German incertitudes, 1914-1945 : the stones and the cathedral

GERMAN INCERTITUDES, 1914–1945

Cathedral by Paul Klee. Used by permission of The Phillips Collection.

GERMAN INCERTITUDES, 1914–1945 The Stones and the Cathedral KLEMENS VON KLEMPERER

To Otto and Fritz Molden

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Von Klemperer, Klemens, 1916– German incertitudes, 1914–1945 : the stones and the cathedral / Klemens von Klemperer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–97017–5 (alk. paper) 1. Historians—Germany—Biography. 2. Von Klemperer, Klemens, 1916– 3. Germany—Intellectual life—20th century. 4. Authors, German—19th century—Political and social views. 5. Authors, German—20th century—Political and social views. 6. National socialism. I. Title. DD86.7.V66A3 2001 943.085—dc21 00–061129 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 䉷 2001 by Klemens von Klemperer All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00–061129 ISBN: 0–275–97017–5 First published in 2001 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from Patrick Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin: The Life and Work of George Heym (London, 1991), 212–220. Used by permission of Libris. From The Works of Stefan George translated by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz. Copyright 䉷 1974 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from William Butler Yeats, “An Irishman Foresees His Death,” Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1964), 133f. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster and A. P. Watt Ltd., on behalf of Michael B. Yeats. Excerpts from Siegried Sassoon Diaries (1915–1918). Used by permission of Barbara Levy: Literary Agency. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

Contents

Preface 1.

Introduction: Tradition and Modernity in German Thought and Society

ix 1

2.

The Great War: Experience and Memory

13

3.

Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism: Max Weber and Oswald Spengler

29

4.

The Adventurer: Ernst Ju¨ nger Reconsidered

45

5.

The Call for Allegiance: Hugo von Hofmannsthal

61

6.

The Lure and Limits of Gemeinschaft

77

7.

Fragments, Abstraction and a Vision: The German Expressionists

87

8. 9. 10.

Authenticity: Martin Heidegger and the Temptation of National Socialism

105

Maturity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Faith and the “World Come of Age”

123

Conclusion: The German Mind between Disenchantment and Reenchantment, and the Spectre of National Socialism

139

viii

Contents

Select Bibliography

155

Index

169

Preface

“Men die for a cathedral, not for stones.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupe´ ry “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.” —George Orwell

This volume of essays should be considered both a personal and a scholarly document. Since the time seems to have come for me to take stock of my past, of my experiences and my thoughts, my daughter Catharine has urged me to write my autobiography. I have lived, after all, during most interesting, if not dramatic, times in which I have played the parts of both observer and participant, and in which by good fortune I have survived. Whether or not I have satisfied my daughter’s prescription remains, however, to be seen. What follows in this volume is not literally an autobiography, but it represents a gathering and ordering of my thoughts, personal and scholarly, that have engaged me for decades. My very first recollection is of a revolution, when as a small child I peeped through a curtain of my parents’ home in Berlin to find a machine gun pointing in my direction. Subconsciously, at least, my whole attitude towards the revolutionary events I have witnessed may have been shaped by that early experience. I have learned to understand the wisdom of the observation that revolutions, like the god Saturn, devour their own children. Some revolutions, to be sure, are inescapable, in particular if they are a matter of broad social and

x

Preface

technological change. The German Revolution of November 1918 which pointed that machine gun in my direction turned out to be abortive. However, the revolutions which fundamentally affected just about all my contemporaries as well as myself, the Socialist-Communist one and the Fascist-National Socialist one, shook the world with close to apocalyptic expectations and promises, and left behind ruins. I shall begin by projecting the story of my own life against that of Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie and their encounter with the National Socialist revolution. They belonged to my age cohort. These two youngsters from Ulm in southern Germany were attracted by the flags and uniforms and songs of their Hitler Youth days until they saw the light and came to understand that all this was but a cover for a brutal tyranny. They then formed with their friends an oppositional group, the so-called “White Rose,” distributed illegally printed leaflets calling on the public to resist, and, after being detected, were executed four days thereafter in February 1943. I am keenly aware of the fact that they, born in 1918 and 1921, were younger than I, born in 1916. Certainly, compared with the lives of these extraordinarily brave people, my life has been less heroic, less remarkable. Like all of my age cohort I had to make my own way through a landscape of ideologies. The friendships of my youth were conspiracies of sorts in which we set out with boundless idealism to form a brave new world of our own. We were beneficiaries of no democratic tradition, and indeed the “Weimar” democracy, and for that matter the Austrian one, did not mean much to us. But we all were in search of some order that would satisfy our youthful vision and our unwavering commitment to the cause of freedom. Faced with a reality that seemed to us fragmented and indeed “broken,” we at no moment abandoned our search for cohesion and wholeness. But the Nazi revolution, the so-called seizure of power of January 1933, awakened us from our dreams. It opened our eyes to the fact that the search for cohesion and wholeness, inocuous and indeed legitimate as it was in our case, can easily be derouted, as it was by the Nazis, to serve evil ends. Before long, I went into exile to the United States which gave me safe haven. My friends who stayed behind went—against their will—into the German army, prisons and concentration camps, and some eventually joined the German and Austrian resistance. No doubt theirs was the harder lot, and a number of them did not survive to tell their story. I am fortunate, then, in being in a position to tell my story. Indeed the story I wish to relate here has become enriched by my occupation and by my experiences. Soon after coming to the United States I took up the study of history which allowed me to view my life through the prism of a broader scholarly investigation. My studies were interrupted during the Second World War by three and a half years in the U.S. Army. Perhaps I should not say “interrupted” since my service took me back to Germany, helping me to clarify my thoughts on German history, in particular in those times of German stocktaking in the

Preface

xi

face of and after defeat. After the war I returned to the United States to pursue a career in teaching and writing about modern European history. All my scholarly work, as I survey it now, has revolved around tradition and the definition of a healthy conservatism in the face of revolutionary change, and I have taken my case studies without fail from Germany and Austria. This was the crisis area of Europe which was marked by uncertain traditions and an illdefined conservatism and therefore was all the more vulnerable to being overwhelmed by revolutionary change and fascist domination. In order to compose this volume I have done no particular archival work. This is a “think piece,” falling back on years of experience, studies and thought, a reflection on my life as far as it has been witness to history. In short, it deals with a question which has agitated me both as an open-eyed, and I hope openminded, human being and as a scholar. Staying in the German language area, I propose to tackle head-on the problem of how the German mind in the early part of the twentieth century came to terms with the inevitable workings of what historians and political scientists have come to identify with the shorthand of “modernity”: a stage in the technological, social, economic, political and spiritual development of advanced societies that constituted a singular challenge to their sense of tradition and continuity. In Germany this development was particularly eruptive, and therefore the potential for dislocation and disruption of the social and political order all the more acute. The term “German incertitudes,” which I have chosen for the title for this volume, goes back to a work much discussed in the early nineteen thirties by the French journalist Pierre Vie´not1 about the crisis of “civic culture” in Germany. While he himself did not clearly identify the concept, it struck me important enough to develop it further as a basic condition of modern Germany. “Incertitudes” were a chronic condition with the Germans. Ill-defined as Germany has been in her history, she has been in all her political fragmentation less than a state and more than a state, a virtual jungle of principalities, free cities and ecclesiastical territories under the roof of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The multiplicity of quasi-sovereign units, then, spelled cultural affluence and political impotence and, in the nineteenth century, a correspondingly compensatory aggressive nationalism. In short, Geist and Politik were in dissonance in the Germanies, and the lack of as well as search for German identity were the leading themes accompanying the course of German history. However, the problem which finally overshadowed and absorbed all these historical “German incertitudes” was the one I have resolved to address in this volume, namely the never resolved clash between premodernity and modernity which had its cause in the late unification under Bismarck (which strictly speaking was no unification) and the precipitate industrialization which contributed to a constant self-questioning among the Germans. As a result the course of German history was marked by “incertitudes” concerning adjustment or non-

xii

Preface

adjustment to an inevitable modernity and was given to register the highest feats of human insight and endeavor as well as, alas, the worst imaginable misdeeds. To set the parameters of the “German incertitudes,” I am tempted to fall back on the metaphors of Antoine de Saint-Exupe´ry,2 the French airman who during the Second World War was lost in flight off Corsica. Up in the air, in the service of his country—humiliated France—seeing little more than fragments and ruins and “stones,” he kept searching for meaning of the whole and insisting on the vision of the “cathedral.” The tension between a reality of stones, that is the perception of a fragmented universe, and the search for wholeness of the cathedral is a phenomenon that marks all of humankind in an age that has lost its innocence and is riddled with doubts. It was, however, singularly acute in the German context of the incertitudes. In this sense, then, this volume of essays should not be seen as dealing with “German history,” but with the German case as an extreme manifestation of the general European experience. I may in my selection of chapters have moved into areas which others may rightly claim as their field of expertise, and I hope that they will forgive my trespassing on their territory. I should, I suppose, have covered music and dance—areas in which I lack the competence—and included chapters on film and theater and other fields and personages. Some chapters will address themselves to topics, and others to the thought of individual historical figures. All of them are meant to focus on the same central problem, and I hope that the chapters which I have included and as I have presented them will suffice to clear up stereotypes and misconceptions about the German mind and its encounter with modernity. The reader must know that in the course of the past two years, as I was working on this book, my thoughts have evolved and I have been confirmed in a certain distance to Exupe´ry’s all too precipitate celebration of the cathedral, and have gained a correspondingly greater appreciation of the courage and endurance it takes to live with stones. The vision of the cathedral is one thing, and it always will be part of myself. But I have come to appreciate the wisdom of George Orwell’s skepticism towards the cathedral, which, I take it, he meant when questioning the search for perfection. Also I have come to understand that in our secular world the insistence on the actual building of the cathedral, in particular in the name of a secular faith, is likely to be a dangerous undertaking. It was the freewheeling dialecticism in the German mind between the quest for the cathedral and the acknowledgment of the reality of the stones which accounts for the dynamics and for the vitality and the triumphs of the German mind. But once the reality of stones was lost sight of or was explained away, the dream of the cathedral became a nightmare and the drama, as Fritz Stern called it, of German history truly unfolded.3 These essays unabashedly belong to the realm of the history of ideas. The latter is a discipline that can and must hold its own even, indeed particularly, in a sea of social history which has vastly expanded the historians’ horizons in

Preface

xiii

recent times. Clearly, treatises on the phenomenon of modernity, modernization, also what is called nowadays the postmodern condition, have opened up our eyes to the fundamental changes in the social stratification of the modern period. Works on class, family, gender, social mores and tastes have thrown inestimable light on the formulation of ideas in our age. They form the inevitable backdrop for any study of ideas such as this one. I might add that as I was working on these essays I became acquainted with the book by Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, 1996). It is an exemplary study examining the part of German scientists since the turn of the nineteenth century in the search for reenchantment of a disenchanted universe. I like to think of this volume as a companion to Anne Harrington’s book in the field of the humanities and the social sciences. This volume, then, will make its own way between the stones and the cathedral as I have encountered them in thought and action, and this prism will, I hope, throw some special light, for better or worse, on the horizons of the Germans, a people who can claim Max Weber and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger—and Adolf Hitler. NOTES 1. Incertitudes allemandes. La crise de la civilisation bourgeoise en Allemagne (Paris, 1931). The German edition appeared as Ungewisses Deutschland. Zur Krise seiner bu¨ rgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt/M., 1931). 2. Flight to Arras (New York, 1942), 247. 3. See Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York, 1987).

1 Introduction: Tradition and Modernity in German Thought and Society

Perhaps we experience a mere optical illusion, although a common one, when we look from the vantage point of the present toward a past which we see as informed by a sense of faith in God, by community among people and by harmony within the individual. The complex and discordant realities of our times make us particularly prone to this experience, an escape mechanism of sorts. When we confront, as we often must, crises in a body politic or in a culture, we project them all too readily against a past supposedly marked by pastoral serenity, by “oneness with the universe,” as Sigmund Freud put it. But did that “beautiful and splendid time,” about which the German Romanticist raved,1 ever exist—times, as he would have us believe, when “Europe was a Christian land” where “one Christendom” inhabited this continent and “one great communal interest” held together the most remote provinces of this wide spiritual Empire? Was there any sense to Thomas Carlyle’s lament that Divinity had withdrawn from the Earth, or was divinity not consistently present, or distant, or entirely absent, depending on the degree and intensity of one’s faith? Has God ever “appeared” or, for that matter, “disappeared”? Finally, can we seriously assume, as did Karl Jaspers in his celebrated survey of 1930 on Man in the Modern Age, that there ever were times when the assumption of a “unity of life and knowledge” went unchallenged?2 Die heile Welt (the intact world), which the Germans, however ironically, have a way of invoking, then, would turn out to be but a figment of the beholder’s nostalgic imagination and what Max Weber dismissed as a “mystic flight from reality”? No doubt all of human history is a story of crisis, chronic crisis. Jacob Burck-

2

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

hardt maintained, that “men are men in peace as in war,” and that “the wretchedness of earthly things lies equally upon them both.”3 Yet the discerning observer scanning the panorama of history cannot but notice periods of relative stability and balance in the public as well as in the private realm, and periods of outer as well as inner turbulence. In a restricted sense we might after all be able to talk of “normalcy” as against “crisis.” While perfect “normalcy” may never have prevailed, it might nevertheless be reasonable for a historian to write about, say, Victorian England as an “Age of Equipoise” marked by a balance between the old and the new and between elements of growth, survival and decay. In turn, periods and situations in history stand out as particularly marked by discontinuity and turmoil, as unmistakably bearing the stamp of crisis. To be sure, we might well remind ourselves of the entry in Webster’s Dictionary pointing towards the ambiguous meaning of “crisis”: a turning point in a disease or fever either “for better or worse.” All revolutions and wars can be seen as the breakdown of an existing order, the birth of some new one, or both. And while it is reasonable to assume a certain interaction, indeed cross-fertilization between the benefits derived from “normalcy” and the stirring impact of “crises,” the latter have received more attention. It is common knowledge that the whole European continent was catapulted into an almost unending crisis by the effects of that “dual revolution,” as E. J. Hobsbawm has dubbed it,4 the Industrial and the French Revolutions. The shorthand for this crisis is “modernity,” meaning the exposure as a result of “explosive proliferation of knowledge,”5 of traditional institutions and patterns of thought, to accelerated change brought about by the workings of rationalization, nationalization, centralization, urbanization, industrialization, and secularization. All these developments spelled crisis: they called for social and political readjustments, for a more or less distinct perception of crisis, and consequently for a rethinking by men and women of their relation to society and the universe. The depth and singularity of crisis and the perception of it were brought home by the calamities of the Great War (First World War), which turned some of modern man’s prime accomplishments—industrialization, mechanization— against him, and which in turn precipitated a virtual epidemic of crises: the sequence of revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1917–18 and the breakup of the old Empires—Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian; the Great Depression triggered by the Wall Street crash of 1929 with far-reaching catastrophic repercussions, particularly in Central Europe; the breakdown of democratic regimes in the between-wars period in much of Europe and the emergence of new totalitarian empires. James Joll was probably on solid ground, then, in arguing that “the crisis of the twentieth century” was “deeper and of a different kind from that of any previous epoch.”6 The history of different countries and societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been written in terms of how they have coped with the crisis of modernization, that is of the process by which modernity was absorbed and

Introduction

3

implemented. In all of them the encounter with modernity posed a formidable challenge to traditional institutions and patterns of thought and called for readjustment along all lines of human endeavor. This book, however, is neither about modernity nor about modernization as such, on which the literature is already abundant. Rather, it proposes to deal with the crisis of the mind brought about by these phenomena, that is, how they were perceived. When Jaspers wrote that “now every newspaper is talking of the world-crisis,”7 he was referring not merely to objective circumstances, but also to a general awareness among modern men and women of living in an age of “radical crisis.”8 After the deluge of the Great War the perception of crisis was pervasive in Europe. In England, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” while a very personal poem and a piece of what he called “rhythmic grumbling,” was read as the prime expression of the disillusionment of a generation that had survived the war of 1914–18. The landscape which he evoked was one of “stony rubbish” and “exhausted wells.” Among the French it was Paul Vale´ ry who immediately after the war addressed himself, more explicitly than his English counterpart, to the “crise de l’esprit,” insisting that, while the military crisis may have been over, the crise intellectuelle, being “more subtle,” was all the harder to fathom in its depth. But what was the nature of this crisis? Was it the loss of hitherto generally understood certitudes? For Vale´ ry it was a matter of the agonizing fragmentation of European thought which made even the sceptics lose their doubts, recover them, and lose them again.9 But the special focus of this book will be on Germany, that is on German reactions to the European crisis. In Germany that crisis was writ large; the disjunctions which came with modernization were particularly acute. The lateness and suddenness of modernization and the coincidence of its various manifestations—unification, industrialization, urbanization, the emergence of new elites, the call for mass democracy—caught the population unprepared for accommodation to them and caused widespread uneasiness and discontent towards their workings, and the resulting crisis of the mind was most intensely felt. From this perspective, then, I propose in this series of essays to furnish a commentary on the so-called “German Question” which never ceases to vex those who, as statesmen and as scholars, are preoccupied with European political and spiritual affairs. Let me dispose right here of some hurdles in our path. It hardly needs stressing that we can safely leave behind us the nineteenth century German poet Emanuel Geibel’s boisterous eulogy of the universal mission of German culture: Und es mag am deutschen Wesen Einmal noch die Welt genesen;10

This prescription was after all responsible for leading Germany into the abyss of two catastrophic wars. But we might also, despite all the horrors perpetrated by the Germans in our

4

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

century, dismiss A. J. P. Taylor’s verdict that Germany constituted “an alien body in the structure of European civilization.”11 The attempt to explain the “German Question” by means of a German “otherness” amounts to an evasion of causal explanation. Similarly we can safely leave behind us the all too simplifying “from-to” interpretations of modern German history which flourished in the nineteen forties in the West and which had a way of reducing the deficits of German history to the impact of Luther or Romanticism or Hegel or Nietzsche.12 Nor is it the aim of this book to enter into and contribute to the much debated issue among historians of modern Germany concerning a German Sonderweg, according to which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, for better or worse, had taken a “special path” of development and had, unlike the western European countries, gone the way of modernization not by means of a politically responsible but a feudalized Bu¨ rgertum.13 This argument led its proponents in the post–World War II era to explain all too sweepingly the deficits in the German development, especially those on the way to modernization, and it has encouraged a summary and therefore simplistic accounting for the phenomenon of National Socialism. If German history led along or into a Sonderweg, it was not that this course was preordained by intrinsic German traits, but that it was conditioned by a combination of factors and events resulting in separation from the European norm. My aim, then, is not to belabor a supposed German deviancy from a European norm nor to insist upon supposed German congenital virtues and vices, but rather to consider the question of why the crisis and sense of crisis were singularly strong in Germany. No doubt, there has been something peculiar about the course of modern German history. In Germany the modernization process was affected, no doubt, by the weaknesses of the liberal and democratic traditions and the survival of pre-industrial elites. Furthermore, the syndrome of the “belated nation,” as addressed by Helmuth Plessner, played a decisive part in accounting for the “fragmentation of its character.”14 Modern Germany, which had produced seminal thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, unequalled in other countries in their eminence and revolutionary dangerousness, was, he argued, a “land without tradition.”15 Moreover, while England and France reacted “more calmly”16 to industrialism and finance capitalism, Germany turned out to be more vulnerable than they.17 Germany suffered “all the more” from the condition of mechanization and specialization of life.18 The German predicament was precisely the clash between two spheres, the old and the new, and between Geist and Politik. It accounts for the proverbial German “inner turmoil,”19 that made the crisis of the mind so “radical.” It was not, then, a question of German certainties for better or worse, but instead of the so-called “incertitudes”20 that have shaped modern Germany. Germany, the land of the center, was torn between West and East, imperial in tradition and all the more given to questioning its national identity, leading in the realm of the mind and trailing politically, outstanding in science and industry and yet burdened with a carryover of a premodern political system and social structure,

Introduction

5

indeed with prevailing traditional popular attitudes towards and resistances to modernity. Backwardness and forwardness clashed, and it was precisely the interplay between these directions which produced a heightened intensity of consciousness on the German scene. There was no fiat in the back of German history that determined its past. Nor was its course a result of altogether unpredictable and unforeseen contingencies. In short, German politics and the workings of the German mind were subject to disjunctions in Germany’s social evolution and body politic that caused shocks and aftershocks of increasing intensity. The “German incertitudes” in history, then, added up to a drama. Drama, not predictability or contingency, was the mark of Germany in the modern era. Against this background Robert Musil’s proposition about German history as the “paradigm of world history” might assume a penetrating meaning. He went so far as to elaborate on this premise by making the failure of a “synthesis between the soul and reason” responsible for this state of affairs.21 At any rate, the German experience was seen as an extreme expression of the general European discontent with and revolt against modern civilization.22 As a matter of fact Ernst Robert Curtius, one of the most astute and levelheaded observers of the German intellectual scene in the early decades of our century, thought he was justified in exclaiming that “in Germany, and only in Germany” a “new discovery of man” was under way,23 and he left no doubt but that the “new discovery” had its roots in Friedrich Nietzsche, an “explosive” figure of “highest significance” in the pantheon of the German mind.24 Friedrich Nietzsche (Figure 1.1), the great iconoclast among late nineteenthcentury philosophers, had challenged all canons of Western civilization, religious and rational, leaving humankind exposed to all the summits and precipices of life, caught in the turmoil of pain and exhilaration, and ultimately in triumphant affirmation of the meaninglessness of existence. But the Nietzsche who staged his revolt as a “good European” was a singularly German phenomenon after all. Germany was to him an index of what had happened all over Europe. A virtuoso in the German language, he sat in judgement over what he identified as a waning, decadent civilization and reserved the harshest indictment for his own people. Unsparingly, Nietzsche addressed the “German problem,” charging into the whole fabric of the German “inner turmoil”: [A]s the “people of the center” in every sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves—they escape definition. . . . It is characteristic of the Germans that the question “What is German?” never dies out among them.25

And not without a sideswipe at the German historicist tradition he argued that “the German himself does not exist: he is becoming, he is developing himself,”

6

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

Figure 1.1. Friedrich Nietzsche. Etching by Hans Olde, 1899.

and that this development was “an essentially German discovery” which, “together with German beer and German music” was “laboring to Germanize all Europe.”26 However, the invectives and hurts which Nietzsche showered upon the Germans should not detract from the fact that his quarrel with the Germans was, like most of his other quarrels, in effect a projection of his “quarrels with him-

Introduction

7

self.”27 He was after all as unsparing with himself as he was with the Germans: “A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!!!”28 While he exposed the German “barbarism,”29 he made a point of distinguishing between the barbarians of “the depth”—by which he meant the Germans— and the “other kind of barbarians who come from the heights: a sort of conquering and dominating creatures.”30 Nietzsche’s nihilism was, then, as much an indictment of barbarism as it was a celebration of it, and a prescription to purge that “slave morality” as much as to give back the pristine and uncorrupted values of authenticity. Said Zarathustra to his disciples: “You say, you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra! You are my believers: But what matter all believers! . . . Now I order you to lose me and to find yourselves; and only when you all have denied me, I will return to you . . . to celebrate the great noon with you.”31 The legacy of Nietzsche was pervasive all over the European continent; but in Germany it turned out to be singularly so. “Whether positively or negatively conceived,” Steven E. Aschheim wrote in his fine study of Nietzsche and the Germans, he occupied “a strategic place in individual and collective German self-definition and national debate.”32 Nietzsche as a German patron saint? In the landscape in which people had come so close to the perception of the Western “void,” the void itself, however disturbing, took on a liberating function pointing towards a new Table of Ethics beyond good and evil. Phrases like “beyond good and evil,” “transvaluation of all values,” “overman,” “will to power” thus assumed a magnetic and liberating—and indeed seductive—character among German thinkers and artists, promising the “new discovery of man.” Germany, said the historian Ludwig Dehio, echoing Curtius, was “spiritually richer than any other country in the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and she was still second to none at the beginning of the twentieth.33 But while “spiritually richer,” German intellectuals also lived “on the edge of a precipice,” as H. Stuart Hughes put it aptly, having “attained to an intensity of consciousness that recalled the reputed clairvoyance of the dying.”34 It will be my task, then, to trace the impact which the dialectics inherent in what Dehio called Germany’s “discordant history”35 had on its public mind. Thomas Mann in his Doctor Faustus addressed himself to this very problem by tracing the odyssey of the German spirit. Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D., tells us of Adrian Leverku¨ hn, the bedeviled musician whose story he records, that in the spring of 1919 his illness “lifted like a miracle from off him, and his spirit, phoenix-like, rose to its fullest freedom and most amazing power, in an unchecked, not to say unbridled, anyhow an intermittent flow of almost breathless productivity,” a productivity, incidentally, which “was by no means a time of enjoyment, but rather in its own way one of affliction.” And Dr. Zeitblom continues, editorializing so to speak, reminiscing and giving meaning to the events of 1918– 19, saying that they in fact signified a spiritual divide—that is, the end of the ep-

8

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

och of individualism, of freedom, the end, as Mann puts it, of the epoch of “bourgeois humanism.” And the awareness of this condition, this divide, Zeitblom argues, occupied the mind much more in a defeated country like Germany, than among the victorious nations which “precisely on account of victory” were sheltered by a sense of normalcy.36 The shock of defeat made the Germans experience the need to re-think such basic cultural values as the rationality of humankind and the idea of progress. In short, what Mann-Zeitblom suggests is that the Germans, for better or for worse, in “enjoyment” and “affliction,” were, among European nations, the trailblazers into the landscape of the twentieth century. In this sense German history was for Thomas Mann, as it was for Robert Musil, “the paradigm of world history.” The overall question here is, then, how modern man, and above all the Germans, would and could come to terms with the fragmentation of thought, culture and society that was the concomitant of modernity. He has become “uprooted” in a landscape, as Jaspers called it, of “ruins.”37 The awareness of and also the lament over the “desacralized cosmos”38 and the resultant fragmentation have become ubiquitous, especially since the turn of the century. Life has no longer seemed to reside in the whole, history seems to have lost purpose and even continuity, and art and beauty have visibly parted company. Curtius saw all this as “Weltnot,”39 a distress of the world in which the Germans were alarmingly involved. At the same time, however, this very Weltnot constituted a challenge to the German mind to orient itself in that landscape of ruins. Around the turn of the century Hugo von Hofmannsthal observed that “today, two things seem to be modern: the analysis of life and the flight from life. . . . One practises anatomy on the inner life of one’s mind, or one dreams. In short, reflection of fantasy, mirror image or dream image.”40 Hofmannsthal’s “analysis of life” and “flight from life”—like Thomas Mann’s “enjoyment” and “affliction”—were taken from the dictionary of modernism. The term is appropriate here since the outstanding characteristics of modernism as a climate of opinion and as language in the arts are a facing up to the challenges of modernity and an awareness of manoeuvering in a landscape of fragments as well as the quest for wholeness after all. Falling back on the metaphor “The Cathedral and the Stones,” the reality of stones and fragments, the burden of modernity, does not preclude the quest for joining them together again and the search for the wholeness and the magic of the cathedral—the cathedral, as Saint-Exupe´ ry had it, “more radiant than any heap of stones.”41 On the German scene these two dimensions and moods both coexisted and clashed. Moreover, even though the German case was not altogether unique, the clash was intensified by the “German incertitudes” which allowed for little pragmatism, and too few of the necessary traditional safeguards to prevent that “mystic flight from reality” from taking the place of a stoic confronting of the “polar night of icy darkness and hardness” that, Max Weber said, lay ahead.42 By mid-1945 Thomas Mann had come to the conclusion that the TwoGermanies theory, positing the existence of a “good” and a “bad” Germany, did not hold, and that there was only one Germany “whose best turned into evil

Introduction

9

through devilish cunning.”43 This observation should help us to understand and convey the whole complexity of the impact of modernity upon the German mind and German policies. The perception of living with fragmentariness was by itself liberating. It was a way of confronting the twentieth-century realities, and it paved the way for revolutionary perspectives in thought and styles in the arts. At the same time, this very perception turned out to be a source of anxiety and frantic efforts to overcome it. These essays will attempt to trace the whole complex spectrum of German adjustments and misadjustments to living in the modern age, beginning with the “shock of the new” that came with the Great War and ending with the nightmare of the Third Reich. In the German mind “disenchantment” and “reenchantment,” “enjoyment” and “affliction,” to fall back once more on Doctor Faustus’ vocabulary, went hand in hand. They were part of modern Germany’s dialecticism. The German mind became Europe’s avant-garde; but the German mind and, alas, German policies became nevertheless Europe’s nemesis. The capture of German politics and the German mind by the sweep of the National Socialist revolution strangled the freewheeling and indeed potentially salutary rhythm between a realistic, however stoic, acceptance of disenchantment and the quest for reenchantment that had characterized the German scene in modern times. It replaced the drama of German history by the imposition and enforcement of an ugly dead-end orthodoxy. NOTES 1. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), at the beginning of his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799). Actually, it was in a more prosaic mood that Novalis conceded in one of his “fragments” that “everywhere we search for the infinite but find only the finite.” 2. Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (London, 1933) 9f. The original German edition, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin, 1931) written in 1930, was published as jubilee volume 1,000 in the distinguished series Sammlung Go¨schen. The German passage (on p. 6 of Jaspers) speaks of the one time “fraglose Einheit” that had ceased to exist. 3. Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom. An Interpretation of History (New York, 1955) 232. (“Die Menschen sind Menschen im Frieden wie im Kriege; das Elend des Irdischen ha¨ ngt ihnen in beiden Zusta¨ nden gleich sehr an.” Jakob Burkhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen [Berlin, Stuttgart, 1910], 164.) 4. See E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1884 (New York, 1962) 17–20. 5. C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization. A Study in Comparative History (New York, 1966) 7. 6. James Joll, “Introduction: Some Reflections on the Twentieth Century.” In Eds. Nobutoshi Hagihara et al., Experiencing the Twentieth Century (Tokyo, 1985) 3. 7. Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, 80. 8. Ibid., 83. 9. Paul Vale´ ry, “La Crise de l’Esprit.” Premie´ re Lettre, Variete´ (Paris, n.d.) 16f. 10. “May someday the German mind regenerate Mankind.” This passage from a poem “Deutschlands Beruf” (Germany’s Calling, 1871) was given general currency by the

10

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

Kaiser in a speech in Munich of August 1907. He cited it as promise of an exemplary role of Germany in world affairs. Later it often because the object of derision. 11. A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History. A Survey of the Development of Germany Since 1815 (New York, 1946) 7. 12. Rohan d’Olier Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (New York, 1942); William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler (New York, 1941); Peter Viereck, Metapolitics. From the Romantics to Hitler (New York, 1941); Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA, 1941). 13. For the by now burgeoning literature on the subject see in particular Ed. Institut fu¨ r Zeitgeschichte, Deutscher Sonderweg—Mythos oder Realita¨t? (Munich, 1982); Ju¨ rgen Kocka, “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg,” Journal of Contemporary History vol. 23 (January 1988): 3–18; Helga Grebing, Der ‘deutsche Sonderweg’ in Europa 1806–1945. Eine Kritik (Stuttgart, 1986). For a leading document expounding the Sonderweg thesis see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Lemington Spa, 1985); for the refutation of the thesis see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford, 1984). 14. “Die Gebrochenheit seines Wesens”; Helmuth Plessner, Die verspa¨tete Nation. ¨ ber die politische Verfu¨hrbarkeit bu¨rgerlichen Geistes (Stuttgart, 1959) 72. The book U first appeared under the same title in Zurich in 1935. It was based on lectures which Plessner had given in the winter of 1934–35 while in exile at the University of Groningen in Holland. 15. “Land der Traditionslosigkeit,” Ibid., 73. 16. Ibid., 81. 17. “Widerstandsloser,” Ibid., 148. 18. “Umso tiefer,” Ibid., 148. 19. “Zerrissenheit”; see especially Koppel S. Pinson, Modern Germany. Its History and Civilization (New York, 1954) 3, who rightly made this condition the theme of his overall text. Richard Lo¨ wenthal used the term of the German “Geschichtszerrissenheit”; “Geschichtszerrissenheit und Geschichtsbewußtsein in Deutschland,” Ero¨ffung des Instituts fu¨r Zeitgeschichte an der Universita¨t Tel Aviv 20. Oktober 1971 (Tel Aviv, 1972). 20. This term goes back to a much discussed book by a French journalist in the early nineteen thirties about the crisis of bourgeois culture in Germany: Pierre Vie´ not, Incertitudes allemandes. la crise de la civilisation bourgeoise en Allemangne (Paris, 1931). The German edition appeared as Ungewisses Deutschland. Zur Krise seiner bu¨rgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt/M., 1931). It is interesting that Helmuth Plessner (p. 16) made reference to the incertitudes allemandes. 21. “Paradigma der Weltgeschichte,” Robet Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg, 1952), Anhang, 1634. 22. For this train of thought see also David Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–1942 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1980), 129f. 23. Ernst Robert Curtius, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (Stuttgart, 1932), 28. 24. Ibid., 14, 28. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Jenseits von Gut und Bo¨ se,” Gesammelte Werke, XV (Munich, 1925) 244, 198–201. 26. Ibid., 200. 27. For this argument see especially Michael Hamburger, “What to do about Him [Friedrich Nietzsche]?” The New York Times 2 December 1979, Section VII, 32 and 36.

Introduction

11

28. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Aus dem Nachlass,” Gesammelte Werke, 16 (Munich, 1925), 318. 29. Ibid., 354. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Der Wille zur Macht,” Gesammelte Werke, 19 (Munich, 1926), 285. 31. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathstra,” Gesammelte Werke, 13 (Munich, 1925), 99. 32. Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley, 1992), 19. 33. Ludwig Dehio, “Thoughts on Germany’s Mission 1900–1918” (1952) in Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1967), 107. 34. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society. The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930 (New York, 1958), 421. 35. Dehio, “Thoughts,” 108. 36. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverku¨hn as Told by a Friend (New York, 1948), 352f. 37. “Tru¨ mmer,” Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, 6. 38. For this idiom see Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion (New York, 1961), 17. 39. Curtius, Deutscher Geist, 8. 40. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Gabriele D’Annunzio,” Gesammelte Werke, Prosa I, (Frankfurt/M., 1950), 172f. 41. Antoine de Saint-Exupe´ ry, Flight to Arras (New York, 1942), 250. 42. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf (28 January 1919),” idem, Politik als Beruf 1919, Eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe I/17 (Tu¨ bingen, 1992), 251. 43. Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress 1942–1949 (Washington, 1963), 64.

2 The Great War: Experience and Memory

The decisive agent of the “crisis of the twentieth century” was the First World War. In all belligerent countries the outbreak of the war itself was, as is common knowledge, greeted almost unanimously with elation. Men followed the call to arms in a state of vitually unprecedented exultation, their helmets and knapsacks bedecked with flowers. The war was a singing war, and its songs, whether the cheering “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” the snappy “Madelon” or the sonorous “Wacht am Rhein,” were expressions of the so-called “war experience” which captivated both sides of the impending confrontation between the nations in the early days of August 1914. On both sides the conscripts, and even more so the volunteers, were longing for adventure, camaraderie and sacrifice for their countries and were readily supported by the general populace and indeed by the intellectual establishments. The flash of enchantment paradoxically electrified both sides. “Honor has come back, as a king,” the English poet Rupert Brooke elegized in praise of the dead.1 The German philosopher Max Scheler saw fit to exclaim: “No more were we what we had been so long: Alone! The broken contract between individual, people, nation, world, and God was suddenly re-established. . . .”2 The motto “rather blood than always cheating” threw the painter Franz Marc, who himself eventually fell in battle near Verdun in March 1916, into the arms of a mystique that seemed to promise the regeneration of a “mendacious” civilization.3 Later on the German dramatist Carl Zuckmayer would recall that in those days of war euphoria there were no more “separations” among Germans and no longer any “distance” between them. They all sang “as though with one voice.”4 However, before long the “heroic festivity,” as Thomas Mann later called the

14

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

enchantment of the first August days or weeks,5 was to give way to an ugly reality, a war of attrition, rat- and lice-infested trenches, wounds and death. The letters and poems that emerged from the war reflect all ways of experiencing it, with intoxication and disillusionment, patriotism and revulsion, pride and despair holding each other in balance. The “irony” about which Paul Fussell wrote in his masterly work The Great War and Modern Memory,6 the disproportion between expectations and reality, between the generally assumed noble ends and the brutal war machine, between the heroic vision of patriotic youth storming to victory and the reality of soldiers suffering a solitary, bloody death between unapproachable lines of barbed wire, no doubt inherent in every war, was more pronounced in the First World War than in any war before or since.7 With the First World War a whole world collapsed, and the “whole long age,” as Henry James wrote, founded on the belief in the forward motion of history, was plunged into the “abyss of blood and darkness”8 and yielded to a mood of bitterness and disenchantment. But of course the experience of the Great War goes far beyond the years of the war itself and carries over into the culture of the following decades. How, then, was the long-range impact of the war perceived especially by the German public? This question is the focus of this chapter. Enchantment and disenchantment were the languages of the soldiers in combat on both sides of the front. But, as we shall see, in Western Europe the voices of disenchantment were allowed to surface more readily than in Germany. And it was in Germany after all, by contrast to Britain and France, that after the war disenchantment, which seemed to be the lasting legacy of the deadly battles, was matched by a mood of more or less forced reenchantment. These two, then, disenchantment and reenchantment, carried over from the war into the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, and in these decades the interplay between them defined much of the cultural and political argument in Germany, with reenchantment carrying the day. Recent literature on the Great War has often emphasized the connection between the war and the modernist mode in the arts.9 Short of entering into the fray over the elusive concepts of “modernism,” and for that matter “postmodernism,” it is indisputable that in the early twentieth century, style in the arts underwent a marked change. Whether it was a matter of devolution or revolution, a new style emerged in all the arts that was unmistakably and uniformly challenging, indeed shocking and disruptive. The old stylistic certainties, harmony in music, representation in the visual arts, coherence and continuities in the novel, metrical verse in poetry gave way to the rearrangement of parts into altogether unprecedented mosaics of tunes, pictures, episodes that clearly were more than artistic fancies: they had a meaning rooted in the changing and charged fabric of European society. It would be a mistake to attribute this development altogether to the war. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “an artist cannot endure reality,”10 thus indicating that all art, certainly all great art, takes off from reality and moves into the realm of the imaginary and visionary. In their own ways the Christian masses and

The Great War

15

oratoria, the compositions of Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Du¨ rer, Dante’s Divine Comedy were anything but “realistic” monuments. Their creators rearranged a conventional reality to give expression to their artistic, formgiving impulses. But the departure from a more or less agreed upon, conventional reality was particularly striking in the early twentieth century. It set in during the first decades in the form of all sorts of new and related art movements that departed from tradition, like constructivism, cubism, surrealism, vorticism, futurism, expressionism, and in music atonality. First and foremost it gave expression to a revulsion against what at the time was generally referred to as “bourgeois” life and “bourgeois” taste. In Germany it was to begin with the Nietzsche-inspired Youth Movement of the early century that represented a cultural revolution of sorts against a climate of materialism and conventionality, against the city and the machine. At the same time the modern movement represented a perception of crisis, of modernity, a response to it, a new departure. The new language resorted to primitivism, the distortion and exaggeration of conventional reality and imaginative abstraction. The new vision was not necessarily a beautiful one, but it spelled artistic honesty. In 1915 the Swiss-born German painter Paul Klee noted in his diary: “I have long had this war inside me.”11 In a sense it can be argued that the modern movement even before the outbreak of the Great War was war-related. It articulated and anticipated the cultural discontents which found, momentarily at least, a euphoric release in the outbreak of the war. Certainly the war, if it did not give birth to the modern movement, made it imperative. The dulce et decorum est pro patria mori had receded in that terrible war. Among the British War Poets Rupert Brooke’s heroic style before long gave pride of place to a style that was commensurate with the indignities of the war. In particular after the deadly stalemate in the battle of the Somme of July-November 1916 his patriotic poetry no longer seemed appropriate to the grim reality of battle. The British poet Robert Graves tackled the issue of the “Big Words”—glory, valor, heroism: the young soldier, waiting to attack, “He cursed, prayed, sweated, wished the proud words back.”12 Siegfried Sassoon,13 who earlier in the war had written beautiful Georgian poems, after his experience at the Somme came to renounce those “gallant lies”; now Jack, that “hero,” who had “panicked down the trench that night the mine went up at Wicked Corner” and who, at last, had died, was remembered as but a “cold-footed, useless swine.”14 After the slaughter of the battle of the Somme Sassoon was in search for ways of giving artistic expression to the horror that man had inflicted upon himself. The Beethoven, Bach, Mozart who had “built cathedrals” in his heart, he could no longer find: You have no part with lads who fought And laughed and suffered at my side.

16

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945 Your fugues and symphonies have brought No memory of my friends who died. For when my brain is on their track, In slangy speech I call them back. With fox-trot their ghosts I charm. ‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’15

The War Poets—Graves, the later Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg— would no longer write “beautiful” poems. Their poetry had to be expressive of a devastating reality. Owen’s use of “pararhymes” was indicative of the new style. The new style, one that was fragmented, often disjointed, elliptical, jarring, thus recognizing the profound inhumanity of war and, alas, of life itself. The poetry of the War Poets was “modern” in that it heralded the parting of ways between poetry and beauty. Art and poetry had above all to be honest, facing up to a terrifying reality. In this respect the poetry of the Great War did anticipate the mood and technique of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” which was acclaimed as one of the chief documents of post-war disillusionment. Wilfred Owen, who served on the Western Front as Company commander in the Manchester Regiment and fell on November 4, 1918 while trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal, exposed the Horacian “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” as “the old Lie.”16 True poets, he insisted, “must be truthful.”17 “Above all,” Owen protested in the “Preface” to his Poems, “I am not concerned with Poetry”; his subject, he continued, was war, “and the pity of War,” and if he then proceeded to the lofty statement that “the Poetry is in the pity,” he indicated his profound awareness of the tragic disparity between man’s elevated calling and his fall into the abyss of suffering and death.18 Wilfred Owen’s and Isaac Rosenberg’s war poems came to reflect the “shock of the new,” attempting to translate it into poetic language, a language that itself risked being dissonant and shocking. With authors like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot the new style became common currency; it became testimony to the continued concerns over the “crisis of the twentieth century” extending beyond the war years. But in this connection it should be noted that the very “heap of broken images,” the “fragments” shored against ruins in Eliot’s “Waste Land,” were nevertheless signposts along a pilgrimage, a quest for “The Peace which passeth understanding.” The range of German reactions to the First World War was not altogether dissimilar from those among the Western Europeans, extending all the way from the initial enchantment to disenchantment and disillusionment, except that in the course of time it became marked by a singularly freezing intensity spelling ideological doggedness on one side and cutting satire on the other. Actually, despite all the glamor and glitter in the Kaiser’s Germany and the exuberance with which the Germans then followed the call to arms in the August days of 1914, there was an undercurrent in pre-war Germany, “unknown Germany,” as it has been called,19 which gave vent to somber premonitions of doom.

The Great War

17

Figure 2.1. Illustration from the pamphlet “Volunteers 1914.”

In a pamphlet written shortly after the war Walther Rathenau, the German philosopher-statesman, wrote that “in that unhappy and worthless Europe” the war had started well before August 1, 1914: “already decades ago had it broken out.”20 (Figure 2.1) The documents reflecting the forebodings to which Rathenau alluded constituted the earliest manifestations of the modern mode in Germany. Among the striking examples of this genre there was Georg Heym’s poem “Der Krieg” (“The War,” September 1911).21 One of the major German Expressionist poets, Heym was caught in a terrifying ambiguity. While he fully shared with his

18

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

generation the disdain of that “ignoble peace” which had spelled boredom, banality and hypocrisy, he longed for engagement, decision, action, and indeed battle. Heym’s dream of glory was matched in the poem by a terrified vision of the carnage of war. The vision of heroism and the foreboding of barbaric destruction were united in a macabre dance of death: “He is risen” the poem begins, “now that was so long asleep,” Risen out of vaulted places dark and deep. In the growing dusk he stands, tall and unknown, And crushes the moon in his strong black hand.

Right here, in the first stanza, the religious imagery of resurrection was coupled with the terror of crushing destruction. But in the end the poem came down hard, unsparingly and shockingly hard, on the imminent terror: Our storm-torn clouds’ reflected glow, Into the cold wastelands of dead darkness down below; That his fire may consume the night far and wide, He pours pitch and brimstone down on their Gomorrha.22

But premonitions of the horrors of war were shared by other German and Austrian writers and artists. The Austrian poet Georg Trakl’s poem “Menschheit” (“Mankind”), written between September 26, and October 10, 1912, was yet another striking document of impending catastrophe: Mankind facing fire chasms, A drum-roll, brows of dark warriors, Steps through bloody fog; black iron rings, Despair. Night in sad brains Here Eva’s shadow, hunt and red money.

Yet for Trakl, unlike for Heym, there was a glimmer of hope in the form of redemption: The light breaking through clouds, the last supper. In bread and wine there is a gentle silence And they, twelve of them, are assembled. At night they scream under olive-tree branches; St. Thomas dips the hand into the mark of wounds.23

The “fire chasms,” then, it should be noted, were confronted by hope and faith after all. In the metaphors I have chosen, the poem bore witness to both the reality of stones and the quest for the cathedral. A notable visual exhibition of the anticipation of war was the cycle of gigantic oil canvases entitled “Apocalyptic Landscapes” by the Expressionist Ludwig

The Great War

19

Meidner, painted in 1912–13 and continued into the war years.24 Like Heym, Meidner was a Silesian by birth who had come to Berlin, and as a matter of fact he was well acquainted with the poet and his work. Both artists shared a confusingly ambiguous attitude towards the German capital, which of course was vibrant and exciting, but which at the same time appeared decadent and menacing to them. Meidner’s compositions are replete with jagged lines, garish colors, threatening thunderclouds, flashing fireballs, shattered buildings. “I used countless indigo and ochre colors” he himself commented, “and a painful urge induced me to break all rectilinear-vertical lines,”25 so as to convey a haunting sense of terror, leaving man, both the culprit and the victim, in flight and degradation. Somehow the premonition of war thus brought into focus the ills of modern civilization, as Meidner perceived them, destined to spell universal doom; and if there was a God in his universe, it was the Old Testamentarian one of anger and retribution. The sense of cultural crisis, then, helped foster among German artists a new language, call it the language of modernism or Expressionism, that was commensurate with anxiety and suffering. In the cases of Heym, Trakl and Meidner premonitions of war were accentuated by bold verbal and pictorial eruptions. Even Stefan George, a poet who otherwise was “far removed,” as C. M. Bowra rightly observed, from Heym in his aims and his art, joined the chorus of the prophets of doom. The shallowness and mendacity of Wilhelmian Germany made him, the seer, strike heavy blows, as if with a hammer:26 You build beyond all metes and bounds. “What’s high Could be still higher!” But no patch or prop Or new foundation serves. The structure quakes. And at your wisdom’s end you howl to heaven: “Do what to keep from choking in the rubble, The spook we shaped from gnawing at our brains?” But Heaven laughs: Too late to stop or mend! Ten thousand must submit to holy madness, Ten thousand perish in the holy plague, And tens of thousands in the holy war.27

It seemed as though the holy madness, the holy plague, the holy war, would reduce the rotten order to ruins before a new covenant could take its place. The necessity of the coming war was a measure of the depth of the cultural crisis that had befallen the country. It is remarkable, however, that in Britain as well as in France the basic national consensus allowed the airing of views critical of, if not hostile to, the war effort even after the war had broken out. Sassoon, once he had persuaded himself that the war he had entered as a war of defence and liberation had, as he saw it, become a “war of aggression and conquest,” sent a statement to his Com-

20

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

manding Officer on July 6, 1917 protesting his “wilful defiance of military authority.” The statement, of which copies were sent to fourteen public figures, was read out in the House of Commons on July 30th by a Liberal M. P. and printed in The Times the following day. Also some of Sassoon’s anti-war poems were published before the end of the war.28 In Britain, then, despite all the pressures of the official propaganda machine, there was room for the expression of dissent. As a matter of fact it was not just accidental that there was no term in Britain equivalent to the French union sacre´ e and the German Burgfriede of the August days of 1914. It might be said that because the consensus among Britons of all stations and backgrounds was unqualified, there was no particular need to emphasize it. Moreover, the very consensus did not—even in wartime—silence voices critical of the war. The Great War indeed saw the beginnings of the modern British pacifist movement. Both the predominantly Labourite NoConscription Fellowship and the largely Nonconformist and Quakerite Fellowship of Reconciliation were founded in 1914 (in November and December), and while the membership of both was relatively small and their publicity muted, they enjoyed public tolerance. They stood their ground and stated candidly their defiance of the national policies.29 But the war against the war was not restricted to these organized Fellowships. Dissent has had a long and vital tradition in Britain; it was precisely the general consensus that legitimized it. It found a voice in Parliament among the members of the Independent Labour Party, in various left-wing journals, among men of letters like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and his Cambridge friends, and in the Bloomsbury Circle. In France the union sacre´ e, generally regarded as the “magic potion” of the French people during the war,30 certainly did not obliterate the old traditional divisions that had marked French society; but these were momentarily subordinated to the one aim shared by most all French people: the winning of the war. Then, as in Britain, the heroic note which had set the tone for the literature of the first two years of the war, gave way to the voices critical of the war. As a matter of fact, according to Jean-Jacques Becker, from as early as the autumn of 1914, “regardless of their political or patriotic feelings, soldiers came to despise heroic literature.”31 By the end of 1916 certainly the patriotic conformism that had prevailed in France in the early stages of the war gave way to dissent; the days when the likes of Maurice Barre`s and Charles Maurras had swamped and virtually monopolized the bookmarket with their heroic tracts were over. In 1916 Henri Barbusse’s fierce reckoning with the war in his novel Le Feu, based on his experience of two years of service in the trenches, was snapped up and serialized in L’Oeuvre and before long, because of its enormous popular appeal in various provincial papers, was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt for that year. This was, to be sure, no indication that the French resolve to pursue the war to victory had become in any way weakened. As in Britain, the incidence of dissent was but an indication of national cohesion.

The Great War

21

The situation in Germany in this respect turned out to be utterly different. Nonconformity and dissent had never been highly valued in the German Reich created by Bismarck, and now that the fatherland was in danger, the closing of ranks was all the tighter. The Burgfriede proclaimed by the Kaiser in the Reichstag on August 4, 1914 turned out to have a stifling long range effect on the mind of Germany. The well-known manifesto of the 93 German men of letters, scientists and artists of October 4, 1914, which spoke of “the struggle for existence forced upon Germany” and sought to justify the German violation of Belgian neutrality, might in itself be ascribed to the initial war hysteria. To be sure, it was only natural that the ardor of the early days and weeks should fade and sober voices make themselves heard in the course of the war. As it progressed and as the expectation of a decisive Siegfriede faded, the war aims discussions and certainly the Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917 carried by a majority consisting of Centrists, Progressives and Social Democrats punctured the national harmony. But in what was thereafter a house divided between annexationists and moderates, the last word was had by the former—until the bitter end, defeat. Of course there were some German intellectuals who stood their ground against the war policies. The German pacifists, a small band, initially made a tortuous effort to reconcile an expression of solidarity with the Austro-Hungarian ally with warnings against irresponsible warmongering.32 For the rest they found themselves up against a wall of officially inspired rejection and were subjected to rigorous censorship and systematic harassment. From his own olympian height Stefan George, the seer-poet, made sure to assure his disciples that the war he had foreseen, once it had come, was not his war: What grips you now—I knew it long ago! Long have I sweated blood of anguish while They played and played with fire. I exhausted My tears before and I have none today. The thing was almost done and no one saw, The worst is yet to be and no one sees. You yield to pressure goading from without . . . These are the beacons only, not the tidings. The struggle, as you wage it, is not mine . . . You shall not cheer. No rise will mark the end, But only downfalls, many and inglorious.33

Ka¨ the Kollwitz, the great German sculptress and graphic artist (Figure 2.2), whose son Peter died fighting in Flanders in October 1914 and who at first sought to “keep faith” with him, so as to honor his sacrifice for the fatherland, in the course of the war, “after a terrible struggle” underwent a change of heart, seeing his death as a waste.34 At the very end of the war she then went public

22

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

Figure 2.2. “Mourning Parents,” granite sculptures by Ka¨ the Kollwitz. Installed 1932 at the Military Cemetery, Dixmuiden, Belgium.

in an article printed in the Social Democratic Vorwa¨ rts and reprinted in the liberal Vossische Zeitung, opposing a call for a last ditch stand of German youth: “Seed for planting must not be ground.”35 Even at this late stage it took courage to take this stand. A German expatriate, Hermann Hesse, novelist and poet, who had escaped to the Ticino before the war, frequently published his critiques of the German war psychosis in the Neue Zu¨ richer Zeitung, for which he was branded back in Germany as a defeatist.36 Later Hesse argued that the “German misery” had started not with Hitler but indeed with the “intoxicated jubilation”37 of the Germans in the summer of 1914.

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This thesis, sweeping as it is, cannot be dismissed altogether. While there were pressures to conform in all warfaring countries, in Germany they were singularly powerful. To begin with the Kriegserlebnis and before long the Fronterlebnis were all too readily translated into a fixed patriotic orthodoxy. The German war effort became identified with the “ideas of 1914” which by contrast to the “ideas of 1789” were to define the alignments in what the German mandarins upgraded into a Kulturkrieg. In a flood of speeches, pamphlets, books they rushed to convince themselves and the public of the ideological legitimacy of the German war effort.38 During the war itself the “official version” was, for understandable reasons, the dominant one. It created the “German misery” not only by virtually smothering all dissent, in particular on the part of the pacifists, but also by outriding increasing forebodings of defeat and perpetuating itself after the war with the help of the pernicious Stab in the Back legend launched by the old General Staff. The theory that the German army was undefeated in the field but betrayed at home by defeatists readily gave the “official version,” which otherwise may have appeared increasingly defensive, if not mendacious, a new dynamism. It paved the way for a new generation of militarists, albeit literary ones, which, disregarding the sense of crisis that had become pervasive even before the war among German thinkers and artists, was eagerly at work to make up for it, to counteract it by perpetuating the legend of the experience of the nation in arms. It was instrumental in shaping the German memory of the war and had a decisive impact on the catastrophic political developments of the later years of Weimar Germany. The landmark in the enormous body of German works that set out to explore the meaning of the Great War was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which appeared in 1929, a good decade after the end. It was not exactly the very first book of its kind; Walter Flex’s Wanderer between Two Worlds was published as early as 1917, and Ernst Ju¨ ngers first major work, The Storm of Steel, in 1920, both prime specimens in exaltation of the war experience and celebration of daring and death in the field. But it was Remarque’s war novel which stirred up the lively debate about the war and in fact created a language that was designed to enable the survivors of the Armageddon and of course posterity to come to terms with it. There were in fact two languages, the language of disenchantment, which was Remarque’s, and the one of heroism and enchantment, which was that of Flex and Ju¨ nger. All Quiet on the Western Front was a smash hit; translated into many languages, it sold one million copies in Germany alone by July 1930,39 and set the example for a whole slue of works of its kind. The tone was established for them all by Remarque’s initial statement of purpose: “To tell of a generation of men which even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” However, the rejoinders to Remarque were many and massive. The heroic mode had its way after all. A “sea change,” celebrated by nationalists,40 had

24

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

taken place, and in turn left wingers were left with resigned lamentations: “until yesterday the war was the accused . . . but its proponents suddenly have become its embarrassed defenders. Already the war has become a redeemer . . . ; a strange mythology makes it immune to all condemnation: it is being worshiped.”41 The sense of crisis had not abated after the first decade following Versailles; much to the contrary, just about then Weimar Germany, hit by the Great Depression, entered its final crisis, which turned out to be deadly. This time round the crisis was an identifiable one, not merely a matter of perception. It was precisely this crisis which encouraged among the middle strata recourse to the legend of the healing function of war. Evoking the unifying function of war, then, served as a massive escape from an unwanted reality, and the compulsive conjuring up of the “war experience” served as an escape from crisis. The Kriegserlebnis, then, became hostage to the German right wingers. They appropriated and exploited it to the fullest. Whatever came from the Left, as from Remarque and authors like Arnold Zweig and Ludwig Renn, had little political impact after all, and the satire of a Bertolt Brecht and Karl Kraus did not speak to a broader public which resisted having its wounds opened. The Nazi demonstrations in Berlin of December 1930 against the showing All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to the suspension of further showings of the film, are indicative of the pressures exerted on the censorship by “the street.” People were craving to turn their backs on an ugly reality, and the heroic mode offered the best directive for them. They chose heroizing over debunking, and thus the war became a perfect “crisis solution”42 for them. The nationalistic war literature thus became a vehicle for a frantic reenchantment. Indeed after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany the right wing authors who had celebrated the war were rewarded with the printing of huge editions of their works.43 They after all prepared the ground for National Socialism and its vision of a Volksgemeinschaft which compulsively turned its back on the real legacy of war— destruction, torment and death—and reassembled its broken images, the stones to construct a gigantic cathedral which indeed turned out to be a dangerously seductive phantom.44 NOTES 1. Rupert Brooke, 1914 and Other Poems (London, 1919), 13. 2. Ibid., 36ff. 3. Franz Marc, Briefe aus dem Feld (Berlin, 1948), 60. 4. Carl Zuckmayer, Als wa¨ r’s ein Stu¨ ck von mir. Horen der Freundschaft (Vienna, 1966), 193, 197. The belief of the general public’s elation over the outbreak of the war has recently been challenged by a number of historians, in particular Jeffrey Verhey, Der “Geist von 1914” und die Erfindung der Volksgemeinschaft (Hamburg, 2000). 5. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt/M., 1956), 399, quoted in Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 2d ed. (Mu¨ nchen, 1964), 121.

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6. (London, 1975), 7ff, 29ff. 7. Ibid., 8. 8. Percy Lubbock, Ed., The Letters of Henry James (New York, 1920), 11, 384, quoted in Ibid., 8. 9. See the general work on modernism, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Eds., Modernism 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1976), esp. 27; on the war and modernism in specific see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York, 1990). 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), 572; also quoted in Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 25. 11. Felix Klee, Ed., The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1964), 313. 12. Robert Graves, “Big Words,” Over the Brazier (London, 1916), 27. 13. For Graves and Sassoon see especially Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined. The First World War and English Culture (New York, 1991), 153–159. 14. Siegfried Sassoon, “The Hero” (originally printed in Cambridge Magazine, vol. 6, November 18, 1916, 145), Collected Poems (New York, 1949), 29. 15. “Dead Musicians,” Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915–1918, Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1983), 204f. 16. “Dulce et decorum est,” Wilfred Owen, Poems (London, 1920), 66. 17. Siegfried Sassoon, preface to Poems, by Wilfred Owen (New York, n.d), VII. 18. Poems VII; for a commentary of Owen’s understanding of “pity” see Gertrude M. White, Wilfred Owen (New York, 1969), 56–81. 19. See the fine work by Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany. An Inner Chronicle of the First World War Based on Letters and Diaries (New Haven, 1948). 20. Walther Rathenau, Der Kaiser. Eine Betrachtung (Berlin, 1919), 47ff, quoted in Gu¨ nter Dammann, et al., Georg Heyms Gedicht “Der Krieg” (Heidelberg, 1978), 40. 21. The poem was undoubtedly occasioned by the Moroccan crisis of 1911 which conjured up in Germany fears of military action by French Moroccan troops. This crisis certainly belongs to the prehistory of the First World War. Moreover text and style of the poem indicate a broader apocalyptic vision on the poet; see Patrick Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin. The Life and Work of Georg Heym (London, 1991), 212–220; Gu¨ nter Dammann, et al., George Heyms Gedicht “Der Krieg” (Heidelberg, 1978). 22. This translation is from Patrick Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 214. 23. The translation is mine. 24. See Carol S. Eliel, The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Ludwig Meidner (Los Angeles, 1989). 25. Ludwig Meidner, Septemberschrei: Hymnen, Gebete, La¨ sterungen (Berlin, 1920), 8, quoted in Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, 26. 26. Sir Maurice Bowra, Poetry and the First World War (Oxford, 1961), 5. 27. Stefan George, The Star of the Covenant (Berlin, 1914); ten advance copies of the volume were printed the year before. This translation is taken from Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz, Eds., The Works of Stefan George Rendered into English, 2nd. ed. (Chapel Hill, 1974), 323. 28. Starting in 1916 Sassoon published his poetry in the Cambridge Magazine which by that time had become a principal voice of dissent in England; Hynes, A War Imagined, 154. Also Siegfried Sassoon, Counter Attack (London, 1918). 29. See Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of Faith (Oxford,

26

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

1980), esp. 31ff; also Keith Robbins, The Abolition of War. The Peace Movement in Britain 1914–1919 (Cardiff, 1976). 30. See Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (New York, 1986), 324; see also Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect. French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA 1996). 31. Ibid., 173. 32. See Ludwig Quidde, Der deutsche Pazifismus wa¨ hrend des Weltkrieges 1914– 1918, Ed. Karl Holl (Boppard am Rhein, 1979), esp. Erstes Kriegsflugblatt der deutschen Friedensgesellschaft, (Mu¨ nchen, Stuttgart, 29. Juli 1914), 239ff. I have not found confirmation of Roger Chickering’s claim that the German pacifists went as far as to initially endorse the war effort, persuading themselves that their country was fighting for international justice; see Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War. The Peace Movement and German Society 1892–1914 (Princeton, 1975), 322ff. 33. Stefan George, Der Krieg (Berlin, 1917); this translation is taken from Marx and Morwitz, Eds., The Works of Stefan George, 359. 34. The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, Ed. Hans Kollwitz (Chicago, 1955), 7f. 35. Ibid., 8, 88f. 36. The articles have been collected in Hermann Hesse, Krieg und Frieden. Betrachtungen zu Krieg und Politik seit dem Jahr 1914 (Zu¨ rich, 1946). 37. Ibid., 256. 38. The term “ideas of 1914” was coined by Johann Plenge, a sociologist at the University of Mu¨ nster, and given added publicity by the Swedish geopolitician Rudolf Kjelle´ n (Johann Plenge, Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft (Mu¨ nster/W., 1915) and 1789 und 1914. Die symbolischen Jahre in der Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (Berlin, 1916). Rudolf Kjelle´ n, Die Ideen von 1914. Eine weltgeschichtliche Perspektive (Leipzig, 1915). See also Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (Leipzig, 1915); Werner Sombart, Ha¨ ndler und Helden, Patriotische Betrachtungen (Munich, Leipzig, 1915); Die deutsche Freiheit, Ed. Bund deutscher Gelehrter und Ku¨ nstler (Gotha, 1917), containing among others contributions by Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch; Ernst Troeltsch, Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa, Ed. Hans Baron (Tu¨ bingen, 1925), Otto Hintze, et al., Eds., Deutschland und der Weltkrieg (Leipzig, 1915), including among others contributions by Meinecke and Troeltsch; Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Erhebung, 2nd-5th eds. (Stuttgart, Berlin, 1914). Of course Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin, 1918), amounted to a grandiose literary paraphrase of the “ideas of 1914.” 39. The figures on overall numbers of translations and sales vary somewhat. Estimates for the years 1966 and 1968 speak of 45–50, respectively 45 languages, and 20–30, respectively 8 million sales; Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges in der Literatur. Zu den Frontromanen der spa¨ ten Zwanziger Jahre (Kronberg/Ts., 1978), 42. 40. “Tendenzwandel,” see Heinrich von Gleichen, “Tendenzwandel in der Literatur,” Die Standarte (1929), 541, quoted in Hans-Harald Mu¨ ller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller. Der Kriegsroman der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1986), 299. 41. See Arno Schirokauer, “Kriegsmythologie,” Das Tage-Buch, 11, 19 April 1930, 631, Ibid., 299. 42. “Krisenlo¨ sung,” “Krisenlo¨ sung”; Karl Pru¨ mm, “Das Erbe der Front. Der antidemokratische Kriegsroman der Weimarer Republik und seine nationalsozialistische Fortset-

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zung,” Horst Denkler and Karl Pru¨ mm, Eds., Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich. Themen—Traditionen—Wirkungen (Stuttgart, 1976), 140f. 43. Ibid., 157, and Dietrich Strothmann, Nationalsozialistische Literaturpolitik. Ein Beitrag zur Publizistik im Dritten Reich (Bonn, 1960), 377. 44. This chapter was completed in June 1996 before I became aware of the publication of the proceedings of a scholarly conference that took place in September 1993 in the Munich Historisches Kolleg (Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Ed., in cooperation with Elisabeth Mu¨ ller-Luckner, Kultur und Krieg. Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Ku¨ nstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1996). While I have derived much benefit from this fine volume, I have not seen the need to revise my version which reflects my own distinct approach to the subject.

3 Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism: Max Weber and Oswald Spengler

The ideas of Max Weber (1864–1920) and of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) are not normally coupled or even compared. Both were, no doubt, titans of the German mind, each with enormous range and arresting insights. The differences between them are all too evident. Weber (Figure 3.1), the great sociologist, by almost one generation the elder of the two, represents the apex of the much celebrated German academic tradition. He was a meticulously responsible scholar whose scholarship was informed by his character as much as his character was defined by the rigor of his scholarship, and he never allowed his passions to get the better of what he thought was correct and just. Spengler, (Figure 3.2), Germany’s illustrious polymath, by contrast, was distinctly an outsider to the German world of learning, and he had a way of allowing himself to be guided and carried away by high-flown intellectual constructs that helped him indulge in prophesies that closely informed his political preferences. While his speculative horizons may have been as broad as Weber’s scholarship, he was a man of obsessive hunches and ingrained prejudices. Spengler, Golo Mann, Thomas’ historian-son, wrote facetiously, “was always right.”1 As a matter of fact, once, in February 1920, the two titans, as I have called them, met for a disputation.2 The initiative came from the students in Weber’s seminar who were eager to arrange a debate between their professor and the man whose Der Untergang des Abendlandes3 had caused something of a sensation at the time. The “tournament” between the mandarin and the prophet took place in a conference room of the Munich City Hall and lasted one day and a half. Although the sources are sparse, the argument between Weber and Spengler,

Figure 3.1. Max Weber, ca. 1917–18. Photograph by Leif Geiges, courtesy of Verena Geiges-Zweifel. 30

Figure 3.2. Oswald Spengler, 1926. Photo courtesy of C. H. Beck Publishers.

31

32

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

insofar as it can be reconstructed, can give us some insight into their thinking. Therefore I want to fall back on it briefly. First Spengler presented the main theses of his work, not without sideswipes against Nietzsche and subsequently against the prognoses of Marx, which irritated Weber.4 Spengler’s position on Marx was consistently negative. It came explicitly to the fore in the later booklet Preuβentum und Sozialismus (Munich, 1929) in which he stubbornly praised the “ethical” socialism of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia at the expense of Marx’s ill-disguised “Manchester liberalism.” Weber then came to the rescue of Marx: “Your prognoses, compared with Marx’s,” so he was quoted, “are devoid of any scholarly value. . . . They are the kind of prognoses that when I look out of the window” (and here he leaned way over the table and turned swiftly his large head upward toward the light) “and say: ‘now the sun is shining’ and turn back pensively to my true believers and declare: ‘but you may be certain that some day it will rain.’ This is very different in the case of Marx whom you have chided so much. If he would rise up today from his grave and look around, he would have all reason, despite of important deviations from his prophecies, to say: ‘this indeed is flesh from my flesh. . . . ’ ”5

Concerning Nietzsche, Spengler was more ambivalent. Basically he was one of the many militant Nietzscheans. See in particular the lecture which he delivered later on October 15, 1924, in the Weimar Nietzsche Archive on the occasion of the philosopher’s 80th anniversary.6 Goethe and Nietzsche were “the only two Germans of statue” who had become common property of their nation.7 But though Spengler saw in Nietzsche the “born musician,” he had reason to take issue with him on various grounds. Already in his great work he criticized Nietzsche for incorporating his vocabulary “decadence,” “nihilism,” “transvaluation of all values,” “will to power” into the ancient-medieval-modern scheme, which he rejected as too narrowly Europe-centered. But there were other criteria on which Spengler most likely attacked Nietzsche in the course of the confrontation with Weber, thus Nietzsche’s polemics against the great historical “systems,” against historical inevitability and against the state. Max Weber’s approach to both, Marx and Nietzsche, was, though not systematic, more intensive than Spengler’s. He projected his thoughts about the nature and function of ideas against Marx and Nietzsche. While explicitly rejecting Marx’s monocausal materialist view of history, he recognized class struggle as an integral feature of the modern industrial world, as he recognized, concerning Nietzsche, the psychological foundations of ideas. To revert to the disputation between Weber and Spengler, Weber, on the way back along the Ludwigstraße, is reported to have said to one of his students: “The honesty of present-day’s scholar, and above all philosopher, can be measured by his position towards Marx and Nietzsche. Whoever does not admit that

Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism

33

he could not do the greatest part of his work without the contribution of these two, cheats himself and others. The world in which we exist spiritually is largely one shaped by Marx and Nietzsche.”8 By contrast to Spengler, Weber’s critique of Marx and Nietzsche proceeded, beyond any pathos and resentment, along strictly scholarly lines. Despite all the obvious differences between Weber’s and Spengler’s casts of mind, there are some affinities which remain to be explored and which, I hope, will throw light on the argument of this book. Their historical sweep made both men ask questions concerning the rise and decline of whole civilizations. For Weber the fundamental problem turned out to be the inevitable process of the rationalization of the European mind that was destructive of the magic in life and the holistic perception of the universe. His studies of the Protestant Ethic led him to his insight into the affinity between Calvinism and capitalism. Protestantism, and in particular Calvinism, had impressed upon people the notion of a calling. By means of this “asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality.”9 Calvinism thus encouraged a pattern of behavior that was conducive to rational calculation and rational thinking. Rationalization and intellectualization, specialization and fragmentation, Weber concluded, were “the fate of our times.”10 Spengler’s grandiose comparative study of cultures—he called his work a “morphology of world history”—substituted for the traditional linear view of history a cyclical theory that had been elaborated in the early eighteenth century by Giambattista Vico, according to whom each culture, like a plant, goes through an appointed course of youth, maturity, and decline. Each Kultur, in his terminology, produces its Zivilisation, the latter representing a late, declining phase of that culture. “Mankind,” he boldly declared, “is a zoological expression, or an empty word.”11 Central to the thought of both Weber and Spengler, then, was the theme of living in an age of crisis and indeed decline. Moreover in both their constructs crisis and decline were, as we have seen, results not of momentary and shortrange precipitants but of long-range historical processes. Karl Jaspers wrote in his tribute to Max Weber that Weber “actively fulfilled his being in an era of decline.”12 Spengler’s whole thought, of course, was consumed by the proposition of coming to terms with decline. Ernst Robert Curtius has remarked that his fellow Germans fell back all too readily on “destiny and tragedy.”13 Certainly “destiny” (Schicksal) held a pivotal place in the thought of both Weber and Spengler. Both ventured with bold strokes into the realm of speculation and theorizing which the German historical school had refrained from in the name of historical honesty. But there was no less honesty in Weber’s and Spengler’s search for and facing up to those theoretical designs which, as they perceived them, dictated the course of human affairs. Both men have generally been classified among the outstanding pessimists of our century. This may have been fitting. However, it was Spengler who took

34

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

issue explicitly with the label of “pessimism,” suggesting that it be replaced by the Goethean concept of “fulfillment.”14 Both Weber and Spengler differed from the host of German so-called “cultural pessimists” who, especially after the turn of the century, abandoned themselves to mourning the unity of being lost through the workings of modernity. There was no lamentation in the thought of Weber and Spengler. What they urged was not escaping from Kulturkrise into the past or into a romantic never-never land—Weber talked about the “mystic flight from reality,”—but a facing and coming to terms with the dissonances of the harsh and inhospitable world in which we live. As a matter of fact, when in the summer of 1904 Weber with his wife Marianne crossed the Atlantic to attend an international congress in St. Louis, he was eager to face the New World. The venture, which amounted to a systematic study trip, took the couple to the eastern, southern and northern sections of the United States. Max Weber was particularly struck by New York City and annoyed at his German colleagues as they groaned at the first sight of the city. “Weber,” his wife recorded, “was on the side of the new and empathized with it,” and while he conceded that it was not exactly “beautiful,” neither was it the opposite: it was “beyond both.” The New York skyscrapers he recognized as “fortresses of capital.” And though he was considerably less taken by Chicago, “one of the most incredible cities,” in fact “an endless human desert,” his fascination with America did not subside. After the halt in St. Louis the Webers took a further southward loop which took them to New Orleans, and returned by way of Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston to New York City. Even on this wide and foreign continent, despite all the questionable features of machine politics and corruption which Weber observed, he would still detect traces of the Protestant ethos. All in all the Webers in their encounter with America came to say to themselves: “Look, this is what modern reality is like.” Whether likeable or not, beautiful or not, the New World pointed towards the future. There was no reasonable alternative but to meet it positively. The Americans were a “wonderful people,” Max Weber concluded, not without recording in his discerning way that “only the Negro question and the terrible immigration” constituted “the big black cloud.” In her memoir his wife then repeated “a wonderful people,” adding “for there was a youthfully fresh, confident energy, a force for good that was just as powerful as the evil forces.”15 As for Spengler’s image of America, he had little understanding of the New World. He imagined trappers moving from town to town in search for gold. Otherwise he thought of being able to discover similarities between America and Russia, like the breadth of landscape and the existence of a dictatorship, though not imposed by a party but by society itself. Furthermore, he did manage to summon some admiration for the technological and industrial achievements of the Americans. But on the whole his image of America was shaped by intuitions and prejudices. During the very days of the collapse of the German effort in the first War, Weber said: “The Germans, if they want to continue existing, must become an

Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism

35

iron people of work.”16 Just about the same time Spengler on his part emphasized that Zivilisation, as he termed it, “is the inevitable destiny of a Kultur,”17 and that to understand the world required “being equal to it”: what was essential was not “the ostrich-philosophy of idealism,” but “the hard reality of living.”18 If anything, then, the two men’s historical perspective led them to the position of a wholly unromantic, indeed anti-romantic, ascetic pessimism. Both had the quality of the “stoic greatness and hardness” which Ernst Troeltsch attributed specifically to his friend Weber.19 For both it was the plight of modern man to face up to a world that had left behind the Faustian magic and holistic perception of the universe and was condemned to put up with, what Weber, in one of his most striking figures of speech, called that “iron cage”20 marked by specialization and fragmentation. The Great War made both Weber and Spengler see the need to go public and activate themselves in the political debate. Actually, neither of them saw action during the war. Weber, already 50 years old when the war broke out, did take on an assignment as disciplinary officer on the Military Hospitals Commission in Heidelberg for a little more than a year. But he lamented not having been able to serve “in the field.” He considered the war “despite its hideousness . . . great and wonderful and worth experiencing”: “for no matter what the outcome,” he wrote in August 1914, “this war is great and wonderful.”21 Spengler was excluded altogether from active service because of his “nervous weakness”; but, as he confided to his friend Hans Klo¨ res, he envied those who could volunteer “and then experience the war.”22 His own way of participating in it consisted of grandiose flights of political speculations: Germany, no longer the Germany of Goethe, was to become a “second America” and emerge from the war setting the pace in an “Imperium Germanicum.”23 Indeed Spengler sent off the first volume of his magnum opus, hoping that the volume “may not be altogether unworthy in taking a place beside the military accomplishments of Germany.” But Weber at no point identified himself with the construct of the “ideas of 1914” which had mesmerized so many of the German mandarins. He rejected all ideologizing tendencies, whether from the left or from the right, whether born of an internationalist spirit or from a patriotic one, and he, during the war itself, did not hesitate to express his indignation over the “lack of political judgement” being exhibited by the academic teachers.24 Spengler, by contrast, insisted on the salutary experience of 1914, which he later interpreted as having constituted the legitimate “German socialistic revolution” that was bound to overshadow the “repulsiveness of 1918”25 and take its proper place in the historical evolution of Germany. The Revolution of 1918–19 was an event for which both Weber and Spengler had disdain. In the address “Politics as a Vocation,” which he delivered in Munich on January 28, 1919, Weber talked with sovereign sarcasm about “the enormous collapse” and “this carnival we decorate with the proud name of ‘revolution,’ ”26 and Spengler, fiercer yet, met the turmoil in Munich where he

36

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

experienced the proclamation of the Bavarian Democratic and Social Republic by the Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner, with nothing short of unsparing contempt. The events of November 1918 he dismissed curtly as “revolution of stupidity.” Yet it was in the conclusions which they drew from the immediate crisis of war, defeat, and revolution, that the deep chasm, long prepared, opened up between the positions of the two. Weber kept insisting on being guided by his responsibilities as a scholar, whereas Spengler let himself be carried away by the fancies of the magician. Not that Weber in any way insisted on living in the scholar’s ivory tower— much to the contrary. In the later years of the war and during the revolutionary time he opened himself up to a dialogue with the young generation outside the university. To begin with, he consented to attend the two conferences in 191727 at Lauenstein Castle in the Franconian forest, convened by the Jena publisher Eugen Diederichs with the highflown intent of stimulating an exchange of ideas between the generations “about the meaning and mission of the age,” as Marianne Weber recalled.28 “It was to Max Weber,” according to the young revolutionary dramatist Ernst Toller, “that the youth of the day most turned, profoundly attracted by his intellectual honesty.”29 It was precisely on this same occasion, however, that Weber came to perceive what separated him from all the political romanticism that marked the meetings of the group. Diederichs’ own grandiose visions of a rebirth of German culture out of the spirit of 1914 were altogether repulsive to him; no less alien to him was the utopist agitation from the leftist students. Weber on his part ironically dismissed Lauenstein as a “department store for Weltanschauungen.”30 The Lauenstein deliberations all marked a distinct divide between Max Weber’s rational and measured approach to political problems and a new, troubled generation in search for encompassing Weltanschauungen. Weber’s two great speeches, “Science as a Vocation” (November 7, 1917) and “Politics as a Vocation” (January 28, 1919)31 were honest adaptations of his broad historical premises to the spiritual and political needs of his times. At the same time they can be seen as answers to the overheated climate that had prevailed at the Lauenstein meetings. What Isaiah made the Lord say: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” Weber said to those who were in search for “religious experiences.”32 Science as the “way to true being,” the “way to true art,” the “way to true nature,” the “way to true God,” the “way to true happiness” was but an “illusion.”33 It was indeed a commonplace, Weber said, to observe that something may be true although it was not beautiful and not holy and not good. It may be true, he added, in precisely those aspects.34 It was the “fate” of the young generation “to live in a godless and prophetless time.”35 The magic and holistic universe of ancient Greece and the age of Goethe were inevitably past, and the law of the modern world had become “disenchantment” that imprisoned man in that “iron cage”; the “demands of the day” called for bearing “the fate of the times like a man.”36

Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism

37

It was a matter of maturity in the last analysis for modern man to face up to an irrevocably fragmented reality. Any position which would not do so, which would insist upon the search for absolutes and spiritual oneness and seek salvation through prophetic intervention, Weber relegated to the realm of escapism and romanticism. He had what Karl Jaspers called “the strength of being himself in an age without faith.”37 To be sure, Weber’s scientific diagnosis remained no mere theory, and when the going got rough, namely after defeat and revolution, he stuck by his prescription of stoicism. Even though his second great speech on “Politics as a Vocation” can be and has been considered an anti-climax of sorts devoid of the stirring pathos of the earlier one, it stood the test of immediate adversity and thus reinforced the persuasiveness of his voice. His “secret love” for politics even made him engage himself on behalf of the new Republic and even enter into the party struggle on the side of the newly constituted German Democratic Party. But even though his political ventures were anything but decisive and successful,38 they by no means detracted from his widely recognized authority as a sage. Max Weber kept hammering in what he called “the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.”39 In the landscape of defeated and humiliated Germany in which swarms of prophets and preachers conjured up anything from Armageddon to a Second Coming, he had the courage to diagnose unsparingly the disharmonies of modern life. His “heroic pessimism,” as it has often been called, for which no doubt he paid the price with the nervous affliction that plagued him throughout the last decades of his life, was now put to a test. Leaving no doubt about his “Here I stand; I can do no other,” he left his audience with a resounding jeremiad and rejection of all rosy views of life: “No summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.”40 Both Weber and Spengler, looking into the future of the Occident and especially of Germany, envisaged the coming of some form of Caesarism.41 It was partly thanks to his observations during his American experience that Weber had become aware of the place of machine politics in a mass democracy, which, as he saw it, would lead to control by charismatic Caesarist tribunes of the people. He who had so long been a vociferous critic of the Bismarckian autocracy, had come round to foresee the eventual blending in the West of modern parliamentarism with democratic plebiscitarian leadership. But while Weber maintained that Bismarck’s Caesarist policies had been backed up by monarchical legitimacy, he insisted that the machine politician, swept up by mass support, be subject to parliamentary control.42 Spengler was less circumspect in his recommendations for the future of Germany. In his customary apodictic fashion he declared: “We Germans will never again produce a Goethe, but indeed a Caesar,”43 and he went on to advocate “an extraordinary strengthening of governmental powers” at the expense of Par-

38

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

liament which was to meet twice a year for short—in fact little more than ceremonial—sessions.44 Inevitably both Weber’s and Spengler’s ideas have been examined for their relation to Fascism and National Socialism.45 As for Weber, it must be remembered that he died in June 1920, before the National Socialist, and for that matter the Fascist, movement really took shape.46 Yet there is no doubt that Max Weber took decidedly nationalistic positions all along, starting with his Freiburg Inaugural address of 1895, unequivocally identifying with the prerogatives of the national interest at the expense of the quest for peace and eudaemonism, and after the war he persistently took issue in public with the whole complex of German war guilt47 and the Versailles Treaty. Voicing these opinions, he, like so many of his fellow liberals, clearly used a vocabulary on which eventually the Nazi line of argumentation relied heavily. As for the scrutiny of Weber’s basic ideas for their affinity with Fascism and National Socialism, the chief target has always been his idea of charismatic leadership which has understandably been related to the pattern of Fascist and National Socialist leadership.48 But also his identification of the dimension of rationality in modern society has been, sweepingly, interpreted as having anticipated the technocratic features of the concentration camp universe.49 Even though it may be possible to accept Ernst Nolte’s argument that Max Weber’s position betrayed an “undeniable relatedness”50 with the central features of the fascist world view, we are not really entitled to go as far as arguing, as did Karl Lo¨ with, that he “prepared the way to the authoritarian and dictatorial leadership state.”51 No doubt Max Weber had some insights into the direction in which modern political systems were moving, that were borne out by the emergence of Fascism and National Socialism. But giving expression to these insights did not add up to prescribing them. Indeed Max Weber took a firm stand when in January 1920 he took issue with the pardoning of Count Anton Arco-Valley, the extremist assassin of Kurt Eisner. Quite against his usual practice of not using the lectern for political statements, he saw the need to declare that, while his sympathies were with Arco’s cause, he had to oppose the pardon lest “political murders will become the fashion.” Caustic, as he could be, he warned against making the murderer a “coffee house celebrity” and leaving politics, on both right and left, to madmen. Of course this stand of Weber’s meant incurring the wrath of the rampaging rightist students who identified with Arco. But Weber maintained that he was indeed willing to ally himself with any power on earth, even the devil incarnate, to restore Germany to her old glory—not, however, with the force of stupidity.52 In any case, Marianne Weber commented that he emerged from the affair “very animated” and that political strife had a “refreshing” effect on him. If nothing else, this episode should dispel any doubt that a person of Max Weber’s integrity would have rejected the German tyranny wholeheartedly. Furthermore, we have all reason to assume that the man to whom the disenchant-

Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism

39

ment of the world was a matter of “destiny” would not have yielded to and would in no way have condoned the compulsive reenchantment pursued by National Socialism. He did have the courage to live with the fragmentation and all the antinomies of the modern world; indeed his defense of due process and his stand for parliamentarism and democracy were extensions of his fundamental convictions. Yet the parting of ways between Weber and Spengler was particularly evident in their respective recourse to the dimension of “destiny.” While Weber adhered unflaggingly to his stoicism, Spengler, who grandiloquently called his work a “philosophy of destiny,”53 allowed himself to be carried away by anger and vituperation, and his call for “hardness” and, as he put it, a “deeper scepticism,” degenerated into an escape into ideology. His stoicism finally gave way to grandiose constructs, such as the opposition between skepticism and ideals,54 between facts and truths,55 pitting him in each case on the side of the former against the latter, and leaving his readers with rather confusing signals about coping with a supposedly manichaean world. The suggestion that Spengler’s message constituted “a right-wing version of Weber’s iron cage”56 in this case is particularly appropriate. Spengler of course lived to see Hitler come to power, and his relation to National Socialism was very complex. While his shameless advocacy of Caesarism is striking compared with Max Weber’s scholarly argumentation, a careful sifting of his pronunciamentos on the nascent “national movement” reveals distinctly Weberian traits. In a running refrain he scoffed at “the politics of unrestrained, romantic, blind passions,”57 and called for “hardness” and a “courageous scepticism.”58 “The pathfinder,” he wrote in an unmistakable allusion to Hitler, “must be a hero, not a Heldentenor.”59 Indeed in Spengler’s last political tract, The Hour of Decision, published in 193360 after Hitler’s “seizure of power,” he once again stated, albeit in veiled terms, his misgivings about the “national revolution of 1933”: it was no victory, “for opponents were lacking.”61 The “Total State,” he reminded his readers, was realized by the Jacobins during the years of the Terror, and “one party is impossible in a State as is one State in a stateless world.”62 Henceforth Spengler became persona non grata with the Nazis, who attacked him as a charlatan, sadist and decadent. As a matter of fact, on the occasion of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth in August 1933, a fortnight before the appearance of the controversial book, Spengler, upon his own initiative, had an interview with the “Fu¨ hrer” which did not come off well at all. When later he sent a copy of the book to Hitler, he only received a notice that the Chancellery had received it.63 All this having been said, it must be remembered that to the uninitiated public Spengler’s profile was one of a herald of the “national movement.” His language throughout had been typical of the right-wing intelligentsia, spiked with abrupt and always somewhat oracular metaphors, at first shocking and at second sight platitudinous. Indeed his orphic style concealed a confused and confusing am-

40

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

bivalence about the Nazi movement, and his criticisms of it always were correspondingly veiled. Still, in The Hour of Decision he protested that “no one” could have looked forward to the national revolution “with greater longing” than himself, adding: “The national revolution of 1933 was a mighty phenomenon and will remain such in the eyes of the future by reason of the elemental, superpersonal force with which it came and the spiritual discipline with which it was carried through.”64 This was clearly not the language of Max Weber. Spengler could not sustain his composure in the encounter with a harsh and inhospitable world; he let himself be carried away by the temptation of “the movement.” The stones then, appeared all too broken, and the glittering mirage of the cathedral all too tempting. Thus Max Weber and Oswald Spengler, notwithstanding all the similarities in their lofty historical visions, outline the parameters within which German thinkers of the turn of the century moved in reacting to a deeply perceived cultural crisis. Weber’s citation of the “mature man”65 who follows the “ethic of responsibility”66 contained a wisdom which in a perhaps less troubled environment might have found many echoes. But he remained a solitary titan, an honest, “heroic” witness of decline. Spengler preferred the part of a not-soheroic magician, conjuring up for his compatriots’ visions of a never-never land.

NOTES 1. “Er wuβte Bescheid ein fu¨ r allemal”; Golo Mann, Deutsche Geschichte des neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt/M., 1958), 711. 2. See Marianne Weber, Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild (Tu¨ bingen, 1926), 685f; Eduard Baumgarten, Ed., Max Weber. Werk und Person. Dokumente (Tu¨ bingen, 1964), 554f. 3. The first volume of Spengler’s magnum opus had appeared in 1918 and caused a great deal of stir among the reading public, not only among scholars. The second volume was published in 1922. 4. There is no record of the “disputation” other than the brief reference in Marianne Weber’s work and the somewhat more extended one in Eduard Baumgarten’s volume. 5. Baumgarten, Max Weber, 554. 6. Oswald Spengler, “Nietzsche und sein Jahrhundert,” Reden und Aufsa¨ tze (Munich, 1938), 110–124. 7. Spengler, “Nietzsche,” 110. 8. Baumgarten, Max Weber, 554f. 9. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 21st impression (London, 1980), 155. 10. Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf (7 November 1917),” Wissenschaft als Beruf, Eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe I/17 (Tu¨ bingen, 1992), 109. 11. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, Erster Band, Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Munich, 1923), 28. 12. John Dreijmanis, Ed., Karl Jaspers on Max Weber (New York, 1989), 37.

Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism

41

13. Ernst Robert Curtius, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (Stuttgart, 1932), 45. 14. “Vollendung”; Spengler, “Pessimismus? (1921),”Reden und Aufsa¨ tze, 63. 15. For the Webers in America see Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 292–317. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 15–18; Henry Walter Brann, “Max Weber and the United States,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly (June 1944), 18–30. 16. Max Weber, “Deutschlands politische Neuordnung (4 November 1918),” Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands. Schriften und Reden 1918–1920, Ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe I/16 (Tu¨ bingen, 1988), 365. 17. Spengler, Untergang 1, 42. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Hans-Georg Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch. Leben und Werk (Go¨ ttingen, 1991), 212. 20. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 155; see on this subject in particular Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, Culture, Politics and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1989). 21. Weber, Max Weber 521f. 22. Letter Oswald Spengler to Hans Klo¨ res, Munich, 25.10.14, Spengler Letters, 1913–1936, Ed. Arthur Helps (London, 1966), 29. 23. Letter Oswald Spengler to Hans Klo¨ res, Munich, 14.7.15, Ibid., 37. 24. Max Weber, “Das preuβische Wahlrecht” (March 1917), Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914–1918, Ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max WeberGesamtausgabe I/15 (Tu¨ bingen, 1984), 230. 25. Oswald Spengler, Preuβentum und Sozialismus (Munich, 1920), 12. 26. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf (28 January 1919),” Politik als Beruf 1919, Eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe I/17 (Tu¨ bingen, 1992), 222, 227. 27. 29–31 May; 29 September–3 October 1917. 28. Weber, Max Weber 608–612. Apart from Max Weber a number of the leading German scholars and public figures participated, among them Friedrich Meinecke, Werner Sombart, Ferdinand To¨ nnies, Theodor Heuss, Walter von Molo. The younger generation was represented largely by members of the Free German student movement which went back to the turn of the century and set as its aim to organize and unite the student body independently of the traditional exclusive “corporations” in the spirit of free inquiry above party affiliations; see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Einleitung,” Max WeberGesamtausgabe I/17, 25ff. Among the students, many of whom were way on the left, was the socialist and pacifist poet Ernst Toller. See also Max Weber, Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914–1918, Ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max WeberGesamtausgabe I/15 (Tu¨ bingen, 1984), 701–705. For the minutes of the May 1917 Lauenstein meeting see Wolfgang J. Mommsen in cooperation with Mu¨ ller-Luckner, Eds., Kultur und Krieg, Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Ku¨ nstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Mu¨ nchen, 1996), 268–274. 29. Ernst Toller, I was a German. An Autobiography (London, 1934), 89. 30. This was reported in Theodor Heuss, Erinnerungen (Tu¨ bingen, 1963), 214. 31. Both speeches were given as part of a lecture series under the auspices of the Free German student movement in the Steinicke bookstore, a rather dingy venue holding barely 100 persons. 32. Isaiah 55, 8; Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 92. 33. Ibid., 93.

42

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

34. Ibid., 99. 35. Ibid., 106. 36. Ibid., 110f. 37. See Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin, 1932), 184. 38. See in this connection Guenther Roth, “Max Weber’s Political Failure,” Telos, No. 78 (Winter 1988–89), 136–149. 39. Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” 249. 40. Ibid., 251. 41. See on the subject Otto Kollreutter, “Die staatspolitischen Anschauungen Max Webers und Oswald Spenglers,” Zeitschrift fu¨ r Politik, 14 (1925), 481–500. 42. Max Weber, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland (1917),” Zur Politik im Weltkrieg 421–596; see also Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1974), 186–188. 43. Spengler, “Pessimismus?” Reden und Aufsa¨ tze (Munich, 1938), 79. 44. Oswald Spengler, Neubau des deutschen Reiches (Munich, 1924), 24–25. 45. See in this connection the encompassing article by Ernst Nolte, “Max Weber vor dem Faschismus,” Der Staat 2 (1963), 1–24; for a balanced treatment of the case of Spengler see H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler. A Critical Estimate (New York, 1952) ch. 8. 46. As Nolte put it aptly, “Weber hatte den Nationalsozialismus nie ‘vor Augen’,” Ernst Nolte, “Max Weber vor dem Faschismus,” Der Staat 2 (1963), 1. 47. Only “old women” were after a war in search for the guilty party; Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” 231. 48. This connection has been pointed out, to be sure with utmost caution, by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Afterword,” Max Weber, 415–417. 49. See Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History (New York, 1978), 91, 195, and Zygmunt Bauman, “Sociology after the Holocaust,” The British Journal of Sociology 39, no. 4 (December 1988), 470–497. A similar argument could no doubt be made connecting Max Weber’s identification of traditional authority with the traditional strains in Fascism and National Socialism. But such reasoning would replace all attempts at pinpointing historical causation by a fishing venture in muddy waters. 50. Nolte, “Max Weber,” 24. 51. Karl Lo¨ with, “Max Weber und seine Nachfolger,” Mass und Wert 3 (January/ February 1940), 171. 52. For this episode see Marianne Weber, Max Weber, Ein Lebensbild, 684f. and Baumgarten, ed., Max Weber, 555f. 53. Spengler, Untergang, 1, 8. 54. See Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens (Munich, 1931) 14. 55. See Spengler, “Pessimismus?” 70. 56. See the chapter on Spengler, “Oswald Spengler: bourgeois antinomies, reactionary reconciliations” in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984); in particular p. 66. 57. Oswald Spengler, “Politische Pflichten der deutschen Jugend (1924),” Oswald Spengler, Politische Schriften (Munich, 1934), 150. 58. Spengler, Preuβentum, 98. 59. Oswald Spengler, “Vorwort (October 1932),” Spengler, Politische Schriften, 10.

Heroic and Not-so-Heroic Pessimism

43

60. Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung: Deutschland und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung (Munich, 1933); The Hour of Decision: Part One: Germany and WorldHistorical Evolution (New York, 1934). For the history of the book which was conceived back in 1929 and which never was followed by the projected second volume see Ibid., 15, and Hughes, Oswald Spengler, 127–133. 61. Spengler, Hour of Decision, 9. 62. Ibid., 183. 63. See Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism. Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1957), 207f; Detlef Felken, Oswald Spengler. Konservativer Denker zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich, 1988), 193f. 64. Spengler, Hour of Decision, 9, 11. 65. Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” 250. 66. Ibid., 237.

4 The Adventurer: Ernst Ju ¨nger Reconsidered

On October 26, 1924, Andre´ Gide entered into his diary, somewhat selfdeprecatingly, “I am perhaps merely an adventurer.” However, he added, “It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves—in finding themselves.”1 By “some people” addicted to adventure, he undoubtedly meant a type of man who, as Georg Simmel defined him, is marked by “extraterritoriality” and has a way of “dropping out of the continuity of life,” of defying all predictability and all conventions in a great leap into the unknown.2 The adventurer has an important place in almost all societies. Particularly in times when the creative springs of a civilization seem to flag, he appears as a guardian of vitality—like the medieval monks who played a part in renewing and reinvigorating the faith. Alfred North Whitehead went so far as to propose that adventure belonged “to the essence of civilization,” and that without adventure civilization was “in full decay.”3 He did not, however, fail to call attention to adventure as a cause of dislocation and confusion; all adventure, in fact, he saw as “dangerous, easily perverted.”4 The adventurer is of course an archetype in folklore and literature. Somehow Odysseus and Achilles, never wholly swept away by modern civilization, are points of reference for us all, and there keep recurring in history moods and moments that favor the incidence of adventure and in which “excursions of excitement” and plunges into risk-taking become the order of the day. The fragile and increasingly questioned civilization of the nineteenth century after all gave birth to a philosopher—Friedrich Nietzsche—who squarely challenged all remnants of what he called the “herd instinct” and the “slave morality” in the name of dionysian exuberance and a celebration of a “great noon” of adventure.

46

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

“Nor law, nor duty” bade William Butler Yeats’ Irish airman fight as he foresaw his death, “nor public men, nor cheering crowds”: A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.5

For Antoine de Saint-Exupe´ ry, the French pilot-poet who in the service of the Free French got lost in flight off Corsica in July 1944, there was no victory, and there was no defeat; they were terms he did not know what to make of. He went up into the air to escape the restraints of “bourgeois” life in search for “the cathedral,” because, he insisted, “Men die for the cathedral, not for stones,” and even when he had to face up to the fact that he no longer was able to see the cathedral, he persisted in his quest, “I am dying for the service of a dead god.”6 It was in the course of the first decades of the twentieth century and especially under the impact of the Great War that the adventurer surfaced as a common European figure. He now stepped out of the veil of myth and philosophy. The “generation of fighters and dragon-slayers,” to which young Nietzsche had appealed, now became reality. After the war itself, a pervasive sense of crisis, in part a widespread inability and unwillingness to part with the martial experiences, carried over into the post-war era, translating the language of crisis into political activism. The chief representatives and spokesmen of this breed of men of action were Gabriele D’Annunzio (b. 1863), T. E. Lawrence (b. 1888), Ernst Ju¨ nger (b. 1895), Antoine de Saint-Exupe´ ry (b. 1900), Andre´ Malraux (b. 1901), and Ernst von Salomon (b. 1902). They all shared an acute sense of the meaningless and absurdity of civilization and statecraft. These men were willing to take the leap, freed from the chains of a dead culture, into pure action, be it war, revolution, resistance, descent into the depths of archaeology or ascent into flight, love or hate, death or murder. Adventurers tend to be eccentrics, more or less troublesome ones, always challenging their societies. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the dionysian self-styled hero, led the quixotic escapade to Fiume in September 1919, in the name of “youth, beauty, daring, cheerful sacrifice, broad aims, profound newness”7 until finally, having held on to the city for more than one year, he had to be snuffed out by the grenades of an Italian battleship. T. E. Lawrence’s archaeological excavations in Syria took him outside the sphere of “bourgeois” drabness, much as his Secret Service assignments and his adoption of the Arabs’ cause in their revolt against the Turks dissociated him from European conventionality. He sought refuge in the Royal Air Force and Royal Tank Corps under assumed names to

The Adventurer

47

salvage the integrity of his lonely impulse. “Saint-Ex,” as he was generally called, took to the air in search of the “cathedral,” however elusive, that would emerge triumphantly over the mere “heap of stones.” For Malraux, art, archaeology, flight over the Yemen desert in search of “the lost city of the Queen of Sheba,” serving the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, playing a lead part in the Re´ sistance, all served as escapes from Europe, that “great cemetery where only dead conquerors sleep.” Ernst von Salomon, unregenerated soldier of fortune and outlaw, was no Nazi, no anti-Semite, and yet he got deeply involved in the murder of Weimar Germany’s wunderkind Walther Rathenau, so as to free his country of the one man who could have salvaged that Republic that he so detested. Men like Lawrence of Arabia, or Malraux or “Saint-Ex,” were rather extravagant loners, eccentrics in the settings of their societies which were sufficiently grounded in democratic traditions to absorb and benefit from eccentricity. Ernst Ju¨ nger, along with men like Ernst von Salomon, was one of the German eccentrics, political and cultural, who came out the Great War. He was no doubt the outstanding one of the lot, and his place on the German scene was central. In the German setting the eccentric became, as one of Ju¨ nger’s biographers aptly put it, the “representative of the epoch.” Indeed Ju¨ nger wanted his work to be understood as being its “map.”8 He then became inextricably embroiled in the crisis and awareness of crisis that had gripped the Germans since the turn of the century. Even as he maneuvered in stormy waters, he played a part in whipping them up. Ernst Ju¨ nger’s long life (1895–1998) has spanned the periods in German history that have left the world aghast at the “German question,” one marked by the heights of cultural triumphs and the apocalyptic lows of the concentration camp universe. Ju¨ nger may well be, along with Thomas Mann, one of the truly outstanding German writers of the twentieth century. The “German incertitudes” were Ernst Ju¨ nger’s, like Thomas Mann’s, challenge and predicament. Which German man or woman of right mind did not have to cope with them? But it was the longevity of both men that accentuated the problem by forcing them to take a stand on each regime through which they lived—the Second Reich of the Hohenzollern Monarchy, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, and finally the Federal Republic, which from 1949 until 1989 was separated from its Eastern twin, the German Democratic Republic. Mann himself, after a short phase during the first war of entanglement with the bedevilling lure of spiritual militarism and “unpolitical” ultranationalism, was able to dissociate himself from his pact with the devil. On October 13, 1922, in a public address, “The German Republic,” in the Berlin Beethovensaal, he embraced and hailed the fledgling Weimar democracy.9 Short of an outright disavowal of his earlier position, this step signified a demonstrative embrace of a rationality that, however prosaic, was henceforth bound to be, as he saw it, the guideline for responsible citizenship.

48

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

For Ju¨ nger, the German incertitudes were to be not faced but overcome by means of the intoxication of adventurism and flight into mystical ambiguities of contents and style. It could be said that Thomas Mann, a chronicler of the German turmoils, created a mirror image of himself in his Serenus Zeitblom, the professorial narrator in his novel Doctor Faustus who was deeply troubled over the future of his country. It could also be said that Ernst Ju¨ nger in his long life played the part of Mann’s bedeviled musician Adrian Leverku¨ hn. Insofar as delving into the sphere of the demonic was, as Mann proposed, a particularly German activity, it was Ju¨ nger who did so in an exemplary fashion. The case of Ju¨ nger, then, is central to everything German.10 He was a paradigmatically German type and might well be considered, for better or worse, the spokesman of a large segment of his generation. He too might have had good reason to claim that where he was, there was Germany. Thomas Mann conceded somewhat condescendingly that Ernst Ju¨ nger was an undoubtedly gifted man who wrote a German style “much too good for HitlerGermany.” Mann saw Ju¨ nger essentially as a “trailblazer” and an “ice-cold beneficiary of the barbarism”11 (Figure 4.1). There is no doubt that Ju¨ nger was just this. Particularly in his early, triumpantly blood-drenched celebrations of the battle experience12 he struck a cord in the generation that would not part with the memories of the war and that aspired to transform Germany in accordance with its martial memories. Indeed, early in 1926 Ju¨ nger sent a copy of his work Feuer und Blut to Adolf Hitler with the nauseating inscription: “To the national Fu¨ hrer Adolf Hitler!—Ernst Ju¨ nger.” The Nazis in turn courted him, offering him a seat for their Party in the Reichstag. But, so the story goes, Ju¨ nger declined, remarking that writing one verse was worth more than representing sixty thousand fools (Trottel) in Parliament. Josef Goebbels, particularly eager to coopt people like Ju¨ nger so as to give the Nazi movement an intellectual profile, in 1933 asked him to join the Prussian Academy of Poets. Once again Ju¨ nger declined. Was he moved by second thoughts on National Socialism as a political movement and by his disapproval after all of the “plebeian” party, or by his compulsive aloofness?13 In any case no merely political scrutiny can do justice to the stature of Ernst Ju¨ nger. He must be recognized as a major German, indeed European, man of letters and as a prime representative in our times of litte´ rature engage´ e. He was an alchemist just the same. A seismographer of the great quake that starting with the Great War shook our world, and most violently, along with Russia, his own country, he chose the leap into adventure that led him to identify with a stoic, indeed sanguine, affirmation of war and revolution. Ju¨ nger was everything but an eudaemonist; his landscape was one of fire and blood in which death—that is, a death befitting the adventurous heart—was incessantly courted. No doubt he was greatly impressed by Oswald Spengler’s “morphological” view of history, which he recognized as a “Copernican discovery”; yet he could not accept the organic view that went with it.14 Schicksal

Figure 4.1. Ernst Ju¨ nger, 1919. Ju¨ nger is wearing the Pour le Me´ rite, Germany’s highest military award. Photo courtesy of the Schiller National Museum.

50

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

is not after all subject to historical evolution; it is the inescapable presence in our lives. Schicksal is the paradox that lies over them; their ultimate manifestation is the identity of life and death. Life is a mystery, and in death alone, in the test of fire and blood, is its mystery fully revealed. The extreme situation alone, the plunge into daring and “pure existence,” could free man from the burden of a decadent civilization. “We have branched out too far,” he observed: The sap no longer reaches the extremities. Only when a spontaneous impulse grips us like lightning, we shall revert to simplicity and become fulfilled again. . . . The fragmentation then will yield to a few powerful impulses and all the multiplicity of forms will reduce itself to one effort: the struggle. The people as a body will align itself behind one aim: the army.15

But far from prescribing escapism into an irretrievable past or a lament over a cruel present, far from even trying to evoke the memories of heroic battle, Ernst Ju¨ nger commended the actual experience of battle, however murderous: he offered a test that was an intoxicating and liberating feat and feast. He dedicated his whole long literary life after the war to accounting for and celebrating the transforming magic of the war, and to find a formula for reinventing it as an “inner experience.” Ju¨ nger’s central position on the spiritual scene of the Germany after the war was in no little way furthered by his style of writing. He was one of the great masters of the German language, although he made no secret of it having been pepped up by the use of drugs. The more cryptic and coded his writing, the more it spoke to a young generation thirsting for the meaning of the meaningless. But his sway was not restricted to veterans of the war. Before long he was recognized, by his detractors as well as his admirers, as a formidable landmark among modern German men of the mind. Ernst Ju¨ nger’s life and work, then, spelled out varieties of adventure. It all began when he and his brother Friedrich Georg, with whom he came to share ever so many experiences and thoughts, joined the legendary Youth Movement, the Wandervogel. They were in search, as the brother recalled, of “distant lands” and the “carefree life” of the vagabond, freed of “bourgeois” constraints.16 But young Ernst Ju¨ nger was serious about his quest for adventure; it was no mere romantic fancy. At the age of 18 he ran away from home and, yielding to the lure of Africa, signed up for the French Foreign Legion. Thus, early on in his life he, later known as one of Germany’s ultranationalists, betrayed an indifference to national concerns. The experiential dimension of adventure transcended political considerations, and in a sense this was always the case with Ju¨ nger. At any rate, the rough legionary ways soon turned out to be too much for the novice, and with the help of his father and the German Foreign Office he was bailed out. Then the war broke out. The angel of death along with what Ju¨ nger came to

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see as the angel of wild creativity and life, opened up its wings and reconnected him with the cosmic orbit for which he was searching. The war turned out to be the great adventure: When I joined up, the thought of all that lay hidden in the darkness of the future rejoiced me as indeed it did every other young fellow in those days. We knew already that an experience awaited us whose imprint on our development would be sharp and deep, and we saw in it a short and emphatic schooling from which, if we returned at all, we should return as men.17

But for Ju¨ nger the war experience was not limited, as it was for so many of his compatriots, to the initial intoxication; nor did it survive, as it did in much of the literature of heroism and reenchantment that came out of the war, merely as memory. It became the pivot of a new heraclitean philosophy. “War is the father of all things”: for Ju¨ nger this flighty maxim was yanked into a celebration of a magnificent show of destruction and into the transformation of the “bourgeois” into the adventurer. Advocacy of strife was translated into a prescription of wounds, blood and death, and war, not a “material matter” and not even a mere proud, masculine memory, was elevated to an occasion when “values are tested” and man could be reconnected with the springs of life: Against this powerful and overwhelming call for battle all works become paltry and all concepts hollow in the face of the expressions of the elementary, the mighty, which always existed and always will exist, even when since long human beings and wars will have ceased to exist.18

This was, no doubt, bloodcurdling stuff. But Ju¨ nger’s “lapidary sentences,” as George Steiner called them,19 had a way of transcending the cult of naked brutality, and of connecting with the realm of the cosmic. His “heroic realism,” he made sure to explain, was not after all to be translated into hatred of the foe with whom he fought on the battlefield. The enemy who had “warmth of blood”—faith, piety, courage, capacity for enthusiasm, allegiances—was preferable to the friend who lacked it.20 After all, “what mattered was not what we are fighting for, but how we fight.”21 Were these mere palliative statements designed to distract attention from a fundamentally ferocious message, or did they enable Ju¨ nger to universalize it? In any case, according to his fiat the “bourgeois” was to yield to the “warrior,” who in the new “order of rank” emerged as the paradigmatic “type” of the twentieth century. Death in the “fiery dream-landscapes of war” was thus identified as the greatest and most dangerous of adventures, “since not without reason the adventurer time and again goes for the flaming precipices.”22 As Ju¨ nger’s thinking evolved, the “type” of the “Arbeiter” was the one to carry on the struggle after the Great War. While the “warrior” could never become obsolete in Ju¨ nger’s world, after the war he became reincarnated in the

52

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

“worker.”23 The type of the soldier had served the extraordinary function of war—and revolution; now, in time of “peace” the type of the worker was destined to administer the final deathblow to the “Bu¨ rger.” Ju¨ nger declared that his sense of security, his faith in progress, had been shaken for good; he therefore had to give pride of place to the worker. This vision of Ju¨ nger’s, while parting with the artifacts of “bourgeois” life, was far from proposing a romantic retreat into a pristine world. It was fortified by an acknowledgment of the place of technology in the modern world. Ju¨ nger was no romantic; neither was he a reactionary. He did not plead for chivalry alone, but for a stoic conditioning to a “landscape of ice and fire.”24 He was a robust and unsentimental modernist whose uneasiness with rationality catapulted him into a ferocious version of a technological dystopia,25 and his worker emerged as a prototype of twentieth-century totalitarianism: hence Ju¨ nger’s early courting of Hitler; hence too his fascination with Bolshevik Russia. Russia was the “land of planned economy” that belonged to the “great destinations (Reiseziele) of our times.”26 This chapter at least of adventurism had landed him in a dead end. The wave of the future that he loftily projected augured a new form of conformity and compulsion and of almost unprecedented enslavement: not a cure for the crisis of the spirit, but an index of it. It was Walter Benjamin who volunteered the observation that the logical result of fascism was the introduction of aesthetics into public life.27 If only according to this standard, Ernst Ju¨ nger was a fascist. Even for the horrors of war he found a language of exaltation designed to serve the reenchantment of a world that had gone the way of overrefinement and fragmentation. The shrapnels of battle were hallowed counterparts to civilian confusion. Understandably, Ju¨ nger sought to legitimize his militarism by reminding the public that Homer himself was a glorifier of war, as were thousands after him,28 and he never hesitated to quote and paraphrase Heraclitus’ aphorism that war was the father of all things.29 Ju¨ nger was no Homer; and his facile application of Heraclitus’ pristine vocabulary to the brutal scene of the twentieth century battlefield was utterly deceitful. Meanwhile he did manage to give even total war a language, arcane, cryptic and wildly allusive, that swayed its readers momentarily at least to dispense with moral imperatives. Ju¨ nger was a magician of the word, and his insistently hieroglyphic style has contagiously invaded the German—and not only German—public and literary canons. Indeed, his chivalric gestures towards the enemy gave him, the one time foreign legionary, a strong and lasting following in, of all countries, France. He made war and total mobilization an adventure designed to overcome the discontents and uncertainties of modern civilization, and in his heathen paradox death, the one certainty we know of, became the life force, the ultimate adventure. Ernst Ju¨ nger’s celebration of war was a way of celebrating release from that “lazy peace” that had emasculated man in the course of the long nineteenth century; even his toying with “total mobilization” was an expression of libera-

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tion from the pedestrian world of the “bourgeois” past. But Ju¨ nger was also a naturalist—his only academic training he received after his discharge from the Reichswehr in 1923 in Leipzig where he studied zoology and philosophy. A handsome, not to say vain, man, he liked to be photographed, and it is not by chance that many photos show him in front of a microscope or over a magnifying glass observing beetles, or proudly holding up a beast of prey, or examining flower prints. While he did not finish his studies, they made immeasurably important contributions to his world view. The observation of nature yielded a reality beyond the empirical and rational realms, an enrichment of perception and understanding bordering on the magical and demonic. Here also was a key to a liberating adventure. Indeed Ju¨ nger the incorrigible militarist did not fail to observe that microscopes and telescopes resembled the cannons he used to watch swaying “so delicately and precisely in their carriages”; they all were weapons that serve life; and he recorded his pleasure “that Nietzsche now and again proudly called himself an old artilleryman.”30 Ju¨ nger’s adventurism, as far as we have traced it, moved all along on the edge of a precipice. He insisted somewhat grandiloquently that war is no material occurrence: there are higher realities to which it is subject. Where two cultures face each other there is more at stake than dynamite and steel. . . . There values are being clarified whose significance makes everyone who understands dismiss the brutality of the method as unimportant. There a comprehensive and redoubled will manifests itself as the highest and wildest assertion of life which must maintain itself through its own destruction.31

To be sure, the warrior’s joy in facing danger may have been conveyed by Ju¨ nger’s surrealistic celebration of “fire and blood”; but did it not after all try to overcome a murderous reality by means of stylistic virtuosity? “The lust of the blood which hangs over the war like a black storm-sail over black galley”32 was a literary creation, a far cry from the undeniable brutality and squalor of the trenches. Ju¨ nger’s “workers,” strapped into the technological structures of the twentieth century, were at the same time called upon to realize the liberating and ennobling Nietzschean prescription that they would some day distinguish themselves by the simplicity of their wants, “the higher caste: namely poorer and simpler, but in possession of power.”33 However, the triumph of National Socialism in Germany and Adolf Hitler’s precipitation of the Second World War did much to open Ju¨ nger’s eyes to the folly of expecting that invoking total mobilization in war and factory would reenchant a world that had been degraded by the bourgeoisie. But where was he to go from here? Ernst Ju¨ nger, we must assume, would always remain Ernst Ju¨ nger the adventurer, the spiritualist; he would certainly not turn pacifist and hardly democrat. Indeed, the outbreak of the Second World War saw him once again in uniform. Captain Ju¨ nger, in command of an infantry company, though no longer on front line duty, could now be seen riding in style on horseback

54

German Incertitudes, 1914–1945

leading his troops into occupied France. The one time young hero in the storms of steel had turned into a middle-aged observer, still fascinated by, but no longer captive of the war mystique. “The warrior,” he now reflected, “has the right to be a guest in every house, and this privilege belongs to the most beautiful ones conferred by his uniform”; and he concluded: “He shares it solely with those who are persecuted and suffering.”34 People’s basic convictions seldom change radically, save through the agency of profound religious conversion. Otherwise, these convictions are at the most modified by new experiences. Even the two apparently contrasting stages of Thomas Mann’s career must be seen in conjunction with each other. The first stage, during the First World War, when he composed his fierce anti-Western and anti-democratic diatribe, the Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man,35 belongs distinctly to the prehistory of German fascism. In the later stage he was a pillar of German democracy. Yet he never altogether shed the German romantic tradition that had informed his early years, and he never saw fit to parade as a Zivilsationsliterat, whom he had earlier so angrily dismissed.36 In view of the rising tide of revolutionary reactionaryism in his country he sought a subtle reconciliation of his initial romantic-aristocratic viewpoint with the much needed and inevitable defence of rationality and democracy.37 Ju¨ nger’s “heroic realism” was not after all honored in the Third Reich. Hitler, no longer the “national Fu¨ hrer” to Ju¨ nger, now emerged in Ju¨ nger’s subtly cyphered language as “Knie´ bolo” who turned out to be a satanic tyrant, and the Nazi movement a plebeian, marauding rabble let loose to level all traces of the code of the ethos that Ju¨ nger had assigned to his “warrior” and “worker.” The question is of course what impact this final disillusionment with the regime had on Ju¨ nger, and in which ways it affected or indeed changed his basic position. The “auspicious splendor of adventure” kept luring Ju¨ nger, but adventure now became increasingly internalized. His work Das abenteuerliche Herz of 1938,38 which amounted to a drastically revised version of a text of 1929, was a collection of sixty-three surrealistic “Figures and Capriccios” of fleeting dreamlike episodes and reveries on places real and imaginary, on crystals and the elements, on the life and death of plants and animals and human beings. Was this a retreat from the effort to heal the ills of the modern world? It certainly had become evident to him that the Nazi “solution” was a fraud. His language, then, had by necessity to be a language of metaphors, distant ones, but all the more radiant and likely to recapture the meaning of a wholeness that he had all along striven to recapture. “When the world has been turned completely upside down,” he speculated, “cracks become visible which betray the secrets of the architectural design.”39 From now on adventure had to assume the shape of some form of “inner emigration.”40 When in 1939 On the Marble Cliffs, Ju¨ nger’s ill-disguised allegory, appeared,41 it was common knowledge that its narrator and his Brother Otho, who had sought refuge in the idyllic Marina, were Ernst Ju¨ nger himself and his brother Friedrich Georg, and that the threatening Head Ranger and his savage gang, the

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55

Mauretanians, stood for Adolf Hitler and his movement. When in the end the Marina went up in flames and the great cathedral, which the Christians had erected, had once again reverted to ruins, what was left to the exiled brothers was acceptance of their plight and a resigned celebration of “the shimmering golden light of the flames” shooting up from the rubble. The prescription for heroism, the message went, had gained its ultimate validity in the face of destruction. Early in 1941 Ju¨ nger, against objections by the Armed Forces and Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, was posted to the staff of the “Military Commander France” in Paris where he soon established close ties with “the Proconsul” (since February 1942), General Karl-Heinrich von Stu¨ lpnagel, and befriended the then Colonel Hans Speidel, the Chief of Staff—both decided opponents of the Nazi regime and later the moving forces of the conspiracy against Hitler in Paris. Ju¨ nger himself thus became involved in the Resistance (Widerstand)—but not too deeply. He enjoyed having esoteric conversations in the exclusive Hotel “Raphael” and circulating in Paris salons where he rubbed elbows with the cream of French society, people of money and mind; but the fellow-intellectuals he saw were almost exclusively French collaborators, including such notorious ones as the writers Louis-Ferdinand Ce´ line and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. In Ju¨ nger’s pilgrimage, then, did everything dissolve in aesthetic aloofness? As a matter of fact, on May 27, 1944, Ju¨ nger, after watching from the roof of the Raphael the Royal Air Force dropping bombs over the city, entered in his diary, poetically: Alarms, raids. From the roof of the “Raphael” I twice saw blasts of clouds rise up in the direction of Saint Germain while the squadrons flew off in high altitude. Their targets had been the bridges across the river. . . . At the second sortie, at sunset, I held a glass of burgundy in my hand in which strawberries floated. The city, its spires and domes reddened, spread out before me in majestic beauty, like a chalice awaiting lethal impregnation. All was spectacle, was pure, underscored power, sanctioned by pain.42

When Ju¨ nger later saw the need to explain and justify this Neronic episode, he recalled to begin with that strawberries had featured especially in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings as “fruit of the earth but also of transcendence.” Moreover, only the Germans and the French would seek refuge in the shelter; but if you found unpleasant both those in the shelter and those up in the planes, why not drink a glass of champagne (in the recollection burgundy became champagne) with death? 43 Since the winter of 1941–42 Ju¨ nger had been working on a tract on peace.44 Its final version was dedicated to the memory of his elder son Ernstel who, court-marshalled in February 1944 for having formed a resistance group and then released from jail on probation, fell in battle in November 1944 at the Marble Cliffs in Carrara, Tuscany.45 The apologist of war, then, had become a

56

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champion of peace; the one time chieftain of German ultranationalists addressed the youth of Europe and the world. The paradox was not hidden to Ju¨ nger. The treatise on peace was an altogether unhappy document. The conversion of the warrior was not persuasive, and the vision of war as destiny still hovered over the yearning for peace. “Destiny” remained the decisive dimension that dictated the balance between war and peace, and the harmony of the world of the burgher remained drowned out by “apocalyptic thunders.”46 The “adventurous heart,” for the moment at least, made do with grandiloquent words, and for the rest what was said about the part of faith and of the churches in a regenerated Europe sounded hollow and disingenuous. But Brother Otho, looking back over the “Mauretanian period,” was overheard to have said that “mistakes become errors only when persisted in.”47 Once the war had receded further into the background, Ju¨ nger came out with a really beautiful piece in which he once again attempted to redefine meaningfully the relation of modern man to his environment. The “type” whom he now singled out was the “woodsman” (“Der Waldga¨ nger”). “We called the Worker and the Unknown Soldier the two great types of our times. In the Woodsman we encounter the third one that becomes increasingly distinct.”48 This discovery of Ju¨ nger’s was obviously prompted by his thoughts about resistance. While he himself clearly took no part in it, he was an astute observer of its landscape. In that setting the woodsman is the person who says “no.” Instead of the “no,” Ju¨ nger mused, one could use one letter, the “W”: “We, watchful, weapons, wolves, Widerstand. It could also mean Waldga¨ nger.”49 The woodsman is a sovereign person who goes his way alone and in a hostile world stands up for his convictions, ready to take the consequences even if they mean deprivation and suffering. At this stage in the evolution of Ju¨ nger’s thinking, adventure no longer means an intoxication with fire and blood, nor absorption into the collective of total mobilization. It leads, rather, into solitude, a “new solitude.”50 Ernst Ju¨ nger, then, emerged from his experiences in and between the two wars with a double and indeed ambiguous message. His savage legacy is ineradicable. Yet even this amounted to more than a prescription for militarism, ultranationalism, totalitarianism. All along he was engaged in a struggle, however misguided, with himself rather than with the enemy, for clarity. His quest for adventure led him along dangerous paths. All adventure, let us remember Whitehead’s observation, is “dangerous, easily perverted.” However, it also belongs “to the essence of civilization.” Ju¨ nger must be understood as a formidable German mind. Ju¨ nger-Leverku¨ hn was a bedevilled artist, a distinguished artist who never ceased to struggle with the secrets of man’s place in the modern universe. He was the adventurer par excellence, extraterritorial, never conforming, indeed anarchic, ever risking the leap into the unknown. “Who would be surprised,” wrote Martin Heidegger in allusion to Ernst Ju¨ nger, “if in a time such as this one, when the world as we know it is completely turned upside down, the thought arises that now only the joy of danger, ‘ad-

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venture,’ could serve man to reassure himself of reality.”51 Thus Ernst Ju¨ nger received the imprimatur of a thinker, similarly august and similarly questionable in the landscape of the German mind. But it must have been something of a tribute to Ju¨ nger’s transcendence of combat between nations, and to his stature as moral philosopher after all, that the President of France as well as the German President and Chancellor paid their respects to the old man by visiting him at his retreat in the forester’s house of the Stauffenbergs in Wilflingen.52 Yet will these accolades make up for the deceptive quality of the messages which the model adventurer had all along sent out to his troubled contemporaries? The case of Ernst Ju¨ nger confirms the rectitude of Mr. Whitehead’s observation about the ambiguity of all adventurism and in particular about its inherent dangers. In any case, the cathedral that Ju¨ nger, like all of his fellow adverturers, sought to erect, has turned out to be a mirage.

NOTES 1. The Journals of Andre´ Gide, Ed. Justin O’Brien (New York, 1956), 2, 3. 2. See Georg Simmel’s splendid essay “The Adventure” in Georg Simmel, 1858– 1918. A Collection of Essays with Translations and a Bibliography, Ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus, OH, 1959), 243–258. 3. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York, 1933), 360, 380. 4. Ibid. 5. William Butler Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Definitive ed. (New York, 1964), 133f. 6. Antoine de Saint-Exupe´ ry, Flight to Arras (New York, 1942), 247, 33. 7. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italia e Vita (Rome, 1920), quoted in Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York, 1966), 187. 8. “Landkarte”; Hans-Peter Schwarz, Der konservative Anarchist. Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Ju¨ ngers (Freiburg i. Br., 1962), 242. 9. Thomas Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” Von deutscher Republik. Politische Schriften und Reden in Deutschland (Frankfurt/M., 1984), 115–159. It has become generally accepted that the chief agent that caused Thomas Mann’s “conversion” was the murder in 1922 of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and the reaction to it among his compatriots; see in particular T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford, 1974); also Michael Beddow, “From Nationalist to Anti-Nazi,” The Times Literary Supplement (London), October 13, 1995, 15f. 10. See for this thesis also Alfred von Martin, Der heroische Nihilismus und seine ¨ berwindung. Ernst Ju¨ ngers Weg durch die Krise (Krefeld, 1948). U 11. “Er ist . . . ein Wegbereiter und eiskalter Genu¨ ssling des Barbarismus”; letter Thomas Mann-Agnes Meyer, Thomas Mann/Agnes Meyer: Briefwechsel 1937–1955 (Pacific Palisades, CA) 14 December 1945, Hans Rudolf Vaget, ed. (Frankfurt/M., 1992) 649; see also letter, 4 November 1945, “Wollu¨ stling der Barbarei,” Ibid., 645. 12. See in particular In Stahlgewittern (1920), Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922), Sturm (1923), Feuer und Blut (1924), Das Wa¨ ldchen (1925). 13. In this connection see chapter IV, “Ernst Ju¨ nger and Adolf Hitler,” in Schwarz, Der konservative Anarchist, 109–130.

58

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14. For Ju¨ nger about Spengler see Ernst Ju¨ nger, An der Zeitmauer (1959), Werke, vol. 6, 460ff. 15. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin, 1922), 116. 16. Friedrich Georg Ju¨ nger, Gru¨ ne Zweige. Ein Erinnerungsbuch (Munich, 1952), 115f. 17. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Copse 125. A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918 (London, 1930), vii. 18. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922), Werke, vol. 5, 108. 19. George Steiner, “Introduction,” Ernst Ju¨ nger, On the Marble Cliffs (Harmondsworth, England, 1970), 7. 20. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Das abenteuerliche Herz (Erste Fassung, 1929), Werke, vol. 7, 34f. 21. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922), Werke, vol. 5, 78. 22. Ju¨ nger, Das abenteuerliche Herz, 147, 67. 23. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg, 1932). 24. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt, Werke, vol. 6, 102. 25. In this connection see the work by Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984); esp. the chapter on Ernst Ju¨ nger, pp. 70–108. 26. Ernst Ju¨ nger, “Ein neuer Bericht aus dem Lande der Planwirtschaft,” Widerstand. 8 (1933), 280. 27. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, 1968), 212. 28. “Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod. Der 87 ja¨ hrige Schriftsteller Ernst Ju¨ nger u¨ ber Geschichte, Politik und die Bundesrepublik,” Der Spiegel, 16 (August 1982), 163. 29. See in particular Ernst Ju¨ nger, Der Kampf, 13f. 30. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Das abenteuerliche Herz (Erste Fassung, 1929), Werke, vol. 7, 94. 31. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Das Wa¨ ldchen (1925). Eine Chronik aus den Grabenka¨ mpfen 1918, 5th. Ed. (Berlin, 1930), 9. 32. Ju¨ nger, Der Kampf, 19. 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre, Werke in drei Ba¨ nden, Ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich 1956), 3, 843. Ju¨ nger’s publisher in a 4-page prospectus used this Nietzschean maxim; Schwarz, Der konservative Anarchist, 82f. 34. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Welschbillig, 22. Mai 1940, Ga¨ rten and Straßen. Aus den Tagebu¨ chern von 1939 und 1940, 2nd. Ed. (Berlin, 1942), 129. 35. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin, 1918); Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (New York, 1983). 36. Thomas Mann originally coined the epithet Zivilisationsliterat in his Betrachtungen in attack against his brother Heinrich whose championship of the ideas of the French Enlightenment appeared to him, especially in wartime, as betrayal of German Kultur. 37. See especially Kurt Sontheimer, “Thomas Mann als politischer Schriftsteller,” Vierteljahrshefte fu¨ r Zeitgeschichte, 6 (January 1958), 1–44; Hans Rudolf Vaget, “The Steadfast Soldier: Thomas Mann in World Wars I and II,” Reinhold Grimm and Jost Herman, Eds. (1914–1939). German Reflections of the Two World Wars (Madison, WI), 1992. 38. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Das abenteuerliche Herz (Zweite Fassung, 1938), Werke, vol. 7, 177–338. 39. Ibid., 259. 40. I use this term with caution. Coined by the writer Frank Thieβ, it connotes the attitudes of those dissenting literary figures during the time of the Third Reich who did

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not leave the country but manifested their opposition by withdrawing wholly or largely from public life. As for Ju¨ nger, though he refused public office and honors offered to him by the Nazis and found refuge from party control in the army, he remained ambivalent throughout in his attitude, fudging issues that he might well have met head on and dissolving them in aesthetic excursions. 41. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Auf den Marmorklippen (1939), Werke, vol. 9, 197–298. 42. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Das zweite Pariser Tagebuch (1949), Tagebu¨ cher III. Strahlungen, Zweiter Teil, Werke, vol. 3, 280f. 43. “Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod,” 162; “Ja, gut. Andre´ Miller spricht mit Ernst Ju¨ nger,” Die Zeit (December 15, 1989), 12. 44. Der Friede! Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas und an die Jugend der Welt. The edition which I have studied here is Der Friede, Werke, vol. 5, 201–244. 45. At first it was surrepticiously distributed in leaflet form. Scheduled to be published in May 1945, it was held back by Military Government, and then appeared in print not before 1949. 46. Ju¨ nger, Der Friede, 215. 47. Ju¨ nger, Auf den Marmorklippen, 206. 48. Ernst Ju¨ nger, Der Waldgang (1951), Werke, vol. 5, 316. 49. Ibid., 305. 50. Ibid., 356. 51. Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 51 (Frankfurt/M., 1981), 36 (based on a lecture by Heidegger in Freiburg i. Br. in the summer 1941), quoted in Ru¨ diger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich, ¨ ber die Linie” (1950, Werke, vol. 5, 1994), 382. In return Ju¨ nger dedicated his essay “U 245–289) to Heidegger at the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. 52. As a matter of fact the “Ju¨ nger-Renaissance,” as Horst Seferens put it [“Leute von u¨ bermorgen und von vorgestern.” Ernst Ju¨ nger Ikonographie der Gegenaufklrung und die deutsche Rechte nach 1945 (Bodenheim, 1998), 41] was not long in the coming after the war. As early as 1955 President Theodor Heuss honored Ju¨ nger with a visit. An important landmark in his “upgrading” (Ibid., 42) was Karl-Heinz Bohrer’s work Die A¨ sthetik des Schreckens. Die pessimistische Romantik und Ernst Ju¨ ngers Fru¨ hwerk, Mu¨ nchen, 1978, which recognized him as a notable figure of the German literatry avantgarde. Still the award in 1982 of the prestigious Goethe Prize gave occasion to much controversy in the Federal Republic. Yet the visits in Wilflingerr by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Franc¸ ois Mitterand in 1984 (Ju¨ nger’s 90th birthday) and by President Roman Herzog and Kohl in 1994 (Ju¨ nger’s 100th birthday) did give Ju¨ nger an imprimatur as a weighty personage on the German cultural scene.

5 The Call for Allegiance: Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Ernst Ju¨ nger, despite his studied aloofness, was a public figure. His adventurism reflected the martial mood of the Germans during and after the First World War, and in turn he became one of the most influential authors of the era after the war. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Figure 5.1) was the guardian of the realm of poetry. He was born into the sensitive, even oversensitive culture of late Habsburg Vienna in which art, indeed the highest flights of artistic creativity, tended to dispel and displace a mounting sense of inadequacy and inability to cope with the realities of power and politics. Comparing the atmosphere in Berlin and Vienna during that time, people used to quip that while in Berlin everything was serious but not hopeless, in Vienna everything was hopeless but not serious. For the moment at least the charms of genius and the scent of aestheticism would cover up the fear of life itself, the awareness of crisis, the premonition of doom. Hofmannsthal was sixteen years old, still a schoolboy at the renowned Viennese Akademisches Gymnasium, when he published his first poems. Since there was a rule against schoolboys’ publishing, he wrote under the name “Loris,” borrowed from a recently deceased Russian general, Count Michael T. Loris-Melikow. Starting at that time also the boy prodigy frequented, first accompanied by his father, the famous Cafe´ Griensteidl at the Michaelerplatz, where the luminaries of the Vienna avant-garde convened and conversed. In that select company the “young prince” quickly became the object of general wonderment and admiration. His lyrical presence somehow seemed to bring its thoughts and creations into focus, and disparate as they were, to authenticate them. But Hofmannsthal was after all more than “that gem-collector” who “flees

Figure 5.1. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ca. 1920.

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life and loves things which beautify it,”1 as the ever-acid satirist Karl Kraus, one of the regulars at the Cafe´ , caricatured him. Decadence, with which Kraus identified Hofmannsthal, was not his refuge. It was increasingly his problem; and once he had outgrown his youthful, self-indulgent and perfumed raptures, he came to recognize that the pursuit of beauty for its own sake was not enough; it had to be related to and ultimately to serve the whole. And the more he became overwhelmed by the crisis of culture and the disintegration of everything, the more he strove to acknowledge his debt to the past and the social responsibility of his art: I can never cast off from my eyelids Lassitudes of long-forgotten peoples, Nor from my astounded soul can banish Soundless fall of stars through outer distance. Many destinies with mine are woven; Living plays them all through one another, And my part is larger than this slender Life’s ascending flame or narrow lyre.

In other words, he made it his task to define the place of literature in the “spiritual realm of the nation.” In the pursuit of this endeavour he became a national figure, and it was in this capacity that he had to come to terms with some of the central manifestations of the German “incertitudes.” For Hofmannsthal the word “nation” had a distinctly cultural connotation. For him invoking the “nation” meant the responsibility to maintain the linguistic and cultural heritage of the German speaking world. Moreover his Swabian and Austrian, Italian and Jewish heritage lifted him above any parochial confines. Nation and nationalism were virtually antithetical to him. If he had learned early on from his father that being Austrian also meant being German,2 he understood and interpreted this as an allusion to the outreaching nature of everything Austrian. When during the First World War he had come to identify Austria as “the German responsibility in Europe,”3 he was referring to the openness of everything Austrian towards north and south, west and east, and to a “spiritual imperialism,” as he put it, that transcended national constraints (emphasis added). But since the establishment of the Bismarckian state, Hofmannsthal argued, the “old Germany” had yielded to a national power complex, and the “new Germans,” no longer at peace with themselves, thus left the Austrians with the burden of safeguarding the supranational traditions of empire.4 To resign himself to identifying with a “smooth, flat nation state,” he wrote to a German friend in 1917, was out of the question.5 He was an imperial figure rooted in the universalist heritage of Habsburg rule and of Roman Catholicism, and his personality and art were nourished by the wide horizons of the empire. For better— and, alas, for worse—Hofmannsthal’s Austria was his “never wholly definable fatherland.”6

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At the same time, however, his very commitment to the open and wide horizons of the Habsburg tradition faced him with the burden of the indefiniteness of empire in an age of nationalism. In this sense in particular did the German “incertitudes” extend to him. He could not help but sense that the Danubian Monarchy was vulnerable in an age of nationalism and that it had become a paradigm of a fragmented world. Sadly, stoically he witnessed “the agony, the true one [die eigentliche], of the thousand year old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,”7 and he, the poet, made it his task to remain the guardian of its sacred heritage even though in his lifetime it had become more and more a phantom. Early on young Hofmannsthal had declared his intent to overcome the “mannered inadequacies” of l’art pour l’art.8 Indeed in the first of his morality plays, Der Tor und der Tod, which he wrote at the age of nineteen, he exposed the folly of Claudio, the nobleman, who has lived a life of self-indulgence and wandered across the larger stage “without conviction, strength and worth,” and who came to understand only in the face of death what it means to live: If now, extinguished, I must pass away, My brain replete with this last ecstasy, This poor and faded life will not be missed: Dying at last I feel that I exist.9

The play, Hofmannsthal later remarked, had been written in premonition of the breakup of the old Monarchy. Nevertheless, all of his life somehow remained imprinted by the “paradox,” as he himself put it, of “seeming to be able still to persist” in view of the real end.10 The Letter of Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon, written in 1902, has generally been interpreted as the most visible expression of the poet’s personal crisis. His protagonist has been abandoned by the lyrical muse. Gone are those “delirious days,” days of “almost perpetual intoxication” when the whole of existence appeared “as one vast unity” and when he, Philip, Lord Chandos, the younger son of the Earl of Bath, perceived himself one with all of nature. The document is indeed of extreme significance, but not merely as a guide to Hofmannsthal’s artistic disposition or to a temporary mood of his. The course of overcoming narcissistic introspection and opening himself up to the wider world was one he had set for himself early on, and he had moved steadily in that direction. No less striking than the plight of Lord Chandos himself is the identity and the significance of the addressee, Francis Bacon, later Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans. Chandos’ crisis was really a reflection of Bacon’s rational and scientific world view. It was this view that occasioned Chandos—Hofmannsthal’s disenchantment. A sense of “awful solitude” overwhelmed him: “Everything fell into fragments for me, the fragments into further fragments, until it seemed impossible to contain anything at all within a single concept.”11 Hofmannsthal suffered deeply from the “fragmented condition”12 of his world.

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His personal crisis found immediate expression in his work. Abandoning the writing of lyrical poetry, the private poet yielded to the dramatist trying by means of the stage to reach and serve the public. The once enchanted lyricist of the fin-de-sie`cle now sought “the road to the social domain,” which he recognized as “the road to the higher self”13 eventually it was to reconcile the “nation” with itself “beyond the purely literary medium” and thus “to remind it of its inherent dignity.”14 Hofmannsthal as a public writer turned out to be a deeply conservative voice. In any case, there was only one step from the cult of the self as one form of aesthetic insouciance to the extended cult of the whole in the form of a conservative outlook. In the first decade of the new century Hofmannsthal turned to making adaptations of Greek plays, of which “Electra,” put to music by Richard Strauss, was the most celebrated; through those he intended to revive the roots of Western culture. But before long he had to recognize that they were not the right medium for accomplishing this purpose. He therefore turned for a model to the medieval morality play, which, he thought, would allow him not merely to “contribute” to the German stage, but indeed to “return something” to it.15 In November 1915 the Austrian historian and political scientist Josef Redlich noted in his diary that the war had a strange effect upon his friend Hofmannsthal: “He has become a realist and politician; he wants to make an impact abroad. It is moving for me to observe how he translates his deep Austrian sense of identity ¨ sterreichertum behandelt].”16 into practice [wie praktisch er sein tiefinnerliches O Needless to say, nothing lay further from Hofmannsthal than the idea of entering the world of politics; but amid the general stir that came with the war, he felt that he had to do his part. It was actually through Redlich’s intervention with the Austrian Prime Minister that Hofmannsthal was freed from active service in the army. Instead he devoted himself to deepening and communicating his understanding of the historic “mission” of his country, as well as to undertaking various semi-official missions abroad. He himself had earlier expressed his intent to represent a class that, he thought, Austria badly needed: of people “at the same time politically interested and disinterested” and therefore “independent.”17 His perspective on politics, then, was distinctly that of an Upper House. Hofmannsthal’s wartime pieces were patriotic, embarrassingly, if you wish, though not offensively so.18 They included tributes to Prince Eugen of Savoy, to the Empress Maria Theresa, the latter headed by an epigram by Adam Mu¨ ller which might as well have been Edmund Burke’s,19 and a number of incantations on the Austrian identity. All of them were variations on one theme, namely the majesty of the supranational Monarchy which, by contrast to the German ally, stood for more than mere power; and later, as the war went on, they were accompanied by lamentations over the impending dissolution. They altogether added up to a hurrah, a last hurrah as it turned out, for a conservative order of universality and cohesion. The chief avenue by which Hofmannsthal chose to communicate his message

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was the Salzburg Festival which became the stage for his main morality plays, Jedermann (Everyman, 1911)20 and The Salzburg Great Theater of the World (1921). In both plays the characters act out the part assigned them by God, as they are called upon to account for their lives in the face of death. The “plot” of Jedermann, reminiscent of Der Tor und der Tod, is rather simple: Everyman, the rich man, is yet another fool. Nevertheless in this case he is in the end saved, rich and foolish though he is, by repentance. The final lines thus are spoken by Faith: Hail him, methinketh, I hear a tone As the angels await him before God’s throne; While they in glory are singing so May this poor soul to heaven go.

Jedermann became the mainstay of the Salzburg Festival (Figure 5.2). It was performed almost every year, often along with the Hofmannsthal-Strauss Rosenkavalier and almost always with at least one Mozart opera.21 The secret of its great attractiveness lay to no small degree in the dramatic Salzburg setting and Max Reinhardt’s production. The plans for the festival actually went back to the pre-war days, but only in 1920 was it actually put on stage, Hofmannsthal together with Max Reinhardt and Richard Strauss being its chief moving spirits. To begin with, Reinhardt obtained the Archbishop’s permission to stage the performance in front of the Cathedral portals; fanfares would introduce the ceremony, the actors would emerge from and again disappear behind the high statues of the saints guarding the facade; from the spires of the Cathedral, from the distant cemetery, the Petersfriedhof, and from the majestic Hohensalzburg fortress presiding over the city, portentious calls would sound for “Jedermann! Jedermann! Jedermann!” And at the end of the play, at dusk, the singing angels would reenter the portals to the ringing of the heavy cathedral bells.22 The setting of The Salzburg Great Theater of the World, which was performed during the festivals only of 1922 and 1925, is, like that of Jedermann, exalted and deeply allegorical; yet it has a more intricate plot and carries a message more readily transferred to the political and social scene. The allegory is now brought down to earth by six characters representing humankind: the king, the rich man, the peasant, the beggar, wisdom (a nun) and beauty (a court lady). As the play unfolds, it moves towards a juxtaposition of the rich man and the beggar; indeed the beggar has become the central figure of the play. As a matter of fact, Hofmannsthal prided himself on having presented not the passive and resigned beggar of the old mystery plays, but rather the “active” beggar, the excluded and disinherited one aspiring to a place among those who have inherited. The beggar, then, emerges as a contemporary figure, namely “the threat of chaos to the world order.”23 The beggar, threatening to destroy with the blow of his axe “the world struc-

Figure 5.2. First performance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann on the Domplatz in Salzburg, 1920.

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ture of a thousand years,” is subdued by wisdom who raises her arms in prayer. In the end, then, as though by miracle, he lets his axe drop, falls to his knees, and moves as a “holy hermit” into the beyond where everybody shares equally and worldly possessions do not matter. The actor playing the beggar, the same one who always impersonated Jedermann, was Alexander Moissi, a Triestian Italian of Albanian stock. A discovery of Reinhardt’s, he was one of the great actors on the German stage. There was something of a “Russian quality” to him, Hofmannsthal remarked, “and the spectre of Bolshevism stood very unmistakably behind his extraordinarily sparing and unforgettable movements. But at times his voice, with its Italian timbre, enabled him to handle his lines in a remarkable manner which was incomparably fitted to the marble church where so much of the Italian spirit of past centuries found its expression.”24 This kind of mysticism, celebrated as it was by the international public, did not go unchallenged. The Salzburg citizenry was by no means pleased by the invasion of foreign tourists who appropriated their cathedral. Let the prestigious “Neue Freie Presse” of Vienna rejoice in the fact that “the call of ‘Jedermann’ rang from Salzburg to the whole world,”25 but the locals felt unwanted in their own city. Besides, the never reticent anti-Semites had a field day, taking the occasion to lash out at the Jewish—meaning Hofmannsthal’s and Reinhardt’s— spirit pervading the festivals. Karl Kraus, never in want of an argument, staged a vitriolic attack against the “Great World Theater Swindle.”26 Himself a Jewish convert to Catholicism, he took issue with what he considered a blasphemous commercialization of religion. In his one-man journal Die Fackel he took aim at the “Holy Trinity of Messrs. Reinhardt, Moissi and Hofmannsthal,”27 the three imposters who had desecrated the House of God; and since God himself, as he ventured to guess, had probably left the Church already, he, Kraus, saw himself justified in following suit. Intemperate as this attack may have been, it did raise the broader issue of the identity of modern Austria. Austria after the First World War, truncated and deprived of its empire, had been left a “state against its own volition,” as the saying went. Amid its initial sense of disorientation the question of joining Germany loomed large for the Austrian public. Indeed the Provisional National Assembly in Vienna proclaimed on November 12, 1918 the Democratic Republic of “German Austria” (Deutscho¨ sterreich) a “Component of the German Republic,” a provision of course blocked by the Allies, who subsequently inserted in both Peace Treaties, the one of Versailles with Germany and the one of St. Germain-en-Laye with Austria, articles (80, resp. 88) prohibiting the so-called Anschluβ with Germany. At any rate, in Salzburg, as in the Tyrol, a plebicite (unofficial) took place in April 1921 on the Anschluβ question, resulting in an overwhelming vote (99.3%) in favor of it. The German “incertitudes,” then, clearly had spilled over into little Austria. In this setting the message which came from Hofmannsthal was clearly out

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of place. Whatever the official constraints on governmental policies, public opinion in Austria and especially in Salzburg, which bordered on Germany, was predominantly Pan-German. Hofmannsthal’s Salzburg, however, was, the heart of the heart of Europe. It lies halfway between Switzerland and the Slav lands, halfway between northern Germany and Lombard Italy; it lies in the middle between South and North, between mountain and plain, between the heroic and the idyllic; Salzburg architecture lies between the urban and the rural, the ancient and modern, the princely baroque and the lovable, eternal peasant world. Mozart is the expression of all this. The center of Europe knows no more beautiful space and precisely here Mozart should have been born.28

Embedded in this beautiful celebration of Mozart’s land and city were Hofmannsthal’s fears and hopes. The fears were of separation: separation of everything German from classical antiquity, of German Kultur from the wider European civilization, as well as of the romantic rural from the inevitable urban. “The threat to the whole,” as he wrote elsewhere,29 was his constant concern; all the more was he obsessed with the somewhat mysterious motto, “The whole man must move at once,” which he quoted three times in English,30 recalling an almost vanished wisdom. These ruminations might well have remained private, had they not been projected on the stage. The stage after all is a forum that lends art the fullest possible public exposure, and the performances of both of Hofmannsthal’s morality plays made him, whether he wanted it or not, a political figure. The one time aesthete, then, appeared as a lawgiver, and he went the opposite direction from Ernst Ju¨ nger whose path led from commitment to a, however ferocious, cause to an evasive and compulsively coded aestheticism. “Life,” Hofmannsthal once wrote, “is the complete conciliation of the irreconcilable.”31 Hoping against hope, he launched a message that would surmount all the discontents of modern civilization, if not of civilization itself. A poetic, pastoral vision it was at best, and akin to the Papal Encyclicals of 1891 and 193132 which had constituted efforts on the part of the Church to define its position on the social question in the modern industrial state. But as a political prescription, it read like a blueprint for the corporate order as it became implemented in 1934 in Austria under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuβ, who thus terminated the admittedly shaky democratic order of the first Austrian Republic. Hofmannsthal and his cofounders of the festival no doubt had raised Salzburg to the rank of a cosmopolitan city in which church, synagogue, Mozart and European high society merged cheerfully. Karl Kraus’ satire was not so far off the mark. But it ignored compulsively the genuinely holistic thrust of Hofmannsthal’s venture. If one of the chief functions of poetry is to enchant the world, Hofmannsthal’s drama as it was played on the stage in Salzburg did so almost demonstratively. It sought to reassemble the fragments that Hofmannsthal

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had been left with after his Chandos crisis, and it was, as Friedrich Heer put it with some exaggeration, “an apolitical political event of the first order.”33 It would be straining the point to talk about a “Salzburg ideology.”34 If we understand by the twentieth-century ideology a millenarian political religion assuming orthodoxy and aspiring to total penetration of state and society, Hofmannsthal, and for that matter his friends, had no part in it. It was his conviction of the omnipotence of God and the impotence of man that dictated his politics, and his faith in the supremacy of the sacred over the profane that dictated his imagination. His was a deeply conservative imagination, and the religious drama and allegory were the language by means of which he meant to communicate. They might, he hoped, show the way out of the crisis, “the gravest one which has shaken Europe perhaps since the sixteenth, if not the thirteenth, century.” The universe was not to be cured by “prophets of decline and Bacchanalians of chaos, chauvinists and cosmopolitans,” as he labelled all those millenarians who came up with easy and tempting solutions. He saw himself as a representative of a “creative restauration,”35 as he put it, which was to redress the preordained relation between God and humankind and which derived its legitimacy from the Habsburg empire even after it had in fact become a phantom. Is it not going too far, then, to suggest that the Catholic and Austrian metaphysics, like Hofmannsthal’s, was akin to European fascism?36 Although Hofmannsthal was altogether honest in declaring that he had a distaste for politics,37 he eventually became deeply involved in the public political argument after all. Was this because in the long run everything, even the most unpolitical statement, has political implications? In any case, early in 1927 Hofmannsthal gave a now famous address to the students of the University of Munich with the highly promising but somewhat mysterious title “Literature as the Spiritual Voice of the Nation.”38 Addressing students, particularly in times of crisis, is always a risky business. The reader will remember that in November 1917 and shortly after the German November 1918 revolution Max Weber delivered his twin lectures in Munich on “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.” The tenor of both these lectures was an unsparing realism, with Weber rehearsing before his listeners, as he put it in his second lecture, “the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life . . .” But Weber was made to feel acutely the generation gap between himself and his young audience, and although in the long run the occasions turned out to have been really seminal statements on the place of scholarship in the modern world and on the laws governing political life, the public resonance was negligible. Then there was Thomas Mann’s talk on “The German Republic” of October 1922 in the Berlin Beethovensaal, addressed to the students. He had to struggle to get their attention in order to persuade them of the rationality of democratic republicanism over revolutionary occultism. Less incisive than Max Weber, he ventured into a rather shaky argument that attempted to legitimize the democratic-republican order by invoking its sources in German Romanticism as

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represented by Novalis and in Walt Whitman. But, as the text of the speech attests, the students kept shuffling their feet in disapproval. Thomas Mann did not make many converts after all. All the public addresses in question, those by Weber, Mann and Hofmannsthal, were variations on the theme of crisis. Weber’s approach, as he dealt with the predicament of modern man in the face of a world without faith, was the broadest one. Mann had come to understand the pitfalls in the metaphysics of the nationalism to which he had been addicted during the war. In the immediate crisis situation of the post-war period, then, both men appeared on the scene as apologists of rationality—and their argument was by no means well received by the students. Hofmannsthal’s perception of crisis was informed by his self-image and role as a custodian of German culture. All along he had, particularly from his Austrian perspective, lamented the stuffiness and parochialism of the Germans; the tradition of sacrum imperium was carried on not in the Bismarckian Germany, but in Austria. Now, that is by the mid-twenties, the time had come for a comprehensive examination of the state of affairs in the realm of the German mind. Hofmannsthal’s Munich address amounted to a grand stocktaking on the place of the poet in society. Inspite of himself he had become a public figure, and his shyness notwithstanding had entered into the public arena,39 the auditorium maximum of a great German university turned out to be the proper venue in which to speak for the whole German nation. Against the background of a dissertation on the French scene he plunged into a powerful jeremiad on German conditions. In France poet and nation, writer and reader, speaker and listener were one, and altogether the French scene was marked by a remarkable perception of holism, namely “holism of being”40 forming an “inner universe.” By contrast, the German side was marked by “inner turmoil” and “confusion.”41 German literature, he maintained, was not instrumental in effecting “the cohesion of all productive spiritual forces of the nation” and was therefore “neither truly representative nor tradition-building”42 and indicative of the dissonance between Geist and Politik. Now, coming from a less conspicuous and well-known personage such a lamentation could well have been dismissed as vague, sentimental gibberish packed with interminably rambling sentences. The eminent Hofmannsthal scholar Richard Alewyn, has in fact called it a “tortured speech;”43 and Peter Gay, while commenting on it as “civilized” and “elegant,” could not help but allude to its being “elusive, strenuously vague.”44 Whether or not this was in fact so, the tenor of the lecture was indicative of a widespread malaise and crisis-consciousness that prevailed at the time in Germany and Austria. In any case, Hofmannsthal had set the stage for his message, and this was the decisive and memorable part of the address. Appealing to the students, he fell back on Friedrich Nietzsche to identify the type that was to overcome cultural fragmentation, the “seekers” who were to be recognized by a single word: Gemeinschaft. Here, then, was Hofmannsthal’s vocabulary: Gemeinschaft, alle-

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giance, holism. These were loaded, potentially electrifying words before an audience clearly hungry for direction. Indeed Hofmannsthal wound up with the challenging statement that it was “not freedom” which they, the “seekers” wanted “but allegiance”45 and concluded with the climactic, nowadays often cited incantation: “The process of which I am speaking is nothing less than a conservative revolution on such a scale as the history of Europe has never known. Its object is form, a new German reality, in which the whole nation will share.”46 The paradoxical and ever fascinating term “conservative revolution,” which Thomas Mann had introduced into modern German usage,47 was potentially dynamite. The contrast with the speeches by Weber and Mann discussed earlier is striking. Both had things to say which were bound to trouble, if not offend, the students, and they said them firmly. Max Weber certainly had the guts to demonstrate to his audience the separation between science and values and between power and ethics, and to rehearse before them that “polar night of icy darkness.” To revert to the metaphors informing my argument, he faced up stoically to the fragmentariness of the stones.48 Thomas Mann, while fudging on the issue of romanticism and democratic republicanism, found the courage— and it took courage—to terminate his speech with the exclamation “Long live the Republic!” The students who may have wanted the cathedral were confronted with the stones. And Hofmannsthal? This time a basically apolitical event became a political event of the first order. May we say that the guardian of the realm of poetry, inspite of himself, allowed himself to be carried away by political emotions, by the quest for the cathedral?49 It was Thomas Mann who, when the speech appeared, warned Hofmannsthal in a conversation “of the impending threat, to which to some extent he had thus given support.”50 In any case, the spectre of the “conservative revolution” kept haunting the political scene of Germany during the whole period of the Weimar Republic.

NOTES 1. Die Fackel I (April 1899), 25, 27, quoted in Carl Schorske, Fin-De-Sie`cle Vienna. Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), 16. 2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe des Zuru¨ ckgekehrten (Der dritte, 9. Mai 1901),” Gesammelte Werke. Prosa II (Frankfurt/M., 1951), 339. ¨ sterreicher und 3. Die deutsche Aufgabe in Europa; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Wir O ¨ Deutschland” (1915), Osterreichische Aufsa¨ tze und Reden (Vienna, 1956), 121. 4. For this see in particular Hofmannsthal, “Briefe des Zuru¨ ckgekehrten (Der erste, ¨ sterreicher und Deutschland,” 121. April 1901),” Prosa II, 330; “Wir O 5. “Letter Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen-Degener, Rodaun, 10 July 1917,” Mesa (Autumn 1945), 34. 6. “Letter Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Josef Redlich, Rodaun, 12 April 1923,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Josef Redlich Briefwechsel (Frankfurt/M., 1971), 63. 7. Ibid.

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8. Quoted in Werner Volke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1967), 58. 9. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poems and Verse Plays, Ed. Michael Hamburger (New York, 1962), 132–135. 10. “Das Paradoxon des scheinbar Noch bestehen-ko¨ nnens bei tatsa¨ chlichem Ende”; “Letter Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Josef Redlich, Rodaun, 28 November 1928,” Briefwechsel (Frankfurt/M., 1971), 116. 11. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter (Marlboro, VT 1986). For my understanding of the Chandos letter I am particularly indebted to Hermann Rudolph, Kulturkritik und konservative Revolution. Zum kulturell-politischen Denken Hofmannsthals und seinem problemgeschichtlichen Kontext (Tu¨ bingen, 1971), 41–46. 12. “Den zersplitterten Zustand dieser Welt”; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” Gesammelte Werke. Prosa II, 287. 13. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ad me ipsum,” Gesammelte Werke, Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt/M., 1959), 217. ¨ ber das Litterarische hinaus”; “die Nation in sich zu verso¨ hnen”; “Letter Hugo 14. “U von Hofmannshal-Erich Vogeler, Rodaun, 15 January 1923,” Christiane von Hofmannsthal, Tagebu¨ cher 1918–1923 und Briefe des Vaters an die Tochter 1903–1929, Eds. Maya Rauch and Gerhard Schuster (Frankfurt/M., 1991), 139. 15. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Spiel vor der Menge (1911),” Gesammelte Werke, Prosa III (Frankfurt/M., 1952), 61f. ¨ sterreichs 1908–1919. Das politische Tagebuch Josef Redlichs, 16. Schicksalsjahre O Ed. Fritz Fellner (Graz, Cologne, 1954), II, 1915–1919 (23 November 1915), 82. 17. “Letter Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Josef Redlich, Rodaun, 22. February 1907,” Briefwechsel, 7. ¨ sterreichische Aufsa¨ tze und Reden. 18. Hofmannsthal, O 19. “The state is an alliance between the past and future generations and the other way around.” 20. He had worked on the play since 1903. 21. For the Salzburg Festival Repertory, 1920–1944, see Michael P. Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival. Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, London, 1990), 233–235. 22. This account is based on Hofmannsthal’s own rendition of the festival scene; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Festspiele in Salzburg (1919),” Festspiele in Salzburg (Vienna, 1952), 11. 23. For Hofmannsthal’s interpretation of the play see “Vienna Letter, July 1922,” The Dial (August 1922), 206–214. 24. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Vienna Letter (February 1923),” The Dial LXXIV (March 1923), 288. 25. Much of the information for this passage including this quotation has been taken from Stephen Gallup, A History of the Salzburg Festival (Topsfield, MA 1987) (ch. 2, “Difficult Beginnings,” 17–32). 26. Karl Kraus, “Vom groβen Welttheaterschwindel.” Unsterblicher Witz (Munich, 1961), 219–223. 27. Ibid., 219. 28. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der erste Aufruf zum Salzburger Festspielplan, 1919,” Festspiele in Salzburg (Vienna, 1952), 32.

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29. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ed., Wert und Ehre deutscher Sprache (Frankfurt/M., 1957), 12. 30. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe des Zuru¨ ckgekehrten” (Der erste, April 1901), 323–324, 329. 31. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke. Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt/M., 1959), 200. 32. Rerum novarum (1891); Quadragesimo anno (1931). 33. Friedrich Heer, “Kultur und Politik in der Ersten Republik.” Norbert Leser, Ed., Das geistige Leben Wiens in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna, 1981), 301, quoted in Hermann Dorowin, Retter des Abendlands. Kulturkritik im Vorfeld des europa¨ ischen Faschismus (Stuttgart, 1991), 129. 34. Unfortunately this term is being used consistently in the otherwise fine work on the Salzburg Festival by Michael P. Steinberg. 35. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Europa (1925),” Gesammelte Werke. Prosa IV (Frankfurt/M., 1925), 243; for Hofmannsthal and Restoration see also Ernst Robert Curtius, “Hofmannsthal’s German Mission,” Essays on European Literature (Princeton, 1973), 129–135. 36. This suggestion is contained in the otherwise penetrating study by Dorowin, Retter des Abendlands, 144. Also Dorowin characterizes the architect Clemens Holzmeister’s construction plans for the Salzburg Festival House as “the architectural self-portrayal of Austrofascism”; Ibid., 129. 37. “Ich will nur eins nicht ho¨ ren, das Politische”; “Letter Hugo von HofmannsthalMarie Luise Borchardt, Rodaun, 21 March [1923],” Hugo von Hofmannsthal-Rudolf Borchardt Briefwechsel (Frankfurt/M., 1954), 174. 38. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation (10 January 1927),” Gesammelte Werke. Prosa IV (Frankfurt/M., 1955), 390–413. Note that Hofmannsthal used the word Schrifttum and not Literatur,’ the latter being more fitting for conditions in France. For an elaborate analysis of the address see Rudolph, Kulturkritik und konservative Revolution, 211–224. 39. Carl Jacob Burckhardt, who spent the time of the composition of the address with the Hofmannsthals in their country seat in Rodaun near Vienna, reported afterwards that Hofmannsthal had been “almost sick” over the prospect of it and that he had already composed a telegram to call it off; “Letter Carl J. Burckhardt-Max Rychner, Sch[o¨ nen]b[erg], 21 August 1929,” Carl J. Burckhardt and Max Rychner, Briefe 1926– 1965 (Frankfurt/M., 1970), 24, quoted in Ute and Helmut Nicolaus, “Hofmannsthal, der Staat und die ‘konservative Revolution,’ ” Politisches Denken (Jahrbuch 1997), 141–174. 40. “Ganzheit des Daseins”; Hofmannsthal, “Schrifttum,” 394. 41. “Zerrissenheit”; “Zerfahrenheit”; Ibid. 42. Ibid., 395, 397. ¨ ber Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Go¨ ttingen, 1958), 11. 43. Richard Alewyn, U 44. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968). 45. Hofmannsthal, “Schrifttum,” 408. 46. Ibid., 413. 47. Thomas Mann, “Russische Anthologie (1929),” Thomas Mann, Rede und Antwort (Berlin, 1922) 236, where Nietzsche is identified as a conservative revolutionary. For the history of the concept see Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch, 2nd. ed. (Darmstadt, 1972), 9–12, 191. 48. Hofmannsthal indeed expressed his greatest understanding and respect for Max

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Weber. After reading the biography by Marianne Weber, he commented on Weber, “the deep, dark, passionate man,” an “aristocratic nature” which, endowed with “unusual mental powers,” was a “truly great person”; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Biographie,” Prosa IV (Frankfurt/M., 1955), 361f. 49. As a matter of fact, Hofmannsthal later confided to his friend Leopold von Andrian that to begin with he had been “careless” to take on the Munich address which “after all” had brought him “no satisfaction”; “Hugo von Hofmannsthal/Leopold von Andrian,” Briefwechsel (Frankfurt/M., 1968), 392. 50. “Letter Thomas Mann-Professor Karl Vie¨ tor,” 4 December 1946; and Thomas Mann added: “with some uneasiness he passed over the subject.”

6 The Lure and Limits of Gemeinschaft

“As a matter of fact, certain distinct limits will be set to life in the new community [Gemeinschaft], and if these are violated out of a spirit of a false solidarity, everything will collapse internally.” —Letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his nephew Hans-Walter Schleicher about to be called-up to military service, 10 October 1942, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Konspiration und Haft 1940–1945, Werke, vol. 16, 364

In the course of the past two centuries the concept Gemeinschaft has moved into the center of all thinking about Germany. It has of course its equivalents in, say Britain and France, but they have been self-evident and have received no particular emphasis. In Britain all citizens, of whatever standing, were included, as Walter Bagehot put it, in “the pride of sovereignty” under the protection of the “family on the throne (emphasis added).” In France, despite all the discontinuities in its nineteenth-century history, societe´ , as Emile Durkheim envisaged it, encompassed all citoyens and was the basis of the so-called “Republican synthesis” (Stanley Hoffmann) that became the mark of the Third Republic. In the German language and political discourse in modern times nothing pertaining to Gemeinschaft has been self-evident. Originally, to be sure, Gemeinschaft was a beautiful and important concept that became part of the vocabulary of German romanticism, which as a matter of fact used it unpolemically and indeed frequently exchangeably with the neighboring concept Gesellschaft. Thus Adam Mu¨ ller saw the state as an “eternal alliance of men among each other,”

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and Friedrich Schlegel spoke of the “ethical imperative of absolute Gemeinschaft” and of the church as “absolute Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft of all men in their relation to another and to the Divinity.”1 However, insofar as the social theory of the Enlightenment had emphasized the contract as the basis of political and social relations, the Romanticists came to diverge from it. They began to call attention to a dimension of communal life determined not mechanically by contract but by an organic and holistic interrelation of parts quite apart from utilitarian considerations. No doubt, the identification of Gemeinschaft as a social unit amounted to a meaningful sociological breakthrough inasmuch as it recognized an associative relationship defined by consensus and purposefulness of a more or less spiritual nature. It denotes a unit, generally held together, as were the early Christians in the catacombs or the early Jewish settlers in Palestine of the kibbutzim, by inspired spontaneity. But in any case it must be remembered that it is a precious and generally shortlived unit whose functioning depends on limitation of its membership and a personal connection among its members. This very focus on the concept of Gemeinschaft has led to a juxtaposition of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft according to which the former has come to connote an inspired and cohesive community as opposed to Gesellschaft, the modern society held together by merely contractual if not mechanical controls. Gemeinschaft, then, took on the function of a corrective vision in the face of an increasingly complex, if not troubled, reality, and the designation came to carry with it a presumption of an ideal cohesive and regenerate social unit that was more than the sum of its members. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Ferdinand To¨ nnies, sociologist at the University of Kiel, published his now famous work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.2 In it he postulated—probably for the first time—an unambiguous dichotomy between the two concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. This very dichotomy precipitated the transformation of the “originally beautiful and important” concept of Gemeinschaft into a highly dubious, if not dangerous, one. Whether or not this was To¨ nnies’ original intention remains to be discussed. In any case, the understanding of this dichotomy went beyond To¨ nnies’ original intention and assumed a life of its own. It led not only to a highly unhistorical and unrealistic idealization of an allegedly communitarian past and at the same time a rejection of modernity, but also to a very questionable opposition between a specifically German tradition and Western natural law norms. Like the dichotomy of Kultur and Zivilisation, which also became common coinage in German intellectual life around the turn of the century, the polarity of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft helped create the consciousness of the German Sonderweg as something apart from the West. Since the turn of the century, then, we have learnt that the supposedly ideal state of Gemeinschaft is Janus-faced. An ideal, inspired form of association as it may be, it hardly fits as a model of a society in which, as if by necessity, the original inspiration has cooled off and which, by virtue of diversity and

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sheer size, can no longer hold together by consensus and spontaneity and consequently must depend on being governed by the rationality of laws. Naturally, as a corrective to the impersonal contractual Gesellschaft, an emphasis upon small communities such as family, neighborhoods, church congregations, selfadministrative units tends to have a revitalizing effect. But when artificially revived in a setting where naturally it can no longer function, it can on a large scale be recreated only by perversion into myth and propaganda and lies. This kind of revival of Gemeinschaft, then, was invoked by German rightwing extremists between the World Wars and forced into reality by the National Socialists. This way the workings of the law, a necessary form of governance of society in the modern age, was squarely challenged and subverted. Gemeinschaft, indeed Volksgemeinschaft, became the commanding slogan, an instrument for overcoming an increasingly complex and fragmented world by total oppression. The “originally beautiful and important” vision of Gemeinschaft thus came to serve as justification for tyranny. It became a heinous myth and as such an instrument of total oppression. Gemeinschaft became, then, an index of the tensions not only between the quest for a communal spirit and the acknowledgment of an increasingly complex and fragmented world, but also between attempts to realize the ideal vision by means of mutual consent and doing so by force. This way the otherwise creative tension that had characterized the dynamics of the German mind and German politics between the acknowledgment of the stones and the vision of the cathedral was short-circuited. The concept of Gemeinschaft, then extends from a value-free dimension, in which its rediscovery made an important contribution to the social sciences, to the normative one in which it moved close to National Socialism. Given its range, we would not be justified in dismissing Gemeinschaft as merely harmful if not invidious, as happens all too readily in our post-Nazi era.3 Actually, in the course of time To¨ nnies himself could never really commit himself about the degree of his own personal involvement in the question of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In the first edition of 1887 he emphasized his neutrality, but he later insisted that the “organic position” was “the only correct one.”4 In this connection it should be stressed that in his work he relied heavily on Sir Henry Maine, Otto von Gierke and Karl Marx, who in no way contributed to the German Sonderweg awareness. No doubt, the emphasis on Gemeinschaft was connected with the German reactions to the industrial revolution, and To¨ nnies, scion of a peasant family from Schleswig, did ponder the swift changes caused by the transition from an agrarian to an industrial and urban order. No doubt To¨ nnies also pondered the “decay” of the communal way of life; but, nota bene, he was sufficiently realistic and open-minded to accept this decay as a “normal process.”5 Siegfried Kracauer once wrote that much of intellectual history is misrepresentation of ideas. Does this maxim also apply to the ideas of To¨ nnies? Certainly the signals which he sent out were in no way unambiguous. We should not forget that his ideas were oriented towards Marx, and that like Marx he had a

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sentimental backward-looking side along with a predominant, realistic, forwardlooking one. He did indeed write about the “pathological course of modern Gesellschaft.”6 Yet he did not succomb to cultural pessimism of the kind that dominated the German mind and German politics after the lost World War. His vision of the future was in no way a matter of reverting to Gemeinschaft, but rather an affirmation of an inevitably coming Gesellschaft which would absorb as much as possible the best features of Gemeinschaft. In the hour of German defeat in November 1918 To¨ nnies expressed hope that falling back on Gemeinschaft in defiance of the “world-Gesellschaft and its mammonism” might spell renewal in his country. But while maintaining that it remained the Germans’ mission to infuse the idea of Gemeinschaft into the modern Gesellschaft, he rejected all “chiliastic expectations” of a triumphant Gemeinschaft.7 To¨ nnies’ scholarly insight and political integrity cannot be denied. He was altogether immune to antimodernism or any Sonderweg tendency. As for his politics, he joined the Social Democratic Party to protest the threatening takeover of National Socialism in Germany, and after Hitler’s “seizure of power” he was relieved of his professorship because of his earlier public criticism of National Socialism and of anti-Semitism.8 It cannot be said even of the German Youth Movement that Gemeinschaft, certainly one of its chief concepts, meant anything but renewal and an I-thou encounter in a social environment society that was perceived as atomistic and impersonal.9 Also for the otherwise cranky sociologist Othmar Spann, who preached his holistic gospel at the University of Vienna, “the beautiful German word ‘Gemeinschaft’ ” did not mean an alternative to “Gesellschaft.” The latter had to evolve to “holism,” as Spann put it in his somewhat eccentric way, by way of “separation.”10 There is no reason, then, to make the dichotomy “Gemeinschaft”/“Gesellschaft” hostage to the passions that engulfed it in the political argument of the Weimar era, when Gemeinschaft became “one of the magic words”11 for the political Right, which relegated Gesellschaft to a foreign, Western tradition, denounced by Oswald Spengler as an “inner England.”12 Die heile Welt (“the intact world”), supposedly represented by Gemeinschaft, never did exist unencumbered by the strains of Gesellschaft, which in turn never spelled anomie and anarchy. Gemeinschaft, that originally beautiful and important concept, is at best a corrective and complement to an otherwise large and impersonal Gesellschaft: Gemeinschaft speaks to the heart as Gesellschaft does to the mind. Especially during the Weimar years a sense of community was as necessary as the sense of a lawful and contractual society. Each had a distinct potential even then, and it was a particular challenge for the Germans, in absence of the bonds which existed in Britain and in France, to balance the two. By and large it was to To¨ nnies’ merit to have put this issue before his compatriots; he well knew that his sociological distinctions were, as he put it, “significant for Germany.”13 But

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Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft underwent a corruption which in the end became an index of the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. Despite all the nonsense that has been gathered around Gemeinschaft there were two German scholars, Helmuth Plessner and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who during the 1920s gave serious thought to its scholarly usefulness and political integrity. Distinguished and original thinkers, both concerned themselves with the fate of the “modern machine man,” as Rosenstock put it, especially among the Germans, and thus they came to confront the problem of Gemeinschaft. Both pointed to the problems created by the German encounter with modern technology and the city. But they neither stopped at negative criticism nor abandoned themselves to sentimental Weltschmerz or otherwise backward looking illusions, but they sought to explore positive and creative ways of facing up to an inevitably modern world. Helmuth Plessner, whom I have already cited, has argued that Germany, divided in itself, was a “land without tradition.” It should be no surprise therefore that he also gave serious thought to the problem of Gemeinschaft; the persistent quest for community among Germans after all was to correct the manifest deficiencies of their past. Actually Plessner had already in 1924 written a work dealing with the question of Gemeinschaft.14 It was explicitly addressed, not only to academic experts but also to the broader public, and above all to German youth which, as he read its mood, was “exclusively” preoccupied with Gemeinschaft. As sociologist Plessner could not help but acknowledge, in his rather awkward German, that a “noticeable cooling off of human relations” had taken place “on account of the abstractions governed by machine, business and politics” and that the German Youth Movement had all the more become “the bearer of the heroic cult of Gemeinschaft.”15 Nevertheless he felt that he had to raise his voice against the temptation of a “mystic flight from reality,” about which Max Weber had talked earlier in his Munich speech of January 1919 on “Politics as a Vocation.” Fundamentally, an affirmation of Gesellschaft was a matter of “courage to face up to reality,”16 and he unequivocally stated that “the dialectics of the heart” was “certainly more dangerous than the dialectics of reason.”17 In any case, Plessner was determined to explore a way between an all too fragmented Gesellschaft and an absolutist radicalism of Gemeinschaft in order to penetrate by means of “small but communally ordered units” to the “positive frontiers of Gemeinschaft.”18 Plessner, then, was one of the few scholars of the Weimar era who, “opposing the Zeitgeist,” as his pupil Christian Graf von Krockow attested, had the insight and courage to expose the temptations of the radical cult of Gemeinschaft. Like To¨ nnies, Plessner opposed the “revolution to the rear” and especially the Volksgemeinschaft slogan.19 The latter amounted to an “effective misuse” of the sociological insights of To¨ nnies.20 In the last analysis Plessner sought an “alternative . . . within the Gemeinschaft ethos,” as he said, “between the Star of the Covenant21 and the Star of Bethlehem.”22

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Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy addressed the Gemeinschaft issue in word and deed.23 He was one of the German cultural critics of the type of Julius Langbehn (Der Rembrandtdeutsche), Ludwig Klages or Oswald Spengler who distinguished themselves by a certain depth and boldness of thought and expression. Was he a thinker to be taken seriously? Was he a polymath? His work is not easily accessible and hard to classify. He was an academician, and yet not only an academician. He was a philosopher, sociologist, historian, educator, scholar and also a prophet. His sense of mission led him into a flamboyant thicket of speculation, if not eccentricity, and his voice reaches us like that of an oracle, dark and often cryptic. To read his works requires perseverance. But in the end one has to admit that it was worth the trouble. At any rate, his life’s work is distinguished by cleanliness of intent and by his readiness to translate his constructive ideas and plans into reality. Like Plessner Rosenstock-Huessy had to go into exile after the National Socialist “seizure of power.” Even before that, during the Weimar era, he applied himself tirelessly to the cause of social reform, in particular adult education, university reform and industrial organization. At the center of his thinking and doing was his concern about the harmful effects of the precipitate Industrial Revolution, especially on the German “Industrievolk.”24 Rosenstock criticized employers for not living up to their social obligations, as well as the Social Democrats for their theoretical commitment to a Marxism that spelled class warfare and atheism. When sixteen years old he had been converted to Christianity, which from then on clearly guided all his trains of thought. In his vocabulary Gemeinschaft was so to speak written in capital letters; it figured even in the term Volksgemeinschaft. He did not, however, use these terms, as did the radicals of the Right and the National Socialists, as seductive and in the last analysis meaningless propaganda cliche´ s designed to undermine the democratic order. The design of Rosenstock, after 1923 professor at the University of Breslau, was, as he later explained, to enrich life in the factory by the “rhythm of communal life.”25 He also took great interest in the work camp movement in Silesia which aimed at bringing together workers, peasants, and students as well as captains of industry in a vita communis that would help solve the many economic and social problems of the area so much afflicted by the World War. In the course of this undertaking he met up with the Youth Movement in Silesia and also with a group of men, Helmuth James von Moltke and his friends, who during the Third Reich would form the oppositional “Kreisau Circle.” It was upon Rosenstock’s initiative that in September 1927 Moltke got in touch with Heinrich Bru¨ ning, then Reichstag representative for Electorial District 7 (Breslau), in order to obtain financial backing for the work. In many ways Rosenstock became Moltke’s mentor, and after Helmuth’s death remained closely connected with the family. At this point it is relevant to comment on the Gemeinschaft concept of the Kreisau Circle. There Moltke set the tone.26 From a wide-ranging historical

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perspective he came to the conclusion that the modern state had smothered all other “allegiances” and therefore all “small communities.” In particular the total state, which claimed the whole man, had abused its power and destroyed individuality. When therefore Moltke and his Kreisau friends spoke of “kleine Gemeinschaft,” they looked beyond the state to a transcendental realm of values “which are not of this world,”27 and also within the state into the realm of allegiance to smaller units. If one authority could claim “the whole man,” Moltke believed, it was Chistianity.28 Otherwise the idol of the state should be challenged by a loosening of its larger structures and a revival of smaller autonomous units. “The essence of a ‘kleine Gemeinschaft’ by contrast to the ‘groβe Gemeinschaft,’ ” wrote Moltke, is to rally a number of people for a common purpose in such a manner as to allow them to understand the pursuit of their special aim within the context of the greater whole and feel responsible for their special interests as part of the life of the whole. The two fundamental components, then, are the common purpose which brings and holds together the members of a “kleine Gemeinschaft,” and the feeling of responsibility towards all others.29

It is striking that among the German resisters the idea of Gemeinschaft occupied a central place, especially in the Kreisau Circle.30 Otherwise, with men like Carl Goerdeler, the chancellor-designate of the Resistance, who like the Kreisau group lamented the “splintering” of man in modern society, it took second place behind such concepts as “law and justice,” “tradition and morality,” “religion and church,” and remained value-free. Moltke’s understanding of Gemeinschaft was by no means value-free; it was distinctly normative. And even if the spirit of the Youth Movement hovered over the circle of friends, it was not fixed in a rigid confrontation of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The small community, as the Kreisau people understood it, indicated neither a “mystic flight from reality” nor an insistence on a German Sonderweg or a rejection of modernity, but the preservation of individual freedom in the impersonal city and the machine world of the twentieth century. The concepts of Gemeinschaft and allegiance—though not holism—were central to Moltke’s thinking. It must be noted, though, that he did not think of them as conflicting with freedom. Hofmannsthal’s formula “not freedom . . . but allegiance” was altogether alien to Moltke and his friends. “Freedom,” Moltke emphasized, “is the counterpart of allegiance; both belong together. Freedom is the precondition [Probierstein] of allegiance, and allegiance is a part of freedom”; “these two,” he reiterated, “therefore belong together.”31 Under the threat of the totalitarian state of the Third Reich Gemeinschaft became a libertarian concept which gave direction to their resistance and their planning for a better future. It cannot be denied that the specific constitutional plans of the Kreisau Circle were not in accord with our contemporary understanding of parliamentary de-

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mocracy.32 They certainly reflect tiredness with the party system. “Never again should the German people get lost in the struggle among parties,” wrote Carlo Mierendorff, one of the Social Democrats among the Kreisau people.33 Not only had the Weimar Republic exposed all the weaknesses of parliamentary democracy; what is more, in the eyes of the Kreisau Circle the Third Reich, by assigning a monopoly to the Nazi party, thoroughly discredited the party system. The post-Hitlerian Reich therefore was to be protected from party chaos and party monopoly, and founded on the presciption of federalism, not on the oppressive power of the state. Thus the Kreisau people, steering between the Scylla of pluralism and the Charybdis of the total state, outlined a reform of the Reich on the basis of kleine Gemeinschaften. They did favor, as Hans Mommsen has emphasized, a conflictfree society. Yet it is a mistake to bring them into propinquity with the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft ideology. Their plans did not accord with our present-day notions of a democratic order, yet they certainly did not contradict these. Threatened by Nazi terror, these men were determined to chart a way into a better future. The ethos of the Kreisau Circle was a libertarian one, as was clearly Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s when he reminded his nephew of the “limits” of service to the Gemeinschaft—in this particular case the army. Therefore we can conclude that the men of Kreisau interpreted To¨ nnies’ somewhat ambiguous Gemeinschaft concept in a distinctly libertarian way. They indicated its “positive frontiers” (Plessner) and in hard times showed “the courage to face reality” which Helmuth Plessner cited in introducing his book, and to which Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy pointed the way. Their course was indicated not by flight from modern industrial society but by the will to enrich it by revitalizing its communal ties. By advocating a complementarity between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft they helped correct the ideological distortion of the former in the German world. Their vision was a reorganization of the Reich, adjusting its development to that of the West, in particular of England, where modernization was backed up by communality and was immune against degenerating into a “Leidenschaft zur Nacht” (passion for the night).34 The Kreisau Circle envisaged what Professor Kurt Huber, the mentor of the “White Rose” oppositional group, said so courageously and appositely before the “People’s Court” when he called for “true Volksgemeinschaft” and “return to clear ethical principles, to the state founded on the rule of law and to mutual confidence between man and man.” The Kreisau Circle was only a small group of men, no doubt, but it was a memorable one. They for once sought a formula which would have enabled their country to build a cathedral of durable stone. NOTES 1. I have taken these quotations from Manfred Riedel, “Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon der politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck II (Stuttgart,

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1979), 831. See also in general about the concept “Gemeinschaft,” Ibid., 801–862; Theodor Geiger, “Gemeinschaft,” Handwo¨ rterbuch der Soziologie, Ed. Alfred Vierkandt (Stuttgart, 1959), 173–180; Gustav Gundlach, S. J., “Gemeinschaft,” Staatslexikon. Recht. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft III (Freiburg i. Br., 1959), Col. 728–732 and Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York, 1966) 47–106. Here also it should be mentioned that Rousseau in Du Contrat Social identified the dimension corresponding to “Gemeinschaft” as the “association” which in contrast to the mere “aggre´ gation” served the common good; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (Geneva, 1947), 187. 2. Ferdinand To¨ nnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Abhandlung des Communismus und des Sozialismus als empirischer Kulturformen (Leipzig, 1887). 3. See for example “Ferdinand To¨ nnies,” Man in Contemporary Society. A Source Book Prepared by the Contemporary Civilization Staff of Columbia College. Columbia University, I (New York, 1961), 543, where the comparison of “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” is banded “invidious”; also Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968), 80. Also Ralf Dahrendorf takes to task To¨ nnies, “one of the most effective cultural pessimists in German sociology” for his “untranslatable dichotomy,” Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1967), 127. Roland N. Stromberg in turn in his work An Intellectual History of Modern Europe (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1975), 440 points to a connection between To¨ nnies and the self-appointed Nazi court philosopher Alfred Rosenberg. 4. Ferdinand To¨ nnies, “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie” (1899), Soziologische Studien und Kritiken I (Jena, 1925), 71. 5. Ibid. 6. To¨ nnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft 28. 7. Ferdinand To¨ nnies, “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft Vorrede” (der dritten Auflage), Soziologische Studien und Kritiken I (Jena, 1925), 58–64. 8. According to an anecdote told by Helmuth Plessner, the old To¨ nnies, passing in the course of a walk by Nazi Party headquarters lifted his cane or arm in that direction, exclaiming: “Those fellows [Kerle] have robbed and besmirched me!” Letter Christian Graf von Krockow to me, June 3, 1995. 9. But see the letter of Richard Widmann to his friend Dietrich Bonhoegger of Nov. 17, 1925: “. . . see the latest ‘movement’ in the Youth Movement: everything is crying out for ‘association,’ ‘fellowship,’ ‘community’ . . .”; quoted in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Man of Vision. Man of Courage (New York, 1970), 58. 10. “Gezweiung”; “Ganzheit”; Othmar Spann, Der wahre Staat. Vorlesungen u¨ ber Abbruch und Neubau der Gesellschaft (Jena, 1931), passim and esp. 27f; and idem, Gesellschaftslehre (Leipzig, 1930). 11. Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Mu¨ nchen, 1962), 315. 12. Oswald Spengler, Preuβentum und Sozialismus (Munich, 1920), 63. 13. Ferdinand To¨ nnies, “Die Entstehung meiner Begriffe Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,” Ko¨ lner Zeitschrift fu¨ r Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 7 (1955), 463. 14. Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus (Bonn, 1924). 15. Ibid., 35. 16. Ibid., 11. 17. Ibid., 10.

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18. “Gemeinschaftlich geordnete Lebenseinheiten”; “die positiven Grenzen der Gemeinschaft”; Ibid., 52. 19. Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Deutschen in ihrem Jahrhundert 1890–1990 (Reinbek, 1990), 371. 20. Plessner, “Nachwort zu Ferdinand To¨ nnies,” Ko¨ lner Zeitschrift 7 (1955), 342. 21. Obviously an allusion to the heroic Gemeinschaft cult of the poet Stefan George. 22. Plessner, Grenzen, 35. 23. About Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy see especially Michael Balfour and Julian Frisby, Helmuth von Moltke. A Leader against Hitler (London, 1972), esp. 25–34; Ger van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand. Der Kreisauer Kreis innerhalb der deutschen Widerstandsbewegung (Munich, 1967) esp. 26–34. 24. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Industrievolk (Frankfurt/M., 1924). 25. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future or The Modern Mind Outrun (New York, 1946), 198; see also the earlier work Industrievolk. 26. For Moltke’s thoughts about Gemeinschaft and notably the “kleine Gemeinschaften” see Moltke’s draft of 1939 in Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Vo¨ lkerrecht im Dienste der Menschen, Ed. Ger van Roon (Berlin, 1986), 154–158, and his memorandum “Ausgangslage, Ziele und Aufgaben” (“Starting Point-Objectives-Problems”) of April 24, 1941 in van Roon, Neurodnung, 507–517. 27. Ibid., 509. 28. Ibid., 508. Later, in the proceedings against Moltke before the Nazi “People’s Court” the “judge” Roland Freisler admitted that only in one respect Christianity and National Socialism were alike inasmuch as they demanded “the whole man.” In his prison letter to his wife Freya, Moltke reported this admission on the part of the “judge” with great pride; Helmuth James von Moltke, Briefe an Freya 1939–1945, Ed. Beate Ruhm von Oppen (Munich, 1988), 609. 29. See van Roon, Moltke, 157–158. 30. On this subject see also Hans Mommsen, “Gesellschaftsbild und Verfassungspla¨ ne des deutshen Widerstandes,” Walter Schmitthenner and Hans Buchheim, Eds., Der deutsche Widerstand gegen Hitler (Cologne, 1966), 80–89. 31. Moltke, “Ausgangslage,” 510. 32. For this topic see Mommsen, “Gesellschaftsbild,” passim. 33. “Aufruf Mierendorffs,” Berlin, 14.6.43, van Roon, Neuordnung, 590. 34. This expression I take from an assessment by Plessner of the person and work of To¨ nnies of 1955; the perversion of his concepts into slogans [Parolen] had “nothing or only very indirectly to do with his work”; Plessner, “Nachwort,” 341–347, esp. 345, 347.

7 Fragments, Abstraction and a Vision: The German Expressionists

“The moment is simply a transformed fragment of eternity.” —Ernst Barlach

Mircea Eliade, one of the penetrating philosophers and historians of religion of our age, once wrote: “There are only fragments of a shattered universe.”1 Writing this, he summarized an awareness, pervasive among European men and women of letters and artists since the turn of the century, of a reality that was neither continuous with the past nor internally cohesive. The unremitting mechanization of life, the swift pace of technological change, the relentless displacement of country by city, the perceived freezing of the springs of culture and “banishment of instinct” at the price of “vital strength,” and last but not least the massive impact and the catastrophic consequences of the First World War altogether reshaped and changed the outlook of men and women, including those who saw themselves as cultural guardians and spokesmen of their times. Somehow the traditional harmonies in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, the sequential narrative in the novel, and the “realistic” rendering of nature in the visual arts appeared to be no longer an honest mode of intellectual and artistic discourse. A “shattered universe” called, then, for an altogether new intellectual and artistic creativity, for a language that reflected it authentically. “Formerly,” Paul Klee wrote, the painter depicted objects which were to be seen on earth, things he liked or would have liked to see. Now the real nature of visible things is revealed, and so the belief

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becomes reality that, in terms of the universe, what is visible is but a fragment of the whole, there being more latent realities.2

Klee’s friend, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, echoed this observation, “It is a question of faith to know to what degree we accept reality and then attempt to express ourselves through it. Broken and mutilated creatures are best rendered by their own debris.”3 Eliade, Klee and Rilke thus identified the conditions with which the German and Austrian Expressionist painters and sculptors were faced. They represented a particularly profiled version of the variety of modernism which defined the visual arts in Central Europe beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Their language spelled abstraction and the distortion of the “bourgeois” reality. In every way this modern movement constituted a revolt against what was perceived as the false values of Philistine society and against the conventionality of realistic representation in art. Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born Expressionist painter who spent much of his adult life in Germany, spelled out most vigorously the predicament of the new school of painters, “The disintegration of the soulless, materialistic life of the nineteenth century, i.e. the destruction of the very basis of matter, its fragmentation into parts and then the dissolution of those parts.”4 Was this not the very language which Hofmannsthal had used ten years earlier when in his Lord Chandos letter he lamented that everything was falling into fragments and “the fragments into further fragments”? But Hofmannsthal’s lament had become a challenge for Kandinsky and his generation of artists. The conventional view of reality would no longer do; reality was in fact ever shifting, splintered and discontinuous, and for the sake of authenticity it had to be rendered as such, not by means of empathic naturalism but by expressive abstraction.5 A fragmentary reality by necessity called for fragmented artistic forms, and abstraction, far from being a composite of undefined forms and wild colors, was designed to reinvent the elemental forces of naturalness. The German painter Emil Nolde in fact was altogether persuasive in arguing that “the more you move away from nature while remaining natural, the greater is art.”6 The horizons of modernism were transnational. The whole work of art, Kandinsky and his painter-friend Franz Marc emphasized, “knows no borders or nations, only humanity.”7 What all the “modernists,” whether French, British, Italian, German or Russian, had in common was their artistic honesty and their courage to identify with a world which, by conventional standards, was no longer beautiful, and to plunge into a world in which art and beauty—at least conventional—beauty had parted company. Virginia Woolf may have been excessively epigramatic in declaring that “on or about December 1910 human nature changed,” this being the date of the first post-Impressionist exhibition in London. But this statement pointed neatly to the departure of the avant-garde European artists from the naturalism of the nineteenth century which they deemed no longer fit to serve as valid artistic expression of life. Almost all of

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the leading European artists, whether in literature, painting, music or dance, experienced what the German painter Oskar Schlemmer called “the fascination with abstraction.”8 As a matter of fact, the very term “Expressionism” was originally used in France, and the first group exhibition anywhere in the world of “Expressionist” artists, which opened in April 1911 as part of the XXII Berliner Sezession, reserved a special gallery for the paintings of eleven French artists including Derain, Braque, Vlaminck and Picasso who were labelled “Expressionisten.”9 Not before 1914 was the term applied to the German and Austrian artists of the early century. And in departing from and rebelling against art as a reproduction of the natural world, the German Expressionists were deeply indebted to the nightmarish imagination of the Norwegian master Edvard Munch, to the fierce brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh, to the strident colors of the French Fauves, to the restless constructs of the Futurists and to the fragmentation of forms of the Cubists. Nevertheless, in Germany modernism, particularly in the visual arts, was a special case. Expressionism was essentially a “German intuition.”10 It was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner who in 1912 wrote to Emil Nolde, “German art has to fly with its own wings. We have the duty to separate ourselves from the French—it is time for an independent German art.”11 By the rejection of the French he meant more than dissociation from the stylistic features of French painting, but from the whole tradition of Cartesian rationalism and of the French Enlightenment. Of course German art had a long pedigree, and indeed Expressionism did too. Expressionism was rooted in the Gothic tradition which freed art from structural constraints and dematerialized it by a flight into spirituality and transcendence.12 The Gothic cathedral in all its verticality, then, became the beacon of the Expressionists, and the art of Albrecht Du¨ rer, Matthias Gru¨ newald and Hans Holbein (The Younger) their model. Gru¨ newald’s use of light and color and his distortions of the human figure were designed to express a transcendental spirituality in which many of the twentieth-century German Expressionists recognized a model for their own search for faith. Expressionist art, then, was the formula for the attempt to escape from the “dead end,” as Oskar Schlemmer put it, of naturalism and to recapture the elemental in nature.13 The Germam Expressionists were rebels, rebels in art as well as in their selfimage as cultural critics. If there was a godfather of the Expressionist rebellion it was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose exhortation “what totters should be pushed over . . .” they took as their cue. Young Paul Klee noted in his diary that Nietzsche was “in the air,”14 and, true to Nietzschean style he wrote of “angry thoughts about the artistic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and its corrupting influence.”15 The Expressionists fully shared Nietzsche’s despair over decadence and the “death of God,” and they sought ways to regeneration through their art: When religion, science and morality are shaken (the last by the strong hand of Nietzsche) and when outer supports threaten to fall, man withdraws his gaze from externals and

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turns inward. Literature, music and art are the most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what was at first only a little point of light noticed by the few. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but they turn away from the soulless light of the present toward those substances and ideas that give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul.16

It was, then, the language of nonrepresentational art which would, as Kandinsky argued, open the gates to a new spirituality. Expressionism was not, to be sure, a uniform movement. While the two major groups of artists that took form in the early twentieth century, Die Bru¨ cke and Der Blaue Reiter, along with almost all the independent artists like Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde, were united in their Nietzschean rebelliousness, they differed a great deal in style of life and art. Actually, the very name Die Bru¨ cke was taken from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under,”17 and in their 1906 program, composed by Kirchner, the Bru¨ cke artists proclaimed their “faith in development, in a new generation” and assured a welcome to “everyone who with directness and authenticity conveys that which drives them to create.” All the founding members of the Bru¨ cke—Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Bleyl—were originally students of architecture at the Dresden Technical University who then threw themselves into painting and woodcutting. They constituted, to start with at least, an inspired Gemeinschaft which developed a distinct style marked by garish colors and eruptive lines, and it was the strength of their commitment to a spiritual revival, more than training or theoretical thinking, which informed their often strident but always powerful and impressive creations. The Blaue Reiter group, formed in 1911 in Munich by Kandinsky and Marc, was an association of visionaries. Kandinsky, clearly the king pin in the group, was steeped in Russian spiritualism, and his friend Marc, younger by 14 years, infused the partnership with religious zest. Kandinsky was a follower of, indeed missionary for, the ideas of the Russian occultist Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society. Marc, who once had considered becoming a priest, somehow blended a residual familiarity with the Bible with Nietzschean fervor, and dreamed of a revival of art and society by a reversion to primitive models and forms, thus to return to elemental strata. In 1912 Kandinsky published a theoretical treatise on art, Concerning the Spiritual in Art,18 which became a classic outline of sorts of the ideas and aspirations of the inspired Munich painters. In the same year, together with Marc, he edited The Blaue Reiter Almanac,19 which became the basic statement of the ideas and aims of the group. By comparison with the Bru¨ cke artists, the Blaue Reiter set were more prone to spell out their ideas and ideals; at the same time they were less groupy, certainly stylistically more individualistic, than their

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“cousins” in the North. Before long they were joined by more young artists who shared their inspiration, among them Paul Klee, August Macke and the Austrian Alfred Kubin. All the German Expressionists were distinguished by their boundless sense of mission. The French Cubists experimented with dislocation and dismemberment of forms and thus, no doubt, reflected, as Schlemmer conceded, “the fractured quality of our age, the dismemberment of time.”20 However, the artists of the Bru¨ cke as well as those of the Blaue Reiter were not merely concerned with problems of form.21 They had a sense of mission almost religious in nature and intensity which aimed at overcoming the fragmented form and culture and aspired to a renewal of culture. Was this not what Schlemmer meant when he wrote about the “yearning for synthesis”?22 It was the perception of the reality of fragmentation, the stones and the quest for reassembling the fragments in a new whole, the cathedral, that represented the creative tension within most of the German Expressionists. The Expressionists’ move towards and into abstraction was a matter not merely of rearranging forms and of visual distortion, but of a search for those “latent realities” about which Paul Klee wrote. The abandonment of natural forms freed the painter from dependence on the material world and material values and opened up the gates of the spirit. The art critic Wilhelm Worringer in his groundbreaking work Abstraction und Einfu¨ hlung (1908), pointed toward the liberating, indeed spiritual, potential of abstraction. Zarathustra-Nietzsche had ordered his disciples to lose him, to deny him in order to find themselves. Now the latter-day Nietzscheans set out, as Worringer observed, to “lose themselves first,” in order to find “their real selves.”23 The German Expressionist painters, then, were visionaries and missionaries, and in a wholly unorthodox sense it can be said of them that their message was a fundamentally religious one. Kandinsky of course was altogether impelled by his occultist predisposition, but abstraction meant to him, as he put it, “being reborn,” ultimately in the form of “religion in its broadest sense.”24 The aim of the“ ‘Savages’ of Germany,” Franz Marc added in his youthful exuberance in the Almanac, was, “to create out of their work symbols for their own time, symbols that belong on the altars of a future spiritual religion, symbols behind which the technical heritage cannot be seen.”25 The vocabulary of the Expressionists was always ecstatic and bordering on the religious realm. The sculptor Ernst Barlach extolled visions, “Creating visions is a god-like act.”26 Schlemmer knew that he had “a mission to fulfill.”27 Lyonel Feininger made sure to distance himself from the Cubists, “My ‘cubism,’ so to miscall it, for it is the reverse of the French cubists’ aims, is based on the principle of monumentality, concentration to the absolutest aim possible, of my visions. . . . My pictures are ever nearing closer the synthesis of the fugue.”28 Even when an artist in the Expressionist mode was not particularly religious in the usual sense of the word, as was the case with Paul Klee, his preoccupation with his art alone opened up his vision of the religious realm. Art was for Klee

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“a parable of Creation” and abstract forms were the key to a perception of creation; they became “symbols of the cosmos” and indeed “a form of religious expression.”29 The “dead” Nietzschean god, then, was resurrected in an art whose innovative fragmented style became a key to a piety cleansed of a religion which had become corrupted by the bourgeois “dictatorship.” It is particularly relevant here that the Blaue Reiter artists, especially Kandinsky and Marc, displayed a considerable interest in and understanding of Arnold Scho¨ nberg and his music.30 On January, 1, 1911, Kandinsky together with Marc and other friends attended a concert in Munich in which Arnold Scho¨ nberg’s string quartet (opus 10 of 1907–08) and piano pieces (opus 11 of 1909) were performed. Marc, reporting on the event to his painter friend August Macke, remarked that the audience behaved “like a rabble,” snuffling, coughing, giggling, squirming, while he himself was jolted by the music. It reminded him of Kandinsky’s large compositions. Like Kandinsky and his friends, Scho¨ nberg seemed “convinced of the inevitable dissolution of the laws of European art and harmony.”31 For Kandinsky the correlation of painting and music was more than a fleeting intuition. He himself was a musician, having learned to play the cello and piano. He was so overwhelmed by the affinity between his abstract painting and Scho¨ nberg’s atonal music that he sat down to write a letter to the composer without knowing him. [O]ur efforts as well as the whole way of thinking and feeling have so much in common that I feel altogether justified to express to you my sympathy. You have realized in your works . . . what I had so much longed for. The independent facing up to your own fate, the separate life of the single voices in your compositions are precisely what I am trying to find in painting. . . . I find that our present harmony is not to be found along the “geometrical,” but the antigeometrical and antilogical way. And this way is the one of “dissonances in art,” just as in painting. And today’s visual and musical dissonance is nothing other than the consonance of “tomorrow.”32

For Kandinsky just as for Marc, music, being the only truly abstract art, was the highest of the arts, the model for all the other arts in the quest for spirituality and therefore the accomplishment of the much coveted Gesamtkunstwerk. Scho¨ nberg in turn speculated about the commonality of musicians and painters: both had to acknowledge the existence of riddles. It was important, he argued, to face up to these riddles without asking for “the solution.” They were a reflection of what is incomprehensible, “but if only we learn from them to believe the incomprehensible to be possible, we draw nearer to God.”33 The First World War was in many ways the cradle of the modern mode. While it obviously did not, as we have seen, create the new style, which went back to earlier years, it had a distinct and transfiguring impact, certainly upon the German artists, their language and their determination to speak for their

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time. The German theologian Ernst Troeltsch no doubt was beyond his depth when in the middle of the war, invoking the “ideas of 1914,” he thought he could observe a “recession of abstractness, artificiality, fragmentariness” and predict a future of an “organic unity within the individual as well as in the national community.”34 The compelling persuasiveness of the devastating apocalyptic landscapes, which Ludwig Meidner had started painting in 1912, their jagged lines and deep, dark, menacing colors conjuring up a cacophonous vision of things to come, had evidently passed unnoticed by the eminent theologian. But Meidner had set the stage for the visual expression of the terror of war. Once the war had broken out, even the ever so much gentler Paul Klee entered into his diary: The more horrible the world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now. Today is a transition from yesterday. In the great pit of forms lie broken fragments to some of which we still cling. They provide abstraction with its material. A junkyard of unauthentic elements for the creation of impure crystals. That is how it is today. But then: the whole crystal cluster once bled. I thought I was dying, war and death. But how can I die, I who am crystal? I, crystal.35

But the fragments, the very “abstract forms,” Klee tried toward the end of the war to explain—to himself at least—had a meaning after all, they may become “symbols of the cosmos”; indeed they become “forms of religious expression.”36 The legacy of the war upon the avant-garde of German visual artists was ambiguous. The ritual relief which almost all of them initially felt, expecting to be freed from the “mendaciousness of the European culture,” as Marc put it,37 yielded before long to a sense of horror and despair. Macke and Marc never returned from the field. Beckmann wrote about “the fear of sickness and of lust, of love and hatred to the outer limits,”38 and, injured in his soul by the war, finally suffered a nervous breakdown. Kirchner’s “Artillerymen in a Shower Room” (1915), depicting a degrading scene of the naked soldiers squeezed together under the jet of water under the supervision of an obviously sadistic officer, might well be read as a prelude to worse things to come, namely the “shower room” of the Nazi concentration camp which turned out to be a gas chamber. In the same year he painted the “Self-Portrait as Soldier” which was one of the most disturbing paintings coming out of the First World War. It showed Kirchner, staring into a void, with the stump of his right arm, the hand cut off, issuing from the sleeve of his uniform and reproachfully held up to the viewer. Discharged from the army after a physical and mental breakdown, he was brought by his friends to a sanitorium in the Taunus hills and eventually, for recovery, to the Swiss mountains in Davos.

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Klee served in the German army behind the lines and Kandinsky had to leave Germany for his native Russia, but returned after the war in 1921 to take up teaching in the newly founded Bauhaus, that unique German school of art and architecture which had been established in 1919 in Weimar under the leadership of Walter Gropius. But whatever dislocations, disappointments and terrors the war caused, those among the German Expressionists who survived held on to their dream. Despite his sufferings Beckmann persisted in asking, “What would we poor people do if we would not recreate for ourselves persistently an idea of fatherland, of love, art and religion with which to cover time and again a little at least that dark black hole. This boundless desolation in eternity. This solitude.”39 And Schlemmer, who in 1915 had recorded that he was going off to war because of “the mystery of fate,” still towards the end of the war, when in uniform, kept insisting that it was the artist’s task to strive for “oneness with God and the universe.”40 The fires were still burning. There is a certain irony in the fact that the group of the Bru¨ cke artists, which to begin with had been the more cohesive one among the two major expressionist associations, was the first one to dissolve. Already shortly before the war, in 1913, the group decided to disband by the mutual consent of all its members, and everyone went his own way. It was different with the Blaue Reiter; it experienced a revival of sorts under the tutelage of the Bauhaus. Kandinsky and Klee became masters in the new school as did Lyonel Feininger, who before the war had exhibited together with the Blaue Reiter. It was Feininger who created the woodcut entitled “The Cathedral of Socialism,” which accompanied the initial Bauhaus manifesto. In revolutionary exuberance it showed a threespired cathedral flooded by lightbeams radiating from three stars—altogether a marvellous gothic composition exuding hope and faith in spiritual renewal. But the ultimate test for the integrity of the artistic and cultural vision of German Expressionism came with its encounter with National Socialism. Already in 1925 the Bauhaus itself had to leave Weimar under pressure from a right-wing reactionary government and set up shop in Dessau in Anhalt where it remained until a Nazi electorial 1932 victory in that province. A brief attempt to recoup in Berlin and indeed to accommodate itself with the Nazi regime that had seized power in Germany in January 1933 by proposing a parallelism between the two revolutions, the political and the architectonic ones, soon proved futile. Last minute efforts by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who since since 1930 had directed the Dessau Bauhaus, to salvage the institution, failed. It finally dissolved itself in August 1933.41 Actually Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda since March (if anyone in the Nazi hierarchy) had entertained sympathies for the artistic avant garde. Back in 1924, after a visit to the Cologne Wallraf-Richartz Museum, he had seen fit to refer to Nolde’s and Barlach’s work as “bright spots of modern art,” to praise Nolde’s “wonderful colors” and to single out Barlach’s works for having “gripped” him most. “This is the meaning of Expressionism,” he entered

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into his diary, “simplicity heightened to grandiose representation.”42 The moving letter which Schlemmer wrote to Goebbels early in 1933 amounted, then, to a last ditch stand for the new art. He cited the instances in numerous cities of the Reich of modern art works having been placed in “chambers of artistic horrors” and reminded the Minister of the “spontaneous revolution of consciousness in the arts” that had occurred in all artistically vital countries shortly before the First World War when “the windows of the musty chambers of art were opened wide” and when “the artists were caught up in a dilirium of enthusiasm for the new spirit they sensed being born.”43 Might he get a hearing after all? Indeed as late as May 1933 Goebbels praised the “healthy views” of Expressionism. He was, however, soon outwitted by the yet more sinister “Reich philosopher” Alfred Rosenberg who made himself advocate of a strictly volkish approach to art. The rivalry between the two, Goebbels and Rosenberg, before long was decided by the “Fu¨ hrer,” who had never been a friend of the Modernists. They were “cultural bolsheviks” and their cause amounted to “sabotage” of the new regime. Within one year after the “seizure of power” Hitler threw in his lot with a reactionary art policy and dashed all hopes that the avant gardists may have entertained,44 and Goebbels made haste to fall in line with Party orthodoxy. Then in 1937 came the big showdown. On July 18, the day proclaimed as the “Tag der deutschen Kunst,” Hitler opened the Groβe deutsche Kunstausstellung in the Munich “Haus der Deutschen Kunst,” that “temple of art” designed by his court architect Paul Ludwig Troost in monumental neo-classical style. Outdoors an elaborate pageant was staged, a parade through the arteries of the city, floats with elaborate pastiches of heroic legendary and historical themes. The exhibition itself displayed more than 600 sculptures and paintings of the by then official “new and genuine German art”: neo-classical sculptures and paintings showing peasant scenes, military glory, pastoral landscapes and the like in the approved style of Nazi realism. In his opening address, which lasted two and a quarter hours, the “Fu¨ hrer,” while pleading for a revival of German art, staged a frontal attack on “cultural bolshevism,” which covered all varieties of modernism in art—including of course Expressionism. In defiance of all German “incertitudes” he declared with thunderous finality that “to be German means to be clear.” Believe it or not there were “so-called” artists, he rampaged, who painted meadows blue, the sky green and the clouds sulphur yellow; these “artists” either suffered from faulty vision due to a mechanical failing or a congenital defect, or they did not believe in the reality of what they depicted but had other reasons for “imposing this hoax on the nation.” In this case, Hitler added, “they are liable to prosecution under criminal law.” Thus the stage was set for the parallel, or should I say opposite, exhibition that opened the following day, on July 19, also in Munich. This time it was Professor Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reichskammer der bildenden Ku¨ nste, otherwise a painter of legendary neo-Grecian nudes, who in a much less monumental venue, the quickly remodelled building formerly occupied by the

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Institute of Archaeology, launched the exhibition “Degenerate Art.”45 The “Fu¨ hrer” had his say earlier and did not deign to appear in the setting of those “degenerate cretins.” Now some 650 works of the German avant garde were crammed together in a helter-skelter way, some with frames removed, accompanied by hostile graffiti-like labels and offensive slogans in provocative mockery of them. Eventually many of these art works, among them those confiscated from museums, were sold by a Swiss auctioneer for foreign currency and some 5,000 were outright burned. But in itself the juxtaposition of the heinous Munich exhibition of “Degenerate Art” and the maligned modernist artists would give us the wrong perspective on the latters’ outlook and aspirations. No doubt abstraction and distortion separated them fundamentally from the Nazis’ philistine realism. It must be remembered, however, that avant garde movements rarely are readily welcomed by the artistic establishment, not to speak of the broader public. In rejecting modernism the Nazis were by no means unique in the history of modern art—although the way in which they did so was unprecedented. To be sure, the “Shock of the New,” as the new language of the avant garde has rightly been characterized,46 virtually necessitated a vocabulary that, to begin with at least, scandalized traditional taste. Thus back in 1911 a disgruntled painter, Carl Vinnen, managed to collect 140 signatures of fellow artists for a manifesto entitled “German Artists’ Protest” in which he took issue with the increasing French influence on German painters and with the purchase and public exhibition of modern French paintings. The greater part of the signatories were, as can be expected, traditionalist Germanophiles. But among the protesting artists was none less than Ka¨ the Kollwitz, one of Germany’s great artists and a person of unquestionable integrity and strong social commitment. She took issue with the flooding of the German art scene by mediocre French artists among whom she singled out Henri Matisse for her anger; but she soon regretted having signed the document in question.47 In turn, the Nazis, upon seizing power, lost no time in dismissing her from membership in the Prussian Academy of the Arts, and although none of her works were included in the Munich exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” thirty-one of them were among those confiscated from German museums.48 Even Max Liebermann, the ever-innovating doyen of German impressionism, Honorary President of the Prussian Academy of the Arts, and the darling of the Berlin upper bourgeoisie, joined the chorus of the critics of modernism. In a vicious attack in 1932 against the Director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie Ludwig Justi, an outspoken advocate of the Expressionist art, he railed against the purchase by the museum of a van Gogh, thus,—Liebermann maintained—promoting diletantism and snobbery in the arts. Some of the arguments to which he resorted, like the one about the “waste” of public funds—the “virtually insane price paid of 250,000 Marks”—indeed anticipated the kind of insults accompanying the display of Expressionist art in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition.49

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To be sure, this prelude to art censorship did not prevent Liebermann’s works from being purged from the German museums in the Third Reich. Liebermann resigned in May 1933 from the Academy in protest against the Nazi cultural policies. But quite apart from the rather freakish “preludes to art censorship” which I mentioned above, there is no way of getting around a certain affinity between the purger and the purged, between the philistine and brutal Nazi art dictators and their modernist victims. There is a grain of truth in Peter Gay’s observation that modernists hated the modern world,50 and this observation has a particular relevance to the German artists. Their strong missionary and almost religious disposition may account for their singular sensitivity to the discontents of modern civilization. They suffered from it and from all its incongruities and inconsistencies. This was after all also the sentiment behind National Socialism which, while using all the material accomplishments of the modern industrial world, was fundamentally hostile to it. The spiritual “revolution” of the German Expressionist artists was, like the Nazi “revolution,” a counterrevolution against the sweep of history that supposedly destroyed a medieval unity, against the tradition of rationalism and individualism associated with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The Expressionist vision was essentially Gothic, and its identification with abstractness meant, as Kandinsky explained, it an avowal of spirituality, whether in the form of a liberating primitivism or transcendence. In their aversion to the classical tradition and in finding their models in the art of Du¨ rer, Gru¨ newald and Holbein they thought to rediscover behind the layers of “modern” rationality the lost world of spirituality and faith. While it is outright crude to argue, as did the Marxist philosopher Georg Luka´ cs, that Expressionism was a forerunner of National Socialism,51 there was, as John Willett put it, a “potentially Nazi element in its ideology”:52 in its suffering from the sweep of modernity of which the reversion to the Gothic style is a distinct symptom and in its ready rejection of the “bourgeois” ethos and its all too facile translation of the Nietzschean legacy into a new faith. It is conceivable that the Nazis could have responded positively to the Gothic vision of the Expressionists. As a matter of fact, even from within the Party, especially from students, there were initially efforts afoot to make a case for Expressionism as a rejection of the tradition of classicism, a revulsion against “bourgeois” materialism and as a force for a renewal of Nordic spirituality. It was Alois Schardt, who immediately after the Nazi “seizure of power” was called to Berlin to become provisional director of the Nationalgalerie in place of Ludwig Justi, and who made himself spokesman for the symbiosis of National Socialism and Expressionism. In a sensational lecture in July 1933 “What is German Art?” he stressed the particularly Germanic and Nordic elements in Expressionism. Its abstract, nonobjective style, he argued, had its roots in the German Bronze Age, while the decline of German art could be traced to the year in 1431 A.D. with the advent of naturalism. By these criteria, he thought

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he could legitimize artists like Barlach and Nolde, and even the artists of Die Bru¨ cke and Der Blaue Reiter found their place, even though only on the top floor, of the museum.53 However, there was in the end no way to legitimize modernism to the Nazis. Not even Schardt’s tortured constructs would do.54 To the honor of the Expressionists it can be said that they took their plight with dignity. Their artistic language which had become the language of abstraction, and their sense of mission consigned them to their artistic martyrdom. Only a few of them, such as Emil Nolde, did not understand what was happening to them.55 The rest were prepared to suffer isolation, insult, and exile—both inner and outer. For the predicament of the German expressionist artists there is no more fitting summary than the one by Franz Marc. In their search for a “future spiritual religion,” he said, they were “Gothic artists without Cathedral and Bible.”56 Clearly, their Gothic vision committed them to abstraction which was a manifestation of transcendent spirituality. Abstraction meant disassembling a conventional reality into parts and fragments as much as reassembling these into a new whole. The reality of stones itself was a precondition for the cathedral that, though in ruins, remained the great objective. Nietzsche’s “Madman’s” outcry “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” after all was accompanied by the incessant outcry “I seek God!” Over all the ruins, then, of that “horrible” world which Paul Klee lamented, there stood that cathedral. It is striking that the theme of the cathedral has preoccupied the visual artists of the twentieth century, and especially those in the German world. In a fragmented world of stones and ruins the cathedral became a metaphor, an all the more cherished one. But, to be sure, it was neither a question of a call for demolition nor of nostalgia. No one clamored for a reenthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame and no one went along with Hofmannsthal’s celebration of the medieval legacy to modern times of that “enormous cathedral of metaphors.”57 But when in 1919 Lyonel Feininger composed his woodcut for the Bauhaus Manifesto, the new school was permeated with boundless enthusiasm. Note that the cathedral which it showed was to represent “The Cathedral of Socialism.” There was indeed a medieval aura about it as its founder, Walter Gropius, sounded a jeremiad over the “boundless confusion” of building as a mirror of a “world torn to pieces.” On that occasion he urged the breakdown of the isolation of the arts and that “arrogant barrier between artists and craftsmen” and, addressing the student body, conjured up a “spiritual-religious idea” that was to find its “crystalline expression” in a Gesamtkunstwerk.” But the “cathedral of the future” about which he spoke, like Feininger’s, was to be forward looking and committed to exhibiting modern industry and the city. Under Gropius’ leadership the Bauhaus became, then, an experimental station for every modernist school of thought and art. It opened itself to the sweeping winds of Cubism, Dadaism and in particular Expressionism, and it attracted into its student body youngsters, radicals from the Youth Movement, veterans from

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the war, men and women who were excited, ready to swing between the cathedral and the factory, the workbench and the machine, and prepared to plunge into an exciting and yet uncertain future. However, when in 1923 Oskar Schlemmer composed a Manifesto for the Bauhaus exhibition of the year and once again referred to the “Cathedral of Socialism,” the Council of Masters had the phrase deleted for fear of political misinterpretation from the side of traditionalists.58 The revision the document had to undergo was a sign of the fact that the “sky-storming enthusiasm” of its heroic days was a matter of the past. Barlach’s woodcut “The Cathedrals” (1920)59 was a distinct statement on the relation of this world to the world beyond. Overarched by a three-dimensional God, their builder, the cathedrals are given a clear presence of their own. God, arms folded, hovering over them, looks satisfied with his creation, a scape of Gothic spires and windows and buttresses. For Barlach the creation equaled “the moment,” as much as we can ever grasp of eternity. The moment, as he put it, is “simply a transformed fragment of eternity”—but a fragment nevertheless. Such was Barlach’s understanding of God’s creation, and giving expression to it allowed him, without basphemy, to lend God’s face the likeness of his own. But whereas Barlach’s “The Cathedrals” are a statement, Klee’s “Cathedral” (1924), like so many of his other paintings, was a playful metaphor. It showed a jungle of naves and arches and gables and circles and even a horizontal crescent—all fragments against a copper-colored background. Nevertheless, out of these fragments “the more latent realities,” the majestic apparition of the cathedral, emerged after all. A sober, if not devastating, counterpart to the these variations on the cathedral theme was Kurt Schwitters’ architectural collage, the “Cathedral of Erotic Misery.”60 It was part of a huge construction, the so-called “Merzbau,”61 that Schwitters had planned to be his Gesamtkunstwerk and that was built into his own house, occupying two floors as well as the cellar. Within this monumental complex of interconnected grottoes and niches and nooks covered with scraps and rags, splinters of glass, wires and sundry clippings, the cathedral took a pivotal place. The title alone, not to speak of the bric-a`-brac consistency of the collage, mocks all of our conventional associations with the “cathedral.” But as a commentary on the times in which Schwitters lived it was an honest statement. It represented a Gothic vision of fragmentation and eroticism and suffering, an altogether hilarious perception of decadence. Schwitters shared none of the high hopes of Feininger and Gropius, and Klee shared none of the Protestant sternness of Barlach. But what they all had in common was that their cathedrals were predicated on the existence of a “world torn to pieces” and they were then ready, each in his way, to face up to it and to create art and architecture commensurate with it. But what, then, can be said of Albert Speer’s “Cathedral of Light”? It was Hitler’s first major commission, early in 1934, for the 29-year-old architect to whom after Troost’s death in January 1934 he had transferred all his own architectural fantasies. The Nazis, having triumphantly disposed of that “cathe-

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dral of Marxism” as one relentless critic of the Bauhaus dubbed it,62 now “erected” their own. Over the Zeppelin Field on the occasion of the yearly monstrous Nuremberg Party rallies Speer had the vision to install some 130 anti-aircraft search lights at intervals of 40 feet, designed to send into the darkness powerful beams whose “pillars” way up at the height of twenty to twenty thousand feet would form a magic dome.63 The ambassador from Great Britain, Sir Nevile Henderson, as impressed by the Third Reich as he was by the “solemnity” and “beauty” of this spectacle, thought that it was like being inside a “cathedral of ice.”64 The effect was undoubtedly magical. However that cathedral, like National Socialism itself, was a gigantic illusion designed to wash away an unwelcome reality; it was, as Speer himself later conceded, a “mirage.”65 In the intoxication of the beat of marching columns under the protective veil of the light beams the fragmentary reality of that “world torn to pieces” could, momentarily at least, be set aside. The groups of artists identified with German Expressionism did not survive the First World War. Internal dissension dissolved Die Bru¨ cke the year before the guns of August went off, and dispersal and death in the battlefield accounted for the dissolution of the group of Der blaue Reiter. The Bauhaus, that pioneering community of German artists and architects, fell victim first to narrow traditionalism and then to National Socialist aggressive philistinism. Ever since the early twenties the crisis, indeed, the death of Expressionism had been declared by art critics. As an artistic rebellion Expressionism, they argued, had lost its momentum after the war and “settled comfortably into a mannerism.”66 Even Wilhelm Worringer, who had originally laid the theoretical foundations for Expressionism, now, in October 1920 delivered a lecture in Munich in which, referring to Oswald Spengler’s “sinister phrase” of the “decline of the West,” he registered its loss of “metaphysical energy.” It had degenerated, he fumed, into “calligraphic externalization” and a new “decorative chic.”67 It has been argued that the end of Expressionism can be attributed to its very success, that is to the fact that the expressionist painters who survived the war moved into position as teachers in the Art Academies and that their style found broader acceptance.68 Similarly expressionist art had asserted itself in the stage design of film and theater, thus popularizing and at the same time commercializing what had been a “form of religious expression.” More fundamentally, however, the receding of Expressionism as a style representing and interpreting its times must be explained in terms of the immediate post-war scene. After the disastrous war there was no more place for the missionary zest and the visionary mood that had defined the Expressionist artists. In the visual arts the disillusionment which followed the war was translated into a new realism, the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) of painters like George Grosz and Otto Dix who felt the need to express the horrors of war and no less the injustices of the world of capitalism through shocking displays of blood and suffering and destitution. And so the artistic styles, whether they

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were called “Post-Expressionism,” or “Magic Realism,” or “Abstract Expressionism,” or “Post-painterly Abstraction,” kept and continue to keep succeeding one another. Nevertheless, once all this has been said, the original inspiration of German Expressionism does survive. Expressionism was erased neither by Nazi censorship nor by succeeding artistic styles and fashions. Its spirituality, which may be interpreted as a particularly German quality, is a message for all times. Its resort to abstraction was clearly not merely an artistic play with new forms but a veritable reflection of a twentieth century reality, the reality of fragments and the attempt to find meaning in them. What I have called earlier the “creative tension” within most of the German Expressionists between fragmentation, the stones, and the need to reassemble the fragments in a new whole, the cathedral, constitutes the lasting legacy of German Expressionism. It is a sane and honest legacy transcending despair and defying the lure of intoxication. NOTES 1. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion (New York, 1961), 23f. 2. Paul Klee, “Creative Credo” (1920), Felix Klee, Ed., Paul Klee. His Life and Work in Documents 1898–1918 (New York, 1962), 154. For the phrasing of the translation I am following Werner Haftmann, The Mind and Work of Paul Klee (New York, 1954) 90. 3. Letter Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Ballandine, February 23, 1921 in G. Di San Lazzaro, Klee. A Study of his Life and Work (New York, 1957), 94. 4. Wassily Kandinsky, “The Problem of Form” (1912), Victor H. Miesel, Ed., Voices of German Expressionism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970), 64. 5. See in this connection the work by the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer whose Abstraction and Empathy (London, 1953) (Abstraktion und Einfu¨ hlung, Munich, 1908) became a basic and most influential statement on the rationale of modern art. 6. Quoted in Jean Clay, Modern Art, 1890–1918 (New York, 1978), 63. 7. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac (New York, 1974), 251. 8. Oskar Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries, Ed. Tut Schlemmer (Middletown, CT, 1972), 314. 9. See Donald E. Gordon, “On the Origins of the Word ‘Expressionism,” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutions 29 (1966), 368–385. 10. This was the title of a major exhibition which took place in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1980. See the catalogue Expressionism. A German Intuition 1905–1920 (New York, 1980). 11. Quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York, 1981), 286. 12. For this argment see in particular Wilhelm Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic (New York, 1910); also Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1957), 12–19. 13. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries, 314. 14. 1898; The Diaries of Paul Klee. 1898–1918, Ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley, 1964), 26.

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15. 1906; Paul Klee, “Autobiographical Jottings: 1879–1918,” Paul Klee. His Life and Work in Documents, 11. 16. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York, 1947), 33. 17. Fourth Prologue. 18. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York, 1947); the orig¨ ber das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich, 1912). inal German edition U 19. Kandinsky and Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac; the original German edition Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1912). 20. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries, 72. 21. See Kandinsky: “I felt ever more distinctly that in art not the ‘formal’ matters, but the inner desire (⫽ content) which determines the formal imperiously”; Wassily Kandinsky, Ru¨ ckblick (Baden Baden, 1955), 25. 22. Ibid., 127. 23. Wilhelm Worringer, “The Historical Development of Modern Art,” quoted in Rose-Carol Washton Long, Ed., German Expressionism. Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berleley, CA, 1995), 12. 24. Kandinsky in a note of a 1911 publication in Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford, 1980), 6. 25. Franz Marc, “The ‘Savages’ of Germany,” Almanac, 64. 26. Ernst Barlach, “From a Notebook, 1906,” Miesel, Voices of Expressionism, 92. 27. Schlemmer, The Letters, 75. 28. Quoted in “Art before Hitler,” London Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 1962, 113. 29. Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” Paul Klee. His Life and Work in Documents, 154f. 30. Scho¨ nberg was also an amateur painter, and Kandinsky, more than his friends, was particularly interested in his paintings. Some of them were included in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in the Munich Thannhauser Gallery in 1911. 31. Letter Franz Marc to August Macke, January 14, 1911, August Macke and Franz Marc, Briefwechsel (Cologne, 1964), 40f. 32. Letter Wassily Kandinsky to Arnold Scho¨ nberg, Munich, January 18, 1911, Arnold Scho¨ nberg and Wassily Kandinsky, Briefe, Bilder und Dokumente einer außergewo¨ hnlichen Begegnung, Ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch (Salzburg, Vienna, 1980), 19. 33. Letter Arnold Scho¨ nberg to Wassily Kandinsky, Berlin, August 19, 1912, Ibid., 69. 34. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Ideen von 1914 (1916),” Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa, Ed. Hans Baron (Tu¨ bingen, 1925), 44. 35. The Diaries of Paul Klee, 313. 36. Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” Paul Klee. His Life and Work in Documents, 154. 37. Letter Franz Marc to L. [his wife Maria], 6.IV.15, Franz Marc, Briefe aus dem Feld (Stollhamm [Oldb], 1948), 60. 38. Max Beckmann, Briefe im Kriege (Munich, 1955), 64. 39. Beckmann letter V., d. 24. 5.15, Briefe, 63. 40. Oskar Schlemmer diary entry March 20, 1915; letter to Otto Meyer, In the field, February 11, 1918, Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries, 21, 53. 41. See Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 171–172. 42. Josef Goebbels, Tgb. IfZ. Bd. 1, 29. 8. 1924. 78, quoted in Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels (Munich, 1990), 368, 686 n. 132.

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43. Letter Oskar Schlemmer to Minister Goebbels, Berlin, April 25, 1933, Schlemmer, Letters and Diaries, 310f. 44. For the relations between the artistic avant garde and National Socialism in the initial phase of the Third Reich see Hildegard Brenner, “Die Kunst im politischen Machtkampf der Jahre 1933–34,” Vierteljahrshefte fu¨ r Zeitgeschichte 10, January 1962, 17– 42, and Vittorio Mangnago Lampugnani, “Weder rein noch reaktiona¨ r. Die merkwu¨ rdigen Abenteuer der Architektur unter Hitler und Mussolini,” Die Zeit, February 3, 1984, 11– 13. 45. For the Exhibition of “Degenerate Art” see Stephanie Barron, Ed., “Degenerate Art.” The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles, 1991); Berthold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich (New York, 1979); Franz Roh, “Entartete” Kunst. Kunstbarbarei im Dritten Reich (Hanover, 1962); Kunststadt Mu¨ nchen 1937. Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst.” Ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Munich, 1987). 46. See the fine volume on modernist culture, based on a BBC television series, Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York, 1981). 47. Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession. Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 188–189. 48. Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 40. 49. Kunststadt Mu¨ nchen, 24f. 50. Peter Gay, Art and Act: On Causes in History—Manet, Gropius, Mondrian (New York, 1976), 108. 51. See the excerpts from Georg Luka´ cs in Long, German Expressionism, 313–317. 52. John Willett, Expressionism (London, 1970), 246. 53. See Brenner, “Die Kunst im politischen Machtkampf,” 26f; Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 55f. 54. Schardt, himself an expert on the work of Franz Marc, was eventually arrested by the SS upon opening a Marc exhibition in Hanover. In 1939 he emigrated to the United States. See Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 55f; Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 403. 55. In a letter to Minister Goebbels he protested that he, a founding member of the Nazi Party up in Schleswig, was neither “degenerate” nor “decadent,” but that his art was “German, strong, austere, and sincere” (Letter Emil Nolde to Josef Goebbels, July 2, 1938 in Miesel, Voices of German Expressionism, 209f). Nevertheless he remained proscribed, and a ban was imposed upon him to continue painting. The result were the so-called “unpainted paintings” on which he worked through the rest of the war. 56. “Gotiker ohne Dom und Bibel,” quoted in Hans Sedlmayr, “Franz Marc oder Die Unschuld der Tiere,” Wort und Wahrheit (Vienna) 6, June 1951, 436. 57. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” Gesammelte Werke. Prosa II, 268. 58. Paul M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 65f. 59. See Ernst Barlach woodcut “The Cathedrals, (1920), Reinhold Heller, Stark Impressions: Graphic Production in Germany, 1918–1933 (Evanston, IL, 1993), 106f. 60. “Kathedrale des erotischen Elends,” this title being generally abbreviated as “KdeE.” 61. From 1919 on Schwitters called all of his artistic works “Merz-Paintings.” The term, sensical and nonsensical at the same time, was derived from an early collage, the “Merzbild,” which contained fragments of an advertisement of the Kommerz- und Privatbank. “Merz” in his mind has come to stand for the intensification and commercial-

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ization, acceleration and dehumanization of life in the modern city. The whole “Merzbau” was destroyed in an Allied air raid in October 1943. 62. Konrad Nonn, himself not an architect, was an engineer who was extremely influential in the Prussian architectural administration. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1930 or 1931. The Nazi Party organ Vo¨ lkischer Beobachter actually elaborated on the theme by referring to the cathedral of Marxism “which damned well looked like a Synagogue”; Vo¨ lkischer Beobachter (Munich edition), Nov. 4, 1932, quoted in Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, 162. 63. See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich. Memoirs (New York, 1970), 55–59; photo following 166; Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, 163. 64. Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission. Berlin 1937–1939 (New York, c. 1940), 66. 65. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 59. 66. See Wilhelm Hausenstein, “Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick” (1919) in Washton Long, German Expressionism, 280–283. 67. Wilhelm Worringer, “Ku¨ nstlerische Zeitfragen” (1921), Ibid., 284–287. 68. For this argument see Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 317.

8 Authenticity: Martin Heidegger and the Temptation of National Socialism

Of all German philosophers, not generally known for the ease and accessibility of their expression, Martin Heidegger was one of the most obscure. His language was elaborately, if not painfully, convoluted, weighed with archaic and arcane Ur-words that, to the uninitiated at least, would appear, as the American philosopher Sidney Hook put it, as “gibberish,”1 and which probably left even the students who crowded the lecture halls at the Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg guessing at what precisely he meant. (Figure 8.1). Nevertheless, Heidegger was not merely another German philosopher. When Ernst Robert Curtius wrote, somewhat flamboyantly, about the unique role of German philosophy in the “new discovery of man,” he had Heidegger—along with Max Scheler—in mind, and Heidegger has generally been recognized among his peers, for instance by Carl-Friedrich von Weizsa¨ cker and George Steiner, as the outstanding philosopher of the twentieth century. Since the early twenties he has acquired all over Germany, not only among academicians, and indeed beyond the German orbit, the aura of the “secret king of German philosophers.” The significance of Heidegger has in the past decade or two been overshadowed by the “Heidegger affair” going back to the exposure of the philosopher’s Nazi affiliation and in particular to his behavior upon assuming the rectorship of the University of Freiburg in May 1933.2 His comportment in that time of revolutionary upsurge was puzzling, characterless, and, indeed in the last analysis, scandalous. The exposure of the kind of political wrongdoing which Heidegger committed cannot be lightly dismissed, as it was by himself, as “fruitless digging in past

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Figure 8.1. Martin Heidegger, 1949. Photo courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

attempts and deeds.”3 Or is it reasonable to leave it that Heidegger’s Nazi entanglement was a mere blunder and, as Richard Rorty maintained, the result of “chance events”? Or was there after all an “internal connection,” as Ju¨ rgen Habermas insisted, between Heidegger’s thought and politics?4 No doubt the great philosopher, by virtue of his entanglement with National Socialism, like

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Dr. Faustus, struck a bargain with the devil, and it remains for us to relate his political activities to the premises of his philosophical thought. How could a scholar of Heidegger’s distinction have gotten himself trapped, as he did in 1933–34 and perhaps even before and after? Of course the moral factor cannot and should not be eliminated from this kind of historical stocktaking. But while it will be our task to judge his behavior, we should not let judgmentalism stand in the way of a possibly dispassionate approach to the insights yielded by Heidegger’s philosophy. How much better, it has recently been argued, if Heidegger’s writings had appeared anonymously so as to enable us to study them on their own merits.5 In any case, it behooves us, apart from investigating the circumstances which might throw light on Heidegger’s political commitment, to assess the importance, the originality of his thought on its own merits, and the influence which it had on academia as well as on the wider public. Fundamentally, it must be remembered, Heidegger was not a “zoon politicon.” His vocation was originally service in the Church. His roots as well as the roots of his thought were Catholic, and so was, we have reason to venture, finally his destination. Born in the small Badensian town of Meβkirch in the Black Forest where his father was sexton of the St. Martin’s Church, he joined the Jesuit order as a novice; he studied Catholic theology and philosophy at the University of Freiburg, writing his Habilitation thesis6 on the thirteenth-century British scholastic Duns Scotus. While at that time he was entirely committed to the view of metaphysics as the “real optics” of philosophy, his very exposure to Duns Scotus’ nominalism must have implanted in him seeds of doubt concerning the self-evidence of rationality. Still, upon completion of the thesis late in 1915 he entertained hopes of being called to occupy the vacant chair of Christian philosophy at the university. However, before long Heidegger strayed from his religious and ecclesiastic roots. It was the “Catholic system” which he came to see as “problematic and unacceptable.”7 Largely influenced by Edmund Husserl, his teacher and mentor in Freiburg, and his call to penetrate “to the things themselves” which meant that the study of philosophy should get away from theories and books and turn towards the thinking process itself, he embarked upon his own elaborate philosophical course. A central consideration in any dissertation on the times and the work of Heidegger should be the fact or the awareness of crisis. In the setting of the pervasive political and spiritual German crisis he made himself the philosopher of crisis.8 In the realm of the German spirit, we have learned crisis or the awareness of crisis was more dominant than in Britain or France. Cultural pessimism was rampant among German thinkers, with countless cultural critics, many of them self-styled prophets and detractors of a supposedly tired Western tradition and in turn harbingers of salvation in search of a “greening” of Germany. After all Sigmund Freud himself had set the stage with his penetrating critique of “civilization.”9 While of course a child of the Enlightenment, he

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questioned its premises, and in this respect was on the same wavelength as the many prophets of doom. However, I should hasten to add that he sought no formula for escaping from the predicament of civilized Unbehagen: “I have no courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation.” But this was what, as Freud put it, “the wildest revolutionaries” as well as “the most virtuous believers” demanded.10 Oswald Spengler, however, belonged to the legion of German thinkers who succumbed to a veritable cult of crisis and doom. Heidegger in his early Freiburg lectures had repeatedly referred to Spengler,11 who may have appeared to him as a latter-day Abraham a Santa Clara, the thundering seventeenth-century Augustinian friar, a fellow native of Baden with whom he was preoccupied throughout his life.12 What was it in Spengler’s thought, then, that appealed to Heidegger? Was it his critique of Zivilisation, the materialistic and therefore moribund phase of Kultur? Was it his calling upon his fellow Germans to face up heroically, in the evening of Western culture, to the “hard cold facts of a late life”?13 Or was it that, when Spengler in later years translated his “morphology of history” into concrete political terms, Heidegger like so many others was impressed by the historian’s eloquent dismissal of liberalism, democracy and the West and thus also of the Weimar Republic, that “business enterprise”?14 But would Heidegger not also have understood that Spengler, while seeming to play into the hands of the Nazis and while paving the way for them, disagreed with them and explicitly took issue with them on various basic issues such as race?15 Heidegger’s great work, Sein und Zeit,16 was a pronouncement on the crisis of the European mind, that is, in his own words, the “crisis of Sein” (Being) and the atrophy of the “authentic” life. Ever since the times of the ancient Greeks, that is after the age of the pre-Socratics and Sophocles, Western culture had gone astray and undergone a long process of decline. The crisis, then, was not merely caused by the Great War: the latter was but an outward manifestation of a long process of decline in the course of which self-conscious analytic thought, conditioned by the relentless march of technology, had submerged the mystery of Being. I hear reverberation of Max Weber’s preoccupation with the “disenchantment” which, he observed, had marked occidental culture for millennia, in the course of which the “organic cycle of life”17 had yielded to routine and rationality. I hear reverberations of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who during the same year regaled the students of Munich with his lament over the loss of the “holism of being.” In any case, Max Weber’s concern over “disenchantment” and Hofmannsthal’s heralding of the “conservative revolution,” no less than Spengler’s critique of Zivilisation and Freud’s analysis of the “Discontents” of civilization, provide the proper context for Heidegger’s awareness of and thinking about the crisis of the modern mind. This context should serve as a reminder that, notwithstanding all the troubling revelations concerning Heidegger’s politics, we have all

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reason to examine his cultural criticism as a bona fide and penetrating manifestation of a widespread, however exaggerated and indeed misguided, German awareness of crisis. Heidegger in particular addressed himself to the atrophy of “authentic” life (Eigentlichkeit) under the impact of modern technology. The Germans in particular, caught in the pincer between the two “dreary” technological giants Russia and America, were, he argued, the most endangered of peoples. All the more was it their task, the task of “the most metaphysical people,” to recapture the “mystery of Being.” Thus Heidegger appeared on the scene in a world from which the magic had receded, if not had been lost, in the mantle of the magician; in a landscape of disenchantment he promised reenchantment. But Sein und Zeit was obviously anything but a call for discipleship. Heidegger, with the “torrent of his language,” as Karl Jaspers put it18 when in retrospect in 1945 he reported about his misguided friend’s political escapades, had not really set out to play the Pied Piper to German youth. His elaborate semantic contortions, variations on the theme of the “Being-in-the-world” of existence,19 were designed to take his readers and audience down the steep path over the great void that was left to men after the fall from the authenticity of the “mystery of Being.”20 Not the consolation of Christian metaphysics, he after all concluded, could overcome the “fallness” of Western man. As far as this goes Heidegger initially at least, followed Max Weber’s stoic prescription of facing up to that “iron cage” loss of wholeness and fragmentation. Not metaphysics, then, but, certainly since the expulsion from the early Greek paradise, time, “Dasein’s temporality”21 with its relentless reminder of finiteness, was the factor which defined the human condition. Guided by Wilhelm Dilthey’s rigid historicism, Heidegger plunged into a crisis philosophy that evoked the pains of living in a void. Man, thrown into inauthenticity,22 was abandoned to the hardness of Schicksal, to the Angst confronting the Nichts. And the temporality of Dasein was marked by what the great juggler with words called Sorge (care). This key concept of his philosophy he explained by falling back on a fable of late antiquity: When once “Care” was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. “Care” asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While “Care” and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: “Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives.”23

This fable was especially significant for Heidegger since, as he explained, Sorge (care) was here presented as identified with human Dasein “for its life-

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time,” but also “because this priority of ‘care’ emerges in connection with the familiar way of taking man as compounded of body (earth) and spirit. . . .” “Thus the pre-ontological characterization of man’s essence expressed in this fable,” Heidegger concluded, “has brought to view in advance the kind of Being which dominates his temporal sojourn in the world, and does so through and through.”24 Sorge became in Heidegger’s philosophy the magic word that was to remind man to confront the void and indeed his mortality resolutely. Heidegger’s basic message, then, was commensurate with the crisis which he perceived: it was a grim one. The crisis of Dasein and the agony of “authentic” life, as he put it, were futhermore accentuated by the pervasiveness of technology. Heidegger’s question here was, how an “authentic” life was still possible in a technological world. Once again, he coined a special and, as later he himself conceded, clumsy term to designate “the essence of technology,” namely “Ge-Stell” (“the frame” or “enframing”). The workings of Ge-Stell, he explained, means that “the essence of man is framed (gestellt), claimed, and challenged by a power which manifests itself in the essence of technology, a power which man himself does not control. . . .”25 By virtue of giving such prominence to the problem of technology and the dangers of man’s alienation from the authentic life, Heidegger added his voice to the chorus of German cultural pessimists and critics, like Ju¨ nger and Spengler.26 But, as was the case with these two, Heidegger’s position towards technology and modernity was not an unqualifiedly negative one. He himself described it as one of “a simultaneous yes and no.”27 While technology has, especially as he identified it with soulless Russia and America, indeed degraded man, it cannot be rejected outright. Heidegger saw in modern technology a “global movement”28 that had to be rescued from its unchained manifestation in Russia and America and harnessed for the recovery of authenticity. “Enframing” was, he conceded, “the fate of our age,” and, lest it slip from human control, it depended on human mastery.29 Ultimately technology’s function should be to open up new perspectives on reality and our understanding of it. So far, then, so good. There is no reason to equate Heidegger’s ontology as expounded in Sein und Zeit with the tricks of a “terrible simplifyer.” On the contrary, his exploration of temporality and the relentlessness of Angst and Sorge was a legitimate reminder of the fallacies of the facile eudaemonism of the enlightened tradition and of our commercial culture, and opened up a chasm that only the most persistent of students of philosophy would want examine. Furthermore his strictures and warnings concerning the wasteland of technology were no mere chapters of that proverbial German “mystic flight from reality.” It was not mere sentimental, retrospective romanticism that propelled him to issue warnings against the “dreary rage of unchained technology”30 and search for a formula for authenticity in a technological age. Especially from the vantage point of the late twentieth-century’s concerns with environmentalism Heidegger’s double perspective on technology, the threat and the challenge, might well resonate with all public-spirited men and women of our own days.

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All this does not mean that there were not strains in Heidegger’s philosophy which facilitated his later involvement with National Socialism. The very language of his lectures on metaphysics in the winter semester of 1929–30, the longing for Ha¨ rte und Schwere betrayed, as Winfried Franzen has pointed out, a distinct “disposition for National Socialism.”31 In this connection the readiness of the great philosopher to translate, at least at this stage in his thinking, Nietzsche into terms of crude heroism is puzzling. Had Nietzsche not made a clear distinction between barbarians who came from “the depth” and those who came from “on high”? In any case, Heidegger’s acquisition of a public profile and his subsequent convergence with Nazidom occurred over time. To begin with, Heidegger was an inspiration to students, promising to give them direction in the troubled years between the two wars. No one has described the atmosphere in Freiburg at the time more vividly than his faithful student and lover Hannah Arendt.32 Already before he moved from Marburg to Freiburg in 1928 as successor to his teacher Husserl, an “underground” reputation had preceded him of a philosopical magician of sorts. Instead of talking about philosophy he insisted on living it and arguing it out with his students, thus bringing thinking to life again and rescuing embattled Being from inauthenticity. No doubt the economic crises in Germany of the twenties and early thirties had their effect on the universities; they fed discontent among the students, for only a fraction of whom there would be academic employment. This situation helped make the universities breeding grounds for the legion of “seekers” in the sense of the unsuspecting Hofmannsthal, especially of the right-wing variety, who clamored for a collective revivalism that would transform the university into a preserve not for learning but for extremist political commitment. As a matter of fact, the Nazi “seizure of power” at the German universities had taken place already in July 1931 when the Deutsche Studentenschaft at its annual convention in Graz fell under the control of the Nazi student organization,33 and the Albert-Ludwig University was no exception. While the mandarin professors did not jump on the bandwagon and maintained some reserve toward the young iconoclasts, their almost unanimous estrangement from the Weimar Republic made them view benevolently the perhaps “undisciplined” idealism of the Nazi rowdies.34 This line of thought was also Heidegger’s. It was surely not merely vanity that impelled the would-be philosopher-king—or indeed the would-be Fu¨ hrer— to embark on a course of wooing the Nazi youths. Like so many other wellmeaning but misguided Germans as well as non-Germans, he developed an idealized vision of Nazism that corresponded little to reality. Actually Heidegger seems long before 1933 to have entered into a dialogue with the Nazi-dominated Deutsche Studentenschaft.35 The university, then, became the arena in which Sein und Zeit might be translated into reality. “Back from Syracuse?” so the story goes, a younger colleague of Heidegger’s asked him insinuatingly as the two met—it must have been sometime in mid1934—in a Freiburg street.36 Heidegger’s encounter with National Socialism

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has often been compared with Plato’s escapade to Syracuse.37 After the death in 367 B.C. of Dionysis I, the “tyrant,” Plato was prevailed upon by Dion, at the time the strong man of the city, to attempt the political education of his brother-in-law, the new “tyrant” Dionysis II. Plato’s idea was, historical scholarship seems to be in agreement, not to transfer to Syracuse the tight blueprint of his Republic and to make the “tyrant” into a philosopher-king, but to transform the city into a monarchy based on the rule of law as he had spelled it out in his Laws, strong enough to check the Carthaginians and to expel them from Sicily. In the end, after a second visit by Plato in 361–360, his intervention proved to be a fiasco. So Heidegger also went to “Syracuse.” My question here is of course why, after his grim Weberian acknowledgement of the “fallness” of Western man since the days of the ancient Greeks, he should have succumbed to the lure of National Socialism. For a proper assessment of Heidegger’s thoughts and actions at that time we must consider the nature of National Socialism and the way in which the public then perceived it. If the so-called Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute) of the past decade or two has done any good, it is in challenging us to set aside the taboos that have in the past decades been built around National Socialism. Our awareness of its unspeakable crimes has been responsible for a tendency to remove it from critical inquiry to a realm beyond rational exploration. It has inevitably become identified with the Holocaust, a catastrophic and eschatological term which has become part of a “sacred” history. The call for the historization of National Socialism38 that precipitated the Historikerstreit was an attempt to break the taboos surrounding the topic and to rescue it for the realm of “profane” history where it can be subjected once again to rational investigation. I am keenly aware of the pitfalls which this process presents: they have been brought out loudly and acrimoniously in the course of the “Historians’ Dispute.” It would lead, the argument goes, to minimize the evils and horrors connected with the regime, to “trivializing” it. But these are not the necessary implications of historization. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the “masquerade of evil”39 that Nazism represented, appearing as light, charity, historical necessity, social justice. It is only once we fully grasp this everyday “banality” of Nazism (Hannah Arendt) that we shall fully be able to understand its baseness and the extent of evil in it: not trivialization, then, but full understanding. In connection with our inquiry into Heidegger it might and should help to explain why and how this celebrated philosopher could have become embroiled with Nazism. To begin with, let us remember that National Socialism, unlike MarxismLeninism, the other monster of our century, had no distinct profile. MarxismLeninism had from the very beginning an identity and visibility conferred on it by Marxist canons as reinterpreted by Lenin. But National Socialism? In the first months after the “seizure of power” the revolution was generally presented as “national uprising” (nationale Erhebung), which only in time revealed itself

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as National Socialist revolution. This was surely more than a matter of tactics; it was indicative of the indistinctness of the movement. Was National Socialism a party or was it a movement? Was it traditionalist or revolutionary? How real was its social component? How central to its program and its policies was its ideology, in particular racism and anti-Semitism? Heidegger must undoubtedly have pondered many of these questions as he veered in the direction of Nazism. But the very indistinctness of the movement had, if anything, a way of attracting the likes of Heidegger. With the exception of those in academia who withstood Nazism and those who had to leave the country, and at the other extreme, of course, the Nazi enrage´ s, almost every “nationally” oriented or otherwise Nietzschean professor had a way of constructing his own “PrivatNationalsozialismus.” The historization of National Socialism should also address itself to the state of affairs in the Weimar Republic and to the way in which it was perceived, and also to the unquestioned “attractveness” of Nazism to wide sectors of the population. Fritz Stern has written about Nazism as a “temptation.”40 The Weimar years had been identified with the humiliating defeat of 1918, with an unwanted and unbeloved parliamentary order, with economic crisis, rising unemployment and social divisiveness and, among the middle and upper strata in particular, with the menace of Bolshevism. No wonder, then, that the nationale Erhebung gave rise to a widespread sense of rebirth. New energy, it was felt, had been infused into German life, and the Nazi slogan of Volksgemeinschaft promised a new dispensation in which class struggle could be overcome and harmony among all social classes achieved. The Fu¨ hrer’s appeal to national pride furthermore raised expectations that he would lead the Reich to a new position of pride and power in the world. Fritz Stern also rightly emphasizes the attractiveness of the pseudo-religious vocabulary of the Nazis to a wide secular populace; in his Sportpalast speech of February 10, 1933 Hitler cited “God and our conscience” and spoke in a crescendo of the “time of resurrection of the nation” and the “faith” in his people, concluding with “Amen.” Weimar had been branded as a “godless” state,41 and now salvation might come through the Third Reich, full of chiliasitic promises. One wonders whether this pseudo-religious note of National Socialism played any part in wooing Heidegger, who had, perhaps not without qualms, shed his Catholic allegiance. Could Nazism have served as an ersatz religion for Heidegger? The Nazi “seizure of power,” then, opened up to the philosopher the “way to Syracuse,” so to speak, and the Rektorat became his instrument for endowing the crumbling West, especially of course the Germans, with the spiritual strength to recapture the “mystery of Being” and renewed authenticity. The momentary (?) infatuation with National Socialism of the “little magician of Meβkirch,” as his student Karl Lo¨ with called him,42 was the other side of his stoic confronting the nightmare of the void. Heidegger threw himself into the whirl of the nationale Erhebung: he joined the Party on May 1, 1933, the

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Day of National Labor, on which occasion he ordered his faculty to march in the streets to demonstrate its solidarity with their Volksgenossen. Whatever his reservations about National Socialism—he certainly never went along with its racial theories—he thought that it was within his power to have a moderating effect upon the excesses of the Party and thus save the “positive” features of the movement. Characteristically Heidegger saw himself committed to the “movement” rather than to the Party,43 and even after the failure of his tenure as rector, which terminated with his resignation in April 1934, he maintained his faith in the “inner truth and greatness” of the movement.44 But in the last analysis it is Heidegger’s “Privat-Nationalsozialismus” that deserves more scrutiny than his political proclamations, however offensive and foolish, during his rectorate.45 Born of the tradition of German cultural pessimism, it juxtaposed Eigentlichkeit and “das Man,” paralleling the traditional German distinctions between Kultur and Zivilisation, and Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Das Man stands for the unheroic philistine who made his peace with “Allta¨ glichkeit” (everydayness) and acquiesced in a world of imperfection. Like the guardians of German Kultur, Heidegger, the guardian of Dasein, thus came to depreciate politics as the art of compromise and “half measures”46 that detracted from the authentic life. The philosopher’s politics—essentially apolitical if not antipolitical—were in no way geared to the average citizen’s—that is the Man’s—supposedly banal and mediocre and selfish appetites: but they were designed to infuse in him heroic values. They would lift the public discourse out of the concrete arena of appetites, wants, and needs that call for satisfaction, transferring it to the realm of myth and slogans. The rectorial address is a perfect example of the politics of antipolitics. Its very beginning amounted to a bombastic mystification, namely the assumed identification of the leader and the led: the leaders themselves being led by the “inexorability of that spiritual mission which impresses unto the fate of the German Volk the stamp of their history.”47 These were politics not of rational discourse in a pluralistic setting, but of absolutes, and enforcement through intoxication—in effect, of panem et circenses. Walter Benjamin, writing about fascism, argued that it attempted to organize the masses, short of substantially satisfying them, by feeding them with symbols, rituals, and elaborately staged pageantry. It thus injected aesthetics into public life.48 Alfred Rosenberg, the so-called “Reich philosopher,” in one of his more lucid moments talked about the Third Reich as a “theatocracy.” Heidegger in his rectorial address also transformed reality, the plural open society, into theatre, in effect substituting hypnosis, domination, and compulsion for genuine political dialogue. His political legacy, then, is finally an attempt to overcome the discontents of civilization not by stoic acceptance, but by conjuring up what Susan Sontag calls “the fetishism of courage”49—Ha¨ rte und Schwere—and by the prescription of communal authenticity. Converging with Nazism, he pinned his hopes on the movement in order to realize his philosophical policy. But the very ambitiousness of his aims, his utopianism, was his delusion—as though,

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unlike Plato, he were aiming at imposing, in concert with Nazidom, his own Republic on his “Syracuse.” Furthermore he offered the consolation which Freud in all forthrightness disclaimed. The failure of the Rektorat unmasked the rule of philosophy as an illusion and a dead end. It tells us that politics cannot be an implementation of philosophy, but must be an acceptance of plurality and a coping with the contingent and the unforeseen. George Orwell reminded us that “the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life. . . .”50 One wishes that Heidegger had been open to such wisdom. After the fall of the Third Reich Heidegger at no point came clear about his involvement with Nazism. His later claim that the very title of his rectorial address of 1933 was a statement of refusal might be given a modicum of hearing inasmuch as it can be construed as having suggested a warning against the “politization of the sciences.”51 But of course the subsequent proclamations of the Rektor-Fu¨ hrer give little reason for sustaining this claim. As a matter of fact, looking back on the place of National Socialism in the modern world, he proved himself strangely impervious to the ethical problem involved, trivializing the Nazi experience by correlating it with the technological order of things.52 Outright ludicrous is Heidegger’s claim that he offered “resistance”—that is after his resignation from the Rektorat in April 1934.53 There is no denying that in France he was “instantly denazified,” as Ju¨ rgen Habermas put it caustically,54 and became a hero for the Re´ sistance. But quite apart from this strange juggling of hard and fast evidence, how does Heidegger measure up to his schoolmate Max Josef Metzger? Metzger, who became a priest, was the leading spirit of the so-called Una Sancta religious fraternity dedicated to ecumenical work and peace; a pacifist, he became a resolute opponent of National Socialism and was finally dragged before the Nazi People’s Court and executed in October 1943. But Heidegger did not choose the path of resistance. After the war he claimed that his lectures had given inspiration to the action of the “White Rose” resistance group in Munich.55 But did Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends, and their teacher Professor Kurt Huber, who went to their deaths for their courageous protest against the Nazi atrocities, really need to fall back on Heidegger for moral support? Moreover, Alfred Delp of the Society of Jesus, one of the most prominent members of Helmuth James von Moltke’s oppositional Kreisau Circle, wrote a book on Heidegger which, while presenting a positive assessment of the philosopher’s quest for the authentic life, took him to task for his essentially “horizontal” vision that offered a confining “theology” without “theos.”56 I wonder what Heidegger’s way through the world would have been if he had not abandoned his faith and if the “vertical,” that is the transcendent, dimensions of healing and redemption had been accessible to him. In his lectures on meta-

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physics he discussed the “foolishness” (Torheit) of grafting philosophy unto theology, but remained silent about grafting theology onto philosophy.57 Might a “Christian philosophy” in the latter sense not have pointed the way to really ultimate questions concerning life and death rather than that of the dead-end philosophical policy? Perhaps the propinquity with men like Metzger and Delp would have been more salutary for him than that with writers like the ferocious aesthete Ernst Ju¨ nger. Not that Heidegger would have gone the way of resistance; that would have been out of keeping with his whole makeup. But he might not have been tempted by that monstrous ersatz religion of Nazism. The Heidegger case obviously transcends the question of Heidegger and National Socialism and even Heidegger and fascism. The temptation of National Socialism, to which he succumbed, led his philosophical quest astray. But Theodor W. Adorno’s polemical indictment of Heidegger’s philosophy—the “jargon of authenticity,” as he labels it58 —as a fascistoid “illumination of the ether” that added up to no more than linguistic pretense lending itself to “demagogic ends,” does not come close to an informed assessment of his thought. There is no doubt that Heidegger was one of the really important and inquisitive philosophers of our age. After all philosophy meant to him “asking questions about the extraordinary.”59 The questions he asked about the authentic life and especially the place of technology in our world are central to our existence. However coded and convoluted, his great work Sein und Zeit was a document of penetration and courage as it mercilessly dug into “the ‘concretion’ of factically thrown existence”60 as the key to recovered authenticity. “Temporality” and “fallness” Heidegger then identified as preconditions for the search for the “meaning of Being.” The recognition of a reality of disenchantment was the precondition of authenticity. Questioning was an important theme in Heidegger’s thought and writing, “for questioning,” he insisted, “is the piety of thinking.”61 However, in the course of his confluence and infatuation with National Socialism—was it a mere episode in his philosophical journey?—he violated his maxim. Did not his philosophical policy amount to hubris? Should philosophers expect to be finders? Should philosophers seek answers to their questions, and worse, try to enforce them, as Heidegger did in the capacity of Rektor? Much has been made in the literature on Heidegger about what he himself called Die Kehre (The Turning).62 It occurred sometime in the mid-thirties when he had come to understand, partly in disillusionment over his Nazi experience, the futility of human interference in the affairs of this world. Being, he now came to recognize, reveals itself, if at all, in a flash and as a mystical sensation, independently of the rational process and certainly not in the field of politics. This new perception of Heidegger’s owed much to the discovery of the poetry of Friedrich Ho¨ lderlin. For about a century Ho¨ lderlin had remained largely ignored in the German public consciousness until at the eve of the First World War Norbert von Hellingrath, a member of the circle around Stefan George, launched the first critical edition of his works. From then on Ho¨ lderlin under-

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went a veritable renaissance with poets like Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, and also Hugo von Hofmannsthal,63 placing him in their pantheon, and in the German Youth Movement. His lament over the German Zerrissenheit reverberated widely: It is a hard word, and yet I say it, because it is the truth: I can conceive of no people more torn, than the Germans. You see craftsmen but no human beings, thinkers but no human beings, priests but no human beings, masters and servants, youths and staid people, but no human beings—is this not like a battlefield, where hands and arms and all limbs lie around dismembered, while the spilt life-blood seeps into the sand?64

For Heidegger Ho¨ lderlin became “the poet of poets.”65 The philosopher could fully identify with the poet’s concerns about the fragmentation of modern man and his alienation from the godhead, himself and society. He could likewise identify with his exalted vision of rebirth. Ho¨ lderlin now took the place of Ernst Ju¨ nger, the poet took the place of the warrior. In “times of trouble”66 the poet became the priestly witness of the “nothing of this night.”67 Here, then, was Heidegger’s paradox: God was dead, and yet there was Heidegger’s outburst in the interview with Der Spiegel of 1966: “Only a God Can Save Us.”68 Of course it left open the question of what Martin the Apostate really meant by invoking “God.” But it was Ho¨ lderlin who commandeered the Olympian position between the “no more of the dead gods” and the “not yet of the Coming.”69 But after all is said about Heidegger’s spiritual journey, we are left wondering whether after all he, the apostate, has not been on a religious quest after all? His attempt to recapture Being might then be understood, as has been suggested, to have been “merely a disguised kind of belief in God.”70 No doubt Heidegger was a great seeker—indeed, as Bernhard Welte, the priest, said over his grave, “perhaps the greatest seeker of this century.” Commenting on Matthew 7:7 (“seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you”), he suggested that it may have been “the secret message of his death” that finally allowed Heidegger, the seeker, to be also the finder; death, as the philosopher himself had written, “the shelter of Being.”71 Martin Heidegger’s Nazi escapade has left a dark cloud over his standing in history. He was not a good man; he was tight and vain and often petty. The would-be all-powerful Rektor-Fu¨ hrer who insisted upon political implementation of his philosophical dreams was mean and overbearing and in retrospect certainly pathetic and farcical. Yet the Kehre allowed him to revert to the freewheeling dialecticism between acknowledgment of finiteness—the stones—and the insistent quest for authenticity—the cathedral. This seeker Heidegger will go down in the annals of the German mind as a very central personage. NOTES 1. Sidney Hook reviewing the translation of Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (New York, 1962, being the first translation of Sein und Zeit (1927), Tu¨ bingen,

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1949), The New York Times Book Review Nov. 11, 1962. Heidegger’s one time student and lifelong friend, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, actually ventured that some day he might be “retranslated” into the German language; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Sein und Zeit,” Ju¨ rg Altwegg, Ed., Die Heidegger Kontroverse (Frankfurt/M., 1988), 13. 2. The exposure of Heidegger was launched by a Chilean scholar, Victor Faria´ s, with his work Heidegger et le Nazism (Paris, 1987), revised and translated as Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/M., 1989), and Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu einer Biographie (Frankfurt/M., 1988). See also, among the by now many works dealing with the subject, Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being. The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York, 1990) and Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” The New York Review of Books, June 16, 1988. 3. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universita¨ t; Das Rektorat (Frankfurt/M., 1983), 40. 4. For Rorty see Richard Rorty, “Another Possible World,” Karsten Harries/Christoph Jamme, Eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (New York, London, 1994), 34–40, esp. 37. For Habermas see Ju¨ rgen Habermas, “Heidegger—Werk und Weltanschauung,” Faria´ s, Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus, 11–37, esp. 36. Also, from the by now burgeoning literature on Heidegger and National Socialism one particularly challenging book (Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, Cambridge, 1997) should be singled out here, a tour de force of sorts which, while avoiding a “deNazification” of Heidegger and his “serious and compromising involvement” with the Nazi movement, insists on presenting a “ ‘de-Nazified’ Heidegger . . . as the name of a body of philosophy . . . free of the taint of Nazism.” (4f). 5. George Steiner, “Der gottlose Theologe,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung September 23, 1989. 6. In the German university system a candidate for academic position must write, in addition to the doctoral dissertation, a habilitation thesis which conveys upon him or her the right to give lectures (venia legendi). 7. See Ott, Martin Heidegger, 108–119; idem, “Heidegger’s Catholic Origins. The Theological Philosopher,” Harries and Jamme, Eds., Martin Heidegger, 30. 8. For this subject see in particular Wolin, The Politics of Being, passim; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary modernism. Technology, culture and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984), 109–115. 9. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930) (New York, 1961). 10. Ibid., 92. 11. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Po¨ ggeler, Eds., Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt/M., 1988), 26. 12. See Faria´ s, Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus, 63–81, 377–387. 13. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. I, Form and Actuality (New York, 1947), 40; italics in original. 14. Oswald Spengler, Neubau des deutschen Reiches (Munich, 1924), 8. 15. Ibid.; Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung (Munich, 1933). 16. (1927) (Tu¨ bingen, 1949); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962) and more recently trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY, 1996). 17. Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (November 7, 1917), Wissenschaft als Beruf, Eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter (Max WeberGesamtausgabe I/17) (Tu¨ bingen, 1992), 87f.

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18. “Im Strom seiner Sprachlichkeit”; Letter Karl Jaspers to Friedrich Oehlkers (member of the Political Purification Committee of Freiburg University), December 22, 1945, Bernd Martin, Ed., Martin Heidegger und das Dritte Reich (Darmstadt, 1989), 151. 19. “Das In-der-Welt-sein des Daseins.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 56; Being and Time, 83. 20. For basic expositions of Heidegger’s thought see Walter Biemel, Martin Heidegger in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1973); Thomas Sheehan, Ed., Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (Chicago, 1981); I am especially indebted to Ru¨ diger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich, Vienna, 1994). 21. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 331ff. 22. Uneigentlichkeit. 23. Ibid., 197f. 24. Ibid., 198f. 25. Martin Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Spiegel-Gespra¨ ch mit Martin Heidegger vom September 23, 1966, Der Spiegel, May 31, 1976, 209; translated in Richard Wolin, Ed., The Heidegger Controversy. A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 107. 26. For this topic see especially Herf, Reactionary Modernism, passim. 27. Quoted in Safranski, Ein Meister, 460. 28. Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott,” 206. 29. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York, 1977), 5, 25; see in this connection Karsten Harries, “Philosophy, Politics, Technology,” Harries and Jamme, Eds., Martin Heidegger, 225–245. 30. Martin Heidegger, Einfu¨ hrung in die Metaphysik (Tu¨ bingen, 1953), 28, quoted in Karsten Harries, “Heidegger as a Political Thinker,” The Review of Metaphysics 29 (June 1976), 665. ¨ ber ein zum NS31. Winfried Franzen, “Die Sehnsucht nach Ha¨ rte und Schwere. U Engagement disponierendes Motiv in Heideggers Vorlesung ‘Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik’ von 1929–30,” Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Po¨ ggeler, Eds., Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt/M., 1988), 78–92. 32. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971, 51. 33. See Geoffrey J. Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany (Princeton, 1985), esp. 62–74. 34. This distinction was voiced by the pedagogue Eduard Spranger, one of the few German professors who throughout the Nazi era maintained a marked aloofness from the regime and the Party; Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 439; also Martin, Ed., Martin Heidegger, 18–22. 35. Ott, Martin Heidegger, 186. 36. This story I take from Safranski, Ein Meister, 324. The younger colleague was Wolfgang Schadewaldt, a member of the Freiburg faculty, himself a National Socialist, who had been instumental in proposing Heidegger for the post of rector of the university. 37. For Plato’s intervention in Syracuse see George Klosko, The Development of Plato’s Political Theory (New York, 1986), 185–188, A. E. Taylor, Plato. The Man and His Work (London, 1986), 7–9. 38. See above all Martin Broszat, “Pla¨ doyer fu¨ r eine Historisierung des Nationalso-

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zialismus,”Merkur 39 (May 1985), 373–385; idem, “Was heißt Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus?” Historische Zeitschrift 247 (1988), 1–28; Historiker-“Streit” (Munich, Zurich, 1987); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989). 39. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York, 1972), 4. 40. Fritz Stern, “National Socialism as Temptation,” Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York, 1987), 147–191. 41. Ibid., 12. 42. Karl Lo¨ with, Mein Leben Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1986), 42. 43. Martin, Ed., Martin Heidegger, 57. 44. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, 1959), 199. There is some ambiguity as to whether during the lectures on metaphysics in 1935 Heidegger actually said “of National Socialism,” “of this movement,” or “of the movement”; see Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” The New York Review of Books, June 16, 1988, 42–43. 45. For those see Wolin, Ed., The Heidegger Controversy, 40–60. 46. Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott,” 206. 47. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, 29. 48. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen (Frankfurt/M., 1989), 174–175. 49. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, February 8, 1975, 26. 50. George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” The Collected Essays. Journalism and Letters, Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York, 1968), 4: 467. 51. “Nur noch ein Gott,” 158. 52. “Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, essentially the same as the blockading [an allusion to the Berlin blockade imposed by the Russians which lasted from June 1948 to May 1949] and starving of countries, the same as the manufacturing of hydrogen bombs”; from an unpublished lecture of 1949 by Heidegger entitled “Das Ge-Stell,” quoted in David Luft, “Being and German History: Historiographical Notes on the Heidegger Controversy,” Central European History 27 #4 (1994), 488. 53. Martin Heidegger, Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945 in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, 66; as a matter of fact, the Wolin translation reads “spiritual resistance,” whereas the original German version plainly reads “Widerstand”; see the corresponding paragraph in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 36. 54. Ju¨ rgen Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung: the Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” Critical Inquiry, 15 (Winter 1989), 456. 55. “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universita¨ t,” Das Rektorat 1933–34: Tatsachen und Gedanken, Ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt/M., 1983), 42. 56. Alfred Delp, Tragische Existenz: Zur Philosophie Martin Heideggers (Freiburg i. Br., 1936), 103, 107. 57. Heidegger, Einfu¨ hrung in die Metaphysik, 6. 58. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, Il, 1973), esp. 6–9. 59. Ibid., 10. 60. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 436. 61. The motto, as given here, concluded Heidegger’s lecture “The Question Concern-

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ing Technology” (1953), The Question Concerning Technology, 35; Heidegger had a way of concluding his lectures and writings, including his Sein und Zeit, with question marks. 62. See Martin Heidegger, “The Turn” (1949), The Question, 36–49. 63. For a good treatment of the Ho¨ lderlin Renaissance see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968), 57ff, 69. 64. Friedrich Ho¨ lderlin, Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland, II (Hyperion to Bellarmin), Sa¨ mtliche Werke und Briefe (Leigzig, 1914), 2: 201. 65. “Der Dichter des Dichters”; Martin Heidegger, Ho¨ lderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (Munich, 1937), 4. 66. “In du¨ rftiger Zeit”; Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt/M., 1950), 248ff. 67. “im Nichts dieser Nacht”; Heidegger, Ho¨ lderlin, 16. 68. Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott.” 69. “im Nichtmehr der entflohenen Go¨ tter und im Nochnicht des Kommenden,” Heidegger, Ho¨ lderlin, 15. 70. Arne D. Naess, “Martin Heidegger,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th. ed (Chicago, 1997); see also Steiner, “Der gottlose Theologe.” 71. Bernhard Welte, “Seeking and Finding,” Sheehan, Heidegger, 73–75.

9 Maturity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Faith and the “World Come of Age”

“What do we sons of God have got to do with morality?” —Friedrich Nietzsche “The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all intellectual reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“We must fully endure the problems of our culture in order to have the right to believe in its future,” wrote Ernst Robert Curtius in the early nineteen thirties.1 The German “Geist,” with which Curtius was so much concerned, had since the turn of the century been navigating between the Scylla of resignation to a reality of ruins, the stones, and the Charybdis of a vision of wholeness, the cathedral, between acceptance of an apparently inevitable disenchantment and a more or less compulsive insistence on reenchantment. Both attitudes and positions were in constant interaction, if not conflict, with each other, contributing to the “inner turmoil” that marked the intellectual scene in modern Germany and made it a “special case” among the European nations.2 It was what Karl Jaspers called the condition of “unfaith”3 of the modern world that singularly agitated the German mind, accentuated the “German incertitudes” and eventually affected decisively the political course which the country was to take. The condition of “unfaith” was bound to be the main challenge for Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, born in 1906, was one of the truly great German theologians of the century (Figure 9.1). A pastor as well as a theologian, he took an active

Figure 9.1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the courtyard of the Armed Forces Prison in Berlin-Tegel, summer 1944. Photo courtesy of Chr. Kaiser / Gu¨ tersloh Publishers.

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stand against Nazi tyranny. He was imprisoned in April 1943 and executed two years later for his participation in the Resistance against Hitler, one of the few German clergymen to suffer martyrdom for his faith. His posthumous writings, especially the well-known Letters and Papers from Prison, have influenced theological thought at all levels. For his undaunted facing up to the “fragmentariness” that he detected in the life of his generation and for his determined rejection of the deception of ideology Bonhoeffer paid with his life at the hands of the Nazi oppressors. One of the notable martyrs for the Christian faith, Bonhoeffer was eventually recognized as one of its most distinguished theological innovators of the twentieth century. There was nothing particularly striking, not to say eccentric, about Bonhoeffer’s personality. Fundamentally conservative in temperament, he was neither a rebel nor a zealot. He took his due place in the line of the Bonhoeffer generations and among his brothers and sisters. “There must be certitudes in life,” says Christoph, the principal character who most resembles himself in the drama fragment Bonhoeffer wrote in jail in 1943.4 His extended patrician family gave him that sense of certitudes; it lent him a self-assurance and firmness of purpose that came to stand him in good stead later, in particular, when his radical theological speculations and his decision to go into active resistance against a murderous regime led him down perilous paths. Bonhoeffer’s decision to enter the ministry and become a theologian was not really a matter of “conversion.” Quietly, undemonstratively, at the age of thirteen, he made up his mind to follow a calling which would guide him throughout his life. Of course the fact that forebears on both his father’s and mother’s sides had included theologians and preachers5 may have helped him find his vocation. To be sure, the Bonhoeffers, like many families of the upper bourgeoisie, had loosened their ties with the Church, and except for the mandatory attendance at confirmation classes, none of them went or was sent to Sunday church service. The mother, Paula von Hase Bonhoeffer, did take it upon herself to give the children some religious education: she saw to it that evening prayers were said, followed by the singing of hymns, and that the rituals of the Christian holidays were cheerfully observed. But all this took place in the household, and no need was felt for ecclesiastical guidance. Karl Bonhoeffer, the father, after 1912 Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Berlin and Director of Psychiatry at the Charite´ hospital, was an agnostic, and merely lent a certain authority to the family observances. Secularization, then, had made inroads even into the Bonhoeffer family. When Dietrich made his decision, it was met in the family with some skepticism. The father thought that his highly gifted son was “too good” for a remote pastor’s existence, and when his siblings tried to confront Dietrich with the fact that he was about to devote his life to a defunct and boring “bourgeois” institution, his response, at the time perhaps made in jest, was: “In that case, I shall reform it.”6 The tradition in Bonhoeffer’s home was Lutheran, and his life as preacher and theologian revolved around the Lutheran faith. He began with Luther; he

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explored alternate channels of religious experience; he rediscovered Luther, albeit a Luther radically rethought and transformed. To begin with he had to deal with the direction that Lutheranism in Germany had taken since Luther’s own time. The University of Berlin, where Bonhoeffer pursued his study of theology, was a fortress of the so-called “liberal theology” which sought to correlate the story of Christianity with the historical process towards man’s self-fulfillment, a position which under the impression of the Bismarckian unification was all too readily translated into unquestioning obedience to secular authority7 and into nationalistic terms that made Luther the God-sent herald of German cultural and political unity. This secularized version of Luther’s theology left Bonhoeffer thoroughly dissatisfied. He could not follow the Establishment and had to go his own way. No wonder, then, that given what he saw as the German misunderstandings of Luther, he was casting about in the midst of his turmoil for inspiration elsewhere. Already before the Nazi “seizure of power,” during his stay at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1930–31, he paid weekly visits to the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., hoping to find in Black Christianity an authentic expression of his faith. Three times between the years 1928 and 1935 he considered visiting Mahatma Gandhi in India whence, he thought, the “great solution” might come.8 And eventually he even entertained the posssibility of returning to Rome.9 All these stations in Bonhoeffer’s life were exploratory in nature: they certainly led him to settle on a theological vision of his own while relating it to the duties of the Christian at the time of the Western “void”10 —and worse even, at the time of the backlash against it in the form of National Socialism. In his effort to recapture the authenticity of the Christian faith, his great and decisive experience was his meeting with the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, twenty years his senior. This took place in July 1931 in Bonn, where Barth had taught since 1930. It was later reported that Bonhoeffer, as a guest in Barth’s seminar, interjected Luther’s saying that the curses of the godless sounded better in God’s ear than the hallelujahs of the pious. This spontaneous interjection by a visiting student, so the story goes, delighted Barth.11 It provides some insight into Bonhoeffer’s evolving theology, which said “No” to the sin and yet “Yes” to the sinner,12 and which indeed dignified the sinner by grace and salvation and by Christ’s sacrifice. In any event, one thing led to another in the relationship between the two theologians. After Bonhoeffer’s Bonn visit they met frequently and continued to communicate in agreement and disagreement, in perfect candor. Certainly the first encounter with Barth proved decisive for Bonhoeffer’s thought. Undoubtedly it was to Karl Barth, next to Luther, that Bonhoeffer was most indebted. Barth had initiated a virtual revolution in Protestant theology by rejecting liberal theology. His theology was not “liberal” but “dialectical.” The gap between reason and revelation is unbridgable, he argued: God’s will is not a corrected continuation of our own; it is the “Wholly Other.” Bonhoeffer like-

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wise came to postulate the “deepest gap between Christianity and the world” and to emphasize the “eschatological understanding of the kingdom which God alone can bring and which he brings in opposition to the world.”13 And on April 8, 1936 he wrote to his brother-in-law Ru¨ diger Schleicher: We must not search for general eternal truths which correspond to our own “eternal” values. . . . But we search for the will of God which is altogether alien and contrary to us, whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, who is hidden behind us behind the sign of the cross where all our ways and thoughts find an end.14

Following the footsteps of Barth’s “dialectical theology,” then, Bonhoeffer returned to the original Lutheran insistance on the “otherness of God”; God was the deus absconditus hidden to us behind the sign of the Cross and accessible to us only through the gift of grace. All along Bonhoeffer’s religious sensibilities made him struggle with the paradox of the distant, hidden God and the “profound this-worldliness [tiefe Diesseitigkeit] of Christianity15 which related it to the very real suffering of man, his inadequacies and perplexities—a paradox which he would resolve in the suffering of Christ on the cross, indeed of God. God himself is weak and powerless in the world, and he, who is with us is the God who forsakes us.16 God’s revelation was consummated after all in his incarnation, in his becoming fully human. This is also the way Bonhoeffer interpreted his own position later when writing from jail to Maria von Wedemeyer, his betrothed: “I am afraid that the Christians who dare to stand with only one leg on earth, stand with only one leg in heaven.”17 In any case, it was a difficult, very difficult paradox to envisage and he well knew that it was difficult to live within this paradox. But the sliding progression from this world to the transcendent God was a shallow and banal formula to him and fell short of true discipleship. Bonhoeffer, then, brought the distant God back into the world by asking the basic question: “What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? How can he help us to be good Christians in the modern world?” And he commented: “The real trouble is that the pure Word of Jesus has been overlaid with so much human ballast . . . that it has become extremely difficult to make a genuine decision for Christ.”18 In Bonhoeffer’s thinking, then, grace— that is the manifestation of God’s “otherness” through grace—assumes an all the more crucial place. I am now impelled to wonder what Bonhoeffer’s place in history would be, had there been no Hitler, no National Socialism to challenge his faith and his sense of decency. By the time Hitler came to power in January 1933 Bonhoeffer was well on his way to defining his theological position, to breaking the ice of the conventional German readings of the Lutheran message. On these grounds alone he would stand out for us today, just as Karl Barth does, as a conscience of the Christian faith leading back to its foundations, and, along with Willem

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A. Visser’t Hooft, then the Secretary General of the Provisional World Council of Churches, as a pioneer ecumenist. However, the advent of Hitler’s dictatorship deeply affected Bonhoeffer’s course. It was not that he changed direction—much to the contrary. Nor did it make him give priority to political activism. If anything, it confirmed him in his faith, and this meant that he had to break out of the confines of academic theology. He was no longer content with being the mere theologian. For him the challenge which came from without in fact amounted to a challenge from within, and the deepening of his faith in turn made him intensify his call for discipleship. Like Luther, who left the cloister and went back to the world, Bonhoeffer left academic life behind in order to bear public witness to his faith. An “abstract Christology,” namely a general religious knowledge, would, Bonhoeffer came to argue, amount to Christianity without the living Christ. Going back to the world was the Christian’s duty, above all in times of need and distress, and not in glory but in suffering, in the discipleship of the suffering Christ. Then indeed, “for the sake of Jesus,” the law if necessary had to be broken.19 When Bonhoeffer wrote these words,20 he had come to the conclusion that resistance to tyranny was a necessary component of discipleship. From the very beginning, of course, both Barth and Bonhoeffer were in fundamental disagreement with National Socialism, which they opposed on religious as well as political and moral grounds: it was itself a religious movement, a counter-religion. Subsequently both Barth and Bonhoeffer became embroiled in the so-called “Church Dispute,” unleashed by the nazified faction of the Protestant clergy, the “German Christians” who threatened to blend the Christian message with the racist doctrines of National Socialism. In reaction to the so-called “Brown Synod” of September 1933, which, dominated by the German Christians, declared its loyalty to the new regime and furthermore adopted “aryan” descent as a requirement for ministry in the Church, Bonhoeffer together with Martin Niemo¨ ller organized the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund), denouncing the Aryan clause as an infraction of the Gospel. The Pastors’ Emergency League was the nucleus of what came to be the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), around which clergy and laymen rallied to stand up for the integrity of the confession. Barth, who had taken the initiative by blasting Nazi intrusions into the Christian preserve in a pamphlet “The Theological Situation of Today” (June 1933),21 which he sent to Hitler, took the lead in the Barmen Synod of May 29–31, 1934, that set itself the task of affirming the premises of the Christian faith against its perverters. It was Barth who formulated the Six Points of the synod’s theological declaration, unanimously agreed upon by 138 delegates, among them the most distinguished princes of the Protestant Churches in Germany; it became the constitution, so to speak, of the Confessing Church. The Barmen Confession, as it is generally called, in its first article affirmed the evangelical truth that “Jesus Christ as he is attested for us in the Holy Scripture is the one word of

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God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and death,” and went on to state: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could or should recognize as source of its message besides this one word of God other events and powers, figures and truths as God’s revelation.” The Confession amounted to a clear and firm statement of the prerogatives of the Church. Indeed it reasserted the “triple ‘solus’ ” of the Reformation: “solus Christus, sola scriptura, sola fide.”22 The chuchmen at Barmen thus had made their decision, a theological one, to define the prerogatives of the Church as a sacred institution, but had refrained from following it with a political statement. Could not everyone see that the declaration amounted to a clear-cut rejection of the totalitarian aspirations of National Socialism? There is no doubt that its drafters thus avoided direct confrontation with the regime, and they have accordingly been criticized for having offered no more than “limited disobedience.”23 What about the question of the Jews and the merciless campaign against other minorities and political dissenters? Should their persecution not have bestirred the Church to make it a matter of status confessionis? Such were the questions which Dietrich Bonhoeffer, along with Karl Barth, asked. He was not present at Barmen, and although he at the time endorsed the Six Points, he harboured misgivings about the Synod’s restraint. The stand in church matters taken by the Confessing Church in staving off the German Christians was not enough. The Church, he concluded, has often been untrue to her office of guardianship and to her office of comfort. And through this she has often denied to the outcast and to the despised the compassion which she owes them. She was silent when she could have cried out because the blood of the innocent was crying aloud to heaven. She has failed to speak the right word in the right way and at the right time. She has not resisted to the uttermost the apostasy of faith, and she has brought upon herself the guilt of the godlessness of the masses.24

While the Barmen Synod was in session Bonhoeffer was in England. Earlier, in October 1933, he had accepted a pastorate in two German-speaking parishes in the London area. As a matter of fact, Karl Barth by no means approved of this step; he thought that the place of his younger colleague was in Germany, since, as he put it, “the house of our church is afire.” But if Bonhoeffer expected to gain some time for reflection, he was mistaken. During his sixteen months in England he repeatedly interfered by remote control into the Church Dispute at home and also was actively engaged in the ecumenical movement. In pursuing his interest in ecumenism he met up with Bishop George Bell of Chichester, a distinguished statesman of the Church. The two soon developed a very close understanding of one another, and in the course of time the Bishop became one of Bonhoeffer’s most understanding and loyal supporters. He never lost sight of his German friend, and the more Bonhoeffer was hounded by the Nazis and misunderstood by official Britain, the more he stood by him.

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The circumstances of Bonhoeffer’s life under Hitler’s dictatorship put his act of witnessing to a test far more rigorous and troubling than any that his fatherly companion Barth ever had to face. When after the death of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934, all German civil servants including university professors were required to take an oath of loyalty to the Fu¨ hrer, Barth refused; he considered himself put into the status confessionis. Arguing valiantly before the disciplinary tribunal that he could obey the Fu¨ hrer only within the limits of his responsibilities as a Christian, he was nevertheless dismissed on grounds of being unfit as a teacher of German youth.25 Almost immediately, however, Barth found a welcome in his native Basle, from where he continued his struggle against the pseudo-religious aspirations of Nazism. But his resistance remained first and foremost theological in nature and within the context of the Church Dispute, directed not against the political authority in Germany but against the German Christians representing the newest and meanest version of liberal theology. When in the later 1930s Barth came round to advocate active resistance and when in the now famous letter to his fellow theologian in Prague, Josef Hroma´ dka, he argued—I might say rather light-headedly—that every Czech soldier fighting Nazi aggression was also “doing it for the Church of Jesus,” he did so from the safety of neutral Switzerland. Bonhoeffer returned from England in the spring of 1935 strengthened in his resolve to stand fast and join battle with the regime. From London he had written to a Swiss friend that he had considered the Church Dispute after all only a “way station” (Durchgangsstation) which was to lead to an “altogether different opposition,” namely “opposition to the blood.”26 He now was on his way to engage in just this kind of opposition. But that “opposition to the blood” meant more than mere political opposition. This by itself would hardly have been the clergyman’s task. The challenge of National Socialism had to be met by a fundamental testing of the faith in the light of political action. Indeed it was to lead not away from but to a clarification of the canons of the Scriptures in the face of the concrete threat of evil. If, then, the law was to be broken, if resort to violence was indicated, it had to be done “for the sake of Jesus.”27 Upon his return to Germany much of Bonhoeffer’s effort was devoted to directing improvised seminaries designed to make up for the curtailment of preacher training imposed by the Nazi-appointed “Reich Bishop.” Also during those years he composed two of his seminal contributions to theology, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together.28 In June 1939, in order to escape from all the political vexations, Bonhoeffer sought relief by once again scouting out in America.29 His friends at Union Theological Seminary in New York had prepared the ground for him, and indeed Henry Smith Leiper, the Secretary General of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, had arranged to have him assume responsibilities as pastor for the New York Christian refugees. Yet almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he was overtaken by remorse. Ever since his first stay at Union Theological

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Seminary he had harbored misgivings about the prevalence of social action among American Protestants, and much as he respected their outgoing and public-spirited stance, he criticized their lack of theology. Now, however, came the realization that he had a responsibility to his struggling brethren at home. After much soul-searching he came to the conclusion that he must return “to the trenches.” To his mentor and friend at the seminary, Reinhold Niebuhr, he explained himself most movingly: I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people. . . . Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security.30

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had made what proved to be the gravest decision of his life. By deciding to return home Bonhoeffer had for all practical purposes set the course for his future. Since he was a man of steadfast determination, that course was bound to lead him into that “altogether different opposition,” the need for which he had foreseen some five years earlier. Already in February 1938 he had made the first contacts with the leaders of the Resistance (Widerstand); in the autumn of 1940 he signed up for service on the Munich staff of the Counterintelligence Section of the Armed Forces (OKW/Amt Ausland/Abwehr) where his friends, including his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, formed a general staff of sorts of the Widerstand. This step of course involved not only a test of Bonhoeffer’s courage and ingenuity, but also a reexamination of the innermost values by which he had lived all along. He now had to justify to himself the saying of Christ, “I came not to send peace, but a sword,” which was especially perplexing to him since he had all along considered himself a Christian pacifist.31 Bonhoeffer’s fundamental challenge was how to reconcile his commitment to the teachings of the Gospel with his entanglement in the “worldly sector.” He had clearly left behind him the shallow correlation of God’s revelation with the tides of this-worldly affairs. It was not success or failure in this world which was a measure of discipleship, but the willing acceptance of God’s judgement. Nevertheless, if Bonhoeffer acknowledged his debt to the world of reason, humanity and progress, he did so knowing that it was here to stay. “We cannot now go back to the days before Lessing and Lichtenberg,” he wrote in his Ethics, and for that matter, “we cannot return to the pretechnical era.” The values of “modernity,” which for the longest of time had served as battle slogans against the Church, against Christianity, against Jesus Christ himself, had now, in times which were “out of joint,” assumed auxiliary functions, and a “kind of alliance

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and comradeship” had formed between the defenders of human rights and values and the Christians that Bonhoeffer wanted to interpret as a return of these worldly values to their origin, namely Jesus Christ.32 The prime concern of Bonhoeffer in the “time of storm,” became, then, the battle with National Socialism. National Socialism was ideology. No man-made constructs, not even as benign as natural law or rationality or universal human rights—now in “alliance” with the Christians—can ultimately serve as guides for the Christian man. And of all manmade constructs Bonhoeffer was up against the most absorbing, the most absolutist one, namely Nazi ideology. Ideology in itself is the chief manifestation of man’s claim to self-sufficiency and omnipotence. “All ideological action carries its own justification within itself from the outset in its guiding principle.” But to ideological action Bonhoeffer opposed “responsible action” which “does not lay claim to knowledge of its own ultimate righteousness.” And he summarized this argument as follows, “The man who acts ideologically sees himself justified in his idea; the responsible man commits his action into the hands of God and lives by God’s grace and judgment.”33 Let us at this point remind ourselves that Bonhoeffer was a man of letters. He read voraciously and absorbed an enormous amount of Western and nonWestern thought. The theological line, especially the one from Luther—by way of So¨ ren Kierkegaard—to Barth is inescapable. No less decisive, however, and as far as I can see, not sufficiently explored, is the connection between Bonhoeffer and the, might I say, “worldly philosophers,” Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Max Weber. It should not surprise us at all that Bonhoeffer in his search for an authentic reading of the Gospel should have drawn on Nietzsche. He was in fact an avid reader of the great iconoclast philosopher whose impact upon his thought was pervasive. “The knowledge of good and evil,” Bonhoeffer wrote in his Ethics, “seems to be the aim of all intellectual reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge.”34 Christianity and ethics thus were for him “disparate and divergent entities.”35 Hence Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the Christian message stands “beyond good and evil.”36 And the discovery of what is beyond good and evil, he acknowledged, was not made by Friedrich Nietzsche with his polemics against “the hypocrisy of Christianity”: “it belongs to the original material of the Christian message, concealed, of course, though it is.”37 Not even Nietzsche’s Superman, Bonhoeffer maintained, was the opposite of the Christian: “without knowing it, Nietzsche has here introduced many traits of the Christian made free, as Paul and Luther describe him.”38 Bonhoeffer thus wove Nietzsche skillfully into the fabric of Christian theology. He indeed as much as conceded that “it was only from the soil of the German Reformation that there could spring a Nietzsche.”39 Let us remember also that Nietzsche’s Madman, who in the market place proclaimed the death

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of God, cried incessantly “I seek God! I seek God!” and did not fail to add: “We have killed him—you and I.” As a matter of fact, in the drama fragment written in Tegel jail in Berlin, Bonhoeffer has one of the characters exclaim that “in the midst of hell” he had encountered God.40 Nietzsche’s dead God after all was resurrected and reincarnated in Bonhoeffer’s vision of the suffering God, suffering on this earth, if not suffering in hell. If Friedrich Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” and “God is dead” helped Bonhoeffer to find his bearing in defining his theological position, so did Martin Heidegger’s theme of “Being-in-the world.”41 This happened early in Bonhoeffer’s academic career. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit appeared in 1927; in the summer semester of 1929 and the following winter term Bonhoeffer wrote his Habilitation thesis. The book to which it led, Akt und Sein,42 contained, apart from a critique of Barth’s all too rigid dialecticism, a thorough commentary on Sein und Zeit, and prompted the director of the dissertation, Professor Wilhelm Lu¨ tgert, initially at least, to think of its author as a Heideggerian.43 While this categorization did little justice to Bonhoeffer’s rigorous sense of independence and integrity,44 there were some crucial points of convergence between the thoughts of the young theologian and the philosopher who during his Marburg tenure had risen to meteoric fame on the German academic scene. Whether or not Bonhoeffer was correct in characterizing Heidegger’s philosophy as a “conscious atheistic” philosophy of finiteness45 is, after what has been discussed earlier,46 debatable. But Heidegger’s philosophy was a “philosophy of finiteness”; and Bonhoeffer’s theology was a theology of finiteness. While Heidegger harped on the ever-presence of temporality and Sorge (care) as heralds of man’s mortality, Bonhoeffer brought God down from a distant beyond to the pain and suffering on earth. What he called the Geschichtegewordensein (historicization) of God’s word47 meant that God also, not merely man, is on earth, and not as the triumphant God but as God on the cross. Heidegger’s philosophy was one not of glory but of somberly facing the inevitability of death, Bonhoeffer’s theology was one not of glory but of God in time and on the cross. And time and death, Bonhoeffer said with great emphasis in an early sermon, “are the same!” and “all that happens in it [the world] is but penultimate by contrast to the ultimate.”48 Although Bonhoffer made sure to say that Heidegger’s concept of being remained “unsuitable for theology,”49 the convergence of their cultural criticisms is inescapable. Authenticity, whether philosophic or theological, was their prime concern. Heidegger’s “authentic being-toward-death”50 was translated by Bonhoeffer into theological terms, “Every concept of existence that is not formed by being encountered or not encountered by Christ is ‘inauthentic’ (including Heidegger’s ‘authentic’ existence).”51 While therefore the theologian’s vision was set on what he called the “ultimate,” he made sure to modify this position:

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He [Jesus] neither renders the human reality independent nor destroys it, but He allows it to remain as that which is before the last, as a penultimate which requires to be taken seriously in its own way, and yet not to be taken seriously. . . . The Christian life means neither the destruction nor a sanctioning of the penultimate. . . . Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world.52

Bonhoeffer’s insistent preoccupation with the “penultimate” came not from ambivalence but from the paradox that defined his theology. The “penultimate” was after all the world into which Jesus entered and “the world in which the cross stands,”53 and, “Everything would be ruined if one were to try to reserve Christ for the Church and to allow the world only some kind of law, even if it were a Christian law. Christ died for the world, and it is only in the midst of the world that Christ is Christ.”54 Bonhoeffer, like the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, pursued rigorously the path toward “concretion.”55 Both left metaphysical speculation behind them56 and set the stage for an inevitable confrontation with a world that, in Heidegger’s terms was “thrown,” and in Bonhoeffer’s “fragmented.” Both the philosopher’s and the theologian’s prescriptions were hard to live with and were no less hard to “sell,” and no doubt both were concerned with bridging the gap between “temporality” and the “ ‘supra-temporal’ eternal,” as Heidegger put it,57 and Bonhoeffer’s “penultimate” and “ultimate.” Heidegger’s attempt to resolve the tension was, as we have seen, painful and, alas, dishonest. For Bonhoeffer resolving it meant to face up to “life’s broken fragments” firmly, not to bemoan the fragmentariness “but rather rejoice in it.”58 His resolution would be everything but surrender, but acceptance of the reality of a fallen and fragmentary human existence would take place in the context of the divine dispensation. It spurred him on towards the definition of a new, indeed revolutionary, theology. The contours of Bonhoeffer’s theology, rudimentary as it had to remain, became in the end visible in his letters, written from jail to his friend Bethge. It is at this stage of his thinking that the influence of Kierkegaard and the convergence between himself and Max Weber become especially evident. Like Kierkegaard Bonhoeffer was prepared to “discover Christianity by himself” and to “preach Chistianity anew.” There was no way in which the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer could remain without sin; there was no way for him to avoid involvement in political murder. Kierkegaard’s radical theology had prepared the way for Bonhoeffer’s decision, for linking his grim resolve with the Christian message. This then was “Christianity’s paradox” that Bonhoeffer had chosen to live with and for which to die. And after all, was it not this kind of predicament that Luther had in mind when he issued his “pecce fortiter: Esto peccator et pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo”?59 Besides all this, Bonhoeffer had occupied himself intensely with Max Weber’s work, which his brother Klaus and his friends had called to his attention. He emerged impressed by Weber’s “enormous matter-of-factness.”60 Might it not be argued that Bonhoeffer arrived at a Christian version of Weber’s “ethic of respon-

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sibility” that called for accountability for the foreseeable consequences of one’s decisions and actions? A “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life” and the “ability to face such realities and measure up to them inwardly,” Weber said in his address on “Politics as a Vocation” in January 1919 before the University of Munich, would in the end induce the “mature” man to reach the point of saying, to use Luther’s words: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” “Maturity” (Weber: “Reife”; Bonhoeffer: “Mu¨ ndigkeit”), that is facing up to the world of disenchantment and adversity, was a key concept in the thinking of both Max Weber and Bonhoeffer, and while with Weber it led to a stoic “trained relentlessness” in the face of the “polar night of icy darkness and hardness,” in Bonhoeffer’s case it meant a challenge to connect it after all with the Christian message. Ultimately, to be sure, Bonhoeffer’s “Here I stand; I can do no other” was prompted by a “time of storm” and by the agony of need (in German “Not”) and suffering. It was Not, need, that catapulted him into a perception of a world that had irreparably become secularized. He did not often use the word “secularization”; indeed he did not lament that development. It was a reality that had to be confronted, the reality, as he preferred to call it, of the “world come of age” (“mu¨ ndige Welt”).61 Nazism itself was a symptom of the modern loss of faith, the religious vacuum; it was a desperate effort to fill that Western “void” with ideology, in fact with a new surrogate religion—and precicely in this lay for Barth and Bonhoeffer its chief menace. The world come of age is the world without religion. “We are moving towards a completely religionless time,”62 Bonhoeffer wrote, in which God, as he saw Him, was not God almighty, but weak and powerless in this world. He is the suffering God, the God “hidden in suffering” (Luther), the God on the cross. And man is called upon to suffer the grief together with God. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the suffering of God. This means, after all, the affirmation of a world come of age and compassion with the suffering God through acceptance of the drama of guilt and redemption. Bonhoeffer’s decision to resist was not merely a political one: it had its justification in theologia crucis. He was distinctly a Christian martyr despite the lingering disclaimers of the German churches. Bonhoeffer’s resistance was essentially an expression of his theology. As a Christian living in a “time of storm” Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw himself justified in translating Luther’s “suffering disobedience” into resistance. Indeed the “time of storm” impelled him to define, more than Luther ever had occasion to, the relation between confession and resistance63 and the point at which confession without resistance denies itself and at which resistance alone validates confession. Dietrich Bonhoeffer went to the scaffold on April 9, 1945 in the Flossenbu¨ rg concentration camp. He may not after all have “reformed” the Church. But he had alerted his Christian brethren at home and abroad to the enormities of the Nazi menace and reminded the Protestant Churches of their obligations. He had outlined a reading of the Christian faith that shook his own Church.

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But ultimately Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s legacy to posterity transcended the churchly dimension. As Max Weber earlier in the century had admonished his fellow Germans to come to terms with the “mature” world of disenchantment, Bonhoeffer, by his example, reminded them that they lived in a “world come of age,” in a world which pointed no way back to “the land of childhood”; the only way was one “through absolute honesty”—that is, through acknowledgment of a landscape of stones. “Before God and with God we live without God”64 was the very difficult prescription for himself and all others. But this prescription precluded and resisted “to the blood” the false God under whose auspices a deceptive orthodoxy was to be enforced.

NOTES 1. Ernst Robert Curtius, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (Stuttgart, Berlin, 1932), 30. 2. In his exemplary study of the German academic community between rejection and acceptance of modernity Fritz Ringer did argue the point that the tensions between the two positions were particularly marked in Germany, making her in this respect to have been “something of a special case”; Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 2, 258. 3. “Glaubenslosigkeit”; Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (New York, 1933), 230. 4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fragmente aus Tegel, Eds. Renate Bethge and Ilse To¨ dt, Werke, VII (Munich, 1994), 68. 5. The grandfather on his mother’s side, Karl-Alfred von Hase, was court preacher under Wilhelm II in the Potsdam Garnisonskirche; but after he corrected the monarch for referring to the proletariat as canaille (rabble), the Kaiser ceased to attend his services, and he saw himself forced to resign. Thereafter he moved to Tu¨ bingen as professor of theology. 6. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Man of Vision. Man of Courage (New York, 1970), 22. 7. Bishop Hermann Kunst in a study of Luther’s relations to the Counts of Mansfield and the Electors of Saxony has demonstrated that Luther in the face of princely injustice had come around to condone “suffering disobedience”; Evangelischer Glaube und politische Verantwortung. Martin Luther als politischer Berater seiner Landesherrn und seine Teilnahme an den Fragen des o¨ ffentlichen Lebens (Stuttgart, 1976), 400. 8. Letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Helmut Ro¨ ssler, Berlin-Grunewald, October 18, 1931, Gesammelte Schriften (hereafter cited as G.S.), Ed. Eberhard Bethge, 6 vols. (Munich, 1965–1974), I, 61. 9. Letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge, Klein Kro¨ ssin, October 9, 1940, G.S., VI, 485. 10. “Das Hichts”; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, Eds., Ilse To¨ dt et al., Werke, VI (Munich, 1967), 118f. 11. This episode has been related in Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 132. 12. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, Revised and Unabridged Edition (New York, 1979), 41. 13. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G.S., III, 21.

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14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer letter to Ru¨ diger Schleicher, Friedrichsbrunn, April 8, 1936, G.S. III, 28. 15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer letter to Eberhard Bethge, [Tegel], 21 July [1944], Letters and Papers from Prison, New Greatly Enlarged Edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York, 1972), 369. 16. See letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge, [Tegel], 16. July [1944], Ibid, 357–361. 17. Brautbriefe Zelle 92. Dietrich Bonhoeffer-Maria von Wedemeyer 1943–1945, Alice von Bismarck and Ulrich Kabitz, Eds. (Munich, 1992), 38. 18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 37f. 19. Ibid., 65. 20. The original German edition of the Cost of Discipleship (Nachfolge) appeared in Munich in November 1937. 21. Karl Barth, Theologische Existenz Heute! (Munich, 1933). 22. See Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen im Dritten Reich, vol.2, Das Jahr der Entscheidung 1934, Barmen und Rom (Berlin, 1985), 191f. 23. Heinz Eduard To¨ dt, Der Bonhoeffer-Dohnanyi-Kreis in der Opposition und im Widerstand gegen das Gewaltregime Hitlers, typescript (Berlin, 1986), 25. 24. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, 129. 25. For this episode see Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth. His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Philadelphia, 1976), 255–262. 26. “Widerstehen bis aufs Blut”; Letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Erwin Sutz, London, April 28, 1934, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G.S., I, 40. 27. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 65. 28. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (Munich, 1937); Gemeinsames Leben (Munich, 1939). 29. For Bonhoeffer’s second trip to America see Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 552– 566; Ruth Zerner, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s American Experiences: People, Letters, and Papers from Union Seminary,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 31, no. 4 (Summer 1976), 261–282. 30. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G.S., I, 320; Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 559. 31. On this subject see Martin Heimbucher, Christusfriede—Weltfrieden, Dietrich Bonhoeffers kirchlicher und politischer Kampf gegen den Krieg Hitlers und seine theologische Begru¨ ndung (Gu¨ tersloh, 1997). 32. The quoted passages are from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, 62ff, 93ff, 342ff. 33. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, 268. 34. Ibid., 301. 35. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Grundfragen einer christlichen Ethik,” G.S., III, 49. 36. Ibid., 50. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 53. 39. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, 97. 40. Ibid., 38. The character is Heinrich, a Christlike dock-worker who cared for the destitutes and outcasts while refusing to go to church. 41. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 56. 42. Akt und Sein. Transzendentalphilosophie und Ontologie in der systematischen Theologie, Ed. Hans-Richard Reuter (Gu¨ tersloh, 1931); American edition: Act and Being.

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Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Philosophy, Ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr. (Minnesota, 1996). The habilitation was completed in July 1930. 43. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Akt und Sein, 9. 44. As a matter of fact, Lu¨ tgert later in this respect revised his assessment of Bonhoeffer, conceding that he had, “while starting off with Heidegger, gone his own way altogether”; Dietrich Bonhoeffer letter to [Ministerial Director] Georg Gerullis, Berchtesgaden, August 15, 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin 1932–1933, Eds. Carsten Nicolaisen and Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth, Werke, XII (Munich, 1993), 113. 45. Ibid., 66. 46. See chapter 7. 47. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio. Eine dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche, Ed. Joachim von Soosten (Munich, 1986), 89. 48. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sermon in Barcelona where he served as curate from February 1928 to February 1929, August 26, 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barcelona, Berlin, Amerika 1928–1931, Eds. Reinhart Staats and Hans Christoph von Hase, Werke, 10 (Munich, 1991), 500f. Bonhoeffer later took up the distinction between the “penultimate” and “ultimate” in his Ethik (“Die letzten und vorletzten Dinge,” 136–162): human reality is the penultimate, and the cross is the ultimate. 49. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Akt und Sein, 67. 50. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, passim and esp. 260. 51. Ibid., 113. 52. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, 149–151. 53. Ibid., 150. 54. Ibid., 53. 55. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Akt und Sein. 56. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethik, 347; Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’ ” The Question Concerning Technology (New York, 1971), 61. 57. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tu¨ bingen, 1949), 18. 58. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Letter to Eberhard Bethge, [Tegel], February 23, 1944, Letters and Papers, 219. 59. “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but more boldly yet have faith and rejoice in Christ”; Epistolae M. Lutheri (Ienae, 1556), I, 345. For Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of this passage see The Cost of Discipleship, 55–57. 60. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Vorlesung ‘Die Geschichte der systematischen Theologie des 20. Jahrhunderts,’ ” Wintersemester 1931–32, in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologe. Christ. Zeitgenosse (Munich, 1967), 1053. 61. Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 327, 346, 361. 62. Letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge, August 30, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 279. 63. For this topic see especially Eberhard Bethge, “Zwischen Bekenntnis und Widerstand: Erfahrungen in der Altpreußischen Union,” Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Die deutsche Gesellschaft und der Widerstand gegen Hitler, Ju¨ rgen Schma¨ deke and Peter Steinbach, Eds. (Munich, 1994), 281–294. 64. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Letter to Eberhard Bethge, [Tegel], 16 July [1944], Letters and Papers, 360.

10 Conclusion: The German Mind between Disenchantment and Reenchantment, and the Spectre of National Socialism

There are no certainties in history. “The unending pageantry of life,” as So¨ ren Kierkegaard called it, “with its motley play of colors and its infinite variety” will always give the lie to those who claim to have detected a “plot,” a “rhythm,” a “predetermined pattern” in history.1 Of course we persistently hypothesize, work with hunches and guesses, more or less educated ones, more or less emotional ones. But then, in the light of the evidence available to us, more often than not we have to let them go again. In the last analysis the dialectic between hypothesis and evidence defies stereotypes and dictates the dynamics of the historian’s craft; it also makes it exciting and pleasurable. However, for understandable reasons German history, in the wake of the horrors of the Nazi past and of the Second World War unleashed by Hitler, has been subjected to tight retrospective treatments which have tended to provide the enormity of the “German catastrophe” with certain, all too certain, explanations, tracing a direct, almost preordained, line to it from the German past. But while there may be little doubt about the existence of a “German Question” that has troubled Europe including the Germans themselves, and the course of German history was no doubt marked by peculiarities that indicated a divergence from the West, we should guard against a reductionism that would amount to what Peter Gay called a “false determinism.”2 No doubt the course of German history has on balance been a troubled and troubling one; no doubt German thought has moved all too insistently and consistently “on the edge of a precipice.” Yet there have been episodes, and indeed even more than episodes, in the German past, which showed a distinct openness pointing to outcomes other than the catastrophic one that understandably has tainted the im-

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age of German history. After all, the present-day German Federal Republic was no mere creation of a magic “zero hour” (“Stunde Null”), but had roots in a tradition going back certainly to the revolutionary era of 1848–1849. Yet there also were German men of letters and artists, as the chapters of this book will have shown, who in the crisis and general awareness of crisis of the 1920s and 1930s kept a clear mind and resolutely tried to steer away from the ground swell of Nazism.3 Altogether, then, I have good reasons for dismissing the assumption of the existence of German “certainties” and falling back on the thesis of the German “incertitudes.” The way into the catastrophic rule of the Nazi thugs was not a preordained and straight one, and precisely the fact that there were forks along the way and roads not taken accounts for the dramatic quality of our story. It has convincingly, I hope, presented the dialectics in the German encounter with modernity between the resolute and stoic acceptance of its discontents and adversities, and the search for wholeness to the point of becoming a flight into myth and unreality, between the stones and that illusive cathedral. These dialectics defined the “drama” of German history. To begin with, we must always remind ourselves that underlying all the German uncertainties was the question of German identity. The very central location of the Germans in Europa has left them torn, culturally as well as politically, between West and East. Moreover German history is marked by discontinuities and continually shifting frontiers and self-definitions. The Bismarckian unification, partly because of its incompleteness, by no means laid the identity problem to rest. Even after 1871 Germany remained a “belated nation.” In fact the criticism that came from Jacob Burckhardt and the invectives that came from Friedrich Nietzsche reminded their German contemporaries that the German ills went deeper than ill-defined frontiers. Of course the dislocations resulting from modernization took their toll on the Germans. And certainly after the lost war of 1914–1918 the humiliation, as it was generally perceived, of Versailles, the shock of inflation and economic crisis came together to harden the German sense of unsettledness. This collection of essays is a record—I hope, a fair one—of the heights and depths of the German mind in the turbulence of the first decades of the twentieth century. The vocabulary which we have encountered in the past chapters is peculiarly reflective of the pathology of the German mind since the turn of the nineteenth century. Leafing through the literature, cultural and political, of the first half of our century, yields a repetition of rather loaded words which in their German setting have acquired peculiar significance. On “crisis” of course the Germans had no monopoly; yet the word was invoked almost compulsively. Other recurrent words were “experience” (Erlebnis), “wholeness” (Ganzheit), “destiny” (Schicksal, Geschick), “bourgeois,” “the void” (das Nichts), “allegiance” (Bindung), “community” (Gemeinschaft), “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit), “the seekers” (die Suchenden). Taken each by itself, these words would mean nothing in particular; but in the aggregate they indicate the prevalence of a restless questioning of the fun-

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damentals of the human as well as the national condition, as though confirming that proverbial German “inner turmoil.” The “German Question” that has agitated the minds of virtually all the writers in the German cultural orbit has been marked by extreme self-consciousness as well as by relentless self-questioning. For better or for worse this self-questioning has led to the depth of insecurity about the German identity, to frantic efforts to compensate for it, and to the heights of new insight into, as Curtius put it, “the most fundamental problems of world—and human significance.”4 Both moods, both tendencies, as we have seen, were often manifest in one and the same intellectual current, even in one and the same thinker. Both the hazards and the vitality of the German mind, let us remember, came together in the creativity of Thomas Mann’s “Adrian Leverku¨ hn,” a source of “enjoyment” at the same time as a symptom of “affliction.” The first word in the vocabulary of the German crisis and awareness of crisis was Nietzsche, and the last one, alas, National Socialism. Granted that this was the case, the plight of modern Germany was heavily mortgaged. Hardly any educated German after 1900, wrote Walter Kaufmann, one of Nietzsche’s chief interpreters, was not “influenced” somehow by Nietzsche.5 However, the legacy of Nietzsche was, as we have seen, ambiguous, and the range of his impact was wide. It was Nietzsche, more than Karl Marx, who stirred up his fellow Germans, heightening their awareness of crisis. No doubt, his dithyrambic e´ lan lent itself readily to an escapist existentialism designed to overcome the unheroic “bourgeois” discontents and frustrations. No doubt Nietzsche had an enormous surface effect on the German middle strata, to a degree where the Nietzscheans could displace Nietzsche himself. His delight in shocking metaphors deprived his work of what Michael Hamburger called the “middle register”6 which might have made it easier to access and protected it from being appropriated and straightjacketed by Nazi orthodoxy. But then Nietzsche would not have been Nietzsche. And who is to say what the correct exegesis of Nietzsche should be? Oswald Spengler, whom Thomas Mann labelled Nietzsche’s “clever ape,”7 rightly remarked that it was the “melody” of Nietzsche’s vision that kept captivating friend and foe and would continue doing so even some day when no one would any longer have read his works.8 Even though the story that the German soldiers had gone into war with Zarathustra in their knapsack may not have been much more than a legend, in fact a special Kriegsausgabe bound in durable field-gray was printed and distributed to tens of thousands of German troops.9 The more turbulent conditions became in subsequent years on the German scene, the more did Nietzsche, or the legend of Nietzsche, serve as a catalyst. Almost every other German was a Nietzsche “disciple,” to use Crane Brinton’s distinction, either a “tough” or a “gentle” Nietzschean,10 and it is fair to say that, for better or worse, much of the agitation that gripped the German mind since the turn of the century is unthinkable without Nietzsche, whether or not properly understood. In any case, we are left with a legion of “Nietzscheans,” starting with the war

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poet Walter Flex’s friend Ernst Wurche, a student of theology who took Zarathustra with him into battle. Flex’s memoir of his friend, Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten11 (Wanderer between Two Worlds), became one of the original documents translating the German war experience into a national Weltanschauung. It was this Weltanschauung which became a virtual obsession in the literature between the wars, Spengler and Ju¨ nger being prime exhibits of it. They certainly stand out as unabashed partisans of the dionysian cult, and, as we have seen, the German Expressionist artists saw themselves bewinged by Zarathustrian fervor. As for Martin Heidegger, all his philosophizing revolved around an argument with Nietzsche. Richard Wolin talks of Heidegger’s “Nietzsche obsession”12 which led him all the way from subscribing to Nietzsche’s nihilistic critique of the modern age to criticizing Nietzsche himself as the culmination of the very metaphysical legacy that was to be overcome. Heidegger’s excursion into the Rectorate cannot exhaust the depth of his message. The Heidegger who will survive the follies of his political engagement and apocalypse is the philosopher of historical finiteness, of time (Zeit) and care (Sorge). “After [Saint] Augustine and Pascal,” George Steiner has written, “no one has looked deeper into the sadness, into the frenzied senselessness of human existence.”13 The Heidegger who will survive his foolhardy celebration of the Nazi seizure of power is the philosopher who squarely addressed and carefully balanced the “yes and no” to the “global movement” of technology. His initial rash condemnation of Russia and America for constituting the avant-garde of soulless technology and his expectation that “the inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement14 would conquer the problems of the modern world yielded to disillusionment even with the German way. Nazism after all had been unable to safeguard authenticity. Heidegger’s Kehre, his seeking refuge with Ho¨ lderlin, was indeed a matter of disillusionment on his part. But at the same time it reveals a basic honesty and consistency in his pursuing the problem of technology as a central one in the modern world. “Who thinks greatly must err greatly,”15 he later argued in his defense. In any case, the Ho¨ lderlin with whom he now identified was the poet who had written those sad and harsh words about the Germans and their Zerrissenheit. By then, Heidegger had exchanged the false certainties about German conditions with a more modest avowal of the German incertitudes. Among Catholic men of letters Nietzschean disciples were understandably few. Nietzsche’s onslaught against Christianity’s “slave morality” amounted all too obviously to a misreading of the redemptive core of the Christian faith. Nevertheless Nietzscheanism could be read as a regenerating message by Christians themselves. Nietzsche’s madman, after all, who ran to the market place to proclaim the death of God, on the same day entered divers churches to sing his requiem eternam deo. It should therefore not be that surprising that Hofmannsthal took Nietzsche

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to heart. When he was seventeen he set out, together with his teacher, to translate Beyond Good and Evil into French, and many of the early literary exercises contained references to Nietzsche; he was “the temperature,” young Hofmannsthal wrote, in which his thoughts would “crystallize.” Nietzsche was “the doctor” and “the critic of nerves and of nihilism.”16 However, Hofmannsthal’s initial more or less casual testimonies to Nietzsche’s literary influence became more substantial later on, when he delivered his unfortunate Munich lecture of January 1927 on “Literature as the Spiritual Voice of the Nation.” By then Nietzsche had moved into the center of Hofmannsthal’s thought; Nietzsche had become the crisis manager so to speak in the setting of the lamented “disenchantment”17 that marked the German spiritual landscape. In the first of his “Thoughts out of Season” on David Strauss, Nietzsche had thundered against the smug “philistines of culture” to whom he juxtaposed the great heroic “seekers.” Now Hofmannsthal invoked the Nietzschean Gemeinschaft of “seekers,” the bearers of a “productive anarchy,” as he put it. However, as though in an afterthought, he acknowledged their “everproblematic” part in the German spirituality.18 It was finally this irony, this “reserved” attempt to translate Nietzsche into politics, which kept Hofmannsthal’s projection of the “conservative revolution” within the bounds of a poetic meditation. Quite another matter, however, was, what his audience made of his proposal and what momentum it subsequently took on in German public life. Hofmannsthal’s excursion into the slippery ground of the “conservative revolution,” which he regretted even as he was composing his address, was designed to be a venture into cultural criticism rather than into politics. Moreover it was not the nation which he set out in his Munich address of 1927 to eulogize; on the contrary, in comparison with the self-evidence of everything French, as he perceived it, he lamented the German “inner turmoil” and “confusion.” Hofmannsthal really worried about “our confused age”;19 but the specially German “incertitudes” were most tangible, most painful to him. “The fate that burdened Hofmannsthal,” wrote Gerhard Masur rightly, “was the fate of the Occident.”20 But the test of the extent of Nietzsche’s penetration came with those thinkers who, like Max Weber and Bonhoeffer, at first sight seemed by virtue of their intellectual orientation or temperament most immune to a Nietzchean discipleship. Weber, least of all German scholars, was anyone’s disciple. He was entirely and uncompromisingly himself, and the very awareness of being confined to that “iron cage” of disenchantment made him resist any temptation of reenchantment. Nietzsche’s nihilism had an exhilarating metaphoric momentum that was alien to Weber’s stern stoicism; Nietzsche’s “melody” passed him by. This may well be the reason that only recently has Weber’s relation to Nietzsche become a topic of scholarly scrutiny. Nevertheless, it should be noticed that Weber repeatedly fell back on and appropriated Zarathustra’s metaphor of the “last man,” the “most despicable of men” who has “invented happiness.”21 In his cultural criticism Weber followed Nietzsche’s unsparing pessimism, though

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of course, unlike Zarathustra, he was not prepared to project even the mirage of a “dancing star.” But in any case he was reported to have as much as conceded to a student of his that the honesty of present-day’s scholar, and above all philosopher, can be measured by the view he takes of Nietzsche and Marx. Whoever would not admit that he could not have accomplished the bulk of his own work without the contributions of these two, cheats himself and others. The world in which we exist spiritually is to a large extent one shaped by Marx and Nietzsche.22

Saying this, he undoubtedly had himself in mind too. No trace of romanticism, not the slightest disposition towards nostalgia, motivated Weber’s thought. The sense of the “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life” made him dismiss impatiently all wishful thinking. The fate of his times, rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, “disenchantment of the world,” had to be borne “like a man.” For Weber it was a matter of “plain intellectual integrity” to stand firm in a “godless and prophetless time,” to confront the world as it really was, a world of “ruins,” and to resist all temptation of “the ersatz of armchair prophecy.” These remarks were like signposts for a Germany that was deep in trouble and headed for times of turmoil. In the early months of the fledgling Republic after the defeat of November 1918, Weber became almost franticly active in publicism and politics. Alas, his excursions into politics remained altogether without success. With considerable misgivings he consented to join the Peace Delegation to Paris where his part in coping with the war guilt question, to him obviously distasteful, amounted to no more than a rearguard action. Having failed being elected delegate to the National Assembly in Weimar, he continued agitating for a strong plebiscitarian charismatic presidency, a provision which seen in the light of what happened in Germany in and after 1933 was rather problematic.23 But about Weber’s commitment to the cause of freedom there should be no doubt. Had he lived longer—he died prematurely in June 1920— it is reasonable to speculate that the ethos of his personality might have helped strengthen the Republic. Certainly the stern prescriptions contained in Weber’s two great Munich speeches, addressed primarily to German youth, should be read as crucial documents in the history of the German mind. His warnings against “ersatz prophets” and “saviors” betrayed his deep insight into the hazards of twentieth century mass politics. And of course the dreaded “prophets” and “saviors” eventually appeared on the scene. Max Weber certainly figured on the German scene as a solitary stoic who expressed his unyielding distaste for illusionism. In the troubled months immediately before and after defeat of the Vaterland this position found little echo among German intellectuals who preferred to give themselves either to disillusionment or to illusionary visions and dreams. Weber’s “heroic pessimism,” his

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resolve not to succumb to cultural or political palliatives, made him an outsider even among the students who in the late phases of the First World War so much wanted to welcome him as their model. In the later Weimar years, indeed, the apostles of reenchantment kept the upper hand, almost compulsively. As ineffective as, on balance, Max Weber remained politically, his reputation—indeed fame—as a political and social analyst kept spreading and has over time become almost unequalled. In his uncompromising ways he, as Karl Jaspers attested, “actively fulfilled his being in an era of decline.”24 It may appear far-fetched to connect Max Weber with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet the affinity between the two men in confronting the “godless and prophetless” condition is striking. For Bonhoeffer, as for Weber, the encounter with Nietzsche was not a mere academic proposition. As we have seen, Nietzsche hovered over them like a gadfly, a reminder of the dark side of life and moreover of course of the German political and cultural incertitudes. As for Bonhoeffer, the encounter with Nietzsche was crucial for his theological vision. He as much Christianized the great Apostate as the latter infused him, the saintly Christian heretic, with a Lutheran sagacity and audacity. But Bonhoeffer’s this-worldly reading of religion, his preoccupation with what he called the “penultimate” was anything but an escape into Dionysian intoxication. This was Spengler’s and Ju¨ nger’s and Heidegger’s and even Hofmannsthal’s temptation. However, Bonhoeffer’s “before God and with God we live without God” was reminiscent of the agonies of the hermit of Sils Maria. It was a way of conjuring up modern man’s abysmal suffering in a world come of age whose God is the weak and powerless God and the suffering God. In a letter of 1909 Weber had written, “I am a-musical as far as religion is concerned, and I have neither the desire nor the capacity to build religious architectures in myself.” However, he added, “after a careful scrutiny, I may say that I am neither anti-nor a-religious.”25 Put next to this statement a passage from a letter by Bonhoeffer of 1944, “I shall not come out of here [namely jail] a homo religiosus! On the contrary, my fear and distrust of ‘religiosity’ have become greater than ever. . . .”26 Was there, then, not some common ground between the sociologist and the theologian? After all Weber, the student of the sociology of religions, had come to recognize the decisive impact of religion on economic life and to refute the Marxist thesis that man’s consciousness was determined by economic interest. In turn Bonhoeffer, who as a young man had studied Weber’s The Sociology of Religion, met Weber halfway by turning his attention as a theologian to the concrete, profound this-worldliness of religion. Weber talked about the “mature man” who followed the ethic of responsibility. For Bonhoeffer this meant gearing and adjusting all his thoughts and his theology to the awareness of living in a world of disenchantment, which, by his own terms, had “come of age.” The vanishing of certainties has always and everywhere been an inevitable concomitant of modernization. But it was in the German world that modernization was accompanied by a distinct tension between the awareness of the loss

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of certainties and the coming to terms with it on one hand, and a more or less marked quest for new and substitute certainties, political or general cultural ones, on the other hand. The German “discordant history” has in this respect served as a particular challenge, for better or worse. There have indeed been “happier nations,” like England and France, whose history has been more harmonious and whose road into modernity has been a less rocky one. However among the Germans the impact of modernization was both deeply disorienting and extraordinarily challenging. The tension, then, between the German incertitudes and a compensating search for new certitudes has dominated the course of the history of the German mind and of German politics since the turn of the century. Matter-of-factness in this respect was a rare commodity among the Germans. Unlike in England and France, among the Germans the very war experience became a potent myth in which authors like Ernst Ju¨ nger eventually overshadowed authors like Erich Maria Remarque. Unlike a T. S. Eliot in England and a Paul Vale´ ry in France the lament over the disenchanted world was translated into a longing for reenchantment. The vocabulary which went with it was invariably on the holistic if not religious side, and it carried a message that was missionary and fraught with passion. The more the incertitudes weighed on the Germans the more intensely did they pursue avenues of new certitudes. Most German men of mind were left troubled and torn between facing up to the burden of the “void” of modern existence accentuated by what Helmuth Plessner called “the fragmentation” of their country’s legacy from the past, and efforts to overcome it in search for new cohesive canons. Attempts at the invention of traditions, as we have witnessed them in connection with the cult of the “war experience,” in the thought of Oswald Spengler, Ernst Ju¨ nger, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the advocates of Gemeinschaft, in the visions of the Expressionist artists and in the aspirations of Martin Heidegger, in a setting that had only uncertain traditions or in which traditions had been lost, were understandable efforts to give their culture an “idea” that would renew its viability. The challenge of cultural fragmentation combined with political and social unsettledness produced among the Germans both a deepened sensitivity to the laws dictating life in an age of crisis and a heightened potential for delusions that might help them overcome the crisis. Helmuth Plessner’s strictures against the cult of Gemeinschaft and similarly Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s careful defining the place of Gemeinschaft within a democratic order were pointers towards reforming an industrial order which had threatened to disrupt tradition as well as to give rise to those “terribles simplificateurs” who, long ago Jacob Burckhardt had warned, would come over the old Europe. To be sure, among all the people covered here in the past chapters Max Weber, Helmuth Plessner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer stand out among their German contemporaries as unsparing realists determined, each from his perspective, to confront squarely the world as they found it and to “fully endure,” as Jaspers stipulated, the problems of their culture. The ships they each steered

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were on course into a future which called neither for lament over disenchantment nor for illusionary reenchantment and romantic escape into a supposedly “heile Welt.” Earlier I wrote that the first word in the vocabulary of the German crisis and awareness of crisis was Nietzsche, and the last one was National Socialism. Of course, as is well-known, the Nazis had their way of appropriating Nietzsche— with the help of the editorial magic of his sister Elisabeth Fo¨ rster-Nietzsche, who nailed her brother down as the philosopher of the will to power and as apologist for Teutonic bigotry. In general it became all too easy and convenient to coopt the wildest and maddest of Nietzschean metaphors such as “will to power,” “master morality” and “blond beast,” yanking them out of context of the Nietzschean iconoclasm and harnessing them as parents to Nazi orthodoxy.27 Nazism’s way of coping with the German crisis was the propagation and imposition of certitudes. No doubt the German spirit had, as we have seen, been torn since the turn of the century between the distinct consciousness of living in an age of crisis and the quest to overcome it by a holistic message and magic. This tension was least of all evident in the thought of Max Weber, Helmuth Plessner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as they defied all illusions and roadsigns for what Weber called that “mystic flight from reality.” It most agitated men like Oswald Spengler, Ernst Ju¨ nger, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Martin Heidegger. Living in times of dissolution, of vanishing traditions and the receding of faith, was and is not easy, and holding on to old, however fragile, indeed vanishing, certitudes and searching for new, however hazardous, ones, were and are very understandable efforts. The visions of the Expressionist artists and Heidegger’s search for authenticity by themselves were expressions of a genuine hunger for renewal of a civilization that seemed to them atrophied. Franz Marc’s vision of the “Gothic artist without Cathedral and Bible”28 and for a “future spiritual religion” were as genuine chapters of a quest for renewal as was indeed the call of Heidegger, that is the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, for “authenticity.” The whole range between acceptance of the inevitable—the stones—and the quest—for the cathedral—was a legitimate expression of the German incertitudes. It represented the unique positive contribution of the German mind to twentieth-century thought as much as it revealed all its pitfalls. The certitudes, however, that the National Socialist movement and Party brought upon the Germans were of a different order. This is not to say that there was no connection between the neo-conservatives’ like Spengler’s angry antidemocratic pamphleteeering and Ju¨ nger’s adventurism, between Heidegger’s quest for “authenticity” on one hand and the Nazis on the other. Despite all the reservations about Nazism which they had or have developed in the course of time, they all had prepared the ground for it with their fierce rejection of moderation and pragmatism. Even Hofmannsthal with his insightful but ill-advised heralding of a “conservative revolution” must be held responsible for having given encouragement to the antidemocratic wave that swept through Germany beginning in the later twenties.

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The certitude that National Socialism stood for was an ideological one.29 The era following the First World War was an era of integral ideologies: MarxismLeninism, Fascism, National Socialism, which, by contrast to the ideologies of the earlier century—nationalism, liberalism, socialism—developed tight orthodoxies of their own, enforceable by a mythical “general will” backed up by violence and terror. These ideologies constituted political ersatz-religions which in the setting of fragmented values and of a secularized world replaced the perceived lost unity of values and the receding of established religions with a vengeance in the form of all-encompassing and doctrinaire secular systems of belief. There is a paradox, but a potent one, inherent in the fact that it was the German incertitudes, the burden of the German incertitudes, which catapulted the German public mind into just the opposite, namely adherence to an ideology which vouched for the realization of dreams and aspirations that the multiple crises of moderization seemed to have shattered. It would be wrong to ignore the consensual basis that carried the National Socialist revolution to victory and which even throughout the horrors of the Second World War sustained the regime. The Third Reich constituted a uniquely plebiscitarian dictatorship, a dictatorship paradoxically not against but backed up by the people, a people thirsting for security, spiritual and material, and no longer able and willing to live with its incertitudes (Figure 10.1). In 1930 Karl Jaspers, even before he became fully aware of the menace from the side of the Nazi movement, wrote about the “mutual deception and selfdeception” of the ideologies,30 and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a reflection entitled “After Ten Years,” written down for his friends at Christmastime of 1942, characterized the Nazi regime as that “great masquerade of evil” which, playing havoc with all ethical concepts, appeared “disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice.”31 Finally the “sirens of nostalgia”32 were marshalled to mobilize the masses and to lead the country into the modern world of the twentieth century. But, whether or not the Nazi consensus was built upon consent, intoxication, or terror, the Volksgemeinschaft it claimed to represent was a prison. The reenchantment of a disenchanted world turned out to be a myth, that cathedral in fact was a phantom construct, but the stones which men like Max Weber, Helmuth Plessner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer assembled turned out to furnish a firmer and more lasting foundation, an appropriate one, for the “world come of age” in which the Germans after the catastrophe of the Third Reich are destined to live. POSTSCRIPT During the Second World War the battle of Stalingrad in early 1943 was the decisive turning point against the German armies in the East, and the “Battle of the Bulge” in late 1944 sealed the fate of the German armies in the West, sweeping away all illusions of last minute “wonder weapons” and an Endsieg.

Figure 10.1. For the exaltation of millions . . . Albert Speer, “The Cathedral of Light.” Alignment of beams around the Zeppelinfield in Nuremberg at the occasion of the Nazi Party Rallies.

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Many German cities—Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, and Kassel—were left in ruins, and Ludwig Meidner’s visionary “apocalyptic landscapes” became an everyday reality. “Unconditional surrender” left Germany on her knees and partitioned, and a cloud of guilt and shame moved over the whole land. For the moment it appeared as though the “German incertitudes” had been resolved at long last, but, alas, they only boiled down to certitudes of doom and damnation. But the debate over Germany’s identity and her place in the world that had suffered so much from her aggression and criminality was not long in coming. It was Karl Jaspers who stepped into the breach. The metaphorical “ruins” about which he had written between the wars had become a brutal reality. In late November 1945, together with Alfred Weber—Max Weber’s brother and a distinguished sociologist in his own right—and a younger publicist, Dolf Sternberger, he launched a journal entitled Die Wandlung. As its title suggested, it was designed to revive a dialogue within the German public that might lead to a new departure. Then, early in 1946, he delivered a much noticed lecture in Heidelberg on the question of German guilt,33 which amounted to a courageous and dignified, yet melancholy, facing up to the crimes committed in the recent past in the name of the German people and to a judicious sorting out of guilt and expiation. That same year, Friedrich Meinecke, the dean of the German historians who, like Jaspers, had always remained aloof from the Nazi madness, published his own accounting for the “German catastrophe,”34 which, falling back on an ambitious historical sweep, also sought to explore “avenues for renewal.” But men like Jaspers and Meinecke were carryovers from earlier days, and before long the public debate over “whither Germany” was seized by members of the younger generation. As a matter of fact, after the war the momentum came from thinkers of the Left since the Right had been, for the moment at least, tainted by closeness to the discredited regime. Bertolt Brecht, returning from exile, undercut his Marxist militancy with his indomitable wit and sarcasm and with his unhappy yet deep love for his Germany—“pale mother” Germany, as he called her. O Germany, how torn you are Not with yourself alone! In spells of cold and darkness Let one be the other’s like. And had you such beautiful meadows And vivid cities galore; You would yourself be trusting And child’s play would be all.35

But dreams of a return to a heile Welt were dreamt out. Indeed, Ju¨ rgen Habermas, the foremost representative in the post-war era of the so-called Frankfurt School of Social Thought and one of the most vociferous and influential, if not

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aggressive, spokesmen for the German Left intelligentsia, was on the warpath against all forms of metaphysical speculation and retrospective exploration, and came to insist upon a relentless and radical linkage between the commands of rationality and political praxis. Auschwitz was, he insisted, the landmark that irretrievably blocked the road into the past for the Germans. With Habermas the German university had taken a big step into “modernity” and had, so it seemed, overcome the traditional unsettling “incertitudes.”36 The radicals, however, could not claim a monopoly in the shaping of public opinion in the German Federal Republic, and this may have been for the better. Dialogue about cultural matters is as crucial as political argument to the functioning of a commonweal. Of course, Oswald Spengler’s corrective tract The Hour of Decision, the late “conversion” of Ernst Ju¨ nger, and the so-called Kehre of Heidegger were in effect but rearguard statements of a cultural criticism that had run its course and had been found wanting. It had lost the enormous momentum and appeal that it had commanded between the wars. But what was to fill the void in the rough and sobering climate of unequivocal defeat and collapse? If the road back to that heile Welt had proven illusionary, was there not a road back to a normalcy that would allow the Germans to live without endless self-flagellation? The German response to the radicals was initiated by the so-called “New Right.” Botho Strauss, Germany’s leading playwright, became the spiritus rector of the group, and the novelist and dramatist Martin Walser entered the public argument over the place of the Holocaust in public memory. The manifesto, so to speak, of the “New Right” was an article by Strauss. In his essay “The Swelling Song of the Billy Goat,” published in Der Spiegel in 1993,37 he chided his countrymen for their “self-hatred” and for being “hotbeds of the sinister Enlightenment,” and redefined a German fundamentalist opposition to a “modern egotistical heathenism.” Walser vented a widespread but nevertheless suppressed resentment against exploitation of Auschwitz, which, he argued, was held over the Germans like a “moral cudgel.”38 Were the Germans not, as the Right reiterated, a “normal people” after all? The demand for normalization after the terrible war and after the horrors of Auschwitz came to be the trademark of the “New Right.” But had not the “German incertitudes” become deepened, if anything, by the back and forth between a Habermas and a Strauss? Between them, alas, there was and still is no dialogue, but only mutual provocation and exasperation. Radicalism here and fundamentalism there have become the order of the day in the German public discourse. How and when will the German nation, now at long last reunified, find its peace with itself? NOTES 1. See the beautiful, if rather extreme, sentence in the Preface of H. A. L. Fisher’s classic A History of Europe (Boston, 1939): “Men wiser than I have discerned in history

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a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.” 2. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and other Germans. Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1976), 8f. 3. See in this connection Fritz Stern, “Der Nationalsozialismus als Versuchung,” Otfried Hofius, Ed., Reflexionen finsterer Zeit (Tu¨ bingen, 1984). 4. “Die prinzipiellsten Probleme der Welt-und Menschenwirklichkeit,” Ernst Robert Curtius, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (Stuttgart, Berlin, 1932), 28. 5. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. Philosopher—Psychologist—Antichrist (New York, 1956), 356f. 6. Michael Hamburger, “A Craving for Hell. Nietzsche and the Nietzscheans,” Encounter (October 1962), 32ff. 7. Thomas Mann, “Nietzsches Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung,” Die Neue Rundschau (Stockholm) (Herbst 1947), 382. 8. Oswald Spengler, “Nietzsche und sein Jahrhundert,” Reden und Aufsa¨ tze (Munich, 1937), 123. 9. Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God Adolf Hitler (New York, 1977), 279. 10. Crane Brinton thus distinguished between the unabashed, literal Nietzsche disciples and partisans of the “Master” in the dionysian rebellion, ready to topple the whole structure of “bourgeois” hypocrisy, and those who welcomed the Nietzschean inspiration as a corrective for a decadent civilization and as an instrument of cultural renewal; Brinton, Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA, 1941), 184–185. 11. (Munich, 1917). 12. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being. The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York, 1990), 137. 13. George Steiner, “Der gottlose Theologe,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “Bilder und Zeiten,” September 23, 1989. 14. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, 1959), 199. 15. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, 1971), 9. 16. I have taken these quotations of Hofmannsthal from Hans Steffen, “Hofmannsthal und Nietzsche,” Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur, Ed. Bruno Hillerbrand, II (Tu¨ bingen, 1978), 4f; see also Bruno Hillerbrand, “Einfu¨ hrung,” I, 21–25. 17. Hofmannsthal used the word “Entgo¨ tterung”; “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation,” Gesammelte Werke. Prosa IV (Frankfurt/M., 1955), 399. 18. Ibid., 398–400. 19. Briefwechsel zwischen George und Hofmannsthal (Berlin, 1938), 154, quoted in Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday. Studies in European Culture 1890–1914 (New York, 1961), 134. 20. Ibid. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Vorrede 5, Nietzsche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, 1968), 12–15. Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” Gesammelte Aufsa¨ tze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tu¨ bingen, 1922), 204 and “Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917–1919,” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17 (Tubingen, 1992), 92.

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22. Eduard Baumgarten ed., Max Weber. Werk und Person. Dokumente (Tu¨ bingen, 1964), 554f. 23. For a judicious treatment of the question see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1974), 410–411. 24. Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (New York, 1933), 37. 25. Marianne Weber, Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild (Tu¨ bingen, 1926), 339 (italics in the original), quoted in Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday. Studies in European Culture 1890–1914 (New York, 1961), 191. 26. Letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge, Tegel, September 21, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, New Greatly Enlarged Edition, Ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York, 1972), 135. 27. See on this subject especially Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 14–20; Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley, 1992), 232ff. 28. “Gotiker ohne Dom und Bibel.” 29. See for this subject in particular Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien. Eine Geschichte politischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1982). 30. Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin, New York, 1979), 16. 31. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, New Greatly Enlarged Edition (New York, 1972), 4. 32. I take this metaphor from an essay by Stephen Spender, “Hatred and Nostalgia in Death’s Dream Kingdom,” The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley, 1969), 215, writing: “The sirens of nostalgia sang to the speeches of Mussolini.” 33. Karl Jaspers, “Die Schuldfrage: 1946,” Lebensfragen der deutschen Politik (Munich, 1963), 36–114. 34. Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe. Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Wiesbaden, 1946). 35. Bertolt Brecht, “Deutschland 1952,” Gedichte 1948–1956, Gedichte VII (Frankfurt/M., 1964), 95. 36. For an exposition of the work of Ju¨ rgen Habermas see Stephen K. White, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge, 1995). 37. “Anschwellender Bockgesang,” Der Spiegel, 6 (1993), 202–207. Literally translated into the Greek, the word Bockgesang actually means “tragedy.” 38. Martin Walser, “Ein Erinnern wider den Zeitgeist,” Das Parlament, 13 (23 October 1998).

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 116 adventurer, 45–48, 51 Alewyn, Richard, 71 Andrian, Leopold von, 75n. 49 Arco-Valley, Count Anton, 38 Arendt, Hannah, 111, 112 Aschheim, Steven E, 7 Auschwitz, 151 Bagehot, Walter, 77 Barbusse, Henri, 20 Barlach, Ernst, 91, 94, 98, 99 “The Cathedrals,” 99 Barmen Synod, 128, 129 Barre`s, Maurice, 20 Barth, Karl, 126–130, 132, 135 Bauhaus, 94, 98–100 Becker, Jean-Jacques, 20 Beckmann, Max, 90, 93, 94 Bell, Bishop George Kennedy Allen, 129 Benjamin, Walter, 52, 114 Bethge, Eberhard, 134 Der Blaue Reiter, 90–94, 98, 100, 102n. 30 Blavatsky, Mme. Helena Petrovna, 90 Bleyl, Fritz, 90

Bloomsbury Circle, 20 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 84, 112, 123–138 passim, 143, 145–148 and Barmen Synod, 128, 129 and Karl Barth, 126–130, 132, 135 and the Church Dispute, 128, 130 and Hans von Dohnanyi, 131 and Mahatma Gandhi, 126 and Martin Heidegger, 132–134, 138n. 44 and So¨ ren Kierkegaard, 132–134 and Martin Luther, 125–128, 132, 135, 145 and maturity, 135, 145 and modernity, 131 in New York (1930–1931), 126, (JuneJuly 1939), 130–131 and Reinhold Niebuhr, 131 and Friedrich Nietzsche, 132–133, 145 and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., 126 and Resistance, 131 and Max Weber, 132, 134–136, 145 and Maria von Wedemeyer, 127 Bonhoeffer, Karl, 125 Bonhoeffer, Klaus, 134 Bonhoeffer, Paula, 125

170 Bowra, C.M., 19 Brecht, Bertolt, 24, 150 Brinton, Crane, 141 Brooke, Rupert, 13, 15 Die Bru¨ cke, 90, 91, 94, 98, 100 Bru¨ ning, Heinrich, 82 Burckhardt, Carl Jacob, 74n. 39 Burckhardt, Jacob, 1–2, 140, 146 Burgfriede, 20, 21 Burke, Edmund, 65 Cafe´ Griensteidl, 61, 63 Carlyle, Thomas, 1 Cathedral and the Stones, the, 8, 18, 24, 40, 46, 47, 79, 98, 101 Ce´ line, Louis-Ferdinand, 55 Church Dispute, 128, 130 Cubists, 89, 91, 98 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 5, 7, 8, 33, 105, 123, 141 Dadaism, 98 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 85n. 3 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 46 “Degenerate Art” Exhibition (1937), 96 Dehio, Ludwig, 7 Delp, Alfred, 115, 116 Diederichs, Eugen, 36 Dix, Otto, 100 Dohnanyi, Hans von, 131 Dollfuß, Engelbert, 69 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 55 Dun Scotus, 107 Durkheim, Emile, 77 Eisner, Kurt, 36, 38 Eliade, Mircea, 87, 88 Eliot, T.S., 3, 16, 146 enchantment/disenchantment/reenchantment, 9, 14, 16, 24, 36, 38–39, 52, 53, 108, 136, 139–148 passim Expressionism, 15, 19, 87–104 passim, 142, 147 Fauves, 89 Feininger, Lyonel, 91 “The Cathedral of Socialism,” 94, 98– 99

Index Fellowship of Reconciliation, 20 Flex, Walter, 23, 142 Fo¨ rster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 147 Franzen, Winfried, 111 Freisler, Roland, 86n. 28 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 108, 115 Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, 32 Fussell, Paul, 14 Futurists, 89 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 118n Gay, Peter, 71, 97, 139 Geibel, Emanuel, 3 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, 71, 77–86 passim, 90, 114, 140, 143, 146 George, Stefan, 19, 21, 116, 117 “German Incertitudes,” the, 4, 5, 8, 47, 48, 64, 68, 95, 140, 142, 145–146, 150–151 “German Question,” the, 3–5, 47, 139, 141 Gide, Andre´ , 45 Gierke, Otto von, 79 Goebbels, Josef, 48, 94, 95, 103n. 55 Goerdeler, Carl, 83 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 32, 34–37 Graves, Robert, 15, 16 Great War, the (First World War), 2, 3, 9, 13–16, 20, 46–48, 61, 68, 87, 93, 95, 145 Gropius, Walter, 94, 98, 99 Große deutsche Kunstausstellung (1937), 95 Grosz, George, 100 Gru¨ newald, Matthias, 89, 97 Habermas, Ju¨ rgen, 106, 115, 150–151 Hamburger, Michael, 141 Heckel, Erich, 90 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4 Heidegger, Martin, 56, 59n. 51, 105–121 passim, 132–134, 138n. 44, 142, 145– 147, and Hannah Arendt, 111, 112 and Wilhelm Dilthey, 109 and Ho¨ lderlin, 116, 117, 142 and Die Kehre, 116, 117, 142, 151 and modernity, 110

Index and National Socialism, 111–115 and the rectorship 105–121 passim, 142 Sein und Zeit, 108, 109, 133, 134, 147 and Sophocles, 108 and Oswald Spengler, 108 and technology, 109, 110, 142 Hellingrath, Norbert von, 116 Henderson, Sir Nevile and the “cathedral of ice,” 100 Heraclitus, 52 Herzog, Roman, 57, 59n. 52 Hesse, Hermann, 22 Heuss, Theodor, 59n. 52 Heym, Georg, 17–19 Hitler, Adolf, 39, 47, 80, 95, 127–128, 130, 139 Hobsbawm, E.J., 2 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 8, 61–75 passim, 83, 88, 108, 111, 117, 142–143, 145–147 and Edmund Burke, 65 and the “conservative revolution,” 72, 143 and fascism, 70 and the First World War, 63, 65 and Gemeinschaft, 71 Jedermann (1911), 66, 67 Letter of Lord Chandos (1902), 64, 70, 88 and Adam Mu¨ ller, 65 and the Salzburg Festival, 66, 68, 69 The Salzburg Great Theater of the World (1921), 66 “Das Schrifttum . . .” (1927), 74n. 38, 152n. 17 Der Tor und der Tod (1893), 64, 66 on Max Weber, 74n. 48 Ho¨ lderlin, Friedrich, 116–117, 142 Homer, 52 Hook, Sidney, 105 Hroma´ dka, Josef, 130 Huber, Professor Kurt, 84, 115 Hughes, H. Stuart, 7 Husserl, Edmund, 107 “ideas of 1914,” the, 23, 26n. 38, 35, 93

171 James, Henry, 14 Jaspers, Karl, 1, 3, 8, 33, 37, 109, 123, 145–146, 148, 150 Joll, James, 2 Ju¨ nger, Ernst, 23, 45–59 passim, 61, 69, 116–117, 142, 145–147, 151 Das abenteuerliche Herz (1938), 54 and Bolshevik Russia, 52 and destiny (Schicksal), 48–49, 56, and fascism, 52 and the French Foreign Legion, 50 and Martin Heidegger, 59n. 51 and Adolf Hitler, 48, 52, 54–55 and inner emigration 54 On the Marble Cliffs (1939), 54 militarist, militarism, 56 and modernity, 52 and National Socialism, 48, 54 and the Paris air raid, 55 and Peace, 52, 55–56 and Resistance, 55, 56 and Oswald Spengler, 48 as stylist, 50, 52, 54 and technology, 52, 53 and totalitarianism, 52, 56 and total mobilization, 52, 53 and the war experience, 50 and the “woodsman,” 56 and the “warrior,” 51, 53, 54, 56 and the “worker,” 51–52, 53, 54, 56 Ju¨ nger, Ernstel, 55 Ju¨ nger, Friedrich Georg, 54 Justi, Ludwig, 96 Kandinsky, Wassily, 88, 90–92, 94, 102nn. 21, 30 Kaufmann, Walter, 141 Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm, 55 Kierkegaard, So¨ ren, 132, 139 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 90, 93 Klages, Ludwig, 82 Klee, Paul, 15, 87–89, 91, 93, 94, 98, 99 “Cathedral,” frontispiece Klo¨ res, Hans, 35 Kohl, Helmut, 57, 59n. 52 Kokoschka, Oskar, 90 Kollwitz, Ka¨ the, 21, 22, 96 Kracauer, Siegfried, 79

172 Kraus, Karl, 24, 63, 68, 69 Kreisau Circle, 82–84, 115 Krockow,, Count Chrtistian von, 81 Kubin, Alfred, 91 Kultur vs. Zivilisation, 33, 35, 58n. 36, 69, 78, 108, 114 Kunst, Bishop Hermann, 136n. 7 Langbehn, Julius, 82 Lawrence, T.E., 46, 47 Leiper, Henry Smith, 130 Lenin, 112, 148 Liebermann, Max, 96, 97 Loris-Melikow, Count Michael T., 61 Lo¨ with, Karl, 38, 113 Luka´ cs, Georg, 97 Lu¨ tgert, Wilhelm, 133, 138n. 44 Luther, Martin, 4, 125–126, 127, 128, 132, 135, 136n. 7, 145 Macke, August, 91–93 Maine, Sir Henry, 79 Malraux, Andre´ , 46, 47 Mann, Golo, 29 Mann, Thomas, 7, 8, 13, 29, 47, 48, 54, 70–72, 141 Marc, Franz, 13, 88, 90–93, 98, 147 Marx, Karl, 4, 32, 33, 79, 112, 141, 144– 145 “the cathedral of Marxism,” 99–100, 104n. 62 Masur, Gerhard, 143 Matisse, Henri, 96 Maurras, Charles, 20 Meidner, Ludwig, 18–19, 93, 150 Meinecke, Friedrich, 150 Metzger, Franz Josef, 115–116 Mierendorff, Carlo, 84 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 94 Mitterand, Franc¸ ois, 57, 59n. 52 modernism, 14, 19, 89, 92, 97 modernity, modernization, 1–4, 8, 15, 110, 131, 140, 146, 151 Moissi, Alexander, 68 Moltke, Helmuth James von, 82, 83, 115 Mommsen, Hans, 84 Mu¨ ller, Adam, 65, 77

Index Munch, Edvard, 89 Musil, Robert, 5, 8 National Socialism, 4, 9, 24, 39, 53, 79, 80, 82, 84, 94, 97, 100, 105–121 passim, 127–130, 132, 135, 141–142 Neue Sachlichkeit, 100 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 131 Niemo¨ ller, Martin, 128 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4–7, 14, 15, 32, 33, 45, 46, 53, 71, 89–92, 98, 111, 132– 133, 140–145, 147 No-Conscription Fellowship, 20 Nolde, Emil, 88–90, 94, 98, 103n. 55 Nolte, Ernst, 38 Orwell, George, 115 Owen, Wilfred, 16 Plato, 112, 115 Plessner, Helmuth, 4, 10n. 14, 81, 82, 84, 85n. 8, 86n. 34, 146–148 Post-Expressionism, 101 postmodernism, 14 Pound, Ezra, 16 Rathenau, Walther, 17, 47, 57n. 9 Redlich, Josef, 65 Reinhardt, Max, 66, 68 Remarque, Erich Maria, 23, 24, 146 Renn, Ludwig, 24 Resistance, 55, 56, 131 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 88, 117 Ringer, Fritz, 136n. 2 Romanticism, 4 Rorty, Richard, 106 Rosenberg, Alfred, 95, 114 Rosenberg, Isaac, 16 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 81, 82, 84, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 85n. 1 Russell, Bertrand, 20 Saint-Exupe´ ry, Antoine de, 8, 46, 47 Salomon, Ernst von, 46, 47 Sassoon, Siegfried, 15, 16, 19, 20, 25n. 28 Schadewaldt, Wolfgang, 119n. 36

Index Schardt, Alois, 97, 98, 103n. 54 Scheler, Max, 13, 105 Schicksal, 33, 39, 48, 50, 140 Schlegel, Friedrich, 78 Schleicher, Ru¨ diger, 127 Schlemmer, Oskar, 89, 91, 94 Schmidt-Rottluff, 90 Scholl, Hans and Sophie, 115 Scho¨ nberg, Arnold, 92, 102n. 30 Schwitters, Kurt, 103n. 61 “The Cathedral of Erotic Misery,” 99 Shaw, Bernard, 20 Simmel, Georg and the adventurer, 45 Sonderweg, 4, 78–80 Sontag, Susan, 114 Spann, Othmar, 80 Speer, Albert, 99, 100, 149 the “Cathedral of Light,” 99, 149 Speidel, Colonel Hans, 55 Spengler, Oswald, 29–43 passim, 80, 82, 100, 108, 141, 142, 145–147, 151 and Caesarism 37, 39 and fascism, National Socialism, 39–40 and the Great War, 35 The Hour of Decision (1933), 39–40, 151 image of America, 34 Spranger, Eduard, 119n. 34 “Stab in the Back” legend, 23 Steiner, George, 51, 105, 142 Stern, Fritz, 113 Strauss, Botho, 151 Strauss, Richard, 65, 66 Stu¨ lpnagel, General Karl-Heinrich von, 55 Taylor, A.J.P., 4 Thieß, Frank, 58n. 40 Toller, Ernst, 36 To¨ nnies, Ferdinand, 78–81, 84, 85nn. 3, 8, 86n. 34 Totalitarianism, totalitarian, 2 tradition and modernity, 1, 3 Trakl, Georg, 18, 19

173 Troeltsch, Ernst, 35, 93 Troost, Ludwig, 95, 99 union sacre´ e, 20 Vale´ ry, Paul, 3, 146 Van Gogh, Vincent, 89 Vico Giambattista, 33 Vie´ not, Pierre, 10n. 20 Vinnen, Karl, 96 Visser’t Hooft, Willem A., 128 Volksgemeinschaft, 24, 79, 81, 82, 84, 113, 148 Walser, Martin, 151 War experience (Kriegserlebnis), 23, 24, 51, 146 Weber, Alfred, 150 Weber, Marianne, 34, 38 Weber, Max, 1, 8, 29–43 passim, 70–72, 108–109, 112, 132, 134–136, 143– 148, 150 American trip (1904), 34 and Caesarism, 37 and fascism, National Socialism, 38 and the Great War, 35 and the Lauenstein Conferences, 36 and the mature man, 40, 135–136, 145 “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), 35–37, 70, 81 “Science as a Vocation” (1917), 36, 70 Weizsa¨ cker, Carl Friedrich von, 105 Welte, Bernhard, 117 Whitehead, Alfred North and adventure, 45, 56, 57 Willett, John, 97 Wolin, Richard, 142 Woolf, Virginia, 88 Worringer, Wilhelm, 91, 100 Yeats, William Butler, 46 Youth Movement, 15, 50, 80–83, 98, 117 Ziegler, Adolf, 95 Zuckmayer, Carl, 13 Zweig, Arnold, 24

About the Author KLEMENS VON KLEMPERER is L. Clark Seelye Professor of History Emeritus at Smith College. His books include German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938–1945.