Following Justus Liebig’s dismissal of the natural philosophy of the German Romantics ( Romanticism) as the “pestilence [...] of the century” [1. 29], historians likewise long imputed to the chemistry of the years around 1800 a reputation for groundless speculation. With its poetological aspects recently rediscovered by scholars of German studies [5]; [3]; [7] and its unique characteristics reconstructed by historians of scholarship [4]; [8], however, it has come to be seen today a…