The German Genius

has gone before that Germany was the first country to boast an educated middle class of any size and that this was all important for its emergence as a great power.
    A few statistics will underline this. Prussia enforced school attendance for children between the ages of seven and fourteen from the 1820s (in Britain children were not compelled to go to school until 1880) and by the 1890s had two-and-a-half times as many university students in proportion to population as did England. 21 We saw in Chapter 22 how in the late nineteenth century, illiteracy in the German army was much lower than among Italian or Austro-Hungarian soldiers, 1 in 1,000, as opposed to 330 in 1,000 among Italians, and 68 in 1,000 among Austro-Hungarians. In another chapter we saw that, in Germany, in 1785 there were 1,225 periodicals published, compared with 260 in France. In 1900 Germany had 4,221 newspapers, France roughly 3,000 (and Russia 125). 22 In the early nineteenth century, when England had just four universities, Germany had more than fifty. James Bowen, in his three-volume history of Western education, points out that Germany took the lead in the establishment of scientific societies in the early nineteenth century, published the greatest number of journals in the vernacular, and became the leading language of scientific scholarship. 23 In 1900 illiteracy rates in Germany were 0.5 percent; in Britain they were 1 percent and in France 4 percent. By 1913 more books were published annually in Germany (31,051 new titles) than in any other country in the world. 24
    For what it is worth, the Germans are still ahead in some familiar ways, even though many of them don’t think so (see the comments of Dietrich Schwanitz, Chapter 42). In a survey reported in 2006, it was found that the average brain size of northern and central Europeans was larger than that of southern Europeans (1320 cc compared with 1312 cc). This translated into higher intelligence, with Germany and the Netherlands coming in on top (107 IQ points), Austria and Switzerland at 101, while Britain (where the research was done) scored 100, and France 94. 25
    It was the educated middle class that made the exciting advances in scholarship that so attracted academics from abroad (especially from America), that rendered the bureaucracy of the ever-coalescing German state so efficient and creative and led to the groundbreaking scientific achievements of the second half of the nineteenth century, that transformed Germany economically, and on which so much of modern prosperity—not just in Germany—is based. The rise—and then the fall—of the educated middle class is central to what happened in Germany and still has a contemporary relevance.
    The development of modern scholarship, the concept of Bildung, and the innovation of the research-based university were seen at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany as a form of moral progress. Education was not simply the acquisition of knowledge but looked upon as a process of character development during the course of which a person would learn to form critical judgments, make an original creative contribution, and learn about his or her place in society with its duties, rights and obligations. Education as Bildung involved a process of becoming , a form of secular perfection or salvation that was, for the educated middle class, the very point of life in a world between doubt and Darwin.
    The educated middle class had essentially taken over and expanded the role occupied in earlier times by the clergy and would remain the most important and innovative element in Germany in the century that lasted from 1775 to 1871. Toward the end of that time, the situation began to change and grow more complex, as is also discussed.
    “I NWARDNESS”
     
    It seems clear that the Germans were (still are?) a more “inward” people than others—the French, British, or Americans, for example (though as Gertrude Himmelfarb notes, the Enlightenment in England “throve within piety”). The Germans certainly seem to have seen themselves for the most part in this light, as the lines from Thomas Mann quoted at the head of this Conclusion confirm. 26
    The combination of Lutheranism and Pietism was a starting point here, both being more concerned with inward conviction than with outward displays of religiosity. Another factor is that Germany’s centers of learning—its universities—came on stream between the advent of doubt and the arrival