Robert Musil once called Egon Erwin Kisch, also known as der rasende Reporter (the hurrying reporter), a Tagesschriftsteller: “[He was] not a poet who failed the test of eternity but rather one who ran away from it.” The term Tagesschriftsteller, which essentially means “journalist,” stresses that journalistic texts are different compared to highbrow literature in that they are supposed to have an expiry date. It thus refers to the journalistic profession, which is concerned with issues of the day, rather than the “eternal” affairs that some think art deals with.

In this chapter, I want to address the opposition between these two models of writing and publishing and the role it played around 1820 and in the following decades. Roughly speaking, this time saw a shift toward a new kind of literary interest in realism. In 1805, Johann Gottfried Seume wrote: “The time of poetry is over, reality has arrived.” This sentence could serve as a motto for the writers associated with the name Junges Deutschland (Young Germany), who voted in favor of realism and were convinced that literature should be socially useful and promote political change.

Since the 1770s, however, other writers had promoted an opposite conception of art that was related not so much to the everyday but rather to the imagination. From this point of view, the right way to approach a work of art was considered to be devotion. Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, for example, regarded art as something that expresses the most noble and prestigious human ideas, such as freedom and happiness—a telos that the artist might never reach but nevertheless had to strive for. This concept tended to isolate the work of art from its empirical context, from the time and place of its production and reception, and most certainly from all economic circumstances. From this perspective, art was considered to be untouchable and sacred.

Obviously, this model of art and literature contrasts with another one that highlights aspects of production and consumption. The latter views art as a kind of communication taking place between specific producers and an anonymous, mixed audience at a specific point in time and space. It conceives of art not as functionless and autonomous but rather as designed to cause specific effects, like empathy, which can be described in psychological terms.