The German Genius

nationalism, faith, intuition, and philosophy could be mixed. 48 Art was particularly suited to Protestant nations, he said, because they were the most “inward.”
    The book was a sensation, presented by booksellers as “the most important work of the century” and warmly reviewed, despite its evident anti-Semitism, by Georg Simmel, Ludwig von Pastor, and Wilhelm von Bode, the latter Germany’s (and the world’s) pre-eminent Rembrandt scholar. Fritz Stern argues that 1890 marked a turning point in the cultural life of Germany. “The decade that followed witnessed a quickening of thought and hope, a new concern for the inner freedom of man, an anxious brooding on how this freedom could be realised…It was in the 1890s that cultural pessimism and anti-modernity became the twin resentments of the disaffected, conservative elements of imperial Germany.” 49 Nietzsche saw where resentment would lead as a political force.
    These modes of thought were by no means confined to Germany, even if they were most extreme there for a time. 50 Nor was the associated idea of eugenics, which found enthusiastic adherents in Britain and France, and almost as often among left-wing advocates as among right-wing. The main difference was between Britain and the United States, on the one hand, where the “soft” side of eugenics was preferred—government encouragement of selective breeding—rather than the “hard” variety favored on the Continent, which included forced abortion, sterilization, and euthanasia. 51
    The most vicious of the eugenicists was Alfred Ploetz, a doctor who grew up in Breslau and whose book Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen ( The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak ) Hitler would read as a young man in Vienna before World War I. The following extract gives the flavor of Ploetz’s argument: “Advocates of racial hygiene will have little objection to war since they see in it one of the means whereby the nations carry on their struggle for existence…In the course of the campaign it might be deemed advisable deliberately to muster inferior variants at points where the main need is for cannon fodder and where the individual’s efficiency is of secondary importance.” Ploetz was not an anti-Semite, however; he thought they were “racial Aryans.”
    After 1880, and especially after the Dreyfus trial in France in 1893, the Jews were increasingly identified as Europe’s leading “degenerates.” This was also a catalyst for the anti-Semitic political parties that were formed, and again not just in Germany (though Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna, was especially vitriolic). There were over a hundred branches of the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany in 1907, by which time a number of anthropologists and other scientists had formed the Ring der Norda, designed to cultivate Teutonic physical specimens. Max Sebaldt von Werth’s many-volumed Genesis (1898–1903) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels Theozoology (1905) both claimed that the real “chosen people” of the Bible were Aryan-Teutons. 52
    The racial ideas of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau passed into Germany via Richard Wagner. Wagner first became interested in Gobineau’s work in 1876 while preparing for the first performances at Bayreuth (they met not long afterward). The composer was very taken with the French (self-appointed) aristocrat’s theories, once describing Gobineau to his wife as “my only true contemporary.” Wagner pushed Gobineau’s ideas on his circle and they were taken up by two people in particular, Ludwig Schemann and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
    Schemann was struck by the similarity of Gobineau’s ideas to those of a key figure in the ultranationalist German völkish movement, Paul Anton Bötticher, who wrote some fifty tracts under the name of Paul de Lagarde. Not unlike Langbehn, Lagarde believed that the German nation had a will of its own, “the expression of its Seele ,” or collective soul. That German soul, he further argued, was being destroyed by materialism, industrialization, and “middle-class greed.” The real Germany, the Germany of rural customs and traditions of the common Volk, was being overwhelmed, progress was “a Trojan horse” hiding a soulless future of mechanization, liberal individualism, socialism, and, above all philistinism. 53
    Lagarde was viciously antimodern, seeing all about him, amid the fantastic and brilliant innovations, nothing but decay. A