But a Man Must Believe in Something
It is the Germans’ ideals which are dangerous; their practices, when their ideals do not have hold of them, are not a bit better or worse than other men’s. Where do they get their ideals? “The ‘passions,’” says Santayana, “is the old and fit name for what the Germans call ideals.” This idealist slave of his own or another man’s passions was twice sundered from Rome, in A.D. 9 and in A.D. 1555. In the year 9 the Germans expelled the founders of secular Europe; in 1555 they cut themselves loose from the Weltanschauung which the age of the Mediterranean fused in Italy from the Greco-Hebraic break with Syria and Egypt. This bright Weltanschauung rests upon the dogma of personal responsibility. This dogma is the first fact of our civilization. Its repulse left Germany peculiarly rootless.
Thought, like feeling, took root in irresponsibility, with subjectivism, relativism, “intelligent skepticism” its flower. It was not only in physics or in government that the Germans excelled in producing Frankenstein’s monsters but in epistemology itself. Thought is all, but there are a thousand ways of thinking. The thinker can attach no worth to his thinking as against another man’s because there is no reality to measure them both, only internal consistency, “system.” At the same time no other man’s system is, by definition, better than his. The superiority of the thinking lies—somewhere—in the thinker.
“A trite, nauseatingly repulsive, ignorant charlatan without esprit, who with unexampled impertinence scribbled together twaddle and nonsense, which his venal adherents trumpeted forth … the hollowest farrago of words devoid of sense that ever satisfied dunderheads … repulsive … recalls the ravings of madmen.” This is a philosophical critique by one of Germany’s greatest philosophers, Schopenhauer, of another of Germany’s greatest philosophers, Hegel. The “pedantic arrogance” of which Goethe complained in the Germans was the self-assuredness not of common, Western dogma but of the antidogmatic who, needing, like all men, dogma to live by, had none to fall back on but his own. Each man was his own “school”; you did not go to Germany to get an education but to get a man or, more exactly, a mind. The characteristic German professor did not know the students or meet them (and there were no student deans or advisers). He was a thinker, and a teacher of thinking.
Cut from its moorings in Western dogma, German thinking shot up unencumbered to the clouds. Balloons ascended everywhere. Which basket the fortunate few boarded was a matter of fancy and favoritism; once they were off the ground, they were all equally impervious to puncture by reality down below. “He stands up there,” said Willy Hofmeister, the old policeman; “I stand down here. I can’t argue with him. I’m not stupid, but he’s spent his whole life studying. He knows. I don’t.” He was contrasting wir Einfachen, we simple people, with die Gebildeten, the cultivated.
Down below were wir Einfachen, the millions who were some day to be Nazis, the “little men” who, as Balzac put it, seemed to have been sent into the world to swell the crowd. When I was first in Germany I asked a German theologian to help me find one such “little man,” one whom National Socialism had confronted with innerüchei Konflikt, moral struggle. The theologian replied: “Moral struggle?—They had none. They are all little sausages, Würstchen.” German thought soared away from the Würstchen, carrying with it the elect, for whom the educational system above the eighth grade existed, and the stage and the philharmonic and the bookstores. For the rest—let the greatest of the great German masters say it:
He who has Science has Art,
Religion, too, has he;
Who has not Science, has not Art,
Let him religious be.
For the rest, there were the churches and the songs of Heaven and Home. At the Kronenberg Singfest, held in the auditorium of Kronenberg University at Easter, I saw not one of my academic colleagues. But eight of my ten “little men” were there.
To the extent that the big men influenced the little men, it was to convince them that thought, of which they themselves were incapable, was everything. There is, besides intelligent skepticism, unintelligent skepticism, and it was a long time ago that Nietzsche asserted that Germans as a whole were skeptics. The ground fell away from under the churches even while, in the gradually emptying sanctuary, those who were still credulous were promised the invincibility of German arms. When German arms proved vincible, the churches lost still more of the credulous.
But people who do not have a good religion will have a bad one. They will have a religion; they will have something to believe in. Men—not just Germans—cannot bear the pressure of life, however light it may be elsewhere compared with the pressure upon the Germans. Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe. My ten Nazi friends—and a great majority of the rest of the seventy million Germans—swarmed to it. German thought had not bothered to take them along on its flight. It had left them on the ground. Now they are back on the ground again, rooting around the husks of old ideals for a kernel.
The Germans were, when Hitler found them, emotionally undernourished. Life in a besieged city, even relaxation, is unrelievedly rigid. Happiness is dismissed as unattainable—the German word for it is derived from Glück, luck—and its pursuit then disdained as decadent. But it is duty-bearers, not pleasure-seekers, who go berserk. The ordinary hours of the German person, day by day, do not feed his hunger for expression. The decline of conversation is a very modern phenomenon, and a world phenomenon wherever the most modern means of mass communication have replaced it; but the malady of repression is something else. Repression is not the same thing as reserve, any more than denial (the Germans are peerless here) is the same as self-denial.
In a stifled, lid-on atmosphere, the “German” way of thinking flourished, exoteric, meticulous, and introverted; flourished in the starved soil of German emotion. National Socialism fructified that soil, and it bloomed suddenly red with fire and blood.