Messenger Service: Hubert Fichte Writes History

Following his early death, Hubert Fichte's publication project Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity) remained a fragment. The reader of the posthumous edition is not only confronted with a variety of genres (novel, glosses, paralipomena), but also with a programmatic heterogeneity, as well as with multiple correspondences between the different parts of the project. Connecting the various volumes is the theme of Empfindlichkeit (sensibility, sensitivity), whose anthropologically oriented project traces a path across the three continents Europe, America, and Africa, both historically and in the present. This paper asks what kind of historiography the various writing formats give rise to. Points of reference are Fichte's narratives about the Casa das Minas, a temple of African-American religions in Brazil, and the assignment given to him by the priestesses of the temple to travel as a messenger to Abomey in West Africa. By examining this messenger service from multiple perspectives, Fichte's conceptions of reality and History should be addressed in relation to four essential aspects: the engagement for the transmission of a foreign message (the assignment), the scholarly documentation of the history of a religious institution (Fichte's Das Haus der Mina in Sao Luiz de Maranhao), the fictional narration with references to a historical setting (Fichte's Explosion), and the consideration of anecdotal transmission as a complementary 'counter-history' (Fichte's Afrika in Psyche).

Automated summary

Fichte's publication project "The History of Sensitivity" includes various literary genres and explores the connections between different parts of the project. This paper examines Fichte's narratives about an African-American religious temple in Brazil and his assignment to travel to West Africa as a messenger. The aim is to analyze Fichte's conceptions of reality and history through the examination of these narratives.