From The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century (Peter Watson, 2022)
THE HATRED OF MODERNITY
In the middle of all this, in 1890, Julius Langbehn published Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Teacher), in which he denounced intellectualism and science. Born in a small town in Schleswig, into a family of pastors, one of whom had studied under Luther, and the son of a philologist, Langbehn argued that it is art, not science or religion, that is the higher good, the true source of knowledge and virtue. In science, he maintained, the old German virtues of simplicity, subjectivity, and individuality were lost. Rembrandt, the “perfect German and incomparable artist,” was pictured as the antithesis of modern culture and the model for Germany’s “third Reformation,” yet another turning inward (the first two had been sparked, he said, by Luther and Lessing). One theme dominated the entire book: German culture was being destroyed by science and intellectualism and could be regenerated only through the resurgence of art, reflecting the inner qualities of a great people, and the rise to power of heroic, artistic individuals in a new society. After 1871 Germany had lost her artistic style and her great individuals, and for Langbehn, Berlin above all symbolized the evils in German culture. The poison of commerce and materialism (“ Manchesterism” or, sometimes, “Amerikanisierung”) was corroding the ancient inner spirit of the Prussian garrison town. Art should ennoble, Langbehn said, so that naturalism, realism, anything that exposed the kind of iniquities that a Zola or a Thomas Mann drew attention to, was anathema.
He intended his book as a new bible for a new, reformed Germany. 1134 The dominant theme was a hatred of science and, as we shall see, hatred itself is a unifying theme that runs through these few pages. His book also coincided with a wider-based critique of industrial society (Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Sigmund Freud) and this helps account for its appeal. His hatred was directed at, among others, Theodor Mommsen, who, like other professors, had “sacrificed his soul to his intellect . . . The professor is the German national disease.” The underlying threat to Germany, Langbehn insisted, “was over-education.” 1135
That Langbehn ignored politics was part of his attraction. In the Germany he appealed to, that ignorance was looked upon as high-mindedness. By means of a “flight into art,” nationalism, faith, intuition, and philosophy could be mixed. 1136 Art was particularly suited to Protestant nations, he said, because they were the most “inward.”
The book was a sensation, presented by booksellers as “the most important work of the century” and warmly reviewed, despite its evident anti-Semitism, by Georg Simmel, Ludwig von Pastor, and Wilhelm von Bode, the latter Germany’s (and the world’s) pre-eminent Rembrandt scholar. Fritz Stern argues that 1890 marked a turning point in the cultural life of Germany. “The decade that followed witnessed a quickening of thought and hope, a new concern for the inner freedom of man, an anxious brooding on how this freedom could be realised . . . It was in the 1890s that cultural pessimism and anti-modernity became the twin resentments of the disaffected, conservative elements of imperial Germany.” 1137 Nietzsche saw where resentment would lead as a political force.
These modes of thought were by no means confined to Germany, even if they were most extreme there for a time. 1138 Nor was the associated idea of eugenics, which found enthusiastic adherents in Britain and France, and almost as often among left-wing advocates as among right-wing. The main difference was between Britain and the United States, on the one hand, where the “soft” side of eugenics was preferred—government encouragement of selective breeding—rather than the “hard” variety favored on the Continent, which included forced abortion, sterilization, and euthanasia. 1139 The most vicious of the eugenicists was Alfred Ploetz, a doctor who grew up in Breslau and whose book Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak) Hitler would read as a young man in Vienna before World War I. The following extract gives the flavor of Ploetz’s argument: “Advocates of racial hygiene will have little objection to war since they see in it one of the means whereby the nations carry on their struggle for existence . . . In the course of the campaign it might be deemed advisable deliberately to muster inferior variants at points where the main need is for cannon fodder and where the individual’s efficiency is of secondary importance.” Ploetz was not an anti-Semite, however; he thought they were “racial Aryans.”
After 1880, and especially after the Dreyfus trial in France in 1893, the Jews were increasingly identified as Europe’s leading “degenerates.” This was also a catalyst for the anti-Semitic political parties that were formed, and again not just in Germany (though Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna, was especially vitriolic). There were over a hundred branches of the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany in 1907, by which time a number of anthropologists and other scientists had formed the Ring der Norda, designed to cultivate Teutonic physical specimens. Max Sebaldt von Werth’s many-volumed Genesis (1898–1903) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels Theozoology (1905) both claimed that the real “chosen people” of the Bible were Aryan-Teutons. 1140 The racial ideas of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau passed into Germany via Richard Wagner. Wagner first became interested in Gobineau’s work in 1876 while preparing for the first performances at Bayreuth (they met not long afterward). The composer was very taken with the French (self-appointed) aristocrat’s theories, once describing Gobineau to his wife as “my only true contemporary.” Wagner pushed Gobineau’s ideas on his circle and they were taken up by two people in particular, Ludwig Schemann and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Schemann was struck by the similarity of Gobineau’s ideas to those of a key figure in the ultranationalist German völkish movement, Paul Anton Bötticher, who wrote some fifty tracts under the name of Paul de Lagarde. Not unlike Langbehn, Lagarde believed that the German nation had a will of its own, “the expression of its Seele,” or collective soul. That German soul, he further argued, was being destroyed by materialism, industrialization, and “middle-class greed.” The real Germany, the Germany of rural customs and traditions of the common Volk, was being overwhelmed, progress was “a Trojan horse” hiding a soulless future of mechanization, liberal individualism, socialism, and, above all philistinism. 1141
Lagarde was viciously antimodern, seeing all about him, amid the fantastic and brilliant innovations, nothing but decay. A biblical historian (one of the areas where German scholarship led the world), he hated modernity as much as he loved the past. 1142 He was also one of those calling for a new religion, an idea that, much later, appealed to Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. Lagarde attacked Protestantism for its lack of ritual and mystery and for the fact that it was little more than secularism. In advocating a new religion, he said he wanted to see “a fusion of the old doctrines of the Gospel with the National Characteristics of the Germans.” 1143 To begin with he adopted the idea of “inner emigration,” meaning people should find salvation within themselves, but then he advocated Germany’s taking over all non-German countries of the Austrian Empire. This was because the Germans were superior and all others, especially Jews, inferior.
For Lagarde, the central aspect of Germanness was its Aryan heritage, an identity that went back to the “forest and bogs” of northern Europe and Scandinavia and provided an honorable and distinctive alternative to the classical Greek Mediterranean culture that so influenced Italy, Spain, and France. This identity and tradition, Schemann said, following Lagarde, survived in the völkish culture of Germany, a Pan-German feeling that was the sole bulwark against Europe’s cultural, social, and racial “disintegration.” Above all, Wagner’s operas were seen as the authentic re-creation of the original Aryan myths. “Bayreuth became an annual festival where Aryan-Germans could participate in ‘their primeval mysteries,’ rediscover the origins of their Kultur, and be restored to spiritual health.” 1144 Lagarde’s disillusion with Germany was aggravated by his visit to Britain, “where he thought he saw a unified people, a popular monarchy, and a responsible gentry—all things that Germany lacked.” 1145
Lagarde’s reputation, which has now all but vanished, was then very high. Thomas Mann called him a “praeceptor Germaniae” (the same term as had been attached to Treitschke), especially for those who were dissatisfied with their “humdrum existence in bourgeois society.” In World War II, soldiers of the Third Reich were issued an anthology of Lagarde’s work. 1146
Schemann’s own writings were limited in their appeal, but not so those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Chamberlain, as his name implies, was born in England but grew up a Germanophile, married Wagner’s daughter, becoming in the process more German than the Germans, an influential member of the Bayreuth circle. In 1899, long after Wagner’s death, he published Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), a rambling survey of European history, the chief arguments of which were, first, that the European achievement was owed entirely to the Aryan race, a race that kept its identity against all the odds, and survived now as the Teutons, exhibiting great “physical health and strength, great intelligence, luxuriant imagination, untiring impulse to create.” 1147 Second, when Teutonic vitality was under threat, the main villain was invariably the Jews, Chamberlain claiming that the Jewish “race” was the degenerate result, he said, of “cross-breeding” between Bedouins, Hittites, Syrians, and Amorites from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. They were a “tainted race” who deliberately tried to sabotage and pollute the world that their “Teutonic superiors” had built. 1148
His book became part of the standard history curriculum in German schools, and we know that Hitler was introduced to his doctrines by Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckhart. 1149 The two men met in 1927 when Chamberlain was quite old. Goebbels was there and later described the meeting, with Hitler and Chamberlain clutching each other’s hands, the former telling the latter he was his “spiritual father.” Chamberlain wrote to Hitler a few days later: “With one blow you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in her hour of need, brings forth a Hitler—that is proof of her vitality. Now I will be able to sleep peacefully and I shall have no need to wake up again. God protect you!” Chamberlain died before Hitler came to power, but Schemann lived on and, on his eighty-fifth birthday, received Germany’s highest literary award, the Goethe medal, from the Third Reich. 1150
As Fritz Stern has said, the “rhapsodies of irrationality . . . illuminate the underside of German culture.” Whatever their starting point, they all envisaged a Germania irredenta, a new destiny in which Germany, purged and disciplined, would emerge as the greatest power in the world. Above all there was the ideological attack on modernity, the dominance of resentment as the major psychological force. 1151
These issues touched the common man more in Germany than elsewhere, in particular the educated classes. It was an idealism that represented an attitude toward life, a set of sentiments and values, in which science and scholarship—however scientistic or tendentious—played an important role in adding a spurious force to the feeling. This idealism, with its emphasis on Innerlichkeit, on inwardness, did not encourage political involvement, a state of affairs reinforced by Bismarck’s “semi-authoritarian” political regime. Norbert Elias has drawn attention to the division in late nineteenth-century Germany between, on the one hand, the satisfaktionfähige Gesellschaft, a society oriented around a code of honor, in which dueling and the demanding and giving of “satisfaction” occupied pride of place, which became brutalized, and, on the other, the educated middle class.
Nationalism, Kultur, and idealism fused into a cultural nationalism in which the German spirit was exalted above those of other nations, with an enthusiasm—even aggression—that had no parallel elsewhere. Elias has again shown how nationalism embodies a moral code, inegalitarianism, at variance with those of the “rising tiers” of society. This was so because the educated classes in particular—the academics, the bureaucrats, the professional people—were being rapidly overtaken by the new industrialists and were slipping down the power-pecking order. Having once been just below the old aristocracy, they were now just above the proletariat. “With a suddenness that has had no parallel, the industrial revolution changed the face and character of German society.” 1152 One revealing statistic is that, by 1910, Germany had almost as many large cities as the rest of Europe put together. This change to modernity was greater and quicker in Germany than anywhere else.
— The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson
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