One must not overestimate the effect of Hertzog’s speeches and writings on subsequent German intellectual life. And even less on political life. He merely served as an alibi. Every conjurer knows the term “misdirection”: a diversionary tactic that, at the decisive moment, shifts the audience’s attention from the fingers about to perform the actual sleight-of-hand. Postwar German development used Professor Hertzog in this way and got along without any actual reference to his ideas. And he was not alone in this respect: the generous occupation-supported interregnum of intellectuals in Germany from 1945 to 1948 (Kultur, Kultur über Alles) was a happy but politically disastrous period.
Nevertheless, Hertzog is pretty much the only one of the then princes of the mind whose head (or mental balls) was not sliced off by the currency cut. His academic career remains unflaggingly at its zenith. Likewise he has a steady influx of patients. He is a shining light at all kinds of national and international congresses—that clever fellow who effortlessly manages to reconcile humanism and technology, Plato and Lenin, Freud and Saint Paul (plus Picasso and Michelangelo, Proust, Joyce, the Bauhaus, Apollinaire, Salvador Dalí, Rilke, Alban Berg, Dada, Nijinski, Herbert von Karajan, and, over and over again, Karl Nagel—for, needless to say, he’s also keenly interested in the arts). No doubt about it, this is a bravura performance, and indeed one of high symbolic content, if one understands that only a shrink could succeed in pulling it off.
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But I digress, and indeed far beyond that wintertide that left so much melancholy yearning in my mind. What I wanted to talk about is the weather: the bitter-cold winter weather during that period, and the hallowed hours in Nagel’s garden house. With Hertzog, they openly acquired the character of a church service.
To be sure, we first had to go through a brief and occasionally stormy process of fermentation.
This was due not just to the topic of the “discussion evenings,” as our once disorderly, turnip schnapps–fired palavers were now suddenly known. The chief cause was that we now had a topic. Earlier, you see, we had jumped erratically from one subject to another—with the rough directness that set the tone in those days. The word “shit,” now vivaciously circulating again, was in great favor before the currency reform. But the rough exterior concealed a heart of gold: an almost childlike openness of minds and feelings. We talked about anything “that came up”—and so many things came up, because everything was new as in childhood. From the flat Ptolemaic world, the world had emerged band-box fresh. “The phoenix,” said Nagel, who was already tending toward complex metaphors, “naturally knows, like any magician, the most dazzling way to perform his feat: on a tabula rasa.” If only he had known then how right he would be at the currency cut!
Anyway, we talked about whatever crossed our minds, and, in greatest detail, of course, about the things that were truly new in our lives. Christa, for instance, harped incessantly on the food shortage, Nagel on God, the rest of us on the preparation of turnip schnapps and the American short story, nuclear fission and its possible consequences, existential philosophy, the Anglo-Saxons, Russians, and French and their behavior during and after the war, radio programs (“The Cultural Word”), diverse treatments for the clap, the possibility of attaining higher caloric value by inserting rabbits into the consumption process for cabbage. And over and over again, needless to say, Germany’s present and future. With Hertzog, however, this higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge was sieved for so-called central questions. And these, in turn, had to be systematically analyzed. The key factor derived from the gap that our unslaked need for religion had sucked out of the world of experience. In terms of a working hypothesis, it was initially most suitable to fill that gap with Jesus Christ.
In the presence of an epistemological stopgap with such lofty moral prestige, we soon stopped laughing (our earlier laughter had been grim, but frequent). Now, I do not mean to claim that our conversations (or rather now: debates) therefore became duller. The chief pleasure had always been the thinking itself—however informal, even innocent (childlike, you see): a kind of intellectual game of tag for letting off steam until you got tired; there was no meaning, much less purpose, to it. But now it became a sport, indeed a club sport under rigid leadership, a competitive sport. Sports too are pleasurable—a competitive sport, however, is a strenuous pleasure, which sometimes comes at the cost of a good mood. And, in contrast to a lively game of tag, a bit abstract.
Hence (and also because the son of God had so dominatingly turned into a gymnastics trainer), a few of our buddies left the group—regrettably, not the worst ones. But those who stayed made it their ambition to show that the missing ones were missing something quite extraordinary.
And indeed: experiencing Hertzog in these discussions was something quite extraordinary. He came with better and better schnapps and more and more English cigarettes, and at first he acted very loose, equal among equals, a primus inter pares by sheer chance, yet incredibly cheerful, spiritually rubbing his hands together, as it were, at the joyous prospect of a good, juicy conversation, a real roast goose of a debate, nicely stuffed with apples and chestnuts and cloves. He warmed the small community up (which, for its part, was keen on the intellectual skeleton of the goose) with parish priest–like jokes. (Some of them were quite daring. For instance, I remember one about a patient who is in the habit of running around with his forefinger up his ass because he imagines he’s got a bee inside that might fly out at some embarrassing moment; he’s promised he’ll be cured; he’s anesthetized; a huge cloth bee from a toy store is placed on his bed, and when he awakes, he’s told that the bee has been removed from his body and he doesn’t have to worry anymore about its slipping out at the opera or at his father-in-law’s funeral; the patient thanks the staff exuberantly, but then he promptly rams his finger back up his ass because he’s scared the bee will fly in again, haha-haha!)
at this point, however, Herr Professor Hertzog switched over from humor to popular-scientific seriousness; he explained that the anecdote had at its heart something worthy of study: you see, the little deception of the alleged surgery on the crazy patient (for supposedly removing the bee from his asshole) was an ancient and utterly wise medical custom, a tried-and-tested therapeutic method of shamans: a casting out of the devil, a feigned exorcism; psychosomatic medicine has established the mental and spiritual origin of many organic illnesses; we still have to clarify whether and to what extent such disturbances cannot sometimes be traced to a genuine state of possession—that is to say, whether the actual psychological nidus did not form solely from a self-created malfunction of the mental and spiritual mechanism (which until now has been pictured rather too mechanistically), or whether something from outside—let us quite undauntedly use the popular term for it, a demonic power—takes control of a man’s mind and soul. As far as many neuroses and psychoses were concerned, he, Hertzog with “tee-zee,” on the basis of his rich practice and with a likelihood verging on certainty, believed he could maintain that, with a surprising number of cases, which provided ample food for thought, such an assumption could not be brushed aside.
In short: Today we make do with the meager few notions with which the psychology of the Freudian school operates—you know, “superego” and “ego” and “id” plus “libido” and “death instinct” and so on—but we cannot manage solely with them, in many cases they simply “just don’t cut it,” as you would probably phrase it, unscientifically but accurately, the concept of “physis,” for instance—in the Heideggerian sense, yes? Not of phyein, or “let grow,” but rather of phaeinein: “to bring to light”—that is: Physis as the “shiningly open,” as the inherent human drive to develop upward (i.e., our innate striving for sublimity, truth, goodness, nobility, beauty, you know) has always been shrouded in mystical twilight, there is some sort of superhuman, if not supernatural, force obtaining here, hence the superego should not be regarded purely as a product of the milieu, it is not merely the cane of the father and similar authority figures that crea
tes and stamps the ethical elements in our souls, no, no, by no means: quite undeniably, there is something else beyond them, a—I shall come out with it plainly—a spirit poured into us (well, it’s Whitsuntide, I ween, when Nature gets so very green), why shouldn’t the id, which gains such a destructive upper hand in cases of a malfunctioning or nonfunctioning ego, which deals with the reality principle, and of the superordinate and controlling superego—why should id consist of more or less repressed drives and not quite objectively—materially!—also contain something that opposes that very physis, that urge for upward development, for both ethical and aesthetic perfection? Yes indeed, why not truly? If one assumes the one as existing and thus as the acknowledged good, then in and of itself it already presumes its correlative opposite, does it not? However: we are speaking about medical phenomena here, so if I use words like “good” or “evil,” then I am applying these concepts much as, say, an electrician employs the terms “positive” and “negative”—I mean, not as value judgments but merely as termini technici of a polarity that exists purely and simply, so do not believe, ladies and gentlemen, that we men of science would ever give up our fundamental impartiality, oh no, absolutely not, to a certain degree we even feel compelled to integrate the concept of disease into a universally framed process of life, after all, disturbance, destruction, death, demolition are part of the overall bios, one must take into account the constant renewal of Creation, it is, alas, not thinkable without the steady decay of life—however, as far as the above-mentioned neuroses and psychoses are concerned, we can (although the former, the neuroses, have already been recognized as defense mechanisms, febrile conditions of the soul, as it were, issuing in fact from a recovery tendency)—we can thus establish a good number of illnesses that are traceable to conflicts of faith or to an unsatisfied need for faith. All manner of traumatic leftovers, residues of old religious conceptions in the superego, which are now being thwarted by an attempted adjustment to a godless reality, are almost more destructive than a need for religious attachment; like everything else in God’s world (inconceivable without the correlative of the devil), faith too has two sides: a positive, health-preserving, healing side, and, under certain circumstances, a negative, health-imperiling, destructive side as well—if, for simplicity’s sake, we do not just say a salvational side and a side twisting into the demonic . . . After all, the praxis of therapy has shown that even in cases in which religious motives could not be directly established as morbific agents, a cautious guidance to the experience of faith managed to bring excellent results; and whenever one could speak of a true state of possession, the results were magnificent, and nothing else could help but the correlative antidote, like the homeopathic principle simili curant similes. The demonic, you see, can be tackled with neither medication nor scalpels, although neurosurgery has made considerable advances thanks to the experiences gathered during the war in an agreeably large number of brain injuries; and modern pharmacology, which originated in alchemy, is now developing specifics that have an amazing and profound effect on the psyche—but here, in particular, extreme caution is advised, we shall have to observe very closely the effects of these on many, many patients . . . In short, in his discipline—namely, in the task of taking patients who tweet like canaries and leading them back to vital harmony—the most proven remedy has turned out on occasion—naturally, on the basis of a diagnosis founded on a psychological analysis attached to the previous thorough examination of the physical state of health of the patient—(my ears itched: I lost three precious minutes yielding to the temptation of checking the grammatical construction of the clause)—I (Hertzog was saying) have, as I have said, determined that careful and skillful guidance to new religious contents has turned out to be a proven method—but I already said that—as I have said: it has turned out that such guidance to new religious contents and thus to a new religious experience constitutes an effective therapy in regard to mental-spiritual disorders—
Period. Paragraph. A chance to clear one’s throat. Could I possibly interest you in another drop of, no, well please, really, many hearty—the schnapps is excellent, by the way (schnapps, come now, this is real scotch!)—anyway, as I have said, let us establish that when I utilize the concept of vital harmony—right?—then I do so from my point of view as a physician, after all, I am no lay preacher, I stick mostly to the relationship between body and soul, the good old saying mens sana in corpore sano must be understood as a reciprocal relationship: a sound soul also determines the physical well-being of the patient, as you know, we are now speaking of religion as a need of the healthy soul, but nevertheless its ambivalence still exists as far as I’m concerned—I mean: the immanent double-poled need, which is termed by the working hypothesis as both “positive” and “negative,” right? Thus, we know religion can heal, but it can also lead to critical spiritual crises, states of hysteria, and the like; we must reckon with that too, and thus we have to deal with the task of manipulating the bivalent notion with utmost caution, we shall thus find it now speaking for our hypothesis, now against it, and this is fully in keeping with the Marxist (originally, of course, Hegelian) dialectical method: analysis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis—right? Incidentally, this is at heart merely the ancient religious view of the polarity of Being—light and darkness, God and devil, good and evil—simply good old dualism, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge, subject and object, this world and the next world, physical necessity and freedom, and so forth, and so on; nothing but conceptual pairs designating the coexistence of two diverse and ununifiable states, principles, modes of thinking, kinds of worldviews, tendencies of will, epistemological axioms—and in intellectual history also the polarity of life and death, which is something idealism wants to overcome, you know, although it did not quite succeed, of great interest for psychology in this context are, of course, the teachings of Mach; the history of philosophy, alas, grants German positivism merely a subordinate role, but let us not forge too deeply into philosophy, we’ll leave that for later, we’ll have very different problems to resolve, the present-day intellectual situation simply demands a new theology, volunteers take a step forward! Germans to the front! We have an enormous mission precisely because of our defeat, but back to vital harmony: the equilibrium between opposites, the resolution of contradictions must be achieved, that is the definition of health: yin-yang, the tolling of bells at Easter, purely materialistic health, that is: conception of life, I mean: exclusively rational thinking excludes the world of emotions, which is rooted deep in the spiritual, and without that world man is inconceivable—or rather, conceivable, yes, but merely as an imperfect human being, a cripple, a mental amputee, our friend Nagel will agree with me here especially since he is an artist; the highest, most valuable expression of the equilibrium of mind and soul, as produced felicitously from tensions of opposites, is art, of course—and art, as a predominantly irrational expression of life (which Karl Marx personally foresaw, after all), is irreconcilable with materialistic thinking; it may be achievable in the gaps of the system but is actually an expression of resistance: metaphysical emigration, so to speak—
a short, nervous clearing of the throat because no one has caught the joke (and how can you tell what is meant to be funny? Extreme caution is advisable: you might laugh at the wrong place, it’s better to hold back, an attentive smile always looks good on a listener, nothing can happen to you, at worst your facial muscles freeze) . . .
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