ABSTRACT
German history before 1918 was profoundly influenced by two factors, particularism and absolutism. These restricted the opportunities for active and liberal citizenship, and they also help to explain the deflection of energy from the practical to the spiritual sphere. One result of this trend was the industrious but unworldly professor, who by the end of the eighteenth century had become a characteristic feature of German academic circles. The narrowness of life contributed to the prevalence in German society of the petty-bourgeois, the ‘philistine’, whom in the nineteenth century Heine mocked and Raabe glorified. “Where-ever we look,” said the latter in his novel Abu Telfan (1867), “we see that the German genius everywhere and always derives a third of its vigour from philistinism”. This provincialism of the German middle class struck the English traveller William Howitt, whose German Experiences contain trenchant comments on life in Germany, for example, in the small university towns. It is noteworthy that when Ludwig Wiese, a senior official in the Prussian Ministry of Education, visited England in the second half of the nineteenth century, he was impressed by the broadmindedness of English schoolmasters and, as he explained in his Letters on English Education, believed that this could be explained partly in the light of the national life. He stated that he had often had to deal with young teachers in Germany “who felt the narrowness of the circumstances in which they had to live in small towns like a paralysing pressure, and who dreaded to become small and pedantic themselves”.
