Ich liebe Deine Liebe. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schlegel und Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). Eine Ausstellung im Deutschen Romantik-Museum, 26. April -28. August 2022. Katalog
(The Correspondence of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg. An Exhibition at the German Museum for Romanticism, Catalogue)
2022, FRANKFURT/MAIN: FREIES DEUTSCHES HOCHSTIFT
Johannes Endres, co-authored with Nicholas Saul

“I love your love”, writes Friedrich Schlegel in 1797 to his friend Friedrich von Hardenberg, known later also as “Novalis”. That is a new and unheard-of tone for a correspondence, even for a literary correspondence among poets. What had happened that made such a tone possible? The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition of Schlegel’s and Hardenberg’s epistolary manuscripts at the new German Romanticism Museum in Frankfurt attempts to answer that question by foregrounding the cultural and intellectual dimension of the relationship between both men and the friendship circle around them

Friedrich Schlegel: “Athenaeum“-Fragmente und andere frühromantische Schriften (“Athenaeum“ Fragments and Other Early Romantic Writings: Edition, Commentary and Epilogue)
2018, Stuttgart: Reclams Universal Bibliothek
Johannes Endres, author

Friedrich Schlegel’s critical writings on literature and art played a central role in the emergence of European romanticism as an intellectual movement. The book assembles and annotates the most important of Schlegel’s texts, prior to his conservative turn in 1808. In addition to the texts, which the edition presents according to their first prints (undoing modifications and modernizations previous editions have introduced), the volume also provides extensive explanations of Schlegel’s language and the many references he makes. The epilogue sheds light on the various complexities of Schlegel’s thinking and, following the concept of the Reclam Universal Library, renders it accessible to a wider audience.

Fetischismus: Grundlagentexte vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart (Fetishism: Source Texts from the 18th century to the present).

2017, Suhrkamp Verlag (Taschenbuch Wissenschaft): Frankfurt M.

Johannes Endres, author

This volume brings together key contributions from the history of fetishism as a cultural practice, discourse and concept. Texts gathered here stem from a variety of fields and disciplines, including ethnography, anthropology, religious history, sociology, the critique of commodification and consumerism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, aesthetics, semiotics and epistemology. These texts, and their selection and presentation in this book, are concerned with a number of questions, which are crucial to the history of fetishism since the 18th century up to the present: Which forces regulate peoples’ relationships to their favorite things? Does the veneration of a piece of clothing repeat an archaic disposition from a remote religious past? Is the commodity fetish a descendant of the idols of the so-called indigenous peoples? Or is the existence of the fetish only owed to the derogatory and misconstrued views of an opaque and alien ‘other’ (the ‘primitive’ people, the childish mind, the bourgeois economy, the pervert)? All texts are carefully introduced and linked to each other through commentaries by the editor, which outline major trajectories of one of the oldest fascinations of humankind – that with the seemingly meaningful objects that it surrounds itself with.

Friedrich Schlegel Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Friedrich Schlegel Handbook: Life – Work – Reception), Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2017.

2017, J.B. METZLER: STUTTGART
Johannes Endres, author

Friedrich Schlegel’s life career, from his revolutionary youth over the Jena years up to his catholic conversion, serves as a mirror of the Romantic era as a whole. His theoretical writings laid the groundwork for the idea of Romantic poetry as a “progressive universal poetry”; his historical-critical method helped to establish ‘Literaturwissenschaft’ (literary studies) in the way it is still practiced today. This handbook presents Schlegel’s oeuvre in its entirety, covering, besides his literary and aesthetic writings, his texts and fragments on classical studies, philosophy, the history of European and world literature, history and politics, and art history, including his many-faceted activities as editor, journalist, and prolific letter writer. Additional chapters address terms and ideas pivotal to his work at large, such as Fragment, Irony, Wit (“Witz”), Mythology, Revolution, and Incomprehensibility. The book, which features contributions from internationally recognized Schlegel and Romanticism scholars, is the first comprehensive reference work on one of the most influential spearheads of European intellectual history.

Literatur und Fetischismus: Das Bild des Schleiers zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne (Literature and Fetishism: The Veil-Motif from Enlightenment to Modernity)
2014, FINK: MUNICH
Johannes Endres, author

European eighteenth-century discourse saw the advent of two concepts, which have been central to our understanding of man’s relationship to the world and himself ever since: the proclamation of the autonomous artwork and the stigmatization of un-enlightened attitudes towards reality as ›fetishistic‹. The book argues that this is not a coincidence. Thus, it explores the discourse on and the phenomenon of fetishism in its major historical manifestations in ethnology, religious philosophy, social and economic theory, and finally psychoanalysis from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Particular interest is paid to the metaphorical transfer of the veil motif between images and text, including the comparison of both media in the history of aesthetics from Lessing over Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche up to Benjamin and Warburg. The history of modern art thus appears as a revision of a teleology that implies an evolutionary escape of man from its fetishistic beginnings.