MANNHEIM AND COMPANY: GENDER, ECONOMICS AND MODERATE STURM UND DRANG IN J. M. R. LENZ'S DER LANDPREDIGER (1777)1

Abstract

ABSTRACTPublished in 1777, J. M. R. Lenz's novella Der Landprediger has been read as a document of Lenz’ own intellectual and spiritual disorientation following his banishment from Goethe's Weimar in 1776. As Marcus Twellmann and others have shown, the novella responds to the agrarian reforms initiated by Margrave Carl Friedrich in Baden, which Lenz witnessed first hand. In this article, I argue that the novella's critique of gender and its discussion of economic and social reform are inextricably intertwined. My analysis proceeds from a key insight of recent scholarship in the field of ‘literarische Ökonomik’, namely that literature and philosophy do not simply exist in opposition to economics, but rather that all three share underlying concerns and, furthermore, that culture is ‘complicit’ with the ‘establishment and solidification of modern economic paradigms’ (Gray 2008). Lenz's novella underscores this complicity in a series of episodes that foreground themes of pedagogy, love and marriage, and Enlightenment social reform. Der Landprediger can be said to align with the concerns of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century feminist economics, insofar as it depicts the struggles of the homo economicus as a crisis of masculinity and recognises women as economic actors in the domestic sphere.