The German Genius

felt to be educated. The division was not quite the same in Germany—where sociologists and politicians were lumped in with scientists as aspects of Zivilisation and opposed to Kultur —but it was from the same family and even more profound.
    There is more to it even than that. The appeal of “culture” in Germany, Lepenies says, accompanied as it is by a “scorn” for everyday politics, has been based on a belief in the “deeply apolitical nature of the ‘German soul,’” and this, he insists, nurtured Germany’s claim, as a Kulturnation , to superiority over the merely “civilized” West from the late nineteenth century on. The resulting “strange indifference” to politics has been much more in evidence in Germany than anywhere else, he says, and involvement in culture at the expense of, and as a substitute for, politics “has remained a prevailing attitude throughout German history—from the glorious days in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Weimar through, though now in considerably weaker form, the re-unification of the two Germanies after the fall of communism.” 65 Germany’s cultural achievements, the belief that it was traveling a special path, a Sonderweg, “was always a point of pride in the land of poets and thinkers. The inward realm established by German Idealism, the classic literature of Weimar, and the Classical and Romantic styles in music preceded the founding of the political nation by more than a hundred years. They gave a special dignity to the withdrawal of the individual from politics into the spheres of culture and private life. Culture was seen as a noble substitute for politics.” 66 Many other observers have remarked on Germany’s inwardness, that “strange indifference to politics,” and some have gone further, arguing that it is this which accounts for the “nightmarish consequences” of one or other of the two world wars. The Germans took on board Thomas Hobbes but not John Locke. On this reckoning then, there was a special path in Germany history, but it was cultural, not political, as Wehler claimed. Karl Lamprecht remarked on this in his German History , published as early as 1891. 67
    Gordon Craig, the great American historian of Germany, noticed the same tendency. 68 “The alienation of the artist in Imperial Germany…was in large part self-willed. Towards the real world, the world of power and politics, the German artist, in contrast to the French, always had an ambivalent attitude. He was…repelled by a belief that to participate in politics or even to write about it was a derogation of his calling and that, for an artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one…Not even the events of 1870–71 succeeded in shaking their indifference. The victory over France and the unification of the German states inspired no great work of literature or music or painting…” Speaking of the Naturalist writers and painters of the end of the nineteenth century, Craig adds that they “never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. Indeed, as those dangers became more palpable…under William II…the great majority of the country’s novelists and poets averted their eyes and retreated into that Innerlichkeit [inwardness] which was always their haven when the real world became too perplexing for them.” 69
    On October 4, 1914, two months into the Great War, ninety-three German intellectuals published a manifesto, known as the Manifesto of the 93, addressed “An die Kulturwelt” (To the Civilized World) in which they defended the actions of the Reich against criticism from abroad. These individuals, among them Max Liebermann, the painter, and Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, made it clear they viewed the war not as a campaign against German militarism but above all as an assault on German culture. “What was not understood abroad was that German militarism and German culture could not be separated from one another…The signatories of the manifesto vowed that they would fight the war as members of a cultural people ( Kulturvolk ) for whom the legacy of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant was as sacred as German soil…Germany’s unity had been achieved not by politics but by culture.” German thought, the ninety-three said, was an indispensable element of the European spirit, “precisely because it differed so much from values and ideals that were pertinent for countries like