The German Genius

specialities—predominantly the humanities such as classics, philology, and history. But, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly with the growth of modern (cell) biology and in physics (the discovery of the conservation of energy), it began increasingly to be applied in the “hard” sciences. This change was all-important.
    Whereas research in the humanities was institutionalized in 1809–1810 at the University of Berlin, the great commercial and industrial laboratories got under way in Germany, as we saw in Chapter 18, only in the late 1850s and the 1860s. In the first place, this change contributed to the decline in status of the traditional scholars in, for example, classics, history, and literature. And with the rise of the hard sciences, a wedge was driven between the humanities on one side and these sciences on the other, creating a divide that—although it occurred in other countries (such as Great Britain)—was nowhere near as wide (or in time as bitter) as it was in Germany, where different terms, Kultur and Zivilisation and Wissenschaft and Bildung , were introduced to encapsulate the division. This was exacerbated in the late nineteenth century when scientific research moved out of the universities into the independent Kaiser Wilhelm Societies. The division, and the loss of status of the humanities that went with it, itself produced an effect on scholarship.
    Now began the great age of nationalist cultural pessimism, with the works of Heinrich von Treitschke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Max Nordau culminating in Werner Sombart’s Heroes versus Traders , and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West . So far as the traditional scholars were concerned, these jeremiads described something all too real—their world was declining: the sciences had appropriated the idea and practice of research and, by the time Germany became a unified country in 1871, science was well on its way to producing the array of hi-tech products that would create modern mass society, discussed in Chapters 17–20 and 25 of this book, in which traditional areas of scholarship would feel increasingly peripheral. Cultural pessimism, and the reasons for it, have been a major topic for German writers and academics ever since, and still are. This also helps explain the pronounced conservative streak in German thought, not to mention the growth of anti-Semitism in the later nineteenth century.
    A further consequence of the advent of doubt—and again this applies especially in Germany, with its tradition of Pietism—was the growth of the idea of a redemptive community. Helping people in this life was a natural ethic to emerge from the collapse of the idea of a future state, the Afterlife, so integral to Christianity. After the death of God, community—the basis of living together with other people—was perhaps the only ethical space left to explore. Germany—the land of Pietism and of 300 small independent states, the Kulturnation before it was a territorial nation—was a natural home for such an idea. 39 A concern with the redemptive powers of community runs across German scholarship, culture, and politics throughout the modern period.
    The redemptive community and cultural pessimism are related, of course, the former being seen usually as a “cure” for the latter. Cultural pessimists, for the most part, seek a return to an earlier, more ideal form of community. (The idea that there was ever a golden age of communal life, before modernity took hold, is savaged in Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon , which won the 2009 Palm d’Or .)
    The German literature of cultural pessimism—though it typified a tradition of overarching syntheses, was not the only form of scholarly analysis in those years. In contrast to the speculative systems of Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, and, to an extent, Nietzsche, the philosophies of Dilthey, Simmel, and Scheler were much more modest, more commonsensical, and all the more refreshing and instructive for that. But the overwhelming reality is that, in the face of the advances being made by science, especially in the forty to fifty years before World War I , the educated middle classes in Germany, the traditionally educated middle classes, the “Bildung classes” as we can call them, suffered two crucial setbacks, setbacks that were exacerbated in the 1920s in the Weimar Republic. First, they lost status and influence, finding their traditional