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, Volk 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 Auerst?dt. 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 Volk, 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 Volk ’. ‘Whatever is not voluntary,’ Madame de Sta?l 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 from 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 Auerst?dt 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.