by Peter Watson
That is all in the past. I do not mean only that the betrayal of Germany’s Bildung class took place more than seventy years ago. I also mean that such a betrayal could not take place again. How can we be sure? Because for once Germany has fashioned its own democratic revolution, albeit one that—surprising as it may seen—has gone very largely underappreciated by the world outside.
In 1945 Germany once more had a revolution imposed on it from above, just as it had in 1848 and 1871, only this time it came not just from above but from outside. The occupying powers imposed a political and legal structure on postwar Germany. But, and this is the crucial point, a point that many outside Germany still do not grasp (with the Germans themselves failing to see why outsiders do not appreciate this profound truth): the social revolution of 1968, particularly in West Germany, was a much bigger set of events there than anywhere else.
Konrad H. Jarausch has chronicled this change, which he describes as nothing short of a “caesura.”45 He argues that, despite the successful establishment of democratic institutions in Germany after the war, authoritarian thought patterns “tended to persist,” and it was not until the 1960s that the “modernisation deficit” (Ralf Dahrendorf’s phrase) was overcome. A crucial factor here, he says, was the “generational rebellion of 1968,” when the younger cohort turned on its parents for the acquiescence in horror they had shown in the Third Reich (the “Brown Past”) and for their inability to face their guilt; and only then, in 1968, did Germans start to internalize democratic values, develop a “counter-elite” and demand self-government and “democratic counterpower.”46 Jan-Werner Müller essentially agreed when he described the events of 1968 as a mixture of “Marxism and psychoanalysis.”47
The substance of this change was explored in Chapter 41; here we need only add two key points. One, that henceforth Germany had a critical, skeptical public, an entity that had been common enough in, say, Great Britain, France, or the United States for generations, but that had now finally arrived in Germany. And two, that there began a concern with the quality of life, with culture, and with the environment in particular. This would lead in time to the formation of the Green Party and bring about a sea change in the political life of the Federal Republic.48 The Germans had turned away from an emphasis on inwardness—perhaps no bad thing. In Heinrich Winkler’s words, the country had completed its “long road west.” The studies of Dirk Moses and the Potsdam Institute of Military History, referred to in the Introduction and in Chapter 41, suggest that the above analyses are correct, that the process is maturing, and that the fourth postwar generation has adjusted to the terrible German past and has the courage to face up to the fact that “almost everyone” in the Third Reich knew what was going on.
It may not be that we shall ever know how Hitler came about, but acknowledging how widespread the knowledge of the crimes was is clearly a significant advance.
In June 2006, Thomas Kielinger, London correspondent of Die Welt, wrote an article in the London Daily Telegraph in which he took his hosts to task. The constant “harping on” about a “happily extinct” Germany by the British was no longer funny, he said. “The funny side escapes us if the Germany of the Nazis is confused with the Germany of today…There is a distinct fire break in our minds about then and now; between the swastika’d pariahs and the country we have rebuilt, ‘with liberty and justice for all’—including the liberty to mock ourselves for the past descent into hell. By contrast, for too many Britons, the old adversary has become frozen in time, encapsulated in 1945 like an insect in amber…Germany has moved on, with a vengeance.”49 I would add this: when you talk to Germans at length, many of them will admit, after a time, that they are not yet completely at ease with themselves. At the same time a recent biography of the last Kaiser has been well received. The Germans are changing more than the British are and more than the British think the Germans are. Of course, one might argue that in Germany there is more to change, and maybe more need of change. But Germany is not as static in its attitude to the Third Reich and World War II, as Britain thinks it is, or as Britain (or France, or America, to a lesser extent) is itself.
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF HUMAN NATURE
The German genius is alive and well. It has been a curious journey in some ways, unreal at times—or it has felt that way. Despite the long night between 1933 and 1989, contemporary German artists can bear comparison with the best of other countries, its filmmakers are enjoying a resurgence, even in English-language countries (Goodbye Lenin!, The Lives of Others, which won an Oscar), its novelists are coping with the dominance of the English language better than most (W. G. Sebald, Bernhard Schlink, Daniel Kehlmann, and Günter Grass, still), and its composers and choreographers continue to shine. More names could have been mentioned—such as Hans J. Nissen, whose team of archaeologists has done so much to illuminate the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, at least until the Gulf Wars, and the new Leipzig school of painters who kept alive the tradition of figurative art. Germany’s scientific community, though it has not yet returned to its position of pre-eminence of 1933, when it had won more Nobel Prizes than scientists from Britain and America put together, nonetheless has returned to prize-winning ways—with Nobels in 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2005, and two in 2008. In Europe, Germany leads the table for patent registration with almost three times the number of its next rival, France. In tables drawn up in 2008 of the leading nations in physics, Austria and Germany came fifth and sixth respectively, behind Switzerland (top), Denmark, and the United States, but ahead of England, France, and Russia.50 In engineering the only non-American institutes in the top twenty worldwide in 2008 were number 15, the Max Planck Society, 16, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, and 20, the Technical University of Denmark (institutes in France and Britain did not feature).51
Despite this, in the spring of 2008 yet another historical controversy erupted in Germany, this time about the planned reintroduction of the Iron Cross medal for military bravery. Notwithstanding the long and colorful provenance of this award (see Chapter 9), with the well-to-do in the Napoleonic Wars wearing iron jewelry because they had donated their gold to the war effort, it was felt by the government in Berlin that the Iron Cross was still too closely linked to the Nazis, and the reintroduction was canceled.
How long must this attitude persist? As this book has tried to show, we owe a great deal to the Germans and, as the Iron Cross incident highlights, there is much more to German history than 1933–45. Let us, therefore, end on an equally controversial note and consider what we might learn from one of the most contrary philosophers of the twentieth century—Martin Heidegger. Yes, he was a Nazi. Yes, he betrayed his Jewish lover Hannah Arendt, and in cowardly fashion. Yes, in a sense, as she herself said, Heidegger “murdered” his Jewish colleague, Edmund Husserl. But, as the twenty-first century gets into its stride, there are two important areas (at least) where the German philosophical tradition—the German ideology, as the French scholar Louis Dumont calls it—may come back into focus and have much to teach us. Many non-Germans find the Idealist cast of mind—if not Kant then certainly Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—obscure and vague, using a language (“Being,” “authenticity,” “releasement”) that is alien to, and uncomfortable in, the empirical tradition: they recall Wickham Sted’s crack about the Germans diving deeper but coming up muddier. At the same time, the German ideological antipathy to technology and its advances can seem (again, to the empirical Anglophone mind) altogether unreal, a plaintive, overtheoretical, and thinly abstract opposition to inevitable “progress.”
And yet, as shown by Jürgen Habermas, who is surely the most interesting post–World War II example of the German philosophical genius, recent developments in the world of biotechnology suggest that Heidegger, duplicitous, self-serving, and unapologetic as he was for his Nazi involvement, may have had a point all along: he perceptively anticipated the threat that technology would ultimately pose and, moreover, he did so in the
very language that we now need to contemplate if we are to consider seriously where we are headed.
In his book Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur (The Future of Human Nature; 2003), Habermas reflects on and himself anticipates the new forms of “damaged life” (Adorno’s phrase) that we may be about to inflict on ourselves. He notes that recent developments in biotechnology allow, or will very soon allow, prenatal genetic intervention, giving parents the choice to select not only for characteristics they don’t want their children to have (major handicaps, “negative eugenics”) but also for characteristics (eye color, hair color, sex, higher intelligence, musical ability) that they do want their children to have—“positive eugenics.” Habermas cautions us that here a line may be being crossed, a Rubicon he calls it, with profound implications for our understanding of freedom, and that it requires a philosophical resolution, not a technical-scientific-psychiatric one.52
In the future, children of one generation will be given characteristics by another generation (their parents’) that are irrevocable. What, he asks, will this do to an individual’s understanding of him- or herself, his or her sense of—as Heidegger put it—being? For Habermas, this new technology blurs the line between the “grown” and the “made,” between chance and choice, all of which are essential ingredients in who were are, who we feel ourselves to be. For Habermas, if these processes are allowed to continue, future generations risk becoming things rather than beings. Any new generation will, to an extent, have been selected by its parents’ generation and will, to that degree, be less free. As he puts it, again using Heideggerian language, the ethics of “successfully being oneself” will have been compromised. The inviolability of the person, “which is imperative on moral grounds and subject to legal guarantees,” for him is something we can never “dispose over.”
For Habermas, not only does this pose a threat to our essential “sense of being,” it poses a threat to our capacity to see ourselves as equally free and autonomous as the next individual, to the idea of “anthropological universality,” that man is everywhere the same.53 For Habermas the evolution of the species is a matter for nature; to intervene in this process at the very least marks a new epoch in the history of mankind and perhaps something much worse.54 Evolution, he insists, should not be a matter of “bricolage,” however well-intentioned parents may be.
His worry is that such intervention amounts to nothing less than a third “decentration” of our worldview, after Copernicus and Darwin, so that a person’s sense of “I” and his or her understanding of “we” would be changed irrevocably, with incalculable consequences for our shared moral life.55 People, he warns, may feel that they are no longer “ends in themselves,” no longer irreplaceable, no longer so completely at home in their bodies, no longer have the same relationship to such emotions as shame or pride, not weighing human life in the same fashion, no longer having equal respect for each other. Most fundamentally, Habermas worries that for genetically preprogrammed people the initial conditions of identity-formation will have been altered and the “subjective qualification essential for assuming the status of a full member of a moral community” will be affected beyond recall.56 “The technicisation of ‘inner nature’ constitutes something like a transgression of natural boundaries.”57
Habermas does wonder whether he is being oversensitive here. To an extent, genetic intervention already exists, in China, where the one-childper-family policy has resulted in a heavy preponderance of male children and entire villages where there are no partners for young men. This has produced social problems but, so far as we know, no clinical-psychiatric epidemics. But Habermas feels this is a special, atypical case, where the whole individual has been chosen, so there is no specific intervention regarding identity.
He urges that our attitude to “being” is a complex philosophical issue and points to our ethical behavior in regard to corpses and dead fetuses. We insist on their dignified disposal—they are more than inert matter to us; they were beings—grown, not made—and therefore they are not things.
We don’t have bodies, he concludes, we are bodies, and this typcially Heideggerian distinction is all-important. We stand on the verge of a major transformation in the understanding of human nature and the way we choose to go forward (since nothing is inevitable, however blinded we may be by the notion of “progress”) is a philosophical matter, not a scientific-psychiatric-technical one.
There is of course a further ironical contextual level to all this. Given the notorious eugenic policies carried out in the Third Reich, Habermas, as a German identifying the future risks of genetic preprogamming, has a redemptive quality. Habermas is himself naturally aware of this context, quoting Johannes Rau, president of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 2001: “Once you start to instrumentalise human life, once you start to distinguish between life worth living and life not worth living, you embark on a course where there is no stopping point.”58
Genetic preprogramming is not the only philosophical problem we face as a matter of urgency. As global warming starts to lay waste our planet, as the rain forests and ice caps shrink together, as inland seas disappear, as terrorists threaten nuclear annihilation, as genocide and famine continue to ravage Africa, as India and China begin to run out of water, does it not ring ever more true that Heidegger had a profound point (and wasn’t being merely “priggish”) when he said we should stop trying to exploit and control the world with our technological brilliance? Is this not a form of hubris that will in time destroy all we have, should we not instead learn to accept the world, to submit—without interference—to the pleasures nature has to offer, to enjoy them as poets enjoy them, and should not our main stance now, our first and only priority, be to care for the world?
Heidegger was caught up in what he saw as the redeeming energies of National Socialism and about that he was wrong, very wrong. And yet, despite the undoubted advantages that science and capitalism have wrought, they now seem incapable of rectifying the ravages they have also brought about. Hannah Arendt counseled us to be adult, and part of her own achieved adulthood was that she forgave Heidegger and in that sense redeemed him. Can we not do the same and learn from him (and her), despite what went before?
For that matter, is Germany itself always to remain unredeemable? Perhaps Norbert Elias was correct in saying that the country cannot move ahead until a convincing explanation for the rise of Hitler has been given. Yet Heidegger was prescient and was part of a recognizable line of German thinkers, from Kant through Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and Habermas himself, who remained and remain skeptical of modernity (there’s that word again, “skepticism”), who remind us that human nature—life itself—is as much about pride, shame, independence, coherence, and respect for others and for ourselves, for morality, for our “inner environment,” for autonomy, intuition, and disgust, as it is about money, the markets, the profit motive, and the hard drives of technology. Germany is not only a “belated” nation in terms of modernity; it is also a reluctant nation and maybe there is a lesson in that reluctance. If science and capitalism—the market—cannot prevent the degradation of our environment, our very world, indeed if they are now the primary ingredient in that devastation, then only a change within us, a change of will, can do it. The way out of our dilemma, the Germans tell us, is not technical or scientific, but philosophical.
There must never come a time when a Schlußstrich, a final line, is drawn under Germany’s past, when the events of 1933–45 become just another episode, another catastrophe mothballed in the chain of history. Gerhard Schröder had it right when he said, “We cannot emerge from our past so easily. Perhaps we should not even wish to.”59
Germany should not wish, or seek, to leave its past behind. But embracing this view, as Beuys showed, as Gunter Demnig and his “stumbling stones” show, as Habermas and Ratzinger show, Germans do not need to remain chained to their past forever. All Germans, as Steve Crawshaw phrases it, are not “umbilically linked” to Hitl
er. The German past consists of much more than the events of the Third Reich and, as this book has tried to show, still has a lot to teach us.
The German predicament is not easy and the arguments in this book will not please everyone. It is to those who find it difficult to move beyond Hitler that The German Genius is dedicated.
APPENDIX
Thirty-five Underrated Germans
I do not mean to suggest for a minute that the names mentioned below are unknown. They are not. Indeed, to many specialists they include some of the very finest minds of their—or any—day. The point of this appendix, rather, is to underline in a vivid way one of the main arguments of the book—namely, that because two world wars have interfered with our view of the past, these German names are generally less well known than they deserve to be, and that they are worthy of being appreciated by a much wider public.
Many of the scientists, for example, are easily on a par with Freud, Mendel, and Einstein in regard to their influence on our lives. Several of the philosophers, though they cannot perhaps match Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, are the equal of Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, William James, and John Dewey, whose names are virtually household words. Writers and mathematicians have also suffered.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT (1767–1835)
As is made clear throughout the main text (but in Chapter 10 and the Conclusion in particular), Wilhelm von Humboldt was responsible for the concept of the modern university, for the institutionalization of research, for much of modern scholarship and, indirectly, for the rise of modern science. He should now be given full credit for being one of the most important creators of modernity.
