Karl Philipp Moritz: Signaturen des Denkens (review)

These are papers from a 2006 conference with the same title, organized at the University of Chicago by Anthony Krupp and David E. Wellbery. Most of the contributors are American-based scholars, perhaps due to the availability of travel funds, but this also affords a refreshing perspective. (One can of course think of people who might profitably have been present, particularly Albert Meier and Heide Hollmer, who have done so much for Moritz in recent years, and Alessandro Costazza.)

Until the 1980s, because of the difficulty of getting at many of Moritz’s texts, scholarship tended to concentrate on the psychological novel, Anton Reiser, and on the aesthetic writings, particularly Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen. Although the long-projected edition of Moritz’s complete works is lamentably still far from completion, the text situation has still improved vastly owing, first, to the Insel Verlag’s three-volume works edition by Horst Günther in the 1980s (I find no mention of Günther in all the notes or text!), and more prominently to the two-volume Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition by Meier and Hollmer (1997–1999). In addition, the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde seems to have had two full photo-reprints since the 1970s. As a result scholars have ventured further and further into the Moritz morass over the last twenty to thirty years. Even though several contributors mention that the first fragments of Anton Reiser appeared in the Magazin, there is little attention paid to that important journal in the volume, with the exception of Rüdiger Campe’s piece on “Moritz’s Grammar Between Aesthetics and Ontology.”

The volume offers a diverse picture of current Moritz interests. Only two essays (Christiane Frey’s and Faye Stewart’s) are devoted to Anton Reiser, and the character in the novel seems no longer totally identical with the author, although in the third (otherwise very interesting and informative) essay, about Moritz’s 1782 Reisen eines Deutschen in England . . ., Erdmann Waniek seems to treat the protagonist as an older and improved version of the novel’s figure Anton Reiser (published 1785–1790). A second series of essays deals with Moritz’s pedagogical endeavors (Krupp on Unterhaltungen mit meinen Schülern, Elliott Schreiber on Moritz’s critique of philanthropism, Jürgen Jahnke and Annelies Häcki Buhofer on Moritz’s writings for children, including the newly appreciated Kinderlogik). Ute Tintemann analyzes Moritz’s language pedagogy in the Englische Sprachlehre für die Deutschen.

Probably the meatiest section of the volume comprises six papers devoted directly to Moritz’s aesthetics and his writings on art. Hans Adler claims that there is a “universal metabolism” at work in the final death- and tragedy-transcending argument of Über die bildende Nachahmung (practically a pre-vision of the bloody Spencerian “tooth and claw”). Simon Richter’s essay on “Moritz’s God,” namely Moritz’s adulation of Goethe as evidenced during his Weimar visit in 1788–1789, accentuates the “impropriety” of Weimar aesthetics as expounded in the Classical period. Edgar Landgraf (“The Psychology of Aesthetic Autonomy: The Signature of the Signature of Beauty” and Joel B. Lande (“Moritz’s Gods: Allegory, Autonomy and Art”) both deal with theoretical and psychological issues of autonomy and the conundrum that in the end one cannot describe art, but only experience it in awed silence. Renata Gambino (“Auf dem Weg zum ‘Mittelpunkt des Schönen’: Das pädagogische Konzept von Karl Philipp Moritz’ italienischer Reisebeschreibung”) and Claudia Sedlarz (on Moritz’s ambulatory method of seeing and perceiving the city and history in the Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien) are welcome contributions not only to the understanding of Moritz’s Italian Journey, but also to the development of art description in the eighteenth century. The last two papers in the volume are more loosely related to aesthetics by way of Freemasonry (Chenxi Tang) and the sermon (Kelly Barry on Hartknopf’s sermon in Andreas Hartknopfs Predigerjahre).

The title of the volume, taken from an essay, “Die Signatur...