Forgotten Land (19 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
When Alfred Knox returned to Britain, he felt he must warn about what he had seen. In 1921, he published two volumes that combined a narrative of events with extracts from his diary. Called
With the Russian Army
, the book was advertised as being by Major General Sir Alfred Knox KCB CMG (he had been promoted and then knighted) and moves along briskly, leaving a picture that for years dominated the view of the First World War’s eastern front – that of a Russian disintegration both on and off the battlefield.
With the Russian Army
, the book was advertised as being by Major General Sir Alfred Knox KCB CMG (he had been promoted and then knighted) and moves along briskly, leaving a picture that for years dominated the view of the First World War’s eastern front – that of a Russian disintegration both on and off the battlefield.
With the Russian Army
is occasionally unpleasant, particularly when Knox indulges in a contemptuous anti-Semitism that was completely unremarked upon by the distinguished military historian Sir James Edmunds in the course of a very favourable review in
The Times
. The book leaves an impression, through the explosions of impatience and disappointment, of a man of a superior type trying to control ‘children’ who can be charming, even bright, but need perpetually to be told to pull their socks up. ‘The Russians were just too simple and too good-natured to wage modern war,’ Knox wrote. He could not, however, avoid one shameful truth: that they, like the French, had believed that Great Britain was leaving its Allies to do most of the fighting.
is occasionally unpleasant, particularly when Knox indulges in a contemptuous anti-Semitism that was completely unremarked upon by the distinguished military historian Sir James Edmunds in the course of a very favourable review in
The Times
. The book leaves an impression, through the explosions of impatience and disappointment, of a man of a superior type trying to control ‘children’ who can be charming, even bright, but need perpetually to be told to pull their socks up. ‘The Russians were just too simple and too good-natured to wage modern war,’ Knox wrote. He could not, however, avoid one shameful truth: that they, like the French, had believed that Great Britain was leaving its Allies to do most of the fighting.
At least this General could continue the battle. The next move, Knox decided, was to get into parliament – and his reason for this, as he made clear, was to educate the British about the Bolshevik threat. In March 1924, he was adopted as the Conservative candidate for Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, a mostly
rural constituency that also included the town of High Wycombe, famous for the manufacture of furniture.
rural constituency that also included the town of High Wycombe, famous for the manufacture of furniture.
At the adoption meeting, the local Conservative chairman, Lord Desborough, read out details of Sir Alfred Knox’s military service and his awards and medals – the British KCB and the CMG, the pre-revolutionary Russian orders and others from France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Japan. Lady Knox, Lord Desborough said, was a worthy wife for this warrior – the daughter of a Scottish colonel and granddaughter of an officer who had been wounded at Waterloo. Then came extracts from Winston Churchill’s recently published history of the war –
The World Crisis
– that called Knox ‘an agent of singular discernment’ whose ‘luminous and pitiless despatches’ had caused ‘grave forebodings’ in Whitehall in 1914, after Tannenberg.
The World Crisis
– that called Knox ‘an agent of singular discernment’ whose ‘luminous and pitiless despatches’ had caused ‘grave forebodings’ in Whitehall in 1914, after Tannenberg.
Knox addressed the meeting. He wished, he said, to do his best for his country, to convince it of the horrors of Bolshevism. He had seen the ruthless
coup d’état
in November 1917 and, some months later, the dark cellar in Ekaterinburg where the Tsar and his family had been murdered – and he was determined ‘through all his life’ to fight this evil. He stood for the maintenance of strong armed forces, for a strong British Empire, for opposition to the rule of the mob in industrial disputes, for ‘orderly and constitutional’ social reform.
coup d’état
in November 1917 and, some months later, the dark cellar in Ekaterinburg where the Tsar and his family had been murdered – and he was determined ‘through all his life’ to fight this evil. He stood for the maintenance of strong armed forces, for a strong British Empire, for opposition to the rule of the mob in industrial disputes, for ‘orderly and constitutional’ social reform.
Russia came up often in the campaign. Knox alluded to his experiences there, declaring that he ‘loathed’ the Bolshevik regime and opposed trading with it, and explaining that the Russian army could have fought on in 1917 but ‘Jewish emissaries’ came from Germany ‘to demoralise it’. To talk about Russia, he said at one meeting, ‘made him very angry and very hot’. His opponent, and the sitting member, was the Liberal Lady Terrington, one of the first women MPs but not at all formidable, ‘completely uneducated’ (according to a feminist observer), although extraordinarily well dressed. It was her dress sense that the
Daily Express
commented on, and Lady Terrington thought this made her sound
snobbish, so she sued the newspaper, which prompted unhelpful publicity. Knox won the seat with a majority of over eight thousand, aided, a local paper suggested, by fear of socialism. The campaign showed that farce was a luxury which British politics could still afford.
Daily Express
commented on, and Lady Terrington thought this made her sound
snobbish, so she sued the newspaper, which prompted unhelpful publicity. Knox won the seat with a majority of over eight thousand, aided, a local paper suggested, by fear of socialism. The campaign showed that farce was a luxury which British politics could still afford.
Further east, in the borderlands of East Prussia, the mood was darker. The 1920 plebiscites delighted Alexander Dohna, with their huge majorities for staying within Germany – 92 per cent in Marienwerder and even only 13.47 per cent voting for joining the new Poland in Allenstein, with its large number of Roman Catholics. He and his friends were German nationalists, against republican Weimar, for the restoration of the monarchy and angered by the French and the Belgians laying claim to the Ruhr district in 1923.
It was a time of revolution. The young Alexander found himself standing with a group on the road near Schlobitten, armed with hunting rifles and two machine guns kept back after the war, prepared to protect his property from a demonstration of angry workers which collapsed in bad weather. He stored weapons and munitions behind the organ at Schlobitten church and gave money to the Heimatbund, a nationalist organization pledged to defend the region from its enemies: the new Poland, Bolshevik Russia and communism. A local communist group was equipping itself with firearms and hand grenades. The Dohnas seemed to be about to suffer the fate of the landlords in Russia and searched for a force strong enough to help them. Alexander Dohna and a Heimatbund delegation visited Hitler in Munich, to find a man whom they considered a commonplace little megalomaniac. The failed Nazi coup in November 1923 seemed to confirm the ridiculous Austrian’s irrelevance.
Alexander Dohna got married in 1926, to Antoinette Gräfin von Arnim (known as ‘Titi’), who came from another Prussian land-owning family. After their honeymoon, the couple entered
their new lives, arriving at Schlobitten in a coach pulled by six horses, to be greeted by the entire estate staff and representatives of the Bismarck-Jugend, the youth organization of the German Conservative Party. Ostensibly they were vastly rich, with their houses and art and land. But East Prussia depended on subsidized agriculture and these were inflationary times, with low prices for wheat and timber. In addition the Dohnas had, like many patriotic Germans, invested in War Loan, a government bond that became worthless after the defeat. The Dohnas’ lives were ruled by their unwieldy inheritance. Great blocks of land had to be sold, and each year Alexander went to Berlin, to visit the banks that supported him.
their new lives, arriving at Schlobitten in a coach pulled by six horses, to be greeted by the entire estate staff and representatives of the Bismarck-Jugend, the youth organization of the German Conservative Party. Ostensibly they were vastly rich, with their houses and art and land. But East Prussia depended on subsidized agriculture and these were inflationary times, with low prices for wheat and timber. In addition the Dohnas had, like many patriotic Germans, invested in War Loan, a government bond that became worthless after the defeat. The Dohnas’ lives were ruled by their unwieldy inheritance. Great blocks of land had to be sold, and each year Alexander went to Berlin, to visit the banks that supported him.
Mostly their life was the daily routine at Schlobitten, among the more than seventy rooms: rising in summer at 5.30, waited upon by the staff, dealing with administration and visiting parts of the property, examining the figures: then hunting deer in the long, light evenings. There was also the care of the art collection and the immense, aging house; advised by visiting experts, Dohna employed craftsmen from Berlin and stonemasons from Königsberg or Elbing. He remained haunted for the rest of his life by the sounds of his family’s possessions – the ticking of the ornate timepieces, their insistent chimes, the click of footsteps on the parquet floors: then outside, the deeper, louder bell of the clock on the stable tower. Hunting was more than a sport and had rituals of an almost sacred intensity. Stuffed or mounted heads of shot animals lined the walls at Schlobitten, even in the library – deer, buffalo and antelope killed on safaris in Africa; two large chamois given to the family by King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy; a spectacular series of stags bought from Rominten, the old royal estate: then, in his study, those shot by Alexander Dohna himself.
Tradition was this world’s scaffolding, Dohna thought, and he felt that occasionally, at family weddings or christenings, he should reveal in its fullness the vision of those who had shaped Schlobitten. The best porcelain – one Berlin set a gift from King Frederick William II – and silver were brought out, all the grand
rooms were opened up and water from the indoor fountain set into a wall in the painted hall cascaded gently down. The whole community took part in celebrations such as the harvest festival, with dancing and the crowning of a young village girl as harvest queen, and the Christmas party when a hundred children of estate workers were given toys and a Bible for those who had just been confirmed.
rooms were opened up and water from the indoor fountain set into a wall in the painted hall cascaded gently down. The whole community took part in celebrations such as the harvest festival, with dancing and the crowning of a young village girl as harvest queen, and the Christmas party when a hundred children of estate workers were given toys and a Bible for those who had just been confirmed.
Dohna and his friends had been wrong about Hitler. With the rise of National Socialism, German conservatism was faced with a crisis, and some of the Dohna family joined the new movement. Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, while not following them, approved of this, thinking they might act as a brake on its more outlandish policies. Others persisted with their wish for the monarchy’s restoration; Alexander Dohna thought this was unrealistic because of the poor quality of the last Emperor’s heirs. The best hope seemed to be the semi-monarchical figure of Hindenburg. At the end of the 1920s, the Dohnas were asked to the presidential palace in Berlin, where the aged victor of Tannenberg shook the guests’ hands with ponderous dignity, spoke slowly in a sonorous voice and retired early to bed. In the presidential election of 1932, Alexander Dohna voted for Hindenburg, although the old man was now eighty-four. In the parliamentary elections in July 1932, he and his wife voted for the German Conservative Party. In those of November 1932, they voted for the Nazis.
Vladimir Gilmanov teaches German at Kaliningrad University and agrees to meet me in a coffee bar up a street from the theatre, near the statue of Schiller. Professor Gilmanov is a slight, intense, thin man in his mid-forties, with fuzzy, dark, longish hair. In his jeans and light-weight jacket and with his unruly hair, he has an academic look, with sharp quick eyes behind glasses. It’s said that he can be so eloquent with German groups that they burst into tears. He grew up in Kaliningrad and remembers the angst of Soviet days: the restraint in the head if you wanted to tell the truth. That’s gone – replaced by a coldness, by something hard. Society is colder. Post-modern civilization is cold.
The Professor sips his coffee. I ask about Rudolf Jacquemien, the German communist poet who came to the Soviet Union looking for a better place. Vladimir Gilmanov knew about him – it was sad but drink had finished Jacquemien. Those poems – did I know them? Not well, I say, but I did go some years to call on his widow because Marion Dönhoff had given me the Kaliningrad address.
Mrs Jacquemien was small, dark-haired, quite shy, and pulled her husband’s books out from a glass-fronted case in the tidy living-room. She didn’t want to talk much about him beyond telling how he had first come to Russia as a sailor, to Archangel, as a German communist. He’d been in the camps for eight years, sent there during the war for being German, and she’d only been able to visit him twice. Now, with communism over, they’d rehabilitated him. That was enough. He died in 1992, she said. Then we had sat in silence. Jacquemien had written in German and
Russian. The cheap paper of those books was already crumbling: the German editions had been published in the communist east. It wasn’t the poems that moved me so much as the poet’s life, the reality of what had been his dream as the ship approached Archangel – how this had crumbled into war and years in a Stalinist jail.
Russian. The cheap paper of those books was already crumbling: the German editions had been published in the communist east. It wasn’t the poems that moved me so much as the poet’s life, the reality of what had been his dream as the ship approached Archangel – how this had crumbled into war and years in a Stalinist jail.
Vladimir Gilmanov agrees that it was sad about Jacquemien. But the poet had been right to retire to Kaliningrad. Jacquemien was a Western European, and Western Europe and Russia could mix more in Kaliningrad than in other places because of the past. I think again of Brodsky’s image of the trees whispering in German, an insistent murmur against the attempts to make a Soviet city. The Professor says you can see problems in microcosm here – the problems of the European and the Russian pasts and of what is to come – in this Russian enclave bordered by Lithuania and Poland, both of which are now in NATO and the European Union. It could be a place for reconciliation or for missiles – a contact point or a fortress.
Professor Gilmanov respects the city’s German past. He thinks that it’s right to celebrate this, for instance in the plaque that had been put up on Agnes Miegel’s old house. Did it matter, I ask, that she’d written a poem in praise of Hitler? The Professor says that some good poets had praised Stalin. He likes to see the groups of Germans at the place where the poet of East Prussia had lived – and he knows that her work has consoled them in their exile. Perhaps, I think, it is her articles, still in print, about Königsberg before the war – those puffs of sweetness and cosy sentimentality – that they read before coming back so that the new city is such a shock that they burst into tears.
In Kaliningrad, it was the city and its port that mattered, Vladimir Gilmanov says; these were what Stalin had wanted. Things are still not so good outside it, with as much as 80 per cent unemployment in some of the country districts. But, the Professor says, idealistic people stay in the villages; he knows a teacher who taught for a year without pay in Krasnolesye, the old Rominten.
Life is cold now but there are good tendencies. Vladimir Gilmanov knows Western Europe. He goes often to Germany but he likes to live here.
Life is cold now but there are good tendencies. Vladimir Gilmanov knows Western Europe. He goes often to Germany but he likes to live here.
Immanuel Kant.
Kant, he thinks, was a forerunner of globalization because his fame spread through Europe even though he never taught or lectured outside Königsberg. Kaliningrad might become Kantgrad: named not after a king (the thirteenth-century Ottakar of Bohemia) as in Königsberg or after an apparatchik (Mikhail Kalinin) but after a philosopher who bridged the Enlightenment and romanticism – or reason and spirit. With his dislike of nostalgia, Kant might not have approved of this commemoration. To him even wars led to progress; there never was a golden age. Until his death in 1804, he defended the French revolution with its blood-letting and terror.
Kant’s own experience of war was quite calm. When the Russians occupied Königsberg from 1758 until 1762, the philosopher
became a subject of the Empress Elizabeth, and young Russian officers attended his lectures. Prussian bureaucrats continued to run Königsberg; and, after Catherine the Great withdrew in 1762, they worked again for King Frederick the Great. So Kant had, briefly, been a Russian. But in the nationalism of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he became a symbol of German greatness. He is one of the figures carved on the base of the statue of Frederick the Great in Berlin’s Unter den Linden, although he had almost no contact with the King. In fact Kant’s interests were international; he may never have left Königsberg, but he read French and English, was inspired by foreign philosophers like David Hume and probably saw himself as a citizen of the world rather than of Prussia. His closest friend – to whom he is said to have read most of the
Critique of Pure Reason
before its publication – was the English merchant Joseph Green.
became a subject of the Empress Elizabeth, and young Russian officers attended his lectures. Prussian bureaucrats continued to run Königsberg; and, after Catherine the Great withdrew in 1762, they worked again for King Frederick the Great. So Kant had, briefly, been a Russian. But in the nationalism of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he became a symbol of German greatness. He is one of the figures carved on the base of the statue of Frederick the Great in Berlin’s Unter den Linden, although he had almost no contact with the King. In fact Kant’s interests were international; he may never have left Königsberg, but he read French and English, was inspired by foreign philosophers like David Hume and probably saw himself as a citizen of the world rather than of Prussia. His closest friend – to whom he is said to have read most of the
Critique of Pure Reason
before its publication – was the English merchant Joseph Green.
Battered by the storms of Fichte and Hegel, Kant’s ideas were accused of being lifeless. The poet Heine deplored the philosopher’s dreary life, his low regard for music and painting, how he seemed to have been a thinking machine rather than a person. To Heine this was made more repellent by the life’s concealment of a destructive intellect, as bad as, or worse, than Robespierre in its defence of terrorism. Kant came to be known as a man of fussily pedantic regularity by whose rigid routine people set their watches: obsessed by problems with his bowels, teeth and diet, betrayed and mocked by his servant, rigidly unadventurous in clinging to this remote land, increasingly eccentric in his thoughts of cats dying in Basel because of their propensity to attract electricity or of beer’s power as a slow poison.
Kant believed in the elevation of duty, in the centrality of individual freedom and truth and personal independence. Perhaps he is most famous now for the categorical imperative – that you should judge each action in terms of a universal moral law – and for the separation of concepts that are beyond human understanding (such as freedom and the existence of God) from those that can be proved. Kant’s belief in God, however, did not include
the need for churches or Christ or prayer. Why, he asked, is it necessary to intercede with an all-knowing creator? The purity of duty should be the moral yardstick of an action, not the action itself or its result, no matter how admirable or beneficial these seem. A defender of the Enlightenment and – although a republican – an admirer of its despotic monarch, Frederick the Great, Kant saw reason as capable of rationalizing its own limitations. In his concept of the unknowable, he pointed to the romantic thinkers who followed him.
the need for churches or Christ or prayer. Why, he asked, is it necessary to intercede with an all-knowing creator? The purity of duty should be the moral yardstick of an action, not the action itself or its result, no matter how admirable or beneficial these seem. A defender of the Enlightenment and – although a republican – an admirer of its despotic monarch, Frederick the Great, Kant saw reason as capable of rationalizing its own limitations. In his concept of the unknowable, he pointed to the romantic thinkers who followed him.
When Kant died in 1804, the church bells rang even though he had scarcely ever attended services, and the funeral was held in a candlelit Königsberg cathedral before the corpse was lowered into the burial place reserved for notables of the city’s university. What was the clue to Kant’s genius? Over the years, his remains were disinterred, examined and reburied, his skull fondled and measured for clues – and he survived not only as a great philosopher but as a relic of a good Germany.
The greatness of Kant’s reputation means that, since his death, he has been quoted often in support of views with which he almost certainly would not have agreed. After the defeat of 1918, for instance, he was exploited by the new, resentful nationalism. A symbolic tomb was built for him outside Königsberg cathedral, its pillared canopy designed by the neo-classical architect Friedrich Lahrs, with the philosopher’s sentence about the powers of nature and the need for a moral imperative set into it: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ At its unveiling in April 1924, the rector of Kant’s old university declared ‘the world must make up its mind to allow German thought and thoroughness their proper place in common labours for the advancement of civilization, or else decide that it could dispense with the works of Kant.’
Kant’s body had already been searched for clues to his genius. The philosopher had disapproved of phrenology – but in 1864 an
influential book,
Neuer Atlas der Cranioscopie
by Dr Carl Gustav Carus, analysed the plaster cast of the philosopher’s face after death. Carus commented on the extraordinarily prominent forehead and the large head. He noted the shapes of the heads of (among others) Schiller, the art historian Baron von Rumohr, the poet C. A. Tiedge, Napoleon, Talleyrand, Goethe, a selection of retarded people, murderers and suicides, various ‘Africans’ and ‘Orientals’ and an Egyptian mummy. There’s a sense of competition, particularly of the Germans against the French, with Kant representing the German genius for philosophy. Kant’s skull, with its wide, high forehead and bulge at the back of the head,
does
have an almost deformed look. In 1880, his corpse was dug up, for reburial in a neo-gothic chapel. Representatives of the city government and the university’s philosophy department watched the librarian and a professor in their shirtsleeves uncover the coffin on a hot June day to reveal a small skeleton approximately five feet in height. A photograph was taken of the skull, with the huge arching bulge at the back, the broad forehead, a lower tooth dark at its decaying root, and the open mouth curving upwards in what looks like a mocking smile.
influential book,
Neuer Atlas der Cranioscopie
by Dr Carl Gustav Carus, analysed the plaster cast of the philosopher’s face after death. Carus commented on the extraordinarily prominent forehead and the large head. He noted the shapes of the heads of (among others) Schiller, the art historian Baron von Rumohr, the poet C. A. Tiedge, Napoleon, Talleyrand, Goethe, a selection of retarded people, murderers and suicides, various ‘Africans’ and ‘Orientals’ and an Egyptian mummy. There’s a sense of competition, particularly of the Germans against the French, with Kant representing the German genius for philosophy. Kant’s skull, with its wide, high forehead and bulge at the back of the head,
does
have an almost deformed look. In 1880, his corpse was dug up, for reburial in a neo-gothic chapel. Representatives of the city government and the university’s philosophy department watched the librarian and a professor in their shirtsleeves uncover the coffin on a hot June day to reveal a small skeleton approximately five feet in height. A photograph was taken of the skull, with the huge arching bulge at the back, the broad forehead, a lower tooth dark at its decaying root, and the open mouth curving upwards in what looks like a mocking smile.
Kant’s small form was used to show that what came to be seen as Prussia’s (and, after 1871, Germany’s) most glorious times had been brought about not only by its army. In 1857, Rauch’s statue of Kant went up in Königsberg and in 1901 the Emperor William II had his head placed on the memorial to Frederick William II, Frederick the Great’s successor, although this monarch had tried to stifle the philosopher’s criticism of organized religion. Kant, like Shakespeare in Britain, became a symbol of national greatness. Under the Nazis, who were obsessed by the idea of Aryan genetic superiority, Kant’s skull was compared with that of the Slav Lenin, which, the so-called experts thought, indicated organizational brilliance and mental derangement. A photograph exists of the director of the Königsberg Museum during Hitler’s time proudly showing a cast of the skull to an awestruck Japanese.
At the Kant exhibition in the Königsberg Museum in Duisburg
in 2004, marking the bicentennial of the philosopher’s death, Klaus Weigelt, chairman of an organization that tries to keep East Prussian history alive, spoke of another anniversary: that of the RAF’s obliteration of the city centre in August 1944. Kant’s tomb at the north-east corner of the cathedral survived the British bombs, the 1945 siege and the Soviet dynamiting not only of the castle but of much of the Prussian past. It was the greatness and fame of Kant that had rescued Königsberg cathedral, Weigelt claimed. Since 1991, with money from the Russian government and from German companies, trusts and individuals, the cathedral had risen, Klaus Weigelt said, to a new beauty. The philosopher had reconciled Königsberg with Kaliningrad.
in 2004, marking the bicentennial of the philosopher’s death, Klaus Weigelt, chairman of an organization that tries to keep East Prussian history alive, spoke of another anniversary: that of the RAF’s obliteration of the city centre in August 1944. Kant’s tomb at the north-east corner of the cathedral survived the British bombs, the 1945 siege and the Soviet dynamiting not only of the castle but of much of the Prussian past. It was the greatness and fame of Kant that had rescued Königsberg cathedral, Weigelt claimed. Since 1991, with money from the Russian government and from German companies, trusts and individuals, the cathedral had risen, Klaus Weigelt said, to a new beauty. The philosopher had reconciled Königsberg with Kaliningrad.
Another Duisburg lecture in 2004 was about what came out of Königsberg in the late eighteenth century, when East Prussia made intellectual history. This had been the age not only of Kant but of Hamann and of Herder. Herder was Kant’s pupil but, partly influenced by Hamann, broke with his old master, to point towards Goethe’s romantic
Sturm und Drang.
Herder disliked universalism, an Enlightenment concept. He thought people needed to belong to a group, to a local culture and language, and that these groups and cultures could peacefully co-exist. Herder held that imperial conquests, like those of the Teutonic Knights or Frederick the Great in Poland or the British in Ireland, were wrong because they let one culture rule, even kill, another. He admired the Slavs, the Balts, the Jews, the Indians and the Chinese and abominated Western, particularly French, assumptions of superiority. He would have loathed Ober-Ost. A country, he recognized, is a mixture, with people leaving and arriving, as with the Salzburg Protestants coming to Prussia in the 1730s. ‘To brag of one’s country is the stupidest form of boastfulness,’ he said. ‘What is a nation? A great wild garden full of bad plants and good.’ Herder was repelled by parts of Kant’s thinking, such as the idea that individual suffering – the suffering of the less able – is needed for progress; Kant found Herder too much given to generalities.
Sturm und Drang.
Herder disliked universalism, an Enlightenment concept. He thought people needed to belong to a group, to a local culture and language, and that these groups and cultures could peacefully co-exist. Herder held that imperial conquests, like those of the Teutonic Knights or Frederick the Great in Poland or the British in Ireland, were wrong because they let one culture rule, even kill, another. He admired the Slavs, the Balts, the Jews, the Indians and the Chinese and abominated Western, particularly French, assumptions of superiority. He would have loathed Ober-Ost. A country, he recognized, is a mixture, with people leaving and arriving, as with the Salzburg Protestants coming to Prussia in the 1730s. ‘To brag of one’s country is the stupidest form of boastfulness,’ he said. ‘What is a nation? A great wild garden full of bad plants and good.’ Herder was repelled by parts of Kant’s thinking, such as the idea that individual suffering – the suffering of the less able – is needed for progress; Kant found Herder too much given to generalities.
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