The Inverted Nationalism of Hugo Ball's Critique Of

INTRODUCTION THE INVERTED NATIONALISM OF HUGO BALL'S CRITIQUE OF THE GERMAN INTELLIGENTSIA ANSON RABINBACH I HUGO BALL'S Critique of the German Intelligentsia is simulta- neously a historical document and a provocation. A passionate in- dictment of the German intelligentsia for its chauvinism in the First World War, the Critique is also an extraordinary instance of the messianic politics that inaugurated our epoch. Above all, it is the consummate performance of an extraordinary career that, in only a few years, took Ball from Munich's expressionist avant-garde to the founding of Dada in Zurich, to theological anarchism and antiwar politics in Bern, and, only a year and a half later, to the spiritual refuge of the Catholic faith. First published in January 1919, the Critique is on one level a historical account of how German religion and philosophy conspired with dynastic absolutism and militarism to produce the disastrous betrayal of August 1914. But in esoteric counterpoint to this prosaic and critical dimension is Ball's theological politics. On this level the book culminates in an apocalyptic vision in which Bakuninist anarchism, French romantic poetry, and chiliastic revolt all combine to restore the originary ideal of Christian justice sacri- ficed to throne and altar. Catastrophe and anticipation thus fuel the Critique's mood of rhetorical urgency and its ultimate desire for a final conflagration of the German "spirit" that would usher in a new order of things. Reading it from the perspective of German unification and the vili INTRODUCTION anti-utopian revolutions of our own time, we are provoked to reex- amine the Critique's messianism as well as the arguments Ball assembled against what he regarded as a singularly negative heri- tage of intellectual authoritarianism. Ball's astonishingly accurate prediction that the failure of German intellectuals to grasp the reasons for the defeat of 1918 would have disastrous consequences for the postwar era is prescient enough to warrant taking his indict- ment seriously. Nor have the Critique's central themes—the cultural and political distinctiveness of the German intelligentsia, the corrupting influence of Germany's intellectual isolation from West- ern Europe and America, its lack of a democratic ethos—lost any of their relevance. Considered obsolete only a few years ago, the question of whether Germany will gradually return to its traditional role as a Central European "land of the middle" and perhaps even- tually abandon its identification with Anglo-Saxon democratic culture is once again a constant journalistic theme. The postwar era (1945-89) is increasingly described as a closed chapter, and four decades of political division are now often retroactively judged as having had a corrosive and mutually inhibiting influence on Ger- many's political culture, East and West. Even the much praised democratic stability and lack of a strong nationalist or xenophobic fringe, characteristic at least of the Federal Republic since the 1960s, can no longer be taken for granted. Certainly the Critique's single-mindedly theocentric approach to German history has not withstood the decades of historical debate. Ball's assertion that Lutheranism and classical idealist philosophy conspired to sanction subservience to autocratic politics by split- ting conscience from blind obedience may have been an original insight in 1919. But it has long since become a dubious historio- graphical cliché. Nor is Ball's revolutionary insurrectionism, the essence of which is a radical revival of romantic and Catholic spiri- tuality, entirely consistent with his political enthusiasms for the Entente and Wilsonian democracy. The political arguments on be- half of the Anglo-American and Anglo-French achievement of hu- man rights are often betrayed by the "fin du fin" rhetoric, queru- lousness, and anti-Semitism of the Critique. Throughout the text the catastrophe of the war is identified with a German spiritual apocalypse, and this spiritual apocalypse—from Luther to Marx— with the catastrophe of thought that led to the war. Ball's insistence on equivalence here is highly ambiguous. We might apply Jacques Derrida's ironic comment that the apocalyptic tone does not easily INTRODUCTION ix allow us to disentangle "who, or what, is directed to whom" since it is precisely this uncertainty about who is speaking or to whom that makes it apocalyptic. The presumed linkage of anarchism, democracy, antidynastic politics, the language of redemption, and the metaphysics or "onto-theology" of a historical catastrophe bears witness to the confusions and fissures in the mentality of the revolutionary antiwar opposition in Swiss exile. Finally, though the Critique has much in common with other Jewish and Protestant esoteric and metaphysical doctrines of catastrophe and redemption typical of that historical moment, Ball's curious brew of Catholic messianism is marred by a degree of anti-Semitism that, for reasons that will become clear shortly, was either ignored or unacknow- ledged in the considerable scholarly writing on Ball that has appeared since his death in 1927.1 Ball himself repudiated much of the Critique after his reconver- sion to Catholicism in 1920 and in 1924 published a heavily revised version reflecting his unpolitical Catholicism under the title Die Folgen dei Reformation. In 1970 an expurgated and sanitized edi- tion of the Critique appeared in Munich, and this adulterated version of the book continues to be the only one available in the German language today. Thus this first English language transla- tion has considerable scholarly significance insofar as it contains the excised passages, making it the first authentic version of the Critique since it appeared under the imprimatur of the Freie Verlag in Bern in 1919. The restored passages reveal that the anti-Semitism of the original text was not merely an embarrassment, but that Ball's Judeophobia was integral to his rejection of the war, the German revolution, and the nationalist intelligentsia of the late Wilhelminian era. With these passages reinstated, what emerges is not merely a complete text, but also the highly problematic and ambiguous relationship of the Critique to the political culture of the democratic West and the very German ideology that it purports to criticize. II Hugo Ball wrote The Critique of the German Intelligentsia when he was thirty-three years old. Completed with a rapidity that aston- ished even its author, the book was conceived in the fall of 1917 and published in January 1919. The circumstances of the Critique's genesis are not inconsistent with a life full of quixotic reversals, X INTRODUCTION sudden leaps, and steep emotional ascents and descents. Of Ball's intellectual biography, it might be said that the only thing that is predictable is its disjointedness. By 1919 Ball had distinguished himself as a leading Expressionist poet and playwright, as a theore- tician of the Munich avant-garde, as the founder of Zurich Dada, and as an indefatigable antiwar publicist. The Critique was his first venture into sustained intellectual activity, an attempt to harmo- nize his political opposition to the war with his odd philosophical blend of radical anarchism and Catholic gnosticism. The Critique can thus be viewed as a point on the strange artistic and political itinerary that finally ended in August 1920 in the village chapel of Agnuzzo, where Ball found what he called the "solution to the question of guilt," returning thereafter to the religious orthodoxy that he sustained until his premature death in 1927.2 Born in the town of Pirmasens in the Rhineland Palatinate in 1886, Ball grew up in a large and devoutly religious Catholic family. His lifelong companion Emmy Hennings, whom he met in 1913, recalled that Ball's mother taught him only "to stand, to walk, and to pray."3 As a student in Heidelberg and later in Munich, Ball was scornful of the strictures and dogmas of his childhood, as is evident in his enthusiastic embrace of Nietzsche, the subject of his never completed dissertation written at the University of Munich in 1910.4 Somewhat mistitled "Nietzsche in Basel: A Polemic," it presents the view of the philosopher then prevalent among the Munich avant-garde. Nietzsche stood for the "emancipation of the passions, of the drives, of nature, including a correspondingly magnificent subjugation through art."5 However much Ball sought to subordi- nate conventional morality to what he called Nietzsche's aesthetic "cosmodicy," he nonetheless remained, psychologically speaking, a moralist, not least in his assertion that a new type of "philosopher- artist" was to be the harbinger of the regeneration of German culture.6 The work on Nietzsche was casually abandoned in Ball's abrupt departure from Munich in the summer of 1910, a move apparently occasioned by the seductions of the theater and Berlin society. Such abrupt exits would become a distinctive character trait from that point on: bolting the scene, for whatever reason, was Ball's trade- mark. During the fall of 1910 he studied briefly in Berlin with Max Reinhardt who noted his gifts as a director and dramaturge. In 1912, after a short stint as director of the State Theater in Plauen, Ball returned to Munich, where he frequented Expressionist circles and INTRODUCTION xi wrote poems and prose for Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion, Der Sturm, and other radical journals. In October 1913, together with the playwright and poet Hans Leybold, Ball founded Die Revolution, which carried on its masthead Erich Muhsam's slogan "Lasst uns chao- tisch sein" (Let us be chaotic). Die Revolution proclaimed its opposition to everything in the German cultural scene, and, predictably, its first number was confiscated by the authorities because of Ball's irreverent poem, "The Hangman." Not untypically, the short-lived journal extolled Dionysian destructivity and the negation of all values, but in contrast to the other journals of the expressionist avant-garde, Ball's writings also emphasized spiritual regeneration through the "inner necessity" of the works of the ascetic artist.

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