In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 YOUTH UNIVERSITY We see then how many interests and influences, how many new ideas, how many theoretical and practical tendencies were then at work. To outside beholders, to the younger and ardent minds, especially at the German universities, the aspect must indeed have been bewildering. —John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1912 In 1810, when Wilhelm von Humboldt founded the University of Berlin, he envisioned an institution of higher education that would not only respond to the practical needs of the Prussian state but also serve the cultural aspirations of the German nation. Exactly how this was to be realized in practice was left unclear. Emil du BoisReymond , for one, began his classes there without any particular focus. Having matriculated on 18 April 1837 in the philosophical faculty (what we would call the liberal arts), he possessed only the vaguest sense of direction, signing up at his father’s suggestion for a class in church history given by the eminent scholar August Neander.1 The subject could have been fascinating, but Neander seems to have been a peculiar lecturer.The theologian James Martineau described him “pulling a pen to pieces with his fingers, rocking his desk backwards and forwards on its hind edge with every promise of a bouleversement, and talking smoothly, as he rocks, for his three-quarters of an hour, without a scrap of paper; quoting authorities, chapter and verse, and even citing and translating longish passages from ecclesiastical writers; then finishing every clause by spitting, in a quiet dropping way upon the floor, as if to express the punctuation .”2 Du Bois-Reymond could not bring himself to attend six such performances each week. He received the worst grade in his university career and gave up any further study of religion. This change of heart made sense in a time of political reaction. In 1819 the Austrian foreign minister used the murder of a prominent writer as a pretext to clamp down 16 CHAPTER 2 on liberalism across the German confederation, issuing a set of decrees that abolished student fraternities, supervised university lecturers for harmful ideas, censored the press, forbade public assembly, and authorized a central commission to search out “the origin and ramification of revolutionary conspiracies and demagogic associations.”3 Those interested in reform had to work with existing institutions of state, church, and education or redirect their energies into culture.The remainder of the population retreated from public life. Du Bois-Reymond also had to contend with economic pressure. Rising university enrollment flooded government posts with applicants, creating a population that one ethnographer identified as an “intellectual proletariat”:“the civil servant proletariat, the schoolmaster proletariat, perennial Saxon pastoral candidates, starving university lecturers ,literati,journalists,artists of all kinds.”4 Their example discouraged du Bois-Reymond from studying; his “real wish and thought,” he later admitted, was to become an artist like his aunt Louise, his grandmother Suzette, or his great-grandfather Daniel Chodowiecki .5 However, to placate his father he signed up for Henrich Steffens’ course in psychology and Eilhard Mitscherlich’s in chemistry. Psychology was a fitting subject for someone concerned with identity. Steffens was the oldest professor in the Philosophical Faculty, and his renown attracted many famous intellects, including Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard.6 Steffens had studied with the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the mineralogist Abraham Werner and had combined their insights in the peculiar German specialty of Naturphilosophie, an attempt to unify all knowledge into a single system of development.7 This ambition can be seen in the final chapter of Steffens’ Essentials of Philosophical Science, which argued that the evolution of our souls mirrors the evolution of the world, and in Steffens’ two-volume, three-part Anthropology, which classified races and temperaments through a Galenic typology. Like his contemporary Schopenhauer, Steffens wrote in aphorisms.A few quotations suggest what it was like for du Bois-Reymond to hear him lecture: With women the bosom is the secret of the incorporation of the inner being in vegetation, i.e., in generation. With men generation is relatively separate.The testicles (to man, what the bosom is to woman) show via their low existence the independence of man’s inner being from generation. Women show a relatively emergent being in the universal tension of totality. The monthly cleansing is a periodic oscillation of childbirth under the potency of pregnancy. The act of generation individualizes women’s universal childbirth.8 [3.133.87.156] Project MUSE...

Share