Thus, development came to be infused with fresh earnestness and world-historical urgency, and then exalted with the prestige of science. Mere being came to be degraded, thanks to Germany’s special experience, by becoming. As Nietzsche wrote caustically, ‘The German himself is not, he is becoming, he is “developing”. “Development” is thus the truly German discovery.’
In the long term, ‘development’ proved to be the most important discovery: it is still the word we use to assess societies. Human self-knowledge since the nineteenth century has been synonymous with all that could help the process of ‘development’: the advance of science and industry and the demystification of culture, tradition and religion. All the hopes, transmitted from Marxists to modernization theorists and free-marketeers, of ‘development’ emerge from nineteenth-century German thinkers: the first people to give a deep meaning and value to a process defined by continuous movement with a fixed direction and no terminus. All our simple dualisms – progressive and reactionary, modern and anti-modern, rational and irrational – derive their charge from the deeply internalized urge to move to the next stage of ‘development’, however nebulously defined.
Finding the Enemy Within
As Romanticism metamorphosed into grand proclamations about the spirit of history (and its fondness for Germany), Heine warned against ‘that vague, unfruitful pathos, that unprofitable vapour of enthusiasm, which plunges, scorning death, into an ocean of generalizations’. Shorn of his earlier hopes, Heine became Germany’s most acute critic as the country’s slow progress under a conservative regime incited grandiloquent daydreams of power among the intellectuals. As he then wrote, ‘The French and the Russians rule the land, Great Britain rules the sea, But we’re supreme in the realm of dreams, / Where there’s no rivalry.’
Heine keenly sensed Romanticism’s disturbing mutations. In ‘Atta Troll’ (1841) a bear dancing vigorously and ineptly represents the Young Germany:
Atta Troll, trend-conscious bear, respectably
Religious, ardent as a companion,
Through seduction by the Zeitgeist
A sansculotte of the primeval forest.
Dances very badly, yet with
Conviction in his shaggy bosom.
Also pretty stinky on occasion.
No talent, but a character.
The Jewish poet was an early critic of nationalism, having noticed its malign dependence on various enemies for self-definition: ‘The French-devourers,’ he wrote, ‘like to gobble down a Jew afterwards for a tasty dessert.’ He attacked the book-burners at the Wartburg ceremony of 1817:
Dominant there was that Teutomania that shed so many tears over love and faith, but whose love was no different than hatred of the foreigner and whose faith lay only in stupidity and could, in its ignorance, find nothing better to do than to burn books!
Heine went after the solemn intellectual defenders of nationalism, the German philosophers and historians who ‘torture their brains in order to defend any despotism, no matter how silly or clumsy it may be, as sensible and authentic’. His defiant Francophilia, and contempt for German nationalists, exposed Heine to anti-Semitic attacks. The most formidable of his critics after 1871 was Heinrich von Treitschke, a kind of intellectual spokesman for unified and rising Germany with his patriotic histories. In 1807, Fichte had already floated the possibility of expelling unassimilated Jews. Treitschke made anti-Semitism respectable in Bismarck’s Second Reich with an article that began with the words, ‘The Jews are our national misfortune.’ He deplored the fact that Heine ‘never wrote a drinking song’ and ‘of carousing in the German way the oriental was incapable’. ‘Heine’s esprit,’ he concluded, ‘was by no means Geist in the German sense.’
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Treitschke was trying to name and shame un-German Orientals when Germany had become a unified nation state, and its material and political conditions had vastly improved. For a long time only some bookish Germans had been even interested in a national state, despite the best efforts of various freelance revolutionaries. The misery of peasants and factory workers had bred passive acceptance rather than political resistance, let alone revolutionary rage – a fact that continually frustrated Marx and pushed him into increasingly radical hopes. Francophobia acquired a mass base only in 1840, when France demanded the surrender of German territories on the left bank of the Rhine.
Soon after its unification, Germany surpassed France, defeating its old tormentor militarily in 1871 with the help of new railways and telegraphy networks. German troops bombarded and occupied Paris, and the subsequent violent chaos of the Paris Commune made Germany seem to many in the French elite a worthy model of national emulation. Germany also started to close in on Britain with a belated but extensive industrial revolution. Germans who had contented themselves by daydreaming about their intellectual and spiritual leadership could now boast about an imperial Second Reich. And intellectuals like Treitschke exercised far more influence in a unified Germany than they ever had in the past.
After a wild burst of enthusiasm, however, the messianic hopes generated by German unity soon came up against the soulless realpolitik of Bismarck and the prosaic reality of an industrializing country. ‘German spirit,’ Nietzsche epigrammatically noted in 1888, ‘for the past eighteen years, a contradiction in terms.’ It was also Nietzsche who had observed previously and perceptively that ‘once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one’s neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation’.
An existential envy of neighbours lingered in unified Germany while the achievement of material success brought tormenting ambivalence in its wake to people who had boasted a great deal of their spiritual culture. Germans seemed less united, and more disconnected from their glorious traditions, than before as they laid railways, built up cities and made money. The gap between organic German Kultur and mechanistic Western Zivilisation seemed to shrink. Many modernizing Germans seemed to resemble too much the unbridled plutocrats and profit-seekers of England, France and the United States.
Self-distrust led to more boosting of the Volk, and the fantasy that the people rooted in blood and soil would eventually triumph over rootless cosmopolitans, confirming Germany’s moral and cultural superiority over its neighbours. Thus, Germany generated a phenomenon now visible all over Europe and America: a conservative variant of populism that posits a state of primal wholeness, or unity of the people, against transnational elites, while being itself deeply embedded in a globalized modern world.