The German Genius

is well-known how the French are accustomed to speaking and writing with unseemly contempt about German traditions, intellect, society, taste and everything else that blossoms under the German sun. Their adjectives ‘ tudesque ,’ ‘ germanique ,’ and ‘ allemande ’ are for them synonyms for ‘coarse,’ ‘ponderous’ and ‘uncultivated.’” 53
    It had been true, in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, that most educated Germans regarded French literary and artistic culture as superior to their own, and that British political freedoms and parliamentary practices were likewise to be envied. But that was before the changes introduced by Pietism and the country’s various rulers had taken hold and the universities had undergone their radical transformation. In that same period a number of economic, political, social, and intellectual changes had occurred in Europe that impacted disproportionately on German speakers and helped ensure that, before the eighteenth century was out, German culture had caught up with French and British achievements—and in some areas had outstripped them. 54
    The first was the reading revolution. This had partly to do with the gradual removal—or lightening—of censorship, harder to enforce in Germany because of its many different self-governing states, and is seen in both the anecdotal and statistical evidence. One account, written in the late eighteenth century, reads: “In no country is the love of reading more widespread than in Germany, and at no time was it more so than at present…The works of good and bad writers are now to be found in the apartments of princes and alongside the weaver’s loom, and, so as not to appear uncultivated, the upper classes of the nation decorate their rooms with books rather than tapestries.” 55
    Robert Darnton has shown that although book publishing suffered drastically after the Thirty Years’ War, by 1764 the Leipzig catalog of new books had regained its prewar level of about 1,200 new titles a year; by 1770 (when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin were born) it had grown to 1,600 and by 1800 to 5,000. Reading was also encouraged by another phenomenon of the eighteenth century—the lending library, which put a limit on the time a reader had access to any particular title. By 1800 there were nine lending libraries in Leipzig, ten in Bremen, and eighteen in Frankfurt am Main. Jürgen Habermas tells us that, by the end of the eighteenth century, there were 270 reading societies in Germany and some described a new illness, Lesesucht , or “reading addiction.” 56 Literacy rates in Prussia and Saxony in the early nineteenth century were unmatched anywhere except New England. 57
    An associated factor was the increased use of the vernacular language. “It was in the eighteenth century that the domination of the printed word by Latin was finally broken,” the percentage of titles published in Latin in Germany falling from 71 percent in 1600 to 38 percent in 1700 to 4 percent in 1800. * 58 The same period also saw a marked shift in taste in Germany, with the proportion of theological titles dropping from 46 percent in 1625 to 6 percent in 1800, philosophy rising at the same time from 19 percent to 40 percent, and belles lettres up from 5 percent to 27 percent. Furthermore, the cultural decentralization of Germany, arising from its many political entities, made it—again in Tim Blanning’s words—“the land of the periodical par excellence .” 59 Whereas the number of periodicals published in France rose from 15 in 1745 to 82 in 1785, the equivalent figures in Germany were 260 and 1,225 (of course many periodicals in France had higher circulations than those in Germany, but German periodicals also had wood-cut illustrations ahead of almost everywhere else). “[I]n Austria, the chief of police had to concede in 1806 that newspapers had become a ‘genuine necessity’ for the educated classes, anticipating Hegel’s celebrated remark that reading the daily newspaper represented the morning prayers of modern man.” The reading revolution brought with it a more critical approach to affairs, through the growth of “moral periodicals.” 60
    Not only was Germany becoming emancipated from Latin, its own language was developing. In 1700 the reputation of German had never been lower. In 1679, at the height of the French Sun King’s influence, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) composed a pamphlet