The nascent German intelligentsia had been the first to come up against the notion of a mandarin culture maintained by a sophisticated minority in a superior language – one to which the untutored masses around the world ought to aspire. Herder inaugurated the nativist quest – hectically pursued by almost every nation since – for whatever could be identified as embodying an authentic national spirit: literary forms, cuisine and architecture as much as language. ‘Each nation,’ he argued, ‘speaks in the manner it thinks and thinks in the manner it speaks.’ Pushing against the French philosophe prescribing his own felicity to all and sundry, he insisted that each nation follow its own organic growth, bringing the human race closer to its ultimate destiny – the fullness of humanity.
Herder was no simple theorist of nationalism, like Fichte, who came to think that Germans were simply superior to everyone else. Striving to create a distinctively German art and style, Herder also recognized a creative principle in different national cultures. He claimed that each of the world’s many nations has a particular character, expressed diversely in its language, literature, religion, traditions, values, institutions and laws, and that history was a process of national self-fulfilment.
Still, his path-breaking concept of cultural identity went on to serve the psychological and existential needs of not only Germans but also many late-coming and unevenly modernizing peoples, and is now also invoked in the Atlantic West against globalizing elites. All kinds of chauvinists work out its implications when they argue that their communities should be true to their own distinctive way of being, rebuffing foreign imports and migrants.
Herder himself, his early disciple Goethe said, had in him ‘something compulsively vicious – like a vicious horse – a desire to bite and hurt’. But Herder may have himself provided the most accurate description of his own personality: as ‘driven by a vague unrest that sought another world, but never found it’. In this vagueness of yearning, and imprecision of destination, his admiration for and revulsion from France, Herder resembles all cultural chauvinists who came after him: they claim a fixed identity, but their selves are actually constantly in flux, often mirroring those of their supposed ‘enemy’. Thus, Hindu chauvinists tend to be Westernized Indians, profoundly dependent on the modern West for, as Naipaul wrote, ‘confirmation of their own reality’. Tied to an imperative to diminish a sense of inadequacy and to feel superior, such an identity never ceases to be conflicted and contradictory while presuming to bring peace and harmony.
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Herder exemplified most vividly among his German peers what Kant identified as ‘longing’, distinguished from desire by its paralyzing awareness of the incapacity ever to achieve the desired object. In 1769, when he was in his mid-twenties, Herder travelled to France from the Baltic port of Riga, where he had spent several exasperating years as a Lutheran pastor in literary feuds. In this commercial city Herder had achieved a measure of fame. But its perceived smallness, and parochial culture, made him feel like a ‘pedantic scribbler’. Like many German provincials, Herder had an idealized image of France as the home of the worldly, elegant and sensuous philosopher, who spoke a language of unparalleled clarity and precision. He saw himself returning from Paris, fully Gallicized, to Riga as a cosmopolitan reformer. As it turned out, Herder never saw Riga again. Instead of mutating into a French-style man of the world, he became the philosophical father of cultural nationalism.
His awakening during his travels to Paris, his perception of hollowness behind the mask of civility and refinement, of simple nature underneath the gloss of civilization, mimics Rousseau’s own perception of the vanity and corruption of modern society on the road to Vincennes. And it anticipates the struggles of Fichte, another keen reader of Rousseau; trying to overcome his plebeian past, Fichte moved from satirizing the moral ills of commercial society to authoring full-blown theories of autarkic and us-versus-them nationalism.
But Herder was more volatile in his emotions than either Rousseau or Fichte. Writing from Nantes, he confessed to his former teacher Hamann (a Francophobe who on a trip to London had experienced his own revulsion from complacently rationalist Westerners): ‘I am getting to know the French language, French habits and the French way of thinking – getting to know but not getting to embrace, for the closer my acquaintance with them is, the greater my sense of alienation becomes.’ In Paris, ‘festooned with luxury, vanity and French nothingness’, a ‘decadent den of vice’, Herder failed to meet any of the philosophes he had fantasized meeting. His fervent desire to wear the French identity of a sociable man and be a charming salon wit shaded into premature and acute disappointment. ‘Magnificence in arts and institutions are in the centre of attention,’ he wrote. ‘But since taste is only the most superficial conception of beauty and magnificence only an illusion – and frequently a surrogate for beauty – France can never satisfy, and I am heartily tired of it.’
Defensive Goths
Herder, like many other provincials, had been attracted, appalled and demoralized by the French capital of cosmopolitanism, and the superior airs of its thinkers. He attacked Enlightenment intellectuals with the peculiar intensity of the spurned lover who thinks he has seen through his own illusions, and found that there is not much there behind dazzling appearances. One of his targets was Rousseau’s jaunty old enemy: ‘Voltaire may have spread,’ Herder conceded, ‘the light, the so-called philosophy of humanity, tolerance, ease in thinking for oneself.’ But:
at the same time what wretched recklessness, weakness, uncertainty, and chill! What shallowness, lack of design, distrust of virtue, of happiness, and merit! What was laughed off by his wit, sometimes without any such intention! Our gentle, pleasant, and necessary bonds have been dissolved with a shameless hand, yet those of us who do not reside at the Château de Fernay [Voltaire’s residence near Geneva] have been given nothing at all in their stead.
Having established Voltaire’s incorrigible frivolity in his own mind, Herder moved rapidly from what he called ‘a way of thinking without morals and solid human feeling’ to the assertion that French lacks what German has: a true moral freedom and connection with sense experience. In his poem ‘To the Germans’ he exhorted his fellow countrymen to ‘Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O you German!’
Many Germans followed Herder’s intellectual journey. They moved from being, in Lessing’s mordant words, ‘subservient admirers of the never sufficiently admired French’ to a willed feeling of superiority, and on to a fervent desire to beat the adversary at his own game. In 1807, as French troops occupied Berlin, Fichte, once a self-proclaimed Jacobin, would argue in ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ that the Germans were lucky to hold on to their language while the French ‘only want to destroy everything that exists and to create everywhere … a void, in which they can reproduce their own image and never anything else’. Aurelie tells Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s eponymous novel, ‘I hate the French language’, and then, praising German as a ‘strong, honest, heartfelt’ language, sneers that French is ‘worthy of being the universal language with which people can lie and deceive one another’.
The need to affirm a sense of national identity that was the exact opposite of the frivolity, refinement, irony and facetiousness of cosmopolitan and wealthy France drove the Germans into continuous idealizations and falsifications. The poet Klopstock, who called for a return to the Volk through the study of peasant legends, claimed that corruption flourished among the rich and the sophisticated while moral purity thrived among the humble.
Gothic style, identified by the French philosophes with barbarism, came to be celebrated for its alleged Germanness. Herder himself played a crucial role in its revival. Returning from France, he met Goethe in Strasbourg in 1770 – one of the most fateful encounters in the history of culture – and found a vulnerable object of indoctrination. The young Goethe was soon working himself up into ecstasy before the Gothic minster of Strasbourg: ‘This is German architecture, our architecture! Some
thing of which the Italian cannot boast, far less the Frenchman!’
In Herder’s anthology On German Art and Character (1773), Goethe attacked ‘Frenchmen of all nations’ and made France seem a byword for imitative, pseudo-rational thought. The rebellion against the narrow intellectualism of the French Enlightenment, led by Herder, and popularized by the young Goethe and Schiller, turned into the movement known as Sturm und Drang, ‘stress and strain’, the essential precursor of the Romantic Revolution that transformed the world with its notion of a dynamic subjectivity. Many of its adherents were students – with their rakish dress, long hair, and narcotic and sexual indulgences, they were prototypes for the counter-cultural figures of our age. These young men upheld feeling and sensibility against the tyranny of reason, natural expression against French refinement, and a determination to find and enshrine a uniquely German spirit.
Herder challenged the Enlightenment assumption that progress in history had been made inevitable by the accumulation and refinement of rational knowledge. He argued that the histories of nations operated according to their own principles and could not be judged by the standards of the Enlightenment. He contended that Europeans living in large cities are neither more virtuous nor happier than the ‘Oriental patriarch’ who achieves virtue and felicity by upholding the beliefs and values of his natural and social milieu.
Herder went on to develop a vision of history with a Rousseauian emphasis: an original social setting of simplicity, truthfulness and self-sufficiency had been ruined by luxury and a cosmopolitan culture of insincerity and dubious morality. In place of Sparta, Herder invoked the Germanic tribes of what he called ‘the North’, which preceded and followed the Roman Empire, and created a society marked by social harmony and moral clarity. ‘In the patriarch’s hut, the humble homestead, or the local community,’ he explained, ‘people knew and clearly perceived what they talked about, since the way they looked at things, and acted, was through the human heart.’ Introducing educated Germans to folk poetry and the cultural values of humble folk, Herder hoped that a literature emancipated from classical French rules would unleash a national spirit among the politically divided Germans. Even the German discovery of the classical past could not remain free of its obsession with their allegedly shallow neighbour. The French had proclaimed themselves as the heirs of the Roman tradition. So it was up to the art, architecture and poetry of Greece to stimulate a cultural renaissance in Germany.
According to Winckelmann, the son of a cobbler who became the most famous art historian of his time, ‘the only way for us to become great, indeed to become inimitable, if that were possible, is through the imitation of the Greeks’; and, he might have added, the rejection of everything French. In German hands, literary and classical scholarship and the brand-new discipline of history received the imprint, ineradicable to this day, of cultural defensiveness.
Quietly Desperate in the Provinces
This potent ressentiment of German literati had a political origin (as did the passive aggression of all aspiring nationalities that followed them). Germany had lost the leading position it had enjoyed at the end of the medieval period after the axis of the European economy shifted from the centre of the Continent to the Atlantic seaboard. The population had doubled over the previous century; and there was an abundance of young Germans, many of them brilliantly creative in music, art, literature and philosophy. Yet they had to suffer petty princes, religious division and constricted economic systems.
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation consisted of three hundred states and another fifteen hundred minor units, all with different customs, manners and dialects. (Arriving in Leipzig from Frankfurt, even Goethe, the son of wealthy patrician parents, appeared weird to the locals.) Political and cultural unity was bedevilled by the division, dating back to the Reformation, of Germans into Catholics and Protestants. Austria and Prussia, two important components of the Holy Roman Empire, were locked in conflict, and frequently pursued policies that seemed to undermine rather than serve the overall German interest.
Educated Germans were alert to events elsewhere: the great economic transformations the Industrial Revolution was bringing to England, the political revolutions in France and America. They had read their Montesquieu and Rousseau, among the most celebrated authors in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century; they knew about doctrines of the separation of powers and the social contract upon which all government power ought to be based. They were impatient for Germany to also embark on a transition from the fixed structures of old Europe to a new society animated by the desire for freedom and equality.
German writers felt this aspiration most keenly. For, as the Swiss-French author Madame de Staël was the first to observe in De l’Allemagne (1813), the most popular book on Germany for decades, they had no status and were sentenced to a life of isolation and insecurity in their provincial cities and small towns – unlike their counterparts in the fast-developing nation states of England and France, who mingled with both the high nobility and the bourgeoisie. There was no unified ideological ‘market’, as Frederick the Great pointed out to Voltaire, of the kind that allowed complex networks of the Republic of Letters to form in France and England. The aristocratic salons, where Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers reigned, made Germans feel excluded and gauche. French writers looked down upon German. Even more annoyingly, German aristocrats boosted the prestige of French letters, threatening to replace a profound and pious tradition with the superficial and impious ways of France.
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Germans confronting a forceful cultural imperialism both at home and abroad could find no relief in national cohesion. Political frustration led to a continuous expansion in spiritual, aesthetic and moral preoccupations. The Lutheran and Pietist emphasis on inner freedom – which partly explains why some of Rousseau’s most fervent and influential admirers were German and why Romanticism developed in Germany – was deepened among a well-educated minority. As Goethe and Schiller wrote in the Xenien (1796): ‘To make yourself a nation – for this you hope, / Germans, in vain; / Make yourselves instead – you can do it! / Into men the more free.’
Many Germans, looking for a source of pride, and failing to find it in the present or the near future, also became vulnerable to the quest for national origins in the distant past. Tacitus’ Germania, which contains the story of the Germanic hero Arminius, the vanquisher of the Romans, had already provided an ancestral myth. More material came, unexpectedly, from Scotland. In 1761 a Scottish translator called James Macpherson published what he said was ancient Gaelic poetry he had discovered while exploring the highlands and islands of Scotland. Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with several other poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, was followed up with The Works of Ossian in 1765. Samuel Johnson doubted their authenticity and asked to see the original texts. Macpherson never obliged.
The evidently long-lost poems with their gloomily romantic setting and sentimental themes were suspiciously Rousseauian in their exposition of virtues uncorrupted by civilization. As the translator wrote in his preface: ‘The human passions lie in some degree concealed behind forms, and artificial manners; and the powers of the soul, without an opportunity of exerting them, lose their vigour.’ A huge success across Europe – the young Corsican then known as Napoleone di Buonaparte read them eagerly – Ossian offered an organic conception of culture and community, one that transcended the hierarchy of class and caste; he seemed to confirm that the lowest of the low could possess the highest values. Ossian naturally had his biggest fans among Germany’s thwarted and alienated youth. Invoked to justify the rights of scorned Scots in Britain, he more significantly vindicated the indigenous ways of the unsophisticated Volk in Germany. Ossian’s songs, Herder asserted, ‘are songs of the people, songs of an uncultivated, sense-perceptive people’.
It seems apt today that the search for ancestral myths – common to all nationalisms – was inaugurated by a fraud; a
nd that its legacy was forgeries of supposedly ancient poems in many countries. But for restless young Germans, impresarios of longing, the quest for a common homeland or group or Church, a place that could transcend their discouraging political reality, had a special intensity. Herder continued to believe that Ossian had opened up a new spiritual home for the Germans long after the poems were revealed to be a hoax.
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In this atmosphere of deceived and frustrated longing, the French Revolution erupted volcanically. Its conversion of religious and metaphysical questions into political ones – freedom, equality and the brotherhood of man – stimulated German political and intellectual life like nothing had before.
Almost all the German thinkers of the 1790s originally welcomed the Revolution, which seemed to shrink the gap between longing and object. Some Germans saw in it a prelude to their own liberation from arbitrary tyranny and provincialism – the young theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher argued suggestively and riskily that monarchs were not exempt from the guillotine. Schelling said he wanted to escape the land of ‘clerks and clerics’ to breathe the ‘free airs’ of Paris. Fichte, who had spent his youth in a series of humiliating tutorial jobs, actually applied for the job of French professor at Strasbourg; he hoped to educate the German youth in the traditions of freedom and place them in the vanguard of progress.
Some, such as Schiller and Friedrich Jacobi, were sceptical that the Revolution could ever reach a peaceful conclusion. Nevertheless, there was general consensus about its basic ideals, broad admiration for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and celebration of the end of aristocratic privilege. Hegel, who erected a liberty tree in Tübingen, proclaimed that ‘only now has humanity come to understand that spiritual reality should be ruled by Thought’. For Kant it was proof of mankind’s emergence from its self-imposed immaturity, the process he had termed Enlightenment: a world-historical experiment in which man was finally self-determining and free.
Age of Anger Page 17