Sebastian Böhmer's ambitious study purports to distinguish high and low semantics in the time from 1770 to 1834 based on levels of reflection on form and medium. The Semantik von unten of the title refers to a kind of writing that includes or thematizes the media and materiality of writing and the writer, who thereby becomes, in an adaptation of Niklas Luhmann's phenomenology, a second- order writer (Schreiber zweiter Ordnung). This semantics is contrasted with a Semantik von oben, the idea of writing as unimpaired communication or transfer without loss or interference, particularly of inner contents, intentions, or affects that are ready-formed and simply awaiting expression. The Semantik von unten therefore disconnects writing from meaning—the reiterated thesis of the book—and disrupts the channels of communication and expression.

The book is divided into three large sections framed by an introduction, preliminary chapter, and an epilogue. The main part of the book, chapters 3–5, labeled “Wege” I–III, contain paths by which the semantic contrast of the title is exemplified. Section I, on efficiency, discusses media of writing and technological developments in writing and printing as well as dictation. Section II covers the crisis in expression in various areas: epistolary writing of Empfindsamkeit, gendered relations in writing practices (Goethe and Charlotte von Stein in this case), Wieland's discovery of the “pure signifier,” and Goethe's Orientalist work. Section II also serves as an exemplary prologomenon, illuminating what is no longer Semantik von oben and not yet quite Semantik von unten, which section III elaborates with the examples of Lichtenberg, Wieland, Forster, Schiller, and Tieck while venturing a rather acerbic criticism of persistent, quasi-hagiographical understandings of Goethe's writing practice under the rubric “Goethes Apostel.”

Böhmer's study is illuminating because it distinguishes its premises from those of a transition “circa 1800.” The plasticity of the two semantics is marked by their use in the same author across this boundary: Goethe's lyric poetry is an example of Semantik von unten, whereas Goethe's dictated writings invoke the interference-free communication that marks the Semantik von oben.