ABSTRACT

The Genius of the People He came to value Gothic architecture as a col lect ive cre ation by ‘the people’ rather than the invention of a single indi vidual. For him, ‘Gothic architecture’ – which he did not par ticu larly like aesthetically – ‘would never have attained its flourishing state’ without the repub lics and the wealthy commercial cities, the free cities of the Middle Ages ‘that built town halls and cathedrals’. Herder even claimed that ‘the better Gothic architecture is most easily explicable from the consti tu tion that gov erned these cities’. For people build and inhabit in the same way that they live and think. For him, the remark able Gothic architecture ‘would never have origin ated in convents or in castles of knights’. Next to the polit ical dimension of the Gothic architecture, Herder praised it also as a product free from the yoke of foreign models, its cre ation embedded in the local con text and needs, ‘the same way every bird constructs her nest to accommodate her figure and her way of life’. Herder circulated these ideas in his book On the Changes of Taste, published in 1766, prior to the 1773 pub lication of his essays that included a reprint of Goethe’s essay. He believed that ‘a poet is the creator of the nation around him . . . he gives [the people] a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world’. Probably that was the reason for including the Goethe essay, which, although it paid homage to the creator architect Erwin von Steinbach, reserved the deepest praise for the ‘German soul’ collect ively, the German people, the Volk, the ultimate creator of the cathedral. At this moment in his tory, while Goethe was inter ested in the German people, Herder was more inter ested in the people. A year after Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Herder published Volkslieder (1774), a collection of

translations of pop ular songs in which he cel eb rated the creative con tri bu tion of ‘people’, unique and par ticu lar, in regions around the world, and in which he believed he was demonstrating their genius. For Herder, ‘the people’ was not an amorphous crowd but a welldefined group, a classless body distinguished by a col lect ive spirit (Volksgeist) and language. For a people, Herder declared, language, ‘the speech of their fathers’, is the dearest thing. Anticipating con tempor ary philo sophers and sociologists, Herder saw residing in a language ‘a whole world of thinking’, tradition, his tory, religion, and the founda tions of life. To deprive a people of its speech, he warned, is to deprive it of its ‘single eternal good’. No greater injury can be inflicted on the people of a nation than to rob that nation of its language. Similarly, people have their own way of settling, and if removed from it they feel mis er able. The Bedouin ‘shudders at the thought of inhabiting a town’, and the Abiponian (a member of a par ticu lar South Amer ican tribe) hates ‘the idea of being interred in a church’. However, just as a people are attached to their language, they are also ‘attached to their soil’. ‘Deprive them their coun try, and you deprive them of every thing.’1 He sites the traveler Cranz, who de scribed in the most moving manner how six Greenlanders brought over to Denmark sought in vain to return, first mentally, then by trying to run away, to their coun try; ‘their eyes often turned towards the north’, and they eventually died of grief despite the friendliness of the Danes and the good food they were given. The same happened with ‘Negro slaves’. The ‘painful recollection and the irreparable loss of their coun try and their freedom’ prompted them to murder, he believed. Whatever the efforts of the Euro peans to compensate them by ‘adopting them as chil dren’ and ‘impressing upon them their seal’, they were still bent on becoming ‘robbers and thieves’. They were unable to ‘suppress the feeling’ that white men harbored the thought that ‘this land is ours; you have no business here’. Echoing previous envir on mental determinists, Herder believed that the diversity of people, and the pro cess through which a ‘people’ becomes a nation characterized by unique beliefs, concepts, and ways of viewing the world, is the result of being attached to a distinct piece of land, a region, characterized by a specific climate and geomorphology, and or gan ized by par ticular education and tradition. He even suggested that research should be ded ic ated to the ‘the physical-geographical his tory of the descent and diversification of our species’.2