“Where do we stand?” asked Wilhelm von Humboldt in his review of the eighteenth century. “Which part of its long and arduous path has mankind covered? Is it on a course that leads to the final destination?” The text is more than just a glimpse on the past: it expresses a borderline experience, around 1800, which had a profound influence on the perception of past and present in Germany.

In the middle of the eighteenth century Greek antiquity had been rediscovered. Greece became the foremost object of productive artistic reception. At the same time, the exclusionist vision of classical culture associated with nobility began to end; while the neo-humanist teaching at grammar schools and the scientific research at the universities concentrated equally on the study of Greece and Rome. The ancients were no longer timeless models, but historicized paradigms for Wissenschaft, literature, and the arts. Their works were still regarded as perfect, but also as historically constituted and therefore specific. The new German image of antiquity was characterized by a latent tension between classical aesthetics and enlightening historicism, and shifted between canonization of an idealized image of antiquity, on the one hand, and recognition of its interconnection with other cultures, on the other. These categories were paradigmatically articulated in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt.