Paper dragon: Jean Paul's late work

01/20/2026

Even 200 years after his death, the work of the German writer Jean Paul offers plenty of room for discussion. On Thursday, 29 January 2026, the Schelling Forum will be the venue for such an exchange.

A work between classicism and romanticism. Jean Paul is the topic at the Schelling Forum in late January. (Image: Schelling-Forum)

Jean Paul is the counter-classic of German literature. A contemporary and challenger of Goethe and Schiller, he wrote novels such as Hesperus, Siebenkäs and Titan, short stories and theoretical writings, including Vorschule der Ästhetik. Jean Paul's writings occupy a special position in German literary history between Classicism and Romanticism. Even today, they inspire and irritate readers with their linguistic extravagance, their pictorial power and the variety of topics they deal with.

Jean Paul's late writings are a configuration of the most diverse texts - glued together from scraps of paper, so to speak - a dragon that promises poetic flights of fancy, but always threatens to crash. Is there a way to understand this seemingly heterogeneous text as an idiosyncratic literary entity? What do the fragmented late writings tell us about Jean Paul's legacy? How does literary scholarship assess the late work today?

Professor Helmut Pfotenhauer, a specialist in German studies, will address these questions. The lecture will be followed by a staged reading of selected texts by Jean Paul, performed by actress Julia Höhfeld. Professor Pfotenhauer will then enter into dialogue with his Würzburg colleague and Chair of Modern German Literature and the History of Ideas, Professor Maximilian Bergengruen - and the audience will be very welcome to join in!

Time & place

When: Thursday, 29 January 2026, 6:00 pm

Where: Schelling-Forum, Klinikstraße 3, 97070 Würzburg

Contributors

Professor Helmut Pfotenhauer is Professor Emeritus of Modern German Literary History at the University of Würzburg. He was President of the Jean Paul Society from 1997 to 2007. In 2004, he founded the Jean-Paul-Edition Centre at the University of Würzburg. Since 1994, he has been involved in the publication of a new historical-critical edition of Jean Paul's works and manuscript estate. He has been a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2006.

Professor Maximilian Bergengruen has held the Chair of Modern German Literature and History of Ideas at the University of Würzburg since 2022. His dissertation already focussed on the philosophical and anthropological concepts in Jean Paul's poetic texts. Since 2022, he has been funded by the DFG for a project on "Consumption", and since 2024 additionally for the edition project "William Lovell digital". He is chairman of the Rückert Society and heads a research centre of the same name at the University of Würzburg.

Reading

Julia Höhfeld is an actress. After completing her master's degree in theatre pedagogy at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre, she completed her acting training in Kassel. In recent years, she has appeared on stage in various productions at the Staatstheater Kassel and the Junges Theater Göttingen, among others. She also works as a freelance actress and theatre teacher and is often on tour throughout Germany, as is currently the case with the classroom play Die letzte O.