Not so long ago popular opinion execrated everything in the German tradition as a mere leading on to Nazism and Hitler. Today, the sore need of a German military contribution to the defense of the West has led to what H. Stuart Hughes calls a “Teutonophile clamor.” In an examination of three recent works on Germany, Mr. Hughes attempts to evaluate what progress sober historical understanding is making, amid these violent changes in the ideological atmosphere, to pierce the mystery of why it was that the Germans embarked on their fatal course.
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For half a decade now the economic resurgence of Germany and its moral rehabilitation in the eyes of Americans have been established facts. With each year that has passed, the Teutonophile clamor has grown louder and more insistent. The mood of moral reprobation that dominated the war and immediate postwar years has receded into dim memory. One begins to wonder how long it will take before it becomes bad form to suggest that the German government was after all responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War and that the Nazi extermination camps were something more than an inspired creation of the Allied propaganda machine.
Obviously this psychological about-face has had its justifications. On the level of writing which hovers between journalism and scholarship, the decade of the 1940’s produced a depressing series of “explanations” of German behavior that sought to align the country’s entire intellectual tradition along one descending track from Luther to Hider. These crude efforts deserved the oblivion into which they have fallen. And in justice one must grant that they have not been succeeded by a new series in which all Germans are depicted as angels of light. The most recent crop of general works on the German tradition displays an admirable reluctance to curry favor with the public by subscribing to the prevailing sentiments of forgive and forget.
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In three books recently published—German History: Some New German Views, edited by Hans Kohn (Beacon); Modern Germany, by Koppel S. Pinson (Macmillan); and Toward Understanding Germany, by Robert H. Lowie (University of Chicago)—we have three extremely conscientious efforts to construct an attitude toward Germany sufficiently grounded in historical and social reality to resist any further shifts of mass sentiment. Only one of them reflects even in attenuated form the dominant popular mood. And this for somewhat tangential reasons. Robert H. Lowie’s Toward Understanding Germany is the work of a senior anthropologist with a long and intimate acquaintance with things Germanic extending back to the pre-First World War era. As a contribution to the new field of the cultural anthropology of “advanced” societies, it shares in the bland and approving method of presentation characteristic of such works. Moreover—besides an obvious and thoroughly innocent sentimental attachment to much of the German tradition—Mr. Lowie’s book betrays a slight but significant time-lag. The most recent field work on which it is based was three years old by the time of publication; the postwar sociological data it presents reflect the hardships of the years 1948–49 rather than the prosperity of the present day. Hence the author is quite understandably led into an implicit appeal to our sympathies and a polemic with now forgotten “anti-German” authors that no longer have much relevance for the questions an inquiring reader would like to have answered.
A more basic difficulty, however, with Mr. Lowie’s approach is that his exclusive concern with “facts” and case studies entails a neglect of the spiritual content of the cultural tradition he is analyzing. One finds in his book no suggestion of the desperate “schism in the soul” that has obsessed the most humane and enlightened Germans—the sense of not fully sharing in the Judeo-Roman tradition of the West, of an eternal conflict in the German psyche between Western civilization and the vestiges of Teutonic barbarism, and the attitude of tragic ambivalence toward the “demoniac” manifestations of military power that have besmirched the recent history of their country.
The “demoniac” is not a scientific category. It can find no place in a respectable work of cultural anthropology. But to sensitive Germans it is a tangible and ever present reality. For confirmation one has only to turn to the collection of historical essays edited by Hans Kohn. Here eleven German historians present their re-evaluations of their country’s political and cultural tradition. Their purpose is appealingly simple: “The things we have lived through in the past fourteen years,” one of them declares, “thrust before us quite novel aspects and problems in our own historical past.” And their method of reappraisal is equally decisive and even old-fashioned. The essays that Mr. Kohn has collected—originally articles or extracts from books published in Germany in the period 1946–51—are discursive and impressionistic in the established tradition of Geistesgeschichte. They will doubtless strike an American-trained sociologist or historian as hopelessly unscientific. Yet the more discerning of them go straight to the crucial issues—issues which Mr. Lowie’s “scientific” analysis either handles in only gingerly fashion or omits entirely. The contrast offers an important, if peripheral, clue to the difference in orientation between the American and the Continental European intellectual communities.
Koppel S. Pinson’s Modern Germany is a more conventional sort of book. It is a detailed general history of the German nation in the 19th and 20th centuries, and as such it goes far to fill a critical gap in historical literature. Ever since the close of the Second World War, the English-speaking public has felt the need of a readable, scholarly synthesis of modern German history. And the books that have appeared in the past eight years—notably by Veit Valentin, A. J. P. Taylor, and Ralph Flenley—have all been inadequate in some important respect. To say that Mr. Pinson’s history is the best published thus far is to give it only its minimum due. Such a judgment fails to suggest the richness of the synthesis, the scholarly meatiness of Mr. Pinson’s tightly packed volume. And by the same token the reader should be warned that the very excellence of the material presented makes for certain difficulties—a frequently crabbed style, a tendency to introduce names and references with little or no previous explanation, and an unusual organization of subject matter—all of which, while readily comprehensible and even enticing to the specialist, may prove confusing to the general reader.
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We have, then, three new books, each one of which is scholarly, fair-minded, even occasionally original in thought—yet all in some sense disappointing. They all seem fragmentary and uneven (the collection of essays, of course, could hardly be anything else). In their lack of integration they suggest the Zerrissenheit of German history—as though the authors were unconsciously reflecting in the literary structure of their works one of the central problems with which they were dealing. Yet in the major German tradition of social and historical thought, this sense of unresolved contradictions has acted as a spur to bold intellectual constructions and syntheses. In its contemporary form—in the work of Troeltsch and Meinecke and Max Weber—it has inspired some of the most perceptive historical writing of the present day. Both Mr. Pinson and the contributors to the Kohn volume (Meinecke himself, it may be noted, is represented here by one of his last scholarly utterances) amply recognize their debt to the contemporary masters. They conform to the major tradition in grouping the events of German history around salient characteristics of cultural formation and class structure. In these two books, the difficulty is with an inadequacy of synthesizing grasp—a failure to execute an announced program—rather than with the intellectual conception itself.
Thus Mr. Pinson’s history proceeds satisfactorily through the early 1920’s. He gives us masterly analyses of such subjects as the Socialist and Catholic traditions, the weaknesses of German liberalism, the German responsibility in bringing on the First World War, and the November Revolution of 1918. But when he reaches the history of the Weimar Republic itself his account becomes excessively condensed, and with the Nazi period his intellectual é lan seems to flag rather severely. National Socialism obviously cannot as yet be dealt with in any remotely “definitive” fashion. But the reader has a right to expect a somewhat more structured account than Mr. Pinson presents: the economic and social policy of the Hitler regime is disposed of in cavalier fashion, and the discussion of religious issues is similarly inadequate (for example, Mr. Pinson has apparently confused the “Confessional” and “intact” branches of German Protestantism). The treatment of developments since 1945, while more satisfactory, is also regrettably episodic. Such criticisms may be unfair: they may simply reflect the desperate difficulties of writing contemporary history at all. Yet surely readers who have been led to study German history largely through bewilderment over events since 1933 deserve a bolder treatment of the past two decades.
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The same criticism cannot be advanced against the contributors to the Kohn volume. These postwar Germans show no hesitation in climbing far out on the most precarious theoretical limbs. Their writings abound in statements as forthright as the following: “The prerequisite . . . for any creative response in Germany is ruthless recognition of the frightful role which we have played, as the last and therefore the most demoniacal hegemonic power of old Europe in decline.” Naturally this roster of historians is an unrepresentative sample: two are anti-Nazi émigrés, and of the others all but the very youngest lost their academic positions under Hitler. Among them one finds three or four of the leading figures in the historical profession. Yet in general their essays display more moral than intellectual elevation. Those by Franz Schnabel and Ludwig Dehio alone offer viewpoints that strike an American as genuinely novel. (Parenthetically, one might express a regret that Mr. Kohn has chosen to republish a comparatively minor essay by Hajo Holborn rather than the brilliant re-evaluation of the idealist tradition which appeared in the Historische Zeitschrift two years ago.) Doubtless this deficiency is partly owing to the fact that views on German history which are thoroughly familiar to American scholars might sound fresher to a German audience. But there is a second and more sinister reason. The effects of Hitler’s decapitation of the German academic elite—through murder, forced emigration, and intellectual stultification—are still far from overcome. In Germany today intellectual leadership has been acquired largely through a process of elimination.
Through these disparate essays—besides the note of mea culpa—one finds two recurring themes: the role of Bismarck in the foundation of the German Reich, and the parallel role of German historians in rationalizing and justifying the handiwork of Bismarck and his fellows. Two of the essays deal specifically with Bismarck, and several of the others touch on the career of the great Chancellor. Their titles are sufficiently suggestive of the major historical obsessions of thoughtful Germans: “Militarism in Modern History,” “Germany and the Epoch of World Wars,” “The Glorification of the State in German Historical Writing.”
The last of these, by Johann Albrecht von Rantzau, is the one that most vigorously berates the German historiographic tradition for the way in which it has conformed to the interests of Realpolitik. In so doing, Rantzau declares, “A perilous separation of German historical thought from the West came in with the principle that each state is an individual per se, living wholly by its own unique laws.” Or, as the youngest of the contributors to the volume, Walther Hofer, summarizes a parallel argument, “Until the Third Reich, German historical scholarship was always exemplary in methodology and detailed research. None the less, a distorted picture of history resulted. The source of error, therefore, clearly lies elsewhere, in the ideological foundation.”
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The more liberal-minded of postwar German historians, then, are in agreement in subjecting their national tradition to critical reevaluation and in arguing that something went radically wrong with the history of their country at least seventy years before Hitler came to power. This concept of wrong turns and missed opportunities—of a decisive break to the German tradition—is central to the work of both Mr. Pinson and the contributors to the Kohn volume. It is part of the ardent democratic faith that animates both these books. It represents their decisive difference with Mr. Lowie, and the reason why I believe that the latter’s work is based on a fundamentally unhelpful intellectual conception.
Its major thesis is the following: “It is my conviction that much of what is popularly conceived as German is in reality either generically human or occidental or Continental European.” As the book proceeds, this “much” imperceptibly turns into a “most.” Thus we learn that the Germans’ “alleged patriarchalism, their love of military glory, their fondness for abstract principles, can all be paralleled in French culture,” and that Americans are similarly prone to racial prejudice. The apparent political incapacity of the Germans evaporates before the obvious success of the Swiss in this realm. And so it goes, as one distinction after another succumbs to the technique of cross-cultural comparison. Finally, about all we have left is a “failure to evolve the ‘gentleman’ concept” on the English or French model. The notion of a “hereditary taint” in the German people has been triumphantly demolished.
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But is this the real question? Does any reputable scholar seriously maintain that the Germans are infected by a “hereditary taint”? I for one would deny it. The argument is rather that the inhabitants of the German Reich—not German-speakers in general—have developed in the past seventy-five or hundred years a cultural tradition that is eccentric and in many respects radically antagonistic to the major tradition of the West, that the weakness of liberal democracy in Germany has simply been the political manifestation of a more generalized failure to develop the individualistic and libertarian values of the Enlightenment, from which the mainstream of British, French, and American democracy has flowed.
This is what the “best” Germans themselves argue: it is ironic that Mr. Lowie, an American, should find himself defending a position to which few thoughtful and liberal-minded Germans would assent. Mr. Lowie grants that a change in German society began to take place sometime around the 1870’s; but he gives it little emphasis. To our contemporary German historians, as we have seen, this change is crucial. Yet Mr. Lowie allows it to be obscured by a strict adherence to the conventional anthropological classification by language groups.
A German, he declares, for purposes of his study means “anyone who uses standard German as his primary medium of communication in so far as he does not employ his local Germanic dialect”—that is an Austrian or a Swiss, in addition to an inhabitant of Germany proper. Now in historical or cultural terms this definition seems rather curious. Even from a purely linguistic standpoint, one is tempted to ask why Mr. Lowie includes the Swiss and excludes the Dutch, whose language is approximately as close to the north German dialects as Schwyzerdütsch is to those of the German south. But the real difficulty is more basic. The simple truth of the matter is that the German-speaking Swiss do not feel themselves to be Germans—and it is precisely this sense of historical and cultural identification that on any commonsense basis defines a national group.
One might add a number of other comments. One might suggest that Mr. Lowie, rather than discussing the quality of national traditions, merely categorizes them. He fails to note that the character of patriarchalism or militarism may be different in France from what it is in Germany, and that race prejudice in the United States may have a somewhat different cultural connotation from what it has among the Germans. Yet his definition of what constitutes a German remains the central difficulty. With his confusing linguistic criterion, he was bound to discover no very startling differences between a German and anyone else. A consideration of these three studies of contemporary Germany suggests that it is more fruitful to follow Mr. Pinson and the postwar German historians in searching—however fumblingly—for the historical turning points at which the German tradition went so dangerously astray.
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In postwar Germany—or, more precisely, since the currency reform of 1948—events have moved so swiftly and new social alignments have manifested themselves so unexpectedly that almost every book on the subject has very shortly become out of date. The three works we have been considering are no exception. The picture they present of German society is more retrospective than contemporary. In fairness one should add that to discuss present-day Germany is not the primary purpose of the Lowie and Pinson books, and that the Kohn volume obviously has quite other goals in mind. Yet readers are insatiably curious for some guidance on the contemporary German scene, and they are bound to pose questions that these three books simply cannot answer.
As a supplement one might suggest Norbert Muhlen’s The Return of Germany. Despite all its faults of journalistic writing and special pleading, it is still, I think, the best general book that has appeared on the politics and society of the Bonn Republic. I am confirmed in this opinion by the publication of an extremely penetrating article entitled “Notes on the Political Scene in Western Germany,” by Otto Kirchheimer, in World Politics (April 1954). Muhlen and Kirchheimer differ radically in their ideological presuppositions: the former is conservative and pro-Catholic—in many respects an apologist for the older national pieties; Kirchheimer is anti-clerical, inclined rather toward Social Democracy, and critical of the German nationalist tradition. Yet in their assessment of what is going on in Germany today they are in surprising agreement. Such a happy coincidence suggests that the Bonn regime has now crystallized sufficiently so that it is possible to make generalizations relatively free of emotional dynamite to which even political adversaries may assent. And this for the reason that present-day Germany seems to have become considerably less dreadful and less excitingless “good” and less “evil”—than it has ever been in its recent past.
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From Muhlen’s and Kirchheimer’s work, and from my own more random observations and reflections, I have formed the following mental picture of Germany under Adenauer. It is a country in which partition and Soviet domination of the East have brought their curious compensations. For the rump Germany of Bonn has been forced back on its natural base—the old, more tranquil Germany of the West and South which, somewhat paradoxically, also contains the center of gravity of industrial Germany. Let me hasten to add that I am not speaking of the music-loving and beer-swilling Germany dear to sentimentalists. Nor am I speaking of a naturally democratic South as against a congenitally reactionary Prussia. These two stereotypes both belong largely in the realm of myth. The actual contrast is rather less dramatic. In losing the East, Germany has not only been deprived of the traditional Junker domain beyond the Elbe: it has also lost in Berlin and Saxony the most active centers of the political left and of working-class militancy. For this reason (among many others) in Adenauer’s Germany both political extremes have become muted. The dominant tradition is neither of the left nor of the right It is the constitutional, bureaucratic tradition of the South German states and the Rhineland. To call its spirit democratic is to endow it with rather too high an emotional charge: the very word “democracy” has suffered from the effects of over-employment in the early occupation period. The constitutional machinery of the Bonn Republic may be punctiliously democratic—its spirit is traditionalist. It is traditionalism of a gentler sort than characterized the Germany of Bismarck, of William II, or, a fortiori, of Hitler—an efficient, paternalistic traditionalism incarnate in the patient, sly, marvelously resilient old Rhinelander who has become its symbol.
Add to this a business boom—the Ruhr once again in full blast—in which employers and workers share a common cult of hard work and single-minded concentration on the immediate task. Paternalistic tradition and economic prosperity unite to form a characteristic amalgam that virtually excludes ideological militancy. And this trend has been reinforced by the aftereffects of wartime suffering. The concentration on “getting one’s own backyard into shape again,” the establishment of a “universe of claims” on the state, the “privatization of life” (witness the popularity of the slogan “ohne mich”—leave me out)—these social tendencies, which Muhlen and Kirchheimer are at one in stressing, suggest a Germany that is far more down-to-earth, self-satisfied, and unpolitical than the various Germanies inhabited by demons or angels to which the polemics of the past have accustomed us. It is a Germany, as a British critic, G. L. Arnold, has put it, that “gives the impression of aiming to become a bigger and better Belgium.”
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One of my correspondents from Germany writes: “Hitler is dead—long live the Spiessbürger.” The middle-class Philistine rules supreme. The Germany of Bonn may be stuffy, but it is considerably less disquieting than the most un-Philistine Germany of Weimar. Before the late war one sometimes offered oneself the luxury of hoping that the “demoniac” in the German tradition would be exorcised by an infusion of the spirit of Kant or Lessing—or perhaps by the mockery of Heine. Today I for one am almost ready to settle for a Germany in which the demoniac is gradually dying of sheer boredom.
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