The German Genius

the underside of German culture.” Whatever their starting point, they all envisaged a Germania irredenta , a new destiny in which Germany, purged and disciplined, would emerge as the greatest power in the world. Above all there was the ideological attack on modernity, the dominance of resentment as the major psychological force. 63
    These issues touched the common man more in Germany than else-where, in particular the educated classes. It was an idealism that represented an attitude toward life, a set of sentiments and values, in which science and scholarship—however scientistic or tendentious—played an important role in adding a spurious force to the feeling. This idealism, with its emphasis on Innerlichkeit , on inwardness, did not encourage political involvement, a state of affairs reinforced by Bismarck’s “semi-authoritarian” political regime. Norbert Elias has drawn attention to the division in late nineteenth-century Germany between, on the one hand, the satisfaktionfähige Gesellschaft , a society oriented around a code of honor, in which dueling and the demanding and giving of “satisfaction” occupied pride of place, which became brutalized, and, on the other, the educated middle class.
    Nationalism, Kultur , and idealism fused into a cultural nationalism in which the German spirit was exalted above those of other nations, with an enthusiasm—even aggression—that had no parallel elsewhere. Elias has again shown how nationalism embodies a moral code, inegalitarianism, at variance with those of the “rising tiers” of society. This was so because the educated classes in particular—the academics, the bureaucrats, the professional people—were being rapidly overtaken by the new industrialists and were slipping down the power-pecking order. Having once been just below the old aristocracy, they were now just above the proletariat. “With a suddenness that has had no parallel, the industrial revolution changed the face and character of German society.” 64 One revealing statistic is that, by 1910, Germany had almost as many large cities as the rest of Europe put together. This change to modernity was greater and quicker in Germany than anywhere else. 65

Money, the Masses, the Metropolis: The “First Coherent School of Sociology”
     
    T here is something rather fetid about many of the individuals in the previous chapter, with their tightly woven—even overwoven—works. Collectively, they seem to have lacked self-awareness of their own motives, to have shared a willful inability to face their own tendentiousness. At the same time, however, there was a raft of rather more serious thinkers in Germany concerned with a similar range of issues—in particular, the problems posed by industrialization, vast metropolises, and rapid technological innovation.
    Some of these were writers. Following the failed bourgeois revolution of 1848, we saw in Chapter 14, that some authors moved away from the developments of modernity and sought refuge in idyllic surroundings cut off from the mainstream, resulting in a special German path in literature, turning away from the harsh (mainly urban, industrial) realities of life to the inner concerns of Bildung (Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, etc.). In the latter half of the century, however, German writers did start to come to grips with at least some of the more contemporary issues. Among the first books of this kind were Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben ( Debit and Credit ; 1856) and Friedrich von Spielhagen’s Hammer und Amboss ( Hammer and Anvil ; 1869), the very titles of which are suggestive and can be read as a sort of Entwicklungsroman , a parallel to a Bildungsroman , stories that lead to the eventual good fortune of the middle-class protagonist: instead of finding inner development outside society, Freytag’s and Spielhagen’s “heroes” find their niche within the business community.
    After them, the two greatest Realist writers of the late nineteenth century were Wilhelm Raabe (1831–1910) and Theodor Fontane (1819–98), both of whom focused on the society—and morals—produced by capitalism. Raabe, very sympathetic to the aims of the French Revolution, modeled much of his work on that of Dickens, attempting to catch some of the British author’s humor, but he never forgot that capitalism was his target and, in such books as Abu Telfan (1867), Der Schüdderump ( The Rumbledump ; 1870) , and Pfisters Mühle ( Pfister’s Mill ; 1884),