The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology by Fritz Stern

The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology Reviews

• 
  Murtaza

  Germany and Russia share something in common with the East: they are latecomers to modernity. As such, both countries produced voluminous literature about the anguish and alienation entailed in watching their traditional world die and a new one, mechanistic, liberal and of foreign origin, come into existence in its place. This book is an excellent intellectual history of three late-19th century German thinkers, Moeller van den Bruck, Stephen Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, who articulated an ideology of discontent, resentment and vengeance during the period in which modern Germany was born.
  
  These "conservative revolutionaries" wrote with great passion but not much realistic analysis about the changes they witnessed in their society, in which spiritual values had been lost and materialism had seemingly been raised up as the highest value. In response to the spiritual desolation of the new society, they argued in favor of a reactionary turn back to Germany's imagined roots: a return to a primitive Golden Age they felt had existed in the past, before the German people had been corrupted by modern ideologies brought to their society by the Jews.
  
  This Germanic ideology of resentment and despair helped inspire great anger among the people once it was diffused into mass politics. But in large part, the ideology also seemed to be a reflection of the loneliness and alienation of these men in particular. "One thing I know: I do not belong in this time nor in this world. My Fatherland is bigger", wrote Langbehn, in a typical passage that condemned the present while calling for the creation of a future built in the image of a past that never existed. The conservative revolutionaries in this sense were like Utopian reactionaries everywhere who despised and sought to destroy the existing world in order to return to history, an ideological tendency also reflected in present-day movements like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
  
  The strongest part of the book was the explosive introduction that laid out the roots of these men's hatred of modernity. But their individual biographies were fascinating as well, showing how fundamentally unpolitical and personal concerns often, perhaps even usually, end up bleeding into political ideology. These men rued the demise of a Christianity that they could no longer believe in and attempting to transmute that lost religious fervor into politics. This aestheticization of politics would become a hallmark of later fascist regimes, though Stern suggests at the end that these men would have condemned the Nazis as an aberration had they lived to see them.
  
  I love intellectual histories and this one is as good as any. It is relevant to understanding German history, but also the history of all peoples who had difficulty adapting to a Western modernity that was foisted upon them.
• 
  John David

  A culture produces its most ardent, strident critics at times of extreme tumult and change. In “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” Fritz Stern details precisely one of those extended periods, from around the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany through the Weimar Republic. He looks at the lives and work of three people who have been largely forgotten today – Paul Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck – whose modes of cultural criticism eschewed liberal, parliamentary politics and adduced ways of imagining a mystical German future which would reinvigorate the Volk.
  
  The first critic discussed is Paul de Lagarde (1827 – 1891), a brilliant philologist and Biblical scholar, especially of the Septuagint, and polyglot. The biographical sketch that Stern offers paints a less-than-desirable picture of Lagarde. His prodigious talents were not unaccompanied by enormous ambition, and he often blamed his colleagues for the academic projects he was unable to complete. He was a sociopath, a snob, and a prig, all of which seem to be character traits of everyone considered in the book. Later in his career, Lagarde passionately took up cultural criticism, thinking that Germany was headed for permanent destruction. Everywhere he looked, he saw only decline, with a secular, Mammon-worshipping state replacing traditional German values; to replace it, he favored a kind of nationalistic “heroic vitalism” that eschewed mushy, bourgeois liberalism. He was a thoroughgoing idealist who insisted that will and character (Nietzsche and Schopenhauer reappear throughout the book in varying interpretations and misinterpretations) predominated over all else, even the corrupt German political apparatus. Lagarde proposed a solution in which the Greek, Roman, and Jewish “elements” were extirpated from the Bible, and from middle-class German Protestantism, in an attempt to create a religion of the future by synthesizing Biblical ideas with the indomitable German Geist or, as Stern calls it, “mystical nationalism with a Christian veneer.” His work in this vein would have him hailed as a prophet within his own lifetime.
  
  Julius Langbehn had many of the same critical concerns, and tried to suggest art as a fundamental savior. His 1890 book “Rembrandt als Erzieher” (“Rembrandt as Educator”) proposed Rembrandt as a kind of salvific figure who could re-teach Germany what true art was, especially its power to save obsolescent German culture. “He had sought a national rebirth through art, but art he regarded as synonymous with mysticism, and hence a form of religion. Rembrandt was the symbol of that reform, and resurrected prophet who could destroy the false art of naturalism and, by his example, prove that the goal of art was not the creation of beauty alone, but the attainment of the most sublime and fullest truth. In the search for that truth, Langbehn believed art and religion coincided, both alike mediating between man and the divine” (p. 112-113). Langbehn also despised science and rationalism because he perceived them to be soulless, demonstrable, and positivistic. He thought that a mind before education and science was at its most creative, and called for a return to German Kindlichkeit (childlike nature) and Volksthumlichkeit (“folksiness”). Langbehn thought that a focus on art as a means of spiritual realization was the answer to Germany’s problems.
  
  Moeller van den Bruck, author of the well-known “Das Dritte Reich,” continued the themes outlined by Lagarde, Langbehn, and others before them. He idealized the mores and folkways of Prussia, thinking them better than the decadent ones of Germany; many of these ideas, perhaps contrary to what Moeller actually wanted, led to the mythical idea of the Third Reich. In the face of Germany’s staggering and unexpected defeat in World War I, and the harsh impositions of Versailles, Moeller turned himself to the creation of a group of soi-disant Jungkonservativen (young conservative revolutionaries) who wanted Germany to her former greatness. “After Versailles, after the vindictive measures of the victors and the submission of the vanquished, Moeller’s long-standing hatred of the West as the repository of all that was old and putrid acquired specious justification. The bourgeois life and the liberal ideals had been equally loathsome to him, and his fight against both now engaged his heart and mind, and won for him a large political audience. In his espousal of a pro-Russian foreign policy and in his vision of a Third Reich he was devising new means to implement an old hope: to tear Germany from its Western course” (p. 246). Less politically extreme than the other two critics, he attempted a kind of quasi-Hegelian dialectical synthesis to bring out his personal political utopia.
  
  In the last chapter, “From Idealism to Nihilism,” Stern synthesizes all three critics, and compares their ideas to other predominant figures of the time, including Darwin, Nietzsche and, eventually, Hitler. This book is worth five stars, had it not been for Stern’s constant implication that the critics’ scholarship and their sociopathic egotism were somehow connected. It’s almost as if he wants tell the reader that they are bad cultural critics because they were horrible people (which, for the most part, they were). This commentary, which can come across as ad hominem in its excess, does detract a bit from Stern’s otherwise spectacular scholarship.
  
  Stern’s book is a fascinating tool for understanding the pre-War I German cultural and social ethos. All of these critics saw the gradual undoing of a Germany that they knew and loved, and then saw it replaced with a more secular and urban country, whose modern institutions – education, science, parliamentary democracy - they grew to hate. They all suffered from a staggering ignorance of political reality, and despised practicality and utility. Their idea of the perfect Germany was religious, immediate, irrational, and intuitive. In short, they were prophets without a God.
  
• 
  AC

  "Two contrary feelings, therefore, grow up in the academy -- the sense of superior knowledge and the sense of ultimate powerlessness, a combination that makes for resentment. And resentment, according to Scheler and Camus, leads to intellectual asphyxiation, the constant rebreathing of one's own thoughts in a closed room." (Garry Wills)
  
  
  Intellectual asphyxiation... and the politics of cultural resentment...
  
  
  Ahhh, yes....
  
  
  Some, I know, will understand.... and will grasp its contemporary relevance.
• 
  Chad

  I forget exactly where this book popped up initially-- but I assume it was a Goodreads recommendation based on some of the politically oriented books or German history books I've been into as of late. Here's the Goodreads blurb:
  
  This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism. By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair. Lagarde, Langbein, and Moeller van den Bruck-their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler's Third Reich-attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit. But they were more than the critics of Germany's cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well. Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth. Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian. It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality.
  
  I am always interested into more insights into the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The average American doesn't really have any real true understanding of the complexities involved, other than German was "the bad guy" in both World War I and World War II, and that Germans as a people just really hated Jews. That's about all you get. Some may include more nuance: The Versailles Treaty that the Allies imposed on Germany after World War I was brutal and embarrassing to Germany, might come up.
  
  What this book contributes is the idea of the mood of nostalgia for a mythic past and the cultural despair in the face of modernity (secularization, urbanization, and industrialization) in Germany in century leading up to World War II, while not necessarily the only cause, certainly created the conditions for a Hitler to arise:
  
  These three critics witnessed the gradual destruction of the old Germany and the emergence of a new, urban, secular country. They hated the temper and the institutions of this new Germany and decried the conditions of modernity. Their protests, as we have seen, were not unique. Others were dismayed as well: conservatives saw their beliefs and privileges challenged, Christians saw their faith attacked, and a new class, the urban proletariat, attacked the exploitative and inegalitarian character of modern industrial society. These groups and their spokesmen had a stake in the past or a tangible goal for the future...
  
  Our critics were simultaneously proud and resentful of their alienation. They were proud of the perspicacity which their "untimeliness" had granted them, but their deepest longing was for a new Germanic community in which they and all their countrymen would at last find the peace of complete unity. Because of this longing they made the leap from cultural criticism to politics, assuming that cultural evil could be dissolved by the establishment of the right kind of faith and community.
  
  Some of these arguments bore resemblance to another book I read recently, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. The stark title critiques the two articles of faith of liberalism: the market and the state. To show how these arguments could perhaps be an extension of the cultural critics of pre-war Germany, here's a quote:
  
  Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them. The result is the systemic rolling blackouts in electoral politics, governance, and economics, the loss of confidence and even belief in legitimacy among the citizenry, that accumulate not as separable and discrete problems to be solved within the liberal frame but as deeply interconnected crises of legitimacy and a portent of liberalism’s end times.
  
  The conservative reactionaries in pre-war Germany also longed for a community, expressed as das Volk, and fought against liberalism as an artifice imported from the West.
  
  This was an interesting book to contrast with another theory of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which attributes the rise of National Socialism to the socialist policies that were already in practice in Germany starting in the 19th century. Hayek's diagnosis is collectivism:
  
  “It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.”
  
  Of course, both liberals and conservatives today feel a need to make clear their ideologies bear no connection or responsibility to Nazi Germany: the conservatives like to pretend that National Socialism wasn't a conservative movement, or at least make clear that Communism was just as bad, if not worse:
  
  While the socialists like to pretend that National Socialism had nothing to do at all with socialism:
  
  This book is a good start for those looking to add a little nuance to the discussion. I would think that the warnings against cultural despair and irrationalism in politics are very relevant to our day, when most political discussions are carried out in the form of Twitter rants.
• 
  Milanimal

  A fascinating read, but even more fascinating for the full throated endorsement of Nietzsche hidden in the conclusion. Nietzsche: totally not a conservative revolutionary like those lame-o's Langbehn and Lagarde, totally worthy of rehabilitation.
• 
  Minäpäminä

  Repetetive and dry. Too much gossip and personal details, too little theory and thought (this being purportedly a study in ideology). Stern wags his finger so hard it becomes comical. I find it hard to believe three stupid assholes shaped the fate of the world with their stupid asshole writings, but this seems to be what Stern is claiming.
• 
  Susu

  Lagarde, Langbehn, Moeller van den Bruck: an overview of their lives and writings - and how they drove the development of ideology behind the Third Reich - some bits sound eerily contemporary
• 
  Shane Hill

  Excellent read on three German personalities from the 19th and early 20th century that more then anyone else, contributed to the eventual rise of Nazism!
• 
  Norman

  Extraordinary.
• 
  Willemf

  Bewertung folgt...