The German Genius

belligerence of the Wilhelmine middle class.) 2
    For many, Kultur was the central factor in the war. 3 What these individuals meant by “Kultur” was the set of achievements represented by Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven—“high culture,” art, music, literature, and scholarship together with “a set of collective virtues” (diligence, order, and discipline) regarded as characteristically German. Writers, historians, and philosophers on both sides of the political divide shared these views—Thomas Mann, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart, Max Scheler, and Alfred Weber, to name only a few.
    T HE I DEAS OF 1914
     
    From the outbreak of war, there was in Germany a very public meditation on what was distinctive about German culture, with dichotomies being sharpened on a “polar opposition” between Kultur and Zivilisation . These polar opposites quickly came to a head, sparked by what the rest of the world saw as Germany’s barbaric behavior during its conquests in Belgium and northeastern France, when the ancient library in the Belgian town of Louvain was burned and the cathedral in Rheims was badly damaged, and Belgian civilians in Dinant and elsewhere were massacred, in “retaliation” for alleged acts of sabotage. British and French academics led the cry that the best-known figures of culture and science in Germany must publicly distance themselves from Prussian militarism, but the effect was not what they anticipated. Whole swaths of German cultural and academic figures rallied behind the German war effort and, on October 4, 1914, a group of ninety-three of the most distinguished German scholars and artists issued the “Manifesto of the 93”—an “Appeal to the Cultural World” (Der Aufruf der 93, “An die Kulturwelt”) in which they flatly refuted all charges of barbarianism in Belgium and insisted instead: “It is not true that the struggle against our so-called militarism is not also a struggle against our civilisation, as our enemies hypocritically pretend it is. Were it not for German militarism, German civilisation would have long since been extirpated from the earth. The former arose from the need to protect the latter in a country which for centuries has been afflicted by predatory invasions.” 4
    The signatories to this appeal included the writers Richard Dehmel and Gerhart Hauptmann; the painters Max Klinger, Max Libermann, and Hans Thoma; the musicians Engelbert Humperdinck, Siegfried Wagner, and Felix von Weingartner; the theater director Max Reinhardt; prominent academics such as Ernst Haeckel, Fritz Klein, the Nobel Laureate physicists Philipp Lenard, Richard Willstätter, and Max Planck; the future Nobel Laureate chemist, Fritz Haber; the theologian Adolf von Harnack; the economists Lujo Brentano and Gustav Schmoller; the philologists Karl Vossler and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff; the philosopher Alois Riehl; and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, together with the historians Karl Lamprecht, Max Lenz, Eduard Meyer, and Friedrich Meinecke. Even before this, a group of academics had renounced their honorary degrees awarded by British universities. 5
    All this may sound unreal now, and irrelevant, after the widespread horrors that happened later in World War I, and then in the 1930s and World War II, but the “Appeal” did reflect the views of educated people in the Germany of the time, that the war would bring about the country’s rise to world power status and would therefore “go down in history as the German war.” Following the “Appeal” there was a raft of speeches, books, and other events in the same vein. The Bund Deutscher Gelehrter und Künstler, which had its head office in Berlin, recruited 200 leading figures from the literary and artistic world, including Thomas Mann, to argue the intellectual case for war. 6 One of the main themes was the superiority of Germany’s authoritarian constitution over the parliamentary regimes of the west.
    These ideas remained important. Max Lenz, Otto von Gierke, Max Scheler, and Karl Lamprecht all advanced arguments for German “world leadership” and Lamprecht, one of the advisers to wartime chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, was, like others, not averse to playing the race card: “It is subjectively recognised and objectively proven that we are capable of the highest achievements in the world and must therefore be at least considered entitled to share in world rule…” 7 Lamprecht argued that the