The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Influenced by Marx and William Morris, Gropius always believed, contrary to Adolf Loos, that craftsmanship was as important as “higher” art. Therefore, when the Grand Ducal Academy of Art, which had been founded in the mid-eighteenth century, was merged with the Weimar Arts and Crafts School, which had been established in 1902, Gropius was an obvious choice as director. The fused structure was given the name Das Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar, with Bauhaus chosen because it echoed the Bauhütten, medieval lodges where those constructing the great cathedrals were housed.5

  The early years of the Bauhaus, in Weimar, were troubled and it was forced to move to Dessau, which had a more congenial administration. This seems to have brought about a change in Gropius himself.6 He now announced that the school would concern itself with practical questions of the modern world—mass housing, industrial design, typography, and “the development of prototypes.”7

  After a lost war and an enormous rise in inflation, there was no social priority of greater importance in Weimar Germany than mass housing. And so Bauhaus architects were among those who developed what became a familiar form of social housing, the Siedlung or “settlement.” Although the Siedlungen were undoubtedly better than the nineteenth-century slums they were intended to replace, the lasting influence of the Bauhaus has been more in the area of applied design. The Bauhaus philosophy, “that it is far harder to design a first-rate teapot than paint a second-rate picture,” has found wide acceptance—folding beds, built-in cupboards, stackable chairs and tables, designed with mass-production in mind and with an understanding of the buildings these objects were to be used in. Bauhaus designers like László Moholy-Nagy never lost their utopian ideals.8

  THE MARRIAGE OF FREUD AND MARX

  The catastrophe of World War I, followed by the famine, unemployment, and inflation of the postwar years, confirmed for many people Marx’s theory that capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight of its own “insoluble contradictions.”

  In fact, it soon became clear that, despite the activities of theoreticians like Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), it wasn’t communism that was appearing from the rubble of war in Germany, but fascism.9 Some Marxists were so disillusioned by this that they abandoned Marxism altogether. Others remained convinced of the theory, despite the evidence. But there was a third group who wished to remain Marxists but felt that Marxist theory needed reconstructing if it were to remain credible. This group assembled in Frankfurt in the late 1920s and made a name for itself as the Frankfurt school, with its own institute—founded by a millionaire interested in Marxism—in the city. Thanks to the Nazis, the institute didn’t stay there long, but the name stuck.10

  The three best-known members of the school were Theodor Adorno (1903–69), a man who “seemed equally at home in philosophy, sociology and music,” Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), a philosopher and sociologist, less innovative than Adorno but perhaps more dependable, and the political theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who in time would become the most famous of all. Horkheimer was the director; in addition to his other talents, he was also a financial wizard who brilliantly manipulated the investments of the institute, both in Germany and afterward in the United States. In addition there were Leo Lowenthal, the literary critic, Franz Neumann, a legal philosopher, and Friedrich Pollock, who was one of those who argued—against Marx and to Lenin’s fury—that there were no compelling reasons why capitalism should collapse.11

  In its early years the school was known for its revival of the concept of alienation but the Frankfurt school developed this idea so that it became above all a psychological entity and one, moreover, that was not necessarily, or primarily, the result of the capitalist mode of production. Alienation, for the Frankfurt school, was more a product of all of modern life. This view shaped the school’s second and perhaps most enduring preoccupation: the attempted marriage of Freudianism and Marxism. Marcuse took the lead to begin with, though Erich Fromm wrote several books on the subject later. Marcuse regarded Freudianism and Marxism as two sides of the same coin. Freud argued that repression necessarily increases with the progress of civilization; therefore, aggressiveness must be produced and released in ever greater quantities. So, just as Marx had predicted that revolution was inevitable, a dislocation that capitalism must bring on itself, so, in Marcuse’s hands, Freudianism produced a parallel, more personal backdrop to this scenario, accounting for a build-up of destructiveness—self-destruction and the destruction of others.

  The third contribution of the Frankfurt school was a more general analysis of the vital question of the day: “What, precisely, has gone wrong in Western civilisation, that at the very height of technical progress we see the negation of human progress: dehumanisation, brutalisation, the poisoning of the biosphere, and so on? How has this happened?” To try to answer this question, they looked back as far as the Enlightenment and then traced events and ideas forward to the twentieth century. They claimed to discern a “dialectic,” an interplay between progressive and repressive periods in the West. Moreover, each repressive period was usually greater than the one before, owing to the growth of technology under capitalism, to the point where, in the late 1920s, “the incredible social wealth that had been assembled in Western civilisation, mainly as the achievement of capitalism, was increasingly used for preventing rather than constructing a more decent and human society.” The school saw fascism as a natural development in the long history of capitalism after the Enlightenment, and in the late 1920s earned the respect of colleagues with its prediction that fascism would grow. The school’s scholarship most often took the form of close readings of original material, from which views uncontaminated by previous analyses were formed. This proved very creative in terms of the understanding produced, and the Frankfurt method became known as critical theory. It was, in is way, an updating of the higher criticism.

  THE KING OF “SECRET GERMANY”

  The Psychoanalytic Institute, the Warburg Institute, the German Institute for Politics, and the Frankfurt school were all part of what Peter Gay has called “the community of reason,” an attempt to bring the clear light of scientific rationality to communal problems and experiences. But not everyone believed that cold rationality was the answer.

  One part of what became a campaign against the “cold positivism” of science in Weimar Germany was led by the Kreis (circle) of poets and writers that formed around Stefan George, “king of a secret Germany.” In practice, the Kreis was more important for what it stood for than for what it produced (though a minority always had a high regard for George’s poetry).12 Several of its writers were biographers—and this wasn’t accidental. Their intention was to highlight “great men,” especially those from more “heroic” ages, men who had by their will changed the course of events. The most successful book of this genre was Ernst Kantorowicz’s biography of the thirteenth-century emperor Frederick II (see Chapter 32). For George and his circle, Weimar Germany was a distinctly unheroic age; science had no answer to such a predicament, and the task of the writer was to inspire others by means of his superior intuition.

  George never had the influence he expected because he was overshadowed by a much greater poetic talent, Rainer Maria Rilke. Born René Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875 (he Germanized his name only in 1897), Rilke was educated at military school. Early in his career, he tried writing plays as well as biography and poetry, but his reputation was transformed by Fünf Gesänge (Five Cantos/August 1914), which he wrote in response to World War I. Young German soldiers took his slim volumes with them to the Front, and his were often the last words they read before they died, making Rilke “the idol of a generation without men.”

  His most famous poems, the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), were published in 1923, their strange mystical, philosophical, “oceanic” tone perfectly capturing the mood of the moment.13 The bulk of the elegies were “poured out” in a “spiritual hurricane” in one week, between February 7 and 14, 1922.14 After he had finished his exhausting week, Rilke
wrote to a friend that the elegies “had arrived.” In the poems he wrestles with the “great land of grief,” casting his net over the fine arts, literary history, mythology, biology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, exploring what each has to offer to help our suffering. The second elegy reads:

  Earliest triumphs, and high creation’s favourites,

  Mountain-ranges and dawn-red ridges,

  Since all beginning, pollen of blossoming godhead,

  Articulate light, avenues, stairways, thrones,

  Spaces of being, shields of delight, tumults

  Of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, singly,

  Mirrors, drawing back within themselves

  The beauty radiant from their countenance.

  SCIENCE, MODERNITY, AND THE NOVEL

  Whereas Rilke shared with Hofmannsthal and Stefan George the belief that the artist can help shape the prevailing mentality of an age, Thomas Mann was more concerned, as Schnitzler had been, to describe that change as dramatically as possible. Though not as famous today (in Germany) as Buddenbrooks, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), published in 1924, did extremely well (it appeared in two volumes), selling 50,000 copies in its first year. It is heavy with symbolism (too heavy in translation), and the English translation has also succeeded in losing some of Mann’s humor, not exactly a rich commodity in his work. Set on the eve of World War I, The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, “a simple young man” who goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit a cousin who has tuberculosis (a visit Albert Einstein actually made, to deliver a lecture). Expecting to stay only a short time, he catches the disease himself and is forced to remain in the clinic for seven years. The overall symbolism is pretty obvious. The hospital is Europe, a stable, long-standing institution that is filled with decay and corruption. “Like the generals starting the war, Hans expects his visit to the clinic to be short, over in no time.” Like them, he is surprised—appalled—to discover that his whole time frame has to be changed. Among the fellow inmates are rationalists, would-be heroes, and innocents. The inadequacies of science as a form of self-knowledge run through the book, Mann’s goal being to sum up the human condition (at least, the Western condition), aware as Rilke was that a whole era was coming to an end, and that heroes were not the answer. For Mann, modern man was self-conscious as never before.

  Thomas Mann has often been compared with Hermann Hesse—and as often contrasted. They were introduced in 1904 in Munich by Samuel Fischer, the publisher. They kept in touch all their lives, exchanging numerous letters, but only became real friends in the 1930s. Their careers had parallels and differences. Hesse cut himself off and remained more or less in one place in Switzerland; Mann moved on, and on. Mann was in favor of World War I, at least to begin with; Hesse opposed it, his “pacificist duet” with Romain Rolland during that time earning him as many enemies as friends. Both flirted with Jungian ideas and both won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  Hesse was a headstrong child and fiercely solitary, not much engaged with the world (other than his writing), and his first two marriages ended in failure.15 He was a prolific author (seven novels, numerous volumes of poetry, 3,000 reviews; he edited fifty volumes of literary classics and wrote 35,000 letters). Many of his works are autobiographical, none more so than Steppenwolf (Prairie Wolf ) which he began in the year The Magic Mountain appeared. It was published in 1928 and tells the story of Hans Haller (the same initials as Hesse himself), who leaves the manuscript of a book he has written to a chance aquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. When he reads the book (the book-within-the-book) the nephew finds that, magically, part of it is addressed directly to him. The book is about personality and human nature and whether we are one self or more than one and whether inner coherence is possible, even in principle.

  It was a theme eerily paralleled (but in a very different way) by Robert Musil. His three-volume work, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), the first volume of which was published in the same year as Steppenwolf, is for some people the most important novel in German written during the last century, eclipsing anything by Mann or Hesse.

  Born in Klagenfurt in 1880, Musil came from an upper-middle-class family, part of the Austrian “mandinarate.” He trained in science and engineering and wrote a thesis on Ernst Mach. The Man without Qualities is set in 1913 in the mythical country of “Kakania,” clearly Austro-Hungary, the name referring to Kaiserlich und Königlich, or K. u. K., standing for the royal kingdom of Hungary and the imperial-royal domain of the Austrian crown lands. The book, though daunting in length, is for many the most brilliant literary response to developments in other fields in the early twentieth century. There are three intertwined themes that provide a loose narrative. First, there is the search by the main character, Ulrich von…, a Viennese intellectual in his early thirties, whose attempt to penetrate the meaning of modern life involves him in a project to understand the mind of a murderer. Second, there is Ulrich’s relationship (and love affair) with his sister, with whom he had lost contact in childhood. Third, the book is a social satire on Vienna on the eve of World War I.16

  But the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalizations and talk about value, ethics, and aesthetics are meaningless, as Wittgenstein tells us, how are we to live? asks Musil. At one point Ulrich notes that the murderer is tall, with broad shoulders, that “his chest cavity bulged like a spreading sail on a mast,” but that on occasions he felt small and soft, like “a jelly-fish floating in the water” when he read a book that moved him. In other words, no one description, no one characteristic or quality, fits him. It is in this sense that he is a man without qualities: “We no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannises our lives.”

  Franz Kafka was also fascinated by what it means to be human and by the battle between science and ethics.17 In 1923, when he was thirty-nine, he realized a long-cherished ambition to move from Prague to Berlin (he was educated in the German language and spoke it at home). But he was in the Weimar Republic less than a year before the tuberculosis in his throat forced him to transfer to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died, aged forty-one.

  A slim, well-dressed man with a hint of the dandy about him, he had trained in law and worked successfully in insurance. The only clue to his inner unconventionality lay in the fact that he had three unsuccessful engagements, two of them to the same woman.

  Kafka is best known for three works of fiction, Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis; 1916), Der Prozess (The Trial; 1925; posthumous), and Das Schloss (The Castle; 1926; also posthumous). But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; he wrote ninety letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several of between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him.

  Although Kafka’s novels are ostensibly about very different subjects, they have some striking similarities, so much so that the cumulative effect of Kafka’s work is much more than the sum of its parts. Metamorphosis begins with one of the most famous opening lines in literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” If a man is turned into an insect, does this help him/us understand what it means to be human? In The Trial, Joseph K. (we never know his last name) is arrested and put on trial. Neither he nor the reader ever knows the nature of his offense, or by what authority the court is constituted, and therefore he and we cannot know if the death sentence is warranted. Finally, in The Castle K. (again, all we are told) arrives in a village to take up an appointment as land surveyor at the cast
le that towers above the village and whose owner owns all the houses there. However, K. finds that the castle authorities deny all knowledge of him, at least to begin with, and say he cannot even stay at the inn in the village. Characters contradict themselves, vary unpredictably in their attitudes to K., or lie. He never reaches the castle.

  An added difficulty with interpreting Kafka’s work is that he never completed any of his three major novels, though we know from his notebooks what he intended. He also told his friend Max Brod what he planned for The Castle, his most realized work. All three stories show a man not in control of himself, or of his life. In each case he is swept along, caught up in forces on which he cannot impose his will, where those forces—biological, psychological, logical—lead blindly. There is no development, no progress, as conventionally understood, and no optimism. It is bleak and chilling. W. H. Auden once said, “Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe have to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.” Eerily, he also prefigured the specific worlds that were soon to arrive: Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Reich.

  So too did Lion Feuchtwanger. It is a pity that he is less well known now than Mann, Kafka, Hesse, or even Musil. Quite apart from his books, his life was in some ways exemplary: he escaped twice, in two separate wars, as a POW.

  Born in Munich in 1884, the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, and a frequent traveler, Feuchtwanger found himself in 1914, at the outbreak of war, in Tunisia, then a French possession. He was imprisoned as an enemy alien but escaped, returned to Germany, and enlisted. His first real success was Jud Süss (translated as Power), an exploration of anti-Semitism. Written in 1921, it wasn’t published until 1925 because he couldn’t find a publisher, though it became an immediate success.