'Ursprünglichkeit' and deep time. Narratives and concepts of originality in German literature around 1800

Thesis

This thesis examines how concepts of 'Ursprünglichkeit' – primordiality, primevality, originality, and authenticity – were mobilised in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature to confront the epistemic rupture introduced by the discovery of Deep Time, the recognition that the earth’s history extends far beyond human time scales.

Chapter One explores how Romantic literature devised narrative structures that rendered the earth’s non-human past legible, particularly how Novalis’s novels engage with geological temporalities, and translate the absence of human records into speculative forms of history. Chapter Two turns to Orientalist philology and literature. In the wake of the Holy Roman Empire’s collapse, German thinkers sought cultural antiquity not in the Greco-Roman canon but in India. Sanskrit’s perceived linguistic depth enabled claims of Indo-Germanic kinship, positioning India as a displaced origin that could confer historical prestige. This identification refigured the Orient not as radical Other, but as ancestral mirror. Chapter Three examines the collection of folk songs as an effort to construct a national past anterior to writing culture, in which the absence of textual transmission was reinterpreted as evidence of authenticity, collective memory preserved in oral form.

By tracing how the fields of natural history, Orientalism, and folk song collection intersected within the discourse of Ursprünglichkeit, this thesis reveals how concepts and terminologies migrated across disciplinary boundaries. It argues that Romantic literature offered representational means for apprehending temporal depth where scientific inquiry reached its limits, and that Ursprünglichkeit functioned as a cultural strategy for restoring coherence in the wake of historical and political fragmentation.

Authors: Hertlein, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-dxp85kojy
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: natural history; Anselm Elwert; folk song; ursprünglichkeit; Friedrich Nicolai; Orientalism; Herder; nation-building; history of ideas; originality; deep time; geology and literature; invented traditions; wissenspoetik; Otto Heinrich Graf von Loeben; novalis; German romanticism; romanticism; Isidorus Orientalis; geo-poetics
• Subjects: German Romanticism; Languages, Modern; History of Ideas; German Studies