Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder: Chronopoetik des "Unregelmäßigen." by David Brehm et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder: Chronopoetik des "Unregelmäßigen." by David Brehm et al. Jake Fraser David Brehm, Nicola Kaminski, Volker Mergenthaler, Nora Ramtke, and Sven Schöpf. Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder: Chronopoetik des "Unregelmäßigen." Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2022. xviii + 377 pp., 47 illustrations. In the last several decades, Anglophone scholars of print periodicals have often cited Benedict Anderson's assertion that the temporality of the nineteenth-century newspaper is characterized by "the steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time." The volume under review here, the latest product of a multiyear research group on "Journal Literature" sponsored by the federally funded German Research Foundation (DFG), challenges each and every one of Anderson's descriptors. The gauntlet is cast in the work's subtitle, which invokes a "chronopoetics of the irregular." While the time signature or characteristic temporality of print serials has traditionally been understood with reference to their periodicity, that is, their appearance at regular intervals, Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 takes as its object of study a number of journals published early in the nineteenth century which declared in advance that they would appear at irregular intervals. In refusing to abide by the norms of periodicity, these publications become, in the eyes of the "Journal Literature" research group, veritable "chronopoetic laboratories, in which experiments with time are carried out." These medial experiments generate forms of time that are not homogeneous but instead remarkably diverse. Through astonishingly careful readings, informed by contemporary approaches in media theory, material philology, and book history, the authors of this work present to the reader a fascinating archive in which the time of news does not clock steadily onward but instead lurches forward, forks, or doubles back on itself. In perhaps the book's most striking example of this "chronopoetics of the irregular," Nicola Kaminski has uncovered a newspaper that temporarily abandoned the present to print new issues concerning past days, such that numbers 7 and 11 of the same periodical are both dated October 21, 1813, albeit with different news! However, if these journals work to defamiliarize the conventions of print periodicals, it is not as a consequence of the avant-garde literary sensibilities of their publishers. Instead, the irregularity of the journals under consideration here is a sign of their times. As the title suggests, Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 is concerned exclusively with issues of journals (Zeitschriften) published from 1813 to 1815, during the final stage of the Napoleonic wars known in German as the Wars of Liberation. Picking up in the spring of 1813, when the failure of Napoleon's Russian campaign encouraged the Prussian army to declare open revolt against the French, the volume traces the fates of numerous German journalistic ventures that sought to document this period of intense struggle against Napoleon's [End Page 181] forces. Indeed, the war itself could plausibly be said to be not just the object of much of the reporting studied here but also its subject; the ongoing conflict between the Grande Armée and the opposing troops of the Sixth and Seventh Coalitions shapes both the form and content of nearly every journal studied. Although the authors' pun in their introduction on the ambiguity of Zeit/Schrift (time-writing), in which it is either time which writes or which is written, the same logic might have been extended to Kriegs/Zeit/Schrift as war/time/writing. The fighting raging across the continent determined in manifold ways the conditions under which papers emerged, flourished, and folded. In several instances, these conditions were nakedly political: the need to mobilize the German-speaking masses, both logistically and ideologically, led to a relaxation of censorship laws for friendly papers, which were often commanded into being by military edict and folded once a given campaign had come to a conclusion. Similarly, many of the journalists studied here were concerned to unmask what they perceived to be the concerted propaganda operations of the French press, which exaggerated victories and concealed or misreported defeats. In other cases, the effects of the war on the press were less direct but no less influential. One of the recurring themes of Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 is the relationship between space, time...