Berlin also became the German centre of the salons modelled on those in Paris and brought to Germany by Germaine de Staël-Holstein. These were held in the private homes of the well-to-do, allowing everyone from intellectuals to impoverished nobles, from bureaucrats to artists to form friendships across the estates.106 The salons were unique in Berlin history for giving a remarkable group of educated Jewish women, including Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin (later Varnhagen von Ense), real influence over intellectual life in the city; the latent anti-Semitism in Berlin would re-emerge with a vengeance in 1806, but for four decades the Jewish salons were the most prestigious in the city. The beautiful and intelligent Henriette Herz wrote that she attracted ‘as if by magic, all the outstanding young men who were either living in Berlin or else visiting the city’.107 The Prussian Academy of Sciences, the gymnasia, the academies and the public lectures were now of a high standard. One of the most influential in this circle was the writer and publisher Friedrich Nicolai.
Nicolai was one of the most important figures of the Berlin Enlightenment. His father, a bookseller, left the business to his twenty-five-year-old son in 1759 and Nicolai turned it into a focal point of Berlin life. In the mid eighteenth century books were still an expensive luxury; there were no public libraries and people were obliged to share copies amongst friends. Nicolai advocated the increased production of books and pamphlets and pushed for the publication of ever more reviews, journals and ‘moral weeklies’ based on English journals like the Tatler and the Spectator. He promoted better education and literacy in the drive to create enlightened citizens. On 4 January 1759 he, advised by his friends Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, began to publish some letters – Briefe, die neueste literatur betreffend, the most important paper of the German Enlightenment, which came out every Thursday. In 1765 he founded the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, which was published for nearly forty years and which contained reviews of some 80,000 German titles between 1765 and 1805 alone, including memoirs, literary histories, biographical dictionaries and novels. His bookstore, the largest in Berlin, became a haven where intellectuals could meet for a glass of wine and discuss the latest publications. Nicolai also promoted the modern newspapers which combined entertainment and edification; in 1721 the Königlich privilegierte Berlinische Zeitung (later the Vossische Zeitung) began its career, and many of the 300 contributors to the Berlinische Monatsschrift were high-ranking civil servants who were published alongside ten army officers and five women.108 The voracity for books meant that the number printed doubled every ten years; there were 3,000 authors in 1760 but 10,000 by 1800. Nicolai’s own works were successful and his Sebaldus Nothanker was a great bestseller of the day. To Goethe’s annoyance it sold 12,000 copies, far more than his own work.109
By the turn of the century Berlin had the highest concentration of ‘intellectuals’ of any German city.110 Many were civil servants or bankers who dabbled in literature, but there were others of profound importance, in particular the friends Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn. It was they who, by moving to Berlin, pulled the city out from under the shadow of rivals like Jena, Leipzig, Göttingen, Königsberg and Weimar. In autumn of 1748 the nineteen-year-old Lessing, a Saxon by birth, came to Berlin to escape debts which he had run up while at university in Leipzig. After finding lodging in the Spandauer Strasse he set out to transform Berlin. Lessing was a true son of the Enlightenment. He fervently believed that reason was the key to progress, that humanism and human freedom were paramount, and he stood against the evils of prejudice in all its forms. In November 1748 he and his cousin Christlob Mylius, who edited the Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung, met the publisher Christian Friedrich Voss and Richier de Louvain, who later became Voltaire’s private secretary. Together they founded the Montagsclub (the Monday Club), which attracted luminaries like the critic Karl Ramler, the composer Johann Quantz, Friedrich Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn, immediately making it a centre of Berlin intellectual life. Lessing became the most eloquent of German Enlightenment writers, with his works reflecting his deep longing for equality and justice: Minna von Barnhelm is a plea for reconciliation between the old enemies Prussia and Saxony and an attack on the outmoded notion of ‘honour’; his famous critique of Johann Winckelmann’s aesthetic theory in his essay Laokoon foreshadowed the classical revival in Germany; the tragedy Emilia Galotti exposed the corruption of the minor German courts.111 Lessing was convinced that morality was more important than the dogma of conventional religion and he detested the religious intolerance which he witnessed in Berlin, the most obvious example being continuing prejudice against the Jews. His two plays, Die Juden of 1749 and the magnificent Nathan der Weise, written in Wolfenbüttel in 1779, which stands as one of the greatest works of the Aufklarung, challenged the stereotypical image of the Jew. Through his work Lessing demanded of his audience that they not ask if a person was a Christian or a Jew. Instead, they should ask if he is a man, a human being. The kind and noble character of Nathan was modelled on Moses Mendelssohn, of whom Lessing said: ‘How free from prejudice his lofty soul, His heart to every virtue how unlocked, with every tender feeling how familiar.’ It was an apt description.
Moses Mendelssohn was the third great figure of Enlightenment Berlin. Born in Dessau in 1729, he moved to the city when he was twenty-five. He began as a tutor to a wealthy Jewish family and later supported himself by running a silk factory. At the same time he wrote extensively in journals and newspapers and produced a number of philosophical works, including Phädon oder Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, which revealed his humane rationalism. Mendelssohn was a tireless campaigner for Jewish emancipation. He founded the first Jewish school in Berlin for eighty children, financed by court banker Daniel Itzig and the businessman David Friedländer, while his work Jerusalem oder Über religiöse Macht und Judentum was a plea for acceptance of his people; it formed the basis of the Haskalah and later for Reformed Judaism. For those Jewish families granted permission to live in the city Berlin offered many advantages: the city had no ghetto, there were few housing restrictions, and during Mendelssohn’s time it was home to around 3,500 Jews – around 2 per cent of the population. Their growing prosperity was reflected in palatial houses on Unter den Linden and Spandauer Strasse and in the great salons of the day.112 Nevertheless Jews still faced a plethora of petty restrictions and discrimination; when he came to Berlin Moses Mendelssohn could not enter the city as other men did but was forced to remain in a hostel outside the gate otherwise used for livestock. There he was questioned at length and had to pay a transfer tax similar to that applied to cattle before being permitted to enter.113 Another of the levies forced him to purchase overpriced figures from Frederick the Great’s struggling porcelain firm; as a result twenty monkeys sat in a row on a shelf in his house in Berlin.114 Mendelssohn was a leading intellectual of his day but he faced official discrimination throughout his life: in 1763 Frederick the Great rejected his application to the Academy of Sciences because he was a Jew, a decision meekly accepted by its members even though they had unanimously supported his application. When he died Mendelssohn had still received no official recognition from the Prussian state. Lessing snorted that Frederick’s renowned religious tolerance clearly did not extend to allowing a Jew into the upper reaches of a learned society.
The passive acceptance of such discrimination which went so clearly against their principles was one of the problems with the Berlin Aufklärer. They were innovative in their social and artistic and cultural lives, but they were politically impotent. The only serious criticism of Frederick came in the form of growing resentment against the very people who had brought the Enlightenment to Berlin in the first place: the French.
Anti-French sentiments and the rise of German nationalism are typically identified with the Napoleonic Wars, but resentment against France was simmering away in Berlin long before 1806. It was the product of increased self-confidence in Prussia: as early as 1700 Leibniz had said: ‘We have set France up as a paragon