The German Genius

command behind the scenes.
    T HE S TOLEN V ICTORY
     
    In explaining what came next, it is necessary to explore briefly the nature of Germany’s defeat in World War I. Although by common consent all the European combatants had fought themselves to a standstill and Germany was, to all intents and purposes, the loser, it was possible for Germans to derive some—albeit grim—comfort from what had actually come to pass. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch puts it, in his book on Die Kultur der Niederlage ( The Culture of Defeat ), “Only America’s sudden intervention, at the Allies’s behest, had saved England and France from the coup de grâce of the spring invasion of 1918. Put simply, the Americans had stolen Germany’s victory.” To the Germans, the very fact that the Allies had “ridden America’s coattails to victory” instantly converted the other European nations into “second-rate powers…Germany had not been subdued in and by Europe.” This meant that Germany was a loser only in relation to America, that she, from now on, would be “the only serious participant in a future Europe-America duel.” 42 Unlike the Triple Entente, Germany had fought the war, not with American aid, but using only its own resources. France was the real weakling and loser. Her old ideas of revanchism since 1870–71 had implied subduing Germany in a one-onone contest, but France had suffered much damage and, by herself, would have been quickly overcome. After the war, General Ludendorff gave as his explanation for Germany’s loss that she had not been defeated by the enemy but “stabbed in the back” by forces at home ( Dolchstosslegende ). The desire for a unanimity of national feeling, the Burgfrieden (literally “fortress-peace”) remained strong.
    There are two ways of looking at these remarks. One, that the German views about her 1919 predicament were real enough, sharpened by her defeat. Or that they were fantasies, ignoring the Realpolitik of the situation ( why had America supported the Allies?). Either way, they played a part in what came next. As Norbert Elias has said, the defeat of 1918 had interfered with the whole process of Germany’s “catching up.” 43

Weimar: “Unprecedented Mental Alertness”
     
    T he old Vienna officially came to an end on April 3, 1919, when the republic of Austria abolished titles of nobility, forbidding the use even of “von” in legal documents. The peace left Austria a nation of only 7 million people with a capital that was home to 2 million of them. The years that followed brought famine, inflation, a chronic lack of fuel, and a catastrophic epidemic of influenza. Housewives were forced to cut trees in the woods, and the university closed because its roof had not been repaired since 1914. Coffee, historian William Johnston tells us, was made of barley, and bread caused dysentery. Freud’s daughter Sophie was killed by the influenza epidemic, as was the painter Egon Schiele.
    Freud, Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, and Otto Neurath all stayed on in Vienna and the Vienna-Budapest (and Prague) German-speaking axis did not disappear completely, still producing individuals such as Michael Polanyi, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Karl Popper, and Ernst Gombrich. But it wasn’t the same, and these people came to prominence only after the Nazis forced them to flee to the West. Vienna was no longer the buzzing intellectual center it had been, its cafés no longer the warm, informal meeting place of a worldly elite. What Vienna offered now, as we shall see, was the occasional literary or scientific or philosophical firework, which had to shine the more brilliantly against a brighter firmament to the north. The city’s thunder had been stolen, and her lightning too.
    T HE F IRST “A RT F ILM”
     
    Berlin was a different matter. Following World War I, Germany was turned almost overnight into a republic. The fact that this could happen at all shows what is often overlooked—that, as mentioned earlier, some parliamentary/democratic traditions had been established. Berlin remained the capital, but Weimar was chosen as the seat of the assembly after a constitutional conference had been held there to decide the form the new republic would take. The choice of Weimar was based partly on its reputation dating from the time of Goethe and Schiller, and partly on worries that the violence in Berlin and Munich would escalate if either of those cities was selected. (Hitler always hated