The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Hardly less multitalented was Ronald Grierson. Born Rolf Hans Griessmann in Nuremberg in 1921, educated at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris, he moved to London in 1936, and went to Balliol College, Oxford, but was interned before joining the army and seeing action in, among other places, North Africa, where he was mentioned in dispatches. After the war he was assigned to the Control Commission for Germany where his most delicate task was to persuade Konrad Adenauer out of his sulky retirement (Adenauer having been dismissed as mayor of Cologne). Later in the 1940s Grierson served at the fledgling United Nations, and at the European Commission in Brussels in the 1970s. He was a director of S. G. Warburg, chairman of the General Electric Company, and in 1984 took over as chairman of the South Bank Centre, the arts complex on the south side of the Thames in central London that houses the National Theatre, the National Film Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, and the Hayward Gallery. He found contemporary music by far the most contentious art issue he had to face: the Centre was charged by the government with presenting “challenging music,” but halls were often more than half empty. He was knighted in 1990.23

  Among the many German-born scholars who settled in Britain and made a name there we may include Max Born, George Steiner, Rudolf Wittkower, Edgar Wind, Marie Jahoda, Max Perutz, Peter Pulzer, and Richard Wollheim. Probably the most well known was Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations, his second masterpiece after the Tractatus, was published in 1953, two years after his death from cancer at the relatively young age of sixty-two. In this book one of his main arguments was that many philosophical problems, as construed, are in fact false problems, mainly because we are misled by language. For Wittgenstein, the concept of mind was unnecessary, and we need to be very careful how we think about the “brain.” It is the person who feels hope or disappointment, not his or her brain. Talk of “inner” and “outer” in regard to mental life is, for Wittgenstein, only metaphor.

  Wittgenstein’s book was part of the attack on Freud that was growing in the late 1950s and 1960s. Freud himself had died in London in 1939, soon after arriving from Vienna with his family. After Sigmund died, his daughter Anna, who had trained with her father, set up a Hampstead War Nursery, and later another clinic, to examine the effects of wartime stress (including being orphaned) on children.24 It was now that she came into conflict with another German-speaking female child psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein.

  Klein was also Jewish and had been in psychoanalysis with both Sandor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham.25 Born in Vienna in 1882, she too was interested in children and was invited to London by Ernest Jones. Klein had a rather unsatisfactory personal life, but she did have a sensitivity toward children and was the first to observe that a way into the thinking of disturbed infants can be through play, in particular their treatment of toys.26 This gave rise to her theory of object relations, which states that the ego settles into a characteristic way of facing the world, and that this inflexibility is the cause of many problems.

  She and Anna Freud had a long-running battle about the inner lives of children.27 Anna Freud discerned distinct developmental stages that children go through that affect the presentation of symptoms, whereas Melanie Klein saw mental life as, in general, an oscillation between depressive and manic phases.28 The two were never reconciled, and the British Psychoanalytic Society remains formally split in its training division into Kleinian, Anna Freudian, and Independent sections.

  Norbert Elias (1897–1990) was introduced earlier. In Germany, he moved in a circle that included Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Lowenthal, and Gershom Scholem, but the real influence on his life was Karl Mannheim, whose assistant he became at the University of Frankfurt. In 1933, when Mannheim’s institute was closed by the Nazis, Elias moved to Paris where he began his most well-known book, The Civilising Process. In 1935 he immigrated to Britain and met up with Mannheim, again becoming his assistant, this time at the LSE. By the outbreak of war, he had finished his magnum opus but was interned on the Isle of Man. The big break in his career did not come until much later, in 1969, with the republication of The Civilising Process.29 This traces the development in Europe of various forms of behavior—sexual behavior, table manners, bodily functions, forms of speech, and the relations between servants and their masters. Elias used documents, memoirs, and paintings as sources to show how etiquette at court spread out, how shame and repugnance developed and widened, and how self-restraint began to be praised as an aspect of democracy. His approach—once ignored—was now welcomed as central to the way psychology and the social sciences were developing, and the book was described by Richard Sennett as “Without doubt the most important piece of historical sociology since Max Weber.”30

  Like Elias, Ernest Gellner (1925–95) taught at the LSE and at Cambridge. He grew up in what Kafka called tri-cultural Prague, where he attended the English-language grammar school, a prescient move on the part of his father, for the family moved to Britain in 1939, and Ernest won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. Before taking his degree he went to serve with the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, taking part in the siege of Dunkirk. After Balliol, he moved to the LSE, subsequently becoming professor of philosophy, logic, and scientific method.

  He made his name with Words and Things (1959), a clever critique of Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, and other linguistic philosophers who, he thought, had been sloppy about their own methods. Ryle was so incensed he refused to have the book reviewed in Mind, the journal he edited. Bertrand Russell wrote to the London Times to complain, and the row went on for weeks. Among Gellner’s other books were Plough, Sword and Book (1988), in which he argued that there have been three great phases in history—hunting and gathering, agrarian production, and industrial production—and that these fit with the three great classes of human activity: production, coercion, and cognition. Probably his most important work after Words and Things was Nations and Nationalism (1983). Gellner had moved to Cambridge, and into social anthropology, in the 1960s, and he made it his business to study societies other than those in the West.31 After his retirement in 1993, he returned to Prague to head up a new Centre for the Study of Nationalism, funded by George Soros as part of the new Central European University. A mountaineer and enthusiastic beer drinker, his writing style was inimitable: “Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.”

  Although Kokoschka and Schwitters were the most famous mature painters to seek exile in Britain, Frank Auerbach, who was only eight when war broke out, has probably become the most well-known contemporary painter among émigrés, and one whose scumbling and heavy impasto technique is closest to the German Expressionist tradition. Born in Berlin, he was sent to Britain in 1939 by his parents, both of whom died in a concentration camp.32 In England he was sent to Bunce Court, a school for refugees in Kent run by Anna Essinger, a Quaker with a Jewish heritage (the school had itself transferred from Herrlingen in the Swabian Jura district). Auerbach was sponsored by the writer Iris Origo.

  Since his parents were dead, Auerbach stayed in Britain after the war, studying under David Bomberg, and becoming known for his scenes of industrial—or at least urban—inner London. Regarded as the most exciting “British” talent since Francis Bacon, Auerbach was given an Arts Council retrospective in 1978 and a major retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2001; he represented Britain in 1986 at the Venice Biennale, where he shared the Golden Lion prize with Sigmar Polke.33 It was reported in 2003 that he had turned down a knighthood.

  While none of the German émigrés in Britain earned the worldwide fame of, say Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich, Hannah Arendt, or Herbert Marcuse, they seemed overall happier in Britain than their counterparts did in the United States. Fewer went back to Germany, and they integrated themselves into British life more smoothly and completely, eventually occupying the high
er echelons of the traditional “establishment”—the BBC, Oxford, and Cambridge, and major cultural institutions such as Covent Garden and the British Museum. Was this because Britain, being a European country, was easier for them to understand? Was it because they had the opportunity to fight in some fashion, or were closer to the fighting, which helped them adjust? There is no American book like Helen Fry’s The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens, about Germans who fought for Britain, though undoubtedly many Germans in America did a lot for the war effort. Was the experience of internment in some way cleansing, too, in the sense that, although it was unpleasant while it lasted, it was a communal experience, people could see that—from a British point of view—it wasn’t entirely unreasonable and, important psychologically, that when it ended it was over? Many émigrés in Britain were there by 1940 and shared the darkest days with their hosts—did the experience of “coming through” affect their subsequent adjustment and loyalties?

  We can never be sure. What is certain is that the émigrés were much more influential than most Britons recognize.

  41.

  “Divided Heaven”: From Heidegger to Habermas to Ratzinger

  After the guns fell silent in Europe in May 1945, Germany was a wasteland, with millions of homeless and displaced people. George Orwell was in Cologne in March 1945 and wrote that to walk through the ruined city “is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.”1 Walter Gropius returned to Berlin on a visit in August 1947 and found the city little more than “a corpse” he recommended that the Americans build a new capital at Frankfurt am Main.2 Others felt the rubble should be left as rubble, a “monument to the obsoleteness of the Third Reich.” New housing was needed on an unprecedented scale—according to one account, some 6.5 million units had been destroyed.3 As Wolfgang Schivelbusch says, it was not just housing that was needed but a new vision. Did the country’s architects and planners re-create and restore what had been destroyed, or did they start afresh?

  They did both. In some areas—Munich, Freiburg, and Münster—they reconstructed what had been lost. In others—Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Cologne, and Frankfurt am Main—they started anew. Everywhere, however, they made use—ironically enough—of Albert Speer’s plans drawn up for the “Working Staff for the Reconstruction Planning of Bombed Cities.”4 Besides houses, theaters, concert halls, universities, and sports stadia all rose from the rubble, some more pleasing to the eye than others, such as the Expressionist Town Hall at Bensberg (Gottfried Böhm, 1962–67), or the Philharmonic Hall in Berlin itself (Hans Scharoun, 1956–63).5 The most remarkable building was Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel Neue Nationalgalerie, with austere lines where the paintings were displayed underground.6

  Amid this rubble and reconstruction, Berlin’s intellectual life enjoyed a short, sharp revival immediately after the end of the war as exiles returned, people who had been hiding underground dared to show their faces, and the Allies encouraged cultural life as something that was easier to rebuild than the fabric of bricks and stone. Brecht’s pithy aphorism for what went on was “Berlin: an etching of Churchill’s according to an idea of Hitler’s.”7

  The Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Revival of Germany), shortened inevitably to the Kulturbund, was licensed by the Russians and soon had a membership of 9,000, showing—if nothing else—the appetite for culture in the ruined city. At first the Kulturbund thought that Thomas Mann might become its figurehead, but he had been attacked in an open letter accusing him, in effect, of watching the war from a “comfortable” distance, and he therefore spurned all overtures. Instead, Gerhart Hauptmann, then aged seventy and living in Silesia, was approached, and he agreed to be honorary president. The Kulturbund mounted a series of concerts and lectures on contemporary music, and founded an organization to promote the sciences and humanities. But then it attracted unwelcome attention from the British authorities, who viewed it as a Russian-inspired communist organization, and it was closed.8

  Newspaper, radio, and film initiatives had to be licensed by the occupying powers, and one of the most interesting developments here was the decision to bring back Erich Pommer, the original force behind the Universum Film AG (UFA) productions of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He returned in July 1946 and was welcomed, in his own words, “like the coming of the Messiah.” A residence was made available for him in Berlin and he was given a personal servant. Hollywood objected vociferously—German films had been their main rival up until 1933—but agreement was eventually reached, both sides accepting the fact that their chief objective now would be to combat Soviet Cold War propaganda.9

  All of these initiatives were interrupted when, on July 24, 1948, the Soviet Union halted all road and rail traffic between Berlin and the West. This resulted in the famous airlift (Luftbrücke), which endured until September 30, 1949.* By then the Cold War was firmly in place, culminating in the summer of 1961 when the Berlin Wall was constructed. An important issue in postwar German culture was the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—overcoming (or coming to terms with) the past. This process was not helped by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s policy of employing former high-ranking Nazis in positions of authority if he felt they could help administer what was to become known as the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s and/or take part in the Cold War. Arguably the most disgraceful element in this direction was the fact that both the German and American governments knew that Adolf Eichmann had been living in Argentina since 1952 under the name Ricardo Clement and shielded him in case he made public information he possessed about figures such as Hans Globke, the author of a commentary on Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws and then a senior figure under Adenauer. The Israelis did not capture Eichmann until 1962.

  In these and other ways the exigencies of the Cold War continually interfered with the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

  Robert Conquest has made the point that the non-Nazi world was hindered in coming to grips with “Hitlerism” by the Soviet presence at Nuremberg. “It seems anomalous that one of the states passing judgement over Nazi Germany, as an aggressor, should itself have been expelled from the League of Nations six years previously on that charge.”10 However, the first full-length book that tried to ensure that Germans were forced to come to terms with their past did appear much sooner than anyone anticipated. Max Weinreich’s Hitler’s Professors:The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People appeared in March 1946, less than a year after the end of the war. Weinreich was born in Latvia in 1893 and studied German philology at Berlin and Marburg. After completing a doctorate on Yiddish, he eventually became director of the institution that was to evolve into the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna. Weinreich was at a conference in Brussels when Poland was annexed and, with difficulty, made his way to the United States. There, when he learned that Vilna had fallen under Soviet control as part of the Nazi-Russian partition of Poland, he set about re-creating YIVO in New York. These experiences made it natural for him to focus on the scholars under Hitler who had lent their good name and imprimatur to Nazi genocidal policies. In his book, Weinreich used 2,000 wartime publications, many of them secret until that point, and roamed among another 5,000 articles from within the Third Reich to identify, for example, “large-scale experimentation” as one of these policies, exposing how the Nazis made a science of the ghetto, how they had developed their concepts of “folk” and “space,” the developments in “racial science,” the scientific aspects of the death factories, and many of the matters discussed in Chapter 35, of this book, on “Nazi Scholarship.” Since the Wall came down in 1989, many other scholars have added to what Weinreich initially reported, but he set the scene, and his book is today rightly regarded as a classic.

  Siegfried Kracauer also spent the war years in New York, where he met up again with his Weimar Republic colleague Theodor Adorno. After his groundbreaking study o
f 1930, Die Angestellten (The Salaried Classes), covered in Chapter 31, he had—being Jewish—moved to Paris in 1933 and then on to the United States, where he worked at the Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. This led to his groundbreaking book of film criticism, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), in which he sought—and found—parallels between film, history, and the politics of the Weimar period that to an extent explained, he thought, the advent of Hitler. Kracauer, and later Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen (1955), which examined the aesthetics of cinema in the Weimar Republic, both argued that the background threat in the Weimar films is chaos (represented in Caligari by the circus), in which a tyrannical figure (Caligari) is redemptive.11 Kracauer also looked at the other main films of the period, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel, and he widened his argument that the “screen of Weimar” was a ground on which the “German catastrophe” could be understood. In particular, he saw slapstick comedy as a metaphor for flirting with power and danger in which the comedian always escapes the grip of power but by chance alone; he retains his liberty, but the threat remains. Kracauer’s book also became a classic, though the chance discovery of the original script of Caligari and other recent initiatives of scholarship have called into question its main theme as to whether films can be said to hold quite such a straightforward link to the imagination, and to politics, as he said.12