Chapter 1 unfolds the historical context of two central overarching notions in this book’s narrative: the German Kulturstaat and the country’s Bildungsbürgertum. Combining historical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin during the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Germany’s largest theatre festival and observations at the city’s iconic Volksbühne, this chapter explores the moral significance attributed to institutionalised public theatres, as well as activist contestations of its state patronage and institutional structures. It also traces the role of cultural politics in facilitating the emergence of public theatres as sites for aesthetic self-cultivation (Bildung) and nation-building in the face of an increasingly diverse contemporary Germany. Expanding on the notion of institutions as traditions in Western contexts, it expands on the necessity for anthropology to take into account cultural history and art history as part of fieldwork.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take climate actions via everyday professional efforts at work. In this dispersal of climate actions, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where we are witnessing a rebirth of togetherness and alternative ways of collective organising, from employee activism, activist entrepreneurship, to insider activism, shareholder activism and prosumer activism. By empirically investigating this diffuse configuration of the environmental movement with focus on renewable energy technology, the commercial footing of climate activism is uncovered. The book ethnographically illustrates how activism goes into business, and how business goes into activism, to further trace how an ‘epistemic community’ emerges through co-creation of lay knowledge, not only about renewables, but political action itself. No longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared political identity, many politicians and business leaders applaud this affluent climate ‘action’, in their efforts to reach beyond mere climate ‘adaptation’ and speed up the energy transition. Conclusively, climate activism is no longer a civic phenomenon defined by struggles, pursued by the activist as we knew it, but testament of feral proximity and horizontal organising.

This chapter provides a general contextual setting for the subsequent analysis of Simmel’s work. It discusses the emergence and significance of a particular perception of modernity that became very common among German intellectuals in the last third of the nineteenth century. They believed that the central conflict of modernity lay in the tension between two polar imperatives: those of general culture and specialisation, or universality and particularity. In Germany, this particular tension acquired a high degree of significance and was often accompanied by strong feelings of urgency and even despair. The chapter offers a brief history of this issue as well as a genealogy of the related conceptual apparatus that included notions such as Bildung, Cultur, Beruf and Civilisation. The final section of the chapter introduces the central aspects of Simmel’s philosophy of culture that may elucidate this general context and are in turn elucidated by it.

Chapter 2 describes the family in which he grew up. Both his parents were teachers, and his father Dirk Cornelis was a quite prominent figure in The Hague. Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen held a PhD in Dutch medieval literature and was part of progressive educational milieu that sought to renew pedagogical methods and the Dutch spelling. His mother stayed home after she had children, but she stimulated the societal awareness of Jan Tinbergen. He had four siblings, two of which also pursued scientific careers. Luuk and Niko Tinbergen were both successful biologists; Niko won a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1973, four years after Jan Tinbergen won the Nobel Prize in economics. It is argued that the family was an example of Bildungsbürgertum. In the education of the children there was ample attention to culture and the study of nature. Unlike his brothers, Jan had little appetite for outdoor life and from a young age was more drawn to the exact sciences and modern industry, in particular, the trams in The Hague.

The first chapter concentrates on the period around 1800, laying the groundwork by examining the concepts of sentimentality, the code of Romantic love, Bildung, interpretation, and the appeal of Greek antiquity as an analogue to the history and formation of the self. Beginning from Winckelmann’s erotic classicism it draws on the writings of Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Georg Herder, together with insights from recent literary, historical, and sociological work on the discursive codification of emotions and of closeness in that period.

The Introduction lays out the argument about personification as the central strategy of scholarly approaches to antiquity. It argues for the importance of a romantic discourse of love and of Bildung and selfhood that intersects with the professionalization of classical scholarship in Germany, and situates the argument within the study of the history and metaphors of emotions. It introduces the figure of Alcibiades as central. It also provides an outline of the chapters to follow.

The compositional output of Johannes Brahms contains a wealth of lieder and choral works that attest to the composer’s intense engagement with literature and the Bible. Brahms was an avid reader, deeply engaged with the literature of his own time and that of the past. He was also strongly preoccupied with philosophy. Literary figures often provide a much more complex and rich account of the human condition than many of the ideologies of philosophy that dominated the nineteenth century. For instance, we find the philosophical ideologies of Kant and Hegel filtered through the writings of figures such as Hölderlin, Goethe and Schiller. Brahms was aware of this, which is evident in his compositional output in several ways.

The composer’s broad intellectual curiosity was often concerned with philosophical issues. From an early age and throughout his life, he read widely and kept a log of proverbs and philosophical sayings that were significant to him.

Brahms was among the many avid consumers of the print culture which burgeoned unprecedentedly during his century. The mid-eighteenth century onwards saw a surge in German-language publishing, following the gradual supplanting of Latin as a scholarly language and Johann Gottfried von Herder’s advocacy of popular literature as the highest expression of the national spirit. During the long nineteenth century, a vast amount of printed matter was devoured by an eager public. Apart from journalism, there were huge numbers of magazines that serialised popular fiction, science, geography, history and suchlike, as well as handsome bound collected editions of classical authors such as Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare in translation, aimed at aspirational middle-class households. Literature was crucial to the wider nation-building agenda to unite the various disparate German-speaking territories and principalities under the umbrella of language. It was inseparable from shifts in religion, philosophy and science, and was shaped and re-shaped by successive waves of political censorship.

We begin our consideration of Brahms’s politics and religion with the great historical turn that occurred in the centre of Europe in the year 1870. With the decisive German military defeat of France and proclamation of King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. Brahms probably would have preferred a Larger German solution that included Austria, Prussia’s traditional rival for leadership in the loosely bound German Confederation that was established by the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. But what mattered most was that Germany had at last emerged from its political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognised achievements in the cultural sphere.