The German Genius

seven academics at Göttingen (the Göttingen Seven), who regarded themselves as “the conscience of the country” and who protested the abolition and alteration of the Constitution of Hanover, had been dismissed. He thought the development of science, the introduction of laboratories, and the increasing specialization they represented further sabotaged the original idea of humanistic scholarship, that “hard” scientists soon developed a contempt for Idealism and Idealists, resulting in the isolation of science from philosophy, “and it remained a powerful discord in German intellectual life for the rest of the century.” This isolation was all the greater after 1870–71, when governments everywhere saw the value of science in a military context. 26 In the end, Lilge felt, research became just an occupation, making reflection difficult and turning scholarship into drudgery, which could do no more than energize the small coterie of specialists to which they appealed. Lilge believed this was one of the reasons the ideas of people like Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Oswald Spengler caught on—these were men outside the universities with big, consistent systems of thought that appealed to people’s need for coherence, if not certainty. 27 With the successful advent of science, Bildung had been forgotten.
    Lilge’s short book was pithy, but its arguments were a little too neat and left out a great deal. Fritz Ringer’s book, though it had a similar theme, was altogether more convincing. Building on Julien Benda’s arguments in The Treason of the Learned (see Chapter 33), on Lilge, and on Dahrendorf, Ringer began by emphasizing that the non-noble bureaucrat in Prussia “represented an extreme which was equalled nowhere else in Europe.” Learning, in Prussia, he said, was an ideal that could function as an “honorific substitute” for nobility of birth in a context where “learning means spiritual ‘cultivation.’” 28 The administrative and professional classes drew together in the nineteenth century to produce “a kind of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy,” involving not only specialized knowledge but also “general cultivation,” to define a distinctive elite. 29
    Ringer’s main theme, however, was that this elite began to decline in importance—both socially and intellectually—after 1890 and was in crisis in the 1920s, just before the advent of Hitler. The “Mandarins,” as he called the joint community of bureaucrats and professoriate, saw itself being overtaken by the new financial and entrepreneurial groups, so that a new disillusioned, displaced alliance was formed in Germany between the rentiers, professional people, academics, and the artisans and petty clerks. This was shown most clearly by the striking statistic that, in 1913, the German higher official earned seven times as much as an unskilled laborer, and in 1922 only twice as much. 30 Ringer traced the Mandarin tradition, via the Aufklärung, Pietism, the concept of Bildung (“the single most important tenet of the mandarin tradition”), the humanism of the Humboldtian university, Idealism and the historicist tradition, the difference in meaning between Wissenschaft and science, all of which underlined that a university education was intended to be “spiritually ennobling rather than a narrowly utilitarian influence.” 31
    Gradually, however, the cultivated elite began to assume a more defensive position, which made them more and more conservative. They became more concerned to defend German cultural traditions, especially as World War I approached, “feeling that a counterweight to the English was needed in this field.” 32 They felt that national greatness came through cultural creativity and “could see no point in material prosperity, if it interfered with these objectives, if it did not create the preconditions for the fullest possible self-development of the individual.” 33 There was a persistent interest among the mandarins in a strong presidency at the head of the Republic, because even after World War I—indeed, especially after it—they looked for a leader who would return Germany to “a natural aristocracy based on culture and capability, intellect and spirit,” to counter the “shallowness” of materialist, interest politics. 34
    The consequence of these forces was that the German universities, especially in the 1920s, “became strongholds of right-wing opposition to the new regime.”