The Correspondence of Jean Paul’s Family and Acquaintanceship

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Bernauer
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 466029789

The requested funds will be used to complete the digital edition, begun in 2019, of the correspondence from the family, friends, and acquaintances of Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825, www.jeanpaul-edition.de) - a total of about 2,000 letters that contribute an unusually large amount to our understanding of the poet’s biography and his work as well as to our understanding of literary history and, of course, the everyday history of Jean Paul’s educated and less educated, wealthy and less wealthy contemporaries. This edition is characterized by diversity: People, who in classic letter editions serve as a kind of feedback mechanism for the main character, step out from the second and third rows, reveal themselves as characters of their own and as centers of their own networks; their letters illuminate the world from their own reality. There are a disproportionate number of women represented, from whose letters the female ‘conditio humana’ emerges. One of Jean Paul’s closest friends is the Jewish merchant Emanuel (Osmund): Both maintained a close German-Jewish relationship through their families, from celebrating Jewish and Christian festivals together to Jean Paul choosing the family name (“Beschützer”, “protector”), which was officially required for Emanuel in 1814. Emanuel was a gifted networker whose correspondences - a focus of the second phase of the project - provide a deep insight into Jewish life and culture around 1800.The edition of letters from Jean Paul’s friends and family makes use of the possibilities of the digital medium: Letters are indexed and assigned to correspondence circles and can be variably grouped, i.e. assigned to different letter corpora. The user can browse chronologically through the entire material (including Jean Paul’s letters) or in a self-chosen selection. The category of ‘co-readership’ introduced for this edition serves to make a phenomenon visible that was crucial to communication around 1800: Correspondences are by no means always a private exchange between one sender and one reader; rather, as the ‘social media’ of the time, they connect and create networks, social connections of changing density and stability. Quite a few of the letters don’t have just one sender, but are written collectively.The project of letters of Jean Paul’s friends and family is conceived as part of a platform on the WWW, which will make the poet’s letters (which have been accessible since 2018) and those addressed to him, as well as the letters of his family, friends and acquaintances, freely accessible and linked through an overarching register database (persons, works, places), but also through links. In this respect, the second phase of the project not only serves to expand the corpus, but also to partially integrate Jean Paul’s letters into the classification system for in-depth digital indexing, which was developed for the letters of Jean Paul’s friends and family.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Norbert Miller