The German Genius

the philosophical faculty he subordinated the natural sciences to the humanities, “fearing that the former would otherwise slide into mindless empiricism.” By offering large salaries (again taking a leaf out of Münchhausen’s book) Humboldt soon lured to Berlin a raft of brilliant young scholars across many disciplines. “Berlin quickly became known as an Arbeitsuniversität , an institution for industrious, mature and unsocial scholars such as Wolf and Humboldt themselves had been.” 52
    Humboldt wasn’t at the ministry for long—he left in June 1810. By then, however, through the university in Berlin, the Abitur, and the Gymnasium, he had made neohumanist Bildung “the cultural philosophy of the Prussian state.”
    Humboldt had a clear understanding of what, exactly, Bildung was. For him, the development of social morality within an individual was an all-important progression which depended on that individual’s “selftransformative progress” from a natural state of ignorance and immaturity to “self-willed citizenship”: a shared understanding of civic harmony and loyalty to the state, a belief that spiritual emancipation through education in the humanities was the true path to (inner) freedom and “willing citizenship.” It was a vision both egalitarian and elitist at the same time and this paradox was to have far-reaching consequences. 53
    Partly under Wolf’s influence, and partly under Herder’s, Humboldt specified that language was to be the main focus of education. He insisted that the very shape and structure of a language revealed a nation’s character. Bildung, for Humboldt, could therefore be achieved only by study of the Greeks, allied to an understanding of language. For Humboldt, Bildung—true (inner) freedom—involved three things: Zwecklosigkeit , Innerlichkeit , and Wissenschaftlichkeit (non-purposiveness—in the sense of non-utilitarian—inwardness, and scholarliness). All (male) students at the Gymnasium must attempt this historico-philological form of learning. 54
    He both did and did not succeed. By the time of his death in 1824, Wolf’s vision had prevailed: classical philology was the recognized foundation for professionalized humanistic scholarship. 55 Later on in the nineteenth century, when German scholarship became the envy of the world, many disciplines would seem to have little to do with ancient Greece. But the methodology on which their successes were based went back to Humboldt, Wolf, and—ultimately—Winckelmann.

The Supreme Products of the Age of Paper
     
    I n the fifteenth century, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, it took twenty minutes to cross Florence on foot, fighting the crowds from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza di San Marco. Into this area, 95,000 people were crammed. 1 By today’s standards, Renaissance Florence was not a large city but even so it dwarfed Weimar, which perhaps fulfilled a similar role in the German renaissance.
    As one approached the city in the eighteenth century, one saw—standing out above the town’s 600 or 700 houses and their enclosing wall—the towers of a couple of churches and the ducal Schloss (fifteenth-century Florence had one cathedral and 110 churches). 2 There were two inns, the Erbprinz and the Elefant, three shops worth the name, and the streets were lit at night by 500 lanterns, though they were so expensive to maintain that the order to light them all was seldom given. 3 In 1786, the population was approaching 6,200, of which 2,000 were courtiers, bureaucrats, soldiers, or pensioners supported by taxation. 4 There was no trade, no tourism, and of course no factories. No wonder Madame de Staël felt Weimar to be “not a small town but a large château.” 5
    Though it was small and unprepossessing physically (drainage was still very primitive), Weimar was a capital and it had a court. The original star—or “muse” (Goethe’s word)—of this court was Princess Anna Amalia of Brunswick, who had been married in 1756, while still a girl, to Ernst August Konstantin of Weimar, himself no more than eighteen. His small duchy was undistinguished, just one of 300 not dissimilar entities that stretched north to the Baltic and south to the Alps. 6 Weimar actually consisted of the combined duchies of Weimar and Eisenach, together with the former duchy of Jena and the bailiwick of Ilmenau. All four areas still maintained their separate tax systems.
    When Anna Amalia was married, she was not yet