Abstract
This article analyses the family, friendship and intellectual ties of Gregor Norbert Korber between 1782 and 1787, using a collection of his outgoing correspondence. The young ambitious librarian at the Premonstratensian monastery in Klosterbruck was previously known primarily as the man behind the remarkable fresco Allegory of the Progress of the Human Spirit (1778) in the monastery library. However, a collection of nearly 200 letters reveals that he openly embraced étatist and anti-monastic Enlightenment ideas, strongly identifying with the emerging bourgeois-bureaucratic elites from which he came. He corresponded with such noted figures as J. V. Monse, the Sonnenfels brothers, Bishop J. L. Hay, Abbot O. Steinbach and brother-in-law F. J. Schwoy, whom he actively assisted in the Moravian topography project. This study examines the strategies Korber used as a scholar, Moravian patriot and enlightened man to forge ties in Enlightenment circles, and the role his family background played in his success.