The poets did not speak for themselves alone. Their critique of politics and their call for wholeness were guaranteed a wide audience, in part because poets had high authority, but in part also because they confirmed, and beautifully expressed, ideas that had been powerful in Germany’s past and continued to be powerful during the Weimar years. There was deep, widespread discontent with politics in the Republic. “We young students did not read the newspapers in those years,” Hannah Arendt has recalled. “George Grosz’s cartoons seemed to us not satires but realistic reportage: we knew those types; they were all around us. Should we mount the barricades for that?”
This rejection of politics was a new version of an old habit of mind. For over a century Germans had looked upon politics with a mixture of fascination and aversion. The enormous numbers of newspapers and the space they gave to politics—once the censor would let them—and the high rate of participation in elections strongly suggest that Germans took to politics with a passion; as soon as they could be political, they were political. Much of this restless expenditure of energy might be self-important busy work—Germans themselves liked to satirize their incurable inclination to form clubs—or the public acting out of private passions, but it was at least what is normally called political activity: political talk, canvassing, voting. Foolish politics is still politics. But side by side with this stream of thought there ran another channel, crowded with traffic and dug deep by careful dredging—the aversion to politics, not to this or that policy, this or that party, but to politics as such.
The pursuit of politics is a habit, like all habits strengthened by practice and atrophied by disuse. Germans had little practice in politics. The authoritarian states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large or small, had lived largely under the fiat of their rulers; there were few newspapers, and the newspapers there were had little political news and no political independence; only a handful of states could boast public debating societies known as parliaments. The imperial institutions that Bismarck built in 1871, by appearing to be better, made things worse; they were, as the veteran Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht colorfully put it, “fig leaves for absolutism.” The federalist structure of the new German Empire barely concealed the predominance of Prussia; the universal manhood suffrage for the federal parliament was badly compromised by Prussia’s reactionary three-class electoral system, which kept all the power in the hands of the powerful; the Reichstag was only a shadow parliament, since the Chancellor was responsible not to it but to his Emperor. Deputies to the Reichstag were largely passive recipients of communications from those who really governed. The great Roman historian Theodor Mommsen, by his own confession a thoroughly political animal, warned against the damage that Bismarck was doing. “The decay of our representative system is certainly frightening,” he wrote; the nation has contented itself with “pseudo-constitutional absolutism”; the Reichstag appears like “a building for momentary utility, to be thrown away after use”—in a word, “Bismarck has broken the spine of the nation.”1 Only a handful of others were as perceptive as Mommsen. And after Bismarck was dismissed in 1890, he left his institutions behind, to be managed by lesser men; what Meinecke would later call the “militarist-conservative combine”2 kept control. Surely, the political mentality cannot train itself in an atmosphere of persistent frustration, or with the sense that it is all a sham. When the democratic Weimar Constitution opened the door to real politics, the Germans stood at the door, gaping, like peasants bidden to a palace, hardly knowing how to conduct themselves.
As realities usually do, these realities produced ideologies that explained and justified them. Leading German intellectuals, poets, and professors made an informal, largely tacit agreement with their state: they would abstain from criticism, even from politics in general, if the state in turn allowed them freedom to lead somewhat irregular private lives and hold rather unorthodox opinions in philosophy and religion. Schiller’s celebrated call for Gedankenfreiheit—freedom of thought—was not so radical as it may appear. “Gedankenfreiheit,” Hajo Holborn has written, “was directly felt as absolutely necessary, while social and political rights were regarded as perhaps desirable, but necessary only to a minor degree.” In fact, “the whole intellectual movement of the German eighteenth century had as its almost exclusive aim the education of the individual, and to that it subordinated all political demands.”3 The world of the Germans—and here the poets helped, as models and spokesmen—came to be separated into the higher realm of self-perfection, Bildung, the achievement of Kultur for its own sake and free of politics, and the lower realm of human affairs, sordid with practical matters and compromises. The Humanitätsideal preached at the beginning of the nineteenth century by civilized men like Alexander von Humboldt was a noble ideal, and, in a sense, an education for humane politics both domestically and internationally; it served as a criticism of prevailing institutions and practices. But its dualism could easily be vulgarized, and was vulgarized, into mere sloganeering which elevated apathy into a superior form of existence and invidiously compared the traders’ mentality of British and French politicians with the spirituality of the educated German. In fact, the separation from, and exaltation over, “Western” values was a prominent part of this German ideology. Nor was this “Vulgäridealismus”—this vulgar idealism4—politically neutral; in valuing obedience and authority above debate and partisan activity, it was self-righteous, conservative, often reactionary, a valuable prop of the established order.
During the First World War, the unpolitical German found an eloquent spokesman, and fought a memorable battle, which was to reverberate through the short life of the Weimar Republic. In 1918 Thomas Mann proclaimed, both in the title and the six hundred pages of his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, that he was an unpolitical man, and proud of it. The volume—it is really an overgrown polemical pamphlet—was a salvo in a family quarrel conducted in the open. Early in the war, still caught up in his conviction of Germany’s cultural mission, Thomas Mann had written an essay reminding the Germans of a historic hero, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who, with all his faults, incarnated Germany itself; the great coalition that had formed itself against Prussia in 1756, after Frederick had invaded Saxony in the name of self-defense, foreshadowed the great coalition that had formed itself against Germany in 1914, after the Germans had invaded Belgium for the same reason. “Today, Germany is Frederick the Great”; it is “his soul that has reawakened in us.”5 The reply to this aggressive defense of German Kultur and German conduct came from Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich, in an essay ostensibly devoted to Zola but actually—as the glancing hits at his brother and at German policy made plain—an uncompromising condemnation of the very ideal that Thomas Mann cherished and hoped to sustain. It is Zola, Heinrich Mann argued, Zola, the republican, the democrat, the pamphleteer against injustice and exploitation, the ruthless truth-teller, the idealist, the Utopian, in a word, the enlightened civilian, who is the truly admirable model. This exchange took place in 1915; Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, begun then and published three years later, was, at least for a time, the last word. Heinrich Mann appears, not by name, but by an untranslatable epithet, as the Zivilisationsliterat—the cultivated but shallow littérateur who is devoted to the cursed values of a rationalist, bourgeois, materialistic, superficial, optimistic civilization, who is blind to the abysses of the human soul, the mysteries of Kultur, the treacherous seductions of the theory of progress, the pitfalls of democracy, and who insists—and this is worst of all—on corrupting with politics the spheres of culture and the spirit. “I hate politics and the belief in politics, because it makes men arrogant, doctrinaire, obstinate, and inhuman.”6 When in the 1920s Thomas Mann under-went his conversion to the Republic and to democracy, he changed his mind about politics as well. “The political and the social,” he now recognized, “are part of the humane sphere.”7 By then it was a little late, and not particularly impressive; there were many who interpreted Mann’s change of front as treason or sheer irresponsibility, maliciously quoted his earlier in refutation of his later pronouncements, and refused to follow him.
Yet if Weimar needed anything, it needed rational politics. With the advent of the Republic, the possibility of political action, like the need for it, increased, suddenly and spectacularly. But the possibility was not realized, the need not filled. Not all the trouble lay with the unpolitical; many who had been unpolitical adopted politics of a kind that makes one long for a little apathy. Some mistook Expressionist declamation for a reform program; others chose murder as their favorite form of electioneering. At times the left seemed no less remote from the reality of reasonable conduct: in 1932 the men around the Weltbühne actually proposed Heinrich Mann for President of Germany, a proposal that Mann declined in favor of Hindenburg—against Hitler.8 At the same time, as the memoirs—the literature of hindsight—make unmistakably clear, the unpolitical strain remained alive. Many simply could not bother to get involved. “I don’t remember,” writes the articulate philosopher Ludwig Marcuse in his autobiography, “if I voted in those years—and certainly not for whom.”9
Doubtless this attitude, so widespread and so fatalistic, induced a certain distortion in perception; what was considered, in advance, to be not worth the trouble appeared to be not worth the trouble. Still, it must be said that the rejection of politics typified by Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Marcuse was more than an old attitude brought up to date; it had a good piece of reality in it. There was some reason to think the political life of the Republic a spectacle, remote and slightly ludicrous. Parliamentary debates, with their legalism and their occasional vehemence, had a curious air of unreality about them: party hacks quibbled, orated, and insulted one another while millions were hungry. Politics seemed a game to which all must contribute but which only politicians could win. Cabinet crisis followed cabinet crisis; in the less than fifteen years of Weimar, there were seventeen governments. It is true that there was more continuity than this figure might indicate: the so-called Weimar coalition, made up of cooperating ministers from the Social Democratic Party, the Catholic Center Party, and the Democratic Party, dominated several of these cabinets; and some men reappeared in cabinet after cabinet regardless of its general makeup; Stresemann, who presided as Chancellor over two cabinets, from August to November 1923, then became Foreign Minister in seven more, until October 3, 1929, the day of his death. Indeed, the Catholic Center was well named: it acted for much of the Weimar period as a parliamentary center of gravity.
Yet the changes of cabinet, coupled with the rise of extremist parties like the Nazis, suggested that the coalitions were papering over deep cracks; they were coalitions without consensus. There were too many for whom the general will seemed obscure or lacking altogether. The phenomenon of the party press did little to mitigate the divisions in German society; millions of voters read only the newspapers of “their” party, thus hardening attitudes they already held. The Center Party, for one, could count on about three hundred newspapers throughout the country, nearly all of them of modest circulation, all of them provincial and parochial. None of them was official—the Center had no equivalent for the Nazis’ Völkischer Beobachter or the Social Democrats’ Vorwärts—and they were stubbornly independent in management, but they remained dependably partisan in their treatment of political news.
There were exceptions, of course: major metropolitan dailies anxious for large circulation, and that voice of reason emanating from the provinces, the Frankfurter Zeitung. The Frankfurter Zeitung was democratic, liberal, but free of parties; its tone was reasonable, its coverage wide, its politics intelligent and wholly independent. In its makeup and its stories, it refused to adopt fashionable sensationalism. Its reporting of parliamentary events was thorough, for it had an important bureau in Berlin; its commitment to the best in modern culture emerged in its championship of modern poets and playwrights, and in the civilized reportage of Siegfried Kracauer. In 1931 its chief editor, Heinrich Simon, spoke movingly of the “other Germany” for which his newspaper stood. Recalling the work of Leopold Sonnemann, the paper’s founder, Simon reminded his audience: “It is good to remember that time in which the advocates of freedom, the advocates of a humane Germany, experienced hostility and persecution. It is good to remember that these persecutions did not cause them to surrender a single iota of their convictions. Where did this courage come from? From the belief in the other Germany which, through the centuries, again and again interrupted saber-rattling self-laceration, even when force sought to condemn it to silence. This newspaper has lived, to this day, on the belief in this other Germany, in the Germany of freedom and humanity.10 Here was the outsider, the representative of the other Germany, the Weimar spirit at its best, speaking sadly and bravely, aware that he was an outsider still. The Frankfurter Zeitung sought to heal the fragmentation of party-ridden Germany with reason. But this, it turned out, was not the kind of wholeness most Germans were looking for. The Nazis had a sense of this; they had a party—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—but they preferred to call it a movement—a Bewegung. It sounded more organic.
The hunger for wholeness found its most poignant expression in the youth. After the war, German youth, restless, bewildered, often incurably estranged from the Republic, sought salvation in the poets, but it also found other, more prosaic if not less strenuous guides. The youth movement, which had had its modest beginnings at the turn of the century and flourished mightily through the twenties, collected among its ranks and preserved among its graduates many would-be thinkers hunting for an organic philosophy of life.
It would be impossible to draw an ideological profile of the Wandervogel and their many offshoots. The youth movements had no real philosophy. Many were anti-Semitic, some accepted Jews. Many tied their members together in strong if unacknowledged homoerotic friendships, some encouraged girls to join. Many expounded a pantheistic love of nature and mystical love of the fatherland, some were casual associations devoted to healthful walks. Many repudiated attempts to introduce politics; some, especially after 1918, allied themselves with Communist, Socialist, or Nazi groups. But all Wandervogel except the most casual attached an enormous importance to their movement, an importance dimly felt but fervently articulated; as solemn, rebellious bourgeois—and they were nearly all bourgeois—they saw their rambling, their singing, their huddling around the campfire, their visits to venerable ruins, as a haven from a Germany they could not respect or even understand, as an experiment in restoring primitive bonds that overwhelming events and insidious forces had loosened or destroyed—in a word, as a critique of the adult world.
The rhetoric of the leading spokesmen for the youth movements betrays this high idealism, unremitting search, and incurable confusion. Many of the youth leaders hailed an idealized, romanticized medieval Germany as a refuge from commercialism and fragmentation. Hans Breuer, who compiled the songbook of the youth movement—one of the biggest best-sellers of twentieth-century Germany—insisted in his prefaces that he had gathered his folk songs for “disinherited” youth, a youth “sensing in its incompleteness—Halbheit—the good and longing for a whole, harmonious humanity.” What, he asks, “What is the old, classical folk song? It is the song of the whole man, complete unto himself—in sich geschlossen.”11 The youth, singing these songs, was a self-conscious rebel against his father; indeed, Hans Blüher, first historian of the Wandervogel and apologist for its adolescent eroticism, explicitly said that “the period that produced the Wandervogel is characterized by a struggle of youth against age.” Alienated sons sought out other alienated sons and formed a great “confederation of friendship.”12 To judge by these writers, the Wandervogel sought warmth and comradeliness, an escape from the lies spawned by petty bourgeois culture, a clean way of life unmarked by the use of alcohol or tobacco and, above all, a common existence that could rise above self-interest and shabby party politics. Leaders and followers alike used a verbal shorthand that was sign, and token, of their emotional intimacy; certain words were talismans for them, invocations with passionate resonance and almost magical powers—words like “Aufbruch,” a rather poetic term evoking revolution, and “Gemeinschaft”—community.
As the philosopher Paul Natorp, full of sympathy and concern, warned as early as 1920, these aspirations and usages were of doubtful value. The facile irrationalism of the Wandervogel, he said, their search for the soul and distrust of the mind, was bound to produce false ideals and lead to antisocial behavior: “You fear the dismemberment of your being in all the piecework of human wishing and knowing, and fail to notice that you cannot achieve wholeness if you reject such large and essential parts of that which has been allotted to all mankind. You seek the indivisibility of man’s being, and yet assent to its being torn apart.”13
Natorp’s warning was wasted. The unbridled neoromanticism and emotional thinking of the prewar years had not been cured by the experience of the war and the peace that followed it—these events, on which youth leaders dwelled obsessively, only compounded the confusion. The result was a peculiarly undoctrinaire, unanalytical, in fact unpolitical socialism—it was “a self-evident proposition,” one observer noted, for all people in the youth movement to be Socialists.14 Young men and women, seeking purity and renewal, were Socialists by instinct; the völkisch, right-wing groups demanded the “reawakening of a genuine Germanness—deutsches Volkstum—in German lands,” while the left-wing groups called for “the restoration of a societas, a communally constructed society.”15 Everywhere, amid endless splintering of groups and futile efforts at reunion, there was a certain fixation on the experience of youth itself; novels about schools and youth groups exemplified and strengthened this fixation. Except for the Freudians and a few others, psychologists and sociologists studied adolescents and neglected child psychology; the concentration of their work on the youth reflected a real need and real concern, but it was, in its own way, part of the fixation it sought to understand. Flight into the future through flight into the past, reformation through nostalgia—in the end, such thinking amounted to nothing more than the decision to make adolescence itself into an ideology.
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, Händler 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 Tönnies’ 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 völkische 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 aristocrats, 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.”16
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 Jünger 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 Hühnerfeld, 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 Hölderlin and Heidegger in their knapsacks can never be counted.”17 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.18 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.”19 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 Führer 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.”20 The words may be a little obscure—though they are, with their reminiscences of editorials in the Völkische 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.”21 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 antidemocratic—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 völkische 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 Blücher 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.”22
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 Humanität, 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.”23 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.24
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.25
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”;26 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.’”27
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 Delbrück—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.28 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.29 “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?”30
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.”31 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;32 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.33
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.”34
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 Staatsräson 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 together 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.”35
Die Idee der Staatsräson 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 Weltbürgertum 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.”36 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.37 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;38 “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;39 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.”40 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 Tönnies and Hofmannsthal and the others manipulated—Volk, Führer, 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—unflätig—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.”41
Yet the Weimar situation was nothing if not complicated. Not all who, in the twenties, hungered for connection and unity were victims of regression; a few, outnumbered and not destined to succeed, sought to satisfy their needs not through escape from but mastery of the world, not through denunciation but employment of the machine, not through irrationalism but reason, not through nihilism but construction—and this last quite literally, for this modern and democratic philosophy was formulated in their writings and carried out in their buildings by architects.
Among the most self-aware of these architects was Erich Mendelsohn, who was to build some distinguished buildings in the Weimar period, among them the Universum movie theatre in Berlin in 1927 and the Schocken department store in Chemnitz in 1928–1929. Mendelsohn insisted that the architect must unite what he called analysis and dynamics, reason and unreason: “Between these two poles—the rational and the irrational, move my nature, life, and work.”42 Certainly, he wrote to his wife, “the primary element is function, but function without sensual admixtures remains mere construction. More than ever I stand by my program of reconciliation” in which beauty and utility are joined. “Both are necessary, both must find each other.” Using the convenient Hegelian term “aufheben,” which means at once elevating, canceling, and preserving, Mendelsohn thought that in the good building all dualisms are “aufgehoben,” just as they are “aufgehoben in every organism, creature, and work of art.”43 In 1920 Mendelsohn, still young and unknown, built an observatory and astro-physical laboratory, the Einstein Tower; he designed it, he said, out of some unknown urge, letting it emerge out of “the mystique around Einstein’s universe.”44 When Albert Einstein walked through the building, he approved of it with a single, appropriate epithet—“organic.”45
Such a philosophy seems proper to an architect like Mendelsohn, who preferred powerful curves to the straight line. But Walter Gropius, the advocate of a classical, geometric style, substantially subscribed to the same philosophy. After doing some fine buildings before the First World War, Gropius was already well known when the Republic was born, but he achieved his real fame in the Bauhaus, which will always be linked with his name. Gropius opened the Bauhaus in early 1919, in Weimar, merging in the new venture two older schools, an academy of art and a school of applied arts. Clarifying and boldly advancing beyond principles first enunciated in the German Werkbund before the war, Gropius from the beginning dedicated his school to the creation of a single artistic unity—the building. Then and later he insisted that his was not merely a craft philosophy; craftsmanship was a “preparation for architecture.” Nor was it simply a “functional” philosophy limited to the practical or to industry; it was explicitly an aesthetic philosophy resting on psychological investigations. “Architects, painters, and sculptors,” he wrote in his opening manifesto of April 1919, “must once again recognize and grasp the multiform shape—vielgliedrige Gestalt—of the building in its totality and its parts.” Only then will their work be filled by the “architectonic spirit” now lost in “salon art.” Older schools of art “could not produce this unity,” since they had separated art from craft. This must change: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn back to craft.” There is no essential difference between craftsman and artist: “The artist is the craftsman in his highest form—Steigerung des Handwerkers.” Let all, forgetting snobbish distinctions, collaborate in “the new building of the future, which will be everything together, architecture and sculpture and painting, in a single shape, rising to heaven from the hands of millions of craftsmen as a crystal symbol of a new emerging faith.” Lyonel Feininger illustrated this call to a new unity with a woodcut depicting a tall, slender, secular cathedral, lit by stars.46
The course of studies at the Bauhaus was designed to turn this rhetoric into reality. After passing the elementary course, each student was trained in the workshop by two masters, who imparted, it was hoped, a mastery of materials as well as aesthetics, of content and form together. “A dual education of this kind,” Gropius later wrote, “would enable the coming generation to achieve the reunion of all forms of creative work and become the architects of a new civilization.” In 1922 Klee drew a symbolic representation of this program: a seven-pointed star is inscribed in a circular band; this band represents the preliminary training that encloses the several materials (glass, stone, wood) and the several courses (construction, color, composition) and leads to the heart of the star, another circle, in which the double aim of the Bauhaus is proudly displayed: “Bau und Bühne—building and stage.”47 The atmosphere of the new Bauhaus was experimental, cheerful, splendidly vigorous; one need only think of some of the teachers to recreate it: Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers.
The activity of the Bauhaus was inventive and versatile; typography, furniture design, lamps, rugs, pottery, book-binding, the dance—all were treated with enormous freedom, and many of them, as we know, had lasting influence; we still sit in chairs designed by Marcel Breuer and read type faces first drawn by Herbert Bayer. The atmosphere at the Bauhaus was curious, exhilarating: the Bauhaus was a family, a school, a cooperative business, a missionary society. Neither Gropius nor the other masters believed in disciples; it was not an academy where the great teacher reproduces little editions of himself, but “a laboratory,” where “students stimulated teachers” and teachers, students. Utility and beauty did not merely stand side by side; the masters strove to make them as one, though there was room for pure beauty as well; some of Feininger’s, Klee’s, and Kandinsky’s most interesting graphic work was done at the Bauhaus. And high morale was essential not merely to creativity but to sheer survival: the appropriations for the school were meager and poverty, especially among the students, was extreme. In 1923, Walter Gropius recalls, when the Bauhaus mounted its first exhibition, there was no money for cleaning the building, and the masters’ wives volunteered their services as charwomen. “The spirit,” Walter Gropius has said, “was simply excellent, and some of the informal activities, like our celebrations—the Feste—when someone would set a theme, like ‘black and white,’ or ‘square,’ were splendid occasions.”
Inevitably, there was some tension within: Johannes Itten, a painter and educator whom Gropius had imported from Vienna to conduct the all-important elementary course, was passionately and exclusively dedicated to aesthetics, and more indifferent to practical results than Gropius thought right or possible. In 1923 Itten resigned, and the preliminary course was taken over by two other great teachers, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. But with the passing of time, and with a congenial atmosphere inviting free debate, these tensions relaxed, and the Bauhaus even profited from that rather premature exhibition of 1923 on which the government had insisted against the better judgment of Gropius and others. The true enemy, in any event, was not internal dissension, but outside hostility—the political and aesthetic aversion of right-wing, tradition-bound craftsmen to the revolutionary implications of the Bauhaus’ experiments and to the Bohemian conduct of its students. Gropius, aware that he was “sitting on a powder keg,” strictly prohibited any political activity, and this helped a good deal. In 1925 the Bauhaus migrated from Weimar to the more congenial city of Dessau; there Gropius built his celebrated buildings—perhaps the most photographed artifacts of the Weimar period—Klee and Kandinsky continued to do their paintings, Breuer built his furniture, and the workshop designed its lamps and china and silverware, clean, sturdy, and beautiful, which made the Bauhaus as famous abroad as it was becoming notorious at home. Finally, in 1932 politics and depression drove it to Berlin, for its final twilight existence.
In the writings of his later years, Gropius simply developed the lines he had laid down in his opening manifesto of 1919: the new architecture sought for wholeness by seeking to satisfy both economic and aesthetic needs. Mechanization must be made to serve; the Bauhaus, in fact, had been designed “to avert mankind’s enslavement by the machine by giving its products a content of reality and significance, and so saving the home from mechanistic anarchy. … Our object was to eliminate every drawback of the machine without sacrificing any one of its real advantages.” True, modern man had been torn apart, but to abandon the division of labor would be not merely impossible but also undesirable. The tragedy of fragmentation was not caused by the machine or the minute subdivision of tasks, but by “the predominantly materialistic mentality of our age and the defective and unreal articulation of the individual to the community.” What was needed was a frankly modern philosophy, unafraid of mechanization or of the right kind of standardization. “What we preached in practice was the common citizenship of all forms of creative work, and their logical interdependence on one another in the modern world.” The “guiding principle was that artistic design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life.” Reason and passion here must collaborate. “It is true that a work of art remains a technical product, but it has an intellectual purpose to fulfill as well which only passion and imagination can achieve.” The Bauhaus, in sum, had been a true community which, “through the wholeness of its approach,” had “helped to restore architecture and design of today as a social art”; it had developed “total architecture.”48
The language of architects is notorious for its imprecision, pretentiousness, and addiction to cliché, and Gropius himself did not always escape the temptation of playing oracle. Yet his work—the houses he designed, the products he supervised, the pupils he trained, the public he educated—gives solid, concrete meaning to his most fanciful expressions. What Gropius taught, and what most Germans did not want to learn, was the lesson of Bacon and Descartes and the Enlightenment: that one must confront the world and dominate it, that the cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind of modernity. It should surprise no one that the Bauhaus survived the Weimar Republic by only half a year.
1 These statements are quoted in Albert Wucher, Theodor Mommsen: Geschichtsschreibung und Politik (1956), 157, 180.
2 See above, pp. 18–19.
3 “Der deutsche Idealismus in sozialgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung,” Historische Zeitschrift, CLXXIV, 2 (October 1952), 365.
4 I have borrowed this happy phrase, a deliberate parody, of course, of favorite German expletives like “vulgar Marxism,” and “vulgar liberalism,” from Fritz Stern; see “The Political Consequences of the Unpolitical German,” History, No. 3 (1960), 122.
5 Kurt Sontheimer, Thomas Mann und die Deutschen (1961), 22.
6 Ibid., 39.
7 Ibid., 95.
8 I agree with George L. Mosse, who writes: “When analyzing the Weltbühne people and Ossietzky it struck me forcibly how far removed they were from reality (trying to put up Heinrich Mann for the Presidency, for example).”
9 Mein zwanzigstes Jahrhundert: Auf dem Weg zu einer Autobiographie (1960), 82.
10 Excerpts from this speech, delivered on October 29, 1931, are quoted in “Ein Jahrhundert Frankfurter Zeitung, begründet von Leopold Sonnemann,” special number of Die Gegenwart, XI (October 29, 1956), 39.
11 “Vorwort,” to the 10th edition of Der Zupfgeigenhansl (1913), in Grundschriften der deutschen Jugendbewegung, ed. Werner Kindt (1963), 67, 66.
12 Geschichte des Wandervogels, from vol. I (1912), in Grundschriften, 47.
13 “Hoffnungen und Gefahren unserer Jugendbewegung,” a lecture first given in 1913; the quotation is from the third edition of 1920, in Grundschriften, 145.
14 Elisabeth Busse-Wilson, “Freideutsche Jugend 1920,” in Grundschriften, 245.
15 See Ernst Buske, “Jugend und Volk,” in Grundschriften, 198.
16 Staatsräson, 490.
17 In Sachen Heidegger (1961), 14.
18 See ibid., 54–55.
19 “The Transmoral Conscience,” in The Protestant Era, 166.
20 Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität, Freiburger Universitätsreden No. II (1933), passim.
21 The address is conveniently reprinted in a posthumous collection of Hofmannsthal’s prose writings, Die Berührung der Sphären (1931), 422–442.
22 Gemeiner Mörder?! Das Rathenau-Attentat, 20, quoted in James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (1960), 128.
23 Weltbühne, in Ausnahmezustand, 236.
24 For this tragicomedy see the account by Ludwig Marcuse, “Die Geschichte des Heine-Denkmals,” Tagebuch (1932), in Ausnahmezustand, 227–236.
25 Erinnerungen, 282–286, 310 ff; the quotation, with the crucial word “outsider” in English, is on p. 282.
26 Hans Mommsen, “Zum Verhältnis von politischer Wissenschaft und Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, X (1962), 346–347.
27 “Georg von Below,” autobiographical sketch in Die Geschichtswissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. Sigfried Steinberg, vol. I (1925), 45; Below is referring to an article he had written in 1918. During the war itself he had predicted that “the monster of a major science of sociology will never be born.” Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung von den Befreiungskriegen bis zu unseren Tagen: Geschichte und Kulturgeschichte (1916), 102. Meinecke, whom no one could accuse of prejudice in behalf of the social sciences, conceded in 1922 that his profession had neglected disciplines from which it had much to learn. “Drei Generationen deutscher Gelehrtenpolitik,” Historische Zeitschrift, CXXV (1922), 248–283.
28 Quoted in Ludwig Dehio, “Gedanken über die deutsche Sendung, 1900–1918,” Historische Zeitschrift, CLXXIV (1952), 479–502; now as “Thoughts on Germany’s Mission, 1900–1918,” in Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century, (tr. Dieter Pevsner, 1959), 72–108. It is indicative of the respectfulness of German historians that in an article on Ranke published two years before (in 1950!) Dehio should still have thought it necessary to disclaim any arrogance, and profess respect for the “great men of earlier generations.” “Ranke and German Imperialism,” in Germany and World Politics, 38n.
29 See above, p. 19.
30 “Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung der Gegenwart,” in Die deutsche Nation, November 1, 1924, now in Goetz, Historiker in meiner Zeit: Gesammelte Aufsätze (1957), 415–424.
31 Beloch’s autobiographical sketch in Geschichtswissenschaft der Gegenwart, vol. II (1926), 27.
32 Rachfahl’s autobiographical sketch in ibid., 215.
33 See Below’s autobiographical sketch in ibid., I, especially 44.
34 “Protestantismus und politische Ideengeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift, CXXXXIV (1931), 15.
35 Staatsräson, 542.
36 Ibid., 27.
37 “Meinecke’s whole life work,” Eckart Kehr wrote in 1928, reviewing Meinecke’s Geschichte des deutsch-englischen Bündnisproblems, 1890–1901 (1927), “is pervaded by a deliberate and disciplined self-limitation of his Problemstellung—the questions he asks.” Die Gesellschaft, V, part 2 (1928), 27.
38 Staatsräson, 8.
39 Ibid., 492.
40 Ibid., 506. Though far from uncritical of Treitschke, and silent on his anti-Semitism, Meinecke significantly separates him from disciples like Dietrich Schäfer, whom he rejects as truly intolerable.
41 Quoted in Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (1957), 113.
42 Wolf von Eckardt, Eric Mendelsohn (1960), 11.
43 Erich Mendelsohn, Briefe eines Architekten, ed. Oskar Beyer (1961), 57, 73.
44 Eckardt, Mendelsohn, 9.
45 Arnold Whittick, Erich Mendelsohn (1940), 64.
46 The manifesto is reproduced in full in Das Bauhaus, 1919–1933: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, ed. Hans M. Wingler (1962), 38–41.
47 See ibid., 10.
48 I have drawn these quotations from Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (tr. P. Morton Shand, 1965 ed.), and Scope of Total Architecture (1962 ed.), passim.