The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  As a fundamental measure, he centralized funding. He introduced a requirement that all prospective university students pass a new examination, the Abitur, the main element of which was testing translations of Greek and Latin texts. Furthermore, he made the Abitur the sole prerogative of a particular type of classical school—known as the Gymnasium. Only these could prepare pupils for university, a state of affairs that continued for close to a hundred years. The culmination of Humboldt’s reforms was his design of the University of Berlin, founded in 1810. Consolidating the trend begun at Göttingen under Münchhausen, Humboldt promoted Berlin’s philosophical faculty (containing philology, philosophy proper, and the natural sciences) over and above the more “practical” faculties of medicine, law, and theology. More than that, within the philosophical faculty he subordinated the natural sciences to the humanities, “fearing that the former would otherwise slide into mindless empiricism.” By offering large salaries (again taking a leaf out of Münchhausen’s book) Humboldt soon lured to Berlin a raft of brilliant young scholars across many disciplines. “Berlin quickly became known as an Arbeitsuniversität, an institution for industrious, mature and unsocial scholars such as Wolf and Humboldt themselves had been.”52

  Humboldt wasn’t at the ministry for long—he left in June 1810. By then, however, through the university in Berlin, the Abitur, and the Gymnasium, he had made neohumanist Bildung “the cultural philosophy of the Prussian state.”

  Humboldt had a clear understanding of what, exactly, Bildung was. For him, the development of social morality within an individual was an all-important progression which depended on that individual’s “selftransformative progress” from a natural state of ignorance and immaturity to “self-willed citizenship”: a shared understanding of civic harmony and loyalty to the state, a belief that spiritual emancipation through education in the humanities was the true path to (inner) freedom and “willing citizenship.” It was a vision both egalitarian and elitist at the same time and this paradox was to have far-reaching consequences.53

  Partly under Wolf’s influence, and partly under Herder’s, Humboldt specified that language was to be the main focus of education. He insisted that the very shape and structure of a language revealed a nation’s character. Bildung, for Humboldt, could therefore be achieved only by study of the Greeks, allied to an understanding of language. For Humboldt, Bildung—true (inner) freedom—involved three things: Zwecklosigkeit, Innerlichkeit, and Wissenschaftlichkeit (non-purposiveness—in the sense of non-utilitarian—inwardness, and scholarliness). All (male) students at the Gymnasium must attempt this historico-philological form of learning.54

  He both did and did not succeed. By the time of his death in 1824, Wolf’s vision had prevailed: classical philology was the recognized foundation for professionalized humanistic scholarship.55 Later on in the nineteenth century, when German scholarship became the envy of the world, many disciplines would seem to have little to do with ancient Greece. But the methodology on which their successes were based went back to Humboldt, Wolf, and—ultimately—Winckelmann.

  4.

  The Supreme Products of the Age of Paper

  In the fifteenth century, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, it took twenty minutes to cross Florence on foot, fighting the crowds from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza di San Marco. Into this area, 95,000 people were crammed.1 By today’s standards, Renaissance Florence was not a large city but even so it dwarfed Weimar, which perhaps fulfilled a similar role in the German renaissance.

  As one approached the city in the eighteenth century, one saw—standing out above the town’s 600 or 700 houses and their enclosing wall—the towers of a couple of churches and the ducal Schloss (fifteenth-century Florence had one cathedral and 110 churches).2 There were two inns, the Erbprinz and the Elefant, three shops worth the name, and the streets were lit at night by 500 lanterns, though they were so expensive to maintain that the order to light them all was seldom given.3 In 1786, the population was approaching 6,200, of which 2,000 were courtiers, bureaucrats, soldiers, or pensioners supported by taxation.4 There was no trade, no tourism, and of course no factories. No wonder Madame de Staël felt Weimar to be “not a small town but a large château.”5

  Though it was small and unprepossessing physically (drainage was still very primitive), Weimar was a capital and it had a court. The original star—or “muse” (Goethe’s word)—of this court was Princess Anna Amalia of Brunswick, who had been married in 1756, while still a girl, to Ernst August Konstantin of Weimar, himself no more than eighteen. His small duchy was undistinguished, just one of 300 not dissimilar entities that stretched north to the Baltic and south to the Alps.6 Weimar actually consisted of the combined duchies of Weimar and Eisenach, together with the former duchy of Jena and the bailiwick of Ilmenau. All four areas still maintained their separate tax systems.

  When Anna Amalia was married, she was not yet seventeen and her husband was under nineteen. Before he died, two years later, she had borne him one son, Karl August, with another on the way. She became Weimar’s regent during her son’s minority, and it was in the nineteen years before his accession that she changed the court and made later developments possible. Anna Amalia’s mother was a sister of Friedrich the Great and shared his views on the importance of art, literature, and theater.7 On first meeting Anna Amalia, Schiller found her mind “very limited” but, in her efforts to keep up with rival courts nearby, she brought troupes of actors to Weimar, then musicians—and then “literati.” There would be four men of world stature who Anna Amalia helped bring to Weimar, of whom the first was Christoph Wieland (1733–1813).

  Appointed in 1772 as tutor to Karl August, then fifteen, Wieland was already one of Germany’s leading authors. He was of middle-class origin (his father was a pastor) and this association, of aristocrats and the middle class, unwittingly initiated a process that was to result in the partial fusion of two culture groups that would together provide what became known as “Weimar Klassik.”* Writers whose origins were lower down the social scale could earn a good living in either Paris or London, but in Germany social distinctions were still relatively rigid and amid all the other changes that Weimar brought about, the social change was as important as any.

  Wieland’s early work, however, had earned him distinction among aristocrats, who counted. He had been a senator in his native town, Biberach in Württemberg, and a professor of philosophy at Erfurt (in Thuringia, central Germany); in his novel Der goldene Spiegel (The Golden Mirror; 1772), he had presented a political philosophy in the tradition of Lettres persanes in that it criticized current affairs in Europe in a fanciful Oriental disguise (this was a practice that had begun in France). The novel emphasized education even for princes and especially the importance of history. But Wieland was also known for his novel Geschichte des Agathon (The Story of Agathon; 1766–67), a narrative of a young man who learns through personal experience that the excessively spiritual “enthusiasm” of his youth was folly. This was, in its way, a first sighting of rudimentary Bildung, and Wieland’s importance lies in his early grasp of this concept. The loss of faith experienced by many figures of the Enlightenment seems to have been more intense, sooner, in Germany than in France or England. Following the Earl of Shaftesbury (a profound influence in Germany), Wieland understood that, in the age of doubt, a man can still live for knowledge, art, and reflection—“the enlargement of his mind”—and continue to fulfill traditional duties.8

  Wieland took up his position in Weimar in September 1772 and immediately embarked on a project for a new literary monthly, Der deutsche Merkur, to accompany his primary responsibility, teaching Karl August. The first issue appeared in 1773 and was an immediate success. It continued publication for nigh on forty years and provided central Germany with a literary culture, in the process making Weimar, tiny as it was, the cultural capital. Wieland’s views overlapped with those of Friedrich the Great, who was still alive. He too thought Germans showed “a chronic uncertainty” in
matters of taste, in marked contrast to somewhere like England, which had its “classics,” as we would say now. Wieland translated and published several Shakespeare plays in an attempt to show Germans what a “classic” from the post-classical world “looked like.”9

  Wieland was always convinced of the cultural importance of the theater. He pointed out that the stage had been a political institution in ancient Greece and it was, even now, in the enlightened, nonabsolute parts of Europe, a moral institution, “capable of exercising a wholesome influence on the thought and manners of an entire people.” Wieland, we must remember, was writing at a time when theater had still to contend with the opposition of the church. Even if others didn’t, Wieland recognized the theater as a venue where people could experience new ideas in a shared capacity. (This is one reason why the church—and other authorities—objected.) The theater helped establish the actuality of “imagined communities,” as Benedict Anderson calls them; it helped spark the self-consciousness, and the self-confidence, of the middle classes.

  As for many others, for Wieland the German nation was “not really a nation, but an aggregate of many nations, like ancient Greece.”10 He nevertheless thought that modern Germany had a character all its own, meaning he had sympathy with—and encouraged in his journal—the early Sturm und Drang poets then emerging. He also welcomed Goethe’s Götz as “the most beautiful and interesting of monstrosities, worth a hundred of our sentimental comedies.”11 Here was the kind of new voice that, he felt, was needed.

  THE FIRST GREAT TRAGIC NOVEL

  Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s arrival in “the large chateau” stemmed from a chance meeting he had with Karl August, the son of Ernst August and Anna Amalia, in Frankfurt. Having chosen his bride, Luise of Hesse-Darmstadt, as he approached his eighteenth birthday, the prince regarded himself as now free to embark on his grand tour. This began, sensibly enough, with a visit to Karlsruhe, where Luise was living, but en route Karl August stopped at Frankfurt, where he was introduced to Goethe, already well known because of Götz and Werther (see Chapter 4). This unlikely pair got on surprisingly well together and met for a second time months later, this time in Karslruhe. The prince had overnighted there on his way back from Paris, while Goethe was bound for Switzerland. Paris had seduced Karl August. His tastes and his ambitions had grown more sophisticated and more cosmopolitan: Goethe was invited to Weimar.12

  The difference between Frankfurt and Weimar was larger than Goethe expected. In Frankfurt, a center of commerce, position was largely determined by financial criteria. At Weimar, in contrast, a basic distinction was made between those admissible at court (die Hoffähige) and the rest. To be admitted at court, a title was necessary. And so was established a pattern that was to be repeated. Goethe was raised to the nobility, becoming Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as happened with Schiller and Herder some years later.13

  At first, Goethe thought of himself as a visitor in Weimar, and this seems to be how others regarded him. Portraits show a man with large eyes, a slight crown on the bridge of his prominent nose, sensual lips. When he arrived in Weimar, Goethe was twenty-six to the prince’s eighteen—a large gap at that age and not the only important difference between them. Karl August might be a prince but Goethe was already much more famous. The previous year, he had produced Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), which, it is no exaggeration to say, had taken Europe by storm. Generally regarded as the first piece of “confessional” literature, this novel is of added interest because of its autobiographical element. The plot line of Werther is closer to Goethe’s life than that between almost any other author and their works.

  In his early twenties, Goethe had spent time in Wetzlar, a small town forty miles north of Frankfurt. Ostensibly looking for a law practice, but not trying too hard, he spent a good deal of his time reading and writing poetry and falling in love with a young woman, Charlotte Buff, who was already engaged to someone else. It took Goethe a while to realize he could never win Charlotte, but then he moved on to Koblenz where, as was his way, he soon fell for someone else. He kept in touch with Lotte and her fiancé and through them learned the details of the suicide of a mutual friend, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem had fallen in love with a married women who hadn’t returned his feelings, whereupon the young man had borrowed some pistols (from none other than Charlotte’s fiancé) and shot himself. It therefore comes as no great surprise, as Michael Hulse says, that Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, published in Leipzig in 1774, was received in its time (and continues to be read) as partly autobiographical, partly biographical.14 Goethe, who took barely four weeks to write the book, later referred to it often as a “confession.”

  The plot is simple and, says Nicholas Boyle, could only have been written because of Goethe’s religious emancipation.15 Werther falls in love with Charlotte (Lotte), who is betrothed to another man. Although his love is requited by Lotte, it is doomed, and the unresponsiveness of the world and the couple’s sufferings eat away at him, so that he can see no alternative but to shoot himself with Lotte’s husband’s pistols. An “editor” then “gathers” his letters and publishes them with the occasional comment.

  Werther was almost immediately translated into every major European language, but the cult of the book went much wider. In Vienna there was a Werther fireworks display and in London there was Werther wallpaper. Meissen porcelain was designed, showing Werther scenes, and in Paris perfumières sold Eau de Werther. In Italy there was a Werther opera. Napoleon took the French translation with him on his Egyptian adventure in 1798 and, Hulse says, “when he met the author in 1808 he told him he had read the book seven times” (though he also added some criticisms).16

  Not everyone shared the rapture. There were those who thought the novel risked sparking a suicide epidemic, but the fear of a wave of Liebestode seems to have been exaggerated. In Leipzig, nevertheless, the book was banned, as it was in Denmark. Elsewhere the book was derided, one critic suggesting sarcastically that “The smell of pancake is a more powerful reason for remaining in this world than all young Werther’s supposedly lofty conclusions are for quitting it.” Now that the dust has settled, Werther has come to be regarded as “the first great tragic novel, a work of exhilarating style and insight.”17

  Despite Goethe’s fame, despite the turbulence his novel sparked across Europe, his friendship with Karl August was solid and genuine, and the writer joined in readily with those activities of the court that the younger man enjoyed—in particular, riding, shooting, and dancing. Bit by bit, however, Goethe’s very presence induced a change, and he began reading from his works in progress (most of what he wrote, he read aloud to friends), in particular his unfinished Faust (the Urfaust as it is now called).18

  Time was passing and after about a year, when it was becoming clear that Goethe’s “visit” was no such thing, Karl August moved to bring his friend closer still. Goethe was persuaded to join in another popular aspect of court life: amateur theatricals.19 In this way he became the prince’s unofficial maître des plaisirs, and it was this appointment, informal to begin with, that shaped Goethe’s immediate future and, indeed, that of Weimar, as other—more onerous and more responsible—duties followed. More than one historian has observed that Karl August’s liking for Goethe owed rather more to his personal qualities than to his fame and skill as a writer. (Jürgen Habermas reminds us that Weimar was a special case, that most men of letters were little more than servants at that stage.) Goethe’s elevation at court was not universally welcomed (he was considered a “half-baked Voltairian know-all” by some), but the prince was an absolute monarch in an age of absolutism—and that was that.20

  The big change, from Goethe’s point of view, came in June 1776, when he was appointed a member of Karl August’s conseil, or Privy Council, which consisted of the duke and three advisers. Goethe was required to take an oath of allegiance, and that gave him the right to wear a distinctive laced coat.21 Now his duties widened further. He took on the mining comm
ission, the military commission, and was even made temporary head of the treasury. He was involved in road-building schemes and helped devise a new system of taxation. By all accounts, Goethe was a safe pair of hands, invariably aware of what was and was not practicable, and this transformed his popularity and made him respected. He was one of those responsible for the belief in Germany that “intellectuals need not live in ivory towers with their heads in the clouds.”22

  Goethe gained a lot from being in Weimar. Being forced to involve himself in mining, he found he needed to develop his interests in, and knowledge of, chemistry, botany, and mineralogy, and this moved him in the direction of science more generally. He was soon collecting plants and studying Carl Linnaeus’s Philosophia botanica. Goethe exchanged a number of letters with Linnaeus and at the same time asked Karl August to send one of his assistants, J. C. W. Voigt, for training at the Freiberg Academy of Mining in Saxony, run by the foremost mineralogist of the day, Abraham Gottlob Werner. (Werner, who visited Goethe in late summer 1789, is considered in Chapter 7.) Later Goethe turned to anatomy, which he studied under Professor Loder in Jena and then passed on, in his own lectures, at the academy of drawing in Weimar.23