Nationalism and Culture (40 page)

Ludwig Jahn, who after Fichte's death became the spiritual leader of German youth and was regarded by it with almost divine veneration, carried Francophobia and nationalistic craze so far that he got on the nerves even of his patriotic fellow fighters. Stein called him a "grimacing, conceited fool" and Arndt a "purified Eulenspiegel." Jahn suspected everything and smelled everywhere foreign customs and French folly. Reading the biography of this peculiar saint one gets the impression of seeing in the "bearded ancient" an earlier pioneer of modern Hitlerism. His rude, presumptuous speech, his incredible arrogance, his hollow boasting, his delight in tying ideas into knots, his violent temper, his bold obtrusiveness, and most of all his boundless intolerance, which respected no other opinion and reviled every thought not in agreement with his own as un-German—all this makes him the ancestor of the present National Socialism.

Jahn really had no political ideas of his own. What mostly appealed to him was not medieval Germany, but primitive Germany j there he was at home, fairly wallowing in German primordialness. He proposed to create between Germany and France, a Ham^mey a barrier, a sort of primitive forest filled with bisons and other wild beasts. A special frontier guard was to see to it that no intercourse whatever should take place between the two countries, so that German youth might not be contaminated by French rottenness. In his crazy hatred of France Jahn went so far as to preach publicly: "It comes to the same thing if one teaches his daughters French or trains them for whores." In the brain of this strange prophet everything became perverted and distorted j most of all, the German language, which he frightfully mistreated with his wild, fanatical "purification."

For all that, Jahn enjoyed not only the boundless admiration of German youth, but Jena University gave him an honorary doctor's degree and compared his tiresome boasting with Luther's eloquence. A distinguished philologist like Thiersch dedicated his German translation of Pindar to him, and Franz Passow, professor of Greek Literature at Weimar, declared that since Luther nothing so excellent had been written as

Jahn's Teutsche Turnkunst ("German gymnastics"). If the present Germany were not such a repellent example of how, under the pressure of special circumstances, a brainless phraseology supported by complicated illogic can impress wide sections of the nation and force them in a special direction, the influence of a confused mind like Jahn's would be difficult to understand. That this man could be accepted by German youth as Fichte's successor can only be explained by the low mental level of the younger generation itself. Even such a thoroughly nationalistic historian as Treitschke remarks in his German History: "It amounted to a social disease that the sons of an enlightened people could venerate a noisy barbarian as their teacher."

But this came about simply because the narrow-minded Germanism which becam.e the fashion in Germany after the wars of liberation had to lead to mental barbarism. The morbid mania of Auserw'dhltheity of "elect-ness," necessarily led to intellectual estrangement from all general culture of the time and to a total misconception of all human relations. It was a time when the spirit of Lessing and Herder could no longer inspire the young generation J when Goethe lived beside, but not in, the nation. What resulted from it was the specific German patriotism which, according to Heine, consists in this, that in its supporters "the heart becomes narrower and shrinks like leather in cold weather j that they hate everything foreign; that they no longer wish to be citizens of the world, no longer Europeans, but only narrow Germans."

It is absurd to see in the men of 1813 the guardians of freedom; not one of them was moved by real libertarian ideas. Almost every one of them had his roots in a long-past age which could no longer open new outlooks for the present. This applies also to the Burschenschaft, the Students' League, whose shameful suppression by the victorious reaction is probably the main reason why even today it is praised for its libertarian activities. No one will deny that the Burschenschaft had idealistic features; but this is no proof that it had a libertarian mind. Its Christian-German mysticism, its grotesque rejection of all that is called "foreign custom" and "foreign spirit," its anti-Semitic tendencies which had been from of old in Germany the heritage of all reactionary movements, and the general confusion of its views—all these fitted it to be the champion of a mystical faith in which elements of the most diverse conceptions mingled in motley patchwork; not to be the banner-bearer of a new future. When after Kotzebue's murder by the student, Karl Sand, reaction dealt a destructive blow, and the infamous Carlsbad Resolutions suppressed all leagues of youth, the Burschenschaft could confront Metternich's creatures with nothing but those helpless and submissive verses of Binzer which end with the words:

The tie has been cut; it was black, red, and gold; And God has endured it. His wish—who's been told? The house it may fall; as fall it needs must; The spirit lives in us, and God is our trust.

Real revolutionaries would have hurled different words against this brutal violation of deepest human dignity. When one compares the bold beginnings of German enlightenment and its great, all-dominating ideas of love and freedom of thought, with the sad results of an unfettered rampant "national consciousness," one realizes the enormous spiritual throw back which Germany has suffered and can appraise the whole grim meaning of Heine's words:

There we now see the idealistic brutality that Jahn reduced to a system. It began as a shabby, loutish, unwashed opposition to a mental attitude which is the noblest, the holiest, that Germany has created; that is, against that humanity, against that general human fraternization, against that cosmopolitanism which our great spirits, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul, and all Germans of culture have always venerated.

It is a curious phenomenon that the best-known representatives of the romantic school, who had contributed so much to the shaping of mystic nationalism in Germany, almost without exception landed in the camp of open political or clerical reaction. This was all the more remarkable since most of them had begun their literary careers as heralds of enlightenment and freedom of thought and had greeted the great revolution in the neighboring land with enthusiasm. If it was strange that a former Jacobin like Gorres, who hailed the dismemberment of the German empire with wild joy, changed with such surprising rapidity into a fierce opponent of France, it was still more incomprehensible that the same Gorres, who in his essay, Germany and the Revolution (1820), with manly resolution showed his teeth to the raging reactionaries, soon after threw himself into the arms of papism and in his clerical fanaticism went so far as to earn the endorsement of Joseph de Maistre.

Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Steffens, Tieck, Adam Miiller, Brentano, Fouque, Zacharias Werner, and many others, were swept away by the reactionary flood. Hundreds of young artists made pilgrimages to Rome and returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church, which was then reaping a good harvest. It was a very witches' sabbath of mad fanaticism and ardent rage for conversion which, however, lacked the inner vigor of conviction of medieval man. This was the end of that cultural nationalism which had commenced as a burning longing for the "verlorene Hei-mat" and ended in the slough of the deepest reaction. Georg Brandes did not exaggerate when he said:

As regards their religious attitude all the romantics, who were so revolutionary in poetry, submissively bent the neck as soon as they saw the yoke. And in politics it was they who guided the Vienna congress and drew up the manifesto for the abrogation of liberty of thought among the people—between a solemnity in St. Peter's Cathedral and an oyster dinner at Fanny Elssler's.^

But one must not compare most of these men with Gentz, to whom Brandes referred in these words j they were not in his class. Gentz, next to Metternich in whose pay he was, was chiefly responsible for the infamous Carlsbad Resolutions; he was a "rotten character," as Stein called him, a brilliant, venal scribbler who sold his pen to anyone who paid for it. He revealed to the English socialist, Robert Owen, in a moment of cynic frankness, the whole leitmotif of his miserable life in a few words when Owen—who did not know his real character—sought to win Gentz for his special plans of reform: "We do not wish to make the great mass wealthy and independent J how could we then rule them?" With Gentz one could perhaps compare only Friedrich Schlegel, who also degraded himself to become a purchased scribbler for Metternich. The rest of the heads of the Romantic School went the way of reaction quite independently, because all their ideas had a reactionary core. The fact that nearly all of them went the same road can very well serve as proof that there was something unhealthy about the whole movement which they never could overcome and which determined the course of their development.

The reactionary core of German romanticism is at once apparent from its view concerning the state, which traced directly back to theoretical absolutism. Novalis had begun by endowing the state with a special individual life of its own, treating it as a "mystic individual" and concluding that "the perfected citizen lives wholly in the state." But only that kind of man can live wholly in the state who is wholly filled by the state. Such a concept is naturally not in harmony with the liberal ideas of the period of enlightenment; it is their self-evident antithesis.

Adam Miiller, the real state-theoretician of romanticism, most decidedly opposed the "Chimaera of natural rights" upon which most of the ideas of liberalism are based. In his Elements of Statecraft he most emphatically opposes the liberal concept, of which the most prominent representative in Germany had been Wilhelm von Humboldt, maintaining that "the state is not only a manufacturing, farming, and insurance institution or mercantile society," but "the most intimate union of the collective physical and spiritual wealth, the whole inner and outer life of a nation in one great energetic, infinitely active and living whole." Consequently, the state could never be the means for any special or definite end, as

^ Georg Brandes, Die romantische Schule in Deutsi hland. Berlin, 1900, p. 6.

liberalism conceived it to be j it was rather, in its highest form, an end in itself, an end sufficient for itself, having its roots in the union of law, nationality and religion. If it often appeared as if the state was serving some special task, this, according to Muller's concept, was only an optical illusion of the theoreticians j in reality the state serves only itself and is not a means for anyone.

Karl Ludwig von Haller's shallow and shameless patchwork with the long-winded title Restoration of Statecraft, or the Theory of the Natural Social State as Opposed to the Chimaera of the Artificial Bourgeois State, was only a crude and lifeless repetition of the same ideas. But with Haller the reactionary trend is much more openly and demonstrably apparent. Haller on principle rejected the thought that civil society could have arisen from a written or unwritten contractual relation between the citizen and the state. The natural condition out of which all institutions of political society had gradually arisen is synonymous with the divine order, the origin of all things. The first outcome of this primal condition was, however, that the strong ruled over all others, from which it is apparent that all power springs from a natural law founded in divine order. The mighty one rules, founds the state, declares the law—and all on the basis of his strength and superiority. The power he possesses is a gift from God and, coming from God, it is for that reason inviolable. From this it follows that the king is not the servant of the state, but must be its master. State and people are his property, a legitimate legacy received from God wherewith to do as he pleases. If the king is unjust and harsh, this is certainly unfortunate for the subjects, but it does not justify their effecting a change by themselves. All that remains for them to do in such a case is to call on God to enlighten the ruler and guide him on the right way.

One can understand how thoroughly such a doctrine must have satisfied the crowned heads. Haller more especially pleased the Prussian crown prince, later Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who has been called "the romantic on the king's throne." Hegel's deification of the state was but a further step in the same direction and found such ready acceptance in Germany for the reason that the state concept of the romantics had smoothed the way for his ideas.

The one superior mind among the romantics, who even here went his own way, was the Catholic philosopher, Franz von Baader, whose diary contains a mass of profound reflections concerning state and society. Baader, who based his doctrine on man's original purity, most strenuously opposed Kant's concept of "innate evil" and especially fought the mania of government which smothers man's noblest talents and makes him incapable of any independent action. For this reason he praised anarchy as a healing force of nature against despotism because it compels men to stand on their own feet. Baader compared man infantilized by government to the fool

who thought he could not walk until a conflagration taught him the use of his legs.

Error and vice receive their great strength through materialization, authorization by institutions; for example, as law. And the latter is the great evil, the great bar to our capacity for perfection, which only government can cause. It is therefore incapable of achieving anything good, but very capable of achieving evil; for it, so to speak, makes folly and vice immortal, giving them a permanence they could not have of themselves.

Baader's state-critical concept does not hark back to liberalism, but to German mysticism. He had gone to school to Master Eckhart and Jacob Bohme and had reached a kind of theosophy which looked very sceptically at all temporal means of compulsion. What most attracted him to Catholicism was the universality of the church and the idea of Christendom as a world-embracing community held together only by the inner tie of religion and hence not in need of any external protection. Baader was a solitary, a deeply probing spirit, who inspired many but had no influence on the general course of German development.