Reform, Liberation and Romanticism in Prussia

[Prussian]

Reform, Liberation and Romanticism in Prussia

The German reformers, Hardenberg, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Stein, wanted to adapt the French reforms to Prussian conditions. To them Napoleon represented the Revolution and therefore they were interested in carrying out a revolution from above. They wanted to make careers open to talent, create equal distribution of talents, to combine true liberty with religion and civil order. As Hardenherg put it, they wanted a revolution in the better sense, the elevation of humanity through the wisdom of those in authority. He felt that this kind of democratic monarchialism would conform to the spirit of the age.

I. Reform and Liberation

It was not the ideals of liberty as such that inspired Stein and Gneisenau, but the totalitarian and authoritarian aspects of French nationalism. Stein admired the prodigious energy and power of the Committee of Public Safety. So Stein's and Hardenberg's work paralleled the August 4 Decrees, the Constitution of 1791 and the military reforms of Carnot. The Prussian state, stirred by the reformers, started Germany back on the road to that position which she held under Frederick the Great in Europe. Schleiermacher, the greatest political preacher since Luther, pave stirring send-offs to the new army recruits as they went into battle against Napoleon.

Like Fichte, Schleiermacher called for moral and educational regeneration. Fichte's patriotism was a call to spiritual regeneration, but its effects were something else again. His concept of "German" was not the usual nationalist one. He believed in the spontaneous originality and liberty of man, which he saw exemplified in the war of liberation against Napoleon. He developed a concept of nationhood which thought of the nation as a living, expanding community--in other words an organism. This has been a persistent definition of nationalism in Germany and Fichte had something to do with its origin.

Görres expressed similar ideas in his famous newspaper, the Rheinische Merkur, which was believed to be a "bastion of German liberty." Even Napoleon called the Rheinische Merkur the fifth power of Europe. Father Jahn, as his devotés called him, coined the word Volkstum. He founded the gymnastic organization in 1810, which latter became known as the Turnverein. Jahn's organization spread nationalism from Prussia to the rest of Germany. He revealed some of the most ludicrous traits of the new Germanism. He was rough and arrogant to the foreigner, he was noisy and boastful, revealing contempt for all that was graceful and refined. His nationalism was the nationalism of muscle and sweat and power. Görres and Arndt started the romantic cult of the Rhine as the symbol of the German spirit.

So Herder's humanitarian and cultural nationalism was turned into political, romantic nationalism. It was the beginning of the fusion of culture and politics, of universalism and nationalism. This became the root of the subsequent pan-German expansionism.

Baron von Stein turned many of these ideas into concrete policies and substantial reforms. He was forced to resign from the Prussian cabinet after Napoleon defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806, but be was back in office after October l, 1807 and stayed there until November 24, 1808. He started most of the important reforms in that short space of time and Hardenberg finished the job after that, while Stein became an advisor to Alexander I of Russia. Stein and Hardenberg preferred British traditionalism and gradualism to the eruptive revolutionary spirit of the French. But they wanted a total mobilization of the moral and spiritual forces of Germany, which the French Revolution had produced for the French.

There were, essentially, four basic reforms started by Stein:

1. legal emancipation of the person of the Prussian peasant;
2. creation of municipal self-government with full participation of the citizens;
3. establishment of a modern bureaucracy;
4. famous Krimper System in the military.

It was Scharnhorst who carried out this military reorganization. Military recruits were drilled for the unprecedented short period of a month and then sent back into the reserves. In this way the Prussians were able to create a large reserve of 150,000 men in a brief time and thus far exceed the 42,000 limit for the army set by Napoleon. This famous Krimper system provided the army for Blücher at Waterloo and created the model for the general staff of World War I. Wilhelm von Humboldt also belongs in this group of reformers, but his impact was in the realm of ideas and education. He became bead of the education ministry in Prussia in March 1809. He was influenced by the Swiss educational reformer Pastalozzi, by the nationalistic ideas of Fichte and Schleiermacher and by the educational ideas of the French revolutionaries and Napoleon.

Education, according to Humboldt must seek to free the individual personality rather than create occupational opportunities. So emphasis fell on a unified school system, rather than caste schools or vocational schools. He thought the state should lead the way in this and not wait for private initiative. He has embedded himself in German educational history by founding the University of Berlin (1810) which today is called the Wilhelm von Humboldt University or the Free University of Berlin. (It should be noted, however, that the Free University in West Berlin was created by breaking away from the original institution in East Berlin.)

All of these reforms prepared the way for the war of liberation. The Spanish guerilla struggle against Napoleon and the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812 set off the Prussian struggle against Napoleon. The German general York, who was fighting with Napoleon, defected in December 1812 and agreed with Russian generals to remain neutral. This finally gave the king heart and resulted in a rapid mobilization of the reserves and new volunteers. This force combined with the Russians and Austrians resulted in the Battle of Leipzig on October 16-19, 1803, which forced Napoleon out of Germany.

This "battle of the nations" as it was called became the symbol of German liberation.

II. Romanticism

Accompanying the reforms, the war of liberation, and the growth of nationalism, was the emotional, literary and philosophical movement known as romanticism. Romanticism as an antidote to enlightened rationalism and revolution swept all of Europe after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, but German Romanticism was different from most of the others. The leaders of German Romanticism were Fichte, Schleiermacher, Novalis, Görres, Tieck, Wackenröder, Adam Müller and the Schlegel brothers. With these men romanticism went far beyond aesthetic and literary concerns and became a comprehensive world view. The antecedents of German romanticism were pietism of the l7th and l8th century, the influence of England's Percy, Rousseau, and the Sturm und Drang period of German literature (l77O's).

Since the French Revolution was considered to be a culmination of the Enlightenment, German Romanticism attained a counter-revolutionary flavor. It was used as a weapon against Napoleonic and French rationalism, as well as against the revolutionary spirit in general. German Romanticism therefore became more comprehensive and deeper, affecting science, scholarship, economics and especially politics. It became identified with political reaction and conservative nationalism. (Heinrich Heine was the only exception!) There was no German equivalent to the libertarian romantics like Lamartine, Hugo, Mazzini and Pushkin. In the German version of Romanticism there was always hostility to the democratic and republican ideology. Novalis was the youthful founder of German Romanticism and Friedrich Schlegel its most important developer.

The basic psychological feature was Sehnsucht--yearning for the lost, the unattainable, the irrevocable, for the disappearing, for fancy, for dreams--for the ''Blue flower'' of Novalis' romance. There was a definite reaction against the materialism and mechanization of the spirit engendered by the new industrial and democratic age. Romanticists sought to escape into fantasy, sentimentality and allegory. Spiritually they toyed with death, with brooding, with the somber, opaque recesses of the night. Novalis said: ''Life is a sickness of the spirit.'' What we have here is the beginning of aesthetic pessimism, which was later reenforced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Richard Wagner, culminating eventually in the literature of Thomas Mann.

Romanticism uncovered the deeper irrational forces of the human spirit. All opposites and contradictions found deeper and richer meaning--unlike the geometric reasoning of the Enlightenment. Novalis believed that all worlds and ages could be united by the magic of imagination. Glorification of heroism, might, pageantry, nobility, the simple peasant, wild ecstasy, naive and serene simplicity could all be combined in one. But all this could and did also lead to charlatanism (Schwärmerei). As Brandes said: "The German mine (soul) reveals precious metal and worthless refuse at the same time." Through the patriotic literature of the war of liberation this ''dance of the soul" reached the broad masses of the population. Schleiermacher emphasized inwardness and individuality, distinguished from individualism, and uniqueness. He was disillusioned with the universal reason of the Enlightenment. But it was not individual anarchism but a community of individuals which these romantics had in mind. Schleiermacher said that life was an alteration between Insichleben and Aussichheraustreten.

This kind of mysticism naturally led to the worship of the organic community, the plant-like structure of society. He believed that true individuality was found only in collective national individuality. Later these ideas became entangled with the whole cultural and physical milieu of the land, the countryside as the soul of the nation. The predominant German interest in folk culture developed from this. The organismic theory of the state, which the Romantics developed, rejects natural rights and the social contract. The state is thought of as a macroanthropos--an individual bound together organically by blood, descent, tradition and history. Germany became the land of the romantic theory of nationalism. With Adam Müller this theory reached its fullest development. He said that the state must absorb the inner feelings and thoughts of individuals. The body of the state was tradition. Müller paid homage to Edmund Burke for saying that ''the state was an immortal family." As a matter of fact, Müller claimed that Burke was more German than he was English--which he also claimed for Shakespeare.

The glorification of organicism and traditionalism led many romanticists to medievalism, to the Minnelieder and folk tales of the Middle Ages, to the Ständestaat, to religion and finally back to Roman Catholicism. There were many conversions to Catholicism, among then were Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Adam Müller and Count Stolberg. Romanticism deepened the historical sense and stimulated scientific history. German historians began to emphasize historical uniqueness and individuality, which they called historical-mindedness. This movement among German historians was called "historicism". Its leaders were Dilthey, Niebuhr and Ranke.

To the Romanticists language became a revelation of inner character of the individual and the nation. Eventually this kind of idea led to linguistic racism. It rejected all democratic ideology and particularly popular sovereignty. Yet a kind of folk populism was highly approved of. Novalis in fact developed a '"law of polarity'' which found a combination of monarchy and republic possible. This contradictory notion was propounded because Navalis felt there was a great need for an absolute center of gravity. Monarchy was such a center of gravity since the king was a being who belonged to humanity and not the state. This seems to be almost an anticipation of Hitler's Führerprinzip or leadership principle.

The German Romanticists developed the cult of aestheticism which was at once a rejection of reason and an attempt to apprehend unity and immediacy in one instantaneous act. In this theory the poetical was the absolutely real. The state was thought of as a work of art. This notion eventually supplied legitimacy for the acts of a dictator--particularly a dictator who thought of himself as an artist. So the French revolutionary epoch can be considered as the beginning of modern German history. The hate motif enters German consciousness here. Heinrich von Kleist exemplifies the internal struggle (Zerissenheit) of the period in his Katechismus der Deutschen, which is anti-Roman, anti-Christian, anti-French. Anti-semitism now replaces the toleration of Frederick's time and of the earlier reform period. After Napoleon the Germans move from Weltbürgertum to the Nationalstaat.

There still are some cosmopolitan aspects German political and cultural thought as revealed later by Friedrich Meinecke, the greatest of modern German historians. But Meinecke failed to see that a mixture of universalism and romantic nationalism gave German nationalism a chiliastic and eschatological character. The notion of Wiedergeburt ( rebirth) emerged here, the idea of mission and finally expansion beyond legitimate borders found its fulfillment in the Pan-Germanism of William I' Germany and the imperialism of Hitler's Third Reich.

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