The Correspondence of Jean Paul’s Family and Acquaintanceship
Final Report Abstract
The project aimed to edit, comment and publish the letters of the family and friends of Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825). Originally intended to edit around 1650 letters, it now consists of around 2000 letters, which contribute an unusually large amount to our understanding of the poet’s biography and his work as well as to our understanding of literary history and, of course, the everyday history of Jean Paul’s educated and less educated, wealthy and less wealthy contemporaries. This edition is characterized by diversity: People, who in classic letter editions serve as a kind of feedback mechanism for the main character, step out from the second and third rows, reveal themselves as characters of their own and as centers of their own networks; their letters illuminate the world from their own reality. There are a disproportionate number of women represented, from whose letters the female ‘conditio humana’ emerges. One of Jean Paul’s closest friends is the Jewish merchant Emanuel (Osmund): Both maintained a close German-Jewish relationship through their families, from celebrating Jewish and Christian festivals together to Jean Paul choosing the family name („Beschützer“, („protector“), which was officially required for Emanuel in 1814. In the course of the project, other aspects of literary history became increasingly important than those usually presented: a close-up view of literary history, everyday literary life, the production of magazines and their role for the literary public as well as once important, today forgotten authors. – The edition of letters from Jean Paul’s friends and family makes use of the possibilities of the digital medium: Letters are indexed and assigned to correspondence circles and can be variably grouped, i.e. assigned to different letter corpora. The user can browse chronologically through the entire material (including Jean Paul’s letters) or in a self-chosen selection. The category of ‘co-readership’ introduced for this edition serves to make a phenomenon visible that was crucial to communication around 1800: Correspondences are not always private; rather, as the ‘social media’ of the time, they connect and create networks, social connections of changing density and stability. Quite a few of the letters don’t have just one sender, but are written collectively.The project of letters of Jean Paul’s friends, family and acquaintances is conceived as part of a platform on the WWW, which make this letters as well as the poet’s letters (accessible since 2018) and in the future those addressed to him freely accessible and linked through an overarching register database (persons, works, places) and by links. In this respect, the second phase of the project not only served to expand the corpus, but also to partially integrate Jean Paul's letters into the classification system for in-depth digital cataloguing that was developed for the letters of Jean Paul's friends and family.
Publications
-
Soziales Medium Brief. Sharen, Liken, Retweeten im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Neue Perspektiven auf die Briefkultur. Für die Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Darmstadt : wbg Academic, 2023 (ISBN 978-3-534-40744-6)
Markus Bernauer, Selma Jahnke, Frederike Neuber & Michael Rölcke
-
„In einem großen »Waschkorb« gefunden. Briefkopierhefte aus dem Nachlass Paul Emile Thieriots in der Sammlung Varnhagen“, in: Simona Noreik, Maja Brodrecht, Jörg Paulus (Hrsg.): Ästhetiken und Materialitäten des Übergangs und des Übertragens. Berlin/Basel 2023
Michael Rölcke
-
„Eines der ‚genialsten Schreib-Weiber jetziger Zeit‘. Minna Spazier als Autorin, Redakteurin und Herausgeberin im Spiegel ihrer Briefe an Beiträger und Verleger“, in: „Schriftstellerinnen aus der Sammlung Varnhagen“. Hrsg. von Jörg Paulus u.a.
Michael Rölcke
-
„‚Hätten Sie doch tausend Hände zum Schreiben!‘ Die Korrespondenz zwischen Helmina von Chézy und Carl Bertuch“, in: „Schriftstellerinnen aus der Sammlung Varnhagen“. Hrsg. von Jörg Paulus u.a.
Selma Jahnke
