The German Genius

superiority in comparison with foreigners in a competitive, nationalistic world. “High culture” was thus always more important in imperial Germany than elsewhere and this is one reason why—as we shall see in due course—it flourished so well in the 1871–1933 period. But this gave culture a certain tone: freedom, equality, and personal distinctiveness tended to be located in the “inner sanctum” of the individual, whereas society was portrayed as an “arbitrary, external and frequently hostile world.” 3 The second effect, which overlapped with the first, was a retreat into nationalism, but a class-based nationalism that turned against the newly created industrial working class (and the stirrings of socialism), Jews, and non-German minorities. “Nationalism was seen as moral progress, with utopian possibilities.” 4 Against the background of a developing mass society, the educated middle class looked to culture as a stable set of values that uplifted their lives, set them apart from the “rabble” (Freud’s word) and, in particular, enhanced their nationalist orientation. The “ Volk ,” a semimystical, nostalgic ideal of how ordinary Germans had once been—a contented, talented, apolitical, “pure” people—became a popular stereotype within Germany.
    These factors combined to produce in German culture a concept that is almost untranslatable into English but is probably the defining factor in understanding much German thought as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. The word in German is Innerlichkeit . Insofar as it can be translated, it means a tendency to withdraw from, or be indifferent to, politics, and to look inward, inside the individual. Innerlichkeit meant that artists deliberately avoided power and politics, guided by a belief that to participate, or even to write about it was, again in Gordon Craig’s words, “a derogation of their calling” and that, for the artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one. Not even the events of 1870–71 succeeded in shaking this indifference. “The victory over France and the unification of Germany inspired no great work of literature or music or painting.” In comparison with the literature of other European countries, the Germans never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. “Indeed,” writes Craig, “as those dangers became more palpable, with the beginnings under Wilhelm II of a frenetic imperialism, accompanied by an aggressive armaments programme, the great majority of the country’s novelists and poets averted their eyes and retreated into that Innerlichkeit which was always their haven when the real world became too perplexing for them.” There were no German equivalents of Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Maxim Gorky, or even Henry James (except, just maybe, in his later work, Gerhart Hauptmann, 1862–1946, though he was the only one).
    T HE R ISE OF N ATIONALISTIC H ISTORY
     
    We may open this aspect of the story with a return to Germany’s historians. They were not especially inward—quite the contrary, in fact—but they benefited from the nationalism that inwardness helped to produce in Germany in the last half of the nineteenth century. First, consider Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903). Born in Garding in Schleswig, yet another son of a pastor, he enrolled at the University of Kiel in Holstein since he could not afford the more prestigious German universities. He won scholarships to visit France and Italy to study classical Roman inscriptions and made so much of them that in 1857 he was appointed a research professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He helped create the German Archaeological Institute and in 1861 became professor of Roman History at the University of Berlin. He published more than 1,500 works and pioneered the study of epigraphy, being responsible for the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarium in sixteen volumes, of which he wrote five himself. He rose at 5:00 A.M. . every day and was frequently seen reading as he walked. He had sixteen children. and two of his great-grandsons, Hans and Wolfgang, both became prominent German historians. In 1902, aged eighty-five, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of few nonfiction writers to receive that accolade.
    Mommsen was also a politician, a delegate to the Prussian Landstag from 1863 to 1866 and from 1873 to 1879, and a delegate to the Reichstag from