The German Genius

way of dressing, their own uniform. As well as physical exercise, their songs encouraged the experience of belonging. Their gatherings in uniform were theoretically illegal but that didn’t stop them calling Fischer their “ Führer ” and greeting each other with “ Heil .”
    T HE A RYAN M YSTIQUE
     
    The history of Germany is different from that of other European countries in so far as her textbooks invariably begin by concentrating on the expansion of the Germanic people in Italy, France, and Spain rather than just telling the story of Germans in Germany. This is reflected in the different names other nations give the Germans—they were “Saxons” to the Finns, “Niemcy” or “Swabians” to the Russians and Poles, “Germans” to the British, “Allemands” to the French, “Tedeschi” to the Italians, with the Germans themselves adopting the last root for their own “Deutsche.” 40 Is it this varied history that gave the Germans their concern with racial purity and the role of heroes in the achievement of that purity? All nations feel themselves special, but the feeling was particularly strong in Germany, where Friedrich Schlegel was the principal builder of the Aryan myth, laying the groundwork for others later to contrast the “old Latin race” with the “young Germanic race,” so that Theodor Mommsen was required to warn against “the nationalist madmen who want to replace the universal Adam by a Germanic Adam, containing in himself all the splendours of the human spirit.” 41
    The founder of modern racial theory, who anticipated the Aryan concept, was Christoph Meiners (1745–1810), a Göttingen professor who was the first to advance the theory that mankind had its origins in Africa, and who saw a sort of progress from orangutans to Negroes, to Slavs, to Germans. But his views were overtaken by those of the Romantics, who thought that, as the Schlegels put it, “Everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin” and Germany “must be considered the Orient of Europe.” 42 Schopenhauer was sympathetic and it was around this time that the term “Aryan” began to be used, having been originally borrowed from Herodotus by the Frenchman Anquetil du Peyron to designate Persians and Medes. Whereas other countries (such as France) also had the Aryan myth, tracing many features of European cultural life (such as language) to “Indo- European ” roots, the Germans referred to “Indo- German ” traditions, seeing themselves as particularly strongly linked with that background, as a rival to the more classical Latin trajectory. They became, as the nineteenth century progressed, the quintessence of the white human race, the noblest of all races, the only ones capable of attaining a “higher spirituality.” (Lorenz Oken went so far as to say that, since blacks could not blush, they could not express an interior life.) 43
    By 1860 the distinction between Aryans and Semites had become accepted in many quarters, right across Europe. The word was used by Darwin and by Nietzsche, in the novels of Gustav Freytag, and in the Proceedings of the Anthropological Society of London. The cult of “blond virility,” later so popular, did not come into being, however, until 1870–71 and had its origins in the writings of the French anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, who, having witnessed the siege of Paris by the Prussians, in which civilians were bombarded, accused the Prussians of being Finns and Slavo-Finns, primitive inhabitants of northeastern Europe. This provoked a backlash in Germany, and it was as part of this backlash that Virchow’s famous study of German craniology was undertaken. The theoretical background to the study was that a mainly blond and “dolichocephalic” (long-skulled) Aryan stock had migrated to Europe and mingled with the dark and “brachycephalic” (round-skulled) natives. Lasting more than ten years, involving more than 15 million schoolchildren, Virchow’s study showed that the northeastern Prussians were blond, like the Finns, and that the southwestern Germans were not—they had been assimilated into the racial types of the Burgundians, the Franks, and the Goths. Both the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns were of the northeastern type, so German honor was satisfied. But in general it was felt, as Ernst Renan wrote: “The inequalities of races is established…” 44
    Darwinism, when it arrived, provided a (spurious) basis for many of these