Introduction: The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit

The field of german Studies in the twenty-first century has been shaped in no small measure by the spatial or topographical turn in the social sciences and humanities. Two important scholarly anthologies edited on either side of the Atlantic indicate the breadth of this critical idiom: Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, edited by Hartmut Böhme; and Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel.¹ Fittingly, in organizing these collections, the respective editors have chosen to apply models associated with the critical turn in question. Thus, the four sections of Böhme's anthology are headed "Representations of Discursive Spaces," "Spaces of Literature," "Literary Spaces," and "Borders and the Foreign," while the four sections of Fisher and Mennel's collection bear the headings "Mapping Spaces," "Spaces of the Urban," "Spaces of Encounter," and "Visualized Space." In their overall organization, these two milestone anthologies thus studiously avoid what Böhme terms "classical systems of order, for instance according to periods" (IX). In this special section of the Goethe Yearbook devoted to the poetics of space in the Goethezeit, we hope to build on the work of these ground-breaking anthologies, while questioning an approach that foregrounds the category of space at the expense of that of period—whether understood in the more traditional sense of the Age of Goethe, or Reinhart Koselleck's notion of the Sattelzeit, or the temporal marker "around 1800."

Within the framework of the spatial turn, the relegation of period to "a secondary role" (Böhme IX) is understandable. Indeed, the turn to an analysis of space as a fundamental social category arose precisely as a reaction to, and critique of, historicism, in particular the Marxian historical dialectic. As Edward Soja writes in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, "The critical hermeneutic is still enveloped in a temporal master-narrative, in a historical but not yet comparably geographical imagination."² Building on twentieth-century social thinkers (particularly Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre), Soja and other contemporary theoretical geographers (such as Derek Gregory and David Harvey) have challenged "the hoary traditions of a space-blinkered historicism" and have helped effect "a far-reaching spatialization of the critical imagination" (Soja 11).

To be sure, Soja's project aims not for the displacement of the historical by the spatial, but rather a "rebalancing," that is, the formulation of a theory of "social being actively emplaced in space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization" (11). In so doing, Soja follows the trajectory of Foucault's line of thought as sketched out in his essay "Of Other Spaces." Foucault begins by contrasting the nineteenth century, with its obsession with history, and the "present epoch" as "the epoch of space." But in the very next paragraph, he blurs this dichotomy when he contends that "the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space."³ Foucault never fully resolves this tension in his thought—one moment drawing a sharp distinction between epochs according to their privileging of time or of space; the next, collapsing this distinction and bringing into view the manner in which space and time are always imbricated.

We have assembled the following six essays in the spirit of Foucault's intersectional thought and Soja's project of rebalancing, with the aim of contributing to the literary history of a range of personal, social, political, and aesthetic spaces. In so doing, we hope to bring into sharper focus the multiple transformations of spatial practices, imaginings, and theories that occurred in German-speaking Europe around 1800.⁴

Technologies of Spatial and Temporal Compression

Some of the most far-reaching of these transformations resulted from technical innovations. Consider, for instance, innovations in transportation technology such as the hot-air balloon (invented in 1782 by the Montgolfier brothers) and the...