The German Genius

mathematical logic. To give some idea of Cassirer’s highly technical work (which approach he regarded as inevitable in the modern world), he looked at Leibniz’s and Newton’s approaches to differentiation, as a way to understand change, on a graph and applied that to change in other fields, exploring whether change—in history, for example—could be understood in a similar, or equivalent, way. 28 Can other areas of life, outside mathematics, be regarded as “formal” in the same fashion? He also examined what implications Einstein’s concept of relativity had for Kantian philosophy, in that Kant had said that our understanding of space was instinctive, or intuitive, when of course Einstein’s concept of “curved” space was anything but. Cassirer’s other important book was Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften ( The Logic of the Cultural Sciences ; 1942), which explored the similarities and differences between the natural sciences, mathematics, and aesthetics, in which he argued that “thing perception” ( Dingwahrnehmen ) is generally given pre-eminence over “expressive perception” ( Ausdruckswahrnehmen ), and this is why the natural sciences are usually felt to have “a more secure evidential basis.” 29
    Cassirer was forced to leave Germany in 1933. After stints at Oxford and Göteborg, he transferred to Yale and Columbia (being spurned by Harvard because, as a young man, he had turned down a visiting professorship there, considering it “too remote”). In America he wrote two books in English, including The Myth of the State , a reply to a number of German (and National Socialist) writers, in which he sought to explain fascism as arising logically from the Platonic tradition in European thought. He died tragically young after a heart attack while walking in New York in 1945. He influenced Erwin Panofsky and Peter Gay, among others.
    A P ATRIOT WITHOUT A C OUNTRY
     
    Weimar Germany was also blessed with what the French scholar Alain Boureau calls “a momentous generation” of historians: Ludwig von Pastor, Percy Schramm, Ernst Kantorowicz, Norbert Elias, and Gershom Scholem. Most were interested in the Middle Ages, Pastor as a Catholic version of Leopold von Ranke, who had of course written a seminal history of the popes in the early nineteenth century. Born in Aachen, Pastor’s greatest success was to persuade Pope Leo XIII of his seriousness of purpose, so that the contents of the Vatican Library—hitherto closed—were opened to him. This led to his lifetime’s work, his Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters ( History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages ), sixteen volumes that run from the Avignon Papacy of 1305 to Napoleon’s entry into Rome in 1799. Unlike Ranke, Pastor eschewed the institutional changes and innovations and concentrated instead on the individual incumbents. His theme was that the weakness of the papacy reflected the “flaws” of the times, and that its shortcomings were not always the weaknesses they were made out to be, enabling the popes to retain power and influence longer than would have otherwise been the case. Owing to the unprecedented access he was given, his history superseded all others and is still regarded as a seminal work.
    Like Pastor, Percy Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz were interested in the Middle Ages, but there the similarity ceases. Schramm (1894–1970) served in the army in World War I, after which he studied history and art history at Hamburg, Munich, and Heidelberg. He is generally credited with making art history a much harder, more interesting, and more powerful discipline than it was originally, less dilettante-like, showing how, in his most important book, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio ( Emperor, Rome and Renovatio ), the German emperors of the medieval period had used the symbolism of the Romans to underwrite their power. In World War II, Schramm volunteered for service and was made official staff historian for the German High Command Operational Staff. His book Hitler als militärischer Führer ( Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader ), published in 1963, stresses the good side of the Führer as well as the negatives. 30 Schramm saw a lot of Hitler and was close to General Alfred Jodl, acting as a witness in Jodl’s support at the Nuremberg Trials after the war, and was removed from teaching. He was reinstated in the late 1940s, and his inside accounts of the high command have become required