The German Genius

, showing the back of a man standing on top of a mountain, looking down on other mountaintops and clouds. Mysterious, but still technically faultless, this impressed Schinkel so much, it is said, that he gave up painting and turned to architecture.
    Contemporary political events also lent themselves to Friedrich’s style. Thanks to the Napoleonic Wars he developed a fierce loathing of France and an intense passion for his own country. His support for the various German liberation movements was expressed in scenes showing French soldiers lost among inhospitable German mountains. In general, though, his aim was to depict “the experience of divinity in a secular world” and this is what he tried to show in his melancholy renderings of the ruins of Gothic churches or dramatic forest landscapes. In his work, humans are more often than not helpless against the forces of overwhelming nature—Kant’s idea of the sublime.
    Friedrich’s fame peaked in 1820 when the Russian tsarevitch, Alexandra Feodorovna (born Princess Charlotte of Prussia), bought several of his pictures. In the wake of the Prussian restoration, his political attitudes brought about increasing official attacks on his art and, like Cornelius, he became an anachronism. He died in 1837, forgotten by all but a few.
    His emotional style of painting was rediscovered in the early twentieth century when the German Expressionists, Max Ernst, and other surrealists saw him as a similar visionary. Many painters in America were influenced by him, including the artists of the Hudson River school, the Rocky Mountain school, and the New England Luminists. Together with other Romantic painters—like J. M. W. Turner or John Constable—he helped to make landscape painting a major genre in Western art.

T HE R ISE OF THE E DUCATED M IDDLE C LASS : T HE E NGINES AND E NGINEERS OF M ODERN P ROSPERITY
     

Humboldt’s Gift: The Invention of Research and the Prussian (Protestant) Concept of Learning
     
    T he decades between 1790 and 1840 constitute the critical, formative period in the evolution of modern scholarship. By 1840 the natural and physical sciences, history and linguistics had forged the disciplinary divisions and had generated the central problems which would dominate academic learning into the twentieth century.” This is R. Steven Turner, in his 1972 Princeton PhD thesis, “The Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative, 1806–1848.” He continues: “Scholars of most European nations contributed to this heroic age of organised learning, but German scholars played the pre-eminent role.” 1
    An ideological change took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, so that by 1850 German universities had almost entirely been converted into research institutes, “geared to the expansion of learning in many esoteric fields.” 2 This “research imperative,” as Turner calls it, involved four innovations: (1) Publication of new results based upon original research became an accepted responsibility of a professor and the sine qua non for even a minor university appointment; (2) the universities began to build the infrastructure—libraries, seminars, and laboratories—that would support research; (3) teaching was redirected and attempted to initiate students into the methods of research; (4) the Prussian professoriate embraced a university ideology that glorified original research. It was in the German universities of the early nineteenth century that the “institutionalization of discovery” was integrated with teaching for the first time. 3 After 1860 this ideology extended to England and the United States.
    In some ways, as we have seen, the universities were the last place where this should have happened. Other institutions, such as the academies of science, had been quicker to respond to new intellectual trends (in Britain, for example). Eighteenth-century universities, as was discussed in Chapter 1, existed to “preserve and transmit” learning. The professoriate in the nineteenth century, however, felt that a creative function must be added to their teaching obligations. This new approach was outlined in a series of treatises by Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, all published in the course of the reforms carried through by Wilhelm von Humboldt. As the historian Friedrich Paulsen wrote: “[W]hoever wishes to enter upon a scholarly career, upon him is the demand to be placed that he not merely have learned the knowledge at hand,