One answer given at the time by Heinrich Heine was that Germany didn’t have the revolution that put the new bourgeois class in power (like in France). Therefore

One answer given at the time by Heinrich Heine was that Germany didn’t have the revolution that put the new bourgeois class in power (like in France). Therefore censorship, political repression and the dead end of many „German“ micro states meant that philosophy and other disciplines where a way to work on the topics of the new age without getting in conflict with the extraordinary dimension of political backwardness. You could say England is the proof that it does not have to be that way, but they where pioneering capitalist economy, so that’s another case. Heinrich Heine hated Göttingen btw.