Biographien, Aufsätze, Skizzen und Fragmente

Varnhagen von Ensens literary oeuvre has emerged from a journalistic interest in the political and cultural events of the day. The memoirs of his own life are also the work of a journalist and biographer: built upon an almost overwhelming number of smaller independent and dependent publications - spontaneous reflections and reactions to the upheavals of the era. The fourth volume of the Varnhagen edition from the Klassiker Verlag makes this layer of journalistic and biographical sketches and articles, correspondences, and pamphlets - some signed, some published anonymously, mostly not reprinted and forgotten - accessible again. For the first time, it presents the first publications of the pamphlets from the Congress of Vienna, and for the first time, it also includes Varnhagen's earliest journalistic works in book form. The commentary examines the prerequisites and contexts of these works and relates them to the already fully available main work of the memoirs.