Citation

Düwell S, Pethes N. Internationales Archiv fuer Sozialgeschichte der Deutschen Literatur 2015; 40(1): 21-45.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015)

DOI

10.1515/iasl-2015-0002

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The Berlinische Monatsschrift, one of the leading monthly journals during the late Enlightenment period, is mostly considered a platform for theoretical philosophical debates, especially since regular contributors such as Immanuel Kant explicitly repudiated empirical methods and popular representations. But as the revision of the journal's 14 volumes shows, from its very beginning, the Berlinische Monatsschrift also included large numbers of empirical case histories that mainly dealt with examples of religious enthusiasm, but also magnetism, felony, suicide, etc. The article reconstructs the journal's serial arrangement of these case histories and discusses the archival function of their collection in a printed periodical. At the same time, this archive of individual cases is increasingly supplemented by statistical tables of the birth and death rates of Berlin in the journal's later volumes, thus revealing the biopolitical implications of the public discourse during the Enlightenment.

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