Wilhelm Meisters Erbe. Deutsche Bildungsidee und globale Digitalisierung by Heiko Christians (review)

Abstract

printed side by side and because the individual contributions in some rubrics extend over multiple “issues” of Zeit/Schrift, one trying to read the concluding installment of a five-issue-long piece on the Deutsche Blätter, for example, will have to also page through a systematic piece on “armee-nachrichten” and a collection of headlines from various papers reporting on napoleon’s retreat following defeat at Leipzig in october 1813. admittedly, this format can sometimes lead to unwieldy results: While the systematic pieces function nicely in this format, the meticulous poststructuralist philology characteristic of the longer essays does not always lend itself well to serialization. Yet the effect conveyed to the reader by the work’s formal juxtaposition of times, themes, and rubrics is, above all, a sense that the entire continent of Europe—from the atlantic to moscow, from Riga to naples—was suffused in war during this period and could think of little else than when the next update on the all-consuming fighting would appear. Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 thus discloses to the reader not just a chronopoetics of irregularity, but also the enduring state of temporal exception that is wartime. as i have tried to suggest, the findings of this book are significant; what its authors are able to extract from a limited selection of journals in a narrow window of time is incredibly rich and will certainly overturn more than a few pieces of conventional wisdom about the time of print periodicals. it also suggests exciting avenues for further work on the media-historical a priori of temporal experience: i have not even been able to mention the muted but persistent engagement with figures like Reinhart Koselleck, whose well-known account of the emergence around 1800 of new experiences of historical time is here shown to rest to an unexpected degree upon the intersections of war, time, and writing in the print periodicals of the napoleonic Wars. (many of these journals, for example, explicitly positioned themselves as “temporary archives” of official documents and eyewitness accounts for “future historians,” floating islands of time that would someday, when the cannon-smoke had cleared, serve as invaluable repositories for historians of the present’s past.) Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder Chronopoetik des “Unregelmäßigen” is, in short, a remarkable contribution to media history, and one can only hope that more works like this will appear from this research group at regular intervals.