The most controversial book of the Age of Goethe is the satirical-nihilistic Nachtwachen (1804; translated as The Night Watches of Bonaventura, 1971) by the pseudonymous author Bonaventura. It appeared at a turning point in the history of German literature and philosophy, shortly after the young Romantics had left Jena and between the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804 (referred to in the text) and that of Friedrich Schiller in 1805. Chapter 8 of this Romantic--or anti-Romantic--"novel" appeared in Karl Spazier's respectable Zeitung für die elegante Welt on 21 July 1804; the book was published at the end of the year (dated 1805) by the parochial publishing house F. Dienemann as number seven in a series of new, mostly trivial, original novels. Bonaventura's only other text, the "Einleitung" (Introduction) to "Des Teufels Taschenbuch" (The Devil's Almanac), appeared in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt on 26 March 1805. Beyond the facts connected to these...