The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  There is already something defiant about Jung’s account of his discovery of the unconscious, the Swiss implying he was not so much a protégé of Freud’s as his equal. Soon after they met, they became very close and in 1909 traveled to America together. Jung was overshadowed by Freud in America, but it was there that he realized his views were diverging. As the years passed, patient after patient reported early experiences of incest, all of which encouraged Freud to lay even more emphasis on sexuality as the motor driving the unconscious. For Jung, however, sex was not fundamental—instead, it was itself a transformation from religion. When he looked at the religions and myths of other peoples around the world, as he began to do, he found that in Eastern religions (Hinduism, for example) the gods were depicted in temples as very erotic beings. For him, this frank sexuality was a symbol and one aspect of “higher ideas.” Thus he began his examination of religion and mythology as “representations” of the unconscious “in other places and at other times.”

  The rupture with Freud first broke into the open in 1912, after they returned from America and Jung published the second part of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (translated as Symbols of Transformation). This extended paper, which appeared in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, was Jung’s first and public airing of what he called the “collective unconscious.” He concluded that at a deep level the unconscious was shared by everyone—it was part of the racial memory. Indeed, for Jung, that’s what therapy was, getting in touch with the collective unconscious. The more Jung explored religion, mythology, and philosophy, the further he departed from Freud and from the scientific approach. He pointed first to the “extraordinary unanimity” of narratives and themes in the mythologies of different cultures. He next argued that “in protracted analyses, any particular symbol might recur with disconcerting persistence but as analysis proceeded the symbol came to resemble the universal symbols seen in myths and legends.” Finally he claimed that the stories told in the delusions of mentally ill patients often resembled those in mythology.

  Jung’s other popular idea was the notion of archetypes, the theory that all people may be divided according to one or another basic (and inherited) psychological types, the best known being introvert and extrovert. These terms only relate to the conscious levels of the mind, of course; in typical psychoanalytic fashion, the truth is really the opposite—the extrovert temperament is in fact unconsciously introvert, and vice versa.

  Although Jung’s very different system of understanding the unconscious had first come to the attention of fellow psychoanalysts in 1912, it was only with the release of Symbols of Transformation in book form in 1913 (published in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious) that the split with Freud became public. Freud, while troubled by this personal rift, which also had anti-Semitic overtones, was more concerned that Jung’s version of psychoanalysis was threatening its nature as a science.15 Henceforth, Jung’s work grew increasingly metaphysical, even quasi mystical, attracting a devoted but fringe following. From World War I on, the psychoanalytic movement was divided into two.

  Thanks to World War I, however, psychoanalysis was undergoing another change—it was achieving respectability. Until the war, it had still been regarded as an exotic speciality—or worse, British doctors referring slightingly to Freud’s “dirty doctrines.” What caused a change was the fact that, on both sides in the war, a growing number of casualties were suffering from shell shock (or combat fatigue, or battle neurosis, or post-traumatic stress disorder, to use the terms now favored). There had been cases of men breaking down in earlier wars, but their numbers had been far fewer than those with physical injuries. What seems to have been crucially different this time was the character of the hostilities—static trench warfare with heavy bombardment, and vast conscript armies, containing large numbers of men unsuited for war. The considerable incidence of battle neurosis shook psychiatry and medicine as a whole.

  Psychoanalysis was not the only method of treatment tried. Both the Allied and Central Powers found that officers were succumbing as well as enlisted men, in many cases highly trained and hitherto very brave men; these behaviors could not in any sense be called malingering. As one of Freud’s biographers says, the Freudian age dates from this moment.

  Early on it was discovered that men with neuroses could not be moved from the Front; if they were, they never came back and became a “pension burden.” In Germany there were several other methods of so-called aggressive treatments that were tried. One involved “phoney operations” in which the patient was encouraged to believe his illness was somatic and surgically curable; another was an isolation technique, an attempt to “bore” the patient out of his symptoms by deprivation of food, light, and human contact. Work groups of neurotic patients were formed, where the life was more arduous than at the Front. The two most widespread techniques were Max Nonne’s hypnotherapy in which it was suggested to patients that their symptoms were not real, and Fritz Kaufmann’s “overpowering” electrotherapy method in which patients were told to expect painful electric shocks through their brains and body and were then “ordered” by a doctor and superior officer to lose their symptoms and get well. These techniques sound bizarre now but success rates of 90 percent or above were claimed, much reducing the pension burden.16

  TECTONIC SHIFTS

  As the 1915 publication of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in English in Britain shows, intellectual life did continue during the war, and it was not always disfigured by nationalistic, or chauvinistic, emotions. Two other German ideas first saw the light of day in the 1914–18 period, both extremely influential and each having nothing to do with war.

  Alfred Wegener, born in Berlin in 1880, was a meteorologist who received his PhD from the University of Berlin. An Arctic explorer, who was wounded in World War I, he first aired his ideas about “continental drift” in 1912 at a meeting of the German Geological Association at Frankfurt, but his full theory wasn’t set down in book form, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans), until 1915.17 His idea, that the six continents of the world had begun life as one “supercontinent,” was not wholly original—it had been aired earlier by an American, F. B. Taylor, in 1908—but Wegener collected much more impressive evidence than anyone else so that his theory, much ridiculed at first, eventually convinced most skeptics. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight one might ask why scientists had not reached Wegener’s conclusion sooner. By the end of the nineteenth century it was obvious that to make sense of the natural world, and its distribution around the globe, some sort of coherent explanation was needed. For example, there is a mountain range that runs from Norway to north Britain and should cross in Ireland with other ridges that run through north Germany and southern Britain. In fact, it looked to Wegener as though the crossover actually occurs near the coast of North America, as if the two seaboards of the North Atlantic were once contiguous. Similarly, plant and animal fossils are spread about the earth in a way that can only be explained if there were once land connections between areas that are now widely separated by vast oceans.

  Wegener’s answer was bold. The six continents as they now exist—Africa, Australia, North and South America, Eurasia and Antarctica—were once one huge continent, one enormous landmass which he called Pangaea (from the Greek, for all the earth). The continents had arrived at their present position by “drifting,” floating like huge icebergs.

  The idea took some getting used to, but it could not go unexamined.18 How could entire continents “float”? And on what? If the continents had moved, what enormous force had moved them? By Wegener’s time, the earth’s essential structure was known. Geologists had used analysis of earthquake waves to deduce that the earth consisted of a crust, a mantle, an outer core, and an inner one. The first basic discovery was that all the continents of the earth are made of one form of rock, granite. Around the granite continents are found a different form of rock—basalt, much denser and harder. Basalt exists in two f
orms, solid and molten (we know this because lava from volcanic eruptions is semi-molten basalt). This suggests that the relationship between the outer structures and the inner structures of the earth was clearly related to how the planet formed as a cooling mass of gas that became liquid, then solid.

  The huge granite blocks that form the continents are believed to be about 50 kilometers thick, but below that, for about 3,000 kilometers, the earth possesses the properties of an “elastic solid,” or semi-molten basalt. Millions of years ago, when the earth was much hotter than it is today, the basalt would have been less solid, and the overall situation of the continents would have resembled more closely an iceberg floating in the oceans. Even so, it took time for the notion of continental drift to be accepted—textbooks as late as 1939 were still treating it as “a hypothesis only.” It was not until sea-floor spreading was confirmed in 1953, and the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge identified in 1968, that Wegener was finally vindicated.

  The work that Ludwig Wittgenstein produced during the war was not a response to the fighting itself. At the same time, had Wittgenstein not been exposed to the real possibility of death, it is unlikely that he would have produced Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he did, or that it would have had quite the tone it did.19

  Wittgenstein enlisted on August 7, the day after the Austrian declaration of war on Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the Eastern Front. He later suggested that he felt the experience of facing death would, in some indefinable manner, “improve” him. On the first sight of the opposing forces, he confided in a letter: “Now I have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death.”

  Wittgenstein was twenty-five when war broke out. His large family was Jewish, wealthy, perfectly assimilated into Viennese society. Franz Grillparzer was a friend of Ludwig’s father, and Brahms gave piano lessons to both his mother and his aunt. The Wittgensteins’ musical evenings were well known in Vienna: Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter were both regulars, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet received its first performance there. Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s sister, sat for Gustav Klimt.

  Ludwig was as fond of music as the rest of the family, but he was also the most technical and practical-minded. As a result, he wasn’t sent to the Gymnasium in Vienna but to a Realschule in Linz, a school chiefly known for the teaching of the history master, Leopold Pötsch, a rabid right-winger who regarded the Hapsburg dynasty as “degenerate.” There is no sign that Wittgenstein was ever attracted by Pötsch’s theories, but a fellow pupil with whom he overlapped for a few months certainly was. His name was Adolf Hitler.

  After Linz, Wittgenstein went to Berlin, where he became interested in philosophy. He also developed a fascination with aeronautics, and his father suggested he go to the University of Manchester in England, where there was an excellent engineering department. There he was introduced to Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. This book showed, or attempted to show, that mathematics and logic are the same, and for Wittgenstein the book was a revelation. He spent months studying the Principles and also Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic). In the summer of 1911 Wittgenstein visited Frege in Jena, and Frege was impressed enough by the young Austrian to recommend he study under Russell at Cambridge.20

  Wittgenstein arrived there later in 1911, and by 1914 Luki, as he was called by then, began to form his own theory of logic. But, in the long vacation, he went home to Vienna, war was declared, and he was trapped. He proved brave in the fighting, was promoted three times, was decorated, but in 1918 was taken prisoner in Italy with half a million other soldiers. While incarcerated in a concentration camp, he concluded that the book he had just finished, during a period of leave, had “solved all the outstanding problems in philosophy” and that he would give up the discipline after the war and become a schoolteacher. He also decided to give away his fortune. He was as good as his word on both counts.

  Wittgenstein had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book, which did not appear in English until 1922. But when it did appear, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus created a sensation.21 Many people did not understand it; others thought it stated the obvious. Maynard Keynes wrote to Wittgenstein, “Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussions at Cambridge.” In Vienna, it attracted the attention of the philosophers led by Moritz Schlick—a group that eventually evolved into the famous Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Frege, whose own work had inspired the Tractatus, died without ever understanding it.22

  Wittgenstein’s major innovation was to realize that language has limitations, that there are certain things it cannot do and that these have logical and therefore philosophical consequences. Wittgenstein argues that it is pointless to talk about value—simply because “value is not part of the world.” It therefore follows that all judgments about moral and aesthetic matters cannot—ever—be meaningful uses of language. The same is true of philosophical generalizations that we make about the world as a whole. They are meaningless if they cannot be broken down into elementary sentences “which really are pictures” of part of our world. Instead, we have to lower our sights, says Wittgenstein, if we are to make sense. The world can only be spoken about by careful description of the individual facts of which it is comprised. In essence, this is what science tries to do. Wittgenstein was saying that we can go no further than that. This is what he implied by his famous last sentence of the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”23

  One of the most influential postwar ideas in Europe was released in April 1918, in the middle of the Ludendorff offensive—what turned out to be the decisive event of the war in the West, when General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s Supreme Commander in Flanders, failed to pin the British against the north coast of France and Belgium and separate them from other forces, weakening himself in the process. In that month, Oswald Spengler, a schoolmaster living in Munich, published Der Untergang des Abendlandes, translated into English as The Decline of the West. He had actually written the book in 1914 and used a title he had first conceived even earlier, in 1912, but despite all that had happened he had changed hardly a word of his text, which he was to describe modestly ten years later as “the philosophy of our time.”24

  Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg, southwest of Berlin, and grew up in a home steeped in “Germanic giants”—Richard Wagner, Ernest Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Werner Sombart. For Spengler, there were two important personal turning points. He failed his doctoral thesis, which meant he became a writer, not an academic. And second, the Agadir incident in 1911, when Germany backed down after its cruiser, Panther, had sailed into the Moroccan port, bringing Europe to the brink of war.25 Spengler felt this humiliation keenly and for some reason drew the conclusion that this marked the end of the realm of rational science that had arisen since the Enlightenment. It was now a time for heroes, not traders. He set to work on what would be his life’s project, his theme being how Germany would be the country, the culture, of the future.

  Spengler drew on eight civilizations to sustain his argument—the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Indian, the pre-Columbian Mexican, the classical or Graeco-Roman, the West European, and the “Magian,” a term of his own that included the Arabic, Judaic, and Byzantine. His main theme was to show how each of them went through an organic cycle of growth, maturity, and inevitable decline, one of his aims being to show that Western civilization had no privileged position in the scheme of things.26 For Spengler, Zivilisation was not the end product of social evolution, as rationalists argued; instead it was Kultur’s old age. Moreover, the rise of a new Kultur depended on two things—the race and the Geist or spirit, “the inwardly lived experience of the ‘we.’” For Spengler, rational society and science were evidence only of a triumph of the indomitable Western will, which would collapse in the face of a stronger will, that of Germany. Germany’s will was stronger, he said, because
her sense of “we” was stronger; the West was obsessed with matters “outside” human nature, like materialist science, whereas in Germany there was more feeling for the inner spirit—this is what counted.

  The Decline was a great and immediate commercial success. Thomas Mann compared its effect on him to that of reading Schopenhauer for the first time, and Wittgenstein confessed himself “astounded” by the book. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was so impressed that she arranged for Spengler to receive the Nietzsche Prize. This made Spengler a celebrity, and visitors were required to wait three days for an appointment to speak to him.

  From the end of World War I throughout 1919, Germany was in chaos and crisis. Central authority had collapsed, revolutionary ferment had been imported from Russia (though Germany had helped export Lenin from Switzerland), and soldiers and sailors formed armed committees, called Räte, or “soviets.” Whole cities were for a time governed at gun-point. Eventually, the Social Democrats, the left-wing party that installed the Weimar Republic, had to bring in their old foes, the army, to restore order.27 This was achieved but involved considerable brutality—thousands were killed.

  Against this background, Spengler saw himself as the prophet of a nationalistic resurgence in Germany—he saw it as his role to rescue socialism from the Marxism of Russia and apply it in “the more vital country” of Germany.28 A new political category was needed: he put Prussianism and socialism together to come up with National Socialism. This would lead men to exchange the “practical freedom” of America and England for the “inner freedom…which comes through discharging obligations to the organic whole.” Among those impressed by this argument was Dietrich Eckhart, who helped form the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP) or German Workers Party (GWP), which adopted the symbol of the Pan-German Thule Society Eckhart had previously belonged to. This symbol of “Aryan vitalism,” the swastika, now took on a political significance for the first time. Alfred Rosenberg was also a fan of Spengler and joined the GWP in May 1919. Soon after, he brought in one of his friends just back from the Front, a man named Adolf Hitler.