The German Genius

later.
    T HE R ISE OF THE U NIVERSITY : “T HE G REAT T URN IN G ERMAN L IFE”
     
    Together with the Beamtenstand, the Prussian universities combined to give Germany another distinction all its own: a special kind of intelligentsia that was to have long-term consequences. The eighteenth-century German universities differed from the British ones in a number of important ways. In the first place, early eighteenth-century Germany had far more universities—about fifty, as compared with, for example, just Oxford and Cambridge in England. Although many were small (Rostock, with some 500 students when it was founded in 1419, now had only seventy-four students, while Paderborn had forty-five), their number and local character meant that it was much easier in Germany for the gifted sons from poorer families to obtain higher education. 34
    At the turn of the eighteenth century, however, teaching methods were backward. The norm was the teaching of static truths, not new ideas; professors were not expected to produce new knowledge, and the arts and philosophical faculties in particular had deteriorated. In many of the Catholic universities, theology and philosophy were the only subjects offered. Moreover, they were under threat from the new Ritterakademien ( Ritter means “knight”), intended for the well-born, which offered a more fashionable curriculum that stressed mathematics, modern languages, social graces, the martial arts, and a smattering of science—worldly breadth rather than scholastic depth. What scientific research there was tended to be carried out in the new royal academies of science (such academies, on the French model, were founded in Berlin in 1700, Göttingen in 1742, and Munich in 1759). The German universities were, moreover, at the disposal of the princes, theirs to command for secular (i.e., very practical) purposes; they were not self-governing communities of scholars devoted to the study of classics and mathematics as were Oxford and Cambridge. 35
    Paradoxically, however, although many people around 1700 regarded the universities in Germany as irrelevant and moribund, at the end of the seventeenth and during the first half of the eighteenth century, four new universities were opened that would transform the intellectual climate in Germany. These were Halle in Prussia (1694), Breslau in Silesia (1702), Göttingen in Hanover (1737), and Erlangen in the Frankish margravate of Bayreuth (1743). Heidelberg was also important but, founded in 1386, it was hardly new.
    The University of Göttingen was to have more of an impact than any other except Halle. The leading figure in the establishment of Göttingen was Gerlach Adolf von Münchhausen. 36 Born in 1688, he studied abroad in Utrecht and subsequently took a grand tour in Italy; it was the necessity to leave Germany to acquire “polish” that struck him as unfortunate and produced in him the desire for university reform. When he became a member of the Hanover Privy Council in 1728, he began agitating for the foundation of a university there and was so successful that he was himself appointed Kurator of the new institution. He soon introduced several innovations that were to prove influential. 37
    In the first place, Münchhausen ensured that theology played a relatively quiet role. Göttingen became the first university to restrict the theological faculty’s traditional right of censorship and, as Thomas Howard says in his study of German universities, “It is hard to overstate the historical importance of this measure.” As a direct result, the confessional age ended for the universities. Götz von Selle was just one who characterized this measure as “the pivot for the great turn in German life, which moved its centre of gravity from religion to the state.” 38 By this enlightened measure, Göttingen’s freedom to think, write, and publish became unparalleled in Germany.
    Crucially, Münchhausen changed the relative weight enjoyed by the theology and philosophy faculties. Traditionally, philosophy was a distinctly inferior discipline, for both professors and students it was an “ante-chamber” to the higher faculties. Münchhausen added to the weight and importance of the “philosophical” subjects—such as history, languages, and mathematics—by his insistence that these fields were more than remedial areas for poorly prepared students. 39 Eventually, the philosophical faculty at Göttingen offered, in addition to the traditional