Age, mobility and creative output: prominent authors in 18th and 19th century Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper studies the movement of creative writers in the light of changes in German economic and political structures from the early 18th to the early 20th century. For this, we have constructed from various sources a yearly data set on all the writers in German listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica and born in the 18th and 19th centuries. The key findings are that, first, there was extensive long-term movment, initially to small university towns and later to large cities, especially Berlin and Munich. As such the notion of creative clusters is not recent but dates back centuries. Second, migration and yearly publication output are both strongly linked to age. The study is broken into three subperiods, 1700–1785, 1786–1839 and 1840–1899, and what is striking perhaps is that these age relationships followed very similar patterns in all these subperiods. Third, some of the causal factors for this are posited, for futher research, such as changes in publishing and transport facilities, employment opportunities and the attractions of being in a lively creative milieu. Useful lessons for present-day policy regarding the extent of and motivation for clustering, and their linkage to age, can be applied.