Reliable reports on the present state of West Germany have been difficult to come by lately, but the recent publication of an important collection of essays under the sponsorship of a leading West German cultural magazine provides G. L. Arnold with an opportunity to glimpse something of what is going on in the minds of at least the German intellectual elite.
We are becoming familiar with the political contours of postwar Germany, or at any rate with the dominant outlook of the Federal Republic. Are we equally attentive to what goes on under the surface? Germany is once more becoming important to the remainder of Europe, and a glance at the scene requires no apology. Fortunately our own task has been eased by recent attempts on the part of representative German writers to strike a balance of their country’s recovery from the zero point of 1945. A number of such essays have been specially commissioned, grouped together, and published, under the title The German Spirit Between Yesterday and Today,1 by the editors of the Merkur, the latter being not merely a distinguished periodical, but itself a sort of prism reflecting the often idiosyncratic tendencies of German philosophers, writers, and critics. Here if anywhere, then, is the proper starting point for analysis.
The contributors to this important symposium have been given a difficult task. Nine years after the end of the Second World War it is still not clear what shape the Germany of tomorrow is going to take. Least of all is it clear to the Germans. The Federal Republic in some respects resembles its ill-fated predecessor, the Weimar Republic, but the after-effects of the 1945 catastrophe have been such as to render questionable the very conception of a German nation. Not only has the country been split in two, but its eastern part has been incorporated—temporarily at any rate—in the Soviet bloc. In 1918 the Reich was left intact—so much so that by 1933 it could afford to dispense with the democratic institutions hastily extemporized after the fall of the Empire. In 1945 not only had the Reich disappeared, but many people doubted whether Germany as a nation could be reconstituted. Hence the sudden growth of interest in Europeanism; hence also the intellectual ferment described in the first of the thirty-one essays included in this volume: “People who hardly knew each other read political manifestos to one another over the peppermint tea they had themselves gathered in.” That was before the currency reform of 1948, which ushered in the great economic boom. Since then the Germans have gone back to taking their tea without notable political emotion. The Federal Republic is today one of the stablest countries in Western Europe, and the living standard of its population—unemployed, old-age pensioners, and some expellees excepted—is fast approaching that of Switzerland. It is less certain that the old pre-1914 intellectual eminence is being recovered. Even the somewhat hectic and brittle atmosphere of the Weimar period held greater promise in some respects than the curiously complacent mood which seems to have descended on the citizens of the Bonn republic.
Most of the contributors to this volume are aware of the ground that has been lost, not only since 1933 but also since 1945, when the conflict between reform and restoration had not yet been decided in favor of the latter. There is some evidence that they are critical of the prevailing trend and, by implication, of the social milieu which has become its principal focus: the new class of property-owners, too busy making money to worry about cultural values. At the same time they are acutely conscious that Western Germany has come a long way since 1945, and that achievements such as the absorption of ten million refugees and the rebuilding of the shattered cities had to be bought by single-minded concentration on material problems. The family and the neighborhood community were the basis of reconstruction during the first hungry postwar years, and within the home it was the women—mothers and grandmothers—who for a time carried the main burden, while the men returned from war or captivity—or failed to return. The immediate result was an inevitable narrowing of perspective, but also greater realism and practicality. Germany after the war was very largely held together by its womenfolk; inevitably their social status changed. It is illuminating to read that the patriarchal family has largely collapsed, and that the majority of German households are today run on a partnership basis: a change also reflected in the legal sphere. As against this advance towards full democracy, the majority of women, to judge from election results, seem to prefer the conservative parties which retain a certain bias towards authoritarianism. Still, the change this time has been far more radical than after 1918, and to that extent German democracy may be said to have acquired a stabler basis.
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Revelations of this kind are scattered through a good many of the essays composing this symposium. They might perhaps have been brought into clearer focus if the editors had allowed themselves to be guided by a single principle of selection, e.g., evidence bearing upon the democratization of German society after the Second World War, compared to the failure of this process after 1918. The aim of the symposium, however, is to paint a broad picture of the cultural scene, including such recondite aspects as the introduction of mathematical models into the social sciences, or the recent development of Heidegger’s philosophy. A certain eclecticism is the inevitable result. It is not always clear why a particular subject has been given emphasis, or in what relation it stands to the rest. The very valuable section on theology and philosophy, for example, is wedged in among a miscellany of papers dealing with various important but unrelated aspects of scientific progress and scholarly reconstruction after 1945.
A more important limitation arises from a circumstance over which the editors have no control: the partition of the country. The symposium resolutely confines itself to the Federal Republic, with barely a side-glance now and then at the part of Germany which is under Communist rule. For the time being this may be appropriate, but one fancies that any companion volume which may issue from the same quarter in future will be thought wanting if it fails to meet this particular challenge. Lastly, there is the question how far anti-liberal tendencies should be ignored in this kind of provisional stock-taking. The Merkur is both a liberal and a self-consciously “European” publication, and a symposium organized by its editors could hardly fail to breathe the air of Goethean humanism, post-Kantian rationalism, and post-Nietzschean return to liberal-democratic values. But there are alternative ways of perceiving the world, and it is arguable that a collection of essays entitled The German Spirit Between Yesterday and Tomorrow could have found room for a critical estimate of such non-liberal philosophies as Thomism, Marxism, and whatever is beginning to take the place of romantic Spenglerian irrationalism and/or fascism. Surely such a discussion would have been of value. One misses it all the more because of the promising nature of certain contributions which just manage to skirt these issues without really coming to grips with them.
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These remarks are inevitably rather general. It is not easy to convey to the American reader something of the spiritual ambience of the halfway-house which is the Federal Republic. Most of the essays “situate themselves,” as the French say, in a context wholly different from anything the West has experienced. The nearest analogy is France during the Vichy period, when half the country was occupied by the invader while the remainder carried on a precarious hand-to-mouth existence. But the Federal Republic is stable and prosperous, and is about to obtain its own armed forces, while on the other hand the partition of the country looks like becoming permanent. Of course, no German is reconciled to this state of affairs, but for the time being (which probably means for some years to come) the emphasis is on reconstruction—in West and East—rather than on unification. And if and when unification does come one day, what are the inhabitants of the Federal Republic to make of their Sovietized brethren in the East? They can hardly suppose that the missing pieces can be fitted into the German jigsaw puzzle without dislodging a good many of the others.
For the moment such questions are not fashionable. They are at any rate not raised in this volume which deliberately averts its eyes from what is happening east of the Elbe. Reconstruction has absorbed all the available energies—to good purpose: one cannot read these succinct accounts of political, legal, social, educational progress since the total collapse of 1945 without being impressed by the speed with which German society has risen from the ruins. In some respects it is a changed society: the reaction from Hitler’s totalitarian despotism has, among other things, carried the traditional German hankering after legal protection against administrative abuse—the Rechtsstaat—to the point of near absurdity. Western Germany today proliferates in constitutional and juridical safeguards of every kind, to the point where its superior courts have arrogated to themselves a position paralleled only in the United States. While the traditional respect for the non-political civil service, the Berufsbeamtentum, has been shaken by the total politicization enforced by the Nazis, the law courts have stepped into the breach and virtually become a third power parallel to the legislature and the executive. This process has been aided by the immense growth in the number of people having claims upon the state—refugees and expellees of every kind, war widows, pensioners, and recipients of social insurance or benefit schemes. The need to keep the millions of refugees alive—one-fifth of the Federal Republic’s population consists of displaced people—and to rebuild the bombed cities has forced the state to shoulder a multitude of major and minor responsibilities, and correspondingly turned a large part of the population into Sozialrentner—recipients of public assistance. While the market economy has been freed from controls and left to its own devices, other sectors of public life have been socialized to a degree not exceeded even in Britain or Scandinavia.
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Not surprisingly, Germany is beginning to acquire the entire apparatus of statistics, social research, and sociology proper which the Anglo-Saxon countries have built up over the years. It appears to be a fact, however, that in the field of applied sociology the institutions of higher learning remain backward—if one regards as progress the kind of empirical research which has become so important an activity in the United States. The older disciplines are having an easier time: philology and history are about to regain their pre-1933 standing; the natural sciences were never as badly hit as the humanities and have been among the first to recover. It is significant, however, that psychology and psychosomatic medicine are lagging behind. Here the effects of racial purges, and the general obscurantism of the Nazi regime (ably abetted by the more conservative elements in the universities and elsewhere), have been particularly noticeable. The United States was the chief gainer from the catastrophe which befell this branch of studies in 1933. At present a revival seems to be in progress, but there is much ground to be regained. The paper dealing with this subject (by Th. v. Uexkuell) is particularly informative, as is H. Schelsky’s account of the situation in the sociological field.
By far the longest and weightiest of the thirty-one contributions is Helmut Kuhn’s essay on the present state of philosophical and theological discussion. It is one of the oddities of the symposium that this paper is squeezed in between others dealing competently enough with such subjects as modern quantum physics and the application of mathematical methods to present-day economics. Kuhn’s contribution is an authoritative summing up which might have found a place along with the editors’ own summary reflections towards the close of the volume. It is the kind of meta-logical analysis that establishes a perspective for the discussion of scientific and aesthetic issues such as those which the editors have grouped under the general heading Die Schoenen Kuenste—roughly “Arts and Letters.” Unfortunately it is impossible to summarize, not merely owing to its conciseness but because it reports on the progress of a discussion which has no counterpart in the Anglo-Saxon world.
It is not as though the Germans were uniquely concerned with disputes over Existentialism, although Kierkegaard, and even Heidegger, do indeed occupy a more central place than they do elsewhere; what really differentiates the German situation from that in England and America is the prevalence of a cast of mind that regards philosophy as relevant to the human situation. In this context it matters little whether or not the fashion of the moment favors some species of Existentialism, Christian or otherwise: both variants exist, as do the rival schools of Thomism, Marxism, positivism, and old-fashioned idealism, whether Kantian or phenomenological. But the distinctive traits of these movements tend to merge in their common concern for the totality of human understanding. To put it differently, they clash on a plane where the layman can stop and listen. There is no pretense that philosophy is reducible to the expert manipulation of linguistic trivialities, or that its business is exhausted by logic-chopping. Hence Kuhn is able to list among his protagonists not merely philosophers like Jaspers but theologians like Barth and Bultmann—inevitably, since the latter at any rate has crossed swords with his philosophical critics, while the former is by implication challenging the Aristotelian basis of Thomism. Positivism exists, of course, but even the radical positivism of Nicolai Hartmann stems from Hegel, while a near Catholic like Scheler did not hesitate to operate with Marxian concepts (as did Max Weber). German philosophy, in short, is alive. No greater contrast is possible with the state of affairs in the English-speaking world, where the total sterility of what passes for philosophical “work” is reflected in neurotic apprehension over the perils of departing from scientific verifiability. It is this unbroken strength of the German tradition of responsible philosophic reflection on the problems of “this world and the other, if there is another” which arouses hope that the torpor so marked at present in so many fields will eventually be overcome.
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As matters stand, a good many energies are absorbed by intellectual stock-taking. Several of these contributions, notably Professor Mirgeler’s and Professor Freund’s papers on the present state of history teaching and historical literature, devote some space to the primary task of acquainting the German reader with a list of important titles—some of them prohibited under the Third Reich. One has constantly to remind oneself that rubble clearance and rubbish disposal were prime national tasks after 1945, and not only in the field of urban reconstruction. Hitler’s true monument is the ruins he left behind, and the most substantial of these—aere perennius—are to be found among the works of the Nazi spirit. It will take decades rather than years before this chapter is closed. The two historical essays in this volume occupy a central position in more than one sense, for unless German history teaching becomes radically self-critical there is little prospect of a permanent change for the better in the domain of academic life.
On the evidence of these contributions, a certain degree of optimism appears justified. The authors would be the last to claim that their own commitment to liberal democracy is generally shared by their colleagues, but it does seem that the 1945 catastrophe has discredited not only its visible engineers but also the more deep-rooted anti-Western and antidemocratic tradition which after 1933 amalgamated with the straightforward racialism of the Nazis. What one chiefly misses in these very soberly worded observations on Germany’s recent past is a clear recognition that National Socialism had its roots in a tradition of which many Germans are still uncritical. Other historians have shown2 that virtually everything the world has come to regard as typically Hitlerian was already present in the teachings and the style of some of the most influential publicists of early 19th-century nationalism—long before Treitschke and Nietzsche had begun to inflame a middle class bored with the material achievements of the Bismarckian epoch. German liberalism, from the Romantic period onward, was confronted not merely with the frozen core of the Prussian state, but with traitors in its own ranks. The mystique of what subsequently became the cult of “heroic” anti-Westernism had been worked out already at the time of the so-called national rising against Napoleon—a movement which Goethe deliberately boycotted. No doubt similar tendencies existed elsewhere. It was Germany’s misfortune that her national unification was delayed by centuries, hence accompanied when it came by a virulent nationalist inflammation of the body politic which lent force to movements that in their turn capitalized on the emotions of an uncivilized sub-stratum. History consists largely of such accidental constellations which retrospectively acquire an entirely spurious aura of inevitability. The outcome is those race theories in reverse which break down on the simplest investigation of the evidence, e.g., the “Black Record” view of German history whose advocates are hopelessly stumped when invited to account for the different development of countries like Sweden, Holland, or Switzerland, the inhabitants of which display most of the German “racial” traits. (A case could be made out for the view that the individual Swiss differs from the typical South German chiefly to the latter’s advantage.) These are properly subjects for the historian; if they are not really tackled in the present survey, one must suppose that reflection on the immediate past still has priority over everything else.
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It is difficult to summarize the remaining section of the survey, which has been allotted to literature and the arts; difficult chiefly because so much that is genuinely internal to the German situation is bound up with imponderables of style. This applies even to architecture and painting; how much more to
Ein Wort, ein Satz—: aus Chiffren steigen
erkanntes Leben, jaeher Sinn,
die Sonne steht, die Sphaeren schweigen
und alles ballt sich zu ihm hin.Ein Wort—, ein Glanz, ein Flug, ein Feuer,
ein Flammenwurf und Sternenstrich—,
und wieder Dunkel, ungeheuer,
im leeren Raum um Welt und Ich.
I shall not attempt any translation of these lines by Gottfried Benn, regarded by many as one of Germany’s most considerable poets (he was born in 1886). Instead I shall risk my nonexistent reputation with readers and critics of German poetry by stating simply that verse such as the above appears to me to be (1) not manifestly superior to the productions of such a minor pre-1914 poet as Walter Calé; (2) intrinsically belonging to a dead epoch. I am not, however, prepared to enlarge on what is ultimately a matter of personal choice. The literary essays in this volume (by Holthusen, Karl August Horst, Walter Boehlich, and others) are extremely competent and remarkably free from pretentiousness or verbiage. If they display a national peculiarity it is the absence of any sign of being influenced by the “New Criticism.” Their language is at once traditional and non-technical, which is to say that it tends to be impressionist and, occasionally, a little exalted and hermetic rather than “scientific” in the modern Anglo-American manner. Whether that is an advantage or a fault need not be argued here. It is certainly one consequence of Germany’s relative spiritual isolation during the Hitler period. For the rest these contributors, too, are once more concerned with what I have called stock-taking—the establishment of an intellectual balance sheet which is also meant to acquaint the German public with the foreign influences it has missed.
This preoccupation with Selbstbesinnung—reorientation on the basis of critical self-awareness—is even more pronounced in the concluding essays by the editors. Their titles—“Land without a Center,” “The Center of Europe,” and “The Janus Head”—are in themselves sufficiently eloquent of the travail through which this generation of German intellectuals is passing. There has seldom indeed been a time when other nations expected (and even feared) so much of the Germans, while the Germans themselves expected so little from their own efforts. Throughout the 470 pages of this symposium an overwhelming emphasis falls on reconstruction and critical reflection, to the point where one begins to feel that the Germans may turn their backs on “greatness” for good and all. It would be ironic if in this new-found contemplative and reflective mood they were to become a disappointment to their foreign mentors—East and West.
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1 Deutscher Geist Zwischen Gestern Und Morgen, edited by Joachim Moras, Hans Paeschke, and Wolfgang von Einsiedel. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart. 470 pp.
2 Compare Erwin Schuppe, Der Burschenschafter Wolfgang Menzel·. eine Quelle zum Verstaendnis des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfort on the Main, 1952.
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