Germany 689
history of ideas. The conception of a Categorical Imperative, an absolute sense of
duty in general, without much attention to specific duties in day- to- day living,
took on momentous overtones as a basis of morality and chief evidence of the ex-
istence of God; as such it pervaded the thinking of people in quite ordinary walks
of life. There was a feeling that with Kant a great intellectual revolution had been
effected in Germany, commensurate in its magnitude to the merely external revo-
lution of the French. As an obscure journalist named Geich wrote in 1798: “Our
nation has produced a revolution no less glorious, no less rich in consequences
than the one from which has come the government of the [French] Republic. This
revolution is in the country of the mind.”^7
If a revolution of the mind was a somewhat ambiguous revolution, entirely con-
sistent with inaction on the part of the citizen, the same was true of the Revolution
from Above, and indeed of the concept of citizenship itself. In France the language
made possible the distinction between a citoyen and a bourgeois, for both of which
the Germans had to use the word Bürger. This fact of language alone helps to ex-
plain why the German nobility, more than the nobles of France or Italy, looked on
“citizenship” with disrelish. Even for the middle classes the old idea of a “burgher”
had become archaic. It suggested the jealous localism of the walled town, and a
modest acceptance of social inferiority, which the spread of education and enlight-
enment had rendered intolerable. Burghers came therefore to call themselves We l t-
bürger, which must be translated as cosmopolitans or citizens of the world. The
word suggests the absence of national consciousness, and Weltbürgertum was long
seen by historians as a stage on the way to a more mature and final phase, the Na-
tionalstaat.^8 It is not necessary, however, to limit oneself to so negative a view, and
it is illuminating to throw the emphasis, not on a We l t that was the absence of na-
tionality, but on the Bürger who was trying to think of himself as a citizen. As a
young diarist at Hamburg confided to himself in 1794: “While inwardly I strive to
become a staunch republican, even a democrat, outwardly I admit to being a
Weltbürger.”^9
Increasingly the German burgher was convinced that, with the broad formation
of mind and character which the Germans called Bildung, he had claims to recog-
nition that monarchs and noblemen must respect. He believed in natural rights,
which he called the rights of humanity, long before the French Revolution. The
Weltbürger was a potential citizen in search of a country. It must be a country of
like- minded persons, a true community, assuring a measure of liberty and equality.
Some, in the 1790’s, found this country in the French Republic, which they saw
more as a human than as a French creation. It was not for them a choice between
France and Germany, but between a free and an unfree society, or between an en-
7 J. Droz, La pensée politique et morale des Cisrhenans (Paris, 1940), 39. Droz quotes at length from
various inaccessible journals of the period edited by Geich and others.
8 Classically set forth by F. Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Stadien zur Genesis des
deutschen Nationalstaates (Berlin, 1908).
9 From the diary of Ferdinand Beneke (1774–1848), published by Valjavec in the appendix to his
Entstehung, 445. It is the argument of Groote, Entstehung des Nationalbewustseins, that the Weltbürger
first tried to reach out to other classes and kinds of people everywhere or anywhere, then developed a
national consciousness stressing the similarities between Germans, but not, as in nationalism, glorify-
ing their differences from others.