here might not be completely irrelevant after all. That concludes my introductory remarks.


I. In the 18th century practices of secrecy manifested themselves first and foremost in


the great number of secret societies which were founded all over Germany and which – as Reinhart Koselleck, Richard Van Dülmen and many others, even quite briefly Jürgen Habermas have pointed out – were one of the most important institutions of bourgeois self-organization and education in this period. The dominant intellectual and ideological force in these secret societies was freemasonry, characterized by a strictly hierarchical organization, Egyptian symbols, esoteric rituals, pseudonyms, code words and secret handshakes. For obvious reasons I cannot go into the history of Freemasonry and Masonic lodges in Germany here. However, two aspects have to be made clear if we want to understand the role of Masonic secrets in German thought and writing from the beginning of the 18th and well into the 19th century: Obviously, one important function of secrecy consisted in concealing what was really taking place on, the actual plans and activities of the secret societies, making them appear much more important than they really were, according to a well-known logic of conspiracy theory. For instance, even as late as in the 1820s the German public still believed that the order of the Illuminati had planned and staged the French Revolution, together with the German and French Jacobins. Secondly, several important intellectual figures in 18th century Germany had affiliations with freemasonry and thus put this motive to frequent use in their works, the most famous examples being the Turmgesellschaft in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the character of Marquis Posa in Schiller’s play Don Carlos as well as the empire of Sarastro in Mozart’s Zauberflöte. From the names featured on this list you will have guessed that Freemasonry, Masonic practices and ideology are by no means new to 18th century German historiography. Moreover, in the last fifteen years there has been a renewed interest in these topics, at least partly fuelled by the renewed interest in 18th century anthropology. At one point this scholarly topic even reached the headlines in German newspaper, after the American scholar W. Daniel Wilson, in book on the order of the Illuminati in Weimar, had claimed that both Goethe and the prince Carl August had entered the order with the sole purpose to spy on and control its members. The title of this paper – “The Functions of Secrecy” – marks an attempt to move away from this mainly biographical and highly positivistic way of studying the secret societies of 18th century Germany as well as their prominent members. Thus, the term “function” is meant to indicate that I do not want to focus the actual secrets or practices of secrecy, their contents, what the Freemasons actually believed, knew or did, but on the idea or mechanism of secrecy itself – how it was perceived, what it meant, how it functioned. More precisely, I want to show how the functions of secrecy play a decisive role in the genesis of some important intellectual contributions of the late 18th century, on the fields of politics, philosophy and poetics – among them the concepts of 48


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