The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  This is true and, conceivably, it will remain true for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, and although it won’t please everyone, it is an argument of this book that it is high time we looked back, beyond Hitler and the Holocaust (or Shoah). There is more, much more, to modern Germany than the Third Reich, and there are important lessons to be learned from that history. From the splendors of Bach to the theology of the present pope, we are surrounded by German-born ideas.

  The above argument should be tempered by the observation that, so far as Britain is concerned, there are other reasons why Germany and its achievements have been underplayed and/or underrecognized. As Nicholas Boyle has pointed out, English-speaking readers are not helped in their assessment of German literature because of a lack of contemporaneous literature of their own with which they could make comparisons: “The period of Germany’s greatest cultural flowering—from about 1780 to about 1806—coincides with a relatively fallow time in their own literature and, understandably, that of France.”62 A further factor is that the turbulence of the 1790s—the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—diverted attention from the achievements of many prominent Germans. The fact that in Germany the ancien régime passed away, its place taken by a society “as peculiarly German as it was clearly post-Revolution,” a middle-class variety of Victorianism without industrial capitalism (until the middle of the nineteenth century at any rate), created a gulf in understanding that, it will be argued here, has never been entirely bridged, and that the excesses of the Nazis traded on and exacerbated.

  Even without Hitler, even without the Holocaust, traditional German history has by and large told a one-sided story. History as it is now practiced was initially a German idea (see Chapter 12), and all the great German historians, from Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) to Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954), argued that the creation and maintenance of the German nation-state was the “big story” of the “long” nineteenth century (1789–1914). Given the political changes that took place in Germany during those years, it is—to an extent—understandable why so many historians should take this view. In a more fundamental sense, however, and this needs to be said loud and clear, it was only ever half the picture. While the political narrative was unfolding, another no less dramatic, no less important, and equally impressive story was also emerging. Thomas Nipperdey, in his magisterial history of Germany, concluded that music, the universities, and science were the three great achievements that brought recognition to that country in the nineteenth century. Between the publication of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s groundbreaking Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of the Art of Antiquity), in 1754, and the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Erwin Schrödinger in 1933, Germany went from being the poor relation among Western countries, intellectually speaking, to the dominant force—more influential in the realm of ideas than France or Britain or Italy or the Netherlands, more so even than the United States. This remarkable transformation is the subject of The German Genius.

  Here too, however, a word of caution is necessary, because the situation is more complicated than it at first appears, certainly to non-Germans. This book is a cultural history—it examines Germany’s achievements in what ordinary British, French, Italian, Dutch, or American readers understand as “culture.” It is important to say at the outset that, among Germans, the concept of “culture” has traditionally been very different from what other nationalities mean by that word. In fact, there are those who argue that this very difference in the historical understanding of “culture” actually comprises Germany’s real “Sonderweg.” It makes sense, therefore, to consider this difference before proceeding.

  This difference has been most recently and thoroughly explored by Wolf Lepenies, professor of sociology at the Freie Universität of Berlin but someone who has also spent several years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and therefore has had, so to speak, a foot in both camps. In his book, The Seduction of Culture in German History (2006), Lepenies begins by quoting Norbert Elias who, in The Germans, published in English in 1996, wrote this: “[E]mbedded in the meaning of the German term ‘culture’ was a non-political and perhaps even anti-political bias symptomatic of the recurrent feeling among the German middle-class elites that politics and the affairs of the state represented the area of their humiliation and lack of freedom, while culture represented the sphere of their freedom and their pride. During the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries, the anti-political bias of the middle-class concept of ‘culture’ was directed against the politics of autocratic princes…At a later stage, this anti-political bias was turned against the parliamentary politics of a democratic state.”*63 And this showed itself in a German obsession for distinguishing between “civilization” and “culture.” “In German usage, Zivilisation means something which is indeed useful, but nevertheless only a value of the second rank [italics added], comprising only the outer appearance of human beings, the surface of human existence. The word through which Germans interpret themselves, which more than any other expresses their pride in their own achievement and their own being, is Kultur.” Lepenies adds: “Whereas the French as well as the English concept of culture can also refer to politics and to economics, to technology and to sports, to moral and to social facts, the German concept of Kultur refers essentially to intellectual, artistic and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts of this sort, on the one side, and political, economic and social facts, on the other.”64

  In the nineteenth century in particular, the sciences, by their very nature, formed a natural alliance with engineering, commerce, and industry. At the same time, and despite their enormous successes, the sciences were looked down upon by artists, philosophers, and theologians. 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.

  This division, between Kultur and Zivilisation, was underlined by a second opposition, that between Geist and Macht, the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavor and the realm of power and political control.

  In other words, Germany has traditionally been afflicted by what C. P. Snow, speaking about Britain in the 1950s, characterized as a “two-cultures” mentality, only much more so. The two cultures Snow identified were those of “the literary intellectuals” and of the natural scientists, between whom he claimed to find “a profound mutual suspicion and incomprehension.” Literary intellectuals, said Snow, controlled the reins of power both in government and in the higher social circles, which meant that only people with, say, a knowledge of the classics, history, and English literature were felt to be educated. The division was not quite the same in Germany—where sociologists and politicians were lumped in with scientists as aspects of Zivilisation and opposed to Kultur—but it was from the same family and even more profound.

  There is more to it even than that. The appeal of “culture” in Germany, Lepenies says, accompanied as it is by a “scorn” for everyday politics, has been based on a belief in the “deeply apolitical nature of the ‘German soul,’” and this, he insists, nurtured Germany’s claim, as a Kulturnation, to superiority over the merely “civilized” West from the late nineteenth century on. The resulting “strange indifference” to politics has been much more in evidence in Germany than anywhere else, he says, and involvement in culture at the expense of, and as a substitute for, politics “has remained a prevailing attitude throughout German history—from the glorious days in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Weimar through, though now in considerably weaker form, the re-unification of the two Germanies after the fall of communism.”65 Germany’s cultural achievements, the belief that it was traveling a special path, a Sonderweg, “was always a point of pride in the land of poets and thinkers. The inward realm established by German Idealism, the classic literature of Weimar, and the Classical and Romantic styl
es in music preceded the founding of the political nation by more than a hundred years. They gave a special dignity to the withdrawal of the individual from politics into the spheres of culture and private life. Culture was seen as a noble substitute for politics.”66 Many other observers have remarked on Germany’s inwardness, that “strange indifference to politics,” and some have gone further, arguing that it is this which accounts for the “nightmarish consequences” of one or other of the two world wars. The Germans took on board Thomas Hobbes but not John Locke. On this reckoning then, there was a special path in Germany history, but it was cultural, not political, as Wehler claimed. Karl Lamprecht remarked on this in his German History, published as early as 1891.67

  Gordon Craig, the great American historian of Germany, noticed the same tendency.68 “The alienation of the artist in Imperial Germany…was in large part self-willed. Towards the real world, the world of power and politics, the German artist, in contrast to the French, always had an ambivalent attitude. He was…repelled by a belief that to participate in politics or even to write about it was a derogation of his calling and that, for an artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one…Not even the events of 1870–71 succeeded in shaking their indifference. The victory over France and the unification of the German states inspired no great work of literature or music or painting…” Speaking of the Naturalist writers and painters of the end of the nineteenth century, Craig adds that they “never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. Indeed, as those dangers became more palpable…under William II…the great majority of the country’s novelists and poets averted their eyes and retreated into that Innerlichkeit [inwardness] which was always their haven when the real world became too perplexing for them.”69

  On October 4, 1914, two months into the Great War, ninety-three German intellectuals published a manifesto, known as the Manifesto of the 93, addressed “An die Kulturwelt” (To the Civilized World) in which they defended the actions of the Reich against criticism from abroad. These individuals, among them Max Liebermann, the painter, and Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, made it clear they viewed the war not as a campaign against German militarism but above all as an assault on German culture. “What was not understood abroad was that German militarism and German culture could not be separated from one another…The signatories of the manifesto vowed that they would fight the war as members of a cultural people (Kulturvolk) for whom the legacy of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant was as sacred as German soil…Germany’s unity had been achieved not by politics but by culture.” German thought, the ninety-three said, was an indispensable element of the European spirit, “precisely because it differed so much from values and ideals that were pertinent for countries like France or England. The Germans insisted on the unbridgeable difference between culture and civilisation.”70 (See Chapter 29 for Max Weber’s view on why the Germans fought the Great War.)

  Nearer our time, many Germans regarded the Weimar Republic—the attempt to establish a democratic regime in Germany for the first time—as a betrayal of German political ideals. In his “Gedanken im Krieg” (Thoughts on War; 1918), Thomas Mann wrote that the democratic spirit was “totally alien to the Germans, who were morally but not politically inclined. Interested in metaphysics, poetry and music but not in voting rights or the proper procedures of the parliamentary system, for them Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a more radical act than the proclamation of the rights of man.” Mann returned to the theme at the end of World War II, when he was in exile in the United States. He believed the triumph of politics in Germany—the rise of Bismarck, the role of the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi movement—had all (all, not just the Nazis) led to cultural impoverishment.71 Later, Mann changed his tune and in a speech to Congress argued that “inwardness and the romantic counterrevolution had led to the disastrous separation of the speculative from the socio-political sphere that made Germans unfit for modern democracy.”72

  To a non-German this all sounds somewhat strange—dare one say it, unreal. The Western but non-German view of “culture” was aptly summed up by T. S. Eliot, in his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), where he famously said: “The term culture…includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August [the beginning of the shooting season], a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.” None of this necessarily implies any particular “inwardness” on the part of participants, or any great education, come to that. It is a much less hierarchical, more ecumenical view of human affairs than the German concept of culture. What the elite of Germany meant by Kultur until at least the Second World War is what we, in the West, outside Germany, traditionally call “high culture”: literature, theater, painting, music and opera, theology, and philosophy.73

  But, and it is an important “but,” this need not be taken as a criticism of Germany. It may well be that this different understanding of the way our intellectual activities should be organized is a crucial point, an instructive difference. At the very least, lessons are to be learned from difference. Consider, for example, these statements.

  “The twentieth century should have been the German century.” The words were written by the American academic Norman Cantor; he was speaking at the time about the devastating effect the Nazi regime had on Germany’s leading historians, such as Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz. Next, there is this sentence, in Fritz Stern’s Einstein’s German World: “It could have been Germany’s century.” This time it was Raymond Aron speaking, the French philosopher talking to Stern when they were in Berlin in 1979 to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn, and Lise Meitner. What Cantor and Aron meant, in asserting that the twentieth century should/could have been Germany’s, was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers, who were the best in the world, would have taken the freshly unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when 1933 came along. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Germany was—without question—the leading force in the world intellectually. It could not perhaps match the United States in sheer economic numbers—America was, even then, a far more populous entity. But in all other aspects of life, Germany led the way. Had a historian of any nationality published an intellectual history of modern Germany at the end of 1932, it would have been very largely a history of triumph. By 1933 Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans put together. Germany’s way of organizing herself intellectually was a great success.74

  But the German genius was cut off in its prime. All the world knows why this happened. Much less well known is why and how the Germans achieved the pre-eminence they did. Yes, people know that Germany lost a lot of talent under the Nazis (according to one account, 60,000 writers, artists, musicians, and scientists were sent either into exile or to the death camps by 1939). But even many Germans appear to have forgotten that their country was such a dominant power intellectually until 1933. The Holocaust and Hitler get in the way, as the work of A. Dirk Moses, referred to earlier, shows and as Keith Bullivant said explicitly: “For those born during and after the Second World War the cultural history of Germany before 1933 is that of a lost country, one that they never knew.”

  I don’t think many people alive today grasp this fundamental point about German pre-eminence in the pre-1933 period. I exclude, of course, specialists. Among them, the situation is, if anything, reversed: the enormities of the Nazi atrocities mean that—in particular—post–World War II English-language scholarship about Germany is deep and detailed. As part of the research for this book, I visited the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. These institut
ions exist in London, Paris, Washington, and elsewhere. The Washington institute, besides its splendid library of German- and English-language books and periodicals, also has its own publishing program, which includes a massive work, German Studies in North America: A Directory of Scholars. This volume, 1,165 pages long, lists the projects of—roughly speaking—1,000 academics. Subjects range from German war novels to an atlas of Kansas German dialects to a study of precision in German society to a comparison of Berlin and Washington as capital cities between 1800 and 2000. There is no shortage of research interest in German topics, at least among scholars in America. But this only reinforces the central point: among the general public the ignorance of German affairs is widespread.

  We are used to being told that the twentieth century was the American century, but the truth is more complex and, as this book aims to show, more interesting than that. This book’s intent is to reinsert into both the non–German-speaking consciousness and the German-speaking consciousness the names and achievements of a people who, for historical reasons having to do with war and genocide, have been neglected—even shunned—over the past half-century.

  This then is a book about the German genius, how it was born and flourished and shaped our lives more than we know, or care to acknowledge, how it was devastated by Hitler but—another “but” that is crucial—how it has lived on, often unrecognized, not just in the two postwar Germanies, which have never received full credit for their achievements—cultural, scientific, industrial, commercial, academic—but in how German thinking shaped modern America and Britain and their culture. The United States and Great Britain may speak English but, more than they know, they think German.