Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The concept of Innerlichkeit was one thing in the hands of Freud, say, or Mann, Schnitzler or Klimt – it was original, energising, challenging. But there was another side, typified by the likes of Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn. Neither of these is as well-known now as Freud, Klimt, Mann and the others, but at the time they were equally famous. And they were famous for being viciously anti-modern, for seeing all about them, amid the fantastic and brilliant innovations, nothing but decay. Lagarde, a biblical historian (one of the areas where German scholarship led the world), hated modernity as much as he loved the past. He believed in human greatness and in the will: reason, he said, was of secondary importance. He believed that nations have a soul and he believed in Deutschtum, Germanism: he thought the country embodied a unique race of German heroes with a unique will. Lagarde was also one of those calling for a new religion, an idea that, much later, appealed to Alfred Rosenberg, Göring and Hitler himself. Lagarde attacked Protestantism for its lack of ritual and mystery, and for the fact that it was little more than secularism. In advocating a new religion, he said he wanted to see ‘a fusion of the old doctrines of the Gospel with the National Characteristics of the Germans’. Above all, Lagarde sought the resurgence of the German people. To begin with he adopted ‘inner emigration’: people should find salvation within themselves; but then advocated Germany taking over all non-German countries of the Austrian empire. This was because the Germans were superior and all others, especially Jews, were inferior.

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In 1890 Julius Langbehn published Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Teacher

). In this book, Langbehn’s aim was to denounce intellectualism and science. Art, not science or religion, was the higher good, he said, the true source of knowledge and virtue. In science, the old German virtues were lost: simplicity, subjectivity, individuality. Rembrandt als Erzieher was a ‘shrill cry against the hothouse intellectualism of modern Germany’ which Langbehn thought would stifle the creative life; it was a cry for the irrational energies of the people or tribe, the Volk-geist, buried for so long under layers of Zivilisation. Rembrandt, the ‘perfect German and incomparable artist’, was pictured as the antithesis of modern culture and as the model for Germany’s ‘third Reformation’, yet another turning-in.

⁵¹ One theme dominated the entire book: German culture was being destroyed by science and intellectualism and could be regenerated only through the resurgence of art, reflecting the inner qualities of a great people, and the rise to power of heroic, artistic individuals in a new society. After 1871 Germany had lost her artistic style and her great individuals, and for Langbehn Berlin above all symbolised the evil in German culture. The poison of commerce and materialism (‘Manchesterism’ or, sometimes, Amerikanisierung) was corroding the ancient inner spirit of the Prussian garrison town. Art should ennoble, Langbehn said, so that naturalism, realism, anything which exposed the kind of iniquities that a Zola or a Mann drew attention to, was anathema.⁵²

In other words, it can be argued – it has been argued – that nineteenth-century Germany produced a special kind of artist, and a special kind of art, inward-looking and backward-looking, and that the German fascination and obsession with Kultur had let Zivilisation run riot. Among other things, this formed the deep background to the emergence of scientific racism.

Modern (scientific) racism stems from three factors. One, the Enlightenment view that the human condition was essentially a biological state (as opposed to a theological state); two, the wider contact between different races brought about by imperial conquest; and three, the application and misapplication of Darwinian thinking to the various cultures around the world.