The German Genius

not too much to say that these are all responses, however inchoate, to the nihilistic existential landscape of modern life, by people who, though they may never have read Nietzsche or Weber, nevertheless recognize, or experience, or feel themselves trapped in the empty, cold, bleak terrain these German speakers identified. The incoherence of their response is part of the condition.
    This surely helps explain why Freud has had the impact he has. In recent years he has come under sustained attack, justifiably so, for fabricating evidence, falsifying his early “cures” and being, generally, wrong. But, in the context of this discussion, that is to misconstrue him. Contemporaneously with Nietzsche and Weber (and too little has been made of this), as they were diagnosing the predicament of modern life, Freud was finding, or inventing, or stumbling across, a solution to that predicament. Psychoanalysis, therapy, “talking cures,” are misconceived if they are understood simply or mainly as a way to treat neurosis and other forms of mental illness (and this is why, generally speaking, they have been judged a failure in that regard). What Freud set in train with The Interpretation of Dreams , published in the very year Nietzsche died, was a method by which people could use their individual histories so as to reconstruct meaning into their lives, a way—however tendentious, hypothetical, abstract, clinically suspect—they could relate to the fragmentation and sheer emptiness of the modern world around them. The fact that therapy is so much a part of our lives (even very young lives) emphasizes that we are inhabiting a Nietzschean, nihilistic world.
    T HE F IRST XI OF M ODERN H ISTORY
     
    To repeat: Kant, Humboldt, Marx, Clausius, Mendel, Nietzsche, Planck, Freud, Einstein, Weber, Hitler—for good or ill, can any other nation boast a collection of eleven (or even more) individuals who compare with these figures in regard to the enduring influence they have had on modern ways of thought? I suggest not. But the German genius is not just a matter of numbers. In the Introduction, several pages were devoted to a question that many people have found—and still find—fascinating, obsessive even, namely whether German history went through a Sonderweg , a special path which, necessarily , was destined to result in the horrors and excesses of National Socialism and the Holocaust. To my knowledge, no one has explored in any scholarly way, and in an overall sense, whether there is a systematic relationship between political history and cultural history. However, looking at modern German culture , as this book has been designed to do (using “culture” in its Franco-Anglo-American sense, rather than the German sense of Kultur ), and bringing that cultural history right up to date—looking at its achievements after the Holocaust as well as before, beyond Hitler in both directions—one may conclude that there were several features of that culture that may be construed as, if not necessarily leading to catastrophe, then at least helping to explain why what happened in Germany happened there when it did.
    Of course, no explanation is ever a complete explanation. But the argument here is that there were five distinct yet interlocking aspects of modern German culture that, as a group, accounted for both its dazzling brilliance and its shocking demise.
    A N E DUCATED M IDDLE C LASS
     
    Conventional wisdom, especially conventional wisdom since Marx, has it that societies are most usefully understood as being divided into three levels or classes: the aristocracy, the middle classes, and the proletariat or working class. It should now be clear, however, that the educated middle class has very little in common with the rest of the middle class and certainly, in Germany, may historically be considered a separate entity. Indeed, the educated middle class is middle class only in the classically Marxist sense that its mode of production is that of neither the aristocracy nor the laboring classes. Yet the educated middle class—inhabiting the world of scholarship, the arts and humanities, science, the legal, medical, and religious professions—has very little in common with, for example, organized labor, shopkeepers and retailers, industrialists, or financiers, either in terms of motivation, aspiration or, indeed, everyday interests and activities. These differences were more marked in the nineteenth century, but it is clear from what