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 be a 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 presumed 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 latecoming 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 unrest 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.
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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.