Germany was slow to take up the ideas of the Enlightenment – the Aufklärung – and by the time they reached Berlin they had lost their radical edge. The progenitors of the Aufklärung included Christian Thomasius, who passionately opposed the witch-burnings and religious show trials of the day and wrote to this effect in a number of the new German periodicals. Leibniz, too, had been important in laying the foundations of the German Enlightenment, writing as early as 1700 that only through the use of reason could man ‘strive towards the development, improvement, complete understanding and correct application of ideas’. Christian Wolff was the first influential Enlightenment thinker in Prussia, although he was forced to move to Leipzig after arguing that the Chinese were capable of philosophical virtue. Nevertheless, while the French Philosophes tended to speak up against their king and were often harassed by the monarch, many of their German counterparts became fixtures at court. Christian Wolff’s Politik was like a handbook for kings and justified the all-powerful state with an absolutist monarch at its head. For many Germans, autocracy was rational, and therefore good. Unlike the French many defended religion, resting the Aufklärung firmly on Pietiest foundations and teaching German Enlightenment thinkers that religion could be reconciled with reason. The Germans did not appreciate French attacks on the Church or on morality; rakish works like Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes were firmly rejected and Berliners failed to grasp that sexual freedom was considered a mark of breeding in the France of Louis XVI. They were baffled when Parisians sneered at Rousseau’s mistress Madame de Warens because she ‘conceals her bust like a bourgeois’; they were shocked when the Parisian lawyer Barbier called Christian marriage a ‘despised popular superstition’, and shook their heads when he proudly recounted that ‘of every twenty lords at Court, fifteen are separated from their wives and keep mistresses’.97 Both Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff rejected empiricism and utilitarianism in favour of religion, a stance which so disgusted Chateaubriand that he wrote in 1797: ‘When all other nations have given up respect for religion it will find a haven among the Germans.’ Voltaire disliked Wolff and called him a ‘system builder’; he later tried to convince Frederick the Great that he was ‘a mere German pedant’.98 Ironically it would soon be Voltaire who would be ridiculed in Berlin.
Berlin was by no means the only centre of the Aufklärung in Germany. Christian Thomasius was a professor in Leipzig and Halle; Johann Christoph Gottsched, who at one time had been forced to flee Prussia to avoid being drafted into the Soldier King’s special band of tall troops, worked in Leipzig; Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg; Christian Wolff worked in Jena and Leipzig. Enlightenment ideas first came to the city ‘from above’ via Frederick the Great and were first manifested at court. Only later did they begin to affect the new middle class of Berlin.
As the administrative centre of Prussia Berlin had gradually become the centre for the new groups of independent, salaried professionals, people who neither worked at the court nor laboured in a trade, who had free time for the pursuit of culture and wanted to improve both themselves and society. They were determined to distance themselves from the world of trade and commerce and were in turn excluded from court life as Frederick still preferred ‘a worthless noble to a cultured bourgeois’.99 Most genuinely admired Frederick’s reforms and believed that he represented their best interests, but such deference was in part due to the fact that he still controlled all appointments in the civil service, including those in academia. But whereas in France and England natural rights were invoked to guarantee the freedom of the individual against oppression by the state, in Berlin it was assumed that the state itself was the guarantor of rights. The people looked to their benevolent despot in a way which was unthinkable in Paris or London, and Berlin’s Enlightenment was anything but revolutionary; it was more cultural than political, more to do with Bildung (education) than with economics or power.100 It would be a charming and civilized episode in its history, it would allow members of the new middle class to ‘improve themselves’ through education and the creation of new institutions, it would revel in public-spirited ideals, in the pursuit of reason, religious tolerance, education and humanitarian principles.101 It would also leave the city ill prepared for the political upheavals to come.
The rise of the new educated middle class changed the face of Berlin. Elegant gentlemen carrying canes and newspapers could now be seen attending the opera or promenading in the Tiergarten or meeting their friends to discuss the latest articles in the new ‘moral weeklies’ or the ‘civil journals’. By the end of the century Berlin contained a plethora of open and secret clubs, reading societies, debating associations, scientific groups and learned and literary circles whose members included everyone from civil servants to professionals to the clergy, from professors to bankers to physicians. Many had their own buildings which contained reading rooms and conversation rooms; each society had a complex set of statutes which usually included the banning of alcohol, smoking and gambling, and the prohibition of conversation about personal problems or religious or political beliefs.102 Conversation tended to focus on sensible reforms, on scientific innovation and on practical matters from new agricultural methods to improvements in education. There were dozens of closed or secret societies: the Society of Friends of the Aufklärung, the German Society, the Reading Cabinet, the Monday Club; but the most famous of the exclusive secret Berlin clubs was the Wednesday Society, started in 1783, which not only championed Enlightenment ideas but which would after Frederick the Great’s death be one of the few to advocate reforms of Prussian absolutism.103 Its membership included the society secretary Johann Biester, who published the respected Berlin Monthly Journal, Friedrich Nicolai, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, best known for his 1781 essay On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, which marked the beginning of the era of Jewish emancipation in Germany, and Prussian state officials like Karl Zuarez and Ernst Klein, who were later involved in the reform of the Prussian legal system.104 The strict code of secrecy allowed even government officials to speak freely at meetings without fear of reprisal. The Freemasons were also very active in the city and were keen to promote the ‘development of men within laws of enlightened reason’. Berlin contained dozens of lodges. The early ones like Aus trois globes (1740), Fidélité and L’Harmonie (1758) were modelled on their French counterparts, while those founded after 1760 were decidedly more German, with names like Hochcapital von Jerusalem (1760), Zu den drei goldenen Schlüsseln (1769), Zum Pegasus (1771), and Friedrich zu den drei Seraphim (1774). Berlin’s growing importance was reflected in its being given the Mother Lodge Zum Widder Grosses regierendes Ordens Capital der grossen Landesloge der Freimaurer von Deutschland in Berlin in 1776. Lessing and Fichte were both members and Lessing would later write, ‘Freemasonry and middle-class society are of the same age. Both originated side by side.’105
The innovative new culture quickly spread beyond the reading rooms of the city centre. In 1749 a famous music club was opened in the Brüderstrasse in the house of the Berlin organist Sack, dedicated to the music of Telemann, Haydn, Glück and to Bach’s sons; other enthusiasts championed Mozart and performed his great Enlightenment opera The Magic Flute. For the first time theatres were built for new middle-class patrons away from the court; in 1760 Andreas Bergé opened the privately funded 1,000-seat