2 a People and Its Myth

2 A People and Its Myth

Emigrants about Germany

To fully grasp what has been happening in Germany on the other side of our eastern border since March 1933 we have to go beyond mere politics. In doing so, we will quickly become aware that the “revolution” wrought by National Socialism has since undergone a sociocultural transformation of an entire people. Politics, in the narrow sense of governing a country, is but a small part of this transformation. Politics by itself is likely to yield a fairly distorted picture, in that behind the scenes — in the living rooms, workplace and laborato- ries — little things are changing that don’t immediately show up in the press, if it were not already strictly monitored. And, as always, here too the little things are crucial to grasping the total picture. Someone who, like this writer, lived for some time in Germany,1 albeit in the Weimar Republic, understands that what is currently afoot there in effect has little to do with party politics as such. In today’s Germany a myth has achieved official standing the German people have willy-nilly professed since the wars of liberation [in the Napoleonic era], even among many groups that at one time called themselves republicans: the myth of blood and kindred ideas to which National Socialism seems to owe its astounding success, after doing little more than set it in motion. It doesn’t take a belief in miracles and yet be shocked that the culture of the official Second Reich simply managed to vanish in a mat- ter of months, for it was nothing more than the façade of a Europe-oriented culture that collapsed. Behind it subsisted instincts which had not come to terms with the façade: an academic civilization steeped in philosophical jar- gon, monstrously specialized but lacking crucial harmony — the symbol of a people of thinkers and poets that had rarely succeeded in bringing this think- ing and poeticizing to a synthesis. Whatever we make of this today, we do know that Goethe and Nietzsche (and possibly some Bismarck as well) were foreign- ers in their own country, and would remain even more so were they to return there today. Goethe, the representative both of a culture in which Europe was completely subsumed (to read Conversations with Eckermann is to remove all doubt) and of the aristocratic court life in a small German state; Nietzsche,

1 Researching his dissertation topic.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004426627_004 1933 29 ignored by his contemporaries and at best patted on the back for his “superb” style, to a ludicrous degree misunderstood by posterity (as though he were a precursor of the current reigning myth in Germany!). Both repeatedly asserted that, culturally, their compatriots lagged behind the rest of Europe. Both were exiles in their own country, and while Goethe easily bore his exile because his spirit instinctively assimilated the contradictions, Nietzsche wandered about Switzerland and Italy and was forced to produce his works as an “emigrant” on foreign soil. Unlike today’s emigrants, under Bismarck Nietzsche at least was allowed to continue to publish. It is highly unlikely Nietzsche would be doing so under current circumstances. For Nietzsche the great drama of German culture was an open book. “You Germans, you are so deep, you cannot even be called superficial.”2 None of this makes me any less disposed to consider Mann’s contem- porary history as erring on the side of superficiality when he insists that in 1933 things could have taken a different turn had there been fewer trai- tors à la Papen.3 Not that I would want to spend a lot of time debating this with Mann, for in the end history is something irreversible, and if someone says that the world would look different if Napoleon had died in infancy from convulsions, there can be no argument about that. Still, there is no way around Mann’s point that had Hitler had more talent for painting he might not have gone into politics. But it so happens that he didn’t have the slightest talent, and history has to come to terms with that. To view the de- velopment of events in Germany as a more or less accidental convergence of circumstances, as Mann does, is to completely ignore the powerful sway of the myth of Volk and blood, if below the surface and latent, before there was the slightest trace of Hitler. In this, Mann is the lesser of the as yet un- surpassed historian of National Socialism Konrad Heiden, whose Gechichte des National-Sozialismus (History of National Socialism) not only paints a masterful psychological portrait of the “Führer,” but also documents the mix of shabby mysticism and political ressentiment which ultimately brought Hitler to power. In Mann we look in vain for something related to this prehistory. He attri- butes too little importance to the soil in which it took root, sees nothing but the plot against the republic, which he defends with an affection seldom encoun- tered in writers even before the “revolution.” Mann was a devoted republican of the sort we have always had to look for with a torch, which may well explain

2 “Ihr Deutsche, ihr seid so tief, ihr seid noch nicht einmal oberflächlich.” 3 Franz von Papen, Chancellor of Germany in 1932, Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor, 1933–34.