Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

This great dislocation had two effects that concern us. One, the middle class, excluded politically and yet eager to achieve some measure of equality, fell back on education and Kultur as key areas where success could be achieved – equality with the aristocracy, and superiority in comparison with foreigners in a competitive, nationalistic world. ‘High culture’ was thus always more important in imperial Germany than elsewhere and this is one reason why it flourished so well in the 1871–1933 period. But this gave culture a certain tone – freedom, equality or personal distinctiveness tended to be located in the ‘inner sanctum’ of the individual, whereas society was portrayed as an ‘arbitrary, external and frequently hostile world’. The second effect, which overlapped with the first, was a retreat into nationalism, but a class-based nationalism which turned against the newly created industrial working class (and the stirrings of socialism), Jews and non-German minorities. ‘Nationalism was seen as moral progress, with utopian possibilities.’⁴²

One effect of this second factor was the idealisation of earlier ages, before the industrial working class existed, in particular the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stood for an integrated daily life – a ‘golden age’ – in pre-industrial times. Against the background of a developing mass society, the educated middle class looked to culture as a stable set of values that uplifted their lives, set them apart from the ‘rabble’ (Freud’s word) and, in particular, enhanced their nationalist orientation. The Volk, a semi-mystical, nostalgic ideal of how ordinary Germans had once been – a contented, talented, a-political, ‘pure’ people – took hold.

These various factors combined to produce in German culture a concept that is almost untranslatable into English but is probably the defining factor in understanding so much of German thought as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and which helps explain both the (predominantly German) discovery of the unconscious and why Germany became so dominant in this area. The word in German is Innerlichkeit

.⁴³ Insofar as it can be translated, it means a tendency to withdraw from, or be indifferent to, politics, and to look inwards, inside the individual. Innerlichkeit

meant that artists deliberately avoided power and politics, guided by a belief that to participate, or even to write about it, was a derogation of their calling and that, for the artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one. For example, and as Gordon Craig tells us, before 1914 it was only on rare occasions that German artists were interested, let alone stirred, by political and social events and issues. Not even the events of 1870–1871 succeeded in shaking this indifference. ‘The victory over France and the unification of Germany inspired no great work of literature or music or painting.’⁴⁴ Authors and painters did not really find their own day ‘poetic enough’ to challenge their talents. ‘As the infrastructure of the new Reich was being laid, German artists were writing about times infinitely remote or filling their canvases with nereids and centaurs and Greek columns.’ Even the great Wagner was composing musical drama that had only the remotest connection with the world in which he lived (Siegfried

, 1876; Parsifal, 1882).⁴⁵