CHAPTER FIVE

GERMANS AND GREEKS

The Greeks are what we were; they are what we shall become again.

- - - Schiller1

Like Mozart and his librettists, many German writers and philosophers were drawn to the

Enlightenment by virtue of its liberating potential, but they were also frightened by the threat to

order it posed. German intellectuals sought to benefit from the Enlightenment but also to tame it,

and sought to do so within a politically fragmented Germany ruled for the most part by

conservative aristocrats. For both reasons they turned to lost traditions, which they sought to

discover and bring back to life. This was manifest first and most importantly in the German

obsession with ancient Greece but also in the Grimm brothers' turn to folk culture in the hope of

recapturing wisdom from the past, the search for the Aryan prototype for Christianity by

religious scholars and philologists, the proliferation of stories, poetry and frescoes based on the

medieval Nibelungenlied, Wagner's appropriation of the Edda for the theme of his Ring Cycle

and Nietzsche's invocation of the Persian Zarathustra for his culminating philosophical work.2

For nineteenth century Germans, myths were templates for building national identities that

would transcend regional, religious and class differences.

For those who turned to Greece, the polis, but especially Athens, was imagined as a

model for a creative and progressive German nation. Nostalgia for imagined pasts was a

continent-wide phenomenon, as intellectuals everywhere sought to cope with the consequences

of the Napoleonic Wars and later, of industrialization.3 The deeply-felt German affinity for a

highly idealized Greece must also be understood as a response to Germany’s late political,

economic and cultural development and the sense of inferiority it engendered. In practice, the

turn to Golden Age Greece would have profoundly negative consequences for Germany’s

political development.

GREECE REDISCOVERED

Early modern Europe was largely ignorant of ancient Greece. The burning of the library

in Alexandria (417 BCE) destroyed much literature, including many Greek tragedies that remain

lost. We have only seven of Sophocles 123 known plays. Greek writings came back to Europe

via the Arabs, and often in Arabic translation. Making use of these texts, the Renaissance

revived an interest in tragedy. The first staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus took place in 1585 in

Vicenza.4 Monteverdi wrote his two operas with Greek mythological story lines in the first half

of the seventeenth century. Opera was intended to reproduce tragedy on the questionable

assumption that tragic characters sang their lines.5 Chapman, and later Pope, produced good

Engliish translations of Homer and by the nineteenth century translating Homer had become

something of a national pastime. Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides was central to his

philosophical development. But it was not until the nineteenth century that Greek texts become a

core component of the English university curriculum.6

In the United States, there was a general interest in Athens beginning in the late

eighteenth century, much of it connected to the country’s experiment with democracy. If the

Pilgrims envisaged their colony as the new Jerusalem, democrats understood America to be the

new Athens. This belief was reflected in place names and in the Greek Revival in architecture.

The founding fathers were nevertheless more influenced by Rome and English writings and

political practices. They rejected the Athenian model because they opposed direct democracy,

2

and thought the experience of a small city state not very relevant to the vast expanse of the

Thirteen Colonies. Following British practice, Latin and Greek nevertheless became an

important subjects in the educational system.7

In Germany, Graecophilia reached a level unequaled anywhere else. The first German

translations of Homer appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. The poet and

playwright Hölderlin authored widely read translations of Sophocles in the early nineteenth

century. The Germans were unique in their efforts to rejuvenate tragedy, not as a genre, but as a

means of nourishing ethical and political sensibilities appropriate to the time. This project had

its roots in Kant but really began with the publication in 1795 of Schelling’s Letters on

Dogmatism and Criticism. Tragedy became the vehicle by which a succession of German

philosophers, among them Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin and Arendt sought

to probe such questions as the meaning of history, the nature and foundation of ethics, the role of

Germany, and often, the relationships among the three.

A more popular fascination with Greece spread in Germany. It fed on a highly idealized

understanding of that culture and its artistic creations as the product of an era in which thought

and feeling, and reason and expression were in harmony. This image of Greece was propagated

by Johann Winckelmann, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich August Wolff, Wilhelm von Humboldt

and Friedrich Schleiermacher. They envisaged Greek art and literature as the foundation of

Bildung, by came to signify education and self-improvement in its broadest sense. In 1792,

Humboldt, a humanist and civil servant, wrote to Greek philologist Friedrich August Wolf that

"no other people combined such simplicity and naturalness with so much culture, and no other

possessed such persevering energy and sensitivity for every impression."8 Many Germans of his

and the next generation sought to discover themselves through their intimate involvement with

3

Greek culture. This project of Menscheit in Altertum was expected to overcome social divisions

and unite Germans by encouraging them to understand themselves in terms of the totality of their

faculties rather than as members of a particular class or estate.9 The fascination with Greece --

especially in Prussia and Protestant Germany -- continued through the nineteenth century,

despite efforts by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt to debunk the highly romanticized

understanding that had taken root. It reached its zenith with Friedrich Schliemann’s possible

discovery of Troy in 1871, which captured the imagination of the entire country, and was taken

as further evidence of Germany’s scientific preeminence.10 Philhellenism was initially the

preserve of the elite, but was gradually diffused through the population by the educational

system. It became a defining feature of middle class intellectuals [Bildungsbürgertum] and

1

REFERENCES

? Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, p. 84.

2 Marchand, Down from Olympus; Chytry, Aesthetic State; Ferris, Silent Urns; Williamson,

Longing for Myth in Germany, all make this point.

3 Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 204.

4. Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens.”

5. Ibid.

6 Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain; Stern, Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English

Literature; Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Porter, "Homer."

7 Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Jenkyns and Turner, The Greek Heritage in

Victorian Britain; Turner, "Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?"

8 Wilhelm von Humboldt to Friedrich August Wolf, 4 December 1792, cited in Sweet, Wilhelm

von Humboldt, I, p. 121.

4

considered part of the national patrimony. As philhellenism spread and became linked to state

institutions it became more conventional and conservative in its aims. By mid-century it was

something of a tyrannical trope, whose supporters used their control of the educational system

and cultural institutions to marginalize critics and maintain their hegemonic position.11

Germans were different from British and Americans in their fascination with tragedy and

the degree to which it and ancient Athens became central to their efforts to construct a national

identity. Following the post-Napoleonic political repression in Prussia, ancient Greece also

became the foundation on which alienated intellectuals attempted to construct an alternative

cultural identity. In this chapter, I ask why Germans became so fascinated with Greece, and

Greek tragedy in particular. I examine the political consequences of this involvement for

Germany and Europe. In doing so, I distinguish philosophers from publicists, as their motives

and influence, while they overlap considerably, are best analyzed separately. With the

philosophers, the consequences of their thought are diverse and cross-cutting. On the positive

side, the development of German philosophy and its progression from Kant through Heidegger,

and beyond to Gadamer, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas represents one of the great intellectual

achievements of the modern era. This philosophical edifice may nevertheless have had negative

political consequences for Germany. It provided the intellectual justification for what German

historians refer to as the special path [Sonderweg] of Germany’s political development in the

nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and subsequently helped to alienate German

9. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal; Buford, German Tradition of Self-Cultivation; Butler, Tyranny of

Greece over Germany; Marchand, Down From Olympus; Taylor, Hegel, pp. 25-29.

10 McDonald, Progress into the Past; Marchand, Down From Olympus, 116-24, 148-50; Ferris,

Silent Urns, pp. 16-51; Chytry, Aesthetic State, pp. 148-77.

11 Marchand, Down From Olympus, for documentation.

5

intellectuals from the Weimar Republic. The German fascination with tragedy illustrates one of

the most powerful truths of this ancient genre. Greek playwrights knew that the world is bigger

than we are, that its dynamics will always remain to a large degree opaque and that the

consequences of our actions are accordingly unpredictable. Like Oedipus, we never know when

we are at a critical crossroads, or when actions, whose consequences appear transparent, will

produce outcomes diametrically opposed to those intended. It is no stretch of the imagination to

read the German fascination with tragedy as a tragedy.

In considering the unfortunate and unintended consequences of Germany’s intellectual

trajectory in the nineteenth century, I want to disassociate myself from those scholars and critics

who have launched a broader critique against modernity. Leo Strauss, a conservative political

theorist, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and postmodernist philosopher and literary theorist Jean

François Lyotard, attribute the worst political horrors of the twentieth century to the

Enlightenment and its unqualified faith in reason. Such a sweeping accusation reflects the

ideological assumptions of these authors more than it represents any reasoned argument. It

exaggerates the triumph of reason over tradition and superstition and ignores the many benefits

of reason, including modern science and medicine, economic development and the gradual

spread of racial, religious and gender tolerance.

My argument is different and, I hope, more nuanced. Some of the Germans in question,

most notably Kant, are prominently associated with the Enlightenment but also with the

emerging counter-Enlightenment. Others, like Schelling and Hölderlin, are considered leading

figures of the counter-Enlightenment.12 The Enlightenment elevated reason as the source of all

knowledge and science as its most perfect expression. History, art, poetry and the world of

feeling were deeply suspect and dismissed as props of the church and aristocracy.13 Voltaire,

6

following a line of argument that stretched back to Plato, condemned poetry as a form of

dangerous “figurative” language.14 The counter-Enlightenment portrayed reason as a pernicious

force that divided man from nature and sought to reverse this trend by restoring respect for

feeling and art as its principal form of expression. Some of its principal advocates envisaged art

as providing an absolute standard of beauty and the basis for the individual cultivation of the

self. For Kant, the experience of beauty is one in which imagination is harmonized with

understanding without the intervention or constraint of concepts, including those concerning the

moral good.15

Much of the German philosophical enterprise from Kant on must be understood as a

reaction to science and the skepticism and materialism it encouraged. Schelling, Fichte and

Hegel refused to concede that everything outside of science was mere poetry and a lesser form of

knowledge. Inspired by Rousseau and Jacobi, Novalis lauds “feeling” as a mode of

consciousness distinct from conceptual knowledge and suggests that the negation of reflection

can put us on the path to being.16 Many of these philosophers and writers rejected the emerging

model of science as the benchmark for knowledge, developed the alternative conception of

Geisteswissenschaft -- which became the “Humanities” or “interpretative sciences” of the

English speaking world. They sought to provide philosophical foundations for it as well as

12 Larmore, "Hölderlin and Novalis"; Sturma, "Politics and the New Mythology"; Schmidt, On

Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122-64; Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 391-96.

13 Kateb, “Utopia and the Good Life”; Dupré, Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of

Modern Culture, pp. 187-228, on new approaches to history.

14 Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary..

15 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,

16 Frank, “Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism.”

7

appropriate standards for its evaluation. This was a goal of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and

Schiller’s essay on “Aesthetic Education of Man” and a major theme of Hegel’s

Phenomenology.17 “Only when philosophy and metaphysics got into crisis in relation to the

cognitive claims of the sciences,” Hans-George Gadamer observes, did philosophers have the

incentive to “discover again their proximity to poetry which they had denied since Plato.”18

I am not the first to see a dark side to German philosophical idealism. German cultural

historians – most notably Fritz Stern -- see a connection between German idealism and the later

success of fascism. German idealism drew on earlier esthetic ideals and moral concerns. It

emphasized the cultivation of Innerlichkeit [inner development] and did not encourage political

participation or even concern with political issues and outcomes.19 Germany’s intellectual elite

“tended to become estranged from reality and disdainful of it. It lost the power to deal with

practical matters in practical terms."20 Fritz Ringer maintains that German universities fanned

this sense of idealistic insulation and with it, an opposition to change on the grounds that it

represented a moral decline.21 Several generations of generally apolitical Germans expressed

alarm over the economic and social changes associated with modernity, among them Thomas

Mann, Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Naumann and Christian Morgenstern. For some Germans, this

sense of alienation helped to nourish an anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic right-wing discourse.22

17 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 7, puts equal emphasis on reason, and rejects sentiment as a

guide;

18 Gadamer, Ästhetik un Poetik I, quoted in Bowie, "German Idealism and the Arts."

19 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15-17.

20 Ibid., p. 15.

21 Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, p. 29.

22 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15-17.

8

The negative consequences of German idealism are all the more poignant when we recognize the

extraordinary intellectual contribution of German idealism and its offshoots. The influence of

German idealism has been so profound and influential in how we have come to think about the

modern world that it is almost impossible to imagine ourselves and our world in its absence.

The great innovator and founder of the Idealist tradition was Kant, who straddled the

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. He employed reason in the form of powerful,

logical arguments to demonstrate its inability to understand our relation to the universal, which

he thought human beings nevertheless struggled to comprehend. However, he also attributed

great power to beauty and nature and their ability to shape the self through their apprehension by

non-reflexive means; the intuition and creativity they inspired could lead to understandings

inaccessible to the theoretical sciences. Reason and feeling, two parts of the self, could be

brought into harmony and provide a firm basis for morality. This belief was based on the more

fundamental assumption of an isomorphism between man and nature and, as the Critique of

Judgment suggested, a purposive principle in nature. Kant and his successors struggled to find

new foundations for ethics, sought them in human drives and capabilities that went beyond

logical inquiry, brought nature and beauty back into the purview of philosophy, and provided a

novel way of understanding the Greeks and Western history more generally. Marxism, Freudian

psychiatry and existentialism are direct outgrowths of German idealism or dependent on them in

important ways.

As my subject is complex, I adopt a layered approach. Each layer captures one reason for

German interest in Greek tragedy and ancient Greece more generally. I begin with philosophy as

an ethical project, then explore political motivations, and finally explain the turn to tragedy with

reference to Germany’s situation as a late cultural developer. These three layers might also be

9

conceived as concentric circles. The inner most circle encompasses a small group of literary

figures and philosophers and their recondite ethical concerns. The next circle out includes the

wider class of German intellectuals and the roles they aspired to play in the states in which they

resided, but above all in Prussia. The outermost circle situates Germany in Europe and considers

its comparative position. All three are connected by the theme of tragedy and the efforts of

intellectuals to construct identities for themselves and their states considered appropriate to the

rapidly modernizing world of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Analysis at these three levels helps to explain the appearance in Germany of idealism and

its implications for Germany's political development. It also encourages thoughts about the

relationship between agency and structure in the construction of identity. The German turn to

tragedy, I argue, was in the first instance a response to a philosophical-ethical problem, and the

work of agency. In the absence of Kant, German idealism might have been stillborn, or certainly

would not have developed in the manner it did. Even without Kant, German writers and

thinkers, reacting to the French Revolution and its aftermath, would have been drawn to the

counter-Enlightenment and its rejection of reason as a more appropriate guide for human

behavior and social relations. Some German historians consider their country’s political

development unique and a deviation from the pattern established by Britain, France and the

countries of northwest Europe. There are many reasons for wariness about the “Sonderweg”

thesis, among them the dubious assumption that there was a single pattern followed by

Germany’s neighbors.23 In A Cultural Theory of International Relations, I argue that there was a

pattern to which Germany conformed, that scholars have missed because they have compared

Germany to the countries of Western Europe. If we look east instead, it is apparent that the

rejection of Western values by many intellectuals was a typical response of late developers, a

10

situation Germany shared with Russia and Japan.24 So it might be argued that the general

direction taken by German philosophy, was a predictable response to a specific political-

economic condition. Agency nevertheless played an important role, giving German philosophy

its specific content and giving rise to a particular Weltanschauung. German intellectuals

confronted choices that were in no way predetermined by circumstances. Different German

intellectuals made different choices, and had more of them made the right choices the German

tragedy might have been averted.

THE GREEKS AND PHILOSOPHY

Like almost everything else in modern German thought, theorizing about tragedy

developed in response to Kant. The Königsberg philosopher never mentioned the word tragedy,

but made it imperative for his successors to tackle the subject. His work pointed to the end of the

philosophy of the metaphysical and made tragedy appear an appropriate vehicle for reflection.

Subsequent German philosophers envisaged tragedy as a means of overcoming metaphysics,

understanding the course of history and preparing the way for cultural revolution. These

philosophers also theorized about tragedy itself and sought to evaluate it as an art form. Hegel,

for whom tragedy was central, wrote about it in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) and

Lectures on Fine Art (1823-29).

Art versus Philosophy: Kant’s philosophical project was above all a response to Humean

skepticism. He sought to provide an alternative foundation for ethics that did not rely on telos or

natural law. His starting point was the assumption that it was impossible for us to cognize our

relation to the universal, but we could grasp our moral need for understanding. Human nature

23 Eley “British Model and the German Road”; Evans, Rethinking German History.

24 Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8.

11

compels us to seek universals. We find them through faith, which is reason’s form of moral

thinking and allows us to affirm that which is real but inaccessible to theoretical cognition. Kant

effectively challenged a philosophical tradition that had dominated Western thought since Plato

had substituted philosophy for literature as the appropriate vehicle for exploring the human

condition. Kant restored literature’s role, giving it coequal status with philosophy.

Kant's successors sought to build on his belief about the isomorphism between the world

and the self by providing firmer foundations for the noumenal self and its relationship to the

empirical world. The attempt to overcome Kantian dualism – noumenal and empirical selves --

led some philosophers and writers to aesthetics in the hope it would serve as an effective bridge

between the worlds of spirit and matter. Novalis and Hölderlin took this road, as did Schelling

and Hegel – all of whom were fellow students at the Tübingen Stift [theological seminary].25

Hölderlin and Novalis imagined a level of being prior to consciousness in which subject and

object are not yet divided. This level of being was not accessible to consciousness, only to art.

Artistic genius, which they thought arose directly from our being, was therefore the true route to

knowledge. Kant emphasized the role of genius in this connection in his Critique of Aesthetic

Judgment.26 Art opens up a realm to us that is unavailable to reflection.

Hegel alone among the German philosophers would resist this move, insisting that only

abstract reflection can generate moral truths. Hegel reversed Kant, who had defined freedom and

its limitations in terms of the self's rational understanding of the noumenal world. For Hegel, it

was the empirical world that provided this guidance. In his imagined polis, ethical life

[Sittlichkeit] arose from civic interaction because the Greek world was still naïve in the sense

25 Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom; La Vopa, Fichte, pp. 200-04, on the

personal relations among these figures.

26 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, §§ 41-54.

12

that it was not darkened by the shadows of individual self-reflection in search of meaning and

identity.27

Schelling and Kierkegaard followed Kant’s lead, as did Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) – which precede Hegel’s first major

publication by a decade – reintroduced tragic art into the philosophical discourse. Schelling

describes tragedy as the highest form of art and suggests that philosophy can be transformed

through engagement with it. His System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), speaks of

philosophy flowing back into the supreme art of poesy.28 Nietzsche would use the same trope in

the Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he wrote that "Philosophy, which was born and nurtured by

poesy in the childhood of science, and which accompanied all those sciences and brought them

into maturity and completion in their sundry individual streams, now flows back into the

universal ocean of poesy, whence they all originated.”29 His approach to tragedy stands in sharp

contrast to W. A. Schlegel and the British classicist George Grote, both of whom linked tragedy

to democratic politics.30

Kant’s turn to literature occurred within his broader engagement with problem of

judgment, specifically ethical judgment. He describes art as an expression of the “free play”

inherent in our nature. Here Kant takes a cue from Aristotle, who understood art as a natural

impulse and source of learning. For Aristotle, however, art is defined by its mimetic character; it

27 On Hegel, especially, Phenomenology of the Spirit.

28 Schelling, Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, and System of Transcendental Idealism,

3.627-28.

29 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, section 3, 629.

30 Silk and Stern, Nietsche on Tragedy, pp. 297-331 on Nietzsche's response to earlier

interpretations of the origins of tragedy.

13

is an imitation and distillation of real life experience, although it also draws on other natural

impulses like harmony and rhythm.31 For Kant, as for Aristotle, art is education in the most

fundamental sense, and something only accessible to ethical beings. Kant was nevertheless

committed to renegotiating the relationship of the truths generated by art and science. This

required the liberation of the imagination from any rules governing particular art forms. To

reveal truths about the world art must go beyond mimesis to poisēs, the act of creation itself.32

Despite their many differences, Hölderlin, Hegel and Nietzsche follow Kant in their recognition

of the force of art in human affairs. They do not envisage writing, style, performance, pictorial

images and rhythm as recherché academic concerns, but as a fundamental concern of philosophy.

Art and language are media in their own right, that exist beyond and independent of concepts.

They are -- and here I must resort to the kind of tortured language that pervades German

philosophy -- the idiom of the idiom that eludes capture by concepts. Art and language have the

ability to speak to us directly. They can lead us to new understandings of the world rather than

merely express known realities.33

Kant's successors understood that philosophy and its concepts were embedded in

language. It encouraged the turn to art as an alernative to language but also the search for a new

language for philosophy. Schelling developed the notion of Bildungstrieb, the impulse to make

art. Hölderlin, who declared that “man is born for art,” initiated this move with his translations

of Sophocles, Greek poetry and an attempt to write his own tragedy.34 He sought to follow the

poetic imperative in the hope that it would reveal the deepest possibilities of language and

31 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b7-1449a18.

32 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment; Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 66-81; Schaper,

"Taste, Sublimity and Genius."

33 Taylor, Hegel, ch. 1.

14

thereby enable the rebirth of ethical human beings. Hölderlin aspired to reconstruct the German

language to make it more like Greek, and to speak and write it with the syntax, word order and

sensibility of that language. Although German idealism rejected mimesis, Hölderlin engaged in

what can only be described as a kind of linguistic mimesis, and struggled to bring out the

“oriental” character of Greek life in his written work.35

Romanticism made artistic creation the vehicle of self-discovery, and the artist the model

human being. In 1788, Friedrich Schiller published “Die Götter Greichenlands” [The Gods of

Greece], which quickly become one of his most influential poems. It contrasted the allegedly

happy, harmonious and beautiful world of the Greeks with the somber, materialist and anti-

creative spirit of the present day.36 In this poem and other writings Schiller propounded the idea

of self-realization through the aesthetic; life and form must come together in the beauty of the

living form [lebende Gestalt].37 “If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice,” he

wrote, “he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only

through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.”38 In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel made a

similar plea: "One has tried for so long to apply mathematics to music and painting; now try it

34 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 62, quoted in Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, p.

53.

35 Larmore, "Hölderlin and Novalis"; Sturma, "Politics and the New Mythology"; Schmidt, On

Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122-64; Chytry, Aesthetic State, pp. 115-77; Ferris, Silent Urns,

pp. 158-200.

15

the other way around."39 For both writers, and German idealists more generally, the relationship

of the subject to the world is better mediated by feelings than concepts.

This project finds it most forceful statement in the writings of Nietzsche, where it became

the basis for his radical critique of Christianity and science. As is well known, Nietzsche posits a

sharp opposition between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the non-plastic Dionysian art of

music. The world of the intellect is Apollonian, and, he insists, has dominated Western

philosophy and culture since the time of Socrates. For the Apollonian, everything must be

intelligible to be beautiful. Nietzsche held the triumph of the Apollonian responsible for the ills

of Western culture. It spawned science, defined as “the belief in the explicability of nature and

in knowledge as a panacea.” Science and reason are “seductive distractions” that solidified

knowledge into constraining concepts that stifle creativity. The Enlightenment and nineteenth

century had greatly accelerated this process. For Nietzsche, the task of art is to interrogate and

undermine all perspectives to keep them from hardening into life-restricting concepts. He

advocates a project of liberation to distance oneself from the dominant values of the age, and

with it a self-cancelation [selbstaufhebung] of morals to attempt to regain the instinct of life. He

urges readers to “frolic in images” and recognize that creative life consists of replacing one set of

metaphors and illusions with another. Whereas Aristotle understood art as an imitation of nature,

for Nietzsche, it is “a metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it to overcome it.” Tragic art in

36 Schiller, " Die Götter Greichenlands," first published in Wieland's Der Teutsche Merkur in

1788.

37 Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp; Taylor, Hegel, pp. 17-10, 36-40.

38 Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Essays, 90

39 Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente 1-6 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988), V, p. 41,

quoted in Bowie, "German Idealism and the Arts."

16

particular, creates and destroys its own illusions. In doing so, it destroys old dreams and makes

way for new ones.40

Nietzsche, like Kant and Schelling, understood that not all knowledge is accessible to

reason. The highest forms of wisdom, he maintained, are achieved by intuition, seeing and

feeling. This is what makes art and music so important. Language and the concepts its spawns

can never capture the cosmic symbolism of music because language itself is a symbol. It can

have superficial contact with music -- words can describe its structure, rhythm, instrumentation

and evolution -- but cannot disclose its innermost heart. That speaks to us directly, unmediated

by language.41 Intelligence beyond the intelligible finds expression in emotions, communal

solidarity and “oneness” with nature, all made possible by Dionysian ecstasy. Dionysian art

convinces us of the joy of existence, and we come to this realization by grasping the truth that

lies behind its representation. “We must have art,” Nietzsche implored, “lest we perish of the

truth” – by which he means the sterile truths of philosophy. Perhaps for this reason, Nietzsche

judged his own efforts to discover and convey wisdom to have failed. “How sad,” he lamented,

“that I did not attempt to say what I had to say as a poet.”42

Beauty and Suffering: German philosophy’s interest in tragedy as art was inseparable

from its conception of beauty. Here too Kant is central because he foregrounded the importance

for beauty and its relationship to ethics. Kant conceived of beauty as the non-conceptual

representation of a sensus communis. His successors went beyond him in rejecting bourgeois

conceptions of beauty. Art should not be pleasing and soothing, but arresting and disquieting,

40 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, sections 2, 18 and 23.

41 Ibid., sections 1 and 3; Kaufmann, Nietzsche; White, Metahistory, pp. 331-74.

42 Nietzsche, Will to Power, Aphorism 822. See also Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra

and Human, All Too Human.

17

like Greek tragedy. Hegel, whom Heidegger called the last Greek, conceived of beauty as a

finite glimmer of the infinite.43 For Rilke, bourgeois beauty was stifling. It was “nothing but the

beginning of the terror that threatens to destroy us.”44 The emphasis on the darker side of beauty

reaches its apotheosis in Nietzsche, who was initially drawn to Wagner because of the latter’s

use of dissonance in his music. In Birth of Tragedy (1872), whose first edition was dedicated to

the Bayreuth composer, he called for the withdrawal of the beautiful from consideration in art.

To nineteenth century ears, musical dissonance was generally painful, which provided

another link to tragedy. Pain is a central feature of tragedy, and knowledge, as the chorus in

Agamemnon affirms, is won through suffering.45 Aristotle was also the first to theorize about

this connection. He argues in his Poetics that tragedy communicates knowledge by

simultaneously evoking fear and pity. This emotional state can bring about a catharsis: a purge

of the soul that restores its balance. Catharsis is a greatly diluted form of praxis, something akin

to an inoculation that gives us immunity by infecting us with a mild and tolerable form of a

pathogen. For Aristotle, the quintessential cathartic moment in tragedy comes when we see

ourselves as the blind Oedipus.46

Hölderlin is the first German to pick up on this theme. He declared true pain inspiring

and tragedy the highest art form because it celebrated suffering. Tragedy brings us knowledge

more through affect than reason, and emotions that take us outside of ourselves. Hölderlin

cryptically observes that Oedipus “has an eye too many perhaps.”47 His extra eye is presumably

43 Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art; Schmidt, On Germans and

Other Greeks, pp. 89-121.

44 Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy, p. 151.

45 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 176-83.

46 Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a-b, 1452a1-10, 1453b1-2

18

his extraordinary intellect that enables him to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and every other

riddle, including that of his identity. His intellect is also his undoing. Only after he becomes

blind, does Oedipus learn from suffering and ultimately able to see and understand in ways he

could not when he had two eyes. Blindness was a time-honored trope in Greek culture and

literature. The Greeks associated light with life, and blindness with death. Blindness is also

associated with wisdom. Perhaps for this reason, Homer is always represented as blind, and the

only person who can see in the underworld is the blind prophet Teresias.

Tragedy and Freedom: Tragedy reveals the power of destiny which in turn points to a

new conception of freedom. Tragedies teach us that we live in a world not of our making, one

we cannot control, but to which we are ultimately answerable. Schelling thought tragedy offered

insight into how human beings can confront the seeming contradiction between freedom and

necessity. His Tenth Letter opens with the observation that mortals succumb to the power of the

world but do not do so without a struggle. Like Oedipus, we must be punished for our struggle

against destiny, but that punishment brings recognition of our freedom. “It was by allowing

tragedy to struggle against the superior power of fate that Greek tragedy honored freedom.” By

trying to escape his fate and accepting his punishment when he inevitably fails, man

“demonstrates his freedom precisely through the loss of this freedom.”48

Schelling, Hegel and Nietzsche are all convinced that tragic art can teach us something

essential about our position in a world larger and more complex than any we can conceive. The

quest for understanding is essential because modernity demands new conceptions of self. The

Enlightenment and Romanticism inspired the goal of autonomous individuals who seek to

47 Hölderlin, "In lovely blue," trans. Poetry Foundation,

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=185347

48 Schelling, "Tenth Letter."

19

express their inner selves; people who have thoughts and feelings that distinguish them from

others. It widened the already existing tension between the individual and the group. However,

solitude and solidarity on the one hand, and self-expression and group identification on the other,

are not mutually exclusive binaries. One of the overarching goals of German philosophy was to

elaborate this truth, and its protagonists turned to tragedy because of its ability to frame and

present it so effectively.

History and Ethics: Beginning with Hölderlin, German philosophers considered

themselves to be living in an age of intellectual and ethical crisis. They attributed this crisis to

the failure of metaphysics, which for over two millennia had been the philosophical basis of

Western civilization. Humean skepticism proved the last nail in the coffin of Christian

metaphysics, and the Kantian project was at its core an attempt to find a new foundation for

ethics based on reason and sentiment.49 Kant’s German successors were in awe of his

philosophical innovation, but saw problems with his attempted solution. They sought better

answers and turned to tragedy for their framework.

Destiny was critical to their proposed solutions. Greek tragedies are driven by destiny,

but it is the destiny of individual human beings that lie hidden within them. Oedipus is once

again the paradigmatic case. His fate is obvious to us at the outset, in due course to those around

him, and finally, to himself. Warned of his destiny as a young man, he uses his impressive

physical and emotional powers to prevent it, and by virtue of his agency, brings this terrible

prophecy to fruition. The Germans depart from the Greeks in conceiving of destiny in collective

terms. It is not individuals, but history that reveals the collective destiny of a people as it

unfolds. Hegel and Nietzsche employ tragedy in a double sense: to make sense of history, and

through this understanding, to provide a new foundation for ethics. Their starting point is

49 Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, on Kant's commitment to god and Christian morality.

20

classical Greece, the last historical moment before philosophy and metaphysics became the

dominant intellectual framework.

Hume and Gibbon -- typical representatives of the Enlightenment -- scorned history as a

record of folly, although they became deeply engaged in its writing . Kant, by contrast,

approached history with reverence because he read it as the story of humanity’s struggles to

uplift itself morally. Hegel followed Kant and was drawn to tragedy as a model for thinking

about historical development. In it he found hidden dynamics that moved social interactions at

every level of analysis. He reasoned that history was driven by the same dialectic of conflict and

recognition, and came to understand it as the efforts of the spirit to recognize its individuality, by

comprehending the universality in terms of which it could come to know and differentiate itself.

Like Schelling, he considered history tragic in its inexorability. Central to its development is the

tragic moment, which always takes the form of a confrontation with death in which the truth is

summoned or revealed. In such crises, the spirit faces the pure singularity exposed by death, and

comes to recognize itself and its potentialities.50

Nietzsche interprets tragedy’s relationship to history differently. His starting point is his

well-known distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian. There is a perpetual struggle

between the Dionysian drive for self-forgetfulness and the Apollonian one toward self-

individuation. Classical Greece was unique in its willingness to recognize, even celebrate, the

irresolvable conflict between these drives, and the suffering it causes. Nietzsche interprets

tragedy in terms of them. The drama is the Apollonian concretization of the Dionysian chorus.

The choral parts are the “womb” of the dialogue, while the dialogue represents “dream images”

of the chorus. Tragedy gives citizens the opportunity to look into their own lives. Dreams are

conversations of the soul, while quotidian life is a mere fiction from which art struggles to

50 Hegel, Philosophy of History.

21

awaken us. Nietzsche accuses Euripides and Plato of replacing dreams with logic. The triumph

of reason in the form of philosophy was responsible for the death of tragedy. Thinking man now

suppresses his Dionysian impulses and mistakenly believes that nature is explicable and that

knowledge of it can make human beings masters of their own fate. Nietzsche saw the

Enlightenment and Hegel as the ultimate and most dehumanizing expressions of this

philosophy.51

To renew ourselves, we need to break the hold of the past over the present. We must

eliminate the “slave morality” of Plato and Christianity. Traditional lives must be rejected along

with traditional philosophy. Nietzsche looked to German music to provide a Dionysian

beginning for the rebirth of tragedy. He had what can only be described as a mystical belief in

the power of the German spirit if it could be unshackled. He nevertheless recognized that people

do not want to be separated from their illusions. We cherish illusions that protect us from the

realization that our lives are meaningless. Morality is real in the sense that it helps to make us

the kind of people we are, but it nevertheless rests on indefensible foundations.52

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche insists that “The strongest and most evil spirits have so far

done the most to advance humanity; time and again they rekindle the dozing passions – every

ordered society puts the passions to sleep.”53 He envisages nihilism as a positive force,

absolutely necessary to sweep away the existing order. He also sees it as destined by history.

Because the land “is eventually exhausted and the ploughshares of evil must come time and

again.”54 God is dead, and people will come to recognize this truth. When they do, politics,

51 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy.

52 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra and Human, All Too Human.

53 Nietzsche, Gay Science, Book 1.4.

54 Ibid.

22

religion and morality – the building blocks of Western civilization – will crumble. People will

have to find new way of life [Gewohnung], discover new answers to new questions and develop

new philosophies.

Greece as Inkblot: It is readily apparent that the Greece the Germans idealized is not a

Greece that ever existed. It is a world they desperately wanted to bring into being and by doing

so make Germany the modern Athens. Fichte was not alone in defining this project as the means

by which Germany could gain honor in the modern world. There was no single image of this

idealized Greece; multiple and cross-cutting depictions were advanced by German writers.

Enlightenment-inspired reformers like Winckelmann and Humboldt conjured up a rational,

ordered society that would enable human being to discover their full intellectual and artistic

potential. There was a darker, "oriental" Greece, first invoked by Hölderlin, and later elaborated

historically by Jacob Burckhardt. It was not a land of Enlightenment values, but a world of

intense conflict, where constructive and liberating forces struggled with destructive and

tyrannical ones, all within the confines of the family and polis. As Greece was generally

assumed to have given birth to Western civilization, the strangeness of this darker formulation

suggested – and it was intended to – the extent to which we are strangers to ourselves.

TRAGEDY AND POLITICS

In pre-revolutionary France, literature was a vehicle for opening up space where the

“discourse of self, blocked by social prohibitions and the absence of an interlocutor,” could

unfold.”55 Something similar happened in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany.

55 Jean M. Goulemot and Didier Masseau, “Naissance des lettres adddressé à l’écrivain,” in

Écrire à l’écrivain, Textes rèunis par Josè-Luis Diaz, Textual, no. 217 (February 1994), p. 10,

quoted in Seigel, Idea of the Self, p. 235.

23

Kant’s Germany was divided into a myriad of political units, most of which were ruled by

unimaginative princes and aristocrats, increasingly jealous of the commercial classes and

downright hostile to intellectuals. The conflict between the old and the new grew more acute by

reason of the French Revolution, French occupation and annexation of the left bank of the Rhine,

Napoleonic conquest of much of Germany and the post-Napoleonic repression by German rules

of reform and reformers.56

I previously alluded to the Kantian project and how it led German philosophers to the

Greeks. They were not the only Germans of the period to look to tragedy for renewal. German

intellectuals did so more generally, and one reason for this had to do with the German aristocracy

and its heavy investment in Baroque architecture and decoration. Many German intellectuals

found it suffocating in form and substance and another expression of the confining political

systems in which they lived. The Baroque was overly decorative, left no space untouched and

drew primarily on religious and pastoral themes. More importantly, it helped to sustain a

discourse that sought to reconcile the population to the aristocratic order. This order and its

artistic projects became increasingly anathema to many progressive intellectuals, and all the

more so after the French Revolution.57 In the first instance, therefore, the rediscovery of Greece

was part of the search for freshness, balance, reason and limits – politically as well as artistically.

This explains why the Greece embraced by German intellectuals was not the historical Greece –

about which little was known in any case– but a highly idealized Greece of reason and “noble

simplicity.” Such an image could serve as a model and lodestone for alienated intellectuals

committed to restructuring their society through a cultural and educational revolution.

56 Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 82-85; Blanning, French Revolution in Germany.

57 Honour, Neoclassicism.

24

Many German intellectuals initially welcomed the French Revolution as they considered

it a challenge and opportunity for the “German nation.” Enthusiasm soured when the revolution

gave way to the terror, Napoleonic Empire and French universalism was superseded by cultural

and political imperialism. As the French Revolution claimed to embody Enlightenment

principles, the violent course of the Revolution and its foreign conquests brought about

disenchantment among many German intellectuals with the Enlightenment. Reason, freed from

traditional restraints. appeared to them to have produced the very opposite of a just, ordered and

secure society.58 As we observed in the last chapter, this concern is also evident in Don

Giovanni, which premiered two years before the French Revoluton, and Die Zauberflöte, which

had its first performance two years afterwards.

German intellectuals were increasingly drawn to the Counter-Enlightenment, a catch-all

term for diverse movements and intellectual orientations, including conservatism, critical

philosophy, historicism, idealism, nationalism, revivalism and holism. Counter-enlightenment

thinkers rejected the expectations of the Enlightenment as naive and dangerous; they saw the

world as complex, contradictory, composed of unique social entities in a state of constant flux.

They rejected the Enlightenment conception of a human being as a tabula rasa, and the mere

sum of internal and external forces, and its emphasis on body over soul, reason over imagination

and thought over the senses. They insisted on a holistic understanding that incorporated and

overcame these dichotomies, and understood that individuals and social collectivities alike were

searching to discover and express their authenticity.59 The Counter-Enlightenment had begun in

58 Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 82-84; Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology.”

59 Frank, Einführung in der früromantische Ästhetik; Boyle, Goethe; Beiser, "Enlightenment and

Idealism"; Dahlstrom, "Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller"; Behler, German

Romantic Literary Theory; Pinkard, German Philosophy.

25

France before the Revolution and gained a wider European audience through the writings of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It found German spokesmen in the 1770s, among them Hamann,

Herder, and Lavater and Möser, the young Goethe, the dramatists of Sturm und Drang and

Schiller.60 In literature it found expression in the early romanticism (Frühromantik) of Novalis

(Friedrich Hardenberg), the Schlegel brothers and Christian Friedrich Tieck, in religion with

Friedrich Schleiermacher, and in philosophy with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg F. W.

Hegel.

Tragedy captured, or allowed the expression of, the principal concerns of the Counter-

Enlightenment. It balanced reason with feeling, and physical sensations with cognition, rooted

individuals in their society and its historical development. It conceived of human beings and

their societies as having made fragile, ultimately indefensible and ever evolving accommodations

with the irreconcilable polarities of social existence. Hegel revolutionized the study of tragedy

by directing attention away from tragic heroes to tragic collisions. Tragedies, he observed, place

their characters in situations where they have to chose between competing obligations and

associated conceptions of justice. Their choices propel them into conflicts with characters who

have made different choices. The polarities included family versus civic commitments, freedom

and authority, and above all else, individual assertion and the certainty of death and oblivion.

Conflicts arise not only as a result of these choices, but even more from the inability of tragic

characters to empathize. They understand the other’s position as a reality without justification

[rechtlose Wirklichkeit].61 In Antigone, the eponymous heroine’s loyalty to her brother and the

gods bring her into conflict with Creon, who is just as committed to upholding civic order and

60 Dahlstrom, "The Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller."

61 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 332; Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, pp. 201-02;

Taylor, Hegel, p. 175; Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 89-121.

26

his authority as head of the family. There are lesser collisions between Antigone and her sisters,

Creon and his son and Creon and Teresias, each of them emblematic.

Although they looked askance at autocratic German governments, many German

intellectuals nevertheless felt humiliated by Prussia’s defeat, all the more so as they had become

deeply invested in the idea of the German nation. German writers and philosophers were not

immune to nationalism and encouraged the idea that Germany could become the midwife of a

spiritual revolution that would succeed where the political revolution of France had failed.

Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel were committed to this project.

The writings of Nietzsche, although scornful of nationalism, were also infused with the idea of

the special mission of Germany.

The hopes of German philosophers, writers and political liberals were dashed by the

reaction that set in once the Napoleonic threat receded. This was particularly significant in

Prussia, the most powerful German political unit after Austria. Following the twin defeats of

Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806, a reluctant Prussian king turned to reform-minded officials

(e.g., Hardenberg, Boyen, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau) to restructure and rebuild his army and

mobilize national support for the war effort. They imposed universal conscription, opened the

officer corps to qualified commoners, removed incompetent officers from their commands and

limited the arbitrary and even draconic military system of control and punishment. They

expected these reforms to go hand-in-hand with abolition of serfdom and estate privileges and

improvements in the general education system. In the words of Gneisenau, Prussia had to be

restructured as a “triple alliance of arms, science and constitution.”62 Political and moral renewal

was incompatible with absolute monarchy. Prussian Junkers (members of the landowning

aristocracy) felt threatened by the reforms, and after Waterloo, the king became increasingly

62 Quoted in Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, p. 38.

27

receptive to their complaints. For their part, the reformers overplayed their hand, quarreled

among themselves, and by 1819 had been driven from office. German liberals and reformers

were shut out of Prussian politics until the Revolution of 1848 briefly put them center stage.63

Excluded individuals and groups not infrequently seek alternative means of expressing

themselves. They may create what Johannes Fabian has called “terrains of contestation,” where

they are free to maneuver and create narratives that may ultimately influence a wider audience,

and through them, the dominant groups in the society.64 As early as 1801, Schiller described

Germany as an “inward Empire.”65 After 1820, conceptualization of Greece and Greek tragedy

became increasingly widespread.

GERMANY AND EUROPE

My third layer of analysis concerns Germany’s position in Europe. The starting point is

the concept of “late development,” coined by Alexander Gerschenkron to explain the more

authoritarian political structures of central and eastern Europe. He theorized that democracy

developed in Britain, the low countries and Scandinavia because they were they first European

countries to industrialize. They had the luxury to develop at their own pace, and to

accommodate in peaceful ways the rising power of new classes to which development gave rise.

In France, a later developer, this transformation required a revolution and led to a centralized, if

ultimately, democratic state. Further east, the pressures on political units were greater. If they

63 Simon, Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement; Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to

Bismarck, pp. 237-80; Kosselleck, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution, 318-32; Levinger,

Enlightened Nationalism.

64 Fabian, Moments of Freedom..

65 Conze, “’Deutschland’ un ‘deutsche Nation’ als historische Begriffe.”

28

were to survive as great powers, they had to industrialize more rapidly, which in turn required

greater centralization and authoritarian rule. Germany after unification reflected this pattern. So

did the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China, countries in which development began

later and government assumed even more authoritarian forms66

I believe a parallel phenomenon can be observed in the cultural sphere. Germany was not

only a late economic developer, but a late cultural developer. German artists had recognized

since the Renaissance but German music and literature only achieved prominence in the

eighteenth century. Late cultural developers copy early developers, but desire to establish their

own identity and buttress their self-esteem by distancing themselves from their predecessors.

They do this by creating a synthesis of the borrowed and indigenous, with much of the latter

based on myth. Their representatives hold themselves out as descendants of a deeper culture

with older and purer historical roots and traditions. German music produced Bach. His sons,

Gluck, Handel and Telemann were imitators of the French and Italian styles, although they went

on to create novel syntheses. Wagner went back to German myths for the plot lines of his

mature operas. His productions became a mainstay of German nationalism and were greatly

favored by Hitler. Conservative German intellectuals condemned the decadent “West” –

meaning France and England – for their alleged materialism and superficial values. They touted

their superior values, supposedly more faithful to their Indo-Aryan roots and reflected in the

triumphs of German Kultur. In the late nineteenth century this comparison gradually took on

racial overtones.

Germany’s sense of special mission and glorification of the state were neither arbitrary

nor unique. Measured against Western values and accomplishments in the eighteenth century,

Germany was an under-achiever. It had failed to unify, and its leading states (Prussia and

66 Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness.

29

Austria) performed poorly on the battlefield, having been defeated decisively by Napoleon at

Jena, Auerstädt and Austerlitz. Subsequent coalition victories against Napoleon (e.g., Leipzig

and Waterloo), did not eradicate the sense of humiliation felt by many German aristocrats,

military officers, intellectuals and members of the emerging middle class. A world view that

offered a different set of criteria for excellence, that stressed German intellectual and artistic

creativity and the solidarity and the world mission of the Volk, and downgraded the value of

commerce and constitutional government, served to buttress the self-esteem of Germans of all

classes. By emphasizing the role of the state as both the instrument and expression of this

mission -- a theme developed by Fichte that received its fullest expression in the philosophy of

Hegel -- power could be concentrated in ways that facilitated unification and the emergence of

imperial Germany as the dominant military power on the continent. This power would

ultimately enable Germany to compete for standing in more traditional ways. Even Nietzsche,

who came to despise Prussian militarism, hoped that art could help the elite raise the masses

above the "dirt" of daily politics.67

Russia, an even later developer, developed an ideology based on the same anti-Western

orientation. Russian nationalism stressed moral over material forces and contrasted the holy

mission of the Russian people to Western rationalism and materialism. Slavophil ideology was

völkish, emphasized the communal life of the Rus in contrast to the individualism of the West.

Aleksei S. Khomiakov, Konstantin S. Aksakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky were among those who

propagated the belief that Russia had inherited the Christian ideal of universal spiritual

unification from Byzantium, while the decadent West, formed in the crucible of Roman

Catholicism, preserved the old Roman imperial tradition.68 Russia was the self-described “big

brother” to Slavs elsewhere in Europe, an ideology that prompted provocative policies in the

67 Nietzsche, "The Greek City."

30

Balkans where Russia increasingly came into conflict with Austria by virtue of its nearly

unqualified support of expansionist Bulgaria and Serbia.69

In Germany, romantic nationalism was always at odds with traditional conservatism, but

had less difficulty in blending with more modern approaches to politics, including socialism.

The Nazi Party appealed to romantic nationalist and völkish strands of opinion, but made only

limited inroads with workers, and at best gained the tacit support of the traditional conservative

elite by virtue of its successful economic and foreign policies. In Russia, these different strands

of opinion found expression in different political movements, although there was a considerable

degree of overlap. In pre-war Russia, Slavophil sentiment was most prevalent within the

aristocracy, but found some support among intellectuals, Dostoevsky being a case in point.70

Liberal constitutionalism was represented by the Kadet Party, the largest party in the National

Assembly (Duma). Socialism blended with nationalism and gave rise to a series of movements,

including Zemlya i Volya (land and liberty), which, in the 1880s, sent students, without notable

success, to live with peasants and mobilize their support.71 More Marxist socialists envisaged the

workers as the vanguard of the revolution. The avowedly internationalist Bolshevik faction

emerged as the dominant force in postwar Russia, renamed the Soviet Union.72 Despite its strong

anti-nationalist ideology, part of the appeal of revolutionary socialism to Russian intellectuals

68 Walicki, Slavophile Controversy; Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the

Slavophiles; Pipes, Russian Intelligentsia; Gleason, European and Muscovite.

69 Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, pp. 141-42; Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan

Entanglements, pp. 248-65; Schroeder, “World War I as Galloping Gertie.”

70 Pipes, Russian Intelligentsia; Gleason, European and Muscovite.

71 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, esp. pp. 253-84, 469-506.

72 Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, pp. 12-31.

31

had to do with their expectation that it would accelerate Russian development and gain new

respect for their country as both a great power and model for the rest of the world.73

As in Germany, this form of cultural nationalism assumed racist form and gave rise to

extreme xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In both countries, cultural nationalism was fed by deep

insecurity. In Germany, it was the result of late cultural and economic development, defeat and

occupation by France and delayed political unification. In Russia, much the same situation

prevailed. It had been unified and a great power for some time, but was economically and

technologically backwards, and had barely avoided defeat by Napoleon. Even more than in

Germany, the indigenous political elite feared the consequences of the spread of Western values

and ideas.

THE TRAGEDY OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

The German-Russian comparison is revealing in two ways. It supports the claim of

causal links between late development on the one hand and insecurity, xenophobia and racism on

the other. Elsewhere I have argued that this pattern is not limited to Germany and Russia; late

developers on the whole tend to have influential segments of their intelligentsia that adopt

xenophobic, anti-Western discourses that stress the alleged superiority and communal orientation

of their cultures.74 Japan is particularly interesting in this connection. It was another late

developer where a discourse of xenophobic nationalism became triumphant. Japanese

intellectuals were drawn to German philosophy and tragedy, which, suitably integrated with

existing traditions, helped to define a special path for Japan.

73 Pipes, “Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia”;

74 Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8

32

Early and superficial efforts to connect German philosophy to fascism emphasized the

collaboration of Heidegger, who briefly served as rector of the University of Freiburg under the

Nazis, and the writings of his mentor Nietzsche, whose call for nihilism and the rise of an

Übermensch [superman] seemed to a provide a link to Hitler. Nietzsche also introduced the

concept of race into his discourse, although it is clear that he conceived of it in a cultural not a

biological sense. The link was made more explicit by Heidegger’s inaugural speech, which

welcomed Hitler’s rise to power as a positive development, and the Nazi appropriation of

Nietzsche – with the willing aid of his sister -- as an ideological prop for their regime. In

fairness to poor Nietzsche, we should note his unwavering public opposition to German

nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch was very different from Hitler’s and motivated

by a benign concerns. Nietzsche aspired to develop a new aesthetic consciousness to free people

from the limitations of conventions and accepted discourses, of which Christianity and science

were the most deeply entrenched and constraining. Such a consciousness would enable and

facilitate self-expression and self-knowledge, although it too would have to be challenged and

replaced before it solidified and became life-restricting. Humanity, its art and other creations --

as Greek tragedy recognized -- could at best hope to achieve a precarious balance between

perfect form and utter chaos. To achieve this recognition, it was first necessary to approach

chaos, and Nietzsche looked forward to the arrival of a Zarathustra-like Superman who would

lead the way to a new barbarism. Unlike the savage life of the prehistoric past, the new

barbarism would free the human spirit and empower man to lead a more creative life.75

75 Ascheim, Nietzsche Legacy in Germany; Golomb and Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of

Fascism?

33

A more compelling line of argument linking German philosophy and Fascism focuses on

the consequences of German philosophy, not the political ideas of individual philosophers.

German idealism helped to create conditions favorable to German imperialism in World War I

and fascism in the 1930s. This was due to its underlying values and aspirations. Kant’s

philosophical corpus was abstruse, and the philosophy of his successors was even more divorced

from everyday language, events and concerns. The corpus of German philosophy directed

thought and action toward noble, if impractical, ideals and away from the issues and concerns of

everyday politics. It devalued those concerns as plebian, distracting and even dishonorable, an

attitude that was also encouraged by the imperialist right, which sought to focus the attention of

German youth on military service, sacrifice and the higher honor of serving the nation. In an

unexpected way, the teachings of the philosophical and military establishments reinforced each

other despite the generally opposed nature of their projects.

The contrast to Anglo-American philosophy and its concern for politics and

constitutional structures is striking. The values and practices that make democracy work –

personal interest in material well being, willingness to bargain and compromise, acceptance of

less than perfect solutions to problems -- were largely anathema to German philosophy and to

nineteenth century German high culture more generally. The texts German students read in

gymnasium and university encouraged them to strive for bolder, more collective goals. They

stressed the importance of the state, and service to that state was conceived as the collective

embodiment of the nation. All of these teachings translated all too easily into sympathy for

charismatic, authoritarian leaders and corresponding lack of respect for plebian, compromising,

patently self-seeking politicians and trade-unionists.

34

Many German intellectuals in the early years of the nineteenth century could not make a

clean break with the authoritarian regimes for which they expressed loathing. They never rid

themselves of the need for a monarchy, and remained half-hearted in the support for, or even

opposed, to democratic constitutions that would transfer power from monarchs, princes and

aristocrats to the demos. In the 1840s and 1860s they were at least as much interested in national

unification as they were in liberal democracy. In 1848, the first national parliament meeting at

the Paulskirche in Frankfurt offered the German crown to the Prussian king, who rejected it out

of hand. In the Prussian constitutional crisis of the 1860s, Bismarck split the liberals by offering

them national unification in return for continued control of the state and its foreign policy by the

king. In the aftermath of World War I, many German intellectuals never developed enthusiasm

or loyalty to the Weimar Republic, and made no effort to save it when it came under serious, and

ultimately, successful attack from the far right. There are many reasons for these attitudes and

behavior, and surely, the path and influence of German philosophy must be considered one of

them.

The Weimar Republic was in many ways the most telling era. I have argued elsewhere

that self-esteem was a key, if frustrated, ambition of the semi-feudalized German bourgeoisie.76

This need became more acute after the humiliation of defeat in World War I and the imposition

of what was widely regarded in Germany as the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Given this

outlook, it was difficult for the Weimar Republic to build legitimacy and comparatively easier

for its right-wing opponents to win support in the name of nationalism. Hitler was particularly

adept at playing on the desires of the middle class for self-esteem. The Nazi emphasis on the

Volksgemeinschaft held out the promise of a higher purpose to be achieved through unity,

sacrifice and struggle in a showdown with the nation’s internal and external enemies. Hitler’s

76 Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8.

35

defiance of the Western powers and the Treaty of Versailles was widely popular with the middle

classes, who were his largest supporters at the polls.77

Some scholars see the collapse of the Weimar Republic as inevitable. Theodore

Hamerow attributes not only the failure of Weimar, but World War I, the rise to power of the

Nazis and World War II to the failure of the German liberals in 1848 to develop constitutional

democracy as an effective alternative to the conservative authoritarianism of Prussia. “The

penalty for the mistakes of 1848 was paid not in 1849, but in 1918, in 1933, and in 1945.”78

Hamerow’s argument is a quintessential expression of the Sonderweg thesis, which attempts to

explain the Nazi period as the inevitable, or at least the most likely, outcome of earlier

developments in German history that mark it off from that of its Western neighbors. Ironically,

the Sonderweg thesis originated with conservatives in the imperial era to justify Germany’s

constitution as a reasonable compromise between the inefficient authoritarianism of Russia and

the decadence of Western democracy.79 It was given new meaning by left-leaning historians in

the post-World War II period. Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler mobilized it to combat the

claims of their conservative-nationalist counterparts that the Hitler period was an extraordinary

development, unrelated to past German history.80

77 Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 1-2; Dahrendorf,

Society and Democracy in Germany, p. 404.

78 Krieger, German Idea of Freedom; Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction, p. viii;

Puhle, Von der Agrarkrise zum Präfaschismus; Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy, p. 398.

79 Kocka, “German History before Hitler.”

80 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War; Wehler, Der deutsche Kaiserreich; Winkler,

The Long Shadow of the Reich and Der lange Weg nach Westen, who attributes Germany’s

special character to developments in the Middle Ages.

36

A few historians emphasize the contingency of Nazi Germany. In an early but still highly

regarded history of the Weimar Republic, Erich Eyck makes a credible case that the synergism

between the economic downturn and bad leadership brought Hitler to power.81 In a weak version

of the Sonderweg thesis, Wolfgang Mommsen maintains that the collapse of Weimar was

inevitable, but Hitler's rise to power was not.82 Henry Turner uses counterfactuals to argue that

Hitler’s survival of World War I trench warfare and a later automobile accident were remarkable,

and that without Hitler, Weimar’s failure would likely have led to a conservative, authoritarian

regime with revanchist goals in the east but no stomach for another continental war. It would

have been anti-Semitic, but unlikely to have carried out draconian measures against Jews.83

The determinists sensitize us to the serious impediments that stood in the way of the

success of the Republic, while those who emphasize contingency alert us to the need to separate

the fate of the Republic from the question of what kind of regime might have succeeded it. The

forces arrayed against the Republic were on both ends of the political continuum. The

communists on the left opposed a constitutional bourgeois order. Led by intellectuals, their base

consisted of workers, whose support waxed and waned as a function of the economic situation.84

By 1928, there was very little inclination on the part of the conservatives to cooperate with the

socialists, and the pro-Republican parties did not have enough seats to sustain a left-center

coalition. The grand coalition lasted less than six months, the victim of Gustav Stresemann’s

death and the stock market crash.85 The nationalist-conservative opposition was divided among

several parties, and in the last years of the Republic, the National Socialists (Nazis) became by

81 Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic.

82 Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy.

83 Turner, Geissel des Jahrhunderts.

37

far the strongest of these parties. In July 1932, the Nazis won 38.2 percent of the overall national

vote, making anti-Republican forces a majority in the Reichstag. Government had to be

conducted by emergency decree, which shifted power to President Paul von Hindenburg, and

paved the way for the appointment of Hitler after the failure of the short-lived von Papen and

Schleicher regimes.86 Hindenburg could have used his emergency power to support a pro-

Republican government, but preferred to rule through a conservative fronde that excluded the

socialists from power. He set in motion a chain of events that had an outcome very different

from what he imagined.87 So did the Communists. On instructions from Moscow, they made a

fatal error in refusing to support the grand coalition, composed of the socialists, Zentrum [Center

Party] and moderate parties on the right. The Communists welcomed the Nazi regime in the

expectation that it would quickly fail and pave the way for a worker’s revolution.88

The years between 1919 and 1933 were ones in which intellectual commitment to the

Republic could have made a difference. It is not unreasonable to think that greater support for

the Republic by intellectuals would have reduced support for the Communists and possibly have

84 Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, p. 456, 494-95; 535-37.

85 Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 2, pp. 203-52; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of

Weimar Germany, pp. 94-115.

86 Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 2, pp. 350-488; Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the

Weimar Republic, pp. 301-446. Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, pp. 115-

49; Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357-432.

87 Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic, pp. 302-03, 316-17,472; Mommsen, Rise

and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357-432; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar

Germany, pp. 80-81.

88 Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, p. 456, 494-95; 535-37.

38

enabled the grand coalition to have survived the early years of the great depression. If so,

President Hindenburg would not have been in a position to invoke the emergency clause of the

constitution and Hitler would not have come to power through the back door. As there is reason

to believe that the Nazi vote had peaked, the Republic could have weathered the Nazi challenge,

although it still would have been under severe pressure from right and the left. In 1928, the

Nazis garnered a mere 2.6 percent of the vote. Once the depression set in, this figure rose to 18.1

percent. In the March 1933 elections, held two months after Hitler took office, the Nazis still

received considerably less than half of the vote, but more votes than any party had in the Weimar

era.89

IDENTITY

I am not alone in arguing that one of the fundamental causes of the Third Reich was the

deep schism between German and Western political thought that opened up in the late eighteenth

century.90 It resulted in a special German sense of destiny with strong anti-Western overtones.

This outlook, we have seen, found expression in Kant’s effort to discipline French individualism

with German enlightened corporatism and in Fichte’s Address to the German Nation. Written in

1807-08, in response to the French occupation, Fichte praised the “German spirit,” whose ideals

transcended the selfish goals of Western culture, and described Germans as the only Europeans

89 Berend Stöver, ed., Bereichte über die Lage in Deutschland. Die Meldungen der Gruppe Neu

Beginnen as dem Dritten Reich 1933-36 (Bonn, 1996), p. 2, cited in Frei, “People’s Community

and War”; Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 314-17.

90 Lukács, Destruction of Reason; Plessner, Verspätete Nation; Mosse, Crisis of German

Ideology; Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair; Holborn, “Origins and Political Character of Nazi

Ideology”; Herf, Reactionary Modernism.

39

capable of profound and original thought. Anti-Western diatribes became a constant theme of

German literature and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thomas

Mann’s Reflections of a Non-Political Man, written toward the end of the World War I, praises

Germany’s musical and metaphysical culture, which he contrasts with the more skeptical,

analytic and political culture of the West. He rejects democracy as “foreign and poisonous to the

German character” and endorses the Obrigkeitstaat [authoritarian state] as most suitable to the

German character.91 In the 1920s, writing in the aftermath of another defeat and partial French

occupation, Oswald Spengler’s advanced a variant of this argument in his best-selling Decline of

the West. Western thought, he wrote, was “merely rational,” and the Germans, who were

capable of great accomplishments, had to be protected from it.92

The German middle class was particularly susceptible to völkisch ideas, as events of

1848, 1866, 1870, 1918 and 1933 revealed.93 Nazi ideology was admittedly the most extreme

variant, but one that played to a largely receptive audience, and for reasons having largely to do

with the need for self-esteem. Victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), national

unification (1871) and recognition as the leading power on the continent should have boosted

German self-esteem and reduced the need of its leaders and people to define themselves in

opposition to France and Britain and the values they were thought to epitomize. Bismarck

certainly behaved as a mature and satisfied leader. He was never drawn to nationalism as

anything other than a means of advancing Prussian power, and under his leadership Germany

acted as a satisfied nation and defender of the territorial status quo. He had a jaundiced view of

colonies, although he briefly flirted with social imperialism, and consistently opposed a blue

91 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, p. 16 for quote.

92 Spengler, Decline of the West.

93 Bracher, Nazi Dictatorship, pp. 27-28.

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water navy as a provocation and waste of money. Bismarck was considered old-fashioned by

many Germans in the 1880s, and especially by those believed that empire was the sine qua non

of great power status.94 Pursuit of empire and a navy to challenge that of Britain’s were widely

supported, especially by the middle classes. Germans now felt strong enough, psychologically as

well as physically, to compete on the playing fields dominated by their competitors and

adversaries, Britain and France. At the same time, they continued to enhance their self-esteem

by defining themselves and their political culture in sharp contrast to those of Britain and

France.95

In the late nineteenth century the Sonderweg thesis was mobilized to justify and extend

the shelf life of quasi-authoritarian government. German music under Wagner sought to fuse

völkish traditions with modernity in the form of a Gesamtkuntswerk [total art], and the composer

and his followers vaunted its artistic superiority to the “decadent” operas of Italy and France.

German literature continued to praise pre-modern values and heap scorn on the petty,

commercial concerns of the middle class. Schelling was horrified that his brother briefly

considered a career in business, warning that he would think of nothing but "self interest and

profit."96 Nietzsche condemned "superfluous people" whose life centered on money, markets,

profit.97 Friedrich Meinecke, Germany’s preeminent historian in the decade prior to World War

I, lauded German Kultur, which combined language, ethnicity, national identity and spiritual

94 Nichols, Germany After Bismarck, pp. 59, 102-04; Mommsen, Imperial Germany, p. 80;

Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, III, p. 141.

95 Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 7.

41

renewal, as superior to the French principles of liberty, fraternity and equality.98 During World

War I, Werner Sombart rhapsodized “the ancient German hero’s spirit,” which was rescuing

Germany from becoming another corrupt capitalist nation and would make the German Volk the

“chosen people” of the twentieth century.99

National neuroses -- if we can use this term -- are no more readily palliated by success

than their individual counterparts. They are, however, greatly exacerbated by failure, which is

what happened in Germany after its defeat in World War I. Defeat prompted denial, a search for

scapegoats and an intense desire for revenge, emotions that made it difficult, if not impossible,

for the Weimar Republic to gain legitimacy. To create a different political-psychological

outlook, it took another round of war that left Germany defeated, in ruins and occupied and

divided by powers intent on imposing their respective political and economic systems and

reshaping the country’s culture.

A principal thesis of this chapter is that the Sonderweg was not unique. German

historians who advance this claim make the mistake of comparing Germany to its western

neighbors. Facing west, German intellectual and political development does appear anomalous

and in need of special explanation. Facing east, Germany looks more “normal.” Poland, Russia

and Japan developed similar ideologies; intellectuals stressed the uniqueness and superiority of

their cultures to the west by virtue of their preservation of traditional values. Although they did

this in somewhat different ways, their cultural claims were similar as were the key arguments

96 Schelling to Parents, 4 February 1797, quoted in Williamson, Lounging for Myth in Germany,

p. 20.

97 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, pp. 67. 75, 127.

98 Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat.

99 Sombart, Händler und Helden, pp. 125, 143.

42

mobilized in their support. These similarities, I contend, reflect underlying similarities in

circumstance. They suggest the extent to which identity, national as well as personal, is an

important means of building self-esteem.

For late developers the west was the model to emulate. A state could not become or

remain great, and its people claim status, in the absence of economic development and the

panoply of other status markers that wealth allowed. In the nineteenth century these included

victory in war, colonies, beautification of one’s capital, and excellence in the arts, sciences and

sports.100 Copying the west conferred status but the need to emulate other countries and their

accomplishments was a palpable admission of one’s relative backwardness and inferiority. The

way around this dilemma was to assert superiority on the basis of a more traditional, less

materialistic culture, which, when combined with the economic development and technology of

the west, would result in a superior synthesis. This was precisely the claim made by advocates

of German Volksgemeinschaft and Kultur, Russian communalism and Japanese depictions of

their country as a “family nation” [kazoku sei kokka].

All these identities were Janus-faced; they looked to the past and to the future. The

backward looking component was reminiscent of golden age discourses and their invocation of

imaginary pasts. German and Russian intellectuals rhapsodized a conflict-free, communally

oriented past that never was. Dissatisfied Japanese intellectuals idealized the spirit of wa

[harmony] and the community [kyōdōtai], that had no place for individualism or profit making.101

All three discourses differed from golden age narratives in that they invoke the past to help

transform the present. By stressing communal solidarity and artistic creativity and denigrating

100 Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, chs. 2 and 7 for elaboration..

101 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths; Vlastos, “Tradition," and “Agrarianism Without Tradition”;

Kimio, “The Invention of Wa”; Scheiner, “The Japanese Village.”

43

the value of commerce and constitutional government they aimed to buttress the self-esteem of

those classes who supported the regime. By emphasizing the role of the state as the instrument

and expression of the nation’s mission – as did the Germans and Japanese -- power could be

concentrated in ways that would sooner or later facilitate successful competition with the leading

powers of the day.

To come back to the German case, it is apparent that identity construction by intellectuals

came full circle. The turn to Greeks and tragedy in the late eighteenth century was motivated in

part by the belief that Germans could become Greeks. By modeling themselves on the

progenitors of Western culture they could recapture its essence, emulate its accomplishments and

forge an identity superior to those associated with the Enlightenment and revolutionary France.

This project was flawed in fundamental ways: it created a highly idealized image of the Greeks,

assumed unrealistically that intellectuals would remake themselves in accord with this image,

and that other Germans would follow their lead. German philosophers and writers were on the

whole supporters of reform and hoped that German governments would work with them toward

common goals. Instead, intellectuals were marginalized by repressive regimes, especially in

Prussia. The Greeks now provided an alternate cultural space where intellectuals could live in a

world of their making, divorced from contemporary politics, but still hopeful of one day

influencing government and society. In reality, the arrow of influence began to work in reverse.

Writers, philosophers, and above all, professors and civil servants, became colonized by the

state, which employed most of them. Intellectual discourses ended up strengthening the kind of

state that was the enemy of the values to which writers and philosophers from Hölderlin and

Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche aspired. Post-Napoleonic generations of Germans faced the choice

of abandoning the cultural-political project of German idealism or deluding themselves into

44

believing that the Prussian state and German empire somehow facilitated their aspirations. Most

chose accommodation. A few, like Nietzsche faced the truth that either option was unpalatable

and unworkable. He found escape in madness, which in retrospect, was not altogether an

irrational choice.

45