The project bore some of the same contradictory features we have just seen in the condition of the early Bildungsbürger, because in most ways German society gave little evidence of spontaneous activity by individuals. John Brewer and Eckhardt Hellmuth note that many activities and projects carried out by private initiative in Britain remained the province of the state in Germany. “The spectrum ranges from schools and theaters to hospitals, which were frequently maintained by private subscriptions.”17 In cultural matters, however, Germans proved perfectly capable of spontaneous action; the very absence of good means of communication encouraged people (partly inspired by the contrast they knew to exist with other countries) to create or foster them. From the 1720s a number of writers and publicists devoted themselves to developing a single literary language for all of Germany, so as to overcome the many linguistic divisions that hindered cultural interchange. Some of the same people advocated improvements in roads and in the postal service, without which, as one put it, “our knowledge of the world remains full of defects, all commercial and literary commerce nearly impossible, and the circle of friendship, humanity’s greatest good fortune, limited to the narrow region of our physical surroundings.”18 The patriotic and literary societies and masonic lodges that sprang up in the next decades gave further expression to this sense that Germany both needed such efforts and offered a particularly favorable field for them. Just as the territorial states took advantage of the relative political vacuum created by German fragmentation to expand their power by developing new administrative networks and the cultural institutions to support them inside their borders, so did the promoters of Enlightenment seize the chance to create webs of their own so as to gain contact with distant resources through which to develop the potential capacities that they believed awaited realization in themselves.
The promoters of this expanded culture were a varied lot; no more than in France can they be identified with a single social class. James Sheehan likens them to a vein of ore running through German society at many levels, rather than a delimited stratum, and Isabel Hull rejects the label “new Bürgertum” proposed by other scholars in favor of the more sociologically neutral description “practitioners of civil society.” Both (along with other writers) emphasize the presence of nobles, most of them office holders, in the group, casting doubt on older views of the Enlightenment as a “bourgeois” movement.19 This does not mean that the social identities of these people were not significant, however. The largest component of the literary and patriotic societies, and of the masonic lodges, were fledgling Bildungsbürger – state officials, academics, lawyers, judges, schoolteachers, pastors, booksellers, journalists, and estate administrators. Merchants, manufacturers and other Wirtschaftsbürger belonged to the associations too (and I will have something more to say about them in a moment), but in markedly smaller numbers. Between 1783 and 1796 some eighty professors, sixty state functionaries, and thirty pastors published articles in periodicals seeking to foster Enlightenment, alongside only five businessmen. Around 60 percent of the subscribers to such journals were Bildungsbürger, compared with 7 percent who were merchants and traders (the remainder were a mix of types, including the already-mentioned nobles).20 What distinguished the advocates of Aufklärung and Bildung from others around them, however, was not their social position (which, all the same, continued to define them locally, and to provide resources for their activities), but their insertion into the networks created by the publications, communications, and correspondence that tied the local societies together. One contemporary writer, Christoph Wieland, described those active in the various associations as “in a certain sense the actual men of the nation, because their immediate circle of activity is all of Germany,” a description hardly applicable to anyone else at the time.21
Given both Wieland’s description and what was noted above about the relationship of incipient Bildungsbürger to the old ständisch order, it should not be surprising that among the ideas fostered inside these groups was a new notion of citizenship, closely related to the one nurtured by the states. In order to replace traditional Stadtbürgertum (urban citizenship) with Staatsbürgertum (state citizenship), individuals had to exhibit Bürgerlichkeit, the attribute or disposition that made individuals able to become independent participants in civil society. Although every person bore the potential to develop this quality, achieving it required a certain level of personal and moral development. Bringing people to this level was precisely the aim of the associations devoted to Bildung and Aufklärung, whose goal of collective self-cultivation and mutually beneficial exchange with others provided a model of the kind of social relations bürgerliche Gesellschaft aimed to establish. In the smaller associations as in the larger one membership was often declared to be independent of the old Stände, and people of different social conditions were expected to treat each other as equals. “Character” began to acquire a new meaning, no longer referring to a social and occupational identity but to a cluster of personal qualities that represented “individual responsibility and self-improvement.” Local communities were still the chief places where Bürgerlichkeit operated, but belonging to them took on new dimensions, involving personal development best nurtured by cultural resources diffused through a range of distant locations.22
The new notion of citizenship seemed full of promise to many, but it was seen to harbor two fundamental problems, both of which would recur in the subsequent history of bourgeois life and culture. The first arose from its claim to inclusiveness, even to a kind of democratic universality. Every (male) person who developed himself to a certain level could be a Bürger and a patriot (that is, a person devoted to civic improvement), and many of the new associations formed for the purpose declared themselves to be independent of traditional social distinctions. In Hamburg Jews were allowed to join the Patriotic Society, and there was discussion about extending citizenship rights to them (like the actual abolition of the older requirements for citizenship, and of the guilds tied up with them, this proposal was only realized in the mid nineteenth century). But older forms of exclusiveness were replaced by a new one, since only those with the personal resources to engage in self-cultivation could advance themselves in this way. Groups that declared themselves open to “the public” still set membership dues that only well-off people could afford, and one quality many of them required was “independence,” a condition that excluded those who had to work for wages.23
Immanuel Kant recognized this difficulty when he wrote that “everybody is born as a potential citizen [möglicher Staatsbürger], but in order to become such, he must possess some means [Vermögen], whether it be in merits [Verdiensten] or in things [Sachen].” Without such “means,” individuals could not sustain the independence citizenship required.24 Kant’s formulation already recognized both the connection and the difference between the later categories of Wirtschaftsbürger and Bildungsbürger, since the latter did indeed claim their “merits,” that is their qualifications not their wealth, as the basis for their position. Perhaps his formulation somewhat obscured the attempt by those Wirtschaftsbürger who participated in patriotic and literary societies to pursue Bürgerlichkeit through “merits” too, joining their more intellectual cousins in the pursuit of self-cultivation. The main point, however, is that he recognized that the ideal of universal citizenship could not do away with significant differences between individuals. In this he was joined by other advocates of the new kind of citizenship, who like him hoped that the interaction promoted by the various kinds of cultural and moral associations could lessen the impact of these differences. One of these was the writer and critic Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, who was troubled by the way that masonic lodges, in the very act of seeking to transcend the old divisions between Stände, made people aware of other inequalities, some of which emerged in the meetings themselves. Thus he wrote in 1780 that bürgerliche Gesellschaft “wholly against its own intention,” cannot unite people “without dividing them, without bolstering the gaps betwee
n them, without raising up walls of division between them.” Instead of the hoped-for relations between “just plain men and just plain men” what surfaced were ones that ranged “certain kinds of men against certain others.” Lessing did not say what kinds of distinctions he had in mind, and wealth was doubtless one of them. But he was aware of rifts produced by contrasts in occupation and education as well. He still hoped that organizations such as masonic lodges could work to “narrow as much as possible those divisions through which men become so foreign to each other.”25 It seems unlikely, however, that he thought the activities of such associations could overcome the difference between those people who had one or another of the kinds of “means” Kant pointed to and those who did not, since very few people on the lower side of that line belonged to the lodges.
The second dilemma of the new Bürgerlichkeit had to do with the tension it created between traditional forms of participation in local communities and the external involvements that self-development was seen to require. The problem was especially acute in Germany, because the web of connections made up of clubs and associations and the materials (publications and letters) they shared and exchanged was the only national network the country possessed, as Wieland recognized when he referred to those people who animated it as the sole “men of the nation.” Intellectually nourishing as participation in such activities might be, it could also feel thin and insubstantial to those accustomed to more compact kinds of communal life. In 1797 Christian Garve revealed the obverse side of Wieland’s image when he bemoaned the separation and isolation that attachment to such distant relations could bring: because those who developed viewpoints grounded in a cosmopolitan culture cut themselves off from the people around them, the new kind of Gesellschaft was stalked by Einsamkeit, loneliness.26
One person who felt just this kind of separation as a consequence of his attempt to make a career in the developing Bildungsbürgertum was Johann Gottfried Herder, who developed the age’s most substantial defense of cultural difference and of what the later anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call “local knowledge.” After attending the grammar school in the small town where his father was a schoolteacher, Herder took a degree at the University at Königsberg, where he attended Kant’s lectures during the 1760s, after which he accepted a post as a teacher in the prestigious cathedral school at Riga. But his discomfort with the distance this put him from his origins led him to voice nostalgia for “the true commerce of hearts and minds” obtainable in traditional communities, and he resigned his place, beginning the turn that would make him a pioneer of ethnographic description and an opponent of the cosmopolitan rationality of which his one-time teacher Kant was a prime exemplar.27
Very similar tensions appeared in other instances where the ideas and values spread by the new cultural networks made an impact, and notably in the cities that became important entry points for it. Hamburg provides the exemplary case. The largest and most prosperous German commercial city, it was also one of the most independent, remaining an autonomous republic until it was absorbed into Bismarck’s North German Confederation in 1867, and the Reich in 1871 (even then it remained exempt from certain customs duties until the late 1880s). Hamburg’s power depended largely on its economy, centered on foreign trade (England and South America were major partners), and on refinishing imported goods such as sugar and textiles. But the city’s position was also grounded in Germany’s peculiar constitution: like other places, it was able to preserve its independence because it could play off various more powerful states against each other, aided by diplomatic connections made through the Imperial Court. In this way the city protected itself especially against the nearby Danish monarchy’s attempts to absorb or dominate it.28 The city’s independence was one reason it was able to develop strong ties with distant places, especially England; for many these were closer than its links to other parts of Germany. Its already-mentioned openness to outsiders meant that by the eighteenth century a number of its leading families had foreign backgrounds. Some were said to know more about South America or Britain than about Germany, having traveled to London and Peru but never to Berlin. Merchant sons were often sent to England to apprentice and learn business methods, (a practice not limited to Hamburg, to be sure), sometimes marrying women they met there, adopting British dress and customs, and giving their children English names.
These circumstances contributed to making Hamburg a favorable point of entry for Enlightenment ideas. A visiting schoolmaster from Thuringia found himself bowled over by the variety of publications from all over the world available in the city’s bookstores (as well as by the constant movement and noise of the streets), making him feel the “narrow limits” of his own town. The Aufklärung in Hamburg proceeded in the same way as in other cities, through the founding and activity of literary and patriotic societies, as well as masonic lodges, and the periodicals and communications they published or exchanged. But it had a special role as the place where the first of the numerous “moral weeklies” that circulated in Germany in the 1730s and 1740s was founded. Called Der Patriot, and modeled on such English publications as the Spectator and the Tatler, the magazine appeared between 1724 and 1726. It aimed to improve the moral behavior of Bürger families and individuals, through criticizing indulgence, laxity, and excess of all kinds, and recommending such qualities as earnestness, hard work, and moderation. These are good bourgeois virtues, but many Hamburg citizens bridled against the new vehicle through which they were being recommended; some may have felt they were the targets of the critiques, or that their position in town life was being challenged. A lively pamphlet war developed, and the excitement generated by the controversy helped the paper to achieve wide circulation, some issues selling as many as 5,000 copies. But many townspeople would have been happy to see the paper banned; it survived because the group sponsoring it contained a number of substantial citizens who, as members of the city Senate, were able to afford it protection. A similar paper founded ten years earlier but without such defenders had been forced to close down in the face of the same kind of opposition.29
Although material that would allow for a social analysis of who made up the two sides of this dispute may never be available, the debate seems to have pitted people who saw distant connections and relationships as pertinent to issues of moral criticism and personal improvement against others who preferred to refer such matters to traditional local authorities. The earlier weekly had been edited by a musician and writer who was the secretary of the English consul in the city, and the group around Der Patriot contained a nucleus of scholars and intellectuals who had encountered Enlightenment ideas in the Netherlands, or who had contacts with people in places that were early centers of new thinking such as Halle; a common recommendation in the paper’s articles was that readers expand their knowledge of foreign places, and some writings attempted to correct misinformation about them. Imitators of the Hamburg journal in other places took names such as Göttingen’s Der Bürger, Danzig’s Der Freydenker (“Freethinker”) and Berlin’s Der Weltbürger (“World Citizen”).30 Neither Der Patriot nor these other publications were wholly secular; all accepted the need to retain a close tie between religion and morality. But theirs was a religion neither dogmatic nor defined by local institutions and practices, creating a contrast with their opponents, who preferred to vest moral authority in their pastors and other members of the traditional Gelehrtenstand.31 Clearly both sides were Bürger, and each was represented in the Senate, so that what chiefly divided them seems to have been no clear social difference but their contrasting attitudes toward local and distant involvements (along with whatever personal circumstances and relationships helped to determine them). The situation was reproduced in other German towns, and it recalls ones we encountered earlier. In England, as Dror Wahrman noted, quarrels and conflicts of various kinds sometimes attributed to class differences actually set people whose positions derived largely from local relationships against socially similar others who were inserted in
to national networks. And in France, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret concludes that class position seldom accounts for the difference between those who supported reform and those who resisted it; what set the two groups apart was a contrast between those who, for whatever reason, wanted to open up local life to broader national currents and influences and those who strove to shield it from them.32
Rulers, Bürger, “movers and doers”
The German lands could not escape being profoundly affected by the convulsions that rocked France at the end of the eighteenth century. Although many people were horrified by what seemed mere chaotic violence, others sought to bring the French example home. But the very different conditions of German life, its fragmentation and lack of a political center, and the absence in the German states of the crisis conditions that brought the French monarchy toward collapse, kept the country free of any similar upheaval. France made its strongest impact on Germany not through the Revolution itself, but through the wars it set off and in particular the domination Napoleon established over much of the country in the decade before his fall. So powerful was the effect of the French supremacy that one distinguished historian begins his account of nineteenth-century developments with the declaration: “In the beginning was Napoleon.”33
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