The Athenaeum was the only literary journal of the early Romantic era. Among its distinctive features was the fact that the editors, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, were also the main contributors. The other texts were by close friends; only the initiated knew that the Schlegels’ own partners also worked on the journal. Limited to a small group of authors and themes, the Athenaeum had a uniform orientation. Later, it would become the main mouthpiece of the Jena Circle. It contains nearly all the programmatic writings of Romanticism’s founding phase (Novalis’s Pollen fragments, Friedrich Schlegel’s essays Conversation on Poetry and On Incomprehensibility), as well as several major literary works (such as Novalis’s Hymns to Night).