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. 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.” 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).