The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  The Great Exhibition was a notable success, not least financially, realizing a surplus of £180,000, an enormous sum. Initially, Prince Albert wanted the profits from the exhibition (which the government promised to match) to be used to found a number of schools of science and industry at South Kensington, where he also wanted all the scientific societies to be grouped, together with the Institution of Civil Engineers, to form a Napoleonic-style technical-national university. It didn’t work out but “Albertopolis” was realized to the extent that “South Kensington,” “that un-English complex of museums, scientific institutions, colleges of music and art, part university, part polytechnic,” advanced in fits and starts, and today is the intellectual and artistic heart of London. The Albert Memorial stands at the edge of this, overseeing the prince’s great creation.27

  While he was in Britain, the prince retained his interest in the country of his birth. He had been infected with enthusiasm for German unity while he was a student at Bonn.28 He used his London experience to try to influence the Prussian king in the direction of a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government along British lines, a model he genuinely approved. His advice may have been responsible for Friedrich Wilhelm’s decision in 1847 to issue a patent establishing a united Diet for the whole of Prussia. Albert fell gradually out of sympathy with the authoritarian trend that was such an important element of the Bismarckian approach. However, he did form a firm friendship with the prince of Prussia, the later King and Emperor Wilhelm I. When Prince Wilhelm was forced to flee from Berlin after the Berlin uprising in March 1848 (he was responsible for the shooting of demonstrators and became known as Kartätschenprinz, the Prince of Cartridge Shot), Albert made use of the prince’s presence in London to begin a sustained attempt to win him over to constitutionalism; Albert argued that, after 1848, a confederation was no longer adequate and that a single state was necessary.29 He was also critical of an excessive Prussian influence over the future of Germany.

  The political differences between Prince Albert and his son, Edward, the Prince of Wales, should not be overlooked. The latter reacted against what he saw as his father’s “overestimation” of Germany and his marriage to Alexandra, the daughter of the future king of Denmark, ensured that he was firmly in the anti-German camp after the Schleswig-Holstein war of 1864 (by which time Albert was dead). Following this, Edward’s sympathies lay with France. A parallel development occurred with Wilhelm II of Prussia, who took against his father and his English mother. In the new climate, dynasties could no longer be links between nations.30

  These are murky waters, with ambiguous messages. Albert’s very tangible influences on the arts and sciences in Britain, on its educational structure and its constitutional monarchy, are his true legacy, and quite substantial enough. Partly as a result of Albert’s influence, many German businesses opened up in Britain (150 in Lancashire) and numerous German clubs established along Oxford Street in London.

  THE PHD CROSSES THE ATLANTIC

  Germany’s relationship with the United States has been very different and in many ways more intimate. It was a German, the cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller (1470–1522), who was the first to suggest, in 1507, that the name “America” be used to designate the New World.31 Similarities between the beliefs of the English Quaker William Penn and the German Pietists had a major effect on America. The English government was in debt to Admiral Penn, father of William, on account of his military successes and because he had paid his men out of his own pocket. The amount owed was a tidy sum: £16,000. Instead of cash, William accepted instead the grant of a large area of land north of what would become Washington, which was named Pennsylvania. Then, in 1677, when Penn was in Germany to meet with Pietists, they negotiated to buy 15,000 acres, subsequently extended to 25,000 acres.32 This land would become Germantown.

  At various times, attempts were made to turn Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin into completely German states. Such plans never succeeded, but as a result those states always had a larger than average number of Germans. In 1835 it was thought necessary to establish a society called “Germania,” the aim of which was to sustain German customs, speech, and traditions against what were felt to be destructive influences. Wisconsin in particular had an attraction for Germans. The climate and soil were similar to that of northern Germany, land was cheap, and people could vote after only one year of residence. The state had a commissioner for immigration, resident in New York, an arrangement so successful that at one time two-thirds of the immigrants to Wisconsin were German, and the Wisconsin Bureau of Immigration became known throughout Europe. The Wisconsin Central Railroad sent an agent to Switzerland, where he recruited some 5,000 immigrants, mainly German speakers, promising them land along the railroad they would help to construct.33 German immigrants into America were particularly numerous after 1848, in the wake of the European revolutions; this meant the bulk of the new people were radicals who were far more apt to side with the northern cause in the Civil War.34

  “The earliest instance of intellectual exchange of any consequence that we know about between Germany and New England was the correspondence between Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke. In 1709 the Boston theologian sent a collection of 160 books and tracts on Pietism to Halle, and several sums of money to support Francke’s philanthropic work. Francke’s reply was a Latin letter of sixty-nine pages, describing the work of the Halle institutions.”35 The sons of both men continued to correspond, during which time “orphan-homes” on Halle lines were opened in America.

  Franz Daniel Pastorius was the first German teacher that we know about and he worked in the English Quaker School in Philadelphia. A friend of William Penn, he became the founder of Germantown, establishing the first German school there in 1702. He introduced two innovations which had profound consequences: his school was coeducational, and it had a night school for anyone whose work precluded their attendance during the day.

  Benjamin Franklin is the first American on record to attend a German university—in his case, Göttingen in 1766 (he was made a member of the Göttingen Gelehrte Anzeigen). George Ticknor and Edward Everett were, however, the first two regular American students at Göttingen (1815–17). Ticknor, by all accounts, was heavily influenced by Madame de Staël’s book: “All the north of Germany is filled with the most learned universities in Europe. In no country, not even in England, have the people so many means of instructing themselves and of bringing their faculties to perfection.”36 Ticknor and Everett were the first in a movement that would grow in strength in the nineteenth century and would shape American education fundamentally. Throughout the century two batches of Americans flooded into German universities: Göttingen, Berlin, and Halle until 1850, roughly speaking, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; later, Leipzig, Bonn, and Heidelberg were more popular. On his visits there Everett never stopped buying books, which in the end formed the core of the German library at Harvard. This, says Albert Faust, was the beginning of the mass migration of German book collections to America (the “Bücherwanderung”).37

  Carl Diehl estimates that between 9,000 and 10,000 Americans studied in Germany from 1815 to 1914, not least nineteen future college and university presidents. His figures show a slightly different picture, that four universities attracted the bulk of the students—Göttingen, Berlin, Halle, and Leipzig—while Heidelberg became popular later on. Most entered the philosophical faculties to study the humanities or the natural and social sciences, with a rapid decline in the theological faculties after 1850. The American influx was led by just two American institutions in the early years—Harvard and Yale, with 55 percent of the American students having been students at one or the other institution.38

  Then, as the nineteenth century progressed, as an interest in history and science developed in the United States, as its own literature began to emerge, and as more graduates returned from Germany—some with PhDs—Germany’s universities grew even more in stature in the eyes of Americans, in
particular their approach of linking teaching and research.* This later generation—from the end of the 1840s—was the first to import the ideal of German scholarship, advanced academic study as a recognized professional vocation, and it was these returning students who created the modern form of scholarship in the humanities in America. Diehl identifies such men as Francis Child and George Lane, who were to form the backbone of the German-trained faculty at Harvard, Basil Gildersleeve, the first philologist at Johns Hopkins, and William Dwight Whitney, the eminent Yale Sanskrit philologist, all of whom studied in Germany. To them may be added “a dazzling array of future college and university presidents, many of whom would be instrumental in creating the modern university in America.” Charles Eliot’s curriculum reform at Harvard in the 1870s and his promotion of graduate studies have generally been taken as the first indication of the emergence of the modern university system in the United States, but Diehl points out that, by that time, “there were at least nine professors of humanities out of the total Harvard faculty of twenty-three who had received advanced training in Germany.”39 They had been influential in choosing Eliot in the first place, and he himself studied chemistry in Germany. By 1870 Yale also had a half-dozen German-trained professors in the humanities, including both the outgoing president, Thomas Dwight Woolsey, and the new one, Noah Porter. In fact, says Diehl, study in Germany had become a kind of graduate school for the graduates of American universities. “By 1850 many American universities made it publicly known that they would favor applicants with German training.”40

  Around 750,000 German immigrants, known as the “Forty-Eighters,” entered the United States between the mid-1840s and the mid-1850s. Among Germans, having a “Forty-Eighter” among your ancestors is almost as notable as having an ancestor on the Mayflower is for English-speaking Americans.41 In 1854, 215,000 Germans immigrated to America, a record beaten only in 1882, when 250,000 crossed the Atlantic.

  In the arts and humanities, German-Americans had their share of painters—Emmanuel Leutze (Washington Crossing the Delaware) and Albert Bierstadt (In the Sierras)—and authors—Friedrich List (Outline of a New System of Political Economy) and Owen Wister (The Virginian). Among German-American philanthropist-businessmen were John Jacob Astor (born near Heidelberg in 1763) and Francis Martin Drexel (born in the Austrian Tyrol in 1792), who spent some years as a painter in South America before traveling north and founding a bank in Philadelphia in 1837 (the New York house, Drexel, Morgan, and Company was founded in 1850). John D. Rockefeller was descended from Johann Peter Rockefeller, who came from Germany and settled among the earliest New Jersey Germans.42

  Overall, alongside the universities, the German influence on American life was felt most strongly in the early nineteenth century in music and journalism. The large German Protestant churches promoted both vocal and instrumental music. In New England the Handel and Haydn Society had by far the most famous choir. Founded in 1815 by Gottlieb Graupner, owner of a music store, who also organized and conducted the first prominent orchestra in America, which was rivaled only by a band of musicians from Hamburg in Philadelphia. About the middle of the nineteenth century, New York took over as the center of American music making, and this had something to do with the arrival of the German Orchestra, upward of a score of young musicians, many of them “Forty-Eighters.”43 Choral societies were founded soon after in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Charleston (the Teutonenbund). These competed at annual singing festivals, some of which grew into Musikvereins. Beginning in Milwaukee, they were not just choirs but also commissioned new operas and oratorios.

  The first German-American periodical was founded in 1739 by Christopher Sauer; this was the Der Hochdeutsch-Pennsylvaniesche Geschicht-Schreiber, oder Sammlung Wichtiger Nachrichten aus dem Natur und Kirchen-Reich. Published in Germantown, its title was (thankfully) shortened to Germantown Zeitung as it changed progressively from a semiannual to a quarterly to a monthly and then, from 1775, to a weekly. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were five German newspapers in Pennsylvania, one of them published half in German and half in English. It was the early years of the nineteenth century that saw the great boom in circulation and influence: Die New Yorker Staats-Zeitung was founded in 1834, Der Anzeiger des Westens in St. Louis in 1835, and the Cincinnati Volksblatt in 1836.44

  In 1813 Caspar Wistar, a glass manufacturer, took over from Dr. Benjamin Rush as president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery and, two years after that, followed Thomas Jefferson as president of the American Philosophical Society.45 As a result, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and the Young Hegelians received growing attention.

  It should not be overlooked that this was a period of strong cultural exchange. There was also a great deal of interest about Britain and America inside Germany. It was at this time, for example, that Rudolf von Gneist wrote his four-volume work on local government in the United Kingdom, a work used north of the Channel. It wasn’t globalization as we know it in the twenty-first century, but not everyone was as nationalistic in the nineteenth century as is sometimes made to appear.

  16.

  Wagner’s Other Ring—Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche

  Thomas Mann said that Richard Wagner’s acquaintance with Arthur Schopenhauer was the greatest event of the composer’s life. It occurred in the autumn of 1854 when he read—and was overwhelmed by—Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), two volumes of well over a thousand pages, yet which he read four times in one year. Few—if any—great composers studied philosophy as seriously as Wagner did. According to Bryan Magee, himself a philosopher, neither Tristan und Isolde nor Parsifal would have taken the form they did without Wagner’s absorption of Schopenhauer’s ideas, and the same argument applies to entire sections of Der Ring des Nibelungen.1

  The reason Wagner was so different from his fellow composers can be put down to politics, in particular his disillusionment following the revolutions of 1848, which caused him to turn inward, away from activity, thus opening himself up to other influences, of which philosophy proved decisive. A passionate—and active—left-wing revolutionary when he was young, Wagner has often been depicted as lurching to the right in middle age. It is truer to see him as someone who fell out of love with politics itself, as someone no longer convinced that the most pressing human problems are amenable to political solutions.2

  Born in 1813, the same year as Giuseppe Verdi, Wagner died at the age of sixty-nine, in 1883, the same year as Marx. He knew very early on what he wanted to do, which was to compose operas, and he started while he was still in his teens.

  At the time, three forms of opera were popular: the German Romantic opera of Weber; the Italian Romantic Realism of Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini, and Gaetano Donizetti; and French opera, epitomized by the spectacles of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy. Wagner tried his hand at all three, deciding that the best way forward lay with the German form, the genre of his three best-known early operas—Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman; 1841), Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). Joachim Köhler says The Flying Dutchman was Wagner’s “French Revolution” though no one noticed it at the time.

  There then followed, not a crisis exactly, but a period of reflection. By this stage, Wagner had been married twice, at first to a beautiful actress who had no idea what kind of genius her husband was and wanted only for him to be conventionally successful. His second marriage, to Cosima, an illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, was considerably happier. Much less beautiful, she devoted her life to him.3

  His early politics had led him into friendship with Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, and to Wagner’s presence on the barricades in the Dresden uprising of 1849. In 1843, following Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman, both of which were well received, he accepted the position of Kapellmeister in Dresden, where Bakunin was living. Wagner was just twenty-nine and in his autobiography says he found the anarchist “a truly likeable and sensitive perso
n.” Bakunin of course knew Marx, though he could be anti-Semitic.4 Wagner and Bakunin formed part of the leadership of the uprising in Dresden. As a result of the failed revolution, Wagner was forced into exile in Switzerland, a wanted man in Germany.

  During his first years in Switzerland, he composed scarcely any music but produced instead a number of prose writings that made his name more widely known. Two of them are still much read: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Work of Art of the Future; 1849) and Oper und Drama (1850–51). These are both important works of theory; and with his theory of the “complete embrace” of art in place, he set about trying out his ideas, which were to lead to music very different from anything composed before.5

  In the first place, he produced the libretti of the four operas that comprise Der Ring des Nibelungen: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (usually translated as “The Twilight of the Gods”). At the same time, he wrote the music for the first two. Then came a long break. After Act II of Siegfried he gave up on The Ring and, for twelve years, never went back to it. He wasn’t idle: he composed Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Only then did he go back to The Ring, finishing Siegfried and writing the music for Götterdämmerung. Only one opera followed the Ring—Parsifal, which premiered in 1882, the year before his death.