![]() His politics were not of the far right there was no hint of revanchism. The gentleman was shaped by the English public (meaning private) school, the German bourgeois by the Gymnasium.Īll of which is to say that Joachim Fest, the acclaimed biographer of Hitler and Albert Speer 1, cultural editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1973 to 1993, and conservative scourge of the postwar German left, was a paragon of Bildungsbürgertum. If sportsmanship, good manners, and fine tailoring were the vaunted signs of the English gentleman, the minimum requirement for a Bildungsbürger was a sound knowledge of Latin and Greek, the classics of European literature, and of course German classical music. Some of the proudest Bildungsbürger were Jews. Briefly, a Bildungsbürger was a member of the pre-war bourgeois German elite whose status was marked less by birth than by a solid classical education. ![]() ![]() Since the German word Bildungsbürger, let alone Bildungsbürgertum, is probably untranslatable, Martin Chalmers wisely leaves it in the original and explains the meaning in a footnote. Joachim Fest, Kronberg im Taunus, Germany, 2005 ![]()
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