49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 240–1.
52 Ibid., epigraph.
53 Johann David Wyss published Der Schweizerische Robinson in 1812.
54 Ulrich Bräker, Lebensgeschichte und Natürliche Abenteuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg (Zurich: Fußli, 1789). Translation from Ulrich Bräker, The Life and Real Adventures of the Poor Man of Toggenburg, trans. Derek Bowman (Edinburgh: University Press of Edinburgh, 1970), 69.
55 Bräker, The Life and Real Adventures of the Poor Man of Toggenburg, 70.
56 See Iffland’s play, “Die Jäger” [The Hunters] (1785), II, 7, in Iffland, Dramatische Werke, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1798), 74–5.
57 Ibid., 75–6.
58 Ibid., 159.
59 Kotzebue, Die Indianer in England (Leipzig, 1790).
60 Die Xenien (1795/1796), a collaboration between Goethe and Schiller, written in response to their critics, and motivated by the negative criticism surrounding Schiller’s journal, Die Horen.
61 In 1797, Ludwig Christian Kehr (1775–1848) opened a commercial lending library in Kreuznach. He later started a publishing house and bookshop, and published translations and pirate editions, arguing that the reprinting and wider distribution of books was a means to greater social justice.
62 Benjamin invokes a distinction attributed to the German poet Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794). The phrase opposes Publikum, German for audience, with the made-up word Pöblikum, a pun on crowd or rabble.
63 Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), editor of the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek; Christian Garve (1742–1798), German translator and writer; Johann Erich Biester (1749–1816) and Friedrich Gedike (1754–1803), co-founders of the Berlinische Monatsschrift. While Nicolai and Garve are sometimes associated with a popularization of Enlightenment thought, Biester and Gedike are less easily placed in an opposition between the popular and the philosophical. Benjamin invokes a once common opposition between the Enlightenment, broadly represented by these figures, and Romanticism, associated with the poets Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Novalis (1772–1801).
64 Schiller’s journal, Die Horen, which appeared from 1795 to 1798, was published by the Cotta publishing house.
65 Goethe’s Faust: Ein Fragment appeared in the seventh volume of the Göschen edition (Leipzig, 1790).
66 See Goethe’s letter to Zelter, dated June 6, 1825, abridged by Benjamin. The translation is from Goethe and Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethes Letters to Zelter: With Extracts of those of Zelter to Goethe: trans. A.D. Coleridge (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892), Letter 183, 246–7.
67 Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan [West-Eastern Divan], published by the Cotta publishing house in 1819.
68 Translation from Goethe’s World View Presented in his Reflections and Maxims, ed. Frederick Ungar, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1963), 69.
CHAPTER 39. Lichtenberg
A Cross-Section
Dramatis Personae
NARRATOR
I. Moon Beings:
LABU, President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research
QUIKKO, Manager of Machinery
SOFANTI
PEKA1
The voices of the Moon Beings reverberate, as if coming from a room in a cellar.
II. Humans:
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN OF THE ENGLISH KING
THE ACTOR DAVID GARRICK
MARIA DOROTHEA STECHARDT, Lichtenberg’s girlfriend
EBERHARD, Justice Pütter’s servant
JUSTICE PüTTER
A TOWN CRIER A SELLER OF SILHOUETTES
FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD CITIZENS OF GöTTINGEN
A PASTOR
NARRATOR: As the Narrator, I find myself in the pleasant situation of taking a position above all the parties — I mean, planets. Because the following events take place between Earth and Moon — or rather, sometimes on one, sometimes on the other — I would violate the laws of interplanetary codes of behavior if I, as Narrator, represented the position of either the Earth or the Moon. In order to adhere to the proprieties, I will inform you that the Earth seems as mysterious to the Moon, which knows everything about the Earth, as the Moon does to the Earth, which knows nothing about the Moon. You can infer that the Moon knows everything about the Earth and the Earth knows nothing about the Moon from the single fact that there is a Committee for Earth Research on the Moon. You will have no trouble following this Committee’s negotiations. But in order to enable you to easily gain an overview, please allow me to point out the following. The Lunar Committee’s negotiations are very brief; the time allotted for speaking on the Moon is greatly restricted. The Moon-dwellers obtain nourishment exclusively from the silence of their fellow citizens, which they therefore only reluctantly interrupt. It is also worth mentioning that one Earth year amounts to only a few Moon minutes. Here we are dealing with the phenomenon of temporal distortion, a phenomenon with which you are doubtlessly familiar. I hardly need to mention that photographs have always been taken on the Moon.
The Society for Earth Research’s machinery is limited to three apparatuses that are easier to use than a coffee grinder. First, we have the Spectrophone, through which everything happening on Earth is heard and seen; a Parlamonium, with the help of which human speech — often aggravating for the inhabitants of the Moon, who are spoiled by the music of the spheres — can be translated into music; and an Oneiroscope, with which the dreams of Earthlings can be observed. That is significant because of the interest in psychoanalysis that is prevalent on the Moon. You will now listen in on a meeting of this Moon Committee.
Gong.
LABU: I hereby open the 214th Session of the Moon Committee for Earth Research. I welcome the committee members, who are all assembled: the gentlemen Sofanti, Quikko, and Peka. We are nearing the end of our work. Now that we’ve sorted out all the Earth’s essential parts, we have decided, in accordance with the many requests from Moon laymen, to conduct a few additional, short experiments concerning humans. It has been clear to the Commission from the start that the material is relatively unproductive. The samples taken over the last millennia have not yielded a single case in which a human has amounted to anything. Taking this established scientific fact as a basis for our investigations, our meetings from now on will deal solely with proving that this is a result of the unhappy human condition. Opinions differ on what is to blame for this unhappiness. Mr. Peka would like the floor.
PEKA: I would like permission to speak on a matter of the rules of procedure.
LABU: On the rules of procedure.
PEKA: I suggest that before we move on to other points on the agenda, we take note of this lunar map, which has just been published based on research done by Professors Tobias Mayer and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in Göttingen.2