The German Genius

about industrial pollution, he explored both the distortions produced by capitalism and the means of keeping alive our humanity in a capitalist world.
    Theodor Fontane was a better writer, a man who turned to the novel only late in life, after a career that took in being an apothecary, a journalist (including a stint as a war correspondent), and a drama critic—and fighting in the 1848 revolution. In his novels he was particularly aware of the class basis of existence in Germany, and with him the German novel was reclaimed from its special path and joined the mainstream. Unlike many writers, he was generally in favor of capitalism, though he was not without sympathy for the Junker class. His main aim was to show the recklessness with which an “utterly conventional society holds sway over the lives of individuals.” This had been true in the age of absolute state and it was, he insisted, still true. Society had changed less—hardly at all—in the moral grip in which its citizens were held. His most famous book in this regard was Effi Briest (1894), sometimes grouped with Anna Karenina (1878), and Madame Bovary (1857) in a trilogy of nineteenth-century marriages seen from the female point of view. Effi, daughter of a nobleman, is married off to a baron twice her age, who had courted her mother. Ignored by her husband, not accepted by the local aristocracy, she consummates a relationship with a married womanizer. Much later, the baron finds out. He kills the womanizer in a duel, divorces Effi, is awarded custody of their daughter, and Effi goes back home but only after her parents, who had rejected her, realize she is dying from tuberculosis. Everyone ends unhappily. Fontane’s real target was the moral fog in Bismarck’s Germany, its self-righteous emptiness, more destructive than creative.
    It has to be said, however, that although Fontane and Raabe were Realist writers to a degree unknown earlier—in the age of Stifter and Keller, say—more enduring originality about modern society was shown at this time by a different cohort of men in a wholly different discipline: they delivered a set of analyses and warnings that, taken together, amount to what has been called the first coherent school of sociology. 1
    In Germany, and perhaps characteristically, sociology had its origins in philosophy and with the work of a man who, though he may not be as well known today as some of his contemporaries, deserves his place as the starting point because, even now, with all that has gone on in between, he was a very clear and sane observer, whose decisive clarity makes him a breath of fresh air.
    “T HOUGHT C ANNOT G O B EHIND L IFE” : T HE B IRTH OF H UMAN S TUDIES
     
    Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was fortunately placed. Born in 1833, he too was the son of a clergyman but one better off than most, being court preacher to the Duke of Nassau. His mother was the daughter of a conductor, and Dilthey inherited a strong interest in music, together with a dislike of the lower classes, in whom—rather like Marx—he had little confidence. 2
    Dilthey first pursued theology, at Heidelberg, but transferred to Berlin because of its greater sophistication, especially in music. He formed his own reading circle to explore Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine and completed his doctorate with a thesis on Schleiermacher. After teaching spells at Basel, where he was a friend of Jacob Burckhardt, and at Kiel, where he began publication of his biography of Schleiermacher, the first installment in what would become “a history of the German spirit,” he was offered the chair of philosophy at Berlin, which Hegel had once held. He remained there for the rest of his life. 3
    In the manner of the ancient Greeks, Dilthey looked about him and observed what he called “the enigmatic face of life.” People, he thought, inevitably found themselves confronted by “circumstances they do not understand, seeing irrational forces and blind chance at work.” Out of all this, he said, they need to manufacture a coherent picture of their circumstances, and they need ideals to strive for and principles by which to order their conduct. Somewhere inside them, Dilthey said, everyone has a “metaphysical impulse”—this is what gives rise to art, religion, and politics. “When the response is based on sustained and critical thought it becomes philosophy.” Philosophy differs only in that it is—or should be—more abstract and closely