Nationalism and Culture (39 page)

The impulse of German romanticism came from France. Rousseau's slogan, "back to nature," his conscious revolt against the spirit of enlightenment, his strong emphasis on the purely sentimental as against the clever systematic thought of rationalism, found beyond the Rhine also a notable response—especially in Herder to whom the romantics, nearly all of whom had been formerly in the camp of the enlightenment, were strongly obligated. Herder him.self was no romantic. His view was too clear, his spirit too unroiled for him to enthuse over the romantic concept of the "purposelessness of all events." But his disinclination to everything systematic, his joy in the primordialness of things, his conception of the inner relationship of the human soul with all Mother Nature and, most of ill, his deep sympathy and feeling of understanding for the spiritual culture of foreign people and past ages, brought him very close to the representatives of romanticism. In fact, the great service rendered by the romantics through their introduction of foreign literatures, their rediscovery of the German legends and folklore, can largely be traced to the inspiration of Herder, who showed them the way.

But Herder in all his thinking viewed mankind as a whole. He saw, as Heine so beautifully said, "all mankind as a great harp in the hands of a great master." Every people was for him a string, and from the harmonious union of the sounds of all the strings arose for him life's eternal melodies. Swept along by this thought he enjoyed the endless variety of the life of the people and followed with loving interest every manifestation of their cultural activity. He knew of no chosen people and had for the Negro and the Mongolian the same understanding as for the members of the white race. When one reads what he had to say concerning a plan for a "Natural History of Mankind in a purely Human Sense" one gets the impression that he had foreseen the absurdities of our modern race theoreticians and nationalistic fetish worshipers.

Most of all, one must be impartial as the genius of mankind itself, have no preferred tribes, no favored folk on earth. One is easily misled by such a preference to ascribe to the favored nation too much good, to the others too much evil. And when the favored people prove only a collective name (Celts, Semites, Chuschites, etc.), which perhaps never existed and whose origin and continuity cannot be proved, then one has indeed written in sand.

The adherents of the Romantic School at first followed these trails and developed a number of fruitful ideas which had a stimulating influ-

ence on the most divergent schools of thought. But we are here interested solely in the influence they had on the development of the national idea in Germany. The romantics discovered for the Germans the German past and brought to light many of its features which had hardly been noticed before. They thoroughly reveled in this past, and their attempts to make it live again revealed many a hidden treasure and made many a silent string vibrate once more. And since most of their intellectual leaders were also inclined to philosophical reflections, they dreamed of a higher unity of life in which all phases of human activity—religion, state, church, science, art, philosophy, ethics and everyday affairs—are focussed like a bundle of sun-rays by the lens.

The Romantic School believed in a "verlorene Heimat" a lost home, a past condition of spiritual perfection in which the oneness of life they were striving for was once existent. Since then there had occurred a sort of fall into sin. Mankind had gotten into a chaos of hostile segregation, so that the inner communion of the individual members was destroyed and each one was set up as a distinct part and lost his deeper relation to the whole. The attempts again to unite men into a whole have so far led to merely mechanical union, lacking the inner impulse of individual growth and purity. Hence, they have only increased the evil and destroyed the gaily colored variety of internal and external vital relations. In this respect France was for the romantics a repellent example, because there for centuries men had striven to embed every manifestation of life in a spiritless political centralism which falsified the primordial meaning of social relations and intentionally deprived them of their true character.

According to the romantic conception, the lost unity could not be restored by external means j it had rather to grow out of man's inner spiritual urge and then gradually to ripen. The romantics were firmly convinced that in the soul of the people the memory of that state of former perfection still slumbered. But that inner source had been choked and had first to be freed again before the silent intuition could once more become alive in the minds of men. So they searched for the hidden sources and lost themselves ever deeper in the mystic dusk of a past age whose strange magic had intoxicated their minds. The German medieval age with its colorful variety and its inexhaustible power of creation was for them a new revelation. They believed themselves to have found there that unity of life which humanity had lost. Now the old cities and the Gothic cathedrals spoke a special language and testified to that "verlorene Heimat" on which the longing of romanticism spent itself. The Rhine with its legend-rich castles, its cloisters and mountains, became Germany's sacred stream j all the past took on a new character, a glorified meaning.

Thus there gradually developed a sort of cultural nationalism whose inner import culminated in the thought that the Germans, because of their

splendid past, which was now to be reborn among the people, were destined to bring to sick humanity the longed-for healing. Thus the Germans became in the eyes of the romantics the chosen people of the present age, selected by Providence itself to fulfill a divine mission. This thought occurs again and again in Fichte, whose philosophical idealism, together with the nature philosophy of Schelling, had the strongest influence on the romantics. Fichte had called the Germans an "Urvolky* a primary people, for whom alone man's final redemption was reserved. What originally had sprung from the pious enthusiasm of an overintense poetic mood, and as such was rather harmless, assumed with Fichte the character of that construed antagonism which is at the base of all nationalism and already carries within itself the dragon's teeth of national hatred. From assumed national superiority to vilification and disparagement of everything foreign, it is as a rule but a step, which, especially in times of agitation, is very easily taken.

If the Germans were indeed an "Urvolk" as Fichte maintained and as others have repeated after him, a people which had more of the "verlorene Heimat" feeling than all other people, then no other nation could rival them or could even endure comparison with them. To maintain this contention to give the real or imaginary distinctions between them the meaning one desires, one is forced to conceive peoples as categories, not to take them as individuals. Thus began the work of idle speculation and construction, in which Fichte especially has achieved the extraordinary. For him the Germans were the only people who had character: "To have character and to be German are indubitably synonymous." From this it naturally follows that other peoples, and especially the French, have no character. It was discovered that there is no French equivalent for the word "Gemiit." Whereby it was proved that God had endowed only the Germans with so noble a gift.

From this and similar premises, Fichte gradually reaches the extremest conclusions: since the Frenchman has no Gemiit his mind is set solely on the sensual and the material, things naturally antagonistic to the inner chastity of the German so richly endowed with Gemiit. To Gemiit is due the "uniform honesty and loyalty" of the Germans. Only where Gemiit is lacking are cunning and guile at the bottom of the soul, qualities which the Germans freely leave to other people. True religion has its roots in the depths of the Gemiit. This explains why among the French that "spirit of enlightenment" had to develop which finally culminated in the crassest free thought and infidelity. The German, however, grasped the spirit of Christianity in its whole profundity, giving it a special meaning appropriate to its innermost essence.

Fichte also spoke of the "Ursprachey" the primitive speech of the Germans, meaning by this "a language which from the first sound uttered by

this people has without a break developed from the actual common life of the people." Thus he reached the conclusion that only among an "Urvolk*' possessing an "Ursprache" does intellectual growth penetrate life. Among other people, who have forgotten their Ursfrache and have adopted a foreign language (to these of course belonged first of all the French), mental development and life each go their separate ways. From this assumption Fichte deduced certain political and social consequences in the life of a people; as when in his fourth Address to the German Nation he says: "In a nation of the first category the whole people are educable. The educators of such test their discoveries on the people and try to influence them. Whereas in a nation of the second category the educated classes separate themselves from the people and use the latter only as blind tools for the accomplishment of their plans."

This arbitrary assertion, whose nonsense is disputed every hour by life itself, is today the subject of most curious commentaries and is proclaimed to the German youth as the profoundest wisdom of the fathers. The higher one elevates one's own nation, the poorer and the more meaningless must everything else appear compared with it. All creative gift even is denied to others. Thus, Fichte maintains of the French "that they cannot raise themselves to the idea of freedom and of the legal state because by their system of thought they have missed the concept of personal values and cannot understand at all how other men or people can will or even think such a thing." ^ Of course only Germans were chosen for freedom because they had Gem-Ut and were an "Urvolk." Unfortunately, we hear today so often and so obtrusively of "German freedom" and "German loyalty" that we have become somewhat suspicious—for the Third Reich gives us none too clear a picture of what this alleged freedom and loyalty really consist of.

Most of the men who played leading parts in the nationalist movement in Germany before and after 1813 were rooted deeply in the spirit of romanticism; and from its descriptions of The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation of medieval times, of the legendary world of ancient Germany, and of the magic of the native soil their patriotism drew rich nourishment. Arndt, Jahn, Gorres, Schenkendorf, Schleiermacher, Kleist, Eichendorff, Gentz, Korner, were deeply imbued with romantic ideas; even Stein as he became older came ever more deeply under their influence. They dreamed of the return of the old realm of Austria's imperial banner. Only a few of them, with Fichte, saw in the king of Prussia the "Zwingherr zur Deutschheit" the compeller towards Germanism, and believed that Prussia was destined to establish the unity of the realm.

With most of these men the nationalistic idea reached its logical con-

' Fichte, Vber den Begrijf des wahrhajten Krieges in Bezug auf den Krieg 1813. Dritte Vorlcsung.

elusion. It had begun as an enticing nostalgia for the "verlorene Heimat" and a poetic glorifying of the German past. Later, they got the idea of the great historical mission of the Germansj they made comparisons between the various peoples and their own and used for the embellishment of their own so much paint that there was hardly anything left for the others. The end was a fierce hatred of the French and an idiotic exaltation of Germanism which frequently bordered on mental aberration.

The same development can, however, be observed in every kind of nationalism, whether it be German, Polish or Italian; the only difference being that the "hereditary enemy" has for each nation a different name. Let no one say that it was the harsh experience of foreign rule and war, releasing all the worst passions in man, that led the German patriots to such one-sided and hatefilled modes of thought. What then, and also after the "wars of liberation," proclaimed itself as German patriotism, was more than a justified uprising against the foreign yoke; it was an open declaration of war against the character, the language and the spiritual culture of a neighboring people who—as Goethe said—belonged to "the most cultivated on earth," and to whom he himself "owed a great part of his education."

Arndt, who was one of the most influential men in the patriotic revolt against Napoleon's rule in Germany, knew actually no limits in his morbid hatred of the French:

Hatred of the foreigner, hatred of the French, of their trifling, their vanity, their folly, their language, their customs; yes, burning hatred of all that comes from them, that must unite everything German firmly and fraternally; and German valor, German freedom, German culture, German honor and justice must again soar high and be raised to the old honor and glory whereby our fathers shone before most of the peoples of the earth. . . . What has brought you to shame must bring you to honor again. Only bloody hatred of the French can unite German power, raise again the German glory, bring out the noblest traits of the people and submerge all the lowest. This hatred must be imparted to your children and your children's children as the palladium of German freedom, and must in future be the surest guardian of Germany's frontiers from the Scheldt to the Vosges and the Ardennes.^

With Kleist the hatred of everything French rose to blind rage. He derided Fichte's Addresses to the Ger7nan Nation^ and saw in him nothing but a weak-willed school-master with whom impotent words had to do duty for courage, for action. What he demanded was a people's war such as the Spanish under the leadership of fanatical priests and monks were waging against the French. In such a war all means seemed to him per-

^ E. M. Arndt, An die Preussen. January, 18 13.

missiblej poison and the dagger, breach of faith and treason. His Catechism for the Germansy Modeled After the Spanishy for Old and Young, which, significantly, is written in the form of a dialogue between a father and his child, displays the wildest manifestation of unrestrained national fanaticism, and in its frightful intolerance treads every human feeling under foot. Perhaps this gruesome fanaticism can be partly traced to the sick mentality of the unfortunate poetj on the other hand, the present time gives us the best possible understanding how such a mental attitude can be artificially trained and can spread with uncanny power if favored by particular social conditions.