The German Genius

after 1918.”
    “All those who have within them the creative quickening of life, or else, assuming that such a gift has been withheld from them, at least await the moment when they are caught up in the magnificent torrent of flowing and original life, or perhaps have some confused presentiment of such freedom, and have towards this phenomenon not hatred, nor fear, but a feeling of love, these are part of primal humanity. These may be considered as true people, these constitute the Urvolk , the primal people—I mean the Germans. All those, on the other hand, who have resigned themselves to represent only the derivative, the second-hand product…and shall pay the price of their belief. They are but an annexe to life…They are excluded from the Urvolk …The nation which bears the name ‘Germans’ to this day has not ceased to give evidence of a creative and original activity in the most diverse fields.” 12
    T HE R ISE OF THE U NCONSCIOUS
     
    Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), who succeeded Hegel in his professorial chair, had a more organic, less aggressive view of spiritual self-development than Fichte. For Schelling the world consisted of phenomena which varied in their degree of self-consciousness, from total unconsciousness, gradually coming to full consciousness of themselves. At its most fundamental, there are the brute rocks that form the earth, which represent the “will” in a condition of total unconsciousness. 13 Gradually life infuses them, producing the first biological species. Plants and animals follow, self-consciousness growing, leading toward the realization of some kind of purpose. Nature represents progressive stages of the will and is striving toward something “but is not aware what it strives for.” 14 Man, as well as striving, becomes aware of what he is striving for. This is an event important for the whole universe, which, in Schelling’s account, is brought in this way to a higher consciousness of itself. This was God for Schelling, a self-developing consciousness, a progressive phenomenon evolving. 15
    It had a deep effect in Germany because, according to this mode of understanding, the function of the artist now involved an ability to dive deep into the unconscious forces “which move within him,” and bring them to consciousness, however difficult the struggle. For Schelling, in order for art to have value, it must tap into “the pulsations of a not wholly conscious life.” Otherwise art is a mere “photograph,” a piece of knowledge that, like science, is no more than careful observation. These two doctrines, Fichte’s understanding of the will and Schelling’s of the unconscious, formed the essential backbone of the aesthetics of the Romantic movement. The truth of art, says Thomas Nipperdey, became the great question of the nineteenth century. 16
    Friedrich Schlegel had yet another view. 17 For him, there were three elements that shaped Romanticism. He agreed that Fichte’s theory of knowledge was one, but he added, for good measure, the French Revolution and Goethe’s famous novel Wilhelm Meister . The French Revolution exerted its effect on the Germans because, as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars, there was sparked, in Prussia in particular, “a vast burst of wounded national feeling.” The events of the Reign of Terror during the Revolution were crucial, those events switching back and forth as they did in such unpredictable ways as to suggest to the Romantics that not enough was known about human behavior and that what was known was only the tip of a vast hidden iceberg, some unknown and uncontrollable and even undiscoverable impersonal force, the strength of which could not be deflected. 18 Schlegel’s third great influence, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister , was admired because it showed how, “by the free exercise of his noble and unrestrained will,” a man can work on himself to improve himself, increase his self-consciousness. * 19
    A C HANGE IN THE M EANING OF W ORK
     
    The effects were momentous. For one thing, the Romantic revolution reinforced the Protestant understanding of work. Instead of being regarded as an ugly necessity, it was transformed into “the sacred task of man,” because only by work—an expression of the unfolding of the will—could man bring his distinctive, creative personality to bear upon “the dead stuff” of nature. Man now moved ever further from the monastic ideal of the Middle Ages, in that his real essence was