Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  For many Germans reading Kant after 1789, the ageing disciple of Rousseau appeared to have achieved in theory what the French had achieved in practice. German philosophy, in this narcissistic view, had been quietly heralding freedom all along. So passionate was this self-vindication in Germany that, as Nietzsche later quipped, the ‘text’ of the French Revolution ‘disappeared under the interpretation’.

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  Disillusionment grew quickly after the Jacobins rose to power, terror was unleashed in the name of freedom by radical political forces, and, disturbingly for the literati, the urban lower classes seemed to gain influence. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), translated by Friedrich Gentz – later one of the closest advisors to the chancellor of Austria, Metternich – became a hit across Germany with its warnings against violent and hubristic political engineering.

  Georg Forster, the writer and activist, who fled a failed mini-revolution in the German city of Mainz to Paris (to die there embittered in 1794), wrote to his wife that ‘the tyranny of reason, perhaps the most unyielding of all, lies yet in store for the world’. Goethe worried that the alliance of the masses with an intellectual elite had inaugurated a new era of deception. People incapable of self-awareness were now in charge of improving others. ‘What must I put up with? / The crowd must strike, / Then it becomes respectable. / In judgement, it is miserable.’

  Others came to recoil from, in Nietzsche’s words, the ‘semi-insanity, histrionicism, bestial cruelty, voluptuousness, and especially sentimentality and self-intoxication, which taken together constitutes the actual substance of the Revolution’. Even Herder, a passionate defender of the Revolution (Goethe claimed to have spotted his inner Jacobin), finally confessed to being repelled by ‘a populace agitated to madness, and the rule of a mad populace’. He issued his own Burkean warning for the future: ‘What effects might, indeed must, this vertiginous spirit of freedom, and the bloody wars that will in likelihood arise from it, have upon peoples and rulers, but above all on the organs of humanity, the sciences and arts?’

  Reports of atrocities from France seemed to demonstrate that inner freedom and morality were necessary before fundamental political change could take place. The liberal catchword of the 1790s accordingly became Bildung. Schiller set out a theory of drama that was an aesthetic preparation for political freedom. According to this pioneering German Romantic, the Enlightenment and science had given an ‘intellectual education’ to man but left undisturbed his ‘inner barbarian’, which only art and literature could redeem.

  Diagnosing Alienation

  Schiller also began to make the first of many critiques familiar to us from Marx, Weber, Adorno and Marcuse of modern commercial society, its gods of utility and instrumental reason, and its deformations of the inner life. Science, technology, division of labour and specialization, he wrote, had created a society of richer but spiritually impoverished individuals, reducing them to mere ‘fragments’: ‘nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge’.

  In Schiller’s vision, the Enlightenment’s ideology had evolved into the terror of reason, destroying old institutions but also the spiritual integrity of human beings. It was now to be the task of the Romantic generation to shore up the ideal of Bildung against modern society, and its atomism, alienation and anomie. Against individual fragmentation and self-maiming, the Romantic ideal of Bildung reaffirmed the value of wholeness, with oneself, others and nature. It was aimed to make the individual feel at home again in his world, instead of seeing it as opposed to himself.

  The Romantics developed further Rousseau’s notion of social hypocrisy in which the human self repressed its true desires and feelings within a culture of civilized manners. They also critiqued specialization, the development of the one at the expense of all the others. The sources of alienation, according to them, lay in the decline of the traditional community – the guilds, corporations and family – and the rise of the competitive marketplace and social-contractism, in which individuals pursued their self-interest at the expense of others.

  Man was alienated from nature also because modern technology and mechanical physics made nature into an object of mere utility, a vast machine, depriving it of magic, mystery or beauty. ‘Spectres reign where no gods are,’ wrote Novalis. Modern man, according to him, was ‘tirelessly engaged in cleansing nature, the earth, human souls, and learning of poetry, rooting out every trace of the sacred, spoiling the memory of all uplifting incidents and people, and stripping the world of all bright ornament’.

  Against these pathologies of modernity, the German Romantics counterpoised ideals of wholeness or unity. Self-division would be overcome by acting according to the principles of morality, by realizing an ideal of community, or what today’s autocrat Vladimir Putin calls the ‘organic life’; and healing the split from nature with immersion in it.

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  On the face of it, this was a backward-looking programme. It seemed to bemoan the advent of bourgeois society and Enlightenment, and celebrate the unity and harmony found in classical Greece or the Middle Ages. But there was no going back for the Romantics. The challenge before them was how to achieve the harmony and unity of the past in the future, how to form a society and state that provide for community – a source of belonging, identity and security –while also securing rights and freedoms for individuals without them fragmenting into self-interested atoms.

  As Novalis wrote, Germany may not be a coherent political nation like France, and in fact had fallen behind its Western neighbours in many respects. But it did not matter since Germany is ‘treading a slow but sure path ahead of the other European countries. While the latter are busy with war, speculation and partisan spirit, the German is educating himself with all due diligence to become an accomplice of a higher culture, and in the course of time this advance must give him much superiority over the others.’

  In almost all cases the German Romantics in their provincial centres were reacting to what they perceived as the defects and excesses of both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. But Romanticism was not a mere reaction. It was also, in Ernst Troeltsch’s words,

  a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal egalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal humanity.

  Politicizing the Spiritual

  We can see now that the German Romantics’ desire to re-enchant the world had radical implications. They shattered the Enlightenment’s notion of a single civilization of universal import; they offered an idea of civilization as a multiplicity of particular national cultures, all with their own special identity. But it took a catastrophic defeat and occupation, and wars of liberation, to turn cultural Romanticism into a treacherous political Romanticism.

  In the absence of a German national state, Volk and Kultur had seemed abstract entities – objects of futile longing. Napoleon’s imperialism infused them with fresh content. As Wagner, the nineteenth century’s most resonant apostle of German nationalism, wrote: ‘The birth of the new German spirit brought with it the rebirth of the German people: the German War of Liberation of 1813, 1814 and 1815 suddenly familiarized us with this people.’

  On 9 October 1806, Prussia, in alliance with Russia, Saxony, Saxony-Weimar, Brunswick and Hanover, declared war on France. The Prussian army, victorious since the Seven Years War, felt invincible; and its self-assessment was broadly shared within Prussian society. However, on 14 October, Napoleon’s French armies crushed the anti-French coalition at Jena and Auerstädt. Some commanders surrendered their fortresses without firing a shot, and troops retreated in chaos. Defeat only five days after the declaration of war came as a devastating shock. The Holy Roman Empire had finally collapsed just
weeks before; Prussia was now reduced to a minor power (and forced in its weakness to become an ally of France). Just as Germany was achieving a spiritual renaissance, it disintegrated politically and came under foreign occupation, manifested by ever-increasing taxation, economic exploitation, conscription and arbitrary oppression.

  At a moment of political catastrophe and cultural crisis, the early Romantic struggles for re-enchantment in Germany mutated, largely due to its humiliations by Napoleon and German elite collaboration with him, into chauvinistic, even militaristic, myths of the Volk, fatherland and the state. In less than two years (1805–7), Fichte moved from upholding freedom in a cosmopolitan realm to asserting a fiercely ‘German’ desire for freedom. In his ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ he condemned German cowardice before the French and called for a return to the authentic German self. The Urvolk, he argued, were the ‘first people’ in Europe to keep their own language since they, unlike the Romanized peoples in western and southern Europe, had remained in the ancestral homelands. Disregarding the facts of defeat and occupation, Fichte exhorted a German-led ‘re-creation of the human race’.

  Despite many local anti-French struggles, the liberation of Germany came only after Napoleon’s Grande Armée, backed by a Prussian army in the rear, was forced to withdraw in defeat from Russia in the autumn of 1812. Prussia then betrayed its ally and its king declared war on France, speaking opportunistically of the ‘cause of the Volk ’. ‘Whatever is not voluntary,’ Madame de Staël wrote of the ferocious anti-Napoleon upsurge, ‘is destroyed at the first reverse of fortune.’ The nationalists could now come out of the closet; the many fantasies born of the lack of a state and nurtured through political fragmentation had been unleashed.

  The Lure of Xenophobia

  Fichte had been their original fount. He not only insisted that Germany find its own path to modernity by rejecting the ‘swindling theories of international trade and manufacture’ and by instituting patriotic education. He also gave nationalism its characteristic secular feature: the transposition of religious into national loyalties.

  Many other neglected and marginal German intellectuals also participated in the race to fix the special qualities of Germanness. These were, not surprisingly, almost all men with clear ideas of what women ought to do. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the ‘father of gymnastics’ and also the innovator of student fraternities, expressed early a view that would become widespread among demagogic nationalists of the nineteenth century: ‘Let man be manly, then woman will be womanly’ (in other words, passive, soothing and domestic). Reserving the privilege of truculent activity for the male, Jahn deigned to recognize only two kinds of men who had taken up the ‘holy idea of humanity’: the Greeks of classical Hellas and the Germans. Certainly, his notion of the Volk, as consisting exclusively of frat boys, fused well with a hatred of the French, especially Napoleon.

  Napoleon was an imperialist in the modern sense, a prototype for European colonialists in Asia and Africa: he not only extracted resources from the territories he conquered; he also politicized the Enlightenment notion of universal rationality, imposing the metric system and the Code Napoléon on all subjugated peoples. To his victims these ‘resources of civilization’ made him seem ‘more terrible and odious’, as his liberal critic Benjamin Constant charged, than Attila and Genghis Khan.

  The Romantics had initially celebrated Napoleon as the sacred embodiment of the Revolution. With his modest background, and short stature, this self-made man from Corsica, who had seized the most dazzling crown in the world and shaped the frontiers of Europe with his will, reminded the provincials of their own aspirations. To Goethe, Beethoven, Hegel and Heine, Napoleon was an embodiment of the spirit of history.

  But Napoleon lost his luster among most German artists and writers after the defeats at Jena and Auerstädt and the humiliation of the French occupation. He showed particular contempt for the Germans, their traditions and Protestant faith; he deliberately maligned the reputation of their virtuous Prussian queen, and then insulted them by calling her ‘the only real man in Prussia’. And so in Trinity Church in Berlin a religious ceremony, presided over by Schleiermacher, inaugurated the war against the French infidel in March 1813, the theologian speaking from the pulpit, and rifles leaning against the church wall.

  Fichte suspended his class at the University of Berlin, exhorting his students to fight until they attained liberty or death. Themes of martyrdom resonated through the campaign; the poet Theodor Körner wrote before his own martyrdom of death in the cause of Germany as a ‘nuptials’ with the fatherland. ‘It is not,’ he clarified, ‘a war of the kind the kings know about, ’tis a crusade, ’tis a holy war.’ This ‘holy war’ – the first in post-Christian Europe – preceded by many decades the jihad against military and cultural imperialism credited to Islamic fanatics.

  Jahn exhorted Germans to ‘know again with manly pride the value of your own noble living language’ and leave alone the ‘cesspool’ of Paris. The exponent of patriotic calisthenics was surpassed by the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt: ‘Only a bloody hatred of the French,’ Arndt asserted, ‘can unify German power, restore German glory, bring out all the noble instincts of the people and submerge the base ones.’ ‘I will my hatred of the French,’ Arndt wrote, ‘not just for this war, I will it for a long time, I will it forever … Let this hatred smoulder as the religion of the German folk, as a holy mantra in all hearts, and let it preserve us in our fidelity, our honesty and courage.’

  No one, however, hated as eloquently as Heinrich von Kleist. Germany’s greatest dramatist went beyond political grievance in his luridly precise description of swinging a small French boy around and smashing his head against a church pillar. The scion of a distinguished military family in Prussia, von Kleist abandoned his family tradition and military career, committing himself to a programme of intellectual and aesthetic growth. Arrested by the French police in 1807 on suspicion of being a spy and detained for a year, he then embarked on a literary career in Francophobia.

  He brought out a patriotic journal called Germania in time for the anti-French uprising. In his ode ‘Germania to Her Children’ von Kleist spelled out what he required of his German peers:

  With the Kaiser preceding you

  Leave your huts and homes

  Sweep over the Franks

  Like the boundless foamy sea.

  Von Kleist wanted Germania’s children to dam up the Rhine with French corpses. Sneering at ‘prattlers’ and ‘writers’ who speak abstractly about freedom, he called for the baptism of Germany with blood. In ‘War Song of the Germans’, he argued that the French must be made extinct, like the beasts that had once roamed the forests of Europe.

  Impatient for Progress

  Patriotic rhetoric became increasingly commonplace among educated Germans, especially after the explicitly anti-nationalist post-Napoleonic settlement sealed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It left Germany as a Confederation of thirty-nine states, and those Germans hoping for unity even more frustrated than before. In 1817 hundreds of students, members of a student fraternity inspired by Jahn, gathered near the Wartburg castle on the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing up of his theses. This castle had been a refuge for Luther, where he had translated the Bible; it now became a symbol of German nationalism as disciples of Jahn recited prayers for Germany’s salvation and threw ‘un-German’ books, including the Code Napoléon, into a bonfire.

  Metternich, the keeper of Europe’s peace, cracked down on universities; Jahn was imprisoned for six years. But the student unrest signalled a far wider discontent than one that the Austrian chancellor’s secret police could stem. The American and French Revolutions had left many young men around the world fretting that they had been left out or had fallen behind in the march of progress. A brilliant military marauder like Napoleon brought, often in person, thrilling new ideas of liberation to many of them. A series of constitutionalist revolts, led by intellectuals and army officers, and often modelled on
Napoleon’s own coup, erupted across southern Europe – in Spain, Italy and Greece – in 1820 and 1821.

  In 1825 military heroes of Russia’s ‘wars of liberation’ against Napoleon in 1812–14 challenged the Russian autocracy. These ‘Decembrists’, as they came to be called after the month of their abortive uprising, were brutally crushed, though they were representatives of Russia’s aristocratic elite. Five of them were hanged and hundreds exiled to Siberia for life.

  The failure of the uprising seeded a Romantic cult of sacrifice and martyrdom (and originally inspired the greatest piece of prose fiction of the nineteenth century, War and Peace). The youthful Herzen, who was fourteen at the time of the uprising, inaugurated Russia’s distinctive revolutionary tradition when on the hills overlooking Moscow he swore a ‘Hannibalic oath’ to sacrifice his entire life to the struggle begun by the Decembrists. Such ideas of resistance and protest, which eventually expanded into revolutionary socialism, were made more urgent and appealing by a repressive state in Russia. In Europe, too, all aspirations for freedom had to reckon with strong and canny forces of conservatism: the supranational dynastic states, dubbed the ‘Holy Alliance’ by the Russian Tsar.

  Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna may have brought peace to Europe, and relief to its monarchical ruling classes, embodied best by the stern and paranoid figure of Metternich. But the mood across post-Napoleonic Europe and Russia was febrile, registered in the growing popularity of soul-stirring opera and lyric poetry, the cult of Byron, and Stendhal’s novels about the maladie du siècle. Young men everywhere waited for a new revelation on the same scale as the French Revolution, or at least some replacements for obsolete religious beliefs.