The German Genius

Isherwood; they had collaborated on a play, Auden had written a handful of verse in (poor) German, started work on his long poem The Orators and, as he put it in his Berlin journal, spent “my substance on strumpets, and taking part in the White Slave traffic.” This sexual underworld notwithstanding, he recognized that Germans had in many ways defined the age in which he lived. He dedicated a poem, “Friday’s Child,” to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and another, written after the death of Sigmund Freud, in 1939, emphasized the nature and extent of his influence:
    For one who lived among enemies so long;
If often he was wrong and at times absurd,
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.
     
    Under whom we conduct our differing lives…
     
    Two years later, in 1941, Auden went on to describe Franz Kafka as “the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relationship to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs.” 1
    Despite the horrors of National Socialism, Auden remained involved in German culture and ideas. 2 In New York he used to visit a German-language cinema in Yorkville, he collaborated with Brecht, formed a close friendship with Hannah Arendt, and was fascinated by another German psychiatrist in exile in the United States, Bruno Bettelheim, and what he had to say about autism, believing that his own allegedly partly autistic childhood and his calling as a poet were related.
    In 1959, after buying a house at Kirchstetten, outside Vienna, Auden became increasingly drawn to Goethe (describing himself as a “minor Atlantic Goethe”). He composed a series of “prose meditations on love,” called “Dichtung und Wahrheit” (Poetry and Truth) after the title of Goethe’s autobiography, a short while later taking on a translation of the German genius’s Italian travel book. He collaborated with Hans Werner Henze on the opera The Bassarids , which many think is Henze’s masterpiece. Auden’s interment took place in the local church at Kirchstetten; the music at the ceremony was Siegfried’s funeral march from Götterdämmerung .
    Auden remained close to German culture, and German ideas, despite everything that happened in the first half of the twentieth century, and in this too Auden was, for a well-known Anglo-American, unusual if not unique. But, as should now be clear, he was not wrong in following the path that he did. As he himself might have put it, the climate of opinion under which we live our differing lives is, much more than we like to think, German.
     
     
    With the exception of market economics and natural selection, the contemporary world of ideas is one that, broadly speaking, was created by, in roughly chronological order, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Rudolf Clausius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Planck, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Max Weber, and two world wars. The ideas of another German, Gregor Mendel, are gaining ground fast at the start of the twenty-first century—it has now been shown that genes govern all manner of behaviors, from certain forms of violence to depression and promiscuity—but they do not cohere together into the overall picture as created by these other German geniuses.
    Along with his fellow German-speaker, Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx probably had a more direct effect on the recently completed twentieth century, and the shape of the contemporary world, than any other single individual. Without him there would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mao Zedong, and few if any of the other dictators who disfigured those times. Without him there would have been no Russian Revolution, and without World War II (or Max Planck and Albert Einstein), would there—could there—have been a Cold War, a divided Germany? Would decolonization have occurred in the way that it did, would there have been an Israel where it is, the Middle East problem that there is? Would there have been a 9/11? Ideas don’t come any more consequential than Marxism.
    In his biography, Das Kapital , the British writer Francis Wheen asserts in his final sentence that Marx “could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century.” He quotes a series of figures who one would normally take to be right-wing, conservative big-business men—the exact opposite of Marxist—who have come back to Marx and even to Rosa Luxemburg. It is not just that what Marx had to say about monopolization, globalization, inequality,