by Peter Watson
THE RETURN OF THE “MANY-SIDED” MEN
Winckelmann may have been the German equivalent of Petrarch, but it was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) who was the Marsilio Ficino of the north, the Renaissance figure who wrote on everything from philosophy to Christianity to astronomy to magic to mathematics. Generally regarded as the founder of modern German literature, Lessing too was a scholar, an antiquarian, a philosopher, a philologist, even a theologian, the first of the “many-sided men” who would characterize the third renaissance in Germany. Above all, Lessing was a symbol of the new, of the new world that existed in Germany—and to an extent throughout Europe—in the eighteenth century, which we have been exploring. This was nowhere more evident than in the fact that Lessing became the first famous German writer to live by his pen.
Born in 1729 in Kamenz, northeast of Dresden, he was the son of a pastor and one of twelve children, five of whom died in childhood (not an unusual casualty rate in those days).28 Lessing had a precocious passion for books and, at the age of six, it is said, refused to be painted with a birdcage in his hand, demanding instead a stack of books. He attended the University of Leipzig in 1746. Then known as “Little Paris,” Leipzig was the center of fashion and publishing, and where Johann Gottsched promoted his literary reforms in the Deutsche Gesellschaft.29
For the reasons we have been considering, the first generation of creative German writers with a voice of their own emerged around 1750. The most celebrated of these figures, who was slightly ahead of Lessing, was Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), who published the first three cantos of his religious epic, Der Messias (The Messiah), in 1748.30 The publication of these cantos “of astonishingly sustained power, discipline and abundant imagery,” had a profound effect upon German readers. To be understood sympathetically today, they must be read against mid-eighteenth-century theories of genius—that the products of genius are glimpses of the divine.31 Classical in form, the cantos switch from religion to science to abstract philosophical subjects, interspersed with vivid real episodes, all sustained by brilliant language, the aim—one aim—being to show that the poet can foment as much enthusiasm and faith as the Messiah.
Klopstock was a many-sided man, too. In his treatise Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (The German Republic of Scholars; 1774), which impressed young writers like Goethe, he broadcast his vision of a “republic of learning,” which found expression, among other places, in his metaphor of the “Hain” or “grove,” the German equivalent of the Greek Helicon.32 This idea prompted a number of young writers at the University of Göttingen to form a circle called the Hainbund, where the natural and social sciences, literature, and the arts were discussed in equal measure.
Though Lessing was interested in—and to an extent stimulated by—Gottsched and Klopstock, it was a less well-known figure, Christlob Mylius (1722–54), a cousin of Lessing’s, who introduced him to the theater. Lessing wrote a number of early plays though they were overshadowed, to begin with, by his hack (but often brilliant) journalism and the ambitious quarterly he inaugurated that dealt with the drama, as a result of which Lessing was offered a position as reviewer for the Berlinische privilegierte Zeitung (which later became the well-known Vossische Zeitung).33 He now had a regular income and abandoned playwriting to concentrate on criticism. In doing so, he formed a firm friendship with two other many-sided men, Friedrich Nicolai (bookseller, editor, publisher, writer, philosopher, satirist) and Moses Mendelssohn (philosopher, mathematician, critic—a man who even risked criticizing the poetry of Friedrich the Great), and all three began to be talked about in Berlin.
Over the years, Lessing started, or had a hand in, no fewer than five periodicals, designed to raise the standard of German literature and rescue it from mediocrity.34 He studied Winckelmann (disagreeing with many of his conclusions about Greek art), dipped into archaeology, and investigated what to him were the crucial differences between art and poetry.35 In 1765, he was offered the chance to become a dramatist and consultant to a new theater company in Hamburg. This was nothing less than an attempt to create a national theater in Germany. It opened in April 1767, at which time Lessing published the first issue of his fourth periodical, Die Hamburgische Dramaturgie (The Hamburg Dramaturgy), the aim of which was to stimulate general interest in the theater. Lessing’s best-known advocacy in the Dramaturgy was that stories about those whose circumstances are nearest to our own move us most and that the presence of kings and princes on stage, though adding grandeur, removes an element of familiarity, making identification with the characters more difficult and therefore less affecting.36
Neither the theater at Hamburg nor the Dramaturgy was as successful as Lessing hoped. This setback was compounded when, on a trip to Italy to survey its antiquities, he met and married Eva König. In January 1778 she gave birth to a child who died within twenty-four hours, the mother herself dying five days later.37 In the midst of his despair, Lessing found himself locked into one of the great fights of his life. The previous year, he had begun to publish in Zur Geschichte und Literatur (To History and Literature), his fifth periodical, excerpts from the manuscripts of Hermann Reimarus’s Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Apologia for the Reasonable Worshippers of God). Reimarus (1694–1768) was a respected Hamburg schoolteacher who, in his manuscript, argued that Jesus was “a noble-minded but imprudent agitator,” that the Resurrection was an invention of the disciples, and that, therefore, at root, Christianity is based on deceit. The problem with the manuscript was that although Lessing wanted to see it published, Reimarus only ever intended publication in a later, more tolerant time. The two men realized there would be reprisals if the book were published openly and so it was released in installments, anonymously.38 And indeed, the Apologia brought about a storm of protest from orthodox Protestants. Lessing’s opponents, realizing they could not defeat him intellectually, importuned the Duke of Brunswick, where Lessing was living, to censor him. Financially dependent on the duke, Lessing was forced to comply.
It was a blow, but during the fight Lessing exchanged letters with Reimarus’s daughter and, in so doing, conceived a notion for reviving an earlier exercise. So came about Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), his masterpiece, published in 1779.
Lessing’s “masterpiece among his masterpieces” was written in blank verse almost a decade before Goethe and Schiller.39 The plot was taken from a Boccaccio fable in which a father possessed a ring “which had the power of making the wearer, who believed in it, agreeable to God and men.”40 This father loved his three sons equally and so, unwilling to favor one above the others, commissioned two replica rings and bestowed one on each son. After his death, the sons were unable to agree on who had the genuine ring and took their dispute to a judge. This wise man’s verdict was that none of the rings was genuine.
Nathan the Wise is set in Palestine during the Crusades and, to begin with, it is a play about a man, a Christian Templar, and a woman, the adopted daughter of a Jew, who fall in love not knowing that they are brother and sister.41 The blood link is revealed soon enough to prevent them from marrying, but, at the same time, they discover that their father was Saladin’s brother. Saladin the Muslim is in effect one of the three sons in the Boccaccio fable. With him, the other main protagonists are Nathan, the Jew, and the Christian Templar. Saladin asks Nathan which of the three great religions is the true one, and Nathan replies with the tale of the three rings. Throughout the twists of the plot, Nathan is portrayed as a wise soul—tolerant and understanding. Saladin, proud and noble himself, recognizes Nathan’s qualities. It is the Christians who, to begin with, are contemptuous and intolerant, in particular toward the Jews. The changing fortunes of the characters eventually soften the Templar’s intolerance, though the Christian Patriarch doesn’t change. And this is the point of the play: Lessing shows us that there are three kinds of individual, morally speaking: those incapable of moral judgments; those who can see the right course of action, yet do nothing; a
nd those who see what is right and act accordingly. The middle group suffers Lessing’s unmitigated scorn.42
Lessing is now recognized as the dominant figure in German literary life before Goethe. His plays helped bring to an end the chronic provincialism of German literature and his criticism ended the hold that French literary models had over Germany, in particular what he called in one of his letters Gottsched’s “slavish adherence” to Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille, and Voltaire. Lessing realized that Shakespeare was a much better model; he argued that Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet were the first modern dramas to achieve the same emotional impact of Sophocles. He argued that Dr. Faust, known to German audiences since the Middle Ages through a puppet play, would lend itself to the Shakespearean approach. This “provided a foundation on which the Weimar classicism of Goethe and Schiller was to build in the closing decade of the century” (Goethe’s original version of the drama—the Urfaust, written in 1772–75, wasn’t discovered until late in the nineteenth century, and was never performed. But Faust, Der Tragödie erster Teil is widely viewed now as the decisive moment of innovative change on the German stage).43
Not least, Lessing’s meticulous investigation of the Gospels was the first dispassionate scientific examination of their origins, boosting scholarship. In the words of one critic, he was “the most admirable figure in the history of German thought and literature between Luther and Nietzsche.”44
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCHOLARSHIP
We now need to examine two others who were to convert Winckelmann’s theories into definite institutional innovation.
The development of classical studies as we understand them today owes much to the work and “uncompromising vision” of Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824). Nineteenth-century classical scholarship—the “conquest of the ancient world by scholarship,” as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the eminent nineteenth-century philologist put it—properly commences with Wolf. Wolf from the beginning rejected any prospect of theological training and was determined to rid classical studies of any clerical control. He was not the first modern philologist, but his rigorous methods of source criticism shaped and promoted philology as the new queen of disciplines. His 1795 study of Homer has been described by Anthony Grafton as “the charter of classical scholarship as an independent discipline.”45
Born in 1759, the son of a schoolteacher, Wolf could read some Greek at the age of six, and rather more Latin and French. At Göttingen, although he kept his distance from the most famous classicist there, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), he nonetheless emulated the older man’s dedication: like Heyne, he slept for just two nights a week for six months, so as to immerse himself in his beloved classical authors as quickly as possible, keeping himself awake by sitting with his feet in a bowl of cold water. He would bind up one eye with a bandage to rest it, while he used the other. His dedication was reminiscent of Winckelmann and the block of wood he attached to his foot.
Wolf’s devotion paid off. In 1783, at the age of twenty-four, he was offered the position of professor of pedagogy and philosophy at the University of Halle.46 At Halle, the original home of the seminar, he introduced his own, aimed at turning out specialist classical scholars. He succeeded so well that his seminar became the model for the new German universities of the nineteenth century. Wolf, says Suzanne Marchand, was haughtily convinced of the power of philological study “to instil self-discipline, idealism, and nobility of character,” a conviction that spread throughout the civil service and professions as the nineteenth century wore on.
His best-known works, the Prolegomena ad Homerum (Prolegomena to Homer; 1795), and the Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft (Classical Scholarship: A Summary; 1807), were not especially original but his painstaking textual interpretations, combined with some sharp common-sense thinking on Homer and his times, placed philological expertise above the philosophical. “[Wolf] was the first to show that access to the Greek mind was to proceed by means of strict attention to linguistic, grammatical and orthographical detail.”47
In order to support his argument that Homer’s poems were written down only in the mid-sixth century B.C., when Pisistratus was tyrant of Athens, Wolf used the fact that linguistics varied in the past to show how, in the earliest manuscripts, entire sections had been interpolated; and, by studying what was missing (“the argument from silence”), he deduced further conclusions—for example, classical commentators found no mention of writing in the Homeric poems. In the process, Wolf was open about his methods, admitting the difference between what he knew and what he merely conjectured, identifying which authorities he trusted and which he did not.48
In the Darstellung, he distinguished between Greeks and Romans on the one hand, and Egyptians, Israelites, and Persians on the other. He said unequivocally that only the Greeks and Romans possessed “a higher Geistescultur (intellectual culture).” The “Orientals,” as he described the rest, had merely reached the level of “bürgerliche Policirung oder Civilisation [policed civility or civilisation].” He thought cultures need “security, order and leisure” so as to evolve “noble perceptions and knowledge” and this had not happened in antiquity outside Greece and Rome. Literature in particular was vital for a culture—it was the free, untrammeled product of a nation. For Wolf, therefore, Greek and Roman civilization alone constituted Altertum (antiquity). Egyptians, Israelites and the rest were “Barbari.”49 In his full-fledged scheme, Altertumswissenschaft, for Wolf, comprised no fewer than twenty-four disciplines—from grammar to epigraphy to numismatics to geography, all being needed for full access to a text.
As a scholar, Wolf’s reputation was supreme. Goethe attended his lectures, and in 1796 Wolf was offered the chair at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, then the summit in classics. He turned it down and for the next decade continued at Halle until the French occupation of the city in 1806 changed everything. It might have been a disaster, but only three years later he was offered and accepted the first professorship of Altertumswissenschaft at the new University of Berlin.
Suzanne Marchand argues that Wolf’s pursuit of philological expertise “contributed to the turning inward of the university community after 1800.” This was an important innovation in scholarship. “Wolfian haughty insistence on ‘disinterestedness’ and scholarly autonomy imbued philology and Altertumswissenschaft with a kind of social detachment rare among eighteenth-century scholars, many of whom had depended on the patronage of aristocrats or income from a second job outside the university. Eighteenth-century professors, too, had generally been esteemed for their lecture skills rather than for their independent research.”
Winckelmann had made more of the comparison between the Greeks and the moderns than between the Greeks and the Germans. The advent of the wars with France changed all that too. Amid comprehensive defeat, the parallels between the German predicament and that of ancient Athens—politically fragmented, conquered by force of arms, yet having a superior culture (to Rome) united by a single language—became more plausible. “In the shadow of Prussia’s defeat in the Battle of Jena in 1806, German philhellenism underwent a profound change; its anti-aristocratic aspects were transformed into pronational sentiments, and a new form of pedagogy, built on the notion of Bildung, made its peace with the state and the status quo.”50 Instead of birth or position, neohumanism—the foundational belief of the new Bildungsbürgertum—judged an individual according to his or her cultural capabilities.
One of Wolf’s close friends was Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt shared with Wolf a belief in the study of the ancients. For him, the study of classical texts provided a means of meeting the more impressive self-educated individuals who had existed in the past and it was also, he felt, a way to “discipline the mind.” Both Wolf and Schiller, to whom Humboldt was also close, convinced him of the suitability of ancient Greece as a countervailing influence to the social fragmentation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1802, Humboldt was appointed Prussian ambassador to
the Holy See, providing him with ample opportunity to live among the antiquities of Rome. This became practically relevant in 1808, when a number of Prussian schemes for reform were initiated, stimulated by Napoleon’s comprehensive defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Jena. These reforms, carried through between 1806 and 1812, were implemented under the aegis of two energetic nobles, Karl August von Hardenberg (1750–1822) and Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein (1770–1840). The most important of the reform measures were the freeing of serfs, the granting of a (limited) form of citizenship to Jews, certain economic reforms, and a rethinking of the bureaucracy—which is where Humboldt came in. A new department of the Interior Ministry—for educational and ecclesiastical affairs—was created, and Humboldt, a friend of Hardenberg and Altenstein, was made minister in charge. Until then, educational institutions in Germany (in particular primary and secondary schools) had been administered by the church, but Hardenberg and Altenstein were convinced a new relationship between the state and the schools was needed.51 Humboldt’s responsibilities included the supervision of schools, universities, the art and science academies, cultural associations, and the Royal Theater, all close to his heart. He now became patron and guardian of the educational ideal that had shaped himself.