The Weimar moderns were alienated, as they said, but the cause was not anything so superficial as social institutions or political systems. Their alienation existed on the most profound level men can experience: they were alienated from the basic values human life requires, from the human means of knowledge, from man’s essential relation to reality.
A mass revolt against a specific set of fundamental ideas can be explained only by an acceptance of opposite ideas.
The late-nineteenth-century German intellectuals absorbed what all their deepest thinkers had taught them; they caught the essence of the message: reality is out, reason is out, the pursuit of values is out, man is out; and then they looked at the world around them, the Western world still shaped by the premises of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The intellectuals saw pyramiding scientific and technological discoveries. They saw value-glorifying art animated by an inspired vision of man. They saw purposeful innovators in every field creating unprecedented achievements, men who did not find reason impotent, but who were smilingly confident of their power to achieve their goals. They saw the “bourgeoisie” and the workers and every social class, excepting only themselves and the remnants of the feudal aristocracy, reveling in the luxuries of an industrial civilization, producing goods and happiness, seeking more of both, refusing to sacrifice the treasures which, for the first time in history, masses of men were able to acquire.
The intellectuals saw it, and they knew they had to choose. They had to challenge the anti-mind doctrines they had been taught, or the minds of those who had not yet been indoctrinated. Their alternative was to demolish the view of life bred into their feelings, or the glowing aftermath of the world of the Enlightenment, a world which was, to them, an alien planet and a reproach. They chose according to their fundamentals and their guilt. They became nihilists.
Such men could not create an authentically innovative culture, not while believing that reality is unknowable and that man is helpless. All they could do, aside from resurrecting the irrationalism of the past, was to find their “creative” outlet in destroying what they saw around them. Their goal and product was a cultural wasteland, reflecting the kinds of ideas they felt they could live with.
In the case of the leaders of the modern rebellion, many ugly psychological factors were undoubtedly at work, such as self-loathing, and resentment of the success of others, and the lust to be of significance by destroying what one cannot equal. By themselves, however, motives as vicious as these are impotent: they pertain in any age only to a handful of men, and do not explain the world influence of any trend, including the modernist one. The thing that makes the difference between evil private psychology and powerful public movement is: ideas, fundamental ideas, and the science that deals with them.
It is philosophy—a certain kind of philosophy, established on the world scene by means of formal, detailed, multivolumed, universally respected statement—which left certain kinds of men with certain kinds of psychological motives free to bare their souls publicly, and which wiped out the possibility of any effective resistance to these men and motives, first in Germany, the cultural pacesetter, then everywhere else. Just as a few men with Hitler’s kind of hatred for the Jews have existed for many centuries, but remained impotent publicly until they heard, voiced on a world scale, the philosophical premises they needed to implement their hatred; just as these men were then free to rationalize their feeling as a crusade for purity or lebensraum, to disarm an entire nation, and to gain mass converts to the cause of mass slaughter; so a few men with the modern intellectuals’ hatred for values as such have always existed, but remained impotent publicly until they heard the premises they needed. The premises freed them to disarm men on an international scale, to rationalize their hatred as “modern culture,” and to unleash, on a cowed, bewildered public, a crew of noisy activist-“innovators” dedicated to the cause of mass destruction.
The basic liberator (in both cases) was Kant’s philosophy. No earlier system could have done it.
Kant denies this world, not in the name of a glowing super-reality, but, in effect, of nothing, of a realm which is, by his own statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. He rejects the human mind because of its very nature, while using the same kind of argument against every other possible form of cognition. He regards men, all men, as devoid of worth because they seek values, any values, in any realm.
Kant is the first major philosopher to turn against reality, reason, values, and man as such, not in the name of something allegedly higher, but in the name of pure destruction. He is not an otherworldly thinker, but an antiworldly one. He is the father of nihilism.
The moderate politicians of the Weimar Republic, anxious to combat the irrationalism of the entrenched professorate, created a new university at Hamburg, then elevated to the chair of philosophy Ernst Cassirer, one of the country’s top neo-Kantians. This indicates what Germany’s leaders grasped about the cause of their plight or about the effects of ideas.
The German intellectuals translated Kant’s system into cultural terms in the only way it could be done. They created a culture in which the new consists of negation and obliteration.
Thus the “new” novels, whose newness consists in having no plots and no heroes, novels featuring characters without characterization and written in language without syntax using words without referents; and thus the poems “free” of rhyme, the verse “free” of meter, the plays without action, theater without the “theatrical illusion,” education without cognition, physics without law, mathematics without consistency, art without beauty, atonal music, nonobjective painting, unconscious psychology—philosophy without metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, or thought.
And thus, too, the conservative intellectuals of Weimar Germany, who hated the modernists’ hatred, and supplied their own brand.
The tone-setters among the conservatives were not nostalgia-craving deadwood, yearning to go back only a few decades or so. They were a new breed, relatively young, highly educated, and more ambitious than that. Such men knew what they thought of thought and of its products, they knew the practical meaning of their crusade against “bourgeois materialism,” they knew what the age of pre-industry and pre-science had been, and that it could be again. Thus Spengler, like Sombart, “repudiates even technological progress and labor-saving devices. The fact that they save hard labor and drudgery and open up the possibility of a good life for the workers is reason enough for condemning them. Work and hardship are good in themselves and general education and progress, illusory.”19 And thus in another variant, Ernst Jünger, the fiery conservative youth leader, who hurled anathemas at the bourgeoisie, demanded “heroic” activism, And urged violence, revolution, bloody war—not, he told his eager following, for the sake of ideas or purposes of any kind, but for the sake of violence, revolution, and bloody war.
If “conservatism” means the desire to preserve the traditional forms of a culture, the key to such intellectuals lies in the fact that they were modern conservatives, i.e., conservative nihilists, who sought to preserve in order to destroy. What they sought to preserve were the most irrational features, social and intellectual, of the German past. What they sought to destroy were any rational, “Western” imports.
The left-moderns claimed to like the West, but hated its distinctive, nineteenth-century culture. The right-moderns liked the nineteenth century—unmechanized nineteenth-century Prussia—and hated the West. The result was, in effect, a division of labor: the left-moderns concentrated on the intellectual attainments of the past, on the destruction of art, education, science (while, sometimes, wishing to retain technology); the right-moderns, taking German irrationalism for granted, concentrated on the material attainments, on the destruction of the machine age and of industrial civilization.
Such was the kind of choice offered to Germany by its intellectual leaders: the hatred of every human value in the name of avant-garde novelty, or in the name of feudal reaction. The rejectio
n of nature by the Oriental method, or by the medieval method. The denunciation of the mind as an obstacle to “self-expression,” or to social obedience. Man as a primordial, Freudian brute versus man as a primordial, Wagnerian brute. Ideas as futile versus the intellect as arid. Life as horror versus life as war. Cynical pessimism on one side versus cynical pessimism on the other side. The open nihilism of Brecht or of Ernst Jünger.
In the orgy which was the cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the Germans could not work to resolve their differences. Disintegrated by factionalism, traumatized by crisis, and pumped full of the defiant rejection of reason, in every form and from all sides, the Germans felt not calm, but hysteria; not confidence in regard to others, but the inability to communicate with them; not hope, but despair; not the desire for solutions to their problems, but the need for scapegoats; and, as a result, not goodwill, but fury, blind fury at their enemies, real or imagined.
Nihilism in Germany worked to exacerbate economic and political resentments by undermining the only weapon that could have dealt with them. The intellectuals wanted to destroy values; the public shaped by this trend ended up wanting to destroy men.
The social corollary of “Weimar culture” was a country animated, and torn apart, by hatred, seething in groups trained to be impervious to reason.
The political corollary was the same country put back together by Hitler.
For years the Weimar culturati, left and right, dismissed Hitler as a crank who was not to be taken seriously. The leftist intellectuals regarded Nazism as a movement devoid of Ideas; Hitler, they said, is merely a vulgar rowdy or a lackey of big business. The rightist intellectuals, as a rule cultured men who were not racists, listened uneasily to Hitler’s gutter denunciations of their own favorite targets, such as communism and cultural Bolshevism; the Nazis, they said, are rabble who are debasing the ideal of a reborn Germany. Both these groups found 1933 inexplicable. How, they wondered, as they stumbled dazedly out of the country or into the concentration camps, could a band of near-illiterates have been able to achieve respectability and power on a nationwide scale?
To an extent, the role of the conservative intellectuals in this regard has been recognized. (Their political ideas are so close to those of the Nazis that it is difficult for anyone to miss the connection.) The role of “Weimar culture,” however, has not been identified.
Did Freud say, pessimistically, that man is ruled by violent Instincts which no rational political arrangements can alter, and that social equilibrium depends on each individual repressing his deepest desires? The Germans heard Hitler say it, too—euphorically. And they heard that, in regard to enforcing such repression, there is an agent more potent than the superego: the SA.
Did the progressive German hear the Existentialists say that one must think with one’s will? Did he hear the new theologians say that the “self-sufficiency of reason” is the fundamental sin? He heard the Nazis promise “the triumph of the will” and an end to the age of reason.
Did the concerned citizen hear Hauptmann and Rathenau denounce the evils of machine civilization? Did he hear Max Weber deplore the “loss of magic” inherent in secular, industrial society? He heard the Nazis demand a return to the “purity” of rural communes and to the magic of “blood and soil.”
Did the parent hear the new educators say that everything is relative and that feeling or fantasizing supersedes thought? He heard the Nazis say that there is no truth but “myth” and no absolute but the Führer.
Did the art-lover hear all the Kandinskys and Klees curse objectivity and insist that the artist’s inspiration is not logic, but the mythological and the occult? It is our inspiration, too, said the Nazi leaders, as they worked to resurrect Wotan, and consulted their astrologers for practical guidance.
Did the theatergoer discover that communication requires delirious raving in “liberated” language? Listen to Hitler, said the Nazis.
Is it good to wipe out the bourgeois world, as the Expressionists said? It is precisely at the task of wiping out that the Nazis promised to be efficient.
Is it daring to turn life into madness, as the Dadaists said? They were village jokers compared to the Nazis.
Is it profound to “keep faith with death in [one’s] heart,” as Thomas Mann said? It is a faith the Nazis knew how to keep.
The left-moderns miscalculated; if nihilism was the standard, as they made it, then Nazism was unbeatable, because Nazism is the final extreme of nihilism, in a form that was tailored to attract all the major groups in Germany.
Hitler denounced some avant-garde details, he raved against “cultural Bolshevism,” but—as he did with Marxism —he unfailingly preached its essence. He differed from the intellectuals only in one (tactical) respect. He stripped the modernist ideas of their world-weary pessimism and made nihilism the basis of a fantasy projection, promising a new order in which men would rise to unprecedented heights, by means of illogic, self-immolation, worldwide destruction, and strict obedience to the Führer.
The intellectuals were spreading the doctrines which, directly or indirectly, produced helplessness, demoralization, despair on a mass scale. Once it was done, it was easy for the right kind of killer to kick the spreaders aside. He had only to announce that he was not helpless and would tell men what to do.
In later years, the creators of “Weimar culture,” the ones who survived, cursed the German people for not having listened to them.
The tragedy is that the people had listened.
11
The Killers Take Over
The Great Depression merely forced the issue, which had been implicit all along in the Germans’ philosophy. Economic catastrophe in Germany was an effect, the last link in a long chain of ideas and events—and a catalyst, which gave Hitler a real opportunity for the final cashing in. The catalyst worked because the nation was already ripe for Hitler’s kind of cashing in.
If a man long addicted to a toxic drug suffers sudden convulsions and then dies from them, one might validly say that the convulsions were the cause of the death, so long as one remembers the cause of the cause. The same is true of a country addicted to a toxic ideology.
For several years after the inflationary debacle, the Republic had seemed to return to normal, enjoying its so-called “period of prosperity.” It was a shaky, foredoomed prosperity built on credit and quicksands.
In essence, Germany’s recovery was the result of a massive inflow of foreign—primarily American—capital, in the form of huge loans along with large purchases of German securities. America was experiencing the artificial boom of the twenties, a pyramid of highly speculative investments and wild spending made possible by a variety of governmental actions—most notably, the action of the Federal Reserve Board in generating a cheap-money policy in the banks. The influx of this capital into Germany, which also lacked the free-market restraints on inordinate speculation and spending, helped to fuel a similar artificial boom.
In particular, the various levels of government in Germany, which had learned nothing and forgotten everything from the inflationary crisis, were once again pouring out money and piling up debts; they were endowing lavish public works, starting a program of unemployment benefits, enlarging the bureaucracy, raising its salaries, and the like. This time, however, the governments were not counting on the printing press to finance their activities, but on the Americans. “I must ask you always to remember,” said Gustav Stresemann to his countrymen, “that during the past years we have been living on borrowed money. If a crisis were to arise and the Americans were to call in their short-term loans we should be faced with bankruptcy.” He said it to deaf ears, in 1928.1
When the New York stock-market crash signaled the collapse of the American boom, the collapse of Germany followed immediately, as a matter of course. For the second time in less than a decade a protracted agony struck the country, this time involving plummeting investment, the crash of famous financial houses, cascading bankruptcies, soaring unemploy
ment, tobogganing farm prices, and widespread destitution.
The mania of the inflation years had been succeeded by a wave of giddy, unreal prosperity. Now the unreal stood revealed as unreal. Giddiness gave way to panic and to black despair.
The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas. In times of crisis, these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.
When Hans Fallada in his popular novel of the time asked Little Man, What Now? the little men in Germany (and the other kinds, too) knew the answer, which seemed to them self-evident. They turned to the group—to their economic class or trade association—as their only security; each group blamed the others for the crisis; each party demanded action, the kind of action it understood, government action. Le, more controls.
Man is rotten, the omnipresent chorus of “Weimar culture” was crying, the individual is helpless, freedom has failed.
The Social Democrats, however, playing out to the end their founding contradiction, were unable to act. One union leader at a party convention indicated the reason eloquently. He asked whether the party at this juncture should strive to preserve the “capitalist” Weimar system or to topple it. Should socialists stand “at the sick-bed of capitalism” as “the doctor who seeks to cure,” he wondered, or as “joyous heirs, who can hardly wait for the end and would even like to help it along with poison?” His answer was that the party is “condemned” to play both roles at once, which in fact is what it did, by switching back and forth at random between them.2
Ominous Parallels Page 24