The German Genius

titled Ermahnung an die Deutschen, ihren Verstand und ihre Sprache besser zu üben ( Exhortation to the Germans to Exercise Their Reason and Their Language Better ). Contrary to his usual practice, in his scientific and philosophical writings, which were written in Latin or French, this pamphlet was in German. 61 The philosopher’s exhortation was taken seriously in a series of new periodicals, in particular one published in Zurich in the 1720s by a group of friends of whom Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–76) were the leading spirits. 62 This, known as the Discourse der Mahlern , was particularly concerned with the German language. Both Bodmer and Breitinger—after a few false starts—composed articles designed to make German a less ponderous language, more intimate, more pleasurable, and less like a sermon—a development that should, they claimed (and this was an important observation), have more appeal to women.
    These innovations were built on by others. At Halle, Christian Thomasius became the first German professor to deliver his lectures in German rather than in Latin. 63 Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), a native of Königsberg, who moved to Leipzig and became professor of poetry and then of philosophy, formed a German society devoted to linguistic integrity: “At all times the purity and correctness of the language shall be promoted…only High German shall be written, not Silesian or Meissen, Franconian or Lower Saxon, so that it can be understood right across Germany.” German societies modeled on the Leipzig original were founded in several other cities. 64 Gottsched also did his best to encourage the development of the novel and the drama. In the same way, in 1751 Christian Gellert published a popular treatise on letter writing, with the intention of encouraging young people, “especially women,” to cultivate a natural style of writing and of removing the “widespread misapprehension” that the German language was not supple and flexible enough “to treat of civilised matters and express tender emotions.” 65 Shortly afterward, the first epistolary novels in German began to appear.
    A final effect of the reading revolution was on self-consciousness. Print-as-commodity, says Benedict Anderson, generates the “wholly new” idea of simultaneity, as people throughout society realize—via their reading—that others are going through the same experience, having the same thoughts, at the same time. “We are…at the point where communities of the type ‘horizontal-secular, transverse time’ become possible.” In this way public authority was consolidated, helped along by the depersonalized nature of state authority. 66 These developments were more important than they might seem at first because it was these (vernacular) print languages, says Anderson, that laid the basis for nationalistic consciousness. Anderson’s conclusion is that print-capitalism operated on a variety of languages to create a new form of “imagined community,” setting the stage for the modern nation, in which a “national literature” was an important ingredient. 67 In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand ( Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand ), a play about liberty, which describes the decline and fall of an Imperial Knight, the author himself said that the theme of the play was “Germanness emerging” ( Deutschheit emergiert ). * In the nineteenth century, says Thomas Nipperdey, all this would lead to Germany becoming “the land of schools.”
     
     
    However much they proliferated in the eighteenth century, novels, newspapers, periodicals, and letters had all existed in some form in the past. At the same time an entirely new cultural and intellectual medium emerged in the field of music: the public concert. By 1800 it had replaced all other forms of the art and become “the main medium for music per se .” 69 Furthermore, because the concert took place outside the princely or ecclesiastical courts, composers were free to invent their own musical forms and compositions. “The result was the conquest of the musical world by the symphony, the symphony concert, and the concert hall. This apparently natural progression has led many historians to present the rise of the concert as the cultural equivalent of the French Revolution, in which the rising bourgeoisie tore down the barriers and fences which had reserved cultural goods