The German Genius

1870s, the country of von Liebig, Clausius, Helmholtz, Siemens, Heine, Koch, Zeiss, and Virchow. In winning the battle against the Catholics, however, they lost the fight with Bismarck. Their defeat was more far-reaching than their victory. 28
    T HE U SES AND A BUSES OF D ARWINISM
     
    Only in the late nineteenth century, with the advent of mass literacy, did science begin to have an impact on daily life. Never before or since has the prestige of science been so high and the interest of the layman so great. 29 In particular, Darwinism was a sensation in Germany. “Darwinism became a kind of popular philosophy in Germany more than in any other country, even England. Darwinism caught on rapidly in the German scientific community; indeed, Germany, rather than England, was the main centre of biological research in the late nineteenth century…not only was Germany the most literate of the major European countries, it also offered the richest environment for Darwinism to expand beyond the confines of science. Political liberalism had been thwarted in Germany in 1848, and Darwinism became a pseudopolitical ideological weapon for the progressive segments of the middle class.” 30 Germans were aware that the Naturphilosophen had in many ways anticipated the idea of evolution, even if they had no understanding of natural selection.
    In this atmosphere, a number of science popularizers emerged, of which the best known, and best remembered, were Ernst Haeckel, Carl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner, Carus Sterne, Edward Aveling, and Wilhelm Bölsche. Hundreds of books were published on Darwinism, and Bölsche was the single best-selling nonfiction author in the German language before 1933. In the process, Darwinism was changed and corrupted as people in all walks of life appealed to Darwin’s authority. But in general, Germany’s Darwinists sought to continue the Enlightenment tradition, to stamp on superstition, to inform and, in so doing, to liberate, as they saw it, and to continue the radical spirit of 1848.
    Although literacy rates in Germany were much higher than anywhere else in Europe, mass reading didn’t really catch on until the 1870s, when the price of books and newspapers dropped owing to the invention of new and more efficient printing presses. It was only after 1860 that the developments in science and technology, referred to earlier in Chapters 17–20, began to seep into popular consciousness.
    A translation of On the Origin of Species was begun within a few weeks of the book’s appearance in Britain and published in 1861; Darwin’s collected works were published in 1875. And Darwinism, as Alfred Kelly says, “made rapid and deep inroads in the German scientific community. From the beginning it was broadly identified with progressive views.” (Nipperdey says the German response to Darwin was “overwhelming.”) As early as March 1861, Darwin wrote to his colleague Wilhelm Preyer, “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” At the end of 1899, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung asked its readers who they thought the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century had been. Darwin came in third after Helmuth von Moltke and Kant, but The Origin of Species was voted the single most influential book of the century. 31
    Most histories remember Haeckel above all other popularizers, but it was Bölsche who was better known at the time, indeed his was a household name in millions of homes. The combined sale of his books by 1914 has been estimated at 1.4 million—Alfred Kelly says he was a “major cultural phenomenon.” Bölsche was a founder of the Cologne zoo and a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott. His major work perhaps reads oddly now— Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe ( Love-Life in Nature: The Story of the Evolution of Love ), three volumes, 1898–1901. Designed to reconcile Darwin with the Bible, it told the story of evolution from the perspective of sexual love and was a sensational success. 32 Sex, for Bölsche, was the ideal experience, a brief glimpse of eternity and the harmony that was the aim of evolution.
    The rise of Darwinism took place, of course, at the same time as the Kulturkampf and, being allied with the forces of progress, it naturally came under attack from the reactionaries, who did not want the Protestant Church interfered with. The main battleground was the