This book investigates the emergence of the modern concept of zeitgeist, the notion of a pervasive contemporary coherence, in the late 18th century. It traces zeitgeist's descent from genius saeculi and investigates its association with public spirit and public opinion before surveying its prominence around the Wars of Liberation in Germany and during the politically restless 1820s in England. This trajectory shows that zeitgeist emerged from the 18th-century discourses about culture and the public functioning of social collectives. Under the impact of the French Revolution the term came to describe social processes of political and cultural challenge. Zeitgeist was discussed as a social dynamic in which emerging elites disseminate new ideas which find enough public approval to influence cultural and political behaviour and practice. These findings modify the view that zeitgeist eludes critical grasp and is mainly invoked for manipulative purposes by showing that the zeitgeist discussions around 1800 contributed to the formation of modern politics and capture key aspects of how ideas are disseminated within societies and across borders, providing a way of reading history horizontally.

This book investigates the emergence of the modern concept of zeitgeist, the notion of a pervasive contemporary coherence, in the late 18th century. It traces zeitgeist's descent from genius saeculi and investigates its association with public spirit and public opinion before surveying its prominence around the Wars of Liberation in Germany and during the politically restless 1820s in England. This trajectory shows that zeitgeist emerged from the 18th-century discourses about culture and the public functioning of social collectives. Under the impact of the French Revolution the term came to describe social processes of political and cultural challenge. Zeitgeist was discussed as a social dynamic in which emerging elites disseminate new ideas which find enough public approval to influence cultural and political behaviour and practice. These findings modify the view that zeitgeist eludes critical grasp and is mainly invoked for manipulative purposes by showing that the zeitgeist discussions around 1800 contributed to the formation of modern politics and capture key aspects of how ideas are disseminated within societies and across borders, providing a way of reading history horizontally.

The essays in this volume discuss the overlap between philosophical, aesthetic, and political concerns in the 1790s either in the work of individuals or in the transfer of cultural materials across national borders, which tended to entail adaptation and transformation. What emerges is a clearer understanding of the "fate" of the Enlightenment, its radicalization and its "overcoming" in aesthetic and political terms, and of the way in which political "paranoia", generated by the fear of a spreading revolutionary radicalism, facilitated and influenced the cultural transfer of the "radical". The collection will be of interest to scholars in French, German, English, and comparative studies working on the later 18th century or early 19th century. It is of particular interest to those working on the impact of the French Revolution, those engaged in reception studies, and those researching the interface between political and cultural activites. It is also of key interest to intellectual historians of this period, as well as general historians with an interest in modern conservatism and radicalism.

This interdisciplinary study examines the impact of the emerging awareness of historicity on the concepts of modernity, identity, and culture as they developed in German thought around 1800. It shows how this awareness determined the German notion of the priority of cultural identity. Key texts from Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, German Romanticism and German Idealism, including Goethe's Faust I and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, are contextualised in relation to post-Enlightenment debates on historicity and modernity. The study traces the modification of the Enlightenment concepts of perfectibility and universal ideals to accommodate the new notion of temporal particularity and impermanence. This is achieved by embedding these once static concepts in a historical process that is powered by a self-prompting internal dialectic. Through synthetic absorption within the historical succession the dialectical process allows for the continuity of values, while leaving room for discontinuity and difference by relying on oppositional successions. The study reveals close connections between the intellectual concerns, the literary ambitions, and the endeavours to construct a modern German identity during this period, which suggests a far greater intellectual coherence of the Goethezeit regarding intellectual challenges and objectives than has been previously assumed.

Contents: Steve Giles: Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture - Gustav Frank: Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion and the Logic of German Counter-Cultures - Nicholas Saul/Susan Tebbutt: Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History - Maike Oergel: Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists? The Burschenschaften and the German Counter-Cultural Tradition - Carl Weber: Performing Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt: Nestroy's Theatre in Times of Reaction and Revolt - Malcolm Humble: Das Reich der Erfullung: A Theme in Wilhelmine Counter-Culture - David Midgley: 'Los von Berlin ' Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany - Margarete Kohlenbach: Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken and the Jugendkulturbewegung - Colin Riordan: The Green Alternative in Germany 1900-1930 - Sabine Egger: The Roots of the East German 'Green' Movement in the 1950s - Stefan Busch: Bluthochzeit mit Mutter Erde: Repression und Regression in der Blut-und-Boden-Literatur - Steve Giles: Limits of the Visible: Kracauer's Photographic Dystopia - Jerome Carroll: The Art of the Imperceptible: A Discussion of the Aesthetics of Wolfgang Welsch - Carmel Finnan: The Challenges of Zurich's Autonomous Youth Movement - Matthias Uecker: Aufrufe, Bekenntnisse, Analysen: Zur Politisierung der westdeutschen Literatur in den sechziger Jahren - Ingo Cornils: Writing the Revolution: the Literary Representation of the German Student Movement as Counter-Culture - Jamie Trnka: The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles - Gerrit-Jan Berendse: Aesthetics of (Self-)Destruction: Melville's Moby Dick, Brecht's The Measures Taken andthe Red Army Faction - Uwe Schutte: 'Heilige, die im Dunkel leuchten': Der Mythos der RAF im Spiegel der Literatur nachgeborener Autoren - Moray McGowan: Ulrike Meinhof im Deutschen Drama der Neunziger Jahre: Drei Beispiele.

Contents: Steve Giles: Introduction: Culture as Counter-Culture - Gustav Frank: Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion and the Logic of German Counter-Cultures - Nicholas Saul/Susan Tebbutt: Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History - Maike Oergel: Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists? The Burschenschaften and the German Counter-Cultural Tradition - Carl Weber: Performing Counter-Culture in the Vorstadt: Nestroy's Theatre in Times of Reaction and Revolt - Malcolm Humble: Das Reich der Erfullung: A Theme in Wilhelmine Counter-Culture - David Midgley: 'Los von Berlin!' Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany - Margarete Kohlenbach: Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken and the Jugendkulturbewegung - Colin Riordan: The Green Alternative in Germany 1900-1930 - Sabine Egger: The Roots of the East German 'Green' Movement in the 1950s - Stefan Busch: Bluthochzeit mit Mutter Erde: Repression und Regression in der Blut-und-Boden-Literatur - Steve Giles: Limits of the Visible: Kracauer's Photographic Dystopia - Jerome Carroll: The Art of the Imperceptible: A Discussion of the Aesthetics of Wolfgang Welsch - Carmel Finnan: The Challenges of Zurich's Autonomous Youth Movement - Matthias Uecker: Aufrufe, Bekenntnisse, Analysen: Zur Politisierung der westdeutschen Literatur in den sechziger Jahren - Ingo Cornils: Writing the Revolution: the Literary Representation of the German Student Movement as Counter-Culture - Jamie Trnka: The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles - Gerrit-Jan Berendse: Aesthetics of (Self-)Destruction: Melville's Moby Dick, Brecht's The Measures Taken andthe Red Army Faction - Uwe Schutte: 'Heilige, die im Dunkel leuchten': Der Mythos der RAF im Spiegel der Literatur nachgeborener Autoren - Moray McGowan: Ulrike Meinhof im Deutschen Drama der Neunziger Jahre: Drei Beispiele.