O Pankaj Mishra (2017) για τον Ρομαντικό Εθνικισμό

Σελίδες 169-196 στο: The Age of Anger (2017)

The First Angry Young Nationalists 

Between 1770 and 1815 a galaxy of German thinkers and artists, almost all readers of Rousseau, responded to the then emergent commercial and cosmopolitan society; and their response set a pattern of the greatest importance for the history of politics and culture. It started with assertions of spiritual superiority and an aesthetic ideology, mutated over time into ethnic and cultural nationalism, and, finally, into an existential politics of survival. All the diverse movements of German Idealism that transformed the world of thought — from Sturm und Drang to Romanticism to the Marxist dialectic — originally emerged out of the resentment and defensive disdain of isolated German intellectuals, which Rousseau’s rhetoric justified and reinforced. 

Feeling marginalized by the sophisticated socio-economic order emerging in Western Europe, and its aggressive rationalism and individualism, these young men started to idealize what they took to be the true Vo/k, an organic national community united by a distinctive language, ways of thought, shared traditions, and a collective memory enshrined in folklore and fable. In contrast to the Rights of Man, and the Atlantic West’s notion of the abstract universal individual equipped with reason, the Germans offered a vision of human beings defined in all their modes of thinking, feeling and acting by their membership of a cultural community. This elaborate theory of collective identity and nativist salvation eventually proved more appealing and useful to other latecomers to history than the Enlightenment’s abstract notions of individualist rationalism.

Not surprisingly, it was the near-exclusive creation of Germans in provincial towns among whom Rousseau’s elegant denunciations of Parisian society and celebration of simple folk found their most receptive and grateful audience. Doomed to political backwardness, they were condescended to not only by the French (Voltaire thought the German language useful for ‘soldiers and horses; it is only necessaty when you are on the. road’), but also by their own Francophile elites, such as Frederick of Prussia, who appointed an inept Frenchman to head the Royal Library in Berlin over the heads of the philosopher Lessing and the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, arguing that the salary of 1,000 thalers was too much for a German. As Herder asked sarcastically, who needs ‘a fatherland or any kinship relations’ when we can all be ‘philanthropic citizens of the world? ... The princes speak French, and soon everybody will follow their example, and then, behold, perfect bliss.’

The Rousseau-reading Germans countered the cosmopolitan ideals of commerce, luxury and metropolitan urbanity with Ku/tur. They claimed that Ku/tur, the preserve of lowly but profound native burgers, pastors and professors, was a higher achievement than a French Zivilisation built around court society. For Ku/tur combined the nurturing and education of the individual soul (Bi/dung) with the growth of national culture. Starting with Herder and Goethe, prodigiously talented German literati elaborated, for the first time in history, a national identity founded on aesthetic achievement and spiritual eminence.

The invasion and occupation of German-speaking lands by Napoleon, the child of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, then helped transform cultural Romanticism into a nationalistic passion. In yet another world-defining pattern, the German myth of the Vo/k as a repository of profound traditional values, and the opposition between German Kultur and French Zivilisation, was deepened by the disgrace of submission to foreigners. The writer Johann Joseph von Gorres claimed that when ‘Germany lay in deep humiliation, when its princes became servants, the nobility scuttied after foreign honours ... [and] the learned worshipped imported idols, it was the people alone ... which stayed true to itself’. Assuming the voice of the ancestors who had fallen in the ‘holy battle for freedom of religion and faith’, Fichte declared to his compatriots: 

"So that this spirit may gain the freedom to develop itself and grow up to an independent existence — for this reason our blood has been spilt. It is for you to give meaning and justification to the sacrifice by elevating this spirit to the world domination for which it has been appointed."

Subjugated and dishonoured Germany came to generate that strange compound we have subsequently seen in many countries: harmless nostalgia for the past glories of the ‘people’, combined with a lethal fantasy of their magnificent restoration. Cults of the Vo/k did not cease to seduce, and mislead, in the second half of the nineteenth century, even as Germany consolidated its political unity and Bismarck’s Second Reich frenetically pursued industrialization. German nationalists defined themselves even more desperately and superciliously against the ideals and achievements of France and Britain. Joseph Conrad was among those who recoiled from the ‘promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans among effete Asians and barbarous niggers.’

But few of the many anxious observers of Germany saw that German patriots had added to an older inferiority complex before the advanced West a tormenting ambivalence about their own rising materialist civilization. For them, it became an existential necessity, no less, to condemn Zivilisa- - tion for its materialism and soullessness while upholding Germany’s profound moral and spiritual Ku/tur. They gave an earlier German idealism about culture a political edge and racial complexion by arguing that the Volk, once cleansed of cosmopolitan Jews, would return society to primal wholeness; it could abolish the intellectual and political antagonisms of modernity, and put an end to alienation and atomization.

It was through these inner deflections in Germany that, as the historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote, ‘the national idea was raised to the sphere of religion and the eternal’. Socially maladjusted scholars, literary writers, composers and painters competed to articulate the primacy of the Volk, connecting it increasingly to the inferiority of the Jew. Even Thomas Mann, whose writings reflect a fundamentally ironic view of German society, came to believe during the First World War that German Kultur had to be protected against Western Zivilisation, and the false and superficial cosmopolitanism of its German devotees.

These included Mann’s own brother, Heinrich, confirming the profoundly intimate nature of the enemy. Mann was later reconciled with his brother. Among many other Germans, however, personal struggles to adjust to a daunting modern world, which usually ended in failure, confusion and drift, deepened the yearning for an uncomplicated belief. The simple ‘people’ came to appear to many of these disorientated men the natural guardian of virtues that had been lost among city-dwellers: weren’t the Vo/k spontaneous, unpretentious and immune to the contagion of modernity? Weren’t they opposed to devious money-grubbing Jews and the effete, sophisticated ruling classes that chased after alien gods?

Thus, a single trend in German thought dating back to the eighteenth century became toxic. The Volk, expeditiously conflated after 1918 with a purified race, began to seem a magical antidote to the spiritual disorientation induced by modernity, and some of the most intelligent and sensitive Germans were inebriated by it. In 1933, as the Nazi Party moved ever closer to supreme power, the poet Gottfried Benn confided to a friend:

"Metropolis, industrialization, intellectualism, all the shadows that the age had cast over my thoughts, all the powers of the century that I confronted in my production, there are moments when this entire tormented life drops away and nothing is left but the plain, the expanse, the seasons, simple words — the Volk."

This exhausted and resentful state of mind prepared the ground for the authoritarian state; it was the basic condition of possibility for the uncanny avant-gardist who, while resurrecting symbols of Germany’s glorious past, outlined a glorious vision of the future in which the German Volk would triumph in the international racial struggle. He offered his followers escape from failure and self-loathing, and release into quasi-erotic fantasies of a near-permanent supremacy: a Thousand-Year Reich, no less. It is no accident that the psychology of ressentiment, first articulated by Rousseau, was embodied and elaborated by German ‘strangers’.

The Making of Cultural Nationalism (and Its Built-in Contradictions)

To understand why cosmopolitan civilization based on individual self-interest has turned out to bea perilous experiment rather than a secure accomplishment, and why nationalism remains its inseparable twin, we must return to Herder, one of Rousseau’s most influential disciples. Like Rousseau, he felt personally affronted by the snobbish intellectualism that ptesumed to tell other people how to live. But Herder went much further than his teacher. Rousseau’s patriotism was basically inward-looking, inspired by what he took to be the civic ideals of Sparta. Herder, while struggling with the Enlightenment’s quasi-aristocratic culture and universalist claims, insisted on a showy separatism, based on the idea of a vital German culture rooted in region and language. 

The nascent German intelligentsia had been the first to come up against the notion of a mandarin culture maintained by a sophisticated minority in a superior language — one to which the untutored masses around the world ought to aspire. Herder inaugurated the nativist quest — hectically pursued by almost every nation since — for whatever could be identified as embodying an authentic national spirit: literary forms, cuisine and architecture as much as language. ‘Each nation, he argued, ‘speaks in the manner it thinks and thinks in the manner it speaks.’ Pushing against the French philosophe prescribing his own felicity to all and sundry, he insisted that each nation follow its own organic growth, bringing the human race closer to its ultimate destiny — the fullness of humanity. Herder was no simple theorist of nationalism, like Fichte, who came to think that Germans were simply superior to everyone else. Striving to create a distinctively German art and style, Herder also recognized a creative principle in different national cultures. He claimed that each of the world’s many nations has a particular character, expressed diversely in its language, literature, religion, traditions, values, institutions and laws, and that history was a process of national self-fulfilment. Still, his path-breaking concept of cultural identity went on to serve the psychological and existential needs of not only Germans but also many late-coming and unevenly modernizing peoples, and is now also invoked in the Atlantic West against globalizing elites. All kinds of chauvinists work out its implications when they argue that their communities should be true to their own distinctive way of being, rebuffing foreign imports and migrants. Herder himself, his early disciple Goethe said, had in him ‘something compulsively vicious — like a vicious horse — a desire to bite and hurt’. But Herder may have himself provided the most accurate description of his own personality: as ‘driven by a vague untest that sought another world, but never found it’. In this vagueness of yearning, and imprecision of destination, his admiration for and revulsion from France, Herder resembles all cultural chauvinists who came after him: they claim a fixed identity, but their selves are actually constantly in flux, often mirroring those of their supposed ‘enemy’. Thus, Hindu chauvinists tend to be Westernized Indians, profoundly dependent on the modern West for, as Naipaul wrote, ‘confirmation of their own reality’. Tied to an imperative to diminish a sense of inadequacy and to feel superior, such an identity never ceases to be conflicted and contradictory while presuming to bring peace and harmony.

Herder exemplified most vividly among his German peers what Kant identified as ‘longing’, distinguished from desire by its paralyzing awareness of the incapacity ever to achieve the desired object. In 1769, when he was in his mid-twenties, Herder travelled to France from the Baltic port of Riga, where he had spent several exasperating years as a Lutheran pastor in literary feuds. In this commercial city Herder had achieved a measure of fame. But its perceived smallness, and parochial culture, made him feel like a ‘pedantic scribbler’. Like many German provincials, Herder had an idealized image of France as the home of the worldly, elegant and sensuous philosopher, who spoke a language of unparalleled clarity and precision. He saw himself returning from Paris, fully Gallicized, to Riga as a cosmopolitan reformer. As it turned out, Herder never saw Riga again. Instead of mutating into a French-style man of the world, he became the philosophical father of cultural nationalism. His awakening during his travels to Paris, his perception of hollowness behind the mask of civility and refinement, of simple nature underneath the gloss,of civilization, mimics Rousseau’s own perception of the vanity and corruption of modern society on the road to Vincennes. And it anticipates the struggles of Fichte, another keen reader of Rousseau; trying to overcome his plebeian past, Fichte moved from satirizing the moral ills of commercial society to authoring full-blown theories of autarkic and us-versus-them nationalism. But Herder was more volatile in his emotions than either Rousseau or Fichte. Writing from Nantes, he confessed to his former teacher Hamann (a Francophobe who on a trip to London had experienced his own revulsion from complacently rationalist Westerners): ‘I am getting to know the French language, French habits and the French way. of thinking — getting to know but not getting to embrace, for the closer my acquaintance with them is, the greater my sense of alienation becomes,’ In Paris, ‘festooned with luxury, vanity and French nothingness’, a ‘decadent den of vice’, Herder failed to meet any of the phi/osophes he had fantasized meeting. His fervent desire to wear the French identity of a sociable man and be a charming salon wit shaded into premature and acute disappointment. ‘Magnificence in arts and institutions are in the centre of attention,’ he wrote. ‘But since taste is only the most superficial conception of beauty and magnificence only an illusion — and frequently a surrogate for beauty — France can never satisfy, and I am heartily tired of it.’

Defensive Goths

Herder, like many other provincials, had been attracted, appalled and demoralized by the French capital of cosmopolitanism, and the superior airs of its thinkers. He attacked Enlightenment intellectuals with the peculiar intensity of the spurned lover who thinks he has seen through his own illusions, and found that there is not much there behind dazzling appearances. One of his targets was Rousseau’s jaunty old enemy: ‘Voltaire may have spread, Herder conceded, ‘the light, the so-called philosophy of humanity, tolerance, ease in thinking for oneself.’ But:

"at the same time what wretched recklessness, weakness, uncertainty, and chill! What shallowness, lack of design, distrust of virtue, of happiness, and merit! What was laughed off by his wit, sometimes without any such intention! Our gentle, pleasant, and necessary bonds have been dissolved with a shameless hand, yet those of us who do not reside at the Chateau de Fernay [Voltaire’s residence near Geneva| have been given nothing at all in their stead."

Having established Voltaire’s incorrigible frivolity in his own mind, Herder moved rapidly from what he called ‘a way of thinking without morals and solid human feeling’ to the assertion that French lacks what German has: a true moral freedom and connection with sense experience. In his poem ‘To the Germans’ he exhorted his fellow countrymen to ‘Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O you German!’ Many Germans followed Herdet’s intellectual journey. They moved from being, in Lessing’s mordant words, “‘subsetvient admirers of the never sufficiently admired French’ to a willed feeling of superiority, and on to a fervent desire to beat the adversary at his own game. In 1807, as French troops occupied Berlin, Fichte, once a self-proclaimed Jacobin, would argue in ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ that the Germans were lucky to hold on to their language while the French ‘only want to destroy everything that exists and to create everywhere ... a void, in which they can reproduce their own image and never anything else’. Aurelie tells Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s eponymous novel, ‘I hate the French language’, and then, praising German as a ‘strong, honest, heartfelt’ language, sneers that French is ‘worthy of being the universal language with which people can lie and deceive one another’. The need to affirm a sense of national identity that was the exact opposite of the frivolity, refinement, irony and facetiousness of cosmopolitan and wealthy France drove the Germans into continuous idealizations and falsifications. The poet Klopstock, who called for a return to the Volk through the study of peasant legends, claimed that corruption flourished among the rich and the sophisticated while moral purity thrived among the humble. Gothic style, identified by the French philosophes with batrbarism, came to be celebrated for its alleged Germanness. Herder himself played a crucial role in its revival. Returning from France, he met Goethe in Strasbourg in 1770 — one of the most fateful encounters in the history of culture — and found a vulnerable object of indoctrination. The young Goethe was soon working himself up into ecstasy before the Gothic minster of Strasbourg: “This is German architecture, our architecture! Something of which the Italian cannot boast, far less the Frenchman!"

In Herder’s anthology On German Art and Character (1773), Goethe attacked ‘Frenchmen of all nations’ and made France seem a byword for imitative, pseudo-rational thought. The rebellion against the narrow intellectualism of the French Enlightenment, led by Herder, and popularized by the young Goethe and Schiller, turned into the movement known as Sturm und Drang, ‘stress and strain’, the essential precursor of the Romantic Revolution that transformed the world with its notion of a dynamic subjectivity. Many of its adherents were students — with their rakish dress, long hair, and narcotic and sexual indulgences, they were prototypes for the countercultural figures of our age. These young men upheld feeling and sensibility against the tyranny of reason, natural expression against French refinement, and a determination to find and enshrine a uniquely German spirit. Herder challenged the Enlightenment assumption that progress in history had been made inevitable by the accumulation and refinement of rational knowledge. He argued that the histories of nations operated according to their own principles and could not be judged by the-standards of the Enlightenment. He contended that Europeans living in large cities are neither more virtuous nor happier than the “Orien-_ tal patriarch’ who achieves virtue and felicity by upholding the beliefs and values of his natural and social milieu. Herder went on to develop a vision of history with a Rousseauian emphasis: an original social setting of simplicity, truthfulness and self-sufficiency had been ruined by luxury and a cosmopolitan culture of insincerity and dubious morality. In place of Sparta, Herder invoked the Germanic tribes of what he called ‘the North’, which preceded and followed the Roman Empire, and created a society marked by social harmony and moral clarity. ‘In the patriarch’s hut, the hum- _ ble homestead, or the local community, he explained, ‘people knew and clearly perceived what they talked about, since the way they looked at things, and acted, was through the human heart.’ Introducing educated Germans to folk poetry and the cultural values of humble folk, Herder hoped that a literature emancipated from classical French rules would unleash a national spirit among the politically divided Germans. Even the German discovery of the classical past could not remain free of its obsession with their allegedly shallow neighbour. The French had proclaimed themselves as the heirs of the Roman tradition. So it was up to the art, architecture and poetry of Greece to stimulate a cultural renaissance in Germany. According to Winckelmann, the son of a cobbler who became the most famous art historian of his time, ‘the only way for us to become great, indeed to become inimitable, if that were possible, is through the imitation of the Greeks’; and, he might have added, the rejection of everything French. In German hands, literary and classical scholarship and the brand-new discipline of history received the imprint, ineradicable to this day, of cultural defensiveness. 

Quietly Desperate in the Provinces 

This potent ressentiment of German literati had a political origin (as did the passive aggression of all aspiring nationalities that followed them). Germany had lost the leading position it had enjoyed at the end of the medieval period after the axis of the European economy shifted from the centre of the Continent to the Atlantic seaboard. The population had doubled over the previous century; and there was an abundance of young Germans, many of them brilliantly creative in music, att, literature and philosophy. Yet they had to suffer petty princes, religious division and constricted economic systems. The Holy Roman Empite of the German Nation consisted of three hundred states and another fifteen hundred minor units, all with different customs, manners and dialects. (Arriving in Leipzig from Frankfurt, even Goethe, the son of wealthy patrician parents, appeared weird to the locals.) Political and cultural unity was bedevilled by the division, dating back to the Reformation, of Germans into Catholics and Protestants. Austria and Prussia, two important components of the Holy Roman Empire, were locked in conflict, and frequently pursued policies that seemed to undermine rather than serve the overall German interest. Educated Germans were alert to events elsewhere: the great economic transformations the Industrial Revolution was bringing to England, the political revolutions in France and America. They had read their Montesquieu and Rousseau, among the most celebrated authors in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century; they knew about doctrines of the separation of powers and the social contract upon which all government power ought to be based. They were impatient for Germany to also embark on a transition from the fixed structures of old Europe to a new society animated by the desire for freedom and equality. German writers felt this aspiration most keenly. For, as the Swiss-French author Madame de Staél was the first to observe in De LAMemagne (1813), the most popular book on Germany for decades, they had no status and were sentenced to a life of isolation and insecurity in their provincial cities and small towns — unlike their counterparts in the fast-developing nation states of England and France, who mingled with both the high nobility and the bourgeoisie. There was no unified ideological ‘market’, as Frederick the Great pointed out to Voltaire, of the kind that allowed complex networks of the Republic of Letters to form in France and England. The aristocratic salons, where Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers reigned, made Germans feel excluded and gauche. French writers looked down upon German. Even more annoyingly, German aristocrats boosted the prestige of French letters, threatening to replace a profound and pious tradition with the superficial and impious ways of France.

Germans confronting a forceful cultural imperialism both at home and abroad could find no relief in national cohesion. Political frustration led to a continuous expansion in spiritual, aesthetic and moral preoccupations. The Lutheran and Pietist emphasis on inner freedom — which partly explains why some of Rousseau’s most fervent and influential admirers were German and why Romanticism developed in Germany — was deepened among a well-educated minority. As Goethe and Schiller wrote in the Xenzen (1796): “To make yourself a nation — for this you hope, / Germans, in vain; / Make yourselves instead — you can do it! / Into men the mote free.’ Many Germans, looking for a source of pride, and failing to find it in the present or the near future, also became vulnerable to the quest for national origins in the distant past. Tacitus’ Germania, which contains the story of the Germanic hero Arminius, the vanquisher of the Romans, had already provided an ancestral myth. More material came, unexpectedly, from Scotland. In 1761 a Scottish translator called James Macpherson published what he said was ancient Gaelic poetry he had discovered while exploring the highlands and islands of Scotland. Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with several other poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, was followed up with The Works of Ossian in 1765. Samuel Johnson doubted their authenticity and asked to see the original texts. Macpherson never obliged. The evidently long-lost poems with their gloomily romantic setting and sentimental themes were suspiciously Rousseauian in their exposition of virtues uncorrupted by civilization. As the translator wrote in his preface: “The human passions lie in some degree concealed behind forms, and artificial manners; and the powers of the soul, without an opportunity of exerting them, lose their vigour.” A huge success across Europe — the young Corsican then known as Napoleone di Buonaparte read them eagerly — Ossian offered an organic conception of culture and community, one that transcended the hierarchy of class and caste; he seemed to confirm that the lowest of the low could possess the highest values. Ossian naturally had his biggest fans among Germany’s thwarted and alienated youth. Invoked to justify the tights of scorned Scots in Britain, he more significantly vindicated the indigenous ways of.the unsophisticated Vole in Germany. Ossian’s songs, Herder asserted, ‘are songs of the people, songs of an uncultivated, sense-perceptive people’. It seems apt today that the search for ancestral myths — common to all nationalisms — was inaugurated by a fraud; and that its legacy was forgeries of supposedly ancient poems in many countries. But for restless young Germans, impresatios of longing, the quest for a common homeland or group or Church, a place that could transcend their discouraging political reality, had a special intensity. Herder continued to believe that Ossian had opened up a new spiritual home for the Germans long after the poems were revealed to be a hoax.

In this atmosphere of deceived and frustrated longing, the French Revolution erupted volcanically. Its conversion of religious and metaphysical questions into political ones — freedom, equality and the brotherhood of man — stimulated German political and intellectual life like nothing had before. Almost all the German thinkers of the 1790s originally welcomed the Revolution, which seemed to shrink the gap between longing and object. Some Germans saw in it a prelude to their own liberation from arbitrary tyranny and provincialism — the young theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher argued suggestively and riskily that monarchs were not exempt from the guillotine. Schelling said he wanted to escape the land of ‘clerks and clerics’ to breathe the ‘free airs’ of Paris. Fichte, who had spent his youth in a series of humiliating tutorial jobs, actually applied for the job of French professor at Strasbourg; he hoped to educate the German youth in the traditions of freedom and place them in the vanguard of progress. Some, such as Schiller and Friedrich Jacobi, were sceptical that the Revolution could ever reach a peaceful conclusion. Nevertheless, there was general consensus about its basic ideals, broad admiration for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and celebration of the end of aristocratic privilege. Hegel, who erected a liberty tree in Tubingen, proclaimed that ‘only now has humanity come to understand that spiritual reality should be ruled by Thought’. For Kant it was proof of mankind’s emergence from its self-imposed immaturity, the process he had termed Enlightenment: a world-historical experiment in which man was finally self-determining and free. For many Germans reading Kant after 1789, the ageing disciple of Rousseau appeared to have achieved in theory what the French had achieved in practice. German philosophy, in this narcissistic view, had been quietly heralding freedom all along. So passionate was this self-vindication in Germany that, as Nietzsche later quipped, the ‘text’ of the French Revolution ‘disappeared under the interpretation’.

Disillusionment grew quickly after the Jacobins rose to power, terror was unleashed in the name of freedom by radical political forces, and, disturbingly for the literati, the utban lower classes seemed to gain influence. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), translated by Friedrich Gentz — later one of the closest advisors to the chancellor of Austria, Metternich — became a hit across Germany with its warnings against violent and hubristic political engineering. Georg Forster, the writer and activist, who fled a failed mini-revolution in the German city of Mainz to Paris (to die there embittered in 1794), wrote to his wife that ‘the tyranny of reason, perhaps the most unyielding of all, lies yet in store for the world’. Goethe worried that the alliancé of the masses with an intellectual elite had inaugurated a new era of deception. People incapable of self-awareness were now in charge © of improving others. ‘What must I put up with? / The crowd must strike, / Then it becomes respectable. / In judgement, it is miserable.’ Others came to recoil from, in Nietzsche’s words, the ‘semi-insanity, histrionicism, bestial cruelty, voluptuousness, and especially sentimentality and self-intoxication, which taken together constitutes the actual substance of the Revolution’. Even Herder, a passionate defender of the Revolution (Goethe claimed to have spotted his inner Jacobin), finally confessed to being repelled by ‘a populace agitated to madness, and the rule of a mad populace’. He issued his own Burkean warning for the future: “What effects might, indeed must, this vertiginous spirit of freedom, and the bloody wars that will in likelihood arise from it, have upon peoples and rulers, but above all on the organs of humanity, the sciences and arts?” Reports of atrocities from France seemed to demonstrate that inner freedom and morality were necessary before fundamental political change could take place. The liberal catchword of the 1790s accordingly became Bildung. Schiller set out a theory of drama that was an aesthetic preparation for political freedom. According to this pioneering German Romantic, the Enlightenment and science had given an ‘intellectual education’ to man but left undisturbed his ‘inner barbarian’, which only art and literature could redeem.

Diagnosing Alienation

Schiller also began to make the first of many critiques familiar to us from Marx, Weber, Adorno and Marcuse of modern commercial society, its gods of utility and instrumental teason, and its deformations of the inner life. Science, technology, division of labour and specialization, he wrote, had created a society of richer but spiritually impoverished individuals, reducing them to mere ‘fragments’: ‘nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge’. In Schiller’s vision, the Enlightenment’s ideology had evolved into the terror of reason, destroying old institutions but also the spiritual integrity of human beings. It was now to be the task of the Romantic generation to shore up the ideal of Bi/dung against modern society, and its atomism, alienation and anomie. Against individual fragmentation and self-maiming, the Romantic ideal of Bi/dung reaffirmed the value of wholeness, with oneself, others and nature. It was aimed to make the individual feel at home again in his world, instead of seeing it as opposed to himself. The Romantics developed further Rousseau’s notion of social hypocrisy in which the human self repressed its true desires and feelings within a culture of civilized manners. They also critiqued specialization, the development of the one at the expense of all the others. The sources of alienation, according to them, lay in the decline of the traditional community — the guilds, corporations and family — and the rise of the competitive marketplace and social-contractism, in which individuals pursued their self-interest at the expense of others. Man was alienated from nature also because modern technology and mechanical physics made nature into an object of mere utility, a vast machine, depriving it of magic, mystery or beauty. ‘Spectres reign where no gods are,’ wrote Novalis. Modern man, according to him, was ‘tirelessly engaged in cleansing nature, the earth, human souls, and learning of poetry, rooting out every trace of the sacred, spoiling the memory of all uplifting incidents and people, and stripping the world of all bright ornament’. | Against these pathologies of modernity, the German Romantics counterpoised ideals of wholeness or unity. Self-division would be overcome by acting according to the principles of morality, by realizing an ideal of community, or what today’s autocrat Vladimir Putin calls the ‘organic life’; and healing the split from nature with immersion in it.

On the face of it, this was a backward-looking programme. It seemed to bemoan the advent of bourgeois society and Enlightenment, and celebrate the unity and harmony found in classical Greece or the Middle Ages. But there was no going back for the Romantics. The challenge before them was how to achieve the harmony and unity of the past in the future, how to form a society and state that provide for community — a source of belonging, identity and security — while also securing rights and freedoms for individuals without them fragmenting into self-interested atoms. As Novalis wrote, Germany may not be a coherent political nation like France, and in fact had fallen behind its Western neighbours in many respects. But it did not matter since Germany is ‘treading a slow but sure path ahead of the other European countries. While the latter are busy with war, speculation and partisan spirit, the German is educating himself with all due diligence to become an accomplice of a higher culture, and in the course of time this advance must give him much superiority over the others.’ In almost all cases the German Romantics in their provincial centres were reacting to what they perceived as the defects and excesses of both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. But Romanticism was not a mete teaction. It was also, in Ernst Troeltsch’s words, "a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal egalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal humanity."

Politicizing the Spiritual

We can see now that the German Romantics’ desire to re-enchant the world had radical implications. They shattered the Enlightenment’s notion of a single civilization of universal import; they offered an idea of civilization as a multiplicity of particular national cultures, all with their own special identity. But it took a catastrophic defeat and occupation, and wars of liberation, to turn cultural Romanticism into a treacherous political Romanticism. 

In the absence of a German national state, Vo/k and Kultur had seemed abstract entities — objects of futile longing. Napoleon’s imperialism infused them with fresh content. As Wagner, the nineteenth century’s most resonant apostle of German nationalism, wrote: “The birth of the new German spirit brought with it the rebirth of the German people: the German War of Liberation of 1813, 1814 and 1815 suddenly familiarized us with this people.’ On 9 October 1806, Prussia, in alliance with Russia, Saxony, Saxony-Weimar, Brunswick and Hanover, declared war on France. The Prussian army, victorious since the Seven Years War, felt invincible; and its self-assessment was broadly shared within Prussian society. However, on 14 October, Napoleon’s French armies crushed the anti-French coalition at Jena and Auerstadt. Some commanders surrendered their fortresses without firing a shot, and troops retreated in chaos. Defeat only five days after the declaration of war came as a devastating shock. The Holy Roman Empire had finally collapsed just weeks before; Prussia was now reduced to a minor power (and forced in its weakness to become an ally of France). Just as Germany was achieving a spiritual renaissance, it disintegrated politically and came under foreign occupation, manifested by ever-increasing taxation, economic exploitation, conscription and arbitrary oppression. At a moment of political catastrophe and cultural crisis, the early Romantic struggles for re-enchantment in Germany mutated, largely due to its humiliations by Napoleon and German elite collaboration with’him, into chauvinistic, even militaristic, myths of the Vo/k, fatherland and the state. In less than two years (1805—7), Fichte moved from upholding freedom in a cosmopolitan realm to asserting a fiercely ‘German’ desire for freedom. In his ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ he condemned German cowardice before the French and called for a return to the authentic German self. The Urvolk, he argued, were the ‘first people’ in Europe to keep their own language since they, unlike the Romanized peoples in western and southern Europe, had remained in the ancestral homelands. Disregarding the facts of defeat and occupation, Fichte exhorted a German-led ‘re-creation of the human race’. Despite many local anti-French struggles, the liberation of Germany came only after Napoleon’s Grande Armée, backed by a Prussian army in the rear, was forced to withdraw in defeat from Russia in the autumn of 1812. Prussia then betrayed its ally and its king declared war on France, speaking opportunistically of the ‘cause of the Vo/k’. “Whatever is not voluntary, Madame de Staél wrote of the ferocious anti-Napoleon upsurge, ‘is destroyed at the first reverse of fortune.’ The nationalists could now come out of the closet; the many fantasies born of the lack of a state and nurtured through political fragmentation had been unleashed.

The Lure of Xenophobia

Fichte had been their original fount. He not only insisted that Germany find its own path to modernity by rejecting the ‘swindling theories of international trade and manufacture’ and by instituting patriotic education. He also gave nationalism its characteristic secular feature: the transposition of religious into national loyalties. Many other neglected and marginal German intellectuals also participated in the race to fix the special qualities of Germanness. These were, not surprisingly, almost all men with clear ideas of what women ought to do. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the ‘father of gymnastics’ and also the innovator of student fraternities, expressed early a view that would become widespread among demagogic nationalists of the nineteenth century: ‘Let man be manly, then woman will be womanly’ (in other words, passive, soothing and domestic). Reserving the privilege of truculent activity for the male, Jahn deigned to recognize only two kinds of men who had taken up the ‘holy idea of humanity’: the Greeks of classical Hellas and the Germans. Certainly, his notion of the Volk, as consisting exclusively of frat boys, fused well with a hatred of the French, especially Napoleon. Napoleon was an imperialist in the modern sense, a prototype for European colonialists in Asia and Africa: he not only extracted resources ftom the territories he conquered; he also politicized the Enlightenment notion of universal rationality, imposing the metric system and the Code Napoléon on all subjugated peoples. To his victims these ‘resources of civilization’ made him seem ‘more terrible and odious’, as his liberal critic Benjamin Constant charged, than Attila and Genghis Khan. The Romantics had initially celebrated Napoleon as the sacred embodiment of the Revolution. With his modest background, and short stature, this self-made man from Corsica, who had seized the most dazzling crown in the world and shaped the frontiers of Europe with his will, reminded the provincials of their own aspirations. To Goethe, Beethoven, Hegel and Heine, Napoleon was an embodiment of the spirit of history. But Napoleon lost his luster among most German artists and writers after the defeats at Jena and Auerstadt and the humiliation of the French occupation. He showed particular contempt for the Germans, their traditions and Protestant faith; he deliberately maligned the reputation of their virtuous Prussian queen, and then insulted them by calling her ‘the only real man in Prussia’, And so in Trinity Church in Berlin a religious ceremony, presided over by Schleiermacher, inaugurated the war against the French infidel in March 1813, the theologian speaking from the pulpit, and rifles leaning against the church wall. Fichte suspended his class at the University of Berlin, exhorting his students to fight until they attained liberty or death. Themes of martyrdom resonated through the campaign; the poet Theodor Korner wrote before his own martyrdom of death in the cause of Germany as a ‘nuptials’ with the fatherland. ‘It is not, he clarified, ‘a war of the kind the kings know about, ’tis a crusade, ’tis a holy war.’ This ‘holy war’ — the first in post-Christian Europe — preceded by many decades the jihad against military and cultural imperialism credited to Islamic fanatics. 

Jahn exhorted Germans to ‘know again with manly pride the value of your own noble living language’ and leave alone the ‘cesspool’ of Paris. The exponent of patriotic calisthenics was surpassed by the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt: ‘Only a bloody hatred of the French, Arndt asserted, ‘can unify German power, restore German glory, bring out all the noble instincts of the people and submerge the base ones.’ ‘I will my hatred of the French, Arndt wrote, ‘not just for this war, I will it for a long time, I will it forever ... Let this hatred smoulder as the religion of the German folk, as a holy mantra in all hearts, and let it preserve us in our fidelity, our honesty and courage.’ No one, however, hated as eloquently as Heinrich von Kleist. Germany’s greatest dramatist went beyond political grievance in his luridly precise description of swinging a small French boy around and smashing his head against a church pillar. The scion of a distinguished military family in Prussia, von Kleist abandoned his family tradition and military career, committing himself to a programme of intellectual and aesthetic growth. Arrested by the French police in 1807 on suspicion of being a spy and detained for a year, he then embarked on a literary career in Francophobia. He brought out a patriotic journal called Germania in time for the anti-French uprising. In his ode ‘Germania to Her Children’ von Kleist spelled out what he required of his German peets:

With the Kaiser preceding you

Leave your huts and homes

Sweep over the Franks

Like the boundless foamy sea.

Von Kleist wanted Germania’s children to dam up the Rhine with French corpses. Sneering at ‘prattlers’ and ‘writers’ who speak abstractly about freedom, he called for the baptism of Germany with blood. In ‘War Song of the Germans’, he argued that the French must be made extinct, like the beasts that had once roamed the forests of Europe.

Impatient for Progress 

Patriotic rhetoric became increasingly commonplace among educated Germans, especially after the explicitly antinationalist post-Napoleonic settlement sealed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It left Germany as a Confederation of thirty-nine states, and those Germans hoping for unity even more frustrated than before. In 1817 hundreds of students, members of a student fraternity inspired by Jahn, gathered near the Wartburg castle on the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing up of his theses. This castle had been a refuge for Luther, where he had translated the Bible; it now became a symbol of German nationalism as disciples of Jahn recited prayers for Germany’s salvation and threw ‘un-Germanr’ books, including the Code Napoléon, into a bonfire. Metternich, the keeper of Europe’s peace, cracked down on universities; Jahn was imprisoned for six years. But the student unrest signalled a far wider discontent than one that the Austrian chancellor’s secret police could stem. The American and French Revolutions had left many young men around the world fretting that they had been left out or had fallen behind in the march of progress. A brilliant military marauder like Napoleon brought, often in person, thrilling new ideas of liberation to many of them. A series of constitutionalist revolts, led by intellectuals and army officers, and often modelled on Napoleon’s own coup, erupted across southern Europe — in Spain, Italy and Greece —in 1820 and 1821. In 1825 military heroes of Russia’s ‘wars of liberation’ against Napoleon in 1812-14 challenged the Russian autocracy. These ‘Decembrists’, as they came to be called after the month of their abortive uprising, were brutally crushed, though they were representatives of Russia’s aristocratic elite. Five of them were hanged and hundreds exiled to Siberia for life. The failure of the uprising seeded a Romantic cult of sacrifice and martyrdom (and originally inspired the greatest piece of prose fiction of the nineteenth century, War and Peace). The youthful Herzen, who was fourteen at the time of the uprising, inaugurated Russia’s distinctive revolutionary tradition when on the hills overlooking Moscow he swore a ‘Hannibalic oath’ to sacrifice his entire life to the struggle begun by the Decembrists. Such ideas of resistance and protest, which eventually expanded into revolutionary socialism, were made more urgent and appealing by a repressive state in Russia. In Europe, too, all aspirations for freedom had to reckon with strong and canny forces of conservatism: the suptanational dynastic states, dubbed the “Holy Alliance’ by the Russian Tsar. Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna may have brought peace to Europe, and relief to its monarchical ruling classes, embodied best by the stern and paranoid figure of Metternich. But the mood across post-Napoleonic Europe and Russia was febrile, registered in the growing popularity of soul-stirring opera and lyric poetry, the cult of Byron, and Stendhal’s novels about the maladie du siécle. Young men everywhere waited for a new revelation on the same scale as the French Revolution, or at least some replacements for obsolete religious beliefs. ' The fascination with the mysterious, the esoteric and the irrational that characterizes the entire epoch would pave the way for the revolutions of 1848. After their failure, accumulated frustration would generate intransigent movements of socialism as well as nationalism, and desire for a genuine, thoroughgoing revolution that would bring freedom and equality to all, not just a few.