habe, zum T –; denn der schleichende Herrsch-, Betrug-, und Kabalengeist ist’s, der hinter ihrer Decke kriechet.2 This, however, is by no means marks the end of Herder’s engagement with Freemasonry and Masonic lodges. Much later, between 1800 and 1803 Herder joins the theater director, actor and well-known Freemason Friedrich Ludwig Schröder in his work to bring about a reform of Masonic rites and practices in Germany, particularly in Hamburg. The goal of this reform was to create a new Masonic ritual, suppressing almost entirely the idea of secrecy and replacing it with a moral obligation to work for the best of mankind. A vivid correspondence between the two documents Herder’s continuing interest in Freemasonry as fundamentally moral and humanitarian institution. Not surprisingly, the same ambivalent and shifting attitude to Freemasonry can be found in his texts on and around this matter – the most important being his three dialogues, his Freimaurergespräche in the tradition from Lessing: “Glaucon und Nicias”, that was never published in his own time; “Gespräche über eine unsichtbar- sichtbare Gesellschaft”, printed in the second part of Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität; and two conversations in the fourth book of the Adrastea. In this paper I am going to concentrate on his earlier texts, from the 1780s, as they are the ones, in which his thoughts on Freemasonry are first being formulated.


Friedrich Ludwig Schröder III. I begin my discussion of some of Herder’s texts by giving a brief account of five


fairly strange letters that were published in the journal Teutsche Merkur in spring and summer 1782, as part of a heated debate. The protagonists of this debate, or rather, should we say, the antagonists were two seminal figures of the German Enlightenment. Furthermore, in the study of the period they have come to represent opposing or even contradictory versions of the Enlightenment project, between – on the one hand – a rigid, but heroic rationalism, strictly rejecting every hint of mysticism or sentimentality, for instance in Goethe’s Werther or in Fichte’s idealism, and – on the other – an open-minded and emphatic historicism, with a singular sense for historical, cultural and linguistic difference. Prior to this debate the two men in question were friends, or at least they tried to be, in a circle that also included Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, afterwards, they were at least for a time sworn enemies. Their names were Friedrich Nicolai and Johann Gottfried Herder. And it wasn’t the first time that they had clashed, either. Some years before, Nicolai, the famous editor of the journal Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, where Herder had been publishing short articles mainly on literary and aesthetical


2 Dobbek 265f, zit. nach Voges 190. 50


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