Hamann and Abbt. Both were important for the young Herder while he was distancing himself from Kant (Zammito 2002: 164) and both were seriously involved in the Prussian-Russian conflict. Johann Georg Hamann, a philosopher from Konigsberg, lived in Riga, under Russian rule, and worked for the major merchants of the area, the brothers Berens. Riga was the center of wartime efforts; the Russian headquarters were stationed there. Trading hemp and timber, the Berens had every reason to be concerned about the turn of European politics that put Russia and England at war. One of the brothers, Reinhold, left a memoir in which he mentions Hamann and Kant as friends of the family. After the Seven Years War ended, Reinhold Berens served in Russia as a military doctor, took part in the suppression of the Pugachev rebellion, and traveled as far as the Altai Mountains; he was so Russified that in his memoir he called his venerable schoolteacher Nestor (Berens 1812: 10).
In 1756, the Berens brothers sent Hamann to London with a "political as well as commercial" mission (Berlin 2000: 262; Betz 2008: 30). This secret mission started and finished with Hamann's visit to the Russian Ambassador in London, Aleksandr Golitsyn. Hamann handed over a proposal from the Berens brothers, which the Ambassador rejected outright. Later, during Catherine's coup, Golitsyn acted like a turnspit, so counting on his support was probably not wise. Isaiah Berlin suggested that the Berens brothers contemplated a secession of German Baltic lands from the Russian Empire; if so, it is difficult to explain why they would send their messenger to the Russian Ambassador in London. It is equally possible that they were struggling to preserve the Anglo-Russian alliance, which was profitable for their commerce. Whatever the message was, Hamann's failure to persuade the Ambassador changed his life. Somehow it led to his Christian reawakening, which triggered his new career as a bitter critic of the Enlightenment. From London, he returned to Konigsberg, where he taught English to Herder and competed with Kant for influence over young minds.
The German public sphere was emerging during the Seven Years War; since Herder, a poem by Thomas Abbt, On Death for the Fatherland (1761), has been credited as a reflection on this process (La Vopa 1995; Redekop 1997). This poem responded to the Prussian defeat at the major battle of Kunersdorf, near Frankfurt (Oder), by calling the Germans to heroic resistance against the invaders. In 1760, Abbt became a professor of philosophy at Frankfurt during the Russian occupation of the city. After the war ended, in 1765, he left his professorship for a post at the court of Count Wilhelm von
Schaumburg-Lippe, one of the most successful Prussian commanders of the Seven Years War. Abbt contributed to the debate on theodicy, or the nature of eviclass="underline"
He formulated a grim parable for the human condition in terms of an army finding itself in hostile territory with no sense of what it has been sent to accomplish, so that each soldier had to make his separate peace with the situation. (Zammito 2002: 169)
Having recovered this wonderful tale from an old journal, Zammito failed to notice that for Abbt, the author of On Death for the Fatherland, this hapless army was the Russian army in Prussia and the pathetic soldier was someone like Bolotov.
Conjectural History
A century and half later, in August 1914, Russian troops were approaching Konigsberg again. "The Cossacks are coming," was the cry in the city. Surrounded by a panicky crowd, the very young Hannah Arendt fled Konigsberg with her mother. But in Berlin, Hannah suffered from homesickness, so they returned to the city 10 weeks later, after German troops had defeated Russian forces at the battle of Tannenberg. Hannah developed a recurrent ailment, a fever that occurred every time she had to leave Konigsberg (Young-Bruehl 1982: 23). One can only speculate that this early experience of unset- tledness had an effect on her later ideas; Ernest Gellner was right in seeing this situation as a philosophical parable (1987: 76). Kant aspired to worldly, universal knowledge without leaving his city, though this was the city that changed hands between the Prussians and the Russians. Arendt traversed the world haunted by stateless- ness, the banality of evil, and the German-Russian symmetry in totalitarianism. Though we do not know what would have happened to these philosophers in a different place, we can feel that their ideas, general as they are, were anchored in the history of Konigsberg. But the meaning of the Konigsberg parable went further than a dialectics of the particular and the universal. Built to colonize, but intermittently colonized, this failed imperial center proved to be a fertile ground for critical thinking about modernity.
After the Russian retreat from Konigsberg, Kant recovered from his subaltern silence. Among his famous Critiques, he wrote a project of perpetual peace (1795), a utopian construction of the future federation of states, close and distant, which would be based on the prohibition against any state appropriating another state. This forward-looking idea had become popular in early-nineteenth- century Russia. In 1813, Sergei Uvarov, the future Minister of the Enlightenment, rewrote Kant's utopia as a project for the post-Napoleonic arrangement of Europe that would be led by the Russian Empire (Maiofis 2008: 74). Despite Uvarov's clout, his treatise did not gain much success in the Russian court or among international allies. Indeed, Kant stated clearly that the future federation would become possible only when every state became a republic. A European peace was realistic if it was based not on a utopian federation but on the balance of power, a British principle that Russian rulers mostly disliked.
With the advent of modernity, power became dependent not only on the size and resources of the state, but also on the knowledge and creativity of the people. In 1786, Kant published an essay, "Conjectural Beginnings of Human History," which provided a reading of Genesis but which actually outlined Kant's thinking about war and his polemics with Herder. Closer to the end of the essay, Kant broke the code and acknowledged that he was talking not only about Adam, but also about the events of today: "For the danger of war is also still today the sole thing that moderates despotism, because wealth is required for a state to be a might, but without freedom, no enterprise that could produce wealth will take place" (Kant 2007c: 172).
This is a strong form of liberalism that connects sovereignty to military power and this power to freedom. Despots need industrious- ness among their peoples and, because of that, have to restrict their despotism. This is where despots find their nemesis, from among the best smiths of their best weapons, who have enjoyed an exclusive freedom and wish to share it with others. This speculation would work particularly well during the twentieth century's Cold War. Arendt, who was passionate about Soviet dissidents and lived long enough to learn the news about Andrei Sakharov, would probably agree with this scheme of things. In earlier centuries, the Prussian Frederick and the Russian Catherine were such despots, who supported both gauntlets and sciences because they needed them for their survival. As usual, Kant tried to look at both sides from some kind of philosophical middle ground. In his biblical essay, the nomadic herdsmen, who were "sworn enemies of all landed property," attack peaceful farmers and urban dwellers. "There was continual war between them, or at least the continual threat of war, and both peoples were at least able to enjoy the priceless good of internal freedom." He continues the tale, twisting it unexpectedly: "With time the increasing luxury of the town dwellers, but chiefly the art of pleasing, in which the town women eclipsed the dingy maids of the deserts, must have been a mighty lure for those shepherds" (Kant 2007c: 172). Responding to this lure of the town women, the herdsmen enter into relations with them, which brings "the end of all danger of war" and with it, "the end of all freedom."