Germany, 1760-1815

3 Germany, –
Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth
Translated by Angela Davies
From the s, the public sphere in Germany became increasingly politi-
cised. Certain strata of Germansociety became receptive to the ideaof civil
activities under
taken for the common good, displayed a new sensitivity to
contemporary political and social conditions and their shortcomings, and
were more prepared to v
oice criticism. Events such as the Seven Years
War and the American War of Independence stimulated this develop-
ment. The dramatic occurences
of the revolutionary and Napoleonic age
gave it a further boost.

In particular, the war with Napoleonic France
had a profound impact on society, bringing with it occupation and hag-
gling about territory, constant changes of ruler and a far-reaching reform
policy which awakened and sharpened the political awareness of broad
sections of the population.

For example, the Confederation of the Rhine
was the ‘subject of debate in all the journals, during which, society was
quickly politicised’.

These upheavals cleared the deckfor a debate on
political basics such as national identity, legal equality and political
participation.
This newly created public was to a large extent the domain of the
enlightened intelligentsia, the Gebildeten, at least in the later eighteenth
century. This group was highly diverse in terms of origin, profession,

type and level of income.

What unified the Gebildeten as a group was
education. As a rule, they had studied at one of the enlightened univer-
sities. Familiarity with the contemporary and classical culture ensured
the homogeneity of this group. Since education, not property or social
background, defined the Gebildeten, in principle it was an open group.
At the same time, it was highly elitist, as it comprised only about  per
cent of the total population. Although the Gebildeten group was middle-
class at heart, it also crossed over into the nobility. It consisted essen-
tially of three sub-groups. First, there were members of the professions
who had had an academic training, such as doctors, lawyers and apothe-
caries. Second, there were writers, artists and journalists. And third, by far
the largest constituent group of the Gebildeten were members of the civil
service. In the widest sense this included, in addition to administrative

 Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth
officials and the judiciary, professors and, in the Protestant territories,
the clergy and teachers. These servants of the state tookpart in the pub-
lic discussion about state, society and the law which began from about
 and became much more widespread during the last quarter of the
century. For civil servants with an academic training this debate naturally
provided an intellectual challenge, especially as academic and literary ac-
tivity offered a high degree of prestige. Thus, in addition to their pro-
fessional duties, officials devoted themselves to the taskof interpreting
the world by writing newspaper articles, academic studies, treatises and
essays.
As authors, editors and publishers the Gebildeten came together in in-
formal but highly influential ‘networks’ which to a large extent domi-
nated the unfolding market in information.


This is the context in which
the profession of journalism began to develop.

In addition to numer-
ous
part-time
‘wr
iters
’,

there were probably about a hundred full-time
journalists in late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century Germany.

Their most important members included Christoph Martin Wieland
and Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart. During the wars of liberation,
Joseph G ¨orres, in particular, made a name for himself
with his journal,
the Rheinische Merkur (Rhineish Mercury)(–). Increasing commer-
cializa
tion meant that in the second half of the eighteenth century not
everyone published out of lofty political and social concerns. Journalists
often sought to make money and further their careers by secur
ing large
sales for their publications, or by writing their way into a job with the
state by publishing pro-government articles.

The Gebildeten saw themselves as an authority entitled to judge, as
‘the mouth of the people and the ear of the prince’.


At the same time,
they sharply separated themselves from the masses, who, because of ‘their
ignorance and roughness’, could have no part in shaping public opinion.

Yet we must not forget that there were also ‘plebeian’ circles of commu-
nication. Interest in printed political information among the broad and
often illiterate masses rose in leaps and bounds at certain times during the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The clergy, teachers and pub
landlords tookan active part by reading political material aloud, and thus
helped to politicise the public at large. In , the Helmstedt professor
Johann Nikolaus Bischoff noted: ‘In short, everyone is eager for the most
recent news of world events, from the Regent, who receives it at first hand
from his envoys and messengers, down to the countryman, who hears
the ...newspaper read by his political schoolmaster every Sunday in the
pub.’

Nothing had changed in the run-up to the wars of liberation, as
this announcement from Rosenheim in Bavaria, dated July , shows:
‘Everyone is drinking and arguing to their hearts’ content; the numerous
Germany –
clergy there, apart from the dean, who is a most noble man, are working
on the audience in their usual way.’

The development of a ‘modern’ public sphere in Germany was closely
tied to changes in reading behaviour. In the last third of the eighteenth
century, a maximum of  per cent of the  million inhabitants of the
German Reich could read; by the end of the century, this figure had risen

to about  per cent.

While Rolf Engelsing’s concept of the ‘reading re-
volution’ may be controversial,

there is no doubt that from the second
half of the eighteenth century the reading public, especially among the
middle classes, expanded considerably. People spoke of a ‘reading addic-
tion’ and a ‘mania for reading’, which filled contemporaries with amaze-
ment and soon with real concern.

This change has been described as the
transition from ‘intensive’ to ‘extensive’ reading.

In the early eighteenth
century, the repetitious reading of, for example, devotional literature, had
dominated; now people read more widely. The purpose of reading was no
longer just to confirm and consolidate a canon of traditional beliefs and
maxims; rather, the aim was to open up a new view of the world. Reading
now frequently went beyond the private sphere and became an occa-
sion for communication within society.

This could happen in circles of
friends, but its main setting was in the context of the rapidly expanding
reading societies, which were even spreading into rural areas.

These
reading societies had two functions: first, they provided access to a stock
of books which, as a rule, went far beyond the holdings of private libraries.
And second, they served as a forum for debate about what had been read.

This ‘extensive’ reading by the educated classes fundamentally under-
mined the monopoly of interpretation previously enjoyed by the Church
and state authorities. What was read can be roughly grouped into four
categories: books, journals, newspapers and pamphlets. All of them profi-
ted from the fact that changes in reading behaviour led to a boom in the
literary market from the late eighteenth century.
During the second
half of the eighteenth century, the bookmarket
was clearly going through an upswing. The total production of German-
language books between  and  is estimated at about ,
titles. About two-thirds of these were probably published after .

Correspondingly, the number of bookshops in Germany is thought to
have ‘increased by a quarter’ between  and .

There is another
indicator that fundamental changes had been taking place on the German
bookmarket from about :

learned books in Latin were largely
being displaced by books written for the educated general reader. They
were written in German, and mostly contained practical information, or
were entertaining. Whereas in ,  per cent of all new publications
at the Leipzig and Frankfurt book fairs had been in Latin, by  this
 Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth
percentage had almost halved (. per cent), and by  it had shrunk
to a mere . per cent. Also striking is that the significance of theological
works decreased constantly. In , a quarter of the books on offer at
the fairs had been theological or religious in content; in , the figure
was about . per cent. While legal and medical books kept their share

of the market, other areas, such as geography, pedagogy, natural science,
politics and philosophy registered a clear increase. The largest growth,
however, was in the sphere of belles-lettres, that is, novels, poetry and
drama. In , these genres had had a market share of just under 
per cent; in  the figure had risen to . per cent. The novel, in
particular, evoked a lasting response in readers.
The second half of the eighteenth century, however, was not only
the
age of the book, it was also the age of the journal. The journal is consid-
ered, with good reason, as the medium of the Enlightenment par excellence.
Until the middle of the century, about  journals had been published in
the German-language area, but after  this market developed its own
dynamic.

Almost , new titles appeared between  and ,
the greatest growth rates being achieved towards the end of the century.
Between  and  alone, , new journals were published. These
are remarkable figures, even if we take into account that quite a few were
short-lived and did not survive
after the
first few issues. Consequently,
only a limited number of journals could build up a steady readership.
The size of print-runs varied. Normally, they would have been around
,; print-runs over , were a rare exception, yet a journal was
financially viable if it could sell more than  copies.

When consider-
ing these – on the whole – modest figures, however, we must remember
that individual copies were, as a rule, read by several people. In addi-
tion, the effectiveness of these journals was increased even further by the

fact that they frequently formed a key part of the holdings of the libraries
of contemporary reading societies.
The landscape of journals that emerged in this period was extraor-
dinarily diverse. Thus there were many specialist journals on subjects
such as theology, philosophy, law, medicine, education, natural sciences,
economics, music, architecture and military science. Their readerships
were drawn from those ‘experts’ in both the state apparatus and the free
professions whose numbers had increased in the late eighteenth cen-
tury. Publishers also discovered other specialist markets, such as women’s
journals

and fashion journals. As Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der
Moden ( Journal of Luxury and Fashion) showed, these publications could
be highly lucrative.

And finally, there were journals that concentrated
on contemporary literature. Among these general reviewing organs, the
Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (General German Library), edited by the
Germany –
Berlin publisher Friedrich Nicolai, initially stood out. In addition to
specialist organs of this nature, which had a relatively clear profile, there
were also journals that covered a broad spectrum of subjects. These in-
cluded the moral weeklies,

which played a key role in broadening the
reading public in the German-language area. Between  and ,
around  journals in this genre were published. Their content centred
on developing a new understanding of ‘virtue’, and the spectrum of sub-
jects addressed included, among other things, questions of upbringing
and education, the home, social conduct, aesthetics, literature and

lan-
guage. The general magazine, however, dominated the journal landscape
in the second half of the eighteenth century. The popularity of this genre
was attributable not least to the fact that i
t treated a remarkable range of
subjects. It ‘regaled readers with information on discoveries, inventions,
nature, history, statistics, practical matters, and occasional medical ad-
vice, all of which – interspersed where appropriate with a little poetry
and moralizing – served both the readers and the common weal’.

The
encyclopaedic character of the age was expressed here in trivialised form.
The real target reader
ship of the general magazines was the
Gebildeten.
But there were also many journals of this sort that aspired to instruct the
‘common man’.
The Intelligenzbl¨atter (advertisers, or information sheets) represented a
unique form of journal.

At first they printed mainly announcements and
official proclamations. But by the second half of the eighteenth century
they often also had a sizeable editorial section which contained contribu-
tions in a popular enlightened vein, literary essays, or pieces on the com-
mon good, which placed them in the vicinity of the moral weeklies. While
the Intelligenzbl¨atter were often close to the state, or even state-owned, a
substantial number were based on private initiatives. During the eigh-
teenth century they spread throughout all the German states, and there
is evidence that they were published in at least  cities. The average
weekly print-run was between  and , copies, but there were some

much higher figures. Around  the two Intelligenzbl¨atter published in
Hamburg – a stronghold of the German press – had circulations of ,
and , respectively. In rural areas, in particular, the Intelligenzblatt
might be the only published organ of the press. Holger B ¨oning has there-
fore justifiably pointed out that Intelligenzbl¨atter contributed to connecting
‘the local, regionally limited publics into a national public that ignored
the borders of the small states and territories’.

A political press in the real sense did not emerge until after . In the
last three decades of the eighteenth century there were several dozen jour-
nals which dealt intensively with political topics. During the s alone,
twenty-four of these historical-political journals came on to the market; the
 Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth
following decade saw another twenty-five more titles of this sort.

A num-
ber of these journals had constantly rising circulation figures, which shows
that they evoked a considerable response among the public. The most
prominent included Schl ¨ozer’s Staatsanzeigen (State Advertiser), Friedrich
Karl von Moser’s Patriotisches Archiv (Patriotic Archive), Schubart’s
Deutsche Chronik (German Chronicle)and Archenholz’s Minerva,which was
published in  with a print-run of ,, and whose authors included
the well-known journalists Friedrich (von) Gentz and Ernst Moritz Arndt.
One of the most important organs of the late Enlightenment in Germany
was the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly)(–), edited by
Joachim Erich Biester and Friedrich Gedicke.

Its authors included
Prussia’s leading intellectuals, among them Immanuel Kant and Moses
Mendelssohn. The s also witnessed the founding of journals which

openly sympathised with the French Revolution, such as Das Neue Graue
Ungeheuer (The New Grey Monster)(–) and Die Geissel (The Whip)
(–), which was edited by the lawyer and later judge in the French
court of appeal Andreas Georg Friedrich Rebmann.

As a rule, the
editors played a central part in these historical-political journals. They
often wrote a substantial proportion of the contents themselves, and thus
significantly influenced their political profile.
In order to attract readers, the histor
ical-political journals, like the
general journals, also carried travel reports, bookreviews and anecdotal
and biographical information.

But their main concern was domestic and
foreign politics. They inundated their readers with a flood of information
about government campaigns of various sorts, economics, commerce and
military undertakings. Frequently, statistical information also formed an
important part of their contents. Thus, they published figures on the
budgets of individual states and territories, on the military potential of the
European powers, birth and death rates, and import and export figures.
By publishing data of this sort, the editors of political journals were trying
to still the enormous public hunger for information. There was more,
however, to this obsession with statistics. It was also a deliberate, political
act which was intended to breakthrough the secrecy with which absolutist
regimes surrounded themselves, to generate a basis of fact for public
debate.

Facts, however, were only one side of the coin; political reflection was
the other. Events such as the American War of Independence, the French

Revolution, and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire necessarily pro-
voked an examination of fundamental constitutional issues. As a result,
ideas such as popular sovereignty, the rights of man and the social con-
tract were taken up by political journals during the Enlightenment and
the Napoleonic period. In this process, two factors reinforced each other:
Germany –
first, political literature became less academic, overstepping ‘the bounds
of its subject in the direction of political journalism’;

and second, these
themes became popular because their significance increasingly made them
spill over into non-specialist organs.

Added to this was the nitty-gritty
of everyday politics: plans to reform the education system, the debate
on the guilds, the problem of serfdom, reflections on the criminal justice
system, thoughts on poor relief and suggestions for improving industry
and agriculture.
However, it was not only these overtly political journals that pushed for-
ward the process of politicisation. Enlightened journals in general had the
same effect. Thus, literary magazines such as Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur
(German Mercury) increasingly discussed political subjects. An attempt
has been made to analyse the topics dealt with by the most important
German journals of the late eighteenth century.

The results of this
project, based on a computer analysis
of
, articles in about 
periodicals published between  and , are as follows: . per

cent were
on the natural sciences;
. per cent on
contemporary society;
 per cent on medicine; . per cent on the arts and humanities; . per
cent on economics; . per cent on theology and religion; . per cent on
politics;  per cent on law and jurisprudence; . per cent on philosophy;
. per cent on education and schooling; and . per cent on history.
Of course, such general categories are problematic. Nor do these figures
show how the relative importance of individual topic areas changed dur-
ing the second half of the century. But it is quite clear that politics, society,
law and economics played an important part in the discourse of German
enlightened society.
Originally, then, journals had concentrated on giving their readers
facts, and had provided the raw material for political discourse. Increas-
ingly, however, writers become more willing to take sides. The most ob-
vious expression of
this change was that controversies began between
individual jour
nals. According to B
¨odeker:
The transition of the journal from its role as provider of material for political
discourse to that of simultaneous bearer and representative of that discourse took
place primarily in the latter third
of the eighteenth century. At this time the press
grew into its new function as an institution of public reflection and representative
of public opinion. Journalists, and almost every learned German, spent at least
some of their time writing for journals, on affairs they considered to be of public
import and which they felt would be occupying the thoughts of others like them.


Like journals, newspapers had a long history in Germany, having de-
veloped out of the so-called Messrelationen around . In the period
under discussion here, they were therefore a firmly established medium,
 Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth
indeed, the most important one as far as politics were concerned. During
the eighteenth century, their numbers tripled. With its  newspapers,
Germany was ‘the country with the most newspapers in the world’.

Most of them probably had an average circulation of around  to
, although some boasted much higher figures. As early as  the
Reichspostreuter (Imperial Postal Messenger), published in Altona, had a cir-
culation of ,, while between  and  that of the Real-Zeitung
(Fact sheet) from Erlangen was as high as ,. The rapid burst of politi-
cisation which German society w
ent through in response to the French
Revolution and subsequent events seems to have stimulated the German
newspaper market. In any case, by the end of the eighteenth century,
a number of newspapers had achieved considerable circulation figures.
Thus the Neuwieder Zeitung (Neuwied News) had , subscribers in
; the Augsburg Ordinari Post-Zeitung (General Postal News) had about
, readers in ; and the Berlin Vossische Zeitung (Vosses Newspaper)
had a circulation of , in .

By far the largest figures, how-
ever, were achieved by the Hamburgische Unpartheyische Correspondent
(Hamburg Impartial Correspondent), which published no fewer than ,
copies at the turn of the nineteenth century, before Hamburg was occu-
pied by French troops: a
number of sources even suggest the extraordi-
nary figure of over ,.


Estimates indicate that by  the German
daily press sold considerably more than , copies per week: a figure
which could be matched by no other contemporary printed material ex-
cept the Bible and devotional literature.

Two factors were involved in newspapers becoming a ‘mass’ medium
in the German-language area during the second half of the eighteenth
century: first, the contents of newspapers changed. Austere lists of events
were increasingly replaced by argument and reflection. The French
Revolution, above all, had a politicising and polarising effect, forcing
many newspaper editors to adopt a position which in turn influenced the
reading public.

This points to the second important aspect, namely,
the new forms of reception that had become established. Parallel to the
reading societies in which the educated urban upper classes assembled to
read demanding material together, subscription clubs emerged among
the urban and rural lower classes, giving their members cheaper access
to newspapers, which they purchased collectively. This collective form of
consumption was an expression of a growing curiosity and an increased
need for entertainment among circles outside the enlightened elite. In ad-
dition to subscription clubs, pubs, coffee houses and taverns were places
in which newspapers were read. Often teachers or clergy would organise
reading circles in these places, which not only provided an opportunity
for communal reading, but also served as forums for discussion.

All of
Germany –
these institutions frequently involved illiterate people, who gained access

to the contents of newspapers when others read them aloud.
In the eighteenth century, most newspapers came out two to four times
per week. As a rule, they consisted of four to eight quarto pages, printed
in one or two columns. Daily newspapers were not the norm until the
first third of the nineteenth century. Prior to this, most newspapers did
not give articles headlines: only the place of origin and the date of the
announcement were mentioned. In the early nineteenth century it be-
came common to organise articles according to subject or geographical
headings. Political reportage formed the bulkof newspaper contents, and
war reports, court reports and official announcements and promulgations
clearly dominated. By comparison with reporting on foreign affairs,
do-
mestic political news from the paper’s home territory and neighbouring
states of the Holy Roman Empire tooka backseat: first, because news
from France and England, for instance, was more easily available, and
second, because there were political reasons why supra-regional newspa-
pers in Germany had to be very careful when reporting the politics of
neighbour
ing German states.

Among the many newspapers that were published in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, a few stand out. These include
the above-mentioned Sta[a]ts- und Gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen
Unpartheyischen Correspondenten, commonly known as the Hamburgische
Correspondent.

Published since , the paper profited from Hamburg’s
comparatively liberal press policy.

It was read by people from all over the

Reich, and even from abroad, for example, Scandinavia. Contemporaries
judged the Hamburgische Correspondent to be not only the biggest, but also
the best newspaper at the turn of the century. By that time its reporting
was already based on stories filed by its own correspondents.

The occu-
pation of Hamburg by Napoleonic troops put an end to the Hamburgische
Correspondent’s pioneering role as the most influential supra-regional
newspaper in the German-language area. Its place was to some extent
taken by the Allgemeine Zeitung (General News), founded by the publisher
Johann Friedrich Cotta in .

Published first in Stuttgart and then
moving to Ulm before settling in Augsburg in , the Allgemeine Zeitung
was the most influential organ of the German press in the first half of the
nineteenth century thanks to its comprehensive and balanced report-
ing. At this time, it undeniably had a European range. ‘Completeness’,
‘truthfulness’ and ‘impartiality’ were its guidelines, laid down when the
newspaper was founded, and followed over the years under Cotta’s
influence.

This pragmatic and clever publisher was able to combine
political caution, economic benefit and a differentiated, but sometimes
somewhat featureless, journalism.

The Allgemeine Zeitung was one of