Toward the Century of Words: Johann Cotta and the Politics of the Public Realm in Germany (review)

Goethe Yearbook 281 enterprise, that of transfer and translation of values. Accepting tumultuous and profound changes and simultaneously forging a language in which traditional values could remain understandable and acceptable, this was what many of Goethe's younger contemporaries were doing and this was what, after all, he had been doing himself, at least since the mid-1780s. Radical historical change could and did elicit many types of responses at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries and this kind of "value transfer" was merely one of them. However, Scott, Manzoni, Chateaubriand, and, not least, Goethe were some of those who found it intellectually exciting and ethically and existen tially satisfying. It is here, in this deep-seated sense of common engagement in a venture of greatest moment for human society, that any continuing relevance of the Goethe-Manzoni relationship can be sought. Catholic University of America Virgil Nemoianu Moran, Daniel, Toward the Century of Words: Johann Cotta and the Politics of the Public Realm in Germany. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990. Connoisseurs of German literary history are aware that Johann Friedrich Cotta (1764-1832), subsequently Baron Cotta von Cottendorf, became at the beginning of his career the publisher of Schiller, then of Goethe, and toward the end of it the employer of Heine. Students of the German press and publishing industry in the firet third of the nineteenth century can learn in addition that upon the prestige he thus acquired in the cultural realm he built a tirelessly innovative publishing industry, including the famed Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung among some forty periodicals, and a sometimes rickety empire of other enterprises, including steam-driven presses and a steamship line on Lake Constance. However, the strongest focus of his interest was in pubfic affaire and politics. Daniel Moran has provided an elaborately researched and highly readable account of Cotta's activities in the public sphere. When Cotta took over the family business on a shoestring in 1787, the firm was old but not very prestigious, ft was printer to the Württemberg court and produced mainly utilitarian publications; it is only a piquant coincidence that it had published Schiller's medical dissertation in 1780. Moran argues that it was Cotta's early association with Schiller that set the enterprise on the path to prestige. Cotta contracted with Schiller to be editor of a political and cultural periodical; characteristically, Schiller quickly quashed the political newspaper, but with Die Horen achieved a major succès d'estime. The Allgemeine Zeitung, which remained Cotta's "favorite child" (4), was founded in 1798, originally in Stuttgart. From then on he embarked upon an extraordinary adventure of maneuvering for publishing space among Württemberg, Napoleon, Bavaria, Metternich's Austria, the Frankfurt Bundestag, and, more peripherally, Hamburg and Prussia. Publishing a newspaper of any kind not totally ministerial under Napoleon and the restoration required exceptional perseverance, flexibility, and guile. Cotta 282 Book Reviews forged alliances and negotiated with governments as though he were a principality. When Württemberg banned the AZ in 1803 at French insistence, he moved it to Ulm in Bavaria; when Ulm was ceded to Württemberg in 1810, he moved it to Augsburg, and for years he leveraged Bavarian interests against Württemberg censorship and Austrian sensitivities, while linking himself with one of the most promising young politicians in France, Adolphe Thiers. His ingenuity is evident in Moran's account of how he actually managed to turn the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, designed to gain government control of all public discourse, to his advantage, with the result that the AZ came to be the only important organ of information in the German states. Cotta was constantly involved in public affaire. In 1815 he was one of the delegates of the book trade to the Congress of Vienna. He became involved in a long constitutional struggle in Württemberg supporting liberal reform in alliance with the crown against aristocratic privilege. As a member of the Württemberg Diet and the dominant figure in its finance committee, he helped arrange a tariff treaty between Württemberg and Bavaria, and tried to mediate one between Bavaria and...