The German Genius

liberation also played a part in changing attitudes, making the universities more popular than they had ever been. 17
    Between 1818, when a measure of political stability returned to Prussia (as to the rest of Europe), and 1848, the year of revolution, the pursuit of scientific and scholarly research became the defining characteristic of the German university. “ Wissenschaftsideologie glorified discovery and creativity within the universities; and…It assumed that one obtains academic knowledge through the rigorous application of well-defined methods of investigation which moreover means that the tools of discovery can be made available to large numbers of students.” 18 This was the new Prussian concept of learning.
    It is important to say what it was not as well as what it was. In Germany the revolution in scholarship began with the Kantian critiques but owed just as much to classical philology, history, and the discovery of the Indo-European languages, covered in Chapter 8. Intellectually, this was all as innovative as the discoveries in the natural sciences that were occurring simultaneously in France through Lavoisier, Laplace, and Georges Cuvier. In Germany, though, the sciences did not play this role. Creativity in science did not begin there until after about 1830. 19
    Speculative philosophy apart, classical philology epitomized the German Wissenschaft from the time of Heyne and Wolf on—it was its new techniques and standards of rigor that were later transferred into law, history, and other branches of scholarship. Moreover, the fierce intellectual rigor that Heyne and Wolf brought to classical philology, and the accomplishments of this approach, stimulated new specialities. Germanic culture itself was one. Romantics such as Friedrich von der Hagen, Achim von Arnim, and Clemens Brentano had rescued from oblivion large amounts of otherwise forgotten old Teutonic literature. The brothers Grimm—Jacob and Wilhelm—produced jointly Kinder-und Hausmärchen , a work on which their fame was based, while Jacob alone published his no less famous Deutsche Grammatik of 1819–37. This, together with their etymological dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch , known as “der Grimm,” and of which they completed only four of the eventual thirty-plus volumes, helped establish a rigorous basis for the advance of Germanic philology. 20
    Likewise, in historiography, the critical tradition that began in classical philology was espoused by Barthold Niebuhr. Born in Copenhagen, Niebuhr was briefly a civil servant before taking up a position at the new University of Berlin, where he gave a famous series of lectures in 1811–12 which he then turned into a book, Römische Geschichte ( History of Rome ; 1811–32), a no-less-impressive multivolume work. It was here that Niebuhr employed critical analysis to the sources of Roman history so as to identify a sound narrative among the myths and oral traditions that had come down from antiquity. Niebuhr’s account was overtaken and improved by the writings of Theodor Mommsen later on, but even so his Rome was a sensation, widely regarded as history of a new kind, and proved to be a model for Leopold von Ranke. 21 The disciplines of philology and history were, importantly, centered in the philosophical faculty, and this contributed further to the rise in importance of that faculty, a changeover in priorities that, as we saw, began in the eighteenth century at Halle and Göttingen.
    “T HE M OST E XACT AND E XALTED OF G ERMAN S CIENCES”
     
    Their common romantic roots gave the different branches of the new scholarship in Germany a striking unity of theme and outlook. 22 Over and above that, however, there was also a transformation in critical method.
    Together with “ Wissenschaft ” and “ Bildung ,” the term “ Kritik ” was emerging as a basic category of the academic approach. It had first been encountered, of course, as a more or less technical term in Kantian philosophy in the 1780s, where it exemplified a turning away from the existing content of knowledge toward a critical assessment of the sources of knowledge and the validity of existing learning. By the time the University of Berlin was fully established in the 1820s, scholars still used “ Kritik ” in this sense (the method is called quellenkritisch ). The term implied a constant, skeptical evaluation of sources. It implied too that the critical scrutiny of evidence should precede the more constructive