The German Enlightenment

The turmoil that engulfed the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the early 1830s marked the beginning of the decline of that institution's control over much of European architectural theory. The institution itself would of course survive the nineteenth century and continue well into the twentieth, but French dominance in architectural theory would now gradually diminish. The new but still unrecognized challenger on the horizon in 1830 was Germany. Few would suspect that by century's end this once rural and divided country would dominate European theory at large.

This development is all the more remarkable if we consider how late an independent Germanic line of thought formed. Germany's artistic “provincialism” in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had everything to do with its political and economic fragmentation. Germany existed during this period not as a country but as a medieval affiliation of over 300 states and cities, nominally confederated under the aegis of the ancient Reich, or Holy Roman Empire. These entities were largely feudal in constitution, not always German speaking, both Catholic and Protestant in religion, and variously ruled by an assortment of emperors, kings, counts, dukes, margraves, bishops, and electors. Fifty-one of these entities functioned as free cities, led by the Hanseatic trading centers of the north.