Königsberg but Weimar as well. If there were also centers of religious reaction,
like Bavaria (and for short periods Prussia itself), and counter-movements of
Pietist anti-Enlightenment throughout the north German population, the com-
petition of multiple centers conjoined to such conflicts provided energy and
excitement for intellectual issues rather than choking them off by the imposi-
tion of orthodoxy.
In the 1760s and 1770s, German thinking was a branch of French themes;
Enlightenment Deism forged ahead against religious traditionalism, and the
focus of attention swung toward a newer conflict, Enlightenment versus sen-
timentalism. The latter was again a pattern from the French attention center,
first exploited by Rousseau. Since the intellectual world lives on oppositions
and by dividing up the dominant attention space, rationalists opened up a slot
for anti-rationalists, and the opponents lived symbiotically by the attention
they drew to one another. If Rousseau was warmly received in Germany, this
cannot be explained tautologically by his “influence” or his “genius”; rather
his sentimentalism fitted a situation that fostered just this opposition. Most of
the north German states had gone much further in de-clericalizing than in
France, reducing clergy to agents of secular government; this freed religious
impulses in the populace for a private marketplace of emotional and moral
symbols. If one of the hallmarks of modernity is the privatization of religion,
and concomitantly the secular control of the school system, northern Germany
was moving through the transition to cultural modernity earlier than virtually
any other society. Not surprisingly, we find in Germany the first notable
expression of the anti-modern intellectual stance, the Sturm und Drang move-
ment of the 1770s.
How, then, did the network of Enlightenment academicians, Deists, and
popular sentimentalists build up to the point where it could give birth to
German Idealism? In the 1750s Kant was a middle-aged product of Königsberg
University, submitting scientific memoirs to the prize contests of the Berlin
Academy and corresponding with mathematicians such as Lambert. A far more
famous Königsberger was Hamann, known as “the wizard of the north” for
his 1760 book, Die Magie aus Morgenlande (The Magi of the East), explaining
the symbolic meanings of astronomical observations. There was a structural
rivalry here, for Kant had made his first small mark a little earlier with his
scientific theory of the heavens (1755); in 1766 Kant struck back with an attack
on Swedenborgian mysticism, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Just at this time, the
early 1760s, Herder got his start as pupil and acquaintance of both Kant and
Hamann—yet another instance of the pattern of network connections forged
between intellectuals prior to the creativity that would bring them fame. In
1767, turning a favorite aesthetic concern in a new direction, Herder argued
that the truest poetry is that of the people; in 1772 he won the Berlin Academy
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^625