The German Genius

single path—their unexpectedness was part of their point. Central to this was the experimental attitude, which he felt at times was in Germany compromised by the idea of Wissenschaft , embracing scholarship in general, in which philosophical speculation was at the center of things. He felt it symptomatic of Germany that the experimental sciences eventually left the universities at the turn of the twentieth century and found their home in the Kaiser Wilhelm Societies. Instead, the “inner freedom” of scholarly inquiry triumphed in the universities, which, he said, allowed the scholar to work in peace. On the other hand, “the experimental sciences necessarily require the political freedom that permits publicity and exchange.” He concluded there were two notions of science, the experimental and the German, and this to him was crucial. “Knowledge by conflict corresponds to government by conflict…At any given time, a lively conflict of minds provides the market of science with the best possible result of knowledge.” 21 On the other hand, “knowledge in the sense of both speculation and understanding [the German way] does not require debate.” This resulted, he said, in a particularly German idea of truth, not one battered out by public debate, after a set of experimental results, but instead a way to “certain knowledge” available “at least for the chosen few” (i.e., the experts).
    In politics, he drew attention to Max Weber’s idea of charismatic leadership—a popular idea in Germany—as, once again, a process of harmony rather than competition or conflict. 22 He noted that in Germany, the “intellectual upper class” was more highly regarded than the “economic upper class” but that it was precisely these people who had undergone “inner emigration” during the Third Reich—again an internalization of their opposition, rather than public statement or action. 23
    He found the idea that the German was unpolitical to be untrue, in the sense that the public’s participation in general elections had risen steadily from around 50 percent in 1871 to around 88 percent in 1961, and a recent survey had shown that nearly two-fifths of students had a “conscious commitment to politics.” But he found the other three-fifths more interesting. The survey showed that they lived very different lives from their more committed colleagues—they valued their family life, their privacy, their detachment from the public virtues. From this he concluded that, in the early 1960s, “the political socialisation of the German is incomplete…Democratic institutions are accepted; but they remain external, distant, ultimately irrelevant…The German is unpolitical because the political is unimportant for him; he is authoritarian because he would much prefer not to be drawn out of the ‘freedom’ of his four walls.” 24
    All of which comprised for Dahrendorf the German syndrome. He further justified his analysis by referring to the suddenness with which the German voters turned to the National Socialists (2.6 percent of the vote in 1928, 43.9 percent in 1933): the syndrome produced an explosive mix, the “extremism of the centre.” This, together with the failure of a counter-elite to emerge to challenge the National Socialists, was both the explanation for the rise of Hitler, and a diagnosis of the German Question. Had a proper liberal elite existed in Germany, he said, the Nazis might have been stopped.
    Dahrendorf made quite a bit of universities in the development of modern scholarship, science, and the division between the private world and the public. The role of Germany’s academics in its modern history was the specific subject of Fritz Ringer’s 1969 book, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 . 25
    Ringer (1934–2006), born in Germany, immigrated to the United States in 1947, graduated from Amherst in 1956, received his PhD from Harvard in 1961, and became a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Part of his argument was preempted by Frederic Lilge’s much shorter work, The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of the German University (1948). Lilge, a professor at Berkeley, argued that the flowering of German humanism under the influence of Wilhelm Humboldt and others such as Schelling, Fichte, F. A. Wolf, and Schleiermacher had been all too brief, that the idealism and strength of German scholarship had begun to falter as early as 1837 when a group of