The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Robert Darnton has shown that although book publishing suffered drastically after the Thirty Years’ War, by 1764 the Leipzig catalog of new books had regained its prewar level of about 1,200 new titles a year; by 1770 (when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin were born) it had grown to 1,600 and by 1800 to 5,000. Reading was also encouraged by another phenomenon of the eighteenth century—the lending library, which put a limit on the time a reader had access to any particular title. By 1800 there were nine lending libraries in Leipzig, ten in Bremen, and eighteen in Frankfurt am Main. Jürgen Habermas tells us that, by the end of the eighteenth century, there were 270 reading societies in Germany and some described a new illness, Lesesucht, or “reading addiction.”56 Literacy rates in Prussia and Saxony in the early nineteenth century were unmatched anywhere except New England.57

  An associated factor was the increased use of the vernacular language. “It was in the eighteenth century that the domination of the printed word by Latin was finally broken,” the percentage of titles published in Latin in Germany falling from 71 percent in 1600 to 38 percent in 1700 to 4 percent in 1800.*58 The same period also saw a marked shift in taste in Germany, with the proportion of theological titles dropping from 46 percent in 1625 to 6 percent in 1800, philosophy rising at the same time from 19 percent to 40 percent, and belles lettres up from 5 percent to 27 percent. Furthermore, the cultural decentralization of Germany, arising from its many political entities, made it—again in Tim Blanning’s words—“the land of the periodical par excellence.”59 Whereas the number of periodicals published in France rose from 15 in 1745 to 82 in 1785, the equivalent figures in Germany were 260 and 1,225 (of course many periodicals in France had higher circulations than those in Germany, but German periodicals also had wood-cut illustrations ahead of almost everywhere else). “[I]n Austria, the chief of police had to concede in 1806 that newspapers had become a ‘genuine necessity’ for the educated classes, anticipating Hegel’s celebrated remark that reading the daily newspaper represented the morning prayers of modern man.” The reading revolution brought with it a more critical approach to affairs, through the growth of “moral periodicals.”60

  Not only was Germany becoming emancipated from Latin, its own language was developing. In 1700 the reputation of German had never been lower. In 1679, at the height of the French Sun King’s influence, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) composed a pamphlet titled Ermahnung an die Deutschen, ihren Verstand und ihre Sprache besser zu üben (Exhortation to the Germans to Exercise Their Reason and Their Language Better). Contrary to his usual practice, in his scientific and philosophical writings, which were written in Latin or French, this pamphlet was in German.61 The philosopher’s exhortation was taken seriously in a series of new periodicals, in particular one published in Zurich in the 1720s by a group of friends of whom Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–76) were the leading spirits.62 This, known as the Discourse der Mahlern, was particularly concerned with the German language. Both Bodmer and Breitinger—after a few false starts—composed articles designed to make German a less ponderous language, more intimate, more pleasurable, and less like a sermon—a development that should, they claimed (and this was an important observation), have more appeal to women.

  These innovations were built on by others. At Halle, Christian Thomasius became the first German professor to deliver his lectures in German rather than in Latin.63 Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), a native of Königsberg, who moved to Leipzig and became professor of poetry and then of philosophy, formed a German society devoted to linguistic integrity: “At all times the purity and correctness of the language shall be promoted…only High German shall be written, not Silesian or Meissen, Franconian or Lower Saxon, so that it can be understood right across Germany.” German societies modeled on the Leipzig original were founded in several other cities.64 Gottsched also did his best to encourage the development of the novel and the drama. In the same way, in 1751 Christian Gellert published a popular treatise on letter writing, with the intention of encouraging young people, “especially women,” to cultivate a natural style of writing and of removing the “widespread misapprehension” that the German language was not supple and flexible enough “to treat of civilised matters and express tender emotions.”65 Shortly afterward, the first epistolary novels in German began to appear.

  A final effect of the reading revolution was on self-consciousness. Print-as-commodity, says Benedict Anderson, generates the “wholly new” idea of simultaneity, as people throughout society realize—via their reading—that others are going through the same experience, having the same thoughts, at the same time. “We are…at the point where communities of the type ‘horizontal-secular, transverse time’ become possible.” In this way public authority was consolidated, helped along by the depersonalized nature of state authority.66 These developments were more important than they might seem at first because it was these (vernacular) print languages, says Anderson, that laid the basis for nationalistic consciousness. Anderson’s conclusion is that print-capitalism operated on a variety of languages to create a new form of “imagined community,” setting the stage for the modern nation, in which a “national literature” was an important ingredient.67 In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand), a play about liberty, which describes the decline and fall of an Imperial Knight, the author himself said that the theme of the play was “Germanness emerging” (Deutschheit emergiert).* In the nineteenth century, says Thomas Nipperdey, all this would lead to Germany becoming “the land of schools.”

  However much they proliferated in the eighteenth century, novels, newspapers, periodicals, and letters had all existed in some form in the past. At the same time an entirely new cultural and intellectual medium emerged in the field of music: the public concert. By 1800 it had replaced all other forms of the art and become “the main medium for music per se.”69 Furthermore, because the concert took place outside the princely or ecclesiastical courts, composers were free to invent their own musical forms and compositions. “The result was the conquest of the musical world by the symphony, the symphony concert, and the concert hall. This apparently natural progression has led many historians to present the rise of the concert as the cultural equivalent of the French Revolution, in which the rising bourgeoisie tore down the barriers and fences which had reserved cultural goods for the feudal elite.”70 This change boosted the sale of instruments and sheet music and the opportunities for music teachers, stimulating a virtuous cycle of which Germany as a whole would be the main beneficiary.

  The practice grew up in the first quarter of the eighteenth century for musicians to frequent the music rooms of inns, and it was these gatherings that eventually evolved into more formal concerts. Blanning says this took place in particular in Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Leipzig and that what these four cities had in common was their commercial character, a factor which links the rise of concerts with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Concert halls proliferated as never before in the 1780s.

  All this refers to musical consumption. Musical innovation, on the other hand, innovation in instrumental music, and in particular the symphonic form, occurred in Mannheim, Eisenstadt, Salzburg, Berlin, and Vienna, residential cities centered on the courts, where such public as existed consisted mainly of state employees, mostly nobles rather than “bourgeois.” The high educational level of the Viennese nobles, musically speaking, made them particularly receptive to innovation. This, argues Blanning, helps account for the speed with which Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven evolved the different forms of their art. In 1784, in the thirty-seven days between February 26 and April 3, Mozart played twenty-two benefits in Vienna.71 The sheer quantity of music helped the evolution of new forms, as innovation was demanded.

  The symphony—purely instrumental music—was seen as a particularly German art form at the turn of the ninet
eenth century. Immanuel Kant had dismissed instrumental music—music without voices, without words—as simply pleasure, a form of “wallpaper,” not culture. But, as we shall see in Chapter 6, the rise of the symphony brought about a new way of listening to music, as people began to think of instrumental music as having great philosophical depth. A final factor was the performance of sacred texts in the vernacular, accompanied by music, a practice that had spread in the first place to Catholic Austria from Italy. In Protestant Germany it was adapted to the Lutheran tradition of the historia, in which biblical stories were set to music (Georg Friedrich Handel’s oratorios in particular). The importance of the genre was that it made public music making respectable. “The oratorio was edifying, lending itself admirably to the raising of money for charity, so it overcame the old association of listening to music in public with ale-house ‘musique rooms’ or dance halls…Here is seen the beginning of a phenomenon that is very much still with us: the sacralization of art.”72

  And so, just as the German language was developing and reading and educational standards were rising, music also helped to change the image of the Germans as backward in cultural matters. The proliferation of distinguished composers could not be ignored, as the names of Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), and Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759) confirm. Tim Blanning quotes a periodical published in 1741 in Brunswick, titled Der musikalische Patriot (The Musical Patriot), which boasted: “Must not the Italians, who previously were the tutors of the Germans, now envy Germany its estimable composers, and secretly seek to learn from them? Indeed, must not the high and mighty Parisians, who used to deride German talent as something provincial, now take lessons from Telemann in Hamburg?”73

  THE GERMAN MOSES

  A quite separate factor specific to Germany, which helped finalize its transformation into a great political and cultural power in Europe, was another king, Friedrich Wilhelm I’s son, Friedrich the Great. The generally accepted view of Friedrich, now, is that he was a divided soul, devoted on the one hand to monarchical autocracy, yet at the same time a lifelong admirer of John Locke, who at least in theory favored liberalism for its cultural and political freedoms. In reality, this division within Friedrich did no more than reflect the evolving politics of the eighteenth century. His was a conservative administration in comparison with the political systems then in existence elsewhere in Europe and in North America, reflecting above all the German idea that freedom and equality could best be achieved under conditions of order, such order being maintained by an established authority, in the person of the monarch.

  Although he was a conservative by European standards, Friedrich did bring about great change. After his accession in 1740, his many battlefield successes (achieved because of the strength and excellence of the army he inherited from his father, built up still further by him), combined with other civic reforms, completed Prussia’s great transformation into Germany’s foremost state and one of Europe’s great powers.74

  Friedrich’s mother, Sophie Dorothea, was a Hanoverian princess whose brother was King George II of England. Her husband’s Pietist, masculine world, effective though it was, was not by any means to her taste and she was anxious lest it smother her children. Friedrich’s education was placed first in the hands of Huguenot soldiers, who introduced him to mathematics, economics, Prussian law, and modern history but also to fortification, tactics, and the other arts of war. His mother nevertheless insisted he be given his own library of several thousand books. As a result, even in his teens Friedrich became familiar with the leading French, English, and German writers (in more or less that order).75

  As soon as he became king, he set up an Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berlin. Directed by a distinguished French mathematician, Pierre de Maupertuis, one aim of the academy was to attract to Berlin the best minds, who would form a learned circle around Friedrich. Day-to-day government was run from the Charlottenburg Palace on the outskirts of Berlin, while Friedrich’s circle of intellectuals met at Sans Souci, a specially built retreat in an area of lakes southwest of Berlin in Potsdam. Here the king entertained and argued with great minds such as Voltaire and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, one of the editors of the multivolume French Encyclopédie.76 Five copies were bought of every book that Friedrich wished to read, since he possessed identical libraries at Potsdam, Sans Souci, Charlottenburg, Berlin, and Breslau.77

  Amazingly, to our modern way of thinking, the Prussian king and his courtiers always spoke French to one another (Voltaire wrote home that he never heard German spoken at court).78 Friedrich shunned his native tongue as “barbaric,” feeling its literary time had not yet arrived. In 1780 he went so far as to publicly criticize the German language in a pamphlet and admitted that the German books he wanted to read must be translated into French first. This was a man whose own writings included poetry, political and military tracts, philosophical treatises, and hundreds—if not thousands—of letters exchanged with leading intellectuals (645 letters with Voltaire alone, spanning forty-two years and filling three volumes).79

  Friedrich was, nevertheless, unable to appreciate great swaths of contemporary culture. He was, for example, ignorant of Mozart and dismissed Haydn’s music as “a shindig that flays the ears.” He complained to Voltaire in 1775, the year after Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of Young Werther) was published, that German literature was nothing more than a “farrago of inflated phrases.” He despised new forms—the drama bourgeois, for instance—and he equally loathed ancient German epics such as the Nibelungenlied.80 In his notorious 1780 essay, Concerning German Literature; the faults of which it can be accused; the causes of the same and the means of rectifying them, Friedrich argued that in material terms Germany was flourishing, having recovered finally from the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, but that its culture was still suffering. What was needed now, he argued, was geniuses, but until they revealed themselves Germans must continue to rely on translations from classical and French authors. Friedrich thought that Germany’s cultural level was about two-and-a-half centuries behind that of France. “I am like Moses, I see the promised land from afar, but shall not enter it myself.”81

  Despite Friedrich’s pessimism, many German artists and intellectuals were convinced that it was the king’s forging of Great-Power status for Prussia that had given German culture the decisive kick-start. Goethe even thought that the widespread infiltration of French culture into Prussia, through Friedrich’s tastes, was “highly beneficial” for Germans, spurring them on by provoking a reaction. Many others agreed.

  Then there was the fact that Friedrich, like no other king before him and few since, entered the public sphere. As Goethe was sharp enough to notice, by simply publishing a pamphlet about German literature, Friedrich gave intellectual debate a momentum that no other living person could have matched.82 Moreover, he encouraged others to enter the public sphere in a critical spirit by having the Academy organize annual prize-essay competitions, setting such ambitious questions as: “What has been the influence of governments on culture in nations where it has flourished?” (won by Johann Gottfried von Herder), “Can it be expedient to deceive the people?” and “What has made French the universal language of Europe and does it deserve this supremacy?”

  These paradoxical achievements in the literary/intellectual world were matched in the military/political sphere. Through Friedrich’s many battle successes, Prussia became a major European power, a status it maintained (other than 1806–13 if we are being finicky) until World War I. His victories were followed by initiatives in other realms of government: an agency dedicated to strategic economic development, greater freedom of the press, a reduction in the number of capital crimes, and advanced codification of Prussian law. He insisted that education become compulsory for all and urged (some) religious toleration. “So far did a new middle class and civil society advance by the end of Friedrich’s reign that German intellect
uals could look on the revolutions in America and France as belated efforts to catch up with Prussia.”83

  Friedrich’s forty-six-year rule undoubtedly helped Prussia’s rise to power and, culturally and intellectually speaking, between Bach’s death in 1750 and Friedrich’s own in 1786, Germany without question witnessed the stirrings of its own renaissance, a rival even of the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

  2.

  Bildung and the Inborn Drive toward Perfection

  While these specific developments were taking hold in Germany—changes to its religion, to its language, in its universities, in its public space, in its image of itself, and in its standing as a political power—Europe itself (and North America, too) was undergoing a set of no less profound changes, perhaps the most important change in thinking since the advent of Christianity. This was the advent of religious doubt.1

  The period between 1687, when Isaac Newton’s discoveries in Principia Mathematica confirmed and systematized the earlier observations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, and 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, comprises a unique time span in the history of Western thought, though it is not always seen as such. It was a time when a purely religious purpose to life (salvation in a future state) was called into question while there was as yet no other model to replace it, when Darwin’s biological understanding of man had yet to appear. The fact that so much of Germany’s golden age came between these two dates—1687 and 1859—was to have profound consequences, consequences that affected Germany more than anywhere else. Intellectually speaking, the country was shaped during this crucial—unique—transitional period. In particular, and most important, this transitional period saw the development of historicism and the rise of biology.