Whereas the standard historical discussions on the emergence of the concepts of patriotism and fatherland in Germany tend to argue that an aggressive nationalism did not arise before the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia in 1806,1 a careful study by Hans-Martin Blitz shows that the opposition between enlightened cosmopolitanism and a rabid, especially Prussian patriotism and nationalism, underlying the dominant thesis about the emergence of a patriotic nationalism, which more or less explicitly makes the emergence of a patriotic nationalism into an issue of a “progressive” liberation from an occupational force, is historically too simplistic.2 Already during the Seven Years’ War there was the attempt on the side of Prussia, the actual aggressor who had invaded Saxony, to mobilize the population through pamphlets and sermons to identify with the war effort and see the Prussian king as rightfully defending their fatherland against an all-powerful recently formed Catholic alliance of Saxony with Austria. In that phase of the war the fabrication of camps based on religious distinctions, pitching Protestants against Catholics, as well as the figure of the king were used to create a unity in support of a Prussian patriotism.3 In the pamphlets describing actual battles and victories a third uniting focus became the image of a dehumanized, alien, dangerous enemy, especially France and, even worse, Russia.
At the same time, that is, relatively early in the war, some writers, especially the officer and poet Ewald von Kleist (1715–1759) and the canon and poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803), tried to acquire fame by producing patriotic poetry. Gleim, for instance, had hoped to become the German-speaking equivalent of Voltaire by writing the history of that war. Thus he collected detailed reports from the front, especially from his friend Ewald von Kleist. However, he did not turn these materials into a historical account, but instead wrote what then became the very popular “Songs of a Grenadier,” which were published with a preface by G. E. Lessing. Gleim’s “Songs of a Grenadier” created a common, enthusiastically patriotic soldier figure, which united all strata of the population. This figure, however, was a pure fiction. For the actual troops were partly recruited by force and against their will, partly mercenaries from all kinds of backgrounds and lands; certainly there were only very few patriots among them such as the poet Ewald von Kleist.4
The official Prussian propaganda as well as the voluntary poetic production of a patriotic military heroic ideal in light of imagery from classical antiquity, the glorification of the king and the vilification, even dehumanization of an enemy figure created all kinds of patriotic fictions and myths promoting primarily a Prussian territory, but possibly also just a local province as the fatherland. However, when, two years into the war, in August 1759, Ewald von Kleist died of his wounds from the battle near Kunersdorf, his fellow poets and writers were suddenly made aware of some of the actual realities of the war and—at least temporarily—ceased some of their patriotic promotion of the honors of dying for the sake of one’s fatherland. And, as the war progressed, the poets’ initial enthusiasm waned not only out of a desire for peace but also out of the eventual realization that their hopes of being recognized and rewarded by the Prussian king for their patriotic efforts were utterly futile; for the latter basically ignored them as he remained dedicated to his belief in French as the only acceptable polite, educated, and culturally relevant language.5
Blitz demonstrates that there was a wide range of intensity and investment on the sides of the poets that were engaged with the production of this kind of patriotism. In this respect, G. E. Lessing holds the most prominent position. Thus it is noteworthy that Lessing launched, in 1759, the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Newest Literature) with a preface that motivated the publication of this literary review journal by referring to a dear friend who, wounded while serving in the ongoing military campaign, bored, and out of a certain “military disgust with all political news,” had asked to be kept abreast of new publications and debates in the realm of belles lettres. The “letters” that constitute the individual installments of the journal hence pose as letters that had been originally addressed to this wounded friend. The focus and debate in that serial publication is offered as a conscious realm of circulating and discussing news that is different from the ongoing campaign and politics.6 The fact that Lessing wrote a preface for Gleim’s “Grenadier Songs” must not be misinterpreted as an endorsement of Gleim’s kind of patriotism. Rather, Lessing must have been motivated by market concerns, since he was the only one among that group of poets and writers solely depending on the income generated by his publications.7 More importantly, Lessing, apart from publishing Gleim’s “Grenadier Songs” and vehemently criticizing one of Gleim’s odes for its rabid promotion of hatred toward the enemy, requesting that his friend make serious changes, then also chose to publish this problematic ode in the fifteenth letter of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend.8 In that letter he does not reproduce the entire ode, rather he quotes it in segments and introduces it with a brief narrative, alerting the reader that the grenadier had been wounded in battle. In between quotes, the editor then calls the reader’s attention to a passage that is omitted. The editor suggests that this omitted passage exhibited the way battlefront wounds must have affected the judgment of the grenadier and allowed him to be carried away with an expression of furious anger, unfit for print and wider circulation.9 Through this strategy Lessing actively calls for a public that is no longer the emotionally and ideologically homogenized unit that all of these appeals to the fatherland and to patriotism tried to invoke but rather the audience of a publication, where each member has to make up her or his own mind and thus judge and think critically about what they are reading and whether it is fit to circulate in what kind of context. This model of a public, as I shall show in much greater detail in the last chapter on Lessing and Kant, has much in common with the traditional practices of the republic of letters. Yet, by relying on the vernacular instead of Latin, this new model of a public extends its potential scope beyond learned scholars.
Blitz’s analysis of the patriotism promoted during the Seven Years’ War shows that the reference to fatherland could mean many things to many people ranging from a particular land or territory to the subjects of a king, the imagined community of all Protestants, or all Christians, or the states that form part of the Holy Roman Empire. The latter version, the most abstract, based on the legal constitutional definition of the empire, was that promoted by one of the most vocal critics of the Prussian propaganda, the constitutional scholar, diplomat, and administrator Friedrich Carl von Moser (1723–1798). And yet, as Blitz shows in the last part of his study, that traditional, abstract, constitutionalist model based on the attempt to construct a collective identity inspired by a “national spirit” as it would fit the entirety of the Holy Roman Empire eventually became problematic for even its initially most ardent advocate. First Thomas Abbt, but then later Friedrich Carl von Moser also invoked a “national spirit” in order to demand the protection of certain freedoms from being totally subjected to arbitrary rules and regulations, without however criticizing the principles of monarchic rule. As Blitz points out, these criticisms must be understood as the demands of an educated part of the population that wants to be involved in reforms serving the common good. They must not be confused with revolutionary demands.10 By the 1780s even Moser felt the need to publish his Patriotisches Archiv, a collection of lives and statements and essays demonstrating an engagement in the common good and a commitment to a larger German unit transcending the many fragments of the empire. Indeed, it seems that the commitment to patriotic ideals became especially strong during the 1780s. It was then that a good number of German writers ranging from Klopstock to Herder expressed their concern with German language–based cultural institutions and it was also then, especially after his death in 1786, that Prussia saw a veritable cult around the figure of Frederick II, who was immortalized by all kinds of plans for publicly displayed monuments.11
Whereas Blitz analyzes with great success the different discursive genres and strategies that were involved in creating the imagined community of patriots during and after the Seven Years’ War, he gives relatively little attention to the self-reflective and critical texts from that early phase of a primarily moralist patriotism. Yet, as I will show in the following chapter, Moser’s very early text from before the war deserves a closer look because it provides a critical analysis of the utter instability of this imagined community as a discursive construct by looking at the pragmatic, rhetorical strategies involved in the appeals to a public.
Von Moser’s essay entitled “Das Publikum” from 1755 was one of the first German publications to address the concept of “the public.” Its author was then living in Frankfurt/Main and served as a high-level constitutional specialist in the legal and diplomatic representation of Hesse Darmstadt and Hesse Kassel. From there he continued to rise to political prominence as an expert administrator and jurist in the services of the Austrian Empire. He was eventually appointed minister of the imperial dukedom of Falkenstein and put in charge of reorganizing the ruined budget of that principality. He also founded the first faculty of economics at the University of Giessen. While he lived in Frankfurt he was part of the Pietist circles around Susanne von Klettenberg. Apart from his religious poetry, those of his writings that are addressed to a more general audience fall into the category of moralist reflections on what it takes to be a fair administrator in government services. On the one hand, he was a staunch advocate of responsible, dutiful government and administration; on the other hand, he was intensely aware of the limitations of the human capacity for self-improvement, of the potential for corruption of those in power as well as their potential for deceiving their subjects in appeals to “the public.” Thus he applauded institutional reforms involving the educational system as capable of promoting enlightenment, but he was also quite skeptical when he considered the means by which a general public could be manipulated. This is how he muses about the prospects for general enlightenment:
How much this quickly accelerating Enlightenment of our times, especially as it concerns the improvement of education and teaching of the general population in several German provinces by way of improving the institutions of primary and middle schools, as it concerns the more liberal and less constrained formation and thinking of the clergy, and most of all as it concerns the more gentle comportment of the rulers who have been alerted by warning examples, how much all of this will have an effect on the common man, and how much of the light he should have for his needs that will gradually reach him, all of this we shall hope for and expect from the new century to come.
The spirit of the times—if one can indicate with this expression the ideas among people, the circulation, expansion and refinement of concepts—has also its striking effects on the understanding of obedience. Even if the actual beliefs of the kings remain always basically the same and even if they continue to make their consciousness of their power in deeds and actions felt as strongly as they can, they nevertheless will also accommodate their words to the assumptions and beliefs of their subjects.12
Obviously, Moser does not hold an uncritically glorified opinion of the “public,” quite to the contrary, as his quoted musing makes clear: the terms and words that are being circulated might change and become more refined, but this refinement might just as well become a means by which a king would dupe his subjects in more sophisticated ways.
I am preceding my discussion of Moser’s well-known essay “Das Publikum” with citation of the concluding paragraphs of his essay “On Obedience” because occasionally Moser’s essay has been misunderstood as the glorification of the public.13 Contrary to such readings, I propose to see Moser’s essay as a critical examination of the means by which “the public” has come to be invoked. In fact, his essay on “the public” does anything but reify this entity. Instead, it approaches the public as a discursive construct. The initial definition of the public as “the most important person in the world” has to be understood as an investigation of the pragmatic aspects, the different kind of speech situations, in which this “person” is invoked and in fact constructed as a most contradictory chimera:
The most important person in the world and at the same time the greatest martyr of all times is the public. The monarch appeals to its judgment, the scholar requests protection from it, the merchant is its tutor, the just man appeals to its understanding and the hypocrite hides behind its weakness. No child is talked to as much as the public, and no old man has ever become so childish that one would have felt obliged to warn as much as one has done with the public. The tyrant opposes the reproaches of his conscience with the applause of the public, the oppressed and persecuted sigh for its sympathy, the man of the world hungers for its praise and only the Christian is capable of approaching it with a true and undisguised noble indifference tinged by respect.14
As we can see, in this opening statement Moser characterizes “the public” as the changing audience that is invoked and created by specific speech acts, as an audience that is supposed to legitimate whatever is being stated, acted, or announced. On the one hand, there are appeals to this “public” as an agent of a critical and fair judgment that is supposed to have an independent position, that is, to provide an objective evaluation of the actions of the speaker. On the other hand, it is an audience or addressee that is being patronized, educated, advised, or warned. In either case this “public” is the creation of specific speech acts by whoever has the privilege of appealing to a larger anonymous group of listeners or readers.
But Moser does not leave his critique with this general ironic characterization of “the public” as the projection of any speaker who is in the position to address a multitude that extends beyond the people personally known. This audience seems to also have a double character: in principle this entity should be all of mankind; in practice it is always composed of very specific groups.
All of humanity, or, where one wants to be more specific, the inhabitants of each state taken together constitute one public. They are addressed by the words: the polity, the common good, the common welfare, the common wellbeing, etc. The entirety of the citizenry would be united in view of the common good. However, this underlying ideal does not hold in practice, because it ignores the fact that there are always group-specific interests as well as specific competences that divide a population of a state. In that sense, there is no common unit that would constitute the public of a specific state. Only a small group seems to be sufficiently interested, intelligent, and educated, or at least in terms of their social standing and power sufficiently privileged, to be able to judge the reasons for a specific cause, whether their judgment be adequate or not.
(55)
Thus Moser makes it clear that there is a decisive and concrete discrepancy between the claims of addressing the public, invoking its critical ability to judge on behalf of a common good or the general welfare and the concrete divisions in any existing state, which allow only very few privileged and educated citizens to assume that role.
There is another interesting aspect to the rhetorical invocation of the public that Moser points out, which involves a temporal distinction and implies the possibility that the audience respond, be actively engaged with the sender of the message or proclamation or the agents of certain deeds. According to Moser, rulers generally tend to appeal to the legitimating judgment of posterity, especially if their actions are detrimental to their contemporaries. However, when they want to legitimate and announce a war, they tend to appeal to the world of their contemporaries. Whenever they present something to be judged by an “impartial public,” they actually want the automatic approval of their audience, and whoever dares to interject anything is excluded for being partial. And yet, Moser adds, contrary to the assumption of the rulers, there are always in actuality better and more critical judges of the decisions and actions of the rulers. These would be people with sufficient experience and knowledge, but distance from the ongoing actions as well, like him.
Certainly Moser could be characterized as a hard-nosed jurist who does not sentimentalize human nature, nor trust in progress apart from institutional, legal reforms, i.e., specific legislation and specific institutions that would serve the common good, where he challenges any automatic appeal to the “common good” as if this were something intuitively known and agreed upon. Thus Moser appears as a Pietist Hobbesian who thoroughly mistrusts human nature as self-interested and power hungry. The only recourse, apart from the external authority of a Christian conscience and ethics, is proper procedure, fair bureaucracy, and rational legislation that keep rulers and subjects in check.15 Thus he cynically formulates his take on natural law in the following words: “The wolf devours the sheep because he is a wolf; and the sheep puts up with it because he is a sheep. This is the nature and the law of nations of all rulers and all subjects” (59). But this characterization does not sufficiently capture what is new and important about Moser’s essay. In spite of his rather dyspeptic moralism, which appears especially strong in his meditations on governmental daily business, which he entitled Reliquien, he is strongly aware of a growing attention to the common good, a common public, the divisions among it as well as the demagoguery involved in appeals to it. Most of all, Moser’s essay presents a set of analytical tools to analyze the various speech situations in which a specific kind of public is hailed, invoked, and constructed: whether we assume all of mankind or a special interest group, whether we allow for an active audience that can actually react, or whether we assume merely an utterly open-ended neutral and vague set of the witnesses that make up the world of posterity. Finally, as we shall see, Moser, fueled by his brand of Christian skepticism when it comes to the basic anthropological assumptions at stake, has put his finger on the key concern: there has to be a fundamental human faculty to transcend self-interest. This is what is at stake if there is to be any attempt at constructing a larger community, a community that extends beyond those united in a common interest, and a community that is nevertheless of a secular makeup. Moser, not only a Pietist but in this respect an orthodox Christian, believes in man’s fallen nature and thus cannot easily allow for that human faculty. It is this fundamental doctrinal issue as well as his understanding of the role of religion and the church that sets him apart from those among his contemporaries, such as Thomas Abbt and Herder, who have addressed modes of constructing a public. From another perspective, all of these moralist patriots at that time held a certain commitment to enlightened absolutism in common.
By way of concluding this section on Friedrich Carl von Moser, I should like to point out one aspect of the reception of his work that has influenced much of the historical scholarship on the emergence of patriotism in Germany. Beginning with Gerhard Kaiser’s study, von Moser has been described as an advocate of a united German nation that is based on the fiery feeling of the pious Christian.16 Kaiser’s influential but misconstrued take on Moser is still noticeable, even in the otherwise carefully researched study by Blitz. Thus Blitz refers to Moser’s treatise Von dem deutschen National-Geist and asserts that Moser’s vision of national unity mobilizes Pietist feeling in his model of the nation for which he supposedly uses not only the traditional body politic metaphor but also the image of the unity of believers of the Christian church. In fact, in that one hundred-page treatise, this image occurs only once.17 It is true though that Moser makes use of his Pietist background. However, he does so quite differently. He holds on to a critical image of the human being’s capacity for goodness if left to its own devices. He therefore trusts in procedure and legislation rather than the individual goodness of the prince or collective investment in the common good. Here he is the shrewd jurist, not the pious advocate. He believes, in line with the Pietist tradition, that religious belief is a matter of one’s personal relationship with God; it is not to be codified and legislated by external authorities. Doctrinal matters can be more harmful than good if used to instigate violence and strife. He blames the history of the religious wars in Germany for the divided, fragmented nature of the Holy Roman Empire and the fact that there is no German unity, something he hopes could and should be overcome both through better legislation and better knowledge of the law as well as through the concept of tolerance that is advocated by the Pietist tradition.
Moser offers in his treatise Von dem deutschen National-Geist advice on how this fragmented nature of Germany could be overcome and claims that it is to be achieved primarily through a better knowledge of the constitution, of the individual legislations, of the rights of the different units toward the Empire and vice versa, but also through a better understanding of the differences and commonalities between the different German states. He advocates better education and travel for gifted young men from the lower and poorer estates that are to be trained for service in the government. In brief: Moser outlines a plan for better educating and broadening the cultural horizon of new government technochrats in the bureaucracy of the individual governments of enlightened absolutist states. He also advocates recruiting those individuals who have a strong enough character and conscience to be able to form their judgment and stand up to it, not to be cowed by the power politics at court. In his Patriotisches Archiv he offers a serial publication of documents worth reading by a public interested in the commonwealth. He publishes documents of exemplary lives of princes and rulers; for that he relies primarily on private letters, funeral sermons, and testaments, but in the later volumes also increasingly includes excerpts from essays and smaller treatises on the topic of tolerance, the concept of the public, and standing up for one’s judgment.
Whereas von Moser was utterly critical of the rulers’ manipulation of the public, especially when it concerned their military interests, Thomas Abbt (1738–1766) saw exactly in this—in the call to die for one’s fatherland—the sublime opportunity for the formation of a public that would be able to transcend not only individual self-interest, but also all particular, special interests that divide the different members of society. Thus he wrote and published his essay “Vom Tode für das Vaterland” (On Dying for the Fatherland) in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, in 1761, at a time when Prussia saw a first wave of patriotic zeal in favor of King Frederick II. The essay made its author famous and in 1765 produced for the young man—albeit not a position at the court of Frederick—a position at the Court of the Margrave Wilhelm of Schaumburg Lippe, a post he gladly accepted over the offer of a professorship at the University of Marburg. The count seemed to have been primarily interested in Abbt’s plans to become a historian. He did not, however, appoint him for political, legal, or administrative advice, for which Abbt’s education in theology, mathematics, and philosophy—in contrast to Friedrich Carl von Moser’s education and experience in legal and diplomatic matters—did not prepare him.
In 1761, when the then twenty-three-year-old Abbt wrote and published “Vom Tode für das Vaterland,” he was already a professor of philosophy in Frankfurt/Oder; later that same year he accepted a position as professor of mathematics in Rinteln. In 1763 he took part in the Prussian Academy’s essay competition on the question whether metaphysical truths were subject to the same kind of proofs as mathematical truths, a competition won by his friend Moses Mendelssohn. Abbt was an ardent admirer of Lessing and wrote many reviews and essays on ethics and aesthetics for the journal founded by Lessing and published then by Friedrich Nicolai as Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend. While in Rinteln he also published his most famous work Vom Verdienste (On Merit) in 1765, a work that expands the question of what constitutes meritorious actions in support of the common good and what kinds of personal characteristics are required to accomplish these tasks in the civilian sphere, in an attempt to address all segments of a population.
At the same time, when Abbt published his pamphlet “Vom Tode” he also published a lengthy and scathing review of Friedrich Carl von Moser’s Beherzigungen in the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend. Thomas Abbt pokes fun of Moser’s inelegant style, his clumsy formulations, and is most of all opposed to Moser’s claim that there is no such thing as civic virtue, that virtue does not exist in a secular form. Abbt argues against Moser that, just as there have been good rulers in history who were not Christians, there are civic virtues that stem from the individual’s capacity to act for a common good that transcends individual self-interest.18 Abbt’s own review is followed by an extremely positive review of Abbt’s own essay, quoting at length from his “Vom Tode für das Vaterland.” Clearly, the review of Abbt’s pamphlet in the Briefe in immediate proximity to Abbt’s review of Moser’s work stages a onesided debate over Moser’s claim that there is no secular, political, social virtue, no fundamental human capacity to make great sacrifices for the common good. For in this context it allows Abbt’s argument about patriotic virtue in war to appear as the victorious argument.19
In 1761, while Abbt was engaged with the composition of “Vom Tode,” he was also collaborating with Moses Mendelssohn on the translation of Shaftesbury’s “Sensus Communis: An Essay on Wit and Humour” (1709). In 1762 he stated in the Briefe, in the context of claiming that writers and journals had to make a special effort to appeal to the German “Bürger”: “Once the whole healthy understanding of the citizens finds support, once the true sensus communis, as Shaftesbury calls it, that is the sense for what contributes to the order and well-being of the whole, once this sense is well known: then the feeling for the beautiful will be promoted: for that is nothing else but that sensibility for order without the consideration of usefulness.”20 Abbt attributes to Shaftesbury the discovery of a human faculty that promotes the common good, which nevertheless needs to be made known to the citizens, before it actually becomes effective. In the case of Shaftesbury these are forms of witty conversation rather than scholarly pedantry, for Abbt, the promotion of civic virtue should be the goal of German writers. But Abbt’s Vom Tode involves more than an appeal to man’s capacity to take pleasure in sociability and act on behalf of the common good. It discusses the production of a new social whole—an imagined community—in the process of engaging for the common good, and it is in this context that it departs decisively from Shaftesbury’s understanding of sensus communis.21
Already in the preface to his work, Abbt takes issue with the argument from Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois that only republics would know a true form of patriotism, whereas monarchies were limited by the aristocracy’s adherence to a concept of honor and distinction: “Should it be difficult to show that the sacrifice of our life, which is sometimes demanded by our fatherland, that this sacrifice will be made easier by this motivation and that this motivation will be most effective; indeed that this motivation can be applied to more souls than those moved by the desire for glory common in monarchies; that one would not have to become a foolish enthusiast, which only happens with patriotism in very special circumstances?”22
According to Abbt, monarchies can just as well, maybe even better than republics, bring out a patriotic zeal in their subjects that shows itself in their willingness to die for their fatherland. For, in the case of monarchies, this patriotic zeal and engagement for the common good finds its focus in the figure of the king. This common focus of love and identification, according to Abbt, helps the people of a much larger land unite in view of a common interest. Moreover, what makes the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s fatherland such a unique virtue is the fact that it alone can transform mere subjects into citizens, regardless of their position in the social hierarchy and regardless of the actual form of their government, whether republic or monarchy:
The division into estates necessary in monarchies might have been the reason that the joint efforts invested in the common good have been dissolved. Each of the estates began to believe that it should contribute only in one specific fashion. And yet, if there is to be one common good (and this can be found in all societies) there has to be also one common political virtue. Seen from this perspective all distinctions between peasant, burgher, soldier and nobleman disappear. All are united and represented under the formerly glorious name of the citizen. Then everybody is a citizen soldier, each soldier a citizen, and each nobleman a soldier and citizen, as you like it.
(Abbt, “Vom Tode” 15–16)
Abbt attributes a most powerful and socially transformative force to the willingness to die for one’s fatherland. The commitment to this ultimate sacrifice produces a socially cohesive whole by creating a community of equals united in view of one common purpose, a community composed of citizen soldiers. This one lofty virtue and imagined community trumps and suspends the functional differentiation between individual estates, which tends to suggest to every estate that each specific function is all the members of one estate have to contribute to the common whole, thus separating the farmer from the burgher, and the soldier from the nobleman. In war everybody becomes a citizen soldier defending the common fatherland. It is noteworthy that Abbt in this essay is far from discussing the specifics of the interaction across ranks in the military. Quite to the contrary, he is engaged with the lofty praise and invocation of patriotic zeal as it is invoked by Thucydides, providing for his readers the illusion of listening to Pericles’ funeral oration, which Abbt quotes at great length. In other words, Abbt is engaged with the construction of an imagined community in view of one purpose and one virtue, one ideal that transcends both individual self-interest as well as the functional divisions within a social hierarchy.
Abbt points out that the willingness to die for one’s fatherland, this ultimate act of self-sacrifice that demonstrates and inspires an attitude that transcends self-interested behavior, can only be matched by religious values and religious zeal. Although he argues that this virtue can exist in civilizations, such as those of classical antiquity, that were not particularly religious, or where it was propagated independently from religious practices and ideals, in modern times, where there is no public forum to awaken such a spirit, the pulpit might indeed serve as an effective medium to promote this ideal. Thus Abbt recommends that pastors make it their business to admonish their parishioners that patriotic self-sacrifice should be their concern: “Would it defile the servant of religion if he became the tool to disseminate this voice; and should he neglect his office if, after having said a thousand times ‘Repent!’ if once he would call out: ‘Be happy to die for your fatherland!’?” (4). Obviously, Abbt does not shy away from instrumentalizing religion and its institutions. Lacking a polis, a public forum with its public-minded culture, the pulpit should serve as the medium to generate and support the commitment to the common good. This call to religious authorities for their assistance in the promotion of the required patriotic zeal roused Friedrich Carl von Moser’s utter indignation. In his Reliquien he criticizes Abbt as somebody who would not shy away from riling up the population and inciting the outbreak of civil war.23
Moser’s scathing criticism of Abbt’s proposal to use religion as a means of promoting his patriotic virtue and recruiting soldiers also reveals another aspect in Abbt’s concept of patriotism versus his own, namely the tension between the very local, more or less arbitrary, states, which did not promote any sense of community among their inhabitants, on the one hand, and Moser’s corporate sense of the German Empire as the site of a German patriotism. Beyond that, Moser’s criticism calls our attention to the fact that although the Seven Years’ War roused a certain degree of patriotic, pro-Prussian, pro-Frederician zeal, by far not all writers and public voices were in support of this war or its propaganda.24 In his criticism of Abbt he calls attention to the brutal, forceful recruitment methods that were used during the Seven Years’ War, something, he sarcastically argues, that would not have been necessary if there had already been the more tightly woven alliance between the church and the military that Abbt’s pamphlet advocates. Thus Moser points out the cost of this kind of an alliance: instead of promoting the creation of a unified community that cooperates in the service of the common good, this alliance would have produced sectarian warfare.
Abbt calls for the assistance of religious authorities in the same context when he wonders if enough is being done in modern times to support the patriotic zeal of the people. He notes the stark contrast with the ancients and challenges his modern contemporaries to be equally receptive to “the voice of the fatherland” as the Greeks and Romans were: “Should the voice of the fatherland which resounded so powerfully in the gatherings of the Greeks and Romans in old times, which resounded in the ears of the dying, and which made the fallen patriots smile even when confronted with the fear of death, should this voice have lost its strength among us, or should we, deprived of nobler sentiment altogether, have become incapable of being moved by it?” (4). Already this contrast between the ancients and the moderns implies a decisive difference in the venues and media available to that “voice of the fatherland,” a distinction that, as I shall show, will become the guiding distinction for Herder’s essays on the nature of a modern public. The question at stake seems to have become how for modern times, where there is no longer the civic culture of public gathering of the ancients, an equivalent can be found. Could religion and religious institutions serve as this medium or should this be left to the poets and writers? Who could and should create the imagined community of one unified fatherland?
In 1766, shortly after having taken up this prominent post, Abbt suddenly died of a medical complication at the age of twenty-eight. Although he did not die on the battlefield, he instantly became a publicly mourned hero. A marble memorial in his honor was erected in the margrave’s chapel, and many writers, philosophers, and poets commemorated him and his work. Among them the young Herder published an excited eulogy/portrait of Abbt in 1768, where he describes him as one of his most important intellectual influences. What sets Abbt apart from all other writers, according to Herder, is his willingness and ability to write not just for a specialized audience, such as a scholarly audience or a highly cultivated and sophisticated courtly audience, but for a common audience of ordinary men and women. It is Abbt’s investment in that kind of public both in his accessible, personable, and metaphorical writing style as well as in his thematic choices, primarily in his essay on “Dying for One’s Fatherland” and his more involved, longer examination “On Merit,” as well as in his historical studies, that makes him for Herder such an extraordinary model and ideal of an author. For Herder, Abbt is not primarily an advocate of Prussian military patriotism and enlightened absolutism but an advocate of a public spirit that was constituted by the people united in support of the common good, a community spirit derived from something utterly different than self-interested rational action. Clearly, for Herder the young Abbt became a figure to identify with, to emulate, and, as we shall see, this also involves Abbt’s rise to fame and power through his appointment by the margrave. We could consider his position symptomatic, embodying the professional hopes for well-educated young men from the middling classes striving for a career in the administration of the governments of the more or less enlightened princes. The idea of a united public in the service of the common good that Abbt attributes to Shaftesbury, which according to Abbt is able to overcome the divisions between the estates, seems to have held an enormous appeal for that generation of young men. One reason for its attractiveness might very well lie in the erasure of one’s own traditional background and standing within the social hierarchy once one can speak to and for that common good and appeal to the public. In the following chapter I shall focus on Herder’s further engagement with Thomas Abbt and the question of what would and should constitute a modern public and we shall see more of the appeal of that speaking position for a certain ambitious young man’s career projects. However, we shall also see a growing awareness of the implications of Abbt’s model of a public that is unified and homogenized under one patriotic umbrella.
In the case of Friedrich Carl von Moser we have observed an entirely different approach to the public. For him there is no doubt about the rhetorical, discursive constructed nature of any kind of public. Moreover, he does not believe in a fundamental capacity to overcome self-interest and serve the common good. Quite to the contrary, it is the religious man with a conscience who is able to be a critical judge of those in power, to resist political intrigue, and to stand up for what is right. Whereas Abbt would not shy away from making use of the pulpit, from recruiting religious leaders into becoming spokesmen for the common good, for inciting love of the fatherland, Moser sees in that unification of politics and religion only the risk of civil war. Instead of advocating the conjunction of church and fatherland, Moser advocates the Pietist concept of tolerance, one that refrains from dogmatic, confessional codification and puts the emphasis on the individual’s relationship toward God, on lived experience and deeds. In lieu of trust in man’s capacity for goodness, for overcoming self-interest for the sake of the commonwealth, Moser trusts in good legislation and a good understanding of legal practices. Whereas for Abbt—quite differently from Lessing—the public is primarily conceived of as an audience to be influenced and united in view of a common interest, whether through the call to arms or in view of common interests in the arts and literature, such as those promoted by the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, for Moser the public is potentially a critical public, one that can make up its own mind and judge those in power in the government in view of the fairness and wisdom of their decisions. However, in the case of Moser, this kind of critical public will always be restricted to the very few who are educated, experienced, and impartial enough to make up their own minds.
This focus on the conceptualization of the public in the context of the Seven Years’ War has brought to light different perspectives on the constructions of the public against the background of a new phase of German patriotism. Through Moser’s reflection on the nature of the public, we have seen an understanding of the public as a discursive construct riddled with certain paradoxes. If understood as an audience that is constituted through its invocation, it is addressed both as a confidant and familiar entity as well as a stranger, an impartial judge. Thus already in Moser’s analysis of “the public” it becomes clear that to a certain extent any normative concept of the public needs to extend to strangers, to be open beyond the well-defined group of a specific audience and, in that sense, cannot be identical with one specific imagined community. In Abbt’s appeal to the unification of all through the willingness to die for the fatherland we could see the attempt to shore up an imagined community of patriots that are united through one common nonselfish interest that would overcome the barriers among estates and transcend social hierarchies by uniting all as “citizen soldiers.” Here we can witness a distinctly different notion of bürgerlich as not “bourgeois” but rather “civic,” harkening back to classical antiquity and its republican ethos, albeit here in the context of Frederician absolutism. It is certainly rooted in Abbt’s specific adaptation of Shaftesbury’s sensus communis that we can localize the new normative aspect of the concept of the public. Yet it remains problematic as to who could actually invoke this common interest, this willingness to die for the common good. In Moser’s criticism of Abbt’s willingness to instrumentalize religion and to have this call to civic duty issued from the pulpit, we could see the problems of using religious authority and mobilizing a sectarian public, which then could easily become an incitement to sectarian warfare rather than one united community. In Lessing’s intervention in the patriotic discourse during the Seven Years’ War, we could see the clearest critique of the patriotic concept of a public. According to Lessing, the public cannot be identical with the imagined community of patriots, supporting the cause of the Prussian war effort, but rather the public becomes a social space created by the circulation of discourse in the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend.