Journal of the History of Ideas

The path-breaking work of Carl Schorske and other scholars have tended to locate the great urban centers as the main sites of modernist culture. But simply to recall the Dessau of Gropius, the Basel of Nietzsche and Burckhardt, and the Czernowitz of Celan, is to conjure an alternative image. This article considers aspects of modernity in Jena, and focuses in particular on how the publisher Eugen Diederichs used this provincial city as template for a form of German modernism that was substantively different than the publishing program of Samuel Fischer in Berlin.