GRP 2006

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"Georg Forster in Mainz:
Literary production and media center before and during the revolution"

Georg Forster Colloquium on June 23/24, 2006

From 1788 to March 1793, Forster developed a tremendous literary productivity in Mainz, of which the Views of the Lower Rhine is only the best known work. Others, however, have often remained in the shadows, including his memoirs from 1790, essays and his scientific writings and experiments, which remained unpublished in Forster's time. However, this production also includes countless reviews that have never been systematically examined, as well as his well-known "translation workshop", which has also not been sufficiently scrutinized. The Forsters in Mainz were an intellectual center to which not only other people in the circle belonged, but which was also deliberately visited by many, sometimes hardly less illustrious contemporaries from Germany and Europe in order to exchange ideas with Forster: a communication center avant la lettre, of which we still know far too little about how it really worked.

In addition to all this, it is all too easy to forget that Forster was a librarian and had to look after the university library, so he was at the center of book distribution and procurement, about which our knowledge is little to zero. With the arrival of the revolution, Forster was actively involved in the procurement and distribution of political news through his own newspaper. This area, too, has so far received far too little attention. How did this whole media center, in which Forster played such a central role, function?

Enough questions about the structures of knowledge acquisition and dissemination under changing political conditions and Forster's role in them and a direct link to and continuation of the successful 2005 colloquium on Georg Forster in the intellectual networks of his time.

Program

Friday, June 23, 2006
International House of the University of Kassel

9.00 a.m.Welcome
9.15 a.m.Jost Schneider, Bochum
Truthfulness and usefulness in Forster's essay 'On historical credibility'
10.15 a.m.Coffee break
10.30 a.m.Ludolf Pelizaeus, Mainz
Research in book form. An attempt to reconstruct Georg Forster's activities as a librarian in Mainz
11.30 a.m.Christine Haug, Munich
"This work entertains me without tiring me out." Georg Forster's lucrative business with translation work
12.30 p.m.Lunch break
14.00 hrsMarita Gilli, Besançon
From science to philosophy and politics: 'Ueber Leckereyen' and 'Ueber die Schädlichkeit der Schnürbrüste'
3.00 p.m.Laura Anna Macor, Padua
Hölderlin and Forster. Some reflections on the development of political thought towards the end of the 18th century
16.00 hrsCoffee break
16.15 hrsAnke Gilleir, Leuven
"Therese was clever while Forster was brilliant." Therese Heyne-Forster-Huber (1764-1829) between memory and repression
5.15 p.m.Robert J. King, Canberra
The Call of the South Seas: Georg Forster and the expeditions to the Pacific of Lapérouse, Mulovsky and Malaspina
20.00 hrsDinner together

Saturday, 24.6.2006
International House of the University of Kassel

9.15 a.m.Karol Sauerland, Thorn
Two conceptions of revolution - Forster on the one hand, Goethe on the other
10.15 a.m.Coffee break
10.30 a.m.Stephan Wendehorst, Leipzig
Georg Forster and the Empire as Republic: Political Discourses of Participation at the Turn of the 18th and 19th Centuries
11.30 a.m.Horst Dippel, Kassel

Georg Forster and the imperial ban

approx. 12.30 p.m.End of the colloquium