1. de Staël Mme, a most sympathetic observer, found the Germans utterly incapable of ‘conversation’. See her D'Allemagne (1813), part 1, chap. 11. On the few fora for non-academic, intellectual life, see Hertz Deborah, Jewish high society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven and London, 1988). Her work focuses on the salon-culture in Berlin, c. 1780–1806, but much reference to the general literature is there. On the character of the intellectuals toward the end of the eighteenth century, see Brunschwig Henri, La crise de l'état Prussien à la fin du xviiie siècle et la genèse de la mentalité romantique (Paris, 1947), 176ff. On the professional class in the eighteenth century, see Bruford W. H., Germany in the eighteenth century: The social background of the literary revival (Cambridge, 1935), 235ff., esp. 247ff.
2. Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515/16), lib. II, epis, lviii & xlvi. The translation is from Francis Stokes's edition: Epistolae obscurorum virorum: The Latin text with an English rendering (New Haven and London, 1925), 508f. 485f. The Epistolae are satire; but, as with all satire, are founded on truth. Cf. Urkundbuch der Universität Leipzig von 1409 bis 1555, ed. by Stübel Bruno (Codex diplomaticus Saxoniae regiae, 2. Hpt., xi (Leipzig, 1879)), 280f. The document here, written between 1502 and 1537, corroborates the portrayal given in the Epistolae.
3. On the dissolution of the collegiate and corporate university in the Germanies, see Clark William, From the medieval universitas scholarium to the German research university: A sociogenesis of the Germanic academic (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1986), 286ff. 325ff. 362f. This work must be consulted with care, since, besides being poorly written, it contains numerous misstatements.