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The German Genius

The German Genius

Titel: The German Genius Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Peter Watson
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detailed description of segmentation. He had just moved from a chair at Königsberg to St. Petersburg, where he made the important inference that what he had observed removed any idea of “preformation” of the embryo (that it existed as a fully formed miniature in the unfertilized egg). Von Baer’s paper was regarded as a sensation among German scientists and from then on the biological significance of furrow formation, and subsequent segmentation, was accepted. 44 This advance was soon followed by that of the Englishman Martin Barry (1802–55) and Carl Bergmann, then an assistant to Rudolf Wagner in Göttingen, and himself later a professor of anatomy at Rostock. Using experiments with frogs and newts, Barry and Bergmann confirmed that the furrows that divided the egg gave rise to the cells that went on to form the embryo. The insight of Harald Bagge, at Erlangen, was no less important: he observed that the nuclei in the embryonic cells divided before the cells divided. The observation of this continuity of the nucleus, together with the demonstration that the egg was itself a cell and that it “begat” daughter cells by binary fission, marked a decisive step in the growth of what later became the science of genetics. 45 The investigation of this set of phenomena culminated in 1855, when Robert Remak published his great work on the embryology of vertebrates, in which he discovered and named the three layers of the embryo: ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm and, no less important, observed that cell division always begins with the nucleus. It was just four years before Darwin was to publish the Origin of Species .

Out from “The Wretchedness of German Backwardness”
     
    T he Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had created one set of European states. The Congress of Vienna, called in 1815 to decide the shape of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, created another. The main aim of the Congress was to prevent there ever again being a revolution in Europe, and to that end the assembled diplomats and politicians set about re-creating much the same landscape as had existed immediately after 1648. But this carefully balanced European system depended on central Europe remaining fragmented and powerless. Many of the Europeans at the Vienna Congress were disturbed by the so-called Germanophiles, determined to unify Germany and turn her into a nation-state. As the French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, wrote to Louis XVIII: “They are attempting to overturn an order that offends their pride and to replace all the governments of the country by a single authority…The unity of the German fatherland is their slogan…they are ardent to the point of fanaticism…Who can calculate the consequences, if the masses in Germany were to combine into a single whole and turn aggressive?” 1
    The principle of nationality was acknowledged, as Hagen Schulze has pointed out, only where it was linked to the legitimate rule of a monarch: in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Sweden—northern and western Europe. The German-speaking lands and Italy were left out. This helps explain why nationalism, cultural nationalism, began as a German idea. The political fragmentation of the region was actually the logical outcome of the European order—look at the map to see why. “From the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, it was Central Europe that kept the great powers apart, kept them at a distance and prevented head-on collisions.” No one wanted an undue concentration of power in central Europe, for if anyone should take control, they could easily become “mistress of the entire continent.”
    The period from 1815, the Treaty of Vienna, to 1848, the year of revolutions, provides a neat time frame politically, but it is meaningful intellectually and culturally, too, certainly so far as Germany is concerned. During this period, and in fact beyond it, across the various bourgeois revolutions of 1848–49, in Berlin, Dresden, Prague, and Vienna, all of which failed, literature fragmented in two. There were those authors who simply ignored the social changes that were occurring in Germany (albeit later there than in Britain or France), who turned their backs on urban and bourgeois life and located their stories in the countryside, or in villages and small towns, withdrawing into a timeless—almost feudal—world, people like Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Grillparzer, Adalbert Stifter, and Joseph von

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