The German Genius

according to Jan-Werner Müller, were a mixture “of Marxism and psychoanalysis.” 32
    Inwardness comes with consequences, of course, as does everything. Karl Heinz Bohrer derided “Protestant inwardness,” this “power-protected inwardness,” arguing that it resulted in a form of provincialism and a neglect of national identity that was “likely to breed nationalist violence” and contributed toward its “belatedness.” 33 Perhaps the most fateful consequence of inwardness was the concept of Bildung itself. Gertrude Himmelfarb is one of several historians who have commented on the similarity of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and Hegel’s “the cunning of reason.” But whereas the invisible hand enables man to embrace an open-ended future, “reason” in Germany became embedded in Bildung, which idealized a distant Greek state 2,500 years in the past and out of which, ultimately, the disease of cultural pessimism emerged. However much we may aspire to high scholarship and the ideal of the well-rounded man, in Germany the shadow of Bildung was in the end the more powerful force.
    The stereotypes we have of other people are too often crude and, almost by definition, overly simple, and they add to our problems rather than ease them. In the German case their stereotypes about themselves have been part of the problem too.
    B ILDUNG
     
    Bildung is in some ways the primary achievement of educated inwardness—indeed, it could be held to be the natural end product. Goethe, it will be recalled, said specifically that the purpose of life when there is no God (this was after he lost his faith in the summer of 1788) is to become , to become much more than one was. “The ultimate meaning of our humanity is that we develop that higher human being within ourselves…” (see Chapter 4). Kant thought the difference between animals and man was that man can set himself goals and “cultivate the raw potentialities of his nature.” In creating the very idea of purpose within us, he felt, we “enlarge” ourselves and those around us. This is inwardness, Bildung, and community (see Conclusion) all in one.
    William Bruford traced the idea of Bildung in novels all the way through the nineteenth century into the twentieth—Adalbert Stifter, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain —and in the middle of the 1900s Karl Mannheim described Bildung as “the tendency toward a coherent life-orientation, the development of the individual as a cultural-ethical personality.” He thought sociological study could add to our understanding of Bildung. Fritz Ringer described Bildung as “the single most important tenet of the mandarin tradition” and Christa Wolf, in Nachdenken über Christa T , explored the meaning and possibility of Bildung in Communist East Germany. In America, Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind , was essentially a plea for a return to this German ideology. Bildung suited the educated middle classes—it made education the central aspect, the most important purpose of life in a post-Christian world. Of course the educated middle class, by definition, had privileged access to it. Bildung defined them and their difference from others. In 1968 there was a campaign in Germany for “Bildung für alles.”
    There was a crucial role here for pastors’s sons, something else distinctive to Germany. As will have been noted, many of Germany’s thinkers, right up until contemporary times, have been the sons and/or grandsons of pastors—Samuel Pufendorf, Gotthold Lessing, J. M. R. Lenz, Christoph Wieland, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann Herder, Karl Schinkel, Johann Christian Reil, Rudolf Clausius, Bernhard Riemann, Theodor Mommsen, Jacob Burckhardt, Gustav Fechner, Heinrich Schliemann, Julius Langbehn, Wilhelm Wundt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Scheler, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Albert Schweitzer, Emanuel Hirsch, Martin Niemöller, Gottfried Benn, Carl Gustav Jung, Jürgen Habermas (and not overlooking Angela Merkel, who is the daughter of a pastor). Besides being inward, many of these individuals had lost their own faith but nonetheless could not help but be influenced by their fathers; in many cases the secularization of salvation, of perfection, was part of their inheritance and achievement. The metaphor of salvation was difficult to lose. Many German professors retain the