Germany 705
the idea of liberty from actual individual persons, and lodged it in a collective
group, which in later years, after their revolutionary- republican period was over,
became for Hegel the rational state of the Prussian monarchy, and for Fichte the
cultural- linguistic- kinship community of the German people.^49
Counter- Revolutionary Cross Currents
A conscious and controversial conservatism, deliberately aimed at discrediting the
new ideas, was neither adopted by the leading thinkers and literary figures of Ger-
many, nor sponsored by the governments of the German states. It was carried on, as
was the pro- revolutionary propaganda, by writers of a lesser kind: journalists, pub-
licists, and pamphleteers. Eventually, Friedrich Gentz became the best known of
these writers. He translated Burke in 1793, and in 1799 he published at Berlin his
Historisches Journal, which was designed to combat the whole revolutionary move-
ment in Europe; but it is to be noted that Gentz received his emoluments not from
the Prussian government but from the British, from which, beginning in 1800, he
sometimes drew as much as £1,000 a year.^50
Conservatism in Germany antedated the French Revolution, having first taken
form as a campaign against secret societies, and against the rationalism, the alleged
aridity, and the abstract ideas of the Enlightenment.^51 It was less political than in
England, since it did not serve, like Burke’s ideas as expressed in 1784, to protect a
Parliamentary governing class against the perils of new modes of election.^52 In
Germany conservatism sometimes justified the peculiarities of the small states, as
in the thought of Justus Möser. Often it arose from religious sources, both Protes-
tant and Catholic. The fact that many Lutheran pastors and Catholic priests
thought of themselves as vehicles of the Enlightenment—the fact, that is, that the
problems posed by rationalism were internal to the churches themselves—only
made the argument the more vehement.
Among Protestants, the most notable anti- revolutionary editor was H. M.
Koester, who was also a professor at the University of Giessen, where he taught
history and political science. In 1777 he launched the Neuesten Religionsbegeben-
heiten, directing it against the critical and freethinking tendencies of the day, and
carrying on in the 1790’s with a denunciation of revolution and secret societies.^53
Protestant Germany had also long been affected by the movement of Pietism,
which, so far as it taught that Christian satisfaction was to be found in subjective
religious feelings, was generally conservative in its implications. Thus the Pietist
Jung- Stilling remarked in 1793 that a pure and obedient Christianity, “not the
spirit of revolt and revolution,” was the best way “to do away with all abuses.”^54
Pietism was hardly to be equated with social class, but there was an important
49 German Idea of Freedom, 125–38, 179–92.
50 Golo Mann, Secretary of Europe; the Life of Friedrich Gentz (New Haven, 1946), 50.
51 One of the leading arguments of Valjavec, passim, but see 5, 11, 255–302.
52 See above, pp. 556–62.
53 Valjavec, 305.
54 Quoted by Droz, Allemagne, 422.