Weimar

Germans and Jews: the Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany.
by George Mosse.
Howard Fertig, Inc. 265 pp. $8.95.

American intellectuals, in their current agony, have constructed a virtual Doppelgänger out of the turbulent life and premature death of the Weimar Republic. In its most recent incarnation, the “Weimar analogy” offers left-wing American intellectuals a historical portrait of then-counterparts in pre-war Germany—an articulate circle of journalists and creative writers who stubbornly clung to their role as critics of a beleaguered democratic government. Older commentators have denounced this group, charging them with political ineptitude or indifference, and implying that progressive intellectuals must rally to a democratic government in crisis. Younger writers, with greater misgivings about the American consensus, have defended the actions of the independent Left, arguing that its adherents were correct in refusing to rally to the Weimar government which, behind its constitutional façade, condoned repressive policies.

Germans and Jews, a new collection of essays by George Mosse, adds a cultural dimension to the issue of the independent Left which should revise the debate profoundly. Mosse defines the goal of the Left intellectuals as the search for a “Third Force”—the “attempt to solve the problems of the modern age by creating a force that could eliminate the unpalatably capitalist and materialist present.” The “Third Force” concept, a motif which unites the essays in this volume, has been used before to describe the ideology of the völkisch Right; what sets Mosse’s book apart is his application of the concept to those intellectuals on the Left who were thought to be most opposed to that ideology. As portrayed by Istvan Deak in his study, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals,¹ the writers who clustered around progressive journals like the Weltbühne and the Tagebuch were steeped in democratic, liberal, and humane values. In terms of their political concerns and journalistic efforts, the left-wing intellectuals emerge from Deak’s treatment as embattled Jacobins—as men who shared the political values of our own progressive intellectuals and who, like them, were forced into opposition (according to this view) by the growing conservatism around them. Even so shrewd an observer as Carl Schorske has followed Deak’s argument to the conclusion that the Weltbühne circle, while deeply concerned with individual liberty, had no sympathy with the yearning for community.

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In Mosse’s estimation, and in my own, this opinion is wide of the mark. Looking beyond the political antagonism between leftist and völkisch intellectuals, one comes upon a rich vein of assumptions and temperamental affinities which the two groups shared. Mosse ascribes the alienation of the left-wing intellectuals not to political circumstances, but rather to the “hunger for wholeness” which plagued the Right as well. The Left was also obsessed with the absence of “meaning” in the modern world, though it used other cultural resources to define its own conception of Geist, or creative spirit. The Left objected to materialism, not on völkisch or religious grounds, but rather on moral and aesthetic ones. Thus leftist intellectuals rejected the mechanistic materialism of both the Social Democrats and the Communists, and tried to forge a humanistic socialism which vacillated schizophrenically between a concern with the integrity of the individual and the desire to create a spiritual community. Like the Right, the Left regarded the Geist of German idealism as a “Third Force” which could reconcile ideological, economic, and social differences. Furthermore, it shared with the Right the conviction that an intellectual elite had to mediate between that Geist and the culturally backward elements of society. Mosse points to the activist movement, under Kurt Hiller, as the polemical center of this messianic conception.

Germans and Jews serves to remind us, then, that the political position which other commentators have argued was forced upon the left-wing intellectuals of Weimar Germany was equally a product of their own cultural orientation. While they feverishly expressed a desire to be socially involved, their notion of political life was informed by an absolutism and idealism that undermined their efforts at commitment. That they distrusted the compromises involved in party politics was perhaps understandable, but their emphasis on spiritual concerns over practical economic issues effectively isolated them from any popular following or mass movement. And that isolation was compounded by their insistent identification of spiritual integrity with political independence.

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Unfortunately, the acuity of Mosse’s approach is all but undermined by his faulty scholarship. His treatment of the independent Left is marred by major errors of emphasis and omission (with regard to the history of the independent Left, Istvan Deak is a much more reliable guide than Mosse), chief among which is the tendency to take the attitudes of the activist movement for those of the intellectual Left as a whole. In fact, the activists were only the most idealistic and elitist faction within the intellectual Left, the most representative of the “Third Force.” Their real influence was limited to the exultant period of chiliastic expectation which followed upon the November 1918 revolution, and expired soon thereafter. The overall tone of the Weltbühne and of the independent Left was much more restrained and pragmatic, and while it is no doubt true that the search for a “Third Force” helped to determine its perspective, the independent Left was actually a much more diverse group than Mosse suggests.

Mosse also ignores some major points which dramatize the connection between intellectuals of the Left and of the Right. His most serious omission involves the impact of the bündische movement. The Bünde were corporate groups whose members were supposedly drawn together by spiritual empathy rather than by economic interest. As Mosse notes in his essay, “The Corporate State and the Conservative Revolution in Germany,” they were initially fostered by the Radical Right and the German youth movement. Yet the spiritual principle of bündische solidarity also inspired the activist scheme for the organization of intellectuals. Men like Gustav Landauer viewed the Bünde as building blocks in a total reordering of German political life, as the vehicle through which Geist could override the artificial social and economic differences which divided the nation.

Finally, Mosse fails to mention some of the more idiosyncratic characteristics of those leftists concerned with the “Third Force,” perhaps for fear that, in so doing, he would tarnish their reputation as intellectuals. Leonard Nelson and his Internationale Sozialistische Kampfbund propagandized for vegetarianism, and Hiller and the activist movement defended homosexual practices. These men wished to be regarded as radicals and revolutionaries, but they were more often dismissed by conservative Germans as eccentrics. Their intellectual independence was frequently parallelled by a self-imposed or externally-enforced social estrangement.

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With a few major exceptions, the German intellectual Left was solidly Jewish. The familiar conjunction between Jewishness and radicalism has usually been explained as a reflection of the Jew’s estrangement in an alien culture. Mosse acknowledges this argument, but also emphasizes the attraction that the idea of the Third Force held for Jewish intellectuals, and relates their attitude to the conditions of German culture. In his essay, “The Influence of the Völkisch Idea on German Jewry,” Mosse notes the ominous opposition between the values of the “Third Force” and the German stereotype of the Jew as rootless, calculating, and materialistic. Among the Jewish youth who embraced the Wandervogel on the one side or the Zionist movement on the other, according to Mosse, were many who accepted this stereotyped image of Jewish life. Their wish to regain contact with nature and community was a classic example of the revolt of the sons against the fathers. On the other hand, the leftist intellectuals, who were largely urban and assimilationist, responded to the problem of Jewish identity with an insistent individualism. Their own desire to relinquish a stereotype, Mosse would argue, led them, through another route, to the seductive vocabulary of German culture.

Mosse also points out, with some alarm, the striking coherence between the völkisch Right and the mystical and communitarian ideas of Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber, in whose writings he discerns a tendency to push beyond the bonds of the religious community toward a mystical union with all mankind. Although he regards this as a laudably humanistic alternative to liberalism Mosse sees little in it that is distinctively Jewish. But here, I think, Mosse neglects an element in Buber’s approach that tied him both to the Jewish community and to the intellectual Left.

In The Holy Way, published in 1919, Buber suggested that the Jewish people could act as spiritual emissaries of Eastern thought to the Western world. While Western theology provided a sharp dichotomy between inner spirit and external action, Eastern religion expounded the essential unity of spiritual and social institutions. Religious experience, according to Buber, crystallized in social action. The Jewish people were destined to demonstrate the role of social commitment and communal organization in the fulfillment of religious awareness. The activist movement rejected the specifically Jewish elements of Buber’s thought, but easily adapted the remainder to its own view of the messianic role of the intellectual in society at large.

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It cannot be said of the Left intellectuals that they were, either as Jews or as radicals, “strangers in a strange land.” Their efforts to create a “Third Force” were nurtured by social circumstances and intellectual traditions that were peculiar to Germany. Nor were they simply a prototype of the American Left today. To a much greater degree than is the case with contemporary American radicals, their humane principles were at war with absolutist and elitist instincts which precluded compromise. Indeed, the most arresting parallel between the German intellectual Left and our own involves the concept of the “Third Force” itself, as it has become manifest in the nether regions of the American Left where political radicalism shades off into communal and cultural experimentation. The German intellectuals, it is true, feared the process of democratization, while the New Left calls for more democracy, in more “relevant” forms. Yet both have called for the emergence of communal life to combat the dehumanizing progress of modernization, and both have regarded spiritual awareness and individual creativity as antidotes to the faceless quality of urban life and corporate capitalism.

As has often been stated, however, contemporary America is by no means the Germany of the 1920’s. Admittedly, a familiarity with the plight of the German Left enables us to view our own radicals of both Left and Right with greater understanding, and greater apprehension as well. Yet the democratic and liberal traditions which protect American radicals had only shallow roots in Germany. The tragedy of the independent Left was that its own humane version of the “Third Force” could not compete with that of the völkisch and fascist Right for the support of the German people.

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¹ Reviewed in these pages by Martin Jay, December 1969.