The German Genius

was established in 1825. “Bonn’s modest seminar can be properly considered Prussia’s first step toward the network of large research institutes which by 1880 had made the German organisation of science world famous.” 36
    That expansion began after 1830, and the following two decades witnessed the all-important flourishing of German science—with the work of Johannes Müller, Eilhardt Mitscherlich, Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Evangelista Purkyne (or Purkinje), Franz Neumann, Julius Plücker, and Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. It was during this time too that Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond, Rudolf Clausius, and Ernst Brücke first attended Prussian universities. In its way, it was the beginning of a second scientific revolution, when Prussian science attained a European pre-eminence that German classical and historical studies had already enjoyed for some time. 37
    A crucial role was played by C. G. J. Jacobi, whose own career epitomized wider changes. Educated first at the Gymnasium at Potsdam, Jacobi attended the University of Berlin in 1821, where he studied philology in August Boeckh’s seminar. He subsequently abandoned philology and turned instead to mathematical physics. Doing well, he was given a professorship at Königsberg, where he lectured about his research—on elliptical functions—and then, with Franz Neumann, founded in 1835 the Königsberg mathematics-physics seminar, modeled on Boeckh’s. In this seminar he insisted on original work from his students and every paper submitted received a stipend of twenty thaler, increased to thirty if the paper was published. The seminar also funded the cost of instruments used by the students. In this way, Jacobi’s Königsberg seminar became the focus of German mathematical physics and was widely imitated—at Halle (1839), Göttingen (1850), Berlin (1864), and elsewhere. Such science seminars as this one formed a logical transition, pointing forward to the great laboratories of the 1870s. 38
    T HE I DEA OF THE U NIVERSITY AND THE K ULTURSTAAT
     
    But there was an extra level to all this: government acceptance of the new ideology. During the 1830s, or thereabouts, professors were increasingly appointed because of their reputations among their peers, rather than as teachers. There was, in effect, says Turner, a new social contract between university intellectuals and the Prussian state: this was the theory of the Kulturstaat . The theory of the Kulturstaat maintained that society exists for the evolution of Kultur . “Culture attains its most highly conscious manifestation in the universities, where it is developed and preserved. The state, therefore, must serve and support its universities and depositories of culture and guarantee the academic freedom which makes the preservation and development of culture possible. A nation’s universities serve as national symbols of its intellectual greatness. As long as the state does this, the universities owe the state support, respect and service…On this basis vast sums of money went into the universities and the theory of the Kulturstaat furnished the basis for the remarkable political symbiosis between Prussian intellectuals and the state which, despite many strains, lasted throughout the nineteenth century.” 39
    Germany was fortunate that its state bureaucrats mainly saw eye-to-eye with its leading scholars. In 1817, Karl von Hardenberg had appointed Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein as director of a newly created Kulturministerium. A Romantic botanist, a fervent follower of Fichte and Humboldt, Altenstein kept the universities free of religious or political interference and allowed the new scholarship and new attitudes to flourish. He was followed by Johannes Schulze, who had been a student at Halle, where he attended Wolf’s seminar, and had himself undertaken a new edition of Winckelmann’s work, at Goethe’s suggestion. Given carte blanche with Germany’s Gymnasien, he embraced Wissenschaftsideologie as the ideal basis of education. It was Schulze who made Greek compulsory for all Gymnasium students, and Schulze who determined that only Gymnasien could send their graduates to the university. 40
    The figures collected by R. Steven Turner, Charles McClelland, and William Clark (all Americans, as it happens), underline this picture. In 1805 Prussia allowed 100,000 thaler for its universities, a sum that rose to 580,000 by 1853. The teaching staff grew by 157 percent over