Diaries of the Times

Can Sugar Beets Fly?

In July of 1819, Börne announces that he is taking over the editorship of the journal Die Zeitschwingen (The wings of time). In this first issue as editor, he demonstratively excises the subtitle “flying pages of the German people” (des deutschen Volkes fliegende Blätter) from the journal’s title page. Since their inception in the seventeenth century, newspapers have been associated with flight and impermanence; the term “flyer” (Flugblatt) or “flying pages” (fliegende Blätter) is taken from the French feuille volante, which refers more to occasional print products—leaflets, flyers—than to recurring journals, though this connection became more common in the late eighteenth century.⁶ In deleting this subtitle, Börne highlights the Germans’ lack of freedom, their inability to “fly”: in the wake of the French Revolution, they were briefly lifted into the air but have since fallen back down to earth.⁷ This prefatory “Announcement” also references the current lack of political and social freedom via a bookish metaphor: the restoration is an age of parchment, not paper, and “the beautiful pigskin era [schweinslederne Zeit] of folio volumes returns with heavy steps.”⁸ Ironically, the imagined throwback to vellum pages and pigskin binding—and thus to the slowness and heft of handwritten manuscripts and large premodern printed books—is characterized by a periodicity analogous to (but much slower than) that of the periodical. This is a conservative form of reverse remediation, in which restoration forces are metaphorized through the idea of trying to contain the potential of new serial forms. Just like certain kinds of repressive governments, certain media keep marching back, in heavy steps (Schritte) that seem the opposite of any progressive forward movement (Fortschritt).

Die Zeitschwingen is published twice a week in Offenbach, near Frankfurt, and is a four-page, two-column cultural journal somewhat similar in size and appearance to the quarto Morgenblatt. Articles in the journal’s short three-month run under Börne’s editorship address press freedom and censorship, the role of Jews in German society, and antiliberal conspiracy theories, as well as other topics in politics, literature, and art. We might translate the title as “The Vibrations” or “Wings of Time,” and it also connotes rising into the air in flight (in noting the journal’s existence, French newspapers translated the title as Essor or “flight”). Börne’s editorship of the journal coincides with the repressive Carlsbad congress (in August of 1819), whose decrees bring an abrupt end to his editorship and those of many other liberal writers. Short-lived journal projects such as this one are typical at the time, due not least to constant financial and political pressures. Just three months after the opening announcement, Börne is prompted to eulogize the journal in a piece that he would later retitle the “Last Will and Testament of the Zeitschwingen” in his Gesammelte Schriften.⁹ This deeply ironic yet also quite serious short piece returns to flight as a metaphor for freedom: due to the crackdown by the censors, the Zeitschwingen “will lower its wings and adopt the name Sugarbeet Pages [Runkelrübenblätter].”¹⁰ Just like the German people, the journal has experienced a brief period of freedom, only to be grounded once again and relegated to covering unpolitical, mercantile topics such as sugar beets. The journal’s short life parallels the German people’s brief flight into the heights of freedom; with every passing day and every passing issue of the journal under censorship as “sugarbeet pages,” the brief duration of freedom recedes into the past.

At the same time, though, Börne looks to have the last laugh with the censors, taking up Jean Paul’s joke about the accessibility of revolutionary periodicals in an age of censorship that we encountered in chapter 4:

Strict oversight, censorship, common standards! And I should hold back from laughing? The Moniteur is spread out in front of me, these giant pages, this book of the kings of the nineties, the Napoleonic era, and the era of the Cossacks in Berlin. A book dealer recently gave me a big pile of them—and this kind of thing people are just giving away! Princes should pay millions for it … ¹¹

The Moniteur was the leading French newspaper of the French Revolution, later became Napoleon’s official mouthpiece, and continued as an official organ of the French government into the 1810s and beyond. For Börne, it is highly ironic that censors shut down his own modest journal while past issues of this initially much more radical and long-lived publication are so readily accessible. For Börne, as for Jean Paul, the material existence of these seemingly worthless back issues ironically demonstrates the permanence of the ideals of freedom. It is print’s very loss of value that points to the sustained worth of the ideas expressed therein. This ascription of value to ephemera extends to Börne’s own failed journal project. Writing its last will and testament counteracts its short duration, as Börne positions his own work in a continuum of historical periodicals in the service of freedom. And by recalling the Moniteur’s outsize importance, Börne opens up a space between the present and the future, imagining a similar scene of retroactively reading the Zeitschwingen. The ephemerality of journals is not simply tied to the shifting present but also encourages future reception and reactualization, and this future horizon gives the activity of lingering with the present a predictive and even prophetic function. His repeated reference to journals’ orientation to the present thus establishes a broader temporal continuum in which the preservation of past and present ephemera for future readers bears fruit, paradoxically both affirming and conditioning the periodical’s orientation toward the present.

Ten years later, Börne explores a similar technique of writing for the future in the context of republishing his writings from journals in a collected works edition. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the early and mid-nineteenth century is a perennial age of works editions, and many of these are purely retrospective or “complete”—coming at the end of an author’s career or even after his death. The collected works edition is organized around the author figure rather than notions of currentness, periodicity, and seriality and lays the groundwork for writers’ canonization in a pantheon of “national” authors.¹² However, it was also common to have ongoing, open-ended editions, with writers contracted to produce new material for new volumes, and this is the case with Börne’s Gesammelte Schriften. Though he is undoubtedly proud to have such an edition, he dodges the aesthetics of completed, self-standing works, stating in an announcement for subsequent volumes of his Gesammelte Schriften published in 1829 in volume 6 of that edition that “I have not written any works. I have just tried my quill on this and that piece of paper; now the pages should be collected, laid on top of each other, and the book binder shall make them into books—this is all.”¹³ Here, again, we see the association of the sheet, page, or leaflet with miscellaneous writing and its positioning against the logic of the autonomous work; indeed, this announcement comes at the end of a collection of miscellanies first published in journals. This image of layered sheets of paper metaphorizes the occasional status of much of Börne’s writing, as well as the serial unfolding of pieces such as Schilderungen aus Paris. In effect, Börne uses the format of the collected works edition to recast his writings’ occasionality and ephemerality rather than expunging them through reformatting. This is an example of reverse remediation (of a journal into a book) that has a more progressive outcome, with the book taking on the features of the more up-to-date medium. Börne’s practice of collecting his individual writings bears certain similarities to the process by which works editions gather self-standing works, but it also draws on his editorial activities in excerpting, commenting on, and collating different kinds of articles culled from the broader sea of periodical literature. Here again we have a journal-like book.

Börne also highlights this occasional quality of his pieces in an 1829 foreword to an earlier volume of his Gesammelte Schriften, where he draws attention to the fact that this and other volumes include the years of publication of certain articles, including framing remarks for his different journal projects such as the announcement and “Testament” for the Zeitschwingen (see the table of contents, figure 6.1). By referencing the duration between initial publication and republication, Börne once more evokes the tension between success and failure, value and worthlessness, and youth and old age:

In this and the subsequent parts of my collected writings, readers will find articles with political contents, and I have noted the year in which they were written. I did this in order to denote their virtue rather than their age. They remain just as bare and shiny as if they just came from the thought mint yesterday. For political truth does not circulate in Germany from hand to hand, like money, it is not made grubby or misplaced—no, it lies quietly and cleanly in a trunk, unused, untouched. What a beautiful country, where one is born old and where one dies young! We come into the world with the wisdom of our grandfathers and we leave behind the wisdom of our grandfathers without adding to it. We are stubborn cattle who pay for the past as well as for the present, and who must hand the present down to the future in the manner that we have received it.¹⁴

Despite these texts’ relative old age (though none are older than ten years old), they have remained youthful, fresh, and current because they have never been truly circulated and debated and because the conditions they critique have not been improved. Change occurs so seldomly and slowly in the restoration era, and new, “virtuous” political ideas preserve their freshness, even if they are several years old, in contrast to the genuinely backward-looking ideas and practices kept in circulation by the authorities. Republication might help Börne’s texts to be reencountered, but it also reintroduces the prospect of being properly encountered after earlier missed opportunities for initial publication. Ideas both friendly and antagonistic to the conservative political order depend on structures of repetition, of handing things down, and of collecting and recirculating. Both subversive and conservative modes likewise assume that certain things of more or less old age stay current and new.

That said, it is unnatural for the young to be born old and the old to die young and for the past to serve as the exclusive model for the present and the future alike. Börne mobilizes this trope as part of a publicational politics that attaches a temporal marker to publications in anticipation of their future reception. Even though he would later come to be associated with the Young Germany movement, here he puts forth a more complicated idea of youth by filtering it through the practice of reprinting writings originally published in journals. These texts were born and have stayed “young,” even as they have “aged.” Youth is tied to a certain understanding of print materials in which coming into being in certain time-specific, potentially short-lived contexts is both a virtue and a limitation. By recirculating these texts and marking their original publication dates, Börne suggests that their moment will come and that we need to wait for the time when they become truly of the present or contemporary. The original date of publication and subsequent date of republication both point to an indeterminate future date where genuine reception is possible.

The technique of marking the original date of publication and collating these writings into a single book establishes a sense that his writings constitute a sequential series, both of different versions and different texts. But, as we can see from the title page, many of the texts are not in chronological order. These different writings each stand in a slightly different relationship to their potential future actualization, but they also create the sense of an author writing with political “virtue” and conviction over time, a writer dedicated to writing about such topics into the future. Here Börne’s mention of the “subsequent parts” of his collected writings stands out; again, the collected edition is premised on the promise that more writings will be added. Two different types of waiting thus come into view: waiting for the future realization of these writings and waiting for the author to reapply himself to the topics at hand. The present volume held by the reader delimits an interval of time that marks both forms of waiting, providing an instance of the continued activity of the author while also recognizing the lack of proper reception of his ideas, with the current reader modeling a form of future reception. Börne folds an experience of time and history into the logic of serial publication, but this seriality is characterized by an irregular, uncertain periodicity—we know neither when the next volume will appear nor when old writings will take on new relevance. More will come, and the past will recur, but in unpredictable ways.

Letters from Paris

Like Heine, Börne rushed to Paris after hearing the news of the revolution, arriving in mid-September of 1831, and his Briefe aus Paris (1832–1834) form the cornerstone of his reputation as a political writer. For many observers, the July Revolution confirms the belief or hope that the revolution might repeat, continue, or complete itself, and the similarities of the 1830 revolution to the 1789 one lead to renewed questions about what is new and what has repeated in the popular energies of the revolution. There was a strong precedent for revolutionary correspondence from Paris dating back to the 1790s and the writings of J. H. Campe, Georg Forster, and others. The letter form allows writers to track ongoing events, a key conceit of various projects of serial Zeitgeschichte as well as of political writers aiming to channel the dynamism of current events into specific political movements. Correspondence reports about the July Revolution for various journals and newspapers are common at this time, including Heine’s articles for Cotta’s Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, which he would later republish under the title Französische Zustände (Conditions in France).²³ Unlike Börne’s Schilderungen von Paris, the texts in Briefe aus Paris are addressed to a specific unnamed female reader; as we know, they are reworked personal letters to his friend and confidante Jeanette Wohl. Given his interest in the brief and the quick, it is no surprise that Börne turns to the genre of collected letters. Here he follows Wohl’s advice, who writes in a November 1830 letter,

Is it not possible to achieve a much fresher, more lively, appealing, and engaging presentation in letters rather than articles? … These letters would not only be placed alongside the best memoirs from the most memorable times, [but] they would also possess historical value. And you could be so useful, so effective as a result! Everyone reads letters, you could spread your principles through them as you would through newspapers.²⁴

Wohl explicitly associates published letters with writing for newspapers, situating them as a natural extension of correspondence reports; indeed, as we saw in part I of this book, foreign correspondence reports around 1800 commonly take the form of an excerpted letter or travel journal, as in Goethe’s “Excerpts from a Travel Journal” in Der Teutsche Merkur. Not only does a similar audience read newspapers and longer-form travel writing, but letters and journal issues alike are both structured as series of shorter, episodic pieces unfolding over time.²⁵ As Wohl suggests, letters are well suited to take the pulse of the present day, but they also allow Börne the chance to write something that stands up to later historical scrutiny, both as subjective recollections akin to the diary or memoir and as more objective, journalistic documentation of the times. Letters cut across book and journal formats, with one of the more influential German travelogues of the day being Pückler-Muskau’s Briefe eines Verstorbenen (Letters of a dead man) (1830–1831). Furthermore, personal memoirs represent an important segment of contemporary reports about the 1789 revolution and remain so through the Napoleonic period and the 1830s.²⁶

The letters open with Börne’s third trip to Paris in September of 1830, almost exactly two months after the revolution, and they end in 1833 with the prospect of his leaving the city once more. His third visit (the first two were in 1819 and 1822) is something of a homecoming, and it also represents the beginning of his on-again, off-again exile from Germany (he lived in Paris from 1830 until his death in 1837). Here one might find echoes of Goethe’s return to Rome and the second experience of Roman carnival discussed in chapter 2, though Börne would likely have none of the comparison, remaining a vehement critic of Goethe throughout his life. Börne is quick to note that this return to Paris finds him at a more mature stage in life, and the difference between youth and middle or old age remains a theme throughout the letters. They contain a remarkable range of topics, as Börne describes his experiences of the city and his responses to public political and cultural debates, explicitly mimicking the style of French newspapers. Theater reviews abound, as do discussions of the literary and periodical landscape of the time and the ways in which various public organs process the ever-shifting political landscape in postrevolutionary France, as conflicts crop up across Europe and as crises such as the cholera epidemic break out. Börne’s detailed accounts of public spectacles—vaudeville theater, public demonstrations, festivities, monuments, and more—likewise stand out as yet another level of representation of the events of the past forty years. Such representations are in constant circulation, and Börne responds to and recirculates them.

Briefe aus Paris is published in six volumes over the course of three years (1832–1834) as part of his Gesammelte Schriften. The sequential publication is thus not dissimilar to that of a biannual periodical, and the location of the letters in the Gesammelte Schriften situates the work as a kind of continuation of the earlier Schilderungen aus Paris, which are in volume 5. The letters are dated between September of 1830 and March of 1833 and make up volumes 9 to 14 of the Gesammelte Schriften. The first four volumes are around 320 pages or twenty Bogen (proof sheets), the lower limit for avoiding precensorship.²⁷ The need to reach a certain page count is an important feature of what Carlos Spoerhase has discussed in other contexts as a “poetics of the Druckbogen.”²⁸ But Börne has to go further than just the minimum Bogen limit to evade the censors, printing volumes 11 and 12 with a fictive title and publication information so as to deceive the censors. Indeed, this fictive title, “Notices from the Field of Geography and Ethnography” (Mitteilungen aus dem Gebiet der Länder und Völkerkunde) is evocative of a recurring, periodical-like format, and contemporary readers found it to be a highly successful satirical ploy.²⁹ As documents of current events, though, the Briefe has a somewhat peculiar publication history, for many letters first reach print up to two years after they are dated (the letters written in the fall and winter of 1830, for example, are not published until 1832). This is not unlike other similarly published letters or travel reports, but, again, the delay does stand out because the texts are positioned as a direct response to the July Revolution. Here, again, we see how Börne engages with frames of time that intervene between writing and these writings’ reception, a delay that parallels the belatedness with which German readers heard about the revolution that Heine would thematize in his Heligoland letters.

The formatting of the Briefe likewise takes on certain important structural similarities to that of the cultural journal. The letter form inherently depends on breaking up the flow of text into discretely written chunks, something that applies both on the macro- and microlevel. In terms of the more general organization of the six volumes of letters, they are broken up into three two-part sections, with the numeration of the letters starting anew in each new two-part section, lending the volumes the appearance of a biannual periodical, with Briefe aus Paris serving as a recurring title heading for changing contents, not unlike the function of a journal title (figure 6.2). Here we see a dual title page of sorts, with the title page of Briefe aus Paris followed by the Gesammelte Schriften title page; both designations present the book that readers are holding in their hands as a repository for contents that are being serially generated. The analogy between the Briefe and a periodical is not far-fetched: memoirs pertaining to specific historical events are intended to be read in tandem with other memoirs, like the common practice of reading different newspapers’ perspectives on the same topic. As the historian Anna Karla observes, “memoirs, as commonly noted in advertisements for their collections, had to be read as part of a series so as not to remain stuck in the partisan perspective of an individual memoirist.”³⁰ This segmentation and numeration of separate volumes is elided by the critical edition of Börne’s writings published in the 1970s (Sämtliche Schriften, edited by Inge Rippmann and Peter Rippmann), which numerates the entirety of the letters sequentially.

The individual letters are also segmented into different pieces, with a single letter sometimes containing five or six discretely dated texts. Of course, this segmentation corresponds to the conventions of letter writing, in which individual letters might bundle multiple missives, yet it is also somewhat evocative of the rubrics common in cultural journals, with natural breaks between individual letters facilitating the shift from topic to topic, from day to day. Individual letters often contain a large amount of heterogeneous material, which is broken into discrete segments through dashes and other diacritical remarks (figure 6.3). The dashes that Börne uses to break up apparently unrelated textual units are likewise borrowed from the journals and newspapers of the time. Additionally, in a departure from the appearance of the pages of newspapers or journals, there is often significant blank space between letters, which can be read as a way of both filling space and managing the particular temporality of waiting for the next letter or the next piece of news.³¹ This is not the blank space of the luxury book that we saw in Goethe’s Carneval; instead, the blank space here points to a pause in the writer’s and reader’s experiences or a pause between the writing and reading of individual letters. From the macro- to the microlevel, then, these different techniques of segmenting the letters help Börne to give shape to his experiences of and attempts to write the complex temporalities of a post-1830 France.

Along with importing certain format conditions of the periodical press into his letters, the work functions as a kind of ongoing commentary on the print landscape, unfolding at a pace that runs both parallel to and divergent from other periodically occurring print objects. Börne frequently directs readers to specific journals or books: he is constantly speculating about the veracity of different reports, constantly waiting for the latest reports about specific conflicts, constantly attending to what in the introduction to Die Wage he called the “open wounds of the time,” and constantly trying to discern what is eventful and portentous from the mass of printed matter that surrounds him. Seen in this light, the letters take on a kind of digest quality (a feature of Heine’s Parisian writings as well), yet in light of this status as digests of the daily news, the delay in publication stands out all the more—readers might have read what Börne is discussing, but it might have been more than a year since they did so.

Especially at the beginning of the Briefe, Börne establishes continuity with his previous writings, touching on urban sites and activities from his Schilderungen aus Paris—reading rooms, eating ice cream, social events with prominent literati, visiting monuments, and more—as well as mentioning other well-known writings of his. This self-citation shores up the uniqueness of Börne’s authorial voice, and it also makes the letters a site where the author reflects on the reception of his own work, something that only grows over the course of the letters as they are reviewed and discussed increasingly frequently. Börne spends more and more time responding to criticism of the Briefe: “My letters are being discussed in all the papers, even in English ones.”³² Such self-reflexivity is characteristic of serial forms that thematize the media environment of which they are a part. Readers are presented with the often dizzying spectacle of letters discussing newspapers that comment on and sometimes even excerpt earlier volumes of his letters. The Briefe remediate the broader sea of print in which they are situated in an impartial, incomplete, yet ongoing manner. This reverse remediation serves to enhance and amplify the progressive impulse generated by the flow of periodicals and newspapers to a fast-growing reading public. Börne’s Briefe are inherently intertwined with the journals and papers then in circulation, mimicking and reproducing them while at the same time selectively setting in motion alternative periodicities and alternate eddies and currents.

“Adieu until the Next Revolution”

We have seen the importance of delay and deferral for Börne’s self-conception as Zeitschriftsteller in the 1820s, and the Briefe, too, are permeated by anticipation and impatience. Börne is never lacking in things to anticipate or things that lose their currency in the process of being communicated, yet, in the intervals of time opened up by delays and interruptions, structures of time become visible. One of Börne’s more telling reflections on the delayed or expired actuality of his writing comes as he thematizes the form of the personal letter in letter 17 in the first volume:

Nine days normally pass before one of us responds to the letter of the other, so that we both often don’t know what the answer is referring to.… Diderot is often bothered by this in his letters and says: “I feel like the traveler who remarks to the person sitting next to him in the coach: ‘That is a very lovely meadow.’ An hour later this person replies, ‘Yes, it is very lovely.’ ”³³

Delays in transmission impinge on the actuality of the occasions under discussion. Communicating about fleeting events runs the risk of potentially missing them. The sense that something will happen in the interim between each individual communiqué is characteristic of Börne’s own situation as a correspondent trying to digest conflicting information about ongoing political conflicts (indeed, this interim finds material form as the blank lower quarter of the page that signals the break between letters). Börne deliberately situates himself in a communicative network in which news and rumors are always coming in and being sent out at different times, a network in which newspapers, letters, pamphlets, and books all play analogous yet differently timed functions. He is constantly waiting for new information to arrive, but he always suspects that it will be outdated by the time it gets there. Waiting is a frustrating yet productive activity, for it entails the active perception of frames of time that one might have to endure in the process.

This kind of delayed or expired actuality is also an integral part of the larger political and historical stakes of his writing, which takes place under the sign of the coming revolution. In something of a continuation of Diderot’s thought experiment, Börne closes this same letter in the following manner: “I am curious—which new revolutions will occur between this letter and my next one.—A new theater is being built on the Place de la Bastille. Adieu until the next revolution.”³⁴ The joke here is that the revolution will occur in the interim between the letter’s composition and its arrival, but this bon mot also allows Börne to set up the idea that the revolution will occur in an indeterminate future. The time between this letter and the next (and the time between these letters’ composition and their arrival with their addressee[s]) opens up a space in which possible revolutions might occur. This is the space of waiting between serial iterations of a periodical form, and this seriality is itself broken up into even shorter segments of time and communication via the dashes he employs. A dash disarticulates curiosity about the next revolutions from the news that a new theater is being built on the Place de la Bastille, and yet the news about the theater is reintegrated into political speculation through the overdetermined location of this new theater as well as through a sense of Paris as the “stage” for political upheaval. This concomitant disarticulation and reintegration of these textual snippets of information models on a rhetorical level the serial structure of the letters themselves, both as individual installments of aggregated letters and as distinct volumes.

Occurring within this extended reflection about letters and the reporting of the ever-shifting present, the statement “Adieu until the next revolution” situates the revolution in a peculiar temporal position: it is less that the next letter will allow the addressee to experience the revolution in any sort of immediacy and more that any news of the revolution will once more be at some kind of temporal remove: “Goodbye until my next report about the next revolution.” The onset of the revolution is situated in the future, yet any reporting of it necessarily relegates its events to the past. This is a complex temporal structure of anticipation and waiting and of retrospective processing and interpreting. Lingering with the ephemeral—in this case, lingering with the expired actuality of the ephemeral present—serves as a way of marking time, of opening up space for a certain kind of waiting for the new, and for the coming event of the revolution. The letter then comes into focus as an archive that enables the experience of certain actualities that have expired or been delayed, or potentially both. And the publication situation of these letters—that they appear almost two years after their composition—introduces yet another level of remove from the imminent revolutions that Börne references, creating ever more temporal complexities that coalesce around a sense of coming revolution.

In my reading, then, Börne’s captivation with ephemeral occurrences is a technique of cultivating an anticipatory sense of an indeterminate future. He delves into the present in order to imagine the relationship between past, present, and future. We saw some of this in the introduction to the Zeitschwingen, where he stages the rereading of the Moniteur in order to imagine the hypothetical situation of future readers encountering his failed journal. The loss of fleeting actuality turns out to not be as serious a problem as one might think for, in the realm of archived print objects, ephemerality does not necessarily connote actual death. Instead, such ephemerality indexes possible structures of historical time and eventfulness. Börne is both ironic and serious when he suggests that the very mediality of his letters carries with it a certain kind of predictive, prophetic potential. Staging the loss of actuality thus comes into focus as an important part of his lingering with the present. In becoming uncurrent but persisting nonetheless, the significance of the ephemeral is transformed; at the very least, expired actuality raises the possibility that it might come to represent something other than itself. The tension between the sense that events are changing so rapidly, on the one hand, and that communication about these events is delayed, on the other, opens up a space for a mode of diagnostic writing. Börne creates something of a map of different moments in time, some of which are linked and others of which are not, a temporal topography upon which various histories can be located and upon which various anticipated, imagined, or hoped for futures can be mapped out. This is a model of history writing different from that of the idealist philosophy of history, which maps out historical eventfulness on the basis of the movement of the concept (Hegel), material forces (Marx), or of “universal” history that seeks a systematic overview of distinct historical epochs (Ranke and F. C. Schlosser).³⁵

The seriality of the letters also contributes to this effect of plural, overlapping temporal frameworks. “Adieu until the next revolution” can also be glossed as “Adieu until the next letter.” As in the introduction to Die Wage, Börne seems especially interested in irregular periodicities that can come to terms with (or at least mark) a variety of contingent delays, disruptions, and misinformation that characterize the topics of his letters. Börne overlays this medial structure onto the turmoil-laden era in history in which he finds himself, allowing him to track the ongoing struggle for freedom across Europe (which will certainly continue after he breaks off the Briefe); a slice of his own life in Paris; snapshots of the world of the arts, public performance and spectacle, and more. The fact that these letters are part of the Gesammelte Schriften from the get-go adds another historical and temporal layer, for the letters are added to an ongoing collection of previous writings, entering into new relationships with them. In each case, the seriality of the letters—the promise that more will come—assures the arrival of something more or less indeterminate in a more or less indeterminate future.

The History of the Coming Revolution

Heine’s critique of Börne’s writing as being negatively influenced by his incessant consumption of the periodical press is more complicated than it looks, not least because this is the very kind of criticism that is leveled at his own work. “His skipping from one topic to another no longer arose from a mad mood but from a moody madness, and was probably to be ascribed to the variety of newspapers with which Börne at the time occupied himself day and night.”³⁶ Heine accuses Börne of only being a man of the present and a writer too involved with the daily press to gain a proper historical overview, yet, as scholars have repeatedly determined, Heine’s portrait of Börne (to the extent that it can be understood as such) contains a good deal of indirect, often ironic self-portraiture. Rather than accept at face value Heine’s criticism of Börne as an unhistorical creature of the present, I instead propose that Börne’s writings offer up a mode of historical awareness that allows for the rediscovery of the past in the future—such rediscovery is, after all, a key feature of the very historiographical project pursued by Heine’s Parisian writings, as we will see in the next chapter.

Like many contemporary commentators, Börne is attuned to Paris as a site of proliferating historical representations and spectacles and to the effects of these historical representations on his own history writing. This includes his admiration of the French vaudeville theater and its ability to incorporate the most current of current events into its performances. As Börne notes in the theater commentaries that pepper his Briefe, it is typical for these plays to depict more or less recent historical events ranging from the early 1790s to the period leading up to 1830. Börne intersperses his accounts of vaudeville with reports on other historically themed public events, including public lectures, panoramas, commemorative festivals, and more. He thereby taps into long-standing modes of cultural journalism and their association with public spectacle and fashion, while at the same time lending the material his particular authorial voice and a sense of historical urgency. This, then, is the context for his reflections on his own unconventional historical method in December of 1832.

Today’s papers are praising this new opera highly. I submit quite eagerly to all of this, because I profit from it. For two years now the boulevard theaters have guided my historical studies. As soon as I saw a historical play, the next day I went and got all the history books, memoirs, and chronicles that deal with the time period and the history that were presented on stage, and I read them. Of course, I would not recommend this way of studying history to young people, but for children and the comfortable [bequeme Leute] this is the proper way; even if I would be hard pressed to pass an examination by Schlosser, in the Ambigu Comique I am the most systematic historian.³⁷

Börne conceives of historical awareness as a multidirectional, multimedial undertaking, with theater criticism in the papers directing him to the theater and the theater leading him back to history writing. Börne’s remark that he gets most of his history from the vaudeville theaters is more than just a cheeky aside. Instead, this insight helps him to diagnose the particular media environment and historical situation in which he finds himself.

Börne writes this letter at the same time he contemplates writing an expressly popular history of the French Revolution, and the language he uses to conceptualize this project is strikingly similar to this passage: “How necessary and useful it would be,” he writes in November of the same year, “to present the atrocities and insanities of the monarchical governments in a comprehensible language accessible to children, women, and childish, womanly men.”³⁸ In characterizing a popular mode of history writing (with clear misogynistic overtones, it should be said), he firmly positions his writing against a more systematic, academic mode and instead addresses youth and adults and men and women alike. This is a time when French histories of the revolutionary period and its aftermath are proliferating and when many German writers seek to do the same. In the end, both Heine and Börne opt for more open-ended formats that incorporate aspects of the modern media landscape (the boulevard theater is a particularly serialized form of performance: Börne remarks that he has been attending them regularly, “for years now”). Börne doesn’t seem repentant about his unscholarly approach to the past: even though he would fail an exam with the Heidelberg historian Schlosser, and even though his work does not share an ideal of systematic universality with Schlossser’s, it has the potential to reach a broader public. To be sure, the letters are filled with Börne’s self-doubt as a historian of the French Revolution, suggesting at one point that the Briefe’s affect-laden mode might be ill-suited to the task of “objective” history and that it has too much “heart” (Herz).³⁹ But there is a performative quality as well as a need for reassurance in such statements, and Börne did in fact make considerable headway toward an initial draft of a revolutionary history at this time.⁴⁰ The ordering of this material is telling, as we can see with notes compiled by Börne organizing literature on the French Revolution, in which he places journals at the top of a list of six items largely composed of serial print (“I. Journeaux. II Mémoires. III. Pamphlets. IV. Histoire. V. Théatre. VI. Pièces officielles.”).⁴¹

The Briefe thus comes into view as perhaps the most important of Börne’s attempts to process the current moment in expressly historiographical terms, probing the potential and limitations of a kind of “history writing of the present,” to borrow Heine’s phrase. The following passage from a letter of January 30, 1831, sheds important light on this attempt:

You write that Heine speaks of the French Revolution in his fourth volume [of the Reisebilder]. I think that he only tried to speak, but didn’t carry it out. What form of speech would be strong enough to contain this wildly fermenting time? One would have to place an iron yoke upon every word, and to do this one needs an iron heart. Heine is too timid [mild]. Campe [Börne’s publisher] also wrote me; he expects me to write something current [Zeitgemäßes] in the eighth volume [of the Gesammelte Schriften]. This eighth volume that I am to write, here in Paris, fifteen minutes from the Tuileries, a half-hour from the Gendarmerie—nothing could be more comical! What, where, on what, with what should I write? The ground is shaking, the table is shaking, the lectern, hand, and heart are shaking, and history, moved by the storm, is itself shaking. I cannot chew over what I have devoured with such pleasure; I am not enough of an ox for that. I wanted to be a prophet for him, throughout all twelve volumes. And can the German be anything but a prophet? We are not writers of history [Geschichtsschreiber], but rather beaters of history [Geschichtstreiber]. Time runs out ahead of us like a deer; we, the dogs run behind it. It will run a long time before we catch up to it; it will be a long time before we become writers of history. But—I want to go now and listen to Beethoven.… The concert starts at 2 p.m. This is better than in the evening. The ear and the heart are more pure prior to eating. Perhaps I will visit the masked ball this evening. Not the one in the grand opera; I know that one from before; it makes you fall asleep; no, the one in the theater at the Porte-Saint-Martin. There I will find my good jacket-wearing people [mein gutes Volk in der Jacke] who fought so bravely in July. Pleasure and life is there. Long coats, boring times [Lange Röcke, lange Weile]—I always found these things together.⁴²

Here we find ourselves back at the criticism leveled at Mercier’s new Tableau of Paris by the editors of London und Paris that it cannot keep up with the changing times; a similar perspective colors Börne’s positive self-identification as a prophet, for, if in his previous volumes of the Gesammelte Schriften, he wanted to be a prophet, his inability to predict or “yoke” the present was a limitation. Yet writing about the present is also by necessity writing about the revolution, a historical event that is still in the process of being completed—history is itself shaking from this storm. The challenge, then, is to prophetically write the “wildly fermenting” time of the revolution, including its past, present, and future. Hence the hunting metaphor of the “beater” or driver of history: Börne feels like he is behind the present and behind the future, yet, by writing, he is in some way also pushing it forward. We have encountered the notion of future-directed, quasi-prophetic writing in the preface to volume 3 of the Gesammelte Schriften, and here Börne casts prophecy both as potential and limitation characteristic of the German observer: because nothing is happening or has happened in Germany in terms of progress toward revolution, there is nothing to write about. This places the German observer in a subservient position, driving the game out into the clearing for noble hunters—perhaps the French historians are able to both participate in and theorize about revolutionary actions? To write the time of the revolution, one must become a future-oriented Geschichtstreiber rather than a past-oriented Geschichtsschreiber; one must attempt to catalyze historical events rather than merely reflect on what has already happened. On this line of thinking, becoming historical is equated with realizing the ideals of the revolution. For the German writer and for Germans, the eventfulness of history is something to come, it is something “out in front of us.” Recognizing that any historical eventfulness in Germany is delayed thereby also entails marking the span of time that reaches back from the past, straddles the present, and projects into the future; it remains uncertain when “we” will catch up with time and be able to write about it as history (yet another marking of a span of time whose duration is indeterminate). Such prophecy anticipates the completion (or repetition) of the revolution but does not specify the duration between now and then.

To linger just a bit more with this passage: “But [Doch]—” Börne inserts another dash into his train of thought, digressing from philosophical-historical reflections to consider his afternoon and evening plans. Again, we have a kind of media-driven confrontation, with the slowness and weightiness of the volumes of his and Heine’s collected writings standing in marked contrast to the fleeting realm of public spectacle. At first glance it might seem that the dash shifts the register and topic of the letter, but this digression involves more continuity than one might think, for a strong trace of revolutionary politics and of the recent historical past emerges at the end, as Börne reports his decision to attend the boulevard theater preferred by the working class, by “my good jacket wearing people, who fought so bravely in July.” Ending on a note of solidarity with those who fought in the July Revolution (and a sartorial note at that), Börne lends the very temporal scales and durations at stake at the end of this passage—long ones and short ones, boredom and entertainment—a political valence. Long duration, lange Weile, and long coattails remind the reader of the persistence of the repressive powers of restoration, while the embrace of diversion, divertissement or Kurzweil, if you will, is associated with revolutionary partisanship and solidarity. Börne thereby shifts his identification from the German people to the French (mein gutes Volk), turning his allegiances away from those for whom the revolution is still to come to those whose steps toward revolution lie in the recent past. He thus ends on a note of implicit hope, namely that the short jackets might portend a shorter duration between the advent of the revolution than what he envisioned in his more historical reflections just prior. This is the hope, in other words, of catching up with time and of closing the distance between the beater and writer of history.

Once again, this scene stages a kind of waiting for the revolution, playfully suggesting a turn away from historical reflections to more fleeting diversions, but doing so exactly to create a temporal topography upon which the recurrence or completion of the revolution can be imagined. The in-between moment, the time of waiting, is not wasted, even if it is spent in masked diversions, for snapshots of fleeting moments in the past and present help to model a prophetic relationship to the future. Börne collects these snapshots, assembling them into a mode of writing time that looks for traces of the future in the experience of heterochronic modernity. This is a mode of writing history that is predicated on the belief that the revolution is not first and foremost a bygone, purely historical event but rather something that is still underway, vibrating, and “shaking” in the present. Like Hegel, Börne equates the process of becoming truly historical with realizing the revolution’s ideal of freedom, yet he seeks to set this process in motion via the vibrations of the contingent and the ephemeral rather than through the teleologically driven necessity of the philosophical concept.

The very last letter of Briefe aus Paris brings the collection to an abrupt close with a similar gesture. The work ends in 1833, the day before March 20, “when, in the morning, at eight sixteen, spring begins.” It also ends on a note of uncertainty and indeterminacy, with the prospect of Börne leaving Paris after his money and heating fuel run out:

I can’t be sure yet about the day of my departure; its dependent upon my wood. Yes, truly on my firewood; this is my tally stick [Kerbholz], my calendar. I have sworn not to have any more wood delivered and to get into the coach as soon as the last log sits in the fireplace.⁴³

Maybe Börne will end up staying in Paris an entire additional spring, summer, and fall if his wood lasts until the warm weather. Or maybe he will be forced to leave. Börne marks the sequential unfolding of time through the few remaining pieces of wood that are his “calendar,” for they represent a series of specific actions (heating his apartment) whose exact duration is unclear. Throughout the Briefe, questions of household economy (and the high cost of heating in particular) are intimately intertwined with Börne’s identity as a writer—like Heine, Börne bitterly relishes his life as an impoverished exile. The pieces of wood (rather than a single tally stick [Kerbholz] that one leaves marks on) index a frame of time but in an indeterminate way that leaves the future open-ended. Once more Börne stages his own waiting; he stages the breaking up of time into discernable durations. But once more he does not mark a determinate point in time when these durations come to an end. That said, while the projected end point in question, whether of Börne’s wood supply, his departure from Paris, or the end of his Briefe, is impending, this end point also marks the beginning of something new (indeed, by the time that readers encounter this letter, he will have left and returned to Paris). Börne will continue on the path of life, political and cultural developments will continue to unfold, and he will write about them in different ways, even if the Briefe comes to an end. In keeping with the propensity of serial forms to defer endings and envision continuation, Börne promises more to come. This performative marking of time through serial form promises the continuation of life, time, history, and maybe even also revolution.

1. 1.   See Karlheinz Stierle, Der Mythos von Paris. Zeichen und Bewußtsein der Stadt (Munich: Hanser, 1993), 205.

2. 2.   What Andreas Beck and Volker Mergenthaler call “journal-shaped books” (journalförmige Bücher). Andreas Beck and Volker Mergenthaler, ed., Journalförmige Bücher—buchförmige Journale, Pfennig-Magazin zur Journalliteratur, vol. 8 (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2022).

3. 3.   Heine, Ludwig Börne, 8.

4. 4.   Norbert Oellers’s judgment on this front is representative: “Börne was equally unphilosophical and unhistorical.” Norbert Oellers, “Ludwig Börne,” in Deutsche Dichter des 19. Jahrhunderts. Ihr Leben und Werk, ed. Benno von Wiese (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1969), 132.

5. 5.   As Mark W. Turner puts it, “Built into the notion of seriality is necessarily some conception of waiting. The pause is a constitutive feature of periodical-ness, of all periodicities—there must be a break in time. What is important about this break is that it is the space that allows us to communicate.” Mark W. Turner, “Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century,” Media History 8, no. 2 (2002): 183–96, 193.

6. 6.   See Hedwig Pompe, Famas Medium: Zur Theorie der Zeitung in Deutschland zwischen dem 17. und 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 75.

7. 7.   Ludwig Börne, “Ankündigung,” Zeitschwingen, oder Des deutschen Volkes fliegende Blätter, no. 53 (July 3, 1819): 210.

8. 8.   Börne, “Ankündigung,” 211.

9. 9 . Börne edited the journal from July 3, 1819, to October 9 of the same year.

10. 10.   The first version of this is titled “Unsere Arme Seele.” Ludwig Börne, “Unsere Arme Seele,” Zeitschwingen, no. 74 (September 15, 1819): 297–99; Ludwig Börne, “Testament der Zeitschwingen.” SS, I, 786–87.

11. 11.   Börne, “Unsere Arme Seele,” 297.

12. 12.   As Piper puts it, collected editions argue “for a fundamental homogeneity of its contents through the overwhelming promotion of the author as the single organizing figure behind the collection.” Piper, Dreaming in Books, 54.

13. 13.   Ludwig Börne, “[Announcement of Collected Works].” GS, 6, 205–10; SS, II, 330–34.

14. 14.   Ludwig Börne, “Vorwort.” GS, 3, vii–viii.

15. 15.   For an excellent recent study of this theater criticism, see Michael Swellander, “Understanding the Present: The Representation of Contemporary History in Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, and Georg Büchner” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2019), 9.

16. 16.   Börne, “Einleitung.” SS, I, 671.

17. 17.   Börne, “Einleitung.” SS, I, 670.

18. 18.   Börne, “Einleitung.” SS, I, 671.

19. 19.   Börne, “Einleitung.” SS, I, 672.

20. 20.   Börne, “Einleitung.” SS, I, 682–83.

21. 21.   See Wolfgang Labuhn, Literatur und Öffentlichkeit im Vormärz. Das Beispiel Ludwig Börne (Königstein: Forum Academicum, 1980), 136.

22. 22.   On the chronopoetics of the diary, see Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

23. 23.   This includes J. H. Schnitzler, F. A. Gathy, F. von Raumer, J. C. Held, and others. See Rutger Booß, Ansichten der Revolution. Paris-Berichte deutscher Schriftsteller nach der Juli-Revolution 1830: Heine, Börne, u.a. (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1977).

24. 24.   Jeanette Wohl to Ludwig Börne, November 1830. SS, V, 846. On the letters’ genesis and Wohl’s role in suggesting the letter form, see Christa Walz, Jeanette Wohl und Ludwig Börne: Dokumentation und Analyse des Briefwechsels (Frankfurt: Campus, 2001), 123–28, 187–91.

25. 25.   Both are forms of “temporalized perception,” as Oesterle puts it. Ingrid Oesterle, “Der ‘Führungswechsel der Zeithorizonte,’ ” 23.

26. 26.   See Anna Karla, Revolution als Zeitgeschichte. Memoiren der Französischen Revolution in der Restaurationszeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

27. 27.   See Katy Heady, Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany: Repression and Rhetoric (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 11; see also Labuhn, Literatur und Öffentlichkeit im Vormärz, 236.

28. 28.   “The basic unit of literary culture around 1800 is not the single page or the side of the page, but rather the Bogen.” Spoerhase, Das Format der Literatur, 576.

29. 29.   See the contents of Börne, Briefe aus Paris, GS, 13/14. As Heinrich Laube puts it regarding this volume of the Letters, “Börne is not merely a journalist (Publizist), he is a humorist, he is our best satirical author.” Quoted in Inge Rippman and Peter Rippmann, “Lebensdaten.” SS, III, 1037.

30. 30.   Anna Karla, “Die verschlafene Revolution von 1789. Französisch-Deutsches Revolutionserzählen im Modus der Zeitgenossenschaft,” in Sattelzeit: Historiographische Revisionen, ed. Elisabeth Découltot and Daniel Fulda (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 212.

31. 31.   See Multigraph Collective, “Spacing,” in Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 260, 273.

32. 32.   Börne, Briefe aus Paris, December 8, 1831. SS, III, 387.

33. 33.   Börne, Briefe aus Paris, December 11, 1830. SS, III, 81.

34. 34.   “—Ich bin begierig—welche neue Revolutionen zwischen diesem und meinem nächsten Briefe vorfallen werden.—Auf dem Bastillenplatz wird ein neues Theater gebaut. Adieu bis zur nächsten Revolution.” Börne, Briefe aus Paris, December 11, 1830. SS III, 84.

35. 35.   On the linear (and serial) model of Ranke’s writings, see Mario Wimmer, “World History in Six Installments: Epistemic Seriality and the Epistemology of Series,” in Truth in Serial Form: Serial Formats and the Form of the Series (1850–1930), ed. Malika Maskarenic (New York: De Gruyter, 2023).

36. 36.   Heine, Ludwig Börne, 53.

37. 37.   Börne, Briefe aus Paris, December 16, 1832. SS, III, 656–57.

38. 38.   Börne, Briefe aus Paris, November 26, 1832. SS, III, 616–17. On this project see Inge Rippmann, “ ‘Die Zeit läuft wie ein Reh vor uns her.’ Der Zeitschriftsteller als Geschichtsschreiber,” in “Die Kunst—eine Tochter der Zeit”. Neue Studien zu Ludwig Börne, ed. Inge Rippmann and Wolfgang Labuhn (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1998), 130–69.

39. 39.   See Börne, Briefe aus Paris, November 12, 1832. SS, III, 596–97.

40. 40.   This material is collected in Börne, “Studen über Geschichte und Menschen der französischen Revolution,” SS, II, 1053–154.

41. 41.   See Börne, “Studen über Geschichte und Menschen,” SS, II, 1121.

42. 42.   Börne, Briefe aus Paris, January 30, 1831, SS, III, 156.

43. 43.   Börne, Briefe aus Paris, March 17, 1833, SS, III, 863.