THIS SECTION HAS four parts that collectively try to pinpoint the emergence of a complex notion of racial thinking and of marking a concept hitherto largely unmarked, namely whiteness; in the process, it delineates a focus area in eighteenth-century German studies but seeks to project an open discussion, one we’d love to see continued for years to come. I t is a discussion that anticipates not as much revision, as it foretells a dynamic exchange and new impulses for a field that has been forced, on more than one occasion, to defend its relevancy. C alls for reexamining names of organizations and the perceived narrow focus of the field, which on the surface Goethe Society and Goethe Yearbook might imply, and which one of the contributors discusses in this volume, are facets of this debate. What is the role that whiteness and, more broadly, debates on race, the world, and the diversification of scholarly narratives play in eighteenth-century German studies?

To be sure, the section's focus does not come out of nowhere but arises, almost naturally, from an increasing engagement with German materials in their non-German and/or comparative contexts, aiming at including “the outside Germany” as a constitutive element. These reference points and reconsiderations of the German eighteenth century indicate, perhaps, global thinking; equally possible, they might be merely a transatlantic figure of thought posing as global. O r they recall, somewhat well-worn at this point, the category of the transnational or transcultural. A gainst and alongside these rubrics, inquiries into race, whiteness, the Black Atlantic, and the scope of eighteenth-century thinking unfold.

In the following section, “Fractured Visions, New Horizons,” Birgit Tautz will discuss recent new work and forward-directed lines of thinking presented at ASECS 2022, a conference that unfortunately saw very few German studies contributions, followed by Patricia Anne Simpson's reflection on Penn State's symposium on the Legacy of Enlightenment Race Theory in the context of eighteenth-century studies, Sarah Eldridge's implied dialog with emergent comparative work as she previews her own book-length project on the centrality of the “white subject,” and a glimpse into a research network in progress, organized by our colleagues Claudia Nitschke and Sigrid Köhler in Durham and Tübingen, respectively, and featured here through a report on a preliminary area of investigation.

SINCE THE 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about “extraordinary” bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as “unexpected” from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human— continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. A lthough scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenthcentury aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a selfidentical, logical “whole” likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human.

In a previous “Forum on (New) Directions” (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to “unexpected” bodies in our field. S tephanie M. Hilger's “Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century” calls attention to the health humanities, which “allow for a fresh perspective”; she elaborates: “Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind.” Eleoma Bodammer's “Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies” seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that “could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions.” This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the “body” and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth- century literature, culture, and the body.

BEYOND THE SCHOLARLY sources found in specialized archives, libraries, and bookshelves (or digitized downloads), streaming services and popular series have piqued widespread interest in a Black presence in eighteenth- century European cultures. A number of binge-worthy shows— among them Shonda Rhimes Bridgerton (2021–22), Tony McNamara's The Great: An Occasionally True Story (season 1) and The Great: An Almost Entirely Untrue Story (season 2), and La cocinera de Castamar—adapted from a novel by Fernando J. M úñez by the same name, feature Black characters whose identities are comprised in unequal parts of historical fact, decolonial fantasies, and professionally progressive color-blind casting practices. Bridgerton imagines a Regency world in which Black royalty and aristocrats coexist with tradespeople and merchants. The presence of Black courtiers in the dark dramedy that unfolds in the Russia of Catherine II (The Great) raised some viewers’ eyebrows, but the historical record attests to the partial reality of this “occasionally true story.” And Múñez's novel follows the path of the protagonist, Clara Belmonte, an agoraphobic cook who catches the eye of a widowed duke in the palace Castamar, as she navigates her affliction and the marriage intrigues that surround the hero. Her character is loosely based on a composite of historical figures—the royal kitchen of Philip V was staffed by men—the person of interest is the duke's adopted brother, Gabriel de Castamar, a formerly enslaved Black man who was educated and elevated into the family. These amalgams of fact and fiction veer into controversies about historical accuracy and the inability of fantasy to right centuries of wrong. Each story indistinctly maps a topography transversed by economic, racial, and cultural politics networking Africa, Europe, and the Americas around 1800. M uch is made of Catherine's Germanness, deftly delivered by Elle Fanning, in The Great—in particular, the ability to transfer Enlightenment theory into political practice. Perhaps we can imagine a popularized version of “Frederick—The Great?,” but the Forschungsstand offers compelling reading with greater gravitas, for much current German studies scholarship is engaged in the project of decolonizing the long eighteenth century.

The Black Lives Matter movements galvanized anti-Black-racist activism, which directly or indirectly has an impact on the work we do: this scholarship itself has a history—Black lives have always mattered.

FOR THIS EDITORIAL team, volume 30 represents our valedictory effort. Over the past year, some of us were able to transition from the Zoom squares to in-person conferences; we tentatively removed our masks, applauded with real hands, and continued debates in the corridors outside conference rooms. Nevertheless, we have come to value even more the continued opportunity to share work in this venue, and we as editors have particularly enjoyed bringing current debates, controversies, and new directions of ongoing, exciting research to these pages.

Hans Hahn's “Wielands Singspiel Alceste, ein Stein des Anstoßes für Goethe?” opens this issue with an exploration of the role Wieland's libretto, in particular, played in a literary dispute with Goethe. A certain synergy emerged in a cluster of contributions around issues of gender, influence, and female marginalization among Carl Niekerk's “Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of ‘Sexuality’ in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,” Maryann Piel's “La Roche and Goethe: Gender, Genre, and Authorship,” and an editorial by Margaretmary Daley in which she challenges us to confront gender bias. While Niekerk dwells on the scene of the canary's kiss as a moment in the history of sexuality at the edge of its biological and cultural construction, Piel latently picks up on Daley's challenge, restoring La Roche's constitutive role in Goethe's oeuvre (rather than the other way round, as much scholarship has it). Departing from scholarly analyses to the genre of editorial, Daley seeks to challenge women writers’ continued relegation to the margins of an eighteenth-century literary canon that she sees revolving around Goethe and/or other “great men”; in picking bias as a Schlagwort, Daley also begins to reflect on the state of the humanities more broadly, oscillating between the seemingly privileged position of choosing one's own research topics and the festering of structural inflexibilities that are contributing to the crisis of the humanities.

The next essay in the line-up, “Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe's Römische Elegien,” by Sebastian Meixner and Carolin Rocks, offers an innovative and compelling reading of the figure of Amor as poetic guide, matchmaker, rogue, servant, and mediator to Goethe's own Roman past.

Monographs and Edited Volumes

Jeremy Adler. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. London: Reaktion, 2020. 256 pp.

This presentation of Goethe's life and work in the Critical Lives series is just the book every scholar of Goethe has been looking for, and this not merely because it is deeply informed, original in its judgments, and keenly insightful, but also because it is the book to recommend to students and nonspecialists who, after having read, say, Werther or Faust, seek a picture of the overall achievement. The book's virtues are legion. Perhaps foremost among them is that it calls attention to Goethe's contemporary significance while firmly situating his work within the context of European literary and cultural history. Goethe's work comes into view here as both remarkably relevant to the concerns of our moment and as a nodal point in a webwork of cultural traditions extending as far back as the biblical and Greco-Roman interventions. Thankfully, Adler's interrogation of Goethe's life and work sloughs off the carapace of disciplinary obsession and gives us a Goethe who deserves to be a topic of urbane and literate conversation. I ndeed, the book is a demonstration of the indispensability of appreciation and discernment—the aims of “criticism” as it emerged in the Enlightenment—to a free and flourishing cultural life.

Every knowledgeable reader will find in Adler's book moments that illuminate their own particular zones of interest. A mong the segments I found especially salient was the account of Goethe's Italian sojourn and, in particular, the account of his deep engagement with Palladio. Brief but nonetheless sharply focused observations on Palladio's masterful treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1570), a copy of which Goethe, inspired by his autoptic inspection of several buildings, intensely studied, lead into an explanation of neoclassical form as remarkably supple and multivalent. The significance of Palladio's art for Goethe can, in fact, be studied in the latter's own drawings and commentaries on particular polyfunctional moments of architectural composition. A dler employs the insights gained from his consideration of the Palladio material in an account of the controlled fluidity that characterizes the verse version of Iphigenie auf Tauris, an account that, despite its brevity, is fresh and richly suggestive.

THE #ME TOO MOVEMENTS assumed specific national andregional characteristics while they circulatedglobally. In Germany, few powerful men fell fromprominence owing to allegations and proof of sexualharassment and predation. #MeToo did, however,reframe a debate about systemic sexism that revivedand expanded the agenda of twentieth-centuryfeminism. Still underexamined is the transhistoricalnormalization of the female body as object of apredatory, prurient gaze and the site of sexualviolence as spectacle. In Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany,1700–1815 (1996), Isabel V. Hullelaborates the “sexual system” of Germany as itsleaders negotiate the transition from absolutism tothe modern state, with a focus on “the patternedways in which sexual behavior is shaped and givenmeaning through institutions.” Specifically, shemarks a semantic shift in the meaning of Dirne (prostitute), atransformation from the eighteenth-century model ofthe innocent victim seduced by a male villain to theprostitute, indicative of a nineteenth-centuryrevision in which the man becomes the victim of thepromiscuous, sexually incontinent woman. Hull'sargument underscores the exclusion of women fromcivil society. Though objectively true, this thesisis open to criticism, as James Van Horn Melton'sintervention reveals. He notes in Hull's work theabsence of women writers, salon hosts, and worksabout intellectual politics and practices thatinterrogate gendered exclusions. Moreover, as Iargue, the issues of female desire and pleasure—andtheir regulation—elude these analyses. Indeed, thereare few narratives in Western modernity thatacknowledge female sexuality without relegating itto the realm of innocent purity, sanctioned andcontractual reproductivity, or prostitution—that is,transactional sex, for whatever reason, subject tocivic regulation. In this chapter, I examine therepresentation of female sexuality and itssyntactical place in a range of texts that do not somuch challenge Hull's analysis as capturepost-Enlightenment obsessions with women as sexuallyactive yet innocent victims. First, I examine theconstruction of female submissiveness andvictimhood. With reference to two engravings, thePrussian legal code, and Immanuel Kant's moraljustification of marriage, I explore three texts byJohann Wolfgang von Goethe to demonstrate how femaledesire around 1800 is coded as sacrificial ortransactional. Finally, the displacement ofseduction, prostitution, and possible violence ismapped onto distant topographies, away from thepublic gaze.

ON OCTOBER 5, 2017, Jodie Kantor and Megan Twohey ofthe New York Timespublished an article that detailed how, for decades,the movie producer Harvey Weinstein had paid off andthus silenced women who accused him of sexualharassment. On October 15, the actress Alyssa Milanoretweeted the suggestion of a friend: “If all thewomen who have been sexually harassed or assaultedwrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people asense of the magnitude of the problem.” In the nexttwenty-four hours, twelve million Facebook postsresponded to this invitation. Through her tweet,Milano introduced to a mainstream audience amovement founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke in order tosupport young women of color who had experiencedsexual abuse. In the weeks and months after Milano'stweet, #MeToo resonated around the globe, includingin France as #BalanceTonPorc, in China as#RiceBunny, in Spain as #YoTambien, and as #ichauchin Germany, where the most prominent cases involvedaccusations of sexual assault against the directorDieter Wedel and against Siegfried Mauser, thepresident of the Musikhochschule Munich.

The worldwide resonance of #MeToo drasticallyillustrates the ubiquity of sexual abuse and sexualviolence and of the failure to acknowledge theirimpact publicly. It shows that there is a great neednot only to hold perpetrators accountable but alsoto raise public consciousness. All too often,attention is directed exclusively to thevictimization of white middle- class women, whileneglecting the experiences of women from lowersocioeconomic backgrounds, women of color, membersof LGBTQ and immigrant communities, and also of men,including, but not limited to, the rape of maleprison inmates.