Abstract
The lecture reflects on the subject of loneliness in German-language literature in multilingual Prague at the end of the 18th century. While texts and authors of the so-called Prague Circle are sufficiently well known and extensively treated in research, the thoroughly lively and productive literary scene of the Bohemian capital in the 18th century still remains largely unknown. In Prague, as a creative and sometimes experimental centre of German-language Enlightenment literature, several texts have appeared, especially since the establishment of the Chair of Aesthetics, each dealing with loneliness in its own way. For example, the moral weekly "Meine Einsamkeiten", published weekly in Prague in 1771, takes up the motif of loneliness quite explicitly as a stylistic device. The text of the journal "experiences" loneliness by withdrawing from the city, which on the one hand means giving up the pulsating social life and on the other hand means linguistic isolation in the mostly Czech-speaking province. Only through supposed letters from the city and its author, who sometimes wanders there, does the personified text, who is in a sense in the home office, allow himself to be informed of what is happening in the city. In the following years, the lonely author (e.g. L.A. Hoffmann's "Willmar's Life and Travels", 1783) or the lonely author (M.A. Sagar's "Karolinens Tagebuch", 1774) became both a leitmotif in the texts and a necessary component of the professional image of these authors, most of whom were still young. However, the aspect of loneliness was not without criticism in Prague society, which is why the anthology "Erstlinge unserer einsamen Stunden", published in 1790, in which lyrical texts by young Bohemian authors were compiled, commented on this in its preface and explicitly emphasised the positive benefits of time-intensive (lonely) writing.
Using selected texts as examples, the lecture shows the literary-historical and aesthetic dimension of the mostly still very young Prague authors and thus offers a small insight into the often unnoticed "solitary" life and work of the enlightening Prague literati of the late 18th century.