Background In 1685, Margrave
Frederick William of Prussia issued the
Edict of Potsdam within a week after French king
Louis XIV's
Edict of Fontainebleau, that decreed the abolishment of the 1598
Edict of Nantes which had conceded to free religious practice for
Huguenots. Frederick William offered his "co-religionists, who are oppressed and assailed for the sake of the Holy Gospel and its pure doctrine...a secure and free refuge in all Our Lands". Around 20,000 Huguenot refugees arrived in an immediate wave and settled in the cities, 40% in Berlin, the ducal residence alone. The
French Lyceum in Berlin was established in 1689 and the French language had by the end of the 17th century replaced Latin to be spoken universally in international diplomacy. The nobility and the educated middle-class of Prussia and the various German states increasingly used the French language in public conversation in combination with universal cultivated manners. At the beginning of the 18th century, Prussia had therefore access, like no other German state, to the skill set for the application of pan-European Enlightenment ideas to develop more rational political and administrative institutions. The princes of Saxony would carry out a comprehensive series of fundamental fiscal, administrative, judicial, educational, cultural and general economic reforms. The reforms were aided by the country's strong urban structure and influential commercial groups, who would modernize pre-1789 Saxony along the lines of classic Enlightenment principles.
Early phase The Enlightenment gradually transformed German high culture in a variety of fields: literature, music, philosophy, and science. The German Enlightenment "supposedly" began with
Christian Thomasius. The polymath
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was "in the vanguard of the German Enlightenment". The philosopher
Christian Wolff expounded the Enlightenment to German readers and established German as the prevailing language of philosophical reasoning, scholarly instruction and research. During the first half of the 18th century, German music, sponsored by the upper classes, came of age under
Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1740,
Frederick the Great began to rule Prussia, and would do so until his death in 1786. As worded by Elizabeth Haller Ellis, Frederick was "less an enlightened ruler than a despotic patron of enlightenment culture".
High phase From approximately the mid-18th century to the 1770s was the phase of “High German Enlightenment”. In 1755, the young
Immanuel Kant from
Königsberg published
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. The same year, the first German
bourgeois tragedy,
Miss Sara Sampson, by
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, was premiered. Between 1767 and 1769, Lessing would also write
Hamburg Dramaturgy, an important collection of essays about theater. He was at that time employed by the theatre principal
Abel Seyler, who greatly influenced the development of German theatre and promoted serious
German opera, new works and experimental productions, and the concept of a national theatre. German music would continue flourishing in the second half of the 18th century with
Christoph Willibald Gluck,
Joseph Haydn and
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Late phase In 1770, Kant introduced a new theory about metaphysics in his inaugural dissertation on the occasion of his appointment as professor of metaphysics at the
University of Königsberg. In the 1770s,
Johann Gottfried Herder broke new ground in philosophy and poetry, as a leader of the
Sturm und Drang, a precursor to
Romanticism. In 1779, Lessing completed
Nathan the Wise, a play on religious tolerance, which would only be premiered after his death. , depicting the German poets
Schiller,
Wieland,
Herder, and
Goethe in
Classical Weimar From the 1780s to the early 1800s, a cultural and literary movement based in
Weimar, the
Weimar Classicism, sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical, and Enlightenment ideas; the movement involved Herder as well as polymath
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
Friedrich Schiller, a poet and historian. Herder argued that every group of people had its own particular identity, which was expressed in its language and culture. This legitimized the promotion of German language and culture and helped shape the development of German nationalism. Schiller's plays expressed the restless spirit of his generation, depicting the hero's struggle against social pressures and the force of destiny. In remote Königsberg, an older Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom, and political authority, completing his
Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, and his essay
What Is Enlightenment? in 1784. Kant's late works contained basic tensions that would continue to shape German thought—and indeed all of European philosophy—well into the 20th century.
Limits German Enlightenment won the support of princes, aristocrats, and the middle classes, and it permanently reshaped the culture. However, there was a conservatism among the elites that warned against going too far. In 1788, Prussia issued an "Edict on Religion" that forbade preaching any sermon that undermined popular belief in the Holy Trinity or the Bible. The goal was to avoid theological disputes that might impinge on domestic tranquility. Men who doubted the value of Enlightenment favoured the measure, but so too did many supporters. German universities had created a closed elite that could debate controversial issues among themselves, but spreading them to the public was seen as too risky. This intellectual elite was favoured by the state, but that might be reversed if the process of the Enlightenment proved politically or socially destabilizing.
End The
Napoleonic Wars brought an end to the German Enlightenment and gave rise to
German Romanticism. ==By center==