The German Genius

of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, when the theological understanding of man was under severe threat and Darwin’s biological understanding not yet available. This state of affairs applied not just in Germany, of course, but it was stronger there than anywhere else, for several reasons. Many people became convinced that, if traditional notions of God were under threat, there must be some other purpose to life, some other teleology and, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 5, the Germans embraced an evolutionary form of teleological biology and at the same time the great systems of speculative philosophy came into being: Kant’s Idealism, Fichte, Hegel, Naturphilosophie, Marxism, and Schopenhauer. The era between doubt and Darwin was the great period of speculative philosophy, and many people thought that Kant in particular had devised a new way of looking inward, of observing new structures of our minds.
    The reading revolution interacted with this. Reading was a much more private—and therefore inward—activity than the most popular cultural activity that had preceded it, dancing and singing (see Chapter 1). Given that Germans read more than anyone else because they were more literate, this too added to their inwardness.
    Romanticism and music were still other aspects of inwardness. Listening to “the inner voice” was one of the main aims of Romanticism, one of the principles it adopted from “inner” Oriental religions, in which the artist, who creates from within, is the most advanced type of human being. Kant’s instinct and intuition, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s will, Freud and Jung’s “unconscious” are all “inner” entities, inner concepts, as is the “second self,” locked within, waiting to be released.
    Schelling thought that music—music, the German art form par excellence—was the “innermost” of the arts, and the repeated and long-term association between German poetry and German music, finding expression in Schubert, Schumann, and Hugo Wolf, only adds to all this. At the turn of the nineteenth century, E. T. A. Hoffmann thought that music provided an entrance to a “separate realm, beyond the phenomenal” as we saw in Chapter 6, the symphony was regarded as an aspect of philosophy precisely because of its ability to penetrate inward, beyond words.
    As we have also seen in earlier pages, for Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bildung was education through the humanities as the true path to inner freedom. The main aim of the German Aufklärer was the Bildungstaat , a state where the ideal was to “enrich the inner life of man.” Suzanne Marchand has noted that F. A. Wolf’s pursuit of philological expertise “contributed to the turning-inward of the university community after 1800” and that this was an “important innovation in scholarship.” Kandinsky and Franz Marc confirmed that what they were trying to do, as abstract painting was born, was to give “impressions of an inner nature,” “immaterial inner sensations.” According to Erica Carter there was a “post-1968 interiority” brought about by the changes induced in that year of revolution, changes that were more psychological in Germany than they were elsewhere. 27 Martin Walser, in the words of Jan-Werner Müller, epitomized a “German form of interiority,” the opposition of the “authentic private self and an untainted Innerlichkeit versus a superficial, even hypocritical public sphere,” when he famously claimed that “poetry and inwardness” provided escape routes from the “inauthentic world of opinions,” which usually led to a form of self-righteousness, part of the “entertainment industry.” 28 Psychoanalysis, Expressionism in painting and film, the very concept of alienation in all its guises, the inward journey of the heroes in that uniquely German form of the novel, the Bildungsroman, the very dichotomy of “heroes versus traders,” all these emphasize the inwardness of the German, the German way of life, and the traditional German set of values. Both Karl Jaspers and Günter Grass referred to Herder’s “other, greater, deeper Germany”—i.e., the Kulturnation . 29 Martin Walser claimed that because of their “religious, inward-looking piety,” Germans found it difficult to “act politically, like Englishmen.” 30 Karl Heinz Bohrer thought that the most urgent task of reunification was to recover Germany “as a spiritual-intellectual possibility.” 31 Even the events of 1968,