by Peter Watson
It is doubtful that Hitler was as well read as his admirers claimed, but he did know some architecture, art, military history, general history, and technology, and also felt at home in music, biology, medicine, and the history of civilisation and religion.129 He was often able to surprise his listeners with his detailed knowledge in a variety of fields. His doctor, for example, was once astonished to discover that the Führer fully grasped the effects of nicotine on the coronary vessels.130 But Hitler was largely self-taught, which had significant consequences. He never had a teacher able to give him a systematic or comprehensive grounding in any field. He was never given any objective, outside viewpoint that might have had an effect on his judgement or on how he weighed evidence. Second, World War I, which began when Hitler was twenty-five, acted as a brake (and a break) in his education. Hitler’s thoughts stopped developing in 1914; thereafter, he was by and large confined to the halfway house of ideas in Pan-Germany described in chapters 2 and 3. Hitler’s achievement showed what could be wrought by a mixture of Rilke’s mysticism, Heidegger’s metaphysics, Werner Sombart’s notion of heroes versus traders, and that hybrid cocktail of social Darwinism, Nietzschean pessimism, and the visceral anti-Semitism that has become all too familiar. It was a mix that could flourish only in a largely landlocked country obsessed with heroes. Traders, especially in maritime nations, or America, whose business was business, learned too much respect for other peoples in the very act of trading. It would be entirely fitting, though not often enough stressed, that Hitler’s brand of thought was so comprehensively defeated by Western rationalism, so much the work of Jews.
We must be careful, however, not to pitch Hitler’s thought too high. For a start, as Maser highlights, much of his later reading was done merely to confirm the views he already held. Second, in order to preserve a consistency in his position, he was required to do severe violence to the facts. For example, Hitler several times argued that Germany had abandoned its expansion toward the East ‘six hundred years ago.’ This had to do with his explanation of Germany’s failure in the past, and its future needs. Yet both the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns had had a well established Ostpolitik — Poland, for instance, being partitioned three times. Above all there was Hitler’s skill at drawing up his own version of history, convincing himself and others that he was right and academic opinion usually wrong. For example, whereas most scholars believed that Napoleon’s downfall was the result of his Russian campaign, Hitler attributed it to his Corsican ‘sense of family’ and his ‘want of taste’ in accepting the imperial crown, which meant that he made ‘common cause with degenerates.131
In political terms, Hitler’s accomplishments embraced the Third Reich, the Nazi Party, and, if they can be called accomplishments, World War II and the Holocaust. In the context of this book, however, he represents the final convulsions of the old metaphysics. Weimar was a place of both ‘unparalleled mental alertness’ and the dregs of nineteenth-century völkisch romanticism, where people ‘thought with their blood.’ That the Weimar culture which Hitler hated should be exported virtually en bloc in years to come was entirely apropos. Hitler’s intellectual failings shaped the second half of the century every bit as much as did his military megalomania.
14
THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION
Perhaps the greatest intellectual casualty of World War I was the idea of progress. Prior to 1914 there had been no major conflict for a hundred years, life expectancy in the West had increased dramatically, many diseases and child mortality had been conquered, Christianity had spread to vast areas of Africa and Asia. Not everyone agreed this was progress – Joseph Conrad had drawn attention to racism and imperialism, and Emile Zola to squalor. But for most people the nineteenth century had been an era of moral, material, and social progress. World War I overturned that at a stroke.
Or did it? Progress is a notoriously elusive concept. It is one thing to say that mankind has made no moral progress, that our capacity for cruelty and injustice has grown in parallel with our technological advances; but that there has been technological progress, few would doubt. As the war was ending, J. B. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, embarked on an inquiry into the idea of progress, to see how it had developed, how best it should be understood, and what lessons could be learned. The Idea of Progress was released in 1920, and it contained one very provocative – even subversive – thought.1 Bury found that the idea of progress had itself progressed. In the first place, it was mainly a French idea, but until the French Revolution it had been pursued only on a casual basis. This was because in a predominantly religious society most people were concerned with their own salvation in a future life and because of this were (relatively speaking) less concerned with their lot in the current world. People had all sorts of ideas about the way the world was organised, for the most part intuitive. For example, Bernard de Fontenelle, the seventeenth-century French writer, did not believe any aesthetic progress was possible, arguing that literature had reached perfection with Cicero and Livy.2 Marie Jean de Condorcet (1743–94), the French philosopher and mathematician, had argued that there had been ten periods of civilisation, whereas Auguste Comte (1798–1857) thought there had been three.3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) had gone the other way, believing civilisation was actually a degenerate – i.e., retrogressive – process.4 Bury unearthed two books published (in French) in the late eighteenth century, The Year 2000 and The Year 2440, which predicted, among other things, that the perfect, progressive society would have no credit, only cash, and where historical and literary records of the past would have all been burned, history being regarded as ‘the disgrace of humanity, every page … crowded with crime and follies.’5 Bury’s second period ran from the French Revolution, 1789, to 1859, embracing the era of the first industrial revolution, which he found to be an almost wholly optimistic time when it was believed that science would transform society, easing poverty, reducing inequality, even doing God’s work. Since 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, however, Bury thought that the very notion of progress had become more ambiguous: people were able to read both optimistic and pessimistic outcomes into the evolutionary algorithm.6 He viewed the hardening of the idea of progress as the result of the decline of religious feeling, directing people’s minds to the present world, not the next one; to scientific change, giving man greater control over nature, so that more change was possible; and to the growth of democracy, the formal political embodiment of the aim to promote freedom and equality. Sociology he saw as the science of progress, or the science designed to define it and measure the change.7 He then added the thought that maybe the very idea of progress itself had something to do with the bloodiness of World War I. Progress implied that material and moral conditions would get better in the future, that there was such a thing as posterity, if sacrifices were made. Progress therefore became something worth dying for.8
The last chapter of Bury’s book outlined how ‘progress’ had, in effect, evolved into the idea of evolution.9 This was a pertinent philosophical change, as Bury realised, because evolution was nonteleological – had no political, or social, or religious significance. It theorised that there would be progress without specifying in what direction progress would take place. Moreover, the opposite – extinction – was always a possibility. In other words, the idea of progress was now mixed up with all the old concepts of social Darwinism, race theory, and degeneration.10 It was a seductive idea, and one immediate practical consequence was that a whole range of disciplines – geology, zoology, botany, palaeontology, anthropology, linguistics – took on a historical dimension: all discoveries, whatever value they had in themselves, were henceforth analysed for the way they filled in our understanding of evolution – progress. In the 1920s in particular our understanding of the progress, evolution, of civilisation was pushed back much further.
T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Adolf Hitler, so different in many ways, had one thing in common – a love of the c
lassical world. In 1922, the very year that both Eliot and Joyce published their masterpieces and Hitler was asked to address the National Club in Berlin, which consisted mainly of army officers, senior civil servants, and captains of industry, an expedition was leaving London, bound for Egypt. Its aim was to search for the man who may have been the greatest king of all in classical times.
Before World War I there had been three elaborate excavations in the Valley of the Kings, about 300 miles south of Cairo. In each, the name Tutankhamen kept appearing: it was inscribed on a faience cup, on some gold leaf, and on some clay seals.11 Tutankhamen was therefore believed to have been an important personage, but most Egyptologists never imagined his remains would ever be found. Despite the fact that the Valley of the Kings had already been excavated so often, the British archaeologist Howard Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, were determined to dig there. They had tried to do so for a number of years, and had been prevented by the war. But neither would give up. Carter, a slim man with dark eyes and a bushy moustache, was a meticulous scientist, patient and thorough, who had been excavating in the Middle East since 1899. After the Armistice, Carnarvon and he finally obtained a licence to excavate across the Nile from Karnak and Luxor.
Carter left London without Carnarvon. Nothing notable occurred until the morning of 4 November.12 Then, as the sun began to bleach the surrounding slopes, one of his diggers scraped against a stone step cut into the rock. Excavated carefully, twelve steps were revealed, leading to a doorway that was sealed and plastered over.13 ‘This seemed too good to be true,’ but, deciphering the seal, Carter was astonished to discover he had unearthed a royal necropolis. He was itching to break down the door, but as he rode his donkey back to camp that evening, having left guards at the site, he realised he must wait. Carnarvon was paying for the dig and should be there when any grand tomb was opened. Next day, Carter sent a telegram giving him the news and inviting him to come.14
Lord Carnarvon was a romantic figure – a great shot, a famous yachtsman who, at the age of twenty-three, had sailed around the world. He was also a passionate collector and the owner of the third automobile licensed in Britain. It was his love of speed that led, indirectly, to the Valley of the Kings. A car accident had permanently damaged his lungs, making England uncomfortable in wintertime. Exploring Egypt in search of a mild climate, he discovered archaeology.
Carnarvon arrived in Luxor on the twenty-third. Beyond the first door was a small chamber filled with rubble. When this was cleared away, they found a second door. A small hole was made, and everyone retreated, just in case there were any poisonous gases escaping. Then the hole was enlarged, and Carter shone the beam of his torch through the hole to explore the second chamber.
‘Can you see anything?’ Carnarvon was peremptory.
Carter didn’t reply for a moment. When he did, his voice broke. ‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘Wonderful things.’15
He did not exaggerate. ‘No archaeologist in history has ever seen by torchlight what Carter saw.’16 When they finally entered the second chamber, the tomb was found to be packed with luxurious objects – a gilded throne, two golden couches, alabaster vases, exotic animal heads on the walls, and a golden snake.17 Two royal statues faced each other, ‘like sentinels,’ wearing gold kilts and gold sandals on their feet. There were protective cobras on their heads, and they each held a mace in one hand, a staff in the other. As Carnarvon and Carter took in this amazing splendour, it dawned on them that there was something missing – there was no sarcophagus. Had it been stolen? It was only now that Carter realised there was a third door. Given what they had found already, the inner chamber promised to be even more spectacular. But Carter was a professional. Before the inner chamber could be opened up, he determined to make a proper archaeological study of the outer room, lest precious knowledge be lost. And so the antechamber, as it came to be called, was resealed (and of course heavily guarded) while Carter called in a number of experts from around the world to collaborate on an academic investigation. The inscriptions needed study, as did the seals, and even the remains of plants that had been found.18
The tomb was not reopened until 16 December. Inside were objects of the most astounding quality.19 There was a wooden casket decorated with hunting scenes of a kind never yet seen in Egyptian art. There were three animal-sided couches that, Carter realised, had been seen illustrated in other excavations – in other words, this site was famous even in ancient Egypt.20 And there were four chariots, completely covered in gold and so big that the axles had to be broken in two before they could be installed. No fewer than thirty-four heavy packing cases were filled with objects from the antechamber and put on a steam barge on the Nile, where they began the seven-day journey downriver to Cairo. Only when that had been done was the way clear to open the inner room. When Carter had cut a large enough hole, he shone his torch through it as before. ‘He could see nothing but a shining wall. Shifting the flashlight this way and that, he was still unable to find its outer limits. Apparently it blocked off the whole entrance to the chamber beyond the door. Once more, Carter was seeing something never seen before, or since. He was looking at a wall of solid gold.’ The door was dismantled, and it became clear that the gold wall was part of a shrine that occupied – all but filled – the third chamber. Measurements taken later would show that the shrine measured seventeen feet by eleven feet by nine feet high and was completely covered in gold except for inlaid panels of brilliant blue faience, depicting magic symbols to protect the dead.21 Carnarvon, Carter, and the workmen were speechless. To complete their astonishment, in the main shrine there was a room within a room. Inside the inner shrine was a third, and inside that a fourth.
Removing these layers took eighty-four days.22 A special tackle had to be devised to lift the lid of the sarcophagus. And here the final drama was enacted. On the lid of the coffin was a golden effigy of the boy-ruler Tutankhamen: ‘The gold glittered as brightly as if it had just come from the foundry.’23 ‘Never was there such a treasure as the king’s head, his face made of gold, his brows and [eye]lids of lapis lazuli blue glass and the eyes contrasting in obsidian and aragonite.’ Most moving of all were the remains of a small wreath of flowers, ‘the last farewell offering of the widowed girl-queen to her husband.’24 After all that, and perhaps inevitably, the body itself proved a disappointment. The boy-king had been so smothered in ‘unguents and other oils’ that, over the centuries, the chemicals had mixed to form a pitchy deposit and had invaded the swaddling clothes. Layers of jewels had been poured between the wrappings, which had reacted with the pitch, causing a spontaneous combustion that carbonised the remains and surrounding linen. Nonetheless, the age of the king could be fixed at nearer seventeen than eighteen.25
In life Tutankhamen was not an especially important pharaoh. But his treasures and sumptuous tomb stimulated public interest in archaeology as never before, more even than had the discoveries at Machu Picchu. The high drama of the excavation, however, concealed a mystery. If the ancient Egyptians buried a seventeen-year-old monarch with such style, what might they have done for older, more accomplished kings? If such tombs haven’t been found – and they haven’t – does this mean they have been lost to plunderers? And at what cost to knowledge? If they are still there, how might they change our understanding of the way civilisations evolve?
Much of the fascination in Middle Eastern archaeology, however, lay not in finding gold but in teasing out fact from myth. By the 1920s the biblical account of man’s origins had been called into question time and again. While it was clear that some of the Bible was based on fact, it was no less obvious that the Scriptures were wildly inaccurate in many places. A natural area of investigation was the birth of writing, as the earliest record of the past. But here too there was a mystery.
The mystery arose from the complicated nature of cuneiform writing, a system of wedges cut in clay that existed in Mesopotamia, an area between the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. Cuneiform was believed to have deve
loped out of pictograph script, spreading in time throughout Mesopotamia. The problem arose from the fact that cuneiform was a mixture of pictographic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts which could not have arisen, all by themselves, at one time and in one place. It followed that cuneiform must have evolved from an earlier entity – but what? And belonging to which people? Analysis of the language, the type of words that were common, the business transactions typically recorded, led philologists to the idea that cuneiform had not been invented by the Semitic Babylonians or Assyrians but by another people from the highlands to the east. This was pushing the ‘evidence’ further than it would go, but this theoretical group of ancestors had even been given a name. Because the earliest known rulers in the southern part of Mesopotamia had been called ‘Kings of Sumer and Akkad,’ they were called the Sumerians.26
