The German Genius

also spent the war years in New York, where he met up again with his Weimar Republic colleague Theodor Adorno. After his groundbreaking study of 1930, Die Angestellten (The Salaried Classes), covered in Chapter 31, he had—being Jewish—moved to Paris in 1933 and then on to the United States, where he worked at the Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. This led to his groundbreaking book of film criticism, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), in which he sought—and found—parallels between film, history, and the politics of the Weimar period that to an extent explained, he thought, the advent of Hitler. Kracauer, and later Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen (1955), which examined the aesthetics of cinema in the Weimar Republic, both argued that the background threat in the Weimar films is chaos (represented in Caligari by the circus), in which a tyrannical figure (Caligari) is redemptive. 11 Kracauer also looked at the other main films of the period, M , Metropolis, and The Blue Angel , and he widened his argument that the “screen of Weimar” was a ground on which the “German catastrophe” could be understood. In particular, he saw slapstick comedy as a metaphor for flirting with power and danger in which the comedian always escapes the grip of power but by chance alone; he retains his liberty, but the threat remains. Kracauer’s book also became a classic, though the chance discovery of the original script of Caligari and other recent initiatives of scholarship have called into question its main theme as to whether films can be said to hold quite such a straightforward link to the imagination, and to politics, as he said. 12
    T HE G ERMAN S YNDROME
     
    In 1961 the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer published a book dealing with Germany’s aims in World War I. This was referred to in Chapter 29, when it was explained that, according to Fischer, at an infamous “war council” in December 1912, Kaiser Wilhelm II and his military advisers “had made a decision to trigger a major war by the summer of 1914 and to use the intervening months to prepare the country for this settling of account.” More than that—and this is what makes the book important in the context of this discussion—Fischer suggested lines of continuity between German aims in the two world wars. This was too much for some fellow historians. Gerhard Ritter, for example, “angrily denied” the possibility of comparisons between Bethmann Hollweg and Hitler, between German foreign policy before 1914 and in the 1930s, between Bismarck’s Imperial Germany and Hitler’s Third Reich. 13 Fischer played up the role of the actors in the drama at the expense of anonymous economic and social forces and in so doing set alight a debate inside Germany about its past that, until then, had received more attention from Germans in exile, mainly across the Atlantic in America.
    Within Germany, birth date came to matter. Those born in or after 1929 were regarded as innocent, part of the weisse Jahrgänge , the “white generation.” Günter Grass (born in 1927), Martin Walser (1927), and Kurt Sontheimer (1928) thus formed part of the Third Reich, however minimally, but not Jürgen Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (all born in 1929). The sociologist Helmut Schelsky was generally held to be correct when he identified these latter as a “skeptical generation,” the first perhaps to overcome the traditional German “chasm” that had pitted a realm of “pure” culture against the “shallow and sordid world of politics.” 14 In many people’s minds, the Third Reich—at least the 1933–42 period—was still associated with “good times” and separated from the Holocaust and its “discovery,” 1941–48, which was negative and traumatic. 15
    Several other studies on topics not unrelated to the Fischer affair appeared at the time. Among them were Wilhelm Röpke’s Die deutsche Frage (1945), Leonard Krieger’s The German Idea of Freedom (1957), Franz Neumann’s The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (1957), Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (1959), Helmuth Plessner’s Die verspätete Nation (1959), Friedrich A. von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), Gerhard Ritter’s Das deutsche Problem (1962), and Hermann Eich’s The Unloved Germans (1963). Georg