Das Kapital
(
Capital
), has exerted
immeasurable influence on the course of subsequent history. It has given rise
both to a wide array of diverse, often wildly conflicting interpretations, and to
numerous political movements and powerful regimes – most obviously that of
Soviet Russia – claiming inspiration and legitimacy, rightly or wrongly, in
Marx’s name. Meanwhile, in pre-March Germany, Marx was only beginning to
formulate his revolutionary ideas, which had little immediate impact on German
developments at the time. It was after his exile, in the tranquillity of the reading
room of the British Museum in London, that his major works were formulated;
even then, he only observed and commented on the course of nineteenth-century
German politics from a distance. We shall return to the impact of Marxist
thought in due course.
In music, Vienna was a major centre: the names of Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770–1827), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), and the Strausses indicate the range
of musical creativity, from the major symphonic works through the Viennese
waltzes to the more intimate
Lieder
or songs. Music was both a public activity,
with operas and concerts, and a private, familial occupation, with piano playing
and singing as well as chamber music in small circles. On the whole, German
music of the early nineteenth century represented a more secular phenomenon
than the religious heights achieved in the northern Protestantism of Johann
Sebastian Bach a century earlier. In the wider cultural sphere, a shift can be
discerned away from the conspicuous consumption of eighteenth-century court
culture towards that more sober middle-class style known as ‘Biedermeier’ – a
term describing not only a style of furniture, but also with connotations of a
slightly repressive, patriarchal, heavy middle-class atmosphere in which a
certain sentimentality went along with an essentially apolitical, ascetic work
ethos. In literature, the period is characterised by diversity. The classicism of the
later Goethe period gave way to a sense, among certain circles, of belonging to a
generation of epigones after Goethe’s death in 1832. Romanticism, associated
with names such as Novalis, Tieck, Hölderlin, Brentano, von Arnim, Hoffmann
and the Schlegel brothers, was countered by the works of those known as
members of the ‘Young Germany’ movement, loosely associated with Heinrich
Heine.
Most profound were the subterranean changes occurring in the
socioeconomic sphere. Shifts in social relations, in patterns of production, and in
the political organisation of economic life combined with rapid population
expansion to amount to the beginnings of a fundamental transformation of
German society. The replacement of a feudal, status society by a class society in
the early nineteenth century provided a basis for the development of an
increasingly industrial society from the 1830s. This process was slow and partial
at first, but snowballed into an explosive transformation of Germany by the end
of the century. Diverse processes were interrelated. Of major importance were
improved communications, with programmes of road-building and hard-
surfacing, the introduction of steamships on the Rhine and the building of canals
to link rivers, and, fundamentally, the building of railways. The first line to be
opened was that from Nuremberg to Fürth in 1835; the first line of economic
importance was opened between Leipzig and Dresden in 1837. Railways both
facilitated the relatively cheap and rapid transport of raw materials and products,
and stimulated increased production, particularly of coal and iron. Despite public
debate and controversy – which included doctors’ warnings of the dangers to
health of travelling at high speeds, as well as the Prussian king’s publicly
expressed doubts about whether being able to arrive in Potsdam a couple of
hours earlier really constituted a major contribution to human happiness – the
railway system continued to expand in subsequent years. Factories were
established, such as the Borsig works in Berlin for the production of railway
locomotives. There were also changes in production methods in such areas as
textiles, with factories beginning to supplement the existing ‘putting-out’ system
(under which workers worked in their own homes). While factory workers in
industrial production remained a very tiny minority, with the largest proportion
of Germans continuing to work on the land or as small-scale traders,
handicraftsmen and artisans, these developments represented important
harbingers of the future.
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