The German Genius

intellectual interests downgraded and marginalized in the newer, mass urban spaces, and then, in the great inflation, they found their economic interests decimated. Second, in Germany in particular, the traditionally educated Bildung class found itself estranged from—and replaced by—the scientifically educated middle class. This was of crucial importance because, when it came to the crunch, when the Nazis began to flex their muscles, there simply was not in Germany a critical mass of educated people in positions of power and responsibility to provide any real resistance.
    T. S. Eliot provided an appropriate framework in his short book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) when he said that the most important purpose of culture lies in its impact on politics. The power elite needs a culture elite, he said, because the culture elite is the best antidote, providing the best critics for the power brokers in any society, and that criticism pushes the society forward and prevents it from stagnating and decaying. For Eliot, within any one culture, the higher, “more evolved” levels positively influence the lower levels by their greater knowledge of, and use of, skepticism (and you cannot be properly skeptical unless you have knowledge to be skeptical with ). For Eliot, that is what knowledge and education are for . In Germany, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that that didn’t happen.
    This surely provided the subtext and the context of the Weimar years. In 1914 the Manifesto of the 93 had proclaimed that the war was being fought to defend the ideals of German culture. The war was then lost, and there was a surrender of nerve and of will. Spengler in 1918 and Moeller van den Bruck in 1922 continued with their versions of cultural pessimism, emphasizing that the war had solved nothing. The great inflation of 1923–24 seemed to confirm those worries while the riotous culture then in vogue—cabaret, Expressionism, especially in the new art form of film, surrealism, the subversive world of Brecht, Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss, the slip-sliding world of Pauli’s exclusion principle, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Gödel’s limits to what we can know—had collapsed traditional ideas and pushed the classics-loving Bildung classes further and further to the periphery, even as Max Weber told them these new sciences could never tell them how to live. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his investigation of what he terms the “cultures of defeat,” shows how many of the German postwar observers dated the origins of the catastrophe (the lost war) to the founding of the empire; they wanted a return not to the prewar world but to a pre-1871 world, the world created by the Bildung classes, a universal world of “spiritual substance” that had, they felt, been destroyed by materialism, mercantilism, and science, which had caused Germany “to lose its soul.” 40
    This was the context for what Hannah Arendt said when she argued that what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was a temporary alliance of the educated elite with the mob. She also noted that the First World War was itself “the true father of a new world order,” the “constant murderous abitrariness” being “the great equaliser” that broke down the classes and transformed them into “the masses.” 41 This, she felt, had created a “community of fate” in which the aim, going forward, was to do something “heroic or criminal” in which both the mob and the educated elite could express their “frustration, resentment and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism…” 42 This collective bitterness , she said, was the “pre-totalitarian atmosphere” in which the ultimate end was the death of respectability, in which the difference between truth and falsehood “ceases to be objective and becomes a mere matter of power and cleverness.” 43 Julien Benda agreed and so did Niall Ferguson. Benda thought that a barbaric nationalism had been sparked in Germany, initiated by its intellectuals. In The War of the World (2006), Ferguson wrote: “An academic education, far from inoculating people against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.” 44
    None of that need necessarily have led to the horrors of 1933–45, but what we can now say is that the crucial failure in Germany in those years and in the years immediately before, was first and foremost among the educated middle class, precisely because they alone