The German Genius

Britain. French scholars were revolted by what they saw as the “intellectual servility, lack of objectivity, and craven spirit” of the scholars who signed the manifesto. Nevertheless, William Keylor concluded of the French academics that they too “rapidly abandoned their pre-war commitment to higher truths in the summer of 1914 and surrendered to the basest form of jingoist hysteria during the next five years.” 20
    That was perhaps overstating the case. Three questions concerned the French: (1) What remained worthy of respect within German culture? (2) Did France owe more to nineteenth-century German culture than to ancient Greece and Rome? (3) Was German science related to German Kultur, or were the undoubted successes of German science rooted in the philosophical traditions of France and Britain?
    At the center was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The conservatives and Catholics in France disparaged Kant because they regarded his ethics and epistemology as the foundations of “unrestrained individualism, subjectivism, and atheism.” These, in their turn, were seen by the same conservatives as the bases of republicanism, fostering notions of rights and duties. Their opponents favored Kant because of his theory of moral obligation and individual responsibility, which, in the years before the war, had been made the cornerstone of (republican) civics in the French schools. Kant also lay at the heart of French theories about the “two Germanies.” Living next door, the French had long been uneasily aware of the two faces of their neighbor—immensely cultured and inward, but at the same time militaristic and expansionist. This view had been sharpened in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. In December 1870, E. Caro, writing in the Revue des deux mondes , had advanced the idea of the two Germanies, one “mystical and metaphysical,” the other “materialistic and militaristic.” Kant, he said, was the apotheosis of the former, the French defeat at Sedan of the latter which, in the end, had gained the ascendancy. This second tradition, said Caro, originated with Hegel.
    As Martha Hanna has pointed out, at the beginning of the war there was also a belief, widely held in France as elsewhere, that science was “if not uniquely, then at least especially, a German enterprise.” This had the unfortunate side effect that, after war broke out, science became suspect in France, a view reinforced when, in April 1915, the German army became the first to use poison gas. Science was now seen as “the regrettable product” of a materialist ethos. Hanna says French scientists worked hard to counter this belief, arguing that science was just as much a French and British activity as it was German. 21
    In Britain before the war there was widespread agreement about a “knowledge revolution” and the “institutionalisation of the German influence” in scholarship, and though some British academics, visiting Germany at that time, were repelled by the belligerent atmosphere, far more were attracted by the ideology of Wissenschaft , which was “virtually a way of life.” 22 Stuart Wallace, in his study of British academics in World War I, published a list of fifty-six prominent British scholars who had studied in Germany, including Lord Acton, E. V. Arnold, James Bryce, H. M. Chadwick, William McDougall, A. S. Napier, W. H. R. Rivers, R. W. Seton-Watson, Henry Sidgwick, and W. R. Sorley. On August 1, 1914, the London Times carried a letter by nine scholars supporting Germany as the more civilized country in its struggle with Russia. After the invasion of Belgium this attitude was completely reversed (on August 29 the German Wolff news agency announced: “the ancient town of Louvain, rich in art treasures, no longer exists today”) and in December 1914 the Times published a letter by A. H. Sayce, professor of Assyriology at Oxford, arguing that, in science, “none of the great names” was German, that apart from Goethe there were no great names in German literature, that Schiller was a “milk-and-water Longfellow” and Kant “more than half Scottish.” 23
    Other scholars, writers, and artists, like the French, “perceived the war against Germany as a war…in defence of civilisation, against a barbarous, many-headed enemy.” At one extreme were those ardent patriots who believed that not even Brahms should be played in wartime Britain. Like the French, British scholars described their horror at the intellectual