I. Overview

From the early unsuccessful satires of the pre-revolutionary 1780s to the late, Restoration-critical novel Der Komet (The Comet) of 1820/22 works of Jean Paul (1763–1825) offer a telling critique of late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century society and politics. For the contemporary reading public, however, this critical element was far less important than the other aspects of Jean Paul’s work, which brought him enormous success (especially after the publication of Hesperus in 1795). These included exuberant outbursts of emotion, dreamlike visions, musical depictions of landscapes, powerfully inspired young men, ethereal women, uncompromising satirists, plots interspersed with Romantic elements, horror, colportage and, last but not least, the playful, self-referential narrative whereby the author is constantly entangled in the world he portrays. This biographical dimension—always present in his oeuvre—includes social factors such as the material and spiritual deprivations of the young Jean Paul, the son of a country vicar growing up in a small corrupt absolutist state, the constraints placed on his world by church and academic dogmatism, and the social discrimination he encountered at the hands of both the feudal aristocracy and the narrow-minded bourgeoisie. It also includes an attempt to acquaint his readers with the sufferings of a provincial and rural underclass, whose often tearful and pitiful portrayal earned Jean Paul the label of “Dichter der Niedergebornen” (poet of the low-born) in the 1825 commemorative speech of Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), and made him a belated figurehead of the liberal Junges Deutschland (Young Germany), which was mobilized in opposition to the supposedly self-centered aesthetic culture of Weimar and its larger-than-life representative, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).

Jean Paul’s narrative world draws, in a highly distinctive manner, on the twisted and decrepit structures of the old German Reich that the Napoleonic Wars swept away. The author reflects on this process in a series of political writings which, though quite different to his novels and stories, are nonetheless subliminally bound up with them. The dissolution of the obsolete federation of the Reich, the founding of the Rheinbund (Confederation of the Rhine) in 1806, and the collective emotional state of the populace—a blend of despondency and enthusiastic nationalism following Prussia’s defeat in 1806—were all instrumental in bringing Jean Paul’s enlightened concept of republican cosmopolitanism to the fore, as well as his grasp of a form of poetics geared to the generation of emotionalism (Empfindsamkeit).