-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,(C) 1994
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd. 27 Wrights Lane London W8 3TZ, England
--[11]--
10
Culture and Conquest
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in 1749, seven years after Frederick the
Great ascended the throne of the still-fledgling Kingdom of Prussia. He died
in 1832, seventeen years after the Battle of Waterloo, when Prussia was
solidly established as one of Europe's 'great powers' and already outbidding
Austria for the 'heart and soul' of Germany. He did not live to witness the
events and personalities that shaped Germany and the German people during the
last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, his life spanned a
crucial and formative period of German history; and for much of his life, his
position and status enabled him to exert a significant influence on German
attitudes and thought. Like Mann a century later, Goethe regarded himself as
sophisticated, cosmopolitan, 'European'. At the same time, and again like
Mann, he felt himself to be utterly and distinctively German. Both men used
their understanding of the relationship between Germany and the world beyond
to investigate the qualities of German self-definition and cultural identity,
and both were obsessed with the nature of the 'German soul'. For Goethe, the
'German soul' was largely uncharted terrain, inviting exhaustive exploration.
Confronted with the emergence of German nationalism during the War of
Liberation, Goethe was alarmed. The German people, he had concluded, could
not be trusted with political responsibility. They were unsuited, he felt,
for political activity; and nationalism. in their hands, could only be
misused. Why should this be so? In part, Goethe believed, because the
Germans, unlike other major European peoples, were claustrophobically hemmed
in and effectively land-locked. Their outlets to the Atlantic were
restricted, and the Baltic was a tamed, domesticated sea. How then, Goethe
wondered, could the German people find space in which to expand, extend
themselves, reach outwards? In what direction could they hope to aspire, to
express and fulfil man's inherent yearning to overreach and transcend
himself, to probe new frontiers, to conquer new dominions? For Germany,
hemmed in and land-locked as she was, such an impulse, if translated into
political terms, must necessarily assume the form of territorial expansion,
and this would inevitably lead to militaristic aggression.
For Goethe, there was only one domain in which the German people could safely
and validly reach out and extend themselves - the domain of culture and the
spirit. Germany, Goethe maintained, was a nation not in any conventional
political sense, but in spirit and culture. As an embodiment of these
principles, the German people could be a beacon to the entire world,
surpassing even the achievements of France, believed at the time to be the ne
plus ultra of civilisation. If the German people's energy and resources were
translated into political reality instead, they could be dangerous. If they
were converted to a political reality oriented towards petty nationalism,
they could be more dangerous still. And if nationalism were embraced under
the aegis of Prussian militarism, the results would be catastrophic- not
immediately, perhaps, but unquestionably within the span of a century.
Translated into modern terminology, Goethe felt that German nationalism,
especially if pursued through Prussian militarism, could not possibly
accommodate the spectrum encompassed by the German collective psyche- the
spectrum running from the irrational to the hyper-rational. By all means, he
insisted, let Germany and the German people lead the world in philosophy, in
music, in the arts, in creative endeavours that served to express and
transmit culture and the spirit. Let rationality and irrationality contend
with each other, cohabit, remain in opposition or achieve equilibrium in that
sphere. Let Germany establish a cultural and spiritual imperium analogous to
the political imperium of Napoleonic France; but for her own sake, as well as
for that of the civilised world, Germany must not attempt to compete in the
arena of politics and war.
France, under Napoleon, aspired to European, if not world, domination, but
Napoleon was no Hitler, and his aspirations were tempered by moderation, by
adherence to a rigorous legal code, by a sense of responsibility and by
humanity. Should Germany develop aspirations to political domination, Goethe
questioned whether they would be so tempered. The Germans, he feared, would
prove incapable of controlling themselves, incapable of self-restraint. In
consequence, he saw the energies released by the War of Liberation as
tantamount to a genie escaping from a bottle - a genie that would assume a
form similar to Frankenstein's monster.
In retrospect, of course, one can appreciate Goethe's foresight. One can also
recognise how his insistence on spiritual and cultural leadership, if allied
to social and political ambition, could themselves become pernicious,
providing a foundation for a theology of racial supremacy. At the time,
however, Goethe's pronouncements. only threw many educated Germans into a
quandary, and fostered an incipient collective schizophrenia.
In 1813, when the War of Liberation erupted and a new Prussian army rose
phoenix-like from the remnants of the old, Goethe was already in his
sixty-fourth year. For more than a quarter of a century, he had been a
minister, then 'Geheimrat' or Privy Councillor, of the tiny Duchy of
Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, a minor principality in itself, little more than a
Ruritanian city-state. But Weimar was closely associated with the powerful
Kingdom of Prussia, and Goethe's influence extended far beyond Weimar
itself-to Prussia and beyond, to the whole of Germany. As a result he loomed
even larger in German consciousness than had Frederick the Great sixty years
before.
When the armies created and led by Yorck and Gneisenau took the field, they
found themselves pitted not just against the French, but against the voice of
Goethe - the voice of a veritable oracle and demi-god. On the one hand, then,
Germans were confronted by the. authoritative voice of their collective
father-figure, admonishing them and offering his own idealised vision of a
nation and people dedicated to culture and the spirit. On the other hand,
they were seduced by the feverish hysteria of war and its promises of martial
glory, a newly discovered collective identity, a nationalistic
self-definition based on prowess at arms, an exhilarating atmosphere of
fraternity and solidarity. Many Germans, and not just the well-educated, were
faced with a painful moral dilemma; and whatever the choice they made, they
were to be haunted by guilt and self-recrimination for the path not taken.
In the end there could only be one conclusion. Goethe's voice was drowned out
by the intoxication and militaristic euphoria sweeping the country; and for
Germany's youth at the time - a generation he prided himself on having shaped
and moulded - he was supplanted as 'role model' by the likes of Gneisenau and
Yorck. Young Germans of 1813 no longer dreamed of becoming great composers,
poets or philosophers, but only of becoming great soldiers, great warriors.
The achievements of the Prussian army during the last two years of the
Napoleonic Wars, while not perhaps as dazzling as later commentators claimed,
were still impressive enough to justify pride and self-congratulation.
Goethe's indifference to such things was perplexing and often offensive. A
few actually dared to accuse him of treason. Even old friends and proteges
were upset. One, for example, a Prussian officer, visited him in the autumn
of 1813, shortly after the triumphant Battle of Leipzig, and found that there
was, frankly, one thing that did not now greatly appeal to me about Goethe,
and that was his lack of patriotic enthusiasm about our recent brilliant
victories and the expulsion of Napoleon from Germany. Towards all this he
maintained a remarkably cool and critical attitude, and even waxed very
eloquent in the praise of the Emperor Napoleon's many brilliant qualities.[1]
Stung by criticism, Goethe replied, but in a characteristically haughty and
ambiguous way that did little to appease his detractors:
Don't think for a minute that I am indifferent to great ideals such as
freedom, the nation, the fatherland. No; we carry these ideals within us;
they are part of our nature, and no man can divest himself of them. Moreover,
I am deeply interested in Germany. It has often been a bitter grief for me to
think of the German people, so praiseworthy in its individuals and so pitiful
as a whole.[2]
More than anything else, Goethe seems to have felt embittered, seeing himself
deposed as the unofficial potentate presiding over German thought. The German
people seemed to him like wayward and unruly children, defying the sage
advice of their self-appointed but universally acknowledged father. Prompted
less probably by paternal solicitude than by petulance and spite, he flaunted
his personal power by pulling strings and ensuring that his own son, August,
was banned from service in the field. August suffered grievously in
consequence, incurring accusations of favouritism, weakness and cowardice.
The opprobrium visited upon him by his now uniformed, booted and spurred
contemporaries drove him to alcoholism and an early death. For this and for
everything else, Goethe never really forgave the German people. During the
remainder of his life, he was to be accoladed as a titan throughout Europe,
but his relationship with Germany was to constitute a state of armed
neutrality.
His legacy, however, was to endure. During what remained of the nineteenth
century and during the first decade of the twentieth, German artists and
thinkers repeatedly invoked the ideal of a nation dedicated not to political
or territorial ambitions, but to culture and the spirit. Among the most
prominent early exponents of this ideal was a Jew, Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856). After Goethe and Holderlin, Heine was the greatest German poet
of the nineteenth century. In the years following Goethe's death, he assumed
his predecessor's unofficial mantle of national bard. Even more than Goethe,
Heine saw himself as a 'citizen of the world' - indeed, it was he who coined
that phrase - and spent much of his life in exile. Like Goethe, he immersed
himself in scrutiny of the 'German soul' and its relation to Western culture,
to Western civilisation and Christianity. And like Goethe, Heine issued
repeated warnings about the dangers of German, and especially Prussian,
nationalism.
In one famous passage, Heine inveighs against the uniquely Germanic
demagogue-thinker who 'will be terrible because he allies himself with the
primitive powers of nature, can conjure up the demonic forces of ancient
German pantheism'.[3] Such a figure, he warns, will kindle 'that lust for
battle which we find among the ancient Germans and which fights not in order
to destroy, nor in order to win, but simply in order to fight'.[4]
Christianity constitutes a bulwark against this dangerous impulse, but a
fragile Christianity - and this is its finest merit - subdued to a certain
extent that brutal Germanic lust for battle, but could not destroy it, and if
some day that restraining talisman, the Cross, falls to. pieces, then the
savagery of the old warriors will explode again, the mad berserker rage about
which the Nordic poets have told so much. This talisman is decaying, and the
day will come when it will sorrily disintegrate. The old stone gods will then
arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe the dust of centuries from their
eyes, and Thor will at last leap up with his giant hammer and smash the
Gothic cathedrals.[5]
Stressing the distinction between the world of the mind and the world of
politics, Heine goes on to admonish the rest of Europe:
Don't smile at the visionary who expects in the realm of reality the same
revolution that has taken place in the realm of the: intellect. The thought
precedes the deed as lighting precedes thunder. German thunder is of course
truly German: it is not very nimble but rumbles along rather slowly. It will
come, though,, and if some day you hear a crash such as has never been heard
before in world history, you will know the German thunder has finally reached
its mark . . . A play will be performed in Germany compared with which the
French Revolution might seem merely an innocent idyll [6]
Goethe's ideal - cultural and spiritual achievement taking precedence over
politics and nationalism - was promulgated by Heine and others not just in
Germany, but in Austria and the old Habsburg imperium as well. For most of
Germany, however, and especially for Prussia, the first intoxicating draught
of nationalistic fervour had proved addictive, and there could be no going
back. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the Prussian army grew into
the largest and most powerful military machine in Europe west of the Russian
frontier; and, having redressed the humiliation of Jena and Auerstadt with
such victories as Leipzig, it proceeded to deck itself anew with the laurels
of Frederick the Great's time. Yet nationalism in Germany was now no longer
dependent solely on emotional fervour and the instinctual solidarity fostered
by war. It was beginning to evolve a persuasive rationale, to establish
itself on a solid, respectable and imposing philosophical foundation.
When Goethe first embarked on his literary career in the 1770s, his closest
friend and collaborator was the writer, aesthetician and philosopher Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herder developed in the young Goethe a
pantheistic love and reverence for nature and the natural world. He opened
Goethe's eyes to the beauty, power and resonance of folk tales, folk songs
and folk poetry. He extolled Shakespeare, Homer and the Ossian poems of James
Macpherson, and developed a concept for which he coined the term
'Volksgeist', usually translated as 'folk soul'.
For Herder, history was not shaped or determined by a human agency. It was
the working out, and manifestation, of divine or cosmic principles or laws.
These expressed themselves through the folk soul of cultures and peoples. The
folk soul was a people's collective soul and destiny. Its relationship to the
divine was ultimately analogous to that of the individual soul. It
constituted a connecting link and conduit between heaven and earth. Through
the folk soul, mystical energies, the vertu, the ordained destiny with which
the cosmos had impregnated a particular soil could find expression in the
human spirit and thence return to the cosmos, thereby closing the circle and
creating - or attesting to - universal harmony. As Herder conceived it, the
process amounted to a mystical or spiritual equivalent of photosynthesis.
Every people, according to Herder, had its own unique and distinctive folk
soul. He did not presume to extol any one folk soul over another; for Herder,
this would have seemed as absurd as ascribing an intrinsic superiority to a
particular individual soul. So far as Herder was concerned, each folk soul
was valid; each possessed its own traits, its own propensities, its own
strengths and weaknesses, its own generic qualities; and if he himself had
any personal sympathies for a specific folk soul, it was for England's, not
Germany's. Essentially, Herder's conception of the folk soul was not
significantly different from what this book has celled 'rational identity' or
'the collective psyche', except that Herder attached to his conception a
sacred, mystical, divinely ordained character.
If Herder accorded no intrinsic superiority to the German folk soul, other
people could - and the War of Liberation offered grounds on which to do so.
Herder was dead by that time, and in no position to object when his
conception was appropriated and conscripted on behalf of nationalism,
chauvinism and a xenophobia hostile to anything foreign. When it was yoked to
these things, the conception of the folk soul provided a seemingly
respectable philosophical foundation for theories of racial supremacy.
Goethe's ideas were vulnerable in the same way. Despite his insistence on the
universality of culture, he himself could be cited as proof of the supremacy
of Germanic culture. With the nationalistic self-confidence engendered by the
War of Liberation, Germanic culture, as a manifestation of the Germanic folk
soul, was soon being trumpeted as superior to others. And if, as Goethe
maintained, the Germans were a people uniquely qualified to reflect or
represent culture and the spirit, that too constituted a claim to superiority.
Out of this arose the nineteenth-century cult of 'das Volk' ('the People')
and an elaborate 'Volklsche' ideology. Das Volk did not mean 'tine masses' in
any socialist or Marxist sense. Neither did it imply socialist or Marxist
class distinctions. And it entailed something diametrically opposed to the
materialism of socialist and Marxist thought. The War of Liberation allowed
das Volk to be put forward as an heroic collective entity, cosmically or
divinely ordained to manifest the power of the folk, fulfil a national
destiny and shatter the yoke of Napoleonic tyranny. The 'people' denoted by
das Volk were thus imbued with a numinous quality, a mystical dimension, a
status mantled with the sacred. In das Volk, nationalism acquired a religious
mandate and ratification.
Idealized and transcendent, the Volk symbolized the desired unity beyond
contemporary reality . . . The Volk provided a more tangible vessel for the
life force that flowed from the cosmos . . . Volkish thought made the Volk
the intermediary between man and the 'higher reality'.[7]
Unlike the urban proletariat exhorted to unite by Marx, das Volk were
essentially rural arid deeply rooted in the sacred national soil, to which
they were inseparably bound by the folk soul.
The landscape thus became a vital part of the definition of the Volk . . .
Man was not seen as a vanquisher of nature, nor was he credited with the
ability to penetrate the meaning of nature by applying the tools of reason;
instead he was glorified as living in accordance with nature, at one with its
mystical forces.[8]
In other words, the relationship between das Volk and the soil harked back to
an archaic, atavistic and pre-Christian symbiosis - the volcanic pagan energy
which, as Heine had warned, lurked latent beneath the brittle crust of German
society, and was liable at any moment to erupt. For the adherents of
'Volklsche' ideology, however, this energy was not destructive, but laudably
dynamic, an assertion of strength, durability and solidarity.
What was more, the essentially 'rooted' nature of das Volk, the symbiotic
rapport between people and soil, rendered 'rootlessness' reprehensible. If
rootedness in the soil was a virtue, lack of roots had necessarily to be seen
as a vice, testifying to lack of harmony, to something alien and artificial,
to a disruption of the mystical natural order. Rootlessness became synonymous
with restlessness and was stigmatised as a threat to ' Volkische' stability.
Foreigners were one embodiment of this threat. The migratory urban
proletariat was another. There were also, of course, Germany's Jews,
emancipated relatively recently and now prospering. In ' Volkische' ideology,
the Jew was the very incarnation of rootlessness. The 'Wandering Jew' could
only too easily be identified as the natural adversary of 'das Volk', the
inimical outsider and stranger, the unwelcome intruder. Thus the ground was
prepared for later anti-Semitism.
Prompted by an identity crisis similar to Germany's, and equally seeking a
post-Napoleonic self-definition, Russia was experiencing the same
developments. A comparable version of the folk soul was being extolled, and a
mystical rapport between people and soil exalted. Hostility was displayed
towards foreigners, 'alien' influences were deplored, and a uniquely national
'purity', in this case Slavic, was sought. And in Russia, too, the seeds of
anti-Semitism were being sown. The 'Volklsche' movement in Germany, also know
as pan-Aryanism, had a counterpart in Russia known as pan-Slavism. Like their
contemporaries in Germany, adherents of pan-Slavism disseminated a kind of
racial supremacy, and ascribed to their people a sacred 'mission' of 'world
historic' import. Among the most prominent exponents of pan-Slavism were the
mystical philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and, of course, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In Germany, the leading early exponent of 'Volklsche' ideology was Wilhelm
Heinrich Riehl, whose expositions, published between 1857 and 1863, exerted a
considerable influence. But Riehl was soon overshadowed by figures of much
greater artistic consequence. There was, for example, Richard Wagner, who
proclaimed himself a proponent of pan-Aryanism and whose operas often focused
on characteristically 'Volklsche' themes - works such as Tannhauser and, of
course, The Ring, which drew extensively on Germanic legend, saga, folklore
and pagan tradition.
The propagators of pan-Aryanism and ' Volkische' ideology eagerly conscripted
figures of the recent past as well - Goethe's contemporaries from the
beginning of the century and luminaries of German Romanticism. Thus, Herder
was repeatedly invoked, even though he would have disapproved. Another such
posthumous recruit, who would also have disapproved, was the great Romantic
poet and essayist Friedrich, Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772-1801), better
known by his pen name, Novalis. There were also the eminent philologists,
scholars, antiquarians and collectors of folklore, the brothers Jacob Ludwig
and Wilhelm Karl Grimm, whose systematic collection of folk and fairy tales,
published as the War of Liberation erupted in 1812 and 1813, remains, even to
this day, the supreme work of its kind. Like Herder, the Grimm brothers did
not really exalt the German 'Volk' or folk soul over any other, but they
issued such pronouncements as: 'The eternal, invisible, towards which every
noble spirit must strive, is revealed in its purest and most distinct form in
the totality, that is, in the idea of a Volk.'[9] These pronouncements
provided vital sustenance to the more nationalistic and xenophobic
'Volklsche' ideology of the mid-nineteenth century.
Later works were also press-ganged into 'Volklsche' service. One such was
Wanderings through the March of Brandenburg, a three-volume collection of
travel sketches, anecdotes, folk tales and historical reflections published
between 1862 and 1882 by Theodor Fontane. With the possible exception of the
Austrian Adalbert Stifter, Fontane, a Prussian of Huguenot descent, was the
greatest German-language novelist of the nineteenth century - a figure who
warrants comparison with Turgenev and Flaubert. It would be difficult to find
a man more temperamentally hostile to ' Volkische' attitudes: Fontane was
signally unmystical and regarded 'Volkische' pantheism with an indifference
verging on disdain. He deplored nationalism, loathed militarism and despised
xenophobia. He condemned the creation of the German Empire after the
Franco-Prussian War. He practiced and extolled an urbane cosmopolitan
tolerance. He prided himself on his own French origins and even pronounced
his surname in the French fashion, keeping the 'e' at the end silent.
Notwithstanding all this, Wanderings through the March of Brandenburg became
a bible of the 'Volklsche' movement.
In addition to literary figures past and present, the 'Volklsche' movement
could muster some impressively lofty and weighty philosophical support,
including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel was contemporary
with German Romanticism, with figures such as Novalis, Schelling and
Holderlin, and was personally acquainted with the latter two. He knew Goethe,
and although they did not often agree, they regarded each other with a
cordial mutual respect.
Hegel is probably best known today for his exposition of 'the dialectic', and
particularly the 'dialectic of history', which was appropriated and adapted
by Karl Marx, but there were other aspects of Hegelian thought that lent
themselves readily to nationalism and ' Volkische' ideology. Heine had warned
that only Christianity, 'the talisman of the Cross', stood between
civilisation and atavistic Germanic barbarism. Hegel, however, was hostile to
Christianity, which he described as 'the product of an alien race and out of
harmony with the Germanic soul'.[10] He wrote a life of Jesus, whom he
depicted as nothing more than a moral teacher, eminently mortal. But what
most endeared Hegel to later proponents of pan-Aryanism and ' Volkische'
ideology was his theory of history.
The theory had elements in common with Herder's concept of the folk soul. For
Hegel, history was ultimately a manifestation of metaphysical principles,
'the self-actualisation of spirit'- or, more specifically, what Hegel called
the 'World Spirit'. The men who shaped history - Alexander, for example,
Caesar, Frederick the Great and Napoleon - were 'used as instruments of the
World Spirit'. And the World Spirit, working through history, was the
ultimate and definitive arbiter, transcending all human systems of ethics or
morality. According to Hegel: 'The actual fate of each nation constitutes its
judgement.'[11] In other words, there is no morality except for what is, the
fait accompli. Thus, 'if one nation succeeds in conquering another . . . its
action is justified by its success'.[12] At any given historical moment,
Hegel further maintained, there was only one dominant people, a people who
reflected the workings of the World Spirit and served as its instrument. Such
a people would have a brief span of pre-eminence and would then decline. The
people ordained for pre-eminence in his own time, Hegel believed, were the
Germans.
Hegel went even further. He also yoked the concrete entity of the people,
'das Volk', to the more abstract concept of the State, and thus to
nationalism. The State, for Hegel, was not an abstract artificial structure
imposed on, and presiding over, the people within it. It was, rather, a
tangible manifestation of the people, their collective will and folk soul.
Each people's folk soul, or 'rational spirit', when embodied in the State,
was 'a phase or moment in the life of the World Spirit'. [13] And because the
State reflected the World Spirit, it enjoyed the prerogatives traditionally
reserved for the divine. The State therefore took precedence over all
individual rights. True freedom existed only when the individual's
aspirations and desires concurred harmoniously with those of the State, and
'the will of the State must prevail over the particular will when there is a
clash between them'.[14] In effect, Hegel contrived to deify the State. He
even described it, on one occasion, as 'this actual God'- in other words, as
the only palpable embodiment of a divine principle in the phenomenal world.
On this basis, Hegel also justified war as the supreme arbiter in disputes
between states resulting from the abrogation of treaties and international
law. War was therefore both 'rational and necessary'; the means whereby the
World Spirit asserted its will in history. From this Hegel could go on to
assert that war is the chief means by which a people's spirit acquires
renewed vigour, or a decayed political organism is swept aside and gives
place to a more vigorous manifestation of the Spirit.[15]
It is easy to see how Hegel could be used to reinforce the nationalism
fostered by the War of Liberation and the burgeoning 'Volkische' movement. He
provided one of the chief ingredients of a heady and intoxicating cocktail
with which National Socialism would later inebriate the German people.
Yet among its ingredients were some that did not mix altogether palatably.
Inevitably, contradictions here and there occurred. 'Volkische' ideology was
rural in its orientation and enamoured of the past. It was hostile towards
industrialisation, which was nevertheless essential to the war machine that
would soon weld Germany into a new imperial unity. When industrialisation
produced victories against Denmark, Austria and France, 'Volkische' ideology
therefore contrived to accommodate it.
In the wake of the War of Liberation, Goethe's and then Heine's ideal - a
nation dedicated to culture and the spirit - was disastrously undermined. It
was now one of two self-definitions contending for the 'heart and soul' of
Germany. The other was based on nationalism, militarism, 'Volkische' ideology
and pan-Aryanism, and an espousal of political unity and the Hegelian cult of
the State. After the wars of Bismarck's era, it was this second
self-definition which emerged triumphant- at least externally. With Prussia's
dramatic defeat of Denmark, Austria and especially France, the struggle for
Germany's 'heart and souls effectively ended, at least in the sphere of
politics. The new German Empire - the Second Reich - was created, and the
monster feared by Goethe, Heine and others came into being.
Yet the Prussian political apparatus of the new imperium was ultimately only
a superstructure, artificially imposed on something much less unified and
homogeneous than its facade suggested. Behind this superstructure, the old
identity crisis persisted. Many Germans felt themselves less 'German' than
Bavarian, Swabian, Hannoverian or Saxon. There were also deep-seated
divisions between the Protestant north and the predominantly Catholic south,
which continued to look to Vienna as its real capital rather than Berlin. And
Goethe's ideal of a nation dedicated to culture and the spirit was kept alive
and propagated by such literary figures as Fontane, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm
Raabe and, especially, the Swabian Eduard Morike, whom Stefan George and the
Stauffenbergs esteemed almost as much as they did Holderlin.
For outsiders, as well as for Germans themselves, a single unified
self-definition and national identity remained elusive. In the aftermath of
the Franco-Prussian War, it was easy enough to characterise Germany by a
spiked helmet, but developments in the south were running counter to this
image. While Bismarck was making war in the north, Ludwig II, King of
Bavaria, was encouraging art. Regarded as an effete fool and probably mad,
Ludwig nevertheless subscribed passionately to the Goethean ideal of a nation
dedicated to culture and the spirit. While Prussia burgeoned with steelworks
and armaments factories, Bavaria bloomed with fairy-tale castles, enchanted
grottos and the supreme temple to high 'Kultur' at Bayreuth. Under the
patronage of Bavaria's monarch, Kultur became, in effect, the official state
religion, Wagner's operas assumed the status of religious rites or festivals,
and Bayreuth became a pilgrimage centre. It was not uncommon, during the late
nineteenth century, for educated Europeans (and especially educated Britons)
to describe themselves as 'Wagnerian' in precisely the same way that their
predecessors might have described themselves as 'Christian'. Kultur became a
creed. In France, it assumed the form of 'I'art pour I'art', 'art for art's
sake', but the focus of it all, even for its most assiduous French apostles,
was Wagner and Bayreuth. And whatever Wagner's own pan-Aryan orientation, his
art was perceived at the time less as a testimony to Germanic supremacy than
to that of culture and the spirit.
Given the contrasting and conflicting values of Prussia and Bavaria, the
question of what it 'meant' to be German remained unresolved. What
constituted the more accurate, more profoundly valid reflection of the true
Germany'? Was it the material progress of increasingly industrialised
Prussia, with her cult of blood and iron, her strategically organised railway
system, her state-of-the-art artillery and awesomely efficient war machine?
Or was it the cultural and spiritual Mecca of Bavaria, with her rival cult of
religio-aesthetic rapture, her lofty aspirations to the numinous, her
investiture of art with a dimension of the sacred and supernal? Neither
outsiders nor Germans themselves were altogether sure, and not even Ludwig's
mysterious death, probably at the hands of Bismarck's agents, did much to
resolve the dilemma.
It is true that Wagner's music, so fervently embraced and patronised by
Ludwig, contained many elements later adopted, embraced and revered by Hitler
and National Socialism. But Ludwig, certainly, had no interest in seeing
these elements translated into politics; and it is doubtful that Wagner,
despite his pan-Aryanism, did either. Of course, that did not spare him from
being posthumously conscripted, as was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Yet Nietzsche, too, repudiated politics, especially in so trivial and
contemptible a form as nationalism. The Nietzschean 'Ubermensch' or
'superman' was hardly a political figure; and the transformation or
revolution he represented was one of spirit and consciousness, not of
political institutions or geographical frontiers. For Nietzsche, as for
Goethe, transformation was of paramount importance; but Nietzsche's
conception of transformation, like Goethe's, had nothing whatever to do with
bureaucracy or the machinery of the Hegelian State.
pp. 202-216
--notes--
1. Goethe, Conversations and Encounters, p.92.
2 Ibid., pp.92-3.
3 Heine, 'Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany' in
Selected Works, p.417.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., pp.417-18.
6 Ibid., p.418.
7 Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology,. p. 15.
8 Ibid.
9 Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, p.47.
10 Copleston, Fichte to Nietzsche, p. 162.
11 Ibid., p. 220.
12 Ibid., p.223.
13 Ibid., p.220.
14 Ibid., p.213.
15 Ibid., p.218.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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