13
HEROES’ TWILIGHT

In February 1920 a horror film was released in Berlin that was, in the words of one critic, ‘uncanny, demonic, cruel, “Gothic”,’ a Frankenstein-type story filled with bizarre lighting and dark, distorted sets.¹ Considered by many to be the first ‘art film,’ The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a huge success, so popular in Paris that it played in the same theatre every day between 1920 and 1927.² But the film was more than a record breaker. As the historian of interwar Germany Peter Gay writes, ‘With its nightmarish plot, its Expressionist sets, its murky atmosphere, Caligari continues to embody the Weimar spirit to posterity as palpably as Gropius’s buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs … But Caligari, decisive for the history of film, is also instructive for the history of Weimar…. There was more at stake here than a strange script or novelties of lighting.’³

Following World War I, as we have seen, Germany was turned almost overnight into a republic. Berlin remained the capital but Weimar was chosen as the seat of the assembly after a constitutional conference had been held there to decide the form the new republic would take, because of its immaculate reputation (Goethe, Schiller), and because of worries that the violence in Berlin and Munich would escalate if either of those cities were selected. The Weimar Republic lasted for fourteen years until Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, a tumultuous interregnum between disasters which astonishingly managed to produce a distinctive culture that was both brilliant and characterised by its own style of thought, the very antithesis of Middletown.

The period can be conveniently divided into three clear phases.⁴ From the end of 1918 to 1924, ‘with its revolution, civil war, foreign occupation, and fantastic inflation, [there] was a time of experimentation in the arts; Expressionism dominated politics as much as painting or the stage.’⁵ This was followed, from 1924 to 1929, by a period of economic stability, a relief from political violence, and increasing prosperity reflected in the arts by the Neue Sachlichkeit, the ‘new objectivity,’ a movement whose aims were matter-of-factness, even sobriety. Finally, the period 1929 to 1933 saw a return to political violence, rising unemployment, and authoritarian government by decree; the arts were cowed into silence, and replaced by propagandistic Kitsch.⁶

*

Caligari was a collaboration between two men, Hans Janowitz, a Czech, and Carl Meyer, an Austrian, who had met in Berlin in 1919.⁷ Their work was not only fiercely antiwar but also explored what expressionism could do in the cinema. The film features the mad Dr Caligari, a fairground vaudeville act who entertains with his somnambulist, Cesare. Outside the fair, however, there is a second string to the story, and it is far darker. Wherever Caligari goes, death is never far behind. Anyone who crosses him ends up dead. The story proper starts after Caligari kills two students – or thinks that he has. In fact, one survives, and it is this survivor, Francis, who begins to investigate. Nosing around, he discovers Cesare asleep in a box. But the killings continue, and when Francis returns to the sleeping Cesare, he realises this time that the ‘person’ motionless in the box is merely a dummy. It dawns on Francis, and the police, whose help he has now enlisted, that the sleepwalking Cesare is unconsciously obeying Caligari’s instructions, killing on his behalf without understanding what he has done. Realising he has been discovered, Caligari flees into an insane asylum. But this is more than it seems, for Francis now finds out that Caligari is also the director of the asylum. Shocking as this is, there is no escape for Caligari, and when his double life is exposed, far from being cathartic, he loses all self-control and ends up in a straitjacket.⁸

This was the original story of Caligari, but before the film appeared it went through a drastic metamorphosis. Janowitz and Meyer had intended their story to be a powerful polemic against military obedience and assumed that when the script was accepted by Erich Pommer, one of the most successful producers of the day, he would not change it in any way.⁹ However, Pommer and the director, Robert Wiene, actually turned the story inside out, rearranging it so that it is Francis and his girlfriend who are mad. The ideas of abduction and murder are now no more than their delusions, and the director of the asylum is in reality a benign doctor who cures Francis of his evil thoughts. Janowitz and Meyer were furious. Pommers version of the story was the opposite of theirs. The criticism of blind obedience had disappeared and, even worse, authority was shown as kindly, even safe. It was a travesty.¹⁰

The irony was that Pommer’s version was a great success, commercially and artistically, and film historians have often wondered whether the original version would have done as well. And perhaps there is a fundamental point here. Though the plot was changed, the style of telling the story was not – it was still expressionistic. Expressionism was a force, an impulse to revolution and change. But, like the psychoanalytic theory on which it was based, it was not fully worked out. The expressionist Novembergruppe, founded in December 1918, was a revolutionary alliance of all the artists who wanted to see change – Emil Nolde, Walter Gropius, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, and Paul Hindemith. But revolution needed more than an engine; it needed direction. Expressionism never provided that. And perhaps in the end its lack of direction was one of those factors that enabled Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. He hated expressionism as much as he hated anything.¹¹

But it would be wrong to see Weimar as a temporary way station on the path to Hitler. It certainly did not see itself in that light, and it boasted many solid achievements. Not the least of these was the establishment of some very prestigious academic institutions, still centres of excellence even today. These included the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin – home to Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel, Melanie Klein, and Wilhelm Reich – and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, which had more than two thousand students by the last year of the republic: the teachers here included Sigmund Neumann, Franz Neumann, and Hajo Holborn. And then there was the Warburg Institute of Art History.

In 1920 the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer paid a visit to the Warburg art historical library in Hamburg. He had just been appointed to the chair in philosophy at the new university in Hamburg and knew that some of the scholars at the library shared his interests. He was shown around by Fritz Saxl, then in charge. The library was the fantastic fruit of a lifetime’s collecting by Aby Warburg, a rich, scholarly, and ‘intermittently psychotic individual’ who, not unlike T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, was obsessed by classical antiquity and the extent to which its ideas and values could be perpetuated in the modern world.¹² The charm and value of the library was not just that Warburg had been able to afford thousands of rare volumes on many recondite topics, but the careful way he had put them together to illuminate one another: thus art, religion, and philosophy were mixed up with history, mathematics, and anthropology. For Warburg, Following James Frazer, philosophy was inseparable from study of the ‘primitive mind.’ The Warburg Institute has been the home of many important art historical studies throughout the century, but it started in Weimar Germany, where among the papers published under its auspices were Erwin Panofsky’s Idea, Dürers ‘Melancolia 1,’ Hercules am Scheidewege and Percy Schramm’s Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio. Panofsky’s way of reading paintings, his ‘iconological method,’ as it was called, would prove hugely influential after World War II.¹³

Europeans had been fascinated by the rise of the skyscraper in America, but it was difficult to adapt on the eastern side of the Atlantic: the old cities of France, Italy, and Germany were all in place, and too beautiful to allow the distortion that very tall buildings threatened.¹⁴ But the new materials of the twentieth century, which helped the birth of the skyscraper, were very seductive and proved popular in Europe, especially steel, reinforced concrete, and sheet glass. The latter in particular transformed the appearance of buildings and the experience of being inside a structure. With its different colours, reflectivity, and transparency, glass was a flexible, expressive skin for buildings constructed in steel. In the end, glass and steel had a bigger effect on European architects than concrete did, and especially on three architects who worked together in the studio of the leading industrial designer in Germany, Peter Behrens (1868– 1940). These were Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. Each would make his mark, but the first was Gropius. It was Gropius who founded the Bauhaus.

It is not difficult to see why Gropius should have taken the lead. Influenced by Marx and by William Morris, he always believed, contrary to Adolf Loos, that craftsmanship was as important as ‘higher’ art. He had also learned from Behrens, whose firm was one of the first to develop the modern ‘design package,’ providing AEG with a corporate style that they used for everything, from letterheads and arc lamps to the company’s buildings themselves. Therefore, when the Grand Ducal Academy of Art, which was founded in the mid-eighteenth century, was merged with the Weimar Arts and Crafts School, established in 1902, he was an obvious choice as director. The fused structure was given the name Staatliche Bauhaus, with Bauhaus — literally, ‘house for building’ – chosen because it echoed the Bauhütten, mediaeval lodges where those constructing the great cathedrals were housed.¹⁵

The early years of the Bauhaus, in Weimar, were troubled. The government of Thuringia, where Weimar was located, was very right-wing, and the school’s collectivist approach, the rebelliousness of its students, and the style of its first head teacher, Johannes Itten, a quarrelsome mystic-religious, proved very unpopular.¹⁶ The school’s budget was cut, forcing its removal to Dessau, which had a more congenial administration.¹⁷ This change in location seems to have brought about a change in Gropius himself. He produced a second manifesto, in which he announced that the school would concern itself with practical questions of the modern world – mass housing, industrial design, typography, and the ‘development of prototypes.’ The obsession with wood was abandoned: Gropius’s design for the school’s new building was entirely of steel, glass, and concrete, to underline the school’s partnership with industry. Inside the place, Gropius vowed, students and staff would explore a ‘positive attitude to the living environment of vehicles and machines … avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy.’¹⁸

After a lost war and an enormous rise in inflation, there was no social priority of greater importance in Weimar Germany than mass housing. And so Bauhaus architects were among those who developed what became a familiar form of social housing, the Siedlung or ‘settlement.’ This was introduced to the world iein 1927, at the Stuttgart trade fair exhibition. Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, J. P. Oud, and Bruno Taut all designed buildings for the Weissenhof (White House) Siedlung, ‘and twenty thousand people came every day to marvel at the flat roofs, white walls, strip windows and pilotis of what Rohe called “the great struggle for a new way of life.” ’¹⁹ Although the Siedlungen were undoubtedly better than the nineteenth-century slums they were intended to replace, the lasting influence of the Bauhaus has been in the area of applied design.²⁰ The Bauhaus philosophy, ‘that it is far harder to design a first-rate teapot than paint a second-rate picture,’ has found wide acceptance – folding beds, built-in cupboards, stackable chairs and tables, designed with mass-production processes in mind and with an understanding of the buildings these objects were to be used in.²¹

The catastrophe of World War I, followed by the famine, unemployment, and inflation of the postwar years, for many people confirmed Marx’s theory that capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight of its own ‘insoluble contradictions’. However, it soon became clear that it wasn’t communism that was appearing from the rubble, but fascism. Some Marxists were so disillusioned by this that they abandoned Marxism altogether. Others remained convinced of the theory, despite the evidence. But there was a third group, people in between, who wished to remain Marxists but felt that Marxist theory needed reconstructing if it was to remain credible. This group assembled in Frankfurt in the late 1920s and made a name for itself as the Frankfurt School, with its own institute in the city. Thanks to the Nazis, the institute didn’t stay long, but the name stuck.²²

The three best-known members of the Frankfurt School were Theodor Adorno, a man who ‘seemed equally at home in philosophy, sociology and music,’ Max Horkheimer, a philosopher and sociologist, less innovative than Adorno but perhaps more dependable, and the political theorist Herbert Marcuse, who in time would become the most famous of all. Horkheimer was the director of the institute. In addition to being a philosopher and sociologist, he was also a financial wizard, who brilliantly manipulated the investments of the institute, both in Germany and afterward in the United States. According to Marcuse, nothing that was written by the Frankfurt School was published without previous discussion with him. Adorno was the early star. According to Marcuse, ‘When he talked it could be printed without any changes.’ In addition there was Leo Lowenthal, the literary critic of the school, Franz Neumann, a legal philosopher, and Friedrich Pollock, who was one of those who argued – against Marx and to Lenin’s fury – that there were no compelling internal reasons why capitalism should collapse.²³

In its early years the school was known for its revival of the concept of alienation. This, a term originally coined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was taken up and refined by Marx but, for half a century, from the 1870s, ignored by philosophers. ‘According to Marx, “alienation” was a socio-economic concept.’²⁴ Basically, Marcuse said, alienation meant that under capitalism men and women could not, in their work, fulfil their own needs. The capitalist mode of production was at fault here, and alienation could only be abolished by radically changing this mode of production. The Frankfurt School, however, developed this idea so that it became above all a psychological entity, and one, moreover, that was not necessarily, or primarily, due to the capitalist mode of production. Alienation, for the Frankfurt School, was more a product of all of modern life. This view shaped the school’s second and perhaps most enduring preoccupation: the attempted marriage of Freudianism and Marxism.²⁵ Marcuse took the lead to begin with, though Erich Fromm wrote several books on the subject later. Marcuse regarded Freudianism and Marxism as two sides of the same coin. According to him, Freud’s unconscious primary drives, in particular the life instinct and the death instinct, are embedded within a social framework that determines how they show themselves. Freud had argued that repression necessarily increases with the progress of civilisation; therefore aggressiveness must be produced and released in ever greater quantities. And so, just as Marx had predicted that revolution was inevitable, a dislocation that capitalism must bring on itself, so, in Marcuse’s hands, Freudianism produced a parallel, more personal backdrop to this scenario, accounting for a buildup of destructiveness – self-destruction and the destruction of others.²⁶

The third contribution of the Frankfurt School was a more general analysis of social change and progress, the introduction of an interdisciplinary approach – sociology, psychology, philosophy – to examine what the school regarded as the vital question of the day: ‘What precisely has gone wrong in Western civilisation, that at the very height of technical progress we see the negation of human progress: dehumanisation, brutalisation, revival of torture as a “normal” means of interrogation, the destructive development of nuclear energy, the poisoning of the biosphere, and so on? How has this happened?’²⁷ To try to answer this question, they looked back as far as the Enlightenment, and then traced events and ideas forward to the twentieth century. They claimed to discern a ‘dialectic,’ an interplay between progressive and repressive periods in the West. Moreover, each repressive period was usually greater than the one before, owing to the growth of technology under capitalism, to the point where, in the late 1920s, ‘the incredible social wealth that had been assembled in Western civilisation, mainly as the achievement of Capitalism, was increasingly used for preventing rather than constructing a more decent and human society.’²⁸ The school saw fascism as a natural development in the long history of capitalism after the Enlightenment, and in the late 1920s earned the respect of colleagues with its predictions that fascism would grow. The Frankfurt School’s scholarship most often took the form of close readings of original material, from which views uncontaminated by previous analyses were formed. This proved very creative in terms of the new understanding it produced, and the Frankfurt method became known as critical theory.²⁹ Adorno was also interested in aesthetics, and he had his own socialist view of the arts. He felt that there are insights and truths that can be expressed only in an artistic form, and that therefore the aesthetic experience is another variety of liberation, to put alongside the psychological and political, which should be available to as many people as possible.

The Psychoanalytic Institute, the Warburg Institute, the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik, and the Frankfurt School were all part of what Peter Gay has called ‘the community of reason,’ an attempt to bring the clear light of scientific rationality to communal problems and experiences. But not everyone felt that way.

One part of what became a campaign against the ‘cold positivism’ of science in Weimar Germany was led by the Kreis (‘circle’) of poets and writers that formed around Stefan George, ‘king of a secret Germany.’³⁰ Born in 1868, George was already fifty-one when World War I ended. He was very widely read, in all the literatures of Europe, and his poems at times bordered on the precious, brimming over with an ‘aesthetic of arrogant intuitionism.’ Although led by a poet, the Kreis was more important for what it stood for than for what it actually produced. Most of its writers were biographers – which wasn’t accidental. Their intention was to highlight ‘great men,’ especially those from more ‘heroic’ ages, men who had by their will changed the course of events. The most successful book was Ernst Kantorowicz’s biography of the thirteenth-century emperor Frederick II.³¹ For George and his circle, Weimar Germany was a distinctly unheroic age; science had no answer to such a predicament, and the task of the writer was to inspire others by means of his superior intuition.

George never had the influence that he expected because he was overshadowed by a much greater poetic talent, Rainer Maria Rilke. Born René Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875 (he Germanised his name only in 1897), Rilke was educated at military school.³² An inveterate traveller and something of a snob (or at least a collector of aristocratic friendships), his path crossed with those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gerhart Hauptmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Ellen Key (author of The Century of the Child., see chapter 5).³³ Early in his career, Rilke tried plays as well as biography and poetry, but it was the latter form that, as he grew older, distinguished him as a remarkable writer, influencing W. H. Auden, among others.³⁴ His reputation was transformed by Five Cantos/August 1914, which he wrote in response to World War I. Young German soldiers ‘took his slim volumes with them to the front, and his were often the last words they read before they died. He therefore had the popularity of Rupert Brooke without the accompanying danger, becoming … “the idol of a generation without men.” ’³⁵ Rilke’s most famous poems, the Duino Elegies, were published in 1923 during the Weimar years, their mystical, philosophical, ‘oceanic’ tone perfectly capturing the mood of the moment.³⁶ The ten elegies were in fact begun well before World War I, while Rilke was a guest at Duino Castle, south of Trieste on the Adriatic coast, where Dante was supposed to have stayed. The castle belonged to one of Rilke’s many aristocratic friends, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. But the bulk of the elegies were ‘poured out’ in a ‘spiritual hurricane’ in one week, between 7 and 14 February 1922.³⁷ Lyrical, metaphysical, and very concentrated, they have proved lastingly popular, no less in translation than in the original German. After he had finished his exhausting week that February, he wrote to a friend that the elegies ‘had arrived’ (it had been eleven years since he had started), as if he were the mouthpiece of some other, perhaps divine, voice. This is indeed how Rilke thought and, according to friends and observers, behaved. In the elegies Rilke wrestles with the meaning of life, the ‘great land of grief,’ casting his net over the fine arts, literary history, mythology, and the sciences, in particular biology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.³⁸ The poems are peopled by angels, lovers, children, dogs, saints, and heroes, reflecting a very Germanic vision, but also by more down-to-earth creatures such as acrobats and the saltimbanques Rilke had seen in Picasso’s early work. Rilke celebrates life, heaping original image upon original image (in a slightly uncomfortable rhythm that keeps the reader focused on the words), and yet juxtaposes the natural world with the mechanics of modernity. At the same time that he celebrates life, however, Rilke reminds us of its fragility, the elegiac quality arising from man’s unique awareness among life forms of his approaching death. For E. M. Butler, Rilke’s biographer, the poet’s concept of ‘radiant angels’ was his truest poetical creation; not ‘susceptible of rational interpretation … they stand like a liquid barrier of fire between man and his maker.’

Earliest triumphs, and high creation’s favourites,

Mountain-ranges and dawn-red ridges,

Since all beginning, pollen of blossoming godhead,

Articulate light, avenues, stairways, thrones,

Spaces of being, shields of delight, tumults

Of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, singly,

Mirrors, drawing back within themselves

The beauty radiant from their countenance.³⁹

Delivering a eulogy after Rilke’s death, Stefan Zweig accorded him the accolade of Dichter.⁴⁰ For Rilke, the meaning of life, the sense that could be made of it, was to be found in language, in the ability to speak or ‘say’ truths, to transform machine-run civilisation into something more heroic, more spiritual, something more worthy of lovers and saints. Although at times an obscure poet, Rilke became a cult figure with an international following. Thousands of readers, mostly women, wrote to him, and when a collection of his replies was published, his cult received a further boost. There are those who see in the Rilke cult early signs of the völkisch nationalism that was to overtake Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. In some ways, certainly, Rilke anticipates Heidegger’s philosophy. But in fairness to the poet, he himself always saw the dangers of such a cult. Many of the young in Germany were confused because, as he put it, they ‘understood the call of art as a call to art.’⁴¹ This was an echo of the old problem identified by Hofmannsthal: What is the fate of those who cannot create? For Rilke, the cult of art was a form of retreat from life, by those who wanted to be artists rather than lead a life.⁴² Rilke did not create the enthusiasm for spirituality in Weimar Germany; it was an old German obsession. But he did reinvigorate it. Peter Gay again: ‘His magnificent gift for language paved the way to music rather than to logic.’⁴³

Whereas Rilke shared with Hofmannsthal the belief that the artist can help shape the prevailing mentality of an age, Thomas Mann was more concerned, as Schnitzler had been, to describe that change as dramatically as possible. Mann’s most famous novel was published in 1924. The Magic Mountain did extremely well (it was published in two volumes), selling fifty thousand copies in its first year. It is heavily laden with symbolism, and the English translation has succeeded in losing some of Mann’s humour, not exactly a rich commodity in his work. But the symbolism is important, for as we shall see, it is a familiar one. The Magic Mountain is about the wasteland that caused, or at least preceded, The Waste Land. Set on the eve of World War I, it tells the story of Hans Castorp, ‘a simple young man’ who goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit a cousin who has tuberculosis (a visit Alfred Einstein actually made, to deliver a lecture).⁴⁴ Expecting to stay only a short time, he catches the disease himself and is forced to remain in the clinic for seven years. During the course of the book he meets various members of staff, fellow patients, and visitors. Each of these represents a distinct point of view competing for the soul of Hans. The overall symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. The hospital is Europe, a stable, long-standing institution but filled with decay and corruption. Like the generals starting the war, Hans expects his visit to the clinic to be short, over in no time.⁴⁵ Like them, he is surprised – appalled – to discover that his whole time frame has to be changed. Among the other characters there is the liberal Settembrini, anticlerical, optimistic, above all rational. He is opposed by Naphta, eloquent but with a dark streak, the advocate of heroic passion and instinct, ‘the apostle of irrationalism.’⁴⁶ Peeperkorn is in some ways a creature out of Rilke, a sensualist, a celebrant of life, whose words come tumbling out but expose him as having little to say. His body is like his mind: diseased and impotent.⁴⁷ Clawdia Chauchat, a Russian, has a different kind of innocence from Hans’s. She is self-possessed but innocent of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. Hans assumes that by revealing all the scientific knowledge he has, he will possess her. They enjoy a brief affair, but Hans no more possesses her mind and soul than scientific facts equal wisdom.⁴⁸ Finally, there is the soldier Joachim, Hans’s cousin, who is the least romantic of all of them, especially about war. When he is killed, we feel his loss like an amputation. Castorp is redeemed – but through a dream, the sort of dream Freud would have relished (but which in fact rarely exists in real life), full of symbolism leading to the conclusion that love is the master of all, that love is stronger than reason, that love alone can conquer the forces that are bringing death all around. Hans does not forsake reason entirely, but he realises that a life without passion is but half a life.⁴⁹ Unlike Rilke, whose aim was to transform experience into art, Mann’s goal was to sum up the human condition (at least, the Western condition), in detail as well as in generalities, aware as Rilke was that a whole era was coming to an end. With compassion and an absence of mysticism, Mann grasped that heroes were not the answer. For Mann, modern man was self-conscious as never before. But was self-consciousness a form of reason? Or an instinct?

Over the last half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Paris, Vienna, and briefly Zurich dominated the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. Now it was Berlin’s turn. Viscount D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Berlin, described in his memoirs the period after 1925 as an ‘epoch of splendour’ in the city’s cultural life.⁵⁰ Bertolt Brecht moved there; so did Heinrich Mann and Erich Kästner, after he had been fired from the Leipzig newspaper where he worked. Painters, journalists, and architects flocked to the city, but it was above all a place for performers. Alongside the city’s 120 newspapers, there were forty theatres providing, according to one observer, ‘unparalleled mental alertness.’⁵¹ But it was also a golden age for political cabaret, art films, satirical songs, Erwin Piscator’s experimental theatre, Franz Léhar operettas.

Among this concatenation of talent, this unparalleled mental alertness, three figures from the performing arts stand out: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Bertolt Brecht. Between 1915 and 1923 Schoenberg composed very little, but in 1923 he gave the world what one critic called ‘a new way of musical organisation.’⁵² Two years before, in 1921, Schoenberg, embittered by years of hardship, had announced that he had ‘discovered something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.’⁵³ This was what became known as ‘serial music.’ Schoenberg himself gave rise to the phrase when he wrote, ‘I called this procedure “Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another.” ’⁵⁴ ‘Procedure’ was an apt word for it, since serialism is not so much a style as a ‘new grammar’ for music. Atonalism, Schoenberg’s earlier invention, was partly designed to eliminate the individual intellect from musical composition; serialism took that process further, minimalising the tendency of any note to prevail. Under this system a composition is made up of a series from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, arranged in an order that is chosen for the purpose and varies from work to work. Normally, no note in the row or series is repeated, so that no single note is given more importance than any other, lest the music take on the feeling of a tonal centre, as in traditional music with a key. Schoenberg’s tone series could be played in its original version, upside down (inversion), backward (retrograde) or even backward upside down (retrograde inversion). The point of this new music was that it was horizontal, or contrapuntal, rather than vertical, or harmonic.⁵⁵ Its melodic line was often jerky, with huge leaps in tone and gaps in rhythm. Instead of themes grouped harmonically and repeated, the music was divided into ‘cells.’ Repetition was by definition avoided. Huge variations were possible under the new system – including the use of voices and instruments in unusual registers. However, compositions always had a degree of harmonic coherence, ‘since the fundamental interval pattern is always the same.’⁵⁶

The first completely serial work is generally held to be Schoenberg’s Piano Suite (op. 25), performed in 1923. Both Berg and Anton von Webern enthusiastically adopted Schoenberg’s new technique, and for many people Berg’s two operas Wozzeck and Lulu have become the most familiar examples of, first, atonality, and second, serialism. Berg began to work on Wozzeck in 1918, although it was not premiered until 1925, in Berlin. Based on a short unfinished play by Georg Büchner, the action revolves around an inadequate, simple soldier who is preyed upon and betrayed by his mistress, his doctor, his captain, and his drum major; in some ways it is a musical version of George Grosz’s savage pictures.⁵⁷ The soldier ends up committing both murder and suicide. Berg, a large, handsome man, had shed the influence of romanticism less well than Schoenberg or Webern (which is perhaps why his works are more popular), and Wozzeck is very rich in moods and forms – rhapsody, lullaby, a military march, rondo, each character vividly drawn.⁵⁸ The first night, with Erich Kleiber conducting, took place only after ‘an unprecedented series of rehearsals,’ but even so the opera created a furore.⁵⁹ It was labelled ‘degenerate,’ and the critic for Deutsche Zeitung wrote, ‘As I was leaving the State Opera, I had the sensation of having been not in a public theatre but in an insane asylum. On the stage, in the orchestra, in the stalls – plain madness…. We deal here, from a musical viewpoint, with a composer dangerous to the public welfare.’⁶⁰ But not everyone was affronted; some critics praised Berg’s ‘instinctive perception,’ and other European opera houses clamoured to stage it. Lulu is in some ways the reverse of Wozzeck. Whereas the soldier was prey to those around him, Lulu is a predator, an amoral temptress ‘who ruins all she touches.’⁶¹ Based on two dramas by Frank Wedekind, this serial opera also verges on atonality. Unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935, it is full of bravura patches, elaborate coloratura, and confrontations between a heroine-turned-prostitute and her murderer. Lulu is the ‘evangelist of a new century,’ killed by the man who fears her.⁶² It was the very embodiment of the Berlin that Bertolt Brecht, among others, was at home in.

Like Berg, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith, Brecht was a member of the Novembergruppe, founded in 1918 and dedicated to disseminating a new art appropriate to a new age. Though the group broke up after 1924, when the second phase of life in the Weimar Republic began, the revolutionary spirit, as we have seen, survived. And it survived in style in Brecht. Born in Augsburg in 1898, though he liked to say he came from the Black Forest, Brecht was one of the first artists/writers/poets to grow up under the influence of film (and Chaplin, in particular). From an early age, he was always fascinated by America and American ideas – jazz and the work of Upton Sinclair were to be other influences later. Augsburg was about forty miles from Munich, and it was there that Brecht spent his formative years. Somewhat protected by his parents, Bertolt (christened Eugen, a name he later dropped) grew up as a self-confident and even ‘ruthless’ child, with the ‘watchful eyes of a raccoon.’⁶³ Initially a poet, he was also an accomplished guitarist, with which talent, according to some (like Lion Feuchtwanger) he used to ‘impose himself’ on others, smelling ‘unmistakably of revolution’.⁶⁴ He collaborated and formed friendships with Karl Kraus, Carl Zuckmayer, Erwin Piscator, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Gerhart and Elisabeth Hauptmann, and an actor who ‘looked like a tadpole.’ The latter’s name was Peter Lorre. In his twenties, Brecht gravitated toward theatre, Marxism, and Berlin.⁶⁵

Brecht’s early works, like Baal, earned him a reputation among the avantgarde, but it was with The Threepenny Opera (tided Die Dreigroschenoper in German) that he first found real fame. This work was based on a 1728 ballad opera by John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, which had been revived in 1920 by Sir Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, where it ran for four years. Realising that it could be equally successful in Germany, Elisabeth Hauptmann translated it for Brecht.⁶⁶ He liked it, found a producer and a theatre, and removed himself to Le Lavandou, in the south of France near Saint Tropez, with the composer Kurt Weill to work on the show. John Gay’s main aim had been to ridicule the pretensions of Italian grand opera, though he did also take the odd swipe at the prime minister of the day, Sir Robert Walpole, who was suspected of taking bribes and having a mistress. But Brecht’s aim was more serious. He moved the action to Victorian times – nearer home – and made the show an attack on bourgeois respectability and its self-satisfied self-image. Here too the beggars masquerade as disabled, like the war cripples so vividly portrayed in George Grosz’s paintings. Rehearsals were disastrous. Actresses walked out or suffered inexplicable illness. The stars objected to changes in the script and even to some of the moves they were directed to make. Songs about sex had to be removed because the actresses refused to sing them. And this was not the only way Dreigroschenoper resembled Salomé: rumours about the back-stage dramas circulated in Berlin, together with the belief that the theatre owner was desperately searching for another show to stage as soon as Brecht’s and Weill’s had failed.⁶⁷

The first night did not start well. For the first two songs the audience sat in unresponsive silence. There was a near-disaster when the barrel organ designed to accompany the first song refused to function and the actor was forced to sing the first stanza unaided (the orchestra rallied for the second verse). But the third song, the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown, reminiscing about their early days in India, was rapturously received.⁶⁸ The manager had specified that no encores would be sung that night, but the audience wouldn’t let the show proceed without repeats and so he had to overrule himself. The opera’s success was due in part to the fact that its avowed Marxism was muted. As Brecht’s biographer Ronald Hayman put it, ‘It was not wholly insulting to the bourgeoisie to expatiate on what it had in common with ruthless criminals; the arson and the throat-cutting are mentioned only casually and melodically, while the well-dressed entrepreneurs in the stalls could feel comfortably superior to the robber gang that aped the social pretensions of the nouveaux-riches.’⁶⁹ Another reason for the success was the fashion in Germany at the time for Zeitoper, opera with a contemporary relevance. Other examples in 1929–30 were Hindemith’s Neues von Tage (Daily News), a story of newspaper rivalry; Jonny spielt auf, by Ernst Kreutz; Max Brandt’s Maschinist Hopkins; and Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen.⁷⁰ Brecht and Weill repeated their success with the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny – like The Threepenny Opera, a parable of modern society. As Weill put it, ‘Mahagonny, like Sodom and Gomorrah, falls on account of the crimes, the licentiousness and the general confusion of its inhabitants.’⁷¹ Musically, the opera was popular because the bitter, commercialised sounds of jazz symbolised not the freedom of Africa or America but the corruption of capitalism. The idea of degeneration wasn’t far away, either. Brecht’s version of Marxism had convinced him that works of art were conditioned, like everything else, by the commercial network of theatres, newspapers, advertisers, and so on. Mahagonny, therefore, was designed so that ‘some irrationality, unreality and frivolity should be introduced in the right places to assert a double meaning.’⁷² It was also epic theatre, which for Brecht was central: ‘The premise for dramatic theatre was that human nature could not be changed; epic theatre assumed not only that it could but that it was already changing.’⁷³

Change there certainly was. Before the show opened, the Nazis demonstrated outside the theatre. The first night was disrupted by whistles from the balcony, then by fistfights in the aisles, with a riot soon spreading to the stage. For the second night police lined the walls, and the house lights were left on.⁷⁴ The Nazis took more and more interest in Brecht, but when he sued the film producer who had bought the rights to Die Dreigroschenoper because the producer wanted to make changes against the spirit of the contract, the Brownshirts had a dilemma: How could they take sides between a Marxist and a Jew? The brownshirts would not always be so impotent. In October 1929, when Weill attended one of their rallies out of mere curiosity, he was appalled to hear himself denounced ‘as a danger to the country,’ together with Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. He left hurriedly, unrecognised.⁷⁵

One man who hated Berlin – he called it Babylon – who hated all cities, who in fact elevated his hatred of city life to an entire philosophy, was Martin Heidegger. Born in southern Germany in 1889, he studied under Edmund Husserl before becoming himself a professional teacher of philosophy.⁷⁶ His deliberate provincialism, his traditional mode of dress – knickerbockers – and his hatred of city life all confirmed his philosophy for his impressionable students. In 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, he published his most important book, Being and Time. Despite the fame of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger was – besides being earlier – a more profound existentialist.

Being and Time is an impenetrable book, ‘barely decipherable,’ in the words of one critic. Yet it became immensely popular.⁷⁷ For Heidegger the central fact of life is man’s existence in the world, and we can only confront this central fact by describing it as exactly as possible. Western science and philosophy have all developed in the last three or four centuries so that ‘the primary business of Western man has been the conquest of nature.’ As a result, man regards nature as though he is the subject and nature the object. Philosophically, the nature of knowledge is the central dilemma: ‘What do we know? How can we know that we know?’ Ever since Descartes these questions have been paramount. For Heidegger, however, reason and intellect are ‘hopelessly inadequate guides to the secret of being.’ Indeed, at one point he went so far as to say that ‘thinking is the mortal enemy of understanding.’⁷⁸ Heidegger believed that we are thrust into the world willy-nilly, and by the time we have got used to being here, we are facing death. Death, for Heidegger, is the second central fact of life, after being.⁷⁹ We can never experience our own death, he said, but we can fear it, and that fear is all-important: it gives meaning to our being. We must spend our time on earth creating ourselves, ‘moving into an open, uncertain, as yet uncreated future.’ One other element of Heidegger’s thought is essential to understanding him. Heidegger saw science and technology as an expression of the will, a reflection of our determination to control nature. He thought, however, that there was a different side to man’s nature, which is revealed above all in poetry. The central aspect of a poem, said Heidegger, was that ‘it eludes the demands of our will’. ‘The poet cannot will to write a poem, it just comes.’⁸⁰ This links him directly with Rilke. Furthermore, the same argument applies to readers: they must allow the poem to work its magic on them. This is a central factor in Heidegger’s ideas – the split between the will and those aspects of life, the interior life, that are beyond, outside, the will, where the appropriate way to understanding is not so much thinking as submission. At one level this sounds a little bit like Eastern philosophies. And Heidegger certainly believed that the Western approach needed sceptical scrutiny, that science was becoming intent on mastery rather than understanding.⁸¹ He argued, as the philosopher William Barrett has said, summing up Heidegger, that there may come a time ‘when we should stop asserting ourselves and just submit, let be.’ Heidegger quoted Friedrich Hölderlin: We are in the period of darkness between the gods that have vanished and the god that has not yet come, between Matthew Arnold’s two worlds, ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born.’⁸²

This is, inevitably perhaps, a rather bloodless summary of Heidegger’s thinking. What made it so immediately popular was that it gave respectability to the German obsession with death and unreason, with the rejection of urban rationahst civilisation, with, in effect, a hatred of Weimar itself. Moreover, it gave tacit approval to those völkisch movements then being spawned that appealed not to reason but to heroes, that called for submission in the service of an alternative will to science, to those who, in Peter Gay’s striking phrase, ‘thought with their blood.’ Heidegger did not create the Nazis, or even the mood that led to the Nazis. But as the German theologian Paul Tillich, who was himself dismissed from his chair, was to write later, ‘It is not without some justification that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are connected with the anti-moral movements of fascism and national socialism.’ Being and Time was dedicated to Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s mentor, who was Jewish. When the book was reprinted during the Nazi era, the dedication was omitted.⁸³

We last left George Lukács in chapter 10, in Vienna, in exile from Budapest, ‘active in hopeless conspiratorial [Communist] Party work, tracking down people who have absconded with party funds.’⁸⁴ Throughout the 1920s Lukács’s life remained difficult. In the early years he vied with Béla Kun for leadership of the Hungarian Party in exile – Kun had fled to Moscow. Lukács met Lenin in Moscow and Mann in Vienna, making enough of an impact on the latter for him to model the Communist Jesuit Naphta in The Magic Mountain partly on Lukács.⁸⁵ Most of the time, however, he lived in poverty, and in 1929 he stayed illegally in Hungary before going to Berlin and on to Moscow. He worked there at the Marx-Engels Institute, where Nikolai Ryazanov was editing the newly discovered manuscripts of the young Marx.⁸⁶

Despite these difficulties, Lukács published in 1923 History and Class Consciousness, for which he was to become famous.⁸⁷ These nine essays were about both literature and politics. So far as literature was concerned, Lukács’s theory was that, beginning with Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, novelists have fallen predominantly into two groups, those who portray ‘the incommensurability between self (or hero) and environment (or society),’ as Cervantes, Friedrich von Schiller, and Honoré de Balzac did, as ‘world fleeing,’ or as in Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, or Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, in ‘the romanticism of disillusionment,’ involved in life but aware that man cannot be improved, as Joseph Conrad had said.⁸⁸ In other words, both approaches were essentially antipositive, antiprogressive. Lukács moved from literature to politics to argue that the different classes have different forms of consciousness. The bourgeoisie, while glorifying individualism and competition, respond in literature, and in life, to a stance that assumes that society is ‘bound by immutable laws, as dehumanised as the natural laws of physics.’⁸⁹ In contrast, the proletariat seeks a new order of society, which acknowledges that human nature can change, that there can be a new synthesis between self and society. Lukács saw it as his role to explain this dichotomy to the bourgeoisie so they would understand the revolution, when it came. He thought the popularity of film lay in the fact that in movies things lost presence, and that people liked the illusion, to live ‘without fate, without causes, without motives.’⁹⁰ He also argued that while Marxism explained these different class consciousnesses, after the revolution, with the new synthesis of self and society that he posited, Marxism would be superseded. He came to the conclusion, therefore, that ‘communism should not be reified by its own builders.’⁹¹

Lukács was roundly condemned and ostracised for being a revisionist and anti-Leninist. He never ready recovered, never counterattacked, and eventually admitted his ‘error.’ However, his analysis of Marxism, class-consciousness, and literature found an echo in Walter Benjamin’s work in the 1930s, and was revived in modified form after World War II by Raymond Williams and others in the doctrine of cultural materialism (see chapters 26 and 40).

In 1924, the year after History and Class Consciousness was published, a group of philosophers and scientists in Vienna began to meet every Thursday. Originally organised as the Ernst Mach Society, in 1928 they changed their name to the Wiener Kreis, the Vienna Circle. Under this title they became what is arguably the most important philosophical movement of the century (and one, incidentally, directly opposed to Heidegger).

The guiding spirit of the circle was Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), Berlinborn who, like many members of the Kreis, had trained as a scientist, in his case as a physicist under Max Planck, from 1900–4. The twenty-odd members of the circle that Schlick put together included Otto Neurath from Vienna, a remarkable Jewish polymath; Rudolf Carnap, a mathematician who had been a pupil of Gottlob Frege at Jena; Philipp Frank, another physicist; Heinz Hartmann, a psychoanalyst; Kurt Gödei, a mathematician; and at times Karl Popper, who became an influential philosopher after World War II. Schlick’s original label for the kind of philosophy that evolved in Vienna in the 1920s was konsequenter Empirismus, or consistent empiricism. However, after he visited America in 1929 and again in 1931–2, the term logical positivism emerged – and stuck.

The logical positivists made a spirited attack on metaphysics, against any suggestion that ‘there might be a world beyond the ordinary world of science and common sense, the world revealed to us by our senses.’⁹² For the logical positivists, any statement that wasn’t empirically testable – verifiable – or a statement in logic or mathematics was nonsensical. And so vast areas of theology, aesthetics, and politics were dismissed. There was more to it than this, of course. As the British philosopher A. J. Ayer, himself an observer of the circle for a short time, described it, they were also against ‘what we might call the German past,’ the romantic and to them rather woolly thinking of Hegel and Nietzsche (though not Marx).⁹³ The American philosopher Sidney Hook, who travelled in Germany at the time, confirmed the split, that the more traditional German philosophers were hostile to science and saw it as their duty ‘to advance the cause of religion, morality, freedom of the will, the Volk and the organic nation state.’⁹⁴ The aim of the Vienna Circle was to clarify and simplify philosophy, using techniques of logic and science. Under them, philosophy became the handmaiden of science and a ‘second-order subject.’ First-order subjects talk about the world (like physics and biology); second-order subjects talk about their talk about the world.⁹⁵ Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was one of the main influences on the Vienna Circle, and he too had been interested in the role of language in experience, and was very critical of traditional metaphysics. In this way, as the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle said, philosophy came to be regarded as ‘talk about talk.’⁹⁶

Neurath was perhaps the most talented of the circle. Though he trained as a mathematician, he also studied with Max Weber and wrote a book called Anti Spengler (1921). He was close to the Bauhaus people and developed a system of two thousand symbols (called isotypes) designed to help educate the illiterate (he would sign his own letters with an isotype of an elephant, happy or sad, as the case might be).⁹⁷ But this huge ebullient character was intensely serious and agreed with Wittgenstein that one should remain silent regarding metaphysics, because it is nonsense, while recognising ‘that one is being silent about something that does not exist.’⁹⁸

The self-conscious organisation of the Vienna Circle, and their enthusiasm for their new approach, was also a factor in their influence. It was as if they suddenly knew what philosophy was. Science describes the world, the only world there is, the world of things around us. All philosophy can do, therefore, is analyse and criticise the concepts and theories of science, so as to refine them, make them more accurate and useful. This is why the legacy of logical positivism is known as analytic philosophy.

In the same year that Moritz Schlick started the Vienna Circle, 1924, the year that The Magic Mountain appeared, Robert Musil began work in Vienna on his masterpiece, The Man without Qualities. If he had never written a book, Musil would still be worth remembering for describing Hitler in 1930 as ‘the living unknown soldier.’⁹⁹ But his three-volume work, the first volume of which was published in the same year, is for some people the most important novel in German written this century, eclipsing anything Mann wrote. Rated by many as on a par with Joyce and Proust, it is still far less well known than Ulysses, A la recherche du temps perdu, or The Magic Mountain.

Born in Klagenfurt in 1880, Musil came from an upper-middle-class family, part of the Austrian ‘mandinarate.’ He trained in science and engineering and wrote a thesis on Ernst Mach. The Man without Qualities is set in 1913 in the mythical country of ‘Kakania.’ Kakania is clearly Austro-Hungary, the name referring to Kaiserlich und Königlich, or K.u.K, standing for the royal kingdom of Hungary and the imperial-royal domain of the Austrian crown lands.¹⁰⁰ The book, though daunting in length, is for many the most brilliant literary response to developments in other fields in the early twentieth century, one of a handful of creations that is incapable of over-interpretation. It is: post-Bergson, post-Einstein, post-Rutherford, post-Bohr, post-Freud, post-Husserl, post-Picasso, post-Proust, post-Gide, post-Joyce and above all post-Wittgenstein.

There are three intertwined themes which provide a loose narrative. First, there is the search by the main character, Ulrich von …, a Viennese intellectual in his early thirties, whose attempt to penetrate the meaning of modern life involves him in a project to understand the mind of a murderer. Second, there is Ulrich’s relationship (and love affair) with his sister, who he had lost contact with in childhood. Third, the book is a social satire on Vienna on the eve of World War I.¹⁰¹

But the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalisations and talk about value, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless, as Wittgenstein tells us, how are we to live? asks Musil. He accepts that the old categories in which men thought – the ‘halfway house’ ideas of racialism, or religion – are of no use any more, but with what are we to replace them? Ulrich’s attempts to understand the mind of the murderer, Moosbrugger, recall Gide’s arguments that some things are inexplicable. (Musil studied under the psychologist Carl Stumpf, as did Husserl, and so was not especially in thrall to Freud, believing that although there was an unconscious it was an unorganised ‘Proustian’ jumble of forgotten memories. He also researched his book in a scientific way, studying a real murderer in jail in Vienna.) At one point Ulrich notes that he is tall, with broad shoulders, that ‘his chest cavity bulged like a spreading sail on a mast’ but that on occasions he felt small and soft, like ‘a jelly-fish floating in the water’ when he read a book that moved him. In other words, no one description, no one characteristic or quality, fitted him. It is in this sense that he is a man without qualities: ‘We no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannises our lives.’

Musil had hardly finished his massive work when he died, nearly destitute, in 1942, and the time it took for completion reflected his view that, in the wake of other developments, the novel had to change in the twentieth century. He thought that the traditional novel, as a way of telling stories, was dead. Instead, for him the modern novel was the natural home of metaphysics. Novels – his novel anyway – were a kind of thought experiment, on a par with Einstein’s, or Picasso’s, where a figure might be seen in profile and in full face at the same time. The two intertwined principles underlying experience, he believed, were violence and love, which is what links him to Joyce: science may be able to explain sex – but love? And love can be so exhausting that getting through today is all we can manage. Thinking about tomorrow – philosophy – is incommensurate with that. Musil wasn’t anti-science, as so many others were. (Ulrich ‘loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it.’) But he thought novelists could help discover where science might lead us. For him the fundamental question was whether the soul could ever be replaced by logic. The search for objectivity and the search for meaning are irreconcilable.

Franz Kafka was also obsessed by what it means to be human, and by the battle between science and ethics. In 1923, when he was thirty-nine, he realised a long-cherished ambition to move from Prague to Berlin (he was educated in the German language and spoke it at home). But he was in Berlin less than a year before the tuberculosis in his throat forced him to transfer to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died. He was forty-one.

Few details of Kafka’s private life suggest how he came by his extraordinarily strange imagination. A slim, well-dressed man with a hint of the dandy about him, he had trained in law and worked in insurance successfully. The only clue to his inner unconventionality lay in the fact that he had three unsuccessful engagements, two of them to the same woman.¹⁰² Just as Freud was ambivalent about Vienna, so Kafka felt much the same about Prague. ‘This little mother has claws’ is how he once described the city, and he was always intending to leave, but could never quite give up his well-paid job in insurance, not until 1922, when it was too late.¹⁰³ He often clashed with his father, and this may have had an effect on his writings, but as with all great art, the link between Kafka’s books and his life is far from straightforward.

Kafka is best known for three works of fiction, Metamorphosis (1916), The Trial (1925; posthumous), and The Castle (1926; posthumous). But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He often claimed that his primary aim was independence, yet he lived in his parents’ home until he left for Berlin; he was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; and he amused himself by imagining the most gruesome way he could die. He lived for writing and would work for months, collapsing in exhaustion afterward. Even so, he might jettison what he had done if he felt it was unworthy. He had relatively few correspondents, yet wrote to them often – very often, and very long letters. He wrote 90 letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several of between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him, and another long letter to a prospective father-in-law, whom he had met only once, explaining that he was probably impotent.¹⁰⁴

Although Kafka’s novels are ostensibly about very different subjects, they have some striking similarities, so much so that the cumulative effect of Kafka’s work is much more than the sum of its parts. Metamorphosis begins with one of the most famous opening lines in literature: ‘As Gregor Sams awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ This might seem as if the plot had been given away right there and then, but in fact the book explores Gregor’s response to his fantastic condition, and his relationship with his family and with his colleagues at work. If a man is turned into an insect, does this help him/us understand what it means to be human? In The Trial, Joseph K. (we never know his last name) is arrested and put on trial.¹⁰⁵ But neither he nor the reader ever knows the nature of his offence, or by what authority the court is constituted, and therefore he and we cannot know if the death sentence is warranted. Finally, in The Castle K. (again, that is all we are told) arrives in a village to take up an appointment as land surveyor at the castle that towers above the village and whose owner also owns all the houses there. However, K. finds that the castle authorities deny all knowledge of him, at least to begin with, and say he cannot even stay at the inn in the village. There then follows an extraordinary chain of events in which characters contradict themselves, vary unpredictably in their moods and attitudes to K., age virtually overnight, or lie – even K. himself is reduced to lying on occasions. Emissaries from the castle arrive in the village, but he never sees any sign of life in the castle itself, and never reaches it.¹⁰⁶

An added difficulty with interpreting Kafka’s work is that he never completed any of his three major novels, though we know from his notebooks what he intended at the time of his death. He also told his friend Max Brod what he planned for The Castle, his most realised work. Some critics argue that each of his ideas is an exploration of the inner workings of the mind of a mentally unstable individual, particularly The Trial, which on this reading becomes a sort of imaginative case history of someone with a persecution complex. In fact, one needn’t go this far. All three stories show a man not in control of himself, or of his life. In each case he is swept along, caught up in forces where he cannot impose his will, where those forces – biological, psychological, logical – lead blindly. There is no development, no progress, as conventionally understood, and no optimism. The protagonist doesn’t always win; in fact, he always loses. There are forces in Kafka’s work, but no authority. It is bleak and chilling. Jewish, and Czech, an outsider at Weimar, Kafka nevertheless saw where that society was headed. There are similarities between Kafka and Heidegger in that Kafka’s characters must submit to greater forces, forces they don’t truly understand. He once said, ‘I sometimes believe I understand the Fall of Man as no one else.’¹⁰⁷ Kafka parts company with Heidegger, however, in saying that not even submission brings satisfaction; indeed, satisfaction, or fulfilment, may not be possible in the modern world. This is what makes The Castle Kafka’s masterpiece, for many people a latter-day Divine Comedy. W. H. Auden once said, ‘Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe have to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.’¹⁰⁸

In The Castle life in the village is dominated by the eponymous building. Its authority is unquestioned but also unexplained. The capriciousness of its bureaucracy is likewise unquestioned, but all attempts by K. to understand that capriciousness are nullified. Though obviously and perhaps too heavily allegorical of modern societies, with their faceless bureaucratic masses, verging on terror, their impersonality, marked by a pervading feeling of invasion (by science and machines) and of dehumanisation, Kafka’s works both reflect and prophesy a world that was becoming a reality. The Castle was the culmination of Kafka’s work, at least in the sense that the reader tries to understand the book as K. tries to understand the castle. In all his books, however, Kafka succeeds in showing the reader terror and the uncomfortable, alienated, disjunctive feelings that so characterise modern life. Eerily, he also prefigured the specific worlds that were soon to arrive: Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.

In 1924, the year that tuberculosis killed Kafka, Adolf Hitler celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday – in prison. He was in Landsberg jail, west of the Bavarian capital, serving a five-year sentence for treason and his part in the Munich putsch. There were several other National Socialists in prison with him, and as well as being given minimum sentences, they had an easy time inside. There was plenty of good food, they were allowed out into the garden, Hitler was a favourite with the jailers, and on his birthday he received numerous parcels and bunches of flowers. He was putting on weight.¹⁰⁹

The trial had been front-page news in every German newspaper for more than three weeks, and for the first time Hitler broke through to a national audience. Later, he was to claim that the trial and the publicity surrounding it were a turning point in his career. It was during his time in prison that Hitler wrote the first part of Mein Kampf. It is entirely possible that he might never have written anything had he not been sent to Landsberg. At the same time, as Alan Bullock has pointed out, the opportunity was invaluable. Mein Kampf helped Hitler establish himself as the leader of the National Socialists, helped him lay the foundation of the Hitler myth, and helped him clarify his ideas. Hitler instinctively grasped that a movement such as the one he planned needed a ‘sacred text,’ a bible.¹¹⁰

Whatever his other attributes, Hitler certainly thought of himself as a thinker, with a grasp of technical-military matters, of natural science, and above all of history. He was convinced that this grasp set him apart from other men, and in this he was not entirely wrong. We need to remember that he started adult life as an artist and an aspiring architect. He was transformed into the figure he became first by World War I and the ensuing peace, but also by the education he gave himself. Perhaps the most important thing to grasp about Hitler’s intellectual development is that it was so far removed from that of most if not all the people we have been considering in this chapter. As even a cursory examination of Mein Kampf will show, this is because most of Hitler’s ideas were nineteenth-century or turn-of-the-century ideas – the kind examined here in chapters 2 and 3 – and once they were formed, Hitler never changed them. The Führer’s ideas, as revealed in his table talk during World War II, are directly traceable to his thinking as a young man.¹¹¹

The historian George L. Mosse has disinterred the more distant intellectual origins of the Third Reich, on which this section is chiefly based.¹¹² He shows how an amalgam of völkisch mysticism and spirituality grew up in Germany in the nineteenth century, in part a response to the romantic movement and to the bewildering pace of industrialisation, and was also an aspect of German unification. While the Volk were coming together, forging one heroic Pan-German nation, the ‘rootless Jew’ was a convenient, negative comparison (though of course this was not at all fair: in Germany Jews could not be government officials or full professors until 1918). Mosse traces the influence of thinkers and writers, many completely forgotten now, who helped create this cast of mind – people like Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, who stressed ‘German intuition’ as a new creative force in the world, and Eugen Diederichs, who openly advocated ‘a culturally grounded nation guided by the initiated elite,’ by the revival of German legends, such as the Edda, which stressed Germany’s great antiquity and its links to Greece and Rome (great civilisations but also pagan). The point about all this was that it elevated the Volk almost to the level of a deity.¹¹³ There were nineteenth-century German books such as that by Ludwig Woltmann, examining the art of the Renaissance, identifying ‘Aryans’ in positions of power and showing how much the Nordic type was admired.¹¹⁴ Mosse also emphasises how social Darwinism threaded through society. In 1900, for example, Alfred Krupp, the wealthy industrialist and arms manufacturer, sponsored a public essay competition on the topic, ‘What can we learn from the principles of Darwinism for application to inner political development and the laws of the state?’¹¹⁵ Not surprisingly, the winner advocated that all aspects of the state, without exception, should be viewed and administered in social Darwinian terms. Mosse further describes the many German attempts at utopias – from ‘Aryan’ colonies in Paraguay and Mexico to nudist camps in Bavaria, which tried to put völkisch principles into effect. The craze for physical culture grew out of these utopias, and so too did the movement for rural boarding schools with a curriculum based on ‘back to nature’ and Heimatkunde, rendered as ‘lore of the homeland,’ emphasising Germanness, nature, and ancient peasant customs. As a boy, Hitler grew up in this milieu without realising that there was any alternative.¹¹⁶

In fact, Hitler never made any secret of this. Linz, where he was raised, was a semirural, middle-class town populated by German nationalists. The town authorities turned a blind eye to the gatherings of the banned ‘Gothia’ or ‘Wodan’ societies, with their Pan-German tendencies.¹¹⁷ As a boy, Hitler belonged to these groups, but he also witnessed the intolerant nationalism of the town’s adults, whose anti-Czech feelings boiled over so easily that they even took against the eminent violinist Jan Kubelik, who was scheduled to perform in Linz. These memories, all too evident in Mein Kampf, helped account for Hitler’s attacks on the Habsburgs for the ‘Slavisation’ of the Austrians. In his book Hitler also insists that while at school in Linz he ‘learned to understand and grasp the meaning of history.’ ‘To “Learn” history,’ he explained, ‘means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events.’¹¹⁸ One of these forces, he felt (and this too he had picked up as a boy), was that Britain, France, and Russia were intent on encircling Germany, and he thereafter never rid himself of this view. Perhaps not surprisingly, for him history was invariably the work of great men – his heroes were Charlemagne, Rudolf von Habsburg, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Wilhelm I. Hitler therefore was much more in the mould of Stefan George, or Rainer Maria Rilke, rather than Marx or Engels, for whom the history of class struggle was paramount. For Hitler, history was a catalogue of racial struggles, although the outcome always depended on great men: ‘[History] was the sum total of struggle and war, waged by each against all with no room for either mercy or humanity.’¹¹⁹ He often quoted Helmut von Moltke, a nineteenth-century German general, who had argued that one should always use the most terrible weapons and tactics available because, by shortening hostilities, lives would be saved.

Hitler’s biological thinking was an amalgam of Thomas R. Malthus, Charles Darwin, Joseph Arthur Gobineau, and William McDougall: ‘Man has become great through struggle…. Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality…. All life is bound up in three theses: struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive…. He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world where eternal struggle is the law of life has no right to exist.’¹²⁰ Malthus had argued that the world’s population was outstripping the earth’s capacity to provide for it. The result must be famine and war. Birth control and much-improved agriculture offered the only hope for Malthus, but for Hitler there was another answer: ‘a predatory war of annihilation as a means to an end, an historically all-important act in response to natural law and necessity.’ According to Werner Maser, one of Hitler’s biographers, his brutal attitude to ‘weaklings’ was transplanted from the teachings of Alfred Ploetz, whose book, Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (The Efficiency of our Race and the Protection of the Weak), Hitler had read as a young man in Vienna before World War I. The following extract from Ploetz will show how his thinking had ‘advanced’ since the nineteenth century: ‘Advocates of racial hygiene [the new phrase for eugenics] will have little objection to war since they see in it one of the means whereby the nations carry on their struggle for existence… In the course of the campaign it might be deemed advisable deliberately to muster inferior variants at points where the main need is for cannon fodder and where the individual’s efficiency is of secondary importance.’¹²¹

Hitler’s biologism was intimately linked to his understanding of history. He knew very little about prehistory but certainly regarded himself as something of a classicist. He was fond of saying that his ‘natural home’ was ancient Greece or Rome, and he had more than a passing acquaintance with Plato. Partly because of this, he considered the races of the East (the old ‘Barbarians’) as inferior. ‘Retrogression’ was a favourite idea of Hitler’s, something he applied to the ‘Habsburg brood,’ who ruled in Vienna but for him were doomed to degeneracy. Similarly, organised religion, Catholicism in particular, was also doomed, owing to its antiscientific stance and its unfortunate interest in the poor (‘weaklings’). For Hitler mankind was divided into three – creators of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture – and only the ‘Aryans’ were capable of creating culture.¹²² The decline of culture was always due to the same reason: miscegenation. The Germanic tribes had replaced decadent cultures before – in ancient Rome – and could do so again with the decadent West. Here again, the influence of Linz can be detected. For one thing, it helps explain Hitler’s affinity for Hegel. Hegel had argued that Europe was central in history, that Russia and the United States were peripheral. Landlocked Linz reinforced this view. ‘Throughout his life Hitler remained an inland-orientated German, his imagination untouched by the sea…. He was completely rooted within the cultural boundaries of the old Roman Empire.’¹²³ This attitude may just have been crucial, leading Hitler to fatally underestimate the resolve of that periphery – Britain, the United States, and Russia.

If Linz kept Hitler’s thinking in the nineteenth century, Vienna taught him to hate. Werner Maser says, interestingly, that ‘Hitler perhaps hated better than he loved.’¹²⁴ It was the Vienna Academy that twice rejected him and his efforts to become an art student and an architect. And it was in Vienna that Hitler first encountered widespread anti-Semitism. In Mein Kampf he argued that he did not come across many Jews or any anti-Semitism until he reached Vienna, and that anti-Semitism had a rational basis, ‘the triumph of reason over feeling.’ This is flatly contradicted by August Kubizek, Hitler’s friend from his Vienna years (Mein Kampf is now known to be wrong on several biographical details). According to Kubizek, Adolf’s father was not a broadminded cosmopolitan, as he is portrayed, but an out-and-out anti-Semite and a follower of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the rabid nationalist we met in chapter 3. Kubizek also says that in 1904, when they first met and Hitler was fifteen and still at school, he was already ‘distinctly anti-Semitic.’¹²⁵ Research has confirmed that there were fifteen Jews at Hitler’s school, not one, as he says in Mein Kampf.

Whether or not Kubizek or Hitler is right about the anti-Semitism in Linz, Vienna, as we have seen, was a sump of vicious anti-Jewish feeling. For a start, Hitler early on encountered a series of pamphlets entitled Ostara, a periodical that was often stamped with a swastika on its cover.¹²⁶ Founded in 1905 by a wild racist who called himself George Lanz von Liebenfels, this journal at one point claimed a circulation of 100,000 copies. Its editorials revealed its stance openly: ‘The Ostara is the first and only periodical devoted to investigating and cultivating heroic racial characteristics and the law of man in such a way that, by actually applying the discoveries of ethnology, we may through systematic eugenics … preserve the heroic and noble race from destruction by socialist and feminist revolutionaries.’ Lanz von Liebenfels was also the founder of the ‘Order of the New Temple,’ whose membership ‘was restricted to fair-haired, blue-eyed men, all of whom were pledged to marry fair-haired, blue-eyed women.’ Between 1928 and 1930 Ostara reprinted Liebenfels’s 1908 tome Theozoology; or, the Science of Sodom’s Apelings and the Divine Electron: An Introduction to the Earliest and Most Recent World View and a Vindication of Royalty and the Nobility. ‘Sodom’s apelings’ was the appealing label given to dark-skinned ‘inferior races,’ whom Liebenfels regarded as ‘God’s bungled handiwork.’¹²⁷ But Hitler’s anti-Semitism was also fanned by Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who in turn owed a debt to the German translation of Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. At the 1919 meeting of the Pan-German League, one of the League’s specific aims was identified as combating ‘the disruptive, subversive influence of the Jews – a racial question which has nothing to do with questions of religion.’ As Werner Maser remarks, ‘This manifesto thus marked the launch of biological antisemitism.’¹²⁸ Certainly, by the time Hitler came to write Mein Kampf, more than five years later, he referred to Jews as ‘parasites,’ ‘bacilli,’ ‘germ-carriers,’ and ‘fungus.’ From then on, from a National Socialist point of view, Jews were deprived of all human attributes.

It is doubtful that Hitler was as well read as his admirers claimed, but he did know some architecture, art, military history, general history, and technology, and also felt at home in music, biology, medicine, and the history of civilisation and religion.¹²⁹ He was often able to surprise his listeners with his detailed knowledge in a variety of fields. His doctor, for example, was once astonished to discover that the Führer fully grasped the effects of nicotine on the coronary vessels.¹³⁰ But Hitler was largely self-taught, which had significant consequences. He never had a teacher able to give him a systematic or comprehensive grounding in any field. He was never given any objective, outside viewpoint that might have had an effect on his judgement or on how he weighed evidence. Second, World War I, which began when Hitler was twenty-five, acted as a brake (and a break) in his education. Hitler’s thoughts stopped developing in 1914; thereafter, he was by and large confined to the halfway house of ideas in Pan-Germany described in chapters 2 and 3. Hitler’s achievement showed what could be wrought by a mixture of Rilke’s mysticism, Heidegger’s metaphysics, Werner Sombart’s notion of heroes versus traders, and that hybrid cocktail of social Darwinism, Nietzschean pessimism, and the visceral anti-Semitism that has become all too familiar. It was a mix that could flourish only in a largely landlocked country obsessed with heroes. Traders, especially in maritime nations, or America, whose business was business, learned too much respect for other peoples in the very act of trading. It would be entirely fitting, though not often enough stressed, that Hitler’s brand of thought was so comprehensively defeated by Western rationalism, so much the work of Jews.

We must be careful, however, not to pitch Hitler’s thought too high. For a start, as Maser highlights, much of his later reading was done merely to confirm the views he already held. Second, in order to preserve a consistency in his position, he was required to do severe violence to the facts. For example, Hitler several times argued that Germany had abandoned its expansion toward the East ‘six hundred years ago.’ This had to do with his explanation of Germany’s failure in the past, and its future needs. Yet both the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns had had a well established Ostpolitik — Poland, for instance, being partitioned three times. Above all there was Hitler’s skill at drawing up his own version of history, convincing himself and others that he was right and academic opinion usually wrong. For example, whereas most scholars believed that Napoleon’s downfall was the result of his Russian campaign, Hitler attributed it to his Corsican ‘sense of family’ and his ‘want of taste’ in accepting the imperial crown, which meant that he made ‘common cause with degenerates.¹³¹

In political terms, Hitler’s accomplishments embraced the Third Reich, the Nazi Party, and, if they can be called accomplishments, World War II and the Holocaust. In the context of this book, however, he represents the final convulsions of the old metaphysics. Weimar was a place of both ‘unparalleled mental alertness’ and the dregs of nineteenth-century völkisch romanticism, where people ‘thought with their blood.’ That the Weimar culture which Hitler hated should be exported virtually en bloc in years to come was entirely apropos. Hitler’s intellectual failings shaped the second half of the century every bit as much as did his military megalomania.