“What is German?”—I cannot answer this question directly. First it is necessary to reflect upon the question itself. It is encumbered with those complacent definitions that presume that the specifically German is not what really is German, but what one would like it to be. The ideal must defer to the idealization. In its sheer form the question already profanes the irrevocable experiences of the last decades. It creates an autonomous collective entity, ‘German’, whose characteristics are then to be determined. The formation of national collectives, however, common in the detestable jargon of war that speaks of the Russian, the American, surely also of the German, obeys a reifying consciousness that is no longer really capable of experience. It confines itself within precisely those stereotypes that thinking should dissolve. It is uncertain whether something like the German as a person or German as a quality, or anything similar in other nations, exists at all. The True and the Better in every people is surely that which does not integrate itself into the collective subject and if possible resists it. The formation of stereotypes, on the other hand, promotes collective narcissism. Those qualities with which one identifies oneself, the essence of one’s own group, imperceptibly become the good itself and the foreign group, the others, bad. The same thing then takes place, in reverse, with the image the others have of the German. Yet after the most abominable atrocities perpetrated under National Socialism by an ideology of the primacy of the collective subject at the cost of any and all individuality, there is doubled reason in Germany to guard against relapsing into the cultivation of self-idolatrous stereotypes.
Tendencies of just this sort have emerged in recent years. They are conjured up by the political questions of reunification, of the Oder-Neiße Line, also by several claims raised by the refugees; a further pretext is offered by a completely imagined international ostracism of the German, or a no less fictive lack of that national self-esteem that so many would like to incite again. Imperceptibly an atmosphere is slowly taking shape that disapproves of the one thing most necessary: critical self-reflection. Once again one hears the ill-fated proverb of the bird that dirties its own nest, whereas those who grouse about the bird themselves tend to be birds of a feather who flock together.1 There are more than a few questions to which almost everybody refrains from voicing his or her true opinion in consideration of the consequences. Such consideration swiftly becomes autonomous and assumes the authority of an internal censor that ultimately prevents not only the expression of uncomfortable thoughts but the thoughts themselves. Because historically German unification was belated, precarious, and unstable, one tends, simply so as to feel like a nation at all, to overplay the national consciousness and irritably avenge every deviation from it. In this situation it is easy to regress to archaic conditions of a pre-individualistic disposition, a tribal consciousness, to which one can appeal with all the greater psychological effectiveness the less such consciousness actually exists. To escape these regressive tendencies, to come of age, to look one’s own historical and societal situation and the international situation straight in the eye, is incumbent upon precisely those people who invoke the German tradition, that of Kant. His thought is centered upon the concept of autonomy, the self-responsibility of the reasoning individual instead of upon those blind dependencies, which include the unreflected supremacy of the national. According to Kant, the universal of reason realizes itself only in the individual. If one wanted to give Kant his rightful due as the star-witness of the German tradition, then this would mean the obligation to renounce collective obedience and self-idolatry. Indeed those who most loudly proclaim Kant, Goethe, or Beethoven to be German property are regularly those who have the least to do with the contents of these authors’ works. They register them as possessions, whereas what these writers taught and produced prevents them from being transformed into something that can be possessed. The German tradition is violated by those who neutralize it into cultural property that is at once both admired and of no pertinence. Meanwhile people who know nothing of the obligation inherent in these ideas are quickly seized with indignation whenever even one critical word falls upon a great name they want to confiscate and exploit as a German brand-name product.2
This is not to say that the stereotypes are devoid of any and all truth. Recall the most famous formulation of German collective narcissism, Wagner’s: to be German means to do something for its own sake.3 The self-righteousness of the sentence is undeniable, as is its imperial overtone contrasting the pure will of the Germans with an allegedly petty mercantile spirit, that of the Anglo-Saxons in particular. However, it remains correct that the exchange relation, the permeation of all spheres, even that of spirit by the commodity form—what is popularly called commercialization—in Germany in the later eighteenth and in the nineteenth century had not flourished as widely as in the advanced capitalist countries. This lent some power of resistance at least to intellectual production. It understood itself to be a being in-itself, not merely a being for-something-else or for-others, nor as an object of exchange.4 Its model was not the entrepreneur operating according to the laws of the market but rather the civil servant fulfilling his duty to the authorities; this has often been emphasized in Kant. In Fichte’s doctrine of action as an end-in-itself it found its most rigorous theoretical expression. One might learn what is true in this stereotype by studying the case of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose name and development are linked to the most disastrous aspects of modern German history, the völkisch and anti-Semitic. It would be rewarding to understand how the sinister political function of this Germanized Englishman came about. His correspondence with his mother-in-law, Cosima Wagner, offers the richest material for such an inquiry. Chamberlain originally was a sophisticated, delicate man, extremely sensitive to the insidiousness of commercialized culture. He was attracted to Germany in general and to Bayreuth in particular by the proclaimed rejection of commercialism there. That he became a racial demagogue is neither the fault of a natural maliciousness or even of a weakness before the paranoid, power-hungry Cosima but rather of naiveté. What Chamberlain loved in German culture in comparison with the fully developed capitalism of his homeland, he took to be absolute. In it he saw an immutable, natural constitution, not the result of nonsynchronous developments in society. This led him smoothly to those völkisch notions, which then had incomparably more barbaric consequences than the unartistic existence he wanted to escape.
While it is true that without that “for its own sake” at least the great German philosophy and the great German music would have been impossible—significant artists of the Western countries have no less resisted the world disfigured by the exchange principle—it is not the whole truth. Even German society was, and is, an exchange society, and the doing-something-for-its-own-sake is not so pure as it affects to be. Rather behind this was hidden also a for-something-else, also an interest, that was by no means exhausted by the thing itself. But this interest was less the individual than the state, to which thoughts and actions were subordinated and whose expansion was supposed to afford satisfaction to the temporarily restrained egoism of individuals. The great German conceptions in which autonomy and the pure for-its-own-sake are so exuberantly glorified were without exception also available for the deification of the state; the criticism of the Western countries, equally one-sided, had repeatedly insisted on this point. The primacy of the interest of the collective over the individual self-interest was coupled with the aggressive political potential of an offensive war. The urge toward boundless domination accompanied the boundlessness of the ‘idea’—the one did not exist without the other. To this day, history proves its nexus of complicity in that the highest forces of production, the supreme manifestations of spirit are in league with the worst.5 Even the for-its-own-sake, in its relentlessly principled lack of consideration for the other, is no stranger to inhumanity. This inhumanity reveals itself precisely in a certain overbearing, all-encompassing violence of the greatest spiritual creations, in their will to domination. Almost without exception they confirm the existing because it exists. If one is permitted to speculate that something is specifically German, then it is this interpenetration of what is magnificent, not contenting itself with any conventional boundaries, with what is monstrous. In transgressing the boundaries, it at the same time wants to subjugate, just as idealist philosophies and artworks did not tolerate anything that could not be wholly subsumed within the domineering sphere of influence of their identity. Even the tension between these moments is no originary given, no so-called national character. The turn inward, the Hölderlinian “poor in deed yet full of thought,”6 as it prevails in the authentic works around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, had dammed up and overheated forces to the point of explosion, forces that then attempted, too late, to realize themselves. The absolute underwent reversal into the absolute horror. If in fact for long periods of time in the early bourgeois history the meshes of civilization’s net—of bourgeoisification—were not so tightly woven in Germany as in the Western countries, this allowed a reserve of untapped natural forces to accumulate. This engendered the unwavering radicalism of spirit just as well as the permanent possibility of relapse.7 Thus while Hitler can hardly be ascribed to the German national character as its fate, it was nonetheless hardly a coincidence that he rose to power in Germany. Even merely without the German seriousness, which stems from the pathos of the absolute and without which the best could not exist, Hitler could not have flourished. In the Western countries, where the rules of society are more deeply ingrained in the masses, he would have been laughed at. Holy seriousness can turn into deadly seriousness, which with hubris sets itself up literally as the absolute and rages against everything that does not bow to its claim.
Such complexity—the insight that in whatever is German the one cannot be had without the other—discourages every unequivocal answer to the question. The demand for such unequivocality is made at the expense of what eludes it. One then prefers to make the all too complicated thinking of the intellectual responsible for the state of affairs that prevents the intellectual, if he does not want to lie, from making simple determinations according to an either-or schema. Therefore, it is perhaps better if I somewhat reduce the question of what is German and formulate it more modestly: what motivated me, as an emigrant, someone who had been driven out in disgrace, and after what had been perpetrated by the Germans on millions of innocent people, nonetheless to come back. By trying to convey some of the things I myself have experienced and observed, I believe I can best work against the formation of stereotypes. It is an ancient tradition that such people who were capriciously and blindly banished from their homeland by tyranny come back after its fall. Someone who hates the thought of starting a new life will follow this tradition almost naturally, without long deliberation. Moreover, to someone who thinks in terms of society, and who understands fascism socio-economically, the thesis that blames the German people [Volk] is really quite foreign. At no moment during my emigration did I relinquish the hope of coming back. And although the identification with the familiar is undeniably an aspect of this hope, it should not be misconstrued into a theoretical justification for something that probably is legitimate only so long as it obeys the impulse without appealing to elaborate theoretical supports. That in my voluntary decision I harbored the feeling of being able to do some good in Germany, to work against the obduration, the repetition of the disaster, is only another aspect of that spontaneous identification.
Experience has taught me something remarkable. People who conform, who feel generally at one with the given environment and its relations of domination, always adapt themselves much more easily in new countries. Here a nationalist, there a nationalist. Whoever as a matter of principle is never unrefractedly at one with the given conditions, whoever is not predisposed to play along, also remains oppositional in the new country. A sense of continuity and loyalty to one’s own past is not the same as arrogance and obstinacy with regard to the person one happens to be, no matter how easily the former degenerates into the latter. Such loyalty demands that rather than relinquishing oneself for the sake of adapting to another milieu, one strive instead to change something in the domain where one is secure and competent in one’s experience, where one is able to discriminate, above all really is able to understand people. I simply wanted to go back to the place where I spent my childhood, where what is specifically mine was imparted to the very core. Perhaps I sensed that whatever one accomplishes in life is little other than the attempt to regain childhood. For that reason I feel justified in speaking of the strength of the motives that drew me home, without arousing the suspicion of weakness or sentimentality, not to mention exposing myself to the misunderstanding that I subscribe to the fatal antithesis of Kultur and Culture*.8 Following a tradition of hostility to civilization that is older than Spengler, one feels superior to the other continent because it has produced nothing but refrigerators and automobiles while Germany produced the culture of spirit. But when this culture becomes entrenched, becomes an end in itself, it also has the tendency of detaching itself from real humanitarianism and becoming self-sufficient. In America, however, in the omnipresent for-other all the way to keep smiling*, there also flourishes sympathy, compassion, and commiseration with the lot of the weaker. The energetic will to establish a free society—rather than only apprehensively thinking of freedom and, even in thought, degrading it into voluntary submission—does not forfeit its goodness because the societal system imposes limits to its realization. In Germany, arrogance toward America is inappropriate. By misusing a higher good, it serves only the mustiest of instincts. One need not deny the distinction between a so-called culture of spirit and a technological culture in order to rise above a stubborn contraposition of the two. A utilitarian view of life that, impervious to the incessantly increasing contradictions, believes that everything is for the best just as long as it merely functions, is just as blind as the faith in a culture of spirit that, by virtue of its ideal of self-sufficient purity, renounces the realization of its contents and abandons reality to power and its blindness.9
Having said this, I will risk speaking about what facilitated my decision to return. A publisher, incidentally a European emigrant, who was familiar with the German manuscript of Philosophy of New Music, expressed the wish to publish the main section of it in English. He asked me for a rough translation. When he read it, he found that the book, with which he was already familiar, was “badly organized”* [schlecht organisiert]. I said to myself that, at least in Germany, despite all that has happened there, I would be spared this. A few years later the same thing happened again, only this time grotesquely intensified. I had presented a lecture in the Psychoanalytical Society in San Francisco and given it to their affiliated professional journal for publication. In the galleys I discovered that they had not been satisfied with improving the stylistic deficiencies of an emigrant writer. The entire text had been disfigured beyond recognition, the fundamental intentions could not be recovered. To my polite protest I received the no less polite and regretful explanation, that the journal owes its reputation precisely to its practice of submitting all contributions to such editing* [Redaktion]. The editing provided the journal with its uniformity; I would only be standing in my own way were I to forego its advantages. Nonetheless I did forego them; today the article can be found in the volume Sociologica II under the title “Die revidierte Psychoanalyse” [“Psychoanalysis Revised”] in a quite faithful German translation.10 In it one can check whether the text needed to be filtered through a machine, obedient to that almost universal technique of adaptation, reworking, and arranging, to which powerless authors have to submit in America. I give these examples not to complain about the country where I found refuge but to explain clearly why I did not stay. In comparison with the horror of National Socialism my literary experiences were insignificant bagatelles. But once I had survived, it was certainly excusable that I sought working conditions that would impair my work as little as possible. I was perfectly aware that the autonomy I championed as the unconditional right of the author to determine the integral form of his production had, at the same time, something regressive about it in relation to the highly rationalized commercial exploitation even of spiritual creations. What was being demanded of me was nothing other than the logically consistent application of the laws of highly advanced economic concentration to scholarly and literary products. However, what represents progress according to the standards of adaptation inevitably meant regression according to the standards of the subject matter itself. Conformity deprives spiritual creations of whatever is perhaps new and productive in them and by which they raise themselves above the already regulated consumer needs. In this country the demand that spirit also conform is not yet total. The distinction is still drawn, though often enough with problematic justification, between the autonomous creations of spirit and the products for the marketplace. Such economic backwardness, the future toleration of which remains uncertain, is the refuge of everything progressive that does not take the prevailing societal rules to be the ultimate truth. Once spirit, as admittedly countless people would like, is brought up to speed, made to order for the customer who is dominated by the market that takes his inferiority as a pretext for its own ideology, then spirit is just as thoroughly done for as it was under the clubs of the fascists. Intentions that are not content with the status quo—I would say qualitatively modern intentions—live from their backwardness within the process of economic exploitation. This backwardness is also no particularity of German nationality but rather attests to contradictions within the societal totality. History up until now has not known any linear progress. So long as progress runs in a single strand, on the rails of the mere domination of nature, then whatever spiritually extends beyond that will much more likely embody itself in what has not kept up completely with the main trend than in what is up-to-date*. In a political phase that to a large extent relegates Germany as a nation to a function of world politics, this may yet be the chance for the German spirit—with all the dangers of a reawakening nationalism that implies.11
The decision to return to Germany was hardly motivated simply by a subjective need, or homesickness, as little as I deny having had such sentiments. An objective factor also made itself felt. It is the language. Not only because one can never express one’s intention so exactly, with all the nuances and the rhythm of the train of thought in the newly acquired language as in one’s own. Rather, the German language also apparently has a special elective affinity with philosophy and particularly with its speculative element that in the West is so easily suspected of being dangerously unclear, and by no means completely without justification. Historically, in a process that finally needs to be seriously analyzed, the German language has become capable of expressing something in the phenomena that is not exhausted in their mere thus-ness, their positivity, and givenness. This specific quality of the German language can be most graphically demonstrated in the nearly prohibitive difficulty of translating into another language philosophical texts of supreme difficulty such as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or his Science of Logic.12 German is not merely the signification of fixed meanings; rather, it has retained more of the power of expression—more in any case than would be perceived in the Western languages by someone who had not grown up in them and for whom they are not second nature. However, whoever remains convinced that, in contrast to the individual disciplines, the mode of presentation is essential to philosophy—as Ulrich Sonnemann recently put it very succinctly, there has never been a great philosopher who was not also a great writer13—will be disposed to the German language. At least the native German will feel that he cannot fully acquire the essential aspect of presentation or of expression in the foreign language. If one writes in a truly foreign language, then whether it is acknowledged or not, one falls under the captivating spell to communicate, to say it in a way such that others can understand. In one’s own language, however, if one says the matter as exactly and uncompromisingly as possible, one may hope through such unyielding efforts to become understandable as well. In the domain of one’s own language, it is this very language itself that vouches for human fellowship. I will not venture to decide whether this circumstance is specific to German or whether it affects far more generally the relationship between each person’s native language and a foreign language. Yet the impossibility of conveying without violence not only high-reaching speculative thoughts but even particular, quite precise concepts such as those of Geist [spirit, mind, intellect], Moment [moment, element, aspect], and Erfahrung [experience], including everything with which they resonate in German, speaks for a specific, objective quality of the German language. Unquestionably the German language also has a price to pay for this quality in the omnipresent temptation that the writer will imagine that the immanent tendency of German words to say more than they actually say makes things easier and releases him from the obligation of thinking and, where possible, of critically qualifying this ‘more’, instead of playfully indulging in it. The returning émigré, who has lost the naive relationship to what is his own, must unite the most intimate relationship to his native language with unflagging vigilance against any fraud it promotes; against the belief that what I should like to call the metaphysical excess of the German language in itself already guarantees the truth of the metaphysics it suggests, or of metaphysics in general. I should perhaps admit in this context that I also for this reason wrote the Jargon of Authenticity.14 Because I attribute just as much weight to language as a constituent of thought as Wilhelm von Humboldt did in the German tradition, I insist upon a discipline in my language, as also in my own thought, that hackneyed discourse only all too happily avoids. The metaphysical character of language is no privilege. One must not borrow from it the idea of a profundity that becomes suspect the moment it stoops to self-praise. This is similar to the concept of the German soul that, whatever it once may have meant, was mortally damaged when an ultraconservative composer gave that as a title to his romantic retrospective work.15 The concept of profundity itself must not be affirmed without reflection, must not be, as philosophy calls it, hypostatized. No one who writes in German and who knows how much his thoughts are saturated with the German language should forget Nietzsche’s critique of this sphere.16 In the tradition, self-righteous German profundity was ominously in accord with suffering and its justification. For this reason the Enlightenment was denounced as superficial. If there is still anything profound, that is, not content with the blindly inculcated notions, then it is the denunciation of every clandestine agreement with the unconditionality of suffering. Solidarity prohibits its justification. It is in the faithfulness to the idea that the way things are should not be the final word—rather than in the hopeless attempt to determine finally what is German—that the sense this concept may still assert is to be surmised: in the transition to humanity.