Poesie as Anthropology: Schleiermacher, Colonial History, and the Ethics of Ethnography1

In 1796, Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768-1834) accepted a position as chaplain at Charite Hospital in Berlin, where on December 30th he received an invitation for tea and dinner at the house of "Kants Lieblingsstudent" and renowned Berlin doctor Markus Herz (Dilthey 224). At the dinner party on the following day, Schleiermacher would begin his intimate friendship with Henriette Herz, Professor Herz's much younger wife. Henriette would introduce Schleiermacher to the "Berliner Gesellschaft," which by July would include the young Friedrich Schlegel, who had moved from Jena to Berlin (227). In a letter to his sister, Schleiermacher describes his friendship with Schlegel as marking a "new period" of his intellectual and social life (Brief 402, V2:177).2 Six months after their first meeting, Schlegel moved in with Schleiermacher.3 Soon after meeting Schleiermacher, both Friedrich and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, the professor and critic, exhorted Schleiermacher to "convert" [bekehren] soon to Poesie and even to write a novel (Brief 933, V4:218). After having returned to Jena in 1800, Friedrich Schlegel writes how pleased he was to learn that his former roommate had finally begun to reflect "so ernstlich und so en detail uber die Poesie" (Brief 791, V.3:379). Schlegel's comment, especially his use of Poesie, is striking because Schleiermacher's published work from his early Berlin period concerns not poetry but travelogues (Zur Siedlungsgeschichte Neuhollands, 1799-1802), anthropology (Rezension van Immaituel Kant: Anthropologie, 1799) and religion (Uber die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verachtern, 1799).4 Schleiermacher's explicit references to Poesie are few but suggestive; the term appears most prominently in his terse and biting review of Immanuel Kant's Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), a review that concludes with the unelaborated assertion that the Anthropologie fails because of Kant's "Nichtwissen um Kunst und besonders um Poesie" (Rezension 1.2:369). Marked by a poetic insensitivity, Kant's Anthropologie, or as Schleiermacher calls it, his "Sammlung von Trivialitaten," is the "Negation aller Anthropologie" (365). While writing this review, Schleiermacher was also engaged in what he alternately refers to as "ein Studium fur mich" or "der verfluchte Kalender," a project that would occupy him for over three years (Brief 910, V.4:151). This "damned calendar" was a history of the English colonies on the east coast of New South Wales, or what Schleiermacher refers to as New Holland (present-day Australia). In this essay, I consider the anthropological character of the work from Schleiermacher's early Berlin period, as evidenced in his colonial history of New Holland, his review of Kant's Anthropologie and his Reden. These texts exemplify an early Romantic challenge to Kant's anthropology and late18th-century ethnography. Functioning at the intersection of anthropology and aesthetics, these early texts question the categorical stability of anthropology's most basic category: the human. In a move that lends his early corpus a distinctly early Romantic character, Schleiermacher appeals to Poesie as a model for using "humanity" or the concept of "the human" in a dynamic and historically dense way. In the first section, I briefly outline what I mean by an 18th-century German anthropology. Then I consider Schleiermacher's incomplete historical-ethnographic study of the colonies in New Holland in terms of his critique of Kant's Anthropologie. Finally, I highlight traces of his work on anthropology and ethnography in the Reden. Ultimately, I argue that Schleiermacher 's early oeuvre is marked by a decidedly anthropological character that relies on an analogical relationship between a self-reflexive anthropology and Poesie. Schleiermacher's review of Kant's Anthropologie and his colonial history of New Holland5 should be read within the frame of a late-18th-century science of man or anthropology that, as Wolfgang Riedel puts it, does not want to abstract from man as a "Naturwesen" (195). …