W. H. Bruford (1894–1988)

Another British scholar in the 1930s digging into the past of the contemporary Germans. Bruford, a specialist on the life and works of Goethe, did not write with the flair of Wedgwood, but Germany in the Eighteenth Century provides a good overview of German political economy, social conditions and cultural arts in the 150 years or so after the Thirty Years War (though Buford’s book appeared a few years before Wedgwood’s).

The Peace of Westphalia sanctioned the interference of foreign powers in German affairs. Tradition, habit and geography checked the centripetal forces of national unity for several centuries. The devolution of sovereignty to provincial princes concentrated economic and military resources and undercut the autonomy of Free Towns. Soldiers were the most lucrative German export, writes Bruford, and the privileged nobility residing in the regional capitals was a mere simulacrum of aristocracy. Still, only the patronage of court society kept the high cultural arts viable; the bürgers had no style, and equated commerce and industriousness with virtue. In the Protestant towns, free enquiry and the love of beauty were incompatible with the insistence on faith and grace and a new orthodoxy. Goethe and Schiller put the duchy of Saxe-Weimar on the map. As almanacs, gazettes and news-sheets in the German vernacular began to displace Latin, the main of the book trade relocated from Frankfort to Leipzig. Wanderlieder and nature poetry sprang from the journeyman tradition and popular customs that predated the Romantics. Herder was a country parson, and Kant, Hölderlin, Hegel and Fichte all for a time worked as private tutors, regarded by the families which employed them as little more than domestic servants. Only in the second half of the 18th c. did it become possible for a German writer to take up literature as a full-time profession.

Bruford draws upon memoirs, essays and the impressions of foreign travellers to construct a splendidly detailed setting for the intellectual and artistic achievements of the time, but a good book has something to say apart from the words on the page. What makes Germany in the Eighteenth Century peculiarly interesting is Buford’s oblique probing of a seeming paradox that arose during the Great War—the problem of two Germanies: “the contradiction between our impression of Germany derived from the German classics and our experience of Germany as a threat to our existence.” Can a study of the profession of letters in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War throw light on the evolution of German national character? Is there such a thing as German national character? Bruford does not engage such questions directly, but the picture he paints is suggestive, and he gives the interested reader much to mull over.… (más)