The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  During World War I, the Germans mobilized about 11 million men and suffered almost exactly 6 million casualties. Against Germany alone, the Allies mobilized roughly 28 million men, more than two-and-a-half times as many, and casualties against Germany (ignoring Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria) totaled about 12 million. “Thus on average each mobilised German soldier killed or wounded slightly more than one Allied soldier; it took five Allied soldiers to incapacitate one German.” On the other hand, the Germans were more often than the Allies in defensive positions, and experience shows that troops on the defensive have the advantage of position, fortification, and so on, with research confirming that defensive positions are, roughly speaking, 1.3 times as efficient as attacking ones. Taking this into account, Dupuy concluded that “there was an overall German superiority of 4 to 1 in inflicting casualties.”45 In a parallel study, Alexander Watson reported that the percentage of Krankheiten des Nervengebiets in the German west field army and nervous disorders in the British army, were 3.67 and 3.27 respectively, though the overall psychiatric casualties among the British battle injuries was 6.54 percent.46

  In the end, the superior numbers of the Allies proved decisive (and the Germans were outperformed in the activities of intelligence and spying), but, man-for-man, German soldiers were better fighters.

  Dupuy carried out his studies as part of the Historical Evaluation and Research Organization (HERO), looking at some sixty engagements in World War II, mainly in 1943 and 1944, later extended backward to World War I. He was particularly concerned to show that the Germans were not especially militaristic.47 Between 1815 and 1945, Prussia and Germany participated in six significant wars (two of them minor), whereas during that time France was engaged in ten significant wars (six in Europe, four overseas), Russia fought thirteen wars (ten European), Great Britain fought seventeen wars (three in Europe, four in Africa, ten in Asia), and the United States was engaged in seven significant wars.48 Dupuy’s point was that there is no evidence that Prussians, or Germans, are excessively militaristic in any genetic or historical sense.

  Instead, he argued, as Paul Kennedy argued (as discussed in Chapter 22), that the Germans’ superior fighting ability was due to their institutionalization of military excellence. These same characteristics, he said, would distinguish the German soldiers in World War II as well. “It was only Hitler who was rigid and inflexible.”

  Still on the technical war front, the Germans—surprisingly enough, given their level of technological and industrial development—were slower than the Allies in bringing in scientists to aid the war effort. They did do work on communications with submarines, and they developed some flame-throwing devices, but their tank experiments were too late to have any real impact on events. As the fighting turned against Germany, the enhancement of food production became a scientific priority. Two dark areas where Germany did lead the way were in the realms of chemical and aerial warfare. Under Fritz Haber, himself a future winner of the Nobel Prize, three other future laureates were pressed into service in the design and production of chlorine gas as a weapon—James Franck, Gustav Herz, and Otto Hahn, the future discoverer of nuclear fission.49

  At the beginning of 1918, the Wehrmann in Vienna was abandoned. “The number of visitors grew smaller and smaller as the war stretched on, until finally nobody looked after him at all,” reported one newspaper. Another noted, shortly after the war, that golden nails donated to the Wehrmann by Austria’s allies had been stolen. “The last visitor was, then, a thief.”

  30.

  Prayers for a Fatherless Child: The Culture of the Defeated

  At no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form, as it did in World War I (at least in the English language), and there are those, such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry “never got over the Great War.”1 It was no different in Germany where, according to one estimate, some 2 million war poems were written in the German language during the course of the war, and where in August 1914, 50,000 poems were written every day. Five hundred were submitted to newspapers every day and one hundred printed.2 As with British war poetry, says Patrick Bridgwater, most of the German poems broke with tradition in that, until then, most war poetry had glorified war, in particular the heroic and chivalrous aspects of hand-to-hand combat. The advent of mechanized war changed all that.

  German poets differed from their British equivalents in several ways.3 Both Georg Heym and Georg Trakl wrote poems about war, or predicting war, well before hostilities broke out, as a test of heroic qualities. Once the fighting started, both Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George wrote verse (“hymns” in Rilke’s case) about the war without actually seeing any action. George showed a marked indifference to the fighting, an indifference to others’ suffering, revealing his conviction that modern war is “bestial rather than heroic,” and most deaths had no dignity:

  Zu jubeln ziemt nicht: kein triumph wird sein

  Nur viele untergänge ohne würde…

  Heilig sind nur die säfte

  Noch makelfrei verspritzt—ein ganzer strom.

  (There is no call for rejoicing: there will be no triumph, only many deaths without dignity…Holy alone the blood which is spilled innocently, a great river.)

  Change came in the second winter of the war, with a more direct reaction to the horrors the poets were seeing around them, though it was slower in coming to the Germans than to the British.4 Within this general picture, and against a background where, in an ideal world, perhaps, a dozen poets would be worth considering, three stood out—Georg Trakl, August Stramm, and Anton Schnack.

  Trackl was Austrian, a man obsessed, as he put it himself, with his own “criminal melancholy.”5 He actually wrote very few war poems—just five—but they were all memorable. Trackl’s gift was for very dense images, in the manner of Hölderlin, and his central message, once war had broken out, and once he could see what was happening, was that “the war may mark the end of man as a spiritual being”:

  Am Abend tönen die herbstlichen Wälder

  Von tödlichen Waffen, die goldnen Ebenen

  Und blauen Seen, darüber die Sonne

  Düstrer hinrollt; umfängt die Nacht

  Sterbende Krieger, die wilde Klage

  Ihrer zerbrochenen Münder.

  Doch stille sammelt im Weidengrund

  Rotes Gewölk, darin ein zürnender Gott wohnt,

  Das vergossne Blut sich…

  Die heisse Flamme des Geistes nährt heute ein gewaltiger Schmerz,

  Die ungebornen Enkel.

  (In the evening autumn forests ring with deadly weapons, gold plains and blue lakes, over which the sun more darkly rolls; night embraces dying warriors, the wild lament of their broken mouths. Yet silently in the willow-grove a red cloud gathers, in which an angry god resides, shed blood gathers…a mighty grief today feeds the hot flame of the spirit, the unborn grandchildren.)6

  Even when Trakl is describing red clouds, shed blood, and the hot flame of the spirit, his words are sparing; his effect is achieved by the cumulative nature of cool, honed images, icy and invigorating, stopping short of sentimentality.

  The poems of August Stramm were much shorter than Trakl’s, than anyone else’s for that matter, making use of onomatopoeic and alliterative devices, neologisms and word layout, all designed to intensify the poetic experience, just as war intensified all experience associated with it.7 Born in Münster, Westphalia, in 1874, Stramm was called up immediately on the declaration of war. He served on the Western Front to begin with, saw heavy fighting in northern France, and had won the Iron Cross by January 1915. In April he was transferred to the Eastern Front, where he again saw heavy fighting and was recommended for the Iron Cross (First Class). His publishers negotiated a release for him from the military, but he refused to take up the offer of “an alibi” and continued to serve. He had seen action seventy times when, on September 1, 1915, he was shot in the head in hand-to-hand fighting on the Rokitn
o marshes.8

  Clearly a brave man, Stramm was nonetheless against the war and did not write a single chauvinistic poem even when hundreds of people around him were doing so. He wrote instead about how fear turns to courage, how ordinary law-abiding people are converted into murderers, and how—again—there is nothing heroic about modern warfare. Most of his poems were published in Der Sturm and collected after his death. This is “Schlachtfeld” (Battlefield), written in the autumn of 1914.

  Schollenmürbe schläfert ein das Eisen

  Blute filzen Sickerflecke

  Roste krumen

  Fleische schleimen

  Saugen brünstet um Zerfallen.

  Mordesmorde

  Blinzen

  Kinderblicke.

  (Clod softness lulls iron off to sleep, bloods clot ooze patches, rusts crumble, fleshes slime, sucking ruts around decay. Child eyes blink murder upon murder.)9

  The neologisms (bloods, not blood; rusts, not rust; fleshes, not flesh) emphasize that there are many men—not just the poet—who suffer, the lack of punctuation conveys the way everything in the battlefield is chaos, one thing running into another, just as dying can be achieved by oozing to death as by being killed outright in a flash. Iron sleeps, iron weapons can be killed as people can—there is no difference here in No Man’s Land.10

  In “Angststurm” (Attack of Fear)

  Grausen

  Ich und Ich und Ich und Ich

  Grausen Brausen Rauschen Grausen

  Träumen Splittern Branden Blenden

  Sterneblenden Brausen Grausen

  Rauschen

  Grausen

  Ich

  (Dread. Me and me and me and me. Dreading roaring crashing dreading. Dreaming splintering burning dazzling. Dazzling star-shells roaring dreading. Crashing. Dread. Me.)11

  This poem has been described as a chain of battle sounds and the reactions they provoke, themselves set out as a rattle, the “au” sound similar to a cry of pain.

  Born in 1892 at Rieneck in Unterfranken, Anton Schnack produced a steady stream of verse from January 1917 onward, mainly in broken sonnet form, the most important examples of which were collected in his Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier, released in 1920, and consisting of sixty war poems. Generally regarded as the best single collection of war poems produced by a German poet, it has been compared with the works of the Britons Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. The poems juxtapose original observations cheek-by-jowl with more ordinary, even banal, images, reminding us that “poetry is not an end in itself,” that to cull beauty in such circumstances cannot be wholly appropriate, that the accumulation of images, of experiences, is as much an aspect of war as the vivid—short, intense—flashes and explosions of metaphor or simile.

  “Im Granatloch” (In a Shellhole) tells about life in a temporary trench, which ends:

  Was sang Ninette?…Leichtes, Südliches.—Weinen will ich, dass ich lagere in Mord und Stürmen, im blauen Raketenmeer, im Sausen des Windes,

  Unter lärmenden Nachthimmeln, in grünen Wassern voll Schnecken und roten Würmern, in Erwartung des Todes, faul und gross; im Sterbeschrei der Pferde,

  Im Sterbeschrei der Menschen, ich hörte Dunkle rufen aus Dunkelm, Hängend in Drähten: so singen Vögel, die sterben wollen, einsam, vertrauert, in Frühlingsjahren.

  Und, über dem Rheine, weit, das schwerbestürmende, eines vaterlosen Kindes…

  (What was it Ninette used to sing?…Something gay, something southern.—I could cry that I am lying here amid murder and assaults, in a blue sea of rockets, in the wind’s sighing, beneath turbulent night skies, in green waters full of snails and red worms, awaiting death, putrid and swollen, amid the dying screams of horses, amid the dying screams of men, I heard them, calling out of the dark, hanging in the wire; thus do birds sing who are ready to die, lonely, pining away, in the spring of their lives. And beyond the Rhine, far away, somebody opened a creaking door, and from the opening came prayer, the overwhelming prayer of a fatherless child…)12

  Nothing chauvinist here, nothing about German “Kultur” and its alleged superiority. The overall tone is by no means bitter, but rather elegiac at the pity of it all.

  Both Bertolt Brecht and Karl Kraus wrote bitter antiwar and savagely satirical poems toward the end of the hostilities. They were not always successful: satire, especially in such a context, risked being seen as “un-German.”

  Not only poets died. August Macke, the Blaue Reiter painter, was shot as the German forces advanced into France; Franz Marc was killed at Verdun; Max Planck lost one son (another, Erwin, was executed in 1945 for his part in the resistance against Hitler), as did the painter Käthe Kollwitz (she also lost her grandson in World War II); Oscar Kokoschka was wounded, and Albert Einstein ostracized. The mathematician and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was interned in a Campo Concentramento in northern Italy, from where he sent Bertrand Russell the manuscript of his recently completed work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

  The war produced many intellectual and cultural ramifications. Some of them took years to reveal themselves, but not all.

  In film, although Germany had a strong industry in 1914, it was still dominated by output from abroad, France, America, and Italy in particular. At the outbreak of war, the importation of foreign films was stopped. Cinema audiences rose in the war—the combination of entertainment and newsreels proving irresistible, though film equipment was so bulky then that real action footage was rare and fiction films about war gradually took over. Documentaries were often more subtle, such as Ernst Lubitsch’s film about the entry of women into male professions.

  Theater was more lively, and more critical. Georg Kaiser’s Gas I was not set anywhere specific, but its plot, pitting the manufacturer, who wants to cease production, against the military and industrial chiefs, who want ever-greater quantities turned out, was close to the bone. Ernst Toller, who had fought at Verdun and suffered a breakdown, wrote Die Wandlung (The Transformation), about the metamorphosis of an enthusiastic volunteer into an artist who leads an uprising (as Toller himself did in the Bavarian Soviet), and he also came too close to current events: his play could not be produced for some months. (Although it did appear late in 1919, while its author was still in prison—where the play had been written—serving a sentence for treason, for his part in the uprising.)

  But it is Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind) that demands most attention. Written between 1915, when the first segment was published, and 1922, it featured a large cast, innumerable dialects, and it brilliantly and bitterly exposed the mendacities of the authorities, the dishonest jingoism of the media, in a world where all authority had broken down. Kraus’s target, for which he often used actual documentation, was the “wilful romanticization of war,” the “predatory greed” and “insatiable imperialism” that were for him the real driving force behind the war effort. It is now generally accepted that much of what Kraus put in his play was factually wrong, but dramatically it was the equivalent of Otto Dix’s frightening automaton/cripples that became so familiar in the Weimar Republic, and his thesis is an anticipation of Hannah Arendt’s idea about “the banality of evil.”13

  One of the other main changes wrought by the war lay in the field of psychiatry, where two developments overtook psychoanalysis.

  By the time of the outbreak of the fighting, psychoanalytic societies existed in six countries and an International Association of Psychoanalysis had been formed in 1908. At the same time, the “movement,” as Freud thought of it, had seen a number of other prominent figures emerge—most of them German-speaking—and suffered its first defectors. Alfred Adler, along with Wilhelm Stekel, left in 1911, Adler because his own experiences gave him a very different view of the psychological forces that shape personality. He conceived the idea that the libido is not a predominantly sexual force but inherently aggressive, the search for power becoming for him the mainspring of life and the “inferiority complex” the directing force that gives lives their shape.
His phrase “inferiority complex” passed into general usage.

  Freud’s break with Carl Jung, which took place between the end of 1912 and early 1914 was more serious—and more acrimonious—than any of the other schisms because Freud, fifty-eight at the outbreak of war, saw Jung as his successor.14 Although Jung was devoted to Freud at first, he had squabbled with other early analysts, and the break with the master came because, like Adler, Jung revised his views on two fundamental Freudian ideas. He thought that the libido was not, as Freud insisted, a solely sexual instinct but more a matter of “psychic energy” as a whole, a reconceptualization that vitiated the entire idea of childhood sexuality, not to mention the Oedipal relationship. Second, and perhaps even more important, Jung argued that he had discovered the existence of the unconscious for himself, independently of Freud.

  He had discovered this, he said, when he realized that a woman he was treating, at Burghölzli hospital in Zurich, who was allegedly suffering from an untreatable mental illness, dementia praecox, had in fact killed her favorite child (by poisoning her with infected water) in order to free herself for a lover, the woman acting from an unconscious desire to obliterate all traces of her present marriage to make herself available for the man she really loved. Jung did not at first query the diagnosis of dementia praecox. The real story only emerged when he began to explore her dreams, prompting him to give her the “association test.” This test, which subsequently became famous, was invented by Wilhelm Wundt (see Chapter 26). The patient is shown a list of words and asked to respond to each one with the first word that comes into his/her head. The rationale is that in this way conscious control over unconscious urges is weakened. Using the test Jung revealed the woman’s unconscious motives and was able to face her with the unpleasant truth. Within weeks, he claimed, she was cured.