by Peter Watson
Once again, we should be careful of exaggeration. Nationalism was catastrophic in many ways, but it also had its positive side. This was nowhere more evident than in regard to the great flowering of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century which, whether or not it was caused by unification of the country, and by the great feeling of nationalism that accompanied the unification, certainly occurred at exactly the same time.
Sigmund Freud, Max Planck, Ernst Mach, Hermann Helmholtz, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Clausius, Wilhelm Röntgen, Eduard von Hartmann,…all these were German or German-speaking. It sometimes escapes our attention that the period between 1848 and 1933, overlapping the turn of the century, when this book comes to a close, was the high point of the German genius. ‘The twentieth century was supposed to have been the German century.’ These words were written in 1991 by the American historian Norman Cantor. They are echoes of those by Raymond Aron, the French philosopher, talking to the German historian Fritz Stern, when they were in Berlin to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. All were born in 1878–79 and this moved Aron to remark: ‘It could have been Germany’s century.’36 What Cantor and Aron meant was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists, who were the best in the world between 1848 and 1933, would have taken the freshly-unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when the disaster that went by the name of Adolf Hitler came along.
Anyone who doubts this claim–that the period 1848–1933 was the German century–need only consult the list of names which follows. One could start almost anywhere, so complete was this dominance, but let’s begin with music: Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Honegger, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Franz Lehár, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic. Medicine and psychology were not far behind–in addition to Freud, think of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Rorschach, Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Ernst Kretschmer, Géza Roheim, Jacob Breuer, Richard Krafft-Ebing, Paul Ehrlich, Robert Koch, Wagner von Jauregg, August von Wassermann, Gregor Mendel, Erich Tschermak, Paul Corremans. In painting there was Max Liebermann, Paul Klee, Max Pechstein, Max Klinger, Gustav Klimt, Franz Marc, Lovis Corinth, Hans Arp, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Slevogt, Max Ernst, Leon Feininger, Max Beckmann, Alex Jawlensky; Wassily Kandinsky was of Russian birth but it was in Munich that he achieved the single most important breakthrough in modern art–abstraction. In philosophy, in addition to Nietzsche, there was Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Franz Brentano, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Haeckel, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Ferdinand Tönnies, Martin Buber, Theodore Herzl, Karl Liebknecht, Moritz Schlick.
In scholarship and history there was Julius Meier-Graefe, Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen, Ludwig Pastor, Wilhelm Bode and Jacob Burckhardt. In literature, in addition to Hugo von Hofmannsthal there was Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Gerhard Hauptmann, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Walter Hasenclever, Franz Werfel, Franz Wedekind, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan George, Berthold Brecht, Karl Kraus, Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Arnold Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Carl Zuckmayer. In sociology and economics, there was Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Popper. In archaeology and biblical studies, in addition to D. F. Strauss there was Heinrich Schliemann, Ernst Curtius, Peter Horchhammer, Georg Grotefend, Karl Richard Lepsius, Bruno Meissner. Finally (though this could just as easily have come first) in science, mathematics and engineering there were: Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Heinrich Hertz, Rudolf Diesel, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Röntgen, Karl von Linde, Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Emil Fischer, Fritz Haber, Herman Geiger, Heinz Junkers, George Cantor, Richard Courant, Arthur Sommerfeld, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, David Hilbert, Walther Heisenberg, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Alfred Wegener, not to mention the following engineering firms of one kind or another: AEG, Bosch, Benz, Siemens, Hoechst, Krupp, Mercedes, Daimler, Leica, Thyssen.
This still does not do full justice to the German genius. The year 1900, the close of our time-frame, saw the deaths of Nietzsche, Ruskin and Oscar Wilde but it saw three ideas introduced to the world which, it may be said without exaggeration, formed the intellectual backbone of the twentieth century, certainly so far as the sciences were concerned. These ideas were the unconscious, the gene and the quantum. Each of these was of Germanic origin.
In explaining the great and rapid triumph of German ideas, in the period 1848–1933, we need to examine three factors, each special to Germany and German thinking but also to the theme of this chapter. First, we need to understand German ideas about culture, what it was, what it consisted of and what its place was in the life of the nation. For example, in English, ‘culture’ does not normally distinguish sharply between the spiritual and the technological areas of life but, in German, Kultur came to stand for intellectual, spiritual or artistic areas of creative activity but not the social, political, economic or technical-scientific life. As a result, whereas in English the words ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ are complementary aspects of the same thing, in German that is not the case. In the nineteenth century, Kultur denoted manifestations of spiritual creativity–the arts, religion, philosophy; in contrast, Zivilisation referred to social, political and technical organisation and, most important, these were deemed to be of a lower order. Nietzsche made much of this, and it is a vital distinction, without which a full understanding of German thought in the nineteenth century is impossible.
There was thus in Germany what C. P. Snow would have called a ‘two cultures’ mentality, and with a vengeance. One of the effects of this was to highlight and deepen the divide between the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. Several of the sciences, by their very nature, formed a natural alliance with engineering, commerce and industry. But, at the same time, and despite their enormous successes, the sciences were looked down upon by artists. Whereas in a country like England, or America, the sciences and the arts were, to a much greater extent, seen as two sides of the same coin, jointly forming the intellectual elite, this was much less true in nineteenth-century Germany. A good example of this is Max Planck, the physicist who (in 1900) discovered the quantum, the idea that all energy comes in very small packets, or quanta. Planck came from a very religious, somewhat academic family, and was himself an excellent pianist. Despite the fact that his discovery of the quantum rates as one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, in Planck’s own family the humanities were considered a superior form of knowledge to science.37 His cousin, the historian Max Lenz, would jokingly pun that scientists (Naturforscher) were in reality foresters (Naturförster)–or, as we would say, hicks.*
The work of Ernst Mach reinforces this point. Mach (1838–1916) was one of the most impressive and ardent reductionists, with many discoveries to his credit, including the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium, and that bodies travelling at more than the speed of sound create two shock waves, one at the front and the other at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates (this is why we speak of a ‘Mach number’ on Concorde, or used to). But Mach was implacably opposed to metaphysics of any kind and denounced what he called ‘misapplied concepts’, like God, nature and soul. He regarded Freud’s concept of the ‘ego’ as a ‘useless hypothesis’. He felt that even the concept of the ‘self’ was ‘irretrievable’, that all knowledge could be reduced to sensation and that the task of science was to describe sense data in the simplest and most neutral manner possible. Mach was widely read
in his day: both Lenin and his disciples, and the Vienna Circle, were adherents. Mach firmly believed that science had the answers, and that such subjects as philosophy and psychoanalysis were largely useless.38
This profound division–between the sciences on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other–had serious consequences. One that is particularly relevant here was that the intuition of artists was given more respect, accorded a far higher status, in Germany than anywhere else at the time. This was reflected in a second division, over and above that between the arts and the sciences, between Kultur and Zivilisation. This was the opposition between Geist and Macht, the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavour and the realm of power and political control. It is important to say that the relationship between Geist and Macht, whether culture or the state should take precedence, was never satisfactorily resolved in Germany. The consequences were momentous, as a brief excursion into political/social history will show.
In 1848, Germany’s attempt at a bourgeois revolution failed and with it the struggle of the German professional and commercial classes for political and social equality with the ancien regime. In other words, Germany failed to make the socio-political advances that England, Holland, France and North America had achieved, in some cases generations before. German liberalism, or would-be liberalism, was based on middle-class demands for ‘free trade and a constitutional framework to protect their economic and social space in society’. When this attempt at constitutional change failed, to be followed in 1871 by the establishment of the Reich, led by Prussia, a most unusual set of circumstances came into being. In a real sense, and as Gordon Craig has pointed out, the people of Germany had played no part in the creation of the Reich. ‘The new state was a “gift” to the nation on which the recipient had not been consulted.’39 Its constitution had not been earned; it was simply a contract among the princes of the existing German states, who in fact retained their crowns until 1918. To our modern way of thinking, this had some extraordinary consequences. For example, one result was that ‘the Reich had a Parliament without power, political parties without access to governmental responsibility, and elections whose outcome did not determine the composition of the government’. In addition to the Reichstag, there was the Bundesrat, not an elected body at all but a committee of state governments, which shared power with Parliament, but neither of whom could depose the Chancellor. Moreover, the internal arrangements of the individual states were not affected by the events of 1871. The franchise for the Prussian Parliament, for example (and Prussia made up three-fifths of the population), depended on the taxes one paid, meaning that the top 5 per cent of tax-payers had one-third of the votes, the same proportion as the bottom 85 per cent.40 Nor did the Chancellor rule with the aid of a cabinet: the imperial departments, which expanded their influence as time went on, were run by subordinate state secretaries. This was quite unlike–and much more backward than–anything that existed among Germany’s competitors in the West (though this ‘belatedness’ or otherwise of Germany is the subject of lively academic controversy right now). Matters of state remained in the hands of the landed aristocracy, although Germany had become an industrial power. This power was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands for, with urbanisation, the growth of commerce and the expansion of industry, the patchwork of old German states became less and less powerful and the empire more of a reality. The state thus became progressively more authoritarian as it took on a greater role in regulating economic and social issues. In short, as more and more people joined in Germany’s industrial, scientific and intellectual successes, the more it was run by a small coterie of traditional figures–landed aristocrats and military leaders, at the head of which was the emperor himself. This essential dislocation was fundamental to ‘German-ness’ in the run up to the First World War. It was one of the greatest anachronisms of history.41
This great dislocation had two effects that concern us. One, the middle class, excluded politically and yet eager to achieve some measure of equality, fell back on education and Kultur as key areas where success could be achieved–equality with the aristocracy, and superiority in comparison with foreigners in a competitive, nationalistic world. ‘High culture’ was thus always more important in imperial Germany than elsewhere and this is one reason why it flourished so well in the 1871–1933 period. But this gave culture a certain tone–freedom, equality or personal distinctiveness tended to be located in the ‘inner sanctum’ of the individual, whereas society was portrayed as an ‘arbitrary, external and frequently hostile world’. The second effect, which overlapped with the first, was a retreat into nationalism, but a class-based nationalism which turned against the newly-created industrial working class (and the stirrings of socialism), Jews and non-German minorities. ‘Nationalism was seen as moral progress, with utopian possibilities.’42 One effect of this second factor was the idealisation of earlier ages, before the industrial working class existed, in particular the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stood for an integrated daily life–a ‘golden age’–in pre-industrial times. Against the background of a developing mass society, the educated middle class looked to culture as a stable set of values that uplifted their lives, set them apart from the ‘rabble’ (Freud’s word) and, in particular, enhanced their nationalist orientation. The Volk, a semi-mystical, nostalgic ideal of how ordinary Germans had once been–a contented, talented, a-political, ‘pure’ people–took hold.
These various factors combined to produce in German culture a concept that is almost untranslatable into English but is probably the defining factor in understanding so much of German thought as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and which helps explain both the (predominantly German) discovery of the unconscious and why Germany became so dominant in this area. The word in German is Innerlichkeit.43 Insofar as it can be translated, it means a tendency to withdraw from, or be indifferent to, politics, and to look inwards, inside the individual. Innerlichkeit meant that artists deliberately avoided power and politics, guided by a belief that to participate, or even to write about it, was a derogation of their calling and that, for the artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one. For example, and as Gordon Craig tells us, before 1914 it was only on rare occasions that German artists were interested, let alone stirred, by political and social events and issues. Not even the events of 1870–1871 succeeded in shaking this indifference. ‘The victory over France and the unification of Germany inspired no great work of literature or music or painting.’44 Authors and painters did not really find their own day ‘poetic enough’ to challenge their talents. ‘As the infrastructure of the new Reich was being laid, German artists were writing about times infinitely remote or filling their canvases with nereids and centaurs and Greek columns.’ Even the great Wagner was composing musical drama that had only the remotest connection with the world in which he lived (Siegfried, 1876; Parsifal, 1882).45
There were of course exceptions. In the 1880s, for example, there was a movement in the arts known as Naturalism, inspired in part by the novels of Émile Zola in France, the aim being to describe the social ills and injustices caused by industrialism. But in comparison with the literature of other European countries, the German Naturalist movement was half-hearted in its attempt to make radical criticism and the Naturalists never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. ‘Indeed,’ writes Gordon Craig, in his history of imperial Germany, ‘as those dangers became more palpable, with the beginnings under Wilhelm II of a frenetic imperialism, accompanied by an aggressive armaments programme, the great majority of the country’s novelists and poets averted their eyes and retreated into that Innerlichkeit which was always their haven when the real world became too perplexing for them.’46 There were no German equivalents of Zola, Shaw, Conrad, Gide, Gorky or even Henry James. Among the major (German) names of the day–Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal–hard, harsh reality was subordinated to fe
eling and the attempt to fix on paper fleeting impressions, momentary moods, vague perceptions. Hofmannsthal’s concept of Das Gleitende, the ‘slip-sliding’ nature of the times, where nothing could be pinned down, nothing stayed the same, where ambiguity and paradox ruled, is discussed in Chapter 36. Gustav Klimt did exactly the same thing in paint, and his example is instructive.
Born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862, Klimt was the son of a goldsmith. He made his name decorating the new buildings of the Ringstrasse with vast murals. These were produced with his brother Ernst but on the latter’s death in 1892 Gustav withdrew for five years, during which time he appears to have studied the works of James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and Edvard Munch. He did not reappear until 1897, when he emerged with a completely new style. This new style, bold and intricate at the same time, had three defining characteristics: the elaborate use of gold leaf (using a technique he had learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent colour, hard like enamel, and a languid eroticism applied in particular to women. Klimt’s paintings were not quite Freudian: his women were not neurotic, far from it. The women’s emancipation movement in Germany had been far more concerned than elsewhere with inner emancipation, and Klimt’s figures reflected this.47 They were calm, placid, above all lubricious, but they were still ‘the instinctual life frozen into art’, as Hofmannsthal said. In drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt was subverting the familiar way of thinking every bit as much as Freud was. Here were women capable of the very perversions reported in Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis, which made them tantalising and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna but it also brought about his commission from the university.
