Germany 687
prominent elements in the middle class were not lawyers in private practice, nor
wealthy men of affairs, with exceptions for trading centers like Hamburg. They
were bureaucrats, civil servants, writers, and university professors. In the Protestant
states the pastors and men whose fathers were pastors added a strong contribution.
But economically the middle class was weak, since commercial enterprises were
local and old- fashioned, or else, as in Prussia, dependent for investment capital and
management on the state, so that the material base was lacking for vigorous inde-
pendent initiative. The middle class, in any event, was not estranged from the
monarchies under which it lived. Individual burghers might criticize individual
noblemen, but there was no deep feeling against nobility or privilege itself, and the
belief continued to prevail (contrary to what happened in France in the 1780’s)
that the government would do what it could to uphold middle- class against noble
interests. The fact that German officialdom was reasonably honest, trained, and ef-
ficient, whatever its less evident shortcomings, kept criticism of it on a moderate
plane.
In these circumstances two kinds of organizations took on more importance in
Germany than elsewhere—the universities, and a variety of secret societies. In
Germany in the eighteenth century, unlike England and Western Europe, several
of the universities were new foundations and others had been recently invigorated
with new ideas; they were closely allied to the governments, not in the manner of
Oxford and Cambridge, but as training centers for official personnel; at the same
time, since professors and students in each institution, such as Jena, came from all
over Germany, and indeed from all over Central and Eastern Europe, the universi-
ties were places in which the narrow localism of the individual states could be
transcended. Beginning about 1770 several new semi- secret student “orders” were
established. Modeled somewhat on the lodges of Freemasonry, they aspired to re-
place the older student societies with their emphasis on drinking and dueling, and
they pursued, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, goals of humanitarianism and the
self- improvement of youth, which in the 1780’s turned to more definitely political
interests.^3 The radical journalist, Rebmann, was active in one of these student or-
ders, the Schwarze Brüder; and Fichte, when professor of philosophy at Jena, found
in them an enthusiastic audience for his message. In general, from some time be-
fore the French Revolution until some time after the Revolution of 1848, Ger-
many was characterized by the “radicalism” of students and professors on the one
hand; and, on the other, since professors were a species of public officials, and
many students became professional government servants, by a certain receptivity
in the governments themselves, not indeed to revolution, but to ideas of world-
renewal and sweeping change.
Secret societies proliferated in Germany for various reasons, as a protection
against censorship and police controls, as a means of overcoming political localism,
and as centers for more exciting discussions than were possible in the open reading
societies, which sprang up in Germany as in other countries.^4 Freemasonry became
3 Valjavec, Entstehung, 235.
4 On secret societies, the Illuminati, etc., see Valjavec, 229–39; Droz, Allemagne, 399–419. There
is a large heterogeneous literature.