Chapter five germans and greeks

In pre-revolutionary France, literature was a vehicle for opening up space where the “discourse of self, blocked by social prohibitions and the absence of an interlocutor,” could unfold.”⁵⁵ Something similar happened in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany. Kant’s Germany was divided into a myriad of political units, most of which were ruled by unimaginative princes and aristocrats, increasingly jealous of the commercial classes and downright hostile to intellectuals. The conflict between the old and the new grew more acute by reason of the French Revolution, French occupation and annexation of the left bank of the Rhine, Napoleonic conquest of much of Germany and the post-Napoleonic repression by German rules of reform and reformers.⁵⁶

I previously alluded to the Kantian project and how it led German philosophers to the Greeks. They were not the only Germans of the period to look to tragedy for renewal. German intellectuals did so more generally, and one reason for this had to do with the German aristocracy and its heavy investment in Baroque architecture and decoration. Many German intellectuals found it suffocating in form and substance and another expression of the confining political systems in which they lived. The Baroque was overly decorative, left no space untouched and drew primarily on religious and pastoral themes. More importantly, it helped to sustain a discourse that sought to reconcile the population to the aristocratic order. This order and its artistic projects became increasingly anathema to many progressive intellectuals, and all the more so after the French Revolution.⁵⁷ In the first instance, therefore, the rediscovery of Greece was part of the search for freshness, balance, reason and limits – politically as well as artistically. This explains why the Greece embraced by German intellectuals was not the historical Greece – about which little was known in any case– but a highly idealized Greece of reason and “noble simplicity.” Such an image could serve as a model and lodestone for alienated intellectuals committed to restructuring their society through a cultural and educational revolution.

Many German intellectuals initially welcomed the French Revolution as they considered it a challenge and opportunity for the “German nation.” Enthusiasm soured when the revolution gave way to the terror, Napoleonic Empire and French universalism was superseded by cultural and political imperialism. As the French Revolution claimed to embody Enlightenment principles, the violent course of the Revolution and its foreign conquests brought about disenchantment among many German intellectuals with the Enlightenment. Reason, freed from traditional restraints. appeared to them to have produced the very opposite of a just, ordered and secure society.⁵⁸ As we observed in the last chapter, this concern is also evident in Don Giovanni, which premiered two years before the French Revoluton, and Die Zauberflöte, which had its first performance two years afterwards.

German intellectuals were increasingly drawn to the Counter-Enlightenment, a catch-all term for diverse movements and intellectual orientations, including conservatism, critical philosophy, historicism, idealism, nationalism, revivalism and holism. Counter-enlightenment thinkers rejected the expectations of the Enlightenment as naive and dangerous; they saw the world as complex, contradictory, composed of unique social entities in a state of constant flux. They rejected the Enlightenment conception of a human being as a tabula rasa, and the mere sum of internal and external forces, and its emphasis on body over soul, reason over imagination and thought over the senses. They insisted on a holistic understanding that incorporated and overcame these dichotomies, and understood that individuals and social collectivities alike were searching to discover and express their authenticity.⁵⁹ The Counter-Enlightenment had begun in France before the Revolution and gained a wider European audience through the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It found German spokesmen in the 1770s, among them Hamann, Herder, and Lavater and Möser, the young Goethe, the dramatists of Sturm und Drang and Schiller.⁶⁰ In literature it found expression in the early romanticism (Frühromantik) of Novalis (Friedrich Hardenberg), the Schlegel brothers and Christian Friedrich Tieck, in religion with Friedrich Schleiermacher, and in philosophy with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg F. W. Hegel.

Tragedy captured, or allowed the expression of, the principal concerns of the Counter-Enlightenment. It balanced reason with feeling, and physical sensations with cognition, rooted individuals in their society and its historical development. It conceived of human beings and their societies as having made fragile, ultimately indefensible and ever evolving accommodations with the irreconcilable polarities of social existence. Hegel revolutionized the study of tragedy by directing attention away from tragic heroes to tragic collisions. Tragedies, he observed, place their characters in situations where they have to chose between competing obligations and associated conceptions of justice. Their choices propel them into conflicts with characters who have made different choices. The polarities included family versus civic commitments, freedom and authority, and above all else, individual assertion and the certainty of death and oblivion. Conflicts arise not only as a result of these choices, but even more from the inability of tragic characters to empathize. They understand the other’s position as a reality without justification [rechtlose Wirklichkeit].⁶¹ In Antigone, the eponymous heroine’s loyalty to her brother and the gods bring her into conflict with Creon, who is just as committed to upholding civic order and his authority as head of the family. There are lesser collisions between Antigone and her sisters, Creon and his son and Creon and Teresias, each of them emblematic.

Although they looked askance at autocratic German governments, many German intellectuals nevertheless felt humiliated by Prussia’s defeat, all the more so as they had become deeply invested in the idea of the German nation. German writers and philosophers were not immune to nationalism and encouraged the idea that Germany could become the midwife of a spiritual revolution that would succeed where the political revolution of France had failed. Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel were committed to this project. The writings of Nietzsche, although scornful of nationalism, were also infused with the idea of the special mission of Germany.

The hopes of German philosophers, writers and political liberals were dashed by the reaction that set in once the Napoleonic threat receded. This was particularly significant in Prussia, the most powerful German political unit after Austria. Following the twin defeats of Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806, a reluctant Prussian king turned to reform-minded officials (e.g., Hardenberg, Boyen, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau) to restructure and rebuild his army and mobilize national support for the war effort. They imposed universal conscription, opened the officer corps to qualified commoners, removed incompetent officers from their commands and limited the arbitrary and even draconic military system of control and punishment. They expected these reforms to go hand-in-hand with abolition of serfdom and estate privileges and improvements in the general education system. In the words of Gneisenau, Prussia had to be restructured as a “triple alliance of arms, science and constitution.”⁶² Political and moral renewal was incompatible with absolute monarchy. Prussian Junkers (members of the landowning aristocracy) felt threatened by the reforms, and after Waterloo, the king became increasingly receptive to their complaints. For their part, the reformers overplayed their hand, quarreled among themselves, and by 1819 had been driven from office. German liberals and reformers were shut out of Prussian politics until the Revolution of 1848 briefly put them center stage.⁶³ Excluded individuals and groups not infrequently seek alternative means of expressing themselves. They may create what Johannes Fabian has called “terrains of contestation,” where they are free to maneuver and create narratives that may ultimately influence a wider audience, and through them, the dominant groups in the society.⁶⁴ As early as 1801, Schiller described Germany as an “inward Empire.”⁶⁵ After 1820, conceptualization of Greece and Greek tragedy became increasingly widespread.

My third layer of analysis concerns Germany’s position in Europe. The starting point is the concept of “late development,” coined by Alexander Gerschenkron to explain the more authoritarian political structures of central and eastern Europe. He theorized that democracy developed in Britain, the low countries and Scandinavia because they were they first European countries to industrialize. They had the luxury to develop at their own pace, and to accommodate in peaceful ways the rising power of new classes to which development gave rise. In France, a later developer, this transformation required a revolution and led to a centralized, if ultimately, democratic state. Further east, the pressures on political units were greater. If they were to survive as great powers, they had to industrialize more rapidly, which in turn required greater centralization and authoritarian rule. Germany after unification reflected this pattern. So did the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China, countries in which development began later and government assumed even more authoritarian forms⁶⁶

I believe a parallel phenomenon can be observed in the cultural sphere. Germany was not only a late economic developer, but a late cultural developer. German artists had recognized since the Renaissance but German music and literature only achieved prominence in the eighteenth century. Late cultural developers copy early developers, but desire to establish their own identity and buttress their self-esteem by distancing themselves from their predecessors. They do this by creating a synthesis of the borrowed and indigenous, with much of the latter based on myth. Their representatives hold themselves out as descendants of a deeper culture with older and purer historical roots and traditions. German music produced Bach. His sons, Gluck, Handel and Telemann were imitators of the French and Italian styles, although they went on to create novel syntheses. Wagner went back to German myths for the plot lines of his mature operas. His productions became a mainstay of German nationalism and were greatly favored by Hitler. Conservative German intellectuals condemned the decadent “West” – meaning France and England – for their alleged materialism and superficial values. They touted their superior values, supposedly more faithful to their Indo-Aryan roots and reflected in the triumphs of German Kultur. In the late nineteenth century this comparison gradually took on racial overtones.

Germany’s sense of special mission and glorification of the state were neither arbitrary nor unique. Measured against Western values and accomplishments in the eighteenth century, Germany was an under-achiever. It had failed to unify, and its leading states (Prussia and Austria) performed poorly on the battlefield, having been defeated decisively by Napoleon at Jena, Auerstädt and Austerlitz. Subsequent coalition victories against Napoleon (e.g., Leipzig and Waterloo), did not eradicate the sense of humiliation felt by many German aristocrats, military officers, intellectuals and members of the emerging middle class. A world view that offered a different set of criteria for excellence, that stressed German intellectual and artistic creativity and the solidarity and the world mission of the Volk, and downgraded the value of commerce and constitutional government, served to buttress the self-esteem of Germans of all classes. By emphasizing the role of the state as both the instrument and expression of this mission -- a theme developed by Fichte that received its fullest expression in the philosophy of Hegel -- power could be concentrated in ways that facilitated unification and the emergence of imperial Germany as the dominant military power on the continent. This power would ultimately enable Germany to compete for standing in more traditional ways. Even Nietzsche, who came to despise Prussian militarism, hoped that art could help the elite raise the masses above the "dirt" of daily politics.⁶⁷

Russia, an even later developer, developed an ideology based on the same anti-Western orientation. Russian nationalism stressed moral over material forces and contrasted the holy mission of the Russian people to Western rationalism and materialism. Slavophil ideology was völkish, emphasized the communal life of the Rus in contrast to the individualism of the West. Aleksei S. Khomiakov, Konstantin S. Aksakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky were among those who propagated the belief that Russia had inherited the Christian ideal of universal spiritual unification from Byzantium, while the decadent West, formed in the crucible of Roman Catholicism, preserved the old Roman imperial tradition.⁶⁸ Russia was the self-described “big brother” to Slavs elsewhere in Europe, an ideology that prompted provocative policies in the Balkans where Russia increasingly came into conflict with Austria by virtue of its nearly unqualified support of expansionist Bulgaria and Serbia.⁶⁹

In Germany, romantic nationalism was always at odds with traditional conservatism, but had less difficulty in blending with more modern approaches to politics, including socialism. The Nazi Party appealed to romantic nationalist and völkish strands of opinion, but made only limited inroads with workers, and at best gained the tacit support of the traditional conservative elite by virtue of its successful economic and foreign policies. In Russia, these different strands of opinion found expression in different political movements, although there was a considerable degree of overlap. In pre-war Russia, Slavophil sentiment was most prevalent within the aristocracy, but found some support among intellectuals, Dostoevsky being a case in point.⁷⁰ Liberal constitutionalism was represented by the Kadet Party, the largest party in the National Assembly (Duma). Socialism blended with nationalism and gave rise to a series of movements, including Zemlya i Volya (land and liberty), which, in the 1880s, sent students, without notable success, to live with peasants and mobilize their support.⁷¹ More Marxist socialists envisaged the workers as the vanguard of the revolution. The avowedly internationalist Bolshevik faction emerged as the dominant force in postwar Russia, renamed the Soviet Union.⁷² Despite its strong anti-nationalist ideology, part of the appeal of revolutionary socialism to Russian intellectuals had to do with their expectation that it would accelerate Russian development and gain new respect for their country as both a great power and model for the rest of the world.⁷³

As in Germany, this form of cultural nationalism assumed racist form and gave rise to extreme xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In both countries, cultural nationalism was fed by deep insecurity. In Germany, it was the result of late cultural and economic development, defeat and occupation by France and delayed political unification. In Russia, much the same situation prevailed. It had been unified and a great power for some time, but was economically and technologically backwards, and had barely avoided defeat by Napoleon. Even more than in Germany, the indigenous political elite feared the consequences of the spread of Western values and ideas.
THE TRAGEDY OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

The German-Russian comparison is revealing in two ways. It supports the claim of causal links between late development on the one hand and insecurity, xenophobia and racism on the other. Elsewhere I have argued that this pattern is not limited to Germany and Russia; late developers on the whole tend to have influential segments of their intelligentsia that adopt xenophobic, anti-Western discourses that stress the alleged superiority and communal orientation of their cultures.⁷⁴ Japan is particularly interesting in this connection. It was another late developer where a discourse of xenophobic nationalism became triumphant. Japanese intellectuals were drawn to German philosophy and tragedy, which, suitably integrated with existing traditions, helped to define a special path for Japan.

Early and superficial efforts to connect German philosophy to fascism emphasized the collaboration of Heidegger, who briefly served as rector of the University of Freiburg under the Nazis, and the writings of his mentor Nietzsche, whose call for nihilism and the rise of an Übermensch [superman] seemed to a provide a link to Hitler. Nietzsche also introduced the concept of race into his discourse, although it is clear that he conceived of it in a cultural not a biological sense. The link was made more explicit by Heidegger’s inaugural speech, which welcomed Hitler’s rise to power as a positive development, and the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche – with the willing aid of his sister -- as an ideological prop for their regime. In fairness to poor Nietzsche, we should note his unwavering public opposition to German nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch was very different from Hitler’s and motivated by a benign concerns. Nietzsche aspired to develop a new aesthetic consciousness to free people from the limitations of conventions and accepted discourses, of which Christianity and science were the most deeply entrenched and constraining. Such a consciousness would enable and facilitate self-expression and self-knowledge, although it too would have to be challenged and replaced before it solidified and became life-restricting. Humanity, its art and other creations -- as Greek tragedy recognized -- could at best hope to achieve a precarious balance between perfect form and utter chaos. To achieve this recognition, it was first necessary to approach chaos, and Nietzsche looked forward to the arrival of a Zarathustra-like Superman who would lead the way to a new barbarism. Unlike the savage life of the prehistoric past, the new barbarism would free the human spirit and empower man to lead a more creative life.⁷⁵

A more compelling line of argument linking German philosophy and Fascism focuses on the consequences of German philosophy, not the political ideas of individual philosophers. German idealism helped to create conditions favorable to German imperialism in World War I and fascism in the 1930s. This was due to its underlying values and aspirations. Kant’s philosophical corpus was abstruse, and the philosophy of his successors was even more divorced from everyday language, events and concerns. The corpus of German philosophy directed thought and action toward noble, if impractical, ideals and away from the issues and concerns of everyday politics. It devalued those concerns as plebian, distracting and even dishonorable, an attitude that was also encouraged by the imperialist right, which sought to focus the attention of German youth on military service, sacrifice and the higher honor of serving the nation. In an unexpected way, the teachings of the philosophical and military establishments reinforced each other despite the generally opposed nature of their projects.

The contrast to Anglo-American philosophy and its concern for politics and constitutional structures is striking. The values and practices that make democracy work – personal interest in material well being, willingness to bargain and compromise, acceptance of less than perfect solutions to problems -- were largely anathema to German philosophy and to nineteenth century German high culture more generally. The texts German students read in gymnasium and university encouraged them to strive for bolder, more collective goals. They stressed the importance of the state, and service to that state was conceived as the collective embodiment of the nation. All of these teachings translated all too easily into sympathy for charismatic, authoritarian leaders and corresponding lack of respect for plebian, compromising, patently self-seeking politicians and trade-unionists.

Many German intellectuals in the early years of the nineteenth century could not make a clean break with the authoritarian regimes for which they expressed loathing. They never rid themselves of the need for a monarchy, and remained half-hearted in the support for, or even opposed, to democratic constitutions that would transfer power from monarchs, princes and aristocrats to the demos. In the 1840s and 1860s they were at least as much interested in national unification as they were in liberal democracy. In 1848, the first national parliament meeting at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt offered the German crown to the Prussian king, who rejected it out of hand. In the Prussian constitutional crisis of the 1860s, Bismarck split the liberals by offering them national unification in return for continued control of the state and its foreign policy by the king. In the aftermath of World War I, many German intellectuals never developed enthusiasm or loyalty to the Weimar Republic, and made no effort to save it when it came under serious, and ultimately, successful attack from the far right. There are many reasons for these attitudes and behavior, and surely, the path and influence of German philosophy must be considered one of them.

The Weimar Republic was in many ways the most telling era. I have argued elsewhere that self-esteem was a key, if frustrated, ambition of the semi-feudalized German bourgeoisie.⁷⁶ This need became more acute after the humiliation of defeat in World War I and the imposition of what was widely regarded in Germany as the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Given this outlook, it was difficult for the Weimar Republic to build legitimacy and comparatively easier for its right-wing opponents to win support in the name of nationalism. Hitler was particularly adept at playing on the desires of the middle class for self-esteem. The Nazi emphasis on the Volksgemeinschaft held out the promise of a higher purpose to be achieved through unity, sacrifice and struggle in a showdown with the nation’s internal and external enemies. Hitler’s defiance of the Western powers and the Treaty of Versailles was widely popular with the middle classes, who were his largest supporters at the polls.⁷⁷

A few historians emphasize the contingency of Nazi Germany. In an early but still highly regarded history of the Weimar Republic, Erich Eyck makes a credible case that the synergism between the economic downturn and bad leadership brought Hitler to power.⁸¹ In a weak version of the Sonderweg thesis, Wolfgang Mommsen maintains that the collapse of Weimar was inevitable, but Hitler's rise to power was not.⁸² Henry Turner uses counterfactuals to argue that Hitler’s survival of World War I trench warfare and a later automobile accident were remarkable, and that without Hitler, Weimar’s failure would likely have led to a conservative, authoritarian regime with revanchist goals in the east but no stomach for another continental war. It would have been anti-Semitic, but unlikely to have carried out draconian measures against Jews.⁸³

The determinists sensitize us to the serious impediments that stood in the way of the success of the Republic, while those who emphasize contingency alert us to the need to separate the fate of the Republic from the question of what kind of regime might have succeeded it. The forces arrayed against the Republic were on both ends of the political continuum. The communists on the left opposed a constitutional bourgeois order. Led by intellectuals, their base consisted of workers, whose support waxed and waned as a function of the economic situation.⁸⁴ By 1928, there was very little inclination on the part of the conservatives to cooperate with the socialists, and the pro-Republican parties did not have enough seats to sustain a left-center coalition. The grand coalition lasted less than six months, the victim of Gustav Stresemann’s death and the stock market crash.⁸⁵ The nationalist-conservative opposition was divided among several parties, and in the last years of the Republic, the National Socialists (Nazis) became by far the strongest of these parties. In July 1932, the Nazis won 38.2 percent of the overall national vote, making anti-Republican forces a majority in the Reichstag. Government had to be conducted by emergency decree, which shifted power to President Paul von Hindenburg, and paved the way for the appointment of Hitler after the failure of the short-lived von Papen and Schleicher regimes.⁸⁶ Hindenburg could have used his emergency power to support a pro-Republican government, but preferred to rule through a conservative fronde that excluded the socialists from power. He set in motion a chain of events that had an outcome very different from what he imagined.⁸⁷ So did the Communists. On instructions from Moscow, they made a fatal error in refusing to support the grand coalition, composed of the socialists, Zentrum [Center Party] and moderate parties on the right. The Communists welcomed the Nazi regime in the expectation that it would quickly fail and pave the way for a worker’s revolution.⁸⁸

The years between 1919 and 1933 were ones in which intellectual commitment to the Republic could have made a difference. It is not unreasonable to think that greater support for the Republic by intellectuals would have reduced support for the Communists and possibly have enabled the grand coalition to have survived the early years of the great depression. If so, President Hindenburg would not have been in a position to invoke the emergency clause of the constitution and Hitler would not have come to power through the back door. As there is reason to believe that the Nazi vote had peaked, the Republic could have weathered the Nazi challenge, although it still would have been under severe pressure from right and the left. In 1928, the Nazis garnered a mere 2.6 percent of the vote. Once the depression set in, this figure rose to 18.1 percent. In the March 1933 elections, held two months after Hitler took office, the Nazis still received considerably less than half of the vote, but more votes than any party had in the Weimar era.⁸⁹