The German Genius

In particular, anti-modernity and anti-Semitism joined forces. 35 There was a return in the 1920s to the attack on specialization and empiricism and a search for synthesis, unity in scholarship, and a form of thinking that was neither Marxist nor socialist but “German socialist,” in effect “a metaphysics of reaction” with vague new concepts such as Volk and Reich , in which one important element was “voluntary submission to the community.” The German university professors, said Ringer, felt themselves involved in a genuine tragedy in which “Geist and its representatives had lost control of society.” 36 No one knew, he said, how this division between Geist and politics had come about, but it generated a kind of self-pity among the mandarins, which often turned to hysteria and sometimes to hate. Ringer thought that intellectuals in France and elsewhere also agonized over these problems, but that the general anxiety was at its most intense in Germany. One of the problems was that so many of the mandarins—Scheler, Meinecke, and Spranger, for example—felt that only a small minority, an elite, was capable of benefiting from and expressing the great tradition. As Karl Jaspers put it, “all standards had been sacrificed in an effort to accommodate a mass of mediocre minds.” 37 These efforts at bringing knowledge together in the search for meaning, for overall coherence, became known as the “Synthesis Movement.” 38
    The result, Ringer affirms, was a certain uncomfortable form of anti-intellectualism in Weimar Germany, at least in some quarters, and this allowed the National Socialists to profit. Because they had lost the economic fight, and then the fight for the hearts and minds of the general population, the mandarins put up little resistance to the Nazis. German Idealism had been weakened by the onslaught of materialism and positivism and specialization, and purely technological thinking “had destroyed the link between knowledge and cultivation.” Ringer concluded that “Hitler’s hordes” had only completed (and accelerated) something that was happening anyway.
    Norbert Elias, in a series of publications set out over the decades but centered on 1969, argued that the inherent conflict in Germany concerned the satisfaktionfähige Gesellschaft , a term difficult to translate but referring to a society oriented around a code of honor in which dueling and the demanding and giving of “satisfaction” took pride of place. The effect of this, he says, was to brutalize a large section of the middle class, setting them against the Bildungsbürgertum and converting them from a humanist orientation to a nationalist orientation. They formed the bulk of the World War I officers who established the paramilitary Freikorps in the Weimar Republic, producing an insistent background noise of violence which helped to destabilize the 1920s.
    The long-term effects of this, he felt, were manifold: their very existence, and the role they played, made a positive self-image of middle-class Germans very difficult to maintain; with their greater concern for honor rather than for morals, conscience formation in Germany was weaker than among her neighbors; there was a more pronounced gap among Germans than among other Europeans between ideals and identity, making them more prone (as Ringer and others had said) to self-pity. Later, partly because of this, they tolerated the unrealistic plans and policies of National Socialists more than would otherwise have been the case. 39
    Theodor Adorno, as we have seen, was as much concerned with the shortcomings of America as of Germany, though he did become a major force in political thinking in Germany after he returned there. He, and people like Karl Löwith (see Chapter 41), Franz Neumann, and Arnold Bergstraesser were distinguished by the term “rémigré” or “rémigrant.” 40 But other major figures from before the war were still alive and still involving themselves in the broader areas of philosophy, the humanities, and social criticism in regard to Germany and the modern condition.
    Having a Jewish wife, Karl Jaspers had not fared well under the Nazis. In September 1937 he was dismissed from his post, his attempts to move to Oxford, Paris, and Basel all fell through, and in 1943 he was banned from publishing anything at all. Matters looked up after the war ended, and he figured prominently on the Allies “White List” of people untainted by links to the Nazis. He