Creating Social Space in Enlightenment Germany
In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson stresses the
role of the expansion of print capitalism in fostering the formation of
"imagined communities" that would find concretization in the nation states
of the nineteenth century. Anderson considers the changing apprehension of
space as a vital component in the definition of these emerging imagined
communities. In the second edition of his book, Anderson highlights the
role of the census, map and museum in the creation of geographical,
statistical and historical spaces that will be used to define communities.
My project will trace a different type of space in an imagined community:
the social space of the reading public as an imagined community .
In eighteenth-century Germany, this social space is connected to the
development of the public sphere described by Habermas in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas argues that while the
public sphere was a mental construct, it was embodied most clearly in three
locations: the coffee house, the salon and the reading public. The first
two of these examples locate a community physically. The reading public,
however, is intangible. Yet, in the German-speaking territories, it is the
most important of the three in the establishment of a public sphere and the
imagined community that will eventually become the German nation.
The reading public actually consists of a series of intertwined and at
times overlapping communities. The most "local" and "physical" of these is
the reading society; it is a community of individuals who can meet at a
specific physical location. Unlike the coffee house and, to a certain
extent, the salon, membership in one of these communities in the eighteenth
century was regulated by wealth and occupation. A reading society was a
voluntary community of individuals who already knew each other in other
contexts. One might say, therefore, that most reading societies created no
significantly new community but tend to affirm an already extant one. The
reading public also consists of the community of all the readers. This
interests Habermas most, for it represents the intellectual and social
space in which educated individuals constituted themselves as the "public"
in order to evaluate state authority. This was a highly varied and
variously imagined community. For instance, Anthony La Vopa has recently
drawn attention to the different conceptualizations of the public sphere by
Kant and Herder. Between these two types of communities--the local
community of the reading society and the public sphere of the reading
public--there are numerous other types of imagined communities.
I am most interested in examining how authors utilize narrative to create
communites within imagined social spaces. My first goal will be to develop
a rigorous theoretical elaboration of the concept of social space. However,
for the moment, I will define social space as those textual places and
situations in which the community in question is portrayed as existing and
functioning. These will include situations in which its members are amongst
themselves and others in which members meet and interact with others. I
will focus not only on physical location, but also on the social activity
assigned to this location in an attempt to understand the self-conception
of the community and the articulation of the community's place and purpose
in society in general.
After developing a theoretical framework to elaborate the concept of social
space, I will analyze in detail one specific community created by narrative
and its imaginary social space: the community and social space portrayed in
the moral weekly Der Patriot. (Hamburg 1724-1726). This publication
lends itself to this purpose for three main reasons. First, moral weeklies
appeared in Germany early in the eighteenth century and were important in
popularizing Enlightenment thought; they mark the emergence of the public
sphere as well as the middle class as the carrier of national
consciousness. Second, the journal is a closed, yet substantial corpus that
allows for a varied portrayal of the space of the imagined community.
Third, the editorial voice of Der Patriot, like that of many other
moral weeklies, stylized itself as a community and placed its contributors
(fictional or real) in imagined spaces and social situations. Descriptions
of the social spaces in the moral weekly help create a portrait of the
community's self-perception. Since the standardization of social life and
the politization of culture necessary for nation
building are not yet evident, the community recognizes that it shares
localities and situations with other communities. Seeing how the community
is mapped onto the existing physical social spaces will help delineate the
role that the authors see the community taking in society as a whole.
The initial phase of the project described above will be followed by
archival work in Göttingen and Wolfenbüttel to collect primary
material so that the project can be expanded to include the creation of
social space in selected works of fictional and non-fictional prose from
the early period of the German Enlightenment up to the Napoleonic Wars.
These materials will allow me to trace the changing conceptualizations of
social space with the evolution of the public sphere in the eighteenth
century up to the development of nationalistic sentiments in the Wars of
Liberation.
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