The German Genius

subservience to the state shown by German academics, though they too helped fashion propaganda. Again like the French, British scholars had long admired German scholarship, but esteem for the German way of doing things quickly withered. Philosophers found it more of a problem. “Hegelianism had indelibly marked British Idealism, the most influential school of philosophical thought in Britain before 1914.” 24
    The war infected scholarship in a different way where archaeology was concerned. The budget for the Deutsche Archaeologische Institut was increased between 1915 and 1916, excavations continued in Babylonia, at Tiryn, Dipylon, and Olympia and commenced at Laon, Arras, and Sois-sons in occupied France. 25 Attempts, ultimately unsuccessful, were also made to “corner” the excavation market in the Ottoman Empire. Because archaeology was so close to the Kaiser’s heart, and several leading archaeologists were welcomed at his court, archaeologists, classicists, and philologists became a hot-bed of “monarchist nostalgia and apoplectic reaction” after the war. 26
    F ROM E DEN TO B ERLIN
     
    In America, the response was more measured than in France or Great Britain (the United States did not join the war as a belligerent until April 1917). Most notably, in 1915 two leading American intellectuals—John Dewey and George Santayana—both published their assessments of German philosophy and scholarship. Each was a short, pithy book.
    John Dewey, then professor of philosophy at Columbia University, achieved a clear synthesis of German philosophy, linking the history of the country’s thought to the war, in an analysis that still reads well and is all the more impressive for having been written nearly twenty years before the events that led to the Holocaust. The book began life as three one-hour lectures and was given the title German Philosophy and Politics . It was also, in part, a reply to General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s book Deutschland und der nächste Krieg ( Germany and the Next War ), published in 1911, which had famously claimed: “Two great movements were born from German intellectual life, on which, henceforth, all the intellectual and moral progress of mankind must rest:—The Reformation and the critical philosophy…whose deepest significance consists in the attempt to reconcile the result of free inquiry with the religious needs of the heart, and thus to lay a foundation for the harmonious organisation of mankind…To no nation except the German has it been given to enjoy in its inner self ‘that which is given to mankind as a whole’…It is this quality which especially fits us for leadership in the intellectual domain and imposes on us the obligation to maintain that position.” 27
    Dewey’s first point was that history has shown that to think in abstract terms is dangerous, “it elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they were born and charges them with we know not what menace for the future.” He observed that British philosophy, from Francis Bacon to John Stuart Mill, had been cultivated by men of affairs rather than professors, as had happened in Germany (Kant, Fichte, Hegel). He thought there was always a connection between abstract thought and “the tendencies of collective life” and that the Germans “have philosophy in their blood.” 28 In particular, he thought that Germany—and its well-trained bureaucracy—had “ready-made channels through which philosophic ideas may flow on their way to practical affairs,” and that Germany differed from the United States and Britain in that this channel was the universities rather than the newspapers. He noticed a crucial difference, he said, in that whereas most nations are proud of their great men, “Germany is proud of itself for producing Luther…A belief in the universal character of his genius thus naturally is converted into a belief of the essentially universal quality of the people who produced him.” 29
    Dewey attached most importance to the achievements of Kant and his idea that the two realms of science and morals are what matter most in life, that each has its own “final and authoritative constitution.” The chief mark of “distinctively German civilisation,” Dewey said, is its combination of “self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation…The more the Germans accomplish in the way of material conquest, the more they are conscious of fulfilling an ideal mission,”