Before and after Death

“Ahead of Time”

Cotta was eager to secure Jean Paul as a contributor for the Morgenblatt and pressed him for a piece for the January 1, 1807, inaugural issue. However, instead of offering an introduction or prologue to the journal, Jean Paul proposed “an anticipated Epilogue (a Closing Speech [Schlußrede]).”²⁸ This would become the “Abschiedsrede bey dem künftigen Schlusse des Morgenblatts” (Farewell speech on the occasion of the future end of the Morgenblatt), a three-page eulogy of the journal’s illustrious past (see figure 5.1).²⁹ Here, too, he might well have drawn inspiration from Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, which in issue 101 presents readers with an “Imaginary Historian” who chronicles the existence of the journal’s essays three hundred years after their publication.³⁰ The “Abschiedsrede” serves as a programmatic introduction to the journal and to what would become Jean Paul’s symbiotic relationship with it as a lead author.

The “Abschiedsrede” returns to the thought experiment that hypothetical conclusion leads to ongoing continuation. Like the “Konjektural-Biographie,” the “Abschiedsrede” toggles between the present and a hypothetical future: for the reader of the first issue, a future moment is constructed in which the journal will have concluded, yet within the speech’s fictive frame, the Morgenblatt is coming to an end, and the author is minutes away from death. To be sure, predicting the end of a journal just as it is starting is something of a heretical action, for it constructs an observer position usually closed off to readers, writers, and editors who are under the assumption that serial publication will ensure a periodical’s ongoing life.³¹ Jean Paul overlays the times of print and of a life of writing in the service of imagining a regimented, sequential production of works. Writing from the future allows Jean Paul to construct a kind of conjectural history both of the journal (which did not cease publication until 1865) and of Jean Paul’s own literary career. Furthermore, it allows him to bring the temporal footprint of the journal—its almost daily periodicity, its orientation to the new, and its sequential accumulation—into resonance with his own life and works.

This piece is chock-full of reflection on time more generally, a stock component of Jean Paul’s beginning- and end-of-year “speeches” in the Morgenblatt that this piece inaugurates. Jean Paul riffs on the temporal connotations of the journal’s title: the Morgenblatt helps readers to begin the day, and each installment brings something new and represents a “daily youth in miniature, a rejuvenated rejuvenation.”³² Morgen means both “morning” and “tomorrow,” with daily rejuvenation promising that tomorrow will bring another issue. As Jean Paul suggests, measuring the passing of time—“moving along, even flying along with time”—is a primary function of all periodicals and of the Morgenblatt in particular.³³ If the central allegory of the “Konjektural-Biographie” is autumnal literary production, then the allegorical thrust of the “Abschiedsrede” centers on the ephemerality of serial print, and Jean Paul does not pass up the opportunity to consider the transience of the political turmoil affecting central Europe. The “Abschiedsrede” is one of the first pieces that Jean Paul publishes after the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt; looking back from a conjectural future, Jean Paul mentions events that coincide with the journal’s founding as they recede into “prehistory” (Vorzeit): “Let us go all the way back, to the dark source of the Nile.”³⁴ In 1806, Napoleon broke up the Holy Roman Empire—this was the year “in which the newspaper the Imperial Gazette [Der Reichsanzeiger] rose up and became the General Gazette [Der allgemeine Anzeiger],” and 1806 witnessed the emergence of the eighth wonder of the world, the “surplus wonder” of the battle of “Jena.”³⁵ Historical events unfold as a series of wonders (and as a series of changing journal titles) no longer contained by a completed set, but the reference to current events also relativizes the suffering of the present. Archived copies of the journal allow readers to register events as no longer current—as he states, the journal is “a valuable repository for miscellanies [Miszellen] [that] proffers everyone all kinds of things from everything.”³⁶ In imagining the entire run of the Morgenblatt, Jean Paul invites readers to test whether the journal really does deliver on its promise to present something new each new day, to “open up the yearly volumes [of the journal], and for example, compare the articles of the year 1807 … with those of the years 1810, 1817, 1825.”³⁷ By encouraging readers to go back to old (and not yet written) articles, Jean Paul envisions scenes of future reencounters made possible by the journal as archive and also by these texts’ potential for migration to other formats. Here, too, he spoofs the hands-on paperwork of scholarly philological reconstruction.

The trope of transience also functions as a hinge by which to swivel back (or forth) from the contrasting temporality of the periodical and that of his own life and works: “The speaker will now lay down his pen, the not-infertile mother of one hundred and seventy-seven volumes, and depart; for the night frost of life is here, and the final yellow leaves fly down from the picked-over treetop.”³⁸ As in the “Konjektural-Biographie,” Jean Paul brings his readers to the onset of winter. Shortly afterward, though, he retracts the farewell gesture: “But I am truly writing myself into emotional states well ahead of time [vor der Zeit];—the Morgenblatt has hardly just begun, let alone concluded, and for my part, I am a forty-three-year-old with plenty of fruit still hanging from me.”³⁹ Jean Paul shifts to a different, now “premature” time of writing. In writing from the present, he recalibrates the time of his life and works with the actual state of the new journal. Marking the end promises continuation.

Once again, Jean Paul juxtaposes the temporal frameworks of authorial production and the broader literary landscape. Indeed, the hypothetical one hundred and seventy-seven volumes of the future are almost more plausible as the proliferating issues of the Morgenblatt than as a notional works edition. As writing and periodical publication outpace the years of his life, media-based periodicities relativize “natural” time. And given that the periodicities of print outpace the cycles of individual life, isn’t there something counterintuitive to Jean Paul’s idea that the end of his life and the Morgenblatt’s will coincide? One might just as well conclude that the journal will continue into an indefinite future, dependent on patterns of literary production and reception independent of a single author. Imagining the complete set of all the issues of the Morgenblatt is an archival fiction that generates hypothetical scenes of future reencounter, and Jean Paul has a chance to make the scene slightly more actual by reprinting the “Abschiedsrede” in 1815 in the second installment of his anthology series Herbst-Blumine oder gesammelte Werkchen aus Zeitschriften (Autumn flora, or collected little works from journals).⁴⁰ Eight years later, the history of the journal belongs slightly less to the future, the Morgenblatt is the leading literary organ it was predestined to become, and readers can test out Jean Paul’s predictions from the first issue. On the one hand, the anthology’s title evokes the convention of the collected works edition, with anthologizing potentially lending occasional pieces the permanence befitting an authorial “work.” On the other hand, the title highlights the origin of its contents in florilegistic formats tied to the seasonal rhythms of Taschenbücher and other anthologies.⁴¹

The Autumn Flora curates the afterlives of his works in an ambivalent way. To a certain extent, he models the incorporation of scattered fragments into a more unified corpus, yet this corpus still appears under the sign of smallness and miscellaneity. Among other things, this anthology collects various new year’s addresses that Jean Paul had written for the Morgenblatt since its founding. The anthology format decouples the addresses from the occasions for which they were ostensibly written, that is, the year-in, year-out passing of time. These texts mark the passing of the calendar years, yet they do so irregularly, interspersed with and interrupted by texts that perform other unrelated functions. This might suggest a mode of reencounter that allows readers to appreciate the texts as primarily literary experiments, as particularly original and humorous takes on established rhetorical genres that could be seamlessly integrated into the miscellaneous reading characteristic of the Morgenblatt and other journals like it. Yet the texts still bear traces of the temporality of the current events that they obliquely reference (such as the Battle of Jena–Auerstadt, which had been revenged by 1815). If the initial pieces write the present of the actual readers of the journal’s first issues, then republication places this present into a sequence of past events, a sequence of past mornings and tomorrows accessible both in the archive of the journal’s past issues and in Jean Paul’s anthology. Jean Paul engages in something of an oblique and incomplete writing of Zeitgeschichte predicated on the open-ended temporalities and experiential contingencies of miscellaneous reading. Offering readers these reconstellated Werkchen, he underlines his works’ status as archived journal literature with time-specific relevance but also as expressly literary works with the potential for multiple future afterlives.

Opera Omnia

The 1820s was a boom time for works editions, as seen in an announcement of Jean Paul’s works in the Morgenblatt, with his publisher G. A. Reimer offering readers collected works of modern (Tieck, Novalis, Kleist, and Lenz) and classic (Shakespeare) authors (see figure 5.2). Like other contemporary writers, Jean Paul undoubtedly approaches his literary output via the horizon of a unified body of work.⁴² Over the course of the nineteenth century, works editions become one of the most “durable and effective vehicles for regulating, institutionalizing, and stabilizing the category of literature,” ascribing “classical” timelessness to certain figures.⁴³ In Jean Paul’s case, his works edition certainly makes good on the promise for more that we encountered in the “Konjektural-Biographie” and the “Abschiedsrede,” and it stands under the sign of both the author’s death and the impulse to collect and edit previously published writings. In Jean Paul’s hands, though, the works edition comes to function as one element in a repertoire of serial formats that troubles the notion of the self-standing work and that prefigures afterlives for his Werkchen that depart from the conceit of naïve monumentalization. In particular, comparing Goethe’s and Jean Paul’s approaches to the works edition underscores Jean Paul’s affinities to the world of serial literature and miscellaneous reading. To be sure, scholars have explored questions of formal open-endedness and serial modularity in Goethe’s works, but Jean Paul represents an even more radical alignment of an oeuvre with principles of continuation, incompletion, and miscellaneity.⁴⁴

The posthumously published edition Jean Paul’s sämmtliche Werke (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1826–1838) would come out in quarterly installments over the course of more than ten years. Working with this edition is difficult, because it is often hard to identify authorial or editorial intention; Eduard Berend, the early twentieth-century editor of the first critical edition of Jean Paul’s works, called it “incomplete … organized without a plan, highly unreliable on a textual level” (unvollständig … planlos angeordnet, textlich höchst unzuverlässig).⁴⁵ Jean Paul did offer some input before his death, but some of his initial plans went unrealized in this and subsequent critical editions, which were predominantly oriented toward an ideal of bringing together the final versions of individual works.⁴⁶ He appears to have remained undecided about certain elements of the edition, and notes and letters detailing his plans were sometimes contradictory. In contrast to Goethe and his work overseeing and expanding Ausgabe letzter Hand, Jean Paul did not play a truly hands-on role. However, as with Goethe’s approach and later scholarly editions, Jean Paul’s tentative plans for this edition nonetheless do reveal certain important features of his approach to the editorial challenge of curating his works for posterity.

Works editions can reveal how authors understand the status of individual works and their interrelation,⁴⁷ for the author serves both as a creative catalyst and as a reader, an editor, and a rearranger of their own works.⁴⁸ The early nineteenth century witnesses a perhaps surprising variety of approaches to the collection and organization of works editions. It is not uncommon to continue to rely on the genre hierarchies of old, as, for example, Goethe does in starting the Ausgabe letzter Hand with poetry, moving to different dramatic forms, and then to the novel.⁴⁹ This generic hierarchy presents readers with a sequence of individual works that successfully instantiate particular literary forms. In contrast, Jean Paul toyed with the idea of installment-based publication, in which each quarterly grouping of five volumes would present readers with a variety of genres: as he writes in a letter, “every installment [Lieferung] would simultaneously contain novels and stories and satirical essays or also didactic ones.”⁵⁰ Here, the logical coherence of each installment stems from the varied arrangement of its contents rather than from the internal logics of the individual works themselves. Indeed, this vision of mixed installments evokes the structure of an open-ended serial anthology. Goethe specifically set aside certain volumes of his works edition for collecting entirely miscellaneous contents,⁵¹ while Jean Paul envisions the entire edition as infused with miscellaneity. Though the Reimer edition only partially (and perhaps accidentally) realizes this deliberately miscellaneous approach to the installment structure, these initial plans reveal Jean Paul’s lingering affinities to use-oriented Gebrauchsliteratur and its promise of regular, diverse content.

It was all too typical for works editions—and for novels, for that matter—to be published in multiple installments, so one might risk placing too much importance on the serialized publication of a works edition. That said, Jean Paul does seem particularly attuned to their pace and scale, professing a desire for “quick installments” (in schnellen Lieferungen) in a letter to Böttiger.⁵² For subscribers, the pace of receiving future installments would not be dissimilar to that of certain other serials. (I have included these organizing designators in my graphic showing republication in different formats [see figure 4.1].) Relatedly, Jean Paul does not shy away from breaking his novels up into parts, something that Berend takes issue with when applying a notion of the work as organic whole to Jean Paul’s novels in particular.⁵³ The practice of consolidating multiple volumes of a given text into a single volume common in twentieth-century editions brings with it assumptions about the unity and totality of the work that stands in tension with the publication landscape of the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, Berend and other editors weighed trimming Jean Paul’s many digressions, a common response to writers perceived to be overly digressive.⁵⁴ Partly through publication conventions that necessitate installment structures and partly through Jean Paul’s embrace of protean continuation, his works seem to only partially conform to later editorial interventions that deemphasize serial and miscellaneous elements.

Another way that Jean Paul diverges from more classicizing conceptions of works editions is in his resistance to what Andrew Nash calls the “air of finality and completeness” that surrounds such editions.⁵⁵ Incompletion and interruption are inherent conditions of many of his works. In one of the only editorial statements he was able to include in the Reimer edition, Jean Paul addresses female readers in the edition’s very first volume with the disclaimer that the Invisible Lodge is “born a ruin”: “But what life in this world do we not see interrupted?”⁵⁶ Again, Jean Paul brings his (re)published work into resonance with his life and works, and it is almost as if the state of incompletion and interruption applies to his collected works.⁵⁷ In contrast to Berend’s mid-twentieth-century edition and its status as a de facto Ausgabe letzter Hand, a new works edition project based in Würzburg, Germany, has sought to edit Jean Paul’s works from a work-genetic perspective, collecting and annotating different versions of specific representative works on the basis of the Nachlass.⁵⁸ This new edition explores how works came into being and relies on digital formats to reproduce textual variants, in the process presenting readers with textual units that, as the editors put it, stand in decided tension with a stable notion of “the work.”⁵⁹ Yet this is a project that is very clearly oriented to Jean Paul’s unpublished writings and represents a different orientation to the authorial oeuvre than the republication of previously published works.

To be sure, the premise of “complete” works is usually merely aspirational, with the common distinction between “complete” (sämtlich) and ongoing, open-ended “collected” (gesammelt) works seldom holding up.⁶⁰ Sämmtliche Werke is the subtitle of Goethe’s Ausgabe letzter Hand, for example, yet he would go on to add to this edition in the last years of his life. He also rejects the notion that works are complete in any absolute way: as published, they are in their “last,” rather than their truly finished, versions.⁶¹ But as later nineteenth-century figures such as Börne, Heine, and Karl Gutzkow go on to anthologize writings first published in journals and newspapers in multivolume single-author collections, they align themselves more with Jean Paul’s performative open-endedness and incompletion than with Goethe’s careful curation of his self-development. Börne’s announcement of his collected works edition—at the end of a republished collection of “Aphorisms and Miscellanies,” no less—is a very Jean Paulian gesture: “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.”⁶² It is inherent to the poetics of miscellaneous Werkchen that they can be repackaged and repurposed in a variety of seemingly arbitrary ways and that readers’ encounters with them are likewise organized by the felicitous and frustrating contingencies of miscellaneity.

Works editions also come to bear in important ways on the interrelated chronologies of life and works. Even while such editions tend to situate works in a dehistoricized, detemporalized pantheon alongside other edition-worthy authors, chronological organization likewise offers “an implicit biography of its author.”⁶³ Such organization is a feature of later critical editions especially and was not yet standard practice in the early nineteenth century. Schiller’s posthumous Sämtliche Werke (Complete works) (1812–1815) pursue such an ordering, for example, while Goethe’s and many others’ do not.⁶⁴ Goethe’s reliance on genre hierarchy and his choice to add further volumes to the edition lend the Ausgabe letzter Hand a nonchronological structure. At the same time, though, Goethe states that this edition is based on an organic model of the author’s quasinatural self-development: it is to reveal “the author’s nature, formation, progressing, and multifaceted striving in all directions” (des Verfassers Naturell, Bildung, Fortschreiten und vielfaches Versuchen nach allen Seiten hin), as he puts it in his 1826 advertisement for the edition in the Morgenblatt.⁶⁵ Jean Paul, in turn, is quite aware of the works edition’s potential for self-historicization, which he spoofs on a small scale when prefacing anthologies with the “history” of the texts contained therein, that is, the details of their previous publication. The Reimer edition, rather than realizing Jean Paul’s initial idea of journal-like mixed contents, hews rather close to the chronological survey of previously published works that Jean Paul presents at the end of his late novel Der Komet (The comet), but even this edition contains certain striking examples of temporal and generic heterogeneity.⁶⁶ In the seventh installment, for example, the first and second volumes contain the comic appendix to the novel from Titan (1800–1803); the third and fourth volumes contain the topical writings Dämmerungen für Deutschland (1809) and Friedens-Predigt (1808), respectively (the latter having been published prior to the former); and the fifth is Jean Pauls Briefe und bevorstehender Lebenslauf, published in 1799. This ordering might exhibit the lack of a plan mentioned by Berend, but it also bears the trace of a chronology more aligned with serial print than the author’s biographical development. It would be up to the critical edition begun in the early twentieth century to provide a more coherent chronological organization of Jean Paul’s works, but such editorial intervention entails a process of de-miscellanizing.

In a way, collected works editions are quintessentially serial forms that reveal the shared economy of journal and book publication characteristic of the nineteenth century, including the reliance on installment structure, the significance of advertisements and announcements in journals, the anthologizing of scattered journal pieces, and more. But we have also seen how Jean Paul’s works edition engages with serial structures under the sign of incomplete, plural Werkchen. To the extent that later editorial interventions seek to tamp down Jean Paul’s initial embrace of miscellaneity, seriality, and self-interruption, these interventions give us a sense of the authorial and editorial control (Werkherrschaft) that Jean Paul deliberately flaunted. The Reimer edition thus represents a transitional moment in literary-historical terms; despite being tied to the contingencies of Jean Paul’s death, it also betrays a certain amount of friction between his own authorial self-presentation and conventional notions of canonical authorship and literary bequest.

The Papierdrache

I’d now like to return to the Werkchen with which we began this chapter. Jean Paul’s 1823–1824 “Ausschweife für künftige Fortsetzungen von vier Werken” (Digressions for future continuations of four works)⁶⁷ was one of the last, more substantive pieces published during his life, and it ended up being his last contribution to the Morgenblatt, though was not Jean Paul’s actual “final word,” as Berend’s critical edition stylizes it.⁶⁸ In 1823, actual death was clearly more salient for him than it was almost twenty years earlier (he would die in November of 1825, at the age of sixty-two). Viewed in this light, this text represents an extended exploration of serial continuation as a response to the possibility of impending death. It appears in installments in the journal’s last seven issues of 1823, concludes in the first issue of 1824, and is very much of a piece with Jean Paul’s end-of-year discourses. It is presented as a set of continuations of four of his earlier novels, including Der Komet, or, more precisely, as a collection of digressions from continuations to come, following the format of Der Komet, in which Jean Paul seeks to give each individual chapter its own supplemental digression.⁶⁹ Like his novels, these digressions mix stock material from Jean Paul’s oeuvre: fictionalized speeches, letters, scholarly and moral discourses, diaries, spoofs of pedantry, accounts of marital disputes, announcements for fictional and actual publications, aphorisms from fictional characters, and more, all in eight installments that add up to approximately twelve double-column pages of the Morgenblatt. Further complicating this piece’s formal structure and temporal footprint is that these digressive continuations are themselves incomplete, introduced instead as excerpts of longer versions to come. Jean Paul demonstratively looks back to previous writings and forward to future ones, a gesture that creates a sense of continuity between past and present and also seeds future continuation. Furthermore, this gesture incorporates earlier novel projects into new structures of journal-based juxtaposition and proximity, doing the kind of work that a works edition organized in miscellaneous installments might do.

Elsewhere Jean Paul had made the same promise that he makes here—to present a last comic work “into which everything must be written—so that finally there will be an end of me and by me,” including his last published novel, Der Komet, in which he also announces a cumulative “last work” titled the Papierdrache, or paper kite or dragon.⁷⁰ Indeed, the preface to the “Ausschweife” literally continues the novel’s introduction, as Jean Paul reminds readers of his announcement of the Papierdrache there and once more states his intention to publish a “last work” (letztes Werk) by this name.⁷¹ This passage recapitulates the conceit from The Spectator “to Print my self out,”⁷² and he goes on to further specify that, rather than operating as a single stand-alone volume, it should appear in octavo, “in the expansive form of a weekly periodical, like the English Spectator.”⁷³ It was common for novels and works editions to be published in multiple volumes over several years, but this envisioned project takes this format to extremes.⁷⁴ Jean Paul did in fact work on this project in the last years of his life; posthumously published notes state that it is to have dual columns, like the Morgenblatt, and is to deal with the “newest,” most current times.⁷⁵ And these notes are emphatic about this project’s serial structure: it is to come out in “open-ended volumes” (ungeschlossene Bände); each article ideally refers both backward and forward in the hypothetical journal’s run;⁷⁶ and “the continuation of a piece is always promised.”⁷⁷ Jean Paul also intended to present himself as editor of this periodical work; the conceit of the author as editor of multiple fictional authors crops up in his earlier novels, in imitation of eighteenth-century moral weeklies. Indeed, an alternative name that Jean Paul considered was Der Apotheker (The apothecary), which was the title of an actual moral weekly and connoted the librarian-like collection of literary objects;⁷⁸ he likewise also conceptualized this as a baroque literary society, or “Fruit-Bearing Society.”⁷⁹ As with the collected works edition, the conceit of the author as (self-)editor is an important part of this project. Here, too, Jean Paul wants to get ahead of later philological curators of his literary bequest, preemptively spoofing the desire to print every last scrap of paper.

The emphatic seriality of this final work begs the question of the end: What exactly is the status of this “end of me and by me”? At first glance, Jean Paul seems to promise a definitive conclusion to his writing, and yet this finality becomes increasingly uncertain: as he puts it, the Papierdrache will be “a veritable overturned cornucopia, where all the windfall [Fallobst] still to come from writing and experiencing will be too much to be useful for anything, from which alone a length can be inferred, not to mention the final sheet [Bogen].”⁸⁰ Here Jean Paul interrupts himself at the thought of this future work’s lack of conclusion and incompletion. Though it is his own work, he cannot presently predict how long it will become: the time the author has left to live could be so excessively productive that the writing that comes from it cannot be properly contained in any kind of conventional work. We are dealing once more with an end under the sign of continuation or continuation under the sign of the end. In a departure, though, from the “Abschiedsrede” and the “Konjektural-Biographie,” which both stage an author late in life exhibiting retrospective control over his works, this piece envisions a scenario where the author’s writings elude his control. This begs the question of the Papierdrache’s status as an emblem of permanent continuation.

The fourth and final segment of the “Ausschweife” brings the interrelationship of authorial life, death, and the time of literary production to an at least provisional conclusion. Reckoning with death and the relationship of writing to the unfolding of life is a pervasive topic in Jean Paul’s late work, and the final segment of the “Ausschweife” is titled “Trostantwort auf Ottomars Klage über die Zeitlichkeit des Lebens (Extrablatt aus dem dritten Bande der unsichtbaren Loge)” (Consolation to Ottomar’s lament about the temporality of life [Extra page from the third volume of The Invisible Lodge]), and it is published on January 1, 1824.⁸¹ In effect, this is a “continuation” of the planned first work in the collected works edition, a perfect instantiation of Jean Paul’s oeuvre as a network of interrelated texts. In the 1793 novel Die unsichtbare Loge (Jean Paul’s first), the figure Ottomar is dramatically taken for dead and buried alive, again part of the protobaroque “constellation of death and rebirth”⁸² that is so central to his authorial brand. In Die unsichtbare Loge, this leads to an extended meditation on time, something which this “continuation” continues.

As the title states, this final piece has two parts: Ottomar’s lament and a consoling response from an unnamed figure. Ottomar is unable to orient himself in the “flowing by of moments” (Verfließen der Augenblicke) and the corresponding “flowing by of people.” The rejoining advice is rather simple: “Do something!”

Make a campaign—[draft] a building plan—[write] an instructional book—[make] an artwork—even [take] a trip: the time of the present loses or hides its rolling away through your stride and your gaze toward a future that remains immobile; indeed, the fleetingness of time turns into the inertia of a non-time.⁸³

To distract oneself by having a clear goal in the future creates the impression of delaying time’s passing. This solution is both secular and deeply Christian, for the orientation toward a temporalized future is grounded in the insight that a detemporalized future in God redeems worldly suffering. This also represents a moral technology of manipulating the experience of time, turning transience into sluggishness, slowing time down almost to the point of detemporalization. Paradoxically, Jean Paul proposes an orientation to pervasive ephemerality that seeks to decelerate the passing of the ephemeral. It is, of course, no accident that he once more invokes the process of writing: “[make] an artwork.” He places the trope of authorial fecundity in the service of scaling time and of dilating the time of the present and near future as much as possible; we saw this gesture in both the “Konjektural-Biographie” and the “Abschiedsrede,” in which the time between the present and death is configured simultaneously as an all-too-brief moment and as a more extended period that writing might stretch out indefinitely. Two different modes of writing determine the future, namely the conceptualization of a teleological work as point of orientation and a kind of ongoing writing that unfolds almost frantically over time. We are dealing here with the Scheherazade-like desire to stave off death through writing: working toward a “final work,” continuing previously started individual works in the present, and promising more of them into the future are forms of writing into the future by serial means.⁸⁴

This scene is both an extended spoof of the gesture of making a literary bequest to posterity and an all-too-pragmatic piece of moral-stoic advice, and these are the coordinates upon which Jean Paul operates as a writer of time and of the end. But what, then, if Jean Paul himself followed the advice of the unnamed respondent to Ottomar’s despair? What would his response be to the call to “do something!” and “[make] an artwork”? Several possibilities come into view as points of future work–poetic orientation. On the one hand, the future work(s) might be the very continuations that the “Ausschweife” announces and prefigures. On the other hand, Jean Paul does describe the Papierdrache as a substantial and final opus. Are the “Ausschweife” foretastes of this later, more expansive work? Publication in the Morgenblatt certainly approximates the format conditions of a periodical-like work. As a last work, though, the Papierdrache also is the culmination of Jean Paul’s life and works, and perhaps the collected works edition itself, with the Papierdrache as its capstone, is to serve as the unmoving future telos. Jean Paul is writing toward this edition, with the Papierdrache as its emblem, writing his own life as he goes. Each of these possible points of future orientation is both fixed and forever continuing. This imaginary network of future last works, each mirroring one another in different ways, encapsulates a vision of an oeuvre as ongoing miscellany.

Jean Paul’s Literary Afterlives

The frame of time between the present of writing and future death must inevitably close, yet there are certain ways in which Jean Paul’s works live on under the sign of ongoing generation and continuation. Like the paradox of a telos that is simultaneously fixed and unfixed, the finitude of individual life is a limiting condition that both does and does not apply to Jean Paul’s oeuvre. Along with writing into the space of time before death, Jean Paul poses the question of the after: What comes after the author? What are the afterlives of a body of work, especially a body of miscellaneous Werkchen? When does his fictional “Fruit-Bearing Society” take over the Papierdrache and let him enjoy his retirement? Here we might explore several horizons in which literary afterlives unfold, horizons of future reception and production that Jean Paul himself anticipates and spoofs.

The first such vista is what we might call the philological horizon. Jean Paul was indeed unable to realize the Papierdrache in published form, and some of his draft material was published several decades after his death, in 1845. In contrast to the continuation of the Morgenblatt announced in 1807, the Papierdrache is never delivered. Writing with an end in sight becomes a way to forestall the end but only for so long; this, at least, is the vision of the incompletion of the Papierdrache as a “failure,” as Helmut Pfotenhauer puts it.⁸⁵ But a failure in the hands of a dying author can be success in the hands of a philologist, with editors of the posthumous works taking over the task of reproducing and reprinting these works. Incomplete writings call out for the philological processing and critical revival of unfinished work, and this, too, is a kind of figural and literal continuation. Indeed, new volumes of Berend’s original critical edition are still being published up to this day, as are volumes of the new work–genetic edition. Ongoing critical editions become different kinds of literary monuments erected by those who come after Jean Paul. As the editors of the Nachlass argue, Jean Paul’s unpublished manuscripts, letters, notebooks, and more allow for a fuller picture of Jean Paul’s life and works, and it is philological work that enables continued encounters and reencounters with the author.⁸⁶ To be sure, with the Papierdrache, Jean Paul spoofed this desire to collect any- and everything from the author, preemptively putting as much into print as possible. This kind of philological work comes into view as a slightly less entertaining doppelgänger of the Papierdrache, a collection of the myriad ephemera that Jean Paul did not have the chance to put into print.

Considering Jean Paul’s writings as ever oriented to continuation and revivification also catalyzes what we might call the horizon of the kindred reader, one well disposed to the author who rediscovers his myriad Werkchen. A sense of Jean Paul as a writer of the present and of unknown futures of course informs Börne’s eulogy for Jean Paul and his conceit of Jean Paul waiting for “his people” at the gate to the twentieth century. Börne’s is a vision of Jean Paul’s works strongly oriented around the semantics of life and original authorial “spirit”: “No hero, no poet has made known of his life so honestly as Jean Paul has done. The spirit has disappeared, the word has remained!”⁸⁷ For Börne, the rediscovery of his works is a kind of memorialization, a commemoration of individual works, but also of his life, a gesture the eulogistic speech performs. Such a scene of future reception is diametrically opposed to readings of Jean Paul as solely of his time and hence closed off to the present and inaccessible to modern readers or as culturally late. Though Börne eulogizes Jean Paul as a contemporary, as a writer of freedom in an age of repression, his person-oriented treatment nonetheless runs the risk of decontextualized monumentalization. The high style of Börne’s eulogy performs certain functions similar to those of the classicizing works edition, lacking the ironic twists that we saw in the Jubelrede. Walter Benjamin would take Max Kommerell to task for literary-historical monumentalization in Kommerell’s account of Jean Paul as a classical German poet (despite his anticlassical aesthetics) and as “Poet-Leader.”⁸⁸ For Benjamin, Jean Paul’s works express the intractable political contradictions of the Biedermeier period, and Kommerell’s treatment of the author decontextualizes his work: “In Kommerell, the poet’s head looms bare against the grey backdrop of eternity.”⁸⁹ Here, too, the evocation of person and work go hand in hand.

One might take a different, less author-centered tack through what we can call the “birth of serial literature from the death of the author” horizon. The miscellanies stamped with Jean Paul’s name peter out with his death, but they are followed by ever more textual units produced by the daily/weekly/monthly necessities of the business of serial print: this is the horizon of the periodic patterns of book fairs, periodicals, and multiauthor anthologies continuing on, as Helmut Müller-Sievers puts it, “like the world on the day after our death.”⁹⁰ In the same way that time unfolds by one moment following another, there is no real end to miscellaneity as a motor of the print landscape. It is perhaps fitting that Jean Paul uses the scene of never-ending production by a fictional “Fruit-Bearing Society” as a way to imagine his own death as an author, merging back into an endless and endlessly miscellaneous ocean of print. From this perspective, the spirit of Jean Paul lives on as much in writings stamped with his name as in sites and styles of print characterized by miscellaneity and seriality. In what ways do Jean Paul’s writings open up a horizon onto subsequent serial modes of the nineteenth century? Perhaps this takes us back to the crucial impasse of “Jean Paul versus Goethe”⁹¹: to be sure, dominant strands of the nineteenth-century Bildungspresse (including the Morgenblatt) are oriented around an emphatic vision of Goethean Bildung and the project of lending life harmonic organic form through literary entertainment.⁹² But what about the strands of the publication landscape that delve more playfully and self-reflectively into the ways that the self and life come to be refracted through ephemeral print and serial writing? Is it not in the multiple Spectator and Zuschauer journals, where the spirit of Jean Paul lives on; in the fools, devils, and charivaris that personify the periodical landscape of the nineteenth century; and in the many deliberately and provocatively contingent receptacles for miscellaneous contents?

Situating Jean Paul’s body of work in analogy to the print landscape more generally puts the world of print (to the extent that it makes sense to create a notional idea of it) in the position of the Papierdrache. In effect, this entails viewing Jean Paul as programming a future history of miscellaneity, with the Papierdrache becoming a foil for imagining ongoing serialized production.⁹³ Jean Paul’s promise of more to come is a promise of more by him and also by others. The series in which this “more”—this “after”—stands is a series not just of the ever new but also of continuations of older things as well, continued at different, heterogeneous paces: recall how the “Ausschweife” goes back to old pieces rather than simply producing new ones. The texts to which one returns through a kind of memorializing reading and through an ever-growing notional archive constitute a heterogeneous textual network, not a detemporalized body of work, but rather works that can be rearranged into new serial formations, temporalized in new and different ways.

Yet this brings us to a final paradox, the paradox expressed in Jean Paul’s assertion that “his” miscellanies are emphatically his—the paradox, too, at the level of literary-historical method, of looking for traces of a depersonalized media landscape in and through individual author figures, as I undeniably do in this book. It would be wrong to claim that Jean Paul isn’t constantly underlining the fact that his works are just that: his. But he does take us up to the brink of this paradox, or, to shift the metaphor, he takes us to a horizon where the gaze back in time surveys the endless accumulation of ephemeral, miscellaneous writings and the gaze forward in time looks ahead to a never-ending, unruly, serial proliferation of more textual units.

1. 1.   “Damit nur einmal ein Ende wird mit mir und von mir.” Jean Paul, “Ausschweife für künftige Fortsetzungen von vier Werken,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 17, nos. 304–7, 309–10, 313; 18, no. 1 (December 20–31, 1823; January 1, 1824); here, 17, no. 304, 1214; II/3, 1065–91.

2. 2.   Spectator 1 (March 2, 1711).

3. 3.   On the relationship of writing and death and on narrative as the Scheherazade-like “effort to keep death outside the circle of life,” see Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 102.

4. 4.   See Berhorst, Anamorphose der Zeit, 25–38; and Sabine Eickenrodt, Augenspiel: Jean Pauls optische Metaphorik der Unsterblichkeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006).

5. 5.   “Der Tod ist kein Punkt, sondern nur ein Abtheilungszeichen im menschlichen Dasein, ist ein Gedankenstrich, der zwo Welten verbindet: auch ist das künftige Leben mit fortlaufender Signatur des iezigen gedrukt.” II/1, 1002.

6. 6.   “Jean Paul macht aus der Problematik des Erbes die Frage nach künftiger Produktion.” Christian Benne, “ ‘Kein Einfall sollte untergehen’: Nachlassbewusstsein und Nachlass-Selbstbewusstsein bei Jean Paul,” in Nachlassbewusstsein: Literatur, Archiv, Philologie, 1750–2000, ed. Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 246.

7. 7.   Ludwig Börne, “Denkrede auf Jean Paul,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 19, no. 294–95 (December 9–10, 1825), here no. 294, 1173.

8. 8.   See Nora Ramtke and Séan Williams, “Approaching the German Anthology, 1700–1850,” German Life and Letters 70, no. 1 (2017): 1–21.

9. 9.   “Nun ist es Zeit, das Bitten und Erwarten so vieler Leser durch die Herausgabe meiner sämtlichen Werke zu befriedigen, welche wegen ihrer Theurung, Zerstreuung, Unsichtbarkeit, endlich einmal auf Ein Bücherbret und in eine Uniform zusammen zu treiben sind.” Jean Paul to Karl August Böttiger in Dresden, August 20, 1825. III/8, 286.

10. 10.   “The author’s creative production is channeled into something repeatable, so that author and publisher produce serially, according to the same pattern” ([Des Autors] Schaffen mündete nun in etwas Wiederholbares, so daß Autor und Verleger seriell, nach dem Gleichen Muster produzieren). Heinrich Bosse, Autorschaft ist Werkherrschaft. Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit (Paderborn: Fink, 2014 [1981]), 14. See also Matthias Schaffrick, “Ambiguität der Autor-Werk-Herrschaft (Bosse, Luhmann, Jean Paul),” in Autor und Werk. Wechselwirkungen und Perspektiven, special issue no. 3 of Textpraxis, edited by Svetlana Efimova, Digitales Journal für Philologie (2018), last accessed March 13, 2023, https://www.textpraxis.net/matthias-schaffrick-autor-werk-herrschaft.

11. 11.   Heinrich Heine, “Die Romantische Schule,” DHA, 8/1, 135.

12. 12.   On Jean Paul’s canonization as an “immortal” author directly after his death, see Böck, “Archäologie in der Wüste,” 243.

13. 13.   See Jacob Sider Jost, Prose Immortality: 1711–1819 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

14. 14.   See Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 31–36.

15. 15.   Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” in Jean Pauls Briefe und bevorstehender Lebenslauf (Gera and Leipzig: Heinsius, 1799); I/4, 1027–82. Pfotenhauer calls this volume a “collection of the most heterogeneous texts solely united by the shared form of the letter” (Sammelsurium verschiedenster Texte, nur durch die allen gemeinsame Briefform verbunden). Pfotenhauer, Jean Paul, 196.

16. 16.   Jean Paul, Briefe und bevorstehender Lebenslauf, ix.

17. 17.   What Fleming calls a “series of lectures in Self-Studies.” Paul Fleming, “The Promises of Childhood: Autobiography in Goethe and Jean Paul,” Goethe Yearbook 14 (2007): 35.

18. 18.   Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 434.

19. 19.   Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 414.

20. 20.   Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 402.

21. 21.   On the questions of books that look like journals and journals that look like books, see Kaminski, “ ‘Nachdruck des Nachdrucks.’ ”

22. 22.   Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 425–26.

23. 23.   Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 403.

24. 24.   Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 404.

25. 25.   “Because humans only honor (according to Jakobi) what is not imitable; with the first part of each and every original book, no one understands how a subsequent part is possible; the more additional parts appear, though, the more it seems possible to imagine its making and its imitation [desto mehr leuchte uns die Möglichkeit des Machens und also des Nachmachens ein].” Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 404–5.

26. 26.   “The grave is the insulating stool for works [Das Grab hingegen ist das Isolierschemel der Werke]; they are enveloped by an isolating, holy magic aura for all eternity.” Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 405.

27. 27.   “Die Sonne geht hinab—meine Reise endigt—und in wenig Minuten bin ich an einem geliebten theuern Herzen—es ist deines, unsterblicher Wieland!” Jean Paul, “Konjektural-Biographie,” 450.

28. 28.   Jean Paul to Johann Friedrich Cotta von Cottendorf, December 11, 1806. SW HKA, III/5, 115–16.

29. 29.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede bey dem künftigen Schlusse des Morgenblatts,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1807): 1–4.

30. 30.   See Jost, Prose Immortality, 33.

31. 31.   See James Mussell, “Repetition: Or, ‘In Our Last,’ ” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015): 345; as well as my discussion of this article in the afterword.

32. 32.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 2.

33. 33.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 3.

34. 34.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 1.

35. 35.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 2.

36. 36.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 3.

37. 37.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 3.

38. 38.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 4.

39. 39.   Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede,” 4.

40. 40.   Jean Paul, Herbst-Blumine oder gesammelte Werkchen aus Zeitschriften, vol. 2 (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta, 1815), 33–53. On the concept of archival fiction, see Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes, ed., Archiv/Fiktionen: Verfahren des Archivierens in Literatur und Kultur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Rombach, 2016).

41. 41.   Jean Paul’s promise that each year would bring a new volume of his Autumn Flora likewise reinforces the similarity between the journal and anthology’s serial formats (in fact, he would only publish three volumes, at five-year intervals). Jean Paul, Herbst-Blumine, vol. 1 (1810), xv.

42. 42.   “Jean Paul views all of his works, printed or unprinted, as part of a coherent body of works, as ‘opera omnia.’ ” Benne, “ ‘Kein Einfall sollte untergehen,’ ” 217.

43. 43.   Piper, Dreaming in Books, 54. On classicizing aspiration in Wieland’s works edition, see Peter-Henning Haischer, Historizität und Klassizität. Christoph Martin Wieland und die Werkausgabe im 18. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011).

44. 44.   See Andrew Piper, “Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything,” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 124–38; and Geulen, “Serialization in Goethe’s Morphology,” 53.

45. 45.   Berend, Prolegomena, 12.

46. 46.   See Barbara Hunfeld, “Eine neue Jean-Paul-Werkausgabe,” Geschichte der Germanistik 31/32 (2007): 111–16. The edition was overseen by Jean Paul’s son-in-law Ernst Förster and the publisher Reimer. On the genesis of this edition, see Berend, Prolegomena, 6–10.

47. 47.   See Carlos Spoerhase, “Was ist ein Werk? Über philologische Werkfunktionen,” Scientia Poetica 11 (2007): 276–344.

48. 48.   See Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, “Editionsphilologie als Mediengeschichte,” Editio 20 (2006): 3; and Botho Plachta, “Goethe über das lästige Geschäft des Editors,” in Autor-Autorisation-Authentizität, ed. Thomas Bein, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, and Bodo Plachta (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 234.

49. 49.   On the Werkchen in relation to standard conceptions of the work, see Peter Horst Neumann, “Die Werkchen als Werk: Zur Form- und Wirkungsgeschichte des Katzenberger-Korpus von Jean Paul,” Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft 10 (1970): 151–86, 169.

50. 50.   Jean Paul to Johann Friedrich Freiherr Cotta von Cottendorf, September 11, 1825. SW HKA, III/8, 288.

51. 51.   Goethe refers to the volumes 30 to 33 that are reserved for writings that exhibit “eine grosse Mannichfaltigkeit des Inhalts und der Form”; these volumes contain various autobiographical notes and book reviews that he wrote for various journals. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Anzeige von Goethe’s sämmtlichen Werken, vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand,” Intelligenzblatt zum Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 25 (1826): 98.

52. 52.   Jean Paul to Karl August Böttiger, August 20, 1825. SW HKA, III/8, 286.

53. 53.   Berend speculates that Jean Paul considered cutting out “the many inorganic ‘extrapages’ of his novels, which so frequently interrupt the flow of the narrative and annoy the reader,” even though the author never carried this out. Berend, Prolegomena, 8.

54. 54.   Samuel Frederick has shown something similar in the case of Adalbert Stifter. See Samuel Frederick, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 160–61.

55. 55.   Andrew Nash, “The Culture of Collected Editions: Authorship, Reputation, and the Canon,” in The Culture of Collected Editions, ed. Andrew Nash (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2.

56. 56.   “Welches Leben in der Welt sehen wir nicht unterbrochen?” Reimer I, installment 1, no. 1 (1826), ix.

57. 57.   Berhorst describes Jean Paul’s novels as “non-teleological finitude[s] [nichttelelogische Endlichkeit(en)] that can break off and stop, but cannot be completed.” Berhorst, Anamorphose der Zeit, 23.

58. 58.   On this new edition, see University of Würzburg, “Projektdetails,” last accessed March 12, 2023, http://www.jean-paul-portal.uni-wuerzburg.de/neue-werkausgabe/pilotband-hesperus/projektdarstellung/projektdetails/.

59. 59.   See Hunfeld, “Eine neue Jean-Paul-Werkausgabe.”

60. 60.   See Walther Morgenthaler, “Die Gesammelten und die Sämtlichen Werke: Anmerkungen zu zwei unterschätzten Werktypen,” Textkritische Beiträge 10 (2005): 13–26.

61. 61.   “Wherever this term is used, it simply refers to the fact that the author has done his last and best, not that he is able to view his work as completed [vollendet].” Goethe “Anzeige,” 98–99.

62. 62.   Ludwig Börne, “Gesammelte Schriften von Ludwig Börne,” GS, 6, 205–10; SS, II, 330–34.

63. 63.   Michael Cahn, “Opera Omnia: The Production of Cultural Authority,” in History of Science, History of Text, ed. Karine Chemla (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 92.

64. 64.   On this point see Plachta, “Goethe über das lästige Geschäft,” 235.

65. 65.   Goethe, “Anzeige,” 98.

66. 66.   See the “Ankündigung der Herausgabe meiner Sämtlichen Werke” at the end of Jean Paul, Der Komet, oder Nikolaus Markgraf, eine komische Geschichte, vol. 3 (Berlin: Reimer, 1820–1822).

67. 67.   “Ausschweife für künftige Fortsetzungen von vier Werken,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 17, nos. 304–7, 309–10, 313; 18, no. 1 (January 1, 1824); II/3, 1065–91.

68. 68.   In Berend’s 1927 to 1964 edition, it is also presented as a concluding statement, and the editors even include a facsimile of Jean Paul’s handwritten manuscript, presenting it as “das Letzte, was er in Druck gegeben hat,” as his “last word,” even though this is not accurate (!). SW HKA, I/18, xxxvii. In the Hanser edition edited by Miller, this piece is also placed at the end of Vermischte Schriften, the final volume of published writings of this edition.

69. 69.   These are ostensibly continuations of uncompleted works, but, as Miller puts it, “these are self-standing contributions composed according to their own logics, though they resonate with each respective prototype in a refined way.” Norbert Miller, in Sämtliche Werke in 10 Bänden, vol. II/4, ed. Norbert Miller (Stuttgart: Hanser, 1974–1985), 691.

70. 70.   The notion of a fantastical flying paper object profits off the near homonyms of Drache (dragon) and Drachen (kite) and the traditional association of comets with dragons. See Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Der Komet als ästhetische Programmschrift—poetologische Konzepte, Aporien, und ein Sündenbock,” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 35/36 (2001): 76.

71. 71.   Jean Paul, “Ausschweife,” Morgenblatt 17, no. 304, 1214; II/3, 1066.

72. 72.   Spectator 1 (March 2, 1711).

73. 73.   Jean Paul, “Ausschweife,” Morgenblatt 17, no. 304, 1214; II/3, 1067.

74. 74.   On this project see most recently Dennis Senzel, “Werkchen, die zum Werk werden. Zu Jean Pauls Wochenschrift,” Colloquia Germanica 49, nos. 2–3 (2016): 119–36.

75. 75.   “Sie falle in die neuste Zeit”; “sie behandelt die neueste Zeit.” SW HKA, II/6, 530.

76. 76.   “Die Aufsätze beziehen sich entweder auf das kommende oder auf das vergangene Kapitel.” SW HKA, II/6, 523.

77. 77.   “Fortsetzung eines Stückes jedes mal vorausgesagt.” SW HKA, II/6, 531.

78. 78.   “A library is the drugstore of the spirit; for this reason, here the apothecary is a librarian” (Eine Bibliothek ist die Apotheke des Geistes; daher eben hier der Apotheker ein Bibliothekar ist). SW HKA, II/6, 513.

79. 79.   SW HKA, II/6, 518.

80. 80.   Jean Paul, “Ausschweife,” Morgenblatt 17, no. 304, 1214; II/3, 1066.

81. 81.   Jean Paul, “Ausschweife,” Morgenblatt 18, no. 1, 2–4; II/3, 1086–91.

82. 82.   See Götz Müller, “ ‘Ich vergesse den 15.November nie,’ ” 134.

83. 83.   Jean Paul, “Ausschweife,” Morgenblatt 18, no. 1, 2–4; II/3, 1090.

84. 84.   On digression as writing against death, see Wieland, Vexierzüge, 304.

85. 85.   Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Das Leben Schreiben- das Schreiben Leben: Jean Paul als Klassiker der Zeitverfallenheit,” Jahrbuch der Jean- Paul- Gesellschaft 35–56 (2000/2001): 58.

86. 86.   Indeed, Pfotenhauer writes that his new biography of Jean Paul was only possible on the basis of new material discovered in the Nachlass. Pfotenhauer, “Das Leben Schreiben-,” 19.

87. 87.   Börne, “Denkrede auf Jean Paul,” 1179.

88. 88.   Walter Benjamin, “Wider ein Meisterwerk: Zu Max Kommerell, ‘Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik,’ ” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 253–54. On this episode in Jean Paul’s reception, see also Böck, “Archäologie in der Wüste,” 246–51.

89. 89.   Walter Benjamin, “Der Eingetunkte Zauberstab: Zu Max Kommerell’s ‘Jean Paul,’ ” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, 413.

90. 90.   Helmut Müller-Sievers, “Kinematik des Erzählens: Zum Stand der amerikanischen Fernsehserie,” Merkur 64, no. 794 (2015): 29.

91. 91.   See Norbert Miller, “Jean Paul versus Goethe. Der Dichter und die Forderung des Tages. Jean Pauls Vermischte Schriften als Teil seiner Wirkungsgeschichte,” in Sämtliche Werke in 10 Bänden, vol. II/4, 459–96.

92. 92.   See Maximilian Nutz, “Das Beispiel Goethe. Zur Konstituierung eines nationalen Klassikers,” in Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 605–37.

93. 93.   Pfotenhauer points to something similar when conjecturing about Jean Paul’s interest in automated mechanisms of writing: “Jean Paul seeks writing mechanisms that never end, a sort of writing machine that can be automatized and can write onto into infinity by itself.” Pfotenhauer, “Das Leben Schreiben-,” 390.