Studien zur Goethezeit (review)

The author shows quite clearly that it was no accident that Nicolai and Mendelssohn arrived at a particular understanding of urbanity, enlightenment and historical change in Berlin—but Lessing’s Minna lacks any such specific groundedness. The book’s final chapter is much more successful in tethering the development of Moses Mendelssohn’s philosophy to his urban environment. Mendelssohn’s thought on sociability and human perfectibility clearly presupposed the social disaggregation effected by the urban alembic, and his thought on religion could only emerge from a city like Berlin, in which the Jewish community enjoyed prominence precisely because there were fewer entrenched structures in the city. Nevertheless, as Erlin shows, Mendelssohn’s later works are marked by much greater ambivalence about the effects of urbanity on enlightenment and human perfectibility (160)—the threat of atomism, of urban anomie looms large in the eighteenth century already. This book opens fascinating new avenues into a history of an urban modernity well before what has become the “canonical” urban modernity of German Studies. Erlin’s accessible prose and lucid presentation make this study especially valuable. However, as the wide scope and sweeping syntheses of the early chapters give way to increasingly narrow single-author chapters with relatively limited purview (and at times relatively tenuous connections to Berlin), the book loses some of its initial momentum—a problem perfectly encapsulated (and even compounded) by the fact that the book’s conclusion consists of little more than a synoptic close reading of a single poem. The book narrows its focus too early and leaves the reader dying to know more about the emerging urban eighteenth century.