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Heaven Help Us! Journals! Calendars!: Goethe and Schiller's Xenien as Circulatory Intervention
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine, Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 28
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2021, pp 33-58
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Summary
Abstract: In their Xenien project, Goethe and Schiller weaponized the classical epigrammatic distich on behalf of their own vision of a public sphere. In response to an oversaturated market in journals and in the context of falling subscription numbers for their own journal Die Horen, they published hundreds of epigrams attacking rival journals and authors. Taking a cue from new formalist approaches, this article analyzes the specific structural and rhetorical affordances of the distich and the broader formal strategies the authors deploy in this cultural intervention. The generic resources of the epigram are deployed to disrupt a commercial circulation generated by second-rate journals and their networks of “Philistine” writers and critics, to deconstruct false paradigms and overblown conceptions, to parody the overaccelerated or excessively sluggish pace of cultural production and exchange, and to expose those forces bent on overturning established social or political hierarchies. At the same time, the epigrams aim to set in motion a more rhythmic circulation that aligns with natural processes and classical antecedents, is shaped by the reciprocal exchange characterizing Goethe and Schiller's own friendship, gives rise to more elastic and internally differentiated conceptions of the whole, and ultimately sustains rather than overturns societal structures.
Keywords: Schiller, Die Horen, Xenien, distich, epigram, formalism, journal, public sphere
Das deutsche Reich.
Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiß das Land nicht zu finden
Wo das gelehrte beginnt, hört das politische auf. (222)
The German Empire.
Germany? But where is it? I don't know where to find that land.
Where the land of letters begins, the political one ends.
DAS DEUTSCHE REICH” may be the best-known couplet from Goethe and Schiller's Xenien (The Xenia), their collection of 414 epigrams lampooning their contemporaries, and published in Schiller's Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1797 (Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1797). This particular epigram is often quoted as a pithy rebuke to the nationalist stirrings of the era. The first line already deals the blow: the “Deutschland” appealed to by an unnamed other (or others) simply does not exist. But the second line demands a little more consideration: why must the political Germany end where the land of letters begins? Evoked here, I argue, is in fact a bitter contest between two journals that represent competing bids, learned and political, to define “das deutsche Reich.”
Pluralism and the Modernized Jesus in Mendelssohn, Schiller, and Schleiermacher
- Edited by Ruth von Bernuth, Eric Downing
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- Book:
- Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, Volume 5
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2021, pp 41-64
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Summary
For Jonathan, in fond memory and in debt
JONATHAN HESS concludes his introduction to German, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (2002) with one of the central paradoxes of modernity. On the one hand, modernity is predicated on a break. It is a discourse that “envision[s] a new and secular world that claimed its legitimacy not with reference to the various traditions and legacies of the past it sought to overcome, but solely in relation to itself.” On the other hand, modernity is defined through its relationship to the past: “In its claim to radical novelty, the discourse of modernity had to negotiate its relation to the historical past and secure its position as the heir to the entirety of history itself” (Hess, 22). This contradictory dynamic—modernity's attempted break with history reinforces its deep ties to history—belongs to the broader story of Hess's book. The Enlightenment project of universalism and secularism is indissolubly, maybe fatally, bound up in the freighted past of Christian evangelism, colonialism, and anti-Judaism. But in his treatment of Jewish authors writing from a marginalized position, Hess also brings out the creative processes of modernity, the more inventive negotiations between past and present, religious identity and civic tolerance, that aim toward “a vision of religious reform that recuperates Judaism for modernity at the same time as it issues a challenge to emergent concepts of political universalism whose link to the Christian legacy were in desperate need of clarification” (Hess, 18). Hess's book thus immerses us deeply in the competing Christian and Jewish efforts to translate tradition into modernity. These eighteenth-century religious struggles, whether overt or covert, have shaped to an extraordinary degree the models of religious and civic pluralism that remain with us today.
One of the primary discursive battlefields for German religious modernity becomes, not surprisingly, Jesus, the figure defining the very boundary between the two religions. Those making a bid for Christianity's unique suitability for the modern age were determined to show that the religion transcended its historical connections to Judaism; they therefore strived to view Jesus in isolation from his historical Jewish context (Hess, 12); Jewish authors, conversely, came to insist on that context.