The German Genius

schools where, for the most part, Darwinism was excluded. In many places in Germany very little science was taught in the schools anyway (in some places, like Bavaria, it was simply not required), so Darwinism wasn’t being singled out. Haeckel, on the other hand, thought that Darwinism ought to become the centerpiece of the school curriculum, and bitter battles were fought—in parliament, in the newspapers, in books—over this issue.
    After its original enthusiastic reception, Darwinism in Germany developed in two ways. First, a variety of Social Darwinisms emerged, several examples of which are considered, Chapter 22. The other way that Darwinism developed was its conjoining with Marxism. The generation of German workers before World War I was extremely socialist in its outlook but, again according to Kelly, the tenets of basic Darwinism were much easier to understand than Marxism itself and so the latter became infused with Darwinist terminology, even to the point that most workers saw the future in evolutionary rather than revolutionary terms. Even Rudolf Virchow, noted liberal that he was, feared that Darwinism “could lead to socialism.” 33 In 1899, A. H. T. Pfannkuche placed an advertisement in Die Neue Zeit asking the librarians of workers’ libraries to send him lists of the most popular books and he published his findings as Was liest der deutsche Arbeiter? ( What Does the German Worker Read? ). Four out of the top ten books were books about Darwinism. Its appeal stemmed from the prestige of science at the time and its message of the inevitability of change.
    Other scholars such as Hans-Günter Zmarzlik, Roger Chickering, and Richard Evans have added the important critique that, with the rise of Pan-Germanism and ideas about “racial hygiene” (see below), Social Darwinism in Germany veered from being a mainly left-wing concern to the right in and after the 1890s. 34
    T HE F EAR OF D EGENERATION
     
    Kelly also observes that it was in the 1890s that Social Darwinism “began to undergo some ominous changes.” 35 By 1890, there was a growing consensus—not least among medical men—that the industrial landscape of Europe was encroaching so quickly on what had gone before that a host of new disorders was being created in its wake: new forms of poverty, crime, alcoholism, moral perversion, and violence. 36 The concept of “degeneration,” the very idea that the European population was no longer physically capable of supporting civilized life, had begun with the Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso, who espoused a theory that criminals were a special “atavistic” type, “criminaloids,” throwbacks to primitive humanity. 37 But the man who made the most of this was Max Nordau, a socialist and committed egalitarian and a man who, in his fiction, called degeneracy the “malady of the century.” 38 He and Ernst Haeckel were founder members of the National Peace League and the Society for Racial Hygiene. On top of its Italian beginnings, the French had built their own ideas of degeneracy, following the Franco-Prussian War, when the humiliation of defeat had shocked France’s intellectual elite. But Nordau, a German-speaking Hungarian doctor and journalist, published Entartung ( Degeneration ) in 1892 and although it was close to 600 pages long, it became an immediate international best seller, translated into a dozen languages. Nordau argued that there was degeneration not just in people but in culture, “degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes…lunatics; they are often authors and artists.” He singled out Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola, Édouard Manet, and the Impressionists, who he thought painted the way they did as a result of nystagmus, a “trembling of the eyeball,” which blurred and distorted their vision. 39
    Nordau thought the European aristocracy was beyond help, the only hope lying with the working class, whose self-confidence and vitality could be best ensured by physical exertion and strenuous outdoor exercises. His theories helped give rise to the mania for athletic clubs, the hiking and backpacking movements and bicycle races that engulfed Germany around the turn of the twentieth century. These activities overlapped with the Youth Movement, started in 1897 in Steglitz, a middle-class suburb of Berlin, under the charismatic leadership of Karl Fischer. Their hikes always took in difficult terrain and they soon embraced their own