In nineteenth-century Germany, scholars in the humanities often enjoyed a fame that few of their colleagues elsewhere could dream of. It was with wonder that Mark Twain, who toured the country in the 1890s, observed tram conductors excitedly pointing out a historian whom they had spotted on the street. Yet even there, those in the humanities felt a sense of crisis. This sense was rooted in developments that contemporary discussions of the humanities have obscured. It’s often said that the German university system was founded on the ideal of Wissenschaft, or systematic knowledge and scholarship. American universities, by contrast, were founded on a dual inheritance: on the one side, the British collegiate tradition of building character and on the other, the mission of specialized research, adopted from the German model in the late nineteenth century.
But this is a misrepresentation, because character formation had also been essential to the thinking behind the emergence of the German research university around 1800. In fact, our present-day understanding of what the humanities can do for students is much closer to that thinking than it is to the notion of moral education institutionalized at the religious colleges and universities of antebellum America.
Humboldt’s formula achieved nearaxiomatic status during the nineteenth century. But a few decades after the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, the link between Wissenschaft and Bildung came under serious pressure. As the Prussian state grew in power and size, technological and scientific advances began to play a greater role in the economy. The Prussian state pressed universities for more immediately “usable” research and knowledge. Key figures in Prussian society and the Prussian government developed a nineteenth-century version of the contemporary STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) obsession; and the state awarded research support accordingly. To compete in this funding environment and ensure their own prestige, some in the humanities tried to match the scale and aspirations of research in the natural sciences, as some digital humanities researchers do today, devising data collection projects of unprecedented size – the “heavy industry of scholarship”, as one practitioner put it. Others, like the Basel historian Jacob Burckhardt, wondered whether these outsized undertakings had left any room for real thinking.