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self admits, the celebration of classical Antiquity in Weimar had little
in common with the intellectual predilections in �ranz’s principality.
A shared interest in conserving the political order of the Old Reich,
which has long been recognized by scholars as Reichspatriotismus
(imperial patriotism), could not and—at least as far as the princes of
other small state were concerned—was not intended to overcome
cultural differences. Yet it is exactly this amalgamation of political
and intellectual concerns that constitutes the specific nature of
Umbach’s form of Enlightenment. Until it can be shown that the
same set of ideas was prevalent in a number of small states, it is premature
to speak of a ‘German federal Enlightenment’ (p. 191).
Although the book does not prove Umbach’s case, it has much to
offer. It (re)discovers the symbolic language of the Enlightenment
and indicates what historians could gain from examining it. Umbach’s
great strength is her ability to show that the late Enlightenment
was more multi-faceted and complex than social historians
have led us to believe. Although some of her arguments seem rather
far-fetched and she at times jumps to conclusions, Umbach nevertheless
succeeds in destroying the doctrinaire character usually associated
with the last phase of the Age of Reason. Instead she unearths
strands like sentimentality which, despite their irrational feel, were
compatible with other aspects like improvement and practicality. The
image of the late Enlightenment thus becomes more intricate, stressing
the co-existence of different traditions in an almost postmodern
way and relegating the old image of sterile and one-dimensional utilitarianism
to the dustbin. This re-evaluation, however, is only made
possible by investigating ‘the multi-layered visual language of the
late Enlightenment’ (p. 144).
Umbach’s approach, however, runs into difficulties as soon as she
claims that this visual language was exclusive to small states. In
Prussia, for instance, Lenné’s early nineteenth-century garden programme
can be read in similar ways, as becomes clear from her own
account. The same applies to the English Garden in Munich, created
in the 1790s. �urthermore, in the case of officials in Berlin, designs for
a monument provided the medium for a discussion of the nature of
the Prussian state, as we learned from Hellmuth’s essay. The visual
code was therefore a universal language, which in principle could be
applied by everyone and was suitable for different cultural and political
purposes. The garden landscape of Wörlitz was only one of many
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A War of Words?