The eighteenth century lures some with its modern face, still fresh and innocent but reassuringly familiar. I backpedaled into the century, in pursuit of the less familiar. Stimulated but unsettled by an exchange of ideas with students of other national histories, I had become intent on following my own hunches – every German historian has at least one – about the peculiarities of the Germans. But the exchange had also made me aware of the insularity and stagnation of eighteenth-century German studies. If we are eventually to reach firmer historical ground for explaining what was and what was not peculiar about a national experience, it will be from new angles of vision on the German route from tradition to modernity, unobstructed by shopworn models and their present-minded criteria for modernization. Above all we need a more nuanced, densely contextualized understanding of the social meaning of German religious and secular cultures and the variations on their interplay over the course of the eighteenth century.

It was in pursuit of this agenda that I made “poor students” (arme Studenten) my point of departure and my recurrent object of reference. Poor students were a more or less substantial minority at Protestant universities, and one that attested to the tenacious traditions of a religious culture. Nonetheless they provoked censure and alarm in old-regime society. With their ambivalent presence as its focal point, the study developed in concentric circles, raying out from a specific social experience to the cultural norms and ideas that gave it meaning and in turn bore its imprint.