The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  The final nail in the coffin that is modern culture was for Weber the fact that most people worked too hard and too long, so that they had no time—and no inclination after a day’s work—to come to grips with the modern condition and sort out, for themselves, how best to experience the world, to address the question, “What Comes Next?”20

  There is clearly a heavy overlap between Weber and Nietzsche. Each had a common core of things to say about the terrors built into the modern world, and each amplified what the other was saying. Weber was, if anything, marginally less pessimistic than his near contemporary. His way of writing implied that the modern world could at least be renounced, whereas Nietzsche, by and large, thought there was nothing to be done. Heidegger’s concepts of “submitting” to the world as it is, or “caring” for it, rather than controlling it, take up Weber’s challenge, as did Marcuse and his idea of “the great refusal.”

  But it should now be plain to what extent we are indeed living in a post-Nietzschean, post-Weberian nihilistic world—for example, in the realm of contemporary high art, where the only criteria by which it is now judged is by newness, where the big auctions have all the qualities of a game, and collecting has become for so many a form of salvation. The world of fashion, where again the defining criterion is sheer newness, is another nihilistic aspect of the modern world. In all these realms, money is a prominent feature.

  But, in a sense, these are peripheral. To what extent, we may ask, were the terrible brutalities of the twentieth century carried out by nihilists who, since they could see no moral purpose to the world, could see no objections to the cruelties they inflicted? Hannah Arendt said that terror lay at the root of totalitarianism, and nihilism is surely the greatest terror there is.

  Furthermore, beyond the nihilistic horrors of Fascism and Stalinism and Maoism, there is another way our lives have been affected—and are still affected—by the cold, empty, bleak landscape Nietzsche and Weber identified. This takes us back again to Freud. The vast majority of people have almost certainly never read Nietzsche or Weber. But, just as Alfred Kazin said that people who had never heard of Freud had nevertheless been influenced by him, so the same is true of those who have never heard of Nietzsche or Weber.

  Despite the great economic earthquake that took place in the late summer and early autumn of 2008, we still live in a world of unprecedented prosperity and comfort—at least, many of us do in the West. Even the worst off in the developed world are cushioned from absolute material degradation by a welfare state. And yet—and it is revealing that it is a commonplace to say so—we are surrounded by criminal violence, drug abuse, child abuse, high-school massacres, gangland vendettas, piracy on the high seas, organized prostitution, and sexual slavery. There are more people in prison and in mental hospitals than ever before, vandalism is widespread, and alcoholism is rampant. It is not too much to say that these are all responses, however inchoate, to the nihilistic existential landscape of modern life, by people who, though they may never have read Nietzsche or Weber, nevertheless recognize, or experience, or feel themselves trapped in the empty, cold, bleak terrain these German speakers identified. The incoherence of their response is part of the condition.

  This surely helps explain why Freud has had the impact he has. In recent years he has come under sustained attack, justifiably so, for fabricating evidence, falsifying his early “cures” and being, generally, wrong. But, in the context of this discussion, that is to misconstrue him. Contemporaneously with Nietzsche and Weber (and too little has been made of this), as they were diagnosing the predicament of modern life, Freud was finding, or inventing, or stumbling across, a solution to that predicament. Psychoanalysis, therapy, “talking cures,” are misconceived if they are understood simply or mainly as a way to treat neurosis and other forms of mental illness (and this is why, generally speaking, they have been judged a failure in that regard). What Freud set in train with The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the very year Nietzsche died, was a method by which people could use their individual histories so as to reconstruct meaning into their lives, a way—however tendentious, hypothetical, abstract, clinically suspect—they could relate to the fragmentation and sheer emptiness of the modern world around them. The fact that therapy is so much a part of our lives (even very young lives) emphasizes that we are inhabiting a Nietzschean, nihilistic world.

  THE FIRST XI OF MODERN HISTORY

  To repeat: Kant, Humboldt, Marx, Clausius, Mendel, Nietzsche, Planck, Freud, Einstein, Weber, Hitler—for good or ill, can any other nation boast a collection of eleven (or even more) individuals who compare with these figures in regard to the enduring influence they have had on modern ways of thought? I suggest not. But the German genius is not just a matter of numbers. In the Introduction, several pages were devoted to a question that many people have found—and still find—fascinating, obsessive even, namely whether German history went through a Sonderweg, a special path which, necessarily, was destined to result in the horrors and excesses of National Socialism and the Holocaust. To my knowledge, no one has explored in any scholarly way, and in an overall sense, whether there is a systematic relationship between political history and cultural history. However, looking at modern German culture, as this book has been designed to do (using “culture” in its Franco-Anglo-American sense, rather than the German sense of Kultur), and bringing that cultural history right up to date—looking at its achievements after the Holocaust as well as before, beyond Hitler in both directions—one may conclude that there were several features of that culture that may be construed as, if not necessarily leading to catastrophe, then at least helping to explain why what happened in Germany happened there when it did.

  Of course, no explanation is ever a complete explanation. But the argument here is that there were five distinct yet interlocking aspects of modern German culture that, as a group, accounted for both its dazzling brilliance and its shocking demise.

  AN EDUCATED MIDDLE CLASS

  Conventional wisdom, especially conventional wisdom since Marx, has it that societies are most usefully understood as being divided into three levels or classes: the aristocracy, the middle classes, and the proletariat or working class. It should now be clear, however, that the educated middle class has very little in common with the rest of the middle class and certainly, in Germany, may historically be considered a separate entity. Indeed, the educated middle class is middle class only in the classically Marxist sense that its mode of production is that of neither the aristocracy nor the laboring classes. Yet the educated middle class—inhabiting the world of scholarship, the arts and humanities, science, the legal, medical, and religious professions—has very little in common with, for example, organized labor, shopkeepers and retailers, industrialists, or financiers, either in terms of motivation, aspiration or, indeed, everyday interests and activities. These differences were more marked in the nineteenth century, but it is clear from what has gone before that Germany was the first country to boast an educated middle class of any size and that this was all important for its emergence as a great power.

  A few statistics will underline this. Prussia enforced school attendance for children between the ages of seven and fourteen from the 1820s (in Britain children were not compelled to go to school until 1880) and by the 1890s had two-and-a-half times as many university students in proportion to population as did England.21 We saw in Chapter 22 how in the late nineteenth century, illiteracy in the German army was much lower than among Italian or Austro-Hungarian soldiers, 1 in 1,000, as opposed to 330 in 1,000 among Italians, and 68 in 1,000 among Austro-Hungarians. In another chapter we saw that, in Germany, in 1785 there were 1,225 periodicals published, compared with 260 in France. In 1900 Germany had 4,221 newspapers, France roughly 3,000 (and Russia 125).22 In the early nineteenth century, when England had just four universities, Germany had more than fifty. James Bowen, in his three-volume history of Western education, points out that Germany took the lead in the establishment of scientific socie
ties in the early nineteenth century, published the greatest number of journals in the vernacular, and became the leading language of scientific scholarship.23 In 1900 illiteracy rates in Germany were 0.5 percent; in Britain they were 1 percent and in France 4 percent. By 1913 more books were published annually in Germany (31,051 new titles) than in any other country in the world.24

  For what it is worth, the Germans are still ahead in some familiar ways, even though many of them don’t think so (see the comments of Dietrich Schwanitz, Chapter 42). In a survey reported in 2006, it was found that the average brain size of northern and central Europeans was larger than that of southern Europeans (1320 cc compared with 1312 cc). This translated into higher intelligence, with Germany and the Netherlands coming in on top (107 IQ points), Austria and Switzerland at 101, while Britain (where the research was done) scored 100, and France 94.25

  It was the educated middle class that made the exciting advances in scholarship that so attracted academics from abroad (especially from America), that rendered the bureaucracy of the ever-coalescing German state so efficient and creative and led to the groundbreaking scientific achievements of the second half of the nineteenth century, that transformed Germany economically, and on which so much of modern prosperity—not just in Germany—is based. The rise—and then the fall—of the educated middle class is central to what happened in Germany and still has a contemporary relevance.

  The development of modern scholarship, the concept of Bildung, and the innovation of the research-based university were seen at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany as a form of moral progress. Education was not simply the acquisition of knowledge but looked upon as a process of character development during the course of which a person would learn to form critical judgments, make an original creative contribution, and learn about his or her place in society with its duties, rights and obligations. Education as Bildung involved a process of becoming, a form of secular perfection or salvation that was, for the educated middle class, the very point of life in a world between doubt and Darwin.

  The educated middle class had essentially taken over and expanded the role occupied in earlier times by the clergy and would remain the most important and innovative element in Germany in the century that lasted from 1775 to 1871. Toward the end of that time, the situation began to change and grow more complex, as is also discussed.

  “INWARDNESS”

  It seems clear that the Germans were (still are?) a more “inward” people than others—the French, British, or Americans, for example (though as Gertrude Himmelfarb notes, the Enlightenment in England “throve within piety”). The Germans certainly seem to have seen themselves for the most part in this light, as the lines from Thomas Mann quoted at the head of this Conclusion confirm.26

  The combination of Lutheranism and Pietism was a starting point here, both being more concerned with inward conviction than with outward displays of religiosity. Another factor is that Germany’s centers of learning—its universities—came on stream between the advent of doubt and the arrival of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, when the theological understanding of man was under severe threat and Darwin’s biological understanding not yet available. This state of affairs applied not just in Germany, of course, but it was stronger there than anywhere else, for several reasons. Many people became convinced that, if traditional notions of God were under threat, there must be some other purpose to life, some other teleology and, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 5, the Germans embraced an evolutionary form of teleological biology and at the same time the great systems of speculative philosophy came into being: Kant’s Idealism, Fichte, Hegel, Naturphilosophie, Marxism, and Schopenhauer. The era between doubt and Darwin was the great period of speculative philosophy, and many people thought that Kant in particular had devised a new way of looking inward, of observing new structures of our minds.

  The reading revolution interacted with this. Reading was a much more private—and therefore inward—activity than the most popular cultural activity that had preceded it, dancing and singing (see Chapter 1). Given that Germans read more than anyone else because they were more literate, this too added to their inwardness.

  Romanticism and music were still other aspects of inwardness. Listening to “the inner voice” was one of the main aims of Romanticism, one of the principles it adopted from “inner” Oriental religions, in which the artist, who creates from within, is the most advanced type of human being. Kant’s instinct and intuition, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s will, Freud and Jung’s “unconscious” are all “inner” entities, inner concepts, as is the “second self,” locked within, waiting to be released.

  Schelling thought that music—music, the German art form par excellence—was the “innermost” of the arts, and the repeated and long-term association between German poetry and German music, finding expression in Schubert, Schumann, and Hugo Wolf, only adds to all this. At the turn of the nineteenth century, E. T. A. Hoffmann thought that music provided an entrance to a “separate realm, beyond the phenomenal” as we saw in Chapter 6, the symphony was regarded as an aspect of philosophy precisely because of its ability to penetrate inward, beyond words.

  As we have also seen in earlier pages, for Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bildung was education through the humanities as the true path to inner freedom. The main aim of the German Aufklärer was the Bildungstaat, a state where the ideal was to “enrich the inner life of man.” Suzanne Marchand has noted that F. A. Wolf’s pursuit of philological expertise “contributed to the turning-inward of the university community after 1800” and that this was an “important innovation in scholarship.” Kandinsky and Franz Marc confirmed that what they were trying to do, as abstract painting was born, was to give “impressions of an inner nature,” “immaterial inner sensations.” According to Erica Carter there was a “post-1968 interiority” brought about by the changes induced in that year of revolution, changes that were more psychological in Germany than they were elsewhere.27 Martin Walser, in the words of Jan-Werner Müller, epitomized a “German form of interiority,” the opposition of the “authentic private self and an untainted Innerlichkeit versus a superficial, even hypocritical public sphere,” when he famously claimed that “poetry and inwardness” provided escape routes from the “inauthentic world of opinions,” which usually led to a form of self-righteousness, part of the “entertainment industry.”28 Psychoanalysis, Expressionism in painting and film, the very concept of alienation in all its guises, the inward journey of the heroes in that uniquely German form of the novel, the Bildungsroman, the very dichotomy of “heroes versus traders,” all these emphasize the inwardness of the German, the German way of life, and the traditional German set of values. Both Karl Jaspers and Günter Grass referred to Herder’s “other, greater, deeper Germany”—i.e., the Kulturnation.29 Martin Walser claimed that because of their “religious, inward-looking piety,” Germans found it difficult to “act politically, like Englishmen.”30 Karl Heinz Bohrer thought that the most urgent task of reunification was to recover Germany “as a spiritual-intellectual possibility.”31 Even the events of 1968, according to Jan-Werner Müller, were a mixture “of Marxism and psychoanalysis.”32

  Inwardness comes with consequences, of course, as does everything. Karl Heinz Bohrer derided “Protestant inwardness,” this “power-protected inwardness,” arguing that it resulted in a form of provincialism and a neglect of national identity that was “likely to breed nationalist violence” and contributed toward its “belatedness.”33 Perhaps the most fateful consequence of inwardness was the concept of Bildung itself. Gertrude Himmelfarb is one of several historians who have commented on the similarity of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and Hegel’s “the cunning of reason.” But whereas the invisible hand enables man to embrace an open-ended future, “reason” in Germany became embedded in Bildung, which idealized a distant Greek state 2,500 years in the past and out of which, ultimately, the disease of cultural pessimism emerged. However much we may aspire to high sch
olarship and the ideal of the well-rounded man, in Germany the shadow of Bildung was in the end the more powerful force.

  The stereotypes we have of other people are too often crude and, almost by definition, overly simple, and they add to our problems rather than ease them. In the German case their stereotypes about themselves have been part of the problem too.

  BILDUNG

  Bildung is in some ways the primary achievement of educated inwardness—indeed, it could be held to be the natural end product. Goethe, it will be recalled, said specifically that the purpose of life when there is no God (this was after he lost his faith in the summer of 1788) is to become, to become much more than one was. “The ultimate meaning of our humanity is that we develop that higher human being within ourselves…” (see Chapter 4). Kant thought the difference between animals and man was that man can set himself goals and “cultivate the raw potentialities of his nature.” In creating the very idea of purpose within us, he felt, we “enlarge” ourselves and those around us. This is inwardness, Bildung, and community (see Conclusion) all in one.

  William Bruford traced the idea of Bildung in novels all the way through the nineteenth century into the twentieth—Adalbert Stifter, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain—and in the middle of the 1900s Karl Mannheim described Bildung as “the tendency toward a coherent life-orientation, the development of the individual as a cultural-ethical personality.” He thought sociological study could add to our understanding of Bildung. Fritz Ringer described Bildung as “the single most important tenet of the mandarin tradition” and Christa Wolf, in Nachdenken über Christa T, explored the meaning and possibility of Bildung in Communist East Germany. In America, Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, was essentially a plea for a return to this German ideology. Bildung suited the educated middle classes—it made education the central aspect, the most important purpose of life in a post-Christian world. Of course the educated middle class, by definition, had privileged access to it. Bildung defined them and their difference from others. In 1968 there was a campaign in Germany for “Bildung für alles.”