by Will Durant
The rapid reconstruction of Prussia between 1807 and 1812 revealed a saving fund of strength in the German character. Under hostile French eyes, and under one of Prussia’s weakest kings, men like Stein and Hardenberg, neither of them a noble, undertook to rebuild a defeated, occupied, and bankrupt nation, and, in six years, to raise it to the power and pride that made it, in 1813, the natural leader in the War of Liberation. Every class joined in the effort: the nobles came forth to lead the Army, the peasants accepted conscription, the merchants yielded much of their profits to the state, the men and women of letters and learning sounded through Germany the call for freedom of the press, thought, and worship; and in 1807, in a Berlin policed by French troops, Fichte delivered those famous Addresses to the German Nation which called for a disciplined minority to lead the Prussian people to moral cleansing and national renewal. At Königsberg, in June, 1808, some university professors organized a “Moral and Scientific Union,” which came to be known as the Tugenbund, or “League of Virtue,” dedicated to the liberation of Prussia.
Meanwhile Stein wandered in exile and poverty, and in daily danger of being captured or shot. In May, 1812, Alexander I invited him to join the imperial court at St. Petersburg. He went, and there waited, with his host, for Napoleon to come.
CHAPTER XXX
The German People
1789–1812
I. ECONOMICS
THE Germans of 1800 were a class-conscious people, accepting class division as a system of social order and economic organization; and rare was the man who acquired a noble title except by birth. “In Germany,” noted Mme. de Staël, “everybody keeps his rank, his place in society, as if it were his established post.”1 This was less so along the Rhine and among university graduates, but in general the Germans were a more patient people than the French. Not till 1848 did they reach their 1789.
The influence of the French Revolution was exciting in literature, slight in industry. Germany had rich natural resources, but the persistence of feudalism, and the power of feudal barons, in the central and eastern states, slowed the rise of a business and manufacturing class that might have been stimulated by a free and classless economy to apply to industry the coal and metals lying abundantly in the soil. Commerce was helped by magnificent rivers—the Rhine, the Weser, the Elbe, the Saale, the Main, the Spree, the Oder; but the fragmentation of states kept roads short and few and poor, and on these there were brigands and feudal tolls. Commerce was hindered by guild regulations, high taxes, and the geographical diversity of measures, weights, coinages, and laws.
German industry, till 1807, had to meet the competition of British goods produced by the latest machinery; England enjoyed a generation of priority in the Industrial Revolution, and it forbade the export of its new technology, or its skilled technicians.2 The double-faced god of war, breeding industries to feed and clothe and kill men, nourished national economies; and after 1806 the Continental Blockade, more or less excluding British goods, helped the mainland industries to grow. Mining and metallurgy developed in western Germany, especially in or near Düsseldorf and Essen. At Essen in 1810 Friedrich Krupp (1787–1826) began the complex of metal works that would arm Germany for a century.
Despite such figures the entrepreneur was looked down upon by noble and king as a potential profiteer, and no merchant or manufacturer was allowed to marry into the nobility, or to buy a feudal estate. Financiers-Huguenot, Jewish, or other—were allowed to lend to nobility or royalty, but when (1810) they proposed that Prussia imitate England and France and establish a national bank, issue government securities at a low interest, and so let a public debt help to finance the state, the King agreed with the nobles that such a procedure would put the kingdom at the mercy of the bankers. Prussia rejected control of the nation by the managers of capital, and chose rather to be led by a military caste and a Junker aristocracy.
II. BELIEVERS AND DOUBTERS
Germany was still religiously divided as in the Thirty Years’ War; and in many ways the wars of Frederick the Great with Austria and France were replays of that prolonged tragedy. If Frederick had lost, Protestantism might have disappeared from Prussia as it had disappeared from Huss’s Bohemia after 1620.
As the Protestant clergy took over the property of the Catholic bishops in the Protestant north, they became dependent upon military protection by the Protestant princes, and acknowledged them as the heads of the Protestant Church in their realms; so the agnostic Frederick was the head of the Prussian Church. In the Catholic states—Austria, Bohemia, and nearly all the Confederation of the Rhine—the bishops, if not themselves rulers, needed similar protection, and fell into subservience to the civil power; many of them paid little attention to papal pronouncements, but most of them regularly read from their pulpits the decrees of the civil authorities that protected them; so, in Napoleon’s German states the bishops—Protestant or Catholic—read from their pulpits his administrative orders and his military bulletins.3
This subjection of the Church had diverse—almost contradictory—effects: Pietism and rationalism. There were many German families that had traditions of a piety stronger than politics and deeper than ritual; they found more inspiration in family prayers than in pulpit eloquence or professional theology. More and more they neglected the churches, and practiced their devotions in esoteric groups private and intense. Even more fervent was a proud cluster of mystics who cherished the traditions of seers like Jakob Böhme, and claimed or sought to see God face to face, and to have experienced illuminations that had dissolved the deepest, bitterest, problems of life. Especially impressive, if only by having borne with silent heroism centuries of persecution, were the uncloistered, unvowed monks and nuns of the Moravian Brotherhood, who, banished from Catholic Bohemia, spread through Protestant Germany, and profoundly affected its religious life. Mme. de Staël met some of them, and was impressed by their premarital chastity, their sharing of goods, and the epitaph chosen for each of their dead: “He was born on such a day, and on such a day he returned to his native country.”4 Baroness Julie (Barbara Juliane) von Krüdener (1764–1824), Mme. de Staël’s favorite mystic, was committed to their creed, and preached it so charmingly that Queen Louise of Prussia—and, for a time, Czar Alexander of Russia—fell under her influence, barring the sharing of goods.
Antipodal to the mystics were the skeptics who had inhaled the winds of the French Enlightenment. Lessing had let loose the German Aufklärung by exhuming and partly publishing the Fragmente eines Ungenannten (1774–78) in which Hermann Reitmarus had expressed his doubts about the historicity of the Gospels. Of course there had been skeptics in every generation, but most of them had found silence golden, and the infection had been controlled by hellfire and police. But now it had found its way into the Freemason and Rosicrucian lodges, into the universities, and even into the monasteries. In 1781 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason turned educated Germany into turmoil by explaining the difficulties of a rational theology. For a generation after him German philosophy labored to refute or conceal Kant’s doubts, and some subtle web-weavers like Friedrich Schleiermacher achieved international renown. According to Mirabeau (who visited Germany thrice between 1786 and 1788) almost all the Prussian Protestant clergy had by that time secretly shed their orthodoxy, and had come to think of Jesus as a lovable mystic who proclaimed the approaching end of the world. In 1800 a hurried observer reported that religion was dead in Germany and that “it is no longer the fashion to be a Christian.”5 Georg Lichtenberg (1742–99) predicted that “the day will come when all belief in God will be like that in nursery specters.”6
Such reports were emotionally exaggerated. Religious doubt affected a few professors and some sophomores, but it hardly touched the German masses. The Christian creed continued to appeal to the sense of man’s dependence upon supersensual powers, and to the propensity of even the learned to ask for supernatural aid. The Protestant congregations warmed their own hearts with mighty hymns. The Catholic Church continued to offer
a home to miracle, myth, mystery, music, and art, and a final port for spirits exhausted by years of intellectual navigation amid the storms and shoals of philosophy and sex; so erudite scholars like Friedrich von Schlegel, brilliant Jewesses like Moses Mendelssohn’s daughters, sought at last the uterine warmth of the Mother Church. Faith always recovers, and doubt remains.
III. THE GERMAN JEWS
Faith must have weakened, for toleration grew. As knowledge rose it flowed over the fences within which the creeds had preserved their innocence. It became impossible for an educated Christian to hate a modern Jew because of a political crucifixion eighteen centuries ago; and perhaps he had read, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew (xxi, 8), how a multitude of Jews had strewn with palm leaves the path of the beloved preacher as he entered Jerusalem a few days before his death. In any case the Jews in Austria were freed by Joseph II, in the Rhineland by the Revolution or Napoleon, and in Prussia by Hardenberg. They came gladly out of the ghettos, took on the dress, language, and habits of their times and place, became able workers, loyal citizens, devoted scholars, creative scientists. Anti-Semitism remained among the unlettered, but in the literate it lost its religious aura, and had to feed on economic and intellectual rivalries, and on ghetto ways lingering vestigially among the struggling poor.
In Goethe’s Frankfurt hostility between Christian and Jew had been especially strong, and survived longer, because the ruling bourgeoisie there felt the vigor of Jewish competition in commerce and finance. Living quietly among them was Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743–1812), who was founding the greatest banking house in history by lending to impecunious princes like the landgraves of Hesse-Cassel, or serving as one of England’s agents in subsidizing the challenged kings in their struggle against Napoleon. Nevertheless it was Napoleon who in 1810 insisted on applying to the Jews of Frankfurt the full freedom guaranteed by the Code Napoléon.7
Marcus Herz (1747–1803) came to personify the flowering of Jewish finance into the pursuit and patronage of the sciences and the arts. Born in Berlin, he migrated in 1762 to Königsberg, where Kant and other liberals had prevailed upon the university to admit Jews. Herz enrolled as a medical student, but he attended Kant’s lectures almost as often as the courses in medicine, and his passionate interest in philosophy made him Kant’s favorite pupil.8 Graduating in medicine, he moved back to Berlin, and soon won repute not only as a physician but as well by his lectures on philosophy. His discourses and demonstrations in physics drew a distinguished audience, including the future King Frederick William III.
His life was both brightened and saddened by his marriage to Henrietta de Lemos, one of the fairest women of her time. She made his home a salon rivaling the best in Paris. She extended her hospitality to other Jewish beauties, including Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter Brendel—later Dorothea—and Rachel Levin, wife-to-be of the diplomat-author Varnhagen von Ense. Christian as well as Jewish notables gathered around these three Graces, and the Christians were delighted to find that they had minds as well as bodies, and were alluringly venturesome. Mirabeau attended these gatherings to discuss politics with Marcus, and more frequently to ponder subtler subjects with Henrietta. She relished the admiration offered by Christian notables, and fell into “ambiguous relations” with Wilhelm von Humboldt the educator, then with Friedrich Schleiermacher the philosophic preacher. Meanwhile she encouraged Dorothea—who had married Simon Veit and given him two children—to leave her husband and home and live with Friedrich von Schlegel, first as his mistress and then as his wife.
So the free mingling of Jews and Christians had a double dissolving effect: it weakened the faith of Christians when they found that Christ and his twelve Apostles had intended their religion to be a reform Judaism faithful to the Temple and the Mosaic Code; and it weakened the faith of Jews who saw that fidelity to Judaism could be a severe handicap in the pursuit of mates and place. In both camps the decline of religious belief eroded the moral code.
IV. MORALS
The code had rested upon belief in a god good and terrible, encouraging every humble appeal, watching every act and thought of every soul, forgetting nothing, and never abdicating the right and power to judge and punish or forgive, a god of love and vengeance, master, in his medieval form, of heaven and hell. This somber and perhaps indispensable creed still survived among the masses, and helped the clergy, the Junkers, the generals, and the patres familias to manage their flocks, peasants, troops, and homes. Periodic war, commercial competition, and the need for family discipline required the formation of habits of obedience and application in the youth, of winsome modesty and domestic arts in the girl, of patient dedication in the wife, of stern ability to command in the husband and father.
The common German male was basically good-humored, at least in the tavern; but he found it wise to put on a solemn front before wife, children, competitors, and employees. He worked hard, and required the same of those under his responsibility. He honored tradition as the well of wisdom and the pillar of authority; old customs enabled him to meet his daily tasks and contacts with a saving and comfortable economy of thought. He held his religion as a sacred heritage, and was grateful for its help in training his children to courtesy, system, and steadiness. He repudiated the Revolution that had disordered France, and the Sturm und Drang of German youth, as the reckless dissolution of established relations vital to order and sanity in the home and the state. He kept his wife and children in subordination, but he could be humane and loving in his homely way, and he labored uncomplainingly to meet their needs of body and mind.
His wife accepted the situation without much resistance, for she agreed that a large family in an insecure country surrounded by potential foes called for a stern and steady hand. In the home, subject to her husband and the law, she was accepted as the guiding authority, and was almost always rewarded with lifelong love from her children. She was content to be the “justified mother of children,”9 consumed in the conquest of the soil and the continuity of the race.
But there were other voices. In 1774 Theodore von Hippel, anticipating Mary Wollstonecraft by eighteen years, published On Marriage, a male defense of woman’s liberation. He objected to the bride’s vow of obedience; marriage should be a partnership, not a subjection. He demanded the full emancipation of women—not only the vote but also eligibility to office, even the highest; he noted some great women rulers of the age—Christina of Sweden, Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria. If full emancipation is not made into law the “Rights of Man” should be more honestly called the “Rights of Men.”10
Germany did not listen to him, but—under the stimulus of the French Revolution and the spread of radical literature in Germany—the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw such a flurry of emancipated women as only our time could match in number, and only eighteenth-century France could match in brilliance, and none surpassed in deviltry. The Romantic movement in literature, echoing medieval troubadours, idealized woman no longer as a mother like Demeter, nor as a virgin like Mary, but as an intoxicating bouquet of physical beauty and intellectual vivacity, with a touch of scandal to complete the lure. We have noted Henrietta Herz and Dorothea Mendelssohn; add Caroline Michaelis (daughter of a Göttingen Orientalist), who, a revolutionary widow, married August von Schlegel, and divorced him and wed philosopher Schelling. Add Therese Forster, who rivaled her husband in republican ardor, left him to live with a Saxon diplomat, and wrote a political novel, The Seldorf Family, which made a stir in the Rhineland; “in intellectual power,” wrote Wilhelm von Humboldt, “she was one of the most remarkable women of her time.”11 Add Rachel Levin Varnhagen von Ense, whose salon was frequented by diplomats and intellectuals in Berlin. Add Bettina von Arnim, whom we have seen fluttering around Beethoven and Goethe. And those cultured, not quite revolutionary, women who outshone Goethe in Weimar: the Duchess Luise, Charlotte von Kalb, Charlotte von Stein.
In the larger cities of Germany this liberation of women was naturally
accompanied by a loosening of moral restraints. King Frederick William II had set a fashion in mistresses, and in the next reign Prince Louis Ferdinand outrivaled him. Love marriages were multiplying as youngsters forsook the charms of property for the ecstasy of romance. Goethe, aging, looked askance from Weimar upon the gay life of the upper echelons in Berlin, but he adopted the new morality when he took the waters at Karlsbad. There the women displayed themselves proudly in the new fashions that Mesdames Tallien and de Beauharnais had set in Paris in 1795.
Political immorality competed with sexual laxity. Bribery was a favorite instrument of diplomacy, and an eager venality lubricated the bureaucracy in Catholic and Protestant states alike. Business seems to have been more honest than politics; the bourgeoisie, even when it married relaxed women, kept apart from the frolics along the River Spree. Meanwhile, however, the universities were pouring into German life and morals the disturbing catabolism of partly educated youth.
V. EDUCATION
Education now became the prime concern and achievement of Germany, matching that interest in war which was excited by the uprising of mind and body against Napoleon. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1807),12 though heard by few, expressed the growing conviction of the age: only a reform of education at every level could lift Germany out of the quest for pleasure into a stern devotion to the needs of the state in these years when quick surrender and national humiliation had almost broken the German spirit. In 1809 Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) was appointed Prussian education minister. He gave himself effectively to his task, and under his lead the German educational system began a renovation which soon made it the best in Europe. Students came from a dozen countries to study in the Universities of Göttingen, Heidelberg, Jena, and Berlin. Education was extended to all classes, and was broadened in subjects and aims; and though religion was emphasized as a prop of character, the law instructors made nationalism the new religion of German schools—quite as Napoleon had made it the new divinity in the schools of France.
