1
A saying that I heard often in my youth still rings in my ears today: History is written by the victor. This sounds like an order and surely originated with a soldier.
The first historical book I read as a boy was Annegarn’s Weltgeschichte [World History],1 a good household book representing German history from a Catholic standpoint. The Catholics of the time, around 1900, were in any case not the victors in a Germany governed by Prussia, and their historiographers stood on the defensive. I was not aware of any of this as a youth. A boy who enthusiastically reads history books does not give a thought to who actually writes these beautiful stories. I was enraptured by the valiant Annegarn and did not dwell on problems of historiography.
Then gradually I got to know the victors of my time and their historiographers. Thus the sociological meaning of that saying about victorious historiographers became clear to me. The saying now meant that the national–liberal historians of the Bismarck Empire, Sybel, Treitschke, and their successors, were the great writers of history. In comparison, the defeated Austrians or the French were not worthy of notice, to say nothing of the Danes, the Poles, and the Italians [Ultramontanen].2 Nevertheless, as World War I approached, one could sometimes also hear a warning, namely that we must stick together in order not to find ourselves in the role of the vanquished. Otherwise to all the other misfortunes of a lost war would be added the triumph of the victors’ historians over our historians.
In all such sayings about war, one thought only of the European land war of the nineteenth century—a military war organized by states. One did not think of civil war. There are many significant proverbs about war in general. Poets and philosophers, historians and soldiers have spoken of war. Unfortunately, everything that has been said about war receives its ultimate and bitter meaning in civil war. Many quote the sentence of Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things.”3 But few dare to think of civil war in this context.
2
For a long time now I have held Alexis de Tocqueville to have been the greatest historian of the nineteenth century. He seems somewhat old-fashioned and courtly, but for all that he is one of those rare historians who did not succumb to the histrionic tendencies of their century. It is wonderful how his gaze pierces the foregrounds of revolutions and restorations to perceive the fateful core of the development that takes place behind contradictory fronts and slogans—a development used by all parties, from right to left, for driving things on to ever further centralization and democratization.
If I say that the gaze of this historian pierces, this should not be taken to mean that he has a strained and tensely penetrating gaze. He does not have the zeal of a sociological or psychological debunker or the vanity of a skeptic, but he harbors no metaphysical ambitions either. He does not wish to find eternal laws of the world-historical process: neither three-stage laws nor cultural cycles. He speaks not of things in which he is not existentially involved, of Indians and Egyptians, of Etruscans and Hittites. He does not seat himself, as do the great Hegel and the wise Ranke, next to God in the royal box of the world theater. He is a moralist in the sense established by the French tradition, like Montesquieu, and at the same time a painter in the sense of the French concept of peinture. His gaze is gentle and clear and always somewhat sad. He possesses intellectual courage, but out of politeness and loyalty he gives everyone a chance and makes no loud displays of despair. Thus in 1849 he became for a few months the foreign minister of President Louis Napoleon, whom he clearly perceived as a histrionic figure. The chapter he devotes to this experience in his memoirs is very topical. In general one recognizes him best in his Souvenirs [Recollections].4 No historian has anything comparable to Tocqueville to offer, with this wonderful book. But what elevates him far above all other historians of the nineteenth century is the great prognosis that stands at the end of the first volume of Democracy in America.5
Tocqueville’s prognosis states that humankind will irresistibly and inevitably continue further along the path it has long been on, toward centralization and democratization. But the forward-looking historian does not rest content with having determined a general developmental tendency. He identifies simply and clearly the concrete historical powers that [will] carry and accomplish this development: America and Russia. As different and opposed as they might be, they both nevertheless come, along very different paths—the one through free, the other through dictatorial forms of organization—to the same result of a centralized and democratized humankind.
3
It is in fact extraordinary that a young European jurist could have conceived of such a prognosis over a hundred years ago, when the dominant picture of the world of his age was still entirely Eurocentric. Hegel had died a few years earlier, in 1831, without having identified the two new world powers as bearers of a new development. The most astonishing fact is that the French historian names the new powers of America and Russia together in this concrete way, although neither of them was yet industrialized. Two emerging giants, both formed by the European spirit but still not European, will confront each other directly, beyond the borders of little Europe and without consulting it.
What Tocqueville predicted in this way was no vague oracle, no prophetic vision, and no general historical–philosophical construction. It was a real prognosis, won on the basis of objective observations and superior diagnoses, registered with the courage of a European intelligence and expressed with all the precision of a French mind. With this prognosis the European self-consciousness changed, and there began a new phase of historical self-contextualization. The wider strata of society became conscious of this shift only later, through the spotlight of open emergency and the amplifiers of the German headline “Demise of the West.” The problem is not one of today, and not one of yesterday. The first modern contribution to this secular theme comes from Tocqueville. Up to the present day this remains also the most significant contribution, because it is the most concrete. Deep historical truths find their clearest expression at the moment of their ascent.
4
Tocqueville was one of the vanquished. All forms of defeat converged in him, and not accidentally and only unluckily, but rather fatefully and existentially. As an aristocrat, he was on the losing side in the civil war, the worst kind of war, which also brings with it the worst kind of defeat. He belonged to the social class that was defeated by the French Revolution. As a liberal, he foresaw the no longer liberal Revolution of 1848 and was fatally affected by the outbreak of its horrors. As a Frenchman, he belonged to the nation that was defeated by England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia after a 20-year coalition war. Thus he was on the losing side in an international world war. As a European, he found himself in the role of the defeated, for he foresaw the development that, over Europe’s head, made two new powers, America and Russia, into the bearers and inheritors of an irresistible centralization and democratization. Finally, as a Christian—which he remained in accordance with the beliefs of his fathers, through baptism and tradition—he succumbed to the scientific agnosticism of the age.
Nevertheless he did not become what he, more than any other, seemed predestined to be: a Christian Epimetheus. He lacked the footing in salvific history that would preserve his historical idea of Europe against despair. Europe was lost without the idea of a katechon.6 Tocqueville knew no katechon. Instead he sought intelligent compromises. He himself felt the weakness of these compromises just as did his opponents, who for that reason mocked him.
Thus he became one of the vanquished who accepted his defeat. C’est un vaincu qui accepte sa défaite [“only someone defeated accepts his defeat”]. Guizot said this of him, and Sainte-Beuve spread it eagerly around. It was ill meant. The literary critic uses it as a poisoned arrow in order to fatally strike the famous historian. But God alters the meaning of such spiteful remarks and makes them into the testimony of an unwanted and unexpected depth of insight. In this way the viciously intended phrase can even serve to help us divine the secret [arcanum] of the greatness that elevates the defeated Frenchman above all other historiographers of his century.
5
In the autumn of 1940, as France lay defeated on the ground, I had a discussion with a Yugoslavian, the Serbian poet Ivo Andrić, whom I love very much. We had met in a shared connoisseurship and in the veneration of Léon Bloy. The Serb told me the following story from the mythology of his people: Marko Kraljević, the hero of the Serbian saga, fought for an entire day with a powerful Turk and laid him out after a hard struggle. As he killed the defeated enemy, a serpent that had been sleeping upon the heart of the dead man awoke and spoke to Marko: You were lucky that I slept through your battle. Then the hero cried out: Woe is me! I killed a man who was stronger than me!
I retold this story to some friends and acquaintances at the time and also to Ernst Jünger, who was stationed as an officer of the army of occupation in Paris. We were all deeply impressed. But it was clear to us that the victors of today do not allow themselves to be impressed by such medieval stories. This, too, belongs to your great prognosis, poor, defeated Tocqueville!
Summer 1946