Is it coincidental that Germanic culture, during the formative eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, should dominate both philosophy and music? France, it is true, produced Descartes; Holland and Denmark produced Spinoza and Kierkegaard, respectively—but no European culture can muster a parade of luminaries to equal Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Nor can any European culture match, in music, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner.
Even within the respective spheres of philosophy and music, Germanic culture spans a greater spectrum than any other. No Western philosopher appeals to rationality more than Kant or Hegel. No philosopher embraces and extols the irrational more than Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. No composer is more rational than Bach, and none is more extravagantly irrational than Wagner.
Germanic culture and the Germanic collective psyche are stretched tightly between opposite extremes, the supremely rational and the supremely irrational. This spectrum can be visualised as a taut elastic band. From a clinical point of view, such tension, were it situated in an individual psyche, would amount to a state of chronic hysteria—a nervous system so highly strung that it constantly twangs like a banjo string. And when the string, or the elastic band, snaps, the effect is inevitably violent—a recoil to one or the other pole of the spectrum. Thus, every intensification of rationality stretches the continuum more strenuously, rendering it all the more liable to fray, to snap and recoil violently to the opposite extreme, the irrational.
In Doctor Faustus, perhaps the most profound and penetrating examination of Nazi Germany so far to have been written, Thomas Mann proposes an alternative model for understanding the problem. Mann maintains that rationality and irrationality need not be seen as opposite poles of a continuum, nor even as existing on a linear continuum at all. The continuum between rationality and irrationality can just as readily be seen as circular—in which case, rationality and irrationality flow into one another. Indeed, it is precisely the most extreme hyper-rationality that lies closest to the irrational.
Above and beyond all schematic models, there lies the phenomenon of the Third Reich itself, which reflects a disquieting mélange, unique in modern history, of rational and irrational. It is precisely this mélange that renders the Third Reich so terrifying and so apparently inexplicable in ‘reasonable’ terms. At Nazi Party rallies—in the mass hysteria, the ecstatic rapture, the mindless chanting, the torchlight processions, the hypnotic ritualistic pageantry and ceremonial, the rhythmic incantatory rhetoric as mesmerising as a drumbeat—the irrational holds triumphant sway. Rationality attains a monstrous apotheosis in the death camps, where mass murder and genocide are transformed into a mechanical bureaucratic process, a drearily routine matter of engineering, accountancy and book-keeping. Often, too, rationality mantles itself with the irrational fervour, energy and power of a religious appeal, as in Goebbels’ cunningly constructed propaganda, the machiavellian manipulation of popular yearning for a messiah figure. And irrationality masks itself with a semblance of rational scientific respectability in Nazi racial theories, in dogma about Aryan superiority, in crack-brained concepts of purity of blood, in an infatuation with ‘hollow earth’ concepts and Hoerbiger’s doctrines of ‘fire and ice’. Few institutions in the course of human history have equalled the SS in the smooth-working precision and efficiency of its murderousness. Yet the SS, that epitome of rational methodology and competence, encouraged its personnel to procreate on the gravestones of illustrious Germans of the past, in order that the children thus spawned might somehow ‘absorb’ something of a dead hero’s qualities. So ‘rationally’ was this bizarre premise spread that the official SS newspaper published lists of gravestones on which copulation was recommended.3
If the Third Reich’s fusion of rational and irrational is disquieting to the ‘civilised’ modern Western mind, it is not without precedent in Judaeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, the very precedent it subliminally evokes may have much to do with the disquiet it engenders. For it is precisely in the volatile, mercurial relationship between rationality and irrationality that the Third Reich conforms to traditional Judaeo-Christian concepts of the devil. Christian theologians have never satisfactorily determined exactly who or what their devil ultimately is—what principles he reflects, what energy he embodies. At times, in the history of Christendom, he is the lineal descendant (or reincarnation) of horned, goat-tailed and cloven-hoofed Pan, avatar of ‘unregenerate nature’, of man’s unredeemed ‘lower’ or ‘bestial’ self, of anarchy, chaos, orgiastic abandonment, frenzied intoxication. The very word ‘Pandemonium’ was originally one of the names for hell. Thus does ‘Pandemonium’ figure in Milton’s Paradise Lost. But if Pan is one variant of the Judaeo-Christian devil, there is also another—the suave and cunning ‘tempter’, the sleek master logician, the adept of insidious sophistry and casuistry who could out-Jesuit a Jesuit, the ‘fallen angel’ who fell originally through the sin of ‘intellectual pride’. These conflicting and seemingly irreconcilable identities have characterised the devil throughout the course of Christian theological history. It is these identities that are mirrored by the Third Reich. Thus does the Third Reich figure symbolically in Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Thus—still symbolically but even more explicitly—does it figure in Luchino Visconti’s film The Damned.
10
Culture and Conquest
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in 1749, seven years after Frederick the Great ascended the throne of the still-fledgling Kingdom of Prussia. He died in 1832, seventeen years after the Battle of Waterloo, when Prussia was solidly established as one of Europe’s ‘great powers’ and already outbidding Austria for the ‘heart and soul’ of Germany. He did not live to witness the events and personalities that shaped Germany and the German people during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, his life spanned a crucial and formative period of German history; and for much of his life, his position and status enabled him to exert a significant influence on German attitudes and thought. Like Mann a century later, Goethe regarded himself as sophisticated, cosmopolitan, ‘European’. At the same time, and again like Mann, he felt himself to be utterly and distinctively German. Both men used their understanding of the relationship between Germany and the world beyond to investigate the qualities of German self-definition and cultural identity, and both were obsessed with the nature of the ‘German soul’. For Goethe, the ‘German soul’ was largely uncharted terrain, inviting exhaustive exploration.
Confronted with the emergence of German nationalism during the War of Liberation, Goethe was alarmed. The German people, he had concluded, could not be trusted with political responsibility. They were unsuited, he felt, for political activity; and nationalism, in their hands, could only be misused. Why should this be so? In part, Goethe believed, because the Germans, unlike other major European peoples, were claustrophobically hemmed in and effectively land-locked. Their outlets to the Atlantic were restricted, and the Baltic was a tamed, domesticated sea. How then, Goethe wondered, could the German people find space in which to expand, extend themselves, reach outwards? In what direction could they hope to aspire, to express and fulfil man’s inherent yearning to overreach and transcend himself, to probe new frontiers, to conquer new dominions? For Germany, hemmed in and land-locked as she was, such an impulse, if translated into political terms, must necessarily assume the form of territorial expansion, and this would inevitably lead to militaristic aggression.
For Goethe, there was only one domain in which the German people could safely and validly reach out and extend themselves—the domain of culture and the spirit. Germany, Goethe maintained, was a nation not in any conventional political sense, but in spirit and culture. As an embodiment of these principles, the German people could be a beacon to the entire world, surpassing even the achievements of France, believed at the time to be the ne plus ultra of civilisation. If the German people’s energy and resources were translated into political reality instead, they could
be dangerous. If they were converted to a political reality oriented towards petty nationalism, they could be more dangerous still. And if nationalism were embraced under the aegis of Prussian militarism, the results would be catastrophic—not immediately, perhaps, but unquestionably within the span of a century.
Translated into modern terminology, Goethe felt that German nationalism, especially if pursued through Prussian militarism, could not possibly accommodate the spectrum encompassed by the German collective psyche—the spectrum running from the irrational to the hyper-rational. By all means, he insisted, let Germany and the German people lead the world in philosophy, in music, in the arts, in creative endeavours that served to express and transmit culture and the spirit. Let rationality and irrationality contend with each other, cohabit, remain in opposition or achieve equilibrium in that sphere. Let Germany establish a cultural and spiritual imperium analogous to the political imperium of Napoleonic France; but for her own sake, as well as for that of the civilised world, Germany must not attempt to compete in the arena of politics and war.
France, under Napoleon, aspired to European, if not world, domination, but Napoleon was no Hitler, and his aspirations were tempered by moderation, by adherence to a rigorous legal code, by a sense of responsibility and by humanity. Should Germany develop aspirations to political domination, Goethe questioned whether they would be so tempered. The Germans, he feared, would prove incapable of controlling themselves, incapable of self-restraint. In consequence, he saw the energies released by the War of Liberation as tantamount to a genie escaping from a bottle—a genie that would assume a form similar to Frankenstein’s monster.
In retrospect, of course, one can appreciate Goethe’s foresight. One can also recognise how his insistence on spiritual and cultural leadership, if allied to social and political ambition, could themselves become pernicious, providing a foundation for a theology of racial supremacy. At the time, however, Goethe’s pronouncements only threw many educated Germans into a quandary, and fostered an incipient collective schizophrenia.
In 1813, when the War of Liberation erupted and a new Prussian army rose phoenix-like from the remnants of the old, Goethe was already in his sixty-fourth year. For more than a quarter of a century, he had been a minister, then ‘Geheimrat’ or Privy Councillor, of the tiny Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, a minor principality in itself, little more than a Ruritanian city-state. But Weimar was closely associated with the powerful Kingdom of Prussia, and Goethe’s influence extended far beyond Weimar itself—to Prussia and beyond, to the whole of Germany. As a result he loomed even larger in German consciousness than had Frederick the Great sixty years before.
When the armies created and led by Yorck and Gneisenau took the field, they found themselves pitted not just against the French, but against the voice of Goethe—the voice of a veritable oracle and demi-god. On the one hand, then, Germans were confronted by the authoritative voice of their collective father-figure, admonishing them and offering his own idealised vision of a nation and people dedicated to culture and the spirit. On the other hand, they were seduced by the feverish hysteria of war and its promises of martial glory, a newly discovered collective identity, a nationalistic self-definition based on prowess at arms, an exhilarating atmosphere of fraternity and solidarity. Many Germans, and not just the well-educated, were faced with a painful moral dilemma; and whatever the choice they made, they were to be haunted by guilt and self-recrimination for the path not taken.
In the end there could only be one conclusion. Goethe’s voice was drowned out by the intoxication and militaristic euphoria sweeping the country; and for Germany’s youth at the time—a generation he prided himself on having shaped and moulded—he was supplanted as ‘rôle model’ by the likes of Gneisenau and Yorck. Young Germans of 1813 no longer dreamed of becoming great composers, poets or philosophers, but only of becoming great soldiers, great warriors. The achievements of the Prussian army during the last two years of the Napoleonic Wars, while not perhaps as dazzling as later commentators claimed, were still impressive enough to justify pride and self-congratulation. Goethe’s indifference to such things was perplexing and often offensive. A few actually dared to accuse him of treason. Even old friends and protégés were upset. One, for example, a Prussian officer, visited him in the autumn of 1813, shortly after the triumphant Battle of Leipzig, and found that
there was, frankly, one thing that did not now greatly appeal to me about Goethe, and that was his lack of patriotic enthusiasm about our recent brilliant victories and the expulsion of Napoleon from Germany. Towards all this he maintained a remarkably cool and critical attitude, and even waxed very eloquent in the praise of the Emperor Napoleon’s many brilliant qualities.1
Stung by criticism, Goethe replied, but in a characteristically haughty and ambiguous way that did little to appease his detractors:
Don’t think for a minute that I am indifferent to great ideals such as freedom, the nation, the fatherland. No; we carry these ideals within us; they are part of our nature, and no man can divest himself of them. Moreover, I am deeply interested in Germany. It has often been a bitter grief for me to think of the German people, so praiseworthy in its individuals and so pitiful as a whole.2
More than anything else, Goethe seems to have felt embittered, seeing himself deposed as the unofficial potentate presiding over German thought. The German people seemed to him like wayward and unruly children, defying the sage advice of their self-appointed but universally acknowledged father. Prompted less probably by paternal solicitude than by petulance and spite, he flaunted his personal power by pulling strings and ensuring that his own son, August, was banned from service in the field. August suffered grievously in consequence, incurring accusations of favouritism, weakness and cowardice. The opprobrium visited upon him by his now uniformed, booted and spurred contemporaries drove him to alcoholism and an early death. For this and for everything else, Goethe never really forgave the German people. During the remainder of his life, he was to be accoladed as a titan throughout Europe, but his relationship with Germany was to constitute a state of armed neutrality.
His legacy, however, was to endure. During what remained of the nineteenth century and during the first decade of the twentieth, German artists and thinkers repeatedly invoked the ideal of a nation dedicated not to political or territorial ambitions, but to culture and the spirit. Among the most prominent early exponents of this ideal was a Jew, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). After Goethe and Hölderlin, Heine was the greatest German poet of the nineteenth century. In the years following Goethe’s death, he assumed his predecessor’s unofficial mantle of national bard. Even more than Goethe, Heine saw himself as a ‘citizen of the world’—indeed, it was he who coined that phrase—and spent much of his life in exile. Like Goethe, he immersed himself in scrutiny of the ‘German soul’ and its relation to Western culture, to Western civilisation and Christianity. And like Goethe, Heine issued repeated warnings about the dangers of German, and especially Prussian, nationalism.
In one famous passage, Heine inveighs against the uniquely Germanic demagogue-thinker who ‘will be terrible because he allies himself with the primitive powers of nature, can conjure up the demonic forces of ancient German pantheism’.3 Such a figure, he warns, will kindle ‘that lust for battle which we find among the ancient Germans and which fights not in order to destroy, nor in order to win, but simply in order to fight’.4 Christianity constitutes a bulwark against this dangerous impulse, but a fragile one.
Christianity—and this is its finest merit—subdued to a certain extent that brutal Germanic lust for battle, but could not destroy it, and if some day that restraining talisman, the Cross, falls to pieces, then the savagery of the old warriors will explode again, the mad berserker rage about which the Nordic poets have told so much. This talisman is decaying, and the day will come when it will sorrily disintegrate. The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe the dust of centuries from their eyes, and Thor will a
t last leap up with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals.5
Stressing the distinction between the world of the mind and the world of politics, Heine goes on to admonish the rest of Europe:
Don’t smile at the visionary who expects in the realm of reality the same revolution that has taken place in the realm of the intellect. The thought precedes the deed as lighting precedes thunder. German thunder is of course truly German: it is not very nimble but rumbles along rather slowly. It will come, though, and if some day you hear a crash such as has never been heard before in world history, you will know the German thunder has finally reached its mark ... A play will be performed in Germany compared with which the French Revolution might seem merely an innocent idyll ...6
Goethe’s ideal—cultural and spiritual achievement taking precedence over politics and nationalism—was promulgated by Heine and others not just in Germany, but in Austria and the old Habsburg imperium as well. For most of Germany, however, and especially for Prussia, the first intoxicating draught of nationalistic fervour had proved addictive, and there could be no going back. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the Prussian army grew into the largest and most powerful military machine in Europe west of the Russian frontier; and, having redressed the humiliation of Jena and Auerstadt with such victories as Leipzig, it proceeded to deck itself anew with the laurels of Frederick the Great’s time. Yet nationalism in Germany was now no longer dependent solely on emotional fervour and the instinctual solidarity fostered by war. It was beginning to evolve a persuasive rationale, to establish itself on a solid, respectable and imposing philosophical foundation.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 23