The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  64. Ibid. The full differentiation in Germany is between Wissenschaft (scholarship), Kunst, Kultur, Lebensart (feine Lebensart), and Zivilisation.

  65. Ibid., p. 6.

  66. Ibid., p. 5.

  67. See also Fritz Stern, Five Germanies I Have Known (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. 16.

  68. See also Lepenies, Seduction of Culture, p. 24.

  69. Gordon Craig, The Germans (New York: Meridian, 1991; reprint, originally Putnam, 1982), pp. 214–218.

  70. Lepenies, Seduction of Culture, pp. 17–19 and 28.

  71. Ibid., pp. 27–29.

  72. Ibid., p. 73.

  73. T. S, Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948/1962), p. 31.

  74. Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World, p. 3.

  75. Keith Bullivant, Realism Today: Aspects of the Contemporary West German Novel (Leamington Spa/Hamburg/New York: Oswald Wolff, 1987), p. 158. Georg Lukács, German Realists in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast, edited and with an introduction and notes by Rodney Livingstone (London: Libris, 1993), p. 168.

  CHAPTER 1: GERMANNESS EMERGING

  1. James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 5.

  2. Jan Chiapusso, Bach’s World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 37. Albert Schweitzer, J. S. Bach, trans. Ernest Newman. 2 vols. (London: Breitkopf & Kärtel, 1911).

  3. Gaines, Evening, p. 7.

  4. Robert Eitner, “Johann Gottfried Walter,” Monatshefte für Musikgeschichte 4, no. 8 (1872): 165–167. Quoted in Gaines, Evening, p. 8.

  5. Gaines, Evening, p. 9.

  6. Ibid., back cover.

  7. Karl Hermann Bitter, Johann Sebastian Bach. 2 vols. 2nd ed. (Berlin: W. Baensch, 1881), vol. 2, p. 181.

  8. Gaines, Evening, p. 237.

  9. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, p. 9.

  10. Steven Ozment, A Mighty Fortress (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 125.

  11. Many of Pufendorf’s works have been translated into English. See Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. xvii and 148–196.

  12. Ozment, Mighty Fortress, p. 126.

  13. Ibid., p. 27.

  14. Richard L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-century Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1 and 2.

  15. Ibid., p. 9.

  16. Ibid., p. 10.

  17. For Pietist conversion narratives and links to Puritanism, see Gisele Mettele, “Constructions of the Religious Self: Moravian Conversion and Transatlantic Communication,” Journal for Moravian History 2 (2007). Also personal communication from the author. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 12.

  18. Johannes Wallmann, Philipp Jakob Spener und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1970), p. 300. Martin Brecht, “Philipp Jakob Spener, sein Programm und dessen Auswirkungen,” in Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 1 of Geschichte des Pietismus: im Auftrag der Historisches Kommission zur Erforschung des Pietismus, ed. Martin Brecht. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), p. 315. This is a magisterial four-volume history of Pietism.

  19. Martin Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus,” in Brecht, Pietismus, vol. 1, pp. 440–539.

  20. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 94.

  21. Ibid., pp. 143–144. The Franckesche Stiftungen still exist in Halle and have been revitalized since reunification. I thank Werner Pfennig for this information.

  22. Ibid., p. 145.

  23. Wallmann, Philip Jakob Spener, pp. 89–90 and 94–95.

  24. Wolf Oschlies, Die Arbeits-und Berufspädagogik August Hermann Franckes (1883–1727): Schule und Leben im Menschenbild des Hauptvertreters des halleschen Pietismus (Witten: Luther-Verlag, 1969), p. 107. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 160.

  25. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 183.

  26. Martin Brecht, “Der Hallische Pietismus in der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts—seine Ausstrahlung und sein Niedergang,” in Brecht, Pietismus, vol. 2, pp. 319–357. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 198.

  27. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 213.

  28. Ibid., p. 221.

  29. Hartmut Rudolph, Das evangelische Militärkirchenwesen in Preussen: Die Entwicklung seiner Verfassung und Organisation vom Absolutismus bis zum Vorabend des ersten Weltkrieges (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), p. 22. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 225.

  30. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 228.

  31. Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 5.

  32. Gawthrop, Pietism, p. 241.

  33. Ibid., p. 268.

  34. Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 28.

  35. Ibid., p. 199.

  36. G. von Selle, Die Matrikel der Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen, 1734–1837. 2 vols. (Hildesheim and Leipzig: A. Lax, 1937), vol. 1, p. 14.

  37. McClelland, State, Society, p. 37.

  38. Thomas Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 110.

  39. Emil F. Rössler, Die Gründung der Universität Göttingen: Entwürfe, Berichte, und Briefe der Zeitgenossen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1855), p. 36. McClelland, State, Society, p. 42.

  40. McClelland, State, Society, p. 45.

  41. Howard, Protestant Theology, pp. 116–117.

  42. Ibid., p. 119.

  43. Ibid., p. 87.

  44. Ibid., p. 55.

  45. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 174.

  46. Ibid., p. 8.

  47. Ibid., p. 237.

  48. Ibid., p. 60.

  49. McClelland, State, Society, p. 96.

  50. Clark, Academic Charisma, p. 19.

  51. Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2006). See also Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, and Howard, Protestant Theology, p. 26.

  52. Clark, Academic Charisma, p. 211.

  53. T. C. W. Blanning, The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power: Old Regime Europe, 1660– 1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 242.

  54. W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775–1806. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 1.

  55. Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 133.

  56. Ibid. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1989), p. 72.

  57. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p. 7.

  58. Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 144. See also the table on p. 145.

  59. Ibid., p. 150.

  60. Ibid., p. 159. Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 25–28.

  61. For a note on how Leibniz converted Latin words to German ones, see Christian Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 278, note 46. See also G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, ed. and trans. David Garber and Roger Ariew (London: Hackett, 1991); and Protogaea, trans. and ed. Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  62. Eric Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 69.

  63. For Schiller’s views of Thomasius, see his letter to Goethe, May 29, 1799, in S. Seidel, ed., Briefe der Jahre 1798–1805, vol. 2 of Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe (Munich: Beck, 1985). See also Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment, and Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 201.

  64. Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 239
.

  65. Ibid., p. 201.

  66. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 41. Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 18–19.

  67. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 49.

  68. Ibid., p. 82.

  69. Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 161.

  70. Ibid., p. 162.

  71. Ibid., p. 176.

  72. Ibid., p. 180.

  73. Ibid., p. 243.

  74. For Frederick’s theories of government, see Reinhold Koser, Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen. 3 vols. (Berlin, 1925); also the catalog for the 1981 Berlin exhibition Preussen: Versuch einer Bilanz. 5 vols. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981); Theodor Schieder, Frederick the Great, ed. and trans. Sabina Berkeley and H. M. Scott (Harlow, U.K., and New York: Addison Wesley Longmann, 2000). This latter is generally regarded as the most recent substantive contribution to scholarship on Friedrich the Great and the Prussia of his time. See also Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 131.

  75. Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 132. The library was later auctioned off by order of Friedrich Wilhelm I.

  76. Schieder, Frederick the Great, p. 37.

  77. G. P. Gooch, Frederick the Great (New York: Dorset Press, 1990), p. 140.

  78. See also Schieder, Frederick the Great, p. 257.

  79. Ibid., Chapter 9, “Philosopher-King” discusses many of Friedrich’s books, pp. 233–267. The king’s intellectual work is also examined in Friedrich Meinecke’s Machiavellism, English translation published by Manchester University Press, 1957, pp. 275–310.

  80. Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 219.

  81. Ibid., p. 222.

  82. Ibid., p. 228.

  83. Schieder, Frederick the Great, pp. 43–44. Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 141.

  CHAPTER 2: BILDUNG AND THE INBORN DRIVE TOWARD PERFECTION

  1. See, for instance, John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule, and Religion, 1660–1750 (London, Thames & Hudson, 1976), p. 150; Karen Armstrong, A History of God from Abraham to the Present: The 4000-Year Quest for God (London: Heinemann, 1993), p. 330; Richard Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 102–103.

  2. Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), p. 31.

  3. Moses Mendelssohn, Über die Empfindungen (Berlin: Bey Christian Friedrich Voss, 1755), p. 52. Also Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 43.

  4. Half a century later, Johann Christoph Gatterer, one of the first historians to hold a chair at Göttingen, still mocked the Chinese: “They wish to appear far older than they are…They play with millions of years as children play with balls.” Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 78.

  5. Johann Salomo Semler, Beanwortung der Fragment eines Lebens Beschreibungen Berühmfer Gelehrten (Leipzig, 1766), vol. 2, p. 290. Hartmut Lehmann, Der Pietismus, in Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich: Beck, 2001), vol. 2, pp. 571–584.

  6. Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 82.

  7. Johann David Michaelis, “Schreiben an Herrn Professor Schlötzer die Zeitrechnung von der Sündflut bis auf Salomo betreffend,” in Zerstreute kleine Schriften. 2 vols. (Jena, in der akademischen Buchhandlung, 1794), vol. 1, pp. 262ff.

  8. Reill, German Enlightenment, pp. 78–79.

  9. Reill, German Enlightenment, pp. 92–93.

  10. Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 220.

  11. Ibid., p. 90.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Johann David Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht. 6 vols. (Frankfurt, 1770–1775), pp. 88ff.

  14. August Ludwig von Schlözer, Allgemeine nordische Geschichte: Forsetzungen der Algemeinen Welt-Historie durch eine Geselschaft von Gelehrten in Teutschland und Engeland ausgefertiget. Part 31 (Halle, 1771), p. 263.

  15. August Ludwig von Schlözer, Verstellung der Universal-Historie. 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1772–1773), vol. 2, p. 273.

  16. Ursula Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis: Die Rolle d. Sinnlichkeit in d. Asthetik d. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972). Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 56.

  17. H. R. Schweizer, ed., Theoretische Ästhetik: Die grundlegenden Abschnitte der “Aesthetica” (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983). This comprises edited extracts from the original Frankfurt (1750–1758) edition.

  18. Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 61.

  19. Ibid., p. 202.

  20. Ibid., p. 62.

  21. Ibid., p. 65. Later, Martin Heidegger would argue that it is possible to philosophize in only two languages: Greek and German.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Isaak Iselin, Über die Geschichte der Menschheit. 2 vols. (Basel, 1768), vol. 1, pp. 7–8.

  24. Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 217.

  25. Ibid., p. 219.

  26. Ibid., p. 214.

  27. Walter Hofer, Geschichtschreibung und Weltanschauung: Betrachtungen zum Werk Friedrich Meineckes (Munich: Oldenborg, 1950), pp. 370f. The standard work on Sturm und Drang in English is Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953).

  28. Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 98.

  29. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 36.

  30. Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 126.

  31. Ibid., p. 50.

  32. Ibid., p. 104.

  33. I thank Werner Pfenning for this information.

  34. Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 156.

  35. Ibid., p. 157.

  36. Ibid., p. 187.

  37. Ibid., p. 158.

  38. Ibid., p. 106.

  39. Ibid., p. 130.

  40. Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 17–18. Johann Blumenbach’s The Institutions of Physiology was translated into English by John Elliotson in 1817, printed “by Bensley for E. Cox,” and dedicated to HRH Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex.

  41. Lenoir, Strategy of Life, p. 19.

  42. Ibid., p. 20.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Ibid., p. 26.

  45. Ibid., pp. 36–37.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid., p. 43.

  48. Ibid., p. 48.

  49. Ibid., p. 50.

  50. Ibid., p. 197.

  51. Ibid., p. 202.

  52. Ibid., p. 310.

  53. Ibid., p. 343.

  54. Ibid., p. 391.

  55. Peter Hanns Reill, “History and the Life Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Chapter 2 of George G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), pp. 21ff.

  56. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, Preussischen Akademie des Wissenschaften, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Berlin, 1903–06) vol. 1, p. 262.

  57. Lenoir, Strategy of Life, p. 27.

  58. In this, he was much influenced by his brother, Alexander. See Ilse Jahn, Dem Leben auf der Spur: Die biologischen Forschungen Alexander von Humboldts (Leipzig, Jena, Berlin: Urania-Verlag, 1969), pp. 40ff.

  59. I have used mainly Paul Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt. 2 vols. (Ohio State University Press, 1980), in this case, vol. 2, pp. 394ff. But see also Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Essai sur les langes du nouveau continent,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 300–341; and Clemens Menze, Humboldts Lehre (Ratingen bei Düsseldorf: Henn, 1965).

  60. Friedrich Schiller, Die Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. Siegfried Seidel (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), 2 vols; Clemens Menze, Wilhelm von Humboldt und Christian Gottlob Heyne (Ratingen bei Düsseldorf: Henn, 1966); Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993). I am grateful to Dr. Gisele Mettele for drawing this reference to my attention.

  61. Pinkard, German Philosophy, p. 7.

  62.
Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 7; Blanning, Power of Culture, p. 205.

  CHAPTER 3: WINCKELMANN, WOLF, AND LESSING: THE THIRD GREEK REVIVAL AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCHOLARSHIP

  1. For the Basel of Burckhardt’s day, see Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

  2. Peter Burke, Introduction to Jacob Burckhardt: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 12.

  3. For Burckhardt’s conception of cultural history, see Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially Chapters 4 and 5.

  4. Christopher Charles Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabiae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 85, 177, and 215–232.

  5. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 12.

  6. Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 6.

  7. Butler, Tyranny of Greece, p. 14.

  8. Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism, pp. 6–7.

  9. Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

  10. Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity, p. 27.

  11. C. W. Ceram, Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology, trans. E. B. Garside and Sophie Wilkins (London: V. Gollancz, 1971), p. 4. Published originally as Götter, Gräber und Gelehrte (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1949).

  12. Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity, p. 104. See also Wolfgang Leppmann, Winckelmann (London: Gollancz, 1971), p. 170.

  13. Butler, Tyranny of Greece, p. 26.

  14. Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism, p. 39. For general background see Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1989).

  15. J. Eiselein, ed., Johann Winckelmanns sämtliche Werke (Donauöschingen, 1825–29), vol. 6, pp. 297–299.