The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  More to the point, he began experimenting with peas. The results for which we remember him were the fruit of ten years of “tedious experiments” in plant growing and crossing, seed gathering, careful labeling, sorting, and counting. Almost 30,000 plants were involved. As the Dictionary of Scientific Biography notes, “It is hardly conceivable that it could have been accomplished without a precise plan and a preconceived idea of the results to be expected.” In other words, his experiments were designed to test a specific hypothesis.

  From 1856 to 1863 Mendel cultivated seven pairs of characteristics, suspecting that heredity “is particulate,” contrary to the ideas of “blending inheritance” to which many others subscribed. He observed that, with seven pairs of characteristics, in the first generation all hybrids are alike—and the parental characteristics (e.g., round seed shape) are unchanged. This characteristic he called “dominant.” The other characteristic (e.g., angular shape), which only appears in the next generation, he called “recessive.” What he called “elements” determine each paired character and pass in the germ cells of the hybrids, without influencing each other. In hybrid progeny both parental forms appear again and this, he realized, could be represented mathematically/statistically with A denoting dominant round seed shape, and a denoting the recessive angular shape. Were they to meet at random, he said, the resulting combination would be:

  ¼AA + ¼Aa + ¼aA + ¼aa

  After 1900, this was known as Mendel’s law (or principle) of segregation and can be simplified mathematically as:

  A + 2Aa + a

  He also observed that with seven alternative characteristics, 128 associations were found—in other words, 27. He therefore concluded that the “behaviour of each of different traits in a hybrid association is independent of all other differences in the two parental plants.” This principle was later called Mendel’s law of independent assortment.26

  Mendel’s employment of large populations of plants was new, and it was this that enabled him to extract “laws” from otherwise random behavior—statistics had come of age in biology.27 He attempted to sum up the significance of his work in Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (1866). This memoir, his magnum opus and one of the most important papers in the history of biology, was the foundation of genetic studies. It was never truly appreciated because he had difficulty following up his pea work, his experiments with bees failing because of the complex problems involved in the controled mating of queen bees. He did show that hybrids of Mattiola, Zea, and Mirabilis “behave exactly like those of Pisum” but colleagues like Nägeli, to whom he wrote a series of letters, remained doubtful.28

  Mendel had read On the Origin of Species. A copy of the German translation, with Mendel’s marginalia, is preserved in the Mendelianum in Brno. These marginalia show his readiness to accept the theory of natural selection. Darwin, however, never seems to have grasped that hybridization provided an explanation as to the causes of variation. As a result, Mendel died a lonely unrecognized genius.

  THE INVENTION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

  Just as some form of “evolution” was in the minds of many biologists and philosophers in Germany (and elsewhere) from the late eighteenth century on, so too the idea of the unconscious was a long time germinating. “Spirit release” rituals were common in Asia Minor as early as 1000 B.C.29

  Among the general background factors giving rise to the unconscious, Romanticism was intimately involved, says Henri Ellenberger in his magisterial The Discovery of the Unconscious. This was because Romantic philosophy embraced the notion of Urphänomene, “primordial phenomena” and the metamorphoses deriving from them. Among the Urphänomene were the Urpflanze, the primordial plant, the Allsinn, the universal sense, and the unconscious. Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843), described by Ellenberger as a “romantic doctor,” argued that conscience originated in another primordial phenomenon, the Über-Uns (over-us).

  A number of philosophers anticipated Freudian concepts. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer conceived the will as a “blind, driving force.” Man, he said, was an irrational being guided by internal forces, “which are unknown to him and of which he is scarcely aware.” Eduard von Hartmann argued there were three layers of the unconscious: (1) the absolute unconscious, “which constitutes the substance of the universe and is the source of the other forms” (2) the physiological unconscious, which is part of man’s evolutionary development; and (3) the psychological unconscious, which governs our conscious mental life.

  Many of Freud’s thoughts about the unconscious were anticipated by Nietzsche, who had a concept of the unconscious as a “cunning, covert, instinctual” entity, often scarred by trauma, camouflaged in a surreal way but leading to pathology. Ernest Jones, Freud’s first (and official) biographer, drew attention to a Polish psychologist, Luise von Karpinska, who originally spotted the resemblance between some of Freud’s fundamental ideas and those of Johann Friedrich Herbart (who wrote seventy years earlier). Herbart pictured the mind as dualistic, in constant conflict between conscious and unconscious processes. An idea is described as being verdrängt [repressed] “when it is unable to reach consciousness because of some opposing idea.” Gustav Fechner (1801–87), an experimental psychologist (and yet another son of a pastor) built on Herbart, specifically likening the mind to an iceberg “nine-tenths under water.”

  Pierre Janet, a doctor in La Havre, France, claimed to have refined a technique of hypnosis, under which patients sometimes developed a dual personality. One side was created to please the physician while the second, which would occur spontaneously, was best explained as a “return to childhood.” (Patients would refer to themselves by their childhood nicknames.) When Janet moved to Paris, he developed his technique known as “Psychological Analysis,” a repeated use of hypnosis and automatic writing, during the course of which, he noticed, the crises that were induced were followed by the patient’s mind becoming clearer. However, the crises became progressively more severe, and the ideas that emerged showed that they were reaching back in time, earlier and earlier in the patient’s life.

  The nineteenth century was also facing up to the issue of child sexuality. Physicians had traditionally considered it a rare abnormality but, in 1846, Father P. J. C. Debreyne, a moral theologian who was also a physician, published a tract in which he insisted on the high frequency of infantile masturbation, of sexual play between young children, and of the seduction of very young children by wet nurses and servants. Most famously, Jules Michelet, in Our Sons (1869), warned parents about the reality of child sexuality and in particular what today would be called the Oedipus complex.

  The idea of “two minds” fascinated the nineteenth century, and there emerged the concept of the “double ego” or “dipsychism.” The dipsychism theory was developed by the University of Berlin philosopher of aesthetics, Max Dessoir (1867–1947) in Das Doppel-Ich (The Double Ego), published to great acclaim in 1890, in which he divided the mind into the Oberbewusstsein and the Unterbewusstsein, “upper consciousness” and “under consciousness,” the latter, he said, being revealed occasionally in dreams.

  Freud’s own views were first set out in Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria), published in 1895 with Josef Breuer, and then more fully in his work titled Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), published in the last weeks of 1899.* Freud, a Jewish doctor from Freiberg in Moravia, was already forty-four.

  It is in The Interpretation of Dreams that the four fundamental building blocks of Freud’s theory about human nature first come together: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality (leading to the Oedipus complex), and the tripartite division of the mind into ego, the sense of self; superego, broadly speaking the conscience; and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud saw himself in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, who ran an asylum in Paris for women afflicted with incurable nervous disord
ers. In his research, Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months and began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842–1925). Breuer, also Jewish, had made two major discoveries, on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear which, he found, controlled the body’s equilibrium. But Breuer’s importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.

  For two years, beginning in December 1880, Breuer treated for hysteria a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), described for casebook purposes as “Anna O.” She had a variety of symptoms, including hallucinations, speech disturbances, a phantom pregnancy, and intermittent paralyses. In the course of her illness(es) she experienced two different states of consciousness and extended bouts of somnambulism. Breuer found that in this latter state she would, with encouragement, describe certain events, following which her symptoms improved temporarily. However, her condition deteriorated badly after her father died—there were more severe hallucinations and anxiety states. Again, however, Breuer found that “Anna” could obtain relief from these symptoms if he could persuade her to talk about her hallucinations during her autohypnoses. This was a process she herself called her “talking cure” or “chimney sweeping” (Kaminfegen). Breuer’s next advance was made accidentally: “Anna” started to talk about the onset of a particular symptom (difficulty in swallowing), after which the symptom disappeared. Building on this, Breuer eventually discovered that if he could persuade his patient to recall in reverse chronological order each occurrence of a specific symptom, until she reached the first occasion, most of them disappeared in the same way. By June 1882, Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, “totally cured.”30

  The case of Anna O. impressed Freud. For a time he himself tried electrotherapy, massage, hydrotherapy, and hypnosis with hysterical patients but abandoned this approach, replacing it with “free association”—a technique whereby he allowed his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds. This technique led to his discovery that, given the right circumstances, many people could recall events that had occurred in their early lives and which they had completely forgotten. Freud concluded that though forgotten, these early events could still shape the way people behaved. Thus was born his concept of the unconscious and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realized that many of these early memories that were revealed—with difficulty—under free association, were sexual in nature. When he further found that many of the “recalled” events had in fact never taken place, he refined his notion of the Oedipus complex. In other words, the sexual traumas and aberrations reported by patients showed what people secretly wanted to happen, and confirmed that human infants went through a very early period of sexual awareness. During this period, he said, a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father (the Oedipus complex) and vice versa with a daughter (the Electra complex). By extension, Freud said, this broad motivation lasted throughout a person’s life, helping to determine character.31

  A later development occurred with the death of Freud’s father, Jakob, in October 1896. Although father and son had not been very intimate for a number of years, Freud found to his surprise that he was unaccountably moved by his father’s death, and that many long-buried recollections spontaneously resurfaced. His dreams also changed. He recognized in them an unconscious hostility directed toward his father that he had hitherto repressed. This led him to conceive of dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious.” Freud’s central idea in The Interpretation of Dreams was that in sleep the ego is like “a sentry asleep at its post.”32 The normal vigilance by which the urges of the id are repressed is less efficient and dreams are therefore a disguised way for the id to show itself.

  Freud has recently come under sustained criticism and revision and is now much discredited.33 At the time he lived, however, in the late nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, the unconscious was taken very seriously indeed and played a seminal role underpinning a transformation that was to have a profound effect on thought, in particular in the arts, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was the phenomenon known as modernism.

  PART IV

  THE MISERIES AND MIRACLES OF MODERNITY

  21.

  The Abuses of History

  If this book were a theatrical production, at this point the lighting would change and the stage would become much darker. “The Germans have been superbly rational in their laboratories and industrial organisations. Their vision of politics and society, however, was blurred by clouds of evil fantasy.” This is Fritz Stern in the introduction to his 1972 collection of essays, The Failure of Illiberalism.1 At exactly the time that Helmholtz, Clausius, Siemens, Virchow, Koch, Benz, and Mendel were making their great innovations, a very different kind of intellectual activity was gathering pace, so different in tone, style, direction, and substance that several observers have remarked that, in the run-up to World War I, there were not one but two Germanies. It is now time to examine that other Germany.

  Since this is a book more about the culture of Germany than its politics per se, we shall concentrate on the areas where this “other Germany” emerged. It emerged among the country’s historians, took in a constellation of views that embraced aggressive nationalism, militarism, Darwinism, the Aryan myth, and anti-Catholicism, and culminated in a variety of sociological theories by both more and less reputable sociologists. These ideas produced a sharpening of Germany’s self-image at the end of the nineteenth century as she distanced herself intellectually, culturally, and even morally from her neighbors and the rivals immediately surrounding her.

  THE RISE OF HIGH CULTURE AND “INWARDNESS”

  Although the focus of what follows is mainly intellectual history, politics—quite naturally—cannot be ignored entirely, in particular the part played by two men who between them epitomized and shaped, were both symptom and cause of, this other Germany: Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  To recap briefly, we have seen how, in 1848, Germany’s attempt at bourgeois revolution failed. Some parliamentary practices were established in the 1860s, but in general the aim of the German middle class for political and social equality and emancipation was unsuccessful. Germany failed to make the sociopolitical advances that Great Britain, the Netherlands, 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 Germany’s economic and social space in society. When this attempt at constitutional evolution failed, to be followed in 1871 by the establishment of the Reich, led by Prussia, an unusual set of circumstances came into being. In a real sense, and as Gordon Craig has pointed out, the people of Germany 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.”2 Its constitution had not been earned; it was a contract among the princes of the existing German states, who retained their crowns until 1918. To our modern way of thinking, this had some extraordinary consequences. 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. This was quite unlike—and much more backward than—anything that existed among Germany’s competitors in the West. Matters of state remained in the hands of the landed aristocracy, although Germany had become an industrial power. 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 dislocation was fundamental to “Germanness” in the run-up to the First World War.

  It was one of the greatest anachronisms of
history and 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—as we shall see in due course—it flourished so well in the 1871–1933 period. But this gave culture a certain tone: freedom, equality, and 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.”3 The second effect, which overlapped with the first, was a retreat into nationalism, but a class-based nationalism that 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.”4 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 semimystical, nostalgic ideal of how ordinary Germans had once been—a contented, talented, apolitical, “pure” people—became a popular stereotype within Germany.

  These factors combined to produce in German culture a concept that is almost untranslatable into English but is probably the defining factor in understanding much German thought as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. The word in German is Innerlichkeit. Insofar as it can be translated, it means a tendency to withdraw from, or be indifferent to, politics, and to look inward, 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, again in Gordon Craig’s words, “a derogation of their calling” and that, for the artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one. Not even the events of 1870–71 succeeded in shaking this indifference. “The victory over France and the unification of Germany inspired no great work of literature or music or painting.” In comparison with the literature of other European countries, the Germans never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. “Indeed,” writes Craig, “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.” There were no German equivalents of Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Maxim Gorky, or even Henry James (except, just maybe, in his later work, Gerhart Hauptmann, 1862–1946, though he was the only one).