CHAPTER FIVE
GERMANS AND GREEKS
The Greeks are what we were;
they are what we shall become again.
- - - Schiller1
Like Mozart and his librettists, many German writers and philosophers were drawn to the
Enlightenment by virtue of its liberating potential, but they were also frightened by the threat to
order it posed. German intellectuals sought to benefit from the Enlightenment but also to tame it,
and sought to do so within a politically fragmented Germany ruled for the most part by
conservative aristocrats. For both reasons they turned to lost traditions, which they sought to
discover and bring back to life. This was manifest first and most importantly in the German
obsession with ancient Greece but also in the Grimm brothers' turn to folk culture in the hope of
recapturing wisdom from the past, the search for the Aryan prototype for Christianity by
religious scholars and philologists, the proliferation of stories, poetry and frescoes based on the
medieval Nibelungenlied, Wagner's appropriation of the Edda for the theme of his Ring Cycle
and Nietzsche's invocation of the Persian Zarathustra for his culminating philosophical work.2
For nineteenth century Germans, myths were templates for building national identities that
would transcend regional, religious and class differences.
For those who turned to Greece, the polis, but especially Athens, was imagined as a
model for a creative and progressive German nation. Nostalgia for imagined pasts was a
continent-wide phenomenon, as intellectuals everywhere sought to cope with the consequences
of the Napoleonic Wars and later, of industrialization.3 The deeply-felt German affinity for a
highly idealized Greece must also be understood as a response to Germany’s late political,
economic and cultural development and the sense of inferiority it engendered. In practice, the
turn to Golden Age Greece would have profoundly negative consequences for Germany’s
political development.
GREECE REDISCOVERED
Early modern Europe was largely ignorant of ancient Greece. The burning of the library
in Alexandria (417 BCE) destroyed much literature, including many Greek tragedies that remain
lost. We have only seven of Sophocles 123 known plays. Greek writings came back to Europe
via the Arabs, and often in Arabic translation. Making use of these texts, the Renaissance
revived an interest in tragedy. The first staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus took place in 1585 in
Vicenza.4 Monteverdi wrote his two operas with Greek mythological story lines in the first half
of the seventeenth century. Opera was intended to reproduce tragedy on the questionable
assumption that tragic characters sang their lines.5 Chapman, and later Pope, produced good
Engliish translations of Homer and by the nineteenth century translating Homer had become
something of a national pastime. Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides was central to his
philosophical development. But it was not until the nineteenth century that Greek texts become a
core component of the English university curriculum.6
In the United States, there was a general interest in Athens beginning in the late
eighteenth century, much of it connected to the country’s experiment with democracy. If the
Pilgrims envisaged their colony as the new Jerusalem, democrats understood America to be the
new Athens. This belief was reflected in place names and in the Greek Revival in architecture.
The founding fathers were nevertheless more influenced by Rome and English writings and
political practices. They rejected the Athenian model because they opposed direct democracy,
2
and thought the experience of a small city state not very relevant to the vast expanse of the
Thirteen Colonies. Following British practice, Latin and Greek nevertheless became an
important subjects in the educational system.7
In Germany, Graecophilia reached a level unequaled anywhere else. The first German
translations of Homer appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. The poet and
playwright Hölderlin authored widely read translations of Sophocles in the early nineteenth
century. The Germans were unique in their efforts to rejuvenate tragedy, not as a genre, but as a
means of nourishing ethical and political sensibilities appropriate to the time. This project had
its roots in Kant but really began with the publication in 1795 of Schelling’s Letters on
Dogmatism and Criticism. Tragedy became the vehicle by which a succession of German
philosophers, among them Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin and Arendt sought
to probe such questions as the meaning of history, the nature and foundation of ethics, the role of
Germany, and often, the relationships among the three.
A more popular fascination with Greece spread in Germany. It fed on a highly idealized
understanding of that culture and its artistic creations as the product of an era in which thought
and feeling, and reason and expression were in harmony. This image of Greece was propagated
by Johann Winckelmann, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich August Wolff, Wilhelm von Humboldt
and Friedrich Schleiermacher. They envisaged Greek art and literature as the foundation of
Bildung, by came to signify education and self-improvement in its broadest sense. In 1792,
Humboldt, a humanist and civil servant, wrote to Greek philologist Friedrich August Wolf that
"no other people combined such simplicity and naturalness with so much culture, and no other
possessed such persevering energy and sensitivity for every impression."8 Many Germans of his
and the next generation sought to discover themselves through their intimate involvement with
3
Greek culture. This project of Menscheit in Altertum was expected to overcome social divisions
and unite Germans by encouraging them to understand themselves in terms of the totality of their
faculties rather than as members of a particular class or estate.9 The fascination with Greece -especially in Prussia and Protestant Germany -- continued through the nineteenth century,
despite efforts by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt to debunk the highly romanticized
understanding that had taken root. It reached its zenith with Friedrich Schliemann’s possible
discovery of Troy in 1871, which captured the imagination of the entire country, and was taken
as further evidence of Germany’s scientific preeminence.10 Philhellenism was initially the
preserve of the elite, but was gradually diffused through the population by the educational
system. It became a defining feature of middle class intellectuals [Bildungsbürgertum] and
considered part of the national patrimony. As philhellenism spread and became linked to state
institutions it became more conventional and conservative in its aims. By mid-century it was
something of a tyrannical trope, whose supporters used their control of the educational system
and cultural institutions to marginalize critics and maintain their hegemonic position.11
Germans were different from British and Americans in their fascination with tragedy and
the degree to which it and ancient Athens became central to their efforts to construct a national
identity. Following the post-Napoleonic political repression in Prussia, ancient Greece also
became the foundation on which alienated intellectuals attempted to construct an alternative
cultural identity. In this chapter, I ask why Germans became so fascinated with Greece, and
Greek tragedy in particular. I examine the political consequences of this involvement for
Germany and Europe. In doing so, I distinguish philosophers from publicists, as their motives
and influence, while they overlap considerably, are best analyzed separately. With the
philosophers, the consequences of their thought are diverse and cross-cutting. On the positive
4
side, the development of German philosophy and its progression from Kant through Heidegger,
and beyond to Gadamer, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas represents one of the great intellectual
achievements of the modern era. This philosophical edifice may nevertheless have had negative
political consequences for Germany. It provided the intellectual justification for what German
historians refer to as the special path [Sonderweg] of Germany’s political development in the
nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and subsequently helped to alienate German
intellectuals from the Weimar Republic. The German fascination with tragedy illustrates one of
the most powerful truths of this ancient genre. Greek playwrights knew that the world is bigger
than we are, that its dynamics will always remain to a large degree opaque and that the
consequences of our actions are accordingly unpredictable. Like Oedipus, we never know when
we are at a critical crossroads, or when actions, whose consequences appear transparent, will
produce outcomes diametrically opposed to those intended. It is no stretch of the imagination to
read the German fascination with tragedy as a tragedy.
In considering the unfortunate and unintended consequences of Germany’s intellectual
trajectory in the nineteenth century, I want to disassociate myself from those scholars and critics
who have launched a broader critique against modernity. Leo Strauss, a conservative political
theorist, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and postmodernist philosopher and literary theorist Jean
François Lyotard, attribute the worst political horrors of the twentieth century to the
Enlightenment and its unqualified faith in reason. Such a sweeping accusation reflects the
ideological assumptions of these authors more than it represents any reasoned argument. It
exaggerates the triumph of reason over tradition and superstition and ignores the many benefits
of reason, including modern science and medicine, economic development and the gradual
spread of racial, religious and gender tolerance.
5
My argument is different and, I hope, more nuanced. Some of the Germans in question,
most notably Kant, are prominently associated with the Enlightenment but also with the
emerging counter-Enlightenment. Others, like Schelling and Hölderlin, are considered leading
figures of the counter-Enlightenment.12 The Enlightenment elevated reason as the source of all
knowledge and science as its most perfect expression. History, art, poetry and the world of
feeling were deeply suspect and dismissed as props of the church and aristocracy.13 Voltaire,
following a line of argument that stretched back to Plato, condemned poetry as a form of
dangerous “figurative” language.14 The counter-Enlightenment portrayed reason as a pernicious
force that divided man from nature and sought to reverse this trend by restoring respect for
feeling and art as its principal form of expression. Some of its principal advocates envisaged art
as providing an absolute standard of beauty and the basis for the individual cultivation of the
self. For Kant, the experience of beauty is one in which imagination is harmonized with
understanding without the intervention or constraint of concepts, including those concerning the
moral good.15
Much of the German philosophical enterprise from Kant on must be understood as a
reaction to science and the skepticism and materialism it encouraged. Schelling, Fichte and
Hegel refused to concede that everything outside of science was mere poetry and a lesser form of
knowledge. Inspired by Rousseau and Jacobi, Novalis lauds “feeling” as a mode of
consciousness distinct from conceptual knowledge and suggests that the negation of reflection
can put us on the path to being.16 Many of these philosophers and writers rejected the emerging
model of science as the benchmark for knowledge, developed the alternative conception of
Geisteswissenschaft -- which became the “Humanities” or “interpretative sciences” of the
English speaking world. They sought to provide philosophical foundations for it as well as
6
appropriate standards for its evaluation. This was a goal of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and
Schiller’s essay on “Aesthetic Education of Man” and a major theme of Hegel’s
Phenomenology.17 “Only when philosophy and metaphysics got into crisis in relation to the
cognitive claims of the sciences,” Hans-George Gadamer observes, did philosophers have the
incentive to “discover again their proximity to poetry which they had denied since Plato.”18
I am not the first to see a dark side to German philosophical idealism. German cultural
historians – most notably Fritz Stern -- see a connection between German idealism and the later
success of fascism. German idealism drew on earlier esthetic ideals and moral concerns. It
emphasized the cultivation of Innerlichkeit [inner development] and did not encourage political
participation or even concern with political issues and outcomes.19 Germany’s intellectual elite
“tended to become estranged from reality and disdainful of it. It lost the power to deal with
practical matters in practical terms."20 Fritz Ringer maintains that German universities fanned
this sense of idealistic insulation and with it, an opposition to change on the grounds that it
represented a moral decline.21 Several generations of generally apolitical Germans expressed
alarm over the economic and social changes associated with modernity, among them Thomas
Mann, Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Naumann and Christian Morgenstern. For some Germans, this
sense of alienation helped to nourish an anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic right-wing discourse.22
The negative consequences of German idealism are all the more poignant when we recognize the
extraordinary intellectual contribution of German idealism and its offshoots. The influence of
German idealism has been so profound and influential in how we have come to think about the
modern world that it is almost impossible to imagine ourselves and our world in its absence.
The great innovator and founder of the Idealist tradition was Kant, who straddled the
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. He employed reason in the form of powerful,
7
logical arguments to demonstrate its inability to understand our relation to the universal, which
he thought human beings nevertheless struggled to comprehend. However, he also attributed
great power to beauty and nature and their ability to shape the self through their apprehension by
non-reflexive means; the intuition and creativity they inspired could lead to understandings
inaccessible to the theoretical sciences. Reason and feeling, two parts of the self, could be
brought into harmony and provide a firm basis for morality. This belief was based on the more
fundamental assumption of an isomorphism between man and nature and, as the Critique of
Judgment suggested, a purposive principle in nature. Kant and his successors struggled to find
new foundations for ethics, sought them in human drives and capabilities that went beyond
logical inquiry, brought nature and beauty back into the purview of philosophy, and provided a
novel way of understanding the Greeks and Western history more generally. Marxism, Freudian
psychiatry and existentialism are direct outgrowths of German idealism or dependent on them in
important ways.
As my subject is complex, I adopt a layered approach. Each layer captures one reason for
German interest in Greek tragedy and ancient Greece more generally. I begin with philosophy as
an ethical project, then explore political motivations, and finally explain the turn to tragedy with
reference to Germany’s situation as a late cultural developer. These three layers might also be
conceived as concentric circles. The inner most circle encompasses a small group of literary
figures and philosophers and their recondite ethical concerns. The next circle out includes the
wider class of German intellectuals and the roles they aspired to play in the states in which they
resided, but above all in Prussia. The outermost circle situates Germany in Europe and considers
its comparative position. All three are connected by the theme of tragedy and the efforts of
8
intellectuals to construct identities for themselves and their states considered appropriate to the
rapidly modernizing world of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Analysis at these three levels helps to explain the appearance in Germany of idealism and
its implications for Germany's political development. It also encourages thoughts about the
relationship between agency and structure in the construction of identity. The German turn to
tragedy, I argue, was in the first instance a response to a philosophical-ethical problem, and the
work of agency. In the absence of Kant, German idealism might have been stillborn, or certainly
would not have developed in the manner it did. Even without Kant, German writers and
thinkers, reacting to the French Revolution and its aftermath, would have been drawn to the
counter-Enlightenment and its rejection of reason as a more appropriate guide for human
behavior and social relations. Some German historians consider their country’s political
development unique and a deviation from the pattern established by Britain, France and the
countries of northwest Europe. There are many reasons for wariness about the “Sonderweg”
thesis, among them the dubious assumption that there was a single pattern followed by
Germany’s neighbors.23 In A Cultural Theory of International Relations, I argue that there was a
pattern to which Germany conformed, that scholars have missed because they have compared
Germany to the countries of Western Europe. If we look east instead, it is apparent that the
rejection of Western values by many intellectuals was a typical response of late developers, a
situation Germany shared with Russia and Japan.24 So it might be argued that the general
direction taken by German philosophy, was a predictable response to a specific politicaleconomic condition. Agency nevertheless played an important role, giving German philosophy
its specific content and giving rise to a particular Weltanschauung. German intellectuals
confronted choices that were in no way predetermined by circumstances. Different German
9
intellectuals made different choices, and had more of them made the right choices the German
tragedy might have been averted.
THE GREEKS AND PHILOSOPHY
Like almost everything else in modern German thought, theorizing about tragedy
developed in response to Kant. The Königsberg philosopher never mentioned the word tragedy,
but made it imperative for his successors to tackle the subject. His work pointed to the end of the
philosophy of the metaphysical and made tragedy appear an appropriate vehicle for reflection.
Subsequent German philosophers envisaged tragedy as a means of overcoming metaphysics,
understanding the course of history and preparing the way for cultural revolution. These
philosophers also theorized about tragedy itself and sought to evaluate it as an art form. Hegel,
for whom tragedy was central, wrote about it in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) and
Lectures on Fine Art (1823-29).
Art versus Philosophy: Kant’s philosophical project was above all a response to Humean
skepticism. He sought to provide an alternative foundation for ethics that did not rely on telos or
natural law. His starting point was the assumption that it was impossible for us to cognize our
relation to the universal, but we could grasp our moral need for understanding. Human nature
compels us to seek universals. We find them through faith, which is reason’s form of moral
thinking and allows us to affirm that which is real but inaccessible to theoretical cognition. Kant
effectively challenged a philosophical tradition that had dominated Western thought since Plato
had substituted philosophy for literature as the appropriate vehicle for exploring the human
condition. Kant restored literature’s role, giving it coequal status with philosophy.
10
Kant's successors sought to build on his belief about the isomorphism between the world
and the self by providing firmer foundations for the noumenal self and its relationship to the
empirical world. The attempt to overcome Kantian dualism – noumenal and empirical selves -led some philosophers and writers to aesthetics in the hope it would serve as an effective bridge
between the worlds of spirit and matter. Novalis and Hölderlin took this road, as did Schelling
and Hegel – all of whom were fellow students at the Tübingen Stift [theological seminary].25
Hölderlin and Novalis imagined a level of being prior to consciousness in which subject and
object are not yet divided. This level of being was not accessible to consciousness, only to art.
Artistic genius, which they thought arose directly from our being, was therefore the true route to
knowledge. Kant emphasized the role of genius in this connection in his Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment.26 Art opens up a realm to us that is unavailable to reflection.
Hegel alone among the German philosophers would resist this move, insisting that only
abstract reflection can generate moral truths. Hegel reversed Kant, who had defined freedom and
its limitations in terms of the self's rational understanding of the noumenal world. For Hegel, it
was the empirical world that provided this guidance. In his imagined polis, ethical life
[Sittlichkeit] arose from civic interaction because the Greek world was still naïve in the sense
that it was not darkened by the shadows of individual self-reflection in search of meaning and
identity.27
Schelling and Kierkegaard followed Kant’s lead, as did Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) – which precede Hegel’s first major
publication by a decade – reintroduced tragic art into the philosophical discourse. Schelling
describes tragedy as the highest form of art and suggests that philosophy can be transformed
through engagement with it. His System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), speaks of
11
philosophy flowing back into the supreme art of poesy.28 Nietzsche would use the same trope in
the Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he wrote that "Philosophy, which was born and nurtured by
poesy in the childhood of science, and which accompanied all those sciences and brought them
into maturity and completion in their sundry individual streams, now flows back into the
universal ocean of poesy, whence they all originated.”29 His approach to tragedy stands in sharp
contrast to W. A. Schlegel and the British classicist George Grote, both of whom linked tragedy
to democratic politics.30
Kant’s turn to literature occurred within his broader engagement with problem of
judgment, specifically ethical judgment. He describes art as an expression of the “free play”
inherent in our nature. Here Kant takes a cue from Aristotle, who understood art as a natural
impulse and source of learning. For Aristotle, however, art is defined by its mimetic character; it
is an imitation and distillation of real life experience, although it also draws on other natural
impulses like harmony and rhythm.31 For Kant, as for Aristotle, art is education in the most
fundamental sense, and something only accessible to ethical beings. Kant was nevertheless
committed to renegotiating the relationship of the truths generated by art and science. This
required the liberation of the imagination from any rules governing particular art forms. To
reveal truths about the world art must go beyond mimesis to poisēs, the act of creation itself.32
Despite their many differences, Hölderlin, Hegel and Nietzsche follow Kant in their recognition
of the force of art in human affairs. They do not envisage writing, style, performance, pictorial
images and rhythm as recherché academic concerns, but as a fundamental concern of philosophy.
Art and language are media in their own right, that exist beyond and independent of concepts.
They are -- and here I must resort to the kind of tortured language that pervades German
philosophy -- the idiom of the idiom that eludes capture by concepts. Art and language have the
12
ability to speak to us directly. They can lead us to new understandings of the world rather than
merely express known realities.33
Kant's successors understood that philosophy and its concepts were embedded in
language. It encouraged the turn to art as an alernative to language but also the search for a new
language for philosophy. Schelling developed the notion of Bildungstrieb, the impulse to make
art. Hölderlin, who declared that “man is born for art,” initiated this move with his translations
of Sophocles, Greek poetry and an attempt to write his own tragedy.34 He sought to follow the
poetic imperative in the hope that it would reveal the deepest possibilities of language and
thereby enable the rebirth of ethical human beings. Hölderlin aspired to reconstruct the German
language to make it more like Greek, and to speak and write it with the syntax, word order and
sensibility of that language. Although German idealism rejected mimesis, Hölderlin engaged in
what can only be described as a kind of linguistic mimesis, and struggled to bring out the
“oriental” character of Greek life in his written work.35
Romanticism made artistic creation the vehicle of self-discovery, and the artist the model
human being. In 1788, Friedrich Schiller published “Die Götter Greichenlands” [The Gods of
Greece], which quickly become one of his most influential poems. It contrasted the allegedly
happy, harmonious and beautiful world of the Greeks with the somber, materialist and anticreative spirit of the present day.36 In this poem and other writings Schiller propounded the idea
of self-realization through the aesthetic; life and form must come together in the beauty of the
living form [lebende Gestalt].37 “If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice,” he
wrote, “he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only
through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.”38 In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel made a
similar plea: "One has tried for so long to apply mathematics to music and painting; now try it
13
the other way around."39 For both writers, and German idealists more generally, the relationship
of the subject to the world is better mediated by feelings than concepts.
This project finds it most forceful statement in the writings of Nietzsche, where it became
the basis for his radical critique of Christianity and science. As is well known, Nietzsche posits a
sharp opposition between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the non-plastic Dionysian art of
music. The world of the intellect is Apollonian, and, he insists, has dominated Western
philosophy and culture since the time of Socrates. For the Apollonian, everything must be
intelligible to be beautiful. Nietzsche held the triumph of the Apollonian responsible for the ills
of Western culture. It spawned science, defined as “the belief in the explicability of nature and
in knowledge as a panacea.” Science and reason are “seductive distractions” that solidified
knowledge into constraining concepts that stifle creativity. The Enlightenment and nineteenth
century had greatly accelerated this process. For Nietzsche, the task of art is to interrogate and
undermine all perspectives to keep them from hardening into life-restricting concepts. He
advocates a project of liberation to distance oneself from the dominant values of the age, and
with it a self-cancelation [selbstaufhebung] of morals to attempt to regain the instinct of life. He
urges readers to “frolic in images” and recognize that creative life consists of replacing one set of
metaphors and illusions with another. Whereas Aristotle understood art as an imitation of nature,
for Nietzsche, it is “a metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it to overcome it.” Tragic art in
particular, creates and destroys its own illusions. In doing so, it destroys old dreams and makes
way for new ones.40
Nietzsche, like Kant and Schelling, understood that not all knowledge is accessible to
reason. The highest forms of wisdom, he maintained, are achieved by intuition, seeing and
feeling. This is what makes art and music so important. Language and the concepts its spawns
14
can never capture the cosmic symbolism of music because language itself is a symbol. It can
have superficial contact with music -- words can describe its structure, rhythm, instrumentation
and evolution -- but cannot disclose its innermost heart. That speaks to us directly, unmediated
by language.41 Intelligence beyond the intelligible finds expression in emotions, communal
solidarity and “oneness” with nature, all made possible by Dionysian ecstasy. Dionysian art
convinces us of the joy of existence, and we come to this realization by grasping the truth that
lies behind its representation. “We must have art,” Nietzsche implored, “lest we perish of the
truth” – by which he means the sterile truths of philosophy. Perhaps for this reason, Nietzsche
judged his own efforts to discover and convey wisdom to have failed. “How sad,” he lamented,
“that I did not attempt to say what I had to say as a poet.”42
Beauty and Suffering: German philosophy’s interest in tragedy as art was inseparable
from its conception of beauty. Here too Kant is central because he foregrounded the importance
for beauty and its relationship to ethics. Kant conceived of beauty as the non-conceptual
representation of a sensus communis. His successors went beyond him in rejecting bourgeois
conceptions of beauty. Art should not be pleasing and soothing, but arresting and disquieting,
like Greek tragedy. Hegel, whom Heidegger called the last Greek, conceived of beauty as a
finite glimmer of the infinite.43 For Rilke, bourgeois beauty was stifling. It was “nothing but the
beginning of the terror that threatens to destroy us.”44 The emphasis on the darker side of beauty
reaches its apotheosis in Nietzsche, who was initially drawn to Wagner because of the latter’s
use of dissonance in his music. In Birth of Tragedy (1872), whose first edition was dedicated to
the Bayreuth composer, he called for the withdrawal of the beautiful from consideration in art.
To nineteenth century ears, musical dissonance was generally painful, which provided
another link to tragedy. Pain is a central feature of tragedy, and knowledge, as the chorus in
15
Agamemnon affirms, is won through suffering.45 Aristotle was also the first to theorize about
this connection. He argues in his Poetics that tragedy communicates knowledge by
simultaneously evoking fear and pity. This emotional state can bring about a catharsis: a purge
of the soul that restores its balance. Catharsis is a greatly diluted form of praxis, something akin
to an inoculation that gives us immunity by infecting us with a mild and tolerable form of a
pathogen. For Aristotle, the quintessential cathartic moment in tragedy comes when we see
ourselves as the blind Oedipus.46
Hölderlin is the first German to pick up on this theme. He declared true pain inspiring
and tragedy the highest art form because it celebrated suffering. Tragedy brings us knowledge
more through affect than reason, and emotions that take us outside of ourselves. Hölderlin
cryptically observes that Oedipus “has an eye too many perhaps.”47 His extra eye is presumably
his extraordinary intellect that enables him to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and every other
riddle, including that of his identity. His intellect is also his undoing. Only after he becomes
blind, does Oedipus learn from suffering and ultimately able to see and understand in ways he
could not when he had two eyes. Blindness was a time-honored trope in Greek culture and
literature. The Greeks associated light with life, and blindness with death. Blindness is also
associated with wisdom. Perhaps for this reason, Homer is always represented as blind, and the
only person who can see in the underworld is the blind prophet Teresias.
Tragedy and Freedom: Tragedy reveals the power of destiny which in turn points to a
new conception of freedom. Tragedies teach us that we live in a world not of our making, one
we cannot control, but to which we are ultimately answerable. Schelling thought tragedy offered
insight into how human beings can confront the seeming contradiction between freedom and
necessity. His Tenth Letter opens with the observation that mortals succumb to the power of the
16
world but do not do so without a struggle. Like Oedipus, we must be punished for our struggle
against destiny, but that punishment brings recognition of our freedom. “It was by allowing
tragedy to struggle against the superior power of fate that Greek tragedy honored freedom.” By
trying to escape his fate and accepting his punishment when he inevitably fails, man
“demonstrates his freedom precisely through the loss of this freedom.”48
Schelling, Hegel and Nietzsche are all convinced that tragic art can teach us something
essential about our position in a world larger and more complex than any we can conceive. The
quest for understanding is essential because modernity demands new conceptions of self. The
Enlightenment and Romanticism inspired the goal of autonomous individuals who seek to
express their inner selves; people who have thoughts and feelings that distinguish them from
others. It widened the already existing tension between the individual and the group. However,
solitude and solidarity on the one hand, and self-expression and group identification on the other,
are not mutually exclusive binaries. One of the overarching goals of German philosophy was to
elaborate this truth, and its protagonists turned to tragedy because of its ability to frame and
present it so effectively.
History and Ethics: Beginning with Hölderlin, German philosophers considered
themselves to be living in an age of intellectual and ethical crisis. They attributed this crisis to
the failure of metaphysics, which for over two millennia had been the philosophical basis of
Western civilization. Humean skepticism proved the last nail in the coffin of Christian
metaphysics, and the Kantian project was at its core an attempt to find a new foundation for
ethics based on reason and sentiment.49 Kant’s German successors were in awe of his
philosophical innovation, but saw problems with his attempted solution. They sought better
answers and turned to tragedy for their framework.
17
Destiny was critical to their proposed solutions. Greek tragedies are driven by destiny,
but it is the destiny of individual human beings that lie hidden within them. Oedipus is once
again the paradigmatic case. His fate is obvious to us at the outset, in due course to those around
him, and finally, to himself. Warned of his destiny as a young man, he uses his impressive
physical and emotional powers to prevent it, and by virtue of his agency, brings this terrible
prophecy to fruition. The Germans depart from the Greeks in conceiving of destiny in collective
terms. It is not individuals, but history that reveals the collective destiny of a people as it
unfolds. Hegel and Nietzsche employ tragedy in a double sense: to make sense of history, and
through this understanding, to provide a new foundation for ethics. Their starting point is
classical Greece, the last historical moment before philosophy and metaphysics became the
dominant intellectual framework.
Hume and Gibbon -- typical representatives of the Enlightenment -- scorned history as a
record of folly, although they became deeply engaged in its writing . Kant, by contrast,
approached history with reverence because he read it as the story of humanity’s struggles to
uplift itself morally. Hegel followed Kant and was drawn to tragedy as a model for thinking
about historical development. In it he found hidden dynamics that moved social interactions at
every level of analysis. He reasoned that history was driven by the same dialectic of conflict and
recognition, and came to understand it as the efforts of the spirit to recognize its individuality, by
comprehending the universality in terms of which it could come to know and differentiate itself.
Like Schelling, he considered history tragic in its inexorability. Central to its development is the
tragic moment, which always takes the form of a confrontation with death in which the truth is
summoned or revealed. In such crises, the spirit faces the pure singularity exposed by death, and
comes to recognize itself and its potentialities.50
18
Nietzsche interprets tragedy’s relationship to history differently. His starting point is his
well-known distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian. There is a perpetual struggle
between the Dionysian drive for self-forgetfulness and the Apollonian one toward selfindividuation. Classical Greece was unique in its willingness to recognize, even celebrate, the
irresolvable conflict between these drives, and the suffering it causes. Nietzsche interprets
tragedy in terms of them. The drama is the Apollonian concretization of the Dionysian chorus.
The choral parts are the “womb” of the dialogue, while the dialogue represents “dream images”
of the chorus. Tragedy gives citizens the opportunity to look into their own lives. Dreams are
conversations of the soul, while quotidian life is a mere fiction from which art struggles to
awaken us. Nietzsche accuses Euripides and Plato of replacing dreams with logic. The triumph
of reason in the form of philosophy was responsible for the death of tragedy. Thinking man now
suppresses his Dionysian impulses and mistakenly believes that nature is explicable and that
knowledge of it can make human beings masters of their own fate. Nietzsche saw the
Enlightenment and Hegel as the ultimate and most dehumanizing expressions of this
philosophy.51
To renew ourselves, we need to break the hold of the past over the present. We must
eliminate the “slave morality” of Plato and Christianity. Traditional lives must be rejected along
with traditional philosophy. Nietzsche looked to German music to provide a Dionysian
beginning for the rebirth of tragedy. He had what can only be described as a mystical belief in
the power of the German spirit if it could be unshackled. He nevertheless recognized that people
do not want to be separated from their illusions. We cherish illusions that protect us from the
realization that our lives are meaningless. Morality is real in the sense that it helps to make us
the kind of people we are, but it nevertheless rests on indefensible foundations.52
19
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche insists that “The strongest and most evil spirits have so far
done the most to advance humanity; time and again they rekindle the dozing passions – every
ordered society puts the passions to sleep.”53 He envisages nihilism as a positive force,
absolutely necessary to sweep away the existing order. He also sees it as destined by history.
Because the land “is eventually exhausted and the ploughshares of evil must come time and
again.”54 God is dead, and people will come to recognize this truth. When they do, politics,
religion and morality – the building blocks of Western civilization – will crumble. People will
have to find new way of life [Gewohnung], discover new answers to new questions and develop
new philosophies.
Greece as Inkblot: It is readily apparent that the Greece the Germans idealized is not a
Greece that ever existed. It is a world they desperately wanted to bring into being and by doing
so make Germany the modern Athens. Fichte was not alone in defining this project as the means
by which Germany could gain honor in the modern world. There was no single image of this
idealized Greece; multiple and cross-cutting depictions were advanced by German writers.
Enlightenment-inspired reformers like Winckelmann and Humboldt conjured up a rational,
ordered society that would enable human being to discover their full intellectual and artistic
potential. There was a darker, "oriental" Greece, first invoked by Hölderlin, and later elaborated
historically by Jacob Burckhardt. It was not a land of Enlightenment values, but a world of
intense conflict, where constructive and liberating forces struggled with destructive and
tyrannical ones, all within the confines of the family and polis. As Greece was generally
assumed to have given birth to Western civilization, the strangeness of this darker formulation
suggested – and it was intended to – the extent to which we are strangers to ourselves.
20
TRAGEDY AND POLITICS
In pre-revolutionary France, literature was a vehicle for opening up space where the
“discourse of self, blocked by social prohibitions and the absence of an interlocutor,” could
unfold.”55 Something similar happened in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany.
Kant’s Germany was divided into a myriad of political units, most of which were ruled by
unimaginative princes and aristocrats, increasingly jealous of the commercial classes and
downright hostile to intellectuals. The conflict between the old and the new grew more acute by
reason of the French Revolution, French occupation and annexation of the left bank of the Rhine,
Napoleonic conquest of much of Germany and the post-Napoleonic repression by German rules
of reform and reformers.56
I previously alluded to the Kantian project and how it led German philosophers to the
Greeks. They were not the only Germans of the period to look to tragedy for renewal. German
intellectuals did so more generally, and one reason for this had to do with the German aristocracy
and its heavy investment in Baroque architecture and decoration. Many German intellectuals
found it suffocating in form and substance and another expression of the confining political
systems in which they lived. The Baroque was overly decorative, left no space untouched and
drew primarily on religious and pastoral themes. More importantly, it helped to sustain a
discourse that sought to reconcile the population to the aristocratic order. This order and its
artistic projects became increasingly anathema to many progressive intellectuals, and all the
more so after the French Revolution.57 In the first instance, therefore, the rediscovery of Greece
was part of the search for freshness, balance, reason and limits – politically as well as artistically.
This explains why the Greece embraced by German intellectuals was not the historical Greece –
about which little was known in any case– but a highly idealized Greece of reason and “noble
21
simplicity.” Such an image could serve as a model and lodestone for alienated intellectuals
committed to restructuring their society through a cultural and educational revolution.
Many German intellectuals initially welcomed the French Revolution as they considered
it a challenge and opportunity for the “German nation.” Enthusiasm soured when the revolution
gave way to the terror, Napoleonic Empire and French universalism was superseded by cultural
and political imperialism. As the French Revolution claimed to embody Enlightenment
principles, the violent course of the Revolution and its foreign conquests brought about
disenchantment among many German intellectuals with the Enlightenment. Reason, freed from
traditional restraints. appeared to them to have produced the very opposite of a just, ordered and
secure society.58 As we observed in the last chapter, this concern is also evident in Don
Giovanni, which premiered two years before the French Revoluton, and Die Zauberflöte, which
had its first performance two years afterwards.
German intellectuals were increasingly drawn to the Counter-Enlightenment, a catch-all
term for diverse movements and intellectual orientations, including conservatism, critical
philosophy, historicism, idealism, nationalism, revivalism and holism. Counter-enlightenment
thinkers rejected the expectations of the Enlightenment as naive and dangerous; they saw the
world as complex, contradictory, composed of unique social entities in a state of constant flux.
They rejected the Enlightenment conception of a human being as a tabula rasa, and the mere
sum of internal and external forces, and its emphasis on body over soul, reason over imagination
and thought over the senses. They insisted on a holistic understanding that incorporated and
overcame these dichotomies, and understood that individuals and social collectivities alike were
searching to discover and express their authenticity.59 The Counter-Enlightenment had begun in
France before the Revolution and gained a wider European audience through the writings of
22
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It found German spokesmen in the 1770s, among them Hamann,
Herder, and Lavater and Möser, the young Goethe, the dramatists of Sturm und Drang and
Schiller.60 In literature it found expression in the early romanticism (Frühromantik) of Novalis
(Friedrich Hardenberg), the Schlegel brothers and Christian Friedrich Tieck, in religion with
Friedrich Schleiermacher, and in philosophy with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg F. W.
Hegel.
Tragedy captured, or allowed the expression of, the principal concerns of the CounterEnlightenment. It balanced reason with feeling, and physical sensations with cognition, rooted
individuals in their society and its historical development. It conceived of human beings and
their societies as having made fragile, ultimately indefensible and ever evolving accommodations
with the irreconcilable polarities of social existence. Hegel revolutionized the study of tragedy
by directing attention away from tragic heroes to tragic collisions. Tragedies, he observed, place
their characters in situations where they have to chose between competing obligations and
associated conceptions of justice. Their choices propel them into conflicts with characters who
have made different choices. The polarities included family versus civic commitments, freedom
and authority, and above all else, individual assertion and the certainty of death and oblivion.
Conflicts arise not only as a result of these choices, but even more from the inability of tragic
characters to empathize. They understand the other’s position as a reality without justification
[rechtlose Wirklichkeit].61 In Antigone, the eponymous heroine’s loyalty to her brother and the
gods bring her into conflict with Creon, who is just as committed to upholding civic order and
his authority as head of the family. There are lesser collisions between Antigone and her sisters,
Creon and his son and Creon and Teresias, each of them emblematic.
23
Although they looked askance at autocratic German governments, many German
intellectuals nevertheless felt humiliated by Prussia’s defeat, all the more so as they had become
deeply invested in the idea of the German nation. German writers and philosophers were not
immune to nationalism and encouraged the idea that Germany could become the midwife of a
spiritual revolution that would succeed where the political revolution of France had failed.
Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel were committed to this project.
The writings of Nietzsche, although scornful of nationalism, were also infused with the idea of
the special mission of Germany.
The hopes of German philosophers, writers and political liberals were dashed by the
reaction that set in once the Napoleonic threat receded. This was particularly significant in
Prussia, the most powerful German political unit after Austria. Following the twin defeats of
Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806, a reluctant Prussian king turned to reform-minded officials
(e.g., Hardenberg, Boyen, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau) to restructure and rebuild his army and
mobilize national support for the war effort. They imposed universal conscription, opened the
officer corps to qualified commoners, removed incompetent officers from their commands and
limited the arbitrary and even draconic military system of control and punishment. They
expected these reforms to go hand-in-hand with abolition of serfdom and estate privileges and
improvements in the general education system. In the words of Gneisenau, Prussia had to be
restructured as a “triple alliance of arms, science and constitution.”62 Political and moral renewal
was incompatible with absolute monarchy. Prussian Junkers (members of the landowning
aristocracy) felt threatened by the reforms, and after Waterloo, the king became increasingly
receptive to their complaints. For their part, the reformers overplayed their hand, quarreled
among themselves, and by 1819 had been driven from office. German liberals and reformers
24
were shut out of Prussian politics until the Revolution of 1848 briefly put them center stage.63
Excluded individuals and groups not infrequently seek alternative means of expressing
themselves. They may create what Johannes Fabian has called “terrains of contestation,” where
they are free to maneuver and create narratives that may ultimately influence a wider audience,
and through them, the dominant groups in the society.64 As early as 1801, Schiller described
Germany as an “inward Empire.”65 After 1820, conceptualization of Greece and Greek tragedy
became increasingly widespread.
GERMANY AND EUROPE
My third layer of analysis concerns Germany’s position in Europe. The starting point is
the concept of “late development,” coined by Alexander Gerschenkron to explain the more
authoritarian political structures of central and eastern Europe. He theorized that democracy
developed in Britain, the low countries and Scandinavia because they were they first European
countries to industrialize. They had the luxury to develop at their own pace, and to
accommodate in peaceful ways the rising power of new classes to which development gave rise.
In France, a later developer, this transformation required a revolution and led to a centralized, if
ultimately, democratic state. Further east, the pressures on political units were greater. If they
were to survive as great powers, they had to industrialize more rapidly, which in turn required
greater centralization and authoritarian rule. Germany after unification reflected this pattern. So
did the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China, countries in which development began
later and government assumed even more authoritarian forms66
I believe a parallel phenomenon can be observed in the cultural sphere. Germany was not
only a late economic developer, but a late cultural developer. German artists had recognized
25
since the Renaissance but German music and literature only achieved prominence in the
eighteenth century. Late cultural developers copy early developers, but desire to establish their
own identity and buttress their self-esteem by distancing themselves from their predecessors.
They do this by creating a synthesis of the borrowed and indigenous, with much of the latter
based on myth. Their representatives hold themselves out as descendants of a deeper culture
with older and purer historical roots and traditions. German music produced Bach. His sons,
Gluck, Handel and Telemann were imitators of the French and Italian styles, although they went
on to create novel syntheses. Wagner went back to German myths for the plot lines of his
mature operas. His productions became a mainstay of German nationalism and were greatly
favored by Hitler. Conservative German intellectuals condemned the decadent “West” –
meaning France and England – for their alleged materialism and superficial values. They touted
their superior values, supposedly more faithful to their Indo-Aryan roots and reflected in the
triumphs of German Kultur. In the late nineteenth century this comparison gradually took on
racial overtones.
Germany’s sense of special mission and glorification of the state were neither arbitrary
nor unique. Measured against Western values and accomplishments in the eighteenth century,
Germany was an under-achiever. It had failed to unify, and its leading states (Prussia and
Austria) performed poorly on the battlefield, having been defeated decisively by Napoleon at
Jena, Auerstädt and Austerlitz. Subsequent coalition victories against Napoleon (e.g., Leipzig
and Waterloo), did not eradicate the sense of humiliation felt by many German aristocrats,
military officers, intellectuals and members of the emerging middle class. A world view that
offered a different set of criteria for excellence, that stressed German intellectual and artistic
creativity and the solidarity and the world mission of the Volk, and downgraded the value of
26
commerce and constitutional government, served to buttress the self-esteem of Germans of all
classes. By emphasizing the role of the state as both the instrument and expression of this
mission -- a theme developed by Fichte that received its fullest expression in the philosophy of
Hegel -- power could be concentrated in ways that facilitated unification and the emergence of
imperial Germany as the dominant military power on the continent. This power would
ultimately enable Germany to compete for standing in more traditional ways. Even Nietzsche,
who came to despise Prussian militarism, hoped that art could help the elite raise the masses
above the "dirt" of daily politics.67
Russia, an even later developer, developed an ideology based on the same anti-Western
orientation. Russian nationalism stressed moral over material forces and contrasted the holy
mission of the Russian people to Western rationalism and materialism. Slavophil ideology was
völkish, emphasized the communal life of the Rus in contrast to the individualism of the West.
Aleksei S. Khomiakov, Konstantin S. Aksakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky were among those who
propagated the belief that Russia had inherited the Christian ideal of universal spiritual
unification from Byzantium, while the decadent West, formed in the crucible of Roman
Catholicism, preserved the old Roman imperial tradition.68 Russia was the self-described “big
brother” to Slavs elsewhere in Europe, an ideology that prompted provocative policies in the
Balkans where Russia increasingly came into conflict with Austria by virtue of its nearly
unqualified support of expansionist Bulgaria and Serbia.69
In Germany, romantic nationalism was always at odds with traditional conservatism, but
had less difficulty in blending with more modern approaches to politics, including socialism.
The Nazi Party appealed to romantic nationalist and völkish strands of opinion, but made only
limited inroads with workers, and at best gained the tacit support of the traditional conservative
27
elite by virtue of its successful economic and foreign policies. In Russia, these different strands
of opinion found expression in different political movements, although there was a considerable
degree of overlap. In pre-war Russia, Slavophil sentiment was most prevalent within the
aristocracy, but found some support among intellectuals, Dostoevsky being a case in point.70
Liberal constitutionalism was represented by the Kadet Party, the largest party in the National
Assembly (Duma). Socialism blended with nationalism and gave rise to a series of movements,
including Zemlya i Volya (land and liberty), which, in the 1880s, sent students, without notable
success, to live with peasants and mobilize their support.71 More Marxist socialists envisaged
the workers as the vanguard of the revolution. The avowedly internationalist Bolshevik faction
emerged as the dominant force in postwar Russia, renamed the Soviet Union.72 Despite its
strong anti-nationalist ideology, part of the appeal of revolutionary socialism to Russian
intellectuals had to do with their expectation that it would accelerate Russian development and
gain new respect for their country as both a great power and model for the rest of the world.73
As in Germany, this form of cultural nationalism assumed racist form and gave rise to
extreme xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In both countries, cultural nationalism was fed by deep
insecurity. In Germany, it was the result of late cultural and economic development, defeat and
occupation by France and delayed political unification. In Russia, much the same situation
prevailed. It had been unified and a great power for some time, but was economically and
technologically backwards, and had barely avoided defeat by Napoleon. Even more than in
Germany, the indigenous political elite feared the consequences of the spread of Western values
and ideas.
THE TRAGEDY OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
28
The German-Russian comparison is revealing in two ways. It supports the claim of
causal links between late development on the one hand and insecurity, xenophobia and racism on
the other. Elsewhere I have argued that this pattern is not limited to Germany and Russia; late
developers on the whole tend to have influential segments of their intelligentsia that adopt
xenophobic, anti-Western discourses that stress the alleged superiority and communal orientation
of their cultures.74 Japan is particularly interesting in this connection. It was another late
developer where a discourse of xenophobic nationalism became triumphant. Japanese
intellectuals were drawn to German philosophy and tragedy, which, suitably integrated with
existing traditions, helped to define a special path for Japan.
Early and superficial efforts to connect German philosophy to fascism emphasized the
collaboration of Heidegger, who briefly served as rector of the University of Freiburg under the
Nazis, and the writings of his mentor Nietzsche, whose call for nihilism and the rise of an
Übermensch [superman] seemed to a provide a link to Hitler. Nietzsche also introduced the
concept of race into his discourse, although it is clear that he conceived of it in a cultural not a
biological sense. The link was made more explicit by Heidegger’s inaugural speech, which
welcomed Hitler’s rise to power as a positive development, and the Nazi appropriation of
Nietzsche – with the willing aid of his sister -- as an ideological prop for their regime. In
fairness to poor Nietzsche, we should note his unwavering public opposition to German
nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch was very different from Hitler’s and motivated
by a benign concerns. Nietzsche aspired to develop a new aesthetic consciousness to free people
from the limitations of conventions and accepted discourses, of which Christianity and science
were the most deeply entrenched and constraining. Such a consciousness would enable and
29
facilitate self-expression and self-knowledge, although it too would have to be challenged and
replaced before it solidified and became life-restricting. Humanity, its art and other creations -as Greek tragedy recognized -- could at best hope to achieve a precarious balance between
perfect form and utter chaos. To achieve this recognition, it was first necessary to approach
chaos, and Nietzsche looked forward to the arrival of a Zarathustra-like Superman who would
lead the way to a new barbarism. Unlike the savage life of the prehistoric past, the new
barbarism would free the human spirit and empower man to lead a more creative life.75
A more compelling line of argument linking German philosophy and Fascism focuses on
the consequences of German philosophy, not the political ideas of individual philosophers.
German idealism helped to create conditions favorable to German imperialism in World War I
and fascism in the 1930s. This was due to its underlying values and aspirations. Kant’s
philosophical corpus was abstruse, and the philosophy of his successors was even more divorced
from everyday language, events and concerns. The corpus of German philosophy directed
thought and action toward noble, if impractical, ideals and away from the issues and concerns of
everyday politics. It devalued those concerns as plebian, distracting and even dishonorable, an
attitude that was also encouraged by the imperialist right, which sought to focus the attention of
German youth on military service, sacrifice and the higher honor of serving the nation. In an
unexpected way, the teachings of the philosophical and military establishments reinforced each
other despite the generally opposed nature of their projects.
The contrast to Anglo-American philosophy and its concern for politics and
constitutional structures is striking. The values and practices that make democracy work –
personal interest in material well being, willingness to bargain and compromise, acceptance of
less than perfect solutions to problems -- were largely anathema to German philosophy and to
30
nineteenth century German high culture more generally. The texts German students read in
gymnasium and university encouraged them to strive for bolder, more collective goals. They
stressed the importance of the state, and service to that state was conceived as the collective
embodiment of the nation. All of these teachings translated all too easily into sympathy for
charismatic, authoritarian leaders and corresponding lack of respect for plebian, compromising,
patently self-seeking politicians and trade-unionists.
Many German intellectuals in the early years of the nineteenth century could not make a
clean break with the authoritarian regimes for which they expressed loathing. They never rid
themselves of the need for a monarchy, and remained half-hearted in the support for, or even
opposed, to democratic constitutions that would transfer power from monarchs, princes and
aristocrats to the demos. In the 1840s and 1860s they were at least as much interested in national
unification as they were in liberal democracy. In 1848, the first national parliament meeting at
the Paulskirche in Frankfurt offered the German crown to the Prussian king, who rejected it out
of hand. In the Prussian constitutional crisis of the 1860s, Bismarck split the liberals by offering
them national unification in return for continued control of the state and its foreign policy by the
king. In the aftermath of World War I, many German intellectuals never developed enthusiasm
or loyalty to the Weimar Republic, and made no effort to save it when it came under serious, and
ultimately, successful attack from the far right. There are many reasons for these attitudes and
behavior, and surely, the path and influence of German philosophy must be considered one of
them.
The Weimar Republic was in many ways the most telling era. I have argued elsewhere
that self-esteem was a key, if frustrated, ambition of the semi-feudalized German bourgeoisie.76
This need became more acute after the humiliation of defeat in World War I and the imposition
31
of what was widely regarded in Germany as the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Given this
outlook, it was difficult for the Weimar Republic to build legitimacy and comparatively easier
for its right-wing opponents to win support in the name of nationalism. Hitler was particularly
adept at playing on the desires of the middle class for self-esteem. The Nazi emphasis on the
Volksgemeinschaft held out the promise of a higher purpose to be achieved through unity,
sacrifice and struggle in a showdown with the nation’s internal and external enemies. Hitler’s
defiance of the Western powers and the Treaty of Versailles was widely popular with the middle
classes, who were his largest supporters at the polls.77
Some scholars see the collapse of the Weimar Republic as inevitable. Theodore
Hamerow attributes not only the failure of Weimar, but World War I, the rise to power of the
Nazis and World War II to the failure of the German liberals in 1848 to develop constitutional
democracy as an effective alternative to the conservative authoritarianism of Prussia. “The
penalty for the mistakes of 1848 was paid not in 1849, but in 1918, in 1933, and in 1945.”78
Hamerow’s argument is a quintessential expression of the Sonderweg thesis, which attempts to
explain the Nazi period as the inevitable, or at least the most likely, outcome of earlier
developments in German history that mark it off from that of its Western neighbors. Ironically,
the Sonderweg thesis originated with conservatives in the imperial era to justify Germany’s
constitution as a reasonable compromise between the inefficient authoritarianism of Russia and
the decadence of Western democracy.79 It was given new meaning by left-leaning historians in
the post-World War II period. Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler mobilized it to combat the
claims of their conservative-nationalist counterparts that the Hitler period was an extraordinary
development, unrelated to past German history.80
32
A few historians emphasize the contingency of Nazi Germany. In an early but still highly
regarded history of the Weimar Republic, Erich Eyck makes a credible case that the synergism
between the economic downturn and bad leadership brought Hitler to power.81 In a weak version
of the Sonderweg thesis, Wolfgang Mommsen maintains that the collapse of Weimar was
inevitable, but Hitler's rise to power was not.82 Henry Turner uses counterfactuals to argue that
Hitler’s survival of World War I trench warfare and a later automobile accident were remarkable,
and that without Hitler, Weimar’s failure would likely have led to a conservative, authoritarian
regime with revanchist goals in the east but no stomach for another continental war. It would
have been anti-Semitic, but unlikely to have carried out draconian measures against Jews.83
The determinists sensitize us to the serious impediments that stood in the way of the
success of the Republic, while those who emphasize contingency alert us to the need to separate
the fate of the Republic from the question of what kind of regime might have succeeded it. The
forces arrayed against the Republic were on both ends of the political continuum. The
communists on the left opposed a constitutional bourgeois order. Led by intellectuals, their base
consisted of workers, whose support waxed and waned as a function of the economic situation.84
By 1928, there was very little inclination on the part of the conservatives to cooperate with the
socialists, and the pro-Republican parties did not have enough seats to sustain a left-center
coalition. The grand coalition lasted less than six months, the victim of Gustav Stresemann’s
death and the stock market crash.85 The nationalist-conservative opposition was divided among
several parties, and in the last years of the Republic, the National Socialists (Nazis) became by
far the strongest of these parties. In July 1932, the Nazis won 38.2 percent of the overall national
vote, making anti-Republican forces a majority in the Reichstag. Government had to be
conducted by emergency decree, which shifted power to President Paul von Hindenburg, and
33
paved the way for the appointment of Hitler after the failure of the short-lived von Papen and
Schleicher regimes.86 Hindenburg could have used his emergency power to support a proRepublican government, but preferred to rule through a conservative fronde that excluded the
socialists from power. He set in motion a chain of events that had an outcome very different
from what he imagined.87 So did the Communists. On instructions from Moscow, they made a
fatal error in refusing to support the grand coalition, composed of the socialists, Zentrum [Center
Party] and moderate parties on the right. The Communists welcomed the Nazi regime in the
expectation that it would quickly fail and pave the way for a worker’s revolution.88
The years between 1919 and 1933 were ones in which intellectual commitment to the
Republic could have made a difference. It is not unreasonable to think that greater support for
the Republic by intellectuals would have reduced support for the Communists and possibly have
enabled the grand coalition to have survived the early years of the great depression. If so,
President Hindenburg would not have been in a position to invoke the emergency clause of the
constitution and Hitler would not have come to power through the back door. As there is reason
to believe that the Nazi vote had peaked, the Republic could have weathered the Nazi challenge,
although it still would have been under severe pressure from right and the left. In 1928, the
Nazis garnered a mere 2.6 percent of the vote. Once the depression set in, this figure rose to 18.1
percent. In the March 1933 elections, held two months after Hitler took office, the Nazis still
received considerably less than half of the vote, but more votes than any party had in the Weimar
era.89
IDENTITY
34
I am not alone in arguing that one of the fundamental causes of the Third Reich was the
deep schism between German and Western political thought that opened up in the late eighteenth
century.90 It resulted in a special German sense of destiny with strong anti-Western overtones.
This outlook, we have seen, found expression in Kant’s effort to discipline French individualism
with German enlightened corporatism and in Fichte’s Address to the German Nation. Written in
1807-08, in response to the French occupation, Fichte praised the “German spirit,” whose ideals
transcended the selfish goals of Western culture, and described Germans as the only Europeans
capable of profound and original thought. Anti-Western diatribes became a constant theme of
German literature and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thomas
Mann’s Reflections of a Non-Political Man, written toward the end of the World War I, praises
Germany’s musical and metaphysical culture, which he contrasts with the more skeptical,
analytic and political culture of the West. He rejects democracy as “foreign and poisonous to the
German character” and endorses the Obrigkeitstaat [authoritarian state] as most suitable to the
German character.91 In the 1920s, writing in the aftermath of another defeat and partial French
occupation, Oswald Spengler’s advanced a variant of this argument in his best-selling Decline of
the West. Western thought, he wrote, was “merely rational,” and the Germans, who were
capable of great accomplishments, had to be protected from it.92
The German middle class was particularly susceptible to völkisch ideas, as events of
1848, 1866, 1870, 1918 and 1933 revealed.93 Nazi ideology was admittedly the most extreme
variant, but one that played to a largely receptive audience, and for reasons having largely to do
with the need for self-esteem. Victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), national
unification (1871) and recognition as the leading power on the continent should have boosted
German self-esteem and reduced the need of its leaders and people to define themselves in
35
opposition to France and Britain and the values they were thought to epitomize. Bismarck
certainly behaved as a mature and satisfied leader. He was never drawn to nationalism as
anything other than a means of advancing Prussian power, and under his leadership Germany
acted as a satisfied nation and defender of the territorial status quo. He had a jaundiced view of
colonies, although he briefly flirted with social imperialism, and consistently opposed a blue
water navy as a provocation and waste of money. Bismarck was considered old-fashioned by
many Germans in the 1880s, and especially by those believed that empire was the sine qua non
of great power status.94 Pursuit of empire and a navy to challenge that of Britain’s were widely
supported, especially by the middle classes. Germans now felt strong enough, psychologically as
well as physically, to compete on the playing fields dominated by their competitors and
adversaries, Britain and France. At the same time, they continued to enhance their self-esteem
by defining themselves and their political culture in sharp contrast to those of Britain and
France.95
In the late nineteenth century the Sonderweg thesis was mobilized to justify and extend
the shelf life of quasi-authoritarian government. German music under Wagner sought to fuse
völkish traditions with modernity in the form of a Gesamtkuntswerk [total art], and the composer
and his followers vaunted its artistic superiority to the “decadent” operas of Italy and France.
German literature continued to praise pre-modern values and heap scorn on the petty,
commercial concerns of the middle class. Schelling was horrified that his brother briefly
considered a career in business, warning that he would think of nothing but "self interest and
profit."96 Nietzsche condemned "superfluous people" whose life centered on money, markets,
profit.97 Friedrich Meinecke, Germany’s preeminent historian in the decade prior to World War
I, lauded German Kultur, which combined language, ethnicity, national identity and spiritual
36
renewal, as superior to the French principles of liberty, fraternity and equality.98 During World
War I, Werner Sombart rhapsodized “the ancient German hero’s spirit,” which was rescuing
Germany from becoming another corrupt capitalist nation and would make the German Volk the
“chosen people” of the twentieth century.99
National neuroses -- if we can use this term -- are no more readily palliated by success
than their individual counterparts. They are, however, greatly exacerbated by failure, which is
what happened in Germany after its defeat in World War I. Defeat prompted denial, a search for
scapegoats and an intense desire for revenge, emotions that made it difficult, if not impossible,
for the Weimar Republic to gain legitimacy. To create a different political-psychological
outlook, it took another round of war that left Germany defeated, in ruins and occupied and
divided by powers intent on imposing their respective political and economic systems and
reshaping the country’s culture.
A principal thesis of this chapter is that the Sonderweg was not unique. German
historians who advance this claim make the mistake of comparing Germany to its western
neighbors. Facing west, German intellectual and political development does appear anomalous
and in need of special explanation. Facing east, Germany looks more “normal.” Poland, Russia
and Japan developed similar ideologies; intellectuals stressed the uniqueness and superiority of
their cultures to the west by virtue of their preservation of traditional values. Although they did
this in somewhat different ways, their cultural claims were similar as were the key arguments
mobilized in their support. These similarities, I contend, reflect underlying similarities in
circumstance. They suggest the extent to which identity, national as well as personal, is an
important means of building self-esteem.
37
For late developers the west was the model to emulate. A state could not become or
remain great, and its people claim status, in the absence of economic development and the
panoply of other status markers that wealth allowed. In the nineteenth century these included
victory in war, colonies, beautification of one’s capital, and excellence in the arts, sciences and
sports.100 Copying the west conferred status but the need to emulate other countries and their
accomplishments was a palpable admission of one’s relative backwardness and inferiority. The
way around this dilemma was to assert superiority on the basis of a more traditional, less
materialistic culture, which, when combined with the economic development and technology of
the west, would result in a superior synthesis. This was precisely the claim made by advocates
of German Volksgemeinschaft and Kultur, Russian communalism and Japanese depictions of
their country as a “family nation” [kazoku sei kokka].
All these identities were Janus-faced; they looked to the past and to the future. The
backward looking component was reminiscent of golden age discourses and their invocation of
imaginary pasts. German and Russian intellectuals rhapsodized a conflict-free, communally
oriented past that never was. Dissatisfied Japanese intellectuals idealized the spirit of wa
[harmony] and the community [kyōdōtai], that had no place for individualism or profit
making.101 All three discourses differed from golden age narratives in that they invoke the past
to help transform the present. By stressing communal solidarity and artistic creativity and
denigrating the value of commerce and constitutional government they aimed to buttress the selfesteem of those classes who supported the regime. By emphasizing the role of the state as the
instrument and expression of the nation’s mission – as did the Germans and Japanese -- power
could be concentrated in ways that would sooner or later facilitate successful competition with
the leading powers of the day.
38
To come back to the German case, it is apparent that identity construction by intellectuals
came full circle. The turn to Greeks and tragedy in the late eighteenth century was motivated in
part by the belief that Germans could become Greeks. By modeling themselves on the
progenitors of Western culture they could recapture its essence, emulate its accomplishments and
forge an identity superior to those associated with the Enlightenment and revolutionary France.
This project was flawed in fundamental ways: it created a highly idealized image of the Greeks,
assumed unrealistically that intellectuals would remake themselves in accord with this image,
and that other Germans would follow their lead. German philosophers and writers were on the
whole supporters of reform and hoped that German governments would work with them toward
common goals. Instead, intellectuals were marginalized by repressive regimes, especially in
Prussia. The Greeks now provided an alternate cultural space where intellectuals could live in a
world of their making, divorced from contemporary politics, but still hopeful of one day
influencing government and society. In reality, the arrow of influence began to work in reverse.
Writers, philosophers, and above all, professors and civil servants, became colonized by the
state, which employed most of them. Intellectual discourses ended up strengthening the kind of
state that was the enemy of the values to which writers and philosophers from Hölderlin and
Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche aspired. Post-Napoleonic generations of Germans faced the choice
of abandoning the cultural-political project of German idealism or deluding themselves into
believing that the Prussian state and German empire somehow facilitated their aspirations. Most
chose accommodation. A few, like Nietzsche faced the truth that either option was unpalatable
and unworkable. He found escape in madness, which in retrospect, was not altogether an
irrational choice.
39
REFERENCES
1
Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, p. 84.
2
Marchand, Down from Olympus; Chytry, Aesthetic State; Ferris, Silent Urns; Williamson,
Longing for Myth in Germany, all make this point.
3
Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 204.
4. Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens.”
5. Ibid.
6
Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain; Stern, Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English
Literature; Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Porter, "Homer."
7
Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Jenkyns and Turner, The Greek Heritage in
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8
Wilhelm von Humboldt to Friedrich August Wolf, 4 December 1792, cited in Sweet, Wilhelm
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9. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal; Buford, German Tradition of Self-Cultivation; Butler, Tyranny of
Greece over Germany; Marchand, Down From Olympus; Taylor, Hegel, pp. 25-29.
10
McDonald, Progress into the Past; Marchand, Down From Olympus, 116-24, 148-50; Ferris,
Silent Urns, pp. 16-51; Chytry, Aesthetic State, pp. 148-77.
11
Marchand, Down From Olympus, for documentation.
12
Larmore, "Hölderlin and Novalis"; Sturma, "Politics and the New Mythology"; Schmidt, On
Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122-64; Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 391-96.
13
Kateb, “Utopia and the Good Life”; Dupré, Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of
Modern Culture, pp. 187-228, on new approaches to history.
40
14
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary..
15
Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,
16
Frank, “Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism.”
17
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 7, puts equal emphasis on reason, and rejects sentiment as a
guide;
18
Gadamer, Ästhetik un Poetik I, quoted in Bowie, "German Idealism and the Arts."
19
Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15-17.
20
Ibid., p. 15.
21
Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, p. 29.
22
Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15-17.
23
Eley “British Model and the German Road”; Evans, Rethinking German History.
24
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8.
25
Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom; La Vopa, Fichte, pp. 200-04, on the
personal relations among these figures.
26
Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, §§ 41-54.
27
On Hegel, especially, Phenomenology of the Spirit.
28
Schelling, Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, and System of Transcendental Idealism,
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29
30
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, section 3, 629.
Silk and Stern, Nietsche on Tragedy, pp. 297-331 on Nietzsche's response to earlier
interpretations of the origins of tragedy.
31
Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b7-1449a18.
41
32
Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment; Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 66-81; Schaper,
"Taste, Sublimity and Genius."
33
Taylor, Hegel, ch. 1.
34
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 62, quoted in Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, p.
53.
35
Larmore, "Hölderlin and Novalis"; Sturma, "Politics and the New Mythology"; Schmidt, On
Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122-64; Chytry, Aesthetic State, pp. 115-77; Ferris, Silent Urns,
pp. 158-200.
36
Schiller, " Die Götter Greichenlands," first published in Wieland's Der Teutsche Merkur in
1788.
37
Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp; Taylor, Hegel, pp. 17-10, 36-40.
38
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Essays, 90
39
Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente 1-6 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988), V, p. 41,
quoted in Bowie, "German Idealism and the Arts."
40
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, sections 2, 18 and 23.
41
Ibid., sections 1 and 3; Kaufmann, Nietzsche; White, Metahistory, pp. 331-74.
42
Nietzsche, Will to Power, Aphorism 822. See also Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra
and Human, All Too Human.
43
Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art; Schmidt, On Germans and
Other Greeks, pp. 89-121.
44
Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy, p. 151.
45
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 176-83.
46
Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a-b, 1452a1-10, 1453b1-2
42
47
Hölderlin, "In lovely blue," trans. Poetry Foundation,
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=185347
48
49
Schelling, "Tenth Letter."
Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, on Kant's commitment to god and Christian morality.
50
Hegel, Philosophy of History.
51
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy.
52
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra and Human, All Too Human.
53
Nietzsche, Gay Science, Book 1.4.
54
Ibid.
55
Jean M. Goulemot and Didier Masseau, “Naissance des lettres adddressé à l’écrivain,” in
Écrire à l’écrivain, Textes rèunis par Josè-Luis Diaz, Textual, no. 217 (February 1994), p. 10,
quoted in Seigel, Idea of the Self, p. 235.
56
57
58
59
Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 82-85; Blanning, French Revolution in Germany.
Honour, Neoclassicism.
Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 82-84; Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology.”
Frank, Einführung in der früromantische Ästhetik; Boyle, Goethe; Beiser, "Enlightenment and
Idealism"; Dahlstrom, "Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller"; Behler, German
Romantic Literary Theory; Pinkard, German Philosophy.
60
Dahlstrom, "The Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller."
61
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 332; Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, pp. 201-02;
Taylor, Hegel, p. 175; Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 89-121.
62
Quoted in Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, p. 38.
43
63
Simon, Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement; Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to
Bismarck, pp. 237-80; Kosselleck, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution, 318-32; Levinger,
Enlightened Nationalism.
64
Fabian, Moments of Freedom..
65
Conze, “’Deutschland’ un ‘deutsche Nation’ als historische Begriffe.”
66
Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness.
67
Nietzsche, "The Greek City."
68
Walicki, Slavophile Controversy; Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the
Slavophiles; Pipes, Russian Intelligentsia; Gleason, European and Muscovite.
69
Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, pp. 141-42; Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan
Entanglements, pp. 248-65; Schroeder, “World War I as Galloping Gertie.”
70
Pipes, Russian Intelligentsia; Gleason, European and Muscovite.
71
Venturi, Roots of Revolution, esp. pp. 253-84, 469-506.
72
Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, pp. 12-31.
73
Pipes, “Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia”;
74
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8
75
Ascheim, Nietzsche Legacy in Germany; Golomb and Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of
Fascism?
76
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8.
77
Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 1-2; Dahrendorf,
Society and Democracy in Germany, p. 404.
78
Krieger, German Idea of Freedom; Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction, p. viii;
Puhle, Von der Agrarkrise zum Präfaschismus; Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy, p. 398.
44
79
Kocka, “German History before Hitler.”
80
Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War; Wehler, Der deutsche Kaiserreich;
Winkler, The Long Shadow of the Reich and Der lange Weg nach Westen, who attributes
Germany’s special character to developments in the Middle Ages.
81
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic.
82
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy.
83
Turner, Geissel des Jahrhunderts.
84
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, p. 456, 494-95; 535-37.
85
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 2, pp. 203-52; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of
Weimar Germany, pp. 94-115.
86
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 2, pp. 350-488; Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the
Weimar Republic, pp. 301-446. Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, pp. 11549; Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357-432.
87
Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic, pp. 302-03, 316-17,472; Mommsen, Rise
and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357-432; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar
Germany, pp. 80-81.
88
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, p. 456, 494-95; 535-37.
89
Berend Stöver, ed., Bereichte über die Lage in Deutschland. Die Meldungen der Gruppe Neu
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and War”; Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 314-17.
90
Lukács, Destruction of Reason; Plessner, Verspätete Nation; Mosse, Crisis of German
Ideology; Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair; Holborn, “Origins and Political Character of Nazi
Ideology”; Herf, Reactionary Modernism.
45
91
Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, p. 16 for quote.
92
Spengler, Decline of the West.
93
Bracher, Nazi Dictatorship, pp. 27-28.
94
Nichols, Germany After Bismarck, pp. 59, 102-04; Mommsen, Imperial Germany, p. 80;
Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, III, p. 141.
95
96
Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 7.
Schelling to Parents, 4 February 1797, quoted in Williamson, Lounging for Myth in Germany,
p. 20.
97
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, pp. 67. 75, 127.
98
Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat.
99
Sombart, Händler und Helden, pp. 125, 143.
100
101
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, chs. 2 and 7 for elaboration..
Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths; Vlastos, “Tradition," and “Agrarianism Without Tradition”;
Kimio, “The Invention of Wa”; Scheiner, “The Japanese Village.”
46