Streitkultur: Polemic and the Problem of Public Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany

My dissertation traces the waning of the Enlightenment in Germany. I examine how a consciously directed attempt to merge the early modern Republic of Letters with the nascent, bourgeois public sphere in order to create a culture of learned public debate was curtailed and ultimately channeled back into an academic forum. In the eyes of its proponents, this culture of public debate, which I term a Streitkultur, carried with it the potential to accelerate the process of popular enlightenment that had until that point in time stagnated in the German speaking territories. I examine controversies such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Fragmentenstreit, the outbreak of theological polemic in the years after Lessing's death, the pantheism controversy between Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Immanuel Kant's efforts to supersede these controversies via his tribunal of Kritik. Collectively, these debates demonstrate how a specific form of erudite polemical discourse was transformed into a popular, polemical assault on the pillars of state and church authority. The significance of these debates for the development of the public sphere has until now not received thorough critical attention. Complementing recent work that has shed light on the political, theological, and rhetorical contexts of numerous early modern religious controversies and the mostly successful to deny publicity to these disputes, I show that the attempt to establish a robust Streitkultur likewise provoked a counter-reaction that had as its effect the reinstallation of polemic in its original context and the ultimate curtailment of the possibility of public enlightenment.