Sigrid Habersaat, Verteidigung der Aufklärung. Friedrich Nicolai in religiösen und politischen Debatten. 2001

Abstract

Considering Friedrich Nicolai's central position in the late German Enlightenment, due above all to the extensive network of correspondents he created through the publication of the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, the disclosure of another part of his correspondence is highly welcome. In the first volume of her book Habersaat discusses Nicolai's efforts from the 1770s through the 1790s to defend the German Enlightenment against (perceived) threats posed by religious and political forms of counter Enlightenment. The second volume contains the annotated texts of the correspondence between Nicolai and two of his friends, Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Both played major roles in Nicolai's struggles and figure prominently in the first volume, Blanckenburg as the trusted ally and Zimmermann as the increasingly alienated bitter enemy. In addition Habersaat draws on an astounding amount of other mostly unpublished Nicolai letters. Her liberal use of Nicolai's marginal notes on many of the letters he received makes her book even more important since they allow a glimpse of his private thoughts, which often differ from the content of his return letters and his published reactions. She deserves high praise both for opening up two more sets of correspondence from Nicolai's network and for the full utilization of this most important, yet still mostly hiddden source of the late Enlightenment in Germany.