The German Genius

“Goethe communities” that would renew devotion to the “German spirit” Gestalt psychology was an entire system built around the perception of “naturally occurring” wholes; and Ferdinand Tönnies and Werner Sombart wrote books about community and its redemptive possibilities. 36 Ernst Kantorowicz, the historian, identified what he specifically called the redemptive community. The National Socialists had their concept of the “community of fate.” Goebbels insisted that the purpose of radio in the Third Reich was to “solidify the community,” and Hitler spoke of the “Volkswagen community,” a shared freedom of the new Autobahnen that brought people together in the enjoyment of new technological achievements. Redemptive communities are a specific feature of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus . Martin Walser upholds an ideal of “non-alienated, to some extent communal subjectivity.” 37 This is why he thought the conscience should be a private affair “so that the newly united national community could be reconciled with itself.” 38
    In Germany scholars themselves were part of their own redemptive community, more so than scholars elsewhere. Not only were many of Germany’s thinkers the sons of pastors—growing up in a nineteenth-century background where the pastor was the very center of the community—but it was commonplace for scholars in Germany (in marked contrast to other countries) to attend three or four universities during the course of their training—it was a privilege built into the system. It naturally follows that the sense of an academic community, a redemptive community of scholars, a union of the educated middle class, was much stronger in Germany than anywhere else. Gadamer, in his exploration of the “relevance of beauty,” thought that art festivals “take us out of ordinary time” and open us up to “the true possibility of community.” For Habermas the central problem of modern life is how we find ways to “sustain a moral community in the face of rampant individualism.”
     
     
    These five elements were each important in themselves. If they weren’t unique to Germany, they were more developed there, of longer standing, taken more seriously. But so far we have only considered them separately. As with Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, they are much more potent, and more revealing, when considered together as an interlocking dynamic system.
    N ATIONALIST C ULTURAL P ESSIMISM
     
    It should perhaps come as no surprise that, in the wake of the advent of doubt, when people began to lose their faith, two things happened. First, we see the rise of the (more secular) educated middle class, taking over some of the functions formerly served by the clergy. This change was eased in Germany by the fact that so many of the new thinkers were themselves the sons of pastors—they represented this change perfectly. It was helped too by the reading revolution, occurring at exactly the same time, and which, as Benedict Anderson has shown us, helped to generate the phenomenon of an ideal community—the very educated middle class we are considering, who thought of themselves for the first time as a group . Simultanously, and secondly, it was natural for this group of people to try to replace religious ideas with something else. Here, again, two things happened. One was the third revival of Greek (pagan) antiquity, thanks to Winckelmann, and the second was the arrival and achievements of Kant and other speculative philosophers. It was only natural, in the circumstances, for theology to be replaced by speculative philosophy in the era between doubt and Darwin. The successes of these developments led to the resurgence of German culture and intellectual life in general, to the concept of Bildung, of education as cultivation, essentially a secular form of salvation, and to inwardness as a way of approaching the truth—not just in Idealistic philosophy, but in Romanticism and in music. All this may be characterized as the growth of inwardness.
    Alongside this rise of inwardness went the other main achievement of the educated middle class, the invention of modern scholarship and in particular the institutionalization of research. The fundamental significance of this in the transition to modernity was mentioned above, but there was another way in which research was of profound importance for the educated middle class in Germany. Research began as a tool of the early scholarly