The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  INTELLECTUAL CENTRALIZATION AND A NEW COLLECTIVE MENTALITY

  This was the state of educational/pedagogical affairs when Friedrich Wilhelm I became king in 1713. He had undergone his own conversion in 1708, producing in him a vision not unlike Francke’s. On his accession, he lost no time in becoming the chief patron of theology graduates from Halle, as he aligned the forces of Halle Pietism with his own priorities.26

  In order to ensure this the king needed to mobilize not just the churches and the schools but the entire state apparatus, every socializing institution in Prussia. In this way was conceived “State Pietism.”27 To help encourage it, in 1729 Friedrich Wilhelm decreed that all Lutheran pastors in his realm must have studied at the University of Halle for at least two years, a remarkable act of intellectual centralization. In 1725 Abraham Wolff and Georg Friedrich Rogall, important Halle Pietists, were made professors of theology at the University of Königsberg. The resulting influx of Pietists changed forever the character of the church in northeastern Germany.28

  But it was in the military and in the bureaucracy that Pietist influence was most far-reaching. The military church was reorganized in 1718 and eventually more than 100 Pietist pastors were employed among the regiments.29 Encountering ignorance on a massive scale, the pastors taught reading and writing to soldiers and their wives, at the same time introducing them to the Bible and through that to Pietist beliefs and values. The military church also educated the soldiers’ children—hundreds of regimental schools were built in the 1720s. (To facilitate matters, Friedrich Wilhelm ordered chaplains not to confirm anyone who could not read.)30 The very concept of honor (Ehre) was itself transformed. Honor was no longer only a reflection of distinction in purely military matters: it now became necessary for an officer to fulfill his duty to others more widely—as a quartermaster, say, as a drillmaster, even as an accountant. What mattered was how much an officer had helped his neighbors, albeit subordinates.

  The same culture permeated the bureaucracy. Following the Thirty Years’ War, the local princes, newly independent, required more money to maintain their courtly life on the French model, and this meant there was a demand for a relatively efficient bureaucracy to administer princely affairs efficiently.31 The Beamtenstand, the “estate of bureaucrats,” became established in the German lands, and in 1693 examinations were introduced for admission to the upper reaches of the judicial system. Then in 1727, the king created two professorships in cameralist studies, one at the University of Halle and the other at Frankfurt an der Oder. They were the first such professors in the history of German universities, and the lectures offered covered the technical and legal side of the Prussian state’s economic, finance, and police systems. As Hans Rosenberg put it in his 1958 book The Prussian Experience, the three dominant elements were bureaucracy, aristocracy, and autocracy. At the same time, the king was a strong promoter of meritocracy, continually underlining the opportunities for lowly clerks to attain the highest level of tax commissar or departmental head.32 In this milieu, the bureaucrat became an advocate of a militant ideology dedicated to raising the level of civilian society through education. By 1742, a royal commission reported that no fewer than 1,660 schools had been built or repaired. (This shouldn’t be exaggerated, however. Schooling for everyone was not established until the mid-nineteenth century.)

  No less important, over time the educational improvements brought about by Friedrich Wilhelm I and the Pietists created an entirely new collective mentality: in the words of Walter Dorn, the Prussians became “the most highly disciplined people of modern Europe.”33 Friedrich the Great had the good sense to keep this military-bureaucratic-educational-economic structure intact. By his death in 1786, State Pietism was the core of the culture. It would prove stable enough to survive the depredations of Napoleon—Stefan Zweig wrote approvingly of it a hundred years later.

  THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITY: “THE GREAT TURN IN GERMAN LIFE”

  Together with the Beamtenstand, the Prussian universities combined to give Germany another distinction all its own: a special kind of intelligentsia that was to have long-term consequences. The eighteenth-century German universities differed from the British ones in a number of important ways. In the first place, early eighteenth-century Germany had far more universities—about fifty, as compared with, for example, just Oxford and Cambridge in England. Although many were small (Rostock, with some 500 students when it was founded in 1419, now had only seventy-four students, while Paderborn had forty-five), their number and local character meant that it was much easier in Germany for the gifted sons from poorer families to obtain higher education.34

  At the turn of the eighteenth century, however, teaching methods were backward. The norm was the teaching of static truths, not new ideas; professors were not expected to produce new knowledge, and the arts and philosophical faculties in particular had deteriorated. In many of the Catholic universities, theology and philosophy were the only subjects offered. Moreover, they were under threat from the new Ritterakademien (Ritter means “knight”), intended for the well-born, which offered a more fashionable curriculum that stressed mathematics, modern languages, social graces, the martial arts, and a smattering of science—worldly breadth rather than scholastic depth. What scientific research there was tended to be carried out in the new royal academies of science (such academies, on the French model, were founded in Berlin in 1700, Göttingen in 1742, and Munich in 1759). The German universities were, moreover, at the disposal of the princes, theirs to command for secular (i.e., very practical) purposes; they were not self-governing communities of scholars devoted to the study of classics and mathematics as were Oxford and Cambridge.35

  Paradoxically, however, although many people around 1700 regarded the universities in Germany as irrelevant and moribund, at the end of the seventeenth and during the first half of the eighteenth century, four new universities were opened that would transform the intellectual climate in Germany. These were Halle in Prussia (1694), Breslau in Silesia (1702), Göttingen in Hanover (1737), and Erlangen in the Frankish margravate of Bayreuth (1743). Heidelberg was also important but, founded in 1386, it was hardly new.

  The University of Göttingen was to have more of an impact than any other except Halle. The leading figure in the establishment of Göttingen was Gerlach Adolf von Münchhausen.36 Born in 1688, he studied abroad in Utrecht and subsequently took a grand tour in Italy; it was the necessity to leave Germany to acquire “polish” that struck him as unfortunate and produced in him the desire for university reform. When he became a member of the Hanover Privy Council in 1728, he began agitating for the foundation of a university there and was so successful that he was himself appointed Kurator of the new institution. He soon introduced several innovations that were to prove influential.37

  In the first place, Münchhausen ensured that theology played a relatively quiet role. Göttingen became the first university to restrict the theological faculty’s traditional right of censorship and, as Thomas Howard says in his study of German universities, “It is hard to overstate the historical importance of this measure.” As a direct result, the confessional age ended for the universities. Götz von Selle was just one who characterized this measure as “the pivot for the great turn in German life, which moved its centre of gravity from religion to the state.”38 By this enlightened measure, Göttingen’s freedom to think, write, and publish became unparalleled in Germany.

  Crucially, Münchhausen changed the relative weight enjoyed by the theology and philosophy faculties. Traditionally, philosophy was a distinctly inferior discipline, for both professors and students it was an “ante-chamber” to the higher faculties. Münchhausen added to the weight and importance of the “philosophical” subjects—such as history, languages, and mathematics—by his insistence that these fields were more than remedial areas for poorly prepared students.39 Eventually, the philosophical faculty at Göttingen offered, in addition to the traditional subjects of logic, metaphysics, and ethics, lectures o
n “empirical psychology,” the law of nature, physics, politics, natural history, pure and applied mathematics (surveying, military, and civilian architecture), history, geography, art, and modern languages. On top of these “philosophical” subjects, Göttingen offered the best training in the courtly arts available at any European institution—dancing, fencing, drawing, riding, music, and conversation in foreign languages.* Observers noted the new desire among young nobles to acquire a university education and a preference for “study and scholarship,” which could pave the way for “important posts.” It was at Göttingen that history, philology, and antiquity ceased to be minor, subordinate fields of study and began to acquire respect as autonomous disciplines. Alongside history, classical philology underwent a dramatic rise at Göttingen, and it and its sister discipline—Altertumswissenschaft, the study of antiquity—became the “German science” par excellence.41 Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761) and his successor, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), transformed the experience of the classics. They removed the emphasis on grammar, replacing it with the appreciation of the texts as examples of the creative energies of antiquity; in so doing, the purpose of the new scholarship was transformed into an evaluation of the classics for what they revealed about culture, civic life, religion. “Above all, Greek antiquity—hitherto neglected—became the central focus.”42 Other innovations at Göttingen included publication of the first professional journals.43

  Göttingen also developed and refined the seminar. This was another innovation whose importance it is difficult to exaggerate. The seminar, as we shall see, led to the modern concept of research, to the modern PhD, to the academic and scientific “disciplines” or subjects, and to the modern organization of universities into “departments,” divided equally between teaching and research. Originally introduced in Halle by Francke, the seminar differed in important ways from the lecture, reflecting a profound change in the concept of knowledge and learning. The crucial distinction was that between late medieval notions of knowledge, or scientia, and the post-Enlightenment idea of Wissenschaft. Scholastic-Aristotelian logic took it as read that there was/is a single, correct method of thinking, a method that, when properly employed—through syllogistic reasoning, disputation, correct definition of terms, and “the clear ordering of arguments”—could be applied to any scholarly subject.44 Different areas of interest did not require different methods, for all could be approached and understood through right reason (recta ratio), apprehended through the study of logic. The main purpose of instruction in the lecture was to help the student acquire general reason.

  In the seminar, however, there were fewer people, criticism was encouraged, knowledge was regarded as mutable, less fixed, and new knowledge was there to be discovered. The aim of the teachers in the seminar was not to reproduce “static knowledge” but to promote the “taste, judgement and intellect” of their charges.

  Seminars evolved over time. They embodied a more intimate form of teaching, where the exchange of ideas and knowledge was more valued, where the students were expected to have more input. Gradually, the passive mastery of a canonically prescribed corpus of materials gave way to the active cultivation of participation, and the early seminars in Germany began to require the submission of written work beforehand as a basis for discussion and evaluation.45 This fostered the concept of research, with a premium on originality, which—again as we shall see in more detail later—reached its apogee in the Romantic period, when original research was regarded as a form of art. In some Göttingen seminars, the practice evolved whereby the original paper had to be delivered a week in advance so that other students could prepare their responses.

  In line with all this, it was at Göttingen, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that the term Wissenschaft first gained its modern meaning. In its Göttingen sense, Wissenschaft incorporates science, learning, knowledge, scholarship, and also implies a research-based element, an idea that knowledge is a dynamic process, discoverable for oneself, rather than something that is handed down.46 The practice of written submissions for the seminars—organized along the lines of the new scientific disciplines then emerging—led to the distinction between dissertation and thesis, and to the degree of PhD. The dissertation was essentially a display of erudition (a student would be asked to locate and assemble all known fragments of this or that minor classical author), whereas a thesis was a piece of research testing or leading to a hypothesis. The PhD eventually became a recognized degree in the German civil service and from this time on, its ascendancy—which again we shall examine in more detail later—was assured.47

  The development of the seminar and the transformation of the PhD went hand in hand with the evolution of classical and philological disciplines and biblical criticism, and so had an even bigger impact than all this implies. The neohumanism that these developments promoted helped to redefine the image of the educated man, changing it from the rather external one of the first university reform movement (at Halle, under Francke) to a more internal one, expressed in the concept Bildung.48 There will be a great deal to say about Bildung in this book. Difficult to translate, in essence it refers to the inner development of the individual, a process of fulfillment through education and knowledge, in effect a secular search for perfection, representing progress and refinement both in knowledge and in moral terms, an amalgam of wisdom and self-realization.

  Together, Halle and Göttingen helped to fashion a new kind of education that prepared the way for a new stratum in German society, which will require not a little attention. This stratum, too small to be a class, in Tim Blanning’s words, nevertheless achieved a prominent position in Germany by means of its domination of the state bureaucracy, the church, the military, the professoriate, and the professions. The self-understanding of this new stratum, which more than any other group helped account for the revival of German culture, set it apart from the traditional, more commercial middle classes.49 The progressive, rationalizing, meritocratic, and statist social vision that this new stratum brought to these institutions influenced the entire sweep of nineteenth-century history.50 In the early part of the century, in the words of Thomas Howard, it even worked toward the establishment of a particular kind of state, “one often described as a culture state (Kulturstaat) or tutelary state (Erziehungsstaat), a state that numbered among its paternalistic duties the goal of inspiring and educating its people to become ‘appropriate citizens’…who understood that their aspirations should coincide with the high and morally serious purposes of the emergent nation-state.” After 1871, says Howard, “Kulturprotestantismus” or “Bildungsprotestantismus” functioned as the “civil-religious foundation” of the German empire.51

  An important observation comes out of all this: the German intelligentsia differed sharply from its counterparts in other countries. In France, the intelligentsia became estranged from the royal regime, so much so that it eventually attacked the traditional authorities. In Russia the intelligentsia consisted almost entirely of nobles, and in Britain neither the term nor the concept existed until the twentieth century. In Germany, because a university education was needed for a government position, the intelligentsia was drawn from all social levels. Not irrelevant either was the fact that Germany at that time lacked a metropolitan capital to rival London or Paris. This left the German intelligentsia dispersed yet far more intimately involved in practical state administration than anywhere else. Whereas British and American sociologists have characterized “remoteness from the practical world of government and administration” as one of the identifying features of the intelligentsia, this is manifestly not true of Germany.52

  THE READING REVOLUTION, A NEW PUBLIC SPACE AND NATIONALISM EMERGING

  As late as May 1775 Christian Schubart reported in his Deutsche Chronik (German Chronicle) an encounter with a Neapolitan lady who was, he said, “under the impression” that “Germany must be a large city.” No less vividly, Joseph von Sonnenfels, one of the most distinguished figure
s of the Austrian Enlightenment, said this in a letter: “It is well-known how the French are accustomed to speaking and writing with unseemly contempt about German traditions, intellect, society, taste and everything else that blossoms under the German sun. Their adjectives ‘tudesque,’ ‘germanique,’ and ‘allemande’ are for them synonyms for ‘coarse,’ ‘ponderous’ and ‘uncultivated.’”53

  It had been true, in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, that most educated Germans regarded French literary and artistic culture as superior to their own, and that British political freedoms and parliamentary practices were likewise to be envied. But that was before the changes introduced by Pietism and the country’s various rulers had taken hold and the universities had undergone their radical transformation. In that same period a number of economic, political, social, and intellectual changes had occurred in Europe that impacted disproportionately on German speakers and helped ensure that, before the eighteenth century was out, German culture had caught up with French and British achievements—and in some areas had outstripped them.54

  The first was the reading revolution. This had partly to do with the gradual removal—or lightening—of censorship, harder to enforce in Germany because of its many different self-governing states, and is seen in both the anecdotal and statistical evidence. One account, written in the late eighteenth century, reads: “In no country is the love of reading more widespread than in Germany, and at no time was it more so than at present…The works of good and bad writers are now to be found in the apartments of princes and alongside the weaver’s loom, and, so as not to appear uncultivated, the upper classes of the nation decorate their rooms with books rather than tapestries.”55