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I. Theaterleidenschafl and Theaterfeindschaft
Readers of Karl Philipp Moritz's psychological novel chronicling the etiology of an almost pathological passion for the theater have displayed a remarkable lack of puzzlement over the fact that the title is borrowed from the name of one of the most vehement antitheatricalists in the German theater wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Anton Reiser. In 1681 this Hamburg pastor published a voluminous and verbose tome whose title, AΩ! Theatromania Oder Die Werke der Finsterniβ In denen öffentlichen Schau-Spielen, provides the matrix for the diagnosis of the hero's theatrogenic suffering. This lack of philological puzzlement ranges from Lothar Müller's outright dismissal1 of any connection between Moritz's Enlightenment novel and the unenlightened diatribes of a Pietist cleric to the dutiful mentioning of a nominal connection2 without further investigating this unholy textual alliance. The sole exception is a rather short and rough article that Wolfgang Martens contributed to the international Fachtagung "Karl Philipp Moritz und das 18. Jahrhundert" and in which he draws on his seminal work on Literatur und Frömmigkeit to suggest (rather than fully develop) the idea that "Moritz' Urteil über Roman- und Dramenlektüre und Theaterlust [...] ist abhängig von frühen, voraufklärerischen Einflüssen und Prägungen, die er erfahren hat, obwohl er als Erwachsener, in seiner von ihm vertretenen Weltanschauung und in seinen Schriften, auch im 'Anton Reiser,' sich davon befreit zu haben scheint. Ich meine Einflüsse und Prägungen durch den Pietismus, durch pietistische Kritik, ja pietistisches Urmißtrauen gegenüber dem Scheinhaften, dem Romanhaften, dem Fiktionalen und Theatralischen."3 But just like most readers of Moritz's oeuvre, Martens is blinded by the simple opposition between his later commitment to Enlightenment ideals and the darker "frühe, voraufklärerische Einflüsse und Prägungen." Moreover, Martens alludes to the reconciliation of this internal contradiction that is generally accepted within Moritz philology: namely that Moritz's contact with Enlightenment thinkers from Gottsched to Mendelssohn enabled him to overcome his religious upbringing. As I have shown elsewhere,4 this assumption of discontinuity does not hold for the history of Enlightenment theater, and more importantly, it naively takes at face value the Enlightenment's myth of a "self-fashioning" that breaks with the past.
Certainly the relation between his early religious "Eindrücke" and his later philosophy is a complicated and conflicted one, and it is...