture runs right through the northern German salon. The northern German salons occupy a special place within European salon culture around 1800. Annegret Heitmann emphasizes that the German salons represented a counterspace, positioning their goals in opposition to the court and in constant flux, especially at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in Danish-German circles; they projected “a deeper sense of the public sphere.”70 Regardless of the social station of the actual hosts, the salons’ aristocratic roots ran deep, extending to local infrastructure. Doris and Peter Walser-Wilhelm describe the physical proximity between salons and aristocratic residences, which created a spatial arrangement that allowed for symbiosis among merchants, politicians, and aristocrats while keeping their social differences intact.71 Writing about the Parisian salons, Antoine Lilti states that “social relations between people in the salons were far more unequal than what we often care to imagine,” thus underscoring, in contrast to Heitmann, that social diversity did not equal social mobility.72 The salons were much less preoccupied with debating the ideas espoused by literary works than with a performance of or conversation about fiction. In short, they evolved neither socially nor politically from Enlightenment institutions such as the Hamburg Trade Academy, despite having similar, echo-like repercussions in a localized public realm and acquiring a reputation in the narratives of literary history that compared to that of journals such as Trade Library, among others. Salons are manifestations of networked (rather than causal) arrangements. Consequently, building upon Lilti’s insights, I propose to disentangle salon culture from a literary or erudite programmatic intention. Rather than sticking to historians’ terms and “merely” interrogating the role of salons in

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the Enlightenment and its public sphere, I explore how the salon negotiated a desire to preserve or create culture in the face of a literary mold that increasingly, though primarily elsewhere, turned toward the nation.73 Salons, Lilti argues, were the formative event of eighteenth-century Enlightenment culture and indeed a vehicle to reach a broader public, rather than a mode of sustaining the Republic of Letters and thus a textual tradition of privilege. In our context, the northern German salons (in Danish lands) emerge and are indeed counteracting what made up the fabric of the (northern) German Republic of Letters: loosely related journals and epistolary exchanges that certainly did not speak with a unified political or cultural voice, reading circles arranged around lending libraries, institutions of higher learning—albeit not universities—and translation enterprises that infiltrated all kinds of spaces. Though the German Republic of Letters was not a completely “reflexive event”74 of political circumstance, it was not, as the work of Jonathan Israel would have it, a clandestine enterprise either. Rather, it was a primary mediator, espousing a form of mediated enlightenment in texts that, as I have shown in chapter 1, invested in epistemic fragments, and proliferated in print. In contrast, the northern German salon enacted a culture of (secondary) orality, thriving on the spoken word and performance. It demarcated island-like existences, loosely connected nodal points that produced, like a network, resonances elsewhere, but failed to reach saturation and excess like the Republic of Letters. The northern German salon shared important characteristics with its Parisian models, serving as a space for elites’ entertainment, not least the Germans within the Danish unitary government and administration. Its significance goes beyond the production of bi- or multilingual writers;75 on the contrary, speaking and writing multiple languages seem common in its context. More generally, given the international investment and interest in Hamburg’s theater, entertainment played a crucial role in the cultural life of the north. However, salons also adhered to the etiquette-inflected aristocratic structures of their respective societies. If the French salon was a space of sociability and politeness,76 the northern German salon was one of sociability and (religious) redemption. Given its spatial proximity to the city (or the mansions of merchants), the salon literally existed in the shadow of global trade routes that intersected in Hamburg, Altona, and Copenhagen, making it part of a network of global exchange: of sentiment, belief, and ultimately, cultural production. As shown in my discussion of Kirstein’s “Excerpt,” German social structure in the Danish Unitary State was saturated with a religious culture

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that was characterized, on the one hand, by Pietism’s emphasis on a highly personal and immediate relationship to the divine and, on the other hand, by the global reach of Moravian mission. By becoming a socially, linguistically, and locally diverse space, the salons were destined to explore a culture of translation and transposition, allowing early instances of a new world literature to bubble up (this is similar, in part, to my earlier discussion of the textual disunity of Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy). In any case, the salon refocused the global, religious network on a local scale. There, one assuaged personal feelings of responsibility and guilt—precisely by participating in polite, public conversation and by reading aloud other people’s texts. At the same time, a heightened sense of locality, even domesticity, defined the gathering spaces. Though often opulent, the cities’ bourgeois houses were divided into small spaces promoting privacy and seclusion. Aristocratic residences meant isolation in the countryside, because more often than not they were removed from the bustling city life of the Weltstadt Hamburg. Seclusion thus became a metaphor, doubling down on the relative isolation of a point in a global exchange network that was, however, not the center of an empire sponsored by a nation-state. Difference in rank and social standing remained a sensitive issue, as we know, for example, from utterances by the poet, Hamburg socialite, and minor Danish court official August von Hennings,77 and as we shall see in chapter 4, in Friedrich Schiller’s response to Ernst von Schimmelmann’s act of patronage. As “social hierarchies were conspicuous, . . . the art of conversation was also the art of praise,”78 and of elevating individual proponents of and participants in the salons. Thus the social hierarchies palpable at the events were replicated in texts; elevation, effusive devotion, and individual celebration stylistically mark the imprint that salons left in writing. For example, Friederike Brun’s Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen (Truth in Morning Dreams, 1824) revolves in large part around the salon. But the author does not detail architecture and decor in her (or other people’s) mansions, resorting instead to brief, architectural simile (“resting on stilts, like a Venetian palace”) and to localizing buildings in the city’s grid or in the landscape (“from Norderto Breitstreet”; “waving tree tips, diving in the blue ocean”).79 Nor does the text reference a truly communal space. Instead, the salon appears as a gathering of individual participants isolated from one another and whose textual representation in prose miniatures or vignettes can be rendered as a gallery of paintings. Their arrangement creates an image of the space. Poets and artists were among these participants, succeeding in the performance culture

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because they fit in, not because they intended to shape it. Being entrenched in a network of like-minded people, writers of the salon therefore rarely distinguished themselves as individual authors driven by investment in their own work or aspirations to fame. For the most part, they depicted, recorded, and documented; in chronicling they testified about the salons in literary history. Inevitably, then, they contributed to the misreading of salons as literary salons, when in fact, writers and performers—and fiction itself—acted “merely” as social lubricant. Friederike Brun enthusiastically inhabited the salon and thrived as a cultural and spatial mediator: between German and Danish and between Copenhagen, Switzerland, and Rome.80 In fact, she locates herself in an even wider world, as snippets of her diaries reveal: when traveling in Marseille, she visits a ship that belongs to the Royal West Indian Trade Company (Königliche westindische Compagnie) and is named for Caroline Tugendreich, Heinrich von Schimmelmann’s wife. Far away from Copenhagen, the visit instigates homesickness,81 while underscoring that she lived within a network of globally acting people. Brun’s literary and cultural legacy replicates this position. As Danish literature oriented itself to political events and rulers and gravitated toward domineering literary figures, she remained intensely aware of her linguistic and cultural outsider position during her life. Nevertheless, today she has retained a place in Danish literary historiography and—as a proponent of sentimental style—in European literature, whereas her language—rendering her a German writer—has done nothing to locate her, in any lasting manner, in German literary history.82 Brun’s self-positioning in a multidimensional, cultural “in-between zone” may have contributed to her fate in literary historiographies. But her contemporary presence in public discourse—and not just through the semipublic environments of the salons—was significant, giving direction to passage into written discourse and, perhaps, into tradition. For example, her active support, protectionism, and patronage of the sculptor Karl Albert Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) were reflected in her art criticism, which appeared in Danish periodicals. These included Ahtarsgabe for Damer (n.d.), Danske Reiseagtagelter (1815–17), Minerva (1803), Tilskuer (1819), Athene (n.d.), Antheros (n.d.), and Harpen (n.d.). Brun wrote her essays in German and had them translated. Later she branched out into German-language journals, most of which were established by prominent representatives of the northern German and, later, the Weimar literary scene. Examples are Deutsches Magazin (1791–1800), several Musenalmanache, and most prominently, Schiller’s Horen (1796–97).

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Subsequently, most of her contributions to journals were republished in prose and poetry editions.83 Brun’s example therefore illustrates how the salons “survived” in literary, social, and broader cultural history and its archives: by reneging their status as an attempt to reach a broader public through an ongoing replication of conversation, and turning instead to journals and author-editions. While journals belonged to the Republic of Letters, book editions mapped a beginning of and pathway into literary history. To have one’s works published in book form gave a writer—especially one known for her spoken words in the salon—legitimacy, enshrining her in the center of a culture that valued reading while guarding against commercial authors merely proliferating books at market, as well as Bücherluxus, the idle display of the books one owned.84 What was printed would be preserved. But not unlike the publication of Hamburg Dramaturgy as a book in Berlin, editing had unintended effects. By extricating criticism from its journalistic context and including it in literary editions, publishers created a second venue for the persistent misreading of eighteenth-century salons as literary salons, that is, as places where literature with a deliberate social and historical vision was launched. Salons thus become, in the narrative of literary history, temporally construed events rather than locations. They alltoo-often stand for a small, point-like period in a teleological narrative rather than a geographically determined space that translated an even larger space for the local imagination. But actually, by marking a stage of literary production, these locals—through spatial arrangements, social hierarchies, and even the trappings of social decorum—absorb and resonate with other contemporaneous domains of culture. At the same time, the turn toward published literature exposed the conundrum facing the salon, namely, how to remain present—and be eventually remembered—as a space of broader cultural life around 1800. Salon gatherings could be repeated but hardly preserved; performances could be represented but not archived. Consequently, texts testifying to the salon enshrine the threshold between oral and literary cultures by seeking to capture performance situations. The texts not only document orality but they also explore the lines of ongoing translation (and retranslation) of performance into text and vice versa, thus resembling Lessing’s struggles in writing the Hamburg Dramaturgy. They represent yet another attempt at documenting the nonwritten poetic discourse and, in fact, of turning it into literature (Literarisierung). Brun traces such situations in her poems, but especially in her autobiographically inflected texts: in her letters and travel diaries, the aforementioned Truth in Morning

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Dreams, and in Idas ästhetische Entwicklung (Ida’s Aesthetic Development). The latter two texts were first published in a joint edition in 1824. Whereas the former evolves as a textual mediator representing the participants, relationships, and status attitudes in the salon, the latter text picks artistic imitation, innovation, and improvisation as central themes. As these aspects become characteristics of art as well as a style of art criticism, they map the inner workings of the salon and its relationship to literature. In Truth in Morning Dreams, Brun mimics the sociable situation of the salon. Overtly, she shies away from presenting the “audience-oriented privacy,” which Habermas identifies as an important characteristic of the eighteenthcentury public sphere, which is always already an urban phenomenon, and whose reliance on cramped interior spaces, seclusion, and compartmentalization Purdy describes as one of the early paradoxes of modernity: evidently, confined spaces did not prevent people from thinking globally.85 Here Brun does not resort to sentimental genres—letters, the diary, the epistolary novel— and “affect management,” which Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite describe as effective modes of sociability (and, ultimately, of running the salon).86 Rather than identifying the spatial and temporal coordinates of the specific gatherings, Brun’s text invokes them in an otherwise (auto-)biographically oriented narrative, only to defy—formally, at least—the forward-directed temporality of an individual life. Instead, the text presents itself in the form of prose vignettes, thus intersecting and dividing a literary genre (the modern autobiography) as well as the author’s biography, which have been reserved for the expression of a sovereign subject. In refusing the formal compliance with both, adherence to autobiographical genre and description of the salon as a literary event, Brun effectively removes her text from the narrative logic of literary historiography. In “Vorbericht an den gütigen Leser” (Preface to the Well-Meaning Reader), Brun articulates how she conceived of the text. In 1810, the ailing author experienced how, in her drug-sustained slumber, people whom she had met and who were important to her paraded in front of her inner eye. She likens them to marionettes or puppets, whose appearances seemed entangled and mysterious, presented by a camera obscura. Brun sets out to organize these images like a distant memory but understands the “psychological trick.”87 Deeply conscious of spatial confines—a feeling that intensified in light of psychosomatic illnesses and the loss of hearing—Brun describes her domestic surroundings in stark terms; we may infer that not just her mood, but also her mansion’s interior was gloomy and dark. Yet what she conjures up as magical,

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poetic inspiration resembles, on the one hand, the incipience of a distinctly modern narrative. As she relates the instant manifestation of hallucinations and spectral images in a person’s consciousness, she constructs memory as an effect of seeing. In turning inward, the narrative delves into the past, resurrects it, and imbues it with individual experience in order to make it significant. But as the narrator further relates her impressions, arranging them in her quest for autobiography, she turns outward. By resorting to the social narratives, settings, and stylistic conventions of her cultural environment, she imitates and reenacts the participants of the salon and their family relations—precisely by creating the aforementioned literary portraits of them. Rather than constructing her text as a manual for a conversion to reading,88 Brun creates distance, encouraging at best spectating at the prose miniatures. The allusion to a portrait gallery is thus not just an image conjured up by today’s readers, but a narrative device to underscore social difference rather than cohesion. As these representations frame the text, Brun’s construction of self gives way to deference to their authority.89 Occasionally, the miniatures combine memory with the depiction of current relationships, blurring description of people’s inner, personal characteristics with the first impressions they made. In turn, spare references to buildings and their interiors frame the images of inhabitants and guests.90 Often, attendees’ descriptions are succinct: “Now the Stolberg brothers (siblings to countess Bernstorff) had joined the intimate family circles of Schimmelmann and Reventlow, who, united by belief, friendship, and confidence, had forever worked on behalf of admirable Denmark.”91 Occasionally, detailed images arise, meshing nuanced character portrayal with the affected voice of the narrator: “Ernst und Emilie” (Ernst and Emilie) tells of the beginnings of Ernst and Emilie Schimmelmann’s love story, only to end in a line foreshadowing Emilie’s untimely death. Thus creating a caption for the prose miniature—a semantic-stylistic feature, which subsequent chapters revisit— the portrayal of Emilie constructs a narrative arch and culminates, poetically, in “Der Schmerz meine Muse” (Pain, This Muse of Mine), before recounting her death in two miniature chapters “Emilie stirbt” (Emilie Dies) and “Emiliens Todtenfeier” (Emilie’s Funeral). As Emilie’s depiction participates in a sentimental celebration of friendship (Freundschaftskult)—in particular of friendship among women—other characters appear in contrast. Brun celebrates them by erecting miniature portrayals within individual vignettes (e.g., Ernst von Schimmelmann). Both patterns—effusive relation of affection and worship-like elevation—reveal the social hierarchies in the salon, as Brun

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succumbs to the protection of influential benefactors, politicians, merchants, and writers.92 She thus communicates salon culture as a hierarchical space that refracts her nascent self-reflexivity as the recording writer. In turn—and at odds with the rhetoric of deference—the textual mediation creates the impression that participants in the salons were static dramatis personae rather than individual subjects capable of poetic, political, and social, or simply conversational, self-expression. This style of mediation is particularly evident in Brun’s poetically most important miniature of Emilie von Schimmelmann: “To Emilie who suffers, soon to perish, Muse of Mine. Amid the turbulent phases that mark this disease, alternating high hope with despair, a cycle of poems arose whose subject was she.”93 Despite the centrality of the prose miniature, Emilie’s image remains vague and not trustworthy, fading in favor of a lasting impression of the social dynamics in the salon. Devotional poetry celebrates a person; the miniature employs a devotional style. Like the chapters in Brun’s Truth in Morning Dreams, devotional poetry is frequently arranged in cycles and occasioned by a particular event. Preserving emotive structures, pathos, and empathy associated with the celebration of life in Moravian funeral services as well as the intensity of Pietist devotion to God, these texts essentially call to be performed and read aloud. Nevertheless, in their small, chopped-up form and their claim to narrate the author’s biography while dwelling on Emilie’s death, the miniatures point to a threshold in cultural production. In a different context, Katie Trumpener describes such a state as rendering “the vicissitudes of oral tradition,”94 where reflection upon narration, writing, abandoned endings, and new starts impede, and even drown out, the bardic song. In Brun’s Truth, the text commemorates not so much a past, bardic culture as the arrangements of the salon, where readers, performers, and debaters enacted the illusion of experiencing immediacy and a quasi-religious community. In Brun’s text, the threshold moment indicates a diversification of cultural modes: the unity of religious experience, memoir, and performance breaks; the passage into autobiography becomes easily obstructed. The salon, which the text commemorates, enshrines a remnant of a bygone culture. The same vignette undercuts this allusion to the immediacy of poetry, recasting the poetic moment as application of form to poetic impulse while laying out the rules for participating in a literal tradition: “My devoted patrons, the brothers Stolberg, rekindle the flame, springing from the heart’s holy fire. Count Christian [Stolberg] wants me to study Greek, claiming that I am a natural talent when it comes to hexameter and pentameter, the Sapphic

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and Alcaic meter. But without access to a pure model (because I only compose verse by hearing), my verse will always remain unfinished.”95 In this passage, as well as in the broader poetic context of German sentimentalism, Greek appears as learned and erudite, forming both a substrate and a mold that lends itself to, and indeed encourages, imitation and repetition. Gender difference serves as the most common “translation” when accounting for this split between inspiration, emotion (“the heart”), and transposed orality (hearing), on the one hand, and formal norm, erudition, and literal tradition, on the other. Inspiration comes from women, guidance from men; emotion is heard, while form emanates from reading the ancient Greek text. However, this split mediates the conditions of literary life in the northern German salon and the threshold moment between the persistence of an oral culture suited to pervading and rearranging nationally, formally, and historically defined traditions and the nascent process of making literary history. Truth in Morning Dreams’ companion text, Ida’s Aesthetic Development, underscores this process of mediation. As the text puts forth the biography of Brun’s daughter, Ida Brun de Bombelles (1792–1857), a famous mime artist performing mimoplastic art or attitudes (Attitüden), it tells one story of how “gender” was affixed to the literary life in salons, suggesting, ultimately, how the division between an oral culture and a written literature is recast in gender terms. The text starts with the narrator’s declaration, “I want to tell you of your essence,”96 thus equating, via the ensuing narrative, Ida’s artistic role with Ida’s personal identity. As Ida’s purpose is to enact and translate another persona, becoming the vessel of somebody else, she cannot represent herself and relies on others, in this case her narrator-mother, to define her. Her performance art thus appears, much like late eighteenth-century notions of translation, as a derivative or imitation of an existing work of art, drama, or literature. Ida’s art ranks as secondary to the original. Like attitudes and other, distinctly eighteenth-century performance practices, translation and translated works of literature find themselves increasingly relegated to the margins of literary historiography. Excluded from the national tradition, they nevertheless inhabit the space that connects them to a dimension of literature and culture that is simultaneously global and localized in the singular event. Accepting this verdict enables Friederike Brun’s role as a mediator. Combining her self-expression as an author with the constricting role as the documenter of performance art, Brun articulates—unintentionally perhaps— the vexing question that defines literary life at the salon: What is literature? Or rather, where does it begin? Is it in the performed text and the declamatory

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event that may be recorded in writing? Or is literature an expression of creativity that can be confined to the page, read in silence, and at best resurrected for performance in the salon? Though the author-narrator’s aggressive selfpositioning in Ida’s Aesthetic Development amounts to an emphatic rejection of Ida’s creativity as an artist and therefore affirms, as critics have stated,97 contemporaneous attitudes that saw women’s role restricted to imitating art, it also obscures the translocal reach and true impact of Brun’s text as an archive of “epistemological interstices,” an early instance of literature that existed beyond the confines of nation and that two hundred years later is dubbed translation zone.98 For under the veil of the self-styled autobiography, the text preserves the salon’s connections to the world and its resonance with Moravian memoir culture.

Into the World: Landscape, Antiquity, Present Visitors enliven the salon’s space, which is otherwise dominated by loud and silent reading. As Brun depicts the salon’s dynamic qualities in narrating Ida’s expressive imitation in movement, she replicates the imitative gesture. Her writing chronicles movement, rather than a static image of her daughter. In the process, she defines a style of poetic expression that Friedrich Schiller, in his review essay “Über Matthisons Gedichte” (On Matthison’s Poetry),99 describes—in many more words—as simultaneously natural and static (with respect to history and politics), yet inwardly preoccupied with the present and thus forever moving. Both the essay’s ostensible subject—Friedrich von Matthison (1761–1831) was one of the editors and publisher of Brun’s first poems—and the essay’s observations connect it to Ida’s Aesthetic Development. As the observed qualities allow poetry to resonate globally, they not only permeate Brun’s salon but also speak to a quality of literary production that transgressed an ocean and linguistic boundaries, as well as the discursive lines that separated religious life from literary life. Schiller argues that, in poetry, form and stylistic mode are the most important aspects of expression, considering them defining elements and placing them in contrast to the poem’s subject, which appears secondary at best. He further observes that the poet faces a conundrum, as she or he must produce art that adheres to two, seemingly contradictory impulses: first, it must stimulate the imagination of the reader, allowing him or her to be creative and free; second, it must assure the poet of her or his effectiveness and

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control. Adherence to both the imagination of others and the self produces a tension or struggle for dominance, because imagination and the poet seek to dominate simultaneously. To resolve this tension, the poet must unify both aspects, abstracting from the reader (i.e., others) and submitting instead to humankind’s innate imagination. Recognizing the latter enables adapting her or his tools. The result will be a poem of “true nature.” Conversely, Schiller adds, the natural must never be stifled by the real, which is always already historical. Poetry, according to this reading, always projects (into the future) or remembers (the past), but does not participate, communicate, or resonate with the present situation. But where does this leave the landscape as a subject of poetry? After all, it eludes the principles laid out by Schiller: not enticing the imagination per se, landscape remains resistant to poetic dominance. Erdmut Jost describes landscape as the perfect medium to render yearning (Sehnsucht), while noting the persistent belief that landscape is unable to represent a compelling ideal that exceeds the status quo; instead, it remains confined to static beauty.100 But there is more, and that is the embrace of the radical present without rendering it mute, static, or postponed. Schiller, in working through Matthison’s poetry, had also argued that, only by becoming human nature, could nature represent feelings and sensibilities. However, here he encountered a problem: sensibilities cannot be represented as image or content but only communicated as form. He thus proposed a series of translations, suggesting, at first, that music has the capacity to exteriorize inner feelings, transposing them in movements of analogy, and second, that landscape can take on a similar role, simply by expressing presence. As Schiller privileges the immediacy—the inner dynamic and movement—of poetry rather than the future of poetically expressed ideas, he embraces, inevitably, the performance culture of the salon, even if it just means conjuring up feeling and sensibility in acts of reading aloud. Of course, Schiller’s rhetorical moves are many times removed from the specific location and experience of the northern German salon. But they strangely recast—in their attempt to explicate landscape poetry—the stroll through the city, which is the subject of Nevermann’s first poem. In fact, by metaphorically leaving the city, Schiller transcends the vocabulary of experience and entertainment. By speaking the language of the landscape, he translates the mundane into human nature, which in turn creates independence of a particular context, space, or time. Simultaneously, though, as Schiller turns to philosophy and aesthetics in his insistence on human nature, he ends up projecting temporally, into the future, while relying on a notion

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of world that is bare of actual global coordinates. Schiller transcends not only the spatial grid of city and world, but also imagination filtered through the emergent discipline of geography as well as the matrix of established literary genres. We will also see in chapter 4 that he ends up becoming a philosopherhistorian in the process. Not so Friederike Brun. Her narration and simultaneous depiction of Ida chronicle the emergence of the prose miniature as an indicator of the glocal nature of the northern German salon as well as the new world literature whose beginnings in translation I locate in the late eighteenth century, and which I have begun to describe, in chapters 1 and 2 of this book, as acts of linguistic translation and localization, as well as performative transpositions across language registers and emergent academic disciplines in the space of theater. At the surface, Brun’s mode of glocalization mimics theater performance. But her narration adapts first and foremost models of mutual visitations at home—an early form of conventicles and an early Pietist tradition—that sustained the salon,101 while also condensing the structure of a Moravian memoir in accounting for Ida. By combining the individual’s self-expression with interpretation through others, Brun’s text remains directed at a community of listeners and readers (despite or because of the emphatic claim that Ida is the narrator’s sole audience). Rather than assuming a predominantly rational interaction, in accordance with Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, and which was at best muted by habitual rituals of friendship, we should presume the pervasiveness of a deep, documented religiosity in the northern German salon.102 This is what distinguishes my reading of this space as one in dialogue with the sentimental empires of the British Atlantic and Moravian religion from those who see it pervaded by Empfindsamkeit’s focus on the emotive structures and symbols of individuality. Seen in this light, the text ultimately epitomizes literature’s inhabiting of translation by espousing an essence and form of literary life that confronts any reflexive representation of nation, norms, or genre. As Brun underscores her belief that nature—and movement coming alive—forms the essence of creative (or original) performance, she envisions a unique artistic expression that defies both invention and imitation. Simultaneously, though, she challenges French philosophical-aesthetic norms, while treating Greek myth as a muse but not as a norm (or as the Stolbergs did, as form). For example, Brun relates an event that has Madame de Staël interact with Ida, in 1804, when the daughter was twelve years old. Described as a jealous adversary, de Staël

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wants Ida to do a pantomime of Rousseau’s Pygmalion. In contrast, her mother wants to cultivate Ida’s status as performer of the ancient classical myth with an emphasis on “the spiritual and poetic,”103 thus rendering the Greek inspiration into something new that surpasses pantomime. She tells the story of Ida’s synthesizing of visual arts and music and translating the synthesis into the harmonious movement of eurythmia. In adapting the myth, Ida creates both a style and an experience that are as immediate as they are confined to the present moment.104 They deeply affect those present, creating an instance of community. Classically trained, and in the worldly costume of the Greeks, Ida appears as an originally performing and improvising artist; however, her performance of characters from the ancient world is resurrected (and reaches culminating qualities) locally, in the domestic salon. Performing what western Europeans perceived as a global tradition not only localizes art; Brun’s depiction of Ida as both a vehicle—or medium—and an innovator of this tradition reveals the schism of literature at the horizon. Clearly, Ida’s performance exceeds imitating the Greek meter, which the Stolberg brothers had recommended to her mother. In fact, it marks a zone of cultural production, which scholars such as Mary Helen Dupree and Katja Mellmann have only begun to dissect. By 1800, imitation had become closely aligned with didacticism and overidentification, whereas creativity implied aesthetic distance, freedom, and the elusiveness of fiction.105 Only the creative act was considered a singular, autonomous act. However, to Friederike Brun, physical performance, gestures, and the performer’s identification with the character could amount to acts of creativity if they remained an isolated instance: “I asked you to portray Althea only once, although it was your favorite performance. However, you revealed such sensitivity in this terrifying myth . . . exposing too much of yourself, with such immediacy.”106 Accordingly, Ida creates art out of ancient raw material, translating it into the present and— into the salon. It is this unique transposition—or localization—that impedes creativity in the conventional sense of the word. Akin to what Schiller calls the successful transformation of nature’s sensibility into human nature, Ida’s transposition threatens to undermine the aesthetic distance that is so intrinsic to art. The act threatens to fall apart, and Brun intervenes. But, rather than codifying narrative innovation, her text pays social debt by revealing—and enforcing— the existing hierarchies in the salon. Brun makes Ida perform Althea again, because two participants in the salon, Amalia von Münster Meinhövel and Friederike’s “protector,” Count Ernst von Schimmelmann, wished to see a

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performance, emphasizing that “we must comply with them.” As repetition destroys the creative act, it returns to the similarities it shares with Moravian worship, which witnessed a constant repetition and renewal of the act of conversion. Thus Ida’s performance escapes literary historiography, unless it is as transformed into another genre, in this case biography. Even so, as an act of mediation per se, biography falls outside any understanding of literature, and art more generally, around 1800. Its publication offers the chance, however, to commit readers to indulging in the construct of salon communities, whose image is likewise shaped by the published (auto-)biography.107 It all seems to hinge, once again, on Brun’s success in publishing a book and involving readers in transmitting its ideas, allowing a tradition to take hold (or not). The nexus of repetition and translocal, national resonance forms the linchpin for a work making it into the literary tradition. In Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850, Angela Esterhammer draws attention to the conundrum of literary history and the singular literary act. Turning to northern German literary circles, and especially to the poets Anna Louisa Karsch and Friederike Brun, she intuits why these circles have been unimportant to German literary historiography. By regarding the salons in a larger European literary framework and defining their importance, in no small part, through their portability (e.g., to Rome), Esterhammer extricates them from the narrow parameters of defining impact strictly along the lines of a national tradition. Nevertheless, she keeps the category of national literature in play (and not just at bay), precisely by focusing on improvisation: here, the nation arises as the normative horizon against which subversive and innovative literary activity unfolds. As a result, performances of improvisers are localized within a transnational travel narrative, namely, the Grand Tour.108 Audiences, Esterhammer claims, were not so much interested in “the improvised poetry itself, but the experience of its production,” noting that northern Europe had its fair share of “oral improvisation,” which she characterizes as an “activity of repeated [and varied] self-representation . . . evident among poets who constructed themselves in the presence of a variety of audiences and readerships, in person and in print.”109 I would add that improvisation, in turn, also challenged the contemporary Zeitempfinden (sense of temporality as well as the perception of the age), especially its emerging sense of crisis. Tied to the immediacy of experience, improvisation eluded repetition. It averted any resurgence of the past—which became central to a then dominant narrative (or historical) management of crisis that projected innovation along a temporal axis combining future utopia with nostalgic waxing about the past. In contrast, improvisation

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became the technique for communicating the moment, expressing a feeling of unencumbered presence. In this respect, improvisation relates to the performance culture of the northern German salon, not just—and I would suggest not even primarily—to (German) Romanticism.110 Improvisation reflects the moment when world imbues the poet with local, that is, immediate, significance. It made its mark precisely through ideas such as “improvisatrice-like writer,” which, according to Esterhammer, was Brun’s preferred self-construct and pervaded literary magazines in, of all places, Classical Weimar around 1800. Though Esterhammer accords them a central role in recording “the improvisational turn,”111 periodicals are significant for yet another reason in the context of my argument. As the example of Kirstein’s “Excerpt” shows, it was in widely circulating periodicals that ideas of a global Moravian community, along with ideas of other religiously inflected constructions of community, were translated into secularized versions. They became exemplary, albeit in strange company. For the same periodicals presented content that offered a contrast to religious discourse while connecting with an empire of enlightenment and reason: the insistence on facts circulating through journalistic news depicting the world.

Toward the World of Knowledge and from City to Town As journals “created a world of their own,” they in turn put pressure on the sociability and community of the salon, intensifying the conversational habit that knowledge ought to be used in a legitimate way.112 At the same time, the public discourse in colonial centers such as London and Paris attempted to understand culture in relation to nation and empire. This ultimately resulted in a move toward the repurposing of the salon, even the suppression of these small, robust, and always local engines of culture and their wide-ranging networks. In this respect, too, the northern German salon’s position is unique. It continued to represent a relic of an older, aristocratic culture, where family relations remained entrenched in and interwoven with friendships and vice versa, while simultaneously exiling a bustling, worldly—not to say global— urban culture to the countryside. Creativity resided on the country estate. At the same time, while obfuscating the quest for nation by seemingly hibernating in geographical margins and seclusion, the salon continuously engaged its global connections. It focused not only the global activities (e.g., trade) and mercantile existence of its participants, but was also engaged,

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avant la lettre, in negotiating multiple disciplines, spheres of interest, and domains of knowledge. It intersected with, but at the same time sublimated, any rhetoric, negotiation, or valuation of useful knowledge, playing against any restriction of knowledge to the areas of trade, mathematics, or economics and unfolding instead an alternate philosophy that wove together new models of thinking about time and space: one that blurred religious sociability and human rights, thereby enacting a new—and yet surprisingly old—model of thinking about the world: a notion of universal truth and knowledge. By casting this web, the salon resonated with the Hamburg Trade Academy and its academic aspirations, while escaping the institution’s demand for publicity and open, democratic debate. Unlike the Trade Academy and Trade Library, the salon thrived by hibernating in the niche of the private, artistic, and predominantly aristocratic home. That the decor and exterior of these houses were occasionally replicated in faraway places is a nod to the colonial network and a trace of global imprints in the outskirts of the metropolis as well as the countryside. As the salon and its mode of cosmopolitanism relied—for their performance—on imitation and improvisation, they produced and reproduced a style that escaped co-option by the national. This style also enacted—and reenacted—the translations that oscillated between the written and spoken word, thus not only casting Lessing’s impact in a new light, but recontextualizing his Hamburg Dramaturgy in the history of performance; the momentary and temporary resurgence of oral and aural cultures in the salon interrupted (or, at the very least, made more problematic) the dominance of inherited poetic form. Rather than simply latching on to various modes of transcendence and to “bind [the senses] to the operation of a mind”113 in a quest for instantiating poetic subjectivity, the northern German salon emphasized relations—among people and among texts—and therefore the “in-between” spaces. All the while, it served the preservation of social hierarchies, not their subversion, while producing and reproducing models of situating its distinct culture in the world.

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4

CLASSICAL WEIMAR RECONSIDERED Friendship Redeemed, Foundations Laid, and Monuments Made

Das Genie Goethe konnte seinen Weltgeist (damaliger Modeausdruck) nicht in einer Ausdünstungspfütze, vulgo Stadt, gefangen nehmen. Bertuch mußte ihm seinen Garten am Park abtreten und dort etablierte er nun seine Geniewirthschaft. The genius Goethe could not lock up his cosmopolitan spirit (a term in vogue at the time) in a smelly pond, otherwise known as the city. Thus, Bertuch had to lease Goethe his garden near the park, and that’s where Goethe established his cult of genius. —Karl August Böttiger, recalling Goethe’s 1775 arrival in Weimar

From the Northern Salon into a Cosmopolitan World: Friendship as Conduit Gradually, in the course of the eighteenth century, salons enabled a culture of protection, which allowed writers to promote their work. Firmly enshrined in the aristocratic entertainment network, the salons were in an ideal position to deploy their cultural and intellectual capital, trading in

singular events and, on occasion, in printed books. In contrast, the older system of patronage had created relationships of different dependencies— for example, literary service and political fidelity—while rewarding authors for completed works; the act of patronage is acknowledged by authors, and even memorialized, through dedication pages. Protection cultivated different social relationships. However, it also introduced a certain opaqueness into the discourse surrounding it: “In fact, the language of friendship is precisely what makes the relationship of protection possible by endowing it with new meaning, different from patronage, and all the more so from forms of literary domesticity: the man of letters is present within it not only as a writer, but also as un homme du monde.”1 In making this statement, Lilti is situating cosmopolitanism locally, namely, in the salon, and discursively, along the lines of friendship. The latter part of the statement not only adheres to long-held beliefs about eighteenth-century sociability, but also (co-)produces misreadings and mistranslations of the same, especially in subsequent historiographies of literature: often conflated, friendship and sociability find themselves, occasionally, in opposition. Nearly always ritualized, friendship vanishes from historical accounts of eighteenth-century literary life, only to be replaced or to reemerge as a driving force, albeit behind genres that are relegated to the margins of literary history.2 As the dynamics of the salon radiate beyond its borders, threshold moments of its existence get exposed, revealing a concurrent existence of conflicting social and discursive relationships. But as the first part of this chapter shows, a line of translation and adaptation, fractured through readings of these relationships, runs from eighteenth-century expressions of friendship to Friedrich Schiller’s formulations of aesthetic community. As the latter informs ideas of the Culture Nation, it is still rivaled by alternate manifestations of sociability as well as by the elevation of an auratic individual (one of the concepts replacing friendship).3 Intersected by a pronounced interest in and turn to the (author-)subject, these configurations of literary life, cultural investment, and, ultimately, power return—and even retreat—to the city. Their passage into the city, or in this case, town, would remain obscure were it not for commentators like Böttiger, whose account of Goethe’s arrival in Weimar introduces this chapter. It is also a passage shot through with many transpositions and conceptual transformations of ideas, accruing metaphors— and crises thereof—in the process, before culminating in a notion of the monumental. For, no matter how hyperbolic, Böttiger’s comment also hints at how a quest for literary self-esteem and aspiration permeated all aspects of

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life in a town of modest means and conditions. Aspiring urbanity, cramped living quarters, famous and less famous people, and a conversational struggle to define Weimar colluded in the making of the town’s reputation. As it were, Goethe arrived in a city that turned out to be just a town, only to emerge as the culture capital decades later—Classical Weimar. Secluded from the world, Weimar nevertheless transmitted its founding idea around the globe. As it signaled the birth of German national literature by curtailing global influence and perspective within its walls, it succeeded in an ultimate act of translation: a modern author-subject usurped the transatlantic circulation of texts. At first glance, intersecting ideas of friendship and cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and of friendship and religion, on the other, conflict with Lilti’s claims about hierarchical relationships in the salon. For if salon participants aspired to become true cosmopolitans and advanced their goal by invoking friendship in emphatic language, Brun’s relationship to Emilie Schimmelmann strengthened the cosmopolitan impact of the local salon, more so than Ernst von Schimmelmann’s role as Brun’s protector. Yet it is his miniature prose portrait that structures Truth in Morning Dreams; grounding the text’s representation of the salon, it makes him a potentially dominant figure in an all-encompassing narrative of literary history. Nevertheless, while readings of affectionate friendship have contributed to retrieving, and occasionally overestimating, the role of women in the eighteenth-century salon, the discourse of friendship unfolded in more intricate ways than both Lilti’s historiographical assertion and Brun’s “authentic,” emotive invocation suggest. Friendship promoted and simultaneously obstructed emerging concepts of aesthetic communities built on ideas of individuality, equality, and integrity of person. In Perfecting Friendship, Ivy Schweitzer attempts to situate eighteenthcentury ideas of friendship in a transatlantic context as well as in historical perspective, dislodging them, contrary to my claims, from the context of “sensibility and sympathy.”4 According to Schweitzer, friendship always presumes equality; it is not an outgrowth of Enlightenment discourse but has been in decline from an ancient classical ideal, weakened by modern cultural forces: “Aristotle refers to the highest form of friendship, . . . ‘perfect’ or ‘ideal’ friendship, to be distinguished from two lesser types, friendship that produces something useful, such as cooperation, and friendship that produces pleasure, such as leisure or companionship.”5 Thus, I infer that it is precisely the eighteenth-century overuse of the language of friendship that replicates illusionary assumptions of equality rather than a conceptual essence; in fact,

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this language use impairs any movement toward equality of station or guarantees of human rights. As we saw in chapter 1, the language of friendship sustains harmonized dramatic closures. Rhetorically though, the conflation of friendship and equality resonates with religious life and communities around the Atlantic rim, even finding both its impulse and a direct reflex in religious thought. Schweitzer observes that while Christian friendship is paradoxically unattainable (because of Christ’s exponent state) and accessible for everyone (because of aspiration and the idea of the unconditional in its foundation), it manifests in conflicting patterns in the late eighteenth century through what I would call a fueling and weakening of the language of friendship. On the one hand, spiritual friendships allow for expressions of intimacy and trust, and, later, for the privatization, secularization, and romanticization of friendship.6 Similarity evolves as a recurrent concept in efforts to define friendly relationships, paving the way for consensual, contractual, and democratic ideas to become affiliated with friendship. Conversely, though, the struggle with inequality exposes a dark underside of friendship and begins to inhabit the rhetoric of legitimacy that defines friendship linguistically. Schweitzer sees “evidence, however, that from the very beginning of Europe’s contact with the Americas, writers deployed various discourses of conquest grounded in classical notions of friendship and in . . . its obverse, a theory of natural slavery.”7 I suggest, therefore, that the rhetoric of friendship created another translation of the redemptive structures that I observed in chapter 3. Manifesting in the northern German salon, they go back to narratives of Moravian conversion, which along with the salon performances share a pattern of reenacting orality. At the same time, the spatially pervasive rhetoric of redemption (and friendship) became a problem: taking hold globally, it called for a guiding concept—an idea or a telos—that resolved its contradictions in a temporal manner. Redemption called for a narrative that projected to the future while delineating and taming geographical space on a smaller scale. Similarly, while friendship was, at least tacitly, dismantled and abridged for its hypocritical stance, social impossibility, and spatial diffusion, it aided the rise of a common reading of Weimar Classicism as the precursor of the Culture Nation in which local friendships among men could model and propel the idea of a larger, national community rooted in erstwhile cosmopolitanism. Friedrich Schiller’s correspondence with Ernst von Schimmelmann and Prince Friedrich von Holstein-Augustenburg, which occurred sporadically over three years (1791–93), exposes the rhetorical deployment of friendship and cosmopolitanism. The men’s epistolary exchange was preceded by two events,

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both of which were highly unusual. One responded to a rumor: in June 1791, news circulated across German lands claiming that Friedrich Schiller had died. Though dispelled almost immediately, not least because of Schiller’s reappearance in person and by letter in Jena, the rumor in fact reached Schimmelmann’s salon in Hellebek. Participants had gathered to celebrate Schiller’s texts in a series of performances and readings. As the event turned into a memorial service, the participants allegedly added a stanza to the “Ode an die Freude” (Ode to Joy),8 praising the dead friend and probably sharing Baggesen’s sentiments: “I can, perhaps, learn to forget that Schiller the playwright has died, but the fact that Germany’s first and perhaps henceforth preeminent historian is no longer with us, that, I will never—never be able to face.”9 Infatuated with Don Karlos (Don Carlos, 1787), the group had prepared to indulge excerpts from the author’s historical writings, among them Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands Against the Spanish Government, 1788). Celebrating Schiller as a person full of “sublime dignity,” they were clearly interested in him as the future educator.10 It mattered little that the celebration now became elegiac. A few months later, the second astonishing event occurred. In November 1791, Schimmelmann and Prince Friedrich von Holstein-Augustenburg offered Schiller a pension for each of the next three years: “Accept this offer, noble friend. Do not be moved to reject it in light of our titles. We value them, but our only pride is in being humans, citizens of the great republic, whose borders encompass more than the life of individual generations, more than the limits of the globe. You face only human beings, brothers.”11 Fully aware of Schiller’s fragile health, precarious economic situation, and pride, they confront the inequality of social rank head-on, urging the writer to accept their offer and regard them as nothing but equals. Holstein’s wealthiest merchant (Schimmelmann) and politically most powerful man (Augustenburg) both hope that the author and professor recovers from his prolonged illness, and that he is able to leave his dreaded teaching post at Jena University, and devote himself to full-time writing.12 Knowing that title and station will prevent the penniless Schiller from feeling on par with them, the aristocrats underscore their intent by situating themselves firmly in the urban, modern context of Copenhagen. On their account, the city appears as the great equalizer: they praise the unity of economic, political, and cultural success the city affords, and they promise to bestow upon Schiller a political office, should he be interested in relocating. In Copenhagen, they propose, the first stage of the French

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Revolution had succeeded: the prince had become an enlightened monarch, who championed trade and the stimulation of wealth; political and economic interests seemed perfectly aligned. Ultimately, the city neutralized any emotive response to life’s circumstance, creating the space for rational discourse. At least, such was the promise. By insinuating unity and equality, the language of friendship enabled them to translate Enlightenment’s success beyond the city limits. Thus the program of aesthetic action, which the prince and his slave-trading cabinet secretary claimed to have adopted from Schiller’s earlier plays, could be exported, possibly across the world. As they “befriended” the German poet, at once cementing social and economic dependency and erasing it rhetorically by remaining anonymous,13 they launched an understanding of cosmopolitanism that relied on the rhetoric of friendship, while stripping the concept of the sentimental flair and ritualistic props it had acquired in the salon.14 Deeply conscientious of his dependence on the wealthy aristocrats, Schiller became an actor in “the revolution of friendship,”15 which is documented in his correspondence with the benefactors. The fewer than twenty preserved letters shed light on Schiller’s gradual retreat from the revolutionary impulse and fascination with France, making room for a narrative emphasizing the harmonious, and ultimately aesthetic, growth of individuals. The narrative, which accumulates throughout the letters exchanged among the three protagonists as well as with other conversation partners, projects a future born out of a culture of sociability by enlisting the rhetoric of friendship. It manifests itself in one of sentimentalism’s favored genres, the letter, but not without stripping it of emotive layers and mapping some emotional distance. The thus networked letter no longer simulates an individual’s instantiation of self or imitation of inherited form, but the interpretive sovereignty that accounts for social space, translocal reach, and temporal projection and that we saw in the mediating impact of Moravian memoirs in the global newsletter and across the world. At the same time, the letter is a testament to a self that does not rely on a building or institution, ritual, or otherwise defined space to situate itself, deriving its substrate from the letter, that is, a literary genre or form.16 Thus properly educated and sensitized to the beauty of life, friends—at least according to the three authors—were eventually capable of fulfilling the promise of reasoned, measured behavior that contemporary commentators, who wrote about France around 1800, had demanded.17 Offering a formidable account of the role of friendship in the formation of aesthetics, Schiller’s letters to Augustenburg and Schimmelmann are important precursors to, but not

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to be conflated with, his Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Aesthetic Letters, 1795). While the latter respond to news from France and French Caribbean colonies by broadly indicting revolutionary terror, Schiller initially avoids any mention of revolution and revolt in the correspondence with Copenhagen. Deeply aware of the Caribbean uprisings and probably of the abolitionist debate, he eventually writes, in one of his letters to Augustenburg, about his disillusionment with the French Revolution and about the fear of latent instability and domestic repression that came with the Caribbean revolts.18 But through carefully managed rhetorical moves, he secludes himself from global news reaching Weimar while putting forth an account that professed to offer a universal response to the risk of, as well as the actually occurring, revolution. He thus emulates the broader discursive context of Weimar, where both Stadtgespräch (talk of the town, gossip) and court politics likewise eclipsed, not to say suppressed, global affairs.19 But here, together with the letters originating in Copenhagen, Schiller’s correspondence offers a model of aesthetic compensation for the revolutionary events of the 1790s, mirroring the process of aesthetic sublimation against and despite an individual’s—in this case, the author’s—political and economic dependencies. This model illustrates, in turn, that aesthetic education, with its transcendence of the world in the realm of ideas before returning it, perhaps, to praxis, was not only far more compensatory than educational, but also more global than Schiller’s commute between late eighteenth-century Jena and Weimar, or his consumption of news from France, might suggest. Such an outcome was not predictable from the beginning. The most famous letter of the exchange, written by Schimmelmann and Augustenburg on November 27, 1791, and offering the pension, begins with the words “Two friends united by a cosmopolitan sense.”20 The opening line serves as a self-designation of the authors, describing their relationship; in addition, it identifies the type of friendship they hope to forge with Schiller. Hinting at the economic, social, and political inequality between Schimmelmann and the prince, the opening line smooths the path toward an acknowledgment of Schiller’s lower social position, a fact that threatens to render the invocation of friendship meaningless. All too easily, friendship could deteriorate and become a hollow sentimental gesture; worse yet, it could set up a rhetoric of illegitimacy in which its use renders imposter syndromes, latent societal instability, and overall confusion, but which is, in any case, based on idle chitchat and conversational decorum. But the letter keeps such risk at bay. By tying “friends” to Weltbürgersinn (cosmopolitanism), it erects a new basis for equality. A

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concept that carried multiple meanings in late eighteenth-century culture, cosmopolitanism erases the manifestations of social and political inequality that existed between Schimmelmann and Augustenburg, while entrusting them with a more global task: to be interested in and supportive of an artist from a German town whom they credited with a deep understanding of the historical process. Accordingly, they consider his works an affirmation of their friendship, which is rooted in the belief “that all human beings are members of a single community and have obligations to all other human beings.”21 Their measured economic gesture, by being communicated in the letter, bridges not only the social space between themselves and the author but also the ideal space between worldly Copenhagen and provincial Weimar, while situating a global impact: the reference to “cosmopolitans” (Weltbürger) is meant to eradicate difference among human beings and resonates, in fact, with several of the six varieties of cosmopolitanism that Pauline Kleingeld has detected in eighteenth-century philosophy as well as in broader intellectual debates. The authors’ appeal to a cosmopolitan community—rendered as emphatic insistence on their status as citizens of the world—has clear underpinnings in “moral cosmopolitanism” as well as its more “Romantic” formulation; their economic activities and political support for trade resonate with “economic cosmopolitanism” and its championing of a free market, albeit not one where all participants enjoy the same rights.22 But above all, the first phrase of the letter erases the distance between them. Judging from his correspondence with Christian Gottfried Körner and Baggesen, Schiller’s response to the offer was enthusiastic. He instantaneously recognized the independence that the pension would give him; he seemed reenergized, thankful, and at times even emotional, especially when discussing feelings of awe, numbness, and speechlessness that overcame him upon receipt of the news.23 In a letter to Baggesen, Schiller speaks of an inner obligation to produce his best work ever, offering a rationale for accepting the pension. Moreover, he sketches the path from friendship to aesthetic education, culminating in an early announcement of the Aesthetic Letters in February 1793. But he begins by clearly differentiating among the friendships that exist between Weimar and Copenhagen and within the Danish aristocratic circle. He describes the joy that Baggesen must have felt when the two aristocrats came through and shared his wish to help Schiller; in turn, he states his hopes to boost the joy of his “dear and highly treasured friend” by accepting the gracious offer.24 Thus, in Schiller’s text, too, friendship resembles a currency, acting simultaneously as a lubricant of exchange, an enabler of reciprocity,

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and a means of investment. Nevertheless, the language of friendship serves as a code that simultaneously acknowledges actual inequality and the manner in which it can be transcended, enshrining a rhetoric that veils social differences in favor of a higher, soon-to-be politicized idea of community. But unlike Schimmelmann and Augustenburg, Schiller applies the language of friendship only to his social station, while envisioning an idea—centered on a more anonymous, purely conceptual community of humans—and situating the space for enacting equality in the future. In the process, an image of Baggesen emerges that can mediate the state of present inequality and future community; it is somewhat akin to “the eternal reader” we encountered in chapter 3 (and thus represents a label that Baggesen passionately rejected). At the surface, Schiller’s praise of Baggesen as a friend to both wealthy aristocrats and the impoverished poet is meant to bring personal satisfaction to the Dane, but ultimately, it also affirms that Baggesen already embodies a member of the future community. For this community to succeed, mediators—and eternal readers—are necessary. For now, Baggesen helps to interpret Schiller’s thoughts at the Danish court, reading and mediating the letters from Weimar in salon conversation. Whereas written discourse is performed and returned to orality in the salon, the idea of reading becomes of course personal and private. Once it was stripped of all remnants of performance culture and silenced into an individual engagement with the text, reading could sustain the ideal of a Culture Nation. Schiller’s first letter to Augustenburg and Schimmelmann stands opposite; it strikes a decidedly humble, even submissive tone. The painful recognition of his position does not allow Schiller to call them his friends. Instead he opts for “two protective geniuses,” and he considers himself “the instrument of their noble intentions.”25 He acknowledges the utilitarian purposelessness of their friendship for each other and his place under patronage. Yet he also inscribes what reads like a threshold moment in the history of aesthetics, precisely by latching onto their claim that Schiller’s words have moved them to act. This figurative embrace first happens outside the direct exchange with his patrons, reentering in communication with his friend Baggesen. Commenting upon the bequest by letter, Schiller sums up: “A morally beautiful act from the class from which this letter originates attains its value not only through its success; even if it missed its purpose completely, it remains what it was: namely, a morally beautiful act.”26 Alluding to his erstwhile precarious finances, Schiller accepts that his economic (and thus poetic) freedom results from the aristocrats’ beautiful action. In contrast, when responding to Augustenburg and

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Schimmelmann, Schiller praises their action as a moral response to his aesthetic offering. With material circumstance rhetorically transcended, he in turn can partake in this new community: “How proud you make me by making me part of your company, which is ennobled by the highest of all purposes, which enthusiasm for the good, for greatness and beauty, has created. But how superior is the passion that expresses itself in action compared to the one that is restricted to merely having inspired action.”27 What reads like both an affirmation and an inversion of Fiesco’s statement on art and life, put forth in dialogue with the painter Romano (“I have done what you—merely painted”),28 positions Schiller as an inspiration to politics while keeping him, in the end, outside the community of privileged historical actors. Schiller remains entrapped in beautiful language—particularly, in the rhetoric of friendship—and fully evolves into the educator and philosopher. Thus, the statement represents a point of culmination in Schiller’s aesthetic program, transcending the revolutionary rhetoric and action of the early, Sturm und Drang years, while continuing the erstwhile dramatic dialogue (and collision) in a simulated, affirmative conversation in letters. To Schiller, Schimmelmann and Augustenburg are present, living proof that his future vision of aesthetic education will work. Schiller’s enthusiasm for aesthetic education results not just from his sense of historical teleology; it speaks first and foremost to his aversion to bloodshed and violence. He did not need the Jacobin terror of the French Revolution to incite his rhetorical ire. Clearly, in Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa, 1783), Schiller had already contemplated revolution turning to terror, engaging in particular with the vexing question of ideological terror that emanated from totalitarian ideas. Closer to home and actual upheavals, Schiller commented only anecdotally on the French Revolution, and not at all explicitly between 1790 and 1792.29 He distanced himself from a plan to publish “Geschichte merkwürdiger Rebellionen” (History of Notable or Strange Uprisings).30 Through a letter from Karl Friedrich Reinhard, dated November 16, 1791, Schiller learned about the danger spreading from the colonies.31 Best known, perhaps, is the controversy in which he became embroiled and which surrounded his plans for defending the French king. Both Jeffrey High and W. Daniel Wilson have reassessed the tales of fact and fiction concerning this controversial plan. They cast in ambivalent light Schiller’s attitude toward (and knowledge of ) receiving French honorary citizenship, while reconstructing the alleged plan as a calculated effort to appease Carl August.32 Indeed, in July 1792, Schiller

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cosigned, along with eight other Jena professors, a letter to Carl August, asking for military assistance in order to contain the student rebellions.33 Global revolution and local rebellion were equally present in Schiller’s mind, altering to some extent the established opinion that the Aesthetic Letters were first and foremost responding to events in France. In terms of literary historiography, global and local lens mediate the more tacit impact of the French Revolution further when looking at the rise and creation of Classical Weimar. Wilson describes 1790s Weimar as shaped by the overall anxious, uprising-squelching policies of the Krisenjahre (Years of Crisis, 1792–93), which, conceived in fear of French revolutionary troops, were followed by a decade-long period of calm. These years, before French troops actually entered town in the Napoleonic Wars, brought the relaxing of restrictions previously imposed upon the dukedom and affecting all denizens of Weimar and, especially, Jena.34 But Schiller’s aversion to violence resulted not just from contemporary events, nor does it merely reflect an experiment in politically effective aesthetics. In Geschichte des dreißigjährigen Krieges (History of the Thirty Years’ War), conceived during these “years of crisis,” Schiller draws lessons arising from bloody episodes during the Reformation, ultimately recommending that a people’s attitude toward religion be taken seriously before engaging in a world-historical enterprise and commencing or imitating a revolution.35 In other words, he looks toward historical event, experience, and thought in order to ponder an allegedly secular present, including the present that unfolds globally, regionally, and locally. Similarly, whenever Schiller resurrects the allusion to revolutionary action for a moment, he knows and insists that any threat of a violent outcome be countered by political power. On the one hand, this certainty is based on local experience; on the other, it is derived from a rhetoric that mediates the threat of violence and power through the language of friendship. Schiller favors the latter mode of sublimation, despite knowing of its rhetorical decorum: after all, his correspondents profess to be the friends that they can never be. In the case of Ernst von Schimmelmann, the rhetorical friend is also a hesitant abolitionist. As we have seen throughout, the global nature of the late eighteenth century shaped him like few other protagonists whose story I tell in this book. The cracks of time run through his existence: he was the most prominent heir in a globally acting merchant family that was, however, also new to the German cultural elites. It had literally remained at the fringes of established society while in Hamburg: the family’s city palace was located en route to Altona. Even more recently, they had ascended to the Danish aristocracy. Ernst himself

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was deeply torn. The shrewd slave owner and trader acted as a devout Pietist, a religiously spiritual person whose cosmopolitan insistence on morals, engagement with culture, and advocacy for public reform were reluctant and often anonymous. In their effects, these endeavors ran counter to Schimmelmann’s global trade activities. Perhaps as a result, he became obsessed with redemption. In his final letter to Schiller, from August 1793, he unloads a rhetorical arsenal of religiously inspired, moralizing metaphors upon the writer. Most likely written in seclusion and in one of his mansions, they did not become part of German literature’s story. The principles that shaped the different spheres of Schimmelmann’s life, as well as his being torn between a global and local existence, were not translatable into one another. Nor did they coalesce. In contrast, Schiller’s engagement with global affairs was contemplative from the outset, filtered through his local experiences. While Jena’s university life and Weimar’s aspirations to become the cultural capital conflicted, at the very least because of their differing respective orientations toward the present and the future, they shared more than a reigning prince and government. They also stood for an infrastructural symbiosis of two small towns. Weimar in particular made for at times complicated political machinations, the traces of which we see in the simultaneous reluctance and editing rigor with which contemporaries in Weimar embraced and shaped the news.

Turning Inward I: Channeling the News, or Bringing Global Space to Town Daniel Wilson treats Schiller’s correspondence with Augustenburg as a small but crucial part of the evolving intent of the Aesthetic Letters. He considers it a formative element of the fifth letter in particular, along with experiencing the local violence in Jena and reading hearsay about the French revolutionary terror. Wilson thus situates Schiller’s emergent classical aesthetics as local and, inadvertently, global, rather than as latently national or apolitical. On the other hand, Wilson—and before him Hans-Jürgen Schings36—attributes Augustenburg’s overtures to Schiller to Freemasonry, with the prince attempting to recruit the poet to the movement.37 Thus, the transatlantic network that enveloped Schiller’s aesthetics has been discussed passim, and I have detailed elsewhere how the program of aesthetic education hinges upon race and visual modes of constructing racial difference.38 The beginning of this chapter accounts for slavery’s diffuse, networked returns upon aesthetics, and

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further mediation through the rhetoric of redemption. But how may we imagine the circulation and treatment of global news in late eighteenth-century Weimar, aside from noting their presence in Schiller’s correspondence? There certainly were global rumblings on the town’s doorstep, if not horizon, no matter how mediated and mitigated news of the world passed into Weimar. Eventually, though, the eighteenth-century world was thoroughly transposed to the local confines—that is, successfully kept at bay—by Weimar’s elite and citizens alike. Journals played an important role in this process. Karl S. Guthke stakes his claim about late eighteenth-century Weimar’s global aspirations (Die große Weltöffnung) on two journals—Englische Miszellen (published by Cotta in Tübingen) and Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch’s Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden, a Weimar product.39 These periodicals quickly developed specialties contributing to the insular and singular existence that shaped the town’s image, counteracting, to some degree, the flow of information that came with reading the revolutionary newspaper Gazette Nationale, ou Le Moniteur Universel (1789–1811)40 or from subscribing to Minerva. Published by Johann Wilhelm von Archenholtz in Hamburg, Minerva created a global perspective on late eighteenth-century revolutions, reporting not only from Paris but also about the French Caribbean slave revolts, often in anecdotes that aided the proliferation, accumulation, and embellishment of colonial news. The periodical resonated particularly well in Hamburg: the city was home not only to a robust merchant class but also to aristocratic refugees from revolutionary France. But Minerva was also eagerly read in Weimar. In 1794, for example, Schiller wrote to Archenholtz, encouraging him to write about the New World in Minerva, most notably the “American liberation wars,” which Susan BuckMorss reads as a request for information about the slave revolts in Haiti.41 Most importantly, though, the reading of Minerva at court and in town shows that Weimar’s connection to the world was mediated through the urbanity of the eighteenth-century metropolis, especially the northern German port city. The global network connecting through Hamburg imprinted itself upon the small town via the journal; however, not without introducing London and Paris as salient points of reverence. Here and elsewhere, the European capitals acted as measures of comparison and contrast. Indeed, the appropriateness of global goods for the German town was rendered within the coordinates of Hamburg, London, and Paris. Condensing this network in its printed pages, Minerva created a space of reference and resonance for the specter of Caribbean revolution as much as

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for those working to mitigate its effects in urban discourses: via media such as letters and journals, Schiller, Schimmelmann, and Augustenburg became part, sometimes imaginatively and merely in spirit, of urban social circles and their institutionalized sociability. However, by 1800 Minerva’s reporting of global revolutionary violence via Paris had run its course, as notes, treatises, and other small genres advocating for appeasement began to dominate. Two years later, Minerva devoted the majority of its articles to the wars in Egypt, trade relations with Asian countries, pseudoscientific accounts of African and Asian landscapes, agricultural conditions on various continents, and natural resources at home and abroad, as well as to more mundane travel reports from around the globe. By then the journal embraced a more customary pastime of Hamburg’s inhabitants: entertainment. Whereas political thought, colonial anecdote, and economic history defined Minerva, Englische Miszellen (English Miscellanea) replicated the transatlantic trade network, albeit in fractured and lopsided form: split into the typical periodical genres (e.g., reviews, excerpts, translations) and with a strong emphasis on luxury trade, the periodical was published by Johann Christian Hüttner at Cotta (1800–1806). Indebted, coincidentally, to Archenholtz, who had issued the precursor journal (Annalen der brittischen Geschichte [Annals of British History]), the first volume of Miscellanea maps the not-just metaphorical ground it covers: entries detail British towns and cities (e.g., Hull, Bath, and London) before concluding with a section about and written in novel literary genres, interlaced with paraliterary genres and illustrations. Travel stories, literary anecdotes, and poems alternate with book announcements, reviews, and maps, in addition to the customary table of contents and publishers’ booklists. Simple, at times arbitrary titles (e.g., “Anekdote”) bring the two groups together: the depictions of urban life and the proliferations of literary styles and paraliterary decorum represent mostly, but not exclusively the British colonies. The methods or arrangement and organization assist in translating the world for Weimar; they imply first and foremost a transposition to the small scale and in a manner that could be redistributed and resonate elsewhere. Thus, despite the distance between Tübingen and the Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach capital, the journal was in the Classical culture mold. The link between metropolis (or city) and empire (or literary representation) engenders the journal’s relevance for Weimar, the literary capital, as already its first volume anticipated the transcendence of global connection into a literary discourse, which, once stripped of actual geographical coordinates, became pure aesthetic form.

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Beginning in the fourth volume, for example, extensive and elaborate musings about genre classifications take hold, pointing to the journal’s penchant for publishing fiction infused with factual allusions. In the process, the relatively new genre of the anecdote moves to the fore. So-called Kolonialanekdoten (colonial anecdotes) and especially Kriminalanekdoten (crime anecdotes) pervade the new book announcements, advertisements, and review section,42 rivaling travel accounts of the New World, which often contain small sections about Caribbean slavery and slave trade, and reviews of travel books. In addition, ethnographic accounts of Caribbean societies continue to persist as freestanding genres, cumulating in frequent reporting about slave rebellions in Haiti, violence against slaves in Barbados, and passionate advocacy for the abolitionist cause. The result of this bifurcation is, on the one hand, a projection to the world by exiling and confining the global to reports about the Atlantic passage and distant Caribbean islands.43 On the other hand, the varied assemblage amounts to and records an outburst of fiction: the world is translated not just into journalistic texts but also into a plethora of literary genres. Together, they condense any expansive, geographical space (or foreign authority) into texts that were read and consumed, regardless of whether the entire text was invented, copied, translated, or otherwise distorted. Most importantly, though, amid this ordering impulse, which is often carried out anonymously, a notion of original authorship arises. Ultimately, then, the rivalry of genres reflects two directions that periodicals take: they are a testament to the manner in which nascent disciplinary discourses emerge and get translated into one another, and they preview how erstwhile popular periodicals either devolve into specialized magazines or are replaced by them. By containing trade sections championing the importation of luxury goods, English Miscellanea recalls transatlantic trade, while anticipating the marketing of literature and its prime object, the book. In this context, too, the small genre of the anecdote magnifies literature’s eventual fate. Throughout the journal’s reviews, for example, anecdotes chronicle a book’s value; their inclusion helps to gauge the novelty of an account, its place within a network of available texts, and the feasibility and use of translating the often-foreign texts. Anecdotes embedded in travel accounts provoke reflection on originality, authenticity, and plagiarism of texts, creating a discourse that proliferates new anecdotes in turn. Particularly by generating more of the same, anecdotes appear to feed the reading public’s desires. Ultimately, they tell the story of how we may imagine popularization. At the same time, the discursive impact of anecdotes fixes literature’s conundrum: they draw information globally but

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proliferate locally, mirroring the state of the book. As an emerging luxury good displaying the owner’s sophistication, interest, and economic might for years to come, the book’s local production contrasts with the importation of exotic luxury items that became synonymous with instant gratification and indulgence (e.g., tea, coffee, cocoa, and fashion).44 As anecdotes regularly form their own section in Miscellanea, they embody and signify transition: between history and fiction, veracity and hyperbole, all the while submitting a part of oral culture to the written record. By inhabiting a multifaceted, transitional genre-space, anecdotes underscore the challenge that literature would soon face in yet another way. By enticing people’s immersion in fictionalized identities, literature became suspect and unreliable; it came under siege for its alleged uselessness.45 Similarly, the use value of anecdotes is unclear at best. Above all, the anecdote mirrors the status of English Miscellanea: standing among journals that were devoted either to the transmission of knowledge or to entertainment, it occupies a threshold position. For, as the journal encloses the world in its pages, it does more than translate the global into a local framework. It inadvertently extols the relegating of literature to its own realm. English Miscellanea’s shortening of geographical distance into the small, condensed space of novel paraliterary and literary genres, most notably the anecdote, finds a curious pendant in the Weimar periodical that was, overtly, devoted to the globe, Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden (General Geographic Ephemerides). Ostensibly seeking to capture global constellations, Ephemerides focused on representing individual, occasionally vanishing, markers of geography rather than the coherence that arose from epistemological authority or comprehensive knowledge in a discipline. In fact, Ephemerides served the geographical imagination. Indeed, the spatial orientation of Ephemerides proves deceptive; stylistically, the journal combines an introduction to geography and planetary and earth sciences with reviews of books and maps, followed by a section on news and letters, often written by reporters abroad (“Correspondenz-Nachrichten”). Because of this structure, Ephemerides teeters in the face of the momentary, fleeting nature of the news and its genres (including advertisements). However, the journal cleverly compensates for the risk that the vanishing authority of the news cycle entails—not by insisting, for example, on reporters’ eyewitness status but by repackaging the global news in book reviews. In this respect, the journal resembles Miscellanea’s strategy of likening the consumption of foreign goods to the possession of a book. The journal directs inward in yet another way, showcasing, for example, the Industrie-Comptoirs zu Weimar’s geographical publishing

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program—amounting essentially to a guide to travelers’ global knowledge—and its implied promotion of Weimar as epistemological authority.46 Furthermore, Ephemerides instructs on how to compile an exemplary library, accelerating the inward-directed motion of its ideal reader by outfitting interior space and emphasizing the value of spatial restraint. The library promotes an understanding of books that relies on their capacity to contain the expansiveness of knowledge between their covers; the image of the book as a receptacle of world knowledge festered especially in times, such as the eighteenth century, that were marked by epistemological saturation and the borderline superfluous whose uncontrollability contemporaries bemoaned.47 They are material objects that transcend the cost of their production and purchase by taking on a timeless, institutional value of knowledge for exchange, loan, and contemplative consumption. Thus, whereas Miscellanea paves the way for marketing outside a closed-off entity, Classical Weimar, Ephemerides—though being all about marketing—creates another ideal image: that of collecting books and world knowledge in a library. The library amounts to enclosing the world by transporting it into a chamber. Translated into the word, accumulating and becoming, ideally a destination, the library transcends all global materiality. What looks like a return to Baroque cognitive figures is firmly rooted in the contemporaneous mind-set; indeed, Ephemerides reconnects to Hamburg and with two of the city’s prominent citizens: Ebeling and Büsch, the directors of the Hamburg Trade Academy. Not only does the idea of the library promote the public reading circles and lending libraries of the Hanseatic city; Ebeling and Büsch represent a relation to the world. In Ephemerides Ebeling stands for the mediation of the Atlantic colonial world through (the translation of ) books. They were the guarantors of knowledge. Often doubling down on their newfound authority by celebrating the expertise (and occasionally, the fame) of their writers, single-authored books supplanted Moravian correspondence and memoirs, as well as the encyclopedic projects that had served as the sources of knowledge about the New World. Büsch, in contrast, emerges as the ideal collector. His books are not only carefully grouped and organized but offered for purchase and reading in Weimar. The collection promises to import not just epistemological authority or value. Nor does it simply stand for the possession of global knowledge.48 Büsch’s collection first and foremost anticipates, in yet another way, a discussion of how world knowledge should be arranged and where literature might fit. Should literary texts be submerged, representing one way of knowing among many in a Gelehrtenbibliothek (scholarly library), or should literature—most notably

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fiction, poetry, and plays—be extracted, housed, and championed as a unique good? Whereas Büsch’s books created the former—as did, as we saw in chapter 1, many of Hamburg’s private and public libraries—Weimar’s book collecting, while wide-ranging and encompassing, prepares for the latter. Ephemerides’s curious piece of news thus sheds light on a network of material and knowledge exchange between cosmopolitan Hamburg and secluded, sleepy Weimar. But its indexical value goes beyond the exchange. As a cultural detail, the announcement illustrates not just that, but rather how and why, Goethe may have used Miscellanea and Ephemerides to commission translations and order books for the princely library as well as his own. To him, the journals likely represented a plan, indicating a particular mode of translating the world into the confines of Weimar, rather than symbolizing an unfettered openness to the world. They allowed him to sketch his ideas on world literature. More importantly still, the journals’ directions shaped and proliferated the local conditions for literary production. The smallness of Weimar provided the ideal context for transcending the global in a literature that eventually became synonymous with cultural icons and, ultimately, with nation.

Turning Inward II: Whispering Tales in Weimar’s Confined Spaces Yet what was so unique about Goethe’s Weimar? Most twentieth-century accounts of eighteenth-century Weimar mask a historical reality that was complex. By 1799 the town had 6,041 inhabitants living in cramped quarters in a few hundred houses of different sizes, often with low ceilings, and stretched along torn-up streets with poor lighting.49 Fields spilled into town, as did sewage, dirt, water, and crime. Visitors and recent arrivals from abroad told stories that competed with what would soon become the dominant narrative of “a literary capital.”50 They sarcastically commented on farm animals roaming the streets, noting the discrepancy between the town’s smelly reality and its high-flying aspirations: “You cannot even imagine what Weimar is like: it looks like a dump and pretends to be a capital,” wrote Siegmund von Seckendorff in 1776, a few months after taking up a position as chamberlain at the court of Weimar.51 Karl August Böttiger echoed these comments in 1791. He not only dished about Goethe but had much to say about his own indignation: “I had hoped to find an elegant residence but what I found were shabby quarters, an antique.”52 Such aspirations and expectations were met with high prices—not just for luxury items but also for bare necessities—that pushed the

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cost of living as high as in Paris.53 Nevertheless, writers and aristocrats, scholars, merchants, and other travelers kept coming to Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach for decades, only to record their disappointment: “If there is any city that fools the imagination, it is Weimar . . . a small, dead, poorly constructed, quite repulsive town, nothing extraordinary is there, with the exception of the castle, perhaps.”54 In other words, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Weimar’s reality was increasingly at odds with the reputation it had abroad. Its desired urbanity and cosmopolitan flair proved not only elusive but also deceptive; Weimar had aspirations that could never be realized. Böttiger’s opinion represents just one among many, but he commands attention for exposing the idiosyncrasies of Weimar’s most famous inhabitants. A headmaster and classicist, he quickly became a literary and theater critic and a much-maligned gossipmonger, whose papers were published as Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen (Literary Life and Contemporaries, 1838) and are helpful in formulating Classical Weimar’s alternate history of rumor, gossip, and the town’s conversation, a tale that was later taken up by Wilhelm Bode and, in the twenty-first century, by Konrad Kratzsch.55 Read in the context of letters, diaries, newspapers, and journals, these compilations convey a remarkably unified image: contemporaries mocked individual inhabitants’ overblown self-image. They complained about high rents and prices, poorly constructed houses and streets, and the generally unremarkable small-town architecture, not to mention a local obsession with street lighting. Many accounts describe unmet expectations, emphasizing the confining nature of Weimar. In portraying the inhabitants, they document a lively literary life in town and a communicative culture marked by both orality and literacy, but they also expose the ways in which an icon—be it a person or a literary period—is styled, kept alive, and marketed via gossip, often with other than the intended effects. Letters by those about to be turned into literary icons—Johann Wolfgang Goethe, for example—interact with this culture, participate in and resist it, while hinting at the manner in which Classical Weimar and the world outside town quickly became two separate spheres; moreover, participants labored to keep them apart. Treating gossip and rumor as substrates rather than as adversaries of the traditional image of Classical Weimar reveals how it emerged as a culture capital not in spite of but, in fact, because of the local limitations in architecture, municipal institutions, and communication. Patricia Meyer Spacks discusses formal considerations of rumor as genre and gossip as a foundation for storytelling; in addition, I seek to recast the discursive role of rumor and gossip in

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small-town Weimar and even within the larger cultural story in which literature intersects with urban life.56 Like Spacks I read epistolary accounts and diaries as literary genres preserving oral discourse, but I am less interested in gossip as a limit of personal space, intimacy, and subjectivity than as a substitute for news in the absence of facts.57 Simultaneously co-constituting and representing the public life of Weimar, rumor and gossip worked, along with journals such as English Miscellanea and General Geographic Ephemerides, in mediating and eventually in shielding and drowning out the global affairs in Weimar. Unlike letters written by immigrants to the New World, or Moravian memoirs, whose amorphousness of genre reveals traces of being overwritten, layered, and indeed multiauthored while delineating both the expanse and diffusion of the global imagination, Weimar’s letters and diaries are a testament to small spaces. While court members were easy targets of gossip, the narrowness of Weimar—a town on which the ducal court relied for its sustenance, no less—enabled and sustained a culture of gossip. Blurring the boundaries between public and private affairs, the circulation of gossip gave rise to persistent rumors—self-styling efforts, to be sure—that helped manage the adversities, opportunities, and differences engulfing the municipality. There were social, economic, and political differences among aristocratic court society, newcomers, and aspiring bourgeois citizens. They needed to be negotiated as much as the discrepancy between Weimar’s cultural aspirations and its economic, social, and political limitations, all of which manifested themselves in the conditions of buildings and roads as well as in Weimar’s dreadful city planning. Rumors thus quickly surpassed the limits of well-defined social circles, becoming instead proclamations of facts about the town. Weimar represented itself for outside consumption, but how it managed its town affairs undermined the image it sold to visitors. Often, this image did not line up with the one inhabitants had of Weimar, an image that also conflicted, oddly enough, with reality. Rumor and gossip colluded in the manufacturing of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as the embodiment of Weimar Classicism, aided by the circulation of gossip in the town of Weimar itself. The interaction between court, aristocrats, and town, on the one hand, and various acts of imaginary and actual border crossings, on the other, were shaped by the physical limitations of Weimar. These limitations defined the emerging ideal of Classical Weimar, which intensified as Weimar’s residents embraced rumor and gossip in an effort to exploit the image of shabby Weimar when it served their municipal interests, shielding their budding economic and political power from the court’s imposition.

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Ultimately, the citizenry’s counterintuitive actions contributed to solidifying Weimar’s reputation as a secluded cultural center that, despite its exclusion from the postal routes for most of the eighteenth century, ascended to international fame. Some of Weimar’s inhabitants were aware of the impact of gossip: letters, diaries, and notes written by affiliates and correspondents of the Weimar court show as much. They preserve traces of immediacy and instantaneousness, attesting to a rather nuanced and sometimes reflective, but always longwinded written conversation depicting the inner workings of Weimar’s large social circles. While hinting at “a greater or lesser degree of individual intellectual control” in the prior act of speaking, these letters imply the uncertainty and unreliability—as well as the fear of wider dissemination—associated with gossip.58 As gossip in any form passed on and altered a story, new stories arose, allowing the private to pass into the public and initiating a process that often got out of control. Thus, the letters also destabilized conversational space, by detaching it from material buildings and penetrating the proverbial walls of chambers and mansions. What would later become a conduit of Weimar’s reputation to the world was contested and uncertain in the beginning. As Weimar’s inhabitants gossiped, complex images emerged, not least of those who were the target of gossip—for example, Goethe. Karoline Herder, wife of pastor and writer Johann Gottfried Herder, bemoaned Goethe’s unapproachability, whereas Sophie von Schardt, wife of a privy councillor, ridiculed Goethe’s devotion to the duke.59 Böttiger seemed bemused by Goethe’s working habits as well as his efforts to balance involvement in politics with grand journeys and spa visits.60 Numerous letters speak of his difficult relationships with other people,61 and others have more general complaints: a status-conscious, noble Seckendorff rants about Goethe’s sudden rise to the aristocracy, and Karoline Herder, an active participant in Weimar’s conversational circles, details his failures as a theater director.62 Fellow writer Friedrich Schiller, constantly facing economic hardship, grudgingly accepts Goethe’s material privilege and frugality toward others.63 Inadvertently, though, by parsing out fact and fiction, many letters fabricate the image that eventually became Goethe: they illuminate his personal relationships with women, especially with his friend Charlotte von Stein and his then-lover Christiane Vulpius, greatly inflating the latter’s role during the French lootings in 1806, all in order to socially legitimize her as Goethe’s life partner.64 After 1800, many writers comment on Goethe’s aging, among them explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and Romantic writer Achim von Arnim.65

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Others point out Goethe’s increasing solipsism.66 Some anticipate his death: in a tone that blends admiration with sarcasm, they recount acts of imagining Goethe’s death in order to be emotionally ready for his actual passing.67 Writers move from sharing personal, at times mildly scandalous or embarrassing details from Goethe’s everyday life toward a distanced depiction of Goethe that separates the aging man from the allure of the poet and writer. Stylistically, though, they hold on to epistolary gossip as a suitable form of communication. By claiming that they have no time or desire for personal conversation while assuring the letters’ recipients that they will, eventually, confirm the truth of their missives in person, the writers insist on the factual accuracy of their letters. Enthralled with their own words, the writers remain blissfully unaware of their share in crafting the image of Goethe. They detail the town’s attitude toward Goethe, laboring to reconcile impressions of the man with reaction to his work. While the lower classes respected Goethe and considered him to be friendly and good natured, the middle classes declared him to be the genius of town.68 In the process, Goethe became both a resident and the center of a meandering, self-styling public discourse that cast him as a silent, absentminded, and almost objectified figure. Not that fellow residents were unaware of Goethe’s role, however passively, in the self-styling efforts: Sophie von Schardt complains, for example, about a reading public inclined to attribute to Goethe everything they dislike, and Goethe’s silence amid these accusations, and concludes that this very silence contributes to conjuring up a mythical person whom she herself hardly ever experienced.69 And yet the writers qualify their insistence on accuracy when pondering whether their letters create any wrong impressions. Weimar’s conversation signaled flux, to say the least. Goethe clearly embraced the allure of himself that urban discourse had produced: a secluded, cerebral figure around which the local conversation revolved. He saw himself not so much as a product or victim of gossip but emerged as its stern adversary—at least publicly, while privately dishing on others. In letters to Charlotte von Stein, written during the first Weimar decade, he proves to be an avid gossiper, while paving the way for the later, at once more contained and more public, image of Goethe—the adversary of gossip; he details early diplomatic missions and governmental work in accounts that reflect what Elisabeth Power calls both an “indicat[ion of ] an active life” and a step toward “the development of a less subjective prose style.”70 But Goethe goes further than defining gossip-free zones. Not only does he berate Böttiger; he also erects proverbial walls between himself and the public, ironically in part by accusing others of being overly concerned with public perception. Recalling the late

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Schiller in his Gespräche mit Eckermann (Conversations with Eckermann), he insists that Schiller never commented on the French Revolution because he was obsessed with his public image and reputation, mocking the dead writer for having advanced to a friend of the people with such an attitude.71 Of course, Goethe himself is more than his reputation and words: he rose to become a national icon. His management of gossip was instrumental in this process. When on the verge of being pulled into the middle of a controversy, he categorically rejected any overtures: “Besides, I’m firmly determined to hear nothing more about this matter. Nor will I speak about it.”72 Thus validating the rumor of being a silent bystander, Goethe added to the perception of him being a larger-than-life man. He elevated his importance even more through calculated interventions in the literary life of Weimar. Goethe suppressed or commissioned the publication of reviews, he orchestrated publishing and performance options, and he insisted on being the executor of the literary will of fellow writers, especially after he had lost political influence at court.73 Clearly, he manipulated, even fabricated, news and relevance, thus enlisting in his self-styling efforts the communicative flow of rumors, including their insistence on factuality. And Goethe’s emerging fame was aided, paradoxically, by the cramped architecture of Weimar. Like other members of the court, Goethe lived in town where they inhabited palaces, court-purchased homes, and rented houses while remaining noncitizens, even foreigners, in any social and legal sense. Not only did they lack property as the minimal, though not only, requirement for citizenship; like anybody else coming from outside the duchy, they were also considered foreigners. Nevertheless, they schemed to have their accommodations reflect their positions at court. In at least one instance, this housing shortage led to bizarre, serial moves, which Böttiger ridicules: “The house where he [Goethe] lived was purchased for him. The court treasurer paid 6000 rtl. to Dr. Helmershausen for it, and spent an equal amount on renovations. . . . But he [Goethe] had to make room for the duke’s love affair. But three houses down the street, there was Wieland, renting a house. Goethe declares: ‘I want to live there and Wieland lost the lease.’ . . . Wieland had to go then! [It was] a ridiculous scene .”74 Amid verifiable facts75 and his effusive, sensationalizing tone, Böttiger depicts—and thus anticipatorily affirms—Goethe as a ruthless self-promoter. The pushing aside of Wieland, the then-famous writer who had joined the court as princely educator in 1772, forebodes the writers’ respective fates in German literary historiography. Wieland and Goethe represent a paradigm shift that

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involved, in the area of genre, the toppling of the novel of Enlightenment education—and its focus on an allegorical public sphere and communal structure—advocating instead for a radical subjectivity marked by individual expression, authorial might, and the sovereign status of the individual person, all on course toward modernity’s genre per se: the Bildungsroman. In style and substance, however, Böttinger’s description resembles a whisper down the lane; it depicts the spread of gossip and conversation’s invasion of the urban space. (Of course, the whisper not only resonates with but avails itself of the genre that, in the history of the German novel, ends up on the margins of literary historiography: epistolary writing.) But Böttiger’s transgression consisted less in his invasion of privacy, or the rhetorical and actual blurring of boundaries between the home and semipublic space, than in the revelation of Weimar’s self-styling efforts. Even worse, he had exposed the shaky foundations of these efforts by zeroing in on what had become a latent problem: Weimar’s spatial limitations and its inadequacy to serve as the capital of the duchy. Unlike in other eighteenth-century ducal capitals, the court did not take responsibility for the town’s residential infrastructure or use its treasury to wield influence over its policies or provide for its protection. After a devastating fire in 1774, there was no longer a central castle; only its outer walls were still standing. The court expected the town to accommodate its members, but none of them had adequate housing—neither those accustomed to a certain standard of living because of their station (e.g., Seckendorff) nor those brought to Weimar because of their recent fame (e.g., Wieland and Goethe). So neither the court’s old social relevance nor its modern aspirations were reflected in the town’s architecture. To any newcomer the real Weimar must have defied any understanding of what a capital should look like.76 Böttiger articulated this tension between the ideal and experience and laid bare the confining nature of Weimar by gossiping about events, protagonists, and communicative relationships in a way that undermined any appealing public image. He told stories of social and spatial transgression, highlighting that Weimar’s ideals were rooted elsewhere and aspired to reach beyond the confines of the town. Böttiger reveals that writers borrowed clothes, sent for food, invited themselves to dinner, and roamed freely—occasionally in neglect of their appearance—within the aristocratic circles and town elites.77 Intervening in other people’s space defined the daily life of those affiliated with the court. For some court members, to enter the various houses and palaces was as close as they would ever come to rising in society. The flexible etiquette, while stimulating and amplifying social aspirations, thus relied on the workings

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of gossip for its execution as it broke with convention by using and exchanging other people’s possessions and by intervening in private spaces. Through these small transgressions, a web of relationships and exchange—of words, goods, places—unfolded, softening the social fabric and making hierarchies at court appear more penetrable.78 Overall, the style of Böttiger’s narration mimicked its content as spatial borders were transgressed and reerected. It is in this context that the account of Goethe’s arrival in Weimar resonates. It alludes to Goethe’s rumored reputation by mocking the writer’s efforts to live accordingly in a place that left much to be desired and that indeed lacked sanitation, proper demarcation of farmland, and a true courtly infrastructure. But Böttiger also suggests that idealized, cosmopolitan images (of both Goethe and his art) are flawed and not sustainable: neither court nor town provides a space where creativity can flourish. For that, one has to leave town, at least metaphorically, by turning to the garden and relying on the garden’s owner, a pragmatic, globally trading merchant. Universally imagined creativity and a cosmopolitan lifestyle could not exist without projecting to the world. As if to underscore Weimar’s stifling effect on its inhabitants, Böttiger (channeling Wieland) declares: “I have to flee town, go to the countryside. Here in Weimar, the court kills my intellect, and the fatal climate kills my body.”79 The confines of Weimar must be left behind, both physically and metaphorically, as Goethe had already intuited and expressed in letters of the first decade—and as popular writers, missionaries, and common people, along with merchants, salon hosts, and the ever restless Lessing, had done. Gossip not only divulged the physical and aspirational limits of Weimar, but also served to keep its (self-)seclusion intact. One episode from 1785 illustrates how rumor and gossip worked. Masquerading as news and affirming the social values and ideals of Weimar’s court society, a story about Emilie von Werthern (1754–1844) and August von Einsiedel (1754–1837) simultaneously shows traces of ridicule and proclaimed factuality, social acceptance, and courtly sanctions, while drawing on the desire to flee town. Werthern and Einsiedel made for a curious pair. Minor aristocrats living in Weimar, they were mocked for their obsessions: when their liaison began, Werthern wanted a young lover, while Einsiedel wanted to go on a scientific expedition to Africa. Therefore, when they suddenly disappeared in 1785, rumor had it that they were en route to Africa. With the pair’s disappearance a social nuisance ended, because their affair had embarrassed Werthern’s husband and Einsiedel’s friends at court. Fellow aristocrats disagreed on details of the abrupt departure, but by and large they

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applauded the adventure, looking forward to exciting travelogues, fantastic tales, and fictions about what promised to be an exotic journey. The reaction revealed much about the court society’s fascination with an outside world kept at safe distance; it also inadvertently exposed hypocrisy when it came to gossip. At first, society accepted the pair’s truth, but acceptance gave way to suspicion when news reached Weimar that Werthern had died. An exhumation discovered an empty grave, and public furor ensued—over the lies, but even more so over the prospect of the lovers’ return. Indeed, when they did return, Werthern and Einsiedel experienced continued social scorn, despite their repeated apologies and subsequent marriage. To reinforce the social sanctions, contemporary commentators denied having known about the affair before the pair’s disappearance. While the episode could have played out elsewhere, Weimar’s condensed and penetrable space amplified its relevance. More than merely illustrating the regulatory impact of gossip, the reactions—recorded in letters and diaries— show gossip’s contradictory impulses and diffusing effects. Rumors and gossip appear socially acceptable if their outcome can be relegated to the realm of fiction, here taking the form of adventurous tales about distant regions of the world. Yet if a community doubts a rumor’s factual probability—and gossip threatens to undermine social values—society picks up on threatening effects. Consequently, once they were sensitized by the suspected falsehood of a rumor (e.g., the alleged death), Weimar’s aristocrats vigorously restored the truth in order to affirm the social code that they had shored up by co-opting the rumor of the African journey.80 As the local horizon and confining (and enshrining) normative boundaries are challenged, global destinations arise as the subject of imagination and fantasy, anticipating the structure of exoticism, which in the era of national literatures becomes the dominant mode of translating and arranging western Europe’s attitude toward cultural otherness. The episode relates yet another direction of cultural historiography. That Wieland later insisted on not having known about the affair—and that Böttiger denied any inkling in his notes81—underscores Weimar’s ambivalent attitude toward gossip and rumor and foretells their fates in cultural historiography. Exemplifying gossip as a genre, Böttiger’s notes glimpse at an image in the making, at the idea that would become Classical Weimar. His text entwines gossip that could have spun multiple plots and inspired alternate stories, all of them playing out within and against the limits of the town, its location and infrastructure, its architecture and social dependencies. Böttiger’s image of literary Weimar suggests that cultural historiography could have taken multiple directions. The image has traits still present in today’s notion of Classical

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Weimar: social mobility achieved through artistic or philosophical community, freedom of spirit, and expansiveness of intellect. But the easy spread of gossip also challenged the spatial-geographical limits of the town and diffused social limitations. Therefore, gossip had to be contained or redirected for it not to impact Weimar’s efforts at self-stylization, which began to revolve around the court. Goethe’s fierce rejection of gossip suggests as much, as does the circulation of news about Werthern and Einsiedel. Classical Weimar’s culture of self-elevation could only succeed if damages inflicted by gossip were turned around and used to elevate the protagonists of Weimar’s success story, thus lifting gossip from moralist condemnation to public prominence, all the while separating society into gossiping and nongossiping folk.82 To turn Goethe into a distant, cerebral figure—which essentially meant memorializing him during his lifetime—was but one way to control gossip; it was a gesture that, like a rumor, set up a narrative that could only be proved by repeating and affirming it. Another way to grapple with gossip was to transcend Weimar’s spatial confines, thus depriving gossip of its foundation. But how could one get away from the town’s dilapidated smallness and from material conditions that were at odds with its inhabitants’ far-flung aspirations? How could the court separate itself from the town on which it depended? For Classical Weimar to ascend, an alternate vision of a capital city was needed, one that left the symbols of courtly society behind. A new idea emerged: the capital as metropolis—an intellectual, spiritual, and cultural center capable of exporting its ideas and values at will, regardless of buildings, architectural space, and geographical limits.83 This idea, too, capitalized on the town’s limitations. For, as voices asserting a nascent cultural cosmopolitanism were all but drowned out by rants against a deteriorating town, the notion of a cultural capital turned Weimar into a “symbol of idealism abstracted from the reality of the city.”84

Shabby Town: Translating Gossip into Cultural Capital To understand this development further, I turn to Sebastian Hunstock’s study of Weimar’s local history. Die (groß-)herzogliche Residenzstadt (The Grand Duchy’s Seat of Power) examines basic social, political, and economic patterns of Weimar’s urban development in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Building on the book’s many insights, I revisit contemporary views of Weimar’s architecture and decay vis-à-vis the town’s self-styling efforts. In considering the overlap between aristocratic, state, and communal administration,

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various views on the town’s interaction with the outside world, and the complex socioeconomic situation, a picture emerges that shows rumor and gossip working outside the court. Weimar’s urban conditions produced stories that fueled, and to a lesser degree challenged, the making of Weimar as culture capital. Considering this nexus of the town’s built environment and its investment in image making complements research on Weimar’s court politics as well as on cultural and literary censorship, which over the last few decades has contributed to continual revisions of the tale of Classical Weimar. Conversely, accounting for these facets shows how literary discourse began to center the nation without ever ridding itself of the local foundation. Certainly, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Weimar was overpopulated and expensive. By 1830, Weimar’s population had increased to 10,112 (from roughly 6,000 in 1799), with steady growth recorded from 1810 on.85 Population density changed from an average of eight inhabitants per house in 1770 to twelve in 1830. Rents were unbelievably high; the combination of available housing, costs, and population growth made for a difficult market. First and foremost, the result of a deteriorating housing base exaggerated by poor city planning, the living conditions brought into sharp focus another aspect of city life: the economics of class, citizenship, and social entitlement. The actual financial situation of many homeowners, taxation, and the social station of the majority of homeowners were at odds with the social expectations of aristocrats. Conflicting trends accounted for the population growth in Weimar. Growth happened, though rumor, and unsubstantiated fear fueled the perception that more people flocked to the town than actually did. Though French revolutionary troops never came,86 British educational reformers and refugees from the French Revolution settled in Weimar. Tides of visitors and migrants from neighboring German lands as well as the English and French created the impression that Weimar was overrun by people from abroad, and the townspeople blamed these foreigners for the housing shortage and high rents. Citizens such as Christian August Vulpius had long complained about the foreigners whose influx had increased and made everything more expensive.87 Official statistics seem to have given credibility to such rumors. In 1836, for example, the Weimar Magistrat (municipal council) recorded, “The stream of foreigners into our town was disproportionally higher than townspeople emigrating abroad.”88 However, the actual vital statistics contradicted this: the root cause of high prices and demographic turmoil, though heightened by inaccurate perception of immigrants, was the famine of 1771–72. The lack of a comprehensive municipal response had profound and immediate effects

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on the town’s health, both literally and figuratively.89 In the immediate aftermath of the famine, disease became rampant. Combined with generally poor municipal hygiene, this situation increased the number of postpartum deaths and led to an overall higher mortality rate, which in turn eventually resulted in fewer marriages, pregnancies, and births for decades to come. In other words, there was no longer a stable population base that could support the variety of communal needs. It was virtually impossible to sustain a healthy economy, and trade was curtailed to protect the town’s interests. When the Wars of Liberation reached Weimar in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a typhus epidemic intensified the negative demographic trend, affecting all inhabitants, irrespective of origin or social or legal standing.90 The subsequent stabilization-and-growth decade (1810–19) resulted from administrative and legal acts that altered the understanding of citizenship. In 1810, a newly installed Stadtordnung (municipal law) codified the standing of many of Weimar’s inhabitants by stipulating, for example, a certain level of income and wealth as prerequisites for residency and citizenship.91 Therefore, as the century turned, Weimar’s municipal government embraced demographic change and sought to correct the rumor of a steady influx of foreigners by defining the place of long-standing residents within the city, and the repercussions were manifold. As town officials continued to insist on legal language that carefully distinguished between citizens and foreigners, they projected an awareness of the world—and the town’s relationship to the world—while shoring up a sense of local identity and exclusiveness. The legislation both complicated and simplified the court’s attitude toward the town: by negating the attraction of foreignness, which some court members had flaunted to avoid paying municipal taxes, these measures allowed the court to cultivate the image of Classical Weimar. A clear definition of foreigners made it easier to co-opt the seclusion of the town and make it part of a destination narrative that was attractive for a visit, thus adding a new layer to the court’s public relations. The court considered visitors vital to having an impact beyond the city and state, emphasizing the limited nature of their stays and valuing them as mediators of Weimar’s evolving self-image. Contemporary commentators linked visitors’ interest to the by-then famous individuals who had moved to Weimar, suggesting that visitors were best able to appreciate local fame. Conversely, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller had come from other German-speaking areas, which at the time meant “from abroad.” Foreign roots thus predestined an individual to be famous in Weimar. The perception of foreign visitors easily correlated with the

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emerging idea of the city as a cultural capital overseeing an empire of ideas, Foreigners —that is, nonlocals—could partake in the spread of such ideas. Of course, as I demonstrated above, a similar logic structured the transposition of global news and goods into town; not only did information and translation about other countries stand in for openness to the world, but the circulation of global goods modeled the circulation, and especially the possession, of books and vice versa. As foreign origins were exhibited, they became part of the foundation on which Weimar’s literary and cultural legacy would rest. The tale that foreigners came to Weimar to be close to Wieland and Goethe, Schiller and Herder, later referred to as the great four, was at least in part a rumor. More mundane attractions lured a small but powerful number of residents to town—mostly older, wealthy aristocrats who retired to Weimar because of the theater, the masquerades, the Redouten (dances), the journals, and the Tischgesellschaften (salons).92 Contrary to popular opinion, which considered them habitual tax evaders, these pensioners shouldered the biggest share of special tax assessments through occasional voluntary payments, which was pleasing to a financially strapped court whose lower members freely interacted with the aristocratic newcomers and on occasion rented from them. This in turn endowed the erstwhile visitors with importance and led to another false claim, namely, the alleged dominance of court over town. In contrast, the townspeople themselves noted a profound disconnect between the two. Vulpius, despite being Goethe’s brother-in-law, reportedly despised the court’s leisure activities because of their disregard for urban hardships.93 In a shoemaker’s diary—an illustrative account of life in Weimar from 1806 to 1839—Goethe is barely mentioned.94 In 1816 a visitor was disgusted by the widespread disrespect toward the court evident in pub conversations.95 These observations illustrate the discrepancy between attitudes found in town and the idealized image of Weimar existing outside. If the destination Weimar was where rumor, gossip, and the town’s architecture and infrastructure came into sharp focus, thus revealing the role that self-styling efforts played in the making of Classical Weimar, the location Weimar cultivated an opposite image. The seemingly desperate condition of architecture and infrastructure, leading to the sense of being overpopulated in 1830, dated back even further, notably to the Entfestigung (dewalling) which had begun in 1757.96 Never progressing at a satisfying pace, it magnified the housing crunch and hindered construction of new quarters commissioned by and for the benefit of Weimar’s municipality. To make things worse, where the city wall was demolished, boundaries between town and farmland no longer existed,

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leaving the vacated space in disarray and allowing livestock to roam within the city limits. This was particularly evident in the area of the hog market, today’s Goetheplatz (Goethe Square), where the town had begun to tear down the city wall in 1770. But (waste-)water trenches were only filled in 1795, and it took a massive fire in the same area—nearly forty barns burned down in 1797—to embark on redevelopment.97 Only then was farming prohibited within city limits.98 Newly constructed houses tended to have multiple floors, and adding a floor to an existing house became popular in order to maximize rental income. In an eerie manner, the effects of Weimar’s abridged dewalling efforts reflected the discrepancy between reality and the ideal image of Weimar. Consistent efforts to capitalize on the rental market exposed Weimar’s unusual profile of homeownership.99 Neither the valuation of houses nor the distribution of wealth across the entire spectrum of Weimar’s population was generally reflected in homeownership. Skilled craftsmen, whose families had lived in the town for generations, owned approximately 50 percent of all houses, setting Weimar apart from other towns and larger cities where this class owned only 30 percent of all residential property. However, because of the individual value of each of these houses, the total value of this real estate segment was in fact lower than that of the property owned by merchants, which was in turn worth less than the property owned by foreign aristocrats, while court and state administrator property had the highest value.100 Then again, while some aristocrats and government administrators possessed houses of high value, others—especially those who had come to the court from other regions—possessed no real estate at all, and they were the ones who harbored expectations, and, soon enough, resentment, and frequently expressed their views about the discrepancy between social rank and economic affluence. They resented not only the rising bourgeoisie, but also the wealthy aristocratic pensioners living in town who mingled freely with the court but did not have to serve it. Resentment grew particularly after the castle fire, which cemented the court’s dependency on the town’s residential infrastructure and literally erased the architectural foundations of an old residential capital. In turn, Weimar’s citizens exercised considerable power over the court because they were the landlords, and having property as equity gave them additional financial flexibility. This intrusion of the socially privileged into a space largely controlled by craftsmen, bourgeois officials, and even servants aggravated the social and political effects of the unusual ownership situation. However, the peculiarities of home ownership were not the only factor fueling a negative, highly emotional verdict about the material condition of

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Weimar. Self-interest led homeowners to perpetuate the persistent tale of a rundown town while disregarding the actual housing substance. Weimar had municipal regulations that allowed property owners to do their own real estate assessments, and homeowners took advantage of this ordinance in order to obtain fire insurance (not to sell their houses). This resulted in deliberately undervalued houses, and the average recorded value stood at 917 rl., fueling the rumor of a shabby town. But there was some truth to this rumor, and particular complaints triggered the same comments about unacceptable urban conditions in Weimar. Not surprisingly, these comments also revealed the competing interests at stake. For example, poor street lighting drew the ire of commentators over and over again. But to light the streets and equip inhabitants and houses with lanterns meant much more than improving the town’s infrastructure; inadvertently, the persistent tale of poor street lighting exposed an interest in sustaining the image of a pitiful town, even if it took the shape of rumor. Street lighting had been subject to special taxation since the early eighteenth century, and the municipality conducted its own assessments to determine each homeowner’s contribution. And here, a very different picture emerged: the documents list an average house value of 1500 rl. Metaphorically speaking, the residents had a vested interest in keeping Weimar in the dark in order to conceal the true substance and value of their houses. Conversely, poor street lighting became an (increasingly wrong and thus empty) metaphor for the overall condition of the housing base. Therefore, while special interests affected both assessments, by the early nineteenth century, the image of a shabby, impoverished Weimar could no longer be reconciled with the actual housing situation in town.101 Ultimately, that Weimar’s building substance was better than its reputation helped sustain the image of Classical Weimar as a cultural capital because it proffered that the town’s limitations—its confining nature, its inward-directed and rumor-filled municipal conversation—could become one of its strongest assets. As an eighteenth-century town aspiring to be urban, Weimar struggled with conflicting influences that challenged the emergence of an identity firmly rooted in local—that is material, social, and economic—conditions: on the one hand, as Weimar inched closer to becoming the true administrative center of the grand duchy between 1810 and 1819,102 the traditional, architectural signs of the early modern capital vanished. On the other hand, administrative steps put Weimar on more solid financial footing. Proper municipal representation was reflected in legislation resembling a modern constitution (1810), in new

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governing bodies, and eventually even in the architecture representing the modern administration and its hierarchies.103 This process entailed a clearer demarcation of socioeconomic power (though not always of housing spaces). Administrative responsibilities were more clearly divided among ducal government and municipal institutions; the duchy contributed its fair share to costs. Indeed, the governmental institutions of duchy and municipality—and their representation in the urban landscape—resembled those of other German lands. And yet, with rumors working to keep Weimar closed off from architectural and migratory innovation, while travelers came looking for a powerful, ever present court and left carrying this elusive ideal abroad, Weimar constituted something unique in the minds of distant readers who had never visited the town. Since Weimar was probably not as dilapidated as various constituents wanted readers to believe, it is not surprising that shortly after 1800, visitors caved in to an image that transcended reality. The material conditions of the town gave way to its ideal, relying on rumor and self-styling efforts to tell the story that would become Classical Weimar. Travelers like Joseph Rückert likened the town to an island while depicting conflicting impressions. Rückert acknowledged the reality of Weimar’s modest architecture while proclaiming the ideal of “the poetic Weimar,” which had impressed itself upon the visitor’s mind. He describes Weimar as a town “like its geniuses, who do not care about outward appearances,” only to note, somewhat contradictorily, “cleanliness and order everywhere.”104 He claims that the strict isolation from everything foreign, combined with a rather impenetrable class structure, allowed for a disciplining of art in Weimar. A cloistering of the select few around the court elevated Weimar “to a true museum of the intellect”;105 this development was aided by social and aesthetic, but also by architectural and spatial, structures. Like urban discourse, Classical Weimar’s image had turned inward and become self-secluded. Yet museums, while at times appearing fossilized and archaic, are also the spaces where memories and monuments are made and cultural capital is issued.

Heights of Subjectivity: Icons Becoming Monuments, or the Fate of Towers Weimar’s museum-like structures condense many layers of cultural and literary history. Not coincidentally, the Mythos Weimar is alive and well, preserving proud eighteenth-century stories as well as more recent, abhorrent episodes

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from the town’s history.106 Classical Weimar’s reputation seems intact, in part, because gossip and rumor, rampant since at least 1800, did not undermine the town’s self-stylization. On the contrary, they created a multitude of stories that visitors could carry into the world, erecting a destination that, while intersecting the museal and the literal, did not dwell on past temporalities by amplifying them spatially, but envisioned the future.107 Nevertheless, the relationship between spatial imagination and actual materiality was distorted in Weimar, colliding with the iconic status that some of the inhabitants had achieved. Having relinquished its representational edge in the Ansicht (view) of the 1774 fire, the municipality’s actual power was as hollow as the burnedout castle, and the town asserted its precedence in local history. Beginning in 1810 and extending over the next three decades, the distribution of economic, political, and social power would manifest itself more transparently in both architecture and city planning. All the while, continuing efforts to turn Weimar into the culture capital accelerated, with Bertuch—overtly the local force behind literary publishing—turning out to be its most excellent marketer and creating a model for fashioning Weimar as a destination. As Hans-Martin Blitz observes, this designation gave direction and orientation to the nineteenth century, most notably to national literary historiography.108 The concept of individual authorship is central to nineteenth-century German literary historiography, as is the rise of literature’s image as a singular sphere that could impact social and historical processes. German national literature also hinges on strategies of monumentalizing people and works in the museum-like Classical Weimar through recourse to their own efforts at self-elevation and constructions of the author-subject. Amid these multilayered strategies of localization, Goethe and Schiller emerge as dominant representatives, and sometimes Herder and Wieland complete the tale of the so-called four greats. Ironically, these moves eclipse local (and global) stories: Schiller’s response to local violence and global news is but one example. His sublimation of these influences in the Aesthetic Letters has of course been construed as a response to the French, most likely by following and reinforcing nineteenth-century accounts of Weimar during the French Revolution. Yet Goethe, who towers as an imposing figure above all, stands for both local self-elevation and ambivalence toward the globe. It is Goethe’s engagement with architecture that tells the story of how German literary history relegated the world and the city to the background and turned to a town, Weimar, all in order to represent the nation. Ironically, it is a town that Goethe himself left behind: fleeing it rather frequently, he traveled elsewhere. Rome being his

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most famous destination, it is nevertheless Goethe’s imaginative not actual escape that is most telling. In this story of flight from smallness, he aspires to heights, creating cognitive figures, metaphors, and concepts that proved suitable for the elevation of persons. Translating these figures in the language of literary history and theory, on the one hand, and into that of cultural studies on the other, enacts the national as a paradigm of literary tradition, while cementing, ironically but forcefully, Goethe’s modernity and relevance today. To tell this particular story of German literary historiography requires two subplots: Goethe’s engagement with towers, and a sweeping, but strikingly simple tale of how aesthetics as a discipline (re-)structured late eighteenthcentury ways of knowing and representing knowledge. Together, these plots point to the intersection of rhetoric and materiality, veiling perhaps the more distant and elusive—in any case less personal and subjective—intersection of city and world. Towers make a sporadic, tantalizing appearance in Goethe’s oeuvre, ranging from the figure of the Türmer (tower-keeper) in poetry to the Turmgesellschaft (Tower Society; or The Society of the Tower) in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship). Heinz Schlaffer read the society as the actual “author of the novel” decades ago,109 while Hellmuth Ammerlahn describes it as a secret association amplifying the metaphorical qualities of the “tower” as an expression of intellectual culmination.110 In each use, the metaphorical invocation of towers barely eclipses the frightening effects that actual towers and heights had upon the author; indeed, Ammerlahn points to Goethe’s frequent allusions to “swaying,” and also to “vacillating,” when speaking of towers or using similes.111 Each of these accounts treats “towers” as figuration, but neither points to Goethe’s extensive engagement with architecture, thus further suppressing the remnants of experiencing the materiality of towers in his texts. One architectural monument both involves and transcends these interpretations as well as their shortcomings. The Strasbourg Cathedral bundles all the effects described above, gaining an emblematic status in Goethe’s works. Through its sheer materiality and the psychological effects of its height (and particularly its towers), the building grounds the essay “Von deutscher Baukunst” (On German Architecture, 1773) and reappears, along with the Cologne Cathedral, in the 1823 essay of the same title.112 Less obviously, the Strasbourg Cathedral also structures Goethe’s more personal, autobiographical reflections at the time. Representing his encounter with towers of the past, the

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Strasbourg Cathedral rises as both symptom and symbol of Goethe’s rhetorical reliance on architecture across his oeuvre, with buildings being the space where inside and outside collide, as well as coalesce, and that engenders an individual’s sense of self and other. At the same time, buildings—in particular tall buildings and towers—symbolize mastery and sovereignty. The Strasbourg Cathedral thus forms the centerpiece of the following section, in which I sketch how Goethe contributed to his elevation as an author. His reflection on towers epitomizes how instances of the local and the global are absorbed and ultimately transcended in the process of making German national literature, and how monuments, both as architectural object and writing subject, begin to play a central role in literary historiography. By transforming literal height into instantiations of subjectivity, Goethe became, avant la lettre, the coauthor of German literary historiography that had Classical Weimar (and himself ) at its center. (That an architectural monument from another city, Strasbourg, figures so prominently is ironic and all but a blip. It creates a stumbling block, exposing what the national imagination of German literature suppressed.) But this is just one subplot in the rise of national literary historiography. And Goethe’s engagement with towers relates to the second as well, as it tells us much about epistemological shifts in the eighteenth century pushing through both, the centrality of individual subjectivity and the all-engulfing dominance of aesthetic thought. This engagement unfolded in a historical context that Jochen Schulte-Sasse describes as a “decentered world,” in which “aesthetic orientation” situated individuals not only spatially and practically, but also temporally; most importantly, philosophy—specifically aesthetics—provided a medium that aided the “require[d] . . . renegotiation of the self ’s relations to others.”113 Inaugurating in historical perspective what Erich Auerbach called “horizontal cultures,” the eighteenth century had done away with “vertical cultures [that] orient subjects toward a fixed point outside space and time, a transcendent being or substance that centers the world as a whole.” SchulteSasse observes that “if the subjectivity of the individual is no longer sustained by a transcendent being . . . a textual or aesthetic culture, in which individuals center themselves through artistic creation and interpretation” will provide just the support for the self ’s re-relation to others.114 An essentially Romanticist viewpoint, this claim restates the nature of crisis: amid the collapse of the old, the new arises, engendering the work of art as an idealist mode of subjective existence. By forming the center of culture, aesthetics generates more than a complex notion of the work of art; its discursive impact makes visible the different functional spheres of modern societies.

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The epistemological consequences of this shift toward aesthetics are profound and crucial for my rethinking of “Goethe’s towers” in the context of city and globe. Taking stock of the role that architecture played in late eighteenthcentury thought is a first step in this process. In his 2011 book, On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought, Daniel L. Purdy argues that eighteenth-century philosophy relied on architecture to articulate some of its most profound ideas and that architecturally articulated philosophy stands as a metaphor for Western ways of life. Modern social theory has used architecture to symbolically enshrine its new authorities, for example, affluence and economic pride.115 Emphasizing the exterior and expressive side of the built environment, which manifests itself in distinct styles, Purdy observes: “Architecture became an isolated object of contemplation and not just a stable frame within which the other arts performed.”116 At the same time, he exposes the reliance of philosophical discourse on “architecture to describe inner life,”117 thus observing a countertrend to the role of visible decorum. Susan Bernstein pursues a divergent strategy, returning “architectonics,” via Kant, to architecture, defining the term as the transcendental parallel to the work of practical architecture, its buildings, materials, and substantive manifestations. Accordingly, modern architectural writing accounts for the discrepancy (or disjunction) between a concept (or plan) and its “physical instantiation.”118 Indeed, by displaying the tension between the architectonic and architectural, Bernstein insinuates, buildings tell a forward-directed story of philosophical ambition, while exhibiting the detours inflicted by trivial experience and needs, or—to use the language of my book—by the expansiveness and spatial folds of eighteenth-century global thought. Purdy goes further: as I noted in the introduction and in chapter 3, he likens architecture’s story to that of modern, social subjectivity. On the one hand, he observes a turn toward domestic, enclosed spaces of privacy;119 on the other hand, he emphasizes that, for much of the German eighteenth century, architecture as a discipline was virtually nonexisting, reflected in the fact that Baukunst (master construction) was only practiced in the building of churches. Thus identifying a split in the correlated expressions of subjectivity, Purdy suggests ways in which the eighteenth century read buildings like books. Translated in the present context: whereas one trend in architecture projected—horizontally—into the future and supported inward-directed subjectivity, another got stuck on heights— namely, that of the church tower—and expressed subjectivity in a vertical relation to a transcendent power.

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Yet “Goethe’s towers” are exemplary rather than singular instances of eighteenth-century writing on cities. Images in eighteenth-century city chronicles, in which church towers loom over the city, signifying not just huge institutional power but also directing the reader’s perspective,120 corroborate Purdy’s take on the display of exteriorities in early modern architectural writing. As city chronicles relate aspects of the city in well-defined categories, sharing population and trade statistics, giving fairly accurate depictions of infrastructure, and describing influential social classes and the stratified hierarchies among them, they produce a substrate for new city narratives that began to foreground the idea of the city, that is, its self-image and (future) aspirations. What stands out in chronicles, however, are the comparatively large sections devoted to churches whose representations dominate entire texts.121 I also associate the churches’ colossal impact with the persistence of verticality in Goethe’s thought, claiming that the writer set out to undo the transcendent authority symbolized by church towers, while seeking to replace it with human creativity. This process rendered chaotic the subject’s daily experience—that is, the experience of his or her immediate, local environs as well as of the global world—because of the lack of any orientation that could structure mundane life. Establishing the human creator is at the center of Goethe’s 1773 essay “On German Architecture.” However, it is chronicling the process of verticality becoming metaphor that ends up being the text’s effect and one of its legacies. Overtly, the essay presents itself as a celebration of Erwin von Steinbach, the Baumeister (the master builder) of the Strasbourg Cathedral. While unfolding a tripartite structure, through which the poetic subject—in dialogue with Steinbach—charts its own genesis by erecting its own foundation, pillars, and authority, the essay rejects any form of monumentalizing the person in a representative Denkmal (e.g., a sculpture of the artist), repeating emphatically: “You need no memorial!”122 In the end, the height of the building itself comes to embody the monumental qualities of the individual subject and human creation. Beginning by equating Steinbach and the divine (“You are like the Great Architect who built mountains towering into the clouds”) and by noting the monumental nature of the building (“your colossus”), “On German Architecture” moves the text, stylistically—and ultimately, the essay as a genre—from the lyrical to the prosaic.123 In fact, the essay is instantiated by a lyrical self, assuring that, in the first part, the text very much reads like an ode. But from its point of departure, the essay rejects memorializing the dead artist as a person, as the speaking subject begins his musings over Erwin’s

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grave, only to leave it behind and indeed rejecting the inorganic emptiness and ultimate irrelevance of a gravestone. Amid it all, the building physically overpowers its surroundings, including any human in its proximity, by forcefully demonstrating its quest for height through its prominent architectural feature, the column. The speaking subject wrestles with the height, pointing out the nearly unnatural contrast, which the column forms with everyday buildings, especially with an architecture whose purpose is to house humans. As the cathedral’s height does not invoke resemblance to trees, instead making all trees appear to be modeled on the building’s vertical lines, the subject recognizes its closeness to the divine. However, the invocation of the divine emanates not only from the cathedral’s exteriorities. Working against any horizontal expansiveness of the mundane, the columns and walls also delineate a sublime form and reciprocal experience, radiating the divine structure of Steinbach’s genius and transcending the confines of the prosaic everyday. In order to emancipate subjectivity from both the architectural craft, including materials as well as construction plans left by predecessors, and its epistemological foundation in God, the essay’s speaking subject deepens his reading and engagement with the detailed, unknown built environment. The subject attempts to read—or translate—according to experience and familiarity, seeking to classify and understand or, at the very least, to create order and clarity of expression. Yet he ends up accumulating, “as in an entry in a dictionary,” what he discerns to be unfamiliar, rendering it semiknown by arranging lists of perceived, yet wrong synonyms (“synonymous misconceptions”). The product is a new category or classification, namely, “Gothic.” In order to arrive at this point, the subject adapts a mode of translating that combines strategies of labeling the foreign with those of crude domestication, only to conceit its failure: “No wiser than a nation which calls the world it does not know barbaric, I called everything which did not fit into my system Gothic: from the elaborate figures and colorful ornaments on the houses of our would-be nobility to the somber remains of early German architecture.”124 This rhetorical strategy proves to be diffusing. An accurate recording and documenting practice—though playing to the global horizon while noting the limitation of local life and remnant history—cannot transpose aesthetic experience, which always involves novelty, nonrepeatability, and immanence. For, in its pure minimalist verticality, the cathedral not only departs from other examples of German architecture—which the subject perceives as suffocating and suffocated by ornaments—but “the edifice” instigates a new vision.125 Though a sign of transcendence, it is precisely the vertical expansiveness that impresses upon

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the viewer the immediacy and presence of greatness upon seeing the cathedral for the first time. The speaking subject appears deflated by his inability to classify, yet simultaneously elated by the aesthetic experience and imaginary ascent to heaven. Aesthetics arises as a realm separate from knowledge. Detailing the impression that enwrapped him—yet unable to recognize and explain it—the speaker inevitably records an impasse of language; he ultimately resorts to reading the cathedral in old terms, that is, according to the metaphors of verticality: “Embellish the monstrous wall, which you shall lead toward the heavens, in order for it to rise like the divine’s sublime and pervasive tree.”126 However, these metaphors are born out of the new idea that structures the narrative of creation and interpretation: that of the genius. Moving through the essay’s middle part—and observing the principles of architectural history and process—architect, aesthetics, and the building itself express themselves through detailed, vertical objects, while telling the story of human-made inventions and activities (along a horizontal plane). But in the end, and despite its monumental appearance, the materiality of the cathedral vanishes or is at least suspended; the material object is sublimated in the flood of “the glory of the Lord,” doubling the feeling of divine beauty predicted at the outset.127 Erwin von Steinbach’s genius affects—or creates—a subject that transcends the Baumeister’s rootedness in a vertical, material culture, throwing the speaking subject into a purely aesthetic experience. The subject’s rhetorical exclamation—denying the master a monument in stone—amounts less to monumentalizing Steinbach in words128 than to erecting a monument to the speaker himself. This reading stands in dialogue with, as well as in contrast to, Purdy’s interpretation of “On German Architecture.” Purdy engages with the treatise intertextually, within the realm of literature, against the backdrop of Goethe’s autobiography (and thus ultimately in terms of the subject’s memory) and literary historiography (where he notes the textual dynamic befitting “the Sturm und Drang notion that the ‘genius’ reshapes traditional forms”129). But he also approaches the text in contextual or sociocultural terms, vis-à-vis the changing status of the architect in eighteenth-century architecture. He contends that poetic structure—and, we may add, its internal rupture or shift in genre from ode to essay—parallels architecture,130 “culminat[ing] in rapture” [!]—which conventionally signals, of course, a delight, and a joyful or sublime experience of the divine, but also a removal. Purdy concludes that “the parallel between author and architect is a corollary of the originary experience of the subject’s confrontation with the building,” underscoring that Sturm and Drang effects on German literature are “projected onto architecture.”131

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The tower therefore becomes a sign of affirmation for the modern subject, a medium or a metaphor. In any case it is a sign expressing subjectivity. For the structure of modern subjectivity, at least as I have reconstructed it in “On German Architecture,” encapsulates an ongoing displacement of the speaker, oscillating from a vertical to horizontal orientation and vice versa. Conversely and historically, the metaphor of verticality is nothing but a condensation of this process (and thus a product or a manifestation of psychosocial memory). In other words, one could easily dismiss my reading as nothing but a rhetorical transposition or translation of the notion of the subject, combining the metonymic effects of displacement with the metaphors arising from the condensation of the subject’s genesis. Just as the subject of the 1773 essay, while seemingly grounding his experience, and thus himself, in the presence, cannot rid himself of the specter of verticality, the Strasbourg Cathedral marks more than the imaginary limits of modern subjectivity when alluding to the transcendent through the reach of the building’s towers. Most immediately, it marks the incipience of the individual subject—here the text’s speaker—as one of self-elevation and as the coauthor of a literary historiography that puts the individual author-subject at its center. Alternatively, though, in recognizing that verticality serves as an important point of orientation—namely, as an image that affirms, and at the same time challenges, modern subjectivity—one can read both tower and verticality as signifying the mediality of literature. Rather than recuperating the immediacy of aesthetic experience, verticality and its symbols then situate literary discourse as one among others. Therefore, through the essay’s subject—its reliance on translating subjectivity into architectural metaphor—the cathedral also points to the limitations of aesthetics. The fate of verticality thus becomes an indicator, at their incipience, of the symbiosis, as well as the tension, that connects literary and cultural studies. The tower marked then, as it does now, a moment of crisis, casting the shadow of literature’s struggle into the future. The status of verticality—and more broadly, Goethe’s engagement with heights—thus entwines with the rise of the author as the icon of German literary history: the Strasbourg Cathedral surfaces periodically as a fixed point of reference in his oeuvre, constituting more than a remnant of verticality. It reveals coping strategies he used to preserve the unity of text and life. In the essays on architecture, the cathedral juxtaposes the narrow confines of the town, its scattered views defined by multiple, small churches. In Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811–33) and in Conversations with Eckermann (1823–32) Goethe tries to shed the specters of verticality, as they assumed the gestalt of

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other people’s art and their potentially rival presence. Particularly striking, though, is his approach to recounting visits to the Strasbourg Cathedral, and subsequent attempts at recreating his impressions, in his life story. In Poetry and Truth—and this provides nuance to, not alteration of Purdy’s reading of Goethe’s autobiographical accounts on architecture—the author relates his fear of heights, exemplified by the cathedral. Before he succeeded in harmonizing, poetically, the overwhelming fascination with taking in the colossal stature of the cathedral while anxiously ascending to its tower, Goethe had to triumph— quite literally—over verticality. Going up the tower became a ritual for him: at first, he did it to survey and take in the surroundings, imposing meaning upon the sprawling landscape from above. Later he climbed the tower so that he would not lose himself; reaching its top allowed Goethe to control his trepidation, the torture and vertigo that heights incited in him.132 Eventually, he organized, in a text, his overwhelming impressions of the Strasbourg Cathedral (and other buildings). In the 1823 essay “On German Architecture,” Goethe finally relegates verticality to books, architectural drawings and prints, memory and representation, rather than experience “a certain apprehension.”133 Facing the Cathedral of Cologne, Goethe reiterates the inability to relate the impressions of tall buildings. Though offering strategies of mediation, he ultimately falls short of the larger critical project he attempts, and whose success he accords to others, namely, “to feel dignity and value correctly, that is, historically, and to recognize them accordingly” in the text.134 Scholars differ on their readings of Goethe’s late essay. Susan Bernstein considers its measured tone, treating it as Goethe’s turn toward proportion, spirit, and Bildung, with the development of subjectivity replacing the act of building in mortar and stone. More recently, she has emphasized “distance and stability,” which is achieved through “intermediary representation” and enables “historical understanding.”135 In contrast, I suggest that verticality nearly disappears in the essay’s retrospection; it vanishes through a series of transpositions: first, Goethe relies on other voices, namely, François Blondel’s, to invoke architectural measures of beauty and symmetry, the very same criteria that Bernstein reads as indicators of mature subjectivity. Second, he designates distance to his earlier text when adapting the regal style of the “we” that replaces the individual speaking voice in the text. He turns to emphasizing personal, spatial distance, when speaking, literally, of his “departure from Strasbourg” and “alienat[ion] from this form of architecture,”136 while recalling his “earlier attachment to the Strasbourg Cathedral,”137 before recommitting the distant experience to fond memory. The latter gesture involves contemplation and concession, as he says,

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“The single tower, although of sufficient height, was nonetheless unfinished. . . . If the essay is somewhat rhapsodically rambling (amphigurisch), that is perhaps excusable since one is trying to express the inexpressible.”138 Still, something of a colossal proportion easily disturbs Goethe, even in the late essay, although he is then able to render disturbances as unfinished ponderings, to identify their disharmonious effects and suppress them in prose. Goethe’s understanding of his earlier text—or experience of aesthetic immanence—thus unfolds along a temporal or horizontal axis, becoming narration and storytelling illustrated by other media, punctuated by life events, and aspiring to be historiography. Goethe achieves at last what his young poetic subject, in dialogue with Steinbach, failed to accomplish: to classify German architecture. He does so, however, only with the help of ground plans, prints, and drawings, available in large part through his friendship with the brothers Boisserée; accordingly, by relying on mediation any chance encounter with the unsettling immediacy of sublime verticality is foreclosed from the outset. As Goethe prepares for the visit to Cologne, he reads the plans, allowing him to imagine a completed cathedral. But unlike Bernstein, I do not consider this mediation as the ultimate aesthetic act, or imagination as Bildung. Surely, Goethe concludes by considering the 1823 essay the “ripe fruit,” profoundly different from “the first budding” in 1773. But ultimately, he reaches clear insight and understanding only after engaging the expertise of architects, draftsmen, and art critics. While claiming to have written a narrative of urban, organic growth, with the city’s churches at its center, Goethe unleashed something else: an exposition of specialized knowledge and expertise. Ultimately, whereas the poetic subject of the older essay relied on the language of architecture—in fact on the monument—to translate its might effectively (as authority) and affectively (as conveyor of immediacy), the later “On German Architecture” represents multiple subjects whose expertise sustains Goethe’s account. The monumental Strasbourg Cathedral casts aside the architectural clutter, which the subject perceives as disturbance in a prosaic world, stabilizing subjectivity through representation. Thus, the modern poetic subject grounds itself aesthetically while expressing itself through reliance on the symbol of the transcendent God. In contrast, the late essay tames, if not embraces, prose by showcasing an early form of interdisciplinary collaboration, all the while telling the history of making national monuments. Whereas, in 1773, the world appears amid the unfiltered and unorganized impressions of secular art forms, only to be transcended in Steinbach’s artistic genius emanating from the German soul,139 the 1823 examples of German architecture are

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first and foremost local and historical: either metaphorical and actual ruins of the past (the Strasbourg Cathedral) or hitherto unfinished monuments of the future (the Cologne Cathedral). In the older essay, the attribution of German reads like a diversion,140 while in the later text, the monuments are a testament to the urban, rather than territorial, existence of Germany. The unfinished tower, however—sign of an erstwhile pure, aesthetic experience—sticks out, marking a rift that runs through this account and pointing, perhaps, to literary aesthetics under siege.

Shifting Aesthetics Taken together, both “On German Architecture” essays exemplify a process in which disciplinary diversity arose, while beginning to shape Goethe’s legacy as one of disciplinary symbiosis. Surely, as verticality and towers expose the vulnerability of self-centered subjectivity, they confront new versions of humans’ engagement with the world, seeking to understand and arrange present experience historically, and primarily teleologically, amid the ruins of the past. Thus, as the lyrical subject—or the aesthetics of immanence—gives way to the comparative historian and collaborator, materiality interferes with the subject’s (and Goethe’s) aesthetic project. Consequently, the author’s 1823 “flight” from the confines of Weimar projects to the heights and monuments of Strasbourg and Cologne rather than to the crumbling city walls (enabling the imaginary expansiveness of territory toward nation) or the museum-like cultivation of self-referential stagnation. Nevertheless, aesthetics structures and shapes the epistemological field of eighteenth-century disciplines that has captured Goethe by then. Not only does the aesthetic shift legitimize thinking and speaking about the eighteenth century as a secular age, but “the new” also stands for disciplinary innovation and social reorganization, leading to profound transformations that go beyond the invention of aesthetics. Consequently, “Goethe’s towers” chronicle more than Goethe’s rise and iconic status in German national literature and culture. They simultaneously mark eighteenth-century aesthetic shifts and the remnants of a bygone coherence of the world, indicating that the new authorities on the subject, in order to express themselves in a world that lacked a transcendent being, depended on the architectural monuments to wrestle with competing worldviews. These remnants were more than the rubble of divine materiality. They became the raw material and substrate

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of the subject’s new language. Reassembling and redesignating this material constituted a novel act of translation: using the built material as a reference point, the subject destroyed the towers’ original orientation toward the divine, redirecting the gesture toward itself and expressing the new authority of subjective designation and reorientation. All the while this act also engendered a mode of transposing ideas into the future that, unlike Schiller’s aesthetic education, relies on the presence of material foundations. In this respect, “Goethe’s towers” stand for the role that buildings played in organizing the cognitive and aesthetic field, relating not just the importance of the material world but, more broadly, the configurations of city, globe, and nation in efforts to think modernity and beyond. With a nascent disciplinary multitude aligning through a domineering aesthetic model, correlating ways of translating—that is, understanding—the world emerge as well. They hinge on processes of turning people and towns into monuments, not to say museums of culture; these processes are more multifaceted than one chapter or book suggests. These ways of understanding or translating the world eventually revolve around Goethe. But around 1800 it was Schiller, whose exchange with Augustenburg and Schimmelmann serves as the gateway into this chapter, who acted in Classical Weimar’s story: a proponent of aesthetic education and practitioner of epistolary exchange, he championed multifaceted cosmopolitan ideas that could be exported and, in Schiller’s mind, produced affective results among his correspondents, culminating eventually in the Aesthetic Letters, that could eclipse and suppress their precursors, which we saw in the exchange of actual “letters among friends.” Yet while the content of the letters may be of cosmopolitan appeal, their impulse and structural effects in the 1790s are best described as compensatory and sublimating. At their core, they remain inward-directed and local, rather than educational and utopian or universal. (The latter characteristics also emerged in nineteenth-century literary historiography; Schiller’s contemporaries ridiculed his living in and of ideas.141) A testament to complex localizing strategies, Schiller’s letters partake in a discourse that, by unfolding aggressively in journals, exiled the global to the Caribbean islands, while promoting a plethora of literature and its media (journals, books, and libraries) that contained and condensed the world while ultimately shielding readers from its influx, coproducing a singular epistemological sphere—literary aesthetics—in turn. In some ways, Classical Weimar practiced glocalization to the extreme: the world remained outside the gates while becoming the destination for an urban export that professed to be national.

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The local conditions of Weimar, this small town aspiring to be a capital city, aided in this process that entwined the narrowing of experience with transcendence of life into aesthetic ideas. Simultaneously creating and curtailing rumors and gossip, Weimar had unique ways of managing the talk of town. Unlike Leipzig, with its lampoons, or Hamburg, where individual merchants wrote meticulous, self-documenting diaries, Weimar elevated individuals, most notably Goethe, and self-styled the town as a destination for foreigners. Goethe’s life and texts began to fuel a story in which the poetic subjectivity of literary writing and broad cultural commentary became one, coalescing and resulting in a narrative where politics seemingly aligned with aesthetics, thus serving as a model of the Culture Nation perpetuated by much of nineteenthcentury German literary historiography. Here Classical Weimar appears as the cradle of national literature, as Germany’s culture capital. And yet it was Weimar’s smallness, cramped architecture, and life beyond the court that cocreated this image. Amplifying the image of actual spatial restrictions for economic benefit, the town was never able to truly rid itself of a specter that confined the intellect as well. Goethe rose above it all, literally and figuratively: allegedly beyond inflicting and spreading gossip, he “fled” the town by turning to heights, to towers and reflection upon literary subjectivity. He centered eighteenth-century literary aesthetics, while tinkering with its uniqueness in his multidisciplinary exploits. He dodged national literature by coining the concept of Weltliteratur (world literature). Most importantly, perhaps, just as he resorted to local monuments in order to write about German architecture, he envisioned Germany only as a collection of small towns, connected by sprawling carriage roads, rather than centered on a capital or being famous for its early modern global cities.142 And with this allusion Translating the World returns to its outset by attempting to chart the relevance of viewing German literary history between the city and the globe.

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EPILOGUE In the Translation Zone or (German) Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Return to the In-Between Epilogues to scholarly books are not unlike the epilogue that was spoken on the eighteenth-century theater stage. To be sure, the former are printed, always constituting an intrinsic part of the book rather than a flexible entity to be adapted to the local performance. Portable only as part of a book, these epilogues resonate with locations—of their authors as well as their readers—but their text is fixed. Nevertheless, like its counterpart in theater, the epilogue contextualizes: situating the preceding chapters once more in scholarship, it often reframes the view on the very subject matter of the book. This epilogue is no exception. Working in tandem with the introduction, “The City and the Globe,” on integrating Translating the World’s chapters in a broader story of German-language literature in the late eighteenth century, it extends well beyond 1800 into the twenty-first century. By reengaging with the concept of translation, understanding it here as mediation between the eighteenth century and today, it demonstrates that “the old and foreign story” I tell in this book rings nevertheless familiar in the U.S.-American academy today. This final chapter underscores my argument’s relevance in an institutional, linguistic, and we may opine, social context, one that repeatedly faces a nagging question: “Whither literature?”1

Accordingly, Translating the World inevitably partakes in the debate on the impact of literary production in our age of globalization by asking, in whatever circumspect way, about the role that nations and their literary histories, and in particular older periods of German-language literature, play, or should play, in today’s university. While reiterating the claim that literary imagination around 1800 was refracted through city, world, and nation, I observe and concede that modern literary discourse has always been a lot more messy, challenged, and dispersed than our tales of literary greatness manifested in authors, genres, and books care to admit, and that national literary histories, far from inevitable, are merely an attempt at ordering literary life. Consequently, the story of literature I tell in this book does not parallel, nor does it mediate, the stories of economic progress and loss, historical progress and restoration. Instead, it accounts for the fractures and holes, imaginative compensation, counteraction, and anticipation that permeate texts around 1800. As Translating the World illuminates the relationships among nascent disciplines around 1800, it certainly notes their contrast to the legacy that German national literary historiography formed in the nineteenth century, all the while positioning itself in a scholarly discourse defined by “the inbetween.” This status resembles the one that literature held within a broader disciplinary network that emerged in the late eighteenth century and which enabled its circulation. My book thus clearly exists in a translation zone, arising from the interplay of different Wissensschafts-/Wissenstraditionen (legacies of scholarly traditions) that Germanistik and German studies inhabit. It is a zone occasionally marked by a clash: between philological traditions, with their self-proclaimed, comprehensive “depth,” and approaches characterized by a penchant for novelty and intervention in the present. This constellation leads, more often than not, to “a provocation of tradition,” similar to the one that Armstrong and Tennenhouse observe in their rethinking of American literature as an emergent literary tradition. Accordingly, in proposing a new reading of eighteenth-century German literature, my book seeks to inspire debate, favoring neither one side nor the other. Therefore, just as my engagement with existing scholarship has been strategic rather than documentary, with key moments of scholarly discourse shaping my lines of inquiry in the preceding chapters, I hope to assert a sense of openness in this epilogue. By offering preliminary conclusions and reminiscing about the legacies of two late eighteenth-century “exports,” I hope to encourage arguments beyond the finite pages of this book.

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Like eighteenth-century knowledge transfer, my study borrows from others: I clearly appropriate translation zone from Emily Apter’s book of the same title. Dislodging the concept from its original post-9/11 context expressed in, among other texts, “twenty theses on translation”2 that pinpoint altered material, intellectual, and local/global conditions of literary life around 2000, I use the concept both literally and figuratively in a late eighteenth-century context. What intrigues me about this concept is precisely its openness to and ultimate synonymy with the “in-between,” allowing for its application to literary phenomena that occurred before the advent—or invention—of comparative literature, as well as for the consideration of a nascent disciplinary multiplicity around 1800. After all, in “Lessing Dethroned,” I argue that the beginnings of a new comparative literature, which seeks to disentangle the “nation” from its corresponding language,3 are discernible in the chaotic discourse of Hamburg Dramaturgy. Translating the World digs in the historical archive, chronicling literal translation from other languages into German, translations between registers of language and those that amount to knowledge transfer, and, finally, more figurative transpositions that sought to forge the German nation in literary discourse. In the process, this book tells a story that exposes not only what Apter calls “the national/nominal language fallacies”4 but also historically misleading beliefs: about eighteenth-century oral and literal languages, about literary and cultural life in general and the preference and dominance of literary genres in particular, and, last but not least, about a broader sense of the world that impacted German cities around 1800. By literally zigzagging through literary life in multidimensional acts of translation, this book captures alternate stories that link this life to a globally imagined world. By situating itself between the city and the globe, Translating the World searches for historical precision and understanding of today’s happenings in the area of culture, especially in discussions of literature, foreign languages, and humanities. How to manage competing interests, tales, and aesthetic forms—indeed the plethora of knowledge and writing—is, after all, not a new predicament but a natural part of living cultures interacting with each other. The nation/the national thus ascended as but one system of understanding the world. Alternately, worlding existed before 1800 (and well before being introduced as a mode for studying eighteenth-century literature today); at the very least, global perspectives pervaded rhetoric, translations, and the coexistence of literary genres, complicating the rise of national paradigms. Consequently, the various readings I offer in this book—all seeking to escape the confines of nation and the national—defy a coherently alternate story of

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historical, psychogeographical or philosophical, and medial arrangement of literary production. Instead these readings remain open-ended, weaving a tale of translation loss and surplus accrued in transposing a colonial and imperial world for the German city. Or they end up expressing the city’s broken relation to individuals and the world; at times, all that is left is a flight to the architectural heights of a bygone world anchored in a divine authority. As these readings emphasize interstices of incongruities, they begin to reveal the impulse and forces behind the making of national traditions. They do so in part by suggesting why texts that may have gotten stuck between the eighteenth-century German city and the world were left behind when it came to telling the story of the German nation in the nineteenth century—or why they were abridged, that is, gendered, localized, or reoralized, in their potential to tell and sustain alternate cultural histories. While network allowed me to imagine an arrangement of literary life that involves the eighteenth-century city and the globe, translation zone begins to describe the condition of literary works within this arrangement.

Classical Weimar’s Exports into the World One important part of the legacy of eighteenth-century German literature is its rarely acknowledged intermediary nature, defining not the space between neighboring, imperial nations, but the space that straddles instead a prenational, “worlded” literary production and the national literary historiography. Such intermediacy insinuates temporal difference, while actually collapsing, in a network-like manner, distances. It localizes literary life, enabling new forms and arrangements of thinking and writing literature’s story. While we saw “worlding” exhibited in Hamburg, the German national literature depends on the museum-like imagination that Classical Weimar, its inhabitants, and their works have become. As twenty-first-century literature inflects a global existence but resonates first and foremost locally, we are reminded of literary life in eighteenth-century Hamburg. Its relations with the transatlantic world, a robust practice of cultivating translations, and the involvement of diverse communities in urban life predestined the city to emerge as a historical case study for the translation zone and its “new comparative literature,” which Apter proclaims. An early instance of a global city, Hamburg around 1800 offers a path for thinking literature beyond the nation.

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And yet it is Classical Weimar that has radiated beyond the eighteenth century, in no small part because it exported its ideas globally—and despite the town’s practice of containing global influences on a local scale, quite literally, within its dilapidating city walls. Weimar imported the world for reading within the town’s limits; its culture firmly enshrined the globe in a book. Thus Goethe’s insights into machinations of empire and colonial conquest transpire, as John Noyes has shown, in restless literary characters. Accordingly, Faust and Wilhelm Meister are enmeshed in “networks of mobility” and obsessed with Bildung (education and imagination), risking being caught up, as Faust ultimately is, in a mode of worlding that is perpetual motion, seemingly forfeiting all anchors in space and time. Imaginary, translocal mobility, Noyes claims in the course of his argumentation, altered Weimar’s image of Europe.5 This conclusion requires, at the very least, a qualifier. In fact, I beg to differ, suggesting instead that Weimar’s translocal activity became first and foremost one of literary exports—of books and dramatic texts, of concepts and disciplines—in exchange with the world. The first export concerns The West Indian, the erstwhile import from Restoration England and, in Bode’s translation, a quintessential Hamburg play. In a later permutation it epitomizes the rise of the melodrama as a global genre, exported from German lands. Before experiencing a renaissance shortly before 1900, supposedly as part of the then full-fledged German colonial sentiment,6 the play was translated and adapted in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The most prominent among the translators was August von Kotzebue, a prolific dramatist whose handling of the comedic genre made him popular in German lands and—with more than forty of his plays translated—on both sides of the Atlantic.7 Jane Austen immortalized his play Das Kind der Liebe (Lovers’ Vows) in Mansfield Park, and the legend of his untimely death in 1819 at the hands of Karl Sand forever entwines Kotzebue, “who ridicule[d] . . . nationalist excess,” with a conservative form of political, rather than cultural, nationalism.8 Despite his popular success around 1800, critics never tired of noting the stock characters and improbable dramatic constellations of his texts, criticized his intense focus on a stage spectacle as well as his scandal-ridden life, and concluded that Kotzebue simply wrote too many plays.9 Punctuated by mutual, deeply personal attacks that embroiled him and Goethe, the criticism did not bode well for Kotzebue’s reputation in Classical Weimar. Ironically though, his plays became some of Weimar’s greatest hits.

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Compared to Bode’s version, Kotzebue’s Westindier (The West Indian, 1815) not only marks the other side of an aesthetic and historical threshold around 1800 when translation seemed finally exiled from the literary landscape, and originals prevailed. It also constitutes one of many, hugely popular plays that its author brought to the Weimar theater; other writers adapted them to the global, English-speaking stage.10 The West Indian’s and other plays’ allusions to the Caribbean world—and to slavery, abolition, and empire—appeared in a new light around 1800, because theatrical image and constellations ended up confronting both the realities and news reporting about the slave revolts of the 1790s, as well as about the by then strong, transatlantic abolitionist movement. As Kotzebue’s translation of Cumberland’s play revisits the theme, it also historicizes some of the author’s own treatment of slavery. In one of his early plays, Die Indianer in England (The East Indian, 1789/99), Kotzebue introduced slavery, while coestablishing his reputation as a writer of comedies. Die Negersklaven (The Negro Slaves) followed in 1796 at the height of the slave revolts; yet while appearing to domesticate the theme, it refrains from using a literary trope—the depiction of slavery—to relate a distinctly German attitude toward abolition and revolution.11 Both The East Indian and The Negro Slaves displace colonial and racial conflicts into family settings, by engaging at least one “bad” and one “good” family member, usually siblings, in the colonial enterprise. These figures perform in The East Indian as squanderers of colonial fortunes and traders, expressing a fear that was of course also bestowed upon the title character in The West Indian. In The Negro Slaves a pair of white planter brothers embodies conflict, with one being a despotic ruler and the other supporting the abolitionist cause. While the latter play presents the colonial struggle as a tale of sexual attraction, abuse, and family virtue, the former explores a contractual arrangement, enforced literally through marriage, between globally enterprising merchants and colonial elites. Their harmonious interaction comes under attack from both the center of the empire (London) and the colonized natives, before the play ultimately succeeds in unifying the various British mercantile communities for the cause of the empire and domestic stability. Thus, whereas The Negro Slaves “privatizes” global relations in their effects on family life and ultimately individualizes affect, The East Indian recalls sentimental identification as a preferred, but now obsolete strategy of uniting audiences in the quest for empire. The play glimpses back, it seems, at an older stage of political, theatrical, and aesthetic communities. The Negro Slaves has been construed as a sign of Kotzebue’s support for abolition,12 but this play, too, appears to allow for safe distance to, and innocent

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participation in, British human rights transgressions during the slave trade.13 However, the play’s metapoetic reflection, rather than its plot, unfolding in support of the morally good brother, complicates any distancing reflex on part of the audience. The play underscores a proverbial aesthetic turn and flight, while its publication happened during a time of frequent, often hasty moves for Kotzebue (before he eventually returned to Weimar in 1798). In condensing the fate of oral discourse, small epistemic and marginal literary genres, and sentimental forms of aesthetic identification in paradramatic texts and metadramatic reflection, The Negro Slaves illustrates both the manner in which Classical Weimar turned inside itself and the force that drove Kotzebue’s dramatic productions from local settings, allowing them to circulate globally instead. The 1797 book edition of The Negro Slaves contains a dedication encapsulating this process. Acknowledging that the Danes got rid of the slave trade,14 while reflecting upon the political considerations involved in the printed dedication, the text documents Kotzebue’s position as an aesthetic mediator prone to perpetual popularization. Wondering whether to dedicate his text to the Danish king or to Bernstorff, Kotzebue opts for a less “towering figure,” the government official Jever Winter von Buch, calling him a person “he loves.”15 Though sentimentality persists, in the “Vorbericht” (preface) the author further differentiates between oral and epistolary discourse, while acknowledging the impact that a text gains through print, its massive circulation in, and eventual saturation of the public realm. Accordingly, the preface defines the play as a text to be read in private (Lesedrama) while recalling the unimaginable amount of information that the author had to transpose into fiction. By listing the sources and disarming any fear of the fictional, Kotzebue urges “his readers, audiences, and reviewers to consider the text not just a play,”16 conceding that it is a play—an invention—nevertheless. He insists on his competence as a writer. For example, Kotzebue details that, for the sake of dramatic stage effect, the text will have to be abbreviated, and the tale’s embedded nonfiction, whose veracity is proclaimed, will have to be purified for the benefit of the reader. This rhetorical move revolves around two anecdotes that he includes in the preface. Thus, the preface amounts to a knot of poetic principles entangling fact and fiction and launching a particular mode of translating these principles into dramatic text and performance. The result is a formulaic structure of the play. Interlacing the plot with a metapoetic dimension, the play bifurcates the latter. It relates dramatic history, on the one hand, absorbing and relegating to the archives the aesthetic work of sentimental communities, while seeking to convey information about slavery,

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on the other. In the space in between a rather mundane affective dimension arises, folding inward, or personalizing, the stories about family values and pride, while globalizing punishment and self-defense. Vis-à-vis the spectator, the dual dramatic effects impart fable-like, “universal” notions. As allegories, these notions become easily transposable into other geographical or historical contexts, insinuating that dramatic impulse, legitimacy, and the affective reach of The Negro Slaves resonate across countries and, for that matter, genres, precisely by staging—and personalizing—the news.17 In contrast, Kotzebue’s The West Indian returns Cumberland’s play, via translation, to its original purpose: an extensive commentary on London society. What seems like a modest aesthetic goal accomplishes more than an “estranging” of text (e.g., declaring it foreign to the German stage). Overtly, Kotzebue’s particular (de-)localization enables national fantasies, including that of a distant and disinterested German nation.18 Covertly, it dislodges the melodramatic genre from the national. Intrinsic to this process is the way that the dramatic characters are stripped of their emotive potential. For example, just as in Cumberland’s “original” and Bode’s translation, The West Indian’s first scene anchors the play in times of mercantile empire. But unlike in the earlier versions, there are no stage directions detailing, and thus contextualizing, business activity. Stuckley simply inquires whether Stockwell’s subdued behavior is caused by bad stock market news and proceeds to report on business success; personal histories give way to stating the facts and sketching broad contours of dramatic personae. In a turn that defines both Kotzebue’s aesthetics of one-dimensional character portrayals and his efficient but vivid use of language, Stockwell confidently asserts his own wealth, but never expresses what Cumberland calls his relation of “friendship and fidelity” with Stuckley;19 Kotzebue forgoes any mention of prior business relationships between old Belcour and Stockwell, while removing any lingering uncertainty about Belcour’s racial identity, which existed—and was exploited for aesthetic effect—in Cumberland’s and Bode’s versions. But here, any unruliness previously associated with Belcour’s Creole body is erased, translated instead into deliberate and stark responses to him and the colony. Similarly, while Belcour endures a few metaphorical bruises in the older texts, in Kotzebue’s play, he preempts any view that others might have of his actions, distancing himself from daily life in the colonies, styling himself retroactively as an abolitionist sympathizer, and, most importantly, denouncing slavery. While this change is as much political and historical as it is aesthetic, Kotzebue exploits one-dimensional attributes, stereotypes, and metaphors to

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sketch his contemporary culture. For one, he applies ready-made clichés, all of which he links to races and temperaments, regions, spaces, and occupations, men and women, modesty and luxury. Mr. and Mrs. Fulmer coldly depict their house as a tavern where people are routinely overcharged and where they plan on pimping out Louisa Dudley as a prostitute.20 Overall, the characters perceive cultural differences as an essence rather than as a result of development and inflicted power. By implying that the characters’ behavior, looks, or personality traits connote an innate nature, Kotzebue presents stable emotion and, in turn, uses these constructs to delineate static identities and communities that allegedly evolved naturally. It is in these configurations—eclipsing historical process in static representation—that he locates the potential for melodramatic conflict. Since material and emotional essence, rather than human actions, define the characters, the affective dimension of the play remains muted. The comedy revolves around ossified personalities in a play that, overall, evokes the circulation of material things rather than ideas. Stockwell’s “unique mood,” though observed in the beginning, does not develop.21 By declaring that he wants to be Belcour’s father at the end of act 4, when his son faces a duel with Carl Dudley, Stockwell renders the final recognition scene unmotivated, if not superfluous. Moreover, the difference between acting as and being the father proves inconsequential for dramatic action; consequently, emotions rarely matter. As the play’s ideas are hollowed out, Belcour’s tears seem fake as well, reduced to a stage prop—and, it turns out, to an outward sign of the melodramatic imagination. For, once historicized, sentimental identification is only accessible as an image: it can be seen but no longer engenders relation. Kotzebue thus initiates the structure and substrate of melodrama, installing it, latently, as a genre that pierces the wholesome image of an aesthetic community engineered by theater—and thus not only undercuts any aesthetic foundation of the nation but individuates and fractures aesthetic experience. Conversely, the characters and plot are typified, and the entire play, while taking place in London, becomes portable and transferable. Settings can be exchanged, and the dramatic action is “at home” wherever money, commodities, and goods circulate and where (the memory of ) the colonial past persists in the present. Kotzebue’s translation of sentimentalism into melodrama therefore explains not only the affective reach of his plays but also his seemingly contradictory reception in German lands and the transatlantic world. However, this explanation hinges on an understanding of melodrama as a German export good. Audiences at home enjoyed the performance, but

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not necessarily out of “an increased sense of spectatorship, moral arbitration, and actual, fictive participation in the colonial drama that unfolded on stage”22 and that continued to unfold in imperial Europe. The gratifying image could inhabit their senses and nevertheless remain at a safe distance, because the play’s content no longer stirred their emotions. Perhaps the staging and performance did. At the same time, the text allowed identifications to fester that, deprived of their historical making, had become stale. The characters, along with dramatic and moral arbitration, were portable in the text, which had long been a trade object. Accordingly, Kotzebue’s plays could be retranslated and adapted, staged—and ultimately would resonate—elsewhere, contributing to a melodramatic imagination that spread across the Western Hemisphere and whose reign would come to define important cultural developments in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. In other words, a part of German literary production around 1800—exemplified by a popular, noncanonical representative (Kotzebue)—coincubated a Western, if not global literary genre as well as a simplified, though affective, way of viewing the world. The second export good is, of course, tied to Goethe. Turning, once more, to his musings on metropolis and small town—and on colony and nation—I suggest that it is his reading of the relation between city and globe that in no small part defines his global legacy. His claim that a network of small towns can explain the nature of Germany not only pits the German lands against Great Britain and France with their metropolitan centers of London and Paris, but also captures Goethe’s reliance on textual mediation: he reads German cities and towns through what he has learned about the European capitals, which he locates globally and imperially. Consequently, his reading in and about non-German-language literatures replicates the matrix of thinking along national, imperial, and global lines while anchoring this matrix not so much in geopolitical events or power constellations but in texts. It is therefore only the literary imagination that reached beyond Weimar’s confining location, albeit in a powerful manner: its perhaps most prominent export is indeed Goethe’s “invention” of Weltliteratur (world literature), which, as Noyes succinctly put it, “has proven most popular outside Germany and German Studies.”23 The term implied exchange and communication across national boundaries, and its story has been told repeatedly, proliferating the academic discipline of comparative literature as well as its criticism—the latter because for decades world literature has been progressively read as a homogenizing force shoring up,

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ironically, the dominance of the English language in the field of comparative literature. While this is not the place to rehash this institutional history, nor to refute or embrace recent reviews of Goethe’s term or its legacy, one claim in Noyes’s essay gives me pause, namely, that Goethe’s Weltliteratur refused to be co-opted in “any universal standardization”—a mode that Noyes discerns in Erich Auerbach’s adoption of the term. The concept provided instead a language “of talking about human action,”24 which on further reading becomes synonymous with cosmopolitan subjectivity.

Looking Ahead I want to suggest, in closing, an alternate view, connecting Translating the World’s alternate stories of late eighteenth-century German literature with our own, twenty-first-century (academic) existence and positioning my book’s (German) argument as an alternative to the Atlantic studies model as well as genre-based approaches to eighteenth-century literary studies. This alternative is also tied to Goethe, specifically to what I described in chapter 4 as his flight from Weimar’s narrowness and the way he turns to vertical monuments in order to speak of subjectivity and artistic production—before he himself became an icon and, ultimately, a monument to the national. But rather than simply “adding” here to my reading of Goethe’s towers, I want to reengage with Goethe’s observation, from the 1823 essay, that the Strasbourg Cathedral made such a powerful aesthetic impression, despite its towers being unfinished. That the monument remained unfinished and imperfect reads, within the late essay, like a stumbling block, isolating the past experience—and the literary prose hymn—within the prosaic, explanatory, and multifaceted essay. Inaugurating multiple disciplinary modes, the essay seemingly establishes literary history as a unique form of knowledge. While standing for an unencumbered subjectivity, the imperfect detail expresses, nevertheless, a nuisance. Did Goethe himself note the crisis of aesthetic experience, relegating unrestricted subjectivity—and thus literature’s pure aesthetic expression—to the past? In pursuing this rhetorical question—which adds a historical dimension to “Whither literature?”—I turn to Auerbach, albeit not his discussion of world literature. Rather, I engage specifically with his theses on verticality and horizontality in order to speculate about the future of literary studies. Apter considers Auerbach’s (and Leo Spitzer’s) essential contributions to comparative literature, reading their existence in Istanbul exile and in translatio as impulses

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to the more recent transformation of the discipline, including its bend toward antinationalism and the local.25 But here, I am not primarily interested in the biographical, lexical, or multilingual condition, but rather in Auerbach’s method and approach of (dis-)entangling philology and literary and cultural studies. To recap, Auerbach’s concepts of verticality and horizontality describe, with striking simplicity, clarity, and order, alterations in the perceptual-cognitive field of eighteenth-century aesthetics. But whereas Schulte-Sasse, who took up the conceptual pair, relegates verticality to the past and “the old,” Auerbach’s use suggests a greater complexity, one that transcends the temporal thinking that views the aesthetic shift as the incipience of modernity. The shift from verticality to horizontality brings us back to the invention and disciplinary innovation that I began to sketch in the previous chapter. Progress becomes the purview of history, while secularization (or enlightenment) positions itself as antithesis to theology. Where anthropology evolves as the sphere that dissects the individual and its natural and sociocultural environments, psychology explores the individual’s inner life. Thus, aesthetics—the new science revolving around an individual’s relation to art—has long been projected as the unifier of emergent disciplines and the differences among them. In supplying the media, arrangements, and images that organize disciplinary interaction and convergence, aesthetics sustains a model narrative that provides orientation of the world, to the world, and in the world—always by proceeding from and reaffirming the individual’s proclaimed centrality. Importantly for Translating the World, literary historiography can envision itself accordingly: namely, as a directive, teleological process that, by superseding and unifying all other disciplinary narratives, can easily be co-opted by an image of nationhood that is grounded in aesthetics rather than territory. This method of thinking also lies behind recent studies in comparative literature such as Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, which, despite “rescuing” literary studies from any monolithic reformulations as the corpus of English-language literature, remains indebted to great, autonomous writers and literary centers. At the same time, the effects of reimagined eighteenthcentury subjectivity are lasting, spinning off a plethora of interdisciplinary methods for exploring literature as but one mode of culture. Equally significant is Auerbach’s understanding of the “old,” which indicates more than the transcendent authority of the divine, to which the speaking subject related himself. The vertical also conjures up raw materiality. It is then in the remnants of material exchanges, including the materialities of language and texts (e.g., philology, translation, transposition among

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registers), that I have located particular interstices in making German literary history. Producing the figural traces of nonharmony and disunity, instability and insecurity, or even of “sticky objects” (such as the nonvanishing images of unfinished minsters), the allusions to materiality constitute the stumbles as well as the flux of intellectual engagement. They secure dynamic thinking and indeed allow us to affirm the eighteenth century’s relevance today—in no small part by reclaiming and reasserting the figural as the task of literary studies. To Auerbach, the figural is as earthly and historical as it is confined by the divine provenance or order. Most precisely worked out in relation to the Middle Ages, this understanding of figura indicates the status of verticality beyond the medieval period.26 Figural interpretation enables a unique mode of comprehending past events. In its emphasis on forms and structures, figura shifts our understanding from tracing teleological progress, a profoundly modern way of looking at the world, to the embrace of the similar and identical among objects circulating in time yet very distinct from one another.27 In contrast, symbols always point to the future, despite being caught up in the present and escaping the realm of textual interpretation by “pertain[ing] directly to the interpretation of life.”28 According to this reading, this symbolic mode of understanding, or horizontal worldview, seems to harbor the objectcenteredness of cultural studies. But the literary and the cultural are much more entangled. For “the earthly event is thus a historically real prophecy, or figura, of a part of a divine reality that will occur in the future and that will at that point be perfected in all its immediacy. Yet this reality is not only in the future [in the sense of the individual afterlife]. Rather, it is always present in the sight of God and in the Beyond.”29 Thus figura makes something thinkable and representable that we have come to perceive as thoroughly modern: an awareness of our own presence engendering the subjectivity of the moment. The embrace of presence must not be confused with the authority of the sovereign subject, however. Self-awareness and authoritative subjectivity remain at odds with one another, as figura indicates a productive Stillstand or singularity in the continuum of time.30 On the one hand, this interruption produces uncertainty, fallbacks, and raptures as the subject must have recourse to genres, discourses, and objects established elsewhere. But in figuration, “facts . . . orient themselves according to a model of events that lies in the future and that thus far has only been promised.”31 The emphasis on subjectivity prevailing in figura thus leaves intact aesthetics’ central role in structuring eighteenth-century disciplines, while enabling their coemergence.

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It is therefore Goethe’s uncertainty that survives; within today’s landscape of literary theory and cultural studies, he appears like a figura confronting apprehension in face of both towers and the imperfect beauty of aesthetic experience. If we hone in on the uncertainty, the ruptures rather than the raptures in subjectivity’s encounter with imposing, vertical materiality, we indeed regain a complex, at times confusing and competitive landscape of disciplines. We may reclaim then, à la Auerbach, an ethical subject aware of his own shortcomings, struggles, and adversaries—and with it, establish Goethe’s modernity and relevance today. Today, any geographical reorientation of perspective on eighteenth-century literature must resurrect a mode of analysis and interpretation that leaves room for the fractures, uncertainties, and freedoms of reading and thinking creatively. Consequently, the challenge that I posed at the beginning of this book, namely, to reconfigure late eighteenthcentury German literature from the perspective of the globe and the city, appears altered as well. In a way, in crossing the Atlantic—for its subject and method—this book leaves the Atlantic imagination as well as city and globe behind.

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notes

Introduction 1. Johann Peter Willebrand, Grundriß einer schönen Stadt, in Absicht ihrer Anlage und Einrichtung zur Bequemlichkeit, zum Vergnügen, zum Anwachs und zur Erhaltung ihrer Einwohner, nach bekannten Mustern entworfen (Hamburg: Bohn, 1775). 2. Rainer Wild, “Stadtkultur, Bildungswesen und Aufklärungsgesellschaften,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 3, Deutsche Aufklärung bis zur französischen Revolution 1680–1789, ed. Rolf Grimminger (Munich: Hanser, 1980), 103–32, here 103. 3. Only male denizens had citizenship in German towns and cities. 4. Richard van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag in der frühen Neuzeit: Dorf und Stadt im 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2005), 83; Mascha Bisping, “Die ganze Stadt dem ganzen Menschen? Zur Anthropologie der Stadt im 18. Jahrhundert: Stadtbaukunst, Architektur, Ästhetik, Medizin, Literatur und Staatstheorie,” in Die Grenzen des Menschen: Anthropologie und Ästhetik um 1800, ed. Maximilian Bergengruen, Roland Borgards, and Johannes Friedrich Lehmann (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001), 183–203, here 183–87. 5. Bruno Latour, “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 796–810, here 799. While I do

not categorically apply network theory—see my comments on pragmatic use—my use of language at times inflects terminology that originates in network theories. 6. Karl S. Guthke, Goethes Weimar und “Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001) advances this claim. 7. A comprehensive bibliography of studies devoted to the city in literature exceeds the space of this introduction. For starters, see Kevin R. McNamara, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); for the specific context of my interests here, see Pamela Gilbert, “The Idea of the City: Afterword,” in The Idea of the City: EarlyModern, Modern, and Post-Modern Locations and Communities, ed. Joan Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 213–20; Andreas Huyssen, “Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Space,” PMLA 122.1 (January 2007): 27–42; Anthony Vidler, “Reading the City: The Urban Book from Mercier to Mitterand” PMLA 122.1 (2007): 235–57. 8. John Lyon, Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 32, 57. 9. Beth Kowaleski Wallace, “Eastern Orientations,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40.2 (2007): 309–13, here 310. “Travel through reading” has been a long-standing trope in travel literature research, beginning,

to the best of my knowledge, with Georges van den Abbeele’s book Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). On how narratives “move” their readers, see Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17. Susanne Zantop pointedly spoke of “armchair conquistadors” in Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) and thus coined a much-used metaphor to describe the phenomenon of partaking in colonizing activity in a strictly imaginary manner. 10. Andreas Huyssen, ed., Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and the aforementioned book edited by Joan Fitzpatrick, The Idea of the City. Saskia Sassen’s work on “global cities” focuses much of the sociological and geographical work on the global entanglements of today’s urban environments, whereas Anthony King addresses colonial and postcolonial legacies. See Saskia Sassen, “The Global City,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2010), 126–32; Anthony King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (London: Routledge, 2004); furthermore, Chris Jenks, ed., Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vols. 3 and 4 (London: Routledge, 2004). Spiro Kostof has written key texts on architectural history and its modern and modernist inflection; for example, Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings (London: Bulfinch, 1993). 11. “Stadt, Haupt-,” in Johann Heinrich Zedlers großes vollständiges Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste 39, 0410, http://www.zedler-lexikon.de. 12. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Das Jahr 2440: Ein Traum aller Träume, ed. Herbert Jaumann, trans. Christian-Felix Weiße (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 185: “Die Kolonien waren für Frankreich das, was ein Landhaus für eine Privatperson war: das Landhaus war daran Schuld, daß das Haus in der Stadt früher oder später verfiel.” See also Bisping, “Die ganze Stadt,” 198–99.

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13. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 19, Gespräche mit Eckermann (Munich: Hanser, 1986), 632–33. 14. Leonardo Benevolo, Die Geschichte der Stadt, trans. Jürgen Humburg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 645. 15. Anthony D. King, “Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2010), 365–73. 16. Leonardo Benevolo, The European City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 163–64. 17. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, eds., Henri Lefebvre: Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 49. Here a disclaimer seems in order: Translating the World is not about evaluating late eighteenth-century city narratives or about discovering early instances of the flâneur; I am not discussing images of the city in literature. For excellent examples of these alternative approaches, see Vidler, “Reading the City”; and Arthur Weitzman, “Eighteenth-Century London: Urban Paradise or Fallen City?,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 469–80. 18. Elizabeth Mancke and Carol Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2. For my overall argument, studies intersecting the Atlantic world and the Enlightenment are important; for example, Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 19. Mancke and Shammas, British Atlantic World, 2. 20. Ibid., 2–3 and 15. 21. Elisa Tamarkin, “Transatlantic Returns,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert Levine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2011): 264–78, here 267–70. 22. The first studies were Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, and Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). The subject matter has again attracted scholarly attention, most recently in Hermann Korte’s review essay “Warum gibt es (noch) keinen postkolonialen deutschsprachigen Literaturkanon? Aktuelle Studien auf der Suche nach

Antworten,” review of Postkolonialismus und Kanon, ed. Herbert Uerlings and IuliaKarin Patrut, IASLonline, accessed April 19, 2014, http://www.iaslonline.de/index. php?vorgang_id-3714. 23. Chenxi Tang, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 12. 24. Perplexingly, Tang does not consider oceanic perspectives. See, in contrast, Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 25. This is visible in the transformation of genres responsible for telling the history of cities, which can be described, roughly, as the substitution of Stadtgeschichte (story and history of a city) for the city chronicle. 26. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 29. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6. 29. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 30. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “A Novel Nation; or, How to Rethink Modern England as an Emergent Culture,” in Eighteenth-Century Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 9–26. “Provocation” refers to the title of Brown’s introductory essay and the intention behind the collection (1–8). 31. Srinivas Aravamudan, “East-West-Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured,” Eighteeenth-Century Studies 47.2 (2014): 195–231, here 196. 32. Ibid., 198. 33. For a succinct overview, see Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 7. 34. Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 415. 35. Felicity Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 5. 36. Ibid., 6–7. 37. Ibid., 10. 38. David Porter (convener), Felicity Nussbaum, Margaret Doody, Lynn Festa,

Ashley Cole, and Robert Mankin, “Worlding the Eighteenth Century” (Roundtable discussion, ASECS annual convention, Cleveland, April 4, 2013). 39. An example is Christopher L. Connery and Rob Wilson, eds., The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2007). A brief look at the table of contents illustrates the various noncongruities brought together for a productive questioning of traditional expectations of scholarly narratives, such as thematic, temporal, and rhetorical coherence. However, from my passage, readers might infer a Heideggerian inflection in “worlding,” recalling the historically close connection between literary and philosophical studies. 40. Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silvia Gruesz, “Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 228–47. 41. For the most recent developments in the scholarly debate on worlding eighteenthcentury literatures, see the special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies 47.2 (2014), in particular Chi-Ming Yang, “Eighteenth-Century Easts and Wests: Introduction,” 95–101. 42. Pamela Gilbert, “The Idea of the City,” 214. See also Kostof, The City Shaped, 27. 43. Leslie Chard, “The Urban Paradox: Two Ideas of the City in the Encyclopédie,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 303 (1992): 153–56. 44. Conrad Wiedemann, “Klassizität des Urbanen: Ein Versuch über die Stadtkultur Berlins um 1800,” in Kanonbildung, ed. Robert Charlier and Günther Lottes (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2009), 121–39 for a succinct report on the now-defunct research project Berliner Klassik. See also Alan Balfour, Berlin: The Politics of Order, 1737–1989 (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). 45. Matt Erlin, Berlin’s Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2. 46. Yair Mintzker, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–11. 47. Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate,

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1648–1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 142. 48. Kostof, The City Shaped, 31–32. 49. Franklin Kopitzsch, Grundzüge einer Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung in Hamburg und Altona (Hamburg: Christians, 1982), 352. See 366–73 for details on population development; the entire book continues to be the most comprehensive and reliable account on Hamburg in the eighteenth century. 50. Sebastian Hunstock, Die (groß-) herzogliche Residenzstadt Weimar um 1800: Städtische Entwicklungen im Übergang von der ständischen zur bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (1770–1830) (Jena: Hunstock & Krause, 2011), 47. See also Konrad Kratzsch, Klatschnest Weimar: Ernstes und Heiteres, MenschlichAllzumenschliches aus dem Alltag der Klassiker (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 11–12; and Hans Eberhard, Weimar zur Goethezeit (Weimar: Rat der Stadt, 1988), 6–7. 51. In eighteenth-century Weimar, all persons with origins outside the duchy were considered foreigners. 52. Astrid Köhler, “Höfische Geselligkeit in Weimar,” in Formen der Geselligkeit in Nordwestdeutschland 1750–1820, ed. Peter Albrecht, Hans Erich Bödeker, and Ernst Hinrich (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 119–38, here 121. 53. Balfour, Berlin, 1–39. 54. Erlin, Berlin’s Forgotten Future, 8. 55. Ibid., 23. 56. Robert Beachy, The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750–1840 (Boston: Brill, 2005). 57. Ibid., 13 and esp. 14. 58. Birgit Tautz, “Stadtgeschichten: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of Classical Weimar,” German Studies Review 3 (2013): 497–514, here 505–10. 59. Jeffry Diefendorf and Janet Ward, “Introduction: Transnationalism and the German City,” in Transnationalism and the German City, ed. Diefendorf and Ward (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 9, e-book. 60. Daniel Purdy, “Enlightenment in the European City,” in Diefendorf and Ward, Transnationalism and the German City, 13–36. 61. Ibid., 20. 62. See Peter Dirksmeier, Urbanität als Habitus: Zur Sozialgeographie städtischen Lebens auf dem Land (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 25.

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63. One poignant example is Peter Merseburger, Mythos Weimar: Zwischen Geist und Macht (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998). Mythos Weimar also translates, of course, as “mythical Weimar” and “the allure of Weimar,” both of which add additional layers to the phrase’s meaning.

Chapter 1 1. Barbara Becker-Cantarino uses this term extensively, for example, in her “Introduction: German Literature in the Era of Enlightenment and Sensibility,” in German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility, vol. 6, ed. Becker-Cantarino (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), 1–31. In the course of my argumentation, I will increasingly resort to notions of the sentimental and sentimentality, reflecting more closely the cultural roots and connections to global sentimentalism. 2. On the latter, see Katharine B. Aaslestad, “Old Visions and New Vices: Republicanism and Civic Virtue in Hamburg’s Print Culture, 1790–1810,” in Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and National Culture, ed. Peter-Uwe Hohendahl (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 143–65, here 145. For a larger discussion of political culture in Hamburg, see Mary Lindemann, “Fundamental Values: Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg,” in Hohendahl, Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and National Culture, 17–32. 3. Sassen, “The Global City”; and my introduction. To my knowledge, Goethe does not comment on Hamburg; he frequently discusses London and Paris as Weltstädte; however, it seems to me that, in his use, the word overlaps (though it is not entirely synonymous) with Hauptstadt. See Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Gespräche mit Eckermann. 4. Herrmann Hipp, “Hamburg,” in Das Bild der Stadt in der Neuzeit: 1400–1800, ed. Wolfgang Behringer and Bernd Roeck (Munich: Beck, 1999), 235–44, here 241–42. 5. Zwischenhandel refers to mediating and enabling enemy parties, most notably France and Great Britain; it allowed “neutral Hamburg” to become a war profiteer. Late eighteenth-century journals frequently used the term, which was coined by Johann Georg Büsch, whose role in Hamburg’s economy,

public life, and education I discuss in this chapter. See, for example, F. Saalfeld, “Ueber die politische und mercantilische Wichtigkeit der Hansestädte Lübeck, Bremen und Hamburg,” Vaterländisches Museum 1 (1810): 416–45, here 420. See also Lindemann, “Fundamental Values.” 6. Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 396. See also my chapter 3. 7. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Cl VII Lit Ca, No. 2, Vol. 3, Fasc. 1: Varia die Sclaven Cassa und Sclaven Lösung betreffend Sec. XVI e XVII. While the files concern mostly the Sklavenkasse, an insurance fund created by merchants to provide ransom for captured captains, carpenters, and other seafarers, there is some indication of the “waves” of debate and discussion of slavery, with an uptick prior to the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Reports are quite detailed for 1756–63, becoming virtually nonexistent afterward until 1787, when they again appear to be fairly detailed until 1794. 8. Caspar Voght, Lebensgeschichte, ed. Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Hamburg: Christians, 2001), 81. 9. Thomas Nugent, Travels through Germany . . . with a particular account of the Courts of Mecklenburg (London: Dilly, 1768), 78. Nugent became famous as a travel writer. His “guidebook,” The Grand Tour (1749), captured what upper-middle-class Europeans came to understand as a rite of passage, a proof of worldliness, and a sign of emergent cosmopolitanism per se. 10. Franklin Kopitzsch, “Zwischen Hauptrezeß und Franzosenzeit 1712–1806,” in Hamburg: Geschichte der Stadt und ihrer Bewohner, vol. 1, Von den Anfängen bis zur Reichsgründung, ed. Hans-Dieter Loose and Werner Jochmann (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1982), 351–414, here 375–77. 11. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 241; Uta Degner, “Interessensdramen: Zur Rivalität von Ökonomie, Moral und Ästhetik bei Friedrich Schiller und ‘Intertexten’ von Richard Glover und George Lillo,” in Gastlichkeit und Ökonomie: Wirtschaften im deutschen und englischen Drama des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Sigrid Nieberle and Claudia Nitzschke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 223–45, here 226; Klaus Weber, Deutsche Kaufleute

im Atlantikhandel 1680–1830: Unternehmen und Familien in Hamburg, Cadiz, Bourdeaux (Munich: Beck, 2004), 251. 12. Wendy Sutherland, “Staging Blackness: Race, Aesthetics, and the Black Female in Two Eighteenth-Century German Dramas: Ernst Lorenz Rathlef ’s Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg (1775) and Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler’s Die Mohrinn (1801)” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002), 104–5. 13. Weber, Kaufleute, 251. Christian Degn’s book Die Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel: Gewinn und Gewissen (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2000) remains the exemplary study of northern German merchants in the Atlantic trade. 14. Numerous accounts establish this connection, if only passim. See, for example, Degn, Die Schimmelmanns; Weber, Kaufleute; H. P. Sturz, Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Grafen Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1777), 56–60. 15. Nugent, Travels, 59. He also has an extensive commentary on former ports along the estuary and valley (19–23). 16. Heinz Schilling, Die Stadt in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), 11–12. See also Erlin, Berlin’s Forgotten Future, 25–26; Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 140–41 makes careful distinctions between Innenstadt and city, including its suburbs, and between Reichstädten (in the political understanding of the early nineteenth century) and “German cities” (by today’s standards). Erlin insinuates that Berlin was consistently the second largest city; however, it only passed Hamburg around 1800. 17. Mary Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) deals especially with the crucial years 1780–90, which saw, among other things, the foundation of the Armenanstalt, which housed and administered to the urban poor. 18. Voght, Lebensgeschichte, 29–37. 19. Feodor von Wehl, Hamburgs Literaturleben im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1856), 18: “Dieser Moment und gerade nur dieser ist es, der das achtzehnte Jahrhundert in Hamburg or Hamburg so groß im achtzehnten Jahrhundert erscheinen läßt” (emphasis in the original).

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20. See, for example, Sarah Colvin, The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage, 1697–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Kevin Hillard, Freethinkers, Libertines, and Schwärmer: Heterodoxy in German Literature, 1750–1800, IGRS Books 1 (London: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, 2011); and Alessa Johns, Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 21. Bernhard Fabian, “English Books and Their Eighteenth-Century German Readers,” in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Paul Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 119–96; see also Fabian, English Books in 18th-Century Germany (London: British Library, 1992). Michael Maurer, Aufklärung und Anglophilie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987) decidedly circumvents the characteristics of the northern German salon. For a comprehensive research overview, see Johns, Bluestocking Feminism, 4. 22. Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 369. 23. See Voght, Lebensgeschichte and titles of books written and/or published in eighteenthcentury Hamburg that had a global theme in Bibliothek der deutschen Literatur: Mikrofiche-Gesamtausgabe nach den Angaben des Taschengoedeke (Munich: Kulturstiftung der Länder im K. G. Saur Verlag, 1990). Degn, Die Schmimmelmanns, 183–95 offers directions for future research. 24. Eric Livingston, “Glocal Knowledge: Agency and Place in Literary Studies,” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 145–57, esp. 147–49. I resort here to three main elements of Livingston’s use of “glocal”: mutual production of place and agency through global and local forces, their tension, and replication/amalgamation. 25. Fabian, “English Books,” 147. 26. Nugent, Travels, 84. See also Alexander Nebrig, “Die englische Literatur in Friedrich Nicolais Übersetzungsprogramm,” in Friedrich Nicolai und die Berliner Aufklärung, ed. Rainer Falk and Alexander Košenina (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2008), 139–64, here 144. Nebrig chronicles Nicolai’s assessment of English language abilities in Hamburg, in contrast to Berlin (and vis-à-vis the mastery of French). Accordingly, Nicolai lamented the shortage of translators from the English.

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27. Sandra Pott, “Triangulärer Transfer: Großbritannien, Frankreich und Deutschland um 1800,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatszeitschrift 50 (2006): 1–9, here 2. 28. The academies deliberately excluded “trade” in the sense of skilled trades. 29. Sean Franzel, Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 7–13, 15–18 discusses the changing nature of the lecture in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. 30. Chad Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 45, 47. 31. Overall, I was able to track about fifteen reports and/or announcements of the Handlungsakademie in German journals, either by Büsch and Ebeling or a few other authors and, most often, in anonymous reports. Examples are Büsch, “Hamburgische Handlungsakademie,” Handlungsbibliothek 2 (1789): 663–64 and Büsch and Ebeling, “Nachricht von der Hamburgischen Handlungsakademie,” Journal von und für Deutschland 5 (1788): 7–12, 334–38. In the journals, Handlungsbibliothek is also reviewed as Handlungsakademie, leading me to suggest that there was conceptual identity between the school and the published text. See also Klaus-Friedrich Pott and Jürgen Zabeck, Johann Georg Büsch: Die Hamburgische Handlungsakademie (Paderborn: Eusl, 2001). 32. Büsch and Ebeling, “Nachricht,” 335. 33. “Handlungsakademien,” Handlungsbibliothek 1 (1785): 182–84, here 183: “Und einer unserer Aufseher wird künftig allemal ein gebohrner Franzose und zugleich Lehrer dieser Sprache sein.” 34. Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 113–58. See also Benes’s helpful introduction, esp. 3–7. On the rise of “translation factories” in Göttingen, see Johns, Bluestocking Feminism, 39–58. 35. C. D. Ebeling, “Handlungsakademien,” Handlungsbibliothek 2 (1789): 316–28, here 324: “für Geldgeschäfte aller Art, im Dienste des Staates, oder in ihrem Privatnutzen.” 36. Büsch and Ebeling, “Nachricht,” 335.

37. Ebeling, “Handlungsakademien,” 325: “Allen überhaupt verschliessen wir die grosse Pforte der Verführung, welche die Gewinsucht in jeder Stadt dem Jüngling so gern öfnet, nemlich den Kredit ohne vorgängige Rückrede mit uns.” 38. Büsch, “Hamburgische Handlungsakademie,” 663–64; “Handlungsakademien,” 182–84, here 183. 39. Ebeling, “Handlungsakademien,” 324: “nicht nur für Deutschland, sondern für alle polizirte Völker.” 40. Pauline Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of History of Ideas, 1999, 505–24. 41. Ebeling, “Handlungsakademien,” 327–28. Again, national origins are downplayed whenever education for the sake of nation building is discussed and/or if the authors describe the role of Germans in the academy. One could claim, with some merit, that the Handlungsakademie was an Anglophile institution. 42. J. G. Büsch and C. D. Ebeling, “Über die öffentlichen Handlungs-Companien,” Handlungsbibliothek 1 (1785): 9–116, here 113. 43. G. H. Sieveking, ed., “Selbstbekenntnisse Caspar von Voght,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 7 (1902): 394–97, here 396; cited in Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 39. 44. Albrecht Koschorke, “In What Direction Is Literary Theory Evolving?,” Journal of Literary Theory 1 (2007): 208–11. 45. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 2. 46. Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization, 59. Osterhammel gives a concise overview of the complicated struggle for empire in the eighteenth century, especially in the Atlantic world, where, for example, Spain and Britain fought for dominance. French seaports were an integral part of the transatlantic slave trade; the silver mines in Spanish colonial America had led to a global trading network well before then. Nevertheless, the eighteenth-century transatlantic trade, concurrent empire formation, and the repercussions in both colonies and imperial centers anticipated important trends and discursive patterns of subsequent phases of globalization.

47. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 32. 48. Birgit Tautz, “Revolution, Abolition, Aesthetic Sublimation: German Responses to News from France in the 1790s,” in (Re-) Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain, and France, ed. Maike Oergel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012): 72–87, here 75–80. 49. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 13. 50. See, for example, Birgit Tautz, Reading and Seeing Ethnic Difference in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 100–106. 51. Birgit Tautz, “Cutting, Pasting, Fabricating: Late Eighteenth-Century Travelogues and Their German Translators Between Legitimacy, Community, and Imaginary Nations,” German Quarterly 97 (2006): 155–72, here 162–65. 52. Yet all of the texts call for a wide variety of case studies to explicate the exact nature, reach, and direction of the embedded intercultural relations (Pott, “Triangulärer Transfer,” 4). 53. Barbara Riesche, Schöne Mohrinnen, edle Sklaven, schwarze Rächer: Schwarzendarstellung und Sklavereithematik in deutschen Unterhaltungstheater (1770–1814) (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2010), 46. The original reads “doppelte Bürgerpflicht.” See also 43–51. 54. Rathlef, Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 23. 55. Felicity Nussbaum, “The Unaccountable Pleasure of Eighteenth-Century Tragedy,” PMLA 129.4 (2014): 688–707. While I do not wish to engage Nussbaum’s argument on the importance of lead actresses in anchoring audiences’ pleasure, at least not within the scope of this chapter, the phrase “unaccountable pleasure” provides a useful shortcut in my description of audiences. 56. Joseph Roach, “‘Deep Play, Dark Play’: Framing the Limt(less),” in The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechtner’s Broad Spectrum, ed. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (London: Palgrave, 2001), 275–83, here 278. 57. Rathlef, Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 39. 58. Laura Stevens, “The Traffic of Women: Oroonoko in an Atlantic Framework,” in Approaches to Teaching Behn’s

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“Oroonoko,” ed. Cynthia Richard and Mary Ann O’Donnell (New York: MLA, 2014), 71–77, here 71. 59. Mrs. A. Behn, Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave. A True History (London: William Cunning, 1688), 1. 60. While the psychology of literary texts works with the polarization of fact and fiction, there is no fact in texts that is not mediated or constructed. The eyewitness can therefore never be more than a representation of approximation. See, for example, Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven Yao, “Sinographies: An Introduction,” in Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), vii–xxi, here ix–x. 61. Behn, Oroonoko, 2. 62. Srinivas Aravamudan has repeatedly drawn attention to the genre mix, most recently in his “What Kind of Story Is This?,” in Richard and O’Donnell, Approaches to Teaching Behn’s Oroonoko, 27–33. The autobiographical component of the text has been fiercely debated; I do believe Behn clearly writes herself into the text, more so through conspicuous (“other women”) than obvious references (“I do not pretend”). Furthermore, it is unclear whether there is a distinction between the narrator and the eyewitness participant, even further obscured by Behn’s presence in the text, though she is not identical with the narrator. 63. Christian Ludwig von Griesheim, Verbesserte und Vermehrte Auflage des Traktats. Die Stadt Hamburg in ihrem politischen, öconomischen und sittlichen Zustande (Hamburg: Wilhelm Drese, 1760), 237. 64. Iris: Unterhaltungsblatt für Kunst, Literatur und Poesie (Frankfurt: Wenner, 1824), 281. 65. Daniel Fulda, Schau-Spiele des Geldes: Die Komödie und die Entstehung der Marktgesellschaft von Shakespeare bis Lessing (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), 229. 66. According to several nineteenth-century studies on eighteenth-century theater, Ackermann’s actors had Oroonoko der Wilde (1756) in their repertoire; somewhat later, almost as a resurrection of the material, we note Heribert von Dalberg’s drama (1786). 67. The records for the Hamburg stage are slim, as most of the theater archive was destroyed in World War II. 68. Stanley Williams, “Richard Cumberland’s West Indian,” MLN 35 (1920): 413–17,

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here 414; Melton, The Rise of the Public, 165–66. 69. Richard Cumberland, The West Indian: A Comedy, in Eighteenth-Century Plays, ed. John Hampden (London, 1928): 341–408, here 346. 70. Johann Christoph Bode, Der Westindier: Ein Lustspiel in fünf Handlungen aus dem Englischen des Herrn Cumberland (Hamburg: Bode, 1775); August von Kotzebue, Der Westindier, in Schauspiele (Leipzig: Kummer, 1815), xix. 71. Cumberland, The West Indian, 343 (all quotations). 72. Contemporary criticism likewise suggests that the combined allusion to blackness and Belcour’s family history obfuscated the issue of racial identity and authenticity. See Williams, “Cumberland’s West Indian,” 114. 73. Cumberland, The West Indian, 343 (all quotations). 74. Ibid., 346 (all quotations). See also Melton, The Rise of the Public, 23, 26. 75. Cumberland, The West Indian, 347. 76. Ibid., 348. 77. Cynthia Lowenthal, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2003), 27–28. 78. Ibid., 27. 79. See Cumberland, The West Indian, 379. See furthermore Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 197. 80. Cumberland, The West Indian, 378. 81. Ibid., 408. 82. Ibid., 405. 83. See ibid., 406. 84. Jean Marsden, “Performing the West Indies: Comedy, Feeling, and British Identity,” Comparative Drama 42 (2008): 73–88, here 80. 85. On pleasure and entertainment, see Nussbaum, “Unaccountable Pleasure,” 693, 697. 86. Karl August Böttiger, Denkschrift auf Bode: Dem Freunde von Freunden gewidmet (Weimar: Industrie-Comptoir, 1796), lxxxviii: “Im Jahre 1772 bearbeitete [Bode] zwey der vorzüglichsten neuern englischen Lustspiele, der Westindier von Cumberland und die Schule der Liebhaber (the fashionable lover)

von Withead, die auch beyde noch in eben diesem Jahre in Hamburg gedruckt und mehrmals mit großem Beyfall, besonders der Westindier, weil hier der Hamburger sich selbst wiederfand, aufgeführt wurden.” 87. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Hanser, 1959), 2:327–775, here 359. 88. “Antwort, die Herr Abel Seyler auf ein an ihn abgelassenes Schreiben hätte ergehn lassen können, an seiner Statt aufgesetzt von F,” Theaterjournal 5 (1777): 168–76, here 169. 89. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (Tübingen: Francke, 1993), 104–5. 90. See Bode, Westindier, iv: “Menschlichkeit und Mitleiden mit seinen Nebengeschöpfen.” Throughout the prologue, Bode speaks of “das Parterre” when musing about the spectators. 91. Weber, Kaufleute, 251. 92. Willebrand, Grundriß einer schönen Stadt, 67, 39. 93. Böttiger, Denkschrift, lxxxx. 94. Cumberland, The West Indian, 355. 95. See ibid., 354–55. 96. Melton, The Rise of the Public, 230–31. 97. Bode, Westindier, 29. 98. Cumberland, The West Indian, 397. 99. Bode, Westindier, 153. 100. Aaslestad, “Old Visions,” 162. 101. Bode, Westindier, 8, 9. 102. Ibid., 41. 103. Cumberland, The West Indian, 392. 104. Bode, Westindier, 41. 105. Nussbaum, Limits, 6. 106. Bode, Westindier, 175. 107. Ibid., i and ii: “Verteutschung” (as opposed to “Übersetzung” on the same page). 108. H. B. Nisbet, Lessing: Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2008), 491. 109. See Livingston, “Glocal Knowledge,” 147.

Chapter 2 1. Actual performances in Hamburg lasted only two seasons and ended in November 1768. The ensemble performed in Hanover during the winter of 1767/68 and moved permanently to Braunschweig in 1769. For a detailed account, see Monika Fick, “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” in

Lessing-Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 333–73, here 333–34. 2. That the theaters’ chance of survival depended on local contexts has been the underlying, though never acknowledged, assumption in historiography, including but not limited to Reinhart Meyer, “Von der Wanderbühne zum Hof- und Nationaltheater,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 3, Deutsche Aufklärung bis zur französischen Revolution 1680–1789, ed. Rolf Grimminger (Munich: Hanser, 1980), 186–216, here 207–8. Lessing himself considered the project a failure; his contemporaries corroborated Lessing’s assessment in their correspondence with him. See Johann Friedrich Schütze, Hamburgische TheaterGeschichte (Hamburg: Treder, 1794), 338–42; Heinrich Stümcke, ed., Johann Friedrich Löwens Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (1766) und Flugschriften über das Hamburger Theater (1766 und 1767) (Berlin: Ernst Frensdorff, n.d.), 68–69; Stephan Reinke, “‘Ob’s gleich nur eine Posse ist!’: Zur Rezeption des ‘Lachtheaters,’” in Musiktheater in Hamburg um 1800, ed. Claudia Maurer Zenck (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 193–230, here 196–200; the author compiles a number of sources (and voices) judging the theater project. 3. Lars Rebehn, “Einführung,” in Lebenselixier: Theater, Budenzauber, Freilichtspektakel im Alten Reich, vol. 1. Das Rechnungswesen über öffentliche Vergnügungen in Hamburg und Leipzig (mit einem Anhang zu Braunschweig). Quellen und Kommentare, ed. Bärbel Rudin, with Horst Flechsig and Lars Rebehn (Reichenbach: Neuberin-Museum, 2004), 10–21, here 14–15. See also H. B. Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 364–66. 4. See Purdy, “Enlightenment in the European City,” 25. 5. Christian Ludwig Stieglitz, Encyclopedia der bürgerlichen Baukunst, in welcher alle Fächer dieser Kunst nach alphabetischer Ordnung abgehandelt sind: Ein Handbuch für Staatswirthe, Baumeister und Landwirthe, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1796), 106–14. 6. See Dieter Fratzke, “Die maßstabsgerechte Nachbildung des Theaters

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am Gänsemarkt von 1765, des späteren Hamburger Nationaltheaters: Ein literaturmusealer Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte des Themas ‘Lessing und Hamburg,’” Lessing Yearbook 20 (1988): 1–14. Older accounts are less generous in the description of the building, calling it a “herrschaftliche Amtsscheune” (a presumptuous municipal barn) and describing sets and curtain paintings as “abscheuliches Geschmier” (horrible scribbles). For a succinct overview of these accounts, see Rudin, “Kommentar,” in Rudin, Lebenselixier, 130. 7. See Stieglitz, “Garten,” in Encyclopedia (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1794), 2:262–357, here 278–79; see also Benevolo, The European City, 163–64. 8. Reinke, “‘Ob’s gleich nur eine Posse ist!,’” 197. 9. See Rebehn, “Einführung,” 14–16. 10. Rudin, “Dokumentation der Rechnungen: Hamburg 1708–1810,” in Lebenselixier, 26–90. See Rebehn, “Einführung,” 10, on the odd payment structure that had performance tax paid to the presiding mayor, who did (or did not) enter the payments into the Senate register, leading to a confusing and complex accounting system, and that may in fact explain the contrasting accounts on the Senate’s position. Rebehn and Rudin, “Kommentar,” in Rudin, Lebenselixier, 91–166, here 99, 117. The latter indicates that Schönemann’s acting troupe, upon arriving in Hamburg in 1750, received a significantly lower rate than others. 11. Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 390–91. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Stuttgart: Göschen, 1886–1924), 15:48–59 lists the plays performed at Hamburg’s National Theater while Lessing was engaged as critic. The first list (48–55) begins with the thirty-fifth performance, perhaps because the text of Hamburg Dramaturgy proves reliable until then, and includes the 1767 performances. The second list indicates, clearly, which shift in repertoire occurred, because Lessing includes nearly daily references to ballet, music, or acrobats (“Signor Carolo”). All subsequent citations from Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, take the form LM, followed by volume and page numbers. See also Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 369. Rebehn and Rudin, “Kommentar,” 132–33 suggest that

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Notes to Pages 73–77

Entreprise only survived because it managed to integrate a successful Luftakrobat and perhaps other circus-like acts. 12. Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 334. Other scholars propose that Hamburg’s citizens simply had no time to go to the theater; see Helga Slessarev, “Hamburg Prize Essay: Lessing und Hamburg. Wechselbeziehungen zweier ‘Persönlichkeiten,’” Lessing Yearbook 13 (1981): 1–68, here 12. 13. Voght, Lebensgeschichte, 61–62; Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 396; Familiennachlass von Voght, StAH 622–1, vol. 5. 14. The accounts of membership vary widely and are at times conflated with the later establishment, Gesellschaft der Theaterfreunde (Society of Friends of the Theater). See, on the latter, Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 661; and Schütze, Theater-Geschichte, 333–35. The latter also calls Ochs a Schöngeist (aesthete). 15. Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 658; on this strange end that had the theater turned into a political stage, see Rebehn and Rudin, “Kommentar,” 135. 16. This statement is in contrast to Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 334 as well as to commentary by Schütze and Löwen on the inaptness of audience. 17. Stümcke, Johann Friedrich Löwens Geschichte. See also Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 333; Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 367–68; Wehl, Hamburgs Literaturleben, 69–77. 18. See Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 413–14 and 420, respectively. 19. Wehl, Hamburgs Literaturleben, 140. 20. Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 333. 21. Wehl, Hamburgs Literaturleben, 145. 22. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Lessing in Hamburg: 1766–1770 (Munich: Beck, 2007), 47. 23. Slessarev, “Hamburg Prize Essay,” 12; my translation. 24. Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 333. 25. Ibid., 330. 26. Nisbet states that Lessing first planned to do so in 1749, suggesting that it was due to his interest in the theater, but perhaps it was entirely a result of Hamburg’s worldliness; see ibid., 359. 27. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “An Karl Lessing,” in Werke und Briefe, vol. 11, bk. 1, Briefe von und an Lessing 1743–1770, ed. Wilfried Bahner, Helmuth Kiesel, et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 454–55.

28. Lessing, “An Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim,” February 1, 1767 (#365), in Werke und Briefe, 457–60. In this letter to Gleim (#365), he shares the pragmatism of going to Hamburg (“ruhiges Leben,” 458); he intends to publish and present his plays but wants to continue Laokoon, also in a popular version (“[für] den großen Haufen,” 458). He also tries to recruit Gleim for the publishing venture with Bode. Lessing discusses his sale of the library in a circumspect way but is much more frank in his correspondence with Karl and in one letter to his father. See Lessing, “An Johann Gottfried Lessing,” December 21, 1767 (#395), in Werke und Briefe, 487–89, here 489. 29. Gleim writes: “Denn nicht dem, der wegen seiner französischen Erziehung, gleichgültig gegen alles, was deutsch ist, geworden, sondern allen denen, die sich für deutsche Patrioten ausgeben, und nicht alle möglichen Wege eingeschlagen sind eine Leßing bei uns zu behalten, diesen nur leg ich es zur Last daß wir Ihn verlieren.” “Von Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim,” March 28, 1767 (#367), in Lessing, Werke und Briefe, 461–62, here 461, emphasis in the original. 30. Lessing, “An Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim,” 458. 31. Matt Erlin, “Urban Experience, Aesthetic Experience, and Enlightenment in G. E. Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm,” Monatshefte 93.1 (2001): 20–35, here 21. 32. See, for example, Horst Lange, “Betting on Providence: Gambling in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm,” Colloquia Germanica 41.1 (2008): 1–9; Sigrid Nieberle, “Problematische Gastlichkeit: Denunziation und Metadrama in Lessings Minna von Barnhelm,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 34.2 (2009): 73–91; Martin Blawid, “Zur Antinomie von ‘weiblichem’ und ‘männlichem’ Glück in Lessings Minna von Barnhelm,” Seminar 47.2 (2011): 141–56. 33. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6 (Munich: Hanser, 1986), 442. 34. On the British reception, see Eric Weissengruber, “‘Can One Not Be Serious, Even When Laughing?’ British Translations of G. E. Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, 1789–1805,” Metamorphoses 9.1 (2001): 51–74, esp. 51–53 and 67–68.

35. Erlin, “Urban Experience,” 33. 36. LM 10:213. 37. Dirk Oschmann, Bewegliche Dichtung: Sprachtheorie und Poetik bei Lessing, Schiller und Kleist (Munich: Fink, 2007); John Hamilton, “Modernity, Translation, and Poetic Prose in Lessing’s ‘Briefe, die Neuste Literatur betreffend,’” Lessing Yearbook 36 (2004/5): 79–96; and Katherine Arens, “Translators Who Are Not Traitors: Herder’s and Lessing’s Enlightenments,” Herder-Jahrbuch/HerderYearbook, 2000, 81–110, make this argument, albeit not in reference to drama. Peter Höyng, “Lessing’s Drama Theory,” extends it to the dramatic text. 38. Reemtsma, Lessing in Hamburg, 47. 39. Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox, “Lessing’s Life and Work,” in A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ed. Fischer and Fox (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), 13–39, here 28. 40. Peter Höyng, “Lessing’s Drama Theory: Discursive Writings on Drama, Performance, and Theater,” in Fischer and Fox, A Companion, 211–29, here 220. 41. Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 334–38; Fischer and Fox, “Lessing’s Life and Work,” 29. On the failure of the project, see also, most recently, McCarthy, whose assessment recalls the earliest verdicts, notably by Schütze and Löwen, who blamed the audience for the collapse. John McCarthy, “Die Hamburgische Dramaturgie im Spannungsfeld zwischen kirchlicher Moral und expandierender Öffentlichkeit,” Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch 41 (2014): 259–81, here 269: “Vielmehr ziele ich auf das Publikum als Hauptfaktor des Misserfolgs.” 42. Monika Fick is the first to call for a reassessment in light of Lukas’s work. See Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 338. Recently, Lukas has applied his theoretical framework to the Dramaturgy. See below and Wolfgang Lukas, “Anthropologische Neulegitimation als discursive und narrative Struktur: Lessings Hamburgische Dramaturgie und die zeitgenössische Dramenpraxis,” Lessing Yearbook/ Jahrbuch 41 (2014): 29–48. 43. Lukas, “Anthropologische Neulegitimation,” 31: “Das Kohärenzstiftende in letzter Instanz scheint zunächst allein der vorgegebene äußere Anlass, das Hamburgische Theaterprojekt und sein damaliger Spielplan, zu sein.”

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44. Höyng, “Lessing’s Drama Theory,” 213. 45. Lukas, “Anthropologische Neulegitimation,” 31. 46. Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 23. 47. Examples are Susanne Eigenmann, Zwischen ästhetischer Raserei und aufgeklärter Disziplin: Hamburger Theater im späten 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994); Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte, ed., Caspar Voght und sein Hamburger Freundeskreis: Briefe aus einem tätigen Leben, 3 vols. (Hamburg: Christians 1959–67); and Voght, Lebensgeschichte. 48. Friedland, Political Actors, 84–86, esp. 85 on Marmontel. 49. See, for example, Die Rache des beleidigten Hamburger Parterre im Deutschen Schauspielhause, oder die fünfköpfige TheaterDirection in tausend Aengsten: Mit einem Anhang, welche eine Beleuchtung des Schriftchens Die vertheidigte Hamb. Theaterdirection enthält (Altona, 1801). 50. LM 9:335–37. See also G. E. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Dover, 1962), 101–4 (essay 36). N.B. The number of the essay is listed in order to allow for a cross-reference with the new and complete translation in progress; the latter is used whenever possible. For the latter, see G. E. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Translation, trans. Wendy Arons, Sarah Figal, and Natalya Badylga (New York: Routledge, forthcoming); online at mcpress.media-commons.org/ hamburg/. If I substitute my own translation, I indicate this in a note. 51. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons, Figal, and Badylga, essay 2:13. See LM 9:191. 52. “Von Karl Lessing,” March 22, 1768 (#412), in Werke und Briefe, 509–12, here 511. 53. Herrmann Uhde, Denkwürdigkeiten des Schauspielers, Schauspieldichters und Schauspieldirectors Friedrich Ludwig Schmidt (1772–1841) (Hamburg, 1875), 334–36. Wehl, in summarizing and critiquing Albrecht Wittenberg, Briefe über die Hamburgische Bühne (1774), states that trade, along with celebrations and gambling, happened during the performance. He mocks Wittenberg’s belief

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that bad mercantile business would promote a more virtuous engagement with theater. A frequent commentary, made in an effort to explain Minna von Barnhelm’s success in Hamburg, is that Hamburg’s citizens enjoyed seeing a Prussian uniform. See Franklin Kopitzsch and Gerhard Bartsch, “‘Von Lessing ist keine Notiz zu nehmen’: Zum 250. Geburtstag des Aufklärers vom Gänsemarkt,” Hamburg Porträt 13 (1979): n.p. 54. Höyng, “Lessing’s Drama Theory,” 216; Reinhart Meyer, Das deutsche Trauerspiel des 18. Jahrhunderts: Eine Bibliographie (Munich: Fink, 1977); Meyer, ed., Bibliographia dramatica et dramaticorum (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986) 55. Stümcke, Löwens Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 86. 56. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons, Figal, and Badylga, essay 1:3. 57. This statement is based on my examination of selected years of Theaterkalender (1775–1799) and Theaterjournal (1776–1800), using keywords “Nationaltheater,” “Nationalstück,” and “Übersetzung.” Though my overview is not statistically precise, “Übersetzung” appears three, almost four times more frequently than the other two combined. 58. Thorsten Unger was the first to debunk the lack as a myth; see his “Das Klischee vom Mangel an deutschen Stücken: Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zur Internationalität des Hof- und Nationaltheaters,” in Theaterinstitution und Kulturtransfer II: Fremdkulturelles Repertoire am Gothaer Hoftheater und an anderen Bühnen, ed. Anke Detken, Thorsten Unger, et al. (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), 233–47. 59. Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 12–13. 60. Johns, Bluestocking Feminism, 39–61. 61. “Vom Übersetzen,” Hannoversches Magazin, 1777, 637–40. By likening translation’s innocence to a child’s mind the author expresses translation’s developmental impact. Furthermore, my (hitherto) speculations on the status of epistemic and literary translation are based on titles of approximately five hundred essays in the eighteenth-century journals contained in the Bielefeld database: http:// www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/aufklaerung/. 62. Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 239.

63. See Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 250–51, for a succinct overview of the history of the journal, Lessing’s contributions to it, and subsequent controversies surrounding its contributors and the journal’s direction. 64. Hamilton, “Modernity, Translation, and Poetic Prose”; Arens, “Translators Who Are Not Traitors.” 65. Helmut Berthold, ed., “Ihrem Originale nachzudenken”: Zu Lessings Übersetzungen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), ix. 66. See the opening salvo of the famous fourth letter in Letters on Literature in LM 8:9. 67. Susan Bernofsky, Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 21. Lessing translated Das Theater des Herrn Diderot, which Fick describes as the most important among his translations (Fick, Handbuch, 240). 68. Oschmann, Bewegliche Dichtung, 77. 69. Fick confines this direction to reconsiderations of Lessing in the context of European literatures and Europe. See Monika Fick, “Einführung,” Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch 41 (2014): 9–25, here 15. Nisbet notes, in passing, the Hamburg years’ relevance for Lessing’s emergent concept of Weltliteratur. Nisbet, Lessing, 508. 70. LM 8:280 and 285, respectively. 71. Fick was the first to suggest this line of thinking. See Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 240. 72. LM 8:284. 73. Hamilton, “Modernity, Translation, and Poetic Prose,” 84. 74. Ulrich Profitlich, “Fermenta cognitionis: Zum 95. Stück der Hamburgischen Dramaturgie,” Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch 38 (2008/9): 47. 75. LM 10:139. 76. LM 9:319. 77. Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Empiricism, Ethics,” Profession, 2010, 72–81, here 74. 78. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons, Figal, and Badylga, 20:3 (both quotations). 79. Walter Fränzel, Geschichte des Übersetzens im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Voightländer, 1914), 60; cited in Bernofsky, Foreign Words, 8. 80. Christopher Wild, Theater der Keuschheit—Keuschheit des Theaters (Freiburg: Romberg, 2003), esp. 174–92.

81. On the details of the former dispute and an elaborate account of the latter, see Wehl, Hamburgs Literaturleben, 115–36, and 74–77, 97–102, respectively. Wild explains the conceptual underpinnings of the dispute with the religious attitude toward the Mitteldinge. Accordingly, theater is considered a Mittelding, a phenomenon or thing that is morally indifferent (because the Bible does not classify said phenomenon as good or evil); Wild, Keuschheit, 178. Accordingly, friends of the theater argue in support of the theory of Mitteldinge, emphasizing their potential to represent and to shape, whereas enemies root their criticism in this dubious nature. Wild builds his argument on the work of Wolfgang Martens, who suggests that Lutherism accepted Mitteldinge, whereas Pietism outright rejected it. See Martens, Literatur und Frömmigkeit in der frühen deutschen Aufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 5, 39–43. Yet Wild shows that this theory became more complex, as it filtered into theater practice and criticism. See also chapter 3 of Translating the World. 82. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Zimmern, 52; also LM 9:262–63. 83. LM 9:213; Arons translates “they give it a practical application”; Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons, Figal, and Badylga, 7:9. 84. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons, Figal, and Badylga, 7:9. 85. Gotthard Lerchner, “Mustermischung und Sprachausgleich im trivialliterarischen Diskurs des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 18 (1990): 261–72; for an older argument, which assumes a central role of great authors, see Eric Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 86. This nuance is in contrast to Oschmann, who presumes a greater intentionality and interest in actively shaping written and spoken language. 87. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Zimmern, 125 (both quotations). 88. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons, Figal, and Badylga,19:3. 89. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Zimmern, 198–99. 90. Meyer, “Von der Wanderbühne zum Hof- und Nationaltheater,” 208.

Notes to Pages 88–103

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Chapter 3 1. German was indeed the dominant, and in some parts (Schleswig and Holstein) the official, language among administrators, aristocrats, and the cultural elite in the Danish Unitary State. See Klaus Bohnen and Sven-Aage Jørgensen, Der dänische Gesamtsstaat: Kopenhagen, Kiel, Altona (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992). 2. Christian Degn details the memorial service in the preface to his book Die Schimmelmanns (no pagination); on salons, 12. 3. Hans Schröder, Lexikon der Hamburgischen Schriftsteller bis zur Gegenwart: Maack-Pauli (Hamburg: Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte, 1870), 516. 4. Most recently, Alexander Košenina, “Friedrich Theodor Nevermanns ‘Alonzo und Elvira’ (1795): Eine Quelle für Kleists ‘Das Erdbeben in Chili’ (mit Textanhängen),” Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 22 (2010): 59–78. Košenina includes the poems in the appendix (no pagination); I cite here from this version. A year before Neuer Almanach, Nevermann published Almanach and “Alonzo und Elvira.” 5. See my chapter 4, “Classical Weimar Reconsidered: Friendship Redeemed, Foundations Laid, and Monuments Made.” 6. Wilberforce made several attempts to pass bills ending the slave trade, beginning in 1789, followed by the speech in 1792 and another attempt in 1795, before finally succeeding in 1804. For a comprehensive overview of the abolition debate in Britain (and, to a lesser degree, Continental Europe), see Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 449–560. 7. Voght, Lebensgeschichte, 60: “Howard und Wilberforce’s und Pen’s Bilder standen über meinem Schreibtisch” [sic]. 8. This image is of course monolithic, as vast scholarship on the subject demonstrates. As the extensive research challenging this type of monolithic thought is too nuanced and wide ranging to detail here, I refer the reader to the following title, which provides a solid critique of method, including the methods this book relies on, and seeks to get beyond constructions of Africa shaped solely by the slave trade and empire: Shaden Tageldin, “The Place of Africa, in Theory:

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Pan-Africanism, Postcolonialism, Beyond,” Journal of Historical Sociology 27.3 (2014): 302–23. 9. Aside from fiction and literary motifs that were transmitted widely across European languages and writings (e.g., Oronooko), comprehensive historical accounts have reconstructed African-European collaboration in the trade. On the emergence of West African slave markets, in the seventeenth century, see, for example Thomas, The Slave Trade, 144–45; on eighteenth-century perceptions of this phenomenon, see C. G. A. Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, ed. Johann Jacob Bossard (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1987), 207–11. 10. Becker-Cantarino, “Introduction,” 14. 11. Not only Klopstock’s poems, but also B. H. Brockes’s Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott and the poetry and prose of the brothers Stolberg, were popular. See Grant Henley, “‘Das mir recht die Seele strahlte’: Aspects of a Pietist Poesie in B. H. Brocke’s Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott,” Monatshefte 103.1 (2010): 1–22, esp. 1–5; for a concise overview of the Stolbergs’ role and impact, especially Friedrich Leopold’s, see Eleoma Joshua, Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg and the German Romantics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 15–23; Gabriel Trop, Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), passim. 12. Degn, Die Schimmelmanns, 247: “Sklaverei und Sklavenhandel wurden in Westeuropa in der 1770er und 1780er Jahren zu einem der meistdiskutierten öffentlichen Probleme.” 13. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 488. 14. For a succinct account of abolition in Britain, in consideration of the broader European and transatlantic discourse, see Thomas, The Slave Trade, 486–511, especially on the role of James Ramsey, a naval surgeon, William Paley and Thomas Clarkson, William Pitt and William Wilberforce. Thomas also provides a succinct account of their impact in the new United States. 15. Deutsches Magazin 1 (1791): 580–613. 16. Degn, Die Schimmelmanns, 553 identifies as source an article in Minerva; however, it could not be found in the available volumes of Minerva. However, Degn provides thorough transcription of the archival sources,

citing most important passages of this as well as Reventlow’s treatise. 17. E. P. Kirstein, “Auszug aus der Vorstellung an den König wegen Abschaffung des Negerhandels für die dänischen Staaten,” Deutsches Magazin 3 (1792): 626–84, here 629. 18. On the names, see Degn, Die Schimmelmanns, 119–34; and Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 46–47. Since Sensbach’s book presents newer research, I conclude that Christiansfort was probably the more common name for the West Indian port. 19. For a reproduction of a sketch, see Degn, Die Schimmelmanns, 131. 20. Kirstein, “Auszug,” 627: “Der Name Wilberforce wird nie in der Geschichte vergessen werden, so lange sie die Namen solcher Menschen aufbewahrt, die dem menschlichen Geschlechte vorzügliche Wohlthäter gewesen sind, und künftige Generationen werden ihn vielleicht mit innigerem Danke nennen, wenn sie die Folgen seiner Handlung in einer Reihe von Jahren übersehen.” 21. “William Wilberforce,” Encyclopedia Britannica online, accessed September 27, 2015, m.search.eb.com/topic/643460/ William-Wilberforce. 22. Birgit Tautz, “Translating the World for a German Public or Mediating the Radical in Small Genres,” in Radical Enlightenment, ed. Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam: Brill/ Rodopi, forthcoming). 23. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 520–25. 24. Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism,” 509. 25. Vladimir Barac and Arnold Highfield, “Translators’ Introduction,” in Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, xvii–xxix, here xxiii. The two-volume edition of Oldendorp’s account was ultimately deemed the authoritative account of the Moravian Caribbean mission, and is considered a text that adhered to high standards of eighteenth-century anthropology (which was, of course, only an emergent discipline). 26. For a recent, fairly systematic overview of the German travel discourse around 1800, see Mike Frömel, Offene Räume und gefährliche Reisen im Eis: Reisebeschreibungen

über die Polarregionen und ein kolonialer Diskurs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2013); on approaches to the travel paradigm from the perspective of oceans, rather than continents, see Cohen, The Novel and the Sea; on the interrelation between geography, epistemology, and intellectual history, see my section in the introduction on Tang, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity. 27. See Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, 137–39. 28. Degn, Die Schimmelmanns, 287: “Ihre Erziehung muß ihrer Befreiung vorangehen, sonst wird ihr eigenes Wohl und das Wohl ihrer Herren aus Spiel gesetzt.” 29. Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 363. 30. Kirstein, “Auszug,” 668. 31. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 12. 32. Degn, Die Schimmelmanns, 257. 33. Ibid., 258. 34. Ibid., 262; I paraphrase the quotation “Bis zum Schicksal eines Tieres oder einer leblosen Sache herabgewuurdigt . . . und dadurch fast jeder moralischen Existenz beraubt zu sein.” 35. Ibid., 270. 36. Ibid., 269. 37. Ibid., 279. 38. This argument has been made, in quite elaborate ways, for the United States and the reflection in domineering discursive genres, for example, slave poetry, but less so for marginal cultures and genres. See, for example, Simon Lewis, “Slavery, Memory, and the History of the ‘Atlantic now’: Charleston, South Carolina, and the Global Racial / Economic Hierarchy,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.2 (2009): 125–35, here 130. 39. Rebecca Protten Freundlich, twice married to influential Moravian Brethren, had much influence in the Caribbean missions. See Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 338–39 (on the first marriage to Matthäus Freundlich) and 270–310 (on the early efforts to convert slaves in St. Thomas, led by Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann). The Brethren secured a permanent site for their mission in St. Thomas, set up a plantation, and ended up “buying several baptized negros” (for missionary work among

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slaves). At the core of all of these actions was the belief that slavery was the ultimate sin, whereby contemporaries blur the lines between “slavery to sin” and “slavery to people.” 40. Anders Pontoppidan Thyssen, “Die Brüdergemeine als Bindeglied zwischen Deutsch und Dänisch,” in Bohnen and Jørgensen, Der dänische Gesamtsstaat, 119–32, here 124. 41. Christopher Wild, “Bekehrung,” in Handbuch: Literatur und Religion, ed. Daniel Weidner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), 331–35, here 332. 42. Barac and Highfield, “Translators’ Introduction,” xxii. 43. Marianne Wokeck, “Harnessing the Lure of the ‘Best Poor Man’s Country’: The Dynamics of German-Speaking Immigration to British North America, 1683–1783,” in “To Make America”: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ida Altman and James Horn (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 204–43, here 211. 44. Rebekah Starnes, “Transnational Transports: Identity, Community, and Place in German-American Narratives from 1750–1850” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012), 108–9. The commonly used term for slaves’ Atlantic crossing is “Middle Passage.” On the broader context of African identity as influenced by the slave trade, and its effects on literature, see Vincent Caretta, “The Emergence of an African American Literary Canon, 1760–1820,” in The Cambridge History of African American Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 52–65. 45. Katherine Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs: Their Related Lives, 1750–1820 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Daniel B. Thorp, “Notes and Documents: Chattel with a Soul; The Autobiography of a Moravian Slave,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112.3 (1988): 433–51; Katherine Faull, “Self-Encounters: Two Eighteenth-Century African Memoirs from Moravian Bethlehem,” in Crosscurrents: African-Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World, ed. C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay, Leroy Hopkins, and David MacBride (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 1998), 29–52. 46. See Faull, “Self-Encounters.” Here, the author emphasizes that in slave memoirs,

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unlike in other Moravian memoirs, the positing of the “I” gains greater significance, as it marks the departure from slavery. 47. David Messmer, “‘If Not in the Word, in the Sound’: Frederick Douglass’s Mediation of Literacy Through Song,” American Transcendental Quarterly 21.1 (2007): 1–18. 48. Lauri Ramey, Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 53. 49. Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs, xxxvi. 50. The digitized materials of the Bethlehem Digital History project serve as materials here; accessed August 20, 2014, http://bdhp.moravian.edu/personal_papers/ memoirs/memoirs.html. Böhner is a prominent example of the former, Nixdorf of the latter. 51. Here, the memoir doubles down on both the immigrant’s story and the vocabulary of Pietism, in which the sea, according to Eleoma Joshua and August Langen, suggests eternity. However, following Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea, it is also likely that the rhetoric participated in the eighteenthcentury more general turn toward the ocean as point of departure for thinking about the world. See Joshua, Stolberg, 14; and August Langen, Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954), 197–99. 52. “Martha Büninger, neé Marriner,” in Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs, 30–32, here 32. 53. “Benigna Zahm,” in Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs, 19–26, here 21. 54. Ibid., xxiii–xxiv: “Choirs were groups of Moravians who lived together in units based not on their degree of piety but rather according to their gender, age, and marital status.” 55. Wolfgang Martens, Literatur und Frömmigkeit, 5. 56. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, 232. 57. Günter Niggl, Geschichte der deutschen Autobiographie im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett, 1977), 62–65; see also Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs, 139. 58. Bruce Hindmarsh, “Chapter 15: Religious Conversion as Narrative and Autobiography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Lewis Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 343–67, here 357.

59. See Wild, “Bekehrung.” Accordingly, the interplay between conversion and constant constitutes the hook for integrating conversion-narratives, and for that matter, confession-narratives in literature. 60. See Dorothea von Mücke, “The Entirety of Scripture Is Within Us,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 320–25. 61. In chapter 1, I paraphrase Vorlesestunden as “reading circles”; I use the modification here to emphasize reading aloud as opposed to silent reading. 62. Hermann Wellenreuther, “Die atlantische Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts: Überlegungen zur Bedeutung des Atlantiks für die Frommen im Britischen Weltreich,” in Transatlantische Religionsgeschichte: 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 9–30, here 15. 63. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther and Elective Affinities, ed. and trans. Victor Lange (New York: Continuum, 1990), 154. All quotations. 64. Ibid., 155, emended. 65. Ibid., 154. 66. For a fine, succinct reading of vocality and gender in Goethe’s novel, see Mary Helen Dupree, “Ottilie’s Echo: Vocality in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,” German Quarterly 87.1 (2014): 67–85. 67. J. W. Eaton, The German Influence in Danish Literature: The German Circle in Copenhagen, 1750–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 13. The decades of German influence in the Danish Unitary State are of course refracted through the so-called Struensee-Affair, the details of which cannot be rehashed here. 68. See Caroline von Humboldt and Friederike Brun, Frauen zur Goethezeit: Ein Briefwechsel. Briefe aus dem Reichsarchiv Kopenhagen und dem Archiv Schloss Tegel, Berlin, ed. Ilse Foerst-Crato (Düsseldorf: Selbstverlag, 1975), 82–83. 69. See Janet Besserer Holmgren, The Women Writers in Schiller’s Horen: Patrons, Petticoats, and the Promotion of Weimar Classicism (Newark: Univesity of Delaware Press, 2007), esp. 95–96 on Brun’s “place.” Goethe’s indebtedness to Brun in the poem “Nähe des Geliebten,” modeled on Brun’s poem “Ich denke dein,” has been much

discussed, including by Holmgren (99–103) and by Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 48–58. 70. Annegret Heitmann, “Muses, Myths, and Masquerades: The Scandinavian Salons in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavica 35.1 (1996): 5–28, here 7: “The transition to the nineteenth century, and to a cultural milieu characterized by a less rigid social structure and a deeper sense of the public sphere, is marked by the literary circles of Charlotte Schimmelmann and Friederike Brun.” 71. Doris Walser-Wilhelm and Peter Walser-Wilhelm, eds., Zeitgebirge: Karl Viktor von Bonstetten, Madame de Staël, Friederike Brun, geb. Münter. Zwei Briefgespräche 1811–1813, Erstveröffentlichung. Nach den Originalmanuskripten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 119. 72. Antoine Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse: Salons and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1.1 (May 1, 2009): 5, http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/38. 73. Katie Trumpener has delineated the differentiation between culture and nation/ empire, and the respective alignment with oral/poetic/bardic cultural production and printed literature. See her Bardic Nationalism. 74. Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 7. 75. Karin Hoff, Die Entdeckung der Zwischenräume: Literarische Projekte der Spätaufklärung zwischen Skandinavien und Deutschland (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 9–10. 76. Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse,” 2. 77. Degn, Die Schimmelmanns, 180–81. 78. Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse,” 5. 79. Friederike Brun, Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen und Idas Ästhetische Entwicklung (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1824), 141 and 162, respectively. 80. Hoff, Zwischenräume, 22. 81. Friederike Brun, Prosaische Schriften, 4 vols. (Zurich: Füssli, 1799–1801), 1:85. 82. Hoff, Zwischenräume, 10–22. 83. Rosa Olbrich, “Die deutsch-dänische Dichterin Friederike Brun, ein Beitrag zur

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empfindsam-klassizistischen Stilperiode” (PhD diss., University of Breslau, 1932), 55–61. Olbrich lists specifically Reinhardt’s Musenalmanach, Voß’s and Göcking’s Musenalmanach, and Schiller’s Musenalmanach; furthermore, Iris, Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, Originalien, and Deutscher Merkur. However, with the exception of the publications listed in the main body of this text, Olbrich’s data could not be verified. 84. Matt Erlin, Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 65–67. 85. Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 51; Purdy, “Enlightenment in the European City,” 20. 86. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, “Introducing Romantic Sociability,” in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840, ed. Russell and Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–23, here 9. The authors borrow “affect management” from Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 17; however, my reading of affects and emotion is influenced by Katja Mellmann, Emotionalisierung: Von der Nebenstundenpoesie zum Buch als Freund (Paderborn: mentis, 2006). 87. Brun, Wahrheit, 58. 88. See Wild, “Bekehrung,” 333, 335. 89. Unlike Hoff, Zwischenräume, 10–22 who speaks of alteration between self-expression and deference. 90. For example, in Brun’s chapter “Wieder eine Fessel abgeworfen,” in Wahrheit, 139–43. 91. Brun, “Ernst und Emilie,” in Wahrheit, 160: “Jetzt waren auch die Stollberge (Geschwister der Gräfin Bernstorff) dem trauten Kreise der Familien Schimmelmann und Reventlau [sic] zugesellt, welcher solange in innigster Uebereinstimmung der Gesinnungen und treuer Freundschaft vereint, zum Wohl des beneidungswürdig glücklichen Dänemarks zusammenwirkte.” 92. According to Lilti, protection replaces patronage. Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse,” 7. 93. Brun, “Der Schmerz meine Muse,” in Wahrheit, 175–76. 94. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 75. 95. Brun, Wahrheit, 176.

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96. Brun, “Einleitungswort,” in Idas Ästhetische Entwicklung, 195–96, here 196. 97. See Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation; and Hoff, Zwischenräume. Tone Brekke reads Idas Ästhetische Entwicklung as a revision of Schiller’s aesthetic education, an argument with which I disagree. Brekke, “A Cosmopolitan SalonHostess: Friederike Brun’s Revision of Schiller in Idas Ästhetische Entwicklung,” Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1–11. 98. See the introduction on my adaptation and appropriation of Apter’s term. 99. Friedrich Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1879), 4:775–88. 100. Erdmut Jost, Landschaftsblick und Landschaftsbild (Freiburg: Rombach, 2006), 203–10. 101. Ulrike Gleixner, “Familie, Traditionsstiftung und Geschichte im Schreiben von pietistischen Frauen,” in Frauen in der Stadt: Selbstzeugnisse des 16.–18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Daniela Hacke (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2004), 131–63, here 144–45. 102. Becker-Cantarino, “Introduction,” 13–15. 103. Brun, Idas Ästhetische Entwicklung, 238: “geistig-poetische, [in das sich] nie etwas Fremdes und Uebertriebenes . . . einschleiche.” 104. Ibid., 258–59. See also Schiller, “Über Matthisons Gedichte,” in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1879), 4:775–87. 105. Mellmann, Emotionalisierung, 135–38. 106. Brun, Idas Ästhetische Entwicklung, 267. 107. In developing this point, I am indebted to the participants of the GSA seminar on conversion (2014), in particular Jonathan Strom, who emphasized how the postmortem publication of the Moravian memoir reinforces conversion and recommits readers to a fairly closed community. 108. Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 3. 109. Ibid., 49–50, my emphasis. 110. This is the place for pointing out peculiar ways of periodization in German literary historiography; Anglo-American–centered scholarship on European Romanticism routinely subsumes sentimentality and Weimar Classicism under Romanticism. 111. Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 37.

112. Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse,” 11. 113. Trop, Poetry as a Way of Life, 244, emphasis in the original, with specific references to Brockes’s Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott. Trop provides a partially alternative reading to my claims, situating sentimental or, in his preferred term, Anacreontic, poetry as an extension of rococo. He situates the latter as a preoccupation with form and giving form to senses. However, he leaves out larger literary, contextual, and disciplinary concerns; see 265–75.

Chapter 4 1. Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse,” 7. 2. Barbara Becker-Cantarino and Wolfram Mauser, eds., Frauenfreundschaft, Männerfreundschaft: Literarische Diskurse im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991); Klaus Manger and Ute Pott, eds., Rituale der Freundschaft (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006). On differences between friendship and family relationships, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman, The Anthropology of Friendship (London: Berg, 1999). 3. The first study to interrogate (and dismantle) the elevation of Goethe is, to my knowledge, Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord, and Simon Richter, eds., Unwrapping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000). Barbara Becker-Cantarino has repeatedly interrogated processes of individuation, including the making of auratic individuals, and their effects on friendships. See, for example, her “Zur Theorie der literarischen Freundschaft im 18. Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Sophie la Roche,” in Becker-Cantarino and Mauser, Frauenfreundschaft, Männerfreundschaft, 47–74, here 61. While the term may evoke allusions to Walter Benjamin’s notions of aura, and thus seem anachronistic in the eighteenth-century context, it is frequently used to describe a domineering author-subject around which the understanding of a particular cultural production revolves (e.g., Goethezeit). 4. Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American

Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 9. 5. Ibid., 33. 6. Ibid., 44–45. For an early discussion of secularization of erstwhile spiritual friendships, see Bengt Sorensen, “Freundschaft und Patriarchat im 18. Jahrhundert,” in BeckerCantarino and Mauser, Frauenfreundschaft, Männerfreundschaft, 279–92, here 282. 7. Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship, 53. 8. See Hans Schulz, ed., Schiller und der Herzog von Augustenburg (Jena: Diederichs, 1905), 15. According to Schulz, the text of the stanza was as follows: “Unser todte Freund soll leben! / Alle Freunde stimmet ein! / Und sein Geist soll uns umschweben / Hier in hellas Himmelhain. [tutissimi] Jede Hand emporgehoben! / Schwört bei diesem freien Wein: Seinem Geiste treu zu sein / Bis zum Wiedersehn dort oben!” [all sic]. 9. Ibid., 14: “Daß der Schauspieldichter in ihm gestorben ist, kann ich vielleicht vergessen lernen; aber daß Deutschlands erster—und vielleicht aller künftigen erster— Geschichtsschreiber nicht mehr ist, das werd ich nie—nie verbluten.” 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Peterson et al. (Weimar: Böhlau Nachfolger, 1943–), 34.1:114. 12. Later, they extended the pension by two more years. 13. In his letter to Körner (January 1, 1792), Schiller mentions that the identity of the prince and count were revealed to him. Apparently Schimmelmann felt it would have been inappropriate to cosign a letter with the prince. See Schiller, Schillers Werke, 26:135. See also Klaus-Detlef Müller, “Schiller und das Mäzenat: Zu den Entstehungsbedingungen der ‘Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen,’” in Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Wilfried Barner (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1984), 151–67. My book amends these long-standing claims, in particular in chapter 3 and epilogue. 14. Klaus Manger, “Rituale der Freundschaft—Sonderformen sozialer Kommunikation,” in Manger and Pott, Rituale, 23–49, here 42–45. 15. Wulf Segebrecht, “Lyrik der Klassik,” Europäische Romantik: Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Klaus von See, vol.

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14 (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1982), 141–78, here 158. 16. This notion of testament replicates, as a strictly textual category, the notion of literary generation; to the best of my knowledge, Sarah Eldridge is the first to introduce the term in her study of the eighteenth-century German novel. See Eldridge, Novel Affinities (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2016), 93–95. 17. J. S. Ersch, “Betrachtungen eines unbefangenen Mannes, den Feinden der französischen Revolution vorgelegt, von einem Franzosen,” Minerva 3 (1800): 303–18. 18. See the letter of July 13, 1793, in Schiller, Schillers Werke, 26:262 and 264, respectively. 19. See the remainder of my chapter, and, for a much more forceful claim asserting willful political suppression, see W. Daniel Wilson, Das Goethe Tabu (Munich: dtv, 1999), 47–75. This section of Wilson’s book is devoted to sale of subjects into colonial wars, an aspect of the time memorialized in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. 20. Schiller, Schillers Werke, 34.1:113. 21. Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism,” 507. 22. Ibid., 509. 23. Schiller, Schillers Werke, 26:117 and 120, for the letter to Körner (December 13, 1791) and that to Baggesen (December 16, 1791), respectively. 24. Ibid., 123: “theurer und hochgeschätzter Freund.” 25. Ibid., 124. 26. Ibid., 120. 27. Ibid., 125, emphasis in the original. 28. Schiller, Schillers Werke, vol. 4 (act 2, scene 17). On transitional aesthetics in this play, see Dorothea von Mücke, “Play, Power, and Politics in Schiller’s ‘Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua,’” Michigan Germanic Studies 13.1 (1987): 1–18, 15; Tautz, Reading and Seeing, 165–71; John Guthrie, Schiller, the Dramatist: A Study of Gesture in the Plays (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009), 78. 29. Jeffrey High, Schillers Rebellionskonzept und die französische Revolution (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 2004), 57–58. 30. W. Daniel Wilson, ed., Goethes Weimar und die Französische Revolution: Dokumente der Krisenjahre (Weimar: Böhlau, 2004), 137. To my knowledge, no such text

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was published; it was also not published by Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, whom Schiller mentioned as a possible editor in Werke, 26:134. 31. Schiller, Schillers Werke, 34.1:105. 32. Wilson, Krisenjahre, 483–84, esp. note 157. 33. Ibid., 207–11. 34. W. Daniel Wilson, “Goethe and Schiller, Peasants and Students: Weimar and the French Revolution,” in Oergel, (Re-)Writing the Radical, 61–71, here 70. 35. High, Schillers Rebellionskonzept, 60–80. In what strikes me as a bold misreading, High references Schiller’s letter to Göschen (October 14, 1792), which ponders religion less in conjunction with contemporaneous revolutions than in a Kantian sense, as a gradual secularization that would bring about a revolution of thought (Schiller, Schillers Werke 26:158). 36. Hans-Jürgen Schings, Die Brüder des Marquis Posa: Schiller und der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996). 37. Wilson, Krisenjahre, 631n49, 637n66. 38. Tautz, Reading and Seeing, 138–43. 39. Karl S. Guthke, Goethes Weimar und “Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001). 40. Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon, vol. 8 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1811), 71–72. After 1811, the paper was renamed Le Moniteur Universale. 41. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009), 45. 42. See, for example, vols. 8, 9, and 12 on so-called colonial anecdotes and vols. 6 and 7 on crime anecdotes. 43. While this is not the place for an extensive excursus, like cities and the globe, islands and oceans alter the perspective of writing literary and cultural history. 44. Erlin, Necessary Luxuries, 93–109, e-book location 100, here near n5. 45. Ibid., e-book location 151. 46. Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden 6.4 (1800): 357–64. 47. See my chapter 1; Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment; and Clifford Siskin and William Warner, eds., This Is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–33.

48. Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden 6.6 (1800): 578–79. 49. Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 47. See also Konrad Kratzsch, Klatschnest Weimar: Ernstes und Heiteres, Menschlich-Allzumenschliches aus dem Alltag der Klassiker (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 11–12; and Hans Eberhard, Weimar zur Goethezeit (Weimar: Rat der Stadt, 1988), 6–7. 50. Astrid Köhler, “Höfische Geselligkeit in Weimar,” in Formen der Geselligkeit in Nordwestdeutschland 1750–1820, ed. Peter Albrecht, Hans Erich Bödeker, and Ernst Hinrich (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 119–38, here 121. In eighteenth-century Weimar, all persons with origins outside the duchy were considered foreigners, and I use the term accordingly throughout this chapter. 51. Siegmund von Seckendorff, “1. Juni 1776,” in Weimar-Album: Blätter der Erinnerung an Carl August und seinen Musenhof, ed. August Diezmann (Leipzig: Voigt & Günter, 1860), 22. 52. Karl August Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen: Begegnungen und Gespräche im klassischen Weimar, ed. Klaus Gerlach and René Sternke (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998), 96. 53. Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 173; Kratzsch, Klatschnest, 13. 54. Eberhard, Weimar, 26. Eberhard attributes this statement to an English traveler named Russell. 55. See Wilhelm Bode, Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen, ed. Regine Otto, 3 vols (Berlin: Aufbau, 1979); and Kratzsch, Klatschnest. 56. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), 3–23; see also 259–61 on the legitimizing role of gossip in literary history. 57. On rumor as a substitute for news, see Edmund Lauf, Gerücht und Klatsch (Berlin: Spiess, 1990), 16. However, I focus more on the political function of gossip as described in Nicola Parsons, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 8; see also Brigitte Dörlamm, Gasthäuser und Gerüchte: Zu integrativer Polyphonie im Werk Paul Raabes (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2003), 97. 58. Spacks, Gossip, 52; and Simon Richter, “Introduction,” in German Literature of the Eighteenth Century:The Literature of Weimar

Classicism, vol. 7, ed. Simon Richter (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), 3–44, here 26, respectively. Richter briefly discusses Weimar’s fear of Böttiger’s gossipmongering. 59. Bode, Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen, 1:365 and 1:385, respectively. 60. Ibid., 2:107 and 2:81, respectively. 61. Ibid., 1:357, 1:390, and 1:407; see also 2:89. 62. Ibid., 1:281 and 2:140, respectively. 63. Ibid., 1:369. 64. Already during his lifetime, there were different versions of Goethe’s decision to marry Christiane Vulpius. Most contemporaries claimed that in 1806, Christiane Vulpius had thrown herself between Goethe and the looting foreign troops, hitting soldiers with household objects and physically attacking them. A thankful Goethe, the story goes, married her. See Peter Schwartz, “Why Did Goethe Marry When He Did?,” Goethe Yearbook 15 (2008): 115–30. Christian August Vulpius, Christiane’s brother, offered a more mundane explanation for why Goethe’s house was not looted, suggesting that it took “wine and shrewdness” and a huge monetary payoff to appease the troops. See Christian August Vulpius, Eine Korrespondenz zur Kulturgeschichte der Goethezeit, vol. 1, Brieftexte, ed. Andreas Meier (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), 125. 65. Bode, Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen, 3:58 and 3:83, respectively. 66. Ibid., 3:49. 67. Ibid., 3:265. 68. Ibid., 1:448. 69. Ibid., 1:407. 70. Elisabeth Power, “Review of Lotte meine Lotte,” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 274. 71. This account of Schiller’s attitude toward the French Revolution reflects High’s line of argumentation (Schillers Rebellionskonzept, 96). 72. Johann Wolfgang Goethe to Johann Carl Albrecht, Weimar, July 30, 1783, in Goethes Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 6, Briefe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887), 183. 73. See Kratzsch, Klatschnest, 113. Goethe frequently interfered in public affairs and opinions; well documented are his spats with Kotzebue about the direction of the Weimar theater, his commissioning of reviews of his novel Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), and his interference in personnel

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decisions such as the hiring of Christian Vulpius as a librarian. 74. Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen, 96. 75. Goethe and Wieland were actually embroiled in such moving around, which demonstrates that Böttiger not only gossiped but also provided news, not least to historiographers trying to tell Weimar’s story decades later. See Klaus Gerlach and Rene Sternke, “Anmerkungen, ” in Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen, 447–48. 76. See “Stadt, Haupt-,” in ZedlersUniversallexicon. 77. Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen, 73. 78. Crane shows how, in early modern England, the garden became both space and metaphor for swapping politically sensitive gossip that subsequently acquired societal relevance. See Mary Thomas Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Space in Early Modern England,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 (2009): 4–22, here 14. 79. Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen, 214. 80. Kratzsch, Klatschnest, 117–18. 81. Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen, 213. 82. This is an abbreviating appropriation of Spacks’s careful reading of “positive value” attached to gossip, which counters public sanction. Processes of division into good and bad gossip replicate gender difference, aligning women much closer with privacy and, by extension, with gossip. See Spacks, Gossip, 24–46. 83. “Metropolis,” in Zedlers Universallexicon, 20, 0698. 84. Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 4. 85. Ibid., 47. My pragmatic use of Hunstock’s Residenzstadt cannot do justice to the plethora of material the author describes; however, I hope to offer an interpretation of the material that is useful to literary historians. For, while Hunstock’s book supplies plenty of facts, statistics, and documentary evidence, it is lacking in analysis and synthesis. 86. Wilson, Krisenjahre, 8 and 35–38. 87. See Vulpius, Brieftexte, 95; and also Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 37. 88. Plenary Transcript, Weimar, July 22, 1836, StdAW HA, 1–1–54, no fol.; cited in Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 47. Hunstock is

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the first to clarify that aristocrats working at the court, the military, and foreigners were not counted among Weimar’s citizenry, irrespective of their possessions. Nevertheless, the latter were a prerequisite for eventually becoming a citizen, as Hunstock argues when detailing wealth and property as criteria for the acquisition of voting rights and the right to trade. See Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 56. 89. Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 41. 90. “Amtsassii, Amtsassen,” in Zedlers Universallexicon, 1, 1814–16. The entry distinguishes Schriftsässige (proprietors whose estate gave them jurisdiction over persons affiliated with their estate), providing a clearer picture than Hunstock, who seems to apply the term only to erstwhile foreigners. 91. Recent Schriftsässige, who despite their property continued to claim foreign status and thus avoid taxation, now had to become citizens as well; see Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 89. 92. For a comprehensive overview of this aspect of Weimar culture around 1800, see Joachim Berger, “Eine ‘europäische’ Residenz? Besucherverkehr und Außenwahrnehmung des Weimarer Hofs um 1800,” in Germaine de Stael und ihr erstes deutsches Publikum: Literaturpolitik und Kulturtransfer um 1800, ed. Gerhard Kaiser and Olaf Müller (Heidelberg: Winter 2008), 75–97. 93. Kratzsch, Klatschnest, 188. 94. Franz David Gesky, Weimar von unten betrachtet: Bruchstücke einer Chronik zwischen 1806 und 1835, ed. Hubert Erzmann and Rainer Wagner (Jena: Glaux, 1997). 95. Kratzsch, Klatschnest, 116–18. 96. Nikolaus Griebel, Vergleichende Zeittafeln der Geschichte der Stadt Weimar (Weimar: Griebel, 2009), 60. 97. Ibid., 84. 98. Eberhard, Weimar, 5. 99. See Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 110–16. 100. Eberhard, Weimar, 38. Hunstock offers a far more nuanced assessment of the skilled trades, and he does not confirm an outright oversupply. However, he provides new insights into protectionist behavior when it came to accepting foreign merchants in town and to trading with other areas (see Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 140–65). 101. Hunstock, Residenzstadt, 116. 102. Ibid., 74. 103. Ibid., 287–89.

104. Kratzsch, Klatschnest, 15. 105. Ibid., 16. To date, Wilson has made the most forceful claim that Classical Weimar tended toward self-isolation, repressing any outside influences that could have undermined its self-styling efforts. See Wilson, Goethe-Tabu; and Wilson, Krisenjahre. 106. See Merseburger, Mythos Weimar. The book chronicles the town’s cultural history from Classical Weimar to the Weimar Republic and Buchenwald and today. 107. See Peter McIsaac, Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 5; Kerstin Barndt, “Layers of Time: Industrial Ruins and Exhibitionary Temporalities” PMLA 125.1 (2010): 134–41, here 134–35. For a more general survey on the intersection of museums with texts, see Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004). 108. Hans-Martin Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 22–23. 109. Heinz Schlaffer, “Exoterik und Esoterik in Goethes Romanen,” Goethe Jahrbuch 95 (1978): 212–26, here 222. 110. Hellmuth Ammerlahn, Imagination und Wahrheit: Goethes Künstler-Bildungsroman “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.” Struktur, Symbolik, Poetologie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 208. Here Ammerlahn delineates “Thurm” positively as a metaphor of intellectual culmination: “Turmgesellschaft als ‘Geheimbund’ des erkennenden und tätigen Geistes.” 111. Ibid., 267 and 281. 112. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1773),” in Schriften zur Kunst: Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, vol. 13 (Zurich: Artemis, 1954), 16–26; Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1823),” in Schriften zur Kunst, 950–57. 113. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “1735: Aesthetic Orientation in a Decentered World,” in New History of German Literature, ed. Judith Ryan and David Wellbery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 350–55, here 353. 114. Ibid., 353.

115. Daniel Purdy, On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 2 and 7. 116. Ibid., 153. 117. Ibid., 1. 118. Susan D. Bernstein, “Goethe’s Architectonic Bildung and Building in Classical Weimar,” MLN 114.5 (1999): 1014–36, here 1015. 119. See Purdy, “Enlightenment in the European City.” 120. An example is the aforementioned city chronicle of Hamburg. See Griesheim, Verbesserte und Vermehrte Auflage. Along with the text’s preface and dedication to God, both illustrations—the Ansicht—and text orient the account vertically, confining Hamburg in its place (and vis-à-vis a transcendent being) rather than promoting its global aspiration. 121. Gilbert, “The Idea of the City,” 214. On competing images of the premodern and modern city, see also Chard, “The Urban Paradox.” 122. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On German Architecture,” in Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von Nardoff and Ernest von Nardoff (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986), 3–10. 123. Ibid., 3. The German original emphasizes the aspect of craft, even in divine creation. See Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1773),” 17. 124. Goethe, “On German Architecture,” 5–6. The original is more precise in describing the social dimension of contemporaneous German architectural style: the would-be nobility translates as “bürgerliche Edelleute.” See Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1773),” 20. 125. Goethe, “On German Architecture,” 6. Consulting the original relates the sensual impact of both experiences: “Ganz vom Zierrat erdrückt!” gives way to (“Anblick”). See Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1773),” 20. 126. Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1773),” 20. 127. Goethe, “On German Architecture,” 5. “Herrlichkeit” in the original preserves the religious context while instigating its secular reading in terms of beauty. See Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1773),” 20. 128. Susan Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole,

Notes to Pages 177–184

227

Freud, and Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 29. 129. Purdy, On the Ruins, 168. 130. Purdy classifies the text as “hymn to Erwin” and does not explicitly entertain the question of genre or genre shift (ibid., 167). 131. Ibid., 168. 132. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, vol. 10 (Zurich: Artemis, 1954), 392–93 and 411, respectively. 133. Goethe, “On Gothic Architecture,” in Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, 10–14, here 12. The translators explain their choice of title by pointing out that the essay discusses the Cologne Cathedral, which was built in the Gothic style. I find this rationale unconvincing and thus, in the body of my text, refer to the essay with my own translation of the title. See also Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1823),” 955. 134. My translation of Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1823),” 952: “Wert und Würde im rechten Sinne, das heißt historisch zu fühlen und zu erkennen.” 135. Bernstein singles out Goethe’s remarks about the completion of Cologne Cathedral, a process he considered possible in the imagination but not in reality in her 1999 essay, while creating a greater context—namely, a juxtaposition of “Cathedral Pieces” and “Goethehaus” in her book. See Bernstein, Housing Problems, 24–40; for quotations, 25–26. 136. Goethe, “On Gothic Architecture,” 11, my emphasis. 137. My translation. “On Gothic Architecture” translates Anhänglichkeit as “admiration” (14). See Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1823),” 956. 138. Goethe, “On Gothic Architecture,” 14, trans. emended. 139. Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst (1773),” 25. I read the attribute at this point of the essay less as an effort to define architectural style than to claim the subject’s (Goethe’s) authority over representation. 140. Purdy contextualizes Goethe’s claim that the cathedral’s architecture is German in a broader European perspective, noting that it merely reflected Italian views on northern European architecture. See Purdy, On the Ruins, 164–66. 141. See, for example, Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, 127–31. Accordingly, not just

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Goethe but also Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer belabored this point. 142. See my introduction, “The City and the Globe.”

Epilogue 1. This formulation is, of course, on the analogy of the ever present “Whither Humanities?” in response to the allegedly new crisis of the humanities. 2. Apter, Translation Zone, xi–xii. 3. Ibid., 243. 4. Ibid., 244. 5. John K. Noyes, “Goethe on Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism: Bildung and the Dialectic of Critical Mobility,” EighteenthCentury Studies 39.4 (2006): 443–62, here 444–52. 6. L. von Beer, Der Westindier: Ein Schauspiel. Bühnenfassung (Berlin: Block, 1882). Another, early nineteenth-century adaptation is Georg Reinbeck, Der Westindier (Coblenz: Hölscher, 1822). 7. See, for example, Sylvester Linus Kreilein, “August von Kotzebue’s Critical Reception in New York City (1798–1805): A Study in Early American Theatre Criticism” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1989). 8. George Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–1819,” Journal of Modern History 72.4 (2000): 890–943, here 943. 9. Neue Deutsche Biographie, 12:xii, 62425; Oscar Mandel, August von Kotzebue: The Comedy, the Man (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 310. 10. See, for example, Jeffrey Richards, “How to Write an American Play: Murray’s Traveller Returned and Its Source,” Early American Literature 33 (1998): 277–90. 11. This is in contrast to both Riesche, Schöne Mohrinnen, 46 and the central tenet of Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. Furthermore, Kotzebue’s texts do not exhibit true transcultural patterns, as Chunjie Zhang claims in Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 12. Mandel, August von Kotzebue, 37. 13. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 127. 14. The Danish decree would of course not take effect until 1803.

15. August von Kotzebue, Die Negersclaven: Historisch-dramatische Gemählde in drey Akten (Leipzig: Kummer, 1797). 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Also Johannes Birgfeld, “Medienrevolution und gesellschaftlicher Wandel: Das Unterhaltungstheater als Reflexionsmedium von Modernisierungsprozessen,” in Das Unterhaltungsstück um 1800: Literaturhistorische Konfigurationen, Signaturen der Moderne, ed. Johannes Birgfeld and Claude D. Conter (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2007), 81–117, here 86. 18. I am revising here my earlier claim, put forth in Tautz, “Travelling Ideas of (the British) Empire: Translating the Caribbean World for the Eighteenth-Century German Stage,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 79.2 (2010): 95–111, here 107. 19. Cumberland, The West Indian, 345. 20. Kotzebue, Westindier, 34 and 37, respectively.

21. Ibid, 5: “besondere Gemüthsbewegung.” 22. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 127. 23. John K. Noyes, “Writing the Dialectic Subject: Goethe on World Literature and World Citizenship,” Seminar 51.2 (2015): 100–114, here 100. 24. Ibid., 107. 25. Apter, Translation Zone, 41. 26. James I. Porter, ed., Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 110. 27. Ibid., 96. 28. Ibid., 99. 29. Ibid., 110. 30. Maybe this also applies to the historical event. See ibid., 116. 31. Ibid., 100.

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index

abolitionist movement development of, 111 German journals and, 111–12, 159 in Hamburg, 108 interaction with religious movements, 111 Nevermann’s poetry and, 110 writings of, as network of texts, 110 academic disciplines, rise of, 4, 10, 85, 86, 140 Goethe and, 188, 202 Hamburg and, 37 Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie and, 100, 102 vs. nineteenth-century German national literary historiography, 13, 192 translation and, 86, 87 university and, 38, 86 Ackermann, Konrad, 72, 75 adaptation of drama, as distinguishing feature of Hamburg theater, 36 aesthetic compensation British imperialism and, 44, 45–47 German commercialism and, 66 literary text as, 81 Schiller’s correspondence and, 151 Aesthetic Letters (Schiller). See Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Schiller) aesthetic thought Goethe and, 180, 188 and renegotiation of self ’s relation to others, 180–89 and translation of world, 189 Ahtarsgabe for Damer (periodical), 132 “Alleruntertänigste Vorstellung” (Schimmelmann), 113

Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden (periodical), 157, 160–62, 164 “Alster, Die” (Hagedorn), 30, 33 alternate German literary history as alternative to Kulturnation concept, vii, 3, 4, 10, 61 cities focus and, 11–12 issues of dominance and marginality in, 13–14 Altona, Danish Unitary State and Deutsches Magazin, 111 foreign residents in, 20 homes of wealthy along road to, 62 proximity of, 32, 130 Trade Library (Handlungsbibliothek) on, 39 American colonies, transport of Hamburg culture to, 36 Ammerlahn, Hellmuth, 179 “An den Frieden” (Nevermann), 107–8 anecdotes, in German journals, 157-58, 159–60 Anglo-American world, Trade Library (Handlungsbibliothek) on, 39. See also American colonies; British Empire Antheros (periodical), 132 Antiquarian Letters (Lessing), 75 Apter, Emily, 13, 29, 71, 193, 194, 201–2 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 12, 14, 15, 16, 211n62 Archenholtz, Wilhelm von, 157, 158 architecture early modern writings, and idea of city, 17, 182 and folding of public/global space into private institutions, 7, 21, 24–25, 28 and modern social subjectivity, 181

architecture (continued) and processes of imagination, 23, 24 role in late eighteenth-century thought, 178–79, 181–82 and urban planning, 5, 19 Arens, Katherine, 88 Aristotle on friendship, 147 Lessing on poetics of, 91–92 Armstrong, Nancy, 14, 192 Arnim, Achim von, 165 art, creative vs. imitative, and salons of northern Germany, 138, 140–42 Athene (periodical), 132 Atlantic studies alternative to, 201, 204 worlding and, 16 Atlantic trade networks, and Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 71. See also slave trade Atlantic world broader network conception of, 3–4, 9 traditional conception of, 8–9 Auerbach, Erich, 180, 201, 202–4 Aufklärung und Anglophilie in Deutschland (Maurer), 34 “Aufmunterung zum Spatziergang an einem angenehmen Sommertage” (Nevermann), 107–8 “Auszug aus der Vorstellung an den König wegen Abschaffung des Negerhandels für die Dänischen Staaten” (Kirstein), 110–18 communal images in, 114 communities of readers invoked in, 115 contending ideological forces in, 114 Ernst von Schimmelmann as voice behind, 112–13, 116, 118 failure of aesthetic identification in, 114–15, 122 focus on religious conversion of slave owners, 116 influences on, 121 mix of subjects and genres in, 113–14, 122 and Moravian influence in Danish Unitary State, 122 Moravian principles in, 117–18, 122 as one of many abolitionist publications, 111 and plantation reform plans, 118, 121 publication of, 110–11 and religious discourses of sentimentality, 114 religious influences on, 115, 116–17

248

Index



and secularization of Moravian sense of community, 143 on slave trade abolition, 118 as summary of deliberations by Danish commission on slave trade, 112 and threshold between local and global, 122 ultimate translation into language of trade, 114–15, 116 on white conflicts within colonies, 116 author-subject, rise of and Goethe’s efforts to replace religious authority with human creativity, 180, 182–89, 190, 202 as act of translation, 189 Weimar and, 146–47, 159, 178 Baggesen, Jens, 104, 105, 127, 128, 149, 152, 153 Balfour, Alan, 20 Banks, John, 98, 99 Bardic Nationalism (Trumpener), 13–14 Beachy, Robert, 22–23 Behn, Aphra. See Oroonoko (Behn) Benevelo, Leonardo, 7, 8 Berlin architecture of, 20–21 disenfranchised people, and belated modernity, 21 of eighteenth century, forecasting of imperial future, 17 embrace of modernity, 20–21 Bernofsky, Susan, 89 Bernstein, Susan, 181, 186, 228n135 Bernstorff, J. H. E., 128 Berthold, Helmut, 89 Bertuch, Friedrich Johann Justin, 157, 178 bilateral transnational connections, efforts to move beyond, 16 Bildungsroman, rise of, 168 Blackamoor Woman, The (Ziegler). See Mohrin, Die (Ziegler) Blackamoor Woman of Hamburg, The (Rathlef ). See Mohrinn zu Hamburg, Die (Rathlef ) Blitz, Hans-Martin, 178 Blondel, François, 186 Bode, Johann Christoph. See also Westindier (Bode) Lessing and, 77 Bode, Wilhelm, 163 Böhner, Johann, 124, 220n51 books emergence as luxury good, 133, 160 and libraries, 161-62, 174



rise as primary source for global knowledge, 161, 189 Bossart, Johann Jacob, 115 Böttiger, Karl August on Bode’s Westindier, 60 on Goethe, 145, 165, 167 Goethe’s criticism of, 166 Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen, 163 undermining of Weimar self-image by, 146–47, 168–69, 171 on Weimar, 145, 162, 169 and Weimar gossip, 163, 168, 170, 226n75 Bourdieu, Pierre, 16 bourgeois tragedy, early modern theatrical tradition and, 12, 53, 94 Brethren, abolitionist writings of, 115 Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend (Lessing), 88, 90–91 British Empire and commercial networks, 44 and empire of feeling, 43–47 and globalization, 211n46 influence in Hamburg, 36–37, 108 monopoly of text and information, 44–45, 47 shaping of public discourse in Hamburg, 43 and slave trade, 44 and transfer of cultural ideas in Europe, 37 British imperialism and aesthetic compensation, 44, 45–47 German interest in, and German public’s self-understanding, 45 and globally oriented patterns of identification, 44–45 and sentimentalism, 45–47 British Mercury (periodical), 36 Brook, Heinrich, 98 Brun, Friederike and boundaries of literature, as issue, 137–38 and creative vs. imitative arts, 140–42 and cultural “in-between” zone, 132 as cultural mediator, 132 Esterhammer on, 142 and gender difference as translation of split between inspiration/orality and formality/literary tradition, 137 and glocalization, 129, 140 Idas ästhetische Entwicklung, 133–34, 137, 138, 140–41 and imitation/translation as gendered, 137–38



and improvisational writing, 143 and layers of meaning, 9 literary career of, 132–33 and literature that existed beyond confines of nation, 138 as mediator, 137 Moravian memoirs and, 136, 138, 140 as nearly forgotten today, 129 as part of network of global actors, 132 Pietist tradition and, 140 records of salon culture, 131–32, 133–37, 142 social circle of, 128–29 and social hierarchy of salons, 135–36, 147 and threshold between oral and written cultures, 133, 136, 137 and translation zone, 138 “Vorbericht an den gütigen Leser,” 134–35 Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen, 131, 133–37, 147 Brun de Bombelles, Ida. See also Idas ästhetische Entwicklung (Brun) as mime artist, 137 salon performance of Rousseau’s Pygmalion, 140–42 Bubbers, Adolph, 74 Bürger (citizen), eighteenth- vs. pre-eighteenth-century conceptions of, 3 Büsch, Johan Georg, 38, 39, 40, 41, 74, 161–62 capital cities multiple meanings of, 6–7 as part of far-reaching network, 7 Caribbean Islands, and slavery, German periodical readers’ interest in, 159 A Caribbean Mission (Oldendorp). See Geschichte der Mission der evangelischen Brüder auf den caraibischen Inseln S. Thomas, S. Croix und S. Jan (Oldendorp) Casanova, Pascale, 202 China, and Willebrand’s globalized urban planning for Hamburg, 1–2 Christian doctrine, and plantation reform plans, 119–21 cities in alternate literary history, 11–12 in cultural and literary history, 5 development in relation to literary genres, 5–6, 140 evolution of differences in, 19–20 global interaction of, 8 global links to, 193

Index

249

cities (continued) and good, honorable life, impairment of, 8 and Holy Roman Empire, invisibility of, 18 and human experience in distinct imaginary space, 11 imaginary horizon, shaping of genre confinements by, 6 literary departure from, 104–5 modern, and hallmarks of civil society, 17 multidirectional worldwide engagement of, 7 network of people and texts created by departures from, 105 and reinscribing of local in national space, 24 return of literary life to, 146–47 and rise of aesthetic practices, 17–18 temporal and spatial projection of, 6–7 tension between conceptions as built space and naturally grown space, 24–25 theorizations of, 17–19 and transnational context, penetration of, 24 Claudius, Matthias, 61 coffeehouses and British influence in Germany, 43 of Hamburg, as trading floors, 67 Cohen, Margaret, 35, 44–45 Cologne Cathedral, Goethe on, 179 colonialism benevolent, Jonathan Israel on, 15 and object-like qualities of cities, 7–8 colonial studies, linking of city and globe in, 6 community. See also literary communities outside cities; religious communities; sentimental communities audience as, in Rathlef ’s Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 53 and cosmopolitan rhetoric, 153, 154 salons in northern Germany and, 131, 141 comparative literature Goethe’s invention of world literature and, 200–201 Hamburg’s translation zone and, 194 Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie and, 95–96, 97–103, 193 Conversations with Eckermann (Goethe). See Gespräche mit Eckermann (Goethe) conversion narratives, Moravian. See Moravian conversion narratives

250

Index

Corneille, Pierre, 92, 98 cosmopolitanism French Revolution and, 150 Goethe and, 201 and language of friendship, in salons in northern Germany, 146–48 in Schiller’s correspondence with Schimmelmann and Prince Friedrich, 148–54 six varieties of, 152 Crane, Mary Thomas, 226n78 Creation of the British Atlantic World, The (Mancke and Shammas, eds.), 8–9 critical global studies, 15 cultural studies disentangling from philology and literary studies, 202 divergence from literary studies, 88 cultural transposition, acts of, intersection with linguistic translations, 6 Cumberland, Richard. See West Indian, The (Cumberland) Danish Colonial Empire Danish architectural echoes in outposts of, 113 and global significance of the local, 113 opposition to abolition of slavery, 112 Trade Library (Handlungsbibliothek) on, 39 “dankbare Afrikaner, an Lord Wilberforce, Der “ (Nevermann), 108–9, 218n8 Danske Reiseagtagelter (periodical), 132 Degn, Christian, 113, 119, 218–19n16 de Staël, Germaine, 128, 140–41 Deutsches Magazin, 110–11, 111–12, 132 Dever, Carolyn, 35, 44–45 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe), 185–86 Diefendorf, Jeffry, 23–24 Don Karlos (Schiller), 149 dramaturge, Lessing on, 95, 102 Dreyer, Hans Andreas, 74 Dupree, Mary Helen, 141 East Indian, The (Kotzebue). See Indianer in England, Die (Kotzebue) Ebeling, Christoph Daniel, 38, 39, 161 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 7 Einsiedel, August von, 169–70, 171 Eldridge, Sarah, 224n16 Elective Affinities (Goethe). See Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe) empire of sentiment in Bode’s Westindier, 69

and British influence in Germany, 43–47 Hamburg as center of, 69 Nevermann’s poetry and, 110 in Rathlef ’s Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 52, 69 salons in northern Germany and, 140 Englische Miszellen (periodical), 164 and filtering of Weimar experience of global affairs, 157, 158–60 Goethe and, 162 English Miscellanea. See Englische Miszellen (periodical) Enlightenment, and sentimentalism, 46 “Enlightenment in the European City” (Purdy), 24 Enlightenment Orientalism (Aravamudan), 12, 14, 16 Enterprise, Die. See National Theater Erdbeben in Chili, Das (Kleist), 106 Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika (Ebeling), 38 Erlin, Matt, 17–18, 21, 24–25, 78-79 Esterhammer, Angela, 142–43 ethical subject, reclaiming of, 204 Evangelical Brethren. See Moravians Fabian, Bernhard, 34 Fashionable Lover (Withaed), 60 Faull, Katherine, 123–24 Faust I (Goethe), Lessing’s legacy and, 70 Festa, Lynn, 43–47, 45–46, 60 fiction, shaping of life by, viii Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa (Schiller). See Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (Schiller) figura Goethe as, 204 and horizontal vs. vertical cultures, 203 figural, as task of literary studies, 203 Fischer, Barbara, 80 Fox, Tom, 80 Fragmentenstreit (fragment controversy; 177679), 75 French Revolution and Classical Weimar, rise of, 155 and cosmopolitanism, 150 Schiller and, 150, 151, 154, 167 Freundlich, Rebecca Protten, 123, 219n39 Friedland, Paul, 81, 82 Friedrich von Holstein-Augustenburg, prince correspondence with Schiller, 148–54, 156, 189 and global affairs, filters on perception of, 158 and stipend for Schiller, 149–54

friendship, language of in Bode’s Westindier, 65, 66 and cosmopolitanism, in salons, 146–48 in Rathlef ’s Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 53 in Schiller’s correspondence with Schimmelmann and Prince Friedrich, 148–54 Fulda, Daniel, 54 Garrick, David, 33, 56, 59 Gazette Nationale, ou Le Moniteur Universel (periodical), 157 “Gedanken der Zukunft” (Nevermann), 108, 109–10 Gemein Nachrichten, conversion narratives in, 125, 126 gender roles and restriction of women’s role to translation, 137–38 and salons in northern German country estate and, 137–38 General Geographical Ephemerides. See Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden genres Aravamudan on, 12, 14 and cities’ alternate literary history, 11–12 and eighteenth-century accounts of city, 5–6 global action of, 6 plurality of, 10 proliferation of in journals, 159 small and now-marginal, important role in cannon formation, 22–23 and translation, 12–13 geographical knowledge, effect on cultural production, Tang on, 11 Geographic Imagination of Modernity, The (Tang), 11 German cultural identity, translation and, 88 German liberalism, merchant with social conscience as one ideal of, 41–42 German Magazine. See Deutsches Magazin Geschichte der Mission der evangelischen Brüder auf den caraibischen Inseln S. Thomas, S. Croix und S. Jan (Oldendorp), 115, 121, 219n25 Geschichte des dreißigjährigen Krieges (Schiller), 155 Gespräche mit Eckermann (Goethe), 166–67, 185–86 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, 68, 76, 77, 215n28 Global Eighteenth Century, The (Nussbaum), 15

Index

251

globalization, and risk of eliding historical precision, 14–15 globally inflected style, 9 global network(s) Brun as part of, 132 capital cities as part of, 7 commercial, British Empire and, 44 journals and, 111 multidirectionality of transculturation and exchange within, 7 parameters of, 3–4 placing German cities within, 1–2 of scholars, ix Weimar’s separation from, 5 global processes in urban settings engagement of literary life with, 3 as focus of this book, vii–viii, 3, 4 glocalization in Bode’s Westindier, 68–69, 69–70 Brun and, 129, 140 classical Weimar and, 189 in Cumberland’s West Indian, 60–67 definition of, 15 in Hamburg, 67 and literary departure from city, 104 Nussbaum on, 15 in Rathlef ’s Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 68–69, 69–70 salons and, 129, 131, 140, 141 stage as institution of, 36 and translation zones, 15 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. See also towers, in Goethe; “Von deutscher Baukunst” (Goethe); Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe) and aesthetic model in translation of world, 189, 202 and ambivalence toward global, 178 Brun and, 129 characters of, and worlding, 195 and Classical Weimar as attraction, 173–74, 178, 190 as coauthor of German literary historiography, 180, 185, 202 and cosmopolitan subjectivity, 201 Dichtung und Wahrheit, 185–86 and doubts about colonialism, 7 and Faust, 70, 195 frequent trips from Weimar, 178–79, 190 on Germany as collection of small towns, 190, 200 Gespräche mit Eckermann, 166–67, 185–86 global legacy of, 200–201 on Gothic architecture, 183

252

Index



involvement in local Weimar affairs, 167, 225–26n73 and journals, translation of world into Weimar by, 162 and layers of meaning, 9 and metaphors for elevation of person, 179 modernity of, 204 retreat to Weimar garden, 145, 169 on Schiller, 166–67 self-promotion by, 167 and textual mediation of global, 200 and Weimar gossip, 164–68, 171 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 70, 179 and world literature, invention of, 190, 200–201 Goeze, Johann Melchior, 75, 94 Göttingen University, early modern translation theory program at, 39 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 10, 22 Grand Duchy’s Seat of Power, The (Hunstock). See (groß-)herzogliche Residenzstadt, Die (Hunstock) Griesheim, Christian Ludwig von, 67 (groß-)herzogliche Residenzstadt, Die (Hunstock), 171, 175, 226n85, 226n88, 226n100 Grundriß einer schönen Stadt (Willebrand), 1–2, 6, 7 Gusdorf, George, 126 Guthke, Karl S., 157 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 40, 134, 140 Hagedorn, Friedrich von, 30, 33 Haitian slave rebellion, circulation of British texts on, 45 Hamburg and academic disciplines, introduction of, 37, 38 anti-imperial forces in, 108 architecture of, as reflection of global aspirations, 21 British influence in, 32, 36–37, 108 and circulation of genres, 36 as city of worldly pleasures, 21 commodification of things in, British influence and, 36 disenfranchised people, and belated modernity, 21–22 domestic slaves in, 32 as early glocalized space, 67 early growth and industrialization, 19–20 eighteenth-century reputation for wealth and pleasure-seeking, 33



engagement with modernity, 19 exclusion from narrative of Germany in the world, 32–33 and filtering of Weimar experience of global affairs, 157–58 form of government in, 31 as global city, 20, 21, 31, 67 growth and decline of, 33 international financial system in, 31 inward-directedness and singularity, 31 large foreign presence in, 51 and Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 103 merchant as central figure, 67 multilingualism of, 67 poverty in, 33, 63 Sklavenkasse, 209n7 and slave trade, 31–32, 108, 112 as successful international port, 19, 21, 31–32 theater in, foreigners as primary audience for, 21 as translation zone, 194 urban decay in, 51 wealth of, 32, 51 Willebrand’s globalized urban planning for, 1–2 and worlding, 194 Hamburg culture export to American colonies, 36 and filtering of global phenomena through local urban environment, 35 forms of translation in, 35 and German literary historiography, 25 and German national literature project, 66–67 Hanoverian reign in Britain and, 31 historical marginalization of, viii, 4, 25, 34 importance in German-English literary relations, 25–26, 34 lending library, 33 literary institutions, and transformation and localization of knowledge, 36 literary life: as defined by relation to world, 36; lack of investment in legacy of, 33; and literature beyond nation, 194–201; and national project, 67; reading circles (Vorlesestunden), 33; vitality of, 33–34 parallels to Leipzig, 23 and trade in English books, 36–37 and trade in knowledge, 33, 42 vitality in late eighteenth century, 4

Hamburg Dramaturgy (Lessing). See Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Lessing) Hamburger Nationaltheater. See National Theater Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Lessing) anticipation of translation zone, 99–100 and attempt to create new norms for theater practice, 81 and call for German national literature, 67, 71, 90, 95, 98–99, 101–2; conflict with performance localization, 96–97 and call for original German play, 84 and collapse of National Theater, 71 and comparative world literature, introduction of, 95–96, 97–103, 193 and cultural studies, 100 and disciplinary distinctions, 100, 102 as experiment in creativity, 80 forces shaping, 71 on German drama, links to English and French traditions, 98 global but portable notion of literature in, 90 and Hamburg urban setting, importance of, 71 on ideal translation, 98 influence on depictions of theater, 70 local nature of text, 76, 81 and modern dramatic theory, founding moment of, 98 multidisciplinary view of drama in, 97 on parterre, 83 perceived incoherence of, 71, 91 publication and circulation of, 102–3 salons’ culture of translation and, 144 scholars’ reading of as call for German nation-state, 79–80 scholars’ reading of as manual for creation of National Theater, 84–85 tension between literary and theater culture in, 71 on translation, 90, 91–93; alignment with disciplinary expertise, 100–101; criteria for evaluating, 92–93; and dramaturge, 95, 102; and elision of source/author and target/translator, 92–93, 98, 100; and emphasis on playing well vs. reading well, 99; equality of translators with authors, 90; evolution of concept, 91, 99, 100–101; favoring of prose for target text, 92–93, 95; functions of, 101; localization to performance contexts, 94–97, 99–100, 102, 103; mix of theory and practice in, 91–93; and popular

Index

253

living language, 93, 99; and prologues/ epilogues as localization strategy, 95–97; published, need for preserving affective content of performance in, 93–94; and theory of tragedy, 101; as tied to location and performance, 91; transpositions and contradictions in, 90; use of comparative translations in, 91 as urban text, 89 and worlding of Lessing, 89–90 writing of, 70, 77 Hamburg region diversity of residents in, 32 sugar production in, 32 Hamburgs Literaturleben im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Wehl), 34 Hamburg theater. See also National Theater and British colonialism, influence of, 47 city Senate’s attitude toward, 73 competition among theaters, 73 effect of business cycles on, 47, 74 emphasis on foreign languages, 34 failure of, conventional reading of, 61 and global engagement, 34–35 high taxes on, 73, 214n10 and Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 71 number of theaters, 73 as privately funded, 73 religious hostility toward, 75, 94, 217n81 and sentimentalism, localization of colonial identification through, 47 and small, epistemic genres, 34 theatergoers as not necessarily respectable, 61 translations of British plays in, 47 Hamburg Trade Academy. See also Trade Library (Handlungsbibliothek) and academic disciplines, establishment of, 37–38 and bilinguality and translation, 39 and capitalizing on epistemic fragments, 38 and conflation of private and public spheres, 40 and cultural capitalization, 39 curriculum, 41 decline of, 42–43 directors of, 38 and dissemination of knowledge, 37–39 emphasis on foreign language education, 34 focus on holistic humanist education, 40–41, 54

254

Index



and global engagement, 34–35 influence of, 42 initial prioritizing of civic education, 40 international focus of, 38, 39, 41, 43, 69 language instruction at, 39 merchant with social conscience as goal of, 41, 42 network of influence of, 43 number of students, 38 pedagogical approach of, as more American than German, 39–40 publicity campaigns, 38 restrictions on student credit and speculation, 40–41 salons and, 144 and small, epistemic genres, 34 and social stratification, 40 stage-like features of, 34 ties to British imperialism, 43 and trade in knowledge, 42 turn to comprehensive education, 40 urban context of, 40 Hamilton, John, 88, 90, 92 Hannoverisches Magazin, 86 Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Grimminger, ed.), 2 Harpen (periodical), 132 Heitmann, Annegret, 129 Heitmann, Johannes, 118–19 Hellebek, Schiller memorial service in, 105 Hennings, August von, 131 Herder, Johann Gottfried and Classical Weimar as attraction, 173–74, 178 wife of, 165 Herder, Karoline, 165 High, Jeffrey, 154, 224n35 Hindmarsh, Bruce, 126 Hiß, Franz Peter, 74 Histoire des deux Indes (Raynal), 111, 114 Historical Political Magazine. See Politischhistorisches Magazin History of the Thirty Years’ War (Schiller). See Geschichte des dreißigjährigen Krieges (Schiller) homes, bourgeois, role in penetration of transnational in German cities, 24 Horen (periodical), 132 horizontal and vertical cultures in eighteenth century, 180, 202 figura and, 203 Goethe and, 182–89, 202 How the Ancients Portrayed Death (Lessing), 75

Höyng, Peter, 80 Humboldt, Alexander von, 165 Hunstock, Sebastian, 171, 175, 226n85, 226n88, 226n100 Hüttner, Johann Christian, 158 Idas ästhetische Entwicklung (Brun), 133–34, 137, 138, 140–41 ideal spectator development of concept, 81–82 theater treatises on, 81 improvisation, salons and, 142–43, 144 in-between state. See also translation zone Brun’s self-positioning in, 132 of language of theater, 102 of literature in late eighteenth century, 192 salons and, 144 slave trade as, 105 Translating the World and, 192 Indianer in England, Die (Kotzebue), 196 industrialization, impact on cities, 17 Industrie-Comptoirs zu Weimar, geographical publishing program, 160–61 Israel, Jonathan, 14–15, 52, 130 Jones, Heinrich, 98 Joshua, Eleoma, 220n51 Jost, Erdmut, 139 journals, and network of transatlantic locales, 111 journals, German-language abolitionist publications in, 111–12, 159 eighteenth-century debate on translation, 86 filtering of global news, Weimar and, 157–62 and genres, proliferation of, 159 and improvisational writing, 143 interest in West Indies slavery, 111 secularization of Moravian sense of community in, 143 translation of world into Weimar by, 162 translations in: language areas of origin, 86; wide variety of genres, 87 Karsch, Anna Louisa, 142 Kauffman, Angelica, 128 King, Anthony, 7–8 Kirstein, Ernst Philipp, 110, 112–13. See also “Auszug aus der Vorstellung an den König wegen Abschaffung des Negerhandels für die Dänischen Staaten” (Kirstein) Kleingeld, Pauline, 114–15, 152

Klopstock, Freidrich Gottlieb, 33–34 Klotz, Adolph, 75 knowledge-capital, origin of term, 42 Kopitzsch, Franklin, 34 Körner, Christian Gottfried, 152 Kostof, Spiro, 19 Kotzebue, August von. See also Negersklaven, Die (Kotzebue) career of, 195–96 conflicts with Goethe, 195 Indianer in England, 196 transatlantic legacies, 29 Kratzsch, Konrad, 163 Kulturnation. See also national literature, German alternate German literature history not based in, vii, 3, 4, 10, 61 as goal assumed by historians, 2–3 necessity of, 11 Weimar and, 25, 190 landscape, as subject of poetry, 139 Langen, August, 220n51 Laokoon (Lessing), 77 Leipzig cultural parallels to Hamburg, 23 culture of criticism in, 22–23 and latent provinciality, 20 as literary center, 22 urban reform movement in, 22–23 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. See also Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Lessing); Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing) alleged obsession with German plays, 84 Antiquarian Letters, 75 Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend, 88, 90–91 correspondence with Gleim, 68, 76, 77, 215n28 decision to move to Hamburg, 76–77 as early proponent of interdependence of play and dramatic text, 94 on German nationalism, 68, 76 and German national literature project, 66 on German plots, 64 in Hamburg, and national project, 71 Hamburg texts of, 75 How the Ancients Portrayed Death, 75 Laokoon, 77 and Literaturfähigkeit, 89 and national theater, limitations of, 61 at National Theater: ambition of, 77; and critics’ interpolation of national project, 79–80; and infighting, 75–76;

Index

255

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. (continued) intricacies of urban context and, 75–76; and national project, 77; performances, 214n11; and praise of first play, 84 on parterre, 82–83 on prologue, 61 ties to Berlin, 76–77 and translation: culture of, 91, 144; elision of source/author and target/translator, 90–91, 92–93, 98, 100; as translator, 87–89 Letters on Literature (Lessing). See Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend (Lessing) libraries, personal, promotion of on Weimar periodicals, 161 Lilti, Antoine, 129–30, 146, 147 Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen (Böttiger), 163 Literary Channel, The (Cohen and Dever, eds.), 35 literary channels, as metaphor, 35 literary communities outside cities. See also salons connection of global and local in, 106 formation of, 105–6 literary historiography, German Goethe and, 180, 185, 202 and image of nationhood grounded in aesthetics, 202 rise of, 180, 185 salon performances and, 129, 132–33, 142 literary imagination impact on city architecture, 19 projection into future, and conflation of genres, 11 literary life global remnants in, 25 and global world, 3 Literary Life and Contemporaries (Böttinger). See Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen (Böttiger) literary market, rise of, and German national literature, 22 literary production alternative modes of, as acts of translation, viii and British influence in Germany, 43 as complex network of types and genres, 9–10 and empire of feeling, 47 engagement with global culture, 8 and reclaiming countryside as true place of art, 8

256

Index



and rise of city as conceived space, 8 role in age of globalization, 191–92 and urban history, 22–23 and varied forms of city-globe interaction, 8 as vehicles for transnational cultural transfer, 46–47 literary studies disentangling from philology and cultural studies, 88, 202 figural as task of, 203 issues in emergence of, 14 literary text, rise as autonomous work, 81 literature, role in modern university, 191–93, 201 localization, acts of, in cultural transposition, 6 London Merchants, and British influence in Hamburg, 32, 36 Löwen, Johann Friedrich, 75, 76, 84 Lukas, Wolfgang, 80–81 Maffei, Scipione, 100–101, 102 Manchester Trade Academy, Büsch critique of, 41 Mancke, Elizabeth, 8–9 Marmontel, Jean-François, 82 Matthison, Friedrich von, 138, 139 Maurer, Michael, 34 McMurran, Mary Helen, 44–45 media, and British influence in Germany, 43 Mellmann, Katja, 141 merchant with social conscience as figure in literary works on Biedermeier and realism, 42 as one ideal of German liberalism, 41–42 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien, 7 Merope (Maffei), 100–101, 102 Messias (Klopstock), 33–34 Meyer, Reinhart, 85 Minerva (periodical), 45, 111–12, 113, 132, 157–58 Mingotti, Pietro, 73 Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing), 77–79 Berlin setting of, 77, 78 brief success of, 78, 79 critics’ reading of as national project, 80 and everyday language, 99 and national project, 77, 78 popularity of, 83 as urban play, 78–79 writing of, 78 Mintzker, Yair, 18 modern world, aesthetic grounding of, and split of capital and knowledge, 42–43

Mohrin, Die (Ziegler), 53, 56 Mohrinn zu Hamburg, Die (Rathlef ), 47–56 and audience as community, 53 Behn’s Oroonoko and, 50, 55 British characters in, 48 comic stinginess of Wallmer in, 54 and competing discourses in eighteenthcentury value systems, 52–53, 54 distance between world and city in, 69 and empire of feeling, 52, 69 failure of aesthetic identification in, 52, 53–55 and fusing of global and domestic sentiment, 53 and glocalization, 68–69, 69–70 and Hamburg as world city, 68 international focus of, 69 and legitimization of colonialism, 51 linking of city and globe in, 48, 51 love triangle in as echo of Atlantic trade, 53 medial and perceptive insecurity in, 55 mercantile values anchoring emotional investment in, 52 as never performed in Hamburg, 55–56 plot of, 48–49, 51–52, 52–53 as quintessential Hamburg play, 47–50 and sentimentality, 55 significance of Hamburg setting of, 51–52, 53–56, 79 on slavery, 48–50, 52 social pressure in, 49, 53 monuments, and literary historiography, 180, 201 monuments and museums, turning people and towns into, 145, 177, 188 Classical Weimar and, 178, 189 and self-monumentalizing, 9 Moravian conversion narratives, 123–27 community implied in, 124, 126, 127 on conversions and lives of former slaves, 123–24 marginalization in literary history, 126–27 as mediated, 123 and orality, 124, 125, 126 publication in Gemein Nachrichten, 125, 126 recitation at subject’s funeral, 125 as report disseminated to others, 124 structure of, 124–25 stylistic influences on, 123 supplements added to, 125 and tension indicative of modern literature, 123 translation into text, 125 and translation networks, 123

Moravians alignment of whiteness and morality in, 118 emigration stories by, 123 history of, 117 impact of proselytizing by, 118 influence on colonial project, 121–22 and Kirstein’s transatlantic religious community, 116–17 and language of friendship in salons, 148 memoir (Lebenslauf): influence on literary production, 122; and modern biography, 122; Nevermann’s poetry and, 110; and salon culture, 122, 136, 138, 140, 142 New World colonization by, 118 and plantation reform efforts, 118–21 sense of community, secularization in journals, 143 Munich, and latent provinciality, 20 Münster Meinhövel, Amalia von, 141–42 Musenalmanache (periodical), 132 Mythos Weimar (myth of Weimar), 25, 177–78 national literature(s) alternatives to, 193–94 and colonialism, 10 development of concept, 10–12 reclaiming individual works from, 15–16 role in modern university, 192–93 national literature, German. See also Kulturnation absorption and transcendence of local and global in, 180 antitheatrical discourse of, 66 and author-subject, rise of, 178 Goethe’s circumvention of, 190 Hamburg and, 66–67 intermediary nature of, 194 interstitial texts and, 194 Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie and, 67, 71, 90, 95, 98–99, 101–2 and literature’s power to impact social and historical processes, 178 and monumentalizing of people and works in Classical Weimar, 178, 189 move of literary culture from cities, 104–5 northern German culture of sentimentality and, 66–67 push for, salons and, 143, 144 rise of literary market and, 22 role in modern university, 192 and self-monumentalizing, 9 and worlded literary production, 194–201

Index

257

National Theater as brief episode in larger Hamburg theater tradition, 72 building for, 72–73 and call for original German play, 84 collapse of, modern understanding of, 70 community focus of, 72 directors of, 74–75 as distinctly local institution, 74, 213n2 effect of business cycles on, 74, 75 failure to address audience interests, 74 “firsts” attributed to, 70 fluctuating leadership of, 75 Hamburg’s global engagements and, 81 Lessing at: ambition of, 77; and critics’ interpolation of national project, 79–80; and infighting, 75–76; intricacies of urban context and, 75–76; and national project, 77; performances, 214n11; and praise of first play, 84 and Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 70 as merchant-run venture, 74 performances by, 213n1 reasons for failure of, 80–82 as specific to Hamburg context, 71–72 struggle to survive, 73, 74 touring of provinces by, 74 transition to City Theater of Hamburg, 74 types of productions, 73 Negersklaven, Die (Kotzebue), 196–98 balance of historical accuracy and conventional form in, 197–98 book edition of, 197 and Classical Weimar turn inward, 197 dedication of, 197 privatization of global relations in, 196 and sentimental identification, 196–97 Negro Slaves, The (Kotzebue). See Negersklaven, Die (Kotzebue) neoliberal mindset, terminology avoiding, 14, 15 network. See also global network(s) abolitionist texts as, 110 broader conception of Atlantic world as, 3–4, 9 as central term, 4 cultural, salons as, 105–6, 129 epistemological, literary production’s creation of, 3 fusion with globalization, in glocalization concept, 15

258

Index



and literary life involving city and globe, 194 network-like arrangement produced by translation, 16 of people and texts created by departures from city, 105 transnational religious literary networks, 106 and worlding, 16 Neuer Almanach aller um Hamburg liegenden Gärten, nebst Zugabe einiger Gedichte (Nevermann), 106–10 Nevermann, Friedrich Theodor, 107–8, 139. See also Neuer Almanach aller um Hamburg liegenden Gärten, nebst Zugabe einiger Gedichte (Nevermann) New Historicism, 21–22 New World, movement of literary life to, 104 Nicolai, Friedrich, 103 Niggl, Günther, 126 Nixdorf, Georg, 124 nonfiction texts, reliance on other genres, 2 novels, Cohen and Devers’ alternative history of, 35 Novel Translations (Wiggin), 12 Noyes, John, 195, 200, 201 Nugent, Thomas, 51, 67 Nussbaum, Felicity, 15, 16, 59 Ochs, Albrecht, 74 Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas, 115, 118, 121, 219n25 Olindo and Sophornia (Croneck), 84 “On German Architecture” (Goethe). See “Von deutscher Baukunst” (Goethe) “On Matthison’s Poetry” (Schiller). See “Über Matthisons Gedichte” (Schiller) On the Ruins of Babel (Purdy), 181, 182, 184, 186, 228n141 open-ended methodology, importance of, 12–13 opera house, Hamburg, history of, 72 the original, Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie and, 71 original German plays early modern theatrical tradition and, 94 German interest in translation and, 12, 85 lack of, as false impression, 85 Lessing’s supposed call for, 84 Meyer’s bibliographic research and, 85 oversupply of translations and, 86–87 and translation, move against, 12 Oroonoko (Behn)



and authenticating role of eyewitness, 50, 51, 212n60 autobiographical component of, 212n62 German versions and translations of, 50, 55, 212n68 and legitimization of colonialism, 50–51 Rathlef ’s Mohrinn zu Hamburg and, 50–51, 55 Oschmann, Dirk, 89 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 14–15, 211n46 parterre Bode’s Westindier on, 61 corrective role of, 82 and development of ideal spectator concept, 81–82 and German theater theories, 82 Lessing on, 82–83 mingling of local and global in, 81 National Theater building and, 72 as rebellious and rowdy, 82, 83, 216n53 social class of individuals in, 61, 70 vs. spectator (Publikum), 82 as translation zone, 81–82, 83–84 Pasquillen (lampoons), and Leipzig’s literary life, 22 Pennsylvania, spread of German literature and culture to, 105 Perfecting Friendship (Schweitzer), 147 philology, disentangling from literary and cultural studies, 202 Pietism, and salons in northern German country estates, 131 Pietist memoirs (Lebeslauf), Nevermann’s poetry and, 110 Piper, Andrew, 85 Poetry and Truth (Goethe). See Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe) Politisch-historisches Magazin, 112 postcolonial studies, linking of city and globe in, 6 Power, Elisabeth, 166 “Preface to the Well-Meaning Reader” (Brun). See “Vorbericht an den gütigen Leser” (Brun) present experience around 1800 as complex and diffuse, vii literary life and, 3 protection culture in salons, 145–46 language of friendship and, 146–48 and writer as homme du monde, 146 Protten, Christian, 123, 126 Protten, Rebecca Freundlich, 123, 125–26

pubs and British influence in Germany, 43 in Hamburg, 51; Bode’s Westindier on, 62–63 Purdy, Daniel, 24, 134, 181, 182, 184, 186, 228n141 Rathlef, Ernst Lorenz Michael. See Mohrinn zu Hamburg, Die (Rathlef ) Raynal, Thomas Guillaume François, 111 Rebecca’s Revival (Sensbach), 116 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 80 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 75–76, 128 Reinhard, Karl Friedrich, 154 religious communities and abolitionist movement, 111 and language of friendship in salons, 148 and Moravian conversion narratives, 124, 126, 127 Nevermann’s poetry and, 110 transatlantic: Kirstein on, 116–17; and transnational literary networks, 106 Remnant, William, 36–37 research universities, discipline-driven, German export to U.S., 40 Reventlow, Fritz von, 118, 119–20 Reventlow, Julia von, 128 Reventlow family, and Schiller memorial service, 105 Riesche, Barbara, 47 Rodogune (Corneille), Lessing on, 92 Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Esterhammer), 142–43 Rückert, Joseph, 176–77 Russell, Gillian, 134 salons in northern Germany and British influence in Germany, 43 Brun’s records of culture of, 131–32, 133–37, 142 as challenge to contemporary Zeitempfinden, 142 colonial network and, 144 and community, 127, 131, 141 as cultural network, 105–6, 129 and culture of translation and transposition, 131, 140, 144 as distinct from German Republic of Letters, 129–30 escape from city and, 128 gender roles and, 137–38 and German culture of sentimentality, 66 global connections of, 143–44 and glocalization, 129, 131, 140, 141

Index

259

salons in northern Germany (continued) and improvisation, 142–43, 144 in larger salon culture, 129 and literary history, 129, 132–33, 142 and literature as social lubricant, 132 and lively German-Danish culture, 128 locations of, 128, 131 misreadings of as literary salons, 132, 133 Moravian influence on, 122, 136, 138, 140 multiple languages used in, 130 and new/old model of universal truth and knowledge, 144 and New World literature, 131 notable figures involved with, 128–29 Parisian models and, 130 vs. patronage system, 146 and performative transpositions, 140 as place of elite entertainment, 130 prominent members of, 105 and protection culture, 145–46; language of friendship and, 146–48; and writer as homme du monde, 146 and public sphere, 114, 129, 134, 140, 220n70 and push for national literature, 142, 143, 144 as relic of older aristocratic culture, 143 and religious culture of north, 130–31, 140 retreat of literary life to, 104, 105, 106 and Schiller memorial service, 105–6, 149 and sentimental empire of British Atlantic, 140 social hierarchies and, 129, 131, 135–36, 141–42, 144; and cosmopolitanism, 146–48 and symbiosis of religion and literary practice, 106 and translation between written and spoken word, 133, 136, 137, 144 and transnational travel narrative of Grand Tour, 142 turn to journals and author editions, 132–33 and vocal/performative paradigm of literary life, 127–28, 129, 130 works translating performances into texts, 133–34 as zone of cultural production, 141 Sassen, Saskia, 31 Schardt, Sophie von, 165, 166 Schiller, Friedrich von on aesthetic community, 146 and aesthetic compensation for revolution, 151

260

Index



on aesthetic education, 154 and aesthetic model in translation of world, 189 and ambivalence toward global, 178 aversion to violence, 154–55 Brun and, 129 and Classical Weimar as attraction, 173–74, 178 correspondence with Schimmelmann and Prince Friedrich, 148–54, 156, 189 Don Karlos, 149 Geschichte des dreißigjährigen Krieges, 155 and global affairs, filters on perception of, 156, 158 Goethe and, 165, 166–67 inward-directed localizing strategies in, 189 and layers of meaning, 9 memorial service following rumored death of, 105–6, 149 northern German interest in, 105 philosophy of history and national literary historiography, 11 on poetry, 139; contradictory requirements of author’s control and reader’s imaginative freedom, 138–39; landscape as subject of, 139–40; poetry of true nature, 139 and revolution, 150, 151, 154–55, 167 and self-secluding life in Weimar, 151 stipend from Schimmelmann and Prince Friedrich, 149–54 on transformation of nature’s sensibility into human nature, 141 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 151, 155, 156, 189 “Über Matthisons Gedichte,” 138–40 Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, 154 Schimmelmann, Caroline Tugendreich, 132 Schimmelmann, Charlotte, 105 Schimmelmann, Emilie von, 128, 135–36, 147 Schimmelmann, Ernst Heinrich von and abolitionism, 112 “Alleruntertänigste Vorstellung,” 113 conflicting impulses in, 156 correspondence with Schiller, 148–54, 156, 189 “Denkschrift,” 112–13 and global affairs, filters on perception of, 158 and global nature of eighteenth century, 155 interest in reforms on West Indian plantations, 112, 118–19, 120–21



Kirsten and, 110, 112–13 religious influences on, 115 and salons, 141–42, 147 and Schiller memorial service, 105, 149 self-monumentalizing in, 9 and stipend for Schiller, 149–54 “Thoughts,” 116, 118 as voice behind Kirsten’s “Auszug,” 112–13, 116, 118 Schimmelmann, Heinrich Carl von, 62, 74, 118, 132 Schimmelmann family existence at fringes of established society, 155 and Hamburg trade, 61–62 as largest slave owners in Danish territories, 112 and Schiller memorial service, 105 Schings, Hans-Jürgen, 156 Schlaffer, Heinz, 179 Schlosser, Johann Ludwig, 94 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig, 62, 72 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 180 Schweitzer, Ivy, 147 Seckendorff, Siegmund von, 162 secularization. See also horizontal and vertical cultures in eighteenth century Goethe’s aesthetic shift and, 180, 188, 202 of Moravian sense of community in German journals, 143 self. See also author-subject, rise of aesthetics in renegotiation of relation to others, 180–89 eighteenth-century reorientation away from transcendent being, 180–81, 188 self-awareness, vs. subjectivity, 203 self-identities, and cultural writing, 10 self-monumentalizing, beginnings of, 9 Sensbach, Jon, 116, 124 sentimental communities, 9. See also empire of sentiment of British Empire, vs. transatlantic religious communities, 117 in Kotzebue’s Negersklaven, 197 in Nevermann’s “dankbare Afrikaner, an Lord Wilberforce,” 108 in Rathlef ’s Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 117 sentimentalism and Behn’s Oroonoko, 50–51, 55 and Bode’s Westindier, 66 and British imperialism, 45–47 and British influence on Hamburg theater, 47 and empire of feeling, 46–47



northern German culture of, 66–67 in Rathlef ’s Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 55 religious discourses of, in Kirstein’s “Auszug,” 114 Seven Years War and Hamburg as international port, 31 Lessing and, 77, 78 Seyler, Abel, 61, 74, 75 Shammas, Carol, 8–9 Sieveking, Georg Heinrich, 107, 128 slave poetry, and orality, 124 slavery German interest in, 45, 111, 159 and plantation reform: Ernst von Schimmelmann’s plans for, 112, 118–19, 120–21; Kirsten’s plans for, 118, 121; Reventlow on, 119–20 in Rathlef ’s Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg, 48–50, 52–53 Zinzendorf on, 117 slave trade acceleration after 1780, 111 Africans’ participation in, 109, 218n9 British and, 44 Hamburg and, 31–32, 108, 112, 209n7 Kirstein’s plan for abolition of, 118 Nevermann’s poetry on, 108–9 oral cultural transmitted by, 105 social theory, modern, architecture as metaphor in, 181 Somerset case (1772), 45 Soul of Commerce, The (Beachy), 22–23 Spacks, Patricia Myers, 163, 226n82 spatial imagination, as substrate of literary figurations, 11 Starnes, Rebekah, 123 Stein, Charlotte von, 165, 166 Steinbach, Erwin von, 182 Stevens, Laura, 50 Stolberg, Friedrich and Christian, 128, 135, 136–37, 140, 141 Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe on aesthetic experience of transcendence provided by, 183–84 celebration of architect of, 182–83 changed perception of, 186–87 as creation of human genius, 184 and Goethe’s coping strategies, 185–86 and Goethe’s crisis of aesthetic experience, 201–2 Goethe’s efforts to translate, 183 and limits of aesthetics, 185 and stabilization of subjectivity through representation, 185, 187

Index

261

Strasbourg Cathedral (continued) symbolic meanings of, 179–80, 185 as unfinished, 179–80, 186–87, 188, 201–2 v. Cologne Cathedral, 179–80, 186-88 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 5 Stueven, Peter, 98 subjectivity, vs. self-awareness, 203 Sutherland, Wendy, 53 tableaux (panoramas) of cities in eighteenth century, 7 Tang, Chenxi, 11 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 14, 192 theater. See also Hamburg theater; National Theater; original German plays as institution of glocalization, 36 northern German religious hostility to, 75, 94, 217n81 and performance as type of translation, 102 Theaterjournal, 85 Theaterkalender (periodical) 1, 85 theater treatises, on ideal spectator, 81 Thomas, Hugh, 111, 114 Thorvaldsen, Karl Albert, 132 Tilskuer (periodical), 132 towers, in Goethe, 179–89. See also “Von deutscher Baukunst” (Goethe) and Goethe’s fear of heights, 179, 186 as indicator of symbiosis and tension connecting literary and cultural studies, 185 and individual subjectivity, rise of, 180 and role of architecture in late eighteenthcentury thought, 181–82 and role of buildings in organizing cognitive and aesthetic field, 189 and Strasbourg Cathedral, 182–83; aesthetic experience of transcendence provided by, 183–84; celebration of architect of, 182–83; as creation of human genius, 184; and Goethe’s coping strategies, 185–86; and Goethe’s crisis of aesthetic experience, 201–2; Goethe’s efforts to translate, 183; and limits of aesthetics, 185; and stabilization of subjectivity through representation, 185; symbolic meanings of, 179–80; as symbol of mediality of literature, 185; as unfinished, 179–80, 201 transcendent authority symbolized by: chaotic life experience following

262

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removal of, 182, 188; Goethe’s efforts to replace with human creativity, 182–89, 202; as act of translation, 189 Trade Library (Handlungsbibliothek) (journal) and academic disciplines, establishment of, 37–38 anonymous texts in, 39 and bilinguality and translation, 39 and capitalizing on epistemic fragments, 38 and cultural capitalization, 39 and dissemination of knowledge, 37–39 influence of, 42 international focus of, 38–39 prioritizing of character in Trade Academy students, 41 as type of teaching manual, 39–40 translation as assertion of epistemic legitimacy, 86 as central term, 4 of drama, as distinguishing feature of Hamburg theater, 36 eighteenth-century focus on, 85 eighteenth-century journal debate on, 86 as embrace of global, 86 epistemic, debate on, 85–86 eventual resemblance to marginalization of local experience, 13 fusion with network, in glocalization concept, 15 and German cultural identity, 88 in Hamburg culture, forms of, 35 important role in cannon formation, 22–23 in journals: language areas of origin, 86; wide variety of genres, 87 in language learning, 87 Lessing and: culture of translation, 91, 144; elision of source/author and target/translator, 90–91, 92–93, 98, 100; as translator, 87–89 Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie on, 90, 91–93; alignment with disciplinary expertise, 100–101; criteria for evaluating, 92–93; and dramaturge, 95, 102; and elision of source/author and target/translator, 92–93, 98, 100; and emphasis on playing well vs. reading well, 99; equality of translators with authors, 90; evolution of concept, 91, 99, 100–101; favoring of prose for target text, 92–93, 95; functions of, 101; localization to performance contexts, 94–97, 99–100, 102, 103; mix of theory and practice in, 91–93;

and popular living language, 93, 99; and prologues/epilogues as localization strategy, 95–97; published, need for preserving affective content of performance in, 93–94; and theory of tragedy, 101; as tied to location and performance, 91; transpositions and contradictions in, 90; use of comparative translations in, 91 literary channels and, 35 marginalization of in literary historiography, 137 material and formal conditions in, 16 multidimensional understanding of, 13 and negotiation of genre, 12–13 network-like arrangement produced by, 16 original play and, 12, 85 oversupply of, and obscuring of original German texts, 86–87 and rise of academic disciplines, 86, 87 before taming by academic disciplines, 13 and transposing of world into cities, 85–87 and worlding, 14, 16 translation zones. See also in-between state anticipation of in Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 99–100 Brun and, 138 and condition of literary works within global networks, 194 glocalization and, 15 Goethe and, 29 Hamburg as, 194 and in-between states, 193 interplay of scholarly traditions and, 192 origin of term, 193 parterre as, 81–82, 83–84 and spaces full of epistemological interstices, 13 Translating the World in, 192 translators Lessing as, 87–89 and literary production as vehicles for transnational cultural transfer, 46 translator’s prefaces, functions of, 60–61 Transnationalism and the German City (Diefendorf and Ward), 23–24 transpositions across disciplines and genres, as cultural exchange, viii travel genres, popularity of, 45 Trop, Gabriel, 223n113 Trumpener, Katie, 13–14, 136, 220n73 Truth in Morning Dreams (Brun). See Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen (Brun) Tuite, Clara, 134

Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Schiller), 151, 156, 178, 189 “Über die Vorbereitungen zur Aufhebung des Negerhandels und Abschaffung der Sklaverei auf den Englischen Westindischen Inseln” (Deutsches Magazin, 1791), 111–12 “Über Matthisons Gedichte” (Schiller), 138–40 Unger, Thorsten, 85 Unhappy Favorites, The (Banks), Lessing’s translation of, 98, 99 unifying forces in Germany, Hamburg Trade Academy and, 43 universities and Hamburg Trade Academy, 42–43 modern, role of literatures in, 191–93, 201 urban history, engagement with literary production in, 22–23 Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (Schiller), 154 vertical cultures. See horizontal and vertical cultures in eighteenth century Vienna, and latent provinciality, 20 Voght, Caspar and German liberalism, 41–42 and global perspective of Hamburg residents, 108 on Hamburg culture, 34 as National Theater director, 74 and salons, 128 self-monumentalizing in, 9 and slavery, 31, 112 turn inward of, 107 Voght, Caspar von (son), 74 Voltaire, 100–101 “Vom Übersetzen” (anon.), 86, 216n61 “Von deutscher Baukunst” [1773] (Goethe), 179–80, 182–85 and rise of disciplinary diversity, 188, 202 on Steinbach, 182 on Strasbourg Cathedral: and absorption and transcendence of local and global, 180; aesthetic experience of transcendence provided by, 183–84; celebration of architect of, 182–83; as creation of human genius, 184; Goethe’s efforts to translate, 183; and limits of aesthetics, 185; and stabilization of subjectivity through representation, 187; symbolic meanings of, 179–80; as symbol of mediality of literature, 185

Index

263

“Von deutscher Baukunst” (continued) and transcendent authority, Goethe’s efforts to replace with human creativity, 182–88; as act of translation, 189 “Von deutscher Baukunst” [1823] (Goethe) focus on local and historical monuments in, 187–88 multiple subjects sustaining account in, 187 and rise of disciplinary diversity, 188 scholar’s readings of, 186 on Strasbourg Cathedral, 179; changed perception of, 186–87; and Goethe’s crisis of aesthetic experience, 201–2; as unfinished, 186–87, 201–2 and transcendent authority, Goethe’s efforts to replace with human creativity, 186–88; as act of translation, 189 “Vorbericht an den gütigen Leser” (Brun), 134–35 Vulpius, Christian August, 172, 174, 225n64 Vulpius, Christiane, 165, 225n64 Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe), 127–28 Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen (Brun), 131, 133–34, 147 Walker, Mack, 18 Walser-Wilhelm, Doris and Peter, 129 Ward, Janet, 23–24 Wehl, Feodor von, 34 Weimar architecture of, 20, 163, 167–68, 170–71, 174, 177–78 attractive features for wealthy retirees, 174 commodification of space in, 20 and conflicting local and court influences, 176–77 and constructed image vs. reality, 164 courting of visitors, 173–74 and court interest in local conditions, 168, 176–77 and court members as non citizens, 167, 173, 226n88 court member’s resentment of conditions in, 175 curtailing of global influence in, 147 dewalling efforts, 174–75 emergence of Classical Weimar, 177 engagement with modernity, 19 and famine of 1771-72, 172–73 flexible etiquette of, 168–69 forces in making of reputation of, 147 and global affairs: filters on perception of, 156–62, 195; journals as filter for, 157–62

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Goethe’s arrival in, 145, 146, 169 gossip in, 163–71; and Classical Weimar’s reputation, 178; court society’s fascination with, 169–70; Goethe and, 164–68, 171; and image of Classical Weimar, 170–71, 190; and marketing of icons, 163; participation of literary figures in, 163; as substitute for news, 164; and town’s image, 146–47, 168–69, 171; and town’s self-seclusion, 169, 170 high cost of living in, 162–63, 172 homeownership in, by class, 175, 226nn90–91 housing shortages in, 167 image of: gossip and, 146–47, 168–69, 171; and poor houses and infrastructure, 162, 168, 174–75, 176; property ownership and, 23 and Kulturnation, 25 literary life, as aborted paths and failures, 25 nineteenth-century architectural improvements, 178 poor houses and infrastructure in, 162, 168, 174–75, 176 population of, 162, 172–73 as preindustrial and fossilized, 20 residents’ cultivation of reputation for impoverishment, 174, 175–76 and rise of author-subject, 146–47, 159, 168, 178; as act of translation, 147 rise to prominence, 25; causes of, 4–5 self-secluding life in, 20, 151; and courting of visitors, 173–74, 178; and filtering of outside news by journals, 157–62, 195; and gossip, 163–71; Kotzebue Negersklaven and, 197; town image and, 177 separation of court and town, 174 social hierarchy in, 172 and Stadtordnung of 1810, 173 and street lighting, 176 translation of world into, through journals, 162 translocal activity as literary exports, 195 and Wars of Liberation, 173 Weimar, Classical global significance of, viii, 25, 195 and glocalization, 189 language of friendship and, 148 marketing of, 178 as museum-like, 177–78, 194 and Mythos Weimar, 25, 177–78



rise of, 177; and French Revolution, 155; new image of capital city needed for, 171 Wellmon, Chad, 38 Welt, conundrum posed by term, 14 Werthern, Emilie von, 169–70, 171 West Indian, The (Cumberland), 56–60. See also Westindier (Bode); Westindier (Kotzebue) affective reach of, 58 on corruption of London, 59–60, 65 on effect of tropical heat on character, 58 epilogue of, 59–60, 65 German translations of, 57 localization of in Britain, 58–59 and national pride in British Empire, 58 plot and characters of, 56–57 portrayal of Fulmers in, 62–63 prologue of, 57–58 sentimental identification in, 58–59, 60, 65 writing of, 56 West Indian plantations, proposed reforms, Ernst von Schimmelmann and, 112 Westindier (Bode), 60–67 as adaptation of Cumberland’s West Indian, 57, 66 affective agenda of, 66 and Belcour, changes to, 65 and Bode’s awareness of audience diversity, 61 on climate’s effect on temperament, 64–65 critical praise of, 60 critique of Hamburg in, 63–64, 65 as critique of mercantilism and empire, 62, 63–64 and culture of sentimentality, 66 deemphasis of final affective component, 65 depiction of West Indian world in, 64 distance between world and city in, 65, 69 emphasis on affective bonds in, 57 and empire of feeling, 69 and epilogue, omission of, 65 and glocalization, 68–69, 69–70 and Hamburg as world city, 68 international focus of, 69 localization to Hamburg, 57–58, 60–62, 65–66 multiple ways of reading, 66 and national literature, 61, 66 new prologue to, 57–58, 60–62, 70 portrayal of Fulmers in, 62–63, 65

revised ending of, 65 structure of, 64 Westindier (Kotzebue) as adaptation of Cumberland’s West Indian, 57 critique of London society in, 198 and dislodging of melodramatic genre from national, 198, 199–200 and melodrama as German export, 195, 199–200 and news of West Indian slave revolts, 196 popularity of, 196 sentimental identification in, 57, 196, 199 stereotypes and clichés in, 198–99 weak affective dimension of, 199 West Indies, translation and circulation of “stolen” texts from, 44 Wieland, Christoph Martin and Classical Weimar as attraction, 173–74, 178 and German turn toward radical subjectivity, 167–68 as Weimar resident, 167, 168, 226n75 and Weimar gossip, 170 Wiggin, Bethany, 12 Wilberforce, William, 108, 109, 113–14, 218n6 Wild, Christopher, 94, 123, 217n81 Wild, Rainer, 2–3 Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Goethe), 70, 179 Willebrand, Johann Peter, 1–2, 6, 7 Wilson, W. Daniel, 154, 155, 156 Wittenberg, Albrecht, 94 world, as spatial imagination, penetration to city, 11 worlding as alternative to national, 16, 193 and Classical Weimar, 194 and dialogue of German studies with other disciplines, 16, 21 Enlightenment notion of, 14 existence before 1800, 193 German national literature and, 194 Goethe’s characters and, 195 Hamburg and, 194 of Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Lessing), 89–90 Nussbaum on, 15, 16 and tension between history and geography, 15 and transcending of nation concept, 15–16 as translation, 14 value of concept, 15–17 world knowledge, place of literature in, as issue, 161–62

Index

265

World Republic of Letters, The (Casanova), 202 Xenien, Die (Goethe and Schiller), 129 Zantop, Susanne, 45, 53 Zedler’s Universallexikon, 6–7 Ziegler, Friedrich Wilhelm, 53 Zinzendorf, Nicholas von, 117 Zwischenhandel (intermediate trade), 208–9n5 Hamburg and, 31

266

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