Geister der Zeit: The Allies' Enlightenment and German Literary History

Katherine Arens, University of Texas at Austin

Standard accounts of the German Enlightenment since World War II remain heavily under the influence of literary Geistesgeschichte, from the early Friz Martini through the classic series by Helmut de Boor and Richard Newald, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, that began in the 1960s.1 Even the newer Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur,2 under influence of systems theory and Alltagsgeschichte, retains such frames in reclaiming a more political bias to the histories they tell.