Figures of Time

Dirk Göttsche sums up well the centrality of reflections on time for Jean Paul’s work: his “modern sense of critical time is at the very heart of his writing and of his critique of political and cultural history in the wake of the French Revolution.”¹² Jean Paul straddles traditionalist and modern visions of time, engaging with the dialectic between the finite and the infinite, the world of transience and the eternity of the divine, cycling through “all levels of temporal reflection.”¹³ A central message of his topical writings is that reflecting on current events entails reflection on time more generally. This interest in time as literary and critical topic saturates the humorous mode of his work, for humor inverts the self-important claim of serious, high style to sublime permanence and lingers with the mundane, ridiculous, and transient.¹⁴ The humorous mode is particularly compatible with literary periodicals and their embrace of fashionable Unterhaltung.

In this context, certain temporal figures play a recurring role in his writing. Perhaps the most basic of these temporal figures is that of temporal flow. To be aware of time unfolding as a linear sequence of singular moments is to be aware of the pervasive transience of worldly life, “this never-ending atomization into the shortest little particles of time—that we call life.”¹⁵ He repeatedly invokes the Christian-Stoic insight that we cannot resist time’s passing, reminding readers both to live in the moment and to look to a future of immortal life in God with hope.¹⁶ The figure of transient flow can bring into convergence the times of the world and of life. Jean Paul also applies the idea of linear temporal flow to language and writing more generally, such that “[the] ceaseless perishing and coming into being in each minute, or the long procession of corpses of deceased moments” correspond to “the letters of this article that have already been read, [which] stand as little grave stones for the once alive moments of reading [die Grabsteinchen der lebendig gewesenen Lesaugenblicke da].”¹⁷ Drawing on Lessing’s account of writing as a temporal medium, Jean Paul configures the temporality of language, writing, and reading via a more general allegory of transience and also via the model of ongoing sequential unfolding. Here we catch a glimpse of how media shape the experience of worldly time. This concept of writing and print shares important features with the tableau considered in part I: the flow of time and the flow of language both roll forward into the future, grounded in the promise that more is coming.¹⁸

A counterpoint to temporal flow is the figure of rearranging diachronic temporal unfolding, of heterochronicity. Jean Paul has a keen sense of the storage potential of writing and of cultural artifacts more generally: “Only art, this transfiguring retrieval of all things [diese verklärende Wiederbringung aller Dinge], allows for the lively resurrection of old feelings from the past, by preparing times and spaces of rebirth for them.”¹⁹ As a particular subset of “art,” writing revitalizes the past by reorganizing textual units into new temporal patterns. Invoking the eschatological notion of the restoration of all things at the end times (apokatastasis), Jean Paul’s point here is nonetheless more general and secular, namely that art has the potential to allow the past to repeat and reemerge. The future is not just the linear rolling out of time but also the reemergence and repetition of the past in new constellations, in new plural “times”; art thus plays a role analogous to memory.²⁰ Here Jean Paul draws on Johann Gottfried von Herder’s vision of a plurality of cultural and individual proper times (Eigenzeiten) that renders untenable the unified notion of absolute time characteristic of Kant’s transcendental idealism.²¹ As Jean Paul puts it, “time shatters into times, as the rainbow shatters into falling drops.”²² On the basis of the awareness of multiple times, he doubts whether it is possible to capture the single, overarching spirit of the age (Geist der Zeit), a conceit of Napoleonic era topical writings of contemporary authors such as Ernst Moritz Arndt and more generally of projects that present certain privileged locations—“London–Paris–Warsaw”—as ground zeros of the contemporary Zeitgeist.²³ Temporal complexity blocks our access to any unified sense of the time of the worldly present, a hindrance that literary writing, journalism, and more only exacerbate. This model of multiple times is ripe for literary adaptation: Jean Paul accesses the figure of reordering temporal flow in his autobiographical Selberlebensbeschreibung, where, in jumping between different childhood episodes, the narrator concedes that he must injure the unity of time “because the hero … must always go from one time to another.”²⁴ Digression, a beloved formal and stylistic principle of Jean Paul’s, likewise serves to interrupt continuous narrative time.²⁵

A third key temporal figure is that of the threshold between before and after and beginning and end. The notion of temporal threshold is at work in the passage above (“the long procession of corpses of deceased moments”), where the present moment of reading straddles words and even letters. As Jean Paul puts it in an epigraph in the Morgenblatt, “every time consists of two parts, the end of the previous period and the beginning of the following one.”²⁶ The threshold is a double-sided figure that suggests both continuation and finality and life and death. On the one hand, an end of whatever sort can always be taken as a reminder of death: “One feels the vanity of all human things most deeply when one ends something, it may be a book or a year or an affecting novel or the end of life itself.”²⁷ On the other hand, the end of one thing is always the beginning of another: this thought is the point of departure for Jean Paul’s many reflections on the year’s end and for his Napoleonic era explorations of transitions between political regimes. The threshold figure also plays a central role in his myriad engagements with prefaces and postscripts and in his vision of his collected works edition, a topic I examine in greater detail in chapter 5.²⁸

Conceiving of moments in time as thresholds in temporal series is inherent to figures of both temporal flow and heterochronicity. On the one hand, temporal flow takes us from one instant, season, or generation to another cyclically and diachronically. Wherever we are in the Heraclitean flow, we can look forward and backward. On the other hand, the world of print media in particular can likewise manifest a plurality of differently timed, proximate temporal frames: again, an idea at work in the notion that reading and publication mark different threshold moments in different overlapping series. The intersections of these three concepts of time show how Jean Paul’s oeuvre stages the confrontation between the theological postulate of the inescapable transience of life and a heterochronic, layered temporal awareness. From the perspective of the diachronic flow of never-ending transient moments, the gaze backward and forward from each and every temporal threshold is the same: the gaping eternity before one’s birth and the gaping eternity after one’s death. But the perspective of synchronous temporal layering reveals the coexistence of differently structured times—and “millions of different spirits of the times”—with multiple incongruent beginnings and ends.²⁹

Preaching at Twilight

Jean Paul’s Napoleonic era topical writings put these figures of time to work in multiple ways. In characterizing miscellaneous writings as plural “twilights,” “political sermons,” and “festivals,” he models moral, political, and literary responses to the past, present, and future via specific conventions of serial (re)publication. Dämmerungen für Deutschland (1809) and its continuation, Nachdämmerungen für Deutschland (1810), are oriented by the metaphor of plural dusks and dawns, the so-called Hesperus motif. Twilight (Dämmerung) can refer both to dawn (Morgendämmerung) and dusk (Abenddämmerung) and evokes the symbolism of a solar eclipse making the morning and evening star (both names for Venus) visible at the same time: “When life darkens for us through pains that are too large, then youth and death appear quite clearly to us; morning star and evening star.”³⁰ This duality captures the transitional nature of the present, and it carries a basic moral consolation: a new day dawns, and an old one recedes into the past. Characterizing the present epoch as especially transient in nature, Jean Paul applies this Christian-inflected moral message to a variety of current events, including the French occupation or the Aktualität of the latest reports about the state of the war. His overarching message is one of solace and hope: the hardship of war will pass and German-speaking lands will rise again. In a way, all one has is the present (“the present is your eternity and never leaves you”³¹), but this can be a consolation (“one can endure anything if it only lasts a moment”³²). Scaling time in different directions can relativize suffering, and turning to the future makes the present seem all the briefer: again, this idea maps nicely onto notions of patriotic rejuvenation.

This notion of plural twilights also captures the essentially serial format of these collections, for Dämmerungen für Deutschland and Nachdämmerungen für Deutschland both contain multiple “twilights” of various sizes: larger essays, aphorisms bundled together as “small twilights” (kleine Zwilichter), and various medium-sized pieces. Conceiving of a collection of texts as a plurality of temporal thresholds gives the miscellany an expressly temporal register. This metaphor catalyzes a sense of time as both diachronic temporal flow (each day brings a new dawn and dusk) and a heterogeneous mixture of times, with each “little” twilight presenting different forward and backward gazes into disparate pasts and futures. Nachdämmerungen adds an additional temporal layer, for it continues serially and is published temporally later than Dämmerungen. Nachdämmerungen first appears in Perthes’s National Museum, a monthly scholarly-patriotic journal, and is then republished in the 1817 anthology Politische Fastenpredigten. Furthermore, republication adds another layer to the serial unfolding of miscellaneous textual units. Jean Paul positions himself as a prophet of rebirth and renewal, though always with a healthy dose of self-irony, and anthology republication allows him to test out his predictive powers. As he retrospectively notes in the preface to the Politische Fastenpredigten, this anthology’s contents are remarkably consistent in their message of hope: “The one thing that runs through all my political articles, from the pressure [Drucke] of the first Consul to the pressure [Drucke] of the last Emperor, rather unbowed and upright, the thing I now prefer most to find there, is—hope.”³³ Jean Paul documents the events that bookend these topical writings: the dual “pressure” exerted by Napoleon in his rise to the position of First Consul in 1799 and upon him, forcing him off his imperial throne. This dual Druck also riffs on the dual printing of these pieces first in journals and Taschenbücher and then in the Politische Fastenpredigten anthology. This is not Vorabdruck per se (which commonly applies to the pre-publication of novels in journals) but of authorized Nachdruck. The publication dates 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1817 each represent a different threshold between distinct pasts and futures.³⁴

These topical writings interlink metaphors of twilights and sermonizing: indeed, the 1809 Dämmerungen serves as the “completion” (Vollendung) of his 1808 Friedens-Predigt an Deutschland gehalten von Jean Paul.³⁵ Occasional speeches and sermons are quite common in Jean Paul’s works; like many German literati of this period, Jean Paul’s father was a pastor, and he relates listening to his father’s sermons as a child in his autobiographical Selberlebensbeschreibung. Jean Paul models the scene of topical address on the Zeitpredigt, the occasional sermon on current events, in which the homilist seeks to integrate morality and politics.³⁶ With the Friedens-Predigt and the later Fastenpredigten, Jean Paul likewise adapts the convention of printed lectures and sermons. Actual or fictive scenes of oral, occasional address are central to topical writings such as Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German nation) (1808) (which Jean Paul reviewed in 1808) and cultural journals of various stripes.³⁷ In such printed speeches, writers such as Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Arndt adapt the conceit of addressing the reading public as a stand-in for the entire nation, and Jean Paul too goes out of his way to title his Friedens-Predigt as “held to Germany.”³⁸ The scene of oral address also lends his writing a sense of occasionality, of intervening at a particular historical moment, and of speaking with the authority of a specific moral, scholarly, or religious office. Though he is often quick to ironize the scene of embodied oral address, this invocation of the scene of address functions as a way of underlining authorial originality: it is no accident that the work’s title includes the attributive “held by Jean Paul,” signaling that this is his “own” original take on the Zeitpredigt.³⁹ That said, this express embrace of ostentatious rhetorical displays was not always received well; Theresa Huber, one of the later editors of the Morgenblatt, for example, dismisses the excesses of the Dämmerungen: “He writes like a woman, all of his ideas are filtered through fantasy in order to come into being.… It is impossible to endure such a long rhetorical effort. These kinds of people don’t help us! What can help us? Steely adversity [Die eiserne Not]!”⁴⁰

Despite their name, the “sermons,” like the Dämmerungen, decidedly look like collections of miscellanies, and the conceit of the extended address often corresponds more to the message than to the form of the many shorter pieces gathered there. The Friedens-Predigt is a sixty-page pamphlet, while the Dämmerungen is longer, around 250 pages. These collections include longer pieces staged as addresses to captive audiences, but shorter aphoristic pieces are interspersed throughout. In Jean Paul’s hands, “twilights” and “sermons” designate small texts addressing the times, the “new time,” texts that can be scaled up or down in size and that can address temporal frameworks that are likewise open to modular scaling. If the philosophical-historical lecture used by the likes of Fichte and later Hegel profits from a sense of sequential, forward movement in the service of constructing a sense of the future, then the heterogeneous mixture of these pieces lends a sense of world-historical time as being characterized by multiple, coexisting, disjunctive temporal frames. Taking the sermon and the miscellany as rough equivalents sheds new light on the notion of the freedom sermon, which comes into view as a more general term encapsulating time- and context-specific texts published in “freedom”-minded journals and newspapers. In Jean Paul’s hands, the sermon evokes both a sense of an occasional speech held at a specific time and the sense of a heterogeneous mixture of different times.

The sermon conceit marks the occasion and context of his political interventions, something that applies all the more with republication, as with the Fastenpredigten. Anthology republication rearranges occasional pieces and recontextualizes the events to which they refer at various kinds of historical remove. In writings from 1810, 1811, and 1812, Jean Paul adopts a predictive stance vis-à-vis the future end of Napoleonic occupation: in 1817, these same writings show readers what a provisional history of the recent past might look like. The conceit of Lenten sermons maps the worldly, political time of Napoleonic occupation onto the church calendar, equating the period of 1806 to 1815 with the week leading up to Easter, calling it the “true fasting time (or Quadragesima) of Germany.”⁴¹ The metaphor of twilight still applies here, with 1817, the present, being the bright new day predicted years earlier. Jean Paul taps into homiletic conventions of specific topics recurring at different times in the liturgical calendar as well as publication conventions of collecting different kinds of rhetorical speeches in anthologies. This anthology also plays with temporal scale, compressing the years of Napoleonic occupation (1807–1813) into the seven days of Christian Holy Week, contracting (the now past) suffering in the very way Jean Paul coached his readers to do several years before. Perhaps even more than the metaphor of twilight, the genre conceit of the sermon brings with it a range of different temporal models of repetition and recurrence, not least because the sermon is usually calibrated with the liturgical calendar and intended to recur on a yearly basis. Sermons were a key part of the more or less directly liturgical Gebrauchsliteratur of the previous century and were often intended to be reread intensively. This sense of (serialized) reencounter applies here, as Jean Paul stages the scene of rereading his sermons in a post-Napoleonic epoch, except that the new time equivalent to Easter is now the status quo. That said, Jean Paul’s evocation of temporal unfolding, including patterns of yearly recurrence and diachronic movement, is more secular than liturgical.

Republishing and anthologizing likewise play an important role in representing multiple frames of time and giving sense to historical events, even allowing Jean Paul to configure his pieces as a form of history writing. By 1817, Napoleon’s demise had of course entered into the history books, but the temporal remove from occupation also makes Jean Paul’s writings from that period historical events in their own right, a thought experiment he pursues in the introduction to the Politische Fastenpredigten, which briefly relates the publication history of the four pieces collected, telling “the small history of these four sections of this little work, printed many years ago, in one minute.”⁴² Here Jean Paul repurposes Lessing’s formulation that forewords should be histories of the publication and no more, but he places more emphasis on republication as a mode of history writing.⁴³ Jean Paul once more sets past events into a contracted temporal frame; in this case, the past events subjected to historicization are his own writings. Looking back at past historical events and looking back at a body of work come into view as interrelated undertakings. These writings already had a strong sense of their place in time when originally published, and republication casts this occasionality in a new light. Jean Paul thus reconstellates temporal indices of before and after and of prefaces and postscripts to the end of representing the historical past.

Anthologizing also serves a rhetorical and moral function, for these collected pieces give voice to paradigmatic sentiments such as consolation in defeat or the celebration of victory and rebirth. Taken as a kind of moral primer, this collection of topical writings may well retain its currency (Aktualität) in future political constellations, yet in a different way than it might if taken purely as an exercise in history writing. To the extent that Jean Paul’s treatment of current events is general enough to be applicable to a variety of situations, his political writings share as much with moral miscellanies that model affective displays based around certain stable topoi, as they do with the historical documentation of unique events. Both the older tradition of the miscellany and the more modern topical writings that presuppose the historical individuality of events use textual practices and techniques of reading, writing, archiving, reactualizing, and more to shape a sense of world-historical time. Straddling history writing, rhetorical imitation, and literary fantasy, Jean Paul writes in dialogue with various models for how texts might be repurposed at later historical moments. Consistent throughout is his authorial voice and the attempt to inscribe his own works into patterns of continuity and continuation and to lend a kind of permanence to ephemeral Werkchen.

Writing the Present, Writing the Future

Jean Paul’s writings lend themselves to contextualization in the broader literary and critical landscape for they commonly take this landscape as a point of departure for thought experiments of various sorts. Jean Paul shares with his contemporaries an orientation to the future that imagines the reencounter of material texts—journalistic reports, historical documents, literary sketches—at different historical junctures, and he reserves a positive role for serial, miscellaneous formats in repurposing various styles of history writing and literary entertainment. It is in this context that we can make sense of Jean Paul’s tendency to filter questions of time through specific forms and formats of writing rather than through the dynamics of conceptual thought. His satiric reflection on the literary landscape is encyclopedic and even monstrous in scope,⁴⁴ but here I would like to focus on a just few key points of reference, including styles of authorship based in political journalism, the philosophy of history, cultural-historical scholarship, literary entertainment, and rhetorical-moral instruction.

For one, Jean Paul shares an interest in critically processing current events with journalistic proponents of Zeitgeschichte, which is firmly rooted in various serial formats across books, journals, and newspapers. The intersection of politics and history is the express focus of newspapers and journals founded in the late 1790s, such as Cotta’s Europäische Annalen, edited by E. L. Posselt (1795–1820), or Neuste Weltkunde/Allgemeine Zeitung (1798–1929), both papers that represent the beginning of modern political journalism in Germany. Journals founded in the Napoleonic era such as Die Zeiten, oder Archiv für die neueste Staatengeschichte und Politik (The times, or archive for the newest state history and politics) (1805–1820) or Nemesis, Zeitschrift für Politik und Geschichte (Nemesis, journal for politics and history) (1814–1818) remain oriented to broader world-historical events while attending to the repercussions of French occupation and play a key role in shaping the temporal awareness of the period.⁴⁵ Serial anthologies of political and cultural criticism are also common, such as Arndt’s Geist der Zeit (Spirit of the time), which spans four volumes from 1806 to 1818. These newspapers and anthology series approach the question of Aktualitat in different ways, depending on their goals.⁴⁶ On the one hand, these projects can model a sense of sequential temporal unfolding, with patterns of print going hand in hand with events as they occur; this is a sense of time that is particularly salient in war reporting.⁴⁷ Contemporary historical writing frequently also undertakes retrospective surveys of the recent past, as in early German histories of the French Revolution, and this is the task of Jean Paul’s 1801/1809 piece on Charlotte Corday (the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat), which first appeared in a Taschenbuch that he coedited with Friedrich Gentz.⁴⁸ Despite being situated in a fictional frame narrative and republished in the miscellaneous novel Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise (Dr. Katzensberger’s trip to the spa), Jean Paul’s Corday portrait is a literary Zeitgeschichte of sorts, at times drawing verbatim on historical documents, including old issues of the Moniteur newspaper. Such writings disprove characterizations of Jean Paul as irredeemably provincial and distanced from current events—as a “disaster in a dressing gown,” as Nietzsche put it.⁴⁹

Projects of Zeitgeschichte likewise operate on a spectrum of more or less organization and overview. Writers and editors constantly face the challenge that the materials they are in the process of collecting are only ever provisionally ordered. Some writers of contemporary history eschewed all systematism, opting to create archives for “future historians” that are scattered across various book and periodical formats. The usefulness of semirandom collection is expressed in journal titles such as Archiv and in the notion of collected “pages,” as in the Deutsche Blätter or Friedensblätter. Such an approach invariably comes under fire from philosophical approaches to history. Hegel, for example, dismisses journalistic history writing for “transforming all events into reports” and for lacking necessary overview, something that only statesmen (and philosophers) can attain with great effort: “Only when one looks down from above can one have a proper overview of things and see everything, not when one has looked up from below through a limited opening.”⁵⁰ But even if it is common for journalists to defer to future historians, prediction and prognosis remain a central part of writing Zeitgeschichte: as Iwan D’Aprile writes, “it is common to all contemporary historians to claim that prognoses are possible and that they represent an essential and useful aspect of historical knowledge.”⁵¹ This propensity to predict the course of the future finds echoes in the literary scene, as writers experiment with modes of prophecy and prediction.⁵² Jean Paul is keenly interested in such modes, writing a conjectural biography of his own life and constantly encouraging readers to imagine the time after Napoleon’s fall. Jean Paul is thus quite interested in a position of future overview as well as in the prospect that archived materials might be fruitfully reencountered at some point to come.

The philosophy of history represents a second competing orientation to the past, present, and future, one that is more bullish about the possibility of overview and less rooted in the daily grind of journalistic publication. Various philosophers construct a future point in time that, whether as regulative idea, utopian horizon, or realizable telos, can make sense of and legitimate the present and past. The philosophy of history proposes a vision of time and of history as a singular, unified course of development, the laws of which can be determined by rational thought. Kant finds the observation of the French Revolution from afar to be conjectural proof that the human race is progressing toward a rational future; in his Berlin lectures, Fichte positions the current Napoleonic era as the third of five stages of world history, an epoch of pure egotism on the cusp of a more enlightened age; and Hegel lectures on the philosophy of history in the 1820s and tracks the “cunning of reason” in producing the philosophical-historical understanding of the present day on the basis of the historical developments of the past. The scholarly lecture plays an important role in creating a sense of forward movement through time with its regular installments.⁵³ Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and other academic figures publish in leading journals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they also distance themselves from the back and forth of political journalism. Furthermore, the idealist philosophy of history commonly elides the material work of historical research upon which its conjectures are based.⁵⁴ Though scenes of reading and rereading are important structural features of this approach to history, as Peter Gilgen has pointed out, this textual work comes to occur primarily via writings belonging to the philosophical canon.⁵⁵ For the philosophy of history, the temporal unfolding of history is modeled on the development of the concept rather than the periodicity and seriality of print artifacts.

Jean Paul addresses the possibility of philosophical-historical prediction throughout his oeuvre, playfully engaging with contemporary models of “conjectural” history, and he repeatedly comes back to the question of historical and religious approaches to time, as in his piece in Dämmerungen für Deutschland titled “On God in History and in Life,” which suggests that the Christian worldview can bridge competing accounts of human history based either in the determinism of the physical world or in human freedom.⁵⁶ Despite admiring Herder’s philosophical-historical writings, Jean Paul’s stoic-moral reflections on transience and on the perspective of distant futures remain at a distance from the philosophical-historical optimism of the Enlightenment and the historical ethos of philosophical Wissenschaft.⁵⁷ By filtering his temporal reflections through medial format rather than the conceptual work of philosophy, Jean Paul is closer to journalistic and literary proponents of Zeitgeschichte than to the idealists, of whom he was often so critical. Following Koselleck, we might note that Jean Paul, like Goethe, is both untimely (unzeitgemäß) in diverging from the ascendant philosophy of history and very much of his time in shaping the pervasive temporalization of culture and thought around 1800.⁵⁸

The impulse to collect and preserve various historical materials at work in Romantic cultural-historical journals represents a third orientation to historical time that would prove important to Jean Paul.⁵⁹ Jean Paul publishes some of his topical writings in Friedrich Schlegel’s Deutsches Museum (German museum) (1812–1813) and Friedrich Perthes’s Vaterländisches Museum (Patriotic museum) (1810–1811), associating the latter in particular with expressly nationalist political discourse.⁶⁰ These journals are modeled on the long-standing Enlightenment era journal Deutsches Museum, edited by H. C. Boie (1776–1791), though Perthes casts the project of “conserving” products of German culture for the future as much more urgent in the Napoleonic era.⁶¹ Engaging in the scholarly reconstruction of and commentary on historical texts, antiquities, and monuments, these “museum” journals are committed both practically and symbolically to collecting products of national culture, even if their mixed scholarly, literary, and cultural contents are often indistinguishable from the contents of other magazines of the time. Jean Paul takes up discussions in these and similar journals when he addresses the possibility of founding new patriotic festivals and monuments.⁶² The ideal of cultural preservation articulated in these journals reconsiders the past in order to build something new in a time of crisis, a model of historical time that goes beyond the mere recapitulation of the topological model of historical repetition and imitation, of “history as the teacher of life.” Furthermore, in embracing the archival function of serial print these journals share a basic challenge with more journalistic Zeitgeschichte, namely that the material they collect might resist systematic ordering. Indeed, in his Nachdämmerungen (first published in Perthes’s Vaterländisches Museum), Jean Paul doubts that future overview is possible, suggesting that contemporary cultural-critical activities share more with “fermenting tubs” than with well-curated collections.⁶³

Jean Paul also publishes many of his shorter and more or less topical Werkchen in cultural journals more oriented to new trends and current fashions and explicitly based in the desire to present something for everyone—“allen etwas,” as Cotta puts it in regard to the Morgenblatt. This includes excerpts of the Peace Sermon in the Morgenblatt and in the journal Zeitung für Einsiedler (Paper for hermits) edited by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Joseph Görres.⁶⁴ Miscellaneity is the guiding principle of these and other smaller daily four-page organs such as Der Freimüthige (The candid one) (1803–1811), Die Zeitung für die Elegante Welt (1801–1859), or Der Zuschauer (The spectator) (1821–1823), as well as longer-format, less frequently published journals such as Kleist’s and Adam Müller’s journal Phöbus (1808).⁶⁵ In temporal terms, literary miscellaneity generates a multidirectional model of time based, on the one hand, on the co-presence of differently timed textual units written by a variety of authors and on the other, on the promise that the flow of serialized diversion will carry on uninterrupted into the future. As Jean Paul writes in his introduction to the first issue of the Morgenblatt: a journal is a “duodecimal or tertiary clock of time, it must move along with time, like every clock, and even fly along.”⁶⁶ Here Jean Paul references the Morgenblatt’s near daily publication (Perthes’s Vaterländisches Museum, for example, appeared monthly). Accelerated forward movement, fortgehen or even fortfliegen, also connotes transience and ephemerality, the vergehen of the mayflies (Eintagsfliegen). As a “clock of time,” though, such journals track seasonally recurring occurrences such as carnival, fall and spring theaters, book fairs, and the end of the year, an occasion that Jean Paul would repeatedly commemorate in his contributions to the Morgenblatt. Cultural journals likewise tap into the periodical’s archival function, assuming that readers will collect and bind together the year’s issues: from its very first issue, the Morgenblatt, for example, was paginated as a yearly run. Journals thus prefigure future reencounters.

The prospect of repeated “intensive” reading in an age of “extensive” serial culture likewise opens up a perspective onto how Jean Paul taps into older models of moral, use-oriented literature (Gebrauchsliteratur).⁶⁷ Moral weeklies were a key part of mid-eighteenth-century literary culture, with their heyday ending in the late 1760s.⁶⁸ Modeled on Addison’s and Steele’s The Spectator, these German-language journals commonly appeared weekly and offered a mixture of moral, religious, satirical contents organized around conceits of social observation (spectatorship), collecting, and fictional authorship. Jean Paul clearly adapts aspects of these organizing conceits by donning the mantle of the author as literary sermonizer and, as we will see in more detail in the next chapter, by structuring his final comic work as a fictional moral weekly modeled on The Spectator. It was common for early nineteenth-century journals to adapt certain features of their eighteenth-century predecessors to the context of the “multiauthor paratactical journalism” that would become increasingly prevalent in the nineteenth century.⁶⁹ These earlier journal forms straddled intensive and extensive reading, for they presented pedagogical and entertaining contents that could be reread and reapplied to different phases of life, but they also cultivated the anticipation of new material characteristic of serial culture. In both cases, an early modern model of reading that jumped around mixed content—florilegistic reading—is at play. The temporal orientation of these journals is compatible both with earlier Christian models of worldly time that coach against vanitas and with more contemporary models of fashion and cultural journalism; as Wolfgang Martens argues, “in being periodically published writings, moral weeklies segue from the regular, intensive reading of books of moral edification to the extensive reading of worldly literature based in the expectation of the new.”⁷⁰ The fact that many leading moral weeklies (including Steele and Addison’s The Spectator) are reprinted multiple times over the course of the eighteenth century brings this potential for intensive reading into view and reveals some of the intersections between book and journal publication, with certain journals being collected and reprinted in larger volumes rather than being consumed as individual issues. The afterlives of use-oriented literary journals show how earlier models of intensive literature remain compatible with nineteenth-century reading practices; indeed, contemporaries would continue to read cultural journals intensively long into the nineteenth century and beyond.⁷¹

Though it might be counterintuitive, Jean Paul also explores how daily newspapers can lend themselves to “intensive” reencounters. In a short piece titled “Germanisms and Gallicisms and Catholicisms” in Dämmerungen für Deutschland, Jean Paul muses on Germany’s and France’s influence on each other and takes aim at the current reign of censorship under Napoleon. To this end, he undertakes a thought experiment with the French Moniteur, the daily paper that had been the leading organ of revolution and that is the official mouthpiece of the French government. Jean Paul notes the cognitive dissonance involved in readers still being able to acquire issues from the early 1790s while being prevented from encountering similarly liberal writings of the present:

Even if the Moniteur cannot forbid its customers … from entering its own beginning and heathen entrance hall, and even if its old impudent sermons [Frechheits-Predigten] can still be read without detrimental effect, … I would like to know whether one such effect might nonetheless arise if the following words were placed atop the journal’s page, as with old chapbooks [Volksbücher]: ‘printed this year.’⁷²

Punning on the term for pro-revolutionary writings as “freedom-sermons” (Freiheitspredigten), Jean Paul suggests that “impudent” (frech) occasional writings of old might retain their relevance long after being published.⁷³ To be sure, this suggestion flips on its head the trope of newspapers’ propensity to go out of date quickly (a trope that he does not hesitate to deploy elsewhere⁷⁴). Certain calendars and almanacs of old were commonly predicated on yearly replacement, making excessive reference to the year to which they applied unnecessary: if readers held a calendar in their hands, it was always this year’s calendar. However, imagining a modern newspaper typographically altered in this way would almost make the Moniteur issues in question all the more ephemeral: like chapbooks of old, wouldn’t altering their dating make the issues much more likely to be thrown away at year’s (or week’s) end? Jean Paul makes precisely the opposite point, though, suggesting that the contents of past issues, archived over time, might still apply to situations that seem quite unrelated.⁷⁵

In Jean Paul’s hands, the tropes of print ephemerality, serial flow, and heterochronic, juxtapositional reencounter commingle. Yet this scene of reencounter is rather different from the use-oriented serial print of earlier centuries (and the propensity for entertaining parts of old calendars to be deemed worth saving from year to year). Here Jean Paul makes an historically specific point about a “new,” postrevolutionary time, namely that out-of-date print matter can validate the permanence and durability of the revolution’s basic ideals to the present day despite attempts of censors to suppress these ideals. Furthermore, Jean Paul’s thought experiment directs our gaze into the future, calling out for future readers who might reactualize the freedom sermons of the past and the present. This sort of passage makes him appealing to liberal writers such as Börne and Heine, who return to this scene of reencountering discarded revolution era print matter. Though Jean Paul’s patriotism might have seemed untimely and outmoded to more chauvinistic nationalists, his long-standing commitment to press freedoms is one of the clearest political positions of a writer that later, compromised Nazi era editors would deem not properly political.⁷⁶

Paper Monuments, Paper Festivals

Jean Paul’s likening of literary works to festivals and monuments reflects another important side of his engagement with contemporary cultural-political debates. Jean Paul is obsessed with literary logics of incompletion and future production—he is always announcing new works, continuations of incomplete projects, abbreviated excerpts of fuller versions yet to be written—and he maps patterns of temporal recurrence and structures of cultural duration on the basis of these logics. Yet if it is characteristic of nineteenth-century German letters that emancipatory political ideals remain in the realm of the word (Wort) rather than the deed (Tat), then Jean Paul’s expressly literary response to cultures of patriotic commemoration reveals certain limits to topical writing as political intervention. As we have seen in previous chapters, bemused curiosity and satirical treatment of the cultural politics of postrevolutionary France are characteristic of a certain strand of contemporary cultural journalism, and Jean Paul does not refrain from casting a satiric light on his own (self-)memorializing gestures.

Like many contemporaries, Jean Paul recognizes the need to organize cultural time anew and the danger of having it imposed from the outside, adding his voice to the calls for new monuments and festivals that memorialize German victories and defeats alike. As he puts it in a short piece in Dämmerungen für Deutschland titled “Proposal for Political Festivals of Mourning”: “Formerly every century was concluded with days of penance, prayer and fasting. Rather than the religious feasts, which are now forbidden, fate called for political ones.”⁷⁷ Jean Paul cites the revolutionary era’s abolition of certain religious holidays and recent French celebrations of military victories across Europe, proposing that German-speaking lands would do well to follow the example of ancient Rome, where recurring public festivities commemorated important defeats along with victories. Jean Paul taps into his friend’s Moritz’s long-standing interest in the festival calendar of ancient Rome (as discussed in chapter 2), calling for “secular celebrations” modeled on both antiquity and more recent Christian traditions: in effect, France does not possess a monopoly on memorializing the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt.⁷⁸ Even though Napoleonic France is commonly associated with the overreaching and decadence of imperial Rome, Rome can also serve as a positive countermodel to French hegemony.

But Jean Paul is not merely concerned with memorializing German defeat. He closes the 1817 preface to the Politische Fastenpredigten by likening Germany’s military resurrection to the resurrection of Christ: “We all hope to celebrate the feast of the resurrection continually” (wir alle wünschen, das Fest der Auferstehung immerfort zu feiern).⁷⁹ Celebrating the defeat of Napoleon as a yearly feast or festival accesses two different patterns of temporal unfolding; as a sign of a new political order, the victory persists throughout the year, but, like Easter, the celebration of political resurrection presumably does not occur more frequently than once a year or season. This analogy between political and religious resurrection is all too common at the time and is embraced by the restoration powers in characterizing the defeat of Napoleon as the advent of a “new” time.⁸⁰ Even though Jean Paul does not buy into this logic as much as the supporters of the restoration, he imagines the recurring memorialization of this historic moment of transition, anticipating the central place of the period of 1813 to 1815 in the national-political imaginary of the subsequent century. In a culture of memorialization in which literary texts are recirculated and reencountered as recurrent festivals are, Jean Paul’s topical writings once again take on certain similarities to primers for rhetorical instruction in which repeated, “intensive” reading helps German audiences to reactivate certain moral-political emotions associated with victory over the French.⁸¹

Yet Jean Paul always tinges this analogy of literary writing and national political commemoration with ample doses of satire. Along with echoing calls for new festivals and physical monuments, Jean Paul also considers memorial cultures that remain entirely in the realm of print and paper. An aphoristic “small twilight” in Dämmerungen für Deutschland suggests that literary endeavors might be more lasting than edifices of wood and stone: “If we hand over two indestructible monuments to Germany to posterity through echt-German education and literature, it will be equal and no less than what the clergy contributes, who—according to the adage: Nil Clerici relinquunt praeter libros liberosque—leave behind books and children.”⁸² Rehearsing tropes of print ephemerality and of the relative permanence of intellectual accomplishments over military ones, Jean Paul opens up a vista onto a future in which Germans commemorate the Napoleonic era through the literary production of the period (as well as through the vitality of new generations). Again, this was an altogether common view, with many leading authors and critics in the 1780s already calling for expressly literary monuments. Such appeals to the commemorative effects of literary culture likewise recall the Modejournal’s “New Year’s Presents of Fashion” discussed in chapters 1 and 2. But likening books to monuments invites the question of the political and historical effects of a literary landscape in which, as Jean Paul himself admits, chaos and miscellaneous dispersal (Zerstreuung) run rampant. What are the chances that the print landscape—indeed, that Jean Paul’s “own” miscellanies qua paper monuments—can be organized into patterns of repetition and recurrence around which modern political rituals might coalesce?

This, at least, is a question implicitly posed by the title of Jean Paul’s 1809 “Programm der Feste oder Aufsätze, welche der Verfasser in jedem Monat des künftigen Morgenblattes 1810 den Lesern geben will” (Program of festivals or articles that the author intends to give to readers in each month of the coming 1810 Morgenblatt).⁸³ This piece was published in installments in the journal’s last three issues of 1809, and it confronts the question of literary writing as a commemorative practice head-on. This end-of-the-year piece previews hypothetical works that are to be published in monthly cycles over the coming year, with the title serving as a kind of announcement of future works. At the end of each year, Jean Paul gives his readers excerpts or brief tastes—“foretastes” (Vorschmäcke), as he put it—of the full articles promised for the next year, even though these complete versions never actually materialize in the journal. This serialized piece is part and parcel of Jean Paul’s authorial brand, foregrounding his role as author in personally presenting readers with a set of writings identifiable as his own.

This piece is very much in the miscellany tradition, with its contents including fictional speeches and sermons, letters, a discourse on marriage, a compendium of passages from other works cut by the censors, a discussion of a solar eclipse, and more. At first glance, this is a virtuosic display of journal authorship, underlining both the entertaining quality of the present pieces and their serial continuation across multiple journal issues. Again, naming texts “speeches” and “sermons” evokes structures of occasionality and periodic return, though his future pieces will come out monthly rather than daily, as the Morgenblatt does. Jean Paul calls these different pieces “festive sermons” (Fest-Predigten) and “proper sermon festivals” (ordentliche Predigt-Feste), suggesting both that his pieces are given on a particular occasion and that the “sermon” is itself a festive occasion meriting pomp and circumstance. For better or worse, though, these texts are merely previews of the real festivals. As Jean Paul puts it in a mock-apologetic aside, there is something unsatisfying about having to wait for the whole piece and for the festival proper—it is like printing summaries of the next day’s homily on Saturday evening.⁸⁴

Jean Paul engages with the project of writing contemporary history when he emphasizes the idea that he is inaugurating a process of serial recurrence (every month a new piece is to appear) and thus contributing to a growing archive for the benefit of future readers, though we might think of these future readers less as future historians and more as future cocelebrants. At the same time, though, the tongue-in-cheek nature of this piece’s basic conceit—no monthly pieces actually follow—once more raises the question of whether monuments and memorials might only be transient constructs: the author claims to be inaugurating festivals, but isn’t he in fact merely circulating more Werkchen that might not stand the test of time? We might read this as a kind of oblique commentary on the difficulty of creating new cultures of national commemoration that he advocates for elsewhere. There will be a future but an uncertain one, in which new festivals might or might not have taken hold. This is a productive uncertainty, though, for it fuels readers’ desire for more from Jean Paul, even if readers are already in on the joke that what will come will look rather different from what is promised.

At first glance, the topics of these pieces hardly resemble Jean Paul’s more political interventions, but publication history sheds important light on the political undertone of these “festivals” or articles and the patterns of continuation they set in motion, both imaginary and actual. The original publication of the “Programm” in the Morgenblatt over the last three issues of the year only contained seven of the twelve articles, with the remaining pieces cut or abbreviated by the French censorship regime that Jean Paul took aim at the same year in Dämmerungen für Deutschland with his joke about rereading old issues of the Moniteur. The editors of the Morgenblatt are quite clear about the extensive cuts by the censors in a note at the end of the piece, apologizing that all twelve foretastes could not be provided and providing dashes in the body of the text to indicate to readers where these cuts were made.⁸⁵ It is up to the 1814 reprinted version to publish the piece in full; by this time, after all, the reign of French censors was over.⁸⁶ Jean Paul places the piece in his anthology Museum, invoking, on the one hand, other contemporary journals with “museum” in their title, thereby making the distinction between “written” and “built” museums, and, on the other hand, the scholarly society (founded in 1808) of the Frankfurt Museum, where Jean Paul had been invited to lecture (the basis of some of the pieces contained in this anthology).⁸⁷ Furthermore, the framing metaphor of museum performs a historicizing role, analogizing how the essay collects works from the past and preserves them in a more complete form (see figure 4.1 for a visualization of this publication history). Republication presents readers with these pieces a second time, if only as previews, but in certain cases, they are decidedly more complete in this republication than they were at initial publication. Indeed, anthology publication partially redeems the disingenuous claim that “full” versions of these excerpts would be published at a later date (though in the journal version, some of the censored pieces were not mentioned by title, and their existence was indicated only by dashes). The fact that we receive more complete versions of some pieces through republication nonetheless reveals a further temporal irony, for the supposed occasions on which these individual “festivals” were to have been published—once a month in 1810—have long passed by 1814.

These pieces do indeed map patterns of recurrence and variation, though the temporal parameters of monthly publication are replaced by those of the anthology. These pieces migrate from one textual environment to another, moving from the Morgenblatt, where they appeared alongside texts by other authors, to a miscellaneous single-author anthology. This migration across formats recalibrates the temporal indices of individual articles. The anthology introduces temporal displacements that recontextualize individual articles. The performative inauguration of a culture of printed “festivity” promises recurrence and return, but, as it turns out, at irregular, potentially tenuous intervals: there is a tomorrow, a Morgen, when these festivals will take place, but continuation is displaced from the Morgen of monthly issues to a later date. Jean Paul thereby echoes other satirical treatments of logics of commemoration and memorialization. He promises future works and commemorative festivities, but he does so by marking the print landscape’s all-too-tenuous relationship to the calendar year and to natural time, as well as the rhythms of the world of publishing. Future works will come; we just can’t be sure when.

Ends and Beginnings

My suggestion, then, is that, in memorializing a telling episode in his ongoing engagement with the censors, the “Programm der Feste” is part of the same textual universe as Jean Paul’s other topical writings (despite the fact that he includes it in the Museum anthology rather than in the Politische Fastenpredigten).⁸⁸ In closing, we might consider additional ways that this text engages in the writing of time—writing about the times and about current events but also mapping patterns of temporal unfolding—at the intersection of Zeitgeschichte and satirical literary entertainment. I have already mentioned that this article appeared in installments at the very end of 1809, and it is as such very much of a piece with Jean Paul’s new year’s pieces. Reflections on the year’s passing and calibrating expectations for the next are an all-too-common genre of periodical literature, dating back to the homiletic universe of earlier moral weeklies and forward to the family journals of the mid- and late nineteenth century.⁸⁹ New year’s pieces help to imagine “the end,” with all of its symbolic weight, but they also perform the absence (or at least deferral) of finality: a new year is starting. Jean Paul takes this genre to predictable extremes, developing it as part of his authorial brand, not least by anthologizing many of these pieces. Indeed, his very first piece for the very first January 1, 1807 issue of the Morgenblatt is an inaugural moment of sorts, preparing the ground for readers to come to eagerly await (or tire of⁹⁰) something from him in the December or January issues over the next fifteen years.⁹¹

The final section of the “Programm der Feste” appears in the final December 30 issue of the Morgenblatt and is titled “December 31, 1810 presents: My Awakening at the New Year’s Ball in the Casino Hall” (see figure 4.2 for page view of this issue).⁹² This piece spoofs Jean Paul’s own self-ascribed prophetic abilities but also has a serious takeaway, for it presents a vision of peace after a dream that morphs a high-society new year’s ball into a scene of a battlefield, in effect allegorizing the war across Europe in the preceding year:

In my sleep I had to watch the column of dancers hopping forward as a cavalry column trotting forward, the clapping hands of the Anglaise for the firing of pistols, and the entire dance for a war dance.… Then, all of a sudden, the dance and the music stopped and trumpet tones flared up out of the silence like skylarks batting their wings—it had rung midnight and the old year had passed.⁹³

Recapitulating the conceit of the Friedens-Predigt, Jean Paul straddles the threshold between a future of peace and a past year of war (not unlike the Janus plate considered in chapter 1). In this final “festival”—which in this case does in fact correspond to an actual celebration, namely a new year’s ball—he looks back on the old year and makes predictions for the new, though the piece is dated one full year in advance of when it was published. In effect, the piece marking the end of the coming year is published before author and readers have experienced the end of the current one. How, one might ask, could anyone know what will happen a year from now? As Jean Paul remarks, “not even the author himself knows, who, as usual, writes down everything prior to it being printed [vor dem Abdrucke].”⁹⁴ Jean Paul writes of an occasion that has not yet occurred and of a peace not yet realized; he writes into the future. As if to underline his certainty that the future will bring peace, Jean Paul makes a point of saying that this piece is presented in full, in contrast to the rest of the “Programm der Feste.” In effect, readers are promised the very same text exactly one year later in the Morgenblatt’s final issue of 1810.

It is essential to the conceit of the “Programm der Feste” that these festivals and articles will be printed again, and this last piece was indeed reprinted, though in 1814 rather than in December of 1810. This might have disappointed those few naïve readers who might have wanted some orientation for 1811 in December of 1810, but in 1814, readers were that much more able to test out the prophetic claims made in 1809 for 1811, something that the announced reprinting in 1810 would not yet have been able to deliver on. Furthermore, the preface to the 1814 Museum is dated October 31, 1813, just weeks after the battle of Leipzig. A year of war has passed, and a year of peace is on the horizon: as a prediction from 1809, this proposition or prophecy is subject to verification, though now in a rather different political context. Both as an expression and a statement independent of authorial intention, Jean Paul’s texts can be—indeed, call out to be—calibrated with a variety of real and imaginary events. This mixture of various fictional and real temporal frameworks marks patterns of recurrence—shapes of time, in Kubler’s parlance—that are both regular and irregular, continuous and discontinuous, and linear and nonlinear. In mapping patterns of serial unfolding and temporal displacement, authors and readers play equal parts in this production of meaning, and both groups also have their blind spots. Jean Paul calls out for readers to map out the unfolding of time, including the prospect of future reencounters, on the basis of the formats and conventions of print, simultaneously keeping and breaking the promise that more is on its way.

Writing in a mode of Zeitgeschichte, Jean Paul intertwines the temporal footprints of media with those of historical events, showing how print can scale different frames of time up and down and reconstellate them. Again, this reveals a certain tenuousness in the logic of commemoration at the heart of the idea that articles are festivals: in staging how the future can be written via print in complementary and antagonistic relations with actually recurring calendar-specific events of popular culture, Jean Paul invites the conclusion that his contemporary histories “shatter” like raindrops into many miscellaneous texts rather than coalescing into structures of permanence associated with the nation.⁹⁵ Perhaps it is characteristic of Jean Paul’s political positionality—his “undependability” (as Mayer describes it) as nationalist propagandizer—that his relativization of the power of topical writings occurs both via the contrast between eternity and historical time (the time of transient nations) and via a vision of the miscellaneity of the print landscape. Jean Paul wants his readers to find inspiration, consolation, and diversion equally in his diminutive Werkchen and in the assurance that more is coming, even if it is not exactly what was promised. In the process, he straddles journalistic and more literary modes of writing, with the former based in an ideal of responding in a timely fashion to current events and the latter based in the consolation that readers are content with simply receiving more from a favorite author’s pen.

A related gesture toward preservation is thus at work in Jean Paul’s fictionalization of the conceit to memorialize and commemorate: Isn’t part of the joke of the “Programm der Feste” that future works are to coalesce as much around an author’s personality as around political events? Following this line of thinking, the future reader would be less a future historian or a future cocelebrant of national political festivity and more a kindred reader seeking to reencounter Jean Paul’s peculiar wit anew. These works, however miscellaneous and incomplete, call out to be read and reread as works by Jean Paul, the author. This gesture toward the kindred reader decouples his topical interventions from the patterns of continuation and repetition characteristic of historical time and the time of the nation (as manifest in temporal patterns of new festival cultures, for example) and shifts them into the time of the literary oeuvre, albeit one predicated on an unruly network of Werkchen rather than the self-standing, completed work. The idea of an authorial oeuvre that straddles different sites and styles of publication and mixes conventions of journal literature and authorial self-branding brings us to the topic of the next chapter, namely Jean Paul’s (in)complete works.

1. 1.   “Such an intensive deployment of topical literature to mobilize for war had no precedent in German history.” Karen Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture, and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 98.

2. 2.   Eduard Berend, Prolegomena zur historisch-kritischen Gesamtausgabe von Jean Pauls Werken (Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1927), 10.

3. 3.   See Becker, Zeit der Revolution!, 131.

4. 4.   Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland (Tübingen: Cotta, 1809), v.

5. 5.   On the notion of the culture of defeat, see Wolfgang Schievelbusch, Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Picador, 2004).

6. 6.   “Ein Chaos wiedereinander arbeitender Zeiten.” From a section of Jean Paul’s pedagogical treatise Levana titled “Über den Geist der Zeit.” I/5, 572.

7. 7.   Jean Paul, “Nachdämmerungen für Deutschland,” Vaterländisches Museum, no. 1 (1810): 13; I/5, 1081.

8. 8.   A recent monograph on literary authorship in Germany during the Napoleonic Wars, for example, does not cite his topical writings. Christoph Jürgensen, Federkrieger: Autorschaft im Zeichen der Befreiungskriege (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2018).

9. 9.   As Günter De Bruyn puts it, “nicht deutsch-romantisch-nationalistisch, sondern deutsch-aufgeklärt.” Günter De Bruyn, “Dämmerungen. Jean Paul und die Politik,” Sinn und Form 38, no. 6 (1986): 1150. Hans Mayer, “Der unzuverlässige Jean Paul,” in Politische Fastenpredigten während Deutschlands Marterwoche (Frankfurt: Insel, 1966), 147.

10. 10.   Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 34.

11. 11.   Pirated versions of his writings are a recurring issue for Jean Paul, something that he fictionalizes to comic effect, as Nicola Kaminski and others have shown. See Nicola Kaminski, “ ‘Nachdruck des Nachdrucks’ als Werk(chen)organisation oder Wie D. Katzenberger die Kleinen Schriften von Jean Paul Friedrich Richter anatomiert,” in Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft 52 (2017): 29–70. On the question of Vorabdruck, see Spoerhase, Das Format der Literatur, 528–50.

12. 12.   Göttsche, “Challenging Time(s),” 238.

13. 13.   Göttsche, Zeit im Roman, 117–18.

14. 14.   See Paul Fleming, The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2006), 50.

15. 15.   “Dieses ewige Zerstäuben in die kürzesten Zeitteilchen—welches wir Leben nennen.” Jean Paul, “Neujahrsbetrachtungen ohne Traum und Scherz, samt einer Legende,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 14, no. 1 (January 1, 1820): 2; II/3, 948.

16. 16.   On Stoic themes in Jean Paul, see most recently Jörg Kreienbock, Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

17. 17.   Jean Paul, “Saturnalien, den die Ende 1818 regierenden Hauptplaneten Saturn betreffend; in sieben Morgenblättern mitgeteilt von Dr. Jean Paul Fr. Richter,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 12, no. 1 (January 1, 1818): 1; II/3, 857–58.

18. 18.   As Ingrid Oesterle puts it, Jean Paul’s “narration is not primarily oriented toward the past, but rather draws from the future and offers a flood of images instead of a narrative based in experience” ([Sein] Erzählen [ist] nicht primär auf das Vergangene angewiesen, sondern [speist] sich aus Futurischem, [läßt] an die Stelle eines auf Erfahrung beruhenden Erzählzusammenhangs Bilderfluten treten). Ingrid Oesterle, “ ‘Es ist an der Zeit!’ Zur kulturellen Konstruktionsveränderung von Zeit gegen 1800,” in Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, ed. Walter Hinderer (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 27.

19. 19.   Jean Paul, “Ausschweife für künftige Fortsetzungen von vier Werken,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 17, no. 309 (December 26, 1823): 1234; II/3, 1080.

20. 20.   On this structure, see Hagel, Elliptische Zeiträume des Erzählens, 90–99.

21. 21.   On the concept of aesthetic Eigenzeiten, see Michael Gamper and Helmut Hühn, “Einleitung,” Zeit der Darstellung. Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft, ed. Michael Gamper and Helmut Hühn (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2014).

22. 22.   “Die Zeit [zerspringt] in Zeiten, wie der Regenbogen in fallende Tropfen.” Jean Paul, “Über den Geist der Zeit,” I/5, 567.

23. 23.   “Aber da dieselbe Zeit einen anderen Geiste heute entwickelt in Saturn—in seinen Trabanten—in seinen Ringen—auf allen zahllosen Welten der Gegenwart—und dann in London—Paris—Warschau;—und da folgt, daß dieselbe aunausmeßbare Jetzo-Zeit Millionen verschiedene Zeit-Geister haben muß: so frag’ ich: wo erscheint euch den der zitierte Zeitgeist deutlich, in Deutschland, Frankreich oder wo?” Jean Paul, “Über den Geist der Zeit,” I/5, 568.

24. 24.   “Weil der Held vom Antritt seines Lebens bis zum Antritt seiner Professur ja immer aus einer Zeit in die andere gehen muß.” Jean Paul, “Selberlebensbeschreibung,” I/6, 1049.

25. 25.   As Wieland puts it, “digression marks something of an untroubled asylum in the temporal progression of the stream of narrative.” Wieland, Vexierzüge, 204.

26. 26.   “Jede Zeit besteht aus zwei Theilen, dem Schluß der vergangenen und dem Anfang der folgenden Periode.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 18, no. 1 (January 1, 1824): 1.

27. 27.   “Der Mensch fühlet die Eitelkeit aller menschlichen Dinge nicht tiefer … als wenn er etwas endigt, es mag ein Buch oder ein Jahr oder ein anziehender Roman oder sein Leben selber sein.” Jean Paul, “Entwurf zu Auswahl aus des Teufelspapieren,” SW HKA I/19, 219.

28. 28.   On Jean Paul’s engagement with the preface, see Séan M. Williams, Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019).

29. 29.   Jean Paul, “Über den Geist der Zeit,” I/5, 568.

30. 30.   Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland, 245; I/5, 1033.

31. 31.   “Die Gegenwart ist deine Ewigkeit und verläßt dich nie.” From an aphorism titled “Trost gegen die ewige Flucht der Zeit” published in the Damen-Kalendar auf 1818. II/3, 853.

32. 32.   “Alles ist zu ertragen, was nur einen Augenblick dauert.” From “Bruchstücke aus der ‘Kunst, Stets Heiter zu Sein,’ ” published in Jean Paul’s Museum (1814). II/2, 972.

33. 33.   “Übrigens geht durch alle meine politischen Aufsätze von des ersten Konsuls Drucke bis zu des letzten Kaisers Drucke, etwas ungebeugt und aufrecht, was ich jetzo am liebsten darin stehen sehe—Die Hoffnung.” Jean Paul, Politische Fastenpredigten während Deutschlands Marterwoche (Cotta: Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1817), vi–vii; I/5, 1072.

34. 34.   This preface is likewise dated “Baireuth, in der Herbst-Tag-und Nachtgleiche. 1816” (Baireuth, in the Fall Equinox. 1816), which represents yet another turning point straddling seasonal cycles as well as the temporal footprint of the fall book fair, when such anthologies hit the market. Jean Paul, Politische Fastenpredigten, xii; I/5, 1074.

35. 35.   Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland, iv; I/5, 919.

36. 36.   As Ursula Naumann notes, “the message and problematic [of these occasional writings] are genre-specific: nowhere else did Jean Paul identify so much with the spiritual tradition.” Ursula Naumann, Predigende Poesie. Zur Bedeutung von Predigt, geistliche Rede und Predigertum für das Werk Jean Pauls (Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1976), 55. On the genre of the literary sermon, see also Nicholas Saul, Prediger aus der neuen romantischen Clique. Zur Interaktion von Romantik und Homiletik um 1800 (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1999).

37. 37.   On this conceit, see the recent publication by Maike Oergel, Zeitgeist—How Ideas Travel: Politics, Culture, and the Public in the Age of Revolution (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 86.

38. 38.   In its first journal publication, Nachdämmerungen appeared alongside a text titled “Several Lectures on the True Character of a Protestant Clergyman, by Professor Marheinecke of Heidelberg.” Vaterländisches Museum 1, no. 1 (1810). On the role of the Protestant sermon in developing national consciousness in the period, see Heidemarie Bade, Jean Pauls politische Schriften (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1974), 90.

39. 39.   As Wieland notes, Naumann’s extended study of the sermon in Jean Paul (Predigende Poesie) fails to take this ironization into account. Wieland, Vexierzüge, 141.

40. 40.   SW HKA, I/14, l.

41. 41.   Jean Paul, Politische Fastenpredigten, ix.

42. 42.   Jean Paul, Politische Fastenpredigten, iii.

43. 43.   Jean Paul, Politische Fastenpredigten, ix.

44. 44.   See Armin Schäfer, “Jean Pauls monströses Schreiben,” Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft 37 (2002): 216–34.

45. 45.   See Nora Ramtke, “Zeitschrift und Zeitgeschichte. Die Zeiten (1805–1820) als chronopoetisches Archiv ihrer Gegenwart,” IASL 45, no. 1 (2020): 112–34.

46. 46.   See Nicola Kaminski, “25.Oktober 1813 oder Journalliterarische Produktion von Gegenwart, mit einem Ausflug zum 6. Juli 1724,” in Aktualität: Zur Geschichte literarischer Gegenwartsbezüge vom 17. Bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Stefan Geyer and Johannes F. Lehmann (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2018), 241–70.

47. 47.   See Brehm et al., Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815.

48. 48.   Jean Paul first published this piece as “Der 17.Juli oder Charlotte Corday” in the Taschenbuch für 1801 that he coedited with Friedrich Gentz, and he then reworked and republished it in his miscellaneous 1809 satire Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise. On the Katzenberger corpus, see Pethes, Vermischte Schriften; and Kaminski, “ ‘Nachdruck des Nachdrucks.’ ”

49. 49.   “Verhängnis im Schlafrock.” Quoted in Böck, “Archäologie in der Wüste,” 267.

50. 50.   Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 14.

51. 51.   Ivan-Michelangelo D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte. Geschichtsschreibung und Journalismus zwischen Aufklärung und Vormärz (Berlin: Akademie, 2013), 42.

52. 52.   “A timeframe—the future—is impressed upon literature and this requires new gestures of writing and oration. Future-oriented forms of oration such as announcement, promise, the prophetic and prognostic are introduced into poetry, literary theory, and criticism.” Oesterle, “ ‘Es ist an der Zeit!,’ ” 106.

53. 53.   See Sean Franzel, “Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form,” in Performing Knowledge, 1750–1850, ed. Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).

54. 54.   See Friedrich Kittler, Die Nacht der Substanz (Bern: Benteli, 1989), 15–24.

55. 55.   See Peter Gilgen, Lektüren der Erinnerung: Lessing, Kant, Hegel (Munich: Fink, 2012).

56. 56.   See Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland, 1–37; I/5, 921–36.

57. 57.   See Helmut Pfotenhauer, Jean Paul: das Leben als Schreiben (Munich: Hanser, 2013), 329.

58. 58.   See Koselleck, “Goethe’s Untimely History,” 60–78.

59. 59.   On this context, see Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness.

60. 60.   Jean Paul published the “Twilight Butterflies or Sphinxes” (Dämmerungsschmetterlinge oder Sphinxe) in Schlegel’s journal and After-Twilights for Germany in Perthes’s journal. Both were later collected in Politische Fastenpredigten. See figure 4.1.

61. 61.   See Friedrich Perthes, “Ankündigung,” Vaterländisches Museum 1 (1810): n.p.

62. 62.   On this new politics, see Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon; see also George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Fertig, 1975).

63. 63.   See Sean Franzel, “Von Magazinen, Gärböttichen und Bomben: Räumliche Speichermetaphern der medialen Selbstinszenierung von Zeitschriften,” in Archiv/Fiktionen. Verfahren des Archivierens in Kultur und Literatur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes (Freiburg: Rombach, 2016), 207–30.

64. 64.   See the excerpt and review “Friedens-Predigt an Deutschland, gehalten von Jean Paul” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 2, nos. 157 and 159 (July 1 and 4, 1808); and the excerpt and commentary “Denksprüche aus einer Friedenspredigt an Deutschland von Jean Paul Fr. Richter,” Zeitung für Einsiedler 3 (April 9, 1808).

65. 65.   On Kleist and Müller’s approached to Phöbus as philosophical and critical miscellanies, see Heinrich Aretz, Heinrich von Kleist als Journalist. Untersuchungen zum “Phöbus”, zur “Germania” und den “Berliner Abendblättern” (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1984), 80–81.

66. 66.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede bey dem künftigen Schlusse des Morgenblatts,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1807): 3.

67. 67.   On this connection see Dorothea Böck, “Satirische Raffinerien für Menschenkinder aus allen Ständen: Überlegungen zur Genesis von Jean Pauls Kunstmodell,” in Greizer Studien, ed. Harald Olbrich et al. (Greiz: Staatliche Museen Greiz, 1989), 149–208.

68. 68.   See Wolfgang Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend. Die Aufklärung im Spiegel der deutschen Moralischen Wochenschriften (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967).

69. 69.   On early nineteenth-century adaptations of moral weeklies, see Nicola Kaminski and Volker Mergenthaler, Zuschauer im Eckfenster 1821/22 oder Selbstreflexion der Journalliteratur im Journal(text). Mit einem Faksimile des Zuschauers vom April/Mai 1822 (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2015).

70. 70.   Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend, 541.

71. 71.   See Stockinger, An den Ursprüngen populärer Serialität, 75–76.

72. 72.   Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland, 62; I/5, 949.

73. 73.   In the 1827 Sämmtliche Werke publication of the Dämmerungen, this passage reads “Freiheitspredigten” (38), though subsequent issues return to “Frechheitspredigten” from the original 1808 publication.

74. 74.   “Die meisten Leser interessiert, als Stadt-Weltklatschen, nicht die Begebenheit—noch ihr Einfluß—noch ihre Notwendigkeit—kaum ihre Wahrheit—sondern die Inschrift: daß sie in diesem Jahre gedruckt ist: alte Zeitungen und Obligationen verlieren gegen neue.” Jean Pauls Briefe und bevorstehender Lebenslauf (Gera and Leipzig: Heinsius, 1799), 113; I/4, 967–68.

75. 75.   Going back to the French and German newspapers of the revolutionary period is a central conceit of Jean Paul’s 1801/1809 piece on Charlotte Corday (who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat), which stages the scene of a narrator reading aloud from the Moniteur’s 1793 account of Corday’s last days.

76. 76.   The historical-critical edition of Jean Paul’s works begun in the late 1920s broke new ground in collecting his topical pieces for the first time under the heading “politische Schriften,” even though the editor of the 1939 volume in question uses Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political—the ability to distinguish between friend and enemy—to ground his claim that “Jean Paul was no political person and author” (Jean Paul war kein politischer Mensch und Autor). Wilhelm von Schramm, “Einleitung” and “Politische Schriften,” SW HKA, I/14, vi. Jean Paul did in fact plan a “war section” (Kriegsabtheilung) of his collected writings, but calling his Napoleonic era topical writings political is a retrospective editorial decision that risks artificially distinguishing between political and nonpolitical projects. As Hans G. Helms puts it (with a pathos particular to the debates of the 1970s and 1980s), “it is a sublimely wearisome perfidy to sequester a certain section of Jean Paul’s oeuvre under the rubric ‘political writings’ and to imply that everything else lacks any and all political implication.” Hans G. Helms, “Jean Paul, ein politischer Autor,” Text + Kritik, special volume (1983): 122.

77. 77.   Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland, 135; I/5, 983.

78. 78.   “In short, do you not believe that there are states other than France who could celebrate the fourteenth of October, even if with a few tears?” Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland, 130; I/5, 981.

79. 79.   Jean Paul, Politische Fastenpredigten, xii; I/5, 1074.

80. 80.   The authors of Zeit/Schrift have shown how the discourse of a “new” time is paradigmatically articulated through the periodicity and anticipatory structures of periodical publication, with journals reporting on the return of the Austrian monarch to Vienna to construct an emphatic sense of the advent of the new and its continued commemoration into the future. See Brehm et al., Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815, 289–97.

81. 81.   Discussing Jean Paul’s interest in monuments, paper and otherwise, Helmut J. Schneider comments that Jean Paul’s commemorative texts “assume for [themselves] the character of a symbolic memorial space that is meant to draw in and unite readers.” Helmut J. Schneider, “The European Machine God: The Image of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Political Writings of Jean Paul,” in Inspiration Bonaparte? German Culture and Napoleonic Occupation, ed. Seán Allan and Jeffrey L. High (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021), 191.

82. 82.   Jean Paul, Dämmerungen für Deutschland, 203; I/5, 1014.

83. 83.   Jean Paul, “Programm der Feste oder Aufsätze, welche der Verfasser in jedem Monat des künftigen Morgenblattes 1810 den Lesern geben will,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 3, nos. 310, 311, and 312 (December 28, 29, and 30, 1809); II/2, 984–1003.

84. 84.   Jean Paul, “Programm der Feste,” Morgenblatt, 3, no. 310, 1237; II/2, 984.

85. 85.   As the editors of the Morgenblatt note at the end of Jean Paul’s “Programm der Feste,” “The Editors: We are sorry to have not been allowed to give our readers all twelve foretastes.” Morgenblatt 3, no. 312, 1246.

86. 86.   On Jean Paul’s use of books as places to print writings not accepted for journal publication by censors, see Wulf Koepke, “Jean Paul’s Battles with the Censors and his Freiheits-Büchlein,” in Zensur und Kultur, Censorship and Culture, ed. John A. McCarthy and Werner von der Ohe (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 107.

87. 87.   Jean Paul, Museum, 227–74.

88. 88.   In effect I subscribe to the point made in various ways by Helms, Göttsche, Jordheim, Hermand and others, that the distinction between Jean Paul’s literary writings and his properly “political” pieces is a false one.

89. 89.   See Naumann, Predigende Poesie, 9.

90. 90.   Norbert Miller and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann call this the “first in the long and occasionally tedious series of articles written for [the] new year.” Norbert Miller and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Kommentar zu den Vermischten Schriften,” in Sämtliche Werke in 10 Bänden, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich/Vienna: Hanser, 1974–1985), II/4, 570.

91. 91.   A prototype for this type of piece prior to the Morgenblatt’s founding is The Marvelous Society on New Year’s Eve (1801), in which Jean Paul reflects not just on the end of the year but also on the much more momentous end of the century. For an extended reading of this piece in terms of the problematic of time, see Oesterle, “ ‘Es ist an der Zeit!,’ ” 91–121. On the prevalence of moments addressing this “constellation of death and rebirth” in Jean Paul’s writings, see Götz Müller, “ ‘Ich vergesse den 15.November nie.’ Intertextualität und Mehrfachbesetzung bei Jean Paul,” in Jean Paul im Kontext. Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Götz Müller (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1996), 134.

92. 92.   “Der 31 December des Jahres 1810 gibt: “Mein Erwachen auf dem Sylvester-Balle im Casinosaale.” Jean Paul, “Programm der Feste,” Morgenblatt 3, no. 312, 1245; II/2, 1000.

93. 93.   Jean Paul, “Programm der Feste,” Morgenblatt 3, no. 312, 1246; II/2, 1000.

94. 94.   Jean Paul, “Programm der Feste,” Morgenblatt 3, no. 312, 1246; II/2, 1000.

95. 95.   “Die Zeit [zerspringt] in Zeiten, wie der Regenbogen in fallende Tropfen.” Jean Paul, “Über den Geist der Zeit,” Levana, I/5, 567.