Legal Cultures in the Age of Goethe: An Introduction

Abstract

This special issue aims at examining various forms in which legal practices and the law are integrated and reflected upon in German literary texts of the socalled “saddle period” around 1800, an age of momentous historical transitions and paradigm shifts in society and politics, but also in literature and the legal system. The years between c. 1770 and 1830, which are widely considered as the apogee of German literary culture, are often referred to as the “Age of Goethe,” as they coincide chronologically with the literary and intellectual production of one of its most defining protagonists. In the present volume, we do not use this expression to suggest that Goethe dominated the period as a singular, towering master, subsuming all the complex cultural developments of the time under the perspective of his work; instead, we refer to the broadest possible context of Goethe’s time and his contemporaries, a time that encompasses some of the most significant political events in modern European history (French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Restoration), as well as highly influential literary and philosophical movements, from the Sp€ ataufkl€ arung (late German Enlightenment) to Idealism, from Weimar Classicism to Romanticism. In the context of these historical, political, and cultural ferments, the decades around 1800 were marked by extensive debates and profound changes in the legal and penal system. At least three different conceptions of law were competing in Europe at the time: “the tradition of Roman law with its tendency toward codification; the philosophy of natural law with its claim to reason and order; and the practice of customary law with its appeal to familiarity.” The conflicting coexistence of these different traditions was particularly pronounced in that fragmented patchwork of territorial, political, and legal particularisms that constituted the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the various territories of the Empire had been ruled by the