More than “Merely a Fleeting Page”?

The journal’s foremost immediately apparent temporal point of reference is fashion’s “thirst for newness and variety” and its “transient and quickly changing” nature, as Bertuch and Kraus announce in their introduction.¹⁰ They emphatically connect the journal’s format to actuality and newness, an association all too typical in fashion journalism.¹¹ The journal is to serve as a fleeting, “flying page” (fliegendes Blatt) or flyer (Flugblatt) that can keep up with the new:

Fashion is a fickle goddess that changes her appearance almost as frequently as the moon; and it is with this in mind that we have made our journal merely a fleeting page [daß wir dies Journal blos zum fliegenden Blatte machen], so as to deliver timely updates and exact descriptions, colors and drawings of every new fashion and invention, regardless of what branch of luxury they belong to.¹²

The monthly appearance of the journal and its advertising supplement are calibrated with the diachronic unfolding of the new and with the cyclical rhythms of the fashion market centered on trade fairs and other recurring commercial events.¹³

The journal also makes a point of juxtaposing fashions past and present, offering a perspective onto the broader arc of history through the lens of fashion. As Bertuch states in an advertisement for the journal,

In fact, a nation is characterized by nothing more strikingly and more clearly than by the sort of luxury it pursues and by the spirit of its fashions, and an accurate history of the fashions of just several of the most important peoples over the past few hundred years would certainly be a most interesting contribution to a future philosophical history of the human spirit.¹⁴

Fashion’s ubiquity makes it a prime candidate for providing unique insight into the history of different peoples. As Georg Simmel would observe over a hundred years later, fashion is such a compelling topic because of “the contrast between its extensive, all embracing distribution and its rapid and complete transience [Vergänglichkeit].”¹⁵ Bertuch’s method of juxtaposing different historical fashions is grounded in Enlightenment conjectural philosophy and its proto-ethnographic interest in the customs and manners of so-called primitive peoples, as well as in the revaluing of sociability, vanity, and self-regard (Rousseau’s amour propre or Kant’s unsocial sociability) in defense of certain forms of fashion and luxury. Bertuch’s original plan was to house historical inquiries in offshoots from the monthly journal, including a yearly fashion calendar titled Pandora (three volumes of which appeared between 1787–1789), and a yearly Annalen des Luxus und der Moden (Annals of luxury and fashion), but he ended up integrating this historical scope into the journal itself. This historical side of Bertuch’s journalism is concerned with patterns of reactualization (of “the old of all centuries becoming new” as the introduction to London und Paris reads or of “ebb and flow”) and of linear progress or decline implied in the gesture to universal history.

Inventorying contrasting fashions is a central tool in the journal’s aim of compiling material for an expansive future cultural history. The introduction calls upon readers to “collect” and submit their own examples of past and present fashions and inventions.¹⁶ The February 1790 issue provides a good example of this style of history writing, as the editors direct readers to consider two adjacent articles as “counter-” or “companion pieces” (Gegenstücke) and “archival pieces” (Akten-Stücke): “We deliberately place [this and the following article] next to each other to offer a gauge of the luxury of different times and nations.”¹⁷ The terms “piece” (Stück) and “companion piece” (Gegenstück) are common in the journal literature of the period, applying both to articles and images. Underlying these terms is the presumption that the individual contents of serial print will be juxtaposed with other more or less similar kinds of texts or images. The first of these companion pieces is titled “Measure of the Fashion and Domestic Needs at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century in Germany,” and it presents an excerpt of receipts of the Duke Johann Ernst von Sachsen-Eisenach from the years 1591 to 1603, which is intended to exhibit the presumably modest taste of a prominent nobleman of the region. This list is a good example of how inventories of commercial goods are integrated into the journal’s broader historical profile.¹⁸ There is an archival quality to this list, which documents and memorializes particular fashions and tastes, some of which may have become obsolete. The second piece, titled “Revenues of a French Court Dentist up to the Year 1789,” is a relic of a much more recent past, detailing the unfathomably high pension (survivance) of a court dentist and the cost of the royal family’s weekly teeth cleanings.¹⁹ This is a past that was still the present as recently as six months earlier, in the spring and early summer of 1789. To be sure, the takeaway from these “counterpieces” is rather predictable—the corrosive excesses of the French ancien régime make the German nobility appear modest in their tastes—yet readers are also given a detailed glimpse of the material objects that filled the domestic life of the past. At this early stage in the revolution, Bertuch and his anonymous French correspondent are still relatively friendly to its aims; like many moderates in Germany, they turned against the Revolution after the Reign of Terror.²⁰ Yet this rather whimsical treatment of royal dentistry occasions a more serious reflection on time and history: as the article notes, “a gap opened up in between June 1789 and January 1790 that is wider than a century.”²¹ The juxtaposition of these two articles prompts readers to evaluate historical breaks and continuities and to scale frames of time up and down: in certain circumstances, the present might bear more similarity to a period two hundred years ago than to one six months ago. Lingering with lists of material objects, taking stock for future historical evaluation, and juxtaposing various partial inventories are thus central to Bertuch’s stated historiographical aims.

Bertuch expands on this juxtapositional aesthetic in the 1798 founding of London und Paris with Böttiger as coeditor. It was their original intention to shift much of the Modejournal’s ever-growing material on England and France into this new journal, what they call the Modejournal’s “foreign sister.”²² Published eight times a year, London und Paris shared the Modejournal’s size and appearance and would prove to be equally profitable. Both were important forerunners to the double-columned Unterhaltungsblätter (journals for literary entertainment) of the early nineteenth century, which were shorter and published multiple times a week. London und Paris reinforces the Modejournal’s focus on England and France as the most important hubs of modern cultural and political life and indeed as the period’s most important “counterpieces.” The parallel depiction of contrasting examples has roots in Plutarch’s accounts of Greek and Roman lives, and the contrast of past and present is a mode of historical and journalistic writing favored by Böttiger, who is himself an antiquarian.²³ Calling on the reader to compare different times and places had been a long-standing form of historical reflection, but it also is well suited to modern serial formats, which present readers with an ongoing stream of various kinds of artifacts and reports. The parallel discussion of antiquity and modernity is one possible permutation of this kind of historical journalism, but other variants were possible: the author and antiquarian Karl Philipp Moritz, for example, founded a journal comparing modern Italy and Germany titled Italien und Deutschland, in Rücksicht auf Sitten, Gebräuche, Litteratur, und Kunst (Italy and Germany, regarding mores, customs, literature, and art) (1789–1792), and the historian and journalist Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz published a multivolume anthology titled England und Italien (England and Italy) (1785–1787).

Juxtaposing “counterpieces” is just one technique of writing cultural history at the disposal of the Modejournal. The “fashion news from …” (Mode-Neuigkeiten aus …) rubric likewise plays an important role in including political news in the journal and contextualizing it historically.²⁴ The fact that many of these pieces are dated with day, month, and year lends them journalistic actuality. It is a common refrain that current events make any discussion of fashion impossible. The Modejournal’s very first July 22, 1789, report on the revolution is prefaced by the following disclaimer: “Do not expect any report from the realm of fashion from me this issue.”²⁵ The Parisian correspondent usually would bring the subject back to fashion, especially to the dress and behavior of revolutionary actors, including the “fashionable political colors” (politische Modefarben) of revolutionary insignia or clothing items that typify the moment in some way. The interest in contemporary trends extends to the consumption of political news. As Bertuch notes in a short 1792 article on “Fashionable Reading Material,” “the reading of newspapers and political flyers and pamphlets” has become an all-consuming fashion in its own right: “From the regent and ministers down to the wood-cleaver in the street and the farmer in the village tavern, from the lady in the dressing room to the servant girl in the kitchen, everyone now is reading newspapers.”²⁶ Reading comes into view as something more than just vicarious involvement in distant events: if reading about politics is a specifically revolutionary fashion, then German readers are as à la mode as anyone.

The trope of the revolution as the ultimate fashion of the day is also never far from the minds of editors, correspondents, and readers. As the Modejournal’s Parisian correspondent writes, political news is a proper topic for the journal because politics is itself an expression of fashion: “In France, politics is now the only universal fashion that exists, it is that through which everything courses and from which an entirely new spirit of the luxury of the nation and its pleasures is developing.”²⁷ This statement reveals a bit more of Bertuch’s attempt to track historical time via the practices of foreign peoples, trends in manufacturing and entertainment, and the circulation of ideas. To this end, the journal presents readers with excerpts from a new French dictionary of political terms (a “Revolutionary Fashion Dictionary”) and its redefinition of terms such as “nation,” “people,” “citizen,” or “state,” or with a copy of the French revolutionary calendar, calibrated for reader reference with the Gregorian calendar, to which I’ll return later in this chapter.²⁸ Yet pejorative inflections of the topos of the revolution as (mere) fashion are always close at hand. Amid the growing political violence in 1792 and 1793, the journal starts carrying satirical articles about being cured of the “French fashion fever” (fränzosische Mode-Fieber).²⁹ The association of revolutionary ideas with a passing fever brings us back to intersecting tropes of fashion and print ephemerality.³⁰ Is reading about the revolution a sign of something more permanent, or is the revolution simply fated to be superseded by the next new thing? Is an archive of snapshots of the present sufficiently durable for the writing of history at some point in the future? The manifestations of fashion as a broader index of cultural history come into view as an ambivalent historiographical template, for changes in fashions reveal something about different historical presents, yet they rarely fail to be supplanted by the new and unexpected.

“Interesting” and “Frightening” Tableaus

In addition to being keenly aware of the temporalities of fashion, the Modejournal is also very involved in the inherently visual aspects of fashion, which has long been based in scenes of display, self-presentation, and conspicuous as well as vicarious consumption. Historians have described the fashion imagery of the late eighteenth century and the serial formats that disseminate it both as the “apogee of [the aristocratic] civilization of the visual” and as catalysts of decidedly modern forms of spectatorship.³¹ This visual project is at the heart of the Modejournal; as its introduction states, the journal is to “deliver” to readers, “from time to time,” an “interesting tableau [Tableau] that is to … entertain but also to teach readers to more accurately judge and make use of this giant ebb and flood through the more general overview [allgemeinere Überblick] that they gain from it.”³² Bertuch and Kraus link the Horatian maxim of prodesse et delectare to serial form, with the journal’s periodicity allowing for ongoing tableaus “from time to time.” As the news of the revolution sweeps across Europe, the journal’s Parisian correspondent often urges readers to prepare themselves for “great, most interesting, in part also terrifying tableaus.”³³ In an 1794 article on the guillotine, Bertuch describes the device as a “gruesome object” (schauerlicher Gegenstand); the journal’s discussion of it “places it sternly in our gallery next to images that awaken much sweeter feelings.”³⁴ Construing the consumption of cultural journalism as a form of serial viewing is at the heart of conceits both of attaining overview and of lingering with individual objects, whether they are tools of political terror and/or justice or more benign domestic accoutrements.

The frequent reference to the tableau and its historiographical potential builds explicitly on the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose Le Tableau de Paris (1781–1788) and Le Nouveau Paris (1798) pioneered the genre of the literary tableau as a short urban sketch, a textual object emphasizing visual observation and a sense of the city as a quasi-stage. With earlier templates in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century depictions of social types, Mercier deploys the format of an ongoing collection of short observations to document a rapidly changing city. He publishes one installment after another of his twelve Tableau volumes, with his six-volume Le Nouveau Paris addressing the “new” postrevolutionary age, and he positions himself as a social critic with an unsparing eye for the hypocrisies of the pre- and post-1789 eras.³⁵ The Modejournal likewise straddles these two periods, and Bertuch, Böttiger, and their correspondents extensively refer readers to Mercier’s pre- and postrevolutionary work.³⁶ The political stakes of the “new” tableaus and the Modejournal are relatively similar, with Mercier opposing the radicalism of the Reign of Terror and remaining a political moderate throughout the 1790s; as we will see, though, Bertuch and Böttiger critique Mercier’s Le Nouveau Paris for its datedness during the rise of Napoleon.³⁷

The tableau is of particular interest to me in the context of the broader issues of this book because it is an inherently serial form and thus a flexible vehicle for generating more writing. Though Mercier is the sole author of his tableaus, his approach encourages multiple perspectives: as he writes, “if a thousand people followed the same route, if each one were observant, each would write a different book on this subject, and there would still be true and interesting things for someone coming after them to say.”³⁸ The tableau genre thus lends itself to scaling up and out for a variety of single- and multiauthor forms of writing characteristic of the periodical press. Indeed, the literature of the urban sketch continues unabated into the mid-nineteenth century, with figures such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Charles Baudelaire, and more embracing the form, and multiauthor anthologies such as Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (The French, painted by themselves) (1840–1842) proliferating.³⁹ The tableau is also of central interest to me because it is a telling example of the temporalization of format and genre conventions. The conceit of offering readers tableaus draws on the characteristic use of visual tables in previous centuries to inventory different kinds of information in written and visual forms, placing objects and phenomena in static, detemporalized categories.⁴⁰ In contrast, the literary-journalistic tableau and its project of documenting the transience of urban life is based more on the temporal unruliness of serial print and the sense of a dynamic city. As Mercier writes in the preface to his Tableau de Paris, he has eschewed earlier topographical descriptions of the city, “the story of every castle, college, and alleyway,” to instead “concentrate on customs and their rapidly changing nuances.”⁴¹ He goes on: “I have made no inventory or catalogue. I have sketched what I saw; I have varied my Tableau as much as possible. I have depicted the subject from many points of view.”⁴² There is clear evidence of this temporalization in the fact that other journalists like Bertuch and Böttiger criticize Mercier’s writings for depicting the city as it no longer currently is. If the tabular inventory functioned in early centuries as a tried-and-true, largely detemporalized means of presenting information in both written and visual forms, the temporalized literary-journalistic tableau relies more on the temporal unruliness of serial print than on any aspiration toward stable classification.

Mercier’s writings are quite influential in the world of German letters in the 1790s. German journals and serial anthologies of the period commonly invoke scenic viewing in their titles, such as Der Pariser Zuschauer (The Parisian spectator), Pariser Laufberichte (Paris walking reports), Zeichnungen zu einem Gemälde des jetzigen Zustandes von Paris (Sketches for a painting of the current condition of Paris), and more.⁴³ Such collections continue long into the nineteenth century and expand to other cities, with the emergence of tableaus of Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna, and more.⁴⁴ Along with Mercier’s collections, another important template for this emphasis on viewing and observation is Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, which was imitated by the German-language so-called moral weeklies of the mid-eighteenth century. Notions of newness and the image converge in the semantics of spectatorship, with many of the terms closely associated with periodicals—“novella,” Neuigkeit, “novel,” “story,” “image,” “piece” (Stück), “painting,” “sketch,” and more—functioning as synonyms and shaping reader expectations for more.⁴⁵ At the same time, though, the cultural journalism of the 1790s bears the trace of an essential temporalization, with writers and readers sensing what they are observing as unprecedented and new rather than as instantiations of long-standing moral truths.

The tableau is likewise a central conceptual anchor of the “foreign sister” to the Modejournal, the journal London und Paris. As Bertuch and Böttiger put it in their programmatic introduction,

But the pictures [Gemälde] of the mass of people, as they drive each other around daily, amid these consequential world events in London and Paris, whipped on by thousands of desires and needs, a scene [Scene] of the most lively human life that is renewed with every morning that reddens the gallery of the Louvre and the gothic towers of Westminster Abbey, in short, a tableau mouvant of these two cities, composed and copied down by adept observers on location and at the very place, captured in the moment of the most lively movement: [it would be a worthwhile undertaking] to arrange this periodically and therefore to place, in quick succession, in the hands of the German newspaper reader and observer of ongoing world affairs, an ever-rejuvenating sketch of the two theaters that corresponds ever anew to the times.⁴⁶

Echoing the introduction to the Modejournal, Bertuch and Böttiger cast the journal’s ephemerality as a virtue, suggesting that its periodicity synchronizes it with “ongoing world affairs” and that the journal approximates the “scenes” its correspondents are observing in real time. Though London und Paris is published only eight times a year, the editors invite readers to imagine the journal’s correspondents setting out into the city each day as walking tour guides or cicerones.⁴⁷ In this model, new tableaus appear diachronically, both in sync with daily and seasonal times and with the rhythms of serial publication. The movement of the tableau mouvant corresponds both to the movements of peripatetic correspondents through the city and to the forward movement of the journal itself through time. Like Mercier, Bertuch and Böttiger evoke earlier topographical travel writing focusing on iconic architecture, while offering a more temporalized vision of the city: both the city’s and the journal’s correspondents are on the move, changing with the times.

It is in this context that Bertuch and Böttiger argue that Mercier’s model of the tableau requires medial updating, as they once again raise the question of the best format for representing the present. Mercier’s writings run the risk of presenting readers with out-of-date accounts of the times: “How eagerly have we waited the past two years for his second tableau, which was only delayed because the skillful painter of scenes had his newest paintings grow old under his pen?”⁴⁸ Mercier’s single-author, serialized books risk portraying the city as it appeared yesterday rather than “today”:

But who could even think himself capable of capturing this fermenting and brewing, this burning and dissipating, this precipitation and sublimation of the most dissimilar substances in a fixed description, and a completed depiction [eine feststehende Beschreibung, und eine geschlossene Schilderung]? I certainly can say: this is how it is today. But in just a few weeks, the actors, decorations, and audience are often new and the old piece is performed with new settings and for new audiences. Whoever wants to write a book about this only lays gravestones. But a regularly recurring periodic writing [Schrift] rejuvenates itself with that which is rejuvenating, flies with the flying genius of the times, and delivers ever fresh paintings, just as it itself is fresh.⁴⁹

In a flurry of mixed metaphors evocative of an ever-changing present, the editors describe the present day as a “retort” (a glass container used in distilling liquids and other chemical operations) in which heterogenous materials ferment, transmute, and potentially settle. Even though Mercier himself came down on the side of open-ended literary reportage rather than of the completed work, Bertuch and Böttiger cast his bookish works as insufficiently fresh and dynamic. This passage also draws on the association of the tableau with the theater and its many moving parts, an association that Mercier himself cultivated as an author of plays. Though Bertuch’s and Böttiger’s emphasis is on the new, they also recognize how the past can still remain at work in the present, with some aspects—“the old piece” (das alte Stück)—being continued while other aspects are switched out. This temporal figure evokes the sense of a limited, repetitive theater repertory, suggesting that the periodical’s format allows it to be ever attentive to the persistence of the old in the present. Yet if Bertuch was comfortable accessing a notion of history repeating itself according to predictable patterns when contemplating the “ebb and flow” of historical fashions in the early 1790s, here the return of the old seems much less predictable. The best the journal can do is keep up, to stay aloft with the “flying genius of the times.”

I have already mentioned Goethe’s indictment of Bertuch’s fashion journalism as being “confusedly pieced together” (konfus zusammenstückelt).⁵⁰ Yet, like Mercier, Bertuch and Böttiger treat such confusion as a virtue, framing their journal more as a receptacle for ever-shifting contents than as a site of coherence and permanence. The conceit of the tableau allows for the juxtaposition of multiple representations of the present that also stand in an open-ended relationship to one another. Multiple Parisian and London tableaus stand side-by-side, “together” but not in any necessary or logical relationship other than one governed by the notion that things are happening at the same time. This takes us back to the logic of the “counterpiece” or “parallel.” The aspiration to offer an overview inherent in the historical tableau is at best limited to a series of different overviews of multiple presents—“this is how it is today”—and the task of collating multiple tableaus is left to the reader. At the same time, Bertuch and Böttiger are attuned to how the rhythms of serial print shape a sense of time and history. Despite coming out only eight times a year, the periodicity and sequence of articles at work in London und Paris simulate to some extent the day-to-day flow of time and impart a sense of the coexistence of multiple temporalities. In the introduction to London und Paris, though, Bertuch seems to temper his bullishness ten years earlier about the Modejournal’s ability to provide philosophical-historical overview, noting here that it is too early to pursue any kind of “serious history” of the present epoch, to “untangle” the “thousandfold knot of intertwining written and oral traditions” (dem tausendfach verschlungenen Knäuel schriftlicher und münndlicher Traditionen) to which the journal itself contributes.⁵¹ In the service of accelerated cultural journalism, the tableau is an all too incomplete form of historical knowledge, but it also has the potential of being as up-to-date as possible.

“Drawings of Every New Fashion and Invention”: The Journal’s Fashion Plates

As a journalistic conceit and literary genre, the tableau’s purchase on the visual imagination remains mediated through language. Of course, actual images do figure quite prominently in Bertuch’s various publishing projects—the Modejournal alone contained over 1,500 images across its forty-year run—and such images were at the heart of Bertuch’s efforts to shape the public’s taste in fashion, design, and the visual arts.⁵² His publishing house aggressively intervened in the contemporary market for illustrated print that cut across journals, pocketbooks, almanacs, art books, lexica, scholarly journals, and more and built on the popularity of print imagery in other European countries.⁵³ This also included children’s literature: the twelve-volume, encyclopedic Bilderbuch für Kinder (Picturebook for children) (1790–1830) was the most successful product of the Landes-Industrie-Comptoir and is a telling example of an ongoing anthology based in serial imagery—“instruction for the eye” (Unterricht für das Auge), as Bertuch puts it.⁵⁴ The reading boom at the time, described as a passion or frenzy for reading (Leselust, Lesewuth), was accompanied by a concomitant Schaulust, or passion for viewing, and Bertuch sought to tap into this to the best of his abilities, not least by according fashion plates a prominent place in the Modejournal.

The fact that the artist Georg Melchior Kraus was listed as the coeditor of the Modejournal until his death in 1806 shows how the journal’s identity is firmly anchored in the “drawings [Zeichnungen] of every new fashion and invention,” as he and Bertuch put it, that are part of each issue.⁵⁵ This “image factory” (Diers) played an instrumental role in establishing the brand of the Modejournal, for it was responsible for producing the journal’s distinctive fashion plates.⁵⁶ The images were commonly placed in a section at the end of each issue, except in the case of the occasional title plate (Titelkupfer), and range in size from single pages to gatefolds opening to the side or the bottom. The plates were made through drypoint line etching on copper plates and commonly feature one or more figures or objects etched in outline and isolated on a blank background, as we see in the image of an officer’s uniform of the new revolutionary National Guard and a young woman wearing an informal yet “elegant demi-negligé” (figure 1.1).⁵⁷ Even though this is one of the earliest traces of the uniforms and accoutrements of revolutionary actors in the journal, there is already a trace here of the deprecating caricature-like treatment of the revolution as flippant fashion—is the National Guard officer possibly flirting with the young woman?—that comes in later issues. The documentation of particular fashions associated with the revolution and its excesses blurs the lines between journalistic reporting and social critique. Most issues contain several fashion plates exhibiting ladies’ and men’s dress. The journal also includes drawings of furniture and decoration for the home and workplace, as well as representations of monuments, statues, and other artworks. These plates’ uncluttered style focuses the viewer’s attention on individual products, design objects, or works of art, abstracting them from their immediate environment. Such images likewise sometimes show the same item from different sides, functioning in effect like something of a product catalogue. Many images are adapted from French and British sources and are accompanied by commentaries by the journal’s editors or correspondents. This penchant for copying and “image translation” brings into clear view the role of Kraus and the Drawing School in image reproduction. Bertuch and Kraus make the most of the techniques on offer in the period that Mattias Pirholt has recently called “pre- or semi-technical reproducibility,” and their images evoke a sense of functional use and circulation rather than an aspiration to artistic originality (indeed, it was common for Bertuch to include the same image in multiple journals).⁵⁸

The fashion plate witnessed a tremendous rise in the second half of the eighteenth century amid the self-assertion of middle-class cultures of visual representation. Predecessors of the Modejournal in this regard included more developed fashion journalism in Britain and France, representations of national costumes, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “ceremonial” literature that offered positive and negative examples of dress and comportment for “young caveliers.”⁵⁹ The fashion plate organizes and “directs” (as Kaminski and Mergenthaler would say) vision in specific ways, focusing readers’ attention on discrete clothing items and design objects, temporarily removing them from the flow of other objects.⁶⁰ At the same time, though, the Modejournal also trains readers to process an ongoing series of images. This dual technique of lingering with one object and moving through multiple fashions, objects, articles, and more is characteristic of this instructional approach. Fashion images fix the transience of current fashions in place, but they also help readers to visualize historical difference and gain “new alertness to the location of all dress in time.”⁶¹ Readers’ activities in making their way through the journal help to establish patterns of serial viewing, as, for example, in the sequential appearance of figures as readers unfold specific images (many of which were commonly larger than the journal’s octavo pages). Gatefold images such as the one in figure 1.2 from 1810 give readers a large image to enjoy; this image depicts figures from a Weimar masked procession put on by Goethe for Duchess Anna Amalia, and an article in the same issue discusses this event in detail.

This procession is organized around the history of Romantic poetry and depicts figures from the medieval romances of King Rother and the Niebelungenlied.⁶² Each opening of a fold in the plate reveals a new figure, aiding in the effect of imagining the procession, and readers could learn more about it and the female figures’ clothing in a supplemental article. Image commentaries are another tool for guiding reader attention, as they call on readers to flip back and forth between texts and illustrations located elsewhere.⁶³ It is common for images in journals and anthologies of the period to be separated from corresponding text, and the Modejournal is a good example of how readers are called on to navigate their way through various kinds of print objects.

Fashion imagery is also in dialogue stylistically and thematically with other contemporaneous forms of visual culture. This includes the moral-satirical prints of the mid-eighteenth century. With their street scenes and depictions of daily life, the print series of William Hogarth (1697–1764) resonated strongly in Germany, aided by Georg Christian Lichtenberg’s adept commentaries on them.⁶⁴ Artists such as Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801) or Johann Heinrich Ramberg (1763–1840) modeled themselves on Hogarth and were kept quite busy providing prints to accompany novels, pocketbooks, and almanacs.⁶⁵ Such illustrations share a basic affinity to fashion journalism, with representations of the dress and behavior of different social classes and professions fueling many series. Indeed, the fact that the term Kupfer is applied universally to fashion plates and literary illustrations, with the term “illustration” becoming widespread in Germany only in the 1830s, speaks to this affinity.⁶⁶ Readers clearly respond positively to the task of navigating a series of related texts and images, which Bertuch and his coeditors promote with their image commentaries.

The Modejournal and Bertuch’s other publications are also swept up in a flurry of pro- and anti-revolutionary imagery, as we saw with the representation of the uniform of the newly founded National Guard. Though the majority of the journal’s images remain in the realm of fashion and decorative arts, images that deal more or less obliquely with current events are not uncommon in the journal.⁶⁷ Copied images (Nachstiche), including caricatures, from France and England play a central role in the German reception of the revolution. London und Paris focuses on the abundant pro- and anti-Napoleonic imagery more systematically (as we will see in chapter 3), but the Modejournal also contains some caricatures, especially those that treat contemporary fashions and national types, as well as typical songs associated with the revolution, such as “Ah, ça ira!” (1790) or “La Marseillaise” (1793). Caricature and other forms of political propaganda are commonly produced via etching rather than the more laborious procedure of engraving. Simple line etching is favored by journalists and propagandists and comes to be increasingly associated with contemporaneity.⁶⁸ Caricature and fashion journalism share certain stylistic similarities, including the focus on dress and bodily features and the use of outline drawing and underdeveloped backgrounds. Poking fun at the silly excesses of certain clothing styles is part and parcel of the world of fashion and fuels certain clichés about gender and national types.⁶⁹ Exaggerated bodily gestures, ostentatious dress, and the depiction of facial features remain key features of anti-Napoleonic caricature and continue to play a central role in the satirical press of the later nineteenth century. As we will see in more detail in chapter 3, Böttiger is also keen to stress the roots of the representation of comic and grotesque types in ancient satire, peppering his commentaries on modern caricature with antiquarian references.

Outline drawing is where fashion journalism, caricature, and classicizing style intersect.⁷⁰ Popular classicism is a defining feature of the Modejournal’s visual aesthetic, which builds on a more general predilection of German print iconography of the mid- and late eighteenth century. The period’s taste for antique dress and ornamentation draws on the Enlightenment critique of baroque excess and profits from the “rediscovery” of antiquity by the likes of Winckelmann, Herder, Goethe, and others. This classicizing visual language cuts across decorative illustration and self-standing images meant to accompany the growing number of luxury editions.⁷¹ In turn, the Modejournal’s interest in consumer items at the intersection of art and interior design skews toward the classical; as Böttiger notes in 1796, “the editors [of the journal] … eagerly seek to do the proper justice to the taste of the ancient Greeks and Romans in everything pertaining to the arts, costumes, and decoration.”⁷² This dedication to classical style extends to an interest in features of daily life in antiquity. The journal’s valorization of contemporary classicizing design, including furniture and monuments and the reproduction of sculpture, busts, medallions, antique vases, ornaments, and more, is very much caught up in the pragmatic classicism of the age.⁷³ As Catriona MacLeod has shown in connection with the Modejournal, manufacturers such as Wedgwood and G. M. Klauer take part in a realm of cultural production where the serial production of identical objects predominates over the uniqueness of the art object and where classical taste is domesticated and commodified.⁷⁴ Bertuch and his coeditors attempt to tap into the growing market for printed representations of classical—or classically inspired—architecture, sculpture, bas reliefs, ancient gems and coins, and more. Art and cultural journals are important organs for the eighteenth-century popularization of Greek and Roman antiquity, and print imagery is an important ersatz for the grand tour (the antiquarian Böttiger, for example, never set foot in Italy). Even Goethe, who was able to travel to Rome, relies extensively on drawings, etchings, wood cuts, lithographs, and plaster castings as sources for his experience of sculpture, painting, and other artworks that he is not able to see in person.⁷⁵

Small Print Luxury

Bertuch’s attempts to capitalize on this strong market for reproductions and print imagery bring us to a key, final point regarding fashion plates, for they are implicated in both terms of the title Journal des Luxus und der Moden: these plates are necessary for the visualization of new fashions, but, as material objects, they are themselves a form of luxury. Literary products are very much at the heart of contemporary debates about luxury; as Matt Erlin notes, books are “one of the most widely circulated luxury commodities in the period.”⁷⁶ The German market for luxury books had lagged behind other countries at the time, and the 1790s represents a period of significant expansion, with the 1794 Göschen edition of Wieland seen by contemporaries and later observers alike as a key turning point.⁷⁷ Along with costly works editions such as the Wieland edition—illustrated, in the Antiqua font—the period also witnesses a boom in ample “luxury articles in miniature” (as Bernhard Fischer put it) in the form of calendars and pocketbooks.⁷⁸ Bertuch’s role in centering various kinds of print in this discourse cannot be overstated: as he and Kraus write in an advertisement for the journal, the journal’s founding occurs at a boom time for “luxury in every form of life and pleasure,” which includes the “industriousness of our scholarly and non-scholarly manufacturers,” that is, those scholarly “fabricants” trained in putting letters, lines, and color to the page.⁷⁹ The Modejournal profiles itself as a key site for advertising and reviewing luxury books, going out of its way to discuss new books, lexica, journals, and anthologies and giving readers a little bit of print luxury to hold in their hands with each issue.⁸⁰ There is certainly a healthy dose of self-promotion here, with Bertuch attempting to shape the criteria according to which classicizing print objects are evaluated, but it must be said that hand coloring the fashion plates is by far the most expensive part of publishing the journal.⁸¹

This association of print with luxury is on clear display in advertisements for the book version of Goethe’s Das römische Carneval, which Bertuch was instrumental in producing in the late 1780s. In a 1789 advertisement in the Modejournal, he describes this book as “a small, interesting work” and “perhaps the first and only of its kind in this well-known branch of newer luxury.”⁸² The advertisement describes the paper, the typeface, the images, the title vignette, the colored cover, and more. The reference to the work’s smallness aligns this product with other forms of serial print, including the diminutive, often duodecimo Taschenbücher or annual pocketbooks, which would commonly contain multiple illustrations.⁸³ The practice of offering more and less elaborate editions of the same text likewise presented readers with a choice between modest and more opulent products, and such books were a sizeable part of the market for holiday gifts. Smallness could be both a positive and negative quality, as an article in the Modejournal assumed to be written by the artist J. H. Meyer shows. Meyer was close to Goethe and would become the director of the Weimar Drawing School after Kraus died, and his 1800 article takes aim at the “etchings that every book or little book [jedes Buch oder Büchlein] receives as a dowry.” Meyer is critical of “all the little etchings and etchings [die Kupferstichlein und Kupferstiche] that our pocketbooks and novels are teeming with,” distinguishing, it would seem, between full-fledged etchings and more diminutive ones, and he criticizes the propensity of young artists to try to make money through rough etchings for this market before they have matured as artists, producing “grimacing faces [Menschen-Fratzen] en portrait and migniature [sic].”⁸⁴ Meyer operates here with classicizing criteria that contrast artistic permanence and monumentality with smallness, coherent visual form with caricature, and worthwhile “books” and “etchings” with “little” products on the print market. The association of pejorative smallness with the representation of faces is an integral part of a related contemporaneous discourse about miniature porcelain busts—another form of “small” luxury discussed by the Modejournal.⁸⁵ We will return to Goethe’s book and its republication in the Modejournal in chapter 2, but I would like to hold on to the fact that the journal serves as a site for commenting on and promoting (as well as disparaging) diminutive forms of luxury while at the same time presenting itself as a modest luxury good competing for readers in the contemporary marketplace.

Bertuch’s attention to print objects as luxury items also extends to more elaborate and expensive texts. In a 1793 article on “typographical luxury” in the Modejournal, he calls for more editions that imitate the Antiqua “Didotian letters, plates, and vignettes” of the Wieland edition and for more editions of “our classical writers whose works will last centuries” that will function as “a series of … national-monuments” (eine Reihe … National-Monumente).⁸⁶ Here the aspiration for print luxury and a kind of monumental permanence go hand in hand and depend on the book taking on certain qualities of the work of art, something that Bertuch traces directly to the illustrations, which, as he notes, can transcend their typical decorative function (as Bücherdekorationskupfer) and “become genuine beautiful artistic pages” (wahre schöne Kunstblätter).⁸⁷ The discourse of print luxury also points to ways that, despite being tied to the transience of fashion, Bertuch’s journal partakes of the desire for collection, preservation, and permanence. Luxuriousness can dissipate in the sensuous enjoyment of the moment, but luxury items can also call out for preservation and extended enjoyment and for being selected from the flood of consumer items on offer. The sense of the journal as a registry of different fashions as they come and go encourages readers to preserve fashion images as items with a documentary, memorializing, or quasi-historiographical function.

The use of the fashion plate to represent obsolete historical fashions amplifies this archival function, as does the use of plates to commemorate historical and seasonal events and turning points. The Modejournal partakes of the convention, firmly established in calendars, almanacs, and pocketbooks, of including commemorative illustrations to mark a new issue, the twelve months (Monatskupfer), or the seasons.⁸⁸ Such images are particularly common in marking the new year, which, in the case of yearly calendars and almanacs, coincides with their being published in the fall, in time to be available as Christmas or new year’s gifts. Bertuch and Kraus’s take on this convention can be seen in the supplemental plates that accompany each January issue, which they call “New Year’s Presents of Fashion.” In the early days of the journal, these began as fashion vignettes—figure 1.3 is one from 1790—but they later take on a classicizing appearance, as with this “New Year’s Present” evocative of reproductions of antique gems. A “New Year’s Present” from 1809 (see image 1.4) lends a classical theme topical relevance, as readers are presented with a scene of Greek heroes deliberating before the siege of Troy, an altogether timely evocation of military strategizing at a time of the Napoleonic occupation of German-speaking lands. By calling these images “presents,” the editors emphasize practices of distribution and circulation, but they also suggest that readers might be more likely to hold onto these images, even if they might neglect other images of clothing or design objects included in the journal. The marking of a particular time or year can take on increasing urgency in a period of turmoil, with the gesture of preservation taking on a commemorative, even historiographical function; indeed, Clare Pettitt describes these expressly miniaturized depictions of historical sites and events in nineteenth-century serial print as the material objects or “equipment of history” that readers and authors use to make sense of historical time.⁸⁹ Drawing on Bertuch’s valorization of luxury editions as “national-monuments,” we might also consider these texts as smaller, more modest quasi-monumental objects—“paper monuments,” to anticipate a coinage of Jean Paul’s—that enable certain memorializing practices in line with other products for domestic consumption popular at the time, products discussed by Christiane Holm and Günter Oesterle as “serially produced commemoration.”⁹⁰ Viewed in light of such practices of memorialization, the association with classical themes functions as a gesture toward patterns of continuity, repetition, and duration. With their new year’s presents and the journal’s other images more generally, Bertuch and Kraus display an awareness that print objects provide temporal orientation by helping readers consider different patterns of transience and continuity in a time of flux.

An “Archive of the Fashions of Body and Mind”

In closing, we might linger on a specific issue of the Modejournal that brings the logic of the journal as both archive and tableau into resonance with questions of (small) print luxury and the marking of time. The first issue of 1794 comes at a dramatic point in the revolution, for the preceding year witnessed an intensification of the Reign of Terror, with the execution of Marie Antoinette and many others. As the commentary on the Titelkupfer, or frontispiece, notes, “never has Germany and humanity yearned so much for a happy turn of the year as this year.… The wounds inflicted by the madness and lunacy of the robber hordes of France … still bleed, and German bravery, manliness, and moral rectitude [treuer Biedersinn] alone will be able to resist them.”⁹¹ The journal’s editors seek to mark this turn to a new year with a “new year’s wish” that incorporates the desire to commemorate but also turn the page on the previous year: “It is completed, this year of horrific, murderous, and disgraceful actions, which will be eternally written, in human blood, into the annals of the world and will stand there as a warning memorial [Warnungs-Mal] for the nations of the world.”⁹² To this end, the editors present readers with an image of Janus, “the two-headed, symbolically rich god of the turn of the year among the ancients” (see figure 1.5). The head on the left looks back directly at the numerals 1793, and as the authors note, in a westward direction (i.e., toward France). It is shrouded in a black veil, which is intertwined with a cypress branch, a symbol of mourning. The second, unveiled head is turned east, into the new year, and it is wearing the “white tunic of quietude and civil affairs” (bürgerliche Geschäfte). As the commentary notes, the ornamental wreath on this side intertwines “the palm branch of peace and the rose of joy—Germany, may this be your horoscope this year!”⁹³ The classicizing imagery serves as a counterpoint to the commemorative function of the year’s violence and its place in human memory, where it should persist negatively as a Warnungs-Mal rather than as a more positive monument, or Denkmal. This image also delineates multiple frames of time. The line between the two heads establishes a vertical plane that divides the years from each other, and the gaze of the head on the right gazes into the new year and also forward into the pages of the journal. The layout of the image connects practices of reading to the forward march of time: a new issue for a new year.

Directly following this image is an article titled “Two Calendars, the Neo-pagan and the Early Christian en Parallèle,” which details the enactment of the French Republican calendar, likewise an event of the previous year.⁹⁴ The revolutionary calendar occurs under the sign of the “old” and the “new”—it is typical of the French, as the Parisian correspondent notes, “to make everything new, and to tear down all of the old” (alles neu zu machen und alles Alte nieder zu machen).⁹⁵ Here the line between old and new unfolds not on the divide of the new year but rather on the divide between revolutionary and pre-revolutionary time and between modernity and antiquity (here represented by the “altchristlich” Gregorian calendar established in 1582 but based in part on the calendar used in ancient Rome). “Since their heads have started to become dizzy or fall off, every day of the New French [Neufranken] produces ten new idiocies along with each new atrocity.”⁹⁶ This tendency to generate ever new things calls for their documentation and for “a prophetic and witty observer” to collect all the “scurrilities, pasquinades, rhodomatades, and ridiculous national traits of the New French that they have exposed to the world during their new revolutions.”⁹⁷

It is the Modejournal, then, that takes on this documentary task, providing readers with an explanation of how the new calendar works, a summary of its months, its new festival dates, and more: “As our journal, according to its purpose and conception, should be the archive of the fashions of the body and mind of our age, it is also our duty to preserve for posterity this strange phenomenon of French folly and to at the same time provide our readers with a necessary table for comparison [Vergleichungs-Tafel] so as to keep this New French anomaly in order.”⁹⁸ Here the journal’s archival function goes beyond merely documenting the new calendar as a historical curiosity; indeed, after summarizing how the calendar is organized, the editors present readers with a tabulated comparison of the two calendars, en parallèle (or facing), as the title states (see figure 1.6). One can only imagine that this document had various kinds of use values that would prompt readers to set it aside or perhaps cut it out and use it as a reference tool. As the editors note, having this handy tool is necessary to keep “all transactions of trade and computation” (aller Handels- und Rechnungsgeschäfte) from “entering into paralysis.”⁹⁹ This print object, running across eleven pages, provides the informative service of offering the German equivalent of translating the names of each day in the new calendar, but the object is also a gesture of rebuke, marking the continued existence of the Christian holidays that had been expunged from the revolutionary calendar.

Here again, we see the journal page divided up in the service of marking time (though the position of the old and the new has switched from the Janus image’s, with the old calendar now on the right). The tabular presentation of the days of the year and other relevant information (feast days, planting and harvest months, and more) is a typical feature of eighteenth-century almanacs and calendars, including Bertuch’s short-lived fashion calendar Pandora, and is a feature of serial print that would have been immediately legible to contemporary readers. Seen in the light of this familiar convention, this archived print object has value both as a reference tool and as a visual curiosity, or as one more example of a peculiar fashion. Though this calendar has just been implemented across France, the question how long it would last remains open—is it just another scurrile thing thought up by the revolutionaries currently in power? In chapter 3 I explore various satirical gestures at work in Bertuch’s journals in more detail, but here we might note that this object’s commemorative function and use function are both based in readers being presented with a material object that in some way marks and organizes time. This goes back to the conception of the journal as a form of tabulating, inventorying presentation and as a format that presents readers with multiple sequential tableaus. This calendar is one more permutation of a counterpoint or parallel to fuel historical reflection. Like the Janus image, the calendar operates through visual juxtaposition based on the layout of the page and the format of the journal.

In effect, the journal presents readers with two different kinds of print luxury and two print objects, each with different uses and aesthetic values and each with different claims on readers’ attention and on readers’ motivation to preserve such artifacts. I could extend this consideration of different “archival” objects to the rest of this specific issue, but these two objects already give a sense of how the journal marks different shapes of time through its status as material object. Its series of images, both metaphorical and actual, help readers to create certain temporal matrices, to renegotiate the old and the new, the fleeting and the permanent, and the cyclical and the synchronic. Part of the way that the journal prompts readers to view print objects as consumer commodities is to lead readers into the activity of observing themselves observing time. Commemorative gestures of marking historical time are connected to the interaction with specific print objects, and these gestures access, but are not limited to, classicizing visual language. The tableau comes into view as a malleable form existing at the intersection of various kinds of “large” and “small” print formats and, indeed, “large” and “small” articles of print luxury. This imbrication of the tableau, print luxury, and the marking of time leads us to the topic of the next chapter on Goethe’s account of Roman carnival across book and journal versions and the different work these formats do in visualizing competing shapes of time established by the recurrence of certain similar phenomena or events. These shapes include the classical permanence and organic unity associated with the stand-alone work as well as the more jumbled temporalities of cultural journalism that unfold according to the patterns of the literary and fashion marketplaces, contemporary political affairs, and patterns of domestic life.

1. 1.   Gerhard R. Kaiser, “Friedrich Justin Bertuch—Versuch eines Porträts,” in Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822). Verleger, Schriftsteller und Unternehmer im klassischen Weimar, ed. Gerhard R. Kaiser and Siegfried Seifert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 21. On Bertuch’s involvement in the business of paper in particular, see Cornelia Ortlieb, “Schöpfen und Schreiben: Weimarer Papierarbeiten,” in Weimarer Klassik: Kultur des Sinnlichen, ed. Sebastian Böhmer et al. (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012), 76–85.

2. 2.   “Das Contōr, des -es, plur. die -e, gleichfalls aus dem Italiän. Contoro, bey den Kaufleuten, die Schreibstube. In Ostindien führen auch die Niederlagen und Handlungshäuser der Europäer in fremden Gebiethe diesen Nahmen. Nach dem Franz. Comptoir, lautet dieses Wort auch zuweilen im Deutschen Comptor oder Comtor.” Johann Christian Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1793), 1348.

3. 3.   F. J. Bertuch, “Über die Wichtigkeit der Landes-Industrie-Institute für Teutschland,” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 8, nos. 8 and 9 (August and September 1793): 458.

4. 4.   The Cabinet de Mode (1785–1793) is widely regarded as the first modern European fashion journal and served as a model for the JLM and for many of the fashion journals of this time. See Annemarie Kleinert, Die frühen Modejournale in Frankreich: Studien zur Literatur der Mode von den Anfängen bis 1848 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1980).

5. 5.   On galant journalism, see Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the “Ancien Régime,” trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 478–79. See also Joseph Vogl, “Luxus,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al., vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 703.

6. 6.   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Schiller, January 30, 1796, in MA, 8.1, 157.

7. 7.   See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Introduction to the Journal of Luxury and Fashion (1786),” Cultural Politics 12, no. 1 (2016): 29. See also Paul Hocks and Peter Schmidt, Literarische und politische Zeitschriften 1789–1805 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975), 21.

8. 8.   On the connection of the Modejournal to the German discourse about Paris in particular, see Boris Roman Gibhardt, Vorgriffe auf das schöne Leben: Weimarer Klassik und Pariser Mode um 1800 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019).

9. 9.   As Martha Bringemeier has noted, scholars have yet to discover the identity of this Parisian correspondent; see Martha Bringemeier, Ein Modejournalist erlebt die Französische Revolution (Münster: Coppenrath, 1981), 15.

10. 10.   F. J. Bertuch and G. M. Kraus, “Einleitung,” Journal der Moden 1, no. 1 (January 1786): 11.

11. 11.   See Borchert, “Einleitung,” 15; see also Karin A. Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780–1830 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 138.

12. 12.   Bertuch and Kraus, “Einleitung,” 12.

13. 13.   As Timothy Campbell puts it, the diverse media of fashion journalism adapted the “regular rhythms sustained by commercial life [as] a generative matrix for historical reflection.” Campbell, Historical Style, 2.

14. 14.   “Ankündigung [des Journals der Moden],” Anzeiger des teutschen Merkurs (November 1785): clxxxvii.

15. 15.   See Georg Simmel, “The Philosophy of Fashion,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 205.

16. 16.   Bertuch and Kraus, “Einleitung,” 15.

17. 17.   “Maasstab der modischen und häuslichen Bedürfnisse Anfange des XVII Jahrhunderts in Teutschland,” JLM 5, no. 2 (February 1790): 73. The editors refer to the pieces as Gegenstücke in a footnote on 77.

18. 18.   On Bertuch’s broader gestures of inventorying, see Sean Franzel, “Serial Inventories: Cataloguing the Age of Paper,” in Network@1800: Non-linear Transatlantic Histories, ed. Birgit Tautz and Crystal Hall (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2023).

19. 19.   “Revenüen eines Französischen Hof-Zahn-Arztes bis ins Jahr 1789 (Ausz. Eines Schreibens aus Paris vom 6. Jan. 1790),” JLM 5, no. 2 (February 1790): 77–78.

20. 20.   On the politics of the anonymous correspondent, see Bringemeier, Ein Modejournalist, 15.

21. 21.   “Revenüen eines Französischen Hof-Zahn-Arztes,” 78.

22. 22.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 9.

23. 23.   Böttiger’s short-lived two-volume anthology Zustand der neusten Litteratur, Künste, und Wissenschaften in Frankreich (Condition of the newest literature, arts, and sciences in France) (1796) contains a piece titled “Two Parallels” that addresses “revolutionary women in modern Paris and in ancient Rome,” and “revolutionary courts in Athens and Paris.”

24. 24.   On the increased influence of political debates on fashion during the revolution, see Wolfgang Cilleßen, “Modezeitschriften,” in Von Almanach bis Zeitung. Ein Handbuch der Medien in Deutschland 1700–1800, ed. Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix (Munich: Beck, 1999), 209–10.

25. 25.   “Mode-Neuigkeiten,” JLM 4, no. 8 (August 1789): 345.

26. 26.   This appears as a supplement Bertuch wrote for a piece on reading fashions in Germany. “Ueber Mode-Epoken in der Teutschen Lektüre, mit einem Zusatz der Herausgeber,” JLM 7, no. 11 (November 1792): 557.

27. 27.   “Mode-Neuigkeiten aus Frankreich,” JLM 5, no. 8 (August 1790): 460.

28. 28.   See “Neustes Revolutions-Mode-Wörterbuch,” JLM 7, no. 2 (February 1792): 57–74; and “Die beyden Kalender, der neuheidnische und altchristliche,” JLM 9, no. 1 (January 1794): 3–20.

29. 29.   See Jean Claude Gorgy, “Meine Genesung vom französischen Modefieber,” JLM 7, no. 7 (July 1792): 333–42.

30. 30.   As Siegfried Seifert notes, in the mid-1790s, “the political concept of fashion is used by Bertuch ever more strongly and clearly and even almost identically to describe the French Revolution itself.” Siegfried Seifert, “Archiv der Moden des Leibes und des Geistes. Zur Wiederspiegelung der Französischen Revolution von 1789 bis 1795 im Weimarer Journal des Luxus und der Moden,” Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte 23 (2015): 114.

31. 31.   Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 475–76. See also Nicola Kaminski and Volker Mergenthaler’s more recent work on the visual appearance of nineteenth-century journals, pocketbooks, and almanacs, which, as they show, guide the reader’s gaze toward different consumer objects and “market scenes.” Stephanie Gleißner et al., Optische Auftritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2019).

32. 32.   Bertuch and Kraus, “Einleitung,” 10.

33. 33.   “Die großen, äußerst interessanten, zum Theil auch schrecklichen Tableaux.” “Mode-Neuigkeiten,” JLM 4, no. 8 (August 1789): 345–46.

34. 34.   F. J. Bertuch, “Über Erfindung und Alter der Guillotine,” JLM 9, no. 4 (1794): 193.

35. 35.   As Karl Riha puts it, “The consciousness of the metropolis corresponds to the stylistic principle of seriality [das Stilprinzip der Reihung].” Karl Riha, Die Beschreibung der “Großen Stadt.” Zur Entstehung des Großstadtmotivs in der deutschen Literatur (ca. 1750–1850) (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1970), 73.

36. 36.   On the relationship of the two works see Joanna Stalnaker, “The New Paris in Guise of the Old: Louis Sébastien Mercier from Old Regime to Revolution,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 223–42.

37. 37.   See Jeremy D. Popkin, “Editor’s Preface,” in Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from Mercier’s Tableau de Paris, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 16.

38. 38.   Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Preface,” in Panorama of Paris, 24.

39. 39.   On aspects of this immense body of literature, see Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 1830–50 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).

40. 40.   This is a well-known story told by Foucault and others; see Annette Graczyk, Das literarische Tableau zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2004). See also Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte. Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hanser, 1976), 26.

41. 41.   Mercier, “Preface,” 23.

42. 42.   Mercier, “Preface,” 23.

43. 43.   On these and related titles, see Seifert, “Die Französische Revolution im Spiegel,” 173.

44. 44.   See Kai Kauffmann, “Es ist nur ein Wien!” Stadtbeschreibungen von Wien 1700–1873. Geschichte eines literarischen Genres der Wiener Publizistik (Vienna: Böhlau, 1994).

45. 45.   See Reinhart Meyer, Novelle und Journal: Titel und Normen. Untersuchungen zur Terminologie der Journalprosa, zu ihren Tendenzen, Verhältnissen und Bedingungen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1987), 236.

46. 46.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 5.

47. 47.   See Christian Deuling, “Early Forms of Flânerie in the German Journal London und Paris (1798–1815),” in The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives, ed. Richard Wrigley (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014), 94–117.

48. 48.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 5.

49. 49.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 6–7.

50. 50.   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Journal der Moden,” WA, 5, 170.

51. 51.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 4.

52. 52.   For a useful registry of these images, see Doris Kuhles and Ulrike Standke, Journal des Luxus und der Moden. Analytische Bibliographie mit sämtlichen 517 schwarzweißen und 976 farbigen Abbildungen der Originalzeitschrift (Munich: Saur, 2003).

53. 53.   On aspects of this market in England, see most recently Pettitt, Serial Forms.

54. 54.   See Silvy Chakkalakal, Die Welt in Bildern: Erfahrungen und Evidenz in Friedrich J. Bertuchs Bilderbuch für Kinder (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014).

55. 55.   Bertuch and Kraus, “Einleitung,” 12. See also Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance, 10.

56. 56.   See Diers, “Bertuchs Bilderwelt. Zur populären Ikonographie der Aufklärung,” in Kaiser and Seifert, Friedrich Justin Bertuch, 435; and Birgit Knorr, “Georg Melchior Kraus (1737–1806). Maler-Pädagoge-Unternehmer” (PhD diss., University of Jena, 2003), 174.

57. 57.   “Ein Officier in der berühmten National-Garden-Uniforme. 2. Eine junge Dame im Demi-Negligé von neuester Mode zu Paris,” JLM 5, no. 1 (January 1790): plate 1. It was common not to differentiate between etching (Radierung) and engraving (Kupferstich) when using the term Kupfer, as Bertuch and Kraus do for the journal’s images. See Renate Müller-Krumbach, “ ‘Da ich den artistischen Theil ganz zu besorgen habe.’ Die Illustrationen für das Journal des Luxus und der Moden von Georg Melchior Kraus,” in Das “Journal des Luxus und der Moden”: Kultur um 1800, ed. Angela Borchert and Ralf Dressel (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004), 218.

58. 58.   See Mattias Pirholt, Grenzerfahrungen. Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (Heidelberg: Winter, 2018), 129–75. On the importance of French sources for German reproduction, see Annemarie Kleinert, “Die französische Konkurrenz des Journal des Luxus und der Moden,” in Borchert and Dressel, Kultur um 1800, 198.

59. 59.   See Karin A. Wurst, “Fashioning a Nation: Fashion and National Costume in Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1827),” German Studies Review 28, no. 2 (2005): 367–86. On the “ceremonial” tradition and its influence on print of the later eighteenth century, see Werner Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild. Die Krise der Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert und die Geburt der Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1993), 312–17.

60. 60.   See Gleißner et al., Optische Auftritte.

61. 61.   Campbell, Historical Style, 1, 15.

62. 62.   Friedrich Mayer, “Die romantische Poesie. Maskenzug, aufgeführt zum Geburts-Feste der Durchlauchtigsten Herzogin von Sachsen-Weimar am 30.Januar 1810,” JLM 25, no. 3 (March 1810): 139–54.

63. 63.   “Costume der Brunehild und der Prinzessin (als Erklärung zum Maskentafel),” JLM 25, no. 3 (March 1810): 197–98.

64. 64.   As Lichtenberg put it, Hogarth and artists like him, such as Chodowiecki, whose images Lichtenberg likewise wrote commentaries on, offer readers “scenes from the play [Schauspiel] that we see daily and in which we, not infrequently, play a role.” Cited in Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild, 309.

65. 65.   On images in Taschenbücher, see Catriona MacLeod, “The German Romantic Reading Public: Taschenbücher and Other Illustrated Books,” in The Enchanted World of German Romantic Books 1770–1850, ed. John Ittmann (New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2017).

66. 66.   Doris Schumacher, Kupfer und Poesie. Die Illustrationskunst um 1800 im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen deutschen Kritik (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 18.

67. 67.   See Kuhles and Standke, Journal des Luxus und der Moden, for a systematic bibliography of the journal’s images.

68. 68.   See Reichardt and Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution.

69. 69.   See Peter McNeil, “Fashion and the Eighteenth-Century Satirical Print,” in The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (London: Routledge, 2010), 257–62.

70. 70.   See Catriona MacLeod, “Schattenriß (Silhouette),” Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 1, no. 1 (2021): 74–82; see also Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (1957): 279–90.

71. 71.   See Peter-Henning Haischer and Charlotte Kurbjuhn, “Faktoren und Entwicklung der Buchgestaltung im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Kupferstich und Letternkunst. Buchgestaltung im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Peter-Henning Haischer et al. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2017), 69.

72. 72.   Karl August Böttiger, “Venus und die Grazien, zum Glückswunsche für das Jahr, 1796,” JLM 11, no. 1 (January 1796): 6.

73. 73.   On classical style in bourgeois monuments, see Peter Springer, “Denkmalsrhetorik,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, vol. 2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 533.

74. 74.   See Catriona MacLeod, “Skulptur als Ware. Gottlieb Martin Klauer und das Journal des Luxus und der Moden,” in Borchert and Dressel, Kultur um 1800, 267.

75. 75.   See Pirholt, Grenzerfahrungen, 132.

76. 76.   See Matt Erlin, Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 54.

77. 77.   See Haischer and Kurbjuhn, “Faktoren und Entwicklung der Buchgestaltung,” 46.

78. 78.   Bernhard Fischer, “Johann Friedrich Cottas Damencalender (‘Taschenbuch für Damen’),” in Haischer et al., Kupferstich und Letternkunst, 558.

79. 79.   “Geschäftigkeit unserer gelehrten und ungelehrten Fabrikanten.” “Ankündigung [des Journals der Moden],” Anzeiger des teutschen Merkurs (November 1785): clxxxvi.

80. 80.   As Fischer puts it, Bertuch and Cotta “embody a new type of publisher, who, rather than simply waiting for manuscripts that they can then circulate as books, themselves become producers of texts through the array of publication forums that they put on offer.” Bernhard Fischer, “Friedrich Justin Bertuch und Johann Friedrich Cotta. Die ‘Phalanx’ der Buchhändler,” in Kaiser and Seifert, Friedrich Justin Bertuch, 395.

81. 81.   See Knorr, “Georg Melchior Kraus,” 162.

82. 82.   “Das Römische Carneval,” Intelligenzblatt des Journals des Luxus und der Moden 2 (February 1789): xvii.

83. 83.   See Multigraph Collective, “Anthologies,” in Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 41–43.

84. 84.   Johann Heinrich Meyer [presumed], “Genügen uns die Kupferstiche deren jedes Buch oder Büchlein in unsern Zeiten einige zur Mitgift bekommt?” JLM 15, no. 3 (March 1800): 116.

85. 85.   See Catriona MacLeod, “Sweetmeats for the Eye: Porcelain Miniatures in Classical Weimar,” in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, ed. Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 41–72. See also Michael Yonan, “Porcelain as Sculpture: Medium, Materiality, and the Categories of Eighteenth-Century Collecting,” in Sculpture Collections in Europe and the United States 1500–1930: Variety and Ambiguity, ed. Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist (Amsterdam: Brill, 2021), 174–93.

86. 86.   F. J. Bertuch, “Ueber den Typographischen Luxus mit Hinsicht auf die neue Ausgabe von Wielands sämmtlichen Werken,” JLM 8 (November 1793): 605–6.

87. 87.   Bertuch, “Ueber den Typographischen Luxus,” 606–7.

88. 88.   See Fischer, “Johann Friedrich Cotts Damencalender,” 544.

89. 89.   See Pettitt, Serial Forms, 239.

90. 90.   Christiane Holm and Günter Oesterle, “Andacht und Andenken. Zum Verhältnis zweier Kulturpraktiken um 1800,” in Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen, Studien zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung, ed. Günter Oesterle (Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2005), 434–35.

91. 91.   “Erklärung der Kupfertafeln,” JLM 9, no. 1 (January 1794): 63.

92. 92.   “Erklärung der Kupfertafeln,” 64.

93. 93.   “Erklärung der Kupfertafeln,” 64.

94. 94.   On this article, see Seifert, “Archiv der Moden des Leibes,” 114–19.

95. 95.   “Die beyden Kalender, der neuheidnische und altchristliche,” JLM 9 (January 1794): 4, italics in original. The alternative title (“Zwei Kalender, der neuheidnische und altchristliche, en parallèle”) is what is listed in the table of contents at the end of the journal.

96. 96.   “Die beyden Kalender,” 4.

97. 97.   “Die beyden Kalender,” 5.

98. 98.   “Die beyden Kalender,” 5.

99. 99.   “Die beyden Kalender,” 4–5.