This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature--namely, the postal system--determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium.
The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used by the population (instead of by the prince alone); the sexualization of letter writing, which was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century and changed the reading of a letter into an interpretation of intimate confessions of the soul; and Goethe's turning of this new ontology of the letter into a logistics of literature whereby literary authorship was constructed by means of postal logistics, with the precision of engineering.
The second part analyzes nineteenth-century postal innovations that facilitated communication through letters and examines how literary works were able to live off such communication. These innovations included the reform of the post office; the invention of the postage stamp; the Universal Postal Union, which subjected letter writing to an economy of materials and uniform standards; and the telegraph and the telephone, which surpassed literature in terms of speed, economy, and analog-signal processing.
In the third part, on the basis of a close reading of Franz Kafka's letters to his typist-fiancee, the author demonstrates how postal logistics of love and authorship have worked in the era of modern postal systems and technical media. Kafka's correspondence is deciphered as a "war of nerves" waged by means of all available techniques and conditions of transmission.

"Modernity" was an inescapable fact of life for the first generation to come of age in the German Empire. Even the most extreme political opponents saw the chaotic transformation of all spheres of life in the wake of industrial capitalism as the central problem facing young men and women at the "fin de siecle." This fresh look at Wilhelmine perceptions of modernity challenges both the traditional emphasis on anti-modernism as a peculiarly German response that led to the rise of National Socialism, and the more recent post-Foucauldian studies on the "pathologies of modernity," which point instead to an unreflective faith in science and efficiency on the part of German progressives. Shifting the focus away from radical extremes on either side, Kevin Repp explores the more moderate agendas of hundreds of mainstream intellectuals and activists from diverse social backgrounds who sought to surmount the human costs of industrialization without relinquishing its positive potential.

Repp combines detailed case studies of Adolf Damaschke, Gertrud Baumer, and Werner Sombart with an innovative prosopography of their milieu to show how leading reformers enlisted familiar tropes of popular nationalism, eugenics, and cultural pessimism in formulating pragmatic solutions that would be at once modern and humane. Easily obscured by radical voices on right and left, this quiet search for alternatives nevertheless succeeded in building a nationwide network of educational centers, associative ties, and institutions that substantially altered the landscape of Wilhelmine political culture in the decades before the First World War.