'Poor in deeds and rich in thoughts' - that was Friedrich Hölderlin's lament about his fellow Germans two hundred years ago. In one form or another the idea became familiar. Germany in the 19th century acquired a reputation as the land of poets and thinkers (the phrase was coined by Jean Paul), something that foreign observers viewed with a mixture of condescension and respect. Many Germans reacted more bitterly. Gervinus, Freiligrath and Börne were among the writers who likened Germany to Hamlet, a comparison instantly understood in a country that had come to regard Shakespeare as one of its own. Germans knew all about des Gedankens Blässe - the pale cast of thought. Others played on the same theme. For Heinrich Heine the Germans reigned supreme only 'in the realm of dreams'; Marx sneered that they had only thought what other peoples had done. These contemporary cadences were surely in the mind of a modern historian, Rolf Engelsing, when he suggested that Britain had produced an industrial revolution, France a political revolution, Germany a mere reading revolution.

LRB 2 January 1997 | PDF Download