“A Small, Interesting Work”

The short book titled Das römische Carneval appeared in the spring of 1789 with a print run of three hundred copies.²² This was a joint undertaking, not just by Goethe, Bertuch, Schütz, and Kraus but also by two other publishers, Unger (Berlin) and Ettiger (Gotha), for Bertuch did not yet have the capacity to print the book himself. Bertuch’s thematization of the book’s production in an advertisement in the Modejournal—calling it “a small interesting work,” “perhaps even the first and only of its kind in this well-known branch of newer luxury”²³—represents a deliberate, self-promotional foray into the luxury book market.²⁴ Even if booklets depicting costumes or national dress were not uncommon in the broader European market, this volume is an important milestone in Germany, and it would turn out to be the most expensive single book of Goethe’s entire career.²⁵ Offering proof of its superlative quality, the advertisement describes the coloring of the images and the “beauty” of the printing, paper, and typography, and calls it a “work” (Werk) five times in just three pages. This emphasis on production details is reminiscent of Bertuch’s later discussions of typography and his praise of Göschen’s 1794 Wieland edition. Antiqua is the typeface of choice for luxury editions, and, perhaps unexpectedly, this is one of the few books by Goethe that utilizes this font during his lifetime.²⁶ The advertisement also explicitly associates the book with antiquity, noting that the author makes use of the “form and taste of the ancients … to make [carnival’s] revelries all the more piquant.”²⁷ In effect, Bertuch enlists Goethe in his project of setting the terms of a developing branch of the luxury print market and establishing the criteria for a classicizing print object. However, given this keen evocation of classical aesthetics, Bertuch’s qualification of the book as “small” is peculiar at first glance, given the common association of the “work” with a certain grandeur and monumentality (as in Bertuch’s vision of luxury editions as National-Monumente²⁸). Perhaps this smallness refers more to the book’s length (just over one hundred pages, including the images) and less to its size relative to the octavo Modejournal (and the duodecimo size of many illustrated pocketbooks). The book’s quarto pages leave considerable blank space around the text and images—in a rather conspicuous consumption of expensive paper—allowing readers to appreciate the appearance of both. To be sure, it is a feature of certain branches of European book markets to produce smaller, more affordable versions of elaborate, multivolume antiquarian works.²⁹

The qualifier “small” also likely refers to the realm of more occasional cultural journalism and travel writing from which this piece emerged. In this same advertisement, Bertuch reveals Goethe as the book’s author through a reference to writings appearing just months before in one of Bertuch’s own journals: the author is “a man whom Germany holds to be among its finest art connoisseurs and its most favorite writers; [to reveal his name] we merely have to refer to his excellent Auszüge aus einem Reise-Journal [Excerpts from a travel journal] in the last installments of Der Teutsche Merkur of 1788.”³⁰ In the late 1780s, Goethe published a variety of short pieces in Wieland’s journal under this title; there, smallness is a function of these texts having been excerpted from a larger, ongoing travel diary. Cultural, fashion, and art historical journals share a particular thematic and structural affinity with travel writing, and journal publication is mutually beneficial for authors and publishers, with authors previewing longer works and prominent correspondents enhancing journals’ reputations. Karl Philipp Moritz, whom Goethe befriends while in Rome, is also adept at publishing travel writing and art criticism, even founding his own journal Italien und Deutschland in Rücksicht auf Sitten, Gebräuche, Litteratur, und Kunst (1789–1792)—the first German art historical journal of the period to use Antiqua type—and publishing in it what would become his three-volume travelogue, Reise eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788 (Travels of a German in Italy in the years 1786 to 1788) (1792–1794).³¹ Moritz also republishes some articles in his 1793 single-author collection Vorbegriffe zu einer Theorie der Ornamente (Preliminary ideas toward a theory of the ornament) (1793), which adds to the flurried format migration of these writings.

Building on the work of J. J. Winckelmann, Moritz, Goethe, and others fuel renewed interest among German readers in the art and cultural life of antiquity as it is preserved in various ways in modern Italy. Central to these writings is the technique of visualizing the presence of the past, a mode of writing time, if you will, that straddles antiquity and modernity. Along with describing encounters with ancient art, journalistic travel writings include quasi-ethnographic observations of everyday life as manifested in clothing, dress, customs, public rituals, popular songs, and more. Moritz and Goethe place strong emphases on visual observation as a way to test out the continued relevance and exemplarity of antiquity. Like many contemporary travelers, they engage in ekphrastic descriptions of sculpture, painting, and architecture, and they guide readers through a sequence of urban and rural scenes.³² Goethe would later call the carnival piece a tableau mouvant, and in it he describes the challenge of representing carnival in terms of organizing a chaotic sequence of visual (and other sense) impressions into a coherent whole.³³ In turn, the carnival piece would leave a particular mark on Moritz, who declines to offer an original account of the festival in his own travelogue, instead directing readers to Goethe’s depiction, which, as he puts it, represents “the whole as deceptively and truly as the images in a perspective viewbox.”³⁴ The analogy of Goethe’s piece to a viewbox (or zograscope) reveals a keen awareness of the potential of serial viewing for creating a sense of phenomena as consistent wholes, a sense that is “true” because of, not despite, the “deceptive” manipulation brought about by specific media. Moritz and Goethe cast the process of education and self-formation (Bildung) as a personal drama of processing antiquity and its different traces in the present day through various media-based techniques. This occurs against the backdrop of the unruly flow of images characteristic of modernity; as Moritz puts it, the challenge is to orient oneself in “the flight of time, [where] it is all we can do just to capture the outlines of the images that rush pass us.”³⁵ Writing time in this context entails finding stable points of orientation in the face of the transience and constant change of modern life.

Public festivals lend themselves especially well to this project of visualization, embedded as they are in the expectations of serial culture for the ongoing representation of new and recurring spectacles. The aspiration to represent various popular events functions as a testing ground both for the writing of contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte) and for different types of literary representation. The contemporary interest in festivals emerges amid shifting valuations of festivals in the Enlightenment and amid the desire to imagine national cultures as collective totalities. Echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous account on the popular fête as an alternative to theater spectatorship, Goethe describes carnival as an occasion for the collective self-experience of the Roman people: it is “not given for the people [Volk], but [a festival] that the people give themselves.”³⁶ Carnival’s yearly repetition shows how forms of popular expression can persist over millennia—the festival is a “modern Saturnalia”—but also how such forms can permeate daily life: as Goethe writes, in Rome, “it seems to be carnival all year long.”³⁷ The temporal footprints of popular collectivities and their different forms of self-expression have the potential to reveal what persists and what changes over time.

Accounts of popular festivity also produce reflections about the present, not least at a time when new public rituals are being established in revolutionary France.³⁸ As the 1790s progress, readers grow accustomed to encountering multiple descriptions of the same revolutionary festival in different papers and to reading accounts of various events as they recur every year. As an article from the August 1790 Modejournal reads, “you will have read the more detailed description of the festivities in all the newspapers and will spare me the effort of regurgitating them for you.”³⁹ Proliferating festival descriptions facilitate a comparative approach, with readers consuming multiple accounts of the same or different festivals. Critical commentary seeks analogies between different sites and styles of popular self-expression, something that can be seen in Goethe’s and Moritz’s invocations of the buzzwords of the French Revolution in their carnival descriptions. Though Goethe concluded his reflections on the festival in early 1789, he would later say that his work from this period captured a prerevolutionary atmosphere and expressed his “frightful premonitions” for what was to come.⁴⁰ The carnival piece does in fact reference the festival’s transient “freedom” and “equality,” where “the difference between upper and lower [classes] seems to disappear for a moment,” though he concludes the piece by observing that “freedom and equality can be enjoyed only in the frenzy of madness.”⁴¹ Moritz’s Anthousa, oder Roms Alterthümer: Ein Buch für die Menschheit (Anthousa, or Rome’s antiquities: a book for humanity), which details the religious festivities of ancient Rome, appears in 1791, and its evocation of egalitarian ideals is more unequivocal about the intersections between ancient republicanism and the cultural politics of the revolution, describing ceremonies where “the Roman Volk triumphantly celebrated all the freedoms and rights that it had attained and that protected it from the oppressions of the more noble and the more powerful.“⁴² It is a general scholarly consensus that Goethe and Moritz alike use the visualization of carnival and of ancient Rome as aesthetic wholes as ways to contain and neutralize what they perceive to be the revolution’s destructive and threatening elements, a conclusion that I will elaborate on later in this chapter. It is likewise notable that their oblique engagement with the revolution emerges from a print landscape in which readers are constantly encountering descriptions of public spectacles.

The cultural politics of the revolution relies heavily on various print formats. Revolutionaries depend on proliferating accounts of festivals and other public events in print to reinforce an aesthetics of patriotic unity, to aid public memory, and to create a sense that new and durable cultural forms are emerging. The documentation and amplification of public spectacle through serial print is an important example of how material objects can be given emphatic temporal indexes as commemorative devices, a more general feature of the temporalization characteristic of the 1790s. The memorialization of public festivities by various kinds of print objects runs parallel to other commemorative modes that mark time on a spectrum between ephemerality and permanence. Commentary on public spectacles lends itself to various modes of pro- and antirevolutionary journalism, including reflections on the classicizing bent of newly founded festivals and the tendency of revolutionaries to dress themselves up in the trappings of antiquity, a tendency which Karl Marx would so ironically diagnose some sixty years later.⁴³ This critical commentary extends to antirevolutionary treatments that liken the revolution to carnival in its status as a fashionable yet ephemeral masquerade.

Public spectacle is also a testing ground for aesthetic aspirations to work-like completion and wholeness analogous to the supposed totality of popular collectivity. The impulse to represent popular spectacle in an aesthetically cohesive form—rounding out the small, occasional tableaus of journalistic reportage and travel writing into a whole, if you will—can be found in book projects such as Moritz’s Anthousa, which he premiered as a series of lectures at the Berlin Academy of Arts. Modeled on ancient chronological lists of religious events, or “fasti,” Moritz’s project describes the religious festivities of ancient Rome as they occurred across a single calendar year, aiming at visually engaging representation rather than scholarly abstraction: “We [are to] see [the Roman Volk] before us, acting and living in its homes and on its streets and public places of gathering.”⁴⁴ For Moritz, it is the intertwining of the religious and the aesthetic that makes Roman public life a beautiful whole, the “the center of beauty” (Mittelpunkt des Schönen). The subject of Anthousa, titled after a Greek word meaning “in blossom,” is the “the individual existence of a people” (das individuelle Daseyn eines Volks), which is to be observed “for its own sake and for the sake of its own existence.”⁴⁵ The wholeness and autonomy attributed here to Roman life parallels Moritz’s account of the work of art as a self-standing, non-instrumental totality in other aesthetic writings.⁴⁶ His vision of the Roman people as a collective whole (or of ancient mythology as a beautiful whole) aligns the book more with the literary artwork than with dry scholarly analysis.

Several design choices tied to serial form organize Moritz’s book and position it both as a self-contained whole and as a modest product of “small” print luxury. For one, the inclusion of multiple plates of simple outline drawings based on Roman coins and gems aligns Anthousa with aesthetic observation—in figure 2.1, we see a positive valuation of the mere “outlines” of objects that, as Moritz puts it, we are able to grasp hold of in the “flight of time.” Here we see an image of the Suovetaurilia procession that was presumedly produced by anonymous members of the Berlin Academy of Arts, of which Moritz was a member.⁴⁷ These images are copied from a well-known collection of reproductions by P. D. Lippert of antique gems, or dactyliotheca, a popular and successful antiquarian product in the second half of the eighteenth century, which Moritz also draws on for the Götterlehre (Doctrine of the gods).⁴⁸ In effect, Moritz’s reproductions are modest, more functional, workaday copies of this elaborate product of print luxury. This modesty can be seen in the simple line work and the fact that the images are printed on pages with text on the reverse side rather than on a separate page. Such illustrations deliberately leave much to the imagination; as Reinhart Wegner has argued, the use of illustrations and vignettes to lead readers to self-reflective observation is a characteristic feature of Moritz’s publications.⁴⁹ In the case of this religious procession, the image fuels a sense of movement through the city and of the festival and the calendar year passing readers by.

Furthermore, Moritz’s choice to structure his book according to a single calendar year contributes to a sense of both completion and continued repetition. Similar to the revolutionary calendar in the Modejournal discussed in the previous chapter, Moritz includes a timeline of the Roman festival calendar at the end of Anthousa, positioning it in relative proximity to other themed literary annuals such as almanacs and Taschenbücher. There is a certain elegiac timelessness to this festival chronology, with the end of the book coinciding with the end of the year and the implication that the calendar will repeat anew, as a “beautiful cycle” (schöner Kreislauf) (in contrast to the more final temporal horizon of the fall of Rome, for example).⁵⁰ And yet Moritz’s book also achieves an accumulative temporal effect by means of the repeated contemplation of antiquity, not least because the modern commemorative recollection and repetition of the religious calendar parallels the function of Roman festivities themselves, which memorialize important events in Roman history. Moritz is entirely clear about the unattainability of the true presence of antiquity, but, at the same time, he is interested less in a kind of mimetic ruin-gazing than in a humanistic Bildung enabled by imagining ancient Rome as a blossoming aesthetic totality.⁵¹ The self-reflective viewing that Moritz seeks to catalyze in readers thus involves observing a classicizing shape of time based in cyclical repetition and recursive memorialization.

“The Whole of Carnival in a Coherent Form”

Moritz’s Anthousa emerged from personal exchanges with Goethe first in Rome and then back in Weimar, where he composed parts of the book, but he also wrote it in dialogue with Goethe’s carnival text, quoting extended sections from it (around ten pages in the original edition of Anthousa) in lieu of describing the ancient Saturnalia. As Moritz writes, Goethe brings “the ancient Saturnalia, as if in a new costume, before our eyes.”⁵² Goethe’s text is also predicated on the idea of guiding readers through a sequence of images and on experiencing the festival and the Roman people as wholes or totalities. As he states, his goal is to present readers with an “overview and the enjoyment of an overly rushed and quickly passing pleasure” (Übersicht und Genuss einer überdrängten und vorbeirauschenden Freude), and he deliberately foregrounds the role of artistic representation in visualizing the festival as a “whole.”⁵³ The appeal to overview is evident at the end of the piece, where he claims to have presented to readers “the whole of [carnival] in a coherent form” (das Ganze in seinem Zusammenhange).⁵⁴ Throughout the piece, Goethe dramatizes the challenge of spatial and temporal orientation; as he writes, the festival culminates in a “crowding that transcends all concepts [ein Gedränge, das alle Begriffe übersteigt], indeed that cannot be recalled by even the most attentive memory.”⁵⁵ Das Gedränge—“throng,” “crowd,” a “crowding,” or a “rushing”—is Goethe’s shorthand for the unruly visual and indeed physical experience of carnival, both for the crowds of people on the streets of Rome and for the sensory data confronting the observer who seeks to take it all in.⁵⁶

Writing both for readers who have already experienced carnival and for “those who still [have] that trip ahead of them,” Goethe seeks to reorganize the flow of information by presenting a series of short textual passages and images. Recounting his method of observation in the Italienische Reise, he writes, “I closely observed the progress of the follies, and how everything actually proceeded with a certain form and decorum. In so doing I noted the individual happenings in sequence [Hierauf notierte ich mir die einzelnen Vorkommnisse der Reihe nach].”⁵⁷ Sequential observation is the primary organizing conceit of the text’s short, individually titled vignettes (twenty-eight in total). These pieces portray specific scenes and refer readers to corresponding images; some describe spatial locations (“The Corso,” “The World of Beauty at the Ruspoli Palace,” or “Side Streets”), while others address delimited frames of time (“The Early Period,” “Evening,” or “The Last Day”) or are devoted to specific costumes (“Ecclesiastical Costumes,” “Masks,” or “King of Pulchinellas”). Moving diachronically through the week or so of carnival, these short pieces encourage a form of serial viewing that unfolds in and with time and enfolds the Gedränge into patterns of necessary movement.

To the end of creating an orderly sense of the whole, Goethe employs compositional techniques of selection and isolation, techniques that he dramatizes when noting the intermittent need of festival participants to withdraw from the chaos of the crowd and into quieter side streets.⁵⁸ The illustrations in particular play an isolating function by foregrounding individual figures against a blank background, with most plates featuring between two and five people. As with fashion plates, the reader’s gaze is directed to specific costumes and gestures.⁵⁹ Here, again, we see the importance of blank space for facilitating imaginary viewing by leaving out the tumult of the street described by the text and thus breaking up the chaotic temporality of the instant into consumable segments. The text also includes indexical markers that recall the gestures of the travel guide or cicerone: “Here a pulcinella comes running … here comes another of his kind.”⁶⁰ Directing the reader to consider specific plates creates a sense of movement, isolating but also enumerating the different masks and costumes. Footnotes direct the reader to the back of the book, and the reader must then find their way back to their previous place in the text. It is not uncommon for journals, illustrated books, pocketbooks, and calendars to situate their plates at the beginning or end of the volume, and readers would have been accustomed to navigating back and forth, but the effect of an unbroken flow of images is mitigated by the placement of the illustrations at the back of the book.

The entry “Masks” clusters a good number of the references to images. Though the images are intended to evoke a sense of individual momentary scenes as they pass by, they likewise access a variety of different temporal registers and historical times. Certain costumes represented in “Masks” lend color to contemporary fads in which Goethe himself partakes, as Romans dress up as the Northern European artists and writers who have flocked to Rome such as he and Moritz.⁶¹ Other costumes reference decidedly contemporary fashions; Goethe describes, for example, how carriage drivers wear “feminine garb” (Frauentracht) and how “a broad, ugly fellow dressed up in the very latest fashion, with a high coiffure and feathers, becomes a great caricature.”⁶² Other costumes access a more expansive historical time, representing different “artistic epochs” or well-known statues in the city.⁶³ Traces of antiquity likewise inhere in the headgear of Pulcinella, which has its origins in the ancient Saturnalia (see figure 2.2). This image depicts by far the largest number of figures and conveys a bit more of the sensory chaos of the festival with its depiction of a procession containing musicians and people singing from songbooks. The Pulcinella costume is a particularly good example of serial proliferation, with multiple people dressed up as the same figure; as Goethe notes, “everyone seeks to reproduce this universal costume” (jeder [sucht] diese Tracht zu vermannichfaltigen).⁶⁴ Goethe exhibits no desire to arrange the disjunctive temporalities evoked by these costumes into any specific historical coherence (this would differ in some of the processions that he organized in Weimar and documented with text and images in the Modejournal [see figure 1.2], for some of these exhibit more of a historical, developmental logic⁶⁵). The images allow readers to linger with single, static moments, but they also create a sense of bodies moving dynamically though space. Serial form thus allows Goethe to contain the crowd, das Gedränge, and to document the proliferation of costumes and bodies but also to slow such a proliferation down and parse it out into consumable parts.

Another key strategy of Goethe’s is marking different kinds of beginnings and ends, a strategy that draws on the propensity of serial forms to dramatize endings and to express various modes of continuation, including repeated viewing and rereading. Marking beginnings and ends is a technique of writing time, including the beguiling temporality of carnival as both ephemeral and recurring. On the one hand, carnival’s existence is all the more fleeting because daily life always restores the temporarily subverted status quo. On the other hand, as a “modern Saturnalia,” the festival is “really just a continuation [Fortsetzung], or rather the culmination, of those customary Sunday and festival-day delights; it is nothing new, nothing unique, but, on the contrary, is just a natural extension of the Roman way of life.”⁶⁶ This mixture of ephemerality and duration is also a reason why the festival calls out for repeated viewing. Furthermore, its yearly repetition helps to authenticate his account: “We would hardly dare to continue [our description] if so many people who have attended Roman carnival could not testify that we have stayed strictly with the truth, and if it were not a festival repeated annually and that will be viewed in the future by many an individual with this book in hand.”⁶⁷ Goethe offers readers the perhaps ridiculous (but in his day and age increasingly familiar) sight of bildungsbürgerlich tourists walking the streets of Rome, guidebooks in hand. The proper treatment of carnival promises insight into how cultural forms are sustained across centuries.

Along with demarcating the time span of the festival itself, Goethe also marks the beginnings and ends of its different parts. One particularly important moment he describes is the beloved carriage race in the Corso. In just a few short sentences, Goethe narrates the flurry of preparations, the instant the race begins, the procession of the horses and decorated carriages, and its end: “Thus does this festivity end with a violent, momentary impression, flashing by like lightning. Many thousands of people were eagerly anticipating it for a long time, but few can explain why they were waiting for this moment and why they enjoyed it so much.”⁶⁸ By tracking a sequence of distinct, momentary occurrences, he creates a sense of the events of carnival as a linear procession, moving from instant to instant.⁶⁹ Clear framing gestures at the piece’s beginning and end likewise create a sense of the whole of the carnival. The end of carnival is the beginning of Lent, and the final vignette is titled “Ash Wednesday,” evoking the historical transition from polytheism to Christianity and from the ancient festival calendar to the Gregorian calendar. But, as with the conclusion of Moritz’s Anthousa, the end of carnival season implies seasonal repetition. In this final section, Goethe shifts to a more serious, almost sermonizing tone, offering what he calls an “Ash Wednesday meditation”:

So then, an unrestrained [ausschweifendes] festival is over, like a dream, like a fairy tale, and perhaps less of it remains in the soul of the participant than of our readers, to whose imagination and understanding we have presented the whole of it in a coherent form [das Ganze in seinem Zusammenhange].⁷⁰

For Goethe, his text and images are better able to achieve coherence than actual participation. As a material artifact and as a literary work, Goethe’s text secures permanence through the promise of renewed viewing, either through readers’ memory or rereading. Goethe’s assertion of the permanence and artfulness of his account depends on the specific media ensembles that allow him and his readers to attain a position of being able to survey “the whole.” In effect, Moritz’s likening of Goethe’s text to an optical viewbox addresses these literary and media-based techniques.

The title page’s vignette likewise undergirds the assertion that the carnival book is an aesthetic whole and shores up its association with a classicist shape of time (figure 2.3). This image stems from a third artist involved in the project, Johann Heinrich Lips, a Swiss painter and engraver whom Goethe met in Italy and who taught at the drawing school in Weimar.⁷¹ The image depicts a container amid several theater masks upon an abstract grid. The amphora-like vase is decorated with what appear to be satyr masks and a ram’s skin evocative of the origins of antique drama. With their exaggerated expressions, two of the main masks are clearly from the theater of antiquity, and a third gazes at the masks on the vase rather than out at the reader. Scholars have conjectured that this face is a likeness of Goethe himself; at the very least, it is more realistic than the other two and evokes a sense of a modern viewer contemplating antiquity.⁷² This image stages yet another scene of serial viewing, taking the viewer through a consideration of the larger masks and those on the vase. The winding of the masks around the vase evokes a certain cyclical movement, either of the vase as it turns around a fixed center, or of an observer moving around the object to view it from all sides; in both cases, such cyclical movement involves a process of serial viewing enabled by a classicizing form. Like Goethe’s text, the vase and the figures winding around it promise that more views of the same are to come. The vase’s isolated, symmetrical form and the implication of its cyclical rotation are evocative both of the seasonal recurrence of carnival and of the permanence and durability of Goethe’s work.

Here we should return to the question of the revolution and the contemporary historical resonances of this text. Goethe’s book presents an allegorical treatment of possibilities and limitations of popular energies—the dreamlike experience of “freedom” and “equality” brings with it a certain madness, intoxication, and confusion. The impulse to live out such freedom and equality recurs, but it is not permanent, for the return to the status quo always comes. The carnival piece casts the Volk as an aesthetic object without any genuine power of self-determination.⁷³ Serial form also plays a role in this depiction of popular energies, with the classicist shape of time suggested by carnival’s yearly repetition precluding the interruption of the revolutionary new. The time span between the beginning and end allows for “freedom” (Freiheit) and “impudence” (Frechheit) but not for the emergence or institutionalization of the new.⁷⁴ Goethe does dramatize the revolution in terms of the trauma of the new in later works, and the carnival piece is by no means his last word on the revolution.⁷⁵ But, to the extent that his treatment of carnival’s simultaneous transience and persistence does in fact obliquely engage with the possibility of revolution, Goethe remains skeptical about popular self-determination, and he enlists serial form to give this skepticism shape.

“The Luxury Edition Is Completely out of Stock”

Given the ubiquitous association of periodicals with ephemerality, one might assume that a second view of Das römische Carneval would reinforce the standard dichotomy between lasting books and fleeting journals. As we’ve seen, Goethe associates the book version with permanence. His account is more lasting for readers than their in-person impressions of the celebration, and future travelers are guaranteed to hold the work in their hands. It is ironic, then, that, as Bertuch and Kraus state in a note explaining the necessity of the journal version, “many connoisseurs have not been able to obtain a copy of the beautiful edition [schöne Ausgabe] … and many of our readers are not yet at all familiar” with it.⁷⁶ As the editors go on to note in the January 1790 issue’s advertising supplement, “the luxury edition [prächtige Ausgabe] published at the last spring book fair is already completely out of stock” despite continuing “demand.”⁷⁷ After a first run of three hundred copies, Bertuch and Kraus conclude that they cannot “make the decision to do a second of the same edition.”⁷⁸ This was particularly frustrating to Goethe, who had given away his copies and was unable to obtain a personal copy.⁷⁹ In effect, just as the journal version was appearing, the luxury book version was disappearing before everyone’s eyes. This curious episode brings the book and journal versions into the same orbit insofar as each comes to be associated with a perhaps all-too-fleeting fashionableness.

To be sure, there are ways in which journals are associated with duration and permanence. A contemporaneous defense of the merits of journals over “many exceptional artworks” put forth by J. H. Campe in his Braunschweigisches Journal (Braunschweig journal) (1788–1791) cites the wider circulation of journals and their ability to make information more accessible.⁸⁰ Out-of-date journals are always being saved and bound together (like many periodicals, the pages of the Modejournal are numerated according to yearly runs, taking on a certain archival function akin to Bertuch’s original idea for publishing yearly fashion annals). Additionally, serial formats can be associated with the kinds of print luxury that Bertuch promotes. This applies in particular to the booklet that is to accompany the journal version of Goethe’s piece and contain the twenty images etched by Kraus. This booklet did not have a large run (eight-five copies were printed), and its appearance recalls key features of the book version, especially through its title vignette (figure 2.4).⁸¹ However, for readers able to obtain a copy of this supplement, certain differences between book and journal versions would have been readily apparent, including between the book and pamphlet’s Antiqua type and the journal’s black letter Fraktur.⁸² Connotations of “small” and “large” print commodities are likewise at stake: Bertuch called the book version “a small interesting work,” but the octavo journal is smaller than the quarto book, and there is not nearly the same amount of white space on the journal page. Readers are tasked with collating the journal with the quarto pamphlet on the basis of footnotes in the journal version. At the same time, the journal version’s section headings resemble other paratextual markings in the Modejournal, bringing the segmentation structuring Goethe’s piece in line with the journal’s appearance.

Journal publication also does the work of constellating the text and its images with other material. This January 1790 issue includes a title vignette commemorating the new year, an article detailing the accessories of a sixteenth-century aristocratic bride, miscellaneous theater reports from several German cities and Paris, and more. Along with the image of the French National Guard uniform discussed in the previous chapter, this issue’s images include a depiction of a woman dressed for one of the carnival-season winter balls, which, as the “Fashion News from France” states, are still being held even though the masked processions of carnival had been greatly curtailed by Parisian authorities in 1790.⁸³ Taken on their own, the theatrical masks of the booklet’s title vignette might seem benign enough, but would readers have been tempted to compare the masks with the bodiless heads on pikes depicted in contemporaneous almanacs and journals, as in the readily available late 1789 German almanacs?⁸⁴ Though the guillotine would not be implemented as a form of punishment until 1792, literal and symbolic decapitation is very much on the minds of contemporaries in early 1790. A “Theater Anecdote” in this same January issue takes the image of severed heads in different direction, relating a scene of two actors perched under a table with their heads sticking through it as if cut off and resting in bowls, disrupting the terrifying scene with a fit of sneezing.⁸⁵ Journal publication brings Goethe’s piece back into the flow of information and imagery characteristic of the contemporary journal landscape and back into the orbit of the Modejournal’s distinctive project of chronicling this flow more or less directly. Furthermore, journal publication shifts questions of what repeats and what comes after into a register more closely aligned with cultural journalism. Goethe’s piece might still be encounterable as a self-contained sequence of images, but it can also be experienced as a tableau predicated on being followed by other tableaus, a “piece” followed by other “counterpieces,” its masks and heads followed by other masks and heads.

It is therefore not merely an ironic literary-historical footnote that the book edition goes out of print so quickly. The format of the journal version accesses the promise of serial print to return in ways that diverge from the logic of the book version. Each version calls to mind a different shape of time and invites potentially conflicting literary-historical and media-historical interpretations. It is no accident that Bertuch and Kraus publish Goethe’s piece in the first issue of the new year, in the season of both modern carnival and the ancient Saturnalia. The book version of Goethe’s Das römische Carneval was published at the 1789 spring fair (Ostermesse), a little more than a year prior, but the time span between first and second publication is nonetheless somewhat evocative of the carnival’s yearly recurrence. Putting the text at the beginning of the January issue also aligns Goethe’s piece with the supplemental beginning-of-the-year articles and images offered by the Modejournal to its readers, that is, its “new year’s presents of fashion.” This convention brings the piece into resonance with the journal’s yearly and monthly periodicities and its position in the broader print marketplace. Along with functioning as a form of print luxury, journal publication also taps into the proliferation of material on carnival and other festivals. Seen in this light, Goethe’s text is both an instantiation of ongoing “fashion news” about carnival and a text that fuels future production, both in more self-contained projects such as Moritz’s and across a variety of journalistic and literary undertakings.

Finally, journal reproduction can also be seen as a harbinger of the numerous republications of Goethe’s piece in authorized and unauthorized versions. The journal version inaugurates a long, winding journey of reconstellation: it is reprinted in the 1792 Goethe’s Neue Schriften (Goethe’s new writings); in pocketbooks and unauthorized anthologies in 1793, 1796, 1799, and 1826; in a new 1801 edition of Goethe’s Neue Schriften; seven times in works editions between 1808 and 1829; and in Swedish (1821) and English translations (1829).⁸⁶ All told, the piece is republished up to fifteen times before it reaches its place in the Italienische Reise, in the Ausgabe letzter Hand (Edition of the last hand) (1827–1830). In each case, the carnival text is part of an anthology-like collection, either multi- or single-author, and is placed in relation to other surrounding texts according to different logics. Republication therefore marks a dual drift toward merging with the broader flow of print matter and toward consolidation in an authorial oeuvre, a topic to which I return at the end of the chapter. Meanwhile, there is more to say about the Modejournal’s treatment of carnival and the journal’s integral place in the business of print.

Böttiger’s View of Carnival

Goethe’s carnival piece enhances the historical scope of the Modejournal and boosts its reputation as a place to experience antiquity. Even if Goethe, Schiller, and others would later dispute the cultural-historical bona fides of the journal’s editors, the carnival piece serves as a touchstone for the journal’s classicizing approach, which Böttiger helps to amplify after becoming an unnamed coeditor in 1795 or 1796 (he also took over editing Der Neue Teutsche Merkur [The new German mercury] in 1794). Not least because of his partnerships with Bertuch, he developed a reputation for being ubiquitous in the journals of the day—“What is friend Böttiger not writing in?” wrote Schiller to Goethe in 1795.⁸⁷ He is also a scholar of antiquity, though unlike Winckelmann, Goethe, Moritz, and Herder, he never visited Rome; his furthest travel destination was Paris, where he developed close ties in scholarly and journalistic circles. Böttiger’s articles in the 1790s bring to the Modejournal a focus on the daily life of antiquity, and he peppers such pieces with ostentatious scholarly gestures, satirical flair, fictional scenarios, and frequent tableau-like visualizations and image commentaries. As Angela Borchert puts it, an interest in the everyday life of Rome is the part of the “double view of antiquity” characteristic of the period, namely the consideration of both the fine arts and the day-to-day habits of the ancients.⁸⁸ This can be seen in Böttiger’s multipart article series about the complicated dressing rituals of a Roman lady that he republished in the influential Parisian journal Magasin Encyclopédique, edited by Böttiger’s colleague and friend Aubin-Louis Millin.⁸⁹ Böttiger thus follows a path distinct both from Goethe and Schiller’s literary classicism and from the institutionalization of classics (Altertumswissenschaft) as an academic discipline in the emerging research university of the nineteenth century. Instead, Böttiger fuses antiquarian scholarship and cultural journalism, treating writing in journals for more general audiences as both a method of distributing antiquarian knowledge and a mode of serialized entertainment that sells.⁹⁰

Böttiger’s two-part article titled “The Saturnalia Feast [Der Saturnalienschmaus]: A Carnival Scene of Ancient Rome” in the February/March 1797 issue of Modejournal brings us directly back to Goethe’s carnival piece. These articles are continuations of sorts of his previous pieces on the dressing rituals of a wealthy Roman lady, but here he turns to the male members of the same household, focusing on a festive dinner shared by patricians and slaves. The articles detail the meal’s course, seating order, silverware and tablecloths, food, and other festive practices, including the selection of the Saturnalia king. Böttiger follows familiar tropes about these festivities’ perpetuation into the present—“for three thousand years, the names of the plays and the actors have always changed, but never the content of the piece and the view of the different scenes”—and he even begins the article with an extended quote of Goethe (“the artful depicter” [der kunstreiche Schilderer]) where Goethe comments on Christianity’s inability to fully do away with carnival’s traditions.⁹¹

In drawing readers’ attention to present-day customs originating in antiquity, Böttiger touches on issues of contemporary-historical importance. Here he enlists Diderot and Mercier as proof of the festival’s modern residues, in particular as they relate to the selection of the ephemeral Saturnalia/carnival king. He cites Diderot’s satiric verses mocking the French king on the tradition of selecting a so-called bean king (roi de la fève) as a premonition of the revolution itself and then cites Mercier’s “witty” (launigt) remarks on carnival in his prerevolutionary Tableau de Paris: “That festival, founded in gorging, will be immortal” (cette fête fondèe sur la bâfre, sera immortelle).⁹² He then goes on to weaponize the ephemerality of carnival against the postrevolutionary directorial government (1795–1799), citing a present-day Parisian bakery’s advertisement for gateaux du directoire (carnival cakes) that likens the current government to the carnival king. In effect, Böttiger mobilizes the convention of the carnival king to cast both pre- and postrevolutionary regimes as fleeting debauches. And yet, each of his sources’ takes on this convention do not stray from the assumption at the heart of carnival that more will come and that the festival (and a carnivalesque politics characteristic of the postrevolutionary atmosphere) will continue in coming years. It is in this context that Böttiger returns once more to Goethe’s piece, directing readers to his image of the contemporary garb of the modern “King of Pulchinellas” as an example of the styles of hats used to crown the ephemeral king of the Roman household. Böttiger musters the Goethe piece to show another side of the festival’s “immortality.” This is a form of satirical neo-Roman mimesis that weaponizes carnival against the revolution, even while embracing the festival as a temporary yet recurring transport (and one from which adept journalists and editors can profit).⁹³

“New Year’s Presents of Fashion”

Along with bringing antiquarianism and a certain style of antirevolutionary Zeitgeschichte into resonance, Böttiger highlights the place of various kinds of material objects in ancient Roman life. Of particular relevance are the journal’s “new year’s presents of fashion,” which Böttiger takes in an increasingly classicizing direction as editor. These images lend themselves very much to being considered as part of Moritz and Goethe’s project of visualizing antiquity and of Bertuch’s project of linking antiquarian topics to the dissemination of print products. A pair of articles in the January 1796 issue illustrates this. The first glosses the issue’s supplemental new year’s Titelkupfer titled “Venus and the Graces, with Good Wishes for the Year 1796” (see figure 1.4). The main image is based on an antique gem in the Museo Florentino, and Böttiger imagines the bathing scene depicted there, drawing on various ancient literary sources, including Homer and Ovid. In Böttiger’s hands, this image of Venus regarding herself in the mirror allows contemporary readers a certain amount of self-reflection: as Borchert puts it, in Böttiger’s hands, “Venus and the graces become a bathing scene that could just as well play out at the court in Gotha or Ludwigsburg as on Cyprus.”⁹⁴

Böttiger goes on to stress how the image exemplifies the journal’s neoclassical commitments, leaving readers to decide whether it partakes of the more dignified side of the ancient Roman custom of giving new years’ presents, or strena, or of its less honorable (and less costly) variant, namely the practice of gifting small tablets with the names of luxury items on it rather than the actual items themselves: a flask of wine, a “wild boar haunch,” “a beautiful overcoat of Gallician wool, a silver chalice, or a Corinthian candelabra.”⁹⁵

Sympathetic male and female readers of this journal may decide for themselves whether its editors, who otherwise so gladly do the justice due to the taste of the model nations of the ancient Greeks and Romans in everything concerning the arts, costumes, and decoration, have followed their example even in this unseemly custom? The editors, too, now present the audience interested in this magazine the small and modest toll of a congratulatory new year’s present.⁹⁶

Böttiger’s demonstrative gesture filters the trope of the persistence of antiquity through the question of large and small print luxury: it is not a monumental sculpture, architectural structure, or weighty book that confirms the duration of classical norms, but rather the “small and modest” page of a fashion journal. The continuity with ancient Rome plays out in terms of style and design and also in terms of attempts to profit from this custom of gift giving by making ever new products for this market, as an article in the previous year’s January issue on the English manufacture of classicizing ceramics details.⁹⁷ In a self-deprecating twist, though, Böttiger does not shy away from concluding that the journal’s new year’s presents might disappoint readers looking for more valuable print objects.

He continues to link the various features of the Modejournal to Roman practices when he embeds his commentary on this new year’s presents in a media-historical genealogy of sorts in which serial reproduction plays a vital role in keeping ancient styles and practices alive. As he writes, even though the representation of the antique gem is a copy, it is able to reach a broader audience through the art of etching (Kupferstichkunst) and print reproduction. Despite being a “mere copy and reproduction” (Copey und Abzeichen) the image “still speaks through form and outline.”⁹⁸ Etching on the one hand continues the antique practice of proliferating small reproductions used as gifts, and on the other, it is a clearly a modern improvement. By being deprived of it, “antiquity missed out on thousands of aesthetic pleasures,” but modern craftspeople are now able to make antiquity more accessible.⁹⁹ Böttiger thus filters the Modejournal’s own etched images such as “Venus and the Graces” through the trope that coins and gems are traces of ancient life. In both content and format, the journal is in the business of broadening reader exposure to antiquity and classicizing forms. Böttiger’s article is thus not merely one more piece of literary entertainment whose topic is antiquity but rather an imitative copy of specific cultural practices, taking the kind of virtual, imaginary “participation” in ancient ritual as proposed by Moritz into the realm of material culture and the business of print.¹⁰⁰

Xenia

The very next article in the January 1796 issue delves deeper into this media-historical genealogy. Böttiger’s “Painted and Written New Year’s Presents of the Ancient Romans” continues to linger with gift giving, addressing hospitality gifts, or xenia, in particular.¹⁰¹ With roots in Roman harvest festivals, these presents played a part in Saturnalian festivities and later in carnival.¹⁰² That said, Böttiger takes issue with the “pious interpretation” (fromme Ausdeutung) of the practice advanced by Moritz’s “catalogue of festivals” (Festverzeichniss), noting that Moritz falsely traces such gift giving back to the Saturnalia’s temporary transport of Romans into (quoting Moritz) an “innocent world where universal freedom and equality reigned along with reciprocal loyalty among humans.”¹⁰³ Insisting on a different genealogy of this practice, Böttiger presents an image of ancient Rome that functions less as a model for the republican or even revolutionary potential of humanity and more as a site of commercial innovation where various artistic, fashion, and luxury items are in a constant process of development and differentiation. Böttiger outlines this strand of ancient gift giving and its various permutations, including the gifting of memorial coins and medallions, which then develops into the circulation of drawings and paintings of such coins, referencing the unseemly practices of providing reproductions rather than the actual objects he mentions above: “What was more natural … that, over time, people would send dainty reproductions and paintings [zierliche Abbildungen und Gemälde] of these items to each other?”¹⁰⁴ The proliferation of such representations also led to the growth of increasingly specialized artists and craftsmen, including so-called rhyparographers, genre and still life painters of sordid or distasteful subjects. Situating the work of these craftsmen in a genealogy of antique arts and crafts, he has more positive things to say about this art than other neoclassical aesthetic theorists of the period.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Böttiger goes so far as to trace a direct line from ancient satire and genre painting to the political and social caricature of the present day, a topic explored in greater detail in the next chapter.

This lineage of practical and material culture includes the emergence of short satirical verses, likewise called xenia, and Böttiger closes the article by translating some Roman examples and even offering a few of his own. In effect, he provides another layer to the enactment of the very cultural practices he describes. The article ends with several verses “to test out this style” and as additional new year’s presents, in the form of a “a poetic platter” (eine dichterische Schlachtschüssel). Titled “Wine and Ointment,” one piece reads: “Leave your heir money, but ointments and wines, / I advise you, do not leave him: give them all to yourself.”¹⁰⁶ Playing with the distinction between consumable or usable items and their medial representation—here, satirically falling much more on the (unseemly) side of giving small drawings of bottles rather than the wine itself—Böttiger playfully ends on a note of celebrating the pleasures of life (Lebensgenuss) as they cut across a variety of forms of luxury items. At the same time, though, the selfish gesture of “save the good stuff for yourself” is also a call for readers to enjoy the print products that they hold in their hands and to commemorate the new year with something nice that is sublimated into the form of literary and visual entertainment. Böttiger thus associates the varied contents of the journal—its articles, its images, its occasional poetry, and its cultural and historical journalism—with these small, consumable products of artistic and artisanal craft. In the process, he gives readers tools to map practices of literary and material gift giving across multiple temporal continuums.

This article by Böttiger in particular caught Goethe’s eye, not least because he and Schiller were in the process of compiling xenia of their own in the form of polemical and satirical verses aimed at the contemporary literary landscape. In January of 1796, Goethe draws Schiller’s attention to Böttiger’s articles, even including a copy of this issue of the Modejournal in the letter. He takes swipes at both Böttiger’s abilities as an antiquarian and the Modejournal itself: “The writer doesn’t know that one is being prepared for him for the next year, these people are just so pitiful and untalented when it comes down to it. Offering only two of these little poems, and so poorly translated on top of it. It’s as if everything spiritual had taken flight from this fire-red soft cover [Es ist aber, als wenn alles Geistreiche diesen feuerfarbenen Einband flöhe].”¹⁰⁷ The journal’s lack of spirit (Geist) implies a certain deformation or formlessness. Goethe suggests, in contrast, that his and Schiller’s xenia project is doing justice to the language, style, and formal innovations of the ancients. This extends to these modern poets’ effortless ability to invent new verses in this style on a much more prodigious scale than Böttiger could. Goethe writes, “The distichs increase daily, they are now up to around two hundred.” For Goethe and Schiller, the xenia are tools for polemical self-differentiation in a crowded literary market, while for Böttiger, they are aligned with satirical entertainment as a consumable literary commodity and with the passing pleasures of the festival week.¹⁰⁸

Seen in light of Böttiger’s genealogy of new year’s gift giving and the editors’ deliberate timing in positioning pieces on these festivals in the first issues of the new year, Goethe’s carnival writings might retroactively come into view as not unlike one of the journal’s “new year’s presents of fashion.” Bertuch and Böttiger are in the business of giving readers things that they like and want, and the new year’s gifts are material objects that fuel readers’ desires for more. A reading of the carnival piece as a type of print luxury promoted to readers cast new light on the relative “smallness” of the book mentioned by Bertuch in the advertisement for it, for this smallness links the book with other ephemeral print objects in the journal. In light of the business model of the Modejournal, such a reading of the carnival piece takes control of the piece out of the hands of the author and the literary politics that Goethe and Schiller pursue. The act of viewing the piece as part of the constellation of content on offer in the journal brings the piece’s publication into alignment with certain cyclical patterns of recurrence mapped by Goethe himself, yet this series of associated texts—and the shapes of time that they catalyze—is also more thoroughly saturated with a sense of the commercial standing of print, fashion, and “small” luxury. Seen in this way, the visual culture of the Modejournal promote a form of self-reflective observation of time. Collector objects attune readers to the passing of time, to questions of what remains and what does not, and to the different shapes of time which these objects mark, whether it is the persistence of antiquity in the present, the patterns of the print marketplace, the time of the seasons, the time of the revolution, and more. This is a mode of pleasure, enjoyment, and diversion befitting the realm of “small” print luxury, but it is also a commemorative mode that gives readers tools for observing time by demonstratively giving them an ongoing series of differently timed material objects. As scholars have noted in regard to practices of reproduction and copying in this period, proponents of reproduction such as Böttiger, Bertuch, and Kraus shift the question of originality from the work to the technology and the materiality of the copy.¹⁰⁹ The association of specific brands with specific new technologies (or the adept use of existing ones) help manufacturers and publishers such as Wedgwood, Klauer, Bertuch, and Böttiger develop recognizable brands. The question is not whether an art object is one of a kind but whether it is a Wedgwood or a Bertuch and Böttiger, if you will. This brings the larger commercial project of the Comptoir into view as a kind of marketing operation: what matters first and foremost is not that something in the Modejournal is extraordinarily original or geistreich, but that it is packaged in the journal’s fire-colored packaging and readers know that more will follow in the coming months.