Post by PatPost by stefanoPaul
With all due respect Paul, Pat's fine answer never dealt directly with
Germany or Bavaria, except by extrapolating from the English case.
Specialists in comparative history are very reticent in taking such
leaps. If one wants to talk about the Reformation, and relations
between Catholics and Protestants, one has to minimally bring into the
comparison the differential impact of the Thirty Years War, which not
only poisoned relations between Catholics and Protestants, but led to
the thorough destruction, spiritual and material, of Germany.
+++++++++++++++++++++
I'd be happy to discuss that fascinating subject, my friend, but I was
just trying to explain my understanding of "old Catholic family" as it
is often used in English and I suggested that I thought it likely that
Jochen's meaning was similar.
Post by stefanoAfter having been one of Europe's leading modernizers, Germany sank into
backward status for centuries to come, until the beginning of the 19th
century
I would not want to understate the ghastliness of the effect of the
Thirty Years War, during which war, death, famine, and pestilence rode
back and forth roughshod over a devastated Germany for a generation.
But I think the phrases "thorough destruction, spiritual and material"
and "backward status ... until the beginning of the 19th century"
overstate the case somewhat. Leibniz, one of the great polymaths in
all of history, was born during the war and eighteenth century
Germany was the century of Stamitz and Bach and Handel and Telemann in
music. The Akademie der Kunst opened around 1700, and the eighteenth
century was the century when Tiepolo painted the magnificent frescoes
in the Wurzburg Residenz, It was the century of Winkelmann, the great
art historian and archaeologist, and it was the century of Lessing
and (the young and middle-aged) Goethe and Schiller. In philosophy
there was Kant, and, on the political side there was that gifted
flautist and philosophile Frederick the Great -- (unless one views
Prussia as distinct from 'Germany,' which one could I suppose.) Apart
from the wars in eastern and central Europe which he largely provoked,
Frederick has to be credited with some of the finest architecture of
that period -- Sanssouci, the Staatsoper, and an assortment of
cathedrals, castles and palaces.
The second and third quarters of seventeenth century Germany, like mid
twentieth century Germany, was indeed a disaster zone. In both cases,
however, I think, the country was fairly resilient given the depth and
breadth of the destruction and rebounded within several decades.
Eighteenth century Germany remained a patchwork of principalities,
dukedoms, bishoprics, etc that wouldn't become fully united until the
time of Bismarck, but it was hardly a cultural wasteland.
Regards,
Pat
Regarding culture per se, of course, you are correct Pat. I didn't
mean to imply that Germany, after the Thirty Years War, had become a
cultural wasteland, thought it was materially and spiritually spent.
Unlike France and England, where the Enlightenment was an expression
of the prosperous, self-confident bourgeoisie, in Germany, however
grand in cultural accomplishment, the Enlightenment, understood as
Kultur, was an insular intellectual and cultural movement that bore no
such relation to society at large, due primarily to the absence of a
comparable bourgeoisie. Kant and Hegel, before Marx, spoke about the
relative backwardness of Germany, and some have argued that the
convoluted, baroque nature of German idealism was due to the fact that
Germans could only do in their heads what Englishmen and Frenchmen
could effect in reality. Despite the admittedly impressive reforms
Frederick the Great, Germany would remain a largely agricultural and
rural country where the vast majority of the population still lived on
the land and earned a living through farming. The explosive growth in
German industrialization and urbanization would not take place until
well into the 19th century, and this was so disruptive (as Dahrendorf
put it -- fast, complete and thorough) that it is no surprise that The
Social Question, as it was called, and sociology, as a discipline, was
borne there with the publication in 1887 of Ferdinand Tönnies'
Gemerinschaft und Geseslschaft. Some have argued that this abrupt
discontinuity in German life contributed eventually to the rise of
Nazism. My goodness, Pat, we have wandered a bit from Kaufmann, but I
appreciate your effort to work the very ground that concerned me at
the beginning of the post, placing Kaufmann's religious identity
within the context of larger historical and sociological questions.
Frank