This thesis investigates the historical conditions of love in Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). Against the background of sociohistorical, institutional, and media-technological developments around 1800, I read the novel as a “laboratory of modernity” that experimentally stages the structures and aporias informing the “birth” of not only the modern subject, but the modern subject in love.
In theoretical dialogue with Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and Friedrich Kittler’s psychoanalytically infused media theory, this thesis takes on a post-hermeneutic approach. It explores how the emergence of the nuclear family and a remodeled institution of marriage, in the transition from stratified, feudal social order to bourgeois functional society, is accompanied by new pedagogical and anthropological regimes for the inscription of desire: I argue that Goethe’s novel shows how love becomes spiritualized, disembodied, and oriented towards the imagination and the “image.”
Die Wahlverwandtschaften bears witness to the convoluted birth of the structures of “modern love” that we still find ourselves in: the experienced “exchangeability” of potential romantic partners, together with an increasing primacy of media-technological image-worlds and imaginary projections, makes for an inherently modern problematic that stretches all the way from 1809 to our contemporary world of dating apps and online dating.
Lukas Lehner successfully defended his thesis on 8 May 2026.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: Love and media: A presentation with literary examples from around 1800 and today.
Evaluation committee
- Professor Thomas Götselius, Stockholm University (first opponent)
- Professor Natalie Binczek, Ruhr University Bochum (second opponent)
- Professor Christian Refsum, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
Supervisors
- Professor Marit Grøtta, University of Oslo
- Professor Cornelia, Zumbusch, Universität Hamburg