The German Genius

Baer as the central figure. Georg Cantor, the mathematician, was born in St. Petersburg of parents who had emigrated from Denmark, but he moved to Frankfurt when he was eleven, studied at the universities of Zurich, Berlin, and Göttingen and taught for most of his career at the University of Halle. Karl Mannheim, one of the founding fathers of classical sociology, was born in Budapest but was much influenced by Georg Simmel and wrote his most important books in Germany (and in German) at Heidelberg and Frankfurt. Hugo Wolf, who according to Harold Schonberg “carried the German art song to its highest point,” was born in Windischgraz, Styria, later Slovenjgrade in Yugoslavia, now in Slovenia. I adopt the same principle as Georg Lukács, who said of the Swiss novelist Gottfried Keller, that he was just as much a German writer as Rousseau, who came from Geneva, was a French author. 75
    I do not of course mean to suggest for a minute that books could not be written titled The French Genius or The British Genius or The American Genius : they could. Small nations like New Zealand, Denmark, and Trinidad have their geniuses too (Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, V. S. Naipaul). My point is that these contributions to the development of modern thought are well recognized. The French Enlightenment, the British Empiricist philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, and the American pragmatists, are important paths but well trodden. On the other hand, modern German cultural history is much less well known to a general readership. I hope this book goes some small way to rectifying that imbalance.

T HE G REAT T URN IN G ERMAN L IFE
     

Germanness Emerging
     
    O ne Sunday evening in the spring of 1747, as his court musicians were gathering for their regular concert, an aide handed Friedrich the Great, king of Prussia, a list of visitors who had arrived at the Potsdam town gate that day. When the king scanned the list, he suddenly cried out: “Gentlemen, old Bach is here!” Later accounts had it that there was “a kind of agitation” in the king’s tone. 1
    Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer, then sixty-two, had journeyed from Leipzig, eighty miles away, to visit his son Carl, chief harpsichordist in Prussia’s royal Kapelle. Ever since Carl had been in Potsdam, the Prussian king had let it be known that he would like to meet “old Bach.” Carl, however, knew how different his father and the king were and had done nothing to bring them together. He was not wrong. The encounter, when it did occur, proved to be a collision between two very different worlds. 2
    Bach was an orthodox Lutheran who believed the biblical tradition that music was Hebrew. He was a widower and a family man who had twenty children between his two wives. “Frederick, a bisexual misanthrope in a childless, political marriage,” says James Gaines in his description of the meeting, “was a lapsed Calvinist whose reputation for religious tolerance arose from the fact that he held all religions equally in contempt.” Bach wrote and spoke German. At the king’s celebrated court, everyone spoke French. Friedrich boasted he had “never read a German book.” 3
    Their differences carried over into their tastes in music. Bach was the most brilliant exponent of church music, in particular the “learned counterpoint” of canon and fugue, an ancient craft that had evolved such sophistication that many musicians of the day thought of themselves as “custodians of a quasi-divine art.” Friedrich considered such claims over-blown. Counterpoint, to him, was old-fashioned. He dismissed music that, as he quipped, “smells of the church.” 4
    Despite their differences, when the king saw “old Bach’s” name on the arrivals list, he ordered that the composer be brought to the palace that very night, not even giving him a chance to change his clothes. When Bach arrived, weary after his trek, he was presented by the king with a long and complex musical motif and a request (except it wasn’t really a request) that the composer make a three-part fugue of it. Despite the hour, despite his weariness, Bach rose to the task, “with almost unimaginable ingenuity,” so much so that all the virtuosi in the king’s orchestra were “seized with astonishment.” 5 Still Friedrich wasn’t done, perhaps even a little disappointed that old Bach had performed so well. He now asked the composer if he could rearrange