The German Genius

France or England. The Germans insisted on the unbridgeable difference between culture and civilisation.” 70 (See Chapter 29 for Max Weber’s view on why the Germans fought the Great War.)
    Nearer our time, many Germans regarded the Weimar Republic—the attempt to establish a democratic regime in Germany for the first time—as a betrayal of German political ideals. In his “Gedanken im Krieg” (Thoughts on War; 1918), Thomas Mann wrote that the democratic spirit was “totally alien to the Germans, who were morally but not politically inclined. Interested in metaphysics, poetry and music but not in voting rights or the proper procedures of the parliamentary system, for them Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a more radical act than the proclamation of the rights of man.” Mann returned to the theme at the end of World War II, when he was in exile in the United States. He believed the triumph of politics in Germany—the rise of Bismarck, the role of the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi movement—had all (all, not just the Nazis) led to cultural impoverishment. 71 Later, Mann changed his tune and in a speech to Congress argued that “inwardness and the romantic counterrevolution had led to the disastrous separation of the speculative from the socio-political sphere that made Germans unfit for modern democracy.” 72
    To a non-German this all sounds somewhat strange—dare one say it, unreal. The Western but non-German view of “culture” was aptly summed up by T. S. Eliot, in his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), where he famously said: “The term culture …includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August [the beginning of the shooting season], a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.” None of this necessarily implies any particular “inwardness” on the part of participants, or any great education, come to that. It is a much less hierarchical, more ecumenical view of human affairs than the German concept of culture. What the elite of Germany meant by Kultur until at least the Second World War is what we, in the West, outside Germany, traditionally call “high culture”: literature, theater, painting, music and opera, theology, and philosophy. 73
    But, and it is an important “but,” this need not be taken as a criticism of Germany. It may well be that this different understanding of the way our intellectual activities should be organized is a crucial point, an instructive difference. At the very least, lessons are to be learned from difference. Consider, for example, these statements.
    “The twentieth century should have been the German century.” The words were written by the American academic Norman Cantor; he was speaking at the time about the devastating effect the Nazi regime had on Germany’s leading historians, such as Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz. Next, there is this sentence, in Fritz Stern’s Einstein’s German World : “It could have been Germany’s century.” This time it was Raymond Aron speaking, the French philosopher talking to Stern when they were in Berlin in 1979 to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn, and Lise Meitner. What Cantor and Aron meant, in asserting that the twentieth century should/could have been Germany’s, was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers, who were the best in the world, would have taken the freshly unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when 1933 came along. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Germany was—without question—the leading force in the world intellectually. It could not perhaps match the United States in sheer economic numbers—America was, even then, a far more populous entity. But in all other aspects of life, Germany led the way. Had a historian of any nationality published an intellectual history of modern Germany at the end of 1932, it would have been very largely a history of triumph. By 1933 Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans put together. Germany’s way of organizing herself intellectually was a great success.