Karl Philipp Moritz, Complete works. Critical and annotated edition, vol. 4/2: Götterlehre and other mythological writings

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Martin Disselkamp
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392406240

Even more so than the “Allgemeine deutsche Briefsteller” (first published in 1793), the “Götterlehre” (1791) is the work of Karl Philipp Moritz that met with greatest success, with thirteen editions and various translations by 1861. This book began a re-evaluation of ancient mythology. Nevertheless, the author’s working methods and knowledge premises remain in large part unknown. Research has overlooked the “Mythologischen Almanach für Damen” (1792) and Moritz’s portion of the “Mythologischen Wörterbuch zum Gebrauch für Schulen” (1794), which appeared posthumously and was likewise republished and translated several times. Antiquity’s diversity of voices and inconsistencies speak to us from the pages of the “Götterlehre”, as does the broad, complexly branched and densely networked reception history from the modern age. Moritz’s immediate field of reference is the presence of myths in the collective knowledge of the 18th century and the obstacles to integrating them into the enlightened world of ideas. The scope of the explanatory notes to vol. 4 of the KMA take account of these conditions. The sources Moritz consulted, and how he positioned himself in myth-related debates, are extensively documented for the first time. Particularly for the chapters on theogony and the Olympian gods, Moritz evaluated ancient literature and often paraphrased quite faithfully from the source: the Homeric epics, Hesiod’s “Theogony”, the Homeric Hymns, Callimachus and a number of Latin classics. In principle, the “Mythologische Almanach” has the same structure, at heart a collage of texts from the “Götterlehre”. While Moritz disregards ancient mythography (Diodorus, Apollodorus, Hyginus etc.), he frequently resorts – even in most of the articles he compiled for the “Mythologische Wörterbuch” – to 18th-century survey literature disposed to view myth critically. The commentary on the “Götterlehre” shows Moritz, no less than the further approaches of Christian Gottlob Heyne, assuming the distanced mindset of mythological Enlightenment literature vis-à-vis the world of Greek gods and heroes, in order to substitute it with the idea of mythology as poetry. The latter allows him to do a number of things: to turn away from antiquarian matters, to treat mythology as an independent field of knowledge, to link the “Götterlehre” with his own aesthetic theory, and to open them up to psychological interests, as he had developed them in the “Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde”. Romantic authors in particular took up the ideas of the “Götterlehre” and ran with them. The edited texts are supplemented with original documentation that also records their reception, including the preface to an unpublished French translation of the “Götterlehre” from the beginning of the 19th century. The illustrations encompass all the title pages and the engravings from the “Götterlehre” and the “Mythologischen Almanach”; their origins are given in the notes.

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