Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The downside to this outbreak of nationalism, which looks inevitable with the benefit of hindsight, was yet more racism. Anti-Semitism was especially virulent in France and Germany. This partly had to do with the envy of Britain³³: the French and German empires were so small, compared with the British, that the view formed, as Paul Déroulède, founder of the League of Patriots in France, put it, ‘We cannot hope to achieve anything abroad before we have cured our domestic ills.’

³⁴ And there was no doubt who was internal enemy number one – the Jews. In 1886 Edouard Drumont published La France juive

, a ‘concoction’ of Jewish life and customs, which, though crude and clumsy, became an instant best-seller. It turned out to be the prelude to a wave of anti-Semitism in that country, culminating in the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of being a German spy. In Germany, the so-called Kulturkampf, the ‘cultural battle’, though it was waged over the supervision of schools and the appointment of parish priests, was really about the attempt by the Protestant state to make Catholic politicians conform to Prussian policy. In amongst this intolerance, the role of Jews was inevitably discussed.

Nationalism reached its ultimate form at the turn of the century in Maurice Barrés’ trilogy, Le roman de l’énergie nationale (1897–1903). Barrés’ idea was that the cult of the ego was the main cause of the corruption of civilisation. ‘The nation ranked above the ego and had therefore to be regarded as the supreme priority in a man’s life. The individual had no choice but to submit to the function assigned to him by the nation, “the sacred law of his lineage”, and to “hearken to the voices of the soil and the dead”.’³⁵

As Hagen Schulze has rightly pointed out, nationalism, the idea of a nation, which at the turn of the nineteenth century had been seen as a form of utopia, as a natural political and cultural entity, had become by the turn of the twentieth century a polemical factor in domestic politics. ‘It no longer stood above the parties uniting society, but itself turned into a party and divided society.’ The consequences were to be catastrophic.

Once again, we should be careful of exaggeration. Nationalism was catastrophic in many ways, but it also had its positive side. This was nowhere more evident than in regard to the great flowering of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century which, whether or not it was caused by unification of the country, and by the great feeling of nationalism that accompanied the unification, certainly occurred at exactly the same time.

Sigmund Freud, Max Planck, Ernst Mach, Hermann Helmholtz, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Clausius, Wilhelm Röntgen, Eduard von Hartmann, . . . all these were German or German-speaking. It sometimes escapes our attention that the period between 1848 and 1933, overlapping the turn of the century, when this book comes to a close, was the high point of the German genius. ‘The twentieth century was supposed to have been the German century.’ These words were written in 1991 by the American historian Norman Cantor. They are echoes of those by Raymond Aron, the French philosopher, talking to the German historian Fritz Stern, when they were in Berlin to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. All were born in 1878–79 and this moved Aron to remark: ‘It could have been Germany’s century.’³⁶ What Cantor and Aron meant was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists, who were the best in the world between 1848 and 1933, would have taken the freshly-unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when the disaster that went by the name of Adolf Hitler came along.