The German Genius

unconscious was taken very seriously indeed and played a seminal role underpinning a transformation that was to have a profound effect on thought, in particular in the arts, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was the phenomenon known as modernism.

T HE M ISERIES AND M IRACLES OF M ODERNITY
     

The Abuses of History
     
    I f this book were a theatrical production, at this point the lighting would change and the stage would become much darker. “The Germans have been superbly rational in their laboratories and industrial organisations. Their vision of politics and society, however, was blurred by clouds of evil fantasy.” This is Fritz Stern in the introduction to his 1972 collection of essays, The Failure of Illiberalism . 1 At exactly the time that Helmholtz, Clausius, Siemens, Virchow, Koch, Benz, and Mendel were making their great innovations, a very different kind of intellectual activity was gathering pace, so different in tone, style, direction, and substance that several observers have remarked that, in the run-up to World War I, there were not one but two Germanies. It is now time to examine that other Germany.
    Since this is a book more about the culture of Germany than its politics per se, we shall concentrate on the areas where this “other Germany” emerged. It emerged among the country’s historians, took in a constellation of views that embraced aggressive nationalism, militarism, Darwinism, the Aryan myth, and anti-Catholicism, and culminated in a variety of sociological theories by both more and less reputable sociologists. These ideas produced a sharpening of Germany’s self-image at the end of the nineteenth century as she distanced herself intellectually, culturally, and even morally from her neighbors and the rivals immediately surrounding her.
    T HE R ISE OF H IGH C ULTURE AND “I NWARDNESS”
     
    Although the focus of what follows is mainly intellectual history, politics—quite naturally—cannot be ignored entirely, in particular the part played by two men who between them epitomized and shaped, were both symptom and cause of, this other Germany: Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II.
    To recap briefly, we have seen how, in 1848, Germany’s attempt at bourgeois revolution failed. Some parliamentary practices were established in the 1860s, but in general the aim of the German middle class for political and social equality and emancipation was unsuccessful. Germany failed to make the sociopolitical advances that Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, and North America had achieved, in some cases generations before. German liberalism, or would-be liberalism, was based on middle-class demands for free trade and a constitutional framework to protect Germany’s economic and social space in society. When this attempt at constitutional evolution failed, to be followed in 1871 by the establishment of the Reich, led by Prussia, an unusual set of circumstances came into being. In a real sense, and as Gordon Craig has pointed out, the people of Germany played no part in the creation of the Reich. “The new state was a ‘gift’ to the nation on which the recipient had not been consulted.” 2 Its constitution had not been earned; it was a contract among the princes of the existing German states, who retained their crowns until 1918. To our modern way of thinking, this had some extraordinary consequences. One result was that the Reich had a parliament without power, political parties without access to governmental responsibility, and elections whose outcome did not determine the composition of the government. This was quite unlike—and much more backward than—anything that existed among Germany’s competitors in the West. Matters of state remained in the hands of the landed aristocracy, although Germany had become an industrial power. As more and more people joined in Germany’s industrial, scientific, and intellectual successes, the more it was run by a small coterie of traditional figures—landed aristocrats and military leaders, at the head of which was the emperor himself. This dislocation was fundamental to “Germanness” in the run-up to the First World War.
    It was one of the greatest anachronisms of history and had two effects that concern us. One, the middle class, excluded politically and yet eager to achieve some measure of equality, fell back on education and Kultur as key areas where success could be achieved—equality with the aristocracy, and