'A New Order of Things': Social and Cultural Transition in the Epistolary and Journalistic Networks of Heinrich von Kleist

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Elke Dubbels; Professor Dr. Christian Moser
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566447967

Writing in November 1805, the German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) expressed a strong sense of the emergence of a new order of things ('eine neue Ordnung der Dinge') catalyzed by Napoleonic dominance in Europe. Over the following years, Kleist would respond to these world-historical political and cultural changes by assembling a series of networks as the journalist and editor responsible for the artistic journal Phöbus (1808), the planned nationalist journal Germania (1809), and Berlin’s first daily newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter (1810-11). He also maintained an extensive correspondence with key cultural and political figures across Prussia and beyond. The proposed research will map out Kleist’s epistolary and journalistic networks across five areas: (1) Politics; (2) the Military; (3) Economics; (4) Means of Communication and Travel; and (5) Visual Arts. The British-German research team will bring together a unique range of expertise required in order to complete this study. Studying these areas will enable the applicants to contextualize more precisely the multifarious responses of Kleist and his associates - particularly his often neglected female associates - to the new order and to understand more precisely the interrelationship between his different networks. By positioning Kleist’s work within broader creative and intellectual networks, the project will provide an analytical and interpretative model for future study of ‘networked’ nineteenth-century cultures and move away from paradigms of creativity typically focused on the lone male genius. The project will challenge the tendency in existing scholarship to emphasize Kleist’s solitary creativity rather than understanding his work as having been shaped by - and having shaped - wider intellectual and creative networks. By doing do, it will advance new understandings of authorship around 1800. Moreover, it will uncover in more detail how Kleist drew upon existing networks and assembled his own, by attending especially to the interplay between public communication in his journals, private communication in his letters and semi-public fora such as salons. This approach will thus illuminate how Kleist’s networks broke down barriers between different classes, between different states in Germany and beyond, and between the supposedly separate spheres assigned to men and women. The project’s conception as a British-German cooperation will transform international understanding of an author who has remained under-appreciated in the Anglophone world. The applicants will translate a section of Kleist’s letters and journalistic work, much of which is currently untranslated. The project will capitalize on the global celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Kleist’s birth in 2027 by staging a public-facing, hybrid event at the University of Birmingham in association with the German Kleist-Gesellschaft.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Séan Allan, Ph.D.; Dr. Elystan Griffiths