Permalink: https://agate.academy/id/PR419

Berliner Klassik

The Berliner Klassik project will examine whether an interdisciplinary reconstruction of Berlin's unusual cultural heyday between 1786 and 1815 can provide an alternative to the Weimar-Jenaic Classicism. To this end, known and less known works and events of this epoch will be related to their internal and external correspondence and oppositions, their socio-cultural prerequisites and their communicative and institutional networking.

Since there are striking similarities in the history of ideas and art between Weimar and Berlin, the criteria of Berlin's different and individual value must first be developed on the basis of comparison. Two completely contrary cultural typologies are indeed revealed. While the "Weimar Classicism" moves only on the fringes of contemporary history, the "Berlin Classicism", true to its Friderician prehistory, remains dramatically involved in it. While in Weimar a small, relatively homogeneous and immobile group of people operates in an almost socially unoccupied space, in Berlin the confusion of voices and interests of a multiple cultural society prevails. While in Weimar it is exclusively the medium of literature that is decisive, in Berlin more or less all the arts, disciplines, stands and schools of thought of the time are prominently represented and the traditional boundaries, not least the social ones, are largely dispensed with. Weimar thus presents itself as a social art structure ("Musenhof") and as a wish image of a power-protected German provincial culture, while Berlin can draw on the established tradition of courtly, bourgeois, German, French and Jewish enlightenment and produces its strikingly pragmatic emancipation drafts in art, science and politics in the culture-fighting climate of a vital urban society.

The project has been financed since 2001 within the framework of interdisciplinary working groups and work has begun with a series of colloquia. Since January 2003 it has been continued within the framework of the academy programme.

Running time
2001-2013
Project type
Edition

Contact person for the academies' programme

Sebastian Zwies M.A.

Geschäftsstelle Mainz
Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 2
55131 Mainz

Tel: 06131/218 528-17
E-Mail: sebastian.zwies@akademienunion.de