The German Genius

theories, aided and abetted by the ideas of Herbert Spencer, who tried to amalgamate the theory of the conservation of energy with evolution and came up with the deadly phrases “the struggle for existence,” and “the survival of the fittest,” which at a stroke enabled people to combine militarism, nationalism, and cultural history into whatever miasma of beliefs they chose. Dr. Ludwig Woltmann (1871–1907) and Dr. Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) were just two of the (predominantly but not exclusively German) scholars who subscribed to such views, going so far as to found secret Nordic societies and serve on the jury for the famous Krupp Prize in 1900, when 50,000 marks was offered for the best essay on state legislation in the field of heredity.
    The culmination of the “Aryan epoch,” as Leon Poliakov calls it, was perhaps 1889, when Max Nordau observed that “Darwin was well on the way to becoming the supreme authority for militarists in all European countries.” Evolution, Nordau thought, acted as a cover for “natural barbarism,” allowing people to cloak the “instincts of their inmost hearts” with the “last word of science.” This is supported indirectly by the observation of Amos Elon that at the end of the nineteenth century the combination of material strength with cultural wealth in Germany “was unparalleled on the continent” and that although the pre-eminence of Jews in some cultural fields was “overwhelming,” there was little if any “religiously Jewish” content in the work of, say, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Edmund Husserl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, or Paul Ehrlich. 45
    Darwin himself was not at all a “ terrible simplificateur, ” but his work was used in that way and, deliberately or otherwise, people missed the real lesson of Darwinism—that all of mankind is derived from the same source. The Aryan myth, incoherently, posited that the Germans had a heredity different from that of their fellow Europeans, indeed from all others.
    T HE H ATRED OF M ODERNITY
     
    In the middle of all this, in 1890, Julius Langbehn published Rembrandt als Erzieher ( Rembrandt as Teacher ), in which he denounced intellectualism and science. Born in a small town in Schleswig, into a family of pastors, one of whom had studied under Luther, and the son of a philologist, Langbehn argued that it is art, not science or religion, that is the higher good, the true source of knowledge and virtue. In science, he maintained, the old German virtues of simplicity, subjectivity, and individuality were lost. Rembrandt, the “perfect German and incomparable artist,” was pictured as the antithesis of modern culture and the model for Germany’s “third Reformation,” yet another turning inward (the first two had been sparked, he said, by Luther and Lessing). One theme dominated the entire book: German culture was being destroyed by science and intellectualism and could be regenerated only through the resurgence of art, reflecting the inner qualities of a great people, and the rise to power of heroic, artistic individuals in a new society. After 1871 Germany had lost her artistic style and her great individuals, and for Langbehn, Berlin above all symbolized the evils in German culture. The poison of commerce and materialism (“Manchesterism” or, sometimes, “ Amerikanisierung ”) was corroding the ancient inner spirit of the Prussian garrison town. Art should ennoble, Langbehn said, so that naturalism, realism, anything that exposed the kind of iniquities that a Zola or a Thomas Mann drew attention to, was anathema.
    He intended his book as a new bible for a new, reformed Germany. 46 The dominant theme was a hatred of science and, as we shall see, hatred itself is a unifying theme that runs through these few pages. His book also coincided with a wider-based critique of industrial society (Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Sigmund Freud) and this helps account for its appeal. His hatred was directed at, among others, Theodor Mommsen, who, like other professors, had “sacrificed his soul to his intellect…The professor is the German national disease.” The underlying threat to Germany, Langbehn insisted, “was over-education.” 47
    That Langbehn ignored politics was part of his attraction. In the Germany he appealed to, that ignorance was looked upon as high-mindedness. By means of a “flight into art,”