A German Life in the Age of Revolution: Joseph Görres, 1776-1848

The story of Joseph G rres's life is in many ways the story of German political culture in the revolutionary epoch. Indeed, his dates, 1776-1848, frame the "Age of Revolution" and, like the age in which he lived, G rres's life was marked by great upheavals. One of the most prominent German journalists of his age, G rres pioneered political journalism, or what was called Publizistik in Germany. He was a founder of political Catholicism, and was in no small part responsible for the fact that Germany eventually developed a party based on the Catholic confession. G rres was also an extraordinarily prolific scholar with an almost dizzying range of interests. His life provides a window into an incredibly prolific era in European history, into the political implications of the Enlightenment, the wide-reaching intellectual movement of German romanticism, the roots of German nationalism, and the origins of German political party formation.

G rres traversed the entire political spectrum of his age: his youth, formed in the shadow of the French Revolution, was characterized by enlightened, cosmopolitan republicanism--what some have dubbed "German Jacobinism"; his middle years included a romantic phase, in which he helped foster a nascent German cultural nationalism, before he became a fiery nationalist writer and publisher of the Rheinischer Merkur, the most important political newspaper in Germany up to that time. In the sunset of his life he was primarily a Catholic political polemicist.

G rres helped shape the immensely creative and pivotal years in which he lived, years that saw the development of the modern state system, of modern philosophy, the origin of the political spectrum in Germany, of the very concepts "liberal" and "conservative," which are so much a part of our political discourse today.

Jon Vanden Heuvel is an associate in investment banking at Credit Suisse First Boston.
He received his doctorate in modern European history from Columbia University.

"Vanden Heuvel's study fills an important gap in the historical literature on the development of modern Germany's political culture. This is a study of one of the revolutionary epoch's most fascinating characters, Joseph G rres, but beyond that it is a portrait of a seminally important and understudied and inadequately understood period of modern history: that of Germany during the two or three generations prior to the country's unification under Bismarck."--From the Foreword by Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

"This work is a meticulous, convincing political biography of one of Germany's most influential Catholic journalists and political thinkers in the 19th century. Gorres's Rheinischer Merkur (1814-1816) helped define German identity during the Wars of Liberation. Gorres began as an idealistic Romantic attempting to secure Rhineland's liberties with France's and Napoleon's support. Disillusioned with French rule in his native Koblenz, Gorres invested his hopes in Prussia, only to be censored and forced into exile in the post-Napoleonic restoration of monarchical privileges and the betrayal of constitutionalism. Gorres ended his career in service to the Bavarian monarchy as a history professor in Munich, dying just before the 1848 revolution. His renewed Catholicism helped sustain him through his increasingly pessimistic political journey. Gorres helped awaken Germans to their cultural accomplishments through idiosyncratic studies of myth, legend, and mysticism, as well as editions of folktales and songs. Based on extensive archival and secondary sources, with detailed citations and a full bibliography, this study is indispensable for those interested in Germany's 19th-century political and cultural history."-- Choice

"In bold strokes, Vanden Heuvel presents a well-organized biography, integrating an immense body of pertinent literature and published and archival sour