The German Genius

Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, the novelist and author of the picaresque Berlin Alexanderplatz , about a criminal who can’t break free from the underworld, and against Walter Benjamin. Born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a Jewish auctioneer and art dealer, Benjamin was a radical intellectual, a “cultural Zionist” as he described himself (meaning he was an advocate of Jewish liberal values in European culture), who earned his living as a historian, philosopher, art and literary critic, and journalist. Of a slightly mystical bent, Benjamin spent World War I in medical exile in Switzerland, afterward forming friendships with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Bertolt Brecht, and the founders of the Frankfurt school. In a series of essays and books— Goethes Wahlverwandschaften ( Goethe’s Elective Affinities ), Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama ), and “The Politicisation of the Intelligentsia”—he compared and contrasted traditional and new art forms, anticipating in a general way the ideas of Raymond Williams, Andy Warhol, and Marshall McLuhan. His approach was to try to understand these new forms, not condemn them.
    In the view of the conservatives, the extraordinary Weimar culture that has been the subject of the previous chapters had as one of its main faults that it neglected or belittled the lower classes, for them the salt of the earth. This attitude combined to create another characteristic of the times—the anti-intellectual intellectual. This, in turn, with its inherent anti-Semitism, sparked a resurgence of Jewish culture—in particular what became known as the Lehrhaus Movement and the Wissenschaft des Judentums . 20 By no means all of the conservatives embraced the Nazi Party (Ernst Jünger, for instance) but the general climate of opinion generated by cultural pessimism, with chaos threatening in the background, did contribute to the Nazis’ growing self-confidence. 21
    T HE C ULTURAL /I NTELLECTUAL B ASIS FOR N ATIONAL S OCIALISM
     
    During the Weimar years, as we have seen, there was a continual battle between the rationalists—the scientists and the academics—and the nationalists, the pan-Germans, who remained convinced there was some-thing special about Germany, her history, the “instinctive superiority” of her heroes. In The Decline of the West Oswald Spengler had stressed how Germany was different from France, the United States, and Britain, and this view, which appealed to Hitler, gained ground among the Nazis as they edged closer to power. From time to time Hitler attacked modern art and modern artists but, like other leading Nazis, he was by temperament an anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers. There was, however, one exception to this mold, a would-be intellectual who was even more of an outsider in German society than the other leading Nazis.
    Alfred Rosenberg’s family came from Estonia, which until 1918 was one of Russia’s Baltic provinces. As a boy he was fascinated by history, especially after he encountered Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century on a family holiday in 1909. He now had a reason to hate the Jews every bit as much as his experiences in Estonia gave him reason to hate the Russians. Moving to Munich after the Armistice in 1918, he quickly joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) and began writing vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets. His writing ability, his knowledge of Russia, and his facility with Russian all helped to make him the party’s expert on the East; he also became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer), the Nazi Party’s newspaper. As the 1920s passed, Rosenberg, together with Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, began to see the need for a Nazi ideology that went beyond Mein Kampf , and in 1930 he published what he believed provided the intellectual basis for National Socialism. In German its title was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, usually translated into English as The Myth of the Twentieth Century. 22
    Mythus is a rambling and inconsistent book. It conducts a massive assault on Roman Catholicism as the main threat to German civilization—the text stretches to more than 700 pages. The third section is titled “The Coming Reich” other parts deal with “racial hygiene,” education, and religion, with international affairs at the end. Rosenberg argues that Jesus was not Jewish and that his