by Peter Watson
There was a crucial role here for pastors’s sons, something else distinctive to Germany. As will have been noted, many of Germany’s thinkers, right up until contemporary times, have been the sons and/or grandsons of pastors—Samuel Pufendorf, Gotthold Lessing, J. M. R. Lenz, Christoph Wieland, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann Herder, Karl Schinkel, Johann Christian Reil, Rudolf Clausius, Bernhard Riemann, Theodor Mommsen, Jacob Burckhardt, Gustav Fechner, Heinrich Schliemann, Julius Langbehn, Wilhelm Wundt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Scheler, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Albert Schweitzer, Emanuel Hirsch, Martin Niemöller, Gottfried Benn, Carl Gustav Jung, Jürgen Habermas (and not overlooking Angela Merkel, who is the daughter of a pastor). Besides being inward, many of these individuals had lost their own faith but nonetheless could not help but be influenced by their fathers; in many cases the secularization of salvation, of perfection, was part of their inheritance and achievement. The metaphor of salvation was difficult to lose. Many German professors retain the aura of the pastor even today.
Not all the influence of Bildung was good. Fritz Ringer concluded that in Germany the classical idea of the humanists became “entangled” with political conservatism and social snobbery.34 This was to have profound consequences.
RESEARCH, THE PHD, SCHOLARSHIP, AND MODERNITY
Research was not a German invention. As early as the twelfth century, Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln and chancellor of Oxford University, had conceived of the experiment as a way to further knowledge. But the important—the significant—achievement of the German universities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to institutionalize research, at the University of Berlin and subsequent universities modeled on it. In particular, the concept of the modern PhD is a German idea—and this is, conceivably, after Idealism, Marxism, and Freudianism, the most influential German innovation of modern times but much less appreciated.
This may seem an excessive claim to make, but the habit of having a well-educated young adult, usually in his or her mid- to late twenties, spend three or more years examining in detail a very specific aspect of the world about us, for little money but instead for love of the subject and, no less important, the honor of putting the letters “Dr.” before one’s name, setting one slightly apart (and above) and being accepted as part of the professoriate, has had an extraordinary effect on our times. It means that, at relatively little expense, we know our world in far more detail than anyone before, say, 1780, could ever have imagined.
The institutionalization of research released an entirely new activity on the world that many people who were not geniuses were nevertheless very good at. Modern democracies are characterized by entire new industries, each with their own talents—advertising and marketing, film directing, sports, journalism. Research was one of the first and by far the most important because so much else is based on it.
A third aspect of the institutionalization of research is that it has been a factor in the differentiation and fragmentation of the world. A direct effect of the PhD has been the proliferation of new disciplines, not just in the sciences (though proliferation has been especially strong there) but in the humanities, too, and in the social sciences. The fragmentation of the world and the specialization of scientists are issues of modernity that have especially taxed German writers, philosophers, and artists.
A fourth effect is that research is now a rival form of authority in the world—a rival, that is, to tradition, to religion, and to political experience. Almost all government policies and the practices of large industrial and commercial corporations are undertaken now only after assiduous research exercises. Moreover, many of us are more comfortable with this form of authority than any other because, provided the research methodology is sound, it tends to meet both rational and moral criteria. The fact that this authority is impersonal is both a strength and a weakness. It is fairer, but perhaps alienating.
In fact, research is now so important in our lives—as it has been for decades, if not for over a century—that it should really take its place alongside urbanization, industrialization, and the development of the mass media as a defining phenomenon of modernity itself.
THE LONGING FOR A REDEMPTIVE COMMUNITY
This theme runs through modern German philosophy, literature, social science, history, art, and politics. It overlaps with, and is associated with, a similar longing for the “whole.”
Kant was obsessed with the relationship between the whole and its parts, the meaning of organic unity; singing in choruses was understood by Goethe to be appropriate training for citizenship. Hofmannsthal believed that the ultimate theatrical experience was the “ceremony of the whole.” The point—and the tragedy—of mass society, Hannah Arendt said, was that instead of creating “a higher form of human community,” it produced isolation and loneliness, which, she insisted, was the common ground of terror and the cold and inflexible logicality of bureaucracy, leading to the executioners. For Max Weber there was no salvation in the modern world other than “the sentiment of community.”35 Wagner wanted to create the Gesamtkunstwerk, the whole artwork; Friedrich Meinecke advocated the formation of “Goethe communities” that would renew devotion to the “German spirit” Gestalt psychology was an entire system built around the perception of “naturally occurring” wholes; and Ferdinand Tönnies and Werner Sombart wrote books about community and its redemptive possibilities.36 Ernst Kantorowicz, the historian, identified what he specifically called the redemptive community. The National Socialists had their concept of the “community of fate.” Goebbels insisted that the purpose of radio in the Third Reich was to “solidify the community,” and Hitler spoke of the “Volkswagen community,” a shared freedom of the new Autobahnen that brought people together in the enjoyment of new technological achievements. Redemptive communities are a specific feature of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus. Martin Walser upholds an ideal of “non-alienated, to some extent communal subjectivity.”37 This is why he thought the conscience should be a private affair “so that the newly united national community could be reconciled with itself.”38
In Germany scholars themselves were part of their own redemptive community, more so than scholars elsewhere. Not only were many of Germany’s thinkers the sons of pastors—growing up in a nineteenth-century background where the pastor was the very center of the community—but it was commonplace for scholars in Germany (in marked contrast to other countries) to attend three or four universities during the course of their training—it was a privilege built into the system. It naturally follows that the sense of an academic community, a redemptive community of scholars, a union of the educated middle class, was much stronger in Germany than anywhere else. Gadamer, in his exploration of the “relevance of beauty,” thought that art festivals “take us out of ordinary time” and open us up to “the true possibility of community.” For Habermas the central problem of modern life is how we find ways to “sustain a moral community in the face of rampant individualism.”
These five elements were each important in themselves. If they weren’t unique to Germany, they were more developed there, of longer standing, taken more seriously. But so far we have only considered them separately. As with Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, they are much more potent, and more revealing, when considered together as an interlocking dynamic system.
NATIONALIST CULTURAL PESSIMISM
It should perhaps come as no surprise that, in the wake of the advent of doubt, when people began to lose their faith, two things happened. First, we see the rise of the (more secular) educated middle class, taking over some of the functions formerly served by the clergy. This change was eased in Germany by the fact that so many of the new thinkers were themselves the sons of pastors—they represented this change perfectly. It was helped too by the reading revolution, occurring at exactly the same time, and which, as Benedict Anderson has shown us, helped to generate the phenomenon of
an ideal community—the very educated middle class we are considering, who thought of themselves for the first time as a group. Simultanously, and secondly, it was natural for this group of people to try to replace religious ideas with something else. Here, again, two things happened. One was the third revival of Greek (pagan) antiquity, thanks to Winckelmann, and the second was the arrival and achievements of Kant and other speculative philosophers. It was only natural, in the circumstances, for theology to be replaced by speculative philosophy in the era between doubt and Darwin. The successes of these developments led to the resurgence of German culture and intellectual life in general, to the concept of Bildung, of education as cultivation, essentially a secular form of salvation, and to inwardness as a way of approaching the truth—not just in Idealistic philosophy, but in Romanticism and in music. All this may be characterized as the growth of inwardness.
Alongside this rise of inwardness went the other main achievement of the educated middle class, the invention of modern scholarship and in particular the institutionalization of research. The fundamental significance of this in the transition to modernity was mentioned above, but there was another way in which research was of profound importance for the educated middle class in Germany. Research began as a tool of the early scholarly specialities—predominantly the humanities such as classics, philology, and history. But, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly with the growth of modern (cell) biology and in physics (the discovery of the conservation of energy), it began increasingly to be applied in the “hard” sciences. This change was all-important.
Whereas research in the humanities was institutionalized in 1809–1810 at the University of Berlin, the great commercial and industrial laboratories got under way in Germany, as we saw in Chapter 18, only in the late 1850s and the 1860s. In the first place, this change contributed to the decline in status of the traditional scholars in, for example, classics, history, and literature. And with the rise of the hard sciences, a wedge was driven between the humanities on one side and these sciences on the other, creating a divide that—although it occurred in other countries (such as Great Britain)—was nowhere near as wide (or in time as bitter) as it was in Germany, where different terms, Kultur and Zivilisation and Wissenschaft and Bildung, were introduced to encapsulate the division. This was exacerbated in the late nineteenth century when scientific research moved out of the universities into the independent Kaiser Wilhelm Societies. The division, and the loss of status of the humanities that went with it, itself produced an effect on scholarship.
Now began the great age of nationalist cultural pessimism, with the works of Heinrich von Treitschke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Max Nordau culminating in Werner Sombart’s Heroes versus Traders, and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. So far as the traditional scholars were concerned, these jeremiads described something all too real—their world was declining: the sciences had appropriated the idea and practice of research and, by the time Germany became a unified country in 1871, science was well on its way to producing the array of hi-tech products that would create modern mass society, discussed in Chapters 17–20 and 25 of this book, in which traditional areas of scholarship would feel increasingly peripheral. Cultural pessimism, and the reasons for it, have been a major topic for German writers and academics ever since, and still are. This also helps explain the pronounced conservative streak in German thought, not to mention the growth of anti-Semitism in the later nineteenth century.
A further consequence of the advent of doubt—and again this applies especially in Germany, with its tradition of Pietism—was the growth of the idea of a redemptive community. Helping people in this life was a natural ethic to emerge from the collapse of the idea of a future state, the Afterlife, so integral to Christianity. After the death of God, community—the basis of living together with other people—was perhaps the only ethical space left to explore. Germany—the land of Pietism and of 300 small independent states, the Kulturnation before it was a territorial nation—was a natural home for such an idea.39 A concern with the redemptive powers of community runs across German scholarship, culture, and politics throughout the modern period.
The redemptive community and cultural pessimism are related, of course, the former being seen usually as a “cure” for the latter. Cultural pessimists, for the most part, seek a return to an earlier, more ideal form of community. (The idea that there was ever a golden age of communal life, before modernity took hold, is savaged in Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon, which won the 2009 Palm d’Or.)
The German literature of cultural pessimism—though it typified a tradition of overarching syntheses, was not the only form of scholarly analysis in those years. In contrast to the speculative systems of Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, and, to an extent, Nietzsche, the philosophies of Dilthey, Simmel, and Scheler were much more modest, more commonsensical, and all the more refreshing and instructive for that. But the overwhelming reality is that, in the face of the advances being made by science, especially in the forty to fifty years before World War I, the educated middle classes in Germany, the traditionally educated middle classes, the “Bildung classes” as we can call them, suffered two crucial setbacks, setbacks that were exacerbated in the 1920s in the Weimar Republic. First, they lost status and influence, finding their traditional intellectual interests downgraded and marginalized in the newer, mass urban spaces, and then, in the great inflation, they found their economic interests decimated. Second, in Germany in particular, the traditionally educated Bildung class found itself estranged from—and replaced by—the scientifically educated middle class. This was of crucial importance because, when it came to the crunch, when the Nazis began to flex their muscles, there simply was not in Germany a critical mass of educated people in positions of power and responsibility to provide any real resistance.
T. S. Eliot provided an appropriate framework in his short book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) when he said that the most important purpose of culture lies in its impact on politics. The power elite needs a culture elite, he said, because the culture elite is the best antidote, providing the best critics for the power brokers in any society, and that criticism pushes the society forward and prevents it from stagnating and decaying. For Eliot, within any one culture, the higher, “more evolved” levels positively influence the lower levels by their greater knowledge of, and use of, skepticism (and you cannot be properly skeptical unless you have knowledge to be skeptical with). For Eliot, that is what knowledge and education are for. In Germany, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that that didn’t happen.
This surely provided the subtext and the context of the Weimar years. In 1914 the Manifesto of the 93 had proclaimed that the war was being fought to defend the ideals of German culture. The war was then lost, and there was a surrender of nerve and of will. Spengler in 1918 and Moeller van den Bruck in 1922 continued with their versions of cultural pessimism, emphasizing that the war had solved nothing. The great inflation of 1923–24 seemed to confirm those worries while the riotous culture then in vogue—cabaret, Expressionism, especially in the new art form of film, surrealism, the subversive world of Brecht, Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss, the slip-sliding world of Pauli’s exclusion principle, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Gödel’s limits to what we can know—had collapsed traditional ideas and pushed the classics-loving Bildung classes further and further to the periphery, even as Max Weber told them these new sciences could never tell them how to live. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his investigation of what he terms the “cultures of defeat,” shows how many of the German postwar observers dated the origins of the catastrophe (the lost war) to the founding of the empire; they wanted a return not to the prewar world but to a pre-1871 world, the world created by the Bildung classes, a universal world of “spiritual substance” that had, they felt, been destroyed by materialism, mercantilism, and science, which had caused Germany “to lose its soul.”40
T
his was the context for what Hannah Arendt said when she argued that what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was a temporary alliance of the educated elite with the mob. She also noted that the First World War was itself “the true father of a new world order,” the “constant murderous abitrariness” being “the great equaliser” that broke down the classes and transformed them into “the masses.”41 This, she felt, had created a “community of fate” in which the aim, going forward, was to do something “heroic or criminal” in which both the mob and the educated elite could express their “frustration, resentment and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism…”42 This collective bitterness, she said, was the “pre-totalitarian atmosphere” in which the ultimate end was the death of respectability, in which the difference between truth and falsehood “ceases to be objective and becomes a mere matter of power and cleverness.”43 Julien Benda agreed and so did Niall Ferguson. Benda thought that a barbaric nationalism had been sparked in Germany, initiated by its intellectuals. In The War of the World (2006), Ferguson wrote: “An academic education, far from inoculating people against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.”44
None of that need necessarily have led to the horrors of 1933–45, but what we can now say is that the crucial failure in Germany in those years and in the years immediately before, was first and foremost among the educated middle class, precisely because they alone possessed the education needed to exercise skepticism and forestall mob action and behavior. Hannah Arendt said, much later, that only educated people can have a private life, and that fits together nicely with Eliot’s argument about skepticism being the great aim of education that we must never forget—it provides people with enough of a private space for them to develop a healthy skepticism. People without a private life soon become a mob, where everything that matters, or seems to matter, takes place on the streets.