The German Genius

reaction. Many others agreed.
    Then there was the fact that Friedrich, like no other king before him and few since, entered the public sphere. As Goethe was sharp enough to notice, by simply publishing a pamphlet about German literature, Friedrich gave intellectual debate a momentum that no other living person could have matched. 82 Moreover, he encouraged others to enter the public sphere in a critical spirit by having the Academy organize annual prize-essay competitions, setting such ambitious questions as: “What has been the influence of governments on culture in nations where it has flourished?” (won by Johann Gottfried von Herder), “Can it be expedient to deceive the people?” and “What has made French the universal language of Europe and does it deserve this supremacy?”
    These paradoxical achievements in the literary/intellectual world were matched in the military/political sphere. Through Friedrich’s many battle successes, Prussia became a major European power, a status it maintained (other than 1806–13 if we are being finicky) until World War I. His victories were followed by initiatives in other realms of government: an agency dedicated to strategic economic development, greater freedom of the press, a reduction in the number of capital crimes, and advanced codification of Prussian law. He insisted that education become compulsory for all and urged (some) religious toleration. “So far did a new middle class and civil society advance by the end of Friedrich’s reign that German intellectuals could look on the revolutions in America and France as belated efforts to catch up with Prussia.” 83
    Friedrich’s forty-six-year rule undoubtedly helped Prussia’s rise to power and, culturally and intellectually speaking, between Bach’s death in 1750 and Friedrich’s own in 1786, Germany without question witnessed the stirrings of its own renaissance, a rival even of the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

Bildung and the Inborn Drive toward Perfection
     
    W hile these specific developments were taking hold in Germany—changes to its religion, to its language, in its universities, in its public space, in its image of itself, and in its standing as a political power—Europe itself (and North America, too) was undergoing a set of no less profound changes, perhaps the most important change in thinking since the advent of Christianity. This was the advent of religious doubt. 1
    The period between 1687, when Isaac Newton’s discoveries in Principia Mathematica confirmed and systematized the earlier observations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, and 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species , comprises a unique time span in the history of Western thought, though it is not always seen as such. It was a time when a purely religious purpose to life (salvation in a future state) was called into question while there was as yet no other model to replace it , when Darwin’s biological understanding of man had yet to appear. The fact that so much of Germany’s golden age came between these two dates—1687 and 1859—was to have profound consequences, consequences that affected Germany more than anywhere else. Intellectually speaking, the country was shaped during this crucial—unique—transitional period. In particular, and most important, this transitional period saw the development of historicism and the rise of biology.
     
     
    Even by the end of the seventeenth century, fifty years before our starting point, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited. Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, for holding opinions that no one could prove one way or the other. The observations of Kepler and Galileo transformed man’s view of the heavens, and the flood of discoveries from the New World promoted an interest in the diversity of customs and beliefs found on the other side of the Atlantic. It was obvious to many that God favored diversity over uniformity and that Christianity and Christian concepts—like the soul and a concentration on the afterlife—were not necessarily crucial elements since so many lived without them. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the invention of printing matured, that vernacular translations of the Bible brought the book before a lay audience who now discovered