Speculations on German History

Home , Evelyn Juers, Hans Mommsen, Harald Quandt, Karl Ludwig von Haller, Malaspina family

erman history never loses its fascination. It is exceptionally G e rman History S p e culations on varied, contradictory, and raises difficult problems for the historian. In a material sense, there have been a great many Germanies, so that it was long unclear what “Germany” would amount to geopolitically, while German intellectuals fought constantly over the idea(s) of Germany. Provocative and spiced with humor, Speculations tackles Germany’s successes and catastrophes in view of this fraught relationship between material reality and ideology. Concentrating on the period from Friedrich the Great until today, the book is less a conventional history than an extended essay. It moves freely within the chosen period, and because of its cultural studies disposition, devotes a great deal of attention to German writers, artists, and intellectuals. It looks at the ways in which German historians have attempted to come to terms with their own varying notions of nation, culture, and race. An underlying philosophical assumption is that history is not one dominant narrative but a struggle between competing, simultaneous narratives: like all those Germanies of the past and of the mind, history is plural. Barry Emslie pursues this agenda into the present, arguing that there has been an unprecedented qualitative change in the Federal Republic in the quarter century since unification. Emsli e Barry Emslie lives and teaches in Berlin. He is the author Speculations on of Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (Boydell Press, 2010) and Narrative and Truth: An Ethical and Dynamic Paradigm for the German History Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). C u l t u r e a n d t h e S t a t e

Cover image: Hermann Wislicenus, Germania oder Die Wacht am Rhein (Germania or the Watch on the Rhine), 1873. Courtesy of the German Historical Museum, Berlin. Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Barry Emslie Speculations on German History

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd i 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:01:52:01 AAMM Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd iiii 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:40:52:40 AAMM Speculations on German History

Culture and the State

Barry Emslie

Rochester, New York

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

First published 2015 by Camden House

Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-929-0 ISBN-10: 978-1-57113-929-X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Emslie, Barry, author. Speculations on German history : culture and the state / Barry Emslie. pages cm.—(Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-929-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)— ISBN-10: 1-57113-929-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Germany—History—Philosophy. 2. Germany—History. 3. Germany— Intellectual life. 4. Germany—Historiography. 5. Historians—Germany. I. Title. DD97.E47 2015 943.0072—dc23 2014046500

This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1: The Problem(s) 9

2: A Plethora of Germanies 18

3: Culture, Language, and Blood 28

4: The Gemeinschaft 46

5: Marx, the Proletariat, and the State 60

6: Hegel and the State 65

7: German Historians and the State 69

8: Meinecke and the State 81

9: The Lingering Ambiguities of the State 103

10: Materialism 110

11: Militarism and Death 118

12: Providence and Narration 132

13: Guilt and Innocence 143

14: The Indispensable Jews 159

15: The Historians’ Debate 171

16: The State Today 188

Notes 215

Index 239

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WOULD LIKE, in particular, to thank two Berlin friends: Herta Frenzel I and Christian Koehler. The former was invaluable during the prepara- tion of the manuscript, while the latter’s advice and criticisms were a constant stimulus. Both are protected by the usual disclaimers. The remaining shortcomings of this book are all my own work.

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HIS BOOK IS AN EXTENDED ESSAY, freely structured, that concentrates Ton the last 250 years of Germany history. It does not sit comfort- ably within the parameters of conventional historiography. For instance, it does not pretend to tell a story, let alone a singular, authoritative story. Nonetheless, stories are central to its explanatory program. More than that even, a privileged notion of narration determines the theoretical assumptions on which that program rests. Therefore this text consciously engages both with theory and with the particular interpretations of historical events when they are placed within the framework of that theory. I should also add that while the German case has been chosen for idiosyncratic reasons (I find it interesting and stimulating), I also believe it illustrates to an exceptional degree the advantages of the theoretical approach taken here. First, then, the theoretical assumptions. This takes us into the epistemology and philosophy of history itself. There is, of course, no lack of theoretical work on history on the part of German thinkers. Indeed one might well regard their contributions in this field as manifold, enlightening, and dangerous. However the position taken up here is not born of a specifically German historical or philosophical school. It is based on the fundamental assumption that history is best seen as a problematic struggle between simultaneous conflicting or competing narratives. History is plural. If one were to look for a German intellectual who most exemplifies this approach it would be Bertolt Brecht. Dramatizing conflicting narrative strands is the fundamental agenda of his “epic” (by which he means narrative) theater. It defines his concept of “real- ism.” However, while the Brechtian notion of narrative (or narratives) is self-evidently of the utmost relevance to what follows, it takes us out of the specific field of the philosophy of history. And despite the large role German artists and intellectuals will play in the following pages, we should stick for the moment with historians, or at least with intellectuals who saw themselves as historians. For instance, in contradistinction to Brecht we might consider Hegel, whose influence in the field of German historiography was once massive. Hegel claims that the “Philosophy of History” (his so-called third form) is itself the highest form of history. And, happily, he can account for it in self-evident, simple, and tautological language. The “Philosophy of History means nothing but the thoughtful consideration of it.”1 This is all based on the axiom that the real (and thereby the world) is rational, a truth to be applied across the

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board. Therefore the fact that “Reason is the Sovereign of the World,” as well as being ubiquitous, means that the historical endeavor is likewise rational.2 But the unhappy result of this is an account of world history, teleologically focused on the beneficent rise of “modern” (nineteenth- century) Prussia, that is debilitatingly singular in its form. It is wholly unproblematized by the question of narrative plurality. At it happens Hegel will be dealt with specifically in chapter 6, not least because his influence was so great, but it should be made clear now that the theoretical argument of this book is designed to establish a notion of history radically contrary to his. Which is to say that the matter of competing simultaneous narratives is always implicit, at the very least, in the following pages, although it is explicitly addressed in chapters 12 and 13. Now to the interpretation of particular events when examined within this framework. Of course historical events and how they are interpreted constitute the guts of the book, and they are dealt with chapter by chapter. However, they should be seen collectively as the product of another tension, a tension that itself reflects the wider dialectic made up of general historical theory and specific historical analysis. This is the friction between materialism and ideology. By materialism all that is meant, in the first instance, is material reality, or (seemingly) objective facts on the ground, no matter that those facts cannot be perceived or described in a manner wholly uncontaminated by the subject who examines them. Ideology, on the other hand, deals overtly with what is imagined to be the case, and with what is desired, or feared. Not surprisingly, ideological schemes and structures proliferate freely, depending on the degree and rigor with which they make contact with material reality, and the stringent, or otherwise, thinking of the theorists who promulgate them. They are unstable and inevitably evolve, becoming more insightful or more deluded, more complex or more (dangerously) simplistic. They have, after all, a great many functions to fulfill and limitless desires to satisfy. One can readily see that an instability and abundance in ideological schemes, ranging from the benign to the inimical, is present to an exceptional and extreme degree in German history. As a result Speculations addresses throughout the ways Germans have seen and interpreted “Germany,” the various notions they have had of it, and the propaganda and epistemological structures they have used to explain their idea(s) of the nation to themselves and the world. Consequently this is a historical account that foregrounds notions of nation, culture, and race. That the German engagement with their ideas of themselves, their nation, and their culture has been a problematic and sometimes a catastrophic business is universally understood. It has also, however, been at times an enlightening and fruitful one. This struggle over the idea—or ideas—of “Germany” has been an unusually productive ideological activity for many reasons, but chief

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among them is that during a good deal of the period covered by this book there was not a single and homogeneous Germany to intellectually engage with. Indeed it is a feature of German history that there has been a plethora of Germanies. And this is the case with respect to both key categories: materialism and ideology. That is, it does not matter whether we are talking about the various geopolitical states of the past or the numerous conceptualizations of Germany. In both cases we are spoiled for choice. The result has been a series of running debates as to identity. But these debates have hardly been restricted to the work of professional historians. They have enriched, and in turn been enriched by, the often remarkable work of German intellectuals and writers in general. Consequently, in the German case the disharmony between the multifarious and discordant notions of the nation on the one hand, and the various realities on the ground on the other, has been unusually profound and intellectually stimulating. One aspect of this dichotomy has been an ideological overcompensation for the failure to realize the nationalist dream of an effective geopolitical state. This was particularly striking in the nineteenth century as the cultural hegemony of France was undermined and then rejected contemptuously, just as Napoleonic military domination had been thrown off in the 1813 wars of liberation. This sense of ideological superiority was further underpinned by the general belief that the German lands, vulnerable both because of their collective disunity and their geographic place in the middle of Europe, had always been victimized by unscrupulous foreign powers. It was possible, however, as a countermeasure, to find comfort in culture and philosophy, in the fecund world of German arts and letters. Hence it was natural to assume that the abstract “Germany” created and celebrated by poets and intellectuals was uniquely lofty and spiritual. In this, at least, Germans surpassed the cruder accomplishments of perfidious foreigners. This bad fit between the basic categories of materialism and ideology turns out to be particularly instructive as a result of two other fundamental considerations. First, it is not as if Germany was merely an idea that at some point, let us say at the founding of the Second Reich in 1871, attained material expression in the form of a new, powerful, and integrated state. There were a great many Germanies before this, some extravagantly imperial in scope and ideology in that they jumped the boundaries of any modern, commonsense notion of a nation-state, irrespective of whether that state is defined geographically, ethnically, or culturally. And even after the Napoleonic period there were still many small sovereign nations in the area that was loosely called Germany, while the debates as to where the borders of any future united state should lie remained seemingly irresolvable. They were only to be settled—though not permanently— on the battlefield. This apparent abundance in possibility and precedent,

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the “presence” of a great many models from the past, and the attendant bitter disappointments born of previous failures to firmly ground a state that would prove equal to its major European rivals, generated a cauldron of ideas and argument that turned out to be wide-ranging, creative, and inimical. Consequently the ideological level was both exceptionally rich and exceptionally important. It certainly should not be seen, in accordance with a vulgar version of Marxism, as a mere expression of, supposedly, more fundamental and determining material reality. Second, when modern Germany did come into being in the nineteenth century the facts on the ground seemed mightily impressive. The Second Reich was successful and dominant. All the arguments and dreams of the past had apparently taken on incontrovertible materialist form. For most Germans the longings of the nationalist poets and thinkers had been realized. History appeared to be providential and, consequently, the future of this new state promised further successes. Was not the new Germany of 1871 just as potent and unique in material terms as it had earlier been, and presumably still was, as an ideological construct? In other words, in the eyes of its citizens Germany was still imbued with special cultural and spiritual qualities. In fact the new state embodied a double triumph, sublimely reconciling material and ideological needs. How and why this double triumph subsequently, and quickly, went awry is one of the key themes of what follows. Given that this extended essay is as much about ideas of “Germany” as it is about German events, it is much concerned with how historians, chiefly but not exclusively German, saw the nation. Therefore attention is paid to Leopold von Ranke, Heinrich von Treitschke, Johann Gustav Droysen and others in the nineteenth century, and to Fritz Fischer, Ernst Nolte, Georg G. Iggers, Fritz Stern and others in the twentieth. Furthermore, intellectuals who have made major contributions to debates on Germany and German history, but are not professional historians, such as Justus Möser, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, Jürgen Habermas, and Daniel Goldhagen play prominent roles. As this is in many ways a cultural studies text it also ranges freely and promiscuously into other fields, looking at writers and artists on a purely instrumental basis. Nor am I shy about making use of ideas and historical illustrations drawn from other countries. All of this will no doubt seem to the stringent reader arbitrary, and quite possibly impermissibly subjective. These are not, however, periph- eral considerations. Within the constricted parameters of a fairly short book, the net is cast as wide as possible precisely to facilitate the “speculations” that follow. For the specialist historian that may be, in itself, a measure and guarantee of how untrustworthy those speculations must be. Nonetheless, exactly that free and heterogeneous approach constitutes the agenda of this essay.

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It should be acknowledged that one historian is given somewhat more space that the others: Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954). There are several reasons for this. Meinecke’s work covers more of this period than that of any of his colleagues because he lived through it. In a long life he experienced the triumph of 1870 when Prussian troops were victorious at Sedan, the subsequent death in the First World War of the empire Bismarck established, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, and the catastrophe of the Third Reich. And he wrote about them all. In fact there was no nineteenth- century German historian, and few early-twentieth-century historians, who busied themselves with the German question to the extent that he did. Furthermore, he did so on a consciously philosophical level. There is a final reason why he plays a prominent role in what follows. He may be at times misguided, certainly at the end desperately naive, and he cannot escape the suggestion—at the very least—of antisemitism. But he is never less than perceptive, trenchant, and stimulating to read. Perhaps his shortcomings make his virtues that much more valuable. So while I remain critical, I admire, and am influenced by, his books. Because of my determination to range freely—to take, as it were, as much advantage of the term “speculations” as I can—my narrative framework is flexible. Although it covers in essence the period from Friedrich the Great until today, it cherry picks. It concentrates on themes and periods and problems that I believe to be important, or instructive, or that have just captured my imagination. Moreover, events, thinkers, and ideas that pre-date the last 250 years are likewise employed from time to time in a wholly uninhibited manner. But this is done in the hope that the reader will find the polemic to which they contribute not only provocative but also worthwhile. However, while this approach means that what follows is not an ordered narrative march from one arbitrarily defined period to the chronological next, this does not mean that the notion of “narrative” is treated as of secondary importance or reduced to a plaything. We are dealing here with competing simultaneous narratives. Furthermore, exactly this emphasis on narrative plurality will be employed to undermine and problematize the power and use of paradigms (above all of Auschwitz) in German historiography. But the general flexibility of approach will result in a good deal of backtracking and cross-referencing, even though the text conforms, albeit roughly, to the chronological course of German history. For instance, the chapters on the twentieth century follow those on the nineteenth and we end with the present. But this free movement has encouraged me to resort to repeated, possibly excessive, signposting. I frequently draw the reader’s attention to something that has already been dealt with or flag what is to come. I can well believe that some readers will find this irritating, however it is intended to help both of us keep as firm a grip as possible on the argument.

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Although not a work of academic history—nothing in this essay is the result of archival research in the Rankean manner—I have put the text within the scholarly apparatus, but only to indicate the sources, books, and essays that I have read and used. There are therefore a good many endnotes. However, nothing is discussed in the endnotes. There is no commentary parallel to that in the text. In keeping with the essay form, if anything was thought worth saying it is on the page proper. The endnotes simply give the sources, and thereby also enable the reader to get some idea of that vast body of literature with which I am not familiar. And should a quote be taken from the secondary literature and duly cited, I will not have read the original. If the original reference is also given in the endnotes, it is only for the reader’s benefit. An increasing number of publications, especially of older texts, are now available via the Internet. Therefore on occasion I have also used online links. These are given in the notes. When possible, I have used sources that reproduce in photocopied formats the original texts. This is the case, for instance, with Ranke’s history of Brandenburg and Prussia, Treitschke’s history, and Bismarck’s letters and memoirs. Where something has been drawn exclusively from the Internet, only the online link is given. If the source used is German and no translator is named, the translations are mine. Despite being influenced by cultural theory, I have tried to avoid difficult or pretentious terminology. I have used the word “signifier,” but hardly in an esoteric sense. I also allow myself the occasional use of “epistemology” and even “ontological.” But the context should make clear what is meant. The term “teleology,” however, is important. Its use in these pages is explained fully when it crops up for the first time in chapter 1, but it ought to be made clear now that in the context of these speculations on history, it is taken to mean not only that the theoretical possibility exists that history makes sense, but that if it does, a telos is unavoidably implied. Which is to say that the historian who accepts, like Hegel, the rationality, let alone the providential character, of history, will end up considering where the history he is talking about is going. Many, chiefly nineteenth-century, German historians did just that. One word that I have tried to avoid because it is a potential mine- field is “historicism.” However, this is difficult, not least because one of Meinecke’s major books employs the German word “Historismus” in its title. This was translated as “historism,” although today one imagines that “historicism” would be preferred. What Meinecke means will be examined in, above all, chapters 4 and 7, but for the moment it is sufficient to say that he is arguing for history as the widest and most illuminating intellectual structure within which the other humanities are best studied and from which they take meaning. In any case, readers, if they wish, can pursue the treacherous and multitudinous connotations of the English

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word “historicism” in the “endnote” of Georg Iggers’s The German Conception of History. There, Iggers states bluntly that the term “has acquired so many often contradictory meanings that it defies definition.”3 Nonetheless, one should state now that the principal difficulty arises from the positivist associations given to the word “historicism” by Karl Popper. That is, does it suggest, as Marx and Engels believed and Popper did not, that the future can be predicted on the basis of a privileged analytical historical method? In general I have cut the Gordian knot where this is concerned and either avoided the term altogether or used it in a context where its meaning is unambiguous. As must be already clear, the word “historiography” is also used, but merely as a loose umbrella term for the various methodologies employed in the study of history. In general I hope that the text is approachable and lively. If it is not, I have failed not only the reader but also myself. It is probably not possible to be both sensible and stringently consistent when it comes to choosing between the original spelling of German proper nouns and their English equivalents. Usually I favor the former. For instance, “Friedrich” and “Wilhelm” are spelled as here throughout. I have also used the odd German noun and, rather pedantically, kept the original capitalized form. I ought to be upfront now and point out that of all the chapters, the last, on contemporary Germany, written by someone who lives there, is the most personal. Indeed, I see that, for whatever reason, I have taken to using pronouns to which I am not entitled. All those “we’s” are unecht. I am not German. My passport is British, although I am not sure what my culture is. More important, however, is that the last chapter attempts to keep all the themes in play, to pull them together, and to push the book into the immediate presence in that I write about things that are not yet, in the autumn of 2014, resolved. It is also the most contradictory chapter of the book, and as it takes us to a conclusion, something should be said now about both the contradiction and the conclusion. While I have already made it clear that the notion of a “teleology” is crucially important if one is to speculate on history, it should also be treated with suspicion. Every age, looking back, is inclined to see itself as some kind of endpoint. Furthermore, while the theoretician might speculate about what is to come, there is a tendency to do so from a position of strength. That is, things, one hopes, will improve, but in part because they are not so bad now. Or, if we do find ourselves in the valley of despair, that only gives us reason to look forward and upward to something better. Of course this does not have to be the case, but as any teleology that is not actively dystopian implies it, it must be seen as a present danger. And it is a danger particularly present in post-1989 Germany. Worse, I am guilty—albeit knowingly and willingly guilty—of succumbing to the folly this implies. That is, I believe the contemporary German

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state to be qualitatively and even profoundly different from all of its predecessors. Moreover it is so, when all is said and done, in a positive sense. I also believe that while the past is never definitively resolved, that it is always with us to some degree or other—and this, as we will see, is an axiom of much contemporary German historiography—there are good grounds for seeing the modern German state as having attained a new and less crippled relationship with the past. This does not mean I believe that Germans are about to start gamboling on sunny uplands, having left behind the valleys and the plains where so many things—heroic, creative, terrible—have occurred. In fact I find the present state of affairs less than inspiring or exciting, which may be one of its principal attractions from the German point of view. But there has, nonetheless, been a radical change with respect to the dialectic struggles formed by idealism and materialism, by culture and the state. .

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N 1945 FRIEDRICH MEINECKE attempted to come to terms with the IThird Reich by writing a little book entitled The German Catastrophe. The title might seem self-evidently unproblematic, but in fact it raises several issues. First, one could cynically observe that while it may well have been a catastrophe for Germany, the Third Reich was a damn sight more catastrophic for other nations and peoples. No doubt that would be a cheap shot since Meinecke, then in his middle eighties and venerated as the doyen of German historians, was arguably the best man to address in national terms the disaster he had just lived through. He was not only well informed on the basis of personal experience as to the manner in which the Nazis had come to power (he knew, as he seems keen to point out, several of the key anti-Nazi players), but he was also unusually well equipped to fold the catastrophe that followed into the long historical narrative. Quite aside from the erudition and exceptional importance of his three major works (Cosmopolitanism and the National State, 1907; Machiavellism, 1924; Historism, 1936), he could remember the celebrations that followed the victory over the French at Sedan in 1870 and the subsequent declaration of a unified Germany in the form of the Second Reich. Who knows, he may even have had some memory of the equally historic victory at Königgrätz in 1866—he would have been four years old at the time—and then the peace treaty that explicitly drove Austria out of German affairs. Consequently Meinecke grew up in a new, unified Germany that had answered in a seemingly unambivalent fashion those great questions of national geopolitical identity that intellectuals and statesmen had fret- ted over for years, most famously during the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. There was to be no Großdeutschland (big Germany). Austria was excluded and would remain so until 1937 when Adolf Hitler violated the kleindeutsch (small German) model and absorbed Austria into the Reich. And here one might note in passing that Mein Kampf, written in the 1920s, states clearly, “The demand for the restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime.” The reason is simple. Even those frontiers are too constricted; they are not “complete.”4 After all, “State boundaries are made by man and changed by man.”5 Hitler, the Austrian, will make all this radiantly clear when he creates the Third Reich.

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The Second Reich, however, remained in effect Prussia writ large, although any number of clever, and glib, rationalizations could be employed to get around the problems this generated. Johann Gottlieb Fichte said that the German becomes a Prussian only when “he becomes fully aware of being a German,”6 and as late as the 1920s Moeller van den Bruck, looking forward to a Third Reich (his book Das dritte Reich appeared in 1922), neatly and naively resolved the matter thus: “Prussia is the great colonizing deed of the German spirit, just as Germany will be the great political deed of the Prussian spirit.”7 But many German thinkers, in particular non-Prussians, were well aware that there was a problem, and that the Prussian/German question had not been resolved definitively. After all, the majority of men running the country from Berlin were Prussian,8 and the Prussian parliament enjoyed exceptional powers. Merely one year before the outbreak of the First World War the Fränkische Tagespost admitted, “We no longer rebel against the new German Reich . . . [nonetheless] . . . how much is still lacking from a unity as we envisage it! . . . But this makes the demand all the more urgent that this Reich not be placed under the thumb of Prussia and its Junker-class, that this Prussian coercion does not suffocate . . . progressive buds in other states. . . .”9 Meinecke, who came from a family of Prussian civil servants and Protestant ministers, had great admiration for much that was Prussian, including the sense of national duty as enshrined in the army, an army that Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, when they instigated military reform following defeats against Napoleon (the most notable being the battle of Jena in 1806), intended to function, in part, as an educational state apparatus, a “school of a new nation.”10 Meinecke thought the introduction of military training in 1814 an event of the utmost importance— and not just for Germany but, as Georg Iggers points out, also for world history.11 However, in 1945 Meinecke had to struggle to keep faith. Writing of compulsory military service, he says: “I myself half a century ago had to describe its introduction into Prussia by the Boyen defense law of September 3, 1814 as a great national as well as epoch-making event, and I still stand by this judgment today.” But he could not deny that he had not fully appreciated the deadly ambivalence inscribed in the Prussian state. He had only now become “aware for the first time of the two-fold nature of the Prussian soul.”12 Meinecke’s image recalls Faust’s sad observation in part 1 that “two souls” dwell in disharmony in his breast. What Goethe has in mind here is the struggle between the sensuous and the spiritual, but the observation and Meinecke’s implied use of it also evokes the antagonistic distinction between German culture and French civilization that will crop up in the next chapter. This was a distinction of which Meinecke was well aware, and his confidence in favor of the German option, even in 1945, was difficult to shake.

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But the title of Meinecke’s little book also reminds us of an issue that is ineluctable in German history and therefore colors all the speculations of this book: how to explain the catastrophe. For there can be no doubt that the Third Reich invests, whether explicitly or implicitly, German historiography of the postwar era across the board irrespective of the actual period the historian may choose to address. This is on the most simple, but important, of levels a question of the timeframe the historian employs. Given that historical events have causes, historians must ask: How deep are the causal roots of the Third Reich? And if the causes are deemed to go back through the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the failure of Bismarck’s Second Reich to establish deep-seated democratic structures (an opinion to which Meinecke came), the inability of the middle class and intellectuals to resolve the German question after the wars of liberation against Napoleon, and (perhaps, finally) to Friedrich the Great in the eighteenth century and his contradictory policy of military expansionism and civil reform, of “enlightened” liberalism and authoritarian practice, does not the rewind itself imply that the poisonous element that burst out in its most virulent form in the mid-twentieth century is diluted retrospectively by the passing years? It is as though immediate guilt and responsibility have been thinned out because the problem has been stretched to cover the previous centuries. Furthermore, the argument for the long view brings with it a great deal of extra and important baggage. How does one hold on to causation if the temporal parameters of the narrative are broadly set? Helmut Walser Smith, who favors the long view and worries that it “no longer represents conventional wisdom” in modern German history, is nonetheless chary of making determinist, teleological claims.13 He wishes to examine how the “centuries connect,” although he wants to talk of “continuities” rather than causation.14 And, beginning in the sixteenth century, he arbitrarily limits his own assumptions. He is in effect employing Lutheran antisemitism as a starting point of something that will end in Auschwitz—which is clearly his goal, despite his fear of determinist explanations. Yet the history of German antisemitism certainly pre-dates Luther. There is a further problem as soon as one connects the centuries, something which, in any case, Smith in his series of discrete essays only does in a jejune sense. One ends up, at the very least, implying a teleology, even if one distrusts, and rejects, the narratively ordered thinking that brings this about. And if one implies a teleology, one is then compelled to consider the possibility of an endpoint—a telos. Yet more or less everyone now feels that this comes with an unsustainable (Hegelian) bent, as though history were a rational process whose outcomes are not only clear but also predictable. That German historians and intellectuals, especially in the late nineteenth century, were very predisposed to this view will be an important theme of what follows, not least because it will help

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explain how a particular Weltanschauung was so powerfully underpinned by the empirical reality of the triumphant Second Reich that it befuddled minds. On the other hand, we might say today that the negative dialectic of Auschwitz has had a similar effect. It has been treated, most notably by Theodor W. Adorno, as the triumphant telos of evil. As such it is and was a goal to which history had always been inexorably moving. For those who are as horrified as Adorno but not prepared to accept his unremit- ting pessimism, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust that it represents, can then be employed as a premise for a day zero (what the Germans call a “Stunde Null”), at which point the slate can be wiped clean and one can begin again and this time get things right. Both of these related positions are unsatisfactory because both either simplify or erase history. More important, they also pay a rigid but debilitating respect to the notion of “telos.” Yet German history is no more focused on the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942 when plans were laid for an effective, high-tech Final Solution to the Jewish Question than it had earlier been on the grand tableau in Versailles on January 18, 1871 when the Second Reich was summoned into existence and the grand Prussian narrative was thereby supremely vindicated. Therefore, this essay is not devoted to the antecedents of the Third Reich when the Third Reich is treated as the end of the story. Perhaps the most important effect of the catastrophe is what happened after 1945. Then the Third Reich functioned as the evil paradigm against which each of the two modern German states measured its contemporary success and exposed the failures of the other. This was a process more marked and explicit in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG: West Germany) partly because the Federal Republic was committed in varying degrees and in various forms to guilt as an ingredient in the new national identity, although it should not be thought that the readiness to foreground guilt was either exclusively or wholly the result of innate decency or lack of self- interest. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR: East Germany) the question of guilt was circumvented by a national propaganda that saw the state itself as a product of the antifascist struggle and claimed, with only limited veracity, that it had been established by Germans whose hands were clean. Throughout the subsequent forty years each state attempted to tar the other as the logical successor of Hitler’s (and in the case of FRG propaganda against the GDR, of Stalin’s) regime, before the matter was settled unambiguously in favor of West Germany. And let us be clear now: There was no (re)unification after the collapse of the GDR in 1989. In 1990 the Federal Republic simply got, in every respect, bigger. However, three years before the events of 1989 the arguments about German history enjoyed a remarkable and passionate outbreak that was wholly framed in terms of the Third Reich. The so-called Historians’ Debate—which raised the question of both the Third Reich’s singularity

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and the causes of the crimes it perpetrated—was the most striking expression in modern times of the lasting and decisive role of Meinecke’s catastrophe. Of course he did not live to see it. Had he done so, he might have thought that the means he had laid out, postwar, to cleanse the German soul and to recover what was good—and to which, like the Historians’ Debate, we will return (see chapters 8 and 15)—had failed. It should be acknowledged immediately that the temporal parameters indicated in the last few paragraphs are not set in stone. They merely mark the period that will be chiefly addressed in this book. But one could, theoretically, pursue the causal question back ad infinitum. Were one to do so, the very notion of history would lose its explanatory function. Instead, a further but radically different category, dependent on a wholly different epistemology, would be logically generated: the Volk and its racial status. In other words, what it meant to be German in some quintessential and near-timeless sense would color and steer the discussion of what Germany was, or was to be. However, in what might be deemed an apposite irony, exactly this element, which in many national histories plays a largely unthreatening role, proves also to be ineluctable in the German context because historians as well as intellectuals, artists, and politicians put it there. Consequently the debate on race and nation enjoyed an unusually intense role in intellectual life, whether before or after the triumph of Prussian militarism. Often race and nation were not treated as matters incidental to the great sociopolitical questions, but as indispensable elements of them. It is true that while this was a pronounced characteristic of German historiography, one could argue that all nations engage in discussions as to national identity. But in the German case what may have seemed reasonable to many thinkers, philosophers, artists, and historians of the nineteenth century proved the treacherous bedrock on which questions of nation and race became matters of life and death in the twentieth, not least because when that catastrophe occurred it was clear that its most extreme and perverse manifestation—genocide—had deep roots in long-standing, though erratic, German antisemitism. Of course one could take a more benign view of the German obsession with what it meant, to quote Wagner’s Hans Sachs, to be authentically German (deutsch und echt). After all, we might speculate that it is understandable if a people who are, for whatever reasons, denied a state spend unusual energies in trying to decide what kind of people, culturally and racially, they actually are . . . and come to pleasing conclusions as a consequence. Happily, at least for all patriotic Wagnerians, questions of race and culture then turn out to be decisive in forming a sublime nationalist propaganda phrased in abstractions and appealing to metaphysics. This propaganda can then serve as a self-flattering overcompensation for not having a nation in which to indulge racial and cultural characteristics in the manner of one’s neighbors. As an aside, one can see much the same

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thing occurring when a nation loses a foreign empire and with it worldly and material dominance. As is clear in the cases of France and Britain, arbitrary cultural factors are highlighted to prove that one is still in certain, but ever more nebulous, senses superior, although the colonies, the district commissioners, and almost all the aircraft carriers have gone. France, it would seem, has style in such abundance that the French need never be in doubt as to the superiority of their national character. The British meanwhile entertain a massive degree of vanity as to particular legal and cultural institutions all wrapped up in a propaganda of fairness. They may not be able to win quite as often as they used to, but at least they have better referees and umpires than Johnny Foreigner. But in the German case nineteenth-century speculations on these matters were more pressing, more influential, and potentially more dangerous. They veered between, on the one hand, high theory, as intellectuals like Herder and philosophers like Fichte at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth tried to identify and explain what made the Germans quintessentially themselves, and, on the other hand, hostility to “aliens,” both foreign like the supercil- ious French and domestic like the German Jews. Both of these groups, but particularly the former, were employed negatively to underpin the counterclaim that echt German culture embodied exceptional “spiritual” values. Naturally these values were taken to be racially and culturally intrinsic. As a result they were a lofty, if impractical, form of psychological consolation, and writers and intellectuals could use them to underline the manner in which Germany, as the land in the middle, had been exploited by its neighbors. Clearly, Germany was a special case, historically destined to pursue a Sonderweg, a unique path that would in one form or another ultimately overcome and then exploit its peculiar geographical (and for that matter cultural) place in Europe. For, as Fichte put it, it was clear that “it was only the deceit of foreign countries that dragged Germany” into lawlessness.15 It is not surprising that this view spills over to some degree, and in various forms, into pure racism. Nor was this process put aside or diluted to the level of, let us say, a manageable patriotism, once there was in fact a geopolitically unified Germany to celebrate. Rather, the subsequent economic and industrial successes of that Germany, along with the military triumphalism of its birth, reinforced and confirmed the self-congratula- tory Weltanschauung to an exceptional degree. Providence, if not God himself, seemed to be at work. It is hard to believe that any other people went through a similar process to the same deep and determining extent. Certainly no other nation succumbed to its malignant potential in like measure and in the same manner. And yet one will always be troubled by the commonsense axiom that this need not have been so, and thus by the unanswerable question as to why it was so, a question that is

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unanswerable because the terrain on which an answer, or answers, must be found is so huge, so potentially expansive in its temporal parameters, and so rich and varied in cultural and historical factors that next to nothing that one might take to be fundamentally determining can be unambiguously established. That, however, hardly means we shouldn’t try. One might note that Fritz Stern, a historian of exceptional perspi- cacity, observed, when reviewing one of the most shallow and fashion- able current accounts of this dilemma, that the Holocaust “somehow eludes understanding.”16 And he is not alone. According to Jane Caplan, Tim Mason, a leading British Marxist historian on Germany, “admitted that he was psychologically incapable of dealing with . . . antisemitism, and subjecting it to the kind of critical analysis that he believed was the only path to historical comprehension.”17 And in 1990 Günter Grass said that Auschwitz will “never be understood.”18 Clearly it would be easy, albeit irresponsible, if we could, in effect, like Daniel Goldhagen, put Meinecke’s catastrophe down to something intrinsically evil in the German character. Of course it must be acknowledged that Goldhagen claims he hasn’t done this, and it was notable that during his remarkably popular German book tour in 1996 he explicitly distanced himself from the notion of collective German guilt. But the whole tenor and argument of Hitler’s Willing Executioners belies these assertions. This, however, is a debate that can be postponed until chapter 13. Yet even the more conventional and substantive historical causes traditionally inferred from immediate pre-1933 history such as the Treaty of Versailles and the economic collapse of the late 1920s fudge a problem that itself will, if taken seriously, only ever generate nebulous speculations. Nevertheless, it is to such speculations that this book is, in part, dedicated. But this specific dilemma should not be seen as independent of the fundamental theoretical problem of historiography itself. This problem can be readily grasped in terms of two overtly banal considerations. First, the historian is always hobbled by what in effect did happen. Consequently, he is driven to underpin the authority of the triumphant empirical facts by the very probity of his method. All subjunctive (or counterfactual) speculation as to how matters might otherwise have run is, irrespective of how theoretically stimulating, lacking in authority when placed alongside the crushing, incontrovertible success of what did. Furthermore, the tyranny of the allegedly factual past can be seen as underpinning what Maurice Mandelbaum has called the “retrospective fallacy,” which is to say, the inference that what happened had to happen. This dangerous solecism leads, as Mandelbaum argues, to a form of historical determinism, implying an “inner necessity” and “a single developing process.”19 As Rainer Rother points out, an axiom is at work in which the possibilities that might be inscribed within the past elude historical portrayal because what has happened “has exposed them as impossible.”20

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The result, we might conclude, is a kind of tyranny, in intellectual terms, of “das Ende.” In these pages this dilemma will be seen in the context of the “telos,” which is of necessity implied in all teleological attempts to understand history. As this also underlines a particular type of historicism that suggests, when events are deemed to be benevolent, that Providence is one of the driving forces of change and that History, as an abstract authority, vindicates the actions and confirms the unique status of the particular nation or Volk, it is a matter to which we will also have to return (above all in chapters 6 to 9), not least because many, chiefly nineteenth-century, German historians fell victim to its seductive powers. Second, the historian is also faced with the paradox that the past about which he speculates is not recoverable in its own terms. No matter how much we may, on the basis of commonsense assumptions, think of the past as empirically indisputable, it is always absent, accessible to us only through the present with all its arbitrary and unstable contemporary baggage. In fact, irrespective of whether, following Leopold von Ranke’s advice, the historian is devoted to archival research or, on the other hand, inclined to abstract speculations based on, let us say, the historical evolution of Hegel’s Spirit, he is always in one form or another writing about the present, no matter that Ranke explicitly rejected this conclusion, at least in his Diaries from 1814. Nonetheless, the presence of the past is no less the case when one uses it to speculate about the future, an activity that in Germany, where there is a great fear of the continued consequences of the twentieth century, is seldom shirked. Naturally these are matters on which, in general, German historians and intellectuals are unusually sensitive and perceptive. In some ways they have always been so. After all, Wilhelm von Humboldt remarked at the beginning of the nineteenth century that “the meaning of the past is not given to, but created by, the historian,”21 while Johann Gustav Droysen, a dominant historian later in the century, observed: “The data for historical investigation are not past things, for these have disappeared, but things which are still present here and now. . . .”22 In particular, the very troubled nature of the last hundred years, ironically thrown into sharp focus by the astonishing successes of the nineteenth century, do not allow a complacent attitude to the business of history writing. The classic Whig interpretation has been utterly exploded and no one who wants to be taken seriously in the Federal Republic is going to be seduced by a Teutonic version of either the standard British nonsense embodied in the “Our Island’s Story” trope or of American exceptionalism. A German intellectual writing about The Presence of History, to employ the title of a challenging post-1989 study, will be untroubled by the observation of the novelist William Faulkner that “the past is not dead, it is not even the past.”23 In Germany this reads as an axiom. And in truth no one will ever fulfill Ranke’s famous dictum to discover how it actually was (wie

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es eigentlich gewesen). He may well, however, discover how it actually is. But, if he is thoughtful, he will readily see that the “actuality” he has uncovered is unstable and unreliable, both with respect to the selected interpretation of the past that has generated it, and to its status and meaning in the present. In order now to give these speculations a more substantive form we can, in taking the first step, return to the title of Meinecke’s well-meaning but naive text from 1945. Certainly, it was a German catastrophe, but one is struck, as has already been intimated, that throughout a good deal of even the period under discussion in this book there was no Germany as a nation-state to talk about. That is, in respect of the title I have chosen, it is not merely the term “History” that is problematic; the term “German” is equally troublesome. Even so, it should be acknowledged immediately that this lack could be rationalized by higher theory into the realm of a blessing. This is most upfront in the work of the greatest apologist for the modern German state before there was one. Hegel had personally seen the collapse of the Prussian realm as put together, chiefly, by Friedrich the Great. It had fallen under the jackboot of Napoleon. But this was simply one “great world historical individual” undoing the work of another. After all, Hegel admired the latter, his nation’s conqueror, at least as much as the former. And there was even a perverse payoff in the humiliation of “Germany” after the defeat at Jena in 1806. As Meinecke in his brilliant book on raison d’état observed perspicaciously: “It was more possible for a prostrate and dismembered State, than for a triumphant and growing State, to feel a painful inducement towards making . . . the reconciliation . . . between the actual existent State and the ideals of Reason.”24 By “Reason” what is meant here is nothing less than the riddle of history solved; and solved in the form of the modern state, which is itself seen as the perfect reconciliation of the rival claims of utilitarian, power-based policy on the one hand, and ethical probity underpinned and vindicated by the great Spirit of History on the other. Dissolving these two polarities into each other was to be Hegel’s great accomplishment; an accomplishment, it can be argued, that spilled in all too poisonous a form into the national ideology of the Germany that was to come. That, however, is a promise realized—and a very two-edged promise at that—to which we will return in chapter 6. For the moment it is enough if Hegel’s theoretical struggles remind us that the absent Germany was very much on everyone’s mind.

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F THERE WASN’T A MODERN GERMANY before the Second Reich was Ideclared in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in January 1871, there was no lack of talk and thinking about Germany. Indeed there were any number of Germanies in play; Germanies of the mind. The problem here is twofold in that it is both seemingly empirical and utterly theoretical. On the one hand there was endless speculation in the early decades of the nineteenth century and before as to what Germany “now” was and what it was to be, and, on the other, there arose the possibility that the very quintessential character of “Germany” was that it was not, in any fundamental geopolitical sense, to be at all. Perhaps, by way of an aside, these two factors can be seen as oddly coupled if we consider some of the fantastic ideas that were current following the wars of liberation against Napoleon. Here, of course, one is up against the brutal fact that whereas there was no Germany to talk of in geopolitical terms, there was, now standing on the European stage with an authority hitherto unequaled in its history, the very concrete fact of triumphant Prussia. Prussia was both a promise and a threat, in that when Germans thought about Germany they certainly thought of Prussia as an indispensable part of the unified nation (whereas about Austria they were ambivalent), but they were absolutely clear that Germany would mean a great deal more—both geopolitically and metaphysically—than Prussia alone could ever mean. It is nonetheless bizarre that both Freiherr vom Stein and August von Gneisenau considered various political arrangements with Britain. Influenced in part by the Hanoverian connection, they imagined a union between Britain and northwest Germany and even looked to what was then, after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, the supreme power in Europe to impose a constitution on the various parts of Germany and then to incorporate them into the British Empire. When political thought, ostensibly dealing with practical empirical matters, takes a turn as fanciful as this, it is clearly the product of a culture profoundly influenced by idealist values.25 It is these idealist values that color and problematize thinking about Germany . . . should, that is, it ever come about as a viable nation-state. This is, in the first instance, very much a move from abstractions to the concrete, but not simply in that the former provides the theoretical model for the realization of the latter. Rather, the former may have to be overcome if the latter is to step upon the stage. Fichte, the great trumpeter

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of German awakening, who at the heady conclusion of his Addresses to the German Nation called on German youth to take up the nationalist struggle, had to make exactly this journey. Initially, he thought Germany could exist only “in the republic of letters.”26 And even as the process of national unification got underway there was discomfort in the minds of many intellectuals as the spiritual and abstract notion of Germany started to take, or give ground to, material shape. For such was the ideal that any empirical manifestation was doomed, at least for the idealist and the romantic, to be a disappointment. If we go back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 we find that Wilhelm von Humboldt had been against the creation of a new, geopolitically unified Germany. He feared it would inevitably become “an aggressive state, which no good German can wish.” What really counted for the German “nation” (or people) was its “great superiority in literary and scientific accomplishment.”27 And just before Bismarck was to instigate the first of the three wars (against Denmark) that would forge the new nation, Bogumil Goltz could confidently assert that Germany was a concept that transcended fixed national boundaries, that its influence was limitless, and that “all humanity” is beginning to recognize it “as its teacher.” Above all, he warned that “we must not trade for the thing or phantom that the French or the English call nation.”28 Even Heinrich von Treitschke, despite being a keen believer in militarism and never afraid of celebrating hard facts on the ground, had no doubt as to where the real, and sublime, crown jewels of the nation lay. Germany was to fulfill what had been promised by the poet and playwright Emmanuel Geibel: “Some day through the German nation, all the world will find salvation.”29 Paul de Lagarde in the late nineteenth century was saying much the same thing. Apparently God had set Germany a sacred task: spread German culture.30 Meanwhile Richard Wagner, who became in the course of the century the dominant embodiment of German art and culture (and a good deal else besides), had, before unification, imagined a mystic state that would set an example to the “daughter lands” on Germany’s borders. In fact its influence would be universal. For would not “German freedom and German gentleness . . . light and warm the French, the Cossack, the Bushman and the Chinese”?31 After unification it was still Germany’s duty to “spread culture,” and then in the year following the creation of the Second Reich he came to a profound realization. Or so it seemed to him. Writing to Nietzsche Wagner confessed that he now thought of “Germanness” “as a purely metaphysical concept.”32 In general one can detect a fear among many German intellectuals, including historians, that what they saw as the essence of Germanness would be sacrificed in the furnaces of blood and iron; that is, sacrificed to the triumphant material productivity of the new imperial power. In 1945 Meinecke was clear that an aberration of just this sort had taken place.33

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In other words, post-Napoleonic arguments as to Germany’s identity was a theme constantly on the minds of intellectuals, politicians, and artists. It was not, and has not yet been, sluiced out of the national consciousness, although it has radically changed its character. Notably, in the century and half before 1945 it took sustenance from the classic debate that played off German cultural values against French civilization. Ironically, perhaps, one of the clearest and most committed (albeit rambling) expressions of this took place during a time when the blood and iron of the industrial great power was involved in a mighty conflict with its neighbor. For when Thomas Mann produced his Reflections of an Nonpolitical Man (written mostly in 1917) it was clear that German victory in the First World War was no longer certain. But the consolations and the rationalizations that gave Mann succor, as well as providing the ammunition for his propaganda, were essentially idealist, even metaphysical, in character. The culture/civilization distinction Mann used goes well back into the nineteenth century, at the very least, where it was common.34 For instance, Wagner’s thinking was thoroughly infused by the German culture versus French civilization binary pair and Wagner features promi- nently in Mann’s book. Put simply, German culture is seen as Volk based and spiritual (mystical appeals to blood and earth are common). It emphasizes community (Gemeinschaft); it is monarchical; expressive of deep social bonding between individuals and groups; it is consciously inward-looking. Whereas the French alternative is arrogant, society (Gesellschaft) based, universalist in its pretensions (including pronouncements on abstract human rights), democratic, more interested in legal systems than communal obligations, republican. There are several aspects in this mix, above all those to do with the native German Gemeinschaft, to which we will return, but of chief importance in the present context is the spiritual and idealist character of the German model. Furthermore, the resonances of this general distinction can be found in other formulations. For instance Meinecke distinguishes between a “cultural” and a “political nation,” Germany and Italy being the former, France and Britain the latter.35 It will be seen readily that Mann’s polemic is based on a contradiction. This is apparent not because he chooses to celebrate metaphysical German values at a time when material reality had taken its most dreadful and immediate expression. Indeed he found a way of getting round this by, in the safety of his study, speculating on the “religious elevation . . . [that] the year-long daily closeness to death produces in the human being.”36 And he was particularly pleased to have received from a soldier in the trenches a letter written “in a gratefully elevated mood” recording how the war had “facilitated his acquaintance with good literature.”37 In fact the privileged higher German values were seemingly enriched by the experience of blood and iron and bullets, not least

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because of the special character of the Teutonic spirit. In another First World War piece Mann expressed this in a neat oxymoron: “The German soul is too deep to take civilization to be a high ideal.”38 But the real contradiction, even paradox, lies in Mann’s appeal to earthy communal existence. Spirituality and metaphysical values have now not merely to be abstracted from blood and soil, they also have to be generated from out of the daily detritus of apparently ordinary (village and urban) life. This is not something that Mann was to do, and in any case he soon disabused himself of the Weltanschauung of his 1917 Reflections. But others, as we will see (chiefly in chapter 4) would take up this challenge. Or, put more accurately, had already done so. One additional factor that emerges from German idealism in general and from specific speculations as to the fundamentally cultural character of Germany in particular is universalism; but of a type to be distinguished from that found in French civilization. Wagner, as part of his attack on French values in German Art and German Policy, proudly declares that “Universal as the mission of the German Folk is seen to have been, since its entrance into history, equally universal are the German spirit’s apti- tudes for Art.”39 We see at once that German universalism is rooted in the special virtues of the Heimat and spreads out from it in order to enlighten the world. But French civilization accepts with open arms the extrinsic universalist values, the Natural Law that its famous school of Enlightenment philosophers in the eighteenth century found in the timeless virtues of, in particular, Lucretius’s De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”)40 and in the classical Roman Republic. Above all, one sees that Germany qua Germany is significant not for itself, but for its pedagogic function in the world . . . that is, for Wagner’s Bushmen and Chinese. Therefore a conceited, overweening notion of the state is theorized but only so that it can be, paradoxically, freed from the constrictions of geopolitical borders. Even in post–World War One Germany this abstraction still had great currency. In fact it was underpinned by reactionary hostility to the Weimar Republic, which was often seen as the triumph of French democratic values. The influential writer (and war hero/warrior) Ernst Jünger remarked at the time that he “hated democracy like the plague.”41 After all, did it not squeeze out of life all the lofty idealist values that were worth dying for? And Jünger is an interesting figure in that he was not only, along with many others (including Adolf Hitler), able to find the ethereal almost tan- gibly extant in wartime experience (something that becomes a trope of German national ideology), but also to positively overdose on it until, when manifested in pain and death, it became the paradoxical raison d’être of existence itself. But other Weimar reactionaries had more to offer than this. For them Germany maintained its special nebulous character in opposition

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to practical notions of the state. Among the more interesting figures are the poets and intellectuals of the Stefan George circle. They held firm to a mystical notion of a seemingly lost Germany that took as its model the Reich at the time of the Hohenstaufen emperors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Consequently, if one was to think in geographical terms, their Germany of the mind would extend as far as Palermo, where the Emperor Friedrich II is buried. But this merely functions as a reduc- tio ad absurdum of the geopolitical idea. Inevitably George’s Germany had to be an idealized manifestation of a divine Spirit. Furthermore this (German) spirit had its roots in the Hellenic world—a claim that, following (at the very latest) the work of Johann Winckelmann in the middle of the eighteenth century, became ubiquitous in a great deal of thinking about the national self-ideal. However, while the George circle’s worldview was axiomatically metaphysical, committed to a lost world of poets (as Max Kommerell, one of the George “disciples,” wrote in his 1928 The Poet as Führer, Hölderlin was the “prophet of a secret Germany”—secret, or geheim, being a key word among the disciples), it, too, celebrated the community, the Gemeinschaft.42 That is, it could not escape a binary coupling that, as we have seen with Mann, is central to much German thought: namely, the double privileging of the intensely local celebrated in all its quotidian detail on the one hand, and the metaphysical concept of the nation on the other. In this coupling, which takes us from the utterly empirical to the uncompromisingly idealist, the state is either treated in the most cursory manner or simply left out of the equation altogether. Significantly, many German historians and intellectuals will often prefer to talk about the “nation” rather than to address the question of the state, not least because the term “nation” can be loosely employed and offers a seductive range of contradictory connotations. Often it is used as a loftier alternative to the word “Volk” and, as a result, marginal- izes or circumvents the practical questions that, in contradistinction, the word “State” evokes. Meinecke, for instance, observes that traditionally the (French) word “nation” has had grander connotations than “Volk,” but then goes on to make the German link explicit.43 Mentioning Montesquieu and Voltaire, he says, “Both men understood by ‘nation’ an ethnological community [Volksgemeinschaft]. . . .”44 Hölderlin, we should note, intends “Volk” even when his term is translated as “nation”: “There are only two good and benevolent forces in this world, God and the nation (Volk).”45 And even Ranke, allegedly with his feet firmly on terra firma, asserts that the historical task is “the task God has given” the human spirit, namely, to celebrate the species, the particular nation—that is, the Volk.46 When we turn to Providence and God in chapter 12 the divine element both implicit and explicit in several of the above quotations will have to be addressed head-on, but for the moment it might be noted

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how the terminology can contribute to incipient fascist ideology. Paul de Lagarde declared in the late nineteenth century, “The nation, like the individual, has a soul,”47 while Thomas Mann in Reflections took comfort in the thought that among the members of the German Gemeinschaft the word “Volk is a truly holy sound.”48 In Hitler’s Mein Kampf the matter is naturally unambiguous. Moreover the word “völkisch,” with respect to both the race and the nation, is raised to the level of a near technical term and, particularly in volume 2, is used obsessively. Clearly there is little place here for any of the practical, sociological-based mechanisms we might take to be necessary to the modern nation-state. Therefore, tackling the theoretical question as to what in fact the state was—a task undertaken as the state in empirical terms emerged and evolved—is one of the threads of nineteenth-century German history, not least because we can see how difficult, even unpleasant, a process it was. Even Goethe, who sensibly suggested that practical matters would bind the nation (he had in mind the coming railways, weights and measures, a common currency, and—something that seems to have meant a lot to him—passports accepted by the border guards of neighboring states49), moved easily from this mundane commonsense position (even though it hardly constitutes a program for erecting the apparatuses of the modern state) to idealism in its grandest form. Put glibly, we see in the two parts of Faust two discrete Weltanschauungen in that we shift unproblematically from Gretchen at her spinning wheel to, at the climax of part 2, the mountainous heights where the eternal feminine (Gretchen in the form of Una Paenitentium) leads us ever onward and upward to salvation. Now, this sort of thing doesn’t get the trains running on time. But, of course, it was never intended to. It does, however, indicate a readiness to leap from the particular to the most abstract and general without bothering very much about anything in between. As Meinecke, struggling with the emergence of the nation-state, observed: “Goethe was at one with Herder and the Enlightenment in his convinced assumption that culture is of higher value than the State.”50 Goethe can also be employed to underline a consideration already mentioned: universalism. It is not merely that much German thinking about Germany was marked by doubts as to what that state should be, or even that it should be at all. It was also the case that the very act of theorizing the nation might be conducted in terms that undercut the assumptions on which one did so. That is, one might begin with the particular (the Gemeinschaft) only to end up with the universal. After all, in the following example Goethe uses language (good, noble, beautiful) that recalls Kant’s terminology in the Third Critique, or The Critique of Judgment (good, beautiful, agreeable).51 And The Critique of Judgment, which attempts to establish universal moral principles through the agency of aesthetics and a historical teleology, is surely one of the most

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intellectually heroic and ambitious endeavors in German idealist philosophy. In any case, we can be sure that Goethe’s eagle, the manifestation of the poet who has taken wing, won’t have to go through passport control:

The poet, as a man and citizen, will love his native land; but the native land of his poetic powers and poetic action is the good, noble, and beautiful, which is confined to no particular province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms wherever he finds it. Therein is he like the eagle, who hovers with free gaze over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence whether the hare on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in Saxony.52

Or, we might add, in Poland or in France. Nevertheless, universalism is intellectually and theoretically wedded to the nation-state and we will return to this later, above all in chapter 6. But as the author of the most significant (that is, influential) of these attempts was Hegel it is worthwhile observing now that the dissolution of universalism and the state into each other is highly unlikely to resolve, or assist in, the practical questions of nation building. One might pause at this point to acknowledge an elephant in the room. It is nothing less than the biggest beast of German nineteenth-century history, one that will repeatedly bully his way into these pages. Bismarck seems wholly untroubled and uninfluenced by all the above considerations. It is as if in counterbalance to German idealism, the actual deeds of unification could only be performed by someone who was absolutely clear in his own mind as to where the parameters of Germany lay—or were to lie—and was utterly goal oriented in getting there. And this would have to be accomplished by laborious empirical struggle employing when necessary brutal means. Above all, it explicitly rejected all philosophical mumbo jumbo, although Bismarck was erudite, well read, and—despite his popular cartoonish image—cultured. Nonetheless, an unpretentious faith in the Protestant God and a sincere dedication to the conservative Prussian establishment, blessed with a dependable Hohenzollern king of considerable personal probity at its head (Wilhelm I, who brought Bismarck back from the embassy in St. Petersburg and made him chancellor in 1862), was all that was necessary by way of abstract theory. And was there not a dialectical interdependence between Bismarck’s clear-sighted goals and his correspondingly flexible and utterly opportunistic exploitation of every twist and turn in sociopolitical life? Certainly his own clarity as to his objectives is striking. He made it clear to an earlier Prussian chancellor (Otto von Manteuffel), with whom he had a difficult relationship, that war with Austria was unavoidable.53 In fact, this is almost the idée fixe of his early political thinking on Prussia’s external relations. That is, the rivalry between Austria and Prussia had to be

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solved “on the field of battle because it was not soluble otherwise.”54 He is also reported to have outlined his plans for the unification of Germany to an amazed Disraeli in 1862, a few weeks before he assumed the Prussian chancellor’s office,55 although the historian A. J. P. Taylor questions Disraeli’s later report of the matter.56 Whatever the case, and despite Taylor’s insistence on seeing luck and inconsistency where others are seduced by the incontrovertible successes, Bismarck’s ability to focus on the goal, even as it shifted, might well have freed him to the degree that he could make full and unscrupulous use of everything that came, opportunistically, his way . . . metaphysics be damned. Here was a man who ate and drank a good deal more than his fill—although in later life a new doctor (Ernst Schweninger) got him into better shape—and whose manifold letters are either devoted to careful analyses of complex business and political matters or to mundane but invariably sincere personal chat with his friends and, above all, with his wife, who was devoted to him, put up with his mistress, and, when possible, provided him with the unpretentious domestic comforts he needed. She was, in addition, the prob- able conduit that led him to a profound and solidly grounded Lutheran faith.57 The higher things in Bismarck’s life seem, appropriately, as deeply rooted and authentic as the trees on his beloved estates. Nonetheless, we are by no means done with the relationship between German idealism and the associated arguments about German nation, race, and culture. But before pursuing the matter further there is time for a speculation that may seem arbitrary and largely self-indulgent but that will, nevertheless, allow us to slip another theme into this text, a theme that will subsequently come into its (appalling) own. The peculiar notions of Germany that have been sketched in this chapter might remind one of contemporary Israel. This comparison may seem like a stretch, but there, too, a state came into being under extraordinary circumstances. Furthermore, there is much uncertainty and dispute as to the geopolitical parameters of this state, and much argument, internal and external, as to what this state actually amounts to. More significantly, there are sections of Jewish society, both within and without Israel, that are explicitly anti-Zionist and question the very validity of the state. For instance, the Weltanschauung of many Hasidic groups is exclusively focused on the return of the Messiah and the study of the Torah and Talmud. In consequence, the state itself is seen as a blasphemous phenomenon, a denial of what it means to be authentically, or quintessentially, Jewish. In other words, the ideal category of “the People” has been sacrificed, sinfully, to the worldly actuality of the state in a manner that recalls the fears of many nineteenth-century German intellectuals worried that material success would corrupt the national soul. Once Germans were also disposed to think of themselves as a special people, perhaps chosen by God.58 Many, notably many influential

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historians like Droysen and Treitschke, had little difficulty in detect- ing in German triumphs the divine imprimatur. Jews, meanwhile, are compelled by textual orthodoxy to see themselves as the chosen people. In a sense this exceptional status pushes both groups into the realm of the otherworldly, although in the Jewish case this shift is explicitly temporal and millenarian. Nonetheless the link is striking, or at least it is in the context of Germany in the nineteenth century. At that time Fichte argued that the Germans had “a metaphysical self” because of their shared recent history.59 Jewish religious, or metaphysical, identity meanwhile is not merely underpinned by a long and often tragic history, but also by the category of racial belonging. This too was to emerge as a marked feature of German life in the nineteenth century before taking on an exceptional form in the twentieth. But the obsessive German concern with the racial identity and social place of German Jews—the famous/notorious Jewish Question—was counterbalanced by attempts to establish a credible notion of the pure Teutonic Aryan. The end result is sometimes an odd and extremely perverse coupling. We have already seen that Wagner—a great and committed antisemite who could hardly address any national issue without employing antisemitism and certainly would never have been able to create his “pure” German works without using the Jews as a negative paradigm—told Nietzsche that he had come to the conclusion that Germanness was “a purely metaphysical concept.” He even went on to claim that this “is unique in the history of the world.” But then he immediately contradicted himself. He added “its only counterpart being Judaism.”60 The racial notion of the German is of course of dubious provenance. Nevertheless it was once a ubiquitous consideration and often generated fantastic pseudo anthropological theories, particularly in the Nazi period. Alfred Rosenberg, for instance, put his money on Atlantis as the birthplace of the Germans.61 This also enabled him to “prove” that Jesus Christ was “an antisemitic descendant” from the Ur-home.62 In practical and legal terms, moreover, “respectable” racial thinking survived even into the modern Federal Republic, where the definition of citizenship (paragraph 116 of the Fundamental Law), although ostensibly framed in geographic terms (the boundaries of the state as they were in 1937), was racial in effect. It is only in recent years that the notion of being a German and being of the German race have been somewhat uncoupled, although in everyday terms it is still difficult for many Germans to think of anyone but an unambiguous looking Caucasian ordering currywurst at the local takeaway, when asking themselves who is a German. It is also a common- place for Germans when struggling with race and nation (clearly the matter is now burdened with some dreadful luggage) to distinguish between their own country and the United States. If, with apparent cosmopolitanism and tolerance, they regularly point out that the latter is a land of

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immigrants, it is invariably for the purpose of making it clear that theirs is not, and nor, frankly, should it ever become so. Angela Merkel, the current chancellor (as I write), has declared that a multicultural (“mul- tikulti”) society is not for Germany. She, or her conservative successors, may come to regret this. But for the moment it is still an electoral winner. Nevertheless, today none of this is as threatening, or as potent, as it once was, when it was easy to elide speculations on race and nation into racism. And it is with this in mind that one returns to the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth to further pursue the question of what the German notion (or notions) of being German was (were) and what this meant for German history.

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S WE HAVE SEEN, when German thinkers turned to culture they inevi- Atably overcompensated for the absence of a national state. Such a state, however much they may have differed among themselves as to the form it would take, became for the majority a wished-for apparatus that would resolve their fears and realize their longings. But in remaining a Germany of the mind it was limited to the status of an ideal form, albeit an ideal form that could be directly and personally experienced. Ranke had said, “Our fatherland is with us, in us.”63 All this meant, however, that when it came to speculating on cultural matters the German intellectual was not obliged to shackle himself with sociopolitical reality no matter where he lived in the thirty-odd sovereign lands that emerged from the Congress of Vienna as the German Confederation (or Bund) in 1815. He was free to seek in abstractions ersatz compensation for what the concrete contemporary reality denied him, even as it imperfectly intimated it. Moreover, these abstractions would rig him out in lofty idealized dress. In fact they might even continue to do their ideological duty when matters were most empirically and dangerously upfront. Hitler declared that as long as the German people thought they were fighting for “ideals” they continued the struggle in World War I, but as soon as they were told they were fighting for their “daily bread” they “gave up the game.”64 This is something of contradiction, as Hitler also wants us to believe that his comrades never gave up; rather they were stabbed in the back. Nevertheless, by this time they did have a Reich to fight for. Before that, however, the parameters of a compensatory German culture could be set as wide as one desired largely because theoretical speculation was unusually untroubled by empirical facts. But where in the cultural field was the intellectual to look in order to discover what was authentically German? The most common and influential answer was: in language. And language, we might note, was no pedantic respecter of either geography or political frontiers. At the end of the eighteenth century Herder, the great public advocate of the innate riches of German culture, certainly put the matter in elevated terms, but he will never let us forget how mundane the privileged category also is:

A nation is formed and schooled by means of its language. By means of the language it comes to love order and honor, it becomes

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virtuous, courteous, open-minded, renowned, hardworking and powerful. He who despises the language of his nation dishonors its loftiest public. He turns into the most dangerous assassin of its spirit, its domestic and foreign reputation, its creativity, its higher morals and its industriousness. But he who elevates the language of the people and employs it as the most potent expression of every sensibility, of every lucid and noble thought, helps to multiply the best part of the public and brings to it a deeper sense of belonging.65

But elevating “the language of the people” also had to be an act of recovery. For speech, being the taproot of national identity, inevitably expresses in its “contemporary” state the decadence into which the German lands and the German nation/Volk had sunk. Above all, the ubiquitous and contemptible imitation (“aping”) of all things French had culturally disinherited the German people. Herder called this “Gallicomania” and his criticism was excoriating. Princes were no longer able to speak German, or if they could it was only a language to be used with “a serf or a servant.”66 And had not every German court become a little Versailles?67 In this, as in many things, Herder reminds one of Wagner, who decades later in What Is German? (1865) derided the petty German princes tarted up in “French livery and uniform, with periwig and pigtail and laughably set out with imitations of French gallantry.”68 Indeed it is Herder who issued the call that Wagner was to heed. German singers and poets were called on to recover the native tongue and all that went with it. For while Herder regretted that the songs of “our” bards had been largely forgotten—unlike, to take his favorite example, the bards of Scotland (understandably he swallowed the Ossian legend whole)— language was still the only potential source of rebirth. And there were, thank God, some grounds for hope. True, there might not have been many leaves on the “old oak tree of our heroic language,” yet there was still some fresh growth.69 Perhaps, before pursuing this a little further, it is worthwhile noting a qualification, even a contradiction, that Herder allows himself and that, as we will see repeatedly, is very pertinent to the question of the German language in particular and German culture in general. It is the privileged status of all things classically Greek. One might have thought that the heroic oak tree of the German language Herder had in mind was indisputably rooted in northern soil. After all, the very raison d’être of the analogy is that it is an unambiguously native plant. And yet we learn that a certain exotic mix, even grafting, is allowed, but it is of such an elevated nature that the result is anything but an inferior hybrid. Even so, the formula Herder uses is odd. The German language remains “unmixed with others” and blossoms “according to its own roots,” but it is also “a stepsister” of the most perfect of tongues: classical Greek. And moreover

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it is unusually well-equipped to absorb the unsurpassable virtues of Greek into itself.70 One can’t help but note that this metaphor seems to imply that there is no blood connection—one’s stepsister is not a blood relative—but that the relationship is close and familial nonetheless. Above all, it is a lived relationship; the stepsister is a contemporary. But, given that classical Greek was a dead, at best ancestral, language, one might have expected German to be its stepchild. However, it does turn out that Herder’s agenda is bolder, and elsewhere he is prepared to go, metaphorically at least, the whole hog. German is the immediate blood “sister” of Greek and therefore is endowed with the duty of preserving for the “whole of Europe” what is the loftiest of language roots. The apparent contradiction (lofty roots), as so often in talk of German culture, is entirely apposite.71 But Herder’s image of the tree is a telling one. The very word in German for “letter” (Buchstabe) is probably derived from runes written on the wood of the beech tree. Wagner, we might note, would have preferred the ash, from which Wotan’s spear is cut and on which sacred runes are engraved. But Wagner is undoubtedly responding to Herder’s call to German poets and balladeers (in German the term “Lyrik” covers both and Wagner was both) to cultivate afresh the roots of German culture. In his idealized Nuremberg of the late Middle Ages the German townsfolk, whether humble or noble, are bound by the common language. They communicate freely, wittily, and poetically. And, ultimately, the freshest, youngest leaf on the tree composes a new and incomparable German Lied, thereby winning the ideal female (Goethe’s eternal feminine in everyday dress) and the victor’s leafy garland. Above all, these Volk exist in explicit opposition to foreign or “welsch” threats. Herder, we should add, had used the same pejorative term for the French.72 In fact The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is the most remarkable manifestation of Herder’s agenda, something which many Wagnerians, troubled as always by anything that evokes the composer’s extreme and racist nationalism, are reluctant to acknowledge. However, if Herder found the fons et origo of his native culture in the soil of its native language, this does not mean that his ethnographic speculations are constricted. For while “the old songs are my witnesses,” this is because whether “Latvian, Polish, Scottish, or German” the older they are and the deeper they are infused with the spirit of the folk, the more far-reaching and meaningful is their contemporary significance.73 After all, he tells us that if he “wanted to psychologically speculate” he could “out of music, song, and speech” lay before us a multitude of “remarkable phenomena.”74 It is clear from this that Herder accepts—must accept— that the principles he applies to his fellow countrymen are applicable to all peoples and their languages/songs. As a result he is far less nationalistic and inclined to xenophobia than Fichte. Nonetheless, he is aware that the

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damage done to Germany by foreign arrogance and native subservience is not solely manifested in the neglected or forgotten epics and ballads, or even in the contemporary inferiority complex vis-à-vis the French. It was indisputable that foreigners had done bad things in the German lands. Did not the crusaders that broke out of France and jour- neyed south though middle Europe mean that no country suffered as much as Germany? Could it be doubted that what may (just) have been stamped by knightly chivalry in the native land (Herder’s view of history often has the feel of a child’s coloring book) turned, when imported into Germany, into “looting and oppression”?75 This is no less than the standard portrayal of German woes one meets in Fichte, Wagner, and the others. Hegel, for instance, plays the same nationalist card. “France took possession in time of peace of free cities, the bulwarks of Germany, and of flourishing provinces, and retained them undisturbed.”76 But Hegel provides a more complex metaphysical explanation of how this was later transcended, of how the special qualities of the Teutonic character dialectically evolved to the point where they could free Germany “from this yoke.”77 Herder, meanwhile, was hardly as metaphysical in his anthropology as Hegel was in his philosophy, yet it is difficult not to detect in his cosmopolitanism—a quality understandably underlined by his admirers today78—the same privileged role for the Germans and German culture. For if the native language is possessed of both a purity and a flexibility that enables it in an unequaled manner to make full use of the (classical) best without abandoning as a consequence its own authentic nature, it is reasonable to infer that the German qua German is special in much the same way. Thus, in Herder’s tempting stewpot of ideas, language and race are destined to become synonyms, or at least sibling expressions of the same fundamental nationalist concept. Naturally they establish their racial superiority over the language and race of (potentially perfidious) foreigners. Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation from 1808 is also keen to underpin the exclusive category of the German language and gives to the argument an ambitious post-Kantian gloss:

This supersensuous part, in a language that has always remained alive, is expressed by symbols of sense, comprehending at every step in complete unity the sum total of the sensuous and mental life of the nation deposited in the language, for the purpose of designating an idea that likewise is not arbitrary, but necessarily proceeds from the whole previous life of the nation.79

Whatever one may think of the philosophical assumptions of this, it is clear that for the author language is unlimited in its national significance irrespective of whether one imagines the people (“nation”) as a

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metaphysical (“mental”) category or chooses to celebrate them in all their material (“sensuous”) everyday existence. For what is the Kantian notion of the supersensuous if not the empirical collective (the Volk) given metaphysical form? Here, however, we might note that it is also explicitly narrative (“the whole previous life of the nation”). In other words, this is a people struggling to live out its historical destiny in difficult times. And when Fichte addresses more directly the practical character of language this national/historical ingredient duly becomes clear. For instance, we note that the parameters of a language are not set by river valleys and mountain ranges. “No German-born prince ever took upon himself to mark out for his subjects as their fatherland, with mountains or rivers as boundaries, the territory over which he ruled, and to regard his subjects as bound to the soil.” Rather, wherever the German language was spoken “everyone who had first seen the light of day in its domain could consider himself as in a double sense a citizen, on the one hand, of the State where he was born . . . and on the other hand, of the whole common fatherland of the German nation.”80 This theoretical flight of fancy, although it recalls Goethe’s eagle, does not lie easily alongside a leitmo- tiv of German history that lasted until the explicit expansionist policies (the drive for more “Lebensraum”) of the Third Reich. Should we go back to the tenth-century chronicles we find the Saxon kings Henry the Fowler and Otto I praised for pushing the German frontier further east, from river valley to river valley, from Elbe to Oder. And if Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s post–World War II, Freudian analysis is to be believed, the hostility to the recognition of the Oder-Neisse Valley as the eastern border of Germany (made official by Willy Brandt as part of a very different Ostpolitik in the early 1970s) was born of a repressed and fearful dream that Germany might one day be whole again.81 One is struck, however, by how fanciful—or perhaps we should say liberated—thinking about the geographic parameters of Germany once was. Helmut Walser Smith draws our attention to sixteenth-century maps in which “Germaniae” extends from Königsberg to Calais,82 and points out that at the beginning of the nineteenth century Fichte was imagining a new Germany that would include Gibraltar.83 We might also note that river valleys got explicitly into the most famous and well-known celebration of the German nation as Volk and state; namely, in the first verse of the national anthem that Fallersleben wrote to Haydn’s tune in 1841. In this case the irony is especially keen, as all the rivers mentioned (Meuse, Memel, Adige) now lie (if they didn’t before) outside the frontiers of the modern German state. And if one regards this as a triviality with which we should not waste time, it ought not to be forgotten that today it still functions, like so much to do with the Third Reich, as a taboo. Sing the first verse in public and you can find yourself in difficulties with the police. Even so, one should not overstate the position of the early cultural

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theorists. Both Fichte and Herder and the others knew that mountain ranges and river valleys are important, even desirable. Practical measures have occasional purchase even in the Weltanschauungen of the most abstract of nationalist thinkers. But they are not, it seems, determining. In this general context, we should not be surprised if uncoupling the claims of language (and race) from geography generates problems. And of course the matter is likely to be especially painful if a nation-state has, however temporarily, the military resources necessary to annex, or hold by force, exactly those areas to which it has, allegedly, cultural and historical claims, irrespective of what one might see as geographical common sense. Perhaps today we might name this the Falklands (or Malvinas) anomaly. But among near neighbors, it is a banality too often confirmed by events that a national power convinced that it is militarily superior to its rivals finds recourse to arms hard to resist. Nonetheless, if one is very broadminded one might, even in the most troublesome instance of this problem in the history of the Second Reich (the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine), concede a certain German claim, but only if the idea of “Germany” is accorded the most generous historical terms of reference. Still, apologists for the Prussian General Staff—following victory in 1870, the General Staff was determined to annex the two provinces and to turn them into a buffer zone—might have pointed out that possession of Alsace and Lorraine could be traced right back to the Saxon kings and emperors of the early Middle Ages, kings and emperors who had some claim to the patrimony of Charlemagne. Nor was this a theme dead to German history. In the fourteenth century the Bishop of Würzburg, Lupold of Bebenburg, published a treatise that was to become influential 150 years later in which he “proved” that Charlemagne was not French but “a German and, consequently . . . the Empire was not only transferred to the kings of the Franks in person, but also to the Germans.”84 We might also note that in 1870 the eminent historian Treitschke, enthused that Germany had now “smashed the last remnants of foreign domination,” was contemptuously dismissive of any criticism of German annexations. In fact he wanted to take more: Luxembourg, for instance.85 And even in 1917 Thomas Mann was still whining that once upon a time the French had stolen the German provinces on the western side of the Rhine.86 Leopold Ranke, meanwhile, in a sweeping account of great power politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that throws Friedrich the Great into the story as a heroic, providential figure, recalled the conquest of Alsace by the “presumptuous” Louis XIV. He laments: “Yet Germany put up with such an insult and concluded an armistice.”87 Meinecke, trying manfully in the 1920s to get an intellectual han- dle on raison d’état and conceding the vital role of geography, sees the “struggle for the Rhine Frontier” as a “constant” going back to “Gauls and Germans from the time of Caesar” and doesn’t, implicitly, have much

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hope of it being definitively resolved.88 But Meinecke didn’t live to see Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand solemnly holding hands at Verdun on September 22, 1984. This issue will crop up again in the context of German claims of innocence and victimhood, notably in chapter 13. But before returning to the nexus made up of language, culture, and race, one should at least acknowledge that territorial expansionism can itself be spurned when “higher” values are put into the equation. Then geography and geopolitical considerations can be readily dismissed with grand indifference. The great, or extreme, German nationalist (and Francophobe) Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who, as Peter Pulzer observes, thought that “Volk and State should be co-terminus,” was still prepared, sneeringly, to leave Alsace to the decadent French.89 It should, however, be admitted that this sentiment is found in his Merke zum deutschen Volkstum from 1833 when Germany was hardly faced with any other option. Nonetheless he is clear that, while one respects history and the rule of Law, the deeper character of the Volk is more important than fresh conquests and new provinces west of the Rhine. Meinecke, somewhat uncomfortable, says of Jahn’s attitude: “The cultural nation itself . . . remains hidden in dark and impenetrable depths.”90 In these matters the key shift is taken when language and culture are married to race. For most thinkers of this period (and, of course, for many others subsequently) this was a self-evident step inscribed in the very logic of the nationalist argument. But in the German case it has special weight because it rests on the premise that the German language has survived largely uncontaminated. Implicit, surely, is the suggestion that something parallel is also the case with the race, although several pro- pagandists—notably Wagner—are prepared to muddy the waters in this matter. However they do so because they believe the racial broth had been strengthened by the new, and robust, ingredients. For instance, Wagner applauds the introduction of barbarian blood into the German tribe, although he chooses to see the “barbarians” as belonging to the generalized Teutonic family. The French, on the other hand, have clearly become hopelessly degenerate, and he wants nothing to do with them. But this sort of stuff descends quickly into propaganda, whereupon the goalposts become playthings and are moved at will. Nonetheless, the decisive element in this once dominant anthropological version of the national myth is indeed the notion of a migration from a Central Asian homeland. But it is a migration that does not, in the exceptional German case, lead to a denial of the Teutonic/Caucasian roots. That is, while other Caucasian groups duly lost their identity, or language, the Germans remained true to theirs and thereby maintained their unique identity. In order for this idea to work one must underline—not unreasonably—that language stands on the first chronological place of culture. Therefore any language that is preserved down the

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generations is of primary significance in every sense. Fichte, in the 13th Address, asserts the necessary premise clearly: “Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins.”91 Here the reference to nature unavoidably evokes the category of race and would, therefore, take us back to the Ur-Heimat before the great migration. But once that migration is deemed part of history, that is, once the Volk are in Europe, we learn that certain Teutonic groups made the mistake of uprooting themselves in a second-stage development that was not only unnecessary but also unwise. And the consequences of this can be best seen in—inevitably—the loss of the native tongue:

The first and immediately obvious difference between the fortunes of the Germans and the other branches which grew from the same root is this: the former remained in the original dwelling-places of the ancestral stock, whereas the latter emigrated to other places; the former retained and developed the original language of the ancestral stock, whereas the latter adopted a foreign language and gradually reshaped it in a way of their own.92

The import of this is decisive. Fichte says it amounts to “a complete contrast between the Germans and the other peoples of Teutonic descent.” It is a consideration that he cannot emphasize too much. “Here, as I wish to point out distinctly . . . it is not a question of the special quality of the language retained by the one branch or adopted by the other; on the contrary, the importance lies solely in the fact that in the one case something native is retained, while in the other case something foreign is adopted.” And this leads him to the causal axiom: men are formed by language, and not language by men.93 Even so, it is clear that this axiom in turn rests on the assumed nature of the racially defined Volk. In fact it seems to be profoundly at one with it, not least because Fichte sees the Germans as the most unmixed of all peoples. They are “the primal nation, the chosen people.”94 Furthermore he was certain that the greatest duty for a man was racially dependent. Race was the overriding ontological category of being and the individual must therefore “forget himself in the Race . . . there is but One Virtue— to forget one’s own personality. . . .”95 Certainly when we realize that language is the principal cultural organ of racial identity, it is difficult, given the above terminology (“stock,” “native,” “ foreign”), to avoid the inference that its loss would amount to the loss of everything authentic to the Ur-tribe. On the other hand, should the native German tongue survive, no doubt owing to those unique qualities Herder ascribed to it, the “contemporary” nation or Volk would possess a cultural and racial status that was not to be outbid. In this manner language and race are shackled.

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One might note, for instance, that Friedrich Schlegel came to the conclusion in the first decade of the nineteenth century that language was the best means to set the frontiers between states because it implied shared origins. He imagined that the advantages of language do not lie in practical matters; it is not a geopolitical alternative to river valleys and mountain ranges. Rather, it is “simply” that language is grounded in shared blood identity. That is itself enough. Meinecke, somewhat regretfully, sees this as a common error of the period.96 And although we are not only post- Schlegel but also post-Meinecke, we should beware of complacency in the matter. Arguably the most influential and insightful of German philosophers of the twentieth century (Martin Heidegger)—and one whose reputation has largely survived his initial enthusiasm for the Nazis—saw the German language as intrinsically privileged. And this was no superficial matter dependent, let us say, on a classic notion of culture as a mere secondary and determined category. Rather, the deepest ontological truths were thought to be encoded in the German language/speech. And even after the Second World War, as Germany’s leading contemporary philosopher Jürgen Habermas notes, Heidegger still saw the German language as “the only legitimate successor to . . . [what else?] . . . Greek.”97 But in returning to the period of the early nineteenth century and preunification ideology, we might now ask ourselves what kind of race did the contemporary German infer from the nationalist arguments on culture and language? And given that Herder is the one who insists on bardic and tribal qualities as the bedrock of authentic speech, we might turn, again, to him. Herder’s image of the early Germans would suit a comic book, although today it seems to have found a livelier, more high-tech home, on the History Channel on German TV. To us it might appear clichéd and childlike. But then, that is intrinsic to both the appeal and the propaganda. These Germans were supposedly childlike in the best sense of the word. They constituted the nonintellectual raw material from which the subsequent generations of “thinkers and poets” sprang . . . or so we must assume. Herder’s Ur-Germans are “blond, blue-eyed,” physically powerful hunters and warriors. And they are dangerous, bringing more “woe” to “this quarter of the globe” than any other people. Yet there is a redeeming, and a promising, Wagnerian nobility in their very simplicity. “The brave primitive German [. . .] can claim nothing but [. . .] a father, a hero, the earth.”98 While it’s notable that Houston Stewart Chamberlain distorts Herder when he uses him to vindicate his own rabid antisemitism (he is a worthy son-in-law to Wagner), he is climbing on the same band- wagon when writes excitedly in his massively influential The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) of: “This barbarian, who would rush naked to battle, this savage, who suddenly sprang out of woods and marshes to inspire into a civilized and cultivated world the terrors of a

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violent conquest won by the strong hand alone. . . .” And although the claim appears fantastic, we can hardly be surprised to discover that our Ur-German was actually “the lawful heir of the Hellene and the Roman, blood of their blood and spirit of their spirit.”99 This is Wagner’s Siegfried and Wagner knew it. He tells us that he found his “blond young Siegfried-man” at “the primal mythic spring” and was “led by his hand, upon the physically-perfect mode of utterance wherein alone that man could speak his feelings.”100 The immediate coupling of the primal source with the primal language is, of course, entirely apposite as a matter of first principle. However, Wagner is more committed to Herder than that. He claims that what he discovered with his archetypal first German was not merely the German language as such, but Herder’s particular notion of authentic Teutonic Ur-speech, a tongue that is, in its very nature, poetic. This is Stabreim, which rejects end rhymes in favor of a dense mix of alliteration, assonance, and consonance.101 Although the standard Ellis translation of “alliterative verse” short- changes Wagner (and Herder), that need not bother us. What is important is that some substance can now be given to the claim that German speech is ontologically unique. Wagner makes this clear when he declares that his operatic poetry is born of “that Stabreim which the Folk itself once sang, when it was still both Poet and Myth-Maker.”102 Elsewhere he theorizes on the nature of Stabreim in more detail, notably in Opera and Drama, although his passion is misleading in that he frequently violated the model by employing end rhymes. I suspect he declared deep commitment in order to give pseudo “scientific” philological expression to his nationalist and völkisch propaganda.103 In any case not everyone was convinced by the Stabreim argument. Like a good many of Herder’s anthropological theories it is, above all, well-meaning and broadminded, but not very securely grounded in historical reality. As a principle it would soon become counterproductive. Schiller, for instance, wrote to Goethe on June 18, 1796 that he was not too taken with Herder’s “implacable hostility toward rhyme . . . he seems to me to go too far.”104 If we stay with blood for the moment, we will not be surprised to see that it soon becomes impossible for serious thinkers to maintain a workable notion of racial purity that remains loyal to anthropological first principles, even as they are laid out in the above naive form. Unserious thinkers will have no trouble and might well pursue the matter to the gates, and beyond, of bestiality. In the generalized barroom context—by which I mean those occasions on which “ordinary” citizens get together and express opinions they know they cannot voice in front of the TV cameras—the attractions of racial thinking are always potentially present. In the first instance any country that permits significant immigra- tion places the question of the cultural suitability of the immigrants on the agenda. If things don’t go swimmingly—and they never do—that

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cultural debate gradually spills over into what we might call today racial profiling, and racial profiling invites racism. This process is certainly not diluted—although it may once have been thought it would be—if the option chosen is something as innately contradictory as a “guest worker” scheme. The hundreds of thousands of Turks and Kurds who came to Germany after the Second World War on this basis were not, by popular (and legal) definition, ever to be seen as German. Nonetheless this would not prevent the average citizen, troubled by growing social problems and declining standards in the school to which he sent his children, from complaining that the guest worker failed to integrate, that is, to take up an ersatz version of that identity from which he was, otherwise, barred on principle. Above all, if the immigrants banded together in sufficient numbers in particular quarters of the city they could minimize the need to take the decisive step that perversely reflects the overriding ideological consideration that has up to now been foregrounded throughout this chapter: learn the host language. Which is to say that although the matter is reduced in the contemporary context to the everyday and the practical, language remains the key consideration, the signifier that, by definition, trumps all others. But surely the foreigner can only acquire it at the cost of realizing that he is in some way not worthy of it, given that he is denied all the ideological and legal benefits that would accrue if he were seen as German. Yet Germans today are still astonished and appalled that so many of “their” guest workers fail to take a step that in commonsense terms (rather than in lofty or racial/nationalist ones) seems self-evidently necessary. Their conclusion, however, is (or better said, was) hypocritical, in that in failing to learn German the guest worker (or his wife, who has even less practical need of it) was deemed to have failed the fundamental test that, it was assumed, would have led him into a community (a Gemeinschaft), from which he would still be in some profound way barred because of questions of blood. What this contradictions reveals, albeit in a perverse manner, is the ideological power of the Third Reich. But it does so in what we might see as a welcome and benign fashion. Today the taboo that makes all forms of German racism wholly unpalatable for the average citizen cripples the German who might otherwise be inclined to pursue the “commonsense” path that, via a series of allegedly logical stepping stones taking one from social to cultural to racial positions, ends up in unadulterated racism. In Germany today to go all the way down that route is to be well-nigh forced to put oneself in the company of crude neo-Nazis who, being overtly and defiantly asocial, are everything other than communally acceptable. Ironically, it is the Nazis, once the most passionate advocates of the Volksgemeinschaft, who are now unconditionally turfed out of the community . . . at least ideologically. More interestingly, the racial taboo with all its fascist associations also makes it difficult to administer the

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guest-worker policy in a stringent enough manner to circumvent exactly these dangers, that is, to ruthlessly throw the guest worker out when he is no longer needed and to ignore his desire to have his family with him. In this matter the German authorities have not—surely to their credit— behaved like the Swiss. And while this has meant considerable social problems in the large cities, the political class has not, on the whole, been deserted by the general public. Therefore Max Frisch’s seemingly banal observation: “We invited guest workers and got human beings” has real significance. Lord knows this has been—and still is—a wretchedly laborious process, but the shifts, both ideological and legal, that the hosts have made to accommodate nonethnic German (guest) workers, have changed the manner in which ethnic Germans in turn think about their own nation and identity. This difficult process needs to be respected, not least because outbreaks of racial/racist thinking (often tarted up in alleged cul- turalist rationalizations) are certainly not things of the past. While this narrative thread will be more directly addressed in the last two chapters of this book, it is necessary to underline that, in the German case, the racist element embedded in historically based notions of culture and people is highly particular and much, even obsessively, addressed. It is a wound still regularly, masochistically, opened. Its special potency is a product of the historical fact that it has always taken as its dominant, focused target German Jews. Therefore if we return to nationalism, culture, and blood in the context of the nineteenth century, we can, appropriately, return to someone who was among the most influential of Germany’s “poets and thinkers,” not least because he well exemplifies the contradictions that are intrinsic to the problem. Wagner had a contradictory, even perverse, attitude to blood. It is not that he determinedly foregrounds the purity of the Aryan option, rather it is that he insists on the singular, poisonous quality of the alternative: Jewish blood. He is then able to underpin the special status of the former by recourse to the absolute evil of the latter. In the first instance we should note that even a drop of Jewish blood in a mixed relationship means that “a Jew will always come to birth.”105 In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler expresses much the same opinion.106 Later, as Führer, he was able to give this legal force in the Nuremberg Laws. Wagner, meanwhile, tells Cosima that Jewish blood always wins out because it is more “corrosive.”107 But in respect of German blood he is, as we have already noted, broadminded. Here the “reality” seems to be a mix of hard facts packaged in what Wagner typically calls “pure metaphysics.” In any case: “Slavs and Celts are mixed in with us and we have absorbed them.”108 Moreover, when the Germans arrived in Europe the initial Frankish and Norman blood is superseded by that of the Saxon and “Alemanni.”109 The new mix then profits from the influx of barbarian blood.110 It is all very undogmatic. Give Wagner his antisemitic paradigm and he is as

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happy as Larry. He can then show himself in all other matters to be toler- ant, even pluralistic, in outlook. Though not to the French, of course. That would be to ask too much. We might also note here that although the basic pseudo-anthropological assumption of the above is grounded on the premise of a homeland in the high snowy and clean reaches of central Asia, another and very privileged model can be smuggled in. The means are entirely arbitrary, but that only underlines how desirable—necessary even—this shift is. So when Wagner in The Wibelungen speculates on a Trojan Heimat, traced back through Rome, for the Frankish people with whom the Germanic tribe once coupled, he has pulled off a key swindle. The classical Greek connection is, by implication, once again engineered. Nevertheless, he is obviously aware that the arguments he is employing are of dubious academic provenance. But should we have doubts, he has a ready answer. It is, as is consistent with so much of the above, the notion that Volk wisdom is superior to the academic alternatives because of its mystic deep roots. The objections of the “chronicle-historian” who patronizingly mocks people “foolish” enough to image that such theorizing holds “a grain of truth” is, at best, beside the point. For Wagner has attained these insights from his studies of Volk art and language, and if the Volk believe it, it is always going to be true in a deeper sense.111 It is equally significant that Wagner does not give up on the first principle of language in this context. Namely, his essential strategy is not only to uncouple the German from the Jew, it is also to defend the German language against the insidious influence of the Jewish tongue. Clearly this could be a real problem when the Jew mastered German. But fortunately it turns out, as a matter of fact, not to be so. For even after hundreds of years, the Jew according to Wagner cannot but help make the degraded manner in which he talks German clear. As he points out with relish in Jewishness in Music, the Jew, no matter how devious, will always expose his exotic linguistic identity. Thus blood and language attain, and maintain, a sublime reconciliation. And given the loftiness of this, it is not at all surprising that it should be most pedantically insisted on in the case of Christ. Confronted by the racial problem of the Godhead made man, Wagner can get quite hot under the collar. Christ must at all costs be freed from the possibility of corruption from the dual Semitic threat. Therefore we are told that he was not a Jew by blood (he is of the “lineage” of Adam rather than of the “House of David”112) and that he never spoke a Jewish tongue.113 He will later be supported in this by his English-born son-in- law, who, as has already been mentioned, writes arguably the most influential book (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) of the prefascist period. Houston Stewart Chamberlain “proved” that the “divine and living personality of Jesus Christ” was not Jewish.114 Understandably, this was something that Germans, formed by the happy, yet logical, mix

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of elevated blood and language, were supposed to appreciate better than other peoples. Interestingly, both Wilhelm II and Josef Goebbels were devoted admirers of Chamberlain. Goebbels—profoundly moved, if his Diaries are to be believed—paid the dying sage a solemn visit on May 8, 1926.115 We should ask ourselves now what kind of expression in daily life is to be found for all these abstract speculations on the immanent character of the German Volk, German blood, and German language. One limits the matter in the first instance to “daily life” because that will throw into greater relief the poor fit between mundane practice and theory or propaganda. But this will also serve to underline subsequently the equally poor—and much more dangerous—fit between the same racial and cultural ideals when placed in the grander narrative of the nation. This latter shift would then have to address the function of Volk, blood, and language within administrative state apparatuses and face up to more expansive crimes and horrors, simply because when things go awry on the geopolitical stage they tend to do so in spades. But for the moment, let us consider the abstract qualities on the more prosaic level. What do they tell us about the propaganda of everyday life, and can they lead us away from abstract speculations and into the hands-on realm of German empiricism? As one might expect from Herder’s sketch of the first Germans noted above, the defining characteristic of their daily life is primitive but noble simplicity. The hunter’s calling is technologically undemanding and even less determined by the seasons than that of the farmer. It is also potentially solitary. For instance, for Wagner, the hero who manifests the grand Germanic paradigm is axiomatically alone but for a sexual encounter with the eternal feminine. That is, while we might imagine Herder’s hunters working in concert to trap and kill their wild boars, Siegfried slays his dragon all by himself. As Hitler, using a quotation from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell for the motto of chapter 8 (volume 2) of Mein Kampf, remarked: “The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone.” Still, there may be something lofty to be made out of this. In embodying action pure, Siegfried, ill- informed—when informed at all—fuses the theoretical with the practical. In this he would be a perfect expression of a Nietzschean ideal. Therefore, if we try very hard we might be able to infer philosophical significance in Wagner’s dragon-slayer; something which gainsays his status as the most jejune of tabula rasa. After all, in the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche puts the argument for action over thought (and causation) rather neatly:

For, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject, which is called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as if behind the strong person there were an indifferent substrate, which is free to express strength or not. But

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there is no such substrate; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming. “The doer” is merely made up and added into the action—the act is everything.116

It is, however, unlikely that this attitude can lead to anything practical. If it has a term of reference it will be the Übermensch and the cult of death. And although that is not at the moment our agenda (but it will be in chapter 11), we should acknowledge that for Nietzsche to give up his ideal is to concede regretfully that weaklings and intellectual cowards are dominant in “contemporary” European life. Christianity and pity and acquiescence have diluted the heroic Greek paradigm. Germans, he is certain, have become dwarfish and decadent. He, meanwhile, still remembers fondly the “mission of that youth, that first generation of fighters and dragon-slayers, which brings forth a more fortunate and more beautiful culture and humanity.”117 Furthermore, this notion of the “deed” will colonize popular German philosophy. The axiom that to act is of itself to understand will later give fascism a certain intellectual veneer. As Karl Mannheim noted: “Fascism regards every interpretation of history as a mere fictive construction destined to disappear before the deed of the moment as it breaks through the temporal pattern of history.”118 But we need to put the communal into the equation. And if we do, we discover that, initially, the German virtues are, as it were, close to hand. We are to imagine the German in his hut, surrounded by all those things that are most authentically natural to him. Of course, being a broadminded chap, he may on occasion like to travel and see the world and gather “strange impressions.” But when he has seen his full he “turns his steps toward home, for he knows that here alone will he be understood: here by his homely hearth”119 This is Wagner and it is striking how it segues easily into Herder’s portrayal. Not only is our attention drawn to the simple but noble life. We are also not allowed to forget that the ideal is axiomatically a-cosmopolitan:

The savage who loves himself, his wife, and his child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity for his tribe as for his own life is, it seems to me, a more genuine being than that cultured shade who is enchanted by the shadow of his whole species. . . . In his poor hut, the former finds room for every stranger, receives him as a brother with impartial good humor and never asks whence he came. The inundated heart of the idle cosmopolitan is a home for no one. . . .120

One sees here that the tribe is an appropriately elevated unit. Cosmopolitanism is, equally appropriately, a danger. This happy picture of domestic good fortune evokes the much-celebrated German notion

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of Gemütlichkeit, where belonging and safety and coziness are all placed in the context of that “homely hearth” to which the Wagnerian traveler, with relief, returns. Moreover, while this is a völkisch paradigm, corpore- ally expressed, it also turns out to exert a potent attraction on the philosopher of spiritual mysteries. Hegel, who has to get the German people into the most advanced and lofty position in the grand dialectical (and narrative) development of the human race, naturally employs more sophisticated strategies (see chapter 6), but he is nonetheless overtly dealing with the same values that drive Wagner and Herder and even, arguably, Nietzsche. He fights his way to the heights via the interaction of German inwardness (Innerlichkeit), the Reformation, and a key Teutonic category (Gemüt) that is sometimes translated as “heart”—“soul” or “nature” might also do. In any case it is German Gemütlichkeit that is explicitly intended and it functions as a dynamic force, “as an indeterminate totality of the Spirit,” that drives, in its initial underdeveloped form, the German nation onward and upward.121 But as we have now landed in the simple German hut, before the homely hearth, with the loving unpretentious family warmly welcoming the tribal comrades, all comfy in a culture uncontaminated by exotic mores, cosmopolitan seductions, and, we would hope, fancy foreign food, we might consider what professional German historians made of this ideal version when it was transported into the empirical world with which they were familiar. This is an important step, not least because empiricism has not yet played a large role in these speculations. It is also a step that takes us from the world of the warrior and the hunter (whether of wild boars or dragons) to, in the first instance, farming. The factories, as unwelcome it seems to many historians as they were to philosophers in general, will have their day. But not yet. Now we have to leave the terrible forest in which the Brothers Grimm, preserving the cruelty of the original folk tales while sanitizing the sex, imprisoned the German imagination after the death of Herder. If we have not, like Siegfried, killed our dragon or laid our ghosts, we will just have to cope with their residual unconscious power as we make our way in the real world of German history. Mind you, there is always the option of consciously making out of the forest something welcoming and nonthreatening; nonthreatening, that is, for the authentic German who dwells there by right. This we could do by indulging a digression. Consider, for instance, the case of arguably the first German hero: an unimpeachably historical figure who in the Teutoburg Forest wiped out three Roman legions in 9 AD. He turns out to be fascinating and ambivalent. Born a member of one of the German tribes (the Cherusker), he was named Hermann. Taken to Rome as a boy, he grew up with the Latin name Arminius. Proving

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himself a brave and loyal soldier, the Roman general Varus took him back to the Rhine. There Arminius betrayed his Roman comrades, lured Varus’s legions into the forest, and saw them slaughtered, and often tortured, almost to a man. This is the so-called Varusschlacht (Varus Battle), but in Kleist’s drama (from 1808, two years after the Battle of Jena, and as the Grimms were getting ready with their first collection) it is the Hermannsschlacht. And although the victory is based on an act of pure treachery on the part of the German hero, we might see this, retrospectively, as evidence that the insightful Hermann, at least in Kleist’s drama, had better understood Hegel’s “cunning of reason” than his Roman commander. It is also clear that the Romans are truly devious and primitive, above all, the legate Ventidius, who attempts to manipulate Hermann’s witty and brave consort Thusnelda. He covets her wonderful blond hair. A lock, at the very least, would make a lovely trophy for his Latin wife. Kleist also denies Varus a historically accurate death. He is not permitted to “play the Roman fool” and kill himself. Rather, he is slain by a German prince from one of the other tribes in one-on-one combat. In being the real thing, Hermann was understandably a more attractive figure to German historians keen on effective mythmaking in the nineteenth century than the utterly mythic Siegfried. Treitschke was a great admirer. Meanwhile the huge Hermann Memorial was finally completed in 1875 when the new empire had been established. During the Third Reich, Kleist’s play was on the boards as never before, and after 1945 it was largely ignored, although there was a production in 1957 in East Germany in which the United States and NATO played the role of imperialist enemies. It is perhaps, prima facie, a rather sad affair to move from heroism of this sort to farming. Nietzsche, for instance, would not have liked it. In fact he loathed it when Wagner, in effect, pulled off this trick in Parsifal. Actually Nietzsche didn’t properly understand Parsifal, but he was right to note the poet and composer’s growing interest in renunciation and pity.122 In a late Schopenhauerian frenzy (clearest in the essays that make up Religion and Art), Wagner shows himself obsessed with the blood- drenched icon of Christ on the cross (the sacrificial lamb of God), and consequently turns against the hero who has the blood of his fallen enemy on his sword. Instead it is the noble loser who earns our respect, for he has grasped the inferior nature of the phenomenal world. Therefore the best option open to him, besides contemplation (and death), is agriculture. But this will amount to more than merely tending one’s garden. Agriculture turns out to have sublime connotations. In the context of the standard distinction between French civilization and German culture, it can be said to set the bar as high as it will go—at least on earth: “violence may civilize, but Culture must sprout from the soil of peace, as it draws its very name from tillage of the fields.”123

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But farming is not a philosophical activity, although tending one’s garden like Candide (or, presumably, Epicurus) might well be. Farming needs lusty lads who work hard and, when necessary, put up a fight. Above all, it is an activity that foregrounds, like village life in general, its own empirical authority. This is something that not only German historians and thinkers understood when they got down to the authentic lived world of the Gemeinschaft. It is also something fully appreciated by a leader who had, apparently, an inexhaustible need of lusty lads. Strangely, although a great lover of Wagner, Hitler had never—or at least so he claimed—been seduced by the ideal of the hunter. He’d seen hunters in the forest and they were a miserable lot. Therefore he concludes: “Our ancestors were all peasants. There were no hunters amongst them—hunters are only degenerate peasants.”124 Moreover he is sure that the standard account of the Hermannsschlacht must be false. “At that period, it was not in fact possible, any more than to-day, to fight a battle in a forest.”125 Instead it will be his archetypal peasants, needing fresh Lebensraum, who will popu- late the east beyond the Memel and the Vistula. They will create German villages, with German trees, German houses, and they will cultivate the soil in the German manner. Hitler is absolutely clear in his own mind just how uncompromisingly alien his German peasants will appear in the eyes of the native and degenerate inhabitants of the neighboring villages.126 Thus, whether history turns out to be tragic or heroic, it would seem that even the rooted German, apparently safe in his local community, cannot escape the grander destiny of his Volk. Simple empiricism cannot find undisturbed peace in the humble but admirable farmer’s home. It turns out that the ideal of the Gemeinschaft cannot defend its parameters against the state. Ultimately, as we will see, greater things will take the stage and carry the peasant off so that he can perform heroic and killing deeds in the best Nietzschean style. After all, thinking aloud about those farmers, Hitler tells his no doubt fascinated dinner guests: “When we are asked about our ancestors, we should always point to the Greeks.”127

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ECAUSE THE GEMEINSCHAFT is such a compelling and powerful German Bconcept, we should pay some attention to arguably its most interesting apologist before we succumb to the overriding authority of the state. More than anyone, Justus Möser takes us into the world of the integrated and authentic German community. His eighteenth-century History of Osnabrück is, in its very detail, a statement of the ordinary in all its modest glory. Osnabrück may have been but a tiny bishopric of a few thousand inhabitants, but therein lay the attractions of Möser’s work to German historians and thinkers. Here, apparently, was a way of escap- ing French and Enlightenment universalism by setting before it modest and indigenous virtues. This was not merely a nationalist gesture, rather it implied, at the very least, an alternative and superior notion of the business of understanding history, a wholly different epistemology. For instance, Meinecke’s observation that “Möser has given us an unforgettable portrait of the Osnabrück farmer’s wife sitting as she had been accustomed through long tradition in the middle of the house and keeping a close watch on all that went on around her”128 is telling. We are confronted by the banal fact that the study of history has, in this example, been so reduced that our theoretical authority figure can indeed keep an eye on everything. But this reduction should not under any circumstances be seen as a loss. Rather it is redolent with riches, riches that come about not because of any retreat into the macabre world of the Grimms, or for that matter into the more fantastic flights of fancy of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Nor do they direct us—at least not in the first instance—to mystical notions of nation and race. Instead they amount to a groundbreaking first step in undercutting the metacommentary of eighteenth-century thought that saw human nature as a constant, reason as intrinsic to the world, and Natural Law as a first principle. That is, in foregrounding the particular, Möser put the Enlightenment fundamentals under threat, although it is by no means clear that he intended to go anywhere near that far. A further aspect of the particular was no less epistemologically radical. It was the manner in which it enabled the historian to build outward from constricted but incontestable empirical experience. The world will be understood on the basis of individual sensual knowledge rather than from the standpoint of overweening theoretical assumptions. Möser himself talked of “a taste for the soil,” and his history does not feel as though it has been imposed interpretively from above.129 In

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fact religion, if not God, was for Möser a highly practical and particular matter owing to the ambivalent status of Osnabrück after the Peace of Westphalia—in effect it alternated between Catholic and Protestant authority. But Möser’s particularism does not reduce his history to “mere” folktales, although he was very taken with the good wife at her spinning wheel and wrote a sentimental story, The Spinning Room: An Osnabrück Tale, to make clear her deep moral and practical worth.130 Nonetheless he remained a constitutional lawyer involved in the administrative affairs of the bishopric. In excavating local history he was consciously dealing with not only important ideas, as he saw them, but with fundamental social and moral matters as well. However, both of the above claims—that he was working in opposition to the Enlightenment and that nothing was intellectually imposed from above—are overstated. Given that he was far from provincial and naive, Möser was hardly likely to be unaware of, or indifferent to, the greater issues on which his study of Osnabrück rested. Furthermore he was politically active and, although preferring to stay in the bishopric, being fully conversant with legal and philosophical debates elsewhere, his outlook might be called cosmopolitan. He also had claim to being a British citizen. He supported the Hanoverian succession in opposition to the Catholic party and was responsible for important negotiations with the British government at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Thereafter he enjoyed a preeminent place in the regency. He wrote poetry and drama (including a work on Arminius/Hermann), and was fluent and well-read in French. In short, he was a good deal more than merely an anthologist of local stories. Meinecke is interesting here because he is not only entranced by Möser on what we might see as the personal level (the Osnabrück history is the source of much pleasure), but he is also ideologically committed to a particular interpretation of Möser’s work. He sees in it a key Herder- like step in the welcomed development of his own version of historicism. Which is to say, he employs Möser instrumentally as proof of an epistemological advance: namely, the need to embed historical analysis within firm temporal and geographic parameters that foreground the contingent values of the chosen period. As Möser said, “conclusions are often better drawn from actual events than from too lofty presuppositions.”131 On this basis, history as praxis becomes the most determining and revela- tory of all intellectual disciplines, and other social studies attain meaning only inasmuch as they accept its premises and place themselves within its framework. Grand theories lie at odds with this undertaking and, in that they promulgate timeless values, either explicitly or as the necessary inferable assumptions on which their historiography rests, they are misleading and false. This is the basis on which Meinecke makes the case for historicism and it is a pity that the original title of his book (Historismus) was

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translated as Historism. Nonetheless, in Meinecke’s epistemology of history, Möser is arguably the second witness for the defense. Despite strict chronology, he deals with Herder first. But in asking all this of Möser, he is possibly asking too much in that he, paradoxically, has to simplify and reduce him in order to make him ideologically fit for the universal purpose he has in mind. The injustice that Meinecke did to Möser, if any, is not of importance. What is critical is the uses to which he can be put by a great German historian struggling with the problems of national history. But we should, nonetheless, note Jonathan Knudsen’s caveat that “Meinecke’s historicist interpretation was possible because it took Möser out of his own intellectual context,”132 and that Möser’s position with respect to the Enlightenment was ambiguous, not least because the German Enlightenment itself was “ambiguous.”133 For instance, Frederick Beiser suggests that Möser in fact did—deep down, as it were—have some sense of Natural Law in that while he historicized the history of Osnabrück over centuries, he nevertheless began with an ahistorical ideal, an Eden subsequently lost: namely, the Saxon farmer in free possession of his land.134 But the virtues that Meinecke excavates are of vital importance if we are to appreciate his struggle to fold moral values within the historical narrative; to declare and show that they are intrinsic to understanding history and, as a result, to explain how they might function as a reservoir from which we can draw solace. If Meinecke’s agenda succeeds, we will be liberated from the inference that the history of Europe in general and of Germany in particular is, at best, a tale of random brutalities, or, at worst, a dangerously sophisticated rationalization for state-driven international lawlessness. Meinecke insists on the local and the empirical because there we land on the desired bedrock where the subject attains the respect he is due. It is a first premise for him that the subject is the site where the moral is most overtly present. Therefore it is the duty of the historian “to reveal the interior aspects of the individual.” This is the royal road that he comes to believe will lead to the reconciliation of utilitarian state policy and ethical probity. While this is clearest in his earlier book on raison d’état (Machiavellism—perhaps another unfortunate translation for the Anglo-Saxon public), the deeper ethical premise of the argument, centered on the lived lives of individuals, suffuses Historism. It requires that “sentiment . . . win its proper status alongside thought.” What is needed is nothing less than “a change in psychological attitude, a new inner experience.”135 Möser, we are told, played a key role in this development, a development that is redolent with optimism, both with respect to the practice of history itself and to what the nation might actually achieve. The importance of this is not to be overstated, not least because Meinecke will live to see his hopes in these matters utterly confounded by

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hard empirical facts. It is this defeat with which he struggles, often vainly but always instructively, in The German Catastrophe. Nonetheless, from the very beginning Meinecke is well aware that the particular is of no use if it is contained solely within the constricted parameters of the village. Möser may have been predisposed to the particular, for: “Only an inner love for these things and a delight in the past could produce the patience required” for the historical task he set himself.136 And we might note that he had written to a friend in the 1760s: “I desire a history of the people and its form of government and view the ruler as an accidental circumstance, who is merely essential in so far as he contributes a certain amount to the alteration of this or that.”137 But Meinecke also noted, and approvingly, that Möser “had a joyful confidence that everything in the world fitted into the perfection of the whole,”138 and that Osnabrück was a “microcosm” of the nation.139 That is, while “he was dealing with Osnabrück . . . he had the whole German people in mind.”140 In other words, it should not be forgotten that Meinecke’s appeal to local empiricism, and his instrumental use of Möser, is born of a desire to come to grips with the nation and the state. This takes us back to an important anomaly. I have already underlined that idealized thinking about the Volk and race inevitably downplays the practical problems of nation-building. There is often either a general unwillingness on the part of intellectuals to bother with such stuff or a recourse to the blithe assumption that the relevant difficulties will, courtesy of Goethe’s weights and measures, coming railways, and friendly border guards, etc., sort themselves out. But a parallel difficulty can surface when the matter is approached from the other perspective. Substituting Goethe’s eagle-eyed view with that of the worm’s, we see the same difficulty in getting to grips with administrative and social apparatuses on the national level. This is a problem for Möser, who is very conscious of the tension between the individual and the state. His attempt—such as it is—to deal with it is glib. He comes up with “the conception of States as individualities.”141 That is, the state has to embody those rights and virtues found on the micro level. This may be an agreeable and appealing metaphor, but it is only that: a metaphor. He also employs the analogy of a joint stock company. The first stake- holders are the aristocratic landowners, but further shares can be issued. New members, however, are placed lower down in the hierarchy.142 The arrangement, while having Enlightenment roots, turns out to function in a reactionary, inflexible, and, with respect to authority, Hobbesian manner. One might note that in Moser’s scheme the serf is vulnerable to the death penalty because his body is not his own; rather, it is his investment in the state. The lord, however, cannot be put to death because his stake is different, based on land and honor.143 In truth Möser is pessimistic. He sees the state as already irrevocably contaminated and consequently he ends up betraying everything he

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otherwise celebrates. Thinking of Prussia, militaristic and (fortuitously) triumphant under Friedrich the Great after the Seven Years’ War, he laments: “the fate of nations is now decided by soulless masses hurled into battle. . . . Such an organization must necessarily suppress all individual variety and perfection, the qualities which alone make a nation great.”144 What is striking here is not solely the horror of militarism (which needs the state in order to attain its maximum, and thereby logical, bestiality and “soullessness”), but also the alternative notion of that which is thereby betrayed. In ideal terms the state, it is imagined, must be the site of variety and perfection. Lord knows how. And even if we were to share and understand this view, it is not clear how this would mean that the nation was “great.” It is difficult here to forgo, admittedly facetious asides as to how public services that function well and trains that run on time will come about in Möser’s escapist model. It would seem that, ironically, his hands-on, local empiricism leads him to a lofty and, as he discovers, impractical paradigm that owes as much to Goethe’s eagle as it does to the down-to-earth Osnabrück farmer’s wife or, for that matter, to Gretchen at her spinning wheel. Behind this stands a phenomenon that can only be expressed as a generalization through which no doubt any number of coaches and horses can be driven: namely, German society celebrated the regional to an unusual degree. That is to say, it accorded regional culture a more ubiquitous presence and gave it ideologically more weight than it had elsewhere. Furthermore, Germany society still does this. Therefore a history of Osnabrück is not in itself so surprising, although the depth of Möser’s achievement is exceptional. Even so, that depth was matched a hundred years later when Theodor Fontane produced a work of yet greater popularity in his Wanderings through the March of Brandenburg. One might say of him what Knudsen says of Möser: he wrote “from a traveler’s perspective.”145 He, too, was dedicated to a direct encounter with the local. In the best Rankean manner he was telling it how it is/ was. Even so, this was in many ways a romantic activity. Like Herder, Fontane was a greatly influenced by all things Scottish. For him as for so many others, Scottish life embodied an idea of the Volk that seductively mixed romance with local authentic culture. His time there had been very formative. He became a big fan of Walter Scott’s novels, although in that he was no different from most educated Europeans of the period. But he was also cosmopolitan, and the paradoxical result is that the local remains for him redolent of the “nation.” Above all, the delayed phenomenon of nineteenth-century unification gave regional identity its deeper significance. As the formulas on the relationship between Germany and Prussia noted in chapter 1 suggest, Germany as an abstract paragon on the one hand and the local as lived and physically experienced on the other, are readily, if glibly, coupled.

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This might seem odd in that the potency of the latter would surely undercut the claims of the former. And yet the empirical and immediate seem not so much to have marginalized the grander notion of the nation as to have contributed to the general tendency whereby it was elevated into the equally potent realm of patriotic abstractions. German idealism actually fed off the materialism that was self-evidently, like the plow and the weaver’s stool, to hand. That is, while it is by definition the quotidian that counts in daily life (local dialect, local costumes, songs, humor, folktales, cuisine, etc.), in a Germany of the mind just these things gained added, paradoxically national, authority and were readily incorporated in all their variety under the mystic, unifying nimbus of racial and cultural identity. And they still fulfill this ideological function today, albeit in an ever more decorative and superficial manner. Nonetheless, local theaters doing allegedly local comedies survive. Their productions are often filmed and transmitted on television. Plattdeutsch is a badge of honor in the north, but much the same can be said of all the local dialects. A Bavarian premier will proudly employ the accent and vocabulary of the region. You can book a table in a Berlin restaurant and dine while listening to an actor reading Berlin poems and stories in Berlinerisch. There might well be reproductions of Heinrich Zille’s sketches of working-class life in late-nineteenth-century Berlin on the walls. Guests on the ubiquitous German TV talk shows like to show off their regional patois and knowledge of local customs. Horrid—and it should be stressed, fake—folk music extravaganzas are an indispensable ingredient in the schedules of all the major TV channels. These shows move around from region to region, where they allegedly remind the natives of what is inherent in and unique to their Heimat. And in this context it is worth noting that East German folk music stars turned out to be unusually well-equipped to survive unification in 1990. They, and their programs, were welcomed with open nostalgic arms. Their colleagues, not defended by a track record in producing kitsch, lost their jobs as the complete apparatus of television production in the GDR was trashed. Above all, regional stereotypes thrive and are treated as a matter of pride and fun: East Frisians are allegedly dim-witted, Swabians stingy, Berliners cheeky, Bavarians drunk and sentimental, and so on. A further and very apposite illustration of this phenomenon takes us back to the 1930s. When the Nazis built the autobahns they killed a great many birds with one stone. There is some debate as to whether the highways were in fact of much use in moving around the military, although they may well have been intended to be so. However, they certainly made a major contribution to the fight against unemployment and recession. But in the context of the above speculations, their function in binding the nation is more interesting. This was not only a matter of the greater and more ambitious travel options they now offered the customers of the

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growing motor industry. Early film of these broad, clean swathes sweeping across the countryside do not conform to our contemporary image of tailbacks, pollution, and rampant industrialism. Rather they reveal the beauties and the variety of the nation-state. The autobahns look inviting; they even look like integrated parts of the landscape. Along the way there were service stations and facilities where the drivers could rest, but these were all built in the local style. That is, as you drove from one region of Germany to another it was not only the color of the cows that you could see from your car window that changed. The very structure of the autobahns itself paid homage to the same homely facts. Thus what was designed to assert the togetherness of the nation did not take place in defiance of the regional; it made a public show of it. Before returning to Meinecke, we can pursue the claim that Germany is a special case with regard to the relationship between the regional and the national by putting the generalization into broader parameters. As this must be, no less than the example last given, an opportunity for cherry picking one’s illustrations, it will underpin the skeptic’s suspicion that the generalization is unfit for the purpose. Nonetheless, considering the Gemeinschaft model in other countries might, at the very least, throw the German case into clearer focus. Normally a small nation has by the fact of its size alone a good chance of asserting the homogeneous ideal in believable terms. At the very least its apologists will feel they might get away with the appropriate propaganda. And they may well be sincere. Ireland, when it became independent following a long and violent struggle against an imperial master, was animated by a strong sense of victorious nationalism and by an equally strong sense of the nation as the community writ large. Éamon de Valera’s famous 1943 St. Patrick’s Day broadcast illustrates this in an upfront and artless manner. Herder would have been very comfortable with it:

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cozy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romp- ing of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.146

What is interesting here is not that this sunny picture correspondents to reality—it is explicitly formulated to make it clear that it does not— but that it is thought to be a credible enough paradigm to be used as a

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measuring rod with respect to the “present” state of the Irish Republic. Yet more important is the total absence of a regional coefficient. All the aspects of de Valera’s paradigm apply across the whole social geography of the nation. It is Herder’s tribal notion of the Ur-Volk given unproblematic national expression. But while a tenable propaganda exercise in Ireland in 1943, it would have seemed absurdly jejune and inadequate in the larger and more varied context of Germany in the nineteenth century. In Britain something more abstract, less rooted in the specific, is needed if the notion of the Gemeinschaft is to be intellectually viable for the nation. Edmund Burke’s attempt is understandably celebrated. It probably inspired Möser. However, it has an ambiguous relationship to the ideal. While it dismisses contracts to do with abstract human rights—or at least puts them in the second place—it favors yet more mystical qualities that allegedly bind the subject in a timeless manner with a national whole that has about it the feel of something impeccable. Society is famously “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”147 And Englishmen claim their intrinsic rights not on the universal basis of “the rights of men” but as Englishmen. That is, “as a patrimony derived from their forefathers.”148 But while these are Gemeinschaft-rooted ideals, they do not take any strength from, or any account of, the regional variety of English (or British) society. In fact in moving from the notion of the community to the notion of the nation without forgoing the propaganda appeal of the former, they fulfill a Nazis agenda in formal terms without lugging around the same inimical baggage. Which is to say that they make out of the Gemeinschaft a Volksgemeinschaft. But when the locally rooted Gemeinschaft as a paradigm is in fact employed in Britain, the choices open to the propagandist are so arbitrary that the result is either shallow or unintentionally funny. Inevitably all the models, outside of Scotland where an alternative notion of “nation” with its own structures is in play, collapse in the face of the vast heterogeneity of national life. Shared values are unavoidably shackled to national structures (law, language, etc.). Their principal nationwide ideological expressions are found in international sporting success, or occasional wars, or, perhaps, the royal family. Above all, the “nation” as an idea and praxis has been around for so long that the local is in every sense marginalized. However, this does not mean that there isn’t a privileged ideal, only that its artificial nature makes it a matter for play. This is the village to which, it seems, any number of “townies” have moved only to have their bucolic and idyllic hopes cruelly disappointed. Its most famous expression is Ambridge, the fictional village of radio’s longest-running soap opera The Archers. But occasionally this deep sense of national longing can even unhinge a prime minister, although one notes that he desperately tries to get some plurality into the mix. The result shows him to be no less sincere

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than de Valera, but, amazingly, far more naive. John Major rhapsodized to the Conservative Group for Europe on April 22, 1993:

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’ and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.149

The Independent in its heartless editorial of April 25, 1993 called this “tosh.” In the United States the tension between the nation and the Gemeinschaft seems to disappear altogether because there is no effective definition of the nation that does not pay homage to the axiom that the republic is a young land made up of immigrants drawn from an exceptionally wide catchment area. As a result, the state takes on board such a plethora of local models that no favored regional ideal can avoid being swamped by the others. This is given additional force by a shifting racial and ethnic profile. For instance, WASPs no longer have pride of place. Consequently, in this astonishingly multifarious, inequitable, and flexible society (can one really talk of a society?), the notion of the “nation” needs to attain massive ideological weight if it is to counterbalance the teeming reality and hold the parts in check. Patriotism is thus elevated into a religion, fervently practiced. Schoolchildren are propagandized every morning, the church—of whatever denomination—is wedded to the national cause, the anthem is sung regularly, the flag is ubiquitous. God blesses America incessantly, and the patriotic citizen just has to rationalize natural catastrophes as best he can, as happened in 2005 with hurricane Katrina. God, after all, does work in mysterious ways, though he is obviously clear in his own mind as to the special status of the United States. Certainly the national self-image, as the most noble and righteous manifestation of History, has a public presence that might even have embarrassed a Hegelian, should the great German philosopher have committed himself to Prussia in the vulgar manner in which every American politician and nearly every American commentator commits himself to the providential status of his own country. Was ever a Briton or a Frenchman at the highpoint of their nations’ imperial greatness, or a German following the victory at Sedan, as sure as the average American as to the identity of the national passport the Almighty carries around in his back pocket? American “exceptionalism,” then, takes us well beyond the allegedly unique and problematic German dialectic made up of the empirical (rooted in the Gemeinschaft) and the grand (expressed in terms of the idealized status of the nation). We should now try and pick up that thread again. This we can best do by returning, in the first instance, to Meinecke.

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It is fair to say that Meinecke gets lost when dealing with the rival claims of the local and the national. As has already been pointed out, he celebrates the former in order to get to the latter. It has also been pointed out that this development is understood as a necessary part of his “historicist” thinking. In fact Meinecke’s privileged notion of “historicism” vindicates exactly this development and is, in turn, vindicated by it. Ideally then, Meinecke would arrive at a synthesis . . . he is, by the way, fully conversant with Hegelian thinking along these lines, although he seldom employs the terminology. This synthesis would allow him to keep the best of the local, using its moral baggage—that is, the lives of individuals when understood in their own contingent time and place—as a vindication of a grander national and historical Weltanschauung. It is not clear, however, that he can accomplish this, although his efforts are daring and admirable. But in, implicitly at least, committing himself to the negation of the negation (or synthesis), he probably abandons not the antithesis, in this case the special status of the whole as expressed in, at the very least, the nation-state. Rather, he loses the moral core that was secreted in the original thesis, that is to say, in empirically experienced daily life. Meinecke may not have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, but what, we might ask, has he done with the Osnabrück farmer’s wife? After all, his attachment to her was almost palpable. But hasn’t she become a victim in what is a typically Hegelian swindle? We might turn to Adorno to better understand this. In his critique of Hegel he points out that in practice it is the negation that is triumphant in the Hegelian system. This is because it is the negation (or antithesis) that drives the historical and intellectual narrative forward. The “synthesis” (a term Hegel seldom used) is merely propaganda or a fraud.150 We will better appreciate the imbalance between the Hegelian terms (and therefore between the Hegelian ideas) if we consider Meinecke’s ideal embodiment of the synthesis: Goethe. Meinecke understands Goethe too well. As a result, his attempt to use him instrumentally to underpin the historicist agenda exposes, unintentionally, the irreconcilable problems of just that agenda. True, Meinecke is hardly alone in discovering that the scope, in every respect, of Goethe’s contribution to German life and letters is such that it readily sabotages the various specific uses to which his disciples put him. But Meinecke’s devotion, although remaining this side of idolatry, is such that Goethe has to function as, if not the privileged (transcendental) signifier, at least the signifier that, in its own way, takes precedence over all others. And Goethe, we might note, is the refuge to which he flees when surrounded by the rubble of 1945. But even in 1936 the matter is not open to doubt. The great German poet and thinker represents the “golden age” of German culture and his position in German history is even more “lofty” and “exalted” than Hegel’s because (unlike Hegel) he “did not seek to

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control history according to a preconceived scheme of salvation.” And even in respect of the empiricists who came after, “it is Goethe who still points the way towards these lofty regions.”151 The problems generated by these grand assumptions can be best understood if one looks at the manner in which Meinecke lays out the development of his historicist argument and his (selective) account of the evolution of Goethe’s thinking. The two run along parallel lines. One notes, for instance, that when he tackles Goethe at the culmina- tion of his argument in Historism he does so according to the chronology of Goethe’s intellectual development. He makes much of the initial friendship with Herder: Goethe was “Herder’s pupil.”152 There are also moments of alleged epiphany when Goethe is suddenly able, for example when confronted by Gothic architecture, to think himself back into the German past and to, simultaneously, grasp what is intrinsic to the Germany of “today.” Indeed, he comes to see that the past and the present are one. Meinecke quotes from The Maxims and Reflections: “We all live upon the past and perish by reason of the past.”153 He does not, however, mention the earlier maxim: “History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.”154 In particular one notes that Meinecke goes so far as to claim that when contemplating the cathedral at Strasbourg, Goethe attains an insight as to the German soul that “belongs to the great moments in the history of German thought.”155 And, by the way, the Cologne cathedral, finally completed in the anachronistic Gothic style in 1880, had a similar effect. But when one looks at both references, the former is in book 9, volume 1 and the latter is in book 14, volume 2 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), one feels more weight is being placed on these privileged moments of national insight than the actual, incidental accounts can readily bear.156 Goethe’s great discovery is arguably the realization that the parts are inseparable from the whole. That is, what he had uncovered in biol- ogy was valid as an epistemological principle across the cognitive board. Furthermore, this vast “whole,” which embraces all life, is axiomatically infinite. But the inference Meinecke wishes to draw from this seems arbitrary, namely, that Goethe made it impossible for thinking “to fall back into the methods of the Enlightenment, based upon Natural Law, of measuring the human individual according to the imaginary external standards of static truths founded upon reason.”157 However, it is difficult to see how we could not, with respect to the relationship between the particular and the whole, use the same material to infer exactly that. True, this could be avoided if it was assumed that the axiomatically infinite whole is in some decisive way chaotic. But, as Meinecke is happily well aware, Goethe’s intellectual stance does not lean toward the arbitrary or the anarchic. He quotes him approvingly: “I would rather commit a wrong than put up with disorder.”158 As a result Meinecke is forced to

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acknowledge a formal similarity, at the very least, between what he wishes to infer from Goethe’s historicism and what he wants us to believe is invalidated by it. “Like the Enlightenment, Goethe strove to find a lofty supra-temporal standpoint from which to view the events of time. Only the point was quite differently selected from that of the Enlightenment and much more upon Neo-Platonic lines.”159 This distinction would seem to us as vital as it seems to Meinecke if we accepted the overriding moral core of his notion of historicism, namely, the devotion to the particular as discovered in the domestic lives of individuals. But getting the particular, whether translated into idealist neo-Platonist terms or not, onto the universal stage inevitably means that it has to lose that which makes it most uniquely itself. If Goethe believes, as Meinecke points out, that “only mankind together is the true man, and . . . the individual can only be joyous and happy when he has the courage to feel himself in the whole,”160 then the species universal that is here inscribed floods empirical life with higher meaning and sweeps all its domestic utensils (the spinning wheel along with the stool) from the stage. And even when that higher meaning is explained in terms of “love” (Goethe, Meinecke says in his final peroration, believed that you can’t understand anything you don’t love), it too functions ultimately—think of the end of Faust—as a universal moral force rather than a localized corporeal activity. It is just this axiomatic universal that causes all the trouble, not least because Meinecke, while intellectually rigorous and lacking grand conceit, is, no less than Goethe and other bold theorists, driven to grand explanations. He may well have established to our satisfaction that the principles of historicism, as he lays them out, are an intellectual advance over the Enlightenment. But those principles are probably no more to be vindicated by their, admirably historically dependent, premises than the sublime notion of a Natural Law is vindicated by its own, debilitatingly ahistorical, premise. That is, while Möser and his followers may well, implicitly, tell us how important it is to embed ethics into metacommen- taries because an ethical disposition, if rooted in the struggles of daily life, will enable us to feel what it is like to suffer when nature is unkind or when things are badly managed, they are, by virtue of their own epistemology, incapable of actually making this work in real terms. The metacommentary simply dismisses the particular and quotidian as secondary and conditional. Nevertheless, for Meinecke the praxis of history is too seductive, the themes it elicits and the problems it generates too important, noble, and awful (as he well knows from personal experience) to be ignored. The task therefore remains: How does one establish a grand explanation that works? Which is to say, to what degree can reason, at the very least as an interpretative activity, and history be coupled? And this avoidably raises the most troublesome question of all. If history has reason, then does it

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somehow or other have teleological meaning? Might it even have a providential character? This will be, chiefly, a matter for chapter 12, but it is of some importance now. Meinecke is no less aware of this problem than he is of all the others, and is no less ambivalent in dealing with it. For instance, he tells us that Goethe was not putting forward explicit teleological arguments, arguments that will lead to a perfect state. That is, while there is “progress,” it doesn’t seem to be focused on a specific goal. For Goethe there was just “a more perfect advance.”161 But any kind of progressive advance, whether it is thought to be inscribed intrinsically in the historical process or comes about solely through the good offices of men and women, will of necessity lead somewhere. And this will be the case independent of whether we are philosophically comfortable with the idea or not. Nor can this conclusion be circumvented because we feel we are not in any position to say what the posited goal will be because the “progress” is so painfully laborious and incremental. This dilemma—or, alternatively, profound truth that invests history with meaning and necessitates a divine “Author”—is very much what Kant established in the Third Critique. And welcome or not (for it can also turn out to be a Weltanschauung that rationalizes mass terror, in that those seen to be standing in the way of history’s inexorable progress presumably deserve to be eradicated), it is not a theme that the historian, if he forgoes the microarchival analysis of supposedly objective facts and accepts the Hegelian premise that to write history is to write the philosophy of history, is in any position to ignore. Hegel’s most fundamental ontological axiom is, as was mentioned in the introduction, the equation of the real with the rational. It does not, however, so much solve a raft of intellectual difficulties as collect them together and then scuttle them. It then replaces them with something that is potentially more disturbing. This is chiefly because Hegel’s equation of the real with the rational is employed to underpin a historical explanation that celebrates the state in the most ambitious and far-reaching fashion. Happily for him the best, which is to say the most advanced, manifestation of this process was the German state in which he was living, even though Prussia had yet to take on its destined and mighty form. But Hegel already knew that the social and spiritual evolution that was at work had drawn on the mysterious dialectical wisdom gained by the German Volk over its long and exceptionally troubled history. And this process would continue until Prussia reached the goal, or telos, that was inscribed in History itself. Thus if we turn to Hegel, we will surely be able to put behind us the, conceivably debilitating, limitations of the Gemeinschaft as examined in this chapter and return to the grand notions of race and nation. And presumably we will also be able to enjoy at the same time the freedoms that come from rationalizing the transcendent course of history as an actual phenomenon. Hegel sells this to us in such a manner that

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Machiavellian state policy (raison d’état) and moral probity, vindicated by a sublime spiritual force, cease to be in opposition. In fact they cease to be discrete conceptual entities. All of this is self-evidently of the greatest import for any speculations on German history. However, before Hegel is allowed to monopolize the spotlight, the chronology is going to be overturned. His most famous disciple will nudge him off the stage, if only momentarily, because what he made out of Hegel is exceptionally important. Moreover, in the context of this polemic, his importance will not in every respect conform to what is generally thought of as his chief contribution to understanding history.

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ARL MARX REMINDS US that materialism is not empiricism. In fact in his Khands materialism may not be materialism. Which is to say, Marxism’s defining characteristic is that it is mystic. Of course this assertion flies in the face of its most fundamental epistemological principle. Namely, that in turning Hegel the right way up the idealist mumbo jumbo of the Hegelian dialectic took on materialist form. As such it was accessible to everyone, an analytical tool that explained the contingent nature of all cultural and intellectual phenomena. Furthermore, it laid out a program of revolution whereby the world itself would be upturned. The upshot of all this is the orthodox axiom that in adding materialism to the mix Marx had rescued Hegel. He had made him, in every sense, sensible. As Brecht said in his poem “In Praise of Communism,” to understand all of this is “easy.” The trouble is, once we have accepted that history is driven by the appropriation of the means of production and the development of class society, Marx’s materialism doesn’t go much further in ontological terms. In modern society, moreover, the mechanism of change—class warfare— rests on a formula that in a highly naive manner calculates the exact sum the capitalist has stolen from the worker. This is the so-called surplus value of labor, and it becomes the Boyle’s law of dialectical materialism in the capitalist era, underpinning the elaborate macrostructure that follows: the evolution of the proletariat into a universal class that attains an unprecedented degree of historical understanding, the mechanisms by which the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers, and so on. Therefore it has to be an unqualified and unassailable expression of market value, no matter how unstable the market is. Ironically, Marx’s positivism forces him to pay at least as much homage to the rationality and authority of the capitalist market as any disciple of Friedrich Hayek. One must conclude here that “value” is not the same as—let us say—“real worth,” which will, presumably, be the correct way to think about the products of labor, and labor itself, in a communist society. But even accepting its highly conditional context, the surplus value of labor ignores other factors. For instance, no account is taken of inventiveness, entrepreneurial skill, or marketing. Nonetheless, the simple calculation whereby it is arrived at (it is essentially no more than a synonym for profit) has to remain, in the capitalist context, inviolable. Consequently, while we are certainly entitled to prefer a Marxist explanation of history over the alternatives, it is not easy to see how it

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can claim to be more materialist than, let us say, an explanation framed in terms of tribal warfare, or the laws of exogamy and endogamy, or even Hegel’s murderous heroes, driven by an “unconscious impulse” to propel history forward.162 Marx’s materialism may be nothing more than his first abstract axiom. But the highly sophisticated historical metacommentary that follows, bookended by an idealized first Eden and a final communist utopia (both axiomatically free of exploitation), takes on an imagina- tive form, defining the temporal parameters of the dialectic in a wholly arbitrary and convenient manner. That is, the triad dialectical structure can be enrolled to explain vast epochal changes (feudalism → capitalism → communism) or local, short-term phenomena, without, allegedly, alter- ing its essential premises. An interesting case of the latter in the German context would be the belief among Marxists in the 1930s that fascism was the negation of the thesis (that is, the negation of capitalism) and that it therefore should be encouraged because it would bring about the negation of the negation (or synthesis), and this would be true socialism. German Communist Party members were instructed to think in this way by their Russian mentors, and a great many of them lost their lives as a result. Faith in the mystic wonders of dialectical materialism could be costly in the real material world. For Marx, however, the appeal of dialectical materialism lay in its explanatory power in the contemporary world. He was, of course, far more engaged in an analysis of capitalism than in celebrating the wished-for future alternative. Marx’s grand theory is, in fact, in hock to capitalism. Given that it is teleological—a Hegelian debt that it gladly pays—this may be only reasonable. After all, capitalism is as far as history had got by the time Marx was living. But this means that his portrayals of earlier periods are often convenient generalizations designed to retrospectively confirm the privileged interpretation of the contemporary situation, while—most remarkable of all—the future is dealt with only in the most wishy-washy fashion. Nonetheless, here at least we can get some idea of the communist Gemeinschaft in empirical and even materialist terms, not least because Marx sketched out two related images of the noble life that bookend history: one gives us a residual sense of man before capitalism has either turned him into an alienated wage-slave or driven him to revolutionary violence, the other tells us, with examples, how he will spend his time once exploitative society has been transcended. The first, from the 1844 Manuscripts, is often thought to be naive, the second, from The German Ideology, is usually the subject of ridicule. I confess to a soft spot for both. The first insists on the sensuous nature of proletarian experience. And, as is only fitting in a theory that is both narrative and (allegedly) materialist, the senses themselves are defined as the product of the “labor of the entire history of the world down to the present. . . .”163 Most striking of all is the nobility Marx finds in the proletarian paradigm. His language

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in 1844 has been dismissed as romantic, “nonscientific,” and therefore retrogressive (it is supposedly Marx before he became a Marxist), but its continued attraction rests, in part, on exactly that rhapsodic feel. Terry Eagleton, for instance, eagerly quotes him on the corporeal lives of French socialist workers and stresses how attractively Marx pictured them. Eagleton insists: “The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.”164 One might think that materialism here has been elevated into its opposite. That is, the real, if perhaps unintentional, function of all the sweat, the camaraderie, even the “smoking, eating, drinking” Eagleton also mentions, is to project sensuous reality into the realm of the ideal. But at least the gesture is made, and it is clearly well-meaning. The second image has both Marx and Engels as authors. The German Ideology (1846) takes our idealized proletarian community into a world where there isn’t a proletariat as such. Indeed, the whole notion of class and specialization has been transcended. For, in a “communist society nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes. . . .” More significantly, because “society regulates the general production” one will be able “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, herdsman or critic.”165 Has any German idealist—or, for that matter, folk music warbler—matched this when rhapsodizing on the Heimat? But in any case, the Gemeinschaft as both an anachronism (even when a lost Marxist Eden) and as a utopian goal (whether Marxist or otherwise) is not an important factor when it comes to power politics in nineteenth-century capitalist society. Yet when Marx does direct his attention to contemporary Germany it is not to pay homage to the state as an alternative structure. That is a Hegelian debt for which he accepts no liability whatsoever. Instead he intends that the proletariat, as both an explanatory tool and a dynamic revolutionary force, be understood in the wider European—at the very least—context. Local conditions may be relevant, but chiefly because they determine microtactical decisions. The proletariat as a supranational phenomenon, however, remains the only agent capable of bringing about world revolution. This is a matter on which he becomes unbending. For instance in his Critique of the Gotha Programm from 1875, his attacks on elements within the German Workers’ Party—a party that was evolving into the SPD and would soon be the largest socialist party in the world—is excoriating. Above all, he is contemptuous of their failure to grasp the universal function of the working class. Most unforgivable of all, the Germans have come up with a manifesto hopelessly diluted by nationalist values. The result is little more than pie-in-the-sky liberalism.

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The Germans have been too influenced by Ferdinand Lassalle. And this “after the work of the International!” For while it is true that the working class “must organize itself at home as a class,” it must not forget that “the German Empire, is itself, in its turn, economically ‘within the framework’ of the world market, politically ‘within the framework’ of the system of states.” In rabbiting on about “the international brotherhood of peoples,” the German Workers’ Party is betraying class warfare and succumbing to a sentimentalized version of internationalism. What’s more, Bismarck has, with understandable satisfaction, realized all this. We, however, might recall that “the brotherhood of man” was the language Marx was using in 1844. Apparently now it must be redefined as an exclusively working-class (and male) concept. Presumably we must then assume that such a male proletariat will realize that the state is not a suitable structure for reform. It is intrinsically inimical. “Freedom con- sists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.” In the revolutionary process it can only have an interim function, which becomes clear at the moment when it is upturned to facilitate its own eradication. “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transfor- mation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”166 The most striking feature of Marx’s attack may well be its tone. Even he thought he might have gone a bit far. But it is not the lack of comradely feeling that is important, rather the assumption that the German Workers’ Party is being naive. And no doubt on reading Marx’s polemic many came to that conclusion. But the irony lies in the judgment of history, which may or may not in this instance have exhibited Hegel’s famous cunning of reason. Whatever the case, the schoolmaster turned out to be wrong while his liberal-minded inattentive students were, whether instinctively or not, backing the winning horse. The proletariat has never managed, even in industrial Europe, to take the stage as the universal class and thereby toss the nation-state into the dustbin of history. Instead the state remains, still, the site on which the battles over culture and identity take place, no matter whether we have in mind ideological struggle or trench warfare. For the German SPD this conclusion was, implicitly, accepted at Bad Godesberg in 1959 when the party renounced many of the fundamentals of Marxist theory, while the ideal of the brotherhood of the proletariat probably reached its highpoint in no-man’s land at Christmas 1914. There is something deeply poignant about the fraternization between British and German soldiers on the western front. It is surely legitimate to claim that it was the product of a good deal more than mere seasonal sentimentality. International working-class solidarity and comradely feeling

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are indeed not fictions. Furthermore, it is insulting to assume that the men who exchanged gifts and got to know each other and even played a little soccer were not capable of appreciating that they were being used by social forces not acting in their best (proletarian) interests. In fact they had probably come to this understanding in the consciousness-raising manner that Marx, and one of his most famous Hegelian interpret- ers (Georg Lukács), had predicted. But that process had not reached the point where it could supplant the mystical power of the state and all the baggage it brought with it. In any case the state was not to be trifled with. Further examples of fraternization between the soldiers would result in a firing squad. So if Marx was, fortuitously, not able to extricate himself fully from Hegel’s idealism, he was undone by his rejection of Hegel’s principal explanatory agent in the modern world. At that time the state may have seemed to Marx like a structure built on ever more anachronistic and rotting foundations. But it turns out we are still stuck with it. Hegel must be given, in this at least, his due.

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“ HE STATE IS THE DIVINE IDEA as it exists on Earth. We have in it, there- Tfore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity, and lives in the enjoyment of this objectivity.”167 This is Hegel and it sounds clear enough. Something, however, should be said about this notion of “the Divine Idea.” The state is here defined as the highest expression of what Hegel normally, but not exclusively, calls the Geist, or spirit. This is the mover of all world history, and its goal is maximum, or universal, “freedom.” It logically and irresistibly approaches this goal courtesy of ever higher, or progressive, social forms. Naturally this evokes the concept of God, as Hegel acknowledges repeatedly in The Philosophy of History. But Hegel’s “God” is free of dogma (for in principle, if not always in practice, it excludes and condemns nothing), and its intentions are worked out through the ruthless triumph of each developing social system. It is certainly not a God of pity or contemplation; that is, it is not the God that Nietzsche found so contemptible in late Wagner, above all in Parsifal. For Hegel, pietism and happiness are quite literally nonproductive: “The History of the World is not the theater of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”168 Therefore the metacommentary needs a driving force, and this too Nietzsche would have read with pleasure. The animating force of history is passion. As a result there is an interesting, but logically accounted for, paradox. Because the spirit encompasses everything, everything that occurs in the world is rational. Hence we have no option but to take on board the fact that “Reason” is the defining characteristic of the spirit. Indeed at times it seems to be employed as a synonym for the spirit. “Reason is the Sovereign of the World” and “the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.”169 As a result, judgment is only possible on the basis of who, or what, wins or loses. To win of itself establishes temporary virtue (until the victor, too, is superseded), whereas to lose simply means historical redundancy. To us, however, the world often seems anarchic, and as a species we do not as a rule exhibit overt undiluted rationality. Therefore in respect of men’s actions, Hegel needs another type of fuel to drive the dialectic. This is “the need, instinct, inclination, and passion of man,” for “we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.”170 Here is a measure of

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Hegel’s comprehensiveness and the fundamental amorality of his system. Even our supposed crimes are rational, for passion is the, quite possibly covert, servant of the higher spirit or reason at work. As a result, conventional moral judgments are beside the point. For it is an axiom that “the real world is as it ought to be.” Therefore: “This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world; the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.”171 But this puts a lot of clear water between the notion of God when used by Hegel and when used by a Christian. Nonetheless that is not the end of the matter. Hegel has a very high opinion of Christianity and an even higher one of German Protestantism. But this is a result of historicizing both. The Christian phase of historical development is placed within a history that stresses its entry and time upon the stage. Christianity is certainly not a poor player and it does not strut and fret, but its role is transitory. Nevertheless it liberates the Geist yet further, giving it fresh power in the lives of men and women. The great step is taken by Luther. When he uncovers the personal relationship between man and God, the spirit duly enters the objective (and material) world to an unprecedented degree. It also allows the state to show its worth, which is to say the (Lutheran) spirit in the world allows the state to justify the grand claim made for it at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that it is “the Divine Idea, as it exists on earth.” Hegel’s “modern” German state proves itself—because of Luther—unprecedent- edly accommodating to the spirit. Furthermore, a related accomplishment is also possible, one that Hegel had indicated was going to be a fundamental feature of his undertaking. He intended to show that philosophy could do what scripture challenges us to do but religious authority denies us: namely, know God. But now via Christianity in general, and German Protestantism in particular, he, as the philosopher of history, is able to do just that. In the first instance “it is the Spirit [der Geist] that leads into Truth, knows all things, penetrates even into the deep things of the Godhead.” In the second, God “has given us to understand what He is” and “this possibility of knowing Him . . . renders such knowledge a duty. God wishes no narrow-hearted souls or empty heads for his children. . . .”172 This is all very grand. It is, however, in every sense overridingly German. Up to this point in universal history no other people and no other state could have managed it. The manner in which the German character is special—in particular with regard to “Heart” or Gemüt—has already been touched on in chapter 3. But when Hegel throws them into his narrative at its climax (“the fourth phase of World-History”), he sees in the previous sufferings of the Germans a necessary ordeal by fire that has made them unusually receptive to the most progressive aspects of Christianity. They, above all, are not likely to slip into quietism like the

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pious recluse or the Hindu. It is interesting, however, that he does not claim they possess the high spirituality of the Greeks. Hegel of course had a problem with the classical Greeks, as they exerted the same fascination on him as they did, and do, on German intellectuals in general. Nevertheless, his explanatory system demands that they, too, must be superseded, not merely by events but also qualitatively. He gets around the problem by privileging the special state structures that are extant in the fourth phase. As a result the Greeks retain their exceptional spiritual niveau, but are shown to have been hobbled by not enjoying the benefits made up of the binary pair of German Protestantism and the German state. In any case we are to conclude that “the pure inwardness of the German nation was the proper soil for the emancipation of Spirit.”173 But what is this state? It is, in fact, not Germany. It is Prussia. Hegel tells us that Prussia came of age in the seventeenth century, “destined to start into a new life with Protestantism.” In the eighteenth century it was blessed with a monarch who both thought deeply and used the sword to make his state a great power: “Friedrich the Great not only made Prussia one of the great powers of Europe as a Protestant power, but was also a philosophical king—an altogether peculiar and unique phenomenon in modern times . . . he had the consciousness of Universality, which is the profoundest depth to which Spirit can attain, and is Thought conscious of its own inherent power.”174 In this manner Hegel has made the universal question (the spirit’s raison d’être is universal freedom) a German question, and he has made the German question a Prussian question. The end result of this reductionism is a knowing celebration of a set of values (protestant, monarchical, law-abiding, duty-bound, militaristic) that theoretically now needs to be projected out and beyond the Heimat. After all, we have already noted in chapter 2 how often German intellectuals in the nineteenth century claimed it was Germany’s job to educate the world. But the same position also underpins with little difficulty material expansionism. Indeed, the noble task of improving the world duly gets deeply entangled in the web of German militarism and imperialism in the twentieth century. Neues Deutschland declared on December 22, 1914: “Nothing is more urgent today than that will to conquer the world should take hold of the whole German people.”175 But this is because, as Alfred Hettner explained a year later: “We want to be the educator of the world, to carry our culture out into the world.”176 This is typical of the German intellectual when he is intoxicated by the, arguably contradictory, philtre mixed from high idealism and deep-rooted love of Heimat. For instance, Thomas Mann as things were getting difficult in World War I remained, apparently, undisturbed in his conviction that German culture was intrinsically superior, and Martin Heidegger, as things were beginning to seem hopeless during World War II, was able to look forward to destruction in the happy knowledge that: “Only from the Germans can

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world historical meditation come—provided that they find and defend what is German.”177 The superiority of the quintessential Prussia/Germany—rather than the later collapse of Germany—is the logical result of Hegel’s philosophy of history, although it does have an odd narrative form. Initially the grand story of world history is explained in terms of a gradual and ever more intense concentration until the spirit takes its deepest and most meaningful root in Prussian soil. There it is enhanced and, by virtue of its own dynamic, reaches a higher dialectical level, whereupon it bursts out in new, potent form and reconquers the world, thus fulfilling its uni- versalizing mission. But at this stage of the teleology the state has not only been infused by the spirit; the spirit has taken on the form of the state. Hence it is the perfect rationalization of realpolitik. This might be seen as one of Hegel’s greatest intellectual accomplishments, although one whose consequences are hardly to be welcomed unconditionally. Even today, states—one thinks of the United States—that believe they are particularly enhanced by the animating power of divine authority are no less than the Prussia/Germany of the past the godchildren of Hegelian realpolitik. Domination is not only appropriate, it is also a historic duty. After all, action is what history is all about, and, as Hegel observed in a sentiment that clearly meant a lot to Nietzsche: “Nations are what their deeds are.”178

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T IS NOT SURPRISING, then, if German historians paid massive attention Ito the state. But not in the sense that British or English historians did. There the state not only existed but, by the time Macaulay’s five-volume history appeared in the 1840s and 50s, had also reached something approaching world domination. Certainly it had put the major problems of the past behind it. Above all, by virtue of the Glorious Revolution and the wisdom of Macaulay’s favored Whig Party, it had settled the question of the Protestant succession and underpinned the constitutional and evolving role of parliament. It was only necessary to explain the mystery of 1688 and the greatness of William of Orange (the Dutch prince who that year took possession of the English throne) to the literate and patriotic British public of the nineteenth century. But contemporary German historians, often Anglophile (Treitschke would be an exception) and deeply influenced by Macaulay,179 were either engaged in actively bringing all this about in their own nation or, after 1871, explaining the miracle by which it had come to pass. And as an aside, we might note that they were also likely, both pre- and post-Macaulay, to praise William of Orange, although it was something only done in passing, while its terms of reference were, tellingly, not historical but (well-nigh) contemporary. For instance, we are told that Scharnhorst’s officers compared him to the Dutch prince.180 There is a further difference between the British and German approaches that is exceptionally apposite. The German historians, while paralleling Macaulay in many ways, pay far more attention to culture, the arts, and literature. For instance, Heinrich von Treitschke, in his seven- volume history from the late nineteenth century, finds it necessary to explain these matters in some detail. But this is entirely consistent, simply because in the German case there is no doubt that culture (like idealism in general) precedes nationhood. Literature, claims Treitschke, had been “the harbinger” of the “revolution” that brought modern Germany into existence,181 and our attention is drawn to Alexander von Humboldt, who celebrated “the intellectual unity of Germany.”182 In volume 5, chapter 7 there is a long excursion on the writers and painters of “Young Germany.” It is clear that Treitschke feels he needs to establish that the development of the intellectual and artistic spheres at the national level was the prerequisite of actual German geopolitical unification.

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No doubt that must have been to some extent true in the case of England/Britain also, but one would have to rewind a long way back in order to be confronted by it as a problem, or a theme, that needed commentary. When Macaulay is writing—and even in the period he is writing about—that is simply no longer an issue. With respect to literature the most he feels he needs to do is lash out at Dryden, but that is solely because he was such a die-hard papist.183 Treitschke, however, praises Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht as a “lofty song of revenge,” which is surely odd terminology, but it underlines the extent to which something new and hostile to the immediate past is being created out of the deep history of the German Volk.184 And it is an apposite irony that you are going to come across far more glowing passages on Shakespeare in the German histories than one would in a standard English/British history. His works were performed routinely in eighteenth-century Germany and they were all duly and quickly translated (and often brilliantly by the likes of Schlegel and Tieck). Arguably Shakespeare’s propaganda and “spiritual” role in German unification was even more historically significant than his ideologically powerful role in the creation of a national English (Tudor) myth. Therefore Treitschke feels duty-bound to excuse Friedrich II’s cultural Francophilia and to rationalize away his disdain for all things German.185 As it happens Friedrich is to be forgiven because he pre-dates what is nothing less than a German renaissance. Subsequently, therefore, we are told how Schiller and Goethe created a new national culture.186 Leopold von Ranke, whose hagiography of Friedrich in his 1833 “Great Powers” article at times recalls the manner in which Macaulay was to praise William of Orange, employs a rationalization similar to Treitschke’s.187 In fact Friedrich’s status as a strong candidate for the Hegelian designation of a world historical individual rather undercuts Ranke’s cosmopolitanism. His contemporaries may have thought that his history of the House of Brandenburg was rather short on the appropriate patriotic gush—who knows, perhaps Ranke really wasn’t totally convinced that God was a Prussian—but he was a Friedrich groupie nonetheless. Interestingly, he upends the relationship between the prince/king and Voltaire. This was, and usually still is, portrayed in terms of an overeager German acolyte and a clever cosmopolitan French mentor. However, Ranke portrays Friedrich as the deeper thinker.188 Furthermore, the final chapter of the last of the nine books (as originally published) on Brandenburg and Prussia con- tains both a hagiography of Friedrich (we mustn’t forget that he was also a poet and a flautist) and a conclusion, written before Bismarck, that outbids Treitschke’s later assertion as to the dominance in every positive sense of the first term in the unstable Prussia/Germany coupling.189 Ranke declares: “In Prussia, and in Prussia alone, was formed a mighty and self-supporting power, at once German and European, which for the first time since ages, brought back into the minds of its subjects the full

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feeling of independence, blended with the proud consciousness of being foremost in the development of the world.”190 One would have thought that Ranke’s rationalization of Friedrich’s realpolitik, and his claim that Prussia was “foremost” in the world, were tendentious enough to lead one to question the depth and insights of his international Weltanschauung rather than his alleged lack of German feeling. And it should also be stressed just how active in national life the historians in general were. Georg Iggers points out that “virtually all the important German historians of the nineteenth century . . . were politically involved and understood the political function of their scholarship.”191 We might note that among the distinguished historians del- egated to the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848/49 were Johann Droysen, Friedrich Dahlmann, and Georg Gervinus.192 In any case, the Frankfurt Parliament itself was a collection of intellectuals: the best-educated assembly in world history, Golo Mann called it. Three-quarters of the 585 delegates were academics, and they were all there to create a new state. German unity was thus a matter for the German intellectual elite and as such it had, alongside the highly active, even militant, student fraternities and Friedrich Jahn’s gymnastic clubs, an immediate ideological presence. It was a perpetual theme in the plethora of magazines and journals that had grown up, despite the censorship. (Not surprisingly the aboli- tion of the censorship was a key demand of the revolutionaries of 1848.) Meanwhile the general public would crowd into the lecture halls of Berlin’s university to listen to the leading intellectuals interpret the great questions of German history and Germany and Prussia’s future. Major histories, such as Droysen’s History of Alexander the Great (1833), were widely read and very influential. Everyone understood the implicit analogy between Prussia and the rough but virile Macedonian state in the north that under Alexander had taken control of Greece and created an empire of unprecedented proportions. Above all, one thing emerged as well-nigh incontrovertible. The beneficent nature of history that, according to Macaulay, had manifestly— and, one might assume, intentionally—favored the English/British in the late seventeenth century (“the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement”193) was yet more manifest in the Prussian/ German successes of the nineteenth. Even if several of the German historians “rejected the schematism of Hegel’s philosophy of history, they nevertheless maintained the conviction that history was a meaningful unfolding process.”194 And how, after Sedan, could the conclusion be avoided that “all of German history seemed to point in the direction of the Second Reich”?195 In retrospect it is not difficult to see how potentially dangerous this was. Fritz Stern, for instance, goes so far as to suggest that “Sedan unhinged the German public mind.”196

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Nonetheless, the problem of Prussia remained. Most of all it remained, fatally, a matter that had too heavy an ideological weight. The glib formulations with regard to the Prussia/Germany binary pair with which we began retained their appeal. And when placed within the framework of the “final” triumph—that theatrical tableau in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles on January 18, 1871 when the empire was proclaimed— their glibness inevitably seemed less problematic simply because they had been vindicated by events. Propaganda had become reality. All that was needed now was for time to do its work. Thus it could be assumed that the enriching process by which Prussia would be absorbed into Germany would come about by virtue of the natural evolution of the state. Facts on the ground would contribute to the gradual erasure of the difficulties and not—as it unfortunately turned out—give them new potency. There is therefore a certain irony in Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s capitulation in 1848 in the face of the Berlin uprising. On March 21 he solemnly declared: “From this day on Prussia is merged into Germany.”197 Two days before, the poor man and his distressed consort had had to salute, bare-headed because the crowd demanded it of them, the revolutionary dead who had been brought into the palace courtyard no less.198 Now the German tri- color was officially on show. The conservatives were outraged, none more so than the king’s brother, the future Wilhelm I; that is the Hohenzollern who would be declared emperor in Versailles. He must have seemed antediluvian to the German liberals (he went into exile in England), as no doubt did Bismarck, who was a delegate to the Prussian parliament at the time and had tried to organize ad hoc military support for the king, a king whose refusal to put up a proper fight disgusted him. But both Bismarck and Wilhelm were, in the long term, to emerge as victors. As indeed was another actor in the March days. This was Albrecht von Roon, then a major of the guard. He and Bismarck had been boyhood friends and enjoyed a long and trusting friendship throughout their lives.199 Roon was later to be Bismarck’s minister of war and was present at the dinner in 1870 when the chancellor pulled off one of his most audacious and opportunistic tricks: the doctoring of the Ems Telegram, which led to the precipitous French decision to commence hostilities. In other words, we might conclude that Friedrich Wilhelm’s March 21 declaration as to the relationship between Prussia and Germany was to turn out to be the exact antithesis of what in fact happened. In general the Prussian school of historians had no option but to make Hegelian arguments. After all, the privileged history they told was the history of victorious events. What higher authority could there be for a historian? On this basis one was well-nigh compelled to infer the providential character of the German narrative. Consequently one might, if desired, also infer knowledge as to the will of the Almighty. That is, the latter was not a presupposition on which the history of events rested;

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rather, he had been revealed, produced even, by history itself. God was thus a paradoxical—but utterly Hegelian—phenomenon in that he was, as spirit, impeccable and atemporal, while at the same time he found expression as a dynamic and conditional (and in formal terms, changing) historical force. The inevitable conclusion was that the Germans had not attained their first position in the history of the world because of their suffering, as though their earlier defeats and the exploitation of their lands were proof of a compensatory higher spiritual nature. That had certainly been an appealing rationalization in the past. But now it could be dismissed as defeatist. Even more damning, it had been invalidated by historical facts. Now a higher vindication was manifest. If the Germans had become the chosen people—as Hegel had revealed—then that was established not by their Babylonian captivity during the Thirty Years’ War, but by the crushing defeats of their enemies at Königgrätz and Sedan. And therefore, surely implicit was the promise of further triumphs. In this context one notes that Heinrich von Sybel, who imaginatively described himself as a “liberal-conservative,” accepted, like Hegel, that the history of the state represents the progress of an “ethical idea.”200 Meanwhile Droysen, arguably the founder of the Prussian school, was clear that “God’s eternal guidance operates powerfully.”201 He did not deny free will, and he dismissed the rigorous positivist assertions made by those who believed that history was a science with laws commensurate with those of the natural sciences. This is most clear in his review of Buckle’s The History of Civilization of England.202 But the “primacy of the state over individual interest” and also over the ethical demands of the individual was, naturally, beyond question.203 However this was not so primarily because of practical considerations. Decisive was the assumption that the state was “the manifestation of an ethical reality.”204 Droysen, however, proves himself to be a subtle, if obscurantist, historian. Not only did he reject positivism, but he believed that writing history was also an art form, and the historian must exercise imagination to do his job. Furthermore, as was noted in chapter 1, he accepted that past events were lost to us in their essential form. Therefore, the history he tells is mystical in character, arguably even more idealist than Hegel. There is, for instance, an active dialectic between the individual and the group: we are told that soul blends with soul in understanding, and something creative and instinctual occurs like “coition.”205 Moral forces are always at work and, like Hegel, Droysen seems to see the mind of God in the grand narrative. It is striking, for instance, how often in his Outlines of the Principles of History he anthropomorphizes his subject (“History forms her incentives,” and so on).206 Furthermore, we all have a “longing” after the One Complete Being, and this longing constitutes the best proof for the existence of God.207 And when he explains that “History is humanity becoming and being conscious concerning itself,” we might

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be reading the Marx of 1844.208 Not surprisingly, he does not avoid the teleological axiom that is deeply inscribed in all of this: “The secret of all move or motion is its end.”209 Nevertheless, for Droysen, as for all the German historians mentioned here, history was a lived experience in a powerful way. That is the case not merely because the past only exists in the present, but because the historian is an active participant in the present. He is an actor in the drama. When Droysen left the Frankfurt Parliament in 1849 he was in despair, “bowed to the very earth,” as his pupil Hermann Krüger put it.210 The failure of the intellectuals to create a modern German state seems to have pushed him even further in the direction of Prussian particularism. Initially he had believed that Prussia should merge with Germany, but if that did not happen then it should be consolidated in its own right as the German state par excellence. But at this time Prussia seemed an almost recalcitrant factor in the grander story. Not only did Friedrich Wilhelm contemptuously reject the imperial crown on April 3, 1849 when it was finally offered him by delegates sent from the Frankfurt Parliament (so much for the king’s earlier claim that Prussia was now merged into Germany), there was also a strong feeling among many Prussian conservatives that their own nation would be wise to keep its hands clean. General von Griesheim in an influential pamphlet from June 23, 1848 argued that the loss of the Prussian military tradition would be catastrophic and that German unity was only acceptable if Prussia was central and remained Prussia.211 In fact this sense of Prussian particularism was, ironically to Bismarck’s intense annoyance, present at Versailles itself as the king and others haggled over the exact formulation by which Wilhelm was prepared to accept the imperial crown. He was by no means overjoyed at the prospect of giving up his sacred identity as Prussian king by the grace of God for a new and seemingly artificial alternative to be offered him by the German princes, including King Ludwig II of Bavaria, although he was unlikely to have known that Bismarck was, in effect, regularly bribing the cash-strapped Ludwig. Rather entertainingly, after he had finally pulled it off the chancellor wrote laconically to his wife on January 21, 1871: “Pardon me, this emperor birth was a difficult one, kings at such times have their queer desires like women before they give up to the world what indeed they cannot keep.”212 And Droysen was to see this longed-for Germany come to pass. His interpretative position duly shifted so that any doubts as to Prussia dissolved. As Krüger tells it, with, one suspects, the simplification born of hindsight and hero worship, Droysen had never given up hope of the German Empire and had placed his “entire reliance on Prussia.” He was to see his faith irrefutably confirmed by history.213 His prediction that the Hohenzollern would take the place of the Hohenstaufen came to fruition, and “the splendor of the Empire . . . glorified the

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evening of his declining life.”214 In other words, he had witnessed the symbolic return of the Emperor Barbarossa, the medieval hero asleep in the Kyffhäuser mountains. When Krüger was writing, the memorial on the Kyffhaüserburg had just been completed—clearly it functions as a companion piece to the Hermann memorial of fifteen years earlier— but Barbarossa (the Hohenstaufen Emperor Friedrich I) had long been a mythic figure to whom German romantics had appealed: “German Emperor! German Emperor! Come avenge us, come and save us,” wrote Max von Schenkendorf, poet and soldier in the wars of liberation against Napoleon.215 Nor should it be forgotten how potent and lasting the symbolic significance of Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen Friedrich II was for those, like Stefan George and the incorrigible romantics of the early twentieth century, whose Germanic aspirations blithely sprang the parameters of geographic common sense. When Droysen died in 1884, work on the massive structure had yet to begin. No matter. He had experienced the act of resurrection itself and, if we take the teleological axiom as seriously as he did, we can conclude he was in the happy position of going to his grave with, unlike Meinecke, all his sublime assumptions as to Germany’s identity and its place in the world still fully and gloriously intact. Heinrich von Treitschke, among the most popular and influential historians of the nineteenth century, lived, like Droysen, to see the Prussian triumph and, also like Droysen, was spared the disasters of the twentieth century. He died in 1896. He, too, duly accepted with enthusiasm the incontrovertible verdict of the Hegelian narrative. He put youthful liberalism aside with no apparent difficulty and disavowed any romantic flummery that might have undercut the triumph of Prussian blood and iron. Therefore he developed into a stringent thinker who was unusually inclined to face up to hard facts as he saw them. Typical of Treitschke is: “Radical theories derive the state from the free will of the sovereign people. History teaches us, rather, that in primitive conditions states for the most part come into existence through conquest and subjugation, and in opposition to the will of the majority of the people.”216 After 1871 he became the most prominent, and arguably the most extreme, conservative advocate of the national cause. His seven-volume History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century had only reached 1848 when he decided that the task had turned out to be vastly more extensive than he had initially imagined (“I have had an unceasing struggle with the overwhelming mass of manuscript materials”).217 He declined to pursue the matter further in such exhaustive detail and devoted himself instead to less encyclope- dic projects, among the more disturbing and notable of which was his campaign to force Jews either to convert or go. But his seven-volume history, like Macaulay’s five-volume magnum opus, covers in teeming detail the elaborate machinations of a—surprisingly brief—period. Indeed both

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works seem to contain a contradiction, one that is more apparent in the case of the English historian. The plethora of material, the strong element of chance, the huge cast of characters, the apparent arbitrariness of events, undercut the providential premise of the author. In fact this is something that Macaulay inadvertently keeps drawing to our attention with his frequent subjunctive observations along the lines of: if only James II had acted sooner, or offered this or that concession a year or so before, he might have saved his throne, and so on. God it seems not only acts in a mysterious way, but he is also astonishingly engaged in every tiny detail. Which, given that he proverbially knows every hair on a man’s head, is probably not so surprising, although one can’t help but remain astonished at the detail that Macaulay (and in his different way, Treitschke) reveal in the divine plan. For instance, Macaulay does not explicitly credit divine Providence with the great good fortune that the deplorable James was a fool. But reading his history we, at the very least, can only be grateful that the king soiled his nest at every opportunity, even if we resist the implied inference as to heavenly guidance. In any case: “Not only was the king of England, as he had ever been, stupid and perverse: but even the counsel of the politic king of France was turned into foolishness.”218 Treitschke did not permit his history to get to the point where Providence’s great actors (Wilhelm I and Bismarck) took over the narrative. But he is clear where everything is heading, which, given that his history is no less ex post facto in the classic sense than Macaulay’s, is not to be wondered at. For instance, in the preface to the third volume of the German edition Treitschke employs the ex post facto argument in order to both vindicate the priority of the Prussian approach and to make a blazingly confident prediction as to the future: “The present volume [shows] that the political history of the German Federation [the post- 1815 Bund or German Confederation] can be contemplated solely from the Prussian outlook, for he only who stands on solid ground can judge the flux of things. For the power of Prussia in our new Empire, the way was prepared long beforehand by honest and quiet work. For this reason that power will endure.”219 Furthermore, although Treitschke denies himself the pleasure of recounting the triumphs of his immediate heroes, he can, very much in the style of Macaulay, take the opportunity of a passing character portrayal of the future emperor when he was but a prince and second in line to the throne. That is, whereas Macaulay has ample opportunity to praise William of Orange throughout his five volumes, Treitschke can in all justice allow himself only occasional flourishes about the privileged monarch. Nonetheless it is necessary that he be drawn to our attention simply because he represents the certain promise of a benevolent future. In other words, the “future” that Treitschke’s readers knew had already come to pass. In volume four Treitschke justifies, with a purple passage, Wilhelm’s readiness to obey paternal authority and

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forgo a passionately desired marriage with Princess Elisabeth Radziwill. The adjectives are showered extravagantly on the noble youth. Wilhelm is “straightforward,” “reasonable,” “honorable,” “cheerful,” “resolute,” “alert,” “chivalrous,” “strict,” “kindly.”220 Both Macaulay and Treitschke might be profitably seen in the context of Isaiah Berlin’s observations regarding Tolstoy in his entertaining essay on the fox and the hedgehog. One feels that Macaulay wishes, like Tolstoy, to be a hedgehog in that he has a clear message and a grand overriding interpretative position: the providential nature of English/British history under the guidance of the Whig Party. But the plethora of events, the multitude of actors, and the demonstrably ubiquitous role of chance incline him, again like Tolstoy, to see matters from the perspective of the fox: that creature who knows too much to believe in the grand, single explanation that he otherwise might ideologically desire. But Treitschke, and many of the German historians, are hedgehogs through and through. They know the one big thing and, far more than Macaulay, are upfront in making it clear how Providence has brought it about. It is no acci- dent that the German historians have far more to say, explicitly, about God than the contemporary English historians. The excess of events they tackle—with yet more archival resources at their disposal than Macaulay had to wade through—actually underpins their teleology in an untroubled manner. They have no theoretical problem organizing the teeming material in order to arrive at the pre-given telos, simply because both the struggle to reach the telos and the triumphant moment when it comes into being have been so immediate, dramatic (an apparently trivial, but in fact highly significant factor in seducing the philosopher of history), and in many ways unexpected in their own lives. And this will be the case until things start to go wrong. But given that, in general, their confidence is so great (the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is, as Meinecke was well aware, an obvious exception221), things would have to go very wrong indeed to shatter their confidence or the confidence of their successors. It is no doubt a measure of the tragedy that did occur that even the most pessimistic of nineteenth-century Cassandras would have been hard pressed to have devised predictions grim enough to adequately fore- warn of what was to happen in the coming century. Returning to Treitschke, one notes in his account of the immediate post-Napoleonic period his praise of both Jahn’s Gymnasts Clubs (“Jahn taught his young friends that salvation for Germany was to be found in Prussia alone”) and the student fraternities (Burschenschaften).222 In fact he interweaves their histories. Moreover, he is not unsympathetic in his treatment of the militant student Karl Sand, who assassinated the controversial writer August von Kotzebue in 1818 and then attempted suicide. His subsequent execution was hardly necessary and Treitschke finds that he exemplified a virtuous and patriotic passion that had merely become dangerously

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and tragically overheated. But the significance of the event is the manner in which it was exploited by perfidious Austria in the person of its master of the black arts of reactionary diplomacy, Prince Metternich: one of the “two greatest liars” of the nineteenth century. The other was Napoleon.223 Out of the crisis Metternich was able to engineer the Carlsbad Decrees (designed to cripple both the Burschenschaften and the Gymnasts Clubs), to extend the censorship, and to drive liberals from their university posts. In effect Treitschke is, in the 1870s and 1880s, writing a history designed to justify the war of 1866 against Austria. He is giving thanks for the great, and for many at the time, surprising triumph at Königgrätz. For instance, he explains in detail how Austria was able to use its dominant role in Germany (and its control of the Bundestag of the German Confederation at Frankfurt) to scuttle Prussia’s plans for a customs union in 1819, even as he later records that Austria failed to prevent the customs union of 1834. But already in the second volume we are clear where we are going: “The whole future of German politics depended upon the triumph of Prussia’s clear-sighted honesty over this alliance between obscurity and the spirit of untruth. And Prussia was victorious.”224 But the most striking feature of the mature Treitschke is the enthusiastic manner in which he accepts realpolitik. Not only does he celebrate the German state once it has been firmly planted on German soil after the exclusion of Austria, but he also becomes a passionate apologist for the practice of warfare in the interests of the state. Apparently this is a bullet that has to be bitten if we are to be clear-sighted. But Treitschke bites with relish. War, he writes, “is to be conceived as an ordinance set by God. It is the most powerful maker of nations; it is politics par excellence.”225 And:

All the peace-advocates in the world put together will never persuade the political powers to be of one mind, and as long as they differ, the sword is and must be the only arbiter. We have learned to recognize the moral majesty of war just in those aspects of it which superficial observers describe as brutal and inhuman. Men are called upon to overcome all natural feeling for the sake of their country, to murder people who have never before done them any harm, and whom they perhaps respect as chivalrous enemies.226

One sees here a commendable honesty as to the brutality of war and the amorality of realpolitik, but one cannot overlook the passionate commitment that animates the observation. In fact there seems to be a dash of dubious sentimentality in Treitschke’s patriotic rhapsodizing. Certainly he deplores any attempt to remove heroism from the national character—it is a quality he holds close to his bosom—and he was allegedly an emotional wreck when he stood before his students after the

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first assassination attempt on the kaiser. Adolf Hausrath recalled the occasion: “He hastily grasped his handkerchief, and overwhelmed by emotion he pressed it to his eyes. I believe there was not a single one amongst the hearers whose heart was not thrilled to its innermost depth at this silent process. Subsequently he found words, and said he was unable to discuss the wicked deed.”227 Naturally his belligerent attitude carried over to the state, but, interestingly, it was tempered by a respect for deterrence and power politics. For although the state “has a natural tendency to grab as many posses- sions as may seem to it desirable . . . [it] . . . will nevertheless show of its own accord a real regard for neighboring States. Prudent calculation and a mutual recognition of advantages will gradually foster an ever-growing sense of justice; there will arise the consciousness that each State is bound up with the common life of the States around it and that, willingly or unwillingly, it must come to terms with them as a body of States.”228 In this context Treitschke’s attitude toward Hegel is notable. Employing what one might see as a Hegelian contradiction, he argues: “Only through the overvaluation of the state could the Germans attain to a vigorous sense of the state. Before all others, Hegel furnished a theoretical justification for the abundant civilizing activity which the Prussian state had long been accustomed to display in practice. . . .”229 But what is most striking is Treitschke’s awareness of the dangers intrinsic in Hegel’s scheme. “Hegel’s great works enshrined a tragical contradiction. He aroused in German science a definite sense of the state, but through the sophistical arts of his dialectical method he likewise fostered that undisciplined spirit of presumption which was beginning to derange and undermine the established order of state and church.”230 Yet, despite this, with Treitschke the state enjoys such an indisputable ideological and moral bonus that the implied dangers are at least as present, and tolerated, in his history as they are in Hegel’s philosophy. Certainly there is no doubt that peace is (ultimately) maintained by the sword, whether it is drawn in the cause of conquest or left, for fear of the potential retributive cost, in its scabbard. It is just this naked Machiavellianism that disturbed Meinecke, who wished desperately to bind clear-sighted historical analysis (and realpolitik or, as he would prefer to say, raison d’état) with moral values. And the moral values that he attempted to tease out of Machiavellianism had to be more than mere rationalizations of raison d’état, no matter that raison d’état was apparently grounded in common sense and was customarily confirmed by the course of events. For instance, Meinecke claims to find Treitschke’s doctrine of power unconvincing because he was “too eager to interpret natural things and processes as being moral and altogether used the predicate ‘moral’ much too lavishly. It was clumsy and dangerous to say: ‘The justice of war is based quite simply on the consciousness of a moral necessity.’ It is possible to be convinced (as we are) of the natural

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necessity and inevitability of war, and yet consider it a moral duty to restrict and diminish this necessity.”231 In this case Meinecke is closer to Ranke, who attempts to rationalize Friedrich the Great’s realpolitik by the introduction of something that we might also call common sense. This is particularly clear when Ranke deals with the awkward question—at least for the purist—of the king concluding a treaty “without regard to his allies.” He has in mind the Treaty of Dresden (1745), which ended the first Silesian war with Austria. Ranke tends to cut the Gordian knot here. It was the sensible thing for Friedrich to do and that is all there is to be said about it.232 He takes much the same line with the outbreak of the war. Friedrich would have been foolish to delay his unprovoked invasion of Silesia because his army was at the ready and Austria, after the death of Emperor Charles VI and the disputed succession of Maria Theresa, was in disorder. Although he does put a favorable gloss on the aggression by arguing that Prussia had good claim to (at least some of) Silesia.233 We will see in chapter 13 that in respect of timing much the same type of thinking dominated the German/ Prussian General Staff in the years leading up to 1914. Delay would simply have weakened the German position. This is hardly a very elevated— intellectually regarded—rationalization for a moral realpolitik, but the term “moral realpolitik” may be in any case such an obvious and irresolvable oxymoron that the rationalization is the best that one can do. Nonetheless, as we will see in the next chapter, Meinecke wants to do more. But Meinecke was condemned to face historical disasters that the other German historians mentioned here were not. His long creative life, profoundly formed by the immediate events through which he lived, meant that he also had to face the shortcomings of his own intellectual constructs. In attempting to reconcile the invariably conflicting claims of German culture and the German state, he explains and proposes and suggests and is, inevitably, exposed by events, events whose final catastrophic nature he is better able to appreciate than any of his colleagues. The temporal range of his histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—for we should not forget how contemporary in character they were—make him an easy target for criticism. But that is, for the most part, an option that should be avoided. Unlike so many colleagues, Meinecke was in the rich position of actually experiencing error in an extreme manner and, consequently, seeing his intellectual labors—which were as much to do with understanding history as a theoretical activity as they were with understanding the specific history of modern Germany—radically undermined. But the task he set himself was a noble one, and if after World War II he ends up prone to despair and seems to be looking for a glib way out, the stringency and depth of his previous struggles amount to a far more valuable undertaking than either the nationalist celebration of blood and iron or the idealist waffle as to a sublime Germany infused with the spirit of long-dead Holy Roman emperors.

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HROUGHOUT HIS WORKING LIFE Meinecke struggled to bring intel- Tlectual order into a discussion of the apparently willful and amoral course of historical events. In the first instance that intellectual order is to give us a feeling for how history works. But it will also afford us some moral sense as to how it should work. Meinecke, however, does not intend to arrive at the latter position by diluting or marginalizing the former. In general, he forgoes recourse to a divine will that of itself rationalizes history despite the apparent arbitrariness and brutality of events. Little is to be gained by assuming that God is somewhere (or everywhere) in history, investing everything with his own grace, while a great deal is to be lost should that notion take on—as it frequently does—a nationalist patina. One might believe in God, but making him a player in the game sabotages serious historical analysis. Nor does Meinecke take advantage of the simplistically attractive idea, born of assumed historical objectivity and vulgar Darwinism, that the winners attain a morally enhanced status simply because they have won. Nor does he imagine that there is encoded in events a science of history based on rules that he can winkle out. History is for him not a riddle that can be solved; it is not a disguised natural science. His attitude is neither that of the mystic, nor the militarist, nor the incorrigible positivist. As a result he is compelled to face up to exactly those things that we might think are most likely to sabotage his work. Nonetheless, he attempts rigorously to embed both the arbitrary and the cult of national (or personal) self-interest into the historical discussion in a manner that reflects their actual potent place in the course of events. Even more than this, he does not—at least, not in many cases—treat these elements as discrete, as somehow independent of the positive achievements through which he has lived. They are not even the other side of the coin, but rather intrinsic and formative elements of the whole. Meinecke intends to take irrationality and chance and evil seriously while fighting against the easy, but by no means intellectually weak, claims of theoretical nihilism. That is, a nihilism based simply on the (manifestly true?) premise that historical analysis is in any philosophical sense a fool’s errand. It cannot be grounded in sustainable methodological axioms and, in any case, it always ends in failure. But in rejecting all such facile exit strategies, Meinecke is addressing the problem of the philosophy of history in its most intractable form. Consequently, he is in every sense among the least inclined to take an easy option.

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There is a further constant in Meinecke’s work that gives his books an exceptional character. While he is the most broadminded and theoretically engaged of historians he is also among the most German in his interests. Nothing is more central to his work than the evolution and character of the German state. Perhaps there is an interesting parallel here. Leopold von Ranke, who allegedly established the facticity of history and revealed the value of deep archival research, produces major texts on Britain and the Roman popes. His interests are cosmopolitan. Moreover, he is imbued with religious conviction and argues that God is not only present in history but that each age and nation is also equally placed, albeit in its own way, to God;234 an attitude that Meinecke thought debilitated Ranke’s notion of the state.235 Indeed the axiom of moral equality seems to have been so powerful as to dissuade Ranke from accepting the notion of progress, although it did push him closer to Meinecke with respect to the latter’s notion of historicism: that is, with respect to the necessity of seeing each period according to the transitory dynamics in play at the time rather than according it to grand timeless forces. Even so, in comparison with Meinecke, Ranke seems theoretically weak simply because of his devotion to empiricism as both a methodology and as an epistemological vindication of his archival work. But Meinecke, despite being suspicious of Ranke’s empiricism and always grappling with his own theoretical difficulties, limits his studies almost exclusively to Germany and the problem of the German state. Intellectually he may be broadly cosmopolitan (French, Italian, and British thinkers are regularly discussed in his books), but the term of reference is Germany. The terrain on which his ideas play out, the explanations that they generate, and the successes and failures with which they are confronted are German. And this leads to arguably his most enriching quality. Meinecke does not allow himself a hiding place—or, if he does and his cover is blown by the course of events, he does not shirk the fact of his own shortcomings. He stands naked among the debris of his own historical constructs. Furthermore, this combination of theoretical speculation with the empirical reality of the (above all contemporary and lived) history of one country is further bolstered by the longevity of Meinecke’s life. He, more than any of the German historians we have looked at, or might look at, is condemned to face up to the consequences of binding theory with facts. His history is almost palpably present. Even more than this, it addresses the future from both the perspective of the nineteenth-century triumphs and the two twentieth-century catastrophes (the latter of almost apocalyptic proportions) through which he lived. Consequently, he is indeed to be found naked, but nevertheless ready to rebuild on foundations that he surely intends to go deeper than any he had previously dug. The result is that Meinecke wrong is often more illuminating than many other German historians (temporarily) right. Although an exception to this axiom

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would have to be made in respect of his often contemptuous attitude toward Slavs and his failure to pay due heed to the dangers of German antisemitism. At times in his first major work (Cosmopolitanism and the National State, 1907), he can sound as though he wants to avoid the problem of the German state entirely by a flight into abstractions, a flight characteristic of much of the thinking in the early nineteenth century. His recourse to the distinction between a cultural nation (Germany) as opposed to a political nation (France) has already been mentioned (see chapter 2). It is a potent distinction and in one form or another survives right through to the twentieth century.236 He also notes that Friedrich Karl von Moser in the eighteenth century argued that German strength lay in what seemed to everyone in the nineteenth to be the difficulty. For Moser the national “spirit” was to be found in the innumerable principalities. It was, moreover, “a by-product of the intellectual efforts of great poets and thinkers of the time” and therefore it was “characterized by unconscious and vegetative growth of the highest order.”237 But Meinecke is, in fact, trying to free himself from this kind of thinking, and this leads him to formulate clearly the problem as it stood after Napoleon’s defeat. “The peculiar situation in Germany was that the only usable foundations for a modern national state were not available in the German nation but in the Prussian state.”238 Everything followed from this dilemma. Prussia was the ersatz solution, but only because a proper solution was not at hand. The question then followed: What was Germany to make out of Prussia in order that the Germany one desired was engineered or evolved? The reverse question—what would Prussia make out of Germany?—was not accorded the same weight. But given that Prussia finally took possession of Germany on its own terms, it was a question of great import. Nor was there any lack of warning signs. Did not Friedrich Wilhelm IV on July 16, 1848 respond to the nationalist liberals in the Frankfurt Parliament with a clear statement of principle? “I will not make the slightest concession whatever to certain demands this neo-Teutonic creature has made for the dissolution of Prussia.”239 Whatever the case, Meinecke was always struggling with the Prussia/Germany dialectic. Writing the epilogue to the third edition of Cosmopolitanism and the National State in 1915 he is still emphasizing that the process of subsuming Prussia into the Reich is not complete. Then in 1921 he points out that Prussia and Germany “have again parted ways”240 and his language duly becomes tougher. “The will of the Prussian state must be subdued by letting Germany directly influence and regulate it in such a way that the tracks will run parallel to each other in the future and not cross each other.”241 Yet despite the concrete metaphor, this is essentially sentiment. Furthermore it is naive and impractical even in its own terms, as though Prussia could be retained as a discrete

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but unthreatening structure within the nation. There was probably only one practical solution to the threat of Prussian hegemony, other than succumbing to it, and that was duly employed by the allies in 1947 when they simply wiped Prussia as a political and administrative unit from the map of Germany. As far as I can see, hardly anyone today wants it back. In Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte of 1924 (the title was put into English as Machiavellism), Meinecke foregrounds the source of all his difficulties. But he does not do so to write them off, or to write them out of the historical narrative. Rather, he wishes to incorporate, and contain, the dilemma of evil within the general framework of his historiography. What in German he calls Staatsräson and what, if we are unhappy with this, we might better call raison d’état is thereby elevated to a technical term. Above all, we are not supposed to read it as a catchall notion for every form of ruthlessness, but as a means of solv- ing the problem that it signifies. Machiavellism is, as a result, Meinecke’s great attempt to square the circle of the state when it is seen, on the one hand, as an honorable and necessary institution that regulates national affairs according to laws and rights that enable fulfilled lives, and when seen on the other as an instrument of oppression that, above all, facilitates foreign aggression and the violation of principle on the basis of national self-interest. We are told that the state is born of “Kratos and Eros” (power and love) as though they were unavoidable constituents of its genetic makeup.242 However, Meinecke then chooses to see raison d’état not as an expression of the former but as a “bridge” between the two.243 Therefore, if raison d’état can be intellectually managed as a praxis, the arbitrariness of foreign policy (the willful decisions to make war and cause misery) could also be managed. Raison d’état would then be a praxis that, while dangerous, had the potential to control and regulate its own inimical characteristics. In a similar fashion, the state would also become the self-correcting apparatus within which the problem of the state itself might be solved. It is hardly surprising if this neat and appealing model duly turns out to be difficult to establish theoretically, even putting aside any attempt to devise a praxis as to how it might be carried out in nuts and bolts terms. Nonetheless Meinecke does not shirk the former challenge. Of course he is not gainsaying the continued presence of universal inimical qualities. In fact he identifies them with a further Greek term, “pleonexia”: greed, power, lust, etc. And it is true that they will always intrude. But they, too, are to be coped with on the national level by raison d’état. In this way, vice might be seen as a potential virtue if, that is, it is contained within the parameters laid down by the overriding conceptual model. Should one choose to see this as a trick, an intellectual sleight of hand, one can only say that it is, at the very least, one that leads Meinecke to a good deal of intriguing and serious analysis.

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When placed within this model the statesman must be cool and objective if he is going to understand all the factors in play and to function successfully. And this brings Meinecke to what is for him a new level of admiration for the, otherwise dubious, figure of Bismarck.244 Bismarck in fact becomes a near paradigmatic exemplar of rational, albeit when necessary cruel, statecraft. This is not an unimportant shift, as it pays homage not so much to Bismarck’s foreign policy but rather to his internal pan- Germanic maneuverings. In removing Austria ruthlessly from the equation the Iron Chancellor had displayed exactly that type of raison d’état that Meinecke now seems to admire. If it is “apparently the case that the State must do evil,” it does not follow that the evil of war is either uncon- tainable or is merely to be handed over in a defeatist manner to the self- indulgence of ambitious statesmen.245 Therefore Meinecke must have seen that the 1870 war with France (which was instigated in an entirely consistent and coolheaded fashion on Bismarck’s part) led to a potential imbalance between Kratos and Eros owing to the subsequent, diplomati- cally disastrous, Prussian land grab west of the Rhine. Yet he seems unable to acknowledge this. Rather, he is now so intellectually in hock to his archetype that he has to upgrade him. Thus Bismarck becomes the unsurpassable empirical proof that Meinecke’s privileged and willful notion of raison d’état does in fact work. He is the “highest and best example” of the nineteenth century,246 and: “If it had not been for him, the old European world would perhaps have collapsed a few decades earlier.”247 This, by the way, is in itself an interesting formulation. Does it suggest that a collapse and, by implication, World War I were inevitable? Or might we imagine that if Bismarck had been allowed to keep things going a few decades longer he would have engineered a better future than that which duly took the stage and slaughtered millions of young men? In any case:

In Bismarck we see the most sublime and successful synthesis between the old raison d’état of the cabinet, and the new popular forces. He made use of these for the power-needs of the Prussian State, satisfied them by setting up the constitutional national State, and yet simultaneously kept both these forces and his own power politics within firm bounds. . . . With Machiavellian ruthlessness and the most acute calculation and exploitation of power-resources, he created the German State, but the same calculation also enabled him to see the limits of the power of which Germany was capable. An intimate connection exists here between his suppression of parliament and democratic tendencies, and his cautious moderate power policy after 1871, which constantly strove to maintain peace in Europe.248

This seems to be the most perfect synthesis that could be imagined courtesy of the explanatory model Meinecke is now using. Bismarck is the

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ruthless practitioner par excellence but he nevertheless devotes his energies, once the great task of nation-building is behind him, to peace in Europe. However, in one key respect Bismarck had played the great game badly, although Meinecke, such is his hagiography at this time, does not address it. Yet he must have grasped the consequences of Prussia over- extending itself at Versailles in 1870–71. Whereas in 1866, after victory against the Austrians, Bismarck was able to prevent the king from parad- ing in Vienna and, far more important, to hold the General Staff and all those arrogant lieutenants in check (sarcastically telling them that they could march on Istanbul if they were so damn foolish as to want to249), he was not able to prevent the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871. But the arguments over the Treaty of Frankfurt (which officially brought all negotiations to an end in 1871) undermine Meinecke’s hagiography. For instance, it would seem that despite his later intimations to the contrary, Bismarck might not have been unattracted by the land grab.250 Perhaps personal vanity, the self-indulgence of the victor, got the better of his judgment. Whatever the case, the standard assumption that he was bullied into the annexation may be glib. Nonetheless, he wrote to his wife immediately after the matter was settled (February 27, 1871): “Yesterday at last we signed; gained more than I think is good for my personal political calculation. But I have to regard, upward and downward, sentiments which just won’t calculate. We take Alsace and German Lorraine, Metz with very indigestible elements. . . .”251 Perhaps what is most interesting here is that he feels he is trapped by forces he cannot reconcile. Ernst Engelberg not only has Bismarck uncomfortable (beunruhigte) with the annexation; he claims he argued against taking Metz but was overruled by the king and Moltke.252 A. J. P. Taylor believes, not unreasonably, that owing to the very forces he had called forth he ended up taking more than he initially intended. However, if annexing Metz and Lorraine was a “blunder,” it was “of his own making.”253 Both George O. Kent and Áine McGillicuddy, however, point out that his actions were fully consistent with his notion of realpolitik.254 Kent suggests that he had “decided on annexation at an early stage,” and notes that in 1848 he asked “that Strasbourg be again incorporated into the Reich.”255 But that would only have affected Alsace. And how would this be consistent with realpolitik if it made an unwanted future war unavoidable? Clark, on the other hand, is quite unambivalent. The annexation of both provinces was “strongly advocated by Bismarck.”256 But what the chancellor may have said when later selling his triumph to both the Reichstag and the public may not have reflected his deeper thinking on the matter. Of all the debates surrounding his policies, this issue seems to be the one in which the historian is most trapped by the conflicting and devious signals sent out by the principal actor himself. It is perhaps only apposite that Meinecke, so keen to underline the deep rationality of Bismarck’s policies, largely avoids the problem.

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Whatever the case, Bismarck made of France an unyielding enemy and he must have known it. In fact even his speech to parliament on May 2, 1871 makes it perfectly clear that he fully understands the instinctual and unchangeable loyalty the “French” citizen of the annexed provinces feels to France. He will always imagine Paris standing behind him.257 And at the time of the negotiations he had been struck that the French delegates were prepared to pay a much higher indemnity if they could keep their eastern provinces. The final sum was, in any case, an unprecedented 5 billion francs. But Bismarck was not interested. In a letter to his son Herbert dated September 23, 1870, he shows himself quite determined on the question of Alsace and Lorraine and records that he has insisted to the French delegates that the border issue be settled first before there is any talk about money: “first fix the German frontier and make it tight.”258 Here the argument is unambiguous, which is not the case with the later letter to his wife quoted above. Making the border tight means putting oneself in an impregnable situation should the French resort to arms, which, as his address to the Prussian parliament makes clear by implication, he imagines they will. To Herbert he is quite explicit. He reports that he said to the French delegates that “as soon as they should get strong enough they would attack us again . . . which they denied under the most pompous protestations of peace.”259 All this is not about placating a defeated enemy, but securing one’s own military advantage. It is also an argument for a future preventive war under what would now be favorable military conditions, something it seems Bismarck later contemplated.260 But in any case, exactly this policy was an explicit and determining element in the arguments put forward by the ultimately successful warmongering clique in the German military in the years leading up to 1914. Certainly there is nothing here that suggests Bismarck’s hand was being forced by the military High Command, although it must be admitted he was excluded from their deliberations.261 The senior officers had not forgotten how he had outmaneuvered them after Königgrätz. If in 1871 the annexation was to be seen as nonnegotiable, the only logical, or Machiavellian, procedure would have been a policy of further French losses in order to weaken her permanently; to turn her into a second-rate power. It was probably beyond Prussia’s strength to force this through in European affairs as they stood in 1871, and it was not, in any case, part of Bismarck’s agenda, which only underlines the folly of the triumphant and attractive, but short-term, policy he in fact did pursue. However, in 1914 the German High Command was in no doubt as to what had to be done following a victory that in late August looked certain. They were not going to make the same mistake twice. The language they used was very similar to that later used by Clemenceau in 1918, along with many vengeful Britons who wanted to “squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked.” Stalin had the same goal in mind in 1945 and

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had some support from the American Morgenthau Plan. Germany would be so industrially denuded that it would not even be able to produce its own plowshares. As we will see in chapter 13, just this was the destiny the Germans planned for France in 1914. It is hardly surprising that Friedrich the Great (Friedrich II) also becomes a pivotal figure in Meinecke’s attempt to raise raison d’état to such a serious conceptual level that it resolves the problems that it otherwise seems to generate. But this, too, is not without an unusually sharp, ironic component. For privileging Friedrich, who was by anyone’s reck- oning a quite extraordinary figure, means facing up to his prima facie status as the conceptual and declared enemy of realpolitik. He is the most prominent Enlightenment apologist among the liberal royals and rul- ers of the time. He is committed, at least ostensibly, to the notion of reason as a timeless constant in human affairs and a belief in the potential rationality of human actions. When crown prince he even wrote a book on Machiavelli with the help of Voltaire, with whom he enjoyed a long relationship. But Friedrich’s book is not designed, like Meinecke’s Machiavellism, to come to terms with, and employ, the great Italian the- orist’s insights with regard to reasons of state. Rather, Anti-Machiavel refutes the evil genius point by point. Princes should behave virtuously, and they will thrive if they do. Furthermore, Friedrich displays another “quality” that only underpins the first “error.” He despises German culture. He was a Francophile, and Voltaire, who lived as an honored guest at the king’s palace at Sanssouci for three years, remarked that the last language you heard at court was German. But Meinecke is able to make a lot out of both the problems Friedrich sets him and the opportunities his remarkable life offers. When Friedrich writes that “in our times, more mistakes are caused by ignorance, than by evil” Meinecke happily agrees.262 What he would not agree with is the notion that underpins this, namely, the perfectibility of man. But that is, in part, merely a question of degree. Naturally the manner in which Friedrich prepared himself for kingship by becoming ever more erudite is admired by Meinecke. Of course one can better oneself. After all, Meinecke’s belief in the integrity of each epoch when taken on its own terms, together with the moral force of the lived lives of ordinary people, is hardly an argument for ignorance or against progress. What disturbs him most, however, is not the threat posed by evil, but rather the potentially chaotic role of chance and the ignorant behavior of others. And this is something, as he is keen to point out, that Friedrich realized as well. Furthermore he realized it to the degree that his own faith in Natural Law was shattered and he was compelled to acknowledge that, when push comes to shove, state interests trump Enlightenment principles.263 In the end Friedrich is trapped in something Meinecke sees as a dualism. He was torn between the humanitarian ideal and utilitarian duty

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to the strong state. They “dwelt in him side by side,” although the king wanted to believe he had harmonized them.264 And the same problem was duly to become a Prussian problem, but here there is a dialectical twist. What might seem to be a misfortune becomes a, potential, virtue. “Prussia did not become a pure power-State; on the contrary, owing to Friedrich it was also put on the road to being a civilized and constitutional State. Henceforth it harbored within itself both Machiavelli and Anti-Machiavelli.”265 Meinecke would have good cause to lament later that this synthesis never came to fruition, not least because he personally witnessed how horribly everything went awry. Meinecke stresses, in particular, how Friedrich could not fail to be disturbed by the irrationality of history. For instance, Friedrich felt that France’s decision in 1756 to take military action against Prussia on the side of Austria was illogical. He cries out in frustration: “How could I have known!?” and then puts it down to the “intrigues of a few gossip- ing women.”266 The world is, when all is said and done, arbitrary, and he comes to realize this.267 After all, if “irrational” French intervention almost cost him his throne in 1756, sheer chance saved it in 1762 when the Russian Czarina Elizabeth died and the Germanophile Peter, her nephew and successor, brought down the coalition that was on the verge of complete victory over Prussia. History was indeed not a science. Surely this was a principle that Bismarck thoroughly understood. It suffused the opportunism of both his domestic and his foreign policy. One has clear long-term goals, but the path that will take one there is seldom self-evident. Consequently, collect as much knowledge, public and private, of your enemies as possible, be ruthless, utterly unsentimental, in your estimation of their strengths and weaknesses, and, above all, be ready to take advantage of every unexpected event chance throws up. These are the skills, both deep-seated and opportunistic, needed to practice statecraft successfully. And they hardly undermine the practice of raison d’état; they merely underline the challenges and difficulties of the task. Meinecke, in short, is going to need exceptional actors to make his elevated notion of raison d’état deliver. And this is why he is compelled to make much of Friedrich and Bismarck. He is, in short, not dealing with a sublime political or diplomatic mechanism that will factor out human folly from statecraft, rather he is setting up a theoretical model that, paradoxically, is dependent on the brilliant operator. There is, of course, the whiff of a contradiction here. Of what use is raison d’état as a system designed to resolve problems and maximize worthwhile and peaceful life in a dangerous and unpredictable world, if it only works in the hands of the most gifted and exceptional of statesmen? This is not merely a theoretical speculation; it goes to the heart of the German problem. When the individual actor takes precedence over the apparatuses of government, the democratic and/or administrative

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credentials of the state are put under too much pressure simply because they become too dependent on personality. Certainly Germany after 1871 had claims to being a democracy of sorts, although parliament, while hardly impotent, was not sovereign and the executive was in the hands of the kaiser. But when the new emperor, Wilhelm II, forced Bismarck out of office in 1890, the apparatus of government that the chancellor had employed was so associated with him that it too went. Or at the very least it did not leave behind effective structures, democratic or otherwise, to be taken over by his successors. Ironically, Bismarck’s departure simply made plain how much arbitrary power lay in the hands of the emperor and his chosen ministers. Parliament was a secondary consideration . . . at best. Indeed it is instructive that Bismarck, the supposed reactionary, did not, through clenched teeth as it were, put up with universal manhood suf- frage in Prussia (which retained, nevertheless, a conservatively weighted three-tier electoral system) and its subsequent introduction into the new Reich. Rather, he welcomed it. But these moves, along with his later concessions to the proletariat (such as pensions and social insurance), were purely political and self-serving. They placed further powers in his hands to be manipulated in his own nondemocratic interests. Using the authority of the emperor he could dissolve parliament at will and call new elections when they best suited him. The exceptionally endowed monarchy exposed the grand democratic gestures as sham. There is embedded here a further, and closely related, irony. While Bismarckianism may well have been so solipsistic that it was nearly crippled after Bismarck himself went, that does not mean that its only legacy was the intoxicating and dangerous nationalist forces that had been emboldened and, if unintentionally, cultivated by the ex-chancellor’s daz- zling successes. There was the civil service apparatus necessary for the modern state that, partly because it had been to a large degree Bismarck’s creation, was easily subverted once he was gone. It was then duly manipulated according to imperial will and the wishes of the new emperor’s favorites. In other words, Bismarck bequeathed to the man who peremp- torily fired him an administrative system infused by deep conservative principles, grounded in faith and tradition. Being profoundly monarchical, it would keep the new and erratic kaiser in power, even though as a system it had developed in the time of his grandfather, a king/emperor who had been in the eyes of the Iron Chancellor exceptionally fit for the role destiny had forced on him. Now, however, Bismarckianism was compelled to empower a man whom Bismarck knew to be unfit for the office of the “All Highest.” In this context we might recall how it was that Bismarck came to power. He was appointed chancellor when the king (Wilhelm I) was fighting bitterly with the Prussian parliament over reforms to the army. These were designed to increase compulsory military service from two to

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three years and, to the chagrin of parliament, downgrade the Landwehr, a territorial force with an officer class independent of the professional army. And it is notable that in the years ahead the special status of the army, the king’s “regiments” (they owed allegiance to no one else), was a constant source of friction between the chancellor and the assembly. But it was also a matter of deep principle, both for the king and the new chancellor. So initially Bismarck governed without parliament precisely because of the arguments over the military budget. Later, in 1874, he forced through a seven-year plan for army finance. Then, in 1887, he dissolved parliament (now the Reichstag) confident that he would get his way on military matters after fresh elections.268 But all of this was in devoted and principled service of his king, which is to say in the service of Bismarck’s notion of what Prussian (and later German) government should be about. On September 22, 1862 in a private conversation with Wilhelm I in the park at Babelsberg, that is, at the time of his appointment as chancellor, Bismarck told the king that there was a clear choice between “monarchical rule or parliamentary government, and that the latter must be avoided at all costs.”269 As he writes in his memoirs: “A real responsibility in a high position can only be undertaken by one single directing minister, never by a numerous board with majority voting.”270 Further, one must understand that this notion of non (or anti) parliamentary ministerial rule rests on the authority of the prince. That politics is a matter for princes and dynasties is for Bismarck a matter of unqualified principle, to which he, nevertheless, gives a specifically German gloss, albeit one that we might find a touch tenuous and not nearly so deeply rooted as he is determined to believe: “The German’s love of Fatherland has need of a prince in whom it can concentrate its attachments.”271 But we should not forget that this devotion to the princely ideal is sincere enough and its political ramifications are never avoided. After all, the ideal is not the consequence of an opportunistic choice, but goes to the root of everything that Bismarck holds most dear. It is clear that in serving his prince he is also serving his God, and he imagines that his loyalty to both is unconditional. Nor was this unusual. Meinecke has pointed out how contemporary thinkers, such as Karl Ludwig von Haller and Wilhelm von Gerlach, were still influenced by the notion of the divine right of kings. God was an important ingredient—and was to stay so—in the royalist mix just as he was in discussions of the German Volk in Jahn’s Merke zum deutschen Volkstum from 1833.272 Perhaps Bismarck’s mistake is that he never realized—as other Germans would—that both the God and the king (later emperor) that he served were ever, and often only, Prussian. Or if he did realize this, it would not have seemed to him an anomaly, but merely an appropriate state of affairs. But for others, including other Germans, this was to remain a severe problem. After all, this is the problem, noted in

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chapter 1, that the Fränkische Tagespost was addressing in 1913.273 Still, we might remain impressed by the depth of Bismarck’s royalist Prussian attachment. Consider, for instance, his speech on January 27, 1863 when he declared: “The Prussian Landtag is not an English Parliament.” He sees himself as the unambiguous defender of the throne. And this means, as he makes clear at the end of his speech, that he is the defender of the interests not only of the king but also of the crown prince.274 But it is exactly here that the irony becomes bitterly manifest. Bismarck, who genuinely grieved at the death of Wilhelm I, was obliged to accept that loyalty to the throne transcended any consideration as to the personality of the king/emperor, even though as a younger man in 1848 he had connived against (the unsuitable) Friedrich Wilhelm IV during the March days. Still, that might be put down to an excess of youthful extremism on Bismarck’s part. “Now,” following Wilhelm’s death, he was presumably shackled to the dynastic principle, at least as it affected his own “princes.” At times he had had a difficult relationship with crown prince Friedrich, who favored the sort of constitutional monarchy Bismarck distrusted. It was all too English and inappropriate in Germany, where a strong monarch was a necessity. It should also be noted that the crown prince’s wife (who was English, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria) heartily disliked Bismarck. Nonetheless, Bismarck recalled in a letter from 1866: “To the crown prince, who through education and trend of mind, is a man of parliamentary government, I once said: ‘What does it matter, if they hang me, if only my rope fastens your throne more firmly to North Germany.’”275 Furthermore, Friedrich was talented and intelligent and both men might have made something out of mutual work. It is surely notable, for instance, that the crown prince wrote to Bismarck on February 21, 1867 that he was in complete agreement with the chancellor: that the creation of a greater Germany that included the southern states was the ultimate aim of current policy and everything “must be subordinated to this point of view.” This might also be seen as putting paid to A. J. P. Taylor’s opinion that Bismarck did not really want to have the Catholic states south of the Main included in the Reich.276 But Friedrich III died of cancer in 1888; that is, in the year he succeeded his father Wilhelm I. And so it was Friedrich’s emotionally unstable son who was called on to vindicate the dynastic principle. The most Golo Mann can say of Wilhelm II is that he was “a good actor.”277 He duly sacked Bismarck within two years. But then it transpired that personal vanity was more powerful than principle and the ex-chancellor could not follow through on his own quasireligious royalist credo. He refused to go quietly. Instead he was bloody-minded, forcing Wilhelm’s hand so that it was made public that the elderly chancellor had not resigned willingly. And if that were not enough, Bismarck then proceeded to put on paper,

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albeit not at first for immediate publication, his opinions as to Wilhelm’s unsuitability for the job.278 It is, of course, quite beside the point that Bismarck was surely right in this estimation. What counts is the blunt fact that he was the one who was wedded to a system that placed exceptional power in the monarch’s hands. If this turned out on occasions to be a mistake simply because it was too dependent on the emperor’s abilities—or lack of them—then the bitterness of an old man indulging in Schadenfreude because things were now going to the dogs could not hide the fact that he was one of the principal architects of the disaster. In other words, what Meinecke has failed to realize—at least when he was writing Machiavellism—are the dangers of raison d’état precisely at those times when it is successful. He claimed, as we have noted above, that Bismarck “created the German State.” But he did not create a state that was fit for purpose after he was gone. It is a crude but telling contradiction in Meinecke’s position that the brilliant king or politician becomes the vindication of a praxis that lacks structures independent of that actor. And if Bismarck’s prediction of future disasters as a result of his dismissal turned out to be true,279 this too was not, as he conceit- edly imagined, a vindication, on the deeper level, of either his policies or his methods. Rather, it reinforced the judgment that as a personality he had become too important and too successful. Bismarckianism had become a phenomenon so personalized that it had nothing practical to bequeath, apart from anachronistic (royalist) values that were never designed to pay heed to, or appreciate, modern mass, industrial life. Of course it also left behind, albeit unintentionally, a great deal of ideological decoration and flummery born of military victories. This reached a new apotheosis in the plumed, almost camp, figure (he would sometimes change his military uniforms six times a day) of the new kaiser, who duly turned official life into perpetual parades.280 He appeared among his subjects “more often than any of his predecessors”281 while his reign was remembered as an “age of festivities,” of unending “official celebrations,” of “addresses, speeches, and toasts . . . marches and parades . . . torch-lit processions and fireworks, church visits, poems and songs. . . .”282 War was thus made implicitly attractive by the preening display of peacetime militarism. “Wilhelm gave support . . . to the misconception that the German Reich equaled Prussia” not least because it “sought a militarization of public life.”283 And it does not matter a jot if Bismarck himself, invariably intelligent and often exceptionally perspica- cious, had despised that sort of thing. The problems that this generated were also seen as problems for German historiography. That is, many of the leading players were certainly well aware of the antagonistic relationship between the claims of the privileged actor on the one hand and the structures (and grand forces) of the state on the other. For instance, Helmut von Moltke “the

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Younger” (the nephew of the victor of Königgrätz and Sedan), who wanted war earlier than 1914 and dismissed contemptuously Wilhelm’s II’s attempts at international diplomacy, took the view that “the interests of states are not determined by meetings between monarchs,” rather “they follow their own course and lead consequently and inexorably to clashes or understandings.”284 In this he reminds one of General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s enthusiastic predictions in his popular 1912 book Germany and the Coming War. It had a lot to say about war as a “divine business” and was stamped by social Darwinism.285 In other words, historical objectivity and great forces, rather than individual players, were at work, and the “coming” war was not to be avoided. But if this was the way Moltke also thought, he was forgetting, or perhaps rationalizing away, his own exasperation at the feeble behavior, as he saw it, of his vacillating monarch, who had missed the boat at the time of the Moroccan crisis of 1911.286 More interesting are the arguments among historians as to the respective power of the two factors (the individual and the state) in this equation. Structuralists and Marxists are compelled to play down the role of exceptional (whether brilliant or stupid) historical actors. But they do not have a theoretical lock on the issue. A leading contemporary historian on German affairs, and the author of a major three-volume biography of Wilhelm II (John Röhl), complains: “For many years I was virtually on my own with my views on the constitutional realities of the monarchy that Bismarck had created . . . and on the outstanding decision-making powers of Wilhelm II.”287 Now, however, his claim that Wilhelm should be seen as running a “personal monarchy” carries considerable weight.288 But as this question will crop up again in chapter 12, we should now return to Meinecke. We see that both Meinecke’s favored actors—Friedrich II and Bismarck—are also alike in another respect. They both understand, or choose to believe, that great powers not only enjoy a special status merely by being great but that they have claims on a moral bonus as well. This, too, Meinecke attempts to interpret positively. Friedrich, we are told, “despised” the small states; they lay at odds with his allegedly undynastic attitude. He was only interested in the relations between large states, for, among other things, only a large state could meaningfully promote happiness.289 Treitschke turns out to be of the same opinion, but he, as always, doesn’t avoid calling a spade a spade: “Small states are apt to appear ridiculous, for the state is power. . . .”290 This might be seen as a potentially reasonable argument for the regulation of the relations between great powers, in that great powers by the very nature of their strengths might be in a better position to understand and limit their ambitions vis-à-vis each other. Get that right and the problem of small states might be readily placed within grander and more stable parameters and thereafter more

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easily handled. Whether this can be characterized as a particularly ethical attitude is doubtful. Furthermore, it simply might not be true. Do not small states often turn out to be the prey over which great powers squabble, if only on occasions by proxy? Treitschke, for instance, is utterly dismissive of Poland, which when one considers the three partitions in the late eighteenth century and, in particular, Friedrich II’s satisfaction after his participation in the ruthless land grab of 1772, is somewhat disturbing. And Treitschke’s dismissal (“Never have a people more justifiably been annihilated than the Poles.”291) leaves a bad taste even if we are able to disregard Poland’s twentieth-century history. In any case, small states turn out to be casus belli with a frequency that seems to belie their otherwise minor place in the scheme of things. Clearly there is a fundamental amorality behind all this, which would have to be incorporated into raison d’état. After all, as he gets older Friedrich the Great shows himself very well aware of the various contradictions interwoven in what Meinecke has called his Machiavellian/ anti-Machiavellian “dualism.” Friedrich observed: “The passions of rul- ers have no other curb but the limits of their power.” And: “To tell the truth, treaties are only affirmations of deception and faithlessness.”292 One feels that Meinecke wants to winkle out of this an argument for deterrence, but it remains a flagrant expression of the degree to which the older monarch violates his previous princely protestations. Indeed it reminds one of Rousseau’s sarcastic observation that Friedrich began his real Machiavellianism by “refuting Machiavelli.”293 Nor does a further, and consistent, gloss on this by Friedrich late in life help matters much. He observes that “both . . . Louis XIV and the Great Elector concluded treaties and then broke them; but the first did it for reasons of ambition, the second for reasons of necessity.”294 Given that both were powerful enough to act in this arbitrary fashion one wonders whether much that is positive can be inferred from the similarity of their behavior and the difference of their motives. It may be nothing more than an example of family propaganda—the Elector was Friedrich’s great grandfather. Nonetheless, we are clearly supposed to be impressed that he, unlike Louis, acted from “genuine” raison d’état. With respect to great powers, Bismarck perhaps put the matter more clearly. In 1907, when his enthusiasm for the chancellor was not as prominent as it was in 1924, Meinecke had quoted him: “The only sound foundation for a major state—and in this it is fundamentally different from a minor state—is political egoism and not romanticism. It is not worthy of a great state to fight for a cause that does not touch on its own interests.”295 This implies that a basis for regulating international affairs rationally might be possible. Romanticism certainly cannot make any such claims. In this context the dualism that Meinecke declares to be a permanent aspect of Friedrich’s makeup is very import because it holds out

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the possibility that one will not succumb to the obvious interpretation, namely, that the erudite crown prince found that his youthful, well-meaning, and naive speculations on reason and virtue in princely life were soon overturned by the cold winds of reality once he had the reins of power in his hands and discovered—as he did—that he liked whipping the horses. However, it may well be that the classic youthful idealist/older realist narrative, no matter how clichéd, is closer to the truth. And yet Meinecke’s struggle is interesting. One can say that he wants to rescue Friedrich from the threat of Hegel, who is quite without dualism in that his theoretical disposition with regard to morality was wholly Machiavellian in the popular sense. In fact Hegel gives to Machiavellism a new status, “almost like the legitimization of a bastard.”296 The result is certainly unambiguous, but hardly reassuring. Now the “contrast . . . was no longer one between moral and immoral, it was rather between a lower and higher type of morality and duty; and the State’s duty to maintain itself was declared to be the supreme duty of the State, and ethical sanction was thereby given to its own selfish interest and advantage.”297 Meinecke is fully aware of the amoral nature of the Hegelian solution in that it has factored out distinctions between morality and immorality. Empirical reality, although explained puzzlingly in terms of an idealist spirit, is now its own rational vindication, irrespective of whatever it is that history throws up. Faced with this problem Meinecke has recourse to a solution that might seem to contradict all of his previous efforts. He begins to down- play the role of the state. In doing this he is in danger of abandoning much of his forgoing intellectual achievements. Apparently we should cease to “deify” the “State”—a sin that goes back to Hegel. Instead the state “shall become moral, and strive to achieve harmony with the universal moral law, even when one knows that it can never quite reach its goal, that it is always bound to sin, because hard and natural reality forces it to do so.”298 One notes, with some relief, the residue of both the raison d’état argument and the dualism of “Old Fritz” in this, but the trace is thin. It is then disturbing to see that raison d’état ends up by evok- ing a figure, or a force, that one would have thought had no place in the discussion at all, a figure that we had assumed to be banished from the discussion on epistemological grounds. It turns out that our exceptional politician will need the Almighty. For one requires of the “executive statesman that he should always carry State and God together in his heart, if he is not to let himself be overpowered by the daemon (which he is still not quite capable of shaking off completely).”299 Well, as Meinecke was to discover a decade later, the daemon could indeed still triumph and, moreover, in a manner and measure that even in 1924 would have beggared belief. Meinecke would, as a result, be faced with the urgent task of finding intellectual sanctuary somewhere. However, for him there was never going to be much doubt as to where

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one would look. There was little or no alternative to the “golden age.” In fact, already in the early Nazi period he was returning to Goethe, who attains renewed authority and significance in Historism (published in 1936). Then after the catastrophe had hit and the rubble of 1945 was ubiquitous and the attendant unequivocal moral collapse inescapable, it was clear that there was no other place where he could find succor and refuge. As a consequence, the notion of the state takes on more water and the whole lifetime’s undertaking seems about to go under. Meinecke is driven to return to first principles, and in the most flagrant and unconditional manner. If he had initially drawn our attention to the deep-seated distinction between German culture and French civilization he had done so explicitly in the context of the state. One felt that all the various shifts that followed would allow the state to give substance in practical terms to the notion of culture so that Germany, paradoxically, ceased to be a cultural nation in the pure and abstract sense and attained instead the practical structures that came as much with the railways as with Prussian expansionism and romantic poetry. In 1945 that undertaking is seen as a failure, a failure whose empirical force brooked no argument. If it has a formal parallel it is the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which placed facts on the ground that made a whole host of (Cold War) arguments as to the relationship between West and East Germany and the politics of international rapprochement simply irrelevant. The result was the same extreme incontrovertible judgment as that of 1945, although in this case the judgment was benign. In 1989 it seemed that all doubts had been contemptuously dismissed courtesy of democratic virtue as manifested in providential history . . . or so everyone wanted to infer. One wonders what Meinecke would have made of it. We do know that with respect to the Third Reich he can be said to have both faced up to and grasped the catastrophe with perverse enthusiasm. In The German Catastrophe (published in 1946) he relished the absolute nature of the failure and duly reacted radically. He returns to culture in the widest, but most abstract, of senses. He reminds us that “we are not disloyal to the idea that spiritual factors are of primary importance in history.” And: “For now that these values [the spiritual factors] are mortally threatened by the consequences of the catastrophe we have suffered, we are doubly bound to understand the dark elemen- tal foundation of all that is glorious and holy in our Western, especially in our German national culture.”300 Later he will throw Herder into the mix, but in a rather odd way. “The peaceful, cultural German-internal folk character was first taught us by Herder. . . .”301 But, as we have seen in chapter 3, Herder was in no doubt as to the belligerent nature of the German Ur-Volk. Now Meinecke also turns explicitly against the “warrior” class and the “thoughtless subserviency” born of Prussian militarism.302 And although

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he will not deny the great benefits that the reforms of Scharnhorst brought to Prussia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it cannot be gainsaid that “Prussian militarism also secured a large place for itself in the mix- ing pot into which Adolf Hitler threw together all substances and essences of German development which he found usable.”303 Now the dangers of “Bismarck’s empire” are more obvious. Then “the lieutenant moved through the world as a young god and the civilian reserve lieutenant at least as a demigod. . . . Thus militarism penetrated civilian life.”304 Now he feels driven to tackle subjects that he has hitherto largely ignored. He turns to the tension between nationalism and socialism (born of industrialization) and sees that a resolution between the two had been essential and that it had not come to pass. He sees a link between imperialism (surely a belated sin of the Wilhelmine Empire) and national socialism. He quotes Friedrich Paulsen from 1902, “what men condemn as disgraceful and inhuman when done by others, they recommend in the same breath to their own people as something to be done to a foreign country.”305 But Meinecke is, as always, unusually honest, disturbingly so. Looking back in 1946 to the First World War, he remembers: “The exal- tation of spirit experienced during the August days of 1914, in spite of its ephemeral character, is one of the most precious, unforgettable memories of the highest sort. All the rifts which had hitherto existed in the German people, both within the bourgeoisie and between the bourgeoisie and the working-class, were suddenly closed in the face of the common danger which snatched us out of the security of the material prosperity that we had been enjoying.”306 One assumes that his attitude to this in 1946 is ambivalent. But in 1914 he was hardly alone among otherwise clear- sighted intellectuals. Thomas Mann experienced the same exultation. He wrote to his brother Heinrich on August 7, 1914: “Shouldn’t we be grateful for the totally unexpected chance to experience such mighty things?”307 Fritz Stern observes, when recording the national war fever of 1914, that the “Germans seemed peculiarly vulnerable to mystical exalta- tion.”308 However, Mann disabused himself of such nonsense relatively quickly and later became a committed anti-Nazi. Meinecke’s position was indeed ambivalent. Those, like Mann, who were more or less forced to leave in order to survive or to continue their careers naturally enough found it less difficult to declare their anti-Nazi allegiances when safely overseas. Meinecke was not forced to leave. No doubt this is partly because he was too old and politically inactive to be a threat. He did not, for instance, choose to take up a prominent and public anti-Nazis stance. To what degree this was due to the mix made up of his devotion to the, as he saw it, special status of German culture, or to his Pan-German nationalism, or even to a certain hostility toward Jews and Slavs, one cannot say. Certainly he despised the Nazis, but being an old man he may have simply desired to be left in peace in the country that

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he loved. Nonetheless it remains a dubious strategy to recognize after the Third Reich the dangers inherent in nationalism and then to turn to the most extravagant outbreak of patriotic feeling in 1914 in order to celebrate the manner in which nation and Volk suddenly came together . . . all apparent dissensions between classes, etc. miraculously, if temporarily, dissolved. This, however, does serve to remind us that with Meinecke the patriotic euphoria of 1914 lasted and that he was committed to, and supportive of, Prussian expansionism, although he doesn’t have much to say about it. But at the time of the First World War he was hostile to the British “character” and the threat it posed “to the development of any free personality” in Germany, which was young and strong and “only now fulfilling itself.”309 In 1917 he and others handed the chancellor a petition (twenty thousand signatures) “calling for the annexation of the Baltic provinces and their settlement with Germans.”310 Meinecke claimed: “The land belongs to us. The soul of the people revolts” against abandoning the Germans there.311 Moreover it seems that once the Second World War broke out in 1939, initial German triumphs on the battlefield allowed him to temporarily come to terms with—to “realign” with—the Nazis.312 And of course the hot patriotic flush that came with the First World War had also been felt by many others of whom today we don’t take a negative view. There was Meinecke’s admired colleague, Ernst Troeltsch. Even Max Weber succumbed. He felt there was a responsibility to keep European culture free from domination by the French, the Russians, and the English.313 In general there is a danger that in looking back at the Third Reich from our contemporary position—which is colored by the successful sixty year history of the Federal Republic—we will too readily overlook deep- seated, extreme nationalist trends in German historiography before 1945, trends that led many historians to view fascism in a manner they would later find embarrassing. “The traditional anti-Marxism of the German historical profession developed after 1918 into a virulent anticommunism, providing yet another affinity with the Nazis.” They “cheered” Hitler’s conquests and the establishment of a new Reich. After 1933 there was also “a revival of certain nineteenth-century historiographical ideas,” for instance the stress on the nation-state, “the notion of Prussia’s ‘German vocation’ and the celebration of heroism and war. . . .” Also within the profession there was a rejection of archival work in favor of experience (Erleben) and “belief.”314 It is the case that a great many postwar anti- Nazi historians and intellectuals had earlier joined, or been associated with, the National Socialists.315 But of course it is difficult to stay indifferent to the fate of one’s own nation, however much one may deplore the policies of the governing regime. On a personal note, I can remember how the Falklands War threw many liberal British intellectuals off kilter in the early 1980s. One

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saw confirmed the principle that good news from the battlefield can have, as Fritz Stern noted, an unhinging effect.316 Perhaps one might see in Meinecke’s almost palpable self-doubts in 1945 a pained and possibly unconscious reaction to the abandon and enthusiasm of 1914. Nevertheless, there are still uncomfortable moments in The German Catastrophe. For instance Meinecke never, as far as I know, addressed Treitschke’s antisemitism—most of his comments on Treitschke are favorable—and one wonders just what point he is making when he notes that many groups came to power and influence in the Weimar period and: “Among those who drank too hastily and greedily of the cup of power which had come to them were many Jews.” This, he claims, naturally enough encouraged antisemitism.317 But are we to believe that Jews are in some way culpable because of their successes (he shows no compensatory awareness of their pre-Weimar sufferings, sufferings that had given them good reason to drink deeply when and if they had the opportunity), or are we merely being asked to consider an objective historical development that leaves blame (somewhat astonishingly) out of the equation? Whatever the case, it is an uncomfortable observation to come across, although, in all fairness, it does remind one of Einstein’s advice to Rathenau in the early 1920s not to take up the position of foreign minister because it is dangerous when a Jew becomes prominent.318 Given that Rathenau was murdered while in office, the advice turned out to be sound . . . at least in this particular case. But the overriding strategy open to Meinecke, post–Third Reich, is flight, both literally and metaphorically. He recalls with passion the German tendency to “soar up suddenly into the limitless, into a metaphysical or at times merely quasi-metaphysical world, which was supposed to emancipate it.” The Goethe period remains the “golden age.”319 But he notes, rather perspicaciously, that German idealism was also an ingredient in militarism and the lust for power. In other words, this prevented in the Bismarckian period the development of the liberal social forms enjoyed by Britain, although that was still possible after unification. So while he is clinging to Bismarck as a great and remarkable man, his faith has clearly been shaken. In any case it was the bad stuff in the German character that, it turned out, had won through.320 The higher soul in the German breast had succumbed to the lower and in the lower was secreted the poison of “materialism.” And materialism was to transform “homo sapiens into homo faber” with “devastating psychological effects.”321 That the higher soul had been strangled—could be strangled—reminds him, Heidegger-like, of a profound inimical element axiomatically inscribed in the modern world. Is not religious life itself “in danger of becoming dried up by modern civilization”?322 Hitler then becomes the “monstrous” element that engorges on all of this. Interestingly, however, language is employed that dismisses the

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Führer from the German nation. Meinecke quotes private conversations he had with Otto Hinze (Hitler “does not belong to our race”) and General Beck, executed after the failed July 20, 1944 putsch (“This fellow has no fatherland at all”).323 To this Meinecke adds his own opinion that “the borderland, fighting form of folk character that Hitler represented is not even specifically German.”324 But what are we to make of such an objection? That Hitler is to be written out of the national story on the basis of race and nation, as he had earlier excluded, and exterminated, millions on the same basis? As Meinecke approaches a solution the narrative rewind attains its full measure. “Everything, yes everything, depends upon an intensified development of our inner existence.” And “we must go back beyond its [the Bismarck era’s] ruins to seek out the ways of Goethe’s era.”325 And: “Therefore our spiritual culture, especially our art, poetry, and science, must be assigned a high place in the external apparatus of our civilization.”326 The solution lies in the abstract glories of the past. Apparently, it did not, as many people came to believe, lie in the future and the VW Beetle. Solace can only be found in the beneficent fact that German culture is, in its essence, uncontaminated. Grace is still, therefore, in the world; Goethe’s eagle is still potentially transcendent. In this Meinecke is the opposite of Adorno, to whom we will come in the next chapter. But now we can thankfully turn to the “spiritual life and the striving for values [that] are their own justification.” For have not German spiritual accomplishments been taken up by the world? Do not people pour into concert halls to hear “the great German music from Bach to Brahms,” and has not “German spiritual production . . . succeeded in having a universal Occidental effect”?327 Therefore: “In every German city and large village . . . we should like to see in the future a community of like-minded friends of culture which I should like best to call Goethe Communities.” They will read poetry, listen to classical music, etc. They will convey “into the heart of the listeners through sound the most vital evidences of the great German spirit, always offering the noblest music and poetry together.”328 Presumably they’ll not watch the soccer on the telly or play cards in the pub, and they certainly won’t go clubbing. Instead, anthologies of poetry and prose will be prepared and Meinecke envisages a special “Handbook for Goethe Communities.”329 There is about this an uncanny mixture of sincerity and absurdity. It reminds one—how ironic!—of the famous couplet in Faust’s first speech: “And here I stand, with all my lore/ Poor fool, no wiser than before.” This may be cruel, not least because it dismisses not only the sincerity of Meinecke’s program cum vision, but also his bravery in seeking one that is quintessentially German in 1945 when the very notion of the “quintessentially German” was viewed as intrinsically untenable. But it is striking

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because it explicitly forgoes the hard core of his intellectual labors hitherto. The state, the growth of national institutions, the praxis of international diplomacy, the struggle between the conflicting claims of Prussia and Germany are all gone. We are back at the beginning—with culture and the Gemeinschaft. Those Goethe clubs, whether in the village or the bombed-out suburbs, embody an absolute dislocation from contemporary reality. Instead they anachronistically appeal to the paradigm of the authentic, and of course utterly idealized, bonded group. But the state has lost the battle in every sense. That fact is extant in the Russian tanks now in the street, and will be yet clearer when American light music and popular culture, once again, colonize the Heimat. In fact the state has disappeared as a meaningful and potentially productive conceptual structure.

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EINECKE IS NOT ALONE IN THIS. In any case he, along with almost Meveryone else, had little notion of what in fact the Federal Republic of Germany would become once it was created in 1949, more or less simultaneously with its sister state the German Democratic Republic. Both Germanies immediately engaged in an incessant propaganda struggle over identity, historical responsibility (or guilt), and “present” probity. But there was little reason to imagine in 1945 that a future German state—of either stamp—would be characterized by Goethe clubs, although there was a Goethe Institute founded in the FRG in 1951 to spread German culture, chiefly by teaching German as a second language. However the post-1989, allegedly reunified, German state and what it can be taken to mean will be a speculation indulged in at the end of this essay. For the moment one should remain with what has been the most ubiquitous theme hitherto: the tension between the ideological notion(s) of Germany and the material fact(s) of the state. Certainly, while German historians, by and large, had earlier succumbed to material facts on the ground and accepted with pride the second empire, the spiritual and idealistic roots of their enthusiasm did not wither. We have already noted the peculiar—but hardly incomprehensible—outbreak of cultural exceptionalism that accompanied the events of August 1914. Oddly, the glamorous rush to the battlefield only underpinned the supranational character of the German idea of the state. One did not go to war to defend boundaries, or to assert sovereignty. Officially Germany had no territorial claims in 1914, although there was a great deal of speculation behind the scenes as to possible annexations of one sort or another (see chapter 13). But while the kaiser and the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, claimed that Germans were forced to take up the “sword” by the belligerence of Russia (Russia mobilized first) and therefore had clean hands, the enthusiastic ideologues of German high culture would claim that Germany went to war simply to establish the superiority of what one was. And if Europe in particular, and the world in general, were to recognize the innate virtues of what was quintessentially German, then all the better for them. Consequently, German propaganda, often sincerely supported by German intellectuals, maintained that Germans were marching against enemies, both east and west, in order to improve the world. They were fighting in the spirit of Bogumil Goltz (whom Thomas Mann admir- ingly mentions in his contemporary Reflections) and Paul de Lagarde. The

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task was pedagogic. Goltz was sure that it was Germany’s duty to educate the world,330 and Lagarde believed that God had set the Germans the task of spreading their culture as wide as they were able. Moreover he yearned for the spiritual revival that war would bring.331 Some measure of how vital Germany’s role as educator was can be gleaned from his premise that “the world is a totality, ordered toward a goal . . . and . . . its disorder is only a means to our education.”332 Both Goltz and Lagarde were long dead by 1914, but Thomas Mann was able to watch enthusiastically the great events and to give them the necessary idealist and nationalist gloss. The war was “a decisive spiritual and physical struggle” that stirred up “the deepest feelings of a nation.”333 Nation here, of course, has all the connotations of Volk. And we should not forget Houston Stewart Chamberlain, also admired by Mann— at least at that time. His significance, however, is a tad contradictory because, writing at the turn of the century, he had already set the points for the 1914 xenophobic orgy. For Chamberlain, war in 1914 was not a holy cause due to immediate political considerations. The great German mission was not the result of the Bismarckian triumph, nor the wars of liberation against Napoleon, nor the great cultural revivals of romanticism and Sturm and Drang, nor the heroics of Friedrich the Great, nor even the victory of Hermann/Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. One had to rewind the beneficent narrative back to the very anthropological emergence of the Ur-Germans onto the historical stage. This was nothing less than the event of capital importance in the history of civilization: “It is only shameful indolence of thought, or disgraceful historical falsehood, that can fail to see in the entrance of the Germanic tribes into the history of the world the rescuing of agonizing humanity from the clutches of the everlastingly bestial.”334 Now that is the hindsight of the Gods. As a result, after 1918 the state came under pressure from many sources. Among intellectuals, artists, and politicians there was a wide range of reactions to the defeat. That is, the matter is not simply reduc- ible to a retreat into cultural overcompensation and imagined indifference to the material world once defeat was inescapable. Certainly the state became again a problematic entity. One might note, for instance, that the left-wing revolutionaries who momentarily gained the upper hand in both Berlin and Munich imagined that they were establishing “soviets.” They were duty bound to think in terms of proletarian dictatorships that transcended the parameters, whether physical or ideological, of the state. In particular, those around Rosa Luxembourg rejected many of the tenets of Leninism and state communism and felt that mass action led by the working class could spontaneously bring about world revolution. In that she can be seen as returning to the classic Marxism of the Gotha program. In fact she downplayed the function of the state even more rigorously than Marx in his attack (“Critique”) had done.

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Among non-Marxists, German cultural superiority naturally carried over into the Weimar period. Indeed it even continued after 1945, as is exemplified by Gerhard Ritter and Meinecke’s pupil Hans Rothfels. Before the Second World War, Rothfels had had no time for the conventional notion of the state and had instead imagined a Pan-European Germany that controlled the east, turning its racially inferior population into serfs. It may have only been his Jewish ancestry that prevented him from becoming a public Nazi ideologue in the style of Alfred Rosenberg. But in general it is rather striking that many German historians were, initially, remarkably untroubled by defeat in 1918. Even so it was clear that the state had become the site of renewed speculation and uncertainty. Otto Hintze, for instance, argued that there was nothing holy about the state that warranted the “worship” (Andacht) it had received in German thought since Hegel,335 while the sociologist Max Weber chose not to regard the state as an end in itself, but rather as an institution or economic enterprise (Betrieb).336 After 1918 there was also a growth in pessimistic, even apocalyptic, thinking. Oswald Spengler in his best-seller The Decline of the West prophesied the end of Western civilization on the basis of a theory of cycles in which individual states were little more than playthings of forces that utterly transcended them. Georg Iggers suggests that this was underpinned by a form of “historicism” that led to absolute relativism and ended up in extreme, individual subjectivity.337 He argues that Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger belong to a world in which there are no longer fixed values. Not surprisingly, there was a more radical break after unconditional surrender in 1945. Such was the totality of the defeat—unlike in 1918, the Heimat was destroyed and occupied—it could not be marginalized or easily circumvented by appeals to cultural values. If the state had been exposed as corrupt, then German history itself was contaminated. History itself now became a problematic category and was duly marginalized. Alfred Heuss’s The Loss of History appeared in 1959 and Golo Mann, whose very influential two-volume history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appeared in 1958, believed that the “idea of progress” was dead.338 There were other ambivalences. Before the war (1936) Gerhard Ritter had seen a causal chain stretching back from Hitler via Bismarck to Friedrich the Great. After the war, however, he turned to Prussian values (there was no longer a Prussia) as a bulwark against Marxism and became a passionate defender of German conservatism.339 Intellectuals from other fields underpinned the loss of faith that followed defeat. The philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers suggested to the Germans that they had a particular moral duty that they could fulfill by turning away from the “national idea.”340 On the other hand the contemporary historian Michael Stürmer sees a danger in the loss of a

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positive sense of national identity and patriotic commitment, and talks of nation and state in terms of a “higher source of meaning.”341 However, as this takes us into the territory of the Historians’ Debate of the mid- 1980s it can be postponed until chapter 15. In the cultural sphere it is interesting to see that Meinecke’s impeccable “Golden Age” refuge is not regarded in the same fashion by all the major creative and philosophical figures. Adorno, unbending in his determination to infer out of every apparent virtue a more than commensurate vice, turns to culture to establish the exact opposite of what Meinecke feels hardly needs to be established at all, so self-evident are the riches of Goethe et al. Adorno’s narrative of German history is certainly a teleology, but the telos to which it is heading, via a chain of technologically advancing horrors, is dystopian. In Negative Dialectics (1966) he boasts with near palpable pride that he too, like Marx, has turned Hegel on his head, but only to reveal, not the progressive spirit forever enhancing its presence in the world, but the deep and killing virus that will destroy us all.342 But this is not a horror that runs parallel to the high culture that it presumably ignores or contaminates. That is, the postwar reaction is not a continuation of Adorno’s rank snobbery toward jazz and popular culture that colors his contributions to The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944). Rather he argues that the great German artists and thinkers from Kant onward are the progenitors and carriers of just that disease that Meinecke imagines they will cure. It is true that Adorno will make a partial exception of Beethoven. He is, like a great many German philosophers and thinkers (one could include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bloch, Thomas Mann) deeply prejudiced in favor of music. But his basic agenda is clear: guilt is to be applied lavishly and with an undiscriminating brush. In Minima Moralia (completed in 1949) Adorno addresses the idea of the “return to culture,” and dismisses the claim that the Nazis are responsible for its decline. This, at least, is very much in the spirit of his previous writings on popular culture.

The assertion that Hitler has destroyed German culture is nothing but an advertising trick of those who wish to rebuild it from their telephone-desks. What Hitler extirpated in art and culture had long led an apocryphal and cut-off existence, whose last hiding-spaces were swept away by Fascism. Whoever did not play along, had to go into inner emigration years before the outbreak of the Third Reich: at the very latest, since the stabilization of the German currency, which coincided with the end of Expressionism, German culture had stabilized itself in the spirit of the Berlin illustrated magazines, which conceded little to the strength through joy [notorious Nazi slogan], national auto highways, and upbeat exhibition-classicism of the Nazis. In its broadest measure, German culture pined for its

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Hitler precisely where it was most liberal, and it would be an injustice to reproach the editors of Moss and Ullstein or the reorganizers of the Frankfurter News for following the sensibilities of the times. (Aphorism 35)343

Furthermore, Adorno’s almost playful radicalism has him assuming the most extreme in-your-face positions with respect to what is usually seen as the privileged sphere of high art. For instance, “All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is garbage.”344 Whether Adorno would also apply this self-indulgently heroic assertion to his own “urgent critique” might be thought doubtful. But we cannot but be struck that whereas Meinecke wants us to read poetry, Adorno says that it is impossible to write it anymore. He has taken the key dialectic tension that Benjamin puts nicely, and accurately, in the Theses on the Philosophy of History—“There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”345—and, typically for Adorno, dashed to the pessimistic extreme. If he is right, those Goethe clubs Meinecke has in mind are going to be pretty dispiriting affairs. But he isn’t right, as he himself had to admit. His blanket rejection of almost everything that he as a philosopher and an artist (he was a pianist and composer who had studied with Alban Berg) had made the intellectual bedrock of his life was too costly a gesture, especially if it was merely to establish that one’s radicalism was not to be trumped. He is aware that a seed of doubt, and therefore of optimism, is not to be avoided. And truth to be told, it is welcomed. He admits: “Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden ‘it should be otherwise.’”346 And this leads him to qualify what is arguably his most famous aphorism: “Perennial suffering has as much right to express itself as the martyr has to scream; this is why it may have been wrong to say that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz.”347 Thomas Mann got to know Adorno in the 1940s. They were near neighbors in California and Adorno became the adviser on musical matters for Mann’s great novel Doctor Faustus. One is not surprised to see in Mann’s response to the German catastrophe something similar to Adorno’s. But it is not as determinedly black and white. Perhaps Mann’s position differs because he is an artist and not a philosopher. This gives him more room to maneuver. He does not feel compelled to pursue stringent argument to its embittered and despairing dystopian goal. He is not afraid of being more subtle, more contradictory, and considerably more subjective. Above all, however, his response is the result of a long journey that began with Reflections, written during the First World War. That was designed as a thinly veiled attack on his pro-French brother Heinrich: a man of “civilization” as opposed to what, as a German artist, he should have been—a man of “culture.” As we have seen, for Mann at that time

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there could be no argument about this: “The German soul is too deep to take civilization to be a high ideal.”348 Therefore during the First World War Mann can indulge in a gush of heroic polemics. Everything is spiritual. In “Germany’s soul, Europe’s intellectual antitheses are carried to the end . . . in a maternal and war- like sense.” And with soul he does not mean just the collective national soul but the “soul, the mind, the heart of the individual German.” To be German is to be the “spiritual battleground for European antitheses.”349 Moreover: “The German will never mean society when he says ‘life,’ never elevate social problems above moral ones, above inner experience.” And: “It can never be Germany’s . . . ‘destiny’, to realize ideas politically.”350 Certainly coming defeat, which he was already rationalizing in 1917, will not alter any of this. How could it? Rather it will simply confirm the higher German things. “We will soon perish, but our nation shall live into the coming centuries. It shall live upwardly. . . .”351 And he quotes Stefan George with respect to these higher things: “A nation is dead when its Gods are dead. . . .”352 One assumes there was little danger of a Götterdämmerung as long as Goethe and Wagner were not forgotten. Above all, one sees that we are, as well-nigh always, talking about the “nation” and all that that implies racially. Mann has very little time for the state. Therefore when he employs the signifier “Germany,” it is to aestheticize it. When war broke out, Germany was “for a sacred moment beautiful.”353 As part of this panegyric there is the entirely appropriate celebration of the Gemeinschaft and the integrated community. Mann finds this most bewitchingly embodied in Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg, which, as he pointed out more than once, Nietzsche had always seen, perspicaciously, as anti-French and therefore anti-civilization.354 Meanwhile Mann’s own early novel Buddenbrooks (1901) is based on the portrayal of the archetypal German “bürgerliche” world. His city, Lübeck, which Mann tells us in Reflections played a decisive role in forming his character, is a tight community, and while the novel’s narrative is centered on the rise and fall of a single family, we feel that the Gemeinschaft is as interwoven and echt as that of Nuremberg. But when Mann gave his lecture Germany and the Germans at the Library of Congress on May 29, 1945, we are treated to a very different picture of Lübeck from that found in Reflections. Now he claims there was still something of “the hysteria of the dying Middle Ages, something of latent spiritual epidemic” in the atmosphere of the town. It was conceivable that a children’s crusade might erupt here, an outbreak of religious fanaticism, although the city was so seemingly sober and commercial.355 Likewise Mann discovers that the great German thinkers now take on a Janus-like form. Luther (he “had a good deal of the medieval man about him and wrestled with the devil all his life”356), Wagner, even Goethe,

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are seen to embody the “two souls” that dwell in the German character. They are not modern or enlightened figures at all. And although Mann does not mention this, one is reminded of Paul Klee’s famous drawing of the Angelus Novus. The past, even the great men of the past, shackle the present. As Walter Benjamin points out, although others disagree, the angel looks back at the rubble that continues to pile up just as he is at the point of attempting to free himself from it.357 We have no good reason to imagine he will succeed. Perhaps what is most telling about Mann’s struggle with both culture and the state is that he doesn’t abandon the latter to preserve the former, let alone use the former as compensation for the loss of the latter. His later shift is more and more in the direction of the Federal Republic, although he never turned his back definitively on East Germany. But now he respects social structures, state institutions, and distrusts a flight into a world imagined to be stamped by the German soul and nebulously shaped by immaculate abstractions. In all fairness it should be acknowledged that this was a development that went all the way back to, at the latest, October 1922 when, appalled by the murder of Walther Rathenau, he declared his loyalty to the Weimar Republic. And then by January 1940 he is in no doubt where a perverse form of Wagnerianism cum fascism can lead: “National Socialism means: ‘I do not care for the social issue at all. What I want is the folk-tale.’”358 Mann is, in his own way, finally paying due respect to materialism. And given that materialism has been hitherto a consideration most notable in these speculations by its absence, it would be well to try to say something about it now.

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T IS A BIZARRE STATE OF AFFAIRS that one should write so much about IGerman history and have so little to say about social and economic development. This is partly due to the axiomatic bias of this essay, which is weighted toward ideological matters. It is also no doubt the result of the plain fact that I am not equipped to write an economic history. Nonetheless, the matter cannot be got around so easily. Ideology and the struggle between the various notions of Germany on the one hand, and the changing empirical reality on the other, mean that the latter has to have its place if only because should it be, for whatever reasons, ignored, the former will not attain its true significance. Furthermore, there is a question here of fundamental importance. It was Bismarck, of course, who informed the Germans on coming to power on September 30, 1862 that it is “not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided.” And, we might add on his behalf: nor are they decided by poetry, philosophy, and, quite possibly, the books— no matter how popular—of historians. His subsequent triumph, accomplished in just under ten years, was nothing less than a confirmation of his own Weltanschauung. He was not to repeat—as he promised he would not—the mistakes of 1848 and 1849, when he saw the Prussian monarchy wobble and watched while the liberal Frankfurt Parliament spent its time pontificating. Above all, he saw how it had failed to grasp the brief historically opportune moment. Bismarck, from the opposite political camp, was always ready to grasp the moment opportunistically. So if we are now confronted by Bismarckian “blood and iron,” the former quality has nothing to do with the romantic and racial notions of German blood and that allegedly high spiritual quality with which it has been associated hitherto. It has to do with that which is spilled on the battlefield and, quite possibly, in the foundry. Bismarck’s materialism is not solely the materialism of the dashing officer, although both his sons were at one point to assume that role. In fact he despised the puffed-up nonsense that Prussian militarism was to become, while always maintaining a deep and unbounded respect for the infantryman and his brave, uncomplaining, honest labors. This is something that will crop up in the next chapter, but for the moment it is necessary to acknowledge that when we talk of blood and iron we must also mean early German industrialization and the subsequent manufacturing explosion that was the basis of imperial Germany’s status as an alarmingly great power. Or,

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in other words, both the Krupp canons that, we are to believe, were the decisive factor at Sedan and the needle-gun that the military observer from The Times (July 11, 1866) was convinced defeated the Austrians at Königgrätz359 had to be made by sweat and technology just as much as the tracks and rolling stock of the railways. Bismarck not only understood the limitations of speech-making in practical politics, he also understood the role of money and production and the powerful business of radical social change whereby so-called Arbeiterkasernen (worker-barrack cities) seemed to crop up overnight and a huge urban industrial proletariat evolved alongside the Biederm eier middle class and utterly changed the social makeup of Germany. Certainly the contemporary Germanophiles among the spiritual ideologues would have been unhappy to see their privileged categories marginalized. But they might have made the best of a bad job and attempted a reconciliation with industrial muscle. Here, for example, is the effort of one of the most committed and patriotic xenophobes: the Englishman (by birth) Houston Stewart Chamberlain. It is a truism that converts are more devoted to their new religion than those who have been fortunate enough to be born into it. Chamberlain honors the rule in spades. He goes so far as to make a distinction between the German and the Greek, but only to wed the latter to the former so that we may appreciate how stunning the German achievements are. We note that the Teuton is capable, like the Hellene, of great abstract thought (Chamberlain’s example is Kant), but then he also “invents the railway.” Clearly that sort of thing was beyond Aristotle and his crew. But there is more. “Bismarck, the statesman of blood and iron, caused Beethoven’s sonatas to be played to him in the decisive moments of his life.”360 How reassuring it must have been for early-twentieth-century Germans to have read that. We must also acknowledge the degree to which the contemporary historians largely ignored industrialization and social change. Alongside left-wing theoreticians, it was to be sociologists like Max Weber who addressed these matters in a fashion that did them justice. For instance, Iggers notes that Ranke’s conservatism and his faith in the monarchy meant that he never paid much attention to socioeconomic factors or, indeed, the masses. Furthermore, in general, “German historians moved in a world of their own, which remained remarkably unchanged in the midst of the great transformations of” the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Quite simply: “They were . . . inattentive to the great social and economic changes brought about by industrialization.”361 A similar failure, although not the result of indifference so much as of cultural snobbery and that deep love of the Gemeinschaft that is such a trope of German thinking, can be detected when the state and its rep- resentatives first encounter embryonic but clearly unstoppable industrial development. For instance, Treitschke records with approval the reactions

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of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the Prussian Minister for Commerce, Beuth, when they visited “England” in 1826. They found the island nation culturally very insular, but there was no doubt that Britain showed them a future that Germany could not avoid. Beuth, in particular, seems to have been both impressed and horrified by the dark satanic mills. He concluded that “Germany must learn to control matters as perfectly as had the Britons, but must aspire towards an artistic refinement which was unknown to the island nation.”362 But although German industrialization followed the British example, it would seem that Beuth’s hopes that it would thereby be in a position to spiritually transcend it were not realized. There is no evidence that I know of that Germany’s own remorse- less industrial advance exhibited a redeeming “artistic refinement.” What is perhaps most striking about the general economic development of Germany from Friedrich II onward is the manner in which the traditional power structures and classes held on to their influence alongside the industrial nouveau riche, who in any case could be, in the classic manner, ennobled like Bismarck’s Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder or married off into the nobility like Bertha Krupp. It was Kaiser Wilhelm II who had Bertha marry Gustav “Krupp” von Bohlen und Halbach, making sure that her family name was added to the bridegroom’s own. Furthermore, the parallel histories of militarism and industrialization meant that the latter, instead of bringing about the social revolution that we might expect (let us say, by forcing the establishment to concede effective parliamentary democracy), was kept in check by the dominant nationalist ideology centered on the monarch. There is nothing like patriotism and successful foreign wars when it comes to the exercise of false consciousness. Germany’s belated push for colonies played a frantic but colorful role here too. After all, von Bülow, in a famous speech to the Reichstag on December 6, 1897, phrased it in terms that consciously mixed idealism and materialism: “The times when the German left the earth to one of his neighbors, the sea to the other, and reserved for himself the heavens where pure philosophy reigns—these times are over. . . .” He famously continued: “We don’t want to put anyone in the shadow, but we too demand our place in the sun.”363 But this was all done in the service of a state that preserved, both ideologically and (with respect to government) materially, an anachronistic core. For instance, while Bismarck may have taken on the Catholic Church and the socialists and come away with a bloody nose in both cases, he never had to abandon what he saw as the monarchical bedrock on which the state rested. And were not patriotism and working-class false consciousness further underpinned by material progress? When there is bread, the circuses—let us say reports of German troops killing valiant African warriors (while making no mention of what happened to the defenseless women and children) in what is today’s Namibia—attain their maximum effect.

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Nonetheless, it is true that the new cities of the nineteenth century, which seemed to spring up overnight, were often dreadful. In 1800 there were 64 urban centers with a population of 10,000 or over. By 1871 there were 222.364 But Germany profited by industrializing after Britain. It did not merely copy; it learned and improved. As the century approached its end, life got better. Germans lived longer and were relatively well fed and, most important, well educated, especially in the industrial trades. In general Germany always placed a high premium on technological skills and training, and never succumbed to the class snobbery that socially downgrades the skilled workman, or at least didn’t do so to the degree that was normal in Britain. The German social system was not so rigid or so ideologically suffocating. As a result, even more than in Britain, one can talk of an embourgeoisement of the proletariat. One might also add that this was a difference very clear in the sociological organization of the two states following 1945. In the Federal Republic the industrial worker enjoyed a status and played a role in factory administration not paralleled in Britain, not least because his trade union was likely to be huge and avoided endless petty struggles with (rival) groups of workers over pay differentials. The worker was, furthermore, embedded in the grander state structures of pensions and health insurance in a manner that was generally thought to be fair. But, of course, in Germany a radical restructuring of society post-1945 was not only possible but also necessary. Today it is clear that this postwar settlement has taken on so much water that the sense of a homogeneous society where everyone was/is included equitably can no longer be credibly maintained in the old manner, even by the most naive of social capitalist ideologues. Nonetheless, Germany still has a manufacturing industry and continues to prosper by making things and then selling them in foreign countries. And despite this antediluvian policy, it still maintains its economic advantage over Britain and the rest of Western Europe. The spectacular economic growth of the nineteenth century also created an educated and increasingly comfortable middle class that had, as long as it remained free of the seductions of radical thought, little to com- plain about. Perhaps there is a comparison here with contemporary China, where an even more authoritarian ruling class/party prospers—for the time being—because it is able to satisfy the rising material expectations of the public. Certainly the German “success” in maintaining authoritarian conservative government was not based on reactionary economic, or even social, policy. Already under Friedrich II there was major land reform, changes in farming methods (modern crop rotation was introduced), and there were new crops (the Prussians had many witty things to say about Friedrich and the potato). Most striking of all, institutes were established to study agriculture. Later there would be technological colleges. Germany proved itself exceptionally advanced in all matters to do with

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scientific research. Astonishingly, during its forty-seven years of existence, the second empire received more Nobel Prizes in science than Britain, France, Russia, and the United States combined.365 Population growth was also rapid. In 1750 there were seventeen million living within the boundaries as they were to be drawn in 1871. By 1913 there were sixty-seven million Germans living in the same area.366 Naturally policymakers thought increasingly about expansion and annexation. There was only one plausible direction, and that was eastward, a theme that, in any case, went back to the early Saxon kings. Certainly Hitler was not the inventor of the notion of Lebensraum. Even Meinecke, as we have seen, was in favor of repopulating the Baltic states with Germans. And of course there were the classic instruments of economic growth. By the 1890s Germany had become Europe’s leading steel-producing nation. The German chemical industry outperformed its rivals; again innovation and research were on a level that European competi- tors couldn’t match. And then there is what is traditionally the nineteenth century’s great powerhouse of industrial growth, capitalist investment, and profit: the railways. Germany may have got into this business a little later than some, but its growth was spectacular. In 1835 the first track of six kilometers was laid in southern Germany. At this time France had 141 and Britain 544 kilometers. But by 1840 there were 5,000 kilometers of track in the North German Customs Union, four times as many as in Austria, and twice as many as in France, the two nations with whom Prussia was destined to go to war.367 And it was the customs union, set up by Prussia in north Germany in 1834, that both facilitated the rapid rise of Prussian and German industrialization in general and pushed Austria out of German affairs while overtaking her industrially. Moreover, when war did come with Austria, it can be said to have been financed by the Cologne-Minden railway deal.368 This was largely due to the brilliance of one of the key figures in this story: Gerson von Bleichröder, Bismarck’s banker. Bismarck had got to know him in Frankfurt in the 1840s. When Bleichröder, who had been a protégé of the Rothschilds, with whom Bismarck had also been in close contact, moved to Berlin and established his own bank, and Bismarck’s term as ambassador in St Petersburg was over, they saw each other regularly. Bleichröder became an indispensable (arguably the most important) figure in his governing circle. He was a visitor to Bismarck on his estates, notably Varzin. There the chancellor claimed to prefer the company of trees to human beings and demanded that he be “fucking” left alone by his ministers. (He used the English expletive.369) Bleichröder, however, was needed. Indeed it has been said that he was in many ways so extraordinary that if he had not existed it would have been impossible to invent him. And yet Bismarck mentions him, I believe, but once in his memoirs. And that is also an expression of why he embodies, as a Jew, so many of the key themes of this essay.

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Bleichröder was a loyal, deferential (certainly often flattering), yet frequently candid enabler. He financed liberal and revolutionary forces in Hungary and Italy in order that they should destabilize Austria;370 he helped guarantee the Prussian loan to Bavaria that kept King Ludwig II sweet. It also included a cut to the king’s then ally, Count Holnstein.371 He was sent for by Bismarck when the Iron Chancellor was at Versailles and getting very frustrated with the negotiations with the French. Bleichröder duly played a decisive role in bringing matters to the conclusion Bismarck wanted. After 1871 he took over the loss-making Romanian railway project in which many Germans had invested. He didn’t make a penny out of it, although he was able to force the Romanians to emancipate their large Jewish population. At least officially. In fact they, and the new Hohenzollern occupant of the Romanian throne, Prince Charles, were bloody-minded, and mendaciously made promises that they never kept, nor ever intended to. Bleichröder had simply been used to get German investors out of the affair with their money intact. When push came to shove no one was prepared to go to the wall on the issue of the emancipation of Romanian Jews, who were consequently left to their wretched fate. As Fritz Stern dryly notes in his book on Bleichröder and Bismarck Gold and Iron: “There is no reason to think and almost no evidence to suggest that Bleichröder at any time understood his own role in defeating his own purpose.”372 Neither Bismarck nor Bleichröder seem to have made as much money out of their mutual dealings as public gossip would have it,373 although they were often sailing close to the legal wind. Bismarck invested heavily in railroads and then benefited from his own nationalization policies.374 And the Cologne-Minden railway deal of 1865, which allowed Bismarck, von Roon, and von Moltke to clear the decks for war, was designed to circumvent the Prussian parliament. In fact Bismarck ceded the rights Prussia held to the railway line to Bleichröder’s bank for, in return, a huge injection of cash. While it was clear that ownership was still nominally in the hands of the government, the deal was probably unconstitutional because it involved the alienation of state property.375 No matter. Bismarck and his circle got what they wanted and forced a war that was wildly unpopular—until it was won. Then Bismarck found himself, for the first time, acclaimed. Earlier he and the king, along with several min- istries and a large entourage of staff members, all went south by trains for the big battle at Königgrätz. Their lives, or at least Bismarck’s, may well have been on the line. At least he seemed to have considered that possibility.376 Bleichröder didn’t go, but he was very solicitous. He made sure that Bismarck had a range of coins of different currencies so that if he was in difficulty he might be able to bribe his way out. Bleichröder also went to great lengths to do all he could to help Bismarck, his wife, and their son Herbert when the latter was wounded

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in the Franco-Prussian war. Initially it seemed he might have been killed. Later it is possible that Bismarck used Bleichröder to sabotage Herbert’s relationship with the divorced Princess Carolath. He was determined to prevent the marriage and he succeeded, largely, however, because Herbert didn’t have the raw courage to go through with it. Whatever the reason, it was Bleichröder who was to take the blame. Herbert loathed him, called him a “filthy Jew.”377 But then the others in Bismarck’s inner circle had always been, in general, “bitterly jealous of the Jew,”378 although that had never stopped them profiteering in exactly the same fashion that, they alleged, was practiced by Bleichröder. John Röhl has recently argued that one of the reasons Wilhelm II sacked Bismarck was his fear that Germany would fall into the hands of the Jews.379 And it is this crude but blatant fact that emerges as such a complicated thread (or threads) in German history, that, above all, makes Bleichröder so intriguing and so tragic. The odd and ultimately ghastly relationship between German Gentiles and German Jews is a matter for chapters 14 and 15, but Bleichröder is so remarkable, yet at the same time almost perversely emblematic, and his relationship with Bismarck so unique, that further discussion should not be postponed until then. He longed to be accepted as German in every respect, but as a German Jew. Fritz Stern intriguingly speculates that although he didn’t convert, he might have been pleased that his children did, and then repudiated him.380 He yearned for recognition and respectability among the great and the good in the capital of the new empire. He coveted the title of baron and, after his success at Versailles sorting out the financial negotiations with the French, Bismarck felt that he couldn’t withhold raising him to the nobility. Also, as one would expect from a patriotic social climber (he might well have been the richest man in Germany), his parties were spectacular—his grand apartments were above his bank in the center of Berlin. Sarasate might play; the caviar and the champagne were, of course, especially imported and of impeccable quality. Nonetheless, Bleichröder did not invite his relatives, and his wife sat modestly in a black dress away from the dancing and the fuss. Above all, he wanted to see the Prussian officers tripping the light fantastic in his ballroom, although several of the “demigods” were hostile when it came to partnering the Jewish women. Bleichröder was also able to get his son Hans into the reserve corps and thereby into uniform, an almost unprecedented accomplishment for a Jew. It seems this was a matter whose importance could not be overstated, not least because when Hans lost his commission after being seen in the company of a lady who was not respectable, his father moved heaven and earth to get it back for him. Hans had taken the lady concerned to stand outside the palace after an assassination attempt on Wilhelm in 1878 and apparently this was taken as some kind of affront.381 Wilhelm finally set aside the demotion, but Hans could never rejoin his regiment. Well, at

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least he had the uniform. And, of course everyone derided Bleichröder behind his back. At the time it was remarked of his parties: “Berlin’s society is divided into two camps—those who go to Bleichröder while mocking him, and those who mock him but do not go.”382 Perhaps Bleichröder’s most remarkable gesture concerns his purchase from von Roon of the Gütergotz estate near Potsdam. He had stones brought from the battlefields where Prussians had fought in order to lay them out, thereby turning the estate into a German shrine. And he managed to get the kaiser to visit. Wilhelm stayed an hour. And perhaps this takes the discussion full circle. What, in this chapter, was initially designed to do justice to materialism in the context of socioeconomic developments, has in the bizarre form of a German Jewish banker brought us back to the battlefield. Nevertheless, that may be, if only superficially, entirely apposite. After all, what could better embody materialism than the life-and-death struggle of the soldier under fire, alive with fear and soiling his pants? What is more physically upfront than the marching, the deprivations, the lousy food, and the appalling conditions of warfare? Militarism might then be seen as an, albeit exceptional, expression of those qualities that stand, if perhaps only in part, in opposition to all the ideological baggage of race and blood, of culture, of nation and Volk that have played the dominant role up to now. But of course militarism does not celebrate vulgar materialism in so unambiguous a fashion. Death in uniform claims for itself both a special ideological glamor and a moral (and aesthetic) status that a “natural” death endured by the infirm in their own beds does not. Prussian militarism is then the proverbial two-edged sword. And too often the glamorous propaganda was allowed to swamp the awful yet mundane reality. In what might be seen as a thoroughly appropriate motif for the following chapter, Bismarck wrote to his wife from France on August 28, 1870, complaining that what he could least tolerate when on the campaign was the absence of decent lavatory facilities: “It is to me the most unpleasant of the martial deprivations.”383 And Bismarck, unlike the soldiers under fire, had it easy.

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HERE WAS A TIME when the victorious general would ride over the bat- Ttlefield in order to observe, soberly, the carnage. Perhaps he would take the opportunity to decide, as was his right, what the battle was to be called. It was also an opportunity to say something memorable or to indulge a powerful emotion of great import. Somehow these occasions seem all the more dramatic when the business had been settled between sunrise and sunset on a single day. For instance, Wellington at Waterloo on June 18, 1815 famously observed that it had been the “nearest run thing you ever saw in your life” and that “nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Napoleon III was so appalled at the sight of the wounded after Solferino on June 24, 1859—a battle he could claim to have won—that he lost his nerve, betrayed his Piedmontese allies, and ended the war with Austrian on generous terms. One of the Austrian generals who distinguished himself that day was Ludwig August Ritter von Benedek. Actually he was Hungarian by birth, but his reputation was so high that he was appointed to command the imperial troops at Königgrätz on July 3, 1866. He was defeated by von Moltke, and was subsequently treated shamelessly by the Austrian press and the general staff. After victory, Bismarck rode the battlefield. He did not decide what the battle was to be called, but A. J. P. Taylor has him musing about his son when looking at the dead: “It makes me sick at heart to think that Herbert may be lying like this some day.”384 He had, however, another problem. No one had thought to prepare a billet for him and he was tired. Unfortunately he slipped off his horse. On hitting the ground he discovered that it was unusually soft. He had landed in a “manure pit.”385 Perhaps the glamor and the dash are indeed best reserved for the victorious parades, although it is undeniably true that those who participate in battle often remember it as a very intoxicating business. How could facing death be anything other than a heightened experience? But for true glamor you probably needed to be on a horse. Cavalry officers clearly have all the best outfits, at least among those actors who actually get to see action, and cavalry charges are particularly popular with painters. The engagements late in the day at Königgrätz, for instance, were apparently exceptionally spectacular and inspired several military artists. Bismarck, however, for all his erudition and love of the arts—or perhaps because of it—saw heroism, if not glamor, elsewhere.

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After Königgrätz, writing to his wife, he gave voice to his deep feelings about ordinary Prussian soldiers: “Everyone of them so brave, so composed, so polite, despite empty stomachs, wet clothes, wet quarters, little sleep, the soles falling off their boots, friendly to everyone, indulging in no plundering or burning, paying what they can and eating moldy bread. Fear of God must be deeply embedded in our common people or all this couldn’t be.”386 Four years later, shortly before the battle at Sedan, he writes to her that he is worried that the rain is damaging the boots of the infantrymen (August 28, 1870).387 And when the battle has been fought and won he tells her that the victory has been a “world historical event; a victory for which we will thank God our Lord in humbleness” (September 3, 1870).388 I see no reason to doubt his sincerity, which is also to say I see no reason to doubt his deep, and humble, Protestant faith along with his respect and affection for the foot soldiers among his countrymen. Bismarck, although seen as the most belligerent statesman of his time, was among the least likely to be seduced by militarism and show. However, after Sedan the decks were cleared for show. Most notably, it was thoroughly indulged in the huge and grandiose victory parade in Berlin. If this cannot be seen as the ostentatious birth of a domestic peacetime military culture, at the very least it gave it a massive fillip. The Second Reich was going to overdose on this sort of thing, as we have already seen in chapter 8 in the context of Wilhelm II and his ubiquitous, plumed displays. Germans found themselves in a culture where, as Sybille Bedford remarked, “Uniforms, no longer the livery of duty, were worn like feather.”389 But this also underlines an ironic and unfortunate contradiction. The peacetime indulgence of the military reanimated the old reactionary Junker class so that “precisely at the moment of Germany’s modernization the anachronistic and economically declining elements of a modern society were once more exalted.”390 In other words, the reactionaries retained, even strengthened, their grip on those ideological matters that were at odds with the socioeconomic development of the state and, more important, with the most progressive democratic forces within it. This dichotomy is unusually pertinent in the German case, where the asynchronicity between cultural, social, and technological state apparatuses was always particularly severe. These discrepancies bred a hostility toward technology and modernization that were, not without reason, characterized by many German intellectuals (on both the right and the left) as inimical to the humanist ideal of the whole “man.” Little that subsequently happened in the twentieth century countered this fear. In fact with Martin Heidegger it was given added force. It also became a major consideration in post-1945 debates (in which, for instance, the left intellectual Jürgen Habermas played a major role) on the function of uni- versities and the dangers of specialization in the context of a humanist and rounded tertiary education.391 Perhaps these matters should be kept

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in mind when looking at film of the kaiser and his family. Compare newsreels from Berlin with those, let us say, from New York at the same time (or even from monarchist and imperial London), and there is something almost bizarrely anachronistic about the public, and militaristic, self- image of the German governing class. Indeed the vulgarity of the military ostentation of the Second Reich is hardly to be exaggerated, and no doubt mocking it is as easy as shoot- ing the proverbial fish in a barrel. Furthermore it spills over, as we will see later in this chapter, into a kind of camp culture that does not spare the imperial “All Highest” himself. Nor should it have. But the public displays were not trivial, and their overtly decorative function hides deeper and potentially more insidious tendencies. Certainly they did not end with defeat in 1918. The Nazis, in particular, understood their function perfectly. Joachim Fest has talked of the “liturgical magic” of National Socialist demonstrations and how this gave back to post–First World War Germans their “lost sense of belonging together and their feeling of collective camaraderie.” Fritz Stern observes appositely that “the National Socialists turned politics into national drama. Hitler and his lieutenants were stage directors of national emotion,”392 and that “National Socialism left people ‘trembling with joy,’ freudeschlotternd, to use a term spawned by Karl Kraus.”393 All of these observations from the post-1945 period on the function of, usually military, display should be put in the context of Walter Benjamin’s earlier coupling of aesthetics and militarism. But we might also draw an instructive parallel with Stalin, who established a wide-ranging “performative culture” in which the citizen lived a responsible life inasmuch as he participated in the public sphere as a theatrical spear car- rier of one sort or another in mass demonstrations designed to affirm that what the propaganda declared as desirable had in fact been accomplished. Display came to usurp reality. Simply to set the targets of the next five-year plan was to guarantee that they would be—perhaps already had been—not only met but also exceeded. As Louis Fischer points out, all writers were “ordered . . . to treat the present as though it did not exist and the future as though it had already arrived.”394 And one is struck by the “fact” that the true citizen was, logically enough, getting happier. “Life has become merrier,” Pravda announced on February 4, 1933.395 And if I may add a personal recollection, when living in East Germany, where public demonstrations were regularly on the agenda, I once visited an amusement park graced with the title “The meeting place of the happy people.” Clearly one needed to be told, otherwise one might not have noticed. And that would have been, in entirely unimpeachable terms, not only ignorant, but disloyal as well. But, again, it is Benjamin who has most to tell us about this sort of thing. When analyzing Marinetti’s “Futurist” peroration on the beauties

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of mechanical warfare in the Afterword of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he points out that aesthetics and militarism become blood brothers, and that fascism’s “aestheticizing of politics climaxes in a single point. And that point is war.”396 Ernst Nolte records that the Nazis used to quote the Edda: “Our Death will be a Festive One.” On special occasions school children had to chant it enthusiastically.397 In his reactionary nationalist phase Thomas Mann was also not immune, although the Germanness he puts on show during the First World War is based on a sophisticated view of aesthetics: “Art, like all culture, is the sublimation of the demonic . . . its knowledge [is] deeper than enlightenment; its cogni- tion not science and scholarship, but sensuality and mysticism. . . .” And, while it has been related to “religion and to sexual love . . . one can also compare it with another elementary force . . . war.”398 This is the sort of rapturous nationalism that one comes across in the fascist period. And while it may exceed the Stalinist model in Stalinist terms, it still carries the theatricality of the Second Reich to its logical goal. The key change is that in the twentieth century the cavalry regiment may well keep its title, but will replace the horses with tanks. And with respect to the early twentieth century, one has already noted how Wilhelm encouraged the coupling, especially “abroad,” between the German Reich and Prussia. As Sösemann remarks, Wilhelm gave support to this “misconception” because Germany also appeared to glorify “the military, sought a militarization of public life, and had a longing . . . to prove itself . . . in wars.”399 But was this really a “misconception”? There is a further irony in aestheticizing militarism in the manner of the Second Reich. In having no empirical expression, militarism loses the very thing it publicly claims to be foregrounding: battle experience. Parades, maneuvers, even war games inevitably become ends in themselves. And Wilhelm was keen to take part in these “Kaisermanöver.” He led the cavalry charges. His side was always judged to have won.400 This of course does not mean that the yearning for war implied in the displays is diluted, merely that it is a desire focused on an ever more imagina- tive goal. Nor do the foreign, empire-building adventures help much in this regard. Rather they underpin the same tendency in that they inevitably allow the soldier to glamorize the business simply because it is so exotic, while deluding himself as to what warfare might, in other circumstances, amount to. Winston Churchill enjoying the last cavalry charge of the British Army at Omdurman in 1898 and German soldiers encounter- ing the extraordinary sight of the natives of southern Africa at the same time, were getting the fix that their romanticism longed for, but none of the reality of battle. The Mahdist forces were in no position to fight a European army equipped with “modern” artillery and were duly routed with appalling losses. Churchill and his friends could count only forty- seven fallen comrades. Meanwhile even the German public, despite a late

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outbreak of heady imperialist enthusiasm, saw nothing to be particularly thrilled about when their troops in South West Africa massacred the Herero in 1904 and then let the survivors and their families die of thirst and hunger. And although the general who carried this out and who made no bones about his bloodthirsty “war” aims, Lothar von Trotha, was recalled to the Fatherland, Wilhelm still decorated him. None of this prepared anybody for the trenches of 1914. But it certainly didn’t diminish the desire of the German officer class for war. There was in fact something of a fear among the older generation that they might miss out. Earlier, several leading figures (among them Moltke and Bernhardi) were disappointed not to have been chosen to fight in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion.401 Clearly that had all the beguiling ingredients: a glamorous country, an ill-equipped but exotic enemy who would presumably put up enough of a fight to make the whole thing fun and thereby justify the subsequent victories, trophies, and new costume accessories. Nonetheless we might assume that there were sensible officers who didn’t wholly succumb to this sort of thing. Count Zedlitz-Trützschler writing in his diary in 1904 recorded his frustration: “We are currently . . . occupied with the 37th change of uniforms since the accession to the throne.”402 A further, and rather theoretically fascinating, ingredient in German/ Prussian militarism was the famous Schlieffen Plan. This was explicitly proposed, in something like its final form, by Chief of the General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen in a memorandum in 1905. Although the details might change, the plan modified, extra divisions added, etc., as was the case in 1913,403 the thrust of the thing was clear enough and easily inferable . . . by the French, who had received leaked documents, or by anyone else.404 Certainly the civilian German authorities were “well informed” of the details.405 Nor should it be seen as one plan among many worked out by a General Staff obliged to cover all the bases in the event of a war against enemies not yet known. Rather it was the all-determining bedrock of German military thinking, which is no doubt one of the reasons why its basic premise (hold up the Russians and throw everything at the French) was so public. King Albert of Belgium, through whose country the German divisions were to march in what was supposed to be a huge right hook that would knock France out of the war in six weeks, stated unambiguously that Belgium was a state, not a road, and told the kaiser in December 1912 that his army would fight.406 Furthermore, in the years immediately before 1914 there was frequent and at times desperate diplomatic activity on the part of the German government to secure British neutrality in the event of an attack through Belgium. Moltke even advocated trying to come to some agreement with the Belgians themselves in the hope they might let the German troops pass through peacefully. But they were not having it. Instead the Belgium government announced in 1913 that it intended to increase the army by 150,000.407

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With regard to the German General Staff (and to a certain extent those in the German government around Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg), it was as though a holiday had been booked, the luggage packed, all the necessary arrangements made but for last-minute quanda- ries as to whether we really needed extra supplies of this or that. The only thing that wasn’t clear was the exact departure time. But already the “historical” narrative was incontestably in place. The Schlieffen Plan seems to have created a paradoxical situation whereby the a priori is projected into the future as a fait accompli. The subsequent debates, dominated by a kaiser who first leaned one way and then the next, and underpinned by a chancellor who occasionally got cold feet, merely add an extra dash of comedy to the collective, macabre operetta. But what is of the utmost significance is the contribution the Schlieffen Plan made to the fact of war, that it forced the nonmilitary decision makers in Berlin (and no doubt elsewhere) to think in terms of war. It was a given, because it seems to have become if not the dominant narrative at least an essential part of it. Nothing is but talking makes it so, and the Schlieffen Plan, as modified by Moltke, dominated the chatter to the degree that it “significantly reduced political and military options at the end of July” 1914.408 All of which merely confirms that when Bernhardi wrote his book on the coming war in 1912, he had good reason to be sure of his premise. But we should return to the question of battle because in concentrating on the theatrical, or camp, elements and ideological overin- dulgence, we have hardly done it justice, even if the discussion is still framed in terms of bold hussars rather than exhausted foot soldiers. It should be conceded that the glamorizing of battle, which is such a powerful, though hardly exclusive, German trope, need not be axiomatically a vulgar business, no matter that popular opinion today would incline, in general, to that view. In the long tradition of German idealist thought and aesthetics, however, militarism, naturally enough, couples with death, and death turns out to be a potent aesthetic and philosophic concept. It enriches militarism in part by shrouding it in a heady narcotic fug. Death is, after all, the opiate of the German romantic. Therefore it perversely underpins the glamor of battle by adding a deeper significance to the whole business. In particular, an explicitly religious desire to sacrifice oneself in battle, duly aestheticized (courtesy of poetry, etc.) and publicly celebrated (courtesy of war songs, etc.), becomes an increasingly potent ingredient of national life during the period of Friedrich II’s campaigns. The poet Christian Ewald von Kleist declares: “Death for the Fatherland is worthy of eternal veneration!”409 Warfare is thus, in part paradoxically, an escape from the mundane notion of death, that is, death seen in incontrovertible commonsense terms as a drab universal whose democratic, and thereby worthless, credentials cannot be circumvented. Battle, however, makes it something tremendous. And, in

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a further paradox, death will even go so far as to undercut the orgiastic delights of victory, replacing it with its own intoxicating fatalism, a taste for “downfall,” a yearning after redemption packaged as a sacred act. At which point it becomes clear that the operetta has been supplanted by grand opera. And this takes us back to Wagner. Wagner makes ecstatic death the portal to transcendence. Death is thereby not the end but the beginning. But it is not the beginning of the bodiless, renunciated life, as his alleged philosophical mentor Arthur Schopenhauer would have us believe. Rather it is flagrantly passionate—Wagner’s privileged heterosexual figures tend to die in pairs—and redemption is enjoyed as an enhanced expression of heady sexual abandon. The classic case is Isolde’s Liebestod, where the heroine, yearning to join her dead soul mate and lover, sings herself to a transcendent death imagined as a descent into waves of sound. It drove Nietzsche to gush that Wagner was “a voluptuous divinity of individualism.”410 Whatever the case, it is clear that death in this context is very special indeed. It has to be trained for, suffered for. It is hard work, but when pulled off properly, shatteringly rewarding. Particularly perceptive Wagnerians—Thomas Mann would be a leading example—have seen how this all goes back not merely to the favored philosopher, Schopenhauer, but, more significantly, to the romantic poet Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) and his Hymns to the Night of 1800. In section 4, the poem Novalis produces is remarkably close to Isolde’s death-drenched “love song.”

Shall one day remain Yet in a few moments Then free am I And intoxicated In Love’s lap lie. Life everlasting Lifts, wave-like, at me, I gaze from its summit Down after thee. Your luster must vanish Yon mound underneath — A shadow will bring thee Thy cooling wreath. Oh draw at my heart, love, Draw till I’m gone, That, fallen asleep, I Still may love on. I feel the flow of Death’s youth-giving flood To balsam and ether

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Transform my blood — I live all the daytime In faith and in might And in holy fire I die every night.411

And it is in the general context of this overwrought, overwritten, and overindulged brew that death, initially in the nineteenth century, finds its privileged place in the elect German imagination. In his own way Ernst Jünger was sozzled on this in the First World War. In fact he is the overriding example of someone who did manage to get this sort of thing off its high horse and down into the trenches. His language, however, is everything other than Bismarckian. That Jünger triumphs over the gruesome realities of war in the trenches, at least as he commits them to paper, is asserted in the trumpeting confidence of his romantic and death-dedicated prose: “Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood.”412 As Walter Benjamin points out in Theories of German Fascism, with Jünger the German dead “went in their death from an imperfect reality to a perfect reality, from Germany in its temporal manifestation to the eternal Germany.”413 Yet despite Jünger’s experience as, at least at first, an ordinary soldier it is hardly surprising if the romantic Weltanschauung of German militarism is more at home in the officers’ mess, where a remarkably large number of the men were also intellectuals, artists, poets, amateur musicians, etc. And neither is it surprising that war was thus theorized as “a moral discipline, almost in fact as a spiritual inspiration.”414 It trumps normality in every respect: “Fighting is magnificent and more worthy of man than self-indulgence in smug comfort,” says Moeller van den Bruck.415 It is the true subject’s highest destiny. As Treitschke pointed out: “Not only the life of man, but also the right and natural emotions of his inmost soul, his whole ego, are to be sacrificed to a great patriotic ideal; and herein lies the moral magnificence of war.”416 Nor is the cult of death employed to marginalize, or downgrade, lived German culture. It encompasses it, so that if we were to think of spiritual Germany inde- pendently of killing we would be guilty of a solecism. Rather spiritual Germany itself should be seen as an impeccable vindication of slaughter. In 1915 the first wartime Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, blended the particularism of Germany with its heroic military tradition. The resulting philtre was potent and urgent. It allowed of but one outcome: “The spiritual progress of mankind is only possible through Germany. This is why Germany will not lose this war; it is the only nation that can, at the present moment, take charge of leading mankind towards a higher destiny.”417 Also notable is Arthur de Gobineau, a Frenchman who had a marked influence on late Wagner. He had, like

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his intellectual blood brother Houston Stewart Chamberlain, many fine things to tell the Germans about themselves. Of course they were to follow in the footsteps of Athens. But once again the ancient Greeks are held up as a prototype in order that modern Germans might exceed them, but this time not with railways, but with killing. Gobineau’s message is, presumably, meant to be inspiring: German/Aryan culture is the only one to have possessed the “power of murdering.”418 Death in warfare is thus Janus-like. But happily, in the romantic German model, to kill and be killed are equal benedictions. Still, one is struck by the perverse but bewitching enticement of defeat. We have already seen how Thomas Mann faced up to Germany’s coming collapse in the First World War with determined enthusiasm. Germany’s downfall would mean that the nation would thereafter live “upwardly.” Going under, like Isolde sinking beneath all those waves, is the oxymoron to a transcendental entry into the higher noumenal realm. Spengler tells us that there is something heroic in fighting against the inevitability of fate, of grasping the downfall with intoxicating enthusiasm. In his Urfragen, published posthumously, we discover that although life might be “endless murdering,” when a man struggles against destiny he creates great things.419 In any case it is clearly better to opt for “a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without substance.” In Man and Technics, Spengler calls this “the choice of Achilles.”420 An essential part of this mix is that the hero and the artist become one. War, even when the fighting begins, maintains its theatrical credentials. But it is a stage work that is saturated by religious significance. As Goebbels proclaimed in one of his most ecstatic oratorical performances (in Gorlitz, March 9, 1945), the German soldiers about to throw back the Russians would go into battle showing no mercy. Nonetheless they would be inspired by the same holy devotion men feel when attending a church service.421 This is the sacred theater that Wagner’s music dramas were always struggling to realize and for which the temple at Bayreuth was built. And perhaps there is something here that is faux democratic. The old men whom the Nazis assembled for the Volkssturm in late 1944, no less than the women and boys who fought in Berlin during the last weeks of the Reich, were clothed by Goebbels in the Wagnerian language otherwise used for Achilles and Siegfried. Being German was enough to secure top billing in the Hegelian epic. And is not a grand death the bit player’s certain chance of stardom, his moment in the limelight— however brief? In the 1933 film Morgenrot a German submarine captain says: “Perhaps death is the only event in life. We Germans may be bad at living—but at dying we are fabulous.”422 One also thinks of those Germans who staged their own deaths in the Second World War, from Hans Langsdorff, captain of the Graf Spee, who on December 20, 1939 in full dress uniform and lying on his scuttled ship’s battle ensign shot

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himself, to the numerous suicides in 1945. Nor was this latter group limited to those at the top of the cast list, now often barely sane players in the fetid atmosphere of the Führer’s bunker. Several Nazis in Berlin and elsewhere killed themselves and their wives, and many officers still fighting chose death rather than surrender. But of course it is the utter perversity of the Goebbels’s suicide in the bunker that is most astounding. They took their six young children with them. What we are forced to consider is that many of these acts were not born of despair, but of belief. There is an element of ecstasy in Magda Goebbels’s last letter to Harald Quandt, her son by her first marriage. Her belief in the Führer and national socialism is unshakeable and her children by Joseph will be killed exactly because of this elevated attitude. Surely, then, no one is going to disagree with Richard Wolin, who says that a longing for downfall is “a classic trope of reactionary German Kulturkritik.”423 Among the most cultured (he was a musician and poet) and ambivalent of the dashing German officers before the Second World War was Claus Graf von Stauffenberg. Appropriately he was a cavalry officer (he rode to Olympic standards) and he later served in a tank regiment, notably under Rommel in Tunisia, where he lost one hand and two fingers of the other. Despite his many gifts he was destined, as much by personal enthusiasm as by family tradition, for the military, where he impressed, even captivated, nearly everyone who dealt with him. Although not Prussian, he saw the army in the manner of Scharnhorst. It was “the State and the heart of the people” and its officer corps was “the embodiment of the nation” in its highest form.424 He also became a disciple in the famous Stefan George circle. The “master,” as George was known, was a mystic who believed that Germany was essentially an idealized and secret (“geheim”) phenomenon. And in the classic nineteenth-century manner he consciously evoked the dead Hohenstaufen emperors as spiritual guides and forefathers. George was also a distinguished poet and his, quite possibly passive, homosexuality (he urged celibacy on the disciples) gave his lyrics the sort of rhapsodic and perfumed quality of Novalis— although they are somewhat more disciplined. George’s great love was Maximilian Kronberger, a young poet who died at sixteen. George virtually deified him in his own poems, rather in the manner in which the emperor Hadrian worshiped the dead Antinous in marble. When Claus Stauffenberg came to plan the assassination of Hitler it was to George’s poem “The Oath” that he turned. Those closest among his fellow conspirators not only had to solemnly pledge themselves to the cause, but it was also necessary that their—conventionally regarded— criminal act be underpinned by all possible moral justification. Recourse to classic Greek precedents was necessary; a document was prepared. Quite appropriately, there was for Claus, his brother Berthold, and others, a profound link between Hellenic culture and the idealized Germany

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for whom they had already fought in battle and for whom they were now prepared to die in an act of state treason.425 Nonetheless it is worthwhile remembering that when Claus set out to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944 (he very nearly succeeded), he was just as much committed to the Volksgemeinschaft and the Führerprinzip as he had been at the start of the war. It was this particular Führer, he now realized, who was militarily destroying and morally contaminating Germany. However, earlier, after the first victories, he had been as enthusiastic as the rest. Then he tellingly and snobbishly remarked of Hitler that “the father of this man was not of lower middle-class origins.”426 In this context it might be remembered that general Beck, also a conspirator, had told Meinecke, after things had started to go wrong, that Hitler was “Vaterlandslos.”427 According Hitler a lofty Germanic status when he succeeded and then culturally disinherit- ing him when he failed are closely interdependent rationalizations. Stauffenberg died heroically. He had also lived heroically and therefore the Nazi hierarchy hated him deeply. His wife and children were fortunate to survive the war. But if he makes a fine charismatic hero, is he the hero that the contemporary Federal Republic has decided he must be? Of course he is celebrated annually, and justly, as an antifascist figure; one of the good Germans who attempted to do something against the evil that had the nation by the throat. But he was hardly the protodemocrat that the modern state wants him—yearns for him—to be. It is likely that the last words he called out before he was shot were not, as is often reported, “Long live holy Germany!” but “Long live secret Germany!”428 To the last he was loyal to George and the deep romantic and idealist tradition (and myth) that stretched back beyond the nineteenth century into the Ur-mists of the first German tribes. With regard to Claus’s own biography this deep commitment might have had its birth in 1918 when, as a boy, he had the utmost difficulty in coping with the collapse of the Second Reich. At sixteen he consoled himself by writing a poem in which he claimed: “We are still the destiny of the world, ‘we’ the blond descen- dants of the Hohenstaufen and the Ottonian.”429 It would be agreeable to finish a chapter on militarism and death with such an admirable, if ambivalent, man, one who, ultimately, made the most of both militarism and death in an attempt to limit the sufferings of his fellow countrymen and save his nation. But the tradition of German belligerence comes, at the very least, to a radical caesura in 1945 (Stauffenberg for all his virtues is an anachronism), while the rough chronology of the history laid out here has yet to escape the Second Reich. That is to say, Stauffenberg was so exceptional an individual that he lies at odds with the narratives that are still in play. And if he can be seen—and he can—as embodying many of the key characteristics that carry the particular narratives of German idealism and romanticism into the realm of warfare, that too is because he is thrown into

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an unprecedented situation, itself so diseased by the nation-state that German history was also thrown, in the most extreme manner, out of what had been up to then its obvious narrative parameters. Perversely, and despite German postwar propaganda, Stauffenberg looks back to a world still rooted in nineteenth-century German culture. He is not a harbinger of the Federal Republic. Meanwhile, when seen in his own time, Wilhelm II is, equally perversely, more modern. He should also by rights (which is to say by virtue of imperial propaganda) have been exceptional. However, if he was so, it was only in the sense that he was at least as overparted as Stauffenberg was overendowed. Foreign leaders were well aware he was a loose can- non. Theodore Roosevelt, whom the kaiser admired because he was a real “man,”430 found him “as vain as a peacock. He would rather ride at the head of a procession than govern an empire.” Even worse, he was always bluffing; for Roosevelt the most contemptible flaw among would-be real men.431 The tsar (cousin “Nicky”) thought him “raving mad,”432 while the British foreign office was perpetually exasperated by his erratic behavior and irrational outbursts.433 But he too was emblematic, arguably more so than Stauffenberg, because he not only, as the principal peacock, embodied the Second Reich but also took it forward to the abyss by virtue, in part, of his own mistakes. Among these was his “modern” love of, and massive financial investment in, technology, principally his navy. With Wilhelm, plumes and pocket battleships were all of a piece, which is to say he neither realized the expectations the past bequeathed him nor rose to the challenges of the future. Nevertheless, it is appropriate that someone so addicted to delusion proved hopelessly unable to understand the consequences of his actions. To the end of his comfortable life in Dutch exile (he died in 1941) he maintained that he had been betrayed by weaklings and bad counselors. Perhaps the high theatrical camp that Wilhelm inevitably evokes reached its climax in November 1908 when the chief of the Military Secretariat, Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, dressed in a ballerina’s tutu, collapsed and died while dancing front of the kaiser and friends at Prince Eulenburg’s castle, Liebenberg. Eulenburg was a devoted supporter of the kaiser (when writing to others he referred to him as “Sweetie,” as did many in the artistic “Liebenberg Roundtable”), and the kaiser in turn felt he couldn’t do without him. Eulenburg, however, had a trenchant and long-term enemy in the journalist Maximilian Harden, who was blessed with first-class informants, including at one earlier point an old and embittered Bismarck. Although driven by nationalist right-wing sentiments, Harden attacked Eulenburg on the basis of sexual innu- endo. In an overheated atmosphere accusations of homosexuality flew around, blackmail was common, and several German officers committed suicide. At first Harden did not name Eulenburg in print, but in

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1907 he accused him explicitly of, among other things, a homosexual relationship with Kuno von Moltke, the military commander of Berlin. There followed two trials, a great public scandal, more suicides, a public crisis of confidence in the manliness of the German Army, and a purge of the German officer class. One might speculate on the feminine and masculine sides of the kaiser. He worshiped his father (a hero at Königgrätz) and was rejected by his English mother, the first daughter of Queen Victoria. Because of his withered left arm, the result of a breech birth, he was always an inadequate figure and was put through tortures in his youth, learning to ride—and always falling off his horse—and so on. In later life he tended to surround himself with figures that provided him with both the feminine love he needed—and had never had—and confirmed his status as a masculine prototype, albeit one who had never proved himself in battle. Somehow his costuming (he preferred the company of military attaches to ambassadors, was delighted with his British naval outfit, and could be very peeved if he thought someone in uniform was guilty of a sar- torial slipup434) unites both of these tendencies: theatrical campery and a feeling that he must finally get a grip and set the Schlieffen Plan in motion. One suspects that somehow the former actually drove him to the latter. Always oscillating between determination and uncertainty, he partly created and fed off the crises immediately before 1914. But he was never in command of them. He declared from the balcony of the palace at noon on July 31 that there was an “imminent threat of war” and that Germany’s enemies “are pressing the sword into our hands.”435 Frequent mention was made at this time of the “sword.” In fact four days before the kaiser’s speech, during an extraordinary performance of Siegfried at Bayreuth, “the entire audience, sensing the moment of destiny, leapt to its feet at Siegfried’s cry ‘Nothung, Nothung, Neidliches Schwert.’” (Nothung, Nothung, trusty sword!) Kaiser Wilhelm, we are told, had already “accepted Chamberlain’s designation of his role as Siegfried the dragon-slayer, whose divine mission it was to restore the former glory of the fatherland.”436 Swords, however, were, like horses and hussars, soon to become matters of pure decoration. Death was to prove far more badly dressed and vastly more replete than hardly anyone had imagined. Nonetheless, at the end—or at least at what should have been the end—it was suggested that Wilhelm ought indeed to do something tremendous and Wagnerian. In 1918, as defeat appeared inevitable, it was felt that the monarchy could be saved and the emperor’s reputation rescued if he was assisted on to his horse once again (because of his arm he needed steps to make the saddle) and died in battle. This would give the national downfall both meaning and redemption. So now a real-life Brünnhilde would ride her real-life steed into the flames. It might be difficult to believe that this melodramatic scenario, which pulls together

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so many of the ideological strands of German thinking in general and Prussian heroism in particular, was apparently taken seriously, but it seems it was. The “King’s Death Ride” (Königstodesritt) “was championed by a wide spectrum of high-ranking officers and officials including many who are hardly remembered today as romantics and illusionaries.”437 What is striking here is not merely the strands of romantic and idealist thinking that clearly feed into this, but the manner in which they foreground narrative. The grand events of the nineteenth century through which the historians, as much as the cavalry officers, had moved with dash and increasing confidence had been a story. And a story implies, at least in commonsense terms, a telos no matter how often that telos may be redefined, deferred, or merely treated as a theoretical necessity. It is, however, an irony that victory simply drives the story forward with yet more authority to the degree that the telos becomes utopian, and a utopia always lies, at the very least, just slightly out of one’s reach. No doubt we will get there one day—presumably when the whole world does indeed recognize the spiritual superiority of Germany—but in the meantime we can happily live with the incremental but unmistakable progress of the present. Defeat however, especially cataclysmic defeat, either brings the story to a dreadful conclusion or throws the narrative into an entirely different and initially incomprehensible context and thereby conjures up a new and alien telos. But up to 1918 the narrative of post-Napoleonic Germany had been triumphant and therefore benevolent. There had to be a reason for this.

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O TURN TO THE QUESTION of Providence now is to address directly Tsomething that has always been implicit and often explicit in the forgoing. Nonetheless, Providence is a dangerous topic. To face up to it on its own terms is tantamount to smuggling into the historical undertaking an ingredient that is threatening. An easy and more attractive proposition would be to label it as alien and block its path at the threshold. One would then argue that Providence belongs to a different epistemology. That epistemology, as far as it had any claim to academic credentials, might, at best, shift between theology and philosophy. But there the line would have to be drawn. For surely nothing is more disturbing to the professional historian, especially one educated in the empirical British tradition (which would exclude the Marxists), than the devious Hegelian axiom, addressed in the introduction, that history in fact amounts to the philosophy of history. Better dismiss all questions as to providence, teleology, meaning, and so forth as bunk. But if one does that, one is forced, as I will attempt to show, to dismiss narrative (or narratives) as bunk. And if we dismiss narrative as bunk, then we have arrived at the easy conclusion that liberates us from any problems to do with history whatsoever, simply because we are forced—Henry Ford-like as it were—to accept that history is bunk. That, however, is not the agenda here. One might begin the argument by taking a seemingly further—and therefore even more heretical—step away from history. If we go back beyond Hegel to Kant we completely upset the balance of the terms found in “the philosophy of history.” If Hegel uses philosophy as the justification (or proof) of a particular account of history, Kant uses the notion of history (or narrative) as an essential concept in his philosophical argument. It turns out that the notion of history allows him to manufac- ture a proof that establishes that moral inferences as to the good life and the summum bonum are possible. And with Kant “the greatest good” is not solely a qualitative term, to be applied exclusively to the highest possible moral values. It is also very much a quantitative (democratic) notion in that what it implies has to be empirical and practical within the community. It has to be good for something. Therefore it is “formed by the union of the greatest welfare of the rational beings in the world with the supreme condition of their good, or, in other words, by the union of universal happiness with the strictest morality.”438 The key source is the Third Critique, in particular the final section on teleology.

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It must be said at once that Kant’s grander agenda whereby he infers (some of his disciples would claim deduces) moral values by virtue of aesthetics is only tangential to this discussion. Nonetheless it should be acknowledged that his goal is to show that there are certain synthetic statements (that is, statements that are not of themselves tautologically true) that are a priori true nevertheless. And they instruct us, authori- tatively, on what is correct and morally good. This goal is reached when aesthetics is added to the philosophical mix. It is this that enables Kant to make firm ethical judgments about the right way to behave and so forth. It is important to mention this, if only in passing, because Kant’s influence on the German aesthetic tradition is unequaled and many of the thinkers and actors mentioned in these pages were profoundly, if indirectly, influenced by him. Indeed many of the aesthetic “virtues” to do with German spirituality, culture, militarism, death, etc. that have played such an important role up to now have their roots in Kant’s work on aesthetics, no matter that they debased it. And debased it they must have, for clearly all nationalist thinking violates Kant’s axiomatic universalism. This establishes that what is proved as true and ethical for one is so for everyone. No individual may be a means to an end. Therefore the summum bonum is everything other than an exclusively German notion, or a notion weighted in favor of German interests, no matter how those interests are defined nationally. But what is important here is narrative and teleology, and the manner in which both terms imply each other and spill over into each other’s territory. Even so, while Kant certainly uses the latter term (teleology) in respect of a goal, it is the story (narrative) element that is most relevant in the context of this essay. For instance, he does not employ teleology as a fixed concept, as though it established in itself that the world makes sense, or that there is a God, although he does toy with the idea and mentions the argument from design as a possible proof for God. And we might note that he chooses language that suggests a narrative is indeed being written: God is the “Author.”439 But he seems reluctant to make conclusive claims for the argument from design and warns of the circular fallacy of using God to explain and justify nature and nature to explain and justify God.440 Richard Dawkins, dishing the “watchmaker” solecism (still a popular illustration of the same argument and notably influential in the United States), does not put the matter more satisfactorily. The crucial point is that although Kant avoids any kind of explicit historical analysis, he is talking about history and narrative nevertheless. And having established this, he is forced to accept the commonsense inference that a goal (or telos) is thereby unavoidable. Stories are simply going somewhere. The mechanics of how this comes about (the business of the historian) is beside the point for him. He is almost exclusively interested in the telos (unlike historians, who are chiefly, often exclusively, interested in the

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stories), because it is the telos that is going to establish the moral values he wants established, rather than the narrative, which merely gets him there. Nonetheless the former is utterly dependent on a mode of thinking that uses the latter as an essential factor in the general argument. Initially, Kant’s argument is based on “nature” rather than human history: “strictly speaking, we do not observe the ends in nature as designed. We only read this conception into the facts as a guide to judgment in its reflection upon the products of nature.”441 Therefore, as the first framework for his notion of teleology is the physical world, he talks about a “physio-teleology” that “can never disclose to us anything about a final end of creation. . . .” And although “it is true that physical teleology urges us to go in quest of a theology . . . [it] . . . cannot produce one. . . .”442 But as his objective is ethical, it is not long before he shifts the argument and introduces man, at which point there is a radical change, and a deepening, in what he claims to be able to deduce. In the section titled Remark we read that man “exists for an end, and this end demands a Being that has formed both him and the world with that end in view.”443 Whereupon the argument drawn from narrative becomes very strong: “supposing we follow the teleological order, there is a fundamental principle to which even the most ordinary human intelligence is obliged to give immediate assent. It is the principle that if there is to be a final end of all, which reason must assign a priori, then it can only be man—or any rational being in the world—subject to moral laws.”444 The moral laws that Kant infers from this are not the issue here, but it is fair to say that they would be hard to discover in the Schlieffen Plan. What does matter however is that—despite the apparent indifference, in contradistinction to Hegel, as to the course of events—it is narrative itself that enables us to understand the world and, if we choose, to underpin a specific notion of telos . . . Kantian or otherwise. Despite the sophistication of Kant’s argument—which has been substantially neglected in the above instrumental and very cursory sum- mary—what is striking is that it confronts us with certain self-evident problems: events are narrative phenomena, therefore they are going somewhere; if the historian explains cause and effect (which is generally thought to be his principal function as an intelligent storyteller) then he cannot avoid inferences as to how events under given circumstances play out; consequently, it will be impossible for him to avoid didactic and moral judgments. All of these banal facts push the historian in the direction of a meaningful teleology, however much his courage may fail him at the sticking point. After all, this is simply not a problem that the historian qua historian normally wants to deal with. So it is hardly surprising if the historian, preserving the probity of his own field, rejects inferred providence, or indeed the presence of some kind—any kind—of extrinsic force. He does not have to agree with

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Alexander von Humboldt, who thought: “World history . . . unthink- able without a cosmic plan governing it.”445 Instead he might place the dynamic, causal elements of history within the parameters of individual psychology, or the character of the species (race, if he chooses), or socioeconomic forces. Marxism, after all, allegedly functions according to the inner dynamic of exactly such socioeconomic forces, which, it claims, push the narrative of human history forward irresistibly. It declares itself axiomatically free of abstract externalities, “cosmic” or otherwise, largely because by being wholly materialist, if only as a premise, it “knows” that there can’t be any. But no matter what the historian does, he will find himself obliged to try and make sense of his material. In this, highly constricted manner at least, he is compelled to be Hegelian (the world is to be rationally understood), although he hardly needs to go so far as to assume that a spirit imbued with specific dialectical characteristics is at work in the grand, and disturbingly singular, narrative. Nor can the claims of reason be avoided if the historian concludes that at a particular point in the narrative random elements have taken charge and events have become irrational, incomprehensible. In choosing, to some extent at least, the parameters of the narrative with which he is dealing the historian has loaded the dice. He is the rational author of the irrationality that confounds him. For even to attribute axiomatic chaos or randomness under particular circumstances, within particular historical parameters, is, however unintentionally, to explain, to place matters in some kind of order. Furthermore—to take a very relevant example that has already been mentioned—should one confess, like Fritz Stern, that the Holocaust “somehow eludes understanding,”446 that is not to say that it is not to be understood, but (merely) that understanding at this point falls debilitatingly short of the phenomenon. Stern hasn’t thrown in the towel. On the contrary he underlines the pressing nature of the intellectual struggle: “I have spent my professional life trying to answer [the question]: why and how did the universal human potential for evil become an actuality in Germany?”447 And in any case, all explanations of all historical phenomena worth taking seriously come up short to one degree or another. If this were not the case, further historical work would not be possible. Is not today almost all serious history a form of revisionism, centered around interpretative debates, often shaped by the intellectual predispositions of different schools? It is this that makes history so thoroughly present. What is clear, however, is that the argument drawn from chaos or randomness—even if it could be established in some definitive sense as corresponding unproblematically to reality—is, being wholly arbitrary in content and form, of no use. Arguably the opposite is the case with dystopian arguments, at least if they forgo the option of celebrating chaos. Being singular and easy to grasp, they are easily usable, but only as pessimistic rationalizations. In

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general, no one is going to accuse the great negative dialectician Theodor Adorno of simplifying matters or of an irresponsible inclination to call a spade a bloody shovel, yet when push comes to shove his historical explanation is banal and, most important of all, singular: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanity, but one indeed from the slingshot to the H-bomb. It culminates in the total threat of organized humanity against organized human beings, in the epitome of discontinuity. Hegel is thereby verified by the horror and stood on his head.”448 Upturning Hegel yet again, but this time in order to explode Marxist utopianism, is entertaining, but like so many of Adorno’s formula-based games with opposites (not believing means having faith, and so on), the element of play soon exposes the undertaking as glib. Meanwhile in popular culture the idea that we are all going to hell in a handcart produces any number of disaster stories (viruses, meteorites, climate changes, population explosions, and so forth), each as focused and as singular as the next. They are, incidentally, exceptionally popular in Germany. And this is to say nothing of the little extraterrestrial lizards that Jonathan Kay touches on in his book Among the Truthers.449 However, in general it is clear that disaster scenarios per se—and Adorno’s encounter with history is, when all is said and done, little more than this—are, being dramatic and telos-obsessed, remarkably straightforward. It is not surprising therefore if sensible historians are wary of hitching their reputations to narrative prediction, even though they cannot gainsay that to talk in narrative terms is to imply a teleology. In other words, one can hardly blame them for simply ignoring, or shying away from, the implication. And should this understandable timidity be explicitly mentioned by the historian, it will unavoidably draw our attention to a philosophy of history that the disciplined (possibly archive-based) practice today would otherwise rather not want to admit into the discussion. For instance, it has already been noted above that even Meinecke’s comments on Goethe’s belief in modest, piecemeal progress does not, despite what Meinecke wants to think, free Goethe of a teleological Weltanschauung. In fact it does the opposite. For any historian—or philosopher—who points out that he is not in a position to come to far-reaching conclusions about the telos inscribed in a given notion of progress, has by that gesture alone, whether deliberately or inadvertently, conceded the fact of incremental progress itself. And this concession will remain in ironic and accusatory force should the subsequent historical narrative descend into unimagined horrors. All this leads us to what is the most striking characteristic of the German historians of the nineteenth century. They were, as we have had cause to note, not timid; they did not shy away from grand teleological inferences. The events of their own time or the immediate past were so seductive that they succumbed to a confident belief in national progress

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and, consequently, out of narrative and teleology they well-nigh deduced (an intrinsically German) Providence. The Prussian school, above all, was conformist, it controlled the historical apparatus through its own net- work, and it was partisan. Prussian historians “went into the archives with preconceived answers which they sought to document. They saw themselves in the service of the Hohenzollern dynasty as the guarantor of a bürgerlich order and a powerful Germany.” Consequently, they endowed Prussia with “a German mission.”450 By 1866 and the victory over Austria it was clear to all of them “that history was on the side of Bismarck.”451 Behind all this stood the necessary premise, at least it seems to have been necessary in the nineteenth century: Providence had spoken and had revealed itself in Prussian and German history. Certainly false modesty with respect to nationalist particularity was to be resisted. The extrinsic verdict of History, as an ersatz divine phenomenon, was not to be dismissed merely because it had been given in your favor. There was therefore no pressing reason to be embarrassed by the demonstrable, empirical truth that in the great scheme of things the moral and material superiority of the contemporary Prussian state had been confirmed. Quite the contrary in fact. As Georg Iggers points out, had not Herder in the eighteenth century believed that there is a divine purpose in history and that “Providence guides the path of development onward”? And does not: “All of Nature and of history reflect God”?452 In short, history is meaningful, a “rational process.”453 Ranke, for instance, needed to believe in the “divine will” into which the temporal particulars of his historical research could be fitted.454 And Hegel, most strikingly, felt that “the recognition of the plan of Divine Providence” would, when narratively understood, lead us to know God. It is also this aspect of the duality—constructed from history and the divine—that appears to have attracted Hitler, who had only contempt for organized religion, although he was wary of making Bismarck’s mistake and attacking the Catholic Church. Nonetheless he needed Providence and the divine in the here and now and, moreover, he needed them in a German uniform. “If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will. But I owe nothing to the Church that traffics in the salvation of souls.”455 His sincerity is hardly to be doubted when he declares: “I’m truly happy that it has been granted to me to see, in my lifetime, the German soldier rewarded by Providence.”456 After Hitler and the collapse, there was an understandable rush away from utopian and providential thinking. Such was the horror, it seemed only the antipode could cure the culture. But it was an antipode that, regrettably, did not give up on the singularity of the dominant narrative. As far as there can be said to have been a dystopian (although passing) telos it is embodied in both the historical fact of Auschwitz and in the unequaled symbolic and formative power of the ideological signifier “Auschwitz.” “Auschwitz” can be said to have thoroughly upset, even

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invalidated, the praxis of history for German historians, or at least to have made it uniquely difficult. The philosopher Karl Jaspers, attempting to come to terms with the Holocaust and German guilt, is addressing this problem when he says that “language fails . . . [when] . . . face to face with nothingness.”457 And without language one is utterly at sea. But of course even Adorno knows, as does everyone, that Auschwitz was not the end of history, although it is understandable if it is felt that it must have been the end of something. How appropriate then, in the German context, that it was assumed to be the end of culture. What greater punishment, what greater expression of German failure, could there be? Naturally no one worth taking seriously actually believed this assertion; everyone (including Adorno) knew that poetry was perfectly possible, perhaps even especially desirable, after Auschwitz. But many intellectuals had a visceral feeling that it really ought to be true (Germans had deserved such a punishment) and they were, as a result, reluctant to dismiss it. More than that, for some time they were prepared to embrace it. There were also specific, immediate postwar struggles that, while loaded and overtly conditional on transitory circumstances, were a product of the same loss of faith in a culture that had either been exposed as wholly incommensurate in the face of what had been perpetrated or culpable in the crimes themselves. For instance, in the areas controlled by the Western powers the authorities sometimes blocked productions of Bertolt Brecht’s plays because they implied a vindication of Marxism and, hence, of the Soviet military triumph. This reflected a deeper discontent among the Western powers. They took the view that Marxism, an allegedly superior analysis of history embodying higher moral values, could not have taken root in the offensive form of an alternative German state without the Nazi disaster. Marxism was therefore doubly exposed and doubly damned. The presence of the GDR also called forth a deep (and vulgar) desire to equate Stalinism with fascism, an equation that was attractive in the West because it was seen as an ideal basis on which to cobble together a propaganda that could facilitate a moral reconstruction. These conflicting notions were to develop, in some instances in a more sophisticated form, into the Historians’ Debate of the mid-1980s. One might mention a further example, one that centers on arguably the most influential and seductive German cultural ideologue of the nineteenth century. Wagner did not get back into the repertory of the opera houses of the GDR without much agony and his operas were duly subjected to censorious productions. But in the high temple of Wagnerianism in West Germany, where the Nazi fellow travelers of the Master’s own family were able to keep control, the solution was to deny the relevance of all matters extraneous to an allegedly purist notion of high culture. Wieland Wagner, quoting Eva in Die Meistersinger, reopened the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 under the motto “Art is what matters here.” Ironically, his stripped-down,

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politically safe production style was deemed ultraradical. Wagner purists protested. These days they protest even more violently because directors increasingly address the contaminated history of Wagner production itself and thereby in the eyes of the devotees overtly befoul everything once thought to be expressive of unblemished and sublime German art. In the end, however, the narrative(s) of history won out. “Auschwitz” does fulfill its dialectical function—whether positive or negative, the individual will have to decide for himself—in that in being a perversely celebrated masochistic end it inevitably becomes a “new beginning” or a “Stunde Null.” In other words it finds its place, in however disrup- tive a manner, in the narrative. Interestingly, there was an inclination in Germany to accept the first term and reject the second, as in Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech in the Bundestag in 1985. One may say that things are new, but one must be careful in talking of a beginning. The past cannot be—mustn’t be—downgraded. Above all, it is not to be forgotten. But whatever the fine sensibilities and shades of meaning, and however much one respects the feelings of liberals horrified at the thought of folding the Holocaust into the historical narration as though it was, epistemologically at least, an event like any other, were one to pursue the fetishization of “Auschwitz” (the signifier) it would be impossible to avoid an ahistorical and atemporal—albeit highly moral— Weltanschauung. And such a Weltanschauung, by definition, is not going anywhere. This is an intellectual danger that had (once) a magnetic effect on German liberals who were often far too susceptible to its seductive attraction. Dirk Moses says that Günter Grass saw Auschwitz as “a negative sublime.” It’s a nice formulation. Grass himself wrote in 1990—that is, after reunification—that the Holocaust “will never cease to be present; our disgrace will never be repressed or mastered . . . Auschwitz will . . . never be understood.”458 The unconditional, even prideful, masochism that is here, at the very least, inferable, is dubious yet clearly potent. At which point we can leave this subject until the two final chapters, where one will question whether the magnet still exerts the same perverse and irresistible attraction. One matter that has already emerged in a simple form from the forgoing remarks on Providence and narrative is the singular character of the model thereby implied. This underpins both the dangerous enthusiasms of Whigs (whether the British historian Macaulay or the German historians who took him as their guide) when they concluded that God/ Providence/the Author is on their side, as well as the understandable doubts of those thinkers well aware of the dangers of teleological and utopian thinking. To deal with this issue in the most fruitful manner we should now turn to the theoretical position briefly laid out in the opening pages of this essay. The singular model should be unambiguously ditched and history should be seen in terms of multiple narratives.

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There is no single “story” in telling a country’s history. Even the singular noun “history” is toxic. For instance, one of the big brains in the UK Conservative Party, the former Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove, has been making clear that the “Our-Island’s-Story” mentality is not dead. He wants a new history curriculum emphasizing a clear narrative, progress, and a stress on heroes. But we should never forget that the narrative that apparently triumphs is not “clear.” Instead it is made up of a myriad of competing factors, including the traces of those things that didn’t happen but at one time might well have. Furthermore a battle won can, in the long run, be more fatal for the victors than a battle lost was for the vanquished. Historical matters are seldom if ever done with once and for all. As will become increasingly plain as we approach the history of antisemitism in Germany, problems that were once thought unambiguously solved have a propensity to break out again in a yet more violent mutation. In principle it might be wise to proceed on the assumption that there are no final solutions, whether benign or malignant. Nevertheless, as was noted at the beginning of this essay, the conventional historian, keen to avoid conspiracy theories and speculative nonsense, is when all is said and done obliged to pay homage to the incontrovertible fact of what did happen. And so he should. However, in writing history he is not telling a story, although most historians cannot avoid claiming that this is what they are doing. But it would be better if such claims were not made. After all, even a Whig historian of the standing of Macaulay talks of a “checkered narrative,” which while singular at least suggests ambivalence. True, such a premise will hardly solve the historian’s dilemma as he confronts the degree to which he brings sense to (and thereby willfully distorts) the myriad of factors at play. In fact it will make that task all the more difficult and self-evidently arbitrary. But it should be a warning that no privileged narrative—including the one(s) here—is, when all is said and done, to be trusted. Nonetheless, this should not be used as an argument for inactivity or intellectual timidity. The unpredictability and instability that confronts the historian—and that he is obliged to misreport merely by bringing order to events—is, in itself, an attractive rationale for doing nothing in the present, or at least for doing nothing interventionist and violent, simply because history “establishes” that such action often goes awry and can have horrendous consequences. But one cannot avoid the fact—no weaker term is permissible—that violent action does not axiomatically lead to suffering and decline. Violent action has frequently brought liberation precisely because incrementalism (Karl Popper’s axiom that all we can do is try “to make life . . . a little less unjust in every generation”459) is often shown to be inadequate. It is particularly inadequate if we accept that liberation from injustice is to be accomplished within the lifespan of the victim, which is surely the most morally grounded claim that the

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individual (endowed with but one life) can make. Furthermore, liberal incrementalists in the West (Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Tony Judt, and others, together with their numerous intellectual godchildren who are so influential today) all too readily forget that the liberties they enjoy were won initially on the barricades. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, mentions the “argument” that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But he does so to point out that the omelets don’t get made.460 Well, sometimes they do, and sometimes revolutionary action against tyranny is the best option the oppressed have. And when one considers whole peoples damned to a wretched destiny—let us say the Palestinians, largely because both they and their current oppressors have historical claims to a place within Western liberalism—it is clear that Berlin’s negative liberty and Popper’s incrementalism have failed. No parents should be forced to bequeath to their children a hopeless destiny, and certainly not because Western nations, who are happy to resort to violence in other countries, decide that the values allegedly driving Western democracy have no practical purchase in their case. Rather we should consider the proposition that incrementalism will never emancipate a slave. Furthermore, Isaiah Berlin’s incontrovertible observation that “history does not move in straight lines” does not axiomatically underpin the incrementalist’s timidity, although that is the use to which Berlin and others put it.461 Yet the complexity of narratives is as much an argument for the potential efficacy of intervention as it is for well-meaning, laissez-faire inactivity. If the reader is puzzled why matters of this sort are mentioned here, it is not merely because, like Hegel, I believe that to do history is to do, whether one wants to or not, or whether one is conscious of it or not, the philosophy of history—albeit of a type far removed from Hegelianism. It is also because the question of interventionist and violent action in the specific German context reminds one of the agonies that liberals went through at the time of the Kosovo crisis (especially those like Jürgen Habermas with links to the then SPD/Green government) before they could bite the bullet and send German troops outside of NATO. This was an empirical step so small as to be almost comical, but its ramifications reset the theoretical foundations on which the “new” German state is based. In short, if we were to think of a range of narratives, competing with each other within given, temporally framed, geopolitical situa- tions, we would be more able to consider violent options. This would be the direct result of engaging with history in a more sophisticated and insightful—albeit in a vastly more challenging—manner. Above all, we would have to accept that there is no single narrative that embodies virtue, whether virtue is seen as the product of divine Providence or of secular Western capitalism convinced that it too has, in its own way, solved the riddle of “events” and thereby revealed the ultimate, collective, DNA of human destinies.

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This matter—in respect of both the beneficial consequences of seeing history in terms of competing simultaneous narratives and of the dangers of succumbing to a dominant story—becomes unmistakably acute and glaring in the context of German twentieth-century history, where events are often exceptionally extreme and apparently unambiguous. The result has been an unusually vigorous set of arguments among (in particular German) historians with respect to guilt and innocence. On the one hand, it can be argued that matters to do with the catastrophe of the Third Reich are so unambiguous that guilt is more or less axiomatically accepted across the board, but on the other hand historians have fought with increasing bitterness over the nature of that guilt. Furthermore, there stands behind this the classic debate as to culpability for the causes of the First World War and the effects for Germany of the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. Can this in some way be used to exculpate what happened in 1933 . . . and after? Can blame be shifted onto the rapacious, short-sighted victors? This question, which will be intertwined with much that now comes, is of itself interesting because the question of guilt following “Auschwitz” has often been regarded—and not merely in the popular history that today flourishes on German TV—as an expression of an immorality that has an absolute, unconditional character. As such, it has assumed a paradigmatic identity that threatens to take it out of the framework of history altogether, placing it instead in a—usually unac- knowledged—theological context while still dressing it up in the now misleading garb of standard historical research. Guilt and innocence are, of course, neither absolute nor discrete concepts, and the conflicting narratives that generate them, and on which they in turn feed and grow, shift and proliferate dialectically. They are tackled in the following chapter in the context of two classic debates in German history. One is now old, happily like so much of the historiography that has gone into this book. It is to do with Germany’s role in, and possible guilt for, the First World War and is often called the Fischer debate after the historian Fritz Fischer, whose 1961 book Germany’s Aims in the First World War (re)ignited it. The other, more recent, has been no less inflam- matory. It might be called the Goldhagen thesis and addresses, allegedly, the degree to which “ordinary” Germans participated in and enabled the Holocaust. It followed the sensation caused by the publication in 1996 of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. However, neither of these controversies are tackled in an exhaustive manner, nor in terms exclusively limited to their own historical parameters. Rather, they have been opportunistically chosen so that this essay can now pursue in the context of the twentieth century the same thematic material that has up to now shaped it, namely, the tensions embedded in identity, culture, materialism, and idealism in the particular context of German histories.

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RTICLE 231 OF THE VERSAILLES TREATY made Germany and her allies Aresponsible for the outbreak of the First World War. It caused a lot of offense, which is hardly surprising. Meinecke thought that Germany had been treated in an exceptional and unjustified manner, a manner that violated historic precedents. Furthermore, the war guilt clause seemed— and certainly not only to Germans—to be a gross simplification of the complicated state of affairs, of the manifold and highly unstable forces, that led to hostilities in August 1914. But in being a subject of controversy and a cause of outrage, it was also useful to German nationalists bent on undermining the immediate postwar “Weimar” Republic. The Nazis, in particular, regarded the men who signed the treaty at Versailles as national traitors, fit only for assassination. Moreover their act of alleged treason also underpinned the popular “stab in the back” (Dolchstoß) theory, which claimed that German armies had not, in fact, been defeated on the battlefield but had been betrayed by Jewish capitalists at home. Although Hindenburg knew this was nonsense, his closest military ally, Erich Ludendorff, who had planned and lost the final offensive on the Western front and who postwar got into print very quickly in order to blame everyone else, was all for the opportunistic rationalization and duly joined Hitler’s gang and participated in the unsuccessful 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler, of course, was the player who made the most of the propaganda opportunities implicit in the Versailles Treaty. It is, for instance, a sore at which he repeatedly picks in Mein Kampf, notably in volume 2, chapter 6. And yet one stumbles here on an odd fact. Hitler’s thinking was not as simple or as crude as we are prone to assume, or rather as we want to assume. For instance, in relaxed, private circumstances, he showed himself inclined to think more broadly within the parameters of German history. At dinner in the 1940s he remarked: “It was the Peace of Westphalia which was the foundation of the permanent weakness of modern Germany. I have always said to my supporters: ‘It is not the Treaty of Versailles we must destroy, but the Treaty of Westphalia.’”462 We should note that the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) is not mentioned in Mein Kampf at all, an anomaly that encourages us to conclude that what is true for Hitler is true for us: coming to historical judgment is arbitrary and dependent to a large extent on the willful selection of temporal parameters.

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The debate on the origins of the First World War is striking for another reason. Not only does one not know how far back to go—or how far back one can go in seeking out causation without descending into incoherence owing to the increasing plethora of material—but also how far one can limit the number of players and constrict the geopolitical topography. In other words, this is a classic case of a historical dilemma not solely because it problematizes the temporal parameters. It also raises the question of how broad or otherwise the spatial geography is to be within those parameters. Therefore it is not merely a question of whether we pursue German feelings of inferiority together with the twentieth-century overcompensatory military arrogance back to the late Middle Ages and all the woes that followed from being the land in the middle, but also whether the causes of the war should be seen—to select examples arbitrarily—in the wider context of imperialism, or the narrower one of struggles in the Balkans, or the yet narrower one of unresolved French and German rivalry over Alsace and Lorraine. With respect to the spatial consideration, the Fischer thesis—which places unambiguously the greater blame on Germany—is easily criticized as shortchanging the wide-ranging factors at work. This, for instance, is the conclusion that Christopher Clark reaches in his recent exhaustive survey. He downplays Fischer’s book (given that history is so much a matter of contemporary fashion it is astonishing that it hasn’t yet been ditched), although he is careful to acknowledge that “a diluted version of the Fischer thesis still dominates in studies of Germany’s road to war.”463 Nonetheless Clark, like most historians, invites us to see the 1914–18 disaster as the result of numerous factors and players; it was “multipolar and genuinely interactive.”464 Well, who could possibly disagree with a conclusion as self-evidently reasonable as that? Nevertheless it might be worthwhile to take the other tack. What if Fischer were right? What this possibility foregrounds by implication is the opposite tendency. That is, when a great many factors are in play to go for comprehensiveness and to accord equal weight to everything so that everything is right. This would seem to respect plurality (and might even imply a parallel respect for competing narratives), but in fact it is a flat generalization that means the resulting historical analysis is no analysis at all. It is drained of meaning. For instance, I remember as a schoolboy learning, for exam purposes, the causes of World War I in the form of a checklist, the items of which were inevitably undifferentiated in importance but for the order in which one scribbled them down in the exam essay. Of course Clark does not commit this solecism. If anything he favors the classic Balkan-based explanation while emphasizing the effect of Russian mobilization at the end of July. But keen not to appear as though he is simplifying the conundrum, he is careful to qualify even this latter factor, while still calling it “one of the most momentous decisions of the July Crisis.”465 Fischer,

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however, is more interesting precisely because he comes to bolder, and very focused, evaluative judgments. Fischer’s interpretation forces us to consider the power of one factor in the equation to overwhelm in authority all the others. In this case that factor is the German desire for war. Therefore, what we are being asked to do is to resist the temptation to infer an equality among the mesh of causal strands or to conclude that nothing precise can be said because the Gordian knot is so intractable. Above all, we should not commit the error of inferring that the notion of simultaneous competing narratives is democratic. Rather it underlines instability and the temporal shifts in relative strength among the narratives. In this instance the key narrative thrust animating the German desire for war was the premise (accepted by virtually all policymakers in Berlin, whether civilian or on the General Staff, and by a great many decision makers in foreign capitals) that the German military position was gradually getting worse relative to Germany’s potential enemies in the Triple Entente. Therefore the Germans concluded that the longer they waited the more likely they were to lose the coming war. As Clark acknowledges, there was a “sooner the better” attitude. Of course this is based on the assumption that war was coming. But just this assumption was widespread in Berlin. Mention has already been made of General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s 1912 book Deutschland und der näch- ste Krieg (Germany and the Next War). It is notable that it went through five editions in its first year. Meanwhile Chief of the General Staff Helmut von Moltke declared: “It is the duty of all states who uphold the banner of German spiritual culture to prepare for this conflict.”466 One is, of course, not surprised by the metaphysical flourish in this. It is entirely of a piece with the romantic tradition of German militarism. Bernhardi’s book, for instance, reassures us that war is a “divine business.”467 However, not all the enthusiasts among the war party were of such an elevated disposition. For instance, General Falkenhayn, who by late October 1914 was in Moltke’s job, had taken a more jolly line before hostilities began: “Even if we perish over this, at least it will have been fun.”468 Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was also keen on war, saw it as well-nigh inevitable, although he thought that Britain could be kept out of it. Most of the German generals didn’t share this view, but they remained untroubled. After the Boer War they had a low opinion of British land forces. Nevertheless Bethmann Hollweg wanted a crisis and with Wilhelm’s support (naturally the kaiser would later vacillate) urged Austria to set impossible terms for Serbia in order to bring about a greater conflict.469 In fact he knew the text of the July 23 ultimatum before it was sent and lied about it after it was published.470 Clearly in Berlin there was a potent mix of two combustible factors. First, the general belief that war was inevitable, and second, the necessity that it had to happen as soon as possible. Hence the assassination of the

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heir to the Austrian throne and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28 seemed a marvelous opportunity. Above all, the major players among the German war party were desperate that the kaiser shouldn’t let this chance slip as he had let the Agadir Crisis of 1911 slip. In other words, he should imitate Friedrich the Great who acted in 1740 because his army was at the ready, even though he had no honorable casus belli. Interestingly, in the 1740 case Ranke attempts, in the Meinecke manner, to square the circle and couple raison d’état with political morality, but the best he can manage is the classic and feeble rationalization as to common sense. It is true, however, that the divine does get evoked, although only indirectly and without commentary on Ranke’s part. Even so, we are told that when the Russian empress Anna died, conveniently on cue, Friedrich concluded: “God is with us.”471 Well, if Wilhelm had been able to believe something similar in 1914 it would only have been for short periods—let us say on July 28 when he thought that, via his brother Prince Henry, he had received a personal assurance from George V that Britain would stay out of the war. “I have the word of a king,” he declared, and remained deaf to his ministers and generals, who understandably placed no faith in Henry’s brief chat with George—and not the British government.472 In any case, the matter was soon cleared up by a further communication from Ambassador Lichnowsky in London. All this led to imperial tears, hysteria, and the contradictory signals of July 30 and 31. On August 1 (after an offer from Grey, the British foreign secretary) he tried to pull back and demanded that the Schlieffen Plan—already running—be brought to a temporary halt. He was told it was too late, an answer that he verbally rejected but in effect accepted. By this time both the civilian and military leaders regarded the kaiser as someone to be manipulated and lied to, rather than obeyed. After further news from Lichnowsky he finally caved in, in bed at midnight on August 1, declaring that he would put up no more resistance. He didn’t “care either way.”473 The example of the much-admired Friedrich II and his ruthless attack on Austrian Silesia is a reminder of the ambivalent nature of the German dedication to realpolitik. This ambivalence was not dead in 1914. For instance, there was much fussing over the unavoidable necessity of the march through the low countries. Violating the neutrality of Holland and Belgium was axiomatic to the Schlieffen Plan and without the Schlieffen Plan Germany was not in a position to make war in a manner that its generals could regard as tenable. Moltke, when he succeeded to the office of chief of the General Staff, had modified the plan in order to circumvent a violation of Dutch territory. But that meant that his armies would be forced through a narrow wedge of Belgium and would not be able to avoid the formidable fortress at Liege. There was a considerable, although forlorn, attempt to get Belgium’s compliance on this. There was an offer of an indemnity and even a promise of a share of French territory once

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victory had been secured. Interestingly, in London Winston Churchill was not, initially, too disturbed by the German plans. He felt that the Germans didn’t have much option in the matter and in any case the actual territorial violation was minor: “why should we come in if they go only a little way into Belgium?”474 Nonetheless, when push came to shove he was in the war party. What is yet more remarkable, however, is the manner in which Bethmann Hollweg attempted to keep the irreconcilable polarities of honor and practicability in harmony in the best tradition of self-delusion. Soon after the outbreak of the war he apologized to the Reichstag, with it seems some depth of feeling, for the violation of Belgian neutrality. Perhaps this sort of ambivalence is also evidence that German guilt is to be approached with suspicion. Were not all the great powers in the grip of forces that placed them in similar ambivalent positions? But we ought not to overlook the second major aspect of Fischer’s thesis. For he is not solely concerned with the manner in which Germany pushed Europe to war; he also establishes that Germany’s war aims, fluctuating according to battlefield fortunes, confirm its exceptional responsibility. We might think that the Reich had no territorial claims in 1914. But that was not the case. Should France, as expected, be defeated, Germany would have a great many important decisions to make, and naturally it would not want to repeat the mistake of 1871 whereby France was left as a permanent enemy with the resources to do further damage. This time she must be weakened by yet more radical territorial losses and a war indemnity so high as to prohibit future armaments spending.475 Bethmann Hollweg said that it was necessary “to make her revival as a great power impossible for all time.” Meanwhile Belgium would either be absorbed, as Luxembourg was to be, or it would become a vassal state.476 But the most interesting and damning example concerns the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed after the Russian Revolution. The new Soviet state was not in a position to continue the war and the Germans duly insisted on huge territorial losses before they would agree to a deal. They dreamed of a “New Germany” in the northeast.477 Astonishingly their greed kept the negotiations going well into 1918 as they turned the screws, although it was in their urgent interests to move their eastern armies to the western front in order to achieve final victory. This was, in particular, a pressing consideration as the United States was now in the war and sending tens of thousands of men across the Atlantic. The treaty was signed on March 3, 1918 and ratified in the Reichstag on March 22. In comparison, Versailles seems generous, even indulgent, to the defeated. Hitler, by the way, feels the need to deny all this at length in Mein Kampf.478 Brest-Litovsk also gave a fillip to German triumphalism and a belief that victory was now there for the taking, and when the new German offensive began in the west on March 21, 1918 the first reports from the battlefield

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were positive. The kaiser was ecstatic and Admiral von Müller gushed in his diary: “If a British parliamentarian comes to sue for peace, he must kneel before the imperial standard, for this is a victory of monarchy over democracy.” This might well remind us of both Bismarck’s commitment to the Prussian/German monarchical system as opposed to British parliamentary democracy, and of Thomas Mann’s mystic conservatism. For instance it was clear to Admiral von Müller, as it was to many others, that the victory he was, finally, about to celebrate was also the victory of German “philosophy.”479 The Fischer thesis, like all German history—indeed like all German intellectual work post-1945—is saturated, whether explicitly declared or not, by the Third Reich. Even if the historian goes out of his way to choose a topic and a period far removed in every sense from the events of 1933–45, he does not escape the formative power of the negative paradigm. Rather, in avoiding it he evokes it by implication. It is the dreadful, inescapable judge that stands behind all German discussion of all matters German. However, if the historian addresses German history in general, or the period leading up to 1933 and/or following the Third Reich in particular, he is forced to confront directly a whole raft of questions to do with causation and guilt. If one is to simplify these questions, one could say that they foreground the dual factors of continuity and particularity. This became a specific and bitter topic of dissent during the Historians’ Debate and will, therefore, be addressed more directly in chapter 15, but one should—again—note the intrinsic and contradictory dilemma at the heart of the dialectical struggle between continuity and particularity. That is, one should note the theoretical problems it sets for historians. They deal in continuity, they explain causes and effects. Their intellectual undertaking is axiomatically hostile to the notion of discrete, free-standing events even as they are forced by the temporal borders of the period they study and the intellectual limitations of their interests and abilities into paying homage to history as, of necessity, a series of discrete events. In merely beginning to study a particular theme or phenomenon at a particular time they are compelled to violate the fact of history’s complex interwoven narratives. However, on the other hand, it is not the case that any phenomenon is a clone of any other. The particularity of what happens is as intrinsic to it as its conditional nature. Unfortunately, for the purposes of analysis, this does not lead to a happy unproblematic state of affairs whereby all historical phenomena can be regarded as equally balanced between what makes them unique and what folds them into the histories that precede and follow them. Instead they would be better seen as moving along a continuum, whose two poles are the clone and the utterly unique (or sui generis) event. No historical phenomenon ever reaches one polarity or the other, and should the historian claim it does, he is writing bad history. Nor is the historical

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phenomenon—any historical phenomenon—fixed to a single place on the continuum. Further analysis, revisionism, and debate are all based on the—perfectly correct—premise that historical phenomena are epistemologically unstable and shifting, forever fighting for relative space with all the others that make up the rival narratives. Their meanings are therefore forever being lost, recovered, altered. “Events”—or better said, how we portray and explain them—move continually on the continuum. It is this problem that the Fischer debate, indirectly but with unusual force, evokes. In fact, the problem is not, in itself, the question of German guilt for the First World War. Behind that there is hidden the question of why Fischer’s book should have been so upsetting. The real answer is German guilt with respect to the Second World War. This, for obvious reasons, is not the subject of fundamental debate. That Germany is guilty for the Second World War in general, for war crimes more specifically, and for Auschwitz most specifically, is a universal axiom that no mainstream historian may gainsay; although it does not follow from this that the nature or degree of that guilt is beyond debate. We will turn to this directly in a moment when we look at Goldhagen, but as a general theme it will gradually colonize the next two chapters. However, German guilt with respect to the Second World War is an interesting business even when looked at prima facie. The phenomenon of the Third Reich is so exceptional that it sets problems in expressing guilt. As has already been noted several times, it tends to produce a kind of principled speechlessness that, paradoxically, attempts to express itself by voicing the utterly incommensurate nature of all speech. And if speech is attempted, at least by a German intellectual addressing the matter head-on, it can drive the speaker to a type of enthusiastic masochism, as if that were the only way to express one’s disgust and therewith to free oneself—in an equally paradoxically manner—from the guilt of the parental generation. Perhaps because guilt in this case is often seen as biologically acquired characteristic in the German cultural DNA (albeit one that in opposition to scientific orthodoxy has been allegedly inherited from the forefathers) it is so appealing. If the younger generation of masochists had actually perpetrated the crimes that torment them they might not be so public about their shame. A good example would be the young Joschka Fischer. He was, as foreign minister, to take Germany to war in the Balkans, but earlier, in 1984, he had declared with verbal relish that “even in rebellion one could not wipe the filth of the Fatherland from one’s boots.” Instead one has to spew (kotzen) with “indignation.”480 Here I cannot resist a gratuitous comment. When Fischer entered the Bundestag he was celebrated for wearing sneakers. They were his ideological trademark. However, boots are, as Bismarck was well aware, footwear for soldiers rather than Greens. Who did Fischer think he was, or was going to be? Certainly the process by which Center

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Right Germans, with patronizing satisfaction, watched him “grow up” and become a rich, international “consultant,” with a large lakeside house in a select Berlin leafy suburb, is one of the most interesting ideological phenomena of contemporary politics. According to the polls, when Joschka Fischer was foreign minister he was the most popular politician in the “Fatherland.” But there is another context in which we can better understand the outrage among conservative historians that Fritz Fischer’s book elicited at the time of publication. They wanted to contain exceptional guilt within the temporal parameters of 1933–45. If that could be done, the task of elucidating historical continuity would be less troublesome. This is, by the way, a wholly subjective inference on my part, but I am no less committed to it for that. For this strategy to work the guilt of the Third Reich has to be extraordinary. If that can be established—and doing so hardly sets insurmountable problems—then the act of recovery for German history as a whole, for the grander narratives that stretch out back and beyond 1933, is that much easier. But this strategy is based on a perverse principle. One is prepared to mea culpa passionately with respect to the exceptional period because implicit within this strategy is a, possibly unconscious, quid pro quo. If one unconditionally concedes ground there, one might be allowed to morally recoup elsewhere. Therefore the task is not to underplay the evil of the Third Reich but to make it epistemologically unique; to place it outside the customary explanatory parameters of history, except with respect to those causal elements (for which Germany might not be responsible) that engendered it. These might include Versailles, reparations, subsequent hyperinflation, etc. This does not mean that the events preceding 1933 are to be seen as unblemished, only that they can be fitted back into the normal historical narrative of choice, that is, into the sort of narratives that are the bread and butter of standard historical work everywhere. Even more, the particular contami- nations pre-1933 might not be specifically German; rather they might, to some extent at least, have been forced on Germany by her neighbors. In this instance Germany returns theoretically, to put the matter at its most self-servingly ambitious, to its traditional role as the victim land in the middle of Europe torn apart by avaricious enemies lying on both its eastern and western frontiers. But this will be okay, even unproblematic, in the modern world if Germany, now deeply embedded in European supranational structures, is allowed to recover the pre-1933 period and then to project that out and over the disastrous interregnum and forward into the modern democratic state, a state, moreover, that is exceptionally generous to its neighbors. Within these parameters the modern Germany army, Germany’s political parties, the law, social welfare structures, etc., will all be portrayed—and are portrayed—as the historical godchildren of Germany prior to the Nazi

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Machtergreifung. For instance, we are still regularly reminded that we owe our pension system to Bismarck. But all of this was endangered by Fischer’s book. The desired strategy cum rationalization was exploded if one disputed the so-called unjustified punishment of the Germans after the First World War, if one underplayed the malicious and unreasonable character of Versailles, and, above all, if one made Germany responsible for the war in the first place and therefore, in part, also responsible for its final act. Seen in this context, German guilt in 1914 invalidated German victimhood in 1918 . . . and beyond. And this diluted the responsibility of foreigners for the disaster that began a mere fifteen years after Versailles. This was the existential threat that historians like Gerhard Ritter understood (instinctively?) to be inscribed in Fischer’s book; it—and Fischer—were “anti-German.” Not surprisingly conservative historians were angry and not surprisingly they did what they could to blacken Fischer’s reputation and scupper, successfully, German government funding that had been promised for his lecture tour of the United States in 1964. As a digression—but one hopes not an uninteresting one—we might note how something similar is the case today in a specific area of German high, but nevertheless popular, culture. In Wagner scholarship there is the same implied quid pro quo deal as to guilt and innocence. There was a time when Wagner’s antisemitism could be ignored or marginalized. Given that his essays were not generally read (no one became a Wagnerian for the pleasure they afforded), it was assumed that the matter was a nasty aberration that could be contained within the pages of his early tract Jewishness in Music (1850). Being grounded in ignorance, this was never a very convincing strategy and it could not be expected to survive. The publication of Cosima Wagner’s Diaries in the 1970s (resisted by several in the family)—to say nothing of any serious analysis of Wagner’s writings in general—made indifference among intelligent Wagnerians impossible. The result was an act of overcompensation, especially on the part of Anglo Saxon fans who had reputations as intellectuals to uphold. They started to write books in which they expressed with enthusiastic disgust their horror at Wagner’s antisemitism, piling on the adjectives as though they had to convince the reader that they were not antisemites themselves. However, implicit in this, and explicit in what invariably followed on the page, was the claim that Wagner’s music dramas were uncontaminated by the same disease. After all, it was the operas that turned the fans on, not the essays, or the letters, or the “table talk,” and if they could be preserved then everything would be okay. Therefore one is supposed to believe that acknowledging unconditional guilt in the matter of antisemitism when it is contained within one set of specific parameters (Wagner’s essays), meant that guilt in the same matter could be ruled out as impermissible with respect to another set of specific parameters (Wagner’s operas). This

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rather odd strategy, which in any case breaks down owing to a variety of factual and empirical reasons—that is, quite aside from its inherent contradictory nature—was pursued (still is pursued) with a rhetorical passion that has everything to do with the psychological needs and enthusiasms of (usually non-German) Wagnerians, and very little to do with serious analysis. Tellingly, in Germany, given that antisemitism cannot be discussed without reference to the Third Reich, the need for guilt is more pressing and the same strategy is therefore not so appealing. There intellectuals are prepared, duty bound even, to embed Wagner into the general narrative of guilt no matter that he died fifty years before the Machtergreifung. Nonetheless that does not mean that guilt is to be indulged unconditionally. Which brings us to Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen claims that he doesn’t apportion guilt unconditionally and yet exactly that is essential to his agenda. He is explaining a phenomenon that he defines as exclusively German. He has well-nigh nothing to say about the many thousands of non-German perpetrators of the Holocaust, although they displayed the same cruelties and the same range of sadistic perversity as their German comrades. Therefore, for Goldhagen, the answer to our stupefied question: “How could they have done it?” has to be a quintessentially German answer. And being quintessentially German it is not limited to a group of men specifically trained to commit exceptional crimes away from the public gaze. Rather it spills out to embrace the nation as a whole. In the sense that it was a nationally committed crime, the criminals were ordinary and guilt can therefore be generously and democratically dished out. For instance, we are told with respect to Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938) that “ordinary Germans spontaneously, without provocation or encouragement, participated in the brutalities.”481 But they were most certainly encouraged. Nazi propaganda could not have been more encouraging. It had always gone to great lengths to propagate reasons whereby Germans might feel themselves “provoked.” And of course full opportunistic use was made of the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath by a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. Rath was shot on November 7 and died on the 9th. One of the problems here is the use of the word “ordinary.” Goldhagen is caught in a bind of his own making. In spreading the net as wide as possible with respect to ordinary Germans (consider the subtitle of his book), ordinariness is implicated as a causal signifier of exceptional crimes. As a result, it loses its customary term of reference and no one is then extraordinary. There are just varying degrees of ordinariness, some more horrible than others. By the same token he is compelled to play down the differences, both moral and material, between the various (killing and nonkilling) camps and the various instruments of persecution. Consequently, ordinariness is ubiquitous, as by tautological definition it has to be: “an enormous

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number of ordinary Germans” serviced the camps and they “killed, tortured, and immiserated the camps’ unwilling denizens.”482 When he gets to the police battalions (“Agents of Genocide”) he piles on examples of gratuitous violence and humiliation. Illustration follows illustration, brutality after brutality is enumerated, as though it is only by quantity that one can establish the axiom of ordinariness. After all, if it is ordinary there must have been a lot of it about . . . everywhere. But he is limited by the relatively low numbers of people involved in the police battalions and, relative to the camps, their very low killing quotas. They are, however, attractive to him because there is a good cache of documentary evidence as to the personnel involved, and it all shows how ordinary they were. What is one to do with these sorts of tautological arguments? If we accept Goldhagen’s thesis that ordinary Germans were killers, the fact that you and I may think they performed acts of extraordinary wicked- ness, not least because their victims were innocent and defenseless, is quite beside the point. Having been defined as ordinary, there is nothing the Germans of the period could have done that would justify Goldhagen seeing them as out of the ordinary. The tautological disposition simply overturns the initial causal relationship. Now it is the fact that people killed and tortured gratuitously that makes them ordinary. Heaven help the German who had the opportunity to indulge a spot of gratuitous murder and physical abuse and let it slip. And this might be the only— perverse—exception Goldhagen allows. But then for him on occasion to put his transcendental adjective in quotation marks (for instance on page 191) seems almost dissembling. Is he having doubts as to what “ordinary” means? Nevertheless there were, as he acknowledges, some perpetrators who got themselves “excused.” That phenomenon, however, can also be inverted to prove how ordinary the remaining majority was. That is, the majority who, despite being splattered with blood, bones, and brains, continued to do their dreadful work dutifully.483 Being ordinary in circumstances like this does rather take one’s breath away, which, one suspects, is what it is supposed to do. Goldhagen badly needs some kind of psychological basis on which to rest these assumptions. But there isn’t one that would allow him to make the arguments he wants in a satisfactory, nontautological manner. It is, however, far more reasonable to assume that under given circumstances everyone (including someone as “ordinary” as Daniel Goldhagen) is capable of performing dreadful deeds, although not everyone is brought to the point of doing so with equal ease or difficulty. Nevertheless sadism is not a parsimonious quality in the human makeup. Certainly the saints among us might sacrifice ourselves (as some Germans did) rather than descend into beastliness. However saints are, by definition, extraordinary. But to reduce the matter to rhetorical questions, as Goldhagen frequently does, is to underline, again, the tautological solecism at the heart of his

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thesis. He asks of a German killer: “Did he see a little girl . . . or did he see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless?” And did he wonder what “could possibly justify his blowing a vulnerable little girl’s brains out?”484 His answer to his own question is often to put another one along the rhetorical lines of: “How could they be so cruel?” In fact on page 399 (and later on page 417) he seems unable to disguise, even to himself, the tautological card that he otherwise repeatedly, if implicitly, plays. He asks in effect, why did the Germans do all those terrible (antisemitic) things to those poor Jews? The answer is: because the Germans were so antisemitic. And that has to be, in essence, the best answer he can offer. Nonetheless, even this need not, when treated seriously, forgo causation or history. But while the historical narrative(s) of German antisemitism are the subject of the next chapter, it needs to be pointed out now how little Goldhagen makes of them. He has almost nothing to say of German history and what there is at the beginning of the book is tellingly lin- ear and unproblematic. Goldhagen does indeed argue “that the road to Auschwitz was straight.”485 That is to say, he embodies in the most extreme manner possible the historical solecism that, as was noted earlier, Maurice Mandelbaum warned against: seeing an inner necessity in what in fact happened. But more than that, Goldhagen is driven by his own premise into the awkward position of embedding something intrinsic within an (enfeebled) historical epistemology. This follows from his basic assumption that Germans were just very, very antisemitic because . . . well, that is just how they were. Hence there was a folk-based, inherent cruelty toward Jews.486 So, while he is prepared to countenance the universality of cruelty, he needs to conclude that “in the long annals of human barbarism, the cruelties practiced by the Germans upon the Jews during the Nazi period stand out in their scope, variety, inventiveness, and, above all, by their wantonness.”487 German antisemitism is exceptional because it rests on “eliminationist antisemitic beliefs.” Consequently “the slaughter” was in German eyes manifestly “just.”488 The Germans had come to believe (so there is a historical narrative in there somewhere) that the Jew was a “terrestrial demon.”489 Whereupon, the tautological coupling once again surfaces: “Although the Germans’ brutality remains somewhat unfathomable, German antisemitism helps explain their immense cruelty towards Jews.” But antisemitism doesn’t do anything of the sort. Deliberate cruelty toward Jews, qua Jews, and antisemitism are in effect the same thing. Neither explains the other. The former merely illustrates (albeit often in a terrible fashion) the latter. For real causation Goldhagen must look elsewhere. Therefore there follows, of necessity, the claim that this perversity must lay in the German psyche. “The refusal or unwillingness of others to do what the Germans did demonstrates that the Germans were not ordinary men . . . but that there was something particular about them,

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something particular about their political cultural parentage, that shaped their views of the victims such that they could willingly, even eagerly, have brutalized and killed Jews, convinced of the rightness of their actions and of the larger enterprise.”490 This is a trifle contradictory, for the argument now works on the basis that the Germans were not “ordinary.” But presumably this is only the case when compared to non-Germans. Heaven forbid, then, that one should regard Germans as human beings and place them in the human family among all those non-Germans. Then you really would set the cat among the ontological pigeons. Before this is pursued further, it is necessary to emphasize, in case anyone should be so naive as to think otherwise, that the vast majority of Germans during the Third Reich never raised a hand to a Jew. This is not to say that most could not under certain circumstances have been brought to do so. But then again in a totalitarian system that eradicated all opposition, it is not clear how any of us would act—although I suspect the sight of street-side public guillotining would concentrate the mind no end. But the glut of examples in Goldhagen’s book cannot establish a generalization based on “something particular” about German hatred of Jews if that “particular” is to be manifested across the board so that all Germans are, by implication, included. Across the board, the Holocaust is exceptional, and it beggars belief. And we should not forget that the effectiveness of the Holocaust was in part based on keeping the truth from the German population. They were shown newsreel film of happy work camps, and were told of possible emigration to the east or even Madagascar. One might note that the International Red Cross was completely hoodwinked by Theresienstadt as late as 1944, and the Nazis made a film of the good life there to show to their own public. If ordinary Germans had been as Goldhagen suggests, none of this would have been necessary. The last thing they would have wanted to see, if they were truly “eliminationist,” would have been happy, thriving Jews. And if he then replies that not all Germans were ordinary in the same way, he has left himself with a very shaky place on which to stand polemically. What the Holocaust in part exemplifies is the ability of totalitarian forces in a highly controlled and closed society to create an apparatus made up of individuals so trained and indulged as to perform brutalities uninhibited by the customary psychological and social constraints, while also creating a public space that enabled the sadistic, when willfully desired, humiliation of the scapegoated group. That was not unprecedented then, and nothing has since happened to suggest that it is no longer possible. Meanwhile the general population in Hitler’s Germany would have closed its eyes or tried to ignore horrors that more or less everyone would have suspected—although many, probably most, would have later lied about this. Certainly in the 1930s—well before the gas chambers—the existence of concentration camps was surely universally

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known. Fritz Stern came under fire for claiming that you had to be a “village idiot not to know about Dachau,” but the evidence of public knowledge is overwhelming.491 In any case, the Germans were implicated in a dictatorship that had made of antisemitism a moral axiom, a lofty cultural disposition, and a political platform, no matter that most of them had never voted for the Nazis in a free election. In the Third Reich they were trapped and while things went well it was a normal, if deplorable, reaction to think better of the Nazis and see only what one wanted to see. But Goldhagen wants to make out of every German meat-eater a German butcher. That, however, is not the way it works. Most of us—Jews and Gentiles, Germans and non-Germans—are perfectly ordinary meat-eaters and never resort to butchery, although it may be hypocritical of us not to face up to the slaughter that our diet necessitates. Of particular interest is Goldhagen’s response to the general conundrum of historical narratives. He might argue that he is concerned with the Third Reich and not the history of German antisemitism, but he cannot ignore the matter completely. His reaction to it is revealing. Regarding the dual claims of continuity and particularity—the two poles of the continuum mentioned above—he seems to want a bob each way. “The Holocaust is a sui generis event that has a historically specific explanation. The explanation specifies the enabling conditions created by the long-incubating, pervasive, virulent, racist, eliminationist antisemitism of German culture.”492 It is hard to see how these two factors (the “sui generis” and the “historically specific”) can be made to gel. Certainly Goldhagen doesn’t tell us. In fact, when they are used as loosely and as unproblematically as they are here, they constitute a model of continuity and particularity that could be applied to any phenomenon at any time. It is absolutely true and therefore absolutely meaningless to say that a historical phenomenon is sui generis if you then go on to say that, at the same time, it comes about because of historically specific enabling conditions. Here both poles—the unique and the contingent—are dissolved into each other to create a single historical model that functions as a convenient rationalization and explains nothing. Furthermore, while Goldhagen’s language (“virulent, racist”) may imply a narrative of sorts, the values still seem timeless. True they incu- bate, like a virus no doubt, but we are in the dark as to how this works as a historical process. And unfortunately, in using language of this sort, one is reminded of Hitler’s Table Talk and the constant characterization of the Jews as a bacillus and a virus. I daresay Goldhagen doesn’t wish to adopt toward German Gentiles Hitler’s attitude toward German Jews, but it is a pity that he cannot manage a more substantive historical explanation. Instead the moral thrust of his argument, and the flabbergasted horror to which he frequently resorts, drive him to the polarity of the utterly unique phenomenon that is only “historical” when observed within the

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constricted temporal parameters of the Third Reich, which is to say it has no explanatory (causal) historical function at all. In this, history is as closed a concept as the tautological arguments that underpin the thesis in general. Certainly the real history/histories of German antisemitism are of little use to Goldhagen because if they were to be respected they would, by definition, make the particularity of the sui generis notion of the Holocaust untenable. Goldhagen, a political scientist, may have a notion of history, but it is an unusually jejune one. There is one element in Goldhagen’s book, however, out of which one might, perversely, make something. It is sadism. This, too, is not per se a historical notion. It is, however, an unavoidable part of the human makeup and plays a role in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen notes the pleasures the German Übermenschen got from their work in the camps: “He or she could indulge any urge by degrading, torturing, or killing a camp prisoner at a whim. . . . He or she could indulge in orgiastic displays of cruelty and gratify whatever aggressive and sadistic impulses he or she might harbor.”493 Yet from the point of view of an efficient killing program—the practical undertaking of the Final Solution—sadism is a counterproductive “pleasure.” But it does play a role in the deeper history of German antisemitism—as it does in all forms of deliberate oppression—and it reminds us of the dangerous cocktail whereby the pleasure to be got from tormenting others not only couples with, but “enhances,” racism. It is one thing to believe, as Treitschke would proclaim, that “the Jews are our misfortune,” it is another to consider how they might be got rid of (convert them into Christians, force them to emigrate, put them in camps, herd them into gas chambers) . . . and yet another to enjoy doing it. How these things spill over into each other—but need not—is a terrible element of, in particular, the Jewish catastrophe and of Jewish histories. And Jews did not have to wait until Hitler to experience the gratuitously indulged sadism of their German fellow citizens. And nor did Jews elsewhere with regard to their host societies. Nor should the general theoretical basis for this surprise us. It was once, when the Nazis were at work but before Auschwitz, put very pertinently by Sigmund Freud. In the following passage he is talking about the necessary role of aggression in “civilization/culture.” But it could just as easily be sadism. It too, like “love,” has to be, at least for Freud, a product of the libido.

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility towards intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, as long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. . . . In this

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respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered the most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts.494

Before pursuing this in the next chapter one might address an odd fact. Why were the chances of survival for a Jew in Vienna worse than in Berlin? Definitive figures are of course impossible, but it seems clear that between two thousand and four thousand Jews survived in the Reich capital, having been protected by “ordinary” Berliners,495 while only eight hundred were still alive in Vienna when the war ended.496 Furthermore, there is archival evidence that Viennese Gentiles were more devoted in denouncing Jews to the authorities (perhaps wanting to move into their apartments) than Berliners. Fritz Stern quotes James J. Sheehan that “whereas Austrians made up less than 10 percent of the population of Hitler’s Reich, they were involved in half the crimes associated with the Holocaust.”497 And then there is the peculiar mixture of pettiness and sadism. Having Jews clean the Ringstrasse with toothbrushes is, when looked at coldly, an intriguing phenomenon. How conscious were the perpetrators of the pleasure they were getting from this wholly gratuitous, almost infantile, business? I don’t know the answer to any of this, but it does suggest that across the board generalizations as to a uniform wicked- ness inherent in racist perpetrators on the basis of their nationality is not likely to be of much help. At which point one might look at the Jews in German history. But one does so—despite what the Final Solution might by definition trumpet—to suggest that Germans, particularly antisemitic Germans, couldn’t do without them.

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OR THE MOMENT, let us put aside murderous acts of antisemitism of Fthe sort that Garry Wills has called “too grotesque for credence.”498 If, instead, we consider the mundane, we are struck by the superflu- ous regulatory and everyday humiliation inflicted on German Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably in Frankfurt, where a ghetto was maintained. Indeed it was reinstated after the Napoleonic period, although after 1816 Jews were not obliged to live in it. Yet there was a wide range of wholly gratuitous and astonishingly detailed regulations as to where Jews were allowed to walk (they would have to get off the pavement if a Gentile approached) and how they were to defer to and humble themselves in the presence of non-Jews and so on.499 What on earth was the point of all this? It could surely not have been to keep the Jews in order out of fear of some kind of uprising, as would be the case with a large population of helots or slaves. That was never a possibility, and anyway Jews numbered less than 2 percent of the German population. And if there were to be riots it would be on the part of Christians attacking Jews in a seemingly random fashion, as in the notorious “Hep Hep Riots” that broke out all over Germany in 1819. Synagogues were attacked, Jews murdered, etc., although in Berlin, which had the largest number of Jews of any German city, there was no trouble.500 But none of the quotidian humiliations to which Jews were subjected served any practical civic purpose whatsoever . . . but for the role they might have filled in bonding non-Jews together, in “love,” that is to say, in the fashion noted above by Freud. Therefore, in attempting to come to terms with an event (the Holocaust) toward which the conflicting strands of German Jewish, German Gentile histories intertwine, two possible but discrete and even disharmonious frameworks can be identified: the psychological and the administrative or social. The relationship between these two is odd because they don’t generally work in obvious tandem, although government administration is easier, if only in a practical political sense, if the citizenry feel that their psychological needs are being satisfied to an adequate degree. In the case of the Holocaust, however, these possible explanatory frameworks seem to be exceptionally out of synch . . . contradictory even. One might torment Jews because it gives one pleasure. Antisemitic loathing—like all loathing—is a powerful emotion and surely the racist

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enjoys the opportunity to work out the psychic energy that this particularly perverse form of the libido takes. Nor should one be surprised if this ranges from gratuitous humiliations inflicted on the despised “subhu- mans” to occasional torture and murder. But to have a state policy, itself requiring in part a new and considerable infrastructure, to wipe out all the members of the despised group (including many millions of their brothers and sisters in lands now conquered) is, in the psychological context, senseless. And this is the case even if the murderous apparatus is officially hidden from the general population, no matter that they may well suspect it. For to eradicate the scapegoats is to irrationally and willfully sacrifice the group on which one is psychically dependent. In other words, there is not—no matter how obvious it may seem in commonsense terms—an unproblematic, logical line from the antisemitic cruelties of, let us say, the Frankfurt ghetto, to the gas chambers. There may well be a rational narrative from the ghetto to the camps, at least with respect to camp guards tormenting or torturing or even arbitrarily killing individual Jews. But the gas chambers, as a manifestation of a state apparatus, make no sense within the usual parameters of German antisemitism. Here the racist agenda has taken another form. It is qualitatively different. Nor should it be imagined that antisemitic psychical dependency was unconsciously indulged. No doubt in many cases the psychic desire was unconscious, but some Germans were aware of their obsession in the matter and even prone to rationalize it. That is, they admitted to the fact that they couldn’t get enough of that which they allegedly despised. Martin Luther is vulnerable to this accusation. In On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) he rather gives away the game when he declares that he has made up his mind to stop writing and talking about the Jews. It is clearly an effort for him to put the matter—even late in life—behind him. And the tract he then produces in order to have done with them is so extreme (Jews are “vermin,” “robbers,” and so forth) that it has required unusual special pleading on the part of those of his followers who have tackled the issue, as opposed to those Lutherans who can only throw up their hands in despair. However, an example more immediately relevant to the period this book covers would be Wagner. After the 1840s he remained a committed, creative, and sophisticated antisemite until his death. The Jews were—ideologically—a gift that never stopped giving. On April 18, 1851 he wrote to Liszt: “I harbored a long suppressed resentment against this Jewish business, and this resentment is as necessary to my nature as gall is to the blood.”501 But this is not simply a personal dislike. Rather it is intellectually and morally necessary. Twenty-seven years later, when he has his own adoring, self-hating, house Jew, Josef Rubinstein, as a permanent fixture in his home at Wahnfried, he remarks to Cosima: “I find it embarrassing to keep coming back to the subject of the Jews but one can’t avoid it when thinking about the future.”502 No doubt

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many Germans were equally ambivalent in their relationships with Jews. In good times they would maintain civil and agreeable contacts, but when things got difficult it was convenient to attack them, as Cosima Wagner did when Rubinstein behaved inappropriately, at least as she and Richard saw it. Then he “displayed all the dismal characteristics of his race.”503 This ambivalence is creative and its utilitarian function, no matter how transparent, is hard to overestimate. Behind the backs of the Jews one would always have recourse to the customary rationalizations. They were parasites, the source of all our woes, how better life would be if they simply went . . . somewhere. Yet many Germans, no doubt opportunistic antisemites, put the well-being of their children into the hands of Jewish doctors. How confused, as a result, must their feelings have been. The waywardness of Gentile attitudes and the changing fortunes of the Jews is striking. For instance, even before national emancipation, 14.8 percent of high school students in Berlin were Jews, three or four times their percentage in the city’s population.504 Jews made considerable strides in high-status professions, notably as doctors, lawyers, and—perhaps not quite so high—journalists. In the period just before the Nazis took over, there were approximately fifty thousand doctors practicing in Germany, of which about 18 percent were Jews. Almost one quarter of lawyers were Jewish (though not of course judges), and among journalists the number was even higher, a fact that, in particular, enraged Hitler.505 Previously, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jews had “german- ized” in large numbers; tellingly, many were not happy at the arrival of the “primitive” Ostjuden after the Russian pogroms in 1881.506 They could be ennobled, they regarded service to the Fatherland as an honor, they worshiped in German (not in Hebrew), and for many Sunday became the new Sabbath.507 By 1915 intermarriage was running at 29.86 percent.508 Interestingly, conversions, once on the increase, declined as intermarriage became more common and emancipation more effective. For instance, Treitschke in his highly influential essay from 1879 deplores the decline in conversions. He claims that “in recent times a dangerous spirit of arrogance has arisen in Jewish circles,” an arrogance that is exceptionally flagrant because, he alleges, Jews control the press.509 By 1918 there was a growth in antisemitism, no doubt in part as a long-term result of the efforts of Treitschke and his ideological friends, and baptisms were up at 21 percent.510 Then it was safer not to be a Jew. However, in 1914 they had enlisted with enthusiasm, many thinking that the war might further encourage integration. There would be in Germany an “inner Sedan.”511 As many as twelve thousand Jews died fighting for the Fatherland in the First World War,512 but when things started to go badly they became the “enemy within.”513 The Jews were not only rumored to be war profiteers, but Jewish soldiers also allegedly managed to serve in disproportionate numbers behind the lines. This sort of propaganda was pushed by the

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antisemitic Reichskammerbund and became so prevalent that in 1916 it was felt desirable to conduct an army survey. It was established that there was no truth in the assertions that Jews avoided combat.514 Nonetheless the damage had been done and the Jews resumed their customary role as scapegoats in times of stress. The kaiser, as one might expect, took full advantage of the excuses this offered. As a young man he had been friendly towards the Jew. He later met Theodor Herzl and was a fan of the Zionist goal of a Jewish homeland. But after 1918 he blamed them for the disaster. They were “the hated tribe of Juda,” and he demanded that they be “exterminated from German soil.”515 This instability in the relationship between Gentiles and Jews—the remarkable progress after 1869 when they “were the envy of Jews elsewhere,”516 the reversals (e.g., an outbreak of ill-feeling following the stock-market crash of 1873), the apparent triumphs, and the sudden intellectual respectability of “modern” antisemitism after Treitschke’s 1879 article—should be born in mind when histories are written that treat Auschwitz as a telos approached in a singular and straightforward manner. Auschwitz was no more inscribed as an inevitability in the complex histories of Jewish and Gentile Germans than was any benign, albeit not rose-tinted, alternative. Perhaps the best chance of finding an answer to the conundrum is to be found in the critical categories that were introduced into this essay early on: blood, Volk, language. Here is a nexus of qualities as particular and defining in its own way with regard to German Jews as it is to German Gentiles. That is, there is a similar struggle in both groups, each attempting to realize a particular, privileged confluence of the determining qualities in their own interests. But while each group maintains them, at least in part, in opposition to the other, only the Gentile can make them quintessentially German. Despite integration, even despite bap- tism and intermarriage, the Jew maintains his own identity. And should he marry within his community he asserts the priority of blood, and by wedding his religion to his supposed racial identity he declares his special nature. Even in the Jew’s use of the German language, the antisemite, as Wagner makes clear, will always hear—want to hear—something innately alien: the “Jewish naturel.”517 But there is a deep irony embedded in this discrepancy. In these things the Jews had attained, in terms of identity, much of what the Germans throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries yearned and struggled to attain. And, to underline this very point, it is on this basis that a great German nationalist, Herder, broadmindedly praises them. In fact he holds the Jews up as a model for the German community precisely because they have preserved what is inherently their own: “The mode of thinking of the Jews, which is best known to us from their writings and actions, may serve as an example: both in the land of their fathers

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and in the midst of other nations they remain as they were.”518 There is no talk of bacillus here; no doubt Wagner must have read it with some discomfort. And yet we have already seen how Wagner equates Germans and Jews on a “higher” level. They are the only two deep “metaphysical” peoples.519 Collectively the Jews are therefore also an object of perverse envy in cultural and racial terms. Being metaphysical, these matters are much more potent and upsetting to the German intellectual than popular envy directed at, let us say, the rich court Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the successful bourgeois bankers of the nineteenth. Again, the ambivalence in the Gentile position seems just as deep and exceptional as the Jewish attempt to marry his own notion of culture and race with his desire to be German. Moreover, this parallel Jewish desire can take an extreme, even a pathological, form, simply because the radical imbalance in influence and numbers was so great, and the Jewish Question so ever-present and oppressive. The discrepancy in terms of overt power was not to be gainsaid or ignored. The brilliant and exceptionally successful Walther Rathenau remarked that every Jew experiences “that painful moment which he remembers all his life,” the moment when he becomes “fully conscious that he has entered the world as a second- class citizen.”520 Rathenau wanted to go so far as to change his physical appearance. This forlorn strategy has the feel of self-abuse about it, and Elon sees in the Weimar foreign minister (assassinated by antisemites in 1922) the classic case of the “self-hating Jew.”521 Surely, then, one cannot but be struck, fascinated even, by the bizarre and unfathomable dialectical mix in which Germans, both Jews and Gentiles, were entangled before that mix descended into exceptional horrors. Fritz Stern has talked of the “unrequited love the Jews had for the Germans,”522 and more recently Amos Elon elegantly remarked that “before Hitler rose to power, other Europeans often feared, admired, envied, and ridiculed the Germans; only Jews actually seemed to have loved them.”523 And even when Hitler was in the spotlight, Jewish devotion to Germany remained potent. Max Naumann, the leader of the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (The Union of German Nationalist Jews), in an article for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (July 31, 1932) praised the National Socialists as part of a wider nationalist movement preparing for a “rebirth of the German way of life and the restoration of German prestige.”524 Meanwhile, when looked at simply, the embodiment of the other polarity in the dialectic opposition seemed to have all the cards in his hands. The non-Jewish German was so legally and socially preferred as to make the very notion of a “Jewish Question” (ubiquitously discussed during, above all, the nineteenth century), never mind a Jewish problem that will “need” a definitive solution in the twentieth, risible. The Jew, so scarce in the German population, really should have been neither

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here nor there. Yet the German Gentile is disturbed by the two factors already intimated. The children of Jews, particularly urban Jews, have a tendency to outperform his own at school, and the Jew as archetype manifests a rooted, cultural, and racially based notion of self (rooted it would seem in millennia that outbid in their depth and special character even the Hermannsschlacht) that in its very presence underlines the Gentile’s doubts. Inevitably such a deep-rooted sense of the Jewish self would lead the German Gentile to a compensatory celebration of his own victorious position as an unquestionably echt citizen in a new and triumphant Reich. And being echt would, by definition, mean being non-Jew- ish. Consequently, for the German Gentile the act of overcompensation was seductive partly because he possessed all the material aces and could surely trump unproblematically whatever sense of inferiority and whatever doubts the Jews, qua Jews, induced in his breast. Therefore, humiliating Jews, when looked at as a deep phenomenon, is very attractive, no matter how petty and socially vulgar its superficial manifestations. And when the German Gentile did turn to the ideological advantages he enjoyed he found them to be quite exceptional. The irony being, that the very things that might have underpinned his inferiority could be blazingly employed to define the iniquitous character of the disturbing minority that was embedding itself, with growing success, in national life. The Jew’s guilt then becomes as quintessential as the Gentile’s indisputable social superiority. In other words the Jew can be exposed as sinful to an absolute degree on the basis of the fundamental things that otherwise might make him remarkable in a positive sense: chiefly religion and blood. Here his sin can be ideologically maximized. Put simply, he is the modern representative of those who murdered God incarnate. And if, in the contemporary world, he insists brazenly that he is a member of an “alien” people that was, however, (once) chosen by God, then he too should rightfully, even inherently, continue to carry the guilt today. He cannot have it both ways. If from his own point of view he has a special and uniquely virtuous role inscribed in scripture in respect of the divine plan, then from the Christian point of view he has an equally special and unique role in, presumably, the same plan when it is taken to its redemptive but bloody conclusion. This amounts to nothing less than his immeasurable crime in colluding, at the very least, in the torture and murder of God made man. Nor is it a trivial thing that this seductive and elevated drama is easily accessible to the devout German Christian in the powerful verse, shaped by quotidian life and language, of Luther’s translation of the New Testament Gospels. We might see the Oberammergau passion play, for instance, as emblematic of the perceived guilt of the Jew. The play has always been popular, democratic, and, pre-1945, deeply antisemitic. This is indeed a potent brew and it makes of antisemitism an unparal- leled instrument of hate—at least in Christian hands. Other groups, even

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when racially defined as is the case with the “gypsies” (Roma and Sinti), were never going to attain an equal level of intrinsic sin even though the Nazis would subject them to the same “end” fate, if not to the same visceral hatred and gratuitous sadism in getting them there. Of considerable importance in this context is the banal fact that Christians qua Christians did not in general free themselves from the sacred texts of the Jews, nor did they free themselves from the historically necessary assumption that Christ (as man) and his disciples were members of the Jewish race . . . although some rather desperately attempted to do this. One could mention Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner inevitably, and Paul de Lagarde, who with sublime assurance claimed that when Jesus said I am the son of man what he really meant was: “I am not a Jew.” Naturally Hitler wasn’t in any doubt on this issue, or, if he was, he overcame it with a self-evident axiom that tautologically expressed the prejudice it was in fact designed to disguise with supposed logic: “Jesus was most certainly not a Jew. The Jews would never have handed one of their own people to the Roman courts; they would have condemned Him themselves.”525 It is true there were more ostensibly subtle attempts to get around this in pure theological terms. For instance, the distinguished Catholic theologian Karl Adam, a fan of Hitler, argued that the immaculate conception guaranteed that Jesus was not a Jew. God, or the Holy Spirit, would have organized things so that it would have been impossible for Mary to bequeath to her son anything Jewish.526 The reasoning behind this might seem a tad less than transparent, but at least it shows a certain imagination and inventiveness. In general, however, Christians had no choice but to place themselves in the most intimate religious and ideological relationship with the very people they blamed for a crime of unequaled iniquity. And of all the Christian communities who did this, none did it to quite the same degree as the Germans. Furthermore, no other Volk were so clearly upset by all the baggage it brought, or devoted the same intellectual energy to the problems that it generated—and their possible solutions. But there was no Pan-German expulsion of the Jews, as there was for instance in England (1290) and Spain (1492), and from most of the Hapsburg lands in 1671. The very variety of German states and the heterogeneous character of “Germany” herself militated against a homog- enous policy and provided opportunities for survival by increasing the range of possibilities open to Jews. Even in the times of crusader mas- sacres and later pogroms they could survive, often in the smaller states. And in finding special professions that their Christian “brethren” left to them (perhaps because of restrictions on “usury”), some might flourish. Remarkably the Prussian kings were to prove themselves exceptionally tol- erant, despite outbreaks of local antisemitism.527 One sees that German antisemitic feeling is not the tautological result of Germans being naturally antisemitic; rather it is, in part, the ironic result of Jews finding

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place and at times good fortune in Germany. Consequently the “Jewish Question” always generated a variety of “answers” ranging from complete assimilation to expulsion to Zionism—among Jews and Gentiles both. It is no wonder then that Germans in general—again whether Gentiles or Jews—saw it, at least initially, as a question, and not, as all true convinced antisemites would have wanted, a problem that might be solved once and for all. However, when the plethora of small states disappeared and German heterogeneity was lost, it was possible to make out of a complex matter a simple gut prejudice that led logically to one extreme or the other. Hence, when the united state had fallen into the hands of a murderous clique that would tolerate no intellectual plurality, let alone dissent, it was possible for the true bigot to demand that the matter, and with it the Jewish community, be erased definitively and uncompromisingly from the national agenda. The fact that the Holocaust is a modern phenomenon, made possible by twentieth-century administrative and technological advances, should not be used to dilute the historical truth that the axiomatically irresolvable dichotomy in the very nature of the Jews’ relationship with the Christian majority always made their position precarious. Nor was it helped when, if Hegel is to be believed, German national consciousness took a great leap forward. The move from the universal Catholic Church (whose theology and prayers were explicitly antisemitic) to German Lutheranism did not liberate the Jews. Rather, the Great Reformer, no matter his earlier claim that the Jews were blood relations of “Our Lord,” excoriated them. As we have seen, in later life he regarded them as an alien element in his homeland and he urged the princes to persecute them violently. The German intellectual who most notoriously gave a fillip to the status of antisemitism at a time when one might have thought that the Jewish Question would be in abeyance was Treitschke. The article in the Preussische Jahrbücher (1879) “with one blow . . . [gave] . . . respectability to antisemitism. He had made it part of German patriotism . . . [and] . . . raised it from the gutter.”528 Nevertheless something might be said on Treitschke’s behalf. But first it should be noted that he is not indifferent to the (perverse) values already touched on. George Kohler observes that he was very committed to the idea that the Jews had murdered God.529 Even so, his actual agenda was always, as has been underlined in chapter 7, the greater, albeit divinely inspired, history of Germany as it narratively and unproblematically progressed under the guidance of Prussia in general and of Bismarck in particular. So while it has been suggested that for Treitschke “the German spirit is essentially equal to the Christian Holy Ghost,”530 the history at stake is not a nebulous celebration of abstract values detached from the material questions of blood, iron, realpolitik, and conquest. Rather, these are exactly the qualities that have real purchase in Treitschke’s Weltanschauung.

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Treitschke’s most notorious contribution to the antisemitic debate is the motto (as it became on the front page of every number of the hate- ful—in the literal sense—Nazi weekly Der Stürmer): “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.” In fact he didn’t claim any particular authorship of this great “truth.” Rather he had discovered that “among the circles of highly educated men who reject any idea of church intolerance or national arrogance there rings with one voice: the Jews are our misfortune!” He professed to having heard this sentiment “everywhere.” But even the terminology was probably not his own. A likely source is Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who was a passionate antisemite. However, in all fairness it should be acknowledged that he was also not very keen on the Poles, the French, and priests.531 Although Treitschke claims to find this ubiquitous hostility to the Jews “strange,” it does mean that he can declare himself forced to tackle the Jewish Question.532 However, in view of the rest of his argument, his self-declared puzzlement at the growth in anti-Jewish feeling is probably just blatant dissembling. After all, he is absolutely clear in his own mind that the Jews haven’t quite made the concessions they should have, and I suspect this is underpinned by contemporary German triumphalism. Given that Jews are now emancipated Germans, and given that Germany is the most modern and successful power in Europe (to put the matter rather modestly), in maintaining their own identity within the Reich Jews are for Treitschke in implicit violation of the dominant ideology. So the question arises: how can they pay due respect to that ideology? Treitschke’s answer is quite consistent: they must convert. The point here is clear. If they give up their religious particularism, the blood question will become irrelevant. Supersessionism is the solution, in that when the Jew accepts Christ—that is, when he accepts that the New Testament supersedes the Torah—he wipes the slate clean of racial problems. Wagner would not have agreed, nor would vulgar antisemites disturbed by Jewish dress, dietary customs, and so forth; which is to say, the sort of Germans to whom the Nazis were to aim their populist propaganda in newsreels, etc. But for Treitschke the solution is straightforward enough: “Our Jewish fellow citizens must resolve to be German without qualification, as so many of them have already done, to our benefit and their own.” Even though: “The task can never be wholly completed.”533 This solution—although it is an intentional, even principled, statement of antisemitism—is consistent with Kohler’s remark that Treitschke was not “racist.”534 However, despite Treitschke’s claim that emancipation is irreversible and despite his admiration for the richness of Jewish culture, no one can fail to detect in the 1879 text a feeling, expressed in plain language, of disgust for Jewish mores. That is, the act of conversion itself does not make the Jews “German without qualification.” There would also have to be a shift in cultural and social practices. Indeed the text itself is sufficiently polemical and extreme in language on the one hand,

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while being simplistic in its answer to the Jewish Question on the other, that it is slightly incoherent. But such was the author’s status that it was taken as an academic statement of considerable significance and duly elicited rebuttals from Jewish intellectuals and academics (and one or two Gentiles such as Theodor Mommsen), who fully understood its dangers. Perhaps Treitschke was trying to disarm this criticism when he concluded that “even conciliatory words will be easily misunderstood.” But this reads like a feeble gesture tacked on to an ambiguous treatise. One has, for instance, some sympathy with the rather exasperated reaction of Rabbi Samuel Joel: “What does Herr Treitschke actually want?”535 What all this makes clear is that the Jewish Question would not go away. And Treitschke, whatever he may have claimed or thought, was in fact making sure that the question of antisemitism remained a pressing German problem. And perhaps the problem did not go away because both groups (Gentile and Jewish) didn’t, for different reasons, want it to, even as they expended energy and time in endless debates in order to find a definitive “answer” and thereby to commit the whole question to the irrelevant past. Such a hope is, in respect of historiography, dubious at best; in this case it was utterly forlorn. There can surely be no doubt that the Jewish Question became the German Question. It was a critical element—arguably the defining element—in discussions of German nationality and culture, and the very successes of Germany made it yet more critical. Moreover it is still indispensable today. But it is so in a radically different form. This is owed to the Nazis, who managed to get antisemitism to work for them on a mass level while shielding the public from an overt role in genocide. The mixture of elements that made up this brew is peculiar and no doubt owes its success in part—possibly in great measure—to chance, but surely we should do it the courtesy of acknowledging that it worked on a variety of levels. Hitler, for instance, was driven by deep personal loathing and envy. He had had next to nothing to do with Jews as a boy in Austria, although there is the classic instance that his mother was treated for breast cancer by a Jewish doctor. It has been suggested that her painful death, which Hitler, still a teenager, witnessed, was a critical formative factor in his antisemitism, although he later protected the doctor concerned (Eduard Bloch) when Austria was annexed. Whatever the case, Hitler records that it was only on arriving in wonderful Vienna that, rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts and driven to live in a dosshouse, he came to appreciate the dangers Jews posed. What is striking about his subsequent “philosophy” in this matter is its vulgarity and theoretical vacuity. He is only able to hate. His reaction is entirely based on empirical experience. But as Golo Mann says, while “hatred of Jews was the most genuine feeling of which Hitler was capable” that “hardly amounts to a Weltanschauung.”536 But the vulgarity of his attitude is the

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basis on which he can dehumanize Jews (all that talk of bacillus) and consequently actively pursue their eradication. Unlike Wagner, he does not have to have them around him in order to be aware of how much he needs them. Hitler’s obsession on the matter is always psychically present and alive, his memory of past humiliations always gnawing at him, and no doubt that is why he is able to free himself to act consistently in purely ideological and emotional terms. Although to advocate and instigate a Final Solution during the war when it served no political or military purpose whatsoever is astonishing. Not surprisingly Hitler was able to surround himself with men who felt the same revulsions: men animated, like Julius Streicher, by the same unthinking hate. And they were backed up by an ad hoc army of Brown Shirts more than ready for a street punch-up. Yet there was also a considerable number of intellectuals able to provide a different sort of underpinning to Nazi ideology. For instance Fritz Fischer, who played a large role in the last chapter, joined the Nazi Party, albeit briefly. But he was far from the only German historian who was seduced by the fascist German rebirth. Many, including some who later attacked his book on the First World War, were once profoundly in hock to Nazi ideology. They were more than able to elevate its philosophy until it became, to their own satisfaction, expressive of the highest notions of German culture. Many of them no doubt evoked those ancient Greeks whom Hitler saw as the master race’s true forefathers.537 But intellectuals, whether vulgar like Alfred Rosenberg or sophisticated like Martin Heidegger, were never likely to deal directly in blood (although Rosenberg was involved, administratively, in genocide), but they certainly had their uses. Hitler, in short, was able to establish an apparatus that delivered across the board the satisfactions born of both hatred toward, and victory over, one’s enemies—whether domestic or foreign. And once the country began to work its way out of the great depression few non-Jewish Germans were likely to feel that their ideological needs were being neglected. Those who did would be in a position so precarious that they would have been wise either to shut up or get out. The perverse result of all this is that today the Jewish Question has never been more potent. But it is so now in an entirely different form. If the Jews are still indispensable it is no longer a matter of numbers or culture or race. It is one of taboo. The extreme—many would say absolute—nature of Germany’s crimes during the Third Reich has made the notion of the Jew, as victim, a part of the modern ideology of the state, a state that perversely celebrates the horrors out of which it was born. For instance, today the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany can issue an opinion that has, in effect, the power of a fiat. Debate and dissent is difficult. That is, modern Germany always has (or at least still has) a present model of evil that also functions as an instrument with which

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one can, in part, evaluate contemporary achievements and confirm, or otherwise, the moral probity of the state. But this is an epistemology that generates an entirely different set of problems. And they become most ostensible, and potentially troubling, when an attempt is made to analyze the nation in the context of competing simultaneous narratives, that is, when one engages in history. In being dependent on a paradigm (that of absolute guilt), the taboo pushes the discussion into ahistorical territory. The Holocaust (enshrined in the signifier “Auschwitz”) becomes a model against which all other forms of evil can be measured simply because they must, it is assumed, fall short of it. As a result it is difficult to treat it as a historical phenomenon in the manner in which historical phenomena are customarily treated. There is, above all, a palpable—and wholly reasonable—fear that to contextualize it in temporal terms will qualify the absolute, and thereby violate the taboo enshrined in German guilt. It is on this basis—which, let it be said, is an arbitrary speculation on my part and one that also loads the dice—that the arguments that made up the so-called Historians’ Debate are now addressed.

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HE HISTORIANS’ DEBATE on the meaning, status, and above all on the Tsupposed “singularity” of the Third Reich is an odd affair. First, in its most virulent form it occurred over a period of barely a year in 1986 and 1987. Second, and more strikingly, it was conducted in the pages of the press. That historians would continue to debate all the relevant material in academic journals and books in the years ahead may be taken as read,538 but when looking at the Historians’ Debate as it happened in the mid-1980s we are confronted with a discussion about nation, identity, patriotism, and guilt that had exceptional resonance among the general public, and which on occasions had the feeling of a nasty, personalized spat. It left a lot of people wounded and upset. And for a time it colo- nized the TV chat shows. It is fair to say that the debate kicked off properly when the sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in an article that appeared in the pages of the liberal Die Zeit (“A Kind of Settlement of Damages: The Apologetic Tendencies in German History Writing,” July 11, 1986), attacked Ernst Nolte. Nolte had written a piece on the Third Reich for the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) (“The Past That Will Not Pass,” June 6, 1986). Habermas’s attack, however, was not limited to Nolte; rather, he had a broader revisionist tendency in his sights, which included, in particular, the historians Michael Stürmer and Andreas Hillgruber. What, then, was his agenda? This is not an unimportant question, as he was in turn attacked by the historians for an alleged lack of competence, for smuggling into the debate alien material in order to skew matters in his own interests. And, being the most important participant who was not an academic historian, he was vulnerable to the charge—at least prima facie. Moreover his general position is, when looked at superficially, likewise vulnerable to a further and much more important accusation: namely, the solecism of turning history into a paradigm, an error this essay is keen to expose. Yet Habermas’s contribution is considerably more sophisticated than such an accusation would suggest. Even so, there is in the liberal camp (that is, among those determined to hold onto the uniqueness of German crimes in the Third Reich and worried about the dangers and temptations of relativism) a tendency to conflate historical events with moral concepts so that the former as a result take on the status of atemporal phenomena. Habermas does not fall into this category. As he said repeatedly when

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defending himself from the attacks of the conservative historians, what counts is the actuality and immediate function of the past, of “the public use of history.”539 In other words his agenda was not, consciously, a historical one in the conventional sense. It was explicitly contemporary, political, and moral, and it was not dealing in atemporal concepts, or at least not treating historical phenomena as though they were atemporal. Nevertheless, not all the commentators with whom he might be associated were as clear about this in their own minds as he was in his. Certainly among nonhistorian moralists there is, as was noted in chapter 13, an inclination, sometimes a passionate desire, to insist on guilt, historically manifest, as a special defining German prerogative. What Habermas feared was a retreat into conservatism and a new and vulgar patriotism under the Helmut Kohl administration, several of whose intellectual supporters had influential positions on the FAZ, notably Michael Stürmer, who worked for Kohl and was an editorial writer for the newspaper.540 Now, one might argue, why shouldn’t a new Christian Democrat-led government attempt to reset the points of the identity debate? After all, it is hardly irrelevant that Kohl was the first chancellor of the Federal Republic who had not been an adult during the war and was therefore surely unencumbered in a manner none of his predecessors could match. He was neither a former Nazi Party member like Kiesinger nor a former active and “traitorous” anti-Nazi like Brandt. And, furthermore, what on earth is so surprising if a conservative government attempts to redefine matters so as to comply with a conservative interpretation? By the same token, one would expect the Left to counterattack vigorously. In the German case, however, the fundamental and uncomfortable truth at the root of the existence and identity of the Federal Republic meant that the argument became an argument over the Third Reich. Perhaps in contemporary Germany this is (still) unavoidable. It is, as Thomas Lindemann says, the territory on which all debates as to the never-ending “virulent identity crisis of the Germans” sooner or later land.541 But this does mean that arguments over identity and patriotism bring with them a great deal of baggage from which the German cannot readily unburden himself. All of this would not be a problem if patriotism could be uncoupled, if only for everyday purposes, from history, if it were to be seen and experienced as an essentially contemporary phenomenon. After all, to take a mundane example, that’s how most sports fans experience it . . . and enjoy it. However, any serious discussion of German patriotism soon shows itself to be ineluctably drenched by recent history simply because that history is so unsettling. Consequently, attempts by conservative historians to readdress the question of what it meant to be German also meant a reengagement with, and an attempt to relativize, the Third Reich. In short, they were caught in a bind. What most of them really wanted to

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do was to fulfill Franz Joseph Strauss’s plain, commonsense wish (it was part of his stump speech): “It is now high time for us to step out of the shadow of the Third Reich and the aura of Hitler and become a normal nation again.”542 But one could not be normal—at least not as a historical people or as a historical nation—unless the incontestable “abnormality” of the Third Reich was dealt with, irrespective of one’s opinion as to the degree and type of that abnormality. That the Third Reich was abnormal in the sense that it was a deviant period that disrupted German history—threw it off course even—was accepted by everyone who was not a neofascist. In fact it was in everyone’s interests that the Third Reich be seen as abnormal, the consequences of any other position, for Center Left and Center Right alike, being intolerable. However, in the context of the dual and defining concepts of “singularity” and “clone”—that is, of the opposed polarities neither of which a historical event can reach but that, nevertheless define historical epistemology—this problem produced an odd constellation in each camp. It is to be seen most clearly with respect to singularity. This was the pole that, ironically, exerted, at one time or another, an irresistible attraction on liberals and conservatives alike. Put simply, it raised the possibility that the abnormality might be absolute. There had been a time, as Hans Mommsen pointed out, when conservative historians had welcomed the notion of singularity with regard to the Third Reich. It enabled them to compartmentalize the 1933–45 period as a grotesque aberration.543 Of course you could give it certain causes (Versailles, economic crises, etc.), but the phenomenon itself, in all its particularity, remained outside of explicable, conventional history . . . and to say otherwise was to say the unsayable. Therefore it was entirely reasonable to spring over it and return to the standard German narrative out of which something patriotic could be made. This, however, changed with Nolte. By folding the Third Reich back into the story of German and European history, questions of causation became more readily questions of guilt . . . and, likewise, questions of guilt became questions of causation. That it was Nolte’s intention to relativize that guilt, if only—in the first instance—by giving it historical context in a greater narrative continuity, simply made the task that much more uncomfortable. Merely the act of historical comparison itself—if it was not undertaken to establish, paradoxically, that something had occurred that was incomparable—not only upset all the spoken and unspoken assumptions of previous German history but also made the present historical task that much more difficult. One might proceed on the commonsense and impeccable historical assumption that nothing is truly sui generis, that comparison and causation are the bread and salt of historical analysis, but if one now applied that to the Third Reich a whole new raft of problems surfaced, problems that had previously been repressed by absolute German guilt. For if the absolutism of the Nazi evil were questioned, then one might

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even end up relativizing Auschwitz itself. And that would mean violating the axiom of exceptional German guilt on the very terrain where that guilt, and the taboo it generated, had always been utterly indisputable. It would be to say that which everyone knew could not (publicly) be said. Auschwitz, after all, had never been a subject for serious postwar analytical and historical discussion. For a long time it had been repressed. And when it reentered the popular German consciousness in the 1960s (the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, conduced by the West German authorities and not the Allies, ran from 1963 to 1965) it took the form of a retelling of the horrors and then the commensurate expressions of national shame. And that is still, largely, its role in the media and on the TV history programs today. But in the 1980s Nolte and his conservative allies confronted German historians with the consequences of normalizing (in academic practice) the notorious Nazi period. This not only implied a historical and conditional context for the death camps, but it also raised the possibility that something patriotic might be abstracted from out of the Third Reich in general. For instance, the historian Andreas Hillgruber greatly upset liberal and Left historians by “identifying” with the bravery of ordinary soldiers defending German civilians from the advancing Russians in 1944–45,544 invading soldiers, it might be added, who were, for whatever reason, to show less than unconditional respect for the international rules governing the treatment of civilian populations. In this context it is not unimportant to remember that most German historians had hitherto, and not surprisingly, actually avoided doing work on the Third Reich. It was left, in general, to foreigners. This could well be seen as the result of a national psychological phenomenon, which would on principle be applicable across the board, that is, applicable to both conservatives and liberals alike. It has, for instance, been argued that when Hitler emerged after the war as “a criminal of truly monstrous proportions . . . the ego of every single German individual suffered a central devaluation and impoverishment.” And this created a melancholic reaction. But the Germans got around this “by breaking all affective bridges to the immediate past.” Hence there was an attempt “to be rid of the Nazi past by de-realization and withdrawal of object libido.”545 But “now” (in the 1980s) “affective bridges” were being consciously erected to the immediate past, and the builders were complaining that their labors were being unjustly undermined by people not qualified to comment on, or evaluate, the quality of their work. For instance Hillgruber, who felt very wounded by the attacks of Habermas and the editor and journalist Rudolf Augstein—the latter had called him a “constitutional Nazi”546—claimed that research itself had been put under threat. He countered, not unreasonably, that “the discipline of history lives, like every discipline, on the revision through research of

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previous conceptualizations,” and that “every occurrence, every event, every personality, has to be compared; that is an essential element of the discipline of history. Singularity and comparison do not exclude one another.”547 All of this is self-evidently true, but it does not address the conservatives’ political agenda, that is, the uses to which history was being put. It was as if that question was being pushed to one side, or even ignored, in the hope that their work, overtly and honorably revisionist, could be draped in academic objectivity. One was, as it were, simply trying to get closer to historical truth unencumbered by any contemporary instrumentalist agenda because that was one’s duty as a historian. However, it can be countered that such a claim, even if the historian makes it with apparent sincerity, is based on an assumption removed from reality. There will always be a contemporary agenda in all historical activity, no matter whether we define the issue in terms of the conscious (or unconscious) intentions of the historian or the general cultural climate in which he works. In all cases there is no tabula rasa. For liberals, for whom the very idea of patriotism was unsettling (those whom Dirk Moses has called the “Non-German Germans”), the singularity had also been attractive. Moreover, for many of them it was to remain so. This was because they clung to the ahistorical function of the taboo. But that does not mean that they were indifferent to history. On the contrary, their concern was with contemporary “historical” events, with, for instance, the danger of changing curricula in schools and uni- versities and the Kohl government’s plans to establish two new historical museums. All this was given a fillip when President Reagan and Helmut Kohl visited, on May 5, 1985, the cemetery at Bitburg where Waffen SS were buried. Liberals were alarmed, and not surprisingly saw the visit to the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen on the morning of the same day as a transparent and offensive exercise in window dressing. As Habermas was to point out, Kohl had once compared Gorbachev to Goebbels. This was long before Gorbachev’s ascent into political sainthood in German, if not Russian, eyes. Now the official ceremonies with Reagan seemed designed to prove that “we had really always stood on the right side in the fight against Bolshevism.”548 And Bolshevik crimes, their status and character vis-à-vis Nazi crimes, were to be become the most controversial ingredient in the dispute. Therefore, irrespective of the actual content of the debate, there can be seen a constant effort on the part of both camps to set the controversy within theoretical parameters (whether historical or political) of their own choosing. This was particularly marked on the part of the conservatives, who wanted—at least when it suited them—to limit the arguments to purely historical matters, no matter that their agenda, at least in part, was contemporary and tendentious. Nonetheless, the detailed nature of the arguments that cropped up during the debate and in the books and essays subsequently written by

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the participants is not uninteresting. Nolte is perhaps the key, and quite possibly the most interesting, figure. A venerable historian when the controversy began, he found at times that he had become a hate figure. Ultimately this may well have clouded his judgment, although the dispute’s own dynamic led to a natural hardening in the respective positions of both sides. But from the beginning it is notable that Nolte works within rather contradictory structures. That is, he is keen on painting the bigger, Pan-European picture, but when he makes the argument for reevaluating the Third Reich he comes up with historical proofs so limited and specific that they seem incommensurate when placed alongside the huge events they are designed to explain and redefine. His broader agenda is a discussion of fascism in the European context, and in early books like Three Faces of Fascism (1965) and Die faschistischen Bewegungen (1966) he pursued this theme stringently. The former is limited to Italy, France, and Germany, but the latter covers the whole continent. This approach does, however, drive him into an unavoidable difficulty. The very scope of the phenomenon undermines its integrity as a sustainable concept. Under these circumstances calling the second book The Fascist Movements is a sensible strategy, but no more than a strategy. The plural is really just a way of papering over the epistemological cracks. Fascism simply wasn’t a coherent philosophical phenomenon. It drew its theoretical material promiscuously from wholly contradictory (right-wing and left-wing) sources and the mix it made of them was unstable and shallow. It was largely opportunistic, and being, as a condition of its own existence, deeply rooted in the nationalist propaganda of each separate country in which it found effective life, it was varied, discrete, and dependent. To have any purchase it had to differ fundamentally from country to country to the degree that to talk of fascism (as opposed to fascisms) was impossible. And this is exactly the form Nolte’s 1966 book takes. That is, one proceeds from nation to nation, forever being impressed by each specific case and its particular character while always losing sight of the bigger picture. The best Nolte can manage by way of a definition of Pan-European fascism is the axiom that there would have been “no fascism without the challenge of bolshevism.”549 But this is also to give the game away. Even his list of the six defining characteristics of Italian fascism cannot avoid making it conditional on another political/ philosophical movement. In fact it seems intellectually secondary to bolshevism,550 and is, as a result, robbed of any substantive meaning on its own terms. The logical high point of the fascist movements is then Hitler’s fatal, but for Nolte totally rational and principled, invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.551 More than that, it has been suggested that because Nazi Germany was the only major power to stand up to bolshevism, Nolte is able to justify the pro-Nazi position of his “teacher” Martin Heidegger.552 According to Habermas, Heidegger also made

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the equation between the annihilation of the Jews and the expulsion of the Germans from the east.553 On this reading the threat posed by the Soviet Union takes precedence over Nazi crimes. Therefore these early, text-book-style volumes, which certainly establish Nolte’s reputation as an archive historian of probity, probably led him to the understanding that when he tackled the German problem and the Third Reich head-on he was going to have to do so in exclusively German terms. Fascism is so unbendingly nationalist in character that the questions of patriotism and national history it raises take on an exceptionally intense form. The German case cannot therefore be credibly diluted by being poured into the larger vessel of right-wing European political movements. Nonetheless, Nolte does not give up on the generalized anti-bolshevist position; rather, he gives it renewed importance in what becomes his chief strategy in contextualizing the Third Reich. It is this shift that led his critics to see in him the great and dangerous revisionist of his later years. Nolte’s argument as it developed in the 1980s is based on the axiom that Hitler should be seen in the context of the Stalinist crimes that pre- ceded his. These crimes constituted a “deed” to which Hitler reacted. Moreover Hitler’s reactions were explicable, while remaining inexcusable morally. It should be pointed out that Nolte makes his revulsion for the Holocaust clear, although this is a lot more prominent in the earlier books. By the 1980s, however, he is engaged in polemical history and consciously aware that he is saying things that some people will find unsa- vory. Consequently his critical comments have a slightly twee, gratuitous quality: “No German can desire to justify Hitler.”554 Well, I daresay we all hope that is true . . . even as we know it isn’t. Whatever the case, it was his comparison between the Soviet and German killing camps that gave rise among the debate’s combatants to much discussion, sometimes rather tasteless in its fetishizing of details as to body counts and methodological similarity and difference: how alike were the means of extermination, could the German case be deemed a form of industrial killing in a manner different from the Soviet, and so forth? Interestingly, and not surprisingly, Nolte wants to underline the similarity. But he is obliged to concede on one point, a point that one might have thought of some significance. Apparently the Gulag manifests all the premises for genocide but for “the technical process of gassing.”555 Nolte’s cool formulation does seem to trivialize inappropriately the distinction. Also a matter of debate was the significance attributed to the fact that (paranoid) Stalin was attempting to wipe out people he saw as his enemies, usually defined in terms of class (the bourgeoisie), whereas (paranoid) Hitler was eradicating a race. That is, being Jewish or gypsy— communists and homosexuals often got lost in the discussion—was the reason for extermination quite irrespective of age, sex, social position, etc.

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This was a distinction to which the liberal camp turned repeatedly, but Nolte seemed unimpressed by it. He, rather, underlines the fact of shared extermination. Struggling for a wider European context, he will even trace this back to the French Revolution, which had “for the first time in European history, made the concept of annihilating classes and social groups a reality.”556 So much for selective Roman genocide, though one suspects that example was ignored because it would not have offended the liberals. They, after all, probably thought that the French Revolution was not an unreservedly bad thing. Whatever the case, the deciding factor remains the act of mass killing itself, independent in the final analysis of how the victimized group is defined or the method employed. The Holocaust then becomes (merely) a biologically determined expression of the same historical precedent. And then finally all this, as a modern phenomenon, has to be laid unambiguously at the feet of Lenin and the Bolsheviks: “Auschwitz is not primarily a result of traditional antisemitism and was not just one more case of ‘genocide.’ It was the fear-borne reaction to the acts of annihilation that took place during the Russian Revolution.” And this “fact” then becomes a test of the thinking person’s intellectual probity. “Those who do not want to see Hitler’s annihilation of the Jews in this connection are perhaps led by very noble motives, but they are falsifying history.”557 And that would appear to be the key point. It is all a matter of precedent. In some ways this is banal. History is about the order of events. That of itself, however, does not prove causation. That B follows A does not mean that A has caused B. Yet Nolte produces a seemingly straightforward, although implied, causal link. It all sounds very self-evident. Not only should we not forget that “the so-called annihilation of the Jews by the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or original,”558 but we should also never forget that “the Gulag was in the mind of the originator of Auschwitz; Auschwitz was not in the minds of the originators of the Gulag.”559 With respect to Hitler’s mental state this might well have been true, and it must have been true for Stalin and his crew. But it does not mean that without the Gulag there would not have been Auschwitz. However, later in the debate Nolte occasionally qualified his language somewhat so that the causal links became a touch more tenuous, partly one suspects because of anomalies pointed out by his critics. Matters that had earlier seemed the result of a simple and unambiguous (A → B) causation, now rest, in part, on inference, albeit inference expressed in rather wishy-washy language: “Auschwitz is not a direct response to the Gulag Archipelago, but rather a response mediated through an interpretation.”560 Nonetheless, the causal priority as a principle is held onto with unbending conviction. In Nolte’s 1987 book The European Civil War 1917–1945, communism is always the evil spirit, ever present, and it always gives meaning to

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fascism. Bolshevism is doubly and contradictorily dangerous. It horri- fies and it attracts. It is both “Schreckbild” and “Vorbild.”561 In that sense Nolte’s position had not changed in content since the 1960s. It had only hardened. Therefore Habermas has a case when he asserts that with Nolte: “The magnitude of Auschwitz shrinks to the format of technical innovation and is explained on the basis of the ‘Asiatic’ threat from an enemy that still stands at the door.”562 But all this leaves Nolte needing to add chapter and verse to the general disposition of his argument. Can he establish that Hitler was being consciously driven by the Soviet model, and, moreover, can that be employed to contextualize and qualify Nazi/German guilt? He must, in the first instance, get into the mind of Hitler in order to show that the Führer was not only as conscious of, but also as motivated by, the “Asiatic precedent” as he contends. It is here that he finds himself in difficulties. And, above all, it is here that the bad fit between his general theoretical claims and the specific “historical” evidence he employs becomes most apparent. Being a good historian, he presumably feels he needs to ground his interpretation in textual proof. Consequently he comes up with Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. During the First World War Scheubner- Richter was a German diplomat in Turkey and witnessed the rounding up of the Armenians, that is, “the beginnings of the first great act of genocide in the twentieth century.”563 After the war he was an early member of Hitler’s group and helped plan the Beer Hall Putsch. He was duly shot and killed at the Führer’s side on November 9, 1923. As Hitler makes clear in his Table Talk, Scheubner-Richter was a hero and martyr and his widow a fine woman who exhibited exemplary fortitude.564 More important, Scheubner-Richter had presumably explained to Hitler all about genocide (that is, pre-Stalin) and thereby established what was to be for Nolte the critically important precedent that, via the Gulag, undercut the singularity of Auschwitz. And then there are the rat cages. Nolte really seems to have got this from George Orwell and 1984, but he is convinced that rat cages were employed as a form of torture in the Lubyanka. Hitler—pre-Orwell— had talked of rat cages in the context of the officers who surrendered at Stalingrad and Nolte assumes that he must have meant this in the literal sense. That is, he wasn’t referring to the prison cells themselves. Rather, he imagined that caged rats were employed in something like the manner in which one of them crops up at the climax of Orwell’s novel and finally breaks Winston Smith’s resistance in Room 101. Thus rat cages, too, can be folded into the broader history that contextualizes the Holocaust. But this time the psychological context is not to be overlooked. What counts is the Führer’s horrified and overheated imagination. “Cannot Hitler’s most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the

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rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?”565 This is such a weak example, demanding an exceptional degree of inference, and probably, in any case, based on a misap- prehension, that it is not pursued by Nolte. However, the Chaim Weizmann example is. Moreover, although bolder, it can be employed to make Hitler’s antisemitism explicable in a less subjective fashion than the rat cage theory. Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization, wrote to Neville Chamberlain on August 29, 1939 and declared that the Jews “stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies.”566 We are to infer from this that Hitler had every reason to see the Jews as enemy combatants and therefore to intern them. In response it has been pointed out that world Jewry was not a subject of international law and there was no Jewish state with which Hitler could go to war.567 But this seems rather beside the point. All one need do is put this specific example in the broader context and it becomes absurd. European Jewry in general, and German Jewry specifically, had every reason to regard Hitler as their enemy because he had repeatedly characterized them as his. They were a bacillus and he had explicitly promised to wipe them out in the event of a European conflagration, for which he was determined, despite his own substantial efforts in the matter, to make them responsible. He later boasted: “From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe.”568 Hitler, personally, did not need a hostile statement by a prominent Jew either to justify or guide—let alone explain—his behavior. What is telling, however, is that this evidence is presented by Nolte as hard (one might say paper-based) research. In any case, he is subsequently compelled to qualify his own argument. For instance, he concedes that Hitler was already passionately antisemitic as a young man. But even then he maintains that this developed “on a much more intense experiential basis” due to later events.569 Putting aside the almost risible, certainly inadequate, nature of these specific pieces of evidence, it is fair to say that Nolte never gives up on the bolder parameters of his interpretation, and it is here that he is interesting. If anything, he shows himself unusually creative, even stimulating, when he puts his anti-singularity argument in its most liberated form. His principal and most interesting device is to shift around very freely when discussing genocide and war crimes so that the temporal parameters become arbitrary. Which is to say the simple, precedent-based binary model is sublimely transcended when we address the phenomenon in theoretical terms. Now the Third Reich is written into twentieth-century history in that it has its proper, and explicatory, place in the narrative. It can, as a result, escape the confines of the exclusive German paradigm and—the most appealing aspect to Nolte—become, if not normal, at least historically accounted for as but one crime in a broad history of crimes

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committed by different nations at different times throughout the century. But this means that we can now look before and after the Third Reich. Indeed “precedence” appears to become so flexible as to lose its customary temporal character. It is almost as if A and B now cause each other in whatever changing order one wants. Indeed, relatively early on in Deutschland und der kalte Krieg (1974) Nolte had compared American crimes in Vietnam with the Holocaust. Allegedly the Americans were even crueler. This, not surprisingly, upset a lot of people, notably Peter Gay.570 Subsequently Cambodia and other horrors are thrown into the mix. Perhaps the increasing bitterness of the debate drove Nolte to more extreme positions. In The European Civil War (1987) he questions the historical veracity of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when the industrial-killing phase of the Holocaust was planned, and even suggests that various aspects of the Shoah itself are to be doubted. Left activists burnt Nolte’s car in Berlin in 1988. In general, it is fair to say that all the matters that have been tackled in this chapter in the context of the Historians’ Debate probably hide, or address only elliptically, a greater issue that lies at the heart of this essay. Which is to say that what we are really looking at is the fundamental question of, and arguments about, the identity (or identities) of Germany. In other words we are confronted by conundrums and problems of the type that German historians have always been confronted by. Germany remains a problematic concept, where ideology and sociopolitical reality are out of synch in a manner that is both exceptionally discordant and, perhaps perversely, exceptionally instructive. One remembers all those debates in the immediate post-Napoleonic period as to what Germany, politically and culturally, was. At that time there was a plethora of German states, although two great powers dominated. At the time of the Historians’ Debate Germany was still divided. But in this case neither Germany was a great power, and the ruling oligarchies of both sovereign states, keen to fight over the meaning of their shared history while propagandizing their contemporary and opposed sociopolitical identities, were deeply embedded in two rival supranational blocs. Both took their dominant political and cultural identities from those blocs. That the Federal Republic was more willingly embedded in the West (both with respect to the European Union and NATO) than East Germany was in the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet empire was something universally understood. The events of late 1989 did not let the ideological cat out of the bag, but merely confirmed what everyone had always known. Nonetheless, it duly transpired that the West had underestimated the strength of the attachment felt by the citizens of the GDR to their own country. Oddly many of them were not happy when their “national” history, with which their own working lives and personal commitments in the most quotidian sense had been indis- solubly entangled, was trashed. This was experienced by “Wessies” on the

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personal and the public level. Both the ingratitude of “Ossie” relatives, their frequent refusal to condemn absolutely the value of their own previous lives, their refusal to see the GDR as a pale imitation of the Third Reich, and the unexpected political success of the reformed Communist Party generated a certain degree of resentment. It was a resentment that amounted to more than the bitter jokes of West Berliners who claimed they wanted “their” Wall back, but only this time two meters higher. Nonetheless the collapse of the GDR and the expansion of West Germany and West German legal and political and social structures into eastern Germany as part of a peaceful takeover seems to have settled many of the overt issues of the Historians’ Debate. Whether they have been settled for good might, however, on sound historical principle, be doubted. Even so, it seems that they have been put aside so unambiguously that should many of the themes return they would do so in radically different forms. And although it is surely the case that even now, some twenty-odd years after the fall of the Wall, one cannot say with confidence what the real significance of 1989 was, it is clear that it constitutes a remarkable caesura in German history: remarkable, that is, for its effect on the Federal Republic. The apposite irony here, when the events of 1989–90 are seen within the long narrative of German debates on culture and sociopolitical identity, is that the sociopolitical factors in the equation remained, from the point view of the Federal Republic, wholly unques- tioned, while the cultural and ideological consequences of having matters settled so unequivocally—of sitting wide eyed in front of the television while all the great questions were answered “once and for all”—were huge. To triumph in this manner was going to constitute a great burden. Had the German question really been settled once and for all, and this time in an unqualified peaceful manner, a manner that brought nothing but credit on the (victorious) nation? Perhaps one should never forget how astounding the peaceful takeover was, if only to gain some sense of its massive ideological punch. The historian Wolfgang J. Mommsen thought in late 1986 that while it was highly improbable that a fundamental shift between the two German states would come about, if it did, it would be a “federative solution” and not the “so-called reunification in the sense that the GDR would simply be annexed by the FRG as was envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s.”571 But he was absolutely wrong. It was the anachronistic, long-wished-for solution that enjoyed an unqualified, if belated, confirmation. Looked at in this context, the true significance of the Historians’ Debate is not immediately obvious. It is certainly inscribed in the arguments about the Third Reich, but it is not really of them. After all, one should not forget the banal fact that none of those involved could possibly have known how critical it was to be, how they were standing on the cusp of the most remarkable event in Germany’s post-1945 history,

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and how everything they wrote would be subjected to a radical rewrit- ing—or at least would shed and acquire meanings promiscuously—by virtue of the simple fact of being thrown into a new . . . Germany. That is, a “new” Germany that had retained the same title, constitution, legal system, and social apparatuses of the Federal Republic, but had lost the GDR as the wicked antipode, the antipode that had always enabled West Germany to define its alternative ideological identity and its superior political morality. And therefore it is ironically, but appropriately, the case that the Historians’ Debate on its most profound level was compelled to transcend the Third Reich and all the detritus and details that came with it. Perhaps the participants had indeed been arguing about the long reach of German history, and in that sense the conservatives might be said to have won. But their victory would seem to be essentially formal. In ideological terms, as will be suggested in the next chapter, it looks, at least at the moment, as though they got it wrong. The key issue here is one that goes back to Germany’s famed place as the land in the middle. The term Sonderweg has hitherto been used only once in this essay, largely because it has always meant radically different things to different commentators. But as the Sonderweg declares that the course of German sociopolitical development is different from, and should be consciously pursued as different from, its neighbors (both east and west), it can be seen, in part, as a direct product of Germany’s place in the middle of Europe. Jürgen Kocka, quoting J. R. Seeley, points out that it is “pressure” exerted on a nation’s borders that determines to a large degree the freedom it can allow itself. Kocka sees this as the basis of Germany’s Sonderweg. He also points out that although the model gradually lost its attraction in the mid-twentieth century, Michael Stürmer was to give it new life in the 1970s.572 Consequently we might speculate that it should have come, albeit contradictorily, into its own with the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. If one of the two external “pressures” is removed utterly, and if the other has, since 1945, evolved into, and come to be seen as, something essentially benign, then there is nothing external to further hobble the particular drives and hopes of a nation that had once been constrained by its neighbors. For several of the conservative historians who participated in the Historians’ Debate, Germany’s status as the land in the middle was an important consideration. Nor was this simply relevant because Soviet Russia was an obvious and present danger, one that had already colo- nized the historic Prussian capital city Königsberg and induced an SPD chancellor to come to an arrangement with Moscow that many thought betrayed the Federal Republic, surrendering its valid claims of sovereignty over German lands east of the Oder and even violating its postwar constitution. Non-Germans do not always appreciate how many of Willy Brandt’s fellow countrymen were unhappy when he received the Nobel

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Peace Prize in 1971. It is certainly true that the failure to bring down his government in 1972 was the most dramatic, and narrow, defeat endured by the conservative cause in West Germany, involving shifting parliamentary alliances and the bribery of at least two members of the Bundestag, courtesy of the East German security service . . . the famous Stasi. But conservatism, at least in respect of academic arguments among historians, was not exclusively anti-Soviet. It was also to a certain extent anti-American and not merely because American “crimes” in Vietnam could be instrumentalized, however implausibly, as a point of comparison with the Third Reich. There was a strong tendency, which in postwar Germany went back to Heidegger, that deplored the influence of the United States in German life. America, flagrantly materialist, was seen as debasing German culture and dragging the nation westward, detaching it from its deeper history, a history that placed it, at least on occasion and in some matters, in a fruitful relationship with the East . . . with the axiomatically spiritual phenomenon of Mother Russia. Did not General Yorck on December 30, 1812 take, on his own initiative, the momentous step of walking across the snows into Russia to meet General Diebtisch at Tauroggen, thereby deserting the retreating French forces with whom Prussia was allied? This is usually seen as nothing less than the fait accompli that instigated the heroic wars of German liberation, wars that, we are to believe, nearly spontaneously mobilized the whole of German manhood from soldier to journalist to gymnast to Burschenschaft. And throughout the nineteenth century Prussia’s policy, especially under Bismarck’s guidance, toward Russia was usually friendly. For instance he argued vigorously against taking advantage of its problems at the time of the Crimean War.573 And we might remember that while Thomas Mann was contemptuous of Russia’s position as a “tool” of the West in the First World War, he still declares a closer allegiance to Russian culture than to the “rational” French alternative in the West.574 In any case, it is a clearly self-defining fact of the Sonderweg, that if it was wholly Western (or for that matter wholly Russian) in disposition, it wouldn’t have been particular or special to Germany at all. What the Sonderweg does, however, is give substance to German patriotism. True, it hardly has a monopoly function in this regard. One should note that many Left intellectuals will go so far as to squeeze patriotism out of guilt feelings. Habermas, for instance, says that Germans should embrace the Holocaust as “an element of broken national identity.”575 Some will even attempt to make something patriotic out of not being patriotic. I was always struck in my early months in Germany in the 1980s when student friends, nominally on the Left, told me how much they liked to watch international soccer matches on the television in the hope that the German team would lose. It never occurred to most of them that they were not only proud to be defeated but also felt

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themselves superior as a result. However, that sort of observation can be left for the next, and final, chapter. For the moment it is important to underline the importance of the Sonderweg largely because it was in many ways the most intellectually influential framework within which German patriotism was/is formed and understood. Among the conservative historians active in the Historians’ Debate, Michael Stürmer was probably the most overtly concerned with patriotism. Not surprisingly he gave it the same patina of spirituality that German historians of the past had given the related questions of race and culture. After all, we have already noted in chapter 9 that Stürmer was of the opinion that history itself provides, or should provide, a “higher source of meaning.”576 Of course he is aware that love of country has its dangers, but it is in principle something to be respected, indeed desired. He turns to the French historian Braudel, who “loved France with a passion and without distinguishing between vice and virtue or between ‘what attracts me and what repels me.’”577 We might think that this sort of thing led to the worst aspects of the Dreyfus Affair when conservatives claimed that patriotism, or raison d’état, demanded that Dreyfus be forever guilty irrespective of the facts of the case. No doubt Stürmer didn’t want to go that far, but love of country is not to be gainsaid nevertheless. Clearly what is needed in order to make patriotism of this sort work, to give it adequate expression, is a strong integrated state. Pluralism is a threat. Habermas, for instance, points out that for Stürmer “pluralism in values and interests leads, ‘when it can no longer find common ground, sooner or later to civil war.’” Habermas continues by saying that what is needed, according to Stürmer, is “‘a social mechanism for endowing higher meaning, something that, after religion, only nation and patriotism have been capable of.’”578 And now, we are to believe, it is “History” that is to perform this function. In the context of the general thrust of these speculations on Germany, what we have here might seem of some importance, even if it does not exactly constitute a quantum leap. Writing history is no longer the means by which we are directed toward the higher spiritual values of nation, race, and culture, values assumed to be explicable in the present because they were/are empirically extant in the past. Given that after 1945 these things have been lost to us, history is the means by which they will once again come about. But even more than that, history is the creative force that gives them life. And as these values are, on this model, national as a condition of their existence, they need the strong state in order to flourish. Consequently patriotism, born out of the great, and unique, German narrative, is now an existential factor: not only necessary but also rich with the highest possible collective significance. This too might be traced back to Heidegger, who again proves himself to have been the most influential intellectual in determining the

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modern conservative German notion of “being” or “Dasein” (literally, “there-being”). It is suggested that in 1930–31 his thinking turned to the group as an entity, following the individualistic existentialism of Being and Time. This resulted in a more collective idea of “nation,” which in turn underpinned a spiritual notion of Germany. The end result was “the nationalistic privileging of the German fate.” Dasein thereby became a collective and dynamic (and eschatological) phenomenon. This in turn facilitated Heidegger’s elevation of the Führer, for the Führer is able to address the collective’s spiritual needs. He puts “truth to work.” The intellectual is then called on, as a matter of principle, to seek out and celebrate “the ‘guides and guardians of the German destiny,’ who can shape necessity and create the new, if only their followers keep themselves in hand.”579 All of this only makes clear how special, in an elevated sense, the unique path of German history is. It is not surprising, then, if Left historians and intellectuals on the Left in general either reject patriotism or try to find a form of it that is at odds with the traditional German view, especially when that view has survived the Third Reich with something like the character born of the Sonderweg still intact. The question is, however, how practical is such an approach? Does it not, potentially at least, place too many demands on the individual? After all, most soccer fans who actually take the trouble to go to the match don’t do so hoping that “their” team will lose. Still, the appeal of a conditional, even a nonpatriotic, patriotism is certainly on the agenda. For instance during the Historians’ Debate, Wolfgang Mommsen pointed out that Karl Jaspers suggested to Germans that they had a particular moral duty that they could fulfill by turning away from the “national idea.”580 Presumably the anti- nation nation would seek identity, even refuge, in international structures. Theo Sommer goes so far as to claim that Germany must “self-consciously” abandon, rather than rehabilitate, the nation-state on the assumption that “the hope of the future does not lie in nation-states” but in “supranational institutions.”581 Presumably they will play the same role for Sommer as the international proletariat was supposed to do—and didn’t—for Marx. Günter Grass takes a more morally ambitious and wholly unambiguous line and claims that Auschwitz has disqualified Germany from having a “united nation state.”582 Habermas, not being a novelist, is not so dashing. But he is more subtle. He declares an allegiance to a type of patriotism that we might well find elevated in its own way. He points out that he has “taken up” Dolf Sternberger’s phrase “constitutional patriotism.”583 This is what he wishes to see Germany embody. Naturally he rejects the Sonderweg, but, according to Dirk Moses, he keeps “Auschwitz at the center of collective identity because it was the thorn in the flesh, that provokes critical reflection and the dissolution of the collective ‘we.’”584 This nexus of conflicting opinions should now be seen in the context of the new Germany that came suddenly on the scene in 1989 and 1990.

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Only a year or two before, the FAZ was saying that the GDR should be occupied, while perceptive non-German historians like Richard Evans foresaw a “decentralized” unified Germany with a “with a very weak center.”585 How wrong most everyone was. The unified Germany that fell into the lap of the Federal Republic confirmed all the most traditional and presumably anachronistic propaganda of the western state since it was founded in May 1949. Unambiguous victory over the alternative Germany (the GDR), blessed by the incontrovertible judgment of the God of history, was near absolute once the Russians accepted that they had to go. And some considerable credit should be given to the conservative Helmut Kohl and his kitchen cabinet for speedily taking advantage of history’s remarkable gift in a focused and unwavering fashion. It was sobering, and a little disturbing, to see how many others in Germany and, more particularly, in foreign Western chancelleries were either confused, or fearfully indecisive, or, most disturbing of all, just plain hostile. And yet it is not clear that this has meant a conservative victory. What is the cultural and social character of the present Germany? Does it really deliver anything even remotely like the lofty historical comforts and con- firmations that the long arguments as to Germany’s special spiritual nature would suggest that it must? It does not. It is unmistakably a new Germany, and while it was born in triumph it enjoys a strange relationship—as far as one can talk of a relationship—with the Germanies whose messy histories we must presumably assume to be in some way or another its progenitors. Rather than being a confirmation of conservative longings, the modern Federal Republic shows itself, in real terms, indifferent to them. It is also indifferent to the Left’s desire that it somehow or other transcend, on the basis of inferred and perversely ennobling guilt, German national history itself. Hegel’s notion of the state—even if it is no longer a “divine idea”—has yet to be swept from the boards. Nevertheless, Habermas was no doubt right when he wrote in 1986 that “the unconditional opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the greatest achievement of our postwar period; my generation should be especially proud of this.”586 This is certainly an opinion that would be echoed by Fritz Stern, for whom the West is the birthplace of modern libertarian civilization.587 And indeed it might be that events post-1989 confirm that this step—the shift west, which does not, however, for Habermas, unlike for Stern, mean that NATO is to be unambiguously welcomed—was the most decisive and positive development of modern German history. But whether it, and “constitutional patriotism,” have delivered what the libertarian Left hoped for is another question. It is, moreover, a question that it is too early to answer definitively. Nonetheless an answer—or rather a bundle of arbitrary and subjective answers—should be attempted.

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F THIS LAST CHAPTER constitutes a climax, it might well be seen as a feeble Ione in form if not in theoretical pretension. It does, however, attempt to underpin the conclusion that was flagged at the end of the introduction. It was suggested there that we would end up with a contradiction, in that when we—how appropriately—got to the end of the essay, teleology would be treated in a less problematic and suspicious fashion than in the rest of the book. This would come about because claims would be made for contemporary Germany that would distinguish it from all the Germanies of the past. Something more should be said with regard to this contradiction at the outset. The contradiction reflects two apparent discrepancies, one general, the other specific. Both will be seen as fundamental to the observations of all the preceding pages in that they lie directly at odds with them. And both follow from the claim that the Germany that came into being in 1989/90 was not only a “new” Germany but also one radically and uniquely different from its predecessors. The first and general discrepancy that follows from the claim that the Germany de facto born in 1989 and baptized in 1990 was new in a special sense, is simply that it doesn’t pay due respect to the axiom that the past is never dead. True, it does not, even superficially, contradict it absolutely. After all, radical change and revolution (whether violent or, as in 1989, peaceful) are just as much historically dependent phenomena as those developments that come about gradually. Yet I want to go further than this and argue that 1989 either answered or simply tossed aside the traditional package of questions that had previously shaped the argument as to Germany’s identity, and that this step was so radical that the Germany we now talk about has a fundamentally new relationship to the past. Therefore that past, when it asserts its “actuality,” will do so in a wholly altered form. Of course, that the past will assert itself is not in doubt. It is still the case that nothing is ever dead, that no ghost is ever definitively laid. But now when they break out afresh in modern Germany, even when they take on their classic ideological function of accusations come back once again to haunt “us,” they will not do so in the manner they hitherto have and therefore they will not have the same debilitating effect. So although post-1989 Germany is hardly free of the past, it is woven into it anew and is, as a result, not troubled by it in the way it once was.

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The second discrepancy might be placed within the parameters of the first. It is much more specific. It is the claim, already made early on in this essay and repeated in the last chapter, that there was no reunification in 1990. Rather, the Federal Republic just got bigger. This is legally, constitutionally, and with respect to a whole range of social apparatuses, nothing less than the plain truth. Moreover it is a truth perceived without qualification by the citizens of the former East Germany, quite irrespective of whether they are happy or disappointed with the outcome. How, then, can one talk of a radically new Germany when it is merely one of the two Germanies of the immediate past now in a larger and more triumphant form? What follows is an attempt—a no doubt excessively speculative attempt that is much too skewed by anecdote and the worm’s eye view— to justify the claim that 1989 does indeed mark a caesura of exceptional significance. I will attempt to show that both of the above discrepancies do not in fact undermine this claim. The chief and most striking characteristic of modern Germany is how little it is bothered by the great philosophical questions of the past. It is not only that the geopolitical facts on the ground in Europe in general have so changed that the whole land-in-the-middle business is largely irrelevant. It is also that the determining cultural questions as to national identity have likewise altered radically. Of course questions as to who “we” are and what our country should be and what are the roots from which we come, etc., remain pressing. But the great questions born of the clash between ideology and materialist reality no longer exist in their old form. There is no longer a massive cultural (and imagined “spiritual”) overcompensation for the divided state of the nation. There is no celebration of the Volk independent of, and often in opposition to, the idea of a geopolitical homogeneous state. It was noted at the beginning of this essay that “nation” and “Volk” as terms (and concepts) were often in nineteenth-century German thought coterminous. Now they are not. Nation does not mean Volk in today’s Germany. It means what it does in most Western capitalist “nations.” Furthermore, Germany no longer has either the need or the inclination to see in German culture something intrinsically superior to what is found elsewhere and therefore something that must be, benignly or violently, exported in order to save mankind. The very idea would seem ridiculous if it ever occurred to the average citizens, who anyway get their culture from various forms of modern, that is to say high-tech, mass entertainment, forms that are, for the most part, international in character. As to those interested in what is understood by traditional high art, they would find the suggestion that German culture was quintessentially more elevated than that of other nations both embarrassing and dangerous. Germany is no longer in any special sense the land of “thinkers and

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poets”—if it ever was. For instance, there are no new Hegels in national life busily explaining the special position of Prussia in the universal development of the spirit. Now there is no Prussia to elevate and no one who attempted to earnestly describe the new Germany as the point nation of world history leading mankind on to fresh nonmaterialist heights would be thought of as anything other than an anachronistic fool or an unintentional satirist. For instance, I have no recollection of reading any modern intellectual who claims, as Thomas Mann once did, that they were living “upwardly”—although I daresay they can be found, presumably in religious sects. Nor, to latch onto another expression of the once popular elevated/profound oxymoron, is anyone as far as I can see talking any more about “inwardness” (Innerlichkeit) as an intrinsic quality that Germans have in special form and measure, and that foreigners might aspire to if they read the German classics and devote themselves to the music of J. S. Bach and Hans Pfitzner. But I daresay they too can be found somewhere. Even today’s great native lieder singers (and happily there are many) seldom, if at all, claim, as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf used to do, that the German lyric is somehow an expression of German “exceptionalism,” although she would never have used the word. Now Teutonic holy art, at least in standard discourse on the matter, neither establishes the innate superiority of the German “soul” nor does it function as a place of patriotic refuge where one finds exalted, and hence more than adequate, compensation for the evils done to a (divided and weakened) nation by rapacious foreigners. It does not even function as an adequate expression of public virtues so placed that they can be used to redeem us from our past sins in the manner Meinecke (and one suspects Schwarzkopf) imagined. The modern German has, thank God, no need of redemption of that sort. Art, too, has thus been normalized and if heilige Kunst still redeems, it does so on an exclusively personal level according to wholly subjective criteria. So if we are to be redeemed in the mass and ascend, albeit momentarily, to a higher state it will be by virtue of radically different cultural means. And astonishingly it has just happened. Never mind Liederabende and dramas of redemption, never mind even good export figures for our cars: we have won the 2014 World Cup! Now you might say dismis- sively: “So what.” After all, even if you do think soccer is a vital business, it’s not the first time Germany has had its hands on the trophy. And yet in a key aesthetic sense it is. For this time we have won by not being Germans. In the past we tended to defeat more talented sides by virtue of better organization and true grit. This was clearly the case in Bern, Switzerland, in 1954, when the West German team defeated the mark- edly more skilled and creative Hungarians in the final. True, it should be acknowledged that “the miracle of Bern” was extremely important in postwar West German culture. It essentially made the point—as many

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said at the time—that Germany was back again. It could not, however, make the point that this was a new Germany. But a seven-to-one semifinal victory over Brazil—Brazil, the very embodiment of dash and glamor, the only true practitioners of what Pelé has called the “beautiful game”— makes something delightfully non-Teutonic out of Europe’s once, but no more, privileged blue-eyed boys. We have discovered that our real ancestral homeland is not Atlantis (pace Alfred Rosenberg) or even the clean bracing air of Central Asia (pace Wagner and all the rest). It’s the beach at the Copacabana. And when the team arrived home and were drenched in mass delirium along the Berlin “fan mile,” blow us all down if the players didn’t show us that they’d learned how to samba. It is notable that all of this was treated with great care by many commentators. There was real fear that joy would turn into a nationalist orgy; that we might blot our copybook by a too outward display of arrogance. And yet the relieved consensus is that this hasn’t happened. The party atmosphere has been, above all, fun. One notes, for instance, that replays of the 1954 victory are becoming a slight cause for embarrassment simply because the German commentator at the time was, at the final whistle, so hysterical as to sound gloating. But the young people dancing in the city this time are, at worst, only making unusual demands on their bladders and causing extra work for the street cleaners next morning. And at last the trauma of 1966 can be ditched. Then Germany lost in the final to England partly owing to a disputed goal. What a blessing that postwar defeat was and how we Germans gorged on it. The pleasure to be got from suddenly attaining the status of victims because of bad referring—and moreover in the capital city of one of the victorious allies—was a consummation devoutly to be wished, a huge psychologically satisfying overcompensation for the immediate stereotypical image of aggressive, brutal Germans. We simply couldn’t get enough of it. But now it is redundant. Where once it was the standard topic, the masochistic default setting, in any German discussion of the World Cup, it has suddenly disappeared. It seems that we have now learned to be patriotic without being dangerous. If this turns out to be true, in no matter how transitory a form, the cultural payoff will be vastly more positive for the German people than anything accomplished by Bayreuth-type theaters and the redemptive dramas of the past. But such things are indeed transitory. In fact they are a bit like carnivals. They are unmistakably passing phenomena simply because they have a given place on the calendar; they are red-letter days. But even this can be socially and psychologically positive. The great thing about supporting a sports team is that the next season is always fresh, filled with new pleasures and disappointments. Nothing is scripted. And if we can face up to this, it can have a reassuring or a learning function in that it takes the unpredictability of life and puts it on a much more dramatic and culturally

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exciting plane. In contradistinction, think of all those radical, interventionist, theater and opera directors trying, rather desperately, to make high culture fulfill a similar function. They upend the German classics so that the redeemed are not allowed to escape to Schopenhauer’s noumenal world. They deny the exceptional, tragic souls their grand deaths (or lives) and condemn them instead to drab reality. After all, in the theater these days one never knows if Kleist’s entranced Prince of Homburg will live or die, while the archetypal German hero can be decked out as an adolescent hooligan. Perhaps the dragon will come back and—bless him—turn Siegfried into lunch. But such cultural interventionism is never necessary in sport. Sport constantly invents new narratives and always guarantees that we are never permanently in despair or ecstasy. It makes for us new disappointments just as it makes for us new heroes while letting the old ones slip away or fall into misfortune. And we do not need the warning found in Brecht’s Galileo. There the Nietzschean axiom that a land without heroes is a wretched place is punctured by Galileo’s famous retort: “Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.” But sports fans have always known that heroism, and even hero worship, is a dodgy business. It always goes wrong in the end. How far, then, can the celebration of our new ersatz Latin identity go? Not very. Not only do we understand that it is all ephemeral, we are, in general, sufficiently disciplined to know that in real life one will still have to get up the next morning and accept a myriad of responsibilities: from recycling the coffee filters, to putting out the rubbish, to getting everyone off to wherever they have to go with, when necessary, a packed lunch. We still walk; we don’t boogie; and we won’t be doing the samba for much longer either. Perhaps carnival is indeed the key cultural trope here, even though Protestant Prussians despise it, arguing, in effect, that they have no need of it. Carnivals, at least ours, never even pretend to be steady states. Furthermore, despite their self-publicity and certainly despite what goes on during the hot nights in Rio de Janeiro, they are depressingly disciplined. Which is why all those people in the Rhineland directly before Lent, when winter is still keen enough as to discourage al fresco sex, have to work hard to convince themselves that they are enjoying a really awesome and oh-so-naughty big bang as they sit wearing silly hats at long tables and jump up and down obediently on musical cue. Too often even fun turns out to be hard work. No wonder we publicly criticize Latin types living for real pleasure in sunny cities that don’t have proper rubbish collection systems. But we do so psychologically from a position of great but repressed (we seldom if ever admit it to each other) envy. If only we too could get away with that. What a liberation it would be! Meanwhile the young people will just have to be satisfied with the ersatz pleasures of foreign holidays, Mediterranean cuisine, a smattering of Italian, and, ultimately, the grand gesture of calling their overindulged

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children Lorenzo and Inez. But at least we can now dream happily of the next soccer season . . . and other Latin goals. And those foreign holidays, it should be stressed, are exceptionally important for the Germans. Fun elsewhere really does rest on plain terra firma at home, which is probably one of the reasons why it can be lavishly enjoyed in the sunlight without embarrassment. Indeed von Bülow’s demand for a place in the sun has certainly been met but not, whatever host nations who don’t have as much money as their Germans guests might think, as a result of belated imperialist longings. I suspect this mundane sense of nationhood, coupled with a certain amount of self-satisfaction at having the money needed to become—as the Germans always say—“world champions” in tourism, is behind the determination to go to as many places as possible. This was given a massive fillip by the former citizens of the GDR who were desperate to do, and see, what had hitherto been denied them. But even for the “Wessies” it can’t be solely a question of wealth unproblematically enjoyed. After all, many Germans forgo or postpone desirable domestic consumer purchases in order to preserve the indispensable foreign holiday. There seems to be a genuine need to embed oneself in the world, however temporarily and however superficially, whether because the northern winter has become intolerable, or because one is intellectually curious, or because one simply wants to let one’s hair down and behave badly without the neighbors finding out. But whatever the case, the flight into the sun is both an escape from, and a confirmation of, the drab dependable world to which one will have to, duty-bound, return. And return and buckle down to reality we will. But whether at home or on holiday, it is clear that our pleasures are prosaic. We no longer have need of what Fritz Stern called “mystical exalta- tion.” For instance, all those people on the old Nazi newsreels in manifest ecstasy in the presence of the Führer seem like utter foreigners. Not only doesn’t one really understand what they are on about—although children in the classroom may study the phenomenon as a preemptive measure— one also finds them plain ridiculous. Now the reader will drive his coach and horses of choice through this generalization on Germans and the foreign holiday, but I believe it to be plausible; plausible whether we are talking about a high-minded “study” trip to the local North African Roman ruin with an enthusiastic local guide who speaks good German (one is always told in rather awed terms by the returning travelers that he was actually a professor of arche- ology at the local university and only did the tourist thing for fun), or German boys drinking cheap Spanish wine through straws out of a bucket at “Ballermann” on Mallorca and competing in one way or another with the yet more drunken “Tommies” down the road. And although foreigners don’t always want to believe it, the Germany their guests come from is a settled, nonthreatening place. Nor are the guests nearly as arrogant

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as foreign prejudice wants, privately at least, to believe. Today’s Germans are really just far more secure in themselves than Germans have been for some time, not least because now they are happily divested of any tendencies to megalomania of any sort. They are blessed with the basic but crushingly decisive fact—which is too banal for most of them to be conscious of—that the all-important question of the national borders is settled. Or at least so it seems. Which is to say, if the past is going to come back and haunt us in this matter too, it will not be able to do so on the basis of unshakable precedent. One also notes that the proportion of native German speakers who regard themselves as German living outside of the now constricted frontiers of the new, and exceptionally homogeneous, state is unprecedent- edly low. For instance, the German communities once on the Volga (then transported to Siberia by Stalin), or in Siebenbürgen in Romania, have died out, or are dying out. Those young enough to try for a better life in the Federal Republic have already taken advantage of the opportunity they were given as ethnic Germans abroad. Furthermore the population of the new Germany, putting aside (momentarily) the guest workers, has no important minorities with allegiance to other countries. And when there is any ambivalence—let us say with ethnic Danes in Schleswig- Holstein—special voting procedures are in place that favor them. Most strikingly, during the immediately preceding decades the political function of the refugee groups has diminished because those groups no longer feel like refugees and have, largely, given up their claims to foreign territory. This is no small matter, as about twelve million Germans fled from what was then German territory as the Soviet armies advanced, and over two million were driven out of Sudetenland in 1946. Czech President Beneš declared, rather refreshingly, that he wanted a (bloodless) “final solution,” although many in fact died. But once we had regular “Silesian days” when the nominal refugees, now living conventional lives as citizens of the Federal Republic, gathered to celebrate the lost Heimat, wear local dress, eat local food, show off the old folk dances, and listen to vote-hungry politicians telling them that the Heimat was not lost irrevocably. Occasionally one might hear the cry “Silesia is ours,” which would upset the Polish ambassador no end and colonize the talk shows for a week or two. And then an eager young blood might declare that he looked forward to the day when the troops of the “Wehrmacht” would march back into the homeland and recover it for greater Germany. Even Helmut Kohl found this sort of thing beyond the pale. And this means that the question of the Oder-Neisse border is likewise settled. The leading politicians of the past who found Willy Brandt’s concessions unconstitutional or treasonous have either died or succumbed to common sense. Outside of the tiny, and grossly overreported, neo-Nazi groups, there is no longer any space in social and political life

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for a policy that doesn’t accept the present eastern border. Nor is this the result of Germans in general choosing to bite their tongues. The coming generation, in particular, just doesn’t care. In fact it really doesn’t know there is a mythic Germany of the past somewhere over there on the open and misty plain stretching to the Memel and beyond, a place where Effi Briest once committed adultery and her screamingly boring husband did the decent Prussian thing and fought a duel with her lover and then, also in accordance with the absolutely correct social mores of the time, unintentionally set about emotionally destroying her until she ended up wasted and dying at a pitifully early age. That is all fiction and fantasy, along with, it seems, the history and culture out of which Fontane’s wonderful, unpretentious novel was born. Meanwhile the Sudeten Germans seem to have accepted their fate— or, at least their children and grandchildren have. No doubt expressions of regret would be nice (in fact, president Václev Havel did apologize in early 1990, much to the chagrin of many of his fellow countrymen), but no one wants to go back any more. Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary) is certainly worth a visit and modern bourgeois Germans can always report, with barely hidden pleasure, on how badly the nouveau riche Russians behave in the casinos. And not so long ago Berliners, in particular, were grateful when the Czechs helped clear up the growing backlog of German bodies waiting to be cremated. We sent them to Sudetenland. So it’s clearly a pleasant place to take the thermal baths and have your aged “P” turned into ashes, but the average German citizen with an average German income doesn’t feel any special need to live there. And German politicians no longer bother milking the votes of the “Vertriebenen” because they aren’t enough of them anymore and, in any case, most of them don’t feel in the least “dispossessed.” Nonetheless, behind this there is a patriotism of sorts. But if it is Habermas’s (and Sternberger’s) constitutional patriotism, it is so when metamorphosed into a different, and very materialist, shape. Once it would have been Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) patriotism, and then no doubt deutsche mark patriotism when on holiday. In fact, it is quite interesting the way older West Germans could trace the growing value of their currency. It gave the selective narrative of regained national pride a clear statistical, yet temporal, measuring rod contained, thankfully, within precise financial boundaries. I often remember being told the same story of the ever diminishing number of deutsche marks one had to sacrifice in order to get an ever declining “English” pound sterling. Here at least history was proving herself providential, but this time it was clear that it had to do with hard work, living within your means, and paying your debts. At the moment, however, there is no comparable feeling about the euro. In fact an anti-euro political party has been formed. “An Alternative for Germany” is made up, for the most part, of perfectly respectable

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economists (for all I know there is no other sort) who want to ditch the euro and reintroduce the deutsche mark. It came very close to the decisive 5 percent mark in the last general election but has since lost ground and fallen into internal dissension. But there is nothing yet overtly jingo- istic about it—a fellow who waved the German flag at its inaugural meeting was soon put in his place. The press, in any case, reported that he was a German Russian. So that explains it. “An Alternative for Germany” is in no sense a German version of the British UKIP. It is “merely” responding to the (seemingly) near-permanent economic crisis in the European monetary union. And this crisis does give German identity an understandable, and perhaps perversely positive, boost, in that Germans find themselves insulted by foreigners (their chancellor portrayed on posters with Hitler mustache and SS uniform) simply because they have generously bailed out those lazy Mediterranean types. Forget all the past Herder- Heidegger-based brouhaha about the special ontological status of the German language because of its classical roots, or Wagner’s overexcited flourish: “Hail to thee, Goethe, thou who hadst power to wed Helena to our Faust, the Greek ideal to the German spirit!”588 You don’t hear that sort of thing anymore . . . from anyone. Now when the Germans talk about the Greeks it is not Achilles as an ersatz or Ur-dragon slayer they have in mind, but some grumpy taxi driver that doesn’t seem too happy about picking them up at the airport in Salonica and, anyway, is almost certainly not paying his taxes. Although he doesn’t seem to have any problem pocketing ours. Treated like this, ordinary Germans, who no more than I understand the economic theory behind the austerity programs now being pushed down everyone’s throat, might indulge a little indignant national pride without being thought unreasonable, let alone threatening. But arguments about the euro remind us how often the financial policies of the Federal Republic have been steered by nonfinancial considerations. This seems, prima facie, odd for a country that places great emphasis on monetary probity and whose Federal Bank is constitutionally obliged to prevent inflation. However, so powerful is the counterforce born of a deep yearning for international respectability and belonging that financial principle has given way on more than one historic occasion to (principled?) politics. The introduction of the deutsche mark into the disintegrating GDR in 1990 at an exchange rate of, in effect, one to two, was economically unsustainable. And this was probably the chief reason why the then president of the Federal Bank, Karl Otto Pöhl, resigned. Nevertheless, Pöhl was scrupulous about not attacking the policy of the Federal Government explicitly. What is significant here is that the exchange rate was determined, in the final analysis, not by the realities of the respective economies of the FRG and GDR, but by the need to reassure the citizens of the collapsing state. Moreover, Helmut Kohl

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was entirely upfront about this, although it is clearly the case that he had no idea how intractable the problems posed by the absorption of East Germany within the Federal Republic were going to be. Perhaps the most striking expression of the same principle was the readiness of Germans to sacrifice their deutsche marks in the cause of European monetary union. I remember at the time hearing the comments of several British economists and politicians who thought the Germans mad to the point of masochism. And, of course, many distinguished native economists—some now involved in “An Alternative for Germany”—opposed the whole enterprise on the grounds that the supranational political structures necessary to regulate the economic affairs of the countries who were to join the euro zone were not in place, and that, consequently, there would be a fatal disharmony between European-wide financial regulations and the economic interests of the individual states. The attempt to cobble together in an ad hoc manner, and very much after the fact, political structures necessary to cope with the problems that have duly arisen is turning out to be both bloody and lengthy. Which is to say, nothing that has happened since monetary union has given the purely economically motivated critics of day one any cause to imagine they were wrong. But in contradistinction to British xenophobia, the Germans are more ready to develop the strong and binding federal structures necessary to obviate any future financial crises of this sort. Behind all this is the need felt by modern Germany to bind itself within a web of supranational structures. German thinkers and politicians do not, in general, see such structures as threats to national sovereignty; rather they see in them the parameters within which the national state will be most securely held and best protected should there be any indication that the old atavistic viruses have not yet been fully sluiced out of the body politic. Which is to say that they also underpin a readiness to subject any new neofascist political group that shows early signs of making headway among the general public to a national propaganda campaign designed to throttle it at birth. If that doesn’t work, and the party’s support grows a percentage point or two, the state will contemplate banning it altogether. This in part also explains the excessive attention given to the small, opportunistic bands of violent right-wing thugs. In fact most Germans know that these so-called neo-Nazi cells do not constitute an ideological, let alone an existential, threat to the state. They are essentially criminal bands that tart themselves up with pig-ignorant slogans and cod beliefs. And if they were treated as criminals and nothing more, we would be spared the, partly faux but very obligatory, outbursts of national panic and attendant endless discussion in the mass media that they cause. But this is not possible because of the threat they pose to Germany’s standing within international alliances among the democracies. And modern Germans have always understood that they must show themselves

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excessively sensitive to the old taboo in order to outbid foreigners who, left on their own, automatically and unproblematically slot racist and neofascist violence in Germany into the classic pigeonhole of the Third Reich. Hence respect for the United Nations is in the German public sphere inviolable. The state is also, at least ostensibly, committed to NATO. Meanwhile substantial sacrifices are made to keep the euro zone in one piece. This is the guts of the German postwar settlement and it is still a matter of life and death for Germans, even if their chief empirical experience of it is as tourists. Even so, in public discourse at home they believe in it. And this, too, is a form of constitutional patriotism. So perhaps the hopes of Freiherr vom Stein and August von Gneisenau, which I treated frivolously in chapter 2, have had their belated but effective triumph, no matter that the geopolitical facts have somewhat changed since their day. Nevertheless it should be acknowledged that the sacrifice of national sovereignty that they were then eager to make was purely theoretical in nature, there being no sovereign state to sacrifice. Today’s Germans, however, are debating what degree and type of concessions their successful and integrated sovereign nation should make in causes that are, at least at the moment, regarded as democratically desirable and productive of effective bulwarks against international (above all European) disharmony. And in 2013 we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty signed between German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French President Charles de Gaulle. It was famously sealed with a couple of proper French kisses—but only in the politically correct sense. I confess that I didn’t have any idea of how historically important this event was, but today it is seen, and I suspect with good reason, as one of the cornerstones of European stability. And let me confess a further ignorance. I needed the television to learn that Adenauer had even suggested monetary union to de Gaulle and offered France the deutsche mark, it being at that time already stronger than the franc. De Gaulle refused, presumably from nationalist motives, but it does presage remarkably what was to happen in 1990 with the introduction of the deutsche mark into East Germany and then in 1999 with the introduction of the euro into Germany as a whole, and the concomitant sacrifice of the deutsche mark. The problem with all of this is that there are borders that, it seems, Germany does not want to cross, although she is urged to do so. (I see that Germany is now the Motherland. I shall not speculate why.) But George Soros in 2012 demanded that the Federal Republic get out of Europe or lead. It will do neither. At least not in the timeframe Soros has in mind. If Margaret Thatcher told Europe that she hadn’t dismantled the oppressive, as she saw them, apparatuses of the state in Britain in order to have them reimposed from Brussels, then Germany hasn’t joined the European orchestra, even if it sits at a first desk, in order to make a lunge for the conductor’s podium. Soros says: “Today Germany does not have

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imperial ambitions. Paradoxically, the desire to avoid dominating Europe is part of the reason why Germany has failed to rise to the occasion and behave as a benevolent hegemon.”589 But where’s the paradox? Mind you, one is struck that Soros now looks to Germany the way Stein and Gneisenau once looked to “England.” Nor, by the way, might Germany accede to a more recent (April 2013) and likewise black-and-white demand of the influential commentator (and former currency speculator), and either accept euro bonds, and thereby underwrite debt in weaker EU countries, or get out of the euro altogether. By 2014 Soros had shifted again and given up altogether on the “lead or leave” demand.590 But, in any case, it is hard to imagine Germany opting out because of a row over proposed euro bonds. The loss of the GDR has had other consequences that underpin and shape the new Germany. One of the more nebulous, but I believe important, is that it robs contemporary Germans of the luxury of black-and- white thinking. This may be, in essence, a matter more to do with how we think about history than how we are living it at the moment, but either way it is highly relevant for this essay. The two sister states, each obsessed with the other, both fighting over a shared history, each living with the challenge of the alternative other, and both screaming their anti- thetical propaganda across the Wall, encouraged an “either/or” analytical approach. They may have done this in different ways but it was a determining factor for both. In the early days each claimed to be the only echt Germany and reunification was the goal of both. This meant that the other was essentially an existential threat in, if the contradiction is allowed, pure ideological terms. For the East German establishment, the Federal Republic was merely a neofascist capitalist state doomed to fall under the chariot wheels of inexorable historical (that is, socialist) progress, as exemplified in the triumphant Red Army, an army that had heroically defeated the Wehrmacht at huge cost to both the victors and the vanquished. After all, the GDR could point to its ruling elite and claim they all had antifascist pasts and many had risked their lives in the cause, while old Nazis were ubiquitous in the new FRG. Nonetheless, as one worked one’s way down the hierarchy of the GDR the matter became far less black and white. But that was seldom done. Instead attention was turned to the FRG, where Hans Globke, who had helped draft the Nuremberg Laws, worked for Adenauer, and the former Nazi, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, became chancellor. That was surely proof enough. Furthermore, in the early days there was genuine fear in the West that socialism might indeed win out. Hence there were forms of censorship that were later relaxed once the economic miracle made “our” triumph manifest. It was a triumph experienced in an upfront fashion by many West Germans when they were allowed to visit their relatives in the GDR. The latter were very well informed via Western

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media about capitalist consumer goods, and their visitors were often astonished, and not a little put out, to be told that they had brought as a present the “wrong” coffee machine or electric iron. For the West German establishment, the GDR was illegitimate in every sense, something that the attempt to starve West Berlin into sub- mission in 1948–49 made clear, happily, to the whole world; a point the then mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter, made much of in grand rheto- ric: all of the free world was looking to freedom-loving Berlin, and so forth. If it were possible to cleanse an entire people of their guilty past in a great collective bathing cum rebirth, then the Berlin Airlift did it . . . at least temporally. In the long term it turned out not to be possible, as subsequently became clear, above all in the Auschwitz trial of the mid-1960s. But the airlift did work as a type of generalized “Persilschein”: that document that a postwar German could get from the Allied authorities proving that he was free enough of Nazi associations to be employed. For it was obvious to everyone that when the Soviet blockade was lifted our Germans had become the good Germans, and their Germans were either culpable or our good brothers and sisters who hadn’t yet managed to escape. But what was most striking was the refusal of the Federal Republic to actually acknowledge, for several years, even the de facto reality of the GDR. For decades it remained difficult for West German TV and radio to broadcast the GDR national anthem, let us say in reports of sporting events. It was also difficult to allow the flag to be shown, while the epi- thet “so-called” was tacked on to references to East Berlin as the capital of the GDR. And the eastern state as a whole could be referred to as the “Zone,” as in the Soviet Zone. The pain—in part the psychical pain—that the very existence of the GDR caused the FRG was also expressed in the initial refusal to recognize any third country that had diplomatic relations with East Germany. After all, how was it possible to have diplomatic relations with a country that had no right to exist, or, conversely, whose very existence was a thorn in our eye? The absurdity of this mutual struggle is beautifully exemplified in the two national anthems. The West Germans “sing” the third verse of Fallersleben’s hymn, although hardly anyone not employed to do so knows the words . . . or cares about them. Millions, however, are fully conversant with the first verse. But that is now forbidden. Meanwhile the East Germans for years sang the text written by Johannes R. Becker that was set to music by Hanns Eisler. Both words and music are, not surprisingly, rather good, but when the GDR decided that its policy was no longer German unification, the text of its own national anthem became toxic. Then there was no more singing. But every East German had already been schooled to trill about “Germany, united Fatherland” and it duly appeared on the banners of the protesters in 1989. Both sides had, for decades, been hearing texts in their heads that they were not allowed

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to voice. And although one half of this taboo has now evaporated, we are still left with the task of learning the third verse of Fallersleben’s hymn. But why bother? Of more significance is the fact that western Germans have now been deprived of the paradigmatic antipode to their own virtues. Western writing about, and portrayal of, the GDR was striking in its almost unremit- ting bleakness. And even otherwise subtle Westerners seemed to want to see in East Germany something similar to what we now see in North Korea. It is certainly true that there were more lights in West Berlin than in East Berlin, but the latter was not Mordor. Nor does the customary portrayal of daily life fit with my own memories. The GDR was not an aggressive country, and although a totalitarian one, its principal aim was to feed its people and improve their standard of living and their quality of life. In this it was successful. East Germany compared favorably with many Western countries: its health service was excellent and available to all, life expectancy was high, social services were good, and the cultural life was manifold and affordable. I remember, for instance, the American authorities in West Berlin getting worried about the number of GIs who did their family shopping (baby clothes, etc.) in East Berlin because the products were good and cheap. Above all, wide discrepancies in standards of living were absent. Certainly all the fuss about the government settlement at Wandlitz north of East Berlin was pure propaganda and nonsense. The average western banker lived/lives a far more luxurious life. But people in the west saw extreme inequalities because they needed to. In this they wanted, hypocritically, to be better Marxists than the communist leaders in the east, who allegedly lived off the fat of the land while the ordinary Volk didn’t have access to exotic foods all year round. Listening to outraged Wessies pointing out that the party bosses had a supermarket where they could buy bananas out of season was risible. But it, and similar piffle, was essential for the westerner. That the GDR was a totalitarian state dependent on a complex and ubiquitous web of informers is known. But what is often not appreciated is that people lived lives largely independent of this. It was those who opposed the party actively who had something to fear. That, in itself, is a deplorable state of affairs and it should not be marginalized in order to avoid the charge of totalitarianism. But real life in the GDR in the 1960s and beyond did not conform to the Stalinist paradigm. I saw no evidence that people led lives that were manifestly unhappier than those led by people on the western side of the Wall. In fact their mundane lives were similar, which is why so many of them were disappointed with the “Wende” (the Change) when its effects became apparent, and angry when told constantly how grateful they should now be, and how contaminated, even wicked, their previous existence had been. Yet we needed to believe this. Even the most subtle and broadminded of observers are

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not immune. Fritz Stern recalls arguing with his friend, the playwright Peter Hacks, who went over to the GDR and remained loyal to the state. Stern’s conclusion: “He knew about the West’s deficiencies but nothing about its virtues.”591 But reading Stern on the GDR in the same book one might say the same of him. Although, when in the final chapter he addresses the difficulties that followed 1989 and the legitimate discontent of many eastern Germans, this changes somewhat. The need we all have—and I can hardly excuse myself—to believe what we want to believe has particularly bizarre results when the paradigm of evil, gray uniformity is clamped onto the GDR. First, the citizens I met spoke freely in small groups. But more than that, the state’s attempt to control information was a farce. East Germany was totally open to western electronic media. It is absurd to imagine that its people lived in a state of ignorance—even including those in Dresden (“the valley of the ignorant”), who were prevented by a line of low-lying hills from receiving West German TV. Discussion in the GDR was consequently informed and lively. This was not a society of terrified clones, no matter how they might be portrayed in the simplistic but much admired film The Lives of Others. In fact it was exactly the unrestricted supply of news and opinion that made the authorities obsessively vigilant. They were not dealing with an ignorant sheep-like mass. Quite the opposite. And that’s why they manically collected information that was often ridiculous in its triviality and mind-numbing in its scope. Nevertheless, the result is that “Stasi” has become a notion, and a word, that has entered the international vocabulary. The signifier Stasi is supposed to function like the signifier Auschwitz. It is Pavlovian and it immediately evokes Orwellian terrors. We are talking about a modern Gestapo. And the word can be used, as the fact of the Wall itself was once used, as a guillotine to settle all argument immediately. But the Stasi was nothing like the Gestapo. Its agenda and its methods were cruel and inexcusable, but they were not per se murderous. There are many more institutions, some in Western democracies, that have had a good deal more blood on their hands. And still do. But how do we evaluate those? And how do I sound now if I say that the CIA has a lot more bodies in its cellars than the Stasi ever had? Or if I mention Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and water-boarding and extraordinary rendition, or the truly Orwellian opinion of George W. Bush that it’s not torture if the US president says it’s not? Is there not for these cases a type of Persilschein? Do we not collude—not in forgiving them, but in contain- ing them within discrete intellectual structures that, while enabling us to acknowledge how deplorable they are as exceptions, leave the fundamental democratic credentials of the state unchallenged? For it seems crimes do not come with the same opprobrium if they are committed by the agents of a country that, it is assumed, has claim to being—unlike

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the GDR—a democracy. And this is the case even when those crimes are greater in scope and more iniquitous in character. Apologists for the United States, whether American or German, should beware of body counts, especially with respect to foreign adventures. Reality here poses a serious moral and intellectual threat. Propaganda as to the land of the free is a better bet. After all, the Stasi can always be instrumentalized to settle things one way or the other, making it clear who are the good Germans and who the bad. And it is here that we land on a problem that reminds one of the model of the continuum linking the clone with the unique historical phenomenon. This was employed (above all in chapter 13) as means of eval- uating events when they are placed within competing narratives. Now, instead of being confronted by the conflicting and unstable claims of would-be clones and unique occurrences that, when seriously examined, turn out to be neither one thing nor the other, we are faced again with, allegedly, “either/or” phenomena. And within that framework, when we consider states that we define as culpable we discover that we long to reach the absolute negative pole. This is the pull exerted by Goldhagen’s contradictory sui generis German monstrosity. But we do so in a dishon- est manner. Being subtle (perhaps more subtle even than Goldhagen), and acknowledging that nothing is either black or white, and so forth, we talk in terms of a “tipping point” or a “bottom line.” That is, of that stage that when reached makes further argument pointless. This is because we simply must accept that the matter under debate has attained a level of iniquity that makes it indefensible and therefore further dispute is a waste of breath and an insult to the intelligence. This is a goal profoundly reassuring and much to be desired. And it is this option that Germans have lost with the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. One of the characteristics underpinning the attraction—the intellectual as well as the propaganda attraction—of the negative pole is that it is so much easier to be clear about indefensible vice than it is to be certain of impeccable virtue. No one in the modern Federal Republic could possibly claim the latter. If nothing else, it would make a nonsense of the very practice of democratic plurality. But we can be quite sure that the other side’s behavior is/was unforgivable. To be deprived of this in the immediate context of a sister state that made the same assertions that one did oneself and fought over the very meaning of shared terms such as “German democracy” and “German history” and “German crimes,” etc., is a massive loss. It makes everything that much more difficult and throws the citizens of the new Germany onto terra incognito. Perhaps, as a result, for the first time Germans are having to grow up, not because they have secured an unambiguous victory—although that is what it looked like at the time—but because that victory has turned out to be, if not Pyrrhic, at least very unsettling.

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Now the virtues of the FRG can longer be explained and justified by the vices of the GDR. The old barroom argument that if the GDR was as wonderful as all those lefties used to claim, then why did the commies have to build a wall to stop their citizens from getting out, is lost to us. Now the burdens of victory—which in ideological terms are absolute, oce- anic, and therefore never to be fulfilled, and scarcely to be borne—breed a type of enforced modesty as the FRG faces up to the shortcomings of its own propaganda, the deep disappointment that the bubbly and the revels didn’t last longer (reality, as always, set in all too soon), and the failure of a great many citizens of the former GDR to accept that the judgment of history has been not only right (it’s always that on principle) but in this case unambiguously benign as well. The new Germany has been robbed in some ways of a double satisfaction. It is socially and economically not nearly as flourishing as Helmut Kohl famously and foolishly promised at the time of unification (for which, incidentally, we Wessies have paid with our taxes for a good deal longer than we were told we would have to), and it has no privileged recourse any more to virtues (including higher spiritual virtues) that the existence of the negative, alternative “other” had always facilitated. Moreover, there is a further ambivalent gain. The peaceful and exemplary extinction of the “other” Germany, which is (or was) easily sold as the product of the heroic actions of its liberty-loving citizens, had the added effect of diluting the potency of the other evil. That is, the evil—the immeasurably greater evil—of the real Other Germany: the Third Reich. This is the ghost that has always haunted the Federal Republic. And happily, to have one’s national probity in 1989/90 confirmed in such a dramatic and indisputable fashion meant that it was possible to mark out a fresh and exceptionally deep caesura with the past. Moreover, this caesura was well-nigh universally understood, at least in West Germany, as a break not merely, or even chiefly, with the communist other. Rather it marked a shift in Germany’s relationship to the Hitler period. After all, looked at crudely, it was Hitler who had divided Germany, and therefore built the Wall by proxy. Thus the collapse of the GDR pushed the Third Reich further back into another timeframe, in that it was assumed that the period that immediately succeeded it was now irretrievably over. The Hitler era had now perforce retreated a step, and consequently it was yet further contained and thereby less, apparently, immediate. In the crude and classic sense it had become more of a historical (that is a past) phenomenon: a model of Germany that was now demonstrably older and consequently less (ideologically at least) roadworthy. This is not to say that the citizens of the new Germany deluded themselves en masse that the Third Reich had been done with. Quite the contrary in fact. Its ideological significance became, if anything, greater partly because, being a museum piece, it was not so palpably oppressive.

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Hence its place vis-à-vis the present changed in character. Or rather, in losing more of its immediate corrosive effect, in becoming more of a theoretical construct rather than a source of pressing psychic guilt, there had to be a fresh debate over that character. Indeed the parallel discussion as to the meaning of the new Germany, together with the euphoria of its birth, displaced, albeit momentarily, guilt as a necessary, even as the deciding, ingredient of the German self-image. As Helmut Kohl said when the Wall fell: “Today Germans are the happiest people in the world.” (He did not, by the way, say that they were the “luckiest,” despite what several foreign commentators seemed to want.) And declarations of happiness are not common in German national life, and they certainly make a welcome change from the usual strategies whereby the stigma of the past is forever reprocessed. And even if guilt was not displaced permanently, it would no longer be the guilt of the pre-1989 period. Perhaps it was that that drove some Left intellectuals, about to lose one of the props on which their raison d’être rested, into near panic. Günter Grass, as we have noted, went to some lengths to warn against the loss of the old taboo and to argue that past crimes simply made unification impossible. But then in his case the taboo was unusually pernicious. It later turned out that he had kept silent about his own past as a loyal young soldier in the service of the Third Reich. In 1944 he was conscripted into the Waffen SS as a seventeen year old. Frankly I think it small beer, although some Germans and, it seems, considerably more foreigners, don’t share this view. But whatever the case, when Grass revealed all in 2006 it caused a sensation, not unmixed with Schadenfreude. But there is no getting around it. As a result of the mixed brew of triumph and contemporary sociopolitical difficulties, Germany has a renewed sense of purpose and identity within European structures. Oddly enough success has disabused it of national vanity. Matters have changed radically. For instance I recall a recent TV interview with Helmut Schmidt before an audience of young people.592 When he said that Germans would always carry a special responsibility and burden because of the past, they all applauded soberly. It was an act of faith, overtly sincere but quite possibly superficial. Surely it would be preposterous to imagine that they felt, or could feel, the way their parents and grandparents had once felt, let alone dedicate themselves to the taboo in the fashion of the guilt junkies. And in this context we might take a moment to look back, a little bemused, at the construction of Berlin’s Jewish Memorial. It was built by German Gentiles, following a campaign led by Lea Rosh. Her original Christian name was Edith. She is not Jewish, but has adopted a type of ersatz or faux Jewish identity—a phenomenon that is not unknown in postwar Germany. In her case the whole business became doubly paradoxical when she came into conflict with Germany’s small (then it was unusually small), but understandably influential, Jewish community.

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When Rosh told Heinz Galinski, the leader of the community, to, in effect, mind his own business and butt out of the memorial project, she was celebrating what Dirk Moses has called the “stigma.” Her aggressiveness and devotion was a measure of her determination to bleed, to hold onto, as she put it, the “burden of our history.”593 Consequently this would be a memorial built by the perpetrators to honor their victims. And this is, no matter which way you look at it, an odd business. For instance, the journalist Arno Widdmann has observed that Germans no longer bow their heads before the memorial: “It is our pride.”594 Very expansive—it had to be in order to make all other Berlin reminders to Jewish suffering irrelevant, otherwise their very presence would undermine the Rosh project’s raison d’être—it has certainly become a tourist attraction. It is, after all, in the center of Berlin, handily close to the grand edifice of the Brandenburg Gate and the renovated and super luxurious Adlon Hotel. Quite possibly there is a type of nobility inscribed in this. But quite possibly it also expresses an unhealthy psychic state that we will outgrow. Frankly I am sure the dreadfully, or reassuringly, normal teenagers who dutifully applauded Helmut Schmidt, despite no doubt suffering from all the quotidian angst to which teenagers are unfortunately condemned, already have. There is one area, however, where the evil past and the difficult present come together in a pungent and instructive manner. It is the question of (former) guest workers and the changing view, and legal status, of those who have hitherto been “foreigners” in Germany. Now there are regulations allowing nationalization. The very definition of what it means to be German (if not deutsch und echt in the manner Hans Sachs and Wagner had in mind) has changed and matters are no longer limited to the borders as they stood in 1937. That had produced a notion of nationality that was, in real terms, based on blood. The new law that came into force at the beginning of 2000 is particularly important in respect of the large (two million plus) nominally Turkish population in Germany. This figure also includes many Kurds who do not (or until recently did not) see themselves as willing citizens of the Turkish state. However, it is particularly important that young Turkish people are now able to take on German nationality, although in most cases permanent dual citizenship is not allowed and they must give up their Turkish passports before their mid-twenties. One sees here a radical racial and cultural (especially with respect to religion) shift. It constitutes the most striking and challenging factor that deprives Germany of an unambiguous homogeneous identity. That this has been, and will continue to be, a source of severe difficulties can be readily imagined. For instance, when the then President Christian Wulff declared on October 3, 2010 that Islam now “belongs” in Germany it caused bewilderment and even outrage among many. Chancellor Merkel

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had at much the same time expressed her opinion that multiculturalism had failed. And yet the continuing struggle, inevitably often clumsy and even culpable, of Germans to come to terms with and to make the most of the consequences of their earlier, and perhaps foolishly liberal, policies with regard to the guest workers (see chapter 3), can be seen as a central question that helps define the moral status of the Republic today. Rather than Auschwitz being the productive “thorn in the flesh” that keeps debate on civilized values present, it is probably the contemporary fear of prejudice, and murderous violence, toward nonethnic Germans and guest workers. This is now the abrasive factor that guarantees that the question of national probity stays productively on the agenda. That this is complicated by certain powerful and intrinsic elements within the Turkish community itself (honor killings being the most appalling) that make this issue far from one-sided, may be seen—perhaps perversely—as a means of enriching the problem and underpinning the dynamic that, one hopes, leads to progress. But faced with the problems that are thus generated, and remaining determined not to sacrifice the basic principles of their modern liberal democracy, Germans, in general, continue to develop a more multifaceted notion of their society. This works counter to the desire to establish comforting, but dangerous and certainly impractical, idealized notions of racial, religious, and cultural exclusivity. Meanwhile Islam is forced into a confrontation with the inimical aspects of its own ideology and practices, and driven to more pluralist values as a result. Consequently the number of ethnic Turkish Muslims, now German citizens, who redefine what Islam means to them, especially in their attitude to girls and women, grows. And so, consequently, do isolated acts of terror on both sides. They are the hostile countermeasures born out of the fear generated by growing liberalism and tolerance. That this is a rose-tinted view is easily inferable. I can only justify it by admitting that I was once pessimistic in the matter and, along with many foreigners of my acquaintance, prophesied (perhaps driven in part by Schadenfreude) disaster. That I was wrong and that there have been many positive shifts in the interim encourages the rather naive conclusion of the last paragraph. But honesty requires that major social problems need to be admitted. There is still an eager market for arguments that purport to prove that a terrible mistake has been made and that Germany is doomed. The most striking in recent years was Thilo Sarrazin’s remarkably popular 2010 book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Is Tearing Itself Apart). And there is never a shortage of horror stories as to lowering educational standards and rising crime figures in those city suburbs with high Turkish and Arab populations. And yet one sees progress. But this progress, such as it is, comes with its own ineluctable warning. There no longer is a reachable goal where all the basic questions as to nation, folk, culture are resolved fundamentally and permanently. We always knew that, of course,

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but given the past and its exceptional pains, and—most thrilling and unmistakable of all—given the utopian moment of November 1989, one deluded oneself that history’s sunny uplands had indeed been reached. We really were going to enjoy Kohl’s blooming landscape and gambol happily in a world where all the big problems had been solved, leaving us merely the task of occasional fine tuning and a spot of tinkering with this and that, now and then. But the past, whether of the receding Third Reich or the pressing problems born of the multiculturalism that have followed from a liberal guest worker program, remains productive, even progressively productive. There are, however, moments when these two threats can join forces in a wholly inimical manner. Not surprisingly, neo-Nazi groups express their atavistic passion by attacking today’s “foreigner” or Untermensch— the overt bacillus flaunting itself in the body politic. This has never been more of an issue than it is now, but not because it is necessarily on the increase. As I write, the trial of a neo-Nazi “underground” group (the NSU) is still running in Munich. Its members started killing in 2003 and were not uncovered until 2011, by which time they had murdered nine Turkish immigrants, one Greek (he was probably taken to be Turkish), and one German policewoman. In fact only a single key member of the actual cell will be on trial, her two male comrades having committed suicide. What is instructive here is not, however, the crimes themselves, nor even the incompetence with which the investigation was conducted, although this was astonishing and stamped by a near absurd inability of the various state police and security organizations to coordinate their activities. Incidentally, this was not the first time that Germany’s federal structure (there are now, post-1989, sixteen different federal states in the FRG) turned out to be counterproductive. Rather, what is so telling is the earnest manner in which the German judiciary and the German establishment tackled both the crime and its prosecution. This, it turns out, mixes the tragic with the comic. There is deep horror in Germany that these murders could have happened over such a long period, and consequently there is endless discussion and analysis as to how they did. The police, for instance, thought initially, and not unreasonably, that the killings were the result of dis- putes and mafia-like battles within the affected community. However, they were wrong. But it turned out to be almost impossible to persuade them of this, and to get them to consider the alternative of right-wing assassinations. As a result their treatment of the victims’ families was insensitive and, at times, probably indefensibly mendacious and aggressive. One Turkish family claims that police showed them a photo of a blond woman who was allegedly the lover of their murdered husband/ father. It was a lie. Inevitably some measure of police hostility toward foreigners is suspected. As details of all this came out, there was further

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public discomfort. But yet more revealing, and arguably downright silly, has been the foul-up in organizing the trial. At first, press accreditation was distributed on the customary and reputable precedent of first come first served. However, it turned out that the Turkish media didn’t know this, or were informed too late to apply, or were simply not on the ball. Whatever the case, the brouhaha that followed is wonderfully German in that it takes correctness to laughable lengths. Ultimately the protests of the Turkish media ended in German’s highest court, the Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe, it being deemed much too absurd merely to find a bigger venue for the trial, or to hand over three seats from the public gallery to the Turkish journalists, or to find some more furniture. The Constitutional Court demanded that the press accreditation be repeated, whereupon the Munich authorities really got down to work and devised a lottery system of such labyrinthine complexity, involving categories and subcategories and the possibility of shifting, under particular circumstances, one media outlet from one category to another, and so forth, that working out the group phases for a soccer World Cup are a doddle (or a cakewalk) by comparison. Anyway, the results of this farce were duly announced on April 29, 2013 by the team of professor doctors who had conducted the lottery. When the smoke cleared it turned out that several major national newspapers hadn’t got so much as a collapsible stool while local radio stations with a few thousand listeners at most, and a women’s magazine that specializes in gossip and hairstyles and so forth, were in. Furthermore, analysis of the method used has turned up anomalies. So then there were further appeals, increased costs and, as always, more public bleeding. One never gets it right and foreigners are only going to see in this an unwillingness on the part of Germans to bite the bullet. But the foreigners will be wrong. Which is why what is essentially, or at least overtly, a trivial matter is made much of at this point. The comedy comes about because of an almost pathological desire on the part of the Germans to do the right thing; to face up to the past (and the present) in the most rigorous and fastidious manner possible. In matters of this sort the Germans spare themselves nothing. But they get little credit for it. We might concede, however, that a society prepared to make such an ass of itself by going to such lengths in the cause of fairness can’t be all that bad. In any case, the trial is taking place and justice will, presumably, be done, but not, one suspects, before the usually litany of legal appeals and so forth has been exhausted and endured. Already there seems to be a consensus that the whole show will take up to two years. No matter. Long before it is settled the international press will have cooled and started to look elsewhere for stories that suggest that the Germans are up to their old tricks again. And this raises a further question. Would anything like this attention be paid, or anything like this trouble be taken, if we were talking

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about, let us say, a series of killings perpetrated by a couple of bank robbers? Well, this question is easily answered. The answer is “no.” This, however, does not of itself mean that we can take a jaundiced view of what is going on in Munich and the role it will have in the media. If it can be established that there is a real threat that Germany will fall once again into the hands of fascists, then this type of attention is apposite. However I suspect that this cannot be established. Furthermore, I would go so far as to say that Germany is among those European countries least likely to succumb to the neo-Nazi agenda. Nonetheless there is a double obsession that undercuts any shift toward normality. At home Germans are educated to be manically vigilant for any sign whatsoever of extreme right-wing sentiment, while all Germans are conscious of knee-jerk foreign reactions. Although one must emphasize (again) that their hyper- awareness of foreign stereotyping is usually something that they are (still) honest about—often painfully honest about—only in private. Whether this obsession with Nazism, this determination to make out of every skin- head with social problems an embryonic storm trooper, is not a perverse and unconscious means of keeping alive a taboo that one wants, overtly at least, to strangle at birth, is something we might, at least, speculate on. But where would Germans be without guilt and fear? And yet what a burden is thus placed on them! Nonetheless, I wonder whether the “Amfortas complex” isn’t on the wane among the Germans themselves. They no longer—in the fashion of the fallen Christ-like hero of Wagner’s last and “sacred” music drama, Parsifal—have to bleed regularly in order to purify themselves. At the risk of sounding cheap, one might add that many of them feel they have been bled dry anyway, although this, again, is an opinion usually heard only in private. Nonetheless, when Otto Graf Lambsdorff was sent to New York in 1999 to negotiate further reparations with surviving victims of Nazi terror (in this case former slave laborers), he was told it had to be a once- and-for-all settlement. One also wonders whether the Amfortas complex survives, as far as it does, chiefly for fear of what foreigners will think if they are not treated to the usual public bloodlettings. Clearly the premises on which so much of this are based are changing, but they do so slowly, partly because so many native liberals are deeply and sincerely worried about revisionism. As a result public expressions of frustration on the part of prominent Germans—let us say Martin Walser’s speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1998—immediately appear like a dereliction of duty. The subsequent bad-tempered exchange with the then Jewish leader Ignatz Bubis (Walser was naturally enough called an antisemite) led the latter to expressions of despair, to conclude that his life’s work of reconciliation had been in vain. Walser’s speech was, in any case, the personal, exasperated outburst of a man who refused, as he saw it, to keep silent any longer. As such it didn’t push the debate forward

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in worthwhile intellectual terms. Nonetheless the next year Fritz Stern received the same prize and he was very conscious of the difficult legacy Walser had left him. Stern’s remarks on that occasion make clear what a gap there is—of course there must be—between those who were affected directly by the Third Reich (his immediate family got out at more or less the last minute when he was a boy, and he lost relatives in Auschwitz) and those who inherit the guilt. There will always be a tendency, no matter how naive, to demand of the second group a level of empathy with the first that can never be attained and, if determinedly pursued, will lead to self-delusion and possible psychic self-damage. After all, how could anyone with any direct connection to the Third Reich be anything other than profoundly, and above all uniquely, formed by it? One wonders therefore if some statements do not make clear the problem in a manner they were never intended to. For instance Stern, recalling his speech from 1999, says that of course: “Auschwitz would, ‘unavoidably and for all time,’ remain the symbol of German inhumanity.”595 Well, one certainly hopes so! It would be a terrible state of affairs if something happened that actually outbid the Holocaust in horror. Nonetheless, Auschwitz cannot be preserved as Stern’s generation presumably wants. It cannot maintain that psychic power, let alone that dislocating emotional force. Furthermore, Stern’s remark as to the role of Auschwitz makes clear what, for many Left intellectuals, the dominant, highly selective, historical perspective in effect amounts to. It seems one is obliged to think forward from that particular ethical and narrative base point, as though the world pre-Auschwitz is of lesser meaning and validity, at least in as far as it can be uncoupled from Nazi associations. This makes of Auschwitz not only a moral absolute but also a temporal year zero that “for all time” invests and explains the histories that follow. But in fact, as we have seen, it cannot be prevented from retrospectively investing, whether in a potent or a diluted form, all of German history. Even so, this is a function that Auschwitz will never successfully fulfill in absolute terms. The coming generations will not be as stringent, or as hobbled, and quite possibly not even as moral, as their predecessors. For them the paradigm and the taboo will inevitably give way to historical praxis and Auschwitz will, as a result, lose its contradictory epistemological meaning. Today it embodies as a signifier irreconcilable components. It is set in historical concrete as a temporal paradigm and is protected from the passage of time precisely because it declares its precise place in the narrative record. Of course, the best of contemporary historians would deny they were in any way in hock to such an intellectual aberration. And yet much postwar writing about the Third Reich has underpinned intellectual constructs of exactly this sort. The essential, but hardly trivial, truth with respect to the epistemology of the Third Reich is banal. History goes on . . . or German histories

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go on. And if we make, in particular, a great fuss about these matters today it is because we see how they change meaning and function as the players who were once actively involved in them die out. That soon they will not be around to continue the struggle simply makes the present fight over legacy that much more immediate, bitter, and not a little desperate. There is an inevitable tendency to try to fix in aspic, memorial-like, something that will only exist, can only survive, by changing its form. It is, for instance, an appropriate irony, as well as a self-evident hypocrisy, that contemporary German authorities show themselves increasingly willing to pursue assiduously Nazi war criminals the fewer of them there are to pursue. Knowing that they won’t have to do it for much longer, they can now dedicate themselves enthusiastically to a principle and an activity to which in the past they were only halfheartedly committed. In any case, whatever the guilt junkies and the well-meaning moralists might think, it turns out that German history does not stumble at its own version of King Charles’ head. Postwar German historians, no matter how hobbled and honorably bewildered they may have on occasions been, are not like Charles Dickens’s Mr. Dick, who cannot get past the king’s decapitation. There is, as it were, no effective guillotine that brings everything to an end and settles matters once and for all. Meanwhile the reader will have to decide whether the argument here—or the subjective speculations—underpinning the claim that post- 1989 Germany is a new country and that people do things differently there will stand. But looking back at the course of German history in the general context of the bad fit between ideology as to nation, race, and culture on the one hand, and material praxis on the other, one almost regrets the passing of all the dash and color, of the great heroic gestures, the daring risk-taking politics, the fine poetry, the inflated theater flush with anachronistic propaganda; in other words, of everything that was born, at least in part, because Germany (or the plethora of Germanies) constituted a rich range of possibilities that compensated for the lack of a stable geopolitical entity, even as it fantasized feverishly about just that entity. Of course, given what happened when the nation-state did finally burst upon the stage, and given the orgy of national pride it generated— to say nothing of the huge cost in lives to which it led—it is no doubt tasteless to miss the past. But I have always regretted that Wilhelm II didn’t respond to the urging of his royalist supporters and have a crack at that Königstodesritt. Imagine the pictures, the poems, the grand tragic operas, the comic operettas, the piss-taking cabarets that a proper King’s Death Ride would have spawned. But alas, like so much else, it’s gone. I confess, however, that my heart did jump with disreputable pleasure when I stumbled on a report in the German press (Berliner Zeitung, November 26, 2012). The Burschenschaft are still with us. Truly it seems the past is not dead. The boys, pictured in the short-panted uniforms of

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old and no doubt graced with dueling scars, had gathered for a national meeting in Stuttgart. There were six hundred of them drawn from a hundred different clubs throughout the land, which was in itself reassuring. Of course one could not hope for an assassination attempt in the manner of Karl Sand’s murderous attack on August von Kotzebue in 1818 (see chapter 7), but at least they could have burned the effigy of a foreigner or two and thrown a few books onto the bonfire before giving themselves over, in an orgy of Gemütlichkeit, to jolly boozing and the inspiring ballads of yore. But no. The organization was rent because some of the lads have become liberal and want to disavow exactly those traditions that have made them what they are. These wimps, it seems, want to belong to a dueling club without swords. In other words, there is no reason to make a special fuss about Germany any more. And if at times it seems that some foreigners (and even the odd German) cannot get enough of the old intoxicating brew, that is merely because they (and we) see with regret and a pinch of nostal- gia that, in effect, all the convenient prejudices are becoming not merely absurd, but irrelevant. Even so, it will be hard to get by without them. Prejudices would be poor things if they did not turn out to be obdu- rate. Yet it is unlikely that any European leader in the future will talk as Margaret Thatcher did at the meeting with experts on Germany that was organized for her at Chequers, the prime ministerial country resi- dence, in March 1990. At least it is to be hoped so. There she flaunted her hostile, stereotypical view of the Germans and wanted to know when their armies would march east again.596 But if something like that is ever repeated it will not be evidence of the determining and inescapable power of the past, but of a future that has gone wildly awry. In the meantime we Germans are probably to be trusted. Lord knows, these days we are dull enough . . . all those Brazilian goals notwithstanding.

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Introduction

1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitch ener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 21–22, http://socserv.mcmaster. ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hegel/history.pdf. 2 Ibid., 22. 3 Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer- sity Press, 1983), 295.

Chapter 1: The Problem(s) 4 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925–26), 649, accessed October 30, 2014, http:// archive.org/stream/Mein_Kampf_Facsimilie/MK#page/n0/mode/2up. 5 Ibid., 653. 6 Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 75. 7 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 213. 8 Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 68. 9 Quoted in The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm’s II’s Role in Imperial Germany, ed. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 54. 10 Gordon A Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 1955), 48. 11 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 225. 12 Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 105. 13 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1922), 229, http://archive.org/stream/addressestogerma00fich#page/54/mode/2up.

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16 Fritz Stern, “The Goldhagen Controversy: One Nation, One People, One Theory?,” Foreign Affairs 75, no 6 (1996): 136. 17 In Mombauer and Deist, Kaiser (see note 9), 8. Original source: Tim Mason, Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class, ed. Jane Caplan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22. 18 A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26. Original source: Günter Grass, “Schreiben nach Aus- chwitz,” Die Zeit, February 23, 1990. 19 Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, & Reason: A Study in Nineteenth–Century Thought (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1971), 134 and 138. 20 Rainer Rother, Die Gegenwart der Geschichte: Ein Versuch über Film und zeit- genössische Literatur (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1990), 146. 21 Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2011), 208. 22 Johann Gustav Droysen, Outlines of the Principles of History (Boston, 1897), 11, http://archive.org/stream/outlineofprincip00droy#page/n5/mode/2up. 23 Rother, Gegenwart der Geschichte (see note 20), 4. 24 Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History (Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte) [1924], trans. Douglas Scott, intro. Dr. W. Stark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 348.

Chapter 2: A Plethora of Germanies 25 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 121–25. 26 Ibid., 74. 27 Gordon A. Craig, The Battle of Königgrätz (Philadelphia: University of Penn- sylvania Press, 2003), 171–72. 28 Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 150. 29 Heinrich von Treitschke, His Doctrine of German Destiny and of International Relations Together with a Study of His Life and Work by Adolf Hausrath (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1914), 235. http://archive. org/stream/treitschkehisdoc00treiiala/treitschkehisdoc00treiiala_djvu.txt. 30 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair (see note 7), 29. 31 William Ashton Ellis, trans. and ed., Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London, 1892–99), 8:140. Many can be found online at Patrick Swinkels’s The Wagner Library, accessed October 22, 2014, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/. 32 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987), 213. 33 Meinecke, German Catastrophe (see note 12), 8–9 and 95. 34 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair (see note 7), 196.

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35 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 12. 36 Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983), 338. 37 Ibid., 339. 38 Thomas Mann, “Gedanken im Kriege” in Schriften zur Politik, trans. Fritz Ringer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 7–23. This translation is from Fritz Ringer, “Thomas Mann’s Modernist Conversion to Politics” in Culture and Politics in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, Occasional Paper No. 8, ed. Hart- mut Lehmann (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1992), 9–12. 39 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), 4:63. 40 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 99–105. Originally published in 1966. 41 Ernst Jünger, On Pain, trans. and intro. David C. Durst, preface Russell A. Berman (New York, Telos Press, 2008), xxvii. 42 Peter Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder (Stutt- gart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1992), 217–18. 43 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 23. 44 Ibid., 24. 45 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 54. 46 Ibid., 74. 47 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair (see note 7), 29. 48 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (see note 36), 267. 49 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Heinz Schlaffer, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ed. Karl Richter with Herbert G. Göpfert, Norbert Miller, and Gerhard Sauder (Munich: Hanser, 1986), 19:632. See also note 52 for a web version translated by John Oxenford from 1906. 50 Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 434. Originally published 1936. 51 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Ade- laide: ebooks@Adelaide, 2014), section §5, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/ kant/immanuel/k16j/. If there is no section number, a page reference is given for Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, trans. James Creed Meredith, vol. 42 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1952). 52 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe (see note 49), 460. The date is March 1832. The translation is by John Oxenford, 1906. Online at http://www.hxa.name/ books/ecog/Eckermann-ConversationsOfGoethe-1832.html. 53 Otto von Bismarck, “Letter to Minister von Manteuffel,” 1856, Modern His- tory Sourcebook: Documents of German Unification, 1848–1871, Fordham Uni- versity, accessed October 22, 2014, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ germanunification.asp#Bismarck.

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54 Otto von Bismarck, The Man and the Statesman; Being the Reflections and Rem- iniscences of Otto, Prince von Bismarck, trans. R. J. Butler (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1898), 1:138, http://archive.org/details/bismarckmanstate01bismuoft. 55 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the Ger- man Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 24–25. The source is Robert Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966), 430. 56 A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (London: Hamish Ham- ilton, 1955), 49. 57 Ibid., 20–22. 58 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 83. 59 Ibid., 82. 60 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (see note 32). 61 Peter Viereck, Metapolitics (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), 234–35. 62 Ibid., 282.

Chapter 3: Culture, Language, and Blood 63 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 205. 64 Hitler, Mein Kampf (see note 4), 153. 65 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, ed. Heinz Stolpe with Hans-Joachim Kruse and Dietrich Simon (Berlin: Aufbau, 1971), 1:295–96. 66 Ibid., 2:156 and 1:296. 67 Ibid., 2:154. 68 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 4, What Is German?, 163. 69 Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (part 4, book 16, section 3), 254, http://www.textlog.de/5547.html. An Eng- lish version is also available online. See John Godfrey [sic] Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill, 2 vols. (London, 1803), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000433899. 70 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (see note 65), 2:116. 71 Ibid., 2:318. 72 Ibid., 2:211. 73 Johann Gottfried Herder, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, in Meisterwerke deutscher Dichter und Denker, on CD-ROM “Deutsche Literatur von Lessing bis Kafka” (Berlin: Directmedia, 2000), 19118. In hard copy: Johann Gottfried Herder, Sturm und Drang: Dichtungen und theoretische Texte in zwei Bänden, Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Heinz Nicolai (Munich: Win- kler, 1971), 1:284. 74 Ibid., CD-ROM 19082 and Nicolai 263. 75 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (see note 65), 2:153.

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76 Hegel, Philosophy of History (see note 1), 456. 77 Ibid., 476. 78 See Richard White, Herder: On the Ethics of Nationalism, Humanitas 18, nos. 1 and 2 (2005). 79 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (see note 15), 68. 80 Ibid., 147–48. 81 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn, trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1975), 6. 82 Smith, Continuities of German History (see note 13), 39–47. 83 Ibid., 65. 84 Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 73–74. 85 Treitschke, His Doctrine of German Destiny (note 29), 231 and 244. 86 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (see note 36), 131. 87 Leopold Ranke, “The Great Powers,” in Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years, trans. Theodore Hermann von Laue (New York: Johnson, 1970), 198 and 186. 88 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 17. 89 Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 31. 90 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 181. 91 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (see note 15), 223. Emphasis added. 92 Ibid., 54. 93 Ibid., 55. 94 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 83. 95 Mandelbaum, History, Man, & Reason (see note 19), 217. 96 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 65. 97 Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Histo- rians’ Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge Polity Press, 1989), 159. 98 Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (see note 69) 2:339–46. 99 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed. (Bodley Head: John Lane, 1912), 369–70. These are the page numbers on the PDF download: http://www.hschamberlain.net. 100 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 1, A Communica- tion to My Friends, 376. 101 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (see note 65), 2:36 (and note 113). 102 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 1, A Communica- tion to My Friends, 267–392. 103 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 2, Opera and Drama, 227–29.

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104 Friedrich Schiller, Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, 1794–1805, trans. Liselotte Dieckmann (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 113. 105 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 6, Know Thyself, 271. 106 Hitler, Mein Kampf (see note 4), 315–16. 107 Cosima Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 1869–1883, ed. and annotated Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (London: Har- court Brace Jovanovich, 1978–80), entry for April 7, 1873. 108 Ibid., November 4, 1872. 109 Ibid., December 26, 1873. 110 Ibid., November 9, 1878. 111 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 2, The Wibelungen, 280. 112 Richard Wagner, Jesus of Nazareth and Other Writings, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 297. 113 Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 1869–1883 (see note 107), November 27, 1878. 114 Chamberlain, Foundations of the 19th Century (see note 99), 462–68. 115 Die Tagebücher von Josef Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1987), 1:178–79. 116 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, section 13, trans. Ian Johnston, accessed October 30, 2014, http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/ nietzsche/genealogy1.htm. 117 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Ian John- ston, accessed October 30, 2014, http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/ history.htm. 118 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1954), 122. 119 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 4, What Is Ger- man?, 159. 120 Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (see note 69), 1:400. But this translation is taken from: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ mod/1784herder-mankind.asp. 121 Hegel, Philosophy of History (see note 1), 367. 122 Barry Emslie, “The Kiss of the Dragon-Slayer,” Wagner Journal 7, no. 1 (2013): 22–38. 123 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 6, Religion and Art, 248–49. 124 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 116, http://archive.org/details/HitlersTableTalk. 125 Ibid., 25.

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126 Ibid., 25 and 595. 127 Ibid., 225.

Chapter 4: The Gemeinschaft 128 Meinecke, Historism (see note 50), 250. 129 Ibid., 225. 130 Jonathan B. Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 126. 131 Ibid., 26. 132 Ibid., 95. 133 Ibid., x. 134 Frederick C Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2011), 91. 135 Meinecke, Historism (see note 50), 250. 136 Ibid., 258. 137 Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (see note 130), 97. 138 Meinecke, Historism (see note 50), 256. 139 Ibid., 264. 140 Ibid., 261. 141 Ibid., 266. 142 Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (see note 130), 159. 143 Ibid., 161. 144 Meinecke, Historism (see note 50), 280. 145 Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (see note 130), 109. 146 De Valera, Éamon. “On Language & the Irish Nation.” In Maurice Moyni- han, ed., Speeches and Statements by Eamon De Valera: 1917–73, 466. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980. 147 Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in France, vol. 3 of The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke in Twelve Volumes (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887; Project Gutenberg, 2005), 3:359, http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/15679/15679-h/15679-h.htm#REFLECTIONS. 148 Ibid., 273. 149 John Major, “Mr Major’s Speech to Conservative Group for Europe,” April 22, 1993, http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/page1086.html. 150 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Denis Redmond (2001), paragraphs 158–61, http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/nd2.PDFhttp://members.efn.org/-dredmond/ndtrans.html. 151 Meinecke, Historism (see note 50), 494–95. 152 Ibid., 493.

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153 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections, trans. Bailey Saun- ders (New York: Macmillan, 1906; Project Gutenberg 2010), maxim 138 from part 3. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33670/33670-h/33670-h.htm#IIIb 154 Ibid., maxim 80 from part 2. 155 Meinecke, Historism (see note 50), 381. 156 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, trans. Minna Steele Smith (London: George Bell & Sons, 1908), 2:164, http://archive. org/stream/poetryandtruthf02morrgoog#page/n8/mode/2up 157 Meinecke, Historism (see note 50), 396. 158 Ibid., 434. 159 Ibid., 423. 160 Ibid., 444. 161 Ibid., 481.

Chapter 5: Max, the Proletariat, and the State 162 Hegel, Philosophy of History (see note 1), 44. 163 Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, in Reader in Marxist Philosophy, ed. Howard Selsam and Harry Martel (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 308. 164 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 204. 165 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 54. 166 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 3:13–30. Because it is so short only section numbers are given in the main text. All quotes in this paragraph are from section 4, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/.

Chapter 6: Hegel and the State 167 Hegel, Philosophy of History (see note 1), 54. 168 Ibid., 41. 169 Ibid., 22. 170 Ibid., 37. 171 Ibid., 51. 172 Ibid., 28–29. 173 Ibid., 439. 174 Ibid., 457. 175 Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, intro. Hajo Holborn and James Joll (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 159. 176 Ibid., 160.

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177 Habermas, New Conservatism (see note 97), 155. 178 Hegel, Philosophy of History (see note 1), 90.

Chapter 7: German Historians and the State 179 See Benedikt Stuchtey, “Literature, Liberty, and Life of the Nation: British Historiography from Macaulay to Trevelyan,” in Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, ed. Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore (London: Routledge, 1999), 32. 180 Heinrich von Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, 7 vols., trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, intro. William Harbutt Dawson (New York, 1915), 1:339, http://archive.org/details/treitschkeshisto01treiuoft. 181 Ibid., 4:531. 182 Ibid., 4:222. 183 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates; Project Gutenberg, 2008, updated 2013) 2: chap. 7, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2439/2439-h/2439-h.htm. 184 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 1:369. 185 Ibid., 1:97. 186 Ibid., 1:228. 187 Ranke, “The Great Powers” (see note 87), 203–5. 188 Leopold Ranke, Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Sir Alex and Lady Duff Gordon, 3 vols. (London 1849), 2:19–20 and 3:128–29, http://archive.org/ details/memoirshousebra00rankgoog. Originally in 9 volumes. 189 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 3:649. 190 Ranke, Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg (see note 188), 3:467. 191 Georg G. Iggers, “Nationalism and Historiography, 1789–1996: The German Example in Historical Perspective,” in Berger, Donovan, and Passmore, Writing National Histories, 19. 192 Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism from Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 1763–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 71. 193 Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II (see note 183), 1: chap. 1. 194 Iggers, “Nationalism and Historiography, 1789–1996” (see note 191), 19. 195 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 128. 196 Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 140. 197 Schulze, Course of German Nationalism (see note 192), 31. 198 Ibid., 28–29.

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199 Bismarck, Man and the Statesman (see note 54), 1:328. 200 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 116 and 118. 201 Ibid., 105. 202 Droysen, Outlines of the Principles of History (see note 22), see Appendix. 203 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 104. 204 Ibid., 109. 205 Droysen, Outlines of the Principles of History (see note 22), 14. 206 Ibid., 36. 207 Ibid., 47. 208 Ibid., 48. 209 Ibid., 33. 210 Ibid., xxxi. 211 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 268. 212 Bismarck’s Letters to His Wife from the Seat of War, 1870–71, trans. Armin Harder (New York, 1903), 111, http://archive.org/details/ bismarckmanstate01bismiala. 213 Droysen, Outlines of the Principles of History (see note 22), xxxi. 214 Ibid., xxxii. 215 Schulze, Course of German Nationalism (see note 192), 58–59. 216 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 5:425. 217 Ibid., 3:648. 218 Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II (see note 183), 2: chap. 9. 219 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 3:649. 220 Ibid., 4:171. 221 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 383. 222 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 3:13. 223 Ibid., 3: appendix 7, 619–20. 224 Ibid., 2:344. 225 Treitschke, His Doctrine of German Destiny (see note 29), viii. 226 Ibid., 138 (Essay on the Army). 227 Ibid., 108–9. 228 Ibid., 162 (Essay on International Law). 229 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 4:573. 230 Ibid., 4:577.

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231 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 409. 232 Ranke, Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg (see note 188), 2:411–13. 233 Ibid., 2:124–25.

Chapter 8: Meinecke and the State 234 See Beiser, German Historicist Tradition (see note 134), 279. 235 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 205–8. 236 Ibid., 12. 237 Ibid., 27. 238 Ibid., 33. 239 Ibid., 293. 240 Ibid., 379. 241 Ibid., 385. 242 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 4. 243 Ibid., 5. 244 Ibid., 6. 245 Ibid., 12. 246 Ibid., 418. 247 Ibid., 416. 248 Ibid., 415. 249 See Craig, The Battle of Königgrätz (see note 27), 180. 250 See Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 139. 251 Bismarck, Bismarck’s Letters to His Wife (see note 212), 122. 252 Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck: Das Reich in der Mitte Europas (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1990), 10. 253 Taylor, Bismarck (see note 56), 124. 254 Áine McGillicuddy, René Schickele and Alsace: Cultural Identities between the Borders (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 46. 255 George O. Kent, Bismarck and His Times (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni- versity Press, 1978), 80. 256 Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600– 1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 553. 257 McGillicuddy, René Schickele and Alsace (see 254), 48–49. 258 Bismarck, Bismarck’s Letters to His Wife (see note 212), 61. 259 Ibid., 61. 260 Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 334. 261 Taylor, Bismarck (see note 56), 125–26. 262 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 273.

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263 Ibid., 283. 264 Ibid. 265 Ibid., 309. 266 Ibid., 320. 267 Ibid., 321. 268 Golo Mann, Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Deutscher Bücherbund, 1966), 448–49. 269 Bismarck, Man and the Statesman (see note 54), 1:292–94. 270 Ibid., 1:304–5. 271 Ibid., 1:317. 272 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 172–73. 273 Mombauer and Deist, Kaiser (see note 9). 274 Hermann Schoenfeld, Bismarck’s Speeches and Letters (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905), 14–23. 275 Ibid., 12. 276 Bismarck, The Correspondence of William I and Bismarck: With Other Let- ters from and to Prince Bismarck, trans. J. A. Ford (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1903), 2:140, http://archive.org/stream/ correspondenceof00bismuoft#page/n7/mode/2up. 277 Mann, Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (see note 268), 496. 278 Otto von Bismarck, The Kaiser vs Bismarck: Suppressed Letters by the Kaiser, and New Chapters from the Autobiography of the Iron Chancellor, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1921). See chapter 8 and, in particular, chapter 10, http://archive.org/stream/kaiservsbismarck00bismuoft#page/n7/ mode/2up. 279 Taylor, Bismarck (see note 56), 264. 280 Craig, Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (see note 10), 239–40. 281 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 40. 282 Ibid., 37. 283 Mombauer and Deist, Kaiser (see note 9), see Bernd Sösemann, “Hollow- Sounding Jubilees: Forms and Effects of Public Self-Display in Wilhelmine Ger- many,” 61. 284 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 141. 285 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 35–36. 286 Ibid., 15. 287 Mombauer and Deist, Kaiser (see note 9), 291. 288 Ibid., 292. 289 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 293. 290 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 5:117.

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291 Smith, Continuities of German History (see note 13), 171. 292 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 301. 293 Gay, Enlightenment, vol. 1, Rise of Modern Paganism (see note 40), 485. 294 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 314. 295 Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (see note 6), 225. 296 Meinecke, Machiavellism (see note 24), 350. 297 Ibid., 357. 298 Ibid., 429. 299 Ibid., 433. 300 Meinecke, German Catastrophe (see note 12), 4. 301 Ibid., 74. 302 Ibid., 10. 303 Ibid., 11. 304 Ibid., 12. 305 Ibid., 24. 306 Ibid., 25. 307 Thomas Mann quoted in Adam Kirsch, “Review of House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011. 308 Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gir- oux, 2006), 37. 309 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 156. 310 Ibid., 172. 311 Ibid., 276 and 460. 312 Hans Schleier, “German Historiography under National Socialism: Dreams of a Powerful Nation-State and German Volkstum Come True,” in Berger, Dono- van, and Passmore, Writing National Histories, 187. 313 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 369–70. 314 Schleier, “German Historiography under National Socialism” (see note 312), 176–77. 315 See Smith, Continuities of German History (note 13), chap. 1; and Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 3–4. 316 See note 196. 317 Meinecke, The German Catastrophe (see note 12), 32. 318 Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusion: The Drama of German History (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 41. 319 Meinecke, German Catastrophe (see note 12), 51. 320 Ibid., 54. 321 Ibid., 95.

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322 Ibid., 114. 323 Ibid., 57–58. 324 Ibid., 74. 325 Ibid., 115. 326 Ibid., 116. 327 Ibid., 117. 328 Ibid., 120. 329 Ibid., 121.

Chapter 9: The Lingering Ambiguities of the State 330 See note 28. 331 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair (see note 7), 29–30. 332 Ibid., 59. 333 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (see note 36), 244. 334 Chamberlain, Foundations of the 19th Century (see note 99), 360. 335 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 234. 336 Ibid. 337 Ibid., 243. 338 Ibid., 251. 339 Ibid., 267. 340 “Piper Collection,” Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents on the Historikerstreit: The Controversy concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). In other words, the English translation of the original German text known as the “Piper Collection,” 206. 341 See Habermas, New Conservatism (note 97), xiv. Original source: Michael Stürmer, Dissonanzen des Fortschritts (Munich, 1982), 12. 342 Adorno, Negative Dialectics (see note 150), paragraphs 313–15. 343 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Dennis Redmond (2005), aphorism 35, accessed October 30, 2014, http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ MM1.html. 344 Adorno, Negative Dialectics (see note 150), paragraphs 358–61. 345 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte),” in Walter Benjamin, Allegorien kultureller Erfahrung: Ausgewählte Schriften 1920–1940 (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1984), section 7, 160. 346 Adorno, in Aesthetics and Politics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, ed. Ronald Taylor et al. (London: Verso, 1980), 194. 347 Adorno, Negative Dialectics (see note 150), paragraphs 354–58.

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348 See note 38. 349 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (see note 36), 36. 350 Ibid., 21. 351 Ibid., 250–51. 352 Ibid., 387. 353 Ibid., 68. 354 Ibid., 18. See also “To the Editor of Common Sense,” in Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 197. 355 Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–1949 (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008), 50. 356 Ibid., 49–50. 357 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (see note 345), section 9, 160–61. See also Carl Djerassi in “Letters,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2014. 358 Mann, “To the Editor of Common Sense” (note 354), 201.

Chapter 10: Materialism 359 Craig, Battle of Königgrätz (see note 27), 140. 360 Chamberlain, Foundations of the 19th Century (see note 99), 403. 361 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 12. 362 Treitschke, Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (see note 180), 4:261. 363 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Lon- don: Allen Lane, 2012), 151. 364 Paolo Malanima and Oliver Volckart, “Urbanisation, 1700–1870” (paper presented at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Third RTN Summer Sympo- sium, October 26–28, 2007), 25http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/1/1679/ papers/Malanima-Volckart-Chapter.pdf, accessed October 29, 2014, http:// www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/1/1679/papers/Malanima-Volckart-Chapter.pdf. 365 Jurgen Schmidhuber, “Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares in the 20th Century,” 2010, accessed October 30, 2014, http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/sci. html. 366 Schulze, Course of German Nationalism (see note 192), 35. 367 Ibid., 78–79. 368 Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 62–63. 369 Ibid., 101. 370 Ibid., 90. 371 Ibid., 133–35. 372 Ibid., 393.

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373 Ibid., 332. 374 Ibid., 212. 375 Ibid., 62–64. 376 See note 275. 377 Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 223. 378 Ibid., 232. 379 John Röhl, “Deutschlands letzter Kaiser,” German TV channel Sat 1, transmitted January 19, 2005. See also John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 380 Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 492. 381 Ibid., 487. 382 Stern, Dreams and Delusion (see note 318), 280. 383 Bismarck, Bismarck’s Letters to His Wife (see note 212), 35–36.

Chapter 11: Militarism and Death 384 Taylor, Bismarck (see note 56), 105. 385 Craig, Battle of Königgrätz (see note 27), 63–64. 386 Ibid., 167. 387 Bismarck, Bismarck’s Letters to His Wife (see note 212), 36. 388 Ibid., 44. 389 Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 159. 390 Ibid., 160. 391 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 121–24 and 141–55. 392 Stern, Dreams and Delusion (see note 318), 148. 393 Ibid., 152. 394 Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revo- lution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 109. 395 Ibid., 89. 396 Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzi- erbarkeit,” Zweite Fassung (see note 345), 433. 397 Piper Collection (see note 340), 18. 398 Mann, “Gedanken im Kriege” (see note 38), 7–23. Ringer article, 8–9. 399 See note 283. 400 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 58–59. 401 Mombauer and Deist, Kaiser (see note 9), 106. 402 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 18.

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403 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 35–36. 404 Clark, Sleepwalkers (see note 363), 306. 405 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 161. 406 Ibid., 162. 407 Ibid., 163–67. 408 Ibid., 186. 409 Clark, Sleepwalkers (see note 363), 221–26. 410 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, section 22, trans. Ian C. Johnston (Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada), revised 2003, http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm. 411 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich, Freiherr von Hardenberg), Hymns to the Night. This is a revision of George MacDonald’s translation in Rampolli: Growths from a Long-Planted Root: Being Translations, New and Old, Chiefly from the Ger- man (London: Longman’s Green, 1897), http://www.io.com/~smith/novalis/ index.html. 412 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, trans. and intro. Michael Hofmann (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 156. 413 Benjamin, quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martín Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 162. 414 Treitschke, His Doctrine of German Destiny (see note 29), viii. 415 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair (see note 7), 188–89. 416 Treitschke, His Doctrine of German Destiny (see note 29), 138–39. 417 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 283. 418 Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française–Italian Fascism– National Socialism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965), 279–80. 419 Klaus P. Fischer, History and Prophecy: Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 117–18. 420 See Jünger, On Pain (see note 41), xxxvii. The original is in: Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1931), 88. 421 “Joseph Goebbels—Speech in Gorlitz, March 9 1945,” posted by THELINDGRENN, December 19, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qAZqkQvopL0. 422 Guido Heldt, “Hardly Heroes: Composers as a Subject in National Socialist Cinema,” in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber–Verlag, 2003), 129. 423 Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Fascination with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 57. 424 Peter Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder (Stutt- gart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1992), 180–81.

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425 Ibid., 396–97. 426 Ibid., 218. 427 See note 323. 428 Hofmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder (see note 424), 598–99. 429 Ibid., 446. 430 Mombauer and Deist, Kaiser (see note 9), 148. 431 Ibid., 175. 432 Ibid., 123. 433 Ibid., 17. 434 Ibid., 7. 435 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 86. 436 See Barry Millington, Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 112. 437 Mombauer and Deist, Kaiser (see note 9), 255.

Chapter 12: Providence and Narration 438 Kant, Critique of Judgment (see note 51), section § 87. 439 Ibid., section § 65. 440 Ibid., section § 67. 441 Ibid., section § 75. 442 Ibid., section § 85. 443 Ibid., 593 (That is, the book reference. See note 51.) 444 Ibid., section § 87. 445 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 40. 446 See note 16. 447 Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (see note 308), 4. 448 Adorno, Negative Dialectics (see note 150), paragraphs 313–15. Emphasis added. 449 Jonathan Kay, Among the Truthers: A Journey through America’s Growing Con- spiracist Underground (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 180.\ 450 Iggers, “Nationalism and Historiography, 1789–1996” (see note 191), 20. 451 Iggers, German Conception of History (see note 3), 120. 452 Ibid., 36. 453 Ibid., 40. 454 Georg G. Iggers, “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” Jour- nal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 1 (1995): 131. 455 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (see note 124), 343.

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456 Ibid., 13. 457 See Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 21. 458 Ibid., 26. 459 Karl Popper, “Utopia and Violence,” The Hibbert Journal 16 (January 2, 1948): 115. 460 Isaiah Berlin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, ed. Ramin Jahanbegloo (Lon- don: Peter Halban, 1992), 143. 461 Ibid., 36.

Chapter 13: Guilt and Innocence 462 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (see note 124), 663. 463 Clark, Sleepwalkers (see note 363), 560. 464 Ibid., 561. 465 Ibid., 509. 466 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 33. Emphasis added. 467 Ibid., 35–36. 468 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 202. 469 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 58. 470 Ibid., 64. 471 Ranke, Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg (see note 188), 2:129. 472 Röhl, “Deutschlands letzter Kaiser” (see note 379). 473 Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke (see note 8), 224. 474 See Clark, Sleepwalkers (see note 363), 494. 475 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 117–18. 476 Ibid., 103. 477 Ibid., 273. 478 Hitler, Mein Kampf (see note 4), 464–69. 479 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (see note 175), 618–19. 480 See Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 36. Original source: Joschka Fischer, “Identität in Gefahr!,” in Grüne Politik: Eine Standorts- bestimmung, ed. Thomas Kluge (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 28–29. 481 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 100–101. 482 Ibid., 177–78. 483 Ibid., 218–19. 484 Ibid., 218. 485 Stern, “Goldhagen Controversy” (see note 16), 132.

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486 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (see note 481), 255–56. 487 Ibid., 386. 488 Ibid., 392–93. 489 Ibid., 398. 490 Ibid., 408. 491 Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (see note 308), note 94. 492 Goldhag en, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (see note 481), 419. 493 Ibid., 174. 494 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 51. 495 See s.v. “Berlin” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, ed. Michael Beren- baum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), vol. 3, 450. 496 See “Virtual Jewish World: Vienna, Austria,” American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014, accessed October 29, 2014, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary. org/jsource/vjw/Vienna.html#World%20War%20II. 497 Stern, “Goldhagen Controversy” (see note 16), 129.

Chapter 14: The Indispensable Jews 498 Garry Wills, “Catholics and Jews: The Great Change,” a review of From Enemy to Brother, by John Connelly, New York Review of Books, March 21, 2013. 499 Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of German Jews, 1743–1933 (Lon- don: Allen Lane, 2003), 25–27. 500 Ibid., 101–4. 501 Wagner, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (see note 32), 221–22. 502 Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 1869–1883 (see note 107), November 28, 1878. 503 Ibid., July 13, 1876. 504 Elon, Pity of It All (see note 499), 207. 505 Pulzer, Jews and the German State (see note 89), 555. 506 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 153. 507 Elon, Pity of It All (see note 499), 208. 508 Ibid., 225. 509 Heinrich von Treitschke, article dated November 15, 1879, first published in Preußische Jahrbücher 1879. The section on the Jews is available online at German History Documents Online, accessed October 29, 2014, http://germanhistoryd- ocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1799. 510 Elon, Pity of It All (see note 499), 229. 511 Pulzer, Jews and the German State (see note 89), 194.

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512 Elon, Pity of It All (see note 499), 339. 513 Pulzer, Jews and the German State (see note 89), 199. 514 Clark, Iron Kingdom (see note 256), 585–86. 515 Pulzer, Jews and the German State (see note 89), 214. 516 Stern, “Goldhagen Controversy” (see note 16), 131. 517 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 3, Jewishness in Music, 85. 518 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (see note 65), 1:294–95. 519 See note 32 and text. 520 See Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 469. Original source: Walther Rathe- nau, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin: Fischer, 1925), 188–89. 521 Elon Pity of It All (see note 499), 231–37. 522 Stern, Dreams and Delusion (see note 318), 100. 523 Elon, Pity of It All (see note 499), 10. 524 Pulzer, Jews and the German State (see note 89), 318–19. 525 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (see note 124), 721. 526 Garry Wills, “Catholics and Jews: The Great Change,” a review of From Enemy to Brother, by John Connelly, New York Review of Books, March 21, 2013. 527 Clark, Iron Kingdom (see note 256), 123. 528 Stern, Gold and Iron (see note 55), 512. 529 George Y. Kohler, “German Spirit and Holy Ghost—Treitschke’s Call for Conversion of German Jewry: The Debate Revisited,” Modern Judaism Advance Access, April 15, 2010, 7, doi:10.1093/mj/kjq009, http://www.academia. edu/472738/German_Spirit_and_Holy_Ghost. 530 Ibid., 5. 531 See “Friedrich Ludwig Jahn,” Wikipedia, last modified October 17, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Ludwig_Jahn#cite_note-1; and Viereck, Metapolitics (note 61), 85. 532 Treitschke, article dated November 15, 1879 (see note 509). As the article is short, no page numbers are given. 533 Ibid. 534 Kohler, “German Spirit and Holy Ghost” (see note 529), 12. 535 Ibid., 4. 536 Mann, Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (see note 268), 864. 537 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (see note 124), 225.

Chapter 15: The Historians’ Debate 538 See Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18). 539 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 168.

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540 Ibid., 115 and 122. See also Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 223. 541 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 4. Quote from Thomas Lindemann in Die Welt, May 8, 2005. 542 See Habermas, New Conservatism (see note 97), 246–47. 543 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 108. 544 Ibid., 198. 545 Mitscherlich, Inability to Mourn (see note 81), 26 and 31. 546 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 131. 547 Ibid., 156–57. 548 Ibid., 163. 549 Ernst Nolte, Die faschistischen Bewegungen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1966), 11. 550 Ibid., 64–67. 551 Ibid., 171. 552 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 252–53. 553 Habermas, New Conservatism (see note 97), 163. 554 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 20. 555 Ibid., 22. 556 Ibid., 11. Emphasis added. 557 Ibid., 13–14. 558 Ibid., 14. 559 Ibid., 151. 560 Ibid. 561 Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazis Past (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 30. 562 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 41. 563 Ibid., 21. 564 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (see note 124), 173. 565 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 22. 566 Ibid., 8 and 92. 567 Ibid., 59. 568 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (see note 124), 88. 569 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 151. 570 Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans (see note 506), xi–xiv. 571 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 213. 572 Ibid., 89. 573 Bismarck, Man and the Statesman (see note 54), 1:121. 574 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (see note 36), 29.

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575 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 27. 576 See note 341. 577 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 197. 578 Ibid., 34. 579 Habermas, New Conservatism (see note 97), 152. 580 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 206. 581 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 233. 582 Ibid., 234. 583 Habermas, New Conservatism (see note 97), 193. 584 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 232. 585 Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow (see note 561), 105–6. 586 “Piper Collection” (see note 340), 43. 587 Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (see note 308), 339 and passim.

Chapter 16: The State Today 588 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (see note 31), vol. 4, German Art and German Policy, 43. 589 George Soros, “The Tragedy of the European Union and How to Resolve It,” New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012. 590 Soros’s full speech can be found in The Guardian, April 9, 2013. One year later Soros had changed his mind. In an interview in the New York Review of Books published April 24, 2014, he says: “I am no longer advocating that Germany should ‘lead or leave the euro.’ The window of opportunity to bring about radical change in the rules governing the euro has closed.” 591 Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (see note 308), 320. 592 “Warum noch an Europa glauben?—Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck und Alt-Kanzler Helmut Schmidt bei Maybrit Illner” [Why should we still believe in Europe, Federal President Joachim Gauck and former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt with Maybrit Illner], ZDF (60 min), September 27, 2012. 593 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (see note 18), 265. 594 Ibid., 266. 595 Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (see note 308), 513. 596 Ibid., 469.

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Individual works are listed under the author’s name in, as far as it is possible to be clear in the matter, chronological order.

Abu Ghraib, 202 Bedford, Sybille, 119 Adam, Karl, 165 Beethoven, 111 Adenauer, Konrad, 198, 199 Beiser, Frederick C., 48 Adorno, Theodor, 12, 101, 106–7, Benedek, Ludwig August Ritter von, 138 118 The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Beneš, Edvard, 194 106 Benjamin, Walter, 120, 125 Minima Moralia, 106–7 Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Negative Dialectics, 55, 106–7, 136 technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Agadir Crisis, 146 120–21 Albert I (King of the Belgians), 122 Theses on the Philosophy of History, Alsace and Lorraine, 33–34, 85–87, 107, 109 143 Theories of German Fascism, 125 “An Alternative for Germany” Berg, Alban, 107 (Political party), 195–96, 197 Bergen Belsen, 175 Antisemitism, 13, 40, 100, 115–17, Berlin, Isaiah, 77, 141 151–58, 159–70. See also Third Berlin Airlift, 200 Reich Berliner Zeitung, 212 Antonius, 127 Berlin’s Jewish Memorial, 205–6 The Archers (radio serial UK), 53 Bernhardi, Friedrich von, 94, 122, Arminius (Hermann), 43–44, 47, 104 123, 145 Atlantis, 26, 191 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, Augstein, Rudolf, 174 103, 122, 145, 147 Auschwitz, 5, 12, 15, 107, 137–38, Beuth, Christian Peter Wilhelm, 112 149, 154, 157, 174, 178, 179–80, Bismarck, Herbert, 87, 115–16, 118 186, 200, 206, 211 Bismarck, Otto von, 6, 11, 19, 24–25, “Auschwitz,” 137, 139, 142, 164, 63, 72, 74, 76, 85–87, 89–93, 170, 178, 202 94, 95, 100, 105, 110–11, 112, Autobahns, 51–52 114–15, 117, 118, 129, 147, 149, 151, 166, 184 Babelsberg, 91 The Man and the Statesman Bach, J. S., 101, 190 (Memoirs), 25, 91 Bad Godesberg, 63 Letters, 24, 74, 86, 87, 92, 117, Barbarossa Memorial, 75 119 Beck, Ludwig, 101, 128 The Kaiser vs Bismarck: Suppressed Becker, Johannes R., 200 Letters, 93

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 223939 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:52:52:52 AAMM 240  INDEX

Bitburg, 175 Cologne-Minden railway deal, 114–15 Bleichröder, Gerson von, 112, 114–17 Congress of Vienna (1814–15), 19 Bloch, Eduard, 168 Craig, Gordon A., 86 Bloch, Ernst, 106 Crimean War, 184 Blood, 20, 34, 36, 37–41, 44, 75, 80, 110, 160, 162–64, 206. See also Dachau, 156 Race and the Volk Dahlmann, Friedrich, 71 Boxer Rebellion, 122 Dawkins, Richard, 133 Brahms, Johannes, 101 Death, cult of, 20, 21, 42, 44, 117, Brandt, Willy, 32, 172, 183–84, 194 118–31. See also Militarism Braudel, Fernand, 185 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 163 Brecht Bertolt, 1, 60, 138, 192 Dickens, Charles, 212 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 147 Diebitsch, Hans Karl Friedrich, 184 Brothers Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm), Disraeli, Benjamin, 25 43 Dolchstoß (Stab in the back), 28, 143 Bubis, Ignatz, 210 Dresden, Treaty of, 80 Bülow, Bernhard Heinrich von, 112, Dreyfus Affair, 185 193 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 4, 16, 26, Burckhardt, Jacob, 77 71, 74, 75 Burke, Edmund, 53 History of Alexander the Great, 71 Burschenschaften, 77, 78, 184, 212–13 Outlines of the Principles of History, Bush, George W., 202 16, 73 Review of Buckle’s The History of Candide, 45 Civilization of England, 73 Caplan, Jane, 15 Dryden, John, 70 Carlsbad Decrees, 78 Carnival, 191–92 Eagleton, Terry, 62 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, East Germany. See German Democratic 36–37, 40–41, 104, 111, 126, 130, Republic 165 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 49 Chamberlain, Neville, 180 Gespräche mit Goethe, 52 Charlemagne, 33 Einstein, Albert, 100 Charles I of Romania (Carol I or Eisler, Hanns, 200 Prince Karl of Hohenzollern- Elizabeth (Russian Czarina), 89 Sigmaringen), 115 Ellis, William Ashton, 37 Charles VI (Austrian Emperor), 80 Elon, Amos, 159–63 China, 113 Elysée, Treaty of, 198 Churchill, Winston, 121, 147 Ems Telegram, 72 CIA, 202 Engelberg, Ernst, 86 Clark, Christopher Engels, Friedrich, 7 Iron Kingdom: The Rise and The German Ideology, 62 Downfall of Prussia, 86, 165 Enlightenment, 21, 23, 46, 47, 48, The Sleepwalkers, 144, 145 49, 56–57, 88 Classical Greece and German Culture, Epicurus, 45 22, 29–30. 36, 37, 40, 42, 67, 71, Eulenburg, Philip Prince, 129–30 84, 111, 126, 127–28, 169, 196. Evans, Richard J., 187 See also German language Clemenceau, Georges, 87 Falkenhayn, Erich von, 145

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224040 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:52:52:52 AAMM INDEX  241

Falklands (Malvinas), 33, 99 The Enlightenment: An Fallersleben, August Heinrich Interpretation, 21 Hoffmann von, 32, 200–201 Geibel, Emmanuel, 19 Faulkner, William, 16 Gemeinschaft, England, 53 Fest, Joachim, 120 Gemeinschaft, Germany, 20–23, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 4, 10, 14, 41–45, 46–52, 54–58, 61, 62, 18–19, 26, 30–33, 35 111–12. See also German Culture Fischer, Fritz, 4, 142, 144–51, 169 versus French Civilization Fischer, Joschka, 149–50 Gemeinschaft, Ireland, 52–53 Fischer, Louis, 120 Gemeinschaft, United States, 54 Folk. See Volk Gemütlichkeit and Gemüt, 43, 66, 213 Fontane, Theodor, 195 George, Stefan, 22, 75, 108, 127, 128 Wanderings through the March of George V (British King), 146 Brandenburg, 50 Gerlach, Wilhelm von, 91 Effi Briest, 195 German Confederation (or Bund), 28, Ford, Henry, 132 76, 78 Frankfurt, Treaty of, 86 German Culture versus French Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 174 Civilization, 3, 20, 29, 31, 83, Frankfurt Ghetto, 159, 160 107–8, 121, 189–90 Frankfurt Parliament (1848), 9, 71, German Democratic Republic, 12, 74, 83, 110 103, 109, 138, 181–84, 187, 189, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 193, 196, 197, 198, 199–204 (FAZ), 171, 172, 187 German language, 28–38, 162–63 Fränkische Tagespost, 10, 92 German National Anthems, 200–201 French Revolution, 178 German refugees (post World War II). Freud, Sigmund, 157–58, 159 See Vertriebenen Friedrich I (“Barbarossa,” German South West Africa, 121–22 Hohenstaufen Emperor), 75 Germans and tourism, 192–94 Friedrich II (Hohenstaufen Emperor), Gervinus, Georg, 71 22, 75 Gesellschaft, 20. See also German Friedrich II (“The Great,” Culture versus French Civilization Hohenzollern, Prussian King), 5, Gestapo, 202 11, 17, 50, 67, 70, 80, 88–89, 94, Globke, Hans, 199 95–96, 105, 113, 123, 146 Gneisenau, August Neidhardt von, 10, Anti-Machiavel, 88 18, 198, 199 Friedrich III (Hohenzollern, German de Gobineau, Arthur, 125–26 Emperor), 92. 130 Goebbels, Josef, 41, 126, 127, 175 Friedrich Wilhelm (Duke of Goebbels, Magda, 127 Brandenburg, “The Great Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 10, 23, Elector”), 95 32, 49, 50, 55–58, 70, 100–102, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (Hohenzollern, 103, 106, 136 Prussian King), 72, 74, 83, 92 The Maxims and Reflections, 56 Frisch, Max, 39 Faust, 10, 23, 57, 101, 196 Poetry and Truth, 56 Galinski, Heinz, 206 Goethe Institute, 103 de Gaulle, Charles, 198 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 4, 15, 142, Gay, Peter, 181 149, 152–57, 203 Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, 161 Goltz, Bogumil, 19, 103–4

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224141 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:52:52:52 AAMM 242  INDEX

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 175 Briefe zur Beförderung der Gove, Michael, 140 Humanität, 28–30, 162–63 Grass, Günter, 15, 139, 186, 205 Hermann Memorial, 44, 164. See also Grey, Edward, 146 Arminius Griesheim, Karl Gustav Julius von, Hermannschlacht (Battle), 44, 45, 70. 74 See also Kleist Grynszpan, Herschel, 152 Herzl, Theodor, 162 Guantanamo Bay, 202 Hettner, Alfred, 67 Guest workers, 26–27, 38–39, 194, Heuss, Alfred, 105 206–8 Hillgruber, Andreas, 171, 174–75 The Gulag, 177, 178, 179 Hindenburg, Paul von, 143 Gütergotz, 117 Hintze, Otto, 105 Gymnasts Clubs, 71, 77, 78, 184 Historians’ Debate, 12–13, 106, 138, Gypsies (Roma and Sinti), 165, 177 148, 170, 171–87 Historical events as neither sui generis Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 36, 119, 141, nor clones, 148–49, 156–57, 173, 171–72, 174, 175, 176–77, 179, 201, 203 184, 185, 187, 195 Historicism, 6, 16, 47, 57, 105. See The New Conservatism, 67–68, 186 also Meinecke and Historism Hacks, Peter, 202 Hitler, Adolf, 9, 12, 21, 98, 99, Hadrian (Roman Emperor), 127 100–101, 105, 106–7, 120, 127, Haller, Karl Ludwig von, 91 128, 156, 161, 168–69, 173, 174, Harden, Maximilian, 129–30 177–80, 196, 204 Hausrath, Adolf, 79 Mein Kampf, 9, 23, 28, 39, 41, Havel, Václev, 195 143, 147 Haydn, Joseph, 32 Hitler’s Table Talk, 45, 137, 143, Hayek, Friedrich, 60 156, 165, 179 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 6, Hobbes, Thomas, 49 11, 16, 17, 24, 31, 55, 58–59, 60, Hoffmann, E. T. A., 46 61, 63, 64, 71–75, 79, 96, 106, Hölderlin, Friedrich, 22 126, 132, 134–36, 137, 141, 166, Holnstein, Graf Max von, 115 187, 190 Holocaust, 12, 15, 135, 138, 139, The Philosophy of History, 1–2, 43, 142, 152–58, 159, 166, 170, 177, 65–68 178, 179, 181, 184, 211. See also Heidegger, Martin, 36, 67, 100, 105, Auschwitz 119, 169, 176–77, 184, 185–86, Hülsen-Haeseler, Dietrich von, 129 196 Humboldt, Alexander von, 135 Hellenism. See Classical Greece and Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 16, 19 German Culture Henry (Hohenzollern Prince), 146 Iggers, Georg G., 4, 10, 71 Henry the Fowler (Saxon king), 32 The German Conception of History, “Hep Hep Riots,” 159 7, 105, 111, 135, 137 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 14, 23, Historicism: The History and 28–31, 33, 37, 43, 47, 50, 52–53, Meaning of the Term, 137 97, 137, 196 Nationalism and Historiography, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, 30 71, 137 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte Industrialization and technological der Menschheit, 29, 36, 42 progress, 111–14

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224242 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:52:52:52 AAMM INDEX  243

International Red Cross, 155 Krupp, Industrial Firm, 111 Israel, 25–26 Kyffhaüserburg, 75

Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 34, 71, 77, de Lagarde, Paul, 19, 23, 103–4, 165 91, 167 Lambsdorff, Otto Graf, 210 James II (King of England), 76 Landwehr, 91 Jaspers, Karl, 105, 138, 186 Langsdorff, Hans, 126 Jena (Battle), 17 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 63 Jesus of Nazareth, 26, 164–65 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 178 Jews expelled from England, Spain, Lichnowsky, Karl Max, 146 and the Hapsburg Lands, 165 Liege, 146 Jews in German life, 14, 39, 40, 150– Lindemann, Thomas, 172 70, 177–78, 180 Liszt, Franz, 160 Joel, Samuel, 168 The Lives of Others (film), 202 Judt, Tony, 141 Louis XIV, 33, 95 Jünger, Ernst, 21, 105, 125 Lübeck, 108 Lubyanka, 179 Kant, Immanuel, 23–24, 32, 58, 106, Lucretius, Titus Carus, 21 111, 132 Ludendorff, Erich, 143 The Critique of Judgment, 23–24, Ludwig II (Bavarian King), 74, 115 58, 132–34 Lukács, Georg, 64 Kay, Jonathan, 136 Lupold of Bebenburg Bishop of Kent, George O., 86 Würzburg, 33 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg, 172, 199 Luther, Martin, 11, 25, 66, 164, 166 King’s Death Ride (Königstodesritt), On the Jews and their Lies, 160 131, 212 Luxembourg, Rosa, 104 Klee, Paul, 109 Kleist, Ewald von, 123 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 69–71, Kleist, Heinrich von, 44, 70 76, 77, 139, 140 Hermannschlacht, 44, 70 Machiavelli, Niccolò (and Prince of Homburg, 192 Machiavellism), 59, 79, 84, 87, 88, Knudsen, Jonathan B., 48, 50 95, 96 Kocka, Jürgen, 183 Madagascar, 155 Kohl, Helmut, 34, 172, 175, 187, Major, John, 54 194, 196–97, 204, 205, 208 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 15, 154 Kohler, George Y., 166 Mann, Golo, 71, 92, 105, 168 Kommerell, Max, 22 Mann, Heinrich, 98, 107 Königgrätz (Battle), 9, 73, 78, 86, 87, Mann, Thomas, 4, 22, 33, 67, 98, 94, 111, 115, 118, 119, 130 106–8, 121, 124, 126, 148, 184, Kosovo Crisis, 141 190 Kotzebue, August von, 77, 213 Buddenbrooks, 108 Kraus, Karl, 120 Gedanken im Kriege, 21, 121 Kristallnacht, 152 Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Kronberger, Maximilian, 127 20–21, 103–4, 107–8 Krüger, Hermann, 74, 75 To the Editor of Common Sense, 108, Krupp, Bertha, 112 109 Krupp, Gustav von Bohlen und Germany and the Germans, 108–9 Halbach, 112 Doctor Faustus, 107

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224343 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:52:52:52 AAMM 244  INDEX

Mannheim, Karl, 42 Morgenrot (film), 125 Manteuffel, Otto von, 24 Morgenthau Plan, 88 Maria Theresa (Austrian Empress), 80 Moroccan Crisis (1911), 94 Marx, Karl, 7, 60–64, 106, 186 Moser, Friedrich Karl von, 83 1844 Manuscripts, 61–62, 63, 74 Möser, Justus, 4, 46–50, 53, 57 The German Ideology, 61, 62 Moses, A. Dirk, 139, 175, 186 Critique of the Gotha Program, Müller, Georg Alexander von, 147 62–63, 104 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, 143, 179 Marxism, 4, 60–64, 94, 135, 132, 135, 138 Napoleon I (Bonaparte), 10, 11, 17, Mason, Tim, 15 75, 78, 83 Materialism versus Ideology, 2–3, Napoleon III, 118 60–61, 110–17, 189 Narration and Narrative Theory, 1, 2, McGillicuddy, Áine, 86 5, 11, 12, 43, 48, 55, 61, 68, 72, Meinecke, Friedrich, 5, 9–13, 33–34, 104, 123, 128, 131, 132–42, 145, 54, 75, 77, 80, 81–102, 105, 106, 148–49, 156, 170, 192, 203, 211– 107, 114, 128, 136, 143, 190 12. See also Historical events Cosmopolitanism and the National Naumann, Max, 163 State, 9, 20, 22, 34, 36, 82–84, Neues Deutschland, 67 95 Nicholas II (Russian Czar), 129 Machiavellism, 9, 17, 34, 48, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 26, 65, 68, 79–80, 84–85, 88–89, 94, 106, 108, 124, 192 95–96 The Birth of Tragedy and The Case Historism, 9, 23, 46, 47–49, of Wagner, 124 55–58, 82, 97 On the Use and Abuse of History for The German Catastrophe, 9–11, 17, Life, 42 19–20, 49, 97–102 The Genealogy of Morals, 41–42 Merkel, Angela, 27, 206–7 Nobel prizes, 114, 183–84 Metternich, Prince Klemens Wenzel Nolte, Ernst, 4, 121, 171, 173–74, von, 77 176–81 Militarism, 13, 19, 50, 67, 93, 97, 98, Three Faces of Fascism, 176 100, 110, 112, 117, 118–31 Die faschistischen Bewegungen, Mitscherlich, Alexander and 176 Margarete, 32, 174 Deutschland und der kalte Krieg, Mitterrand, François, 34 181 Moeller, Arthur van den Bruck, 10, The European Civil War, 178–79 125 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich, Moltke, Helmut von (The Older), 86, Freiherr von Hardenberg), 124–25, 94, 118 127 Moltke, Helmut von (The Younger), NSU (National Socialist 94, 122, 123, 125, 145, 146 Underground) and trial, 208–10 Moltke, Kuno von, 130 Nuremberg Laws, 39, 199 Mombauer, Annika, 93, 125 Mommsen, Hans, 173 Oberammergau Passion Play, 164 Mommsen, Theodor, 168 Omdurman (Battle), 121 Mommsen, Wolfgang, J., 182, 186 Orwell, George, 179 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Osnabrück. See Möser Secondat, 22 Otto I (Saxon King), 32, 128

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224444 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:53:52:53 AAMM INDEX  245

Paulsen, Friedrich, 98 Sand, Karl, 77, 213 Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento), Saraste, Pablo Martín, 116 191 Sarrazin, Thilo, 207 Peter III, Russian Czar, 89 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von, 10, 98, 127 Pfitzner, Hans, 190 Schenkendorf, Max von, 75 Pöhl, Karl Otto, 196 Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von, Poland, partition of, 95 179 Popper, Karl, 7, 140–41 Schiller, Friedrich, 37, 41, 70 Population growth, 114 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 112 Pravda, 120 Schlegel, Friedrich, 36, 70 Providence and German success, 4, 14, Schlieffen, Alfred von, 122 16, 71–72, 76, 77, 132–41 Schlieffen Plan, 122–23, 130, 134, Prussia versus Germany, 10–11, 18, 146 24–25, 50–51, 58, 67–68, 70–78, Schmidt, Helmut, 205, 206 83–84, 91–92, 97–98, 102, 121, Schmidt, Helmut Walser, 11, 32 137, 168, 190. See also Bismarck Schopenhauer, Arthur, 44, 106, 124, Pulzer, Peter, 34, 161–63 192 Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth, 190 Quandt, Harald, 127 Schweninger, Ernst, 25 Scott, Walter, 50 Race and the Volk, 13, 20, 26, 34–45, Second Reich (and First World War), 159–70 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 33, 71, Radziwill, Princess Elisabeth, 77 119, 121, 128–29, 143–48 Railways, 114–15 Sedan (Battle), 5, 9, 71, 73, 94, 111, Ranke, Leopold, 4, 6, 16–17, 22, 33, 119, 161 82, 111, 137, 146 Seeley, J. R., 183 The Great Powers, 28, 70 Seven Years’ War, 47, 50 Memoirs of the House of Shakespeare, William, 70 Brandenburg and History of Sheehan, James J., 158 Prussia, 70–71, 80 Silesia (and “Silesian Days”), 80, 146, Rath, Ernst vom, 152 194 Rathenau, Walther, 100, 109, 163 Smith, Helmut Walser, 11, 32 Reagan, Ronald, 175 Social Darwinism, 81, 94 Reuter, Ernst, 200 Soccer (and sport as narrative), 101, Ritter, Gerhard, 105, 151 184–85, 186, 190–92, 193, 213 Röhl, John, 94, 116 Solferino (Battle), 118 Rommel, Erwin, 127 Sommer, Theo, 186 Roon, Albrecht von, 72, 115 Sonderweg, 14, 183–86 Roosevelt, Theodore, 129 Soros, George, 198–99 Rosenberg, Alfred, 26, 105, 169, Sösemann, Bernd, 121 191 Spengler, Oswald, 105, 126 Rosh, Lea, 205–6 Stabreim, 37 Rother, Rainer, 15, 16 Stalin, Joseph, and Stalinism, 87–88, Rothfels, Hans, 105 120, 121, 138, 177–78, 194, 201 Rothschilds, 114 Stasi, 184, 202–3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 95 Stauffenberg, Claus von, 127–29 Rubinstein, Josef, 160 Stauffenberg, Berthold von, 127 Russian Revolution, 178 Stein, Freiherr vom, 18, 198, 199

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224545 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:53:52:53 AAMM 246  INDEX

Stern, Fritz, 4, 15, 100, 158, 166, Unsere Aussichten (1879 antisemitic 187, 193, 211 article), 161, 162, 166–68 The Politics of Cultural Despair, 10, Troeltsch, Ernst, 99 19, 23 Trotha, Lothar von, 122 Gold and Iron, 71, 87, 114–17, 119 de Valera, Éamon. 52 Dreams and Delusions, 100, 120, Varus and Varusschlacht. See 163 Hermannschlacht The Goldhagen Controversy, 15, Versailles, 12, 18, 29, 72, 74, 86, 115, 135, 154 116 Five Germanys I have known, 98, Versailles, Treaty of, 15, 142, 143, 156, 187, 202, 211, 213 150–51, 173 Sternberger, Dolf, 186, 195 The Vertriebenen, 194 Strauss, Franz Joseph, 173 Victoria (British Queen), 92, 130 Streicher, Julius, 169 Victoria (German Empress, wife of Stunde Null, 12, 139 Friedrich III), 92 Der Stürmer, 167 Volk re Nation and State, 13, 16, Stürmer, Michael, 105–6, 171, 172, 18–20, 22–24, 28–45, 49, 69–80, 183, 185 98–99, 104, 162–63, 181, 185, Sudetenland, 194–95 187, 189–90, 206–10, 212–13 Supersessionism, 167 Volksgemeinschaft, 22, 38, 53, 128 Sybel, Hein rich von, 73 Volkssturm, 126 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 22, Taboos in German history and culture, 70, 88 33, 38, 169–70, 174, 175, 198, 201, 205, 210, 211 Wagner, Cosima, 39, 113, 151, Taylor, A. J. P., 25, 86, 92, 118 160–61 Teleology (and Telos), 6, 7, 11–12, Wagner, Richard, 4, 20, 26, 30, 31, 58, 74, 77, 106, 131, 132–37, 34, 41, 65, 124, 125–26, 138–39, 139–42, 162, 188 151–52, 160–61, 165, 167, 191, Thatcher, Margaret, 198, 213 196, 206, 210 Theresienstadt, 155 Prose Third Reich, 106, 127–28, 142, The Vaterlandsverein Speech, 19 148–50, 152–58, 169, 171–87, Jesus of Nazareth, 40 204–5, 210–12. See also Hitler and The Wibelungen, 40 Historians’ Debate Jewishness in Music, 40, 151, Thirty Years’ War, 73. See also 162 Westphalia A Communication to My Tieck, Johann Ludwig, 70 Friends, 37 Tolstoy, Leo, 77 Opera and Drama, 37 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 4, 6, 26, 33, German Art and German Polity, 44, 69–70, 75, 77, 94–95, 100, 21 157 What is German? 29, 42 Treitschke’s History of Germany in Religion and Art, 44 the Nineteenth Century, 19, 70, Know Thyself, 39 75–78, 94, 111–12 Letters, 19, 160, 163 His Doctrine of German Destiny, Operas 33, 78–79, 125 Siegfried, 37, 41, 43, 130, 192

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224646 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:53:52:53 AAMM INDEX  247

Tristan und Isolde, 124–25 Widdmann, Arno, 206 Die Meistersinger, 13, 30, 108, Wilhelm I (Hohenzollern, Prussian 138 King and German Kaiser), 24, Götterdämmerung, 108, 130–31 72, 74, 76–77, 90, 91, 92, 116, Parsifal, 44, 65, 210 117 Wagner, Wieland, 138–39 Wilhelm II (Hohenzollern, German Walser, Martin, 210–11 Kaiser), 41, 90, 92–94, 103, 112, Wandlitz, 201 116, 119–22, 123, 129–31, 145– Wannsee Conference, 12, 181 46, 162, 212 Wars of Liberation (1813), 3, 18, 104, William of Orange (Dutch Prince and 184 English King), 69, 70, 76 Waterloo (Battle), 118 Wills, Garry, 159, 165 Weber, Max, 99, 105, 111 Winckelmann Johann, 22 Weimar Republic, 5, 11, 21, 100, 109, Wolin, Richard, 127 143 Wulff, Christian, 206 Weizmann, Chaim, 180 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 139 Yorck, Johann David, 184 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 118 Die Wende, 201–2 Zedlitz-Trützschler, Count, 122 Westphalia, Treaty of, 47, 143 Die Zeit, 171

EEmslie.inddmslie.indd 224747 11/17/2015/17/2015 88:52:53:52:53 AAMM erman history never loses its fascination. It is exceptionally G e rman History S p e culations on varied, contradictory, and raises difficult problems for the historian. In a material sense, there have been a great many Germanies, so that it was long unclear what “Germany” would amount to geopolitically, while German intellectuals fought constantly over the idea(s) of Germany. Provocative and spiced with humor, Speculations tackles Germany’s successes and catastrophes in view of this fraught relationship between material reality and ideology. Concentrating on the period from Friedrich the Great until today, the book is less a conventional history than an extended essay. It moves freely within the chosen period, and because of its cultural studies disposition, devotes a great deal of attention to German writers, artists, and intellectuals. It looks at the ways in which German historians have attempted to come to terms with their own varying notions of nation, culture, and race. An underlying philosophical assumption is that history is not one dominant narrative but a struggle between competing, simultaneous narratives: like all those Germanies of the past and of the mind, history is plural. Barry Emslie pursues this agenda into the present, arguing that there has been an unprecedented qualitative change in the Federal Republic in the quarter century since unification. Emsli e Barry Emslie lives and teaches in Berlin. He is the author Speculations on of Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (Boydell Press, 2010) and Narrative and Truth: An Ethical and Dynamic Paradigm for the German History Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). C u l t u r e a n d t h e S t a t e

Cover image: Hermann Wislicenus, Germania oder Die Wacht am Rhein (Germania or the Watch on the Rhine), 1873. Courtesy of the German Historical Museum, Berlin. Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Barry Emslie