Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  For six months, through the summer of 1919, the Communists proceeded to act as the people’s vanguard: the party staged a nationwide campaign of violence designed to precipitate a civil war and overthrow the Republic. These months were filled with Communist-instigated riots, insurrections, putsches, marches on Berlin, seizures of buildings, angry mass strikes, and bloody street fighting—all of it adding up to an orgy of anarchy and murder. The chaos in the country may be glimpsed from the fact that Bavaria in April 1919 had three competing governments: an elected one, which was ousted by a “Soviet Republic” announced by a group of left-wing (but non-Communist) intellectuals, which was challenged by another “Soviet Republic” led by the Communists.

  The Social Democrats leading the national government abhorred the eruptions of violence. They did not cease to preach the revolutionary exhortations of Marxism, which were their stock in trade. But at the same time they urged their followers, who numbered in the millions, to take up arms against the Communists. “Do you want the German Socialist Republic? ... Then help us create a people’s force for the government that will be able to protect its dignity, its freedom of decision and its activity against assaults and putsches.... A government ... that cannot assert itself has also no right to existence.”28

  The government’s plea evoked no response from the workers. The party faithful were not Communists, but they took the slogans of the Social Democrats seriously. They did want socialism, and they heard the Communists demanding it, too. However much the workers may have disliked the radicals’ violence, they could not bring themselves actively to resist it; they were reluctant to fight against men who were—according to all the speeches of their own leaders—fellow proletarians, fellow comrades, fellow idealists. (The workers were capable of decisive action against an enemy identified as rightist: a year later a nationalist putsch in Berlin was defeated by a massive general strike.)

  The Social Democratic leadership itself showed signs of a similar ambivalence. The party that was working to put down the Spartacist rebels was even capable on occasion of cooperating with the rebels’ disruptive tactics. In March 1919, for instance, the Communists called for a general strike in Berlin, flaunting such slogans as “Down with the National Assembly!” and “The revolution can only advance over the graves of the Majority Social Democrats.” The Social Democrats in Berlin first opposed the strike call, then abruptly decided to join the strike committees themselves (and finally, alarmed by the threat to life, resigned from them). The moderates joined in, despite the Spartacist call for their slaughter, largely because of what has been called “the rivalry of radicalism.” The other left-wing groups had to try to surpass the Spartacists in revolutionary zeal. Such groups had to justify their existence; they had to show their followers and themselves that they, too, could be counted on for moral fervor and political action—as defined by the basic philosophy which all these groups shared.29

  Qua republicans, the Social Democrats did not want the Communists to win. Qua Marxists, the Social Democrats did not want the Communists to lose. The result was a party that could do little during a momentous national crisis except appease, vacillate, temporize, and hope that someone else would act.

  The Social Democrats found someone else. In a fateful step, the party leadership turned to the one German group able and eager to put down the Communists: the remnants of the Kaiser’s army and of the old Officer Corps—and asked them to save the country. These men were open enemies of the Republic, but they preferred it to a communist state for tactical reasons. A republic, they felt, would buy them time, until conditions favored the establishment of a truly “German” system of government.

  In this manner, by the default and decision of the moderate left, the initiative in Germany and the basic responsibility for its future passed to the country’s nationalist forces—specifically, to the troops known at the time as the Free Corps.

  The Free Corps were bands of armed adventurers—primarily, bitter young soldiers returned from the front—who, unable or unwilling to find employment, roamed the country and acted according to their feelings; in many cases they were led by former junior army officers. Although mostly of middle-class origins, these soldiers hated the same basic enemy as the Communists: the bourgeois mentality and way of life (some even called themselves “Bolshevists of the Right”). In place of the money-grubbing bourgeois system, they said, Germany needs “idealism,” passion for the Fatherland, a Führer, and, most important of all, action. They were seldom more specific. “We could not,” one of them said, “answer the question that so often echoed from the other side of the gorge [i.e., from the middle-class establishment], ‘What do you really want?’ ”

  We could not answer because we did not understand the question, and they could never have understood the answer.... Over on the other side they wanted property and permanence ... and we wanted no system, no order, no platitudes and no programs. We acted according to no plan, toward no established goal. Indeed, we did not act at all, something acted in us.... “What do you believe in?” you ask. Nothing besides action.30

  When asked by an old monarchist what was the sense of their actions, one of them answered: “There is sense only in danger. Marching into uncertainty is sense enough for us, because it answers the demands of our blood.”

  Their blood led these fighters—who defiantly called themselves “freebooters,” “outlaws,” “nihilists”—to loot and to smash. They fought the “red terror” of the Spartacists by unleashing a “white terror” of their own. They fought the Reich’s attempt to disband their units (in 1920), by marching on the capital in an abortive attempt to overthrow the government (the Kapp Putsch). In the name of “German honor,” they pronounced secret death sentences in vigilante courts, then carried out the sentences in wave after wave of political assassinations. What the Free Corps stood for, summarized one enthusiastic member, was “robbery and plundering, arson and murder—a mixture of every passion and demoniacal fury.”31

  The Free Corps did not consist only of soldiers. “Next to the war veterans,” writes one scholar, “students formed the largest group in the Free Corps. For the most part, they were young idealists” who despised “peace and money-grabbing.” “Next to the racist officers,” said the leader of Hitler’s Storm Troopers, Ernst Röhm, recalling his Free Corps days, “it was primarily the aggressiveness and loyalty of the students that strengthened us.”32

  Such were the men who, in a series of brutal armed confrontations (brutal on both sides), decisively crushed the Spartacist threat—thereby gaining, at the expense of the hand-wringing moderates, the prestige of national heroes. From this time on, the Communists were forced, despite their ideology, to try to gain power by electoral means. “The German nation,” observes Ludwig von Mises, “obtained parliamentary government as a gift from the hands of deadly foes of freedom, who waited for an opportunity to take back their present.”33

  Ideologically, the clash between Communists and Free Corps was a clash between champions of the all-powerful state and seekers after an all-powerful leader; between activists eager for an unselfish (socialist) Germany and activists eager for an “idealistic” (non-capitalist) Fatherland; between brute force justified by economic determinism or “dialectic logic” and brute force justified by “the demands of the blood.”

  The clash was only a variant of the basic alternative that was being offered to the nation in the meetings of the Weimar Assembly.

  Wherever the German turned—to the left, to the right, to the center; to the decorous voices in parliament or to the gutters running with blood—he heard the same fundamental ideas. They were the same in politics, the same in ethics, the same in epistemology.

  This is how philosophy shapes the destiny of nations. If there is no dissent in regard to basic principles among a country’s leading philosophic minds, theirs are the principles that come in time to govern every social and political group in the land. Owing to other factors, the groups may proliferate and may cont
end fiercely over variants, applications, strategy; but they do not contend over essentials. In such a case, the country is offered an abundance of choices—among equivalents competing to push it to the same final outcome.

  It is common for observers to criticize the “disunity” of Weimar Germany, which, it is said, prevented the anti-Nazi groups from dealing effectively with the threat posed by Hitler. In fact, the Germans were united, and this precisely was their curse: their kind of unity, their unity on all the things that count in history, i.e., on all the ideas.

  The effect of this unity was a world convulsion. The cause, however, like a silent tremor, had been hard to notice.

  It was only some deadly marks on paper made one hundred and fifty years earlier by a purposeful figure at a solitary desk in the peaceful little town of Königsberg.

  8

  The Emotionalist Republic

  Just as Germany’s political movements, despite their clashes on the surface, were united in essence by one viewpoint, so were the nation’s cultural movements. They were united on the kinds of issues that alone could give rise to the country’s monolithic politics. One fundamental principle was everywhere in the ascendancy—among artists and educators, radicals and traditionalists, young and old alike.

  For a country ruled by such a principle, several names are possible.

  The “rational Republic” is not one of them.

  More than any other form of human expression, art is the barometer that lays bare a period’s view of reality, of life, of man. A work of art reflects its creator’s fundamental ideas and value-judgments, held consciously or subconsciously. Since most artists are not independent theoreticians, but absorb their basic ideas from the prevailing consensus (or some faction within it), their work becomes a microcosm embodying and helping to spread further the kinds of beliefs advocated by that consensus.

  The leading art school of Weimar Germany, especially in the Republic’s earlier, formative years, was Expressionism, the product of a middle-class youth movement that had been growing since the turn of the century. According to admirers and enemies alike, this school, which reached its greatest influence after the war, was the perfect cultural embodiment of the new, anti-Kaiser spirit.

  What Expressionism expressed was an open break with the intellect, with material reality, and with the entire spectrum of “middle-class” values, from emphasis on work and personal success, to industrial civilization, money, business, to sexual standards, to law and order.

  The profound recoil against the mechanization of life, the wholesale attack on bourgeois morals, the emphasis on nudity and sexual license, the affinity for anarchist tactics, the search for exotic states of mind and exotic forms of dress, the yearning for pastoral freedom, communal living and generational solidarity, above all, perhaps, the cult of the irrational ... [wrote The New York Times’ art critic in 1969]—all of these features of the revolt we are now witnessing were crucial to the Expressionist program.1

  Some of the Expressionist rebels were apolitical, some were moderate socialists, some flirted with the Nazis. Most, however, were drawn by their viewpoint to a different group. They were either members of the Communist party or, more commonly, its freewheeling sympathizers and fellow travelers.

  The essence of the new approach to art was on stage nightly in Weimar Germany: the Expressionists took the theater over completely, making it their leading, most controversial, and most highly publicized showcase.

  The themes featured in the new plays included the stifling “prison” of bourgeois life; the threat of the machine age to religion or the soul; the anguished cry of the heart before the abyss of nothingness; the frustration and agonizing loneliness of modem man; his need for love; his disgust with “the system” and with the older generation. A favorite motif in these works was the praise of patricide, i.e., of the new youth’s passion to kill his father.

  These themes were offered to the public not in the form of coherent statements, but as occasional flecks of meaning surfacing in a torrent of inarticulate rage. Art, the playwrights explained, must be an agent of cultural revolution. It must be designed to shock the bourgeoisie out of their wits and their “self-satisfied complacency.” It must reject the old-fashioned “lie” of beauty in order to tell the truth about man: the truth that he is a huddle of impotence caught in an apocalyptic universe, doomed to a nightmare existence of horror, torment, defeat. Above all, the new authors said, a play must not make concessions to the nineteenth century: it must be willing to dispense with “intellectualism,” to “experiment” with the nonobjective, to flaunt the nonintelligible.

  Rejecting the concept of plot, leading playwrights such as Georg Kaiser offered the theatergoer collages of random episodes and moods, devoid of progression, structure, even adequate lighting—and pocked with deliberate absurdities. (For example, in Kaiser’s most famous play, From Morn to Midnight, first produced in 1916, a man’s refusal to eat his pork chops causes his mother to fall dead; a man, meeting a woman with a wooden leg, proceeds to water it with champagne; etc.) Rejecting characterization, the Expressionists presented nameless figures—e.g., “Cashier,” “Lady,” “Stout Gentleman”—figures without individuating traits or intelligible motives, but exuding an unmistakable aura: strident hysteria, alienated bitterness, frenzied disorientation. Rejecting “beautiful phrases” and contemptuous of clarity, the Expressionists specialized in plays filled with mad dialogue, raving confessions, disjointed screaming at the audience, and delirious word salads, such as: “Space is loneliness. Loneliness is space. Coldness is sunshine. Sunshine is coldness. Fever heat burns you. Fever heat freezes you. Fields are deserted. Ice overgrows them. Who can escape? Where is the door?” These new modes of theatrical speech were hailed as the “liberation” of language, its liberation from the shackles of grammar, syntax, and logic.2

  The Expressionist plays were offered as a cry from one heart to another, bypassing any intermediary, such as the brain. They were offered as an expression of pure feeling—a kind of feeling reveling in its own willful subjectivity, pulsing with the terror of its own helplessness, chuckling at the consternation of the audience, and begging for the moral ideal, conceived as mystic union with God or Community or Humanity. It was a prayer to the ineffable—and a thumbing of one’s nose at the “philistine” elders.

  To feel is human; to extol feeling above reason is philosophy, a special kind of philosophy, the kind that the Germans had been taught for over a century.

  The conservatives in Germany hated the new theater and its counterparts in the rest of the arts and every other social symptom which, in their view, was a product of the postwar culture, such as pornography, prostitution, public nudity, rising juvenile delinquency, blatantly flaunted homosexuality. They cursed all of it as “cultural Bolshevism.” This is a loose term signifying antipathy to any innovation, of whatever nature; or antipathy to the pro-Communist politics of the avant-garde; or, more often, antipathy to what an enraged segment of the population sensed about the new manifestations: that they were a monstrous aberration overrunning the country, something decadent, wanton, anarchist, degenerate.

  This aberration, said the conservative intellectuals, is the price Germany is paying for rejecting the tradition of Prussia, Luther, and the German heart, in favor of freedom, secularism, and the Western intellect. The modern corruptions, they said, are the product of reason.

  Reason, they said, is precisely what man cannot live by. Life, explained Oswald Spengler, the world-famous nationalist historian, “has no system, no program, no reason....” It cannot be analyzed or “dissected” according to intellectual principles. “[T]he profound order in which it realizes itself can only be grasped by intuitive insight and feeling. . . .”3

  The political left demanded the new in art, the youth-oriented, the radical. The rightists, by contrast, revered tradition and flocked to the artistic heroes of an earlier era. One of their top favorites in this regard, which indicates the nature of their “intuition
and feeling,” was Richard Wagner.

  Wagner intoxicated the nationalists by re-creating the world of ancient Teutonic mythology—in Shirer’s evocative description, “an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation. . . .” Here was a vision of life congenial to the deepest feelings of the German chauvinists. They knew what alternative they would accept to the wanton decadence of “cultural Bolshevism.” It was the wanton barbarism of the savage Nibelungs. 4

  Wagner presented his vision of life in appropriate musical terms. Through his unprecedented use of chromaticism and dissonance he became the major transition figure leading from traditional harmony to modem atonality. Thus the prophet of Wotan became the hero not only of Goebbels and Hitler, but also of Arnold Schoenberg.

  The Weimar conservatives admired certain contemporary artists, too—for instance, the highly influential poet-seer Stefan George. Idol of the rightist literati and center of a prolific circle, George, who was given to holding “seances” in darkened salons, sought to unite in his work such values as Spartan aristocracy, German community, Catholic communion, and the “nobility” of force.

  What the youth of Germany learned from George may be gleaned from one of his disciples, the influential psychologist (and graphologist) Ludwig Klages. The intellect, according to Klages, is a “hostile power, asphyxiating the originally intuitive and prophetic mind of primeval man and culture.” The proper course for psychology, therefore, “is to turn away from rationalist and causal procedures to the primeval level,” which is to be grasped by “divination.”5

  Between 1929 and 1932, Klages published his three-volume masterwork, The Intellect as Adversary of the Soul. The title is an eloquent statement of the cultural credo of the German conservatives—and of their mortal enemies.