Jean Paul constantly played with a multitude of witty and bizarre ideas; his works are characterized by wild metaphorics as well as digressive, sometimes labyrinthine actions. In them Jean Paul mixed reflections with poetic and philosophical commentaries; in addition to witty irony there are suddenly bitter satire and mild humour

 

Jean Paul [Jean Paul Friedrich Richter], A

Reader, Ed. by Timothy and Erika Casey, The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991

Jean Paul occupies a special position in German literature and has always divided the reading public. Some of them were highly esteemed, others were shaken and disinterested. August Wilhelm Schlegel called his novels “self-talks”, in which he let the reader participate – in this respect an exaggeration of what Laurence Sterne had begun in the Tristram Shandy. Jean Paul constantly played with a multitude of witty and bizarre ideas; his works are characterized by wild metaphorics as well as digressive, sometimes labyrinthine actions. In them Jean Paul mixed reflections with poetic and philosophical commentaries; in addition to witty irony there are suddenly bitter satire and mild humour, beside sober realism there are transfiguring, often ironically broken idylls, also social criticism and political statements are included. - Harald Sack     Read more here

Siebenkäs is a German Romantic novel by Jean Paul, published in Berlin in three volumes between 1796 and 1797.

The novel's full title is Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs im Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschnappel — "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the Public Defender F. St. Siebenkäs in Reichsmarktflecken, Kuhschnappel [de]." However, the book is most commonly known simply as Siebenkäs.

As the title suggests, the story concerns the life of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs and is told in a comedic style. Unhappily married, Siebenkäs goes to consult his friend, Leibgeber, who, in reality, is his alter ego, or Doppelgänger. Leibgeber convinces Siebenkäs to fake his own death, in order to begin a new life. Siebenkäs takes the advice of his alter ego, and soon meets the beautiful Natalie. The two fall in love; hence, the "wedding after death" noted in the title. - wikipedia

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His novels were especially admired by women. This was due to the empathy with which Jean Paul created the female characters in his works: never before in German literature were women represented with such psychological depth. At the same time however, his work contains misogynistic quips. Jean Paul’s character may have been as diverse and as confusing as many of his novels: he was said to be very sociable and witty, while at the same time extremely sentimental: having an almost childlike nature, quickly moved to tears. It is obvious from his works that his interests encompassed not only literature but also astronomy and other sciences.

It is no surprise that the relationship of so capricious an author with the Weimar classicists Goethe and Schiller always remained ambivalent: Schiller once remarked that Jean Paul was as alien to him as someone who fell from the moon, and that he might have been worthy of admiration “if he had made as good use of his riches as other men made of their poverty.” Herder and Wieland on the other hand fully appreciated his work and supported him.

Although he always kept his distance from the classicists, who wanted to “absolutize” art, and although his theoretical approach (most notably in his Introduction to Aesthetics) was considerably influenced by Romanticism, it would be misleading to call him a Romantic without qualification. Here too he kept his distance: with all his subjectivism he didn’t absolutize the subject of the author as the Romantics often did. Jean Paul had what had become rare amidst classical severity and romantic irony: humour. He also was one of the first who approached humour from a theoretical standpoint.

He thought that both the Enlightenment and metaphysics had failed, though they still held importance for his worldview. He arrived at a philosophy without illusions, and a state of humorous resignation. Correspondingly he was one of the first defenders of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. He didn’t try to indoctrinate but to portray human happiness, even (and especially) in an increasingly alienated environment — the rococo castles and bleak villages of Upper Franconia.

Jean Paul was not only the first to use and name the literary motive of the Doppelgänger, he also utilised it in countless variations (e.g. Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, Liane and Idoine, Roquairol and Albano). In his novel Siebenkäs he defines the Doppelgänger as the “people who see themselves.”

read more here: https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/contemporaries/jean-paul/

Schiller said of Richter that he would have been worthy of admiration "if he had made as good use of his riches as other men made of their poverty." And it is true that in the form of his writings he never did full justice to his great powers. In working out his conceptions he found it impossible to restrain the expres-sion of any powerful feeling by which he might happen to be moved. He was equally unable to resist the temptation to bring in strange facts or notions which occurred to him ; and of such facts and notions he had a vast store, for he was an omnivorous reader, and forgot nothing that had ever touched his fancy or awakened his sympathies. Hence every one of his works is irregular in structure, and in some of them it is hard to detect the governing idea by which the relation of the parts to the whole is supposed to be controlled. His style, too, lacks directness, precision, and grace. With the main idea of a sentence he almost invariably associates a crowd of subordinate ideas ; and they are often grouped in an order so capricious and so fantastic that the meaning can be made out only by the closest study. The splendour of Richters genius, however, makes it easy for the class of readers to whom he appeals to forgive even these grave defects. His imagination was one of extraordinary fertility, and he had a surprising power of suggesting great thoughts by means of the simplest incidents and relations. No German prose writer has presented more fascinating pictures of childhood and youth, of friendship and love ; nor has any one shown more finely how' sordid circumstances may evoke the noblest qualities of loyal and generous minds. The love of nature was one of Richter's deepest pleasures, and he communicates his own delight in its beauty by many a description glowing with all the colour and the radiance of the real world. His expressions of religious feelings are also marked by a truly poetic spirit, for to Richter visible things were but the symbols of the invisible, and in the unseen realities alone he found elements which seemed to him to give significance and dignity to human life. His humour, the most distinctive of his qualities, cannot be dissociated from the other characteristics of his writings. It mingled with all his thoughts, and to some extent determined the form in which he embodied even his most serious reflections. That it is sometimes extravagant and grotesque cannot be disputed, but it is never harsh nor vulgar, and generally it springs naturally from the perception of the incongruity between ordinary facts and ideal laws. There are works of imaginative genius which we may read and enjoy without necessarily thinking of the author. The writer may reflect nature with so much fidelity that at first sight no element may seem to be imported into his conceptions from his personal peculiarities. But we appear always to see Richter's face and to hear his voice behind the printed page ; and his creations are true and suggestive only in so far as they are [manifestations of his own inward life. This means, of course, that his genius was not in any important sense dramatic, and that he was much more closely akin to the romantic than to the classic school; but it does not imply that his works produce a monotonous impression. Richter's personality was so deep and many-sided that in every new book he had some fresh secret to disclose. And the more he is known through his unconscious self-revelation the more he is loved and honoured; for we soon learn that with all his wilfulness and eccentricity he was a man of a pure and sensitive spirit, with a passionate scorn f«r pretence and an ardent enthusiasm for truth and goodness.

In 1826-38 a complete edition of Richter's works was published in sixty-five volumes, including several posthumous works. The second edition (1840-42) was in thirty-three volumes, the third (1860-63) in thirty-four. There are also a good many volumes of Richter's correspondence. See Döring, Leben und Charakteristik Richter's (1826); Kunz, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1839); and Nerrlich, Jean Paul und seine Zeitgenossen (1876). There are two admirable articles on Richter in Cavlyle's Miscellanies.

read more here:  https://www.1902encyclopedia.com/R/RIC/johann-paul-friedrich-richter.html

Adrian Daub, Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism, 2012

Transcendental Masturbators: Jean Paul's Siebenkäs

This chapter illustrates how a critic of early Romanticism, Jean Paul, could precisely mobilize the problematic in exploding the Romantic metaphysics of marriage. Siebenkäs found Jean Paul leveling a more general critique at the Romantics and at Fichtean Idealism. This novel has been called “the first German marriage novel.” It appeared at a time in which the theory of marriage and the theory of self-consciousness were curiously intertwined. Jean Paul's critique of philosophical language threatened the self-understanding of German Idealism, construing it as a radicalization rather than a partial repudiation of the Enlightenment. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften showed that a married couple has sex while committing imaginary adultery. The erotics in the Wahlverwandtschafte imagined the four partners (real and imaginary) in four different sexual arrangements.

Vera Kotelevskaya: Jean Paul’s “Siebenkäs” as an explicit and implicit intertext in Thomas Bernhard’s fiction

“Siebenkäs” is considered to be one of the first German “family novels” (Eheroman). However, the description of “family” (Firmian and Lenettaliberating the writer's Self through rejection of family as an obstacle to creativity. While the book remains openended, the image of the new bride Natalie is significantly idealized and hardly could support development a traditional family fable. Jean Paul and Bernhard compensate familial estrangement with relationships with “others”. Friendship becomes an alternative to family.

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Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) adopted the pen-name 'Jean Paul' in honour of Jean Jaques Rousseau. His Levana or the doctrine of education (Levana oder Erziehlehre) was once a standard text and required reading in teacher education. Outside Germany the name of Jean Paul is now little known and the seminal educational text for which he was famous is rarely read. This neglect of Jean Paul is undeserved. What Jean Paul owed to Rousseau is apparent, but his work is rich in insight of his own. Three principles undergird Jean Paul's understanding of spiritual education (geistige Erziehung). Jean Paul insisted that spiritual education is essentially counter-cultural, that it is promoted by play and that it is grounded in love. Such education can never be at home in a curriculum which, however lofty are its stated objectives, is ultimately politically controlled. Jean Paul's insistence that play is constitutive of education needs to be heeded in an educational culture in which the playful is always at risk of displacement by what the government of the day deems to be of greater consequence. The heart of Jean Paul's understanding of education can be expressed succinctly, 'We love to teach and we teach to love'. - John Pridmore