by Peter Watson
THE GERMAN SYNDROME
In 1961 the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer published a book dealing with Germany’s aims in World War I. This was referred to in Chapter 29, when it was explained that, according to Fischer, at an infamous “war council” in December 1912, Kaiser Wilhelm II and his military advisers “had made a decision to trigger a major war by the summer of 1914 and to use the intervening months to prepare the country for this settling of account.” More than that—and this is what makes the book important in the context of this discussion—Fischer suggested lines of continuity between German aims in the two world wars. This was too much for some fellow historians. Gerhard Ritter, for example, “angrily denied” the possibility of comparisons between Bethmann Hollweg and Hitler, between German foreign policy before 1914 and in the 1930s, between Bismarck’s Imperial Germany and Hitler’s Third Reich.13 Fischer played up the role of the actors in the drama at the expense of anonymous economic and social forces and in so doing set alight a debate inside Germany about its past that, until then, had received more attention from Germans in exile, mainly across the Atlantic in America.
Within Germany, birth date came to matter. Those born in or after 1929 were regarded as innocent, part of the weisse Jahrgänge, the “white generation.” Günter Grass (born in 1927), Martin Walser (1927), and Kurt Sontheimer (1928) thus formed part of the Third Reich, however minimally, but not Jürgen Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (all born in 1929). The sociologist Helmut Schelsky was generally held to be correct when he identified these latter as a “skeptical generation,” the first perhaps to overcome the traditional German “chasm” that had pitted a realm of “pure” culture against the “shallow and sordid world of politics.”14 In many people’s minds, the Third Reich—at least the 1933–42 period—was still associated with “good times” and separated from the Holocaust and its “discovery,” 1941–48, which was negative and traumatic.15
Several other studies on topics not unrelated to the Fischer affair appeared at the time. Among them were Wilhelm Röpke’s Die deutsche Frage(1945), Leonard Krieger’s The German Idea of Freedom (1957), Franz Neumann’s The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (1957), Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (1959), Helmuth Plessner’s Die verspätete Nation (1959), Friedrich A. von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), Gerhard Ritter’s Das deutsche Problem (1962), and Hermann Eich’s The Unloved Germans (1963). Georg Lukács’s Die Zerstörung der Venunft (1962), and Ralf Dahrendorf’s Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland (1965) stand out, however.
Lukács’s book, which has been translated as The Destruction of Reason, looked at “the path to Hitler in philosophy” and was among the first to tread what would become a well-known path, from Ludwig Gumplowicz and Houston Stewart Chamberlain to Wilhelm Dilthey, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber and Oswald Spengler to Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Carl Schmitt. Lukács was among the first to remark on Germany’s “delayed” status in capitalist development, on the misère among German intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their cultural pessimism. He attributed this to, first, the Idealism of Kant, “which gave intuition a good name,” culminating, he said, in a form of vitalism that, among other things, prevented the far more rational and scientific Marxism from taking hold in Germany, where the “class struggle” was different from that elsewhere. Philosophically, Germany embraced the Goethe-Schopenhauer-Wagner-Nietzsche route (Lukács reserved special scorn for Nietzsche) rather than the more “enriching” path of Lessing, Heine, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach to Marx and Engels. Lukács claimed to see irrationalism taking hold in the United States after World War II and this, combined with his argument that Leninism-Marxism was a “higher intellectual stage,” at a time when Stalin’s Great Terror was becoming known, somewhat vitiated his arguments.
Dahrendorf’s book, translated as Society and Democracy in Germany, on the other hand, was less polemical and had the merit of considering most of the arguments in the other titles and of using recent sociological and survey work to confirm or contradict their theses.16
Born in Hamburg in 1929, Dahrendorf was the son of a Social Democratic member of parliament in the Weimar Republic. His education at the University of Hamburg bridged the traditional and the modern—he read classical philology and sociology. He took his PhD in 1956 at the London School of Economics, and thereafter his career straddled the academic world and practical politics. In 1969–70 he became a member of the German parliament and was subsequently appointed a commissioner to the European Commission in Brussels. After that, he returned to the LSE as director and then became warden of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, taking British citizenship and being elevated to Britain’s House of Lords. He died in 2009.
In his book, Dahrendorf set out to answer what he called “the German Question”: Why is it that so few in Germany embraced the principle of liberal democracy? He went on: “There is a conception of liberty that holds that man can be free only where an experimental attitude to knowledge, the competition of social forces, and liberal political institutions are combined. This conception has never really gained a hold in Germany. Why not? That is the German Question.”
He began by highlighting some important differences between Germany’s industrialization and the parallel (or not so parallel) process in other countries. He noted, for instance, that German industrial enterprises tend to be much bigger than those in Britain (three times as big in terms of capitalization), and that one result of this was that, “instead of developing it, industrialisation in Germany swallowed the liberal principle.” This led him to conclude that, “Contrary to the beliefs of many, the industrial revolution is not the prime mover of the modern world at all.”17 The industrial sector was so large in Germany that it formed an alliance with the state, and “there was no place in these structures for a sizeable, politically self-confident bourgeoisie.”18
He traced the origin of the idea, first popularized by Tönnies, that the original human Gemeinschaft is threatened by an artificial Gesellschaft, and found it unlikely that “a sweet community of minds” ever existed.19 In a section headed “The nostalgia for synthesis,” he argued that the Germans harbored different attitudes toward conflict than did some other modern nations, and that “different attitudes to conflict imply different interpretations of the human condition.”20
In a section on universities, he drew parallels between science and politics—both were open-ended and their direction could (and should) not be forced along any single path—their unexpectedness was part of their point. Central to this was the experimental attitude, which he felt at times was in Germany compromised by the idea of Wissenschaft, embracing scholarship in general, in which philosophical speculation was at the center of things. He felt it symptomatic of Germany that the experimental sciences eventually left the universities at the turn of the twentieth century and found their home in the Kaiser Wilhelm Societies. Instead, the “inner freedom” of scholarly inquiry triumphed in the universities, which, he said, allowed the scholar to work in peace. On the other hand, “the experimental sciences necessarily require the political freedom that permits publicity and exchange.” He concluded there were two notions of science, the experimental and the German, and this to him was crucial. “Knowledge by conflict corresponds to government by conflict…At any given time, a lively conflict of minds provides the market of science with the best possible result of knowledge.”21 On the other hand, “knowledge in the sense of both speculation and understanding [the German way] does not require debate.” This resulted, he said, in a particularly German idea of truth, not one battered out by public debate, after a set of experimental results, but instead a way to “certain knowledge” available “at least for the chosen few” (i.e., the experts).
In politics, he drew attention to Max Weber’s idea of charismatic leadership—a popular idea in Germany—as, once again, a
process of harmony rather than competition or conflict.22 He noted that in Germany, the “intellectual upper class” was more highly regarded than the “economic upper class” but that it was precisely these people who had undergone “inner emigration” during the Third Reich—again an internalization of their opposition, rather than public statement or action.23
He found the idea that the German was unpolitical to be untrue, in the sense that the public’s participation in general elections had risen steadily from around 50 percent in 1871 to around 88 percent in 1961, and a recent survey had shown that nearly two-fifths of students had a “conscious commitment to politics.” But he found the other three-fifths more interesting. The survey showed that they lived very different lives from their more committed colleagues—they valued their family life, their privacy, their detachment from the public virtues. From this he concluded that, in the early 1960s, “the political socialisation of the German is incomplete…Democratic institutions are accepted; but they remain external, distant, ultimately irrelevant…The German is unpolitical because the political is unimportant for him; he is authoritarian because he would much prefer not to be drawn out of the ‘freedom’ of his four walls.”24
All of which comprised for Dahrendorf the German syndrome. He further justified his analysis by referring to the suddenness with which the German voters turned to the National Socialists (2.6 percent of the vote in 1928, 43.9 percent in 1933): the syndrome produced an explosive mix, the “extremism of the centre.” This, together with the failure of a counter-elite to emerge to challenge the National Socialists, was both the explanation for the rise of Hitler, and a diagnosis of the German Question. Had a proper liberal elite existed in Germany, he said, the Nazis might have been stopped.
Dahrendorf made quite a bit of universities in the development of modern scholarship, science, and the division between the private world and the public. The role of Germany’s academics in its modern history was the specific subject of Fritz Ringer’s 1969 book, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933.25
Ringer (1934–2006), born in Germany, immigrated to the United States in 1947, graduated from Amherst in 1956, received his PhD from Harvard in 1961, and became a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Part of his argument was preempted by Frederic Lilge’s much shorter work, The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of the German University (1948). Lilge, a professor at Berkeley, argued that the flowering of German humanism under the influence of Wilhelm Humboldt and others such as Schelling, Fichte, F. A. Wolf, and Schleiermacher had been all too brief, that the idealism and strength of German scholarship had begun to falter as early as 1837 when a group of seven academics at Göttingen (the Göttingen Seven), who regarded themselves as “the conscience of the country” and who protested the abolition and alteration of the Constitution of Hanover, had been dismissed. He thought the development of science, the introduction of laboratories, and the increasing specialization they represented further sabotaged the original idea of humanistic scholarship, that “hard” scientists soon developed a contempt for Idealism and Idealists, resulting in the isolation of science from philosophy, “and it remained a powerful discord in German intellectual life for the rest of the century.” This isolation was all the greater after 1870–71, when governments everywhere saw the value of science in a military context.26 In the end, Lilge felt, research became just an occupation, making reflection difficult and turning scholarship into drudgery, which could do no more than energize the small coterie of specialists to which they appealed. Lilge believed this was one of the reasons the ideas of people like Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Oswald Spengler caught on—these were men outside the universities with big, consistent systems of thought that appealed to people’s need for coherence, if not certainty.27 With the successful advent of science, Bildung had been forgotten.
Lilge’s short book was pithy, but its arguments were a little too neat and left out a great deal. Fritz Ringer’s book, though it had a similar theme, was altogether more convincing. Building on Julien Benda’s arguments in The Treason of the Learned (see Chapter 33), on Lilge, and on Dahrendorf, Ringer began by emphasizing that the non-noble bureaucrat in Prussia “represented an extreme which was equalled nowhere else in Europe.” Learning, in Prussia, he said, was an ideal that could function as an “honorific substitute” for nobility of birth in a context where “learning means spiritual ‘cultivation.’”28 The administrative and professional classes drew together in the nineteenth century to produce “a kind of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy,” involving not only specialized knowledge but also “general cultivation,” to define a distinctive elite.29
Ringer’s main theme, however, was that this elite began to decline in importance—both socially and intellectually—after 1890 and was in crisis in the 1920s, just before the advent of Hitler. The “Mandarins,” as he called the joint community of bureaucrats and professoriate, saw itself being overtaken by the new financial and entrepreneurial groups, so that a new disillusioned, displaced alliance was formed in Germany between the rentiers, professional people, academics, and the artisans and petty clerks. This was shown most clearly by the striking statistic that, in 1913, the German higher official earned seven times as much as an unskilled laborer, and in 1922 only twice as much.30 Ringer traced the Mandarin tradition, via the Aufklärung, Pietism, the concept of Bildung (“the single most important tenet of the mandarin tradition”), the humanism of the Humboldtian university, Idealism and the historicist tradition, the difference in meaning between Wissenschaft and science, all of which underlined that a university education was intended to be “spiritually ennobling rather than a narrowly utilitarian influence.”31
Gradually, however, the cultivated elite began to assume a more defensive position, which made them more and more conservative. They became more concerned to defend German cultural traditions, especially as World War I approached, “feeling that a counterweight to the English was needed in this field.”32 They felt that national greatness came through cultural creativity and “could see no point in material prosperity, if it interfered with these objectives, if it did not create the preconditions for the fullest possible self-development of the individual.”33 There was a persistent interest among the mandarins in a strong presidency at the head of the Republic, because even after World War I—indeed, especially after it—they looked for a leader who would return Germany to “a natural aristocracy based on culture and capability, intellect and spirit,” to counter the “shallowness” of materialist, interest politics.34
The consequence of these forces was that the German universities, especially in the 1920s, “became strongholds of right-wing opposition to the new regime.” In particular, anti-modernity and anti-Semitism joined forces.35 There was a return in the 1920s to the attack on specialization and empiricism and a search for synthesis, unity in scholarship, and a form of thinking that was neither Marxist nor socialist but “German socialist,” in effect “a metaphysics of reaction” with vague new concepts such as Volk and Reich, in which one important element was “voluntary submission to the community.” The German university professors, said Ringer, felt themselves involved in a genuine tragedy in which “Geist and its representatives had lost control of society.”36 No one knew, he said, how this division between Geist and politics had come about, but it generated a kind of self-pity among the mandarins, which often turned to hysteria and sometimes to hate. Ringer thought that intellectuals in France and elsewhere also agonized over these problems, but that the general anxiety was at its most intense in Germany. One of the problems was that so many of the mandarins—Scheler, Meinecke, and Spranger, for example—felt that only a small minority, an elite, was capable of benefiting from and expressing the great tradition. As Karl Jaspers put it, “all standards had been sacrificed in an effort to accommodate a mass of mediocre minds.”37 These efforts at bringing knowledge together in the search for meaning, for overall coherence, became known as th
e “Synthesis Movement.”38
The result, Ringer affirms, was a certain uncomfortable form of anti-intellectualism in Weimar Germany, at least in some quarters, and this allowed the National Socialists to profit. Because they had lost the economic fight, and then the fight for the hearts and minds of the general population, the mandarins put up little resistance to the Nazis. German Idealism had been weakened by the onslaught of materialism and positivism and specialization, and purely technological thinking “had destroyed the link between knowledge and cultivation.” Ringer concluded that “Hitler’s hordes” had only completed (and accelerated) something that was happening anyway.
Norbert Elias, in a series of publications set out over the decades but centered on 1969, argued that the inherent conflict in Germany concerned the satisfaktionfähige Gesellschaft, a term difficult to translate but referring to a society oriented around a code of honor in which dueling and the demanding and giving of “satisfaction” took pride of place. The effect of this, he says, was to brutalize a large section of the middle class, setting them against the Bildungsbürgertum and converting them from a humanist orientation to a nationalist orientation. They formed the bulk of the World War I officers who established the paramilitary Freikorps in the Weimar Republic, producing an insistent background noise of violence which helped to destabilize the 1920s.
The long-term effects of this, he felt, were manifold: their very existence, and the role they played, made a positive self-image of middle-class Germans very difficult to maintain; with their greater concern for honor rather than for morals, conscience formation in Germany was weaker than among her neighbors; there was a more pronounced gap among Germans than among other Europeans between ideals and identity, making them more prone (as Ringer and others had said) to self-pity. Later, partly because of this, they tolerated the unrealistic plans and policies of National Socialists more than would otherwise have been the case.39
