The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Ottomans and the Spanish Monarchy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries was the first to use this approach and the first volume of the series Fürsten und Völker von Süd-Europa (Princes and Peoples of Southern Europe). Ranke’s first aim was to make the behavior of the main players explicable in terms of contemporary diplomacy, trade, finance, and administration. Again, we take this approach so much for granted now that we forget it started with Ranke. Other books reinforced this approach. Because he was a Protestant, the Vatican archives were off limits but he discovered in the archives of some of the great papal families (notably the Barberini) sufficient material for his magisterial Die römischen Päpste (History of the Popes; volume one, 1834). These archives enabled him to treat the Papacy like any other institution in the development of Europe, but the fulcrum of the book is the Counter-Reformation, of which Ranke was the first authoritative interpreter. The attempt to revive spiritual life and the foundation of the great orders are brilliantly evoked. He had a further coup with Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (German History in the Time of the Reformation, 1839–47). After his work on the popes, Ranke felt he should write the history of Protestantism to put alongside his account of Catholicism and here too he discovered a mass of correspondence, this time in connection with Charles V in Brussels.19

  Ranke’s most typical project was Neun Bücher preussischer Geschichte (Nine Books of Prussian History), appearing in 1847–48. A study of Friedrich the Great based on the archives in Berlin, this book was essentially an examination of the rise of a great power, depicting Frederick as the foundational figure in the Prussian administrative machine. Ranke employed the same method as he did with his history of the popes, allowing no bias to taint his judgment and, in order to obtain a better grasp of the king’s motives, he betrayed no hostility toward Austria. This is Ranke as “the father of value-free history,” doing his best, as he famously put it, to tell history “as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen), avoiding imposing modern ways of thinking on historical personages. This approach he employed with his subsequent works on Machiavelli, the history of France, and the history of England. He wrote “as a European” (his wife was English), his conviction being that European history was essentially about the rise and rivalry of the great powers, what would come to be called Realpolitik.

  The sheer number of masterpieces set Ranke apart from other historians. (Perhaps no one has ever had as much historical knowledge.) Though his books deal with the great tendencies of whatever age he was writing about, he also acknowledged the importance of the individual actor: “General tendencies do not alone decide; great personalities are always necessary to make them effective.”20 He assumed “a divine order of things” that “cannot be proved but felt.” This order manifests itself in the “sequence of periods.” So Ranke’s first achievement was to divorce the study of the past from the passions of the present. Before Ranke, historians assumed memoirs and chronicles to be the best authorities. After him, all scholars accepted that nothing less than the papers and correspondence of the actors in immediate contact with the events they describe was a sine qua non.21

  In criticism of Ranke, George Iggers says that, although he was interested in power, he never considered the role of evil in history. Convinced that states were “ideas of God,” ends in themselves, his perspective was that of governments. Arguably, this led Ranke and his followers to underestimate economic and emerging sociological factors. A potent side effect was that his approach helped foster a growing nationalism.22 Historians were better scholars after Ranke, but in Germany in particular they were also more politically involved and active.

  THE GERMAN IDEA OF FREEDOM

  Ranke’s approach, we can see with the benefit of hindsight, was not without its consequences. George Iggers says that three ideas shaped German history but also the wider picture.

  The state as an end in itself and the concept of the Machtstaat.

  The German conception of the state always had an aristocratic and bureaucratic bias plus an appreciation of the cultured, propertied middle class as the backbone of the country. German historians maintained a much sharper distinction between government and governed than was true in France or in Britain. The state was seen as an “individual,” an end in itself.

  The rejection of normative thinking.

  For Ranke, the main task of the state is to secure “the highest measure of independence and strength” among other powers, so that the (German) state will be able to fully develop its innate tendencies. All domestic affairs are subordinated to this end, from which it follows that “The state cannot sin when it follows its own higher interests.” Sheer power becomes one and the same as morality.

  Anti-Begrifflichkeit, the rejection of conceptualized thinking.

  Generalizations and overarching theories in history and the cultural sciences are of limited value. History, “the area of willed human actions,” requires understanding, but this is not accomplished by abstract reasoning, rather “by direct confrontation” with the subject and acknowledgment of its individuality. It follows that all historical understanding requires an element of intuition. The irrational aspects of life need to be taken into account.23

  These notions meant that German historians moved in a world of their own, remaining largely unaffected by the great transformations of the period 1848–1914, in particular the great social and economic changes brought in by industrialization. History for them remained primarily the interplay of the great powers, and the primary solution for domestic social and economic problems was an expansive foreign policy, the main means of which was a strengthening of the nation.

  It is in this sense that, as Iggers has said, German historicism is a unique event in the history of ideas. Besides its substantive scholarly achievements, its effect on politics and on Germany’s self-understanding was remarkable. The increasing achievements of the natural sciences throughout the nineteenth century did not affect this. Only the disasters of the twentieth century brought change. 24

  The other important consequence of the Ranke mind-set was how it affected notions of freedom. Freedom, the historians insisted, can only be achieved within and through the state, and this was closely tied to the political and social outlook of a particular class, the academic Bildungsbürgertum. Historicism thus provided a theoretical basis for the traditional political and social structure of nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany. This represents a major cultural divergence of Germany from “the West.” For German historians, the reformed Prussian monarchy represented a “high point” in the history of freedom: it was a society where the individual was fully free, but at the same time integrated into a social whole. This “German idea of freedom” was a core belief, at least among Humboldt’s Bildung-loving Bildungsbürgertum and flatteringly contrasted with “the atomistic ideas of 1789.”25

  13.

  The Heroic Age of Biology

  On the evening of March 11, 1890, hundreds of men in white tie and tails gathered for a gala dinner at the Berlin City Hall. The chandeliered room was lined with palm trees, and everyone of note was there, including the cream of Germany’s hostesses, seated at separate tables in an arcade. It was, according to one present, “A festival of magnificence perhaps unparalleled in the history of science” and, to mark the occasion, ten speeches were delivered.1

  Each speech honored one man, the last to speak. The dinner, known as the Benzolfest, was held to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of a discovery he had made that brought to a head one of the great adventures of the mind in the nineteenth century and that had occurred only after half a century of painstaking inquiry. The man was August Kekulé and his discovery was the benzene ring and the belated realization that there was such a thing as a molecule, the smallest particle of a chemical compound that can exist, that it has a structure—a shape and a size, with specific properties depending on that structure—and that this was the basic building block of organic chemistry, the chemistry of life, the chemistry
that governs biology.2

  Organic chemistry had been invented—or discovered—seventy years earlier. It was one of three breakthroughs that made the middle years of the nineteenth century a heroic age for biology. The second was the development of fertilizers, which transformed agriculture at a time when many people all across Europe were leaving the land to work in the new metropolises, so that the demand for food had reached unprecedented levels. The third was the identification of the cell, the realization that it was the basic building block of both plants and animals, and that its differentiation made up the various organs of living things. Between them, these developments transformed medicine, concepts of illness and wellness, industry (dyes, fertilizers, cosmetics, drugs) and—insofar as the new discoveries explained life processes and linked inert matter conceptually to living organisms—played a major philosophical and religious role in refining our understanding of ourselves at a time when traditional beliefs were under severe threat.

  The vital role played by carbon in the science of natural products—organic chemistry—was known from a fairly early date. What puzzled people was why one element out of the dozens already known should account for the amazing diversity of natural substances. This strange state of affairs helps account for the fact that so many scientists of the early nineteenth century believed that chemistry was not enough to explain the diversity and that some kind of “vital force” must be operating.3

  The term “organic chemistry” had crept into use around 1777, though understanding was rudimentary, and early textbooks did little more than list the various substances regarded as organic: gum, saliva, urine, albumen, gelatin, and blood, which many regarded as an “impossibly complex” substance.4

  Systematic sense was first put into this field by the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier, who showed that several natural products—alcohol, sugars, and acetic acid (from vinegar)—contain only three elements: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The two men who built on this and therefore came to personify the emergence of organic chemistry were Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wöhler. From about 1824, for roughly three decades, von Liebig and Wöhler investigated almost every area of the new science, publishing hundreds of research papers and teaching thousands of students (8,000 in Wöhler’s case). Wöhler, three years older than von Liebig, was quiet and modest, slender, and always looked much younger than he was (when he met Michael Faraday on a visit to Britain, Faraday thought he was talking to Wöhler’s son).5 Von Liebig, on the other hand, was an irascible, all-too-fallible man who, as John Buckingham says in his history of early biology, had a career disfigured by more than its share of failures, mistakes, and acrimonious squabbles (at one stage his British publishers refused to print a book of his because of the libels in the text). Nevertheless, von Liebig’s achievements opened a new era in the discovery of the organic molecule.

  He was born in May 1803 in Darmstadt and studied chemistry under Wilhelm Kastner at Bonn and Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac in Paris, where analytic methods were then much more rigorous than in Germany. His breakthrough came when, on the recommendation of Alexander von Humboldt, Ludwig I of Hesse appointed von Liebig extraordinary professor at the University of Giessen. Almost immediately, he and two colleagues set up their own teaching laboratory. The twenty places were soon filled, and the founding of a new chemical laboratory at Giessen signaled the beginning of the eastward migration of chemistry across the Rhine. Using new equipment that von Liebig designed himself, which allowed much quicker and more accurate analysis, he and his students analyzed many of the more mysterious natural substances, including quinine, morphine, and strychnine, finding out in the process that their molecules contained relatively large numbers of atoms but not in simple ratios.

  They also discovered the important phenomenon of isomerism, which came about when von Liebig was in Giessen studying the salts of fulminic acid, and Wöhler was in Stockholm, collaborating with Jöns Jakob von Berzelius (1779–1848), the famous Swedish chemist, and examining another acid, cyanic acid.6 Though completely different in their properties (cyanic acid was not at all explosive, as the fulminates were), Wöhler obtained exactly the same results for his analysis of silver cyanate as von Liebig did for his silver fulminate. How could that be? The two men met in Frankfurt to compare results, and, to everyone’s surprise, decided that they were both right. This meant that two different substances could have the same elemental composition. In this specific case, cyanic acid and fulminic acid each contained carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen in exactly the same proportions. It was Berzelius who coined the term “isomerism” to describe the phenomenon, more and more examples of which would be uncovered in the coming years.7

  It was a phenomenon slow in being grasped partly because, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, organic chemistry, not to mention physiology, were muddied by the concept of “vital force”—the belief that living organisms could not be explained by physical laws alone, that there must be some “special influence” at work. This view was reinforced by the sheer extent and diversity of organic substances which, it was thought, only a deity could have envisaged. As more analyses were completed, and more substances found to be made of carbon, nitrogen, and water only, the mystery deepened.8

  It was in this intellectual and religious climate that Wöhler performed the experiment for which he will always be remembered. By treating silver cyanate with ammonium chloride he was hoping to derive the ammonium salt of his cyanic acid. However, after he had filtered off the (insoluble) silver chloride and evaporated the residual solution, he found he had “colourless, clear crystals in the form of slender four-sided dull-pointed prisms.” To his astonishment, they resembled nothing so much as urea. “This similarity…induced me to carry out comparative experiments with completely pure urea isolated from urine, from which it was plainly apparent that [urea and] this crystalline substance, of cyanate of ammonia, if one can so call it, are completely identical compounds.” In fact, the two compounds were not identical—they were isomers, but even so Wöhler’s was an iconic experiment: he had manufactured a substance, urea, hitherto the product solely of animals, out of inorganic materials and without any intervention of vital force. “Von Liebig and his successors regarded [this] experiment as [the] beginning of a truly scientific organic chemistry.”9

  The vital force did not vanish overnight but it did now come under sustained attack, not least from von Liebig, who carried out a raft of experiments on food consumption and heat production in animals. He showed beyond all doubt that the energy that characterizes a living organism is a product of the combustion of food in the tissues, with no need for other mysterious sources such as “electricity” or “nervous energy” or “vital force.”10

  BENZENE: A NEW ERA IN CHEMISTRY

  Physiological chemistry was one line of biological research. Another, unlikely as it may seem, grew out of gas lighting. By 1816, twenty-six miles of metal piping had been laid in London to carry illuminating gas to factories and for street lighting.* Early gas supplies were made, not from coal tar, as they were later, but from the more obviously organic whale or cod oil, which produced a high residue of liquid waste that would condense out, either at the works or in the pipes themselves. This waste, the so-called gas oil, was produced in sufficient quantities for the owners of the gasworks in London to send a sample to Michael Faraday in 1825 to see what it was and what it might be used for. He experimented for about ten days and found it to be a hydrocarbon—a substance containing carbon and hydrogen only.11

  At first, Faraday called the waste “bicarburet of hydrogen,” later known as benzene. At that stage, there was not the slightest inkling that benzene is the stable backbone underlying a vast series of substances that would come to be known as “the aromatic compounds.”*12

  Seven years after Faraday’s identification of benzene in 1832, von Liebig and Wöhler began their second important collaboration, this time working on the aromatic compounds. In the first phase they isolated from the oil of bitter
almonds a substance they named hydrobenzoyl (today called benzaldehyde), which they found to contain carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen only. But it was their next move that was to prove crucial: they performed a series of transformations—and found that treating benzaldehyde with chlorine gave benzoyl chloride, a substance that could be further transformed into benzoyl iodide by potassium iodide and so forth. This was the first demonstration of a series of systematic chemical transformations that could be carried out with related organic substances. What von Liebig and Wöhler were the first to realize was that throughout this series of transformations a sizable backbone of the molecular structure, which they calculated as C14H10O2 (as then written), remained unchanged. This backbone, which they labeled “benzoyl,” they called a “compound radical.” The idea of a “radical,” in this context, meant a collection of elements “mimicking the behaviour of a single element.” Lavoisier had considered the idea, but in a much simpler form, and as it related only to inorganic examples. A new era in chemistry was opening up. This was confirmed when the Berlin chemist Eilhardt Mitscherlich performed a transformation that von Liebig and Wöhler had missed. In 1834, by heating benzoic acid with lime, he obtained “nothing other than Faraday’s bicarburet of hydrogen”—benzene itself. This substance, benzene, C6H6, in time became revered as the truly irreducible nucleus or “radical” of the aromatic compounds.13

  As more discoveries about the properties of the many organic compounds accumulated, it became ever clearer how exceptional benzene was. All other substances with a low ratio of hydrogen to carbon were unstable. Benzene had the same ratio of the two elements (1:1) as the highly explosive gas acetylene, but the benzene nucleus, as von Liebig and Wöhler repeatedly demonstrated, “could pass unchanged through a whole series of substitution reactions that could lead back again, given the right manipulations, to benzene itself,” behavior that set it “quite apart” from inorganic compounds. “The eventual solution to the nature of benzene would be one of the great attainments of the human mind.”14