A Most Dangerous Book by Christopher B. Krebs

Author:Christopher B. Krebs
Language: ara, deu, eng, fra, ita
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

8. A Germanic farmer in Justus Möser’s History of Osnabrück.

Widener Library, Harvard College Library, 47528.1.10.

A woodcut adorns the History of Osnabrück. Traditional and Tacitean, it looks back to the prints included in Philipp Clüver’s Germania antiqua (a copy of which was in Möser’s library). But it also contains elements alluding to the peasant and his property (the spear in the right corner should probably symbolize Möser’s “defense”—when farmers turned soldiers to fight for their community). In the first edition of his History, as quoted in this section’s epigraph, the landowning commoners overruled the nobles. In a concurrent letter Möser, who had himself refused nobility, bluntly stated that “the nobles in Germany did not really belong to the nation.”32 Although he softened that declaration in the second edition to include both the people and the nobility, the commoners—the simple Volk, as they are specified in a footnote with reference to Tacitus—remained the backbone of “the body of the nation.”33 No hardworking commoner himself, Möser increased the people’s clout in politics. He thus helped bring about the change in meaning that would lead Jacob Grimm a few decades later to reflect on how the noun “folk” and its adjective “folklike” now were associated with the free.34 Outside the Holy Roman Empire others advanced the voice of the people in poetics. They, too, had little of the common folk experience.

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