Introduction: post-revolutionary Germany

TL;DRAbstract

By 1800, the scene in Germany had quite dramatically shifted. Kant was publishing his first Critique in 1781 against the background of a widely felt sense (among the educated youth) that things simply had to change and were about to change in favor of some more satisfying way of life; there was also a sense that things were going to be as they had always been. As Kant was finishing up his work in the 1790s, the younger generation born between 1765 and 1775 was now coming of age, and the cohort of that group that belonged to the reading public had either already left or was preparing to leave the university in pursuit of careers and positions that for all practical purposes did not exist. In that context, the lust for reading, and particularly for the new, was intense. Part of the appeal to these sorts of people (and to a huge number of the literate generation of 1765–1775) of the kinds of books that fueled the "reading clubs" (and led to the so-called "reading addiction") was that they

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