This book is very lucky.

First of all, on the outside: half linen, blind embossing, the cardboard cover chosen by Michael Rosenlehner is a real pleasure to hold, even though you have to hold more than a kilo.

This book stands out from any shelf environment with its almost classic elegance.

And the content?

The first opening after being amazed in the bookshop happened to lead to a page in the middle of which an entry from June 2, 1833 begins with the following words: “I quickly get tired of Venice.

It's a great oddity – a city for beavers.” That's all it takes to get people enthusiastic about this book through the text.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

  • Follow I follow

Its author is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most important author in the United States, comparable in his influence on American intellectual life to what Goethe means(d) to the Germans.

Emerson lived from 1803 to 1882, and he began writing extensively in his journal when he was sixteen.

Emerson lived through his last seven years with increasing dementia, but as late as 1880 he was delivering one of his legendary lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, where he had moved in 1834 from his nearby native city of Boston.

Emerson's fame had drawn other writers there;

the best known in this country were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, pioneers of American narrative prose.

But Emerson succeeded above all as a philosopher and political thinker.

His transcendentalism, which developed as a further development of German idealism, was the most important American school of thought until the emergence of analytical philosophy in the twentieth century and has shaped the intellectual self-image of the United States to this day - a metaphysical ideal of reason based on the Christian principle of elect.

"Manifest Destiny" as a spiritual life form.

Emerson was aware of his importance, so he meticulously prepared his lectures and the essays on which they were based or derived from them.

The American complete edition of his diary notes comprises ten thick volumes, and even if the first major selection in German that has now been published comprises almost nine hundred pages, we are only talking about one eighth.

Careful selection and translation was all the more important.

Both were taken care of by the Dortmund publicist Jürgen Brôcan, whose work deserves nothing but admiration.

One may call him co-author of this German diary edition.

And not only because, in addition to the translation, he also provided the (each brief but precise) commentary and postscript of Emerson's notes.

"I still feel sorry for people who aren't beavers"

Brôcan turns the quarry of ideas, impressions and interpretations of the tirelessly reading and teaching Emerson into a well-edited park landscape, an intellectual Arcadia.

This does Emerson justice, for although he strove to occupy his time in theoretical thought, he was above all an admirer of the great poets: Shakespeare in particular, who has never before or since received comparable eulogies ("In teleology it will be said that the final reason for the creation of the earth was Shakespeare"), but also Dante or the Latin authors.

And as Goethe's most closely related in spirit among the somewhat contemporary authors - "if you haven't read Goethe or the Goetheans, you are an old-fashioned coot and count among the antediluvians".

Bettina von Arnim thus became an important literary influence on Emerson;

he read German fluently.

Emerson, on the other hand, tended to keep his distance from the prominent current authors in his own language, although Walter Scott and Charles Dickens were also able to inspire him (in contrast to Jane Austen).

But they were not poets for him, because Emerson measured literary ability by the rhythm and eloquence of poetry: "When reading prose, I become attentive as soon as a sentence lags, when reading poetry as soon as a single word lags."