Heaven Help Us! Journals! Calendars!: Goethe and Schiller's Xenien as Circulatory Intervention

Summary

Abstract: In their Xenien project, Goethe and Schiller weaponized the classical epigrammatic distich on behalf of their own vision of a public sphere. In response to an oversaturated market in journals and in the context of falling subscription numbers for their own journal Die Horen, they published hundreds of epigrams attacking rival journals and authors. Taking a cue from new formalist approaches, this article analyzes the specific structural and rhetorical affordances of the distich and the broader formal strategies the authors deploy in this cultural intervention. The generic resources of the epigram are deployed to disrupt a commercial circulation generated by second-rate journals and their networks of “Philistine” writers and critics, to deconstruct false paradigms and overblown conceptions, to parody the overaccelerated or excessively sluggish pace of cultural production and exchange, and to expose those forces bent on overturning established social or political hierarchies. At the same time, the epigrams aim to set in motion a more rhythmic circulation that aligns with natural processes and classical antecedents, is shaped by the reciprocal exchange characterizing Goethe and Schiller's own friendship, gives rise to more elastic and internally differentiated conceptions of the whole, and ultimately sustains rather than overturns societal structures.

Keywords: Schiller, Die Horen, Xenien, distich, epigram, formalism, journal, public sphere

Das deutsche Reich.

Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiß das Land nicht zu finden

Wo das gelehrte beginnt, hört das politische auf. (222)

The German Empire.

Germany? But where is it? I don't know where to find that land.

Where the land of letters begins, the political one ends.

DAS DEUTSCHE REICH” may be the best-known couplet from Goethe and Schiller's Xenien (The Xenia), their collection of 414 epigrams lampooning their contemporaries, and published in Schiller's Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1797 (Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1797). This particular epigram is often quoted as a pithy rebuke to the nationalist stirrings of the era. The first line already deals the blow: the “Deutschland” appealed to by an unnamed other (or others) simply does not exist. But the second line demands a little more consideration: why must the political Germany end where the land of letters begins? Evoked here, I argue, is in fact a bitter contest between two journals that represent competing bids, learned and political, to define “das deutsche Reich.”