Exhibiting Enlightenment
Opening speech of Liliane Weissberg
18 October 2024
The exhibition “What is Enlightenment? Questions for the 18th Century” was festively opened at the Deutsches Historisches Museum on 18 October 2024. Here is the opening speech of the curator, Liliane Weissberg.
Dear Minister of State Roth, dear Raphael Gross, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The French historian Antoine Lilti begins his study of the legacy of the Enlightenment with a look back at the shooting attack against journalists of the French satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” in January 2015. Shortly after this assault, graffiti drawings appeared on the house walls of Paris that showed a portrait of Voltaire with the words: “Je suis Charlie / I am Charlie.” Many of the inscriptions also cited a maxim that is attributed to this philosopher, but is unfortunately not verifiable: “I do not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”[1] Tolerance and the freedom of speech were demanded after these turbulent events, and these demands led back to a representative of the Enlightenment.
Tolerance and freedom of speech are certainly not the only ideas that we connect to the Enlightenment today. We refer to the emancipation of the individual, we call for the equality of all people and their political self-determination, and we support universal human rights. We associate the postulate of objective scientific research with the Enlightenment, the results of which are meant to improve human life, and we hope for general access to education, but also for public spaces and media that allow discussions and the exchange of ideas to take place. The fact that this was already being debated back then and that these demands are still only haltingly – if at all – being realised today certainly has little to do with the fact of their legitimacy.
“Enlightenment” has become a commonplace that can all too easily be evoked. But the philosophers and scientists of the time often formulated their thoughts in a contradictory fashion, and above all, these ideas were hardly ever put into practice. Let’s take the much-lauded idea of tolerance, for example. Friedrich II, the Prussian king known as Frederick the Great, who once hosted Voltaire in Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam, proclaimed religious tolerance in his state; everyone, he actually wrote, should be saved after their own fashion. And yet at the time he was in office, more and more edicts were enacted to limit the rights of the Jews in Berlin and Brandenburg. Immanuel Kant demanded the emancipation of the individual as an autonomous, mature being. However, that women were not to be included in this emancipation process can clearly be found in Kant’s writings, just as they were absent from the early declarations of human rights during the French Revolution. When Thomas Jefferson took up the quill to formulate the American Declaration of Independence, he insisted on the equality of all people. But in this new republic that had freed itself as a colony from the motherland he remained the master of hundreds of slaves, which he apparently found compatible with his declaration.
The Enlightenment as an epoch of the so-called long 18th century and as a collective term for certain philosophical ideas is full of contradictions and problems; many of its advocates wanted to design a new world and failed in the effort. Today we can explain this in different ways. New ideas appeared to conflict with old prejudices or with economic interests. For many philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries, the Enlightenment with all of its ambivalences was in fact the beginning of what we can now call modernity, the modern age.
And therefore, it is important for us today to understand two things: on the one hand, that many of the demands that were formulated in the 18th century must also be applied to us if we want to live in a democratic country; but on the other hand, it is precisely the problems of that time that determine our thoughts and actions today. This is not simply a programme for an exhibition where the circle has already been squared on the question of how to present philosophical questions visually and audibly. For a museum that is devoted to the question of historical judgement, this task becomes a veritable obligation.
Today we are not offering you a celebration of the Enlightenment, but an exhibition with some 400 unique objects that not only aim to throw light on our theses, but that also tell stories. Some of these objects might even amaze you. But our exhibition is neither some kind of curiosity cabinet nor a panorama of the 18th century, and we had no thought of attempting to create a comprehensive overview. There will probably be persons, events and objects that you would expect to find here that are missing. And although the encyclopaedia was an invention of that era, we do not see the succession of sections presented in the exhibition as an ordered sequence, but rather as possible constellations. Herein we have been guided by the principle of a kaleidoscope. You will be able to recognise and make connections; the design of the exhibition lays open visual axes.
It was not by accident that I began this talk by pointing to Voltaire and the Parisian graffiti. The exhibition is being shown in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, but it does not concentrate only on the German states of the time. The Enlightenment was a global project. Philosophers and scientists who are now considered enlightened thinkers wrote and researched primarily in Europe, but their intellectual world would have been unthinkable without the scientific expeditions of the period, without the reading of translated works, without far-reaching correspondence, without international trade routes, and ultimately, without colonial politics. And it is precisely in this way that the Deutsches Historisches Museum fulfils its central function par excellence: to see German history in its European context. Moreover, it was exactly the extra-European relations of European intellectuals that shaped the idea of “Europe” in this period.
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Please follow me on a brief tour of the rooms.
Our question “What is Enlightenment?” is also the title of a famous essay by Immanuel Kant that was published in 1794 in the Berlinische Monatschrift. “Sapere aude!” he declared there, “Have courage to make use of your own reason!”[2] This essay by Immanuel Kant, the 300th anniversary of whose birth we are celebrating this year, stands at the beginning of our exhibition. When you enter the room, you will first see three pictures that comment on the notion of Enlightenment. The German term “Aufklärung” – which is clearly seen in the illustration by Daniel Chodowiecki – comes from meteorology. The clouds clear, making place for the rising sun. In England many representatives concentrated on economic writings and the practical application of the new sciences. In France the term Lumières takes its departure from an old pictorial tradition that was related to the Catholic religion and the depiction of political power.
To be sure, the Enlightenment was not only the age of light, but also of reason, as Kant was to explain in his Critiques. At the beginning, you will not only meet some of the protagonists who will accompany us through the exhibition, but also find some of their definitions and statements concerning reason. As to this idea, there was no consensus among the thinkers of the time. Can reason or understanding be independent of emotions – and are emotions just as important? And was there some other dark side of reason? Artists like Henri Fueseli or Francisco Goya posed this question.
Many people considered Newton to be the guiding light of the new science; his optical research did in fact usher light into the centre of attention. The seeing eye became a central organ for empirical studies and blindness an essential topic of research. Not only were new instruments developed by scientists, they were also embraced by the general public. Not all of this research can be seen as progress that we would welcome. Alongside studies in electricity, there were areas for which we now have less sympathy, such as phrenology, which attempted to describe the character of persons by studying the shape of their skulls.
All this new knowledge now had to be ordered. The curiosity cabinets of the princes were still aiming to display the peculiarity of individual things. Although based on a private collection, the first museum, founded in London in 1753, had a different aim. While the English universities were located in Oxford or Cambridge, the British Museum was to educate the people in its own way by collecting objects and books and making them available to the general public; by displaying the Magna Carta it showed the duty of the state towards its citizens. Museums that were subsequently founded, such as the Hermitage in St. Petersburg or the Louvre in Paris, had different, political aims, but also followed classification systems, which found their culmination in another invention of the time: the encyclopaedia. While the English Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers was published in 1728 and the German Zedler between 1731 and 1754, it was the generously illustrated French Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, which took account of practical knowledge in its 71,818 entries and 3,129 pictures, that was the high point of these undertakings and soon became synonymous with the thought of Enlightenment itself.
This was a time of collecting, sorting, alphabetising and filing. Without this organisation we can no longer imagine our life today. Cities began to integrate planning into their streetscapes. The architecture of hospitals and prisons reflected the need for control. Here, too, the eye ruled. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach collected and catalogued human skulls and thus laid the groundwork for the racial theories of the 19th century. Classifications are and never were completely harmless.
The order of the world might have been God-given, but people, too, should actively give order to the world. Many enlightened thinkers did not question the existence of God, but wanted to reform their respective religions, or they turned against the institution of the Church. The Grand Lodge founded in 1717 in England was followed by many other Freemason lodges, including some in the German territories. They advocated ethical values and were active outside of the established Church. The new, now self-reliant individual could be understood like a plant that should develop from a seed to full fruition. The corresponding German word “Bildung” (education, cultivation) stems from biology. Every person was important, every path to education was different and yet interesting. The genre of the autobiography flourished. The first journal of experimental psychology, the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, appeared in 1773, in the same year that the Berlinische Monatschrift was founded, also a journal dealing with the new discipline of psychology.
Pedagogy took the development of a person seriously and became a basic science that was to promote the new individual, and thus not least of all the new society. Schools were founded and textbooks written to pass on the new ideas. But the strict austerity in teaching and the actual leashes for guiding small children continued to exist; after all, the state needed fewer free people than soldiers. On the other hand, women were offered many new opportunities. Writers addressed them as a new reading public and many women sought to make their way as writers, artists, scientists. Those who succeeded in this self-realisation remained, however, a minority. Instead, women were believed to have a certain nearness to nature that predestined them for the role of the nurturing and fostering mother.
But the call for equality failed not only because of the different tasks that were attributed to man and woman. People were generally designated as equal and also described as different. Wherein did these differences lie? Some people cited an economic origin; for Johann Gottfried Herder climate and geography were decisive. Pedagogy could also be applied in order to balance the different stages of development. For Christian Wilhelm Dohm the emancipation of the Jews was only possible through education; they had to change themselves before their political status could be changed; they had to prove themselves worthy of emancipation. The situation for the slaves that had been shipped from the west coast of Africa to the American colonies was different. There had been slaves for centuries, even in Africa. But now their social difference was evident and the colour of their skin visible. They were prohibited to learn to read and write; it seemed impossible to integrate a bodily defined difference into the pedagogical model.
Meanwhile, antiquity became modern. Greece offered models for a new polis. The excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum opened a window to another world that was soon to be discovered by travellers on the Grand Tour, especially from England. Antiquity also marked a new form of art, which spread throughout Europe and was to manifest itself in Berlin, for example, in the temple structures of the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. And although the educational tour was a matter of luxury for the upper class, the research expeditions and international networks of the scientists and philosophers were basic prerequisites for their work.
Enlightened individuals saw themselves as cosmopolitans and were not beholden to nationalistic thinking; this idea of a citizen of the world also went back to antiquity and to Diogenes of Sinope. But it was not only research and education that brought people together; trade also contributed to this. Raw materials were imported to Europe and processed there. Furniture made of imported mahogany, for instance, became an essential part of English home décor. To be sure, this exchange did not take place between equal partners. The trade of many products was integrated into the slave trade, which operated not only in the Europe/Africa/America triangle, but also included the Asian continent. The new wealth everywhere in Europe was not possible without the slave labour in the colonies.
The new thoughts and ideas circulated in the many publications of the period. The emerging reading public developed a hunger for books, newspapers and magazines, which were sent to distant places and became available despite censorship with the help of cheap pirated editions. And new public spheres arose in the cities for the bourgeois classes. In addition to the museums mentioned above, there were new academies and scholarly societies where such matters were discussed; tea parties and coffeehouses were also popular meeting places. The age distinguished itself by a culture of discussion and conversation–and we hope we have carried the critical thinking that characterised the era into the exhibition and into the interaction of our visitors with the topics and objects that we have presented.
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In this short description you will have noticed that the individual sections of the exhibition that deal with certain aspects of the Enlightenment are inherently connected with one another. We therefore invite you to follow the predefined path through the exhibition, but of course also to take detours and especially to visit the exhibition several times. You will always be able to discover something new. And you will come across certain individuals a number of times. For example, Angelo Soliman, born Mmadi Make, an African servant of Prince von Liechtenstein, appears in the context of the demand for equal human rights. The prince appreciated Soliman and paid him a good wage. The membership list of the Viennese Freemason Lodge Zur wahren Eintracht (True Concord) shows Soliman’s name alongside of that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. However, after Soliman’s death the Austrian Emperor Franz I demanded possession of his corpse. It was thereupon prepared and stuffed and exhibited as an exotic object in the Emperor’s natural history collection. A cast skull formed after his death mask made its way into the phrenological collection of Franz Joseph Gall – you can see it in the section on science. Incidentally, Soliman’s daughter married into the aristocracy; her son, Soliman’s grandson, became the Austrian writer Eduard Freiherr von Feuchtersleben.
Another example is Josiah Wedgwood. You will see his English ceramics in the section on antiquity. Wedgwood pottery was manufactured using new materials and techniques but had decorations based on Roman models, thus creating post hoc souvenirs of Pompeii. But Wedgwood was also an important opponent of slave trading and designed the symbol of the kneeling slave that became the widespread sign of the abolitionists in England, one of whose methods was to stop the consumption of sugar, which was produced with the help of slave labour. However, this did not prevent Wedgwood from providing slave dealers and owners with his porcelain or from profiting through the sale of sugar bowls.
And our project goes beyond the walls of the museum.
Along with a visit to the museum I would like to point out the publications accompanying the exhibition that are available in German and English and in which leading philosophers and scholars have dealt in great detail with various facets of the Enlightenment. At the same time, we have conducted interviews with experts from Germany and abroad who answer the question “What is Enlightenment?” in their own way and explain the relevance of these questions to their own work. Since we could only offer excerpts from these interviews in the exhibition itself, the longer versions can be seen on a website that the DHM has made available for the exhibition. Three of these interviews have already been published in the German edition of the DHM magazine Historical Judgement, edited by Oliver Schweinoch.
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In conclusion, it is important for me to express my thanks. First of all, I am of course very grateful to Raphael Gross for his trust and to Ulrike Kretzschmar, head of special exhibitions, for her support, and to the Scientific Advisory Board and the museum’s own Advisory Committee. My thanks go out to research associate Saro Gorgis and project assistant Harriet Merrow, to student assistant Nina Markert, and to Wolfgang Cortjaens, standing for the heads of the different DHM collections who worked on the project, and especially to Dorlis Blume, who as Project Head had a great deal of patience for my ideas and tried again and again – sometimes in vain – to keep me down to earth. Hans Hagemeister and Marie-Luise Uhle, supported by student assistants Johannes Karger and Jelle Spieker, were able to turn the concept into the exhibition architecture. I would also like to thank the restorers under the leadership of Martina Homolka as well as the team members of the Spandau workshops headed by Lisa Berchtold who worked behind the scenes of the museum, but without whose contribution no exhibition is possible.
The public programme accompanying the exhibition was organised by Stephanie von Steinsdorff with the support of Nike Thurn. Brigitte Vogel-Janotta and her team, especially Crawford Matthews and Lilja Ruben-Vowe, headed the project “Enlightenment NOW” with the support of the Federal Cultural Foundation, which was integrated into the exhibition and is represented more extensively on our website. Verena Günther made sure that our exhibition was inclusive and was also responsible for the children’s notebook. The registrar Nicole Schmidt took care of the at times complicated loan procedures; Ilka Linz headed the production of the books accompanying the exhibition, which were published by Hirmer Verlag, and Dorit Aurich supervised the editing of the catalogue and of the texts in the exhibition itself. The graphic design lay in the hands of Julia Volkmar and Studio Bens. Felice Fornabaio, assisted by Sina Aghazadehsaeini, adapted the video interviews, while Peter Schützhold prepared them for the website as well as the videos for the “More Story” series, which is also on the website. Nathanael Kuck prepared the audio guide. My thanks also go out to Nicola Schnell and Stephan Adam from the communications department, and to Daniela Lange and Alexandra de Léon, who were responsible for the press work.
Curators from other museums in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Switzerland and the United States granted me and my team an extensive look into their collections, thus making discoveries possible. Some of them as well as some of the catalogue authors and dialogue partners have accepted our invitation to the opening of the exhibition and have come a long way to be with us here and now. Also, thanks to them. I hope the exhibition will convey their interest and appeal to the other visitors and especially move and engage them.
[1] Cf. Antoine Lilti, L’héritage des Lumières. Ambivalences de la modernité (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2019), 7.
[2] Immanuel Kant, “Zur Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” Berlinische Monatsschrift 2, 12 (1784), 481-494; here 481.