The growing recognition that Friedrich Nicolai was the catalyst of the Prussian Enlightenment and one of its important satirists indicates that he should no longer be discussed under the category of Dichtung (the poetic arts) but under the heading of literary, cultural, and religious criticism. It was largely through his satirical works that Nicolai became the whipping boy of nineteenth-century literary historians, who--while occasionally acknowledging his merits as publisher, critic, and historian--displayed only slightly veiled contempt for his literary output. Echoing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's and Friedrich Schiller's attacks on Nicolai, they established a tradition that continued well into the twentieth century of branding him the sworn enemy of German Innerlichkeit (inwardness). Today, the reassessment of the Prussian Enlightenment has resulted in a concomitant revision of Nicolai's reputation. This man of letters wrote no fewer than forty-five books and as many articles on a wide range of literary...