"We Stargazers and Calendar Makers": Johann Peter Hebel's Planetary Poetics

Abstract: This article examines Johann Peter Hebel's cycle of astronomical essays, Betrachtungen über das Weltgebäude ( Reflections on the Universe ), which first appeared in the Rheinländischer Hausfreund ( The Household Friend from the Rhineland ; 1808–15/19) as well as in Hebel's anthology Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes ( Treasure chest of the Rhineland Household Friend; 1811). While these texts unquestionably served a didactic function in the spirit of popular enlightenment, this article argues that their greater significance lies in how they reframe cosmological knowledge as a mode of affective and epistemological reorientation during the tumultuous period of the "Age of Goethe." By negotiating the tension between provincial rootedness and a defamiliarizing, planetary point of view, Hebel transforms astronomical knowledge into a means of unsettling and expanding the reader's relation to time, place, and self. In this way, his essays register and respond to the disjunctive temporalities of modernity, or what Ernst Bloch would later call the "synchronicity of the asynchronous."