The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  THE ANTI-CATHOLIC IMAGINATION

  On July 19, 1870, France declared war on the North German Confederation. Only twenty-four hours before, the First Vatican Council had confirmed the proclamation of the Pope’s “infallibility.” For many in Germany this coincidence was just too much, and the speed of the German victory was therefore all the sweeter. Paris was taken and the German states united in an empire under the aegis of the Prussian king, now an emperor. Sybel spoke for many when he confided, in a letter to Hermann Baumgarten: “How have we deserved God’s grace to be permitted to experience such great and mighty things? And for what shall one live hereafter?”11

  As Michael Gross has pointed out, Sybel and others soon found an answer. “They committed themselves now to a war against the Roman Catholic Church and with it the consolidation within Germany of modern society, culture and morality.” Papal infallibility was provocative because it seemed to invite German Catholics to direct their allegiance to Rome rather than to the newly installed Kaiser.12 Paul Hinschius, a Liberal deputy, said that the Vatican’s proclamation was “nothing less than a death sentence” passed against the newly unified state.

  That was going too far, but his words had resonance because this Kulturkampf, as it came to be called, had been building for some time. Catholicism in the land of Luther, Reformation, Protestantism, and Pietism came to stand as the enemy of liberalism, of belief in reform, above all of opposition to the cultivation of the human intellect and spirit in civic society through Bildung.

  After the failed revolutions of 1848, liberalism had come under sustained threat in the reactionary 1850s, and the Catholic Church threw its weight in with the state to rub in the liberal defeat. From 1848 on, waves of missionaries swept across Germany, visiting thousands of towns and small villages from the Rhineland to the Baltic, and for more than twenty years initiated a counterrevolutionary, anti-Liberal, anti-Enlightenment onslaught. The missions—usually consisting of three Jesuit, Franciscan, or Redemptorist missionaries, though there could be as many as eight—concentrated on the smaller localities and between them, according to one account, mounted at least 4,000 interventions between 1848 and 1872.13

  They were strikingly successful. Typically lasting for two weeks, the towns where they were located often swelled in size to double or even three times their normal population as pilgrims descended on the missions. The pilgrims would either be put up with locals or sleep in churches and even churchyards. Work in the fields was suspended, shops, theaters, and schools were closed. Congregations would be in their places from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. At Cologne, in 1850, when the mission arrived, as many as 16,000 people crowded into the cathedral.14

  For two weeks, the missionaries held masses, heard confessions, and carried out exorcisms at an intense pace, though the chief attraction was invariably the sermon. These were held three times a day—at dawn, in the afternoon, and in the evening—and each lasted a full two hours. Two subjects appear to have been pre-eminent. One concerned the veneration of the Virgin Mother of Christ, whose Immaculate Conception had become dogma only in 1854. In adoring the exemplary nature of Mary’s life, the missionaries railed against the sins of the contemporary world—alcohol consumption in the taverns, dancing, cards, gambling, sexual license, and the reading of political literature. Some sermons proved so popular that the police commissioner in Düsseldorf in 1851 had them printed as a pamphlet to encourage order in the city. The other theme—the more popular one—was on the fiery reality of hell. The Jesuits in particular specialized in bloodcurdling hell-sermons.15 At Aachen, people were so keen to confess that brawls broke out as they fought to get to the confessional. Theaters were denuded of their patrons, inns stood empty. In one case the priest reported to his bishop that girls were even wearing their hats more modestly, “without bands and flowers.”16 Although the missions made a lot of noise, there is, says Michael Gross, no evidence that such “sins” as illegitimacy or alcoholism declined.

  There was also a dramatic rise in the number of new monastic orders and religious congregations. In Cologne there were 272 monks and nuns in 1850; by 1872 that number had grown to 3,131. Four monasteries were built there before 1848; thirty-seven were built in the two decades afterward, and the figures were much the same in Paderborn, five before 1848, twenty-one between then and 1872.17

  Although the authorities were sometimes concerned that the missions might provoke civil trouble, by and large they welcomed them because their conservative, antiradical aims suited the powers that be and, again for the most part, the sermons steered clear of blatantly political arguments. In May 1852 sixty-two deputies in the lower house of the Prussian Parliament formed the “Catholic Fraktion,” the first sign of a Catholic Center Party that would come to full fruition with the founding of the empire in 1870. At the same time, worries did begin to be aired about the Jesuits, that they were a rogue “state-within-a-state” pushing anti-Prussian “ultramontanism” and reasserting Austrian influence.18 These fears grew in the late 1850s as Protestant pastors found they had to work harder to educate their flocks about the differences between Protestant and Catholic. As a result, a Protestant revival took place in Germany toward the end of the 1850s and throughout the 1860s, an indirect and unintended consequence of the Catholic missions. Priests and pastors now saw themselves as being involved in a Kriegszustand, or state of war. Pastors argued that the Catholic campaign to improve morality was a sham, a Trojan Horse, and that they were just as keen to assault the virtues of the Enlightenment, “against Bildung and the humanity of our time.”19 Others argued that Catholicism was backward, whereas Protestantism was progressive and, yes, liberal. Treitschke, after Pius IX had issued the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, confessed, “what good luck it is to be Protestant. Protestantism has the capacity for endless, continuing Bildung.”20

  Feelings were just as strong against nuns and monks because the Kulturkampf was overlaid with a Geschlechterkampf, or a conflict between men and women. Rudolf Virchow, leader of the Progressive Party in the Prussian Parliament, and the man who actually coined the term “Kulturkampf,” attacked the emergence of the women’s movement and was joined by Sybel. The growth of female religious orders was singled out—these nunneries “were draining the marriage pool.”21 In the convent schools the girls were made to promise not to read Goethe or Schiller.

  If there was a tipping point, it occurred in the early 1860s. Throughout the late 1850s, state after state had initiated policies that helped them join the Zollverein (the German Customs Union). In 1866 Prussia’s decisive victory over Austria put an end to any idea of a Grossdeutsch solution to the German national question, a German state unified under the Hapsburgs. Moreover, Catholics—who had been in the majority in the German Confederation that had existed since 1815—now found themselves in a minority in the North German Confederation: 20 million Protestants to 8 million Catholics. The Protestants thought the victory a proof of their virility, Droysen characterizing it as “the triumph of the true German spirit over the false.”22 The “problem of Catholicism” became a major topic of debate, not helped by the Syllabus of Errors, which made it plain that the pope considered liberalism and Catholicism incompatible. Anti-Catholic literature, and anti-Catholic feeling in general, would soon reach hysterical proportions.23

  By the early 1870s, then, several things came together—militant Catholicism (including better organization, politically), the women’s movement, the demand for democratization, plus nascent socialism and even the fear of French revanchism, after the victories of 1870–71, to produce what Gross again has called a “meta-enemy.”24 All these factors were enemies allied against what was, after all, a new empire. And when, in October 1873, the pope claimed that everyone who had been baptized Christian “belonged” to him, all liberal fears were confirmed, and the campaign against the Catholics became urgent. According to the Catholic Badische Beobachter, a war was in the offing: “We have made peace with France; with Rome, we will never make peace.”25 That camp
aign was launched “in the name of German unity, the modern state, science, progress, Bildung and freedom.” For many, nonetheless, this was the abandonment of liberal principles by the liberals.

  The famous “pulpit paragraph” was passed in December 1871 and made public discussion of matters of state by clerics “in a manner endangering public peace” a criminal offense. In 1873 the first of the so-called May Laws was passed, stipulating that the appointment of all clerics be approved by the state.26 A second law, passed the following July, banned the Society of Jesus and the Redemptorist and Lazarist orders from German soil. The following year a Court of Ecclesiastical Affairs abolished the authority of the pope over the Catholic Church in Prussia and a year after that abolished the state’s subsidy to Catholic dioceses until their bishops agreed in writing to abide by all Kulturkampf laws. In all, 189 monasteries were closed and several thousand clerics banned. Twenty newspapers were closed down, 136 newspaper editors arrested, and 12 dioceses left without bishops. By 1876 1,400 Prussian parishes did not have priests.27 Jews looked on nervously.

  In cultural terms, the educated liberals of Germany had seen—or professed to see—in the rise of Catholicism the return of an ignorant, backward age, “indifferent or hostile to Bildung” and all that had helped raise Germany from what she had been in the mid-eighteenth century, to where she was in the 1870s, the country of von Liebig, Clausius, Helmholtz, Siemens, Heine, Koch, Zeiss, and Virchow. In winning the battle against the Catholics, however, they lost the fight with Bismarck. Their defeat was more far-reaching than their victory.28

  THE USES AND ABUSES OF DARWINISM

  Only in the late nineteenth century, with the advent of mass literacy, did science begin to have an impact on daily life. Never before or since has the prestige of science been so high and the interest of the layman so great.29 In particular, Darwinism was a sensation in Germany. “Darwinism became a kind of popular philosophy in Germany more than in any other country, even England. Darwinism caught on rapidly in the German scientific community; indeed, Germany, rather than England, was the main centre of biological research in the late nineteenth century…not only was Germany the most literate of the major European countries, it also offered the richest environment for Darwinism to expand beyond the confines of science. Political liberalism had been thwarted in Germany in 1848, and Darwinism became a pseudopolitical ideological weapon for the progressive segments of the middle class.”30 Germans were aware that the Naturphilosophen had in many ways anticipated the idea of evolution, even if they had no understanding of natural selection.

  In this atmosphere, a number of science popularizers emerged, of which the best known, and best remembered, were Ernst Haeckel, Carl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner, Carus Sterne, Edward Aveling, and Wilhelm Bölsche. Hundreds of books were published on Darwinism, and Bölsche was the single best-selling nonfiction author in the German language before 1933. In the process, Darwinism was changed and corrupted as people in all walks of life appealed to Darwin’s authority. But in general, Germany’s Darwinists sought to continue the Enlightenment tradition, to stamp on superstition, to inform and, in so doing, to liberate, as they saw it, and to continue the radical spirit of 1848.

  Although literacy rates in Germany were much higher than anywhere else in Europe, mass reading didn’t really catch on until the 1870s, when the price of books and newspapers dropped owing to the invention of new and more efficient printing presses. It was only after 1860 that the developments in science and technology, referred to earlier in Chapters 17–20, began to seep into popular consciousness.

  A translation of On the Origin of Species was begun within a few weeks of the book’s appearance in Britain and published in 1861; Darwin’s collected works were published in 1875. And Darwinism, as Alfred Kelly says, “made rapid and deep inroads in the German scientific community. From the beginning it was broadly identified with progressive views.” (Nipperdey says the German response to Darwin was “overwhelming.”) As early as March 1861, Darwin wrote to his colleague Wilhelm Preyer, “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” At the end of 1899, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung asked its readers who they thought the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century had been. Darwin came in third after Helmuth von Moltke and Kant, but The Origin of Species was voted the single most influential book of the century.31

  Most histories remember Haeckel above all other popularizers, but it was Bölsche who was better known at the time, indeed his was a household name in millions of homes. The combined sale of his books by 1914 has been estimated at 1.4 million—Alfred Kelly says he was a “major cultural phenomenon.” Bölsche was a founder of the Cologne zoo and a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott. His major work perhaps reads oddly now—Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe (Love-Life in Nature: The Story of the Evolution of Love), three volumes, 1898–1901. Designed to reconcile Darwin with the Bible, it told the story of evolution from the perspective of sexual love and was a sensational success.32 Sex, for Bölsche, was the ideal experience, a brief glimpse of eternity and the harmony that was the aim of evolution.

  The rise of Darwinism took place, of course, at the same time as the Kulturkampf and, being allied with the forces of progress, it naturally came under attack from the reactionaries, who did not want the Protestant Church interfered with. The main battleground was the schools where, for the most part, Darwinism was excluded. In many places in Germany very little science was taught in the schools anyway (in some places, like Bavaria, it was simply not required), so Darwinism wasn’t being singled out. Haeckel, on the other hand, thought that Darwinism ought to become the centerpiece of the school curriculum, and bitter battles were fought—in parliament, in the newspapers, in books—over this issue.

  After its original enthusiastic reception, Darwinism in Germany developed in two ways. First, a variety of Social Darwinisms emerged, several examples of which are considered, Chapter 22. The other way that Darwinism developed was its conjoining with Marxism. The generation of German workers before World War I was extremely socialist in its outlook but, again according to Kelly, the tenets of basic Darwinism were much easier to understand than Marxism itself and so the latter became infused with Darwinist terminology, even to the point that most workers saw the future in evolutionary rather than revolutionary terms. Even Rudolf Virchow, noted liberal that he was, feared that Darwinism “could lead to socialism.”33 In 1899, A. H. T. Pfannkuche placed an advertisement in Die Neue Zeit asking the librarians of workers’ libraries to send him lists of the most popular books and he published his findings as Was liest der deutsche Arbeiter? (What Does the German Worker Read?). Four out of the top ten books were books about Darwinism. Its appeal stemmed from the prestige of science at the time and its message of the inevitability of change.

  Other scholars such as Hans-Günter Zmarzlik, Roger Chickering, and Richard Evans have added the important critique that, with the rise of Pan-Germanism and ideas about “racial hygiene” (see below), Social Darwinism in Germany veered from being a mainly left-wing concern to the right in and after the 1890s.34

  THE FEAR OF DEGENERATION

  Kelly also observes that it was in the 1890s that Social Darwinism “began to undergo some ominous changes.”35 By 1890, there was a growing consensus—not least among medical men—that the industrial landscape of Europe was encroaching so quickly on what had gone before that a host of new disorders was being created in its wake: new forms of poverty, crime, alcoholism, moral perversion, and violence.36 The concept of “degeneration,” the very idea that the European population was no longer physically capable of supporting civilized life, had begun with the Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso, who espoused a theory that criminals were a special “atavistic” type, “criminaloids,” throwbacks to primitive humanity.37 But the man who made the most of this was Max Nordau, a socialist and committed egalitarian and a man who, in his fiction
, called degeneracy the “malady of the century.”38 He and Ernst Haeckel were founder members of the National Peace League and the Society for Racial Hygiene. On top of its Italian beginnings, the French had built their own ideas of degeneracy, following the Franco-Prussian War, when the humiliation of defeat had shocked France’s intellectual elite. But Nordau, a German-speaking Hungarian doctor and journalist, published Entartung (Degeneration) in 1892 and although it was close to 600 pages long, it became an immediate international best seller, translated into a dozen languages. Nordau argued that there was degeneration not just in people but in culture, “degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes…lunatics; they are often authors and artists.” He singled out Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola, Édouard Manet, and the Impressionists, who he thought painted the way they did as a result of nystagmus, a “trembling of the eyeball,” which blurred and distorted their vision.39

  Nordau thought the European aristocracy was beyond help, the only hope lying with the working class, whose self-confidence and vitality could be best ensured by physical exertion and strenuous outdoor exercises. His theories helped give rise to the mania for athletic clubs, the hiking and backpacking movements and bicycle races that engulfed Germany around the turn of the twentieth century. These activities overlapped with the Youth Movement, started in 1897 in Steglitz, a middle-class suburb of Berlin, under the charismatic leadership of Karl Fischer. Their hikes always took in difficult terrain and they soon embraced their own way of dressing, their own uniform. As well as physical exercise, their songs encouraged the experience of belonging. Their gatherings in uniform were theoretically illegal but that didn’t stop them calling Fischer their “Führer” and greeting each other with “Heil.”