The German Genius

but rather that he also be capable of producing knowledge out of his own independent activity…” 4
    The modern professor is a member of two communities: the institution where he teaches and the fellow scholars in his discipline. The first disciplinary community, says Turner, may be traced to Professors Johann Friedrich Pfaff at Helmstedt and Carl Friedrich Hindenburg at Leipzig, who founded Germany’s first specialized mathematics journal, the Archiv der reinen und angewandten Mathematik . In chemistry Karl Hufbauer identified Lorenz Crell at Helmstedt and his Chemisches Journal as the center of the newly emerging chemists’ community. In these fields, as among the classical philologists identified in Chapter 1, an inner circle was emerging. 5
    The significant point about these self-conscious communities was that they began to acquire authority . In the eighteenth century such authority had been limited because the state had a monopoly over hiring and firing and often simply did not consult either the faculty or the discipline. 6 (Göttingen was an exception, which accounts in part for its pre-eminence.) Attempts were made to encourage professors to publish, but not works of original scholarship: textbooks were what counted, not specialized monographs.
    That our modern concept of research had still to emerge is evident from the language of academics who, before 1790, spoke of “discoveries” ( Entdeckungen ) and “emendations” ( Verbesserungen ) in the sciences without ever using the word “research” ( Forschung ). Discoveries arose, it was assumed, from sheer force of intellect, from minds which fastened on a previously unrecognized relationship or that could order a mass of learning and so extract a higher generalization. It was, in other words, the prerogative of genius. On top of that, it was understood that some areas of the sciences were, essentially, static. J. D. Michaelis was just one who did not expect new truths to emerge in certain sciences: philosophy, law, theology, and much of history. 7
    Probably, nothing would have happened without Napoleon and the crushing defeats he imposed on Prussia. (Thomas Nipperdey opens his magisterial history of nineteenth-century Germany with the words, “In the beginning there was Napoleon.”) Reformers were swept into power. The country’s collapse, they believed, had stemmed from the “rotten core” of the Frederician garrison-state with its emphasis on “mechanical obedience and iron discipline.” A moral renewal was needed and that included education.
    This was carried through on three fronts: organizational, administrative, and ideological. 8 Old, weaker institutions were abolished, others amalgamated, and, most exciting of all, new universities founded at Berlin and Bonn.
    The reforms started in Königsberg, where King Friedrich Wilhelm III was impressed by the patriotism of the university faculty when his court moved there during Napoleon’s invasion. Friedrich Wilhelm turned down a delegation of Halle professors who wanted him to transfer the University of Halle in its entirety to Berlin, but he did agree to found an entirely new university in the city, and this proved crucial. Fichte, Schleiermacher, and F. A. Wolf had all migrated to Berlin, and the king’s decision provoked a great explosion of theorizing about universities. The critical move took place, however, when Hardenberg, one of the reform-minded ministers, brought Wilhelm von Humboldt back from a diplomatic sinecure in Rome to head up the newly created Department of Religious and Educational Affairs. Humboldt, having himself written on philology, was closer to Wolf than to anyone else, and they set out to recruit individual scholars themselves. The university opened its doors for the winter semester of 1810 with Fichte as the first (elected) rector. This began what Nipperdey calls “the religion of education” in nineteenth-century Germany. 9
    Humboldt succeeded in attracting a number of eminent scholars—the jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the anatomist Karl Asmund Rudolphi, plus Schleiermacher, Wolf himself, of course, J. C. Reil, and J. G. Bernstein. He also poached a raft of scientists from the Berlin Academy. In the early days, the faculty was strongest in philology and law, and here Berlin soon outshone Göttingen. In the sciences, however, it was not until the late 1820s that the new institute really began to shine. By then a second new university had been created at