Johann Peter Hebel pacifista ante litteram. Pastorale e berretto frigio sullo sfondo di rivoluzione e controrivoluzione nella Germania meridionale d’inizio Ottocento.

Abstract

Looking at the work of Johann Peter Hebel in a historical-social as well as a critical-literary perspective, we rediscover the modernity of this author of the late Enlightenment, pioneering innovative thought on tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and pacifism. Hebel lived in Baden, a theatre of the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration. By writing in the Der Rheinländische Hausfreund (1808-19) on the Weltbegebenheiten, he became a chronicler of the Napoleonic campaigns and the fate of the Rheinbund from an institutional position. Here we explain how these articles and some of the Kalendergeschichten were aimed to raise public awareness of the inhumanity of war and the lies of propaganda with ironic, sometimes sarcastic, moving, and “participatory” narrative.