The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Most of all, Benda saw a change in the behavior of intellectuals, creative people, scientists, and philosophers. Before the nineteenth century, he said, people of the character of Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Erasmus, Kant, Thomas Aquinas, Kepler, Descartes, Roger Bacon, Pascal, and Leibniz “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” Now, he said, it was very different. “Today, if we mention Mommsen, Treitschke, Ostwald, Brunetière, Barrès, Lemaître, Péguy, Maurras, d’Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the ‘clerks’ now exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion—the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas.”27 In descending to the level of the rest of the public, Benda thought these men were betraying what they—or their predecessors—had stood for. They were not acting like Socrates or Jesus, but like the mob.

  Benda was anxious to show that this betrayal had occurred not just in Germany—indeed, as a Frenchman his chief focus was the French, but he extended his arguments from France to Germany, Italy, Britain, and America, more or less in that order, and he thought that German intellectuals had been especially culpable in World War I, in particular in regard to the Manifesto of the 93 (see Chapter 29). “We know how systematically the mass of German teachers in the past fifty years have announced the decline of every civilization but that of their own race, and how in France the admirers of Nietzsche or Wagner, even of Kant or Goethe, were treated by Frenchmen…”28

  Although he excoriated his fellow French in this regard, Benda did think that German intellectuals had “led the way in this adhesion of the modern ‘clerk’ to patriotic fanaticism.” He thought it had begun with Lessing, Schlegel, and Fichte, who were “organising in their hearts a violent adoration for ‘everything German,’ and a scorn for everything not German. The nationalist ‘clerk’ is essentially a German invention.”29

  Although he blamed novelists, dramatists, and artists equally, he reserved particular venom for historians, “German historians of the past half century and the French Monarchists of the past twenty years.” “‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master, ‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of Germany.’” The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it) for having written a Roman history “which becomes a history of Germany with Roman names.” And the philosophers were hardly better. “Fichte and Hegel made the triumph of the German world the supreme and necessary end of the development of Being…”30 Not even the French could compete here, he said. The German historians, says Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, onetime director of the French school in Athens, “urge their nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity. The French moralist does not lag behind…” What had ruined Germany in World War I, Benda felt, was that its material strength was not equal to the arrogance that had been bred by this intellectual nationalism. The Germans, too, he said, were responsible for the cult of the powerful state. The learned had divinized politics.31

  The most important effect in all this, Benda thought, and it was a profound point, was that the military life and war, fought inevitably with nationalist aims in mind, became attached to morality rather than utility.32 Courage, honor, and harshness came to be extolled by the learned—even, in the case of Nietzsche, cruelty (“Every superior culture is built upon cruelty”). Another cult, the cult of the will (of the successful will, of course), had arisen, supported by “everyone in Germany since Hegel” and by many in France “since de Maistre.”33

  All this, said Benda, was in the ascendancy, whereas the passion of the learned to understand, the desire to be universal or objective, had, since Nietzsche and Sorel, been derided. Several French writers had insisted, he said, that people interested in purely intellectual things were “inferior to soldiers…A whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense, i.e., as opposed to the intelligence) and has proclaimed it in the name of the practical spirit, because the instinct and not the intelligence knows what we ought to do—as individuals, as a nation, as a class—to secure our own advantage.”34 For him, this all amounted to a “prodigious” decline in morality, a “sort of (very Germanic) intellectual sadism.”35

  He concluded that the battle was over. “Today…humanity is national. The layman has won…The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to the nation as much as the day-labourer and the merchant. Those who make the world’s values, make them for a nation…All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.” Then, in Chapter 5 (and remember this was first published in 1927), “This humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes.”36

  These are not all of Benda’s arguments and I have made the book seem to be more about Germany than it was.37 He was no less harsh in his treatment of the French than of the Germans, but this makes his arguments less nationalistic than would have otherwise been the case, and therefore more equable. Nonetheless, Benda made it clear he thought this “treason” had originated in Germany and spread to other countries, notably France, from there. Several of his points—the divinization of politics, the elevation of the will, the understanding of war as an instrument of morality, not utility, the downplaying of objectivity—had an uncomfortable resonance with what came later.

  PART V

  SONGS OF THE REICH: HITLER AND THE “SPIRITUALIZATION OF THE STRUGGLE”

  34.

  Nazi Aesthetics: The “Brown Shift”

  On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Six weeks later, on March 15, the first blacklist of artists was published. George Grosz, visiting the United States, was stripped of his German citizenship. The Bauhaus was closed. Max Liebermann (then aged eighty-eight) and Käthe Kollwitz (sixty-six), Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and Oskar Schlemmer were all dismissed from their posts as teachers in art schools. A few weeks later the first exhibition defaming modern art—called “Chamber of Horrors”—was held in Nuremberg, then traveled to Dresden and Dessau. These facts and events, and many others like them, are well known now, but they still have the power to shock. Four days before these dismissals took place, the Reich’s Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda was announced, with Joseph Goebbels as minister.

  These brutal actions did not come out of the blue, however. Hitler had always been clear that if and when the Nazi Party formed a government, there would be “accounts to settle” with a wide range of enemies. Artists were foremost among these “enemies.” In a 1930 letter to Goebbels, he insisted that when the party came to power, it would not be simply a “debating society” so far as art was concerned. The party’s policies, laid out in the manifesto as early as 1920, called for a “struggle” against the “tendencies in the arts and literature which exercise a disintegrating influence on the life of the people.” 1

  Some artists—like many scientists, philosophers, and musicians—seeing which way the wind was blowing, attempted to align themselves with the Nazis, but Goebbels was having none of it. For a time he and Alfred Rosenberg competed for the right to set policy in the cultural/ intellectual sphere, but the propaganda minister sidelined his rival as soon as an official Chamber for Arts and Culture came into being under his control. Its powers were formidable—every artist was forced to join a government-sponsored professional body, and unless they registered, they were forbidden from exhibiting in museums and from receiving commissions. Goebbels further stipulated that there were to be no public exhibitions of art without official approval. In a speech to the party’s annual meeting in September 1934, Hitler emphasized “two cultural dangers” that threatened National Socialism. On the one hand were the modernists, the “spoilers of art”—identified specifically as “the cubists, futuri
sts and Dadaists.”2 What he and the German people wanted, Hitler said, was a German art that was “clear,” “without contortion,” and “without ambiguity.” Art was not “auxiliary to politics,” he insisted. It must become a “functioning part” of the Nazi political program. From May 1936 all artists registered with the Reichskammer had to prove their Aryan ancestry. In October that year the National Gallery in Berlin was ordered to close its modern art galleries, and in November Goebbels outlawed all “unofficial art criticism.” From then on only the reporting of art events was allowed.

  Some artists protested—Ernst Kirchner that he was “neither a Jew nor a Social Democrat,” Max Pechstein that he had fought for Germany on the Western Front in World War I, that his son was a member of the SA, Emil Nolde that he had been a member of the Party since 1920—but it was all in vain. Some protested in their art—Otto Dix portraying Hitler as “Envy” in his 1933 painting The Seven Deadly Sins, and Max Beckmann caricaturing the chancellor as a Verführer, or “seducer.” Many artists realized they had little choice but to emigrate, Kurt Schwitters to Norway, Paul Klee to Switzerland, Lyonel Feininger to the United States, Beckmann to the Netherlands, and Ludwig Meidner to Britain.3

  As has been seen, the closure of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg actually preceded that of the Bauhaus, with the Frankfurt school the next to go. Most members of the school were not only Jewish but also openly Marxist. According to Martin Jay in his history of the school, its endowment was moved out of Germany in 1931, to the Netherlands, thanks to the foresight of the director, Max Horkheimer. Foreign branches had already been set up in Geneva, Paris, and London (the latter at the London School of Economics). Shortly after Hitler assumed power in March 1933, Horkheimer quietly crossed the border into Switzerland, only days before the school was closed down for “tendencies hostile to the state.” The building on Victoria-Allee was confiscated, as was the library of 60,000 volumes. Only days after he escaped, Horkheimer was formally dismissed, together with Paul Tillich and Karl Mannheim. Horkheimer and his deputy, Friedrich Pollock, went to Geneva, and so did Erich Fromm. Offers of employment were received from France, initiated by Henri Bergson and Raymond Aaron. Theodor Adorno meanwhile went to Merton College, Oxford, where he remained from 1934 to 1937. Pollock and Horkheimer made visits to London and New York to sound out the possibilities of transferring there. They received a much more optimistic reception at Columbia University and so, by the middle of 1934, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was reconstituted at 429 West 117th Street. It remained there until 1950.

  The migration of the Vienna Circle was perhaps less traumatic than that of other scholars. Thanks to the pragmatic tradition in America, not a few philosophers there were sympathetic to what the logical positivists were saying, and several of the Circle crossed the Atlantic in the late 1920s or early 1930s to lecture and meet like-minded colleagues. They were helped by a group known as Unity in Science, philosophers and scientists searching for the constancies from one discipline to another. This international group held meetings all over Europe and North America. Then, in 1936, A. J. Ayer, the British philosopher, published Language, Truth and Logic, a brilliantly lucid account of logical positivism that popularized its ideas still more in America, making members of the circle especially welcome there. Herbert Feigl was the first to go, to Iowa in 1931; Rudolf Carnap went to Chicago in 1936, taking Carl Hempel and Olaf Helmer with him. Hans Reichenbach followed in 1938, establishing himself at UCLA. A little later, Kurt Gödel accepted a research position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and so joined Einstein and Erwin Panofsky.

  On May 2, 1938, Hitler signed his will. In it he ordered that, upon his death, his body was to be taken to Munich—to lie in state at the Feldherrnhalle and to be buried nearby.* Even more than Linz, where he had been at school and grown up, Munich was home to him.4 In Mein Kampf, Hitler described the city as “this metropolis of German art,” adding that “one does not know German art if one has not seen Munich.” Here the climax of his quarrel with the artists took place in 1937.

  On July 18 that year, Hitler opened the Haus der deutschen Kunst, the House of German Art, in Munich, with nearly 900 paintings and pieces of sculpture by such Nazi favorites as Arno Breker, Josef Thorak, and Adolf Ziegler.5 There were portraits of Hitler as well as Hermann Hoyer’s In the Beginning Was the Word, a nostalgic view of the Führer “consulting his colleagues” during the early days of the Nazi Party. One critic, mindful that speculative criticism was now outlawed and only reporting allowed, disguised his criticism in reportage: “Every single painting on display projected…the impression of an intact life from which the stresses and problems of modern existence were entirely absent—and there was one glaringly obvious omission—not a single canvas depicted urban and industrial life.”

  On the day the exhibition opened, Hitler delivered a ninety-minute speech in which he reassured Germany that “cultural collapse” had been arrested and the vigorous classical-Teutonic tradition revived. Art was very different from fashion, he insisted. “Every year, something new. One day Impressionism, then Futurism, Cubism, and maybe even Dadaism.” No, he insisted, art “is not founded on time, but only on peoples.” Race—the blood—was all. What did it mean to be German? It meant, he said, “to be clear.” Art is for the people, and the artist must present what the people see—“not blue meadows, green skies, sulphur-yellow clouds and so on.” There can be no place for “pitiful unfortunates, who obviously suffer from some eye disease.” 6

  This time there was criticism of a sort, albeit in a disguised way. The very next day, July 19, in the Municipal Archaeological Institute, across town in Munich, the notorious exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) opened. This displayed work by 112 German and non-German artists, 27 Noldes, 8 Dixes, 61 Schmidt-Rottluffs, 17 Klees, plus works by Gauguin, Picasso, and others. The paintings and sculptures had been plundered from museums all over Germany, and this exhibition surely ranks as one of the most infamous ever held. Even the Führer was taken aback by the way some of the exhibits were presented. Kirchner’s Peasants at Midday was labeled “German Peasants as Seen by the Yids” Ernst Barlach’s statue The Reunion, which showed the recognition of Christ by Saint Thomas, was labeled, “Two Monkeys in Nightshirts.”

  If Hitler thought that he had killed off modern art, he was mistaken. Over the four months that Entarte Kunst remained in Munich, more than 2 million people visited the show, far more than the thin crowds that drifted through the House of German Art. This was small consolation for the artists, many of whom found the exhibition heartbreaking. Nolde wrote yet again to Goebbels, demanding that “the defamation against me cease.” Beckmann was more realistic; on the day the show opened he took himself off into exile.

  Yet another retroactive law, the degenerate art law of May 1938, was passed, enabling the government to seize “degenerate” art in museums without compensation. Some of the pictures were sold for derisory sums at a special auction held at the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne; there were even some that the Nazis deemed too offensive to sell and these were burned at a great bonfire in Berlin in March 1938.7

  A different meaning of degeneration was fixed by Victor Klemperer (1881–1960), a Jewish professor of French literature at Dresden, who lived in Germany throughout the Third Reich, protected by friends. He kept a detailed account of the Nazis’ use of language and showed, inter alia, how the word Sturm (storm), which had been the name of a (now banned) Expressionist art magazine, was appropriated as a hierarchical military term. Schutzstaffel (Protection Echelon) was soon reduced to abbreviations, SS and SA, “which became so satisfied with themselves that they were no longer really abbreviations at all,” with official typewriters being fitted with special keys showing the angular SS character.8 Elsewhere, among many other examples, sunshine became “Hitler weather,”* and Klemperer noted that in the university physics department the Hertz unit of frequency could not be referred to in that way because Hertz’s father’s family was Jewish.
Just occasionally, he notes that the Nazi use of language gave him hope: whenever German troops were reported to be fighting “valiantly,” they were losing. 9