gossman basle bachofen and critique of modernity

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Basle, Bachofen and the Critique of Modernity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Author(s): Lionel GossmanSource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 47 (1984), pp. 136-185Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/751443.

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BASLE, BACHOFEN AND THE CRITIQUE OFMODERNITY IN THE SECOND HALF OFTHE NINETEENTH CENTURYLionel Gossman

IBASLEUne r6publiquesage ne doit rienhasarderquil'exposea a bonne ou' la mauvaise fortune: e seulbienauquelelle doit aspirer,c'est la perp6tuit6de son6tat.-Montesquieu, GrandeurtdicadenceesRomains,X.

BORDER ITYwedged between France, Germany and the rest of Switzerland, Baslehas always had to defend its identity and independence against the designs ofhostile or covetous neighbours - Habsburgs, Bourbons and Bonapartes alike. Ithas always served both as a meeting ground and place of exchange and as an obstacle, alimit to the influence and ambition of outsiders - a bulwark and a refuge at the sametime. Because of its peculiar situation, the view of the world from the 'Dreilinderecke' ofBasle was different from those which could be enjoyed from the great centres of Europeanpower - from Paris, London, Berlin or Vienna. It was not the dominating view of thehero and conqueror; but the cautious, questioning, mistrustful view of the prosaic anti-hero among giants whose dangerous games threaten his livelihood and his very existence.In the second half of the century of blood and iron, Basle emerged as a focus ofresistance to the dominant progressivist trend of contemporary European, and especiallyGerman culture. The present essay is mostly concerned with aspects of the work ofJohannJacob Bachofen, a Basle philologist still remembered for his comparative approach to thestudy of classical antiquity, his pioneering anthropological investigation of the so-called'avunculate' or relation between mother's brother and sister's son in early societies, andhis bold and imaginative rethinking of woman's place in the history of civilization.1Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

1 Bachofen's name appears in most of the standardhistories of anthropology, but there has been no full-length study of him in English to date. Two shorterstudies deserve mention - Joseph Campbell's Intro-duction to the Bollingen volume, Myth, Religion, andMotherRight: SelectedWritings fJ].]. Bachofen,Princeton,1954, pp. xxv-lvii; and a slighter piece by PhilippWolff-Windegg, 'C. G. Jung - Bachofen, Burckhardt,and Basel', in the Jungian journal Spring, 1976,pp. 137-47. See also Gossman, Orpheus Philologus,Philadelphia 1983. In German the literature is consider-able. The following is a select bibliography:

Alfred Baeumler, Das mythischeWeltalter:BachofensDeutungdesAltertumsmiteinemNachwort Bachofen nddieReligionsgeschichte,Munich 1965 [apart from the 'Nach-wort', this is the text ofBaeumler's 1926 Introduction toDerMythusvonOrientundOccident:ineMetaphysikderAltenWeltaus den Werken onJ.J. Bachofen].Walter Benjamin, 'Johann Jacob Bachofen', Text+Kritik, 1971, xxxI-xxxII, pp. 28-42.Johannes D6rmann, 'War Johann Jakob BachofenEvolutionist?', Anthropos,1965, LX,pp. 1-48.Id., J. J. Bachofen:ReligionsforscherndEthnologe,1966(Studia Instituti Anthropos, xxI).Id., 'Bachofen-Morgan', Anthropos, 1968-69,LXIII-LXIV,pp. 129-38.

136Journal f theWarburgnd Courtauldnstitutes, olume 47, 1984

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BASLE AND BACHOFEN 137It is intended as a contribution to a larger projected study of nineteenth-centuryBasle.2Among the Basle intellectuals four achieved particularrenown. Two were natives ofBasle and contemporaries - Bachofen himself and Jacob Burckhardt;and two, bothyounger men who received support and encouragement from the Baselers, were immi-grants from Germany

- Nietzsche, who came to Basle in I869 as Professor of ClassicalPhilology at the University, and Franz Overbeckwho was called, around the same time,to the chair of Theology.3 Though the character of their relations varied, all four menknew each other and followed each other's work.And all four were sharplycritical of theoptimistic modernist culture that had come to be the established cultureof WilhelminianGermanyjust before and during the Griinderjahre.4een from Basle, Berlin, even morethan Paris, appeared as the capital of the nineteenth century. In classical philologyTheodor Mommsen was the prestigiousBerlinprofessorwhom Bachofen identifiedas theincarnation of modernism and the object of his special loathing, while the bitenoireofOverbeck, whose scholarly work was nothing less than a long, perpetually renewedcritique of the very subject he had been engaged to teach, was Mommsen's colleague atthe PrussianAcademy, Adolf Harnack, a prominentliberal theologian highly regardedatKaiser Wilhelm II's court and dedicated to working out an accommodation betweenreligion and modern life.5 During his years as Professorof Philology at Basle, Nietzsche

Erich Fromm, 'Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutungder Mutterrechtstheorie', Zeitschrift ir Sozialforschung,19341,I, pp. 196-227.Thomas Gelzer, 'Die Bachofen-Briefe: Betrach-tungen zu Vision und Werk, Wirklichkeit und LebenJ.J. Bachofens anhand von Band X der 'GesammeltenWerke', Schweizerische eitschrift ir Geschichte, 969, xIx,pp. 777-869.Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, Sexismus: iber dieAbtreibungder Frauenfrage,Munich and Vienna 1976,ch. 6, pp.96-iii .Karl Kerenyi, Bachofenund die Zukunftdes Humanis-mus,Zurich 1945.Id., 'Johann Jakob Bachofens Portrat', in TessinerSchreibtisch: Mythologisches Unmythologisches,Stuttgart1963, pp. 21-3 1.Rudolf Marx, Introduction to his MutterechtundUrreligion: eine Auswahl, Stuttgart 1927, repr. 1954,pp. vii-xxviii.Walter Muschg, Bachofenals SchriftstellerRectorialaddress, 25 November I949) Basle 1949.Gerhard Plumpe, 'Die Entdeckung der Vorwelt:Erliuterungen zu Benjamins Bachofenlektfire', Text +

Kritik 1971, xxxi-xxxII, pp. 19-27.Adrien Turel, Bachofen-Freud, ern 1939.In addition, the remarkable introductions andafterwords by Karl Meuli, Emanuel Kienzle, JohannesD6rmann and others, to the published volumes of theGesammelteWerke,under the general editorship of KarlMeuli, Basle 1943- , publication interrupted at vol. x.See nn. 8 and I I below for further bibliography.2 The project, on which Professor Carl Schorske and Iare working together, grew out of a seminar we taughtjointly in 1979, in the European Cultural Studies

Program at Princeton, of which Schorske was thendirector. I thank M. Charles Gillieron at the SwissConsulate General in New York for his interest in theproject and the Pro Helvetia Foundation in Ziirich forhelping to finance some of the research associated withit.

3 These four were the most prominent and the best-known. Later, it is hoped to include their teachers,colleagues and associates: Alexandre Vinet, FranzDorotheus Gerlach, XW.M. L. De Wette, Karl Steffen-sen and others.4 The opposition and contrast of Berlin and Basle wasa topic developed by Friedrich Meinecke, especially inthe aftermath of the Second World War, when it seemedfinally incontrovertible that Burckhardt had, after all,been less deluded than Ranke. See his 'Ranke andBurckhardt' (orig. German 1948) in Hans Kohn, ed.,German History: Some New Views, Boston i954,pp. I41-56.s 'One could call theology the Satan of religion',(Christentumund Kultur.:Gedankenund AnmerkungenurmodernenTheologie, onFranz Overbeck. us dem Nachlassherausgegeben von C. A. Bernoulli, Basle 1919, P. 13).On Overbeck and Harnack, ibid., pp. 198-241. See alsoKarl Barth, 'Unsettled Questions for Theology Today',a 1920 review of Christentum ndKultur, n his TheologyndChurch: Shorter l'Writings 920-1928, trans. Louise P.Smith, London 1962, pp. 57-73; Karl Kupisch, KarlBarth, Hamburg 1971, PP. 46-49; Thomas F. Torrance,KarlBarth:An Introductionohis Early Theology9gio-Ig93,London 1962, pp.36-38, 42-43, 72-73; and MaxSchoch, 'Die Entdeckung von Franz Overbeck', in hisKarl Barth: Theologien Aktion.Frauenfeld and Stuttgart1967, pp. 58-68.

10



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138 LIONEL GOSSMANalso frequently expressed contempt for the 'philistine' scholars of his native Germany,notably those of Berlin.6The stance of the Basle scholars and critics was a peculiar mixture of negativity andaffirmation. In the face of the common nineteenth-century view of history as a storymoving toward a happy ending- a 'romance',as Hayden Whitewould say7 they cameincreasingly to stress the distinctiveness of history as a temporal category, with respectboth to pre-historyand to any possible transcendenceor fulfilmentof itself. Shut off fromboth origins and ends, history was not a directed movement, but a constant ebbing andflowing, a sphere of alienation and perpetual conflict, more or less favourable, at varioustimes, to human well-being. All pretendedhistoricalsolutions, all claims that historyitselfcould definitively overcome the reality of alienation and the discomforts of culture, werebogus. The Baselers thus looked on the 'quickfix' offeredby prematurepseudo-totalitiessuch as the nation-state or the folk with suspicion and hostility.This did not mean that the ideal of totality and of a life undivided by competing andseemingly incompatible demands and impulses - individuality and community, self-control and self-abandonment, moralityand sensuality, rationalityand affectivity- hadto be relinquished. It meant that it had to be seen as something beyond all historicalexperienceor reasonable historicalexpectation. In this way, in the midst of his scepticismand even pessimism about his own world, Bachofenkept alive the idea of a pre-historicalworld of heroic proportions, in which the sensual and the ethical had been brieflyharmonized, and of which actual traces were still to be found in the 'primitive'cultures ofAfrica and America. Such cultures, however, were survivals, not models that historicalman could hope to emulate. Similarly, the philosopherKarl Steffensen,an immigrant toBasle fromSchleswig-Holstein, arguedthat German idealism was untenable and danger-ous in so faras it claimed to account forthe real historicalworld, but defended its ideals oftotality and presence, as ideals, against the encroachmentsof an agnostic Anglo-Frenchpositivism.Historically, the work of the Basle critics not only contributedto the growing critiqueof liberal progressivismin the second half of the nineteenth century, it was also exploitedby many who did not share their diffidence and distrust of all popular and populistmovements. Burckhardt and Overbeck were least easily appropriated, in part no doubtbecause both deliberately eschewed those forms of writing, lyrical or oratorical, that aim

6 Nietzsche's biting attacks on Wilamowitz arenotorious. Burckhardt presents a special problem.Always more temperate than Bachofen, who could notshare his disengaged, aesthetic outlook- Bachofen atfirst called him 'familiaris meus et amicissimusantecessor Basiliensis' in a letter recommending him tothe Italian scholar Gervasio (JohannJakob BachofensGesammelteWerke,ed. Karl Meuli, Basle 1943-67, x[hereafter Bachofen, Briefe], letter 37, 21 March 1846)but later cooled notably toward him (Bachofen, Briefe,letters io9, i16) Burckhardt was ready to enjoy whatthe new Prussian Weltstadthad to offer without fear of

compromising his virtue (see Werner Kaegi, JacobBurckhardt: ineBiographie,Basle 1947-77, Iv, p. 416, onBurckhardt in Berlin in 1882) and he never created aBerlin double as overwhelming and threatening asBachofen's Mommsen. Nevertheless, when he was

approached about succeeding Ranke in the chair ofhistory at Berlin, he let it be known that he did not wantto be considered (Kaegi, op. cit., IV, pp. 30-33). Inaddition, despite genuine admiration for Ranke, whohad been his teacher, his attitude became increasinglyreserved. Likewise, though he entertained courteousrelations with nationalist historians such as Sybel andTreitschke, he was aware of the important differencebetween what he called ironically his 'dilettantism' onthe one hand and their practice of historiography on theother. 'Ich werde nie eine Schule griinden', he wrote,not without a certain satisfaction (letter to Paul Heyse,22 April 1862; also Kaegi, op. cit., iii, pp. 135-37).7 Hayden White, Metahistory:The HistoricalImagina-tion in NineteenthCenturyEurope,Baltimore 1973, pp. 8-II, 150-52.



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BASLEAND BACHOFEN 139to seduce or transportthe reader.Burckhardt'sstyle is markedby leaps and hiatuses:it isanything but soothing or reassuring. Overbeck's is dense, intricate and scholarly,rebuffing all but the most serious and committed readers. Bachofen and Nietzsche,however, could be and often wereperceivedas pointing beyond the courageousscepticismresolutely held to by Burckhardtand Overbeck,Bachofenby appearingat times, througha selective and tendentious reading of his work, to advocate a regressive retreat intoreligious myth and symbolism, Nietzsche by recommendinga strainingforward to a moreheroic formof myth.Bachofen was in fact richly exploited by ideologists of both the Left and the Right:in agenerally leftward direction firstby Engels himself, then to some extent by Erich Frommand Lewis Mumford;8 n a moreright-wing and irrationalist directionby the members ofthe Kosmischeunde, n avant-gardeartisticand philosophicalmovementin Munich at theend of the last century, which included the philosopher Ludwig Klages,9 and subse-quently in a distinctly fascist direction, in the 1920s and I930s, by Manfred Schr6ter andAlfred Baeumler. Baeumler, a Berlin professorof philosophy who in 1937was appointedDirector of the Nazi Institute for Political Pedagogy, contributed a long and immenselylearned three-hundred-pageintroductory essay to his colleague Schr6ter's1926edition ofselections from Bachofen (DerMythus onOrient ndOccident,eissuedin 1956). Reviewingthis publication, which marked the high point of the Bachofenrevival in Germany in the1920S,10 Thomas Mann took Bachofen and Nietzsche as representative of the twodirections between which modern man, faced with the failure of nineteenth-century

8 Friedrich Engels, Originsof theFamily (1884), ch. 2,and Preface to 4th edn, New York 1942, pp. 8-Io, 28-50.Erich Fromm, op. cit. n. I above, IIi,pp. 196-227. Walls:Res Sanctae,Res Sacrae.A passagefrom 'VersuchfiberdieGraebersymbolikerAlten'. Translated by B. Q. Morganand with a Note on J.J. Bachofen by Lewis Mumford,Lexington I961. That Mumford wroTeon Bachofen isnot surprising. His entire view of man and society, andespecially of early society, is very close to Bachofen's,notably in the contrast he establishes between thefeminine neolithic village community and the domineer-ing, aggressive, male city that emerged later from whathe sees as the fusion of neolithic and palaeolithic, as wellas that between the Orphic and the Promethean aspectsof man. (See TheTransformationsfMan, New York 1952,chapters 1-2, and The City in History,New York i961,chapters 1-3). There is a link between Mumford andBachofen in the person of Elie Reclus, the FrenchUtopian, who was an admirer and correspondent ofBachofen, and who also taught at the famous Edinburghsummer seminars of Mumford's mentor Patrick Ged-des.9 On the KosmischeRundeand Bachofen's relation tothe George circle in Munich, see Claude David, StefanGeorge et son ouvrepoitique, Lyons and Paris 1952,pp. 196-209; Hans-Jiirgen Linke, Das Kultische in derDichtungStefan Georges,Munich and Diisseldorf I960, I,pp. 6o-62; Ernst Morwitz, Kommentaru demWerke tefanGeorges,Munich and Diisseldorf 1960, pp. 46, 309.1oThis revival was marked by a number of republica-tions of texts by Bachofen, as well as by an active

exchange of critical views of his work. In 1923 ManfredSchr6ter put out the essay on Oknos der Seilflechter(Leipzig: Beck) and the following year Das lykischeVolk(Leipzig: Haessel). In 1925 Ludwig Klages and C. A.Bernoulli saw the whole of the Grinbersymbolikhroughthe press in Basle. In 1926 Schr6ter and Baeumlerpublished their 6oo-page selection of Bachofen textsknown as Der Mythusvon Orientund Occidentsee also n. Iabove), and Philip Reclam published a 3-volumeselection, running to over I500 pages, edited by C. A.Bernoulli - Urreligionund antike Symbole(1926). Thefollowing year yet another selection, edited by RudolfMarx, appeared in the popular 'pocket editions' of theKr6ner firm in Leipzig under the title Johann JakobBachofen:Mutterrechtnd Urreligion see also n. I above).1927 also saw a new edition of Bachofen's Autobiography(first published by Hermann Blocher in the BaslerJahrbuch or 1917), along with his inaugural lecture onnatural law and historical law, by Alfred Baeumler(Halle/Saale), and Georg Schmidt's edition of thehitherto unpublished GriechischeReise (Heidelberg). Itwas probably Ludwig Klages's Vomkosmogonischenros(Munich 1922) that launched the Bachofen revival.This work went through a second edition in 1926, and athird edition in 1930. In 1924 two major studies bv C. A.Bernoulli appeared: Johann Jacob Bachofen und dasNatursymbol (Basle), and the shorter Johann JakobBachofen als Religionsforscher (Leipzig). The Zfirichphilologist Ernst Howald responded to the rehabilita-tion of Bachofen with an attack 'Wider Johann JakobBachofen' in 1924 (repr. in his Humanismus und



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140 LIONEL GOSSMANliberalism, must choose: that of regressioninto the dark world of myth and the Uncon-scious (Bachofen) and that of progress, heroic transcendence of old fears and idols andcourageous assumption of freedom (Nietzsche).11There is nothing surprising,no doubt, about this popularuse of Nietzsche. Bachofen'spart in the debate, on the otherhand, is somewhat unexpected. Nietzsche's repudiationofphilology and his departurefromBasle in 1879markeda decisive break with the cautious,conservative, carefully masked criticism representedby Basle scholarship, and the laterNietzsche trod paths on which none of his colleaguesat Basle was preparedto accompanyhim, not Burckhardt,not Bachofen,not even Overbeck,who remainedpersonallyloyal tothe end. Nietzsche's relations with Burckhardt- the theme of a well known essay byErich Heller in TheDisinheritedMindand of countless books and articles by German andSwiss historiansl2- became more and moreproblematicalas his challenge to traditionalphilology and traditional philosophy became more radical and more violent. LikewiseBachofen, who had befriended Nietzsche in his early years at Basle and who hadwelcomed The Birthof Tragedywith great interest, greeted his later writings first withreserve,then with dismay. Eventually, all communicationbetween the two men ceased.13Bachofen's historical role in the popularideological strugglesof the twenties in Germanyis thus hardly in keeping with the characterof the man or his work,forin the end, despitethe vehemence of his attacks on contemporary scholarship, Bachofen himself alwaysremained a respectable bourgeois of Basle, living quietly, seeking neither scandal nornotoriety, entertaining relations almost exclusively with other scholars, preferablywealthy private ones like himself, and pursuing his work in a recognizably scholarlymanner. Above all, his outlook was profoundly Christian. No doubt the criticisms ofcontemporaryculture that came from the pen of men like Nietzsche or Wagner evoked asympathetic responsefromhim, but he could have reactedonly with consternation to theEuropaertum Zuirich and Stuttgart 1957], pp.63-77).Howald was among the first to suggest an oppositionbetween Bachofen and Nietzsche. In 1926 Baeumlerentered the fray with a massive 300-page introduction tohis and Schr6ter's selection of texts, entitled 'Bachofen,der Mythologe der Romantik'. This publication promp-ted an important commentary by Thomas Mann in hisPariserRechenschaft1926), where Howald's contrast ofBachofen and Nietzsche is taken up again. In 1927 anarticle on 'Der Kampf um Johann Jakob Bachofen', byWerner Deubel, appeared in the PreussischeJahrbiicher(ccIx, pp. 66-75) and the year after K. E. Winterinvestigated what he termed the 'Bachofen-Renaiss-ance' in the Zeitschrift itr die gesamteStaatswissenschaft(Lxxxv, 1928, pp. 316-42), while the same year in ItalyCroce was sufficiently intrigued by the revival of anauthor who had been neglected in his lifetime to inquireinto the reasons ('I1 Bachofen e la storiografiaafilologica', Atti della Reale Accademiadi Scienzemorali epolitichedi Napoli, 1928, LI, pp. 158-76). 1929 saw thepublication of Georg Schmidt's doctoral dissertation,Johann Jakob Bachofens Geschichtsphilosophie;nd of animportant article by Baeumler on 'Bachofen undNietzsche', (repr. in his Studien zur deutschenGeis-tesgeschichte,erlin 1937, Pp. 220-43).'1 Mann's criticism of Bachofen grew out of his deepsympathy with him and reflected his concern at the use

being made of Bachofen in the political climate of themid-192os in Germany. Mann's own work shows theinfluence of Bachofen, and it was he who introduced thephilologist Karl Kerenyi to the work of his predecessor,thus totally transforming the direction of Kerenyi'sinterests and the character of his scholarship.12 Erich Heller, 'Burckhardt and Nietzsche', in his TheDisinherited Mind, Cambridge 1952. See also C. A.Bernoulli, Franz Overbeckund FriedrichNietzsche: eineFreundschaft,Jena 1908, 2 vols; Alfred von Martin,NietzscheundBurckhardt,Munich 1942; and Edgar Salin,JakobBurckhardt ndNietzsche,Heidelberg 1948.13 See Baeumler, Studienzur deutschenGeistesgeschichte,3rd edn, I943, pp. 220-43.

In November 1871 Nietzschewas writing to his mother and sister that he had beeninvited to lunch at the Bachofens (Briefe, Berlin andLeipzig, 90oo-I909, v, I, n o107). On II November19o9, however, Frau Bachofen wrote to C. A. Bernoulli:'Then The Birth of Tragedyappeared. My husband wasdelighted with it and had high hopes for Nietzsche. Butthen came his subsequent writings, which my latehusband judged quite unfavourably. Thereafter ourpleasant association with Nietzsche became more andmore clouded until finally all relations between usceased' (quoted by Bernoulli, BachofenunddasNatursym-bol,op. cit. n. Io above, p. 593).



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BASLE AND BACHOFEN 1'4anti-Christian heroic ideal proposed both in the writings of his young friend and in those- the early ones at least - of the prophet of Tribschen.To some extent the Basle scholars can be considered 'cultural pessimists'. Despite theabusive exploitation of Bachofen in the i920os, however, they cannot rightly be lumpedwith popular cultural pessimists of the type studied by Fritz Stern in his Politics of CulturalDespair (Berkeley 1961). Attracted and fascinated at first by Lagarde, in whose writingsthey easily recognized themes and concerns similar to their own, Bachofen, Burckhardtand Overbeck all ultimately drew back from him.14 Though they were sharply critical ofthe civilization created by modern enlightenment, they distrusted every attempt to restorea way of life and a form of existence - whether represented by primitive religious faith(Overbeck), primitive matriarchal society (Bachofen) or the seamless culture of the earlypolis (Burckhardt) - that they saw as no longer possible or even, perhaps, desirable.Burckhardt's astringent reminder that the Greek polis was intolerant of all individualdeviations from the communal norm contrasts strikingly, for instance, with the unre-strained enthusiasm of the author of 'Art and Revolution'. The historian's well knowndistaste both for Wagner's charismatic and manipulative personality and for his engulfingmusic, his abiding affection for Haydn and Mozart, seem more than incidental.Burckhardt was probably repelled by an art that he saw as subversive of hard wondistinctions and orders and that may well have been associated in his mind with thedemagogy of modern mass politics. The poet Carl Spitteler, who came from Liestal, nearBasle, and was a student of Burckhardt's at the Basle Piidagogium, put his finger on anessential aspect of Burckhardt's relation to antiquity that is equally characteristic ofBachofen's relation to prehistory. 'Jacob Burckhardt's ideal', he noted, 'is not so muchantiquity itself as the study of antiquity'.15 Not the original presence, in other words, but areligious attitude to irreparable absence and loss.In 1885 Mallarm6 observed that the proper attitude of the poet in the age of industrialcapitalism was a kind of heroic abstentionism. The poet, he declared, is 'en grave devantla soci6t6':Au fondje considerel'Fpoquecontemporainecomme un interiegne pourle poete quin'a pointa s'ymeler: elle est trop en desuetude et en effervescencepreparatoirepour qu'il ait autre chose a fairequ'a travailleravec mystere en vue de plus tard ou dejamais ...Most of the Basle critics would have subscribed to this judgment. But they wouldprobably have rejected the faint anarchist undercurrent in Mallarme's remarks, had theydetected it. For their relation to their small city-state, which they saw at one and the sametime as a microcosm of the modern world and as a haven from it, was more ambivalentthan that of the French poet to thefin-de-siicle France of the Third Republic.16

14 On the relation of the Basle scholars to Lagarde, seethe excellent pages in Robert W. Lougee, Paul deLagarde, I827-9I, Cambridge Mass. 1962, pp. 226-31.On Burckhardt and Wagner, see Burckhardt's letters toVon Preen (New Year's Eve 1872) and Max Alioth(25August 1878) in The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt,selected, edited and translated by Alexander Dru,London 1955, PP. 157, 182-83. In the first of theseBurckhardt associates Wagner and Bismarck as clevermanipulators.15Carl Spitteler, 'B6cklin, Burckhardt, Basel', Gesam-melteWerke,Ziirich 1945-58, vi, p. 164.

16 Mallarmi on the artist 'en grave devant la societe' inreplies to a questionnaire on the future of literature, byJules Huret (1891), in Oeuvrescompletesde StiphaneMallarmi, ed. Henry Mondor and G.Jean-Aubry, Paris1951, p. 870; on the contemporary period as aninterregnum, in a letter to Verlaine, 16 November 1885,ibid., p. 664. On Mallarme's anarchist sympathies, seeJames Joll, The Anarchists,New York 1964, PP. 133,167-69; Giampiero Posani, Mallarmi: il tramonto i Dio eil mezzogiornodel Capitale, Naples 1975, PP. 75-111;George Woodstock, Anarchism:A History of LibertarianIdeas andMovements,New York 1962, pp. 295, 305-06.



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142 LIONEL GOSSMANFrom the time it joined the Swiss Confederationin 1501 until the second half of thenineteenth century, Basle was the largest, wealthiest and most important German-speaking town in Switzerland. A formerImperial City, the residence at various times ofErasmus and Holbein, the home of the Bernoullis and the Eulers, it was a centre of

humanist scholarship and printing, art, science and letters as well as a thriving commer-cial place. Yet it was a compact, moderately sized town, even by the standards of anearlier age. Its population, entirely contained within the fourteenth-century walls,remained stable from the fifteenth to the earlynineteenth centuryat about 15,000, whichwas a modest figure compared not only with new commercial and industrial cities likeLiverpool or Philadelphia, but with many traditional trading centres, such as Frankfurtor Strasbourg. It owed its importance to its situation, at the head of the long navigablestretch of the Rhine and astride the main trading routes between Northern and SouthernEurope, to the enterpriseand resourcefulnessof its merchantsand manufacturers,and toits political independence and republican traditions, which made it a preferred place ofrefugefor many seeking asylum fromreligiousor political persecutionor from conditionsofviolence and unrestin the neighbouringlandsorin the lands alongits tradingroutes.Aswe shall see, the city's ruling elite was composed predominantly of immigrants andrefugees.Priorto the FederalConstitution of 1848the Swiss Confederationwas little morethana loose defensive alliance among communities that varied greatly in size, population,social and economic structure, and political organization, with virtually no centralauthority, let alone a common language or religion, commonlaws, or a common coinage.Unlike most other Europeanstates, Switzerland owed its existence not to the unifyingandacquisitive ambitions of a princeor princelyhouse, but- on the contrary- to resistanceto such ambitions. Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, the country had nocapital city: the Federal Diet met at Zuirich,Lucerneor Bern. The obligations of the Diet,moreover,were still limited to protecting the independence and the rights of the membercommunities and to mediating in disputes that might arise among them.Though it was the largest city in the Confederation and its most important centre oftrade, Basle was geographically the most eccentric and militarily the most vulnerable ofthe members of the Confederation.Trading relations,as well as the countless occasions offriction and cooperation, dispute and negotiation, that inevitably arise in a border city,bound it to France and Germany, Italy and the Netherlands as much as, and even morethan, to the other cantons. Basle's trading connections in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies extended to Bremen, Hamburg, Lfibeck and Copenhagen in the North;Frankfurt-on-the-Oderand beyond (Poland, Russia, Turkey)in the East;Venice, Genoa,Milan and Marseilles in the South; and Paris, Nantes, Amsterdam, London and theAtlantic colonies in the West. In the earlynineteenthcenturyBaslemerchants were activefrom Rio de Janeiro and New York to Africa and the Far East, and Basle capital wasfinancing the industrialization of neighbouring Alsace. Basle's relation to the rest ofSwitzerland was tempered by these international connections, which contributed, alongwith the city's history and the almost total political and institutional autonomy itcontinued to enjoy as a member of the Confederation, to preserve among its citizens astrong sense of distinctiveness and civic independence."7

17 On the history of Basle, see especially PaulBurckhardt, Geschichte er Stadt Basel von derReformationbis zur Gegenwart,Basle 1957, 2nd edn; in additionMartin Alioth, Ulrich Barth, Dorothee Huber, Basler



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BASLEAND BACHOFEN 143Basle's eccentricity as a member of the Swiss Confederation was highlighted andaggravated in the early nineteenth century when, alone among the populous andprosperous Protestant cantons, the traditionally enlightened and progressive city-statedid not put a liberal government in power in the wake of the 1830revolutionin Paris. Onthe contrary, a bitter, protracted and - for Switzerland - costly struggle, both ineconomic terms and in terms of lives lost, between the city and its rebellious countrydistricts ended in 1833, after the humiliating defeat of the city army at the village ofPratteln, with the division of the old city-state into the two independent half-cantons ofBasel-Stadtand Basel-Land,and the consolidation rather than the overturning of theprudent, essentially conservativerule of the merchantelite.The Basle Wirren r 'Troubles' of 1830-33 increased the city's isolation in two ways.Firstly, there was a sense of estrangementfromthe predominantlyliberalConfederation,which had intervened to mediate in the dispute and had helped negotiate a settlement thatplaced a heavy financial burden on the city. To the city fathers and to many of the leadingcitizens of the time it seemed that the Federal Diet had not been even-handed but had

consistently favoured the rebels. As a result, after 1833, there was not much support leftamong the leaders of Basle society forprojectsto enhance the powersof the Diet and givethe Confederation a more effective and centralized state apparatus.The Federal Consti-tution of 1848 was adopted by 66 votes to 5 in the city Council, but almost half thecouncillors had stayed away. Unwilling to reject it, they were not willing to vote for iteither.18Secondly, the amputation of the country districts not only consolidated the power ofBasle's ruling elite by removingthe principalsource ofoppositionto it, it strengthenedthecity's sense of its peculiarly urban and civic destiny. The countrydistricts had demandeda more equitable distribution of representatives on the Council, one that would haveaccurately reflected the distribution of the population. While the regime had beenprepared to make changes, it had balked at any arrangement,no matter how equitable,that would have deprived the city of its majorityvote in Council. The city's destiny, thecity fathers maintained, was urban and commercialand could not therefore be entrustedto a majority of peasants and country squires. This reasoningwas not peculiar to Basle.Sismondi spoke against extension of the suffrageat Geneva in i83 I on exactly the samegrounds.19 There is nothing implausible about the claim made later by the liberalSchweizerischeational-Zeitungwhich, as its name implies, stronglyfavoured the develop-ment of centralized state power in Switzerland) that the division of the canton had at notime been an objective of the country districts, which desired equitable representation,not autonomy, and that it had been proposed, and even secretlydesired by the city.20The amputation of the country districts from the city made clear the opposition ofurban and ruralinterestsat Basle and thus the essentialdifferencebetween the nineteenth

Stadtgeschichte,i, 'Vom Briickenschlag 1225 bis zurGegenwart', Basle i98i, a volume put out by theHistorischesMuseum;and the richly documented articlesby Carl Roth, August Burckhardt, Anton Haefinger,L. E. Iselin and Ernst Stihelin in Dictionnairehistoriquetbiographique e la Suisse, Neuchitel, 1921, I, pp. 522-55.On Basle's trading connections, see especially AndreasStiihelin, 'Gold aus Seide' and Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin'Untergang und Ubergang' in SchaffendesBasel: 2000JahreBasler Wirtschaft,Basle 1957, PP. I I5-I6, 122.

18 Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 252-53;Dictionnairehistoriqueet biographiquede la Suisse, n. 17above, art. 'Bile', p. 536.19See William E. Rappard, La Carriere arlementaireetrois economistesgenevois: Sismondi, Rossi, Cherbuliez,Geneva 1941, pp. i13-14.20SchweizerNational-Zeitung,20 October 1842, P. 497.See also Charles Andler, LajeunessedeNietzschejusqu' larupture vecBayreuth,Paris 192 I, pp. I13-14.



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144 LIONEL GOSSMANcentury city-state and the city republicsof antiquity with which it liked to compare itself.Nevertheless, fbr most Baselers, the events of 1830-33 confirmed the city's traditionalperceptionof itself as a polis,an autonomous Republic within the Confederation but withinterests and connections extending far beyond Switzerland. The formulaSPQB (Senatuspopulusque asiliensis)which until the last century appeared everywhere in Basle, indocuments, on monuments, and on public buildings, conveys an idea of how the citizens,especially the well-to-do elite, thought of their city. When a Biirgermeisterwas describedon medals struck to commemorate his term of office as Illustr.Reip.BasiliensisConsul aterPatriae, he Patria hat was referredto was Basle, not Switzerland.From about the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth Basle was effec-tively governed by an elite of some thirty or fortyfamilies drawnfrom the five hundred orso burgher families of the city.21These families, most of which were in the silk-ribbontrade, the mainstay of the city's economy until the First WorldWar, wereclosely linked toeach other by an intricate web of marriages and business partnerships. Family namealone, however, was neither an indication nor a guarantee of social standing or influenceat Basle- members of the less well-to-do branches of prominentfamilies did not move inthe same circles as their more successful cousins, asJacob Burckhardt'scareer confirmsand the term 'patriciate', which is often used to referto the elite, can be misleading.Whereas the ruling elite in other patrician cities, such as Bern or Fribourg, was alanded aristocracy, and at Lucerne, from the beginning, membership in the cantonalcouncil or Rat could be bequeathed from father to son, the government of Basle wasessentially, like that of Ziirich, in the hands of the guilds, the old nobility havingabandoned the city completely by the middle of the sixteenth century. The concentrationof power and prestige in a few families should not therefore be misinterpreted. Thecondition of distinction and prominenceat Baslewas wealth, not birth. The rulingelite, asthe liberalNational-Zeitungever tired of pointing out, was a 'Geldaristokratie'.22

In addition, from the seventeenth centuryon, this rulingelite was composed less andless of indigenous families, like the Iselins and the Faesch, and more and more ofwealthyimmigrants. The names of many of these- Battier, Burckhardt,De Bary, Sarasin,Socinfigure prominently among the Biirgermeisters of the seventeenth, eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. Most of the immigrants came to Basle as refugees from religiouspersecution in Italy, France and the Spanish Netherlands, or from the ravages of theThirty Years' War in neighbouring parts of France, Germany and Eastern Switzerland.As the city did not welcome poor refugees,almost all those who immigratedto Basle werewell-to-do merchants or skilled artisans in possessionof some capital resources.23Being used to more advanced business practices than those current in their adoptedcity - most of them, for instance, engaged in general merchandising rather than in asingle craft activity, and it was they who introduced the putting-out system of21 [Markus Lutz], BaslerischesBiirger-Buch,enthaltendallegegenwtartign derStadtBaseleingebiirgerteneschlechter,Basle 1819, pp. 1-25.22SchweizerischeNational-Zeitung, 20 October 1842,P. 497. See also Alfred Biirgin, Geschichtedes Geigy-Unternehmens,asle 1958, p. 16. According to Peter Stolz(Basler Wirtschaftn vor- undfriihindustriellerZeit, Zilrich1977, pp. 147-48), at the end of the eighteenth centuryabout 85% of the wealth of Basle was in the hands of

Io% of the population. Many of the Basle fortunes wereconsiderable. In 1946 the personal fortune of the Merianfamily, to which Bachofen's mother belonged, wasestimated at about 18 million Swiss francs, and up tothat time the family had made gifts to the city of about32 million francs.23On immigration to Basle, see A. Stfhelin, op. cit.n. 17 above, pp. 102-o6; Stolz, op. cit. n.22 above,p. 150.



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BASLE AND BACHOFEN 147should be personally familiar with the firm's principal customers and markets. Inaddition, members of leading Basle families had settled in the major trading centres ofEurope and America, where they conducted their own businesses, often in close co-operation with their brethren in Basle. The Burckhardts, the Iselins, the Merians, theVondermiihlls, the Weisses had family members in the French Atlantic port cities of LeHavre, Nantes and La Rochelle, as well as in Paris, London, Hamburg, Copenhagen,Vienna, Moscow and New York.33In this way, Basle political conservatism was coupled with commercial flair andresourcefulness.The city's affinitywas with Figaro,not Almaviva. In the earlynineteenthcentury, forexample, the ribbonmanufacturerswerequickerto adopt modernproductiontechniques than their French competitors and soon cornered all the major markets.Around the same time, Basle merchant capital was financing a wide range of industrialand commercialenterprisesin Alsace.34The opportunities given by Basle businessmen toFrench and German chemists launched an industry which, starting as an adjunct to themanufacture of ribbons, has grown into the mammoth undertakingof today.35s he city'smerchant bankers quickly realized that modern industrial and institutional borrowersrequiredfarvaster amounts of capital than any one of them individually could command- banking, formost of them, was only one of a rangeofcommercialoperationscentredonthe ribbon trade - and they soon banded together in syndicates. The old families thusmoved as resolutely into the world of modern finance as they moved into the world ofmodern industry.36The energy, skill, and enterpriseof the Basle elite were also expended on behalf of thevery Confederation that the city had welcomed so half-heartedly. Men from the greatmerchant families, such as Geigy and Laroche, were behind some of the most important

33Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit. n. 17 above, p. 122.34 On Basle's success in ribbon manufacturing, seeLevy-Boyer, op. cit. n. 28 above, pp. 132-38. On Baslecredit operations, see pp. 349-51. Basle merchantsinvested heavily in France, not only in land (a syndicatewas formed in 1806 to acquire Church lands that wereup for sale [p. 450 n]), but in early industrial enter-prises, such as those ofJ. P. Peugeot and F.Japy, andabove all in the calico mills of Mulhouse. As of I8o6, thehouse of Forcart, Weiss and Son, for instance, wasinvesting regularly in French enterprises and makingloans to French clients (for the breakdown of theiroperations cf. P. 455n), so that by August 1842 thecompany's portfolio contained holdings to the value of390,000 francs in France, of which 200,000 were inAlsace alone. Levy-Boyer describes the Basle activities

as 'une veritable colonisation financiere' (p. 450).35 On the chemical industry, see L. F. Haber, TheChemicalIndustryduring the NineteenthCentury,Oxford1958; Paul M. Hohenberg, Chemicalsn WesternEurope,1815-1914, Chicago 1967; Heinz Polivka, Die chemischeIndustrie m Raumevon Basel, Basle 1974; The Society ofChemicalIndustry n Basle 1884-1934, Ziirich n.d.; aboveall Alfred Biirgin's outstanding company historymarking the bicentennial of the Geigy company, op. cit.n. 22 above.

36 According to Polivka, the Basle ribbon manufac-turers were 'fabricants-marchands-banquiers' (op. cit.n. 35 above), Basle bankers were among the 44 Swiss

bankers represented in Paris in 1714, and by the end ofthe eighteenth century the city had become a significantbanking centre (August Piintener, Das schweizerischeBankwesen,Bern and Stuttgart, p. 14). In the nineteenthcentury distinguished families like the Laroches, theIselins, the Heuslers, the Burckhardts, the Stihelins,the Merians, the Forcarts and the Passavants were allheavily involved in private banking. The Frenchhistorian Jules Michelet relates that a Stihelin 'pro-fesseur de theologie, fort occupe des Hebreux et de ladixieme dynastie des Pharaons' was not above lendingmoney (Journal, ed. P. Viallaneix, Paris 1959-62, I,p. 529). According to Levy-Boyer, op. cit. n. 28 above,'en 1837 Bile compte outre 200 maisons de gros, et 120de detail, 82 banquiers' (P. 454n) and the city hadbecome a major centre of capital for eastern France,south-west Germany, and the rest of Switzerland(PP. 349-50, 450-51, 454-55, 469, 471, 592, 705n; alsoMax Iklk, Die Schweiz als internationalerBank- undFinanzplatz, Ziirich 1970, pp. 21-23). Until mid-cen-tury, however, few of the Basle banking houses werepure banks: they were commercial houses engaged in avariety of business activities. But by 1854 several of theold family banks had banded together to form theSchweizerischerBankverein, and in 1863 the BaslerHandelsbank was formed from a consortium of fiveprivate banks. On banking in Basle, see also HansrudolfSchwabe, 'Neue Zeit, neue WVirtschaft', n SchaffendesBasel, n. 17 above, pp. 136-53.



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148 LIONEL GOSSMANfederal enterprisesof the middle years of the nineteenth century: the customs union, thepostal system, the currencyand the Central Bank, and the building of a railway networkintended both to knit the Confederation together and to ensure that Swiss commercialinterests would continue to play a dominant role in trade betweenNorthernand SouthernEurope.37It is true that not all the leaders of Basle society were consistently progressive orfavourably disposed to the expansion of trade and industry. Though the elite's positionrested mainly on its business success, it also supplied the city with most of its preachers,professors, and scholars, and this spiritual arm of the elite was not unequivocally insympathy with the aims and ambitions of its commercial brethren. In addition, manyartisans were now threatened by the free trade policies favouredby the elite. There wasenough public concern about the possible deleterious effects of the new chemical industry,for instance, to prompt Johann Rudolf Geigy to enter it with great caution, by firstproviding financial backingfor an associate and only later engaging the reputation of theold-established family drysalters' firm.38 Similarly, the extension of the Strasbourgrailway line into the city was hotly debated in the Council, where it met with oppositionfrom a coalition of extreme conservatives and traditionalartisans. These groups saw thesteam locomotive as a Trojan horse that could only undermine what they valued mostabout Basle - the city's traditions and its autonomy - by introducing foreign goods,industrial spies, Catholic priests, and French morals. Even after the extension of therailwayinto the city had been approved,a new city gate was builtat the pointofentry,andthis was closed and barredevery night afterthe last train had passed through it.Nevertheless, most of the leading families were well aware that their own prosperityand that of the city as a whole restedon tradewith the outside world and that Basle couldnot afford not to seize the opportunity offeredby the extension of the Strasbourgline andproposals to build lines to Germanyand central Switzerlandof becoming, as the National-Zeitungput it, 'a city like no other on the Continent ... the terminus of the railways ofthree countries.'39 The conservatives had not been wrong when they sensed that thearrivalof the railway would mean the end of the old Basle. Within fifteenyears, the CityCouncil yielded to pressure to permit the razing of the ancient city walls and thedevelopment of land previouslyoccupied by the fortifications.Significantly,however,oneof the two city officials most closely associated with the 'Entfestigung' of Basle was amember of the old 'patrician' family of Sarasin:Karl Sarasin, directorof the sanitationdepartment from 1850 to 1855 and head of the buildings department from 1858 to 1866.Just as characteristically, Sarasin tried to combine commercial enterprise with publicservice:it was he who was largely responsible for the gardens and open spaces that wereincluded in the development plans.So far from being obstructed by the politically conservativeruling elite, the economictransformationof Basle and its entry into the modern world were thus in large measurethe achievement of that elite. When a writer in the National-Zeitungomplained in I842

37 See Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. I above, pp. 258-61;Edgar Bonjour, 'Basels Anteil an der Entwicklung derneuen Schweiz', Die SchweizundEuropa,vi, Basle 1979,pp. I33-233; Paul Siegfried, Basel im neuenBund, Basle1925. Basler Neujahrsblatt, 1925; Albert Hauser,Schweizerische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte,Ellenbach-Ziirich iq6i, p. I93.

38 Haber, op. cit. n. 35 above, pp. I8-19; Biirgin, op.cit. n. 22 above, pp. Io4-o8.39SchweizerischeNational-Zeitung, i i December 1842,6 May 1843, II May 1843.



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BASLEAND BACHOFEN 149that in the twelve years since I830 Basle had fallen furtherand further behind the othercantons - 'while they have progressed, Basle has stood still' - it was 'political develop-ment' alone that he was measuring. Basle's isolation, he had to acknowledge,had not hurtthe city economically. 'We have tried to make our own home and conduct our ownbusiness, and it is true that from the point of view of material success we can do thatwithout any sacrifice'.40The 'reactionary'government of Basle, to sum up, was not a government of genuinepatricians. It was not dominated by landed interests or by an old nobility or bytraditionalistCatholics, as were most of the other cantons that bandedtogetherwith Baslein the conservative Sarnen League. Above all, the ancien regimethe Basle elite wanted todefend bore no resemblance to the absolutist regimes of the past. On the contrary, themost diehard Basle conservatives were still republicans- ardentrepublicans.They wereunimpressed by nobilities and courts and they despised 'despotism'. Openly expressinghis hatred of democracy, as he described with horrorthe events he witnessed at Rome in1848,Bachofen did not fail to criticize the arbitrary, ndifferentand improvident regimeofGregory XVI and to charge it with having created the conditions that Pius IX thenproved incapable of curing. And after the debacle of 1870 he expressed the hope that atleast it might teach the Frenchthe value of true republicanism.41Basle conservatism hadmorein common with the Whiggism ofBurke,who was widely readin elite circles,both inthe original and in the Gentz translation, than with the ideals of Metternich or of Prussianreactionaires such as Arndt and von Arnim.On some issues the Basle government even came into direct conflict with the morerepressive regimes of Restoration Europe. In 1824, forinstance, it resisted pressurefromthe Prussian and Austrian governments to extradite Wilhelm Snell and Karl Follen, twoliberals who had been given appointments at the University and who were considereddangerous by Berlin and Vienna. Among the professors at the University there wereseveral who had left Germany to escape political persecution.De Wette in theology andCarl GustavJung, the professorof anatomy, were only the most notable of these.The position of even the most conservative members of the Basle elite is wellillustrated by an anecdote. In 1847 Andreas Heusler and Peter Merian, who wereregarded throughout Switzerlandas pillars of conservativeBasle politics, paid a courtesycall on a couple of visiting Prussian dignitaries, Ludwig von Gerlach and Reinhold vonThadden-Trieglaff, both dyed-in-the-woolJunker reactionaries. 'Do you know', Merianis said to have remarked to Heusler afterwards, 'compared to these gentlemen, we arearrant Jacobins'.42Even at home, Basle conservatism was shrewd and pliant. The men of the so-called'juste milieu' in particular- active and enterprisingbusinessmen and men of the worldlike Achilles Bischoff and August Stfihelin- knew how to hold on to power by makingadroit and timely concessions. In 1846, and again in 1857, they succeeded in forestallingthe plans of the liberals and radicals by themselves proposing a revision of the city

40 Schweizerischeational-Zeitung,27 August 1842.41 'Die r6mische Staatsumwdilzung vom Tode GregorsXVI. bis zur Wiederherstellung Pius IX.' (supplementto the AugsburgerAllgemeineZeitung, 24 and 25 August1850), GesammelteWerke, p. cit. n. 29 above, I, pp. 397-4Io; Briefe,op. cit. n. 6 above, letter n' 283, 9 February1871. For the Baselers, as for the Genevan Sismondi,republicanism had nothing to do with revolution. 'J'ai

besoin de protester ' haute voix qu'il n'y a rien decommun entre l'esprit des republiques et l'esprit desrevolutions', Sismondi declared; 'que l'antique Geneveetait republicaine et non revolutionnaire' (quoted inRappard, op. cit. n. 19 above, p. 35)-42 Quoted in C. A. Bernoulli, Franz OverbeckundFriedrichNietzsche:eineFreundschaft,ena 1908, I, p. 41.-



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150 LIONEL GOSSMANconstitution and thus forcing their opponents to choose between settling for moderatereform or leaving themselves no cards to play except the risky one, in a city not given toprecipitate action, of revolution.43It may be that the peculiarities of the situation at Basle and the ambivalent view thecitizens had of their city as both a progressive centre of commerce, industry and finance,and a last repository of rapidly vanishing republican virtues, gave to the criticism ofmodernity associated with the city's writers and artists a character that distinguishes itfrom that of French writers such as Flaubert, Baudelaire and Mallarme. For whileBurckhardt, Bachofen and Bdcklin were to some extent marginalized in relation to themainstream of their society, they were still in important respects integrated into the fabricof the little city. Burckhardt was a much admired and highly successful public lecturer.B6cklin received important civic commissions, even Bachofen continued to play his role inBasle society, and his withdrawal from the family business in favour of his brother appearsto have had the full support ofJ.J. Bachofen senior, himself an ardent amateur scholarand connoisseur, so that it can in no way be construed as a gesture of rebellion. Above all,Burckhardt, Steffensen, Overbeck and Nietzsche, as professors at the University of Basle,all enjoyed the official approval and protection of the city, for it was part of the elite'simage of itself that it took care not only of the city's material prosperity but of its culturalwell-being too. In a free city-state, culture and learning could not be left to aristocrats andprofessionals any more than administration could be entrusted to bureaucrats or defenceto a hired army of professional soldiers. The citizens of the virtuous republic, in contrast tothe subjects of the powerful monarchies around them, intended to alienate none of thetheir privileges or responsibilities. Traditionally, therefore, the leading families of Baslehad not only been merchants, they had provided the city's professors and preachers aswell as its Biirgermeisters, civil servants and military officers.Like their Genevan counterpart Sismondi before them, however, the Basle criticscame to question whether the values of the elite culture - material success and individualenterprise on the one hand, social cohesion and community well being on the other -were compatible, and whether the elite's commitment to the development of commerceand industry might not be bound, sooner or later, to come into conflict with the ideals itprofessed and the mission by which it justified its rule: to protect the moral as well as thematerial well-being of the polis, and to preserve the traditions of the city republic. In I833,as we saw, the elite had accepted the loss of most of the country districts dependent on thecity in order not to have to share power with landowners and peasants whose interests andoutlook, they felt, were different from those of a city of international traders. Yet one effectof the loss of the country districts was the development of factory production in the city,especially after the introduction of steam-driven looms around the middle of thecentury.44 Large numbers of immigrant workers, many of them politically radicalized,

43 Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. I7 above, pp. 245-47,279-80.44 Ibid., p. 207; Schwabe, op. cit. n. 36 above, p. 142.According to Heinz Polivka, op. cit. n. 35 above, p. 32,the putting-out system dominated until 1833. Themajority of the looms were in the country districts ofArlesheim, Sissach, Liesetal and Waldenburg (Livy-Boyer, op. cit. n. 28 above, p. 135), but the 'division ofthe canton in 1833 forced the ribbon manufacturers toswitch from the traditional putting-out system to factory

production' (ibid., p. 43; see also William E. Rappard,La Rivolutionindustrielleet les originesde la protectiondutravail en Suisse, Berne 1914, pp. 182-83). After about1839 factory work increased markedly, and by 1844 oneeighth of the looms employed by the ribbon manufac-turers were in factories. By I88o, of a total of 7ooo looms,2000 were steam-driven in factories in the city (La Suisseiconomiquetsociale,Ouvrage publik par le Departementf6diral de l'Economie publique, Einsiedeln 1927, p. 27).



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BASLEAND BACHOFEN 151began to arrive from Germany, France, other parts of Switzerland, and the erstwhilecountry districts themselves. In 1779 the city population stood at I5,000, of whom abouthalf enjoyed burgher-rights.By i88o it had swollen to 6i,ooo, but only a quarterof thesewere burghers.45At the same time, relations between employersand employees deterio-rated, the workers resorted to strike action, and in 1869, after a particularly bitterindustrial dispute, the city was selected as the site of the fourth Congress of the FirstWorkers' International. The conflict of interest between manufacturers and workerswhich, in the putting-out days, had been an aspect of the conflict between town andcountryside had thus become, in part as a result of the Kantontrennung,social conflictwithin the town itself. The old frommesBasel, in which rich and poor, manufacturers,merchants, and artisans had lived togetherin relativeharmony, had been made over intoa modern industrial and commercial town.The Basle intellectuals, especially those who emerged from the elite, observed thetransformation of their city and foresaw its consequenceswith dismay. Many of them hadpersonally seen the social effectsof industrializationin England, and in the considerableliterature on that topic they could have read frighteningaccounts of the human degrada-tion and the revolutionary situations 'Manchesterism' had produced. The price of'progress' seemed to them unacceptably high, the two goals of the moderate leaders -economic progressand political conservatism- incompatible.Yet most of these critics whom we now thinkof, not without reason,as dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, even 'reactionaries' startedout, in theyears betwen 18I5 and I848,as moderates. In 1841 Burckhardt still saw Switzerland's future in a 'definite- thoughnot political - Anschluss with Germany', that is, as part of a larger, culturally definedGerman 'Nation'.46 Correspondingly, he appears to have had, at this time, a fairlyoptimistic view of history. 'When I see the present lying quite clearly in the past', hedeclared, 'I feel moved by a shudder of profoundrespect. The highest conception of thehistory of mankind: the development of the spirit to freedom, has become my leadingconviction'.47 In 1844, when he accepted the editorship of the BaslerZeitung,he didso not only to oppose the 'raucous Swiss radicals', but 'to exterminate ... the odioussympathy ... among the ruling clique here forabsolutism of every kind'.48It appears to have been the experienceofradical volunteer bands attackingthe cantonof Lucerne in 1845 that soured Burckhardt rrevocably. 'Conditions in Switzerland- sodisgusting and barbarous- have spoilt everythingforme', he wrote in April 1845. 'The

45The number of active burghers - those possessingboth voting rights and the right to hold office - was, ofcourse, far smaller, since it was restricted by an incomequalification. The foreign population - largely drawnfrom neighbouring Baden - also increased - to 30% ofthe total by 186o - and was made up almost exclusivelyof factory workers and domestic servants. See PaulDopper, OrganisationundAufgabenkreisder StadtgemeindeBasel, 18o3-1876, Ingebohl 1933, p. 7; Paul Burckhardt,op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 206, 284; William Rappard, op.cit. n. 44 above, pp. 182-88.46 LettersofJacob Burckhardt, p. cit. n. 14 above, letter65, 25 September 1841.47 Ibid., letter 73, I9June 1842.48 Ibid., letter 91, 21 April 1844. Fritz Blaser(Bibliographieder SchweizerPresse, Basle 1956, 2 vols),

describes the Basler Zeitung as 'the organ of the nowconservative "old liberals" of 1830'. UntilJune 1839 itwas liberal-leaning but after that was described by itscritics as the 'official organ of the conservative Basleestablishment'. In 1844 Burckhardt was still expressingconfidence that 'the liberalism of 184o-43 was only thefirst sour bloom which encloses the fruit and which isbound to fall away. A new liberalism and a broad publicopinion will arise all the stronger and the purer of everykind of extravagance ... Only such a liberalism,grounded in the people, will gather strength and be ableto put together a new Federation' (Briefe, ed. MaxBurckhardt, Basle 1949-80, n, 78, letter of 28-29January 1844 to Eduard Schauenburg).



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152 LIONEL GOSSMANwordfreedom sounds rich and beautiful, but no one should talkabout it who has not seenand experienced slavery under the loudmouthed masses called "the people"'. Theerstwhile moderately liberal critic of the local conservatives now declares that he knows'too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a futuretyranny', and tells his liberal friends in Germany that they are 'political children' whoought to 'thank God that there are Prussian garrisons in Cologne, Coblenz and otherplaces, so that the first crowd of communized boorscannot fall on you in the middleof thenight, and carry you offbag and baggage'.49By February1846he was announcing that hehad turned his back on 'this wretchedage' and on the historicalworld in general. 'I havesecretlyfallen out with it entirely,and for that reasonam escapingfrom it to the beautiful,lazy south, where history is dead'. All that now remainsis to stand up for human values inthe private sphere. From the public sphere, the worldofhistory,nothing is to be expected:'I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionatefriend, a good spirit ... I can donothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towardsit is willy-nilly ironical'.50Thenew nationalism and democracy will give rise, in the end, he predicts, to despotic andmilitarist regimes,s5 and the attack on private capital will be used to justify the mostdeadly philistinism and barbarism.52In such circumstances,in which 'I hope fornothingfrom the future', except perhaps 'a few half-bearabledecades, a sort of Roman Empire',53there is nothing left for the virtuous republicanto do but withdraw:'We, on the contrary,are steadily becoming strangersto the world and its ways'.54Though disenchanted politically and convinced there was no way ofstemmingthe tideof 'barbarism', Burckhardt did not withdraw completely from all aspects of public life.Like other disappointed and disaffected talents, he retreated to Basle's cultural andeducational institutions- the libraries,the Kunstmuseum, the various learnedsocieties,the Music Society, above all the University- where he dug himselfin, as it were, in orderto uphold, in adversity and against the current, values he considered important.55'Mybusiness is simple', he wrote in 1874: 'it is to stay at my post even though I have hadseveral attractive opportunities of leaving it'.56Despite their pessimism and their caustic rejection of contemporary liberal andnationalist optimism, the Basle intellectuals resisted despair. Precisely because historycould no longer be viewed by them as in itself a processof redemption, but was seen as aconstant ebb and flow, offeringmore or less favourable conditions for the cultivation oftimeless human values, they understood their task as that ofholding out in evil times untilthe storm had passed. 'I want to debauch myselfwith a realeyefulof aristocraticculture',Burckhardt declared, 'so that, when the social revolution has exhausted itself for amoment, I shall be able to take part in the inevitable restoration.... I want to help savethings, as far as my humble station allows'."7The old optimism was finished for good,however, and the historian's role was no longer to reconcile, to show how everything

49 Lettersofjacob Burckhardt, p. cit. n. 14 above, letter93, i8 April 1845.50 Ibid., letter 96, 28 February 1846.51 Ibid., letter 1o7, September 1849.52 Ibid., letter 97, 5 March 1846.53 Ibid., letter Io7, September 1849.54 Ibid., letter 1o5, 22 March 1847.ss For a good Marxist analysis of this strategy ofwithdrawal, see Heinz Schlaffer, 'Jacob Burckhardt

oder das Asyl der Kulturgeschichte', in HanneloreSchlaffer and Heinz Schlaffer, Studienzum asthetischenHistorismus,Frankfurt 1975, PP. 72-III.56 Letter to Bernhard Kugler, 9 August 1874, quotedby Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, vII, p. 137.s7LettersofJacob Burckhardt, p. cit. n. 14 above, letter97, 5 March 1846.



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BASLE AND BACHOFEN 153contributed to the great design of history, as it had been in the great days of Restorationliberal historiography, but to criticize relentlessly: 'It is high time for me to free myselffrom the generally accepted bogus-objective recognition of the value of everything,whatever it may be, and to become thoroughly intolerant'.58ssThe idea that the elite should serve as the guardian of a cultural heritage is oftenexpressed by Burckhardt. 'If there is some happiness in the general misery of man', hewrote in the Fragmente,it can only be a spiritualone, one that looks backward in order tosave the culture of a previous age and forward toward a joyful and uninhibitedmanifestation of spirit in a time that might otherwise fall completely prey to matter'.59Similarly Bachofen, commenting on Mommsen's RomanHistory,which he saw as theepitome of modern philistinism: 'I do not hope to convince or to convert. But at least itshould not be possible later, when humanity has recoveredits good sense, to say that ourage had sunk so low that it did not even enter a protest'.60If Bachofen and Burckhardt continually emphasized cultural, religious, and socialvalues over material development, if they spoke slightingly of railways, credit banks 'andother swindles that go by the name of progress',61 hey were in part remainingtrue to theprinciples of their mentors of the 182os and 183os, few of whom were yet prepared toprofess a thoroughgoing materialism. BenjaminConstant, it is true, had argued againstMontesquieu that the economic conditions of modern life had far more influence on theconduct and the ideas of men than the political systems they lived under, so that 'citizensof republics and subjects of monarchies alike all desire materialgoods, and no one, in thepresent state of society, can avoid desiring them'. But the old civic ideals died hard,especially in Switzerland perhaps. Pellegrino Rossi, for instance - the refugee fromAustrianrepressionin Italy who became a Genevancitizenand one of the leading lights ofGenevan and Swiss liberal politics in the 182os- referredto economics, which he wascalled by Guizot to teach at the College de France, as the 'partieshonteuses' of politics.Rossi always insisted that economics should not be confused with politics or ethics andshould not be expected to take their place. The science of economics, he wrote, providesanswers to economic questions, not to political or moral questions. 'The aim of society,like that of the individual, is not only to be wealthy. Indeed, that aim may, in certaincases,be subordinated to a higher one'.62The citizen, in short,was not completely reducible tothe bourgeois, nor the body politic to society.It was because they appeared to him to have discardedeven the remnantsof idealismthat Bachofen, forone, became severelycritical, in the I85os, of those membersof his ownclass who hoped to preservetheirposition by adroit concessions. It was the Roman senate,according to Bossuet, that 'preservedthe ancient principlesand the spirit, so to speak, ofthe republic'. But at Basle the senate itself had succumbed to corruption. The regime's

58 Ibid., letter i Ii, 15 August 1852. See the excellentaccount of Burckhardt's rejection of contemporary'Fortschrittschwdirmerei' in Carl Spitteler's recollec-tions of his teacher (GesammelteWerke,n. 15 above, vI,PP. 374-77, 385-86, 388-89).59Jacob Burckhardt, HistorischeFragmente,ed. EmilDiirr, Stuttgart 1957, P. 269.

60 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 143,24January 1862.61 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 152, 14 January 1863, onbanks. Two years earlier (Briefe, letter 132) he had

extolled the modern 'achievements' of 'railways andPrussian criticism'. Burckhardt often expressed hisdispleasure at what the railways were doing to his nativecity (see Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, vII, p. 136).62 Benjamin Constant, 'De l'Esprit de conquete et del'usurpation', ch. vi, in Oeuvres,d. Alfred Roulin, Paris1957, p. o047n;Pellegrino Rossi, Coursd'iconomie oliti-que, Paris 1840, I, pp. 17-41 (second lecture). See alsop. 285.

11



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154 LIONEL GOSSMANwillingness to compromise, its clever playing at 'politics' and its own lack of principlemade it as responsible, according to Bachofen, for what he considered the decay ofpolitical and social life as the liberals and radicals themselves.All wereequally motivated,in his view, by greed and desire for power, equally indifferent to the well-being of thecommunity as an enduring political entity. A constitution, Bachofen maintained in 1857against the advocates of reform n the governing elite, must be based on principleswhosevalidity does not vary from one decade to the next according to the interests or whims ofdifferentgroups or individuals. Already, it seems, he was ponderingthe contrast betweenhis own city, where the constitution was apparently to be subject to revision every tenyears, and those ancient peoples whom he admired, like his contemporary Fustel deCoulanges, because they 'do not work for the day but have eternity in mind in all theiractivity', and to whom he devoted a lifetime of study.63 Even in the middle of thenineteenth century, the enduring model of any authentic human communityremained, itseems, for Bachofen - notwithstanding Constant's assertion that it is unrealisable inmodern conditions - something close to the virtuous city-republicsof earliest antiquityor, at the very least, to the free cities of the Middle Ages. It was certainly not the modernnation state. In the end, he warned, continual tamperingwith the constitutiondestroysallpolitical confidence: 'The revision of the constitution' - and for Bachofen the 'artificial'written constitutions of his day already marked a falling away from the originalfoundations of political life in 'Sitte und Gesinnung', the firststep on the road to politicalruin - 'is soon perceived by the people as what it truly is: an ambitious struggle forinfluence, favour and seats in the chamber. Convictions are put up for sale; egoismemergescompletely naked.... The good of the state is not a goal but a pretext'. What hashappened at Basle is typical. 'The government, forgetfulof its true obligations, joins withits assailants in ordersubsequently to sharethe spoilswith them and win the reputationofliberalism. The old try to please the young, the men of the future'. But no one attends tothe common people as they stand silently by, watching. 'Sofar,they are still waiting at thedoor, but they too have their desires, passions and reawakenedhopes that they would liketo have fulfilled. Whoever speaks of revision, must truly deliver it. A minimum appeasesonly for a short time; soon the maximum will be demanded, and taken'.64 Whenrenunciation and sacrificeare no longer the order of the day among the leaders, in short, itis only a matter of time beforeeverybodydemands the full satisfaction of his desires andsocial order dissolves in the chaos of class conflict.The fear is patent. At the end of the road of political reform lies the proletarianrevolution, socialism, the regression- so Bachofen would have it - to barbarism.It could be argued that Bachofen's relentless criticismof Wilhelminian Germany, ofthe vulgarity and materialism,as he saw it, of the Griinderzeit,f Prussianphilology, and ofthe brash new imperial Berlinof Bismarck,was actually directedat Basle and had simplybeen deflected on to a - for Bachofen himself- less problematicobject. For Basle too, asthe art historians point out, had its Griinderzeit.he city of Geigy and Speiser,of railways,chemical factories and banks, also expressed its optimism and prosperity, albeit on asmaller scale, in sumptuous neo-Renaissance and neo-baroque buildings. About I850,according to a recent historian, 'the clear, sober, late classical building cubes produced

63 'Autobiography', in Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. RalphManheim, Princeton 1967, p. 12.64 'Die Verfassungsrevision von Basel' (Supplementto the AugsburgerAllgemeineZeitung, 31 October 1857),GesammelteWerke, p. cit. n. 29 above, 1,pp. 436-39-



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BASLE AND BACHOFEN 155during the period of the Regeneration' by architects such as Burckhardt'sbrother-in-lawMelchior Berri (the most austere) and ChristophRiggenbach (youngerand moregiven tothe picturesque), yielded to 'a striving after monumental representation,the expressionthrough buildings of political success'.65The chief exponents of the new style were the twoJohann Jacob Stehlins, father andson. As Biirgermeisterand head of the city's departmentofbuildingsJohannJacob seniorpresided over the final demolition of the fourteenth-centurycity walls and the implemen-tation of a vast programmeof urban expansion and development. Ambitious and clever,the two men succeeded in winning many contracts for major buildings from less astuterivals. They were also somewhat ruthless. Amadeus Merian, the city's Inspector ofBuildings, recalls with bitterness, for instance, that when it was proposed to open up asquare in frontof the old Aeschentor he drew up a design which would have incorporatedthe familiar city gate into the new urban space. Stehlin, however, marchedinto his officeand, as vice-president of the Buildings Committee (Baucollegium),hrew out his plan andimposed one that requiredthe destructionof the gate, telling Merian- a memberof theyounger branch of the distinguished family - to concern himself henceforward exclu-sively with the inner city and to leave all the development areas to him.66Characteristically, Stehlin - whose family name should not be confused withStaihelin (the Stehlins were recent immigrants from Basel-Land, he Staihelins an oldestablished city family) - was a leading member of the radical party and both hisarchitecture and his politics earnedhim the hatred and contemptof Bachofen. I quote thelatter's comment on him at the time of his election to the Swiss National parliament ini86o, because it sums up a seriesof changes and the responsethese evoked. It is a scandal,Bachofen wrote to a Ziirich friend, that the only likely candidates for Basle's seat in theFederal Parliament are 'der Bauer Stehlin, ein grober Zimmermann ... und derMazzinist Klein, ein Schullehrer'.67The contempt here is unbounded, and effectively expressed. The term Bauerconveysthe idea of a builder who, unlike the humanistically educated architects of the 182os and1830s, the Schinkels and the Berris,has no philosophy of architecture and builds withoutprinciples - a merebuilder. This implication is reinforcedby the second term, 'a crudecarpenter'. So a mere mindless artisan, a practical self-made man, without a classicaleducation, that is to say without an education in firstprinciples.68In addition, of course,the word Baueralso means 'peasant', an allusion to Stehlin's modest family origins in theBasle countryside. In fact, Stehlin was no strangerto Bachofen. In 1825he had been thebuilder employed to execute Melchior Berri's design for J.J. Bachofen senior's townhouse on the Sankt Alban Graben. Whatever the merits and education of this elderStehlin, the younger had in fact received his training in Paris, and Burckhardt, forinstance, thought highly of him. But facts do not concernus here as much as attitudes. ToBachofen, clearly, the chief architect of the new Basle that emerged in the 1850s, 186os

65 Joseph Gantner and Adolf Reinle, KunstgeschichteerSchweiz,Frauenfeld 1936-62, IV(by Adolf Reinle), p. 4.66 See Paul Siegfried, 'Basels Entfestigung', BaslerJahrbuch,1923, pp. 81-146; Birkner Othmar, Bauen undWohnen n Basel (185o-I1oo), Basle I98i (Neujahrsblatt,159); Rolf Br6nnimann, Basler Bauten186o-910o, Basle1973, PP- 31-32 (on the Stehlins and Amadeus Merian).67 Briefe,op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 124, 26 October1860.

68 To Bachofen's teacher B6ckh, as to most of thestrongly Platonic neohumanists, a classical educationwas above all an education in the first principles ororigins of things before they had been corrupted andobscured by custom and convention (Encyklopiidie ndMethodologieder philologischenWissenschaften, d. ErnstBratuschek, Leipzig 1877, PP. 31-32).



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156 LIONEL GOSSMANand i870oswas a crude parvenu, a man totally unschooled in the neohumanism that hadinspired Schinkel, Berri and the other architects of an earlier generation, all of whomthought of architecture as the expressionof the ideals and values of the polis.Stehlin hadno ideals, no true knowledge, no sophia,only techne.He wasjust a builder, a Bauer.If the Basle critics of modernity had much in common with formerliberals from the182os and 30osn other parts of Switzerland and Europe, there was another respect inwhich, no doubt, they were not unique. Bachofen, Burckhardt, Bocklin and CarlSpitteler, each in his own way, no less than Nietzsche, were estranged not only from thematerialism and the ostentatious vulgarity, as they experienced it, of the world aroundthem, from a society dominated by economic ambition and indifferent to questions ofculture, indeed incapable of conceiving culture as anything more than an aggregate ofdiscrete, more or less pleasurable activities (theatres, concerts, art galleries andmuseums), they were also estranged from the restricted way of life that modernitythreatened. They all dreamed, as Holderlin, Zoega, Humboldt and others of theneohumanist generation had done, of a more glorious, harmonious,generous and heroicexistence, a return to nature and to a life more beautiful and also more bold andadventurous than that represented by the pious, repressed Calvinist Alt-Basel whosepassing they might lament. Bocklin's great dream-like mythological and symboliccanvasses, as well as the frescoes he painted for that monument of Basle civic achievementin the period of the Regeneration, Melchior Berri's noble Schinkel-inspired Museum(1844-49) in the Augustinergasse, Spitteler's epic PrometheusndEpimetheus, achofen'sevocation of prehistoric matriarchalcultures, and Burckhardt'sportraits of the princesand artists of Renaissance Italy all bear witness to that longing.What seems to distinguish the Basle artists and writersfrommany others who, at thetime, also imagined more exhilarating and richly human existences than that offeredbythe bourgeois society of the time, from Baudelaireand Flaubert to Wagner and Gauguin,is the particular strain of irony with which they tempered their idealism. While irony isalso essential to Baudelaire or Flaubert, that of the Baselers is characterized by adistinctive, almost folksy, down-to-earth quality, a cautionary mistrustfulness, such asDilthey observed- and was made uncomfortableby - in all the Baselers he met duringhis brief stint as professorof philosophy at the University in 1867.69 Irony and midisancewere (and supposedly still are) second natureto the Baseler,forthey were the instrumentsa small, bourgeois community was likely to use, both to exert its control over individualmembers and, where necessary, cut them down to size, and to deflate the pretensions ofdangerous strangers and neighbours. Often it is a whole community that stands behindthe defensivelyanti-heroicironyof the Baseler,and it is probablynot fortuitousthat manyof the astringentbonmots forwhich Burckhardtwas famous were spokenin Baseldytsch,fwhich the eminent professorwas reputedly a master.The irony the Baselers used on theirown high-flown fantasies thus reintegratedthem, in a certainway, into their city and itsculture. There was nothing contradictoryin the praise they often gave to modest virtues

69 'Es liegt etwas so Enges in der Art der Menschen, zudenken und zu sein. In Berlin gibt jeder sich ganzgerade, offen, ohne besonderen Argwohn. Hier finde ichselbst bedeutende Menschen wie Burckhardt, sehrweltkundige wie die beiden Vischer misstrauisch,beobachtend, als wdire bei dem Gegeniiber auf ver-borgene Fangeisen irgendwo zu rechnen in die man

treten k6nne. Noch mehr fillt etwas andres auf: einMangel an Glaube, an Zuversicht aufdie Welt' (quotedin Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, vii, pp. 198-99, from Derjunge Dilthey: ein Lebensbildin Briefen und Tagebiicherni852-i870, ed. Clara Misch, Leipzig and Berlin 1933,pp. 237-38).



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BASLE AND BACHOFEN 157and humble achievements. This may explain why they clung obstinately to their little cityeven as they denounced its pettiness, and why Burckhardt, for instance, chose to live a lifethat, as he put it himself, was 'as philistine as possible'.70 Again Dilthey's testimony isrevealing. Taken aback by the scepticism and even pessimism of the leading Basleintellectuals - which he contrasted with the confident optimism of Berlin - put out byBurckhardt's outbursts about the ageing of Europe and the decadence of Western culture,Dilthey commented to his father in 1867 that 'only someone who had not lived throughBerlin in the last year could attribute such notions to anything other than ignorance ofone's own time'.71 To Dilthey's surprise and apparent annoyance, the Baselers wereneither inspired by the victory of Sadowa nor inclined to hail modern Prussia as the heraldof a new heroic age.

Perhaps it was its peculiar combination of defiantly prosaic and anti-heroic realismwith nostalgic memories of ancient republican virtue that made Basle, if not congenial,then at least less intolerable than most other places, both to its disaffected, yet still piousand unrebellious sons, and to outsiders like Franz Overbeck who were repelled by thepomp and sycophancy of Wilhelminian Germany and its capital, the brash Gross-stadt Berlin.

IIBACHOFEN

Ich habe immergehofftund hoffe mme

gossman basle bachofen and critique of modernity

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