Tgk1946's Blog

From Weimar Culture (Peter Gay, 2001) pp80-96

The leaders of the youth movements did not need to generate their own ideas; if anything, Weimar enjoyed too many ideas, variegated, mutually (and sometimes internally) contradictory, unanalyzed and often unanalyzable. It was swamped with polemics designed to expose the inferiority of republican culture to the imaginary glories of the First and Second Empire, or the imagined glories of the Third Empire to come. And for those who confined their reading to book jackets, authors provided slogan-like titles. Werner Sombart’s indictment of the commercial mentality confronted, in its winning title, Handler und Helden, traders (the West) with heroes (the Germans); it was a characteristic product of the war, but kept its public during the 1920s. Even more remarkable, Ferdinand Tonnies’ classic in sociology, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, first published as far back as 1887, made its fortune in the Weimar Republic, with its invidious contrast between the authentic, organic harmony of community and the materialistic fragmentation of business society. Hans Grimm’s novel of 1926, Volk ohne Raum, which was a long-lived best-seller, expressed in its very title a prevailing sense of claustrophobia, an anxiety felt, and played upon by right-wing politicians, over “inadequate living space,” and the “encirclement” of Germany by its hostile, vengeful neighbors. In 1931 the vélkische author Hans Freyer called, ecstatically, for a revolt against liberal ideas in his Revolution von Rechts, thus offering another striking novelty, the idea of a revolution not from its usual point of departure, the left, but from the right. Perhaps most effective was the pairing offered in the title of a three-volume work by the anti-Semite Ludwig Klages, who had in early years belonged to the George circle: his Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele pitted mind against soul, and assailed the intellect in the name of irrationalism. These fabricators of titles thought themselves aristo- crats, but they did not disdain, in fact enjoyed coining, popular clichés.
Books spawned movements, which generally paraded before the public covered in deliberately incongruous labels — Conservative Revolution, Young Conservatism, National Bolshevism, Prussian Socialism — ostensibly responsible attempts to get away from traditional political terminology, actually testimony to a perverse pleasure in paradox and a deliberate, deadly assault on reason. It was strange: the pundits who proudly proclaimed that they had outgrown or — a favorite word — “overcome” the traditional labels of liberal politics, “left” and “right,” generally ended up on the right. Meinecke saw it precisely in 1924: “The deep yearning for the inner unity and harmony of all laws of life and events in life remains a powerful force in the German spirit.”
The spokesmen for this yearning were as varied, and as incongruous, as the ideas they proclaimed: Martin Heidegger was a difficult, it would seem deliberately esoteric, philosopher who clothed the revolt against reason in a new language of his own; Hugo von Hofmannsthal was an exquisitely cultivated Literat, who sought to hold high the flag of civilization in a time of decay; Ernst Jiinger translated his experiences of adventure and war service — that half-authentic, half-mythical Kriegserlebnis — into a nihilistic celebration of action and death; the industrialist, economist, and Utopian Walther Rathenau turned on the industry on which his fortune rested by constructing elaborate and ambitious indictments of machine civilization and forecasting a new life; Oswald Spengler impressed the impressionable with his display of erudition, his unhesitating prophecies, and his coarse arrogance.
Among these prophets, Heidegger was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to influence. But his influence was far-reaching, far wider than his philosophical seminar at the University of Marburg, far wider than might seem possible in light of his inordinately obscure book, Sein und Zeit of 1927, far wider than Heidegger himself, with his carefully cultivated solitude and unconcealed contempt for other philosophers, appeared to wish. Yet, as one of Heidegger’s most perceptive critics, Paul Hiihnerfeld, has said: “These books, whose meaning was barely decipherable when they appeared, were devoured. And the young German soldiers in the Second World War who died somewhere in Russia or Africa with the writings of Hélderlin and Heidegger in their knapsacks can never be counted.”
The key terms of Heidegger’s philosophy were, after all, anything but remote; more than one critic has noted that words like “Angst,” “care,” “nothingness,” “existence,” “decision,” and (perhaps most weighty) “death” were terms that the Expressionist poets and playwrights had made thoroughly familiar even to those who had never read a line of Kierkegaard. What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time. Thus Heidegger aroused in his readers obscure feelings of assent, of rightness; the technical meaning Heidegger gave his terms, and the abstract questions he was asking, disappeared before the resonances they awakened. Their general purport seemed plain enough: man is thrown into the world, lost and afraid; he must learn to face nothingness and death. Reason and intellect are hopelessly inadequate guides to the secret of being; had Heidegger not said that thinking is the mortal enemy of understanding? The situation in which men found themselves in the time of the Republic was what Heidegger called an “Umsturzsituation,” a revolutionary situation in which men must act; whether construction or utter destruction followed mattered not at all. And Heidegger’s life — his isolation, his peasant-like appearance, his deliberate provincialism, his hatred of the city — seemed to confirm his philosophy, which was a disdainful rejection of modern urban rationalist civilization, an eruptive nihilism. Whatever the precise philosophical import of Sein und Zeit and of the writings that surrounded it, Heidegger’s work amounted to a denigration of Weimar, that creature of reason, and an exaltation of movements like that of the Nazis, who thought with their blood, worshiped the charismatic leader, praised and practiced murder, and hoped to stamp out reason — forever — in the drunken embrace of that life which is death. By no means all who read Heidegger were Nazis, or became Nazis because they read him; Christian existentialists or philosophers concerned with the supreme question of Being found him interesting and sometimes important. But Heidegger gave no one reasons not to be a Nazi, and good reasons for being one. “It is not without some justification,” Paul Tillich has cautiously said, that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are connected with the antimoral movements of fascism or national socialism.” and of these two Nietzsche was certainly far more remote from modern barbarism, both in time and in thought, than Heidegger.
I am not offering this scanty paragraph as an adequate summary of Heidegger’s philosophy; I am suggesting, rather, that this is what Heidegger’s readers thought, by and large, they were reading in him — and not without justice. When the Nazis came to power, Heidegger displayed what many have since thought unfitting servility to his new masters — did he not omit from printings of Sein und Zeit appearing in the Nazi era his dedication to the philosopher Husserl, to whom he owed so much but who was, inconveniently enough, a Jew? But the notorious address of May 27, 1933, with which Heidegger inaugurated his rectorate at the University of Freiburg, was not simply servility; it was a logical outgrowth of his philosophy, with its appeal to the Fiihrer and the Volk, the abuse of words like “self-determination,” the attack on objective science, the fervent proclamation of the powers of blood and soil, the call for an end to academic freedom in the name of higher things. The essence of the German university, he said, “arrives at clarity, rank, and power only when, above all, and at all times, the leaders themselves are the led — led by the inexorability of that spiritual mandate which forces the destiny of the German people into the stamp of its history.” The mandate consists of three kinds of service: “Labor service, military service, and knowledge service — they are equally necessary and of equal rank.” The will of the students and the will of the Volk together, mutually, must be ready for the struggle. “All powers of will and thought, all the forces of the heart and all the capacities of the body, must be unfolded through struggle, elevated in struggle, and preserved as struggle.” No question: “We want our Volk to fulfill its historical mission. We want ourselves. For the young and youngest power of the Volk, which already grasps beyond us, has already decided that.” The words may be a little obscure — though they are, with their reminiscences of editorials in the Vélkische Beobachter and speeches by Goebbels, rather less obscure than Heidegger’s normal style — but the message is plain enough.
Nothing could seem more remote from this dark antirationalism than the troubled musings on the modern world which Hugo von Hofmannsthal offered to an audience at the University of Munich in 1927, yet they have more in common than might at first appear. Hofmannsthal’s address bore a strange title: “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation — Literature as the Spiritual Space of the Nation.” Not unexpectedly, it was a highly civilized performance; its diction was elegant and its cultural purpose unimpeachable. But it was also a mystification, elusive, strenuously vague: Hofmannsthal speaks of seekers and prophets, and discerns in the Germany of his day a “conservative revolution” of a “magnitude hitherto unknown in European history.” But he does not identify the seekers and prophets, and specifies the aim of the conservative revolution only as “form, a new German reality, in which the whole nation can participate.” This elusiveness was itself, though perhaps not intentionally, a political act, for if the Germany of 1927 needed anything, it needed clarity, concreteness, demystification.
Yet a careful reading of Hofmannsthal’s address suggests, if not a program, at least a coherent attitude. Evidently, Hofmannsthal believed that Germany failed, but needed, to be a cultural organism in which spirit and life, literature and politics, the educated and the uneducated, might join in common possession of cultural goods, in a living tradition that all could enjoy. We are “connected to a community,” Hofmannsthal argued, not by physical coexistence or intimacy, but by some “spiritual adherence.” Indeed, only where there is “believed wholeness of existence — geglaubte Ganzheit des Daseins” — there is reality. And now, in the 1920s, there are some seekers and prophets in Germany who are groping for this reality, and in two ways. They “seek, not freedom, but connection,” and they have achieved the insight “that it is impossible to live without believed wholeness,” that “life becomes livable only through valid connections,” that “scattered worthless individuals” must become “the core of the nation” — that, in a word, “all partitions into which mind has polarized life, must be overcome in the mind, and transformed into spiritual unity.” Hofmannsthal was fortunate; he died in 1929, before he saw the consequences to which fatigue with freedom and the denigration of individuality would lead.
In contrast with Hofmannsthal’s dim vistas, Spengler’s Preussentum und Sozialismus, first published in 1920 and often reprinted, is clear at least in the target of its scorn. Spengler had leaped into immediate prominence with the first volume of his Untergang des Abendlandes, in 1918, and retained his position as a deep thinker with Preussentum und Sozialismus, the first of his political pamphlets. It is one long insult to the Weimar Republic — “The revolution of stupidity was followed by the revolution of vulgarity.” But it is also more than that: Preussentum und Sozialismus appropriates the word “socialism” to special purposes. Spengler agrees with most prophets of his day: socialism is inevitable. But there are two types of socialism — English and Prussian — and we must learn to discriminate between them, and choose. To Spengler, Karl Marx, “the stepfather of socialism,” was an English Socialist — the materialist imbued with unrealistic, “literary ideals”; the cosmopolitan liberal in action. The task, clearly, is “to liberate German socialism from Marx.” With frightening shrewdness, Spengler recognized that the so-called Marxist Socialist Party of Germany really contained powerful anti-Marxist and true Prussian elements: “The Bebel party had something soldierly, which distinguished it from the socialism of all other countries: clanking step of the workers’ battalions, calm decisiveness, discipline, courage to die for something higher — Jenseitiges.” Class struggle is nonsense, and the German Revolution, the product of theory, is nonsense, too. The German instinct, which, rooted in the blood, is truthful, sees things differently: “Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign. The king is only the first servant of his state (Frederick the Great). Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience. This, since the eighteenth century, has been authoritarian — autoritativer — socialism, in essence illiberal and anti- democratic — that is, if we think of English liberalism and French democracy.” The true German must recognize the needs of the day and, yielding to them, transform the authoritarian socialism of the eighteenth into the authoritarian socialism of the twentieth century. “Together, Prussianism and socialism stand against the England within us, against the world view which has penetrated the whole existence of our people, paralyzed it, and robbed it of its soul.” The one salvation is “Prussian socialism.” Here are Hofmannthal’s search for community and leadership in the language of the officers’ barracks.
Quite naturally, almost inevitably, the searchers for a meaningful life in a meaningless Republic turned to German history, to find comfort or models there. They found what they sought; German historians were ready to join them, and German history turned out to be singularly rich in oversized heroes and memorable scenes, both of them invaluable to mythmakers. One famous scene, from which nationalist and volkische elements derived much inspiration, had taken place in October 1817, three hundred years after Martin Luther had nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg. German students, wearing old-fashioned costumes, gathered at the Wartburg, a historic and romantic spot; they shouted “Heil,” sang patriotic songs, said fervent prayers, and burned some books. They were members of the new Burschenschaften, radical, nationalistic, anti-Semitic, anti-French student associations with names drawn from the legendary past: Germania, Arminia, Teutonia. They were at the Wartburg to celebrate the liberation of their country — or, rather, countries — from the alien yoke, and in their celebration they linked the reformer Luther with the general Bliicher as twin liberators of the German spirit and the German land, determined to draw strength from ancient myths for the political and moral tasks before them.
This spirit survived into the Weimar Republic, drawing on a widening repertory of heroes: on Bismarck, the man of blood and iron, the tough realist who had unified the German nation by the sheer force of his will; on Frederick II of Prussia, invariably called “the Great,” who with a historic display of self-discipline had grown from an effete flute player into the Alte Fritz, tough, sly, hard-working, in a word magnificent, gaunt from a lifetime of exhausting labor as first servant of his state; on Martin Luther, defiantly forging a new faith and a new language, doing what he must do; on Wagnerian Teutons, who had inspired eighteenth-century French lawyers as they had inspired classical Roman historians with their purity, their valor, their political prowess. It was a heady and, to susceptible spirits, a poisonous amalgam. “The younger generation,” wrote Ernst-Walter Techow, one of Rathenau’s assassins, in 1933, “was striving for something new, hardly dreamed of. They smelled the morning air. They gathered in themselves an energy charged with the myth of the Prussian-German past, the pressure of the present and the expectation of an unknown future.”
The wholehearted commitment to Weimar required the repudiation of all such mythology. By its very existence, the Republic was a calculated affront to the heroes and clichés that every German child knew, many German politicians invoked, and, it turned out, most Germans cherished. In the battle of historical symbols the republicans were at a disadvantage from the start: compared with Bismarck and other charismatic leaders, at once superhuman and picturesque, the models available to Weimar were pallid and uninspiring: the Goethe of modern Weimar was a benign, ineffectual cosmopolitan, full of memorable observations about Humanitaét, whom everyone quoted and no one followed — “Official Germany celebrates Goethe,” wrote Carl von Ossietzky in 1932, on the centenary of Goethe’s death, “not as poet and prophet, but above all as opium.” And the revolutionaries who were supposed to inspire the republicans were the revolutionaries of 1848, with their black-red-gold flag, their well-meaning speeches, and their decisive failure. Significantly, Heinrich Heine, perhaps the least ambiguous and most vital ancestor of the Weimar spirit, had found no fitting memorial even by the end of the Republic; for seventy-five years proposals to erect a statue to him had aroused vehement tirades, unmeasured slanders, and, in the end, successful obstruction.
While Weimar’s need for a transvaluation of historical values was urgent, the hopes for achieving it were small; indeed, the need was great and the hope small from the same cause: the German historical craft, far from subjecting legends to criticism or the acid of humor, had long rationalized and refined them. Theodor Mommsen was a notable exception; in general, German historians had fitted easily into the imperial system. Professionally committed to a conservative view of things, more inclined to treasure established values than to urge change, they were thoroughly at home in the German university system, rejecting new men as much, and with equal vehemence, as they rejected new ideas. In 1915 the journalist and historian Gustav Mayer, a Jew and an independent political radical, applied for a job as a lecturer at the University of Berlin, and was advised to take the step by Erich Marcks and Friedrich Meinecke. Mayer, skeptical whether “the old prejudices against democrats, Jews, and outsiders” had “really lost their power over the university clique,” decided to risk it; he subjected himself to humiliating examinations only to find his skepticism justified — he did not get the appointment he obviously deserved. It was not until the Weimar years that he was imposed on Berlin University, but the dominant university clique of historians changed little.
The ideology that continued to dominate the German historical profession through the twenties was tenacious in part because it had a long history of its own; it could invoke a figure as charismatic for German historians as the personages of the German past were for the German people: Leopold von Ranke. Beyond doubt, Ranke was a very great historian; it must be confessed that if German historians often took a high tone of self-congratulation, they had much to congratulate themselves on. Ranke was a pioneer in the use of archives, a master of complex materials, a splendid dramatist, and the founder of a new style of historical thinking. Ranke’s central doctrines—the autonomy of the historian and his duty to understand each segment of the past from within — were of enormous service to the profession. But in the hands of German historians in the late Empire and the young Republic, the autonomy of history turned into its isolation. The segregation of history from ethics drove most German historians into a passive acceptance of things as they were, and the segregation of history from other disciplines alienated most German historians from the social sciences. For all his acknowledged historical erudition, most historians dismissed Max Weber as an “outsider’; for all his extravagance, the medievalist Georg von Below spoke for his fellows when he insisted that historians could “do without a new science of ‘sociology.’” As their work shows, they did without it, and badly. What they could have learned from sociology and from political science was critical distance from the social and political structure in which they so comfortably lived. But then the whole energy of Ranke’s historical thinking had been away from the criticism, and toward the sunny acceptance, of power; his celebrated insistence on the primacy of foreign policy was only a corollary of his cheerful resignation to the realities of the modern imperialistic state.
Ranke’s triumph as a historian was as fateful as it had been glittering; his legacy was unfortunate. While many of his epigones were competent men — and few escaped being Ranke’s epigone — they turned Ranke’s pride into conceit, his diligence into pedantry, his acceptance of power into a mixture of servility at home and bluster abroad. This was perhaps less their fault than the fault of history itself — Ranke’s teachings were more appropriate and less harmful to the nineteenth century than to the twentieth — but whatever the cause, the effects of these shifts were disastrous. We tend to make much of historians’ efforts to revise the work of their predecessors; we make too little of the continuity of historical schools. Ranke’s declared disciples before the First World War — capable historians like Max Lenz, Otto Hintze, Erich Marcks, Hans Delbriick — took Ranke’s mystical belief in the nation-state and its ceaseless struggle for power and projected it onto the world as a whole: in the history of modern Europe, the great powers had, through war or diplomacy, prevented any single state from gaining hegemony. But now, they reasoned, in an age of imperialism, Germany was threatened by the hegemony of a single naval state, Great Britain. Germany, therefore, must arm and, if necessary, fight to secure its proper place among the great powers.
The consequences of such thinking were inescapable: unquestioning support for the political-military machine that was ruling the country, and an unpolitical evasion of domestic conflicts. The historians of the post-Rankean generations thus displayed a curious mixture of bloodless rationalism and half-concealed mysticism; they coolly shoved armies and frontiers across the chessboard of international politics, and, at the same time, reveled in the mysterious workings of History, which had assigned to Germany a sacred part to play, a sacred mission to perform. They subscribed to the dictum of the democratic imperialist Friedrich Naumann, who defined nationalism as the urge of the German people to spread its influence over the globe. Thus, when the war came, they simultaneously defended the unrestrained use of naked power and Germany’s special mission to preserve, and spread, Kultur, a product in which Germans apparently excelled, and which they thought they must defend against the barbarous mass society of Russia, the effete decadence of France, the mechanical nightmare of the United States, and the unheroic commercialism of England. Distinguished historians — Troeltsch, Meinecke, Hintze — lent themselves to collective volume after collective volume proclaiming to an incredulous world the superiority of German Kultur over the mere civilization of the Allied powers. Much of the substance of Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen was anticipated in these manifestoes.
This type of historical thinking did not survive the revolution unchanged; even historians noticed that something had happened in 1918. But the myth-making mentality that had produced such thinking went underground and emerged in disguised form, more inaccessible than ever to unmasking or self-criticism. The traditional boasts about German Kultur and Germany’s mission had embodied elaborate fantasies, wish-dreams sprung from deep needs, and historians in the Weimar Republic found it psychologically more economical to patch up their fantasies than to discard them. The Weimar spirit, I have said, was born before the Weimar Republic; so was its nemesis. As in the Empire, so now, too, there were exceptions and, thanks to Weimar, there were more exceptions than before, but the bulk of the historical profession trafficked in nostalgia, hero worship, and the uncritical acceptance — indeed, open advocacy — of apologetic distortions and sheer lies, like the notorious stab-in-the-back legend.” “The full devotion to Bismarck, and to the house of Hohenzollern,” the cultural historian Walter Goetz lamented in 1924, “produced that profound aversion to democracy which was characteristic of German educated strata of the period between 1871 and 1914,” an aversion that survived into the Republic, and was unhappily supported by leading historians. Respect has its value, but now, in the 1920s, it had become a burden: “The task of the historian is not cultivation of piety for a misunderstood past, but the pitiless exploration of the truth.” But this, Goetz argued, was precisely what the German historical profession seemed incapable of grasping. What Germany needed was “clarity about itself,” but what it got from its historians was yearning for the good old days, and misreading of recent history; historians were investing the old military caste with false glamor and the Republic with imaginary crimes. “Preceptors of the nation! Do you really think you are fulfilling an educational task if you command history to stop in its course and return to an old condition?” The vehemence of Goetz’s outburst betrays his despair; he must have known that those who would listen to him did not need his warning, and that those who needed his warning would not listen to him. Patriotic, antidemocratic myth-making went on. “Above all,” wrote the aged historian Karl Julius Beloch a year after Goetz’s article, “I do not want to close my eyes forever before I have seen Germany rise again to its old glory. But if this should not be my lot, I shall take with me the conviction that my people will one day remember that God, who made iron grow, wanted no slaves.” Beloch’s quotation of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s patriotic Vaterlandslied only underlined the continuing vitality of the old Wartburg spirit. And, indeed, some of Beloch’s most respected colleagues did their bit to restore Germany’s glory. Felix Rachfahl was only one among many in the twenties to defend Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914 as historically perfectly justified; while von Below, coyly refusing to comment freely on the revolution and the Republic, in ostensible fear of the libel laws, did feel free to denounce democracy as “the great danger of our time,” a force that was devouring and devastating the German people. These were the voices of grand old men among German historians. It is not surprising that in 1931 Hajo Holborn should note little progress toward scientific objectivity among his colleagues. “The profound transformations experienced in all areas of intellectual, political, and social life as a consequence of the world war,” he wrote in the Historische Zeitschrift, had “scarcely touched the core of Scientific historical studies.” Old academic “traditions and institutions” had been powerful enough to make “criticism of customary procedures, directions and aims of historical research and writing” extremely rare; what was far more in evidence was “‘a certain pride” in the discovery “how few of one’s inherited ideals one had to give up.” All too many historians thought themselves heroes for “swimming against the stream of the times.” But, Holborn warned, these “inclinations to a kind of ‘Faith of the Nibelungs’” were no better than “self-satisfaction,” mere symptoms of thoughtlessness and self-deception which were threatening to “become dangerous to our craft.’ In retrospect, Holborn’s solemn strictures are even more poignant ; than they must have seemed in their day, for they apply to some degree to Holborn’s revered teacher Friedrich Meinecke, the best-known and doubtless the most distinguished historian in the Weimar Republic. Friedrich Meinecke is the Thomas Mann of German historical writing, and his Idee der Staatsrason is his Zauberberg, published, like the Zauberberg, in 1924, and written, like the Zauberberg, to confront recent history, to grasp the dialectical struggle of light and darkness battling one another in unappeasable conflict yet yoked to-gether in indissoluble brotherhood. Like Mann, Meinecke was a cultural aristocrat converted to the Republic; like Mann, Meinecke was master of ponderous irony, enjoyed the subtle interplay of motives, sought the good but found evil fascinating, and from the pains of war and defeat derived the single lesson that if man is ever to conquer the daemon that is within him, he can conquer him only by looking at him unafraid, and taking his measure. Thomas Mann leaves his simple hero, Hans Castorp, on the battlefield, his chances of survival uncertain, but sustained by the hopeful question, Will from this universal lustful feast of death love arise some day? Meinecke, wrestling with his daemon, raison d’état, ends on a similar note: “Contemplation cannot tire of looking into its sphinxlike countenance, and will never manage to penetrate it fully. It can only appeal to the active statesman to carry state and God in his heart together, that he may prevent the daemon, whom he can never wholly shake off, from becoming too powerful.” Die Idee der Staatsriison is literature, philosophy, and, as Meinecke himself openly confessed, autobiography; he had written it, he said, to pursue some themes he had first taken up before the war, in his Weltbiirgertum und Nationalstaat, but the grave events of the war had given him new perspectives, while “the shock of the collapse” had pushed the central problem into the forefront, “in all its terror.” But the book, I must quickly add, is scholarly history as well. In more than five hundred closely printed pages, Meinecke traces the conception of raison d’état from the origin of modern political thought in Machiavelli, through its great representatives like Frederick the Great, to the twentieth century. And, in tracing it, Meinecke demonstrates its importance and its problematic quality; the state has its needs—maintenance and expansion of its power in a system of competing states — and the statesman finds himself compelled to act in ways that he, as a moral man or in private life, would condemn. Power, it seems, is dominated by a tragic duality: seeking its own good, it is committed to evil means — to cold calculation, to fraud and force.
There is much penetrating analysis here, informed by deep moral passion and great subtlety — though, strange to say, not enough subtlety. Meinecke, the master of words, is also their victim, and a victim in a way peculiarly representative of the Vernunftrepublikaner: for all his critical energy, Meinecke cuts short criticism by taking rhetoric for reality, and mundane psychological conflicts for philosophical difficulties.” His very vision of power as a tragic phenomenon is an unfortunate philosophical habit inherited from German Idealism; it gives a practical question metaphysical dignity, which must lead not to analysis but to resignation. “Hatred and revenge,” he cites Bismarck, “are bad counselors in politics,” but he does not stop to ask if Bismarck followed his own counsel; “At least in his own eyes,” he quotes Frederick the Great, “the hero must be justified,” but he fails to inquire whether the word “hero” does not prejudge the issue, or whether Frederick was indeed justified in his own eyes; he quotes some isolated, high-flown moral pronouncements of Treitschke’s and, despite some rather severe criticisms of Treitschke’s aggressiveness and crude social Darwinism, grants him “deep ethical seriousness and spiritual breadth.” Meinecke takes his ideal of the state — an organic unity in which rulers and ruled join — for the reality, thus assuming as demonstrated what needed to be — and could not be proved. Caught in his presuppositions, Meinecke never saw that the tragic view of the state helped to excuse its crimes, that the poor had no stake in the state’s growth in power or glory, that the state was not nature’s final answer to the problem of human organization, and, quite simply, that the state did not always, indeed not often, represent the public interest. If Kantorowicz regressed by turning scientific questions into myths, Meinecke regressed by turning them into philosophical problems.
The complex of feelings and responses I have called “the hunger for wholeness” turns out on examination to be a great regression born from a great fear: the fear of modernity. The abstractions that Tonnies and Hofmannsthal and the others manipulated — Volk, Fihrer, Organismus, Reich, Entscheidung, Gemeinschaft – reveal a desperate need for roots and for community, a vehement, often vicious repudiation of reason accompanied by the urge for direct action or for surrender to a charismatic leader. The hunger for wholeness was awash with hate; the political, and sometimes the private, world of its chief spokesmen was a paranoid world, filled with enemies: the dehumanizing machine, capitalist materialism, godless rationalism, rootless society, cosmopolitan Jews, and that great all-devouring monster, the city. Othmar Spann, the Austrian Catholic social philosopher, whose fantasies were enormously popular in right-wing circles, offered a list of villains his readers could accept with ease: Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Ricardo, Marx, Darwin, filthy — vunflatig — psychoanalysis, Impressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, and the film drama. It was this conglomerate of hostile feelings masquerading as philosophy that prompted Troeltsch in 1922, not long before his death, to warn against what he regarded the peculiarly German inclination to a “mixture of mysticism and brutality.”