The Apocalypse in Germany

Home , End of All Days, Ernst Toller, Karl Lachmann, Ludwig Meidner, Wilhelm Michel

Klaus Vondung

University of Missouri Press The Apocalypse in Germany

The Apocalypse in Germany

Klaus Vondung

Translated from the German by Stephen D. Ricks

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London © 1988 Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich/Germany © 2000 for the English language translation: Stephen D. Ricks © 2000 for the English language edition by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 54321 0403020100

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vondung, Klaus. [Apokalypse in Deutschland, English] The apocalypse in Germany / Klaus Vondung; translated from the German by Stephen D. Ricks. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1292-1 (alk. paper) 1. Germany—History—Philosophy. 2. History (Theology) 3. Nationalism—Germany—History. 4. German literature—History and criticism. 5. Apocalyptic art—Germany. I. Title.

DD97.V6613 2000 943'.001—dc21 00-032558

⅜ϱ ™This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Text design: Elizabeth K. Young Jacket design: Susan Ferber Typesetter: BOOKCOMP, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Helvetica, Goudy Old Style

Frontispiece: Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape I (1912), © Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, Judisches¨ Museum der Stadt, Frankfurt am Main, 2000.

This book is published with the generous assistance of the Eric Voegelin Institute in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Contents

List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1

Part One: Approaches 1. How Exciting the Vision of the New World Is! Or, What Ernst Toller Connects with John of Patmos 11 2. Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 19 3. Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 36 4. Symbols and Experiences 50

Part Two: The Apocalyptic View of History A. Structures 67 5. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 68 6. History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 87 7. “World History Is the Last Judgment” 106 B. Movements 120 8. The Birth of Nationalism from the Spirit of the Apocalypse 123 9. From Holy Spirit to National Spirit 130 10. Protest and Futility 142 11. “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power”: The Apocalypse of 1914 154 12. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 169 13. The Spirit of Utopia 184

Part Three: Aesthetics of the Apocalypse C. Forms 213 14. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 217 15. Style: Dramatic 237 16. Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 259 D. Representations 275 17. Dreams of Death and Destruction 277 18. “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .”: Visions of the New Man 293 19. Shaping the Shapeless 308 20. “Paradise Is Won in Every Form”: Redemption through Art 321 21. Surrender of the Imagination? 337

Part Four: The Existential Apocalypse 22. Transformation and Revolt 363 23. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacriﬁce 375 24. The Last and the First 397

Bibliography 419 Index 425 Illustrations

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape I frontispiece A Scheme of the Lives of the Patriarchs from Adam to Moses 25 Lucas Cranach the Elder/Atelier, The Babylonian Whore 94 AW,The Assault of Gog and Magog on the Beloved City 95 Johnson, The New Phoenix 181 Max Beckmann, Scene from the Destruction of Messina 221 Max Beckmann, The Sinking of the “Titanic” 222 Franz von Stuck, War 289 Arnold Böcklin, War 290 Alfred Kubin, War 291 Ludwig Meidner, Horrors of War 304 Ludwig Meidner, Vision of a Trench 305 George Grosz, Authorities 306 Elk Eber, The Last Hand Grenade 319

vii This page intentionally left blank The Apocalypse in Germany This page intentionally left blank Introduction

The apocalypse is omnipresent. No one can fail to recognize that the apocalyptic fears of the last decades have receded only momentarily with the disintegration of the communist regimes and the Soviet Union, and with the independence achieved by the Eastern European states. Only for a short time did it appear that a new, peaceful world order would be possible. Meanwhile there are more trouble spots than ever before, as though—paradoxically—the previous balance of terror would have taken care of peace and stability. Since 1989 death and destruction have been the daily fare of news reports on television: in Kuwait and Iraq, in Somalia and Rwanda, in the former Yugoslavia, and in the Caucasus. The desolate situation of the successor states of the Soviet Union may hold even greater terrors. Ever since the bombing of Hiroshima, the destruction of mankind through war has become not only imaginable, but also possible. As early as the ﬁfties and sixties, there were individuals who warned of the “apocalyptic danger” of a nuclear war, for instance, Günther Anders, who used this expression as early as 1959.1 But it was a while before everybody became aware of this danger. The possibility that mankind could destroy itself had become obvious in the seventies and eighties with the nuclear arms race between the superpowers and in view of the SS 20 and Pershing-2 missiles that were threateningly directed against each other. The disarmament of the medium-range missiles and, above all, the collapse of the Soviet Union made the fear of a nuclear war recede but not disappear: the future of the successor states of the Soviet Union and of their nuclear potential is still too uncertain, while too many other states are attempting to obtain nuclear weapons or already possess them. As if the danger that results from nuclear weapons for mankind were not bad enough—meanwhile another danger appears even larger and less avoidable: the self-destruction of mankind by the elimination of the bases of life. Indeed, even earlier critics of modern technological civilization warned about its dangerous effects, long before the Club of Rome, the

1. Günther Anders, “Thesen zum Atomzeitalter,” in Die atomare Drohung: Radikale Überlegungen, 95.

1 2 The Apocalypse in Germany

Cousteau Society, Greenpeace, and the Greens, but the deadly seriousness of the situation was perceived only when the destruction of forests and the increasing poisoning of rivers and seas came to everyone’s attention. Meanwhile, ecological disasters began to amass, warning us ever more clearly of the prospect of an uninhabitable world. The nuclear reactor disaster at Chernobyl has made us all acquainted with the incalculable dangers of even the peaceful use of atomic energy. Since then we have heard again and again of “irregularities” and “breakdowns” in nuclear reactors. Reports have multiplied about accidents in chemical works that poison our rivers, about crippled oil tankers that pollute the seas, and even about criminal actions. Scandals about the dumping of extremely radioactive or dangerous chemical wastes show again and again what a deadly threat we have made for ourselves and how poorly we deal with it. The daily poisoning of our atmosphere continues to increase. The hole in the ozone layer is growing, and the sun, the greatest life-giving power, is increasingly associated with cancer. The exploitation of natural resources continues. The world’s human population is exploding. With all of this, the end of mankind appears to be near. The danger of the end of the world is a global phenomenon. An all-out nuclear war between the superpowers would presumably have destroyed mankind. Similarly, the destruction of the environment is a threat that is not restricted solely to the industrialized nations. Third World countries increasingly damage their resources through overfertilization, overgrazing, excessive clearing of land, and other types of environmental exploitation. The fear of global destruction, however, is not equally universal. One can hardly deny the fact that it is particularly rife among the Germans—even their neighbors have noted it. In 1986 a major article in the French period- ical Documents, which concerns itself primarily with “German questions,” characterized the different reactions to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl as an example of the contrast between “German emotions and French indifference.” Without attempting to determine which response is the appropriate one, the article claimed that German discussions concerning nuclear arms and nuclear power are ﬁxated on the idea of destruction and that this obsession has predominated since 1945. Similarly, in the New Republic, Walter Laqueur asserted that Germans spend more sleepless nights than other people; that they constantly speak about their anxieties in newspapers articles and books, in television talk shows, and from the pulpit; and that they apparently suffer from the obsession that the world is coming to an immediate end.2

2. “L’apocalypse atomique: Émotions allemandes, indifférences françaises?”Documents: Introduction 3

The threat to our environment is one thing, while the fear of global destruction is quite a different matter, as is the manner in which one articulates this fear and seeks to overcome it. Discussions about this fear in newspaper articles, novels, and theater productions generally characterize the impending global catastrophe as the “apocalypse” and use apocalyptic images. The Germans appear to be leaders in this regard. The apocalypse is discussed in other countries as well—ﬁlms such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and novels by Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gabriel García Marquez´ recount disasters of an apocalyptic nature, and Jacques Derrida, the theoretician of postmodernism, has noted the “apocalyptic tone” in which the threat of nuclear war is discussed. But that apocalyptic tone is sounded particularly loudly and often in Germany. It is symptomatic of this tendency that the almanac of the Cousteau Society, An Inventory of Life on Our Water Planet, appeared in German under the title Die Reiter der Apokalypse (“The Horsemen of the Apocalypse”). In Germany, anything that provides even the slightest hint of global destruction is viewed as apocalyptic. It is literature and the theater in particular that treat the themes of the apocalypse and corresponding ideas. In the fall of 1983 Hans Neuenfels’s production of Zimmermann’s Soldaten (“Soldiers”) at the German Opera in Berlin led two critics to entitle their reviews “Clever and Absurd Apocalypse” and “Flood of Images of the Apocalypse.”3 A short while later the review of a ballet in Essen appeared under the title “Firebird of the Apocalypse.”4 At about the same time, at the annual meeting of the Drama Society in Munich, Bazon Brock delivered a stormy address against theater that was “addicted to the apocalypse.”5 Apparently his protest went unheeded: In the spring of 1984 the Frankfurt Playhouse produced Die Blume von Nagasaki (“The Flower of Nagasaki”) as an “apocalyptic revue.”6 In 1985, the “Theater im Bauturm” in Cologne organized an “Apocalyptic Night” with the reading of three pieces dealing with destruction: Herbert Achternbusch’s Sintﬂut (“Flood”), Dieter Hirschberg’s Dortmund: Das Nichts (“Dortmund: Nothingness”), and Urs Widmer’s Der neue Noah (“The New Noah”).7 In 1986 Harald Mueller aroused

Revue des questions allemandes 41 (1984): 3–5; Walter Laqueur, “Post-Pershing Germany,” New Republic (March 5, 1984), 19–23. 3. Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 3, 1983; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 4, 1983. 4. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 19, 1983. 5. Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 18, 1983. 6. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 29, 1984. 7. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, January 18, 1985. 4 The Apocalypse in Germany considerable attention with the apocalyptic drama Totenfloß (“Raft of the Dead”). Within a matter of a few months it had gone through twenty-one German-language productions.8 This list could easily be lengthened. And the novels and stories that draw horrifying pictures of the possible end of the world as “apocalypse” simply cannot be ignored any longer. Günter Grass’s Die Rättin (“The Rat”) and Christa Wolf’s Störfall (“Accident: A Day’s News”) are only the tip of this very considerable iceberg. In 1983 the writer Hans Christoph Buch expressed his belief “that the apocalyptic mood here in Germany represents a specifically German variant of a more general apocalyptic attitude. Of course, people in other countries are also concerned with war and peace, . . . but without, it seems to me, the eschatological hysteria and consequent panic that we manifest.”9 But what are the characteristics of the “specifically German” variant of this universal apocalyptic mood? It consists not only of increased fear of global destruction, but also of the expression of this fear in images and symbols of the “apocalypse.” This is not the first time that Germans have shown an inclination for the apocalyptic—apocalyptic interpretations of the world situation have long been popular in Germany. It is, perhaps, significant that the Germans have chosen Michael, the angel of the apocalypse, as their national saint. After the Second World War Thomas Mann noted that the Germans, in contrast to the French, had nothing better to do than to “dream of apocalypses,” just as they had done after the First World War.10 Indeed, both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to a flood of apocalyptic interpretations. But such unusual and terrible events as wars are not the only ones that appear apocalyptic to the Germans. It seems that a fundamental inclination to the apocalyptic worldview appeared in the political movements and ideologies that have had a substantial impact on Germany’s history during the last two hundred years. The image of the world that the Nazis created, resulting in the mass murder of the Jews, was apocalyptic. The outbreak of national feeling against Napoleon was characterized by apocalyptic images. From that time until the First World War and even afterward, German nationalism brought apocalyptic impulses in its wake. But even movements and ideologies that are generally designated “socialist” reveal the same tendencies. Theoreticians of this camp, from Karl Marx to Ernst Bloch, have made substantial contributions

8. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 18, 1986; Rheinischer Merkur/Christ und Welt, February 27, 1987. 9. Frankfurter Rundschau, May 14, 1983. 10. Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer, 1949), 190. Introduction 5 to the apocalyptic orientation of German socialism. And, finally, both art and literature have long shown the same fascination with the apocalypse. In this century alone, more than eighty cycles of the graphic arts pertaining to the apocalypse have been produced, not including paintings and pictures with only indirect references to apocalyptic themes.11 Literature is full of apocalyptic visions that come to life in the songs popular during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon as well as in the poems of the First World War, in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”), in expressionist dramas, and in fin de siècle and 1920s novels. What does it mean when an event, past or future, or the world situation as a whole is interpreted apocalyptically? The reason for such interpretations in our own time is obvious: the apocalypse means the total and final destruction of mankind and the end of the world. The vision of global destruction has always been one of the central ideas of the apocalypse, but that has not always been the end of the matter. In the Revelation of John, which gave the most important impetus to the tradition of apocalyptic thought, the end of the world was only a transitional phase, albeit an important one, to a “New Earth” and a “New Jerusalem.” This element has characterized apocalyptic thought up to our own century, even where it had already distanced itself from its religious origin: the old, imperfect, and corrupt world must be destroyed in order that a new and perfect one might be established. Ultimately, the apocalypse was concerned with this new world: the apocalypse was a vision of salvation. Only today, under the threat of an “apocalypse of our own making,” which Günther Anders has called “the very real possibility of self-destruction,” is salvation no longer in the picture.12 If we still speak of the apocalypse of a nuclear war, we are dealing with a “docked” apocalypse. We mean thereby only the first half of the traditional apocalyptic vision; the second half, the establishment of a new, perfect world, which earlier gave meaning and purpose to the end of the world, has disappeared. Why, then, do we still speak of the apocalypse, when we actually mean a final, total cataclysm with no prospect of salvation? Apparently the interpretations of the current situation and the future prospects of our world as apocalyptic arise from our need to deal symbolically with this situation and from our fear of what is coming. Mankind has always attempted to deal with crucial events and difficult problems of a political and existential nature not only through actions but also through symbolic speech that makes these events understandable, interprets their meaning, 11. See Richard W. Gassen and Bernhard Holeczek, eds., Apokalypse: Ein Prinzip Hoffnung? Ernst Bloch zum 100. Geburtstag, 7. 12. Anders, Die atomare Drohung, 93–94. 6 The Apocalypse in Germany and thereby provides orientation and emotional security. The apocalyptic interpretations of the past originated from this need as well. And the traditional virulence of apocalyptic thought in Germany is certainly one of the reasons that such interpretations are again being taken up, although their meaning has changed. Or has their meaning not changed so radically after all? The article in the journal Documents, which contrasts “French indifference” to “Ger- man emotions,” carried the heading “The Nuclear Apocalypse,” thereby maintaining that the anxious fixation of the Germans on destruction betrays a religious or quasi-religious longing for a totally different life, and that they are animated by the desire to rescue peace and nature at the same time.13 And “the question underlying” the great exhibition on the apocalypse that the Wilhelm Hack Museum organized on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the birthday of Ernst Bloch was whether, despite the nuclear threat and suicidal destruction of the environment, “the apocalypse might be a part of the ‘principle of hope’ or contain something like it.”14 Perhaps Germans have such a particular inclination to an apocalyptic worldview because apocalyptic symbolism still retains a link between destruction and renewal. Perhaps the “eschatological hysteria” of the Germans, articulated in apocalyptic terms, is so extreme because it stands in such close relation to the equally extreme and typically Ger- man longing for salvation, which comes with it, whether conscious or unconscious. Even if Germany appears in particular measure as “the land of the apocalypse,” Germans do not possess a monopoly on an apocalyptic worldview. The apocalyptic worldview originated in Judeo-Christian thought and spread along with this thought throughout the whole West.15 There have been apocalyptic interpretations of world events in every Christian

13. “L’apocalypse atomique,” 4. 14. Gassen and Holeczek, Apokalypse, 7. 15. I cannot deal here with the question of whether there are symbols, interpretations of the world and of history, that are comparable to the apocalypse in other civilizations, independent of the Judeo-Christian tradition. According to Norman Cohn’s latest book, the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition is itself rooted in Zoroastrian eschatology; see Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. Zoroastrian eschatology seems to have also influenced medieval Persian philosophy, and this tradition apparently had an impact for certain phenomena in contemporary Iran that show similarities to the apocalyptic worldview; see Ernst Böklen, Die Verwandtschaft der jüdisch- christlichen mit der parsischen Eschatologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1902); Isidor Scheftelowitz, Die altpersische Religion und das Judentum (Gießen: A. Töpelmann, 1920); and Wolfgang Günther Lerch, “Rückkehr zum Licht: Der Iran besinnt sich auf seine philosophische Tradition” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 26, 1987). Indian renewal movements, Pacific Cargo Cults, or the Germanic myth of Ragnarök (as of an apoc- Introduction 7 country, following the religious tradition or at least indirectly influenced by it. The First World War was understood in nearly all countries engaged in the combat as an apocalyptic event. Similarly, the current threats to our world have spawned associations with the apocalypse. But there are notable differences. Next to the Germans, Americans show the most distinct tendency to an apocalyptic worldview. Numerous religious groups brought the apocalyptic tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the Old World to the New. The influence of this tradition can still be seen today in literature and in statements by politicians. Until the First World War, Orthodox Russia showed a distinct inclination to apocalyptic interpretations, in particular with regard to its own role in history, and it is significant that the early Soviet Republic continued this tradition, albeit with different symbols. Still, apocalyptic thought has played a substantially less important role in other countries since the late Middle Ages, although there have been isolated expressions of apocalypticism in politics and society, for example, in England during the Puritan Revolution, as well as treatments of apocalyptic themes in philosophy, art, and literature. When I assert that apocalyptic thought has played a particularly significant role in Germany, I wish to emphasize not merely the number and intensity of apocalyptic expressions, but also their unique character—the “specifically German variant of the general apocalyptic type”—although it must be noted that this variant is not only a phenomenon of our own time. Numerous peculiarities of the “German spirit” (Geist), with its effects on politics, society, and culture from the eighteenth century until today, appear in a new light when they are seen as belonging to the “German apocalypse.”16 The apocalypse is a many-faceted phenomenon; that is, the apocalypse may be viewed from several different perspectives. Its origin is religious, alyptic event) attained their apocalyptic orientation under the influence of Christianity; see Wilhelm E. Mühlmann, Chiliasmus und Nativismus: Studien zur Psychologie, Soziologie und historischen Kasuistik der Umsturzbewegung; and Will-Erich Peuckert, “Germanische Eschatologien” (Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 32 [1935]: 1–37). Even the Japanese Aum sect has been influenced, under the guidance of its guru Shoko Asahara, by the Revelation of John. 16. In my view Hans Urs von Balthasar did not take advantage of this opporunity in his three-volume work, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltun- gen, although he takes into account a wealth of texts and provides some important insights. But he elevates the simple meaning of the word apokalypsis (“revelation, unveiling”) to a theoretical point of reference, equates apocalypse with eschatology (doctrine concerning the last things), and consequently subsumes everything to its primary concept, which is, in his understanding, “self-revelation of the soul” to its “eternal fate” (1:4). Thereby the specific element of apocalyptic exegeses of experience and of apocalyptic interpretations of meaning in their respective historical situation vanishes. 8 The Apocalypse in Germany and this religious dimension continues to the present. It has always been the object of theological discussion. The apocalypse has always had a great deal to do with the interpretation of history; consequently, it appears in philosophies of history as well as in political ideologies. This fact suggests a consideration in the history of ideas. To the extent that ideologies inspired by apocalyptic thought became socially active, the apocalypse represents a movement in the field of politics and society and demands an analysis from the perspective of social history. Apocalyptic ideas expressed in art—since the nineteenth century, particularly in literature—not only have had an impact on the specific content and on forms and style, but sometimes even gave artistic works themselves the appearance of an apocalyptic project of salvation. Viewing the apocalypse as an aesthetic phenomenon should not, however, be restricted to art; even religious, philosophical, and political writings have an aesthetic dimension that can express apocalyptic ideas. Finally, the apocalypse is an existential phenomenon. It results from specific experiences and emotions, for example, existential angst, as the apocalyptic interpretations of our own time demonstrate; it has its origin in questions concerning the meaning of human existence and in the desire for a new, totally different life and thus gives rise to philosophical and psychological reflections. I have attempted in this book to treat the various perspectives from which the “Apocalypse in Germany” may be considered, although this is often possible only through examples, in an interchange between systematic analyses and chronological presentations. Still, this procedure will show how the multifaceted phenomenon can be clarified step by step; and it will surprise the reader less and less to meet unanticipated relationships in the “apocalyptic spirit,” for example, between avant-garde movements of the twenties and fascist aesthetics or between Ernst Jünger and the terrorist “Red Army Faction.” I have given particular attention to the existential impulses in which such commonalities have their origin; and I hope to impress on the reader the conflicting feelings that are connected with the apocalypse: the fascination that originates from the vision of a radical renewal of life, as well as the terror over the consequences that such a vision can have. In addition, I have attempted to let the reader participate in my own approaches to the apocalypse, that is, the questions concerning what the apocalypse “actually” is, whether and how its meaning can be related to the “concept,” and what modern apocalypses have to do with the original, religious one. I also hope to communicate to the reader the gradual process of illumination that working on this book has provided for me. PART ONE Approaches This page intentionally left blank 1 How Exciting the Vision of the New World Is! Or, What Ernst Toller Connects with John of Patmos

“I was at the front for thirteen months, and by the end of that time the great emotions had become dulled, the great words mean. The war had become an everyday affair, life in the line a matter of routine; instead of heroes there were only victims; volunteers fell in bondage; life had become hell, death a bagatelle. We were all of us cogs in a great machine which sometimes rolled forward, nobody knew where, sometimes backwards, nobody knew why. We had lost our enthusiasm, our courage, the very sense of our identity; there was no rhyme or reason in all this slaughter and devastation; pain itself had lost its meaning; the earth was a barren desert.”1 With these devastating experiences, war volunteer Ernst Toller’s time at the front ended. In 1916, ill, he was released from the army. In the following months he sought desperately “to find a way out of the dreadful confusion, a new way out of the chaos.”2 In 1917 he wrote his first drama, Die Wandlung (“Transfiguration”), in which he presented the troubling images of senseless killing and dying and outlined the way by which he believed that he could transform men who had become mere machines into real human beings, thereby renewing the world. What is apocalyptic about Die Wandlung? Numerous apocalyptic themes—the image of a world that is thoroughly corrupt, chaotic, murderous, evil, a world that died and became “rubble” and “slag,”3 “ripe for annihilation”4—are sounded in this drama. In contrast to this image is the vision of a new world full of life and joy:

1. I Was a German: The Autobiography of Ernst Toller (New York: Morrow, 1934), 90 (trans. of Eine Jugend in Deutschland). 2. Ibid., 88–89; see also 84–87. 3. Ernst Toller, Transﬁguration, trans. Edward Crankshaw, in Modern Continental Dra- mas, ed. Harlan Hatcher (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 680 (trans. of Die Wandlung). 4. Toller, I Was a German, 88.

11 12 The Apocalypse in Germany

Now down the arches of the years I see The great cathedral of mankind arise Through doors ﬂung wide The youth of every nation marches singing Towards a crystal shrine. Radiant visions— No misery, no war, no hatred left on earth And mothers garlanding their bright boys For games of joy and dances of increase. Stride on, oh youth, stride on, oh fruitful youth, Rebirthing eternally, eternally destroying the barren world; Thus create life glowing with spirit.5

But it is not simply the dualism of good and evil, nor the contrast of destruction and renewal, that reﬂect apocalyptic themes in Toller’s drama. It is the taut expectation expressed in the vision of “transformation,” redolent of the Revelation of John, that has had the most lasting impact on our notion of an apocalyptic transformation:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the ﬁrst heaven and the ﬁrst earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.6

The expectation spawned by the vision of a new world and a redeemed mankind affects the whole scenario and gives it both an absoluteness and a radicalness that contribute to its apocalyptic character. There are no nuances; the former existence is so suffused with cries of pain and unspeakable suffering, with madness, hate, and malice, that redemption appears possible only through the destruction of the old world in order to prepare the way for the new. And so strong is the anticipation that the old situation is no longer bearable, and the vision gives the certainty that

5. Toller, Transfiguration, 681; the translation of this passage has been slightly changed in order to make it more consistent with the German original. 6. Rev. 21:1–5 (unless otherwise specified, all biblical citations are to the King James Version). How Exciting the Vision of the New World Is! 13 transformation is imminent. “The action takes place in Europe before the beginning of regeneration,” it says at the beginning of Toller’s drama. “The time is at hand. . . . Surely, I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”7 So ends the Revelation of John. The “apocalypse” is not an event, but rather a text that describes and interprets an event in a particular manner. If Toller’s drama Die Wandlung appears to be apocalyptic, it is because it suggests associations conveyed by other texts that are called “apocalyptic,” or because we immediately recognize the similarities in Die Wandlung with these texts, especially the Revelation of John. For two thousand years the Revelation of John has fascinated minds with its pregnant imagery. Indeed, the word used as the collective term for this genre of literature comes from the initial sentence of the Revelation of John: “The apokalypsis [“unveiling, revelation”] of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John.” If we wish to determine whether a modern text is apocalyptic we must establish criteria based on the texts that form the basis of our notion of “apocalypse”—besides the Revelation of John, the Book of Daniel (the only apocalypse accepted into the canon of the Old Testament),in addition to the numerous apocryphal apocalypses of the intertestamental literature,8 besides the so-called little apocalypse of the synoptic Gospels9 and other apocalyptic passages in the New Testament.10 Determining the specific features that characterize apocalyptic texts from the three centuries around the birth of Christ is the first step. Naturally, texts that are produced two thousand years after that time have a different character and their own “meaning,” even if they display numerous similarities with ancient apocalyptic texts. Further, they exist in other literary traditions and in their own historical contexts. Still, some attention to ancient apocalyptic texts is useful since, through an acquaintance with the original meaning and characteristic features of “apocalypse,” we gain a point of reference that enables us to understand their similarities as well as their differences. Since at first we are only concerned with the external features of the texts, we can initially expect no more than a kind of typology of the elements that relates to structure,

7. Toller, Transfiguration, 59; Rev. 22:10, 20. 8. The Apocalypse of Baruch, the Book of Jubilees, the Psalms of Solomon, the Sybilline writings, the Ethiopic and Slavic Book of Enoch, the Fourth Book of Ezra, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Apocalypse of Abraham, and the Testament of Abraham. 9. Matt. 24–25; Mark 13; Luke 21:5–36. 10. Especially 1 Thess. 4:13–5:11. 14 The Apocalypse in Germany content, style, and form that are characteristic of apocalyptic texts. When we discover “typological” similarities with modern texts, we must be conscious that such a comparison is unhistorical and that it leaves open numerous questions, in particular questions regarding the characteristic historical features of the texts. Still, it is striking how many similarities many modern texts have with ancient apocalypses: our brief comparison of Toller’s Wandlung with the Revelation of John has already demonstrated that. Chief among the features of structure and content in the apocalypse is the clear-cut dualism that characterizes the scenario, the persons, the evaluations, and the images and symbols. The dualism that exists between the old and the new world is of a qualitative nature: the old world is deficient, full of sorrow, pain, and death, while the new is perfect, a world of happiness, joy, and life. Dualism is of a moral nature: the old world is corrupt and evil, the new pure and good. Dualism determines the structure of the action and has a temporal plane: it constitutes a “before” and “after” between which there is no link, but only the radical transition of “transformation,” the comprehensive renewal through the destruction of the old. Dualism affects persons: in the old Jewish and Christian apocalypses God or the Messiah brings about the renewal. Together with his angels and the pious who have been true to him, he represents the new world and its qualities. Representatives of the old world are the devil and the powers connected with him, the opponents of the faithful. In Toller’s drama, the young man Friedrich leads despairing men to transformation. He is a messianic figure; he suffers through war and social misery like a passion, at the end of which he dies and is reborn. He thus transforms himself into the “New Man,” who knowingly anticipates the new world, unmasks the representatives of the old world as “men who bring dishonor on the name of God,”11 and brings about the new birth of mankind. Dualism determines the images and symbols: the Revelation of John contrasts the Lamb on the throne in heaven with the images of revolting beasts from the abyss; the New Jerusalem, having the luster of the most precious pearls and jewels, is contrasted with an offensive and bloodthirsty Babylon. In the apocalyptic passage of the first epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul is constantly playing with the contrasting images of night and day, darkness and light, sleep and wakefulness, drunkenness and sobriety.12 And, as we have already seen, Toller clothes the contrast of the old and new worlds in images of suffering against those of joy; of the rigidly material against the spiritual; of death

11. Toller, Transfiguration, 680. 12. 1 Thess. 5. How Exciting the Vision of the New World Is! 15 against life: of the hungry and lame against garlanded boys playing and dancing full of joy; of “rubble” and “parched slag” against “life glowing with spirit.” The image of the new world unfolds as a vision before the inner eye. This fact affects not only the form and imagery of most apocalyptic texts, but also their style and manner of speech. In “radiant visions” Toller sees mankind reborn; in the Book of Daniel God’s judgment of the old world and the establishment of the new is revealed in vision;13 and in the Revelation of John almost every new image is introduced with the stock phrase “and I saw,” or “and, behold, I saw.” Its portrayal as a dream or vision allowed the imagination to depict images of exquisite color and newness, images of horses with the heads of lions from whose mouths fire and smoke and sulfur emanate, with tails like serpents that kill men, of an angel who is clothed with a cloud and has a rainbow on his head and a countenance like the sun and feet like pillars of fire, of a city that comes down from heaven, adorned like a bride, with gates made of pearls and streets of pure gold like transparent glass,14 of a “cathedral of mankind” and “a crystal shrine.”15 These images are so rich and intense that one is inclined to believe that they come involuntarily to the visionaries. The insistency of images gives a sense of urgency to the visions; the visionary gives expression to his conviction that what he has just seen will become reality in the immediate future. And he is thoroughly conscious of his significance as a visionary who was permitted to look upon the new world and who can show the way to salvation. The first verses of Revelation, in which John testifies that “everything that he saw” was sent to him by God and that whoever hears and observes the prophecy will be saved, reveal the same self-consciousness as may be seen in the prologue, “Arousing,” in Toller’s Wandlung:

A brother, possessed of great knowledge Of all suffering and joy . . . Who passionately shouts The way! The way! Thou poet wise.16

The consciousness of being endowed with a world-shattering, world- transforming vision and of being able to point the way to salvation,

13. Dan. 2:19, 7:1. 14. Rev. 9:17–19, 10:1, 21:2, 21. 15. Toller, Transfiguration, 681. 16. Ibid., 240. 16 The Apocalypse in Germany the sense of unconditionalness with which the visionary new world is separated from the old, the immediate expectation of transformation, and the flood of images in which the vision comes to mind all contribute to the excitement and heightened sense of expectation that characterize apocalyptic texts. This excitement is expressed in striking language (noted at the beginning of our observations) that takes us beyond the text. It is rooted in the situation that produced the vision. Even if we were not to know it from other sources, the content and character of the apocalyptic texts themselves would indicate that this situation is extreme. For Toller it is the First World War, whose unspeakable misery at the front and at home the author of Wandlung experienced himself. The Revelation of John originated toward the end of the first century a.d., presumably around 95, during the last years of the reign of the Emperor Domitian, who required sacrifice at the imperial image, thereby providing occasion to punish the Christians who refused. The Book of Revelation, addressed to the churches of Asia Minor and containing admonitions to be steadfast, refers directly to this situation and faithfully reflects, on the whole, the persecutions of the Christians during the preceding decades. The origin of the Book of Daniel is generally set in the time between 168 and 164 b.c. Its historical context was deeply affected by the rule of the Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom over Palestine and the oppression of those Jews who opposed Hellenization. The immediate occasion for chapters 2 and 7 may have been the religious decree of King Antiochus IV Epiphanes of 168–167 b.c., which resulted in the introduction of Hellenistic cult practices into the temple—for pious Jews the most terrible of abominations—and forbade Jewish worship, leading to the persecution of the Jews who remained steadfast. In the background of the apocryphal apocalypses from the two centuries around the birth of Christ are the numerous suppressed revolts of the Jews against the rule of Rome over Palestine, as well as religious wars of Jewish sects among themselves. Accordingly, typological similarities exist between the old and new apocalyptic texts, as well as between their respective historical contexts: they all deal with an extreme situation of oppression, persecution, and violence, to which pious and upright persons are exposed and which causes them to despair concerning the meaning of their life and of the world as a whole. These commonalities are, of course, of a very general nature, since it is clear that each event is unique and can be differentiated as sharply from other historical situations as can the First World War from the persecutions of the early Christians. These similarities come most sharply into focus when they are given an apocalyptic interpretation, while the specific historical details of these events stand out when the connections How Exciting the Vision of the New World Is! 17 of the apocalyptic texts to their historical context are the central object of investigation. Still, these typological commonalities remain important as a starting point for making further connections and comparisons. Among modern texts, so far only Toller’s Wandlung has been taken into consideration in showing such similarities. I chose that drama, of course, because it has a particularly large number of features in common with ancient apocalypses. Still, in order to show that this text is not unique in this regard, and in order to enlarge our understanding of features typical of the apocalypse, I wish to investigate another text with regard to its apocalyptic character, a text that differs from Toller’s drama in numerous respects and, in addition, was written a century earlier: Ernst Moritz Arndt’s Geist der Zeit (“Spirit of the Age”). Arndt wrote the essays and political pamphlets contained in the second and third volumes of his Geist der Zeit between 1807 and 1813, from the time of Prussia’s defeat at the hands of Napoleon until the beginning of the Wars of Liberation, that is, during the period of Napoleon’s greatest power and the nadir of the power of the German states. For a German patriot the situation must have been depressing, but Arndt was not satisfied with decrying Napoleon’s rule and the weakness of Germany, hoping, perhaps, for the renewal of the political order of Germany. For him the situation fit the apocalyptic scenario. This meant that he understood the events of the day as a battle between the powers of good and evil, indeed, as the decisive conflict, as the “last holy war,” which would decide the fate not only of Germany but also of the whole world. Napoleon was for him not a political opponent, but rather the “Prince of Darkness and Enemy of the Sons of Light,” “the Devil on his infernal throne,” in short, “completely evil.” In Arndt’s view he had filled the world with such abominations and so corrupted everything, even many Germans, that, together with Napoleon, “everything old” must be “smashed . . . in order that what is new can arise.” And this “new” means not merely the rearrangement of the political order and of societal life, but also “the new birth of the ages,” nothing less than “redemption.”17 Arndt’s interpretation, too, conveys the impression of being apocalyptic because of the agitation it betrays. In a state of deepest humiliation and despair, which Arndt describes with passionate words, he wrote his Letztes Wort an die Deutschen (“Final Word to the Germans”) in the fall of 1808, where he reveals the vision of a new world and of a changed, godlike man: 17. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Geist der Zeit, vols. 2 and 3, in Ernst Moritz Arndt, Sämtliche Werke, vols. 9 and 10, ed. E. Schirmer (Magdeburg: Magdeburger Verlags-Anstalt, n.d.), 2:128, 2:96, 3:110, 2:220, 2:207, 3:299, 3:292. 18 The Apocalypse in Germany

“Oh holy enthusiasm of future generations, sweet happiness and sweet consolation in a time that frightens terrestrial and shortsighted man just as much with imagined as with real terrors! The time will come, when the learned and ennobled man, who still now experiences only error and misery and, though possessed of rich knowledge, still has only a poor life, will enter into true spiritual greatness and certainty as the god and lord of the earth.”18 Arndt is conscious of the excitement into which his vision transports him, and he even asks himself whether it does not blur insight and judgment: “Am I enthusing? Yes, since every blessed and inspired person enthuses. Do I rave? No, for I have spoken the deeper truth. Am I speaking out of place? No, for I have never spoken anything more joyful.” It is the grandeur of his vision, his certainty of its quick fulfillment, his sense that a view of the new world will liberate him from the misery of the present, and, not least, the consciousness of being lifted by the vision from the mass of those who suffer unknowingly, which justifies his high sense of expectation: “I am as certain of the eternal honor and endless life of my race as I am of well-being after disaster and calm following a storm. I experience the terrors and confusion of the present; like others, I sense anger and sorrow at its horrors; but I look beyond that to the Golden Age.”19 As in Toller’s Wandlung, we see in Arndt’s writings more than mere typological similarities with ancient apocalyptic texts. Their historical settings, as well, show similarities to the situations in which the other apocalyptic texts originated: the visionary and those to whom he speaks see themselves exposed to oppression, persecution, and violence. Once again there is a question of how great these similarities are. It appears that, beyond certain basic features in common, many of these similarities are a function of apocalyptic interpretation. On the other hand, the apocalyptic interpretation is itself rooted in a specific historical situation and is powerfully influenced by it. Ought not, then, the explanation for the similarities in these apocalyptic texts be sought in the character of that historical context? There have, of course, been in history many persecutions and violent repressions of individuals and of whole peoples that did not call forth apocalyptic interpretations. I shall deal in greater detail below with what forms the basis of apocalyptic interpretations.

18. Ibid., 2:211. 19. Ibid., 214. 2 Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia?

According to Ernst Bloch the New Jerusalem is a utopia. He regarded the judgment on the wicked and the redemption of the persecuted in the Revelation of John as the “arch-utopian archetype.” Are all apocalypses accordingly utopias as well? Peter Ludz appears to be of this opinion; for him, utopias are “already found in apocalyptic Judaism.” “Of course,” he adds as a qualification, in reality only expanding thereby the scope of its meaning, “eschatology, utopia, and millenarianism here merge. Jewish messianism is, beyond that, simultaneously a utopian, religious, and social phenomenon.” The situation appears to be unclear, and it becomes even more complicated when we consider definitions of more recent manifestations of the apocalypse. David Roberts, for example, says about a selection of poems from the expressionist anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (“Twilight of Mankind”): “The first and last section breathe the spirit of eschatology, apocalyptic in the first and millenarian in the last.” For him, the apocalyptic and millenarianism are opposites, as are also eschatology and utopia, and, accordingly, he also sees a contrast between apocalypse and millenarianism on the one hand and utopia on the other.1 We are not spared the need to untangle this muddle somewhat. To be sure, in doing so, we encounter some fundamental problems. The concepts that appear again and again in connection with the apocalypse, which Peter Ludz has gathered so meticulously, are generally used as scientific terms, that is, with the intention of classifying phenomena of different times and cultures as being of the same kind. But are all of these terms really appropriate to it? When they can sometimes designate opposites while at other times designate phenomena that merge, questions about their scientific value arise. And what are “scientific” terms in this context, in any event? 1. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 2:1132; Peter Ludz, “Utopie,” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, ed. Kurt Galling, 3d ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1957–1965), vol. 6, col. 1217; David Roberts, “ ‘Menschheitsdämmerung’: Ideologie, Utopie, Eschatologie,” 88, 97.

19 20 The Apocalypse in Germany

The situation is relatively simple when we say: “The ‘New Jerusalem’ expresses the eschatological ideas of the Revelation of John.” In this case the “New Jerusalem” is a part of historical reality, that is, it functions as a symbol that has a specific meaning within the religious phenomena that the Revelation of John documents; and “eschatology” is a concept used in scholarly discourse that classifies the meaning of the symbol. For purposes of classification, it was made up in the seventeenth century,2 although it did not become dominant as the term for the Christian “teaching about the last things”—thus the literal meaning of eschatology—before the nineteenth century; but then it became the general theological term for concepts about the other world. The definition in the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche of 1898, for example, gives an idea of what the concept embraces and where its boundaries lie: “The word . . . includes all notions that deal with the end of human terrestrial life, in particular the prospects for what may lie after earthly life, not merely for the whole of humanity, but for each individual.”3 This definition could also be used for apocalypse, but since the term eschatology is supposed to include all notions that deal with the end of human terrestrial life, it cannot designate what is specifically apocalyptic. It is less easy to determine whether the apocalypse can also be designated as a kind of utopia. For, in contrast to eschatology, “utopia” has not always been a concept of scholarly language that was coined with a definition. Originally utopia was much like New Jerusalem, a symbol with a limited meaning in a particular historical context, a symbolic designation in the sense of the “telling name” (from the Greek ou topos, “no place”). Thomas More gave this name to the island about which he sketched in his 1516 fictional travelogue an idealized picture of political organization and societal life. In contrast to New Jerusalem, utopia entered scholarly language as well as everyday speech. A glance at the dictionary shows us what meanings are attested there for the word utopian: “visionary, idealistic, unrealistic.”4 It

2. Presumably by A. Calov, who used the term in place of the otherwise usual “De novissimis” to designate the final part of Christian dogmatics (death, resurrection, judgment, end of the world); see the article “Eschatologie,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971–). 3. “Eschatologie,” in Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, ed. Albert Hauck (Leipzig: J. H. Hinrichs, 1896–1913). In theological studies there is, of course, some discussion about the different shadings of the definition of the term and especially about the meaning of eschatology in Judaism and Christianity, but these need not concern us here; see “Eschatologie,” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Josef Höfer and Karl Rahner, 2d ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1957–1968); Gerhard Krause and Gerhard Müller, eds., Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1977); Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart; and Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. 4. Der Große Duden: Fremdwörterbuch, vol. 5 (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1966). Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 21 seems clear that we cannot properly classify the New Jerusalem with these meanings or with the original meaning of More’s ideal island state. Eric Voegelin described the fundamental problem: “Man does not wait for science to have his life explained to him, and when the theorist approaches social reality he finds the field pre-empted by what may be called the self-interpretation of society.” This self-interpretation is made through symbols “in various degrees of compactness and differentiation,” and the self-illumination of society through symbols “is an integral part of social reality.”5 If the scholar wishes to analyze social reality with its symbols, he makes it an object of study, but he frequently does it by means of concepts that originate in the reality of symbolic self-interpretation, which he describes as the “object.” In such cases it is necessary to determine whether the historically unique symbols of self-interpretation can be generalized to scientific concepts and what scope they gain thereby. Karl Mannheim discussed how this could be done when he attempted to clarify the meaning of the term utopia. First of all, there is the possibility of establishing meaning by definition: “Insofar as we define: ‘Utopia shall signify such and such . . . ,’ no one can object to our procedure, because we admit that the definition is designed only for certain purposes.” This approach is honest and necessary in order that it be clear what the term is supposed to mean, but it is at the same time unsatisfactory, since it opens the door to arbitrary limitations that have nothing at all to do with the original or the still present symbol of self-interpretation. But it would be equally unsatisfactory to accept only the historical meaning of a term. In that case there would be no opportunity to understand “events [that] are to be grouped and classified not on the basis of a principle of similarity, but rather as phenomena whose relationship is discoverable (through discernible marks) as parts of the unique historical situation” and to illuminate structures in history. This is precisely our intention when we classify as apocalyptic modern works such as Toller’s Wandlung. As a solution, Mannheim suggested that a systematically constructed definition be used to “link such a definition with the historically evolved connotation of the term,” that is, to use “constructions, [that] have their roots in empirical reality.” Thereby it would be guaranteed that elements emphasized in the construction would also “be present as significant features” in historical events as well.6 Such a procedure may also be used for other concepts under discussion. Millenarianism and messianism are terms frequently used in scholarly language, but they likewise go back to symbols of self-interpretation. An 5. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 27. 6. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 200–202. 22 The Apocalypse in Germany overview of the origin and previous manner of use can explain to what historic phenomena they refer and with what meaning they may be used. Since millenarianism and messianism come closer in meaning to apocalypse than utopia, and since the utopian character of the apocalypse also includes features that are designated millenarian and messianic, I will direct my attention to these two terms first. Chiliasm and the synonymous term millenarianism, which is more widely used in English, are both derived from the number one thousand (Greek chília éte, Latin millennium, “period of a thousand years”); they go back to the symbol of the “thousand-year kingdom” in Revelation 20:4. In their narrowest meaning they refer to the belief that before the Last Judgment and entrance into the Heavenly Jerusalem a period of peace lasting a thousand years will be established under the rule of Christ. Like many other concepts ending in -ism that were coined since the seventeenth century to designate systems of thought and belief, the terms chiliasm and millenarianism were first used only in the modern period. The concept of millenarianism was current in Germany in the eighteenth century;7 at the beginning of his comprehensive Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus (“Critical History of Millenarianism”), published in 1781, Heinrich Corrodi attempted to define millenarianism as a “system” of religious expectation concerning the future. Kant used the word in 1798 for a systematic “classification of the term from what one wishes to know concerning the future.” To be sure, the designation for the adherents of a belief in a thousand-year kingdom was fixed at an early period; in De Civitate Dei Augustine called them chiliastai and miliarii, with the intention of characterizing them as representatives of a heresy. Like many fathers of the Church, Augustine originally had believed in the millennial kingdom but later on, in his magnum opus, took the position that the number one thousand was not to be understood literally, but rather “spiritually,” in the sense that “the fullness of times is designated with a perfect number.”8 This view was accepted as a doctrine at the Coun- cil of Ephesus in 431 and has since remained the teaching of the Church.

7. Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1793–1801), only knows the adjective chiliastisch, although the term is already well known to Heinrich Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chil- iasmus, and Bengel uses it as early as 1740 (Johann Albrecht Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung und Vielmehr JEsu Christi . . . [Stuttgart: Erhardt, 1740], introduction, 10, 942). In England there is an early attestation of the term with reference to Augustine (“Chiliasm,” Oxford English Dictionary [Oxford, 1933]); but the terms deriving from the Latin millennium appear in 1650 as millenarism, in 1676 as millenisme, in 1721 as millenianism, and ﬁnally in 1864 as millenarianism (see the relevant entries and editions of the Oxford English Dictionary). 8. Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, vi; Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultät- en (1798), in Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 23

The designation “chiliasts” was thus originally a terminological and polemical concept used in religious and theological discussion. The modern concept of millenarianism was also used mostly with the purpose of demarcating and devaluing. Since the eighteenth century the adherents of a belief in a millennial kingdom have been under attack from two sides, not only from the side of the Catholic Church and Protestant orthodoxy, but also from representatives of the Enlightenment and “rational religion.” Thus, for example, as Corrodi made clear from the outset in his Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, he viewed millenarianism as “religious fanaticism” based on “deceptions” and “fallacies” that offered “rich material for amusement,” and saw his task as “presenting all these types of religious enthusiasm in a negative light.” Consequently, believers in the millennial kingdom themselves hardly used this term that was stigmatized in this manner. The Protestant millenarian Bengel, who represents an exception to this rule, had a difﬁcult time defending “so notorious a name” and distinguished “pseudo-millenarianism” from true (i.e., his own) millenarianism. The critical component of the term millenarianism was retained when it was transferred to political ideologies that predicted and strove for a condition of perfection on this earth, as, for example, when Max Scheler spoke of the “millenarian hope of the communist state of the future.”9 By his critical use of the term chiliastai, Augustine attacked what he viewed as an untrustworthy, speculative interpretation of the Scriptures. In fact, from the beginning the millenarians inclined to speculation. John of Patmos had prophesied that the thousand-year kingdom would be established “shortly.” After time had passed and nothing happened, believers in the thousand-year kingdom resorted to complicated calculations in order to determine its onset. The end of history preceding the millennial kingdom could best be determined if the whole period of world history was counted. The early Christian chiliasts attempted this, as Augustine reports, basing their calculations upon the Creation account, the prophecy of the thousand-year kingdom and Psalm 90, according to which to God a thousand years are like a day. Accordingly, the history of the world should last for six thousand years, analogous to the six days of Creation, followed by the Sabbath rest of the millennial kingdom. In order to determine precisely when the six thousand years would be over, one could count up

Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 9:352; Augustine, De Civitate Dei Libri XXII, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alfons Kalb, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981), 2:420–21. 9. Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, vi–x; Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung, 942; Max Scheler, Der Friede unter den Konfessionen (1920–1921), in Scheler, Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Francke and Bouvier, 1954–1997), 6:251; see also Fritz Gerlich, Der Kommunismus als Lehre vom Tausendjährigen Reich. 24 The Apocalypse in Germany the ages of the Patriarchs and include in the calculation further dates and prophecies from the apocryphal writings.10 The characteristics of millenarian belief should by now be clear: Fol- lowing the original prediction of the thousand-year kingdom, prophecy becomes a learned phenomenon, that is, it develops into a speculation that bases itself upon exegesis, namely, upon the secondary interpretation of texts. Speculation is required in attempts to determine the beginning of the thousand-year reign. For this purpose the whole of world history is taken into consideration and developed into a speculation on history. Special calculations serve to ascribe a system to history that expresses itself in the tendency to periodization. These features characterize Christian millenarian speculation up to the present. The designation of millenarianism as a systematic speculation on history still leaves room for rather varied interpretations. The south Italian abbot Joachim of Fiore, for example, who worked out the most inﬂuential historical speculation of the Middle Ages, divided world history into three ages (Latin status), corresponding to the Trinity: one of the Father, one of the Son, and one of the Holy Ghost. The third, which should begin “soon,” can be seen as analogous to the thousand-year reign, but Joachim avoided specifying when it would begin or how long it would last, in order not to contradict the authority of Augustine, nor did he prophesy the return of Christ.11 The English chiliasts of the seventeenth century relied upon the Book of Daniel and speculated about a “ﬁfth monarchy” following the four empires that are prophesied there.12 Further, “premillennialists” may be distinguished from “postmillennialists” depending on whether the return of Christ was expected at the beginning or at the end of the millennium.13 And Bengel, who in 1740 developed a particularly complicated key to calculating these events, by means of which he connected the prophecies of

10. Augustine, De Civitate Dei 2:419; Hippolytus and Julius Africanus, for example, set the birth of Christ at the year 5500 of the history of the world; see Adolf Bauer, Ursprung und Fortwirken der christlichen Weltchronik (Graz: Leuschner und Lubensky, 1910). 11. Abbatis Joachim Liber Concordie Novi ac Veteris Testamenti (Venice: Simon de Luere, 1519); Expositio Magni Prophete Abbatis Joachimi in Apocalipsim (Venice: Franciscus Bindonus and Mapheus Pasynus, 1527); see also Herbert Grundmann, Studien über Joachim von Floris (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927), especially 64, 138; Herbert Grundmann, Neue Forschungen über Joachim von Fiore, 22–23, 112; and Bernhard Töpfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens: Zur Entwicklung chiliastischer Zukunftshoffnungen im Hochmittelalter, 48–85. 12. Thomas Goodwin, A Sermon of the Fifth Monarchy . . . (London: Livewel Chap- man, 1654); see also Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress, 88–92. 13. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1974), 33–34 (unless otherwise speciﬁed, all citations are to this edition); “Chiliasmus,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 25

Figure 1 Calculation of the World’s age from the Creation to Moses. A Scheme of the Lives of the Patriarchs from Adam to Moses. Illustration in collection of the author. the Revelation of John with historical occurrences, actually believed that he had to add two thousand years for the period between the antecedent history and the Last Judgment.14 These differences in content may pass, but when the term millenarianism is used for modern ideologies such as communism, its definition should be used to designate only a systematic speculation about history that envisions a condition of perfection on this earth. Still, such a definition does not specifically characterize the apocalypse, since by this definition the term can serve not only to designate systems of speculation that (like the Revelation of John) look forward to the millennial kingdom as a breach in the absolute deficiency of history, but also to indicate those that view the condition of perfection as the goal of a progressive evolutionary development. Joachim of Fiore represents this latter type, with his division

14. Johann Albrecht Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis oder vielmehr JEsu Christi . . . , ed. Christian Burk, new ed. (Stuttgart: Fr. Brodhag, 1834), 586. 26 The Apocalypse in Germany of history into the ages of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; Kant also called the idea that the human race was “constant[ly] progress[ing] to a higher state [zum Besseren],” particularly “the goal of progress broadly conceived,” millenarianism.15 Thereby this concept breaks away from a decisive meaning of the apocalypse—from which the millenarian belief itself originated—namely, from the view that redemption has to be brought about through the destruction of the corrupt old world, and it neglects the experiential causes that have produced the apocalypse. The views of history designated “millenarian” apparently tend to detach themselves from the original experiential causes of the apocalypse and to make themselves independent as mere speculations. In recent times, the term millenarianism is used in a way that places the historical context of chiliastic belief more squarely into the foreground. Norman Cohn began his book The Pursuit of the Millennium with the statement: “Between the close of the eleventh century and the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth it repeatedly happened in Europe that the desire of the poor to improve the material conditions of their lives became transfused with fantasies of a new Paradise on earth, a world purged of suffering and sin, a Kingdom of the Saints.” He included under the term social millenarianism the corresponding movements of the pauperes from the period of the Crusades to the Münster Anabaptists and understood them as protest movements of the lower classes that were pressing for social change. This perspective was taken over by sociologists, historians, and anthropologists and transferred to other phenomena that were also called “millenarianism.” Cohn himself noted similarities among the outbreaks in the late Middle Ages and modern totalitarian movements, while others interpreted primitive forms of social revolt in European and non-European societies as millenarianism.16 We will leave open the question whether it is meaningful to widen the scope of the term millenarianism so far that it includes the reform movements of North American Indians and Paciﬁc Cargo Cults. It is doubtless appropriate to classify many of the manifestations of chiliastic belief during the late Middle Ages, as well, presumably, as some in the early Christian period and many modern varieties as protest movements of the lower social classes. Still, a generalization along these lines would be incorrect. There were also quietistic sects that maintained their belief in the thousand-year

15. Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, 353. 16. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, xiii–xiv, 307–9; see also Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, especially 57–65; and Mühlmann, Chiliasmus und Nativismus. Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 27 reign in seclusion from society and in passive expectation;17 there were even millenarian groups that supported the existing political, societal, and ecclesiastical order. In the Middle Ages there were the so-called last- emperor prophecies that predicted a powerful reign under the rule of the reigning emperor or a successor from his house.18 One example is particularly interesting, because it was snatched from oblivion in quite recent times: the Ludus de Antichristo. The play originated early in the reign of Barbarossa in the court—perhaps even at the command of the court—and had as its unmistakable object the glorification of the Hohenstaufen Empire and the glorification of the imperial idea.19 It is not mere coincidence that a few years after the founding of the German Empire in 1871 two translations were published,20 and it is perhaps even more significant that two more translations appeared in the period of national depression after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, in several editions, and a whole series of performances followed.21 A member of the “Conservative Revolution,” Albrecht Erich Günther, “one of the most impassioned preachers of the imperial idea,” said at the time: “I see in a good amateur performance of Ludus de Antichristo a most sublime tribute to the Empire,”22 and Gottfried Hasenkamp, one of the translators, explained the “profound effect” of the play during the Weimar period as resulting from the “deep yearning for a new marriage of power with a saving grace for the fulfillment of its mission in the West”23—of the German Empire, one might add. In the course of our investigation we will see further examples of apocalyptic interpretations of political situations that are affirmative or at least not revolutionary. My purpose here is simply to show that even the sociological or sociohistorical use of the term millenarianism cannot reduce the diverse, even contrasting, manifestations to a single common denominator. In more recent scholarly literature, millenarianism is often used synony-

17. Cohn, Pursuit, xiv; and Töpfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens, 330, concede this as well. 18. Töpfer, Das kommend Reich des Friedens, 18–21; Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, 29–30; Franz Kampers, Vom Werdegang der abendländischen Kaisermystik (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924). 19. Wilhelm Kamlah, “Der Ludus de Antichristo,” Historische Vierteljahresschrift 28 (1933–1934): 53–87; Töpfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens, 19–20. 20. Johannes Wedde, Das Drama vom Römischen Reiche deutscher Nation (Hamburg: K. Grädener, 1878); Gerhard von Zezschwitz, Das mittelalterliche Drama vom Ende des Römischen Kaisertums deutscher Nation (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1877). 21. Ludwig Benninghoff, Ludus de Antichristo oder Das Spiel vom Kaiserreich und vom Antichrist (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1922); Gottfried Hasenkamp, Das Spiel vom Antichrist (Münster: Aschendorff, 1932), see also the foreword to the 5th ed. (1961), 3. 22. Rudolf Mirbt, Münchener Laienspielführer (Munich: Kaiser, 1934), 42. 23. Hasenkamp, Das Spiel vom Antichrist (1961), 3. 28 The Apocalypse in Germany mously with messianism in order to designate specific political and social movements. Messianism is the most recent among the terms discussed here, although the concept from which it ultimately derives is the oldest. The origin is the expectation—appearing in Judaism since the time of King David and increasing with the political decline of Israel—of the appearance of a “Messiah.” It is not always completely clear what was understood by this Messiah; originally one probably thought of a political leader or king who would renew the Davidic kingship, but in the course of time the Messiah took on more and more the characteristics of a supernatural Redeemer. In this sense the designation was applied to Jesus (Greek Christos, “Messiah”). Christianity, which in its early period expected the speedy return of Christ, can, to that extent, be viewed as a messianic belief. At the same time there remained in Judaism the expectation of a Messiah. The Jewish apocalypses and the rabbinic writings of the first centuries after Christ, which gave expression to these hopes, and the millenarian expectations of the early Christians coincided at many points and influenced each other. To an extent, the Jews also awaited an interregnum of differing durations of time before the Last Judgment: in the Apocalypse of Ezra, for example, it is set at four hundred years. Most probably the thousand-year reign of the Revelation of John originates in such Jewish concepts.24 Messianism, a term first used in the modern period, raises problems similar to the term millenarianism. It was coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in Germany was first used to classify Jewish speculations corresponding to Christian millenarianism. Heinrich Schmid, making this distinction in 1825, noted at the same time that Christian millenarianism differed “from Jewish messianism in little more than that the former await the Messiah not for the first time but for the second and that everything said there about the Jews as the People of God may be applied to the Christian as the Congregation of God.”25 Soon, however, the term messianism was detached from its Judeo- Christian context and penetrated political parlance. Here, too, it often designated the hopes for a redeemer figure, albeit a political one, but just as often it was used for concepts that replaced the belief in a personal Messiah

24. 4 Ezra 7:28. See also the articles “Messias,” “Messianismus,” and “Chiliasmus,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, ed. J. S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1818–1889); Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche; Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart; and Theologische Realenzyklopädie. 25. Heinrich Schmid, “Chiliasmus,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, 16:338; see also Schmid, Der Mysticismus des Mittelalters in seiner Entwicklungsperiode (Jena: Schmid, 1824). Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 29 with “the idea of an imminent (and actively brought about) end of history as the fulfillment of socio-political hopes as well.”26 In this sense the term, among others, was used for nationalistic ideas of renewal, particularly in Poland, but not there alone.27 Berthold Auerbach, for example, exclaimed in 1871 on the occasion of the founding of the second German Empire: “The messianic hopes of our Fatherland are fulfilled.”28 The enraptured enthusiasm that almost always resonates in “messianic hopes” makes it problematic to distinguish between worldly political messianism and religious messianism, as Talmon does.29 That Jewish belief in a Messiah remained at least subconsciously active in messianic hopes is shown by the fact that it is primarily Jewish authors who have used the term as an expression of their self-understanding.30 The philosopher Hermann Cohen used the word for a system of ideas that would unify reason and religion, and he maintained that this would be “brought about by the prophetic concept of history.” In Auerbach we find it in conjunction with nationalistic hopes. Walter Benjamin designated as “messianic time” (in which “redemption” becomes apparent) the historical moment that offered the revolutionary opportunity to transform society. Adorno saw the task of philosophy to view things “from the standpoint of redemption,” so that

26. “Messianismus,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. 27. At approximately the same time at which Messianismus appeared in Germany, the Polish emigré Wronski´ coined the notion of “messianisme” in France to designate a speculative system that would lead to absolute reason and perfection of mankind through the uniting of philosophical reason and the revealed Holy Spirit upon an exact mathematical basis. Another Polish emigré, Towianski,´ outlined a similar, if also less “scientific” schema. Through Mickiewicz, both had an impact on Polish nationalism. See Józef Maria Hoëné Wronski,´ Messianism, union finale de la philolphie et de la religion (Paris: Doyen, 1831–1834); Andrzej Towianski,´ Fragments, 2d ed. (Rome: Romagna, 1913); and Adam Mickiewicz, L’Église officielle et le Messianisme, 2 vols. (Paris: Comon, 1842–1843); see also “Messianismus,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie; J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase; and Jürgen Gebhardt, “Messianische Politik und ideologische Massen- bewegung,” in Von kommenden Zeiten: Geschichtsprophetien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Joachim H. Knoll and Julius H. Schoeps, 44–46. 28. Berthold Auerbach, Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten und Loening, 1884), 2:66. 29. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 8–11. 30. See Michael Löwy, “Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central Europe”; on individual writers, see Michael Ossar, “Die jüdische messianische Tradition und Ernst Tollers ‘Wandlung,’ ” in Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Gunter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1985); Arno Münster, Utopie, Messianismus und Apokalypse im Frühwerk von Ernst Bloch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982); Wilhelm Voßkamp, “ ‘Grundrisse einer besseren Welt’: Messianismus und Geschichte der Utopie bei Ernst Bloch,” in Juden in der deutschen Literatur, ed. Stéphane Moses and Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). 30 The Apocalypse in Germany the deficient condition of the world would appear “wanting and distorted as it will in the messianic light.” Ernst Bloch termed “messianic”—“the red secret of every revolutionary enlightenment that maintains itself in fullness”—as a “borderline idea” that describes the “totality of the human struggle for liberation.”31 In these last cited passages “messianic” appears again as a symbol of self- interpretation, even if no longer in the sense of orthodox Jewish belief, but rather as an expression of the hope that mankind might one day redeem itself through reason. To that extent the symbol “messianism” coincides closely with more recent uses of utopia. Ernst Bloch also subsumed messianic conceptions in his term utopia. Can this concept be elevated to a general term? Is it suited, to return to the initial question, to classify the apocalypse and its characteristics as well? The literary utopias that followed and were modeled after More’s Utopia, and for which utopia as a literary term was first coined, reveal almost no similarities with apocalyptic texts: generally a traveler ends up in a distant land, usually on an island, and discovers there an ideal state in which human beings live together in moral perfection and social harmony. The single point of contact is disclosed by the experiential causes. The authors of utopian novels, at least those that did not merely write in the genre imitatively, were dissatisfied with the moral, social, and political conditions in their respective societies. With sociocritical as well as didactic intent, they designed their ideal island states as positive alternative models. This was a totally different and in many respects “milder” reaction to experiences of deficiency than the apocalyptic exegesis of experience. Current realities were not seen as so thoroughly corrupt that the conclusion that it must perish was irresistible, and no perfect condition for the near future was predicted. Rather, the authors of utopian novels transferred the tension between the condition of deficiency and the ideal condition that they described into the spatial fiction of a paradigmatic elsewhere. From More to the eighteenth century the temporal dimension played no role in

31. Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Fock, 1919), 305 (this notion is similar to that of Wronski;´ see n. 27); Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1:2:693; 1:3:1231; Theodor W.Adorno, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951), 333–34 (Eng- lish trans., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott [London: Verso, 1978]); Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 316–18. On the connection between socialism and Jewish messianism, particularly among representatives of the “critical theory,” see Arnold Künzli, “Zur Befreiung der Emanzipation von der Hypothek der Erlösung.” Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 31 utopias.32 Utopia was a paradigm, not a prediction of the future condition of society. As late as 1927 Alfred Doren made a typological distinction between utopia and millenarianism with the entries “ideal places” and “ideal times,” although he noted that since the Renaissance they not only ran parallel to each other but also approached each other, sometimes even intersecting.33 This convergence began at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1770 the first utopia of the future appeared in the novel L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fut jamais (“The Year 2440”), by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.34 By giving utopia a temporal dimension, the condition of perfection as actually attainable was projected in the future of society; the utopia of the future became a “variant of the philosophy of progress.”35 The utopian concept spread consequently to ideologies that hoped for the progress of mankind to a perfect final condition and portrayed this condition in historical blueprints of the type of “progressivism” of Condorcet or the speculation of the so-called early socialists Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. Marx and Engels termed the latter “utopian socialism” and disparaged it, because the “historical conditions of liberation” were not analyzed and the corresponding “societal activity” and “political action” were not described; only an “imaginative depiction of the future society” was given.36 Of course Marx and Engels also predicted a future condition of perfection of human society, but they restrained themselves from actually describing that condition. In any event, the critique of Marx and Engels gave the utopian concept a pejorative connotation that the word utopian still has in everyday language. As a result, adherents of progressivist thought—of whatever origin they might be—were inhibited from describing themselves as utopians, that is, of using the utopian concept for the purpose of self-definition. The first who dared was Ernst Bloch. In 1918 he professed the Geist der Utopie (“Spirit of Utopia”)—thus the title of his first book—to which he also gave

32. See Reinhart Koselleck, “Die Verzeitlichung der Utopie,” in Utopieforschung: Inter- disziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp, 3:23. 33. Alfred Doren, “Wunschräume und Wunschzeiten,” 184. 34. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fut jamais, ed. R. Trousson(Bordeaux: Ducros, 1971) (English trans., Memoirs of the Year TwoThousand Five Hundred, trans. W.Hooper [Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1795]). See also Koselleck, “Die Verzeitlichung der Utopie”; and Doren, “Wunschräume und Wunschzeiten,” 204 n. 67; these mention Mercier’s novel but do not evaluate it. 35. Koselleck, “Die Verzeitlichung der Utopie,” 5. 36. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1953), 557 (English trans., Early Writings, ed. and trans. T. B. Bottomore [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964]). 32 The Apocalypse in Germany expression in the following book about Thomas Münzer and above all in his magnum opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (“The Principle of Hope”). Still, under pressure of orthodox Marxism-Leninism in the fifties, Bloch felt obliged to defend his concept of utopia and to contrast it with the “normal, justifiably pejorative sense.” One can understand Marxist orthodoxy’s fear of contact, for Bloch mentioned Karl Marx and the apocalypse in a single breath in Geist der Utopie, and in Thomas Münzer he connected Marx, Liebknecht, and Lenin with the heretical tradition.37 This must have provided further evidence for proponents of the thesis that Marxism and Leninism are a form of secularized millenarianism. For the moment we will not deal with the question whether these arguments are valid, but it is obvious from what sources Bloch’s “spirit of utopia” derived. In a remark on Bloch’s book about Thomas Münzer, Karl Mannheim also found “an inner affinity between Münzer” and Bloch to the subject. In his attempt to develop a systematic meaning for the term utopia, Mannheim distinguished four forms: besides the millenarian, which he placed at the beginning of the modern period of development, the liberal- humanitarian, the conservative, and, finally, the socialist-communist. He viewed these forms as ideal types in the sense of Max Weber. However, because these ideal types differed considerably from each other, not to mention from actual historical phenomena, he sought to place what was common to all in the “utopian consciousness.” He defined as utopian “a state of mind . . . when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs,” and develops “situationally transcendent ideas . . . which in any way have a transforming effect upon the existing historical social order.”38 This definition proved fruitful—in a similar manner one designates in more recent times what is common to the various utopias in their “intention” to overcome the status quo.39 Does this designation include apocalyptic phenomena or—to choose an analogous term—the “apocalyptic consciousness”? The authors of apocalyptic texts unquestionably were not in agreement with the world in which they found themselves, and we can describe their ideas as “situationally transcendent ideas,” even if those of Toller differ in content from those of the Revelation of John. Still, Mannheim’s definition of utopian consciousness leaves open the question whether ideas that transcend being are directed toward a perfect condition or only toward a better one. But for

37. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:53; Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 314; Bloch, Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution, 294–97. 38. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 212 n. 10, 211–63, 192, 205. 39. Arnhelm Neusüss, ed., Utopie: Begriff und Phänomen des Utopischen (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1972), 109 and passim. Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 33 the apocalypse that is the salient point—that it predicts perfection and is dissatisfied with what today are called “reforms,” in whose possibility and effectiveness it has no faith. This feature at least must be retained in any definition of the apocalypse. Mannheim’s distinction between “absolute” and “relatively utopian”40 cannot be applied to the apocalypse: there is no such thing as “relatively apocalyptic.” Mannheim’s ideal types of utopian consciousness contain—at least in their millenarian and socialist-communist form—the “absolutely utopian.” In the millenarian form—in the socialist-communist one this has yet to be verified—the “absolute” certainly originates from the apocalyptic tradition. The question arises whether the “utopian consciousness,” to the extent that the “absolute” is intended, does not in general originate from the apocalyptic tradition. In that case the New Jerusalem could be designated not a utopia, but the “absolutely utopian” as an heir of the apocalypse. The term utopia would not as a consequence become obsolete, since the historical manifestations of modern utopias naturally differ from the classical apocalypse and some of their representatives, such as Bloch, have chosen precisely this term as a symbol of their self-understanding. But the “spirit of utopia” could then be explained as a modern manifestation of the apocalyptic consciousness—or, better, of apocalyptic interpretations of experiences—and could thereby be better understood. For the time being I have couched these reflections in the subjunctive, since they must be examined and substantiated in the material itself. In this regard, is it not also necessary to define the term apocalypse in advance? A definition—the previous reflections have implicitly suggested this—can apply only to the manifestation of the apocalypse. As has already frequently become clear, I understand by “apocalypse” first of all a text, and second, a symbolism for the interpretation of experience. Even defining the manifestation of “apocalypse” requires—in Mannheim’s sense—a historical justification: 1. The apocalypse is a text. The word apokalypsis, in the first sentence of the Revelation of John, that refers to this revelation and its content, was from an early period used to designate the writing itself. Augustine thus speaks of the “book that is called apocalypse.”41 The term was eventually applied to other writings of similar content and form, Christian as well as Jewish, and developed in theological discussions into a kind of designation of genre under which one gathered texts having similar content and com-

40. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 196–97. 41. “Iohannes evangelista in libro, qui dicitur apocalypsis . . . locutus est” (“In the book called the Apocalypse, John the Evangelist said”), Augustine, De Civitate Dei 2:418. 34 The Apocalypse in Germany parable formal and stylistic features.42 I began the first chapter with an attempt at a description and characterization of the apocalypse. The primary designation of the apocalypse as a text has as its consequence that particular attention must be paid to the literary features and that the apocalypse is, among other things, to be viewed as an aesthetic phenomenon. This is true of all apocalypses. It is not meaningful to distinguish among literary, religious, or otherwise designated apocalypses, as some more recent authors do.43 The Revelation of John is no less “literary” than a modern science fiction novel. Conversely, it is by no means certain that modern texts are not also religious. When Toller, in Die Wandlung, promises “redemption” “if you had faith in yourself and man, if you were fulfilled in the spirit,”44 “religious” belief is expressed, even if not in the traditional Christian or Jewish sense. By distinguishing religious from literary apocalypses we cannot determine the difference between ancient and modern texts. To the contrary, when we view them all as literary texts and at least assume the possibility that they all express “religious feeling,” this will be possible, because we have a common frame of reference for comparisons. 2. The apocalypse is a symbol for the interpretation of experience. When John speaks of the “apokalypsis,” of the revelation, which he received, he is expressing by means of this language symbol his understanding of the specific character of his religious message as well as his own self- understanding as the revealer of a vision. He thereby interprets experiences that he wishes to articulate through this symbol. Almost all apocalyptic texts contain symbols comparable with this meaning: In Daniel 7 it is the Aramaic haz.on, “vision”; in medieval texts revelatio; in modern German texts Vision, Schau, or even Traum. The designation “apocalypse” as a symbol for the interpretation of experience serves the cognitive

42. See the article “Apokalypse” or “Apokalyptik” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart; Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche; Theologische Realenzyklopädie, but especially H. H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to Revelation, 13–53, 25 n. 2; Philipp Vielhauer, “Einleitung zu ‘Apokalypsen und Verwandtes,’ ” in Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übertragung, by Edgar Hennecke, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, 3d ed. (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1964), 2:408– 42 (English trans., New Testament Apocrypha, trans. A. J. B. Higgins et al., ed. Robert M. Wilson [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964]); Klaus Koch, “Einleitung,” in Apokalyptik, ed. Klaus Koch and Michael Schmidt, 1, 12. 43. Joachim Metzner, Persönlichkeitszerstörung und Weltuntergang: Das Verhältnis von Wahnbildung und literarischer Imagination, 5; K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, “Apocalypse: It’s Now or Never—Wie und zu welchem Ende geht die Welt so oft unter?” 188–89; K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, “Fin de siècle und Endzeitbewußtsein,” in Die Nineties: Das englische Fin de siècle zwischen Dekadenz und Sozialkritik, ed. Manfred Pfister and Bernd Schulte-Middelich (Munich: Francke, 1983), 36–41. 44. Toller, Transfiguration, 680. Is the New Jerusalem a Utopia? 35 purpose of deciphering experiences that have influenced the production of apocalyptic texts and are expressed not only with the term apocalypse or its equivalents, but also in the total symbol systems of texts designated “apocalypses.” The attempt to discover motivating experiences promises, for example, more exact designations of what can only in general be termed “eschatological,” and information about whether modern apocalypses are “religious” and what that means. But above all, consideration of the apocalypse as a symbol for the interpretation of experience brings into a common perspective the historical situations in which the motivating experiences occur as well as the texts that give expression to these experiences. A definition of content of the apocalypse as a “concept” is not possible. The historical events that would have to be considered “significant features” in Mannheim’s sense are too wide ranging. Even such terms as millenarianism and messianism, which are generally used as though they were already defined, are in fact defined only in some general senses. As we have seen, the historical events to which those terms usually refer often differ substantially from each other. It seems to me to be an advantage that apocalypse, by implication, is not a defined term, but—apart from its designation as a genre of texts—is understood primarily as a symbol. This makes it easier, without force, to develop it into a “systematic construction” through description and analysis, as the apocalypse is presented from different perspectives. 3 Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized?

The fact that Arndt’s political pamphlets and Toller’s revolutionary drama display apocalyptic characteristics could give rise to the assumption that modern texts have secularized traditional religious models. But can, in fact, the apocalypse be secularized? This question has never received a thorough examination. That may be because the apocalypse has always been perceived as something unqualifiedly religious. Only recently Manfred Voigts stressed that “the religious (or, more properly, sacred) background cannot be eliminated from the term apocalypse—revelation—and cannot be secularized.” A further reason may be that the word apocalypse evokes primarily images—the riders of the apocalypse, the destruction of the world in fire and brimstone—that is, it is the various manifestations of the apocalypse that come to mind. The question of whether the apocalypse can be secularized is meaningful only when one considers its various features and their significance as, for example: Can the millennial kingdom and the New Jerusalem be secularized? And does this mean a secularization of the hope for the redemption of mankind in another world? In the infrequent instances in which a “secularized apocalypse” is consciously spoken of it refers to very specific elements of the apocalypse. Thus, Bernhard Holeczek recently saw in apocalypse, as the feared destruction of all life in an atomic war, a “secularized meaning in the current sense of the word.” Sometime ago Hans Magnus Enzensberger termed “the catastrophe that haunts us” as a “thoroughly secularized manifestation” of the apocalypse.1 When the threatened destruction of mankind by a nuclear conflict is termed “apocalypse,” then the defining feature of apocalypse in its traditional sense—that is, the creation of a new, perfect world after the destruction of the old—can no longer be meant. To that extent the current usage of the word is surprising. The assertion, however, that such

1. Manfred Voigts, “Die Apokalypse, der Messias und der Friede,” 77; Bernhard Holec- zek, foreword to Apokalypse, by Gassen and Holeczek, 7; Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Zwei Randbemerkungen zum Weltuntergang,” Kursbuch 52 (1978): 1.

36 Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 37 a definition is unjustified is not helpful,2 since it is already a part of the common parlance precisely because the apocalypse appears to be suited to articulate individuals’ interpretation of the present world as well as their own self-understanding. It is questionable whether this use of the word may properly be termed “secularization,” since in current usage the New Jerusalem is not secularized, but simply plays no role anymore. Only the fact that the destruction of the world is not effected by God, but rather by man, can be seen as a type of “secularization.” There appears, then, to be no clear answer to the question of whether the apocalypse can be secularized. This is presumably because the word apocalypse is still understood figuratively. As a consequence, the question of secularization must be posed in such a concrete manner that it has a somewhat confusing effect. Such a question might, for example, be: can the millennial kingdom be secularized at all, since it is supposed to be established on earth before final salvation in the transcendent New Jerusalem? In the past, the concept of secularization was never brought to bear upon the term apocalypse, but rather upon related notions—eschatology, millenarianism, messianism, utopia. Thus, a 1912 manual of Protestant dogmatics spoke of “social-democratic eschatology,” in order to characterize the political program of the SPD (German Social-Democratic party) as a secularized “teaching about the last things”; or Max Scheler interpreted in 1920 the “millenarian hope of the communist state of the future” as a “scientific reshaping of Jewish messianism”; or Karl Mannheim termed the “liberal-humanitarian utopia” as a secularization of pietistic millenarianism.3 Thus, what they had in mind were not symbolic images of texts called apocalypses, but rather systems of thought, teachings, and doctrines: on the one hand, Christian speculations concerning the final goal of world history, which indeed mostly made use of apocalyptic texts, and on the other hand, modern systems of thought that also deal with the course and end of history. The theory that the latter are secularizations of the former is mostly to be found where their derivative character is emphasized from a critical standpoint. In contrast, the theory of secularization is denied where the independence, correctness, and justification of modern historical thought is emphasized. For example, Ernst Bloch viewed the notion that Marx secularized Jewish and Christian ideas as a “radical attempt at the extermination of Marxian thought through a kind of

2. Thus Voigts, “Die Apokalypse, der Messias und der Friede,” 76. 3. Friedrich August Berthold Nitzsch, Lehrbuch der evangelischen Dogmatik, ed. Horst Stephan, 3d ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1911–1912), 718; Scheler, Der Friede unter den Konfes- sionen, in Gesammelte Werke, 6:251; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 224. 38 The Apocalypse in Germany accusation of plagiarism.” Jürgen Habermas criticized “the naturalness with which the reduction of the history of philosophy on the model of Judaeo- Christian eschatology claims evidence”; and Hans Blumenberg rejected the concept of secularization in general as a “theologically conditioned category of wrong.”4 What advance in understanding does the concept of secularization offer? Further, does this concept have any value if what is compared are not eschatology, millenarianism, messianism on the one hand, and Marxism or utopian historical schemes on the other, but rather images of apocalyptic texts, the Revelation of John on the one hand, and Arndt’s Geist der Zeit or Toller’s Wandlung on the other? In order to answer these questions, we must first examine the theory of secularization in its conventional form. The starting point for examining the theory that modern systems of thought are secularizations of Christian systems of thought is their expressions concerning the course and goal of history, concerning the meaning of history altogether. The modern concept of history, the idea that history is more than a “history of something,” but the “history in and of itself,” which contains “the total sociopolitical network of connections on this earth in all of its temporal ramifications,” first developed in the second half of the eighteenth century.5 Reflection on the total context of history gave rise to what we call the philosophy of history: in outlines of universal history a definite developmental structure is attributed to it, that of the progress of the human spirit from primitive beginnings to a state of perfection.6 The thesis that this type of philosophy of history, and, as a consequence, all historical speculations that attribute to history a recognizable movement toward a this-worldly goal, are secularizations of Christian concepts, forms the basis for all further discussions concerning whether definite historical conceptions, ideologies, or political movements

4. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 3:1361–62; Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis: Sozial- philosophische Studien (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963), 294 (English trans., Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertal [Oxford: Blackwell, 1988]); Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 73 (English trans., The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983]). 5. Reinhart Koselleck et al., “Geschichte,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), 2:594; see also 647–53. 6. Turgot, Plan de deux discours sur l’histoire universelle (c. 1751); Discours sur les progrès succesifs de l’esprit humain (1750); Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1794). Progress in the plural (des progrès) is still used here. The collective singular progress originates about the same time as the collective singular history (for the overall context of history “as such”). The first attestation of both concepts coincides with the beginning of modern philosophy of history. See Koselleck et al., “Geschichte” and “Fortschritt” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 39 are secularizations of Christian eschatology, secularized millenarianism, or messianism, and also whether utopian conceptions of the future are phenomena of secularization.7 Wilhelm Dilthey first introduced a theory of secularization in this comprehensive sense in his studies on Western intellectual history with the specific intention of disclosing a central characteristic of the modern period. Ernst Troeltsch continued and developed this theory: he characterized the “history of philosophy concept of progress,” as “the secularization of Christian eschatology,” which transfers the thought of a “universal goal to be reached by mankind from the sphere of miracle and transcendence into that of natural explanation and immanence.” After 1945, it was above all Karl Löwith who attempted to prove, in his book Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen (“Meaning in History”), the “theological implications of the history of philosophy”—thus the subtitle of the book—and whose work, according to Blumenberg, had a “persistent dogmatizing” effect. Löwith, however, fought against dogma himself. Like Dilthey and Troeltsch he maintained the thesis “that philosophy of history originated with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfillment and that it ends with the secularization of its eschatological pattern,” but, in contrast to his predecessors, he took a more radical approach in that he opposed the dogmatic belief in the absolute value of history. He explained the theory of secularization with the intention of freeing this-worldly history from impeding structures of meaning: “The impossibility of elaborating a progressive system of secular history on the religious basis of faith has its counterpart in the impossibility of establishing a meaningful plan of history by means of reason.“8 Thus far, these are the basic outlines of the theory of secularization. Next, let us examine the content of the problem. The basic point of

7. On the problem of secularization in general, see Hermann Zabel et al., “Säkularisa- tion, Säkularisierung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe; id., “Verweltlichung/Säkularisierung. Zur Geschichte einer Interpretationskategorie” (Ph.D. diss., Münster, 1968); Wilhelm Kamlah, Utopie, Eschatologie, Geschichtsteleologie: Kritische Untersuchungen zum Ursprung und zum futurischen Denken der Neuzeit; Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung; Hermann Lübbe, Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs, 2d ed. (Freiburg: Alber, 1975); and Heinz-Horst Schrey, ed., Säkularisierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981). 8. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), in Gesammelte Schrif- ten, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Teubner, and Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1957–1960); id., Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt (1901), in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3; Ernst Troeltsch, Über das Wiedererwachen der Geschichtsphilosophie, in Gesammelte Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1912–1925), 3:57; see also Troeltsch, Über den historischen Entwicklungsbegriff und die Universalgeschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3; Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung, 35; Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, 2, 198. 40 The Apocalypse in Germany reference for the theory of secularization is the “theological philosophy of history,” or “Christian eschatology,” or the “quest for a meaning . . . due to the history of salvation.”9 What are the characteristic features of the eschatological Christian conception of history or of the Christian- theological philosophy of history? We must state at the outset: there is no one Christian historical thought; we must distinguish two opposing perspectives on history. The first goes back substantially to Augustine, and it remained dominant until the eighteenth century. According to Augustine, earthly history is nothing more than a constant reiteration of various, usually unhappy events that have no meaningful structure. Meaning is given to history only by moving from a transcendent beginning, the Creation, to a transcendent end, the Last Judgment and Resurrection. But this movement is not “progress” within earthly history, but rather a transcendent history of salvation that exists in breakthroughs of transcendence into history—with the incarnation as the high point— on the other hand in the peregrinatio, the spiritual pilgrimage of the faithful toward their transcendent goal.10 This conception of history has nothing in common with modern progressivist historical thought. At the most, a structural equivalence can be seen despite the contrast between the two conceptions: according to Augustine, man lives in his temporal and imperfect existence in tension to a ground of all being and toward a transcendent goal of perfection. The dimension of historical time is meaningless for this fundamental existential tension. Of course, this-worldly history has an end sometime, but despite that every man in his respective present exists with this tension toward a fulfillment that is supertemporally present, and which he may approach through peregrinatio. Similarly, a tension between deficiency and fulfillment—set between the present and the future in the history of man— underlies the idea of progress. Therefore, it could be said that the idea of progress temporalizes the existential tension between earthly deficiency and transcendent fulfillment and thereby secularizes it, as it were, in that it transforms this into mankind’s tension toward a this-worldly future. To be sure, secularization in the sense of a temporalization of the existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment has its prototype and roots not in Augustinian theology but in the other, for us more

9. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 99; Troeltsch, Über des Wiederwachen der Geschichtsphilosophie, 57; Löwith, Meaning in History, 5. 10. Aurelius Augustinus, Vom Gottesstaat (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), particularly bks. 15 and 18–20; see also Löwith, Meaning in History, 160–73; and Gert Melville, “Zur geschichtstheoretischen Begründung eines fehlenden Niedergangs- bewußtseins im Mittelalter,” in Niedergang: Studien zu einem geschichtlichen Thema, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Paul Widmer. Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 41 significant, tradition of Christian historical thought. Augustine’s great contribution is that he laid out the problem clearly and thereby made the two contrasting types comprehensible. That we really have to do with two totally opposite positions betrays not only the vehemence with which Augustine attacked the millenarians, but also the tortuous argumentation with which he attempted to explain away the millennial kingdom. He thought it impossible that the world of man, the civitas terrena, would ever become a realm of perfection since this would presuppose a thoroughgoing transformation of human nature. In short, he viewed the existential tension of man between deficiency and fulfillment in this world as insoluble. The hope of the early Christian millenarians for a millennial kingdom, and the implicit expectation that man’s existential tension would be resolved in this world, forms the link with the second tradition of Christian historical thought that continues to our own time. As a result of that hope there were attempts to determine the beginning of the millennial kingdom; the belief in the calculability of history made possible, in its turn, the assumption that events in history that point toward its end present an evolution toward that goal. The first one who drew these conclusions and fully developed the anti-Augustinian conception of history was Joachim of Fiore. Joachim’s “third age,” the age of the Holy Ghost, can be viewed like the millennial kingdom as a temporalization of existential tension with transcendence. To be sure, Joachim did not eliminate the connection with the Christian faith, and he did not “secularize” the transcendent ground of all being, that is, God, and also the final goal of history in transcendence, but he brought to a certain extent a “piece of transcendence” into this-worldly history in that he expected that in this last phase of history the Holy Ghost would reveal himself directly in the hearts of all men. The second and, by implication, new element of Joachim’s speculation was the “historico- theological” elaboration: the meaning that this-worldly history receives by the assumption of a last phase of perfection illuminates the course of this history and makes it appear as a meaningful, gradual development toward a goal. Joachim understood this developmental process by temporalizing the meaning of the symbol of Trinity: The first age, that of the Father, stood under the rule of law and held men in servile bondage. The age of the Son, which began with the appearance of Christ, stood under grace already but still demanded a childlike obedience. The third age will bring men freedom under increased grace.11 Joachim assumed thereby—in contrast to Augustine’s conception of the history of salvation—progress of spiritual

11. See Wilhelm Kamlah, Apokalypse und Geschichtstheologie: Die mittelalterliche Ausle- gung der Apokalypse vor Joachim von Fiore (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1935), 115–29; Löwith, 42 The Apocalypse in Germany fulfillment within earthly history that consequently also had to better the temporal existence of men. After Joachim, Christian historical speculations and social movements that are generally called “millenarian” all represented partial secularizations in the sense that they bring a “piece of transcendence” into history and await its historical actualization or even attempt to bring it about in the present. This is true for the Münster Anabaptists of the sixteenth century who proclaimed the city of Münster the New Jerusalem, as well as for the English millenarians of the seventeenth century who wished to establish the “fifth monarchy” after the four world kingdoms of the Book of Daniel. And the same is true for the millenarian speculations of German Pietists in the eighteenth century, among whom the second element of Joachim’s theology of history was particularly pronounced: the construction of a meaningful developmental process in history, which is expressed as “progress.” Bengel, for example, calculated the exact date on which the millennial kingdom would begin. The presupposition for this calculation was the assumption that God’s plan of salvation, a “divine economy,” was being realized in history;12 he deciphered the prophecies of the Revelation of John as specific historical occurrences and thereby constructed a redemptive progress of history toward the millennial kingdom that could be understood through the history of this-worldly events. Thus, there is an analogy in the narrower sense—that is, in the similarity of structure as well as of symbols—between modern progressivist historical thought and such Christian speculations as are found in the tradition of early Christian millenarians and Joachim of Fiore. But the concept of secularization not only is meant to describe an analogical relation, but also serves “to describe genealogical connections of phenomena of European modernity in its relationship to Christian tradition,” and is used in statements concerning the meaning and the goal of history as “a historical or philosophical concept that defines the process of modern de- Christianization.”13 It is, of course, difficult to prove a genealogical connection between millenarian historical speculations and modern concepts of progress; the opponents of the theory of secularization have again and again referred to this point. Still, at least in some not unimportant cases lines of connection can be shown that make the genetic connection possible. In his work Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (“The Education of the Human Race”), published in 1780, Lessing presented an overall picture

Meaning in History, 145–59; Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 110–11, 117–19; and Töpfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens, 48–55. 12. Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 943 and passim. 13. “Säkularisation, Säkularisierung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 5:789–90. Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 43 of history from the then particularly popular perspective of education. He divided history into three ages that represent stages of an unfolding development: until the birth of Christ mankind’s stage of development corresponded to the “age of children,” in which it had to be trained through “rewards and punishments addressed to the senses.” With the appearance of Christ as the “ﬁrst dependable, practical teacher of the immortality of the soul,” a new age began for a part of mankind: “This portion of the human race had come so far in the exercise of its reason, as to need, and to be able to make use of nobler and worthier motives of moral action than temporal rewards and punishments, which had hitherto been its guides,” and that motive was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul: “The child had become a youth.” Lessing prophesied that a “third age” would follow this phase, in which mankind would mature “to manhood.” The education of the human race has a deﬁnite “goal,” namely, “perfect illumination” and moral “purity of heart . . . that makes us capable of loving virtue for its own sake alone,” in other words: spiritual and moral perfection—“it will come! it will assuredly come! the time of the perfecting.”14 The similarity of this schema with the historical speculations of Joachim of Fiore is patent: the division of history into three phases corresponding to the “old covenant” and the “new covenant,” to which will be joined a third, “the time of a new eternal gospel,” and the development of mankind from being subject to punishments to having perfect freedom of spiritual and moral autonomy. Lessing referred to his model: “Perhaps some of the enthusiasts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had caught a glimpse of a beam of this new eternal Gospel, and only erred in that they predicted its outburst at so near to their own time. Perhaps their Three Ages of the World were not so empty a speculation after all, and assuredly they had no contemptible views when they taught that the New Covenant must become as much antiquated as the old has been. There remained by them”—and now Lessing appears to take up Bengel’s concept of a plan of salvation, of a “divine economy” in history—“similarity of the economy of the same God. Ever, to let them speak my words, ever the self-same plan of the Education of the Human Race.”15 Lessing was acquainted with Bengel’s views and in addition was acquainted with the professor of theology and philosophy Christian August Crusius, who developed Bengel’s conception of the divine plan of history, from his time in Leipzig.16 Lessing reviewed

14. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Education of the Human Race (trans. of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts), trans. F. W. Robertson, in The Harvard Classics, ed. Charles W. Eliot, 50 vols. (New York: Collier, 1938), 32:187, 197, 203. 15. Ibid., 203. 16. See Hermann Freiherr von der Goltz, “Die theologische Bedeutung J. A. Bengels und seiner Schule,” Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie 6 (1861): 460–62; Gerlich, Der 44 The Apocalypse in Germany works of both as well as other Pietist-millenarian writings between 1751 and 1754 in the Berlinische privilegirte Zeitung.17 Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts marks the point at which the step from “partial secularization” of Christian millenarian speculations to the complete secularization of modern historical thought occurred. If the millenarians secularized the state of perfection with their prophecies of the millennial kingdom, they also expected—from Joachim to Bengel—this state to be brought about and determined by God or the Holy Ghost. Now Lessing put education in the place of revelation: “Education is Revelation coming to the Individual Man; and Revelation is Education which has come, and is yet coming, to the Human Race.” This was not merely a linguistic explication or “modern” interpretation of what is called “revelation” by Christians. The salient point is that education can be undertaken by men themselves, particularly bringing out what is already latent in the person: “Education gives to Man nothing which he might not educe out of himself; it gives him that which he might educe out of himself, only quicker and more easily. In the same way too, Revelation gives nothing to the human species, which the human reason left to itself might not attain.” In other words, revelation has become irrelevant; man can by virtue of his unaided reason achieve “perfection” himself. “As we by this time can dispense with the Old Testament, in reference to the doctrine of the unity of God, and as we are by degrees beginning also to be less dependent on the New Testament, in reference to the immortality of the soul: might there not in this Book also be other truths of the same sort preﬁgured, mirrored, as it were, which were to marvel at, as revelations, exactly so long as until the time shall come when reason shall have learned to educe them, out of its other demonstrated truths and bind them up with them?”18

Kommunismus als Lehre vom Tausenjährigen Reich, 142–57; Doren, “Wunschräume und Wunschzeiten,” 198–99. 17. Among others, Lessing reviewed the following relevant works in the Berlinische privilegirte Zeitung or Berlinische privilegirte Staats- und gelehrte Zeitung on April 17, 1751; George Heinrich Kanz, Kurtzer Begrif des biblisch-chronologischen Systems von 6000 Jahren, nemlich von Erschaffung der Welt bis ins Jahr Jesu Christi (1860) 1862, als an dem Anfange des tausendjährigen Sabbaths in einem tausendjährigen Reiche . . . (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1750); August 14, 1753: Christian August Crusius, Sammlung geistlicher Abhandlungen . . . (Leipzig: Dycks, 1753); October 30, 1753: Wilhelm Whiston, Gründlicher Beweis, dass die in der Offenbahrung beﬁndliche Geschichte von der Schöpfung der Welt und die allda Geschehene Verkündigung von dem Untergange der Welt mit der gesunden Vernunft keineswegs streite (Wittenberg, n.d.); January 12, 1754: Das neue Testament . . . nach dem revidirten Grundtexte übersetzt und mit dienlichen Anmerkungen begleitet von D. Johann Albrecht Bengel (Stuttgart: Christoph Erhardt, 1753), in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, 3d ed., 23 vols. (Stuttgart: Göschen, 1866–1924), 4:308–9; 5:190–91, 207–8, 276–77. 18. Lessing, The Education of the Human Race, 185, 200. Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 45

Lessing thus clearly shows the origin of his historical schema in the speculations of millenarian thinkers. He makes no secret of his intention to “let them speak my words.” In similar fashion, for Kant, a connection between “theological millenarianism,” “which looks for the complete moral improvement of the whole human race,” with a historical schema “that hopes for a condition of perpetual peace, founded on a union of people as a universal commonwealth,” was evident; quite logically, he termed the latter philosophical millenarianism. Apparently he also was well acquainted with the millenarian speculations of the Pietists, particularly Bengel’s computations of world history.19 In general, a connection was unabashedly made during this era between contemporary philosophy and millenarian thought. Thus, for example, the philosopher of religion Heinrich Schmid, a disciple of the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries, stated in 1825 at the beginning of his great article “Chiliasmus” (“Millenarianism”) in the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste: “It is the idea of the kingdom of God that lies at the root of millenarianism. . . . What Kant, Fichte, Fries and other philosophers call an ethical kingdom, or kingdom of ends, moral system of the world, intelligible world or spiritual (geistige) world, is merely—expressed in religious terms—the Kingdom of God.”20 In our own century as well adherents of progressivist conceptions of history have used the concept of secularization without trepidation. Walter Benjamin wrote in his last work, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (“On the Concept of History”): “Marx secularized the concept of the messianic age in his concept of the classless society. And that was proper so.” Even Bloch, who so vehemently attacked the concept of secularization, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung, but still adhered, in Geist der Utopie, to the millenarian tradition, termed “utopian-rational socialism”—which he understood as an externalizing of the millenarian “primal desire” shared by him—as a “secularized form of the millennial kingdom.”21 Let us now consider somewhat more carefully the reasons the theory of secularization has been denied in recent decades and examine their validity. Both Bloch and Blumenberg are representative of this negative attitude. Both defended their criticisms of the theory of secularization with the “originality” or “legitimacy” of modern historical thought, although they stated their arguments differently. Above all, Bloch opposed the

19. Ibid., 204; Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, in Werke in zehn Bänden, 7:682; see also Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, in Werke in zehn Bänden, 9:323, 332. 20. Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, 16:324. 21. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:3:1223 (in a passage not contained in the first edition of 1942); Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 327. 46 The Apocalypse in Germany theory that Marxism was secularized salvation history. To be sure, he placed Marx completely within the tradition of millenarian thought, but he postulated that Marx had first to find the “completely new . . . in order to realize good thoughts of the past at all.” He saw the “epoch-making new” “in the knowledge of the surplus, in the economic-dialectical conception of history, in the theory-practice-connection,” and he rejected the theory of secularization, because it explained “the new humanity, activity, change in the world, the rectified dream forwards in a constantly open Marxism,” as a mere copy. “Therefore a good substance is in fact not weakened when it is corrected, and even more obviously it is not secularized when, once set on its feet, it is realized.”22 Blumenberg directed his attention beyond Marxism to the self-understanding of the modern period in general. The “history of ideas” concept of secularization, in its role of determining a principle of modern interpretation of the world and history, is for him a “category of historical wrong,” for this concept of secularization originated as a metaphorical transmission from the historico-political legal term secularization, as it was used since the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, to history of ideas phenomena. The historico-political legal term, however, included the factor of illegal expropriation, and in Blumenberg’s view this factor was preserved by association in the history of ideas concept of secularization. By contrast, Blumenberg stresses the “legitimacy of the modern age,” that is, the justifiability and originality of modern historical thought: “What mainly occurred in the process that is interpreted as secularization, at least (so far) in all but a few recognizable and specific instances, should be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated.”23 Let us try to take stock: it should again be stressed that there is unquestionably an analogical relationship between certain Christian concepts of history and modern historical models that see the meaning of history in the progress of mankind toward a goal of this-worldly perfection. The analogy refers to the structure and symbols of these models. Besides this, there is some reason for believing that the analogy is no accident, but the result of a genealogical connection. The point of reference on the Christian

22. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 3:1363. 23. Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung, 7, 77 (English trans. in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983], 1, 65). For a discussion of Blumenberg’s critique, see “Säkularisation, Säkularisierung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 5:828. Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 47 side is, to be sure, not the Christian eschatology or the Christian historical thought, but rather a particular tradition of history of salvation and theological speculation that stretches from the early Christian millenarians to Joachim of Fiore to the Pietists of the eighteenth century. If one views the historical speculations as interpretations of the existential tensions between deficiency and fulfillment, the line of separation does not run between Christian millenarianism on the one hand and its secularizations on the other, between Christian salvation history and ideas of progress, but rather between such interpretations of existential tension that do not dissolve this tension and others that partly or in toto bring to this world fulfillment as a goal of a temporal developmental process. From this perspective the Christian millenarian concepts appear closer to modern historical thought than to Augustinian thought. On the other hand, a dividing line must be drawn between modern historical schemes and millenarian schemes—indeed, any Christian schemes—from the point of view that the former ascribe progress toward a historical end to the autonomous reason of man or this-worldly developmental laws. In this respect Bloch and Blumenberg are both doubtless correct when they emphasize the specifically new in modern conceptions of the world and history. The concept of secularization hides the fundamentally new rather than revealing it in its particularity. The breadth of meaning and expressiveness of the concept of secularization is further modified when we bear in mind the origin of the concept from legal language as well as its historical development, although I have another matter in mind than the transference of the notion of unjustified expropriation from the politico-legal concept of secularization to that of the history of ideas that is assumed by Blumenberg. Originally saecularisatio designated the transfer of a member of an order (regularis) to a secular priest who does not live according to a particular rule (canonicus).24 The legal term for the takeover of ecclesiastical property by secular authorities originated immediately preceding the Peace of Westphalia. It gained currency in the second half of the seventeenth century and was commonly used in the eighteenth century. The point of time for the appearance of this term seems to me to be more important than the question of whether or not an element of illegitimacy resonates in the term. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the sacrum imperium of the Middle Ages had its actual end, that is, in political theory and in national law, church and state are dissociated. The concepts of politics and religion for two separate spheres follow this dissociation. The legal concept of “secularization”

24. For what follows, see Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 792–807. 48 The Apocalypse in Germany belongs to this development and consequently the concept of the history of ideas. This means that “secularization” is a historically conditioned concept that has a role and significance primarily for the historical phase of Western Europe in the modern period, in which state and church and, consequently, the political and religious or secular and spiritual are each seen as separate spheres. It is therefore highly questionable whether the history of ideas concept of secularization can meaningfully be used with regard to millenarianism of the Middle Ages or even to the Revelation of John and the Book of Daniel, since in fact we have here a melding of the secular and spiritual that can more adequately be described, for example, as the temporalization of the existential tension between this-worldly deficiency and transcendental fulfillment. But even in the modern period there are points of view that relativize the validity of the concept of secularization—although it has its role here within the dichotomized system of thought and conception of the secular versus the religious, but even primarily in the system of thought and conception—that attempts to distinguish types. For here, as well, the reality does not correspond to this clear division. What Bloch, for example, found fascinating in Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists was precisely the political and social dimension of their religious conceptions. And when we proceed two or three hundred years further, into a time in which the state, society, and politics emancipated themselves from the church and even became predominant, we see that genuinely profane spheres, such as people and nation, were sacralized.25 Parallel to the process of secularization of the modern age a new sort of process of sacralization has taken place. The sharp division of the secular and religious, which the concept of secularization implies, is then—with regard to the manner in which men interpret their existential problems, the meaning of their life, their place in history— fundamentally dubious. My own reflections on the content of the problematics of secularization led to the result that different conceptions of history can be viewed as interpretations of the existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment and that a spectrum of varieties and transitions comes into view with this manner of viewing that the concept of secularization conceals. To the question posed at the beginning, whether one can secularize the apocalypse, I therefore answer: The question is not very meaningful. That the concept of secularization offers only a limited advance in understanding is less obvious when it is used to refer to systems of thought whose link to

25. On this, see Chapters 8–10 of this book; see also Schrey, Säkularisierung, 6–12. Can the Apocalypse Be Secularized? 49 religious or secular thought is accepted without question. For this reason, I prefer to view apocalypse as a symbol for the exegesis of experiences and to examine the different possibilities of interpreting existential tension as “apocalyptic,” with regard to their respective content, their various manifestations, their cause, and their meaning, irrespective of whether these interpretations appear in a religious or secular context. 4 Symbols and Experiences

“Lack” and “plenitude,” or “deficiency” and “fulfillment,” are symbols for experiences. We understand the symbols because we can comprehend the experiences, and we can do that because we ourselves have had such experiences. None of us are spared experiences of want, which can occur at several levels of human existence and action, from experiences of failure in daily life to experiences of bodily, intellectual, even moral inadequacy, to the all-pervading experiences of transience and loss, aging, sickness, death. “No matter how healthy one may feel, we have bodies that are ultimately pathetic to us,” Ernst Bloch says, accentuating this tangible, if extreme, example of human inadequacy. “The more we mature, the more we decline. In short order we become yellow and decay deep in the earth. Of course it is possible to picture or imagine what may happen after us. But no gaze is cast upward without brushing death, which bleaches everything.”1 Still, we are also granted experiences of fulfillment at different levels. Nature can give us the impression of plenitude and the experience of bodily and psychic well-being, of existing “in harmony with the world,” and of sharing in the plenitude of the cosmos:

At rest in fullness, calm lies the autumn day, The mellow grape is clear and the orchard red With fruit . . . And all around where now by the quiet path I cross the ﬁeld, for satisﬁed men their crops Have ripened . . .

From heaven through leafy boughs on the busy ones A light subdued and temperate glances down To share their pleasure . . .

1. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 340, 332.

50 Symbols and Experiences 51

Experiences of fulﬁllment can afford the fortunate bonding with another person in love:

Blessed he who, calmly loving a gentle wife, Can call a worthy homeland and hearth his own; Above ﬁrm ground more brightly to the Settled, secure man his heaven glitters.

And, ﬁnally, the presence of a transcendent ground of all fulﬁllment may become luminous in the experience of plenitude:

Above us mortals, heavenly powers, you bless Each man’s possessions, kindly disposed to all.2

Experiences of plenitude are not stable; they are succeeded again and again, often abruptly, by experiences of deficiency. This change is experienced as tension, or, more exactly, what we experience are movements in a field of tension between the poles of deficiency and plenitude, not “deficiency” on the one hand and “plenitude” on the other in respective exclusivity. Further, even if we get very close to one pole or the other, the tension is retained as a painful or hoped-for possibility. And the movements in this field of tension find a figurative-symbolic expression. Hölderlin cannot visualize the fullness of an autumn day without adding to the image of the richness of fruits the following fancy:

At rest in fullness, calm lies the autumn day, The mellow grape is clear and the orchard red

2. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Mein Eigentum,” in Sämtliche Werke, Große Stuttgarter Aus- gabe [Large Stuttgart edition], ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1946–1985), 1:306 (English trans., Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967], 99, 101). Hölderlin frequently associates the symbol Fülle (“fullness” or “plenitude”) with the divine, e.g., in “An den Aether” and “Brod und Wein”:

Beings thrive not only on earthly food But you nourish them all with your nectar, o father! The enlivening air crowds and runs From your eternal fullness through all the cavities of life (Hölderlin, Werke, 1:1:204)

For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them, Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods. (Hölderlin, Werke, 2:1:93; Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 249). 52 The Apocalypse in Germany

With fruit, when of the noble blooms Many already fell thankfully to the earth.

And the heavenly light that lights the reapers, and appears to make the poet too happy at the moment, arouses at the same time the painful recollection:

Once I was it, but like roses, oh, Transient was the godly life!

Again and again, the images of plenitude—of contentment and joy, of rest, strength, and security—are placed in tense relation to images of unsteadiness and transience:

. . . when mighty time, The changeable, with all its waves, Thunders in my ears outwards from afar . . .

But even in the experience of deficiency, the tension with the other pole remains. As overcome by the transience and fading of human existence as Bloch is, he experiences at the same time a “maturing”; as inevitably his glance falls on death, it happens, while he directs his view “upward.” The movements in the field of tension between deficiency and fulfillment are not directionless; the tension is directed to the pole of fulfillment. We strive to attain fulfillment and happiness as perfectly and lastingly as possible, although (or because) we cannot free ourselves from the experience of deficiency. “The notion of redemption,” according to Walter Benjamin, “resonates inalienably with that of happiness,”3 that is, the notion of perfection and permanence of happiness. Plato attempted to describe in the Symposium the existential tension of man as a tension toward the pole of fulfillment by having the seer Diotima tell a story through the mouth of Socrates:

When Aphrodite was born, there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros, or Plenty,4 who is the son of Metis, or Cunning, was one of the guests. When the feast was over, Penia, or Poverty, came about the doors to beg, as the manner is on such occasions. Now Plenty, grown tipsy with nectar (there was no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep. Then Poverty, being of herself so resourceless, plotted to have a child

3. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, sect. 2, p. 693. 4. More precisely: “wealth in aid or funds,” but also “wealth in knowledge of ways and means.” Symbols and Experiences 53

with Plenty, and accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived Eros, or Love. . . . Now, as the son of Plenty and Poverty, Eros is in a peculiar case. First, he is always poor, and far from tender or beautiful as most suppose him: rather he is hard and parched, shoeless and homeless; on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding, and takes his rest on doorsteps and waysides in the open air; true to his mother’s nature, he ever dwells with want. But he takes after his father in scheming for all that is beautiful and good; for he is brave, impetuous and high-strung, a famous hunter, always weaving some strategem; desirous and competent of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times. . . . He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, in the selfsame day he is ﬂourishing and alive at the hour when he is abounding in resource; at another he is dying, and then reviving by force of his father’s nature: yet the resources that he gets will ever be ebbing away; so that Eros is at no time either resourceless or wealthy, and furthermore, he stands midway between wisdom and ignorance.5

The figurative description of the myth suggests various possibilities for determining deficiency and fulfillment: ugliness and beauty, ignorance and wisdom, mortality and immortality, transitoriness and eternality. Eros appears as the symbolic personification of tension at the pole of fulfillment. Diotima characterizes him as a “great daimon,” who mediates “between the mortal and the immortal.” When man allows this daimon into his soul— that is, when he actualizes love for wisdom and immortality—he moves in the field of tension toward the pole of fulfillment.6 Nevertheless, in the tension between deficiency and fulfillment, the loving movement to the pole of fulfillment cannot be experienced alone; it is accompanied by fear, hate, and anger, when the pull of want and of imperfection appears to be overpowering. Ernst Bloch expressed this possibility: “Yet, whither with this feeling, with the indestructible essence of the ego given to us now? It is pleasant for the fewest to be born with this evil heart and these firm grades of talent, while envy of the apparently unreasonably preferred individual usually becomes a poison rather than a cure. And does this not lead to the final mystery, to the revolt against the constellation as such, that makes us be born into this particular class, these particular prospects, this particular time?”7 The tension between deficiency and fulfillment can thus be experienced and interpreted in various manners. My purpose is to understand the apocalypse as a symbol of a specific interpretation of such experiences of tension. The preceding reflections were intended to explain my own path

5. Plato, Symposium 203B–E. 6. Ibid., 202D; Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, 128–30. 7. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 340. 54 The Apocalypse in Germany in formulating this purpose. Before I effectuate this purpose, it would be appropriate to consider the relationship between experiences and symbols. “Deficiency” and “fulfillment” are, as I said, symbols for experiences. This means that I understand as a “symbol” not only an inner element of literary texts, similar to other elements of this kind (such as allegory or metaphor), but also the manifestation of human self-interpretation and interpretation of meaning. Such an understanding has consequences for the examination of corresponding remarks. My reflections upon the terms, which play a role in the orbit of the apocalypse, and the discussion of the concept of secularization indicated the losses, which the reduction of concrete manifestations to the concept of a system of thought, for example, of millenarianism, brings with itself. When I instead understand the apocalypse as a symbol of the interpretation of experience, I do so with the intention of bridging the gap between generalization and abstraction of the “spiritual” world in the terminological concept and the diversity of concrete manifestations. Thus, I initially follow Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. Cassirer saw that the striving of modern philosophy to develop a “sys- tematics of the spirit” leads to a dilemma. Although he granted that Hegel, with whom this striving reached its highest point, tried to preserve (“aufheben”) the totality of “spiritual” manifestations in the concept of “Spirit” (“Geist”), he nevertheless maintained that “all the diverse forms of the spirit set forth in the Phenomenology seem to culminate in a supreme logical summit—and it is only in this end point that they attain their perfect ‘truth’ and essence.” Since spirit gains the pure element of its existence in the conception of itself, “all ‘spiritual’ being and occurring as much as it may be grasped in its specificity and should be recognized in this particularity, is finally shifted and reduced to a single dimension.” Cassirer thus saw a gap between the “ultimate reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic” of the philosophical concept, whose universality threatens to blur the individuality and particularity of individual forms, and the juxtaposition of individual manifestations, whose diversity distorts the view toward the general.8 Cassirer formulated a dilemma that already appeared in a somewhat different form in our first consideration of apocalyptic texts: We discovered that the Revelation of John, Arndt’s Geist der Zeit, and Toller’s Wandlung have something in common—the “apocalyptic.” On the other hand we had to admit that these texts from different times possess singular forms and particular meanings in their respective historical contexts. We encountered this same dilemma in Mannheim’s attempt to determine the

8. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1:83–84. Symbols and Experiences 55 concept of the utopian. While Mannheim maintained the systematic construction of the concept, even when empirical elements should enter into its definition, Cassirer approached the question fundamentally and outlined a solution on a different level. He saw an escape from the dilemma in the discovery of a factor that “recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two of them takes exactly the same shape,” of a medium “through which all the configurations effected in the separate branches of cultural life must pass, but which nevertheless retains its particular nature, its specific character.” He discovered the constant and universal feature, which this medium must possess, as a consequence of the “fundamental principle of cognition that the universal can be perceived only in the particular, while the particular can be thought of only in reference to the universal.” He found the mediating principle between the spiritual and the sensory in the “function of the spiritual itself” to create a specific sensory substrate: “The content of the spirit is disclosed only in its manifestations; the ideal form is known only by and in the aggregate of the sensory signs which it uses for its expression.”9 Cassirer understood the expression of that function of the “spiritual” in the concept of the symbolic form. Cassirer opened up new perspectives in his consideration of “spiritual- social” phenomena by conceiving of languages, myth, religion, art, and science as symbolic forms. However, the bridge he created between the spiritual and the sensory was imperfect to the extent that the bridge “symbol” rested too one-sidedly on the pillar of the idealistic concept of spirit. He viewed the symbolizing function as a “pure activity of spirit,” and the symbolic form as the “essence of spirit.” Recourse to this abstraction seemed to be requisite in order to explain the fact that “all these symbols appear from the beginning with a definite claim to objectivity and value. They all go beyond the realm of simple individual manifestations of consciousness; they claim to place a generally valid principle before them.”10 The observation that symbols claim general validity was important, but its recourse to a general and objective essence “spirit” ignores—as Jürgen Gebhardt stressed—“the concrete constitutive processes of symbols. It also absolutizes dimensions of the spiritual-cultural world to the congealed forms of language, myth, religion, art, and science, with their own quasi- mutually independent laws of construction, which again represent phases of a progressive developmental process of spirit. Thereby symbolic forms free themselves from the psycho-social mooring of the historical world.”11

9. Ibid., 84–85. 10. Ibid., 88. 11. Jürgen Gebhardt, “Symbolformen gesellschaftlicher Sinndeutung in der Krisener- fahrung,” in Kriegserlebnis: Der Erste Weltkrieg in der literarischen Gestaltung und symbolischen 56 The Apocalypse in Germany

Recently, to preserve this mooring and to bring it to bear on analyses of symbols, those that study symbols are making an effort to include input from psychoanalysis, social phenomenology deriving from Husserl, ethnology, and classical philosophy. The intention of grasping symbols as an interpretation of experiences and interpreting their content from the substrate of concrete consciousness is decisive. Thereby the process of symbolizing is freed from its attachment to the speculative essence of a general spirit and connected to an empirical basis. “The concrete consciousness of concrete man is the only consciousness given in our experience,” Eric Voegelin stresses. “Constructions of a collective consciousness—either the consciousness of society or the consciousness of mankind in history—are hypostases that have no standing in theory.” This does not mean that the superindividual claim to validity of symbols could no longer be explained; to the contrary, the origin and validity of symbolic self-interpretations can now be more appropriately described as—in Voegelin’s words—the “processes by which concrete persons create a social sphere, i.e., a field in which their experiences of order are understood by other concrete men who accept them as their own and make them into the basis of their habitual actions. . . . Since such fields are processes and not objects given once and for all, they manifest not only the processual characteristics of their founding and preservation but also those of resistance and mutation, of tradition and differentiating development, of ensuing rigidity and revolt, and so on, until their final decomposition and disappearance.”12 The advantage of such an approach is obvious if we consider the diverse historical situations in which apocalyptic symbolisms have emerged. How- ever, tracing back symbols to the experiences of concrete persons again leads to the question of the elements through which the commonness is constituted that enables us to understand symbols from different times and various social fields as “apocalytic.” Where is the “general” or “constant” in the historical process of symbolization to be seen? In our first consideration of the Revelation of John and of two modern works, we determined that these texts reveal structural and formal similarities, similar contents and similar or like imagery. I consider these similarities or commonalities to be similarities of symbolic articulation, for the symbols constitute in their context also the contents and the structure, for instance, of the symbols darkness/light, old/new, death/rebirth. The similar or like symbols give rise to the presumption that similar

Deutung der Nationen, ed. Klaus Vondung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980), 46; the essay, whose theoretical position I share, provides an exceptional overview of the development of the symbol concept in the twentieth century. 12. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 201–2. Symbols and Experiences 57 or like experiences form their basis, and since the experiences resulted from specific situations, this relegates us first to the historic context of experience. Next to the similarities or commonalities of the symbols there are also similarities in the historical context of the investigated texts, that is, a situation of the suppression and persecution of minorities. The apocalyptic interpretations were apparently spawned by these situations, for they were produced by members of the persecuted minority and referred to the situation of oppression. This context could lead to the conclusion that the basis of the comparison is on the level of historical occurrences and facts. But this conclusion would go too far, as I already indicated, for what is comparable—in the oppression of nonhellenized Jews under Antiochus IV, the persecution of Christians under Nero or Domitian, and the repression of nationalist Germans under Napoleon—is a constellation consisting of a few factors. In addition, there are innumerable comparable constellations that provoked no apocalyptic interpretations. The historically contingent events and facts in their simple facticity cannot offer further possibilities of comparison; they arise more through the manner in which the events and facts were interpreted: that the oppressing power is absolutely evil and represents a universal threat, that the minority represents the Good, that a fundamental shift of the situation is requisite, through which an end is made to the suppression and the Good is led to a final victory. The commonalities and similarities, then, lie much more on the level of interpretation, and these refer indeed not directly to the historical situations in the sense of “objective” facts; they are interpretations of experiences in these situations. In our provisional determination of typical signs of the apocalypse, we have already determined that corresponding texts express a tension between deficiency and fulfillment, as much for the Revelation of John as for the texts of Arndt or Toller. I consider, then, the tension between deficiency and fulfillment brought to expression in language as an interpretation of concrete experiences of such tension in the situation in which the texts originated. In addition, we have determined at the beginning of this chapter that experiences of existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment apparently belong to the condition of man. That I mention this fundamental fact of the matter does not happen with the intention to reify the tension between deficiency and fulfillment and to raise it as “object” to a constant and to an absolute point of reference. This is not possible, for we know of that tension only through our experiences and the interpretations of others’ experiences, and experiences cannot be “objectively” grasped. While experiences are real, they are events in reality, but not “things” of the outside world that could be directly grasped. 58 The Apocalypse in Germany

They are, as the English psychoanalyst Ronald D. Laing noted, “invisible” although “at the same time more evident than anything”; “experience is not ‘subjective’ rather than ‘objective,’ not ‘inner’ rather than ‘outer.’ ”13 In addition, experiences are always unique, are made by concrete persons and occur in ever new situations. That there is something universal on the plane of experience I can determine only by the similarities and commonalities of the interpretations of experience, which I can at least basically understand and grasp because they correspond to my own and to the extent that they have constituted the social sphere of consciousness in the narrower or wider sense of the word, to which I myself belong. If something is constant, then it is man’s participation in the process of reality as a search for meaning and order of this reality and its existence, as well as the symbolic language for this participation. Because experiences belong to concrete persons and unique situations, they cannot be identical to each other, but I can conclude that they are equivalent to the extent that the interpretive symbols reflect a similar structure, for instance, that of “tension.” The explanation of symbols as interpretations of experiences leads to the observation that psychic processes are articulated in this symbolization, and this results in the conclusion “that the structure of the experiential world of the psyche is reflected in the structure of a symbolic form.”14 This connection constitutes the equivalences of experiences and their symbolizations in history.15 With the assumption of equivalences of specific experiences and symbols only a general framework is determined, while a more exact and content- based definition must be undertaken by analysis of the manifestation of concrete symbol complexes. At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that the tension between deficiency and fulfillment is actualized differently and thus can be interpreted differently. The interpretation of the experience of tension called “apocalyptic” marks the “breaking point” of tension—sufficient pieces of circumstantial evidence speak for that; overstretching of this tension to the breaking point is expressed in the tendency to interpret the tension between deficiency and fulfillment dualistically and temporally. This particular form of interpretation of experience, with its corresponding symbols, could distinguish the apocalypse

13. Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 16–17. 14. Gebhardt, “Symbolformen gesellschaftlicher Sinndeutung in der Krisenerfahrung,” 49. 15. On this, see Eric Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” in Eternità e storia: I valori permanenti nel divenire storico (Florence: Valecchi, 1970), 215–34. Symbols and Experiences 59 from other possibilities of interpretation of the experiences of tension, for example, from the Platonic. The equivalences of symbolic language and the experiences thereby interpreted would constitute the commonalities. The distinctions within the symbol-type “apocalypse,” which also exist, could be understood as modified interpretations within the framework of equivalences that seek their appropriate expression according to their location in the historical process of the social spheres of consciousness. All of the difficulties have not yet been removed from the concrete analyses of symbols. If we analyze symbols as interpretations of experiences, we are speaking about experiences as though they were tangible “things.” However, it must be borne in mind that experiences themselves have not been given directly with the symbols even if these experiences are presented with much detail and vividness. The difference remains between “invisible experiences,” which are not “things,” and “reified” signs or images of symbols. If we make experiences an object of our investigation (for example, experiences of tension between deficiency and fulfillment), the linguistic instruments of our investigation—like the words deficiency, fulfillment, and tension—are themselves symbols that merely give the impression that they could “arrest” the object of study. This difference, too, could be viewed as tension that cannot be eliminated, yet in which we are able to move with comprehension and perception. In the Symposium, Plato used, apart from a discursive discussion of the problem of man’s existence in the “Metaxy”—the intermediate area of tension between deficiency and fulfillment, mortality and immortality—the myth, since in myth no opposition exists between “image” and “thing”; “the ‘image’ does not represent the ‘thing,’ rather, it is the ‘thing.’ ”16 Plato put the myth in the mouth of the seeress Diotima, in order to express the “mysterious”17 of the reality of experience. The distance, which must be preserved when speaking about experiences when we ourselves no longer live in myth, Plato established in an artistic manner by having the mythical story of Diotima presented by Socrates at the dinner and one of the participants, Aristodemos, speaks about it years later to a certain Apollodorus, who again tells his friends the story years later. Thus Plato treated the “subject” as a report of a report of a story concerning a myth in order to relativize its character as a “subject” as far as possible. If we cannot use this same means, we must as least be conscious of that difference when we speak about experiences, about symbols, and in symbols. This is particularly important when we turn to the interpretation of 16. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2:38. 17. This is a further characterization of the status of experiences by Laing, Politics of Experience, 17. 60 The Apocalypse in Germany individual texts, since the texts appear as independent worlds in which numerous elements are in a functional and semantic relation according to specific laws of construction. For the characterization of inner literary elements, we have to our disposal conceptual instruments, among which “metaphor,” “allegory,” as well as “symbol” possess exceptional standing. The literary concept of “symbol” is not completely different from the one developed above; also in literary criticism it is emphasized that in symbols—in contrast, for example, to metaphors—“our attention is directed to the empirical reality portrayed,” and one finds expressions there such as: “By means of symbolic consciousness the confused empirical reality can become clear and well ordered.”18 The “symbol” concept of literary criticism, however, refers primarily to the functional relations between the symbol and its context as well as to the approaches to understanding symbols. In the investigation of how symbols are to be understood,19 the difference between the linguistic image and the “meaning” of interpreted experience should particularly be observed. Then again, the various interpretive possibilities direct one’s attention to this relation and its alterations. This is shown when one first reads a text purely as a text: if one understands an element of text as a symbol, one can distinguish between pragmatic and symbolic understanding. At the level of a related action, a symbol can be understood pragmatically, that is, directly, or, to a certain extent, literally (for example, the “New Jerusalem” as it is described in the Revelation of John). At the same time we have the impression that everything has not yet been grasped with the pragmatic meaning; an additional meaning intrudes. In the case of the “New Jerusalem,” we are induced to interpret spiritually—that is, to understand symbolically—the size and layout of the city, as well as the material of which it is constructed, the number of city gates, and so on. “Symbolic comprehension presupposes,” as Kurz stresses, “pragmatic understandings”;20 the semantic connections are intertwined.

18. Gerhard Kurz, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1982), 67, 72. 19. Important for the more recent hermeneutic discussion is Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1975), as well as the posthumously published lecture by Peter Szondi, Einführung in die literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975). Ulrich Nassen provides an overview concerning the discussion of the last decade in “Annotationen zur deutschsprachigen philologischen und philosophischen Hermeneutik-Diskussion 1975– 85,” Sprache und Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 17 (1986): 57. It need not be stressed expressly that my position is only partly inﬂuenced by the recent discussion of hermeneutics. 20. Kurz, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol, 73. Symbols and Experiences 61

This can be understood in Cassirer’s sense, in that the “spiritual” can be expressed in only the sensory, or in the context of our discussion that the relation between the image of a city that bears the name Jerusalem and the spiritual meaning of “perfection” and “redemption” expresses a specific interpretation of experiences. In order to be able to portray this interpretation of experience and to understand the symbol appropriately, we must widen our perspective. The complexity of meanings is better understood when we broaden the historical perspective—when we see the New Jerusalem in relation to the other symbolic image of a city, to the “whore of Babylon,” and to the other symbols of the text. Our understanding is also increased when we direct our view beyond this particular text to the tradition in which two historic cities possessed symbolic meaning and ask how this new meaning came to be and whether the understanding of this meaning has changed in the course of time. An appropriate understanding thus requires that we view symbols within their “social sphere of consciousness,” and this means that it is a matter not only of our understanding, but also of the comprehension of the understanding in the social spheres. Because these fields have a processual character, the symbols are subject to changes, reinterpretations, and misunderstandings. A chief source of misunderstanding of symbols springs from the fact that the tension of the symbols to a nonobjective experiential reality is no longer part of the consciousness; the meaning of the symbol is no longer ascertained from experiences that have originally produced the symbol, but are “objectified” to “qualities” or “essences.” This procedure appears to me to be what is called “allegorical understanding.” This manner of understanding may be observed in Greece in the fifth and fourth century b.c. as a drastic change in a particular social sphere of consciousness: the “sophistic” philosophy endeavored to demythologize myth by eliminating the unity of image and thing in particular by “explaining” the mythical gods and heroes as personifications of powers of nature, moral qualities, or ideal concepts.21 It was Plato who, ironically, criticized this procedure.22 But because he had also left the unity of myth with the new symbolic form of “philosophy” inaugurated by Socrates and himself, he used special methods in order to retain the tension of symbolic speech to the motivating experiences: dialogical argument, the dialectical method, playing with paradoxes and with language itself, and finally—among “objects” that he wished to preserve from conceptual reification—the telling of mythical stories.

21. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2:2–3. 22. Plato, Phaedrus 229C–E. 62 The Apocalypse in Germany

Above all he showed that that tension must remain in the consciousness if one wishes to understand symbolic speech properly, and he thereby gave a paradoxical character to the expression of his philosophizing: although he also gave written form to his philosophy, he had Socrates say that someone must be very naive if he believed that in writing one could have something “clear and certain,” that is, a “thing”; committing something to writing would serve “only to remind the one who already knows what is being written about,” that is, the one who can understand the words as symbols and connect them to experiences.23 In an allegorical understanding this relationship is to a certain extent forgotten; the meaning of the word or the linguistic image is immediately “translated”24 into the “actual” meaning standing behind the text,25 and this meaning is thereby “grasped” as a “thing.” In the tradition of apocalyptic symbolism we can already ascertain allegorical understanding. The ﬁrst

23. Ibid., 275C–D. In this context, the discussion on Plato’s “unwritten doctrine” is also of interest; see Hans-Joachim Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles: Zum Wesen und zur Geschichte der platonischen Ontologie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1959); Konrad Gaiser, Platons ungeschriebene Lehre: Studien zur systematischen und geschichtlichen Begründung der Wissenschaften in der platonischen Schule (Stuttgart: Klett, 1968); and Thomas Alexander Szlezák, Platon und die Schriftlichkeit der Philosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985). 24. Kurz, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol, 75–76; see also 67, 70. Symbolic understanding is made functionally possible through the creation of analogical and synechdochal relations, i.e., that an analogical relation or a connection in the sense of synecdoche can be seen between literal and symbolic meaning. Functional contact between symbol and allegory, but also the possibility of interpreting symbols allegorically, results from allegorical understanding being also based on the creation of analogical connections, although in such a way that pragmatic understanding is no longer object related, but the meaning is now sought behind the text and not in it. 25. Bengel gives a striking example in his explanation of Rev. 12:1 (“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”): “That is the congregation of God and Christ, as it originally germinated, was planted, spread out and was maintained, first in Israel, then also by the gentiles, and in the future will be even more considerable. . . . It is presented as a woman, because it always is in need of and enjoys someone else’s assistance. . . . Sun, Moon, and Stars must be explained in such a way that they maintain a proportion among each other. The sun is a great light, the moon a small light (Genesis 1:16). Therefore in a family the sun represents the father, the moon the mother and the stars the children. . . . The similarity is here, because the prophecy refers to domination among all nations, between the sun and the Christian empire and regime, between the moon and the Muhammadan power (crescent moon), between the crown with twelve stars and the twelve tribes of Israel . . .” (Johann Albrecht Bengel, Gnomon: Auslegung des Neuen Testamentes in fortlaufenden Anmerkungen, German trans. C. F. Werner, 6th ed. [Berlin: Evangelische Verlags-Anstalt, 1952], 2:2:819). On allegorical interpretation in the Middle Ages, see Kamlah, Apokalypse und Geschichtstheologie, 62, 70; and Forrest S. Smith, Secular and Sacred Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1986), 30–37. Symbols and Experiences 63 apocalypse committed to writing, the Book of Daniel, arose in a social sphere of consciousness with which it concerned itself in the specifically new aspects of its interpretation of experience, and from which it also drew its possibilities of expression. Thus the images of the statue of different metals and of the animals from the sea originate from ancient Near Eastern myths and they were certainly understood allegorically by the writer of the Book of Daniel and its readers, that is, in such a way that the four parts of the statue and the four animals represent the empires of the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks. The case is the same with the “whore of Babylon” in the Revelation of John: the author and his contemporaries also doubtless understood the image allegorically—they connected it more or less exclusively with the Roman Empire. It is clear that at the level of comprehension in the historical process no clear distinctions can be made between symbolic and allegorical understanding. But one can determine beforehand that the allegorical interpretation predominated in the Christian exegesis of apocalyptic texts through the entire Middle Ages until the millenarian speculations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Also, individual images that could easily be drawn from their original context, which thereby became independent and readily available, established traditions of allegorical understanding and usage. For instance, this is the case with the “whore of Babylon.” In Germany, in 1813, the picture was automatically connected with France;26 in 1914 we find the same allegorical use—except then, in the face of numerous enemies, in each case a new meaning had to be provided:

England! . . . You are the most evil abomination, constant danger! Because you are Babylon, the great whore!27

On the other hand, it can also be discovered that apocalyptic interpretations are enriched again and again with new, symbolically understood images, that is, with images that should interpret experiences in the current historical situation. Thus, Tollerused the image of the machine as a symbol for the experience of helplessness and the reduction of the humane to

26. “And all people’s hate and scorn is now directed to proud Babylon” (Friedrich Zuckschwerdt, Herzenserleichterungen eines deutschen Patrioten von Pacidives Stringgladius [Berlin: Salfeld, 1813], 77). 27. Ludwig Ganghofer, Eiserne Zither, (part 1) Kriegslieder (Stuttgart: Bonz, 1914), 25– 26. 64 The Apocalypse in Germany mechanical functions in a technological war. But the sum of interpretive elements and images of a text that appear apocalyptic can always be viewed as the symbolism of the interpretation of experience, even if isolated, possibly numerous elements were allegorically understood by the author, since it is true for an entire apocalyptic interpretation that it would not be provided without motives and intentions that are rooted in experiences. PART TWO The Apocalyptic View of History This page intentionally left blank A. Structures

The apocalypse deals with history. It interprets history in a particular manner and therefore presupposes a consciousness of history. The earliest apocalyptic texts of the book of Daniel make this clear. While the ancient Jewish consciousness of history is not fully comparable to modern historical consciousness, and there is in the Old Testament no Hebrew word that corresponds precisely to our word history, the writings of the Old Testament nevertheless make it clear that in Israel, since the time of Moses, there was a conception of history as a process determined by the activity of God. In time, this conception crystallized into a notion of history that is called “history of salvation”: history as a chain of events from creation to redemption that is directed by God. The “history of salvation” viewpoint taken up by Christianity is doubtless one of the sources of modern historical consciousness, even if the concept of history has widened since the eighteenth century to include the whole development of the human species, and the plan of history—to the extent that such a plan toward a ﬁnal purpose is assumed—now appears as a process of self-realization of mankind. The beginnings of the apocalypse are characterized by a tension with the “history of salvation” conception of history. Apocalyptic historical thought has the “history of salvation” as a background. This is also true for the modern period, in which the “history of salvation” thought was replaced by substantively different, but structurally similar conceptions of history as a systematic process of evolutionary development and progress. In each case, apocalyptic thought presupposes the assumption that history is possessed of a quality that may be designated “meaning.” The apocalyptic reaction to the experience that history has no meaning is comprehensible only based on this presupposition. For this reason, an examination of apocalyptic historical thought must take into consideration the background with which it contrasts.

67 5 History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed

“The time is nigh”—that is the heart of the apocalyptic message. The Revelation of John repeatedly utters this prophecy in a number of different ways. But what does the expression “the time is nigh” mean? It means that time will soon be “fulfilled,” that a condition of “fulfillment”—of perfect fulfillment—will be reached, as is outlined in the Revelation of John: “And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”1 Why does the apocalyptic visionary await an imminent condition of absolute fulfillment? The experiences of sorrow, of pain, and particularly of death are powerful motives to desiring a state in which these negative conditions no longer remain. But death, sorrow, and pain have always been experienced as a characteristic of the imperfection—if not the curse—of human existence, and this experience did not always and necessarily lead to the expectation that it will be eliminated in the near future. To be sure, the Revelation of John reveals a second motive for apocalyptic expectation: those whom the prophecy addresses are humiliated and persecuted by their society; they are subject to the power of the apocalyptic beast, behind which the Roman emperors that persecute the Christians are hidden. As a consequence it is expected that power will be taken from the beast and

1. Rev. 21:4; see also Rev. 1:1: “which must shortly come to pass”; 1:3: “the time is at hand”; 2:16: “I will come unto thee quickly”; 3:11: “I come quickly”; 22:6: “the things which must shortly be done”; 22:10: “the time is at hand”; 22:12: “behold, I come quickly”; 22:20: “Surely I come quickly”; on the imminent expectation as a fundamental characteristic of the apocalyptic, see Jakob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie, 32; Rowley, Relevance of Apocalyptic; Gerhard von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, vol. 2, Die Theologie der prophetischen Überlieferung Israels (Munich: Kaiser, 1965), 282, 323 (English trans., Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker [London: SCM Press, 1975], 2); Martin Noth, “Das Geschichtsverständnis der altestamentlichen Apokalyptik,” in Geschichtsdenken und Geschichtsbild im Mittelalter, ed. Walther Lammers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge- sellschaft, 1965), 53; Koch and Schmidt, Apokalyptik, 14–17.

68 History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 69 will be transferred to those who are still oppressed: “And they shall reign for ever and ever.”2 But there has always been political or religious oppression of minorities, social injustice, and persecution, as far as we have any knowledge of human society. As much as this fact may stir the desire for change among the oppressed, the expectation that this change is imminent and will be permanent is again of no necessary consequence. When the apocalyptic visionary expects that the sorrow of this world will be eliminated in the immediate future and be replaced by a condition of perfection, this means that he sees a radical contrast between “deficiency” and “fulfillment” and brings this contrast into a temporal sequence: the previous conditio humana is deficient—“the old order,” whose passing is prophesied and encompasses both the past and the present—while fulfillment will come in the future. History, including the present, is radically depreciated in favor of the future.3 The existential and societal experiences of deficiency mentioned above offer, by themselves, no answer to the question of how the apocalyptic writer is brought to his expectation of the end and to his implicit depreciation of history. Apparently it requires additional presuppositions in order to spawn an apocalyptic interpretation of experiences of deficiency: it requires a particular historical context. For this reason the connection between historical experiences and the social field of consciousness in which the apocalypse arose must be considered. We have already shown that the apocalypse deals with the interpretation of an experience of extreme tension between deficiency and fulfillment. This interpretation is dualistic, and it temporalizes the contrasts by placing all previous history in a condition of deficiency, but projects fulfillment into the near future; this interpretation is presented as an interpretation of history. Because the problematics of history are so central for understanding the apocalypse,4 and because history receives such a comprehensive interpretation and radical evaluation in apocalyptic 2. Rev. 22:5. The same expectation can be seen in Dan. 7:27: there in the background is the persecution and oppression of Orthodox Jews in the Seleucid Empire of Antiochus IV. On this, see Klaus Koch, Das Buch Daniel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 127–54. 3. On the depreciation of history by the apocalypse, see Rowley, Relevance of Apokalyptic, 170; Martin Buber, Sehertum: Anfang und Ausgang, 64–68; Rudolf Bultmann, Geschichte und Eschatologie, 30–36; Klaus Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik, 42, 50 (English trans., The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic [London: SCM Press, 1972]); Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 183. 4. Historians of religion and theologians have continually stressed this; see Stanley Brice Frost, Old Testament Apocalyptic: Its Origin and Growth (London: Epworth, 1952), 8; Nils Messel, Die Einheitlichkeit der jüdischen Eschatologie (Gießen: Töpelmann, 1915); Mar- tin Noth, “Das Geschichtsverständnis der alttestamentlichen Apokalyptik,” 53; Dietrich 70 The Apocalypse in Germany thought, it would be worthwhile to consider briefly those traditions that connect deficiency and fulfillment with history or simply “time,” since it is to be expected that the apocalypse is connected with such interpretations or consciously contrasts with them. The following sketch presents these interpretations as steps in a historical progression. It should be noted, however, that the image of continuous development arises as a construct from the question of the origin of apocalyptic thought, that this interpretation was not unavoidable, and that there were other, even contradictory, developments. 1. In cosmological societies the tension between deficiency and fulfillment is experienced as a this-worldly phenomenon; with respect to its temporal dimension it is associated with the experiences of emerging and passing away, growing and decaying. The conception of time is connected with this rhythmic up and down. Thus, with the “fading” of this-worldly phenomena, even time itself, within which it occurs, may become deficient, but it may return to fulfillment through cultic ritual in the sacred time of the festival. “Historical” events in our sense play no role in the cosmological cult.5 Of course, conceptions of more comprehensive and even goal-oriented passages of time are to be found in the cosmological societies of the ancient Near East, particularly in Babylon and Egypt. The cyclical understanding of time can extend to all cosmic events so that these events are placed between primeval beginnings arising from chaos and a final debacle. This understanding cannot yet compare with the unilinearity and uniqueness of our understanding of history, for the cyclical conception of history has a new creation and a new “aion” following destruction.6 Still, for the present aion the conception of a goal-oriented flow of time is possible. This type of “historiogenetic” conception of history, in which a formative primeval period is chronologically connected with the present by lists of gods, heroes, and kings, is, despite its linearity, mythical history, in which historical events have no meaning or are adjusted through mythical

Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zur Theologie der jüdischen Apokalyptik und der pharisäischen Orthodoxie (Neunkirchen: Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1960), 68; Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik, 40. 5. See Mircea Eliade, Das Heilige und das Profane: Vom Wesen des Religiösen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), particularly 40–49; id., Kosmos und Geschichte: Der Mythos der ewigen Wiederkehr, particularly 46–79; and Paul D. Hanson, “Old Testament Apocalyptic Reex- amined,” Interpretation 25 (1971): 458. 6. Thus in Plato, Politeia 546A; Nomoi 676A,B, 677C,D, 721C; Timaeus 30A; see also Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 102–6. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 71 symbolization.7 Nevertheless, ancient Near Eastern conceptions of history influenced Jewish historical thought, as the Books of Genesis and Exodus clearly show; clearly, Jewish historical thought, which deeply influenced our own, takes on a new quality via-à-vis its cosmological precursors. 2. Consciousness of “history” has its origin in Israel with the Exodus from Egypt. The Exodus is conceived of as a “historical” occurrence that constitutes an irreversible “before” and “after,” because in this event a new spiritual truth is experienced that is superior to the truth of cosmological myth and that at the same time gives new meaning to the existence of the people of Israel: Yahweh, “who led Israel from Egypt,”8 is revealed as the God beyond the cosmos and the intracosmic world of the gods; thus, the Exodus from Egypt becomes, in the self-understanding of the people of Israel, the exodus from cosmological civilization, and Israel becomes a people that has a history in the presence of the transcendent God.9 While for members of cosmological civilizations fulfillment exists only as plenitude of the cosmos in which they—themselves part within the cosmos—can participate, a clear distinction is made between the deficient events within the cosmos and the fulfillment beyond the cosmos. To be sure, fulfillment can reach into the cosmos, but this happens only in specific, singular, “historical” events, in which the transcendent God reveals himself. 3. As “historical” events, revelatory events are again and again overshadowed by other events of this-worldly time. The experience of fulfillment can therefore be interpreted (under the impact of the continuing deficiency of existence within the cosmos) as a promise of renewed yet larger fulfillment, and, in view of the experience of a continuing process of revelatory events, as a promise of the never-ending presence of oth- erworldly fulfillment: history is “eschatologized.” This perspective, at first temporally bound and restricted to the people of Israel,10 widens during the

7. See Mühlmann, Chiliasmus und Nativismus, 367; Doren, “Wunschräume und Wun- schzeiten,” 168–69; on historiogenetic historical speculation, see Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: Piper, 1966), 79–116 (the chapter on Historiogenesis is missing in the English translation); and Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 59–113; see also Klaus Koch, “Geschichte/Geschichtsschrei- bung/Geschichsphilosophie II,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Krause and Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977), 12:570–86. 8. This description of Yahweh is one of the most fundamental and frequently repeated articles of faith in the Old Testament; see Koch, “Geschichte,” 573. 9. See Gerhard von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, vol. 1, Die Theologie der geschichtlichen Überlieferung Israels, 5th ed. (Munich: Kaiser, 1966), 189–200; Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1, Israel and Revelation, 111–44, and vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 14–17. 10. See von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1:108–15; Hanson, “Old Testament Apocalyptic Reexamined,” 462–64; and Koch, “Geschichte,” 579–83. 72 The Apocalypse in Germany

Babylonian captivity and especially later, under the impact of the Persian Empire, to include the whole course of history and mankind; it extends from the creation of the cosmos to the constitution of the people of Israel to the redemption, not only of Israel, but of all peoples.11 Revelatory events are spiritual events that have an impact on the order of society and, to that extent, also on the political fate of the people of Israel. Each of these events constitutes meaning in history: the Exodus, the taking of the land, the kingdom of David. Therefore, the outline of a “history of salvation” has revelatory events appearing not only as a process of continual unveiling of transcendent truth, but at the same time as way stations in the meaningful process of the history of Israel in the presence of God. But because the tension between the experience of spiritual fulfillment and the adversity of the intracosmic course of time persists, under the influence of political humiliation, the expectation can arise that the superior truth of the transcendent God will be shown in the “success” of Israel within this-worldly history. This expectation grows during the fall of Israel in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c., especially during the time of the exile; the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deutero- Isaiah hope for a second exodus and a new covenant with Yahweh, the reconstitution of the Kingdom of Israel, and the renewal of the Davidic dynasty. The prophetic view of history may be compared with a line rising upward that then shifts downward, and then a second line that attempts to surpass the first one.12 Upon the earlier salvation history from the Creation to the kingdom of David follows a “history of disaster” to the total destruction of Israel; a new history of salvation follows this that eventuates in the renewal of Israel on a qualitatively higher level. The prophetic view of history deals primarily with the fate of Israel. But with the spread of the salvation history perspective to the whole of mankind in Deutero-Isaiah the question arises whether the expected inclusion of other peoples in Yahweh’s salvation also has an impact upon the political relations of his chosen people to these peoples. Deutero-Isaiah himself leaves it undecided whether Yahweh’s making Israel a “light to the Gentiles” is to be understood only spiritually or if it allows for consequences in the further course of intracosmic history.13 4. If the perspective of promise and fulfillment is transferred to intracosmic history, the failures that the train of historically contingent events perforce brings in its wake would scarcely be bearable. A critical point

11. Isa. 40–55, especially 40:5, 49:6, and 55:5; see also von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1:248–54; and Hanson, “Old Testament Apocalyptic Reexamined,” 467–70. 12. Koch, “Geschichte,” 578–79. 13. Isa. 49:6. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 73 was reached with the conquests of the Persians; Spengler made it clear what their claim to have conquered the oikoumene, the whole known world, must have meant for Israel: “Of two small tribes that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of ﬁghting men, the one had taken possession of a world . . . and the other had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy. . . . And how despairing are the arguments with which the Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact the image of their god. Here, in exile . . . pure Judaic prophecy (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into Apocalypse (Deutero-Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah).”14 The nonappearance of the promised fulﬁllment heightened their impatience, as a psalm from this era betrays:

O God, how long shall the adversary reproach? shall the enemy blaspheme thy name for ever? Why withdrawest thou thy hand, even thy right hand? pluck it out of thy bosom.15

Still, fulfillment did not come; in the centuries after the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah, despair and impatience grew. Not only was hope for the renewal of the kingdom of Israel disappointed, but worse was the grave realization that one was no longer dealing with different cosmological kingdoms. These had nothing to counter the humanly representative claim to Yahweh’s truth; against them, Israel could stand up in the realm of power politics, at least to some extent. Now Israel saw itself conquered by empires, first by the Persian Empire and then by the empire of Alexander and its successor states, which made a similar claim: the ecumenic empires contrasted the claim of Israel to represent Yahweh’s transcendent truth, valid for all mankind, with the claim to be establishing a universal order in the intracosmic world. This claim won out. The “historical” interpretation of the tension between deficiency and fulfillment, according to the promise- consumation schema, had prepared the ground for the apocalypse. Over the centuries the tension had become extreme; it reached the breaking point when the gap between the humanly representative claim to transcendent truth and the universal claim of this-worldly order had become so deep that a balance in history no longer appeared to be possible.16 This gap was decisive not only for the apocalypse of Daniel of the Seleucid period,

14. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:207–8. 15. Ps. 74:10–11. 16. See Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 26–27, 183, 228, 239; Koch, Das Buch Daniel, 203–4; and Hanson, “Old Testament Apocalyptic Reexamined,” 471–72. 74 The Apocalypse in Germany but also for the Revelation of John, for which the Roman Empire was the point of reference. And, after the Messiah had already appeared and had promised its speedy return, the impatience felt while waiting for its fulfillment was possibly still greater. The characteristics of the apocalypse can be explained from the situation that engendered it: the longer the subjugation under the empires lasted, the less promising the prospects for success and fulfillment in the intracosmic history appeared. For Israel the “history of disaster” continued,17 with its downward spiral in the course of history, despite the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah. The earlier history of salvation dropped more and more into the background; in the historical schema of the apocalypse of Daniel there is no more talk of it.18 The succession of several empires that were perceived as spiritually “empty” intensified the sense of the meaninglessness of the historical process and made it appear as completely negative. In Daniel 2 history as a whole is encapsulated in the image of a statue whose different metals allegorically represent four empires that follow each other. The same happens in Daniel 7 through the vision of four beasts. The negative evaluation of the whole course of history is so strong that at least in the vision of the beasts even the thought of the line that leads downward recedes; the third beast is as powerful and terrible as the first.19 Only the

17. It should be noted here that the origin of the apocalypse represents merely one line of religious development of the people of Israel; presumably apocalyptic interpretations originated in sects or heterodox congregations; see Otto Plöger, Theokratie und Eschatologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1959), 58, 62 (English trans., Theocracy and Eschatology, trans. S. Rudman [Richmond: John Knox, 1968]); Koch, Das Buch Daniel, 127–81; and Hanson, “Alttestamentliche Apokalyptik in neuer Sicht,” 459, 463. New light has been shed on the origin of the apocalypse by Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come. 18. See Bernhard W. Anderson, Creation versus Chaos: The Reinterpretation of Mythical Symbolism in the Bible (New York: Association Press, 1967), 136: “Apocalyptic, unlike prophecy, does not stress Israel’s Heilsgeschichte. In Daniel, for instance, there is no typology of the old Exodus and the new, no reinterpretation (Vergegenwärtigung) of the sacred history of God’s dealing with his people, Israel. Apocalyptic writers viewed history in universal terms—as a historical and even a cosmic drama which moves from the absolute beginning of time (creation) to the absolute end.” 19. I am here following the interpretation of Noth: “Das Geschichtsverständnis der alttestamentlichen Apokalyptik,” 49, 52–53; Koch emphasizes the thought of the declining line more strongly (Das Buch Daniel, 203); see also Norman W. Porteous, Das Danielbuch: Das Alte Testament Deutsch, vol. 23 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1962), 37, 84–87 (English trans., Daniel: A Commentary, 2d ed. [London: SCM Press, 1979]). Under the impact of the ecumenical empires of the Persian and Greeks the cosmological kingdoms of the Babylonians and Medians (which existed at the same time) are raised, in the retrospective of the second century b.c., to the same position. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 75 fourth, the present, exceeds all previous ones in brutality. The impression that the absolute low had been reached motivated the expectation that the end of history, the radical shift from deficiency to fulfillment, was imminent. We observe essentially the same view in the Revelation of John.20 What still appears here as “history” is symbolized by the apocalyptic beast and the whore of Babylon. On the surface, these symbols stand for the Roman Empire, but they also represent the untruth of the whole of intracosmic history in contrast to the truth of Christ. The significance that the experience of failure has in its encounter with the universal claim to order of the ecumenic empires can be seen by the fact that in the apocalypse the power factor comes into play with respect to the whole of humanity. It is no longer simply a matter of the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Israel, and—in contrast to Deutero-Isaiah, which left open the question of the political consequences of the spiritual claim to human validity—it clearly says in the Book of Daniel: “And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them.”21 That the awaited condition of fulfillment is also conceived in the categories of power politics is in itself contradictory, for God will destroy the metal statue and the four beasts. This fact is expressly interpreted in this way, that God will establish a kingdom that “shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms.”22 Thereafter no kingdoms can actually remain to rule over, especially since, with the destruction of all four ecumenic empires, intracosmic history as a whole would be abolished, previous reality transfigured, and an eternal condition of fulfillment created that permits nothing of the deficient world to remain. Because of this contradiction, scholars are not in agreement as to whether the eternal kingdom of the “saints of the most High” actually means a radical transfiguration of reality, or whether history still continues, even if on a higher plane and in the sense of a new “aion.”23 I believe that

20. In our context we are dealing with the commonalities in the interpretation of history. Apart from that there are of course distinctions between the apocalypse of Daniel and the Revelation of John that generally result from the latter being connected with the promise of a revelatory event of a different nature: the incarnation of the divine in Jesus. 21. Dan. 7:27. 22. Dan. 2:44. 23. See, for example, Buber, Sehertum, 67; Noth, “Das Geschichtsverständnis der alttestamentlichen Apokalyptik,” 53; Rowley, Relevance of Apocalyptic, 55; Plöger, Theokratie und Eschatologie, 53; Koch, Das Buch Daniel, 200, 214–15; Koch, “Geschichte,” 583; Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 228, 239; and Hanson, “Old Testament Apocalyptic Reexamined,” 474–76. 76 The Apocalypse in Germany the contradiction can be solved in another manner, since we find the same contradiction in the Revelation of John. It can, of course, be allowed that in the millennial kingdom the resurrected martyrs “reign” with Christ, since this kingdom is still of this world and Satan has not yet been completely overcome—here the Jewish apocalyptic tradition appears to be preserved.24 But there can be no doubt that a complete transfiguration of reality is expected after the Last Judgment: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven.” Nevertheless, the blessed inhabitants of the New Jerusalem will also “reign for ever and ever,”25 although there would be no more subjects to rule, since the adversaries of God, the faithless and idolaters, would be consigned to everlasting death. The expectation that in a new, eternal kingdom dominion and power would still be exercised seems to me to reflect the experiential background: suffering under the rule of the world empires is so severe that thinking in categories of power politics cannot be completely eliminated and an overturning of the existing powers through the transfiguration of reality is expected, although power politics will no longer actually have any place in a state of fulfillment. The new state of complete and eternal fulfillment has no history. The inner logic of the schema of apocalyptic interpretation alone excludes further “historical” changes and developments. Apart from the “systemic error” that dominion is still exercised, the author of the Revelation of John takes great pains to stress the timelessness of the condition of rest in the immediate presence of God that is not even subject to cosmic cycles of time: “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it.”26 After having outlined the historical development of the interpretations of history in Israel and the stimuli that finally triggered the apocalyptic outlook, the specific structure of apocalyptic historical thought can be more precisely analyzed in the light of this development. The original conception of a “history of salvation” in Israel originates from the reve-

24. Rev. 20:4–6; the prophecy of an interim kingdom (Zwischenreich) in Jewish apocalypticism is generally viewed as a model of the millennial kingdom; it is there partly of indeterminate length (Ethiopic Enoch 93:1–4), while in the Ezra-Apocalypse, four hundred years are given (4 Ezra 7:28). The number one thousand could go back to the calculation of Weltepochen in Slavonic Enoch 33, as well as to the “conception of the thousand- year universal Sabbath” (see Heb. 4). On the scholarly discussion of the millennial kingdom, see Otto Böcher, Die Johannesapokalypse, 2d ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 96–106, and the further literature cited there. 25. Rev. 21:1–2; 22:5. 26. Rev. 21:23. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 77 latory events that constitute meaning in history to the extent that they reveal the truth of a transcendent God and, at the same time, influence the history of Israel in a positive manner. The belief that transcendent truth guarantees—at least in the long term—success in this world leads, in conjunction with failures in the intracosmic course of history, to a rupture in the history of salvation conception, to the conception of a “history of disaster” with an ensuing new and definitive history of salvation. The nonappearance of this history of salvation has as its result that less and less meaning is seen in history. Jewish apocalyptic thought still has past history in view but reduces it in summary fashion to the succession of ecumenic empires or world epochs and views this history as a totality, “as one and as a whole,”27 as meaningless, deficient, and opposed to God. In the Revelation of John, previous history ultimately fades completely from the picture. This is not surprising: God, who became man manifest in the flesh, has thereby made the fulfillment imminent and, to that extent, has closed previous history; the delay of the parousia only heightens impatience and fixes the gaze more firmly upon the event awaited with full assurance: “See, I come soon!” Thus, the apocalyptic outlook leads not only to the devaluation of previous history, but in extreme cases even to the “dehistoricization of history.”28 History collapses between devalued temporal existence and transcendent fulfillment. I call the structural characteristic of this interpretation “the inversion of beginning and end in history.” This characteristic is made intelligible by the structure of apocalyptic visionary accounts. While the narration of history moves from a beginning to an end, the narration of the history of salvation even from the beginning to the end begins the apocalyptic vision with the end and ends with the beginning. It begins with the end of previous history; only the end is important, while previous history is lost in the darkness of disinterest because of its meaninglessness. And it ends with the beginning, that is, the beginning of a new, perfect existence that continues into timelessness without end. Between end and beginning there is only one remaining “historical” moment of fulfillment: the irruption of the all-transforming presence of God. The apocalyptic vision is already the beginning of the transfiguration expected in the near future; in it perfect and continuous fulfillment is already at hand. Thereby it “has abdicated its responsibility to the politico- historical realm, a realm which has been given up as hopeless and fallen

27. Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte, 68; see also Buber, Sehertum, 64–69; Plöger, Theokratie und Eschatologie, 39; and Noth, “Das Geschichtsverständnis der alttestamentlichen Apoka- lyptik,” 52–53. 28. Bultmann, Geschichte und Eschatologie, 35; see also Buber, Sehertum, 67–68. 78 The Apocalypse in Germany to the dark powers of the cosmos.”29 The apocalyptic vision has also removed the tension between intracosmic existence and the experience of a transcendent fulﬁllment that extends into this deﬁcient existence.30 Thus, the intracosmic existence of man between a beginning and an end similarly experiences an inversion and is focused on the one immediate moment of redemption.

In my attempt to outline the structure of apocalyptic historical thought I have focused on the final point toward which the apocalyptic interpretation of experience moves in relation to history. This final point, the breaking point in the tension between deficiency and fulfillment, is an expression of extreme despair about the meaning of history and of the highest expectation for a fulfillment outside of history; at this point history is annihilated. The tendency to move toward this point is a fundamental characteristic of apocalyptic interpretations of experience. I wish to say by this that the final point is only seldom reached and this tendency is not always realized. In most apocalyptic interpretations of experience, history does not completely disappear in the inversion of beginning and end. Besides the tendency to annihilate history, we observe a second structure of historical thought: without regard to the expectation, to enter soon into the timeless state of fulfillment, a certain meaning is given to previous history at least insofar as it is directed toward the expected end. This is a contradiction only at first glance; also the tendency to structure previous history is motivated by experiences, and experiences do not follow the laws of logic. We will concern ourselves with the second structure of apocalyptic historical thought that can, paradoxically, be connected with the tendency to annihilate history, in the next chapter. But we must first examine whether this fundamental tendency to the annihilation of history through the inversion of beginning and end can be seen in modern interpretations of history as well and, to that extent, be characterized as “apocalyptic.” The “unhistorical” leap into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that I am now making is justified only to the extent that it is concerned with the question of typological equivalences, that is, with the question of whether the structures and symbols of modern interpretations, when I view them as interpretations of experiences, are equivalent to those of ancient apocalypses. Our first observations about the apocalyptic characteristics of modern texts have shown that these, too, referred to extremely critical historical

29. Hanson, “Old Testament Apocalyptic Reexamined,” 477–78. 30. See Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 241, 248. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 79 situations. Ernst Moritz Arndt interpreted Napoleon’s imperial display of power as an apocalyptic scenario. Meanwhile, we can understand more clearly the particulars of the apocalyptic interpretation of experience as an interpretation of history. Arndt interpreted his experiences as a part of universal history. The present crisis became for him a turning point in world history, whose meaning all previous history devalued: the experience of “deepest need” and of the “most terrible danger” provided the impetus. He saw the occupation of Germany by Napoleon as the low point of German history. The danger increased in his eyes to a universal threat: he insinuated that Napoleon, the “devil upon the infernal throne,” sought to rule the world. Consequently he prophesied the inevitable conflict with Napoleon as the “final holy war,” as “the Last Judgment,” that would introduce the rebirth of the ages.31 The typical structure of apocalyptic historical thought appears even more clearly in Fichte than in Arndt. The experience of the “barbaric” and “beastly brutality,” of the “shameless and brazen thievery” of the “conqueror” who was apparently seeking “universal rule,”32 led him to the interpretation that Napoleon was the epitome of previous history in its negative manifestation: “If I recognize aright God and his plan for the world, as I firmly believe—if I have rightly understood the phenomenon of our enemy as manifested through his whole public life . . . : everything evil, everything inimical to God and freedom, which has been opposed by all virtuous persons from the beginning of time, may be found in him, and have appeared all at once, equipped with every force that evil may possess.”33 The reason for this interpretation is that Fichte experienced such an extreme contrast between material power, represented by the Napoleonic empire, and the claim to spiritual truth, represented by the Germans, that is—one may reasonably add—by his philosophy and that of his contemporaries, and that he considered the suppression of the spiritual claim by the material power to be so unbearable that, in his view, a radical and final reversal of power structures would have to take place: “You are granted the greater fortune, to establish the kingdom of the spirit (Geist) and of reason, and to destroy the raw physical force that rules the world. . . . It is up to you to incorporate this spirit into universal rule.” For him, history had reached

31. Arndt, Geist der Zeit, vols. 2 and 3, in Sämtliche Werke, vols. 9 and 10; 2:255; see also 135–39, 3:110, 2:195, 252, 128, 3:105–6, 127–28, 299. 32. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Reden an die deutsche Nation,” in Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Fritz Medicus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962), 5:578–80. 33. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Über den Begriff des wahrhaften Krieges in Bezug auf den Krieg im Jahre 1813 usw. (Tübingen: Cotta, 1815), 3d Vorlesung [lecture], 39. 80 The Apocalypse in Germany the low point of deficiency; and he considered this low point to be the turning point to the state of fulfillment: “it depends on you, . . . whether you want to be the beginning and the starting point of an age that is new and glorious beyond all your dreams, and those from which your children will count the year of their salvation. Bear in mind that you are the last one to have the power to effect this great change.”34 With the end of the Napoleonic Era, apocalyptic historical thought receded into the background. Until the end of the nineteenth century, there were no apocalyptic interpretations of history of any significance, with one well-known exception: it has “become almost fashionable,” Blumenberg has noted somewhat sardonically, “to interpret expectations of political redemption, like those typified by the Communist Manifesto, as secularizations either of the biblical paradise or of apocalyptic messianism.”35 Fashionable or not, a fresh reappraisal of the specific structure of the Marxist conception of history with particular attention to its experiential background would be useful, although the question of “secularization” is, as I have already indicated, of only minor interest. It must first be stressed that Marx’s conception of history reveals a twofold structure. This has probably not been clearly seen in the past because both structural configurations are intertwined and merge into a single state of “fulfillment,” the “realm of freedom.”36 Still, Marx conceives of history until its entry into this realm in the contrasting “figures” of unilinear movement upward according to the pattern of the “history of salvation” or of progressive thought on the one hand and of abrupt change from extreme deficiency to absolute fulfillment on the other. The intertwining of both contrasting figures is possible only when varying contents of deficiency and fulfillment are reserved for each figure and, consequently, the time can be more or less fulfilled and deficient at the same time, according to its content. This is in fact the case. On the one hand, Marx views history as a developmental process of social productive capacities and material means of production. This process attained, in his eyes, a height “which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected.” Fully developed productive capacities and means of

34. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, 607, 597. 35. Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung, 21 (English trans., Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 14–15). 36. That fact is itself of course well known, but there is a tendency to lay the stress either on “salvation history” (“Historical materialism is essentially, though secretly, a history of fulfillment and salvation in terms of social economy” [Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, 45]), or on the apocalypse (“In the announcement of a forced leap of man from the ‘aion’ of necessity into that of freedom the apocalyptic principle alone is at work” [Buber, Sehertum, 68; see also Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie, 186]). History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 81 production are also important as prerequisites for the predicted “Realm of Freedom,” since they “alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.”37 Thus, this developmental process reveals the pattern of an ascending line that leads directly into a state of fulfillment. “On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. . . . The victories of art are bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.” It should be noted that this antagonism is not the dialectical principle of Hegel “turned on its feet.”38 In Hegel the continued dialectical interplay of thesis and antithesis, as a whole, forms the figure of upward movement. Marx, on the other hand, sees two lines of development that open like scissors: progress of the productive capacities, and decline of societal relations and of character; the latter development reached, in his opinion, its absolute low point. The low is determined in its content by the “formation of a class with radical chains, . . . a sphere which possesses a universal character by its universal suffering, . . . which, in a word, is the complete loss of man.” This condition of extreme deficiency can be eliminated only by a radical change, by the “dissolution of the hitherto existing world order,” which will grant fulfillment to human existence, “the complete rewinning of man.”39 The twofold structural pattern of the Marxist conception of history requires several further explanations: 1. The second line of development—more precisely its final point of total deficiency—is decisive for the end and, consequently, the overall process of history. 2. Marx apparently perceives this condition of deficiency as so over-

37. Karl Marx, “Rede auf der Jahresfeier des ‘People’s Paper’ am 14. April 1856 in London,” in Werke, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Dietz, 1956–1989), 12:3 (English trans., “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper,” in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels Collected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1975], 14:655); Karl Marx, Das Kapital, in Werke, by Marx and Engels, 23:618 (English trans., Capital/Manifesto of the Communist Party [Great Books of the Western World, vol. 50] [Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952], 292). 38. Marx, “Rede auf der Jahresfeier,” 3–4; Marx, Das Kapital, afterword to the 2d ed. (1873), in Werke, by Marx and Engels, 23:27. 39. Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,” in Marx, Die Frühschrif- ten, 222–23 (English trans., “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels Collected Works, 3:186, 187). 82 The Apocalypse in Germany powering that he, like Arndt and Fichte, accords it a “universal character.” Accordingly, he conceives of the totality of history under a single head: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”40 He thereby shows to what end history must come; at the same time, he devalues previous history as a whole and describes it as simple “prehistory.”41 This view is similiar to the one expressed in the historical outline that Daniel 2 presents in the image of the statue of different metals: a process of decline may surely be seen, but one that is overshadowed by its negative final condition and thereby is, in the final analysis, unimportant. 3. The devaluation of previous history as “prehistory” implies that the true history of humanity will begin only with a condition of fulfillment. But, as with other apocalyptic conceptions of history, there may be legitimate doubts here as well whether this condition can still be “historical.” Apart from the characterization of this condition that results from the negation of the extreme deficiency of human existence, that is, that the state of fulfillment means the “reintegration or return of man to himself, the transcendence (“Aufhebung”) of human self-estrangement” or the “complete rewinning of man,”42 Marx restrains himself from describing the nature of the new condition with one notable exception: “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity,” it will be possible “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”43 It is symptomatic but thoroughly logical that this description includes only activities that are characteristic for “prehistoric” culture, that is, ahistorical and timeless activities. For “being born and dying, eating and drinking, sleeping with women and going hunting and fishing, perishes in nothingness because it is insignificant.” This insight, which reads just like a commentary to Marx’s vision, was pronounced by Arndt; of course, it must have caused him to think when he prophesied the “golden age.”44

40. Karl Marx, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, in Die Frühschriften, 525 (English trans., Capital/Manifesto of the Communist Party, 419). 41. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, in Werke, by Marx and Engels, 13:9. 42. Karl Marx, “Nationalökonomie und Philosophie,” in Die Frühschriften, 235 (English trans., “Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844,” in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels Collected Works, 3:296). Marx, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,” in Die Frühschriften, 223 (English trans., “Contribution,” 186). 43. Karl Marx, “Die deutsche Ideologie,” in Die Frühschriften, 361 (English trans., “The German Ideology: L. Feuerbach,” trans. W. Lough, in Karl Marx/Frederich Engels Collected Works, 5:47). 44. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Einleitung zu historischen Charakterschilderungen (Berlin: Re- alschulbuchhandlung, 1810), 183. Arndt, Geist der Zeit, 2:214. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 83

In any event, the fact cannot be denied that ultimately the condition of fulfillment must be thought of as ahistorical, for it would not be perfect, if there were any subsequent historical changes. 4. It has certainly already become clear that both structural patterns of the Marxist conception of history are not of the same value. The second is not only decisive for the end of the previous history and its point in time—it refers to a weightier content, namely, the tension between existential deficiency and fulfillment, while the former development merely provides the prerequisites for the condition of fulfillment— but also the subject of a moral evaluation. This fact allows us to in- fer occasions of experiences, especially since the language in which the evaluation is articulated is very revealing: while the development of the productive capacities and the means of production are described in factual and sober language, the description of the low point of existential deficiency betrays the highest moral outrage and emotional concern. We have already met the complaints concerning “loss of character” and human despicableness; we find many expressions of such indignation in the early writings. In the Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (“Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law”), an apocalyptic document par excellence, which remained completely free of economic determinism,45 Marx warns that in the present circumstances “man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being”; that the existing society commits a “crime” against the proletariat; and that the proletariat is exposed to the mercies of “universal suffering,” indeed, to “wrong generally.”46 Marx’s language here makes it clear that he interprets experiences of extreme existential deficiency—desolation, despicableness, humiliation—in the historical context in which the experiences happen with respect to their political, societal, and, finally, human meaning, and that universal status is accorded these experiences.47 5. The equivalence of the apocalyptic structural pattern of a change from deficiency to fulfillment corresponds to the equivalent interpretation of experience that makes the condition of deficiency appear universal, absolute in its negativity, and, under the previous historical conditions, no

45. See J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, 193. 46. Marx, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,” in Die Frühschriften, 216, 220, 222 (English trans., “Contribution,” 182, 185, 186). 47. Later, Marx gives a socioeconomic interpretation to the experiences of existential alienation, but he ultimately interprets it again as the self-alienation of mankind in the antagonism of two collective persons, “Monsieur Capital” and the “collective worker.” An illuminating discussion of this phenomenon is given by Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972); see also Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie, 184–91. 84 The Apocalypse in Germany longer resolvable. This unbearable weight implied by this interpretation leads Marx to the expectation that the radical change would shortly take place. The revolution, he prophesied in 1850, “is imminent.” He perceived the self-induced expectation as time pressure for his attempt to explain the imminent event and its prerequisites scientifically. In 1857—a time in which nothing pointed to a radical change in the world—he wrote to Engels: “I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the outlines clear before the déluge.”48 Towardthe end of the nineteenth century, apocalyptic interpretations of history began to appear frequently and to replace the previous dominance of belief in progress. Skepticism spread. The “liberal devotion to reason and progress,” which Thomas Mann ascribed to the nineteenth century, appeared “laughable” to him in hindsight. And his son Klaus could already say for his generation: “Early we became acquainted with apocalyptic moods.”49 These moods are with us still today. Most represent a mixture of fear and hope. Belief in continuous progress had given way to fear of destruction, but often the hope of a renewal after a catastrophe was maintained; the apocalyptic visions of expressionism make its connection especially clear. But meanwhile, after the bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequently developed potential for nuclear overkill, fear is predominant. Both superpowers, which until the eighties viewed each other—according to the pattern of apocalyptic dualism—as the incarnation of evil, could for the first time in history actually completely destroy the “evil enemy” without the intervention of God being necessary. However, because both had the capability, this would not bring about the redemption of mankind, just global destruction. The “docked” apocalypse of our time is limited to the vision of destruction. Yet there are also interpretations of the present situation that fully reflect the typical structural pattern of apocalyptic historical thought. I am not speaking of the widespread fundamentalist exegeses of the Revelation of John that decoded behind the apocalyptic number 666 the Soviet Union or President Reagan, but exegeses whose perspective on our historical situation produces an original apocalyptic interpretation of history. Thereby the structural equivalence of apocalyptic 48. Karl Marx, Ansprache der Zentralbehörde an den Bund, in Karl Marx-Frederick Engels, Studienausgabe, ed. Iring Fetscher (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1972), 3:91; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel (Berlin: Dietz, 1949), 2:314 (English trans., Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters: January 1856–December 1859, in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels Collected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1983], 40:217). 49. Thomas Mann, Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners (1933), in Leiden und Größe der Meister (Berlin: Fischer, 1935), 89; Klaus Mann, Der Wendepunkt (1944/1952) (Munich: Spangenberg, 1981), 137. History Has No Meaning; Therefore, It Must Be Destroyed 85 historical thought with specific interpretations of experiences of tension between deficiency and fulfillment comes once again clearly into view since it deals with our present situation. One of the most explicit apocalyptic thinkers of our time is Ulrich Horstmann. Even if he does not mean it altogether seriously, he still plays the role convincingly. The dedication to his book Das Untier (“The Beast”) leaves the possibility open that his apocalyptic interpretation of history is also to be read as satire, but the manner in which his interpretation of experience is articulated seems to suggest that deadly seriousness stands behind the label “satire.” Horstmann views the nuclear, biological, and chemical self-destruction of mankind not only as unavoidable and imminent, but also as desirable, since for him there will be a “universal redemption” thereafter, which consists of man’s destruction and the return of all life to the “existential peace (Seinsfrieden)” of inorganic matter. Let us first note that this conception reveals the typical structural pattern of apocalyptic historical thought; vis-à-vis the future state of redemption— which in this case by definition is ahistorical—all previous history appears in Horstmann as deficient. Tobe sure, with regard to contents, the completion of the pattern stands in stark contrast to apocalyptic tradition. There is a state of perfection, but only without man: “The true Garden of Eden is desolation.”50 The state of fulfillment thereby becomes—with respect to man—identical with complete emptiness. How does Horstmann come to this misanthropic apocalypse, to the certainty of his—as he himself says—“anthropofugal” vision? He answered this question in a radio interview: “I believe that the only thing that can give certainty is experiential values; one gains these experiential values through the analysis of history. These values come to us involuntarily, and they are obvious. History has basically never been anything other than an endless process of armament; this process of armament . . . encompasses the whole development of the species.” His book Das Untier is, among other things, an outline of world history as a “slaughterhouse”; Horstmann is relentless in his portrayal, again and again pointing to the “continuous litany of chopping, stabbing, skewering, hacking, the monotony of slaughtering and smashing skulls”; “tearing and gobbling, grinding and bleeding, stabbing and gouging”; of “history as the place of a skull and charnel house of a mad, incurably bloodthirsty slaughtering, flaying and whetting, of an irresistible urge to destroy to the last.” In good apocalyptic style, he devalues the whole of history as absolutely negative and meaningless and

50. Ulrich Horstmann, Das Untier: Konturen einer Philosophie der Menschenflucht, 110, 95, 8; see also 100, 109. 86 The Apocalypse in Germany refers to “experiential values.” Of course, history is itself not an object of experience, although it can be made an object of an overall interpretation. Still, even if there were always wars in history—or class struggles, to look back to Marx—history cannot for that reason be reduced to this one trait. Nonetheless, Horstmann rightly refers to experience, which is confirmed— just as it is in Marx—by his passionate indignation at the “earthly hell,” the “ubiquity of sufferings,” the “universal pain”; but since it cannot be the experience of history as such, it must be the primary experience of man as a “defective being” that despairs because of his deficiency and longs for fulfillment: “Are we not one flesh, aglow with pain, shaking, and squeaking, that whimpers for redemption?”51 In addition, there is doubtless the experience of the meaninglessness of armament that can lead to only the end of mankind. It is thoroughly understandable that, under the weight of such experiences, only similar facts “suggest themselves” and “come to mind” to one who reflects on history. What does a philosopher do who despairs of the meaning of human existence and human history, but who still has the “longing for redemption”? He solves the question of meaning intellectually and, employing the given premises, in a logically consistent manner: “The task for reflection and particularly philosophy is, in my opinion, no longer how can I avoid what is coming, but, rather, how can I intellectually deal with the un- avoidability of the apocalypse? And this process of reflection presupposes that I discover something in the apocalypse that men have always found in the catastrophe in permanence, that is, in history, so that history not only becomes worth living, but worth surviving, that is, that I discover meaning, which means that I am compelled to interpret the apocalypse as meaningful, as a meaningful end.” Like all apocalypticists, who no longer find meaning in history, Horstmann also asks the question of the meaning of history. This question can be answered only from the vantage point of the end of history, since the historical process itself appears meaningless. Thus, to the extent that meaning is projected to the end of history, but taking into account that a nuclear world war would destroy mankind, Horstmann sees himself compelled as a logical thinker to accept this outcome as meaning, and to interpret all human evolution teleologically as a unilinear process toward this “goal emerging in all clarity.”52

51. “Die Lust am Untergang—Zukunftsperspektiven zwischen Kulturpessimismus und Hoffnung: Südwestfunk, 2. Programm 7.8.1984” (“Pleasure in Destruction—Perspectives on the Future between Cultural Pessimism and Hope,” radio program); Horstmann, Das Untier, 57, 7, 110, 96, 102, 98, 83, 14, 100. 52. Horstmann, Das Untier, 105; Horstmann, “Die Lust am Untergang”; Horstmann, Das Untier, 71. 6 History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created

“But it must have a meaning,” Private Wammsch exclaims in Werner Beumelburg’s war novel, Die Gruppe Bosemüller (“The Bosemüller Squad”), about the incomprehensible, murderous events of the First World War. Any circumstance of life, even daily tasks, may spawn questions of meaning, but these questions become particularly pressing when we are confronted by events that endanger our existence and that we face helplessly, un- able to comprehend or influence them. War, particularly of the modern, technological variety, as well as misfortune and injustice, persecution and oppression can all raise questions of the meaning “of all that.” And when the feelings of threat, disorientation, helplessness, and despair become so strong that absolutely no more meaning can be found, then, when further circumstances arise, an apocalyptic reaction can follow.1 The whole world is perceived as meaningless and is consigned to destruction; meaning is expected from a new world. The assertion that “it must have a meaning” points in another direction. It not only indicates protest and resistance against meaninglessness, but also announces the will to find or perhaps even to create a meaning. But what is the significance of meaning? Meaning makes the incomprehensible comprehensible, changes chaos into order, orients one’s own actions, gives suffering a purpose, and eliminates the feeling of insecurity and powerlessness. In the perilous trench war of 1916, meaning was frequently maintained by so behaving that one preserved his life for himself and his family as best he could. Still, the exclamation that in 1930 Beumelburg placed in the mouth of his character is not directed to such an “unassuming

1. Werner Beumelburg, Die Gruppe Bosemüller (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1930), 126. The apocalyptic interpretation of experience can certainly be viewed as an existential phenomenon, but is at the same time a historical phenomenon that—as the previous chapter showed—had its origin in speciﬁc historical circumstances and created a social (and, again, historical) ﬁeld of consciousness.

87 88 The Apocalypse in Germany meaning,” but it betrays what Odo Marquard called a “meaning of a grand order”;2 the call demands a comprehensive description “of all that,” of the “totality” of events, of history. Marquard characterizes this kind of meaning as an “emphatic concept of meaning,” in contrast to the concept of meaning connected with the senses and with understanding: “Meaning has what is worthwhile (possibly absolutely)—what is important, fulfilled, satisfied, what makes one happy and does not cause one to despair, . . . emphatically applied to human life, history, the world.” He considers the concept of meaning “a very recent and thoroughly late-modern matter”; Dilthey formulated it for the first time when he asserted that the philosophy of history “expresses the meaning of the process of history, i.e., its value and goal.”3 Now the “emphatic complaint over the loss of meaning” may be especially characteristic of our own time, but the question of the meaning of history is by no means new, even if before Dilthey philosophers did not ask about the “meaning” but rather about the eidos, the “goal,” the “plan,” or the “law” of history. And the answers that were given to this question betrayed the same intention: to take the threat from unsettling experiences, and to make one satisfied and happy by placing one’s own existence in a comprehensible order of the world and of history. Johann Albrecht Bengel’s calculation of world history and of the onset of the millennial kingdom was commented on by his disciple Oetinger in the following manner:

Christ told his disciples that it was not their gift to know the times and the hours (Acts 1:7). What was denied the apostles is a gift to our time, for in our time the times and hours were revealed by Bengel, the greatest calculator of times, by the decree of God; his revelations are, according to the measure of the knowledge of our age, the worthiest object of our belief. If it is difficult for someone to follow the ganglia of the mathematical calculations of Bengel, he can still do this according to the nature of a calendar in usum fidei and find out what times have already passed, in what times we now live, and what times we have yet to expect until the day of Jesus Christ.4

2. Odo Marquard, “Wider die allzu laute Klage vom Sinnverlust: Philosophische Be- merkungen und eine Fürsprache fürs Unsensationelle,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 31, 1983, 9. 3. Ibid.; Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), 1:96. For the general context of the discussion about the meaning of history, see especially Theodor Lessing, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen; and Leonhard Reinisch, ed., Der Sinn der Geschichte. 4. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Theologia ex idea vitae deducta, in sex locos redacta . . . (Frankfurt an der Oder: n.p., 1765), quoted from the translation in Ernst Benz, Endzeiter- wartung zwischen Ost und West: Studien zur christlichen Eschatologie, 87. History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 89

This commentary reflects all substantial elements of this kind of interpretation of the meaning of history: the motivation for the question of meaning and the psychic function of the answer, the characteristics that the interpretation of meaning must have in order to fulfill its function, the method by which meaning is constituted, and the prestige of the person who can answer the question of meaning. Let us consider these elements somewhat more closely: Bengel proceeded from the conviction that God’s plan for the salvation of the world, a “divine economy,” lies at the basis of world history. He discovered that this plan for the salvation of the world, the total course of history, is laid down in the Revelation of John. After he had found the “apocalyptic key”5 by a combination of different numbers that appear in the Revelation, he was able to make the individual visions of the text correspond with historical occurrences. And because the apocalyptic key allowed him to calculate the total length of world history, he was able to establish what point in the course of history his own time had reached and when the end of history would come: he dated the beginning of the millennial kingdom to the year 1836.6 What is achieved by such a calculation? It is decisive, as Oetinger emphasized, that it provides certainty, “what times have already passed, in what times we now live, and what times we have yet to expect until the day of Jesus Christ.” That means that history is comprehensible, that one attains certainty concerning one’s own place in history, and that the goal of history that brings fulfillment can be foreseen. Almost all historical speculations that attempt to determine the overall course and the goal of history make clear the role of giving certainty in the following three ways: the Book of Daniel makes history comprehensible as a succession of four empires; it marks the present place in the course of history by describing the last king of the fourth kingdom in such a manner that Antiochus IV, who suppressed the Jewish cult and desecrated the temple, is recognizable: “And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws.” Further,

5. Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 943; Johann Albrecht Bengel, Sechzig erbauliche Reden über die Offenbarung Johannis oder vielmehr JEsu Christi . . . (Stuttgart: Erhardt, 1747), 6. 6. The entire Erklärte Offenbarung (see note 5) is devoted to this calculation and its substantiation. A clearly organized table of visions of the Revelation of John, correlated with the historical events, is contained in Bengel’s Gnomon, 2:2:747–49. On Bengel’s theology of salvation, see Benz, Endzeiterwartung zwischen Ost und West, 38–41; Ernst Benz, “Johann Albrecht Bengel und die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 27 (1953): 528–54; and Gottfried Mälzer, Bengel und Zinzendorf: Zur Biographie und Theologie Johann Albrecht Bengels (Witten: Luther-Verlag, 1968), 19–26. 90 The Apocalypse in Germany the encoded prophecy that only “one time, and two times, and half a time” will pass until the judgment provides the certainty that redemption is no longer far off. Joachim of Fiore’s interpretation of history fulfills the same function by dividing history into three ages (Latin status)—of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—identifying his own time as the final phase of the second age, and predicting the beginning of the third, the status of freedom in the near future. Lessing’s educational plan for the human race reflects a similar structure, as we have already seen. Similarly, Condorcet divides history into three large eras that he subdivides into ten epochs; the last era, which is identical with the last epoch, began for him with the French Revolution and would lead mankind through “unlimited progress” to perfection. Finally, Marx, to cite one last example, divides previous history into four epochs of “economic formation of society”—the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois—and determines the position of his own time by placing it at the end of his series, thereby pointing at the same time to the immediately expected end of previous history: “The bourgeois means of production are the last antagonistic form of the societal production process” that “create at the same time the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society ends with this societal form.”7 The role of providing certainty concerning the meaning and goal of history and one’s own place in the course of history corresponds to the need to eliminate uncertainty. This must be a strong impulse, for it leads to interpretations of history that cannot bear empirical examination and whose predictions of an imminent end are constantly being contradicted. What causes such uncertainty, and what are its distinguishing features? We have seen that war can lead to disorientation, accompanied by fear and despair. But such extreme conditions do not necessarily have to exist. In essence, it is history itself that can provide the feeling of uncertainty when it is experienced as an incomprehensible roller coaster of absurd

7. Dan. 7:25; Joachim calculated forty-two generations for the first status from Abraham to Christ and assumed this same number of generations for the second status. Since one generation encompasses thirty years, he saw himself in the fortieth generation that had to end in the year 1200 (Joachim died in 1202). Consequently, his followers awaited the beginning of the third status in the year 1260. Joachim himself, however, deviated from his system by stressing that the length of both remaining generations was uncertain, thereby avoiding setting a specific time for the beginning of the third status (see Töpfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens, 50–51); Antoine Nicolas de Caritat de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain—Entwurf einer historischen Darstellung der Fortschritte des menschlichen Geistes, ed. Wilhelm Alff (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963), 395; see also 345; Marx, foreword to Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, 13:9. History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 91 events that one is exposed to helplessly. Naturally, this fundamental experience is realized again and again in various situations and in different ways; what appears to us as “fundamental experience” can be inferred from the equivalence of many separate historical experiences and their interpretations. Indeed, the experience of uncertainty in history is in any event a historically determined phenomenon: it presupposes that there is a consciousness of history. And this consciousness—in a sense, comparable to the modern consciousness of history—took shape with the exodus from cosmological civilization; the certainty that was provided by a cosmos full of gods was lost when the divine moved into the otherworld and left the dedivinized world to the responsibility of man and to chance. The first reaction to this new feeling of uncertainty in Israel was the construction of a salvation history, the second, when the promise of salvation history was not fulfilled, was the apocalypse. This uncertainty was strengthened through the Christian message, which granted no certainty but faith, especially when the Parousia was delayed and the Christians were forced to prepare themselves for the con- tinuance of history. In the Revelation of John, the historical appearance of Christ was still so near and the expectation of the Parousia so overpowering that the course of earlier history became unimportant; the Revelation represents with particular clarity the apocalyptic inversion of beginning and end in which history disappears. Still, even the early Christian millenarians began to calculate world history when the promises of the Apocalypse of John had delayed so long. Julius Africanus, for example, calculated in a.d. 222 the beginning of the millennial reign in the year 500.8 Accordingly, he—like Joachim and Bengel—did not expect to experience it himself, but the calculation fulfilled the purpose of placing the goal of history in sight and establishing one’s own place in it. Augustine attempted to put an end to all that by distinguishing between the civitas terrena and civitas Dei and their respective histories. He saw certainty flowing only from the faithful peregrinatio to the latter. This- worldly history had no independent meaning and no specific direction for him. Its last phase, which had begun with the appearance of Christ, was a simple expectation of the end that could not, however, be calculated in advance. With this doctrine he aggravated the burden that experiences of meaningless events in the world represent, for not only have we the experience of meaninglessness in history but we can also experience certain

8. Sextus Julius Africanus, Chronographiai: Reliquiae sacrae, ed. M. J. Routh (Oxford: Mawman, 1846), 2:238–40. Within the six thousand years until the beginning of the millennial kingdom he, as well as Hippolytus, calculated the year 5500 for the birth of Christ; see Bauer, Ursprung und Fortwirken der christlichen Weltchronik. 92 The Apocalypse in Germany processes, beginning with our own lives and continuing through political processes, as being meaningfully structured, and we can experience our historical situation as integrated into a comprehensible order. There is, then, analogous to the tension between deficiency and fulfillment with respect to the temporal constituent of our existence, a tension between the meaninglessness and meaning of historical processes. The consequence of the cry, “It must have meaning,” namely construing a universal meaning of history, not only is motivated by the experience of meaninglessness, but also extrapolates the meaning of ordered and comprehensible processes between a beginning and an end. So we find, despite Augustine’s teaching, through the whole Middle Ages, attempts to make history comprehensible, even when that order is always seen as the result of the history of salvation.9 Augustine’s belief that he was living in the final phase of history remained valid; expectations of the end were strong in varying degrees, but calculations of the end ceased. That was the result of Augustine’s verdict, but also of the fact that between the ninth and twelfth centuries Christianity spread over the whole of Europe, and the Roman Empire was resurrected as a Christian empire by the translatio imperii and achieved a glorious status with the Church. This development must have been experienced as meaningful: it mediated the sense of security in history.10 Thus, an imminent end of history was no longer absolutely desirable. The Ludus de Antichristo, for example, supported the Hohenstaufen Empire, among other reasons, on the basis of the conviction that the Antichrist could not break free as long as the Holy Roman Empire, interpreted according to Daniel as the fourth and last empire, was vigorous and in power. Joachim of Fiore was again the first to construe the course of history in such a way that the onset of a final, perfect phase of history could be calculated as being immediately imminent (even though he avoided setting a specific date). It seems reasonable to suppose that this construction not only satisfied the general need to make history comprehensible, but also followed an additional experiential impulse. In fact, signs of societal but especially religious and ecclesiastical decay increased in the twelfth

9. See Alois Dempf, Sacrum Imperium: Geschichts- und Staatsphilosophie des Mittelalters und der politischen Renaissance (1929) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1954); Lammers, Geschichtsdenken und Geschichtsbild im Mittelalter; McGinn, Visions of the End; Smith, Secular and Sacred Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages. 10. On the tension between apocalyptic consciousness and “Aufbruchsstimmung,” see Gert Melville, “Zur geschichtstheoretischen Begründung eines fehlenden Niedergangs- bewußtseins im Mittelalter,” in Niedergang, ed. Koselleck and Widmer; Alfred Haverkamp, Aufbruch und Gestaltung: Deutschland, 1056–1273 (Munich: Beck, 1984). History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 93 century.11 Joachim’s vision of a sort of monastic republic, in which the Holy Ghost revealed himself to each individual and, to that extent, made the Church as an institution superfluous, betrays the deficiencies that motivated him and corresponds to the wish to eliminate evils once and for all, in a manner that had appeared meaningful and logically consistent to the theologian and abbot. It may properly be concluded that Joachim’s construction of meaning interpreted the experience that there are meaningful orders and structures in history as well as it reflected the insecurity that was caused by the crises of the time. Both experiences led to the reaction: “History must have meaning”; the expectation of a state of perfection was doubtless caused by the pressure of the experience of crisis. On the other hand, the pressure was not so strong that it had fully overshadowed the former experience, for Joachim did not devalue history as totally chaotic and corrupt. It ended for him not in an extreme point of deficiency, nor was it destroyed in his speculation. That is, Joachim’s speculation is not apocalyptic. Nevertheless, in the following three centuries the pressure of uncertainty and insecurity became stronger and stronger. Political crises, wars, and societal changes occurred widely, as did famines and plagues, but, especially, the signs of decay of the Church increased; the Church was less and less able to provide men with spiritual orientation and emotional security.12 Thus the expectations of a better, even perfect situation not only spread, but again took on an apocalyptic character: experiences of deficiency became so powerful that the trend toward the annihilation of history gained ground. One can see them lead to the upheaval of the Reformation period, where the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer represent the vertex of the development more than Luther. Luther, too, apparently sensed that he stood at a critical juncture in history; although he originally viewed the Revelation of John skeptically, he equated the Roman Church with the whore of Babylon, the pope with the Antichrist, and the Turks with Gog and Magog, who are mustered by Satan for the final battle. He

11. Contra Grundmann, who held the opinion that Joachim was motivated solely by the pure “will to know,” one must concede that Töpfer was right, who pointed to the motivating phenomena of the time; Grundmann, Studien über Joachim von Floris, 21, 117; Töpfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens, 54–55. 12. On the political, social, and spiritual upheavals, and the natural catastrophes and epidemics that motivated apocalyptic expectations and apocalyptic interpretations of experience between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, see Gassen and Holeczek, Apokalypse, 40, 65, 75, 94; for the entire period, see Norman Cohn, Pursuit; for the Reformation period, see Will-Erich Peuckert, Die große Wende: Das apokalyptische Säkulum und Luther. 94 The Apocalypse in Germany

Figure 2 Lucas Cranach the Elder/Atelier, The Babylonian Whore (crowned with the tiara). Illustration from Luther’s ﬁrst edition of the New Testament of 1522 (“Septembertestament”). History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 95

Figure 3 A W [monogram], The Assault of Gog and Magog on the Beloved City (depicting the assault of the Turks on Vienna, 1529). Illustration from Luther’s New Testament of 1530. 96 The Apocalypse in Germany believed that Judgment Day was imminent.13 On the other hand, Luther attempted to maintain the existential balance that is necessary if one wishes to continue to live in the world and not flee from history. In order to attain certainty, without which we so easily feel threatened and afraid, he, too, could show no other way than Augustine, who believed that it comes from faith alone. And because Luther confronted men with this problem on a very personal basis, because he reduced the significance of the Church as mediatrix, it was inevitable that experiences of insecurity would again produce constructions of meaning in history. Since the Reformation, we observe an unbroken chain of such attempts to determine the meaning and goal of history and one’s own place in it. In his Historie der Auslegungen (“History of Interpretations of the Revelation of John”), Bengel was able to cite an uninterrupted succession of authors who worked out the beginning of the millennial kingdom. And despite “so many dates that have passed by empty,”14 as he had to admit, his desire to attain certainty and to determine a date grew even stronger. The calculation of the end of history, that is, the imminent expectation of the end, characterized most interpretations, although there were periods of varying intensity. In the seventeenth century, for example, the Flanders enthusiast Serrarius, who was for a time a preacher in Cologne, awaited the end in the year 1662; Johann Heinrich Alsted, professor of theology at Herborn College, calculated the end to be in 1666; his disciple, the theologian and pedagogue Comenius, in 1672; Johannes Coccejus, professor of theology in Bremen, Franeker, and Leiden, who presumably also followed Alsted, expected the end in 1667. This accumulation of imminent expectations of the end was doubtless a reflex of the heightened uncertainty in history, which the Thirty Years’ War and its catastrophic consequences had caused, as well as other events, such as the Polish-Swedish War and the recent

13. In his preface to the Revelation of John of 1522, Luther reveals his disapproving attitude: “I cannot reconcile myself to the book” (Dr. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe [Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–1997], Abt. 3: Deutsche Bibel, 12 vols. [1906–1961], 7:404). In the second preface of 1530, he reticulates his position somewhat differently: to be sure, he still views Revelation as a problematical writing, but he no longer questions whether it was inspired by the Holy Ghost and belongs to the canon. In any event, he felt it necessary to give believers an interpretation, and in this interpretation—as elsewhere—he presents the comparisons mentioned above and expresses his apocalyptic feeling (Deutsche Bibel, 7:406–21, especially 416). See also Hans Ulrich Hofmann, “Luther und die Johannes- Apokalypse: Dargestellt im Rahmen der Auslegungsgeschichte des letzten Buches der Bibel und im Zusammenhang der theologischen Entwicklung des Reformators,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese 24 (1982): 439; and Richard W. Gassen, “ ‘Kom, lieber jüngster Tag’:Die Apokalypse in der Reformation,” in Apokalypse, ed. Gassen and Holeczek, 75–86. 14. Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 1100–1118. History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 97 war with the Turks.15 Nevertheless, the specifically apocalyptic impulse was comparatively weak; the learned theologians preferred the view that history must indeed have a meaning. It was Coccejus through whom “a new zeal in this matter was brought about,” as Bengel noted.16 Coccejus divided world history into three great ages, while he divided the history of the Church into seven periods, corresponding to the seven communities that were addressed in the Rev- elation of John. He became very influential with the concept of a “divine economy,” the idea that a very specific divine plan for the salvation of the world is realized in history, a plan determining each step in the course of history. This conception had a substantial impact on the structure of future constructions of meaning, particularly that of Bengel.17 Among the English and American denominations that can be called “millenarian,” two fundamentally different groups may be distinguished. One consists of denominations that are apocalyptic in the classical sense; they expect the onset of the rule of God in history when it has reached its low and evil has reached its full extent. Members of the second group are “believers in progress”; they believe that good will eventually conquer the world in a gradual but unstoppable triumphal advance and ultimately be completely successful.18 Bengel, in his structuring of the economy of salvation, was able to express both of the contrasting experiences of meaninglessness and meaning in history. Experiences of disorder and of decay caused him to interpret his own time apocalyptically and to await the speedy end of history: in his youth he experienced the campaigns of Louis XIV as well as repeated occupations of his hometown. The new type of absolutist prince, who set himself above traditional norms and values, embodied for him the decline of the political and moral order of the community, as his conceptions concerning the political and societal conditions in the millennial kingdom betray.19 The advance of rationalism, even in Protestant theology and in the Protestant Church, must have appeared as threatening to him as the

15. See Schrenk, Gottesreich und Bund im älteren Protestantismus, vornehmlich bei Johannes Coccejus: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Pietismus und der heilsgeschichtlichen Theologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), 234. 16. Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 1117. 17. Schrenk, Gottesreich und Bund, 221–23, 335–38; Mälzer, Bengel und Zinzendorf, 23. 18. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 32–39, 232. 19. “There will still be rulers and authorities who treat their subjects like brothers” (Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 951). Bengel’s disciple Oetinger is even clearer on this point (Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, “Die güldene Zeit” [1759], in Oetinger, Abhandlungen von den letzten Dingen, ed. Karl Chr. Eberhard Ehmann [Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1864], 32–35 [“Additions for Rulers”]). 98 The Apocalypse in Germany onslaught of the Counter Reformation. In short, experiences of deficiency had such a forceful impact on him that he interpreted them apocalyptically, that is, he saw that history had arrived at the extreme point of corruption and meaninglessness: “Evil increases so enormously that one can scarcely understand how it could increase any more.”20 On the other hand, he maintained the conviction that “history must have a meaning.” He combined this conviction with his apocalyptic interpretation of experience in the construction of a divine economy in history that constitutes meaning. Accordingly, history is a process of decline to the point of absolute deficiency, when the apocalyptic change brings about the state of fulfillment. On the other hand, the historical process can be seen dialectically in the sense that the nearer redemption is, the more powerfully evil reveals itself in the world: “The Devil has great wrath because he knows that he has little time on the earth. Only a small bit of this little time remains, considerably less than one hundred years. How great must his wrath be now?” But this development is not the only one that corresponds to the divine plan of salvation for the world; even more decisive is the assumption that with the increase of evil, the insight into the course, meaning, and goal of history concurrently increases: “Revelation goes step by step until it reaches us.”21 What was hidden to the apostles will now, since the final point of the process is reached, be revealed “by the foremost calculator of the time, Bengel,” as Oetinger declared. Not everyone is able to reveal the meaning of history. Simple people like Private Wammsch in Beumelburg’s novel are, perhaps, capable of saying “but it must have a meaning,” yet the answer to the question of meaning is a matter for the intellectuals. Whoever has difficulty comprehending their constructions and understanding the complicated calculations can, following Oetinger, “use the calculations in usum fidei,” that is, he has to believe in them. We meet a further characteristic of this kind of historical interpretation: in order to calculate the whole course and the end of history, comprehensive knowledge and exceptional intellectual abilities are necessary; “wisdom” is necessary. The apocalypse of Daniel discloses this trait already; the empire speculations of the second and seventh chapter, which make use of historiogenetic myths of Persian origin, belong to the tradition of wisdom rather than to the prophetic tradition of Israel.22 Joachim of Fiore and Bengel were able to make their calculations only on the basis of the most exacting knowledge of the Scriptures and of strenuous

20. Bengel, Sechzig erbauliche Reden, 419. 21. Ibid., 426, 7. 22. For a discussion of the influence of the wisdom tradition on the Book of Daniel, see Koch, Das Buch Daniel, 174–76. History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 99 exegetical efforts. And Condorcet or Comte or Marx and Engels devised their historical systems on the basis of intensive historical studies. The authors of the historical interpretations were of course conscious of the “wisdom” aspect of their systems, and they derived great claims from it. Because they comprehensively defined the meaning of human existence while providing their interpretation of history, they were inclined to ascribe to their systems the rank of a vitally important science or to design a universal science in the framework of their vision of the future. This was the case at least since the seventeenth century, since the sciences, especially philosophy and the natural sciences, began to free themselves from theology and to attain an independent prestige yet at the same time causing a plurality of systems explaining the world. Quirinus Kuhlmann was the first to claim explicitly that his speculation on history would dominate all sciences. Among the numerous enthusiasts who prophesied the imminent end of the world in the seventeenth century, he excelled particularly in missionary zeal. He attempted to convince the German princes as well as the theologians of the German universities that Germany was chosen to prepare the world for the divine judgment and the universal renewal in the following fifth monarchy. When he did not find an audience in Germany, he traveled to nearly all the great courts of Europe—to London, Amsterdam, Paris, Constantinople, and Moscow—in order to present his mission of salvation. In Moscow, finally, he became a victim of his own missionary zeal and was burned as an instigator of rebellion. Kuhlmann found the speculative basis for his eschatological message in Jacob Böhme. He compiled Böhme’s prophecies and applied them to his own time in such a way that they served to validate the universal claim of his interpretation of history: “From our Germany’s new disciple of heaven, I perceived my own arguments that the Almighty has marvelously shown to me / or rather certain proofs of them / so that I intended for the glory of God and the instruction of men / after having exposed false doctrines / to enrich all branches of knowledge with many thousand discoveries / in an unprecedented manner of teaching / in which the great center of the world is hidden / to disclose the difference between true and false Christian as well as heathen knowledge.”23 Since Kuhlmann, the tendency grew even stronger to make the interpretation of the meaning of the eschaton and of world history the mistress

23. Quirinus Kuhlmann, Neubegeisterter Böhme / begreifend Hundertfünftzig Weissagungen / mit der Fünften Monarchi oder dem Jesus Reiche des Holländischen Propheten Johan Rothens übereinstimmend / Und Mehr als 1 000 000 000 theosophische Fragen / allen Theologen und gelehrten zur beantwortung vorgeleget / . . . (Leiden, 1674), 91; see also Benz, Endzeiter- wartung zwischen Ost und West, 45–65. 100 The Apocalypse in Germany of all branches of knowledge and to design a universal science of the future from an overview of the world and of history. Bengel was convinced that he had gained knowledge of “things” and “times” through insight into the “divine economy”;24 this knowledge not only had theoretical value but also gave life in the present time an orientation to the imminent end: “The community of the Lord has therewith its complete instruction, that one can always know where one stands.”25 Bengel was so overwhelmed by his knowledge of the “times” that he drew no further conclusions from knowledge of “things” and called for only “wisdom, patience, loyalty, vigilance” as preparation for the imminent end.26 His disciple Oetinger, however, made explicit the claim that was implicit in Bengel’s knowledge of things and times. He did not need to prove in detail that the millennial kingdom “was not very far away, which I presuppose from Bengel’s calculation.” He laid greater weight on the importance “that one should prepare oneself for it.” This preparation should take place “according to the best model of the Golden Age,” for whom not only the millennial kingdom of his teacher, but also Jacob Böhme’s “Age of Lilies” (Lilienzeit) served as models. In Oetinger’s opinion, the Golden Age will be characterized by spiritual and societal order flowing from a single principle, and that this principle is the “priesthood of Jesus,” defined as “the basis and source of all true science.” The central science will be intuitively accessible to everyone; Oetinger here presents a thought similar to that of Joachim of Fiore, according to whom the Holy Ghost will reveal himself directly to each man in the third status: Jesus will “clearly present every branch of knowledge, make it easily understandable, make everything easily comprehensible, and will eliminate what is superfluous and confused in the sciences”; “all gifts of the spirit will be revealed.” How can one best prepare for the Golden Age? By preparing the way for the future central science and eliminating the current fragmentation, particularly of those sciences that have to do with the physical sphere, the soul, and the legal order: “As far as the science of law and the science of life are concerned, we wish to propose making the rough spots level, in order that these three fields of knowledge, law, theology, and medicine, shall be one field from a single source of wisdom. The laceration of the various fields of knowledge is the product of a corrupt age. The unification of the sciences is part of the preparation for the Golden Age.”27

24. Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 96. 25. Bengel, Sechzig erbauliche Reden, 6. 26. Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 1175. 27. Oetinger, Die güldene Zeit, 7, 9, 139–40, 141, 28, 9; in another passage, Oetinger speaks about additional sciences—“the science of logic, which is the doctrine of reasoning, History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 101

We find Oetinger’s conception again and again, whether in theological or philosophical garb: in anticipation of the awaited condition of perfection, a universal science is designed that spiritually anticipates this condition. Universal science is supposed to accomplish this by encom- passing all dimensions of human existence, indeed, reality itself, interpreting its meaning and thereby ending the condition of deficiency in the consciousness, eliminating ignorance, doubt, and uncertainty. It is characteristic that the conception of universal science follows from the interpretation of the meaning of history: Bengel and Oetinger understood history as a process of revelation that unfolds gradually until it reaches a comprehensive knowledge of “things” and “times”; this makes it possible, as Oetinger concluded, to devise a universal science. Ernst Benz has shown what a lasting effect Bengel and Oetinger—and, through Oetinger, Jacob Böhme as well—had on Schelling and Hegel.28 My purpose here is not to review in detail the influence of this tradition on Schelling and Hegel. In our context it must suffice to say that both intended a universal science as spiritual anticipation of perfection and that this intention was the result of their interpretation of history; that is, the universal science was regarded as the revelation of the meaning of history. Schelling appears to be taking up Bengel’s thoughts almost literally when in 1804 he defines history as “a successively developing revelation of God”;29 and he sees this process result in the merging of all sciences, especially the natural sciences with the humanities. For its part, universal science anticipates the condition of perfection: “the peace of the Golden ontology, which is the science of general notions, cosmology, which is the science of the world, pneumatology, which is the science of the spirits, psychology, which is the science of the soul, theology, astronomy, physics, ethics, arithmetic, geometry, and algebra”—and he predicts that “once they will all stand intuitively together in perfection and will be seen by the children of God” (139). 28. Ernst Benz, Schellings theologische Geistesahnen (Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz [no. 3 in the lecture series of the Mainz Academy of Sciences], [Mainz: 1955]); Benz, “Johann Albrecht Bengel”; see also David Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study of Jacob Boehme (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1983). 29. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie und Religion (1804), in Schellings Werke: Nach der Originalausgabe in neuer Anordnung, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Beck and Oldenbourg, 1927), 4:47. A decade later Schelling remarked, “It is usually thought now that world history may be seen as a continuous revelation of God” (Die Weltalter [1813], in Schellings Werke, 4:681). Schelling never mentions Oetinger in his works, in stark contrast to his letters. How well acquainted he was with the tradition of the millenarian interpretation of history may be seen in his Philosophie der Offenbarung, in which he sees the development of Christianity after a Petrine and Pauline epoch flowing into a final, Johannine phase of the spiritual church (Geistkirche). In this connection he refers to Joachim of Fiore in a footnote (Philosophie der Offenbarung, in Schellings Werke, 6:690). 102 The Apocalypse in Germany

Age will first be announced in the harmonious unification of all sciences.” With respect to this goal Schelling reveals an eschatological consciousness that is not apocalyptic but oriented to progress. He expects that only “a short period of time” will pass until the breakthrough of universal science can be established: “It seems that it was reserved for our own age to open the path to this objectivity of science.”30 Hegel, although differing from Schelling in many respects, establishes the meaning of all being by means of a similar interpretation of history. For him, too, history is a process of continuous revelation, that is, it is a process of self-realization of the spirit.31 The individual consciousness, in this case, that of Hegel, partakes in this process and attains “absolute knowledge” of a philosophical system.32 In this state the subjective consciousness and the objective process of realization of the spirit are reconciled and the spirit grasps “the principle of unity of divine and human nature, the reconciliation of objective truth and freedom as appearing within self-consciousness and subjectivity.”33 Thus, the “absolute knowledge” of Hegel’s philosophical system is meant to make the state of perfection and, consequently, the meaning of history manifest. Merging the meaning of history with the conception of a universal science is not confined to German thought. The logic of the system of progressive thought that aims at perfection and conceives of “spirit,” divine or human, as a vehicle of this process, suggests such a connection. Thus, we find constructions of meaning with a similar structure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in other countries as well. Condorcet, for example, in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, designed a universal science as the zenith of the progress of the human spirit and as the epitome of the final period of world history. This science, the new philosophy of raison, is intended to become a “universal tool” (instrument universel) on the basis of mathematical methods, which would disclose the principles and general truths that determine the “unchangeable and necessary laws of justice and injustice”; this universal tool can be “applied to every object of human understanding.” Several decades later, Auguste Comte explained anew the meaning of history according to a three-stage law: after the sciences, but also the political orders of the peoples, have passed through a theological-fictive and a metaphysical-abstract period,

30. F. W. J. Schelling, Die Weltalter (1813), in Schellings Werke, 4:581–82. 31. “World history is . . . the interpretation and realization of the general spirit” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Georg Lasson [Leipzig: Meiner, 1911], § 342). 32. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister, 6th ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), 26–28. 33. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, § 358. History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 103 they will arrive at the third and final state of “positivity,” which is to be the universal tool of the sciences as well as of the future orders of society.34 Marx and Engels, who follow both German and French traditions, also entertain the idea that the “prehistory of the human society” is close to its end. They further contend that previous history reaches its goal with the development of a scientific universal tool, namely, dialectical and historical materialism that makes the whole of human existence and history intelligible. The “scientific” constructions of history, which also led to the outlines of a universal science, indictated a final important characteristic of this kind of response to the question of meaning, a characteristic that Oetinger’s commentary on Bengel betrayed: the creators of the constructions of meaning are drawn into their own constructions and assume a central place there, or their adherents assign that place to them. It is not surprising that they accord themselves a high position, since they claimed to have determined the meaning and goal of history; and the temptation is as great for them as for their adherents to see world history as having arrived at a prophetical or scientific peak in their person. This can be seen particularly well in Bengel and in the reception of his prophecy of history. His calculations on the Revelation of John induced Bengel to connect chapter 14 and the three angels that appear there with his own time and the previous centuries. He equated the first angel, who preaches the gospel to all nations, with Johann Arndt; he connected the second angel, who announces the fall of Babylon, with Spener. He was not yet able, according to his chronology, to identify the third angel, who announces judgment on the adherents of the beast; still, he awaited its speedy appearance.35 It is no surprise that in the groups that enthusiastically received Bengel’s prophecies, Bengel himself was soon considered the third angel. The Denkendorf educator recognized the temptation of superbia. His Christian humility induced him to view his discovery of the key to the apocalypse as an unmerited gift of grace, but on the other hand he was thoroughly conscious of the meaning of his message, so that he did not wish altogether to reject the possibility that he was the third angel.36 The way in which

34. Condorcet, Esquisse, 271; see also 267 and 299. On the development of a new universal science by way of the conception of a mathématique sociale, see Condorcet, “Tableau général de la science, qui a pour object l’application du calcul aux sciences politiques et morales,” in Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet-O’Connor and M. F. Arago, 12 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1847–1849), 1:539–73. Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842), ed. E. Littré (Paris: Ballière, 1864); on the inﬂuence of Condorcet on Comte, see 4:185 n. 35. Bengel, Sechzig erbauliche Reden, 385–87. 36. See Christian Burk, Johann Albrecht Bengels Leben und Wirken (Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1831), 287, 502–4. 104 The Apocalypse in Germany

Bengel’s disciple Oetinger classified “the greatest calculator of the times” requires no further comment. More interesting is the assessment of Jung- Stilling, for whom Bengel’s “prophetic chronology” was a “marvelous system,” “very probably the only true one.” In 1799, in his Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion (“Triumphalist History of the Christian Religion”), Jung-Stilling identified the first angel with Luther, the second with Böhme, and the third with Francke, to that extent deviating from the “marvelous system” of the “great and pious Bengel.” But in a supplement published in 1805 he revised the list; Luther maintained his place, but second place went to Bengel, while the third remained open for the future. Because Jung-Stilling at the same time—in the light of contemporary events, not surprisingly—predicted that “by far the most important part of the apocalyptic prophecies . . . will soon be fulfilled,”37 there is something to the presumption that Jung-Stilling saw himself and his Siegsgeschichte as the successor to Bengel and quietly reserved the unoccupied place of the third angel for himself. That the prophecies included the prophets and that the promises already have a fulfillment in them, which the final completion makes certain, is also a tendency of the philosophical interpretations of history. Schelling viewed the time as not yet having arrived when the sciences would be united, but he understood himself as a “prophet of this unification” and his work—in all modesty—as an “attempt . . . which contains some preparation for that future objective presentation of science.”38 He, too, could have assumed the place of the third angel, who appears shortly before the end. In Hegel, the self-implication into the historical interpretation is perhaps even further advanced than it is in Schelling. For the self- consciousness, in which the general spirit that is reconciled with itself and the objective truth and freedom appear, is indeed the self-consciousness of the one who is able to trace the path of the world-spirit through history. Comte, creator of positive universal science, toward the end of his life considered himself the founder of a new, final religion for mankind.39 And Marx so internalized the expectation that the revolution was “imminent” that the prophetic vision threatened to overcome itself and even to jeopardize the significance of its creator: “I have a presentiment that

37. Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Die Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion in einer gemeinnützigen Erklärung der Offenbarung Johannis (Nuremburg: Raw, 1799), 6, 10, 402; Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Erster Nachtrag zur Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion in einer gemeinnützigen Erklärung der Offenbarung Johannis (Nuremberg: Raw, 1805), 136, 144, 146, 134. 38. Schelling, Die Weltalter, in Schellings Werke, 4:582. 39. See Löwith, Meaning in History, 90–91. History Must Have Meaning, So Meaning Is Created 105 now, when after fifteen years of study I have got far enough to have the thing within my grasp, stormy movements from without will probably interfere. Never mind. If I get finished so late that I no longer find the world ready to pay attention to such things, the fault will obviously be my own.”40 The self-consciousness of the heralds of a Golden Age and the creators of a universal science is linked with their expectations, with their conviction that they stand at or near the end of history, and that they are able to foresee the transition to a condition of perfection. This self- consciousness distinguishes apocalyptic prophets as well as interpreters of meaning who believe in progress, for both have the same goal in mind and see themselves in a position to predict it. Aside from the goal of perfection, they represent contrasts. The ones await the completion as a leap from deepest deficiency, the others as the final point of a continuous upward development. The structural contrasts are like two sides of a coin. The fact that many interpretations of history—for instance, those of Bengel and Marx—reveal both sides shows how close they are to each other. And we shall see how quickly the one side can change into the other. For this reason, we had to examine the bright side of optimism about progress, although we are chiefly concerned with the dark reverse side, that of the apocalypse.

40. Letter of 1858; cited according to Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 225. 7 “World History Is the Last Judgment”

The apocalypse culminates in the Judgment. In the Judgment the irreconcilable contrast between evil and good is resolved: the old, corrupt world is condemned and the new one is founded. The Judgment is the only historical event that counts, and the last one. Previous history, the quintessence of meaninglessness, sinks with its adherents into the fiery pool of ultimate annihilation, while the new state of perfection has no history. In the symbol of the Judgment, apocalyptic dualism and its resolution, the goal-directness of the interpretation of history and the certainty and finality of the expected decision find their most conclusive expression. Further, the symbol of the Judgment is a reflection of structural changes in apocalyptic historical thinking. Whether the goal of history is viewed as something still to come or whether some present event appears to be bringing about the transformation of the world, whether God achieves redemption or man takes the work of redemption into his own hands, whether the whole world is destroyed or only a part of it, whether the condition of perfection is brought about on this earth or in another sphere—all these issues are expressed in the manner in which the Judgment is presented and in the context of the Judgment symbol. Among the events of recent history that were interpreted apocalyptically by contemporaries, the First World War assumes a special place. In all the combatant countries there were apocalyptic interpretations of the events, but nowhere was the war interpreted more often as the “judgment of God,” “the Last Judgment,” and “the Day of Judgment” than in Germany; nowhere else did these interpretations gain such wide circulation,1 and

1. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, gehalten von den Professoren an der Universität Berlin (Berlin: Heymann, 1915), 1:145 (A. Lasson); ibid., 177 (W. Kahl), and also Ludwig Schneller, Drei Kriegspredigten (Cologne: Palästinahaus, 1914), 23; Der Heilige Krieg: Gedichte aus dem Beginn des Kampfes, ed. Reinhard Buchwald (Jena: Diederichs, 1914), 72 (C. Flaischlen). On the publicity of war poems, speeches, presentations, and sermons in which the First World War was interpreted apocalyptically, as well as on further aspects of apocalyptic thought in 1914, see my Chapter 11.

106 “World History Is the Last Judgment” 107 nowhere were more complete apocalyptic speculations to be found than in Germany. In 1914, writers, professors, and clergymen all viewed themselves—like John of Patmos—as “seers” when they attempted to interpret the war. As with Daniel, the motivating experience was a feeling of oppression; Cäsar Flaischlen complains that the enemies “have surrounded us for years,” and Gerhart Hauptmann sees the Fatherland “surrounded . . . [by] the yellow glow of pale hate.” Also present is the apocalyptic dualism of good and evil along with its relevant symbols. Thus, Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff identifies England with the “evil spirit,” “conjured . . . from Hell”; Fritz von Unruh and others describe the enemies as “imbruted,” as “beasts,” “dragons,” and “snakes,” language that is redolent of the beasts of the Revelation of John. Carl Hauptmann recalls the Riders of the Apocalypse when he portrays the Russians as they race along “on starved skeletons of horses . . . as though they were summoned by Satan.”2 And, finally, the enemy appears as the “Devil” himself and as the “Antichrist.”3 The Germans, on the other hand, represent the good, since they are on God’s side. Friedrich Lahusen, superintendent general of Berlin, characterizes the German people as “God’s tool” and “the people of God,” while Pastor Karl König speaks of the “divine responsibility which we as Germans have for the spirit of mankind.” According to Walter Flex, Germany has been called to be “God’s shield-bearer,” while for Rudolf Alexander Schröder it is the “house where God feels at home.”4 Consequently, God becomes a “German God,” and, accordingly, the German army is identified with “God’s armies.”5 For this reason, war against Germany is war against God and is, consequently, a kind of sacrilege:

Who would forgive The sin against the Holy Spirit?

2. Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 18 (C. Hauptmann), 70; Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:7 (Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff); Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 2 (G. Haupt- mann), 60 (F. von Unruh); Walther Eggert Windegg, ed., Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen (Munich: Beck, 1915), 79, 106 (L. Sternberg); Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 18 (C. Haupt- mann). 3. Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 42–43 (L. Finckh); Franz Koehler, Die deutsch-protestantische Kriegspredigt der Gegenwart (Gießen: Töpelmann, 1915), 19. 4. Friedrich Lahusen, Werfet euer Vertrauen nicht weg! (n.p., n.d.), 8; Karl König, Sechs Kriegspredigten (Jena: Diederichs, 1915), 26; Das Volk in Eisen: Kriegsgedichte der Täglichen Rundschau (Berlin: Verlag der Täglichen Rundschau, 1914), 5 (W. Flex); Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 43 (R. A. Schröder). 5. Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 142 (H. Benzmann). 108 The Apocalypse in Germany

The sin against the holy life That forever courses in our German veins?6 Because Germany ﬁghts in God’s service, its victory is supposed to be guaranteed. In the context of apocalyptic interpretations the expected victory has a particular quality: it will not only strengthen the political position of Germany but also bring about a permanent change for the better, in the sense of apocalyptic “transformation.” Eduard Stucken expects an “ultimate victory,” which, “through suffering, frees us from suffering,” while other authors prophesy that victory will bring the Germans into the “promised land”7 and will give them the “new kingdom.”8 But it is not the Germans alone who will experience a transformation; as an apocalyptic event with global consequences, Germany’s victory must change the entire world. Emanuel Geibel’s famous verse, “Through the German character the whole world may yet recover,” is often cited in poems, speeches, and sermons, although now it is generally set in the future, a change ﬁrst made by Wilhelm II.9 Poets see the “dawning of a new mankind,”10 and pastors anticipate the “day of perpetual peace.”11 A “future kingdom of peace” will arise,12 in which Germany “provides the sun for all nations.”13 German victory thereby achieves the quality of an act that redeems mankind. Reverend Philippi expresses this notion in the succinct expression of “German redemption” (deutsche Erlösung). Martha Grosse sees the German people as a sort of collective Messiah: “An image of men who redeem the world.”14 Again and again the apocalyptically viewed events are combined in the symbol of the “Last Judgment” (Weltgericht), by Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Heinrich Lersch, Josef Winckler, Wilhelm Kahl, and others.15 The Last Judgment is the central symbol to appear in interpretations of the

6. Ibid., 44 (W. Eggert Windegg). 7. Ibid., 108, 11 (O. Crusius). 8. Das Volk in Eisen, 105 (Kandt); Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 15 (K. E. Knodt). 9. In a speech given in Münster on August 31, 1907; see also Georg Büchmann, Geﬂügelte Worte, 24th ed. (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1910), 264. 10. Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 199 (C. Wagner). 11. Moderne Predigt-Bibliothek, ed. Ernst Rolffs, 13th series (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1916), 4:103 (A. Ritzhaupt). 12. Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 199 (C. Wagner). 13. Das zweite Jahr: Kriegsgedichte der Täglichen Rundschau (Berlin: Verlag der Täglichen Rundschau, 1915), 22 (F. Lienhard). 14. Fritz Philippi, “Ich bin gekommen, ein Feuer anzuzünden auf Erden!” Feldpredigt, Christliche Welt 29 (1915): 635; Das zweite Jahr, 6 (M. Grosse). 15. Feldgraue Ernte: Der Weltkrieg im Gedicht, ed. Karl Rauch (Berlin: Holle, 1935), 19, 34; Heinrich Lersch, Deutschland! (Jena: Diederichs, 1918), 29; Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:177. “World History Is the Last Judgment” 109 war in 1914; the term Weltgericht appears much more often than Gottes- gericht (“God’s Judgment”) or jüngstes Gericht (“The Final Judgment”). The reason for this is not only that in the designation Weltgericht (judgment of the world) the universal character of the event is expressed more clearly, but also that this term makes it simpler than Gottesgericht or jüngstes Gericht to interpret the event not exclusively as an act of God. This accommodates the intentions of the interpreters, for the completion of judgment is no longer left to God alone: Germany is celebrated as the “tool of God” to be the executor of the Last Judgment. Walter Flex has God place the sword of judgment in the hand of the German kaiser, while Eduard Stucken apparently contrasts the Germans as the “Horsemen of the Last Judgment” with the “Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” and Reverend Ludwig Schneller expresses the conviction that “this time eternal Providence is using our people, in order to carry out the Last Judgment against our enemies.”16 The term “Last Judgment” (Weltgericht) for the apocalyptic Judgment is not a creation of the World War prophets. The symbol has a venerable tradition behind it, a further reason that it was used in the First World War. It embraces the interpretive structure according to which the events of the war in 1914 were understood. Therefore I wish to consider the special tradition of the symbol of the Last Judgment. The term Weltgericht ﬁrst began to appear as a circumscription for jüngstes Gericht in the sixteenth century and had already become current by the seventeenth century, as hymns by Simon Dach and Paul Gerhardt show:

God, who in the Last Judgment [Weltgericht] Will act as Judge.

He comes to the Last Judgment [Weltgericht] To curse those who curse him; With mercy and sweet light To those who love and seek him.17

The latter example shows that the form Weltgericht places greater emphasis on those to be judged.18 But apart from this shift in stress, the term,

16. Das zweite Jahr, 63 (W. Flex); Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 108 (E. Stucken); Schneller, Drei Kriegspredigten, 23. 17. Albert Fischer and Wilhelm Tümpel, eds., Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied des 17. Jahrhunderts, 6 vols. (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1902–1916), 3:213, 401. 18. See also the article “Weltgericht,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–1954); Dietrich Korn, Das Thema des Jüngsten Tages in der deutschen Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1957), 26–27, 79–81. 110 The Apocalypse in Germany until the end of the eighteenth century, remained a Christian eschatological symbol that could carry apocalyptic overtones as much as jüngstes Gericht. The symbol underwent a decisive shift in meaning in Schiller, who used it in his poems “Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft” and “Resignation.” In the latter poem, which appeared in 1785 in Thalia, we find the line: “World history is the Last Judgment [Weltgericht].”19 At first, this saying appears somewhat unexpectedly, but closer examination shows that the sentence captures the essence of the poem. Schiller expressed the view that the final fulfillment of human existence does not occur through a divine act that will bring history to an end; instead, this end must be sought in human life or—generally speaking—within history itself. The succinct formulation with which Schiller transferred the fulfillment of human existence from the end of history into the historical process was widely echoed. Hegel doubtlessly had Schiller’s expression in mind when, in his Rechtsphilosophie, he introduced the last chapter about world history by speaking of “world history as the Last Judgment.” Beginning with the same basic idea as Schiller and using the same symbol, Hegel now developed a systematic historical speculation. He defined world history first of all as the “interpretation and realization of the general spirit” or “world-spirit”; he characterized the individual “spirits of the peoples” as the “ones who bring about its realization.” “Bearers of the present stage of development of the world-spirit” can only be a particular people, whose right and responsibility is the “execution” of that stage of development. Because Hegel viewed the stages of development of the world-spirit as “direct natural principles,” he saw the right of a people to be the executor of the world-spirit as an “absolute right,” against it “the spirits of other peoples are without rights, and those whose epoch is past, no longer count in world history.”20 Hegel thus stated more precisely the interpretation of world history as a process of fulfillment by designating the national spirits as agents of this process, and he put this interpretation in concrete terms by equating the process with the succession of four historical empires whose national spirits represent the stages of development of the world-spirit “in the course of its liberation.” He assigned to the “Germanic Empire” the completion of this process and thereby of world history.21 Hegel’s outline of history is no more apocalyptic than was Schiller’s basic

19. Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert, 6th ed., 5 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1980), 1:133. 20. G. W.F.Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Leipzig: Meiner, 1911), §§ 340, 342, 352, 347, 346. 21. Ibid., §§ 352, 358–60. “World History Is the Last Judgment” 111 idea. Hegel saw the relationship between deficiency and fulfillment not as dualistic, but as dialectical, and he viewed the transition from one state into the other not as a single, abrupt event that ends meaningless history, but as a meaningful process of development that is itself world history. Of course this process flows into a state of complete fulfillment, too. Despite the fundamental differences with the apocalyptic view of history, Hegel maintained the symbol of the Last Judgment with its apocalyptic connotations. Thereby the possibility was left open to future interpretations to link an apocalyptic interpretation of concrete historic events as “the Last Judgment” with elements of Hegelian historical speculation. Ernst Moritz Arndt presented the various uses of the symbol of Judgment before and after Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie, which first appeared in 1821. At the beginning of 1813, on the eve of the decisive campaigns that ultimately resulted in the liberation of Germany from Napoleonic rule, Arndt wrote an essay in Königsberg entitled “Was haben die großen Mächte jetzt zu tun?” (“What are the Great Powers to Do Now?”)22 He began the article with the citation from Schiller that “World history is the Last Judgment.” Arndt proceeded from the general meaning that the saying had in Schiller, namely, the shift of human fulfillment in history. But by applying the saying specifically to the historical situation of 1813, he restored the apocalyptic meaning of the symbol Weltgericht: thereby the liberation and unification of Germany was declared an event of world historical significance; besides, Arndt transferred the execution of the act mediating meaning to men themselves: “Whoever believes in miracles, performs them.”23 In 1848 Arndt again applied the symbol to a concrete political problem, namely, to the Polish question, which was heatedly discussed in connection with the revolutionary events of 1848. Again he cited Schiller, but this time with an addition that indicates that in the meantime he had accepted Hegel’s concept: “World history is the Last Judgment of the nations.” With fundamental consistency, Arndt applied Hegel’s historical schema to the relationship between Germans and Poles: because the Poles and other Slavs have never represented the world-spirit either in the past or in the present—since “the numerous and teeming tribes of the Slavs and Wends have never done or been able to do anything lasting, either with respect to the state or to science and art”—they have no right in world history, particularly not vis-à-vis Germany, which is called to bring about the

22. Published in the same year together with other essays as the third part of Geist der Zeit. 23. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Werke: Auswahl in zwölf Teilen, ed. August Leffson and Wilhelm Steffens (Berlin: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong, n.d.), 8:104. 112 The Apocalypse in Germany consummation of world history. Without hesitation, Arndt made himself spokesman for the Last Judgment and frankly stated: “At the outset I assert with world history that pronounces the judgment: the Poles and the whole Slavonic tribe are inferior to the Germans.”24 After 1848 it was particularly the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 that again gave rise to apocalyptic interpretations of history. Geibel, for example, used in his war poems the symbol of the Last Judgment, thereby representing the final unification of Germany as the fulfillment of German national history.25 The symbol of the Last Judgment was thus used so widely that it quite naturally presented itself in 1914 for the interpretation of the war. The interpretive concept standing behind the symbol corresponded to the fundamental transformation of the symbol of the Last Judgment by Schiller, various elements of Hegelian historical speculation, as well as the manner in which Arndt had applied the symbol to a concrete historical event: the Last Judgment (Weltgericht) is no longer God’s Final Judgment but an act of transformation that occurs within the historical process. The fulfillment brought about thereby is this-worldly and consists, among other things, in the expected extension of the rule of the German Empire and in the redemption of the world by “German character” (Wesen). Ultimately, the Final Judgment is not carried out by God, but by the Germans themselves; there is no doubt about that, even if in some interpretations the Germans still act on behalf of God. Not in all cases, but frequently enough, God is reduced to a sacral ornament through which world-immanent interpretations receive a legitimizing religious component. Occasionally the shifts in meaning were clearly seen, as shown, for example, by the theologian Adolf Deißmann, in a discussion of a poem in which the symbol of the Final Judgment appeared; but apparently the theologian was unconcerned when the words of scripture were twisted; for Deißmann, the strengthening of apocalyptic enthusiasm was more important: “Certainly,” he conceded, “this concept of Final Judgement [Weltgericht] does not correspond literally with that of the apostles, but apostolic power lies in the enthusiastic anticipation that God’s strong hand will soon intervene in the wheel of time.”26 It is justified to classify the shifts in meaning of the judgment symbol, with Mircea Eliade, as a “dégradation du symbole.” Eliade describes the

24. Ibid., 12:127–28. 25. Des Vaterlandes Hochgesang, ed. Karl Quenzel (Leipzig: Hesse and Becker, 1914), 222; Karl Hammer, Deutsche Kriegstheologie, 1870–1918 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), 190–91. 26. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:504. “World History Is the Last Judgment” 113 phenomenon that he understands by this term and that he views as characteristic of the great spiritual crises of Europe in the following way: “When the consciousness is no longer able to perceive the metaphysical meaning of a symbol, the understanding of this symbol falls into coarser and more tangible spheres of meaning.”27 Eliade’s definition aims at the heart of the problem, but it does not hit it completely and can give rise to misunderstandings. For the original meaning of the symbol in question is not adequately described by the term metaphysical, since this term hypostasizes facts that are neither “objects” nor abstract principles,28 that is, the experience of tension of individuals to a ground of being that is not man himself. The nonobjective reality of this existential tension is interpreted by language symbols that denote something objective, but the terminological hardening of such experiential symbols to “metaphysical” propositions already marks a first step of degradation. In consideration of this more precise definition, Eliade’s classification can nevertheless be made useful. In order to properly understand the process of degradation expressed in the symbol of the Final Judgment, the fundamental change of meaning must be considered, which the symbol of judgment passed through with the rise of the apocalypse. Almost all religions recognize the symbol of divine judgment, even the ancient Israelite Yahwistic faith.29 Misfortune, sickness, death, defeats by foreign enemies, crop failures, and natural catastrophes are interpreted through the symbol of judgment as a punishment for apostasy from God or for violation of ritual prescriptions, but also as an expression of the arbitrary wrath of God. The judgment of the ancient Israelite Yahwistic faith is still “without set norms”;30 there are no firm norms according to which God’s judgment could be anticipated. This symbol interprets the experiences of tension between human deficiency and the incomprehensible power of the numinous in a compact manner as an incalculable judgment. This experience of tension has been interpreted in a more differentiated manner since Elijah. Attention ceases to be fixated on misfortune and catastrophes, which could be interpreted only as a

27. Mircea Eliade, “La coincidentia oppositorum et le mystère de la totalité,” Eranos- Jahrbuch 27 (Zurich: Rhein, 1959), 216. 28. See Voegelin, Anamnesis, 193–94. 29. On the following, see mainly Willy Cossmann, Die Entwicklung des Gerichtsgedankens bei den alttestamentlichen Propheten (Gießen: Töpelmann, 1915); see also the article “Gericht Gottes,” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart; Theologische Realenzyklopädie; Franz Hesse, “Wurzelt die prophetische Gerichtsrede im israelitischen Kult?” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 65 (1953): 45–53; Klaus Koch, Die Profeten, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978–1980). 30. Cossmann, Die Entwicklung des Gerichtsgedankens, 6. 114 The Apocalypse in Germany judgment after the event, and is directed toward human action. In concrete experiences of spiritual disorder as of social injustice, be it of the king or of the people, the relationship between Israel and Yahweh is expressed as a tension between the moral deﬁciency of human action and an absolute, ethical norm grounded in God. In the symbol of judgment a new dimension in the nature of God is articulated; at the same time it becomes possible to threaten judgment in the future as the result of moral failure. The prophets of the preexilic period, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah, all used the symbol in the same way: with the threat of judgment they confront Israel—the king, the people as a whole, but also individuals—with the demands of an absolute ethical norm, and they show the necessity of an existential decision. If need be, the prophets accentuate their message differently depending on whether they experience the depravity of the people to such a degree that they view punishment as unavoidable, or whether they believe moral improvement to be possible through a “chastening judgment” or the threat of it, whether they are more concerned about moral and social conduct or about political action, whether they expect the total destruction of Israel or promise the separation and preservation of those who are repentant and are pleasing to God. A fundamental shift in meaning of the symbol of judgment occurred again during the period of the Babylonian exile. Under the impact of Israel’s total powerlessness it was now expected that judgment would fall upon the other peoples. Although the preexilic prophets already knew of the judgment of God against other peoples, they saw it as the result of a violation of divine law—in the same way as judgments against Israel—not as a punishment for injustices committed against Israel.31 The prophets of the exilic period, on the other hand, feeling their misfortune was undeserved, pronounce judgment on the other people as a punishment for their crimes against God’s Chosen People, and increasingly they extend it to all Gentiles. No longer is Israel’s salvation brought about through repentance, but rather through the destruction of Israel’s enemies. The existential tension between divine justice and human injustice is expressed in the contrast between God’s people and other peoples. The experiences that result in this polarization can be seen at the beginning of the exilic period in Ezekiel, particularly in the vengeful nature of the prophesied judgment. By the end of the exilic period the vindictiveness has lost its strongest impulse, but even Deutero-Isaiah expects a universal judgment of all peoples that will bring about the complete redemption of Israel. On the other hand, he extends for the ﬁrst time the anticipated salvation

31. Ibid., 190–98; see also my Chapter 5. “World History Is the Last Judgment” 115 to the Gentiles. The universal perspective that Ezekiel introduced in the symbol of judgment is enlarged in Deutero-Isaiah, while the polarization is maintained, since only those Gentiles who submit themselves to Yahweh’s people will share in salvation.32 Thereby a decisive step is taken in the direction of the apocalyptic concept of judgment. Having determined the change of meaning of the judgment symbol between preexilic prophecy and late Jewish apocalypse, we now can differ- entiate and classify the forms of degradation at that time as in the modern period. The different forms of degradation can be viewed as steps in a process, although this process is not unilinear. 1. The symbol is detached from the experiences it originally expressed, that is, experiences of an existential tension interpreted as a tension between divine justice and human injustice. Insight into the necessity of existential decisions and corresponding actions disappears. In its place comes a polarization of external “powers” of justice and injustice, of good and evil. In Israel we observe this development during the exilic period. 2. The “judgment” as a decision between these powers is extrapolated as a “metaphysical fate” that will shortly occur “without the aid of men’s hands”33 and makes existential decisions between concrete alternatives in action, particularly in the societal and political realm, forever unnecessary. This position is reached in the Daniel-Apocalypse that represents the “quietistic” type of apocalypse; in Christian apocalyptic thought this type is passed on from the Revelation of John to the quietistic Anabaptists and Pietists and further on to the expectations of contemporary denominations. 3. The state of perfection that is grounded in “metaphysical fate” is partly or completely immanentized, and to a certain extent reinterpreted as a this-worldly “fact.” This fact can be seen as the end point of a well- ordered historical process, viewed in a quietistic attitude, as, for example, by Bengel or Hegel. But when the fact is identiﬁed with the current historical situation it can also provoke action. The question of proper action, however, triggered by experiences that present an alternative and require an existential decision, no longer arises; rather, action is prescribed and dictated by the this-worldly fact, and it requires no further legitimation than that it serves the realization of the this-worldly fact. This position represents the type of activist apocalypse, represented by the interpretations of the German Wars of Liberation or of the First World War as the Last Judgment against other peoples. 4. Finally, the activist components are freed from their legitimizing

32. See Isa. 45:14–17; 45:20–22. 33. Dan. 2:34. 116 The Apocalypse in Germany background and sink to a vulgar level that appears to stand in no particular connection with the more demanding speculations on history. But the phenomena that are characteristic for activism on the vulgar level may be understood as residues of the process of degradation that have made themselves independent but follow from the interpretive concept that revolves around the Last Judgment symbol. That this is so is shown by the emotional state in which activism is articulated and which the theologian Deißmann in 1914 quite correctly if not critically characterized as “religious excitement” and “enthusiastic tension.”34 We already noted at the beginning what excitement may be aroused by the vision of the new world; this “apocalyptic excitement” can also change to raging violence and is an indication of its origin.

We need to look at the process of degradation that we have just described more closely. One of the phenomena where it may be observed is the regularly recurring sense of superiority of the Germans toward other peoples. This phenomenon is usually viewed as particularly characteristic of modern nationalism and seen as rooted in nationalism; in any case, this does not explain it. For it is nationalism that must be explained as the result of different causes and developments to which belong, among others, political religiosity, this-worldly apocalyptic thought, and its degraded forms. The theory that the conviction of being superior to other peoples has its roots in the military successes and cultural achievements that were attained during the nineteenth century seems to be closer to the truth. A further source could have been the social Darwinist notions by which those achievements seem to have been verified. It is doubtless correct that these factors validated and strengthened the feeling of superiority, but it has its origin—as was to be seen—before most of those successes and achievements. In Arndt’s treatment of the Polish question was revealed the belief in the greater worth of the Germans as the direct and logical result of the application of the Hegelian concept. He justified the use of force against other peoples with the Last Judgment on whose side he knew himself to be. The same justifying background may also be presumed with the Hegelian Adolf Lasson, who articulated in 1914 the “consciousness of German superiority.”35 But on the third or fourth level of vulgarization, the justifying derivations have disappeared; with the arrogance of stupidity, it is stated as a fact, without further justification, that “we are worth more than others.”36

34. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:294, 304. 35. Ibid., 112. 36. Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 88 (E. König). “World History Is the Last Judgment” 117

The same is true of the frequently expressed self-righteousness. It, too, is the logical consequence of a concept according to which Germany, as the executor of the last and highest stage in the development of world-spirit, possesses an absolute right vis-à-vis other nations, which have no rights. Detached from its original concept, this attitude is expressed, for example, in the view that Belgium was justifiably conquered by Germany: Ludwig Ganghofer characterizes the “way to the sea” gained by this conquest as “justly obtained” and also wishes to “keep” it; the only legitimation that he can think of is that it was “gained by force” with “German blood,” as though the unavoidable losses in a war of conquest could justify the conquest itself. If Germany is in the right, Belgium must be in the wrong; in A. W. Heymel’s view, “this brutish land” is responsible for its own fate and should attribute its destruction more to its “own murder and fire” than to German cannons.37 The notable aggressiveness that is expressed in many interpretations of the war is a further product of degradation. It results from the new concept of action that originated with the immanentizing of the apocalyptic speculation. At its root is the notion that Germany has the responsibility “to imbue this world with Germanness,”38 that it was a mission of universal significance and with the war the time had arrived to fulfill this mission. Its accomplishment through violent means becomes in the this-worldly apocalypse a world-historical necessity: “We must be victorious,” König argues in a sermon, “because the decline of Germanness would mean the decline of the history of mankind.”39 König repeats with this argument a sentence of Fichte in the Reden an die deutsche Nation (“Addresses to the German Nation”), to which writers, preachers, and professors referred again and again, including the writers Ludwig Thoma and Rudolf Alexander Schröder as well as the philosophers Alois Riehl and Adolf Lasson.40 Applied to the First World War and connected with the other apocalyptic interpretations, this argument leads to extreme aggressiveness against enemies: as enemies of the German Empire, they are identified with the powers of evil that bring about the demise of mankind, because they hinder Germany from its universal mission of redemption. Here, too, finally, the legitimizing construct recedes into the background. The will to power no longer needs to refer to the

37. Ludwig Ganghofer, Eiserne Zither, part 2, Neue Krieglieder, 50; Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 55 (A. W. Heymel). 38. Ganghofer, Eiserne Zither, part 2, 92. 39. König, Sechs Kriegspredigten, 5. 40. Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 37; Buchwald, Der heilige Krieg, 43; Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:145, 203. 118 The Apocalypse in Germany world-spirit that chose the German people as its representative; it justifies itself on the principle of aggressive activism itself: “War is the helmsman of world history,” a war sermon states. “A new step in the power of the German people is to be climbed. . . . It will now be revealed whether our German people is called to have precedence over other peoples.”41 The “Last Judgment” in 1918 was not decided in Germany’s favor. It must be for this reason that appeal to this court became unfashionable. Oswald Spengler, however, took up the symbol once again after the war was lost. In 1922 he completed the second volume of his book Der Untergang des Abendlandes (“The Decline of the West”) with the quotation from Schiller, “World history is the Last Judgment.” However, he gave the saying a completely different meaning in comparison to the previous tradition. Even before 1914 he had, under the influence of Nietzsche, bid farewell to the belief in progress. Nietzsche had rejected the notion, in his posthumous fragments published under the title Der Wille zur Macht (“The Will to Power”), that mankind represents “development toward something better” and “as a whole will approach some goal.” Spengler made this his own position. In the introduction to the first volume of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which was written before the war and revised during the war, he rejected the “optimism with regard to the course of the future,” and he made fun of the notion “that everyone sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection.” Like Nietzsche, he observed that “ ‘Mankind,’ however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids.” The demise of Mexican culture, which did not break down like other cultures at the end of their age, but was destroyed “by a handful of bandits in a few years . . . in the full glory of its unfolding,” was a compelling proof for him that “the history of humanity has no meaning whatever.”42 However, even if they lack a meaning, Spengler attributed to individual cultures a plan, of growing, ripening, and decaying. He saw this plan recurring in all cultures, so that it also appeared possible to him to determine any culture’s current historical location, not the location in the overall course of history, but the location in the course of contemporary culture, that of the West. Even before 1914 he claimed to have seen the present and the approaching war not as a “unique grouping of accidental facts

41. Cited in Erich Stange, “Das Urteil Gottes über unsere Predigt vom Kriege,” Pas- toralblätter 62 (1920): 175. 42. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:507; Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 13:191, 87; Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:21, 2:43–44. “World History Is the Last Judgment” 119 that is dependent on national moods, personal influences, and economic tendencies,” but rather as the “model of a turning-point in history” that “has for centuries had its preordained place within a great historic organism of exactly determinable proportions.” As a consequence he also believed he was able to predict the future: the development of “Caesarism” and the victory of the politics of violence as a precursor of ultimate decline.43 Spengler, too, thought himself to be a prophet before the end of history, although he defined this end not as the end of world history but as the breakdown of the West. Contrary to previous apocalyptic prophets, he did not expect a state of eternal perfection after the decline, but the rise of a new civilization in the succession of many others. For him, the notion that world history is the Last Judgment meant that history relentlessly executes the law of “rise” and “decline.” The Decline of the West shook the apocalyptic optimism of the Germans no less than the war they had lost. The “apocalyptic mood” in the twenties, about which Klaus Mann spoke,44 was heavily influenced by Spengler, particularly among the educated. The pessimistic vision of the future that was obsessed with decline became predominant, also, as the central meaning of the term apocalypse. Spengler left only a single possibility open for maintaining a positive attitude toward the future: to wish for what would necessarily come and thus be led instead of being drawn by “fate.” Of course, this possibility could also be understood as a perspective for a new apocalyptic activism, because world history as the Last Judgment— Spengler ended his book with this summation—“always has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice more than power.”45

43. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:47, 2:506–7. 44. Klaus Mann, Der Wendepunkt (Munich: Ellermann, 1981), 137. 45. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:507. B. Movements

Anticipation of the end of history and visions of the millennial kingdom of perfection share an unbroken tradition from the Middle Ages to the historical interpretations of Pietistic theologians in the eighteenth century. In the decades around 1800 this tradition underwent fundamental changes. Until the Pietists, it had been an undercurrent of Christian faith. Sometimes this current emerged to the surface when, for example, during the period of the Hohenstaufens it combined with the ruling powers in an “affirmative imperial apocalypse,” or—as was more frequently the case—it caused substantial societal and political turbulence, as in the case of the heretical movements of the late Middle Ages, of the Münster Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer, or it gained greater religious influence even in ecclesiastical circles, as the example of Bengel shows. Generally, however, speculations concerning the speedy onset of the millennial kingdom were dismissed by the Church, so that they were denied long-lasting public recognition and influence in society. But toward the end of the eighteenth century the undercurrent became the main current, which, at the same time, began to follow a different course. Despite that, the structures of Christian historical speculation and many of the symbols of these visions of redemption did not change, but they were taken up by intellectual, societal, and political movements that gained widespread intellectual recognition, shaping public opinion and attaining social dominance over long periods of time. They penetrated the constructions of the meaning of history that developed in the modern philosophical systems and brought about— in connection with these philosophies of history—the new societal and political movements of nationalism and, later, of socialism. The tradition of Christian speculation concerning the imminent end of the world, the return of Christ, and the onset of the millennial kingdom did not cease; on the contrary, it is still alive today. However, it developed no fundamentally new intellectual or societal impulses, but remained an undercurrent of Christianity that is carried on by sects and Free Church congregations. The fascination that the thought of a radical shift in the structure of reality and the vision of a perfect world exercised was transmitted to the historical speculations and political movements that broke off from the narrower sphere of Christian concepts and the exegetical fixation on the Revelation of John. Despite their newness,

120 B. Movements 121 modern movements reveal similarities with tradition. For this reason, the investigation of historical developments must be carried out without being narrowed by the concept of secularization. Also, such investigations should be conscious of the tension between the structural commonalities and historical peculiarities of the interpretations of experiences in order to clarify both the changes in the historical phenomena and their respective peculiarities, as well as the commonalities in the sense of the equivalents of experience and their symbolizations. I have distinguished two structural models of the Christian view of history, in addition to the Augustinian: the apocalyptic interpretation finds no meaning in previous history and expects—because it cannot accept the complete meaninglessness of the historical process—in the state of deepest deficiency the onset of fulfillment; speculation of a “divine economy” ascribes to history the meaning of continuing revelation until the full presence of the divine. Both perspectives are generally termed millenarian, in that they are directed to a state of perfection in the millennial kingdom, in the status of the Holy Ghost, and are characterized by the expectation of this condition. But actually they represent a contrast in structure and content: The one presents history as a meaningful and systematic process; the other presents it as a meaningless motion to which a violent end must be made; and both perspectives thereby express completely different interpretations of experience. Of course, I have also pointed out that these perspectives are like two sides of a coin, that the one can change into the other, and that both sides can even join in a dialectical relationship as, for example, in Bengel’s speculation on history. Both perspectives affected the new philosophical and political movements that had arisen since the end of the eighteenth century in a different manner. Elements of the “divine economy” speculation, which ascribes to history a continuously developing meaning, entered the historical schemas of idealistic philosophy, particularly that of Schelling and Hegel, but also into Lessing’s plan for the education of mankind. These new philosophies of history were not apocalyptic. What connects them with the tradition of Christian theologies of history must be understood primarily as an intellectual impulse. The political doctrine of nationalism was, for its part, influenced by the new philosophies of history. Ideas about the meaning of national history, about the special mission of one’s own nation, and about its contribution to the history of mankind referred to these philosophies, as can be seen in the case of Arndt. In nationalism, however, there was an additional, apocalyptic impulse, and this impulse was the result of original interpretations of experience in a particular historical situation. The same is true for the apocalyptic outbursts on the socialist side. Both movements 122 The Apocalypse in Germany went back to symbols of the apocalyptic tradition in order to articulate their interpretations of experience. In both, a specific symbol—“spirit” (Geist)—plays a central role. I will therefore pay particular attention in what follows to the meaning and role of the apocalyptic spirit. 8 The Birth of Nationalism from the Spirit of the Apocalypse

“In the beginning was Napoleon.” With this sentence Thomas Nip- perdey begins his Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866, and he continues with the explanation: “The history of the Germans, their life, and their experiences in the first one-and-a-half decades of the nineteenth century, in which the groundwork of a modern Germany was laid, remains under his overwhelming influence. Politics was fate, and it was Napoleon’s politics: war and conquest, exploitation and oppression, empire and reorganiza- tion.”1 Among the movements that arose under the impact of Napoleon’s politics, nationalism was particularly significant. At the same time, Napo- leon inspired apocalyptic interpretations that were novel in comparison to the previous ones as, for instance, those of the Pietists. Since these apocalyptic interpretations of the political situation under Napoleon’s rule were combined with expressions of a rising national political consciousness, I believe that nationalism in Germany was suffused with apocalyptic conceptions from the beginning. This theory must be elucidated and verified. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century there was no German national consciousness in a distinctly political sense. Although there had been mention of a “German Nation” as early as the fifteenth century, the “Holy Roman Empire of German Nation” was not a nation-state, but a union of different nations. In addition, the “nation” concept, without regard to linguistic differences or commonalities, was used also for the territorial states within the German Empire until at least 1814, as an article about the “Patriotism of the Prussian Nation” reveals.2 Patriotism was a feeling of loyalty toward the territorial state of which one was a subject. Thus, for example, Ernst Moritz Arndt, who had been born and had grown

1. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), 11. 2. “Über den Patriotismus der preußischen Nation,” Allgemeiner Anzeiger der Deutschen 1 (1814): 1033–34.

123 124 The Apocalypse in Germany up in Swedish Hither Pomerania, in 1805 still confessed to be a Swedish patriot.3 The feeling of solidarity and the consciousness of unity among all Germans was based primarily on a common language, literature, and culture, but this feeling of unity was completely unpolitical. Both territorial- state patriotism and consciousness of cultural unity were subordinated by intellectuals of the period to the ideal of universal education and human cosmopolitanism: the Germans viewed their unpolitical nature even as a virtue. The most famous witness to this can be read in the Xenien, which Goethe and Schiller published in the Musenalmanach of 1797:

GERMAN NATIONAL CHARACTER You hope to make yourself into a nation, Germans, but to no avail; Educate yourselves more freely to be human beings—that you can do!4

As late as 1805, Arndt stated: “It is lovely to love one’s fatherland and to do everything for it, but it is lovelier, infinitely lovelier, to be a human being and to honor everything that is human more than the fatherland.”5 There is no doubt that it was Napoleon’s reign “that politicized the classical-romantic national feeling and consciousness of the Germans, . . . the years between 1806 and 1813 are the birth years of the national movement.”6 It is generally agreed that, from the outset, political nationalism possessed religious features in Germany as well as elsewhere.7 It has been less widely noted that, in Germany and elsewhere, this nationalist religious sentiment had a specifically apocalyptic character. The American national consciousness, for example, was—and is—strongly influenced by “millennarian” ideas that originated as a legacy of the Puritan sects.8 In

3. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Erinnerungen aus dem äußeren Leben, in Ernst Moritz Arndts Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Heinrich Meisner (Leipzig: Pfau, n.d.), 1:82. 4. Goethe’s Werke, ed. Erich Trunz,12th ed., 14 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), 1:212. On this discrepancy, see Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1922). 5. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Fragmente über Menschenbildung, vol. 2 (Altona: Hammerich, 1805), 202. 6. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866, 303; see also Hans Kohn, “Napoleon and the Age of Nationalism,” Journal of Modern History 22 (1950): 21–37. 7. See also Christian Graf von Krockow, Nationalismus als deutsches Problem (Munich: Piper, 1970), 25; Heinrich August Winkler, “Der Nationalismus und seine Funktionen,” in Nationalismus, ed. Winkler (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, Hain, Scriptor, Hanstein, 1978), 6; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866, 300; and Jürgen Gebhardt, “Na- tionale Identität und nationale Ideologie: Anmerkungen zum Problem des Nationalismus,” Zeitschrift für Politik 32 (1985): 244–45. 8. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation; Winthrop Still Hudson, ed., Nationalism and Religion in America: Concepts of American Identity and Mission (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). The Birth of Nationalism from the Spirit of the Apocalypse 125

Germany, however, the connection between nationalism and the apocalypse had its own character, conditioned by the particular situation in which it came about and by the previous development of national consciousness and of the apocalyptic worldview. I have already shown how the political situation was apocalyptically interpreted during the Napoleonic period, particularly in Arndt’s Geist der Zeit. But such interpretations are to be found not only in Arndt, but also in Fichte, Kleist, Körner, Schenkendorf, Arnim, Friedrich Schlegel, and many other poets and publicists of the period.9 Apocalyptic interpretations of the historical situation were widespread. Was there anything new in this approach compared with previous apocalyptic traditions? We can best determine this by ﬁrst ascertaining those interpretations, which were not at all innovative, and then follow developments that resulted in new interpretive strategies. The traditional method of interpreting a certain situation apocalyptically consists of applying the apocalyptic passages of the Bible, especially the Revelation of John, to the situation whose “actual meaning” one wishes to understand. This method, which does not differ fundamentally from that used by Bengel, was widespread during the Napoleonic period. In light of the overwhelming role that Napoleon played in the history of that period, the apocalyptic fantasy was sparked primarily by him. On November 11, 1805, the painter Friedrich Meier in Dresden wrote to Wilhelm von Gerlach in Berlin: “Here everyone is reading the Revelation of John, where you can ﬁnd everything prophesied about Napoleon, even down to the smallest detail. Recently I met my landlord reading and studying it. He said that even his name is in it.”10 In fact, his name can be found in it if one is not too particular about spelling. In Revelation 9 we read: “Out of the smoke came locusts, and they were given the power that earthly scorpions have. . . . In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. . . . They had for their king the angel of the abyss, whose name, in Hebrew, is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon, or the Destroyer.” But it was not merely the landlord of the painter Meier, but numerous poets as well—Wilhelm Christian Müller, Wetzel, Thieß, Scheller—who made this discovery (i.e., Apollyon = Napoleon) and treated it in their poems.11

9. Numerous examples, already arranged according to relevant interpretive models and symbols, may be found in Oskar Richter, Die Lieblingsvorstellungen der Dichter des deutschen Befreiungskrieges (Leipzig: Seele, 1909); and Karl Scheibenberger, Der Einfluß der Bibel und des Kirchenliedes auf die Lyrik der deutschen Befreiungskriege (Gelnhausen: Kalbfleisch, 1936). 10. Eckart Kleßmann, ed., Deutschland unter Napoleon in Augenzeugenberichten, 2d ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 50. 11. Scheibenberger, Der Einfluß der Bibel, 37–38. 126 The Apocalypse in Germany

The identiﬁcation of names in Revelation with like-sounding names in the contemporary world is only a special case of the technique of making comparisons through allegorical exegesis and application of Revelation. The ubiquitous characterizations of Napoleon as monster, dragon, snake, and devil are to be understood in this manner; the locusts are interpreted to be his armies, the whore of Babylon is Paris. Word-for-word borrowings from Revelation are also made in order to describe the new aion of liberation and redemption after Napoleon’s destruction:

Then there will be no more death Hell will be no more.12 Then is there neither suffering nor crying, Behold, he says, I make everything anew.13

The source in both these cases is Revelation 21:4–5: “There shall be an end to death, and mourning and crying and pain. . . . Behold! I make all things new.” There is something rhetorical in the verbose attacks against Napoleon as Satan and the apocalyptic beast just as there is in the literal citations from Revelation. As a consequence, it is difficult to determine whether a fundamentalist faith lies behind the interpretation that Napoleon was himself the Antichrist incarnate or whether the interpretive model and symbols of the apocalypse are being used to describe him as a representative of a “power of evil.” It is equally difficult to tell whether the prophecy that death would be no more expresses a fundamentalist belief in the millennial kingdom of Christ or whether it is merely a rhetorical usage to characterize the desired better condition of the world after Napoleon. But this difficulty directs our attention to the point at which the innovative element of the apocalyptic interpretation in this period is to be grasped. At first the innovative element diverges from the traditional apocalyptic interpretive strategy only in isolated instances; I will select a characteristic case and compare it with an interpretation whose fundamentalist basis is indubitable. The fundamentalist interpretation was presented by Jung-Stilling. His Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion (“Triumphalist History of Christian Religion”) of 1799 clearly reveals that he believed in the speedy coming of the millennial kingdom of Christ on earth. He followed Bengel in

12. Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel, Aus dem Kriegs- und Siegesjahre Achtzehnhundert Dreyzehn (Leipzig: n.p., 1815), 98. 13. Johann Otto Thieß, Lieder dem Vaterland und der Religion gesungen (Kiel: n.p., 1807), 69. The Birth of Nationalism from the Spirit of the Apocalypse 127 the calculation of the date; he thought it “highly likely” that the last great battle would be fought in the year 1836.14 In an addendum to the Siegsgeschichte, which appeared in 1805, he discussed the current interpretations of Napoleon being the Antichrist, and he rejected them: “Seek the man of sins, the son of Satan, the actual Antichrist—not yet— among the spiritual and temporal rulers who are now alive.” He cited “factual” reasons for his rejection, which he drew from the Book of Daniel, 2 Thessalonians, and the Revelation of John, but what was obviously decisive for him was that another three decades lay ahead until the predicted year 1836. On the other hand, he offered an interpretation of Napoleon that ascribed to him a role in the last phase of history; this is disclosed by the remark that the hour of decision has come “when the greatest Christ hater, the son of Apollyon, sits on the throne.” Overcoming him will be Christ’s affair alone; Jung-Stilling put the faithful under obligation both for the current age as well as for the future great battle: “In no case rebel— Christians can and should never overcome in any other manner than through love and suffering, patience and hope.”15 In comparison with Jung-Stilling’s fundamentalist faith the new developments can be determined particularly well in Arndt, especially since Arndt concerned himself in detail with Jung-Stilling’s interpretation. Under the influence of the defeats of Austria and Prussia against Napoleon in 1805 and 1806 Arndt was transformed from Swedish patriot and cos- mopolitan to German nationalist. The move to apocalyptic interpretations of the events went hand in hand. In particular, Arndt apparently experienced the collapse of Prussia at Jena and Auerstädt as so terrible and meaningless that he could find solace and meaning in only an apocalyptic interpretation of his experiences. The death of Prince Louis Ferdinand in the battle induced him to ask the despairing question: “Must then everything in this terrible era that could have carried the greatest love and enthusiasm, everything that promised such endless hope, swiftly flee and die, and is the vice marked monster alone invulnerable and immortal?” But precisely this hopeless situation provoked the apocalyptic interpretation that a radical transformation must follow the absolute low point: “Indeed, if righteous beings enliven and judge the world, there is now more hope than ever before; the most destructive of all goddesses, that bewitching old woman, has gathered such a thick cloud of pride and sin, of lies and injustices, over the head of the Grim Reaper, she will, she must, break in

14. Jung-Stilling, Die Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion, 407. 15. Jung-Stilling, Erster Nachtrag zur Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion, 95, 147–48, 133. 128 The Apocalypse in Germany thunder and lightning and ravage him and the world at the same time.”16 Arndt’s experience wanted a meaningful explanation that he found in the apocalypse. In order to articulate the apocalyptic interpretation of experience, Arndt was able to go back to the traditional models of interpretation and symbols, as a starting point; from his earliest youth, he knew the Bible by heart.17 Besides, he came into close contact with fundamentalist interpretations of present events in the years following 1806, during a stay in Sweden. King Gustavus IV Adolphus himself was a faithful follower of Jung-Stilling and considered—surely in this point being less careful than his mentor—Napoleon as the beast from the abyss. Arndt was thereby prompted to deal with the fundamentalist interpretations of the apocalypse; he studied Jung-Stilling’s Siegsgeschichte and excerpted the most important passages.18 But ultimately he was not able to grow accustomed to either the fundamentalist belief in the millennial kingdom of Christ, or the method of meticulous exegesis of the Revelation of John. This is shown by his own apocalyptic interpretations as well as by his derogatory comments about the apocalyptic enthusiasm of Jung-Stilling and Gustavus Adolphus in his Schwedische Geschichte (“History of Sweden”).19 Did Arndt use the apocalyptic apparatus solely as a rhetorical device in a political struggle against Napoleon? By no means! Although the rhetorical elements of his interpretation cannot be overlooked and were certainly used deliberately, Arndt developed an original apocalyptic faith. Arndt’s sincere expression of profound despair and indignation when he discussed his own experiences betrays the authenticity of the apocalyptic interpretation of his experiences. Compared with the fundamentalist tradition, the apocalyptic conclusions have been changed in content, despite the basically similar structure of the interpretation of experience. The changes in the symbolic language show this: instead of the names of God or Christ, who, according to traditional belief, will conquer the Antichrist, Arndt regularly uses circumscriptions such as “endless being,” “fate,” and

16. Arndt, Geist der Zeit, vol. 2, in Sämtliche Werke, vols. 9 and 10; 2:83, 94. 17. On Arndt’s knowledge of the Bible, see Günther Ott, Ernst Moritz Arndt: Religion, Christentum und Kirche in der Entwicklung des deutschen Publizisten und Patrioten (Bonn: Presseverband der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, 1966), 70–71. 18. Printed in Ott, Ernst Moritz Arndt, 318–19. The excerpts are paraphrases with numerous literal borrowings, chieﬂy from the Nachtrag of 1805. The dating of these excerpts to the year 1809 does not seem to me to be completely convincing: I consider an earlier point in time possible. It is astonishing that Ott’s otherwise exceptional study of Arndt’s religious development treats the apocalyptic component of Arndt’s belief on only a single page, in connection with these excerpts. 19. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Schwedische Geschichte (1808–1811), in Sämtliche Werke, 13: 419, 421–22, 499–500. The Birth of Nationalism from the Spirit of the Apocalypse 129

“providence,” but most frequently “spirit,” for example, “the adjudicating spirit that pervades history,” or “the giant spirit, who . . . travels through time.” Within his apocalyptic interpretation, Arndt connects this “spirit,” whom he already conjures in the title of his collection Geist der Zeit, with the German people: “Believe me,” he says, “this time is your time, its God and its spirit are your God and your spirit, and you will lead off the radiant round of the new century.” He further states: “You are the spirit and the soul of modern history.”20 What does “spirit” (Geist) have to do with it? Is it the spirit of God or the spirit of the German people (and what is one to understand concretely by this?), or are both the same? Let us first state that instead of the battle between God and the incarnate Antichrist understood in a fundamentalist fashion, we find a struggle between abstract “entities,” between “spirit” and the power of evil for which Napoleon, indeed, is a rhetorically embellished representative as a “vice-scarred monster,” and a “spirit on the infernal throne.” The “adjudicating spirit that pervades history” merges with a spirit that is ascribed to the German people. Even though it is at first unclear how this works and what is behind it, the effect is still clear: belief in the (divine) spirit is transferred to the people, as well as the judgeship, and with it the responsibility to bring about justice: “To be a people, to have a feeling for a matter, to gather with the bloody sword of vengeance, that is the religion of our time: through this faith you must be united in solidarity and strong, and through it you will overcome the devil and hell.”21 It becomes clear at this point once again that the interpretive concept of “secularization”—“that which is religious is secularized in the nation, the secular sacralized”22—allows only a superficial, categorical definition, since what we have here is nothing new: “faith” is expressed, and this faith is apparently the result of an apocalyptic interpretation of experience, which is equivalent to other apocalyptic interpretations of experience, as its structure and the evaluation of certain events show. The contents of faith, however, have shifted. The apocalyptic spirit, from which faith lives, is cast by Arndt into a new form. Although the spirit of the apocalypse was present in almost all interpretations of that time, its new form, which is particularly conspicuous in the writings of Arndt, provided German nationalism its center and dynamics. How the spirit of the apocalypse assumed its new form and what role it later played in German history is the subsequent topic of our study.

20. Arndt, Geist der Zeit, 3:111, 127–28, 2:222, 3:303, 305. 21. Ibid., 2:119. 22. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866, 300. 9 From Holy Spirit to National Spirit

“Spirit” (Geist) is one of the most deeply layered concepts in the German language. The Geist entry in Grimm’s dictionary, with its 118 columns, is among the longest in that work. If the reader tries to determine the special theological and philosophical meaning of the term,1 he or she quickly recognizes that simple meanings and precise distinctions are not possible. Nevertheless, some fundamental distinctions may be made to simplify our investigation. Until the eighteenth century, Spirit in the singular (der Geist) was understood exclusively as the spirit of God or the Holy Spirit.2 The “spirits” that were ascribed to men or natural objects designated a fundamental quality of life in contrast to the physical body (in man) or to matter in general. Spirit was also used to express the speciﬁc capacity of man to participate in reality. Because this capacity has different dimensions for which there are also other terms, the human “spirit” was often connected with these terms or was used with a similar meaning: spirit as “reason” and “understanding” for the capacity to gain knowledge through participation in external reality, spirit as “consciousness” for the capacity to reﬂect the participatory ability itself, spirit as “soul” for the capacity to transcend existence in space and time and to participate in a reality beyond that existence. These dimensions are again not sharply separated from each other, and their content could also be differently described. I have stressed

1. See the entries for Geist in the following: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche; Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart; Theologische Realenzyklopädie; and Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. In particular, the last-cited reference provides an outstanding overview of the history of the concept and also discusses the fundamental difﬁculty of a philosophical deﬁnition of the philosophical concept of “spirit.” 2. The “singularizing” of spirit as a fundamental concept of philosophy (competing with the traditional singular of the “spirit of God”) runs parallel to other instances of “singularizing,” e.g., of “history” and of “progress”; see the relevant articles in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, as well as Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae,” in Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hermann Braun and Manfred Riedel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967), 205.

130 From Holy Spirit to National Spirit 131 the participatory character of “spirit” because I wish to understand the word spirit as a symbol and not as a term that eludes definition anyway. By the designation “symbol,” I wish to draw attention to the fact that by the word spirit experiences of participation—of various sorts—can be expressed; at the same time, I point out the possibility that the symbol can be separated from its experiential context, in the sense of Eliade’s dégradation du symbole, and that it can be reified. For answering the question of where the spirit of the apocalypse comes from, which, in its manifestation as “national spirit,” I see playing such a decisive role in the birth of German nationalism, the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the participatory ability of the “spirit” of man is particularly significant. While the Holy Spirit has undergone a complicated development in the history of dogma, the following may be noted: the Holy Spirit is closely connected with the revelation of Christ; “spirit” is the symbol for the revelation of the hidden God in the flesh of the person Jesus; it combines God as Father and Christ as Son in a personal unity and thereby constitutes the symbol of the Trinity. It is not so simple to grasp its symbolic character; as a result, there were constant speculations concerning the independence of the three “persons” and the differences among them, in which “spirit,” a quality that is particularly difficult to grasp, has exercised the greatest fascination. The speculations that are especially significant for us originated, on the one hand, in the context of the historical reflections of Pietistic theologians whom we have already discussed, as well as in the context of reflections concerning the nature of language. The first prerequisite for freer speculation about “spirit” was separating the Holy Spirit from the revelation of Christ. We can observe such a process in Protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the Spirit of God was more and more “made a tool for human aspirations for virtue and salvation,” if not in effect an “inner potency of man.”3 The separation of “spirit” from the revelation of Christ went hand in hand with the separation of that revelation from the person of Christ. The revelation of God through his spirit in Christ was conceived in Christianity in the tradition of Jewish understanding of revelation as a historical event that constituted an irreversible before and after. The “historicity” of the revelation event induced theologians to seek revelations of the spirit in other historical occurrences as well and, finally, to ascribe a revelatory character to history as such. As we have seen, this idea was developed by 3. Ingeborg Röbbelen, Theologie und Frömmigkeit im deutschen evangelisch-lutherischen Gesangbuch des 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1957), 282–83. 132 The Apocalypse in Germany

Coccejus in his concept of “divine economy in history” and was continued by Bengel. According to this concept, God’s plan of salvation for history consists of continuous revelations until the beginning of the millennial kingdom under the rule of Christ. One can descry the gradual progress of revelation when one has found the “apocalyptic key,” as Bengel believed he had. Finding the key is itself a revelatory event that announces the speedy onset of the millennial kingdom. Oetinger advanced the speculation of his teacher further by interpreting the process of continuous revelation not only—from the point of view of man—as an increasing insight into God’s plan of salvation, but also as a process by which God himself comes to fulfillment in man: “Before the creation of the world, God had the intention in Christ that from the beginning to the end, from A to , many periods or eternities should pass until man should be sent that God would be all in all in him. This, however, can only happen step by step.” To the extent that Oetinger conceives of the revelatory process as a successive process of redemption, he is able to apply the symbol of the judgment to the course of history, as Schiller does shortly afterward: “Since the suffering and death of Jesus, judgment has come over the world: the corruption that Satan caused must eventually be removed.” Since revelation takes place through the spirit, and since the revelatory process is understood by Oetinger as a process of elimination of the ungodly, the spirit achieves the quality of an independent power, which brings about this elimination: “That which is spiritual is hidden in the terrestrial nature; but it achieves the upper hand.” “In such a way matter must be elevated to the spiritual.”4 In Oetinger, the development of “spirit” became an actual redemptive process. In order that God can become identical with himself in redeemed man he must first be reunited with the spirit. This occurs when man realizes “spirit” in his reason: “Philosophers of today ask little about the highest principle, that is, spirit, from which all knowledge flows . . . spirit has everything in itself while reason brings it only to conceptual terms, and in the Golden Age it will be found true in the highest degree what, after many false definitions of knowledge, all of which Plato refutes,5 the true definition is. For true knowledge is the epitome of divine things, which is 4. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Betrachtung über das Geheimnis Gottes, und des Vaters und Christi (1772), in Sämmtliche Schriften, zum ersten Mal vollständig gesammelt und un- verändert herausgegeben, ed. Karl Christoph Eberhard Ehmann, 11 vols. in 2 sections (Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1858–1866), sec. 2, 6:300, 301. 5. The reference to Plato reflects Neoplatonic thought, as the accompanying reference to Marsilio Ficino demonstrates. Further, Oetinger’s doctrine of spirit is clearly influenced by Jacob Böhme—whom Bengel still regarded with reservation—as well as by hermetic and alchemical conceptions, as the context of the last cited passages shows. From Holy Spirit to National Spirit 133 located in spirit and hereafter flows into reason. God planted them into spirit, while the teacher must bring them into reason through God, reason must combine them with spirit, and spirit must thereby unite with God.”6 The bridge that Oetinger constructed between God and man reflected the same principles of construction and, to an extent, even the same linguistic constituents as Hegel’s philosophy of identity, which makes absolute “spirit” realize itself in reason.7 Oetinger reified the symbol “spirit,” which stood for the participatory tension between man and God, into a bridge over which the divine can be drawn into man and history. Spirit still comes from God, but it becomes an independent being that is placed by the side of God and actualizes the redemptive process in such a manner that God himself appears to be brought into it. Schelling and Hegel further advanced the process of making “spirit” independent; the spirit became a basic concept for the absolute and took over the traditional titles of God. The reification of “spirit” in the concept of the absolute, and the definition of history as the process of realization of “spirit,” made it possible to divide “spirit” into partial realizations, as Hegel had done: “spirit” is realized in the course of its self-realization in individual “national spirits,” which represent the respective current “stage of development of the world- spirit.” Thereby, to a certain extent, “spirit” turns outward. In Oetinger, the process in which reason combines with “spirit,” and “spirit” through reason with God, can be understood as an enterprise of this-worldly self-redemption and self-deification, but it is also a process of the inner spiritualization of man. However, when the process of realization of “spirit” is transferred to “national spirits” and these gain the right to “executing” the current stage of development of “spirit” on other peoples, the desire to experience the effect of the realization of “spirit” incarnate in external reality cannot be overlooked. Thereby one comes to Hegel’s speculation on world history as a succession of four empires, the final one of which, the Germanic, is chosen to bring the process of the self-realization of “spirit” to its goal: the “spiritual” and the “temporal” will combine in this goal, “so that the true reconciliation, which develops the State to the image and reality of reason, becomes objective.”8 Schelling, too, had in mind the goal of a reconciliation of the spiritual with the temporal, and he also indicated a desire to see the reconciliation become manifest, albeit in a manner less clear than Hegel. The state, which

6. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Die güldene Zeit (1759), in Sämmtliche Schriften, sec. 2, 6:141 (emphasis mine). 7. Ernst Benz has already pointed this out in “Johann Albrecht Bengel,” 546–47. 8. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Lasson, §§ 342–47, 360; see also p. 110 in this book. 134 The Apocalypse in Germany had acquired spiritual power in the Christian world, was for him a “false theocracy” and not the proper model; he even stated: “It is (apocalyptic) enthusiasm to wish for a perfect state in this world.” Against this, he saw in the Reformation a model that protested against “false theocracy” and pointed to that which was “true.” But Schelling also considered the creation of such a true theocracy, “which will be a rule of the known divine spirit itself,” as “the historical destiny of the Germans.”9 The reification of “spirit” to an entity that is operative in history and is made manifest in historical processes also made it suitable for assuming an independent and active role in various scenarios of political reality as, for example, in the scenario of nationalism; and this role could also be legitimized by philosophy of history. In order that “spirit,” in the form of “national spirit,” could gain nationalistic momentum, it needed additional buttressing; this was provided by a different development. In order to delineate this development, I must first address a more general problem. Nationalism in Germany had no clearly defined, unified doctrine. Still, despite the differences that can be seen between individual authors of the national movement after 1806, certain general characteristics can be established. It must first be stressed that the national consciousness that originated during the Napoleonic period was an intellectual phenomenon. This can be understood from the point of view of social history: those who originated and promoted national consciousness were overwhelmingly intellectuals. This may also be understood from the perspective of intellectual history: the rise of national consciousness is connected with the idea of Bildung.10 Bildung is an extremely complex and particularly “German” concept, which makes it impossible to translate into foreign languages. Among the English terms the dictionary lists for Bildung are: formation, educa-

9. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, in Schellings Werke, ed. Schröter, 5:734, 728. 10. For the connection between nationalism and Bildung, see Christian Graf von Krockow, Nationalismus als deutsches Problem (Munich: Piper, 1970), 30, 58, 74; Elie Kedourie, Nationalismus (Munich: List, 1971), 55–58; and Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866, 30–31, 59–65, 300–313; as well as my study, “German Nation- alism and the Concept of ‘Bildung,’ ” in Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. J. C. Eade (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 1983), 135–50. On nationalism and Pietism, see Koppel S. Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934); and Gerhard Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Säkularisation (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1961). On the rise of the concept of Bildung, see Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe; Franz Rauhut and Ilse Schaarschmidt, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bildungsbegriffs (Weinheim: Beltz, 1965); and Hans Weil, Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsprinzips (Bonn: Cohen, 1930). From Holy Spirit to National Spirit 135 tion, constitution, cultivation, culture, personality development, learning, knowledge, good breeding, and refinement. Bildung indeed can mean all this—and it most often means all this together—but it means still more. The basic concept of Bildung as it was developed toward the end of the eighteenth century was applied first, not to the nation, but to the individual, as well as to mankind. For the individual, Bildung meant a process of self-realization and perfection of all one’s capabilities into a harmonious whole; in Humboldt’s words: “The true purpose of man . . . is the highest and most proportional Bildung of his powers into a whole.” As a means of achieving the realization of the true nature of man, Bildung becomes the means to “complete the Bildung of mankind as a whole.” The individual process of Bildung is accordingly seen as an element of the comprehensive process that will lead mankind to perfection. Thus it is not surprising that the concept of Bildung, as a designation of the individual as well as the human process of attaining perfection, came into contact with historical speculations, in which history was interpreted as a process of increasing revelation or self-realization of the entity “spirit.” In his Phänomenologie des Geistes (“Phenomenology of Spirit”), Hegel made the most comprehensive attempt to integrate the Bildung of the individual into the universal sphere of the Bildung of “spirit.” “The task,” he says in the introduction, “of leading the individual from his ungebildete standpoint to knowledge had to be defined in its general meaning, and the general individual, the independent spirit, must be viewed in its Bildung.” The independent spirit for its part achieves knowledge by passing through “the stages of Bildung of the general spirit”; on this path the general spirit is finally led to the “absolute” stage of “perfection,” and on this stage “the single elements of the general spirit—consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit—return as into thier ground.”11 It has become clear that a decisive goal of Bildung, of the individual, of mankind, as well as of “spirit,” is unity, and the other goal is freedom. According to Humboldt, for the individual, Bildung aims at “becoming free and independent in himself,” and, in Hegel’s view, spirit realizes, on the stage of perfection, “the principle of unity of divine and human nature, the reconciliation of divine and human nature as the objective truth and 11. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen, in Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Andreas Flitner und Klaus Giel (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1979–1981), 1:64; Wilhelm von Humboldt, Theorie der Bildung des Menschen, in Werke, 1:234; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, 26, 27, 477. On the concept of Bildung in phenomenology, see Georg Lukács, “Der junge Hegel,” in Werke, (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1967), 8:572–655; Reinhardt Klemens Maurer, Hegel und das Ende der Geschichte: Interpretationen zur “Phänomenologie des Geistes” (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965), 30–33. 136 The Apocalypse in Germany freedom being revealed within self-consciousness and subjectivity.” Unity and freedom stand in so close a relationship that it may be said that they presuppose each other.12 There is a striking parallel to the objectives of nationalism. If we take our bearing from the model of the Western, particularly the French and American, doctrine of nationalism, we can say: the unity of the nation is founded politically in the same rights of its citizens and in the general will to realize these rights: unity is represented by a government that guarantees these rights. Linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and geographical unity can enter the picture as further facts. Unity and freedom also presuppose each other in the political doctrine of nationalism. Among the same rights upon which political unity rests, the rights of freedom in all its aspects stand at the center. The inner process of unification of the nation can be seen as a process of political liberation from detractors who oppose these rights. Needless to say, next to inner freedom, the highest goal of the nation is freedom and independence from other nations. Even the universal claim of the ideal of Bildung “to perfect mankind as a whole” finds a parallel in nationalism. Although the goal of unity and freedom is set only for the individual nation, the political order represented by the nation can make the claim of a universal standard. If all nations would follow this standard, the whole of mankind could find unity in freedom; in this sense, Woodrow Wilson, for example, saw the First World War as a war for “freedom and righteousness and self-government among all nations of the world,” and the expected victory as an opportunity “to write a constitution for the whole world,” in order thereby “to save mankind.”13 The parallels between the political doctrine of nationalism and the idea of Bildung opened the possibility of linking the two concepts. In fact, this linkage took place in Germany, but not on the basis of a political understanding of unity and freedom, as it had been developed in America and France, but in a different way. The German idea of Bildung was brought into contact with national consciousness through speculations concerning the nature of language.14

12. Humboldt, Theorie der Bildung des Menschen, 235; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, § 358. 13. Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Albert Bushnell Hart (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), 216; A. L. George and J. L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: EK, 1964), 198. 14. Luther, sixteenth-century humanism, Jacob Böhme, and Pietism laid the foundations upon which Hamann and Herder built; see Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism, 165–75; Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland, 180–204. From Holy Spirit to National Spirit 137

Hamann initiated this development with his attempt to explain the differences between different languages that apparently confused him. He appeared to maintain the philosophical view that man had a nature, and that language was a fundamental characteristic of man’s nature, when he postulated: “Therefore, there must be similarities among all human languages that are based in the similarity of our nature.”15 But it is precisely this insistence that there must be similarities that betrays the unease concerning the differences, for in fact, it is insignificant for the identification of language as the characteristic of human nature, in what vocabulary or grammar it is expressed. Hamann did not concern himself further with the search for similarities, but directed his attention to the differences. But he was less interested in a philological definition: he wanted to find a fundamental philosophical explanation. Hamann proceeded from the conviction that language is “the only expression of the soul.” Then he concluded: “When our conceptions are directed from the point of view of the soul, and this is determined in the view of many by the position of the body; a similar view may be held of the body of a whole people.” First of all, Hamann supposed that the soul would be shaped by the nature of the body, so he posited, in analogy to the human body, a “body of the people,” which accordingly must also have its own soul, so that the conclusion suggested itself that a particular language was the expression of the “history of our race and our soul.” Hamann’s conception of language as the expression of the soul—both of the individual as well as of a whole people, was taken up by Herder and continued for some decisive steps. For Herder, language is not only the expression of the soul; it possesses a soul or—as he also says—a “spirit,”16 that is, he sees language as an active spiritual power that shapes reality, indeed, constitutes reality. We meet anew a reified manifestation of the Holy Spirit, for apparently behind Herder’s conception of the spirit of language is the notion of the word as the divine creative logos. But the symbolic understanding of God’s spirit that reveals itself in the flesh as the word has given way to the reified concept of “spirit” as an independent being that operates in language and through language.17 The reified concept of

15. Hamann’s Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, 8 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1821), 2:121. 16. Carl Hermann Gildemeister, Johann Georg Hamann’s, des Magus in Norden, Leben und Schriften (Gotha: Perthes, 1863), 4:158 (see also Hamann’s Schriften, 1:449, 2:122– 23, 1:449); Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), 17:287. 17. This concept, which must be seen in the context of the process of reification of the spirit described above, spread toward the end of the eighteenth century up to Novalis’s 138 The Apocalypse in Germany the “spirit of language” enabled Herder, like Hegel, to divide the “spirit of language” into partial realizations; following Hamann’s concept that the soul of a people is expressed in its language, he concluded that each language embodies a particular spirit that corresponds to the spirit of the respective people.18 Because the soul of language corresponds to national soul, and the “spirit of language” corresponds to “national spirit,” and because Herder ascribes an active power to the “spirit of language,” he can conceive of it as the motor of Bildung: “Since as language is the organ of the powers of our souls, the means of our innermost Bildung, we cannot be well educated except in the language of our people and country.” Thus Herder classifies individual Bildung in the context of the nation, which is understood as a community that is constituted through the particular spirit of its common language and only then shaped into a nation: “By means of language a nation is educated and formed (gebildet).” Herder does not give up the universal perspective of Bildung, but universal unity can, from his point of view, be achieved only by way of Bildung within individual nations; only by the joining of the various national individualities is the unity of mankind possible. Herder claims no particular role for the German people for the realization of this goal; again, he sees the “spirit of God” as the “uniter of the peoples,” and he holds the view that “no people are a people alone chosen by God.”19 Rather, all peoples in common, each in its place and following its own right, work for the Bildung of mankind. This view, which was also shared by other contemporaries such as Schleiermacher and even Jahn,20 is not reconciled with speculation about “spirits of language” and “national spirits,” because the inner logic of the latter suggests other conclusions. For when the quality of language as a general characteristic of human nature withdraws to the background and speculation on the magic of the word; see Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland, 94. 18. Until the end of the eighteenth century, Volksgeist meant nothing more than the “dominant mode of thought of a people,” where Volk is understood to mean “the great mass of the population in contrast to the upper class.” See the entry Volksgeist in Joachim Heinrich Campe, Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung, 1807–1811); see also the entries “Volksgeist,” “Volk,” and “Geist,” in Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch. Schiller remarked in 1784: “The national spirit of a people is what I call the similarity and agreement of one’s opinions and inclinations in matters where another nation has different perceptions and opinions” (Sämtliche Werke, 5:830). Only with the connection of the “spirit of language” (Sprachgeist) with “national spirit” (Volksgeist) could national spirit become an entity that—as in Hegel—was able to play an active, independent role in history. 19. Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, 18:157–58, 17:287, 20:32–34, 17:212. 20. See Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland, 210–17. From Holy Spirit to National Spirit 139 in its place the differences among certain languages are stressed, and when the “national spirit” is inferred from the “spirit of language,” the discovery that a particular language is richer and subtler than another may lead to the conclusion that the respective “national spirits” have varying ranks. When the “spirit of God” is reified to the “spirit of language” and is divided into individual “national spirits,” the basis for unity is lost. “National spirits” then come into open competition, and each individual spirit can claim to be the best and the representative of the “absolute spirit,” whereby the other “national spirits” are made inferior or are even forced into the position of being “counterspirit.” Minor differences become significant, while the diversity that previously composed the unity breaks out into a struggle between irreconcilable opposites. Herder, to be sure, had not yet come to these conclusions, but Fichte had. In his Reden an die deutsche Nation he distinguished between original, pure, and therefore living languages like German, and others, such as the Romance languages, which he viewed as the result of adulterations and therefore as abstract and lifeless. Accordingly, he also viewed the Romance peoples as mongrelized, while the German people were an “aboriginal people, the people as such.” To be an aboriginal people and to possess an original language is therefore meaningful (Bildung again comes into play here), because among such a people “life” and “spiritual Bildung” are not separated from each other, but form a unity and produce in this manner the spiritual as well as social unity of the people. With this argument Fichte not only made claims for the superiority of the German people but also gave reasons for its mission in history and for mankind. In the wars against Napoleon in 1805 and 1806, according to Fichte, “it was not completely clear what we were fighting for”; except for the decision not to yield to force, “we were incited by a higher spirit never fully revealed to us.” But now, through Fichte, through his “prophetic vision,” “this spirit is revealed,” and Fichte can appeal to the Germans that “you appoint this spirit to the world dominion for which it was intended.”21 Fichte’s “prophetic vision” was apocalyptic; the apocalyptic interpretation of the historical situation first created, as I have shown,22 the unbridgeable gap between the spirit, which the Germans represent, and “raw physical force.” It was this interpretation that burdened the mission of the Germans with the “hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depths of its evils,” and gave the war the character of a “final judgment.”23

21. Fichte, Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden, 5:430, 470, 438; see also 387–89, 448, 607, 390. 22. See pp. 79–80 in this book. 23. Fichte, Ausgewählte Werke, 5:607, 609–10. 140 The Apocalypse in Germany

The spirit of the apocalypse found its form in the German “national spirit,” which thereby assumed its role as protagonist of the German mission and gave German nationalism its particular momentum. It is Arndt again in whom all the developments that have been mentioned combine most clearly: he soaked up the new ideas of his age like a sponge. He was acquainted with Schelling and Hegel, he took over the idea of history as the continuous revelation of God or of “spirit,” and he saw the “world-spirit” emerge in certain epochs as the “spirit of the age”; he also saw the “world-spirit” become politically manifest: “Where the creative and formative spirit hovered above, dominion flowed there.”24 He inclined to Hamann and Herder, whom he often mentions in his works,25 but he was particularly familiar with Fichte, whom he had heard in Jena in 1794 and whom he met again in Berlin in 1813. He shared his conclusion from the connection of the “spirit of language” and “national spirit,” that is, that the Germans possessed an unadulterated language and were, therefore, a pure, superior, aboriginal people: “As we are a pure and unmixed aboriginal people, so we have maintained our language pure and undefiled.”26 Finally, he made use of the symbolic language of the apocalypse, and he knew the current apocalyptic interpretations of the events of the time. But only Arndt’s independent, apocalyptic interpretation of experience in the years after 1806 connected these influences, images, and interpretive and linguistic models; made them usable for his specific interpretive concept; and tied them into a “knot” of apocalyptic nationalism. This knot was held together by the “national spirit,”27 which, as in Fichte’s writings as well, became the “form” in which the national mission of the Germans for human history was embodied. Since only through action in the political sphere can “national spirit” attain the form that will also be outwardly manifest, Arndt appeals to the Germans: “You must give the spirit a body.”28

24. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Geist der Zeit, vol. 3 in Werke, selection in 12 parts, ed. August Leffson and Wilhelm Steffens (Berlin: Bong, 1912), 8:106. On the inﬂuence of Schelling and Hegel, see Rudolf Krügel, Der Begriff des Volksgeistes in Ernst Moritz Arndts Geschichtanschauung (Langensalza: Beyer, 1914), 27–30, 49. Arndt also prophesied a third epoch of Christianity, in Geist der Zeit, vol. 2, in Sämtliche Werke, vols. 9 and 10; 2:197, 213. 25. Krügel, Der Begriff des Volksgeistes in Ernst Moritz Arndts Gechichtsanschauung, 11; Werner Kohlschmidt, “Luthers Sprachgeist und Sprachform bei E. M. Arndt,” in Luther- Jahrbuch 19 (1937): 116. 26. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Blick aus der Zeit auf die Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Eichenberg, 1814), 170. 27. This term does not appear in Arndt’s writings, although other words that mean the same thing do; see pp. 128–29 in this book; see also Krügel, Der Begriff des Volksgeistes in Ernst Moritz Arndts Geschichtsanschauung, 35. 28. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Hoffnungsrede vom Jahre 1810, newly edited by Erich Gülzow (Weimar: Böhlau, 1939), 55. From Holy Spirit to National Spirit 141

In the writings of Fichte and Arndt, what is novel in the apocalyptic interpretation of history—which also appears as “nationalism”—comes most clearly to the fore. With their apocalyptically tinged doctrine, they were the outstanding spiritual fathers of German nationalism. In what follows, I shall examine why the apocalyptic “national spirit” also achieved success in society and what political and social role it actually played. 10 Protest and Futility

Apocalyptic visions result from interpretations of experience in a particular historical situation. The political and religious oppression of a minority appears to be a feature of such situations. In the Middle Ages there were also apocalyptic interpretations of history that served the ruling powers, but the apocalypse originally arose in situations of persecution and oppression, and the apocalyptic outbreaks in the late-medieval heretical movements also show that such situations are ideal breeding grounds for apocalyptic interpretations. The fundamentally negative attitude of the apocalypse toward the world as it is, combined with social and political protest, makes the apocalypse a symbolism of resistance, if not of revolt. The apocalyptic interpretation of the Napoleonic era, too, arose in circumstances of persecution and oppression. The Germans, at least the nationally minded ones, saw themselves as a persecuted minority. Was, then, national spirit—inimical, according to the apocalyptic interpretive model, to the oppressor Napoleon—a revolutionary spirit that would fundamentally transform the structure of reality as well as the political and societal order? Or would it just restore the power of the defeated German Empire? Asked in a different way: what role did national spirit play in society? Although apocalyptic interpretations were generally occasioned by persecution and oppression, such conditions do not provide the complete explanation. In order to be able to interpret the situation in such a way that it appears as a clash between two irreconcilable, universal powers, that the world appears to be in the grasp of the powers of evil, that history appears to have reached a low point of deficiency, and that the destruction of the evil will shortly bring about redemption—in short, to be able to interpret the situation in a specifically apocalyptic manner—a particular understanding of history is required, and understanding of the powers that are active in it, and of its meaning and goal. It further requires a particular attitude of expectation that is fed by such understandings. In brief: the interpretation of a particular historical situation as apocalyptic 142 Protest and Futility 143 presupposes a specific social field of consciousness. This social field of consciousness not only provides the constituent and structural elements for that apocalyptic interpretation, that is, the goal-directedness of the view of history, but also provides the predisposition of consciousness—for interpreting experience according to the schema of promise-fulfillment. On the other hand, the apocalyptic interpretation shatters the previous social field of consciousness: the apocalypse is, for example, a reaction to the experience that fulfillment of a promise appears less and less probable under existing conditions; thus it constitutes a new social field of consciousness. I have attempted to show how in Israel the field of symbolic interpretations of experiences emerged in which the apocalypse, under specific historical conditions, was ultimately formed. In order to explain the rise of apocalyptic nationalism in Germany, I have made a similar attempt that must, of course, be carried further. The protagonist of German nationalism, national spirit (Volksgeist) gained its apocalyptic momentum through a specific interpretation of the situation of political oppression. But that the apocalyptic interpretation of experience could take on—in the national spirit—a form with very particular characteristics again required a specific social field of consciousness. Social fields of consciousness originate in such a way that groups of men or whole societies accept symbolic interpretations of meaning and social order devised by individuals as their own and make them the basis of their actions.1 In the last two chapters I have outlined the elements of consciousness and symbols that made up such a field—spirit (Geist) as the operative power in history; Bildung as individual and human self- realization; the spirit of language (Sprachgeist) as an indicator of national spirit (Volksgeist); and national spirit as the producer of national unity, proof of national particularity, and representative of the “world-spirit” (Weltgeist)—and I have described how the apocalypse developed from this field as a new interpretation of meaning. In order that this field and, with it, apocalyptic nationalism could become the social field of consciousness, it had to be received by more men than those who had a part in the development of its contents and symbols. The reasons for its “success” in society are doubtless to be found in the fact that the elements and symbols of consciousness were suited to explain the experiences of other men plausibly and to answer their questions about meaning. However, the experiences of a great number of persons, who did not produce, but merely accepted, “interpretations of meaning,” we can conclude only from the historical context of the experience and from the very fact that these persons did accept these interpretations of meaning as their own. The 1. See p. 56 in this book. 144 The Apocalypse in Germany question of a societal role of interpretations of meaning, which is also a question for social motives and functions, must take this context into consideration. And the special question—whether the apocalyptic protagonist of nationalism, national spirit, was a spirit of revolt and, if so, what sort of revolt it spawned—must take into consideration the development of the social field from which the apocalyptic national spirit arose. For social fields of consciousness are processes that, with their context of experiences, are subject to change. Let us first of all cast a glance back in order to evaluate the societal significance of national spirit and thereafter to be able to follow its further history. During the Middle Ages it appears certain that the apocalyptic conception of the transformation of the old, corrupt world to a millennial reign of perfection found fertile soil because societal upheavals, wars, epidemics, and famines had created the social potential for protest.2 However, it is not merely the lowest levels of society, the have-nots and outcasts, who expressed their needs and longings in apocalyptic visions, but also peasants who were being deprived of their rights as well as the rising middle class who were being hindered in their progress, and who linked the visions with their own social wishful thinking. As a rule, the visions were produced not by members of the lower strata, but by scholars, clerics, members of the middle class, and sometimes even nobles. We have already noted that, at least for sophisticated interpretations of history, “wisdom” is requisite. A similar picture presents itself to us during the period of the Reforma- tion: not only was it the completely deprived and the peasants exploited by the feudal nobility and the Church who adopted apocalyptic prophecies about the new kingdom of the free, equal, and just; but it was craftsmen and merchants as well who suffered under feudal rule and pressed for political participation, plus the priests and monks who were dissatisfied with the feudal structures of the Church, who were inclined to such visions. Again, the prophets and social leaders came predominantly from middle-class and learned circles. Recent studies have shown that, for example, Thomas Münzer, who originally had a benefice in Braunschweig, came from the middle class that had achieved affluence and pressed for political emancipation. Later, too, during his prophetic period, he stood in friendly contact with merchants, goldsmiths, and patricians.3 The contingent of fighters for

2. Cohn, Pursuit; Töpfer, Das kommende Reich des Friedens; Lothar Baier, Die große Ketzerei: Verfolgung und Ausrottung der Katharer durch Kirche und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1984). 3. The church historian Ulrich Bubenheimer discovered pertinent documents in the private archives of Braunschweig, Nuremberg, and other cities in which Münzer stayed on his flight between Prague and Basel; see Wolfgang Sannwald, “Schwärmer als Funktionär: Protest and Futility 145 the millennial kingdom, with which Münzer went to the Peasant War from Mühlhausen, consisted of merchants and craftsmen. Luther came from the same middle-class background as Münzer. His example, as well as that of some middle-class sympathizers of Münzer, shows that there is ultimately a moment of existential decision that cannot be explained on the basis of social history: the decision whether the apocalyptic interpretation of meaning is actually and consistently made the real impulse for action, that is, with the intention of actively bringing about the millennial kingdom and not just eliminating the one or the other ill. The tension between social preconditions and existential decisions, which can be explained only individually, can be grasped even better in the case of the Münster Anabaptists. Here, too, most leaders were of middle-class origin: the originally Lutheran preacher Rothmann, the most active propagandist of Baptist doctrine; the first prophet Jan Matthys, master baker from Harlem; and the Münster cloth dealer and patrician Knipperdolling, later governor of the second prophet Jan Bockelson, who declared himself Johann of Leiden, king of the New Jerusalem. This last individual, who led the apocalyptic eruption in Münster to an extreme, was an enigmatic figure who, in the view of Reck-Malleczewen, bore “the blurry and spoiled features of the bastard born in a roadside ditch, the saloon- and brothel-keeper,”4 but on the other hand had learned the trade of tailoring, had traveled much, and had tried his hand at writing. The adherents of the Anabaptists did not belong to the lower strata of society, either. First, a part of the Protestant middle class that had revolted against the bishop during the Peasant War and who was thoroughly opposed to his regime was won over. Only in a second wave, when the Anabaptists securely held power in the city and engaged in ever more radical politics, did more and more dispossessed, impoverished peasants or escaped soldiers and other marginal persons from other areas stream into Münster. At the same time a part of the established citizenry left the city, another part remained.5 The question of why the one adopted the apocalyptic redemptive vision,

Quellenfunde zur Geschichte Thomas Müntzers,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 20, 1986. 4. Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Bockelson: Geschichte eines Massenwahns (Wiesentheid: Droemer, 1946), 11. 5. On the social structure of the Münster Anabaptists, see Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff, Die Täufer in Münster 1534/35: Untersuchungen zum Umfang und zur Sozialstruktur der Bewegung (Münster: Aschendorff, 1973), 80–89; and Otthein Rammstedt, Sekte und soziale Bewegung: Soziologische Analyse der Täufer in Münster (1534/35) (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966), 101–14; see also Das Täuferreich zu Münster, 1534–35: Berichte und Dokumente, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974); on the connection between social structure, psychological motives, and symbolic traditions, Hedda J. Herwig’s 146 The Apocalypse in Germany while the other did not, must ultimately be treated in each individual case, and this is not possible. But when one considers the movement as a whole, it can be said that the precondition of social success is the protest potential of a social class that does not consist primarily of those completely deprived of their rights, the dispossessed and despairing, but of persons who are motivated by a “strong discrepancy between social status (or ‘rank’) and claim to recognition or power,”6 that is, overwhelmingly of members of the middle class. The adherents shared the previously mentioned motivations with the leaders, and, because the discrepancy between social status and claim to recognition can be perceived with varying strength, a general explanation can also be found for the differing preparedness for revolt within the class. Since the Reformation, apocalyptic currents have been found mainly among the Protestant middle class. This has religious and social causes. Al- though Protestant orthodoxy rejected apocalyptic speculations just as the Catholic Church had, Reformation doctrine strengthened the motivation for apocalyptic interpretations since it reduced the certainty of achieving redemption by making this dependent on faith and grace alone. Thereby the tension between deficiency and fulfillment was increased and people were stimulated to find solutions according to the apocalyptic model, in order to eliminate the tension that is so difficult to bear. Further, the Reformation doctrine placed the believer in a direct relationship with God; the Bible, which everyone could interpret for himself, took the place of the Church as a mediator that provided institutional security. The gate was thereby opened for individual inspiration and speculation. Finally, Protestantism was from the beginning connected with a middle- class desire for reform that also focused on change in political and social conditions. The desire for reform was, however, forced to the fringes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which not only had consequences for the possibility of emancipation of the middle class, but also sparked subsequent apocalyptic speculations. Both economically and socially, the middle class in Germany had been decisively weakened by the Thirty Years’ War, and the absolutist rulers took advantage of this weakness for more oppression. Under the pressure of absolutism the free Protestant congregation, which Luther had considered an ideal form of organization for the Reformation church, changed into a church of pastors and authorities that became an additional— and important—instrument of rule in the service of absolutist princes.

“Das Münsterische Täufertum: Prototypische Charakteristika und Ursachen einer politischen Erlösungsbewegung, dargestellt am historischen Beispiel,” is particularly enlighten- ing. 6. Herwig, “Das Munsterische¨ Taufertum,”¨ 182. Protest and Futility 147

Pietism can be viewed as a new phenomenon of resistance: in the religious protest against the authoritarian Church also lay the social opposition of an oppressed and newly rising middle class of craftsmen, merchants, and scholars that generally supported Pietism.7 If Pietism represented a general potential for protest, the apocalyptic interpretations of meaning that arose in this milieu were a specific symbolic expression of experiences of deficiency and social protest. When Ben- gel and Oetinger describe the societal order in the millennial kingdom, thereby holding a mirror to the current conditions, their antiabsolutist opposition is apparent. Oetinger even formulated his ideas concerning the “Golden Age” in the form of political maxims: “Three conditions are necessary for real happiness in a kingdom—first, that the subjects, for all their diversity that belongs to order, for all their differences of rank, have a similarity, as we have heard above in the distribution of the land Israel, where the similarity of the piece of land reminds them all that no one should think himself better than another. Everyone should find his happiness in the happiness of others, his joy in the joy of others; everyone should be a Lord next to the others, Micah 4:4; second, that they have a community of property, and should not gloat because of this property; . . . third, that they should demand nothing from each other as a duty. For if everything were there in abundance, it would require no dominion, property, no courtesy compelled through force.”8 These maxims basically repeat the program of Thomas Münzer “that Christians should all be equal,” and the proclamation of the community of property by the Münster Anabaptists. Münzer, to be sure, incited rebellion with the intention “that the princes and lords who did not wish to observe the Gospel should be banished and put to death.” The Anabaptists actually introduced community of property with the threat of a death penalty in case of infringement, while the Pietists left it at formulating their ideas concerning the millennial kingdom. Oetinger only went so far as to threaten—between the lines—the princes with the no longer distant end of history and to suggest that they, “in order to prepare for the final era . . . should view the well being of one’s subjects as one’s own,” and that they should take “reasonable reforms.”

7. See Werner Mahrholz, Deutsche Selbstbekenntnisse (Berlin: Furche, 1919), 140–45; and Max Scheler, “Von zwei deutschen Krankheiten” (1919), in Gesammelte Werke, 6:212. A good illustration for the connection of religious and social resistance in Pietist communities is given by Christa Elisabeth Hertling, “Der Wittgensteiner Pietismus im frühen 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beispiel sozialer Intervention” (Ph.D. diss., Cologne, 1980). 8. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Die güldene Zeit (1759), in Sämmtliche Schriften, sec. 2, 6:29–30. 148 The Apocalypse in Germany

Thus, the social protest of the Pietists kept away from a political revolt. We still find an echo of this quietistic attitude in Jung-Stilling’s exhortation in 1805: “Obey every authority, and when you are commanded to do something that is contrary to your conscience, address a decent and submissive petition and, if that does not help, emigrate. The Lord will be with you, and if you cannot, endure everything—God will give you strength, but in no case rebel!”9 Nonetheless, the potential protest asked for expression, even when it refrained from political actions, and found this expression in the apocalyptic visions of the speedy end of the current world order and in the establishment of a better one. The role of “comforting and strengthening” fulfilled the needs of many and promoted the acceptance of apocalyptic interpretations of meaning. In his adaptation of Bengel’s apocalyptic speculation, Jung-Stilling names not only a book that presented Bengel’s prophecies to a wider public, but also a “mass of writings concerning the apocalypse,” following Bengel. Lavater, who also followed Bengel, repeatedly alludes to speculations concerning the millennial kingdom that were current in his time.10 Bengel and Oetinger were widely influential beyond Württemberg and Pietism in the narrower sense. Apocalyptic interpretations of meaning had found a social field again. Prophecies of the millennial kingdom of perfection, still believed in a fundamentalist way, were not the only factor that determined the social field of consciousness from which apocalyptic nationalism arose. An equally important factor, as we have seen, was the ideal of Bildung. It, too, was a middle-class and predominantly Protestant phenomenon. Its success in society was also connected with the motivation of the middle class that had been politically and socially oppressed and was struggling for more influence. The ideal of Bildung as it developed in the decades around 1800 received substantial impulses from the tradition of Protestant spirituality and especially of Pietism: Bildung was originally the symbol for the approach to God until mystical unification with God through which— 9. Protocol of the trial of Thomas Münzer before his execution cited after Sannwald, “Schwärmer als Funktionär,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 20, 1986 (on community of goods of the Anabaptists, see van Dülmen, Das Täuferreich zu Münster, 97–98); Oetinger, Die güldene Zeit (“Zusätze für Regenten”), 32–33; Jung-Stilling, Erster Nachtrag zur Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion, 132–33. 10. Jung-Stilling, Die Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion, 409, 6; (Johann Gustav Fein, Einleitung zu näherer und deutlicher Aufklärung der Offenbarung JEsu Christi, oder St. Johannis, nach Chronologie und Geschichte, als Beitrag zum Beweis, daß Bengels Apokalyptisches System das wahre sey [Karlsruhe: Macklot, 1784]), 9; Johann Caspar Lavater, “Aussichten in die Ewigkeit,” in Briefe an Herrn Joh. George Zimmermann, 4th ed. (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fuessli, 1782), 1:192–96. Lavater believed in Rev. 20, in the first Resurrection of the martyrs and the millennial kingdom. He was also acquainted with Bengel’s Gnomon and was positively disposed to it (1:187–90, 2:170). Protest and Futility 149 as in Pietistic experiences of awakening—an existential transformation in the sense of an inner redemption was experienced.11 Bildung may thus be viewed as a symbolic and even ritual form of individual redemption that also stood in opposition to the restrictions of social and political development. Both factors—its stress on inwardness and its oppositional character—were retained, when Bildung detached itself from the goal of unification with God and became the symbol for the aspiration to become “a God of the earth,” as it says in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.12 Bildung now was viewed as a process of autonomous self-realization with the goal of this-worldly perfection, in Friedrich Schlegel’s words: “To become God, to be a human being, sich bilden are expressions that mean the same thing.” According to Humboldt, this was to be understood in such a way that man as an individual should become “free and independent within himself” and gain “perfect unity” through “joining our ego with the world.”13 The social meaning of the ideal of Bildung lay in its providing the middle class, which had been shut out of the “world,” particularly the social and political world, a program of emancipation and of unimpeded identity, that is, of unity with itself and the world. The motivating experiences that this program answered can be grasped particularly well in Herder’s Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769. Again and again, Herder speaks in this diary of the experiences of “exclusion,” of “restrictions,” and of “narrowness,” and he makes it clear how strongly he sensed the incongruity between these experiences of deficiency and his high ambitions. He wishes to bring “everything” into his “power,” and remarks that “for this purpose I am currently travelling.” This Bildungsreise (“educational trip”) was the means to make the world his own. But in reality it was a tour in the mind; for several months Herder sat around in Nantes without any particular contacts and was primarily concerned with reading and writing in his journal. Thereafter only a short stay in Paris followed. The wide world is not so easy to conquer. He would have liked to “turn away from the spirit of writing and become accustomed to the spirit of action,” and he dreamed of becoming a politician and lawgiver, but these dreams never became a reality.14

11. The history of this symbol goes back to the mystical tradition. On the rise of the concept of Bildung, particularly the contribution of Pietism, see the literature cited in Chapter 9, n. 10. 12. Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz,14 vols., 6th–12th eds. (Munich: Beck, 1981), 7:71. 13. Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenäum-Fragmente,” in Schriften zur Literatur, ed. Wolf- dietrich Rasch (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972), 54; Humboldt, Theorie der Bildung des Menschen, 1:235–40. 14. Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Katharina Mommsen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976), 7, 11, 28–29, 33, 77, 86–87. 150 The Apocalypse in Germany

That the middle class, which had chosen the ideal of Bildung as its program of emancipation, was shut out from the shaping of the societal and political order was also its own fault. Bildung was concentrated far too much on the sphere of “inwardness.” In Humboldt this self-limitation finds its classic expression; in his eyes, the highest form of Bildung was the “inner Bildung” that effects an “inner improvement and ennobling,” which should lead to perfecting “the inner nature of man” and lead to “inner freedom.” He viewed participation in political life not only as secondary, but even as a hindrance to individual self-realization: man was not to be sacrificed to citizen.15 The leap from individual self-realization to the formation of mankind was a bit too direct—pragmatic goals of political emancipation were leaped over. Still, the demand for influence, even the demand for power, remained, but these claims were moved to the highest level and were articulated in interpretations of meaning in which the ideal of Bildung was joined with speculations about the self-realization of the spirit in world history. The potential for protest expressed itself in a “revolution of the spirit,”16 whose symbolism betrayed its origin from apocalyptic expectations of the millennial kingdom: “The revolutionary desire to realize the kingdom of God, is the starting point of progressive Bildung, and is the beginning of modern history.”17 Even if the vision of the rule of the spirit could provide symbolic meaning, at least to the educated, there still remained a gap between establishing a universal meaning and self-realization in the sphere of inwardness that was filled with very concrete and frightening experiences of deficiency. For not only were the political conditions oppressive, but society itself was also experiencing changes in the decades around 1800 that aroused feelings of insecurity. The old world was disappearing—“house and status, the traditional bonds, particular (local, corporate) groups, personal networks, community, and the visible presence of norms and meaning in the traditions.” The process of individualization, borne and advanced by the middle class, particularly by the educated, also had negative aspects. Security was lost; the individual ran the risk of being isolated and exposed to a world that had become alien. This stimulated the motivation to seek

15. Humboldt, Werke, 1:238, 235, 60, 237 (emphasis mine). On the retreat of Bildung into inwardness, see also Hans Weil, Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsprinzips, 2d ed. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1967), 52–59, 106. 16. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Briefwechsel, ed. H. Schulz (Leipzig: Haessel, 1930), 1:139. On this complex in general, see Jürgen Gebhardt, ed., Die Revolution des Geistes: Politisches Denken in Deutschland, 1770–1830; on Fichte in particular, 69–73. 17. Schlegel, “Athenäum-Fragmente,” 48. Protest and Futility 151 new forms of community. The cult of individualized friendship, as practiced by Klopstock, the Göttingen Hainbund, or the circle of friends around Goethe and Herder in Straßburg, was insufficient.18 Needs were directed to a community and especially to a symbolism constituting community, which made possible identification beyond a single individual or small groups and focused on unity. Spirit, reified in the spirit of language or national spirit, provided the basis for that and thereby allotted to Bildung the sphere of activity of a great community in the field between individual and humanity: the nation. Thus the social field of consciousness was prepared, in which national spirit could develop apocalyptic dynamics under the influence of Napoleonic rule. For in apocalyptic action a body could be given to spirit, as Arndt had demanded; in solidarity against Napoleon the symbolism became concrete, and the new community could be experienced as “salvation” from isolation: “When a great throng of people moves before me, when a crowd of warriors with banners flying and bugles and drums sounding passes by me, then I sense that my thoughts and actions are not empty illusions, I feel imperishable life, eternal spirit, and the everlasting God. . . . I am selfish and sinful just like other men, but in these lofty human feelings I am immediately freed from all sins, I am no more a single pitiable human, but am in the people and in God.”19 Was the national spirit of the Germans revolutionary? To the extent that its goal was the transformation of the world, national spirit had an unquestionably revolutionary component. But how was this concretely expressed in society and politics? First of all, we must not forget that an antiabsolutist and antiaristocratic opposition was still present. Arndt sharply and repeatedly criticized the lack of character and “cowardice of the princes” who had lost the German Empire to Napoleon and now fawned upon him. He understood the “nation” (Volk) to be primarily the “ordinary” people (die Gemeinen), the middle class and peasants, whom he viewed as the vital and dynamic part of society that represents “what lives and moves.” He did have a leadership role in mind for the educated class, as is clear when he remarked, about writers, that they are “also princes of the people.” Fichte expressed in a somewhat similar fashion his support of the middle class and opposition to the nobility. He asserted “that until now all human progress in the German nation has come from the people,” and by “people” he meant “citizens of the independent cities.” The virtues

18. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866, 301; see also 302. 19. Arndt, Geist der Zeit, vol. 3, in Sämtliche Werke, vols. 9 and 10, 3:267. 152 The Apocalypse in Germany of “loyalty and trustworthiness” were less common in the “upper classes,” that is, among the nobility, and had taken refuge in the “houses of the middle class” and the “cottages of the country people.” He, too, claimed a leading role for the representatives of “spirit.” He directed his Reden an die deutsche Nation “particularly” to the “educated classes of Germany,” and he challenged them “most of all to be the originators of this new creation”: the nation.20 Still, the claim to leadership for the representatives of “spirit” and the invectives against the nobility remained hypothetical. This was because the national consciousness of the Germans was dominated by an apocalyptic national spirit: in the dualistic, universal, and eschatological scenario of apocalyptic interpretation, the power of resistance was directed outward and absorbed in visions of human salvation. The nationalist enthusiasm of Fichte, Arndt, and the other poets and writers of the Wars of Liberation, Körner, Schenkendorf, Brentano, or Christian Stolberg, used up all of its political force in the struggle against Napoleon. When they spoke of freedom, they meant freedom from French domination. The political unification of Germany was seen primarily as a guarantee of future independence. There were no specific ideas about the constitution and political organization of the new nation,21 and no ideas at all that even approximated the “ideas of 1789.” The small number of those Germans who did support these ideas were curbed by the pressure of the old powers and of public opinion after the defeat of Napoleon. Ultimately, it was the standing armies of the established powers that achieved victory over the “power of the evil one.” “Lützow’s wild and bold hunt” and other irregular corps, manned primarily by students, played no role. Freedom and political self-determination were finished off. According to the middle-class view of Bildung, unity and freedom were goals of “inner” self-realization and human perfection. In Germany, the apocalyptic national spirit took the place of the fundamental political rights 20. Ibid., 2:1, 20 (see also 132–35, 207–12), 3:258; Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, in Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden, 5:389, 466–67, 504, 606. On the rise of “popular” (völkisch) thought, see Klaus von See, Die Ideen von 1789 und die Ideen von 1914: Völkisches Denken in Deutschland zwischen Französischer Revolution und Erstem Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaion, 1975). 21. Most of the philosophers and writers imagined Germany’s unification as a restoration of the Reich, be it again under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty, as Schenkendorf hoped, or under Prussian leadership, as Arndt would have preferred. The old problem of the tension between the constitution of the Reich and the territorial states lacked attention. With respect to the interior political constitution, there were, at most, concepts of an order of the estates of the realm; Schenckendorf even wanted to revitalize the medieval feudal society, while Arndt advocated a more moderate and modern model, but based also on an order of the estates. Protest and Futility 153 found in other Western nations; the national spirit was to bring about “a transformation of the human race”22 and achieve universal salvation in a single stroke:

In Germany shall bloom Salvation for the whole world.23

Such visions obstructed the view for the goals of practical politics.

22. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, 568. 23. Max von Schenkendorf, Gedichte (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1815), 6. 11 “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power”: The Apocalypse of 1914

The Congress of Vienna and the consequent restoration in Germany not only spelled an end to the “ideas of 1789” but also disappointed the hopes that had been placed in “national spirit” (Volksgeist). The nation had not been unified, nor had there been a “new birth of the ages,” about which Arndt and Fichte had prophesied.1 Things were scarcely better for the adherents of “national spirit” than they had been for the German Jacobins. The Karlsbad Resolutions of 1819 led to the imprisonment of Jahn; pro- ceedings were initiated against Arndt and Schleiermacher, and Arndt was dismissed from his professorship in Bonn. Even the nationalistic “Volks- geist” was suspected of revolutionary activities by the entrenched powers, although it never threatened them with republican or democratic ideas. As a consequence, the apocalyptic fire almost completely went out for a long period of time. Still, “national spirit” remained in the minds of intellectuals. It grew in importance in the course of the nineteenth century in proportion to the increasing frustration in the middle class’s drive for political emancipation. Nevertheless, the apocalyptic power of nationalism still made itself felt occasionally. During the Rhine Crisis of 1840, the Schleswig-Holstein Crisis of 1848, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, many authors embellished their patriotic poems with apocalyptic images, but in comparison with the poetry of the Wars of Liberation these were only faint echoes. But in 1914 “national spirit” reappeared in full flower in its apocalyptic form. The basis of the view, according to which German “national spirit” again assumed the role of protagonist in an apocalyptic “Final Judgment,” was a conception of history fully in the tradition of Coccejus, Bengel, and Hegel, who believed that history itself has the character of revelation or may be explained as the process of the realization of “spirit.” Pastor Otto Dibelius, for example, argued within the framework of a “history of salvation” when 1. See pp. 79–80 in this book.

154 “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power” 155 he characterized world history as the “revelation of the living God.” As a consequence, he could view the war as a “salvation event.” This same basic conception led the canonist Wilhelm Kahl to characterize the war as a new “Pentecost,” that is, a new manifestation of “spirit.” With his view that German “national spirit” was the bearer of revelation and therefore the agent of salvation, the theologian Friedrich Gogarten was even closer to Hegel: “The German people and German ‘spirit’ are, in our most sublime conceptions, the revelation of eternity.” The philosopher Hermann Cohen argued in a thoroughly Hegelian fashion about the role of “spirit” in the war in his work Über das Eigentümliche des deutschen Geistes (“On the Uniqueness of German Spirit”): “With our actions we must be leading if political leadership is to be due to the spirit and to a universal spiritual quality in the ethical sense of world history.” Even an economist and social scientist such as Johann Plenge saw the war primarily as a “crusade in the service of world-spirit (Weltgeist)” whose final stage of development— familiar to every Hegelian—is represented by German “national spirit” and must be “executed” (vollstreckt) on other peoples: the German crusade redounds “to the world’s benefit.” Further, Pastor Karl König combined theology, dealing with the “history of salvation,” and Hegelian historical thought by defining the revelation of spirit in history as the “divine history of spirit,” identifying this with the “human history of spirit,” and seeing its fulfillment in German spirit. From this conclusion it followed logically that Germany must and would win the war—since it was interpreted apocalyptically—“quite simply because it is necessary for the human and divine history of spirit in the world.”2 The success of “national spirit” in the history of German national consciousness resulted at least partly from a paucity of other symbols. In the United States and France, national self-understanding was kindled through events in which the will to political freedom and national self- determination was clearly expressed, and which could take on a symbolic quality for the nation’s self-definition. In America these events include the shots fired against the English at Lexington and Concord—“the shots heard round the world”3—in France it was the Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille. In Germany there were no events in which the

2. Otto Dibelius, Gott und die deutsche Zuversicht: Drei Reden in dunkler Zeit (Berlin: Vaterländische Verlags und Kunstanstalt, 1918), 5–7; Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:179; Friedrich Gogarten, “Volk und Schöpfung,” Protestantenblatt 48 (1915): 45; Hermann Cohen: Über das Eigentümliche des deutschen Geistes (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1915), 45; Johann Plenge, Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft (Münster: Borgmeyer, 1915), 200; Karl König, Sechs Kriegspredigten, 6. 3. The text of the memorial plaque in Concord, Massachusetts. 156 The Apocalypse in Germany will to national political self-determination could have been expressed in a comparable manner and could have taken on corresponding significance. We cannot help concluding that “national spirit” in the German Reich in 1871 lost its final component of resistance against political oppression, that it made its peace with the princes after they had brought about the desired national unity, and that it developed its renewed apocalyptic dynamism exclusively in the service of the Reich. In 1813 there was as yet no Germany with which “national spirit” could have been identified; it could take shape only through the apocalyptic action of the people, and Fichte, Arndt, Schleiermacher, and Jahn understood by “people” (Volk) primarily the middle class and peasants, led by the educated. In 1914, however, the educated had God placing the sword of judgment into the hand of the kaiser in order that he might carry out the apocalyptic final judgment against Germany’s enemies.4 This meant that the educated class supported the imperialistic goals of the political, military, and economic leaders of the Reich, that they were “in league” with them (as Fritz Fischer expressed it), that they gave to the objectives of the war a “divine sanction” (sakrale Überhöhung)5 and to that extent responded affirmatively to the then current power structure and societal order. Still, the situation is more complicated than it would appear at first glance. We can see this clearly when we again regard the apocalyptic interpretations of the First World War as interpretations of experience that were to determine the meaning of the war. Only when we connect the interpretations of meaning with motivating experiences can we understand the societal role that “national spirit” actually played in the First World War, and the political and societal significance of the apocalypse of 1914. In other words, we must once again illuminate the social field of consciousness out of which the apocalyptic interpretation of the First World War took shape. As was the case during the Napoleonic period, in 1914 apocalyptic interpretations were produced primarily by members of the educated middle class. Among the most conspicuous representatives of this group were university professors and gymnasium teachers, as the outstanding teachers of the nation; pastors, as the spiritual educators of the people; and well- known writers, as publicly accepted representatives of German culture. Members of these professions possess the capability to have a wide impact on society through the spoken and written word. During the First World War they shaped public opinion with their apocalyptic interpretations.

4. See p. 109 in this book. 5. Ernst von Lynar, ed., Deutsche Kriegsziele, 1914–1918 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1964), 110. “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power” 157

However, the apocalypse of 1914 was such a mass phenomenon that the borders between writers and speakers, readers and listeners blurred—a clear indication that the meaning that the interpretations provided were accepted by many people and satisfied widely felt needs. Among the publications on the war in which apocalyptic interpretations and symbols appeared, war poems achieved the widest circulation: the amount of their production and distribution was astonishing. “The flood of German poetry in the first months of the war,” wrote Carl Busse in 1916 in the introduction to the third edition of the Deutsche Kriegslieder, “surpassed every expectation, came like a storm or spring flood, broke all dams, rose singing and preaching like a gigantic chorus into the darkly threatening heavens. Boundless, a vigorous army of spirit, the legions of iron larks moved in the heavens above the marching regiments, no longer individually important and potent, but overwhelming (like the soldiers marching out below) primarily because of the weight and force of their numbers.” According to Busse, an estimate revealed that “in August 1914 alone one and a half million German war poems were written, on the average 50,000 a day.” The majority of these poems came from unknown writers, “from suddenly inspired dilettantes,” among whom educated members of the middle class figured prominently: gymnasium and university students, teachers, pastors, or educated housewives. Still, the “actual lyricists, the born poets of the nation,” dominated the scene.6 It was particularly the poems of Richard Dehmel, Cäsar Flaischlen, Walter Flex, Ludwig Ganghofer, Gerhard and Carl Hauptmann, Rudolf Herzog, Ernst Lissauer, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Ina Seidel, and Eduard Stucken who sounded the apocalyptic tone and were reprinted again and again in countless anthologies that often went into several editions, in daily newspapers, and in magazines.7 The clergy were equally active in their publication activities. During the first two years of the war more than a thousand sermons and other edifying writings were published on the war; some publications went into printings of several hundred thousand.8 The writings of university professors were

6. Carl Busse, ed., Deutsche Kriegslieder 1914/16, 3d ed. (Bielefeld: Velhagen and Klasing, 1916), vi, vii. 7. Among those named, Dehmel, Flex, Ganghofer, Herzog, Lissauer, Schröder, and Seidel published volumes of poetry containing only war poems. The same is true for Max Barthel, Hans Friedrich Blunck, Victor and Clara Blüthgen, Reinhold Braun, Karl Bröger, Otto Crusius, Ilse Franke, Otto König, Heinrich Lersch, Franz Lüdtke, Alfons Petzold, Rudolf Presber, Richard Schaukal, Christian Schmitt, Gustav Schüler, Leo Sternberg, Will Vesper, Maria Weinand, Josef Winckler, Oskar Wöhrle, and Hugo Zuckermann. 8. Heinrich Missalla, “Gott mit uns”: Die deutsche katholische Kriegspredigt, 1914–1918 (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1968), 19–21; see also Wilhelm Pressel, Die Kriegspredigt, 1914– 158 The Apocalypse in Germany not published in quite these numbers, although the war addresses and presentations of well-known personalities such as Eucken, Gierke, Harnack, Roethe, or Wilamowitz-Moellendorff achieved sizable circulation in separate and in collected editions as well as in special “trench editions.” The public activity of professors increased particularly through their public addresses that were not restricted to the academic community. The philosopher Rudolf Eucken, for example, Nobel Prize winner of 1908 and an international celebrity, during the first year of the war gave at least two lectures per week in German cities as well as before soldiers in the field.9 The wide distribution of war and field sermons resulted not merely in publications, but even more in oral presentations that were in all these instances—this applies also to speeches in schools—the primary, if not the sole, mode of circulation. But this flood of poems, lectures, and published sermons declined perceptibly when after 1916 the prospects for a quick victory dimmed and the effects of the war became increasingly more oppressive. The social field of apocalyptic interpretations of the war was held predominantly by the educated middle class and was characterized by extensive publicity. As was the case in the Napoleonic period, a further characteristic was the predominance of Protestants. A comparison of Catholic and Protestant war sermons reveals this most clearly. Though the Catholic clergy’s enthusiasm for the war and for their country was equal to that of the Protestants, their patriotism was primarily to demonstrate (after the now past cultural struggle [Kulturkampf]) Catholic loyalty to a regime dominated by Protestants. They usually did not develop theological speculations on history and apocalyptic interpretations of the war. In 1914 the apocalypse still was predominantly a Protestant phenomenon, and the meaning it was to reveal was thought of as something “Protestant,” too. Pastor König “can see in the deeds of our army nothing but a revelation of true Protestantism, the German form of Christianity.”10 But it was not only theologians and pastors who understood revelation again as apokalypsis, as an unfolding of the imminent Last Judgment. Even the writers and university professors who gave apocalyptic interpretations of the war were, with few exceptions, Protestants. There are several reasons the apocalypse of 1914 had again a predomi-

1918 in der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967); and Karl Hammer, Deutsche Kriegstheologie, 1870–1918 (Munich: Deutscher Tasch- enbuch Verlag, 1974). 9. Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte (Basel: Schwabe, 1963), 185; see also Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 2:ix; Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Neue Kriegsaufsätze (Munich: Bruckmann, 1915) (advertisements). 10. Karl König, Neue Kriegspredigten (Jena: Diederichs, 1914), 21. “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power” 159 nantly Protestant character. The intellectual class to which most authors of apocalyptic interpretations belonged was predominantly Protestant in the Wilhelminian Reich. Their ratio was even higher than the 70 percent representation of Protestants in the population as a whole. The ideal of Bil- dung crucial for the self-understanding of the educated middle class resulted from the philosophy of idealism and the literature of the classical period supported and promoted by Protestants. The Catholics participated in this ideal of Bildung in only a limited way, if they did not reject it altogether. Further, the anti-Catholic undercurrents of the liberalism of the educated middle class, the institutionalized overrepresentation of Protestants in the Reich united under Prussian hegemony—precisely in educational institutions such as the universities—and, finally, the Kulturkampf had increased the wariness of Catholic intellectuals toward the Protestant educated middle class and its ideas. In Catholicism, on the other hand, those upholding regional traditions and European-universalist preferences that were opposed to the authoritarian nation-state of Bismarck found support. Thus, Catholic intellectuals were not inclined to a belief in a national mission. Finally, a living symbol tradition formed part of the background of the apocalyptic explosion of 1914: the ideal of Bildung, the speculations concerning the realization of spirit in history, and the belief in the superiority and special mission of the German nation had been cast at the beginning of the nineteenth century into a set of symbols that had not only been fertile for the apocalyptic interpretation of the Napoleonic age, but also shaped the self-understanding of a substantial part of German intellectuals. These ideas and symbols were popularized primarily through the university, church, and school. Representative figures among the many influential and successful mediators of these ideas include university teachers such as Heinrich von Treitschke, who based his nationalistic and authoritarian concept of history on Hegel and Fichte; theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl, who continued the idea of history as a revelation of God; and schoolmen such as Friedrich Kohlrausch, a passionate adherent of Fichte, who was close to Arndt and Jahn and who contributed significantly to spreading their ideas in the schools of north Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century.11 Fichte and Arndt experienced a rebirth in popularity in Bismarck’s Germany that they had not known for many years. Between 1870 and 1914 Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation was published in at least fifteen new editions, in addition to

11. See Ernst Weymar, Das Selbstverständnis der Deutschen: Ein Bericht über den Geist des Geschichtunterrichts der höheren Schulen im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett, 1961), 19–49. 160 The Apocalypse in Germany reprints in both editions of his collected works and in collections of various sorts; in 1914 the university professors showed a particular predilection to referring to Fichte’s Reden in their own war addresses.12 Between 1895 and 1914 six different editions of the collected or selected works of Arndt appeared, apart from innumerable republications of individual writings; and during the First World War Arndt was again and again cited as an example in speeches and sermons. The availability of such interpretive models still does not explain sufficiently why they gained currency in 1914, nor does it explain the explosive force and the unparalleled circulation of apocalyptic interpretations. Why did the intellectual class cause national spirit to rise again for a new apocalyptic mission a hundred years after its first apocalyptic eruption? The conviction of having a cultural mission and the goals of power politics could have been expressed and legitimated in a different way. In justifying the German desire for the status of a world power one could as easily point to the superiority of German culture and technology as to the necessity of territorial and economic expansion in order to ensure the future well-being of the nation: such arguments were in fact made, despite the apocalyptic interpretations. Even the inclination to “sanctify” political goals through religious language does not inevitably lead to apocalyptic speculations on history. Did the writers, professors, and pastors have additional, particular motives for interpreting the war apocalyptically? As was the case a hundred years before, did their interpretation reveal a meaning that not only consisted in the salvation of the world through German spirit, but also had something to do with the experiences of its proponents, with their specific wishes and interests? In fact, we can determine such a meaning and judge the societal role that the apocalyptic “national spirit” played in 1914 more subtly if we compare the interpretations of the war with the societal situation, with the historical “experiential context” of the educated middle class. Thus, I am suggesting that the explanations of meaning also interpreted experiences that had sought an explanation even before 1914, to which only the war appeared to offer a satisfactory answer. One should not expect that experiences always be expressed directly. In particular, negative experiences often can be determined only indirectly by attributing loud rejoicing about certain events as a positive reaction to previous experiences of deficiency. Such rejoicing arose particularly over the unity of the nation that was apparently restored through the war:

12. The Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, delivered in the fall of 1914 by the professors of the University of Berlin, provides a precise parallel to Fichte’s Reden. “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power” 161

We got together, we are united, With God and Kaiser against the enemy! What had so bitterly divided us is now crushed, We are a single element, One people, my people, formed into a clump.13

The experiences behind this rejoicing were doubtless those of uncertainty and fear that were triggered by the central crisis of Wilhelminian society: the increasing disintegration of society into “two nations” of aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one hand and workers on the other. Carl Busse revealed this particular concern when he noted with some relief in his collection of war songs that the “armies of workers of Germany,” who “unanimously supported their Fatherland in the unforgettable hour, . . . gave up their opposition for the first time and marched stride for stride with the entire nation.”14 From all of this one fact appears to be clear: it was hoped that the war would act as an integrating factor in society, and at the beginning this hope was not disappointed. But wasn’t it merely an expression of the old striving for “unity” that sought for the creation of meaning for the entire society despite the special interests of individual groups? If one sees the hope for integration against the background of the specific situation of the intellectual class, justified doubts may be raised whether the educated middle class was concerned solely with the fate of the entire nation, since the political and social polarization of the prewar period had had a particularly unfavorable impact on the educated middle class.15 The bourgeoisie’s struggle for political emancipation had been repulsed several times in the course of the nineteenth century. The Wars of Libera- tion of 1813 and 1814, on which the bourgeoisie had set so many hopes, did not lead to national unification. The Revolution of 1848, which was supposed to create a united constitutional state, failed. The actions preparatory to the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony between 1862 and 1866 were accompanied by a constitutional conflict in which the liberal

13. A. J. Winckler, “Furor Teutonicus,” in Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, by Eggert Windegg, 36. 14. Busse, Deutsche Kriegslieder 1914/16, xi. 15. For the following, see Klaus Vondung, ed., Das wilhelmische Bildungsbürgertum: Zur Sozialgeschichte seiner Ideen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1976); Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Werner Conze and Jürgen Kocka, eds. Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Teil 1: Bildungssystem und Professionalisierung in internationalen Vergleichen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984); Ul- rich Engelhardt, Bildungsbürgertum. Begriffs- und Dogmengeschichte eines Etiketts (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986); and Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987). 162 The Apocalypse in Germany bourgeoisie of Prussia suffered defeat in their effort to establish parliamentary rule, a setback that was to have serious consequences. In 1871 the German Reich was finally founded over the heads of the bourgeoisie, who still failed to have any effective say in the government. If the political emancipation of the entire bourgeoisie stagnated, the opportunities for influence of its educated classes declined. Toward the end of the century, the originally relatively homogeneous liberalism of the “bourgeoisie of property and education” disintegrated along with the type of “party of notables” in which academics had set the tone in 1848 and in the following decades. The bourgeoisie of industry, trade, and commerce turned to “parties of order” that more and more took on the character of special interest groups. Its economically most influential parts drew closer to the aristocracy, which not only remained the real political power, but actually increased its influence. On the left, the social democrats formed themselves into a party of the masses that replaced liberalism in its role as the most progressive political movement. The intellectual class thus found itself robbed of its political function and of its influence. The social situation of the educated class was no less problematic. With the fall of liberalism the “old middle class” also began to disappear. The increasing industrialization led not only to the secession and rise of an industrial bourgeoisie, but also to the disintegration of the petty bourgeois classes of workers in trade, commerce, and farming who joined the appropriate interest groups and parties according to their respective economic interests, when they had not simply disappeared into the new class of industrial workers. The educated middle class, among whom economic interests did not necessarily dominate or—as in the case of civil servants—could not be pursued in a free market, was left behind. The educated classes also organized themselves in appropriate interest groups, but, in comparison with the commercial associations on the one hand and organizations of workers and employees on the other, they had little impact. It was particularly through pressure from the lower classes of society that they saw themselves increasingly threatened. The educated middle class had no interest in the unilateral elimination of polarization; they had no interest in a socialist revolution, nor could they expect much from a “revolution from above.” For this reason the absorption of the old fragmented society into a new “community” (Gemeinschaft), the reconstitution of an “inner unity of the nation,”16 must have appeared particularly desirable. Just how much professors, clergy, and writers actually felt beset by their own problems can be seen in statements that reflect in

16. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:292 (A. Deißmann), 86 (O. von Gierke). “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power” 163 a direct fashion experiences of deficiency, in particular, references to a psychosocial crisis. Thus, for example, Eucken, looking back at the period before the war, stressed the difficulties, indeed, the dangers, of the “spiritual situation”; Natorp stressed the “impoverishment and destruction of the nobler emotions”;17 writers bemoaned the inner “fragmentation” of men as well as their “alienation” and “enmity” among themselves, and they criticized the “torpor” of the prewar period and the “shallow company” of those days.18 This psychosocial crisis was projected onto the entire society, but in reality it concerned specific problems of speakers for the intellectual class: entrepreneurs as well as industrial workers would not have seen their primary concern in the “noble emotions” nor have suffered under feelings of “listlessness.” Experiences were expressed here that were caused by the societal decline of the old intellectual class. A symptom of this decline was the increasing “underestimation of the age” of the humanities that Theobald Ziegler observed; he also named the reasons public opinion “decidedly” turned “away from the universities, to an extent, against them”: “National life, with its strong emphasis on material interests, commerce, and technology introduced and necessitated other paths and means of education, but the scholars did not wish to and were not able to follow this modern life quickly enough and became increasingly alienated from it. As a result, belief in academia as the only saving educational path was lost.”19 The devaluation of classical education and, consequently, of the universities and gymnasia was connected to the increasing value placed on the natural sciences and technology as well as to an upswing in institutes of technology or engineering and Realschulen. This led to a shift in the hierarchy of social prestige: the old academic educated middle class, which had viewed itself since Fichte’s time as the intellectual leading class of the nation, saw itself surpassed in the meantime not only by captains of industry and labor leaders, but even by engineers and technicians. This loss of prestige was, for its own part, the consequence and expression of a more serious change in social structure. The “other courses of education” became increasingly a vehicle for upward movement in society for members of the lower classes who began to form, along with government and office employees, the “new middle class” of 17. Rudolf Eucken, Deutsche Freiheit (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1919), 10; Paul Natorp, Der Tag der Deutschen (Hagen: O. Rippel, 1915), 24. 18. Reinhard Buchwald, ed., Der Heilige Krieg: Gedichte aus dem Beginn des Kampfes (Jena: Diederichs, 1914), 4 (H. Krailsheimer), 46 (W. Schulz); Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 5 (H. Spiero); Das Volk in Eisen: Kriegsgedichte der Täglichen Rundschau, 10 (I. Seidel). 19. Theobald Ziegler, Die geistigen und sozialen Strömungen Deutschlands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Bondi, 1916), 551, 549. 164 The Apocalypse in Germany

“dependent white-collar workers”20 into which the old educated middle class was threatened to be absorbed. The war was expected to eliminate those manifestations of crisis that directly affected the traditional core of the educated middle class: the loss of prestige and value of humanistic and academic education that industrialization and technology had brought and whose causes were seen in the “materialistic leveling”; the internal and external decline of the Protestant Church manifested in decreasing church attendance; and the appearance of “Germanic” or “Aryan” denominations. But, again, it was possible to view these negative experiences from positive reactions: after the beginning of the war, university professors believed that they could see that the war had restored intellectual values that were threatening to be lost. Theologians and pastors noted with satisfaction that churches were again full, and they observed a new “religious awakening.”21 Even the world of technology, so often blamed for the loss of inner values, appeared to be suffused with the newly awakened piety and to be reconciled with the spiritual world. According to Pastor König, “the storm of war blew equally into the churches and the modern world,” and he hoped that it would “blow the two most deeply hostile brothers, technology and religion, into a great and glorious bond of brotherhood.”22 Let us summarize: The interpretations of the professors, pastors, and writers were all motivated by class-specific experiences of deficiency even when they were presented in such a way as to suggest that they resolved, at the same time or even exclusively, the problems of society as a whole. The experiences of deficiency were caused by political conditions and societal changes that harmed the educated middle class. In this respect we can see a situation very similar to the one that existed a century previously, with the significant difference that the educated middle class found itself on the defensive in the meantime and that the gap between social status and influence had become even wider. The protest that this situation engendered was not expressed politically, but rather in the symbolism of apocalyptic interpretation. This interpretation was provoked by the war, which seemed to transform everything and promised to solve the problems that were not solved in the realm of ordinary politics. Finally, the apocalyptic tradition was still latent, and this facilitated reactivation of the apocalypse as the symbolism for expressing experiences of deficiency and for articulating protest and hope.

20. Theodor Geiger, Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes: Soziographischer Versuch auf statistischer Grundlage (Stuttgart: Enke, 1932), 125. 21. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:154 (A.von Harnack), 294; see 290 (A.Deißmann). 22. König, Neue Kriegspredigten, 38. “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power” 165

On the basis of these results we may pursue the question somewhat further: what societal intentions lay hidden in the apocalyptic interpretations of the war? Spirit, again made the protagonist of apocalyptic events, would not only rescue the world for German Bildung and intellectual culture, not only restore the unity of the nation and thereby free the educated middle class from its difficulties, but also create and rule a new societal order. Progress and accomplishments in the area of material culture were noted by the educated class with a certain pride, but, because they had gotten the better of the intellectual culture of the educated middle class, they were relegated to the lower orders of the hierarchy of goods as mere emanations of spirit. While König applauded the new “bond of brotherhood” between technology and religion, he emphasized that “everything technological and organizational is borne by spirit and is a manifestation of spirit.” The machinery of war, with whose help the apocalyptic turn to a new spiritual order for Germany and the world was to be brought about, was consequently seen, too, as an emanation of spirit. The philosopher Adolf Lasson stressed: “Our army and navy are also a spiritual power.” Further, König stated: “In this army we have an embodiment of our national spirit.”23 It would be a misinterpretation to consider such statements simply as the idealistic effusions of philosophers and theologians who floated in metaphysical clouds above the realities of power and interests and in any event helped to gloss over them. The insistence on the preeminence of spirit articulated the protest of those representatives of spirit who had fallen behind in society. Behind the missionary claims made for spirit both in Germany and in the world were hidden certain class-specific interests: In a renewed society that was dominated by spirit, wouldn’t the representatives of spirit have to assume appropriate societal roles? Was this claim not justified, since, in the final analysis, all of the achievements of civilization were “spirit-borne”? In a war lecture Gierke put together an informative list of those achievements that the German nation had brought about during the past decades: “A constantly growing class of civil servants has successfully transmitted the traditions of conscientious fulfillment of duty and of incorruptible loyalty. German science has claimed its place at the forefront of scientific research throughout the world. Further, German art has moved forward energetically. German technology has achieved unexpected victories over an unruly nature. . . . Our transportation system has exceeded to a greater and greater extent that of our neighbors in quality and safety. German industry has beaten its competitors in the world market.

23. Ibid., 25; Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:142; König, Neue Kriegspredigten, 15. 166 The Apocalypse in Germany

German commerce has spread throughout the world. The German working class has risen . . . to first in the world.”24 With this demonstration of accomplishment, Gierke was not merely trying to outwardly legitimate the German claim to mission. He also conjured up for German society a unity of achievers who did not exist in reality and to the particular disadvantage of the educated middle class because of the extremely differentiated situation and interests of those classes and occupations. This list had the character of an ideal if not of a program. It was led by civil servants and scientists, the social and intellectual exponents of the educated middle class, while other professions and spheres of activities followed in a descending line according to their decreasing share of spirit. The German apocalypse of 1914 was one of the last great attempts of an insecure old intellectual class to express the quintessence of its experiences and hopes in this symbolic form, where the vision of a salvation of the world consistently—even when this was not expressly stated—included the societal reconstitution of the representatives of spirit. The phoenix, in whose form the poet saw German spirit rising “from the flames of this conflagration,”25 was a clear symbol for the desired rebirth. The attempt to shape these hopes into a regular program was undertaken in an almost hopeless situation, in the expectation that the war would somehow turn the page; it was presented with all of the means of influencing public opinion that this group of the intellectual class still possessed. The “revolution of spirit,” which Fichte had proclaimed, again stirred under the surface of the seemingly affirmative behavior; the “rule of spirit,” to which it was to lead, included a wide spectrum of possible perspectives: it went from the universal goal of saving the world “in the service of world-spirit,” past the intention of securing for spirit “political leadership in the ethical sense,”26 past the wish to see the traditional ideals of Bildung in force, to the political claim of “replacing the aristocratic protectors of the throne with academic ones.”27 A claim to political leadership in society followed logically from the intellectual class’s claim to a “spiritual” mission. Still, the visions of the salvation of the world through spirit vanished, and with them the claims of the educated class. The protest that their apoc-

24. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:85. 25. Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 36 (K. Strecker). 26. See p. 155 in this book. 27. Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1911), 10–11 (English trans., Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oli- garchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul [New York: Collier, 1962]). “Our Army and Navy Are Also a Spiritual Power” 167 alyptic interpretation expressed remained futile. Once more it turned out that the apocalypse was not the appropriate symbol to deal with political problems, to establish meaning in society, and to provide orientation for behavior and action in historical reality. The distance from reality of the symbolic interpretations of meaning corresponded to the inadequate interpretations of experience: the causes of the social tensions in Wilhelminian society were sought solely in the difficulties of the “situation of the soul” and in the lack of “agreement of souls” in the society. Other problems were ignored or similarly traced to psychological or spiritual lack, to a lack of “spirit.” As a result, the educated class expected that a psychological or spiritual transformation would solve all problems, which explained their rejoicing over the “revival of the national soul” that appeared to them at the beginning of the war like a “glorious miracle.” It was the “movement of the soul” from which they hoped in the end for a “new life,” indeed, a “divine existence.”28 Political and social problems do not disappear when they are given a new interpretation, and the realities of power and self-interest retain their importance even if the vision of a comprehensive salvation appears to dissolve such realities through spirit. They remain dissolute precisely because spirit tries to leave them out. The resulting vacuum can, in any event, be filled with secondary virtues: where spirit should have established standards for rational political action, it could not be realized in any other way than in a “spirit of loyalty to duty, of conscientiousness, of unqualified devotion, of military discipline, or order”—thus Adolf Lasson. For König, “exactness, punctuality, precision” were the “embodied spirit of German loyalty.”29 Secondary virtues of this sort have an instrumental character; only a rational final goal makes them truly virtues. If this goal is lacking or remains indeterminate, there is no rational end-means relation. The consequence is that the purposes that should actually determine the instrumental scope are sought within the instrumental scope itself: the simple declaration of military power as an emanation of spirit gave the secondary virtues no rational goal, making, rather, spirit dependent on its success. The victory of spirit was equated with political expansion by means of German weapons and military virtues. A possible failure of weapons

28. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:86 (O. von Gierke); see also 201, 88, 292– 93 (A. Deißmann); Walther Buder, In Gottes Heerdienst: Fünfzehn Feldpredigten 1917/18 (Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1918), 19; Eggert Windegg, Der deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 144 (F. Port). 29. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:142 (Adolf Lasson); König, Neue Kriegspredigten, 28–29. 168 The Apocalypse in Germany could not therefore be realistically considered, but rather appeared as a global spiritual catastrophe, which would “rob world history of its deepest meaning”30 and would mean “the end of human history.”31 The world did not perish in 1918, but it appeared to many as though it had. Defeat in war rarely had a cathartic effect; often it strengthened resistance against a reality that resisted German spirit and the claims of its representatives to such a degree. Thus the apocalypse in Germany had an epilogue.

30. Rudolf Eucken, Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1914), 22. 31. König, Sechs Kriegspredigten, 5. 12 An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!”

Spirit played no role in Hitler’s apocalyptic conception of the world. Still, the apocalyptic scenario that he outlined did reflect the traditional structure and many of its relevant symbols: he viewed world history as being determined by the struggle of two universal powers whose irreconcilability he generally expressed with the dualistic symbolism of “light-darkness,” and he believed that the decisive battle that would bring about the victory over the “deadly enemy of all light” was close at hand, and would secure that victory “for all future time.”1 But in Hitler’s apocalyptic scenario new players assumed the traditional roles: in place of “spirit,” blood appeared as the protagonist of the apocalyptic transformation, assuming the role of a sacred absolute. Like “spirit,” blood was embodied in the German people, but Hitler defined “people” solely as a pure-blooded racial community: “the people as such are the essence of flesh and blood.”2 The “power of evil” was also embodied in a “race,” Judaism, “the evil enemy of mankind.” Hitler, too, believed that the salvation of the entire world depended upon Germany winning the final apocalyptic struggle: “If our people and our country become the victims of these bloodthirsty and greedy Jewish tyrants, the entire world will fall into the clutches of this octopus; but if Germany can free itself from its grasp, then we may regard this greatest of all dangers as eliminated from the whole world.” Hitler was convinced that the German people would win the racial struggle and must therefore become the “master of the earth.”3 The National Socialist apocalypse thus inherited the legacy of apocalyptic nationalism but transformed it. Rosenberg made it perfectly clear that the “racial principle” had left the “old nationalism” behind and that the “meaning of world history” was to be seen in the triumphal march of the

1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. (Munich: F. Eher, 1933), 1:123, 216, 320, 346, 2:421, 432, 724, 782, 752. 2. Speech of Hitler on Nov. 2, 1932, in Berlin, cited in “Das dichterische Wort im Werk Adolf Hitlers,” Wille und Macht, special issue on occasion of April 20, 1938. 3. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2:724, 703, 782.

169 170 The Apocalypse in Germany

Nordic “race of light.”4 The dualism between both universal powers that determined the course of world history stood out in even sharper relief, and the expected final struggle appeared even more fundamental and radical since the “power of evil” was embodied not only in one or another enemy nation, but, in millions of individual people in every land around the earth. Further, this new configuration in the apocalyptic conception of the world gave the apocalyptic activism an added impetus. If the First World War was still interpreted as a “global conflagration,” which had erupted like a natural phenomenon, if the “evil enemy” had not lit it, now one could kindle the apocalyptic fire oneself, first in one’s own country, and then expand it to a “global conflagration,” from the book burnings in May 1933 to the burning synagogues in 1938 to Warsaw in flames and the “scorched earth” of the Second World War to the crematoria of the death camps.

Put fire under the cauldrons And let the flames crackle, The fires under the cauldrons, The fires that unleash power Also unleash us.5

With the murder of millions of Jews and other “subhumans,” the extreme point of the apocalypse in Germany was reached—beyond the tradition of “spirit” of the apocalypse. The Nazi mass murderers translated their apocalyptic fantasies of a struggle against the “evil enemy of mankind” into action with such single-mindedness, with such narrow-minded bookkeeper’s logic, that this monumental, factorylike mass murder goes well beyond an analysis of apocalyptic “spirit.” The psychological mechanisms that were in effect here need to be pursued in another context. In any event, “spirit” played no role in this monstrous and primitive apocalypse, and the representatives of “spirit,” the educated middle class—with their reasons for the mission of “German spirit” taken from Hegel, Fichte, and Arndt— were no longer needed to start the global conﬂagration of a racial war of annihilation. At this point, where the apocalypse of German spirit was succeeded and—taken literally—surpassed in an inconceivable manner by the apocalypse of mass murder, important questions still arise: How could the representatives of German spirit allow criminal apocalypticists to come to power? Why did they respond with only applause and submissiveness? An event in May 1933, in which German spirit gave a brief epilogue, may

4. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1935), 28, 590. 5. Kurt Eggers, Sturmsignale: Revolutionäre Sprechchöre (Leipzig: Strauch, 1934), 18–19. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 171 provide an answer. The representatives of German spirit were once again involved in a significant way at the first of the apocalyptic fires that the Nazis set, the book burning. It is worthwhile to review this “epilogue” in more detail.

“German spirit: Sieg Heil!” Professor Eugen Lüthgen ended his speech at the book burning at the Bonn marketplace on May 10, 1933. The scene has grotesque features: the professor’s “Sieg Heil!” makes one suspect that he already saw German spirit embodied in an SA uniform. Previously in his address, he had already said “thanks to the SS and SA,” presumably because the SA and SS had rendered outstanding service to German spirit by keeping the “flames of purification”6 burning. This must not have been easy since—as the General-Anzeiger (Bonn) reported—“heaven did not keep its windows shut. The steadily pouring rain certainly interfered with the meeting and rally, particularly the terrific downpour immediately before the beginning of the rally,”7 and so forth. It is a comically absurd tragedy that is difficult to laugh about, when one considers the political meaning and the murderous results of the spectacle. Still, the grotesque characteristics are symptomatic of the role played by German spirit at the book burnings. To evaluate the overall meaning of the event, one must first of all ask for what purpose the book burnings were organized and why German universities and well-known professors so willingly participated. The effect of these book burnings was disastrous outside of Germany, and even within Germany it was mixed. Even the professors who dedicated the pyres with speeches and poems sometimes betrayed a certain unease, as, for example Ernst Bertram, who wrote to his friend Glöckner: “Only young people, in the enthusiasm of the moment, should have improvised something like this . . . but not as a theatrical performance ‘with rector and senate’: that’s not studentlike for my taste.”8 It would have been possible to withdraw and prohibit the undesired literature by administrative measures, something that occurred as well. Yet why these spectacular “theatrical performances with rector and senate” at almost all German universities?

6. Hans Naumann and Eugen Lüthgen, Kampf wider den undeutschen Geist: Reden, gehalten bei der von der Bonner Studentenschaft veranstalteten Kundgebung wider den undeutschen Geist auf dem Marktplatz zu Bonn am 10. Mai 1933 (Bonn: Gebr. Scheur, 1933), 10–11. 7. “Flamme empor!” General-Anzeiger für Bonn und Umgebung (May 11, 1933). Cited in Joseph Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1963), 47. 8. Letter from Ernst Bertram to Ernst Glöckner, dated May 8, 1933. Cited in Inge Jens, ed., Thomas Mann an Ernst Bertram: Briefe aus den Jahren 1910–1955 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1960), 277. 172 The Apocalypse in Germany

The book burnings were initiated not by the professors, but by the Nazi leaders of the German Student Organization (Deutsche Studentenschaft) and their assistants in the party.9 The intentions of the organizers are obvious: the actions against undesired literature were a part of the comprehensive measures for “Gleichschaltung,” which was carried out during the first months of Nazi rule through laws, administrative measures, and terror in all areas of the state and society. The National Socialist students were anxious to make their contribution to the Gleichschaltung of cultural life. By putting on public book burnings additional purposes were pursued: by having these events forced upon them, the universities were also intimidated. How this functioned may be seen in the tone of command in which Ernst Krieck, the new Nazi rector of Frankfurt University, “invited” all of the professors to the book burning.10 How quickly that intimidation worked may clearly be seen in an otherwise seemingly insignificant incident. On May 10, 1933, it rained in Cologne as heavily as in the neighboring city of Bonn. Unlike their colleagues in Bonn, however, the leaders of the University of Cologne decided to postpone the book burning a week. Although this must have seemed a perfectly natural decision to make, given the weather conditions, the rector and senate of the university felt obliged to counter possible “unfounded rumors” in a solemn official announcement in the Stadt-Anzeiger (Cologne) and to point out in an obsequious fashion that “there remained complete agreement” with the National Socialist students and that the postponement was really decided on only because of the “pouring rain.”11 This is a further example of the grotesque features of the spectacle. But besides the intimidation of the professors, the Nazi planners of the book burnings pursued a further purpose—the destruction of “un-German” literature “before the entire world,”12 as Goebbels stressed, carried out and thereby supported by the educated elite of Germany. The propaganda purpose and political function of the book burning are quite apparent. More difficult to understand is the unresisting, even obsequious, cooperation of the universities and of countless respected

9. On this, see Hans Wolfgang Strätz, “Die studentische ‘Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist’ im Frühjahr 1933,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 16 (1968): 347–72; and Gerhard Sauder, ed., Die Bücherverbrennung: Zum 10. Mai 1933 (Munich: Hanser, 1983), 80, 109– 13. 10. The invitation is printed in Karl Kraus, Die dritte Walpurgisnacht (Werke von Karl Kraus, ed. Heinrich Fischer, vol. 1 [Munich: Kösel, 1955]), 132. 11. “Unbegründete Gerüchte,” Stadt-Anzeiger für Köln und Umgebung (May 11, 1933), cited in Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich, 57. 12. “Die Verbrennung des undeutschen Schrifttums: Reichsminister Goebbels an die deutschen Studenten,” Deutsche Kultur-Wacht 10 (1933): 13. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 173 professors. The question of why there was next to no resistance13 is not to be asked of those who already had to fear for life and limb, but precisely of the intellectual elite, professors of whom Ernst Bertram and Hans Naumann are representative. These representatives of German Bildung were certainly German “nationalists,”14 but were scarcely wild-eyed fascists who thirsted for Jewish blood—they were scholars of standing who had good taste and knew how to distinguish between good and bad literature.15 For this reason they were at pains to protect certain writers, such as Gundolf and Thomas Mann, from the flames,16 and so the organized book burnings were not much to their taste. Still, they placed themselves on the front rows of this—as Thomas Mann called it—“wild, sorrowful, and terribly ominous joke”17 and made speeches and composed poetry. In order to understand this sacrificium intellectus properly one must bear in mind that the book burnings possessed more than merely a propaganda and political function. It was accorded a substantially higher significance, not only by the National Socialist students and by Goebbels and his immediate academic henchmen—professors such as Krieck and Baeumler—but also by other speakers and writers from the educated middle class. It is no accident that in invitations to the book burnings and speeches about them, constant reference was made to the “symbolic meaning” of these events. In his nightly address in Berlin, Goebbels described the book burnings as “a great, powerful, and symbolic act,” and one may suppose that this language already made the rounds during the preparation for the event. Ernst Krieck added emphasis to his invitation to the Frankfurt book burning by referring to “the great symbolic meaning of this ceremony.” Hans Naumann stated in his speech at the bonfire in Bonn: “We are performing a symbolic act.” And the newly named professor of political pedagogy at the University

13. Sauder reports the protest of three Berlin professors (Rector Kohlrausch threatened to resign, but did not carry through on his threat; Eduard Spranger announced his resignation but withdrew it following a discussion with Minister of Culture Rust; the Jewish scholar of the drama department Max Herrmann wrote Rust a letter of protest) (Die Bücherverbrennung, 90). 14. See the explanation in 1965 of Gerhard Fricke, who gave a speech at the book burning in Göttingen, cited in ibid., 156–57. 15. See the portrait of Hans Naumann in Karl Korn, Lange Lehrzeit, ein deutsches Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1975), and the letters of Thomas Mann to Ernst Bertram. 16. On Hans Naumann’s admiration for Thomas Mann, see Hans Naumann, Die deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1931), 188–90. On Bertram’s effort to keep the works of Gundolf and Thomas Mann from being burned, see Jens, Thomas Mann an Ernst Bertram, 276–80. 17. Thomas Mann, radio address on the BBC on May 25, 1943, in Reden und Aufsätze II (Frankfurt am Main: Fisher, 1965), 258. 174 The Apocalypse in Germany of Berlin, Alfred Baeumler, prepared the students for the forthcoming book burning in his inaugural lecture by stressing the lofty meaning that National Socialism gave to the symbolic in word and deed.18 But can we take this all seriously? In these “symbols” aren’t we simply dealing with empty phrases that gloss over crude political intentions? Shouldn’t we be satisfied with this—in many cases certainly correct— conclusion? I believe that this would be insufficient. Those “symbols” have doubtless fallen prey to a kind of dégradation du symbole: they no longer maintain any rational relationship to reality. Still, they provide reasons and motivations for behavior and action, and for this reason they need to be analyzed. Let us begin with the bonfire itself. The most obvious intention may have been to model the event after Luther’s burning of the bull threatening a papal ban and after the book burning at the Wartburg festival of 1817. Still, however, these “autos-da-fé of thought”—as they were characterized by Romain Rolland in his Open Letter of May 14, 1933—also suggested association with the burning of heretics of the Inquisition. This association also suggested itself to the organizers themselves, which is clearly shown by their effort to dismiss them. Thus, as at the book burning at Cologne, the student leader stressed “that this burning does not mean . . . an Inquisition.” Further, Professor Baeumler even seemed to fear that the medieval parallel could become so apparent that it could lead to attacks that should best not appear in public for the time being. For this reason he stated in his speech: “Heretics will not be burned on the bonfire that you are now erecting.”19 Still, “auto-da-fé,” the terminus technicus for the burning of heretics during the Inquisition, was used as a matter of course. As early as March 1933 it appeared in the preparations of blacklists.20 In April and May it appeared repeatedly in announcements and newspaper

18. Goebbels, “Die Verbrennung des undeutschen Schrifttums,” 13; Krieck cited in Kraus, Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht, 132; Naumann and Lüthgen, Kampf wider den undeutschen Geist, 3; Alfred Baeumler, Männerbund und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1934), 134–38. 19. Kölnische Zeitung on May 21, 1933, reprinted in Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland: Rudolf G. Binding, E. G. Kolbenheyer, Die “Kölnische Zeitung,” Wilhelm von Scholz, Otto Wirz, Robert Fabre-Luce antworten Romain Rolland (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt: 1933), 7–9; student cited in Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich, 52; Baeumler, Männerbund und Wissenschaft, 137. 20. “Grundsätzliches zur Anfertigung von Schwarzen Listen (Vorbemerkung der Kom- mission Berliner Bibliothekare zur ersten Empfehlungsliste für die Umstellung der Volks- büchereibestände, März 1933),” reprinted in Friedrich Andrae, Volksbücherei und National- sozialismus: Materialien zur Theorie und Politik des öffentlichen Büchereiwesens in Deutschland 1933–1945 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1970), 167–68. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 175 articles.21 Ernst Bertram commented on his success in having the writings of Gundolf and Thomas Mann spared from the book burning with the remark: “Now I can attend the solemn ‘autodafé.’ ” The writers Binding and Kolbenheyer, in their responses to the Open Letter of Romain Rolland, used the term auto-da-fé without displaying any reservations about it.22 Auto-da-fé means “act of faith,” and the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition were solemn occasions that were often celebrated with great pomp and were viewed as ritual manifestations of proper belief. Its ritual form also had striking parallels to the Nazi book burnings: a solemn parade accompanied with song to the place where the bonfire had been made, wagons escorted by torchbearers with the books to be burned, the various student societies in full academic regalia, the National Socialist Student Union (Nation- alsozialistischen Deutscher Studentenbund—NSDStB) in brown shirts, the SA in uniform, the ceremonial burning of books while reciting execration formulas, plus the SA and SS bands, speeches and choruses, and brilliant searchlights. The book burnings followed the solemn festivities that had been inaugurated only a few weeks before by “Potsdam Day” and May First that would be followed by many quasi-religious celebrations. If the form suggests that the book burning—just like other Nazi celebrations—had the significance of an act of faith beyond its propaganda and political function, this must be shown by evidence. The use of the term auto-da-fé is of itself an insufficient proof. If we look at the speeches and articles connected with the book burnings we are immediately struck by how deeply suffused they are with religious vocabulary. In the four printed pages of Hans Naumann’s speech, the word holy occurs eight times, along with the words pious, faith, and prayer. On a single page of his answer to Romain Rolland, Rudolf Binding uses the word faith six times. The Nazi takeover appears to him like a great religious awakening, “with parades and signs, flags and oaths of loyalty, with martyrs and fanatics among both old and young, including children, with pronouncements and promises, with an unshakable faith and deadly seriousness among the people.” His final evaluation is similar: “The world must understand this revolution in its depths as a highly religious phenomenon.” The findings in other sources are similar.23

21. For example, see Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buch- handel, and Münchener Neueste Nachrichten; see also Sauder, Die Bücherverbrennung, 114, 117–21. 22. Bertram to Glöckner on May 8, 1933, cited in Jens, Thomas Mann an Ernst Bertram, 277; Binding and Kolbenheyer, in Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, 18, 23, 31. 23. Naumann and Lüthgen, Kampf wider den undeutschen Geist, 3–7; Binding, in Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, 20–21; for other examples, see Werner Schlegel, 176 The Apocalypse in Germany

I wish to repeat my view that this needs to be taken seriously. These people truly believed—but what was the content of their belief? If we first move on at the level of self-interpretation, and investigate the symbols that possessed so much significance in the self-understanding of participants, we discover that they are the well-known symbols of apocalyptic belief that we regularly meet: there is talk of the “inner transformation of German man,” of the book burning as a symbol not only of “the decline of the old epoch, but also of the rise of the new age”: “The youth burned the works of the old age, in order to announce the beginning of a new age.” Again and again, the “rebirth” of the German people and of “German spirit” is conjured up. If German spirit arose in the First World War as a phoenix “from the flames of this universal conflagration,” now the “phoenix of a new spirit” arises from the flames of burned books.24 The book burning thus appears as a miniature apocalypse, which represents the comprehensive apocalyptic process of transformation and can give expression to apocalyptic belief in ritual performance: through the destruction of “un-German spirit,” the true “German spirit” is reborn and the German people “redeemed.” What was the reason for such an ardent belief in German spirit? Al- though generalizations do not accurately reflect all individual cases, there are a cluster of motives that were determinant for many intellectuals. Even though the result of the First World War disappointed the apocalyptic expectation of 1914, German spirit still remained, for many members of the old educated middle class, the only symbol in which they were able to find for themselves, and the German people, identity, societal unity, and security in history after their defeat. Belief in German spirit filled a vacuum that appeared after 1918 or had become even more perceptible than in the period before the war and had been perceived in many regards as a threat. From a religious perspective, existential questions of meaning no longer found any satisfying answers in the Christian faith, otherwise one would have scarcely attempted to find religious fulfillment, or even an answer to the question of the “meaning of life,” in the Nazi takeover.25 From an intellectual perspective, the flood of new scholarly disciplines that changed the image of man and the world—modern physics, sociology, psychoanalysis, and so on—made many intellectuals feel insecure and also

Dichter auf dem Scheiterhaufen (Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1934), 7, 16, 54; for literary attestations for this period, see Heinz Kindermann, ed., Des deutschen Dichters Sendung in der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Reclam, 1933), 8–9, 119, 265, 279, 283. 24. Naumann and Lüthgen, Kampf wider den undeutschen Geist, 4, 11; Schlegel, Dichter auf dem Scheiterhaufen, 16, 53, 56; Kindermann, Des deutschen Dichters Sendung, 118, 122, 158, 160, 265, 276; Goebbels, “Die Verbrennung des undeutschen Schrifttums,” 13. 25. Schlegel, Dichter auf dem Scheiterhaufen, 7. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 177 made the traditional humanistic studies appear to be outdated.26 From a societal point of view, as the sociologist Theodor Geiger noted in 1932: “When one element of society of the previous century can complain that it has lost its position and its significance in the overall social structure, it is the educated middle class.” The complaints of the intellectuals confirm that they were aware of this.27 From a political point of view, many intellectuals were not willing to accept the political consequences of the First World War and to identify themselves with the Weimar Republic. “For fourteen years we have not been able to feel like a people,” Rudolf Binding complained to Romain Rolland. He perceived the lack of political identity as “nonexistence.”28 The latter comment is revealing. It shows that the experiences of lack and loss in various areas of life resulted in a feeling of existential meaninglessness and directionlessness. All of the authorities that had previously given substance and meaning were destroyed or had disintegrated, were devalued or had lost significance: the churches, the unity of the sciences, the intellectual class, the state. Left behind were aimless individuals who were not accustomed to reflecting independently about the meaning of their existence, and who could not endure being an individual. “Reflecting about oneself brings despair,” the young intellectual Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1926; Binding viewed his feeling of “nonexistence” as “spiritual torture.” The reaction to such despair and torment bore all the signs of panic. “When, poor devil me, will I ever be redeemed?” complained Goebbels, and Binding admitted a “mad longing”29 to escape this unpleasant condition. Goebbels, who had a doctorate in German studies, was one of the few Nazi leaders who had some characteristics in common with the traditional educated middle class. Among these shared characteristics was the uncertain social situation of the educated middle class during the 1920s. Goebbels felt the discrepancy between social status and claim to intellectual prestige particularly keenly, as his diary of 1925 and 1926 reveals. It

26. Thus already Theobald Ziegler, Die geistigen und sozialen Strömungen Deutschlands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Bondi, 1916), 549–51. 27. Geiger, Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes, 100; Werner Schlegel complained: “The young generation and especially the students had to bear the brunt of this violent process of reevaluation. The extreme confinement of German territory and unemployment that was constantly increasing through overrationalizing and the consequences of the peace treaty devalued diplomas and doctor’s degrees. They no longer gave one a claim to a secure living as they had in the prewar era” (Dichter auf dem Scheiterhaufen, 15). 28. Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, 17. 29. Helmut Heiber, ed., Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels 1925/26 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961), 52; Binding, in Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, 17; Das Tagebuchvon Joseph Goebbels, 20; Binding, in Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, 18. 178 The Apocalypse in Germany led him to apocalyptic hopes for redemption, too. By 1933, however, this imbalance had been redressed: his desire for power was satisfied, and he himself now belonged to the redeemers and could command German spirit and its representatives. Intellectuals who either were not able or did not wish to promote themselves so successfully in the new movement still clung to the belief that German spirit would redeem them from their “nonexistence,” and in 1933 they suggested that it was the “rebirth of national spirit” that would bring about “national redemption.”30 Their despair also allowed them to see marching SA columns as religious processions and each manifestation of power as the symbolic expression of German spirit if only the feeling was conveyed of again being incorporated into the great community, “rooted in a nourishing universal ground.”31 The symbolic interpretations mediated this feeling indeed. In his inaugural lecture, Alfred Baeumler precisely described the twofold function of a symbol. On the one hand, it produces emotional security: “In the symbol the individual and the community are one.” On the other hand, it provides existential certainty: “This symbol brings about a separation. It determines what is just and unjust, what is true and untrue.”32 Finally, in ritual—and this is true of book burnings as it is for other solemn Nazi events—symbols are expressed in an impressive manner. Even intellectuals appreciate a tangible confirmation of their faith. To be sure, although German spirit appeared to brilliantly rise like a phoenix out of the flames of the book burnings in 1933, its real position, and that of its representatives, was pitiable. Gustav Roethe, a professor of German studies, who, in the full bloom of apocalyptic certainty of the future in September 1914 had seen “the flame of holy faith in the historic mission of the German people,”33 in 1919 conjured up a hope that was oriented toward the past: “May German spirit develop the power to make its way through the awful political flood of sin and sludge to that glorious state of trust as the Hohenzollern had given to us Prussians!”34 Many members of the old educated middle class had such a goal in mind, but this goal was no longer on the agenda in 1933 and the German spirit of the tradition of Bildung was no longer in demand. Baeumler, the university professor of the new Nazi style made it unmistakably clear in his inaugural

30. Kindermann, Des deutschen Dichters Sendung, 118, 122. 31. Walther Linden, “Der politisch-religiöse Sinn der echten Dichtung,” Deutsche Kultur-Wacht 17 (1933): 3. 32. Baeumler, Männerbund und Wissenschaft, 134–35. 33. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:32. 34. Cited in Bernhard Zeller, ed., Klassiker in finsterer Zeit 1933–1945 (exhibition catalog) (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1983), 1:22–23. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 179 address on the day of the book burning “that National Socialism cannot be understood from the intellectual positions of the past.” (What he meant was, of course, that National Socialism wanted to have nothing to do with them.) “It is not to be intellectually grounded in the concepts of Fichte.” Even the contemporary student does not stand “with the educated. . . . [H]e feels closer to the SA man than to any representative of the academic professions who went through the system of higher education of the past.” A revitalization of the past was out of the question for Baeumler: “History knows no ‘back’—neither before the year 1918, nor to the year 1818, when Hegel began his lectures in this place.”35 Nazi students for their part made no secret of their contempt for “all the scholarly books that were written by the previous so-called ‘leaders’ of Germany” and for “all these men who believed, in their arrogance through their university training, to have a special right to the intellectual leadership of Germany.”36 The intellectuals, for whom German spirit was the standard of their intellectual as well as national self-consciousness, found themselves in an unpleasant situation. Although they were “irreproachable in their national sentiments,” they found themselves under stress.37 There appeared to be nothing left for them than to accommodate spirit to the demands of the time. Spirit was not accepted by Nazi ideology as the fundamental concept for the absolute, and it was not sufficient merely to see German spirit as a representative of the intellectual accomplishments that the German people had produced in their history. No, German spirit had to acquire a new quality regarding its content. The philosopher, who not only understood a great deal about spirit but also knew how to evaluate the events of 1933, undertook the attempt of a redefinition: “ ‘spirit’ is the originally attuned, knowing determination towards the essence of being. And the spiritual (geistige) world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture, any more than it is the arsenal of usable knowledge and values, but”—and now follows the positive definition—“it is the power of the deepest preserving of its earthbound and blood-rooted forces as the power of the innermost excitation and strongest emotion of its being (die Macht der tiefsten Bewahrung seiner erd- und bluthaften Kräfte als Macht der innersten Erregung und weitesten Erschütterung seines Daseins)”—as Martin

35. Baeumler, Männerbund und Wissenschaft, 123, 125, 127. 36. “Ansprache des Ältesten der Studentenschaft an der Universität Würzburg, Dr. Alfons Ilg, bei der Verbrennung des Schrifttums ‘Wider den undeutschen Geist,’ ” on May 10, 1933, cited in Herrmann Haarmann, Walter Huder, and Klaus Siebenhaar, eds., “Das was ein Vorspiel nur . . .” Bücherverbrennung Deutschland 1933: Voraussetzungen und Folgen (exhibition catalog) (Berlin: Medusa, 1983), 214. 37. Ibid., 211. 180 The Apocalypse in Germany

Heidegger put it in his Freiburg inaugural address as rector of the University of Freiburg on May 27, 1933.38 Although he did not spare adjectives in order to attain a closer definition of the new quality of spirit, “one gropes in the dark,” remarked Karl Kraus upon reading the reprint of the speech in the newspaper. In his struggle to find a lead in untangling this jungle of superlatives, Kraus’s attention was drawn to an advertisement next to the newspaper reprint of the speech: “Test and keep the best—Berna cheese.”39 We are again confronted with the grotesque. It appears that, simply in order to come to grips with language that is so far removed from reality, it has to be contrasted with reality in its most trivial manifestations (thus the reference to cheese); the estrangement from reality is thus unmasked as grotesque. The redefinition of spirit in the sense of Nazi ideology, which Heidegger attempted to do in such a wordy fashion, was done several years before by Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer—who liked to describe himself as a “poet-philosopher”—in a rather simpler and clearer manner: “spirit means a specific biological function.”40 Still, Heidegger’s definition is more characteristic of the attempt of many intellectuals to adjust spirit in order not to have to give it up completely. The definition shows how tortuous and evasive this effort was and, in particular, that the adaptation of spirit to Blut und Boden ideology led to its final dissolution. What remained was an empty word that could at the most produce the euphoria of linguistic onanism. German spirit had now definitively become an empty formula that had lost every rational connection to reality. Accordingly belief in this spirit did not possess sufficient substance from which it could have lived. The perversion of the symbols and the mendacity of the ritual at the book burnings are significant symbols of that. The mythical bird phoenix symbolizes rebirth and renewal as well as self-sacrifice and purification: it rises out of its own ashes. The phoenix of German spirit, on the other hand, rises out of the ashes of its incinerated enemies. Only ex negativo, out of the struggle against a “nonspirit,” can German spirit exist; only in destruction does it gain any meaning. The same consequence of being without substance may be seen in the ritual. There, “purification” is frequently mentioned. Hans Naumann began his speech according to custom with a confession of sin, thereafter appealing for self-purification: “This fire is a symbol and should also be

38. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Breslau: Korn, 1933), 13. 39. Kraus, Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht, 59. 40. Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, “Für den Geist, wider den ‘Geist’ ” (1930), in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: A. Langen/G. Müller, n.d.), 8:494. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 181

Figure 4 German literature rising from the burning of “un-German” books. Johnson, The NewPhoenix. Cover of the magazine Kladderadatsch 86: 22 (1933). 182 The Apocalypse in Germany a challenge to us to purify our own hearts.”41 This sounds serious, but what does it actually mean? While Naumann spoke of the purification of one’s own heart, a completely different kind of “purification” had been taking place in Germany for weeks: SA commandos had been beating political opponents in broad daylight, sometimes arbitrarily beating innocent bystanders as well, had driven out Jewish judges and doctors from courtrooms and hospitals, and had made “undesirable” persons disappear in concentration camps. Everyone could see it or read about it in the newspapers. Binding did not deny the excesses: “We deny nothing,” he said in response to Romain Rolland’s charges. “We do not deny the emigration and confiscations. But all that, however harshly and cruelly it may affect a single individual or many individuals, is simply matters of peripheral concern.”42 Apparently, focusing on German spirit, which had become a meaningless absurdity, made a person blind and insensitive to injustice and the suffering of others. The challenge to purify one’s own heart was in fact a sacrificium intellectus in the sense that the last of what really deserved the designation “spirit” was sacrificed and eradicated from one’s consciousness. Intellectual bankruptcy, a moral failure, and not least a psychopatho- logical phenomenon: from the meaninglessness of “German spirit,” no standards could be developed for existential order. As a consequence of this emptiness, the attitude became more important than the content. The attitude of belief became the content of belief, became belief for its own sake, but also belief in oneself, to the extent that one maintained such an attitude of faith. In his diary-novel, Michael, the young Goebbels has the novel’s hero, his alter ego, cry out: “It is not so important what we believe, only that we believe.” Werner Schlegel observed in his pamphlet Dichter auf dem Scheiterhaufen (“Poets on the Pyre”) “the emerging belief in something ‘new,’ ” which—according to his own certificate of spiritual poverty—“one would rather have to call a new readiness to believe, because it lacks a clear conception.” Detmar Sarnetzki proclaimed in 1933 the “belief in ourselves.”43 Forty years before, Theodor Fontane had already given a sensible judgment concerning such an attitude of faith. In his novel Frau Jenny Treibel one of his socially insecure and intellectually run-down characters stresses the importance of “belief in ourselves” and “our cause” with the explanation: “It is not necessary that what is right be

41. Naumann and Lüthgen, Kampf wider den undeutschen Geist, 4. 42. Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, 18. 43. Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (Munich: Eher, 1929), 31; Schlegel, Dichter auf dem Scheiterhaufen, 16; Detmar Heinrich Sarnetzki, “Sinn und Weg einer nationalen Kulturgemeinschaft,” in Des deutschen Dichters Sendung, ed. Kindermann, 122. An Epilogue—“German Spirit: Sieg Heil!” 183 believed; but that one believes at all is the important thing.” Fontane has the old Mr. Treibel respond to this with the comment: “Whoever believes in a course and a cause is always a poveretto, and if his cause is he himself, he is a public danger and a candidate for Dalldorf”—a madhouse.44 In 1933, belief in German spirit had become a desperate belief that could be maintained with only tightly closed eyes. At best what was recognized, willingly or unwillingly, was the necessity to subject spirit to power. Wilhelm Stapel—a typical representative of the educated middle class that was “unquestioned in its nationalist attitude,” before 1918 the editor of Kunstwart, afterward of Deutsches Volkstum—found himself obliged to the admonition in 1937: “May German spirit never again forget that it is lost, should it attempt to evade the primacy of political leadership.” While German spirit had also submitted as willingly as helplessly to power in 1914, this time the pious desire that power would in return “ever protect German spirit” did not remain merely an unfulﬁlled hope. The belief “that German spirit and German power . . . are united in the person of the German Führer Adolf Hitler”45 was more than absurd, for such a pact involved German spirit in the crimes and ignominy of the Third Reich and dragged it along in its demise. The phoenix that turned out to be a chimera never received a more richly deserved end.

44. Theodor Fontane, Frau Jenny Treibel, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 4:352, 309. Dalldorf, an asylum for the mentally retarded in the vicinity of Berlin, is today Wittenau. Treibel’s remark refers to another character (Vogelsang), but it corresponds with the quoted statement of the retired Gymnasium director Distelkamp. 45. Wilhelm Stapel, Die literarische Vorherrschaft der Juden in Deutschland 1918 bis 1933 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1937), 43. 13 The Spirit of Utopia

German national spirit was not the only form in which the apocalyptic spirit was embodied, nor Nazism the only movement with which it identified its mission. At the same time that the national spirit developed its strongest apocalyptic dynamics, in the First World War, another spirit was preparing for its mission. Like the other, it had already begun to build its apocalyptic potential before 1914, though during the war it was held back by the predominance of “German spirit.” Its moment first came with the defeat of Germany and with the revolution. That its “moment” came is almost to be understood literally, since the space of time in which it could develop was very limited, and even then it was not left to develop unhindered. It never attained the societal influence of “German spirit,” and the later echo of its mission also remained weak. What kind of spirit was it that arose in competition with and in opposition to the national spirit? It appeared in many different descriptions: as the “spirit of revolution” and the “spirit of universal change” in Robert Müller and Kurt Hiller, as the “comprehensive spirit of socialism” and “divine spirit of humankind” in Arthur Holitscher, as the “spirit of community” and “spirit of love” in Ernst Toller, and as the “heavenly,” “prophetic,” “collegial,” “socialist spirit,” “communal spirit,” and “spirit of justice” in Gustav Landauer. All of these circumlocutions—like “national spirit” and “German spirit”—are symbols of self-definition: they express the different qualities that the “new spirit” possessed in the self-understanding of its proponents.1 As a comprehensive term for this spirit, I choose a further

1. Müller and Hiller in Das Ziel: Jahrbücher für geistige Politik, ed. Kurt Hiller, vol. 4 (1920): 14, 241; Holitscher, in Die Erhebung: Jahrbuch für neue Dichtung und Wertung, ed. Alfred Wolfenstein (Berlin: Fischer, 1919), 287; Ernst Toller, Gesammelte Werke, ed. John M. Spalek and Wolfgang Frühwald, 5 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1978), 1:162; second Toller citation from Hans Daiber, Vor Deutschland wird gewarnt: 17 exemplarische Lebensläufe (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1967), 97; Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus (1911), Revolutionsausgabe, 2d revised and enlarged edition (Berlin: Cassirer, 1919), viii, x–xii, xiv, 4, 12, 19, 101, 140.

184 The Spirit of Utopia 185 symbol of self-definition and call it the “spirit of Utopia,” after the title of the first book by Ernst Bloch, which appeared in 1918. I have decided on this general title because the representative of the “new spirit” gave a new meaning to Utopia: “only utopian thought has meaning and value,” Kurt Hiller stressed.2 This positive understanding of Utopia bound them together and at the same time separated them not only from the conservative opponents of utopian ideology, but also from the champions of socialism and of revolution who accorded spirit no role in the historical process. Besides, the “spirit of Utopia” seems to me a particularly appropriate symbol because it aptly expresses one of the modern appearances of apocalyptic consciousness. I have already mentioned it in a previous chapter and will discuss it at greater length later.3 Last, Ernst Bloch, who gave prominence to the “spirit of Utopia” with the title of his book, was the one among the representatives of this spirit that achieved the most long-lasting effect. Spirit was one of the central words of expressionist literature. One look into the anthology Menschheitsdämmerung and the foreword by Kurt Pinthus makes this apparent. In what follows I will chiefly deal with authors who treated the new spirit in philosophical, political, or similar writings and thereby offered detailed insights into their historical thought. The most important of these “theoretical” representatives of the “spirit of Utopia” were Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer—who advertised the new spirit even before 1914—and Kurt Hiller, spokesman for “activism,” who provided a public forum for all the adherents of a new, “active spirit,” and of the “politics of spirit” in his yearbook Das Ziel.4 The generalizing term spirit of Utopia should not suggest that its proponents represented the same view in all things. On the contrary, between Bloch, Hiller, and Landauer, as also among the expressionist writers, there were doubtless

2. Kurt Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” in Die Erhebung: Jahrbuch für neue Dichtung und Wertung, ed. Alfred Wolfenstein (1919), 372. Gustav Landauer occasionally uses the Utopia concept in a critical fashion (Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 21, 61), but within his concept of history it has a positive and central significance (see Die Revolution [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten und Loening, 1907], 13–15, 53). 3. See p. 33 in this book. 4. Citations: titles or subtitles of Kurt Hiller, ed., Das Ziel: Aufrufe zu tätigem Geist (Munich: Müller, 1916); Tätiger Geist! Zweites der Ziel-Jahrbücher (1917/1918) (Munich: Müller, 1918); Das Ziel: Jahrbücher für geistige Politik, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Wolff, 1919); Das Ziel: Jahrbücher für geistige Politik, vol. 4 (Munich: Wolff, 1920). On “activism,” see Wolfgang Paulsen, Expressionismus und Aktivismus: Eine typologische Untersuchung (Bonn: Gotthelf, 1935); Wolfgang Rothe, ed., Der Aktivismus 1915–1920 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1969); Juliane Habereder, Kurt Hiller und der literarische Aktivismus: Zur Geistesgeschichte des politischen Dichters im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1981); see also Günter Helmes, Robert Müller: Themen und Tendenzenseiner politischen Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1986). 186 The Apocalypse in Germany greater differences of opinion as among the representatives of national spirit. Still, they reveal several fundamental similarities, which I wish to retain before turning to the questions of how the apocalyptic character of the “spirit of Utopia” expressed itself, where this spirit comes from, and what motives of experience in the “spirit of Utopia” found an apocalyptic interpretation. To begin, let us consider what they opposed: the adherents of the “spirit of Utopia” were opposed to the bourgeoisie and especially opposed to the educated bourgeoisie, understanding “bourgeoisie” not so much from a sociological point of view, but rather as a type, embodied in Philistines and advocates, “even when they are not called advocates,” by “professors and tract writers” who let living spirit desiccate and sold only empty husks. The antibourgeois character of proponents of this view was also expressed in their lifestyle: most of the champions of the new spirit inclined to a bohemian lifestyle.5 Adherents of the “spirit of Utopia” were antinationalists. Gustav Lan- dauer, for example, viewed the nation, particularly “in its amalgamation with the state,” as “artificial and brutal, as colossally stupid,” and as a “substitute for spirit.”6 In 1915, when the flight of national spirit as yet appeared unbroken, Johannes R. Becher wrote an apocalyptic song of hate against his own nation, whose destruction was for him absolutely essential for the redemption of the world:

Again, curse you, Germany, belly of a beast! ...... ’Til you suffocate in a thunderclap, in the quagmire and smoke of your lightning bolts. Rejoice! rejoice when you, skeleton, smashes. Peace, peace feeds creatures. Sunbeams branching out through the whole world. Colossus, fall! Utopia, rise!!!7

5. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 4; see also Hans Blüher, “Der Bund der Geistigen,” in Tätiger Geist! Zweites der Ziel-Jahrbücher (1917/18): 13; on the connection with bohemian lifestyles, see Helmut Kreuzer, Die Boheme: Analyse und Dokumentation der intellektuellen Subkultur vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 289–300, 312–13, 331. Of those mentioned above, Ernst Bloch is perhaps the least bohemian in his lifestyle, although as a young man he displayed some typical bohemian characteristics both in his lifestyle and in his relation to money; see Peter Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch—Leben und Werk (Bühl-Moos: Elster, 1985), 39–49; and Ernst Bloch, Briefe, 1903–1975, ed. Karola Bloch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 1:55, 58, 75, 85, 126–29. 6. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 19. 7. Johannes R. Becher, “An Deutschland,” in Kameraden der Menschheit: Dichtungen zur Weltrevolution, ed. Ludwig Rubiner (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1919), 60–61. The Spirit of Utopia 187

Finally, the anticapitalist tendencies that the “spirit of Utopia” reflects also mean that it was connected with socialism. If we wish to describe this socialism somewhat more accurately, we immediately fall into difficulties. Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer had differing ideas about what socialism was and how it might be realized. Even in the group of “activists” and “politicians of spirit” around Kurt Hiller there was a broad spectrum of opinions. What they shared, however, may first be seen in their counterpositions: they rejected the party organization of social democracy and criticized Marxism with varying sharpness. For them, the Social Democratic Party, in part also the trade unions, belonged to the hollow bourgeois world that they despised. Hiller, for example, spoke sharply against special-interest politics, against the “mentality of union secretary Piefke,” as also against the class principle, against “class struggle babbitry.” Landauer viewed the Social Democratic Party and the unions as elements and simple functions of capitalism itself and considered them incapable of alighting from capitalism.8 Criticism of Marx and Marxist ideology is more interesting and revealing than the critique of the organizations of the workers’ movement. The spirit utopians considered the materialist view of history as insufficient and Marxism in this regard as in need of emendation at the very least. In his book about Thomas Münzer in 1921 Bloch stressed that a “purely economic view” was not sufficient “to be able to explain even the approach of a historical event of the weight of the Peasant War completely, absolutely conditionally, or causally,” not to mention grasping the “deeper contents of the history of mankind awakening here.” “For economic interest is the most down-to-earth and constant, but not the only one, not the strongest over a long period of time, nor is it the most characteristic of the human soul, particularly not in religiously excited times.” Bloch postulated an independent “path of the intellectual-religious” that effectively stands at any given time “in the way of or at the side of the economic event”; indeed, he even implied here, setting Marx on his head, that the “condition of respective means of production” is “dependent on a higher, simultaneously attached complex of attitudes, above all, as Max Weber shows, on such of a religious nature.” As a consequence, he criticized that Marx had “narrowed communism positivistically . . . from theology into national economy.” He still held firm to Marx, but Marxist doctrine should be expanded “by metaphysical reasoning as neglected by Marx,” as Bloch noted in the revised 1923 version of Geist der Utopie.9 8. Kurt Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” 363, 375; Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 77. 9. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 73–74; Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 324. 188 The Apocalypse in Germany

Kurt Hiller argued along similar lines: “The form of socialism that has made its way in history, Marxism, is characterized by an overemphasis on the economic.” While he saw the “leveling of the material substructure” as “the most fundamental technical precondition” for the “realization of the Kingdom of God,” he still viewed it as only a technical precondition. “Everything of an economic nature” was for him “only a preliminary stage,” and the explanation of every evil as deriving from capitalism an “economic oversimplification”—“stupid or exaggerated, and in many cases demagogic.”10 Like Bloch, he was critical of the Marxist’s “denying the spirit.”11 In the historical situation of 1919, in which Hiller formulated his criticism, there appeared to him only one guarantee that the revolution “would neither falter nor run amok”—the dictatorship of the working classes, combined with the dictatorship of spirit. He believed that this combination was possible, “because the proletariat and spirit have the same enemy: the bourgeoisie.”12 But a year later, visibly disappointed by the course of the revolution, he expressed himself in a completely different manner. Now he saw “free spirit kept better by an educated philistine than by a raging revolutionary, whose raging was the raging of materialism, a rage of inferior-feeling rawness against the hated superiority of the sensitive, of spirit.” Since spirit was what was important, he viewed the demand for the absolute rule of the proletariat as “dangerous nonsense” to which he juxtaposed his own demand, “to finally empower spirit.”13 The most severe critique of Marx and Marxism came from Gustav Landauer. While Landauer admitted that Marx “carefully examined the facts of economic life,” he believed that the assertion that it was possible to deduce from these facts the laws underlying the development of mankind and to predict the future was an “unspeakably foolish presumption” and “scientific sorcery.” In the Marxism of Marx’s successors he saw the “swindle and deception” completely triumph, along with “obsessiveness and inflex- ibility.” He gave it the same polemical judgments that were otherwise reserved for the condemnation of the bourgeois world: for him, Marxism was “the philistine” and “the professor who wishes to be in control.” In Landauer’s view nothing better could be expected of Marxism than a kind of “state capitalism” in which “all forms of capitalism and regimentation

10. Kurt Hiller, “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus,” Das Ziel 3 (1919): 200. 11. Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” 363. 12. Hiller, “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus,” 214, 208. 13. Kurt Hiller, “Logokratie oder ein Weltbund des Geistes,” Das Ziel 4 (1920): 228; see also 221, 241. The Spirit of Utopia 189 are to be found again,” which allows the “tendency toward uniformity and leveling to continue unabated,” and in which everyone, without exception, would be “little economic officials of the state.” The inability of the Marxists to provide a “realistic picture” of history and to create real, dynamic socialism also finally led Landauer to assert that “the Marxists, in their marvelous view of history that they call materialist, have completely extinguished spirit.” In Marxism, scientific sorcery had taken the place of spirit as a “substitute” and a “travesty of spirit.” For Landauer, spirit was the “quintessence of life”; true “renewal,” indeed, “salvation”—not only of a class but also of “all mankind”—could be brought about only by spirit. For that reason, Landauer declared uncompromising “enmity against Marxism of every hue,” since in his view socialism could “only arise in a life-and- death struggle against Marxism.”14 In the spectrum of the political ideologies and movements this anti- Marxist socialism usually defined itself as “anarchic” or was connected with anarchism.15 For our analysis such a classification has little meaning. It is of interest to us that the common thread running through all of these positions is that “spirit” is ultimately the driving force of world history, and only spirit could really change the world. But above all it is of interest that this spirit possessed apocalyptic momentum, even though that was articulated differently by the different authors. Let us examine how this apocalyptic momentum was expressed and what differences, but also what similarities, existed between the “spirit of Utopia” and national spirit. It accorded with the pattern of the apocalyptic view of history that the adherents of the “spirit of Utopia”—those mentioned above, but also expressionist writers and those who were connected with “activism”— viewed the present condition of human society as thoroughly corrupt and evil and awaited a “revolution,” which they conceived of as a radical transformation of human existence, brought about by spirit. Still there were variations from the apocalyptic ideal depending on whether the change led to a condition of absolute perfection, whether this condition was viewed as final and unchangeable, and whether there was an expectation of immediate fulfillment. And there were inner contradictions in the conceptions and prophecies of individual authors. Still, Ernst Bloch, Kurt Hiller, and some others came close to the ideal, and they also used the relevant symbols. Ernst Bloch, in particular, outlined a purely apocalyptic vision that he found foreshadowed in the Taborites, the Münster Anabaptists, and Thomas Münzer. On the basis of their 14. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 23, 26–28, 33, 42, 56, 35, 116, 42, 146. 15. Even Bloch confessed in 1929 a “predominantly anarchic tendency,” which he contrasted with Georg Lukacs’s´ communist position (Briefe, 1903–1975, 1:322). 190 The Apocalypse in Germany example he formulated precisely the nature of the apocalyptic quest: “Not for better days, but for the end of all days the struggle was carried on according to the proper expression: in apocalyptic propaganda of action; not for overcoming earthly difficulties in a eudaimonistic, uninstalled civilization, but for their ‘disrealization’ at the breakthrough of the Reich.” What had remained a dream for the Anabaptists and Münzer appeared to him to be attainable: “days like of Münzer have come again.” Liebknecht and Lenin were for him Münzer’s copies: “the final earthly revolution is about to be born.” This revolution would bring about the “absolute transformation,”16 would bring about the “turning of everything to paradise” and the “Third Reich,” and would create the “new man”17 and the “new world.” The expectation of a perfect condition, which Bloch expressed with enthusiasm in his first two books, treated previous history with utter indifference— a typical characteristic of the apocalyptic view of history. Indeed, Bloch admitted his disgust with history: “We have had enough world history, it was definitely enough, too much, much too much form, polis, work, delusion, isolation through culture.”18 His quest was ultimately directed to “disrealization,” to the “elimination of the physical world,” that should be brought about through spirit.19 The devaluation of history corresponded to the judgment concerning the present situation of the world, which Bloch believed had arrived at the low point of deficiency: the world was for him “ungenuine” and “untrue,” full of “evil, emptiness, death, and enigmas.” This radically negative judgment motivated his quest to “disrealize” the world, while at the same time it fanned the flames of expectation of “redemption.”20 Like Bengel, he concluded that the low point had been arrived at now, that the apocalyptic transformation must follow shortly: “the world would never appear so dark to us were not absolute storm and central light imminent.”21 Kurt Hiller and the writers who were close to “activism” connected their apocalyptic expectation to the radical rejection of the present and the devaluation of previous history. “Everything that has been, is false,” Ludwig Rubiner stated in 1916. For Kurt Pinthus, “the sum of suffering” had grown “into the astronomical” and now led to an “apocalyptic dance of death.” Hiller despised history, since the activist “has nothing to learn from history”; the vision of a changed world made what had gone on

16. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 85, 150–51. 17. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 209, 325. 18. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 297. 19. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 442. 20. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 310, 209. 21. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 297. The Spirit of Utopia 191 before seem uninteresting and dull: “To the active person it is a matter of utter indifference about what ‘was in the beginning’; the only thing that matters is ‘what will be at the end!’ ” At the end, the condition of perfection is expected to exist, which was described with the pertinent images and symbols: Alfred Wolfenstein called for making a “new creation” and a “renewed man.” His desire to destroy the evil old world ended, as it did with Bloch, with the wish to “disrealize” the world, and this meant doing away with history. “But what would be the value of liberation from those presently in power, if we were not freed from the rule of the temporal itself?” For Hiller, too, the “redemption” of the world was at stake. In 1916, in the middle of the war, he declared: “Let it be stated with perfect clarity: we wish to enter Paradise while still alive. While that is utopian,” he continued, “it is not mere fantasizing,” and he thereby reclaimed, as had Bloch, Utopia, to actively bring about the “Kingdom of God.” He, too, saw at this point in time the apocalyptic transformation impending: “Wait a few days,” he finished his proclamation. “Then the brightest trumpet calls: peace is made. War begins.” However, by 1919 he no longer believed so firmly in “immediate redemption”; the “final paradise” appeared to him now as an “infinite thought” in the sense that a condition of mankind “which they would perceive as complete and final” was incomprehensible: “It will always leave something to be desired; the goal of desire always flees forward before the step of fulfillment; it will never catch up with it.” The more cautious declaration of goals was more in accordance with the faith of progressivists in the limitless perfectibility of man and unlimited progress, but the goals were again and again eclipsed by apocalyptic enthusiasm that was inflamed by the dream of an “earthly Kingdom of Heaven” and of the “Kingdom of God on the earth.”22 The tension between skepticism and traces of apocalyptic hopes was even greater in Gustav Landauer. Landauer’s view of history was itself thoroughly unapocalyptic. In his book Die Revolution, written in 1907, he saw the course of history characterized by a continuous back-and-forth movement, an endless succession of “topias” and “utopias.” He designated a “topia” as the “condition of relative stability” of a society in order

22. Ludwig Rubiner, “Die Änderung der Welt,” Das Ziel 1 (1916): 105; Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” Die Erhebung (1919): 403; Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivis- mus,” 365, 368; Alfred Wolfenstein, “Der menschliche Kämpfer,” Die Erhebung (1919): 274, 283; Alfred Wolfenstein, “Das Neue: Ein Vorwort,” Die Erhebung (1919): 2; Hiller, “Orts- bestimmung des Aktivismus,” 377; Kurt Hiller, “Philosophie des Ziels,” Das Ziel 1 (1916): 196, 188, 217; Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” 376; Hiller, “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus,” 196. See also Condorcet, Esquisse, 344 (perfectibilité indéfinie), 394 (progrès indéfini); and Hiller, “Überlegungun zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus,” 196. 192 The Apocalypse in Germany and affluence that degenerates and becomes rigid after a certain period of time until a “utopia” arises in this crisis as the result of an effort to create a new order “that no longer includes harmful elements and injustices.” Still, a utopia can never be realized as a perfect and continuing condition. It “always” leads “to another topia.” For this reason, Landauer was convinced “that there is no progress in human history as a whole, but only the cessation of certain cultures from age,”23 a conviction that Spengler later shared with Landauer. Landauer also distinguished both types of goal-oriented historical thought that I have outlined above, the apocalyptic and the progressivist, and he rejected them and their adherents equally: “all ethicists and politicians who believe in development, whether they adhere to the theory of catastrophic transformation . . . or whether they wish to establish a continuing progress as the result of the gradual accumulation of small achievements.” His call to create socialism and thereby renew, indeed, to “rescue,” mankind was not intended to suggest that a continuous condition of perfection could be achieved. He rejected “final safety precautions for the millennial kingdom or for eternity” as unattainable.24 Still, apocalyptic sounds are also to be found in Landauer’s vision of a “rebirth,” regularly when he spoke about the current situation and his hopes for the immediate future. The theorist who looked at the “trajectories of human history” could not, in contrast to the apocalyptic purist, reject everything that had gone on before as evil and corrupt. “Everything that is past, even the most reprehensible,” still had, in his view, “a patina of beauty despite its frailty, dispensability, and need to be removed.” He respected “tradition” and thus stressed: “Being a revolutionary and yet being a conservative are not mutually exclusive.” Yet when he looked at the present he saw only “chaos,” and it appeared to him to be indispensable for a socialist to reject “all of our forms of existence.” His vision of the renewal of the human race then gained that absoluteness that is characteristic of the apocalyptic, who intends “to realize nothing less than the whole, the general, the principal” and who enthusiastically devotes himself to

23. Gustav Landauer, Die Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten und Loening, 1907), 12–13, 22–23. Landauer gave his “scientific” view of history an ironic twist, since history and sociology could not, in his view, be pure sciences. But basically this image of history as a continuous back-and-forth corresponded to his own conviction; see 53. On Landauer’s view of history and on the role of “spirit” in his historical thought, see especially Gerlich, Der Kommunismus als Lehre vom Tausendjährigen Reich, 52–69; Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 175–77; and the introduction to Ulrich Linse, ed., Gustav Landauer und die Revolutionszeit 1918/19 (Berlin: Kramer, 1974). 24. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 29, 116, 130, 136. The Spirit of Utopia 193 the dream of a new world of “beauty, greatness, plenitude.”25 In the title of a book by Landauer this tension is aptly expressed: Skepsis und Mystik (“Skepticism and Mysticism”). His fundamental skepticism toward a belief in science and progress, toward all predictions of a complete and final redemption in this world stood in contrast to his desire, which he described as “mysticism” and for which the “heretics, sectarians, and mystics,” the Neoplatonists, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, and Gottfried Arnold, were models. But this quest was directed toward a goal—one that also meant “redemption” and “perfection”—“disrealization” (Entrealisierung) and spiritualization of human existence and of the world, “that we do not have spirit, but are spirit; that the world in us is spirit; not that we recognize it, but that we are it.” Such a goal could properly be expressed with a symbol of the highest perfection: “Let us see how we may become gods.”26 In Landauer, as well, it was “spirit” that made redemption appear possible and could display apocalyptic dynamics in a situation of great distress and despair. Where did this spirit come from, which I—with Bloch—have called the “spirit of Utopia”? It has the same origin as the national spirit, as betray first the frequent praises of the “spirit of Utopia” as the “Holy Spirit,” the “heavenly spirit,” and the “spirit of the future ascension,” in Bloch as well as Hiller and Landauer.27 This is revealed also by Landauer’s judgment that Marxism could offer no “Pentecost miracle,” while his socialism obviously presupposed such a miracle of outpouring of the Holy Spirit.28 The adherents of the “spirit of Utopia” also followed the tradition that reified the “Holy Spirit” of Christianity into an independently operative power in history. At least Landauer and Bloch were aware of the tradition and referred to it. In Thomas Münzer, Bloch cited several brethren “of the free spirit” as models, among them Joachim of Fiore. In his essay “Zur Originalgeschichte des Dritten Reiches” (“On the Original History of the Third Reich”) in 1937, he occupied himself with this thinker in greater detail and, with the keen eye of one who is seeking what he feels akin to, he stressed Joachim’s fundamental and “revolutionary” new elements of speculation: the Calabrian abbot “projected” the movement of spirit, which was merely a “step for the soul” in mysticism “upon the entire human process” and shifted “the view from the hereafter to a terrestrial future time and awaited his ideal not in heaven but on earth.” In the meantime,

25. Ibid., xvii, 101, 87–88, 105; see also 1–2, 16–17, 22–23. 26. Gustav Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik: Versuch im Anschluß an Mauthners Sprachkritik (1903) (Cologne: Marcan-Block, 1923), 46–47, 21, 12. 27. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 441–42, (1923), 311; Hiller, “Philosophie des Ziels,” 204; Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, viii; see also Rothe, Der Aktivismus, 15. 28. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 27. 194 The Apocalypse in Germany

Bloch had also discovered that Lessing took up Joachim’s tradition with his Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. He particularly appreciated Hegel, even more than Schelling, for example, because Hegel had interpreted world history as a process of the self-realization of spirit, while he criticized Schelling for reducing this process to “epochs of Church history.”29 The “spirit of Utopia” could thus appeal to the same tradition as German national spirit at least as late as Hegel. Landauer, too, accorded Hegel’s philosophy “real spirit.” In fact the most important features of the “spirit of Utopia” are foreshadowed in this tradition, precisely those that constituted the modern understanding of the “utopian”: the reification of spirit to an entity that is operative in history, which ultimately means through men who share in spirit; the temporalization of the movement of spirit to a this-worldly process whose goal may be determined, predicted, and ultimately actively brought about. Although Hiller, for example, gives little information about his spiritual forebears, of which he was probably less aware than Bloch, his “doctrine of the final goal” reflects those characteristics: “The total liberation of mankind can only be the work of spirit. For spirit is the name for the power in man that has as its goal the liberation of mankind.” Since it is not easy to understand how this power is concretely expressed, Hiller continues: “Where is spirit to be found? Potentially and rousable in everyone, no doubt; present and awake in few.” The total liberation of mankind will bless “everyone with spirit”—Joachim had already developed this notion of the goal, but only those who “have spirit” already can bring about that liberation. For this reason Hiller again and again asserts the “rule of spiritual men.” Such an assertion is certainly not surprising if one attributes the redemption of mankind to spirit and views oneself as its representative. This claim has its own tradition, as we know; and Hiller also refers here to a relevant model: Fichte. Other adherents of the “spirit of Utopia” are not quite as explicit in their assertions as Hiller is, but even if not expressed, these claims always resonate in the background. Landauer, for example, claimed in 1911 that in times of decline spirit exists only in “a few, in geniuses,” that it withdraws to lonely thinkers, poets, and artists. It scarcely needs to be said that this statement refers to his own time and to himself. During the revolution, when Kurt Eisner invited him to participate in the establishment of a Bavarian People’s Republic, he observed that spirit “leads the revolution” and required one to “be obedient to spirit.”30

29. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 295–96 (see also 60–63); Ernst Bloch, Zur Originalgeschichte des Dritten Reiches (1937), in Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe, 16 + 1 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959–1969), 4:134, 136–39. 30. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 23; Hiller, “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und The Spirit of Utopia 195

In connection with the claims of spirit to rule, some of the men of spirit also entertained the idea of a particular mission for Germany, although they were against nationalism. Kurt Hiller formulated these thoughts carefully but gave them weight by closing his essay “Logokratie” (“The Rule of Spirit”), with the following words: “If Germany has a mission to fulfill in the world, it can only be to place a ‘logocratic’ revolution on top of the democratic revolution of the French and the ‘proletocratic’ revolution of the Russians. In its entire nature and history no people appears more called to the creation of a new nobility than the German people.” Robert Müller, too, ended a contribution for Hiller’s Jahrbuch with the same thought, by commissioning “activism” to found a “universal race” that he defined as a “new spirit race”: “The final result, race, will appear German in the good sense. . . . The universal race is a national affair of the Germans. In it alone can Germanness be fulfilled if it gives itself up as it is today.”31 It appears as though the heritage of Fichte and Hegel roused reminiscences of a mission of German national spirit even in the “spirit of Utopia.” The common ground of tradition ended, however, when spirit was placed in the service of nationalism and gave up more and more of its intrasocietal protest potential in favor of redeeming the world through the destruction of external enemies. The “spirit of Utopia” preserved this protest potential that spirit had possessed and with it the goal of a new and justly ordered society. Oetinger, for instance, in his vision of the “Golden Age,” had provided a detailed picture of a society in which justice and equity prevailed, as an explicit critique of absolutism. If we ignore the fact that in Oetinger’s vision the perfect society would be brought about by divine intervention and not through human effort, this vision was already imbued by the “spirit of Utopia” in the modern sense: the perfect society was not outlined as a fictional paradigm but as a goal of history to be realized in the near future. Tothat extent Oetinger’s “Golden Age” provides—with the noted qualification—an example of the temporalization of utopia even before Mercier’s L’Année 2440. The “spirit of Utopia” extended the protest potential against aristocracy and an authoritarian state, which the national spirit caused to wither, to those who were responsible for it: to the bourgeoisie, who had accommo- dated themselves to the prevailing conditions. Even before the First World

Methodologie des Aktivismus,” 199, 203–5 (see also many other of his publications); Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 6–7, xiii (foreword to the new edition, dated Munich, January 3, 1919). 31. Hiller, “Logokratie oder ein Weltbund des Geistes,” 247; Robert Müller, “Die Geist- Rasse,” Das Ziel 4 (1920): 52; see also 51. Müller’s “race” concept is, despite its connection with “spirit,” not without a biological element. See Helmes, Robert Müller: Themen und Tendenzen seiner publizistischen Schriften, 122–27. 196 The Apocalypse in Germany

War, as societal tensions were increasing in Wilhelminian Germany and created an awareness of a serious crisis, writers and artists, bohemians and anarchists raised, in the name of “spirit,” a protest against the existing society, which they viewed as being represented by the “bourgeois,” and they also asserted the “rule of spirit.” They already included the organizations of the workers’ movement, which seemed to them as philistine as the bourgeoisie, as well as Marxism in their critique.32 Landauer’s judgment that Marxism represented “spiritlessness”33 determined the reason Karl Marx was not included by most of the representatives of the “spirit of Utopia” in the tradition upon which they were building: because in Marx spirit is not in fact the driving impulse of history, but the development of the forces and means of production. Ernst Bloch was the only signiﬁcant representative of the “spirit of Utopia” who attempted during his entire lifetime to harmonize Marx with this “spirit.” Consequently he continually encountered mistrust among the orthodox Marxists. Bloch did receive a professorship at the University of Leipzig after the Second World War, but this occurred more to win the renowned emigrant for socialist Germany than because of his philosophy. In any event, Bloch was not lacking in praise for Lenin and Stalin as well as expressions of loyalty to the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union. In the long run, however, there were too many points of friction between his philosophy and the pure doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. In 1957 he was involuntarily retired, and in 1961 he was offered a professorship at the University of Tübingen in West Germany. Directly after his retirement, the East German Communist Party organized a “Conference on Questions of Bloch’s Philosophy” at which the party philosophers pinpointed the primary point of disagreement: antimaterialism and the idealistic undermining of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, but above all the ideological undermining of Marxism through Judeo-Christian chiliasm.34 In fact, the crucial point was thereby noted: not only did Bloch attempt to combine Marxism and the “spirit of Utopia” to a certain extent as elements of equal right, but he even tried to incorporate Marx “in the

32. Kreuzer, Die Boheme, 289–90, 293–94, 311–12, 331. 33. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 42. 34. See Trautje Franz, Revolutionäre Philosophie in Aktion: Ernst Blochs politischer Weg, genauer besehen (Hamburg: Junius, 1985), 192–97; Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels, 235–45. On his hundredth birthday Bloch received a rehabilitation in the Weimarer Beiträge, but this was a short while later corrected in the Leipziger Volkszeitung with accusations against Bloch’s “metaphysical interpretive model.” See Günther K. Lehmann, “Stramin und totale Form: Der Kunstphilosoph Georg Lukács und sein Verhältnis zu Ernst Blochs Ästhetik der Hoffnung,” Weimarer Beiträge: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Kulturtheorie 31 (1985): 533–57; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 24, 1985, and July 10, 1985. The Spirit of Utopia 197 adventism of the history of heresy.”35 That means that for Bloch, “spirit” was ultimately decisive and the tradition of the “spirit of Utopia” was more comprehensive and of a higher order than Marxism. Further, Bloch appealed particularly to that tradition of the “spirit of Utopia” that was millenarian, and within that tradition particularly to those periods in which spirit developed an apocalyptic dynamic. In his magnum opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Bloch explicated phe- nomenologically what he had already stated enthusiastically in his early works: for him, utopian was the modern term for manifestations of apocalyptic consciousness. The utopias of the type of More’s ideal state were too abstract and limited for him. Although the concept had been shaped according to More’s Utopia, he applied it to apocalyptic visions of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which he contrasted with the “rational utopias” as being of a higher character. The apocalyptic visions embodied for him the actually utopian, that is, hope for the transcendence of the existing deﬁcient reality to a condition of perfection; they embodied for him the “absolute.”36 As early as Thomas Münzer this word, characteristic of apocalyptic rigorism, is used, and it is now clear on the basis of what common ground “Marxism and the dream of the absolute” would join “in the same stride and campaign.” Bloch missed “spirit” in Marx, but he found the same absoluteness of an apocalyptic vision that also distinguished the “spirit of Utopia”: “as the power of the quest and the end of conditions under which man was an oppressed, a despised, a forgotten being, as the remodeling of the planet, and as the call, creation, and the forcing of the Reich.”37 It has often been noted that Bloch’s apocalyptic “spirit of Utopia” “is beholden not merely to the tradition of Christian chiliasm, but is also rooted in Jewish messianism.”38 In his works, Bloch makes no secret of his “messianic attitude.”39 Messianism of Jewish origin also inﬂuenced other adherents of the “spirit of Utopia.”40 Gustav Landauer, to be sure,

35. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 328. On the relationship between the “spirit of Utopia” and Marx in Bloch’s view, and on continuities and changes between Geist der Utopie and The Principle of Hope, see Hans Mayer, “Ernst Bloch, Utopie, Literatur,” in Deutsches utopisches Denken im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, 82–95; see also note 62. 36. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 2:515. 37. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 297. 38. See Münster, Utopie, Messianismus und Apokalypse im Frühwerk von Ernst Bloch; Pinchas Lapide, “Apokalypse als Hoffnungstheologie,” in Apokalypse, ed. Gassen and Holeczek, 10–14; and Voßkampe “ ‘Grundrisse einer besseren Welt,’ ” 316–29. 39. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 296. 40. See Löwy, “Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central Europe,” 105–15; and Künzli, “Zur Befreiung der Emanzipation von der Hypothek der Erlösung.” 198 The Apocalypse in Germany attempted to avoid the apocalyptic acme of messianic hopes of redemption, but Ernst Toller, like Bloch, recognized the apocalyptic “will to the absolute.”41 Even Kurt Hiller, who did not deliberately show his Jewish background, identiﬁed his “impulse to good, messianic, world-changing action” as the root of his “activism.”42 The millenarian and messianic traditions, however, can explain neither the soaring of the “spirit of Utopia” at the beginning of the twentieth century, nor the apocalyptic eruption of the German national spirit in World War I. The “spirit of Utopia” was also the result of genuine interpretations of experience, although the tradition supplied models and symbols for articulating these interpretations. Gustav Landauer made it clear just how troubling and painful the underlying experiences were when, in his Aufruf zum Sozialismus of 1911, he concluded his description of the conditions in the Wilheminian state with the words:

Do you feel, you who hear my words, hear with your ears and with the whole person, do you feel that I was scarcely able to speak while describing this? That I only spoke about this of necessity, because it must be to the point and for your sake that I spoke of this terrible thing, and called it into your consciousness, what I no longer need to be made known, because all this outrage of my surroundings has become a piece of my own property, of my life, of my very bearing and expressions? That I was like one convulsed and almost succumbed to an overwhelming force, that I was short of breath and that my heart was pounding right up to my throat? All you people who suffer from this terror, do not just let the voice that I speak stir you, the color of my words. Above all, hear my silence and my muteness, my suffocation and my anxiety. See also my clenched ﬁsts, my contorted face, and the pale determination of my bearing. Above all understand the shortcomings of this description and my unspeakable inability, because I want people to hear me, people to stand by me, people to go with me who, like me, cannot endure it any longer.43

The “terrible thing” that Landauer had described was the poverty and need of the “great mass of mankind”—their life in dirt and sickness, in joylessness and numbing through alcohol, the violence and regimentation that the state used with its schools, churches, courts, prisons, workhouses, with its ofﬁcials, police, and soldiers. Landauer spoke “from experience.”

41. Toller, Gesammelte Werke, 1:63; see Michael Osser, “Die jüdische messianische Tradition und Ernst Toller’s ‘Wandlung,’ ” in Im Zeichen Hiobs, ed. Grimm and Bayerdörfer, 293. 42. Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” 366. 43. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 20–21. The Spirit of Utopia 199

Because he had dedicated himself to socialism since the beginning of the 1890s, he knew the oppressive situation of the industrial worker from direct observation. He agitated among workers’ groups and participated in strikes as well as in a cooperative self-help organization of Berlin workers. He had personally experienced violence exerted by institutions of the state. As a publicist he was exposed to constant police harassment. Three times he was condemned to jail terms of several months. On the basis of such experiences Landauer was able to identify with the suffering of the “great mass of mankind.” The “ignominy of social conditions” had therefore become a part of his own life experience, because he interpreted the cause of his own suffering as the reason for all the evils of society, not only the material need of the poor, but also the “emptiness, desolation, and lies” of the “wretched rich”: lack of “community” was for him the basic evil, for which reason there could be “no joy and no meaning” for all mankind; the community was lacking, because “spiritlessness” prevailed.44 When Landauer spoke of the “terror” that he himself experienced and when he was so overcome by experiences of suffering that he believed he could no longer endure it, he came close to apocalyptic visions. Such visions, resulting from societal and political abuses, grew more and more in the German Empire under the surface of apparent stability and display of power. In Emmanuel Quint, Gerhart Hauptmann described the mood in the bohemian world of Breslau when socialist laws gave rise to “fanatical resistance” and contributed to

the formation of a mass of bold and revolutionary ideas in many good youthful heads. In all seriousness a violent general societal collapse was expected that would occur at the very latest around the year 1900 and would renew the world. . . . What was called by this name or another, had resulted basically from the same power and longing of the soul for redemption, purity, liberation, happiness, and perfection: while some called this the social state, others called it freedom, or paradise, the millennial kingdom or the kingdom of heaven.45

These examples reﬂect the differences between the “spirit of Utopia” and German national spirit, but they also reveal similarities in the interpretation of experiences: in both cases the apocalyptic reactions were the result of societal tensions and crises; both groups decried the insufﬁcient

44. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 16–19. On the biography of Landauer, see Wolf Kalz, Gustav Landauer: Kultursozialist und Anarchist (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1967); and Linse, Gustav Landauer und die Revolutionszeit 1918/19, 269–75. 45. Cited according to Kreuzer, Die Boheme, 311–12. See the same source for more on the utopian and apocalyptic vision in the bohème of the Wilhelminian period. 200 The Apocalypse in Germany unity of society and were inclined to interpret the failures of society spiritually—as lack of spirit; both types of interpretation of experience were often expressed in the same language, when, for example, the “bar- renness,” “emptiness,” and “meaninglessness” of existence was decried; both looked toward a speedy “redemption”; and the representatives of both “spirits” claimed, more or less explicitly, the rule of spirit and of spiritual men. Still, while in the apocalyptic mission of national spirit protest was turned outward, the “spirit of Utopia” protested against political and social conditions. Its adherents never lost sight of the actual evils and problems of society; and at least some of them, at least those who were not blinded by the vision of the apocalyptic leap into perfection, also thought about the virtues that had to be practiced in a well-ordered society. Landauer in particular had such cardinal virtues in mind when he conjured up the “spirit of justice” for “action on earth,”46 while German national spirit, which was realized within society as the “spirit of devotion to duty and punctuality,” kept only secondary virtues in store. The First World War intensified the experiences of violence, hunger, and want. The “spirit of Utopia” thereby gained additional apocalyptic dynamics that reached their climax at the end of the war. In Toller’s Wandlung we could see what significance the experience of war had for apocalyptic interpretations of experience. The first version of Bloch’s book, Geist der Utopie, written between 1915 and 1917, also clearly reflects the experiential background of war. On the other hand, Bloch shows just how elastic is the connection between the context of experience and the interpretations of experience, and he shows that one cannot say that the more intolerable the external circumstances, the more radical the interpretation of experience and the greater the inclination to apocalyptic reactions. For in contrast to Toller, Bloch did not have to experience war on the front, and, in comparison with Landauer, his life had been much more pleasant until the First World War. Landauer knew whereof he spoke when he expressed indignation at social misery and political repression. By contrast, Bloch, who was fifteen years younger, had never come into contact with such want until the war years. The young doctor of philosophy, who came from a petit bourgeois background but was self-confident and ambitious, moved in the exclusive literary and philosophical circles around Georg Simmel and Max Weber in Berlin and Heidelberg. The role of rebellious enfant terrible that he played with his friend Georg Lukács did not exclude enjoying the advantages of upper-class affluence. In 1911 he turned his eye to a rich young woman, “at least a million dowry, later

46. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 12–13; see xi and passim. The Spirit of Utopia 201 three million marks more to be expected,” he wrote to Lukács. In 1913 he married Else von Stritzky, also the daughter of a millionaire, obtained a villa in Heidelberg that he furnished in an opulent fashion and a year later a palatial estate in Grünwald near Munich—“profound seclusion in our little, secluded palace surrounded by meadows and woods with many rooms and gorgeous old furniture, carpets”; it was here that he wrote his book Geist der Utopie. But when his father-in-law, who lived in Riga, was no longer able to send more money, Bloch began to feel the effects of the war. In 1916 he wrote: “I am a tired, worn-out man who has struggled for the past year and a half with distress and down classing with a sick wife who is in need of good care and nourishment but instead has been experiencing hunger and has been a regular at the pawnshop and at the bailiff’s.”47 In 1917 he went into exile in Switzerland where he continued to live in straitened circumstances. The comparison of Bloch with Landauer shows that the protest of both, which they had raised in their works in the name of “spirit,” was the result of concrete experiential occasions, but that the particular features of their interpretation of experience cannot be explained from the specific occasions of their experience nor from the general political and societal context of experience. What we call “experience” escapes our grasp and is, in the final analysis, not to be “explained.” We can draw conclusions only from the interpretations of experience, first those that arise from the particular character of the interpretations themselves and from their relation to motivating occasions, in addition to conclusions that refer to the relationship of the interpretations to interpreted reality as a whole, that is, to their adequacy to reality. Landauer’s statements make it clear that he perceived his motivating experiences at least as deeply and painfully as Bloch. His protest against the conditions in Germany, which I have noted above, is doubtless an authentic witness to his suffering, his despair, and his rage. With regard to the occasions for experience, which we can to a certain extent view as external events and facts, he could have inclined to apocalyptic reactions more readily than Bloch. Still, Landauer stayed close to the occasions for experience by attempting to describe social distress and political sanctions in as concrete and detailed a fashion as possible. In Bloch, on the other hand, concrete occasions for experience nearly disappear into the metaphorical language of a “metaphysical lament,” revealing the typical characteristics of the apocalyptic interpretation of experience: generalization and absolutizing of experiences of deficiency. The verbose

47. Quotes and biographic information after Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels, 40, 52, 71. 202 The Apocalypse in Germany lament about human existence as a whole, which we also find in Ulrich Horstmann, is already to be found in Bloch. For him, the characteristic features of this existence are “the spider, eating and being eaten, the poison scorpion, the Angel of Death, the demon of chance and mishap, the homelessness of everything meaningful, the stench of death of mankind.”48 Even deeper motives than those of a political and societal nature must underlie such a categorical condemnation of reality, more extreme than poverty and hunger, and Bloch does not conceal them: what causes his “revolt against the constellation as such” is the frailness and limitations of human life, ultimately of death, which show most clearly the fundamental deficiency of the conditio humana. His despair over the unavoidable end drives his quest “to find the remedy against death and finally the rope, the key out of the labyrinth of the world.”49 Bloch was not the only one who was compelled to an apocalyptic interpretation of experience by his experience of the fundamental frailty of man that is finalized by death. The same thing is reflected in Hiller’s dream: “The human spirit will eliminate death.”50 Here we have touched upon the existential center of the apocalypse, which we will discuss in greater detail later. For now, let us continue our consideration of the historical, political, and societal implications of the interpretations of experience. The classifications of “spirit,” which contain such implications, disclose additional differences. The range of possibilities can again be seen in Landauer, Bloch, and Hiller, with Landauer’s interpretations even revealing intrinsic tensions and contradictions. He was particularly concerned about the concept of “spirit” and tried harder than all the others to determine what spirit actually was. “Indeed! Indeed! Here spirit is mentioned rather often,” he admitted in his Aufruf zum Sozialismus. The complex characterizations of spirit that he presented in this pamphlet were an expression of that attempt. They also reflect his effort to preserve spirit from reification, since Landauer made a basic distinction between symbols and “rigid and inflexible concepts that are caught in their linguistic cages.”51

48. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 441. 49. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 330–31. 50. Hiller, “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus,” 205. 51. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 13, 107. Landauer’s understanding of language was very much inﬂuenced by his friendship with the philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner. In 1899 and 1900 Landauer edited the manuscript of the ﬁrst volume of Mauthner’s magnum opus, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, so thoroughly that Mauthner wrote in the foreword: “I could not have managed the publication without the friendship of Gustav Landauer, who supported me unstintingly in organizing and reviewing the manuscript” (Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 82 [afterword, where there are further references to the connection between Landauer and Mauthner]). The Spirit of Utopia 203

And he was aware not only of the origin of the “new spirit” from the “Holy Spirit,” but also of its symbolic quality. “The age of the power of myth has, among Greeks as well as among Christians and everywhere, the particular gift of not taking literally, but symbolically, what is believed, yet not realizing consciously this contrast, thus perceiving of and experiencing the symbol as something corporeal.” This gift was destroyed in Christianity through theology and church, so that the formerly meaningful symbols now would be taken literally and spirit had degenerated into demonry and lies. Landauer criticized Marx in a similar fashion. In his view, Marx had transformed reality into “finished, self-contained, dead being” through rigid, reified concepts, and thereby made an attempt “to take command” of reality. Landauer contrasted Marx with Proudhon, who had shown “that self-contained concepts were only symbols for ceaseless movement; he absorbed the concepts into flowing continuity.”52 Landauer’s belief that the ceaseless motion of reality is expressed in symbols prevented him from ascribing to spirit a regular path of development to a final goal of perfection and basically kept him from apocalyptic speculations on history: “Spirit is always in movement and in creation and what it creates will always be incomplete, and nowhere than in the image or idea will what is perfect occur.” However, this conception did not prevent him from speaking of spirit in such a manner as though it were indeed an independent entity. Although he stressed that “we can only speak in images,” the images regularly presented spirit as a concrete, self-active entity: “Spirit will act in a direct way and he will create his visible forms out of living flesh and blood.” Landauer’s understanding of symbols was not sufficient. It is not sufficient to set spirit into continuous and incalculable movements in order to protect it from prepositional hardening if this movement is not anchored in man’s experiences and “spirit” is understood as a symbol for movements in the human psyche. Since “spirit” in Landauer has not escaped reification, he has to accept the question of how and under what circumstances it may act and shape mankind into a new community, bringing about renewal and salvation. Landauer cannot answer with an explanation, but only with a hope: “I suppose that the miraculous—spirit—can come to the proletariat as it can to any other people.”53 Miracle is ultimately the ground of hope of the apocalyptic adherents of the “spirit of Utopia.” That a radical structural change of reality, with the goal of perfection, will take place is supported by no empirical

52. Landauer, Die Revolution, 39, 40, 54–55; Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 14, 107. 53. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 135, 128, 100, 27. 204 The Apocalypse in Germany evidence and no logic, but is rather a hope that is drawn against all empiricism and logic from the well-known interpretation of experience: that the world has reached such a low point of deficiency that it can no longer continue to go downhill and that a sudden change into a state of fulfillment must take place. Landauer had avoided this conclusion, which is a characteristic feature of the apocalyptic interpretation of experience: “Decline does not by any means suggest decrepitude or a tendency to break down or to be overturned.”54 In contrast, Bloch and Hiller did establish the apocalyptic connection, and as a result of this they did not need to examine as carefully the question of what “spirit” actually is. If the apocalyptic transformation was assumed to be something in the immediate future, then “spirit,” which would bring this about, could be viewed as an unquestioned entity. In apocalyptic expectation “spirit” attains a status that requires no explanation and frees the action of the “spiritual men” of further legitimations. “The impulse to good, messianic, world-changing action,” according to Hiller, “remains dark and bereft of any justification. Intellectualism burning for proofs, compartmentalized and denatured philosophy fail here; the passion of deeper, the certainty of holier powers prevail here.”55 The visionary element that expressed itself in “dark impulses,” in the “passion for deeper and holier powers,” that refused justification, early produced criticism among those who were moved by social misery and political injustice, too, but interpreted their experiences in a different way. The philosopher Salomon Friedlaender, an expert in Kant, Schoepenhauer, and Nietzsche, about whom he had published several books, in 1920 wrote a harsh as well as ironic review of Bloch’s Geist der Utopie. Friedlaender, who also wrote grotesques under the pen name “Mynona,” could not resist mocking the “apocalyptic, fantastic, colorful church-window German of the book,” but he did not leave it at that. He traced Bloch’s style, the “incense of words,” back to Bloch’s “delicate taste . . . to find the Holy Spirit of apocalypse more intelligent than the more sober spirit of Kant,” and he stated, now without any irony: “The noblest opinions, without reason, without a logical law, lead to enthusiasm and chaos.” Above all Friedlaender emphasized the problematic character of Bloch’s absolutizing the experiences of deficiency: “ ‘We modern men are empty, unbelieving, impure, hollow, completely abandoned’—and therefore suited to nibble the bait of the Third Testament?” And with the devaluation of existence and the apocalyptic flight from reality, he contrasted the challenge to

54. Ibid., 59. 55. Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” 366. The Spirit of Utopia 205 accept the conditions of reality and to oppose deficiency under the conditions of deficiency: “The most terrible reality is merely a reason to overcome it with one’s self, to be ‘the eternal Yes’ to everything, is what the earth is lacking. . . . There you have the ‘counter-ideal’ to your spirit of Utopia that breathes the spirit of resentment!” Friedlaender’s position not only betrays Nietzsche’s influence but is also the attack of a Jew in the prophetic tradition against a Jew who adheres to apocalyptic messianism. On the occasion of Ernst Bloch’s hundredth birthday, the Jewish theologian Pinchas Lapide summed up a conclusion that is similar to Friedlaender’s critique and expresses that contrast: Bloch showed “sympathy toward active Jewish messianism, whose goal remains the kingdom of God on the earth. . . . What appears to have escaped him is the golden mean of the Jewish prophets that, between flight from the world and activism in the world, could raise competence in the world to a guiding star of their hope, a clear, creative Yes to this deficient, still incomplete world.”56 Friedlaender’s review of Geist der Utopie appeared in Hiller’s yearbook Das Ziel, and the publisher appended an epilogue in which he attacked Bloch with carefully chosen abuse: “This hysterical pundit, this irides- cent rack-brain, this arrogant and evil preacher of humility and love (in sentences that anxious impotence has produced with an effort), this man rich in ideas that are no real ideas, who writes in a serious-unclear, paradoxical arrogant-ecstatic manner,” who is a “virtuoso dazzler, a richly faceted faker, a conceptually artificial affair of the second or third order. A would-be Utopian, a would-be believer. A ‘depth-turner.’ A toad exploding with spirit, but of an unholy sort.” This flood of abuse even makes the reader who is already acquainted with Hiller’s rude and polemical criticism breathless and leaves him in confusion. Haven’t we determined that Bloch’s and Hiller’s apocalyptic aspirations are very similar, that Hiller even makes the “depth” that he excoriates in Bloch the justification of his own impulses? How can his attack on the apparently congenial Bloch be explained? Friedlaender’s critique remained, for all its biting sharpness, distanced and superior, whereas Hiller betrayed blind hatred, and this fact leads to the explanation: competition at such close proximity and with such fundamental similarity provokes such hatred. We know of this phenomenon from the bitter feuds among different confessions or denominations of the same religion. Bloch and Hiller were fundamentally similar in the interpretation of their experiences, in their radical condemnation of reality, in their devaluation of history, in their hope for apocalyptic

56. Salomon Friedlaender, “Der Antichrist und Ernst Bloch,” Das Ziel 4 (1920): 104–6, 114; Lapide, “Apokalypse als Hoffnungstheologie,” 11, 14. 206 The Apocalypse in Germany upheaval, for entrance into Paradise that “spirit” should make possible. But for Hiller, Bloch was, or sounded, too “religious,” his “spirit” too much in the tradition of Christian enthusiasts, too “metaphysical.” Hiller, on the other hand, wished to have “spirit” understood in a strictly secular and un- metaphysical sense, although it was ultimately irrelevant whether “spirit” has a Christian, idealistic-metaphysical, or activist-secular genealogy if it is conceived of as a reified entity that is realized in history and thereby redeems the world. Hiller indirectly confirmed that his close competition with Bloch was in fact the cause of his hate-filled critique. Hiller himself even recognized his emotional reaction, and he attempted to explain it: “How, friends—a cadenza of hatred? Indeed, I hate this author. . . . I hate him as the caricature of a type that is dear to me,” for he cuts “grimaces as though he were who I am.”57 Bloch was accused of enthusiasm his entire life from all possible sides, and he was repeatedly excused by his adherents. Even on Bloch’s hundredth birthday, his disciple Gert Ueding began his evaluation of Bloch by defending Bloch’s enthusiasm with an appeal to Hegel.58 In contrast to Ueding, I consider enthusiasm dangerous since it clouds a sober view of reality. And, with Friedlaender, I am of the opinion that enthusiasm is a symptom of a deficient sense of reality of the apocalyptic “spirit of Utopia.” This is revealed by the fact that Bloch’s “spirit” failed in his evaluation of political events at a crucial moment, that is, in his evaluation of Stalin and his tyranny during the 1930s. In his essay “Zur Originalgeschichte des Dritten Reiches,” which he published in the exile journal Das Wort in 1937, Bloch demonstrated a sharp eye for the apocalyptic character of Nazism: he characterized Nazi belief in the “Third Reich” and “the Führer” as a perversion of millenarian tradition. But his own apocalyptic faith made him blind to perversions in the other direction. He attempted to defend the “Führer dream” with millenarian tradition, and he saw this dream realized in Stalin with the same enthusiasm that was evinced toward Hitler at that time: “The revolutionary class and certainly those undecided about the revolution desire a face at the head that carries them along, a helmsman whom they trust and whose course they trust—the work on board ship is thus easier. . . . The Communist Manifesto contains no word about Führers or only between the lines, as it were in the existence of its writers, of those who have enacted it. But as soon as the Manifesto began to be realized, there appeared among the majestic fathers of Marxism the name of Lenin,

57. Das Ziel 4 (1920): 117. 58. Gert Ueding, “Utopie als Idee und Erfahrung: Zum hundertsten Geburtstag von Ernst Bloch,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 6, 1985. The Spirit of Utopia 207 followed by that of Stalin—genuine leaders to happiness, focal points of love, of trust, of revolutionary veneration.”59 During these years Bloch again and again defended the necessity and legitimacy of the Moscow trials, through which Stalin disposed of opponents and competitors, even when all the other German emigrants who inclined to Marxism drew away from Stalin, and Bloch even seized upon the most absurd arguments in order to explain the suspicious compulsion of the condemned to confess: “These Trotskyites vie with each other in their compulsion to confess because they know what a problematical effect that would have on the bourgeois West, because they wish to discredit the Soviet Union thereby.”60 Bloch’s enthusiastic belief in the complete transformation of reality made him incapable of judging the political events adequately and critically; for him, the goal of a new world justified the means to attain it, indeed, made the means appear irrelevant; the autosuggestion that Stalin was the leader to happiness made him blind to his crimes. The “spirit of Utopia” turned out to be just as susceptible to blindness to reality as “German spirit.” Bloch’s sacrificium intellectus toward Stalin was indistinguishable from what Binding and Naumann showed to Hitler. Finally, let us ask about the “success” of the “spirit of Utopia.” Kurt Hiller called for the “rule of spirit” most decisively; in 1918, following the outbreak of revolution in Berlin, he attempted, as chairman of a “political council of intellectuals,” to influence the shaping of future political conditions. But the workers’ and soldiers’ councils had no sense for “spiritual politics,” and Hiller was rejected. Until the end of his life, as a result of his elitist attitude, his other activities found little resonance beyond the small circles of his followers. Landauer and Tollergained greater influence during the revolution in Munich. Landauer was a member of the Revolutionary Workers’ Council and became minister of education and the arts in the first Soviet republic in Bavaria, a post that lasted for

59. Cited in Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels, 153. Bloch added this writing in the complete edition of his works in Erbschaft dieser Zeit; there, however, the “majestic (erhaben) fathers of Marxism” have become “founding fathers,” and the remainder of the sentence after “Lenin” is missing (Gesamtausgabe, 4:146–47). Geist der Utopie (the 1923 version) and Thomas Münzer, too, were “revised” or “complemented” by Bloch for the Gesamtausgabe. If this procedure is bothersome for one who would like to read these works in the Gesamtausgabe in their original form, it is interesting evidence that Bloch viewed his early works not from a historical distance, but instead, through their revision, as currently valid statements. 60. Cited in Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels, 157. There also is more detailed information on Bloch’s partisanship for Stalin and his justification of the Moscow trials, as well as in Franz, Revolutionäre Philosophie in Aktion, 104–15. 208 The Apocalypse in Germany only a week. Following Eisner’s murder, Toller became chairman of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and at the same time was a chairman in the Central Council of the Bavarian Workers’, Farmers’ and Soldiers’ Councils; during the Second Bavarian Soviet Republic, he was a commander of the Red Guard. Both Landauer and Toller had to pay dearly for their political involvement, Tollerwith five years’ imprisonment, Landauer with death. Finally, the Third Reich forced nearly all adherents of the “spirit of Utopia” who were still alive to emigrate—Tollerand Hiller, Wolfenstein and Bloch. Bloch was the only one who still found wide resonance after 1945. While his attempt to change the doctrinaire Marxism of the German Democratic Republic according to his own views failed, he became an important figure in the Federal Republic during the student movement of the sixties. Still, few read his works, and his theoretical influence on the New Left was minimal.61 It was not the philosophical program of the “spirit of Utopia” that exercised such fascination, but Bloch’s charisma and enthusiasm: it was Bloch’s unbroken apocalyptic indignation at the evil and inequity of the world for which there are many concrete occasions indeed, and the pathos of his “Principle of Hope,” hope for a better world, which resonated with students.62 But for this very reason Bloch had little lasting impact, when the apocalyptic momentum of the student movement waned. Today the influence of his work on the political Left scarcely goes beyond a few verbal allusions. A critical assessment of the “spirit of Utopia” cannot consist of “spite- fully pointing to the lack of success of the ‘men of spirit,’ ” as Wolfgang Rothe stressed with regard to the failure of the “activists” around Hiller. That their failure was “not their own fault,”63 however, is only half correct. Although the adherents of the “spirit of Utopia” were violently prevented from realizing their ideas, their fixation on the apocalyptic leap into the condition of perfection damaged their ability to correctly evaluate political realities and to act accordingly. It is true that criticism of the “spirit of Utopia” cannot be made from a position that Hiller referred to as that of “pessimism”: “According to eternal ironclad laws everything must remain as bad as always.”64 The struggle against misery and injustice is necessary, 61. See Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels, 321–26. 62. While a “process of development in language and style of thought” in the sense of a “great disillusionment” may be seen between Bloch’s early writings and later writings, according to Burghart Schmidt, Ernst Bloch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 62, to the end of his life Bloch still maintained a belief in the apocalyptic “spirit of Utopia” and confessed to his early works; see note 59. 63. Rothe, Der Aktivismus 1915–1920, 21. 64. Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” 369. The Spirit of Utopia 209 but it can be prosecuted with the prospect of success only with an awareness that it will never end. The apocalyptic belief in final redemption and the vision of an earthly paradise may easily mislead one to despise the struggle for more limited goals and ultimately make one incapable of such a struggle. This page intentionally left blank PART THREE Aesthetics of the Apocalypse This page intentionally left blank C. Forms

There was a great earthquake: and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a ﬁg tree casteth her untimely ﬁgs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together: and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. Revelation 6:12–14

It is hardly surprising that Herder viewed the Revelation of John as a “poetic book”;1 a large share of the fascination that this text exercised in the previous two millennia stems from its “poetic” character. The prophecy of apocalyptic transformation and redemption captivated not only minds, but also the manner in which it was expressed. The Revelation of John and, along with it, to a lesser extent, the Book of Daniel and apocryphal apocalypses shaped, along with the religious tradition, a literary and, in the fine arts, an iconographic tradition. The inconceivable events outlined in the apocalyptic texts inspired the imagination and again and again provided a challenge to artistic creativity. Of course, the manifestation of traditional images did not always remain the same: the poetic as well as the iconographic tradition of the apocalypse continued to develop. In more recent works we further observe such images and motifs that may clearly be traced back to ancient texts as, for instance, the “whore of Babylon” or “the New Jerusalem,” but others as well that are less specific, which cannot definitively be traced to literary models but still have an “apocalyptic” feel as, for example, depictions of a “fall” through fire or flood and descriptions of a “renewal” in images of life, joy, and plenty. Can characteristic commonalities of aesthetic manifestations of “the apocalypse” be ascertained? Is there a specific poetic form of the apocalypse? The classic Jewish and Christian apocalypses are viewed by some theologians as an independent literary genre,2 caused by the desire to distinguish between apocalypses and other genres, particularly those of prophetic texts.

1. Letter to Lavater, October 30, 1771, in Wilhelm Dobbek and Günter Arnold, eds., Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1977), 2:255. 2. See Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik, 19–24; Koch and Schmidt, Apokalyptik, 1, 12; and also essays on the theme of “The Literary Genre of Apocalypses,” in Apocalypticism in

213 214 The Apocalypse in Germany

And indeed, if one wants to determine apocalyptic texts as a genre, one has to take into account not merely religious criteria and criteria with regards to content, but also formal and stylistic criteria: apocalyptic texts have the form of reports of visions, they appear with pseudonyms, they are “syncretistic” in their world of images and symbols. Still, other theologians doubt that such characteristics are sufficient to form an independent genre.3 But even if it were possible to determine ancient Jewish-Christian apocalypses as a specific literary genre on the basis of their formal similarities, such an attempt would fail when we turn to modern manifestations of the apocalypse. In the latter, we find characteristics of “the apocalyptic” in all poetic genres, in drama and in novels as well as—and this makes the matter even more complicated— in nonfiction texts of the most varied sort: in essays, in political pamphlets, and in philosophical treatises. Therefore we will have to forgo the framework of a genre when we attempt to grasp the characteristic commonalities of aesthetic manifestations of “the apocalyptic.” We can determine such commonalities in the most varied kinds of texts; this was demonstrated by our very first comparison between the Revelation of John, Toller’s Wandlung, and Arndt’s Geist der Zeit. It is scarcely necessary to stress that a novel differs from a philosophical treatise, but the latter possesses an aesthetic dimension, too, and uses now and again markedly “poetic” images—let me mention, for example, Bloch’s characterization of human existence through the images of a “spider,” a “poisonous scorpion,” and an “angel of death.” Even explanations that can hardly be described as “poetic” can be conceived of as fictional creations as, for example, when a being, called “spirit,” in an event, called “world history,” acts like a person in a narrative or a drama. Thus, the aesthetic representation of the apocalyptic seems to be capable, after all, of being brought into a comprehensive perspective, although the impression of the apocalyptic emerges in various manifestations—in images, in plot elements, in narrative structures—although these manifestations appear in various texts. How is this comprehensive perspective made possible? The aesthetic form of the apocalyptic vision cannot be separated from its content. The apocalyptic riders, the whore of Babylon, the fall of the the Mediterranean World and the Near East, ed. David Hellholm (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983), 329–43, and Philipp Vielhauer, “Die Apokalyptik,” introduction to Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung, ed. Edgar Hennecke, vol. 2: Apostolisches, Apokalypsen und Verwandtes, 4th ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1971), 408–21. 3. See von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 2:330; and Amos N. Wilder, “The Rhetoric of Ancient and Modern Apocalyptic,” 438; on these difficulties, see McGinn, Visions of the End, 5. C. Forms 215 sinful world, and the New Jerusalem were taken up in literary works and the fine arts not only as formally interesting subjects, even if they frequently appear like simple citation; the images of the apocalyptic tradition were taken up because they expressed something that the recipients viewed, felt, feared, or hoped in the same or in a similar way. Precisely for that reason it did not stop with a simple, unchanged citation. Writers and artists found such images appropriate to visualize their feelings, experiences, and intentions, but because they were their own feelings and intentions, and not those of John of Patmos, they attempted, at the same time, to express their uniqueness. They attributed new, changed meanings to traditional images that created new, changed forms of articulation. The new forms are the result of new interpretations of experience, but the fact that the new forms are modifications of traditional ones leads to the conclusion that equivalent experiences and intentions lie at their basis. We have to draw the same conclusion with respect to linguistic images and other formal elements that cannot be reduced to traditional models, but still appear “apocalyptic.” This impression can arise only because there are commonalities of manifestation, even if they are only structural. The similarities of the manifestations can apparently be an original result of interpretations of experience, which are equivalent to traditional apocalyptic interpretations of experience. Consequently, the aesthetic characteristics, in which the commonalities of apocalyptic texts are expressed, not only are the result of a specific literary tradition, but also are expressed—in the framework of this tradition or in a new, original fashion—through equivalent interpretations of experience. The comprehensive perspective on the aesthetic representation of the apocalyptic is made possible by insight into the equivalence of experiences and their symbolizations, through the insight that the structure of the psyche is depicted in the structure of a symbolic form.4 The symbolic quality of language that is not in itself what is intended allows one to see all forms of linguistic articulation, that is, the aesthetic form of a text in the comprehensive sense, as the symbolic expression of experiences and psychic processes—not merely the “poetic” image, the pictorial symbol, but also the structure of a philosophical treatise or the manner of speaking of a political speech. The theologian Amos Wilder defined three “linguistic modes” as particularly suited to apocalyptic utterances: vision, dialogue, and narrative. He traced back the characteristically “apocalyptic” element that may be equally well expressed in these various modes to the “power” and “myste-

4. See p. 58 in this book. 216 The Apocalypse in Germany riousness” of the “transhistorical” and “transsubjective” experience of revelation, that is, to the particular character of the underlying experience.5 In what follows I will make a similar observation but deﬁne differently the forms in which the apocalyptic appears: images, style, and rhetoric. Thereby better account may be taken of the peculiarities of the aesthetic form that the varied text types reveal. Wilder’s “linguistic modes” are also included in these forms. It is my intention to discover the commonalities of the aesthetic manner of manifesting “the apocalyptic” in these various forms and texts.

5. Wilder, “Rhetoric of Ancient and Modern Apocalyptic,” 449. 14 Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal

The most impressive images in the Revelation of John are of destruction; they present monstrous and fearful scenes that are ultimately more forceful and overpowering than the presentation of the spotless New Jerusalem, and they also take substantially more room; three great visions—the vision of seven seals, the vision of the seven trumpets, and the vision of the seven bowls—fully describe the unimaginable plagues that befall the world and people before Babylon is judged; before the final battle against the enemies of God takes place, Satan is discomfited along with his minions, and, finally, the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven. In these images of destruction, fear and even panic are expressed, while aggression is also vented; fantasies of destruction relieve the pressure of suffering. The historical occasions for these experiences of suffering are not very clear at all; the enemies against whom the aggression is directed may only indirectly be grasped as historical figures: they appear encoded in allegorical images or enciphered in figures. The apocalyptic vision transcends its direct motivations; the motivating experiences of suffering are interpreted in such a way that the whole historical world is corrupted, and the suffering as a result of this reality may be ended by only the destruction of the entire world and the removal of the cosmic order itself. Historical events and political facts are extrapolated to natural or mythical processes; cosmic revolutions appear most suited to displaying the fundamental character of the destruction that is regarded as necessary.1 Earthquakes shake the foundations of the world; hail and fire, mixed with blood, fall from heaven; the sun darkens; stars fall to the earth; the waters turn to blood; and heaven flees.2 Even the “little apocalypse” of the synoptic Gospels prophesies such cosmic revolutions,3 and the Jewish apocalypses similarly present the destruction of the old world in grandiose images

1. Wilder, “Rhetoric of Ancient and Modern Apocalyptic,” 448. 2. Rev. 6:12; 8:6; 11:13, 19; 16; 17. 3. Matt. 24:29; Mark 13:24; Luke 21:25.

217 218 The Apocalypse in Germany of nature: in Daniel a stone smashes the image of the four empires and becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth;4 in the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch, black water, mixed with fire, comes from heaven and brings death and destruction;5 in the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, heaven falls upon the earth, mountains fall on mountains, hills on hills, tall trees are uprooted, and the earth is swallowed up in a great abyss.6 Connected with these images of nature are other images that are also ahistorical but derive from cosmological myths that emphasize the inhuman and superhuman, the terrifying and the mysterious aspects of these events: the chaos-dragon and other horrible beasts rise up out of the sea, murderous insects swarm up from the abyss; they torment and kill people until they themselves are finally destroyed.7 The images and symbols of the Jewish and Christian apocalypses derive from various traditional contexts; they are syncretistic. Theologians and historians of religion have expended great effort to attribute these symbols, which do not come from the prophetic tradition, or apparently are new, to ancient Near Eastern, Iranian, or Canaanite myths. The origin of individual symbols and images is interesting, but even more important is the realization that the syncretistic symbols in the apocalypse make up a symbolic world of images sui generis, whose individual elements have more or less been strongly removed from the meaning that they possessed in the cultural context of their origin. As a means of expression in interpreting experience in a changed situation, syncretistic symbolism as a whole takes on a new meaning. Although the apocalypse uses the symbols of myth, it is not itself a myth as, for example, Northrop Frye believes;8 such a classification would be misleading if the designation “myth” should represent the symbolism by which the origin and order of the cosmos is described in cosmological societies. The apocalypse arises out of a tradition that has broken with the myth of cosmological civilization, and presupposes the experience of a new truth, of a revelation that is superior to that of myth, and also the experience of history. Without this break with cosmological myth, the apocalypse would not be possible at all, since it can arise only out of the experience of extreme tension between intracosmic deficiency and transcendent fulfillment, out of the historical interpretation of this experience of tension, out of the disappointment over the sudden

4. Dan. 2:34–35. 5. Syr. Apoc. of Bar. 53:7. 6. 1 Enoch 83:3–4. 7. Dan. 7:3–8; Rev. 9:2–10; 13:1–11. 8. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 141. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 219 change from a “history of salvation” (Heilsgeschichte) to a “history of disaster” (Unheilsgeschichte), over the delay of the Parousia, which would set a goal for history and give it meaning. That the apocalypse nevertheless uses mythical symbols and images of nature related to the cosmological myth is because their primordial character permits the expression of the fundamental aspect of the projected revolution. But in the apocalypse the processes that are represented in these images are no longer events seen in the context of cosmic creation and dissolution, but historical events that terminate both the cosmos itself and its history. The apocalypse passes judgment on the historical world and also on current political and societal conditions, but formulates this judgment in ahistorical, mythical, natural images in order to express the absolute, comprehensive meaning of the judgment. This ambivalence remains a characteristic of apocalyptic interpretations of experience, just like the syncretism of the images. The respective manifestations change; old images and symbols are rejected, new ones accepted, again from varying contexts of tradition. But the basic inclination remains to garb apocalyptic visions in images of the forces of nature. The complex of images in which visions of destruction are preferentially represented illustrates this well. Since the Revelation of John (in which fire falls from heaven), destruction by fire is a preferred image of the apocalypse, while in more recent times it expanded in Germany to “universal conflagration,”9 very probably under the influence of the north Germanic myths of the “Ragnarök” that gained popularity following the romantic period and, not least, helped by Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.10 Another image of nature that became common in the apocalyptic tradition for the destruction of the world is the flood, for which Noah’s flood doubtless served as a model. The apocalyptic prophecy in the Gospel of Matthew for the first time compared the coming judgment with Noah’s flood, and it is still cited, in our days, in Enzensberger’s “comedy” The Sinking of the “Titanic.”11 Finally, to a certain extent as a counterpoint to the world conflagration, the congealing of the world in ice and frost

9. This was particularly widely used to interpret the First World War; see Eggert Windegg, Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, 3, 12, 55, 56, 91. 10. For its part, the apocalyptic component of the Ragnarök myth appears to have taken shape toward the end of north Germanic paganism under Christian influence; see Peuckert, “Germanische Eschatologien”; and Axel Olrik, Ragnarök: Die Sagen vom Weltuntergang (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1922). 11. Matt. 24:37–41; Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Der Untergang der “Titanic”: Eine Komödie (1978) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 42, 69, 107. The original myth interpreted the flood not as an apocalyptic event, but in the apocalyptic context the image of the flood took on this interpretation. 220 The Apocalypse in Germany appeared in the picture gallery of the apocalypse.12 The conception of universal destruction by flood or frost has also been promoted since the eighteenth century by scientific theories and by speculation about periodic flooding of the earth and “Welteislehren.” Images of destruction through natural forces could thus be drawn from various sources, but not only from literary or “scientific” ones; destructive forces of nature can be experienced again and again in reality: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, storm and hail, ice and snow. The visualization of apocalyptic interpretations of experience could thus be related to one’s own experiences. Often natural catastrophes, or the fear of them, generated apocalyptic visions or—what is more probable—strengthened the inclination toward an apocalyptic outlook, and were taken as signs of its validity: at the beginning of this century Max Beckmann saw the earthquake of Messina in 1908 as an occasion to paint a picture of the destruction of human society; Ludwig Meidner’s Apokalyptische Landschaften (“Apocalyptic Landscapes”) may have even been indirectly influenced by this event as well as by the San Francisco earthquake in 1906; in 1910 Halley’s comet led to a wave of fantastic speculations about the end of the world and was interpreted as the “Vermouth-Star” that falls from heaven like a burning torch in the Revelation of John; the sinking of the Titanic in the icy waters of the North Atlantic two years later was understood as an event of symbolic significance and was accordingly used as such in works of art and literature, from Beckmann’s colossal painting in the same year to Bernhard Kellermann’s novel Das blaue Band in 1938, to Enzensberger’s “comedy”; Welteislehren and Sintflut-Theorien by Hanns Hörbiger, Philipp Fauth, Karl Brandler-Pracht, and others gained popularity, transforming fears of destruction into “scientific” and, at the same time, colorful prophesies. With images of fire, flood, and other forces of nature, the association with cosmic destruction may still be evinced, and such images are still suited to express not only fundamental fears and the experience of suffering, but also the apocalyptic desire that the old, imperfect world would disappear in order that the new, perfect world might arise. The occasions for experiences

12. As a metaphor for the torpidity of the old existence that must be overcome; see Johannes R. Becher, Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten: Der Aufbruch eines Volks zu Gott: Ein Festspiel (1919), in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Johannes-R.-Becher-Archiv der deutschen Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, 18 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1969–1981), 8:39, 85, 97. The imagery of death through freezing and particularly the motif of the polar journey were thoroughly analyzed by Metzner, Persönlichkeitszerstörung und Weltuntergang. Although the imagery of death through freezing and the motif of the polar journey certainly are very interesting I consider them, in contrast to Metzner, more a peripheral phenomenon of the apocalyptic tradition that in many regards, e.g., with the motif of the journey, goes beyond the typically apocalyptic experiential world and its symbolization. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 221

Figure 5 Max Beckmann, Scene from the Destruction of Messina (1909). © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2000. on which apocalyptic interpretations are ﬁxed have certainly changed since the time of Daniel and John of Patmos, but even manifestations of modern civilization and current political events are connected with the ahistorical images of forces of nature and myth in more recent apocalyptic interpretations. The metropolis provided one of those new occasions for experience, becoming a center and symbol of a new, highly industrialized civilization toward the end of the nineteenth century in Germany.13 With its streets and buildings, its factories, and its technical equipment, the metropolis

13. In the decades before World War I, German society experienced an unprecedented and stormy process of change; Germany became a modern industrial society. The employees in industry, trade, and services outnumbered the employees in agriculture; people living in 222 The Apocalypse in Germany

Figure 6 Max Beckmann, The Sinking of the “Titanic” (1912–1913). © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2000. documented the progress of the modern world, and it evoked fascination with its liveliness and its constantly changing impressions. But at the same time it also presented the dark face of progress: unhealthy working conditions and miserable living quarters with dreary tenement blocks; its chaos and anonymity, hectic pace and noise, were alarming. Also, the literary works, for which the experience of big cities had become an important theme since naturalism, betray both shock and fascination.14 cities for the ﬁrst time outnumbered the rural population. Old residential and commercial towns changed into industrial cities; the cities grew vigorously because of the immigration from rural regions and because of population growth, which in Germany amounted to 36 percent between 1890 and 1913. While in 1870 there were only eight big cities with a population more than 100,000, in 1910 there were forty-eight. Berlin doubled its population between 1880 and 1910 from 1 to 2 million. 14. See the introduction to Wolfgang Rothe, ed., Deutsche Großstadtlyrik vom Natura- lismus bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973); Wolfgang Haubrichs, ed., “Stadt und Literatur,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 48 (1982); and Karl Riha, Deutsche Großstadtlyrik. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 223

If in the literature of naturalism criticism of poor living conditions and social grievances was prominent, for expressionists the metropolis became a symbol for an apocalyptic world that is doomed to destruction. Georg Heym’s metropolis poems best present this new dimension. The visions of his poems transcend the motivating experience of the big city and degrade the manifestations of the city to metaphors of destruction whose apocalyptic dimensions may be mediated only by images of myth and of the forces of nature:

THE GOD OF THE CITY He sits broadly on a block of houses. The winds lie blackly about his brow. Full of fury he looks, where far off in solitude The last houses wander about in the countryside.

As evening falls Baal’s red belly shines, The big cities surround him, kneeling. A monstrous number of church bells Surges toward him from a sea of black towers.

Like a dance of Corybants bellows the music Of millions loudly through the streets. The chimney smoke, the factory clouds Rise up toward him, like the scent of incense turning blue.

The weather smoulders in his eyebrows. The dark evening is deadened in night. The storms ﬂutter, which like vultures look out From the hairs of his head, which bristle in anger.

He thrusts his butcher’s ﬁst into the darkness. He shakes it. A sea of ﬁre races Through a street. And the glowing vapor rages And devours it until the late break of morning.15

In other poems by Heym, too, for example, in “Die Dämonen der Städte” (“The Demons of the Cities”), black clouds and a cloudburst, black rain and red ﬁre, but above all the demons themselves, lend an apocalyptic character to the “funeral song” of the “sea of cities”:

But the demons grow monstrously. Their templehorn tears the skies red.

15. Georg Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider, 3 vols. (Hamburg: Ellermann, 1960–1964), 1:192. 224 The Apocalypse in Germany

Earthquakes thunder through the lap of the cities Around their hoof, over which a ﬁre blazes.16

That the metropolis is only an occasion for experience, and that, in its image, a more comprehensive, apocalyptic interpretation of experience is articulated, which is also based on other experiences, is suggested by Heym’s poem “Der Krieg” (“War”) in 1911. In it, the motif of the dying city is included in a vision of cosmic destruction by a mythical god of war:

A great city sank in yellow smoke, It plunged silently into the belly of the abyss, But stands monstrously above the growing debris That turns its torch thrice into the wild heavens. Above the reﬂection of mangled clouds Into the cold deserts of deathly dark, Because he parched the night far and wide with the ﬂames, Fire and brimstone drips down on Gomorrah.17

In 1911 it might still have been obvious to represent the vision of war as an event of nature or in mythic form; even in the visual arts of those years, war was represented overwhelmingly by allegorical persons. But the experience of the First World War, with its means of mass destruction, changed the way of seeing war and thus its artistic representation. But still, if war was interpreted as an apocalyptic event, images of destructive forces of nature and of mythical figures superseded the realistic representation of the new occasion of experience. Bernhard Kellermann’s novel Der 9. November (“The Ninth of Novem- ber”) portrays the final year of the war in the visions of the young invalid soldier, Ackermann, as an apocalyptic scenario: “For months, for years, a cloud of dust flickers high above the battlefield, it rains black blood—the apocalyptic riders move over the clouds and pour out their vessels over Eu- rope.” In Berlin, Ackermann experiences the dissolution of societal order and morals as a precursor of total destruction: “Silently and ceaselessly the black rain of ashes fell on the dying city.” But at the same time, harbingers of the “coming Kingdom of man upon the earth,” “the kingdom of the New Man,” are already being revealed, and again in images of myth—the Furious Host—and of nature: “The black clouds hastened along over the dark city without end, without number. The dead in their frozen soldier’s cloaks stood on it.” “Like a flash the new sun burns in the sky. It rose up

16. Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften, 1:186–87. 17. Ibid., 346. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 225 from broad Russia, soaked with blood and tears. It crossed the Vistula. It will cross the Rhine. It will cross the English Channel.” Even the actual events of war, whose description appears at first blush to be thoroughly “realistic,” gain momentum and the impression of apocalyptic destruction by transforming modern technical warfare into images of nature: “From one horizon to another fire, dust, and smoke roll—burning men fall from heaven, a hailstorm of torn human flesh sweeps over the earth. The air lightens with raging thunderbolts, full of rage the glowing cannons flash, the angry predatory growl of the heaviest caliber rumbles. The earth shakes, the framework of the atmosphere shudders. Avalanches, landslides, volcanoes belch forth.”18 It scarcely needs to be said anymore that the “vision” is the typical mode of expression of apocalyptic texts. The apocalyptic interpretation of experience that seeks to eliminate the unbearable tension between deficiency and fulfillment finds the appropriate form of representation in this mode. Redemption may be anticipated only in vision. But also the images of destruction are expressed in visions since the apocalyptic interpretation of experiences extrapolates occasions for experience of destruction, dissolution, and decline to a comprehensive, cosmic catastrophe. Since the end of the nineteenth century, visions of destruction appear that do not open a perspective to a new world, but there are still visions of the classic apocalyptic type in which renewal follows destruction. The visionary new world stands in radical qualitative and moral contrast to the old; the dualism between deficient and perfect, bad and good, which the apocalyptic interpretation of experience transforms into the succession of destruction and renewal, characterizes the imagery of apocalyptic texts. Images of nature, or images that represent the contrasts in the rhythm of nature and life, illustrate the qualitative and moral dualism: darkness and light, sleep and wakefulness, fading and blooming, rigidity and movement, glowing fire and embers, death and birth. Examples of this sort are to be found in the Revelation of John and in the apocalyptic passages of the Epistle to the Thessalonians, as well as in Arndt and the poets of the First World War, in Toller and Kellermann, Hitler and Rosenberg.19 Among the metaphorical representations of apocalyptic dualism, the images of filth and cleanliness are particularly striking. This is already a characteristic of the Revelation of John: again and again the chosen, who are to enter the New Jerusalem, are presented in white clothes, while the damned wear filthy clothes and are covered with sores; the “beautiful 18. Bernhard Kellermann, Der 9. November (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), 389, 156, 113, 357, 462, 456, 448, 367. 19. See Chapter 1 and pp. 169–70, 234, 253 in this book. 226 The Apocalypse in Germany pure linen” appears as an allegorical image for the “righteousness of the saints.” Among the symbolic animal figures, the lamb in its purity and innocence stands in contrast to disgusting vermin, frogs, and impure fowl, but particularly to Satan’s dragon that is cast into a pit of fire and brimstone. In contrast to the whore of Babylon, “full of abomination and filthiness,” rises the New Jerusalem, of “pure gold, like unto clear glass,” surrounded by light, “clear as crystal”; “and there shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth.”20 Images of filth and of purity are also characteristic of modern apocalyptic texts—both fiction and nonfiction. In this regard Karl Marx briefly formulated his judgment concerning the old world: the apocalyptic “transformation”—that is, the “massive change of men”—must be brought about through a revolution, because the oppressed class “can only succeed in a revolution to get all the old filth (Dreck) off their backs, as a precondition for establishing a new society.”21 The picture that Ernst Bloch painted of the world that he wished to see destroyed was substantially more colorful: Creation itself appeared to him as a place of “darkness,” “hourly we see living things decaying into dead matter, and this piling up around us as trash, as dung, as the scene or inadequate frame of inorganic nature.” But the society of his time, too, the time after the First World War and the failed revolution, was for him “filled with the stench of paralysis, rotting and black darkness.” Thus he considered it imperative first to oppose the obvious manifestation of evil, that is political and economic power, and this together with Marx and “with a revolver in one’s hand wherever and as long as it cannot be destroyed otherwise, wherever and as long as the devil vigorously opposes the undiscovered amulet of purity.”22 In expressionist literature, besides other images for apocalyptic dualism, images of filth and purity were popular. In 1919 Alfred Wolfenstein introduced Die Erhebung: Jahrbuch für neue Dichtung und Wertung with a preface, titled “The New” (Das Neue); he saw “the New” as “light” after the “darkness” of the old world, as “life” opposite “paralysis” and “slag”: “the ‘New’ signifies ‘purity.’”23 In his drama Die Wandlung, Toller contrasted the “rubble,” “slag,” and “filth” of the old, dying world with the vision of a “great cathedral of mankind,” shining like “crystal,” that is reminiscent of the New Jerusalem.24 “Rubble” and “slag” were popular

20. Rev. 19:8; 3:4; 4:4; 6:11; 7:9, 14; 16:2, 10; 19:14; 9; 12–14; 16:13; 18:2; 20:10, 14; 17; 21:11–27. 21. Karl Marx, “Die deutsche Ideologie,” 367. 22. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 316, 325. 23. Wolfenstein, Die Erhebung (1919): 1–2. 24. Toller, Transfiguration, 104, 56, 98. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 227 metaphors used to describe the dead and paralyzed as well as the “polluted” in the former existence; in Johannes R. Becher’s 1919 apocalyptic drama Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten (“Workers, Farmers, Soldiers”), the “glorious transformation” to a new existence appears as “deslagging”: “for behold, my deplorable terrestrial form, has been ‘purged of night and slag,’ and evolved in a preternatural form.” As in other texts, “slag” and “filth” stand for the old world as a whole, including one’s own existence, which Becher even characterizes by involuntarily implying scatological associations: “But we poor are the rubbish. Just crap.”25 His completely revised drama of 1924 retained the same main title but had changed the ecstatic subtitle “Setting Out of a People to God” to the class-conscious “Outline to a Drama of Revolutionary Struggle.” This work maintained the scatological imagery, but applied it to the opponents of transformation: capitalists, aristocrats, officers, shavelings, and “social traitors” are presented in a “German cesspool”; many wear “coiled exhaust pipes on their posterior,” a lieutenant appears as a “mixture of swine and sparrow,” and the “German god”—“a medal shines on its posterior”—spreads a “pestilential odor.”26 In Kellermann’s novel Der 9. November, Ackermann’s apocalyptic vision of revolutionary upheaval casts the contrast between old world and new, as well as that between good and evil in images of filth and cleanliness: “Indeed, brothers will march along and will build a new world on the bloody debris of this poor world. Raze the barracks, they will call out, smash them, raze them! Their stench poisons Europe and the earth. . . . Cleanse the schools and churches, where innocent children and pure souls are cheated. Cleanse the temples, out with the false priests, . . . out with the vain lawyers, with hardhearted old men.”27 The Nazi apocalypse, as well, cast the promised renewal in the image of “purification” and associated the enemy with “filth”: Hitler promised redemption by “keeping the blood pure”; he saw the realization of this goal as a “mission assigned by the creator of the universe to the German people.” This mission was hindered by “impure” Judaism; Goebbels noted in his diary: “The Jew is, I believe, the Antichrist of world history. We hardly find our way in all this filth of lies, dirt, blood, and bestial savagery.” Rosenberg described the approaching “final decision” as a struggle against filth: “Either we ascend to a cleansing effort, or the last Germanic-Western

25. Johannes R. Becher, Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten, in Gesammelte Werke, 8:84, 29; see also 8:33: “Break in, light! The perniciousness of my dross is washed away: I believe I am looking for a miracle.” 26. Johannes R. Becher, Arbeiter, Bauern, Soldaten: Entwurf zu einem revolutionären Kampfdrama, in Gesammelte Werke, 8:155–61. 27. Kellermann, Der 9. November, 281–82. 228 The Apocalypse in Germany values of civilization and culture are lost in the filthy human tides of the metropolises.”28 Images of filth for the enemy and of flood for destruction are common features of the apocalyptic imagery. As early as 1919 Gustav Roethe had stormed against the “ugly political torrent of sin and filth” of the revolutionary era; in 1943, looking back at the twenties, Heinz Kinder- mann reacted with shock to the “rising tide of these spirits of mud,” by which he meant primarily the Jews.29 In order to present Judaism as the evil enemy in a particularly dangerous and sinister light, the imagery of “filth/flood” was associated with vermin. The film Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), for instance, presented the wanderings of the Jews on the map of Europe and commented on this presentation with fade-ins that showed rats streaming along. It seems obvious that a psychoanalytic interpretation may be connected with the preference of apocalyptic visions for images of filth and cleanliness, but also with the excessive destructive fantasies of the apocalypse. For Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and other Nazis who displayed respective fixations in their imaginations as in their behavior, such interpretations were repeatedly attempted; but the imagery that I described as characteristic for the apocalypse was not analyzed in this context, and therefore there was no question to what extent apocalyptic symbolism generally can be attributed to specific psychic dispositions.30 Still, character studies of Nazi leaders are significant as representative diagnoses. If I neglect individual peculiarities of those investigated, and collect only the results that relate to “apocalyptic” ideas and their representation, a psychopathic syndrome may be described with narcissistic, necrophilic, destructive, and anal-sadistic components. The tendency of the apocalypticist to take himself and his suffering so seriously that everything else becomes unimportant and that the whole world might perish for the sake of his suffering, and that history should come to its end, may be seen as an expression of narcissism. The unshakable

28. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 5th ed. (Munich: F. Eher, 1933), 1:234; Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels, 85; Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 82. 29. Cited in Klassiker in finsterer Zeit 1933–1945, 1:22, 344. 30. Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Erlösung und Vernichtung: Dr. phil. Joseph Goebbels: Zur Psy- che und Ideologie eines jungen Nationalsozialisten, 1923–27, 306–32, represents an exception; see, too, Walter C. Langer, Das Adolf-Hitler Psychogramm: Eine Analyse seiner Person und seines Verhaltens, written in 1943 for psychological warfare in the United States (Vienna: Molden, 1973); Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness; Helm Stierlin, Adolf Hitler: Familienperspektiven (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975); and Alan Dundes, Sie mich auch! Das Hinter-Gründige in der deutschen Psyche (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch- Verlag, 1987). Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 229 certainty of representing truth and good, which leads to the demonization of the enemy, and results in typically apocalyptic dualism, is in accord with the profile of the narcissistic personality that cannot free itself from its childish megalomania;31 finally, the visions of glorious triumph over the enemy in which megalomania flourishes also accord with this profile. Erich Fromm has found necrophilic destructiveness in Hitler. He described Hitler’s reveling in “fantasies of uninhibited destructive rage,” whose primary target was the Jews, as characteristic: necrophilic aversion to the outside world, which was experienced as “filthy” and “poisoned,” became concrete in his hatred of the Jews. However, Hitler’s destructive fantasies were directed against not only the Jews; they became more and more comprehensive, particularly during the war: The enemy countries were to be left behind as “scorched earth”; Paris was to burn; finally, Germany itself was to be destroyed and nothing was to remain except an immense funeral pyre. Destruction was ultimately more important to him than creation. Fromm concluded: “He was a hater of mankind, a hater of life itself.”32 Universal destructive fantasies are also characteristic of the apocalypse, and often enough the authors of apocalyptic texts gloat over the fantasy that enemies are being killed and their bodies are lying around. The Revelation of John repeatedly describes the destruction of evil men through carefully chosen plagues; many suffer particular torments: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” Others will be humiliated even in death: “And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city. . . . And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry.”33 In modern visions of destruction, also, we find images of “blood, entrails, corpses of animals and men,” “shimmering in all colors of decomposition,”34 as in Alfred Kubin’s novel Die andere Seite (1908) or in Alfred Lichtenstein’s “Prophezeiung” in 1912:

Once comes—I have signs— A storm of death from the far North.

31. Sigmund Freud, Zur Einführung des Narzißmus, in Gesammelte Werke von Sigmund Freud, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols. (London: Imago, 1952), vol. 10; Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 200–207; Bärsch, Joseph Goebbels, 212–33. 32. Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 401. 33. Rev. 9:6; 11:8–10. 34. Alfred Kubin, Die andere Seite: Ein phantastischer Roman (1908) (Vienna: Gurlitt, 1952), 261. 230 The Apocalypse in Germany

Everywhere it reeks of corpses. Massive killing is beginning.35

Narcissism as well as necrophilic destructiveness may be expressed as malicious aggression and form a syndrome to which anal sadism may be added. The latter disposition was ascribed to Hitler as well as Himmler: both were possessed by a burning, hate-filled connection to dirt and an overpowering demand for “purification.” They continually equated Jews and other “subhumans” with images of filth and trash and finally had them eliminated like rubbish in death camps in order to “purify” Germany and Europe. The anthropologist Dundes described this excess of anal sadism as the final culmination of a typically German disposition: for hundreds of years the German national character has been anally fixated; from Luther to Grass, a particular preference for scatological language and for images of filth may be observed, and perforce conceptions of cleanliness.36 In addition to Dundes’s thesis I wish to put forth my observation that images of filth and cleanliness are characteristic of the apocalypse in general and, at the same time, warn against hasty conclusions. As regards the anal fixation of German national character, it may be observed that the relevant images and ideas also appear in apocalyptic texts of other nations and in all eras. The Revelation of John already presents such images in great number, as we have seen; the apocalyptic transformation is symbolized as a ritual of purification, and if one wishes, one can even see here an obsession with washing: “Blessed are they who wash their clothes, that they may share in the Tree of Life and enter in at the gates of the city.”37 Not just the Germans interpreted the First World War as an apocalyptic event that should effect a great “purification.” For example, the young Rupert Brooke wrote, in the euphoria of the outbreak of the war:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

35. Cited in Silvio Vietta, ed., Lyrik des Expressionismus (Munich: Deutscher Taschen- buch Verlag, 1976), 122. 36. Dundes, Sie mich auch! 56–68, 123; see also 117–20. In addition, see Sigmund Freud, Über Triebumsetzungen, insbesondere der Analerotik, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10; and Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 299–324. 37. Rev. 22:14 (New International Version); similarly 7:14. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 231

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love!38

May we thus conclude that the fantasies of filth and cleanliness are primarily characteristic of all apocalypses and, to that extent, are not reserved for the Germans alone, but that this imagination is particularly popular in Germany to the extent that it betrays a peculiar inclination of the Germans for apocalyptic ideas? There is some evidence for this conclusion, but does this conclusion lead to the further conclusion that the apocalypse is an expression of anal fixation? Absolutized in such a way, this résumé would be one-sided and would fail like so many other exclusively psychoanalytic interpretations.39 It is common to express experiences in images of everyday life. The apocalyptic interpretation of experience not only makes use of images of filth and of cleanliness, but also has darkness and life, sleeping and wakefulness, cold and warmth, age and youth, just as Brooke’s poem indicates. The “anal” imagery must be seen in its context. It should further be noted that psychoanalysis ascribes these traits of character to everybody in a greater or lesser degree; narcissism or anal fixations are not necessarily expressed in malicious aggression. The symbolism of the apocalypse is rooted in experiences; with their interpretation psychic dispositions are disclosed that can be interpreted psychoanalytically, but the symbolism of the apocalypse cannot be reduced to such interpretations. Not every anal fixation that hides behind striking images of filth and cleanliness produces an apocalyptic view of history and the expectation of the end of the world. Apocalyptic interpretations of experience are rooted also in psychic dispositions that are not anchored in sexual libido and that cannot be determined by the Freudian profile. But above all, the apocalypse is a historical phenomenon that appeared for the first time in a specific historical situation and changed in its further development. Each type of apocalyptic symbolism interprets experiences in a specific historical context and makes use not only of anthropologically constant images of

38. Cited in John H. Johnston, ed., English Poetry of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 30. 39. A good example is Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 1977). Theweleit’s book, as instructive as it is in many details, shows in its chapters about “filth,” “mud,” and “flood” that the absolutizing of psychoanalytic observation has certain distortions and limitations as a consequence; the relevant images may be observed not only among “völkisch,” nationalist, and Nazi authors of the twenties and thirties, as I have indicated, but also among “writers of the Left” and in texts of completely different eras and civilizations. Thus they may clearly not be used as proof of fascist or quasi-fascist characteristics. 232 The Apocalypse in Germany nature and everyday life, but also of patterns of interpretation mediated by the social context of consciousness, which to that extent have a historical character; finally, each symbolism interprets also occasions for experience that are historically new. A look at current visions of destruction that occur in the thrall of a threatening nuclear conflict shows what changes may thus take place in apocalyptic fantasies of filth and cleanliness and of apocalyptic interpretations of experience in general. It is interesting that they also share a preference for images of filth and cleanliness. A condition of perfect human existence that could be represented in the image of cleanliness is not being expected by the majority. As I have tried to show, Horstmann’s vision alone fulfills the classical apocalyptic interpretive schema at the price of excluding man from the state of perfection: the rubbish of the human world, the “cesspool of creation,” shall disappear, and only the world that is freed from organic filth can represent cleanliness. “The final judgment of the organic! The return of immaculate matter! The dawning of the kingdom of heaven on earth!”40 Others are not able to rejoice at this prospect; in numerous more recent novels, fictitious documentaries and plays about a nuclear war, or about the period thereafter, the terrors of destruction stand in the foreground and images of filth are dominant. The latter are apparently inspired by a new reality, by the justified assumption of how the world would appear after a nuclear conflict: “completely buried under meter-high ashes.” In his novel Julius oder Der schwarze Sommer (“Julius, or The Black Summer”), Udo Rabsch relates the odyssey of his “hero” who survives the bomb through the world that is suddenly and completely transformed into filth. Anton Andreas Guha, too, in his “Journal from the Third World War,” Ende, conjures up the terrifying vision of total nuclear pollution: “The flash of detonation pierced the eyes like an arrow, thunder threw us to the ground. . . . Rain! Let’s not get into the sticky, black rain. . . . Fine, thin rain of ash fell ceaselessly. The sky was black-gray. Wilderness. The whole of Europe one Pompeii. The end of the world. Total nuclear war. Billions of tons of dust begin to transform the earth into a black desert, into a desert shrouded in poisonous fumes. I saw the shroud fall down, the invisible radiation interwoven like a curse.”41 Although this vision translates scientific knowledge about the effects of a nuclear war, the similarity of the vivid presentation with the vision of

40. Horstmann, Das Untier, 98, 100. 41. Udo Rabsch, Julius oder Der schwarze Sommer (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1983), 103; Anton Andreas Guha, Ende: Tagebuch aus dem 3. Weltkrieg (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1983), 151–53. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 233 destruction of, for example, the Apocalypse of Baruch, is striking: “Before its disappearance the cloud rained black water . . . and fire was mixed with it. This water brought destruction and annihilation as it fell. Then I saw how the lightning hit the people and threw them to the earth, the lightning that I saw at the far edge of the clouds.”42 Let us attribute these similarities to the accidental inventions of the imagination, whose possibilities are limited when it comes to visualizing global destruction—through the forces of nature, even if they are produced by man; through fire and lightning; black, evil rain; and ashes as from a volcanic explosion. Guha draws the parallel to Pompeii, and in Rabsch’s novel, Julius thinks: “Of course it could have been a volcano.” In Matthias Horx’s “novel between the ages,” Glückliche Reise (“Happy Journey”), which takes place sometime after a nuclear conflict, other images of filth come to the fore that are likewise mediated by a new universe of experience. The threat to our environment by the garbage that modern civilization produces clearly presents the imagery of “environmental pollution”; Horx has his “hero” Jonathan wander around in the ashes of civilization in a postnuclear landscape: “They waded though rubbish, empty tin cans, soggy cardboard. . . . On slushy ground with tin cans, paper, trash, stood tables, chairs, sofas in a semicircle around the hearths. . . . Others sat dumbly on pews sinking in the mud. Behind the fires glinted an oily, rubbishy expanse of water. . . . Everywhere trash, battered cans, rubbish, parts of furniture.” This “new” world is symbolized not by the purity of crystal but by a “ ‘layer of filth’ that covered all men and things.”43 Still, in the chaos of filth, the opposite pole has not completely disappeared. To be sure, cleanliness does not appear as a shining vision of what lies ahead, but as a small preserved remnant of a bygone world: a moving high point in Julius’s as well as Jonathan’s odyssey through filth is a bath, once in a real bathtub, the next time in a brook. Because pure water in reality would not be found in a world polluted and contaminated by nuclear fallout, one can attribute these scenes to the authors’ efforts to maintain the tension; between filth and the opposite pole of purity and fulfillment, for compositional if not psychic reasons. The state of purity and fulfillment is indeed still depicted: the bath produces a sense of well-being, and in both novels it provides the scene for a love affair between the hero and a woman whom he met by accident. However, purity and happiness have become a frail, quickly passing illusion. At first, Julius marvels at the “beautiful body,” at the pure “neck like ivory”; in the next moment 42. Syr. Apoc. of Bar. 53:7–8. 43. Rabsch, Julius, 103; Matthias Horx, Glückliche Reise: Roman zwischen den Zeiten (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1983), 92–93, 104, 112. 234 The Apocalypse in Germany he “grasped in slippery knots. They were as big as a fist and covered the entire back.”44

Let us leave the visions of destruction and ask how the visions of fulfillment were imagined when the condition of perfection still appeared possible. Like the scenes of destruction, the visions of the New Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth employ images of nature, too. The Revelation of John depicts the New Jerusalem as a city of pure gold, pearls, and precious stones, and in the middle of it flows a “pure river of water of life,” on both sides of which stands a “tree of life” that “bare[s] twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month.” The image of the garden, reminiscent of Paradise, is popular. “We can forsee gardens,” Becher has the children call out in Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten, and immediately thereafter he translates the “premonition of paradisiacal purity” into stage instructions: “Bright—The Wilderness is transformed—Tree—The Green—Fullness—Silence—A Flute.” Ackermann has a similar vision of redemption in Kellermann’s 9. November: “And the earth will be a garden! . . . The deserts will bloom, the sand itself will bear fruit. Indeed, the earth a garden.”45 Furthermore, creaturely well-being, and an uninhibited development of vital powers, belongs to the conception of perfection. For Kurt Hiller, Paradise, which should be effected through the spirit of activism, is in the first place “a place that allows all its inhabitants to be nothing but vital”: “Paradise is the place where everyone feels well in a physical, spiritual, and who knows what other regard. The inhabitants of Paradise (who are not spirits or angels but men) enjoy the happiness of an unconscious creature— without the pathy of the unconscious. Paradise knows no poverty except difference in needs; no sickness except the rhythm of turgor; a fertile back and forth between fatigue and exuberance.” Hiller, however, did not envision Paradise as the Garden of Eden but more “as a beautiful, very large city.” Whether the model of the New Jerusalem or the fascination of big-city life was responsible for this preference may be left open for the moment; in any event, he did not wish his Paradise to refrain from the comforts of modern civilization: “Even newspapers are to be found in Paradise; they are just as indispensable as water closets.”46 Finally, there are images of abundance that capture the condition of fulfillment, of an abundance that again nature grants. The early Christian millenarians and Talmudists demonstrated a particular imagination by in-

44. Horx, Glückliche Reise, 122; Rabsch, Julius, 202–3. 45. Rev. 21:11–27, 22:1–2; Becher, Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten (1919), in Gesammelte Werke, 8:74, 76, 53; Kellermann, Der 9. November, 345–46. 46. Hiller, “Philosophie des Ziels,” 196–97. Images: Torrents of Mud and Crystal 235 venting images that make Paradise a land of milk and honey. Appealing to Papias, a disciple of John, Irenaeus described the millennial kingdom thus:

Days will come when grapevines will grow, each with 10,000 branches, and on one branch 10,000 twigs, and on each twig 10,000 shoots, and on each shoot 10,000 grapes, and on each grape 10,000 berries, and each berry, squeezed when pressed out, will give 25 pails of wine (250 gallons). And if one of the saints takes one grape, another will call out to him: I am a better grape, take me and praise the Lord through me! Similarly, a grain of wheat will produce 10,000 ears, and each will have 10,000 grains, and each grain will give 10 pounds of pure white ﬂour. Accordingly, all other sorts of fruit and seed and plants.47

Heinrich Corrodi, the enlightened critic of millenarianism, attempted the malicious joke of calculating that, according to Irenaeus’s statements, a single grapevine would produce 2.5 quintillion pails of wine (25 quintillion gallons), and the saints in the millennial kingdom would have to be of considerable stature in order to be able to consume such quantities.48 The Talmudists envisioned the fulfillment of the Messianic kingdom as a feast at which abundance prevails. There is a gigantic ox, Behemoth, available to be eaten, which feeds on a thousand mountains every day, but especially the whale Leviathan is available, whose savoriness is surpassed only, perhaps, by its size: it is so large that it daily devours a fish three hundred miles long. Immediately after the Creation, God killed the female Leviathan “and pickled it for the righteous for the world to come,” while the male Leviathan is now being captured by the archangel Gabriel with great effort. The righteous thus eat from the delicious fish; there is wine in abundance to drink, and for dessert God will “have all sorts of fruits brought from the Garden of Eden.” “Thereupon one will set out to thank the host”; the “cup of blessing” that is the size of a wine cask will, in a contest of modesty, be passed on from Abraham to Isaac, to Jacob, to Moses, and to Joshua, until finally David lays hold of it and drinks his thanks to God.49 The picture that Marx drew of the earthly paradise of communist society is less colorful, although he, too, as I have already indicated, envisioned a condition of perfection in very basic and ahistorical activities that relate to nature: “to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, to raise livestock in the evening, even to criticize the meal.”50 The state of perfection, 47. Ernst Klebba, trans., Des heiligen Irenäus fünf Bücher gegen die Häresien (Kempten: Kosel, 1912), 5:33, 3. 48. Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, 1:496–97. 49. “Baba Bathra” V,1, in Der Babylonische Talmud, trans. Lazarus Goldschmidt (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1967), 8:207–9; Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, 1:331–45, offers the richest collection of relevant texts. 50. See p. 82 in this book. 236 The Apocalypse in Germany however, appears to have a flaw when food can be criticized. Pious Jews who are permitted to eat pickled Leviathan are the better for it in this regard. The image failed Marx because it draws attention more powerfully to the pleasure of the stomach than to that of the head. But it is intellectual pleasure he is after. Marx, who wrote “critiques” his entire life—including Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsphilosophie (“Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of the State”), Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (“Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law”), and, especially, his magnum opus, Das Kapital, to which he gave the subtitle Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (“Critique of Political Economy”)—obviously could not imagine Paradise without the pleasure to criticize. And since state, society, and economy can no longer be criticized since the Kingdom of Freedom is perfect and in the condition of perfection without history, the desire to criticize might at least be satisfied with food. It is clearly difficult to vividly imagine a condition of perfection and fulfillment. The cold grandeur of the New Jerusalem paved with gold and jewels actually has no attractions. And who could find it enjoyable day in and day out to hunt, fish, and raise cattle? Even the “excellent and very wisely appointed ecclesiastical government,” which Jung-Stilling envisioned for the millennial kingdom, has an alarming quality: “Every Christian man or woman, from childhood to old age, will be under strict observation and management so that no one will be able to take a step unnoticed.”51 There is no denying that in all the images of the kingdom of perfection shortcomings are hidden, but the greatest evil is boredom. Cor- rodi had reproached the Talmudists with “crude and animal sensuality,”52 but, if any, the image of a festival, particularly when it is so richly drawn as in the Talmud, is most suited to give a lively impression of “plenitude.” However, even a festival would become tedious if it never ended. Under the conditions of human existence, fulfillment cannot be experienced without tension to the opposite pole of deficiency, that is, only as relative, con- ditional, and temporary, and it therefore cannot be imagined as absolute fulfillment. If the tension is apocalyptically eliminated and one attempts to pin down fulfillment in vision, it turns into its opposite. Boredom means emptiness. To that extent, Ulrich Horstmann has found the most fitting image for the “fulfillment” of an apocalyptic vision: “The true Garden of Eden—that is a wasteland.”53

51. Jung-Stilling, Erster Nachtrag zur Siegsgeschichte der christlichen Religion, 118–19. 52. Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, 1:330. 53. Horstmann, Das Untier, 8. 15 Style: Dramatic

Although it scarcely seems possible to identify apocalyptic texts as an independent literary genre, a generic literary term appears again and again in any attempt to describe them, particularly in theological investigations— and the term used is apocalyptic drama.1 This is remarkable since by “drama” one understands a text in dialogue form that can be performed as a theater play, and none of the ancient apocalypses possesses this form. There must be other qualities that suggest a comparison with drama. The theologian Bernard McGinn characterized the plot as the most important basis of comparison; he ascertained that, as a rule, apocalypses reveal a three-part basic pattern that may be compared with the structure of a three-act drama: “crisis,” “judgment,” and “redemption.” This may be seen particularly well in the apocalyptic interpolation in the Gospel of Mark, Mark 13, because of its brevity and conciseness. Alfred Wilkenhausen has organized the Revelation of John according to this principle, but without justifying the use of the generic literary term. The first part of his disposition has the heading: “First act of the eschatological drama: The events preceding the decisive battle between Satan and God and preparing it.” This section contains the visions of the seals and trumpets and of the trials and plagues that are imposed on men, that is, the description of the “crisis.” Wilkenhausen included the vision of the bowls, the judgment on Babylon and the beast, the millennial kingdom, and the destruction of Satan in the central section; he entitled it “The second act as well as the climax of the eschatological drama: The final struggle between God and Satan for control of ‘dominion over the earth.’ ” To the final section, he gave the title: “Third

1. Thus, for example, already Lavater, Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, 1:242; similarly Alfred Wilkenhausen, Der Sinn der Apokalypse des Hl. Johannes (Münster: Aschendorff, 1931), 35– 40; Anderson, Creation versus Chaos, 136–37; Wilder, “Rhetoric of Ancient and Modern Apocalyptic,” 442; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 5; and McGinn, Visions of the End, 6.

237 238 The Apocalypse in Germany act of the eschatological drama: Establishment of the eternal kingdom of God.”2 The similarity in plot of apocalyptic texts with many dramas is an important characteristic, but it is actually insufficient to justify the frequent comparisons between apocalypse and drama. Are there further similarities? McGinn noted that the “dramatic form” of apocalyptic texts results from “easily perceptible scenes and powerfully sketched characters.” Wilder defined the characters as dramatis personae, while Tuveson stressed the “dramatic confrontations,” and the “suspense” of the apocalyptic action. All of these comments permit us to see that their authors attribute the quality “dramatic” to the apocalypse on the basis of more or less exactly defined characteristics that are known to them from dramas. Lavater expressed his impressions in a very similar fashion: he stated that he was impressed by the “dramatic character” of the apocalypse: for him it was primarily the content of prophecy that appeared to him as a “nonpareil drama,” but that he gained his impression over the model of literary form is betrayed by the ensuing exclamation: “What material for the poet!”3 We can thus state that apocalyptic texts appear “dramatic,” even if they are not dramas, on the basis of characteristics that are generally found in dramas but whose occurrence is not restricted to this literary genre. I include all these characteristics in the designation “style” and characterize the apocalyptic style as dramatic without regard to which literary genre the individual texts belong. In this I follow Emil Staiger, who made precisely this distinction between drama as a genre and the “dramatic style” in his Grundbegriffe der Poetik (“Basic Principles of Poetry”). To be sure, the most impressive examples of dramatic style are found in dramas, but each work of literature has a share in all genres and can reflect the various characteristics of style in varying strengths and mixtures; dramatic style may also be found in texts of other genres. In his description of style, Staiger actually went beyond literature by understanding the conceptual adjectives dramatic, lyric, and epic as “literary names for fundamental possibilities of human existence,” and he thereby did not always find agreement. Nonetheless we have to keep this aspect in mind since we want to understand apocalyptic modes of expression as specific interpretations of experiences that are at least partially rooted in the conditio humana, that is, in the basic tension of human existence between deficiency and fulfillment. But this does not mean that the adjective dramatic has to designate an “anthropological”

2. McGinn, Visions of the End, 6, 11; Wilkenhausen, Der Sinn der Apokalypse des Hl. Johannes, 35–40. 3. McGinn, Visions of the End, 6; Wilder, “Rhetoric of Ancient and Modern Apocalyp- tic,” 442; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 5; Lavater, Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, 242. Style: Dramatic 239 quality, since it always stands for the formal expression and can always be used with the qualified meaning that Peter Szondi preferred: “belonging to drama.”4 In apocalyptic texts, too, we have to do with structural and formal elements that appear like those of a drama. Staiger characterized the features of dramatic style by way of the Greek tragedies and dramas of Corneille, Racine, Gryphius, Lessing, Schiller, Kleist, and Hebbel, which means according to models of “Aristotelian” drama in the widest sense. What characterizes the dramatic style according to this definition? In the first place, tension, of which two types have to be distinguished that nevertheless often supplement or suffuse each other: the tension of pathos and the tension of posing and solving a problem. The quintessence of pathos is: “[T]he prevailing situation ought not to be! Instead of that, something else ought to be!” That is precisely the basic position of the apocalypticist, whom one could consequently characterize from an aesthetic point of view as a pathetic man par excellence. Like the pathetic hero of drama, he is “moved by what ought to be and his movement is directed against what exists”; he lives in the “tension between the present and the future.” The claim that the pathetic speaker represents, in his feeling what ought to be, enhances his stature vis-à-vis his public and refers him to the speaker’s platform or the stage. The herald of the apocalypse does not necessarily speak from the theater stage, but he nevertheless speaks from an elevated position, too: he is selected by the revelation that he receives, like John of Patmos; he exalts himself in the consciousness of his superior knowledge, like Arndt, who revealed this self-consciousness in the title of his pamphlet Letztes Wort an die Deutschen (“Last Word to the Germans”), or like Toller, who expressed this self-consciousness in his preface to his drama Die Wandlung: “The way! The way! Thou poet wise.”5 The exalted position of the pathetic speaker, as well as his tension toward what ought to be, places the listener under pressure, attempts to overcome his lassitude, to rouse him and to break his resistance. This is expressed in particular features of style that we also find in apocalyptic texts and that are articulated in particular in apocalyptic rhetoric. Further, pathos develops a propelling force in the tension between the present and the future, a violent “precipitation,” as Schiller observed. Drama follows 4. Emil Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, 4th ed. (Zurich: Atlantis, 1959), 209, see also 10; Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas 1880–1950 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 13. The discussion of the concept of “style” is as lively as it is confused; Hans- Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds., Stil. Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), offers a current overview of the state of the discussion. 5. Staiger, Grundbegiffe der Poetik, 151–52; Arndt, Ernst Moritz Arndts Sämtliche Werke, 9:169; Toller, Transfiguration, 56. 240 The Apocalypse in Germany the “law of intensive and restless progress.” We also find this acceleration toward the end in the apocalypse. Bengel already stressed the “rapidity” with which the Apocalypse of John moves toward the end.6 Everything moves toward this end or—in order to formulate the circumstances now in the sense of posing and solving a problem as in drama— “everything depends, in the truest sense of the word, on the end.” The totality of a literary text in the dramatic style, be it a drama, a novella, or a ballad, is organized toward one point. The parts of the text have no life of their own, as is possible in subplots in a novel: they have meaning only with respect to the goal—they are “signposts.” “The totality and the final meaning of the events are only revealed at the end.” This is also the case in the apocalypse, as Lavater already observed: “The end of the world and the final judgment will also be dramatic—a step-by-step development of divine thought. The final judgment is the sum, the cataclysm of all previous divine actions, of everything that has happened.”7 A further important characteristic of the dramatic style that Staiger stresses may also be found in the apocalypse: the dramatic poet does not narrate the story of one’s life, like the epic poet, but evaluates it. He is like a judge who investigates a case and finally renders a judgment “according to the law that was fixed and established from the outset. . . . As a result drama moves by its inward nature to the form of judgment, as shown by a large number of plays of various periods.” Schiller had expressly proclaimed the “jurisdiction of the stage”: “The entire realm of imagination and history, past and future is at its disposal.”8 The similarity with the apocalypse is again apparent: judgment as a “scene” within many apocalyptic texts, as in Daniel and John; the fundamental jurisdiction of the apocalypse, which, in its most comprehensive sense, extends to history, past and future; the apocalyptic author taking on the role of judge who, like Arndt, passes judgment according to a law fixed from the beginning that says that the accomplishments of national spirit determine the value and rights of a people: “At the outset I assert with world history that pronounces the judgment: the Poles and the whole Slavonic tribe are inferior to the Germans.”9

6. Schiller to Goethe, December 26, 1797, in Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Hans Gerhard Gräf and Albert Leitzmann (Leipzig: Insel, 1912), 1:455; “Präzipitation,” in Grundbegriffe der Poetik, by Staiger, 156; Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 165. 7. Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, 158, 169; Lavater, Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, 242. On the ﬁnal tension of drama, see also Peter Pütz, Die Zeit im Drama (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977); and, of course, Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 7. 8. Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, 176–77; Friedrich Schiller, “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” in Sämtliche Werke, 5:823. 9. See p. 112 in this book. Style: Dramatic 241

The loose, but not arbitrary, connection that Staiger made between style and genre makes it possible to transfer the poetic characteristics of dramatic style to apocalyptic texts. Apocalyptic interpretations may appear in all literary genres in addition to nonfiction texts. Still, a tendency to dramatic style can be observed. This tendency may be more or less strongly realized, not only according to how explicit an apocalyptic interpretation is expressed but also according to what literary genre it is articulated in. The Revelation of John is dramatic in a high degree, as readers have indicated again and again, although it is not literally a text of the dramatic genre. Of course we observe a pronouncedly dramatic style when an apocalyptic vision is also literally cast in the form of drama. We can easily see this in Toller’s Wandlung: the stylistic tension produced by the action that poses and solves a problem is in harmony with the existential tension toward salvation; the rhetorical pathos corresponds to the indignation that grows from the apocalyptic interpretation of experience; the formal structure of drama, which is organized toward the end, corresponds with the apocalyptic worldview and interpretation of history; the condemnation of the dramatic antagonist undertaken in scenic performance expresses the apocalyptic jurisdiction; and the scenic exaltation of the hero of the drama and the self-exaltation of the author correspond to the self- consciousness of the apocalyptic visionary who has recognized the way to salvation. In expressionist dramas of an apocalyptic character, these correspondences are particularly apparent as, for example, in Becher’s drama Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten, whose organization in three acts also maps the phases of apocalyptic action—crisis, decisive battle/judgment, salvation. Other apocalyptic texts, for example, poems or essays, cannot stylistically transform their dramatic intensity in such a complete fashion. But even texts that are thought of as scientific reveal the dramatic style of the apocalypse, as, for instance, those of Marx. I wish to view, from an aesthetic perspective, as if it were a work of fiction, one of the texts in which Marx develops his apocalyptic interpretation of history—the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law. Marx himself gives the key at hand for an aesthetic consideration that gives particular regard to dramatic style. He introduces his overview of the most recent history of Europe with the exclamation: “What a drama!” and he sees the individual phases of this history as “tragedy” or “comedy” and personifies the various regimes as “comedians” or “real heroes.” The drama that Marx is outlining carries the title “general human emancipation”; with this title he marks the goal to which it ought to lead. How can this goal be achieved? Marx first sketches a dramatic outline of how he views achievement of this 242 The Apocalypse in Germany goal under conditions in France, “that a certain class, from its particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society.” Let us read the following passage as a deliberation of casting this possibility as drama and leading it to its desired goal, let us think of the “classes” and “social ranks” as dramatis personae, let us consider the discussion of their actions as a test of dramatic conclusiveness and theatrical effectiveness, and let us understand the metaphors not in the figurative sense, but literally:

No class in civil society can play this part [that is, effecting the general emancipation of society] unless it can arouse, in itself and in the masses, a moment of enthusiasm in which it associates and mingles with society at large, identiﬁes itself with it, and is felt and recognized as the general representative of this society. Its aims and interests must genuinely be the aims and interests of society itself, of which it becomes in reality the social head and heart. It is only in the name of general interests of the society that a particular class can claim general supremacy. In order to attain this liberating position, and thus to enable the political expropriation of all spheres of society in the interest of its own sphere, revolutionary energy and consciousness of its own power do not sufﬁce. In order that the revolution of a people and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, in order that one class represents the whole of society, another class must concentrate in itself all grievances of society; a particular class must represent all obstacles and limitations. A particular social sphere must stand for the notorious crime of the whole society, so that emancipation from this sphere appears as the general emancipation. In order that one class be the liberating class par excellence, it is necessary that another class should be openly the oppressing class.10

To a certain extent, Marx discusses the posing of the problem and possible solutions of the proposed drama, which ought to lead to the goal of “general human emancipation.” Under French conditions he considers possible his outlined solution to the extent that the dramatis personae “nobility” and “bourgeoisie” can take over those roles described. But in Germany he does not consider this sketch as realistic since the corresponding classes or ranks are insufﬁciently educated as dramatic characters. For France a drama can be outlined that moves in a traditional manner in several acts to its goal: “The role of emancipator passes from one class of the French people to the next in dramatic movements.” In Germany, on the other hand, such a drama cannot be performed with the actors at hand: “The relationship of the different spheres of German society is thus not dramatic, but epic.”11

10. Marx, Die Frühschriften, 211–12, 219–20. 11. Ibid., 222, 221. Style: Dramatic 243

How is the drama “general human emancipation” to be staged under German conditions? This task, first of all, places significant demands on the dramatist. He is obliged to subject the German situation—insufficiently educated actors—to sharp criticism, and to express this criticism in the pathos of the dramatic style: “Its essential pathos is indignation.” By developing this pathos, Marx passes to the stylistic formation of the drama itself. Through rhetorical figures—repetition, iteration, intensification—he creates the impression of a dramatic posing of the problem; those addressed are being roused, they are placed under pressure, and their resistance should be broken: “The point is that the Germans must not be allowed a single moment of self-deception and resignation. The existing pressure must be made even stronger, by adding to the pressure the consciousness of being oppressed; the disgrace must be made even more ignominious by publicizing it. Each sphere of German society must be described as the partie honteuse of German society; the petrified conditions must be forced to dance by singing to them their own melody! One must teach the people to be frightened of itself in order to make it courageous.” But since in Germany, in contrast to France, the “gradual liberation” over several acts is not possible, another terse form of the drama must be outlined; and because the bourgeoisie is not in the position of playing the role of emancipator, another protagonist has to be trained that not only produces a “partial emancipation,” but also brings about “universal emancipation.”12 In his sketch of this new outline, Marx creates drama by intensifying the tension between the posing and solving of the problem through more and more confrontations, until the solution at the end, on which everything depends, is expressly named and the tension disappears. What constitutes the possibility of realizing the drama “general human emancipation” under German conditions?

The answer lies in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society that has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and that does not claim a particular redress because the wrong that is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong as such. A sphere of society must be formed that claims to no traditional title but only a human title, which is not partially opposed to the consequences but is totally opposed to the preconditions of the German political system; a sphere, ﬁnally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society, and without thereby emancipating all of them; a sphere, in short, that is the total loss of humanity and that can only redeem itself by a total

12. Ibid., 210, 211, 222. 244 The Apocalypse in Germany

redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.13

The hero of this drama, the proletariat, will accordingly not be presented as a mixed character, like the French bourgeoisie, which plays an ambivalent role, liberating and at the same time oppressing. The new hero is unambiguous in his “universal suffering”; he is (using once again Staiger’s characterization) “motivated,” in an extreme degree, “by what ought to be; his movement is directed against what exists”—against “everything that exists,” might be added—against “all other spheres of society.” The specific dramatics of Marx’s sketch result from the extreme contrasts that the hero and his antagonists represent; these contrasts also justify the absoluteness of dramatic judgment concerning justice and injustice; the high pathos of indignation results from them, as well as the enormous “precipitation” of the drama that does not allow a gradual development, but leads to the goal in one breath, in a dramatic reversal of the original situation. The goal is the “German resurrection day”;14 and this phrase, in the final sentence of the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, reminds us once more that the contrasts reproduce the dualism of the apocalypse and that we are facing an apocalyptic drama. It is not unusual that the world and history are presented as drama. This tradition extends from antiquity through Calderon’s´ “Great World Theater” and similar baroque plays to Das Salzburger große Welttheater, by Hofmannsthal. But these plays are as a rule not apocalyptic. Only in Hofmannsthal’s Welttheater does the figure of the beggar articulate a typical apocalyptic protest against the world:

The present world must perish, the world must be renewed, Even if the world should drown in a sea of ﬂames And in a bloody deluge: It is blood and ﬁre that we need.15

But the conversion of the beggar eliminates this protest—the drama itself does not become apocalyptic. Apocalyptic dramas control history, past and future, in a particular manner, and they develop particular dramatics, even if they are not theater plays. We can grasp the reason for this peculiarity if we view the dramatic style of the apocalypse as “symbolic” in the sense that

13. Ibid., 222–23. 14. Ibid., 224. 15. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das Salzburger große Welttheater, in Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, 15 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1951–1969), Dramen 3:294. Style: Dramatic 245 even the style expresses experiences, and if we relate these experiences to the structure of the apocalyptic view of history. We have noted that the apocalyptic view of history tends to invert history: it commences with the end of previous history and ends with the beginning of a hoped-for new existence. We can designate its structure as inversion because it appears to us as “more natural” that a history moves from the beginning to an end even if we have to do with the history, the history of the world and of mankind whose end is still open. We find this structure realized in a representative way in the cosmological myth, for example, in the Theogony of Hesiod as well as in the cosmogonic and anthropogonic myth of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The style of this depiction of history is epic; to that extent, just like the literary genre of epic, myth is distinguished fundamentally, structurally, as well as stylistically, from the traditional apocalypse. I view these contrasting modes of depicting history as fictions, even if they present themselves as nonfiction texts. I understand them as fictional models of the temporal world: they are constructions, and these constructions express differing interpretations of experience. In our experience, time moves not in steady speed but in completely different measures according to the experiential content of a specific “time.”16 According to our perception, time can pass faster or slower, and we experience continuous periods of time as well as disruptions and interruptions of continuity.17 Normally continuity corresponds to our needs. Telling a story that moves from a beginning to an end means constructing a continuum in which the middle stands in agreement with beginning and end; thereby the order of a context is established that offers reliability and meaning. In our own life we strive for continuity, too. From the midpoint of our present we direct our perspectives of memory into the past and expectation or planning into the future in order to construct the reliability and meaning of a continuing process. In his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man without Qual- ities”), Robert Musil brought the basic human need for continuity into

16. For the aspects of this problem of time that play a role in the following discussion, see G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Paul Fraisse, The Psychology of Time (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964); and Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. 17. I do not wish to enter into a discussion concerning the distinction between chronos and kairos, since it would unnecessarily complicate our reflections and since the distinction is not clear in the New Testament. In recent theological discussions (see note 16), one usually distinguishes between chronos as “flow of time” and kairos as “moment of crisis,” but also as “fulfillment of time.” 246 The Apocalypse in Germany direct connection with the order that is constructed by epic narration. In view of the difficulty of bringing all possible experiences in relation to himself, it occurs to Ulrich, the central character of the novel,

that the law of this life, for which one yearns, overburdened as one is and at the same time dreaming of simplicity, was none other than that of narrative order. This is the simple order that consists in one’s being able to say: “When that had happened, then this happened.” What puts our minds at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order: the stringing upon one thread of all that has happened in space and time, in short, that notorious “narrative thread” of which the thread of life itself consists. . . . This is the thing that the novel has artiﬁcially turned to account: the traveler may go riding along the highroad in pouring rain, or be walking though crackling snow, the temperature thirty degrees below freezing-point, and still the reader will feel a cozy glow. This is something it would be hard to understand if this everlasting epic device, by means of which even nannies soothe their little charges, this tried and tested “intellectual foreshortening,” this “perspective of the mind,” were not part and parcel of life itself. In their basic relation to themselves most people are narrators. . . . What they like is the orderly sequence of facts, because it has the look of a necessity, and by means of the impression has a “course,” they manage to feel somehow sheltered in the midst of chaos.18

We discover the same need for order and “epic” comprehensibility when the entire history of mankind is narrated as in Jewish and Christian “His- tory of Salvation” (Heilsgeschichte) or in Condorcet’s or Hegel’s philosophy of history. It is true, the beginning and end of mankind are in the dark— like the beginning and end of our life, by the way, too—although we know that there was a beginning and there will be an end. But the narration of history invents a mythical beginning or reconstructs it “scientiﬁcally”; and it lengthens the line of developments and events that are seen in consonance from our presence, from the past to the future toward an end that corroborates the consonance of the entire process. The construction of a human beginning-end continuum requires the experience that our present stands in meaningful agreement with developments and events of the past, since otherwise trust in the future, which the ﬁctional continuation of the continuum expresses, could not be summoned. But there are also experiences of dissonance, of the irruption of irrational events, of chaos, which destroys all continuity. The present

18. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, 3 vols. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1979) 2:435–36. Style: Dramatic 247 is thus not perceived as a point of transition of lines of continuity that stretch from the past into the future, but as a time of discontinuity and dissonance, as a moment of crisis. Such a time is perceived as unstable, which makes one uncertain and anxious. The less bearable this experience, the greater the inclination to write off the past completely and to interpret the moment of crisis as a juncture to something completely new that is hoped of the future. This is the fictional model of the temporal world that the apocalypse outlines. History as narrative of continuities no longer appears to be possible; the only thing of interest is the interim phase between the actually completed hitherto and the hoped-for new, which is so intensely anticipated that it already appears to irrupt into the present. This interim phase is the “sphere” of the apocalypse. The temporal sphere of the apocalypse is extremely similar to that of drama. “Every dramatic theme was formulated in this sphere of the ‘between’ ”—thus Szondi designated the drama of modernity. He had the sphere of “interhuman relations” in mind, but this sphere also lies between the times, it interrupts the flow of time, and it thereby eliminates time itself to a certain extent. In his discussion with Schiller about epic and drama, Goethe assigned to the latter the “presentation of the perfect present”; and Szondi stressed, citing Lukács: “The present of drama is absolute because it has no temporal context: ‘drama does not know the concept of time.’ ‘Unity of time means being set out from the flow of events.’ ” In his calculation that the “duration of judgment day” will “perhaps be completed in the space of a minute, a year, or a millennium,” Lavater stated that time also is irrelevant for the present of apocalyptic events. In the same way, Bengel saw the events described in the Revelation of John squeezed into the absolute present of a moment that, to that extent, “has no time”: “We must thus view the entire book as though everything in it were stated in a moment.”19 The apocalyptic moment, the moment of crisis, already includes the solution. Also the anticipatory inclusion of the future into the absolute, “timeless” present is a characteristic of drama, as Szondi indicated: “The passage of time in drama is a succession of the absolute present. Drama guarantees this as an absolute itself, for it creates its own time. Therefore each moment must contain the germ of the future in itself, it must be ‘pregnant with the future.’ ” This characterization, for its part, is comparable to Walter Benjamin’s and Ernst Bloch’s conceptions of messianic time, to Benjamin’s conception of “messianic time” as an interruption and 19. Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas, 14; Goethe to Schiller, December 23, 1797, in Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, 1:452; Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas, 75–76; Lavater, Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, 242; Bengel, Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 166. 248 The Apocalypse in Germany elimination of the continuous flow of history, as a “messianic shutting down of events” at the particular moment that brings “a completely new solution,” and to Bloch’s understanding of the current “Now” as a “Not Yet” that potentially contains “the date of the completion of the world” and to that extent already anticipates the “goal” of history.20 This fictive model of the temporal world, which drama and apocalypse outline in a similar manner, is based on the possibility of experiencing time as discontinuous, as a moment of crisis, which interrupts and stops the flow of time, as a dividing line between the past, which is finished off, and something completely new. Like the beginning-end continuum, this model is a construction, since the moment of the present cannot be completely removed from the flow of time, the past never completely closed off like a book. The construction cannot be carried out except by aesthetic means; the similarity between drama and apocalypse is presented through the similarity of these means that we characterize by ascribing dramatic style to the apocalypse according to the pattern of drama. On the other hand, drama and apocalypse are fundamentally different modes of representing and interpreting experiences, posing problems, and acting. In contrast to an overwhelming number of dramas, the apocalypse does not enact any moment of crisis in human relations or of political life, but the universal and final crisis. It therefore inclines to representative, generalizing expression that may not so easily be translated into a play of real persons on the stage. That may be a reason why complete apocalyptic scenarios were realized (if at all) in a particular form of drama, in allegorical plays or in mystery plays such as the medieval Ludus de Antichristo. There is only one historical phase in which apocalyptic theater plays appear in large numbers: the age of expressionism. Also these plays are presented in an allegorical and solemn form, for which the term proclamation drama (Verkündigungsdrama) has been introduced.21 Toller’s Wandlung and Masse Mensch, Becher’s Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten, Reinhard Johannes Sorge’s Guntwar, Georg Kaiser’s Hölle. Weg. Erde and Gas II, Julius Maria Becker’s Das letzte Gericht, just to name a few, all reveal the universal perspective of the apocalyptic vision. They desire to reveal the crisis of mankind and to point out the way

20. Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas, 17; Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Ge- schichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 1:2:691–704 (even more explicit in the preliminary studies and the versions: ibid., 1:3:1229, 1231–39); Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:308; see also Voßkamp, “ ‘Grundrisse einer besseren Welt,’ ” 318–19. 21. See Eberhard Lämmert, Das expressionistische Verkündigungsdrama, in Der deutsche Expressionismus, Formen und Gestalten, ed. Hans Steffen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1965), 138–56; Christoph Eykman describes the apocalyptic character of expressionistic dramas by means of relevant motifs in Denk- und Stilformen des Expressionismus, 44–62. Style: Dramatic 249 to redemption; their characters are representatives of gender groups, age groups, and classes of society; and their characters embody moral qualities and fundamental human experiences and needs. It is the apocalyptic vision’s universal claim that causes the expressionist proclamation dramas to incline to allegorical abstraction. They are similar to medieval mystery plays or Passion plays when the expressionist hero appears as a messianic figure who suffers vicariously and promises redemption, like Friedrich in Toller’s Wandlung. In imitation of such apocalyptic “Passion plays” there are also—with a different ideological background—some “choral poems” (Chorische Dichtung) and other solemn plays of National Socialism, as, for example, Kurt Eggers’s Job der Deutsche, which has the subtitle “A Mystery,” or Richard Euringer’s Deutsche Passion 1933. Here, the apocalyptic drama is expressed not in the struggle for the redemption of mankind, but in the battle for the redemption of the German nation; again, this struggle is carried on between the “powers” of good and evil embodied in allegorical figures. In Euringer’s play, the “unnamed soldier” struggles for redemption against the “evil spirit” by taking the “Passion” upon himself; he stands for the fallen soldiers of the First World War and adumbrates also the “unknown corporal” Hitler. Redemption brings—the play ends with this announcement—the “Third Reich.”22 We have gained the idea of the dramatic and the characteristics of the dramatic style in connection with Staiger in the model of “classical” dramas, and we have determined the similarity between the apocalypse and drama—with regard to their models of the temporal world—in view of such classical dramas. In the expressionistic proclamation drama we can rediscover those characteristics, although it has distanced itself in many regards from the classical type of drama: the expressionistic hero, who is on the way to becoming a new man, does not stand in conflict with human relations, but stands as an isolated ego against the old world that must be overcome. The abstraction of his role reduces the dramatics of individual scenes, which are often presented as representative “stations” of the struggle for redemption. This “technique of stations,” which was used already in medieval mystery plays (for example, the Ludus de Antichristo), brings an “epic” characteristic into expressionistic drama. Still, the apocalyptic outline preserves the dramatics of the whole: the vision of redemption

22. Richard Euringer, Deutsche Passion 1933: Hörwerk in sechs Sätzen (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933), 17, 47. See the interpretations of this play and Eggers’s Job der Deutsche in my book Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1971), 176–81; Lämmert, too, placed Euringer’s play in the tradition of expressionist proclamation drama, in Lämmert, Das expressionistsche Verkündigungsdrama, 153–54. 250 The Apocalypse in Germany directs events toward the end on which everything depends. Apocalyptic dualism even strengthens the pathos of the allocution and underlines the character of these plays as judgments. But in more recent dramas we ﬁnd the characteristics of the dramatic style less and less frequently and still less frequently apocalyptic visions in the traditional sense. On the other hand we observe in other literary genres not only apocalyptic interpretations but an advance of the dramatic style. This is due to the changes the apocalypse underwent as well as to changes of the literary genre, and again it is a result of changing interpretations of experience. Of less interest are the changes in lyric, since, if poems present apocalyptic interpretations, they always show very little lyrical quality in the sense of the characterization that Staiger has advanced by example of the poetry of Goethe and romanticism. On the contrary, the apocalyptic poem likewise distinguishes itself through dramatic style. It expresses itself in the rhetorical air of pathos, as in the political poems of the Napoleonic age and of the First World War, or in the “scenic” structure of images, as in expressionistic poems; and here, too, there is a dramatic pointing toward the end, as the poem cited by Georg Heym shows.23 But apocalyptic poems of the most recent period have mostly lost the explicitness of the traditional apocalypse as well as clear characteristics of genre. Enzenberger’s sequence of poems Der Untergang der “Titanic” (“The Sinking of the Titanic”), for example, which is divided into “cantos” like Dante’s Divine Comedy and carries the designation “comedy” in its title, mixes the styles of all genres. The changes in the relationship between drama and novel are more informative because their traditional manifestations or the “ideal types” of the dramatic and epic genres construct contrasting models of the temporal world. Since the end of the nineteenth century we observe these parallel developments: the apocalypse has become more and more frequently the subject of novels, and, at the same time, the novel is dramatized and drama becomes “more epic.” But also the apocalypse has changed its meaning in the course of the twentieth century. Simply put, the categories become mixed up and the traditional deﬁnitions change, in the apocalypse as well as in the genres. In Staiger’s view each literary work has a share in other genres and can reveal corresponding stylistic features, but the mutual penetration and mixing of the dramatic and epic, which is in evidence in increasing measure since the middle of the nineteenth century, goes beyond what Staiger says, tending to shatter the boundaries of genre. Otto Ludwig and Friedrich Spielhagen, for example, still stressed the fundamental differences between

23. See p. 223 in this book. Style: Dramatic 251 drama and novel, but they already claimed the “characteristic moment of the dramatic” for the novel of their time. Theodor Storm explained the modern novella as a “sister of drama”; like the drama, it requires “for its completion a conﬂict standing in the middle, out of which the whole is organized, and consequently it requires the most concise form and the elimination of everything unimportant.”24 The increased penetration of the dramatic into novels and novellas also implied the dissolution of the epic, which was continued in the twentieth century with additional techniques and is also to be observed in biography and historiography.25 An obvious reason for this dissolution is doubtless to be seen in the fact that the consonance of the beginning-end continuum, constructed in traditional novels—especially the Bildungsroman, but also biography—corresponded less and less with experiences in the modern world. The growing existential uncertainty in a world that has become incomprehensible destroyed the conﬁdence in a meaningful consonance of one’s life and of reality in general. As a consequence, the aesthetic structures that had created such consonance broke down, too. The consciousness of crisis at the end of the nineteenth century facilitated apocalyptic interpretations of experience. The First World War made this crisis manifest; it was experienced as a radical, “dramatic” irruption into all continuities and particularly suggested apocalyptic interpretations. The expressionistic proclamation dramas that arose during the war and immediately thereafter brought the apocalyptically interpreted experience of crisis and the dramatically perceived experience of time to complete coincidence in content and form. However, the elimination of the epic through dramatization permitted the transmission of apocalyptic visions in the novel as well. A good example is Kellermann’s 9. November. The novel exhibits the apocalyptic inversion of beginning and end: it begins with the war that is drawing to a close and ends with the beginning of revolution. The “intermediate phase” of the last months of the war is imagined as a moment of crisis in dramatic, almost simultaneously occurring scenes that already include what is new. The action is directed exclusively toward

24. Otto Ludwig, Epische Studien, cited in Theorie und Technikdes Romans im 19. Jahrhun- dert, ed. Hartmut Steinecke (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970), 91; Albert Köster, ed., Theodor Storms Sämtliche Werke, 8 vols. (Leipzig: Insel, 1919–1920), 8:122. On Spielhagen, see especially 107. On the penetration of dramatic style into the novel, see Franz Rhöse, Konflikt und Versöhnung: Untersuchungen zur Theorie des Romans von Hegel bis zum Naturalismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978). 25. See Wilhelm Emrich, Protest und Verheißung: Studien zur klassischen und modernen Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1960), especially 123–34, 169–92; and Helmut Scheuer, Biographie: Studien zur Funktion und zum Wandel einer literarischen Gattung vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), especially 230–48. 252 The Apocalypse in Germany the end, toward this “new”; repeatedly through the entire novel, visions of redemption break forth amid the scenes of destruction; they increase the tension toward the end and the dramatic “precipitation.” Dramatic style characterizes the dialogues as well, which are theatrically staged, and the (inner) monologues of the messianic hero Ackermann, in which the pathos of the apocalyptic indignation is expressed. The First World War interrupted the continuity of history and the lives of countless men in a way that could be dramatically perceived and apocalyptically interpreted, but beside this spectacular event there were other less dramatic but much more lastingly effective manifestations of dissolution. The modern world made it more and more difficult to experience reality as an ordered and meaningful whole; reality increasingly dissolved into unconnected fragments. The fragmentation of reality was also perceived as a fragmentation of time. This process of dissolution became more painful with the particularizing of modern mass society, especially with the increasing presence of mass media; today we are constantly flooded by transient, disembodied particles of reality that form no connection that can be experienced and that cannot be brought into harmony with our other perceptions and experiences.26 Robert Musil had noted, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, not only man’s need for narrative order “of everything that has happened in space and time,” but also “man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of particulars,” and he demonstrated the difficulty of bringing the chaos of particulars into “epic” consonance: Ulrich, the protagonist of the novel, “noted that he lost this primitive epic element, to which private life still clings, although publicly everything has already become unnarratable and no longer follows a ‘thread, but is spreading out in an endlessly interwoven

26. See Peter Gendolla, “Punktzeit: Zur Zeiterfahrung in der Informationsgesellschaft,” 31–41—Gendolla distinguishes “three great concepts of time, . . . that have determined the world of human beings in the course of the history of our species: cyclical time, linear time, and punctual time”; but, in my view, one has to distinguish between facts of experiences and constructs. Thus, I distinguish first between the polar experiences of “epic” continuity, or consonance, and the interruption of time (dissonance). The cyclical image of a space-time order of the cosmos and the image of history as salvation history or as progressivistic history (aiming at a final goal) are already constructions as results of the exegeses of experiences. Also in cosmological societies, with their cyclical image of the world, we can find “epic” succession (in Sumeric lists of kings, Homer’s epics, cosmological myths) as well as “dramatic” interruptions of time (in Greek tragedies). An apocalyptic interpretation of the experience of dissonance, however—that is, the interpretation of an event as a singular and final interruption of time—can be produced only within the unilinear image of history. Apart from this type, we witness in modernity, as additional experience of dissonance, the experience of fragmentation of reality, which, at the same time, is experienced as fragmentation and punctuation of time. Style: Dramatic 253 surface.’ ”27 Just as in the case of the protagonist Ulrich, so, too, in the case of the author Musil the primitive epic element has become lost; the novel itself spreads out in an endlessly interwoven surface. It is multidi- mensional, fragmentary, without prospect of an end that might conclude and create consonance. Joyce and Proust, Döblin and Broch reacted in a similar manner to the reality that has become “unnarratable” and dissolved the epic structures in their novels through fragmentation of what is narrated, montage and collage techniques, “stream of consciousness,” and philosophic reflections that interrupt the narrative flow. But, to the extent that it played a role in modern novels, the apocalypse also lost its unambiguousness and changed its style. Hermann Broch’s trilogy Die Schlafwandler (“The Sleepwalkers”) makes this particularly clear, especially in comparison with Kellermann’s “dramatic” novel Der 9. November. The three novels of the Schlafwandler trilogy gradually lose narrative harmony; parallel to this progressive dissolution of epic order, apocalyptic elements gain space in narration as well as reflection. Apocalyptic features are connected with August Esch, the hero of the second novel, who also plays a central role in the third. Early on, Esch reveals a fundamental inclination to an apocalyptic worldview. The bookkeeper and later press owner has a strong sense of righteousness and order; he suffers because the “anarchic condition of the world” hinders righteousness and order. He speaks a great deal about “redemption” in the characteristic manner of the apocalypticist, who hopes for a “new life” and will “destroy everything old” for this goal. Under the impact of the First World War—the third novel takes place in 1918—Esch’s inclination to interpret the events of the era and the condition of the world apocalyptically comes completely to a head: “The worse the evil, the deeper the darkness, the sharper the whizzing knife, the closer the realm of redemption.” The approaching defeat in the war, the casualties that appear more and more meaningless, and the social and moral manifestations of dissolution all raise the feeling—even among other people—that “the chaos of the world” is mounting and “the last judgment” is near; and this feeling makes them more and more receptive to Esch’s apocalyptic visions.28 Besides the apocalyptic interpretations that Broch puts in the mouths of characters in his novels, tendencies toward an apocalyptic worldview may be seen in the philosophical reflections that keep interrupting the flow of the plot. Broch puts these reflections under the heading “Zerfall der Werte” (“The Decline of Values”). That life has become “unreal” and the “unity of 27. Musil, The Man without Qualities, 1:40, 2:436. 28. Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler: Eine Romantrilogie (1931–1932) (Zurich: Rhein, 1952), 250–52, 273, 321–22, 588, 496, 607, 684, 702. 254 The Apocalypse in Germany the event” has become lost, that things have fallen under the “curse of being incidental and blown together,” he finally traces back to the “dissolution of the Christian-Platonic worldview”; “partial systems” have taken its place, and the struggle of partial systems against each other moves toward the “destruction of the world in the complete fragmentation of values.” Broch depicts this situation as an apocalyptic crisis, as a typically apocalyptic interim phase, “between the not yet and the no longer,” “between end and beginning.”29 Still, Die Schlafwandler is not an apocalyptic novel like Kellermann’s 9. November; the apocalyptic element in Broch has lost its unambiguousness. The apocalyptic visionary Esch is murdered, more or less, en passant, but his death does not have the character of a sacrifice, in which redemption is revealed, like that of Ackermann in 9. November. Broch’s novel ends not with a vision of new life, but with a look at Esch’s murderer, Huguenau, who has survived all the complications and dangers skillfully and impudently and without any feelings of guilt or inner transformation; his survival leaves the ending of the “fragmentation of values” open. In his philosophical reflections, too, Broch does not come, despite his apocalyptic-sounding analyses of the age, to a distinctly apocalyptic conclusion. He speaks of the longing for the “bringer of salvation” “who will build the house anew, . . . that the time may be counted anew,” but he does not believe in a “miracle.” There is no apocalyptic certainty of salvation, only hope; that alone can lead “from the most difficult darkness of the world,” even if that hope is in vain.30 His reflections thus finish with an open-ended perspective. The stylistic presentation corresponds to the indecision and openness of the apocalyptic in Broch’s trilogy. Broch presents the coming collapse in the First World War in scenes that are sketched thoroughly dramatically, and he unfolds Esch’s passionate apocalyptic outbreak even in a proper theatrical dialogue, including stage directions,31 but on the whole the dramatic tension to the decisive conclusion is lacking. Kellermann shaped the death of Ackermann as an apotheosis; Ackermann’s “spirit moves along” above the masses that leave at the end of the novel for the new age. In contrast, Esch’s death “in greasy street mud” appears as an anticlimax; nothing happens as a result of his death.32

29. Ibid., 442, 754, 750, 745–46, 752. On the apocalyptic character of the Schlafwandler, see David Roberts, “The Sense of an Ending: Apocalyptic Perspectives in the Twentieth- Century German Novel,” 150–52; and David Roberts, “Indivduum und Kollektiv: Jünger und Brecht zum Ausgang der Weimarer Republik,” Orbis litterarum 41 (1986): 160–61. 30. Broch, Die Schlafwandler, 760–61. 31. Ibid., 585–94. 32. Kellermann, Der 9. November, 475; Broch, Die Schlafwandler, Style: Dramatic 255

The “de-dramatization”33 of the apocalypse in the twentieth century is a phenomenon of content as well as style. Even before the possibility of mankind’s nuclear self-destruction distorted the prospect of an earthly paradise, the hope disappeared, as in Broch, that “the absolute would ever be fulfilled in the terrestrial.”34 The dramatization of the novel, which converged with the particular mode of apocalyptic interpretations of experience in novels, declined again, when the apocalyptic certainty that the world would be renewed after its destruction collapsed. Under the heading “De-dramatization of Destruction,” Klaus R. Scherpe referred to this connection in Kafka’s stories and novels. Above all, Der Prozess makes it clear that no apocalyptic judgment takes place here, which would be followed by redemption. Like Esch, at the end Josef K. is killed like a dog; also, K.’s death does not receive the glorification of a sacrifice. Without a meaningful end, the process that stands for life appears as a meaningless back-and-forth and “allows no philosophical and absolutely no psychological dramaturgy.”35 We observe the same “de-dramatization” of the apocalypse as of the style in current nuclear war novels. The plot during or after a nuclear attack does not exclude individual dramatic scenes, but the fundamental dramatic tension toward the end is lacking. For the apocalypse is “docked.” The survivors of a nuclear catastrophy are without perspective; the respective novels end hopelessly, without any real ending. That some young people leave for the south of France at the end of Guha’s novel Tagebuchaus dem 3. Weltkrieg (“Journal from the Third World War”) in order to perhaps be able to survive there and that the dying diarist dreams of nature again “starting from the beginning”36 are unconvincing attempts to preserve a reflection of previous hope of redemption and thereby to preserve a law of composition that demands an accentuated ending. Guha’s Tagebuch would have ended better in midsentence. The disappearance of hopes for redemption took the drama out of the novels that dealt with destruction. This did not necessarily have a return to the epic as a consequence; the modern novel, which concerned itself with reality that has become “unnarratable,” simultaneously lost its epic order. The fragmentation of reality also made phenomena of destruction appear arbitrary and robbed them of the meaning of at least being an initial step to redemption. The “desert of particulars” into which life in the modern

33. On this, see Klaus R. Scherpe, “Dramatisierung und Entdramatisieung des Unter- gangs—zum ästhetischen Bewußtsein von Moderne und Postmoderne,” in Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels, ed. Andreas Huyssen and Klaus R. Scherpe, 270–301. 34. Broch, Die Schlafwandler, 760. 35. Scherpe, “Dramatisierung und Entdramatisierung des Untergangs,” 281. 36. Guha, Ende, 181. 256 The Apocalypse in Germany world disintegrated for Musil could be experienced as a “fall” that also “is spreading out in an endlessly interwoven surface” without a clear “one after the other” and especially without the prospect of an “afterward.” Parallel to the changes in apocalyptic style in the novel there was also a change in the presentation of the apocalypse in drama in the twentieth century. Drama began to take on a more epic character as early as Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Strindberg. “Narrative” elements, along with the technique of stations, penetrated also into expressionist drama, while the fundamentally dramatic character of apocalyptic plays remained unchanged with the tension of the plot toward change and redemption, supported by the pathos of indignation and the agitated address of the audience. With his theory and practice of “epic theater,” Brecht made a decisive and programmatic turn from “Aristotelian” drama and its style. “Epic theater,” as Brecht understood it, meant that the stage no longer “embodies,” but “narrates” action. The viewer is not suggestively taken into the action, but confronted with it; the action is offered to him as a subject for reﬂection.37 The play does not unfold as a sequence of events in the absolute present, but as an “epic” sequence of scenes that is isolated by means of estrangement effects and draws more attention to the course than to the outcome of the action. “Epic freedom to tarry and to reﬂect replaces dramatic pointedness.”38 According to this conception, epic theater appears to be unsuited to represent apocalyptic visions. Yet Brecht’s plays of the twenties and thirties present the apocalyptic tension between destruction and redemption, as David Roberts has shown.39 While epic theater of the twenties, especially Mahagonny, Mann ist Mann, and Dreigroschenoper (“Threepenny Opera”), helped to destroy the bourgeois individual, the “didactic plays” (Lehrstücke) from around the year 1930—Der Flug der Lindberghs, Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis, Die Maßnahme, Der Jasager–Der Neinsager—prepared the way for the rebirth of the individual in the collective. Also, Brechtian theater is thoroughly suffused with the tension that Staiger ascribed to classical drama and that at the same time characterizes the apocalypticist— it is “suffused with what ought to be, and it is directed against what currently exists.” But it makes use of different means to realize the tension

37. Bertolt Brecht, “Anmerkungen zur Oper ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’ (1930–1938), in Gesammelte Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967) 17: 1004–16, especially 1009–10; see also “Über eine nichtaristotelische Dramatik” (1933– 1941), in ibid., 15:227–336; and “Kleines Organon für das Theater” (1948), in ibid., 16:659–708. 38. Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas, 118. 39. Roberts, “Individuum und Kollektiv,” 167–74. Style: Dramatic 257 between what currently exists and what needs to be done. The fundamental apocalyptic pattern of annihilation and renewal not only determines the content of the plays; new theatrical practice is the aesthetic instrument of the Brechtian apocalypse. The technique of estrangement effects destroys what encouraged bourgeois individualism in classical drama; it prevents the viewer from identifying with an individual hero empathetically. In place of this Brecht attempts to actualize the desired manner of existence of the collective in the collective action of the play, which eventually makes players and viewers interchangeable, thereby eliminating the personality of the individual and allowing him to identify only with the collective: Brecht intended no audience for his “didactic plays”; the plays were to be lessons for the actors themselves. This means that the viewer is best taught and introduced into collective practice if he himself takes part in the play in changing roles, as Brecht noted in Maßnahme.40 However, if the viewer remains in his traditional distant position, as in most theater pieces, the collective practice is presented to him at least in such a way that he can identify with the collective of the players and anticipate the goal of collective existence. But this practice implies a danger that Brecht himself recognized in the midthirties: “The attempts to reorder the technique of empathy in such a way that identification now is achieved in collective form (in classes) are not promising. They lead to unrealistic coarsening and abstractions of both persons and collectives. The role of the individual personality in the collective becomes unpresentable although it is of the highest significance.”41 As in expressionistic dramas, the generalizing character of the play, that is, the “collectivizing” intention, has abstractness as a consequence; the play takes on features of the mystery play if the goal of transindividual redemption is to be presented. Roberts has noted that the “didactic plays” resemble Passion plays.42 The destruction of the individual personality is ritualized in Maßnahme or in the second version of Jasager as a sacrifice, to which the victim must show his agreement. The sacrifice thereby appears as a voluntarily assumed passion that is consummated in the victory of the collective. If Brecht’s theater still had a perspective on “redemption,” current pieces that deal with destruction must cope with the same fundamental problem as modern nuclear war novels: an earthly paradise cannot be expected following a nuclear catastrophe. But how can one make a drama out of a “docked” apocalypse? Harald Mueller’s Totenfloß (“Raft of the Dead”)

40. Bertolt Brecht, Anmerkung zur “Maßnahme”: Schriften zum Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 2:132–39. 41. Brecht, Über eine nichtaristotelische Dramatik, 245. 42. Roberts, “Individuum und Kollektiv,” 169–70. 258 The Apocalypse in Germany presents the ultimate possibility as well as the difﬁculties: three men and a woman, who survived the nuclear catastrophe, crippled and sick from radiation, are on their way to Xanten, which is reported to be safe and clean, through a polluted Germany. Dramatic tension leading toward the end cannot develop in this piece, since Xanten is a chimera, like southern France in Guha’s Tagebuch aus dem 3. Weltkrieg. Even if the four were to reach the city, they are already doomed. The actual end—nuclear war— has already taken place, and the play about the handful of survivors can only prolong this end: it is a scene from the struggle for survival that is in reality a slow death struggle. This piece lives only from the appalling inventions of individual scenes and from shockingly funny plays on words. Its style is the sequence of points; even the ﬁnal point, the birth of a child, does not mark a new beginning but underlines the pointlessness of the event: the child is born without a face. Like the play itself, it has no view, no prospect, no future.43 When imagination indulges in painting destruction in all its particulars of horror, without awakening the hope of new life, apparently not only does the dramatic tension collapse but also the possibility of epic theater, of constructing a meaningful continuum in the course of the action, breaks down. The absolute catastrophe is neither dramatic nor epic; it cannot be expressed in any style that creates tension and organizes unity, since it consists of meaningless splinters of horror. These may indeed radiate the aesthetic appeal of the grotesque, but their accumulation produces weariness, akin to the boredom created by the condition of endless plenitude.

43. Harald Mueller, Totenﬂoß, Theater heute (1986), 7:35–46. 16 Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation

The drama of the apocalypse corresponds to the experience that the continuity of time is interrupted and a moment of crisis is reached that promises a change to something completely new. To that extent dramatic style may be viewed as a symbolic expression of the apocalyptic interpretation of experience. But the apocalypticist not only copes with his experiences in the specific aesthetic form that he lends to his interpretation but also wishes to have an effect on his listeners or readers in accordance with his interpretation of experience. Dramatic style also corresponds to such a desire for effect. One of its characteristic features is the immediate, sensually arousing allocution that is to draw the listener into the events addressed by the speech. Dramatic allocution is in one particular regard comparable to public speech: it is directed at an audience with a particular claim that elevates the apocalyptic visionary as well as the dramatic hero and the orator vis-à-vis the audience. In order to emphasize this claim, the apocalypticist makes use of “oratorical,” rhetorical means as well. In theological studies of Jewish-Christian apocalyptic, the rich use of rhetorical tools is sometimes even counted among the stylistic peculiarities of the apocalyptic.1 If we presume, following our observations on dramatic style, that modern apocalyptic texts reflect this peculiarity, the following questions arise: Are there rhetorical means characteristic of the apocalypse that produce, to a certain extent, a specific “rhetoric of the apocalypse”? And if this is so, for what purpose are the rhetorical means of the apocalypse used? What function do they have? But first, an entirely different, more fundamental question arises: what is to be understood by “rhetorical means” if its use should be investigated in apocalyptic texts? Since the fifth century b.c., rhetoric—speaking successfully in public—was developed as an “art” (Greek techne) in Greece. Among many others, Corax and Aristotle and later, in Rome, Cicero and

1. See McGinn, Visions of the End, 5; and Wilder, “Rhetoric of Ancient and Modern Apocalyptic,” 436–53.

259 260 The Apocalypse in Germany

Quintilian developed rhetoric into a system of rules and forms whose use would enable the orator to attain the intended effect on his listeners. It is a noteworthy coincidence that the Revelation of John most likely was written in a.d. 95, the very year in which one of the most important textbooks of antique rhetoric was written, Quintilian’s Insitutio oratoria. This coincidence is an accident since it must be ruled out that John of Patmos and other writers of apocalyptic texts made conscious use of Greco- Roman rhetoric.2 Nevertheless, in the Book of Daniel, in Revelation, and in the apocryphal apocalypses are numerous rhetorical figures, or, to choose a more careful formulation, images, word constellations, and syntactic structures that can be defined as rhetorical figures with the inventory of Greco-Roman rhetoric. However, if one looks beyond apocalyptic texts, one notes that such rhetorical figures can be found in all writings of the Bible, and not only there but also in other Oriental sources that are even older than Greek rhetoric, in Sumerian, Egyptian, and Persian texts.3 The fact that it is possible to collect rhetorical figures in all these texts and define them in accordance with the labels of classical rhetoric discloses the following: 1. Apparently each language has rhetorical modes of speech for certain situations and for particular purposes, even if there is no conscious reflection about it, and no techne is developed, as it happened in Greece. 2. Gathering rhetorical figures is meaningless if it cannot be shown that they possess a specific function within a more comprehensive rhetorical strategy, a strategy that is particularly characteristic of the apocalypse.

2. In the case of the Apocalypse of Daniel, the fact that the book is composed in Hebrew and Aramaic and, to that extent, reveals a completely different linguistic form and tradition of style speaks against the conscious use of Greek rhetoric, as well as the fact that the book is directed against Hellenistic rule and culture; it would have been contradictory to adopt something that belonged to a culture that one despised. The situation is the same with the Revelation of John. Although the Revelation is written in the vernacular of the Hellenistic world—koine—the linguistic background of the author is Hebrew or Aramaic. But above all, the intellectual background of the apocalyptic vision is Jewish. This legacy, as well as the new Christian faith, results again in a defensive posture toward the rule and culture of the current rulers, the Romans, who assumed the legacy of Hellenism; see Rudolf Halver, Der Mythos im letzten Buch der Bibel: Eine Untersuchung der Bildersprache der Johannes-Apokalypse (Hamburg-Bergstedt: Reich, 1964); and Gerard Mussies, Morphology of Koine Greek, as Used in the Apocalypse of S. John: A Study in Bilingualism (Leiden: Brill, 1971). 3. For example, hyperbole in Gen. 11:4 and Matt. 7:3; 23:24; oxymora in Isa. 9:15 and Luke 9:24; parallelismus membrorum in Ps. 89:37, in a Sumerian proverb, and in an Egyptian hymn of praise to Amon; see also Walter Bühlmann and Karl Scherer, Stilﬁguren der Bibel (Fribourg: Verlag Schweizerisches Katholisches Bibelwek, 1973), 35–36; James Muilenburg, “A Study in Hebrew Rhetoric: Repetition and Style” (Supplement to Vetus Testamentum) (Leiden: Brill, 1953), 1:97–101; and Eduard König, Stilistik, Rhetorik, Poetik in Bezug auf die biblische Literatur (Leipzig: Weicher, 1900). Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 261

We must understand the “rhetorical means” of the apocalypse to include not only rhetorical figures. In order to be able to answer the questions given above adequately, apocalyptic texts must in fact be viewed like speeches that are directed at an audience with a specific intention, and their “rhetorical” means as elements of a strategy that serve this intention. We will gain more interesting information concerning the purposes and functions of “apocalyptic rhetoric” if in this sense we apply the inventory of Greco-Roman rhetoric to apocalyptic texts.4 It will become apparent where the limits of its application lie. From the time of Aristotle, rhetoric distinguishes three genres of speech, each with two possible functions: “1. The judicial genre, having the functions of accusation and defense, has as an example the speech of a lawyer before the court, particularly in a criminal trial. . . . 2. The deliberative genre, having the functions of persuasion and dissuasion, has as an example the speech of the representative of a political party before a people’s assembly. . . . 3. The epideictic genre, having the functions of praise and blame, has as an example the speech of an orator summoned for the purposes of celebrating or praising someone.”5 Rhetoric controls the drafting of such speeches by numerous rules, but the techne rhetorike, rhetoric as “art,” as it was formulated, especially by Aristotle, is not restricted to the arrangement of simply technical instructions and formal rules. Rather, it begins with careful reflection on the intentions of a speech as well as the circumstances in which it is delivered. These reflections are useful for our line of questioning. Apocalyptic texts may of course not be attributed to one of the genres of rhetoric—most do not have the form of public speech, while ancient apocalypses are even esoteric—but they are directed to specific groups of people. The Revelation of John, for example, is addressed to the seven churches in Asia Minor, and it was supposed to be read before those congregations.6 Among more recent apocalyptic texts we also find some in the form of public speeches; I refer, for instance, to Arndt’s Final Word to the Germans. If we follow the underlying presuppositions of the rhetorical “art,” we must first ask what was the intention of the authors of apocalyptic texts. In 4. I am relying on Aristotle, Techne rhetorike; Cicero, De Oratore; and Quintilian, Insti- tutio oratoria; from more recent literature, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft (Munich: Hueber, 1960); Lausberg, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich: Beck, 1963); Josef Martin, Antike Rhetorik: Technik und Methode (Munich: Hueber, 1974); and Gert Ueding and Bernd Steinbrink, Grundriß der Rhetorik: Geschichte, Technik, Methode (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986). 5. Lausberg, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik, 20; Aristotle, Techne rhetorike 13586. 6. Rev. 1:4, 2–3; 22:7, 18. 262 The Apocalypse in Germany order to be able to answer this question, we must bear in mind the situation in which the authors and addressees found themselves, and we may first clarify this situation on the basis of ancient apocalypses. As we know, its authors and addressees found themselves in a situation of oppression and persecution: in the case of Daniel, it was the tribulation of pious Jews who did not submit to the Hellenistic cult; in the case of the Revelation of John, it was the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. If we read the Book of Daniel and the Revelation in view of these situations, it seems reasonable to assume that the intention of both authors was to admonish the persecuted to steadfastness, to promise a reward for their persistence and punishment for their persecutors, thereby giving solace to those sorely pressed. Can the basic principles of rhetoric and the rules that result from them be used for this situation? A presupposition for the success of a speech is, as rhetoric teaches us, that the listeners find themselves in the same situation as the speaker, and that this situation is of interest to the listeners. In our examples this presupposition is doubtless given. However, the principal intention of a speech composed according to rhetorical rules is not to provide comfort in a given, unhappy situation, but to lead to a change of the situation. In a speech before a court, this would be the condemnation or acquittal of a defendant, whereas in political speech it is the bringing about of a political decision that leads to action; the orator attempts to achieve a change of the situation by persuading or convincing the “master of the situation.” In judicial speech, the “master of the situation” is the judge, whereas in political speech it is the people’s assembly or another political decision maker. In epideictic speech, no practical change to the situation is envisioned; rather, the goal is to strengthen through praise or blame—but this function may also be interpreted as an intention to change the mind of the perhaps still undecided listeners. It is apparent that the apocalyptic texts that we are dealing with first— Jewish and early Christian—do not belong to speeches that intend to change the given situation through practical means. Had this been the case, they would have been directed to the “master of the situation,” the lord of the political and societal affairs, to Antiochus in the case of the Apocalypse of Daniel, or to the Roman emperor in the case of the Revelation of John. This would have been futile, as the authors knew very well. They sensed the situation as so hopeless that change on the level of practical action appeared impossible. Can apocalyptic texts be compared with epideictic speech? In fact, they are full of praise and blame. Worldly rulers are damned; steadfast believers and martyrs are praised. But Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 263 the intention of apocalyptic texts is not to approve of a given situation as it is the case in epideictic speeches. In the Book of Daniel and in the Revelation of John, God is given the highest praise; God reveals himself as the real “master of the situation.” He will judge the persecutors and change the situation. Indeed, the situation is already virtually changed, since he has decided on the imminent change. Therefore it is not necessary to persuade the “master of the situation”; rather, the intention of the texts is to realize spiritually the imminent change. The admonishing and consoling function that first attracted our attention is the result and, to a certain extent, the psychological complement of this intention. The apocalyptic texts cannot be assigned to any of the rhetorical genres, but they show characteristics of all three, in addition to the fact that the basic principles of rhetoric can be made useful for their interpretation: 1. The fundamental condition of a speech, which is directed to a particular audience, is given. 2. Consideration of a given situation (the quaestio status of rhetoric) is evident in apocalyptic texts. 3. The main intention of changing this situation by persuading the “master of the situation” appears in the modified form that the condemnation of wrongdoers and the imminent change is anticipated and revealed. Consequently, the accent lies in attacking those already virtually condemned and praising the master of the situation, who has already rendered judgment. 4. Finally, the further intention should not be forgotten, to admonish the hearers so that they endure the short remaining time in loyalty and steadfastness. If we go a step further and ask about the means by which the apocalyptic texts pursue their intentions, we can further make use of the rhetorical techne, and indeed of those parts of rhetoric that bear the designations inventio, dispositio, and elocutio. Under inventio we understand the discovery of thoughts that accord with the subject and promise success in speaking by being as credible as possible; the subjects in which thoughts are clothed are called loci. In apocalyptic texts, loci are chosen that inspire the highest credibility: references to the highest instance of truth, God himself, or his angels, and loci that are taken from religious tradition and bring with them the weight of ancient truths, such as references to the prophetic predictions of God’s justice or the Messiah. By dispositio, rhetoric—with a view to desired success—means the most 264 The Apocalypse in Germany favorable selection and arrangement of thoughts and of linguistic formulation in which the thoughts are expressed. In apocalyptic texts, of course, we cannot expect the set schema of rhetorical dispositio. Nevertheless—and this is not surprising—the texts are organized and arranged in a manner that heightens their effect: In Daniel 2, for example, is found the sequence of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, not revealed and not interpreted, the unraveling of the dream by Daniel, and finally the interpretation of the dream; or in Revelation, the triple repetition of the seven plagues, followed by the Mil- lennium and finally by the New Jerusalem. Both sequences have functions of increasing intensity. More important are the intellectual and emotional devices to increase credibility. Through teaching devices (docere), facts and experiences are transmitted as credible; through emotional devices (movere), hope and fear are evoked (spes et metus), in order to make them more palatable to the audience. In our apocalyptic texts, it is clear that both devices are used. Pathos also belongs to emotional effects. Another device to increase the emotional and intellectual effect is the artificial amplification of the conventional or normal (amplificatio); this device is employed, for example, to depict the enemies of God and their deeds as especially horrific and abominable. Finally, elocutio is the linguistic expression of thoughts found in inventio; in this part of rhetoric, we deal with actual rhetorical figures. It has already become clear that certain of these figures are in the highest degree suitable to serve the intentions of apocalyptic texts, and in fact such figures are found in abundance: pathetic metaphors and figures of hyperbole in order to illustrate the punishment of wrongdoers and the reward of the righteous, and thereby to produce fear and hope; intensifying repetitions of words and phrases; antitheses in order to mark the unbridgeable gap between good and evil; examples of martyrdom, in order to strengthen steadfastness; emphatic declarations (exclamations) and direct allocution of the opponent (apostrophes), in order to move and to influence the audience. It is not necessary to list all possible rhetorical figures; only one more should be mentioned, since it occurs particularly frequently in Hebrew and is characteristic for Jewish thought and argument: parallelismus membrorum, the parallel construction of sentences and phrases.7 We also find this figure in ancient apocalyptic texts. Although the following text from the Revelation of John has been written in Greek, it betrays the Jewish manner of thinking and speaking; this example combines word repetitions, parallel construction of phrases, and antitheses, which serve the purpose to admonish and to promise with great effect:

7. See Muilenburg, A Study in Hebrew Rhetoric, 98–101. Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 265

He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.8

But let us turn to modern texts! In order to disclose the most extreme possibilities of apocalyptic rhetoric, I will turn my attention to the texts that accord with, or come close to, the form of public speech as, for example, pamphlets or war songs that consciously focus on a speciﬁc audience. I will concentrate on examples from the tradition of apocalyptic nationalism. I will begin with Ernst Moritz Arndt, whose status as an apocalyptic author is evident, and I will choose a passage from the frequently cited pamphlet Letztes Wort an die Deutschen:

No, never, Bonaparte, as great and powerful as you may be, never will you control the future and the colossal spirit that, unbeknownst to you, travels along through time, like showing your soldiers the way they ought to go. Behold, in his time he will seize with storm wings your little work, which you think is so great, and blow it apart like chaff so that no one can find a trace of it. Vainly you will try to brighten up the old and miserable with a new gleam and sell it as something new; vainly you will seek to hide with fine-sounding names and titles your deceitful despotism, your bloody stubbornness, your savage contempt for every freedom and majesty of the human race: death, which inevitably lies in every breath, will also destroy your glory. . . . You and your works, too, will finally prove that no understanding and no cleverness suffice to hinder the almighty power that goes darkly through all these abominations, upheavals, and revolutions. So continue in your unstable and trivial thinking. When the work is done, Providence will break the instrument. . . . For the last time, then, I will show you [Germans] what others did to you and what you have to do, what others desire with you, and what you desire to do with them. Time will bring the storm that shakes you up, that shows the man who directs you and maintains you in the storm. What now appears so terrible, as though it were as insuperable as Hell; what now appears as secure, as though it stood with unshakable firmness for all time; what now appears so certain and settled, as though it were foolishness and a sin not to wish to accept it—oh how differently will everything appear to you. How amazed you

8. Rev. 22:11–13. 266 The Apocalypse in Germany

will be that you were astonished and numbed in the face of something vulgar. Your time has not come yet, but it will come. The French still rule and they will yet rule for a while. . . . But don’t despair, don’t forget what you owe to yourselves and what you owe your grandchildren. It is given into your power to obtain the means whereby freedom and glory can again come into the world.9

The text has the form of a speech, directed to listeners who find themselves in the same situation as the author: They are oppressed by an exceptionally powerful and evil enemy. The situation for the author as well as the listener in the sense of “rhetoric” is “of interest”; the speech is given in a tone of extreme urgency that is well known to us from the Revelation of John. Arndt’s first intention is to predict the fall of the enemy; he wishes to convince his listeners that Napoleon will fall because he must fall. This intention is complemented by a second, to admonish listeners to patience and steadfastness and to comfort them. But that is not all. Although there also appears to be a “master of the situation” in his text, which Arndt calls “colossal spirit” (Riesengeist) and “Providence” (Vorsehung), the change of situation is not left to him. A change on the level of pragmatic action ought to take place, and this change must be brought about by the listeners. For this reason Arndt pursues the third intention: to produce action. It will not be necessary to go into the details of rhetorical style. All the elements that we have emphasized in our first overview are also to be found in Arndt’s text, from the apostrophe (the direct address of Napoleon, which is used for a hyperbolic characterization of the enemy) to antitheses (which contrast the future condition with the current one) up to pathetic exclamations and to extensively employed parallelismus membrorum. All these means serve to move the feelings of listeners and to rouse feelings of repugnance as well as confidence; they give the speech a passionate intensity and thereby promote the emotional readiness to follow the intentions of the speaker. The same rhetorical strategy may be observed in poems, although in a more concentrated form. A poem from the year 1914 that illustrates the apocalypse of German spirit in the First World War is also an impressive example of apocalyptic rhetoric:

It is decided, indeed! and now it is good, Now the masks have all fallen all around, Now the false brood of hypocrites is exposed

9. Arndt, Geist der Zeit, vol. 2, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 9, 222–24. Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 267

Now it’s on, encircled Germany, war with everyone. A deep breath of air—then lift the sword high! The brow gladly raise to the death struggle, Believe it: only one people that God values above all others, He sets this, the most difficult of all tests. We want to pass it! Despite necessity and death! We will not fail even if the world collapses, A phoenix arises, as beautiful as the sunrise, The German spirit from the flames of this conflagration.10 The rhetorical strategy begins with the quaestio status, the presentation of the situation, in which “we,” speaker as well as listener, find ourselves; the strategy realizes the intention to encourage, to strengthen belief in “our” cause, to call for action and struggle, and to promise a change of situation, rebirth, and salvation. These intentions are supported by moving exclamations, powerful images (ornatus fortis), parallel sentence constructions, word repetitions, and anaphoras with intensifying effect. Let us look at the rhetoric of the Nazi apocalypse, in which the role of an exceedingly powerful and evil opponent was transferred to “World Judaism,” the putative “world conspiracy” between Jewish capitalism and Jewish Bolshevism as can be seen, for example, in a speech by Rosen- berg. In this speech, given at the Nazi Congress (Reichsparteitag) of 1936, Rosenberg sketched out the nightmare of a “Jewish world revolution,” which is the “monstrously structured” “messianic” attempt “to take revenge on the everlastingly foreign character of the Europeans, and not just the Europeans”; and he prophesied an apocalyptic struggle, a “decisive universal struggle.” As well, Rosenberg admonished his audience to faith and challenged them to action: “Overcoming Bolshevist doctrine is only and exclusively possible through a new belief, through a will to action born from this Weltanschauung and then through decisive action itself.”11 In this speech, too, we find the well-known rhetorical devices, but with the exception that Rosenberg’s stylistic abilities cannot compare with those of Arndt, and that sermo robustus (abusive language) prevails under the rhetorical “adornment.” The question naturally arises whether there are no differences between Rosenberg and Arndt—or, to sharpen the question even more, between Rosenberg and John of Patmos—beyond slight stylistic ones. We have reached the point at which the question about truth, credibility, and

10. Karl Strecker, “Die Kriegserklärung Englands,” in Der Deutsche Krieg in Dichtungen, ed. Windegg, 36. 11. Alfred Rosenberg, Der entscheidende Weltkampf: Rede des Reichsleiters Alfred Rosen- berg auf dem Patreikongreß in Nürnberg 1936 (Munich: n.p., n.d.), 2, 4, 12, 13. 268 The Apocalypse in Germany appropriateness of apocalyptic rhetoric must be asked in the sense in which this fundamental problem of rhetoric was discussed by Plato in Gorgias and Phaidros and Aristotle in the Techne rhetorike. This means that we must confront the intentions and devices of apocalyptic rhetoric with the reality of the historical context and connect them to the motivating experiences of apocalyptic interpretations. As far as the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of John are concerned, there is no doubt that their audience was suffering under religious and social distress, often even under existential threat. The intention of admonishing to steadfastness and providing comfort in such a situation is obvious and understandable; the hope that the situation will change is also understandable. But how do we judge the central intention of the apocalypse to predict that the change of situation will occur in the immediate future and will lead to the final destruction of the enemy? Events and occurrences of practical reality do not point to that. How, then, does it come to this prophecy? We have already found out that, regarding the people of Israel, the greater the expectation of a fundamental change of power relations, the bleaker the political situation became. The prophets of the exilic period for the first time predicted a divine judgment over the Gentiles because they had wronged the chosen people of Yahweh. The more universal the reach of the enemy powers, and the more improbable the prospect of achieving their own spiritual and political ideas of order on the level of practical action, the more radically the vision of hoped-for change took shape, the more anxiously the change was expected. At the time of the origin of the Book of Daniel, the extreme point is finally reached: “There is no hope of pragmatic victory over the imperial enemy or of a spiritual transformation of mankind. Since the present structure of reality is without meaning, divine intervention has to change the structure itself if the divine order is to be reintroduced.”12 We have the same constellation in the case of the Revelation of John. The tension between the overpowering but spiritually empty ecumenic empire and the universal but powerless claim to represent spiritual truth is no longer to be maintained and is resolved in the vision of the imminent ending of this meaningless order of reality. Although such a reaction can be understood with regard to the situation of oppression and persecution, it is still a misinterpretation of the relationship between the spiritual and the practical orders of reality; it inclines to overestimate the meaning of its own historical situation and to exaggerate the contradictions. Exaggerations are typical of the apocalypse; the hyperbole—the figure of pathetic intensification, exaggeration, and of

12. Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 26. Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 269

“notions transcending reality”13—presents a characteristic that typifies the rhetoric of the apocalypse as a whole: inventio corresponds to exaggeration in the apocalyptic interpretation of experience, inventio as the hyperbolic structure of thought; and the amplifications of dispositio are hyperbolic as well, the intellectual as well as emotional means of intensification to which the actual figures of hyperbole belong, as well as other rhetorical figures with intensifying and exaggerating effect. Is this connection of motivating experiences and rhetorical consequences also to be observed in modern examples? When Arndt wrote his apocalyptic interpretations, Germany, like the greater part of Europe, was doubtless being oppressed by Napoleon. It is noteworthy that Arndt understood Napoleon’s rule as a danger for the entire world; he feared that Napoleon would establish a “universal monarchy.”14 But this is not the only parallel to ancient apocalyptic thought that saw, in the ecumenic empires, an enemy with a universal claim to power. Analogous to the experiences of the Jews under Antiochus IV and of the Christians under the Roman emperors, being persecuted for primarily religious reasons, Arndt interpreted Napoleon’s wars of conquest not only as a political threat, but also as a spiritual danger: “Its entire meaning is spiritual, and only in the third place political.” He supposed that Napoleon wanted to establish not only a “universal monarchy” but also a “universal religion.” At this point the interpretation departs from the reality of the historical context doubtless in a stronger measure than in the case of Daniel and John. The tendency to exaggerate the actual distress and persecution intensified still more in the apocalyptic interpretations of the First World War until it reached its extreme point in the Nazi apocalypse with the fiction of a Jewish “international conspiracy.” The notion of exaggeration of the apocalyptic interpretation of experience and the hyperbolic inventio of apocalyptic speech, the exaggeration of threatened danger, and the division of reality into black and white, into powers of good and evil, mean for elocutio, verbal expression, that the opponents are placed in the worst possible light. With the repulsive beast from the abyss and the whore of Babylon, the Revelation of John established standards for the verbal demonization of enemies; Arndt still held closely to these examples when he called Napoleon the “devil on the hellish throne” and a “monster branded with depravities.”15 To be sure the practice of denouncing enemies as “raw hordes of barbarians” was a

13. Lausberg, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik, 76. 14. Arndt, Geist der Zeit, 2:195. 15. Ibid., 83. 270 The Apocalypse in Germany millennia-old tradition,16 but the verbal aggressiveness of Arndt and other writers of the Wars of Liberation, as well as of the First World War, does not exhaust itself in attacks of this sort. Its particular sharpness gains verbal aggressiveness only by the influence of apocalyptic notions. In its context, opponents are bestialized and demonized, in a process using classical images of the apocalypse. The less specific vocabulary of condemnation connects to this point of reference; it also has the function of presenting the enemy not only as evil, but also as evil incarnate; not only as a passing threat, but also as the ultimate danger for mankind. In this manner, the apocalyptic orator attempts to arouse the greatest repugnance among his audience, which he himself sincerely feels, and feels is justified on the basis of his own interpretation of experience. The apocalyptic demonization of the enemy not only is thus a tactical rhetorical maneuver, but also arises from the conviction of standing opposite evil incarnate. Only in this manner may we explain how even clerical dignitaries—or these in particular— exclude any Christian charity from their characterization of the enemy. The cathedral preacher from Schwerin, Gerhard Tolzien,in 1916 described the enemies of Germany as “murderers,” “mortal sinners,” “bloodhounds,” “monsters,” and “human beasts.”17 The interpretation of political foes as enemies of mankind, whose victory would mean the end of the world, elevates the apocalyptic orator into the highest pitch of excitement, which he seeks to transfer to his listeners through his verbal aggressiveness. This apocalyptic excitement can become so powerful that the speaker to a certain extent can only wildly thrash about, and his condemnation of the enemy slips into vulgar- ities. This vulgar level of apocalyptic rhetoric is excellently represented by Ludwig Ganghofer, who carried a particularly varied palette of foul language and other verbal acts of violence during the First World War. Precisely because of his vulgarity, he enjoyed a particular popularity. The following descriptions of Germany’s enemies derive from two small volumes of war poems that appeared under the title Eiserne Zither (“Iron Zither”), which had a high circulation during the First World War. In the center stands the apocalyptic identification of the enemy as “Babylon, the great strumpet.” From this interpretive core the excitement spreads, which the other abusive words display, too: “flood of ticks,” “cowardly wolves,” “Huns,” “pigs,” “pus wound,” “putrefaction,” “beasts,” “pack of murderers,” and “dehumanized hordes in butcher’s smocks.” England is the “world’s blister of pride,” a “wondrously stinking ulcer,” and carries on 16. Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit, 1:108–9 (A. Lasson); see also 32, 45 (G. Roethe). 17. Gerhard Tolzien, Der unselige Krieg: Eine sechste deutsche Zeit- und Kriegs-Betrachtung (Schwerin: Bahn, 1916), 7, 10–11. Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 271 a “robber’s struggle with butcher’s knives.” The “oversexed French” are a “horde of thieves” and show the typical “mendacity of the Frenchies.” The Russians are characterized as “Russian sows” or a “mob of Kalmuks.” Ganghofer already anticipates the Nazi technique of denunciation when he speaks of Russians as “rats” and of the “vermin of the Serbs.”18 The question arises anew whether there are only differences in style among John of Patmos and Arndt, Ganghofer, and the Nazis as regards the rhetorical treatment of the enemy. Can nothing else be determined than an increasing radicalization and vulgarization of the language? But even on closer inspection we discover a fundamental difference between the rhetorical functions of ancient and modern apocalyptic texts. The latter are not content with exaggerating the situation of distress. Rhetor- ical exaggerations, particularly the extreme and vulgar disparagement of enemies, achieve here an additional function that results from the new, special intentions of modern texts. In contrast to the authors of the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of John, Arndt and the poets of the First World War, as well as National Socialist authors, are not content with calls for steadfastness in the face of real or presumed distress; rather, they demand action. This intention pushes modern apocalyptic texts into greater proximity with classical political speech whose purpose was to effect a change of situation through practical means. Of course, apocalyptic texts interpret the situation in an inappropriate, exaggerated manner; thereby the intended action receives a special justification and a particular quality. No objections may be made against practical action or political and even military resistance if—as in the Napoleonic period—one’s own land is oppressed by an apparently conquest-hungry enemy. But the call for the use of force becomes problematic if the pragmatic facts of reality have veered out of view, if the struggle for political independence of a nation is styled as a universal and final struggle against the power of evil. When this happens, apocalyptic interpretation with its hyperbolic rhetoric acquires a new character that reacts to practical reality in a dubious way. When the authors of the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of John described the Seleucid and Roman Empires as the beast and whore of Babylon respectively, this was not with the intention of calling the pious to arms, since the destruction of the enemy was God’s prerogative “without any additional help from the hands of men.” However, when Fichte suggested to the Germans in 1808: “If you perish, all mankind perishes with you, without the hope of a subsequent restoration,” and when Karl König stated in 1914: “We must be victorious, since the fall of the Germans would mean

18. Ganghofer, Eiserne Zither (part 1), 5–6, 24–26, 37, 61–67, 74, 84; (part 2), 12, 16, 36. 272 The Apocalypse in Germany the fall of the history of mankind,”19 then, by using such devices, they called for the use of violence. And when, at the same time, the enemies were denounced as dangerous and disgusting beasts, it is clear that this kind of rhetoric resulted in the justiﬁcation of using every conceivable means to destroy this enemy. Heinrich von Kleist, in his poem “Germania an ihre Kinder” (“Germania to Her Children”), written in 1809, reduced the connection of the apocalyptic worldview, the demand for action, and the legitimization of the use of violence against the demonized opponent to the least common denominator:

A pleasure hunt, as when marksmen Track down the wolf! Beat him to death! The last judgment Will not ask for reasons!20

We have discovered a further important rhetorical strategy that is characteristic of the modern type of activist apocalypse: the interpretation of the opponent as the power of evil, abasing him as a dangerous and precipitous beast, and the call to destroy this beast are connected with the rhetorical strategy of calling upon a “higher law” (lex potentior) as justification. In classic courtroom speech, one of the most important questions that must be dealt with is the legal qualification of an act (quaestio status qualitatis). In order to justify an act that may be culpable according to normal law, the speaker can, in certain circumstances, appeal to a higher, superior law. This higher law can be more or less obvious; if possible, the speaker attempts to give the higher law the strongest possible evidence (qualitas absoluta). We find conspicuous examples in Plato’s Apology of Socrates and in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles. In his defense speech before the court of the Athenians, Socrates declines to desist from seeking for wisdom and teaching the youth, even under threat of the death penalty, with the explanation: “Athenians, I am loyal and friendly to you, but I prefer to obey God more than you.” And in the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and the apostles defend themselves against the claim of the High Council of the Jews that they had violated the prohibition of spreading

19. Dan. 2:34 (New International Version); Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Reden an die deutsche Nation,” in Ausgewählte Werke, 5:610; König, Sechs Kriegspredigten, 5 (August 5, 1914). 20. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols., 6th ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1977), 1:27. Rhetoric: Consolation and Agitation 273 the teachings of Jesus with the words: “We ought to obey God rather than men.”21 The situation of men who appeal to the lex potentior is also to be found in classical apocalypses, although the rhetorical strategy is not articulated: in the Book of Daniel the Jews—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego— are cast into the fiery furnace because they refuse to bow down before the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar commanded them to worship. Daniel is himself cast into the lions’ den because he prays to his God and thereby violates the commandment of King Darius that no one is permitted to ask anything from any god except the king. In Revelation, John admonishes the congregations not to yield to the power of evil, which is represented by the Roman Empire and its laws, but to be faithful to God.22 In all these cases—Socrates, Daniel and his friends, the apostles, the Christian congregations—obedience to the higher law brings punishment and suffering, even death. In the modern “activist” type of apocalypse, the strategy of appealing to a higher law is used in a different manner, as we can observe in the apocalyptic interpretations of the Napoleonic period, of the First World War, and also in the Nazi apocalypse. The appeal to a qualitas absoluta, which is called “the Last Judgment,” “German Spirit,” or—in the case of Nazism—“racial law,” serves to justify the punishment or killing of others. It is clear that this justification, if it is directed to arousing the emotions through rhetorical means, can lead to unrestrained actions, and that this has fatal consequences if the presumed threat is fictitious. Napoleon and the Allies in the First World War could defend themselves, but the appeal to a lex potentior toward the Jews served as a justification for the murder of defenseless individuals. Our investigation has revealed that the manner in which apocalyptic texts relate to a given situation, the purposes they pursue, the linguistic methods they use, and the functions they perform with regard to their public may be viewed with the apparatus of classical rhetoric as a specific rhetorical style of speaking, as a rhetorical strategy that is particularly characteristic of the apocalyptic. The most salient feature of this strategy is exaggeration, beginning with the interpretation of the historical situation in which the authors find themselves, and continuing to the extreme language that is used for the condemnation of enemies. It may be conceded that hyperbolic rhetoric is understandable in certain circumstances—that

21. Plato, Apology 29D; Acts 5:29. 22. Dan. 3 and 6; Rev. 2 and 13. 274 The Apocalypse in Germany is, when the motivating experiences are likewise extreme—and that the exclusively spiritual functions of encouraging and comforting have no detrimental consequences on others in the realm of practical reality. At the same time, however, a fundamentally faulty evaluation must be admitted with regard to the relationship between the spiritual and the practical orders of reality. And the inappropriate interpretation of this relationship can have dangerous consequences when the apocalyptic interpretation refers back to practical reality with the intent of causing violent action. In this case rhetorical exaggeration not only turns apocalyptic interpretation into a lie, but may even serve as the justiﬁcation of criminal activities and, in extreme cases, even lead to mass murder. D. Representations

If apocalyptic visions are an expression of a consciousness of crisis, since the end of the nineteenth century until today there has prevailed in Germany an unbroken sense of crisis. It is true that a chain of apocalyptic speculation existed previously, but it came to massive outbreaks only at greater distances and in particular situations as, for example, the occupation of Germany by Napoleon. But from the visions of destruction of the fin de siècle until today runs an unbroken chain of fearful or hopeful apocalyptic fantasies and prophecies, through the expressionist dreams of the “dawn of mankind” and of the birth of the “new man,” the culturally pessimistic or utopian apocalypses of the twenties, the activist apocalypse of Nazism, and the apocalyptic interpretations of the Second World War after 1945, which merged almost seamlessly into warnings of a nuclear apocalypse. The chain of apocalyptic visions continues to the current prophecies and literary anticipation of the total destruction of our planet by a final nuclear war or by the rampant destruction of the environment. What is new in this recent tradition of apocalyptic visions is the decisive share that the arts have in it: mainly literature and theater, but also the fine arts, and, very recently, film. It is true that the Revelation of John already has a “poetic” character, as Herder noted, but it was not written as a “work of literature” in the modern sense; a similar view can be applied to Oetinger’s Güldene Zeit or Marx’s Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, although religious, philosophical, or political texts can also be considered from aesthetic points of view, as I have shown. Of course, in the fine arts, the apocalypse already played an important role during the Middle Ages and the early modern age, but in the role of illustration and religious “program art”; autonomous representations of apocalyptic motifs that have detached themselves from canonical models are to be found in only the nineteenth century. The situation is similar in literature. In the Middle Ages we have apocalyptic religious plays such as the Ludus de Antichristo, and in the period of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, there are religious hymns and poems that deal with apocalyptic motifs. But for the first time in the Napoleonic era, literary works detach themselves from the religious suppositions of the apocalyptic tradition; to be sure, these works—poems and journalistic pieces like those of Arndt and other writers of the Wars of Liberation—have a practical purpose as well and now fulfill political

275 276 The Apocalypse in Germany functions. The increase of poetic quality compared to the Revelation of John is in any event modest. The main stress of aesthetic representation is on rhetoric, as the previous chapter has shown. A truly productive development and renewal of the apocalypse took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also affected the aesthetic form of nonﬁction apocalyptic texts as, for example, displayed by the “expressionist” style of the younger Bloch. Although philosophers, critics, and politicians followed the apocalyptic thread further as well, in what follows I will focus greater attention on the literary works, since ﬁctional representations and their imagery often betray more about experiences and their interpretation, about the motives and intentions of apocalyptic visions, than do philosophic discourses. 17 Dreams of Death and Destruction

The apocalypse begins with destruction. The sense that the world is approaching destruction—indeed, that it must perish, since it is experienced as wrong and distorted—is the cause of apocalyptic interpretations of experience. A century ago, the latest apocalyptic tradition began with the sense that the previous, old world, Western civilization, bourgeois society, was doomed to destruction. That a new existence, a perfect world, would follow this destruction is hope and consolation, euphoric and sometimes even desperate self-assurance, or will turning outward, to accelerate destruction and even to bring about a transformation. But at the beginning there is destruction, and the threat of destruction may be so overpowering that all hope of an apocalyptic change dries up. The visions of destruction that appeared in considerable numbers at the end of the nineteenth century were of a different sort than the optimistic apocalypses of Fichte and Arndt at the beginning of that century. Certainty of the future and bourgeois complacency were scarcely perceptible. At the very time when bourgeois society had developed to its highest point— although in Germany politically subdued but nevertheless successful in all aspects of spiritual and material culture—and when the belief in progress appeared to gain ever more triumphal confirmations through the development of modern technological civilization, more and more voices were raised to intone a requiem over bourgeois society and Western civilization as a whole. Marx was the first great prophet of destruction who predicted the end of the bourgeois world. Still, the eighteenth-century bourgeois belief in progress was bound up in his vision of destruction. He was an optimistic apocalypticist who believed firmly in an earthly paradise and assumed, of course, that the material accomplishments of the bourgeois age would be preserved after its end. The apocalyptic faith of the second great prophet of destruction of that era—Richard Wagner—was more complicated. He began with an apocalyptic vision that corresponded completely to the classical model 277 278 The Apocalypse in Germany and, as with Marx, was socially motivated by rebellion against the “prevailing order of things . . . that makes millions the slaves of a few and makes these few slaves to their own power, their own wealth, . . . an order of things that is composed of violence, lies, sorrow, hypocrisy, necessity, misery, poverty, pain, tears, deceit, crime.” In 1848 and 1849 he expected that revolution would destroy this order forever and act as a “redeemer from this world of lamentation”: “Indeed, as we know, the old world is going to ruin, and a new one will arise from it, for the exalted goddess revolution is coming racing along on the wings of storms, her noble head surrounded by flashes of lightning, the sword in her right hand, the torch in her left, and wherever her powerful footsteps tread, that which was built in idle madness for millennia falls into ruin, and the hem of her garment brushes the last vestiges away! But behind her a never-before imagined paradise of happiness, brightened with delightful rays of sun, opens itself to us.” But with the failure of revolution, Wagner’s imminent expectation of salvation collapsed. What still remained for him was the conviction that the order of the “rich and powerful” was doomed. Indeed, so powerful did the notion of inescapable annihilation of everything in existence become that, for the time being, it completely darkened the precious vision of a sunny paradise. Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelungen”), whose text originated in the years after 1848, ends with a world conflagration, the complete destruction of a world corrupted by greed for gold and power. The opera leaves it open whether a new, better world will follow the end; only the recollection of the mythical model of Ragnarök may rouse the vague hope that it would be so.1 Until the end of his life, Wagner maintained the belief that the present world order had to be destroyed; indeed, he developed this belief into a philosophical view of history to which he attested continuous decline. That this decline would lead to the final “destruction of everything in

1. Richard Wagner, “Die Revolution” (1849), in Dichtungen und Schriften: Jubiläumsaus- gabe in zehn Bänden, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), 5:240, 237, 234. Hans Mayer calls the end of the twilight of the gods, which Wagner chose for his final composed version, “bakunistic.” He hereby assumes that Wagner expressed the hope for renewal by the destruction of the world and of the corrupted gods, since Bakunin, who powerfully influenced Wagner’s mind-set in 1849, was indeed a classical apocalypticist who viewed the destruction of everything in existence as a precondition for renewal (Richard Wagner in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten [Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1959], 147). Peter Wapnewski deduces Wagner’s hope for a new world from Nordic-Germanic mythology that has a new world follow the twilight of the gods and that was properly known to Wagner through his constantly used Deutsche Mythologie by Jacob Grimm (see Der traurige Gott: Richard Wagner in seinen Helden [Munich: Beck, 1978], 194–97). If hope for renewal or redemption resonates at the end of the Ring—it is not visualized here yet. Dreams of Death and Destruction 279 existence” appeared logical to him.2 But also the apocalyptic vision of a “new world” after the destruction gained more distinct contours in his later years. Soon after the failure of the revolution of 1848–1849, he focused his hope of salvation, which he apparently had not completely buried, in a new direction. If the imminent expectation had been disappointed, it was still possible to anticipate a new, better “life of the future,” indeed, with a “work of art of the future”; the creator of such a work of art would then “already be living a better life.”3 With these ideas of 1851 Wagner introduced the redemptive visions of his last years, which found their highest symbolic expression in Parsifal: as the elimination of all the opposites that make life in this world so painful, in a new kind of existence that would be religiously and aesthetically determined, a representation of this way of existence in an “opera festival” (Bühnenweihfestspiel), the anticipatory “redemption through art.”4 The third great prophet of destruction of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche, ultimately prophesied the end of European culture sans phrase: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I am describing what is coming, what cannot come otherwise: the arrival of nihilism. The story can now be told, since necessity itself is here at work. The future speaks in a hundred signs, it announces this fate everywhere; everyone’s ear is tuned to the music of the future. For a long time now our entire European culture has been in motion, tortured with a tension that is growing from decade to decade toward disaster—restless, violent, precipitate, like a river rushing toward its end, which is no longer reflective, which fears reflectivity.” Nietzsche was more radical and skeptical than Marx and Wagner since he was not an optimistic apocalypticist. He had completely given up his belief in progress, if only in the limited sense, still maintained by Marx: “Mankind does not represent an advance to something better, or stronger, or higher in the sense in which it is believed today.” He saw the world as completely “false, violent, contradictory,

2. Cosima Wagner reported on August 16, 1879, that Wagner had a “formal vision of the destruction of everything in existence” (Die Tagebücher, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack [Munich: Piper, 1982], 3:399). Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: Sein Leben. Sein Werk. Sein Jahrhundert (Munich: Piper, 1980), 760–77, has shown that the late work of Wagner stands in closer connection with the writings around 1848 than previously seen. On Wagner’s philosophy of history, see Jürgen Kühnel, Parsifal: Erlösung dem Erlöser: Von der Aufhebung des Chistentums in das Kunstwerk Richard Wagners (Vortragssammlung des Siegener Richard-Wagner-Verbandes, 1) (Siegen: n.p., 1982), 12–16. 3. Richard Wagner, “Oper und Drama” (1850–1851), in Dichtungen und Schriften, 7:370. 4. On this, see Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner, 778–85; Wapnewski, Der traurige Gott, 250–68; and Kühnel, Parsifal, 21–23, 34–35. I will go into Wagner’s vision of redemption from the viewpoint of an “existential apocalypse” more fully below; see pp. 375–84. 280 The Apocalypse in Germany misleading, meaningless.” This approach could have driven him—like Wagner—to apocalyptic hopes, but he did not expect a transformation to universal salvation. That mankind “as a whole is approaching some goal,” be it in continuing progress or through the apocalyptic inversion of history, was for him a “very unclear and arbitrary notion”: “We forget how little mankind belongs to a single movement, how youth, age, decline are not notions which befit it as a whole.” As a countermovement to decline he saw only isolated “strokes of luck of great success,” types of persons of greater worth, now and again of entire houses, lineages, peoples; and he entrusted the future to such a type of greater worth, which he called “superman,” whose appearance, however, did not affect the prophesied destruction of European culture.5 Marx’s activist apocalypse had greater political consequences than Wag- ner’s or Nietzsche’s vision (to the extent that responsibility for Nazism is not laid on their shoulders). Still, Wagner did have an impact on the decades around 1900, while Nietzsche’s influence was even stronger. In fact, everyone’s ear was tuned to Nietzsche’s apocalyptic hymn, and many others, whether influenced by or independent of him, joined in this hymn. The prophecy that the entire culture of Europe was moving toward a catastrophe apparently found its fulfillment in the First World War. To later reflection, everything appeared to be moving necessarily toward this disaster. Indeed, it could appear that the terrible war that actually ended the power and glory of Europe as well as the bourgeois era had been almost conjured up by such prophecies.

Everything was in me . . . the howling of death-cries that bounced off the musty walls, these twisted spasms of powerlessness, this confused despair; the mad search for exits; I carried this in me and burning Carthage at the same time; but it was more, more divine, more bestial; and it was the present, the fullest, most sublime present.6

Taken from the context in which this passage stands, one could think that it is the recollection of a soldier at the front in the First World War, perhaps describing an artillery or gas attack in the trenches. In reality, this quote comes from the year 1901 and is to be found in the famous Brief (“Letter”) of Lord Chandos by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Those

5. From the posthumous fragments of 1887–1888 that were compiled under the direction of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche by Peter Gast and the Horneffer brothers, and published for the first time under the title Der Wille zur Macht (1901), here cited from Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 13:189, 191–93, 87. 6. Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” in Gesammelte Werke, Prose II: 16. Dreams of Death and Destruction 281 despairingly seeking a way out are not people but rats that are being poisoned in a basement; this scene is not even the description of an actual event, but takes place in the imagination of Lord Chandos after he had given the order to poison the rats. I concealed the context, author, and time of origin of this scene in order to stress the similarity of this event with the experience of war as it was described, for example, by Bernhard Kellermann: “Should he tell Heinz how they ran back and forth—like rats under fire—like rats— from one shelter to another—each evening?”7 The destructive fantasies of Hofmannsthal were not an isolated incident in the literature before 1914; there are many such scenes. Did they really anticipate the Great War? Did they actually wish for this disaster? What motivated these descriptions of destruction and dread of death? Before I examine these questions I wish first to stay briefly at the scene cited above, since it reveals some peculiarities that we will meet again and again in other texts. It must first be borne in mind that this is a topical description of a catastrophe that brings death and destruction. That those mentioned are not men but rats is of secondary importance for the character of the scene. Second, the lethal destruction suggests associations with destruction by war, in this instance with “burning Carthage.” Third, the scene of destruction does not describe—within the fictional context— a real event, but unfolds in the imagination of the narrator as a dreamlike vision. And, fourth, the speaker makes it known that he is fascinated by the imagined murderous events and feels attracted by them. The description of the scene as “divine” and “sublime” betrays this just like the further commentary of the narrator: “Do not think that it was compassion that filled me; it was much more and much less than compassion; a tremendous participation, an overflow into those creatures or a feeling that a fluid of life and death, of dreaming and wakefulness overflowed into them for a moment.”8 The same characteristics that may be observed in the short scene from the letter of Lord Chandos unfold in more detail in Alfred Kubin’s novel Die andere Seite (“The Other Side”), which first appeared in 1908 and presents a monumental vision of destruction. The narrator reports about his life in a fantastic, surreal “dream realm” (Traumreich), which was artificially erected in Inner Asia by Patera, a man with secret gifts and powers, and he reports about the destruction of this “dream realm.” An “antagonist”

7. Kellermann, Der 9. November, 40. 8. Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” 17. For what follows, see Gert Sautermeister, “Irrational- ismus um die Jahrhundertwende: Hofmannsthals ‘Manche freilich müssen drunten sterben’ und der ‘Brief des Lord Chandos,’ ” Text und Kontext 7 (1979): 2. 282 The Apocalypse in Germany of Patera, “the American,” intrudes into the “dream realm” and, with his machinations, brings about its destruction, leading to a grand apocalyptic spectacle: sexual orgies turn into a murderous struggle of all against all, into madness and “mass suicide.” Even the beasts turn against men; finally, the earth opens up and swallows the burning dream realm. “From the lofty French Quarter a mass of mud, trash, gore, entrails, animal and human cadavers moved along slowly like a river of lava. In this mixture shimmering in all colors of decay the last dreamers plodded around. Almost all were naked, while the more robust men threw the weaker women into the flood of carcasses where, stunned by the vapors, they perished. The great place was like a gigantic cloaca, in which they choked each other with their last strength and bite and finally died.”9 The narrator experiences the final struggle between Patera and the American, which is related as an earthshaking, titanic battle, in a vision. Thus the monstrous finale of this destruction is set off once again within the narration, which in itself is dreamlike, and, as in Hofmannsthal, reserved for a dream vision. This narrator, too, is fascinated by the end; although he only saves himself with effort, he cannot free himself from the “magic of the violent scenes” that he has experienced. His fascination goes as far as a death wish: “I thought of my own life as the greatest heavenly joys, the eternal wedding night would then have begun.”10 In a similar manner, the writer Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (“Death in Venice”) (1913) feels himself attracted by the vision of destruction. The city, attacked by cholera, breathing death and ruin, forms the background of a dream that Aschenbach suffers like a strange power: “Fear was the beginning, fear and pleasure and the horrified desire for what would come. Night reigned, and his senses listened; from far away turmoil, a thunderous roar, a mixture of noise approached: rattling, blaring, and muffled thundering, as well as shrill exulting and a certain howling in a drawn ululation—everything interspersed and atrociously sweetly drowned out by a deeply cooing, insinuatingly persistent playing of the flute that enchanted the entrails in a shamelessly intrusive manner.” This dreamer, too, experiences the orgiastic, bloody witch’s Sabbath with a mixture of horror and fascination until the murderous end: “And his soul tasted the unchastity and madness of the fall.”11

9. Kubin, Die andere Seite, 260–61. 10. Ibid., 286–87; Hellmut Petriconi, Das Reich des Untergangs: Bemerkungen über ein mythologisches Thema, provides a thorough interpretation of the novel, in which reference is made to Kubin’s models, e.g., Indic mythology. 11. Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, in Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1958), 516, 517. From the great number of books and articles on Der Tod in Venedig I’m referring here Dreams of Death and Destruction 283

These first examples may suffice to deal with the question of the meaning of all these dreams of death and destruction. How may they be explained? I would first like to begin with the self-understanding of contemporaries and have a diagnostician speak who felt the pulse of his time in art and culture like no other, the writer and critic Hermann Bahr. Bahr exhibited a particularly informative example of the talent for grasping the undercurrents of the mood of the era, and for analyzing them carefully, as in his review of the premiere performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra in 1909—perhaps the most spectacular artistic presentation of destruction from the period before the First World War. The libretto was written by Hofmannsthal and first performed as a play in 1903. Here Hofmannsthal revels in blood-soaked fantasies, in painful and pleasure-filled detail that he puts in the mouth of his heroine, Electra, as the constantly repeating visionary reminiscence of the murder of Agamemnon and as a visionary anticipation of the murder of Clytemnestra. In many of the passages spoken by Electra, the images of murder and the “wind of death” and “steaming” blood are compressed into an ecstatic “show of great splendor,” whose exquisite verbal formation betrays the fascination of the author as much as the stage direction for having Electra’s entrance accompanied by “spots of red light” that “fall obliquely over the floor and against the wall, like a fleck of blood.” Richard Strauss composed music congenial to this murderous piece, translating the scenes of horror onomatopoeically and presenting previously unheard-of dissonances, played to the limits of atonality by an outsized orchestra of 112 musicians.12 For Hermann Bahr, Strauss was a representative figure: “He is the great contemporary, the only one today who has the entire essence of this dubious epoch in his art.” He characterized the epoch as a combination of extremely disparate elements: “with its pride from an unbounded feeling of power that believes itself permitted to dare anything, that knows how to play with all dangers, to laugh at all threats, to taste of all allurements”; “with its barbaric defiance, that is tempted to defy morality, and lures back into chaos; . . . with its bitter contempt against itself and its great self- love . . . with its firm comfort in technological omnipotence that must only—as being relevant for the present complex of problems—to Petriconi, Das Reich des Untergangs, and Walter H. Sokel, “Demaskierung und Untergang wilhelminischer Repräsentanz: Zum Parallelismus der Inhaltsstruktur von ‘Professor Unrat’ und ‘Tod in Venedig,’ ” in Herkommen und Erneuerung; Essays für Oskar Seidlin, ed. Gerald Gillespie and Edgar Lohner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976). 12. Hofmannsthal, Elektra, in Gesammelte Werke, Dramas II: 15. See Paul Rosenfeld, Discoveries of a Music Critic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936), 138–43; and Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914 (London: Hamilton, 1966), 327–34. 284 The Apocalypse in Germany obey the impossible itself, and with its hopeless, destitute longing for some completely simple, still, unbroken feeling.”13 This mood, so sensitively sketched by Bahr, was the product of highly conflicting reactions of contemporaries—above all, the educated middle class—to the dominant events of the time. The power and glory of the empire, on the one hand, invited proud identification but, on the other hand, repelled by its superficiality and its lack of spiritual substance. A fundamental feeling of impotence arose from the inability to participate in the unfolding of power and to determine political and societal developments. The changes in the structure of society, increasing social mobility and particularization, and the devaluation of traditional norms made status and function in the societal structure appear uncertain and led to subliminal fears, to existential lack of direction and loss of identity. Progressive industrialization and the triumphal progress of technology aroused feelings of pride for the omnipotence of the human spirit, but consciousness had difficulty keeping up with the rapid development: the modern world was becoming noticeably foreign, the machine a symbol of threat. As early as 1913, Ludwig Klages passionately denounced civilization’s progress, whose destructive effects everyone can see today: The “entirety” of nature, “which envelops all living beings as in an ark,” is brought out of equilibrium; entire species of animals are exterminated; the natural forest gives way to “forests of smokestacks”; throughout the world, “the same gray multistory tenements” are lined up next to each other, “and the poisonous effluents of factories pollute the pure moisture of the earth.” “An orgy of desolation without compare has gripped mankind, ‘civilization’ bears the features of an unleashed addiction to murder, and the plenitude of the earth dries up before its poisonous breath. Thus appear the fruits of ‘progress’!”14 Klages viewed the destructive tendencies of technological progress not as a concomitant feature—albeit dangerous, still possibly correctable—but as the central feature of Western Christian civilization, as the expression of its will to subdue the earth: “Wherever progressive man assumed rule in which he took pride, he sowed murder and the terror of death.” The untamed will to power finally leads “truly to the destruction of life” and results perforce in the “self-destruction of humanity.” He viewed this self- destruction not only as a process that threatened to destroy mankind’s external conditions of existence, but also as the destruction of what is

13. Hermann Bahr, “Elektra in Dresden,” in Essays (Leipzig: Insel, 1921), 74. 14. Ludwig Klages, Mensch und Erde: Fünf Abhandlungen (Munich: Mueller, 1920), 24– 27 (first publication of the essay Mensch und Erde in the Festschrift of the Freideutsche Jugend on the occasion of the centennial celebration on the Hoher Meißner 1913). Dreams of Death and Destruction 285 essentially human: “No doubt about it, we are living in the age of the destruction of the soul.” But to him, the withering of the soul affected more and more man’s manner of and feeling for life: “Most people no longer live, but only exist, be it as slaves of an ‘occupation,’ wearing themselves out mechanically in the service of large companies; be it as slaves of money, mindlessly given to the delirium of stocks and promotions, be it finally as slaves of the addiction to entertainment in the big cities; just as many dimly feel the collapse and growing joylessness. At no time was joylessness greater and more poisonous.” The “terror of death,” which in Klages’s view progressive man had spread about, began to turn against himself. Hermann Bahr drew the same conclusion: “We don’t live any longer, we are merely ‘lived.’ No longer do we have any freedom, no longer may we decide, we are through, man has been deprived of his soul, nature has been dehumanized. . . . Never was there a time shaken by so much horror, by so much dread of death.”15 One possible response to these frightening experiences was flight into introspection and dreams. “One pursues the anatomy of his own soul,” as Hofmannsthal characterized his generation, “or one dreams. Reflection or imagination, reflected image or vision.” Kubin expressly constructed the “dream realm” of his novel as an “asylum for those dissatisfied with modern culture.”16 But dreams could not dispense with reality; rather, they repeated the fears of the time. The experiences of threat as well as of helplessness crystallized into visions of descent and destruction, to which the fragmented and weakened existence offered no resistance. At best, this kind of existence could be made attractive through aesthetic sublimation, which was able to transform the “dread” into devotion and even the “terror of death” into longing for death. Within literary fiction, Hofmannsthal represented this transition in the figure of Clytemnestra, who is worn down by “dread” and becomes “brittle”:

And still crawls between night and day, When I lie with open eyes, a something Over me, it is not a word, it is Not pain, it does not press me, it does not choke me ...... It is nothing, not even a nightmare, and still, It is so terrible that my soul

15. Ibid., 17, 29–30, 32–33; Hermann Bahr, Expressionismus (1906), cited in Kulturproﬁl der Jahrhundertwende: Essays von Hermann Bahr (Vienna: Bauer, 1962), 223. 16. Hofmannsthal, “Gabriele d’Annunzio,” in Gesammelte Werke, Prosa I: 40; Kubin, “Die andere Seite,” 11. 286 The Apocalypse in Germany

Longs to be hanged, and my every joint longs for death.17

Through musical shaping, a further dimension for the expression of such feelings resulted. For Bahr, Strauss’s mastery consisted in his ability to generate the appeal that the aesthetic sublimation of terror can yield: “These anxious times that appear to offer no escape than to save oneself from life into the aesthetic and artistic, ﬁnally suggest to him the blackly veiled drive to attempt the magic of art in the horrible and repulsive, trying whether it cannot transform terror into beauty and the unbearable into joy.”18 An impressive example of this characterization is Electra’s vision of the “great show of splendor” that she intends to celebrate following the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus:

—and we sacrifice for you The steeds that are in the house, we gather Them together in front of the grave, and they sense Death and neigh into death’s air And die, and we sacrifice for you the dogs ...... Which lick your feet, for which you Threw morsels, therefore their blood must flow Down to serve you, and we Your blood, your son Orestes and your daughters, We three, when all this is brought to pass and purple-tented Set up, from the haze Of the blood, which the sun draws to itself, Then shall we dance, your blood, around your grave.19

The “magic” of this passage is completed through its musical shaping: through melodic and rhythmic means, wild joy is expressed, rising to a shining major chord upon the word grave. That Strauss succeeded in magically transforming the horrid into beauty was the reason for his success. And although Bahr grasped the dubiousness expressed in the opera and found the same dubiousness in the amazement of the “greedy strangers,” of the “gorged starvelings” for the “magician about whom all Hell dances,” he could not escape this fascination. For Bahr the overall impression of the premiere performance of the opera remained: “The evening was wonderful.”20

17. Hofmannsthal, Elektra, 31. 18. Bahr, “Elektra in Dresden,” 76. 19. Hofmannsthal, Elektra, 15. 20. Bahr, “Elektra in Dresden,” 71–72, 78. Dreams of Death and Destruction 287

The visions of destruction referred to so far may be ascribed to the mood and art of “décadence” that originated in the previously mentioned experiences of crisis and developed the style of its expression through the examples of Wagner, Nietzsche, and French authors. As Wolfdietrich Rasch and others have shown,21 an important characteristic of literary decadence around 1900 was its Janus face: The perceptions of decline and weakness, feelings of fear and helplessness, are transformed again and again into fantasies of violence. And, as Bahr had noted, characteristic of these fantasies of violence is the aesthetic transformation of the dreadful into artistic play. This characteristic becomes particularly clear in an exemplary text of the German ﬁn de siècle, Stefan George’s Algabal (1892). Suicide and murder, which are repeatedly subjects of his poem cycle, are transformed into beauty in the “play” of red blood “with the green corridor” or in the “harmony with the softly raked purple,” and contrasted with the “evening wine cup,” with feasting22—aesthetic and atmospheric elements that recur in the reﬁnement of stage lighting and in the “show of grandeur” of Elektra. Even the vision of destruction in battle becomes, cast in this manner, “aesthetically domesticated barbarism.”23

Upon the seedless field Many heroes silently pale Only the sooty flickering of flaming spruces honor the corpses.

Narrowly in regular chains Flow tile-red brooks Sobbing sings from their beds A hollow wind circles the plane.24

Jens Malte Fischer has shown the relationship of the brutal as well as attractive character of Algabal to the allegorical presentation of the war, which Franz von Stuck painted at almost the same time (1894): War appears as an aesthetically appealing, well-formed youth adorned with a

21. Wolfdietrich Rasch, Die literarische Décadence um 1900; Wolfgang Drost, ed., Fortschrittsglaube und Dekadenzbewußtsein im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts: Literatur—Kunst —Kunstgeschichte; Erwin Koppen, Dekadenter Wagnerismus: Studien zur europäischen Lite- ratur des fin de siècle (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973); Roger Bauer et al., eds., Fin de siècle: Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977); Jens Malte Fischer, Fin de siècle: Kommentar zu einer Epoche. 22. Stefan George, Werke: Ausgabe in vier Bänden (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 1:50, 52. 23. Fischer, Fin de siècle, 134. 24. George, Werke, 1:54. 288 The Apocalypse in Germany crown of laurels. The frog perspective, in which War is portrayed, has him gazing over the field of corpses at his feet, but also beyond the viewer, giving him an aura of lordly and indifferent exaltation. A contemporary stated: “Beautiful in all its horror.”25 Many pictures from those years reveal the Janus face of the décadence, but especially the allegorical depictions of war that appeared in great numbers toward the end of the century. Arnold Böcklin’s second version of a picture of war (begun in 1896) takes up the traditional image of apocalyptic horsemen but gives it a new quality: the horsemen—War, Fury, and Death—almost burst the frame of the picture and crush the city appearing in the lower part of the picture; this motif achieves an extreme as well as threatening and fascinating dynamic. Alfred Kubin’s Der Krieg (c. 1900), like Stuck’s painting, personifies War as a dominating figure in frog perspective, but the depiction of the body—the face made invisible by the helmet, the broad and hoofed feet moved into the foreground for the sake of perspective—makes it more brutal; it gives an even more aggressive impression through movement, while the threatened men can no longer be perceived as individuals. Despite the heightening of the threatening impression, in view of the iconographic presuppositions and autobiographical utterances of the artist, Kubin’s picture also betrays “a feeling swaying between fear and enjoyment of the terribly great.”26 It may appear to the modern viewer as though the Janus face of the décadence foresaw the First World War, with trepidation to be sure, but not without pleasure in the idea of violent destruction. Still, the visions of destruction may in no case be thought of as accurate prophecies of a coming war. It is noteworthy that they are clothed in a mythical or historical mantle. They did not envision a future state of redemption, nor can the fascination with decline and fall be attributed to a death wish, with the result that they longed for a war. The “décadents” overcame their fears through flight into aesthetics, as Bahr had rightly observed. The fascination, which the visions of violence, war, and destruction betrayed, was spawned in an aesthetic medium through the possibility of transforming the pressure of threatening experiences and fears into aesthetic play. One must avoid identifying artistic fantasies with the attitudes and behavior of daily life. Most artists were able to integrate the aesthetic representation of the mood of destruction and dégoût de vivre

25. Fischer, Fin de siècle, 135; comment by Arthur Weese, “Franz Stuck: Eine Analyse,” Die graphischen Künste 26 (1903): 16; cited in Siegmar Holsten, Allegorische Darstellungen des Krieges 1870–1918: Ikonologische und ideologiekritische Studien (Munich: Prestel, 1976), 67. 26. Holsten, Allegorische Darstellungen des Krieges; 58. Dreams of Death and Destruction 289

Figure 7 Franz von Stuck, War (1894). with the enjoyment of a well-situated bourgeois existence. Thomas Mann, Hofmannsthal, and Richard Strauss are obvious examples. Should we require further evidence that these writers and artists neither expected nor desired a war, we may observe their reactions at the beginning of the war. In a letter to his brother Heinrich on August 7, 1914, Thomas Mann expressed his dismay over the “completely unexpected event”: “I am still as if in a dream—and yet one must feel shame not to have considered it possible and not to have seen that the catastrophe had to come.” Alfred Kubin, who had so forcefully given form to war and destruction in image and narration, wrote in retrospect in 1917: “What artist, indeed, what person at all would have dared to predict that such a ﬂood of hate, rage, and mulishness, as it now gushed in, would still be possible? I have . . . never sensed the elemental enthusiasm that so many have sensed.” Hofmannsthal revealed no sort of enthusiasm, either. He 290 The Apocalypse in Germany

Figure 8 Arnold Böcklin, War (second version) (begun 1896). Dreams of Death and Destruction 291

Figure 9 Alfred Kubin, War (ca. 1900) © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2000. tried “to get things arranged for himself” (as one said at that time in Austria), something he had succeeded in doing when he was transferred out of the landsturm ﬁeld regiment into which he had been drafted and into the War Aid ofﬁce in Vienna. This war had nothing to do with his visions of death and destruction. Hofmannsthal, who frequently wrote down his actual dreams in his diary, noted on April 1, 1914, that he had dreamed of being condemned to death, but on November 2, 1914, he observed: “Since the beginning of the war . . . as far as I can remember, I have not yet dreamed.”27 Reality had overtaken visions of death and destruction so decisively that it now appeared to many like a bad dream; Thomas Mann’s remark—“I am still as if in a dream”—betrays it. But also many other members of this generation, less prepossessed by dreams, appear neither to have expected nor to have greeted the outbreak of a war. Arnolt Bronnen reports that, in contrast to himself, his father,

27. Thomas Mann, Briefe 1889–1936 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1961), 111–12; Alfred Kubin, Aus meinem Leben (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), 50; Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen, in Gesammelte Werke, 170–71. 292 The Apocalypse in Germany a high school professor, still considered an outbreak of war impossible on July 31, 1914: “No longer are we man-eaters!” Ernst Toller, who studied in France in 1914 and called the German consul in Lyon on the same July 31 in order to ﬁnd out whether there was some danger of war, received this terse response: “Nonsense!” Even such an alert and critical mind as Max Nordau, who polemically attacked décadence in his book Entartung (“Degeneration”) and who had very realistically assessed the danger of a great war even at the beginning of 1914, asserted in the last days of July: “I do not wish to, I cannot believe in disaster. Even at the last moment they will shrink back from it.” Further, Stefan George reacted coolly to the war euphoria of his disciples. On August 26, 1914, he wrote to Friedrich Gundolf: “I call upon all of you: whether it ends well or badly:—the most difﬁcult only comes afterwards!”28 Twenty years had passed since the decadent, murderous fantasies of Algabal. The aesthetic play with horror had given way to warnings against overestimation of themselves and delusions of grandeur. In the year before the war, George had already conjured up war in a poem not as a fascinating vision but as a punishment that is threatened to those who “commit crimes against order and limit”:

Ten thousand must the holy madness strike Ten thousand must holy pestilence sweep away Ten thousand the holy war.29

The reactions of this generation of writers and artists at the outbreak of the war—incredulous surprise and utter lack of enthusiasm or even warnings against thoughtlessness and a cool distance, as in the case of George—appear to show that the artistic dreams of death and destruction had nothing to do with the expectation of, let alone a desire for, war. Still, these visions of destruction are not unconnected with readiness for war and with euphoria over war. They had created a climate that, although distinguished from the external and normal “life” as an aesthetic and artistic environment, achieved different effects in a younger generation that had learned to breathe in this climate.

28. Arnolt bronnen gibt zu protokoll: Beiträge zur geschichte des modernen schriftstellers (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954), 33; Ernst Toller, Eine Jugend in Deutschland, in Toller, Prosa, Briefe, Dramen, Gedichte (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1961), 55; Max Nordau, Erinnerungen: Erzählt von ihm selbst und von der Gefährtin seines Lebens (Leipzig: Renaissance-Verlag, 1928), 257; Stefan George—Friedrich Gundolf: Briefwechsel (Munich: Küpper, 1962), 258. 29. Stefan George, Der Stern des Bundes (Berlin: Bondi, 1914), 25 (a few copies had a limited circulation in 1913). 18 “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .”: Visions of the New Man

In the final years before 1914, literary visions of death and destruction appeared frequently. Most originated from a younger generation of writers, almost all of whom were adherents of early expressionism.1 While the violent fantasies of décadence were primarily inflamed by historical and mythical figures such as Elagabalus and Electra and unfolded in dreams and imaginative scenes, the newer visions of destruction revealed a stronger connection with the present. Although as in all visions of complete, apocalyptic destruction these visions made use of images of the forces of nature, the manner in which these images were arranged and placed into paradoxical context with fragments of modern civilization was new. Jakob van Hoddis’s poem “Weltende” (“End of the World”) presents this unique element particularly impressively; upon its appearance in 1911 it acted like a beacon, because of its theme as well as its style, and not without some cause it was placed by Kurt Pinthus at the beginning of the anthology Menschheitsdämmerung:

END OF THE WORLD The citizen’s hat ﬂies from his pointed head, In all skies it echoes like a scream. Tilers fall off and split in pieces, And on the coasts—one reads—the ﬂood rises. The storm is there, the wild seas hop Onto land, to crush thick dams.

1. A difference in age of a half generation divides the respective authors. Of the writers mentioned in this and in the last chapter, George, Hofmannsthal, Kraus, Kubin, and Thomas Mann were born between 1868 and 1877, while Becher, Bronnen, Heym, Lich- tenstein, Sack, Toller, Trakl, Unruh, and Wolfenstein between 1885 and 1895; Gundolf, born in 1880, lies between both these groups but is still twelve years younger than George.

293 294 The Apocalypse in Germany

Most people have a cold. Railroads fall from their bridges.2

In another respect as well the early expressionist visions of destruction gained in shrillness. While the violent fantasies of the literary décadence expressed themselves by mere associations of destruction in war, now war itself became the theme. Young writers concerned themselves with this theme so conspicuously that in 1916 Hanns Johst spoke of the “premonition of war” in literature.3 Perhaps the most famous was Georg Heym’s poem “Krieg I” from the year 1911:

He who slept for ages has risen up, Risen up below from vaults deep. In the twilight he stands, large and unrecognized, And he crushes the moon in his black hand. On the mountains he begins to dance And he cries out: All you warriors, up and at it. And it resounds when he brandishes his black head, Around which a clinging chain of a thousand skulls is hanging.

Like a tower he paces out the last glow, Where the day ﬂees, the streams are already full of blood. Numberless the corpses stretched out in the reeds, White-covered by the death-strong birds.

Above the blue ﬂaming torrent of round walls He stands, above the black alley weapon din. Above gates where the guardians lie askew. Above bridges that are corpse-mountain heavy.

And with a thousand red pointed caps The dark plateaus are spread wide about, ﬂuttering,

2. First printed in Der Demokrat (Berlin), January 11, 1911, cited in Kurt Pinthus, ed., Menschheitsdämmerung: Ein Dokument des Expressionismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1959), 39. See also the interpretations of Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper, Expressionismus, 2d ed. (Munich: Fink, 1983), 30–32; and Karl Riha, “Dem Bürger ﬂiegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,” in Gedichte und Interpretationen, vol. 5: Vom Naturalismus bis zur Jahrhundertmitte, ed. Harald Hartung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), 118–25. 3. He referred to works by René Schickele, Carl Hauptmann, Julius Bab, Richard Dehmel, Ernst Lissauer, Georg Heym, Ernst Stadler, and Rudolf Alexander Schröder; Hanns Johst, “Vorahnung des Krieges,” Das literarische Echo 18 (1915/16): 1373–76; Uwe Wandrey, Das Motiv des Krieges in der expressionistischen Lyrik (Hamburg: Lüdke, 1972), gives numerous examples of expressionist poems from years before 1914 in which the war motif appears; Wandrey also shows that metaphors of weapons and war appear in other contexts as well (118–27). “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .” 295

And whatever teems here and there below on the streets He sweeps into the mounds of ﬁre, to feed the ﬂames . . . 4

Heym’s poem and other war poems from the final years before 1914 are not without similarities with the visions of destruction of the décadence. I have noted in my discussion of the apocalyptic imagery that Heym clothes the vision of comprehensive destruction in images of myth and natural forces.5 His shaping of images still corresponds to the style of the fin de siècle. This becomes particularly clear when we compare Heym’s mythical god of war with the fin de siècle fine arts in which—earlier than in the literature—war was made a theme but personified allegorically. In 1916 Hanns Johst saw a striking relationship between Heym’s war poem and Stuck’s allegorical image of war in 1894.6 Other expressionist writers also visualized war in mythical form, for example, Albert Ehrenstein in his poem “Der Kriegsgott” (“The War God”):

But stretching up The animal head wildly overgrown, Hostile to men, I smash, Ares, Snappingly weak chin and nose, Twisting towers out of anger, your earth.

Your blood blooms red About my butcher’s arm, What pleasure the sight gives me!7

But it is not merely the inclination to mythicization that combines the early expressionist visions of war with the violent fantasies of the décadence. The aesthetic representation of death and destruction, decline and violence stands altogether in clear continuity with ﬁn de siècle literature. Visualizing the events of war as the “greatest festival,” as an “orgy” and “bacchanal” in the poems of Heinrich Lersch, Felix Braun, and Johannes R. Becher, is reminiscent of George’s Algabal and the bloodthirsty “grand festival” of the Elektra.8 They also reveal that the young expressionists were just as fascinated by the theme of destruction as was the older generation. In addition, the war poems of Heym and Ehrenstein show that pleasure

4. Georg Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider, 3 vols. (Hamburg: Ellermann, 1960–1964), 1:346–47. 5. See pp. 223–24 in this book. 6. Johst, “Vorahnung des Krieges,” 1375. 7. Cited in Vietta, Lyrik des Expressionismus, 121–22. 8. Cited after Wandrey, Das Motiv des Krieges in der expressionistischen Lyrik, 59–60; see also 115. 296 The Apocalypse in Germany also resonates in the aesthetic shaping of brutality and gruesomeness. The personification of destructiveness in a form that possesses mythical, superhuman characteristics is precisely the feature that can spawn such pleasure in the concept of terrible beauty, doubtless in greater measure than the realistic representation of violence and death in war could. The stylistic connection of early expressionist war poems with visions of destruction of the décadence is a sign that the mood continued that had prevailed in the climate of the fin de siècle. Did also the inclination remain to overcome threatening experiences and existential fear through flight into aesthetics and so—to take up Bahr’s characterization once again— to transform horror into beauty and even the unbearable into joy? Many early expressionist war poems suggest this presumption, as for instance the following verses from Heym’s second poem “Der Krieg” from the year 1911:

But death strides gigantically over the disaster Of bloody days large like a shadow, And ﬁery sound from far plains red Yet the cries and eulogy of dying men . . . 9

On the other hand, new sounds are mixed into the early expressionist visions of death and destruction that reveal the direct existential conster- nation of the authors and give the impression that the experiences are not eliminated in the sphere of aesthetic play. Alfred Walter Heymel—also in 1911—wrote the following verses:

From gentle melancholy and love’s sorrow I pluck up courage; try to pluck up my courage. Still, I cannot banish death and destruction, Where I wish to ﬂee, a wall towers up by a wall.10

The more personal and passionate expression that betrays a more in- tensively perceived existential problem behind the topics of death and destruction refers to the new dimension that divides the younger from the older generation. Destruction and violence are no longer realized merely in mythical or fantastic dream worlds but are contrasted with the present everyday life. Van Hoddis sought this confrontation in “Weltende” just like Alfred Lichtenstein—even more striking—in his poem “Sommerfrische” (“Summer Holidays”) had:

9. Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften, 1:360. 10. Alfred Walter Heymel, “Eine Sehnsucht aus der Zeit,” Der Sturm 2 (1911): 85, 677. “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .” 297

The sky is like a blue jellyfish. All around are fields, green meadow hills— Peaceful world, you great mousetrap, Were I finally to escape you . . . O for wings—

One plays at dice. Boozes. One chatters of future states. Everyone comfortably exercises his jaws. Earth is a fat Sunday roast, Prettily dunked in sweet sunsauce.

Were there only a wind . . . tear with iron claws The gentle world. That would delight me. Were there only a storm..itwould have to tear The beautiful blue eternal sky into a thousand pieces.11

The destructive fantasies that the young expressionists projected on their direct environment not only are composed of images of destructive forces of nature, storm, and ﬂood, they not only are expressed with increasing frequency in mythical and allegorical conceptions of a war, but present war as a current possibility. In 1912, Georg Trakl wrote:

Mankind set up before maws of ﬁre, A drum roll, brows of dark warriors, Steps through the fog of blood; black iron rings, Despair, night in sorrowful minds.12

The above-mentioned poem, “Prophezeiung” (“Prophecy”), by Lich- tenstein, in which “massive killing” is predicted, comes from the same period of time.13 Apparently, the possibility of a war was perceived as being imminent, in a thoroughly ambivalent manner: on the one hand fearfully as an existential threat,14 on the other with lively impatience and readiness for aggression. The wish is universal that the present world should perish, and frequently this wish is expressed—frightening and hard for us

11. First publication in Die Aktion 3 (1913); cited in Vietta, Lyrik des Expressionismus, 123. 12. Georg Trakl, Das dichterische Werk: Auf Grund der historisch-kritischen Ausgabe von Walther Killy und Hans Szklenar (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972), 25. 13. See p. 229 in this book. 14. On this, see Wandrey, Das Motiv des Krieges in der expressionistischen Lyrik, 138; on psychosocial problems in general, see Thomas Anz, Literatur der Existenz: Literarische Psychopathographie und ihre soziale Bedeutung im Frühexpressionismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977), particularly the chapters “Orientierungslosigkeit,” “Ohnmacht,” “Entfremdung,” and “Angst.” 298 The Apocalypse in Germany to understand today—frankly as a desire for war. The poem of Heymel, whose ﬁrst verse I cited above, carries the title “Eine Sehnsucht aus der Zeit” (“Longing out of Time”); it ends with the lines:

In the wealth of peace we become deathly afraid. We neither know must nor can or ought And long for and cry out for war.15

In 1912–1913 Johannes R. Becher wrote:

But so do we rot in lofty pews And crumble to ﬂourdust in terrible waiting rooms. And we listen to the blasts of wild trumpet thunderclaps Wishing for a great world war.16

As early as 1910, Gustav Sack, in his novel Ein Verbummelter Student (“A Lazy Student”), gave his hero the wish: “If war came! In glistening cloudtowers it lurks around: if a storm awoke that chased it from its lurking rest that it comes over us in his black-blue weathernight with his sulfurous winds, his golden thunderbolts! People against people, country against country; a star nothing but a raging storm ﬁeld, a twilight of mankind, an exulting destruction!” And in 1911 Georg Heym wrote in his diary: “I was hoping at least for a war.”17 How are we to understand the numerous appearances of the motif of war in early expressionist literature, above all the expressions of an apparently vehement longing for war? Let us ﬁrst clarify the question of the “prophetic” quality of these works. Since Hanns Johst described the relevant texts as “visionary work pregnant with premonition,” as “artistic prophecy,” in his 1916 article “Vorahnung des Krieges” (“Premonition of War”), corresponding characterizations move through literary history. Georg Heym’s famous war poem of 1911 was regarded by literary critics as particularly exemplary, but they could also refer to numerous other texts that appeared in part to validate explicitly the accuracy of such characterizations as, for example, Lichtenstein’s above-mentioned poem “Prophezeiung.” With regard to Heym’s poem, Bernd W. Seiler and Karl Ludwig Schneider meanwhile have shown that its origin and content stand

15. See p. 296 n. 10 in this book. 16. Johannes R. Becher, “Beengung,” in Verfall und Triumph (Berlin: Hyperion, 1914), 52. 17. Gustav Sack, Ein verbummelter Student (1910), in Prosa. Briefe. Verse (Munich: Langen-Müller, 1962), 164–65; Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften, 3:164. “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .” 299 in close connection with the Morocco crisis of 1911.18 In the summer of that year all of Germany was gripped with war hysteria; it required no prophetic gift to foresee the possibility of war. The same holds true for the other war poems of this or following years. The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 followed the Morocco crisis. The danger of a great war had to be clear to anyone who did not close his eyes to political reality. This crisis, which was substantially intensified compared with the crisis situation of the fin de siècle, doubtless gave an external occasion to take up the war motif. But the new political situation is insufficient to explain the obsession with the war motif; above all, it does not explain the obvious desire for war. What motives may be adduced for this desire for war? I have already shown that the educated among the younger generation took over the fascination for death and destruction from their elders. One of the few of the older generation who saw and admitted that they had heaped responsibility on themselves by their questionable aesthetic games was Richard Dehmel. To the question he asked himself, of who “in fact was responsible for the . . . catastrophe of mankind,” he answered, “probably the leaders of the stubborn peoples, all spokesmen without exception, precisely we spiritual pioneers with our spiritually subversive activities.”19 But the aggressive desire for war cannot be ascribed soley to the “spiritually subversive activity” of the older generation. The psychic disposition of the younger generation had changed in the course of their historical context of experiences. It is true that the “fin de siècle resignation” formed the basis of their mood toward life; complaints about “life without meaning,” about “the emptiness of things,” and “bad times” in Zech and Heym betray this;20 antipathy to the all too “gentle world” in Heymel and Lichtenstein21 betrays this as well; but sharper and sharper overtones lay above this keynote. Disgust at “business, gossip, and playing around,” at “illusion, idle talk, and luxury,” as Gundolf expressed to George in letters, was not only 18. Johst, “Vorahnung des Krieges,” 1374–75; Joachim Schöberl, “Georg Heyms Ge- dicht ‘Der Krieg’ und die Geschichte seiner Deutung,” in Georg Heyms Gedicht “Der Krieg”: Handschriften und Dokumente: Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte und zur Rezeption, ed. Günter Dammann, Karl Ludwig Schneider, and Joachim Schöberl (Heidelberg: Winter, 1978), 72–107, provides an overview. Bernd W. Seiler, Die historischen Dichtungen Georg Heyms: Analyse und Kommentar (Munich: Fink, 1972), 28–32; Karl Ludwig Schneider, “Georg Heyms Gedicht ‘Der Krieg I’ und die Marokko-Krise von 1911,” in Georg Heyms Gedicht “Der Krieg,” ed. Dammann, Schneider, and Schöberl, 40–51. 19. Richard Dehmel, Zwischen Volk und Menschheit: Kriegstagebuch (Berlin: Fischer, 1919), 14. 20. Wandrey, Das Motiv des Krieges in der frühexpressionistischen Lyrik, 197; Zech and Heym cited on pp. 197, 199. 21. See pp. 296–97 in this book. 300 The Apocalypse in Germany an aesthetic attitude, but also desperate repugnance that was transformed into an apocalyptic mood, in which the “end of the world,” the actual end of the old world, was hoped for. Georg Trakl saw his existential conflict in dire connection with the decay and corruption of the world: “I am looking forward to the day when the soul will not longer desire nor be able to live in this unhappy body contaminated with melancholy; when it will leave its travesty of excrement and rottenness, which is an all-too-true image of a godless, cursed century.”22 In his diaries between 1909 and 1911, Georg Heym expressed in moving words the entire range of motivating perceptions—from emotional paralysis brought on by the emptiness of the daily hustle and bustle to gnawing despair at the lack of existential meaning. He passionately laments “the listlessness, the despair,” that festers in him like a “sickness,” and “this empty existence”: “I believe no time was so empty as this one.” “It is always the same, so boring, boring, boring. Nothing, nothing, nothing happens. If something would happen once, that would not leave behind this pale taste of ordinariness.” “Hunger for a deed” seizes him. “If barricades were built, I would be the first to place myself on them, I would feel the intoxication of enthusiasm even with a bullet in the heart. Or if it were only that one began a war, even if it were unjust. This peace is so idle, oily and greasy like varnish on old furniture.” Looking back in his autobiography, Arnolt Bronnen describes this mood in a very similar fashion: “But I felt in my heart that war had to come. It had to come because I wanted it. It had to come because I saw no other way out. I felt this on that July 31st as clearly as I feel it today—and feel it as a fault: never has a war been so wished for by countless young people, by sons of the bourgeois world who had become confused in their world. They all wanted what I wanted; an end. An end of this era. An end of their lives in this era. A life-form had used itself up.”23 But they wanted not only an end, but also a new beginning. A war, they hoped, would bring about—like an apocalyptic event—a radical structural change in the world and in human existence. Not everyone maintained such hopes; Trakl was doubtless no optimistic apocalypticist, and van Hoddis’s and Ehrenstein’s visions of destruction also do not open the prospect of a renewed existence after the end of the world.24 But most

22. Stefan George—Friedrich Gundolf: Briefwechsel, 255, 257; see also 253; Georg Traklto Ludwig von Ficker, June 26, 1913, in Georg Trakl, Werke, Entwürfe, Briefe, ed. Hans-Georg Kemper and Frank Rainer Max (Suttgart: Reclam, 1984), 239. 23. Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften, 3:128, 131, 135, 139; Arnolt bronnen gibt zu protokoll: Beiträge zur geschichte des modernen schiftstellers (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954), 34. 24. See Eykman, Denk- und Stilformen des Expressionismus, 4–62, especially 61–62. “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .” 301 devoted themselves, full of enthusiasm, to apocalyptic expectations. Their apocalyptic mood was not turned backward and did not remain passive in aesthetic sublimation; they had become weary of mere playing and were on the point of leaving the dream world of the décadence.

Loftily we wait for a dominating sign That would lead us from dreams to actions.25 They desired apocalyptic action. But in no way did they think in categories of power politics. For them it was not a matter of enlarging political and economic spheres of inﬂuence or even of gaining land: they desired the destruction of the old bourgeois world. From the act of destruction, so they hoped, a new, better, perhaps even perfect world would arise. After the wish that a war came, Gustav Sack had his lazy student express the hope: “Oh, for something higher—.” After the Second World War, Johannes R. Becher remembered with enthusiastic words the apocalyptic euphoria that van Hoddis’s “Weltende” had kindled in his generation, even though this poem conjures up only destruction and does not promise a new world: “These two verses, oh these eight lines appeared to have transformed us into other people, to have lifted us out of the world of blunted middle-class mentality, which we despised but did not know how to escape. These eight lines abducted us. . . . We felt like new men, like men on the ﬁrst day of creation, a new world should begin with us, and we swore to ourselves to create a restlessness that the bourgeois would be totally stunned and should view it as a grace to be sent to hell.”26 When the war broke out in August 1914 many believed that the desired apocalyptic event had arrived. Friedrich Gundolf, for example, abandoned himself completely to the “great feeling of a decision about being or nonbeing of the contemporary world as well as the counter-world.” With a view to the literary visions of the past he wrote to George: “What was merely play and illusion for years looks different as a reality,” and he meant this in a positive sense: the “shudder at the monstrous” appeared to him to outstrip even the vision.27 But after the initial enthusiasm in whose wake one could easily fall in August 1914, most young writers were quickly sobered by the reality of war, especially when they had to experience this reality at the front. Fritz von Unruh, for example, composed a cutting “Reiterlied” (“Horsemen’s Song”) at the beginning of the war:

25. Paul Mayer, “Knaben im Frühling” (1913), cited in Wandrey, Das Motiv des Krieges in der expressionistischen Lyrik, 151. 26. Sack, Ein verbummelter Student, 165; Becher, cited in Expressionismus: Aufzeichnun- gen und Erinnerungen der Zeitgenossen, ed. Paul Raabe (Olten: Walter, 1965), 51–52. 27. George—Gundolf: Briefwechsel, 255. 302 The Apocalypse in Germany

Our sacred duty, we will do it, Paris is our goal.28

Under the impact of the events of the war itself, however, he became a convinced paciﬁst. The poems, letters, and diaries of numerous other writers and artists reveal this same disillusionment and similar changes in attitude.29 The war poems, which were now written and dealt with direct experiences, differed considerably from the early expressionist poems of war and destruction. While they used the same stylistic devices—montage techniques, fragmentation of syntax, extreme contrasts in imagery and unusual metaphors—war no longer appeared as a mythical allegory whose fearsome manifestation at the same time evoked aesthetic fascination; visions of destruction unfolded less frequently in the mostly abstract images of forces of nature, of storm and ﬂood. The satirical winking with which many early expressionist poems had celebrated destruction disappeared, as did the sometimes loudmouthed readiness to wreck everything. The following verses by Wilhelm Klemm are characteristic of the new war poem that was sated by experience:

Every morning there is war again. Naked wounded, as on old paintings. Suppurating bandages hang like garlands from the shoulders. The remarkably dark, secret bullet holes in the head. The trembling nostrils of bullet holes in the chest. The paleness of those suppurating.

The white in the quarter-opened eyes of those near to death. The rhythmic groaning of those hit in the belly. The horriﬁed expression on dead faces.

The ventriloquist voices of those sick with tetanus. Their stiff, painful smirk, their wooden neck. The clumps of still-wet blood on which you slip...... Until the gasping for breath—and beads of sweat,

28. Cited in Reinhard Buchwald, ed., Der Heilige Krieg: Gedichte aus dem Beginn des Kampfes (Jena: Diederichs, 1914), 57. 29. On this transformation, see Wandrey, Das Motiv des Krieges in der expressionistischen Lyrik, 213–16. The increasing disillusionment and shock are presented with particular urgency in Franz Marc, Briefe aus dem Feld, ed. Klaus Lankheit and Uwe Steffen (Munich: Piper, 1982). “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .” 303

And on the gray faces the night sinks— A soldier’s grave—two slats bound into a cross.30

It is this kind of poem that drew level, in literature, with realistically representing what Ludwig Meidner had already anticipated in paintings in 1911: the true horrors of war. The distance is obvious between this kind of representation and the allegorizations of war in fin de siècle art as well as the fearful-beautiful gods of war of early expressionist poetry. Yet, the apocalyptic hope of a new world and a new man was not finished off by the First World War. To the contrary, this war even inflamed new apocalyptic expectations. The old world was completely destroyed, or at least it seemed that not much more was left to do in order “to destroy the destructive and destroyed,” as Kurt Pinthus believed in 1919, “so that healing could take place.” The curtain to the last, decisive act of the apocalyptic drama seemed to rise. The euphoric tone of imminent expectation pervades many expressionist poems from the years 1917 to 1919. “The time approaches,” wrote Walter Hasenclever at the end of his poem “1917,”31 and in 1919 Ludwig Rubiner, in his poem “Der Marsch,” had the pained masses cry throughout the world: “The time is fulfilled!” Many expressionists combined their hopes for a new world with socialist ideas. In 1919 Rubiner collected such voices in his anthology Kameraden der Menschheit: Dichtungen zur Weltrevolution, in which Johannes R. Becher, for example, directed a greeting to the people of the Soviet Union: “Through your power the holy Reich comes to us. The holy Reich. Paradise. Free elation to God’s heart.”32 Sympathy for socialism was, of course, more colored by feeling and was without a “solid” ideological foundation, as these few verses show. The flight of apocalyptic expectation transcended dogmatic restrictions. Becher, doubtless one of the most fervent apocalypticists of expressionism, also revealed in his drama Arbeiter Bauern Soldaten that his universal vision of redemption went well beyond the revolutionary goals of socialist politics. Only the revision of the drama in 1924 followed Marxism’s maxims of class struggle; in the foreword to the new edition Becher self-critically characterized the drama of 1919 as a mixture of “emotional communism, and confused ecstatic godsearching.”33 Delete the polemical tone of zealous self-criticism, and this characterization accords

30. Wilhelm Klemm, “Lazarett,” ﬁrst printed in Die Aktion 4 (1914); cited in Vietta, Lyrik des Expressionismus, 130–31. 31. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung, 28, 252 (Hasenclever). 32. Ludwig Rubiner, ed., Kameraden der Menschheit: Dichtungen zur Weltrevolution (Pots- dam: Kiepenheuer, 1919), 14, 119. 33. Johannes R. Becher, Gesammelte Werke, 8:104. 304 The Apocalypse in Germany

Figure 10 Ludwig Meidner, Horrors of War (1911). © Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, J¨udisches Museum der Stadt, Frankfurt am Main, 2000. very nicely with the particular nature of most apocalyptic poems of that period: the enthusiasm with which the visions of redemption were presented contrasted all too much with the base of the facts and remained rather indeﬁnite in its content. Toller’s Wandlung is another example of this apocalyptic upswing that is extremely emotional and at the same time somewhat vague, and Pinthus’s anthology Menschheitsdämmerung, in 1919, included many more examples. In his foreword Pinthus himself stressed the apocalyptic impetus that most of the authors of the anthology shared, and he found in the image of “twilight” and “dawn” respectively (in German, just one word: Dämmerung) a symbol that appropriately expressed the apocalyptic impetus as well as its diffuse character: “In this book man consciously turns from the twilight (Dämmerung) of the past and present that has been forced upon him, that embraces him and devours him into the redeeming dawn (Dämmerung) of a future that he creates for himself.”34

34. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung, 25. “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .” 305

Figure 11 Ludwig Meidner, Vision of a Trench (1912). © Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, J¨udisches Museum der Stadt, Frankfurt am Main, 2000.

What Pinthus also aptly characterized was the activist component of the expressionist apocalypse. People were called upon to redeem themselves; Becher’s presumptive “God-seeking,” like many other conjurations of God, should not blind us to the fact that most expressionist writers no longer hoped for an apocalyptic transformation from God’s intervention.35 People themselves were to destroy unfavorable reality, past and present, and form the new man after their own image: “The true struggle against reality had begun with those fearful outbreaks that both destroy the world and create a new world from men themselves.”36 The writers viewed themselves as guides and leaders into the new world, as Toller’s Wandlung made clear,37 as pioneers on the work of redemption. Becher’s poem “Vorbereitung” (“Preparation”) presents this apocalyptic sense of mission very nicely:

35. On the “theology” of expressionism, see Eykman, Denk- und Stilformen des Expres- sionismus, 63–107; David Roberts interprets the apocalyptic elements of the anthology Menschheitsdämmerung in “ ‘Menschheitsdämmerung’: Ideologie, Utopie, Eschatologie.” 36. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung, 27. 37. See p. 15 in this book. 306 The Apocalypse in Germany

Figure 12 George Grosz, Authorities (1927). © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2000.

The poet avoids brilliant chords. He forces through tubes, beats the drums shrilly. He rips people with slashed sentences.

I learn. I prepare. I practice. How I work—ah, most passionately!— Against my still unelastic face—: Folds I draw. The new world (—such a one: eliminating the old, the mystical, the world of pain—) I draw in it as correctly as possible...... Humanity! Freedom! Love!

The new, the holy state Be preached, injected into the blood of the peoples, blood from their blood. May he be completely formed. Paradise begins.38

Of course, the contours of the new world were as vague as the features of the new man. The deﬁnition of its inner values did not go beyond the catch-

38. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung, 213. “If War Came! Oh, for Something Higher . . .” 307 phrases of rhetorical exclamations. What was formed was not the new state but the excitement of apocalyptic desire. Pathos was the appropriate form of expression for this emotion. The features of the new man remained in the abstract. In the ﬁne art of expressionism the representatives of the old, rejected world played a substantially larger role, as, for example, in the pictures of George Grosz and Otto Dix; they could be identiﬁed as characters, while the hoped-for new man eluded pictorial representation. 19 Shaping the Shapeless

During the 1920s Johannes R. Becher and many other expressionists attempted to give shape to the new man by modeling him after the Marxist doctrine of “socialist man.”1 They acquired the principles of Marxism in order to solidify the goal of apocalyptic transformation after all those dreams of death and destruction that lacked an escape, and after the vague and confused visions of the new man. They followed the party line of Communism in order to participate in the realization of this goal. As Becher admitted in 1924 in the new edition of his drama Arbeiter, Bauern, Soldaten:

Behold: From worlds above I have sung Blessed songs, I have feasted on dreams, visions, raptures— Now I march along in the march.2

Becoming part of the march of the Communist Internationale did not mean the renunciation of apocalyptic hopes; Becher held tightly to his aspirations:

Who am I? I am a ﬁghter, Born to struggle for the redemption of all mankind.3

Becher had a particularly good sense for the apocalyptic essence of Marx’s doctrine that claimed “to change the world radically.”4 What possibilities for aesthetic shaping were available when the vision of the new man was tied to Marxist doctrine? Becher’s voluminous 1931

1. Marx, Die Frühschriften, 247. 2. Becher, Gesammelte Werke, 8:174. 3. Ibid., 172. 4. Ibid., 240.

308 Shaping the Shapeless 309 work Der grosse Plan: Epos des sozialistischen Aufbaus (“The Grand Plan: Epic of Socialist Reconstruction”), which celebrates the ﬁrst ﬁve-year plan of the Soviet Union, provides information. Here Becher presents the construction of socialist society as a new creation that brings forth a new society after the destruction of the old one; in his introductory poem he deliberately compares the founding of the Soviet Union to Genesis:

The land looked about And saw that it was empty and desolate. And Lenin designed a plan, And the masses agreed to it: Let there be Electricity!5

In accordance with the doctrine that socialist man, who would take the place of the bourgeois individual, is an element of the societal collective, Becher characterizes the new man as the “man who falls in line.” This “falling in line,” integration into the collective, appears as the most important characteristic of the new man. Not avoiding redundant for- mulations, but actually seeking them out, Becher repeatedly places it in the foreground:

But man falls in line, The man who falls in line, Goes his way, And his way is the ascent of the masses Ceaselessly—6

Thereby a functional aspect is stressed that absorbs the individual in the function of the whole. “The man who falls in line” is thus presented as a type, not as an individual. This is indeed what is intended. Only the collective counts. Thus the individual, should he die, can continue to live in the collective, since others participate in the same function and continue it:

A man died Who fell in line. The man Falls in line.7

5. Ibid., 195. 6. Ibid., 381. 7. Ibid., 374–75. 310 The Apocalypse in Germany

The form of Becher’s work corresponds to the abstraction of the new man in the collective. It is a “choral poem” (Chorische Dichtung), a work for several speakers and choruses that is designed for performance and was actually performed several times. The genre designation “epic” in the subtitle of the work, however, makes it clear that Becher did not want his work understood and realized as a drama in the traditional sense. Like Brecht, he uses epic elements in order to make “objective” what is presented—enumerations, reports, epic repetitions. He even includes statistics that otherwise make party congress speeches an epic matter:

Report of the deeds of the nineteen! Report of the deeds of the two hundred young Communists! Report of the twenty-ﬁve girls, Led by Sosulja! Report of the work of the party cell! ...... You open up the inspection book With the inspection ﬁgures December to February: 4,240,916 tiles laid 2,788,886 square meters glazed 18,067 cubic meters of concrete poured.8

This form of choral poetry aesthetically realizes the apocalyptic renewal through destruction of the old in a manner similar to Brecht’s didactic plays.9 What is ideologically expressed in the presentation of the Schachty trial in 1930, in which alleged saboteurs of the building of socialism were convicted and sentenced, is formally expressed in the aesthetic elimination of individuality. Becher does not allow identiﬁcation with an individually designed hero; the persons that appear are thoroughly typiﬁed, not only “the man who falls in line” but also “red soldier,” “a farmer,” or “GPU.” Even Stalin, whose praise must not be omitted, becomes an abstraction:

There are names, They no longer belong to the one Who bears them: Each one took it on And passes it on And transfers it— In front of all deeds

8. Ibid., 289–90; see also 299–300. 9. See pp. 256–57 in this book. Shaping the Shapeless 311

It is carried— No longer The name Of one man— Name of millions Name of an entire country Name of an era. So also this: STALIN.10

Only the representatives of the old world that must be destroyed, the leaders of the kulaks and of the industry party, are clearly indicated by name in the list of dramatis personae. Thus, identification with individuals is prevented by formal as well as ideological means. Instead, the performance practice of choral poetry suggests to the individual identification with the collective. The identification figure is “the man who falls in line”; his path leads to the “chorus for the building of socialism” that represents the collective, and, at decisive points, proclaims the truth of the new world. The aesthetic practice of choral play has the liturgical character of a mystery-play even more than Brecht’s didactic plays. Its closeness to a mystery play is shown even in its content. The model for the “man who falls in line” is the “unknown soldier,” who in the First World War had been forced into the wrong file and remained on the battlefield. Becher has him rise from his grave and invite those now living to integrate themselves into the right file:

The unknown soldier Goes ahead of the ﬁle As a standard...... Unknown man, Go to the front line!11

All these factors—mystification regarding content, the liturgical form, aesthetic representation of the collective in the choir—cannot give the new man a definite shape beyond his function. The dry pathos of agitation of class struggle that has taken the place of expressionist pathos cannot obscure that fact; it fills the 114 hymns of this “epic,” which extends over two hundred pages, with infatuating boredom. At the end, in a “Hymn to the Beginning of a New History of Mankind” that formally transforms

10. Becher, Gesammelte Werke, 8:385. 11. Ibid., 378–79. 312 The Apocalypse in Germany the apocalyptic inversion of beginning and end in this work, Becher once again conjures the new man in pathetic words. But although he claims to create the new man together with his apocalyptic comrades, he must at the same time admit that he cannot even give its form aesthetic contours:

But man will yet Be discovered, And man will we Create In a form, More powerful than all Dreams and predictions, And in a tempo That leaves far behind All reachable speeds— But today we can Only guess it, Without forming a picture of it And speechless—12

Attempts like that of Becher to design the new man as part of a superindividual unity, of the collective, and to give a new aesthetic form to this design, are typical for the period around 1930. As mentioned, during these years Brecht undertook similar attempts with his didactic plays, but he, too, was not able to prevent the aesthetic shaping of the new man in the collective from “coarsening and abstractions.”13 But the collectivization of the new man did not occur only from the Left. David Roberts has noted that toward the end of the Weimar Republic, Brecht as well as Ernst Jünger defended the abrogation of the individual in the collective.14 The additional comparison with Becher makes the similarities even more striking. Although Jünger was doubtless not a Marxist, the conception of the world that he developed in 1932 in his book Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (“The Worker: Dominion and Form”) was neither conservative nor nationalistic. With good reason one could even call it socialist and revolutionary, were these designations not to mislead us into thinking exclusively in categories of ideology and party politics. And in the spectrum of political movements in the Weimar Republic, Jünger’s position lay of course far from that of Brecht and Becher. What connected them to each other was the apocalyptic character of

12. Ibid., 391–92. 13. See p. 257 in this book. 14. Roberts, “Individuum und Kollektiv.” Shaping the Shapeless 313 their reactions to the crisis of the time and the similarity of the form of their apocalyptic attempts at solving it. If one looks at this form, the problem of drawing lines between conservative-revolutionary, national- Bolshevist, proletarian-revolutionary, Marxist and non-Marxist socialist positions becomes insignificant.15 To direct attention to the “form” of apocalyptic designs means to take into consideration the equivalences of aesthetic phenomena as well. Although Jünger’s book is not a poetic work, but a treatise, an essay, the aesthetic dimension of its design is nevertheless of decisive significance. Jünger’s Arbeiter is an apocalyptic vision although the book is presented as a sober diagnosis of the age. At first glance the author seems to convey dispassionately and thoroughly fittingly the political, societal, and cultural trends of his era. These are the most important phenomena that Jünger observes: 1. The world of the nineteenth century has collapsed, and the bourgeois society is “condemned to death.” Individualism, with its values, morals, its liberal concept of freedom, has become obsolete. The reverse side of deindividualization is the typification of life circumstances. In place of the individual, which found its identity in the peculiarity and uniqueness of its existence, appears a new figure, the “type” that endeavors to “find the features that are situated outside of individual existence.”16 2. The “triumphal march of technology” corresponds to the typification of the circumstances of life. Technologyhas become the dominant creative tool in the modern world. It pervades and alters all aspects of work and life; even the “famous distinction between city and country” exists in view of agricultural machines and chemical fertilizers “only in romantic space.”17 3. Hand in hand with these developments a new concept of work has taken shape that differs fundamentally from that of the nineteenth century. The new concept of work is total—it knows “no opposite outside of itself.” There is no longer a condition that could not be conceived of as work; even sports and leisure time are merely extensions of the world of work, no longer its opposite. The “worker,” who moves in this new world, is neither professionally nor economically nor socially defined, but rather a new type of human, who uses technology as a “tool for total revolution” and in this

15. Jünger, approached about Arbeiter in an 1982 interview, stressed: “I make no fundamental distinctions between right and left” (Der Spiegel 33 [1982]: 157). He would not, however, have accepted the superior category of the apocalyptic to designate what connected him to many writers of the Left. 16. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Ver- lagsanstalt, 1932), 21, 138. 17. Ibid., 160. 314 The Apocalypse in Germany manner seeks a new order: the “realization of work as the total character” of the world.18 4. The above-mentioned developments necessarily result in the destruction of traditional values and ways of life. The destructive element of these developments, and the increasing speed with which they take place, lead to a loss of security. The world becomes increasingly more dangerous; at any time, irruptions of violence are to be expected that appear like incalculable forces of nature and are thus seen by Jünger as “the elemental.” The First World War was for him the most obvious instance.19 That this apparently factual inventory has an apocalyptic character is betrayed by the structure of the universal “worldview” that Jünger constructs from his observations. He views the replacement of the bourgeois world by other societal circumstances and ways of life as a “planetary” process in which a fundamental contrast is expressed, that is, the “difference in nature of two ages, in which a rising one devours a declining one.” He sees himself and his world at the turning point from the old to the new world. The current crisis that already hides the new in itself has been introduced in his view as well as for all his apocalyptic contemporaries by the First World War. The war is his crucial experience; in the experience of war the phenomena observed by him are concentrated as though in a focal point: the First World War set a work of destruction in motion that continues beyond the end of the war and takes on global meaning: “The globe is covered with the debris of smashed images. We are participating in the drama of a destruction that may only be compared with geological catastrophes.”20 The First World War accelerated the “triumphal march of technology” in a murderous manner. It robbed the soldiers of their individuality and made them into a type. It turned fighting man against man into a technological “work” of impersonal destruction. Therefore Jünger in his book returns to war again and again in order to illustrate his “worldview.” The apocalyptic character of his worldview becomes even clearer when Jünger’s assessments and intentions are revealed. Although he claims to strike a sober balance, and although he stresses “that our task lies in seeing, not in evaluating,” he is thereby deceiving the reader. In fact he sees the destruction of the bourgeois age not objectively and unemotionally but with satisfaction. He welcomes it as all apocalypticists welcome the destruction of the old world. In the act of destruction he finds “the fiery source of a new feeling for life.” The intention to complete the work of 18. Ibid., 86–87, 162, 169. 19. Ibid., 18, 46–49. 20. Ibid., 74, 210, 232, 151. Shaping the Shapeless 315 destruction and to extend it to the intellectual foundations, to the values and the entire work of education of the bourgeois age, is just as pleasure- loving as were the destructive fantasies of the early expressionists: “It is a part of the high and savage pleasures of our time to be involved in this work of demolition.”21 The motif for Jünger’s will to destruction is likewise of an apocalyptic nature. He desires the destruction of the old as a “preparation for a new and more daring life.” There is no doubt that Jünger himself experiences the loss of meaning that he observes in his contemporaries: “Entire libraries could be collected in which man’s complaint resounds in a thousandfold variations that he sees himself attacked from unseen regions and sees himself robbed of his meaning and his ability in every respect. This is the great, the only theme of the literature of destruction of our days.” Jünger also reacts with an apocalyptic vision, with the vision of a “new humanity.” The perfection of the new man is reflected in his power—he appears “as the lord and administrator of the world, as a commanding figure in possession of a previously only dimly sensed absolute power.”22 But what other attributes is the new man entitled to besides the dimly sensed—and that would mean secretly coveted—omnipotence? Jünger, too, has difficulties giving shape to the new man, although he makes this task the subject of his book, apart from the claim to power, as the subtitle of his book makes clear. It stands in harmony with his condemnation of all previous norms and values that he places the term form outside of science, morals, and aesthetics. But how can one give body to form, that is, content and substance? Jünger hates illusions too much to portray the new man as an easygoing resident of an earthly paradise; he achieves his image of a new world and of the new man by getting involved with the developments observed by him, by accepting them as “historically commanding,” and by carrying them to the extreme: the world of the nineteenth century collapsed in the First World War; the spirit and morals of the past are thus obsolete and must be completely destroyed. The workaday world tends to enter all areas of life, so Jünger sketches out the picture of a future “total work state.” Technological civilization leads to deindividualization, so Jünger approves the “attack on individual existence” and the “type” as the form of the new man. In this manner Jünger is able to give the impression that he is only objectively claiming what is and drawing the logical conclusions; still he can sketch out an apocalyptic vision. With the claim “to increase the weight and the speed of the processes in which we

21. Ibid., 130, 152, 40. 22. Ibid., 40–41, 144, 162. 316 The Apocalypse in Germany are involved,”23 he can even declare the impulse of apocalyptic activism and still pretend that he is merely arguing in the sense of developments dominating history. In Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann described and analyzed the discussion of intellectuals critical of contemporary civilization; his analysis also covers Jünger’s position:

Very strongly felt and objectively confirmed was the enormous loss of value which the individual had sustained, the ruthlessness which made life today stride away over the single person and precipitate itself as a general indifference to the sufferings and destruction of human beings. This carelessness, this indifference to the individual fate, might appear to be the result of the four years’ carnival of blood just behind us; but appearances were deceptive. As in many another respect here too the war only completed, defined, and drastically put in practice a process that had been on the way long before, and had made itself the basis of a new feeling about life. This was not a matter for praise or blame, rather of objective perception and statement. However, the least passionate recognition of the actual, just out of sheer pleasure in recognition, always contains some shade of approbation; so why should one not accompany such objective perceptions of the time with a many-sided, yes, all-embracing critique of the bourgeois tradition? By the bourgeois tradition I mean the values of culture, enlightenment, humanity, in short of such dreams as the uplifting of the people through scientific civilization. They who practised this critique were men of education, culture, science. . . . They might have said: Unhappily it looks as though things would follow this and this course. Consequently one must take steps to warn people of what is coming and do one’s best to prevent it. But what in a way they were saying was: It is coming, it is coming, and when it is here it will find us on the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is even good, simply by virtue of being what is inevitably going to be, and to recognize it is sufficient of an achievement and satisfaction. It is not our affair to go on to do anything against it.24

The seamless transition from recognition to acceptance of what apparently commands history meant the renunciation of an independent, critical, responsible point of view and debased the putatively objective recognition. According to Thomas Mann: “It was however a fraud that carried with it the satisfaction of recognizing it as such. They sympathized with what they recognized; without this sympathy they could not have

23. Ibid., 39, 235–39, 151, 194. 24. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), 365, 37. Shaping the Shapeless 317 recognized it.” In 1963, in a foreword of the new edition of his book Arbeiter, Ernst Jünger wrote about the book: “It represented and represents the attempt to reach a standpoint from which the events in their multi- plicity and contrasts are not merely to be understood but also—although dangerous—to be welcomed.”25 The will not merely to recognize the trends of the age, but also to accept them and even to place oneself in the forefront was in Jünger’s view “heroic realism.” The heroic element in this attitude may be seen in the readiness to subject oneself to apparently history-commanding developments. Jünger saw this readiness, which must also include readiness to sacriﬁce, represented in outstanding fashion in the “unknown soldier.”26 It is interesting that Jünger, like Becher, takes the “unknown soldier” as a model of the new man. Although Jünger and Becher may have evaluated the First World War differently from a political and ideological point of view, they both outline the shape of the new man from the virtue of “falling into line.” Because they raise the mere function to a model, they come—despite ideological differences—to the same conclusion: to an abstraction.27 Like Becher, Jünger can outline the new man only as a “type,” as a category; the individual must be absorbed in the collective as an exchangeable nameless soldier: “Its virtue lies in its being replaceable, and that behind every fallen soldier a replacement stands in reserve.” Although this is merely an instrumental virtue, a virtue of replacement parts, for Jünger the heroism of the new man lies in that very fact: that he renounces contents, morals, and values and accepts mere function as his form. Only in passing does Jünger consider the possibility of developing a new “work ethic,” but “in this case work concepts are applied to ethical concepts, not the other way around.”28 Jünger’s work concept is purely functional: “Its standard is that of practical performance, performance without empty phrases.” That the work is done in a manner suitable for its function, whether on the battleﬁeld or in production, and not what it is done for, is decisive. It is quite understandable that Jünger demands again and again to see the new man as “form.” But because this new man possesses no primary virtues such as justice and love, because for him it does not matter “whether something is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or false,” its functionality

25. Ibid., 37; Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, in Jünger, Werke (Stuttgart: Klett, 1963), 6:11. 26. Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), 34, 170, 40–44. 27. See also the characterization of Jünger’s position as “flight into abstraction” by Karl Prümm, Die Literatur des Soldatischen Nationalismus der 20er Jahre (1918–1933): Gruppenideologie und Epochenproblematik (Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974), 2:401–40. 28. Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), 147, 86. 318 The Apocalypse in Germany is put in the foreground. Although Jünger rejects aesthetic evaluation of the new man—besides scientific and economic evaluations, that is, evaluations according to the traditional criteria of “beautiful” and “ugly,”— the form of his “worker” ultimately becomes an aesthetic phenomenon by being reduced to its functional manifestation. Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner’s judgment is correct: “profoundly formal, in a strict sense aesthetic values are essential—although it is the pitiless aesthetic of technocratic samurais. Opinions, ideologies, programs are mere smoke and sham; form, shape, attitude is everything.” The aesthetics of “shape,” beyond beautiful and ugly, good and evil, can develop only in celebration of functionality. In his choral poem, Becher raised “falling into line” to a liturgical act; Jünger propagates the “cultic status of work.”29 A form that only appears as function is fluid. It is thus no wonder that the qualities of Jünger’s new man may be found in various incarnations. The TrotzkyistKarl Radek, who until Lenin’s death had been a representative of the executive committee of the Communist Internationale in Germany, discovered behind the “worker” Lenin’s face.30 The physiognomy of the worker, which Jünger shaped according to the image of the unknown soldier, reminds the German reader of other figures: “The face that meets the viewer under the steel helmet or the pilot’s cap has also changed. In the range of its representations, as it may be seen in a meeting or in group photographs, it has lost its diversity and individuality, while it has gained in sharpness and definiteness of form. It has become more metallic, galvanized on its surface, the bone structure has become clearly defined, the features are singled out and tensed up. His gaze is still and fixed, schooled in looking for objects that have to be grabbed at high speed. This is the face of a race that is beginning to develop under the peculiar challenges of a new landscape and which the single figure represents not as a person or an individual, but as a type.”31 In the Third Reich, Jünger did not see his vision of the future realized, and the individual SA-man did not in reality correspond to the image that Jünger had outlined. However, the aesthetic manifestation of the type that was presented by Nazi art and literature, and that acquired corporate form in the parade of brown, black, and gray battalions, resembled precisely Jünger’s “worker,” since the instrumental virtues of the “worker”—in fulfilling unconditionally a function, to integrate himself and even to

29. Ibid., 39; Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, “Konservative Apokalypse,” Frankfurter All- gemeine Zeitung, September 2, 1977; Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), 14. 30. See the interview with Jünger in Der Spiegel 33 (1982): 157. 31. Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), 107–10. Shaping the Shapeless 319

Figure 13 Elk Eber, The Last Hand Grenade (the “new German man” of National Socialism). Kunst im Dritten Riech 1:3 (1937): 3. 320 The Apocalypse in Germany sacriﬁce himself if necessary—were also the virtues of the new Nazi man: they inevitably produced the same aesthetic form.

We stand like brazen walls: Worker Farmer Soldier. The proud work will last. We gather to the state. On thundering machines The heavy ﬁst at the plow We are all permitted to serve. And that is enough for us.32

These verses, by the Nazi poet Gerhard Schumann, are part of a choral poem, Feier der Arbeit (“Celebration of Labor”), that was originally performed in Stuttgart on May 1, 1936, the “Day of National Labor.” As with Becher, the practice of choral speaking serves to realize aesthetically the virtues that are pronounced in words. Here, too, it is primarily the aesthetic representation of a function that comes into view; it corresponds to the character of a choral poem, as the literary critic Langenbucher stressed in 1935, that “the individual as an individual completely recedes, has meaning only as speaker of the group, while the group itself is portrayed through choruses.”33 In Schumann’s Feier der Arbeit and in similar Nazi poems, it becomes even more clear than in Becher’s Der große Plan that the aesthetic representation of the merely functional is moving to liturgical celebration. The integration of the individual into the collective, “falling into line,” may best be realized as a ritual act. In this point, too, Jünger rightly foresaw the aesthetic practice of the “total labor state” when he stressed the “cultic status of work.” The aesthetic shape of the shapeless, of the new man without substance and without existential virtues, of the new man as mere function, is cultic ritual. This is the reason so many marches, parades, and other celebrations of a ritualistic character played such an important role in the Third Reich: “From the struggle and commitment of the life of the brown battalions of the Nazi movement arise today the great common celebrations and solemnities in which the new German man is formed and shaped.”34

32. Gerhard Schumann, “Feier der Arbeit,” in Wir dürfen dienen (Munich: Langen/ Müller, 1937), 74. 33. Hellmuth Langenbucher, Dichtung der jungen Mannschaft (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1935), 68. 34. “Entwicklung der Thingspielarbeit,” Das Deutsche Volksspiel: Blätter für Jugendspiel, Brauchtum und Sprechchor, Volkstanz, Fest- und Feiergestaltung 1 (1933/34): 172. 20 “Paradise Is Won in Every Form”: Redemption through Art

“There are two possibilities: to comment on events with words, and to make events through words.” With this phrase, Kurt Hiller characterized in 1916 the fundamental distinction between the foregoing and current literature. In his view, the foregoing literature and the art of bourgeois society in general had withdrawn into an aesthetic reserve in which they enjoyed the greatest autonomy and could develop the “completeness of their specifically artistic character”—but at the price of being a reflex of reality: “Form, as such, is empty; and projection of the real (even more of something thought up fictitiously) to a peculiar, ‘art-loving’ level beyond the real: a pointless waste of time that only increases the sum of comfort and persistence in the world. If one takes art . . . in the current, narrower meaning: as the specific, formal, even artistic in the works . . . is to say: art is an impotent plagiarism of God, a weak repetition.”1 Art for art’s sake did indeed create an independent, aesthetic reality, but this aesthetic reality was for Hiller an anemic world of illusion that actually produced nothing and changed nothing, hence his judgment that it was an “impotent plagiarism of God.” Hiller viewed this art as unprincipled and irresponsible: “Stuck in one’s ivory tower—and outside everything remained the same. One was irritable, complicated, sensitive, terribly sensitive—finally the World War was permitted. (No ministers, no military persons, no grand princes: L’art pour l’art was responsible for it.)”2 Hiller’s postulate of making events through words reduced the program of the “literary revolution”3 between 1910 and 1925 to the least common denominator. From his verdict—that the “pure,” “artistic” art, the art of aestheticism as a complete accomplishment of artistic autonomy, merely

1. Hiller, “Philosophie des Ziels,” 211, 192. 2. Ibid., 201. 3. See Paul Pörtner, ed., Literaturrevolution 1910–1925: Dokumente, Manifeste, Pro- gramme, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1960–1961).

321 322 The Apocalypse in Germany plagiarizes God and contents itself with mere “copies of existence”4—the basic law of all, not only of German, avant-garde art movements of that time can be deduced. Even if expressionism, activism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism, and formalism in many respects differed and frequently bitterly fought each other, they were all obligated to this basic law: to create a new existence through a new art, not only an aesthetic counterworld. In his attempt to understand the various avant-garde movements as a uniform phenomenon, Peter Bürger also stressed this commonality: “European avant-garde movements may be deﬁned as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not a foregoing form of art (a style), but rather art as an institution that is separated from the practical sphere of human life.” The avant-gardists—according to Bürger— intend “a dissolution of art—dissolution in the Hegelian sense of the word; art is not to be simply destroyed, but to be transferred to the practical sphere of life where it would be preserved, even if in a transformed shape.” The avant-gardists, of course, do not wish to integrate art into the practical life of bourgeois society, from which the art of aestheticism had removed itself; “on the contrary, they share the rejection of the rationally arranged world that the aestheticists formulated. What distinguishes the avant- gardists from the aestheticists is the attempt to organize a new praxis of life originating from art.”5 It was Bürger’s purpose to formulate a “theory of the avant-garde” and thereby to understand “art as an institution” in bourgeois society at a critical point: With the avant-garde, bourgeois art that had achieved its greatest measure of autonomy in aestheticism, but at the price of “societal inconsequentiality,”6 turns back to societal reality with the goal of destroying art as an institution and creating a new reality that unites art and life. It is my objective to show the apocalyptic character of avant-garde intentions. While apocalyptic features are not reﬂected in all avant-garde movements to the same extent, and not with every artist, the fundamental impulse that Hiller expressed and Bürger characterized as constitutive of avant-garde elements was apocalyptic: producing a new reality through the practical elimination of the division of art and life, that is, through

4. Hiller, “Philosophie des Ziels,” 193. 5. Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 66– 67; see also W. Martin Lüdke, ed., “Theorie der Avantgarde”: Antworten auf Peter Bürgers Bestimmung von Kunst und bürgerlicher Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), particularly the contribution by Burkhardt Lindner, “Aufhebung der Kunst in Leben- spraxis?” 72–104. 6. Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 29. “Paradise Is Won in Every Form” 323 the destruction of a reality in which this separation consisted. Thereby the apocalypse, in the garb of aesthetics, gained a new dimension. It was no longer merely a matter of interpreting events apocalyptically with aesthetic means, nor a matter any longer of artistic representation of apocalyptic interpretations of experience, but of the consummation of the apocalypse through art. Art should become an “active form,” as Wilhelm Michel proclaimed, so that it could be said, “Paradise is won in every form.”7 How were the apocalyptic intentions of the avant-gardists realized? First, in programmatic statements that reveal the self-understanding of their authors, despite polemics and intentional contradictions—as, for example, used by the dadaists. In another context I have already discussed Hiller’s activist program of entering “Paradise while still alive.”8 The writer of the “new time” should be “the one who appeals, who fulﬁlls, the prophet, the leader.”9 We were already able to note among other writers this excessive self-consciousness that corresponded to the size of the self- prescribed apocalyptic task. The expressionists, in particular, showed this self-consciousness. Like all avant-gardists—and all apocalypticists—they began with the intention of destroying reality, as it was known before. For Kurt Pinthus, for example, there was “only one radical means of eluding the determination of reality: eliminating it.” The human spirit creates true reality “directly from himself.” In this connection special meaning is attached to art, “since it grows to become the most radical vanquisher of reality and it achieves the pre-realization of the idea in the material of spirit . . . as preceding the more difﬁcult, more inhibited realization in the material of reality.” Pinthus ascribed to the spirit of “new art” an apocalyptic function with a precise formula: “Growing stronger, it breaks up the world, in order to create it anew as a redeemer.”10 In a similar manner Alfred Wolfenstein characterized the task of the new art. His program not only betrays the same apocalyptic impetus, but also expresses the objective that Bürger explained as the totality of the avant-garde movements, that is, to organize a new praxis of life in which art and life are one: “The renewed man will love that art by which he feels himself generated. A new unity of life and art can triumph. This unity will not, as in a bygone era, arise by nature determining art: rather, the creation of art will become the creation of life.”11

7. Wilhelm Michel, “Tathafte Form,” in Die Erhebung, ed. Alfred Wolfenstein, 2:348. 8. See p. 191 in this book. 9. Hiller, “Philosophie des Ziels,” 210. 10. Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” in Die Erhebung, ed. Wolfenstein, 1:411, 413, 416, 418. 11. Alfred Wolfenstein, “Der menschliche Kämpfer,” in Die Erhebung, 283. 324 The Apocalypse in Germany

But how were the apocalyptic intentions of the avant-gardists expressed outside of this program? Among the expressionists it did not go beyond what Kurt Pinthus had called “Pre-Realization”: the shattering of the world was restricted to the aesthetic realm; it was realized by the shattering of syntax, through destructive images, through a montage of disconnected and contradictory particles of reality, as the above-quoted poems by Licht- enstein or van Hoddis show. In 1920 Wilhelm Michel drew a parallel between expressionist art and the “universal disaster” of war and the following revolution: “In revolution a new cosmogony was begun as in expressionism a shattered world is newly formed.” But he was able to draw only the parallel between life and art; he could not realize their union. “Realization” of the new art “in the material of reality” was in fact difficult, as Pinthus had rightly remarked. “In every line there was creation,” Michel stated,12 but creation did not go beyond the poem. Indeed, the expressionists did not even succeed in giving concrete form to the new creation of the world, in complete contrast to the old world that was smashed with eloquence; the new man and the new world remained an abstract vision, an incantation, a manifesto. The new creation was in reality nothing more than the creation of a new aesthetic form. For this reason the dadaists declared themselves resolute opponents of expressionism. In the “Dadaist Manifesto” of 1918, signed by, among others, Tristan Tzara, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Hugo Ball, and Hans Arp, the question was raised: “Have the Expressionists fulfilled our expectations of an art that burns the essence of life into our flesh?” And the answer was: “No! No! No! Under the pretext of internalization the Expressionists have formed a movement in literature and painting that today already longingly awaits its literary and artistic appreciation and is campaigning for an honorable recognition of the bourgeoisie. Under the pretext of advertising the soul they have reestablished themselves in the struggle against naturalism to abstract-pathetic gestures that have an empty, comfortable, and motionless life as a premise.”13 The dadaists undertook a more radical attack on reality than the expressionists, and they explored possibilities of actually translating art into life practice. But they still were not able to eliminate the separation of art and life in a new reality. The paradoxical situation in which such an apocalyptic undertaking results became even clearer in their more radical attempts than in those of the expressionists. For the dadaists, too, the revolt against the bourgeois world and its 12. Michel, “Tathafte Form,” 351–52. 13. Cited in Karl Riha, ed., Dada Berlin: Texte, Manifeste, Aktionen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977), 22–23. “Paradise Is Won in Every Form” 325 culture was decisive; but its destructiveness—and this distinguished them from the expressionists—appeared to be absolute, not compensated by visions of a new paradise, and it expressed itself with a lack of seriousness that questioned again and again the meaning of what was said. Even before the designation “dada” was born in 1916 in the Zurich “Cabaret Voltaire,” its originator, Hugo Ball, together with Richard Huelsenbeck, demonstrated these qualities in a “Literary Manifesto”: “What we want: to incite, to overturn, to bluff, to torture, to tickle to death, confused, without coherence, to be dare-devils and negationists. . . . We always will be ‘anti-.’ . . . We proclaim metabolism, somersault, vampirism, and all kinds of mimicry. . . . We want to spoil the appetite for beauty, culture, poetry, for spirit, taste, socialism, altruism, and synonymism. We are against all ‘isms,’ parties, and ‘opinions.’ We wish to be negationists.”14 The First World War doubtless strengthened this attitude. The literary manifesto that I have cited was printed in the program of a memorial service that Ball and Huelsenbeck had organized in Berlin on February 12, 1915, for the poets Walter Heymann, Hans Leybold, Ernst Wilhelm Lotz, Charles Péguy, and Ernst Stadler, who had fallen in battle.15 The main actors of the Cabaret Voltaire, the godfathers of “dadaism” in 1916—besides Ball and Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Marcel Janco—had all emigrated to Switzerland from belligerent countries. They experienced the meaninglessness of the war—more exactly, that no meaning was to be found in suffering and dying and that this war could be reduced to “blague,” to boasting and “bloody posing” as Ball noted in 191616—and they interpreted this experience in a previously unimagined manner. In 1916 Hugo Ball wrote the following lines under the title “Totenklage” (“Dirge”):

ombula take bitdli solunkola tabla tokta tokta takabla taka tak Babula m’balam tak tru—ü wo—um biba bimbel

14. Cited in Ernst Teubner, ed., Hugo Ball (1886–1986): Leben und Werk (exhibition catalog) (Berlin: Publica, 1986), 116. 15. See ibid., 115–18; Kurt Hiller also spoke at this memorial service. 16. Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Lucerne: Stocker, 1946), 92. 326 The Apocalypse in Germany

o kla o auw kla o auwa . . . 17

It is not surprising that such a serious political person as Leonhard Frank, similarly an emigrant in Zurich, dismissed such matters as “meaninglessness in power” and viewed the dadaists as “fugitives from a difﬁcult era,” who “modestly ﬂed into cynicism.”18 But that an authentic experience of meaninglessness lay hidden behind Ball’s “meaningless” “Totenklage” and that he took this war, which he had personally seen on the Lorraine front in 1914, very seriously, is attested by his poem “Totentanz” (“Dance of Death”), written in the same year as “Totenklage”:

And so we die, so we die And die every day, Because we can die so comfortably. In the morning still in sleep and dreams At midday we’re already gone In the evening deep within our grave.

Battle is our bordello, Our sun is of blood, Death is our token and watchword. Child and wife we leave, What do they have to do with us! If only someone can depend on us! ...... We thank you, we thank you, Herr Kaiser, for the kindness, Of choosing us to die. Sleep, sleep gently and still. Until our poor ﬂesh, covered by grass, Wakes you up.19

Thus, Ball could do it in a different way. He could protest against the war in a “plain text” like Frank and other “committed” opponents of the war. But the “phonetic poems,” “simultaneous poems,” the “abstract dances” in “cubistic masks” and “ ‘bruitistic’ games” that were staged in the Cabaret Voltaire were for the dadaists a more appropriate and more effective reaction to their experiences. The dadaist actions responded to

17. Cited in Karl Riha, ed., 113 Dada Gedichte (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1982), 33. 18. Leonhard Frank, Links wo das Herz ist (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1967), 13–14. 19. Cited in Teubner, Hugo Ball, 24. “Paradise Is Won in Every Form” 327 the meaninglessness of reality with nonsense; they thus mocked reality and shattered it at the same time more decisively than expressionist poems could ever have done, and thereby raised the sharpest protest imaginable against reality. In the Cabaret Voltaire the dadaists celebrated “a comedy and a mass for the dead at the same time,” as Ball noted in his journal in 1916; for them this was the most reckless form of struggle “against the agony and the death fever of the era.”20 The dadaist form of resistance against reality was, however, paradoxical in a problematical manner. The reproduction of experienced meaninglessness in the nonsense of dadaistic actions, in a “game with pathetic remnants” of disintegrating reality, implied agreement with the process of destruction that was taking place in the world outside; indeed, the dadaists attempted to outdo this process, not only by affirming material destruction but also by trying to tear down the facades in front of the disintegrated values, by lining up—thus Ball—for the “execution of posed morals and plenitude.”21 This agreement with the destruction became even more extreme when the leading force in the dadaist movement shifted to Berlin. In his Erste Dadarede in Deutschland (“First Dada Speech in Germany”), in February 1918, when thousands of soldiers were still dying every week all over Europe, Richard Huelsenbeck said: “We were against the pacifists because war gave us the possibility of existing in our complete glory. . . . We were for war and Dadaism is still for war today. Things have to strike each other: it still isn’t savage enough.”22 Peter Sloterdijk characterized Huelsenbeck’s action as an attempt to try, with an extremely sensitive subject, the new tactic “to declare oneself in agreement with the worst in an ironically dirty manner. With his cynical speeches he engenders an ego beyond good and evil, that wants to be like his insane era.” Sloterdijk defined the position of the dadaists as “between the mentality of the generals, who were seriously for war, and the mentality of the pacifists, who were seriously against it,” as an “evil sounding third position free of all scruples: being unseriously for it.”23 It is striking how close this position comes to that of Jünger, who, although not sharing the mentality of Wilhelminian generals, to a certain extent was seriously for it, that is, for the same goal as the dadaists: the

20. Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, 78, 92. The verdict that the Zurich dadaists, in contrast to the Berlin dadaists after 1918, were unworldly and unpolitical cannot be maintained. See also Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “Dada gegen den Ersten Weltkrieg: Die Dadaisten in Zürich,” in Sinn aus Unsinn: Dada International, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen and Helmut G. Hermann, 87–100. 21. Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, 91. 22. Cited in Riha, Dada Berlin, 17. 23. Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2:713, 715. 328 The Apocalypse in Germany destruction of the bourgeois world with its “so-called cultural possessions” and “historical fetishism.” Like Jünger, the dadaists accepted the events dominating history, as destructive as they may have been. The difference between serious and unserious agreements with destruction pales vis-à-vis the common feature that Jünger shared with the dadaists. In the Arbeiter Jünger showed the same cynicism as Huelsenbeck, since cynicism is requisite as an existential attitude for the acceptance of what dominates history: he even accepted the possibility that the world would be transformed into a state of insects—should that be the objective of history—as a “positive” result of his apocalypse; and “the more cynically, Spartan, Prussian, or Bolshevist life may be lived, the better it will be.”24 But where was the “positive” outcome of the apocalypse for the dadaists? Where was the new world and the new man? The objective of apocalyptic transformation that the dadaists were attempting to actuate with their proclamations and actions is not so easy to determine. They did not consistently conjure up “redemption” in a new fraternal community of men as the expressionists had done. Only occasionally did they explicitly indicate that they desired a transformation of an apocalyptic nature, a transformation that would produce a fundamentally new reality from the destruction of the old world. In the “Dadaist Manifesto” of 1918 they stated, for example: “With Dadaism a new reality claims its rights.” And in the same year the “Oberdada” Johannes Baader claimed: “I will take care that men will live on this earth in the future. Men who have command of their spirit and create mankind anew with this spirit.”25 But in content all this remained somewhat vague. In fact, the dadaists explicitly rejected sketching out a picture of the new world, like Kurt Hiller, as “paradise,” in which “everyone feels well.”26 Such a picture and outline of a utopia would have been engendering meaning, and this would have contradicted the central desire of the dadaists to shatter all meaning. In 1919 Raoul Hausmann wrote: “The world has for us today no deeper meaning than that of unfathomable nonsense.” Dadaists were the most radical apocalypticists imaginable; they refused to put a new meaning in the place of the old one. They were apocalypticists nevertheless: although they refused to give shape to the new reality, they enacted it. The new reality consisted in a changed attitude to the meaninglessness of the old. Dadaism, according to Huelsenbeck in his Erste Dadarede in Deutschland, “is the transition to new joy in real things.” And the new men “are fellows who have kept getting into fights with life, they are guys, men with fates and the ability to 24. Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), 197, 201; see also 228. 25. Cited in Riha, Dada Berlin, 23, 40. 26. See p. 234 in this book. “Paradise Is Won in Every Form” 329 experience. Men with sharpened intellect who understand that they are placed at the turning-point of an era.” The dadaists enacted the transition to the new reality by developing a technique that was as crazy as the dadaists’ experience of reality, a technique, according to Hausmann, “like life itself: the exact technique of the finally understood nonsense as the meaning of the world!”27 It appears as though the dadaists had realized the avant-garde intention, to lead art to a new praxis of life. However, the opposite side of relinquishing the autonomy of art was the subjection to the facticity of the given. New praxis of life meant subjecting oneself to meaningless reality with cynical affirmation: “To be a Dadaist means to have oneself thrown around by things, to be against every formation of sediment, a moment seated on a chair means to have brought life into danger”: thus it was written in the “Dadaist Manifesto” in 1918. Sloterdijk discovered in dadaist cynicism a tendency “to the prefascist aesthetics of destruction that would like to live to the full the intoxication of destruction”; this tendency, however, in his view formed an ambiguous complex with the prevalent antifascist “aesthetics of resistance.” But, apart from its pleasure in destroying, to an even greater degree its closeness to fascism results from the dadaists’ attempt to absorb art in life and, for this objective, their willingness to accept the predominance of life, as meaningless and savage as it may be. This constitutes the inherent closeness of all avant- garde groups not only to fascism, but also to other totalitarian and terrorist movements of the twentieth century. “It is just one step to politics”; thus Huelsenbeck evaluated the breadth of dadaist life practice. “Tomorrow minister or martyr in the Schlüsselburg.”28 While the dadaists stayed away from fascism, the futurists made a deal with the Italian Fascists from the very beginning. Their leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who had since 1909 influenced every avant-garde movement—including dadaism29—with his Futuristisches Manifest (“Manifesto of Futurism”) in 1919 led the Fascist list in the Italian elections behind Mussolini; in Fascist Italy he became, after all, a member of the “Accademia d’Italia” and president of the Writers’ Association. Even the surrealist Salvador Dali openly showed sympathy for fascism. Most other surrealists, like the dadaists, inclined—at least

27. Raoul Hausmann, “Der deutsche Spießer ärgert sich,” cited in Riha, Dada Berlin, 68, 69, 18–19. 28. Ibid., 25; Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2:717; Huelsenbeck, “Erste Dadarede in Deutschland,” cited in Riha, Dada Berlin, 19. 29. The dadaists, despite borrowings and commonalties, soon distanced themselves from futurism; see Richard Sheppard, “Dada und Futurismus,” in Sinn aus Unsinn, ed. Paulsen and Hermann, 29–70. 330 The Apocalypse in Germany for a time—to anarchism and communism. At the end of the twenties Louis Aragon hectically changed fronts several times (something that was defended by André Breton with the surrealist—or dadaist—argument that Aragon was not responsible for his change of mind since the writer was merely the “objective interpreter” of the struggles around him),30 until he finally submitted to the Stalinist party line; in 1939, he defended the pact between Stalin and Hitler; in 1954, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France. The Russian formalists, in contrast, had to decide under pressure; they had to obey the dictate of Stalin and convert to “Socialist Realism” or, in fact, became martyrs. Most of the German expressionists inclined to the Left—Johannes R. Becher offered the best example of a transformation to a confirmed Stalinist, indeed, he finally became a minister—however, some of them were associated with Nazism: Hanns Johst, who became Prussian state councilor, president of the Poets’ Academy, as well as the Reich Writers’ Associ- ation (Reichsschrifttumskammer), and SS brigadeführer; Arnolt Bronnen (although he fell into disfavor in 1937 and converted to Communism after 1945), and Gottfried Benn, who temporarily confessed to Nazism in 1933. The conversions of so many avant-gardists to totalitarian political movements show no more, but also no less, than the potential openness of avant-garde aesthetics for totalitarian politics. Whether anyone actually became a fascist or Stalinist doubtless depended on additional factors. But there is little doubt that the readiness of the avant-gardists to surrender art to reality for the sake of a new life practice made them susceptible to such political movements that appeared to reconcile art and life in a new totality. Because the avant-gardists accepted the meaninglessness and savagery of reality, they sacrificed criteria of criticism connected to reality and ran the risk of being satisfied with the appearance of the new life practice. The aporia, in which the avant-garde project resulted, is illuminated from another direction when we consider Gottfried Benn’s temporary association with Nazism. In 1912 Benn had cofounded expressionism with his volume of poetry Morgue; in poems such as “Kleine Aster,” “Schöne Jugend,” or “Mann und Frau gehen durch die Krebsbaracke,” he illustrated the meaninglessness and savagery of life, scorned “the decaying vitiation

30. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (New York: Collie Books, 1967), 18 (introduction by Roger Shattuck), also 175–82; see also Robert S. Short, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–1936,” in The Left Wing Intellectuals between the Wars, 1919–1939, ed. Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, Journal of Contemporary History 2 (1966): 3–25. “Paradise Is Won in Every Form” 331 of corpse-man,” as Pinthus noted,31 and participated in this manner in the “shattering of reality” that he observed in all avant-garde movements as a “uniform basic position.”32 In contrast to the dadaists, however, he drew a sharp distinction between life and art. He developed a new “artistry” that attempted to dissolve everything that belonged to “life,” the material, nature, “contents,” history, even “truth,” and to transform them into “form” and “style.” In 1931 he was still postulating: “Whoever wishes to organize life will never make art,” since making art in his eyes meant to “exclude life, to make it narrower, even to ﬁght it, in order to stylize it.”33 With such an “artist’s gospel” how could Benn declare his support of Nazism only two years later? Benn did not have the ambition, like the dadaists, to organize a new life practice from art, but he shared with them the destructive scorn for everything “real,” which led to a loss of his sense of reality and, paradoxically, to abdication in the face of the real only because it was real and apparently dominated history. “A genuinely new historical movement is present,” Benn stated in 1933, “it is typologically neither good nor evil, it begins its existence.”34 That was enough for him. He submitted to the new political movement because it appeared to be successful to shape anew this hated reality according to aesthetic laws, according to the principles of his—Benn’s—artistry. He believed that this was the case. In a speech for Marinetti, who visited Germany in 1934, he formulated his new confession of faith: “Form—in its name everything was won, as you see about yourself in the renewed Germany; form and discipline: both symbols of the new Reich; discipline and style in the state and in art: the basis of the imperative conception of the world that I see coming. The entire future that we have is this: state and art—, you had announced the birth of the centaur in your manifesto: this is it.”35 Benn had not considered possible the realization of the apocalyptic objective of the avant-garde, the merging of art and life, the birth of the centaur, but now he saw the centaur embodied in the Nazi state, and he was ready to tip his hat to its creators as the greater artists. Avant- garde art—the art of his expressionist generation, was in his view “the

31. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung, introduction, 27. 32. Gottfried Benn, “Expressionismus” (1933), in Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes-Verlag, 1959–1961), 1:243. 33. Gottfried Benn, “Die neue literarische Saison” (radio presentation given on August 28, 1931), in Gesammelte Werke, 1:426. 34. Gottfried Benn, “Der neue Staat und die Intellektuellen” (radio speech given on April 24, 1933), in Gesammelte Werke, 1:444. 35. Gottfried Benn, “Rede auf Marinetti” (speech given on March 29, 1934), in Gesammelte Werke, 1:481. 332 The Apocalypse in Germany

final art of Europe, its last ray, while all around the long, magnificent, furrowed era died. The era with art, gone forever! . . . What begins now, what commences now, will no longer be art: it is more, it is less.” And what would this new phenomenon look like, which Benn was ready to welcome? “Not art, ritual will stand around the torches, around the fires. Fused together the architecture of the south and the lyrics of the fogland; the height of the Atlantides; their symbolic works will be great hymns; oratorios in amphistadia.”36 Benn’s expectations were altogether accurate. In fact ritual stood around the fires at the midsummer celebrations of the Hitler Youth, the nightly swearings-in of political leaders, but also at book burnings. In fact the models of the Pergamon Altar and of the Bernini colonnades fused together with nebulous romanticism into political places of worship and sacred halls. The SS presented the bloom of the “new biological type,” the “new vision of the birth of man”37—Benn was not lacking in feeling for the apocalyptic character of the centaur. And the new existence actually was celebrated with oratorios in stadiums, with processions, and with other ritual spectacles. Yet, Benn was very soon disappointed. But his illusion to a certain extent had been well founded, since Nazism presented a connection of politics and art that appeared to realize the central request of the avant- garde, even if in a different manner, than the avant-gardists had had in mind. The avant-gardists wanted to organize a new life practice from art. Although art should be dissolved in the new reality, the approach was still aesthetic—the “creation of art” should “become the creation of life,” as Wolfenstein said; ultimately the goal was a “redemption through art.” The Nazis, on the other hand, organized the new life practice on ideological and political principles, but they used aesthetic means that produced the semblance of redemption in this aesthetically mantled praxis of life. It is no coincidence that in 1934 Salvador Dali also praised Hitler as a “surrealist innovator.”38 The apparent realization of the avant-garde project through fascism (in Fascist Italy the same thing happened as in the Third Reich) was more than what Walter Benjamin attempted to define in the phrase “aestheticization of political life” through fascism.39 It was

36. Benn, “Expressionismus,” in Gesammelte Werke, 1:252, 255. 37. Gottfried Benn, “Antwort an die literarische Emigration,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, May 25, 1933, 2. 38. Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, 215; see also 183–90. 39. Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier- barkeit,” in Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 175. “Paradise Is Won in Every Form” 333 the formally most wide-ranging effort to stage an apocalyptic renewal in reality, that is, to make people participants in the aesthetic celebration of the new reality—through insignia and greetings, ﬂags and uniforms, marches and ritual celebrations, through the formation of work and leisure with aesthetic means.40 And this attempt was not undertaken only by the fascists. Benjamin claimed that communism answered the fascist “aestheticization of politics” with the “politicization of art.”41 However, the contrast that Benjamin attempted to emphasize through this inversion of concepts did not exist in reality; what Benjamin spoke about were in fact two different things that could be observed in like manner under fascist as well as Stalinist regimes. Art—that is, traditional literature and the ﬁne arts—was politicized in the Third Reich as much as it was under Stalin. The glorifying poems of Johst or Schumann to Hitler are of the same style as the hymns of Becher, Kurt Barthel, and (naturally) of Soviet authors to Stalin;42 the heroic sculptures by Josef Thorak did not differ greatly from the “heroes of labor” of Socialist Realism.43 But art in the traditional sense was not even that essential. What was really important was the new “art” of organizing life practice in aesthetic form. The place of this “art” was not the museum but everyday reality. And this new “art,” which Benjamin attempted to describe as the “aestheticization of politics,” was also carried on under Stalin. Stagings of the personality cult had the working masses appearing as extras and the newly built monumental structures as wings of a huge play in which Stalin was the main actor.44 In form and function the aesthetic ritual of Stalinism was completely comparable to that of

40. C. Rainer Stollmann, “Faschistische Politik als Gesamtkunstwerk: Tendenzen zur Ästhetisierung des politischen Lebens im Nationalsozialismus,” in Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich, ed. Horst Denkler and Karl Prümm (Stuttgart: Metzler,ˇ 1976); Ralf Schnell, ed., Kunst und Kultur im deutschen Faschismus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978). For a discussion of the points of contact between fascism and avant-garde trends, see Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, eds., Faschismus und Avantgarde. 41. Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk,” in Illuminationen, 176. 42. Examples can be found in Albrecht Schöne, Über politische Lyrik im 20. Jahrhundert: Mit einem Textanhang (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1969); see also Alexander von Bormann, “Politische Dichtung der Weimarer Republik,” in Geschichte der politischen Lyrik in Deutschland, ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978). 43. See Martin Damus, Sozialistischer Realismus und Kunst im Nationalsozialismus (Frank- furt am Main: Fischer, 1981). 44. I do not share the view of Boris Groys that the art of “Socialist Realism” continued and concluded the avant-garde project, but I do find convincing his interpretation that Stalinist politics included an “aesthetic project” that resulted in the “transfer of the avant- garde impulse from the sphere of artistic form to the sphere of direct reality” (“Kunstwerk Stalin: Zur Ästhetik des Sozialistischen Realismus,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 21, 1987). If—in the sense of Bürger’s concept of avant-garde—the designation “formalism” 334 The Apocalypse in Germany fascism, although it was exceeded by fascism in perfection and variety. In any event, fascism and Stalinism formally realized the intentions of the avant-garde. For this reason, because the avant-garde appeared as competition in the apocalyptic undertaking of the unification of art and life in a new life practice, it had to give way to the politically initiated project of redemption. Art should again become art in the traditional sense and was forced into a subservient, propagandistic role, be it in the form of “national” or “Socialist Realism.”45 Writers such as Johst, Becher, and Aragon voluntarily broke with their expressionist and surrealist past when they converted to Nazism or Communism. Loyalty to the party line was insufficient. It did not help Gottfried Benn that he declared his loyalty to Nazism in 1933, and Emil Nolde gained no advantage from being a member of the Nazi Party long before 1933, since both remained loyal to their previous work. The mere expression of loyalty to Communism and Stalin did not help the Russian formalists either—they were forced to practice “Socialist Realism.”46 There had to be only one way to redemption; as a result of that, the avant-garde had to be eradicated.47 The organization of the new life practice in aesthetic garb by fascism and Stalinism, in the ritual self-portrayals of the “new community” of the collective and in celebrations of the cult of personality, offered only is used for the Russian avant-garde that describes various schools and movements in our context of discussion, Russian cubism and futurism, “proletkul’t” and “lef” are primarily in view, less formalistic literary theory and linguistics; see Victor Ehrlich, Russischer Formalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 46–57; and Aage A. Hansen-Löve, Der russische Formalismus (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978), 478–509. 45. Martin Damus traces the similarity of National Socialist art with that of Socialist Realism back to the fact that in both political systems art was placed in the service of the state and that similar forms of government produced comparable artistic functions and manifestations of art (Sozialistischer Realismus und Kunst im Nationalsozialismus, 7–13). 46. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 “Socialist Realism” was finally declared the sole and obligatory mode of artistic expression; see Hans-Jürgen Schmitt and Godehard Schramm, eds., Sozialistische Realismuskonzeptionen: Dokumente zum 1. Allunionskongreß der Sowjetschriftsteller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); and Jochen- Ulrich Peters, Kunst als organisierte Erfahrung: Über den Zusammenhang von Kunsttheorie, Literaturkritik und Kulturpolitik bei A. V. Lunacarskijˇ (Munich: Fink, 1980), 190–96. On the concept of “formalism,” see note 44. 47. Only futurists enjoyed a certain “fool’s freedom” in Fascist Italy, but they were deprived of power by Mussolini. On the other hand, in 1929 Marinetti accepted membership in the same “Accademia d’Italia” that he had once wished to burn down, which— in the view of Piero Aragno—“amounted to the end of a movement that had begun with the wildest proclamations imaginable” (“Futurismus und Faschismus: Die italienische Avantgarde und die Revolution,” in Faschismus und Avantgarde, ed. Grimm and Hermand, 86). “Paradise Is Won in Every Form” 335 the semblance of redemption, as I said, and realized the intentions of the avant-garde only in a formal way. The fact that the unification of art and life was realized only on the surface also explains why the forms developed by fascism and Stalinism could resemble each other, despite considerable ideological differences. Of course, the apocalyptic project, of creating a new reality through the merging of art and life, can produce nothing but the semblance of redemption. To that extent the fascist and Stalinist endeavors presented the historical aporia of the avant-garde at its baldest. Gottfried Benn was not disappointed by Nazism because it would not have fulfilled his expectations of a new “ritual.” His disillusionment followed the discovery that ritual only feigned the semblance of a new reality and that there was no substance behind this semblance. He now discovered with a critical eye the apocalyptic character of Nazi redemptive ritual and condemned this undertaking—against the principles of his own “artist’s gospel”—on moral grounds: “First they behave themselves like pigs, then they wish to be redeemed, by one ‘higher’ power or another that forgives them their stupid and stubborn vacillations. They never get to maintaining themselves in order through any thought of inner training, by adapting to a moral principle or standards of reason, or to bring themselves into form again; they have their ‘impulses,’ which is Faust-like—and then they want to be redeemed.”48 Peter Bürger identified failure as the historical result of the avant- garde movements: “The dissolution of autonomous art in the sense of a transformation of art into life practice . . . has not taken place and cannot take place within bourgeois society except in the form of the false dissolution of autonomous art.” That there is such a false dissolution he saw attested through trivial literature and commercial design; the aestheticization of life practice through fascism and Stalinism would have provided him even better examples. Still, was the intended dissolution of the avant-gardists really a “proper” one, which unfortunately happened to fail? Bürger himself probably sensed that something was wrong with his distinction between proper and false dissolution of art into life practice— the final sentence of his summary of the historical findings betrays this: “On the basis of the experience of a false dissolution of autonomy one would have to ask whether a dissolution of the autonomous status can be desirable at all, and if it is not the distance of art to life practice that guarantees freedom to develop alternative concepts.”49 This seems to me an important but all too timidly formulated thought that even circumvents the central 48. Gottfried Benn, “Zum Thema Geschichte” (written ca. 1943), in Gesammelte Werke, 1:376. 49. Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 72–73. 336 The Apocalypse in Germany problem. Whether there is true or false dissolution of art is in any event not the question; instead, one should ask whether apocalyptic intentions are pursued, namely, intentions of destroying the previous reality in order to create a new and perfect one. Such intentions are condemned to failure because they are apocalyptic. No shape could be given to the new reality and the new man in art that would not have been abstract or boring; so much the less could redemption succeed through art in life practice.In fact, art requires freedom, in order to develop alternatives to what exists, but it has the chance to enrich and to improve “life practice” only if the alternative to the status quo is not apocalyptic dreams. 21 Surrender of the Imagination?

The avant-gardists had driven the aesthetics of the apocalypse to the extreme. They were led beyond this limit ad absurdum by movements that organized the apocalyptic task from an ideological and political starting point and produced the semblance of salvation by aesthetic means. But the political apocalypse, particularly of the fascist variety, which attempted to bring about the “thousand-year Reich” and the “new German man” through war and the annihilation of the “evil enemy,” was able only to effect destruction; the countless millions dead, the devastated countries of Europe, and the extermination of Jews revealed the madness of the attempt to realize the apocalypse. The apocalyptic enterprise of Stalinism, which also tried to create a new, perfect world and “socialist man” by liquidating millions of “enemies” or imprisoning them in gulags, could maintain the appearance of legality and success somewhat longer because it at first belonged to the victims of the fascist apocalypse and then won on the battlefield. It took somewhat longer until it became clear everywhere that this attempt was condemned to failure as well. After 1945 could there be any apocalyptic belief at all in an earthly paradise? After Auschwitz were there still possibilities of aesthetic expression for such belief? The existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment is unrescindable, and, again and again, particularly in times of crisis and revolution, the way is being prepared for the inclination to dissolve this tension, to separate oneself from evil along with the past and place hopes on redemption in the future. Thus after the Second World War, just as after the First, apocalyptic expectations stirred among many, although with moderated euphoria in comparison with 1918. Still, the concept of “zero hour,” which suggested that it was actually possible to discard the past and to begin a completely new existence, betrayed the apocalyptic tendency of the longing of many. But how was such hope to be put into aesthetic form after all the failed experiments, disillusioned ecstasies, and brutally realized cynicisms of the first half of the twentieth century? What suggested itself was reversion to 337 338 The Apocalypse in Germany traditions that were unsuspicious or not yet unmasked as illusory. This could be the recollection of Christian forms of expression of apocalyptic hope and traditional symbols. Under the title Apokalypse, Reinhold Schneider wrote in 1945 a cycle of sonnets that interpreted the events of the time by direct reference to the Revelation of John: “The power of the beast is dead.”1 Also, the hope of transformation and redemption was expressed in the language of Revelation. The first sonnet closed with the verses: The heavens ebb and flow tremendously, Whether a people may be transformed in prayer And become a sign for Him in the night.2

At the end of the seventh sonnet is the trio:

Kingdoms smash like rotten halls, And those who still sit enthroned see your face. But we ask: “Come! O come soon!”3

In the eastern half of Germany the apocalyptic certainty about the future was spread unrestrictedly, and even officially, in the consciousness of belonging to the victors over fascism and being able to build up a totally new society. Johannes R. Becher could set the theme in his text of the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic; he, too, reverted to traditional symbols that he had already used in the twenties—the symbol of resurrection after the destruction of the old world and the apocalyptic symbolism of light. The first version of the anthem shows this even more clearly than the final version:

RESURRECTED Resurrected from the ruins Germany our homeland, Lit up by the morning’s gleam And turned toward the future. Germany, thee we desire to Serve united. Here in the East—there in the West That the sun, that the sun Shine over Germany.4

1. Reinhold Schneider, Apokalypse: Sonette (1945) (Baden-Baden: Bühler, 1946), 13. 2. Ibid., 5. 3. Ibid., 15. 4. Becher, Gesammelte Werke, 6:579. Surrender of the Imagination? 339

Other apocalyptic visions from the ﬁrst years of the GDR reverted to the classical metaphorical language of religious models, too, and sometimes even to the pathetic language of expressionism, as, for instance, Peter Huchel’s poem cycle Das Gesetz (“Law”) in 1950. The title refers to the land reform in the GDR, but relevant images are assigned to the word law, for example, the dualistic image “darkness-light,” which makes it a symbol of apocalyptic promise of salvation:

Oh law, written with the plow into the field, with the axe curved into the trees! Law that smashed the seal of lords, Shredded their testament! Oh first hour of the first day, which explodes the gates of darkness!5

In the long run, however, it could be concealed neither in the East nor in the West that there had not been a “zero hour” and that the Germans carried their dark past with them in many forms. In 1962 Christoph Meckel published the poem “Der Pfau” (“The Peacock”):

From Germany’s ashes I saw no phoenix rise. Clearing with a foot in the ashes I came upon charred ﬁns, horns and skins— But I saw a peacock stirring the ashes with a wooden wing, and one of iron growing to a giant that whipped the glowing ashes and combed its feathers.6

In West Germany the generation that had not consciously experienced the Third Reich discovered that the Nazi past had been repressed and still lived, personiﬁed by their fathers. This discovery was one of the strongest impulses for the student protest movement and the revolt of the “extra-parliamentary opposition” of the late sixties; for many it led to the obsession that West Germany, under a thin veneer of formal democracy, was a “cryptofascist” state, and again it produced an apocalyptic vision

5. Peter Huchel, “Das Gesetz,” Sinn und Form 4 (1950): 132; see also Hans Jürgen Schmitt, ed., Die Literatur der DDR, in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1983), 11:334–35. 6. Christoph Meckel, Wildnisse (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1962), cited in Bernd Jentzsch, ed., Ich sah aus Deutschlands Asche keinen Phönix steigen (Munich: Kindler, 1979), 95. 340 The Apocalypse in Germany in the traditional sense: with the crushing of the political system and of the societal order of West Germany, the previously delayed destruction of the fascist past would be completed and the ground prepared for a truly new society. The “apocalypse of 1968” expressed itself in ideological manifestations and political actions; no one believed in “redemption through art” anymore. Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Karl Markus Michel declared the death of literature in 1968 in Kursbuch. Enzensberger stated that literature had become “without purpose and prospect,” and Michel claimed that “our world can no longer be cast in lyrics, it can only be changed.”7 The apocalypse of 1968 found serious literary expression only after its failure, when its failure was recognized. The most interesting literary document of such a recognition comes from Enzensberger, of all people; he revised his renunciation of poetry at the beginning of the seventies, and in 1977 he wrote Der Untergang der “Titanic” (“The Sinking of the Titanic”). The subtitle Eine Komödie (“A Comedy”), the formal variety of the text, the intricacy in content, and the manner of speaking that varied between seriousness and irony gave rise to many false interpretations.8 Der Unter- gang der “Titanic” deals not only with the sinking of the ship Titanic in 1912, but also with the loss of a text, “Der Untergang der Titanic,” which Enzensberger had written in Havana in 1969:

It was a poem without a copy, written with pencil in a black waxcloth booklet ...... In some mailsack or other, that was packed up in Havana and never arrived in Paris, Lost.9 In addition, Der Untergang der “Titanic” also deals with writing about the loss of the “Untergang der Titanic” in Berlin in the winter of 1977.

7. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Gemeinplätze, die neueste Literatur betreffend,” Kurs- buch 15 (1968): 195; Karl Markus Michel, “Ein Kranz für die Literatur,” Kursbuch 15 (1968): 185. 8. Joseph Kiermeier-Debre provided the most convincing interpretation: “ ‘Diese Ge- schichte vom untergehenden Schiff, das ein Schiff und kein Schiff ist.’ Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Komödie vom ‘Untergang des Untergang der Titanic,’ ” in Apokalypse: Welt- untergangsvisionen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Gunther E. Grimm, Werner Faulstich, and Peter Kuon, 222–45; I am following its general tenor. 9. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Der Untergang der “Titanic”: Eine Komödie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 21. Surrender of the Imagination? 341

The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is of minor significance; it has significance only as a metaphor, but in no way as a metaphor for the destruction of the world. This metaphor stands for the destruction of bourgeois society, in which Enzensberger believed, when he traveled to Cuba in 1968 in the good tradition of “ideological pilgrimages,” in order to be edified by the already established new society.10 Further, “The Sinking of the Titanic” is a metaphor for the loss of apocalyptic belief in revolutionary redemption; it is a metaphor, since we have to do with a text “that perhaps never existed.” The apocalyptic belief, however, did exist:

At that time I believed every word That I wrote, and I was working on The Sinking of the “Titanic.” It was a good poem...... I was right then.11

At that time, during the “peculiarly easy days of euphoria,” Cuba seemed to him like a piece of the heavenly Jerusalem, as a “tropical festival,” and at that time he viewed the revolution that would spell the end of class society as unavoidable:

The iceberg is coming toward us Irrevocably.12

But the great revolution failed to materialize; the metaphor for the end of class society proved false:

“In reality nothing happened.” The Sinking of the Titanic did not take place: It was only a ﬁlm, an omen, a hallucination. . . . The rich remained rich.13

Looking back from 1977, the metaphor of the iceberg begins to change, too. In recollection, Enzensberger, looking out over the harbor wall of Havana, sees the iceberg ﬂoating in the Caribbean:

10. Paul Hollander, “The Ideological Pilgrim: Looking for Utopia, Then and Now,” Encounter 41:5 (1973): 3–15. 11. Enzensberger, Der Untergang der “Titanic,” 26, 20–21. 12. Ibid., 15, 20, 27. 13. Ibid., 91. 342 The Apocalypse in Germany

I alone saw it and nobody else, In the dark bay, the night was cloudless and the sea black and ﬂat like a mirror glass, There I saw the iceberg, enormously high And cold, like a cold mirage It moved toward me slowly, Irrevocably, white.14

In retrospect, the iceberg that would destroy class society turns out to be a mirage, but the metaphor for destruction retained its validity; the iceberg now was moving toward him. The sinking of the Titanic did not take place; what did take place was the loss of apocalyptic belief in the sinking of the Titanic, the sinking of the “Sinking of the Titanic”:

At that time nothing more Was lost than my poem About the sinking of the Titanic.15

In Berlin in the winter of 1977 the entire “tropical festival” of that time appears like a mirage, so that it is no longer certain whether there ever was a poem about the “Sinking of the Titanic” at all in 1969.

So I sit here, covered with blankets, While it is snowing and snowing outside And have a good time with the sinking, The Sinking of the Titanic.16

Enzensberger is amused by the metaphor’s transformation between 1969 and 1977. He makes fun of himself and his apocalyptic belief from that time. But at the same time, he is soberly conscious that he has entered upon a dark and cold reality with his leave-taking from the “tropical festival”:

The snow in front of the window Climbed and climbed. This night Wouldn’t end so easily.17

He survived his own downfall. But it is unclear how one should continue without apocalyptic hope:

14. Ibid., 17. 15. Ibid., 21. 16. Ibid., 22–23. 17. Ibid., 108. Surrender of the Imagination? 343

Everything, I cry, everything as usual, everything lurches from side to side, everything is Under control, everything is running, the persons presumably drowned In the sloping rain, too bad, doesn’t matter, makes you cry, just ﬁne, Uncertain, hard to say, why, I cry and continue to swim.18

“Zwei Randbemerkungen zum Weltuntergang” (“Two Marginal Notes on the Destruction of the World”), which Enzensberger published in Kurs- buch in 1978, further shows that the comedy Der Untergang der “Titanic” as a whole is a metaphor for the loss of apocalyptic belief of the “Sixty- Eighters.” Without hesitation he confesses here his view that the “positive Utopia” of leftist theory from Babeuf to Bloch was suffused with apocalyptic belief; among other things, the apocalypse appears to him as “a metaphor for the collapse of capitalism, which has been immediately imminent for over a hundred years as so many assumed.” “With a scornful undertone,” he tells his correspondent—to whom the second “Randbemerkung” is directed and who would like to “maintain the principle of hope just as always,” always ready “to crowd around the standard of Utopia”—that the apocalyptic dreams of the “positive Utopia” are scattered: the “glorious image of the future of the time after the revolution,” the “dream of mankind, presented with messianic pathos,” the “promise of the Octo- ber Revolution sixty years ago.” He is not responsible for the “scornful undertone” of his statements: “I haven’t put it in myself; it is, so to speak, objective historical scorn, and whoever has the ridicule does not need to worry about the damage.” The objective historical scorn results from the fact that “every passer-by has long understood,” in contrast to theoreticians of the Left in the tradition of German idealism: “that there is no world-spirit (Weltgeist); that we do not know the laws of history.”19 The vision of an earthly paradise became in Enzensberger’s view an illusion in the face of “the police state, paranoia, bureaucracy, terror, economic crisis, an obsession with armament, destruction of the environment” throughout the world, whether capitalist or socialist. The apocalypse has narrowed into a nightmare of universal destruction, becoming a “negative Utopia.” Enzensberger accuses leftist theory of not being “particularly well prepared to deal with this type of Utopia for the stated historical reasons,”

18. Ibid., 115. 19. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Zwei Randbemerkungen,” 1, 3–4, 7–8. 344 The Apocalypse in Germany in other words, because of its persistence in an apocalyptic belief in a “positive Utopia.”20 Günther Anders had already noted in the fifties that the meaning of the “feasible,” of the immanent apocalypse, changed with the atom bomb. In Thesen zum Atomzeitalter (“Theses on the Nuclear Age”) in 1959 he got to the heart of the completely new aspect of the situation: “On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima Day, a new age began: an age in which at any moment we can transform any place, nay, our whole earth, into a Hiroshima. Since that day we have become omnipotent modo negativo; but because we can be snuffed out at any moment, it also means: since that day we are completely powerless.” How can we deal with the “negative Utopia” into which the apocalypse has been transformed? Existentially and politically, according to Günther Anders, we have to be “enemies of the apocalypse.”21 Enzensberger closed his “Randbemerkungen zum Weltuntergang” with a rejection of every kind of utopian thought, apocalyptic hope as well as apocalyptic fear: “I wish for you as well as for me and us all a bit more clarity about our own confusion, a bit less fear of our own fear, a bit more attention, respect, and humility before the unknown. Then we will see.”22 But what possibilities still remain to deal with the new situation aesthetically? In Untergang der “Titanic” Enzensberger showed how the loss of apocalyptic belief can be overcome with a “comedy” of metaphors varying between tragedy and satire. In his second “Randbemerkung zum Weltun- tergang” he told his correspondent, who still adhered to Utopian thought, what images were evoked almost unavoidably by fear of destruction: “Our ideologues make themselves look ridiculous when they attempt to eliminate indelible images like flood and conflagration, earthquake and hurricane.” How does it help us, Enzensberger asked, if they “call every comparison between natural and societal processes as impermissible and re- actionary? The elemental power of the imagination teaches millions of people to transgress this prohibition continually.”23 Enzensberger himself made use of the same images of elemental forces of nature that indeed expressed visions of destruction from Daniel to Udo Rabsch.24 “How does one begin to paint the destruction of the world?” he has the unknown painter of an apocalypse around 1490 ask in The Sinking of the “Titanic.” And he enlarges 20. Ibid., 1, 4. 21. Cited in Anders, Die atomare Drohung, 93, 94; see also Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: Beck, 1956), 233–324. Of course it is untrue that there was not “this type before.” Since the beginning of the apocalypse it had enemies, enemies of religious as well as of political apocalypses. 22. Enzensberger, “Zwei Randbemerkungen,” 8. 23. Ibid., 7. 24. See pp. 217–34 in this book. Surrender of the Imagination? 345 its images, the “conflagrations,” the “lightnings,” the “raging sea,” by his own images of the sea that swallowed the Titanic, the “universal flood,” the iceberg that is as large as the mountain in Daniel that fills the entire world.25 Enzensberger stressed that we “produce these images, and that we maintain them because they fit our experiences, our wishes and fears.”26 Still, he did not explain into what structure these—and other—images are brought when fear takes control and images of destruction serve as a means of being relieved of fear. This structure, which refers to the intention with which the specific combination of images is created as well as to the effect that it produces, is usually called “grotesque.”27 Apocalyptic visions of destruction have always inclined to the grotesque, but since the apocalypse was “docked” and fear of destruction was no longer compensated by hope of redemption, the grotesque has changed its character and appears increasingly problematical in its aesthetic function. We describe as “grotesque” everything monstrous, what is extremely terrifying, demonic, and abnormal that can come close to the edge of foolishness and absurdity and can even go over the edge. The earliest apocalyptic texts already depicted grotesque images, primarily of animals: in Daniel, there are four beasts that emerge from the sea; they are “dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly,” they have wings on their backs, have several heads, great iron teeth, many horns, with eyes and mouths that speak blasphemy. The Revelation of John described even more fabulous creatures: locusts like steeds and with human faces, “and they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron: and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails.”28 The grotesque is to be found, according to findings of literary studies, “principally in eras in which the traditional image of an ideal world has lost its reliability in the light of a changed reality, in which the world appears incomprehensible, inaccessible to reason and controlled by irreconcilable contradictions.”29 This definition can also be applied to situations that produce apocalyptic interpretations of experience. The terrifying, death- and destruction-bringing beasts of the early apocalyptic texts symbolize the 25. Enzensberger, Der Untergang der “Titanic,” 12, 27, 44, 69, 93. 26. Enzensberger, “Zwei Randbemerkungen,” 8. 27. The grotesque was defined as “structure” by Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1960), 136; see also Otto F. Best, ed., Das Groteske in der Dichtung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980). 28. Dan. 7:3–8; Rev. 9:7–10, see also 9:17–19. 29. See the entry “Groteske,” in Metzler-Literatur-Lexikon: Stichwörter zur Weltliteratur, ed. Günther Schweikle and Irmgard Schweikle (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984). 346 The Apocalypse in Germany experience that the world is foreign, meaningless; indeed—to use a modern expression—it has become absurd and in its absurdity is of the utmost ominousness. The classical apocalypse contrasts this experience with the vision of a new, perfect reality that promises redemption from the alienated and meaningless world. But the concretization of fear in grotesque images of fearsome beasts functions, at the same time, as a “secret liberation,” as Wolfgang Kayser observed: “The dark is revealed, the uncanny discovered, the incomprehensible formulated in words. The shaping of the grotesque is the attempt to drive out and to exorcise the demonic in the world.”30 In classical apocalypses actual liberation takes place only through judgment, but judgment is seen as certain. For this reason the senseless and the evil can be described undiluted with the greatest ominousness; finally it will fall victim to destruction. But the more powerfully belief in speedy redemption is shaken, and the more fear grows into despair, the more important it becomes to find other ways of relief. Grotesque images that should expel the demonic are distorted until they take on caricaturesque, comic features that generate laughter, but a laughter in which terror ripples and feels like an extreme, hysterical attempt to shove away the unendurable. Kayser called this type of the grotesque “satirical” and distinguished it from the “fantastic” grotesque.31 This distinction does not indicate any clear contrasts, since the satirical grotesque is fantastic, too; and the term satirical for the derisive or contemptuous depiction and criticism of the anomalous, irrational, and senseless embraces all too inadequately the entire spectrum of manifestations and functions that the grotesque shaping of the apocalypse in modern times has developed. Since the fin de siècle, the aesthetic representation of apocalyptic interpretations of experience has continually taken on features of the “satirically” grotesque. In his novel Die andere Seite (“The Other Side”), Alfred Kubin, for example, described in nightmarish images full of terror, as well as piercing comic elements, the destruction of the “dream realm” of “Pearl.” There, too, beasts contribute to giving the impression of the grotesque, but Kubin is no longer dependent on this paradigm alone. In the modern period the representation of the grotesque has enlarged its scope, in particular by blending the mechanical and technical with the organic, by which additional possibilities are created to express the foreign, the demonic, and the threatening of the world. Kubin uses this technique, for example, in order to distort the burning of a mill beyond the natural process to something alive and terrifying, and he completes

30. Kayser, Das Groteske, 139. 31. Ibid., 138–40. Surrender of the Imagination? 347 the scene with a surprising point—likewise a feature of the grotesque— that produces laughter but has that laughter freeze in terror: “The mill, lit from the inside, was in motion, you could look into it like the open body of a man. The wheels still purred, the millstones were still turning, the funnels still shaking, the flour dust spread a light fog through the glow. The flames eagerly attacked the ramshackle stairways and ladders and slowly, unwillingly, so to speak, one part after the other became motionless—like the organs of a dying man. The great flour bin collapsed into the flames last of all. Where it stood I saw a pair of old-fashioned top boots in which half-decaying bones stood—burning timbers hid the rest.”32 Expressionism’s visions of destruction, too, are full of grotesque images; and “satirical” estrangements are to be found especially where decay and destruction control the scene and no prospect of a new world has opened up as, for example, in van Hoddis’s poem “Weltende” or in Lichtenstein’s and Benn’s poems. The “satirical” character of the grotesque may be expressed in differing ways. Comic elements may predominate, as in Lichtenstein’s poem “Prophezeiung,” the first verse of which I have already quoted,33 which ends in the following manner:

Horse stalls fall with a crash. No ﬂy can save itself. Handsome homosexual Men roll out of bed. House walls become cracked. Fish putrefy in the river. Everything has a disgusting end. Busses tip over with a croaking sound.34

Or the deliberate play with the macabre produces a cynical impression, as in Benn’s poems from the Morgue collection, so that there is scarcely a laugh:

PLEASANT YOUTH The mouth of a girl who had lain long in the reeds Looked so nibbled. When the thorax was opened, the esophagus was full of holes. Finally in an arbor under the diaphragm A nest of young rats was found.

32. Kubin, Die andere Seite, 226, 228. 33. See p. 229–30 in this book. 34. Cited in Vietta, Lyrik des Expressionismus, 122–23. 348 The Apocalypse in Germany

A little sister lay dead. The others lived on the liver and kidneys, Drank cold blood and had Passed here a pleasant youth. And their death came about nice and quickly. Thrown all together in the water. Oh, how their little muzzles squeaked!35 The dadaists pushed the mad distortions so far that the terrifying elements of the grotesque withdrew into the background and the impression of absurd comedy predominated. Although the grotesque thereby fulﬁlled one of its most important functions—to offer relief from the experience of an alienated, indeed, mad world and to resolve the horror in laughter—on the other hand, the aesthetic products, with their extreme exaggeration of the meaningless and senseless, risked making the terrifying invisible and weakening the critical intention of satire, or even having it dissolve into a harmless joke. Does the grotesque ultimately show itself to be helpless vis-à-vis the terror that reality itself produces? Must the imagination surrender in the attempt to distort the madness of this world even more? Karl Kraus saw himself confronted by these questions as he attempted to illustrate the madness of the First World War in his drama, Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (“The Last Days of Humanity”). The reality of war presented itself to him as so grotesque that further ﬁctitious exaggerations appeared either unnecessary or even impossible. He therefore used the method of a montage of citations; brought authentic quotes from newspapers, war reports and overheard conversations into a paradoxical mixture; and contrasted them with the actual events in order to have reality itself revealed as grotesque. “The most improbable deeds that are reported here have actually occurred,” he stated in the foreword. “I painted what they did. The most improbable conversations that have been carried on here have been spoken word for word; the crudest inventions are quotations.”36 Kraus’s montages of the grotesque have a “satirical” quality in the sense that the enormities presented demand moral and political protest, but they are so monstrous that no serious, “reasonable” reaction is possible any longer, but only bitter laughter.

37th SCENE Following the winter offensive in the seven communities. Exercise area on the base. The remnants of a regiment, each man having wasted away to a

35. Benn, Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, ed. Wellershoff, 3:8. 36. Fischer, Werke von Karl Kraus, 5:9. Surrender of the Imagination? 349

skeleton. At first appearance there is a group of sick and ragged beggars with torn uniforms, damaged shoes, and filthy underwear. They get up wearily, do rifle drills, and practice salutes. First War Correspondent: How they will light up when they hear that the commander-in-chief, who is just now at the front with his brave troops, deigns to inspect the victorious regiment. Second War Correspondent: How they will be happy if he only looks at them, the good men.37

Kraus was certainly aware that the morbid humor of his montages did not actually liberate and did not alter reality; indeed, he felt guilty about the fact that his satirical device offered psychic relief and distanced the terrifying: “Humor is merely the self-accusation of one who did not become mad with the thought of having survived the witness of these occurrences with mind intact.” Still, he apparently saw no other possibility of encountering the bloody grotesqueries of his time. The famous sentence, “Nothing occurs to me about Hitler,” with which he began Die dritte Walpurgisnacht (“The Third Walpurgis Night”), meant nothing more than that his imagination surrendered to contrasting the grotesquerie of the Third Reich with ideas of spirited polemics and thereby doing “what one calls resisting by using one’s head. But there are evils in the face of which the ‘resisting head’ does not simply cease to be a metaphor; rather, the brain within it, which has one’s share in such acts, would be no longer capable of a thought.”38 He therefore proceeded in the same manner as in Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit by letting the ofﬁcial pronouncements of the Nazi regime and the statements of writers and philosophers such as Benn, Binding, and Heidegger, who declared their support for Nazism, speak for themselves, and contrasted them with actual events; I have already mentioned an example in the chapter about the surrender of the German spirit to National Socialism.39 The grotesque can be intended, can be deliberately created by aesthetic means; still, it is experienced as “grotesque” only when it is perceived that way.40 For this reason it is possible that we perceive something as grotesque that was not at all intended as such. If we disregard aesthetic works of foreign cultures that can have a grotesque effect on account of their foreignness, there is also the possibility of compulsory grotesquerie that arises by the recipient seeing more than the author, that is, a contrast or

37. Ibid., 5:631. 38. Ibid., 5:9, 1:9. 39. See p. 179–80 of this book. 40. See Kayser, Das Groteske, 134. 350 The Apocalypse in Germany contradiction in the context of the work, which reveals the whole as both monstrous and ridiculous. The same possibility arises in an encounter with reality, if the view of the unnatural, absurd, and irrational is undisturbed and can determine that certain acts or events in the context of others appear comic and absurd, foolish and repulsive at the same time. Also for this possibility of involuntary grotesquerie that is given by the reality itself, my chapter about “German spirit” offers examples. The montage technique that Kraus used was built on this possibility. No longer are imaginary mythical creatures invented, nor machines that obtain life in a terrifying manner; it suffices to bring parts of reality into a specific context in order to achieve a grotesque effect. Such a montage of reality with reality is still an aesthetic process that is supposed to enlighten and to control. This technique was frequently used precisely with regard to the political apocalypses of our century. Even in a modified form, reality could be confronted with reality in order to produce a satirical-grotesque effect. Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, for example, published in 1937 a book about the Münster Anabaptist kingdom, Bockelson, Geschichte eines Massenwahns (“Bockelson, History of Mass Hysteria”), which gave the impression of a strictly historical report but specifically stressed the grotesque characteristics of that apocalyptic outbreak. The specific satirical-grotesque effect, however, resulted from the confrontation of the historical reality of 1534 with the current reality of the Third Reich. The book was, of course, not able to provide the latter; the reader had to do that in his head. In his journal Reck-Malleczewen noted what terrifying grotesquerie the confrontation of both realities offered him: “As with us, so also there a wayward individual, a bastard sired, so to speak, in the gutter is the great prophet, as with us every resistance ceases before him, to the astonishment of the entire world, as with us (for just now enchanted women in Berchtesgaden have swallowed the gravel that he, our most worthy gypsy band leader, just stepped on!) . . . hysterical women, stigmatized schoolteachers, defrocked priests, parvenu pimps and outsiders of all occupations are the main props of this regime. The similarities pile so much that I have to suppress them in order not to endanger my head. A tiny bit of ideology in Münster hides precisely with us a core of rankness, greed, sadism, and incredible craving for admiration, and whoever doubts the new dogma or even criticizes it is gallows bait.”41 Kraus and Reck-Malleczewen were “enemies of the apocalypse” in the sense of Günther Anders. They turned against the apocalyptic faith and

41. Entry of August 11, 1936; Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1971), 13. Surrender of the Imagination? 351 apocalyptic activism of the political movements of their time, and they employed allusions to the apocalypse—Kraus with the titles Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit and Die dritte Walpurgisnacht, Reck-Malleczewen by reverting to the historical instance of an apocalyptic mass movement—in order to present the crazy and disastrous element of those apocalyptic endeavors. They did not believe that redemption could be forced by apocalyptic activism; rather, they saw that such a venture leads to hypocrisy and fanaticism, violence and destruction. The madness of this venture appeared to them to surpass even the most terrifying fantasies. In order to keep at least an intact mind, as Karl Kraus said, and in order to express their protest, they had no other choice than to present the reality of madness as grotesque and to incorporate all those feelings and reactions into the montage of the grotesque that suggest themselves in their encounter with madness: terror, fear, despair as well as bitter, scornful, cynical laughter. Neither world war could destroy mankind, even if the destruction of human life and material goods, moral norms, and societal order was perceived by contemporaries as no longer surpassable. But since Hiroshima, the end of mankind has become thinkable. The question, of whether imagination must finally surrender to the idea of nuclear destruction of the world and whether here even the grotesque fails as an aesthetic means of relief, of control, and of protest are since posed with even greater sharpness. The basic structures and strategies of aesthetic realization cannot be multiplied at will and also possess the weight of aesthetic traditions that do not necessarily transform with every change of the reality of experience. In any event the writers who concerned themselves with destruction attempted to create the effect of the grotesque even after Hiroshima,42 and they continue to make use of corresponding means of structuring until today, apparently from the same motives and with the same intentions that led Kraus and Reck-Malleczewen. Everywhere, we find the entire spectrum from the terrifyingly unnatural to ridiculous folly. Arno Schmidt, for example, who in the fifties thought that the Third World War would be unavoidable, represented the entire range. In the first part of the trilogy Nobodaddy’s Kinder (“Nobodaddy’s Children”) (1951–1953), which treats the Second World War, to a certain extent, as a prelude to the Third and last, described a bomb attack as a terrifying-grotesque destruction with the same means that Kubin and the expressionists had used. He brought objects to ominous life and degraded men to absurd objects: “A house front stumbled ahead threateningly, with silk-red foam before the corners of the

42. See Dieter Hoffmann, Das Weltende in der zeitgenössischen Literatur. 352 The Apocalypse in Germany mouth and flickering window-eyes. . . . A long flatbed full of cooked and baked men dangled silently on rubber wheels.”43 In the third part of the trilogy, and in other novels that take place after a nuclear war, such as Die Gelehrtenrepublik (“The Republic of Scholars”) (1957) and Kaff auch Mare Crisium (“Kaff, also called Mare Crisium”) (1960), satire predominates. Mutations, the mixing of human and animal, which Schmidt portrayed in Gelehrtenrepublik—sex-obsessed female cen- taurs and butterflies with human heads like hot-air balloons—seem more like humorous caricatures than demonic monsters. Since the effects that a major nuclear conflict would have on the atmosphere, environment, and organic life have become known in detail, additional material for representing the grotesque has become available. The medical prognoses in which various ways one can perish through radiation—prognoses for which Chernobyl provided a grim example—are so inconceivably terrifying that it requires only a few artificial strokes in order to achieve the effect of the grotesque. A certain specific choice of words that sounds disconcerting and disrespectful for human beings is sufficient for Günter Grass, in his novel Die Rättin, to provide with terrifying- comical characteristics a description of corpses that were “dejuiced” by the explosion of a neutron bomb: “In the staterooms of the ships, on every ship’s deck, along the quaysides, in the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard, everywhere it had sucked out the blood, the snot, all the water, the last juices from men. Whirred together to the size of a dwarf they appeared lightweight to us when we moved them out.”44 Udo Rabsch, who in his novel Julius describes the dying of those having radiation sickness with clinical accuracy, produces grotesque impressions by mixing the terrifying happenings with little day-to-day tasks that had their place in the world before the catastrophe, but now have an inappropriate and ridiculous effect: such as when the doctor who has survived and is fatally ill gives a relieving final injection to a patient with no prospects of living and sticks a bandage on the place where the injection is made.45 Scenes of this sort are touching: they illustrate the effort of the survivors to maintain a semblance of order and normalcy in the chaos of destruction. But the excess of horror and the inescapability of destruction make such actions of a past normality appear meaningless, absurd, and thereby grotesque.

43. Arno Schmidt, Das erzählerische Werk in 8 Bänden (Zürich: Haffmans, 1985), 3:88– 89. 44. Günter Grass, Die Rättin (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986), 211. 45. Udo Rabsch, Julius, oder Der schwarze Sommer (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1983), 132. Surrender of the Imagination? 353

How far may the grotesque representation of nuclear annihilation be pressed? Ultimately to pure comedy, to a joke. The reality of possible terror can apparently not be surpassed by the imagination; thus, aesthetic representation through hyperbole and distortion can go only in the direction of the foolish and the ridiculous, in this respect, however, to the extreme. In the sixties Konrad Bayer already joked with horror in such a manner:

Suddenly the sun went out like a gas lantern And a mushroom cloud hissed up. It wasn’t far at all. Then my backbone dried up. I think to myself, this will be fun, It can be just the beginning. It continued pleasantly. The moon fell on the earth with a cosmic bang. The horizon piled up. Now I’m sitting in a trap. My third artery is exploding. Blood is shooting out my ears. I think to myself, dear Daddy, pretty soon it’s going to come out of my pores. And while my skin comes off, and I softly waste away And the world is dying to the right and left, I hear a voice: Dearest, tell me, do you love me? Tell me, let me know. You know I love you and want to kiss you.46

One of the most recent visions of destruction, Harald Mueller’s play Totenfloß transforms the crippled survivors of nuclear war to caricatures and their language into funny slang that mixes bits of English with fashionable youth jargon and scientific gibberish. “From 0.5 PPM you’re an ex,” goes the statement about the “limit” of a person suffering from radiation sickness; paradise, the presumably unaffected city of Xanten, toward which the “raft of the dead” is traveling, is described in the following manner: “Clean city. Zero chemical toxins. Totally intact biosphere, toxic-clean and body- empty.” A critic of the premiere performance in Stuttgart observed that the public was “amused, rather than shocked by Harald Mueller’s artificial language.” Mueller’s play “is effortlessly shaken off. On the way home, parodies of the hero’s speech, like ‘A beer now, body!’ are to be heard.”47 If the notion of boundless terror that the nuclear age suggests seeks the most extreme possibilities of grotesque representation, the function of the grotesque collapses. The intended protest becomes a noncom- mittal joke that not only relieves, but also anesthetizes. However, the helplessness of the grotesque at the border of its possibilities is merely

46. Cited in Gerhard Rühm, ed., Die Wiener Gruppe (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1967), 472. 47. Harald Mueller, “Totenfloß,” Theater heute (1986): 7:36–37; Georg Hensel, “Eine hypermalade Horroschau,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 18, 1986. 354 The Apocalypse in Germany a special case. The question must be asked more comprehensively: is the aesthetic representation of destruction still possible, since only destruction has remained from the apocalypse? Can a nuclear inferno, which would mean the end of mankind, be adequately represented, that is, so that the actually unimaginable and its meaning, being the end of the history of mankind, are properly represented? Doesn’t every artistic representation produce an aesthetic pleasure per se, be it merely the pleasure of suspense that even a brutally realistic report such as Guha’s Tagebuch aus dem 3. Weltkrieg produces; and isn’t aesthetic pleasure fundamentally out of place in view of the final emergency of all existence and thought? There is no normative answer to these questions. It is the writers who give answers, each in his own way; our task is to determine how convincing they are. Wolfgang Hildesheimer gave the most radical answer. He ceased to write, not only about possible destruction, but at all, since he considered the “terrible end” not only a possibility, but also a certainty, and as a result he no longer saw “a future for literature”: “In any event it has left me speechless.”48 But Hildesheimer is an exception. From Arno Schmidt to Günter Grass to Günter Kunert and Christa Wolf, writers have dealt in literature with the possibility of the definitive end, and this is not surprising. Even if pessimism prevails, the creative impulses and the will to live and to offer moral resistance do not immediately wane.49 Even if the poem is viewed only as a “message in the bottle” before the flood, as by Kunert, or if someone, like Grass, continues to write, “because I would like to postpone the end with words,”50 poems as well as novels prevail as always. Of course the aesthetic representations of the threat of destruction and fear of destruction often differ substantially from each other. If the attempt is undertaken to anticipate the end of the world in fiction, the problem of aesthetic representation is posed in a fundamentally different manner, as if the threat of its present meaning is being interpreted. Schwarze Spiegel (“Black Mirrors”), the third part of Arno Schmidt’s trilogy Nobodaddy’s Kinder, provides an example of what problems the imagining of the end raises: nuclear war has already occurred; the narrator ends up as the last man in the Lüneburg moorland. He cycles through

48. “ ‘Warum gibt es keine Hoffnung, die Welt zu verändern, Herr Hildesheimer?’ Ein Interview von Birgitta Ashoff,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Magazin 354 (December 12, 1986): 86. 49. Even in Hildesheimer this is not the case. His moral and political protest is expressed in his membership in the Greenpeace organization, whose significance, however, in his eyes is reduced to a mere “manifestation of the loser’s dignity” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Magazin 354 [December 12, 1986]: 86); his creativity shifted to art. 50. Günter Kunert, Vor der Sintflut: Das Gedicht als Arche Noah: Frankfurter Vorlesungen (Munich: Hanser, 1985), 26; Grass, Die Rättin, 16. Surrender of the Imagination? 355 undamaged nature (in 1951 the global impact of nuclear war on the environment and climate could not yet be imagined), builds himself a log cabin that he furnishes with fine books and prints that he has obtained from the university library and the galleries of an empty Hamburg, and reads and writes in his journal. For a short while even his erotic fantasies come true; a woman appears, but finally leaves him alone again. This novel is not a “negative Utopia” in Enzensberger’s sense, but the pleasantly readable story of the life and doings of a postnuclear Robinson Crusoe. It is true that “deep sorrow” overcomes the narrator now and again: “That was the result! For millennia they had tried, but without reason.” But then the thought “that all that was done away with” makes him happy again. Anticipating Horstmann’s “anthropofugal cynicism,” he notes: “And when I am away, the last speck of shame will have disappeared: Experiment Man, that stinking thing, has ceased!”51 Of course, he is still alive and active, reflecting and writing, and that is the crucial point. The nightmare of a depopulated Europe is revealed as the half-pleasurable, half-tragic daydream of a misanthrope who despises most people anyway. Schmidt imagines a world in which he lives, later on, in fact, as a “solipsist in the moorland.”52 But the most important point is that one can continue to write. This point has a fundamental meaning that transcends Schmidt’s individual motivation; it has meaning for the fictional narrator as well as for the author of a report about the end of the world. In order that there can be a narration about the end of the world, the narrator has to survive it, at least for a period of time. The absolute end can by definition not be represented. The longer the narrator survives, the longer he can tell his story. But the scenario that only one or a few people survive a catastrophe pushes the storytelling in particular directions. I have already referred to the Robinson Crusoe elements of the story. An older novel of destruction shows even more clearly the tendencies I have in mind; it is a novel that was written before the development of the atom bomb: Werner Scheff’s Die Arche, from the year 1917.53 Scheff reverts to the speculation about the destruction of the world that Halley’s comet set off in 1910. He lets the world go through the tail of a comet whose poisonous gases destroy all human and animal life. At the same time, a newly developed, large submarine is taking its maiden voyage. Since this is an occasion to celebrate, ladies are on board, and various experimental

51. Schmidt, Das Erzählerische Werk, 3:194, 208. 52. On this, see Jörg Drews, “ ‘Wer noch leben will, der beeile sich!’ Weltunter- gangsphantasien bei Arno Schmidt,” in Apokalypse, ed. Grimm, Faulstich, and Kuon, 19–20. 53. Werner Scheff, Die Arche: Roman (Berlin: Ullstein, 1917). 356 The Apocalypse in Germany animals are also included. When the boat resurfaces, the crew finds the earth deserted and sees the opportunity open to reconstruct human society in a new and finer manner. The first observation suggests itself: this type of scenario tends to an idyll. Schmidt’s novel displays the same tendency: the narrator first of all builds himself a log cabin. Why go to this trouble when so many other houses stand empty? Apparently he does not wish to continue to live in structures of the past, but instead wishes to begin a “new life.” How does this new life look? Simple and tranquil in snug solitude, embellished by the best in art and science with which the narrator—corresponding to the taste of the author—surrounds himself. Finally, a transient tryst with a female makes the idyll perfect. Even in his savage novel of nuclear war, Rabsch cannot deny himself an idyllic love scene at the “rapid waters of the river” (“to the right and the left the deep thicket. . . . It was warm and refreshing”), even if it dissolves into horror. At the end of the novel the hero turns up safe in the countryside by the Lake of Constance: “It was still. Only breathing and the scraping sound of shoes. Under the steps it was dusty. But the grass was green and the trees were colorful. Naturally. After all, it was fall in between. Red apples, he saw it exactly.”54 In his novel Die Arche, Werner Scheff cannot touch Udo Rabsch or even Schmidt as a narrator; what Scheff seriously portrays, Rabsch and Schmidt treat in an artfully ironic fashion or sarcastically contradict. On the other hand the occasion of the fiction in Scheff’s novel had already passed, and in any event was not to be taken seriously as a danger; in Rabsch and Schmidt, the occasion of the fiction is the concrete possibility of the future, in contrast to which the idyll, at least in Schmidt’s amusing version, appears out of place. The other tendency that the scenario of surviving after destruction involves concerns the author. Although every artist is a “creator,” with this subject the author imitates God to an even greater degree. In the most extreme case he imagines a new story of creation as with Werner Scheff. Even Schmidt’s novel tends in this direction: the omnipotent auctor joins a new Eve to the last man, the new Adam. The artistic standards demand that it does not remain this way; the alternative—marriage, children—would be sheer kitsch. But despite this, the storytelling, which goes beyond the end, particularly in novels about nuclear wars, presents itself as a new and final possibility of transcending destruction as in the traditional apocalypse, to

54. Rabsch, Julius, 202–3, 262. Surrender of the Imagination? 357 be sure in the course of narration only: the fiction of literature written after destruction has taken the place of the vision of paradise. This element of transcending through storytelling is unavoidable if one writes about the end of the world. Even the gloomiest “negative Utopias,” like Guha’s report about the Third World War, show it; and even Horstmann, who not only expects the absolute end, but even desires it, transcends the end by imagining a beauty of inorganic reality, for which there were actually no more eyes: “Night after night the moon rises above the horizon and puts before our eyes in sharp and spotless beauty the post-history of the world in a paradisiacal fashion.”55 The literature that tells about destruction and the world thereafter transcends the end by reporting about it. Apart from this special case of narrative fiction, literature as aesthetic creation in general embodies the intention to transcend transitoriness. But the possibility that mankind destroys itself has led literature with this intention to a paradoxical situation and brought the tension between art and life to the point of rupture. This is even more perceptible for such literature that does not attempt to exceed the horizon of the threatening present than for that literature that can still maintain the fiction of omnipotent auctoritas in the imagination of a world after destruction. Literature that deals directly with the occasions of our fear and may be understood as a means of having an impact on our life, expressing resistance and protest and presenting alternative conceptions of life, more and more produces the impression of helplessness, a helplessness that any person may perceive in view of the threat that appears enormous and abstract. Christa Wolf’s Störfall, the report about the day following the reactor accident in Chernobyl, illustrates this helplessness in an almost painful manner. The narrator moves aimlessly around in her house, listens to news on the radio, cycles into town, counts the sprouting zucchini seeds, and notes other trivialities. One critic characterized this “exactness of a bookkeeper” as “banal,”56 but the concern with the banal is an authentic and appropriate expression of helplessness as well as of the desire to survive, as one clings to the most concrete aspects of everyday life in the face of unseen threats. But art is brought to the low point of its powerlessness when not only its creators, but art itself is threatened by destruction. The struggle that has existed for millennia to build for eternity, to create something lasting—

55. Horstmann, Das Untier, 110. 56. Christa Wolf, Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1987); Uwe Wittstock, “Christa Wolf und der fremde, unbekannte Gott,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 14, 1987. 358 The Apocalypse in Germany verses like the pillars of the Parthenon, forms that would remain, as Gottfried Benn put it—sees itself suddenly confronted by nothingness. If art is still created, with its inherent function of transcending transitoriness, this is only possible as a paradox. In his Frankfurt poetry lectures Günter Kunert worked out most precisely the paradox of art in the face of the threatening end. Originally Kunert, too, composed in the same spirit of apocalyptic optimism that the German Democratic Republic disseminated following its creation. “Utopia seemed to become real.” Socialism, communism, “these powerful isms and the symbols accompanying them,” promised him a “new society” and functioned as the “longed-for reality”: “All these words and symbols guaranteed a future better world that had to come after the Third Reich like the Promised Land for the Children of Israel.” But in the meantime he, like many other writers of the GDR, lost his faith in the “final salvation.” In 1985, the global threat, not only through a nuclear war but also through the continuing destruction and endangerment of the environment, made political and ideological distinctions between East and West appear secondary in importance; Christa Wolf also gained this impression in view of the reactor accident in the Soviet Union. Kunert views his more recent poems as a “final departure from Utopia, from the principle of hope”; they thereby correspond, according to Kunert’s view, to “generally valid tendencies”: “It appears to me that today there is almost no poem any longer that does not point to a bad future. . . . The final prospect is disaster. That alone appears certain.”57 In his poems Kunert does not envision future destruction, but has possible disaster in the future appear as a threat to the world and one’s own existence in the present moment as, for example, in his poem “Vor der Sintflut” (“Before the Flood”), the title of which he placed above his poetry lectures:

In the evening trees Shapes out of pure air Stretched out like cries From afar And I asked myself Whether that was a farewell Or another sign Of the end For the earth sinks Behind the horizon

57. Kunert, Vor der Sintﬂut, 32, 37–38, 26, 49, 94–95. Surrender of the Imagination? 359

Nothing more rises That is clear And it remains A volatile reﬂection Of us all A while yet58

What significance do such poems have “before the Flood,” before the end of the world and of art? Kunert first validates the helplessness of art vis-à-vis threatening destruction; the poem “no longer rebels against it.” On the other hand this situation opens a new freedom. Art has become independent of all responsibilities, to be a moral authority, to offer resistance, to raise a protest: “If we speak of having arrived at an end time, that certainly and indisputably means an end time for all extraliterary claims to literature. . . . No claim, neither the claim of enlightenment nor that of any other ideology, reaches it in the future.”59 Kunert thereby declares it impermissible to measure literature by moral or political principles, to judge it by asking whether its aesthetic means are appropriate to the “seriousness of the situation.” In its helplessness, art takes the liberty to accept exclusively aesthetic criteria and even to transform disaster into aesthetic play. But what about the paradox that the threatened end of art as such has given? This paradox does not result from the tension to moral claims, but from the fact that works of art by definition attempt to transcend transitoriness. Kunert is aware of this paradox and of the facts of the matter at its root. The subtitle of his poetry lectures reads Das Gedicht als Arche Noah (“Poetry as Noah’s Ark”). Yet he half takes back the idea in the text that the subtitle suggests, that poems offer rescue from destruction: “Poems—Noah’s Ark? At most in a pocketbook edition. Something like a message in a bottle.” But even a message in a bottle is an expression of the will to survive, is given out in the hope that someone will fish it out and read it. It contains “a message about our inner and outer situation,” and a message is directed to someone. After Kunert has stressed that his belief in “ultimate salvation” is long gone, he apparently has difficulty in admitting that poetry as an aesthetic phenomenon reflects a desire to survive. He attempts to overcome the paradox at least intellectually by interpreting poetry as a “fixed dialectical event” that “dissolves itself in the Hegelian sense.” But in the sense of Hegelian dialectic an event or a fact does not dissolve itself, but is dissolved, with its antithesis, in a higher unity and is

58. Günter Kunert, Abtötungsverfahren (Munich: Hanser, 1980), 67. 59. Kunert, Vor der Sintﬂut, 95, 98. 360 The Apocalypse in Germany thereby preserved as well. It appears to me to be more honest to admit that the paradox cannot be dissolved and that the contradiction, “in which each one and each thing is to be found,” remains.60 More appropriate to Kunert is the treatment of this problem by literary means, as he uses it in his ﬁnal lecture, under the title “Absolut unernst gemeinter Rat für geneigte Hörer und Leser” (“Absolutely Unseriously Intended Advice for Inclined Listeners and Readers”). But his remarks are not at all so unserious. What I have called the “transcending intention” of aesthetic creation and the “will to survive” as one of the motifs of its creators, Kunert characterizes with the serious, grand, and pertinent word immortality. But he plays an ironic game with the desire for immortality; he cunningly insinuates to his listeners that the desire to participate in the immortality of the poet has driven them to his lectures; and he gives the public ironic counsel how such immortality is to be obtained. Thereby he both distracts his readers from his own problem and emphasizes it. He presents this problem, the problem of art in the “end time,” in the “serious play” of ironic speech and maintains the contradiction in which art stands vis-à-vis this word: immortality. “Immortality is very easily producible, what I hope I have clearly demonstrated, if we all try a little—I, the author, and you, my dear and well-disposed and duped readers.”61

60. Ibid., 26–27. 61. Ibid., 118. PART FOUR The Existential Apocalypse This page intentionally left blank 22 Transformation and Revolt

“Transformation,” “rebirth,” “new man,” “new community,” and “new world” are symbols of apocalyptic interpretations of experience and of apocalyptic desire, but this must not always be the case. For millennia these symbols have also been used in order to describe experiences or ideas of renewal that do not bear the stamp of apocalyptic radicalness and ﬁnality. The myths and rites of cosmological societies interpreted the annual renewal of nature or the change of heavenly bodies in such a manner. Archaic initiation rites that may still be observed in many areas of the world make the maturation rites of young men and their admission into society appear as a new birth; the initiatory symbols of renewal and rebirth even play a role in modern literature.1 The idea of the renovatio of Roman emperorship, combined with the idea of the return of an ideal political order, pervaded the entire Middle Ages, from Justinian to Charlemagne and the Ottonians and the Hohenstaufens. The concept Renaissance gave expression to a new feeling of life that began with the reacceptance of ancient culture in Italy and took hold of all of Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. We ﬁnd notions of an existential transformation and corresponding symbols in the Bible, in portrayals of Pietistic experiences of awakening, and, in the recent past, in psychotherapeutic reports; one of the latest therapeutic methods is called “rebirthing.” Where is the boundary between a “normal” renewal and the concept of apocalyptic transformation, between the feeling of having become a “new man” through certain experiences or emotional maturity and the apocalyptic concept of a “new man,” between the experience of an epochal

1. Mircea Eliade, The Quest; Joseph Campbell, Der Heros in tausend Gestalten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1978); Peter Freese, Die Initiationsreise: Studien zum jugendlichen Helden im modernen amerikanischen Roman (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1971); Bernd Steinbrink, Abenteuerliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland: Studien zu einer vernachlässigten Gat- tung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983).

363 364 The Apocalypse in Germany change in history and the expectation that a completely different, perfect reality would supersede previous history? The experience that something is changing, that something new is superseding the old, is part of the basic conditions of our existence in this world, within the bounds of our individual existence, as well as within the larger context of events that we call “history.” Among the transformations that we have in mind, the new is evaluated positively, the old negatively or at least as superseded and finished; the wish for renewal feeds on the desire for a better condition of the world, society, and one’s own conditions of life. The evaluation of old and new as negative and positive, as well as the desire for renewal, reflects the tension of human existence between deficiency and fulfillment and the orientation of this tension toward the pole of fulfillment. I have characterized the apocalypse as a type of symbolism that dissolves the tension between deficiency and fulfillment by interpreting the tension dualistically as well as temporally. In order for such a dissolution of this tension to be achieved, different preconditions must work in concert. In order to distinguish between apocalyptic and non-apocalyptic notions of renewal, these preconditions are to be borne in mind, although they do not automatically produce apocalyptic reactions. It is a matter of necessary, but not sufficient, conditions. Triggers for apocalyptic visions are, as a rule, experiences of a “crisis”: experiences of political and social oppression, of existential and spiritual endangerment, experiences of the meaninglessness of life and of history. In order to be able to interpret such experiences as the extreme and final crisis, that is, as an extreme situation that no longer appears to be reme- diable through normal means, it requires differentiated interpretations of experience as a precondition, interpretations that concern the existence of man and the meaning of history. The tension between deficiency and fulfillment could become unbearable only when fulfillment became comprehensible as a divine absolute in Israel through the differentiation of corresponding experiences of tension; as a result, however, the divine absolute was distanced from man beyond the cosmos. And the question of a meaning and goal of history could be raised only after history itself had been constituted as a process that gave the impression of meaningfulness, because transcendent fulfillment became present in “unique” events and appeared to bring these events into a goal-oriented course. The differentiation of the experience of tension in human existence between deficiency and fulfillment opened a wider horizon than the compact interpretation of this experience in the cosmological myth. This differentiation offered a new, previously inconceivable promise, but it heightened the tension and made greater demands for enduring this tension. In Israel Transformation and Revolt 365 the people as a whole were seen as the “subject” of this tension, as the people chosen by the transcendent God; the experience of tension between transcendent truth and the order of this world was interpreted spiritually as well as historically and politically. Thus, the deeper Israel’s political decline, the more difficult it was to tolerate the tension that ultimately found a solution in apocalyptic visions in the Book of Daniel. Contrary to the ethnocentric or “national” interpretation of the experience of tension, Christianity stressed its existential meaning for each individual person. Further differentiation of the tension of existence that took place with the appearance of Jesus still had ambivalent effects—they are especially well documented in Paul. The experience that the promise of transcendent fulfillment had become manifest in Jesus and the consequences of this experience for the relationship between man and God were so overwhelming for Paul that he used the symbols of “transformation,” of “new birth,” and of the “new man” in order to express adequately the existential meaning of his insight.2 However, the insight that with the appearance of Jesus fulfillment has already become present in this world was bound to conflict with the experience that the structure of innerworldly reality had not changed on this account. The problem was how, despite the awareness of having come closer to redemption, one could endure the unchanged deficient conditions of human existence, in particular the prospect of death. In his Epistle to the Romans he wrote:

Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is cruciﬁed with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.3

Again and again, Paul tried in this way to establish the existential balance between the continuing experiences of deﬁciency and the awareness of having already taken part in redemption through Jesus and to have been transformed into a new man; he attempted this by deriving conclusions from this transformation of his consciousness for the image of man and the conduct of life; he thus wrote in the Epistle to the Colossians:

2. See Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age, 239–71; and Gerhard Marcel Martin, Weltuntergang: Gefahr und Sinn apokalyptischer Visionen, 92–95. 3. Rom. 6:3–6. 366 The Apocalypse in Germany

But now ye also put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, ﬁlthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.4

Still, it was not always easy for Paul to endure the tension in his awareness of the “renewal of knowledge,” that is, of new, differentiated knowledge of the existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment toward its transcendent pole. The awareness that transcendent fulfillment has become present in this world through Jesus produced euphoria but also the impatient yearning to see redemption completed; at the same time, the fear remained of falling back into the “darkness” of deficiency, as Paul indicated in his first Epistle to the Thessalonians. In this epistle, probably the earliest one transmitted, euphoria, impatience, and fear induced him to dissolve the existential tension and to express the apocalyptic expectation that those who were now living would not have to taste death anymore, but would experience liberation from all deficiency and attain consummation:

For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise ﬁrst: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.5

Paul demonstrated the ambivalent character of the differentiated experience of human existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment: the transformation of consciousness, which opens new insight into the structure of this tension and of reality as a whole, thereby bringing closer the pole of transcendent fulfillment and thus being experienced like a transformation into a new man, must be balanced with the experience that the deficiency of this-worldly existence continues to exist. The new man, who feels transformed due to the transformation of his consciousness, may change his life accordingly, but he remains bound to the existential conditions of the old man. By contrast, the apocalyptic new man is the

4. Col. 3:8–11. The authenticity of the Epistle to the Colossians has been questioned. Still, even if its author was not Paul, the passage quoted emphatically shows what conclusions can be drawn from the experiences described above. 5. 1 Thess. 4:15–17. Transformation and Revolt 367 conception of a transformed human being projected into the future in order to free him from these ties to deficiency. The more painfully these ties are experienced, and the greater the distress and the peril from outside, the more readily such a solution may suggest itself. The entire New Testament, and not Paul only, documents this tension. The synoptic Gospels also attribute an apocalyptic vision to Jesus, in which the speedy end of the world and the judgment are predicted.6 On the other hand, Jesus stresses the paradox again and again that the transformation in consciousness, the new birth in the presence of the divine spirit, cannot eliminate the conditions of immanent existence, as, for example, in the Gospel of John: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.”7 And in the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of John of Patmos, the paradox of such present regeneration is dissolved again in favor of the vision of a future regeneration that is perfect. The apocalyptic vision of John of Patmos was motivated by growing impatience about the delay of the Parousia and the more and more intolerable suffering from deficient reality; occasions for experience were injustice, persecution, and oppression in the political and societal everyday reality. In this century Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen showed that the experiences of extreme suffering against the background of differentiated insight into the truth of human existence can lead to the verge of an apocalyptic reaction. In the Third Reich he saw evil, pure and simple, having achieved power. He observed with revulsion and horror the malice and amorality of the Nazi regime as well as the increasing deadening and brutalization of the German people. He poured out his heart in his diary, writing of his hate and despair. This despair drove him to interpret as an apocalypse the catastrophe into which Germany and the world were hurled by Nazism. In particular, during the war he heard the “hoofbeat of the apocalypse,” he saw Satan “loose from his chain” and the atmosphere “stuffed full with microbes of universal destruction.” His apocalyptic perspective also inclined him to see in natural disasters omens of a cosmic revolution. But he called himself back again and again from specific apocalyptic conclusions. He had just stated his expectation of a “cosmic catastrophe” when he corrected himself: “It is not a cosmic, but rather a historical catastrophe that I see coming.” Then he admonishes himself: “No, I am not a Chiliast, and the catastrophe I am predicting can only, because I believe in the regenerative capacity of life, be one of many that this world has seen.”

6. Matt. 24–25; Mark 13; Luke 21:5–36. 7. John 3:6–7. 368 The Apocalypse in Germany

The apocalyptic longing for ultimate redemption from the “tear-stained and accursed [world] of yesterday” sometimes resonates in his hope for “transformation,” “renewal,” and “rebirth,” but he holds ﬁrmly to the importance of existential transformation in the here and now; the students Hans and Sophie Scholl, who scattered leaﬂets against Hitler and were executed, are an example for him:

They died peacefully and shed their young blood piously and with magniﬁcent dignity. That saying may shine on their grave before which this entire people, who have been living in deep shame for ten years, have to blush: Cogi non potest quisquis mori scit . . . whoever knows how to die cannot be forced. Won’t we all have to go on a pilgrimage to their graves in shame in the future? Thus it is with these young people—the last and, if God wills it, the ﬁrst Germans of a great rebirth.8

Reck-Malleczewen died in Dachau shortly before the end of the war, presumably of typhoid fever. He viewed himself as a conservative, and this excluded nationalism for him; he was a Christian, and this maintained his examination of the apocalypse in the tension that the New Testament has sketched out.

Modern manifestations of the immanentist apocalypse—nationalist, and National Socialist, the varieties of the “spirit of utopia,” and the belief in redemption through art—dissolved themselves from its Christian point of reference and sketched out a future condition of perfection, which is to be created not by God, but by the nation or the people, by a race or class, by the human spirit or the new art, to be achieved in this world. But they also presuppose the differentiated insight into tension toward the pole of fulfillment, to an absolute, even if this tension is not reified in the vision of a New Jerusalem, but in conceptions of a “realm of freedom,” of the “Third Reich,” of a “terrestrial paradise.” They similarly presuppose that the absolute has manifested itself historically and thereby constructed history as a goal-oriented process, even if they view the absolute as an immanent force operating through man. The dissolution of the existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment is also motivated by experiences of suffering. Experiences of suffering that produced apocalyptic outbursts are mostly occasioned by persecution and oppression, wars and catastrophes. We have become acquainted with enough examples, but we have also seen that apocalyptic reactions do not always correspond to the external occasions

8. Reck-Malleczewen, Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten, 137, 122, 146, 120, 32–33, 37, 133. Transformation and Revolt 369 for experience and often overdraw or even fabricate the danger. We found evidence that still other, more painful experiences are at the root of the apocalyptic rejection of reality as deficient than social misery or political persecution, although these other experiences come to an apocalyptic interpretation only on the occasion of external events. We could deduce experiences of existential deficiency as those other, even more painful experiences: the limitation of human knowledge, moral fallibility, bodily frailty, and, finally, the last, insuperable boundary of human existence: death. To what extent this spur can lead to apocalyptic reactions9 is betrayed by the prophecy of the Apocalypse of John that death will be no more, as well as by Paul’s effort to balance the problem of unavoidable death with the experience of existential “rebirth” in Christ. Ernst Bloch has already shown us that death, through which the fundamental deficiency of the human condition is confirmed, is a central motif of apocalyptic interpretations of experience to our own time. Terror in the face of death moves through Bloch’s entire work. From his first book, Geist der Utopie, he again and again raises passionate and bitter accusations against this human destiny:

It is horrible to live and work in such a way and afterwards to be thrown into the pit. For a short time it was light, a mysteriously promising prelude with powerful purposes uncompleted in itself, and then life turns into nothing, beyond all endurance, as though nothing had been there before, as though, even if one added a thousand beginnings, in view of this nothing, in view of this shallow, and, at the same time, unfathomably deep hollow, no personal history had existed at all. And it is something so inconceivably alien, to become blind, cold, rotten, with eyes fallen in and deep down below in a narrow, black, airless, tightly zinciﬁed cofﬁn.10

In his magnum opus as well, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, he characterizes death as “the power of strongest non-Utopia.” Despair about the prospect of being ﬁnally defeated by this power drives him to revolt, “to rebellion against the constellation as such.”11 Albert Camus called rebellion against the “constellation as such” a “metaphysical rebellion” and described it in the following manner: “Meta- physical revolt is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation.” This means that the “metaphysical

9. Rev. 21:4. 10. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 419. 11. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 3:1103; Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 340. In the 1918 edition of Geist der Utopie, it read: “revolt against individual and social preformation” (418). 370 The Apocalypse in Germany rebel” protests not only against life, which is arranged for him within its own particular circumstances, but also “against the condition in which he finds himself as a man. . . . The metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe.”12 Metaphysical revolt is the central existential motivation of the modern, immanent apocalypse. Although Jewish and Christian apocalypses protest against the deficiency inherent in the reality of this world, too, and dissolve the existential tension in the here and now in favor of the vision of speedy redemption, still the transcendent pole of tension remains untouched; the tension is eliminated in such a way that transcendent fulfillment irrupts in the reality of this world and replaces it, until it fills the entire earth—as, in the case of Daniel, the stone that became a great mountain. The modern apocalypse, in contrast, eliminates the transcendent pole and eliminates the existential tension by imagining fulfillment as an immanent condition that is to be established through the human spirit, through will and action. The metaphysical revolt differs from the protest of the Jewish-Christian apocalypse by aggravating the rejection of the corrupted world to revolt against creation and including the creator in this rebellion. Camus saw in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov a perfect description of how such a revolt can take place. Ivan Karamazov is angry about the divine creation because even innocent children must suffer and die in it. He rises against God, who allows this, in the name of justice. Bloch also refers to Dostoyevsky, but he takes the side of Ivan Karamazov and adopts his arguments: in his view, the creator God has unmasked himself as the “Satan of Golgotha.” We find this charge against the one responsible for the deficiency of reality in almost all apocalyptic outbursts of the modern age. In the same year in which Bloch’s Geist der Utopie appeared, Max Beckmann, for example, noted: “It is all over with humility before God. My religion is pride before God. Defiance against God. Defiance that he has created us thus, that we cannot love each other. I blame God for everything in my pictures that he did wrong.”13 Kurt Pinthus’s 1919 “Rede für die Zukunft” (“Address for the Future”) demonstrates particularly impressively how rebellion against the boundaries of human existence, especially against death, comes to a head in revolt

12. Albert Camus, The Rebel, 23. 13. Ibid., 47–48; Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 440–41; Beckmann cited in Christoph Brockhaus, “Die ambivalente Faszination der Großstadterfahrung in der deutschen Kunst des Expressionismus,” in Expressionismus—sozialer Wandel und künstlerische Erfahrung, ed. Horst Meixner and Silvio Vietta (Munich: Fink, 1982), 103. Further examples of such revolts among expressionist writers are to be found in Eykman, Denk- und Stilformen des Expressionismus, 63–107, especially 79–80. Transformation and Revolt 371 against reality as a whole and against its creator, and how the metaphysical revolt draws apocalyptic conclusions. The motivating experiences are revealed in Pinthus’s anger against God, “who requires abasement and renunciation, who places pain, death, and corruption on man, who always punishes and overthrows every work of man.” Pinthus does not rebel against unfortunate accidents of life, but against the “determinants” of human existence, whose summation is called “reality”:

Reality is for man everything that is and has been outside of him, around him, and before him. Nature and all its manifestations appear to him as reality. . . . The past of man is reality for him, his history, whose last part he considers to be himself. Reality is for him all those circumstances and arrangements that he has created for himself (the state, economy, societal order) in order to relieve the pain of life, and which then became master over him like his God.14

For Pinthus this God is the “most terrible determinant,” since it is furthest “outside of him”: “God is the counter-spirit, since he is that which is unchangeable, unfathomable, unknown, which is everywhere and always there and ﬁlls everything that is outside of our spirit.” Thus Pinthus senses the tension toward a pole beyond human existence, too, but because it is intolerable for him, he attempts to eliminate it: “Therefore every active- spiritual being at some time revolted against this God—since the time of Lucifer.” The revolt against God is the heart of the revolt against reality in all the manifestations that Pinthus numbered; this revolt is now realized as an apocalyptic project: “There is only one radical method of escaping the determination of reality: eliminating it.” In the place of the reality “outside of ourselves” that is to be destroyed, the apocalyptic consciousness, the “self-creating, future-oriented spirit of man,” puts a new reality that is no longer dependent on external determinants: “The spirit of man and its movement as idea that realizes itself, is the real reality and creates reality outside man. Only the idea belongs completely to man; everything else outside of us is unreal and only becomes reality when we make it reality through the power of spirit.”15 When the previous world is experienced as corrupt and evil, and reality as a whole as inimical, it is quite logical to revolt against the one who created so defective a world. Jewish-Christian apocalypses were too certain of the speedy irruption of transcendent fulﬁllment to draw this conclusion;

14. Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” in Die Erhebung: Jahrbuch für neue Dichtung und Wertung, ed. Alfred Wolfenstein (Berlin: Fischer, 1919), 410, 411. 15. Ibid., 410–12. 372 The Apocalypse in Germany the Revelation of John referred to the promise already being fulfilled in Jesus and came to an apocalyptic imminent expectation precisely because waiting for the Parousia became so intolerable. In the vicinity of ancient apocalypticism, however, we find already the “metaphysical revolt,” at least the revolt against the creator God, namely, in Gnosticism. The Gnostic religion of the first centuries a.d. constitutes a complex phenomenon.16 It absorbed Iranian-Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian beliefs as well as elements of Greek philosophy; it possessed no comprehensive organization and presented itself less as a cult than as an esoteric doctrine that divided itself into several schools and sects. Nevertheless, Gnosticism possessed a center of belief that places it close to apocalypticism. Like the apocalypticist, the Gnostic experienced the world as thoroughly corrupted and evil. But in contrast to the apocalypticist, he concluded that it cannot have been God who created this deficient reality, but an evil Demiurge, and that beyond the dominion of this demiurgic creator God there must be the realm of the unknown true God: “fulfillment” or “plenitude” (Greek pleroma). The cosmogonic and anthropogonic myths of Gnosticism relate in various versions how the Demiurge rebelled against the true God, the all-embracing spirit (Greek pneuma, nous, logos), how the world and man were created and were kept prisoner in darkness along with the spark of divine spirit that men received. The Gnostic doctrine of salvation shows how man, through knowledge (Greek gnosis) of the origin and true destination of the imprisoned divine part of human existence, can burst through the prison after death or at the end of the world and reach the realm of plenitude, that is, fulfillment.17 Gnosticism may thus also be viewed as an attempt to dissolve the existential tension of men between deficiency and fulfillment. Comparable to the apocalyptic attempt, Gnosticism reifies the poles of tension and brings them into an unbridgeable, dualistic contrast. But in distinction to the Jewish and Christian apocalypticist, who expects the “transformation” through the irruption of transcendent fulfillment into this world, the Gnostic expects the “transformation” from the exodus from the deficient reality of space and time; he prepares himself for this exodus and begins it now, as it were, by accumulating the requisite knowledge. Of course, there were also fluid transitions between apocalyptic and Gnostic belief.

16. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity; Robert Haardt, Die Gnosis: Wesen und Zeugnisse (Salzburg: Müller, 1967); Kurt Rudolph, Die Gnosis: Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiken Religion. 17. See Werner Foerster, Die Gnosis, vol. 1: Zeugnisse der Kirchenväter (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1969). Jonas, Haardt, and Rudoph also provide paraphrases or textual excerpts of Gnostic writings. Transformation and Revolt 373

Spengler had already promoted the hypothesis that in the first three centuries of the Christian era the entire ancient world was filled with hopes for redemption and the corresponding visions fed on the most varied sources: “These writings travelled from community to community, village to village, and it is quite impossible to assign them to any one particular religion. Their colouring is Persian, Chaldaean, Jewish, but they have absorbed all that was circulating in men’s minds.”18 And in fact the extensive codices found at Nag Hammadi in 1947 from the fourth century a.d. have confirmed this thesis: they contain apocryphal Christian, Gnostic, Hermetic, and apocalyptic writings in rich variety.19 Modern apocalyptic visions, too, are sometimes combined with Gnostic ideas. I cannot go into the debate here as to what extent Gnosticism shaped the self-understanding of the modern age in general;20 the observation that modern apocalyptic interpretations of experience sometimes dissolve the tension between deficiency and fulfillment in a manner that corresponds to the Gnostic type is sufficient for our question. Of course, the fundamental distinction that divides the modern from the Judeo-Christian apocalypse may also be seen in speculations of the Gnostic type: modern versions not only dissolve the existential tension toward the transcendent pole of fulfillment, but also eliminate it and reify it to an immanent entity. The revolt against the creator God remained the same, as demonstrated by Bloch and Pinthus; the dualistic perspective that Gnosticism shares with the apocalypse is unchanged. The manner in which the desired transformation will take place recalls the Gnostic exodus from the dark prison of reality: Bloch asks for a “disrealization,” a “removal of the physical world”; liberation from burdensome reality will be effected through the “spirit.” This spirit is, of course, no longer the transcendent nous of ancient Gnosticism, but the spirit of man to whom the same qualities are attributed: it creates itself “directly from itself,” according to Pinthus, and can represent the realm of fulfillment in this world because “spirit is infinitely superior to reality, because it is independent of time and space.”21 The disrealization that Bloch and Pinthus are striving for is no longer a quietist exodus as in ancient Gnosticism. Since the power to liberate lies in man alone, the exodus must take place as action, as an active “elimination” 18. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:213. 19. James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981); Rudolph, Die Gnosis, 40–58, provides a general description. 20. This thesis was held particularly by Eric Voegelin (New Science of Politics); for background, see Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religions- Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835), as well as more recent contributions to the discussion in Jacob Taubes, ed., Gnosis und Politik. 21. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 442; Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” 413, 411. 374 The Apocalypse in Germany of reality. The Gnostic longing for the dissolution of intolerable reality and the apocalyptic expectation of imminent transformation are combined with the demand for revolutionary action. In the postscript to the 1963 edition of Geist der Utopie, Ernst Bloch gave this amalgam a term: “Thus the specific is exactly defined in Geist der Utopie, which is intimately connected with evil and remedy as well: revolutionary Gnosticism.”22

22. Bloch, Gesamtausgabe, 3:297. 23 Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacriﬁce

But what do they produce, those flights from the existential tension between deficiency and fulfillment, the Gnostic dreams of a “disrealized” world and the apocalyptic visions of transformation to a new man? Above all, what can they set in opposition to the force that Bloch called the “power of the strongest non-Utopia,” that presents man’s deficiency most decisively: death? The intention is clear: it is focused on the goal that revealed irresistible attraction even in Kunert’s ironic bons mots: immortality. This goal is not masked at all. Richard Wagner, in his revolutionary essay in 1849, which was prominently directed against the rule of “the rich and powerful,” had the personification of revolution proclaim: “I come to you to smash all chains that oppress you, to redeem you from the embrace of death,” and again, in similar words: “I wish to destroy the rule of death over life.” Seventy years later, Kurt Hiller stated as the highest goal of his revolt: “The human spirit will eliminate death.” And it was Bloch’s ultimate effort to break the power of the “strongest non-Utopia” and “to find the remedy against death.”1 How is this to be understood? Since metaphysical revolt attempts to eliminate the tension between deficiency and fulfillment by striving for perfection in this life, such expressions are surely not meant as symbolic expressions for the orientation of the tension to immortality beyond time and space. But how can immortality be attained in this world? First let us rule out that the term abolition of death is to be understood too literally, although there are completely serious “concrete Utopias” that go in this direction. As late as 1960 V. A. Obruchev, a member of the Soviet Academy, wrote in his manual Grundlagen des Marxismus- Leninismus (“Foundations of Marxism-Leninism”): “It is requisite to extend the life on average to 150 or even 200 years, . . . to overcome age and

1. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 3:1103; Wagner, “Die Revolution,” 5:237–39; Hiller, “Über- legungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus,” 205; Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1923), 331.

375 376 The Apocalypse in Germany fatigue and to learn to restore life to a person in the case of premature or accidental death.”2 And in the West, aided by progress in “spare-part surgery” and gene technology, there may be such dreams, too. But to be sure: delaying the border still does not mean overcoming it. What other prospects are there for conquering death? In Geist der Utopie Bloch considered several possibilities. The hope, to continue to live “in the memory of men,” offers cool comfort. It is true that “death is at least factually overcome, as far as achievements are concerned.” But we don’t participate in this continuation of life. The progressive belief in an earthly paradise that lies in the distant future cannot compensate for one’s own suffering, either. Shall we sacrifice ourselves “in order that the workers of the thirty-second century suffer no lack of food and sexual pleasures”? And finally: what binds us with our posterity, “who participates in the continuation of life, who or what lives the life as the total life, as the wide, historic life, assigned to ‘mankind’?” As a next possibility, Bloch considers “reincarnation, this diffuse, more complicated form of immortality.” But reincarnation provides no completely satisfying solution, since constantly being born again would mean that “the insufficiencies of physical and social destinies” would return again and again: “This would actually mean being imprisoned in our body and within an inescapable character.” The injustice of life against which the metaphysical rebel revolts would not thereby be eliminated. But above all, through the idea of reincarnation the principal problem would be only shifted, the problem of “who experiences this life as a whole and whether it is possible to establish a binding, reconciling, or even founding connection above this life, as it is, that comprehends subjectivity and destiny.”3 In the apocalypse Bloch finds this final, comprehensive connection, which the elimination of existential tension in fact makes necessary. Still, the “historical-teleological background” of the apocalypse, which has allocated “flow, stream, direction, salvific value to . . . everything that men have created about themselves in works,” can make this possible only at the end of time. How can one immediately, in the present, participate in the ultimate victory over death? Here Bloch grasps the formula of Gnosis. He postulates a “double-ego in God”: he rejects the creator God, the evil Demiurge, who rules this imperfect world, and opts for Lucifer, the rebel. Lucifer is, however, nothing more than a symbol for “our Luciferian nature” for the “desire to create or to know, or to be like God.” The further men

2. V. A. Obruchev, Grundlagen des Marxismus-Leninismus: Ein Lehrbuch (Berlin: Dietz, 1960), 825; cited in Künzli, “Zur Befreiung der Emanzipation von der Hypothek der Erlösung,” 35, 45. 3. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918), 418–22, 426. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacrifice 377 have pursued the path of Gnosis, “the way of desiring to know better,” the more audible the “true revelation” became that the “germ of the Paraclete” lies in ourselves. But for Bloch the germ of the Holy Spirit in ourselves is no longer the spiritual spark of ancient Gnosis, which has to be prepared for the union with the transcendent spirit, but rather the divine spirit itself in its unfolding. It is recognized “no longer as mediator, but as vanquisher.” It is this knowledge that allows participation in immortality now, in the present. In the course of the revolt the spirit of man is revealed as the spirit of God in process and thereby as the process of consciousness of immortalizing oneself: “Just as is shown in this book to know what there is to do and to open up the ‘ego-world,’ these first sketches from the system are not for the public but, as determined by the history of philosophy, written for the spirit of man in us, for the divine spirit in the state of this epoch, as an indicator of its status.”4 Following the First World War, under the impact of revolutions in Russia and Germany, Bloch’s desire “finally to find a way from the world” temporarily rose to a concrete apocalyptic expectation. In Thomas Münzer (1921) he saw the goal of “absolute transformation” at hand in the union of apocalyptic spirit and Marxism: “The final earthly revolution is about to be born.” But the delay of the Parousia caused him to return to the Gnostic solution of the apocalyptic project and to work this out. Ultimate redemption and therewith victory over death can be realized in the “now” of “anticipatory consciousness”—thus Bloch in The Principle of Hope—by focusing the intention of consciousness (as an act of cognition) on the “final utopian condition”: “Every moment therefore potentially contains the date of the completion of the world and the data of its content.”5 There is a startling structural parallel to the Pauline and generally to the Christian-mystical interpretation of experience of tension between deficiency and fulfillment: that, through the incarnation of the divine, redemption has been brought to pass and can be experienced in the presence of the Holy Spirit in the here and now. But the difference in content consists in the fact that the realization of self-consciousness has taken the place of the incarnation of the divine and that the intended final Utopian condition that appears in the now of anticipating consciousness is projected by this consciousness. Richard Wagner had already come to a similar conclusion as Bloch but in the medium of art. Under the impact of the Revolution of 1848 he was, in the beginning, also seized with apocalyptic expectation of an imminent

4. Ibid., 432–33, 441–42. 5. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 150–51; Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:308. 378 The Apocalypse in Germany change: he viewed the revolution as a “redeemer from this world of sorrow, as a creator of a new world that would make everyone happy.”6 But when the immediate expectation was disappointed, he imagined a future state of redemption that would eliminate all painful antitheses of human life in both a moral and an aesthetic world order,7 and he was already participating in the final condition of perfection in his own composition: “The composer of a work of art of the future is none other than the artist of the present who divines the future life and desires to be contained in it. Whoever nourishes this desire by means of his capacity already lives in a better life, but only one person can do this—the artist.”8 Metaphysical rebels desire to create their paradises themselves. “We must not, under any circumstances, leave this undertaking to God,” Kurt Hiller wrote, since his creation is apparently insufficient. Through their metaphysical revolt, men make themselves independent of God and put themselves in his place. In 1848 Richard Wagner saw the “living revolution” as the summation of the revolting millions, and, because revolution would bring about a “Paradise of happiness,” he understood revolution as a personification of “man who has become God.”9 But with the delay of the Parousia he developed a more spiritual understanding of the means of man becoming God, an understanding that is equally connected with the Gnostic solution.10 According to Cosima Wagner’s journal entry, he explained in 1879, “I do not believe in God, but in the Divine.” He saw this divine fully represented in Jesus, but not in Jesus as the Son of God—to have made him that he viewed as the most serious crime of the Christian Church—but in the man who exemplified compassionate love as the “simplest religion” and the highest destiny of the human species.11 But the human “religion of compassion” was buried; the Redeemer must still be redeemed. The true religion, “which would make man a man,” that is, would make his divinity real, was still pending, but Wagner undertook to create it. “We wish once again to preach a religion, you and I,” he once remarked to Cosima; and in his final work, the opera Parsifal, which closes with the words: “Miracle of the ultimate salvation: Redemption to the redeemer!” he realized this religion in aesthetic form. He thereby created

6. Wagner, “Die Revolution,” 237. 7. On this, see especially Kühnel, Parsifal; and Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner. 8. Richard Wagner, “Oper und Drama” (1850–1851), in Dichtungen und Schriften, 7:370. 9. Hiller, “Philosophie des Ziels,” 188; Wagner, “Die Revolution,” 234, 241. 10. Kühnel, Parsifal, 41, also refers to its relationship to Gnostic theology. 11. Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack (Mu- nich: Piper, 1982), 3:411; Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen: Volksausgabe, 16 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1911), 10:213; see also 12:340; Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, 3:117, 382; Kühnel, Parsifal, 16–18. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacrifice 379 the “artwork of the future,” which granted him redemption “already now” and at the same time made him a redeemer.12 In his consciousness man can make himself into God. When the human spirit is fully realized, Kurt Pinthus stated, “he has either forced God out or resolved Him in himself.” The “will to become God” proclaimed by Pinthus thus finds fulfillment in the human “spirit” because the mind can convince itself with some success to be “indefinitely superior to reality” and “independent of time and space”: “Idea is not the daughter of reality, but the son of man—as a symbol named Messiah—who is always expected, because he is always coming . . . not as the physical manifestation of man (to have done this was Christ’s sin) but as the idea that constantly is realizing itself, which frees man and with which he redeems himself.” The dependency on time and space, that is, on the destiny of death, is always experienced as the greatest deficiency. Wagner felt the same way, as Cosima reports: “The bad thing,” he exclaimed, “is that all manifestations reveal themselves in time and space to us and are thereby subject to change”; he also attempted to eliminate this dependence in his mind: “But these things”—that is, the “dramatic explosions” of his rebellious consciousness in music—“have nothing to do with time and space.”13 This act of consciousness, through which man confirms his divinity and his ability to redeem himself, is meant to overcome the feeling of human powerlessness; it is also an expression of the will to power. To the extent that the mind convinces itself that it is independent of outward reality, that it can create and control it, it confirms its omnipotence. But the omnipotence of consciousness rests on weak foundations. Even if we “pound in ourselves,” as Pinthus challenges, that “reality is not outside of ourselves, but in ourselves,”14 outward reality can easily upset its foundations. For this reason not only are there speculative or aesthetic implementations of the task of redemption but also many persons who have made themselves into God in their own minds wish to prove to themselves that their minds can actually control outward reality: through action. And through action a final possibility for overcoming death is revealed.

12. Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, 3:556, 390; Richard Wagner, Parsifal: Ein Bühnen- weihfestspiel (1877), in Dichtungen und Schriften, 4:331. See also Peter Wapnewski, Der traurige Gott: Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (Munich: Beck, 1978), particularly 216; Hartmut Zelinsky, “Richard Wagners ‘Kunstwerk der Zukunft’ und seine Idee der Vernich- tung,” in Von kommenden Zeiten, ed. Knoll and Schoeps, 84–106; Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner, 778–800; and Kühnel, Parsifal, 38–41. 13. Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” in Die Erhebung, ed. Wolfenstein (1919), 401, 410–11, 413; Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, 4:669, 959. 14. Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” 412. 380 The Apocalypse in Germany

Joseph Goebbels showed how this works, at first in fiction. He was one of many in this century who implemented in literature the will to become God. Before Goebbels became a Nazi in the mid-twenties, he wrote a novel, Michael Vormann, which he was able to publish with only the party press of Franz Eher in 1929. In the published version the title of the novel—Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (“Michael: A German Fate in Diary Form”)—announces its representative claim as well as the plot: Michael is not only the patron saint and hero of the Germans, but also the angel of the apocalypse who fights against the dragon.15 The biographical model for the hero of the novel was Goebbels’s friend Richard Flisges, who died “a painful death as a brave soldier of work” in a mine in Schliersee and to whom the novel is dedicated.16 But in fact Michael represents Goebbels’s own experiences, moods, and desires, as many nearly literal correspondences between the novel and his private journal entries demonstrate: Pain at the deficiency of the world and the inadequacy of one’s own existence: “Oh! This dreadful world!” “Inconsolable loneliness—I am confronted with despair.” “All are scoundrels, including me.” Dread at the inescapability of death: “What misery torments my soul. Death is a guest in the house next door. I hate death.” And always the desire for redemption: “When will we be redeemed?” “Poor devil me, when will I be redeemed?” The novel Michael transforms the young Goebbels’s longing for redemption into a programmatic statement that culminates in pronouncements of the hero: “I am a hero, a god, a redeemer.” “I am no longer a man. I am a titan. A god!” “I have redeemed myself!”17 “But what does becoming God mean?” Camus asked. “It means, in fact, recognizing that everything is permitted and refusing to recognize any other law but one’s own.” In 1848 the revolutionary Wagner had the “man who had become God,” revolution personified, explain: because “there is no one who would be over you, so you yourselves are the law, and your own free will is the sole highest law.”18 If the metaphysical revolt proceeds to action, beyond merely subjecting reality to speculation, the rebel who recognizes no law other than his own can consequently make the same claim to be the same murderous god against whom he had rebelled; from

15. See Rev. 12:7. Goebbels had probably begun to work on the novel in 1919 and completed it in 1923. The version that was published in 1929 had been partially rewritten. See Helmut Heiber, Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1965), 35; and Bärsch, Joseph Goebbels, 163. 16. Joseph Goebbels, Michael, 6. 17. Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels, 20, 25, 47, 83; see also Elke Fröhlich, ed., Gesamtausgabe: Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente (Munich: Saur, 1987), part 1, 4 vols.; Goebbels, Michael, 116, 127, 147. 18. Camus, The Rebel, 58–59; Wagner, “Die Revolution,” 239. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacriﬁce 381 his divinity he deduces the justiﬁcation to murder, of course for the sake of justice and redemption. Goebbels’s Michael achieves his redemption in the struggle with an antagonist, the Russian Iwan Wienurowsky, just as the apocalyptic angel Michael struggles for redemption against the dragon:

Iwan Wienurowsky! I have you now, you damned dog! You beast! You devil! You Satan! ...... Now I grab him by the throat. I throw him to the floor. There he lies! A death-rattle in his throat, his eyes running with blood. Die, carrion! I kick his skull in. And now I am free! The final tempter thrown to the ground. The poison is out. I am free! I remain! I remain!! I want to redeem myself. Redeem myself, with my very own strength.19 The murderous imagination of Goebbels’s hero shows in its existential beginning reflections of what the National Socialist apocalypse carried out in reality and on an enormous scale. Goebbels felt the tension between deficiency and fulfillment within himself like a fierce struggle between two demons. He identifies these demons in his diaries; the one is evil and murderous: “We are all sick. We are all inwardly devoured. By the demon! That is terrible. And we are handed over to the inescapable.” The other leads to redemption, for which sacrifices have to be taken into account: “We have no reason to despair. It is going on. And I have to perish. Doesn’t matter: if only I can obey the inner demon.” Goebbels had these demons war against each other also in the heart of his hero, but he personifies the evil demon only in the figure of Iwan Wienurowsky: “I am whipped by demons, as it were. One dwells in me, who observes me, another, a second. Implacable. Harsh. Critical. Iwan Wienurowsky!”20 The previously cited murderous fantasy follows. Goebbels is obviously not able to endure the tension of his existence. “Thinking about oneself brings despair,” he wrote in his diary. He eliminates the tension by reifying its poles into demons that fight against 19. Goebbels, Michael, 129. 20. Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels, 52, 31; see also Bärsch, Joseph Goebbels, 137–94; Goebbels, Michael, 129. 382 The Apocalypse in Germany each other. He separates the evil demon from himself by projecting it into another person who appears as the adversary, as the representative of evil. And he frees himself from the evil and thereby redeems himself by murdering the adversary. By inflicting death on another he has the feeling that he has overcome death: “I remain! I remain!!” The projection of “lie, filth, blood, and beastly savagery” on the Jews, which Goebbels contrives in his diary (“the Jew is surely the Antichrist in world history”),21 fulfills the same function. The mass murder of the Jews, which the Nazi regime would carry out in reality, was meant to turn the liberating feeling, which the murderous fantasies had provided, into actual redemption. The metaphysical rebel probably feels that with the murder of his imaginary figure he also kills a part of himself. In any event that explains why the apocalypticist, whose revolt forces him to act, is also prepared to sacrifice himself. In order to become God, one must cease to be man; it can be done only at the cost of eliminating a part of one’s humanity. It is true that sacrifice has always played an important role in apocalyptic thought and in Jewish and Christian belief in general; the sacrificial death of Jesus is the great model for many modern apocalyptic visions. But the spirit of sacrifice of the metaphysical rebel means something totally different. The sacrificial death of Jesus is understood in Christianity in such a way that God took upon himself the imperfection of human existence and even death in order to bring about redemption. This sacrifice should also show by example that everyone must endure the tension between the certainty of death in this life and of redemption in the next. In contrast, the metaphysical rebel, who eliminates this tension and makes himself into God, becomes a culprit who conquers death by murdering others. The sacrifice that he is prepared to make is identical with the murder of his own humanity, and this is in fact suicide. When Goebbels killed himself in 1945 he included his own children in his death. In this final act of revolt he proved to himself once more that he was no longer a man but a god. He did precisely what Ivan Karamazov accuses God of: allowed innocent children to suffer and die. In the modern, world-immanent apocalypse, the willingness to sacrifice is always the opposite side of the desire for power, of the desire for godlike omnipotence that forces one to act and can end in murder. Particularly conspicuous is the distinction between this and “humble” sacrifice, if the apocalypticists shape themselves or their redeemer figures after the model of Christ. Toller stylized the hero Friedrich in Die Wandlung as a messiah, who suffers, dies, and is born again and who finally calls for action, for

21. Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Heiber, 52, 85. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacrifice 383 revolution, in order to complete redemption. The thought of murder was doubtless far from Toller’s mind, but the “brother who carried great knowledge in himself” and thus was “ready for action”22 might have seen himself obliged to take hard measures under certain circumstances for the sake of redemption and felt himself justified through his knowledge. At any rate, the big brothers, the great fathers and leaders of political reality, did murder as a consequence. This connection between vision and action becomes even more apparent in Euringer’s Deutsche Passion 1933. Here it is Hitler himself, who as an “unnamed soldier” suffers the passion like Christ with the crown of thorns made out of barbed wire on his head; but the evil spirit, which he sends to Hell, represents the Jews.23 Bazon Brock asked, “Hasn’t the synthesis of culprit and victim in self- sacrifice been the only brilliant accomplishment of the Germans, defining their national character, the union of crime and benevolence?”24 Even if there were doubtless other brilliant accomplishments, it is still true that the synthesis of culprit and victim in self-sacrifice has been a particular characteristic of the apocalypse in Germany for two hundred years. Even among apocalyptic individuals during the Wars of Liberation, blood lust and the spirit of sacrifice were often indistinguishable and were expressed in a single breath, as, for example, in Theodor Körner’s widely sung “Lied der schwarzen Jäger” (“Song of the Black Hunters”) and in the equally well-known “Aufruf” (“Call”):

Grant no mercy! If you cannot lift the sword, Strangle them without hesitation; And sell the ﬁnal drop of your life dearly! Death makes everyone free.

Freshen up, my people!—The signs of ﬂames are smoking, The crops are ripe; reapers, do not tremble! Ultimate redemption lies in the sword! Press the spear into your loyal heart; A lane for freedom!—Wash the earth, Your German country, clean with your own blood!25

In his operas Wagner raised the synthesis of devastating act and sacriﬁce to a nearly cultic level. In particular the Ring des Nibelungen is full of

22. Toller, Transfiguration, 56; “Ein Bruder, der das große Wissen in sich trug,” is translated by Crankshaw rather freely as “A brother, Moulded by suffering and joy.” 23. See p. 249 in this book. 24. Bazon Brock, “Der Deutsche im Tode?” Arch+ 71 (October 1983): 47. 25. Eugen Wildenow, ed., Theodor Körners Sämtliche Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe in zwei Bänden (Leipzig: M. Hesse, n.d.), 1:25, 21. 384 The Apocalypse in Germany activists who are also victims: Wotan, Siegfried, Hagen. At the end of the Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde brings action and sacrifice to a complete and culminating identity. She throws herself upon the pyre where Siegfried’s body is lain and sets it alight herself; at the same time, she hurls the torch “into Valhalla’s shining palace” and unleashes the great conflagration. It is Brünnhilde’s lot to bring about with her self-sacrifice the collapse of the fallen world and in this manner—perhaps—to open up prospects of a new world, because she alone has become “knowing”; in her self-sacrifice she has anticipated redemption at least for herself:

Everything! Everything! I know everything: Everything is open to me now!26

Of course, there is something peculiar about the apocalyptic knowledge of redemption: it is final knowledge, knowledge of the importance of the Fall as a presupposition of redemption, knowledge of the relationship of action and sacrifice. In the light of this final knowledge, all knowledge of other things becomes irrelevant; the focusing of knowledge to fall and redemption means at the same time not knowing or, rather, not wanting to know. In the First World War, in which the identity of redemptive act and redemptive sacrifice was celebrated in the same way as at the time of the Wars of Liberation, other aspects of reality were often sacrificed to this not wanting to know. Rudolf G. Binding, for example, characterized himself as a “crusader,” who asks for nothing more and sees nothing more than the necessity of action and self-sacrifice for the sake of redemption:

I am going to a holy war, Don’t ask about the reward, don’t ask about victory...... I am a crusader. My heart beats quietly within me, Quietly my horse moves under me, Besides that nothing else moves.

Above all, no thought moves within him:

I am a crusader. No longer know what drives me forward;

26. Richard Wagner, “Götterdämmerung,” in Dichtungen und Schriften, 3:310–11. See also Hans Mayer, “Zerstörung und Selbstzerstörung in Wagners ‘Ring des Nibelungen,’ ” in Anmerkungen zu Richard Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966); Kühnel, Parsifal, 36; and Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner, 364–69. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacriﬁce 385

He is best who wins, And I desire nothing else.27

In a similar manner the view of many card-carrying Nazis was often fixed and dazzled. The blinding orientation on redemption produced by the concept of action and sacrifice was promoted not only through verbal sanctification, but also through the ritual of numerous cultic ceremonies that Nazism inaugurated. In particular the “day of remembrance for those of the movement who died”—the ninth of November, the most solemn red- letter day of Nazism, which commemorated Hitler’s 1923 Putsch attempt— celebrated the identity of action and sacrifice in front of the Feldherrnhalle as a prerequisite for the final “redemption” in the Third Reich. Every year, in an evening ceremony on the Königsplatz in Munich, the names of the sixteen “martyrs” who had been shot in 1923 were called out one by one; each time the Hitler Youth, in chorus, answered with “Here!” This ritual act gave immortality to those who had offered themselves as a sacrifice and also obligated the survivors, who represented immortality with their “Here!” to take upon themselves self-sacrifice for the sake of redemption. Herbert Böhme showed, in his Kantate zum 9. November (“Cantata on the Ninth of November”), with what attitude the path to such redemption was to be taken:

Not knowing ﬁlls the heart that wants to beat, not seeing the eye that waits for the miracle, we march out in anticipation, we march quietly communed in festive hosts.28

Fixation on the goal of the redeeming sacrifice can be so strong that even the essence of the sacrifice itself, that is, its content and meaning for reality, falls prey to the wish not to know. What is left are only categories: the sacrifice “as such” and the deed “as such” to effect the redemption “as such.” In order to reach this point, considerable psychic manipulation is necessary, since willingness to undergo a “categorical self-sacrifice” is not automatically acceptable if one considers that the original motive—the desire to conquer death—is the driving force. The young Nazi writer Gerhard Schumann showed in two choral poems, which he published in 1935 under the title Siegendes Leben (“Victorious Life”), how psychic manipulation results in such a spirit of sacrifice. In

27. Rudolf G. Binding, “Der heilige Reiter,” cited in Buchwald, Der Heilige Krieg, 4–5. 28. Herbert Böhme, Gesänge unter der Fahne: Vier Kantaten (Munich: F. Eher, 1935), 33. 386 The Apocalypse in Germany particular, one of the two poems, with the title Tod und Leben (“Death and Life”), makes clear the paradoxical solution of the revolt against death. In the mystical play “the man” struggles with the allegorical ﬁgure of death. While he threatens to go down in defeat, “comrades” crowd around him, protecting him. But they, too, eventually are carried off by the touch of death, until ﬁnally the “chorus of the dead” comes to the aid of the living and takes over the banner that previously had gone from one hand to another.

If one of us falls The next one silently takes his place. If everyone collapses, blood continues to ﬂutter Generating in the cloth of the banner.29

What is at stake here is obviously more than mere ideology. The images disclose the existential impulse: “Like a tower, this belief arises out of me.” “Haven’t I carried my high-stretched will before me like a banner?” If “the banner is standing,” “man is standing in the sunstorm of passion” and “he breathes as in a flaming coupling.” It would be an overly hasty conclusion if one were to conclude from these images solely that the author projected his sexual drives onto Nazism, thereby sublimating and repressing them. The sexual imagery for its part is the expression of a desire that is even more powerful than the sexual one: what is at stake is neither skillful propaganda for ideology, nor sublimation of sexual desire. Rather, at stake are, in fact, “life and death,” as the title itself indicates. That is: what is presented is the central question of existence, how life can hold out in the face of death. The images of a phallic erection as well as the tone of religious fervor are the most intensive expressions of the desire to be alive, the desperate wish to overcome death: “As the shaft stretches to heaven . . . the cloth that raises the dead to life.”30 The merging of religious and sexual excitement reveals that the answer the author has found is of the highest existential significance. The flag as a symbol of “victorious life” represents National Social- ism. This means that Schumann considers National Socialism not only as an ideology and political movement, but ultimately as a power that can defeat death and that promises redemption. But how does this faith arise? The content of the answer, which is found in Nazism, is poor;

29. Gerhard Schumann, Siegendes Leben: Dichtungen für eine Gemeinschaft (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1935), 27. 30. Ibid., 13, 10–11, 25. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacriﬁce 387 it consists in continuing to live in descendants, that is, in “biological immortality”:

The fruit! Further and further The golden chain From generation to generation—31

Of course, “biological immortality” is no real victory over death, just as little as is continuing to live in the works that one leaves behind. In the face of death, which threatens one’s individual life, “biological immortality” is cool comfort. The individual must therefore seek redemption for himself in another way: through sacrifice. The solution is paradoxical, since sacrifice again means death for the individual. In order to justify the sacrifice, Schu- mann can only point to life “as such,” although “biological immortality” offers no logical justification at all for the importance of sacrifice:

Life lives because one throws himself away, Who loves the fluttering flag more than himself. The stormy life that never ends, As long as one will offer himself up for sacrifice.32

Evidently it is not at all a question of reasons. Rather, it is decisive that the spirit of sacrifice mediates the feeling of redemption, and this feeling arises through the particular manner in which the spirit of sacrifice is realized: the spirit of sacrifice is the willingness to give up one’s ego in order to be free of its tensions; the dissolution of the ego therefore appears desirable because it produces lust. The phallic images in which the will to be alive is betrayed and could first be seen as an expression of the ego- centered will flow again and again into images of devotion and “melting away” into “gloriously wafting away.” In Größe der Schöpfung (“Greatness of Creation”), the images of the dissolution of the ego, of delimitation and merging, become even clearer: “You should flow as the river flows.” “Give yourself, surrender yourself, effuse yourself.” “Ending is departing, silently losing oneself—Being swept away into something greater.”33 These images gain a deceptive appeal, because they are images of the dissolution of the ego in the sexual act, as a comparison with a love poem of Schumann, Hingebung (“Devotion”), demonstrates:

31. Ibid., 19. 32. Ibid., 27. 33. Ibid., 11, 45, 34, 43. 388 The Apocalypse in Germany

No longer you and I.—We end Spending ourselves in the whole In the heavenly ﬁre of our passion.34

The desire to give up one’s ego becomes evident in the aesthetic presentation. The individual, “the man,” who is bereft of individual characteristics anyway, merges in the “choir” of the community; his self-sacrifice is, in the literal sense, a “sacrifice of the ego.” The choral community is hollow as well: it is celebrated as form. The absorption in this form can be experienced as redemption, because it is perceived in the same way as the dissolution of the ego in sexual union and appears to make definitive the desire for such a dissolution that in the sexual act can be only transitory. What is true of sacrifice is also true of action; it does not depend on the definition of content, but on the feeling of redemption that the act “as such” generating lust mediates. The apocalyptic activists of the 1920s, consciously or unconsciously, made this clear, as, for example, Ernst von Salomon, who fought in the Baltic and Upper Silesia as a member of the Freikorps after the First World War and was also involved in the murder of Walther Rathenau. In his autobiographical novel Die Geächteten (“The Despised”), he portrays himself and his comrades as a “league of warriors . . . soaked with all the passion of the world, mad with desire,” who experienced the intoxication of violence like a sexual euphoria: “During the day we lay completely naked in the baking hot sand and let ourselves be roasted in the sun, and when we were attacked in the afternoon, there wasn’t enough time to get dressed, and the sight of naked men who stood in the trenches and shot was quite peculiar, they then proceeded to counterattack, shiny bodies wearing nothing but a weapon, white, gleaming youths, naked and armed in the shining sun. The slender bodies still glistened in the forest through the tree trunks, and this attack of ours was the craziest and most compelling that I have ever experienced.”35 Arno Schmidt, who decoded the suppressed homoerotic fantasies in Karl May’s adventures,36 would have taken pleasure in this “counter-

34. Schumann, Wir dürfen dienen, 58. 35. Ernst von Salomon, Die Geächteten (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930), 72, 246. The Freikorps novel of Arnolt Bronnen, O. S. (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1929), articulates the redemptive passion for violence. The postwar novel by Ernst Glaeser, Frieden (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930), offers a critical analysis of these symptoms; see my study, “Apokalyptische Erwartung: Zur Jugendrevolte in der deutschen Literatur zwischen 1910 und 1930,” in “Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit”: Der Mythos Jugend, ed. Thomas Koebner, Rolf-Peter Janz, and Frank Trommler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 519–45. 36. Arno Schmidt, Sitara und der Weg dorthin: Eine Studie über Wesen, Werk und Wirkung Karl Mays (Karlsruhe: Stahlberg, 1963). Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacrifice 389 attack in the woods.” The homoerotic element, however, is of secondary importance in our context. What is decisive here is, again, lust, which is generated by action, and that is more important than the question for what purpose action is taken: “What we wanted, we did not know.” The young Freikorps fighters try out everything possible, national economy and religion, Marx and Nietzsche. One of them, who had fought in the Baltic against the Soviet Red Army, wishes to take part in the development of a German Red Army in the Ruhr Region after the Freikorps is dissolved. “We want to get our hands in some blood,” he remarks; whose blood and for what political purpose it is shed is evidently a matter of indifference to him. His only goal is the final, apocalyptic goal, “that we called the New,” redemption “as such”; and they know only this: “If from anywhere, the New springs up out of chaos.” The faith, however, that this will happen, they cannot derive from anything other than from action itself; with apocalyptic action this faith forms a circle of mutual proof. Kern, the murderer of Rathenau, reduces this connection to the least common denominator: “What gives us faith, you ask. Nothing else than our action.” And the action—the murder and the creation of chaos—is justified from the belief in “the New”: it anticipates redemption in the feeling of lust that it produces. Salomon said of himself: “I have always had particular pleasure in destruction.”37 For Ernst Jünger, too, it was a matter of not defining content, but of the feeling of redemption that action “as such” mediates, that is, through its form, not its purpose, and through the attitude with which it is carried out: “The issue is not for what purpose we fight but how we fight.” Fighting appears as a value in itself: “As a result all points of view, even the front at which one fights and dies, take second place.”38 Also, for Jünger, the lust that may be attained with this attitude is an anticipation of redemption, the lust of the highest conceivable freedom that flows from action “as such,” from the act of violence freed from all moral considerations and political purposes.39 But in order to reach the point “from which freedom may be perceived,” the activist must accept that the “destruction that cannot yet be foreseen in its full scope” includes him, too. The “freedom of the activist” is complete only if it is recognized as an “expression of what is necessary”; and the necessity that action made absolute engenders the readiness to also endure action, the readiness for self-sacrifice. If the activist has reached such an attitude free of internal stipulations, he can even experience pleasure in self-sacrifice; he is then one of those people 37. Salomon, Die Geächteten, 72, 152, 214–15, 294, 367. 38. Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), 78, 147. 39. See p. 314–15 in this book. 390 The Apocalypse in Germany

“who can blow himself up with pleasure and who even sees in this act a confirmation of order.”40 The new breed of man, whom Jünger characterizes as the “worker as type (Gestalt),” is nothing more than the perfect synthesis of activist and victim in self-sacrifice. The individual is absorbed in this type; in any case, even as an activist, he must offer the “sacrifice of himself”: “It would be rewarding to consider how the individual from heroic points of view on the one hand appears as the unknown soldier, who is destroyed on the battlefields of work, and, on the other hand and because of that, appears as the Lord and Organizer of the world, as a commanding type in the possession of what previously has been an only darkly surmised plenitude of power. Both sides belong to the type of the worker, and this is what unites them, even when they are ranged against each other in deadly battle.” The reward for self-sacrifice is the feeling of absolute freedom that anticipates redemption. For Jünger, too, it was a question of redemption: “Gestalt” is his recipe for overcoming death. The soldier at the front as the model for “Gestalt” was proved in his opinion “not only as unconquerable, but also as immortal.” “Each of these fallen is today more alive than ever, and that is the result of his belonging to eternity as Gestalt.” But Jünger’s solution is just as paradoxical as that of Schumann: the Gestalt, which is to provide immortality, is not only an abstraction that—to use Bloch’s objection—denies the individual to participate in the continuation of life; this abstraction makes the sacrificial death of the individual necessary in the first place. For if “man discovers his raison d’être, his fate with Gestalt,” he must also be prepared to sacrifice “so as to achieve its crowning expression in blood sacrifice.”41 The characteristics of the apocalyptic activist, which Salomon disclosed in the relations of the Freikorps fighters, unite in Jünger’s Gestalt, so to speak, to a metaphysics of apocalyptic activism. Jünger thereby created a paradigm that is useful as an explanation of modern apocalyptic revolts, since Jünger’s existential foundation as well as his patterns of thought and argumentation are to be found in “ideologies of action” of another political color as well. The most striking example is the activist movement that caused the most serious crisis of the Federal Republic of Germany since its founding—the Red Army Faction. As early as 1974, Til Schulz— who, according to his own statement, was a “left-radical of the SDS” at that time and not suspected of denunciatory intentions42—characterized

40. Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), 57, 34. 41. Ibid., 40–41, 36–37. 42. Til Schulz, “Sieg im Volkskrieg?” in Der blinde Fleck: Die Linke, die RAF und der Staat, ed. Klaus Hartung et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1987), 81. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacriﬁce 391

Ernst Jünger as “the most significant forerunner of the Red Army Faction.” Schulz did not discover the core of the relationship (he referred primarily to Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis [“Fighting as an inner experience”] and to the Waldgang [“Walk in the woods”], not to the Arbeiter), but he was able to ascertain, through Jünger’s example, two of the most important symptoms of apocalyptic activism in the Red Army Faction. One symptom was making struggle independent, separating action from rational purposes: “Fighting is only endured as an inner experience; it reduces to an existential basis the ideological and philosophical components of why one fights.” The other symptom is the spirit of self-sacrifice, which appears to be the last chance to escape the total expropriation of the individual, in “experiencing one’s own destruction, which is only granted the warrior.”43 Designating Jünger as the “forerunner” of the Red Army Faction was still not exact enough; still less exact was the characterization of Red Army Faction terrorism as “fascism of the left” that was popular in the seventies. In the final analysis, it is not a question of “left” or “right.” And a phenomenon of political reality cannot be clarified by equating it with another phenomenon of political reality, especially one that in many ways is quite different. That would be like trying to explain a chemical composition by means of another one without analyzing the common elements that both contain, notwithstanding their differing appearance. For this reason the title of the otherwise penetrating study of the Red Army Faction by Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children, is unfortunate and misleading, since it suggests the conclusion that Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin were the “spiritual offspring of Hitler.”44 There is a genuine connection between the Red Army Faction and Nazism only to the extent that Germany’s Nazi past and the still living “Auschwitz generation” provided members of the Red Army Faction a motive for their drive for apocalyptic interpretation and transformation of reality. The common element that was fundamental for Nazism and the Red Army Faction as well, and responsible for the similarity of many patterns of thought and behavior, was the existential apocalypse of their respective leaders. If one is looking for traditions that provided spiritual and habitual models, one finds—at least in Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin—the legacy and milieu of Protestant rigorism that bound together the longing for the absolute and the contempt of all compromise, moral radicalism and a hate of the routine of daily life, an elitist sense of mission, and a

43. Til Schulz, “Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis: Abenteuer des falschen Bewußtseins,” Kursbuch 35 (April 1974): 142, 145. 44. Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (London: Joseph, 1977); see Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 9, 1977. 392 The Apocalypse in Germany spirit of resistance to the point of martyrdom, and that has frequently led to apocalyptic interpretations of experience. Of course, such a legacy does not automatically produce apocalyptic visions, not to mention the willingness to realize these visions by force. Even the psychic dispositions and personal motives that Jillian Becker discloses, especially for Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, cannot explain the reason for the existential breakthrough to the apocalypse, although they make this breakthrough comprehensible to a certain extent: such dispositions and motives are dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s circumstances of life, injured pride and the feeling of being mistreated and exploited, an unsatisfied craving for recognition, unresolved private conflicts, a lack of identity, ultimately despair.45 The psychiatrist Reinhard Rethardt, who had several conversations with Gudrun Ensslin during the Frankfurt arson trial in 1968, concluded in his medical opinion: “She had heroic impatience. She suffers from the insufficiency of our existence.”46 The proclivity of Meinhof, Ensslin, and other members of the Red Army Faction to interpret their experiences apocalyptically showed itself in the increasing readiness to shift the blame for every deficiency to reality as such, dominated in their eyes by capitalism and imperialism. We cannot pin down the reason for the ultimate existential decision, making the step to apocalyptic violence. What we can analyze are the psychic dispositions and motives, the external occasions for experience, and above all the result: the apocalyptic image of the world with its existential implications and its consequences for behavior and action. The structure of the apocalyptic interpretation of experience was in any event foreshadowed before it found its ideological accoutrements and justification: the division of the world into good and evil that expressed itself in the characteristic, simplifying, and denunciatory bestialization of the enemy—“Either Pig or Human Being”47—and the conviction that the world of evil must be destroyed in order that a new, truly free, and humane world would arise. Their adaptation of Marxism-Leninism and the concepts of Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and other guerrilla leaders, which then took place, was never possible without twists and turns, even if it did not openly defy the reality of Red Army Faction terrorism, like the

45. Becker, Hitler’s Children; see also 65–77 and 159–62. 46. Cited in Stefan Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1986), 70. 47. Letter from Holger Meins to Manfred Grashof, October 31, 1974; cited in Der Spiegel 47 (1974): 30. See also Ulrike Meinhof in an interview with the journalist Ray in 1970: “Of course we say that cops are pigs, we say that the person in uniform is a pig, not a human being, and so we have to deal with him” (cited in Hartung et al., Der blinde Fleck, 195). Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacrifice 393 adoption of Lin Piao’s precept of “The People’s War” or of Mao’s saying: “Serve the People!” Internal consistency was of secondary significance for the apocalypticists of the Red Army Faction: in their fixation on their final goal they, too, blinded themselves to their action’s connection to reality. In an “Open Letter to the Comrades of the Red Army Faction,” the former terrorist Klaus Jünschke wrote from prison in 1986: “We have been made terrorists by the fact that we have killed and injured people for the freedom and happiness of everyone, people chosen almost arbitrarily, chosen by the time of detonation of the explosive devices. Whoever was nearby got it.”48 The apocalyptic metaphysics of action that is supposed to redeem through destruction was the faith and the existential engine of the Red Army Faction terrorists—it is useful here to recall the example of Jünger’s and Salomon’s Freikorps fighters. Action, not ideology, was fundamental to the Red Army Faction: the arson attacks on Frankfurt department stores in 1968 by Baader and Ensslin, the violent escape of Baader in 1970 effected by Ulrike Meinhof. These acts of violence revealed the existential meaning that they had for the activists: they released the feeling of liberation as a promise of redemption. Gudrun Ensslin’s parents, who doubtless possessed a fine sense for their daughter’s longing for redemption, felt this during the Frankfurt arson trial. Her mother said: “I feel that she has brought about freedom by her action.” And her father, a Protestant minister, confirmed that Gudrun “almost experienced the condition of euphoric self-realization, of a holy self-realization in the sense as one speaks of a holy humanity.”49 With her leap from the window of the Institute for Social Issues in Dahlem, from which she freed Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof also made an existential leap from the old, unsatisfying life into a new life of presumably absolute freedom. The violence that also had to be used here—an employee of the institute was shot and seriously wounded—was precisely the springboard for the feeling of real existential liberation. In Stammheim Prison, Ulrike Meinhof noted in July 1973: “The Red Army Faction is: . . . an act of liberation in an act of destruction.”50 Thus it was only logical that the Red Army Faction, in their “theory,” even ascribed the function of knowledge to action as such: “The class analysis that we need is not to be done without revolutionary practice. . . . The Red Army Faction speaks of the primacy of practice. The question of

48. Die Tageszeitung (taz), November 11, 1986; cited in Hartung et al., Der blinde Fleck, 193. 49. Cited by Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, 73. 50. Meinhof-Mat. Pos. I/3.6; cited in Analysen zum Terrorismus, ed. by the Federal Ministry of Interior, vol. 1: Iring Fetscher, Günther Rohrmoser, Jörg Fröhlich, Ideologien und Strategien (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 325 n. 6. 394 The Apocalypse in Germany whether it is right to organize armed resistance is dependent on whether it is possible, and this is only to be determined practically.”51 The act of violence was meant to have the function of knowledge, but above all the function of redemption. In the view of Jan-Carl Raspe: “Certainly, the heart, the core, which must be split, the Midas’s knot, that when unraveled, promised the beginning of the Golden Age, was not unraveled, but split . . . everything revolves around the question of violence.”52 Also, in the case of the Red Army Faction, it is completely legitimate to speak of “redemption” as the goal of their apocalyptic activism. For the terrorists, at least intelligent and sensitive ones like Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, it was not only a matter of political liberation from capitalism and U.S. imperialism; in fact, it was a question for them of the apocalyptic transformation of human existence. In the words of Gudrun Ensslin: “Total revolution means . . . to be, in order to get no less than everything, in order to be liberated, means hate, means an effective killing machine, being in order to become a human being.”53 With them too, the metaphysical revolt against the conditions of reality culminated in protest against death, and they also proclaimed their desire to overcome death. In 1973 Ulrike Meinhof wrote in a prison circular directed to her lawyer, Horst Mahler: “Quit this damned psychoanalysis, since there is only one liberation from the many sorts of death in this system and only one cure for the colonial, fascist, and exploitative market neurosis: that is violence against the pigs.”54 In another circular was written: “that has to come out as large as it is: action, out of misery, against death.”55 As early as 1968 in his conversations with Gudrun Ensslin, the psychiatrist Rethardt heard “man’s cry for eternity.”56 But neither did the Red Army Faction terrorists escape the contradiction that Jünger had ascribed to Gestalt, that one’s own life must be sacrificed to action if it is conceived of as something almost metaphysical, as “action as such.” Since neither murders of arbitrarily selected victims nor self-sacrifices had meaning, but were to be justified only by the apocalyptic metaphysics of action, nothing remained for the terrorists but autosuggestion that the act of destruction is even then an act of liberation if it requires one’s own life. Through Körner, Wagner, Goebbels, and Jünger we are acquainted with the autosuggestion that death through self-sacrifice would make one free. Such stubbornness will probably never die out. As

51. Texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 352–54. 52. Typescript of July 14, 1973, cited in Analysen zum Terrorismus, 1:325 n. 4. 53. Manuscript notes, July 16, 1973, 11, in ibid., 1:325 n. 5. 54. May 20, 1973, Möller-Mat. 7/89, Möller-Mat, 334 n. 31. 55. July 1973, ibid., 326 n. 7. 56. Cited in Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, 70. Lust for Power and the Spirit of Sacrifice 395 recently as 1987, the Red Army Faction sympathizer Karl-Heinz Roth stated: “Suicide in solitary confinement is a final step to liberation.”57 As long as autosuggestion remains a phenomenon of consciousness, justifying self-sacrifice while sitting at one’s desk, it is not particularly heart-stirring, although this phenomenon can become dangerous, too. But existential misery, to which actual self-sacrifice leads, is moving and pitiable, if it is done without meaning. Holger Meins allowed this misery to be felt in his last letter, written to Manfred Grashof a few days before he died during a hunger strike. Grashof was in Zweibrücken Prison; the letter was meant to give him strength during his own hunger strike, but at the same time it obviously served the autosuggestion and self-confirmation of the author. Monomaniacally, Meins repeatedly conjured action and fighting as an existential justification.

The only thing that matters is the fight—now, today, tomorrow, devoured or not. . . . the battle goes on....By the fight for the fight. . . . The guerrilla materializes in fighting—in revolutionary action, without end—thus: fight until death, and, of course: collectively. . . . The battle never ends.

But in dire straits it becomes difficult to draw support from the chimera that self-sacrifice requires. Fear and even despair appear; the menacing resignation can finally be intercepted only in the formal maintenance of stubborn resolution, in rigidly holding fast to unrealistic slogans:

With living it is just like with dying; “People (that is, we) who refuse to end the struggle—they either win or they die, rather than losing and dying at the same time.” Pretty sad to have to write such things to you again. Naturally I also don’t know what it is like when you die or get killed. How should I? . . . Oh, well. Everyone dies sometime. The question is only how, and how you lived, and the issue is clear: fighting against the pigs as man for liberation of man: a revolutionary, in the ﬁght—loving life: disdaining death. That’s for me: serving the people—the Red Army Faction.58

After the death of the inmates at the Stammheim Prison, a volume containing Brecht’s Maßnahme, from which the prisoners had frequently quoted, was found in Gudrun Ensslin’s cell. In this volume is written:

It is terrible to kill. But not just others, we also kill ourselves, when it is necessary,

57. Karl-Heinz Roth, “Zehn Jahre später: Eine Zwischenbilanz,” in Der blinde Fleck, ed. Hartung et al., 145. 58. October 31, 1974; cited in Der Spiegel 47 (1974): 30. 396 The Apocalypse in Germany

Because only with violence is this killing World to be changed, as Every living person knows.59

But the only winner in such an apocalypse of violence is death.

59. Cited in Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, 592. 24 The Last and the First

The fascination, both attractive and oppressive, that “the last,” “the final,” “the ultimate” (das Letzte) exercises is immense. The idea that something is occurring for the last time can produce relief, joy, even euphoria, but also sorrow, fear, even terror. When the apocalypticist speaks of “the last,” he combines in this word the entire content of his message of the final struggle against evil, of the destruction of the old world, of the judgment and of the transformation to the new; “the last” is the focus toward which his vision is directed. But speaking of “the last” not only refers to the content of the apocalyptic message; the apocalypticist also expresses in this word the fascination that he himself perceives and wishes to arouse in his listeners’ and readers’ feelings that correspond to the idea of “the last”: hope and joyful expectation, but at the same time reverence and fear of the power and finality of what is to come. Speaking about the last or final is a characteristic “warrant” of apocalyptic prophecies, but the ideas that are connected with these words have changed in the course of time and with them the feelings that the words evoke, and even the very use of the words. When Arndt in 1807 believed the “final holy war” had broken out and Körner saw the “final salvation, the highest” in the sword, they gave expression to their feelings of intense expectation and reverent fear that a classic apocalyptic vision seeks to mediate. When Arndt entitled one of his prophecies Letztes Wort an die Deutschen (“Final Word to the Germans”), he used the momentous word not only as a signal for the apocalyptic character of his message, but also as a rhetorical tool to stress its urgency and his own authority. In a different political and ideological context, but with the same feelings and intentions of an apocalyptic visionary, Friedrich Engels spoke in 1842 of the “final, holy war, followed by the millennial kingdom of freedom.”1 The Interna-

1. Arndts Sämtliche Werke, 9:128; Körners Sämtliche Werke, 1:2; Arndts Sämtliche Werke, 9:169; Friedrich Engels, “Schelling und die Offenbarung” (1842), in Werke, by Marx and Engels, Ergänzungsband, pt. 2, 220.

397 398 The Apocalypse in Germany tionale, too, which had been calling for “the ultimate struggle” since 1871, attempted with this expression to open up the prospect of “redemption” and to strengthen the exciting and uplifting feeling of standing directly before the final decision. Still, in the First World War we meet the same usage as a hundred years before as, for example, when Julius Hart challenged the German people “to the ultimate battle.” But during the twenties and thirties new sounds were mixed into the discourse of “the last,” namely, in the apocalyptic discourse of Nazism. Of course, the basic apocalyptic meaning of “the last” was retained; as early as 1926, Goebbels spoke of the “hunger for fulfillment” that the National Socialist “mission” spurred on, and of the “ultimate perfection” (letzte Vollendung) that Hitler was struggling for. But at the same time he employed the apocalyptic connotations of “the last” in order to lend their weight of unique greatness and definitive meaning to his own utterances—or also those of his führer—that is, to portray himself as an apocalyptic prophet and Hitler as the Messiah. He certified that Hitler had grown into the “ultimate profile of the Führer”; he described his own efforts in the following manner: “I am speaking to thousands. And am finding the final form of the idea.” “In the evening spirited debates with Rust and Kerrl. About the last.” “Wednesday in Hannover a gigantic meeting. I said the final word.” “The last” became a catchword of Nazi rhetoric. It carried the insinuation that final decisions were always at stake, and it carried the apocalyptic excitement into all spheres of life. In 1933 Wilhelm Schäfer called for “the last exertion” for the spiritual life, while, in his presidential address, Heidegger demanded “the spirit of service to the last, secured in knowledge and ability and ruled by discipline, that in the future must penetrate the students’ entire existence as a military service.” Binding introduced the confession of his apocalyptic faith in Nazism with the words: “Here I have to touch upon last things.” Werner Schlegel demanded the “last sacrifice” from politics and saw in the book burnings of May 1933 a “symbol of the final consequence” (Symbol der letzten Konsequenz).2 During the Second World War Hitler seasoned his appeals with the thrill of the apocalyptic that the notion of “the last” arouses. It began with the proclamation of September 1, 1939, in which Hitler called upon the

2. Julius Hart, “Krieg,” in Der Heilige Krieg, ed. Buchwald; Joseph Goebbels, Die zweite Revolution (Zwickau: Streiter, 1926), 6, 59–62; Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels, 80, 88, 108; see also 84, 87; Schäfer, in Kindermann, Des deutschen Dichters Sendung in der Gegenwart, 272; Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität, 15–16; Rudolf G. Binding et al., Sechs Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, 19; Schlegel, Dichter auf dem Scheiterhaufen, 30, 51. The Last and the First 399 soldiers to fulfill their duty “to the last.” In 1940 he expected wives and mothers “to sacrifice even the ultimate.” As late as January 30, 1945, he demanded of every German, even of every “sick or infirm person . . . that he work even to the final exertion of his strength.”3 And it ended on May 1, 1945, with the propaganda lie broadcast over the radio, introduced with a solemn drum roll, that Hitler had “fallen for Germany, fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism.”4 But it was not only characteristic of Nazi usage that the apocalyptic connotations of “the last” were exploited in order to give the meaning of decisiveness and finality to everything possible and in order to encourage the population to complete compliance and spirit of sacrifice; the dark tone of Nazi speech concerning “the last” was characteristic as well. Regardless of the fact that the National Socialist apocalypse aimed at “fulfillment” and “completion” in the “millennial Reich,” the notion of “the last” often forced the idea of redemption to the background and rather spread the thrill of ineluctable ruin. Even in Gerhard Schumann’s Lieder vom Reich from the year 1930, that dark tone predominated; Schumann characterized Hitler’s political struggle according to the pattern of Jesus’ struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane:

The ﬁnal glow before the collapse! ...... A cry of distress went up and shattered shrill and anxious, Despair groped with a last hand into the emptiness.5

During the war speeches about “the last” increasingly aroused associations of a final catastrophe. When Hitler forbade the army, which was surrounded in Stalingrad, to surrender, with his command by telegraph, “The army holds its position to the last soldier,”6 he was giving the order for suicide. In his radio speech of November 9, 1943, despair was already in his voice as he invoked the hope that “not before the final battle there will be a decision.” And at the beginning of 1944, in an address to his field marshals and commanding officers, he could invoke a mood of only hopelessness with the notion of the “last” when he said: “Gentlemen, if

3. Adolf Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen 1932–45, ed. Max Domarus (Munich: Süd- deutscher Verlag, 1965), 1307, 1558; see also 1559, 2197. 4. Cited in Wilfried Daim, “Germanische Apokalypse: Vom Nibelungenlied bis zum Untergang des Dritten Reiches,” 25. 5. Gerhard Schumann, Die Lieder vom Reich (Munich: Langen und Müller, 1936), 19– 20. 6. Cited in Joachim C. Fest, Hitler: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen- Velag, 1973), 909. 400 The Apocalypse in Germany there ever is a final hour, then I hope that you, my generals, will stand together at the barricades and that you, my field marshals, will stand by me with your swords drawn!”7 The inflationary usage of the last that Nazism had set in motion continued after 1945. Even the degradation of the meaning of the word that occurred with its increased use continued; today, if something is characterized as “the last” in German colloquial language, it is mostly meant in a contemptuous sense. The apocalyptic idea of “the last,” however, is perhaps even more somber than during the Second World War, because since Hiroshima it is combined with the terror of nuclear war, which excludes any hope of redemption in an earthly paradise. Thus “the last” also became a code word for the threat of final destruction that we can never again escape. Günther Anders stated in his Thesen zum Atomzeitalter: “No matter how long, no matter whether it will continue forever, this age is the last, since its differentia specifica—the possibility of our self-destruction—can never end, except through the end itself.”8 The idea of “the last” filled the apocalypticist—who could still believe in the creation of a new world after the end of the old one—with a sense of elation and joyful expectation, even if the prospect of destruction and judgment caused apprehension. It was decisive that “the last” would introduce a new, perfect existence. All attention, hope, and energy were directed to this goal. Therefore, Kurt Hiller could say that “it was a matter of utter indifference to the active head what was in the beginning; the only important thing is what should be at the end!” Therefore Ernst Bloch, following Marx, concluded his book The Principle of Hope with the quintessential sentences: “Man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and every thing still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True Genesis is not at the beginning but at the end.”9 When the hope for “true genesis” is shattered, “prehistory” remains the only history that we have; but the apocalypticist denies this history any meaning. Even suffering from deficient reality, which the prospect of redemption had still given meaning, must now appear to him as meaningless. A feeling of vast emptiness arises, and collapse into despair threatens. Not only is the apocalypticist confronted by this problem in the face of the nuclear bomb and the threatened destruction of the planet but the progressivist, who hoped to achieve an earthly paradise in a gradual but inexorable process of development, also feels the ground giving way

7. Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen, 2053, 2080. 8. Anders, Die atomare Drohung, 93. 9. Kurt Hiller, “Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus,” in Die Erhebung, ed. Wolfenstein (1919), 368; Bloch, Principle of Hope, 3:1375. The Last and the First 401 beneath his feet in the face of the possibility of a sudden end. Both determined the meaning of history from its goal; only in respect to this goal were they able to ascribe a meaning to their own place in history. The idea that mankind could destroy itself could terrify even those who do not search for a great and emphatic answer concerning the meaning of the whole of history. Although we must in any case die and cannot ourselves continue the life of mankind, although for this reason it could be a matter of indifference to us whether the history of mankind ended in a century or two, we have the immediate feeling that such a global suicide would be iniquitous, would be a criminal attack on the mystery of human life even if its meaning is hidden to us. Because the idea of “the last” evokes extreme dread, many turn their view back to the “first,” in complete contrast to the traditional apocalypticist, for whom the beginning was a matter of utter indifference. The retrospection has two sources of motivation; two questions arise in the face of the threatening “last”: when did the Fall occur in human history, and when and how did the troublesome development get under way that now makes the definitive end appear possible? And what was the nature of the “first” that was not yet pregnant with ruin? In Günter Kunert’s eyes, the Fall occurred when one day “enlightenment” was victorious, that is, when man liberated himself from the world of myth and began “to proceed historically”: “the legend of the decline of the ancient mythological figures after the triumph of Christianity designated this moment with the cry: ‘Pan the great is dead!’ Thereafter, following this legend, the nymphs and dryads, all the holy personifications of the powers of nature disappeared with a huge wailing.” Early man still lived in a “cosmos,” in a spiritually enlivened whole that mediated a collective identity. He did not yet know the separation between “spirit” and the “world” of objects. This separation represents for Kunert the core of the Fall. The “higher insight,” on the basis of which the separation became possible, in his opinion proved in fact to be the “lower insight,” since this insight was deadly, at first to the natural environment that once was spiritually enlivened: “Things, once animated by our view, must die under our grip, under our activity.” Meanwhile, as a result of that separation, that deadly, objectifying grip is directed against man himself; in the place of the erstwhile “humanization of things,” the exact opposite has occurred: “The reification of man and his degradation to an object.”10 Christa Wolf explored in Kassandra and in the Frankfurt poetry readings

10. Günter Kunert, “Vor der Sintflut: Das Gedicht als Arche Noah,” in Frankfurter Vorlesungen (Munich: Hanser, 1985), 12–13. 402 The Apocalypse in Germany the Fall that led to the “insanity” of our current weapon-mad world that is threatened by inhuman technology.11 She discovered the Fall in the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. For her, too, the “first” was a life in totality, in which human beings and nature had not yet estranged each other and had not yet been demoted to objects of exploitation. In her eyes, women represented this life in totality. Women mediated spiritual order to life; they performed the vocation of priestess, “which only women performed in remote antiquity: when the supreme goddess was a woman; Ge, Gaia, the earth goddess.” For Christa Wolf, too, a division of the whole, which led to the “dissolution of modern man into body/soul/spirit,” defines the Fall; she makes this division responsible for the “erroneous thinking” of an independent, instrumental reason, which men used in order to attain rule, in order to subdue nature, other men, and, in particular, women. Kassandra is a roman à clef about the woman who experiences that division for the first time, who experiences “how this operation on her living flesh is performed. That means that there are real powers in her environment that demand partial self-denial of her as it occurs. She learns techniques for self-maceration.” She is made an object.12 Christa Wolf narrates the Fall, which Cassandra prophesies and experiences herself, as a prediction of the total destruction that now threatens all people as a consequence of that Fall. Krolow devoted the poem cycle Herodot oder der Beginn von Geschichte (“Herodotus, or The Beginning of History”) to the Fall, which opened the way to decease to the “End of everything.” As with Kunert, for Krolow the “first” is the world of myth, the cosmological age, in which men still lived in a condition of innocence despite all that was strange and the many acts of savagery:

One washed twice during the day and the same at night: Times of purity, without hygiene, absolute like fantasy.13

Krolow sees the Fall at the very beginning of history. He has the historian Herodotus as a witness and an author speak of this beginning. Herodotus still experiences the sensual ﬁrmness of the mythical world, in which

11. Christa Wolf, Kassandra: Erzählung (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1983); Wolf, Voraus- setzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra: Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen (Darmstadt: Luchter- hand, 1983), 97. 12. Wolf, Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung, 87–91, 96. 13. Karl Krolow, Herodot oder der Beginn von Geschichte (Waldbrunn: Heiderhoff, 1983), 40–41, 30–31. The Last and the First 403

Xerxes placed golden ornaments on a plane tree because he found it so beautiful, and “in which everyone could become God,” but he is also witness to manifestations of dissolution:

When I was alive, I was blessed, for I found myths as attractive as gravestones. I saw too many gods, who moved or were already disintegrating like mortar.14

Herodotus had himself become a representative of the new age. He no longer lives unquestioningly in myth, but begins to examine critically mythical reports, to assess their pros and cons and to doubt the veracity of many stories:

I did not believe everything that was told me about the long-lived Ethiopians, who ate dirt instead of cake or about male sphinxes.15

Herodotus stands at the point of transition; he looks back at the innocence and naïveté of myth and forward to “the course of history,” which guiltily rushes toward disaster because new reason veered off from the concrete needs and passions of men, because it was made an instrument for the accomplishment of abstract goals to the ﬁnal consequence, that what can be done in fact is done:

The henchmen came the bookkeepers, with blood on their hands, the hypertonic lords the deadly ill killers and their machines...... While the slayers, anonymously, Turn to their work with sensitive instruments And these display to them The work in electronic waves: The horror and massive self-destruction.16

Not only Krolow, Wolf, and Kunert returned to the “ﬁrst” in the face of the “last,” to the dawn of man in the age of myth. The return to myth

14. Ibid., 11, 30, 20. 15. Ibid., 22. 16. Ibid., 31–32. 404 The Apocalypse in Germany has become a conspicuous phenomenon of our time, which determines literature as well as philosophical discussion and critiques of contemporary civilization. Krolow, Wolf, and Kunert have demonstrated the underlying need: the guilty course of history and its hopelessness arouse the longing for the innocent, prehistoric existence of man. But what does the view back to the time before the Fall, before the onset of history, achieve? We cannot, in fact, return to the cosmological age; “an escape is not in sight,” not in reality, Christa Wolf states.17 Is the return to myth therefore a flight from reality? The motives for this return are as ambivalent as myth itself, the intentions equally variable. For Kunert it is not a matter of evading the problems of our historical existence. But for him the poem that was born in the age of myth preserves the totality of the cosmos, which had surrounded man with a spiritually enlivened environment. At the same time, however, the poem is burdened with sorrow about what has been lost; it has also absorbed the “pain of individuation that was our own fault,” the pain of “being expelled from protective contexts, into which there is no return.” Further, it has to take this pain on itself and come to terms with it because there is no return. “So it is certainly one of the most important intentions of the poem to make this condition at least bearable, to endure it, by virtue of the specifically poetic reflection—since one cannot overcome it.”18 Most of Kunert’s poems express the pain of lost totality without “verbally revealing” the many sediments that, in his view, are carried along by the poem, and without making myth its theme.19 Krolow also makes his sorrow for the lost world of myth felt in his poem cycle, but he reenlivens this world and has Herodotus transform history into poetry: “History as poetry,” the disastrous history that later took place—the guillotine of the Jacobins, the Vitus’s dance of the führer, the stocking masks of terror. This is Krolow’s way of setting poetry against history: “The images of myth,” Klaus Jeziorkowski commented, “are the credo quia absurdum of literature, its hope against the reason of history plummeting toward the jaws of Hell.” Of course, the redemptive effect of art that frees one from history cannot, by definition, extend to the future; it is true for only the absolute present, in which poetry is realized:

I am waiting for a telegram of love, an ode on the ground, a sonnet under the feet.

17. Wolf, Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung, 97. 18. Kunert, Vor der Sintﬂut, 13. 19. Ibid. The Last and the First 405

We pick up the miracle. It is light; a scrap of paper, legible, that only is true in the moment, you bend down to pick it up.20

The return to the “first,” to the myth before the beginning of history, can be an expression of the intention to eliminate history altogether. But because history cannot be undone, since, on the other hand, no more meaning can be found in the “course of history,” the intention of eliminating history is realized in literature as the dissolution of historical succession: in the aesthetic medium, everything becomes simultaneous for the author, the narrator, or the lyrical I. Krolow’s poem cycle already made this apparent. In Herodotus’s prescient eyes, meaningless history whizzes along together into an episode—“Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler.” His view, retroactively metamorphosing history into poetry, embraces “holy beetles,” and “Kafka’s beetle,” Isis and Osiris, Medes and Assyrians, genetics and missiles, as though he were looking at a painting.21 In a conversation with Siegfried Lenz, Günter Grass outlined the tense “futurepastpresent . . . a fourth time that makes it possible for us to transcend our scholastic categories past-present-future.”22 And in his novel Die Rättin, he mixed the narrative tenses into a scenario of simultaneity: the reports of the title figure from mythical prehistory, when Noah refused to accept rats into the ark, the story about man’s present shortly before a nuclear war, and the prospect of a postnuclear future, in which the mythical existence of the rats supersedes human history. Of the many present literary works that follow the trend to return to myth in order to absorb history into aesthetic simultaneity, the most impressive example is Tankred Dorst’s monumental theater play, Merlin oder Das wüste Land (“Merlin, or The Wasteland”). In order to mark the transition from myth to history, Dorst uses the myth complex of King Arthur and his Round Table, which has already been transformed by Christian salvation history. The story begins with the end of cosmological prehistory: “Christ illuminated by a thousand light bulbs expels the pagan gods. Flashes of lightning tear up heaven. Roaring. Shrieking. Floodlights tracking down the pagan gods. They are falling down into the dark from high above. They are fleeing into the forests; they are hiding themselves in the cities.” History develops from myth according to the pattern of

20. Krolow, Herodot, 36, 57–58 (postscript), 39–40. 21. Ibid., 19, 24, 29–30, 34, 36. 22. Siegfried Lenz, Über Phantasie: Gespräche mit Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Walter Kempowski, Pavel Kohout (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), 72. 406 The Apocalypse in Germany

Christian salvation history as a struggle for perfect political order, represented by the Round Table,and for redemption, symbolized in the quest for the Holy Grail. Christian symbols represent the eschatological, utopian, and apocalyptic visions of meaning, they stand for all attempts to begin civilization, to build up a “better world,” and to let “spirit” rule over “chaos.” In his play about King Arthur and his knights, Dorst demonstrates how these attempts fail.23 Sir Galahad, who to a certain extent plays the role of the apocalyptic visionary—he alone sees the Grail, a symbol of illusory redemption in Dorst’s portrayal—ends his life as a madman who deifies himself: “I love you all; I would like to see all of you happy! I am mad, I am God, I am love! . . . I love Russia, I love France, I love England, America, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Japan; I love Australia, China, Africa, Transvaal. Because I love the whole world, I am going to become God.”24 He is crushed in the decisive battle between the armies of Arthur and Mordred, a fate that—like the previous self-deification—distinguished so many apocalyptic visionaries. Also, King Arthur, who counted on the progress of civilization, on “higher principles,” on “utopia,” perishes with his Round Table. The story ends in “conflict, revenge, murder.” At the end, after everyone has killed each other and the dying King Arthur is rowed away over the dark sea, we read: “The pagan gods are returning. They are wandering around the battlefield.”25 The story is presented by Dorst in the garb of Arthurian myth as an experiment for which failure is inborn. Before the final battle destroys everything, King Arthur reflects: “Isn’t it even possible that the course of history is totally stupid—perhaps more stupid, even, than I am?” Reflecting on himself, he comes to the conclusion: “I thought, said King Arthur, if I were born once again, I would like to be a hermit: only God and I, a man without a history.”26 But not only does Dorst eliminate history by letting it collapse, not only does he dissolve it in the aesthetic scenario of simultaneity by offering the story of the Round Table as a parable of the history of mankind, in which

23. Tankred Dorst with Ursula Ehler, Merlin oder das wüste Land (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 19, 357, 359. See also the excellent interpretation by Jürgen Kühnel, “Tankred Dorsts ‘Merlin’ oder Die ‘Postmoderne’ auf dem Theater,” in Besichtigung der Moderne: Bildende Kunst, Architektur, Musik, Literatur, Religion, ed. Hans Holländer and Christian W.Thomsen (Cologne: Du Mond, 1987), as well as Rüdiger Krohn, Hajo Kurzen- berger, and Georg Guntermann, eds., Deutsche Gegenwartsdramatik, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987). 24. Dorst, Merlin, 363–64. 25. Ibid., 357–58, 360, 373. 26. Ibid., 359, 361. The Last and the First 407 disparate persons and sceneries are mixed together like the Devil in the form of M. Rothschild, Christ hanging on the cross, enormous overcrowded parking lots, and speculations about the question of property: Dorst’s play also dissolves history into simultaneity by virtue of its form. Jürgen Kühnel has indicated that the formal variety of the work, in which “almost all forms of European (and American) theater since the Middle Ages are used,” makes Dorst’s Merlin comparable to Goethe’s Faust. But while Goethe made use of a variety of literary, dramatic, and theatrical forms in order “symbolically to illustrate the history of mankind in its unity and totality,” Dorst uses a variety of jumbled-up historical forms in order to show that the totality of history disintegrated along with its meaning. Characteristically, the “closed form” of classical theater is lacking in the formal variety of Merlin. Kühnel interprets Tankred Dorst’s Merlin as an exemplary work of “postmodernity” in German literature,27 properly, I believe, to the extent that the concept of “postmodernity” is replaced by “postmodernism,” since we are dealing with the literary expression of an attitude of consciousness and not with an epoch. If there is a basic principle for the various manifestations that today bear the label “postmodern” and are an expression of “postmodernist” consciousness, it is their tendency to end a history that has been experienced as meaningless. To that extent “posthistoire” is more characteristic for these manifestations than “postmodernism.” It is significant that the expression “posthistoire,” which in the current critical discussion is used nearly synonymously with the concept “postmodern,” was already introduced in Germany in 1951 by Hendrik de Man to designate that principle that the previously discussed literary works revealed. De Man saw the “current situation”—the situation after the Second World War— characterized by “our culture having fulfilled its archetypal meaning and having entered a phase of meaninglessness. . . . In post-histoire we do not have to do with the lethargy of a culture, whose life force has expired, but with the onset of a phase of world history that falls out of the context of history altogether, because the connections between the cause and effect that previously could be identified historically are lacking.” A year later Arnold Gehlen took up the designation “posthistoire,” using it repeatedly and propagating it in the sense “that the history of ideas has come to an end.” In 1960 he also used the word to characterize the visual arts of his time: “From now on there is no longer a development inherent to art! A somehow logical history of art is at an end; even the consequence of absurdities is at an end, the development is finished, and what is

27. Kühnel, “Tankred Dorsts ‘Merlin,’ ” 304–7. 408 The Apocalypse in Germany now coming is already present: the confused syncretism of all styles and possibilities, posthistoire.”28 The discussion in the eighties is thus not so new just as little as the phenomenon for which the expression posthistoire is used. In particular the syncretistic simultaneity of styles has always existed at the end of epochs, from the Wilhelminian period to as far back as Hellenism. But what is new—and has been new for some time—is that the world has become increasingly “optically and informationally transparent” and, to that extent, “immune to surprises,” as Gehlen noted in 1961. Meanwhile, further progress in computer and electronic technology has led to the point where the impression of immunity to surprise has come to a head in the lack of events. More and more the mediation of events has forced itself before the reality of events so that Jean Baudrillard, one of the French theoreticians of postmodernism, drew the conclusion that an “agony of the real” has taken place that would permit only “pseudo-events”: “The entire scenario of public information and all the media have no other task but maintaining the illusion of events, or the illusion of the reality of actions and of the objectivity of facts.”29 What is finally new is that the possibility of the universal destruction of mankind—which actually has existed for a long time, since the explosion of the first atom bomb— has penetrated everyone’s consciousness as a real threat, but only in the eighties, intensified by the arms race, ecological disasters, accidents in nuclear reactors, and other threats to our environment. The impression that history has come to an end combines itself with the premonition that the remaining senseless confusion will shortly disintegrate into nothing. This state of mind is not a global phenomenon, although the external threat is universal, but characteristic of all Western societies, in which one is accustomed, before the background of the Western tradition, to reflect on the meaning and goal of history, on the apocalypse, and about the “first” and the “last.” For this reason the leading spirits of French postmodernism,

28. Hendrik de Man, Vermassung und Kulturverfall: Eine Diagnose (Munich: Lehnen, 1951), 135–36; Arnold Gehlen, Die Rolle des Lebensstandards in der heutigen Gesellschaft, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 7:19. Gehlen, “Über kulturelle Kristallisation,” in Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1963), 323. Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder: Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modenern Malerei, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1960), 206. It is quite certain that Gehlen took over posthistoire from de Man, to whom he made reference, although at this time and later he was referring primarily to the mathematician Cournot (1801–1877), whom de Man named as the one who coined the expression. Cournot, however, probably did not use the word, although he described a similar matter (Gehlen, Gesamtausgabe, 7:468–470). 29. Gehlen, “Über kulturelle Kristallisation,” 323; Jean Baudrillard, Agonie des Realen (Berlin: Merve, 1978), 62. The Last and the First 409 especially Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida, find lively resonance especially in Germany and the United States. In Germany, however, the discussion inspired by the French has acquired an additional, particular accent. The initial situation is clear: it is determined by all those experiences of the loss of meaning and direction that we have frequently met and that result in the depressing conclusion that history has no meaning. This conclusion receives its depressing force, however, only under the suppo- sition that history does have an ascertainable meaning, even a meaning that can be produced by men. Only for the person who once believed in this meaning does its loss become so painful that he sees himself obliged to attempt something against the consequent emptiness, something fundamental that would counterbalance the construction of meaning that has become illusory. For the intellectual, who feels himself trapped by the dualism of the absolute claim to meaning and his own experience of meaninglessness, the consequent solution is to actively promote the dissolution of meaning and make it absolute, too. We know this strategy from the dadaists; it is also practiced by the theoreticians of postmodernism, although in a different, even more cunning way, not philosophical (in the sense of Plato), but sophistical (in the sense of Gorgias). The experience that reality is more and more disintegrating into inco- herent and meaningless particles and that therefore events mean nothing more, and even lose their reality status, is first generalized and absolutized. But when reality as a whole is shown to be mere sham, there can no longer be attitudes that are adequate to reality. Baudrillard thus asserts a new, radical nihilism: “The universe, and all of us, have entered into a shadowy existence, into the realm of curse and of evil, or not even evil, but rather one of indifference and lack of conviction. Nihilism has asserted itself completely in an unusual manner, no longer through destruction, but as a dissolution into sham, as a rejection of every conviction.” If that is the case, then it is logical to dispose finally of all those convictions that viewed reality as something trustworthy, whose truth can be investigated with reason. Therefore the theorists of postmodernism declare all Western thought that—no matter what school—started from the conviction that a rational relationship to reality is possible as the heresy of “logocentrism.” The distinction between science (episteme) and simple opinion (doxa) with which Plato laid the foundation for rational analysis and argumentation has always been, in Derrida’s view, inappropriate and illusory: “There is only doxa, opinion, belief.” The possibility of examining the truth of differing beliefs with the methods of episteme is thereby negated, indeed, deliberately destroyed. This intellectual act of destruction is in its configuration 410 The Apocalypse in Germany apocalyptic, as Baudrillard rightly recognized: “The destruction of meaning and its order ends in an ‘apocalypse of indifference.’ ”30 Does this apocalypse also promise “redemption”? Yes, it does, by first declaring that irritating reality has been eliminated. The desire for “disrealization” (Entrealisierung), always a warrant of the apocalypse, also characterizes the intellectual strategies of postmodernism. And what is the new condition that takes the place of that vanishing reality? It is écriture, the free flow of linguistic symbols that makes itself independent of all references to reality and links to firm meanings, which dissolves these references and links and thereby actually “redeems” from reality. The apocalyptic character of this “ontosemiological” project of redemption is shown most clearly when it approaches that critical point for which the designation “apocalypse” is current today: the threatened end of human existence by a nuclear war. Jacques Derrida, who tested his strategy in two lectures at that point, does not, of course, doubt that nuclear weapons exist; but their “reality” is not important for him. What is important is that a nuclear war “only exists insofar as people speak about it. . . . It has never yet happened; it is a non-event.” Tothat extent nuclear armaments are also “in a fabulous manner a textual phenomenon”: they “depend more than any previous armament—so it seems—on information and communica- tions structures, on language structures, even those of nonpronounceable language, on graphic coding and decoding.” Accordingly, the “nuclear matter” turns out in his eyes to be a matter of rhetoric. He argues that the discussions concerning armament and disarmament are essentially rhetorical, that is, they seek to persuade; even the strategy of deterrence is, in his eyes, properly rhetorical, in the sense of a “negative manner” of persuasion: “The art of persuasion, as you know, is one of the axes of what has been called rhetoric since antiquity. Deterrence is certainly persuasion, but not merely to think or believe this or that, which can be a factual condition or an interpretation, but rather that something ought not to be done.”31 In the dialogue with the sophist Gorgias, Plato had Socrates depreciate rhetoric as a technique that merely produces “belief without knowledge,” but not “knowledge with respect to the just and unjust.” Indeed, he ridiculed rhetoric as the counterpart of cookery, which only flatters the soul, as cookery does the body. In order to save it from abuse, Aristotle attempted to rescue rhetoric as a useful instrument by connecting it to the

30. Jean Baudrillard, “Transparenz,” in Probleme des Nihilismus: Dokumente der Triester Konferenz, 1980, in Berliner Hefte 17 (1980): 30; Jacques Derrida, Apokalypse, 106; Bau- drillard, “Transparenz,” 31. 31. Derrida, Apokalypse, 100, 102–3, 107. The Last and the First 411 philosophical search for truth. While rhetoric was not a science (episteme) and could operate only with arguments, which are similar to the truth, on the other hand it was also true that “to see the truth and what is similar to the truth is the task of one and the same ability. At the same time men by nature have a sufficient gift for the truth, and mostly they reach the truth.”32 Derrida relies on neither Plato nor Aristotle, but the Sophists, who were proud of being able to help any opinion win a rhetorical victory. The sophistic position suits him, because in his view, there is “no more room for a division between opinion and science” and there is also “no longer truth.” The instrumental indifference of the sophistic position has become in his opinion an all-suffusing principle. It controls not only debates about nuclear strategies, but even the technologies of armament: “Nuclear war is not only fabulous, because one can only speak of it, but so because of the extraordinary sophistication of technologies—which are technologies of mission, of missiles in general, of mission, emission, and transmission, like every techne—essentially coexists and cooperates with the sophistic position.”33 Since for Derrida the strategy of deterrence is a rhetorical matter, since nuclear weapons are a textual phenomenon, and since even armament cooperates with the sophistic position, his reflections on the danger of a nuclear war focus on the following question: “In the light of the nuclear matter how can a dialogue be produced not only between the so-called competent and incompetent parties, but among the competent persons themselves?” And since the “nuclear matter” in his view may ultimately be reduced to “sophistry/rhetoric,” he considers himself just as competent as, if not more competent than, physicists, politicians, diplomats, and soldiers: “We can view ourselves as competent since the sophistication of nuclear strategy never succeeds without sophistry of belief and the rhetorical simulation of a text.”34 Derrida thus produces a discourse concerning the apocalypse of nuclear war. This means that for him it is neither a matter of truth—that does not exist—nor is it a question of the danger resulting from bombs and rockets: he recognizes these only as a textual phenomenon. What he is talking about is not the matter of fact, but rather the discourse about that matter; and this discourse about the discourse of the apocalypse is for its part apocalyptic: Derrida rhetorically destroys the reality of facts and events (when he speaks of the “ ‘reality’ of nuclear armament,” he 32. Plato, Gorgias 454E–55A, 465; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1355A; see also 1359B. 33. Derrida, Apokalypse, 108, 106. 34. Ibid., 100, 107; see also 106, 114. 412 The Apocalypse in Germany places the word reality in quotation marks, as though its existence were questionable), and he supersedes it in the novel condition of a language that declares itself independent of all “significates,” which is absolutely free in its indifference and which accordingly no “real” apocalypse can harm: “I tell you, I have come to tell you that there is no apocalypse, there never has been an apocalypse, and there never will be one. . . . There is only an apocalypse without apocalypse.”35 One may find the theories of these French thinkers of postmodernism abstruse, but they are contestable only if one refuses to accept their premises. On the basis of their premises they prove to be a closed system, even if this system is merely a sophisticated word game that flatters the intellect as French cookery flatters the palate. The uniformity of the system is achieved by carefully avoiding references to the “outside” of reality. German disciples of the French thinkers are less careful because they are more serious. They open the door for argumentation referring to reality and thereby easily allow the game to be destroyed. Michael Wetzel, for example, Derrida’s translator into German, attempts to strengthen his thesis that nuclear war is a “non-event” because it could be spoken about only by referring to reality: the apocalypse “does not take place as the real detonation of the overkill arsenal because there would be no setting and no audience anymore for whom it could take place.”36 But this very reasoning makes the thesis absurd: in reality millions of people would first survive, in Australia, Asia, probably even in Europe and America, who could experience in a very real sense the putative “non-event” as they slowly die in the nuclear winter. The German postmodernist thinkers show in another regard more seriousness than the French: they participate doggedly in the tumult of the German battle of ideologies, thereby giving up necessarily the indifference of the rhetorical game and lending a specifically German character to the apocalyptic tendency of postmodern thought. All this is presented by Gerd Bergfleth, the editor of Georges Bataille’s works and Baudrillard’s translator, who is advertised by his publisher as a “metaphysicist.”37 The chief opponent on the German battlefield is the “Project of Moder- nity,” inaugurated during the Enlightenment and continued via idealism and Marxism up to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School that undertook to establish in this world the rule of reason and thereby to bring mankind on the path of progress to the goal of perfection. With good

35. Ibid., 104, 88–89. 36. Ibid., 138 (postscript). 37. Jean Baudrillard, Der symbolische Tausch und der Tod: Mit einem Essay von Gerd Bergfleth (Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1982) (description on the dust jacket). The Last and the First 413 arguments, Bergfleth states that the project of the rule of reason not only has failed, but must have degenerated to the “logical-technocratic rule of reason that exercises power for its own sake.” The technocratic corruption of “reason that is based on nothing but itself” is inevitable: “The current that pulls the rule of reason to technocracy’s reason of rule cannot be stopped because enlightened reason can only assert its rule by making use of science and technology. Its claim to universality can only be pushed through, because of its abstract character, if it is ready to follow the terrorist agencies of technocracy. What motivated Horkheimer and Adorno to criticize the instrumentalizing of reason was wasted effort; indeed, it was a nearly grotesque undertaking, or how should reason come to the world if it refrains from using the instruments of science? However, it was not intended so seriously; what was criticized were merely deformities, like the reversal of means and ends or the use of reason for irrational purposes. Nowhere was the claim of reason to rule the world shaken, but it was simply shown that this rule is still incomplete.”38 But what does Bergfleth set against the “bankruptcy of the rule of reason”? It is the “postmodern” apocalypse in intensified form. Technoc- racy becomes, “metaphysically expressed,” the apocalyptic opponent, the “principle of primordial evil.” “Primordial evil” must be destroyed if the apocalyptic hope of redemption is to be fulfilled: “The fall is placed before rebirth”; and, in Bergfleth’s opinion, the fall of technocratic reason of rule can be brought about through the utter liquidation of bankrupt enlightened reason, through the “critique of reason.” Bergfleth understands the critique of reason as a “ceaseless decomposition of everything given ontologically or otherwise”: “A puzzling, unbounded desire drives it that, once set in motion, can never again stop, and what it has once achieved must undo again.” Reason does not spare itself in this process of disintegration: “The entire movement of reason takes place basically as a sequence of inner upheavals, which pushes toward destruction, to the point at which reason sacrifices and wastes itself.” We discover familiar characteristics: the German specialty of apocalyptic identification of action and sacrifice in self-sacrifice, this time in the variety of the reflective disintegration of everything “given” and the autodisintegration of reason: “Reason is not spared self-sacrifice.”39 What then constitutes the paradise that is created through the self- sacrifice of reason? “The foreign kingdom that falls to its lot in this fortunate catastrophe is also the land of its birth, its home since time 38. Gerd Bergfleth et al., Zur Kritik der palavernden Aufklärung (Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1984), 9, 186. 39. Ibid., 7, 17, 13, 23–24, 189. 414 The Apocalypse in Germany immemorial, which it has in inexhaustible nature.” There is cause for the presumption that Bergfleth means the return to the “first,” that is, regression to a primeval condition of mankind, from which he assumes that “plenitude” prevailed in it, that is, “the plenitude of human nature,” as well as innocence and purity, that is, the “pure, unspotted condition of nature.” What does he understand by “human nature”? The differentia specifica of man that Aristotle, following Plato, interpreted in the symbol nous (“reason, spirit”), cannot be meant. Presumably he tosses it into a pot along with enlightened reason. He can merely contrast the “groundlessness” of reason with this, which claims to be out of itself,40 whereas Aristotle understood by nous neither a reason that exists out of itself, nor a groundless reason, but rather “the human capacity for knowing questioning about the ground and also the ground of being itself, which is experienced as the directing mover of questions.”41 Bergfleth sees the “plenitude of human nature” exhausted in “dream, madness, eroticism,” and “passion,” primarily in passion. Even “pure thought,” which somehow exists, even if groundlessly, is expressed as passion, specifically in revolt, “in the rebellion of human nature.” Human nature sees itself impelled to revolt because reason becomes cognizant of its groundlessness. But what does revolt achieve? Nothing, if there is no ground; passion realizes itself for its own sake and can find its limit only in death: “Only destruction produces endless excitement, which we experience in passion. . . . Passion is not an élan vital, but rather an élan mortel.” Regression to the putative “first,” “down to the groundless ground, into the maternal origin, which is eternal renewal,” actually ends in death: “It appears certain to me that a leap into one’s own death is necessary, into the experience of one’s own groundlessness, if I wish to make myself absolutely untouchable. The rebellion of human nature (which, in contrast to the second, domesticated nature, can be called the first) is grounded in the groundlessness of death.”42 We have met this feature of the German apocalypse as well.

Where do we stand now? Apparently still between the fronts of progressivist designers of meaning on the one side and the apocalyptic destroyers of meaning on the other. Both camps continue to insist on their absolute claim to legitimacy, although they have both discredited themselves to such an extent in the course of the last two centuries that their claims would have to collapse. The belief in progress, which is built upon the perfectibility of autonomous human reason, has been reduced ad absurdum

40. Ibid., 189, 12, 25. 41. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 149; see also Aristotle, Metaphysics 1070–72. 42. Bergfleth, Zur Kritik der palavernden Aufklärung, 10, 25, 297, 11. The Last and the First 415 by the current condition of the world. Not only is the belief in the autonomy of human reason shaken by the negative effects of scientific and technical progress, which are visibly damaging our environment and could completely destroy it; as Bergfleth rightly noted, the principle itself is finished off, that is, the principle of autonomous reason that, emancipated from any obligations, has become absolutely free and “incorruptible, and stabs everything that does not like to walk the straight path of virtue like itself.”43 But apocalypticists are at an end, too; even if they have tried out as many different varieties of revolt as are possible. Inevitably, they first have to pass through destruction, and again and again they produce only death, be it in their own heads or in gas chambers. Does nothing else remain for us than the curse: “A plague a’ both your houses”? No, there is no occasion for resignation when we consider how worn out both redemptive projects are; however, there is no reason for wholesale condemnations, either. We can learn from the failure of both. Although their interpretations of experience are apparently not adequate to the reality of human existence, these interpretations are rooted in authentic experiences that have to be taken seriously. In particular, the apocalyptic rebellions offer the opportunity to gain insights into the fundamental problems of human existence, since they are motivated by fundamental experiences of suffering and unmistakably express these experiences. They are experiences that we ourselves make or at least can understand; even the interpretations that generalize the experience of suffering and condemn everything that does exist as corrupt and evil can become understandable from the extreme situation of their occasion, although upon sober reflection we recognize their inappropriateness. The longing for meaning is comprehensible and the despair understandable when systems of order collapse that previously had been valid and dependable—even the wish to see an existence ended that is experienced as meaningless, chaotic, and superficial. Of course, understanding experiences of suffering does not solve the problem, even if it is an important prerequisite for seeing through it. One hundred years ago, Nietzsche remarked:

Nihilism as a psychological condition must occur . . . if we have looked for a meaning in the whole of history that is not in it, so that the searcher ﬁnally loses courage. Nihilism is the growing awareness of the long-standing squandering of energy, the pain of “in vain,” the insecurity, the lack of opportunity to recover somehow, to calm oneself some way—the shame of oneself, as though one has cheated oneself too long. . . . That meaning could have been: the “fulﬁllment”

43. Ibid., 15. 416 The Apocalypse in Germany

of the highest moral canon in the whole of history, the moral world order; or the increase of love and harmony in contact among beings; or the approach to a general condition of happiness; or even the movement towards a general condition of nothingness—a goal is still a meaning. The common element of all these ideas is that something should be arrived at by the process itself—and now one grasps that in the process of becoming nothing is achieved, nothing arrived at. . . . Thus the disappointment concerning a supposed purpose of becoming as the cause of nihilism: be it with regard to a very deﬁnite purpose, be it, more generally speaking, insight into what is insufﬁcient in all previous hypotheses concerning purpose that regard the entire “development” (—man no longer as coworker, not to mention the center of becoming). . . . There remains as an escape, to condemn this entire world of becoming as deception and to create a world, which is beyond this one, as the true world.44

This is the escape of the apocalypse. Yet there is the possibility not only of escape but also of resisting. It is true that history is an open process and, as a whole, not an object of experience; whether it has a meaning as a whole thus remains concealed to us, who ourselves are a part of this process. But there are experiences of meaning in history that illuminate the process of reality from within. It is true that the history of mankind is, like our own lives, moving from a beginning to an end; this movement is structured by the tension between deficiency and fulfillment, and to it belongs the urge to transcend it and to imagine a condition of complete fulfillment. But this condition is reached neither by regression to the “first” nor by the forced leap to the “last.” As long as we are in motion between beginning and end, there are experiences of plenitude only in the “middle,” as “miracles” of the present moment, as Krolow said—light and fleeting like a poem: “a scrap of paper that only is true in the moment you bend down to pick it up.” This moment of fulfillment is not the apocalyptic moment, in which time is destroyed forever, since it remains harnessed between the first and the last. There is a “middle” only between the beginning and the end. The moment of fulfillment is fleeting, and it is true that the words that seek to capture it are light and not the matter itself. But when one does not misunderstand the words allegorically but sees them as symbols that depict the process of reality in the psyche, they serve to illuminate this process. To be sure, one must bend down to pick them up. The words of the apocalypse also mediate insight into the tension that that process produces, in this case, by seeking to eliminate that tension. To be sure, this insight is mediated only to the one who comprehends the apocalyptic interpretation of experience without falling victim to the apocalypse.

44. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 13:46–48. The Last and the First 417

Perhaps such comprehension must first be accomplished if it shall be possible to restore the tension between deficiency and fulfillment and to win back humanity, since the apocalypse cannot be undone or repressed anymore after the exegesis of the tension of human existence has reached this extreme point. This page intentionally left blank Bibliography

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Achternbusch, Herbert, 3 Asahara, Shoko, 7 Activism (political movement), 185, Auerbach, Berthold, 29 187, 189–90, 195, 198, 208, 234, Augustine, Saint: on chiliasm, 22–24; 322–23. See also Hiller, Kurt on the term apocalypse, 33; on history, Adorno, Theodor W., 29, 413 40–41, 47, 91–92, 96, 121; on Alexander the Great, 73, 405 existential tension, 40–41, 96 Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 96 Aum sect, 7 American Revolution, 155 Auschwitz, 337, 391. See also National Amos, Book of, 73, 114 Socialism, mass murder of the Jews Anabaptists, quietist, 115. See also Auto-da-fé, 174–75 Münster Anabaptists Avant-garde: and totalitarian politics, 8, Anarchism, 189, 330 330, 332–35, 337; new praxis of life, Anders, Günther, 1, 5, 344, 350, 400 322, 329, 335; apocalyptic intentions, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 16, 57, 69, 89, 323–24, 336; Benn on, 330–31; and 262, 269 Socialist Realism, 333; its failure, Aragno, Piero, 334 335–36 Aragon, Louis, 330, 334 Baader, Andreas, 391, 393 Aristotle: on rhetoric, 259, 261, 268, Baader, Johannes, 228 410–11; on nous, 414 Bab, Julius, 294 Arndt, Ernst Moritz: characteristic Babeuf, François Noël, 343 features of the apocalypse, 17–18, 54, Baeumler, Alfred, 173–74, 178–79 57, 214; apocalyptic interpretation of Bahr, Hermann, 283–88, 296 the Napoleonic period, 17–18, 79, Bakunin, Michail A., 278 125, 127–29, 140–41, 152, 154, 156, Ball, Hugo, 324–27 277, 397; secularization, 38; on Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 7 history, 82, 121; world history as the Barbarossa (Frederick I), 27 Last Judgment, 111–12, 116, 240; Barthel, Kurt, 333 patriotism and nationalism, 123–24, Barthel, Max, 157 127, 170; on Jung-Stilling, 128; on Baruch, Syriac Apocalypse of, 218, 233 spirit, language and nationalism, 140, Bataille, Georges, 412 151; opposition to nobility, 151; and Baudrillard, Jean, 408–10, 412 Kohlrausch, 159; popularity in World Bayer, Konrad, 353 War I, 160; dualistic imagery, 225; Becher, Johannes R.: on nationalism, self-consciousness of the apocalyptic 186; dualistic imagery, 227, 234; prophet, 239; apocalyptic rhetoric, apocalyptic drama, 241, 248, 303; and 261, 265–67, 269–71, 275, 397 the expressionist generation, 293; on Arndt, Johann, 103 war, 295, 298; on van Hoddis, 301; on Arnim, Achim von, 125 Stalin and the Soviet Union, 303, Arnold, Gottfried, 193 309–12, 333; self-consciousness of the Arp, Hans, 324–25 poet, 305–6; and Marxism/

425 426 Index

Communism, 308, 330, 334; 204, 206, 208, 343, 377; on religion, compared with Brecht, 310–12; 187; on socialism, 187; on Marx and compared with Jünger, 312, 317–18; Marxism, 187–88, 196, 400; on national anthem of the GDR, 338 Münzer and the Münster Anabaptists, Becker, Jillian, 391–92 189–90; compared with Bengel, 190; Becker, Julius Maria, 248 on Stalin, 196, 206–7; motivating Beckmann, Max, 220–22, 370 experiences in World War I, 200–202, Bengel, Johann Albrecht: on chiliasm, 377; protest against death and 22–23; apocalyptic key, 24, 89, 96, metaphysical revolt, 202, 369–70, 103, 132; on history and divine 373–77, 390; Friedlaender and Hiller economy, 42–45, 88–89, 91, 96–98, on, 204–6; compared with Bindung 100–101, 104–5, 115, 121, 132, 154; and Naumann, 207; images, 214, 226; allegorical interpretation, 62, 125; on aesthetic dimension, 276 the millennial kingdom, 97, 101, 120, Blumenberg, Hans, 38–39, 45–47, 80 147; inﬂuence on Schelling and Blunck, Hans Friedrich, 157 Hegel, 101; as prophet, 103–4; Blüthgen, Clara, 157 followed by Jung-Stilling, 126–27, Blüthgen, Victor, 157 148; and Böhme, 132; compared with Bockelson, Jan, 145, 350 Bloch, 190; dramatic style of the Böcklin, Arnold, 288, 290 apocalypse, 240, 247 Böhme, Herbert, 385 Benjamin, Walter: on messianic time, Böhme, Jacob, 99–101, 104, 132, 136, 29, 247; on secularization, 45; on 193 redemption, 52; on aestheticization of Brandler-Pracht, Karl, 220 politics, 332–33 Braun, Felix, 295 Benn, Gottfried: and National Braun, Reinhold, 157 Socialism, 330–32, 334–35, 349; and Brecht, Bertolt: on epic theater, 256–57, the grotesque, 347–48; Kraus on, 349; 310; compared with Becher, 310–12; on the transcending intention of art, compared with Jünger, 312; read by 357–58 Ensslin, 395 Benz, Ernst, 101 Brentano, Clemens von, 152 Bergﬂeth, Gerd, 412–15 Breton, André, 330 Bertram, Ernst, 171, 173, 175 Broch, Hermann, 253–55 Beumelburg, Werner, 87, 98 Brock, Bazon, 3, 383 Bildung: concept of, 134–36, 143; and Bröger, Karl, 157 nationalism, 136, 138, 151, 165–66; Bronnen, Arnolt, 291–93, 300, 330, 388 and language, 138–39; and Brooke, Rupert, 230–31 Protestantism, 148–49, 159; and Buch, Hans Christoph, 4 self-realization, 149–50; and Bürger, Peter, 322–23, 335 inwardness, 150, 152; in 1933, 173, Busse, Carl, 157, 161 178 Binding, Rudolf Georg, 175, 177, 182, Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 244 207, 349, 384, 398 Calov, Abraham, 20 Bismarck, Otto von, 159 Camus, Albert, 369–70, 380 Bloch, Ernst: apocalyptic view of history, Cassirer, Ernst, 54–55, 61 4, 6, 190–91, 400; apocalypse and Charlemagne, 363 Utopia, 19, 30–33, 189–90, 204; Chernobyl, 2, 352, 357–58 messianism, 30, 198, 247–48; on Chiliasm, 22–24, 26, 196–97, 367. See secularization, 37, 45–48; on also Millenarianism existential tension, 50, 52–53; spirit Christ. See Jesus Christ of Utopia, 185, 193–94, 197, 202, Cicero, 259 Index 427

Coccejus, Johannes, 96–97, 132, 154 Dante Alighieri, 250 Cohen, Hermann, 29, 155 David, King, 28, 72 Cohn, Norman: on the roots of the Décadence, 287–88, 292–96, 301. See apocalypse, 6, 74; on medieval also Fin de siècle millenarianism, 26 Deficiency. See Tension of existence Comenius, Johannes Amos, 96 Dehmel, Richard, 157, 294, 299 Communism: and Utopia, 32–33; as Deißmann, Adolf, 112, 116 secularization of apocalyptic Derrida, Jacques, 3, 409–12 messianism, 80; communist society, Deutero-Isaiah, 72–75, 114–15 82; Bloch’s view of, 187; and Becher, Dibelius, Otto, 154 303, 308; Internationale, 318; and Dilthey, Wilhelm, 39, 88 avant-garde movements, 330; and Dix, Otto, 307 Benjamin, 333; aestheticization of Döblin, Alfred, 253 politics, 333–34; and Kunert, 358. See “Docked” apocalypse, 5, 84, 255, 257 also Socialism Domitian, 16, 57 Comte, Auguste, 99, 102–4 Doren, Alfred, 31 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Dorst, Tankred, 405–7 Caritat, Marquis de, 31, 90, 99, 102, Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 370 246 Dualism: of the apocalypse, 12, 14–15, Congress of Vienna (1815), 154 106–7, 152, 169–70, 225–33, 244, Consciousness, social field of, 58–59, 61, 250, 339, 364, 392; compared with 63, 69, 87, 143–44, 148, 151, 156 Gnosticism, 372–73 Coppola, Francis Ford, 3 Dundes, Alan, 230 Corax of Syracuse, 259 Corneille, Pierre, 239 Eber, Elk, 319 Corrodi, Heinrich, 22–23, 235–36 Eckhart, Johannes, Meister, 193 Cosmological societies, 70–71, 73–74, Ecumenic empires, 73–77, 268–69 91, 218, 252, 263, 402, 404. See also Eggers, Kurt, 249 Myth Ehrenstein, Albert, 295, 300 Cournot, Antoine Augustin, 408 Eisner, Kurt, 194, 208 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder, 94 Elagabalus, 293 Crusius, Christian August, 43 Eliade, Mircea, 112–13, 131 Crusius, Otto, 157 Elijah, 113 Engels, Friedrich, 31, 84, 99, 103, 397 Dach, Simon, 109 Enoch, Ethiopic Book of, 218 Dadaism, 322–31, 348, 409 Ensslin, Gudrun, 391–95 Dali, Salvador, 329, 332 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus: on Damus, Martin, 334 secularized apocalypse, 36; images of Daniel, Book of: compared with Toller, destruction, 219, 344–45; The Sinking 13, 15–16; and English chiliasts, 24; of the “Titanic,” 220, 250, 340–45; on on vision, 34, 42; and secularization, utopianism, 343–44, 355 48; social field of consciousness, 63; Ephesus, Council of, 22 and history, 67, 74–75, 82, 89, 92; Epic theater, 256–58. See also Brecht, expectation of imminent change, 69, Bertolt 73; wisdom, 98; application to Eschatology: as distinguished from political events, 107, 127; judgment, apocalypse, 7, 35; and Utopia, 19–20; 115; as a literary text, 213, 240; and secularization, 37–40 images, 218, 221, 344–45; rhetoric, Eucken, Rudolf, 158, 163 260, 262–64, 268–69, 271, 273; and Euringer, Richard, 249, 383 existential tension, 365, 370 Existential tension. See Tension of 428 Index

existence Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 112, Expressionism: drama, 5, 241, 248–49; 154 251, 256–57; apocalyptic visions Frank, Leonhard, 326 (dawn of mankind), 84, 275, Franke, Ilse, 157 293–307, 323–24; and spirit, 185, Frankfurt School, 412–13 189; and the big cities, 223–24; and Frederick I (Barbarossa), 27 war, 224; dualistic imagery, 226–27; French Revolution (and the Ideas of poetry, 250; and Bloch, 276; 1789), 90, 152, 154–55, 195 compared with Jünger, 315; as Freud, Sigmund, 231 avant-garde movement, 322; and the Fricke, Gerhard, 173 dadaists, 324–25, 327–28; and Friedlaender, Salomo, 204–6 politics, 330; and Benn, 330–32, 334; Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 45 and poetry after 1945, 339; and the Fromm, Erich, 229 grotesque, 347, 351 Frye, Northrop, 218 Ezekiel, Book of, 72–73, 114–15 Fulfillment. See Tension of existence Futurism, 322, 329, 334 Fascism: and avant-garde movements, 8, 329–30, 332–33; Italian Fascism, 329, Ganghofer, Ludwig, 117, 157, 270–71 332, 334; aestheticization of politics, García Márquez, Gabriel, 3 333–35; as seen in East Germany, 338; Gebhardt, Jürgen, 55 and Red Army Faction, 391. See also Gehlen, Arnold, 407 National Socialism Geibel, Emanuel, 108, 112 Fauth, Philipp, 220 Geiger, Theodor, 177 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: and Gendolla, Peter, 252 millenarian tradition, 45; on history, George, Stefan, 287, 292–93, 295, 299, 82; apocalyptic interpretation of the 301 Napoleonic period, 79–80, 125, 139, Gerhardt, Paul, 109 141, 154, 156, 271, 277; on Germany’s Gerlach, Wilhelm von, 125 mission, 117, 139, 170, 271; on German spirit (Deutscher Geist), 7, 129, language and national spirit, 139; 155, 160, 166, 168, 170–71, 176, influence on Arndt, 140; opposition 178–80, 182–84, 207, 266–67, 273, to nobility, 151–52; influence on 349–50. See also National spirit Treitschke and Kohlrausch, 159; Gierke, Otto von, 158, 165–66 popularity in World War I, 159, 163; Glaeser, Ernst, 388 revolution of spirit, 166; Nazis’ view Glöckner, Ernst, 171 of, 179; referred to by Hiller, 194; Gnosticism, 372–78 influence on the spirit of Utopia, 195 Goebbels, Joseph: book burnings, Ficino, Marsilio, 132 172–73; social background, 177; Fin de siècle, 5, 275, 277–92, 295–96, apocalyptic expectations, 178; on 299, 303, 346. See also Décadence belief, 182; dualistic imagery, 227–28; First World War. See World War I psychoanalysis of, 228; on Fischer, Fritz, 156 self-redemption, 380–82; and Red Fischer, Jens Malte, 287 Army Faction, 394; rhetoric of the Flaischlen, Cäsar, 107, 157 “last,” 398 Flex, Walter, 107, 109, 157 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: on Flisges, Richard, 380 German national character, 124; on Fontane, Theodor, 182–83 Bildung, 149; in Straßburg, 151; on Formalism, 322, 330, 334 epic and drama, 247; his poetry, 250; Fourier, Charles M. F., 31 compared with Dorst, 407 Francke, August Hermann, 104 Gogarten, Friedrich, 155 Index 429

Gorgias, 409–10 Arndt, 140; on Bildung, 149; in Grashof, Manfred, 392, 395 Straßburg, 151; on Revelation, 213, Grass, Günter: writing about the end, 4, 275 354; and German national character, Herodotus, 402–5 230; and the grotesque, 352; Herrmann, Max, 173 dissolution of historical succession, Herzog, Rudolf, 157 405 Hesiod, 245 Grosse, Martha, 108 Heym, Georg: on the big city, 223–24; Grosz, George, 306–7, 324 on war, 224, 294–96, 298; dramatic Grotesque, 171–72, 180, 258, 345–54 style in poetry, 250; and the Groys, Boris, 333 expressionist generation, 293; Grundmann, Herbert, 93 experiential background, 299–300 Gryphius, Andreas, 239 Heymann, Walter, 325 Guevara Serna, Ernesto (Che), 392 Heymel, Alfred Walter, 117, 296, Guha, Anton Andreas, 232–33, 255, 298–99 258, 354, 357 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 354 Gundolf, Friedrich, 173, 175, 292–93, Hiller, Kurt: on the spirit of Utopia, 299, 301 184–85, 191, 193–94, 202, 204, Günther, Albrecht Erich, 27 206–8; on socialism, 187–88; Gustavus IV Adolphus, 128 apocalyptic worldview, 189, 191, 204, 400; devaluation of history, 190–91; Habermas, Jürgen, 38 on Germany’s mission, 195; and Halley’s comet, 220, 355 messianism, 198; protest against death Hamann, Johann Georg, 136–38, 140 and metaphysical revolt, 202, 375, Harnack, Adolf von, 158 378; on Bloch, 205–6; political Hart, Julius, 398 influence, 207; on earthly paradise, Hasenclever, Walter, 303 234, 323, 328; on art, 321–23; Hasenkamp, Gottfried, 27 compared with dadaists, 328 Hauptmann, Carl, 107, 157, 294 Himmler, Heinrich, 228, 230 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 107, 157, 199, 256 Hippolytus of Rome, 24, 91 Hausmann, Raoul, 324, 328–29 Hiroshima, 1, 84, 344, 351, 400 Hebbel, Friedrich, 239 Hirschberg, Dieter, 3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Historiogenesis, 70–71, 98 Cassirer on, 54; dialectics, 81; History of Salvation, 40–42, 46–47, 67, influenced by Bengel and Oetinger, 72, 74, 76–77, 80, 91–92, 154–55, 101, 121, 133; universal science, 102; 219, 246, 252, 406 on history, 102, 104, 246; as prophet, Hitler, Adolf: apocalyptic worldview, 104; on world history as the Last 169; and intellectuals, 183; compared Judgment, 110–12, 115–16, 154–55; with Stalin, 206–7, 333; dualistic on spirit, 133, 138, 170; on Bildung, imagery, 225, 227–28; psychoanalysis 135–36; influence on Arndt, 140; of, 228–30; hero of plays and poems, influence on Treitschke, 159; Nazis’ 249, 333, 383; as Messiah, 249, 383, view of, 179; and Bloch and Landauer, 398; Hitler-Stalin pact, 330; Dali on, 194, 206; influence on the spirit of 332; H. and S. Scholl, 368; Putsch of Utopia, 194–95 1923, 385; and Red Army Faction, Heidegger, Martin, 179–80, 349, 398 391; rhetoric, 398–400; in Krolow’s Heilsgeschichte. See History of Salvation poetry, 404–5 Hennings, Emmy, 325 Hoddis, Jakob van, 293, 296, 300–301, Herder, Johann Gottfried: on language 324, 347 and spirit, 136–39; influence on Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: drama and 430 Index

apocalypse, 244, visions of Joyce, James, 253 destruction, 280–83, 285, 295; on Julius Africanus, Sextus, 24, 91 dreams, 285, 291; compared with Jung, Franz, 324 George, 287, 293; and World War I, Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich: as 289, 291 prophet, 104; belief in the millennial Hölderlin, Friedrich, 50–52 kingdom, 126–28, 236; on political Holeczek, Bernhard, 36 protest, 148 Holitscher, Arthur, 184 Jünger, Ernst: compared with Red Army Homer, 252 Faction, 8, 390–91, 393–94; compared Hörbiger, Hanns, 220 with Brecht and Becher, 312, 317–18, Horkheimer, Max, 413 320; on the concept of work and the Horstmann, Ulrich: apocalyptic view of worker, 313–15, 317–18, 320; history, 85–86; compared with Bloch, apocalyptic worldview, 313–16; on 202; images, 232, 236; compared with action and self-sacriﬁce, 317, 389–90; A. Schmidt, 355; transcending and National Socialism, 318, 320; function of literature, 357 compared with dadaism, 327–28 Horx, Matthias, 233 Jünschke, Klaus, 393 Hosea, Book of, 73, 114 Justinian, 363 Huchel, Peter, 339 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 324–25, 327–29 Kafka, Franz, 255, 405 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 135, 149–50 Kahl, Wilhelm, 108, 155 Husserl, Edmund, 56 Kaiser, Georg, 248 Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus, 318 Ibsen, Henrik, 256 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 25, 45, 204 Ideas of 1789. See French Revolution Karlsbad Resolutions of 1819, 154 Inversion of beginning and end in Kayser, Wolfgang, 346 history, 77–78, 91, 245, 251, 254, 312 Kellermann, Bernhard: on the sinking of Irenaeus, Saint, Bishop of Lyon, 235 the Titanic, 220; World War I and Isaiah, Book of, 73, 114 apocalyptic expectation, 224–25, 227; images, 234; dramatic style, 251 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 138, 154, 156, Kern, Erwin, 389 159 Kerrl, Hanns, 398 Janco, Marcel, 324–25 Kindermann, Heinz, 228 Jeremiah, Book of, 72–73, 114 Klages, Ludwig, 284–85 Jesus Christ: second coming and Kleist, Heinrich von, 125, 239, 272 millennial kingdom, 24, 88–89, 91, Klemm, Wilhelm, 302 100, 120, 126–28, 132, 372; as Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 151 Messiah, 28, 75; incarnation, 131; and Knipperdolling, Bernt, 145 existential tension, 365–67, 369; and Kohlrausch, Eduard, 173 the apostles, 273; Wagner on, 378; Kohlrausch, Friedrich, 159 Pinthus on, 379; sacriﬁcial death as Kolbenheyer, Erwin Guido, 175, 180 model, 382–83, 399 König, Karl, 107, 117, 155, 158, 164–65, Jeziorkowski, Klaus, 404 167, 271 Joachim of Fiore (Flora): on the periods König, Otto, 157 of world history, 24–25, 41–44, 47, Körner, Theodor, 125, 152, 383, 394, 90–93, 98, 100–101; Bloch on, 397 193–94 Kraus, Karl: on Heidegger, 180, 293, Johann of Leiden. See Bockelson, Jan 349; on World War I, 348–49, 351; on John of Patmos. See Revelation Hitler and National Socialism, Johst, Hanns, 294–95, 298, 330, 333–34 349–51 Index 431

Krieck, Ernst, 172–73 drama, 238, 240; on the Last Krolow, Karl, 402–5, 416 Judgment, 240, 247; on time, 247 Kubin, Alfred: images of destruction, Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 32, 190, 196, 229, 281; dream, 285; drawing War, 206–7 288, 291; on World War I, 289; and Leninism, 32. See also Marxism the expressionist generation, 293; and Lenz, Siegfried, 405 the grotesque, 346–47, 351 Lersch, Heinrich, 108, 157, 295 Kuhlmann, Quirinus, 99 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: on the Kühnel, Jürgen, 407 periods of history, 42–44, 90; Kulturkampf, 158–59 compared with Joachim of Fiore and Kunert, Günter: writing about the end, Bengel, 43; and millenarianism, 45, 354, 358–59; on immortality, 360, 121; Bloch on, 194; drama, 239 375; on myth, 401–4 Leybold, Hans, 325 Kurz, Gerhard, 60 Lichtenstein, Alfred, 229, 293, 296–99, 324, 347 Lahusen, Friedrich, 107 Liebknecht, Karl, 32, 190 Laing, Ronald D., 58 Lin Piao, 393 Landauer, Gustav: on the spirit of Lissauer, Ernst, 157, 294 Utopia, 184–85, 191–94, 197, 202–3; Lotz, Ernst Wilhelm, 325 on nationalism, 186; on Marxism, Louis Ferdinand, 127 188–89; on history, 191–92; compared Louis XIV, 97 with Spengler, 192; on Hegel, 194; on Löwith, Karl, 39 socialism, 197; and messianism, Lüdtke, Franz, 157 197–98; motivating experiences, Ludwig, Otto, 250 198–99, 201; on political virtues, 200; Ludz, Peter, 19 against apocalyptic interpretations, Lukács, Georg, 189, 200–201, 247 204; political influence, 207–8 Luther, Martin: on history, 93, 96; Langenbucher, Hellmuth, 320 compared with Augustine, 96; on the Lapide, Pinchas, 205 Revelation, 96; as prophet, 104; on Laqueur, Walter, 2 language, 136; social background, Lasson, Adolf, 116–17, 165, 167 145; on the Reformation Church, Last-emperor prophecies. See 146; burning of the papal bull, 174; Millenarianism and German national character, 230 Last Judgment: Bloch on, 19; in the Lüthgen, Eugen, 171 Revelation, 22, 76; in Judaism, 28, Lützow, Ludwig Adolf von, 152 113–15, 268; Augustine on, 40; Arndt Lyotard, Jean-François, 409 on, 79, 111–12, 116, 240; Luther on, 96; in World War I, 106–19, 154, 156, Mahler, Horst, 394 158; Dach and Gerhardt on, 109; Man, Hendrik de, 407 Schiller on, 110, 112; Hegel on, Mann, Heinrich, 289 110–12; Spengler on, 118–19; Mann, Klaus, 119 Oetinger on, 132; Fichte on, 139; and Mann, Thomas: on the German flood, 219; Lavater on, 240; in Broch’s inclination to apocalyptic worldviews, Die Schlafwandler, 253; in Kleist’s 4; book burnings, 173, 175; vision of poetry, 272; as a rhetorical device, destruction, 282; and World War I, 273, 397; in classical apocalypses, 346; 289, 291; and his generation, 293; on and Jesus, 367. See also Weltgericht the intellectual climate of the Lavater, Johann Caspar: following twenties, 316–17 Bengel, 148; on the millennial Mannheim, Karl: definition of the kingdom, 148; on the apocalypse as utopian, 21, 32–33, 35, 54–55; on 432 Index

Bloch, 32; on millenarianism, 37 Micah, Book of, 114, 147 Mao Tse-tung, 392–93 Michel, Karl Markus, 340 Marc, Franz, 302 Michel, Wilhelm, 323–24 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 329, 331, Mickiewicz, Adam, 29 334 Millenarianism: compared with Marquard, Odo, 88 messianism and apocalypse, 19, Marx, Karl: apocalyptic worldview and 21–24, 35, 28, 198; early Christian conception of history, 4, 80–84, 86, and medieval, 23–24, 41–42, 47–48, 90, 99, 105; on utopian socialism, 91, 234–35; and modern ideologies, 31–32; and secularization, 37, 45; and 25, 32, 54; and social revolt, 26; millenarianism, 46; on the earthly last-emperor prophecies, 27; and paradise (communist society), 82, Utopia, 31–33; and secularization, 235–36; as prophet, 84, 104–5, 37–39, 44–45; English and American, 277–78; universal science, 103; 42, 97, 124; and Marx, 46; allegorical Bloch, Landauer, and Hiller on, interpretation, 63; meaning of history, 187–88, 196–97, 203, 400; imagery, 121; Bloch on, 206 226; aesthetic dimension (history as Millennial kingdom: in the Revelation, drama), 241–44, 275; compared with 22–23, 25, 28, 42, 76, 120, 237; Wagner and Nietzsche, 279–80; and Augustine on, 22–23, 41; and early Becher, 308; and Salomon, 389 chiliasts, 23–24; and Joachim of Fiore, Marxism: and apocalyptic tradition, 24; and secularization, 36–37; Bengel 32–33; and secularization, 38, 46; on, 42, 44, 88–89, 97, 101, 120, 126, Hiller on, 187–88; Bloch on, 187–88, 132, 147; and Bloch, 45; 196–97, 206–8, 377; Landauer on, seventeenth-century calculations, 96; 187–89, 193, 196; and German Oetinger on, 97, 100, 132, 147, 195; emigrants, 207; and Becher, 303, 308; in the Middle Ages and early and other ideologies, 313; and Red Modernity, 120–21, 147; in the Army Faction, 392; and the “project Napoleonic period, 126–27; of modernity,” 412 Jung-Stilling on, 126–28, 236; and Marxism-Leninism. See Marxism Arndt, 128; and Münzer, 145; and Matthys, Jan, 145 Lavater, 148; and “revolution of the Mauthner, Fritz, 202 spirit,” 150; and Landauer, 192; May, Karl, 388 expectations around 1900, 199; McGinn, Bernard, 237–38 Irenaeus on, 235; and Engels, 397 Meckel, Christoph, 339 More, Thomas, 20–21, 30, 197 Meidner, Ludwig, 220, 303–5 Moscow trials, 207 Meier, Friedrich, 125 Mueller, Harald, 3, 257–58, 353 Meinhof, Ulrike, 391–94 Müller, Robert, 184, 195 Meins, Holger, 392, 395 Müller, Wilhelm Christian, 125 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 31, 195 Münster Anabaptists: Cohn on, 26; Messianism: compared with partial secularization, 42; Bloch’s view millenarianism and apocalypse, 19, of, 48, 189–90; political and social 21–22, 28, 35; political messianism, context, 93, 120, 145–46; community 28–30; and secularization, 37–39, 80; of property, 147–48; Reck- and the spirit of Utopia, 197–98, Malleczewen on, 350 204–5; messianic time (Benjamin and Münzer, Thomas, 32, 48, 93, 120, Bloch), 247–48 144–45, 147–48, 187, 189–90 Messina earthquake (1908), 220–21 Musil, Robert, 245–46, 252–53, 256 Metaphysical revolt, 369–71, 373, Mussolini, Benito, 329, 334 375–76, 378, 380, 382, 394 Mynona. See Friedlaender, Salomo Index 433

Myth: of Eros, as used by Plato, 52–53, Faction, 391. See also Fascism 59; Cassirer on, 55, 59; National spirit (Volksgeist), 110, 129, demythologizing, 61; in the Book of 131, 133–34, 138–44, 151–56, 160, Daniel, 63, 98; mythical history, 165, 178, 184, 186, 189, 193, 195, 70–71; 98; in National Socialism, 198–200, 240. See also German spirit 180; Landauer on, 203; in other Natorp, Paul, 163 apocalyptic texts, 217–19; in Naturalism, 222–23, 324 cosmological societies, 218, 245, 252, Naumann, Hans, 173, 175, 180, 182, 363–64, 401–4; Ragnarök, 219, 278; 207 in expressionist literature, 223–24, Nero, 57 295–97, 302; of the beginning of Neuenfels, Hans, 3 history, 246; Nordic-Germanic, 278; Nietzsche, Friedrich: on the meaning of Indic, 282; and décadence, 288; and history, 118; on the belief in progress, Gnosticism, 372; Krolow, Kunert, and 118, 280; and Friedlaender, 204–5; on Wolf on, 401–5; Dorst on, 405–7 nihilism, 279, 415–16; compared with Marx and Wagner, 279–80; prophet of destruction, 279–80; and décadence, Nag Hammadi library, 373 287; and Salomon, 389 Napoleon Bonaparte, 4, 5, 17, 57, 79, Nihilism, 279, 409, 415–16 111, 123, 125–29, 139, 142, 151–52, Nipperdey, Thomas, 123 266, 269, 273, 275, 405 Nolde, Emil, 334 Nationalism: and apocalyptic Nordau, Max, 292 speculation (apocalyptic Novalis, 137 nationalism), 4, 120, 123, 131, 134, Nuclear threat, 1–3, 5–7, 36, 84–86, 143–44, 148, 151–52, 154, 156, 232–33, 275, 344, 351–53, 355, 159–60, 169, 368; sense of superiority, 357–58, 400, 408, 410–12 116, 159; and philosophy of history, Nuclear war in literature, 3–4, 85–86, 121; origin under the impact of 232–33, 255, 257–58, 351–57, 405 Napoleon, 123, 129; and Bildung, 136–41; and the spirit of Utopia, 195; and rhetoric, 265 Obruchev, Vladimir Afanasyevich, 375 National Socialism: mass murder of the Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph: on Jews, 4, 170, 337, 381–82; apocalyptic Bengel and divine economy, 88–89, worldview, 169, 275, 337, 368; 98, 103–4; on the millennial student organization and book kingdom, 97, 100, 147, 195; on burnings, 172–73, 175; and symbols, universal science, 100–101; inﬂuence 174, celebrations and festivities, 175, on Schelling and Hegel, 101; on 178, 320, 332–33, 335, 385; and spirit, 132–33; inﬂuence of, 148; religion, 175–76, 178; and intellectual aesthetic dimension, 275 tradition, 179; and national spirit, Ott, Günther, 128 184; Bloch on, 206; dualistic imagery, Owen, Robert, 31 227; apocalyptic plays, 249, 383; and rhetoric, 267, 269, 271, 273, 398–400; Papias, 235 and Wagner and Nietzsche, 280; and Paul, Saint, 14, 365–67, 369, 377 Benn, 330, 331–32, 334–35; and Peasant War, 145, 187 avant-garde, 330, 332, 334–35; and Péguy, Charles, 325 1968 student movement, 339; Kraus Petzold, Alfons, 157 on, 349; compared with the Münster Philippi, Fritz, 108 Anabaptists, 350; Reck-Malleczewen Philosophy of history: as secularization of on, 350–51, 367; and redemption, Christian concepts, 38–40; meaning 386–87; compared with Red Army of history, 88, 120; Condorcet, 90, 99, 434 Index

246; Schelling, 100–102, 104, 121; Red Army Faction (RAF): compared Hegel, 101–2, 104, 110–12, 121, 246; with Jünger, 8, 390–91, 393–94; and nationalism, 121, 134; epic compared with National Socialism, continuity, 246; Wagner, 279 391; on self-sacriﬁce, 391, 394–95; Pietism: and millenarianism, 37, 42, 45, apocalyptic worldview, 392–94; on 47, 120; and the Last Judgment, 115; violence, 393–94 on spirit, 131; on language, 136; Reformation, 93, 96, 134, 144, 146, 275 religious and social protest, 146–48; Rethardt, Reinhard, 392, 394 and Bildung, 148–49 Revelation: characteristic features, 5, Pinthus, Kurt: on spirit, 185, 323–24; 12–16, 56–57, 60, 63, 115, 240; apocalyptic worldview, 190, 303; compared with Toller, 12–16; as anthology Menschheitsdämmerung, utopian, 19–20, 32; millennial 293, 304; on self-redemption, 305, kingdom, 23, 25, 28, 42, 76, 120; the 323, 379; on Benn, 331; metaphysical word apokalypsis, 33–34; as a literary revolt, 370–71, 373, 379 text, 33–34, 213–15, 217, 275; and Plato: on existential tension, 52, 59; and secularization, 38, 48, 54; expectation myth, 59; on demythologizing, 61; on of the parousia, 68, 74, 91, 372; and writing, 62; and Neoplatonism, 132; history, 75–77, 84, 89, 103; Luther’s on rhetoric, 268, 272, 410; and view of, 93, 96; application to Postmodernism, 409–11; on nous, 414 political events, 107, 125–28, 338; Plenge, Johann, 155 images, 215, 217, 220–21, 225–26, Posthistoire, 407–8. See also 229–30, 234, 345; dramatic style, Postmodernism 237–41, 247; and rhetoric, 260–64, Postmodernism, 3, 407–14 266–69, 271, 273, 276; motivating Presber, Rudolf, 157 experiences, 367, 369, 372 Progressivism, 31, 38–40, 42, 45, 47, 67, Revolution of 1848, 111, 161–62 80, 84, 102, 118, 191–92, 248, 252, Rhetoric, 126, 128–29, 239, 241, 243, 400–401, 412, 414–15 250, 259–76, 307, 410–12 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 203 Riehl, Alois, 117 Proust, Marcel, 253 Ritschl, Albrecht, 159 Psychoanalytic interpretations of Roberts, David, 19, 256–57, 312 National Socialism, 228–32 Roethe, Gustav, 158, 178, 228 Pynchon, Thomas, 3 Rolland, Romain, 174–75, 177, 182 Rosenberg, Alfred: on the Nordic race, Quintilian (Quintilianus, Marcus 169–70; dualistic imagery, 225, Fabius), 260 227–28; rhetoric, 267 Roth, Karl-Heinz, 395 Rabsch, Udo, 232–33, 344, 352, 356 Rothe, Wolfgang, 208 Race, 169–70, 180, 195, 273, 368 Rothmann, Bernhard, 145 Racine, Jean, 239 Rubiner, Ludwig, 190, 303 Radek, Karl, 318 Rust, Bernhard, 173, 398 Ragnarök myth. See Myth Rasch, Wolfdietrich, 287 Raspe, Jan-Carl, 394 Sack, Gustav, 293, 298, 301 Rathenau, Walter, 388–89 Sacralization, as counterpart of Reagan, Ronald, 84 secularization, 48, 129 Reck-Malleczewen, Friedrich Percyval: Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, on Bockelson, 145, 350–51; on Comte de, 31 National Socialism, 350–51; Salomon, Ernst von, 388–90, 393 motivating experiences, 367; San Francisco earthquake (1906), 220 existential tension, 368 Sarnetzki, Detmar Heinrich, 182 Index 435

Schäfer, Wilhelm, 398 41–42, 44; and Lessing, 43–45; Schaukal, Richard, 157 Benjamin on, 45; and Kant, 45; legal Scheff, Werner, 255–56 concept of, 46–48 Scheler, Max, 23, 37 Seidel, Ina, 157 Scheller, Karl Friedrich Arend, 125 Seiler, Bernd W., 298 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Serrarius, Petrus, 96 von: influenced by Bengel and Simmel, Georg, 200 Oetinger, 101, 121, 133; on universal Sloterdijk, Peter, 327, 329 science, 101–2, 104; as prophet, 104; Social field of consciousness. See on spirit, 133–34; influence on Arndt, Consciousness, social field of 140; Bloch on, 194 Socialism: and apocalyptic speculation, Schenkendorf, Max von, 125, 152 4, 5, 120–21, 303; and Utopia, 31–33, Scherpe, Klaus R., 255 45, 184–85, 187; Hiller on, 188; Schickele, Rene, 294 Landauer on, 189, 192–93, 199; Schiller, Friedrich von: quoted by Hegel, Becher on, 309–11; and other 110; on world history as Last ideologies, 313; and dadaism, 325; Judgment, 110, 112, 132; quoted by Kunert on, 358. See also Communism Arndt, 111; quoted by Spengler, 118; Socialist Realism, 330, 333, 334 on German national character, 124; Socrates, 52, 61–62, 272, 410 on national spirit, 138; drama and Sophists, 61, 410–11 apocalypse, 239–40, 247 Sorge, Reinhard Johannes, 248 Schlegel, Friedrich, 125, 149–50 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 103 Schlegel, Werner, 177, 182, 398 Spengler, Oswald: on the origin of the Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 138, 154, apocalypse, 73; on the meaning of 156, 159 history, 118–19; on world history as Schmid, Heinrich, 28, 45 the Last Judgment, 118–19; compared Schmidt, Arno, 351–52, 354–56, 388 with Landauer, 192; on ancient Schmitt, Christian, 157 religions, 373 Schneider, Karl Ludwig, 298 Spielhagen, Friedrich, 250 Schneider, Reinhold, 338 Spirit. See German spirit, National Schneller, Ludwig, 109 spirit, World-spirit Scholl, Hans and Sophie, 368 Spirit of Utopia. See Utopia Schopenhauer, Arthur, 204 Spranger, Eduard, 173 Schröder, Rudolf Alexander, 107–8, Stadler, Ernst, 294, 325 117, 157, 294 Staiger, Emil, 238–41, 244, 249–50, 256 Schüler, Gustav, 157 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich: Bloch on, Schulz, Til, 390–91 196, 206–7; compared with Hitler, Schumann, Gerhard, 320, 333, 385–88, 206–7, 333; Becher on, 310–11, 333; 390, 399 Hitler-Stalin pact, 330; art and Second World War. See World War II aestheticization of politics, 333–34 Secularization: concept applied to Stalinism, 330, 333–35, 337 apocalypse, eschatology, Stapel, Wilhelm, 183 millenarianism, and messianism, Sternberg, Leo, 157 36–49, 54, 121, 129; Bloch on, 37, Stolberg, Christian, 152 45–48; Habermas on, 38; Blumenberg Storm, Theodor, 251 on, 38–39, 46–47, 80; Dilthey, Strauss, Richard. 283, 286, 289 Troeltsch, and Löwith on, 39; as Strindberg, August, 256 temporalization of existential tension, Stritzky, Else von, 201 40; partial secularization (Joachim of Stuck, Franz von, 287, 289, 295 Fiore, Münster Anabaptists, Pietists), Stucken, Eduard, 108–9, 157 436 Index

Student movement of 1968: and Bloch, Troeltsch, Ernst, 39 208; and Nazi past, 339–40; belief in Tuveson, Ernest Lee, 238 Utopia, 343–44 Tzara, Tristan, 324–25 Surrealism, 322, 329–30, 332, 334 Szondi, Peter, 239, 247 Ueding, Gert, 206 Universal science, 99–105 Taborites, 189 Unruh, Fritz von, 107, 293, 301–2 Talmon, Jacob Leib, 29 Utopia: and apocalypse, 19–20, 22, Talmud, 235–36 32–33, 191; classic utopias (More), Tension of existence: to a ground of 30–31, 197; modern utopias of the being, 40, 51, 113, 414; between future, 31, 194–95, 275, 358, 375, deficiency and fulfillment, 40–41, 377; and secularization, 37–39; spirit 47–54, 57–59, 69, 83, 85–86, 92, 146, of Utopia, 184–89, 193–200, 202–3, 218, 225, 236, 238, 337, 354–66, 368, 205–8, 368; and dadaism, 328; and 370–73, 375–77, 382, 416–17; leftist theories of 1968, 343; negative temporal dimension, 40–41, 48, 58, Utopia, 343–44, 355, 257 69–70, 72–73, 75, 78–82, 85, 92, 111, 204, 218, 364; between transcendent Vesper, Will, 157 truth and political order, 72–75, 78, Voegelin, Eric: on self-interpretation of 365; between divine justice and society, 21, 56; on consciousness, 56; human injustice, 113–15 on the origin of the apocalypse, 268; Theweleit, Klaus, 231 on gnosticism and modernity, 373; on Thieß, Johann Otto, 125 nous, 414 Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 46, 96, Voigt, Manfred, 36 146, 275. See also Treaty of Westphalia Volksgeist. See National spirit Thoma, Ludwig, 117 Vonnegut, Kurt, 3 Thorak, Josef, 333 Titanic, 220, 222, 250, 340–45 Wagner, Cosima, 279, 378–79 Toller, Ernst: characteristic features of Wagner, Richard: apocalyptic vision in the apocalypse, 11–18, 21, 32, 54, 57, Götterdämmerung, 5, 384; and 214, 241, 248–49, 304; apocalyptic Ragnarök myth, 219, 278; as prophet, interpretation of World War I, 11–18, 277; on the Revolution of 1848, 278, 63, 200, 292; dualistic imagery, 14, 377; redemption through art, 279, 225–26; and religion, 34; 377–79; compared with Marx and secularization, 38; on the spirit of Nietzsche, 279–80; and décadence, love, 184; and messianism, 198; 287; revolt against death, 375, 379; political influence, 207–8; on the will to become God, 380; on self-consciousness of the poet, 239, self-sacrifice, 383–84, 394 241, 305; dramatic style, 241; Wapnewski, Peter, 278 Verkündigungsdrama, 248–49; and the Wars of Liberation (1813–1815), 5, 17, expressionist generation, 293; on 63, 115, 152, 154, 161, 270, 384 redemption through revolution, Wartburg festival (1817), 174 382–83 Weber, Max, 32, 187, 200 Tolzien, Gerhard, 270 Weinand, Maria, 157 Töpfer, Bernhard, 93 Weltgeist. See World-spirit Towianski,´ Andrzej, 29 Weltgericht, 108–12. See also Last Trakl, Georg, 293, 297, 300 Judgment Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 46–47. See Wetzel, Friedrich Gottlob, 125 also Thirty Years’ War Wetzel, Michael, 412 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 159 Widmer, Urs, 3 Index 437

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, World War I, 4–5, 7, 11, 16, 27, 63, 87, 107, 158 106–9, 112, 115–19, 136, 154–68, Wilder, Amos N., 215–16, 138 170, 176–77, 184, 191, 195–96, 198, Wilhelm II, 108 200, 219, 221, 224–26, 230, 249–54, Wilkenhausen, Alfred, 237 266, 269–73, 280–81, 283, 288–89, Wilson, Woodrow, 136 291–92, 301–3, 311, 314–17, 321, Winckler, Josef, 108, 157 325–27, 337, 348, 351, 377, 384, 398; Wisdom, and speculation on history, anticipation of, 293–301 98–100, 144 World War II, 4, 170, 229, 275, 337, Wöhrle, Oskar, 157 351, 367, 398–400, 407 Wolf, Christa: writing about the end, 4, Wronski,´ Józef Maria Hoëné, 29 354, 357–58; on matriarchy and Xerxes, 403 patriarchy, 401–3 Wolfenstein, Alfred: devaluation of Zech, Paul, 299 history, 191; spirit of Utopia, 208; Zechariah, Book of, 73 dualistic imagery, 226; and the Ziegler, Theobald, 163 expressionist generation, 293; Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, 3 apocalyptic function of art, 323, 332 Zoroastrianism, 6, 372 World-spirit (Weltgeist), 104, 110–11, Zuckermann, Hugo, 157 117–18, 133, 135, 140, 155, 166, 343