Whereas in England the great literary epoch of Queen Elizabeth I had coincided with commercial and naval expansion, and in France the golden age of Classicism had added lustre to the military glory of Louis XIV, German arts and letters flourished amid tiny principalities and somnolent towns that could only envy the powerful national monarchies west of the Rhine. In France and England public opinion could exert a significant influence on government, and the debate over issues of state and society was conducted with a vigour that reflected its importance, but in the autocratic states of Germany the debate was bound to remain purely theoretical. No Voltaires, Rousseaus, or Burkes were likely to emerge out of such an environment. The thinkers of Germany tended to emphasize introspection and spirituality. Culture became an escape from the narrow world of princely absolutism. Intellectual energies that could not reform the community fought to emancipate the individual through self-purification and self-perfection.

This was the background of German idealism, a philosophical movement seeking to establish a foundation for ethics and aesthetics beyond the realm of empirical knowledge. Proceeding from principles articulated by Immanuel Kant, it attempted to prove that there was a realm of experience lying beyond the categories of scientific investigation: the realm of the good, the true, and the beautiful. There were realities of the spirit and the mind, in other words, that were inaccessible to the practicality of the British empiricists or the intellectualism of the French rationalists. The disciples of idealism hoped to transcend the barriers created by nation, class, and religion. They spoke in the name of humanity as a whole, which manifested its underlying harmony through the infinite variety of its political, social, and theological categories. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing pleaded for religious toleration on the basis of a common system of ethical values to which all men of goodwill could subscribe. Johann Gottfried Herder preached that the unique character and meaning of each culture contributed to the richness of common humanity that defied state boundaries. Johann Joachim Winckelmann idealized the Classical ideal of beauty that he found in Greek art as an eternal standard, immune to the vicissitudes of time and history. These were views that offered an escape from the narrowness of everyday life. Kant, Lessing, Herder, and Winckelmann all believed in the necessity of changing institutions, but they were convinced that the place to begin was the individual’s moral consciousness. This gave thought in Germany a metaphysical coloration that distinguished it from the more robust pragmatism of philosophy in the west. It was during the second half of the 18th century that the Germans began to consider their country “the land of thinkers and poets.”

The literary revival of the age displayed the same quality of introspective idealism as the philosophical movement. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest genius of German letters, willingly accepted the existing system of civic and social values. He regarded the disunity of his nation as an expression of its historic character and defended the authority of the petty princes as an instrument of good government. He urged his countrymen to seek greatness not in collective action but in individual perfectibility. After a period of youthful rebellion against traditional canons of literary propriety, he turned to a Classicism in which a serene acceptance of life harmonized with his own sympathy for the established order. Friedrich Schiller, a man of more turbulent temperament, resented political injustice and weakness. In his plays and poems there are occasional outbursts of indignation and appeals for reform. Yet there is also a pessimistic mood of resignation induced by the burden of civic ineffectualness that history had imposed on his people. Ultimately, he, too, sought refuge from the world in the poet’s private vision. The Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) was a movement of literary innovation through which a group of young writers in the last decades of the 18th century sought to throw off the yoke of accepted standards of composition, but it remained confined to problems of prosody and taste and reluctant to confront political and social issues directly.

The cultural achievements could not alter the harsh realities of national fragmentation and princely autocracy. They supported, however, the ideals of rational reform and social progress that the Enlightenment had introduced throughout the Continent. In Germany as elsewhere the 18th century became the age when the monarchical principle advanced the loftiest justification of its claim to power. The authority of the prince, so the argument went, was to be exercised not for his private advantage or gratification but for the greatness of his state and the welfare of his people. His power had to be unrestricted so that his benevolence might be unlimited. Absolute government was the only effective instrument for achieving the general good. Impressed by the scientific discoveries and material advances that they saw about them, Europeans began to believe that the prejudices and injustices that had plagued society would gradually disappear before the steady march of reason.