organizational leader who assembles the material conditions for members to
work (Mullins, 1973). Goethe combined both roles. The ducal court at Weimar,
with its nearby university at Jena, became a magnet in the attention space to
which Goethe’s creative energy attracted others; for many of them Goethe
found a material base (Herder received a sinecure as state director of clergy,
Schiller a position as history professor). These in turn sent out further reso-
nances, generating creativity far beyond Goethe’s own interests, and sometimes
even opposed to them. Wieland, an old student friend of Goethe who began
the wave of German Shakespeare translations, moved to Weimar and published
there his popular literary magazine, Teutscher Mercur; through this magazine
Kant’s work first became famous as the result of articles in 1786–87 by the
Jena professor Reinhold. Others introduced the teaching of Kantian philosophy
into Jena and founded a journal to publicize the Kantian viewpoint. By the
1790s, Jena-Weimar had become a hotbed of rival groups, each with its own
journal: Goethe and Schiller’s Die Horen, the Romantic circle’s Athenaeum, a
little later Schelling and Hegel’s Kritisches Journal der Philosophie.
Jena-Weimar, of course, was not the only location where salons and maga-
zines existed in Germany. It became the center by a process which is quite
general in the network theory of creativity. The highest level of creativity is
determined by an intense focus of attention. One part of the network, initially
quite dispersed, catches fire from a particular creative development, often a
famous controversy. The first-mover advantage magnifies small beginnings; a
circle grows ahead of others as it attracts attention and recruits, building up
emotional energy locally and deference elsewhere. The first-mover advantage
passes the point of critical mass; what was once one local circle among others
now is bathed in fame that blots out the rest.^3 From a great distance we see
only Kant, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Viewed from closer up, the
networks shouldering one another aside for position in the attention space are
crowded and rather breathless.
The Idealist movement crystallized from networks all over Germany. Two
of Goethe’s early connections were at the flashpoints of the controversies which
brought on the storm. The first incident was precipitated by Lavater, a Zurich
pastor. In 1769 Lavater challenged Moses Mendelssohn to demonstrate the
falsity of Christian religious belief or to convert; Mendelssohn made a sensa-
tion with his reply that Judaism itself is the religion of reason. Here we see
Lavater, still rather early in his own career (his fame built up between 1768
and 1778 for publications propagating enthusiastic mysticism as well as the
new science of physiognomy and fortune-telling), jumping into the public
eye by picking a controversy with the already famous; for Mendelssohn had
been the leader of the popular essayists at Berlin since the 1750s, a winner of
prizes from the Berlin Academy and defender of toleration and the separa-
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^627