Ominous Parallels (24 page)

Points 1-6, 8, 19, and 22 are concerned primarily with foreign policy (and with racism), and put forth a variety of nationalist ultimatums, including demands for abolition of the Versailles Treaty, more German land, the exclusion of Jews from citizenship, an end to non-German immigration, and the formation of a “national army” as against a “paid army.”

Four further passages deal with another area: they supplement economic statism and foreign-policy nationalism by calling for domestic thought-control. Point 20, dealing with education, demands curriculum revision. “Comprehension of the State idea (civic training),” it says, “must be the school objective, beginning with the first dawn of understanding in the pupil.” Point 23 demands the creation of a “German national press” and concludes: “It must be forbidden to publish papers which do not conduce to the national welfare. We demand legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation, and the suppression of institutions which militate against the requirements above-mentioned.” Point 24 promises liberty to all religions “so far as they are not a danger to, and do not militate against the moral feelings of, the German race.”

Point 18, the climax in this area, is a mere two sentences; they reveal what “the public good,” once it has consumed property and liberty, demands in regard to life: “We demand a ruthless struggle against those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals against the nation, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.”

A criminal, according to the Nazi philosophy, is not a man who violates individual rights; he is a man who injures “the common interest.” For the supreme crime—activities “against the nation”—they believed, such a man must receive the supreme penalty. In a broad, programmatic statement, the Nazis did not find it necessary to specify in detail which activities were to merit this penalty. The general outlines of the answer, they felt, were clear enough, implicit in the commonly accepted code: “usurers, profiteers,
etc
.”

Within twenty-five years, that “etc.” was to subsume millions of lives.

The moderates invoked the altruist code loudly, but applied it inconsistently and incompletely, primarily to demand an extension of economic controls. Hitler invoked the same code, but went the whole way with it. He would not hear of limiting self-sacrifice to the realm of material production, while allowing self-assertion to dominate the realm of men’s spiritual concerns.
He indignantly dismissed the dichotomy between economic freedom and political freedom;
he was against both equally and for the same reason. Men, he said, must be prepared to give up everything for others: they must give up soul and body; ideas and wealth; life itself.

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit,” Hitler told Rauschning.

The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun.... I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.
⁹

The Social Democrats and their allies were widely accused, especially in the thirties and by the young, of using noble slogans as mere rhetoric to cover up the manipulations of “politics as usual”; the moderates were unable to convince the country that they really meant the slogans. The Nazis’ righteous consistency on the issue did convince people, though not at first. In the early twenties, the party’s uncompromising demands, moral and political, were a liability, and Hitler was not taken seriously by most Germans. The Republic, people still believed, had not yet been given a chance, and temporizing measures within the framework of the new system might be able to work.

Within a decade people were to see the results of such measures.

In Weimar Germany a political movement without the backing of an armed troop was doomed to impotence. This was evident from the beginning, when the only efficacious forces in the country were the Free Corps soldiers and the Spartacist guerrillas. The two groups were soon imitated by other factions, large and small, all claiming that the solution to Germany’s problems lay not in “talk” but in “action,” i.e., in physical force.

By the mid-twenties, all the leading political parties were equipped with their own private armies, either officially or by informal alliance. This was true not only of the Communists and the Nationalists, but also of the Social Democrats, who created a uniformed socialist army, the Reichsbanner, consisting of over three million workers.

Hitler did not intend to be left out. In 1921, he began to organize his own army, recruiting its members largely from unemployed former Free Corps fighters. The result was the brownshirted Sturm Abteilungen (the SA or Storm Troopers). In 1925, a special Nazi elite corps was added, the blackshirted Schutz Staffeln or SS.

Some of the recruits to these squads had strong ideological commitments; many did not. “We were young guys without any political ideas,” one man recalled. “[W]hy should we bother ourselves with politics? ... If Hauenstein [a Free Corps leader] was ready to give his support to this man [Hitler] that was good enough for me.”
¹⁰

If a German youth firmly endorsed any kind of idea, then, given what he had been taught, the chances are that he was (or soon would be) ready to fight for Hitler. If he brushed aside ideas and lost himself in a group, he was still following the country’s dominant principles, and he was even more ready. Either way, through conscious ideology or professed anti-ideology, the result was the same.

The Nazi formations were trained to vent fury and sow terror—to break up meetings of opponents, to administer beatings, provoke street fights, stage riots, mutilate bodies, kick in skulls. These were the methods by which Hitler proposed to make his nationalism, his socialism, and his promises to every group come true.

The method was brute destruction, and from the beginning the Nazis presented it to the country as such, with little attempt at apology or cover-up. In this regard, Hitler himself was the most eloquent party symbol: wild-eyed, gesticulating, raving—contorted by a frenzy to kill and avidly explicit about it.

The Nazis held out to the electorate something besides material support. They promised the Germans the satisfaction of a special kind of lust: the lust to see their enemies, foreign and domestic, torn into bloody pieces. In the emotionalist republic, this kind of lust was a dominant emotion.

The poor hated the rich, the rich hated “the rabble,” the left hated the “bourgeoisie,” the right hated the foreigners, the traditionalists hated the new, and the young hated everything, the adults, the Allies, the West, the Jews, the cities, the “system.”

The Nazis promised every group annihilation, the annihilation of that which it hated. Just as Hitler offered Germany a
synthesis of ideas,
so, appealing to the nationwide, classwide spasm of seething fury, he offered the voters a
synthesis of hatreds.
In the end, this combination was what the voters wanted, and chose.

10

The Culture of Hatred

An historic group of intellectuals in Weimar Germany-in-eluding theorists in the humanities, scientists, novelists, social commentators, journalists, playwrights, artists—professed a deep antipathy to the nation’s entrenched dogmas, and undertook to offer their countrymen fresh ideas. On the whole, these men were independent of the political, religious, and educational establishments and beholden to no outside power. They were the “free spirits” of the German Republic.

The product of their activities was that blend of art, theory, values, and manners which observers at the time and ever since have cherished as “Weimar culture.”

“Weimar culture,” in this sense of the term, does not designate the total of the cultural activities of Weimar Germany, but those highly visible works and trends which rejected the traditional, nineteenth-century approaches, each in its own field, and self-consciously championed the new, the unorthodox, even the revolutionary. For the most part these trends antedated the Republic; despite the vigorous opposition of the imperial regime, Expressionism, for instance, the leading art movement within Weimar culture, had already reached maturity in Germany prior to World War I. After the war, with the conservative forces in disarray, the new trends flourished in every field; although bitterly controversial, they were passionately acclaimed in avant-garde circles, and they set the dominant tone of the Republic’s cultural life.

The Weimar vision of the world came to be the pacesetter for the other countries of the West. Weimar Germany, in the words of Walter Laqueur, was “the first truly modern culture.”

“Whereas in France,” writes Bernard Myers, “the struggle was far from over and in the United States merely beginning, Germany during the twenties seems to have been a paradise for contemporary painters, sculptors and graphic artists.... [P]er capita there was more acceptance of contemporary art in Germany during the pre-Hitler period than anywhere else.”

“When we think of Weimar,” writes Peter Gay, “we think of modernity in art, literature, and thought. . . .”
¹

This raises the question: what
is
“modernity in art, literature, and thought”?—a question none of these authors discusses. What is the fundamental impulse defining “Weimar culture,” the basic principle uniting the work of Kaiser, Kandinsky, and Schoenberg with that of men such as Thomas Mann, Karl Barth, Sigmund Freud, and Werner Heisenberg?

And what does this principle do to the people who have to breathe it in daily? What does it do to their souls, their lungs, their sense of hope, and their capacity for hatred?

If art is the barometer of a culture, literature, the most explicit of the arts, may be taken as the barometer of art.

The two preeminent figures of Weimar literature were Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann. Both had been famous before the Republic, and both were criticized in certain avant-garde circles as insufficiently modern. Nevertheless the two men are an eloquent indication of the spirit of the new German culture.

Of the two, Hauptmann was the more widely respected at the time. Although his work was not confined to any one artistic school or literary form, his reputation rested on his activity in the German theater of the 1890s. He was the country’s outstanding exponent of Naturalism.

Hauptmann was dedicated to portraying “realistic,” “human” characters, as dictated by his idea of reality and of human nature. Although his plays typically feature bitter social protest (from a Marxist perspective), the characters are not presented as purposeful men. In this regard,
The Weavers
is representative. Despite their fury at injustice, the weavers are not efficacious proletarian giants. They are, stressedly, pawns determined by economic factors, made wretched by social forces beyond any single man’s power to cope with; they are worn, self-effacing “little people,” brooding, reckless, weak, given to whining complaints and berserk rages and drink and superstition. There is no outstanding figure among these sufferers, no individual to dominate the action—in fact, no developed characterizations at all. The protagonist of
The Weavers
is not a man but a social class, represented by hordes of interchangeable workers who function only as a mass.

As a social determinist, Hauptmann preached that the individual is a pawn of the group; in his own political behavior, he acted accordingly. He never abandoned his fundamental commitment to collectivism, and he was the perfect German weather vane in regard to the forms of implementing it. In 1914, he wrote poetry defending the war; in 1919, he celebrated the advent of the Republic; in 1933, the “idol of the Socialist masses” voted for Hitler.

In relation to the glowing view of man held by earlier writers such as Schiller (and, in France, Hugo), Hauptmann’s late-nineteenth-century Naturalism
is
modem: man the proudly independent being has given way to man the moaning social atom. Hauptmann, however, is not fully representative of the Weimar trend. He is almost an old-fashioned man-glorifier, when compared to the other, much more influential literary leader of the country, Thomas Mann.

Mann, a disciple of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, began his career as a German chauvinist-authoritarian, explicitly opposed to reason and to the values of Western civilization. Gradually, however, he made his peace with the Republic and became a convert to democratic socialism (he went into exile when Hitler took power).

The essence of the republican Mann’s approach to philosophy and to art is eloquently revealed in
The Magic Moun. tain,
the major philosophical novel to come out of Weimar Germany. According to one observer, the book, published in 1924, “has important symptomatic meaning for Weimar”; according to another, it “may justly be called the saga of the Weimar Republic.”
²
These statements are true, though in a different sense than their authors intended.
The Magic Mountain is
an important symptom—of a uniquely twentieth-century condition.

Set in a TB sanatorium in the Alps during the period just before World War I, the novel details seven years’ worth of the inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations) of Hans Castorp, a tubercular engineer, presented as a simple, average youth who wishes to discover the meaning of life.

Hans Castorp is an average youth, as such might be conceived by Schopenhauer in a necrophiliac mood. There is nothing distinctive about Castorp, except a penchant for lengthy abstract discussions, and a hypnotic fascination with suffering, disease, and death (his eyes, for instance, glitter with excitement when he hears the coughing of a tubercular patient). “. . . I insist,” he says early in the novel, “that a dying man is above any chap that is going about and laughing and earning his living and eating his three meals a day.”

The major event in Castorp’s life at the sanatorium consists in his falling in love with a young woman, Claudia, who attracts him for a number of reasons—among them, the fact that she is diseased; that her eyes and voice remind Castorp of a boy to whom he had been attracted years earlier in school; and that she slams doors, an act “as intimately bound up with her very being and its state of disease as time is bound up with the motion of bodies in space.” After much hesitation and soul-searching, Castorp declares his love to Claudia in pages of (untranslated) French; he explains to her that speaking in French prevents his statements from being fully real to him, thus permitting his declaration to retain the quality of a mere dream. Nothing comes of his dreamlike avowal. The next day Claudia departs from the sanatorium (she later returns as the mistress of a diseased old man and then departs again). Castorp is left, however, with “his keep-sake, his treasure,” which he carries about with him and often presses to his lips: an X ray of her lungs.
³

At the end Castorp descends from the mountaintop to fight in the war. We are not told his fate.

These few events (along with a grab bag of Castorp’s random experiences) are scattered across hundreds of pages; they are buried under mountains of obsessively detailed trivia (accounts of the weather, the scenery, the meals, the doctors, the entertainments, the treatment of the various patients, etc.), and of similarly detailed conversations and narrative tracts on an assortment of purportedly intellectual subjects (life, nature, physiology, love, art, time, etc.).

During the conversations, two men, presented as the spokesmen of opposite schools of philosophy, fight to win Castorp’s intellectual allegiance. One is the “corrosively ugly” Naphta, the defender of death, a passionate, virtually maniacal champion of pain, illness, sacrifice, religious mysticism, the Inquisition, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The other—presented as the defender of life, health, science, man, happiness, and liberal republicanism—is the freethinker Settembrini.

It has often been said that Settembrini dramatizes Mann’s sympathy for the Republic, and that this character, more than any other in the literature of the period, represents the best of the German republican spirit.

Settembrini is described by Mann as having the curling mustache, shabby dress, and general appearance of an Italian “organ-grinder”; the intellectual manner of a posturing “windbag”; and the occupational interests of an unworldly simpleton (to alleviate human misery, e.g., he is working on an “encyclopaedia of suffering”). A self-proclaimed champion of human dignity, Settembrini interrupts a recitation from Latin verse to “smile at and ogle most killingly” a passing village girl, whom he succeeds in embarrassing. An avowed champion of human brotherhood, he has one dominant emotion, mockery; he loves to laugh at the foibles, real or imagined, of others, a practice he defends by warmly endorsing
malice
, which is, he says, “reason’s keenest dart against the powers of darkness and ugliness.” An avowed champion of this world, he admires the “great Plotinus” for having been ashamed to have a body, and delivers several tirades against physical nature, which he calls a “stupid and evil” power because of its ability to frustrate the intellect (an ability allegedly evidenced in such phenomena as disease and earthquakes). An avowed champion of peace and freedom, he urges Castorp at the novel’s end: “Go, then [to the war], it is your blood that calls, go and fight bravely. More than that can no man.”
⁴

This muck of contradictions and pretentiousness signifies, in the author’s opinion, a definite school of philosophy. Mann presents Settembrini, stressedly, as the man of reason and the representative of the era of Enlightenment.

The contest between Naphta and Settembrini for Castorp’s soul is resolved not by their interminable arguments or by any existential event, but by a dream which Castorp chances to have, involving an idyllic community of beautiful youths (supposed to represent life), and a temple in which bloody witches dismember a child with their bare hands (death). With no explanations offered, Castorp suddenly intuits the an- swer to his dilemmas. Unrestricted death-worship, he decides, is wrong, and so is unrestricted life-worship. The truth is the middle of the road, a golden mean as it were between Naphta and Settembrini, “between recklessness and reason . . . between mystic community and windy individualism.” “Man,” Castorp thinks, “is master of contradictions, they exist through him, and so he is grander than they. Grander than death, too grand for it.... Grander than life, too grand for it. . . .” “The recklessness of death,” he decides, is inherent in life, but one must award sovereignty in one’s thoughts and actions to life—so long as one always remembers to “keep faith with death in [one’s] heart....” Settembrini, he decides, is
too rational.
“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts.”
⁵

As the caliber of these statements indicates, Mann, despite the abundance of abstract talk in the book, does not take ideas seriously.

In the sequence on Pieter Peeperkorn, he all but says so openly. Peeperkorn is an old Dutchman described as self-indulgent, nonintellectual, and almost completely inarticulate. It is, he tells Castorp, “our sacred duty to feel.... For feeling, young man, is godlike.” This incoherent creature is presented by Mann as a stammering, often farcical figure and at the same time as a majestic presence, who wins Castorp’s admiration, completely overshadowing “pedagogues” like Naphta and Settembrini, because he has a power transcending “the realm of the Great Confusion” (i.e., intellectual debates). “[S]omehow or other,” Castorp tells Settembrini, “he has the right to laugh at us all....” He is, Castorp concludes, an example of “the mystery of personality, something above either cleverness or stupidity. . . .”
⁶

Thomas Mann, the major philosophical novelist of Weimar Germany, is no thinker. The out-of-focus flow of non-events in the book is matched only by the similar flow of non-thoughts, i.e., of pseudogeneralities purporting to have cosmic significance and amounting only to a high-school bull session with delusions of grandeur.