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 Volk, 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 necessary 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 Kultur. They claimed that Kultur, the preserve of lowly but profound native burgers, pastors and professors, was a higher achievement than a French Zivilisation built around court society. For Kultur combined the nurturing and education of the individual soul (Bildung) 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 Volk 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 G?rres claimed that when ‘Germany lay in deep humiliation, when its princes became servants, the nobility scurried 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 Volk 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 Zivilisation for its materialism and soullessness while upholding Germany’s profound moral and spiritual Kultur. 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 Volk 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?