This chapter moves to the last phases of the French occupation in parts of Germany and to the improved position of the local Jews in these regions. It then concentrates on the efforts to legalize Jewish equality in the constitution of the new German Bund, discussed in a special committee at the Congress of Vienna, and within this context, it examines the position of a number of important German politicians towards Jewish emancipation. While Wilhelm von Humboldt’s liberal approach is relatively well known, but appears to be more complex on taking a closer look, it is interesting to observe the position of another Prussian politician, Karl August von Hardenberg, and especially that of the Austrian foreign minister chairing the entire congress, Metternich. Both were much more conservative, but still supported Jewish equality, insisting it must apply to Germany as a whole. In the end, this question remained undecided, like so many other issues relating to the planned constitution, mainly because of the pressure from the presumably much more liberal bourgeoisie in the various cities of the new Bund.

Chapter 3 offers a double biography of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Alexander von Humboldt (1767–1859) until the latter’s departure for the Americas, and does so for two reasons: Not only did the two brothers grow up together in an intimate fraternal relationship (with their father lost and their mother estranged), and did so despite differences in personality and interest, but Alexander also became a major resource through his own linguistic-ethnographic observations with Indigenous peoples of the Americas and as a liaison for resources from American contacts on his elder brother’s behalf. In short, Alexander served as the eyes and ears of William, who never crossed the Atlantic. On his return to Europe, Alexander then brought along major linguistic works for Wilhelm’s library. Over the years, the two Humboldts would grow even closer to each other, as evident in their organismic perspectives of language and nature.

When Alexander was exploring the rainforest of northern South America at the turn of the nineteenth-century, Wilhelm pursued intensive sociolinguistic-ethnographic fieldwork on Basque, a non-Indo-European isolate, in the Pyrenees of Spain. Basque would attest as an ergative-absolutive language comparatively rare in Europe, but quite common in the Americas. Research on a language without a philological tradition required linguistic and anthropological field research, including the learning of its grammar, its uses and contexts, plus accompanying sociocultural customs. Humboldt recognized Basque as “a living image of their way of thinking and feeling,” for which he drew on proverbs, poetry, music, and dances. Conversely, distinctive Basque society was intelligible solely through the Basque language as part of an integrated theory of language in culture and society. Although Humboldt never identified Basque as Native American, his journey to the Pyrenees then became his substitute for a voyage to the Americas in the mind of German Humboldtians.

Humboldt personally inspired American linguists of the early nineteenth century such as Peter S. Duponceau and John Pickering (both by correspondence) plus A. Albert Gallatin (probably in person by Alexander’s introduction and perhaps by correspondence) as the first generation of American Humboldtians. Whereas Duponceau had already been impressed by Humboldt’s sociolinguistic field study of Basque, he and Pickering responded to Humboldt’s inquiries for information on North American languages; but Duponceau and Pickering also drew on the Prussian as a descriptive-analytical linguist with a broad hemispheric, even global comparative foundation, a solid interest in linguistic-cultural alterity and diverse language use, language change, and linguistic typology. Thus, they came to share a broad range of linguistic topics. In contrast, Gallatin likely found primary inspiration in Humboldt's early model of linguistic cartography for his own early maps of American languages and for his cultural ecology with language at the center.

With its “emic” underpinnings and multi-faceted comparative principles, Humboldt’s Americanist platform proved suitable for the initial description and analysis of the languages of the Pacific such as Old Javanese and other Malayo-Polynesian languages in their own terms (“inner forms”) in contrast to the unidimensional Sanskrit-derived models by Indo-Europeanists. Humboldt instead concentrated on linguistic-sociohistorical diversity as key notions in the description and analysis of Southeast Asian and Pacific languages, alternative models of language change, including language contact, and complementary historical methodological resources. He did not suggest any common ancestry between the languages of the Americas and the Pacific beyond that of modern humanity; but he merely argued for linguistic processes that applied in the Americas also to hold true in the Pacific or in still other areas, and thus defined a modern anthropologically-based historical linguistics in truly comparative terms with special attention to the analysis of grammar.

While regularly recognized as a statesman, an educational reformer, the founder of the University of Berlin, and a scholar in political science, philosophy, and literature, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) has not always received as much acknowledgment for his contributions in anthropology or linguistics. When he is paid homage as a student of languages, it is for his role as a philosopher of language rather than as a philologist or linguist. When on other occasions Western academia has remembered Humboldt as a distinct linguist, he has appeared as a scholar of almost all languages except those of Africa or the Americas – and yet it is the very languages of the Western Hemisphere to which Humboldt paid his longest and most intensive attention, as evident by a set of recent publications in German. Chapter 1 offers an introductory discussion for an anglophone audience interested in Humboldt’s contributions to Americanist linguistics.

Humboldt not only offered a theoretically much more diverse program of Americanist linguistics than conventionally recognized, ranging from fundamental analytical issues, historical problems, and sociohistorical descriptions to comparative studies, typological questions, innovative notions, and programmatic statements across much of Middle and South America and eventually eastern North America; significantly, the present book also covers a longer historical period, from the early nineteenth century through the years after World War I, during which he exerted direct and indirect influences on four generations of linguists and anthropologists. Although the present discussion does not address the developments of the twentieth century, it answers a question that half a century ago Dell Hymes raised in wonderment about the continuous reinvention of Humboldtian notions: American Humboldtians then offered a long, sociohistorically diverse and rich platform for a broadly defined comparative linguistics to reinvent itself in various forms.

The third and fourth generations consisted of Franz Boas and his prime students, Alfred L. Kroeber and Edward Sapir, reflecting a distinctly Humboldtian perspective from the century’s turn through the years before World War II. Boas had still grown up in the Humboldtian tradition of Theodor Waitz, Adolf Bastian, and Wilhelm Wundt in Germany, and had even consulted Heymann Steinthal. In the United States, Boas offered the first doctoral anthropology program at Columbia University, presenting linguistics in traditional Humboldtian terms and with Kroeber and Sapir as early beneficiaries. When joining Boas’ graduate program, Sapir already brought along Humboldtian notions from his undergraduate Germanic linguistics, eventually to lead to some theoretical differences with Boas about the interpretation of language change (with Kroeber frequently taking an intermediate position). All together, the Boasian program of anthropological linguistics however reflected closely Humboldt’s ideas a century ago, although Boasians did not advertise their historical link.

Over the years, Humboldt repeatedly expressed intentions to write a book on American languages. Although he did not follow through with his plans, we can reconstruct to considerable detail what his book would have looked like by building on his “Essai sur les langues du nouveau Continent” and other Americanistic writings. Humboldt’s book would accordingly have included the following major sections: an introduction addressing the comparative-contrastive study of American languages; a unit on their sociohistorical embeddings; a part on historical comparisons (with attention to their phonologies); a section on grammar (with attention to its internal analysis); and a unit on linguistic typology. Another topic might have been language contact. Major samples would have come from Nahuatl, other languages of Mexico (Cora, Tarahumara, Huastec, Totonac, Otomí, and perhaps Yucatec), Quechua and other languages of South America (Araucano [Mapuche], Guaraní, and Muisca), plus Massachusett, Mahican, and Onondaga of northeastern North America.

When called as Prussia’s emissary to the Vatican beginning in 1803, Humboldt gained access to its library with one of the richest collections of American linguistic materials in Europe, offering a piecemeal impression of the Americas’ great linguistic diversity. Shortly, he raised doubts about the missionaries’ Eurocentric analyses, their motivation of converting speakers to Christianity, and the sociocultural contexts of use. By his analysis of Nahuatl, Humboldt came to recognize the need for original in-situ descriptive-analytical research as he had pursued with Basque; but short of such opportunities, Americanist linguistics had to rely on high-quality historical analyses in their own terms (“inner forms”) and within their own, traditional sociolinguistic contexts, as made available by Alexander and others. By a variety of grammars, Wilhelm von Humboldt became ever more sensitive to notions of linguistic and sociocultural diversity in the Americas, but disagreed vociferously with any biologistic, racist interpretation of their findings.

In Germany, learning through research has experienced a great upswing in the last decade, especially through project funding and research within the framework of the national “Quality Pact for Teaching” (QPL, Qualitätspakt Lehre). Forschendes Lernen – as the concept is called in German – was developed in Germany about fifty years ago. In the last twenty years, this teaching and learning concept has been adapted to current conditions and challenges through the commitment and creative ideas of various university players. Forschendes Lernen became the foundation for undergraduate research in Germany.

“Humboldt reloaded” is a cross-faculty teaching program for undergraduate research experiences established in 2011 at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany. The overall goal is to provide students with the opportunity to experience and conduct research at a very early stage in the undergraduate curriculum. The program is named after the educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the modern German university, who advocated the unity of research and teaching and the development of critical thinking skills (the Humboldtian education ideal).

‘The Sea of Language’ is the first chapter of Volume 1 of a two-volume work entitled Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande (When Freud Sees the Sea: Freud and the German Language). The author, as writer and translator, explores how the founding tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis are not concepts that happen to have been framed in German, but were derived from the way German parts of speech are rooted in the body and thus grounded in the German language itself, which is not a language of abstraction, as French admirers of German philosophy tend to believe, but of the body in space and in motion, a language of the common people going about their everyday life. The author’s study of the essence of German takes him from poetry to philosophy to the ‘ultimate perversity’: the language of the Third Reich, which he briefly envisages as a return of the repressed within the German language, possibly intuited by Freud. Through his analysis of German, he illustrates how the character of a language can lend itself to perverse manipulation and how individuals can find themselves rejected by the Mother tongue that had so far nurtured them.

The debate in 1792-94 between Wilhelm von Humboldt and Karl von Dalberg focuses on the legitimacy and limits of the state’s promotion of welfare for its subjects. It represents a clash between the Kantian school and advocates of the Leibniz-Wolff philosophy. Dalberg advocates a strongly interventionist state, while Humboldt circumscribes narrowly the scope of rightful political action. Humboldt’s post-Kantian perfectionism aims to maximise freedom and its conditions, rather than to promote happiness, as older perfectionisms had done. Dalberg, in contrast, appeals to Wolff’s defence of enlightened absolutism, viewing the state as the agency for eliminating obstacles to individual and social thriving, or the good life. While illustrating the reception of Kant’s critiques of previous ethical systems, and the persistence of Wolffian themes, the debate is also indicative of the diversity of political positions advocated by Kantians in the aftermath of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). In conceiving the individual as a spontaneous monad with a unique developmental trajectory, Humboldt shares with Dalberg a revised version of Leibniz. The blending of Leibnizian and Kantian concepts constitutes the central theoretical interest of the political thought of this period.