Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Philipp Moritz

Moritz’s sentence is the Enlightenment traveler’s humblebrag in its most revealing form: he’s ostensibly describing architecture, but he’s really performing judgment. The careful throat-clearing - “notwithstanding the total difference” - sets up a little rhetorical magic trick. He concedes the obvious (Berlin’s St. Peter and London’s St. Paul’s don’t match stylistically), then pivots to the more valuable claim: his eye can detect likeness where tourists see only surface. It’s a bid for authority, the voice of someone trained to move from “style” to “resemblance” - from cataloging to interpretation.

That distinction matters in the late 18th century, when cities are competing for cultural legitimacy and writers like Moritz are acting as roving auditors. Berlin, still eager to be read as a serious European capital, benefits from being even faintly echoed by London’s grandest ecclesiastical landmark. Moritz’s phrasing quietly stages a hierarchy: St. Paul’s is the reference point, the measuring stick, the standard a Protestant metropolis has already canonized. Berlin’s church becomes legible through that prestige.

The subtext isn’t only comparative; it’s moral and political. Protestant architecture in both places can be framed as disciplined, civic-minded, rational - a sacred space that doubles as state symbolism. Moritz lets “resemblance” do the ideological work of affiliating Berlin with the modern, imperial confidence of London, while preserving his own pose as the discerning cosmopolitan who can translate one city into the language of another.